RTHK: Trump officials seized data of Democrats: report

Prosecutors in the US Justice Department under former president Donald Trump seized data from Apple from two Democratic lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee, as well as that of their staff and family members, The New York Times has reported.

Subpoenas for the communications metadata targeted congressman Adam Schiff of California, a Trump foe who was then the panel's top Democrat and now its chairman, the paper said.

Congressman Eric Swalwell told CNN on Thursday he was the second Democratic lawmaker on the committee who was targeted.

"I was notified... by Apple that they did seize my records. It's wrong," he said.

According to the Times, prosecutors working under attorney general Jeff Sessions made unusual efforts in 2017 and early 2018 to find the source of leaks of classified information regarding contacts between Trump associates and Russia.

The Justice Department officials targeted electronic data not only of the lawmakers, but that of their staff and families, including one minor, possibly because investigators thought the lawmakers were using their associates' or children's devices to hide contacts with journalists.

Ultimately, none of the data or other evidence tied the lawmakers or the House Intelligence Committee to the leaks, the Times said.

Schiff, while not confirming he was a target of the investigation, called for a probe by the Justice Department's inspector general into "this and other cases that suggest the weaponisation of law enforcement by a corrupt president."

Trump "tried to use the Department as a cudgel against his political opponents and members of the media. It is increasingly apparent that those demands did not fall on deaf ears," Schiff said in a statement.

Top Democrat Nancy Pelosi also called for an investigation, describing the New York Times report as "harrowing."

"These actions appear to be yet another egregious assault on our democracy waged by the former president," she said in a statement. (AFP)

This story has been published on: 2021-06-11. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
South Africa: R300m to fund KZN small business

Small businesses and cooperatives are set to receive a major shot in the arm when the KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Government rolls out over R300 million funding to projects run by Small, Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) across the province.

The amount, which is part of Operation Vula Fund District, will target the furniture, detergents, bakery, clothing and textile, and farming sectors, among others.

Operation Vula Fund is part of the provincial governments radical economic transformation projects, which seek to increase the number of entrepreneurs from underprivileged communities, so that they can participate in the mainstream economy.

Operation Vula Fund is a key cog in governments Economic Recovery and Transformation Plan, as articulated in the State of the Province Address in February, KwaZulu-Natal Premier Sihle Zikalala said.

During a Provincial Executive Council meeting chaired by Zikalala, the council heard that the Department of Economic Development, Tourism and Environmental Affairs received a total of 4 229 applications.

So far, a total of 1 018 applications, with a monetary value of R296 808 786.06, have been approved to date, Zikalala said.

The Premier is expected to unveil more details on the programme in the coming weeks and handover support to beneficiaries.

Youth Development Strategy approved



Meanwhile, the provincial council has approved the KZN Youth Development Strategy, which aims to attend to the plight of unemployed graduates, support youth entrepreneurship, and the coordination of youth development interventions for impact.

The council said it views the strategy as an important step in addressing the plight of many young people, who constitute the majority of the KwaZulu-Natal population.

Young people are the hardest hit by unemployment and there is recognition that many young people support and require assistance in various small business ventures, and incubator programmes with industry, education and skilling.

The Youth Development Strategy provides concrete steps for young people to drive initiatives that are committed to changing lives.

The Provincial Integrated Youth Development Strategy (PIYDS) is a road map for engaging the youth of the province to take their rightful place in the strategic developmental initiatives, which seek to transform the province into a prosperous one, the Premier said.

The strategy targets unemployed youth, young women, youth with disabilities, school-aged out-of-school youth, youth in rural areas, youth at risk, youth headed households, youth in conflict with the law, and youth characterised by substance abuse.

The Strategic Framework is organised around five pillars and each pillar has programmes/interventions that are relevant to the specific outcome.

The five pillars include:

Quality education, skills and second chances;

Economic transformation, entrepreneurship and job creation;

Physical and mental health promotion, including other pandemics;

Social cohesion and nation building; and

Effective and responsive youth development machinery.



The provincial government hopes to use the approved youth strategy to fight unemployment, poverty and other social ills ravaging society and young people in particular, Zikalala said.

KwaZulu-Natal will host National Youth Day at Harry Gwala Stadium in Umsunduzi Local Municipality on 16 June 2021. President Cyril Ramaphosa will deliver the keynote address at the event.

This years event will be held under the theme The Year of Charlotte Mannya Maxeke: Growing youth employment for an inclusive and transformed society.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2021-06-11. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
The Treasury has defended the governments appetite for borrowing, maintaining that the alternative would be worse as Kenyans would have to pay more taxes.

Speaking on Citizen TV ahead of the reading of the 2021-22 Budget, Treasury Cabinet Secretary Ukur Yatani reiterated that the country is still within the debt ceiling set by parliament. He noted that they will be seeking an extension of the limit in parliament.

Taxing our people at this stage is only going to affect businesses but seriously affect the common man, based on all this we prefer to borrow for the time being and deal with it at a later date, Yatani said.

Adding: Our debt ceiling is within the ceiling we set for ourselves, the scope is narrowing and at some stage in course of the next financial year, we will be going back to the National Assembly and Senate for adjustment.

Asked if the Sh3.63 trillion budget will cushion Kenyans, CS Yatani said the 2021-2022 budget is a recovery budget.

We are going to continue with sustained expenditure by implementing agenda four, enhance the economic stimulus package that we initiated in this financial year and there are vast of them including the Kazi mtaani, creating jobs and opportunities by expanding jobs in the medical sector, having more teachers, to stimulate consumption, he said.

Yatani said Treasury is also exploring Public-Private Partnerships for development projects and creation of jobs, as well as indirect tax relief for certain products, especially in the health sector.
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Jay Gogues second time as president of Auburn University will soon be coming to an end.

The two-time Auburn alumnus told the Auburn Board of Trustees at its June 11 meeting that it was time to search for a new president.

I think its important for you guys to begin to think about a search for a new president, he said during his report to the board. Ive been back a couple of years, and I think its about time you do that.

Gogue became Auburns 18th president in 2007 and retired in 2017. He and his wife, Susie, remained in Auburn, which allowed him to consult for the university and teach College of Education classes.

He agreed to return to the presidents office in 2019 and was named the universitys 20th president in 2020.

We all appreciate everything you have done over the last 12 years, said Trustee Wayne Smith, who was presiding over his last meeting as president pro tempore of the board.

Trustee Bob Dumas, who was elected to serve as president pro tempore, appointed Smith to chair the executive committee and therefore serve as chair of the presidential search committee, pursuant to board policy.

Gogue will continue to serve as president through the search process.

I will ask Trustee Smith to be in contact with each of you [board members] shortly with more information regarding the presidential search. I know he will oversee the process with great transparency and respect for all stakeholders, said Dumas.

President Gogue, you have served incredibly well, twice, and we will miss you, greatly. I have great confidence however that we will find an excellent leader to follow in your big footprints.

Gogue, a Waycross, Georgia, native, earned bachelors and masters degrees from Auburn and a doctorate in horticulture from Michigan State University.

Regarding action items, the board voted to proceed with the project to renovate the Quad Residence Halls, starting this summer with Harper and Broun halls.

Four of the Quads 10 residence halls were built in 1938including Harper and Brounand six were built in 1952. The last renovations were in the 1990s. Plans presented previously call for renovating two halls each year over the next five years. This first phase should be complete before the fall 2022 semester.

Renovations in Harper and Broun include replacing mechanical, electrical, plumbing and heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, upgrades to furnishings and fixtures, changes to meet current American Disabilities Act code requirements, replacing all windows and doors and utility improvements to provide hot water.

The project involves approximately 51,510 square feet of existing interior and exterior space at an estimated cost of $13.5 million, to be financed by Campus Housing and university repair and renovation funds.

DAVIS of Birmingham had been previously selected to serve as the project architect.

Harper and Broun are located on Mell Street and Quad Drive.

With the area near the Haley Concourse proposed to be the future site of a new student housing project, the board agreed to relocate the academic and outreach programs in the three buildings along the concourse to other locations on campus. The buildings currently house the Early Learning Center, the Marriage and Family Therapy Center and the Center for Health Ecology and Equity Research, all part of the College of Human Sciences.

The Dawson Building, along South Donahue Drive, will be renovated to house the Early Learning Center. Birchfield Penuel & Associates of Birmingham will serve as the project architect, and financing will come from university general funds.

The board also agreed to initiate two projects at the Auburn University Regional Airport: one to expand the maintenance hangar and another to construct an additional T-hangar at the north ramp. Garver LLC of Huntsville will serve as the engineer for both projects.

Work at the maintenance hangar will be financed by Aviation Center funds, while the new T-hangar should be financed by an Alabama Department of Transportation grant and university general funds. The 10 aircraft bays in the new hangar could be leased by the airport to commercial or private aircraft owners, serving as a source of future revenue.

In other matters, the board decided to:

Continue to retain PricewaterhouseCoopers as the universitys external auditors.

Create a Master of Science in forest business and investment (non-thesis) in the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences. The proposed program will combine advanced forestry and business knowledge, specifically strategic investing and financial decision-making. In addition to online courses in the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, students will also complete courses in the Raymond J. Harbert College of Business. The board additionally learned about the creation of a non-thesis option for the current Master of Science in marriage and family therapy degree program in the College of Human Sciences, as well as the establishment of a graduate certificate in economic development from the Department of Political Science in the College of Liberal Arts.

Appoint Trustee James Pratt to serve on the Trustee Selection Committee. He will serve until the 2022 annual board meeting or until the appointment/reappointment of members to the committee, whichever comes first. The Auburn board will face vacancies for three seats: districts 5 and 7 and at-large.

Among the awards and namings accepted by the board, one resolution called for naming the skills labs and patient assessment areas in the Harrison School of Pharmacys Walker Building in memory of Dr. Charles Isbell 55. Isbell, whose children made a gift in his memory, served as a pharmacy officer at Brooke Army Hospital after graduation, going on to earn his medical degree. He served as a pediatrician in the Fort Payne, Alabama, area for more than 50 years, where he was noted for being devoted to his patients, co-workers and the community.
As the cryptocurrency world sees enormous growth, banking regulators across the world want them to be placed under the toughest bank capital rules. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), which is the world's most powerful banking organisation, has said banks that have a bigger exposure to cryptocurrencies should be placed under stricter capital norms that reflect on the higher risks.

In a report released on Thursday, the committee said policymakers of the world should step up efforts to regulate cryptos considering their fast emergence. "While banks' exposures to crypto-assets are currently limited, the continued growth and innovation in crypto-assets and related services, coupled with the heightened interest of some banks, could increase global financial stability concerns and risks to the banking system in the absence of a specified prudential treatment," the report said.

Also read: Bitcoin selloff: Will the cryptocurrency drop to $20,000?

Cryptoassets have given rise to a range of concerns, including consumer protection, money laundering and terrorist financing, and their carbon footprint, the report added. It further stated that the growth of cryptoassets and related services has the potential to raise financial stability concerns and increased risks faced by banks.

The report also noted that certain cryptoassets have exhibited a high degree of volatility and could present risks for banks as exposures increase, including liquidity risk; credit risk; market risk; operational risk (including fraud and cyber risks); money laundering/terrorist financing risk; and legal and reputation risks.

BCBS has decided to proceed with the public consultation to enable further work to continue with the additional benefit of incorporating feedback from external stakeholders. The committee has also called for "minimum capital standards" for banks in cases of assets such as tokens, while cryptos like Bitcoin could be placed under a "conservative" prudential regime.

Also read: Cryptocurrency market crashes! Is it time to sell Bitcoin?

It suggests all cryptocurrencies assets, including the most popular Bitcoin and Ethereum, would be placed under a new and stricter regime of a risk weight of 1,250 per cent, considering banks' exposure to cryptos. A high-risk weight (1,250 per cent) will lead to a "conservative outcome" for direct exposures to cryptoassets, the report said. This means banks would have to keep capital equal to their exposure in crypto on hold, BCBS said. Rules would also apply to decentralised finance and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) but cryptos rolled out by central banks have been kept out of it.

Also read: 'Investors' funds are safe at WazirX,' says Nischal Shetty on receiving FEMA notice
Britain's competition watchdog is planning a formal competition investigation into e-commerce company Amazon.com Inc, the Financial Times reported on Thursday, citing three unidentified people familiar with the situation.

The Competition and Markets Authority has been analysing Amazon's business for months, the newspaper said, adding regulator was focusing on how the online retailer uses the data it collects on its platform.

The regulator has also scrutinised how Amazon decides which merchants appear in the crucial 'buy box' - the white panel to the right-hand side of a product where buyers click to add the item to their cart, the report added.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

A probe into the company may focus on whether Amazon favours merchants that also use its logistics and delivery services when deciding who has access to the buy box and to its Prime customers, the newspaper said, citing the sources. The timing and scope of the probe were still being worked on, it said.

The investigation was likely to cover similar ground to probes underway in the European Union, according to the report.

Brussels has two open probes into Amazon - one that is looking at how the company is using data to advance its own products to the potential detriment of rivals, and another which is looking at the criteria for the use of the buy box.
WazirX founder and chief executive Nischal Shetty has said WazirX is in compliance with all applicable laws, and that it is yet to receive any show-cause notice from the Enforcement Directorate.

"We go beyond our legal obligations by following Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) processes and have always provided information to law enforcement authorities whenever required," he tweeted.

1/3



WazirX is yet to receive any show cause notice from the Enforcement Directorate as mentioned in today's media reports.



WazirX is in compliance with all applicable laws.  Nischal (WazirX)  (@NischalShetty) June 11, 2021

The founder of India's biggest crypto exchange said the company can trace all users on its platform with official identity information. "Should we receive a formal communication or notice from the ED, we'll fully cooperate in the investigation," he said.

Also read: Big blow to India's crypto scene! ED issues show cause notice to WazirX

The enforcement directorate has launched a money-laundering investigation against the Mumbai-based crypto exchange for violating the FEMA rules, 1999 for transactions involving cryptocurrencies worth Rs 2,790.74 crore.

According to ED, users of WazirX have received cryptocurrency worth Rs 880 crore via its pool account from Binance accounts and transferred out cryptocurrency worth Rs 1,400 crore to Binance accounts during the period under investigation. Global crypto exchange Binance had acquired WazirX in 2019.

Also read: 'Please address': Users seek clarification from WazirX after ED's FEMA notice

The ED is also probing money laundering by Chinese nationals who allegedly laundered Rs 57 crore by converting money into digital currency Tether (USDT) and further to Binance accounts.

The ED has alleged that none of the above-said transactions is available on the blockchain for any audit or investigation.

WazirX, which claims to have 2 million users on its platform, allows a range of transitions, including exchange of cryptocurrency with rupees and vice-versa, person-to-person transactions, and transfer to crypt held in its pool accounts to wallets of other exchanges. These wallets can be held by foreigners in foreign locations.

Also read: Bitcoin selloff: Will the cryptocurrency drop to $20,000?

Also read: Bitcoin falls to $36,279 as China blocks crypto-related accounts
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her meeting on infrastructure road map on Friday, directed ministries to front-load capital expenditure and achieve more than their CAPEX targets. She also asked ministries and CPSEs to ensure clearance of MSMEs' dues at the earliest, and told them to explore Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode for viable projects.

The FM said enhanced CAPEX will play a critical role in revitalising the post-pandemic economy. The Budget for Financial Year 2021-22 provided a capital outlay of Rs 5.54 lakh crore, a sharp increase of 34.5per cent over the Budget Estimate of 2020-21, she said, adding that these efforts must be complemented by the Public Sector Enterprises.

She said infrastructure expenditure is not just the Centre's budgetary expenditure on infrastructure and also includes infrastructure spending by states and private sector, and government expenditure through extra-budgetary resources.

She said ministries must work on getting projects funded through innovative structuring and financing, and provide all support to the private sector for enhancing infrastructure spending.

Also read: 'Is the GST Council heartless?': Here's what FM Sitharaman has to say

The ministries also need to explore Public Private Partnership (PPP) mode for viable projects, and clear Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSME) dues at the earliest, she said.

The DoT has also been asked to expedite the important projects that bring the benefit of high level data connectivity. The MoRTH was especially asked to explore the possibility of enhancing connectivity in hilly regions and to expedite the implementation of Vehicle Scrapping Facility. She also asked the department of atomic energy to ensure timely achievement of initiatives announced under the Atma Nirbhar Bharat Package (ANBP).

Also read: Exclusive: GoM for retaining 5% tax on Covid jabs; tax cut on PPEs, ventilators, sanitisers
Online fashion industry witnessed an order volume growth of 51 per cent and gross merchant value (GMV) increase of 45 per cent in FY21 as compared to the previous financial year, a report by Unicommerce said on Thursday.

The faster volume growth as compared to GMV has led to a marginal decline of 4 per cent in the average order value, the report titled 'Fashion E-commerce Report' said.

Unicommerce, e-commerce focused SaaS (software as a service) platform, analysed fashion trends for the period of FY2021 and FY2020 with a sample size of over 70 million orders.

"Fashion labels have been at the forefront of re-inventing, re-strategising, and re-aligning themselves to rapidly evolving business environments and changing consumer needs. The industry has also observed multiple retail brands establishing their niche in the e-commerce industry," it said.

The rising adoption of D2C (direct to consumer) amongst fashion brands has helped them build a strong connect with the consumer, leading to higher growth.

The brand websites have reported 66 per cent order volume growth and 77 per cent GMV growth in FY2021 as compared to the previous financial year, the report said.

The strong order volume growth supported with higher GMV growth has led to a 6 per cent increase in average order value, it added.

As compared to brand websites, marketplaces have reported 45 per cent order volume growth and 33 per cent GMV growth, with an 8 per cent decline in the average order value for FY2021 - which strongly reinforces that the fashion brands are investing aggressively to build a stronger D2C presence.

Notably, the trend of shopping fashion online is getting prominent in tier-II and III cities, with 118 per cent order volume growth coming from these locations driving 192 per cent order volume growth.

Womenswear held the majority share of the e-commerce fashion market with a 50 per cent share and reported 30 per cent order volume growth in FY2021 as compared to the previous financial year.

On the other hand, the kids wear segment registered over 200 per cent order volume growth and the market share significantly increased from 3 per cent in FY2020 to 17 per cent in FY-2021.

The menswear segment maintained consistent growth with 37 per cent order volume growth and 33 per cent market share in FY2021, the report said.

Casual accounted for 84 per cent market share in FY21 and 49 per cent y-o-y order volume growth in FY2021. Formal wear category saw over 100 per cent order volume growth.

"Fashion segment is one of the biggest contributors to the e-commerce industry of India with the highest order volume. This report deep dives into the fashion industry to analyse the trends in the online fashion space... this report will help fashion e-tailers in understanding the changing dynamics of the fashion e-commerce industry," Unicommerce CEO Kapil Makhija said.

Also read: Centre urges Chinese govt to allow Indian travellers into China
Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are soon expected to be released in the Indian market. However, the catch is that these vaccines are not likely to be included in the free vaccination drive for beneficiaries above 18 years. Nevertheless, the government will facilitate the procurement of the vaccines.

While the government is in advanced talks with the companies for the vaccines, the high price tag is likely to act as a deterrent for bulk procurement, said people in the know to The Economic Times. The Centre has so far even indicated that the Pfizer vaccine could be available in India as early as July.

An official told the daily that the government will facilitate the procurement but these vaccines are most likely to be available largely in private hospitals only.

The aim of the Centre, the official said, was to scale up vaccination as much as possible to prevent a possible third wave. The official said that the government wants to target at least 40 per cent of the adult population. "This would mean large scale procurement of vaccines. If we want to increase the reach, more vaccines would be required and investing in expensive vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna would not be logical," he told the daily.

However, inclusion of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines might take the load off public immunisation as willing beneficiaries could take the doses at private hospitals.

Additionally, both Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are required to be stored in temperatures below zero. The cold chain requirement is something that can only be maintained in big hospitals in large metros. The official said that these factors restrict their choices considerably. Instead of putting the money in the cold chain, the government would rather invest in procuring more vaccines, the official stated.

Also read: COVID-19: Centre close to granting indemnity to Pfizer, other foreign vaccine makers

Also read: Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine may be priced at Rs 730 per dose in India
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IKEA to help suppliers in India, China, Poland transit to 100% renewable power

Swedish home furnishing retailing major IKEA on Thursday said it will launch a programme in India, Poland and China this year, helping suppliers there transit to 100 per cent renewable electricity. Under this initiative, the company would invest and support nearly 1,600 direct suppliers, IKEA said in a statement. IKEA is striving for 100 per cent renewable energy throughout the entire value chain.

Centre urges Chinese govt to allow Indian travellers into China

India on Thursday asked China to allow Indian citizens to travel to that country especially those who work or study there, and said that essential two-way travel should be facilitated, especially keeping in view the fact that Chinese nationals are able to travel to India. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) also said that it was in touch with the Chinese side in order to seek an early resumption of travel by Indian citizens to China.

G-7 nations to share 1 bn COVID-19 vaccine doses with the world

The Group of Seven nations are set to commit to sharing at least 1 billion coronavirus shots with the world, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced, with half coming from the U.S. and 100 million from the UK as President Joe Biden urged allies to join in speeding the pandemic's end and bolstering the strategic position of the world's wealthiest democracies.

Indiscriminate, incomplete vaccination can promote mutant strains, health experts tell PM Modi

A group of public health experts, including doctors from AIIMS and members from the national taskforce on Covid-19, have said mass, indiscriminate and incomplete vaccination can trigger the emergence of mutant strains. The panel have also recommended that there is no need to inoculate those who have had coronavirus infection. Vaccinating the vulnerable and those at risk, instead of mass population-wide inoculation including children, should be the aim at present.

India slips 12 spots to 55th position in housing price appreciation

India has moved down 12 places in the global home price index in Q1 of 2021 to 55th position from 43rd rank during the same quarter last year, shows the latest report by global property consultancy Knight Frank. In the Covid-hit quarter, housing prices in India fell 1.6 per cent. With respect to 6-month (Q3 2020 to Q1 2021) and three-month (Q4 2020 to Q1 2021) changes, housing prices saw 0.6 per cent and 1.4 per cent growth, respectively.
Hong Kong: CS highlights HK's unique strengths

Chief Secretary Matthew Cheung today introduced Hong Kongs strong fundamentals and unique advantages under one country, two systems to more than 200 people from the business community in Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member states.

The Reconnect: Hong Kong - ASEAN Partnership webinar updated participants on the latest social and economic developments in Hong Kong, and the opportunities and benefits presented to enterprises in ASEAN.

Mr Cheung noted that ASEAN has been Hong Kongs second largest trading partner for 10 years in a row since 2010. The Free Trade Agreement and the Investment Agreement, which both came into full force in February, also reflect the significant economic connections between both sides.

The Chief Secretary expressed his confidence in Hong Kongs future development, pointing out that the two significant decisions of the National Peoples Congress on national security legislation and improving Hong Kongs electoral system have put Hong Kong back on the right track and ensured its long-term stability and prosperity.

He emphasised that with the full support of the Central Peoples Government as stated in the 14th Five-Year Plan, investors from ASEAN will be able to benefit from Hong Kongs unlimited development potential.

He invited the ASEAN business community to tap into the enormous opportunities and strengthen its business ties with Hong Kong.

Mr Cheung also spoke with participants on Hong Kongs experience and strategy in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.

Addressing questions from participants, Mr Cheung said Hong Kong has a keen interest in joining the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership at the earliest appropriate time.

Given its unique advantages, Hong Kongs accession to the partnership will further deepen regional economic integration and co-operation for the prosperity of the region, he added.

The webinar was organised by the three Hong Kong Economic & Trade Offices in ASEAN, located in Bangkok, Jakarta and Singapore, together with the Hong Kong Trade Development Council and the Thai-Hong Kong Trade Association.

This story has been published on: 2021-06-11. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Highlights A website on Thursday claimed that the data of 150 million vaccinated Indians have been leaked on the dark web.

Health Ministry and security researchers denied the data breach but said that they are getting the matter investigated.

CoWin platform is used to book a slot for COVID-19 vaccination.

A website on Thursday claimed that the data of 150 million vaccinated Indians have been leaked on the dark web. However, the Health Ministry and security researchers denied the data breach but said that they are getting the matter investigated. CoWin platform is used to book a slot for COVID-19 vaccination. The website requires users to submit their Aadhar card or any government-issued ID card, their phone number and location to book a slot. The report claimed that the phone numbers, Aadhar card details of 150 million were leaked.

Data Leak Market on Thursday claimed that a database carrying the details of COVID-19 vaccinated people in India was on sale for $800. The data that was allegedly leaked included the name, Aadhaar number, location and phone number of people who have registered for the vaccine. The website claimed that it is not the original leaker of data, it is a reseller.

However, the health ministry and security researcher Rajshekhar Rajaria soon refuted the claims of the data leak market. "Our attention has been drawn towards the news circulating on social media about the alleged hacking of Co-WIN system. In this connection we wish to state that Co-WIN stores all the vaccination data in a safe and secure digital environment. No Co-WIN data is shared with any entity outside the Co-WIN environment. The data is claimed as having been leaked such as geo-location of beneficiaries is not even collected at Co-WIN. The news prima facie appears to be fake. However, we have asked the Computer Emergency Response Team of MeitY to investigate the issue," RS Sharma, who heads the Co-WIN portal, said in a statement.

However, the health ministry also said that they are investigating the matter.

Rajaria, a security researcher, who has unearthed many data breaches involving popular companies said that the website claiming CoWin data leak is absolutely fake. Sharing the screenshots of the fake website, Rajaharia wrote, "Cowin Portal Not Hacked!! Some Fake #DarkwebLeakMarket are claiming to sell data of 150 Million COVID19 Vaccinated People of India. It's completely fake. It's a Bitcoin Scam. Don't Trust. Check Screenshots. They are listing fake leaks."

He further added that the website cons people by posting fake data leaks." This market is frequently posting fake data leaks and scamming people. They are just taking Bitcoin for nothing. Data Sample also not available anywhere," he said.
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Sentence of ex-St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region penitentiary official for graft upheld

 Mikhail Telekhov, RAPSI

15:42 11/06/2021

ST. PETERSBURG, June 11 (RAPSI, Mikhail Telekhov)  The St. Petersburg City Court has upheld sentence given to ex-deputy chief of the Federal Penitentiary Services (FSIN) St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region Directorate Sergey Moiseyenko for receiving bribes amounting to 710 million rubles (about $10 million) during the construction of a detention center, RAPSI has learnt from the United press service of St. Petersburg courts.

In February, Moiseyenko received 18 years in a maximum security penal colony.

The Kolpinsky District Court of St. Petersburg found the defendant guilty of receiving a bribe as a state official acting in conspiracy with other persons and with the use of extortion. Moiseyenko did not plead guilty and refused to testify. The court sentenced him to 11 years behind bars; in combination with the 15 years term Moiseyenko had been given earlier for organization of assassination against his subordinate by the Leningrad Regional Court he is to be in confinement for 18 years, according to the statement. The defendant was also deprived of his rank of the colonel of internal service.

According to case papers, from March 2010 to August 2015, Moiseyenko received over 710 million rubles from CEOs of two commercial organizations for common protection. In particular, he ordered his subordinates to sign without delays reports of completion, cover them, pay advances at the start of every year at the maximum value stipulated by a state contract signed earlier.

Another defendant in the case, ex-deputy director of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) Nikolay Barinov was earlier convicted and sentenced to 3.5 years in prison and a 950,000-ruble ($15,000) fine.




Legislative proposal to ban surrogacy services for foreigners moves onward in Russia

 flickr.com/ Matt Cunningham

15:10 11/06/2021

MOSCOW, June 11 (RAPSI)  A draft law prohibiting surrogacy services for foreigners has been submitted to Russias State Duma.

The bill bans the use of the surrogacy institution in the Russian Federation for foreign citizens and people without citizenship.

In 2020, when the pandemic restrictions were active, Russian investigators were notified of unattended babies born by surrogate mothers and cases of human beings traffic as to such kids, an explanatory note to the initiative reads.

According to the documents sponsors, investigative bodies launched 25 criminal cases over crimes against minors last year as compared to 17 cases in 2019. Twelve cases reached courts in 2020 as compared to nine cases in 2019. Seven children under the age of one year were recognized as victims in the completed cases as compared to ten minors in 2019.

The bans initiators believe surrogate kids from Russia are used by foreigners for sexual abuse.

In April, Russias Child Rights Commissioner Anna Kuznetsova said the transfer of Russian children to destination unknown must be stopped.

As for foreign countries, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, China, India, Singapore and several U.S. states have totally banned surrogacy services.
Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin's Regular Press Conference on June 11, 2021

2021/06/11

State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will deliver an address titled "Uphold Multilateralism to Promote Common Security" at the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament (CD) on June 11.

Xinhua News Agency: Yonhap reported on June 7 that Ambassador of the ROK to ASEAN Lim Sungnam expressed concern over the Japanese government's decision to discharge nuclear contaminated water from Fukushima nuclear power plant into the sea while attending a virtual EAS Ambassadors' Meeting. Lim pointed out that Japan's ocean discharge plan is problematic in terms of transparency, consultation and verification and stressed that it might negatively impact human health and marine environment. The ROK is deeply concerned about it. Does China have any comment?

Wang Wenbin: I've taken note of relevant reports and fully understand the ROK's position. Besides the ROK, many Pacific-rim countries including China all oppose Japan's decision to release nuclear contaminated water into the sea.

The Japanese government, in disregard of doubts and objection at home and abroad, made the highly irresponsible unilateral decision to dispose of nuclear contaminated water from Fukushima by ocean discharge before exhausting safe disposal means, disclosing all relevant information, fully consulting with neighboring countries and other stakeholders or coming up with verification arrangement that can be monitored. The international community's major concerns are as follows: First, Japan has neither fully consulted with neighboring countries and other stakeholders nor addressed seriously the legitimate concerns of all relevant parties. Second, Japan made the decision based solely on economic calculation without considering the impact on marine ecology, food safety and public health. Third, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has a poor track record of data-tampering and cover-up in its handling of the Fukushima nuclear accident and so the data it releases is not trustworthy. Recently Japanese media have reported on distressing incidents involving radioactive leaks on the site of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Fourth, the Japanese side claims that the treated unclear contaminated water is safe, but has no verifiable arrangement in place. Many Chinese people are wondering, if the water is truly harmless, why doesn't the Japanese side discharge it into lakes or use it for civil purposes instead of releasing it into the ocean? Japan needs to give a direct response to these questions and concerns.

The disposal of the nuclear contaminated water requires the greatest prudence and we cannot afford a misstep. Japan cannot knowingly deceive itself and simply dump the water and do done with it. Once again we urge the Japanese side to assess the issue anew and revoke its wrong decision. It must not wantonly start the ocean discharge before consulting and reaching consensus with all stakeholders including neighboring countries and relevant international institutions.

China Daily: The rapid rise of China's red tourism has caught the attention of international media. Many say that as the CPC celebrates its centenary, the flourishing red tourism has inspired the Chinese people's patriotism and support for the Party, enhanced solidarity, boosted domestic consumption and helped former revolutionary bases to shake off poverty, achieving both economic and social benefits. Do you have any comment on that?

Wang Wenbin: Red is the defining color of the CPC and China. The century-old history of the CPC is chronicled by many "red sites", and every piece of the red land records the Party members' selfless and arduous struggle and exploration for national rejuvenation and people's happiness. History is the best textbook. Visits to the revolutionary sites help us understand how the CPC has grown strong from a small party, so that we will never forget where we came from and draw wisdom and strength from the history to forge ahead.

Also, red tourism is a successful practice of the CPC leading the Chinese people to a new life. Red tourism is closely integrated with the government's policies and projects including sustainable development, poverty alleviation, rural revitalization, agricultural diversification, producing a rich variety of cultural products with unique characteristics. It has empowered the revitalization of former revolutionary bases and supported poverty reduction in impoverished areas. In 2019, the country saw a total of 1.4 billion red tourism trips and the revenue exceeded 400 billion yuan. In 2020, red tourism strongly boosted the post-COVID recovery of China's tourism market. All these show that China's red tourism boom is mainly the result of the Chinese people's spontaneous pilgrimage to the holy sites of revolution, which reflects the Chinese people's endorsement of the CPC and their pride in China's development.

Finally, I want to stress that these red revolutionary sites in China also serve as a window through which foreign friends can learn more about China and the CPC. Through visits to those sites, you will be impressed by the young Chinese Communists' lofty ideal to make a difference and defend the motherland; you can get to know how the Chinese revolution has marched from victory to victory; you can grasp the CPC's maxim of serving the people heart and soul as public servants, thus understanding why the CPC can win the endorsement and support of the people. We sincerely welcome people from all sectors to visit the holy sites of revolution in China to understand the real CPC and China.

Phoenix TV: The British government released the Six-monthly Report on Hong Kong, declaring that China is in a state of ongoing non-compliance with the Sino-British Joint Declaration. UK's Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs stated that Britain and the international community "must continue to stand up for the rights and freedoms of the people of Hong Kong" and "continue to hold China to its obligations". Do you have any comment?

Wang Wenbin: The British government released its latest so-called Six-monthly Report on Hong Kong yesterday. The report, which is full of ideological bias, is a continuation of its moves to confound right with wrong and distort facts. The groundless accusations against China's policies in Hong Kong made by Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab in the foreword of the report again constitute gross interference in Hong Kong affairs and China's domestic affairs. We strongly condemn and firmly oppose this.

I must stress that Hong Kong is part of China and One Country, Two Systems is China's basic national policy. The Central Government cares about Hong Kong and hopes to see the continued successful implementation of One Country, Two Systems more than anyone. Since Hong Kong's return, the Central Government has been governing Hong Kong in accordance with the China's Constitution and the Basic Law of the Hong Kong SAR. The policy of One Country, Two Systems, "Hong Kong people administering Hong Kong" and a high degree of autonomy has been earnestly implemented. Hong Kong residents' lawful rights and freedoms have been fully guaranteed according to law. These are undeniable facts. Everything we've done, whether it's the promulgation of the Law on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong SAR or improving Hong Kong's electoral system, is aimed to uphold and improve the One Country, Two Systems institution, ensure its steady and sustained implementation, and realize lasting peace, stability and prosperity in Hong Kong.

Since the Law on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong SAR took effect nearly a year ago, Hong Kong has regained stability and returned to the right track. Global capital keeps flowing into Hong Kong and foreign enterprises are more confident about Hong Kong's business environment. The improved electoral system fully implements the principle of "patriots governing Hong Kong", ensures extensive and balanced political participation of Hong Kong residents and better accommodates the interests of all social strata, all sectors and all aspects. The democratic political system in Hong Kong will advance in a sound and steady manner and good governance will be gradually realized. The IMF in its latest report once again recognized Hong Kong's status as a global financial hub, casting a vote of confidence in its growth prospects. We believe that with the full support of the Central Government and the concerted efforts of people from all walks of life in the SAR, Hong Kong will surely maintain lasting stability and prosperity and its status as a global financial, shipping and trade hub will be cemented.

The so-called British report disregards these facts and spared no effort to attack and smear China's Central Government and Hong Kong SAR. The report also listed with great pride a series of despicable actions taken by the UK to meddle in Hong Kong affairs and undermine its stability and prosperity. Under the disguise of upholding Hong Kong's democracy, the UK has been meddling in Hong Kong's politics and interfering in China's domestic affairs. Under the disguise of standing up for Hong Kong people's rights, the UK has been disrupting Hong Kong and reaping benefits at others' expense. Hong Kong affairs, which are purely China's domestic affairs, bear on China's sovereignty, security and core interests and brook no external interference. We urge the UK to abide by international law and basic norms governing international relations, grasp the reality that it has been 24 years since Hong Kong's return to the motherland, let go of its old colonial dream, get rid of double standard, stop releasing relevant reports, stop meddling in China's domestic affairs including Hong Kong affairs in any way, and do more things in the interest of Hong Kong's stability and prosperity and China-UK relations.

Reuters: The Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law was passed this week, and the foreign business community has expressed concern about how it could further politicize the business environment. Are you worried about the negative impact that this law may have on foreign investment?

Wang Wenbin: The Legislative Affairs Commission of the NPC Standing Committee has already offered information on this. Around this year's "two sessions," some NPC deputies, CPPCC members and people from all walks of life suggested that it is necessary for China to formulate a specific law on countering foreign sanctions to provide legal support and guarantee for the country to counter discriminatory measures by a foreign country in accordance with the law. According to related work plan, the Legislative Affairs Commission of the NPC Standing Committee has formulated the draft law after studying the legislation advice from various sectors, summarizing China's anti-sanction practices as well as related work, taking into account related overseas legislation, and soliciting opinions from the CPC Central Committee and national government departments as well as experts. In accordance with the legal procedure, the NPC Standing Committee conducted two reviews of the draft in April and June respectively. The Legislative Affairs Commission solicited opinions on the draft law from the CPC Central Committee and national government departments. The Constitution and Law Committee of the NPC then revised and improved the draft in accordance with the deliberations of the Standing Committee and the opinions from various sectors. The law on countering foreign sanctions that has been adopted accommodates input from various sectors, reflects the will of the Chinese people and is consistent with international law and basic norms of international relations.

As to the impact of the law on foreign investment, I don't see any causal effect here. If anything, the legislation will help create a predictable legal environment and stable and foreseeable business environment for foreign companies' development in China. The 29th session of the 13th NPC Standing Committee also reviewed and adopted the Hainan Free Trade Port Law and a draft decision to authorize the Shanghai Municipal People's Congress and its standing committee to formulate regulations concerning the Pudong New Area. These are new measures China has taken to deepen reform and opening-up. I want to stress that China always welcomes and supports foreign companies doing business and pursuing cooperation in China and protects their rights and interests in accordance with law. China will only open its door wider to the world and remain committed to fostering better business environment for foreign companies and sharing development opportunities with the rest of the world.

AFP: Amnesty International released a report yesterday claiming that China's "oppressive" actions against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities constitute "crimes against humanity". What's your response to this?

Wang Wenbin: People are clear about the nature of Amnesty International. This organization, wearing tinted glasses, has been misleading the public and spreading lies and rumors about Xinjiang. Its so-called report is like adding one more page to its "record of lies". We urge the relevant organization to abandon its persistent prejudice against China, stop fabricating and spreading disinformation and look at relevant issues from an objective and just perspective.

Bloomberg: Yesterday, the US Trade Representative and her Taiwanese counterpart had a meeting in which they agreed to resume the discussions on the trade and investment framework agreement between the two parties. Do you have any comment on this and on those contacts? And also, do you have any comment to make about Taiwan's expressed interest in joining the CPTPP?

Wang Wenbin: On your first question, China's position on the Taiwan question is consistent and clear. We firmly oppose all forms of official interactions between the US and Taiwan and reject any agreement with implications of sovereignty and of official nature between countries having diplomatic ties with China and the Taiwan region.

China urges the US side to earnestly abide by the one-China principle and the three China-US joint communiques, discontinue all forms of official interactions with the Taiwan region, avoid sending any wrong signal to "Taiwan independence" forces to avoid undermining China-US relations and peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.

On your second question, as we have repeatedly said, the Taiwan region's participation in regional economic cooperation must be handled on the basis of the one-China principle.

Bloomberg: Yesterday, a US naval vessel and an Australian naval vessel sailed together through the South China Sea. Do you have any comment on the action?

Wang Wenbin: We hope relevant countries can do more to promote regional peace and stability, rather than flex muscles.

*********

According to this year's public holiday schedule for the Duanwu or Dragon Boat Festival, the MFA regular press conference will be adjourned on Monday, June 14 and resumed on Tuesday, June 15. In the meantime, you may send your questions to the MFA Spokesperson's Office via fax, email or WeChat as usual.

I'd like to wish all of you safety and good health on this traditional Chinese festival!
Climate change is causing mountain snow to melt more rapidly and glaciers to shrink, but this is making a widely varied impact on water supplies in Asia, a new paper by PSI Senior Scientist Jeffrey Kargel says.

These effects are altering the water supplies of more than 1 billion people who depend on rivers that have their headwaters in the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges, according to the new paper "Glacio-hydrology of the Himalaya-Karakoram" that appears today in Science on which Kargel is a co-author. Mohd. Farooq Azam of the Indian Institute of Technology Indore is lead author.



"The new work is the most thorough review ever of the region's glacier-fed rivers. Our research team gathered the results of nearly 250 scholarly papers to arrive at a more accurate understanding -- something approaching a consensus -- of the links between climatic warming, precipitation change, glacier shrinkage, and river flow," Kargel said.



"More than 1 billion people derive some of their water from melting glaciers in the Himalaya and Karakoram mountains, and so the population will be affected when much of the glacier ice mass melts throughout this century and gradually stops supplying an important amount of water. Region-wide, the total impact on each year's water supplies varies," Azam said. "Glacier meltwater, and therefore climate change impacts on glaciers, are crucial in the Indus basin. The Ganges and Brahmaputra basins are more dominated by monsoonal rains, so the really big climate change story there is how it affects the monsoons."



"Himalayan and Karakoram mountain glaciers are the main story with part of the region's annual water supplies, particularly that in very high elevation mountain valleys and villages near the glaciers. At more distant points, elevations are lower and glaciers have a reduced importance as a source of annual water supplies compared to rainfall and melting mountain snow," Kargel said. "However, in some of the lower valleys during the driest seasons in the drier parts of the region, glacier outflows are still dominant, and people's livelihoods and ability to live there depend on glaciers. This affects millions of people."



The team's work builds a stronger consensus about the important roles of glaciers in regulating river flows in the region and how the shifting climate is affecting those flows. Important gaps in knowledge remain wide and must be filled in coming years. Kargel highlights a few of the gap questions: "How does snowfall and glacier health vary between river valleys? How thick are the glaciers and how long will they survive in an era of accelerated melting? Why are some glaciers advancing even when most of them are shrinking? The geographic variations in glacier health are substantial, and this means that one size does not fit all when projecting the future changes."



Climate change, however, is not only melting glaciers but is having a broad and deep impact on the overall hydrology from the mountains down to the river deltas. Umesh Haritashya of the University of Dayton, a co-author on the paper and a co-investigator of a NASA-funded project with Kargel, said, "Climate change is altering rainfall amounts and distribution. Changes in the runoff pattern from both rain and glacier melting is expected to increase incidents of extreme runoff and resultant flash floods, landslides, and debris flows."



Some aspects of global warming like the impacts on snow, glaciers, and water supplies are in the hands of the region's people and their leaders, Kargel said: "Asia now dominates the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, smog and soot are thought to be almost as important in causing accelerated melting of Himalayan glaciers as greenhouse gas-driven global warming, according to other studies. If the regional economies could control air pollution, this could bring that part of the glacier shrinkage problem under control. This is a topic of ongoing scientific study by the scientific community."



Kargel's and Haritashya's work on the project was funded by grants to PSI from NASA's High Mountain Asia and Interdisciplinary Science programs.

THE PLANETARY SCIENCE INSTITUTE:



The Planetary Science Institute is a private, nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation dedicated to Solar System exploration. It is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, where it was founded in 1972.



PSI scientists are involved in numerous NASA and international missions, the study of Mars and other planets, the Moon, asteroids, comets, interplanetary dust, impact physics, the origin of the Solar System, extra-solar planet formation, dynamics, the rise of life, and other areas of research. They conduct fieldwork on all continents around the world. They also are actively involved in science education and public outreach through school programs, children's books, popular science books and art.



PSI scientists are based in 30 states and the District of Columbia, and work from various locations around the world.



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Mission controllers will command the Canadarm2 robotic arm to remove a new pair of solar arrays from the SpaceX Cargo Dragon resupply ship tonight.

Four Expedition 65 astronauts are also training for robotics activities to support two spacewalks scheduled to begin next week.

Packed inside the unpressurized segment of the Cargo Dragon, also known as its trunk, is a pair of unique solar arrays that will soon be attached to the International Space Station's Port-6 truss structure. Also called iROSA, or ISS Roll Out Solar Arrays, they will be extracted tonight from Dragon's trunk by robotics controllers remotely commanding the Canadarm2. It will be staged on the truss structure where two spacewalkers will install it on the station starting next week.

In the meantime, Flight Engineers Shane Kimbrough and Thomas Pesquet are preparing for those two installation spacewalks planned for June 16 and 20. The duo joined fellow flight engineers Mark Vande Hei and Megan McArthur on Thursday afternoon for computerized training to prepare for the robotics activities necessary to support the solar array installation work.

Kimbrough and Pesquet this week have been inspecting their spacesuits, organizing their tools and readying the U.S. Quest airlock where they will stage both spacewalks. They will set their spacesuit batteries to battery power at 8 a.m. EDT on both days signifying the start of their spacewalk. NASA TV will begin its live coverage of both spacewalks at 6:30 a.m.

Science is still ongoing aboard the orbital lab as the astronauts and mission controllers get ready for the two spacewalks.

Commander Akihiko Hoshide and Pesquet took turns wearing a virtual reality headset and clicking a trackball for the Time Perception experiment. Kimbrough inventoried medical supplies and photographed cotton plants growing for the TICTOC space botany study. McArthur worked on a pharmaceutical freeze-drying study while Vande Hei loaded a CubeSat deployer for upcoming satellite deployments.

In the Russian segment of the orbital lab, Flight Engineer Oleg Novitskiy checked on Soyuz MS-18 crew ship and ISS Progress 77 resupply ship gear today. Flight Engineer Pyotr Dubrov assisted with the Soyuz work and worked throughout the day on Russian life support and computer maintenance.

On-Orbit Status Report

Payloads:

Bioculture system: The crew removed the Bioculture system from Dragon, installed it into EXPRESS rack 4, and successfully powered it up. This facility will be used to support the Cell Science-04 investigation in mid-July. The tardigrade (water bear) is the model organism for studying biological survival under the most extreme environmental stress conditions on Earth and in space. The objective of the Using Water Bears to Identify Biological Countermeasures to Stress during Multigenerational (Cell Science-04) investigation is to characterize the molecular biology of short term and multigenerational survival in the space environment by identifying genes that are required for adaptation and survival in high stress environments. The findings from this study can be applied to understanding the stress factors of humans in the space environment and identification of countermeasures.

Lyophillization-2: The crew installed one sample tray into the sample chamber. Although originally intended to accommodate two samples at a time, the crew was only able to fit the one sample and still reliably seal the chamber door. This frozen sample will be exposed to vacuum to allow it to freeze dry. Lyophilization-2 in Microgravity (Lyophilization-2) examines gravity's effects on freeze-dried materials. Lyophilization, or freeze-drying, is a common method for formulating pharmaceuticals with improved chemical and physical stability. On Earth, the process leads to formation of layers with structural differences, but if such stratification is due to gravity, it may not occur in microgravity. This investigation, which follows up on previous work, could result in improved freeze-drying processes for the pharmaceutical and other industries.

NRCSD-20: The crew gathered the appropriate items and installed the Nanoracks Cubesat Deployer-20 (NRCSD-20) onto the JEM Airlock (JEMAL) slide table. NRCSD-20 will be used to launch two satellites: RamSat and SOAR. RamSat is a 20x10x10 cm satellite equipped with multispectral and near-infrared cameras to study large-scale disturbances to forests. SOAR is a 30x10x10 cm satellite which looks at the effects various materials have on aerodynamic drag and performance, measures thermospheric winds, and demonstrates various maneuver capabilities. NRCSD is a stackable, modular, ground loaded launch case. Each NRCSD accommodates up to six launch cases. NRCSD is passed through the JEM Airlock, and manipulated robotically to the satellite deployment position.

RTPCG-2: The crew set up the appropriate microscope hardware, observed and took photos of the crystal growth screening plate. The protein crystals in the plate have been growing for seven days under varying conditions. Phase II Real-time Protein Crystal Growth on Board the International Space Station (RTPCG-2) demonstrates new methods for producing high-quality protein crystals in microgravity. Previous work has shown microgravity can sometimes produce high-quality protein crystals that can be analyzed to identify possible targets for drugs to treat disease. RTPCG-2 tests high-quality proteins crystals for detailed analysis back on Earth.

Tangolab: The crew completed the Tangolab-2 card cube install and Tangolab-4 card cube replace activities. Space Tango's TangoLab locker is a reconfigurable general research facility designed for microgravity research and development (R&D) and pilot manufacturing aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

TICTOC: As a continuation of the experiment which started this past weekend, the crew set up the appropriate hardware and took photos of the 12 plant growth chambers for science day 5. They also reviewed the procedure for the harvest, currently scheduled for Friday. The ground teams will use the images to evaluate the status of the growing plants. Target, the retail store, is funding the investigation Targeting Improved Cotton Through On-orbit Cultivation (TICTOC) that studies how root system architecture affects plant resilience to stress, water-use efficiency, and carbon sequestration during the critical phase of seedling establishment. Roots play a central role in plant stress resistance and survival, but their growth patterns depend upon gravity. This investigation examines how environmental factors and genes control development of roots in the absence of gravity.

Time Perception: The crew set up the appropriate hardware and participated in a Time Perception science session. The accurate perception of objects in the environment is a prerequisite for spatial orientation and reliable performance of motor tasks. Time perception in microgravity is also fundamental to motion perception, sound localization, speech, and fine motor coordination. The Time Perception in Microgravity experiment quantifies the subjective changes in time perception in humans during and after long-duration exposure to microgravity.

Systems:

Treadmill-2 (T2) Status: This morning the crew completed the re-alignment of the right bottom snubber pin and verified the rack was centered. Review of the photos indicated the T2 rack was back to its nominal configuration and crew is now able to exercise on T2.

Advanced Resistive Exercise Device (ARED) Imbalance: On Tuesday June 8th, Engineering teams reported an imbalance occurrence in ARED since completing a tensioning adjustment back on May 25th. The load was concerning enough that the team had requested crew limit loads to under 60lbs. Today crew performed an inspection of the detents and performed additional un-tensioning and re-tensioning of the cable arm rope. Ground teams reviewed photos and three subsequent exercise sessions deemed ARED was back in a nominal configuration. ARED is again GO for nominal use with the load restriction lifted.

Crew Quarters (CQ) Exhaust Airflow Sensor Remove and Replace (R&R): This morning the crew replaced the failed exhaust airflow sensor in the deck crew quarters. This sensor was deemed failed back on May 18th.

Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) 3009 Dump and Fill: This morning an additional dump and fill was performed on EMU 3009. This was to verify nominal water sensor pressure after it was reading slightly higher than expected during suit operations back on June 3rd. Pressure readings looked nominal with no discrepancies.

Internal Thermal Control System (ITCS) Node 3 Maintenance Canister removal: After being installed for 28 hours to allow for dispersal of Ortho-Phthalaldehyde (OPA) into the Node 3 Internal Thermal Control System (ITCS) and thermal equalization of the ITCS Maintenance Canister, the ITCS Maintenance Canister was removed from the Cupola quick disconnects (QDs). The gas trap plug was then replaced on the Node 3 Moderate Temperature Loop (MTL) Pump Package Assembly (PPA).

Completed Task List Activities:

None

Today's Ground Activities:

All activities are complete unless otherwise noted.

PRO Bioculture System Activation Commanding

JEM Airlock and ACDU-RC Activation

SSRMS Extraction of IROSA solar arrays [ACTIVE]

MSS maneuver to inspect magnetic elements with P1UPOB EHDC. [PLANNED]

Look Ahead Plan:

Friday, June 11 (GMT 162)

Payloads:

AC Touch, BCM, Food Acceptability, FSL/Board exchange, FSL/Soft Matter Dynamics, GLACIER logistics, Kidney Cells-02, Lyophillization-2, Molecular Muscle Experiment-2, NanoRacks Module 93 photo, TICTOC harvest

Systems:

Atmosphere Revitalization System (ARS) Thermal Amine Scrubber (TAS)

Accessing and sampling ITCS fluid from the Node 3 Sampling Adapter

Regenerative Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) Recycle Tank Drain

Saturday, June 12 (GMT 163)

Payloads:

BPA housekeeping, TICTOC closeout

Systems:

Crew off-duty day

Sunday, June 13 (GMT 164)

Payloads:

No utilization activities

Systems:

Crew off-duty day

Today's Planned Activities:

All activities are complete unless otherwise noted.

HRF Generic HRF Centrifuge Frozen Blood Collection

CABLE ARM ROPES TENSIONING AND DETENT INSPECTION

HRF Generic MELFI Sample Insertion

Extravehicular Activity (EVA) Tool Configuring

Deck 1 cleanup from cargo

Phospho-Aging Generic MELFI Sample Retrieval And Insertion Operations

Lyophilization MELFI Sample Retrieve

Time experiment science

TICTOC MWA Preparation

Bioculture System Hardware Transfer and Install Ops

ISS HAM Columbus Pass Kenwood

Treadmill 2 (T2) Right Bottom Snubber Fix

SpX Cargo Dragon Payload Unpack

Public Affairs Office (PAO) Event in High Definition (HD) - JEM

Deck Crew Quarters Powerdown Prep

Internal Thermal Control System (ITCS) Node 3 Maintenance Canister Removal

Deck Crew Quarters Exhaust Airflow Sensor Remove and Replace

Internal Thermal Control System (ITCS) Node 3 Gas Trap Plug Replace

HRF Rack 1 Supply Kit Inventory

JEM Airlock Slide Table (ST) Extension to JPM Side

NanoRacks CubeSat Deployer Installation on the MPEP

Microscope Reposition Preparation

TangoLab-2 Card Cube Install

Real-time Protein Crystal Growth Microscopy Plate S/N C1 Row B, Day 7

EVA Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) Water Tank Dump and Fill

Inventory Management System (IMS) Conference

Microscope Reposition Post Ops

Robotics Procedure Review

On-board Training (OBT) EVA Robotics Onboard Trainer (ROBoT) Session

JEM Airlock Stowage Replace

Flight Director/ISS CREW CONFERENCE

LSG Work Volume Deploy

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Hong Kong: Boarding rules to be tightened

The Government today announced that it will tighten boarding requirements for people arriving from Colombia and Korea from June 18.

It will move Colombia and Korea from Group C to the high-risk Group B specified places due to the persistent unstable epidemic situation in various overseas places and the prevalent transmission of cases involving mutant virus strains.

People who have stayed in any Group B specified places on the day of boarding for Hong Kong or during the 14 days before that day will have to present at boarding a negative result proof of a nucleic acid test for COVID-19 conducted within 72 hours before the aircrafts scheduled departure, and the confirmation of a room reservation in a designated quarantine hotel in Hong Kong.

If they have been fully vaccinated, they will be subject to a 14-day compulsory quarantine at designated quarantine hotels, with three tests to be conducted during the period, followed by a seven-day self-monitoring period and compulsory testing on the 16th and 19th day of arrival at Hong Kong.

Fully vaccinated means the suggested dosage of a recognised COVID-19 vaccine has been given in accordance with relevant guidelines at least 14 days before arrival in Hong Kong, the Government noted.

Meanwhile, those who are yet to be fully vaccinated will be subject to a 21-day compulsory quarantine at designated quarantine hotels, with four tests to be conducted during the period.

This story has been published on: 2021-06-11. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Algiers,June 11, 2021 (SPS) - The ambassador of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) to Algiers Abdelkader Taleb Omar affirmed Thursday that the Moroccan system has experienced bitter defeats, the last one was within the Pan-African Parliament (PAP), after Western Sahara was elected vice-president of regional group for North Africa .

In a statement at the end of the audience granted by the Speaker of the Council of Nation Salah Goudjil to the Sahrawi parliamentary delegation, Taleb Omar underlined that the Sahrawi parliamentary delegation has come to extend its thanks and respect for the speaker of the Council of the Nation for his personal efforts and those of the Algerian parliamentary group, and his contribution to achieve this result, by adopting the right path likely to enable PAP to organize itself and to conform to the rules governing the African Union, like alternation and the representation of regions without exception.

By returning to AU, the Moroccan system wanted to freeze the position of the latter vis-a-vis the Sahrawi issue, and even hindering its actions and changing its positions, by sowing discord, nevertheless its attempts failed, like that aimed at changing the position of the European Union, Spain and Germany and bringing the new American administration, chaired by Joe Biden, to adopt the same position as the former American president with regard to the Sahrawi issue.

For his part, vice-president of North Africa Geopolitical Group at PAP Djamel Bendir affirmed that the meeting was an opportunity to review the developments of the Sahrawi cause and the novelties recorded at the level of PAP. SPS

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Dili (Timor-Leste),11 June 2021 (SPS) - The new ambassador of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (S.A.D.R), Mr. Abba Malainin presented Friday his Credentials letter as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Saharawi Republic to the President of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, H.E. Mr. Francisco Guterres Lu Olo in the Presidential Palace in Dili.



The President expressed his pleasure to receive the new Saharawi ambassador letter of credence and said that Timor-Leste and S.A.D.R share a similar history and defend the same values of peace and freedom.



He also expressed the Timor-Leste government as well as his own personal commitment to continue supporting the just cause of the Saharawi people.





During the ceremony the Saharawi Ambassador Said I am really pleased and honoured to be the Saharawi Republic new Ambassador to Timor-Leste and I am conveying the desire of the Saharawi President, H.E. Mr. Brahim Ghali and the Saharawi Government to strengthen the existing good relations between the Saharawi Republic and the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste.





He further expressed to H.E. the President the Saharawi Government and the Saharawi People gratitude and thanks for Timor-Leste Principled stand of support with regard to the just struggle of the Saharawi people in order to exercise their right to Self-determination and to extend S.A.D.R sovereignty over all its territory.





The Saharawi Diplomat briefed H.E. the President about a range of issues related to the recent developments in Western Sahara including Morocco last November violation of the cease-fire agreement.



The event was attended by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, H.E. Mrs. Adaljiza Reis Magno and high officials in Timor-leste. (SPS)



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Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP) has received CSR support from leading ICT solutions provider Huawei to put to use two C-CAMP marquee COVID innovations in the form of non-invasive ventilator devices and state-of-the-art remote vitals monitoring technologies in public health hospitals and facilities in the state of Karnataka.

In response to the massive surge of COVID-19 cases in the second wave, Huawei has partnered with C-CAMP to accelerate the facilitation of urgent medical supplies to support those most affected. The project has been fulfilled with the guidance from the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser, Govt. of India. In a bid to further boost existing oxygen capacity, the joint initiative will also facilitate oxygen concentrators to the deployment. 15 HFNC CPAP Oxygen therapy systems, 200 remote monitoring units and 200 concentrators were personally handed over to the Honble Deputy CM of Karnataka, Dr. Ashwath Narayan C.N. by C-CAMP CEO and Director, Dr. Taslimarif Saiyed and Mr. Gilbert Nathan, AVP, Huawei India in Bengaluru.

Welcoming this most recent deployment, Honble Deputy CM of Karnataka, Dr. Ashwath Narayan C.N. said In association with C-CAMP, Huawei India AVP Nathan handed over 200 Oxygen concentrators to the Govt. These will be distributed equally between 40 constituencies. We also launched innovative solutions, developed by C-CAMP to tackle the COVID-19.

Upon this close collaboration with Government of Karnataka and Huawei India, Dr. Saiyed said C-CAMP has been working in close collaboration with Govt of Karnataka in developing innovations to boost public healthcare infrastructure and access to quality healthcare. Today, we are happy to launch a few of these technologies that can contribute to Nations fight back in these unprecedented difficult times. 

Speaking on the initiative, Mr. Ramu Patchala, Executive Director, Huawei India, said, As we start witnessing welcome signs of recovery in the second Covid-19 wave, it is important that we plan and provide for the future. Huaweis partnership with C-CAMP is aimed at strengthening the resource availability for future medical requirements. As part of our continued commitment to India and the people of Karnataka, todays contribution of 15 HFNC CPAP Oxygen therapy systems, 200 remote monitoring units and 200 concentrators for the state of Karnataka is first part of our overall commitment to support India with Covid medical resources worth INR 5CR. In these trying times, we remain steadfast in our commitment to do whatever it takes to serve the people of India.

C-CAMP as a premier bio innovation hub with a decade long experience in deep tech life sciences innovation and entrepreneurship in India is helping contribute in this hour of need by deploying and scaling up of innovative technologies to strengthen Indias public healthcare facilities. It has been joined by several other partners, both national and international, in this crucial fight back.

Being based in Karnataka a majority of these C-CAMP efforts are centred around the State which also happens to be one of the worst afflicted in India.

As a part of this support the following three lifesaving technologies will be provided to the public health facilities across the State 

1. High Flow Nasal Cannula (HFNC) and Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) Oxygen therapy system: Bangalore-based and C-CAMP portfolio start-up Coeo Labs/Innaccel Technologies Saans Pro CPAP and HFNC system is an all-in-one unit compatible with multiple patient interfaces, including protective continuous interfaces such as Helmet/hood for CPAP.

2. Remote Vital Parameter Monitoring: Another Bangalore-based C-CAMP supported start-up Turtle Shell Technologies product Dozee is a contactless remote vitals monitoring and AI based triaging system that can convert non-ICU beds into step-down ICUs thereby virtually increasing ICU grade bed capacity in hospitals.

3. Oxygen Concentrators: Oxygen concentrators using pressure swing adsorption (PSA) technology are a portable and cost-efficient source for providing oxygen for patients requiring medical oxygen due to low oxygen levels in their blood.
Former employees of LIAT in Antigua, met and rejected the Governments offer of part severance payment. (Photo Source: ANR)

LIAT, or whats left of the entity known as LIAT (1974) Ltd. and that entity that Antigua and Barbudas Prime Minister Gaston Browne has said he has salvaged, was dealt a double whammy last week.





Antigua News Room online service reported at the end of last week that Prime Minister Gaston Browne was made to endure even further strain, when the former LIAT workers employed in Antigua and whose services had been terminated, rejected his governments offer of paying 50 per cent of their severance in cash, land and bonds.





In fact, it was Prime Minister Browne himself who announced that the union representing the former LIAT workers had rejected the offer, but he cautioned that the offer will not change.





Scientific Study





And in what could have far reaching repercussions, a scientific study that was made available recently, is said to have uncovered a potential source of chemicals onboard certain LIAT ATR planes, that may pose a long-term risk to crew and passengers travelling on those aircraft.





Barbados Today, in a June 5 article, reported that the study was ordered "following complaints from a number of pilots that they were falling ill at the end of their flights, between 2016 and just before the company collapsed in 2020.





Barbados Today reported that Environmental Scientist Dr Linroy Christian from Antigua and Barbuda was contracted to conduct a study, and produced a report dated February 18, 2019.





That study, as per Barbados Today, pointed to a link between the cause of a variety of respiratory problems, allergic reactions, headaches and other health issues experienced by the pilots, "to contaminated air quality inside the aircraft.





Findings





Among the scientists findings were:

* accumulation of dust and fibres on surfaces within the flight deck and the main cabin;

* material found within the mixing chamber, recirculating fan, and supply ducting of the air conditioning /recirculation system;

* filtration of the recirculating air did not occur;

* housing of the recirculating fan was lined with foam that was inundated with dust and a soot-like material a potential source of chemicals that may pose a long-term risk to crew and passengers;

* the ground air conditioning units were identified as an additional source of potential allergens, and were not maintained according to a defined and documented schedule and standard procedures.

LIF (one type of ATR planes as per the LIAT fleet) recorded the highest levels for synthetic fibres, opaque particle, fibre glass, fungi and black particles.





Recommendations





Dr. Christians study advanced 21 recommendations but he admitted that he "was not sure if any of the recommendations were implemented by LIAT.

Among the 21 recommendations were:

* immediate in-depth remedial measures should be instituted for the LIF aircraft;

* that the air conditioning and recirculation system be specifically addressed;

* improve daily and in-depth maintenance to include routine vacuuming of the cabin housekeeping;

* introduce scheduled deep-cleaning to remove particles from vents, instrument panels, mixing chamber and baggage hold;

* investigate the possibility of duct cleaning as a maintenance activity pilots prone to hyper-allergenic responses should not operate the aircraft identified in the study until remedial measures have been instituted.

It was agreed that Dr. Christian would conduct a follow up study, but the airline collapsed before that could be undertaken.





Action by dismissed pilots





Dr. Christians 600-page report sparked the filing of a class action claim last year against LIAT. It was lodged in the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court in Antigua and Barbuda by five pilots who were among hundreds of staff members terminated as part of a restructuring process to try to stave off liquidation.





The ex-pilots are accusing the company of frustrating their efforts to access the courts to get justice for the years of suffering from being forced to fly "sick planes; that the company was fully aware that they got ill from working in its aircraft, nevertheless caused them to continue to work in the poor air-quality environment.









But even though the pilots who were adversely affected by the environmental problems are no longer employed by LIAT, Barbados TODAY reported that some of those who were kept on to fly the planes, have been experiencing health challenges similar to those of their former work colleagues.





LIAT suspended its services in April 2020 purportedly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It returned to flying with a limited schedule on November 1, 2020, with its first daily flight from Antigua to Dominica. (Sources: Barbados Today, Antigua News Room)
The typical fishing boat that is used by the majority of fishermen in SVG including the three men who are still missing since June 1.

As of Thursday, 10th June, three fishermen from Rose Place were still missing at sea.





The three  Lennox Grand Charge Phillips, Angus Pharaoh Webb and Bernard Butters Dublin - were reported missing since Tuesday 1st June. They had left at 6:00am that morning on a routine fishing trip in a 27-foot pirogue  Odyssier





The men, who would usually return at around 6:00pm on a normal fishing day, did not return at that time on that Tuesday, and a missing persons report was made that evening.





Searches, mounted by the SVG Coast Guard, local fishermen with the assistance of the Regional Security Services, Coast Guard units from Grenada, St Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago and Martinique, with Martinique offering aerial services, were all in vain.





In a press release that followed, the SVG Coast Guard said the missing vessel with the three men was last seen on the northeast coast of SVG by another fishing vessel, at around 10:00 am on the said Tuesday.





This north east positioning is in keeping with the usual course fishermen here use.





Since the sighting on Tuesday 1st June, there have been no other sightings to date (Thursday) the Coast Guard confirmed.





Notwithstanding the progress of time without any good news, residents, loved ones and the fishing communities are keeping their fingers crossed.





According to SVG TV, when they visited the Rose Place community Thursday, Dublins wife said that her husbands birthday was on the Tuesday, the said day he and his colleagues had left for sea.





She was, as expected, finding it difficult to come to grips with not hearing from her husband, SVG TV reported.





Meanwhile, Winsbert Harry, President of the National Fisherfolk Organisation, in weighing in on the ordeal, told local media personnel that this highlights once again, the question of safety at sea, especially for fishermen whose operations expose them to danger on a daily basis.





Harry also confirmed, based on information he had received, that it was more than likely that the three fishermen had gone to the northern side of the island to fish.





Tales of men missing at sea are not new to the Rose Place area including one of those missing. THE VINCENTIAN understands that Angus Webb had had a previous experience of being missing at sea. He was rescued by a search party after going missing last year.





Mark Dennis, Amron Thomas Simonette, and Walter Lynch returned home from Puerto Rico to a heros welcome, June 9, 2010. They had gone fishing on Fishermans Day (May 24), encountered problems and drifted for eleven days before being rescued and taken to Puerto Rico.





Residents also speak about a man who survived a 45-day ordeal and found his way to Jamaica, after his rescue.





His welcome home was also an occasion of a joyful reunion, which the Rose Hall community hopes it can reproduce for the three who are currently missing.
Where and when possible, supplies were delivered directly to those in need.

After spending nearly a month on mainland St. Vincent, the Volunteer Ministers from the Freewinds completed the distribution of essential supplies sent in by the Freewinds Ship, and executed a massive cleanup in several towns in the red and orange zones.





The project began with the arrival of a 40-foot container of much needed relief supplies based on a list of priority items issued by the National Emergency Management Organization. This container was arranged by the Freewinds through donations by the International Association of Scientologists.





The Volunteer Ministers distributed the relief supplies to shelters for evacuees in Kingstown as well as to villages in the red and orange zones, including the most remote and devastated areas like Owia, Fancy and Sandy Bay.





They also assisted the Red Cross by conducting assessments of areas in the most hazardous zones, so that disaster relief planning could be done for these.





Once the supplies were organized and stored for proper distribution, it was time to prioritize what was needed to be done. The collaboration with the Red Cross was invaluable in accomplishing this.





Soon, in addition to the distribution of relief supplies to villages and shelters for evacuees, the Volunteer Ministers executed cleanups by removing ash from drainage, ditches and rooftops. Wherever this work was started, the local residents joined thereby expediting this basic but necessary undertaking.





Ms. Kirstie Clements, the team leader of the Volunteer Ministers on St. Vincent, had this to say: "We spent nearly a month on St. Vincent and were welcomed at every turn by the many kind and spirited people that we now all consider lifelong friends. From Chateaubelair to Georgetown, we were greeted with smiling faces, expressions of thanks and most importantly, people jumping in to help their own communities. The island was clearly taking a turn for the better.





Joy "Mamma Duncan of Chateaubelair had this to say about the Volunteer Minsters: "When I first met them I was asked what is needed. I told them food and water, and the very next day they showed up with it along with other supplies.





"After the supplies were given out they started to help with cleanup, digging ash out of drainage ditches. These volunteers worked very hard. They visited the Chateau area a number of times. We are very thankful for what they have done.




Lloyd Lynch, Head of the UWI SRC La Soufriere Monitoring Team, cited a hold up in obtaining permits to install equipment at newly identified sites.

"But I dont know about it and all it will do is to take one telephone from me to relevant persons.





This was a clear indication of how the government bureaucracy works in essence, and it came directly from the Prime Minister, Dr. Ralph Gonsalves.





Dr. Gonsalves was moved into summing up the situation when he called in from Cuba to Mondays edition of the Eyeing La Soufriere proramme as aired no NBC radio, to give some explanations as to why it appeared there was an unnecessary delay in approving a request for permission (permits) to erect monitoring equipment/instruments, to be used in the ongoing monitoring of the La Soufriere volcano.





Head of The UWI Seismic Research Centre monitoring team, Lloyd Lynch, Instrumentation Engineer, said on the progamme as referenced, that he had been in the country now going into three weeks, during which he made request for permission to set up monitoring stations at Walliabou, Greiggs Mountain and Fitz Hughes. He was still awaiting a response.





The sites were chosen after helicopter flyover of La Soufriere on Wednesday January 5th. The team on the flyover, including Lynch, scouted possible new seismic station sites to better monitor the latest activity.





The helicopter flight was arranged between the Government of SVG and the Government of France, through the Embassy of France to the Eastern Caribbean States, to Barbados and the OECS in Saint Lucia.





Dr. Gonsalves wanted to know to whom the request was made and advised that since it should have been made of the Lands and Planning Division, it should have presented little difficulty since Montgomery Daniel, who is acting Prime Minister in Dr. Gonsalves absence, has the responsibility for those portfolios.





The Prime Minister also disclosed that he had spoken to Michelle Forbes, Director of NEMO, a few days prior and neither she nor anyone else told him of any impediment to granting permission for construction at the sites as identified.





Dr. Gonslaves admitted during the discourse that this matter should have been attended to with urgency and not become entangled in the usual government bureaucracy.





When all was done, there was a sense that a call from the Prime Minister would set the situation right.




Kenezia Baynes, a former student of the St Josephs Convent (Marriaqua), is the 2020 recipient of the CXC Award as the Most Outstanding Candidate for Geography.





Ms. Baynes was declared recipient of the Professor Wilma Bailey Award during a virtual presentation ceremony on Thursday 3rd June, hosted by CXC in Antigua and Barbuda. The ceremony served to recognize the Caribbeans top sixteen awardees at the July/August 2020 examinations.





While Trinidad and Tobago dominated the awards receiving eight, the regional top performer for 2020 was Bhedesh Persaud of Queens College in Guyana. He won the Overall Outstanding Performance Achievement Awa rd with 22 subjects at Grade I and 1 subject at Grade II.





Ms. Baynes was presented with her award here in SVG by Senior Education Officer with responsibility for Secondary Schools- Mrs. Kay Martin Jack, acting on behalf of CXC.





The Annual CXC Award Ceremony is considered one of the prestigious events on the Caribbean calendar.





Outstanding students would usually be flown to the host country to receive their awards in person. However, the prevailing circumstances occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic forced an innovative approach, where all the students, parents, principals, teachers, award sponsors and officials from CXC participated virtually.





Antigua & Barbudas Prime Minister Gaston Browne, delivered the feature address and stressed the need for the Caribbean Region to build an education system that adequately responds to the needs of modern economies by giving students the tools to succeed at all levels of their educational pursuits.
Novel fast-beam-switching transceiver takes 5G to the next level

Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) and NEC Corporation jointly develop a 28-GHz phased-array transceiver that supports efficient and reliable 5G communications. The proposed transceiver outperforms previous designs in various regards by adapting fast beam switching and leakage cancellation mechanism.

With the recent emergence of innovative technologies, such as the Internet of Things, smart cities, autonomous vehicles, and smart mobility, our world is on the brink of a new age. This stimulates the use of millimeter-wave bands, which have far more signal bandwidth, to accommodate these new ideas. 5G can offer data rates over 10 Gbit/s through the use of these millimeter-waves and multiple-in-multiple-out (MIMO) technology--a technology that employs multiple transmitters and receivers to transfer more data at the same time.

Large-scale phased-array transceivers are crucial for the implementation of these MIMO systems. While MIMO systems boost spectral performance, large-scale phased-array systems face several challenges, such as increased power dissipation and implementation costs. One such critical challenge is latency caused by beam switching time. Beam switching is an important feature that enables the selection of the most optimal beam for each terminal. A design that optimizes beam switching time and device cost is, thus, the need of the hour.

Motivated by this, scientists from Tokyo Institute of Technology and NEC Corporation in Japan collaborated to develop a 28-GHz phased-array transceiver that supports fast beam switching and high-speed data communication. Their findings will be discussed at the 2021 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits, an international conference that explores emerging trends and innovative concepts in semiconductor technology and circuits.

The proposed design facilitates dual-polarized operation, in which data is transmitted simultaneously through horizontal and vertical-polarized waves. However, one issue with these systems is cross-polarization leakage, which results in signal degradation, especially in the millimeter-wave band. The research team delved into the issue and developed a solution. Prof. Kenichi Okada, who led the research team, says, "Fortunately, we were able to devise a cross-polarization detection and cancellation methodology, using which we could suppress the leakages in both transmit and receive mode."

One critical feature of the proposed mechanism is the ability to achieve low-latency beam switching and high-accuracy beam control. Static elements control the building blocks of the mechanism, while on-chip SRAM is used to store the settings for different beams (Figure 1). This mechanism leads to fast beam switching with ultra-low latency being achieved. It also enables fast switching in transmit and receive modes due to the use of separate registers for each mode.

Another aspect of the proposed transceiver is its low cost and small size. The transceiver has a bi-directional architecture, which allows for a smaller chip size of 5  4.5 mm2 (Figure 2). For a total of 256-pattern beam settings stored within the on-chip SRAM, a beam switching time of only 4 nanoseconds was achieved! Error vector magnitude (EVM)--a measure to quantify the efficiency of digitally modulated signals such as quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM)--was calculated for the proposed transceiver. The transceiver was supported with EVMs of 5.5% in 64QAM and 3.5% in 256QAM.

When compared with state-of-the-art 5G phased-array transceivers, the system has a faster beam switching time and excellent MIMO efficiency. Okada is optimistic about the future of the 28-GHz 5G phased-array transceiver. He concludes, "The technology we developed for the 5G NR network supports high-volume data streaming with low latency. Thanks to its rapid beam switching capabilities, it can be used in scenarios where enhanced multi-user perception is required. This device sets the stage for a myriad of applications, including machine connectivity and the construction of smart cities and factories."

###

This research is supported by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in Japan (JPJ000254).

Reference

Authors: Jian Pang, Zheng Li, Xueting Luo, Joshua Alvin, Kiyoshi Yanagisawa, Yi Zhang, Zixin Chen, Zhongliang Huang, Xiaofan Gu, Weichu Chen, Yun Wang, Dongwon You, Zheng Sun, Yuncheng Zhang, Hongye Huang, Naoki Oshima, Keiichi Motoi, Shinichi Hori, Kazuaki Kunihiro, Tomoya Kaneko, Atsushi Shirane, and Kenichi Okada

Session: Session 11 Advanced Wireless for 5G, C11-2 (June 17,8:50JST)

Session Title: A Fast-Beam-Switching 28-GHz Phased-Array Transceiver Supporting Cross-Polarization Leakage Self-Cancellation

Conference: 2021 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits

Affiliations: Tokyo Institute of Technology, NEC Corporation

About Tokyo Institute of Technology

Tokyo Tech stands at the forefront of research and higher education as the leading university for science and technology in Japan. Tokyo Tech researchers excel in fields ranging from materials science to biology, computer science, and physics. Founded in 1881, Tokyo Tech hosts over 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students per year, who develop into scientific leaders and some of the most sought-after engineers in industry. Embodying the Japanese philosophy of "monotsukuri," meaning "technical ingenuity and innovation," the Tokyo Tech community strives to contribute to society through high-impact research.

https:/ / www. titech. ac. jp/ english/

This story has been published on: 2021-06-11. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Another medicinal cannabis related enterprise here has received Governments recognition of its products.





The Minister of Agriculture of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Saboto Caesar, recently commended locally owned and operated company "Medicinal, on their recent launch of an extensive line of locally produced medicinal cannabis products.





The products include but are not restricted to lotions, gummies (both CBD and THC), tinctures and THC ape cartridges.





The launch of the "Medicinal product lines follows on the December 2020 launch of a similar line of products by another locally registered company- Green Lava.





In fact, Green Lava opened a local pharmacy on Bentick Square ion December 23 last year.





These two developments follow on what the Agriculture Minister described as Government "hope and intention to see SVG develop into a "a destination of a well- planned, structured, and conceived local nutraceutical industry.





As expected cultivation of cannabis for use in the medicinal cannabis industry has been affected by the ash fall occasioned by the explosive eruptions of the La Soufriere volcano. A vigorous cleaning and replanting operation is planned.
It is more than likely, according to what can be deduced from statements by Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves that there will be number of families who will have to be relocated, especially those who resided in the Red Zone, particularly Sandy Bay.





Much of the housing stock in Sandy Bat was damaged by ash flow, lahars and other floods, the effect of the eruption of the La Soufriere volcano.





And while the Prime Minister said recently on radio that the damage assessment was still in its early stages which point to some 180 household as being in need of assistance, he affirmed that the government has already moved to identify lands to be used to relocate residents from the Red Zone.





Interestingly, it could well be, the Prime Minister said, that some of those lands to be identified could well be in the north, north eastern part of mainland St. Vincent.





Should this be the case, the Prime Minister promised that that it will have to be in keeping with safety measures and be informed by advice of the La Soufriere Monitoring Team of scientists, to wit, that residents should not be allowed to build houses in river valleys moving forward.




Emmeline Nash Barbour  101 years and looking to many more.

Surrounded by family, close friends and other well-wishers, Vincentian centenarian Emmeline Nash Barbour on May 31 celebrated her 101st birthday with a bash at her home in Jamaica, Queens, New York.

"I feel very good, wonderful to be celebrating my birthday with my family, Nash Barbour told THE VINCENTIAN afterwards. "I didnt expect I would reach there (101st birthday), but I thank God I reach there.





But, in the same breadth, she said shes looking forward to her 120th birthday.

Nash Barbour  who migrated to New York in 1986, from Spring Village in North Leeward  based her longevity on being "grateful to people and God.





"I pray every morning and every night to God to make me a good person, and I ask God to live good with my children, said Nash Barbour, who lives with her last daughter and sole caretaker, Jana Williams.

Nash Barbours husband, Thomas Ezekiel Barbour, formerly from Barrouallie in Central Leeward, died on Sept. 24 last year, in Jamaica, Queens. He was 93.





"My eating and my health are perfect, Barbour said. "My memory is good; everything is good.





Barbour, who was born on May 31, 1920, previously worshipped at Vision Pentecostal Church on Tilden Avenue in Brooklyn.





Williams said her mom enjoys the simple things in life.





"She loves to pop the bubble rapper and often refers to it as her company, when she is watching TV, said Williams, adding that her mothers favorite color is red; her favorite game shows are Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and Family Feud; and her favorite soap opera is General Hospital.





"She also loves to tell stories of her life growing up, and all her generations enjoy listening to her, she continued. "She is of sound mind, fully aware of whats going on around her. Her children and grand-children, relatives and friends join to wish her a happy 101st birthday.





Williams said Barbour gave birth to 11 children  three deceased  and currently has over 100 grand, great and great, great-grand-children.





"She lives to see her fourth generation, Williams said.





Barbours grand-daughter, Curlina Edwards-Hills, a prominent Vincentian community activist and lawyer in New York, said she was "very grateful to God for His blessings on her grand-mother.





"We love her very much and look forward to spending many, many more birthdays, Edwards-Hills told THE VINCENTIAN. "Shes really the anchor that holds our family together. Shes well respected and loved; so, everyone listens to her.
Jemark Parch Nuts Jackson moved from being a victim of abuse at the hands of the police, to be a constant feature on the police crime radar.

A young man who made national headlines after being badly beaten by police when he was just a teenager was shot and killed on Friday 4th June, sometime after 8pm.





Jemark Parch Nuts Jackson, 29, was shot dead while on his way to his home in Coconut Range, Campden Park.





His body was discovered a short distance from his home.





Persons in the community recalled hearing about 5 to 6 gunshots and seeing two men in "hoodies leaving the scene.





One of Jacksons neighbours told THE VINCENTIAN that a few hours before Jackson was killed, he was seen leaving his home in the company of a young lady.





The neighbour said it could have been that the gunmen hid in some bushes and awaited Jackson on his return.





"Me na see when dem come but after me hear the gunshots me see the two man in hoodie walking calmly away from the scene, said the neighbour.





An elderly lady who lives a few meters from where Jackson died said she was watching TV when the incident took place, but she did not know it was Jackson.





"Whenever he pass he does shout and call me. The same day he dead he bring some bushes for me to deal with the mosquitoes and I use to always tell him to behave himself. He was nice to me, said the elderly lady.





No spring chicken





Jackson has had his fair share of run-ins with the law.





He catapulted to national headlines in 2008 after three police officers were charged with beating him into a coma that lasted for seven days.





The officers - Constables Osrick James and Hadley Ballantyne, and Corporal Kasankie Quow - were found guilty and fined EC$1,500 each, in 2010.





They appealed their convictions to the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal which, in 2011, dismissed the appeals and upheld their convictions.





Against much public condemnation of the Officers crimes, the then Commissioner of Police Keith Miller reinstated the officers to their substantive positions.





Since the matter of assault by the police officers, Jackson was arrested for a number of burglaries, handling stolen goods and theft.





For example, he was a suspect in a recent burglary at Eastern Caribbean Bottlers Inc. in Campden Park.





And on the August 10th, 2020, Jackson, Quincy Boyde, 26-year-old labourer of Rillan Hill and Romano Andrews, 29-year-old labourer of Clare Valley/Diamond were arrested and charged with the offences of damage to property, attempted burglary, burglary and handling stolen goods, acts committed August 8th, 2020 at Triple S Supermarket and 2-Go Restaurant, Peruvian Vale.





Jackson was, up to the time of his death, a key witness in a case in which Glenville Harry of Vermont, and Jerome Ollivierre and Ulric Hanson of Mayreau, are to be tried for murder in connection with the death of Rodney George, a 50-year-old security guard of Victoria Village, who died in September, 2018 after being stabbed at his work place in Arnos Vale.





When a Court employee was questioned about how Jacksons death might affect this matter, the person said that it should not since his evidence was already given at a preliminary inquiry.





Jacksons death is listed as the 18th homicide in St. Vincent and the Grenadines this year.





Police investigations into Jacksons death are ongoing.
The police have stepped up their vigilance and enforcement of the COVID-19 protocols which have been in place for some time now.





Prime Minister and Minister of National Security Dr Ralph Gonsalves called in on radio on June 6 from Cuba, to say that he had been advised that police had taken certain steps to curb the number of social gatherings being staged, despite health officials warning to desist from organizing and staging such events.





He criticized the weaknesses in policing within the last few weeks saying that it had been obvious to the public that the COVID-19 protocols were not being fully enforced.





"Even the Commissioner (Commissioner of Police) admitted to me that there were weaknesses in policing, Gonsalves said.





He said, though, that he was informed that that police had been speaking to the proprietors of certain establishments and that on June 4, they took certain steps.





Within recent weeks, large social gatherings have been seen at various places throughout the country, prompting health officials to admit at a press conference on June 1 that this was a worrying issue.





Reports are that there have been large gatherings at some night spots and gatherings of individuals, particularly youngsters, at other well-known locations like the car park at Massy Stores, Arnos Vale.





A number of national events, e.g. the Bequia Easter Regatta, and Vincymas, have been cancelled since the first case of COVID-19 was recorded here in March 2020.





Amplified music has been banned with the Ministry of Health advising that gatherings indoors have no more than 10 persons, and outdoor gatherings 20.





But as of late, persons have not been adhering to the protocols.





And even as the prime minister commented on the actions of the police, he cautioned that the police against being inconsistency.





"You cannot tell people that certain amounts of people cannot be at one location on a Friday, but allow something else to happen on a Sunday, he said, adding, "We have to make sure that we dont drop the ball for too long on the COVID issue.
The Public Establishment for Industrial Estates (Madayn), represented by Madayn Industrial Academy, organised a workshop on the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model and the Japanese Kaizen Strategy.

According to a statement by Madayn, this was a part of a series of workshops held along the lines of the agreement signed by Madayn with the European Business Centre for Training and Development to lay the groundwork for Madayn to obtain Committed to Excellence  C2E certification.

Dr. Khamis Al Muniri, Director General of Madayn Industrial Academy, stated that the programme aims at disseminating continuous improvement concept and practices (Kaizen) and enhancing comprehensive quality and application of EFQM standards in Madayn. Achieving these shall qualify Madayn to obtain European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Certification through organising a series of workshops to spread awareness on Kaizen and EFQM within Madayn and gear Madayn up for the excellence award, Al Muniri pointed out.

Delivered by Dr. Munthir Al Qaderi of the European Business Centre, a workshop was delivered to highlight several related topics including an introduction to the project, its components and the action plan. The workshop also reviewed the theoretical background related to quality, development, change, continuous improvement, maintenance management, and waste management at the work environment.

This workshop came as part of an extensive programme that will continue for one year to disseminate advanced awareness on the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model and the Japanese Kaizen Strategy within Madayn. It should be noted that the academy had earlier organised a meeting with the director generals at Madayns head office and the industrial cities on these models.TradeArabia News Service
Air France has been awarded the APEX Health and Safety Diamond Award. With this new award, Air France has received the highest distinction in the APEX Health and Safety ranking.

This distinction rewards the efforts of the airline which places the health and safety of its customers and staff at the heart of its priorities. With Air France Protect, its health commitment, the airline offers its customers safe and flexible travel and optimal travel conditions adjusted to the latest health situation.

The APEX Health Safety award recognises the efforts made by airlines since the beginning of the crisis. By receiving this award, which represents the highest level of certification in terms of health and safety, Air France is reiterating its promise of a safe travel experience.

Fabien Pelous, Senior Vice President Customer Experience at Air France, said: "We are proud to be recognised and rewarded once again for what concerns us most, the health and safety of our customers and staff. We have implemented the strictest health measures and relaxed our commercial policy to best meet our customers' needs at this unprecedented time. This is an honour for Air France and its teams, who are mobilised on a daily basis to ensure the safety and well-being of our customers. It is also a great sign of confidence for our customers who continue to choose us for safe travel. "

APEX  the Airline Passenger Experience Association - was founded 42 years ago and is a recognised research and evaluation organisation in the field of customer travel experience. Its network includes the world's leading airlines, airports, alliances, suppliers and associated companies committed to improving the air travel experience. With the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, APEX created the APEX Health Safety Award to encourage airlines to take a proactive role in the resumption of safe travel, and to create a common standard for passenger health and safety. - TradeArabia News Service
Help India!



The Gujjar-Bakarwal community live in the hilly areas of the Indian subcontinent, especially in Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Pakistan, and Tibet. In Jammu and Kashmir, the nomadic community remain educationally, economically, politically, and socially backwards. In the second and final part of TCN Ground Report series, we look at the impact the Covid-19 lockdown has had on the livelihood and migration plans of this nomadic community of Jammu and Kashmir. Read the first part here.

Shadab Farooq | TwoCircles.net

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JAMMU  Rafaqat Ali, a 12-year-old Gujjar boy studying in 6th standard, used to attend Government High School in Upper Thanua village in the high hills near Udhampur district of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). He has been in 6th standard since 2020 when the first Covid-19 lockdown was enforced across the country and is lagging in his studies due to a lack of sufficient online education facilities. Only my father has a smartphone in our household, but he is usually out working with the cattle. As a result, I skipped many online classes. This year, I was expected to be in class 7, but I failed to complete my online papers and homework. I am already missing a lot of lessons, and it looks like I will just be in class 6 until the coronavirus is over, Rafaqat Ali told TwoCircles.net.

The Gujjar-Bakarwal community is one of J&Ks most backward tribes. The community remains educationally, economically, politically, and socially backwards.

Besides education of their children, the Covid-19 lockdown has severely impacted the livelihood of the community.

Covid hit livelihood of Gujjar-Bakerwals

Jabaar Din, 50, is a resident of the same village as Rafaqat Ali but has been living in a makeshift hut in Jig village, Chenani, on the Jammu-Kashmir national highway, for the past two years.

Din is waiting in Jig village with his horse named Sheru, for the pandemic to end so that he and his horse could return to Shri Mata Vaishno Devi, Katra, and resume their lives. For the past two years, I have been living far away from my family. Before the onset of this virus, I used to take visitors to the shrine of Vaishno Devi on my horse and earned between Rs 1000-1500 per day. Everything was fine before the pandemic. There have been no Yatris for two years, and the shrine is closed. We are not allowed to remain there anymore. It has been two years since things have been normal, Jabaar Din said.

Worried about his future, Din said, In these summer times, I used to travel in the hills with my buffaloes. All that I can see now is a dead end. I lost both of my buffaloes last year. Since there is no job in the hills now, I am unable to return home. I am just here to work and send money home when I get some regular wage work. I am trapped in the middle, unable to go home or to my usual work.

Migration in distress

This years nationwide lockdown to combat the spread of Covid-19 has interrupted hundreds of thousands of Bakarwals and Gujjars long spring migration. Almost half of them are only starting now, nearly a month late.

In the coming month, Barkat Ali, 27, of Gundoh village, Bhalessa, will begin migrating with his flock of cattle in the high mountains of Jai village with only one companion this year because of the advisory issued by the authorities declaring that the families of the herders including the elderly, women and children should not be allowed to travel, to prevent chances of infection.

Responding to the late migration, Ali said, We are already behind schedule in terms of migration this year, and this will have a ripple impact on our communitys lives and traditional businesses, which are closely tied to the regions seasons, festivals, and land-use practices. Unfortunately, we will not be able to cover all of the pastures in time, which means that the animals will not be able to eat enough grass.

Ali said that for the Gujjar-Bakerwal community, migration means moving with the whole community. This annual trip will be impossible for me without my clan, he said, adding, We cant challenge authorities and the nature of this disease. Many among our community are already late so we should keep moving even if we are moving within small groups.

Fear of separation from family amid lockdown

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has not impacted the livelihood and migration plans of the Gujjar-Bakerwal community, it has also led to fears of separation from family.

Seena Begum, 35, a mother of four girls and two boys, has a constant fear of not leaving her home and children alone. Seena Begum travelled from her village in Kathua to Doda to see her ailing sister on April 22, 2020, just before the first lockdown was announced. Destiny, on the other hand, had other plans for her. She had to live away from her children for the next three months as the lockdown was announced on the next day of her arrival. To survive, she had to find work as a domestic help in Doda.

Reflecting on her ordeal Seena Begum said, After three months without seeing my children, I returned to Kathua in a truck carrying cement material at midnight. The driver slid me under the trucks seat when the police were doing checks along the way. I have been through a lot and I dont want to go through it again.

I am terrified of leaving my children alone, and I seldom leave the house, she said.

Earlier in May, Seena Begums entire clan started migrating in smaller groups to Sarthal, a village near Bani-Basohli. Seena Begum chose not to migrate and stayed with her children because of the trauma of separation she had gone through.

Attacks against travelling Gujjar-Bakerwals

On May 6, two Muslim men from the Gujjar community were injured in a brutal attack by cow vigilantes in Jammu. The men were returning home with a pair of oxen they had bought to plough their fields.

Our community continuously moves with our livestock, Talib Hussain, a 35-year-old Gujjar activist told TwoCircles.net, adding, Recent incidents of vigilantism have caused fear among the community. We have to think twice before relocating anywhere. If these incidents continue our lives will be in jeopardy.

Hussain said that people of suspicious of Gujjar-Bakerwals and demand negative coronavirus test reports before purchasing our products.

In addition to this, local shopkeepers are taking advantage of the disease by purchasing our produce (milk) at half price. As the communitys economic situation continues to worsen, we have no other option but to sell our produce at whatever prices they offer us, Hussain said.

The attacks have led to fears among the community and many have chosen not to migrate.

Aziz-ud-din, 60, of Billiwar, Kathua, had planned to migrate to Kashmir via the Pir Panjal but decided against it after a recent incident in Samba, Jammu on May 26, in which two Bakarwal families were beaten by a gang of roughly two dozen individuals, injuring several of them, including children and women.

I dont want to put my life and the lives of my family at risk, Aziz-ud-din said when asked about the reasons for not migrating. They are going after anyone who has livestock with them. I have already lost two buffaloes due to an unknown disease in the previous lockdown, and I wasnt able to provide them with medical care. Now, because of these incidents against us, I am not willing to risk my family and animals. I decided not to migrate.
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Hong Kong: Patrick Nip inspects CSD graduates

Secretary for the Civil Service Patrick Nip today attended the Correctional Services Department's passing-out parade at its Staff Training Institute in Stanley to mark the graduation of 22 Officers and 104 Assistant Officers II.

Speaking at the parade, Mr Nip said the department has been guarding the last element of Hong Kong's criminal justice system for 100 years. Correctional officers are dedicated to ensuring a safe and secure custodial environment and have been proactively making efforts to help rehabilitate people in custody.

He commended the department for arranging for more than 200 officers to be special constables to assist in stopping violence and curbing disorder during the social unrest and violent incidents in 2019.

It also promptly arranged for more than 2,500 off-duty and retired staff members to engage in mask production on a voluntary basis to ramp up output to maintain the normal functioning of society and public services during the outbreak of COVID-19 last year.

Additionally, the department participated in restriction-testing declaration operations in specified restricted areas and paid attention to the anti-epidemic work in correctional institutions to prevent the spread of the virus.

It has also planned to arrange vaccinations for people in custody on a voluntary basis in early July, Mr Nip noted.

With many people being detained in correctional institutions due to riot-related offences, the number of remands has reached a new high in nearly a decade.

In view of the unprecedented challenges faced by the department, Mr Nip told graduates that he is confident that they will be able to rise to the challenges and overcome all difficulties to uphold the department's mission and values.

Furthermore, the department has allocated considerable resources in recent years to improve staff welfare in order to recruit and retain staff and to enhance the professionalism of correctional work and the sense of belonging among officers, he added.

Mr Nip pointed out that graduates should have gained a clear understanding of their responsibilities to uphold the Basic Law, bear allegiance and be responsible to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government, and be dedicated to their duties.

He expressed the hope that they will uphold the core values of the civil service, support the Government and make concerted efforts to maintain Hong Kong's prosperity and stability.

This story has been published on: 2021-06-11. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.


Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, inspects the achievements made in comprehensively harnessing environmental problems and protecting biodiversity at the Qinghai Lake, in Gangcha County of Haibei Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, northwest China's Qinghai Province, June 8, 2021. (Xinhua/Shen Hong)

XINING, June 9 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping stressed the need to always put the people first and advance reform and opening-up in efforts to promote ecological conservation and high-quality development on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.

Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks during his inspection tour of northwest China's Qinghai Province from Monday to Wednesday.

The trip took Xi to the provincial capital Xining and the Haibei Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. On Monday afternoon, Xi visited a carpet production company in Xining, where he learned about efforts in preserving and carrying forward local craft of hand-knitting carpets.

Xi stressed encouraging industries that have the most distinctive local features and the most vigorous enterprises in promoting high-quality development.

He also called for fostering a policy environment that encourages, supports and guides the development of private enterprises, as well as coordinating the development of industries and enterprises with efforts in boosting employment and promoting rural vitalization and ethnic unity.

Xi then went to a residential community in Xining. He stressed the roles of primary-level Party organizations and Party members in community governance, urging efforts to build residential communities into important platforms for promoting ethnic unity and progress.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, visits the home of a herdsman in a village in Shaliuhe Township, Gangcha County in Haibei Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, northwest China's Qinghai Province, June 8, 2021. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi)

Inspecting the county of Gangcha in Haibei on Tuesday, Xi said the achievements in conserving the ecological environment of Qinghai Lake are hard-won, and must be cherished, consolidated and expanded.

He called for accelerated efforts in building a nature reserves system "centering on national parks, based on natural reserves and supplemented by various kinds of natural parks" to better protect the eco-environment and biodiversity.

Xi then went to a village in Shaliuhe Township where herdsmen have resettled. Visiting the home of a Tibetan herdsman, Xi said the Party has won the people's wholehearted support because it has always served the people with heart and soul and strived for the wellbeing of all ethnic groups.

Speaking with villagers, Xi said he felt delighted to learn that they are leading happy lives. "We shall continue to work hard, and by the time New China celebrates its centenary, the Chinese nation will, without a doubt, stand firmer and stronger among the world's nations," he said.

Not a single ethnic group should be left behind in the efforts to fully build a modern socialist China, Xi said, adding that the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation can be only achieved when all ethnic groups remain closely united like the seeds of a pomegranate that stick together.

On Wednesday morning, Xi listened to the work reports of the provincial Party committee and government of Qinghai, and acknowledged the achievements the province has made in various fields.

Xi stressed Qinghai's significant role in the country's security in ecological, homeland, and resources and energy spheres, and urged the province to foster new industries, accelerate the development of a world-class salt lake industrial base, as well as make itself a clean energy industry leader, an international eco-tourism destination and a supplier of green farm and animal products.

Qinghai should stimulate technological innovation and actively align itself with major regional development strategies such as the Yangtze River Economic Belt to boost the internal drive of economic growth, he said.

On Qinghai's environmental protection, Xi said that the conservation of the source of three major rivers should be the utmost priority.

The province should improve the management of national parks, restore the ecology of its various landscapes, protect biological diversity on the plateau, and promote ecological conservation and high-quality development along the Yellow River, he added.



Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, learns about the lives of local Tibetan residents while visiting a village of Shaliuhe Township in Gangcha County of Haibei Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, northwest China's Qinghai Province, June 8, 2021. (Xinhua/Xie Huanchi)

Highlighting people's wellbeing and the goal of prosperity for all, Xi urged the province to coordinate ecological conservation with people's livelihood.

He also emphasized the need to consolidate the progress in poverty alleviation and further revitalize the countryside.

Xi expressed sympathy and concern to those affected by a 7.4-magnitude earthquake, which jolted Maduo County of Qinghai on May 22, and called for solid reconstruction efforts.

Noting the strategic role of Qinghai in safeguarding stability in Xinjiang and Tibet, Xi urged full implementation of the Party's general plan for governing Tibet in the new era and stressed efforts to shoulder due responsibilities. He also called for more efforts to build the province into a paragon in ethnic unity and progress.

Efforts should go toward fully implementing the Party's basic policy on religious work and providing guidance to religions so that they can adapt to a socialist society, Xi said.

Xi also highlighted the value of the Party's revolutionary spirit, which has motivated the Party to forge ahead.

By studying the Party history, all Party members and cadres must remind themselves of the oath of loyalty to the Party, deliver benefits to the people, and exercise strict self-discipline, said Xi.

Xi also stressed further improving Party conduct, promoting integrity, and training a contingent of competent and professional officials loyal to the Party, with moral integrity and a keen sense of responsibility.
Photo taken on May 27, 2020 shows a view of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China. (Xinhua/Li Xin)

BEIJING, June 10 (Xinhua) -- China has passed a law banning the defamation of military personnel.

The legislation was adopted at the closing meeting of a session of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress on Thursday.

No organization or individual may in any way slander or derogate the honor of servicemen, nor may they insult or slander the reputation of members of the armed forces, according to the law.

The new legislation also bans the desecration of plaques in honor of military personnel.

Prosecutors can file public interest litigation in cases of defamation of military personnel and the infringement on their legitimate rights and interests that have seriously affected their performance of duties and missions and damaged the public interests of society, the law adds.
-- A total of 36 defendants stood trials in Shenyang in June and July 1956 in two groups, 25 years after Japanese troops blew up a section of railway under their control near Shenyang, then accused Chinese troops of sabotage as a pretext for their attack on Sept. 18, 1931.

-- Many witnesses recount the law-based trials, during which many Japanese defendants even knelt at the feet of victims coming to give their testimonies.

-- The humanistic treatment by the Chinese government and people and the re-education experience in China have awakened the conscience of the defendants.

by Xinhua writers Lyu Qiuping, Xu Yang and Zhao Hongnan

SHENYANG, June 10 (Xinhua) -- In a two-story building in downtown Shenyang, capital of northeast China's Liaoning Province, a documentary tells about the trials of Japanese war criminals in the building 65 years ago.

It shows Tadayuki Furumi, a former official with the "state council" of the puppet "Manchukuo" regime established by the Japanese invaders, lowered his head and asked for severe punishment on himself.

"I have committed monstrous crimes against the Chinese people. I should be held responsible. Please sentence me to death immediately," he could be heard saying in the documentary.



File photo shows an open trial of the special military tribunal in June 1956 in Shenyang, capital of northeast China's Liaoning Province. (Xinhua)

On Sept. 18, 1931, Japanese troops blew up a section of railway under their control near Shenyang, then accused Chinese troops of sabotage as a pretext for their attack. They bombarded barracks near Shenyang the same evening, starting the bloody invasion.

Twenty-five years later, the city witnessed ultimate justice. A total of 36 defendants stood trials in Shenyang in June and July 1956 in two groups, with the trial of the first group of eight starting on June 9, 1956.

"The trials took place just seven years after the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The whole world was waiting to see how the New China led by the Communist Party of China (CPC) would deal with the war criminals," said Wang Jianxue, a professor at the Party School of Liaoning Provincial Party Committee.

LAW-BASED TRIALS

Quan Deyuan, 89, was then a court clerk who witnessed the trials.

"The court personnel wore judge costumes, the prosecutors were in uniforms of the Supreme People's Procuratorate and the lawyers were in black ties, all rare outfits back then in China," Quan recalled.

Quan was assigned to a law school in Shenyang as an instructor after graduating from Peking University in 1954. "I majored in law and spoke a little Japanese. That's why I was appointed the court clerk, I think," he said.

In court, facts of the offense must be substantiated by five kinds of evidence: interrogation records, accounts of the defendants, witness accounts, files information and accomplice testimonies.

In the trials against the second group of 28 criminals alone, the tribunal reviewed 642 indictments of victims or their families, 407 pieces of written evidence from witnesses, 315 documents or books as evidence and 48 people giving testimonies.



Photo taken on July 20, 2014 shows the memorial hall of the former site of the Shenyang tribunal against the Japanese war criminals in Huanggu District of Shenyang, capital of northeast China's Liaoning Province. (Xinhua/Yao Jianfeng)

According to a decision by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, the national legislature, the defendants could defend themselves, hire lawyers recognized by China, or have lawyers designated for them.

Lian Xisheng, now 89, was a defense lawyer for three Japanese defendants.

"We were all designated for them, as they did not defend themselves much and had no eligible lawyers to hire," said Lian, a professor who has retired from the China University of Political Science and Law.

Lian said defense lawyers like him faced a lot of pressure, being criticized as "traitors" by many Chinese for defending the Japanese invaders.

"If there had been no defense lawyers, the trial procedures would have been incomplete," he said.

He recalled many Japanese defendants even knelt at the feet of victims coming to give their testimonies. Aisin-Gioro Puyi, the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and the puppet emperor of "Manchukuo," also showed up to testify as a witness.

Han Fenglu, 90, was a defense lawyer for Hideo Sakakibara, a detachment commander of the notorious Unit 731, a biological and chemical warfare research base, which was the nerve center of Japanese biological warfare in China and Southeast Asia during WWII.

The defendant confessed in court that he injected cholera or plague germs into four Chinese nationals, which led to their deaths. His detachment produced 870 doses of germs in 1945 and captured a large number of mice and fleas in preparation for a large-scale germ war.

"My crimes have ravaged the sacred international conventions and were totally against humanity. I'd like to express my deep apology in front of the Chinese, Japanese and the peace-loving people in the world," Han recalled Sakakibara saying in court.

REQUITING INJURY WITH KINDNESS

A total of 45 defendants, including the 36 standing trials in Shenyang and nine in Taiyuan, capital of north China's Shanxi Province, received jail terms of eight to 20 years. Some 1,000 other Japanese war criminals with minor offenses were exempted from prosecution and released.

"They could have been sentenced to death for their crimes, but China showed mercy," said defense lawyer Lian.



Former court clerk Quan Deyuan gives a lecture at the memorial hall of the former site of the Shenyang tribunal against the Japanese war criminals in Shenyang, capital of northeast China's Liaoning Province, June 8, 2016. (Xinhua/Yao Jianfeng)

Song Miao, deputy curator of the memorial hall of the former site of the Shenyang tribunal against the Japanese war criminals, said the trials solved the remaining issues following WWII.

According to Song, the criminals, who were handed over by the then Soviet Union to China for trials in 1950, were among the most stubborn militarists who refused to admit their crimes at first before they were re-educated in a war criminal management center in Fushun, Liaoning Province.

However, the humanistic treatment by the Chinese government and people and the re-education experience in China have awakened their conscience. Every defendant confessed in the courts and even knelt for harsh punishment, Song said.

Despite the food shortage back then, the war criminals were offered decent meals in the management center, while their Chinese custodians only had coarse grains.

Zhao Yuying, former head nurse of the center, had an argument with a co-worker as she tried to explain why the criminals should be given decent treatment, even though they had slaughtered many Chinese people. Zhao died in 2020 at the age of 90.

Zhao's daughter, 63-year-old Gao Luwei, said she still has the letters the Japanese wrote to her mother after returning home.

Back in Japan, most of the criminals became advocates of Japan-China friendship and turned against the resurgence of Japanese militarism.

REMEMBERING PAST FOR PEACE

Even after a span of 65 years, the original architecture of the memorial hall has been maintained, forming a sharp contrast to the modern buildings in its busy vicinity, where a shopping mall, a supermarket and a karaoke house are located.

Students from nearby primary school regularly visit the memorial hall to learn about the history.

Photo taken on Sept. 18, 2015 shows a wax figure re-enactment at the memorial hall of the former site of the Shenyang tribunal against the Japanese war criminals in Shenyang, capital of northeast China's Liaoning Province. (Xinhua/Li Gang)

This year marks the 100th founding anniversary of the CPC. As China is promoting the learning of the CPC history, the history of the PRC and socialist development, the memorial hall has received more than 20,000 visitors so far this year.

Yao Chenghai, who has lived in Shenyang for nearly 30 years, stepped into the memorial hall for the first time.

"I didn't know its existence until recently when I read about it in a newspaper," said Yao, 65. "More people should learn the history."

At the memorial hall hangs a photo of morning glory flowers taken by Susumu Soejima, one of the criminals exempted from prosecution.

When Soejima left for home in 1956, a custodian from the Fushun war criminal management center gave him some flower seeds as a gift, telling him to "carry flowers when you are back to China, instead of weapons."

He then planted the seeds at home and took the photo, which was brought back to China as a gift to the former head nurse Zhao. The photo was named "flower of peace."

"It is expected that the 'flower of peace' can forever be in full bloom in the hearts of Chinese and Japanese people," said Song. (Xinhua correspondent Cui Shihao contributed to the story) 
Recently, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) released a promotional video for recruiting students to inspire the aspiring youths to join the military academies under the PLA Navy and devote to the building of a strong Chinese military.
The increase in infections is "serious and worrying", because it occurred in a short period of time. The new cases are linked to the festivals of Hari Raya Puasa and Hari Gawai. In the past week, an average of 6,313 new infections have been recorded per day.

Kuala Lumpur (AsiaNew / Agencies) - Malaysia is seeing a surge in infections from Covid-19 after the celebrations of some national holidays. 58 new outbreaks have emerged, linked to the holidays of Hari Raya Puasa (the celebration that marks the end of Ramadan's fast) and Hari Gawai (an annual holiday celebrated by the Dayaks).

More than 13,000 people have been tested for Covid-19 and 27% of them tested positive. According to Noor Hisham Abdullah, director of the Health Department in Malaysia, at least 20 deaths yesterday are linked to the new outbreaks, while for 17 consecutive days the number of people in intensive care has continued to increase. Yesterday there were 911.

Dr Noor Hisham also said that the increase in infections and deaths associated with the holidays was "serious and worrying" because it occurred in a short amount of time. " It is the responsibility of all to protect those who are vulnerable, especially elderly parents in our hometowns, by not exposing them to the coronavirus, he added. Dr Noor Hisham also said that Malaysia should follow the example of neighbouring countries that have succeeded in controlling the pandemic situation. They have shown that with the cooperation among all parties and the adherence to stipulated standard operating procedures, a normal way of life can be possible.

There are almost 80 thousand people currently suffering from Covid-19 in Malaysia. On average in the last week, 6,313 new cases were recorded per day. Since the start of the pandemic, the country has reported 2,422 outbreaks, of which 745 are still active.
Protests via social media. Some residents say they haven't eaten a grain of rice for two days; others received damaged food aid from the authorities. The local government promises the delivery of three meals a day. The province affected by the Delta variant. Concern over clinical data.

Guangzhou (AsiaNews / Agencies)  Residents of the Guangdong capital have taken t social media to denounce chronic food shortages or rotten food supplied by the authorities, after more than a week of lockdown adopted to contain a new Covid-19 outbreak.

As Apple Daily reports today, some of them said they hadn't eaten a grain of rice for two days.

The southern Chinese province has been struggling with a resurgence of the coronavirus since the end of May, especially affected by the Delta variant, which appeared for the first time in India.

Yesterday the health authorities counted 11 new cases of contagion; the average of the last week was 12 infections per day. Since May 28, 165 new infections have been recorded across Guangdong.

Information about the food shortage in Guangzhou appeared on the web on June 9. Videos posted on YouTube and Weibo show people protesting against visiting city officials in areas under sanitary isolation. Others criticize the local government for restrictions on movement, which prevent them from obtaining basic necessities.

District city committees responded to complaints by promising home delivery of three meals a day for each resident.

The coronavirus first manifested itself in Wuhan (Hubei) at the end of 2019; in the summer of 2020, the Chinese government said it had successfully contained its spread. Although the numbers remain far from those of the hardest-hit countries at the moment, Chinese authorities are concerned about the clinical data of the Guangdong outbreak.

According to the government funded Global Times, 10-12% of infected patients in the province are seriously ill: in the initial epidemic in Wuhan and in 20 other areas of the country, the average was 2-3%, with peaks of 8-10% in very limited areas.
by Vladimir Rozanskij

The Fund for the Fight against Corruption has been hit. Last year it was qualified as a "foreign agent". Gagged after nearly 10 years of complaints. All possible pro-Navalny candidates banned. The Communists could take advantage of the useful vote for the anti-Putin candidates.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Moscow central court has ruled the Fund for the Fight against Corruption (Fbk), The group is linked to the well-known dissident Alexei Naval'ny, an "extremist organization". Last year the authorities qualified it as a "foreign agent" (a body financed from abroad), applying various punitive measures. Now members of the Fbk even face prosecution for terrorism.

The foundation of the Fbk dates back to September 2011, when it was registered as a non-commercial, non-profit organization. Navalny is the founder, even if he has not assumed any official role within it. The first executive director, Vladimir Ashurkov, had explained the aims of the Fbk with the desire not to limit itself to the statutory purpose of avoiding abuses in the expenses of state bodies, the so-called Rospil project, but to create a team of analysts and jurists to denounce all kinds of abuses in the public economy. Other projects followed by called the Rosjama and Rosvybory, with denunciations addressed to the world of Russian politicians in Moscow and throughout the country.

Funding was raised publicly. Initially via the Yandex.koshelek website (the "virtual wallet"); in April 2012 Ashurkov told Forbes that the budget exceeded 300 thousand dollars: by the end of the year it had reached more than half a million. The names of major Russian lenders were also indicated, announcing the launch of other analysis and reporting projects.

In 2013, about thirty people were already working at Fbk, including web campaign designers, and staff from the St. Petersburg branch. One of the groups first successes that year was the resignation from the State Duma of the director of the Ethics Commission, Vladimir Pekhtin, a member of Putins United Russia party: the navalnists had found he owned several properties in Florida.

The first persecution against the Fbk dates back to January 2015, when the offices were searched. The then director Roman Rubanov explained that it had been requested by Duma member Mikhail Degtarev after another campaign of accusations against the corruption of deputies. Navalnists were not cowed and continued their campaigns, also circulating films against politicians and magistrates, including a widespread one about the robberies in the construction of the Vostochnyj cosmodrome.

The Fbk gained great popularity in 2017 with the film "He's Not Your Dimon", which exposed the broad corruption schemes attributed to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, former president of Russia and a staunch associate of Putin. The drones showed the princely villas of "Dimon"; then large protests by young people began, known as the parades of "jogging shoes" (which Medvedev was buying at a rate of 20 per month). The characters of Medvedev's court included various oligarchs; one of them, Alisher Usmanov, sued Navalnyj. The court forced the Fbk to delete the video and issue an official apology.

Rubanov refused to remove the offending clips. To avoid further sanctions, he was replaced by Igor Zhdanov in 2018. In May 2019, the Fund had to undergo a new registration procedure, in the Putin era the weapon of choice for state bodies to liquidate unwanted groups. Then the accusations of being "foreign agents" started, a definition that now applies to any association unwelcome to the government: a like on Facebook from a US fan is enough to start the sanctioning procedures.

Until 2021, with the return and arrest of Navalnyj after the poisoning, and the famous video of Putin's palace on the Black Sea: the imminence of the elections led to total persecution, banning everyone possible naval candidates.

Now Communists hope to take advantage of the "useful vote", that is for non-Putin candidates. Until now they had been more or less loyal allies of the President-Tsar, but could reserve some surprises. Stalin's heirs may just become the only way out of neo-Stalinism: a truly unexpected scenario in post-Soviet Russia.
Shanghai (Gasgoo)- On June 11, Chinese real estate giant Evergrande Group and the state-run oil firm Sinopec Group entered into a strategic partnership for a number of businesses including the construction of EV charging and battery swapping facilities.

Evergrande Group, Sinopec Group signing agreement; photo credit: Evergrand Group



Under the agreement, both parties will leverage their advantages in energy, technologies, referral traffic, and sales network to jointly work on the building of the charging and battery swapping stations for lithium-battery-powered vehicles, automotive lightweight materials, new high-performance building & chemical materials, as well as mineral water.

The property giant Evergrande Group is being much discussed by insiders of Chinese automotive industry due to its EV development ambition. It announced in August 2019 the birth of the EV brand Hengchi, under which a total of nine models simply numbered from 1 to 9 have been unveiled.

Evergrande Auto, the group's EV-dedicated arm, said it plans to put its in-house developed power batteries into mass production in the second half of 2021. In addition, it signed on March 15 an agreement with TINNOVE, a Tencent-backed IoV (Internet of Vehicles) technology developer, to build a joint venture dedicated to the development of in-car smart OS (operating system) with independent intellectual property rights. The H-SMART OS, an intelligent-connected system Evergrande Auto co-developed with Tencent and Baidu, was also unveiled in that month.

Sinopec Group is the largest oil and petrochemical products supplier in China and also ranks second in the world by the total number of gas stations. The group is also speeding up the transition to being a comprehensive energy service supplier. During the 14th five-year plan period (2021-2025), Sinopec plans to deploy 5,000 EV charging and battery swapping stations.
by Nirmala Carvalho

Bishop James Thoppil of Kohima looks at efforts in his diocese. Although the Catholic Church lacks its own hospital, it is helping in other ways people who are sick or quarantined. In the diocese, a 50-hour chain adoration of the Blessed Sacrament ended today, the feast day of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Kohima (AsiaNews)  In the past few days, India has reported a significant drop in the number of coronavirus cases, falling below 100,000 a day after topping 400,000 just a few weeks ago.

However, in some regions, the pandemic is still raging. In north-eastern India, where the latest wave came later than elsewhere in the country, the death toll keeps rising.

This has worried local church since the infection has spread to villages and there are fears that it could spread to communities that lack the health infrastructure necessary to cope with the emergency.

For this reason, the dioceses of north-eastern India have set up an anti-COVID task force, coordinated by Archbishop John Moolachiara of Guwahati, with individual committees within each local Church.

Bishop James Thoppil of the Diocese of Kohima (Nagaland) told AsiaNews that during the first wave of the pandemic, his diocese created a task force of priests, religious and lay people to deal with the emergency.

During the second wave, however, many more people needed hospitalisation or quarantine assistance. Since the Catholic Church does not have its own hospital, it decided to help in other ways.

Diocesan priests have provided financial support available by offering the subsidy they receive each year from the German -based Missio Aachen (Institute of Missiology and Missio e. V)

The Catholic Association of Nagaland, the main lay association in the diocese, established the Nagaland Catholic Laity Charity Corpus on 19 May 2021, a new charity that the bishop himself launched in an online event.

Several religious congregations have offered their support to the diocesan task force. Many local committees are fully active and providing accurate information on prevention and home care to alleviate people's suffering and curb the spread of the contagion.

Two other important initiatives include the establishment of a 24-hour phone line for anyone in need as well as a 50-hour chain adoration of the Blessed Sacrament across the entire diocese that ended today, the feast day of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Bilateral talks between the United States and Taiwan, which ended when Donald Trump became US president, are set to resume within weeks. Taiwan needs bilateral deals to overcome the isolation imposed by China. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen also wants to join the CPTPP multilateral agreement. China rejects any agreement with implications for Chinese sovereignty over its Taiwan region.

Taipei (AsiaNews)  Taiwan and the United States will resume free trade talks in the coming weeks, the Office of the United States Trade Representative said on Thursday.

This followed a virtual meeting between US Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Taiwan's chief trade negotiator John Deng.

The island has been pursuing a major trade deal with Washington for years. Discussions broke down after the 10th negotiating meeting in 2016 at the start of the Trump presidency.

The Republican leader was unhappy with Taiwanese restrictions on imports of US products, especially agricultural goods.

The Taiwanese need to expand bilateral trade relations. Due to opposition from China, Taiwan is excluded from many regional trade mechanisms. Beijing considers the island a rebel province to be retaken by force if necessary.

Taiwan is member of the World Trade Organisation and has entered into trade agreements with Singapore and New Zealand.

In addition to a free trade deal with the United States, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen formally applied for membership in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which replaced the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) promoted by former US President Barack Obama.

Japan, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam are currently members of this multilateral pact.

However, most countries are reluctant to sign agreements with Taiwanese, fearing Chinese retaliation.

On Monday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken signalled the possible restart of trade talks with Taipei, sparking an immediate negative response from Chinas Foreign Ministry.

Spokesman Zhao Lijian made it clear that China opposes any official agreement between Taiwan and any country with which China has diplomatic relations that might have implications for Chinese sovereignty over the island.
The new round of indirect negotiations between the parties is scheduled for the weekend in Vienna. The measure affects three former government officials and two oil companies from the Islamic Republic. US spokesman: "conciliatory" gesture on the eve of the meetings, ready "to be reasonable" on sanctions.

Tehran (AsiaNews / Agencies) - The United States has lifted part of the economic sanctions against Iran. The measure affects three former government officials and two oil-related companies; comes on the eve of the new round of indirect negotiations between Tehran and Washington in Vienna on nuclear power (JCPOA), scheduled for the weekend,

Sources in the White House speak of a "conciliatory" gesture a few hours after a meeting that could sanction the full US return to the pact signed in 2015 by Barack Obama and disavowed three years later by his successor Donald Trump.

The Biden administration remains cautious and urges not to give too much importance to the decision. Also because, at the same time, punitive measures were ordered against a group of people and activities headed by Sa'id Ahmad Muhammad al-Jamal, for the support provided to the Houthi rebels in the bloody war in Yemen. The sanctions lifted yesterday affected former officials and companies "involved in the purchase, sale, transport or marketing of Iranian petrochemicals".

State Department spokesman, Ned Price, stresses that "there are no links" between the sanctions and talks with world powers and the Islamic Republic. "What we want to say to Iran - he adds - is that we want to be reasonable. When the sanctions are no longer justified, we are ready to revoke them, but when they are justified, we are ready to impose them.

Meanwhile, the attention of international diplomacy is focused on Vienna, where the sixth round of indirect talks between the US and Iran is about to begin. Recently, Tehran progressively violated the terms of the pact by easing restrictions on nuclear activities. The first steps in this direction date back to 2019, in response to the May 2018 withdrawal by the then US President Donald Trump from the JCPOA and the reintroduction of the toughest sanctions in history, causing a collapse of the Iranian economy.

The temporary agreement will expire on June 24, a few days before the presidential elections to close the era of moderate Hassan Rouhani (who will not be able to stand as a candidate having finished his second term) and lead a conservative to power. A change destined to also affect the timing, methods and possible results of the ongoing nuclear talks.
by Melani Manel Perera

The missionary passed away last Monday. Hospital authorities have not yet determined if he died from COVID-19. For many, he was truly a genuine companion of Jesus.

Colombo (AsiaNews)  Father Anton Weerasinghe, a member of the Society of Jesus in Sri Lanka, died on Monday at the age of 82.

A good-hearted man, he was able to win the affection of many friends at home and abroad, devoting much of his life to the development of Radio Veritas Asia.

Born on 12 June 1939, Fr Anton entered the seminary in 1960, becoming a priest 10 years later. Once he obtained a Master's Degree in communication from the University of Manila, Philippines, he was appointed advisor for the foreign service of Radio Veritas Asia.

In the 1970s, more Asian languages were added to Radio Veritas Asia, which until then aired only in Vietnamese, Mandarin, and Burmese, the Catholic radio said in a statement.

The decision was taken by the then President of the Mass Communications Division of the Asian Bishops' Conference, Oswald Gomis, who at the time was the auxiliary bishop of Colombo.

With Fr Antons arrival, Radio Veritas Asia began broadcasting in 12 other languages, including Bengali, Karen, Kachin, Japanese, Sinhalese, Tamil and Hindi.

There is no doubt that he fulfilled his responsibility to the fullest, said Cyril Gamini Fernando, former coordinator at Radio Veritas Asia's Sri Lankan service, speaking to AsiaNews. His communication skills were excellent. He was instrumental in launching the Radio Veritas Asia Sinhala service.

His invaluable service to the field of Catholic communication in Sri Lanka is immense, Fr Fernando added. But above all, The most outstanding quality I saw in him was humility. May God bless him with the treasures of heaven.

Nimal Ignatius Perera, a lay Jesuit, also remembers him with affection. He was truly a genuine companion of Jesus with a very unassuming character gifted with many talents.

Funeral arrangements have not yet been announced. Fr Antons remains are still in hospital to determine if he died from COVID-19.
The UN report shows an increase in child labour on a global scale for the first time in 20 years. Progress in the fight has stalled due to the pandemic. 160 million children in the world are victims of exploitation. The example of Laos: education declines; child workers increase.

Vientiane (AsiaNews) - The Covid-19 pandemic has increased the poverty level of Laotian families and denied the right to education of a growing number of children, pushing them into the arms of those who exploit child labour. Most of them are employed in the fields and farmland by their parents and, in the worst cases, some of the little ones start working before they even go to elementary school.

Recent research relaunched by Radio Free Asia (RFA) shows that almost 30% of minors between the ages of five and 17 are dedicated to the most varied forms of work, while 25% cannot even complete the primary school cycle or secondary because they already have a full-time job.

Most of these live in agricultural areas, where over 80% of the total population is concentrated. Nine out of 10 children are employed in agriculture, fishing or forestry, while 70% work more than 49 hours a week.

Most of the children exploited in Laos come from communities belonging to ethnic minorities of Christian faith, sometimes subject to persecution by the communist authorities. A problem that does not concern only the small Asian nation, however, because in the whole continent and in the Pacific region there are at least 62 million victims of child labour, equal to the sum of the populations under 14 in the Philippines, Vietnam and Japan.

Globally, the number of children involved in child labour has increased to 160 million, with an increase of 8.4 million children in the past four years.

According to a study prepared by experts from the UN agencies Unicef and ILO (the International Labour Organization), millions more are at risk due to the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic on the economy of their respective countries, and for increasingly family situations difficult.

The data are contained in the report entitled " Child Labour: Global estimates 2020, trends and the road forward " published in recent days on the eve of the World Day against Child Labour, which is celebrated tomorrow 12 June.

The study shows that, for the first time in 20 years, progress in the fight against the phenomenon has entered a stalemate; moreover, the downward trend - between 2000 and 2016 there were fewer 94 million minors victims of child labour - seems to have stopped and is likely to increase in the immediate future.

The report shows a significant increase in the number of children between the ages of five and 11 who are victims of child labour, who now account for nearly half of the total. Meanwhile, the figure for minors between the ages of five and 17 employed in professions considered "risky" for physical and psychological health increased by 6.5 million, rising to 79 million compared to 2016 estimates.

The worsening is also evident in areas that, up to 2016, recorded situations of progressive improvement such as Asia (and Latin America), where the impact of the new coronavirus on children's schooling and early entry is more evident. in the labour market.

Globally, as a result of the pandemic, at least nine million children are at risk of being initiated into child labour by the end of 2002. Forecast models indicate that the number can rise to 46 million if adequate protection and prevention policies are not implemented.
By James Patrick Rule, Research Fellow, Monash University

Peter Trusler, Author provided

Monk seals are one of the most endangered marine mammals alive today, with just over 2,000 individuals remaining in the wild. These seals live in warm waters, specifically the tropics and the Mediterranean.

Hunting by sailors in the past resulted in the extinction of the Caribbean monk seal by the end of the 1950s. It also heavily reduced the numbers of the two remaining populations, in Hawaii and the Mediterranean.

Given how rare monk seals are today, it is hard to imagine a time when they were abundant. However, fossils from Australia show monk seals used to be much more widespread.



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Peter Trusler, Author provided





Two fossils from Beaumaris and Hamilton in Victoria have turned out to be the remains of ancient monk seals. This discovery, part of an ongoing effort to investigate Melbournes globally important marine fossils, was outlined by our team in a paper published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.

How are monk seals different from other seals?

Monk seals are from a completely different group to the fur seals and sea lions that live in Australian waters today. Australias warm environment in the past made it an ideal habitat for true seals, the group to which monk seals belong.

These seals would have coexisted with Australias ancient megafauna, such as giant kangaroos and the oddball palorchestids.





Read more:

In a land of ancient giants, these small oddball seals once called Australia home





This discovery was made when our team revisited two fossils from Museums Victorias collections, the identity of which has been a mystery for 40 years.

When we analysed them, they turned out to be the oldest evidence of monk seals found so far, at roughly 5 million years old. The fossils are earbones, the part of the skull that contains the structures needed for hearing. The anatomy of earbones means they are very useful for helping palaeontologists identify what animal fossils belong to.



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Erich Fitzgerald, Author provided





Together with the recently discovered Eomonachus (a 3 million-year-old New Zealand monk seal), these fossils demonstrate that monk seals had a long history in Australasia. These discoveries have now almost doubled the number of geographic regions monk seals used to occupy in the past, and confirm they used to be a much larger group.

What happened?

If monk seals were so widespread down under in the past, why are they no longer here? The short answer is climate change.

Around 2.5 million years ago, the onset of the ice ages changed the worlds oceans, making the waters colder and sea levels lower. This led to extinctions in many marine mammal groups, including the monk seals. In short, monk seals disappeared in the southern hemisphere, leaving them only present in the Mediterranean and the tropics.





Read more:

Scientists thought these seals evolved in the north. 3-million-year-old fossils from New Zealand suggest otherwise





Despite monk seals being protected from hunting today, these fossil discoveries suggest their troubles may be far from over. Their fossil relatives have now demonstrated they are susceptible to environmental change.

Rising sea levels are already threatening the Hawaiian species, and human-driven changes also endanger the Mediterranean species.

Without continued protection, the remaining monk seals may soon disappear along with their extinct relatives.



https://images.theconversation.com/files/405839/original/file-20210611-2... 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405839/original/file-20210611-2... 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405839/original/file-20210611-2... 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405839/original/file-20210611-2... 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/405839/original/file-20210611-2... 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">





Peter Trusler, Author provided





James Patrick Rule received funding from an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and a Robert Blackwood Scholarship.

Erich Fitzgerald receives support for research on The Lost World of Bayside from Bayside City Council, Community Bank Sandringham, Beaumaris Motor Yacht Squadron, Bayside Earth Sciences Society, Sandringham Foreshore Association and generous community donations to Museums Victoria.

Justin W. Adams receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Monash University.

Originally published in The Conversation.
Debbie Bell hugs her 6-year-old grandson, Anderson. After nearly a year and a half without seeing each other due to the coronavirus pandemic, Rebecca Echols and her mother Debbie Bell were reunited at last. Her mother, who lives in Florida with her partner and a rescue dog, drove up to the Echols' household in Roland park. 05.20.21. (Ulysses Munoz/The Baltimore Sun)
Bishop Donte L. Hickman, Sr., pastor of the Southern Baptist Church in East Baltimore, is seeing many pictures of his joyful parishioners splashed across Instagram and Facebook. Theyre getting together for parties and going on trips. At the same time, he said some of the older members of his congregation  although they are vaccinated  are still either not able to get back out to see people, or are afraid to.
The University of Maryland Medical System and Johns Hopkins Health System brought the issue to the fore Wednesday when they announced that they would require workers to be inoculated against COVID-19 by the end of the summer. Other Maryland hospitals said they would follow suit with such requirements, though some said they would wait until the vaccines receive FDA approval.
If I had it to do all over again, I would not have tried so hard to move the BSO out of the Ivory Tower, she said. Sometimes you have to say, OK, this is not where people want to go. Try to enjoy the orchestra and community as much as you can.
Video Series Featuring Bishop Barron, Religious Thinkers, and Cultural Commentators Returning to YouTube Word on Fire announces upcoming season of popular discussions on evangelization, politics, social movements, the Catholic Church, and more.



NEWS PROVIDED BY

Word on Fire Catholic Ministries

June 11, 2021



IRVING, Texas, June 11, 2021 /



From June through August, Bishop Barron will be joined by Sohrab Ahmari, Jessica Hooten Wilson, Jason Blakely, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Robert George, and Larry Chapp. Previous guests have included Arthur Brooks, Leah Libresco Sargeant, and Dave Rubin.



Each video will feature a dialogue with one of these thought-provoking guestsamong whom are scholars, writers, and cultural influencersabout the intersection of faith and culture. These intellectually invigorating discussions feature varying religious and political perspectives to encourage greater understanding and civility.



These forthcoming videos will be available across Word on Fire social media and on Bishop Barron's YouTube channel:



Word on Fire Catholic Ministries (



SOURCE Word on Fire Catholic Ministries



CONTACT: Will Sipling, Communications Director, 866-928-1237,



Related Links



https://www.wordonfire.org/



Share Tweet NEWS PROVIDED BYJune 11, 2021IRVING, Texas, June 11, 2021 / Christian Newswire / -- Returning as a regular series in 2021, Word on Fire is pleased to announce a new season of "Bishop Barron Presents: Conversations at the Crossroads," which will host accomplished and fascinating guests and be made available on YouTube and social media.From June through August, Bishop Barron will be joined by Sohrab Ahmari, Jessica Hooten Wilson, Jason Blakely, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Robert George, and Larry Chapp. Previous guests have included Arthur Brooks, Leah Libresco Sargeant, and Dave Rubin.Each video will feature a dialogue with one of these thought-provoking guestsamong whom are scholars, writers, and cultural influencersabout the intersection of faith and culture. These intellectually invigorating discussions feature varying religious and political perspectives to encourage greater understanding and civility.These forthcoming videos will be available across Word on Fire social media and on Bishop Barron's YouTube channel: wordonfire.org/youtube . Interested viewers can subscribe on YouTube to be notified as soon as each video is launched.Word on Fire Catholic Ministries ( wordonfire.org ) exists to support the evangelization efforts of Bishop Robert Barron by drawing people into the Body of Christ, which is the Church, and thereby giving them access to all the gifts that Jesus wants his people to enjoy. To be most effective in this mission, Word on Fire places an emphasis and urgency on the use of contemporary forms of media and innovative communication technologies.SOURCE Word on Fire Catholic MinistriesCONTACT: Will Sipling, Communications Director, 866-928-1237, communications@wordonfire.org Related Links
Councilwoman Odette Ramos took to Twitter to alert residents of the danger. Ramos said the hole is on the 3100 block of Guilford Avenue and opened up early Friday afternoon. It is between the road and sidewalk, and may be considered a partial street collapse.
Thats why the head of the Westport Neighborhood Association paid attention to the citys reaction to recent violence, including shootings that injured three people, in trendy Fells Point. Business owners there signed a letter threatening to not pay taxes if city officials did not provide additional resources for what they described as long-standing problems, including crime, trash and traffic. On Saturday several cars were damaged by bullets and one person was treated for lacerations stemming from gunfire, police said.
Id love by the end of a second Ball term to have all the projects completed, he said. As we were known throughout the nation in 2016 and 2018 for our tragedy, I want us to be known for our triumph. I want us to be known as the community who utilized the best technology, came together and was as prepared as possible for that next big storm.
Ramos pleaded guilty to all his crimes, which he told the psychiatrist were indefensible, but maintains he was insane. He also pleaded not criminally responsible, Marylands version of the insanity defense, telling the state psychiatrist he found it useful because he thought hed have more access to a computer and internet websites at a psychiatric hospital rather than a prison. Both revelations of Ramos thinking came to light Wednesday.
City Councilman Zeke Cohen, who represents the neighborhood, called a meeting Thursday of about a dozen business owners to share what he said was a plan from the mayors office to help. Four police officers already assigned to the district would be positioned in the popular Broadway Square, around where street brawls and gunfire broke out last weekend. Eight additional officers  one from each of Baltimores other police districts  will be deployed to Fells Point along with one commander. Two more officers from the Southeast District will be paid overtime to help maintain order.
None of the defendants faced terrorism-related charges, and a stipulation of facts signed by Mathews, Lemley and prosecutors didnt mention the Richmond rally. But prosecutors are reserving the right to seek a so-called terrorism enhancement at sentencing that could lead to a significant increase in a prison term if the judge agrees to apply it.
Federal prosecutors said according to his plea agreement, while being interviewed by special agents of the United States Capitol Police, Mathur denied that he submitted the message with the individuals name. During the same interview he admitted to placing the phone call.
The insects, which spent the last decade and a half or so feasting on tree roots, rose to prominence beginning in May, later than their last visit in 2004 thanks to cool temperatures. But after weeks of cicadas thrumming in the trees, hosting choir practice in parks and splattered on windshields, one question remains: When will they go away?
I call on Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger not only to reintroduce this legislation, and hopefully get it to a vote, but also to think about the countless other bills that never see the light of day. How can we change this country for the better if our own leaders fail to act? Something needs to be done.
Not long after he started, Harris told lawmakers Thursday, McGrath told him to attend a fundraiser for Hogans reelection campaign in December 2017. Harris said he felt he had little choice but to go  fearing it would put me in an awkward position if I said no. He bought a ticket in exchange for a $1,000 donation to Hogans campaign. Harris said McGrath later solicited $250 for another Hogan fundraiser, and campaign finance records show Harris chipped in $2,000 toward Hogans inaugural committee.
NEWS PROVIDED BY

Catholic League

June 10, 2021



NEW YORK, June 10, 2021 /Christian Newswire/ -- Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the latest attack on U.S. bishops:

President Biden says he is a "devout Catholic," yet he continues to oppose many of the most serious Catholic teachings that bear on public policy. This is of great concern to the bishops, and a large contingent of them are considering whether Biden is deserving of Holy Communion. They will take this issue up next week in a virtual meeting of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).

Enter Faithful America. It is sponsoring a petition aimed at pressuring the bishops to "cancel your planned anti-Biden vote." They claim to have over 20,000 signatures.

Who is Faithful America? It is not an organization like the Catholic League. No one goes to the office because there isn't anyit has a P.O. Box listed on its website. There is no one to call because it has no phone number. It says it is an "online community." But it is not a communityit is simply a website that functions as a front group for Catholic haters.

Who funds it? George Soros, the atheist billionaire who hates Catholics.

Why is Faithful America launching this attack on the USCCB? Because it wants to protect President Biden. They like his pro-abortion and anti-religious liberty record.

There is nothing "anti-Biden" about the USCCB. To be sure, the bishops are rightly concerned about the message that he is sending: The president of the United States can be a Catholic in good standing and still reject core Church teachings on the rights of the unborn, marriage, the family, sexuality, and religious liberty. Indeed, he can seek to force Catholic doctors to perform sex transition surgery and close down Catholic hospitals that refuse to perform abortions.

The USCCB will not be intimidated by phony "organizations" that have no anchor in the Catholic community.

Contact Nathan Empsall, the Episcopalian priest who heads up this dummy effort: nathan@faithfulamerica.org
Destinations



Flights from Canada are Returning to Puerto Vallarta



On June 5, WestJet reopened their Saturday connection between Calgary and Puerto Vallarta, and Air Canada recently announced the reopening of their Vancouver - Puerto Vallarta route starting August 1. Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico - Puerto Vallarta remains a favorite of Canadian tourists, who are eager to vacation on the warm Mexican beaches, particularly in this destination that is one of their favorites in the country.



The increase in demand and the lifting of restrictive measures imposed by the Canadian government have allowed the gradual reopening of flights between Canada and Mexico, particularly to Puerto Vallarta, one of the country's most popular destinations - especially during the winter.



On June 5, WestJet reopened their Saturday connection between Calgary and Puerto Vallarta; Air Canada recently announced the reopening of the Vancouver - Puerto Vallarta route starting August 1; Air Transat has plans to resume flights from Toronto and Montreal starting in November and Sunwing and Swoop airlines are expected to announce their plans to resume flights soon.





Puerto Vallarta International Airport will receive Air Canada flights from Vancouver as of August 1

In the context of the announcement of air reconnections between the two countries, Expedia released data that indicates that there will be a rebound in the number of Canadian visitors during the summer vacation period. Though typically a winter address for Canadians, Puerto Vallarta ranks in the top five most sought summer vacation due to the destination's weather, natural attractions and wide variety of activities.



As vaccination against Covid-19 progresses in Mexico, Canadian tourists have regained confidence in traveling, and the application of preventive protocols in Puerto Vallarta hotels, restaurants and tours to ensure tourists' health, adds to the destination's allure.



According to the Datatur system of the federal Ministry of Tourism, Canada is the second most important foreign market for this destination, after the United States. Every year, thousands of Canadians travel to the Banderas Bay region from cities such as Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, Toronto and Edmonton.



Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico (GAP) reports that last January, before the restrictions on flights from Canada to Mexico and the Caribbean, up to 60 monthly frequencies from that country arrived, with a high number of frequencies from Thursday to Saturday and occupancy percentages higher than 80 percent.



The share of the Canadian market in Mexico's international total went from 10.8 percent in 2019 to 10.2 percent in 2020. This year, Puerto Vallarta seeks to reposition itself as the airport with the largest number of cities directly connecting the two countries. Prior to the pandemic, there were connections from 16 cities in Canada.



Puerto Vallarta Tourism Trust press release translated and edited by Luis Antonio for BanderasNews.com. - Puerto Vallarta remains a favorite of Canadian tourists, who are eager to vacation on the warm Mexican beaches, particularly in this destination that is one of their favorites in the country.The increase in demand and the lifting of restrictive measures imposed by the Canadian government have allowed the gradual reopening of flights between Canada and Mexico, particularly to Puerto Vallarta, one of the country's most popular destinations - especially during the winter.On June 5, WestJet reopened their Saturday connection between Calgary and Puerto Vallarta; Air Canada recently announced the reopening of the Vancouver - Puerto Vallarta route starting August 1; Air Transat has plans to resume flights from Toronto and Montreal starting in November and Sunwing and Swoop airlines are expected to announce their plans to resume flights soon.In the context of the announcement of air reconnections between the two countries, Expedia released data that indicates that there will be a rebound in the number of Canadian visitors during the summer vacation period. Though typically a winter address for Canadians, Puerto Vallarta ranks in the top five most sought summer vacation due to the destination's weather, natural attractions and wide variety of activities.As vaccination against Covid-19 progresses in Mexico, Canadian tourists have regained confidence in traveling, and the application of preventive protocols in Puerto Vallarta hotels, restaurants and tours to ensure tourists' health, adds to the destination's allure.According to the Datatur system of the federal Ministry of Tourism, Canada is the second most important foreign market for this destination, after the United States. Every year, thousands of Canadians travel to the Banderas Bay region from cities such as Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, Toronto and Edmonton.Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacifico (GAP) reports that last January, before the restrictions on flights from Canada to Mexico and the Caribbean, up to 60 monthly frequencies from that country arrived, with a high number of frequencies from Thursday to Saturday and occupancy percentages higher than 80 percent.The share of the Canadian market in Mexico's international total went from 10.8 percent in 2019 to 10.2 percent in 2020. This year, Puerto Vallarta seeks to reposition itself as the airport with the largest number of cities directly connecting the two countries. Prior to the pandemic, there were connections from 16 cities in Canada.



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News Around the Republic of Mexico



Work to Start on Line 4 of Guadalajara Light Rail



The 22km light rail line will connect central Guadalajara and Tlajomulco de Zuniga municipality and serve eight stations, creating a link with line No. 1 and the Mi Macro Periferico BRT beltway line. Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico - Work on Guadalajara's 13.3bn-peso (US$674mn) Mi Tren light rail system will start during the second half of 2021, according to a transport official of Mexico's Jalisco state.



Other works planned for this year involve a US$35mn tender to install a signaling system for lines No. 1 and 2 and complete the US$635mn



These projects had to be postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, "but let's hope that in the post-COVID stage we can reactivate some of them," he said.



Siteur, which also operates bus routes and BRT corridors, is also planning an electric bus corridor to Guadalajara's airport.







LINE NO. 4



According to the work calendar Valle presented, construction will take three years while the testing stage is expected to finish by March 2024.



Governor Enrique Alfaro, who leaves office in three years, has tried to



"We are in the phase of preparing the executive project and the acquisition of land. In particular, the land for the intermodal transfer center," Valle said.



The line will be built at ground level and parallel to an existing freight rail line that is concessioned to



The 22 kilometer line will connect central Guadalajara and Tlajomulco de Zuniga municipality and serve eight stations, creating a link with line No. 1 and the Mi Macro Periferico BRT beltway line.



OTHER PROJECTS







Valle also said Siteur is planning the modernization, expansion and other improvements for lines No. 1 and 2. Some works include restoring damaged locomotives, replacing outdated rail and technology systems, widening the lines and infrastructure and launching a tender to install a signaling system.



Financing comes from the



Meanwhile, works continue for the 41km Mi Periferico BRT project around the 60km Manuel Gomez MorAn beltway that surrounds Guadalajara's urban area and links the municipalities of Zapopan, Guadalajara, Tonala and Tlaquepaque.



The project registered



The corridor will consist of 42 stations and 314 units will circle the beltway daily, reaching an estimated goal of 300,000 trips. The new system will also enable a link to Mi Tren lines No. 1 and 3 and another BRT corridor called Mi Macro Calzada.



In addition, Valle said there are plans to add 8.5km to the BRT system to reach the capital's airport. The stretch, dubbed



The project is still in the planning phase and estimated investment has not yet been determined, he said. But the next administration might pick up the proposal.



Siteur also has plans to launch a 32km bus corridor for 55 electric units. It would link to Guadalajara airport via the Mi Macro Periferico line.



According to Valle, the operator will receive the units, obtained through a US$15mn leasing contract, in the coming days.



Original article - Work on Guadalajara's 13.3bn-peso (US$674mn) line No. 4 of thelight rail system will start during the second half of 2021, according to a transport official of Mexico's Jalisco state.Other works planned for this year involve a US$35mn tender to install a signaling system for lines No. 1 and 2 and complete the US$635mn Mi Periferico BRT project by October, the head of Jalisco's urban transport operator Siteur, Rolando Valle Favela, said recently during a webinar.These projects had to be postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, "but let's hope that in the post-COVID stage we can reactivate some of them," he said.Siteur, which also operates bus routes and BRT corridors, is also planning an electric bus corridor to Guadalajara's airport.According to the work calendar Valle presented, construction will take three years while the testing stage is expected to finish by March 2024.Governor Enrique Alfaro, who leaves office in three years, has tried to obtain funding from the federal government. "We are in the phase of preparing the executive project and the acquisition of land. In particular, the land for the intermodal transfer center," Valle said.The line will be built at ground level and parallel to an existing freight rail line that is concessioned to Ferromex. The company agreed almost a year ago to give away part of its rights-of-way for the project and assist in supervision, according to a collaboration agreement between Ferromex and the national communications and transportations ministry (SCT). Yet, the light rail line will require the construction of several confined upper and lower overpasses, Valle said.The 22 kilometer line will connect central Guadalajara and Tlajomulco de Zuniga municipality and serve eight stations, creating a link with line No. 1 and the Mi Macro Periferico BRT beltway line.Valle also said Siteur is planning the modernization, expansion and other improvements for lines No. 1 and 2. Some works include restoring damaged locomotives, replacing outdated rail and technology systems, widening the lines and infrastructure and launching a tender to install a signaling system.Financing comes from the Banco Nacional de Obras y Servicios lender and Jalisco state, according to Valle.Meanwhile, works continue for the 41kmBRT project around the 60km Manuel Gomez MorAn beltway that surrounds Guadalajara's urban area and links the municipalities of Zapopan, Guadalajara, Tonala and Tlaquepaque.The project registered progress of 65%, according to infrastructure and public works ministry SIOP. But operations should start by October, Valle said.The corridor will consist of 42 stations and 314 units will circle the beltway daily, reaching an estimated goal of 300,000 trips. The new system will also enable a link to Mi Tren lines No. 1 and 3 and another BRT corridor called Mi Macro Calzada.In addition, Valle said there are plans to add 8.5km to the BRT system to reach the capital's airport. The stretch, dubbed Mi Macro Aeropuerto, would extend southeast from Tlaquepaque municipality to Guadalajara international airport, crossing El Salto municipality.The project is still in the planning phase and estimated investment has not yet been determined, he said. But the next administration might pick up the proposal.Siteur also has plans to launch a 32km bus corridor for 55 electric units. It would link to Guadalajara airport via the Mi Macro Periferico line.According to Valle, the operator will receive the units, obtained through a US$15mn leasing contract, in the coming days.



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Informal sector businesses operators in Botswana have been largely affected by Covid 19 as currently many people are conscious about their spending and the sector is becoming saturated as more Batswana are looking for ways to generate income.

Gabane Youth Business Association Chairman, Mokganedi Malope told the Business trends that Covid 19 has encouraged Batswana to choose entrepreneurship as source of income although they are now flooding into informal sector. Many Batswana are now starting small businesses. This is a good thing but they are joining the informal sector at the wrong time when consumer spending has declined due to tough economic conditions brought by Covid 19 and loss or reduced salaries

Local Enterprise Authority (LEA) head of Corporate Affairs and Market Access, Boikhutso Kgomanyane told the Business Trends that the Authority has received 30,929 applications from informal sector businesses across the country, 97 percent were approved and given a grant of P1000. 00. Out of these beneficiaries 79 percent were female operated businesses while 21 percent were operated by men.

During the lockdown last year government came up with initiatives to register informal and formal Small Micro and Medium Enterprises (SMMEs) with the objective of developing a centralised database. The database would be instrumental in decision-making around how the COVID-19 financial interventions from government.

Although most of the hawkers received government relief grant, they are now experiencing a major challenge of low sales and increased competition. In an interview with the Business Trends, Boitshwarelo Ntwakgolo, a hawker which benefited from governments relief fund said since beginning of this year the business is gradually crumbling as customers have declined. This year is very terrible because many people are now starting to set up small businesses but there are no customers to buy our goods because most people are not working and others are having reduced salaries,

She said the situation is also worsened by the governments decision to increase tax. Now everything is very expensive. The wholesalers have now increased their prices by up to 30 percent. We cannot increase prices because demand is low; people are not buying so we are not making profit at all, she said.

Another hawker, Ogorogile Baleki said her business was affected by Covid19 but worsened by the increase in wholesale prices. We are trying to increase prices a little bit but now customers are not buying. People do not have money. A recent survey conducted by LEA indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected most of the small businesses assisted by the authority. According to a survey of 382 companies, 63 percent had suspended operations. The sampled companies also reported average drops in monthly revenue of 47 percent. The SMMEs still operating were struggling with importation of raw materials and the inability to pay fixed costs such as rent, salaries and loans.

Government had allocated to LEA an amount of P100 million from the Industry Support Facility (ISF), which was launched by the Ministry of Investment and Trade Industry as part of the Economic Recovery Transformation Plan last year.






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Prolyte ORS, the professional rehydration brand of Cipla Health Ltd., has launched a new TVC with the aim of educating Indians about the glucose-electrolyte solution called Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS), its correct formulation and its appropriate usage to keep dehydration at bay.

Dehydration is the loss of water and body salts through diarrhea, vomiting, excessive sweating or any other reason. Consuming World Health Organization (WHO) recommended ORS during diarrhea and dehydration enables the intestine to absorb the fluid and the salts more efficiently thus replacing the bodys lost fluids and essential salts. This helps to reduce the risk of hospitalization, health complications and minimizes the need of IV fluids thus curbing resultant severe consequences. In line with this, Prolyte ORS offers a healthy blend of ingredients entailing a unique scientific formulation recommended by the WHO which helps in fluid maintenance in the body leading to speedy recovery within the confines of your home.

The TVC showcases a real life scenario at a medical store with a customer asking for any ORS as he does not have much knowledge of WHO approved ORS formulation. This situation further progresses into a thought-sparking conversation by a child disguised as a teacher explaining the why behind the WHO and the importance of making an informed decision while picking the right formulation of ORS. Other replica brands that read or look similar to Prolyte ORS are drinks with high glucose load that can lead to osmotic diarrhea and worsen loss of fluid and electrolytes further. This can be potentially fatal in dehydrated patients, especially in children, and spike up mortality rate whereas the WHO recommended ORS will dramatically bring you relief and effectively revitalize you.

In India, children are highly susceptible to dehydration due to infections, malnutrition, soaring temperatures among others. However, adults also need rehydration treatment as much as children. Hence, administering the right ORS becomes crucial to keep consequential health hazards at bay.

Commenting on the new TVC, Mr. Shivam Puri, CEO  Cipla Health Ltd., said, As a brand that is committed to its consumers, we are constantly focused on educating them about the best practices in day to day healthcare. Through our initiatives, we wish to encourage them to make sound decisions pertaining to their health and overall safety. The new Prolyte ORS TVC helps consumers to make the right choice when it comes to their overall well-being. We hope to continuously make a difference to their lives.

This TVC has been conceptualized by The Womb Communications and will be played across TV channels in Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Odiya languages and digital platforms in 30 seconds and 10 seconds format. Prolyte ORS is available across medical stores and online ecommerce websites in a powder form in 21 gm sachet as well as 200ml ready to drink solution at a price of Rs. 19.53 and Rs. 29.40 respectively.
Taproot Dentsu, the creative agency from the house of dentsu India, has been awarded the creative mandate for the forthcoming campaign of the leading tech giant, Lenovo. The agency won the mandate following a multi-agency pitch and will now service the account from its Mumbai office.

The campaign will focus on Lenovos smart and innovative offerings. It aims to carry the Lenovo story forward in the Indian market.

Speaking of the association, Amit Doshi, CMO - India and South Asia, Lenovo said, Taproot was quick to understand our business need and translate it into interesting possibilities. They have a stellar track record in producing disruptive work and we are excited about working with the unit.

Ayesha Ghosh, Head, Taproot Dentsu added, In an ever-evolving category, Lenovo has continued to stay ahead of the curve and we are delighted to be part of that journey. We enjoyed bringing the brief to life and were happy that the Lenovo team felt we had hit the nail on the head with the work we are now developing.
The Federal Council

Bern, 11.06.2021 - At its meeting on 11 June 2021, the Federal Council approved a temporary restriction on the use of airspace during the summit between President Biden and President Putin from 15 to 17 June 2021 in Geneva. The Swiss Air Force will provide air policing and tighter airspace surveillance. The armed forces will also set up a support service to assist the civilian authorities in providing security on a subsidiary basis.

In order to ensure adequate security during the meeting in Geneva between the US president Joe Biden and the Russian president Vladimir Putin, the Federal Council has approved a temporary restriction on the use of airspace in the Geneva area from 15 to 17 June 2021. As this is a high-level international summit, such a measure is necessary to ensure security during the event. Switzerland is obliged to ensure the protection of persons who enjoy special protection under international law, such as the American and Russian heads of state. The Swiss Air Force will provide air policing and tightened airspace surveillance.

The use of airspace in the zone above the Place des Nations in Geneva will be restricted from Tuesday 15 June 2021 8am local time until Thursday 17 June 2021 5pm local time. Commercial flights to and from Geneva International Airport will not be affected by the restriction.

Role of the armed forces

At its meeting the Federal Council also approved the subsidiary deployment of a maximum of 1,000 military personnel in support of the Geneva cantonal authorities. In particular, the armed forces will be responsible for protecting foreign representations and will provide equipment to the Geneva cantonal police for air and lake transport. These measures complement the security measures put in place by the cantonal authorities. They do not involve any additional expenditure for the Confederation, as they are covered by the ordinary budget.

Address for enquiries

Mireille Fleury

DDPS spokesperson

+41 58 463 16 23

Publisher

The Federal Council

https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start.html



General Secretariat DDPS

https://www.vbs.admin.ch/



Defence

http://www.vtg.admin.ch



Federal Office of Police

http://www.fedpol.admin.ch/fedpol/en/home.html



Federal Department of Foreign Affairs

https://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/home.html




Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research

Bern, 11.06.2021 - President Guy Parmelin will travel to Sweden on 14 June. During his presidential visit he will be received by King Carl XVI Gustaf. Separate talks are also scheduled to take place with Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, Minister of Enterprise, Industry and Innovation Ibrahim Baylan, Minister for Higher Education and Research Matilda Ernkrans and Speaker of Parliament Andreas Norlen.

The purpose of the talks is to discuss common goals at the international level, European policy and political, economic and scientific cooperation. The visit will also include talks on economic policy measures to address the pandemic.

In addition, a declaration of intent will be signed in the presence of the Swiss president and the Swedish prime minister between Innosuisse and Vinnova on strengthening the cooperation that has existed between the two innovation agencies since 2013. The Swiss delegation, which includes Innosuisse Director Annalise Eggimann and State Secretary Martina Hirayama, Director of the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), will also meet with representatives of the Swedish science and research community in Stockholm.

The last visit by a Swiss president to Sweden took place in 2009. The two countries largely share the same values and objectives. Cooperation in multilateral bodies, particularly the UN and the OSCE, is very important. Sweden is also Switzerlands largest trading and investment partner in the Nordic region.

Address for enquiries

GS-EAER Communications

Tel. +41 58 462 20 07

info@gs-wbf.admin.ch

Publisher

Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research

http://www.wbf.admin.ch




Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research

Bern, 11.06.2021 - The high-level summit between US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin will take place at Villa La Grange in Geneva on Wednesday 16 June. Switzerland will also hold separate meetings with both the United States and Russia during the summit to discuss bilateral matters.

The SwissUS bilateral meeting will take place on Tuesday, 15 June. The US delegation, led by President Joe Biden, also includes Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. The Swiss delegation, led by President Guy Parmelin, includes Federal Councillor Ignazio Cassis, head of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA), and State Secretaries Marie-Gabrielle Ineichen-Fleisch (SECO) and Livia Leu (FDFA). Talks with the US will focus on a long-term strengthening of economic ties and close cooperation in education and research. Switzerland's good offices will also be on the agenda.

SwissUS ties are historically close, with around one million US citizens having Swiss roots. Relations are nonetheless dynamic, with an emphasis on education, research and innovation. The US is Switzerland's second-largest trading partner for goods after the European Union. Meanwhile, in the US, Switzerland is the sixth-largest foreign direct investor and among the top three for R&D investment. Another important element of the relationship is Switzerlands protecting power mandate for the US, under which Switzerland has represented US interests in Iran since 1980.

The SwissRussian bilateral talks will be held on Wednesday, 16 June. The Russian delegation, led by President Vladimir Putin, also includes Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The Swiss delegation is the same as for its US meeting. Russia, like the US, is among the priority countries of Swiss foreign policy. Bilateral relations are good and close in many areas. The stated aim of Switzerland's foreign policy strategy is to maintain a constructive and critical dialogue with Russia in order to further strengthen relations. Fostering the relationship is particularly important on account of Switzerland's protecting power mandates for Russia and Georgia. There is also great potential for economic exchange. In addition, the talks will address security issues in Europe and efforts to strengthen the multilateral level (Council of Europe and OSCE).

Strong media interest

The decision to hold the BidenPutin summit in Geneva is a reflection of the trust that both the United States and Russia place in Switzerland. Switzerland enjoys long-standing good relations with both countries and maintains an open and transparent dialogue. Moreover, Switzerland firmly believes that constructive dialogue between the worlds major powers is necessary and expedient for solving intergovernmental and global challenges and therefore offers its good offices to this end. Interest in the summit is intense, with over 1,000 media representatives expected in Geneva. The federal government and the cantons are taking extensive security precautions.

The Federal Office of Police (fedpol) has conducted detailed risk assessments in advance of the event. Security measures have been determined on this basis and are being implemented under the lead of the Geneva Cantonal Police in coordination with fedpol and the security details of the foreign delegations, with the support of other cantonal police forces and the Swiss Armed Forces.

Various measures have also been taken to preserve the security of the airspace during the summit. The Air Force will step up its surveillance of the airspace and civilian air traffic will be restricted. The cantonal security arrangements will be supplemented by the Swiss Armed Forces, which will provide additional equipment and up to 1,000 military personnel on support duty. These measures, approved by the Federal Council at its meeting on 11 June, are intended to support and relieve the local authorities.

Address for enquiries

GS-EAER Communication, Tel. +41 58 462 20 07, info@gs-wbf.admin.ch



FDFA Communication, Tel. +41 58 462 31 53, kommunikation@eda.admin.ch

Publisher

Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research

http://www.wbf.admin.ch



Federal Department of Foreign Affairs

https://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/home.html




Kazakhstans leaders have long expressed ambitious goals for the countrys development, and worked to make the country a force in international affairs. To a considerable degree they have succeeded. Kazakhstan has played an important role in international organizations, including chairing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and obtaining a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council. The country has also played an important role in international peace and security, including through its support for nuclear non-proliferation and its mediation of a number of international disputes. These many steps on the international scene have provided Kazakhstan with considerable goodwill and respect. Meanwhile, Kazakhstans leadership have set ambitious goals for the countrys future. These include a closer partnership with the European Union through an Enhanced Partnership and Cooperation Agreement, the goal of obtaining membership in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, and most potently, for Kazakhstan to be part of the worlds 30 most developed nations by 2050.

Kazakhstans international image, and its ambitious development goals, have one thing in common: their biggest challenge arises from certain aspects of Kazakhstans domestic situation, particularly those relating to individual rights and freedoms. As became clear during Kazakhstans candidacy for the OSCE chairmanship, international concerns regarding individual rights and freedoms in the country constituted a significant challenge that led to reservations from influential member countries and, fairly or not, delayed Kazakhstans chairmanship. More broadly, while Kazakhstans contributions to international peace and security are widely recognized, criticism concerning human rights issues in the country continue to emerge both from partner governments, international organizations, and non-governmental bodies.

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Here's the problem with communism (and sometimes socialism). If you study these subjects, you will encounter lots of abstract theories about how best to organize society, money, property, and so on. Some ideas might sound appealing. But they have little to do with communism as this ideology has existed in the real world.

Better to think of these theories as maps and guidebooks for people who want to rule others. Communism appeals to dead souls hungry for power. These are not normal, healthy people. When they finally seize power, everyone else becomes a victim, even as never-ending propaganda promises the perfect society.

The last people you want in control of your life are control freaks eager to be your masters. They think it's natural they should dictate your activities. The word slave does not appear in the contract, but that is your job in their world.

Everyone should reflect on the bloody history of socialism and communism, so often with beautiful banners and abundant promises, but a decade later, most of the wannabe bosses are dead or missing in action, replaced by others like themselves. The smell of death hangs over this history. The bigger the government, the more power is taken from the people and given to commissars and bureaucrats. These people work to increase the concentration of power in fewer hands  their hands.

If you were a follower of Germany's Hitler, Russia's Stalin, Cambodia's Pol Pot, or China's Mao, you naturally expected to participate in their success. But these four visionaries killed people, including devoted followers, by the millions. Indeed, the real common denominator of the top socialists and communists is their extreme comfort level with imprisonment, suffering, and death.

Here is the essence of the matter. Communists want you to think their theories and plans are concerned with you and your happiness. That's a lie. Their theories are concerned with helping them gain control of you. A lot of these theories came from Karl Marx, a nobody around 1850, but he was the leader of a tiny socialist party. I think he saw his theories, grandiose and highly intellectual, to be his passport to the top of the pyramid. But he was not a nice man. Disagreeing with his fellow socialists, he often shouted, "I will annihilate you!" That arguably is the spirit of his teachings.

A U.K. historian writing about Hitler and Stalin concluded: "TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN." These mass killers are described as "narcissistic and antisocial." Stalin, always thinking big, mused: "The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic." A leader like this won't notice whether you live or die.

Wikipedia indicates that both men were comfortable with torture. The peak of totalitarian terror was reached with the Nazi concentration camps. These ranged from labor camps to extermination camps, and they are described as aiming to "eliminate all actual, potential, and imagined enemies of the regime."

Experts refer to the camps as involving "extreme viciousness." They also compare these camps with the Soviet Gulag system, and they highlight the use of such camps as a method of punishment and execution by Nazi and Stalinist regimes alike. Pol Pot and Mao were similar.

Another scholar focused on the violence and terror employed by Hitler and Stalin. The Stalinist USSR underwent an "extraordinary brutalization" of the relations between state and society "for the purpose of rapid modernization and industrialization." Other experts discuss "mass violence, and the way that it was used by both Stalinism and Nazism."

All levels of Soviet society were affected by Stalinist repression. At the top, high-ranking members of the Communist Party were arrested and executed under the claim that they had plotted against Stalin. At the bottom, the peasantry suffered the artificial famine that killed many millions in Ukraine.

Point is, normal people don't want to torture people. Live and let live  that's the central philosophy of Western culture. Sadly, normal people are slow to see the threat from totalitarian players. The essence of the people at the top of socialist and communist governments tends to be exploit and let die.

Looking at the track records of socialist and communist governments, you really appreciate how brilliant George Orwell was. Both of his famous books explore the monsters at the top. Think of the lead characters in Animal Farm: swine in every sense.

And consider the extraordinary candor of O'Brien, the Party boss in 1984. He explains that constant pain is essential; otherwise, how do the bosses know that ordinary citizens are submitting, not merely pretending?

You probably have noticed that our public schools seem determined to teach everything that makes America look bad. In reality, American history contains almost nothing comparable to the vast, relentless Terror that is the norm in most historical socialist and communist countries.

All the bad things done in these countries result in massive rates of alcoholism, depression, divorce, suicide, and early death. Every good thing is promised, but in reality, there is a slow, grinding desperation in these far-left paradises, as in Venezuela today.

Teachers who seriously want to teach the history of this planet have to include material about communism. Some say communist governments killed 100 million people; some estimates go as high as 150 million. Schools should teach students how to recognize the oncoming catastrophe.

Another resource is a museum in Washington, D.C. called Victims of Communism. Its website contains lots of interesting information.

The corruption and decline of our schools are thoroughly exposed by the increase in students supporting totalitarian tendencies. It's disgusting, at least to me  young people who have everything working to take everything away from everybody else.

Black Lives Matter announced they were "trained Marxists." That's enough to know you want to stay far away from them.

Bruce Deitrick Price's new book is Saving K12: What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them? Price deconstructs bogus theories and methods on his ed site, Improve-Education.org.

Image via Flickr, Public Domain.

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
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When I was a kid, I collected Wacky Packs  a series of stickers inside packages of gum. The images were well illustrated but crude satires of familiar products and brands. For instance, instead of Gillette's Right Guard Deodorant, the Wacky version was Killette's Fright Guard, the can depicting a thug proudly unleashing lethal B.O. This raunchy spoof and others like it thrilled my kindergarten boyish sense of humor.

Fast-forward a few decades, and such shenanigans aren't a childish novelty in the candy aisle anymore. Now cheap-shot rip-offs of corporations are supposedly groundbreaking art and tools for social change. As Art and Object states:

Whether you call it artistic activism or artivism, the compound word keeps gaining traction. The use of creative expression to cultivate awareness and social change spans various disciplines including visual art, poetry, music, film, and theater. To make their points, artivists cleverly employ parody or satire through culture jamming and other forms of subvertising  a portmanteau of subvert and advertising  to change the original meaning of a well-known image or corporate logo.

"Cleverly" is not a word that applies here. An example of subvertising would be creating and distributing as art a feeble graphic where the word "McDiabetes" is inserted into the Golden arches logo.

What Art and Object is promoting as cutting-edge are progressive activists using Wacky Packlevel discourse, while preening as if they were brave rebels artfully skewering The Man. In my ongoing art market research, it's becoming rare to find any efforts that don't aspire to partake in misconceived ideology. Artist statements are sociology lectures. Landscapes preach on climate change; portraits must feature hot takes on racism. Left-wing proselytizing and conformity are mandatory conditions for advancement.

The main reason the awkward word and practice of artivism is gaining traction in the alienated modern art world (and nowhere else) is that substituting propaganda for art fulfills the globalist agenda. Like a tainted Midas, everything leftism touches turns into witless and bullying collectivist policy statements. The totalitarian impulse for control demands that all means serve statist ends; artivism is part of that mindset. The Cultural Marxists embedded in our institutions make sure this is the kind of art that gets support, attention, and funding.

Art and Object quotes Steve Duncombe, a professor of media and culture at New York University and the co-founder of The Center for Artistic Activism. "What we realized in the end is that 'all successful activism is artistic activism,'" he claims. The C4AA boasts of having trained over 1,500 artists worldwide.

That kind of mentoring takes money. Their website reveals that one of the entities pulling the puppet strings is the Open Society Foundations, one of George Soros's money-laundering fronts. It's no accident that this enemy of liberty puts artists on the payroll to inject toxic messaging into society. Another supporter is the National Endowment for the Arts. Our own government is funding the subversion and perversion of the culture. But whom is this ultimately benefiting?

Visual art is undergoing a crisis of relevance. For five years, I helped run a gallery in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. Through those years, I interacted with thousands of people. I liked to ask visitors, "Who is your favorite living American artist?" No one ever had an answer to that question.

This is not a poor reflection on the general audience. In my experience, people appreciate good art when they see it. The problem is, so much of what is presented as art these days is not really art at all.

The governing philosophy of would-be overlords worldwide is Postmodernism. The Postmodern mindset believes that reality is formed by the manipulation of language, in the service of the preferences of the powerful. The globalist governing elites have constructed a simulated world where their customs of sophistry, networking, and bureaucratic maneuvering dominate. They lie and perform bait-and-switches constantly, and not just about art.

To not-really-elites, the arts are considered just another delivery vehicle for non-artistic agendas, such as virtue-signaling, status-seeking, and radical indoctrination. However, the decline in influence of the non-art hyped by the New Aristocracy of the Well Connected is telling evidence of their hubris and incompetence. It's a blessing that most people have tuned out modern art, because the current priorities of establishment art, like artivism, are vile proxies for art, and not the authentic phenomenon.

Through stunning mismanagement and abuse trending back at least a century, establishment cultural institutions marginalized the timeless human practice of creativity. Art is older than agriculture. It's as human as the opposable thumb, and just as prevalent. In the end, the experience of art cannot be faked.

Humanity has a natural hunger for the creation and enjoyment of art. Just like our other instinctual appetites, we aren't really satisfied with anything but the real thing. As author William S. Burroughs noted, "you can't fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal."

Traditionally, art has shown us who we are, and what we can be, in ways almost impossible to reduce into language. True art delivers the inspiration to live up to ideals. True art gives the encouragement to think and feel deeply. True art causes a yearning to harmonize with truth and beauty.

The politicized hacks of the modern art world can't produce profound insights, so they lie about what art is and what it is for. This vital means of communication was hijacked, its function betrayed. But we still hunger for the real thing. We need it. Once we've tasted the genuine uplift and communion true art contains, it can change us. In this, there is an opportunity.

Art is dangerous to the status quo, especially a status quo organized around deceit. The conjoined establishment maneuvers of the Overblown Outbreak and massive election fraud are peak Postmodernism. This tyranny of falsehood is an existential threat to the United States and, by extension, Western civilization. We must fight back against these attempts to destroy us from within.

Let art become one of our weapons. It's a counterattack the Marxists will never see coming because they assume that's already thoroughly conquered territory. From an institutional standpoint, they are correct.

But that's the great thing about being a free people: we can innovate our way past the existing structures. The existing cultural forums are so broken that the potential audience looking for something better is practically the entire population.

Andrew Breitbart was right when he said, "Politics is downstream from culture." We need art that shows us what liberty can achieve. We need art that shows how we are made in our Creator's image. We follow His example when our works show skill, truth, beauty, and inspiration. That kind of art breaks the monopoly of thought the establishment holds and exposes their actual corruption.

As Americans in the information age, we enjoy the greatest opportunities in human history. We should be creating the greatest works of art in history. The reason we aren't is due to traitors in high places who have led us astray for generations. We can't afford to let them continue to hobble us.

Renew the arts, and renew the civilization.

Richard Bledsoe is an artist and writer, author of the book Remodern America: How the Renewal of the Arts Will Change the Course of Western Civilization. He blogs at The Remodern Review.

Image: Pexels via Pixabay, Pixabay License.

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The forced remote learning fiasco imposed on the vast majority of Vermont K12 students this past year highlighted the advantage of school choice. In September 2020, more than 80% of state-run schools offered only hybrid or remote learning in response to COVID-19. Even as late as March 2021, only one third of state-run schools were fully open, and 37 of them remained closed entirely. But students from Vermont towns lacking government schools for some or all grades (i.e. "sending towns") had school choice for the missing grades. Those students easily found independent schools that would accept tuition "vouchers" to provide in-person instruction, starting in September 2020 and continuing to the present with no untoward COVID infections.

Of course, for 150 years before the pandemic, Vermont law said parents in those sending towns could send their kids to virtually any school in the world, while most other parents had to make do with the local state-run school, regardless of its adequacy. The pandemic has just made this violation of Vermont's constitutional commitment to providing common benefits to all its citizens more apparent and less possible to sustain politically and legally.

The unequal educational options exposed by the pandemic also failed to meet the standard set forth in the Vermont Supreme Court's 1997 Brigham v. State decision, which requires each Vermont child be provided a "substantial equality of educational opportunity" and the "mere fortuity of a child's residence" cannot diminish the state's obligation to provide it.

This past December a group of parents from "no choice" towns set out to protect their kids from the impact of these longstanding, pre-COVID constitutional violations. They filed a lawsuit in Vermont courts to overturn the requirement that children attend whatever state-run school exists in their local district, regardless of the individual educational needs of each child. By the time the courts rule on this suit, the pandemic will likely have passed into history and every child will be taught in person. But the fundamental injustice will remain until the court speaks: some kids  based solely on the "mere fortuity of their residence"  will be able to attend the schools that work best for them but most must attend whatever school is available locally. The shocking number of government school students who can't pass the state achievement tests every year makes it plain that this inflexible situation has a real impact on many children's lives, especially those from low-income families.

Image: Chris Jepsen.

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I have access to a Facebook group composed of strongly Democrat-voting Jewish Zionists. It has been fascinating over the past six months watching them coming to come to terms with the fact that, no matter how much Democrats talk about "white supremacists," the only hatred for Jews and Israel is coming from people affiliated with the Democrat party. This problem has accelerated for them in the wake of the recent fighting between Israel and her genocidal neighbors.

When I scroll through the Facebook page, more and more, these Zionist Democrats are posting things from conservative sites about the rising anti-Semitism in America or being forced to confront anti-Semitism in often celebrated members of their political party. Here's a sampling of what's they've posted about in just the past few days:

Several of them posted with approval Kathryn Wolf's The Screamers, in which she explained that, beginning in 2019, she was trying hard to counter rising anti-Semitism in Durham, North Carolina (a city that gave over 80% of its votes to Joe Biden). Nobody in the Jewish community (which gave over 77% of its votes to Biden) wanted to acknowledge this problem. And since then, she says, anti-Semitism is exploding  and every place she named (New York City, Alameda County, Columbia University, Brown University) is a Democrat redoubt. Her point was that, at least in the circles in which she travels, if you're a Jew who fears anti-Semitism in America, "The cavalry is not coming. We are the cavalry." In other words, your fellow Democrats will not save you when the anti-Semitic mob beats down your door.

These Zionist Jews were deeply upset a few days ago at the way Rep. Ilhan Omar put out a tweet accusing Israel of "crimes against humanity" and the perpetrators of "unthinkable atrocities." Yesterday, though, they were pleased that the House's Democrat leadership issued a legitimately good statement about Ilhan Omar's deplorable equivalency:

However, what my Jewish friends didn't mention is that only 12 Democrats out of the total of 219 Democrats in the House joined in.

On June 1, Joe Biden, the man my friends, like 77% of their co-religionists, desperately wanted in the White House, spoke in Tulsa. Although his focus was primarily on Blacks, he managed to throw in a nod to "the various hate crimes against Asian Americans and Jewish Americans." And then Biden said something that made sense:

I didn't realize hate is never defeated; it only hides. It hides. And given a little bit of oxygen  just a little bit oxygen  by its leaders, it comes out of there from under the rock like it was happening again, as if it never went away. And so, folks, we can't  we must not give hate a safe harbor.

What my Jewish friends are slowly being forced to face is that the Democrat party is the one providing tanks of oxygen to anti-Semitism, and turning each college, university, city, and county that votes Democrat into a safe harbor for the haters.

Images: Jews for Biden event poster. Jewish Democrats.

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Down in Mexico, they are talking about the meeting between President Andres Lopez-Obrador and V.P. Kamala Harris. Let's just say that some noticed a lack of courtesy. This is from Therese Margolis, the chief editor of Mexico Pulse News, a leading digital news service:

The long list of AMLO's diplomatic faux pas with the U.S. official began from the very instant Harris arrived at the National Palace.

In the midst of a global covid-19 pandemic, Harris had the consideration and courtesy to wear a mask, even though she is fully vaccinated against the virus.

AMLO has had one shot of the vaccine (i.e., he is NOT fully vaccinated) and yet he did not wear a mask.

And as if that were not enough, AMLO then proceeded to address the U.S. VP as "presidente" (in the masculine form of the Spanish word for "president"), thus promoting her in rank and ignoring her gender.

And it only got worse as the encounter proceeded.

Not only did AMLO not extend Harris the diplomatic courtesy of welcoming her to Mexico  which is expected in the case of any official visit  but he next addressed her by her first name (without asking permission to do so), or at least what he interpreted to be her first name, tactlessly changing "Kamala" to "Kabala."

Crass as ever, the Mexican president also ignored Harris' attempts to have a brief chat as they walked through the National Palace's corridors, instead using his forefinger to point out the artwork on the walls, at times, even crossing in front of her with his arms to do so.

Is it any wonder that Harris intentionally chose to visit Guatemala before Mexico (a clear diplomatic message to AMLO as to U.S. priorities in the region) or that Biden sent his VP instead of coming to Mexico in person?

Unfortunately, since AMLO is a total neophyte to the world of diplomacy, that message most probably did not resound with him.
The Wall Street Journal, in a June 10 editorial, "Barr, Garland and Lafayette Park," published a curious way of referring to the mendacious, mean-spirited anti-Trump media. The editorial, citing false reports of vote manipulation by the U.S. Postal Service under President Trump, the wrongheaded attacks on the former president discounting the Wuhan lab leak origins of the coronavirus and, finally, the government report absolving Mr. Trump of responsibility for the June 1, 2020 clearing by force of protesters in Lafayette Park  all these false reports were gathered by the Journal under the umbrella of "anti-Trump folk wisdom" that was "willed into being" by "[t]he liberal establishment." (What, pray tell, is "liberal" about the deep state and its media lackeys?)

Let it be made clear: a false report in a newspaper constitutes an intentional act of willful deception of its readers. That is what Pravda in the former Soviet Union was all about: willfully deceiving the Soviet people of political reality for the purpose of maintaining totalitarian control over them. Eventually, this willful deception caused rust to form on the Iron Curtain, which then fell apart in 1989.

The term "anti-Trump folk wisdom" is a most peculiar way to describe the media's rush to publish lies about Donald J. Trump. The reader is left to infer that the phrase could mean there is something rotten in the country's newsrooms.

But in another June 10 Wall Street Journal editorial, June 10, "The Capitol Riot and the Pentagon," the Journal, in the last paragraph of this editorial, removes its gloves to show the anti-Trump fists underneath: "Donald Trump bears moral responsibility for the disgrace of Jan. 6." The Journal, slyly, has moved from accusing the former president of direct responsibility for whatever "Jan. 6" (always with the month abbreviated) means in the minds of the editorialists to "moral" responsibility, the updated qualifier at the Journal for "responsibility." Here, too, "moral" leads to a Pandora's box filled with anti-Trump jargon, whatever that jargon means. The key to all this is the vituperative "anti-Trump." Therein lies the source of NeverTrump-light thinking, or hardcore NeverTrump hatred and loathing.

There is no propaganda outlet better than The New York Times as a source for anti-Trump hatred and loathing. Behold the June 10 op-ed from Barbara Comstock, identified as a Republican from Virginia who, for two terms, was a member of the House of Representatives. Her op-ed  sorry, that term has been purged  her guest essay is titled "My Fellow Republicans, Stop Fearing Trump." (First thought: How long will she remain a Republican?) In the first paragraph, the former president is dismissed as "the patron saint of sore losers." Before the opening paragraph ends, Comstock decries "his attempted subversion of democracy in the run-up to the Jan. 6. [again, the abbreviated form of the month!] riot at the Capitol." Note that here, too, as with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Trump is not charged with directly fomenting that "Jan. 6 riot."

Ms. Comstock conjures up illusory visions of a Trump conspiracy to overturn our democratic institutions and urges some kind of investigation of "Jan 6." Unmentioned by Comstock are the circumstances leading to the shooting death by a Capitol cop (still unidentified) of Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed demonstrator at the Capitol. But, arguably, Comstock is not interested in the truth of "Jan. 6." More likely, she is not interested in the disclosure that Mr. Trump had nothing to do with the tear gas used to clear protesters out of Lafayette Park one year ago.

For Ms. Comstock, "Mr. Trump's lies are red meat to those in the conspiracy world[.]" Now, that is what the notion of "projection" by persons perhaps afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome is all about. The illusory conspiracies foisted on the American people originate in the ranks of the NeverTrump hordes and their fellow travelers. In the NeverTrump world, to ask questions about questionable procedures utilized in the presidential election of 2020 is to be a lying presidential-denier, part of the right-wing, white supremacist conspiracy against leftist hegemony.

But enough of focusing on the specious acrimony from leftist conspirators against Donald J. Trump from the moment he announced for the presidency, six years ago this month.

Let's conclude with an observation from President Biden, made in the course of his June 1 remarks in Tulsa on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Mr. Biden said, "Only with truth can come healing and justice and repair."

It is more than fair to infer that only when the NeverTrump horde forgoes its campaign of deceit against Donald Trump and the tens of millions of his supporters, then the country can begin to heal and turn its face toward justice. This suggests that President Biden should be the first to stop traducing the presidency and personality of Donald J. Trump. Presently, Biden gives no indication that he will follow his oratory with positive action to heal our partisan wounds.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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Kamala Harris's staff seem embarrassed in the wake of her first blundering trip abroad to Mexico and Guatemala, and once again, they're leaking it to the press.

According to the New York Post:

Biden administration officials are "quietly perplexed" about Vice President Kamala Harris' fumbling multiple questions about the border and are concerned her unforced errors will overshadow her first international trip, according to a report. Speaking to CNN, administration officials discussed how the question of visiting the border dogged Harris for the whole trip, with her answer to NBC News' Lester Holt stealing the spotlight from her work.

They're not angry at the press; they're embarrassed about her and her inability to answer a simple question from CBS's fawning Lester Holt (a newsman who views fairness in news coverage as overrated), and very likely wanted to make Harris look good. The Harris blunders were stealing the spotlight, they said, as if that trip, which Harris herself said was to bring "hope," had any substance whatsoever.

Harris in fact had made a public relations trip to cover up for her failure to manage the border crisis and, as a matter of fact, visit the border. It was fluff. It was ceremony, lots of photos of her walking down airplane steps in exotic foreign lands and walking the red carpets with soldiers in full dress uniform at her side. Lots of podium speeches at ornate Latin American presidential palaces, the architecture and bunting in the background looking grand. That was her job, looking good for the cameras, and being Instagram-obsessed, she seemed to be typecast for the role.

Yet she couldn't even do that.

At her appearance in Guatemala, she showed up looking haggard, with clumped, dirty hair and apparently no makeup, as if the luxury-amenities-laden trip were too much work for her, and her 184-person staff couldn't find even one person to do her hair and makeup for the camera-focused trip.

Sure, she claimed her trip was about finding "root causes," about substance, but what substance?

The president of Guatemala told her the same things the sheriffs of Arizona and Texas are trying to tell her  that Joe Biden issued an invitation to would-be illegal border crossers, and they took him up on it.

"The message [under the Biden administration] changed to, 'We are going to reunite families and we are going to reunite children,'" [Guatemalan president Alejandro] Giammettei explained. "The very next day the coyotes here were organizing groups of children to take them to the United States."

That quote was heard round the world, along with Harris's blundering responses to Holt.

Meanwhile, Harris's trip to Mexico was apparently brutal, with, as AT contributor Silvio Canto noted, some rude, crass treatment from Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador, who had had a good working relationship with President Trump earlier, and was apparently disgusted at Harris's failure to address the issue that was important to him: why the Biden administration scrapped the "Remain in Mexico" agreement, which had in fact stabilized the border and cut sharply into cartel profits. Cartels, as is well known, are a threat to Mexico itself, and rich cartels are an even bigger threat. Lopez-Obrador had walked out on a phone conversation with her earlier, having better things to do. Harris is some diplomat with this guy.

As for Central America, specifically, Guatemala, the border exodus is a disaster, too, given that they are losing critical manpower needed for their own economic development  and face a future of empty cities with remittance roofs. Wouldn't that have been an important issue to consider with Guatemala's leaders? It wasn't, so far as is known from the White House readouts and press reports.

In fact, not much in Harris's trip will stop such things from happening, which is what concerns those presidents. While Harris made a talking point of "root causes," she didn't seem to find any. The Guatemalans took her on a tour of schooling establishments in the country as if to prove that their country is not a dump (which it isn't), and all Harris could say was that these were the kinds of things she could "support." Memo to Kamala: If they have those things, why are they leaving?

So much for her failed quest to find root causes, which I wrote a lot about here.

Nope, this was a publicity trip, a slick production of spin and public relations, all to keep attention away from the fact that Harris still hasn't visited the U.S. border and actually tried to find some root causes of why people are migrating illegally. The odd spectacle of migrants handing tens of thousands of dollars to the very cartels they say they are afraid of and don't want to live around, before making it across the border to move into cartel-infested neighborhoods of Los Angeles and other places loaded with other illegal aliens, and then waving the flags of the countries they don't want to be sent back to at their U.S. college graduations, doesn't sound like a poverty issue to normal people, which is pretty much the extent of her "analysis."

Suffice it to say, there was no quest for root causes from Kamala on this trip. She didn't even listen to what the presidents of Mexico and Guatemala told her.

No wonder her staff are murmuring to the press. They murmur a lot, actually, and stories have rolled out about Harris being unable to keep staff. Maybe if she didn't treat her staff so badly, they wouldn't leak to the press about their concerns about her incompetence even on photo-op travel, where all she had to do was look good.

They murmured earlier about being in a "panic" at her being named border-surge czar in March. They murmured some more about being in an even bigger panic about the prospect of her as a presidential candidate, presumably in 2024.

"Everyone is saying, 'Oh God, Kamala is next and then we're in trouble'," says a Democrat close to the White House.

Wow. One thing after another from this leaky staff.

As it is now, with Kamala unable to work a room, figure out a "root cause," gladhand a foreign president, or answer a fawning media question, so they're now letting us know they're "perplexed."

Impressive job, Kamala. But not the way she thinks.

Image: Screen shot from a camera aimed at a television set during a live broadcast.

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Mark Robinson exploded into the conservative consciousness three years ago, when he gave an impassioned, informed, and rousing defense of the Second Amendment. That speech gave him so much prominence that he successfully ran in 2020 to become North Carolina's Lieutenant Governor. He is not shy about his conservative values  and he is also not shy about telling fellow conservatives that they need to find some backbone. And so this amazing snippet showed up on the internet:

I encourage you all to take a minute to listen to this fiery speech by Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina Mark Robinson.



It's worth every second. pic.twitter.com/oJ6ubGyoFJ  Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) June 8, 2021

If you're like me, after hearing that, you may just want to march right out of your house and declare your principles at the top of your lungs  and then be willing to fight for them.

A couple of few comments:

Robinson is a splendid orator and needs a bigger pulpit than North Carolina.

Having said that, for those imagining him as a running mate for Ron DeSantis in 2024, I don't see that happening. He has some issues in his past.

First, he's filed for bankruptcy three times, which is something he needs an "elevator pitch" to address.

Second, he's not tactful (which is scarcely surprising for a fighter). As Wikipedia is happy to tell readers, he opposes abortion; rejects "the scientific consensus on climate change" (the same "scientific consensus," I assume, that said COVID comes from pangolins) and opposes recreational pot; disbelieves in transgenderism, is concerned about Muslims; hated Obama (an atheist and foreign-born); dislikes Democrat Blacks; opposes atheism; dislikes leftist Jews; and views homosexuality as a sin.

All these views can be stated respectfully. The problem is that Robinson's Facebook page was long on the powerful and colorful, with a good dose of revival Christianity thrown in, and short on the respect. For example, he didn't like the movie Black Panther (which I lost interest in after 15 minutes), but he threw in a lot of classic anti-Semitic rhetoric to make that point. As part of his dislike for Obama, he called Michelle a man, which is a surprisingly common belief, but not a politically useful one.

Unlike leftists, who cast people into the outer reaches for any deviation from doctrinal purity, I don't like to do that. I can condemn slavery as a profound and immoral evil, but I still respect the Founding Fathers for giving us the gift of the greatest form of government ever devised by man, a government that benefits all people, regardless of race, color, creed, country of national origin, sex, sexuality, or any other of the artificial divisions leftists love to create.

Mark Robinson is an imperfect person (and aren't we all?) with some beliefs that don't jive with mine and a disdain for Jews that always worries me in anybody. Having said that, he loves his country passionately, gives absolute fealty to the Constitution (which means he won't ever use the instruments of government against those whom he dislikes), and has a rare rhetorical gift that should be cherished and celebrated.

I hope we hear more from Lt. Gov. Robinson. And speaking as a Jew, I hope that, while he retains his core values, he recognizes that the things he dislikes in Jews stem not from the Jewish faith or nation, but from the leftism that, sadly, infuses way too much of the Jewish community. Just as he would dislike it if I trafficked in ugly stereotypes about Blacks, mainly because doing so is really stupid, I'd like him to see that trafficking in ugly stereotypes about Jews is no better.

Image: Mark Robinson. Twitter screen grab.

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Former Georgia state representative Vernon Jones made waves last spring when, as a Democrat, he announced his support for President Donald Trump. Jones, who also served for eight years as chief executive of one of Georgia's largest counties (Dekalb), followed up in January of this year by formally switching to the Republican Party and declaring his candidacy for governor, running against incumbent Republican Brian Kemp.

That move was noted with interest by many conservatives in the state who, like me, have been less than pleased with Kemp's apparent reluctance to investigate potential fraud in the November 3 general election. While we appreciate Kemp's stand on COVID restrictions, as he reopened the state much earlier than most, and we shudder to think how bad it could have been had his opponent in 2018, the execrable Stacey Abrams, been in office, we still can't help but feel that Kemp has betrayed us in some fundamental way.

As a result, many Georgia conservatives are open, at least, to a Jones candidacy, if not entirely ready yet to trust him fully. (Is it ever a good idea to trust any politician fully?) And so, earlier this week, led by my natural curiosity as well as a desire to find a better option than Brian Kemp, I ventured north from my home in Gwinnett County to hear Jones speak at the monthly meeting of the Republican Women of Forsyth County.

I can report that I was, overall, impressed. Vernon Jones is certainly a charismatic guy, tall and commanding and, at 60, still trim, looking every bit the former athlete. He is an engaging speaker, articulate and funny, half Donald Trump and half Baptist preacher, moving easily back and forth between country-boy slang (he actually is a "country boy," having grown up on a farm in North Carolina) and educated bureaucratese. He held the crowd in the palm of his hand from the start, as any successful campaigner must be able to do.

His pitch to the audience was fairly straightforward: Brian Kemp has let us down (eliciting many figurative and a few literal "amens" from those in the room), and he, Vernon Jones, is going to demand a forensic audit. (Indeed, he left that very evening for Arizona, to observe the audit taking place there.) He called Kemp a "RINO" (to no disagreement that I could detect) and insisted that, having once acceded to her "voting rights" demands  which helped create the mess in November  the governor would not be able to defeat Abrams a second time. As a Black man, however, Jones believes he can beat Abrams, because "they ain't gonna get away with using that 'racist,' 'white supremacist' crap against me."

Jones did take a few moments to address the elephant in the room  the fact that he is a lifelong Democrat who only recently converted  by pointing out that he has always been a conservative Democrat and asserting that he didn't leave the party; the party left him. (A well used phrase, perhaps, but potentially no less true for that.) He had "come home," he said, to "the Party of Lincoln, the party of abolition, the party of desegregation." He also reminded us that anyone who refused to vote for former Democrats would never have voted for Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump, which I thought was a fair point. The crowd, in any case, ate it up.

Beyond that, Jones shared with us his "Contract with Georgia," which calls for a forensic audit of the last election and increased election security moving forward. It also, among other things, promotes open carry and declares that "Georgia will never be a sanctuary state." It doesn't specifically mention Critical Race Theory (another hot-button issue for conservative Georgia parents) but does say schools should not teach ideas that divide students by race.

All in all, it was an effective stump speech. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to vote for Vernon Jones  there's a lot of time between now and Georgia's next gubernatorial election, and anything can happen  but I will say this: with Jones as his opponent, Brian Kemp has good reason to be concerned.

Image: TimothyJ.

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It's not really your fault. The cabal that selected Joe Biden, knowing he wouldn't have any real power, conceded to his pandering notion that he had to have a black female vice president, giving Stacey Abrams/Maxine Waters/Sheila Jackson Lee/Frederica Wilson/Ayanna Pressley/Jamele Hill collective giggly vapors. The cabal, also knowing it wouldn't matter because the black female vice president wouldn't have any real power, either, said what the hell, and you were eenie-meenie-miney-moed. Considering all the alternatives, you were the least bad choice.

But now you're stuck, because you don't know what you're doing, and you know it. Everyone else knows it, too, and you know that, and you're mad about it, because people keep pointing it out in ways you never see coming. You had no fixed goal in mind when you went south, and the muckety-mucks of Guatemala and Mexico ate your lunch. They smelled your fear and weakness and incompetence before your plane even landed. You babbled something about U.S. companies investing in "hope" down there so all those Guatamexihondurans would stay put but offered the same old aid packages they've seen before. They told you the ugly truth that you and Joe just can't get into your freakishly bloated cortexes: if you don't want all these poor, uneducated, unskilled, sick, hungry brown people coming into the country illegally, announce that you are closing the border, and then close the border. How hard is that?

And you keep getting that question about when you are going to the southern border. Lester Holt asked you about that just recently. You haven't kept up with your Botox because your eyebrows yanked up to your hairline and you launched an aria sung in the key of livid: "We've been to the border. We've been to the border. We've been to the border."

Lester pointed out that you have not been to the border.

"And I haven't been to Europe," you said with that cackly laugh that telegraphs to everyone in listening range that what you're about to say is so stupid that you can't believe it yourself. "And I mean, I don't understand the point that you're making. I'm not discounting the importance of the border." Lester looked at you as if you were a Jimi Hendrix wa-wa pedal. Keep practicing that Advanced Petard Hoistmanship. It's going to come in handy.

You won't go to the southern border because you know everyone down there thinks you and Joe are idiots, and they're going to tell you that to your face. The people trying to keep the lid on this boiling kettle of disaster will want to know what you and Joe are going to do about the mass mayhem, and all those furious, frustrated sheriffs and mayors of all those Texas, Nevada, California, and Arizona border towns overrun by illegals are going to demand answers from you that you just don't have.

"What are you going to do about all the sex trafficking of young migrant girls?"

"What are you going to do about all the unaccompanied minors? The young children hurled over the border fence and left to fend for themselves?"

"What are you going to do about all the sex offenders and the increased crime these unvetted migrants are bringing us? What do we tell our wives and daughters?"

"What are you going to do about the drug cartels moving massive quantities of drugs and violence into the U.S.?"

"What are you going to do about all the COVID-positive people you aren't even testing?"

"Who's going to pay to feed and shelter all these people?"

And this is the only answer you have: Well, we are working on discovering what the root causes of immigration from Central America are. The thud factor of such variations of that statement causes the earth to burp, buckle, and shiver in horror every time you say it, as everybody except you already knows the answer to that: the border is open, and everyone is welcome, and things are better here than they are there. That's the root cause of immigration from Central America.

Go home. You're embarrassing yourself, and America is embarrassed for you.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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One of the longest and deadliest battle of the First World War was fought over a small parcel of land in north-eastern France, near the commune and town of Verdun. The Battle of Verdun lasted over 300 days from 21 February 1916 until 19 December 1916 and caused an estimated casualty of over 700,000 dead, wounded and missing.

The attack on Verdun came about because of a cunning plan by the German Chief of General Staff, von Falkenhayn. Verdun wasnt strategically important to the Germans, but had a historic sentiment for the French. The area around Verdun contained twenty major forts and forty smaller ones that had historically protected the eastern border of France for centuries. Falkenhayn knew that the French simply could not allow these forts to fall into the hands of the enemy because of the national humiliation that would follow. Falkenhayn believed that France would fight for this piece of land to the last man, and by doing so would lose so many men that the battle would change the course of the war. His plan was not to capture the city, but simply to kill as many Frenchmen as possible, or to quote him, bleed the French army white.

The battlefield of Verdun scarred with shell craters. Photo credit

On the first day alone, the Germans sent 140,000 soldiers to attack the French town. Supported by 1,200 artillery guns, they blasted hundreds of thousands of shells at the Verdun region. Over the course of the next eleven months, the two armies fired an estimated 65 million artillery shells at one another that not only decimated both armies but completely devastated the land. So many shells were fired that the top of one particular hill vanished. Many troops at the battle never saw an enemy soldier, experiencing nothing but artillery fire.

The massive amount of artillery tore up the ground turning it into a wasteland of mud pools when the rain came. Forests were reduced to tangled piles of wood. Even today the soil is contaminated with heavy metals such as copper, lead and zinc, and poisonous chemicals such as arsenic and ammonium perchlorate, which were used in detonator shells. Only the most toughest plants managed to survive. Millions of unexploded shells still litter the region. Everywhere you look the brutal scars of war are visible in the many over lapping craters.

As for the war, Falkenhayn had seriously underestimated the French, for whom victory at all costs was the only way to justify the sacrifices already made. By July, the increased counter attack from the French army forced the Germans to go into defensive. By then the war had dragged for so long that a victory at Verdun became a matter of German prestige as much as it was for the French. Eventually, the collapse of the southern front in Russia and the power of the Anglo-French attack on the Somme, reduced the German armies to holding their positions as best they could. The German defenses collapsed in December and those surviving were taken prisoners. After the failure at Verdun, Falkenhayn was removed from his position

Trees stand where the village of Fleury once stood, near Verdun, on March 5, 2014. Photo credit

This moonscape of shell holes, still visible a century later, is located at Froideterre on the Verdun battlefield. Photo credit

The undulating landscape is not natural but made by artillery shells. Photo credit

Photo credit

One hundred years ago, this land was probably flat. Photo credit

There are still areas which are blocked off because of the high levels of poison still seeping through the land. Photo credit

A preserved trench in Verdun. Photo credit

A preserved trench in Verdun. Photo credit

Nine villages were destroyed and never rebuilt, in memory of what had happened here. This sign marks where the main street once passed on the site of the former village of Bezonvaux. Photo credit

A retired forest services worker walks past German 77mm and 105mm artillery shells which were never fired that he collected and marked in orange paint for later disposal in Bois Azoule forest. Photo credit

A former First World War German bunker stands in Spincourt forest near Verdun. At least half a dozen of the bunkers still stand in the forest in an area where the German army maintained a hospital, rail connections and command posts during the Battle of Verdun. Photo credit

Rusting French water cannisters dating from the First World War lie in Bois Azoule forest near Verdun, France. Photo credit

A perforated metal bowl, springs from an artillery gun, a spool for communications wire, the lid of a German ammunition box and other rusting remnants, lie in Bois Azoule forest near Verdun, France. Photo credit

Rusted rifles found in the ground around the French town of Verdun. Photo credit

These are just some of the shells which have been found in the ground around Verdun in the years since. People have been killed by the bombs left behind after the battle as recently as 2007. Photo credit

A bomb being safely exploded in the forest. Photo credit

A former steel machine gun turret overlooks the Woevre plain from the top of Fort Douaumont near Verdun. Photo credit

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A visitor approaches a crater created by a mine during the fierce battle of Les Eparges hill during the First World War near Verdun. Photo credit

One of the many cemeteries at Verdun. Photo credit

Sources: History Learning Site / Wikipedia / AllKMC / LeMonde

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South of Martinique, an island in the eastern Caribbean Sea, lies a small basalt island called Diamond Rock. With an imposing peak of 175 meters, the island is said to appear like a cut piece of the eponymous jewel during certain hours of the day. Despite being a mere rocky outcrop, Diamond Rock has quite a history.

HMS Diamond Rock from Martinique. Photo: Marc Bruxelle | Dreamstime.com

Located at the north end of the St. Lucia Straits, Diamond Rock occupied a strategic position. Possession of the rock allowed interdiction of navigation between Martinique and its southern neighbor, St Lucia. Yet, when Royal Navy Commodore Sir Samuel Hood arrived at Diamond Rock in 1803 with instruction to blockade the bays at Fort Royal and Saint Pierre, he found the rock surprisingly devoid of French presence. Sir Hood wasted no time and hoisted two 18-pounder cannons to the rocks summit. Then, he hastily built fortifications and a garrison of two lieutenants and 120 men was established. Two additional 24-pounder guns were placed at the base of the rock, and another 24-pounder was placed in a cave halfway up the side of the rock. Furthermore, a six-gun sloop, designated HMS Fort Diamond was placed in service to support the fort at Diamond Rock.

Traditionally, naval bases in many Commonwealth countries, including the Royal Navy, are named after ships and thus carry the appropriate prefix (HMS in the Royal Navy, HMCS in Royal Canadian Navy, HMAS in Royal Australian Navy, INS in Indian Navy, and so on). The use of ship prefixes to denote naval installations has its roots in the age of sail, when navies used the hulks of old wooden ships moored in ports as floating barracks or classrooms to train sailors and officers. These hulks retained their HMS designations, and later, when these training facilities moved ashore to more permanent bases, the name moved with them. Another theory is that all sailors, by law, have to be on the payroll of a commissioned ship. So by naming naval bases as ships of the Royal Navy, service records could show personnel serving on a ship even though they are not at sea.

HMS Diamond Rock. Photo: Chromoprisme | Dreamstime.com

Going with this tradition, Hood officially commissioned the island as the sloop-of-war HMS Diamond Rock, under the command of Lieutenant James Wilkes Maurice. Other Royal Navy ships were required, when passing the island, to show due respect, with personnel on the upper deck standing at attention and facing the rock whilst the bridge saluted. HMS Diamond Rock made popular the term stone frigate which is another name for shore establishment.

The garrison on HMS Diamond Rock constituted the usual officers found on a British warship, including a surgeon, purser, and a junior lieutenant to command the small supply vessel. Maurice established a hospital, and food, gunpowder and ammunition were brought to the rock in boats from the islands of Centaur and Martinique, where it was purchased from sympathetic inhabitants. The principal weakness of the island was the lack of food and water, which had to be supplied by vessels foraging among the nearby islands. The sailors also kept goats, guinea hens and chickens on the island to supplement their uncertain food supply.

A cannon is hauled up to the summit of the rock suspended by a cable lashed to the base of Centaur's mainmast. Photo: National Maritime Museum/Wikimedia Commons

Life on Diamond Rock. Photo: National Maritime Museum/Wikimedia Commons

For 17 months, HMS Diamond Rock completely dominated the channel between it and the main island, firing towards French ships that attempted to wander too close to the rock and intercepted supplies destined for the French garrison. Because of its elevation, the guns on Diamond Rock had a long firing range, and this forced French vessels to give a wide berth to the rock. Between the guns of Diamond Rock and the currents and strong winds, it made approaching the harbor in Port Royal for the enemy ships nearly impossible.

The French decided to recapture Diamond Rock by creating a blockade and cutting off supplies to the island, thereby forcing the British to surrender. The plan, although a simple one, worked. After exchanging fire with the French for several days, ammunition and water began running low on the island, and Lieutenant James Wilkes Maurice was left with no option but to surrender to the French forces.

Taking of the rock Le Diamant, near Martinique, 2 June 1805 by Auguste Etienne Francois Mayer. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Maurice later wrote to Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson:

It is with the greatest sorrow I have to inform you of the loss of the Diamond Rock, under my command, which was obliged to surrender on the 2d ist., after three days' attack from a squadron of two sail of the line, one frigate, one brig, a schooner, eleven gun-boats and, from the nearest calculation, 1500 troops. The want of ammunition and water was the sole occasion of its unfortunate loss.... [our losses were] only two killed and one wounded.

Maurice was tried for court martial for losing a shipthe island in this caseas Naval procedure of the time dictated, but was honorably acquitted for the loss.

The rock remained in French hands until the capture of Martinique by the British in 1809. The island was traded back to France at the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars along with Martinique. It has remained a French possession since then, inaccessible, inhospitable and uninhabited.
Samsungs first-ever Fan Edition tablet, the Galaxy Tab S7 FE, didnt have the smoothest launch. Aside from the uncountable leaks, the device was prematurely listed on the companys official website much before the announcement. And while the tablet finally broke cover late last month, its market debut might be delayed, at least in some regions.

According to a report coming from Korea, the Galaxy Tab S7 FE will now release in the domestic market in July. The company had initially said the device would arrive in stores in June. So we are about to see a delay of one month.

The report attributes this delay to multiple factors. Firstly, the ongoing global semiconductor shortage has rocked the tech industry and Samsung is unlikely to have escaped from it. The company may not have been able to secure chips to manufacture enough units early on. Moreover, the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in Vietnam might have also affected the production rate. Samsung manufactures the majority of its mobile products there.

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The production has been disrupted due to the shortage of semiconductors in the industry as a whole and the Corona 19 issue. As such, the release date of the Galaxy Tab S7 FE is expected around July, the report cites an industry official as saying (via).

Samsung, meanwhile, declined to comment on unreleased products. The company has yet to reveal the availability details for the Galaxy Tab S7 FE in its home country. This further hints at a delay in the market release of the product.

The Galaxy Tab S7 FE might release late in several markets

When Samsung announced the Galaxy Tab S7 FE last month, it gave a vague June release time frame. The company didnt go into details. But it didnt make fans wait for too long as the new device went on sale in Russia yesterday. This gave hope that the tablet could soon release in other markets as well. But it appears everyone wouldnt be that lucky.

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The latest report only talks about a delayed launch in South Korea. However, since it is seemingly a production-related issue, the possibility of a delay in other markets is also very much on the cards. If you recall, the launch of the Galaxy A72 smartphone in the US has also been delayed due to chip shortage issues. It appears the Galaxy Tab S7 FE is now facing similar problems as well. We will keep you updated as and when more information emerges.
According to Counterpoint Research, the global smartphone market grew 20 percent year-on-year (YoY) to reach 354.94 million units in Q1 2021. This strong growth means smartphone shipment revenue ballooned to over $100 billion for the first time for a March-ending quarter this year, reaching $113 billion.

The figures still mark a 10 percent decline from the previous quarter, i.e. Q4 2020, which is usually a strong quarter for the smartphone industry. The shipment volume nearly touched the 400 million mark during the year-ending quarter last year. Apple, as usual, was the biggest vendor during the period, thanks to its latest iPhone 12 series.

However, the Cupertino-based iPhone maker wasnt able to replicate this success in Q1 2021. A steep quarterly decline in shipments of iPhones in North America and Europe means the company conceded the top spot as the worlds biggest smartphone vendor to its usual holder Samsung. The Korean firm registered strong growth in the European market to reclaim the crown it briefly lost to Apple.

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According to the report, Samsung held a 22 percent share in the global smartphone market in Q1 2021. Apple and Xiaomi captured 17 percent and 14 percent share respectively. OPPO and Vivo follow them with 11 percent and 10 percent market share respectively to make up the top five. Beleaguered Chinese giant Huawei, which topped this chart briefly in the first half last year, has tumbled down to the sixth spot, capturing just about 4 percent of the overall market.

Samsung led the market in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East

A region-wise breakdown of the Q1 2021 smartphone market reveals a few more interesting bits. To begin with, the North American market is still largely dominated by two players, Apple and Samsung. They accounted for a whopping 83 percent of the overall market. As expected, Apple held the majority of that (55 percent), followed by Samsung (28 percent). LG, Motorola, and Alcatel make up the top five.

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The breakdown of the Asian smartphone market, meanwhile, reveals a contrasting story. Chinese brands Vivo, OPPO, and Xiaomi are fighting neck-and-neck in this region. They held 18 percent, 17 percent, and 16 percent of the market respectively. Apple and Samsung both captured a 12 percent share of the Asian smartphone market in Q1 2021.

Samsung was a breakaway leader in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East and African region though. The Korean firm held a 37 percent share of the European smartphone market this past quarter. Apple (24 percent) and Xiaomi (19 percent) were the only other brands with a double-digit market share.

The story is similar for the Latin American market as well. Samsung captured a 42 percent share in this region in Q1 2021, followed by Motorola with a 22 percent share. No other OEMs could reach a double-digit market share, with Xiaomi coming third with an 8 percent share.

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Lastly, in the Middle East and Africa, Samsung tops the chart with a 26 percent share. TECNO, Xiaomi, and Itel distantly follow the South Korean behemoth with 11 percent, 10 percent, and 9 percent market share respectively. Check out the infographic below for a visual representation of the regional smartphone market share for Q1 2021.
That antenna was first turned on about two years ago, but there were some glitches with the power-supply and the computer, so we had to bring it down again with a Russian rocket, then transport it from Moscow to Germany to fix it, said Martin Wikelski, director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, whose scientific team is honing the technology. After the usual troubleshooting for space science, the antenna was turned back on this spring.
(ANSA) - ROME, JUN 10 - Italy recognizes Ukraine's aspirations to join the European Union and will "concretely support them", Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio told a press conference in Kiev with his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba Thursday.

"On the European level," Di Maio said, "I am convinced that the strengthening of relations between Brussels and Kiev is very important for both sides." For this reason, he said, "we are proud to have backed the signing of the accord of association and free trade between the EU and Ukraine and the concession of the liberalisation regime of Schengen visas". (ANSA).


Holidaymakers can make huge savings if they choose a destination on the Governments amber list, new figures show.

Average prices for breaks in Portugal in July or August fell by 64% in the week after the Government moved the country from green to amber compared with the previous seven days, price comparison website TravelSupermarket said.

Seven-night family package breaks during the school holidays are available from as little as 180 per person, according to the firm.

People returning to the UK from amber destinations must self-isolate at home for 10 days.

There are no viable major summer hotspots on the quarantine-free green list.

Summer holidays on Spains Canary Islands, which are also on the amber list, are lower than before the coronavirus pandemic.

The biggest savings compared with 2019 prices are on Gran Canaria (25% cheaper), but prices are also reduced on Tenerife (23%), Lanzarote (15%) and Fuerteventura (12%).

Prices for trips to another amber destination, the Greek island of Corfu, are down 20% on pre-pandemic levels.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) does not advise against travel to any of these destinations.

However, the Government is urging people to avoid holidays to amber locations.

Emma Coulthurst of TravelSupermarket said before the pandemic it would have been fairly hard to find a seven-night package holiday during the summer school holidays from less than 300 per person, but the industry has many holidays to sell.

She went on: Prices are often the most expensive at the start of the school holidays as people are itching to get away as soon as they can.

This year, they are some of the cheapest due to the current confusion and chaos over how the traffic light system is implemented.

The decision to move Portugal from green to amber, and not make any additions to the green list, led to a furious reaction from the travel industry.

Many senior figures claimed data shows destinations such as Malta should have been put in the green tier, and questioned why Portugal was not put on a green watchlist to highlight it was at risk of being switched.
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In early June, the United States delivered $14.9 million worth of 155mm artillery ammunition to the Estonian Defense Forces, and $2.7 million worth of mobile radars (AN/TSQ-288) to the Estonian Navy. Over the next several weeks, the U.S. Navy will support the Estonian Navy with technical training on the radars.

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In early June 2021, the United States delivered $14.9 million worth of 155mm artillery ammunition to the Estonian Defense Forces, and $2.7 million worth of mobile radars (AN/TSQ-288) to the Estonian Navy. (Picture source: U.S. Embassy in Estonia)

The United States European Commands Building Partner Capacity Program (BPC) funded the ammunition and radars through the Fiscal Year 2018 and 2019 appropriations. These deliveries further strengthen U.S.-Estonian defense cooperation while ensuring interoperability among NATO Allies. The equipment delivery to the Estonian Defense Forces is part of multiple, ongoing BPC programs in Estonia. These programs are funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and are designed to complement Estonias national efforts to enhance defensive capabilities. The United States has provided and continues executing over $240 million in security assistance programs to Estonia funded between 2015 and 2020.

In 2021, U.S. funding for security assistance to Estonia will include more than $50 million for integrated air and missile defense equipment and training; aircraft recovery and firefighting equipment and training; communications networks and radios; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance equipment; and shore-based maritime domain awareness systems. This funding includes more than $40 million from the U.S. Department of Defenses BPC program and $10 million from the United States Department of State Foreign Military Financing program. The US Department of State also provides $1.2 million in International Military Education and Training funds annually for Estonian Defense Forces students to attend US military education courses.

The United States Embassys Office of Defense Cooperation in Estonia works in close cooperation with the Estonian Ministry of Defense, Defense Forces, and Center for Defense Investment to complement Estonias significant defense investments. The United States and Estonia jointly participate in multiple exercises and military-to-military engagements each year.
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Public lands were in the midst of boom times, in Maryland and across the country, even before pandemic restrictions drove interest in outdoor spaces to a fever pitch. Traffic into Marylands state parks grew remarkably in recent years, shooting from 10.3 million visitors in 2013 to nearly 14.9 million in 2019, a rate of growth that was already taxing the capacity of states most popular destinations and stretching the ability of rangers to manage the crowds.
EV

Mat Watson, the likable host of the carwow YouTube channel probably decided that he wanted to honor Elon Musks event about his latestwith a little bit of Tesla play of his own. And he enlisted the help of an EV specialist, who also happened to be a vlogger and Model S owner. After all, two drivers are needed when a couple of cars meet up for a race.Naturally, as he pitted the Audi RS e-tron GT and the Tesla Model S against each other from Inverness to London, he also wanted to give us all the usual review tidbits, discussing about the design, interior, features, and specifications of each car.And dont worry, across the journey, Mat also found time for a little fun . But first, the rules of engagement come from the 0:42 mark, and we find out theres a 571-mile (919 km) journey from the snowy northern parts of Scotland all the way down to the sunnier south.As such, the two EVs did get properly tested for the most various real-world conditions in just eleven hours (the 10h52m journey time includes the charging periods, as far as we can tell). First up on the roster was the newer Audi RS e-tron GT from the 1:55 mark. We find out many things about it, including quirky stuff like the fact that Mat barely fits inside the frunk and trunk, unlike with the Model S.But thats not all, because Watson also included a bit of proper racing (not on the street, of course) with a launch from the 10:33 mark. And he tested not just the RS e-tron GT (surprisingly better than stock figures are included), but also both the road trip Model S and a Performance model to make sure we get the most accurate zero to 60 mph (96 kph) and standing quarter-mile perspective.Back to the journey from the 13:05 mark, it was time for the Model S to get dissected , all the while both drivers struggled to get the best possible range and charging times needed to win the race. You can see the final charges at the 27:14 and 31:20 marks for both cars, and from then on, its getting darker and darker as the final destination approached.Its safe to say that its a surprisingly close result in the end, mostly because of Londons traffic and a providential Honda Jazz, but we won't spoil the entire fun. Well let you discover who came out victorious (by mere seconds) from the 34:50 mark.
More on this:

1 California Startup Alpha Aims to Lead the EV Pickup Pack With the Small WOLF

2 Tiny Alpha ACE Coupe EV Grows Into Sturdy-Looking JAX Crossover for $38k

3 Electric Alpha ACE Coupe Treated to a Performance Edition, Does 0-60 MPH in 4.6s

4 Alpha Seeks to Become the Little ACE of a Coupe for Our Sustainable Mobility
Recent years have spawned all sorts of big-kid toys and vehicles, some of which have even begun being implemented into business structures and models. One industry that seems to be making great advancements with the use of drones is that of logistics and package delivery.Companies like UPS , Amazon, and even Samsung , are now implementing drone deliveries on one level or another. But why? Well, there are multiple issues that drone deliveries seem to solve. At the same time, they also raise a few issues of their own.One of the largest problems within the logistics industry seems to be pollution. No matter where you go on this earth, youll run into a car, truck, semi, freight vessel, and even airplane carrying something for someone, and usually, those vehicles are powered by fossil fuels. Sure, some companies are now turning to electric drivetrains, but then traffic is still an issue.The answer appears to be delivery drones, which have several advantages. The first is that they eliminate fossil fuels from the equation. If thats not enough, think of it from a business standpoint. Currently, all over the world, local governments are dishing out all sorts of subsidies and incentives to get the population to switch over to EVs.This seems to hold true for every electrically driven industry, from e-bikes to delivery vehicles and even VTOLs. Plus, electric power can be harnessed using wind, water, and sun, not to mention several other peculiar methods, one of which includes radioactive elements.Even the issue of traffic is resolved with a drone-based delivery system. Because drones fly, all ground-based disturbances no longer impede deliveries. For example, Samsung has recently announced that it will be working with Manna Drone Delivery services to run trial operations in the Oranmore area of Ireland, delivering Galaxy Buds Pro, S21 Ultra, Galaxy Tab S7, and a few others.Using custom-developed aerospace grade drones, Oranmore residence can now order goods to be delivered by drone from a central warehouse. Even coffee from local shops is part of the deal. Oh, and guess what, delivery times range from two to three minutes only. Two to three minutes! That's all it takes for you to get your coffee or Samsung accessories from a couple of miles or kilometers away.With these sorts of results, the future of drone deliveries looks promising, not to mention the technological advancements being made. Honeywell and Pipistrel, for example, has been working on long-range and large-capacity UAVs that are pushing load limits into the hundreds of pounds range. Honestly, I feel were on the right track with the tech as the ultimate payload is and will always be humans.But theres a catch to all this drone business. Like most industries in their infancy, regulations are anything but rigid. Only last year, in December, did the EU finally issue a set of new regulatory frameworks that dictate how high a drone must fly, how fast (safety), how quietly, and how structurally sound it must be. Even weight limits have been set. One recurring question yet to be fully answered regards the effects on wildlife.The way things are going, youre bound to see more and more UAVs in your local town that are no longer meant for playing around; they mean big business. After all, would Samsung or Amazon be betting on a losing horse? I dont think so.
More specifically, users explain that listening to radio has become pretty much impossible, all because Android Auto insists on using media apps that rely on an internet connection to stream content.A post with nearly 50 replies on Googles forums reveals that whenever Android Auto is started, the radio automatically stops, and the audio switches to a media app installed on the phone and using an internet connection.Manually switching back to the radio is just a temporary workaround, as it typically takes Android Auto just a minute or two before it reverts to media apps again. And needless to say, the same thing happens again and again, so its become pretty impossible to listen to the radio when Android Auto is running.But according to someone on Googles forums, the workaround is as simple as it could be, and it all comes down to the Google app. On Android and Android Auto, the Google app is responsible for powering the Google Assistant experience, so when the Mountain View-based search giant ships new updates for its assistant, this is the app thats getting new versions.And as it turns out, the radio listening problems on Android Auto are caused by the Google app, with one user explaining that uninstalling the latest updates brings things back to normal. Of course, this isnt necessarily the most convenient workaround, given that you could end up missing some new features and improvements, but at least youre not forced to listen to media apps anymore.Google hasnt come up with a fix until now, but given that the user community discovered the Google app is the culprit, maybe itll be easier for the company to figure out whats wrong.
AMG

ICE

Early last month, the Affalterbach-based high-performance automobile manufacturer announced it kicked off the process of self-discovery with a new campaign showcasing to the world its desire to deliver a new identity and attitude. It was purposedly designed to bind existing customers to the brand and conquer new target groups while also focusing on the timeless spirit.Are you AMG-ready? was the tag used for the upcoming transformation into a performance luxury brand, and Mercedes-promised it would deliver a visual aid to fulfill the dream. Actually, we should use the plural because the company said it would release a host of short films designed around individual stories at certain intervals.Initially, we saw the SLS Electric Drive deliver the first media punch. Still, some might have been more enthused about the colorful and performance-loving Mercedes AMG G 63 that tried to spell the AMG name while shredding the tires Now its time for the third installment, one that mixes contemporary beats (quite literally, since its focused on sound) with the reminder that it once helped create the legendary 1986 Mercedes-Benz 300 E 5.6 Hammer that paved the way for even bigger things. Such as all the AMG-badged models that we see rolling on the streets today.It was Mercedess first E-Class fitted with a hulking V8 engine and the craziest coupe with attitude caused uproar upon its release in 1986, with a sound that defined a decade. Interestingly, fans have commented they dont want to lose the V8soundtracks any time soon, and the account caretakers winked and replied the future maybe (comes) with an electrified one?
Im before you today to take the final step in a long process that weve been working on with the state of Maryland to get some broadband grants, Mark Ripper, director of the department said. We applied for the grants four or five months ago and we just found out about six weeks ago we were awarded the grants.
Unveiled in 2014 as one of six Bugatti Legend models, the Rembrandt is limited to just three units. One of them is owned by real estate millionaire Manny Khoshbin, and you can now take a virtual ride in it.While not as powerful as the Chiron, the Veyron Rembrandt sounds just as menacing, especially when the gas pedal hits the floor. The fact that it's based on the Grand Sport model, which features a targa top, makes things that much more interesting when putting pressure on the massive 8.0-liter W-16 engine.With the top removed, the quad-turbo mill becomes much louder inside the cabin. The thundering roar puts a big smile on Manny's face, and that says everything about the perks that come with open-top hypercars, including the fact that you can enjoy a big cigar.During his lunch break away from the Veyron, Manny reveals that he has a Tesla Model S Plaid underway, apparently due for delivery next week. By the way, he mentions he was pretty bummed that Elon Musk decided to cancel the Plaid+ . He also expresses interest in the new Rimac Nevera, but mentions that he's not getting any new hypercars soon, as everything he has on order has been delayed due to the global chip shortage.Getting back to the Veyron Rembrandt in question, this limited-edition model was developed as a tribute to Rembrandt Bugatti. Not to be confused with the famous Dutch painter, Rembrandt Bugatti was Ettore's brother and one of the most important sculptors of the early 20th century.He became famous for his sculptures of animals, which included the dancing elephant appearing on the Bugatti Type 41 Royale radiator cap. Because most of his sculptures were cast in bronze, the Veyron Rembrandt is wrapped in a two-tone finish that combines a darker bronze top and a lighter bronze bottom.Each of the three Bugatti Veyron Rembrandts was priced at 2.18 million (about $2.65 million), excluding taxes, back in 2014.
Speaking with German newspaper Handelsblatt , Volkswagen board member Murat Aksel explained that the company is now going through the toughest six weeks since the beginning of the chip shortage, with over 100,000 cars being impacted.Aksel explains the semiconductor crisis has reached the worst point, suggesting that production should improve in the third quarter of the year, though itd still take a while until everything returns to normal.Some 10 percent of the global demand for chips cant be filled because foundries cant deal with so many orders, so in theory, the industry needs increased production capacity either by upgrading the existing lines or with the help of new companies expanding into semiconductor manufacturing.Aksel says Volkswagen is already planning ahead as the company wants to build larger chip inventory to make sure its production wouldnt be affected in the long term. But on the other hand, Volkswagen obviously isnt the only company thats planning to do this.Several other carmakers have been struggling with the lack of chips, many of them eventually suspending operations at some facilities for several days as they were waiting for suppliers to deliver semiconductors.Earlier this week, General Motors announced that some 2021 models sold by the brands it owns would come without automatic start-stop to reduce the number of chips it uses on the cars. The company is offering a $50 price cut for these models, though right now, its still not known when it plans to reintroduce the technology across the entire lineup.Industry analysts expect the semiconductor shortage to continue into 2022, even despite other big names, such as Intel, expanding manufacturing specifically for car chips.
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President Biden arrived in Europe for his first foreign trip bearing what could be a game-changing pledge: 500 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines to be shared with low- and middle-income countries over the next year.

The state of play: The remaining G7 members  Canada, the EU, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and this years hosts, the U.K.  are set to pledge at least another 500 million to bring the total to 1 billion by mid-2021, per a draft communique seen by Bloomberg.

After months of vaccine hoarding by the worlds wealthiest countries, that's a whiplash-inducing shift  particularly from the U.S., which wasnt even allowing vaccine exports until recently.

But a year is a long time in the life of the pandemic, so urgency is a key element here.

The U.S. already has sufficient supply to cover all domestic demand, while the other G7 countries will reach that point by June (Canada), July (France, Italy, Germany, U.K.) or August (Japan), per an analysis from the One Campaign.

What to watch: The G7 is also set to call for a new investigation into the origin of the pandemic, per the draft communique.

The key unresolved question is what the countries will announce on climate change  in particular how much money they'll make available to help poorer countries decarbonize their economies.

The summit's host, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is reportedly pushing for a climate Marshall Plan.

Bidens next stop will be Brussels for his first NATO summit (June 1415).

The alliance went through something of an identity crisis over the last four years, with Donald Trump calling it obsolete and French President Emmanuel Macron declaring it brain dead.

Biden will have to reassure allies that America is indeed back while also encouraging them to invest in their own defense, says Stacie Pettyjohn of the Center for a New American Security.

Questions will remain about whether America is back to stay, she adds: Theres a fear that President Trump could return, or that another nationalist leader could be elected.

Its also not clear to what extent Bidens top geopolitical priority countering China  will be on the agenda.

What to watch: Biden will meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan while in Brussels.

The two have some uncomfortable history, and the June 14 meeting comes with deep wounds in the relationship over Russia, Syria and Erdogan's autocratic tilt.

The meeting is so politically sensitive in Turkey that senior officials are skipping public events so as to avoid questions about it, Menekse Tokyay reports for Axios from Ankara.

Bidens last stop is Geneva for his much-anticipated summit with Vladimir Putin.

Biden says his goal is to lay the groundwork for a "stable and predictable" relationship with Russia.

On the Russian side, there's a split between the Foreign Ministry and the security establishment, says Tatiana Stanovaya of Carnegie Moscow.

The former sees the summit as a last chance to put long-standing strategic issues on the table, while the latter wants a more pragmatic and realistic agenda that concludes with channels of communication in place to handle day-to-day challenges going forward.

Flashback: Putin arrived at his 2018 summit with Trump in Helsinki with high hopes and a series of proposals for the future of the relationship, Stanovaya says.

Now, "there are fears [in Moscow] that the U.S. side will use this summit to make a point, and after this, the dialogue will fizzle out."

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Here's an increasingly hot word in global warming circles: cement.

Driving the news: BP and Cemex, the Mexico-based multinational materials company, are jointly working on ways to cut emissions from cement transport and production.

A "memorandum of understanding" yesterday is just the latest of several recent industry developments with the same goal.

Why it matters: Cement is a major industrial source of carbon emissions, accounting for roughly 7% of the global total. And cutting emissions from heavy industries like cement will be very important for deeply decarbonizing the global economy.

What's next: BP and Cemex said they'll work on areas like low-carbon power, efficiency, carbon offsets, and CO2 capture, utilization and storage tech."Additionally, they intend to work together to develop urbanization solutions envisioned to decarbonize cities," the announcement states.

Catch up fast: Here's some more recent news on the cement front...
The U.S. Board on Geographic Names on Thursday unanimously approved several requests to remove "Negro" from the names of 16 sites in Texas, the Washington Post reports.

Why it matters: The federal board in 1991 denied a similar request after Texas lawmakers passed legislation to rename the sites after Black people who made notable contributions to the state, per the Texas Tribune.

What they're saying: "This day has been a long time coming, but I am proud to see this change finally happen," Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis said in a statement Thursday, per the Post.

"I hope that the [U.S. Board on Geographic Names] will build on the progress made today in Texas, and work with other groups across the country to ensure that all racially offensive names are erased from the public domain," he added.

The agency also approved the sites' replacement names, "all of which are largely Texas-related heroes," the Post notes.

The big picture: More than 1,000 towns, lakes, streams, creeks and mountain peaks across the U.S. continue to bear racist names, Axios' Russell Contreras writes.

Worth noting: The U.S. Board on Geographic Names works under the Interior Department and is in charge of maintaining "uniform geographic name usage throughout the Federal Government." Geographic names are then added on a registry, "which companies like Apple and Google rely on for their maps services," the Post writes.

Go deeper: Hundreds of places with racist names dot the U.S.
The White House and the Ukrainian government initially sent out conflicting official accounts of Monday's phone call between President Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Why it matters: Ukraine's government initially reported on its official website that Biden had "highlighted... the importance of providing the Ukrainian state with a NATO Membership Action Plan," which would put Ukraine on course for membership in the alliance. The White House denied Biden expressed support for such a step on the call.

"The Ukrainians mischaracterized the statement and corrected the record," a National Security Council spokesperson told Axios.

By Monday evening, the Ukrainian government's readout had been changed to remove the reference to NATO membership for Ukraine.

Flashback: Former President George W. Bush first backed the idea of giving Ukraine a Membership Action Plan  the process through which 11 eastern European countries have joined NATO  in 2008. Thirteen years later, the besieged state is no closer to NATO membership.

In the meantime, Russia has invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. The United States and Europe sent aid to Ukraine but made clear they would not use military force to defend Ukraine from Vladimir Putin.

Zelensky has made NATO integration a top priority, but progress on that front currently looks unlikely.

Of note: When asked, the White House declined to comment on whether Biden supports the idea of offering Ukraine a NATO Membership Action Plan this year.

Driving the news: During the call on Monday, Biden invited Zelensky to the White House in July.

Between the lines: That announcement came 18 hours after Axios published an interview with Zelensky in which the Ukrainian president criticized Biden's handling of Russia's Nord Stream 2 pipeline and urged Biden to meet with him "at any moment and at any spot on the planet" before seeing Putin.

Go deeper: Read the interview
Ghevondian and the three other deputy ministers decided to resign after Foreign Minister Ara Ayvazian stepped down on May 27 following an emergency session of the Armenian governments Security Council which discussed mounting tensions on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border.

At a May 31 farewell meeting the Armenian Foreign Ministry staff, Ayvazian signaled strong objections to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinians policies relating to national security.

Three of Ayvazians deputies -- Artak Apitonian, Avet Adonts and Gagik Ghalachian -- were formally relieved of their duties on Tuesday. By contrast, Ghevondians resignation was not accepted, meaning that he will run the Foreign Ministry for the time being.

The career diplomat attended on Thursday a weekly cabinet meeting in Yerevan. He told reporters afterwards that his resignation still stands.

Ghevondian also said that all four vice-ministers tendered their resignations for the same reason.

Because we said that generally the Foreign Ministry must have a greater involvement in foreign policy decision making, he said when asked reveal that reason. He declined to elaborate.

Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister Tigran Avinian, who chaired the cabinet meeting, said Ghevondians letter of resignation was not approved because the Foreign Ministry could not have been left without anyone performing the ministers duties.

Avinian refused to comment on Ayvazians resignation. Let Mr. Ayvazian tell whether or not he had disagreements, he said, adding that Pashinian has always consulted with Armenias top diplomats before making key foreign policy decisions.

In his farewell remarks, Ayvazian urged diplomats to avoid implementing policies jeopardizing Armenias sovereignty and national security.

The reason for my decision to resign was to make sure that there are never any suspicions that this ministry could take some steps or agree to some ideas, initiatives going against our statehood and national interests, the outgoing foreign minister said in a speech greeted with rapturous applause.

Ayvazian has since repeatedly refused to elaborate on his apparent concerns. Armenian prosecutors have instructed the National Security Service to examine his speech and see if it warrants a criminal investigation.

Speaking at the May 27 meeting of the Security Council, Pashinian called for the deployment of international observers along contested portions of the Armenian-Azerbaijani border. Critics denounced the proposal, accusing Pashinian of failing to defend Armenia against foreign aggression and plotting to cede Armenian territory to Baku. The prime minister dismissed those claims.
Sarkisian publicized on Wednesday the purported audio of Pashinians comments on the conflict amid a continuing war of words between the two men running in the June 20 general elections. He did not say who and when secretly recorded them.

Pashinian can be heard talking about his first conversation with the presidents of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan which took place just days after he became prime minister in May 2018. He said they urged him to accept a Karabakh peace plan drafted by Russia and approved by the United States and France, the two other co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group.

The plan represented the latest version of the so-called Madrid Principles of the conflicts resolution first drafted by the three mediating powers in 2007. It called, among other things, for the gradual liberation of virtually all seven districts occupied by Karabakh Armenian forces in the early 1990s.

Pashinian says in the audio that he rejected the plan because it would not immediately formalize Karabakhs secession from Azerbaijan and determine the territorys internationally recognized status. He says he was unconvinced by the Russian, Kazakh and Belarusian presidents arguments that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyevs realizes that that Baku will never regain control of Karabakh but cannot formally renounce Azerbaijani sovereignty over the territory lest he be branded a traitor at home.

Pashinian says he felt at that point that he must avoid such a settlement and, if necessary, play the fool or look a bit insane for that purpose.

Here is my conclusion: this guy is not crazy, this guy plays the fool, fools around, Sarkisian said during a campaign trip to Gegharkunik province. This is inadmissible for a countrys leader.

The ex-president, who lost power in April 2018 during the Pashinian-led velvet revolution, also charged that the prime ministers intransigent stance left Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks in deadlock and led to the autumn war won by Azerbaijan.

Pashinian dismissed Sarkisians claims and said the audio did not reveal anything new or damage his reelection chances as he campaigned in Lori province the following day. He said he has repeatedly stated that the peace proposals made by the U.S., Russian and French mediators favored Azerbaijan.

The international community, on which we pinned our hopes for many years, pressed us to return the territories in return for nothing, he told supporters rallying in the town of Spitak.

Pashinian made similar statements in the immediate aftermath of the six-week war stopped by a Russian-brokered agreement in November. He denied critics assertions that he could have prevented the disastrous war, which left at least 3,700 Armenian soldiers dead, by accepting the mediators peace proposals.

In January, Igor Popov, the Russian co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, accused Pashinian of misrepresenting those proposals. Popov specifically denied his claims that the mediators offered the Armenians nothing in return for their withdrawal from the districts around Karabakh.

The envoy argued that under the Minsk Group plan Karabakhs population would be able to determine the disputed territorys status in a future legally binding referendum. He also stressed that the plan tied Armenian withdrawal from two of the seven districts, Lachin and Kelbajar, to a deal on the status.
One driver who spoke during the meeting noted how they love the kids but cannot maintain a living without seeking assistance. And noted drivers are leaving Carroll to work in other counties. The contractors of Johnson Bus Service LLC said they have taken four deductions in PVA since becoming contractors, and noted the need for health benefits. And Irene Savage of Savage Transportation LLC said the changed PVA has her questioning how much longer she can stay in business.
Kocharian and senior members of the Hayastan alliance toured central Kotayk province on the fifth day of official campaigning for the snap elections in which they will be one of the ruling Civil Contract partys main challengers.

We are coming to restore security, Kocharian said at a campaign rally held in the town of Abovian. We are coming to strengthen our borders. We are coming to restore and deepen relations with allied states.

We are coming to ensure an economic upswing. We are coming to fight against unemployment, emigration and poverty, he said, adding that a new Armenian government led by him would attract large-scale investments and help to create tens of thousands of new jobs each year.

Kocharian has repeatedly touted his economic track record on the campaign trail, arguing that the Armenian economy grew at double digit rates during much of his 1998-2008 rule. He has also said that he would use his personal relations with Russian leaders and President Vladimir Putin in particular to boost Armenias national security seriously weakened by last years war in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The Russian Sputnik news agency reported earlier this week that Putin and Kocharian again spoke by phone when the latter visited Moscow late last month. A spokesman for the ex-president confirmed the lengthy phone call, saying that the two men discussed Russian-Armenian relations and the security situation in the region.

Russia has criticized criminal proceedings that were launched against Kocharian shortly after Armenias 2018 velvet revolution. Putin has repeatedly made a point of congratulating him on his birthday anniversaries and praising his legacy.

Kocharian campaigned in the Kotayk towns of Yeghvard and Nor Hachn earlier on Friday, holding indoor meetings with local residents. Some of them were able to ask him questions.

One voter wondered if Kocharians possible return to power would restore impunity which was enjoyed by government-linked and wealthy individuals under Armenias former rulers.

The 66-year-old ex-president acknowledged that various abuses committed by them were widespread and said he will not allow such practices if he succeeds in unseating Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian.

He also said: Have you ever heard about by any act of impudence by a member of my family or my other relatives? If my loved ones dont do that, who else would do that?

Kocharian went on to stress in this regard that he is not responsible for the policies of his successor and erstwhile ally Serzh Sarkisian, who was toppled in the 2018 uprising.

After 2008 I had no ties to the authorities, he said. From 2009 through 2018 I didnt even have contacts [with the Sarkisian administration] because there were many things with which I disagreed.

Sarkisian now leads another opposition alliance running in the elections.
Marukian insisted that this outcome would prevent post-election unrest and bode well for the formation of a government of national unity by all the forces to be represented in Armenias next parliament. Such a government should be headed by a politically neutral prime minister, he said.

We have made clear that we will not join any single force and help it come [to power] and destroy other forces, Marukian told journalists while campaigning in Yerevan together with his associates. We dont have such an agenda. Either we all will join the forces to get the country out of this situation or  there will be a second round of voting.

Under Armenian law, a runoff vote between the two top election contenders must be held if no party or bloc polls more than 50 percent of the vote or if up to three groups gaining control of at least 54 percent of the parliament seats between them fail to reach a power-sharing agreement.

In a clear reference to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinians Civil Contract party and radical opposition blocs challenging it, Marukian claimed that a landslide election winner would spark allegations of fraud street protests by rival groups.

The LHK is one of the two opposition parties represented in the outgoing Armenian parliament. Some observers believe that it will struggle to clear the 5 percent vote threshold for being represented in the National Assembly this time around.

During the ongoing election campaign, Marukians party is positioning itself as an alternative to both the current government and the blocs led by former Presidents Robert Kocharian and Serzh Sarkisian.

Marukian deplored on Friday bitter recriminations and insults traded by Pashinian and the two ex-presidents in recent days. How can the countrys incumbent and former leaders use such rhetoric? he said.

The more they insult each other the timelier our agenda becomes  The situation this country is in right now is such that hating each other and making plans to destroy each other is a luxury, added the LHK leader.

Unlike Civil Contract and Kocharians Hayastan bloc, the LHK has avoided holding campaign rallies so far. Instead, Marukian and his allies have spent the first five days of the campaign walking around Yerevan and other cities, handing out booklets to passersby and appealing to voters in residential neighborhoods.
Campaigning in his native Tavush province, Pashinian again said that the upcoming general elections must end the velvet revolution that brought him to power in 2018 and mark the beginning of a steel revolution involving tougher methods of governance.

What does the steel revolution mean? he said during a campaign rally. It means strengthening institutions of law enforcement, it means a dictatorship of the law, and we will go down that path with your mandate.

Pashinian similarly asked Armenians last week to not just reelect him and his Civil Contract party but also replace the velvet mandate with a steel mandate so that his administration can get tougher on the countrys former leaders and their loyalists challenging his rule.

The prime minister has repeatedly complained that he has been too tolerant of them since the 2018 regime change despite what he regularly describes as their corrupt practices and other abuses committed while in power.

Former Presidents Robert Kocharian and Serzh Sarkisian lead two of the main opposition groups running in the snap elections slated for June 20. They both have been facing what they see as politically motivated corruption charges in separate trials that appear to have stalled in recent months.

Dozens of other former government officials have also been charged with corruption during Pashinians rule. But virtually none of them is known to have been convicted by court.

Kocharian and especially Sarkisian have harshly criticized Pashinian during the ongoing parliamentary race, prompting furious reactions from the latter.

Pashinian pledged on Tuesday to purge the state bureaucracy and wage political vendettas against local government officials supporting the Armenian opposition if he wins the elections. Opposition representatives dismissed those statements, saying that they exposed his fears of losing power.

Pashinian again attacked the countrys former rulers during his campaign trip to Tavush.
One of them, Ruben Khlghatian, is a former mayor of the town of Armavir. He is 16th on the electoral list of the opposition Pativ Unem bloc co-headed by Sarkisian and former National Security Service Director Artur Vanetsian.

According to law-enforcement authorities, Khlghatian was arrested in the nearby village of Janfida late on Thursday while giving a local resident 9 million drams ($17,300) in cash which the Armenian police said was due to be used for vote buying.

The Office of the Prosecutor-General said on Friday that the two men tried to discard the money when police officers entered the villagers house. A police video showed stacks of 20,000-dram notes lying on the ground.

A spokesman for the prosecutors said they have asked Armenias Central Election Commission to allow investigators to indict Khlghatian.

The former mayor, who had run Armavir for 14 years, denied the accusations as politically motivated through his lawyer, Gayane Papoyan.

The criminal case has nothing to do with jurisprudence, Papoyan told RFE/RLs Armenian Service.

A senior Pativ Unem representative, Armen Ashotian, likewise described Khlghatians arrest as an act of political vendetta ordered by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian. He claimed that Pashinian is worried about Pativ Unems rising popularity ahead of the June 20 parliamentary elections.

Janfida residents interviewed by RFE/RLs Armenian Service said that nobody has offered to pay them for voting for the opposition bloc.

Nobody has made such an offer to me, said one man. There have been no such things in the village, insisted another.

Meanwhile, the Central Election Commission allowed the authorities to press charges against the other arrested suspect, Aramayis Aproyan. The latter is a resident of the town of Gavar running for the parliament on the ticket of Tsarukians Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK).

The Special Investigative Service claimed that Aproyan and another local BHK activist have handed out food parcels worth 7,000 drams ($13.5) each to Gavar residents pledging to vote for the opposition party.

It was not clear if the suspects will plead guilty to the accusations. The BHK did not issue statements on Aproyans arrest.

Under Armenian law, both giving and accepting vote bribes are criminal offenses punishable by up to seven years in prison.
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I cant believe the governor hasnt gotten us out of that state of emergency, Commissioner Stephen Wantz, R-District 1, said, pointing out Gov. Larry Hogans state of emergency has not yet been lifted in Maryland. Everything seems to be getting back to normal.
The Hunted: Police K-9s are meant to stop dangerous felons. Theyre more often unleashed on Black people accused of stealing
FILE - In this March 17, 2021 file photo, Gov. Kim Reynolds speaks during a news conference, in Johnston, a suburb of Des Moines, Iowa. Iowa's Democratic auditor accused the state's Republican governor of violating a 2018 state law that prohibits statewide elected officials from using public funds for self promotion. Auditor Rob Sand argued Thursday, June 3 that Reynolds broke the law by making ads promoting coronavirus public safety measures.
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The school year unlike any other has resulted in report cards unlike any other. Students are coming home with fewer As, Bs and Cs and a lot mo
If you can't read this email, please view it online BARD THE US-ISRAEL BINATIONAL AGRICULTURAL

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT FUND Call for Proposals

Call for proposals for the next round of funding in 2022. Our programs are open to research scientists, graduate students, and postdocs. We fund research and development in agriculture. The U.S. Israel Binational Agricultural R&D Fund BARD projects focus on increasing agricultural productivity, particularly in hot and arid climates, and emphasize plant and animal health, food quality and safety, and environmental issues. BARD also supports international workshops, and offers fellowships for postdoctoral research, senior research scientists and graduate students.

The primary rationale of BARD is bringing together American and Israeli scientists to address important agricultural challenges that concern both countries. Fostering this cooperation creates a synergy which generates results that would not be possible had the scientists worked independently. All you need to know We are happy to invite you to join the "Application Webinar", an introduction session on BARD (the U.S Israel Bi-national Agricultural Research and Development fund) which will take place online July 7th 9 AM EDT; 4 PM Israel time.



This session will cover: the fund's mission, the different funding opportunities, the research priorities, who can apply, the proposal evaluation process and timeline, and useful tips for writing a successful proposal. Research priority areas for the coming years: Improved efficiency of agricultural production, including sustainable development and engineering, enhancing nutritional value, efficient use of resources & agricultural waste, economic evaluation of policies, regulation, and labor; use of functional genomics & proteomics to protect and produce traits supporting increased crop yield and genetic optimization in animals, focus on heterosis opportunities & consequences. Plant, animal, and agricultural environment defense, including pest and host genetics, invasive species & emerging diseases, early stress detection and rapid point of care methods, development of safe and bio-secure biological, physical, & chemical control measures. Agricultural production challenges in increased marginal conditions, including climate change & abiotic stress factors such as drought, salinity, high temperatures, nutrient, and soil stress. Food quality, safety, and security, including improved assessment and detection methods, nutritive value and post-harvest treatment, reduction of food loss & waste, enhanced supply chain quality and technologies, functional foods, development of alternative quality protein sources including plants, fungi, algae, insects, & tissue. Soil & water, quality, and quantity, including efficient use of low-quality water (grey, black, saline), improved economic return for water in agriculture, crop response to soil & water quality & their constituents, impact of nutrients and agricultural chemicals on water quality. Sustainable Agri-Environmental Management, including sustainable ag-based energy systems for reduced energy costs, bioconversion technologies, agricultural feedstock, controlled environment agriculture, renewable resources and ecosystem services, circular bioeconomy, reduced agricultural waste. Agricultural Engineering/Precision Agriculture - Sensors, instrumentation, & control systems; robotics and artificial intelligence; mechanization for improving labor efficiency; biological engineering, biotechnology, nanotechnology. Funding Opportunities

BARD Research Grants

Funds projects conducted cooperatively by US and Israeli scientists. Covers all phases of agricultural R&D including strategic or applied research.

Award duration: 3 years. One year feasibility studies are also funded.

Maximum award: $310,000 for a 3-year grant.

Next submission date: September 13th 2021

Postdoctoral Fellowship Funds postdoctoral fellowships for citizens from one country (U.S. or Israel) to perform agricultural research with established scientists in the other country.

Award duration: 1-2 years

Next submission date: January 17th 2022

Senior Research Fellowship The program promotes joint agricultural research between established scientists from the U.S. and their Israeli hosts.

Award duration: 2-12 months

Next submission date: January 17th 2022

Graduate Student Fellowship The program enables Ph.D. students in one country (US or Israel) to travel to the other country to acquire new skills and techniques in their field of study.

Award duration: 2-6 months

Next submission date: January 17th 2022

Workshops Funds workshops whose purpose is to identify research needs and to promote increased contact between scientists throughout the world in areas related to the binational and agricultural interests of the U.S. and Israel.

Next submission date: January 17th 2022 Have a question? BARD is a competitive funding program that supports collaborative agricultural research in areas of mutual interest to the U.S. and Israel. BARD, Rishon LeZion 7505101, Israel. We sent out this message to existing BARD contacts. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, simply click on the following link to unsubscribe. .
The N.C. Ribs on Wheels will also be returning to Carroll County this weekend. And it will be one of their first events since late 2019, food truck owner Angus Thompson said. It felt too risky for him to continue to operate the truck during the pandemic. Thompson feared he or his wife may contract COVID-19.
'Barnacle Bill' Seal Makes a Splash Around Oregon Coast for Two Weeks

Published 06/06/21 at 5:30 PM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff





(Cannon Beach, Oregon)  It's molting season again on the Oregon coast for elephant seals, and that means humans will witness a rather painful process on occasion as young seals come up out of the water with patchy fur and skin that is clearly irritated. (All photos courtesy Seaside Aquarium)

However, that doesn't mean that some of them can't wind up entertaining or even endearing. With shades of the Joe the Sea Lion from Lincoln City history (where a sea lion briefly became a local citizen back in the 30s), one elephant seal on the north Oregon coast had a few public adventures and even got the name Barnacle Bill.

Barnacle Bill (as he was dubbed by someone) created a stir starting in mid May, according to the Seaside Aquarium's Tiffany Boothe. Especially over the Memorial Day weekend, after he plopped himself near busy Haystack in Cannon Beach he became a bit of a rock star  becoming quite popular. Boothe said he filled onlookers with concern for his well-being.

According to Boothe, Barnacle Bill first showed up on Falcon Cove beach on May 17, a small, semi-circular beach immediately south of Arch Cape.

While he was lively, he did not look so good, Boothe said. He was going through his annual molt which is a process where he sheds his old coat of fur and grows a new one. During this process large hunks of skin will often come off along with the old fur. This can create large sores and open wounds, but it is a natural process. He also had patches of pelagic gooseneck barnacles growing on his back and flippers, hence his new name Barnacle Bill.' 

Saltwater irritates the wounds created by molting, so elephant seals haul out of the sea to get some much-needed rest. It also helps the regulate their body temperature. This is exactly what Mr. Bill was doing, Boothe said.

After Falcon Cove, he inched his way northward to Arch Cape on May 20, and then by May 23 he was headed down to Rockaway Beach, hanging out at the more secluded Nedonna Beach.

Then, was he looking for more attention? Boothe mused about that, saying he arrived at Cannon Beach for the big Memorial Day weekend, camping out in front of Haystack Rock.

Staff from the Haystack Rock Awareness Program did a wonderful job watching over him, making sure people and dogs did not disturb his peace, Boothe said. They also educated people about him, alleviating fears that he was dying and needed help.

After that, Barnacle Bill wandered southward again, discovering Manzanita.

By this time some of his open sores from the molting process had started to heal and was beginning to look more like a normal' seal again, Boothe said.

Finally, on June 1 Bill left the Oregon coast beaches for good.

Over the two weeks that he visited we received a lot of calls from concerned citizens and with the help of State Parks and the Haystack Rock Awareness Program we were able to educate people about the natural process of molting and help give him the space and rest he needed to heal and get better, Boothe said. We are so thankful for all our partners and this wonderful community.

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4th of July Fireworks Return to Central Oregon Coast's Lincoln City

Published 06/03/21 at 5:35 PM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff

(Lincoln City, Oregon)  After getting paused last year due to COVID, Lincoln City's Fourth of July fireworks have officially returned. It's not just the big fireworks at Taft coming back but also the show over Devil's Lake on July 3. It's a double cannon of pyrotechnics for the central Oregon coast town. (Photo courtesy Jordan May)

2021 will mark the 66th year since the first fireworks at Taft, which were put on in 1955 by the Taft and DeLake Fire Department. That monster of a display has been going uninterrupted  except for 2020 amid COVID concerns.

So far, Lincoln City has been the only Oregon coast town resuming its fireworks. Florence has definitely put off the event but may hold it later in the summer.

We are happy to see a long-standing Lincoln City tradition return after a year's hiatus. said Lila Bradley, City Manager. It's a nice way celebrate as we begin to return to normal with an event that takes advantage of our seven miles of beach and fresh ocean air.

In Lincoln City, you're able to catch two fireworks shows two days in a row. The Devil's Lake fireworks happen on July 3, with a barge set up in the middle of the water and the massive mortars fired off from there  all sponsored by the Devil's Lake Neighborhood Association.

The Lincoln City Visitors Bureau suggests watching from East Devil's Lake State Park  you can't really see them from Devil's Lake State Recreation Area itself as there's a tree-covered campground there. Regatte Park is also excellent. If you have a boat, Devil's Lake will be prime viewing from the water.

The main show is at Siletz Bay, with the rockets fired off from the Salishan Spit across the bay on July 4. There, crowds gather to watch the colorful spectacle, made even more dramatic by the trails and explosions reflected in the waters of the bay. Up and down all of Lincoln City beaches and much of its inland blocks are exceptional places to watch.

See Hotels in Lincoln City for Fourth of July Availability

While the big fireworks displays may be back on, Oregon State Parks and Recreation Department (OPRD) and the City of Lincoln City remind the public that personal fireworks use on the beaches of the entire Oregon coast is not allowed. This year, extra police and other personnel will be patrolling the beaches.

One of the major concerns this year is the added potential for forest fires, which hit the central Oregon coast especially hard last year.

I'm pleased that our residents and guests will be able to have a safe and spectacular 4th of July weekend. said Susan Wahlke, Mayor of Lincoln City.

4th of July Fireworks over Siletz Bay is one of many safe summer events in Lincoln City. See https://www.oregoncoast.org/events/ for more events and updates. MORE PHOTOS BELOW

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Oregon Coast Aquarium Dives Deep with Fossil Exhibit Starting Soon

Published 06/03/21 at 7:20 PM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection staff





(Newport, Oregon)  Oregon Coast Aquarium pulls some major time travel this summer, with an exhibit opening June 11 that features everyones favorite ancient entities: the dinosaurs and other ancient beasts. Cruisin the Fossil Coastline! takes everyone down a journey through the planets geological past, bringing to life the varied species that existed millions of years ago  along with the wild environments they lived in. (Above: a life-sized model of a pachyrhinosaurus)

The entire west coast is featured in Cruisin' the Fossil Coastline!, from California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia to Alaska. The emphasis will be on the coastal regions of the states. Fossils of the Oregon coast are also spotlighted, though actual dinosaurs found here are extremely rare  with a handful on the south coast.

The entire exhibit features the artwork of Alaska artist Ray Troll, and the exhibit is based on the book of the same name written by Troll and Dr. Kirk Johnson, Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Troll and Johnson logged more than 10,000 miles and 250 days traveling the North American coast in search of fossils and the stories they tell. They visited museums, dove into research collections, collaborated with fellow scientists and artists, and visited active dig sites via automobile, airplane and boat.

The all-ages exhibition features life-size sculptures, models, and images of prehistoric creatures and authentic fossils. The exhibit also features paintings, hand-drawn maps, and light and audio installations by Troll. Footage highlighting Troll's fossil excursions can be viewed in the Oregon Coast Aquarium's theater.

The Oregon-focused portion of the exhibit features fossils found in both Lincoln County and across the state. Oregon's geologic record, extending back approximately 400 million years ago to the Devonian period, before which time the state's landmass was likely submerged under water. The state's earliest fossil record includes plants, corals, and conodonts. Oregon was covered by seaways and volcanic islands during the Mesozoic era, and fossils from this period include marine plants, invertebrates, ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs, and traces such as invertebrate burrows. During the Cenozoic era, Oregon's climate gradually cooled and eventually yielded the environments now found in the state. This era's fossils include marine and terrestrial plants, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, turtles, birds, mammals, and traces such as eggs and animal tracks.

Compare your shoe size with that of a gastronis, a massive flightless bird that roamed the coastline ages ago. Examine the teeth of a desmostylia, an extinct order of herbivorous aquatic mammals. See eye-to-eye with a life-size model of pachyrhinosaurus, a relative of the triceratops. Cruisin' the Fossil Coastline is an immersive experience, bound to fill all viewers with awe toward the world that once was.

Tickets can be purchased on-site or in advance via aquarium.org. 541-867-3474.

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Lines of communication have reopened between ExxonMobil and United Steelworkers Union representatives.

But the two still dont have an agreement to end the lockout of around 650 workers despite meeting for negotiations on Thursday for the first time in almost a month.

The meeting resumed talks that ended unsuccessfully on May 12 but found they still didnt have room to meet in the middle for a new contract or to end the lockout, according to both parties.

The groups are preparing for another meeting, which is set for next Thursday, but sources from both sides say there might not be anything new to talk about.

ExxonMobil Beaumont spokesperson Nakisha Burns in an email told the Enterprise that no new proposals were discussed at this weeks Thursday meeting, and the company still offered its previously-proposed six-year contract, which the company detailed in a May informational release.

Related: ExxonMobil reveals goals for contract negotiation

The company continues to meet and bargain in good faith with the Union, Burns wrote. The companys current offer remains available at this time.

The USW repeatedly has said that the companys proposal is a non-starter because of changes the union calls unacceptable.

The union has taken particular exception to a provision in the companys proposal that would change seniority procedures for 120 key positions. It says this change would decrease safety, disrupt the seniority system and reduce job security.

The company has said that the changes are needed to modernize Beaumonts refinery and packaging and lubricant facility to match policies already in place at other sites.

With both sides sticking to the same positions they started in six months ago, representatives with the union believe the lockout could continue to drag on.

Richard Hoot Landry, USW District 13 staff representative, said the companys negotiators were digging in their heels and seemed confident with the way the situation was playing out, despite the impact on workers and their families.

Related: Climate activists join ExxonMobil picket

They claimed that they have flexibility in their proposals to the union, but 650 people out of work doesnt compel them to move, he told the Enterprise. The most disappointing part of the meeting for us was the way they acted when our bargaining chair made the point that there are families going without during this.

Past efforts to avoid a work stoppage failed leading up to the lockout.

The USW made an offer that was intended to extend the negotiation process by one year so workers could avoid a work stoppage. But that offer was rejected on April 23.

Company representatives said the offer didnt meet the standards of stability the company has come to demand from its contracts, forcing it to insist the USW bring a vote on its offer for a six-year contract.

Workers that qualify have started receiving unemployment benefits and food pantries have been established by the USWs international and other local unions supporting the cause.

An intake center for locked-out workers to submit their needs for aid from the internationals strike and defense fund has also been established.

jacob.dick@beaumontenterprise.com

Twitter.com/jd_journalism
We've successfully made it through a tough year, and this summer we're celebrating  outside, of course.

But summer in Houston means more heat and more humidity  so how does one prepare for Houston's (arguably) most intense season?

WHERE TO DINE: Houston restaurants make Yelp's 'Top 100 Places to Eat in Texas'

While we're in our spring cleaning phases with summer around the corner, Houston stylists have some tips for looking your best.

1. Frankie Bleau, Digital Creator & Luxury Stylist

Style pro tip: For the men, Bleau recommends shedding the winter layers.

"Accessorize! Layer those chains, stack those rings, experiment with some bracelets and watches, play with different prints on shorts," Bleau explains.

Above all else, Bleau says that the guys should steer clear of the "too small and too tight" white tee shirts. "My homegirls be talking about yall,"he jokes.

For the ladies, the theme this summer is to simply have fun.

"The details are what matters in these seasons. The jewelry, the nail and toe colors/designs, hairstyles, make-up it all counts! Summer puts everything on display so lets give the cameras something to see. Oversized T-shirt dresses and funky sneakers, monochromatic two-piece sets, cut-out one-piece dresses, and fitted jumpsuits  they do wonders for any body type," Bleau says.

2. Cash McIntosh, Creative & Fashion Designer

Style pro tip: The stylist and creative tells Chron to keep it fly this summer.

"Fellas, it's imperative we look cool, but also stay cool this summer. Pieces like silk bowling tops, bucket hats and sunglasses with polarized lenses are the way to go this summer," McIntosh says. "Silk bowling shirts will give your fit the luxurious pop you need to stand out, but also keep you cool."

He also mentions that "Shorts that go above the knee and Suicoke slides are also ways to keep it fresh."

McIntosh recommends wearing bright colors "because they reflect light, as opposed to dark colors that absorb heat."

3. Devon Harvey, Fashion Influencer

Syle pro tip: Harvey says for summer in Houston, don't overthink it  simplicity is key.

"Dont put too much thought into dressing up, as it gets hot as hell in Houston," Harvey jokes. "The more simple, the better."

HOUSTON STREETWEAR: Here are 7 Houston-based brands bringing streetwear culture back

4. Lauren Ashley Ward, Wardrobe Curator & E-Commerce Model

Style pro tip: Always stepping out of the house snatched, Ward offers her secret weapon to keeping your face in place in Houston's humidity.

"Houston is about to experience one of the hottest summers yet! Some days Im on set shooting for nine hours outside, so naturally, you can imagine the discomfort of modeling in 100-degree index weather with a full glam face," Ward explains. "Ive found a lifesaver, BLOTTING PAPER. Blotting paper is a magic little sheet of paper that absorbs oil on your face but leaves the makeup! Every fly fashionista understands the importance of being fresh! This beauty hack is a must-have in your clutch this summer."

5. Tai Bowen, Fashion Designer, Owner of White Flag Clothing

Style pro tip: One of Houston's hottest moms is keeping it comfy and feminine for the summer months. Bowen says less is always more, especially in Houston weather. For the ladies, Bowen recommends "light chiffon fabric" this summer.
Saturday will rise with patchy fog, and will become mostly sunny as it reaches 80 degrees. Sunday may start a bit sunnier, with chances of thunderstorms in the night. The temperature will go up on Monday, hitting 82, with a slim chance of showers. For those longing for sunlight, Tuesdays forecast is mostly sunny, with no precipitation.
In an effort to foster solidarity between climate activists and refinery workers, marchers with the Sunrise Movement made a pit stop Wednesday on their 400-mile trek across the Gulf Coast to support ExxonMobil employees still locked out from a facility in Beaumont.

More than a dozen Sunrise members arrived in the late afternoon at the United Steelworkers Union line off of Burt Street where workers were continuing the picket that started on May 1 when 650 workers were locked out.

Most of the group are in their late teens and 20s. A few even had to skip their last few weeks of school to make the long journey by foot. They still have around 11 marching days left before they make their final stop in Houston.

But group organizers said it was worth it. They wanted their journey to do more than make a statement. They wanted it to make a difference by stopping in Gulf communities like Lake Charles to assist with recovery efforts from May flood events.

Nathan May, a college student from the Dallas area, said the stop in Beaumont also was a chance to fight the narrative he believes energy companies use to convince workers that climate activists are coming for their jobs.

Were fighting for them to be safe and represented, because we believe that all people should have a right to safe work conditions, good jobs and livable futures, he said. We are on their side, and its about uniting to make sure we get fair treatment from the people at the top.

Members of the political action organization started their march on May 10 in New Orleans. They are continuing through Beaumont to Houston to call on President Joe Biden and the U.S. Congress to establish a more robust Civilian Climate Corps as part of the American Jobs Plan.

They say the CCC would replicate Depression-era efforts to stimulate the economy, transition to a carbon-free energy system and help the most vulnerable parts of the country recover from the impacts of climate change that are already threatening communities like those on the Gulf Coast.

Related: Watch: ExxonMobil pickets corporate headquarters

Bidens version of a climate-based CCC outlined in the $2 trillion proposed infrastructure plan would provide $10 billion for its creation and establish around 300,000 jobs, but groups like the Sunrise Movement and Evergreen Action have called for at least 1.5 million positions.

While on the picket line, activists talked with locked out workers that have been maintaining their watch in shifts at the companys gates for more than a month.

One of those workers, Brad Wiegand, has been making the rounds in front of the gates at least two times a week, joined by his wife.

Hes a third-generation worker in the refining industry and remembered hearing stories about lockouts and strikes from his grandfather. But he said living through one is a different experience.

Related: EXCLUSIVE: USW alleges ExxonMobil broke labor laws before lockout

Its a good way to make a living, but you cant let a big company just run with anything they want to do, he said. We have to make sure these jobs stay in our area.

Glimpses of the conflicts over a new six-year contract have centered around concerns from the USW about company-proposed changes certain cross-training policies and a plan to change the placement of key operator positions. The union said these changes would endanger worker safety and the local seniority system.

The company has said it is only trying to modernize policies at the Beaumont refinery and lubricant facility to match contracts already in place at facilities in Baytown and Baton Rouge.

The unions bargaining committee and the company havent met since May 12, but sources from both sides told the Enterprise that a meeting could be held on Thursday morning.

jacob.dick@beaumontenterprise.com

twitter.com/jd_journalism
WASHINGTON (AP)  Republicans in Congress are alarmed by the leak of confidential IRS data to the investigative news organization ProPublica, enabling it to reveal that famous billionaires including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg paid little in U.S. income tax at times. A senior IRS official said Thursday that a federal criminal investigation into the leak has been requested.

Taking a detour from the debate over President Joe Bidens tax overhaul plan, the GOP lawmakers are demanding to know how the private tax data was disclosed and they are pressing the Treasury Department and the IRS to pursue anyone who violated the law.

Taxpayers must have the utmost confidence in federal institutions that house their personal and confidential information, a group of Republican senators said in letters demanding an investigation. Regrettably, it appears personnel with access to Americans personal and confidential information are misusing protected information for political reasons. Treasury and the IRS must hold accountable any and all individuals who broke federal law by inappropriately sharing the confidential tax information and tax returns of multiple Americans.

Douglas O'Donnell, a deputy IRS commissioner, said at a hearing by a House panel that the Treasury Department, which oversees the IRS, has referred the matter for investigation to the FBI and the U.S. attorney's office in the District of Columbia.

Both getting access to and disclosing the confidential tax data are problems, O'Donnell said. We too want to know what happened, urgently."

The law provides for potential criminal penalties for federal employees or other individuals who leak tax information.

The ProPublica report published Tuesday on the wealthiest people in America was based on IRS data  long held as sacrosanct  delivered by an anonymous source.

For Democrats, the revelations affirmed their long-standing accusations that the IRS gives big corporations and wealthy individuals a free pass while hounding lower-income people. Democrats held up the new report as a prime exhibit in the national dialogue over the vast and widening inequality between the wealthiest and everyone else.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said in a tweet: Our tax system is rigged for billionaires who dont make their fortunes through income, like working families do. The evidence is abundantly clear: it is time for a #WealthTax in America to make the ultra-rich finally pay their fair share.

The report showed that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid no income tax in 2007 and 2011. Tesla founder Elon Musks income tax bill was zero in 2018. Financier George Soros went three straight years without paying federal income tax. Overall, the richest 25 Americans pay less in tax  an average of 15.8% of adjusted gross income  than many ordinary workers do, once taxes for Social Security and Medicare are included, ProPublica found.

They all used perfectly legal tax strategies, which is why the ProPublica report stoked the debate over the loopholes, shelters and offshore havens available to the wealthy and giant corporations courtesy of the federal tax code.

The report intruded on the debate over Bidens sweeping tax plan, which must be approved by Congress. Seeking revenue to finance his multitrillion-dollar plan to boost infrastructure, families, education and job training, Biden is targeting the wealthy for higher taxes. He wants to raise the top tax rate to 39.6% for people earning $400,000 a year or more in taxable income, estimated to be fewer than 2% of U.S. households. The top tax rate that workers pay on salaries and wages now is 37%.

Biden proposes to nearly double the tax rate that high-earning Americans pay on profits from stocks and other investments. Inherited capital gains would no longer be tax-free. The plan also would raise taxes on corporations, affecting wealthy investors who own corporate stocks.

As they raise the alarm on privacy of tax data, Republicans also are denouncing what they see as a related intrusion: a new financial reporting proposal that is nestled in Biden's tax plan. Aimed at helping the IRS collect taxes, it would call for U.S. banks to report to the agency most flows into and out of personal and business accounts, including bank loans and investment accounts. Banks arent wild about it, either.

The aim is to give the IRS a better view of underreported income by individuals and businesses, according to the plan architects. Wealthier taxpayers earnings from investments and business activities would be reported to the IRS the way wages and salaries are.

Republican lawmakers see it as an assault on taxpayers privacy.

The requirement would bring a drastic increase in the amount of private, sensitive information reported to the IRS by financial institutions about deposits or withdrawals made by any individual or business in savings, checking, or other accounts of as little as $600, the senior Republicans in tax policy, Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho and Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, told IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig in a letter. Taxpayers who are already concerned about having their local banks turned into monitoring and reporting agents of the IRS now must also worry about whether data collected and reported to the agency are secure.

An array of trade groups representing big and small banks and credit unions have objected to the proposal, saying their members already provide significant data to the IRS and other regulators. The proposal would impose cost and complexity that are not justified by the potential, and highly uncertain, benefits, the groups said in a recent statement to a Senate panel.

__

Follow Marcy Gordon on Twitter at https://twitter.com/mgordonap
NEW YORK (AP)  Stories of race, racism and colonialism in the U.S. swept the Pulitzer Prizes for the arts, from Louise Erdrich's novel The Night Watchman to a Malcolm X biography co-written by the late Les Payne to Katori Hall's play The Hot Wing King.

The awards were announced Friday during a remote ceremony that honored the best work in journalism and the arts in 2020, a year defined in part by the police killing of George Floyd and the protests and reckoning which followed. The news also comes amid an intensifying debate over race and education, with legislators in Texas and elsewhere seeking to restrict the teaching of racial injustice.

What the Pulitzers are awarding this year seems so timely, Tamara Payne, Les Payne's daughter and the principal researcher for his book, told The Associated Press. "All of these voices are so important and always have been important."

Marcia Chatelain, whose Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America won for history, said that she felt honored to be among a group of writers who have tried to find a way to make clear that writing about race is fundamental to understanding what we need as a society.

Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, has drawn upon her background and blended the traditions of oral and written storytelling for such acclaimed novels as The Round House and The Plague of Doves. She based The Night Watchman on the life of her maternal grandfather, a night watchman whose reservation in rural North Dakota was threatened in the 1950s by congressional legislation.

This story belongs to him and to the Turtle Mountain people. It is very moving, this is very moving recognition," said Erdrich, who runs an independent bookstore in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed in May 2020. She called the Pulitzer a welcome contrast to the news of the past year.

I love this city and it hurts to know how deep the racism goes. It's something indigenous people also know about well. It's been a painful time.

Pulitzer judges called Erdrich's novel a majestic, polyphonic novel about a communitys efforts to halt the proposed displacement and elimination of several Native American tribes in the 1950s, rendered with dexterity and imagination.

It was the first Pulitzer for Erdrich, who turned 67 this week and has been a published author for more than 40 years. Her previous honors include a National Book Award for The Round House and the National Book Critics Circle prize for LaRose.

The Pulitzer for The Dead Are Arising continues the posthumous acclaim for Les Payne, an award-winning Newsday journalist who died in 2018. He began working on the Malcolm X book in 1990 and compiled more than 100 hours of interviews, including with family members of the late Black activist, before he died. Tamara Payne helped complete The Dead Are Arising, which has been praised highly by critics and last fall won a National Book Award.

I do wish he were here, to receive the accolades, Tamara Payne said of her father.

The Paynes' collaboration is also the second Malcolm X biography to win a Pulitzer for an author who didnt live to see his book released. Manning Marable, whose Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention won for history in 2012, died shortly before publication.

Natalie Diazs Postcolonial Love Poem, a work of pain and of ecstasy her publisher describes as a call toward goodness, even as it recognizes the violence of our time, was the poetry winner and David Zucchinos Wilmingtons Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy was cited for general nonfiction.

Tania Leon's composition Stride won for music. The judges commended it for being a musical journey full of surprise, with powerful brass and rhythmic motifs that incorporate Black music traditions from the U.S. and the Caribbean into a Western orchestral fabric.

The Hot Wing King by Katori Hall, a play set around a hot wing cooking competition, won the prize for drama during a theater season that saw most venues largely shuttered.

The drama award, which includes a $15,000 prize, is for a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life.

The Pulitzer board hailed The Hot Wing King as a funny, deeply felt consideration of Black masculinity and how it is perceived, filtered through the experiences of a loving gay couple and their extended family as they prepare for a culinary competition.

Finalists included Circle Jerk by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley, and Stew by Zora Howard.

With most theaters closed during the pandemic, the Pulitzer Prize Board altered the requirements for this years drama award, allowing postponed or cancelled works, as well as plays produced and performed in places other than theaters, including online, outside or in site-specific venues during calendar 2020. The Hot Wing King opened off-Broadway just days before the citys theaters were closed.

Hall is the author of the Olivier Award-winning The Mountaintop and is a Tony Award-nominated co- playwright of Broadways Tina  The Tina Turner Musical.

Previous playwrights honored include August Wilson, Edward Albee, Eugene ONeill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Recent winners include Annie Bakers The Flick, Ayad Akhtars Disgraced, Stephen Adly Guirgiss Between Riverside and Crazy, and Lin-Manuel Mirandas Hamilton.
WICHITA FALLS, Texas (AP)  A Texas man pleaded guilty Wednesday to plotting to blow up an Amazon data center in Virginia, federal prosecutors said.

Seth Aaron Pendley, 28, of Wichita Falls, entered his plea before a federal magistrate judge in Wichita Falls, according to a statement from acting U.S. Attorney Prerak Shah of the Northern District of Texas.

According to his plea documents, Pendley admitted that he planned to blow up the servers at the Amazon data center in Ashburn, Virginia, and revealed the plan last February on the Signal encrypted messaging app. He told a source who responded to his message that he hoped the attack would kill off 70% of the internet.

The source offered to help Pendley obtain C4 plastic explosives, then introduced him in March to an undercover FBI agent posing as a supplier of explosives. In recorded conversations, Pendley told the agent that he wanted to blow up Amazon web servers that he believed served the FBI, CIA and other federal agencies. Pendley told the agent the he hoped it would trigger a backlash from the oligarchy that would convince Americans to act against a dictatorship.

Pendley also told the agent that he had been present at the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and that although he did not enter the building, he came prepared with a sawed-off assault-style rifle that he left in his car.

On April 8, Pendley met the agent to pick up what turned out to be a decoy bomb that the agent also told him how to arm and detonate. When he loaded the decoy into his car, Pendley was arrested. A search of his home revealed the sawed-off AR-15 rifle, a pistol painted to look like a toy gun, masks, wigs, and notes and flashcards related to the planned Amazon attack.

Pendley faces a prison sentence of five to 20 years when he is sentenced Oct. 1.
There are lots of surprises that come with the responsibility of being a homeowner  and some surprises are more adorable than others.

One local homeowner, Scott Walters, was somewhat surprised to see a pack of young armadillos tearing up his backyard earlier this month, though he wasnt all too bothered.

I like to share my yard with the local critters, Walters wrote on NextDoor, alerting his neighbors in the Deerfield neighborhood of the Armadillo Party in his backyard. They were here first after all.

READ MORE: Invasive pink snail eggs are popping up on San Antonio's River Walk

Walters tells MySA.com that he put two and two together, realizing that the young armadillos were extremely local (they are Texas's state small mammal as of 1995, after all). His backyard, which he says is long and deep, shares a fence with five of his neighbors, one of which recently had a litter of four armadillos born underneath their deck. Walters says a few of his other neighbors have also seen the armadillos, but he got close enough to catch the critters in the act.

They were just digging away to their little hearts content, Walters jokes.

While he says another neighbor with a pristine yard very quickly shooed away the mammals, Walters has taken a different approach to the armadillo invasion.

I sort of let nature take its course. I could cover up the holes as they dig them, but once it rains it kind of fills the hole in a little bit, Walters tells MySA.com. My backyard is not nicely manicured, so Im not too worried about it.

The nature aspect of the neighborhood is part of the reason why Walters and his wife Laurie bought the home about 2 years ago. With a backyard with plenty of room for extra guests, Walters says hes made a bit of a game out of the armadillo sightings with his 8-year-old daughter, Abigail.

We see them usually every day, Walters explains. He says this allows him to ask Abigail how many armadillos shes seen and where in the yard each day.

READ MORE: The internet is amazed by S.A. Zoo's hippo Timothy and his aquatic zoomies

Theyre still coming around. Theyre still doing well, he clarifies. When its one by himself or herself, they seem to be a little skittish, but when theyre all together not so much.

Aside from the roll of armadillos, which Walters says are close to full grown now due to eating well, the family has seen foxes, opossums, and even hawks on occasion. They have also seen a pair of great horned owls, which Walters jokes were like a husband and wife that hooted at each other very loudly.

Though other locals may not be as enthusiastic about animals and nature as he is, Walters feels it is important to keep their distance from the armadillos should they encounter some in their own neighborhood.

The first time I saw the armadillos, I walked up to them and I petted them, Walters admits, saying the critters were younger and very docile. Theyre not terribly cuddly.

Though he couldnt help himself, Walters advises other locals from making that same mistake.

Theyre cute and ugly at the same time, I think more cute than ugly, Walters says. They do carry leprosy and Hansons disease. If you do come into contact with one, you may want to wash your hands afterward.

You heard it here first from the armadillo whisperer, San Antonio.
A Lufkin, Texas bakery just wanted to show support to their "LGBTQ friends," but what they initially received were hate messages and order cancelations after posting heart-shaped rainbow cookies on the company's Facebook page in honor of Pride Month.

"More LOVE. Less hate. Happy Pride to all our LGBTQ friends! All lovers of cookies and happiness are welcome here," Confections Bakery posted on June 2.

PRIDE MONTH: Here's how Houston is celebrating Pride this June

It didn't take long for the haters to roll in, and just a day later, the bakery was updating their Facebook page with a status that was anything but heartwarming.

"Today has been hard. Really hard. We lost a significant amount of followers because of a rainbow heart cookie we posted," the bakery wrote in a statement. "My heart is heavy. Honestly I never thought a post that literally said more love less hate would result in this kind of backlash to a very small business that is struggling to stay afloat and spread a little cheer through baked goods. So. If you love our cookies we will have an over abundance of them tomorrow. Hopefully tomorrow will be better <3."

Of course, social media users weren't letting the bakery tank without at least giving them a fair chance. Soon, the bakery was "overwhelmed" by "such an amazing outpouring of support."

OPINION: Texas valedictorian stood up for women everywhere with impromptu commencement speech

Confections Bakery received so much business staff struggled to keep up, eventually selling out of baked goods and closing early to prepare for the following day. (We love to see it.)

Mark Cuban's brother Brian even reached out, offering to buy cookies to donate to LGBTQ charities and other nonprofits, as reported by Reagan Roy with CBS affiliate KYTX.

Screengrab courtesy of Confections Bakery

Looks like love still wins, after all.
Col. Timothy Druell, APGs garrison commander, said there are several jobs within his ambit that cannot be done virtually. The garrison is responsible for the infrastructural and managerial needs of the base  things like childcare, facilities maintenance and real estate acquisition. Within his silo, the pandemic did not change as much because APG and its staff could not afford to let it.
Anti-junta protesters burn the flag of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Mandalay, Myanmar, June 5, 2021.

The U.N. human rights chief urged ASEAN on Friday to intensify efforts to stop violence in post-coup Myanmar, days after officials from the regional bloc met with the Burmese junta chief but failed to extract a promise to end bloodshed.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations meanwhile has yet to name an envoy to Myanmar, an Indonesian foreign ministry spokesman said Friday, seven weeks after ASEAN member-states agreed to appoint and send an emissary to meet with all Burmese stakeholders.

The High Commissioner encouraged the intensification of regional diplomacy, including by ASEAN and other influential States, to insist on the immediate cessation of violence and ongoing human rights violations, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a statement.

Dialogue is urgently needed with the National Unity Government and civil society stakeholders, the statement said, referring to Myanmars shadow civilian government.

Michelle Bachelet, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, made the appeal to ASEAN while demanding that a further escalation of violence in the Southeast Asian country must be halted to prevent even greater loss of life.

State security forces have continued to use heavy weaponry, including airstrikes, against armed groups and against civilians and civilian objects, including Christian churches," she said.

There appear to be no efforts towards de-escalation but rather a build-up of troops in key areas, contrary to the commitments the military made to ASEAN to cease the violence."

ASEAN did not invite any NUG representatives or civil society members to a special summit on Myanmar held in Jakarta in late April, but did invite junta chief Min Aung Hlaing.

The two ASEAN officials who visited Myanmar on June 4-5 met with Min Aung Hlaing but not with NUG representatives. They also referred to the senior general who overthrew the elected government by a title he assumed for himself  Chairman of the State Administrative Council  the official name for the Burmese junta.

That reference to this title was contained in a statement issued by ASEAN on June 5, but the entire statement was removed from the blocs official website three days later. However, BenarNews made a copy of the statements text.

The officials who visited Myanmar were from ASEAN chair Brunei. Officials at the ASEAN secretariat in Jakarta did not respond to multiple inquiries from BenarNews about why the statement was taken offline. Since the visit to Myanmar, Bruneian government officials have also not issued any statements.

The bloc likely removed the statement because of this most fatal blunder, as a Jakarta Post editorial described it on Thursday.

It was an open recognition of the junta, while ASEAN only acknowledges Gen. Hlaing as the commander in chief of Myanmars military, the editorial noted.

In addition, ASEAN had agreed at the April 24 special summit that it would name an envoy to send to Myanmar, and because that envoy has not been named, some observers wondered in what capacity the Bruneian officials visited Naypyidaw.

Rene Pattiradjawane, an associate fellow with The Habibie Center, a Jakarta think-tank, believes Brunei wants a bigger role in the decision on an envoy, he said on Twitter.

At their meeting with Min Aung Hlaing, the two officials submitted to him names of candidates the bloc could appoint as a special envoy. ASEAN operates by consensus so this was not entirely surprising.

But Abdul Kadir Jailani, director general for Asia-Pacific and Africa at the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, made clear that the decision on who is named ASEAN envoy to Myanmar will be made by the foreign ministers of all member states.

In order to deliver the mandate given by the ASEAN Leaders Meeting, the appointment of Special Envoy to Myanmar shall come with a clear policy guidance from the ASEAN Foreign Ministers, Jailani tweeted on Thursday.

This suggests Indonesia was none too pleased with what transpired at the ASEAN officials meeting in Myanmar.

As it is, a day after that meeting, ASEAN member-states Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore expressed their frustration at the delay in the blocs naming of an envoy, amid reports of differences between member states on the issue and even on how to deal with Myanmar.

In addition, some of ASEANs member-states focus on the blocs policy of non-interference when it suits them politically, said Bridget Welsh, a political scientist with Nottingham University in Malaysia.

ASEAN has tried to portray itself as an important interlocutor in dialogue with the Myanmar military, and what has happened is the Myanmar military has refused to respond to anything meaningful suggested by the bloc, Welsh said in a podcast on Thursday.

This has given the impression that ASEAN is being played and this has affected its credibility and fueled divisions within the group, she said.

ASEAN has therefore created a situation where the international community is now stuck on what to do because countries and groups outside the region have said time and again that the regional bloc is central to efforts to return normalcy to Myanmar, Welsh said.

In fact, Kurt Campbell, U.S. President Joe Bidens policy coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, said at a conference this week that Washington was asking other countries in the surrounding regions to take the necessary steps to both isolate and reach out to Myanmars junta, Nikkei Asia reported.

ASEAN is in danger of being rendered irrelevant as Myanmar has pushed it to the brink, said a paper published this week by The Lowy Institute, a think-tank in Australia.

ASEAN has international support to deal with the crisis in Myanmar  from the U.N., to China, the U.S. and Australia  yet has not proven capable of effectively managing the cunning of the generals, or the grievances of the Myanmar population, said the paper by Nicola Williams, a public policy researcher at Australian National University.

The Myanmar coup presents to ASEAN the most serious threat to the importance of its regional diplomacy since the Cold War.

Ronna Nirmala contributed to this report from Jakarta.
Rohingya who illegally entered Thailand and were bound for Malaysia, sit in a house in Bangkok, Jan. 3, 2021.

Rights groups in Malaysia are incensed by an illustration posted on social media by government agencies that shows armed security officials and navy ships surrounding a boat, with a caption that says, Rohingya migrants, your arrival is not welcome.

Posts of the illustration prepared by the National Task Force were taken down from the Immigration Departments Twitter feed and the border agencys Facebook page, after rights watchdog Amnesty International issued a harsh statement against the illustration.

It is despicable to say to a community of people who have undergone ethnic cleansing, who have endured unimaginable brutality for generations that they are not only unwanted in our country, but that we will use brute force against them, Amnesty International Malaysia said in a statement.

The National Task Force (NTF) is a government unit entrusted with tightening border controls, and that works with various national security agencies.

The masterminds and syndicates involved [in trafficking migrants] will continue to be hunted in order to eradicate the crime of border trespassing as well as other crimes, the Immigration Department wrote on its Twitter account, in a tweet that featured the illustration.

The NTF prepared the illustration and released it on social media because 81 Rohingya came ashore in Indonesia a week ago after months at sea, said a source at the task force who is not authorized to speak to the media and therefore asked not to be identified.

The refugees had told Indonesian officials that they had intended to go to Malaysia but were turned away.

This poster is to show that we are serious about not allowing any illegal immigrants into our country, the source told BenarNews.

Hundreds of Rohingya have made attempts to flee to Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and other countries to escape persecution in Myanmar and dire living conditions in cramped refugee camps in Bangladesh.

Sometimes the refugees have managed to enter those countries.

An illustration prepared by a Malaysian government task force that says, Rohingya migrants, your arrival is not welcome, was posted on the Immigration Departments Twitter account for about five hours. [Photo courtesy @ ImigresenMY via Twitter]

Xenophobia

Migrant rights activist Adrian Pereira from the North South Initiative said he was fearful of what the NTFs portrayal of the Rohingya could lead to, especially after a surge of online hate against the refugees last year in May.

This propaganda poster  was issued by the Malaysian government. I am terrified of where this may lead us, Pereira told BenarNews.

Amnesty said in its statement that they had heard from Rohingya refugees in Malaysia that xenophobia and racism against them had increased in the past 12 months.

Make no mistake, strategic communications and policies like these foster a climate of hatred, violence and xenophobia  they harm lives, they punish people for trying to survive, they justify discrimination, Amnesty said.

Another rights group, the Milk Tea Alliance, said Malaysia needed to understand the situation in Myanmar.

The xenophobia of our Immigration Department. They just released a poster saying Rohingya ethnic migrants are not welcome to Malaysia, the alliances Malaysia chapter said in a tweet.

Firstly, they are refugees, not migrants, secondly, it is obvious our immigration department has no idea whats happening in Myanmar  shameful.

North South Initiatives Pereira wondered how Malaysia planned to secure a seat in the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

This does not make us look good in the eyes of the global community. The Rohingya are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. Is this the way we treat them? he said.

Malaysia is aiming for a spot on the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) for the 2022-2024 term, Foreign Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said last December.

Unfair for Malaysia

Meanwhile, the home minister on Friday berated the U.N. refugee agencys office in Malaysia for issuing too many refugee ID cards to people in the county.

In an interview with a Malay daily, Hamzah Zainudin also wondered why UNHCR wanted access to immigration detention centers, which the refugee agency has been denied since August 2019.

You want to go in for what? To give [out] UNHCR cards? Hamzah told Sinar Harian newspaper.

Currently, almost 180,000 UNHCR card holders live in Malaysia, much higher than the estimated 38,000 in 2013.

The minister told another newspaper that Malaysians were against refugees.

I feel that the majority of Malaysians do not agree with the huge number of refugees, who made Malaysia their destination of choice, as it might lead to various social ills, Hamzah told The Star.

He did not elaborate on what he meant by social ills.

Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention.

However, according to UNHCR, the non-refoulement principle applies to the country as part of customary international law, which is binding on all states. Non-refoulement prohibits the return of refugees to their country of origin where they may face violence and persecution.
Health Secretary Francisco Duque III gives a dose of the oral polio vaccine (OPV) to a child in Marawi, southern Philippines, Oct. 14, 2019.

The United Nations declared Friday that the Philippines beat back a polio outbreak two years after the Southeast Asian nation detected cases in small children, although the potentially crippling disease had mostly been eradicated worldwide.

Philippine health authorities went into emergency-containment mode, working with U.N. agencies the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF to carry out a polio inoculation campaign after the first cases of the disease since 2000 emerged here in late 2019. Cases were then detected in toddlers in southern Lanao del Sur province and in Laguna province, near Manila.

According to a joint statement issued by WHO and UNICEF, the Philippine Department of Health (DOH) concluded its response to the polio outbreak on June 3. The outbreak had ended because the virus had not been detected in a child or the environment during the past 16 months, the U.N. agencies said.

This is a major win for public health and is an excellent example of what collective efforts can attain, even amid the COVID-19 pandemic, said Dr. Rabindra Abeyasinghe, the WHOs representative in the Philippines.

The closure of the polio outbreak is a direct result of strong political will and government leadership, the mobilization and engagement of resources and communities, the courage and the commitment of healthcare and front-line workers, and the combined, coordinated efforts of the local governments and partners, he added.

The last known case of wild poliovirus in the Philippines was recorded back in 1993, according to WHO. In 2000, the United Nations declared the Philippines polio-free.

After the discovery in 2019 of new cases of polio  which can cause nerve injury and paralysis  the health department mounted an aggressive vaccination campaign nationwide with the help of U.N. agencies and other partners.

Seventeen confirmed cases of polio were recorded from 2019 to 2020 but there were no deaths, according to the health department.

UNICEF celebrates all the vaccine champions and partners who made this possible. We must keep the momentum and accelerate routine immunization and safeguard essential child health services while rolling out COVID-19 vaccines for priority groups, said Oyunsaikhan Dendevnorov, the country representative for the U.N. childrens agency.

Symptoms of polio include fever, fatigue, headache, vomiting, stiff neck, and the sudden onset of weakening of the arms and legs. A severe case of infections among children aged five and younger can lead to paralysis or even death in rare cases, the WHO said.

An oral polio vaccine was introduced in 1988, and millions of people around the world have averted death or infections because of it, experts said. The vaccine contains a weakened form of the virus and activates a bodys protective response to polio.

This triumph we have achieved only goes to show that vaccines are safe and effective, Philippine Health Undersecretary Myrna Cabotaje told reporters.

It is for this reason that we continue to encourage the public to receive vaccines, not just the polio vaccine but other vaccines as well, including the COVID-19 vaccine, she said.

Jeoffrey Maitem contributed to this report from Cotabato City, Philippines.
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Edna Osborne, center holds her head down in prayer during the dedication of a prayer wall outside of the historic Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Greenwood neighborhood during the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre on May 31 in Tulsa, Okla. The church was largely destroyed when a white mob descended on the prosperous Black neighborhood in 1921, burning, killing, looting and leveling a 35-square-block area.
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The laundry room is three floors below patients rooms, and they were never in danger, she said. The laboratory was briefly evacuated, but the hospital was fully functional Friday morning.
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A board representing the states largest organization of criminal defense lawyers has written a scathing letter to Berkshire District Attorney Andrea Harrington, calling her attempt to have a district court judge removed from the bench an indefensible and unethical effort to circumvent fair process.

In the letter, the board of directors of the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said it was deeply concerned about Harringtons effort to undermine the independent decision-making of a sitting judge by engaging in an ex parte communication with the Court about pending cases brought by your office.

Ex parte communication is when one party communicates to a judge directly about an open criminal case without including the other party. The letter contained information about several criminal cases, including an open murder prosecution.

A local defense attorney whose client was referenced in the letter has said he was upset the district attorney did not alert him about the communication.

In a statement issued late Friday, Harrington said she is listening to the criticism, but denied that the letter amounted to improper ex parte communication.

In May, Harrington wrote a letter to the chief justice of the district court system, Paul C. Dawley, claiming that Judge Jennifer Tyne posed a significant threat to public safety, and asked that she be barred from presiding over criminal cases in the county. Her complaints against the judge ranged from dangerous rulings to hostile treatment of victims and prosecutors in the Berkshire District Attorneys Office.

Dawley reviewed audio from cases Harrington cited in her letter and concluded that there was no factual basis to support her claims of judicial indiscretion.

This week, the deputy chief counsel for the Public Defender Division of the Committee for Public Counsel Services, which provides legal representation to those who cannot otherwise afford it, said Harringtons missive was concerning and dangerous and sends a message to other judges that they need to fall in line or else face an attack on their livelihood.

In her response Friday, Harrington said she understand[s] the concerns raised by the MACDL and CPCS about the separation of power. As a former MACDL member and former state public defender  I am sympathetic to their frustrations.

I understand that being in a public position requires that I accept criticism, and I am listening, she said in the statement. I have a responsibility to do what I can to stand up for victims of crime and ensure public safety. I spoke out in this instance out of deep concern for victims of domestic abuse and gender-based violence, whom our larger justice system has often disempowered and disregarded.

Harrington said this week that she stood by the content of her letter, adding that she is content knowing top district court officials are aware of her concerns.

The letter from the lawyers association, which was dated Wednesday and signed by Victoria Kelleher, the president of the organization, said that Harrington had many other options for voicing objections to Tynes actions, including a motion to recuse, an appeal, or a complaint to the Judicial Conduct Committee.

Your letter to the Court was instead an indefensible and unethical effort to circumvent fair process, barred by the Rule 3.5 of the Rules of Professional Conduct, which prohibits any lawyer from engaging in ex parte communications during the pendency of a case.

The lawyers association concluded the letter by making several requests: We ask that you voluntarily report your conduct to the Board of Bar Overseers, and that your office recuse itself from all matters which were the subject of your ex parte communication.

We further demand that you make public all communications related to this matter or any other effort on your part or that of your office to initiate ex parte communications about a judges conduct in a pending matter.

In her statement, Harrington did not address the recusal request from the lawyers association, the request that she report herself to the oversight board, or the demand to make public all ex parte communications about a judges conduct.

I remain committed to working in good faith with those in the legal community, she said.
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State Sen. Julian Cyr, right, joined a group of health care workers in Boston on Thursday rallying in support of a onetime bonus of up to $3,000 for those who were on the front line of efforts to treat COVID-19 patients.
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Were connecting the dots. Connecting the past to the present, which also has a lot to do with our future, Lindsey said. We need opportunities for dialogues to figure out how we go forward because we know these are open wounds. These are issues of the past. These are ongoing issues that are even problematic today.
Its 9:00 on a Sunday morning and youre still in your pajamas waiting for your morning coffee to brew. A year ago, before the COVID pandemic, youd have been getting yourself and your family ready for church. But this morning, as youve been doing for months now, youll stay in your PJs and go to church online.

Your local church had been prevented from gathering for a few months during the pandemic. For the sake of your neighbor, to follow guidelines, your church felt it wise for a season to suspend the physical gathering of the body and move the gathering to online-only. But a few months ago, the church opened back up and around 65% of your church has gone back to physical gathering. Even though you are now vaccinated, you have decided to continue worshipping at home with your family. It seems to fit your schedule and your personality better to just watch online. Is this okay to do? Does it still count as church?

To effectively answer this question, we need to ask questions about the nature of the church and consider why we gather in the first place. We gather to worship, to pray, to give, to hear the preaching of the Word, to serve one another, and to find community with others. What of these can you not also do online? You can hear the Word of God preachedeven from multiple pastors. With online chat rooms and comments one can pray together and find community. Many people were even giving online before the pandemic. Perhaps the worship is a bit differentits harder to sing to one another, but there are ways to have an online experience of worship that can match the in-person version. If you had the proper elements in your home, you could even perhaps partake of the Lords Supper. So why do we need to gather when I can do church at home?

The problem is that in the Bible, church is not something you do as much as it is a people. As Andy Huette rightly says, The event of Sunday morning worship with preaching, prayer, singing, and fellowship is what the church does when it gathers, but family is what the church is. When Ive tried to define church, Ive leaned towards calling it something like a blood-bought community of believers who have covenanted and gathered together for the glory of God. You can do church online, but you cannot be the church online.

Benefits of Online Church

This is not to negate some of the benefits of being able to move our church services online. It is beneficial for many that they can do church online. I think of all of the shut-ins, or those with compromised health, who are now able to attend our services. It is also wonderful to keep people connected to us even while they go on vacation. It is a blessing for the church to have some semblance of gathering even when they cannot be physically present.

I also think of all those who struggle with things like social anxiety, deep depression, and even the ramifications of church abuse and trauma. Sometimes watching a service online could be a huge step towards finding church a psychologically safe space again. I would not want to minimize this blessing and potential avenue for healing.

Yet these are not ideal. I am sympathetic to what Mark Dever said when his church decided against online-sermons:

Because a video of a sermon is not a substitute for a covenanted congregation assembling together and all the various means of Gods grace in that. I think it would be healthier to respect Gods strange providence in a period of abstinence from meeting together.

There is something about the physical gathering of believers that is different than an online-gathering. There is a physical presence that matters. If you dont believe me, consider the earthiness of the Incarnation. There is a flesh and blood aspect to our redemption and that is reflected with the church gathering physically.





Photo credit: Getty Images/fizkes

The Pendulum Swing

The question of online church is largely a generational question. Though many boomers and builders might have to stay home because of health reasons, they would not think of asking a question of whether or not they should physically gather if they are able. But those who grew up on the internet think of the world and community differently. Online community is real community, to question this seems just as strange as online-church to an older generation.

Though biologically I am of the younger age, theologically Im probably a bit older soul. I believe there is something which my generation has missed that preceding generations understood well; namely, the power of showing up. And I think what we are seeing today is a pendulum swing (perhaps an overswing) that has come from a few excesses of preceding generations.

In regards to a gathered body, I believe there was for many an overemphasis upon the church building. One of my greatest pet peeves is hearing someone say that they cannot do that in Gods house, as if the whole world does not belong to the Lord. I believe an overemphasis upon a building betrays a misunderstanding of the nature of the temple and the new covenant community.

My generation (or maybe those a tad older than me) responded with a de-emphasis upon the sacred gathering. Church isnt a building; it is a people. And therefore we can gather anywhere at any time. There is truth to this, but there is something special about the local gathering of the body of Christ. There is something sacred about the space where we open up Gods Word and the gospel is preached. It does not have to be in a building  it can be in a field  but there is something special about the physical presence of a gathered body.

Secondly, I believe some families in the past were wrecked by ministers of the gospel who felt they (and their entire family) were required to be physically present at the church building every time the doors were open. Some perhaps developed a legalistic mentality of church attendance. But we overswung when we de-emphasized the power of personal presence. There is something powerful about you being physically present.

I cant seem to keep Bonhoeffers Life Together on my shelves during this season. I keep pulling it down and reading it. The longer we find ourselves with our communities ever transforming due to COVID-19, the more Im finding depth in his words. Consider this:

The prisoner, the sick person, the Christian in exile sees in the companionship of a fellow Christian a physical sign of the gracious presence of the triune God. Visitor and visited in loneliness recognize in each other the Christ who is present in the body; they receive and meet each other as one meets the Lord, in reverence, humility, and joy. They receive each others benedictions as the benediction of the Lord Jesus Christ (Bonhoeffer, 10).

What Bonhoeffer is alluding to here is the fact that each believer is in union with Christ and has the Spirit of God residing within. There is powerChrist within youby you just showing up. How can you be a representative of the physical Jesus virtually? How can you be the hands and feet of Jesus when you cannot put your hand on the shoulder of a brother in Christ? How can you be Christ and give your grieving sister a hug in the name of Jesus?

We do not greet one another with a holy kiss but that is in our Bible for a reason. Im not suggesting we start locking lips in our churches, but this verse helps us see that healthy physical touch truly is an important part of our gathering.

Why You Should Go Back to Physical Church if You Are Able

I say this because I believe that Christ is within me and I believe my brothers and sisters in Christ need that Christ within me. There is power in my presencebecause its a symbol of the very real presence of Jesus Christ among us.

So  and please hear me well  I want to show up because to not do so would be to diminish Christ. I know some could read that and say, what about those who cannot attend?! You are making them feel horrible for something which they cannot control. This is my response. Whether it be because of conscience or health concerns, my aim here is to give words to the very pain which you feel. Im sharing why we mourn with you that you cannot gather with us. Fellowship with other believers is a precious gift. You know this deeply and its why you ache, and toss and turn, and feel as if something deeply important is missing in your life. Because something important is missing.

As Bonhoeffer said it is an unspeakable gift of God but also one which is easily trodden under foot by those who have the gift every day. COVID-19 has given all of us an opportunity to mourn with our shut-ins. It has widened that number and opened our eyes to the value of in-person gathering, and the deep mourning which accompanies no longer being able to gather.

But this is also why I feel a deep conviction, as long as I am able, to gather with the body of Christ. To not gather, to treat it as some insignificant thing, to consider it an option to my walk with Christ, would be to trample under foot the gift of the presence of Christ in the life of another believer. Ill admit it was wonderful for a few weeks to wake up on a Sunday morning, smelly breath, wild hair, still in my PJs and gather online with other Christians. But for me to continue to do this by choice when the church is gathering, would be to value the comfort of my Wal-Mart bought Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle jammies over the blood-bought community of the living God.

Photo credit: Getty Images/bernardbodo
South Africa: Government developing comprehensive GBVF prevention strategy

President Cyril Ramaphosa says as government moves into the second year of the National Strategic Plan aimed at tackling gender-based violence and femicide, a comprehensive strategy is being developed to tackle the problem.

The President said this when he responded to oral questions in the National Council of Provinces on Thursday.

As we move into the second year of the National Strategic Plan, we are focused on strengthening accountability at all levels of government and society.

We are developing a comprehensive national GBVF prevention strategy, including evidence-based social and behaviour change programmes.

If we are committed to working together as a country  as government, communities, civil society, organised labour, business, academia, traditional leaders and the faith community  we will succeed in ending violence against women in South Africa, he said.

This comes after the President, in his State of the Nation Address in June 2019, committed himself to strategies aimed at effectively tackling gender-based violence and femicide.

Following this, the Emergency Response Action Plan was implemented to further strengthen the fight against gender-based violence and femicide, and provide justice for the victims and survivors.

This was a short-term plan implemented over six months through partnerships between civil society networks, government, development partners and academic institutions.

The National Strategic Plan on GBVF was approved by Cabinet in March 2020.

The plan, the President said, builds onto the Emergency Response Action Plan, and focuses on improved accountability, responsiveness to the needs of survivors, addressing impunity and driving a comprehensive prevention agenda.

We are beginning to see positive results through various joint interventions.

In February 2021, we launched the private sector GBVF Response Fund, where an initial amount of R128 million was pledged.

Legislative reform has been a critical component of the National Strategic Plan, the President said.

Last week, the National Assembly passed three bills, namely, the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences and Related Matters) Amendment Bill; Domestic Violence Amendment Bill and Criminal and Related Matters Amendment Bill.

These three Bills are now on their way to the NCOP.

I would encourage the NCOP to carefully consider these three important Bills with a sense of urgency, within the legislative mandate of the NCOP.

We have introduced several innovative initiatives to facilitate access to support and justice.

This includes a SMS notification system for applications for domestic violence protection orders, which was launched at all district courts in January 2021, President Ramaphosa said.

The President said the Domestic Violence Amendment Bill, once passed, will make it possible for complainants to apply for protection orders online.

Thirty-two regional courts are ready for designation as Sexual Offences Courts.

There are plans for the establishment of six additional Thuthuzela Care Centres.

As at March 2021, all police stations had the necessary sexual assault DNA kits to assist victims and survivors, said the President.

GBV command centre

South Africa has a Gender-Based Violence Command Centre (GBVCC), which operates under the Department of Social Development.

The centre operates a national, 24hr/7days-a-week call centre facility. The facility employs social workers, who are responsible for call-taking and call referrals.

The centre operates an emergency line number  0800 428 428.

This is supported by a USSD, please call me facility: *120*7867#.

A Skype Line Helpme GBV for members of the deaf community also exists. (Add Helpme GBV to your Skype contacts).

A SMS based Line 31531 for persons with disabilities (SMS help to 31531) also exists.

The centre is able to refer calls directly to SAPS (10111) and field social workers, who respond to victims of GBV.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2021-06-11. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
The Anne Arundel County Resilience Authority is the brainchild of the best minds in resilience financing, and experts across the country are watching us, Pittman said in a statement following the bills passage on Monday. Rather than depending completely on our taxpayers to fund our defense against the impacts of climate change, we are creating a body that will attract federal and private funds to our jurisdiction.
What Is the Meaning of Credobaptism?

Credobaptism is a compound word, credo meaning I believe, and baptism which means to dip or immerse. In this belief, also known as believers baptism, a Christian gets baptized with water after they have professed faith (belief) in Jesus Christ. In this view, baptism does not contribute to salvation in any way, but rather serves as an outward symbol of the inward reality of a believers salvation obtained through faith in Jesus, which includes His death and resurrection.

What Is the Difference between Infant Baptism and Credobaptism?

Infant baptism, also known as pedobaptism, refers to the practice of baptizing the infants of parents who believe in Jesus. In general, pedobaptists fall into two groups:

The first group views baptism as a sacrament that cleanses one from their sin. Roman Catholicism is the primary proponent of this view. It is their belief baptism administers a spiritual washing that operates independently from the subjects faith. Therefore, an infant can receive the purifying effect of baptism even though they do not yet have faith.

The second group is driven by their understanding of Gods covenant people traced through the Bible (every saved person). Covenant theology, developed by John Calvin, undergirds this view. This group puts emphasis on the unity of Gods covenant relationship with His people through the whole of salvation history. There are several factors in Scripture used to support this assertion.

First, there is a connection between the covenant sign of circumcision in the Old Testament (Genesis 17:10-14) and baptism in the New Testament. In Colossians 2:11-12, the Apostle Paul equates baptism to circumcision. Baptism is the sign of the new covenant which replaced circumcision. Infants underwent circumcision in the Old Testament as a sign of being part of the covenant community of Israel. Likewise, pedobaptists baptize their children to confirm their place in the community of Gods people, and also to acknowledge their potential rite of passage to salvation through the Gospel.

Second, Scripture mentions household baptisms. Examples include the family of Lydia (Acts 16:14-15) and the household of the Philippian jailer (Acts 16:31-33). For the pedobaptist, this opens the possibility of infant baptism as part of their household. It should be noted, pedobaptists do believe in the baptism of new adult converts, however, they also extend this practice to include infants.

Credobaptists emphasize baptism as a conscious choice made by someone who professes faith in Christ. They do not deny the parallels between the old and new covenants. However, many credobaptists believe a spiritual shift took place with the establishment of the New Covenant in which Gods people now consist of those who possess faith. Possible support for this stems from Scriptures reference to spiritual infancy. Jesus mentions spiritual birth, which implies spiritual infancy upon coming to faith (John 3:5). Paul also referred to the believers at Corinth as infants when they were new in their faith (1 Corinthians 3:1). Its possible, just as the biological children of Abraham were circumcised shortly after birth, in a similar manner baptism applies to new believers who are in their spiritual infancy. Credobaptists do not endorse infant baptism, yet some will say Scripture does not explicitly prohibit its practice. For further reading on the defense of the exclusionary view of credobaptism, which claims infant baptism is not a legitimate practice, refer to John Pipers article.

What Is the History of Credobaptism?

When He commissioned the Apostles, Jesus commanded them to make disciples and baptize them (Matthew 28:19). Baptism has been an important and even divisive topic throughout Church history. The practice of credobaptism finds its roots in the very beginning of the Church Age in the first century. The second chapter of Acts records the baptism of about 3000 people after they heard Peter preach the Gospel. Only the people who received his word were baptized (Act 2:41). In this passage, we clearly see the Apostles baptized believers after they came to faith.

Over time, early church fathers such as Irenaeus and Origen openly endorsed infant baptism. This view ensconced itself into church tradition and became common practice as people sought to incorporate their children into their nominal Christian communities. The Churchs traditional stance on baptism was challenged in the sixteenth century during the inflammatory advent of the Protestant Reformation.

The most prominent example of credobaptist doctrine arose from the Anabaptist movement in Switzerland. Historians accredit the roots of this movement to the event which transpired on January 21, 1525, in the Swiss town of Zurich. A group of townsfolk, led by Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz, made their way to the Manz house to decide how to respond to the pressures of the city council. The council demanded the people cease their Bible classes, and, four days earlier had issued a warning that any parents who did not have their infants baptized within eight days would face banishment from the territory.

Upon arrival, George Blaurock went over to Conrad and requested Conrad baptize him after making a profession of faith in Jesus Christ. Conrad obliged Georges request and the other members followed suit. This was done to comply with the Apostolic examples of baptism they had observed in Scripture, and it served as a rejection of the baptism they had all received as infants. Thus began the Anabaptist movement.

The antagonists of the movement coined the label anabaptist, (re-baptizer), to associate its proponents with heretics. The Anabaptists themselves did not endorse this name since they did not consider their infant baptisms legitimate. Instead, they believed baptism was only for those who had come to saving faith in Christ. This credobaptist view was part of a broader concept the Anabaptists held regarding the Church Body. They believed Scripture taught the true church included only believers who made a conscious decision to follow Jesus, thus rejecting the validity of infant baptism in the nominal Christian communities.

As a result, they attempted to reconstruct the Apostolic Church model found in the New Testament. This blatant separation from church tradition did not go unnoticed. The Anabaptists suffered extreme persecution for their different views. On March 7, 1526, the Zurich council agreed to drown anyone caught in the act of rebaptism. Felix Manz marked the first of many Anabaptist martyrs when Zurich authorities drowned him on January 5, 1527. The persecution caused the Anabaptists to disperse throughout Europe. Its estimated between 4000-5000 Anabaptists were martyred during the Reformation. The Mennonites and Hutterites are direct descendants, and Baptists and Quakers also share distant relations to the Anabaptist movement. The beliefs propagated by the Anabaptists have a profound impact that echoes through the ages.

Is There Biblical Evidence for Credobaptism?

Scripture affirms the credobaptist position. In this article, we will look at a few of the passages which support this notion.

The day of Pentecost. In Acts 2, Luke records about three thousand people came to faith in the Lord on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:41). The people baptized were the ones who received Peters message when he preached the Gospel. In this passage, it is clear baptism occurred after a person made a conscious decision to follow Christ.

The Gentiles receive the Holy Spirit. Acts 10 records the magnificent event of God imparting the Holy Spirit to the Gentiles, which confirms the gospel message applies to all people. While Peter speaks to the Gentiles, the Holy Spirit falls upon the listeners (Acts 10:44). This is significant because no person can ever receive the gift of the Holy Spirit while they are still in an unregenerate state. The Spirit is given as a promise of eternal life only to those who are saved (Ephesians 1:13-14). This group of Gentiles was baptized after they received the Spirit (Acts 10:48), and one cannot argue the Gentiles received the Spirit in a manner different from believers. First, Peter acknowledged they received the Holy Spirit in the same way he did (Acts 10:47). Secondly, when the Spirit fell on Gentiles, they began to speak in tongues. This can only be the result of the Holy Spirits indwelling because speaking in tongues is one of the spiritual gifts given exclusively to the body of believers (1 Corinthians 12:10-13). This means they possessed faith before they were baptized. In Acts chapter 10, water baptism was carried out as a response to the saving faith of the Gentiles to acknowledge their entrance into Gods kingdom and did not contribute to their salvation.

Pauls understanding of baptism. The Apostle Paul makes a clear distinction between the saving power of the Gospel and baptism (1 Corinthians 1:17-18). This distinction makes no sense if water baptism is necessary for salvation. If it were, Paul would not have excluded it from the Gospel. Instead, this affirms the credobaptist stance that baptism is a symbol that depicts the spiritual reality of salvation through Christ.

When entering the discussion of baptism, a believer should always act with love, patience, and integrity toward those who disagree. We must handle Gods Word rightly, but equally important is the example of Christ-like love we display for others. No believer should ever neglect baptism since our Lord commanded it (Matthew 28:19). It serves as a powerful symbol to acknowledge the saving work Christ has done for us. Let us glorify our Lord, putting on display with our lives the power of the Gospel to give new life as symbolized in baptism.

Photo credit: GettyImages/Evan Schneider

Stephen Baker is a graduate of Mount Union University. He is the writer of a special Scripture study/reflection addendum to Someplace to Be Somebody, authored by his wife, Lisa Loraine Baker (End Game Press Spring 2022).

He attends Faith Fellowship Church in East Rochester, OH where he has given multiple sermons and is discipled by pastor Chet Howes.
Volunteer grizzly bear advocates have produced several new research studies contending that the Bitterroot Mountains along the Montana-Idaho border have strong potential for recovering the threatened species.

The 5,830-square-mile Bitterroot Recovery Zone is one of six federally designated recovery areas for grizzly bears, but the only one with no confirmed resident grizzlies.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service considered transplanting grizzlies there, but shelved the plan in 2000. Since then, a few grizzlies have made forays into the region. Others have moved through the nearby Sapphire and John Long Mountains east of the Bitterroot Valley and explored Montanas Big Hole Valley farther south.

Idaho on a percentage basis has the most potential suitable grizzly habitat of any state in the western United States, said David Mattson, a grizzly researcher in Livingston, who released The Grizzly Bear Promised Land: Past, Present and Future of Grizzly Bears in the Bitterroot, Clearwater, Salmon and Selway Country last week.

Its equal to whats realized in Greater Yellowstone and the Northern Continental Divide in the number of bears that could be supported, Mattson said.

Those two recovery areas, anchored by Yellowstone and Glacier national parks respectively, together hold almost 2,000 grizzly bears. When the bear earned Endangered Species Act protection in 1975, only between 300 and 600 grizzlies were estimated to survive south of the Canadian border.

The wild country of the Bitterroots could help link those two more successful areas, as well as support its own grizzly population. However, a study by the Flathead-Lolo-Bitterroot Citizen Task Force concluded that certain travel corridors need attention if the bears are to successfully expand there.

Bears need denning habitat, said Mike Bader, an independent wildlife consultant and lead author of Grizzly Bear Denning Habitat and Demographic Connectivity in Northern Idaho and Western Montana."

Just sending males around doesnt do anything," Bader said. "Connectivity models must be based on females and what they need.

Bader and geospatial analyst Paul Sieracki defined the kind of steep mountainsides that grizzly sows typically choose for winter hibernation dens and then identified all the potential places they might use in the Bitterroots and surrounding mountains.

They found that the Nine Mile area west of Missoula has particular attraction for both denning and as a connection between bear populations to the north and the Bitterroots. They also identified corridors through the Sapphire and John Long mountains that grizzlies appear to be using to reach the Big Hole and potentially, the Yellowstone area.

However, those connection areas could bring bears into conflict with ranchers who use extensive public-land grazing allotments in Montana, as well as U.S. Forest Service timber and travel management plans on the Idaho side. The Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest is in the final stages of approving its long-range forest plan, which will have major influence on human activity in that Bitterroot grizzly recovery area.

Another question is the status of the two reports. Neither have been published in a mainstream scientific journal, although Bader said his is going to be submitted for publication. Journal publication is usually considered the standard for using research in policy decisions.

Mattson countered that his paper synthesizes a wide swath of published journal research, and his past work has also been officially considered in legal and policy debates. Bader added that state wildlife agencies also contribute in-house research that hasnt been journal-published.

The Interagency Grizzly Bear Committees summer meeting takes place virtually on June 15-17. Its agenda has not yet been posted.
Plus, Bill's Message of the Day, will the Catholic Church stand up to Bill O'Reilly?

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Following a lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity, a judge just rejected the Trump administrations denial of protections for Pacific walruses.

Known for their massive size and ever-growing tusks, Pacific walruses need Arctic sea ice for courtship, raising their young, and resting. With climate change already melting that ice in 2008, the Center petitioned to protect them under the Endangered Species Act. In response the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service announced they deserved protection  but reversed course after Trump took office, declaring they didnt. This month, responding to a 2018 Center suit, a federal appeals court ruled that the Service didnt properly explain its reversal, with all science pointing to the walruses habitat disappearing in the next 50 years.

This decision means the Service has to go back and examine the science on sea-ice loss and walrus survival, said Center lawyer Emily Jeffers. Were confident the agency will give these animals the protections they desperately need.
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.
APO Group has signed an agreement with Getty Images that will make images and press releases about Africa instantly available to tens of thousands of media organizations all over the world.

As a result of the collaboration that started in 2019, Getty Images subscribers will have access to APO Group clients' press announcements and editorial images.This will come at no extra cost to the standard price of APO Groups Pan-African press release distribution service. APO Groups multinational customers are active all across Africa and this new arrangement will help shine a light on some of the positive stories being told on the continent every day.Sport also has a major role to play in the changing of global perceptions about Africa. Getty Images is the official photographic partner to over 85 of the worlds leading sports governing bodies, leagues, and clubs including Fifa and the International Olympic Committee (IOC).APO Group is the exclusive Pan-African communications consultancy for the NBA and the Basketball Africa League. They are also the main official sponsor of World Rugbys African association, Rugby Africa and an official sponsor of Team Qhubeka Assos and the annual Lux Afrique Polo Day. Through these partnerships, APO Group will be able to showcase the best of African sport to new audiences all over the world.Getty Images has over 425m assets, encompassing the latest global news, sports, celebrity, music and fashion coverage, as well as exclusive conceptual creative images.One of the APO Groups main goals is to find a new way of challenging international perceptions and changing the narrative about Africa. Ultimately, it is about driving trade and investment, and helping to stimulate African economies as well.APO Group founder and chairman, Nicolas Pompigne-Mognard, said, This is a truly groundbreaking moment. For our clients, it means an incredible opportunity to reach further with their content than ever before. For Africa, it means the chance to break the cycle of negative news and show the world the bigger picture. I am so thankful to Getty Images for opening their network to Africa. They are using their unparalleled reach and reputation to elevate our continent on the world stage.Senior director sports at Getty Images, Eugene Cariaga, said, We are pleased to continue our partnership with APO and offer African businesses and organisations access to the worlds newsrooms via our unrivalled distribution platform.For more information on this collaboration, go here
IAB SA research tracks digital's upward trajectory in 2020

The IAB SA has released two critical reports that reflect on the year that was 2020 in the context of South Africas digital media and marketing industry. Seemingly overnight, the entirety of the developed world came to rely on digital platforms for connection, information, and education. This step-change is echoed in our findings: the industry saw rapid acceleration in terms of both revenue and usage.Haydn Townsend, IAB SA chair and MD of Accenture Interactive comments: The IAB SA recognises the importance of better understanding our online audiences, and in particular, the digital consumer scale across demographics and the behavioural insights that can be derived across audience segments. By equipping brands, agencies, and publishers with a detailed, relevant, and realistic overview of the last year, we hope to further empower them as they continue to steer the industry forward. The IAB SA Digital Landscape Report and the PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report detail the ways in which this expedited adoption played out on home ground. While some of the findings are expected given the circumstances, these insights reiterate the fact that when it comes to digital, the only constant is change.The IAB SA Digital Landscape Survey Report powered by Narratiive, comprises data from over 180 websites and contains critical insights into the digital audience driving this growth. Notable statistics include a 12.5% overall growth in the number of people who are online, currently representing 98% of those older than 15 years of age accessing the internet every 4 weeks. The report also notes a 21% increase in South Africans accessing the internet at home  thats an increase from 48% to 58% - with the biggest increase being fibre in terms of type of internet access. This aligns with the IAB SA / Narratiive monthly consumer reports, which highlighted the 26% increase in IAB SA publisher page views between January and April 2020, as users looked to find trustworthy information in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak. Other noteworthy findings comparing 2019 activity to 2020 usage are a 19% increase in unique browsers and a 12% increase in mobile traffic.Commenting on these insights, Clare Trafankowska-Neal, MD iProspect and IAB SA Measurement Council lead says: Not only does the report establish a demographic foundation; but also reaffirms the heightened digital consumption that has been noted as a global trend, since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic; and also recorded locally. The report further reveals the impact of the pandemic, on the ways that South Africans connect, communicate, and consume content.Top-level insights contained within the report include: Internet connectivity is more readily accessible than before, with a 21% increase in people whore able to access the internet at home (mobile phones aside); South Africans are increasingly using the internet to shop (35% increase), game (88% increase), and stream television (38% increase).2020 was a huge growth year for digital in South Africa. The online world entrenched itself into our lives and we believe these changes are here to stay. The statistics noted in the report talk to the expedited adoption of digital in almost everyone's lives, says Greg Mason, regional lead sub Saharan Africa, Narratiive.As consumer usage and activity continues on an upward trajectory, brands and advertisers are allocating more resources and placing more emphasis on digital content and digital media, as they shift their focus in line with their audience. The Internet Advertising Revenue Report, conducted by PwC and commissioned by the IAB SA, breaks down the numbers behind South Africas increased appetite for digital content.When economic activity came to a halt at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in South Africa in 2020, most non-essential businesses could not operate. This had a massive impact on the economy and forced the advertising industry to very swiftly diversify the allocation of advertising investment to be more in tune with what consumers were doing during this time. We saw a big uptake in e-Commerce due to online shopping, increased in-home media consumption, and the rise of digital media in general, comments Claudelle Naidoo, managing director, Mediacom and IAB South Africa Research Council chair.Our data reveals that despite the state of the South African economy at large, the digital industry experienced an 18% year-on-year growth, with a total revenue of R4.7bn in 2020. Internet advertising revenue (excluding paid search) hit R2.1bn in 2020, a considerable increase from R1.4bn in 2019. The distribution of spends shifted in 2020 in line with consumer consumption patterns which resulted in digital attracting a bigger piece of the pie in many planning scenarios. Survey participants reported that digital advertising spend amounts to between 21% and 40% of their total ad spend  this up from 9.2% a mere four years ago.The Internet Advertising Revenue Report also details the three key trends that will shape the future of the South African and global digital landscape. One, consumers increasing concerns about data protection and privacy; two, the demise of the third-party cookie (which has seen web browsers Safari and Firefox already phase out the use of cookies. Google, however, has indicated that their phasing out will be a gradual process  a controversial move, as Chrome accounts for more than half of all web traffic.); three, the growth of headless commerce as consumer expectations of a seamless omni-channel experience continue to increase.In addition to the growth and maturation of the digital ecosystem, content and messaging have become markedly more creative, connecting and resonating with an audience facing uncertainty. This has, in turn, driven performance and revenue. If these remain key focus areas of the industry, we can expect to see sustainable growth and increased confidence, translating into an even greater allocation of advertising investment.Both the IAB SA Digital Landscape Survey Report and the Internet Advertising Revenue Report are available, at no cost, to IAB SA members, and can be accessed via the IAB SA member portal. The Internet Advertising Revenue Report was made possible by a multitude of South African agencies, brands, and publishers, as well as PwC South Africa, the Advertising Media Forum, the IAB SA Research Council lead by Claudelle Naidoo, MD of Mediacom and project lead Shaun Frazao, head of digital and content at Wavemaker.The IAB SA Digital Landscape Survey Report was brought to by Narratiive, as well as the Publisher Research Council, BMIT, and Ornico, and the many IAB SA publishers who promoted the survey.The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) South Africa empowers the media and marketing industries to thrive in the digital economy. Its membership comprises more than 150 leading media companies, brands, and the technology firms responsible for enabling excellence in digital marketing, focusing on identifying and targeting audiences, delivering, and optimising campaigns to these audiences and the innovation and selling of such activities. The non-profit, non-government, trade group fields critical research on interactive advertising, while also educating brands, agencies, publishers and the wider business community on the importance of digital marketing.
Tristan Shaun Henry

Congrats on your selection for the Design Indaba Emerging Creatives programme. How do you feel about it?

When did you first know you had an eye for fashion, and what led you pursue design as a career?

Tell us about your brand Saint Shaun Henry  whos it for, whats its brand philosophy and aesthetic

Saint Shaun Henry is for the individuals who never fitted in anywhere, its for the kids who were told oh, youll never amount to anything. Those kids who thought that there isnt a brand that caters and stands for them, now will have something that will allow them to live out their dreams and fantasies.

Where do you draw inspiration from for your work?

As a recent Advanced Diploma in Fashion Design graduate, how do you plan to go about making a name for yourself in the industry?

How would you like to see South Africas fashion retail industry support more young creatives like yourself?

As a self-proclaimed queer kind, what missteps do think brands make when trying to appeal to or align themselves with the LGBTQI community?

We arent clowns, so slapping a rainbow on everything isnt going to appeal to us.

Could you name some fashion designers, local and/or international, who you look up to and admire?

#YouthMatters: Emerging designer Ontlametse Molefe shares his journey of learning, discovery Ontlametse Molefe is a young, talented interior designer who has been inducted into the 2021 class of Design Indaba Emerging Creatives...

What would you like your legacy to be in fashion?

If what Ive done has opened doors for the next generation of designers to do what Ive done and better, its worth it.

Whats next for you and your brand?

Henry deservedly stands among the 40 creatives selected this year. The enthusiastic recent graduate holds an Advanced Diploma in Fashion Design from the Cape Town College of Fashion, and is raring to add their unique point of view to South Africa's contemporary fashion landscape.As a member of the LGBTQI community, Henry aims to recognise and celebrate queer youth culture through fashion brand Saint Shaun Henry - a label the designer describes as "for queer kids by a queer kid".We caught up with Henry to chat about their design journey, the legacy they'd like to leave in the fashion industry, and how brands get LGBTQI representation wrong.I was thrilled. I remember going to the Design Indaba when I was in high school and I said to myself, One day Ill showcase here... and a few years later it happened. Ive been told Im not cut out to do fashion, so it really was a special moment for me, to be one of the selected few out of the country. It made me feel like Im being taken seriously as a designer.Growing up, I always expressed myself through a variety of things, drawing was one of them. You could always find me doing something creative. I really enjoyed visual arts during my school journey and I spent those years learning skills and techniques. It wasnt long after I discovered that fashion can be used as another medium to express myself.I took Visual Arts as well as Design as subjects in high school and even with the workload and pressure, thats when I decided to pursue a career in fashion.Saint Shaun Henry is a brand for queer kids by a queer kid. The brand philosophy can be summed up as 'celebrating queer lives'. Choosing comfort and convenience, without having to compromise on style. Saint Shaun Henry stands for equality, self-expression, individualism and LGBTQI rights.I draw a lot of inspiration from the personal stories of myself, family and friends. It gets to a point where I reflect on myself and others. I then look at whats happening around me, whether it be socially, politically or economically.For the current collection, I looked at a newfound side of me, queer culture and how it shaped contemporary menswear today. A revolution is happening in menswear and Im glad I get to witness and be a part of it.I want to start in the retail industry first. I think its so important to learn the corporate business world if you want to make a successful fashion brand. One thing I want to learn more about is the business of fashion.Networking and collaborating with other creatives is something else I love to do, from all disciplines. Im always pushing my brand as a lifestyle; I plan to do more than just garments. For queer kids by a queer kid, I always say. It brings authenticity.Dont steal from us and pay us for our work. Ive seen and experienced firsthand bigger companies stealing ideas from smaller independent designers. The first thing would be to create more job opportunities in the retail industry. An internship that will allow you to gain experience is a must since jobs today require years of experience with a tertiary qualification.Id really like to see more of that being implemented in the industry. I also want to be a part of that, leading the way for a career in fashion.Getting a month for us out of a year for big operations to cater to us isnt enough. It can be patronising sometimes and done in poor taste if you dont have a member of the community leading the campaign.We arent a trend, were humans. The sooner brands realise that this isnt a fad for a period of time, theyll open up to an untapped target market.Local Id have to say, Rich Mnisi, Thebe Magugu and Nao Serati. International Id have to say, Tomo Koizumi, Peter Do, No Sesso, Nicola Formichetti, Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake.Id like my legacy in fashion to be summed up in one word and thats 'trailblazing'.For me, Id love to intern for a brand thats at the forefront of the queer community. An internship at Rich Mnisi and Thebe Magugu would be such a surreal dream.For my brand, Id have to say Id love to do a collaboration with a bigger company to get people talking about who I am as a designer. Who knows what the future holds for me and my pen, thats where it all starts.
As part of our ongoing #BehindtheBrandManager series, we interviewed some of the Marketing Achievement Awards' Rising Star finalists - said to be the best and the brightest under the age of 35 who have consistently demonstrated excellent performance and who have the potential to become outstanding leaders in their profession.

Robyn Hobson

Robyn, tell us more about your role and what it entails exactly?

Growing up, what did you want to be?

Tell us about your career: what you studied and why, and how you ended up where you are today?

What do you enjoy most about marketing and working in the tech/education space specifically?

Tell us more about your experience in terms of sales and marketing/working with brands?

Too often I feel marketers inherit a finished product that they then have to wrap up in a bow and sell. If youre a marketer and get the opportunity to sit at the table and influence the development of the product, take it with both hands.

You were recently shortlisted as a finalist for the MAAs Rising Star of the Year Award. Firstly, congrats, and secondly, tell us what this recognition meant to you?

What career advice would you give to aspiring young marketing and branding professionals?

Tell us about your latest or most successful campaigns or ads to date, and the rationale behind them?

Classroom in the Cloud

Objective : Get primary and secondary schools to sign up to Mobile Guardian by showcasing how the software can help them navigate the unforeseen complexities of the swift move to remote learning brought about by the enforced school closures.





: Get primary and secondary schools to sign up to Mobile Guardian by showcasing how the software can help them navigate the unforeseen complexities of the swift move to remote learning brought about by the enforced school closures. Method : Use digital marketing channels to showcase Mobile Guardian as an easy-to-use solution that can support safe and secure remote learning on multiple operating systems.





: Use digital marketing channels to showcase Mobile Guardian as an easy-to-use solution that can support safe and secure remote learning on multiple operating systems. Channels : SEO, social media and email.





: SEO, social media and email. Results: A significant lift in both brand awareness and sales. Aside from this, the campaign was named as a finalist in the Marketing Achievement Awards and the team was thrilled to be listed alongside such established brands like FNB and Discovery.

Anything youd like to add?

As part of our ongoing #BehindtheBrandManager series, we interviewed the Marketing Achievement Awards Rising Star finalists  said to be the best and the brightest under the age of 35 who have consistently demonstrated excellent performance and who have the potential to become outstanding leaders in their profession.Hobson studied an MBA from the University of Cape Town and throughout her career has consulted to and worked for companies on the cusp of their high-growth trajectory, often with very limited marketing capabilities.Now, as head of Sales and Marketing at Mobile Guardian, a global company focused on improving education through technology, shes responsible for ensuring that the global sales and marketing teams collaborate effectively to achieve the brands growth targets.Here, Hobson tells us that working at a scale-up entails everything from helping set up a coffee machine to reviewing email campaigns and developing expansion plans into new territories. And how she and her team are crafting the Mobile Guardian storySure. Well, while thats the official title, Mobile Guardian is a scale-up and every day feels a little different. One day youre helping set up a coffee machine, and the next youre reviewing email campaigns or developing expansion plans into new territories.My primary goal is to ensure that the global sales and marketing teams collaborate effectively to achieve Mobile Guardians growth targets. I started as the marketing manager over three years ago, and its incredible how much has changed since then.Believe it or not, my very first dream job was to become a marine biologist.Well, the last 11 years sure have been a story. I studied Business Science Marketing at the University of Cape Town and was deeply interested in digital marketing, or e-marketing back then, as well as consumer behaviour and psychology. I was incredibly fascinated by this bright, shiny thing called the Internet, as well as social media platforms. I set up a blog in 2009, and on reflection, this was the move that set me on this path to where I find myself today.In the right place at the right time, I landed an internship at Stonewall, a leading creative marketing agency and never looked back. It led me to being the fourth hire at a mobile tech startup, launching a digital marketing agency from the lounge, managing the social media team at Woolworths and consulting to brands in South Africa, the United States and the United Kingdom.At a career crossroads, I applied to do an MBA at the UCTs Graduate School of Business. This experience firmly reignited my passion for both marketing and entrepreneurship. I now find myself at Mobile Guardian, where I thoroughly enjoy the work I do, as well as the people I work with. Its a good place to be.I am really enjoying growing a B2B brand that is considered a breath of fresh air in the mobile device management industry. It felt like the space was overdue for a shake-up. I love guiding the team and the work were doing to craft the Mobile Guardian story. The team makes the work a genuine pleasure. Were busy updating the brand and its something thats truly going to set us apart.Education Technology is a very hot topic right now and understandably so. Its been quite an experience working for an edtech company during the global, enforced school closures. Marketing into the education sector has been a steep learning curve, and every market brings with it unique nuance and buyer behaviour. Its challenging, but the silver lining is that it never gets boring.There are a lot of stories. Personally, the most rewarding brands Ive worked on have been those where marketing has been able to influence decision-making at the product level.Thank you, it was an incredible honour to be listed alongside such talented marketers. To be acknowledged by marketing leadership in South Africa is a genuine career highlight. I feel that often we can get lost in the day-to-day and fail to realise how far we have come. The nomination served as a lovely moment to step back and reflect on the journey so far.When talking with respected marketing giants, they often seem to be curious observers with a true passion for their craft. Keep yourself curious and immerse yourself in as many different channels as possible. I believe that often we get stuck in the channels we use personally, and this can narrow our perspective. Be observant and notice how brands communicate with consumers, and how consumers react to different communication styles. Lastly, throughout your career, keep your passion and pride for marketing alive. And dont be afraid to step up and take a leap when you get the chance to do so.If you navigated your brand through 2020/21, take a bow. It has been a challenging time to say the least and you deserve a pat on the back.
Queen and Briggs bodies were found with no money in their pockets to purchase the weed that brought Hurtado-Valdez to the apartment laundry room, Insley said. Hurtado-Valdez told police the two men jumped him and threatened to kill him with the gun. He told police they wrestled with the gun and thats when Hurtado-Valdez shot Briggs in the laundry room and shot Queen while reaching for his phone that he dropped. Queen left the room and died outside.
In Mississippi, where some public schools once defied federal orders to admit Black students and issues of educational equity are still raw, who gets honored and how can dredge up painful questions that are impossible to disentangle from the states racial history. In the past five years, Black women in Cleveland, Mississippi, about 150 miles away, have twice filed federal lawsuits alleging they had been cheated in their schools selection of valedictorian and salutatorian.
Taliban has welcomed the Pakistani government's decision not to give its military bases to American forces after their withdrawal from Afghanistan.

"We welcome the decision taken by Pakistani authorities not to give its bases to US forces", Taliban spokesperson Sohail Shaheen, told The Nation on phone from Doha. "The demand by US forces for having bases in Pakistan is unjustified, and Pakistan responded rightly" Shaheen said.

This comes amid reports that the negotiations for the military bases in the region have reached an impasse, for now, The New York Times reported.

"Some American officials (told the newspaper) that negotiations with Pakistan had reached an impasse for now. Others have said the option remains on the table and a deal is possible," the NYT report said earlier this week.

The report claims that in discussions with American officials, "the Pakistanis have demanded a variety of restrictions in exchange for the use of a base in the country, and they have effectively required that they sign off on any targets that either the CIA or the military would want to hit inside Afghanistan."

The Pentagon is now mulling to authorise airstrikes in Afghanistan if the country falls into crisis due to the rise in violence by the Taliban.

The Hill reported that US senior administration officials said that military officials are actively discussing how to respond to potential consequences following the withdrawal of US troops, slated to be completed by September.

The officials said that decisions to potentially allow airstrikes following troop withdrawal haven't been made yet, but one option now would be to recommend US warplanes or armed drones intervene in a major crisis, such as the fall of Kabul, or other parts of the country fall to the Taliban.

(ANI)

Also Read: EU parliament adopts resolution on Sri Lanka, propose GSP withdrawal
If you are old enough to remember the hit comedy movie of 1980, Caddy Shack, then you will recall that a gopher infestation was threatening a golf course in Nebraska. The somewhat deranged groundskeeper was tasked with getting rid of the pest. His efforts at eradication include shooting, f
Kamala Harris informed Spanish-language media outlet EFE on Thursday in so many words that all her tough talk telling migrants "do not come" was just to placate the American public.





Harris does exclusive interview w/Spanish-language wire service EFE after Guatemala + Mexico trip.



VP toned down her do not come message to potential migrants, assures that shes committed to guaranteeing that the U.S. is a safe haven/refuge. https://t.co/G9N0yRoy2Z  Sabrina Rodriguez (@sabrod123) June 10, 2021



From EFE:

Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday eased back on the harsh message she sent to potential migrants during her trip earlier this week to Guatemala and Mexico, saying that she is committed to guaranteeing that the United States will be a safe haven for people seeking asylum.



Let me be very clear, I am committed to making sure we provide a safe haven for those seeking asylum, period, Harris said in an exclusive telephone interview with EFE after returning from her first international trip as vice president.



[...] In her telephone conversation with EFE, Harris also defended the Joe Biden administration, saying that the government wants to expand legal pathways for immigration to the US, and thus the Democratic administration is pressuring Congress to approve immigration reform measures.



We are also rebuilding our immigration system, to the extent that it deteriorated under the (Republican Donald Trump) administration, but also we must address the root causes of migration, and that is why I traveled to Guatemala and then after that to Mexico, Harris said.



The vice president did not get into the contradictions between this message about a welcoming US and her other remarks that undocumented migrants should not come to this country, and she noted that part of my charge (as vice president) has been to address the root causes (of illegal migration), ... hunger in the region, ... the impact of the hurricanes ... the COVID-19 impact rather than overseeing activities at the US-Mexico border.

People are flying in from all over the world to cross our border.



Reuters reported last month how Gypsies from Romania are flying in from Paris then meeting up with smugglers in Mexico City to waltz right in:





Scores of Romanians who are part of the Roma ethnic minority have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in south Texas in recent weeks to seek asylum. Many have been flying in from Paris to Mexico City as tourists https://t.co/4u85CzebAW pic.twitter.com/qVtC1R3x8m  Reuters (@Reuters) May 27, 2021



DHS head Alejandro Mayorkas and HHS's Rachel Levine appear to be working together to fly these illegal migrants all over the country, targeting red states like Iowa and Tennessee for cultural and demographic enrichment.













The number of migrants being caught at the border in May is about 800 percent higher than the same time last year https://t.co/P4sVkN4x9O  Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) June 9, 2021











It's all going according to plan.



As Biden said at a White House Summit in early 2015 with Mayorkas at his side, America being flooded with an "unrelenting" "wave" of migrants is something we should be "most proud of."







"It's not going to stop," Biden said. "Nor should we want it to stop. As a matter of fact, it's one of the things I think we can be most proud of."



"An unrelenting stream of immigration. Nonstop, nonstop," Biden continued. "Folks like me who are Caucasian, of European descent, for the first time in 2017 [sic] we'll be an absolute minority in the United States of America. Absolute minority. Fewer than 50% of the people in America from then and on will be white European stock. That's not a bad thing. That's a source of our strength."



[Header image by Gage Skidmore]



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Do enough people know how contact tracing works?

One of my favorite weekly news wrap-up shows recently covered an interesting story.

It was from the Telegraph and entitled, Millions unwittingly tracked by phone after vaccination to see if movements changed.

The articles contents are interesting  if not unsurprising  to those against the rising Surveillance Oligarchy. But the reversal from contact tracing the supposed ill to instead surveilling the vaccinated is worth noting, as is the method of tracing described in the article.

Is humanity aware of the multivariate methods of contact tracing beyond the toggle switch in iOS and Android?

And just how do the methods being used by the Anglo-American Establishment at Oxford University in the above Telegraph story differ from those being dreamt up by Silicon Valley?

The short answer is that multiple entities (namely your cell carrier, Google, Apple, and their State and corporate affiliates) are all vying for their position in the emergent Panopticon. The long answer has to do with resolution and accuracy of metadata, but well get to that momentarily.

We kill people based on metadata. -General Michael Hayden

Most people know that contact tracing is a form of person-to-person surveillance using cell phones. Some know that Bluetooth is involved. Others are aware that cell carrier data can be used for contact tracing directly.

The deeper story lies in how each of these methods is accomplished, and by whom.

In this article, well take a look at the technicals of contact tracing  examining the (limited) source code and source documents where possible and unveiling other engineering methods utilized where we can.

Apple <3 Google: A Match Made in Hell

The first time Apple and Google crossed paths, Google CEO and Apple board member Eric Schmidt silently stole the concept for Android from Apples iOS.

The two operating systems now account for nearly 60% of all web traffic.

So it is no surprise that these surveillance titans, after cornering most of modern web traffic, turned to weaponize it under the auspices of a public health crisis in May of 2020.

Despite a propaganda push to ensure the public that contact tracing surveillance data is private, it is anything but  while a lone hacker may have trouble fetching and decrypting packets sent by this contact tracing API, the companies behind contact tracing and their affiliates have already pwned you.

Apple and Google can ruminate all they want that their contact tracing data being sufficiently encrypted and private:

yet their own API documentation reveals that all contact tracing is done on the Big Tech surveillance grid:

This code from Googles contact tracing API (or Application Programming Interface), is closed-source and unauditable. But for the layman, the concept of the API is simple  its a bit of code that performs calculations from a third-party server and returns data to whoever asked for it.

In the case of Apple and Googles contact tracing API, theyre the ones crunching the numbers. And they can share those results with whoever they want  governments, health insurance providers, police, intelligence agencies, you name it.

This doesnt sound very private to me.

Even if identifiers to these API calls are 100% anonymized and encrypted, Apple and Google can still associate your identity based on your Gmail or iCloud device login. In other words, the opposite of private.

While both Apple and Google have alleged methods to disable contact tracing in their settings, there is no way of verifying that this functionality is actually turned off. Apples code is entirely closed-source, and while the Android Open Source Project is fairly open, Googles contact tracing and gApps code is anything but.
Czech Republic made their vaccines available to self-payers. If you do not have public health insurance in the Czech Republic or the European Union and have been residing in the Czech Republic, you can now register for vaccination against coronavirus.The reservation system will offer vaccination places, where therell also be foreign-speaking staff. In this article Blesk will give you some helpful tips, how to get this done easily.

Interested parties can register through the Central Registration System, where a separate application form is at registrace.mzcr.cz/samoplatci. The payment will be done on the spot for the vaccine and the maximum price of one dose including application shall not exceed CZK 810. You will be vaccinated with the COMIRNATY vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech.

Who can get vaccinated from friday?

A person not insured within the public health insurance system of the Czech Republic can register for vaccination if they are citizen of the Czech Republic or a foreigner (from the EU or third countries) who has long term residence in the Czech Republic for more than 90 days pursuant to the Act on the Residence of Foreign Nationals, and who meets one of these conditions:

has a valid long-term or permanent residency permit in the Czech Republic holds a valid long-term visa is an EU citizen with confirmation of temporary residency or a permanent residency permit in the Czech Republic is a family member of an EU citizen with confirmation of temporary residency or a permanent residency permit in the Czech Republic.

How to register?

By registration, you express real interest to get yourself vaccinated. Please visit registrace.mzcr.cz. On the first page, you can see cohorts eligible for a vaccination. Scroll down and insert your phone number and confirm consent to personal data processing. You will receive a PIN after the confirmation, then please insert your PIN, fulfill everything needed, and select vaccination point.

If you make a typo during the registration, you can correct the mistake here: registrace.mzcr.cz/detail. Registration is only the first phase, and it does not mean that you have a vaccine slot reserved now. If you want to check the occupancy rate of vaccine centers, you can do it here.

Waiting for an SMS reminder

After the registration, you need to wait some time for an SMS reminder including PIN2. Waiting times may differ based on the capacity of the specific vaccination center/vaccination point.

Reservation

After receiving an SMS reminder including PIN2, you have 42 hours to complete your reservation and no worries, you will be notified a few times during that period. Then insert your health insurance number and PIN2 and you can choose from the available vaccination slot. Please do not forget to confirm your reservation. If you fail to complete your reservation within 42 hours, registration itself stays but your vaccine slot does not. Once the next vaccine slots are available, you will be notified with new SMS including a new PIN2. You have 3 attempts (each 42 hours long) to finish your reservation. Otherwise, your registration will be canceled. This is to prevent system overload with requests of individuals no longer interested in vaccination.

What to bring with you?

You should bring a document to verify your identity, a document to verify your residence permit in the Czech Republic and a payment card or cash (some vaccination centers only accept payment by card).

Where can you get vaccinated?

In each region, at least one vaccination site will be designated for this population group. There will be six of them in Prague: O2 universum, Fakultni nemocnice Bulovka, Fakultni Thomayerova nemocnice, Vseobecna fakultni nemocnice, Fakultni nemocnice Kralovske Vinohrady, and Nemocnice na Homolce.

Central Bohemian Region  Nemocnice Benesov, Nemocnice Mlada Boleslav

South Bohemian Region  Nemocnice Ceske Budejovice

Plzen Region  Fakultni nemocnice Plzen

Karlovy Vary Region  Karlovarska krajska nemocnice

Usti nad Labem Region  Masarykova nemocnice v Usti and Labem

Liberec Region  Krajska nemocnice Liberec

Hradec Kralove Region  Fakultni nemocnice Hradec Kralove

Pardubice Region  Pardubicka nemocnice

Vysocina Region  Nemocnice Jihlava

South Moravian Region  Fakultni nemocnice u sv. Anny, Fakultni nemocnice Brno

Olomouc Region  Fakultni nemocnice Olomouc

Zlin Region  Nemocnice Tomase Bati

Moravian-Silesian Region  Fakultni nemocnice Ostrava

When and how can you get EU Covid-19 certificate?

You can collect the certificate immediately after vaccination at the Citizen Vaccination Portal - https://ocko.uzis.cz.

If you need more information don't hesitate to call 1221 or email at covid-podpora@nakit.cz.
11. 6. 2021 / Muriel Blaive

MB: KSC was one of few communist parties (we can also think of the German and French CPs) that enjoyed genuine popular legitimacy at the time of their creation. Indeed, the Czech lands were an ideal playground for the Marxist theory (not so for Slovakia.)

ICL : How do you assess the position of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC) in the context of the European communist movement over the years from its foundation until 1990? Was the Communist Party a demonstrably subordinate component of the Soviet communist doctrine and policy? If so, to what extent did it also play an active role in Czechoslovakia and in the European communist movement?

The reason for it was socio-political: it was connected to the level of industrialization of Bohemia, with an already existing and organized working class, a developed economy, and a social-democratic tradition. But it was also cultural and religious: Czech culture, which had long lived under oppression, had developed a dislike for Austrian aristocracy, privileges, superiority. Egalitarianism was a constitutional part of Czech identity at the beginning of the twentieth century. Doubtless because the Catholic religion had been imposed by the Austrian ruler upon a domestic protestant preference inherited from a time of past glory (Jan Hus), religion was comparatively weak compared to neighboring countries. Moreover, the Czechs had no history of conflict with the Russians the way the Poles and the Hungarians did, on the contrary a current of Russophilia existed in Czech culture. And finally, communist parties spoke to national minorities. The KSC disproportionately recruited among Czechoslovak Germans, Hungarians, and Jews for easily understandable reasons: the communist party was a uniting force in a disunited world, one that promised empathy and respect for every identity.

Because it enjoyed genuine popular support, KSC could afford to be one of the most uncompromising communist parties. A party leadership can be inflexible only when it knows it is backed by real power; when its power is less assured, it becomes sensitive to pressures mounting from the bottom. Dogmatism is a luxury, and when it is applied in the wrong context, as was the case of the German, Polish, and Hungarian parties in the 1930s under the class against class strategy decreed from Moscow, it becomes suicidal. There the three parties vanished until 1945.

You ask if there are any documentary proofs that the KSC was subordinated to the Soviet doctrine and politics as if it were debatable that it was. I do not think there can be any doubt about it, from the moment it was bolshevized in the 1920s. Jacques Rupniks monograph on the history of the KSC provides abundant documentary evidence. The year when Klement Gottwald became general secretary of the party, 1929, he also became a member of the Czechoslovak Parliament. This anecdote is recounted over and over again, but it is worth repeating because it is so eloquent: he claimed, We are the party of the Czechoslovak proletariat and our headquarters is in Moscow. We go to Moscow to learn from the Russian Bolsheviks how to twist your necks. And as you know, Russian Bolsheviks are masters at that.

The Czechoslovak communists and sympathizers were believers but the Czech and Slovak citizens who cared to inform themselves could be left in no doubt as to what Stalinism meant in practice after the publication of Jiri Weils novel Moskva-hranice (1937.) In a moving narrative, Weil describes his experiences of repression as a committed communist living in the Soviet Union from 1933 to 1935, an experience that was very distant from the promises of the theory and his original ideals. But the Czech critique ignored the lessons of the novel for the most part.

At home and abroad, the Czechoslovak comrades were known for their particularly zealous enforcement of the Moscow dogma. Be it from former comrades memoirs, or the account of Karel Bartosek, it is quite certain that Artur London and other Czechoslovak comrades were amongst the most dogmatic Komintern representatives during the war in Spain (1936-1939.) It was also the case of Evzen (Jeno) Fried in France in the 1930s. Fried was a fiercely Stalinist Hungarian from Slovakia who pushed for the Stalinization of the French Communist Party and eliminated its moderate wing. He explained to the French comrades that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was justified since the Second World War was a war amongst imperialists - before completely turning face in 1941 and later dying in the Belgian resistance.

After the war, Stalin was intent on cooperating with the West and with the democrats in the countries occupied by the Red Army. The moderate post-1945 policy, the national road to socialism line adopted in each country, was dictated by Stalin and all leaders enforced it with undisguised enthusiasm. Milovan Djilas memoirs, Conversations with Stalin, offer a fascinating glimpse into this faked tolerance and honesty  faked because while Stalin was preaching moderation, the Red Army was occupying Central Europe at great cost to the local populations (except Czechoslovakia, which the Red Army already left on 1 December 1945.)

After the war, a new organization, the Cominform, replaced the Komintern, although it was less dogmatic and mainly less powerful. Giuliano Procacci edited the minutes of the three Cominform meetings. We can observe how the tone of the Soviet delegation changes from 1947 to 1949. All benevolence disappears and after the break with Tito in 1948, Stalin demands complete subservience from the other communist parties. Slansky and Gottwald, who were preaching tolerance and respect of the democrats in 1945, who had promised there would be no collectivization of the agriculture and Czechoslovakia would attain socialism in its own way, a national and democratic way, changed tone after 1947. Czechoslovakia would be Stalinist, and this change precipitated the February 1948 takeover.

That the KSC was subordinated to the USSR during Stalinism is obvious, but the destalinization in 1954-1956 was also imposed by Moscow, as I showed in my book. In 1968, the Prague Spring could take place because Brezhnev gave his blessing to Dubcek during his trip to Prague in late 1967. And after the 1968 interlude, the KSC was again subordinated to the Soviets during normalization, which surely needs no demonstration insofar as the country was occupied. Finally, 1989 happened as a direct consequence of Gorbachovs disengagement from Central Europe in 1988.

A more relevant question would be to know if the subservience of the KSC to Moscow means that communism was imposed from the outside upon a reluctant Czechoslovakia. There the answer is negative: first, because Czechoslovakia embraced communism voluntarily, and second because the forces who opposed it offered such feeble resistance as to be almost irrelevant. The KSC easily won the 1946 elections. The Czechoslovak population then collectively collaborated with the communist regime under various forms: by enrolling into the Party (49% of the Czech active population was KSC member by the end of 1948!), by collaborating with the StB, or simply by accepting the communist rule, be it grudgingly at times  Vaclav Havels plays Audience, Unveiling, and Protest are enlightening in this respect. Communism could have been imposed by force upon Czechoslovakia the way it was upon Poland and Hungary, but the fact is that it did not need to be.

The main reason for this was patriotism and even nationalism: not only was the Soviet Union and its Czechoslovak representative, the KSC, the only power capable of guaranteeing that the expelled Sudeten Germans would not return, but the KSC was the only force in Czechoslovakia capable of reuniting and reconciling the Czech lands and Slovakia after the fascist interlude in Slovakia and the disastrous collapse of the interwar Czechoslovak ideology  which had been, in reality, a form of Czech ethnonationalism imposed upon Slovakia. Czechoslovakia was a country where communism was strongly allied to nationalism/patriotism, which greatly contributed to its popular legitimacy. This is quite ironic if we consider the internationalist dimension of the communist ideology in the first years of the Komintern. But it cant be denied that Stalins bid to bind communism with nationalism in each country and to empty the ideology of international proletarianism of any content beneath its surface flourish, was remarkably successful. As Vaclav Havel judiciously remarked, no one cared about the Proletarians of the world, unite! sign in the greengrocers window.

Czechoslovak democrats also have their share of responsibility in the easy advent of communism. President Benes and the democrats tolerated the increasingly manifest postwar abuses of the KSC in domestic politics because they needed to close their eyes to the complete collapse of the interwar system they had promoted. Jan Masaryk described to his friend John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhowers future Secretary of State, how he had to close his nose with one hand while voting at the UN with the other, so foul-smelling were the Soviet proposals. What defense of democracy is this? The democrats closed their eyes on the abuses, which sometimes veered into ethnic cleansing, that accompanied the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans. Law no. 115/1946, which pardoned all excesses committed against the Germans, set the standard for future abuses of human rights, and it is one door that the democrats eagerly opened. As Benjamin Frommer has shown, the severity of the judicial postwar settlement with the Nazi collaborators was another blow to democracy, as well as a sinister model for the upcoming communist repression. The democrats then ingloriously renounced the Marshall Plan in July 1947. In February 1948, it is the democrats who precipitated a crisis by resigning from the government, it is a democrat, the son of the founding president himself, Jan Masaryk, who betrayed the democrats by refusing to resign (it is true that they had not bothered to consult him), it is a democratic president who surrendered and nominated the new communist government, and it is the democratically elected Parliament of 1946 that swore in the new communist government without one single vote against (although nine MPs did resign.)

Similarly, the Prague Spring was buried by Alexander Dubcek in person. He did not resist the occupation forces, he signed the agreements in Moscow, he stayed in power, and he undid himself the reforms he had done. To say that normalization was the fault of the Soviets would thus be very incomplete. Normalization was first and foremost First Secretary Husaks responsibility and that of his colleagues and collaborators. In this sense, its relationship with Eurocommunism was severed. These were two distinct realities, that answered to two very different contexts. Czechoslovak normalizers had more in common with French communists, who were similarly rooted in longue duree French culture, than with the more moderate Italian communists.

In short, the communist regime would probably not have taken hold of Czechoslovakia without the international context in 1948, but the communist ideology was deeply inscribed in Czech culture. Those who wanted to know knew what communism in practice would entail, but most people chose not to see and let it happen, or even enthusiastically supported it.

ICL: According to your assessment of history as well as your personal experience, how did Western influences, the Western European socialist and communist tradition, the Italian historical compromise, developments in France, Eurocommunism, and reformism in the communist movement in the post-Soviet space reflect in the formation, tradition, and history of the KSC and later in the post-communist KSCM?

M.B. Eurocommunism was in many ways an intellectual continuation of the Prague Spring  this is symbolized by the fact that the famous Czech communist intellectual Jiri Pelikan emigrated to Rome, and later became a member of the European Parliament for the Italian socialist party. But as we know, the Prague Spring was dead and buried in normalized Czechoslovakia. Both the Czechoslovak and French communists were rather the heirs of Stalinism. Both exercised the kind of rule that is made possible in the long run by having enough support to afford to err. They distributed privileges and bought loyalty in exchange  this is the (in)famous social contract I have described in the past years to the virtuous indignation of the anticommunists. That the KSC had built a genuine basis of support became obvious after 1989, insofar as a substantial part of the electorate continued voting for it. It did not want to reform itself because it was proud of its track record and it represented many citizens who regretted the simpler pre-1989 lifestyle and/or who deplored the excesses of wild capitalism  not without reason, I might add. Interestingly, the French communists followed a similar path. They, too, did not want to evolve despite their dwindling electoral support, comforted by the fact that they still had a strong militant base. As a result, both of them are now a civic organization that is not without popular support, but they are practically finished as political parties.

ICL: To what extent do you consider the development of Czechoslovakia after the Second World War until the full seizure of power by the Czechoslovak communists in February 1948 to be a consequence of the war, the activities of the communist resistance and the domestic post-war political development, and to what extent a consequence of the collapse of the anti-Hitler coalition and the action of external forces. Can you provide documentary evidence?

MB: There are several factors explaining the postwar development, some endogenous, some exogenous. The explanation will typically vary with the personal values and beliefs of the historian assessing this period, and also with the contemporary context at the time when he or she is writing. I do not think it would be productive or even possible to define precise degrees of responsibility for each factor. All contributed; all interacted.

As exogenous factors, I would cite the 1929 economic crisis, that created havoc in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s as it did elsewhere. The moral, political, and military betrayal of Czechoslovakia by France and Britain at Munich in 1938 was certainly crucial. The Nazi occupation and its terror regime were constitutive of the postwar identity. And finally, the Soviet sacrifice from 1941 to 1945 and its liberation of Czechoslovakia were certainly a major factor.

As endogenous factors, I would cite the collective enthusiasm of the Sudeten Germans for Nazism, the collapse of the Czech paternalism that had typified the First Republic, the failure of the country to fight for its ideals in 1938, the Slovak fascist betrayal in 1939, the betrayal of the conservative parties during the war, and the weakness of the anti-Nazi resistance. I would point you here to two more novels by Jiri Weil, Life With A Star and Mendelssohn Is on the Roof, as well as Josef Skvoreckys The Cowards, for an accurate description of the passive, one might say even indifferent behavior of the Czech population to other peoples suffering. The Czechs were not particularly antisemitic, yet they did very little to help their Jewish compatriots, and even less for the Roma. Even if it was justified by fear, I cannot believe that this attitude left no trace on the collective psyche  and a guilty conscience is perhaps easier to manipulate.

After the war, what is remarkable is the revenge that took at times the form of ethnic cleansing on the civilian German population, and the inexcusable pardoning of these crimes. All the rest derived from these two factors: it rendered the communists indispensable, and therefore the restriction of democratic life that they imposed was accepted without a blink. Half of the political spectrum was ousted. As mentioned above, a guilty conscience concerning collaboration with the Nazis and/or the expulsion of the Germans was offset by a particularly ruthless treatment of wartime collaborators, another blow to the democratic spirit. The democrats also fatefully let the KSC take over the territorial administration (National Committees) and redistribute the German land and belongings to its own benefit.

To cut a long story short, from the moment the democrats accepted, and depended on, the communists help to accomplish their national cleansing agenda, democracy was doomed. The democrats lost their souls by abandoning their traditional defense of democracy and human rights.

We can remark that all this was made possible because the communists also lost their souls by abandoning their traditional defense of national minorities. Stalins sudden turnabout seems to have occurred in 1943. In contradiction to its previous policy, the USSR now endorsed homogenous national communities, thus effectively sacrificing national minorities, especially of course the Germans. Stalin and Benes found a renewed ground for agreement in Moscow. The Czechoslovak communists of German descent Czechized their names and the KSC became the champion of Czechoslovak patriotism at the expense of its German and Hungarian minorities.

In your questions, you have repeatedly prompted me to supply documentary evidence, however all this has long been documented, there is nothing new in the sources that I am mentioning here. They have been freely accessible for decades for those who were interested in them. The question is, why was almost no one interested in them?

ICL: Was the 1968 Prague Spring an expression of national specificities or a reflection of objective processes in European society? Did the Prague Spring enrich European left-wing (communist, Eurocommunist, socialist) traditions? If so, what reactions of Western Europe can you name or describe? What practical relevance can historical research on the Prague Spring have for contemporary society?

MB: In my eyes, the Prague Spring is first and foremost a slow reaction to the deteriorating economic situation  the Stalinization of the economy had reached its absolute limits by 1963. However, the loosening of censorship opened the gates to a flood of guilt on the part of communist intellectuals who had promised a radiant future to the country in 1948 and who had led it instead to the political and economic hardships of Stalinism and the terrible injustices of the show trials and collectivization. It is often argued that the Prague Spring came late because there was so much terror that Czechoslovak society was anesthetized in 1956. However, I have shown in my book on 1956 that such was not the case. Passed the shock of the terror years, the people did get used to the Stalinist regime, and did find some advantages in it: first and foremost, security against the Germans, but also security against unemployment, generally the advantages of the welfare state, and let us not forget the vast social promotion that accompanied the downfall of the previous elites. 1968 is not a delayed 1956  it was not brought on by popular wrath. On the contrary, Alexander Dubcek was very popular.

The Prague Spring did coincide with a general mood of reckoning in the West. Younger generations there were rebelling against the corseted, authoritarian, and paternalistic societal model of their parents and grandparents, rebelling against the senselessness of war in Vietnam, reckoning with the Nazi past in Germany, rebelling against the authoritarianism and censorship of De Gaulles France. In short, they were shaking loose the model of conservative society they had grown up in. Western movements were led by youngsters who wanted to change the future, and who were more often than not even more radical and leftist than the communists. The Prague visit of Rudi Dutschke and Daniel Cohn-Bendit in spring 1968, and the systemic misunderstanding with Czech students that accompanied it, are quite enlightening in this respect. While the youthful Western revolutionaries despised bourgeois democracy, seen from Prague the very same bourgeois democracy was a dream.

Indeed, the Prague Spring was led by middle-aged intellectuals who wanted to repair past mistakes and injustices. In his autobiography, which was published only in French, historian Karel Kaplan has eloquently described his mental state when he discovered that the show trial victims were innocent: For more than ten years, I progressed on the path to truth. The road was interspersed with discoveries, disappointments, sleepless nights, painful questioning and self-examination, a path marked by overthrown idols and dead illusions. I went through a heart-rending inner conflict resulting from this confrontation between the ideals and reality, the illusions and the facts. [] I experienced this encounter with sources on two counts, as a historian and as a man who had brought his modest contribution to the edification of the work whose deep truth he was now searching. How had all this been possible? The Prague Spring was meant for the KSC to find an answer and to protect the communist rule from future such abuses.

Despite this cultural, political, and intellectual misunderstanding, Western elites were dazzled by the brilliance of socialism with a human face. Alexander Dubcek promised a purified version of socialism, a third way that would combine the social and intellectual advantages of communism (egalitarianism, equal opportunities, welfare state) with respect for human rights and freedom. One had to be singularly conservative not to find this program appealing.

Was communism doomed to fail or could the Prague Spring have saved the communist ideology had the Warsaw Pact armies not invaded Czechoslovakia? It is up for debate, but my answer is that it could not have. Even such a well-intentioned version of communism could not find the strength to acknowledge that it has misled the country. Slansky might have headed an objectionable regime, but he and his co-defendants were innocent of the crimes they were accused of at the Slansky trial. A full reckoning would have entailed acknowledging that the KSC had sacrificed national interests to the Soviet demands; in other words, this would have raised the issue of high treason. This was even truer concerning Horakova and the other democrats. There was no need to execute Horakova, it was an unforgivable moral transgression of the communist regime. The ambivalent attitude of the 1968 leadership towards Gottwald betrays as much. Dubcek and Husak stopped short of saying what needs to be said about Gottwald to this day: he betrayed his promise to lead the country on a national path to socialism. To this day, there is no academic biography of Klement Gottwald, as if acknowledging this ideal as an illusion, or a lie, was still too painful. We can observe that Havel, Klaus, and Zeman also kept silent on Gottwald.

The reason for this collective silence is in my mind quite obvious: if we did, or when we do, produce a quality biography of Gottwald that restitutes the importance of his role as a social actor, the whole communist era will finally find its legitimate place in Czech history. Communism was no accident of history, nor something un-Czech  quite on the contrary, communism is an important episode of Czech history, one that needs to be adequately acknowledged and reckoned with. It did not appear out of the blue but inscribed itself in a specific context, and it left palpable (if unacknowledged) traces in the collective consciousness.

ICL: What do you consider to be the key points of normalization in the Czech concept and how do you define it yourself if you have a different opinion? How is the 1969-1989 period of normalization in the traditional sense judged from the outside, specifically in Germany, France, Italy, the UK?

MB: In my understanding, normalization is both a long slippery slope to the collapse of communism and an ideal standpoint to observe the accommodation of the population to the communist rule. It is clear from all testimonies that almost no one expected the end to come anytime soon practically until November 1989. So, we can study how people endeavored to lead their lives in this constrained environment.

Retrospectively, it has become clear that 1968 marked the beginning of the widening gap in the standard of living between Czechoslovakia and Western countries, for instance neighboring Austria. The 1970s mark a great take-off in terms of development and standard of living in Western Europe (it had happened even sooner in the US.) The trauma and consequences of the Second World War were finally put aside. People became rich and came to terms with their misgivings about surrendering to consumer society. This is what the normalization regime was absolutely incapable of delivering. Things did not get worse, but they improved only very slowly, and by the second half of the 1980s were frankly stagnating.

When I started my studies in 1987, I kept hearing about a new phenomenon, which I didnt quite understand at first: globalization. Seen from todays viewpoint, it is obvious that the communist rule was at the end of its rope and would imminently collapse. What kind of an authoritarian, communist regime could we have had in the era of the internet, social media, and mass travel? In this sense, the Polish Netflix crime series 1983 is fundamentally ahistorical. Communism in power as it was practiced simply could not have lived on in the upcoming era of mass communication. At least not European communism. The Chinese development shows that another model was possible, but the latter entailed opening the borders and allowing free enterprise and shameless individual enrichment  the European communist parties in power were much too priggish for this. Also, the Chinese regime is embedded in patriotism in a way no European regime ever was, not even the Czechoslovak.

As I hinted before, normalization society embodies the dilemma of living under a stabilized dictatorship. The normative ambiguity of survival is impressively sketched. You have a regime propped by a foreign power that is all at once a liberator and an occupying force. You have a leadership that is both discredited and working hard to regain some legitimacy and coopt a new supporting class. You have intellectual elites that feel guilty for the 1950s and proud of the 1960s. You have a population that is left to decide whether and how much they will cooperate with this regime, this new normal, to gain a certain level of peace and quiet in their everyday lives. In the stadium of life, normalization was an Olympic-sized pool of murky waters in which all sorts of survival strategies took place. This is my definition. For a historian studying practices of domination, this is highly fertile ground.

ICL: What are the limits and what influences are reflected in contemporary historical research on the communist movement and the activities of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and what risks must be faced by the researcher who today seeks an honest understanding and description of this historical reality?

MB: The greatest obstacle to a productive interpretation of Czech communist history is ideological anticommunism. Czech memory politics have been obsessed after 1989 with the urge to de-historicize the communist period from national history, to expel it from memory, to pretend no national and social endorsement of the past regime ever took place. The pointlessness of this attitude could not be better illustrated than by the 1993 law that vilified communism as illegal and criminal while simultaneously proclaiming the laws passed under communism as valid until further notice.

It is not only absurd but damaging for many individuals and for the social fabric in general to act as if communism had no part in Czech history. By pre-ordaining a certain narrative that makes room only for heroes, victims, villains, and traitors, the individuality of the people living under communism, the complexity of their fates, and quite simply their identity, is denied, erased, and reshaped. Contrary to what its promoters hope, this process does not result in a shiny new nation, washed out of all its sins. Instead, it creates a society that is ill at ease, does not clearly understand why, and resorts to disillusioned silence or indignant condemnation where the past is concerned.

What Czech society should have learned from its communist experience is that to rewrite history from the top down in a vain exercise. Instead of emulating one of the worst traits of the communist power practice, it would be better inspired to build something new, to face its painful past, and to acknowledge that the communist experience is an irreducible part of Czech twentieth-century history. Only then will Czech society be able to cope with it, and to proceed to a badly needed form of national reconciliation.

How much longer can we endure this undignified post-communist period? It is high time to move on, or it will soon outlast the duration of communism itself. As Havel put it, salvation lies in taking responsibility. To take responsibility is now the order of the day, on all sides.


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But Starbucks is running out of ingredients for Very Berry Hibiscus Refreshers and almond croissants after being one of the clear winners of the pandemic economy. During lockdowns, the coffee chain quickly shifted from its position as a third place, where people could linger to work or meet up for long chats, to focusing on frictionless transactions with customers ordering through mobile apps and drive-thrus. Earlier this year, company executives said Starbucks had seen a full recovery in U.S. sales, back to prepandemic levels.
Gambler First Nations urban reserve being developed on 18th Street North in Brandon will soon have a gas bar.

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Gambler First Nations urban reserve being developed on 18th Street North in Brandon will soon have a gas bar.

Heritage Co-op has reached a deal with the First Nation to develop a gas bar on the property.

The gas bar will be the first under Federated Co-operatives Ltd.s new Western Nations brand, which is being developed in partnership with Indigenous communities.

While most of the gas bars under the brand will be Indigenous-owned and operated, Heritage Co-op general manager Dennis Laing told the Sun on Thursday that Gambler and his organization have come to an agreement for the location to be run by Heritage Co-op.

Though Laing has only been in his position for four weeks, he said it was his understanding that conversations between Heritage Co-op and Gambler started approximately three years ago.

"Were very excited about entering this strategic partnership for a few different reasons," Laing said. "First and foremost, it will be mutually beneficial for both parties. It will allow Gambler to own a business in the City of Brandon and create some long-term sustainability for the members of their community."

According to Laing, it will be the first Western Nations gas bar in Manitoba. The first to open in Canada is located in Saskatchewan.

Ground broke on the urban reserve in May 2019, but the process of creating the urban reserve got its start in 2017 when the City of Brandon and Gambler First Nation entered into a municipal development and service agreement.

A minor scandal emerged when design documents for proposed developments on the site showed a gaming centre alongside a planned hotel. At the time, Mayor Rick Chrest said the city had never spoken to Gambler about a casino being developed within the city.

It turned out that an early rendering of the site from much earlier in the development process had been sent out by mistake.

In February 2020, the First Nation narrowly passed a referendum on pursuing development on the site by a margin of 72 votes for to 70 votes against. The federal government later upheld the results of the referendum after a five-month investigation.

The location is expected to open by the end of this year.

 cslark@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @ColinSlark
If targets are met, Manitoba could see a first round of health restriction reductions by Canada Day.

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If targets are met, Manitoba could see a first round of health restriction reductions by Canada Day.

On Thursday morning, Premier Brian Pallister and chief provincial public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin unveiled the "4-2-3-One Great Summer" reopening path for the province.

"Summers coming and the vaccines are here," Pallister said. "Its time for Manitobans to get their freedoms back and enjoy a summer that we all want and we all deserve."

The plan sets three dates over the summer when the province hopes to reach certain COVID-19 vaccination thresholds.

If more than 70 per cent of all eligible Manitobans have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and 25 per cent have received their second dose by Canada Day, certain businesses, services and facilities can open at 25 per cent capacity.

Then, if 75 per cent of Manitobans have received their first shot and more than 50 per cent have received their second shot by the August long weekend, certain businesses, services and facilities can open at 50 per cent capacity.

Finally, if Manitoba reaches the 80 per cent threshold for first doses and passes the 75 per cent threshold for second doses by Labour Day, businesses, services and facilities can open with limited restrictions.

Manitoba is unlike other provinces in that vaccination rates are the only indicator being used to determine when to move to further stages, though Roussin said public health would continue to monitor other indicators.

British Columbia accounts for COVID-19 case counts, hospitalizations and mortality rate on top of the vaccination rates to determine when to progress. Alberta considers total hospitalizations and vaccination rates. Ontario has set vaccination targets, but "health system indicators" are used to determine if its safe enough to progress.

Saskatchewans plan appears to only take vaccination rates into account like Manitobas.

"Public health supports this phased-in approach to reopening," Roussin said. "It strikes a good balance between now and where we want to and need to be. This plan also gives some flexibility, so we can monitor the situation and make the best decisions based on data at that time."

According to Pallister, some restrictions could be lifted earlier if milestones are hit ahead of schedule. The plan does not mention how the timeline will be adjusted if targets are not hit in time or how the plan will be affected if a fourth wave of the pandemic hits the province.

"If we do worse, were not going to get our freedoms back as fast," Pallister said.

Asked repeatedly what would happen if Manitoba reached its vaccination targets but still had a high number of cases or hospitalizations, Roussin said the specifics would be dealt with by public health when they arrive.

"Today I got my second dose of Pfizer, but Im reading with concern, as we all are, that the first dose of Pfizer may not work as well at protecting against the Delta variant," Pallister said. "Yet it does work to reduce the severity of the Delta variant, therefore there could be number of cases but not the same degree of need for hospitalization or ICU as a consequence of more vaccines.

Neither Roussin nor Pallister said exactly what businesses, services and facilities would be allowed to reopen. However, the doctor emphasized that the reopening plan would not lead to a post-COVID Manitoba, merely a post-pandemic one.

"There are many other plans, seven that Ive read in detail," Pallister said. "Four of those have already departed from the reopening strategies theyve announced. Everybodys in a battle against an unprecedented, adversarial opponent. We have the ability today to lay out a plan, with targets that are very specific and precise and we have the ability, as we have always done, to lay out public health orders to reinforce that reopening."

Earlier this week, the premier announced a new vaccination card program in which those who have reached the two-week mark after receiving their second dose of vaccine can apply for a card that would convey special privileges, such as not having to self-isolate upon returning to Manitoba after travelling domestically.

On Thursday, Pallister added another element to the scheme: those travelling to Manitoba from other provinces and territories who can prove theyve received two doses of vaccine will not have to self-isolate anymore when entering the province.

Speaking to the Sun by phone on Thursday, Manitoba NDP Leader Wab Kinew said the branding for the reopening plan reminds him of the "RestartMB" plan from last year.

"It seems like the government continues to spend a lot of their time and energy on slogans and catchphrases, but not on the really important stuff like investing in health care," Kinew said. "To me, that was a pretty big missing plank from this release today. It didnt really talk about health care. It didnt talk about what theyre doing to strengthen our health-care system, to strengthen our ICUs, including the one in Brandon, didnt talk about how theyre going to get a fair deal with nurses, which I think is super important today as nurses vote to go on strike."

Kinew also criticized the plan for not taking pandemic indicators other than vaccinations rates into consideration and not providing details on what exactly will be reopening in each stage.

Manitoba Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont told the Sun he believed the provincial government had rushed out a plan to say that they have one in place.

"It doesnt actually do anything for anyone," he said. "What we need is a plan based on things like case counts, the infection rate, the number of people in ICU and not just the number of people who are vaccinated."

Lamont also called out the lack of specifics for businesses.

"Its absolutely critical to have business support because there are so many businesses who lose money if theyre open at 25 per cent or can only be open at 50 per cent," he said. "The premier is forcing businesses to operate this way. If youre going to force businesses to operate this way, you have to compensate them one way or another, give them some kind of break."

While new Brandon Chamber of Commerce president Barry Cooper is glad a plan is in place, he has concerns about the lack of specifics.

"We desperately needed to have something written down that said what we need to do and what we can do to get there," Cooper said. "I think its also important that its based on vaccination rates, because thats something individuals have control over ... we view (vaccinations) as the quickest way for businesses to reopen. That said the plan is, in my mind, short on details. Id really like if it had given us details on which businesses will be able to reopen when we hit those target marks."

Like Lamont, Cooper had concerns over a lack of new supports for businesses.

"With this announcement and the very few changes to public health orders that were announced here, we still have a lot of closed businesses, and closed businesses have no income," he said. "All they have are expenses. If were going to have businesses closed for the greater good of all Manitobans, its not unreasonable that we ask that they receive some support from the government. In the short term, I think that has to be a continuation of the bridge grant because we can get that money out really quickly."

Today through Sunday, Peoples Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier is scheduled to visit several Manitoba communities for anti-lockdown protests.

Asked about what the province would be doing in response to those events held in violation of public health orders, Pallister said he cant influence law enforcement but said the PPC leader would have his pockets lightened by fines if he carries out his plan.

Shortly after the media conference ended, Bernier tweeted that hed received an email from the manager of Manitoba Healths health protection unit telling him hed have to self-isolate in a hotel or other residence for two weeks upon entry to Manitoba.

Bernier indicated he would not follow that directive.

 cslark@brandonsun.com

 Twitter: @ColinSlark
The deadly attack against a Muslim family in southwestern Ontario was "a senseless act," the father of the man accused in what police believe was a deliberate hate crime said Thursday.

In this artist's sketch, Nathaniel Veltman makes a video court appearance in London, Ont., Thursday, June 10, 2021 as Justice of the Peace Robert Seneshen (top left) and lawyer Alayna Jay look on. Veltman, accused of deliberately running over and killing four members of a Muslim family in London, Ont., had his case adjourned to next week. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Alexandra Newbould

The deadly attack against a Muslim family in southwestern Ontario was "a senseless act," the father of the man accused in what police believe was a deliberate hate crime said Thursday.

The family was out for an evening stroll when a man driving a pickup truck mounted the sidewalk and ran them over, killing four people and sending a child to hospital with serious injuries.

Nathaniel Veltman, 20, has been charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder.

"It was with utmost shock and horror that I came to hear of the unspeakable crime committed last weekend," Veltman's father, Mark Veltman, said in an email to The Canadian Press.

"There are no words adequate to properly express my deep sorrow for the victims of this senseless act."

Relatives have identified the dead as 46-year-old Salman Afzaal, his 44-year-old wife Madiha Salman, their 15-year-old daughter Yumna Salman and her 74-year-old grandmother, Talat Afzaal.

The couple's nine-year-old son, Fayez, was seriously wounded but is expected to recover.

Police allege the attack was a planned and premeditated act that targeted Muslims.

Court documents filed when Veltman's parents filed for divorce in 2016 suggest he took his parents' separation hard.

The oldest of six children who were homeschooled - along with his twin sister - Veltman blamed his mother, Alysia Bisset, for the divorce, the documents show.

"Nathan is combative and argumentative with me to the extent that he will follow me around the house and I have to lock myself in my bedroom," Bisset wrote in court documents.

Bisset said Nathaniel stopped following the family's rules around that time.

"Nathan has gone to the extreme of stating that he would like to move out of our home into his own apartment and has discussed his plans with (Mark Veltman)," she wrote.

Nathaniel Veltman was 15 at the time.

Mark Veltman said he wasn't to blame for his eldest son's anger, court documents say.

"Nathaniel's anger with (Bisset) is primarily due to (Bisset's) attempt to prevent Nathaniel from having any contact with me," Mark Veltman wrote.

"Nathaniel is 16 years old and very much wants to maintain contact with me."

He also wrote his son became more hostile with him, which he blamed Bisset for.

Nathaniel Veltman was 16 when he moved out to live with friends, his father wrote.

Nathaniel Veltman took the rare step of "withdrawing from parental control" when he was 17 years old, court documents show.

Earlier Thursday Veltman made a brief virtual appearance in court to face four counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder.

Veltman, wearing an orange T-shirt , orange pants and a blue face mask, spoke calmly and clearly from the Elgin Middlesex Detention Centre.

"Mr. Veltman have you retained counsel?" asked Justice of the Peace Robert Seneshen.

"I've only spoken to them," Veltman said, adding that he was in discussions with a local law firm.

Court heard that the Crown continues to work on disclosure, which will be provided to Veltman once he has retained a lawyer.

Veltman is set to return to court on June 14.

Meanwhile, calls continue to grow for a national summit on anti-Muslim hate.

The National Council for Canadian Muslims has a petition signed by more than 35,000 people calling for all levels of government to tackle Islamophobia.

"This loss of a family, the loss of a child in our community because of Islamophobia  this is a sorrow that will run deep for a long time," the council wrote in the petition. "Let that sorrow be the ground where we stand for justice and stand for change."

The group's petition echoes a call by the London Muslim Mosque, to which the family belonged.

The funeral for the family will be held at 1:30 p.m. Saturday at the Islamic Centre of Southwest Ontario that is open to the public. The family will hold a private visitation in the morning at the O'Neil Funeral Home.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 10, 2021.
A company awarded $7 million to monitor industrial emissions on 47,000-year-old rock art in Western Australias north has been dismissed for breach of contract; meanwhile, the state has indicated for the first time that it is considering limiting industrial development nearby.

Murujuga (the Dampier Archipelago, including the Burrup Peninsula), near the mining town of Karratha in the states Pilbara region, is home to the worlds largest, densest and most diverse Aboriginal rock art gallery  more than 1 million images across 37 hectares.

On Murujugas Burrup Peninsula, rock art and industry are a little too close for comfort.

It is also home to the major export operations of Woodside Petroleum, Rio Tinto and Yara Pilbara.

Fifteen years worth of studies over whether industrial emissions, dust, clearing and traffic are accelerating the natural weathering of the art have been hotly contested, including through a federal inquiry, with previous monitoring identifying shortcomings in the science.
I think its fantastic that states are taking it upon themselves to move in the right direction of their own accord, but until things like this are federally discussed and recognized as well, there are going to be quite a few people, such as myself and my wife, who wont benefit directly, he said. Weve come such a long way, but there are still steps that can be taken.
She grew up in a Jewish family in Connecticut (her parents ran a small retail business), and was drawn to the study of China, she thinks, because it was exotic and represented the kind of intellectual challenge she was up for. Of course I knew so little at the time but the idea stayed in my head, she says of the history book. And every time I thought I actually knew a lot about China, I realised I didnt know a lot about China. There are concubines who claim illegitimate sons as heirs, mothers knocking off their sons half-brothers, and the plotting of courtiers. In 2018, when Chris Feik of Black Inc asked if she would like to write the China edition of the publishers Shortest History series, she thought: That is my dream. I couldnt sit down and write it off the top of my head, even after all these years, because China is such a complex place, Jaivin says. But at least I now know what books to go to. And I know what people to ask, to look at the manuscript once its done.

We are seated at a corner table in front of a pleasing Italian-esque mural. As the waitress hovers, I ask Jaivin if she is an entree person. I am an everything person, she replies. On her recommendation, we order stuffed zucchini flowers to share for entree. Zucchini flowers. Credit:Edwina Pickles Jaivin orders risotto with saffron, semi-dried tomatoes, stracciatella and basil for her main. I order the maccheroni with cherry tomatoes and parmesan and rosemary pan grattato. We are clearly not going to cover off the entire history of China during this lunch, particularly as we only order one glass of wine each (Pinot Grigio for Jaivin, Chardonnay for me).

But Jaivin says there are several through-lines in Chinese history which stretch from prehistory to present. One is corruption, and the fear that corruption is going to bring down a dynasty, because corruption has been part of the fall of every Chinese state, she says. What happens is, the rulers go corrupt. They ignore the needs of the people. The people suffer, and they rebel. So, when Xi Jinping came into power in 2012, the first thing he did was launch a major anti-corruption campaign. Theres a reason for that, and its existential: for power. The second through-line, Jaivin says, is anxiety around succession.

Her book is full of concubines who claim their illegitimate sons as heirs, mothers knocking off their sons half-brothers, and the plotting of courtiers. Throughout the book there are axe blows through the night, she laughs. An orderly succession is kind of a holy grail. And so thats another theme, how you work out succession. When some of them were pressured to inform on me, and their families threatened... I just thought, I cant do this any more. Another constant of Chinese history is the strong women characters who emerge throughout  although the influence of Confucianism, with its patriarchal conservatism, has often inhibited Chinese womens freedom. Jaivin dislikes some aspects of Confucianism (chiefly, its hierarchical prescriptions for society) but has learned from its veneration of elders, and its emphasis on humility.

Humility, I think its a rare thing these days, its very underrated. Confucius said ... Here, Jaivin breaks into what seems to me to be flawless Mandarin, and then kindly translates it for me. When three people walk together, there is always one who can teach, who is my teacher, she says. Translated into contemporary idiom, it means: Youre not the smartest person in the room. Jaivins quest for knowledge took her away from home soon after she graduated with Honours from Brown. She moved to Taiwan to continue her study of the Chinese language. Later, she lived in Hong Kong and Beijing, working variously as a textbook editor, a journalist and a translator. She met Australian academic Geremie Barme in Hongkong in 1981 and they married in 1986 (they divorced amicably in 1993).

In China, the couples friends and peers were a group of artists, dissidents, musicians and older literati (translators, editors, cartoonists, and opera writers), many of whom Jaivin wrote about in her memoir/travelogue/social history The Monkey and the Dragon (published 2001). Our mains arrive, and I realise I must manage my tomato-based dish while wearing a white shirt. Thats why I dont listen to the Taoists, Jaivin chuckles. Black is much more forgiving. Risotto with saffron, semi-dried tomatoes, stracciatella and basil and maccheroni with cherry tomatoes and parmesan and rosemary pan grattato. Credit:Edwina Pickles I affix a napkin-bib to my front and ask whether Jaivins understanding of China changed the better she knew the language.

Oh, it made all the difference. It was something that was kind of weird and esoteric, and outside myself, until I began learning the language, she says. And then I began to internalise and have access, both to written stuff and through people and interactions. In 1986, life in Beijing, where Jaivin was working for Asiaweek magazine, became more dangerous, not for her, but for her Chinese friends. I was tailed, they were tailed, some of them were pressured, she recounts. When some of them were pressured to inform on me, and their families threatened, and then they told me, I just thought, I cant do this any more. Barme and Jaivin moved to Canberra, where Barme was studying for his PhD at the Australian National University. Jaivin fell in love with the Australian bush and was freelancing and doing bit-translation work (some of it very notable  she wrote the subtitles for the films Farewell My Concubine and Hero) when she turned her mind to fiction-writing.

The Shortest History of China by Linda Jaivin. It was another thing she had always wanted to do. She had written a comical erotic story based around four women in Sydney who shared their sexual experiences with each other. A publisher friend suggested she send it in to Australian Womens Forum, the now-defunct feminist-leaning soft porn mag. Id been writing all this stuff about China, because I was trying to flog my knowledge as a freelance writer, trying to make a living, Jaivin says. And I would write something using all my knowledge about Chinese film, and I would get paid $250. So I send off this story that I wrote in probably an hour, and revised in half an hour, to Australian Womens Forum. I remember the cheque that came back, I think it was $2000.

About that time, Michael Heyward from Text Publishing approached Jaivin to write for him. He said, I think you have a book-length essay in you. And I said, Probably, but I also have an erotic novel. This was in the days before chick-lit was a thing. Sex and the City was but a glimmer in Darren Stars eye. Linda Jaivin at the launch of her bestselling novel Eat Me in 1995. Credit:James Alcock Text Publishing snapped up the book, which was titled Eat Me, and it became an international bestseller that was translated into over a dozen languages.

Other novels followed. She has written across genres including erotica, social satire and historical. Jaivin has never blanched at writing explicit erotic fiction (some of it involving the combination of fruit with sex acts) while carrying on an academic career as a China-scholar. If people cant accept that you can have several sides to you, what kind of world is that? she says. At some point I just thought, I dont want to be hiding secrets. Im just gonna do what I do. Jaivins latest book couldnt be more timely, given Australias increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the Peoples Republic of China. Jaivins main beef with our governing class is that they dont know enough of Chinas history and culture as they seek to manage Chinese expansionism.

The check please. Jaivin watches with absolute horror the Australian governments recent jousting with China. I think theyre playing to a domestic audience, she says. I think theyre being advised by China hawks who are not China-literate. I think theyre not trying to get the best advice. China has been divided many, many times in its history. The unifiers are the heroes and Xi Jinping wants to make his mark by bringing Taiwan back into the Chinese fold. Jaivin says that would be abhorrent because Taiwan is a democratic place. But Australia beating the drums of war is dangerous posturing.

She believes Australia needs a China advisory taskforce that is not ideologically guided, but guided by knowledge and understanding. There is a Chinese saying that one chopstick can be broken but if you put them in a bundle, you cant break them. Loading We need to really consider how to, when we want to make a strong statement, we do it in alliance with others, Jaivin says. She ends by quoting Sun Zi, who said that the best way to win a war is not to have to fight it at all. We order coffee, and then Jaivin flows off, past the fountain, to her nearby home.
Sinead Stubbins approach to dealing with the angst of acute self-consciousness has a long comic lineage  you lay yourself bare, sending up your flaws and insecurities before anyone else can do it for you. Self-exposure as self-defence. In particular, she has an obsession with coolness and her own lack thereof. Once she got to university, she thought that she would finally unlock her true self only to find a new set of guidelines that were far more insufferable than the last. Now in the workforce, she is still trying to crack the latest cool code. While it can be frustrating that she cares, even as Stubbins dumbs herself down to extract humour at her own expense, we know her self-deprecation is borne of insight. I was always mirroring other peoples tastes; I didnt know how to just be.

I Saw The Dog by Alexandra Aikhenvald

I Saw The Dog

Alexandra Aikhenvald

Profile Books, $29.99

If you said to a speaker of Tariana from Brazilian Amazonia, Columbus discovered America they would think the statement dodgy  and not just because they were there before him. In Tariana, every assertion has an ending attached to the verb to indicate how the speaker knows what they are saying, whether they saw, inferred, assumed or are reporting the information. So, they would ask, Did the speaker see Columbus arrive? Or is this knowledge hearsay? Many scholars, says Alexandra Aikhenvald in this lively introduction to the role of language in human society, wish English was so precise for evidentiary reasons and for matters of trust. This is not a book about signs and signifiers but one built on the stories of native speakers  and the linguists who study their often-threatened tongues.
A man has been shot in the leg by police after allegedly stabbing an officer in the hand on Sydneys northern beaches.

Assistant Commissioner Leanne McCusker said police were called about 5.15pm on Friday to a home on Warringah Road, Narraweena and found a man allegedly armed with a knife and attempting to gain access to that address.

She said a violent confrontation ensued and the man, known to police, allegedly attacked.

He allegedly stabbed a male officer in the hand, causing a laceration, and threw a fire extinguisher, hitting him on the head.
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk says she will probably travel to Tokyo in July to make the final presentation to the International Olympic Committee in person, barring any future outbreaks of coronavirus.

It follows the news that the IOC board had unanimously backed Brisbane 2032 Olympics, with the final hurdle now a full vote of the IOC in Tokyo in July.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she plans to go to Tokyo as long as there isnt a local outbreak. Credit:Getty

Ms Palaszczuk said it was her intention to go and give the presentation in person, but that was dependent on circumstances.

It will either be myself and the Lord Mayor [Adrian Schrinner] going, or it will be [Tourism and Sport Minister] Stirling Hinchliffe and the Deputy Mayor [Krista Adams], the Premier said.
Queensland health authorities believe they have identified the strain of coronavirus the Victorian couple who crossed state lines were infected with, and said other attempts by travellers to breach the border had been intercepted.

No new COVID-19 cases were recorded on Friday despite fears in the Sunshine Coast community of an outbreak.

Queensland Chief Health Officer Jeanette Young. Credit: Supplied

Chief Health Officer Jeanette Young said the couples virus had been partially sequenced.

It looks like they have the Kappa variant, which is slightly less infectious, but still more infectious than previous variants, she said.
He appears to be claiming that Australia, by virtue of being at the frontline of the supposed new Cold War against China, is a standard bearer for a world order that favours freedom. But I think it is a case more of the PMs cleverly tapping into President Bidens longstanding alliance of democracies rhetoric. Far from being out front, Mr Morrison is playing the role of presidential mimic, Curran says. Far from being out front, Mr Morrison is playing the role of presidential mimic. Professor James Curran, Sydney University One way or another, Morrison is firmly on the same page as the new president. Its a easier page to be on than Trumps. In the Trump era, closeness might be deemed necessary for Australias interests but was decidedly awkward.

For instance, when asked on radio before his September 2019 US visit (with its state dinner) whether Trump was a good president, one could almost hear Morrison sliding across the room. Yeah I, look weve got a straight up relationship and he respects Australia. In Wednesdays speech Morrison talked up Australias book, declaring in the written version: Australia is more connected and more respected today than arguably at any time in our history. He added: We have worked hard to ensure we are not a nation that can be easily marginalised and driven to unacceptable compromises. Loading In broad strategic and economic terms, Morrison goes to the G7 focused on and preoccupied with the threat of an ever-more assertive China. Australia has increasingly felt the harsh edge of Chinas diplomatic tongue, and some Australian exports suffer as China weaponises trade to express its displeasure over various issues. Morrison is looking for maximum attention on the China challenge from allies and friends, especially the US, at the G7 and on every other possible occasion.

Given how deleterious for Australia Chinas behaviour now is, the governments reaction is not surprising. But there is also the risk of it becoming seriously counterproductive. In Western Australia, theres concern China could threaten that states iron ore exports. Critics dont buy the federal governments argument this would be against Chinas own interests and so is unlikely. Scott Morrison and WA Premier Mark McGowan are not seeing eye to eye when it comes to the Australia-China relationship. Credit:WAtoday WA premier Mark McGowan was decidedly unimpressed with the tone of Morrisons speech. McGowan warned that we need to be very careful in relation to our language and the way we approach these things because we could be the big losers out of it. One specific issue Morrison hopes the G7 will push is reform of the World Trade Organisations disputes settlement system, which has broken down in the wake of Trump vetoing the appointment of new judges. A well-functioning process is vital, especially for a country like Australia, to enforce trade rules and deal with grievances.

The Australian National Universitys Shiro Armstrong, an expert on the WTO, says Morrisons urging lends weight to a wider international recognition that global trade rules are outdated and the current system is under threat. While the G7 is expected to call for action, Armstrong says change will require broader support. He points to the G20 (of which Australia is a member) being the body able to set the strategic direction for reform of the WTO given its membership of the large emerging economies and established powers. Loading Among the central issues on the G7 agenda will be climate change and the pandemic. Morrison has made it clear he is not ready yet to embrace a firm 2050 target for net zero emissions  though he wants to before the Glasgow climate conference in November  let alone lift Australias ambition in the near term.

For all his talk of technology, and his defensive stand on Australias record, he wont be in tune with the G7 leaders. It will be embarrassing. The question is, how embarrassing? Will he be put on the spot in plain sight, or will Australias laggard position be politely ignored in public? And behind closed doors, will Biden twist his arm to move faster, or will the president leave that until later, or to his climate envoy John Kerry? Britains Boris Johnson has already been firm with him. Loading On the pandemic, Morrison will be able to boast about Australias health and economic performance. Perhaps he wont dwell on the slowness and problems of the rollout. But the G7 leaders will be focused on the need to get more vaccines to developing countries. Biden is proposing a big US initiative. Morrison will point to the vaccine aid Australia is funding for the region. We could always do more however  the government has on order and will receive more doses than necessary to fully cover all eligible Australians.
Businesses owners who have refused to serve maskless customers have agreed to apologise following complaints to Victorias human rights commission.

Since last March, the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission has received 231 complaints from people with legitimate exemptions for not wearing a mask.

Salon owner Mhairi McQueen said requiring maskless customers to produce medical certificates would make things easier for business owners. Credit:Simon Schluter

Almost 90 per cent of these complaints were settled through dispute resolution, with the most common outcome an apology or letter of regret from the respondent and a change of policy to reflect state government rules.

It comes as Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton defended the governments decision to require people to wear mask outdoors, saying outdoor settings shouldnt be dismissed as potential exposure sites.
Convicted paedophile and former Christian Brother Ted Bales has pleaded guilty to abusing 19 children in the 1970s and 1980s, bringing to 50 his total number of confirmed victims.

Bales on Friday entered a plea of guilty through his lawyer to 33 charges of indecent assault in Melbourne Magistrates Court, related to 19 victims. The charges represent a series of offences against his victims as prosecutors withdrew dozens of other individual charges.

Ted Bales in 1994 when he was known as Edward Dowlan. Credit:Geoff Ampt

Bales, 71, who was formerly known as Edward Dowlan until he changed his surname by deed poll, was a teacher and dormitory supervisor at schools in Melbourne, Ballarat, Geelong and Warrnambool in the 1970s and 1980s, where the attacks took place. He was a Christian Brother until he left the order in 2008.

The charges he pleaded guilty to on Friday relate to offending in Melbournes northern suburbs, in Ballarat and in and around Geelong.
On a usual Friday at lunchtime, Pellegrinis Espresso Bar would have a queue stretching down Bourke Street, says owner David Malaspina. But this was no usual Friday.

Inside the empty cafe, staff polished glassware and wiped down the large coffee machine, waiting for customers to arrive. By 12.30pm only 30 people had set foot inside.

Pellegrinis owner David Malaspina. Credit:Chris Hopkins

Another lockdown, Mr Malaspina said, could ruin him.

You cant do lockdowns any more, he said. Theyre killing us. Our industry doesnt survive lockdowns. When they [the state government] scare people out of the city, and actively tell people not to come in, they kill the heart of Victoria, the CBD. Theyre killing it.
Tunnelling workers on the $6.7 billion West Gate Tunnel will earn more than $300,000 a year after the projects builders cut a pay deal with one of Victorias powerful building unions.

The workplace agreement covering tunnel workers ends an industrial relations stand-off of more than three years between the projects builders and the Australian Workers Union.

The West Gate Tunnel construction. Credit:Joe Armao

It will set a standard for the industry on future transport projects in Victoria, including the $16 billion North East Link.

Construction workers in Victoria are among the highest-paid blue-collar workers in the country. This has come about because the state has historically been home to the nations strongest building unions.
I cite that because while I try to be objective I cant guarantee it. Especially because once the 1948 war began, those Holocaust survivors had somewhere to go. As they landed in Israel, some were handed rifles and sent into battle.
Former special forces soldier Ben Roberts-Smith has told his Federal Court defamation trial that being awarded the Victoria Cross put a target on my back and left him open to spite-fuelled attacks from other soldiers.

On Friday, the eleventh anniversary of a 2010 battle in Tizak, Afghanistan, for which he was awarded Australias highest military honour, Mr Roberts-Smith said the 14-hour military assault had put a dent in the Taliban from which they would not recover for many years.

Ben Roberts-Smith arrives at court on Friday morning. Credit:Nick Moir

An estimated 76 Taliban insurgents were killed when Australian troops stormed the Taliban stronghold.

That kind of battle has not happened for Australian troops since Vietnam, Mr Roberts-Smith told the Federal Court in Sydney on the fifth day of his defamation trial against The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Conflicts  between journalists, editors and management  are the subatomic particles of journalism without which not much journalism appears. But rarely has an internal editorial process become so public than when the ABCs managing director David Anderson decided to delay an upcoming Four Corners episode about the Prime Minister and his connections to a QAnon conspiracy theorist. Once again when ABC journalistic endeavour rubs up against the federal government, the friction throws the national broadcaster into turmoil. The ABCs elite investigative unit strives to uncover damaging political stories that their colleagues cant or wont. As veteran investigative reporter Andrew Fowler, the last person to have a Four Corners episode delayed by ABC management, puts it: Four Corners is the single most important investigative unit in Australia. Its powerful visual impact has the kind of political clout that really worries governments. Yet for its detractors, staff at the program are operating as a journalism vigilante unit whose overzealous reporting and intemperate tweets have plunged the ABC once again into crisis. A Four Corners episode about the Prime Minister was delayed by managing director David Anderson. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The decision by the public broadcasters current affairs flagship to pursue a story about Prime Minister Scott Morrisons links to the QAnon conspiracy in the shadow of a defamation suit involving Industry Minister Christian Porter  with the same reporter, Louise Milligan, at the helm  has placed an already irate government on a war footing with the public broadcaster. After weeks of ignoring Milligans requests for comment, Morrison took aim at Four Corners in a press conference last week, claiming it was deeply offensive to suggest he has any association with the QAnon conspiracy (which centres on unfounded and discredited claims about an international paedophile ring) and accusing the program of poor form. On Friday, executive producer Sally Neighbour confirmed the episode, which explores the relationship between the Morrison family and QAnon supporter Tim Stewart, will run on Monday night.

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One Liberal MP, who requested anonymity to speak about internal party room discussions, said there was a widely-held view within Coalition ranks that Four Corners had a vendetta against the government, and this was being met with an animosity comparable to the Abbott-era nadir when MPs boycotted discussion program Q&A. The frustration and concern with the ABC is as strong as its ever been. It routinely gets raised in the party room and no one ever gets up to defend them, the MP said. Four Corners has a lot of brand respect and loyalty from its long history of very high quality journalism, so the fact that it has a vendetta is more serious, more concerning. Its not just any old program. The QAnon controversy may be the latest front in the evergreen war between the ABC and the Coalition. But the current escalation in tensions stem from Milligans Four Corners episode Inside the Canberra Bubble. The episode aired in November and detailed allegations of inappropriate conduct and extramarital affairs by Porter and then-Population Minister Alan Tudge with female staffers. Then in February, Milligan set off a bomb inside the cabinet by reporting the existence of a historical rape allegation against an unnamed minister in an article that ran on the ABCs website. Porter outed himself within days of the articles publication, strenuously denying the claims, and launched defamation action the following month. The parties settled the case last week, with the ABC agreeing to pay Porters lawyer $100,000 for mediation and related costs and to affix an editorial note to the article. But there was no apology. Inside the ABC, there is a view that the pressure Four Corners receives from the government also resembles a vendetta  often exacerbated by the tenure of a prime minister. The reality is that politicians and influential leaders of all stripes dont like the program because of its relentless approach.

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Tensions also exist between Four Corners and other programs, staff and management inside the ABC. Political editor Andrew Probyn last week declined to ask a series of QAnon questions of Morrison despite a request by his colleagues at Four Corners. That refusal soon leaked. Probyn has refused to be drawn on the matter, but there is a widespread perception the act underscored the divide inside the national broadcaster between Four Corners and everyone else. Andersons staff announcement that he was delaying the QAnon episode on the grounds the program needed more work further exposed that divide. The units hallowed status sees it operate within a silo independent to the other wings of the ABC. Its team of about 25, led by Neighbour, keep their stories closely guarded before broadcast, using online systems separate from colleagues. Team members tend to keep to themselves, careful about what they say to avoid it leaking  a standard that some say makes them appear elitist. Some believe the best projects are conducted with other news outlets because they allow reporters to jump in and out of the pressure cooker. Four Corners executive producer Sally Neighbour has led the program since 2015. Credit:Danielle Smith DKS Neighbour, renowned for her uncompromisingly high standards and brusque management style, was incandescent at Andersons roadblock just days out from the programs expected air date.

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When the Herald and The Age revealed Andersons decision  forcing the broadcaster to confirm publicly his view the story wasnt strong enough to air in its current form  there was outrage inside Four Corners at the embarrassing leak. Loading Internally, staff were divided on whether Inside the Canberra Bubble should have aired and how the reporting of the rape allegation against Porter was handled. Those involved in the decision-making insist Four Corners had enough to push ahead with the episode and argue that it unravelled a broader discussion about cultural issues in Parliament and among federal politicians. In the case of the QAnon episode, staff indicated their concerns were not with processes, but that senior ABC staff members bowed to intense scrutiny and political pressure (concerns that Anderson and ABC News director Gaven Morris would dispute). The internal ABC frictions about Four Corners may be simmering, but they were swiftly silenced this week by an editorial in News Corps The Australian. Running under the headline, the Greatest enemy of truth is those who conspire to lie, the editorial directly attacked Neighbour and Milligan  both former employees of the newspaper. Many senior people at The Australian know well the work, the habits and the hubris of Sally Neighbour and Louise Milligan, it said, finishing on the line: The most dangerous enemy of the journalist is bad, lazy, deceitful journalism.

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The editorial, which sources said had been written by editor-in-chief Chris Dore himself (a point Dore did not dispute when contacted by this masthead) triggered an outpouring of support for Neighbour and Milligan, including from former colleagues who worked alongside them in their stints at The Australian. Chris Mitchell, long-serving former editor-in-chief of The Australian, and an outspoken critic of the ABC, contacted Neighbour to tell her he did not agree with the editorial. The Australians editorial on June 8. Credit:The Sydney Morning Herald I regard Sally as one of my best hirings on terrorism and in my view both Sally and Louise left the paper in high esteem, Mitchell told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Another former Australian editor-in-chief, David Armstrong, wrote to Milligan expressing his disdain for the piece. I was impressed when I first met you, which is why I hired you and gave you a start in national journalism, he said. I was distressed to read todays editorial in The Australian ... the heading and the final sentence are defamatory verbal abuse. Im sorry you have been subject to it. Former editor-in-chief of The Australian Chris Mitchell says Neighbour and Milligan left the paper in high esteem. Credit:Anthony Johnson Sources inside The Australian said the editorial was a response to the ABC on behalf of reporters who felt subjected to personal attacks on social media.

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A key government MP says a Tamil family detained on Christmas Island could have a resolution to their plight within two weeks as federal ministers consider a legal brief that could allow the asylum seekers to settle in their former home in Queensland.

Nationals MP Ken ODowd, whose electorate includes the town of Biloela where the Murugappan family once lived, called Immigration Minister Alex Hawke on Friday morning to urge him to let them settle in Australia.

Retiring LNP MP Ken ODowd with Prime Minister Scott Morrison in Queensland in May. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

He agrees with me its gone on far too long, Mr ODowd said.

Its no good for the family, its no good for the Australian taxpayer, its not good for anyone and its got to be resolved.
A major company in charge of critical infrastructure refused to comply with Australias cyber spy agency for weeks after it was hit by a significant cyber attack.

Australian Signals Directorate director-general Rachel Noble has revealed her agency found out about the cyber attack through media reports despite the incident having a national impact on our country.

A growing number of companies are reporting cyber attacks. Credit:Bloomberg

The extraordinary disclosure comes as the nations security agencies push for new obligations on owners and operators of critical infrastructure to provide details about their networks.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison last year revealed a wave of sophisticated cyber attacks on all levels of government, industry and critical infrastructure including hospitals, local councils and state-owned utilities. Australian security agencies believe China was behind the cyber raids, but the government decided not to publicly name the state actor involved.
Washington: Russia is preparing to supply Iran with an advanced satellite system that will give Tehran an unprecedented ability to track potential military targets across the Middle East and beyond.

Current and former US and Middle Eastern officials briefed on details of the arrangement say the plan would deliver to the Iranians a Russian-made Kanopus-V satellite equipped with a high-resolution camera that would greatly enhance Irans spying capabilities.

Officials said the satellite would allow continuous monitoring of facilities ranging from Persian Gulf oil refineries and Israeli military bases to Iraqi barracks that house US troops.

Russian-Iranian relations to hit new high: a Russian Soyuz-2.1a rocket carrying satellites launches. Credit:AP

The launch could happen within months, they said.
Carbis Bay: World leaders are being warned their plan to donate 1 billion vaccine doses is taking a gamble with the economy because the pledge falls short of the effort needed to end the pandemic.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Australia would contribute 20 million AstraZeneca doses towards the global endeavour moments after landing in Britain for the three-day G7 summit in Carbis Bay, Cornwall.

US President Joe Biden earlier pledged to hand over 500 million doses to nearly 100 low- or middle-income countries, followed by a commitment by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson for 100 million jabs.

Health experts and business leaders have criticised the offers as too small and the timeline to roll them out too slow.
By the end of June, most expect to manufacture 85-90 per cent of what they produced in the months preceding the second wave.

After the unlock 1.0 that happened in May 2020, carmakers started ramping up production month-on-month from June 2020 and continued doing so till April 2021, the month the second wave hit.

The resurgence in confidence is based on the expectation of a gradual recovery that has come on back of a fall in the number of covid-19 cases along with latent demand.

The confidence is based on the expectation of a gradual recovery and latent demand.

We will reach our full daily rate of production before the end of this month. There is enough demand with over 150,000 pending bookings and new bookings coming in. It will be busy days ahead for the dealerships, said R C Bhargava, chairman, Maruti Suzuki.

However, he pointed out that fear of the third wave remains and both vaccinations and observance of safety protocols are necessary to ensure a rapid recovery.

Even though factories were allowed to operate with minimal manpower amid restrictions, several companies including Maruti halted production for two to three weeks.

Most companies resumed production last month but they timed their ramped up production schedule to coincide with the gradual unlocking in some states which began on June 1.

With a third of the country still under lockdown, including Karnataka, West Bengal, and Tamil Nadu, carmakers are treading with utmost caution.

With 70 per cent of the country open, 70 per cent of the demand has also come back, said Tarun Garg, director, sales and marketing at Hyundai Motor India.

He expects further improvement by the month end but this will depend on whether more states lift lockdowns or extend them.

Though earlier bookings are lined up and new ones also coming, its too early to make any projections as there are developments on re-opening every day and this is the first week, said Garg.

Ashish Modani, vice president and sector head, corporate ratings, ICRA, pointed out that, in line with expectations, covid 2.0 induced lockdown restrictions across key states have resulted in a sharp decline in wholesale despatches during May.

While the lockdown situation is easing, the ramp up in volume is likely to be gradual, unlike the fast-paced V-shaped recovery witnessed during the last fiscal," said Modani.

Passenger vehicle dispatches to dealers in May rose year-on-year to 88,045 from 33,546 in May 2020 , said the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers on Friday.

However, since 2020 was a year when the pandemic disrupted everything, a comparison with 2019 gives a more accurate picture. Sales fell by over 50 per cent in most categories when compared with 2019.

Jayant Davar, co-chairman and managing director, Sandhar Technologies (an auto component firm that makes aluminium die casting, lighting and other critical parts), said that even though production may catch up with the peak months of January and March by month-end, the full month of June will still be only two-thirds of what it was in the peak months. Production is directed more at individual companies than the whole sector, he said.

Various companies including Royal Enfield, Hero MotoCorp, Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India, and TVS that have units in southern India, have seen production being halted due to the continuing lockdowns.

The June quarter will perhaps be only 40-60 per cent in revenue terms (the value of business from OEMs), according to Davar.

Others are also reluctant to read too much into what is a gradual uptick in production, the reason being that the production ramp up happening now is mainly in the nature of pipeline filling because automakers have to stock up the dealerships.

The inventory at most dealerships has depleted to 20 days from the normal 25 days, said an official at a component maker. The real test will be the retail performance of companies in the months ahead, he said.
There are a few pre-pandemic practices that will be in effect again. Worshippers can now dip their fingers in holy water. Ushers can help greet everyone into the parish community, and choirs, oral responses, collection of envelopes and sharing of bulletins will resume.
The Karnataka High Court on Friday dismissed the petitions of e-commerce giants and against a probe by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) for alleged violation of competition laws. The verdict will have repercussions for the entire e-commerce industry, with large players likely to face a closer scrutiny from the government, according to legal experts.

The order was pronounced by Justice P S Dinesh Kumar, who dismissed the pleas filed by Seller Services Pvt Ltd and Internet Pvt Ltd. The case had been going on for more than a year now.

Last year, the CCI announced a probe into and following a complaint filed by the Delhi Vyapar Mahasangh (DVM), which represents small and medium business owners in Delhi, accusing the two e-commerce giants of favouring some preferred sellers, hurting small businesses. The two had managed to get a stay until now.

When contacted, an Amazon India spokesperson said: We will review the judgment carefully and then decide on the next steps. Flipkart did not comment on the issue.

The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) welcomed the order. It fully vindicates the stand of CAIT that Amazon and Flipkarts business model is entirely based on violating the FDI policy, rules, and other laws. Therefore, without wasting any more time, the CCI should immediately begin its probe, B C Bhartia, national president, and Praveen Khandelwal, secretary general of CAIT, said in a statement.

Legal experts say e-commerce players in general have exploited loopholes in the law.

Effectively, the judgment means that the alleged preferential treatment mechanisms and the indirect holding structures adopted by some of the e-commerce players are now exposed to the CCIs scrutiny, and could lead to heavy fines and penalties if any violations of law are discovered, said Salman Waris, partner head of TMT and IP practice at Delhi-based TechLegis Advocates & Solicitors.

From an immediate legal point, both Amazon and Flipkart have the option to either go to a two-judge Bench in the high court or the Supreme Court, but the judges decision has paved the way to restart the investigation, which has been on hold for more than a year.

In the short term, they may still be able to get interim relief, but in the long term, if the decision goes against them, the could be badly shaken. There is also a new draft of the upcoming e-commerce policy that stresses e-commerce ensure no algorithm bias against any sellers. The policy is likely to be implemented soon, which together with this decision and the CCI probe, could have a long-term impact on the sector, which has already been adversely impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, said Waris.

Sonam Chandwani, managing partner at KS Legal & Associates, said: Amazon's argument to ward off the CCI probe into alleged violations of competition law was a mere attempt to unscrupulously mislead the ED investigation. This dismissal of pleas is a welcome ruling.

When asked about the preferential treatment to select sellers, in a recent interaction with Business Standard, Amit Agarwal, senior vice-president and country head, Amazon India, said the right kind of local retailers were already embracing technology and seeing growth.

CAIT and DVM alleged that Amazon had a direct relationship with the seller Cloudtail and was giving it preferential treatment along with another seller, Appario.

Cloudtail, one of the largest sellers on Amazon India, is owned by Prione Business Services, a joint venture between Amazon and Infosys co-founder N R Narayana Murthys Catamaran Ventures. Appario Retail is a subsidiary of Frontizo, which is a joint venture between Amazon and the Patni Group.

Amazon entered into these tie-ups between 2014 and 2017. However, the revised e-commerce laws restricted marketplace platforms shareholdings in direct retail suppliers.

Industry executives said Amazon had made these investments within the parameters of the law and it was up to the government to come up with policies to regulate such agreements.

In January this year, the Karnataka High Court started hearing the CCI probe petition again. This is a continuation of the matter after the Supreme Court declined to entertain the CCIs petition in October and asked the HC to decide the CCI plea for vacating the stay.

In February, the CCI told the high court that the Competition Act was brought in to create a level playing field, and it wanted more players in e-commerce to promote healthy competition and better choices for consumers.

But as Amazons legal counsel Gopal Subramanium pointed out that the CCIs own market study had concluded that even if the online platform had entered into exclusive agreements with sellers, they could not be called anti-competitive. Subramanium, in his earlier arguments, also said that about 756,000 sellers conducted business on Amazons platform and all of them could not be preferred sellers. The online retailer promotes competition with its competitive prices, he added.
firm Mylab Discovery Solutions on Friday said it has roped in actor as its brand ambassador.

The Pune-based firm, which has a presence across many verticals like diagnostics, food safety, agriculture, veterinary medicine, had recently launched the country's first COVID-19 self-test kit, CoviSelf.

The partnership aims at creating awareness about the company's instruments and kits for laboratories and individuals, including CoviSelf, Mylab Discovery Solutions said in a statement.

Kumar will play a vital role in educating people about the use, safety, and efficacy of products, thus making people well equipped to fight against COVID, it added.

"Through this association, I am hoping to support their goals of solving difficult problems in healthcare and empowering every citizen to lead a healthier life. I look forward to a long and fulfilling association with the brand," the actor noted.

Mylab signs Bollywood megastar as its brand ambassador-The partnership aims at creating awareness of Mylabs IVD instruments, kits for laboratories & Individuals including CoviSelf & share educational content for training purpose of the common man. @akshaykumar pic.twitter.com/oD8N50ZKec  Mylab Discovery Solutions (@MylabSolutions) June 11, 2021

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Hyderabad-based will conduct clinical trials of Covaxin in the US after it hit a roadblock to secure emergency use authorisation for its Covid-19 vaccine from the US drug regulator.

The companys US partner, Ocugen, said on Thursday it would follow the biologics licence application (BLA) route to seek full licensure of Covaxin in the US.

said Ocugen had received a recommendation from the FDA to pursue BLA path for Covaxin, which is full approval. All applications have to follow the BLA process, which is the standard process for vaccines. Therefore, for BLA, the data from an additional clinical trial will be required to support the marketing application submission for Covaxin. This process will extend our timelines, the vaccine maker said.

A company source told Business Standard that planned to conduct these additional clinical trials in the US. The company did not divulge details on whether these would be bridging studies comprising smaller groups of volunteers or large-scale studies.

V K Paul, member, health, NITI Aayog, said at a press briefing on Friday: We respect their (USFDAs) decision and we expect that our manufacturer will be able to comply with whatever is required to be done. Their decision has no bearing on our programme. Our regulator has approved it. We have so much data on safety.





He said every country has its regulatory system and while scientific frameworks are the same, nuancing is based on context.

Nuancing can be different, especially in countries where science is strong, for us manufacturing is strong...We have also asked for trials till now for vaccines for children.



Bharat Biotech said with good herd immunity and a significant percentage of the population vaccinated, the pandemic is reducing in the US. The USFDA had earlier communicated that no new emergency use authorisation (EUA) would be approved for new Covid-19 vaccines, Bharat Biotech said.

According to reports, AstraZeneca is too weighing options to apply for full approval in the US for its Covid-19 vaccine, a process that takes longer.

Timelines, however, are not clear. A senior official at a vaccine firm said there was no precedence of an India-developed vaccine getting full authorisation in the US. Typically, the timelines would be long. It can take months or even a year. However, we cannot say if processes will be expedited during the pandemic, the official explained.

Covaxin has received EUAs from 14 countries with more than 50 countries in the process. It is now in the process of seeking emergency use listing (EUL) from the World Health Organization.

Paul said the data analysis of phase 3 clinical trials of Covaxin will be made public in the next seven to eight days. It is beyond the data that was shared with the DCGI, he added.

Bharat Biotech claimed that no vaccine manufactured or developed from India has ever received EUA or full licensure from USFDA.

Ocugen in a statement on Thursday announced that as recommended by the USFDA, it will pursue submission of a BLA for Covaxin. Biologics Licence Application, or BLA, is a "full approval" mechanism by the FDA for drugs and vaccines. The company will no longer pursue a EUA for Covaxin. The FDA provided feedback to Ocugen regarding the Master File. The company had previously submitted and recommended that Ocugen pursue a BLA submission instead of a EUA application for its vaccine candidate and requested additional information and data, Ocugen had said.

Although we were close to finalising our EUA application for submission, we received a recommendation from the FDA to pursue a BLA path. While this will extend our timelines, we are committed to bringing Covaxin to the US. This differentiated vaccine is a critical tool to include in our national arsenal given its potential to address the SARS-CoV-2 variants, including the delta variant, and given the unknowns about what will be needed to protect US population in the long term, said Shankar Musunuri, chairman, CEO and co-founder of Ocugen, had said in a statement.

Ocugen is partnering Bharat Biotech to co-develop, supply, and commercialise Covaxin in Canada. It will retain 45 per cent of the profits from sales of Covaxin in the US and Canada.
The police have arrested former chairman Ravi Parthasarathy after a complaint filed by Mumbai-based 63 moons technologies regarding alleged cheating and fraud by an subsidiary.

collapsed in August 2018 after it failed to repay its loans to several Indian banks and insurance

The company was then sent to the National Company Law Tribunal for debt resolution and the government appointed a board to steer the group out of financial trouble.

In a statement, the police said Parthasarthy was produced before a court on Friday and was sent to police custody for 15 days.

The kingpin and the mastermind of the Rs 1 lakh crore IL&FS scam, Ravi Parthasarathy, has been arrested by the EOW (economic offences wing) in connection with Crime No.13 of 2020 dated 20 September 2020. The IL&FS group, which consists of more than 350 group companies, was used as a vehicle to perpetrate fraud by the then management of IL&FS group, which was headed by the then chairman and MD & CEO, Ravi Parthasarathy, the police EOW said in a statement.

63 moons had alleged IL&FS Transportation Networks India Ltd (ITNL) failed to repay its dues despite promising investors to return the money (Rs 200 crore). It then filed a complaint with the police in 2020. The EOW had earlier arrested former managing director Ramchand Karunakaran and the former vice-chairman of IL&FS and director of ITNL, Hari Sankaran, in January this year.

Parthasarathy became chief executive officer of IL&FS when it was set up in 1989 and chairman in 2006. He retired in July 2018, just before the IL&FS scam made headlines.

An alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad, the former Citibanker, who was also co-founder of 20th Century Finance, was in the when IL&FS took over Maytas Infrastructure in 2009.

In 2008, he sold a stake in IL&FS Investmart, the broking subsidiary, for $260 million to HSBC. But IL&FS, under his leadership, turned into an opaque and complex organisation despite having listed entities.

Just before the IL&FS scam broke, Parthasarthy travelled to London on health grounds and stayed there till things quieted down. Even as the senior management staff of IL&FS, including Sankaran, were incarcerated, Parthasarathy remained out of jail.

He moved the Madras High Court for anticipatory bail in the 63 moons matter. The petition was, however, rejected and Parthasarathy was arrested on Wednesday in Mumbai and taken to Chennai for questioning.
The global minimum corporation tax of 15 per cent suggested by the G7 nations at the summit of their finance ministers last weekend, could make life more taxing for some large Indian IT companies.

The tax could, for instance, cost TCS, Indias largest IT services company, more under the new tax treatment, but Infosys may just about get away because it still does not rank among the top 100 digital multinationals by size. Indian conglomerates such as Airtel and Tata group with substantial investments abroad may not be able to retain the benefits of their tax shelters abroad ...
Karnataka high court dismissed pleas on Friday by com Inc and Walmart's to quash an antitrust investigation into the business practices of the US firms, dealing them a blow in their key growth market.

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) announced its investigation in January 2020 after a trader group's complaint accused the firms of promoting some "preferred sellers" and hurting business for smaller sellers.

The denied wrongdoing and a court put a hold on the investigation last year.

On Friday, Justice P.S. Dinesh Kumar of the Karnataka high court said he was dismissing the petitions by and Flipkart, and refused them any further relief.

Abir Roy, a lawyer for the trader group, told Reuters the judge's decision effectively paved the way to restart the investigation, which has been on hold for more than a year.

However, the are likely to appeal against the verdict.

said it would review the order "carefully and then decide on the next steps". did not immediately respond.

When the competition panel ordered its investigation, it listed four alleged anti-competitive practices.

These were exclusive launches of mobile phones by the e-commerce firms, promoting preferred sellers on their websites, deep discounting practices and prioritising some seller listings over others.

The investigation is the latest setback for the firms, which have also battled tougher foreign investment rules, and faced accusations for years from brick-and-mortar retailers about circumventing Indian law by creating complex business structures.

In February, a Reuters investigation based on internal Amazon documents showed the U.S. firm for years had helped a small number of sellers prosper on its platform in India, giving them discounted fees and helping one cut special deals with big tech firms.

As the competition panel sought to restart the probe, it told the Karnataka court in March the Reuters report corroborated evidence it had received against Amazon.

In response, the company, which has said it "does not give preferential treatment to any seller", told the court it disagreed with the Reuters report, which should not be considered evidence.

(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.)
Prime Minister on Friday held deliberations with Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP president J P Nadda amid speculation about a reshuffle in the Union cabinet, an exercise Modi has not undertaken since forming the government for a second time in May 2019.

There is also a growing buzz about the Cabinet expansion in Uttar Pradesh after Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath met the BJP top brass during his two-day visit to the national capital.

Sources, however, added that Modi has been meeting Union ministers in different batches of late, and Nadda has also been present there.

The deliberations among the top BJP leaders at the prime minister's residence came a day after Shah also met party allies from Uttar Pradesh, including Apna Dal's Anupriya Patel who was a minister in the first Modi government but was not inducted in the next.

There has been no official word from the party on these deliberations.

The BJP has of late engaged in the review of its organisation and government works in different states.

Nadda had also held a meeting with the party general secretaries where, besides the relief work carried out by the saffron organisation during the COVID-19 pandemic, its performance in the recent assembly polls were reviewed.

With the party now gearing up for the next round of assembly polls in five states early next year, including in all important Uttar Pradesh, it is expected to take various measures to bolster its social equation.

(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 Antigua and Barbuda Cabinet held a brief discussion into Indian fugitive businessman Mehul Choksi's claim, as well as on the decisions rendered by the Magistrate and the High Court of Dominica, local media reported.

"No new information has emanated from the Dominica authorities that now hold Choksi's fate in their hands. The authorities in Antigua continue their investigation of Choksi's claim that he was abducted in Antigua. Since abductions and kidnappings are not crimes usually reported in Antigua, no effort is being spared to uncover all the facts in this supposed abduction," the Antigua News Room quoted a Cabinet note as saying following the discussion.

Choksi, who is currently facing charges of entering Dominica illegally, was "unlawfully renditioned" from Antigua and Barbuda to Dominica so that he would no longer have the option of appealing to the UK Privy Council, his lawyer contended on Thursday.

Michael Polak, part of the legal team representing Choksi and an expert in providing legal assistance to foreign nationals around the world, told a virtual news conference that the team has also filed a complaint with the War Crimes Unit of the UK's Metropolitan Police on the ground that the Indian fugitive businessman was tortured.

Describing the case as one of "egregious breach of the rule of law and fundamental fairness", Polak said: "What happened to Choksi has been terrible. He was lured into a property, kidnapped, a bag placed over his head, beaten, forced on to a boat and unlawfully renditioned into another country.

"In Antigua, he has the right to appeal to the Privy Council in London to determine whether the government is acting properly against him. In Dominica, he does not have such protection. The motive behind the kidnapping could not be clearer."

He further said there was sufficient evidence Barbara Jarabica and the other men involved in the incident had carried out a "reconnaissance or a failed attempt to kidnap" Choksi in April this year, adding that the fugitive businessman should be returned to Antigua.

Giving details of the attempt, Polak said Jabarica, who lured Choksi to her Airbnb accommodation on May 23, had specifically asked the owner if there is a place for docking a small boat in the backyard.

Revealing chats between Jabarica and owner of the properties, Polak said she had discussed taking two adjoining properties after getting confirmation about docking place for boats.

Polak alleged that one property was used by people with her, who were part of kidnapping team.

The lawyer also claimed that soon after the kidnapping of Choksi, Jabarica left Antigua and Barbuda in a private plane to Dominica.

Choksi, who is wanted in India in the Rs 13,500 crore Punjab Bank (PNB) fraud case had gone missing on May 23 from Antigua sparking a massive manhunt.

He was reportedly captured on May 26 in Dominica.

Choksi is facing the charges of entering Dominica illegally.

A Dominican High Court has restrained the extradition.

He had taken the citizenship of Antigua in 2017 and left India on January 4, 2018 days before the case came to light.

--IANS

aks/ksk/

(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.)
While the (BJP) is the most popular Indian political party among the in the US, a majority is critical of government policies despite showing overall strong support for the country, according to a study.

Thirty-two per cent of Indian-Americans surveyed said they identified closely with the BJP and only 12 per cent with the Congress Party, the study reported.

But 40 per cent of those in the survey said they did not feel close to any Indian political party.

Overall, however, those closely identifying with a party other than the BJP is 28 per cent, if the supporters of the Congress and other smaller parties are added up, according to the 2020 Indian American Attitudes Survey (IAAS) published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in association with Johns Hopkins University and University of Pennsylvania.

The survey of 1,200 Indian-Americans -- a broad category in the study covering both US citizens as well as non-citizens -- was conducted in September last year by YouGov and the analysis by a group of experts was published on Wednesday.

According to US Census Community Survey there are 4.2 million Indian-Americans, the study said.

Of them, 2.6 million are US citizens, 1.2 million born in the US and 1.4 who took up citizenship after immigrating, and 42 per cent of them have Overseas Citizenship of India, the study said.

The study said that more than three-quarters of Indian Americans place a high value on their 'Indian-ness'.

Seventy-five per cent of Indian-Americans said that they were "pro-India", but their attitudes to the Indian government varied sharply with 58 per cent critical of the government to some degree.

Only 17 per cent identified themselves as also being "pro-government", while 35 per cent were critical of some of the government's policies, and 23 per cent critical of most of the government policies.

According to the survey, 49 per cent of Indian-Americans rated Prime Minister Narendra Modi's performance favourably, with 35 per cent giving strong approval.

But 31 per cent disapproved of his record, with 22 per cent expressing strong disapproval.

Evaluating how warmly the survey participants rated Indian organisations and leaders, the study came up with a "mean thermometer rating" based on a scale of favourable attitudes (not percentages) reported.

Modi got 58, the BJP 57, the Rashtriya Swyam Sewak Sangh 46, and the Congress Party 44; Rahul Gandhi lags at 38.

Among Republican Indian-Americans, Modi received a higher "thermometer rating" 71, versus 55 among Democrats, while Gandhi got more warmth from Democrats with a 42 rating but 31 among Republicans, the study said.

US President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party get a rating of 64, while Vice President Kamala Harris, who is of Indian-American descent, gets 63.

The study noted that overall the "thermometer rating" for the Republican Party at 42 and for former President Donald Trump at 37 nearly parallel the ratings for the Congress Party and Gandhi.

The survey found "striking" occupational differences in the support for Modi: 61 per cent of engineers and computer scientists back him, while the support falls to 48 per cent among others.

In contrast to the attitudes to Modi personally, more Indian-Americans, 39 per cent, believe that India is on the wrong track, while 36 per cent said it is on the right track, according to the study.

US-born Indian-American immigrants showed a more negative view of India, with 44 per cent saying it was on the wrong track, while 26 per cent who were immigrants shared the view.

But the study found a big contrast in the attitude to the US in the survey conducted before the US elections, and the current COVID-19 surge: 67 per cent reported that the US is on the wrong track, while just 33 per cent believed it is on the right track.

Corruption was ranked by the Indian-Americans surveyed as the top problem for India with 18 per cent listing it and the economy came next with 15 per cent naming it.

Ten per cent ranked "religious majoritarianism" as the country's most important challenge, according to the study.

Terrorism and China were each ranked as the top issue by seven per cent of the respondents.

Indian-Americans showed a liberal bent on many issues.

A majority of Indian-Americans surveyed, 69 per cent, said they opposed the use of sedition and defamation laws to silence reporters critical of Modi.

The Register of Citizens, which is to identify "non-citizens", was opposed by 55 per cent of the respondents.

Support for and opposition to the Citizenship Amendment Act, which prioritises citizenship for Hindus, Christians, Buddhists and Sikhs fleeing persecution in neighbouring Islamic or Muslim majority countries, was almost evenly divided, with 51 per cent of those surveyed opposing it and 49 per cent supporting it.

But 65 per cent opposed the use of police force against those peacefully protesting the law.

Fifty-three per cent of Indian-Americans surveyed said that "Hindu majoritarianis" is a threat to minorities in Indian, but 73 per cent said that "white supremacy" is a threat to minorities in the US.

Nearly half the Indian-Americans surveyed said that they had suffered discrimination in the previous year, but there was a contrast between the first generation and second generations.

Among Indian-Americans who had immigrated to the US, 59 per cent said that they had not faced discrimination, but only 36 per cent born in the US denied running up against discrimination in the past year.

Explaining the difference, the study said: "There are a host of plausible reasons why US-born Indian Americans might report greater discrimination, including differences in social norms, greater awareness of discriminatory practices, or less fear of retaliation."

In a snapshot of the community, the study said that the highest percentage of those surveyed, 14 per cent, claimed Gujarat as their home state in India; Maharashtra followed with 12 per cent, (undivided) Andhra Pradesh at 10 per cent and Tamil Nadu at 9 per cent.

Hindi at 19 per cent is the most popular language followed by Gujarati at 14 per cent, Telugu at 10 per cent, Tamil at 9 per cent and Bengali and Punjabi at 7 per cent each.

Of those surveyed, 54 per cent are Hindus, 9 per cent religiously unaffiliated, 3 per cent atheists, 4 per cent agnostics, 13 per cent Muslims and 11 per cent Christians.

Of those over 25 years, 79 per cent have a college degree and 40 per cent have post-graduate degrees. Fifty-two per cent of them completed their education in the US.

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in and followed @aru.louis)

--IANS

al/ksk/

(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 cash strapped has revenue arrears to the tune of Rs 20,146.39 crore of which Rs 5,765.84 crore is outstanding for more than 5 years, said the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, calling for urgent intervention from the government to clear the outstanding arrears.

According to the latest (CAG) report on the Revenue Sector for the year ending March 2019 that was tabled on Kerala Assembly on Thursday, the total arrears of Rs 20,146.39 crore comes up to 22 per cent of the total revenue of the State.

"Out of the total arrears, Rs 5,564.64 crore (27.62 per cent) is pending from government or government departments. This necessitates urgent intervention from government to clear the outstanding arrears. Audit observed comprehensive and up to date database was not maintained in any of the audited departments," the report said.

The found that some departments had revenue arrears from 1952 onwards.

"The arrears of Rs 5,765.84 crore pending for more than five years in eleven departments included those of Excise department from 1952 onwards for which clarification has been sought from the departments. The cases referred to Government for write off ( Rs 184.40 crore) were also not being pursued by the departments/offices concerned," the report said.

The pointed out that the absence of prompt reporting of arrears to the and pursuance by the departments concerned for realising the arrears were the main reasons for the huge pendency of arrears. "This calls for an urgent need to put in place an effective system for monitoring and realisation of arrears," said in its report.

According to the CAG report, the total revenue receipts of the State Government for the year 2018-19 amounted to Rs 92,854.48 crore against Rs 83.020,14 crore for the previous year.

"About 67 per cent of this was raised by the State through tax revenue (Rs 50,644.11 crore) and non-tax revenue (Rs 11,783.24 crore). The balance 33 per cent was receipt from the Government of India as State's share of divisible Union taxes ( Rs 19,038.17 crore) and Grants-in-aid (11,388.96 crore)," the report said.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The data remains concerning to some who have studied the virus path over the past year, such as Jaline Gerardin, a Northwestern University assistant professor of preventive medicine. She said that those still left to be vaccinated are generally younger and healthier than the population as a whole. So its a troubling sign if this younger and healthier group is still being hospitalized and dying at rates above what the entire state saw last summer.
If is to meet its tentative goal of vaccinating 80 per cent of its population against the coronavirus by the end of the year, tens of millions of may have to start rolling up their sleeves.

Regulators took the first step last week by approving the use of the country's Sinovac vaccine for aged 3 to 17, though no announcement has been made about when the shots will start.

have been largely spared the worst of the pandemic, becoming infected less easily than adults and generally showing less severe symptoms when they do catch the virus.

But experts say children can still transmit the virus to others and some note that if countries are going to achieve herd immunity through their vaccination campaigns, inoculating children should be part of the plan.

Vaccinating children is an important step forward, said Jin Dong-yan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong's medical school.

Doing so, however, may be easier said than done for reasons ranging from vaccine hesitancy to vaccine availability.

Even in countries with enough vaccines to go around, some governments are having problems convincing adults that the shots are safe and necessary despite studies demonstrating they are. Such concerns can be amplified when dealing with society's youngest.

There's also the issue of approval. Few regulators around the world have evaluated the safety of COVID-19 shots in kids, with the majority of shots approved only for adults right now. But the approvals are starting. The United States, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong are all allowing the use of the Pfizer vaccine in children as young as 12.

The Sinovac announcement could open the way for the vaccine, already in use in dozens of countries from Brazil to Indonesia, to be given to children across the world.

In Thailand, where Sinovac makes up the bulk of the country's vaccine supply, Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul welcomed the news that had approved emergency use for children.

Once it gets approved, we are ready to provide the vaccine to cover all ages, Anutin said Monday.

Other vaccine makers are also working to expand access to younger people. Moderna is seeking permission to use its shot in children as young as 12, like Pfizer. Both companies have studies underway in even younger children, down to age 6 months.

Another obstacle to vaccinating children is that many countries are still struggling to get enough doses to inoculate their higher-risk adult populations. Thailand, for example, has vaccinated only 4 per cent of its population so far and adult demand for vaccines far outweighs supply.

Right now given the shortages of vaccines, any available vaccine should be placed in age-based prioritisation and risk-based prioritisation, said Jerome Kim, head of the International Vaccine Institute in Seoul.

It's really important to get this vaccine out in the places it's needed now.

In many places there are also concerns among the public about the efficacy of the Sinovac vaccine versus Western rivals. While efficacy rates cannot be compared directly, owing to the trials being conducted under different conditions, the Western vaccines have shown to be very effective in preventing infection in real world tests. Sinovac's shot has been shown to be effective in preventing severe disease and hospitalization.

The World Health Organisation last week approved the Sinovac vaccine for emergency use in adults aged 18 and older, paving the way for its use in global programs aiming to distribute vaccines to low- and middle-income countries. The WHO has given no indication of when it might approve it for those younger.

Vaccines are often approved separately for adults and children because younger immune systems may react differently to the doses. Experts say inactivated vaccines are generally considered safe for children, as the technology has been in use for a long time, such as in mandatory childhood immunization programs, and have shown low risk.

(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.)
Covid-19 case positivity rate in declined below 5 per cent this week in a development that could pave the way for further relaxation in curbs.

Last week the Maharashtra government issued unlock regulations based on weekly case positivity rate and occupancy of oxygenated beds. Districts have been classified in five levels on the basis of these two parameters.

Mumbai's case positivity rate declined to 4.40 per cent from 5.5 per cent in the previous week and thus the city can get classified in level 2 as per the regulations. Occupancy of oxygenated beds too has reduced to 27 per cent this from 32 per cent in the previous week.Currently has been classified in level 3.

While Pune will see opening of and extension in timings for shops from Monday, the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation will have to issue an order regarding relaxation in

In districts with level 2 restrictions, and cinema halls can function with 50 per cent capacity. Shops and restaurants too can remain open as per their regular timings. Public spaces too can remain open throughout the day and film shoots too can be permitted.
The government has asked people not to panic over the perceived need for an immediate change in the Covishield vaccine dosage interval, adding that the national technical advisory group on immunisation (NTAGI) would review the matter based on the pandemic scenario and the prevalence of delta variant in India. Some reports recently have suggested that the gap between the two Covishield doses should be kept at eight weeks instead of prevalent 12 weeks. V K Paul, member-health, Niti Aayog, said the NTAGI would take a comprehensive view and decide on the matter. Addressing a press briefing, Paul said: Whichever decision is taken by our scientific community, we will honour it. He said there is a need for this debate and discourse in the public domain. However, the decision has to be taken by appropriate fora comprising eminent people who are knowledgeable. The UK must have adopted due process and examined data scientifically, to revise their previous decision regarding the gap, he said. The UK had earlier maintained a 12-week gap, but according to data available to us, we did not consider it safe at that point, he added. Paul said that when it was decided to increase the Covishield dose interval to 12 weeks, the government had to consider the risk posed by the virus to those who have received only one dose. But the counterpoint was that more people will then be able to get the first dose, thereby giving a reasonable degree of immunity to them. We need to balance these concerns, Paul said. On whether people who have Covid should not take the vaccine, Paul said that there was no hardcore ideological position in science and decisions were taken through institutional mechanisms. It is a dynamic process. If more data comes, our technical group will consider it, Paul said. Indias second wave of Covid-19 is now stabilising with around 91,000 new cases registered on Friday, and the overall positivity rate is down to 5.6 per cent in the last week. This is down by 74 per cent from the peak level of 21.6 per cent during April 30-May 7 week. Weekly positivity is less than 5 per cent in 15 states.

Only 196 districts are reporting more than 100 daily cases in the country as of last week, compared to 531 districts during the week ending May 4. data shows a decline of almost 78 per cent in daily new cases since the highest reported peak on May 6 when the figure crossed 414,000.
Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar on Friday said the administration in Pune will consider introducing some relaxations if the COVID-19 positivity rate in the city continues to be below 5 per cent in the next two days.

Last week, Pune city had come under the state government's level 3 category. However, with the positivity rate dropping a little below 5 per cent, the city has now moved to level 2.

Under relaxations in level 2, shops are permitted to operate till 7 pm, while hotels, restaurants, and eateries can function till 10 pm for dine-in with 50 per cent seating capacity and malls can operate by adhering to social-distancing norms.

"Since the positivity rate of Pune city has gone below the 5 per cent, the administration has decided to give more relaxation to the city," said Pawar, who is also the guardian minister of Pune district.

The district and civic administration will observe the positivity rate in the city for the next two days, and if it remains below five per cent, level 2 relaxations will be applicable, he said.

Pune mayor Murlidhar Mohol said the positivity rate in the civic limits of Pune has been at 4.95 per cent for one week.

However, he said since the positivity rate in the suburb of Pimpri Chinchwad and Pune rural is little above 5 and 10 per cent respectively, these areas will continue to have restrictions as per the level 3 and 4 respectively.

"We will take review about the COVID-19 situation in the next meeting and a decision regarding the restrictions will be taken thereafter," he said.

Speaking about the Wari procession, Pawar said 100 warkaris (devotees of Lord Vitthal) each from Dehu and Alandi have been given permission to take part in the annual pilgrimage to Pandharpur in Solapur district.

For the remaining eight revered 'palkhi' procession, which originate from different towns, permission for 50 warkaris has been given.

"This year also, no permission has been given for the palkhis for the journey on foot. Instead, each palkhi will be given two buses and in the bus, the padukas will be taken to Pandharpur," 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.)
The existing Covid-19 curbs will continue in Mumbai for the time being, despite a decline in the positivity rate of Covid-19 cases below 5 per cent this week.

Last Saturday, the government issued unlock regulations based on the weekly case positivity rate and occupancy of oxygenated beds. Districts have been classified in five levels on the basis of these two parameters.

Mumbai's case positivity rate declined to 4.4 per cent from 5.5 per cent in the previous week, thus the city can get classified in level 2 according to the regulations. Occupancy of oxygenated beds, too, has reduced to 27 per cent from 32 per cent in the previous week. Currently Mumbai has been classified in level 3.

While Pune will see opening of malls and extension in timings for shops from Monday, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation was in the process of issuing an order.

In districts with level 2 restrictions, malls and cinema halls can function with 50 per cent capacity. Shops and restaurants, too, can remain open according to their regular timings. Public spaces can remain open throughout the day and film shoots also can be permitted.
Chief Minister M.K. Stalin on Friday announced the extension of the lockdown by another week till June 21 with some relaxations that includes opening of liquor shops in 27 districts.

The current lockdown comes to an end on June 14.

In a statement issued here, Stalin said all shops that are permitted to operate should have: (a) sanitiser with dispenser outside the shop and thermal screening of customers should be done (b) shop employees and the customers should compulsorily wear masks (c) all shops should be without air conditioning and social distancing should be maintained with markings on the floor outside the shop for people to stand should be done.

He said considering the high rate of Covid-19 infection in Coimbatore, Nilgiris, Tiruppur, Erode, Salem, Karur, Namakkal, Thanjavur, Tiruvarur, Nagapattinam and Myladuthurai, some essential services, subject to certain restrictions, are allowed from June 14 onwards.

Private housekeeping services will be allowed with an e-pass, while electricians, plumbers, carpenters, motor technicians and other self-employed persons will be allowed to function between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. with e-pass at their customers' homes buy they cannot open their shops;

Shops selling and repairing spectacles, as well as cycle and two-wheeler mechanic shops, can function between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m, and pottery and handicraft makers can function between 6 a.m. and 5 p.m.

Taxis with three passengers, other than driver, and autorickshaws with two passengers can ply with e-pass.

Meanwhile, export units and units supplying raw materials for export units located in Coimbatore, Tiruppur, Salem, Karur, Erode, Namakkal and Trichy can function for supply of samples with 25 per cent staff strength.

In the case of other 27 districts, including Chennai, apart from the earlier relaxations, the new relaxations include opening of state-owned TASMAC liquor shops between 10 a.m and 5 p.m., beauty parlours/saloons are allowed with 50 per cent customer capacity between 9 a.m and 5 p.m., and shops selling and repairing spectacles, mobile phones, construction materials, and consumer durables can function between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m.

Government parks will be open between 6-9 a.m. for walkers, while pottery and handicraft makers can function between 6 a.m. and 5 p.m.

Schools/colleges can function only for administrative work in connection with student admission, export units and units supplying raw materials for export units can function with 50 per cent staff strength and other industrial units with 33 per cent staff strength, and industrial workers and reach office on their two-wheelers with e-pass and office identity card.

IT offices can function only with 10 persons or 20 per cent staff strength whichever is lower, and housing finance, and non-banking finance companies can function with 33 per cent staff strength.

(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 Crime Branch has arrested a close aide of Olympic medallist in connection with the Chhatrasal Stadium brawl in which a wrestler died and his two friends were injured, officials said on Friday.

A senior police officer said the accused, identified as Anirudh, was involved in the alleged assault. He was arrested in the capital on Thursday.

Kumar and his associates allegedly assaulted wrestler Sagar Dhankar and two of his friends Sonu and Amit Kumar on the intervening night of May 4 and 5 over a property dispute. Dhankar, 23, succumbed to injuries later.

The wrestler was arrested, along with co-accused Ajay Kumar, on May 23 from outer Delhi's Mundka area.

Police said 10 people, including Kumar, have been arrested so far in connection with the incident.

The two-time Olympic medallist faces charges of murder, culpable homicide and kidnapping.

Police have called Kumar the "main culprit and mastermind" behind the alleged murder and said there is electronic evidence in which he and his associates could be seen beating Dhankar with sticks.

A video had surfaced on social media purportedly showing Kumar and his associates allegedly hitting a man with sticks.

On May 31, police had suspended the arms licenses of Kumar.

(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 Delta variant of COVID-19, or the B1.617.2 variant of concern (VOC) first identified in India, is about 60 per cent more transmissible than the Alpha strain identified in the UK and also reduces the effectiveness of vaccines to some extent, UK health experts report on Friday.

Public Health England (PHE), which has been tracking VOCs on a weekly basis, said that the cases of the Delta VOC have risen by 29,892 to hit 42,323 in the country an increase of around 70 per cent.

The latest data also indicates that over 90 per cent of new COVID-19 cases in the UK are now the Delta variant, which continues to show a significantly higher rate of growth compared to the Alpha VOC which was first identified in the region of Kent in England and was the dominant variant in the country so far.

New research from PHE suggests that the Delta variant is associated with an approximately 60 per cent increased risk of household transmission compared to the Alpha variant.

Growth rates for Delta cases are high across the regions, with regional estimates for doubling time ranging from 4.5 days to 11.5 days, PHE said in its latest analysis.

There are now analyses from England and Scotland supporting a reduction in vaccine effectiveness for Delta compared to Alpha. This is more pronounced after one dose (absolute reduction in vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic infection of approximately 15 per cent to 20 per cent after one dose), its risk assessment analysis reads.

Iterated analysis continues to show vaccine effectiveness against Delta is higher after two doses but that there is a reduction for Delta compared to Alpha. There is uncertainty around the magnitude of the change in vaccine effectiveness after two doses of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, it adds.

PHE said that with the Delta variant now accounting for the overwhelming majority of new cases in the UK, it is encouraging to see that the increase in cases is not yet accompanied by a similarly large increase in hospitalisations.

PHE will continue to monitor closely over the next few weeks, but the data currently suggest that the vaccination programme continues to mitigate the impact of this variant in populations who have high two dose vaccine coverage, it adds.

The health experts are using novel genotyping tests to detect the Delta VOC, giving a result for action within 48 hours. Positive tests identified through this process are subsequently confirmed through whole genome sequencing and PHE says that recent data have shown them to be extremely accurate in indicating a positive variant result.

With numbers of Delta variant cases on the rise across the country, vaccination is our best defence. If you are eligible, we urge you to come forward and be vaccinated. Remember that two doses provide significantly more protection than a single dose, said Dr Jenny Harries, Chief Executive of the UK Health Security Agency.

However, while vaccination reduces the risk of severe disease, it does not eliminate it. With data showing that Delta is significantly more transmissible than Alpha, it is just as important as ever to follow public health advice, which has not changed. Get vaccinated, work from home where you can and remember hands, face, space, fresh air' at all times. These measures work, and they save lives, she said.

The latest data comes as the UK government is set to announce its plans on Monday on whether the roadmap to lifting all lockdown restrictions by June 21 can go ahead.

There are growing voices from within the scientific community calling for a delay to that date in order to administer further second doses of vaccines for the over-50s, to ensure greater protection against the Delta variant.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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Over 91,500 fresh cases reported

India reported 91,702 fresh infections on Friday, taking the cumulative caseload to about 29.3 million, according to central health ministry data. This is the fourth day in a row where cases have remained under 100,000. The country saw 3,403 deaths due to the pandemic, taking the death toll to 363,079. The active caseload is at 1.1 million, while the total recoveries have surged to 27.8 million. As many as 246 million vaccine shots have been administered since the nationwide inoculation programme kicked off on January 16. Of these, about 3.3 million were given on Thursday. Read more

Corporates workplace jabs make up a chunk of vaccination in large cities

A sizable chunk of the vaccinations administered in some of India's largest cities are of employees of big corporations and their families, a report in The Indian Express said that cited official data. Cities with large service economies such as Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, Hyderabad, Gurgaon, Noida, and Chennai, had conducted about 2.04 million vaccinations at the workplace  which was more than 12 per cent of the total vaccinations carried out in Indias top seven metros. Read more

Govt to train 117,000 health workers for possible third wave

The second Covid wave highlighted the shortage of trained non-medical manpower in the healthcare sector. To make sure the country is not caught off-guard again in case of a third wave, the Modi government has started to identify and train over 1,17,000 people for various healthcare roles, a report in ThePrint said. This includes over 100,000 healthcare workers in six specific job rolesgeneral duty assistants, general duty advanced, phlebotomist, emergency medical technician, home healthcare aid and maintenance of medical equipment like ventilators and oxygen concentrators. Around 15,000 people will be trained to help in the maintenance of oxygen plants, ventilators and oxygen concentrators. Another 2,500 drivers will be trained to run oxygen tankers, the report said. Read more

Govt dismisses reports that Co-Win was hacked

The central government has dismissed rumours going around on social media that Co-Win, its portal to manage the Covid-19 vaccination rollout, had been hacked, a report in the Scroll said. The health ministry said the portal stores all data in a safe and secure manner. There have been some unfounded media reports of the CoWIN platform being hacked, the ministry said. Prima facie, these reports appear to be fake. Dr RS Sharma, chairperson of the Empowered Group on Vaccine Administration, said CoWIN data is not shared with any entity outside of the system. Read more

Why did US FDA reject Covaxin's emergency use application?

Bharath Biotech's Covaxin was not given approval for emergency use in the US by the country's top health regulatorthe Food and Drug Administration (FDA). An explainer in the Hindustan Times said the FDA requested additional information and data on Covaxin, according to a statement by the firm's US partner Ocugen. Covaxin has been facing criticism in India for not sharing its Phase-3 trial data, despite being approved by India's top drug regulator, the Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) six months ago, the report said. Read more
In her new TV interview, Raines said Peterson admitted to her he killed Savio, and Stacy was his alibi that night. It was a lot to take in. Stacy was pretty much trying to hold that over his head and tell on him, Raines said. He tried to reason with her, and she was not having it. And it wasnt going to work. She said Peterson drove Stacys body about two-and-a-half hours away to a place apparently known only to him.
Indian fugitive diamantaire Mehul Choksi, who is currently facing the charges of entering Dominica illegally, was "unlawfully renditioned" from Antigua and Barbuda to Dominica so that he would no longer have the option of appealing to the UK Privy Council, his lawyer contended on Thursday.

Michael Polak, part of the legal team representing Choksi and an expert in providing legal assistance to foreign nationals around the world, told a virtual news conference that the team has also filed a complaint with the War Crimes Unit of UK's Metropolitan Police on the ground that Choksi was tortured.

Describing Choksi's case as one of "egregious breach of the rule of law and fundamental fairness", Polak said, "What has happened to Choksi has been terrible. He was lured into a property, kidnapped, a bag placed over his head, beaten, forced on to a boat and unlawfully renditioned into another country."

"In Antigua, he has the right to appeal to the Privy Council in London to determine whether the government is acting properly...against him. In Dominica, he does not have such protection. The motive behind the kidnapping could not be clearer," he said.

He further claimed that there was sufficient proof that Barbara Jarabica and the other men involved in the incident had carried out a "reconnaissance or a failed attempt to kidnap" Choksi in April 2021 and said that Choksi should be returned to Antigua.

Giving details of the abduction attempt, Polak said Jabarica, who lured Choksi to her AirBNB accommodation on May 23, had specifically asked the owner if there is a place for docking a small boat in the backyard.

Showing chats between Jabarica and owner of the properties, Polak said she had discussed taking two adjoining properties after getting confirmation about docking place for boats.

Polak alleged that one property was used by people with her, who were part of kidnapping team.

The lawyer also claimed that soon after the kidnapping of Choksi, Jabarica left Antigua and Barbuda in a private plane to Dominica at 7.26 pm as she felt safe from investigation.

Polak also contended that Choksi continues to be an Antiguan citizen and can appeal against any move to strip him of his citizenship or to extradite him to India in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

He also said that the diamantaire would not have access to this legal protection in Dominica.

A complaint filed by Polak with the UK Metropolitan Police contended that Choksi's case should be investigated by the War Crimes Unit as it involves "torture".

"The War Crimes Unit of the Metropolitan Police investigates war crimes, torture and genocide wherever it takes place," the lawyer said.

The Metropolitan Police and Crown Prosecution Service will have the final say in an investigation.

According to Polak's complaint filed with the Metropolitan Police on June 7, Choksi was allegedly lured by Jarabica and then attacked and taken by force by several men to Dominica in a boat. The complaint has also pointed out that Jarabica and three men allegedly involved in the incident - St Kitts and Nevis Gurdip Bath, Gurmit Singh and Gurjit Singh Bhandal - are all residents of the UK.

"The process is with Metropolitan police and we will let them carry out their investigations. We say in this case there is evidence of torture," he said.

IANS was first to report report names of Singh and Bhandal on June 4.

Choksi, who is wanted in Ondianin Rs 13,500 crore Punjab Bank (PNB) fraud case had gone missing on May 23 from Antigua sparking a massive manhunt. He was reportedly captured on May 26 in Dominica.

Choksi is facing the charges of entering Dominica illegally. A Dominican High Court has restrained the extradition of Choksi.

The diamantaire is wanted in India by the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate in Rs 13,500 crore case. He had taken the citizenship of Antigua in 2017 and left India on January 4, 2018 days before the case came to light.

--IANS

aks/pgh

(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.)
Physician and chief medical officer at the Albright Stonebridge Group founded by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright  in Boston, Mehul Mehtas work over the last 23 years has spanned across 33 countries, developing new hospitals, reforming existing healthcare delivery systems, building medical educational institutions and establishing research ecosystems. Over the past year, Mehta has steadily done his bit to counter the pandemic of misinformation through a regular Covid update with groups of around 50-100 participants in India. He spoke to Anjuli Bhargava about the second wave of the pandemic, how the US managed its vaccine rollout better than India, and where India needs to go with its genomics sequencing capabilities. Edited excerpts:

When we last spoke in February, we discussed how well India had done in the first wave. But then things changed dramatically. What went wrong?

Last time, I did mention that I didnt think India was out of the woods. Things took a worse turn than most anticipated. There is a balance between the pathogens infectivity and the populations resilience to fight the infection. It can go both ways. Either the pathogen strengthens, or the mechanisms to prevent infections are removed, or if the population has inadequate resilience, the equation shifts. In India, all three happened.

Just to give you context, the pathogen changed as it spread, more mutations occurred and it became more virulent. The protection measures that people had taken were eased  life went back to normal. Weddings happened, people met each other even without wearing masks, sporting events, large gatherings. There was a false sense of security and normal activity was resumed with a vengeance.

Nothing happens in isolation: There was a broad change in behaviour across the country. This created a ripe environment for a massive surge. Then, it was clear that there were sections  slum dwellers and those without housing that had some immunity or pre-existing antibodies that the middle class, upper middle class and affluent did not. The rate across the country was still low barely 5-6 per cent at the time the guard was lowered.

How did the US manage its vaccine rollout so well? Where were we lacking?

By distributing a highly effective vaccine as fast as possible. Even as the US was going through waves, it got the vaccines out rapidly through Operation Warp Speed. It provided funding, ramped up production, and used the Defence Production Act to procure supplies to manufacture vaccines quickly. The Pfizer vaccine was even produced by its rival, Merck. Vaccinations became a massive national drive. The 100-day target set by the government was beaten by months. Scientifically speaking, your opening must lag your This didnt happen in India.

But even if we start ramping production and getting vaccines out through this pathway now, its going to be weeks or even months. Till that time, the same protective measures need to apply, of which lockdown is the extreme end. Better testing, tracing and isolation all become part of the strategy till the drive is in full swing.

But in India, we have discouraged testing because more reported cases would reflect poorly on the states

Suppression of numbers has happened in many countries. The whole pandemic has been a gap between reality and perception. Its like saying what I dont know cant hurt me, which we all know is not true. Reality always catches up in a pandemic.

But let me say that India is also paying the price for what it never did in the past: invest adequately in public healthcare, ramp up and strengthen hospitals, and invest in manpower and health professionals. Several things have been ignored or taken lightly for decades.

Why did we go so wrong with our vaccine rollout?

I cant answer that since Im not privy to all the decisions taken by the government. But I think the general feeling in the country was that we are over this.

Second, healthcare is a regional game. Every region has to conform even if you set national guidelines, like in the US. In India, we saw how differently states responded and reacted. Just to cite one instance, a city like Mumbai did not dismantle all its first wave facilities and that allowed it to pivot faster. Or take a look back at how Kerala handled the Nipah virus in 2018. We need to examine why our regional responses were so varied.

With a national pandemic or emergency of this kind, we need to have a highly coordinated Centre-state mechanism in place and science has to lead the discussion. Its far more prudent to act in a more conservative manner. There may be short-term pain in the economy but the long-term gains of acting conservatively are higher. Countries that did that have fared Israel is an example  well. Israel procured quickly, vaccinated efficiently and then the country opened up.

But for India, the horse largely bolted in April. You cannot be trying to create a strong dam in the middle of a flood. But I hope this is a lesson for both more waves (which cannot be ruled out) and even another pandemic. Pandemics don't switch off and switch on: They have multiple waves. See Japan, Nepal, Laos, Brazil, etc. Even countries that thought they had everything under control have been hit. India did not anticipate this wave and was hit badly. When I say the country, its everybody. Leaders may be responsible but everyone plays a part. We must prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

You mentioned that the Albright Stonebridge Group (ASG) is trying to help India prepare better for future waves, if any. Can you explain how?

We formed a volunteer, pro-bono group within the company targeting three fronts where we think ASG has the ability to uniquely assist India. The first area is in the area of viral genomics. This is fundamental to understanding mutations. Indias genomics network was pulled together in January and it is mostly through our national institutes that are repurposing their gene sequencing capabilities to do Covid genomic sequencing. However, as a country we need a lot more sequencing. We, therefore, have focused on establishing Covid genomic sequencing capability for Mumbai, which currently does not have such capabilities, by facilitating an interaction between one of the worlds leaders in gene sequencing, the municipal corporation of Mumbai and a well-known Mumbai-based foundation. This should come to fruition soon.

Second, we are working with providers of inputs for vaccine manufacture. One of the reasons the vaccine is in short supply in India is because the inputs to produce vaccines are in short supply. Since we have pre-existing relationships with many of these companies, we have tried to enhance their awareness on the criticality of the situation in India. Also, India is one of the largest producers of vaccines and if it does not produce vaccines at scale, a lot of the world will not get them either.

Third, we are working with a large UK event management company that specialises in expert content to provide short content videos to Indian doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals. The largest hits on the US National Institutes of Healths website are coming from India: On protocols to be adopted, especially home management. We have turned to some of the leading medical entities in the US to give us content  short videos and so on. We will also ask other platforms to push the content out so that physicians can turn to these sites. Regional language is going to be a challenge but we will source high-calibre technical and clinical content for doctors and nurses.

How are nurses, doctors and staff coping mentally? How do they stay sane surrounded by so much disease, death and grief?

Frontline healthcare burnout is a global phenomenon and one of the most serious fallouts of this crisis. We are trying to focus on the mental health of the healthcare workforce. They are dealing with huge anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues. The toll this has taken is enormous. Many nurses in the US are facing a financial crisis. You can imagine the situation for the Indian nursing and medical staff. Their needs and state of mind need to be dealt with on an urgent footing. If the workforce collapses for any reason, it will be a catastrophe.
Covid-19 has been devastating. A future pandemic could be far worse.



If scientists used a scale to classify pandemics like hurricanes, the fatality rate of Covid-19 would probably make it a category two out of five, according to Richard Hatchett, a former White House adviser who leads the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

Whats the worst case? he asked. Its a lot worse than Covid.

The specter of another global crisis, along with the potential emergence of a deadlier foe, is pushing disease trackers to begin preparations now, even as Covid continues to rage in some regions. Researchers and governments want to smash vaccine development records set during this pandemic, harnessing technologies such as messenger RNA, and build a stronger system that can respond swiftly to stop the next outbreaks from exploding when they do occur.

Hatchetts group envisions a future in which new vaccines against infectious disease could be created within 100 days, a challenge that Britain and the U.S. are embracing. The U.K.s Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance and health philanthropist Melinda French Gates are due to outline a roadmap to world leaders at the Group of Seven summit that starts Friday in Cornwall, England.

The effort hinges on contributions from rich governments like the U.K. and U.S., which have raced ahead in vaccinating their populations, along with companies developing vaccines and therapies. Last week, the heads of drugmakers including Pfizer Inc., Bristol Myers Squibb Co., Sanofi, Novartis AG, Roche Holding AG and GlaxoSmithKline Plc backed the 100-day mission.

Health Threats



Its part of a broader campaign that includes an initiative announced last month by the World Health Organization and Germany. As part of the program, a new global center in Berlin will rely on data, artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies to try to predict and prevent major outbreaks. In addition, an independent panel set up by the WHO has proposed an International Pandemic Financing Facility to secure as much as $10 billion a year to fund preparedness measures after determining that failures, gaps, and delays allowed the to run rampant. So far 3.75 million people have been killed.

Rajeev Venkayya, who developed a U.S. pandemic flu plan and led biodefense efforts in the George W. Bush administration, said the and influenza families top the list of global threats, but other pathogens that probably arent on scientists radar pose significant risks as well. Novel infectious diseases that sicken people have been discovered at an average rate of more than three per year in recent decades. About three-quarters come from animals.



While the virus that causes Covid-19 has spread quickly, infecting an estimated 175 million people, its much less lethal than SARS and MERS, two prior threats. Hatchett, whose organization was launched in 2017, said hes assuming a Covid case fatality rate of 0.5%, which he said could be lower or higher. SARS killed about 10% of patients in a 2002-2003 epidemic, and MERS led to death in 34% of about 2,500 cases recorded since 2012.

A future pathogen could combine the ability to spread easily with a much higher case fatality rate, said Venkayya, now president of Takeda Pharmaceutical Co.s vaccines business and a CEPI board member. Another possibility is a virus that severely affects parts of the population beyond older adults and people with health conditions. The 1918 influenza pandemic hit people aged 20 to 40 hard, in addition to the old and young, he said.

One of the concerns I have is that people will limit their imagination to how bad this pandemic was and forget that it could be much worse, he said. Some would say this is the crisis. Another way to think about it is that this is a warning for an even bigger crisis we could face in the future.

Technology Bet



Technologies including mRNA, the approach used by Moderna Inc. and the Pfizer-BioNTech SE partnership, are seen as a key pillar of the pandemic strategy. If the world had a solution that could limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, wed be all over that, Venkayya said. We actually have the equivalent of that for pandemics potentially in our hands.

RNA vaccines could allow countries that have lacked production capacity to leap ahead, strengthening their ability to react to epidemics, Hatchett said, though a number of hurdles remain. Its really important not to get too far ahead of the technology, he said, but if I were a country wanting to bet on a technology, thats the one I would bet on at present.

Still, a number of hurdles stand in the way. Collecting trial data needs to be done in a safe and rigorous way, and any shortcuts could increase the risk of something going wrong. The next targets also could prove more difficult to tackle than the new coronavirus.

Scientists have succeeded in making multiple vaccines against Covid-19, including products from Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca Plc and Chinese developers, but theres uncertainty over whether they will be able to replicate, much less increase, the speed and success theyve achieved over the past year.

What happens if we get a pathogen and actually the first few vaccines dont work? asked Robin Shattock, an Imperial College London professor who has been working on a potential mRNA Covid vaccine. Thats still something I dont think weve grappled with.

Very Real



Given the severity of Covid, countries will recognize the need to ramp up production capacity to fight the next outbreaks, he said. Yet maintaining that focus before and after viruses hit the front page is always a worry.

In early 2019, months before the new coronavirus emerged in China, Shattock gave a presentation at the World Economic Forum in Davos in which he urged a small audience of about 30 people to get ready for Disease X the term used by the WHO and others to refer to unknown pathogens with pandemic potential  and highlighted the potential advantages of RNA vaccines.

At the time, the response was yeah, yeah youve been saying that for 20 years, and its never happened, he said. We wake up now in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, and of course its very real.

Health officials wont be able to let their guard down when Covid ebbs and economies and societies recover. In 2019, Michael Ryan, head of the WHOs emergencies program, warned of a new phase of high-impact epidemics, adding that climate change, conflict, antibiotic resistance and increasingly mobile populations are all conspiring to raise the threat level.

Preventing Pandemics



CEPI, which is based in Oslo, is in the middle of the campaign to tackle new enemies as it continues to battle Covid. The group is working to accelerate development of vaccines that address variants of SARS-CoV-2, as well as shots that could offer broad protection against multiple coronaviruses.

The groups new $3.5 billion strategy calls for putting clinical trial networks and regulators in a position to move even faster and creating a library of prototype vaccines and other weapons to combat potential threats from about two dozen viral families. Expanding production capacity and boosting surveillance also will be vital, Hatchett said.

As he focuses on infectious diseases, Hatchett said hes reminded of the progress made against famines, once seen as inevitable and now mostly preventable through early-detection systems.

There are always going to be outbreaks, he said. But if the effort to get ready for future pathogens attracts enough support, he said, it could reduce the risks and potentially take pandemics off the table.
posts Rs 481 cr net profit in Q4; appoints Ashok Tyagi, Devinder Singh as CEOs

Realty major on Friday reported a consolidated net profit of Rs 480.94 crore for the quarter ended March. It also appointed Ashok Tyagi and Devinder Singh as the new CEOs of the company. had posted a net loss of Rs 1,857.76 crore in the year-ago period. READ MORE...



ED slaps FEMA contravention notice against India's largest cryptocurrency exchange

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday said it has issued a show cause notice to the country's largest cryptocurrency exchange for undertaking transactions worth over Rs 2,790 crore in alleged violation of the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA). Mumbai headquartered WazirX is as a domestic crypto currency and bitcoin exchange start-up registered under the company name Zanmai Labs Pvt Ltd that was incorporated in December, 2017. READ MORE...

back in fold



In a blow to the prestige of the saffron brigade, Bharatiya Janata Partys Vice President along with son Subranshu, re-joined the Trinamool Congress on Friday, with Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and other leaders of the state's ruling party welcoming him back to the fold. Roy, who was closeted with Banerjee in Trinamool Bhavan before his formal re-induction in the party he helped set up, said he was "happy to see all known faces again". READ MORE...

Delta variant 60% more transmissible, reduces vaccine effect: UK experts



The Delta variant of COVID-19, or the B1.617.2 variant of concern (VOC) first identified in India, is about 60 per cent more transmissible than the Alpha strain identified in the UK and also reduces the effectiveness of vaccines to some extent, UK health experts report on Friday. Public Health England (PHE), which has been tracking VOCs on a weekly basis, said that the cases of the Delta VOC have risen by 29,892 to hit 42,323 in the country an increase of around 70 per cent. READ MORE...
US major Applied Materials Inc is planning to set up a plant in India which would make some of the parts and components for highly complex equipment which are used for manufacturing of chips by fabmakers across the globe.



According to sources in the know, the $17.2 billion American giant - a global leader in providing equipment, services and software to the industry  is in talks with the government.



If the plan materialises, it could provide a big push to the governments desire to have a industry and eco-system in the country. If the plan materialises, it could provide a big push to the governments desire to have a industry and eco-system in the country. Read More



SpiceJet, ready for new war zone as cargo biz continues upward swing



Theres been a change in the pecking order since last year. Former head of Coca-Cola India Sanjiv Gupta, who leads SpiceJets logistics business, is now considered a key man by promoter Ajay Singh. Theres reason.



SpiceExpress--the logistics arm of the airline--has virtually kept the company afloat during the pandemic as the passenger business suffered record losses. SpiceExpress--the logistics arm of the airline--has virtually kept the company afloat during the pandemic as the passenger business suffered record losses. In May alone, the airline earned Rs 200 crore from cargo operations and has now 5 per cent market share of the outbound cargo from India. Read More



has given 3,000% return since IPO, says N Chandrasekaran



Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has weathered the pandemic very well, and has earned tremendous goodwill from customers, which enhanced the firms standing in the market, N Chandrasekaran, chairman, said in his virtual address of the 26th Annual General Meeting on Thursday.

He said TCS shareholders received over 3,000 percent return on their investments since the company was listed in 2004.

If invested Rs 850 per share in the IPO of 2004, the value of that investment today would be Rs 28,000 crore. A return of over 3,000 per cent, Chandrasekaran said. Read More

If invested Rs 850 per share in the IPO of 2004, the value of that investment today would be Rs 28,000 crore. A return of over 3,000 per cent, Chandrasekaran said. UP CM to meet PM Modi, BJP president Nadda
Tunisian Health Ministry on Thursday reported 2,373 new COVID-19 cases, raising the total number of infections in the country to 362,658.

The death toll from the virus rose by 76 to 13,305 in Tunisia, while the total number of recoveries reached 317,758, the ministry said in a statement.

A total of 1,540,880 lab tests have been carried out in so far, according to the ministry.

Since the start of the national vaccination campaign against the on March 13, a total of 1,252,125 people have received the vaccines, with 352,570 of them having received both doses, according to the latest figures published by the ministry.

(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.)
With the second wave of Covid-19 receding and the season around the corner, the government in Uttar Pradesh is now gearing up to combat water-borne diseases, such as encephalitis and malaria.

"From June 15, a special campaign to send medical kits door-to-door to children will be started. In this regard, the administration is making all the necessary preparations," said a government spokesman.

Chief Minister has already asked officials to make special efforts to improve surveillance and keep the spread of these diseases in check.

He directed that medicines should be purchased at company rates and transparency should be maintained.

Special attention should be paid by the Medical Corporation to the quality, packing, and convenience of supply.

He also asked officials to ensure regular sanitation and fogging drives to curb the threat of water-borne diseases.

"Uttar Pradesh will be using its experience of controlling the Japanese encephalitis. Our experience in tackling this disease will also help us in curbing the spread of the third wave of Covid-19. For this, the government has prepared an action plan to effectively check the third wave," the spokesman said.

The Japanese encephalitis death rate has been reduced to 95 per cent and now there are hundreds of health wellness and encephalitis treatment centres, which will help control the diseases that get triggered in the rainy season.

The action plan is also being made by the government to increase dialysis units in every district on the PPP model.

The state government is also planning to establish blood banks so that patients do not face trouble in getting blood.

It has also ramped up the health infrastructure for better treatment of children as facilities have been provided in PICU (Paediatric Intensive Care Unit) for children above one month, NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) for children below one month, and SNCU (Sick New-born care Unit) that have been established at maternity hospitals.

--IANS

amita/sdr/

(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.)
Last year, as India went into lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the government announced that each person would receive Rs 1,500 as direct transfer and ration supplies. Despite an estimated population of 4.8 million, only 5,711 individuals received the bank transfer and 1,229 received the ration supplies.

"When we asked persons from the community to send us their bank account details, to forward to the government, around 80% told us that they have no bank accounts," said Tinesh Chopade, advocacy manager at Humsafar Trust, an organisation working to advance health, advocacy, capacity building and research for the LGBTQIA+ community. "This is simply because they have no documentation."

The lack of identity cards in their preferred names and recording their preferred gender identities means that many Indians who identify as are excluded from various benefits.

The countrywide census conducted in 2011 had three options to declare a person's sex--'Male', 'Female' and 'Other'. This was India's first attempt at collecting data on people with non-binary gender identities. Despite issues of exclusion and accuracy, the census provided an estimate of India's transgender population--487,803.

However, most other official data sources continue to collect and provide data in the binary format, excluding transgender and intersex persons. While there are no countrywide surveys or reports, multiple qualitative reports highlight ostracisation and stigma faced by India's transgender community.



Read More: Ensure transgender persons face no discrimination at vaccine centres, says Govt

Transgender children are forced to quit their education due to harassment and bullying, impacting their chances of employment and societal integration. Individuals who identify as transgender often face discrimination from healthcare workers, limiting their access to health services. They are subjected to higher rates of gender-based violence, especially by police personnel.

Most of these issues go unreported or underreported due to limited data.

While sex is biologically determined, gender is a social constuct. Thus far, data collection has been sex-focused and not gender-focused, stated a 2020 report by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC): "Gender-disaggregated data does not reflect the reality of all gender minorities and cannot be used to make development decisions, especially for the inclusion of transgender and intersex persons, who are often misrepresented or absent in this data."

Even sex-disaggregated data fail to include intersex persons. "The first certificate we get as a human being is the birth certificate which our parents provide the data for. Even that does not have a column to record for intersex children," said Chopade.

A transgender person is someone who does not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth. The term 'intersex' is used when a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn't fit the typical definitions of female or male. But India's laws club transwomen, transmen, intersex people, genderqueer people and persons ascribing to socio-cultural identities such as kinner, hijra, aravani and jogta under the definition of 'transgender'.

"There should be no justification required to adopt an inclusive approach to data. A non-binary approach to data is the bare minimum requirement to acknowledge the existence of individuals who identify outside the binary genders of male and female," Brindaalakshmi K., author of the IDRC report, told IndiaSpend, "However, a non-binary approach to data may not solve the data challenges faced by intersex persons. It requires a more nuanced approach."

Addressing the data gap

Nearly six in 10 transgender persons surveyed in Kerala in 2015 had dropped out of school due to "severe harassment" and gender-related negative experiences. The same report--prepared by Sangama, a human rights organisation for individuals oppressed due to their sexual preferences, which interviewed 3,619 transgender persons--found that only 12% of the transgender persons surveyed were employed and half of the respondents made less than Rs 5,000 per month.

The report also highlighted high rates of violence against transgender persons, particularly perpetrated by police personnel. More than half (52%) of the respondents said they had been harassed by the police and nearly all (96%) said they had not raised a complaint because of their gender identity.

A similar study conducted by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) in 2017 among 900 transgender persons in four districts of Uttar Pradesh and the National Capital Region (NCR) found that three in four transgender persons in NCR and 82% in Uttar Pradesh were never in school or dropped out before grade X. Nearly 15% had no jobs and 69% were working in the informal sector, primarily engaged in singing, dancing and 'blessing' [Transgender persons from some communities are invited to give blessings at weddings or after child birth. For many people, this is a significant source of income] . Three in four respondents were dissatisfied with their career or income generating activities and 53% were earning less than Rs 10,000 per month.

"The government has not initiated any survey or census on important issues that affect the transgender community," said Kalki Subramaniam, founder and director of Sahodari Foundation on the lack of countrywide data addressing transgender issues. "We have no data on how many transgender persons are educated, how many are uneducated, how many are homeless, how many live with their families and how many live on the streets."

Major national data sources on health, education and employment that provide sex-disaggregated data do not have a separate category for the transgender population.

These datasets include the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), which provides essential health and nutrition data; the Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE), a collation of data from schools on resources and enrollment; and the Periodic Labour Force Surveys, the primary source of statistics on labour force participation and employment.

"To pitch for a policy change, the officials and other stakeholders ask us questions on the number of transgender persons. But unfortunately, we do not have the data," said Chopade of Humsafar Trust. With no comprehensive national data, the trust relies on data that they build through outreach activities, interventions and research.

The National Statistical Office under the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, which is responsible for conducting countrywide sample surveys, has not conducted any surveys on transgender or intersex persons and their issues.

The annual Crime In India report released by the National Crime Records Bureau, which provides data on all the reported crimes in India, started collecting data on transgender persons in 2016. However, as with other reported crimes, the report may not truly represent the magnitude of crimes against transgender persons as it only includes crimes that are reported to the police and other law enforcement agencies.

Getting the identity cards

Transgender persons were granted legal recognition in a Supreme Court judgement in April 2014 that recognised transgender as a third gender. The judgement, popularly called the NALSA judgement, upheld transgender persons' right to self identify and directed central and state governments to grant legal recognition to their gender identity. It provided a legal recourse for transgender persons to change their name and gender and acquire identity cards in their preferred name and gender.



A valid identity card is a prerequisite for accessing any government welfare scheme or private service system, including healthcare, education, banking and housing. Despite legal recognition in 2014, acquiring an identity card in their preferred name and gender remains a challenge for transgender persons.

"We had to wait months to open a bank account for our organisation," said Shaman Gupta, co-chair of Transgender Welfare Equity and Empowerment Trust (TWEET) Foundation. "Sometimes the identity card details do not match with the PAN card of our board members or our addresses were not updated because we had to provide so many proofs."

Only a third of the transgender persons interviewed in the Kerala government survey had an Aadhaar card or a voter ID card and only 2% had a PAN card. Three in four respondents could not register their preferred gender identity.

Similarly, around 16% of the transgender persons interviewed in UP and Delhi had an Aadhaar card or voter ID card where they were identified as transgender. Around 1% had an Aadhaar card and 2.5% had a voter ID card in the old name and gender.

Some transgender persons may have multiple sets of documents (in their given name and assigned gender, and preferred name and gender), the IDRC report notes. This can be for various reasons: to prevent losing their eligibility for insurance claims that were procured in their assigned gender or to retain property rights that may be lost with changing their gender. No legislation in India covers this issue, the report says.

The process to acquire documents in their preferred name and gender included submitting an affidavit to the district magistrate and a gazette notification. This meant going to government offices and meeting officials who may not be sensitised, and a long legal process. "Sometimes the person sitting in the [gazette] office would not be aware and they would say that this cannot be published or the gazette officer's information may not be available," said Gupta. "So, a lot of people would come to Delhi as it is the central gazette."

This option was thus limited to individuals who are educated or associated with a non-profit organisation working with the community, found the 2020 report on gendering of development data.

Since November 2020, this process has shifted online with the launch of the National Portal for Transgender Persons. The portal, based on the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, requires individuals to log in, fill up a form and upload an identity proof.

Over four months since the launch, by March this year, 1,915 persons had applied for the certificate of identity, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment told parliament. Of these, 220 were rejected due to insufficient or invalid documents. Of the valid 1,695 applications, nearly 85% or 1,418 are pending. Only 227 cards have been issued.

"People had started applying in December," said Gupta, "It has been nearly four months but they have not got an update on the profile."

Getting the identity certificate also requires other existing identification documents. Since many transgender persons leave their home (of birth) without their identification documents, this process becomes impossible for most, stated the IDRC report.

"Many transgender persons run away from their homes and, while leaving, collecting documents may not always be on their minds," said Chopade. "They just want to escape the situation or the violence that they are facing."

From binary to ternary

"While the 'other' category in data forms, like that in census 2011, seems like cherishing inclusion, it is exclusionary and stigmatising," said Ritushree Panigrahi, a transgender woman, corporate lawyer and an LGBTQIA+ activist. Panigrahi, along with Ungender, a consultancy working towards diversity and inclusion in workplaces, created a database of online platforms and streaming platforms to government websites that ask for gender data in binaries.

"Discrimination starts with segregation between humans," she said. "At one hand these gender data forms are giving option of Male/Female to the cisgender persons and on the other segregating the rest of genders in one category of 'Others'."

"Just putting out the 'Others' category or the transgender category does not help," said Subramaniam of Sahodari Foundation, "because different people in different communities have different identities."

Some of the respondents interviewed in the IDRC report echoed the sentiment."Non-binary people don't prefer an identity of a trans man or a trans woman," Sivakumar, co-founder of Nirangal, an NGO based in Chennai, told researcher Brindaalakshmi. "For instance, there is a category called Kothi. This category signifies an individual who is very feminine but wears shirts, pants or lungies. Kothi is a cultural category that falls in between 'male' and 'trans woman'. Often Kothi-identified individuals, as well as gay and bisexual men, get classified as men who have sex with men under the government HIV program. If someone asks for an identity that is neither male nor female, neither trans woman nor trans man then what category is left for that person?"

However, other respondents in the IDRC study said that the option of multiple identities might make the process of identification complicated and counterproductive for people identifying beyond the dominant gender binary of male and female.

While there is a need for data, there is also a need for sensitisation, said Brindaalakshmi K., the author of the gendering data report. "As a first step, all involved--from the architect to the enumerators--should gain a clear understanding of the difference between sex and gender," said Brindaalakshmi. "Sensitisation and training would be essential to address the internal biases of all involved in the process. It will also help them understand the social and living circumstances of transgender and intersex persons before enumerating them. Otherwise, a mere attempt to collect data will not lead to integration of transgender and intersex persons."

(Shivani Pathak and Archita Raghu, interns with IndiaSpend, contributed to this report.)
Digital rights organisation Access Now and 13 other outfits called upon the Government of India to "end its wave of digital censorship and intimidation, including immediately withdrawing its new rules for governing content and communications online".

The coalition, which includes Article 19, Association for Progressive Communications, Center for Democracy and Technology, Dangerous Speech Project, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Human Rights Watch, is also asking corporations to step up against the intrusion by Indian authorities into the rights of the millions of people who use their services everyday.

The Government of India is seeking to seize control of online spaces, said Raman Jit Singh Chima, Senior International Counsel and Asia Pacific Policy Director at Access Now. There is a complete lack of transparency surrounding existing government censorship and surveillance demands; the new rules issued by the executive branch are being used to bully social media platforms and online services into compliance. This assault on fundamental human rights must end.

The government notified the Information Technology (Guidelines For Intermediaries And Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 in February, giving significant social media frms, or those with over five million registered users, three months to comply with them.

However, in May, things came to a head when some content shared by some Bharatiya Janata Party Twitter handles were tagged "manipulated media" in accordance with the microblogging platform's policy that gives it "reason to believe that media shared in a Tweet have been significantly and deceptively altered or fabricated".

This led to a very public standoff between Twitter and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. At one point, the Delhi Police reached Twitter offices to serve notice on one of its employees.

"These are troubling indicators of how the Indian Government, which has already been criticised for silencing protests, criminalising dissent, and blocking access to the internet, will use the expanded powers under the new intermediary rules, notified under the in February 2021, to restrict online content, and chill free expression and access to information. The rules apply to all internet intermediaries, including social media companies, digital media and video streaming services," the joint letter from the organisations noted.

The new IT Rules also impose data retention and traceability requirements which will undermine end-to-end encryption, resulting in a chilling effect on freedom of expression and freedom of association even on private messaging platforms, and put the personal data and privacy of users in India at risk. The rules run afoul of the necessity and proportionality standard laid down by the Supreme Court of India and the UN Human Rights Committee, and are inconsistent with the Indian Constitution, the representation added.
Sugar mills in India have exported 4.25 million tonnes of the sweetener so far in the ongoing 2020-21 marketing year ending September, with maximum shipments to Indonesia, trade body AISTA said on Friday.

Mills have contracted to export 5.85 million tonnes of sugar so far, as against the 6 million tonnes quota assigned by the food ministry in January this year, All India Sugar Trade Association (AISTA) said in a statement.

About 1,50,000 tonnes of sugar is left to be exported under the quota and some sugar mills are finding it difficult to locate small quantities left with mills, it said and requested the government to publish the unshipped export quota left with mills as on May 31.

The sugar marketing year runs from October to September.

According to AISTA, mills have exported a total of 4.25 million tonnes of sugar from January 1 till June 7, 2021.

Of the total exports undertaken so far, maximum exports have been undertaken to Indonesia at 1.40 million tonnes so far this year, followed by Afghanistan at 5,20,905 tonnes and the UAE at 4,36,917 tonnes and Sri Lanka at 3,24,113 tonnes.

About 3,59,665 tonnes of sugar is under loading. An additional 4,98,462 tonnes of sugar is in transit and delivered to port-based refineries, it said.

"The US has withdrawn oil restrictions on Iran and there are chances of to Iran. India's highest were to Iran last year," AISTA Chairman Praful Vithalani told PTI.

Maharashtra has failed to sell in the domestic market the allotted quota in a month. There can be more than 2 million tonnes of additional unsold stock at the end of the sugar year ending September 2021, he added.

The association noted that monsoon has set in and sugar is a highly hygroscopic commodity as it catches moisture very fast. It is necessary that sugar stored in port areas or sugar reaching at the port for export get evacuated immediately.

While Hazira port trust has decided to accord priority to sugar vessels for berthing, similar instructions need to be issued to other ports also, it said.

AISTA has already written to the ports from where major are taking place to give priority to vessels for sugar exports on lines of Hazira ports, it said and added the Union Food Ministry may also take up the matter with Shipping and Commerce ministries in this regard.

The international sugar prices have softened a little as expectation of rains in Brazil has brightened the chances of rise in sugar production, it said.

AISTA said the sugar export without subsidy has started and about 2 lakh tonnes has been traded so far.

AISTA has revised sugar production to 35 million tonnes for the 2020-21 marketing year from earlier projections of 29.9 million tonnes. Consumption will be pegged at 25.5 million tonnes.

(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.)
As India girds to rehabilitate its economy from Covids latest onslaught, pushing ahead with some key and long-awaited reforms in the upstream oil and gas sector could accelerate growth and also secure supply for the countrys growing energy needs.

India's oil and natural gas production has been in a worryingly stubborn decline over the past decade. Crude output in the fiscal year ended March 31 fell by 5 per cent annually to around 610,000 barrels per day (b/d), while gas production slipped 8 per cent to roughly 78.5 million standard cubic meters/day. Covid-related constraints were partially responsible, but the pandemic has also delivered a reminder to build up the upstream sectors resilience against future shocks.

Oil producers have been calling for halving the hefty 67 per cent in total levies that they end up paying in the form of royalty, cess and profit-sharing with the government.

The companies could be asked to commit to channeling the tax relief into boosting production from ageing fields, which would yield longer-term dividend for the government coffers.

Its also time to double down on cutting through red tape for upstream projects. Onerous and multi-layered approval processes at various levels of government waste time and money. Some need to be consolidated and others simplified through self-certification. Executing projects within strict timelines would give oil and gas development the momentum it badly needs.

Theres nothing like Indian oil and gas players themselves exemplifying progress on ease of doing business to attract overseas partners with the funds and technical knowhow that could spur production growth.

Meanwhile, gas production in India does not carry oils tax burden, but is also disadvantaged vis-a-vis growing LNG imports, which also come at a higher cost.

There is some low-hanging fruit in the shape of reforms that could propel the country towards its ambitious target of becoming a gas-based economy, and some bigger improvements that will pay off in the longer term.

Though the Covid-induced global demand destruction and abundant LNG supply made imports cheaper, one cannot bet on a sustained softness in international prices as recovery picks up steam.

A foreseeable acceleration in Indias gas demand growth makes it imperative for the country to create a conducive regulatory and fiscal environment to not only boost domestic production now, but also put the sector on the path of sustainable expansion in the coming decades.

The country has adopted a roadmap for boosting gas usage and penetration and has begun advancing on several fronts. The strategy includes beefing up gas transmission infrastructure, incentivising industries to switch to the cleaner fuel, and a gradual deregulation of marketing and pricing.

It is a giant leap of faith to move from decades of highly centralized and government-regulated infrastructure, marketing and pricing regimes in the gas market to a liberalized system built on free enterprise, competition and innovation. The execution will need persistent determination on the part of all stakeholders and strong coordination across the downstream ecosystem.

The launch of the countrys maiden gas exchange to trade imported LNG last year and the introduction of electronic bidding for the sale of domestic gas are enablers of price transparency and a more efficient marketplace.

But to make the electronic bidding system fair and truly effective, gas buyers and sellers need to have up-to-date information on the total capacity in pipeline systems on their trade routes and the unused capacity available, on a dynamic basis. That is typically not the case at present.

An elegant solution would be to create an independent national nodal agency to collate and disseminate such information on a real-time basis.

There is also a need for standardization in the gas trade and fiscal regimes. A uniform template for all gas sale and purchase contracts will help avoid needless conflicts. Levies and taxes on gas sales should be harmonized across all the states to ensure a level playing field and avoid price distortions across borders. Bringing natural gas under the GST system could help achieve that goal.

Downstream market deregulation needs to be extended to the well-head. Its time to phase out government allocation and pricing of gas from Oil and Natural Gas Corp. and OILs older fields. Its also time to harmonize taxation and incentives across the various licensing regimes, as they were less generous a few decades ago. This would encourage companies operating the older, depleting fields to plough funds to boost the assets life and productivity.

Finally, the growth of domestic gas consumption  and production  depends on the establishment of more pipeline connections.

Projects to boost capacity on trunk routes and build more spur lines to connect gas fields and potential end-users to the existing grid, especially in remote areas, needs to be fast-tracked.

The target of doubling national gas pipeline capacity in the next two to three years will need the full support of the central and state governments, from ensuring faster approvals, to facilitating speedy construction.

India has a short window of opportunity to give the domestic upstream sector a shot in the arm, especially with regard to shoring up oil and gas output from producing fields. Aside from making the most of the national resource wealth, it would help moderate the upward incline of imports over the coming years.

Vandana Hari is founder of Vanda Insights. Views are her own.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are personal. They do not reflect the view/s of Business Standard.
Warren Buffett, until last year a devoted shareholder of big U.S. banks, has moved on to their challengers. Does that spell the end of his faith in the traditional financial sector?

This week, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. poured $500 million into Brazils Nubank--the fintech companys largest single investment--giving it a valuation of $30 billion. Nubank is one of the worlds biggest so-called neobanks, or all-digital lenders, with 40 million users in Latin America.

For decades, financial institutions were Buffetts bread and butter, with stakes in lenderslen, insurers and credit-card companies. That changed last year, when Berkshire dumped 84% of its holdings in Group Inc., initially picked up during the global financial crisis, and pared its stakes in Wells Fargo & Co. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Berkshires investment portfolio had just over 23.6% of its fair value concentrated in financial firms, including banks, at the end of 2020, down from 41% in 2019.

Berkshire watchers were shocked and worried as they tried to decipher Buffetts moves. He compared the coronavirus crisis to 2008, noting there were a lot of unknowns given large swathes of society were shut down.





ALSO READ: China's Didi reveals US IPO filing, all set for blockbuster New York float

Now its worth asking whether Buffett is going a step further with this Nubank stake--and whether this is a deliberate switch from the old and entrenched world of to the new, digital-only variety. Customers certainly don't need brick-and-mortar branches in the middle of a pandemic.

The reality may lie somewhere in the middle. Buffetts fintech bet is less a testament to his beliefs about the future of banking than a hunt for standout growth potential, driven by consumers. Berkshire already owns a stake of around 4% in another Brazilian payments firm, StoneCo Ltd., and Indias Buffett is looking for dislocations in the market, not just efficient money-churners with more or less diminishing to flat returns. After all, the benefits of technological disruption rarely show up in traditional lenders bottom lines; they go to customers.

Virtual seem to have accomplished what incumbents have had a much harder time pulling off. Their ease of use and accessibility is a draw for consumers, while the cost of opening accounts is low. Operational expenses arent as onerous because they dont need branches and physical assets. Firms that Buffett reduced stakes in have been trying to create their own consumer-focused digital units. But the transition from their normal functions to digital is slow and expensive. Goldmans Marcus has struggled with rising loan losses and executive turnover. JPMorgan pulled the plug on its version, called Finn, a year after launch and is planning a digital push into the U.K. instead.

Its true that Berkshire could have made its digital plays closer to home and in theoretically safer markets. In places like Europe and the U.S, however, the neobank space is relatively mature with limited investment upside, given all the venture capital money thats already crowded in. In the first quarter alone, 25 of the 42 digital-banking deals globally transpired in these two regions.



ALSO READ: Warren Buffett says Greg Abel is his likely successor at Berkshire Hathaway

Meanwhile, U.S. and European regulators are becoming more cautious (think Germanys Wirecard AG situation), and have been pushing big players toward full banking licenses. Thats a good thing, but it can also create obstacles to growth. In addition, customer acquisition is more expensive as they have to spend larger amounts to compete with big incumbents, which are investing aggressively to defend their turf.

No wonder Buffet is looking elsewhere. Emerging markets like Latin America and Asia, where consumers have helped payments and digital money systems take off, present a long-term opportunity. Lenders in these regions are inefficient, expensive and relatively weaker  often saddled with bad loans. The number of unbanked people remains vast and, outside China, regulation isnt a huge hindrance yet. The future of fintech has already shown clear success and uptake. Ride-hailers and e-commerce businesses have become super-apps and are getting banking licenses.

Brazils Nubank competes with the big lenders in terms of volumes. It had more than 57 million downloads, while annualized revenue between 2017 and 2020 grew over 100%, according to analysts. Its app-based, no-fee credit card for the urban middle class was key to that success. Yet digital arent able to eliminate competition completely. Nubank itself relies on big lenders for credit lines, and turned to traditional to support its Mexican subsidiary in April. They still need their friends at JPMorgan and Goldman.

So while big banks appear to be on the defensive, they continue to hold the reins to large-scale credit, as costly as that is. Their digital friends, however, will have a much more lucrative path up. Buffett knows that.
The on Friday refused to pass direction on a plea seeking remedial measures to redress the financial hardship faced by borrowers during the second wave of Covid-19 pandemic, saying it is in the realm of policy decision.

The government has many things to do. They have to spend money on vaccine, they have to spend money on migrant labourers. We cannot do it like this, the apex court said, adding that it is for the Centre and the RBI to consider the issue.

These are all in the realm of policy decision. These are issues having financial implications and we are not the experts, a bench of Justices Ashok Bhushan and M R Shah told advocate Vishal Tiwari, who has filed the petition.

The top court was hearing the plea which sought directions to the Centre and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to take effective and remedial measures, including in the form of fresh loan moratorium, to redress and overcome the financial stress and hardship faced by borrowers during the second wave of COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown.

During the hearing conducted through video-conferencing, Tiwari referred to the reports on how the second wave of the pandemic has affected the Indian economy and said the situation is much worse as compared to last year.

The bench noted in its order that the petitioner has also annexed the last month's circular by which the RBI had issued resolution of Covid-related stress of MSMEs.

The petitioner appearing in person submits that the circular does not sufficiently address the hardship of the borrowers. Be that as it may, the financial relief and other measures are in the domain of the government and essentially related to policy matter, the bench said. We are, thus, of the view that no direction, as prayed in the writ petition, be passed. We, however, observe that all the issues, which are raised, are policy matters and it is for the Union of India and the RBI to consider and take appropriate decision."

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Describing as a pacing challenge, US Defence Secretary Llyod Austin said Beijing's "aggressive behaviour" in the Indo-Pacific could spark a crisis in the region.

Responding to questions from members of the Senate Armed Services Committee during a Congressional hearing on the annual budget of the Pentagon, he stressed on having a direct line of communication between the militaries and also between government officials.

"As we look at some of the aggressive behaviour that we have witnessed from in the Indo-Pacific, I'm concerned about something that could happen that could spark a crisis," Austin said on Thursday.

"We need the ability to be able to talk with our allies and partners and also with our adversaries or potential adversaries. So, I think there needs to be a direct line of communication between the military and also between government officials as well," the defence secretary said.

Austin described the US' relationship with currently as one of competition.

"They desire to be the preeminent country on the planet. Their mid to long-term goal is to do that. They look to compete with us, not only militarily but across a spectrum of activity," he said.

"What you see us doing, the military and other sectors in our government, is making sure that we remain competitive, economically; making sure that we continue to develop the best scientists in the world and the most comprehensive research. So it is a competition across a broad spectrum of activity," Austin said.

During the Senatorial hearing, Senator Angus King said that he believed one of the "most serious risks the US faces today is an accidental conflict with China", of some kind of conflict in the South China Sea, the Strait of Taiwan, and the danger of escalation from that accidental conflict of some kind.

"It's concerning to me that we don't seem to have an effective hotline with China. I understand the Chinese are reluctant about this, but I believe this should be a national security priority," King said.

Austin described China as a pacing challenge for the United States.

"China is our pacing challenge. So we've really weighted our main effort there to the My first trip overseas was out to the region, along with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. We visited South Korea, Japan, and India as well," he said.

"We truly value the importance of strong relationships with our allies and partners. I think there's a great capacity that can be leveraged there. So, in some areas through those partnerships, while still strong, we will remain focused on that, he said.

General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that from a military standpoint, China is the number one threat for the US.

Russia is a considerable great power competitor as well, he noted.

"The most significant military threat that we're focused on is China. It's our pacing challenge. That's what we have asked you a number of times to help us resource our efforts on that challenge," he told the lawmakers.

(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.)
Chinas new data security regime gives President Xi Jinping the power to shut down or fine tech as part of his drive to wrest control of vast reams of data held by giants like Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings.

Firms found mishandling core state data can be forced to cease operations, have their operating licenses revoked or fined up to 10 million yuan ($1.6 million) under a law passed on Thursday by the nations top legislative body.

that leak sensitive data abroad can be hit with similar fines and punishments, and those providing electronic information to overseas law enforcement bodies without permission can face financial penalties up to 5 million yuan and business suspensions, according to the law published on the website of the National Peoples Congress. The law, which goes into effect September 1, stipulates major decisions involving data security will be made by national security officials.

Xis administration has tightened control over the hoard of information produced by the nations tech as part of broader efforts to position as a leader in big data. Beijing has been pouring money into data centers and other digital infrastructure to make electronic information a national economic driver and help shore up the Communist Partys legitimacy.

The law represents another important piece in the overall data protection regulatory jigsaw in China, Carolyn Bigg, a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property and technology issues with DLA Piper in Hong Kong, said before it was passed. Companies will still need to wait for guidance and technical standards on the practical measures they must take to comply, she said.

It remains a complex  and increasingly onerous -- compliance framework for businesses to navigate through, Bigg said.

Chinese tech stocks were mixed Friday. Alibaba fell 1.2 per cent and Tencent slipped 0.8 per cent at the close in Hong Kong.
Chinese ride-hailing company revealed a $1.6 billion net loss for 2020 as it moves ahead with plans for a U.S. initial public offering.

The company in its first public filing for the listed the offering as $100 million, a placeholder that will change when the company discloses terms for the share sale. filed Thursday under the business name Xiaoju Kuaizhi Inc., with Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co. leading the offering.

Didi, one of the largest investments in Group Corp.s portfolio, accelerated its listing plans after its business rebounded as the coronavirus pandemic ebbed in China. The company has been considering seeking a valuation of as much as $70 billion to $100 billion in the IPO, Bloomberg News reported in April.

In recent months, has been trading at a valuation of about $95 billion on the secondary market, said people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the information was private. The company last raised funding at a $62 billion value last year, according to PitchBook. A representative for Didi declined to comment on the companys valuation.

SoftBanks Vision Fund, Uber Technologies Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. are currently among Didis biggest shareholders with a combined stake of about 41%, its filing shows. Didi co-founder Will Wei Cheng holds 7% of the shares.

SoftBanks 21.5% stake could be worth $15 billion or more at the targeted valuation range, although that stake could be diluted in the offering. The Japanese company invested more than $10 billion in Didi, Bloomberg News has reported.

While Didi has expanded into 15 countries, most of its revenue still comes from its China mobility business.

Didi reported revenue of $21.6 billion in 2020. In the first quarter of this year, as China recovered from the pandemic, revenue more than doubled from the year before to hit $6.4 billion. The company also turned a profit for the quarter, reporting net income of $837 million.





ALSO READ: China's Didi reveals US IPO filing, all set for blockbuster New York float

The murder of two passengers by Didi drivers in the summer of 2018 sparked public outrage and the mass deleting of the companys app. Didis founders Cheng and Jean Qing Liu called the deaths the companys darkest moment.

In the summer of 2018, two tragic safety incidents occurred on our Hitch platform, they wrote in a letter to investors included in the filing. These shook us to our core. We felt an immense sense of sadness and responsibility and began a period of deep self-reflection.

The company cited safety concerns among the risks to its business, saying failure to ensure safety could cause it to lose customers. The company said in its filing that, after the deaths, it suspended the Hitch Carpooling service for more than a year to develop procedures to protect riders and drivers.

Other potential risks for Didi line up with those of their ride-hailing competitors around the world. Rivals could undercut Didis customer prices or poach drivers with better earning potential, the company said in the filing, and its business model would suffer if their army of drivers were re-classified as employees.

The company also cited the possibility of antitrust fines or regulations, as well as the chance its share price could drop because of negative sentiment in the U.S. about Chinese

Tech Enthusiasm

An would cap a remarkable turnaround for a company that first ran afoul of regulators and then faced the effects of the pandemic. Didi seeks to tap the same investor enthusiasm that propelled this years tech debuts by Chinese video service Kuaishou Technology and South Korean e-commerce pioneer Coupang Inc.

Didis would also mark a monumental year for Chinese tech IPOs. Kuaishou raised more than $6 billion via a Hong Kong debut in January, while ByteDance Ltd. itself is expected to put in motion a listing later this year.

Didi was founded in 2012 by former Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. staffer Cheng. It clashed with Uber in China for years until the U.S. firm retreated in 2016, selling its operation in the country to Didi.

The company is looking for capital to invest in technology, grow its presence in some markets and introduce new products, according to the filing. It is planning to make its debut in Western Europe this year, Bloomberg News reported in February, and its invested heavily in so-called community buying, one of the hottest e-commerce growth areas in China.

Didi, which remains the dominant player in China, is also looking to leverage that lead to expand into adjacent arenas from autonomous driving to electric vehicles.

The company said in Thursdays filing that it plans to list its American depositary shares under the symbol DIDI, although it didnt specify on which exchange.
The U.S. push for a new inquiry to determine the origins of the -- including whether it leaked from a Wuhan lab -- raises a key question: What has failed to disclose?

The Group of Seven leaders this weekend are set to call for a fresh, transparent, World Health Organization-convened study into the origins of this virus, according to a draft statement seen by Bloomberg News. Yet so far theyve been vague on what exactly they want.

In his statement giving intelligence agencies 90 days to redouble efforts into the origin of Covid-19, President Joe Biden asked them to come up with specific questions for  Beijing officials have repeatedly denied that the virus leaked from the lab, and pointed to a WHO report earlier this year that said the most likely origin was natural.

But WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the lab leak hypothesis required further investigation, adding that he was ready to deploy more resources. He said scientists would benefit from full access to data, including biological samples from at least September 2019. The European Union similarly called for more data.

Heres what a new study should examine:

Details on Wuhan Lab Research

One big outstanding question is what type of work was actually going on in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Shi Zhengli, the top bat researcher at the lab, said in a March 2020 article in Scientific American that the genetic code of the virus that causes Covid-19 doesnt match any of her labs samples. She also told the WHO team that all staff had tested negative for Covid-19 antibodies.

Still, researchers havent yet had access to all isolates and genomic sequence data held at Wuhan labs. And they also havent had access to log books and records of the research that was being conducted on coronaviruses, in particular viruses with the RaTG13 bat sequence that is similar to SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen underpinning Covid-19.

There are also questions about whether the institute conducted gain-of-function experiments, in which researchers manipulate naturally occurring viruses to see if they can be made deadlier or more transmissible.





ALSO READ: It is 'plausible' coronavirus leaked from Wuhan lab, finds US study

Medical Records of Lab Workers

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that U.S. intelligence indicates three researchers from the lab became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care. A number of media also reported that the Chinese government has restricted access to an abandoned copper mine in southwest where researchers from the Wuhan lab collected coronavirus samples after a 2012 incident in which six miners fell ill with a mysterious respiratory illness.

Shi, the bat coronavirus researcher, told the WHO team that all staff had tested negative for Covid-19 antibodies. The China Daily again reported this week that no staff member of the Wuhan Institute of Virology has ever contracted the virus that caused Covid-19.

Still, researchers havent had access to medial records and specimens collected from staff at the institute who sought hospital care in late 2019. And they would also want to see medical records and specimens collected from the miners in southwest China.



ALSO READ: Covid: Chinese virologist says Fauci emails prove her Wuhan lab leak claims

More Data on Early Cases

To identify the earliest human cases in December 2019, the WHO team reviewed health records, mortality data, trends in retail sales of cold and cough medications and reported patterns of influenza-like illnesses and severe respiratory infections in the two months preceding the outbreak in Wuhan.

investigators examined 76,000 cases from more than 200 medical centers, and researchers in China also tested some 4,500 patient specimens stored at hospitals in Wuhan and other parts of China.

Even so, the WHO team that went to Wuhan earlier this year proposed further analysis of cases of respiratory illness that occurred in Wuhan in October and November 2019.

Documentation on Wuhan Wet Markets

To identify potential animal sources, 11,000 blood samples taken from livestock and poultry in 31 provinces were tested along with 1,914 samples from 35 species of wild animals. Researchers in China looked for SARS-CoV-2 in 12,000 animal swabs and 50,000 samples from 300 different species of wild animals. All were negative.

Researchers this week found that mink, masked palm civets, raccoon dogs, Siberian weasels, hog badgers and Chinese bamboo rats were among 38 animal species sold live at markets in Wuhan from May 2017 to November 2019.

Still, gaps remain in evidence to support a theory that the virus spilled over to humans from animals. WHO researchers havent seen full documentation of what species of animals were sold live at markets in Wuhan in 2019, when they were present, and a list of their vendors and suppliers.

The WHO team has sought additional sampling of animal species that may act as a reservoir, including bat populations in China and neighboring countries. They also would benefit from names and addresses of farms raising minks, foxes, raccoon dogs and other fur-producing animals in China from 2018 to 2020.

Evidence From Outside China

Chinese officials have repeatedly raised the specter that the virus originated elsewhere in the world, and was brought into the country either through frozen-food imports or even a U.S. military operation. Foreign Ministry officials have repeatedly called for the U.S. to provide access to Fort Detrick in Maryland, which is home to the American bio-defense agency.

The WHO team has called for collecting and analyzing epidemiological, clinical, molecular and environmental data from other countries to better understand the viruss origins, since some reports have suggested it may have been circulating outside China before December 2019. They are also seeking more research to understand if it could be transmitted from contaminated products to humans, and under which conditions that might occur.
The European Medicines Agency says it's recommending that people who have had a rare blood vessel syndrome not be immunised with AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine.

In a statement on Friday, the EU drug regulator said it reviewed cases of six people who had capillary leak syndrome after they had received a shot of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

The vaccine has previously been linked to rare blood clots, but health officials say its benefits still outweigh the small risks.

EMA experts also concluded that the capillary leak condition should be added to the product information as a new side effect of the vaccine.

The agency said it is continuing its review of heart inflammation in a small number of people who developed conditions after getting immunized with the vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna Inc.

The EMA said it is studying cases of myocarditis, inflammation of the heart, and pericarditis, inflammation of the membrane surrounding the heart. Symptoms include shortness of breath and chest pain; the problems are usually temporary.

Further analysis is needed to determine whether there is a causal link with the vaccines, the EU agency said.

The EMA said it expects to finalize its review of such cases next month.

(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 PhD degree of former German Minister for Family Affairs Franziska Giffey had her doctoral was revoked after an investigation into her 2010 doctoral thesis on European found evidence of plagiarism, the Free University of Berlin (FU Berlin) announced.

The reason to revoke the title was "deception about the independence of her scientific performance", the FU Berlin said on Thursday.

Giffey resigned from her ministerial post in May.

In the thesis on the European Commission's (EC) policy on civil society participation, texts and references from other authors were copied without sufficient identification.

"I accept this decision," Giffey said in a statement on Thursday.

However, the former Minister reiterated that she had written the thesis to the best of her knowledge and regretted "any errors that I may have made in the preparation of the paper".

Despite losing her academic title, Giffey did not announce her withdrawal from and is set to continue her campaign as a leading candidate for the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the regional elections in Berlin in September.

--IANS

ksk/

(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.)
Both leaders have taken heat at home over Keystone, with Republicans slamming Biden for shutting it down while construction was underway, costing hundreds of jobs. The project was meant to expand oil exports for Canada, which has the third-largest oil reserves in the world, and provincial officials in Alberta wanted Trudeau to do more to save it.
passed a wide-ranging law to counter foreign sanctions on Thursday, in an apparent move to legalise its tit-for-tat retaliation against punitive actions taken by foreign countries over issues from human rights to Hong Kong. The law, effective immediately, builds upon previous administrative counter-measures against foreign sanctions issued by the Chinese foreign and commerce ministries. It also lays out the scope of China's counter-sanctions.

Whos the target?



Individuals or entities involved in the making or implementation of discriminatory measures against Chinese citizens, or interfering with Chinas internal affairs could be put onto a blacklist. Blacklisted individuals could find their relatives, and the organisations of which they are senior managers or have control over placed on the list.

What happens to those blacklisted?



Those blacklisted could be denied entry into or deported from Their assets within China can be sealed, seized or frozen.

Entities within China could be restricted from engaging in all forms of transactions or cooperation or other activities.

Chinese citizens or organisations can sue in Chinese courts those who enforce foreign measures that discriminate against them.

How it this differebt fron the past?



While the foreign ministry has previously announced sanctions mainly against individuals including Western politicians and scholars, it had not cited a specific law as the legal basis.

It was also not always clear what those sanctions entailed.
External Affairs Minister has held a meeting with India's envoys to the Gulf nations to discuss a host of issues, including encouraging speedy resumption of flights to this region and facilitating reuniting families separated by Covid disruption.

Jaishankar, who arrived here on his first bilateral visit to the oil-rich Gulf nation early on Thursday, also unveiled a bust of Mahatma Gandhi at the Indian Embassy in Kuwait in presence of the ambassadors.

"Chaired a fruitful meeting of Indian Ambassadors in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain today," the external affairs minister tweeted.

"Discussions focused on ensuring utmost welfare of the Indian community in respective jurisdictions, facilitating reuniting of families separated by Covid disruption, interceding for early return of Indian talent and skills who left the Gulf during the pandemic, encouraging the speedy resumption of flights to Gulf destinations to help NRIs and strongly push our trade interests that contribute to economic recovery at home," he said in a series of tweets.

Jaishankar also exuded confidence that the ambassadors and embassies will deliver on these priorities.

Earlier in the day, he held "productive discussions" with his Kuwaiti counterpart Sheikh Ahmed Nasser Al-Mohammad Al-Sabah on Thursday during which the two sides discussed a range of issues including health, food, education, energy, digital and business cooperation.

The two sides also signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) that will give Indian workers greater legal protection in Kuwait.

There are over 10 lakh Indians residing in Kuwait. India is amongst the largest trading partners of Kuwait and Kuwait is a major supplier of oil for India.

Jaishankar, who is carrying a personal letter from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Kuwait's Emir Sheikh Nawaf al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, also called on Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah Khaled Al-Hamad Al-Sabah.

"Conveyed our felicitations on the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations. Appreciated his commitment to taking our partnership to higher levels. Our historical ties have been reinforced through our joint fight against COVID19," Jaishankar tweeted.

His visit comes nearly three months after the two countries decided to establish a joint ministerial commission to formulate a framework to strengthen ties in sectors like energy, trade, investment, manpower and labour and information technology.

Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Ahmed visited India in March during which both sides decided to set up the joint commission.

The year 2021-22 marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between India and Kuwait.

Kuwait has been supporting India in dealing with the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic by supplying relief material as well as medical oxygen. Indian Navy ships have brought a large quantity of medical oxygen from Kuwait in the last few weeks.

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The United States and other Group of Seven nations are considering reallocating $100 billion from the Monetary Fund's warchest to help countries struggling to cope with the Covid-19 crisis, the White House said.

The issue will be on the table when G7 leaders discuss how to help steer the world's recovery from the pandemic at a three-day summit in Cornwall, England, which began on Friday.

"The United States and our G7 partners are actively considering a global effort to multiply the impact of the proposed Special Drawing Rights (SDR) allocation to the countries most in need," the US president's office said.

"At potentially up to $100 billion in size, the proposed effort would further support health needs including vaccinations," it said, adding that it would help promote a more sustained and inclusive global recovery.

SDRs are the IMF's reserve asset, and are exchangeable for dollars, euros, sterling, yen and Chinese yuan or renminbi.

Member states can loan or donate their SDR reserves to other countries for their use.





ALSO READ: Covid-19 pandemic: G7 leaders agreed to keep the money taps open

The United States, which has targeted the SDR allocation to be distributed around the "late (northern) summer," on Friday said: "We strongly support the effort to recycle SDRs to further support health needs."

The IMF had no immediate comment.

IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, who will speak virtually with G7 leaders this weekend, on Wednesday told a separate event that she expected the fund's governors to approve a $650 billion boost in SDRs in mid-August.

The global lender is continuing to study how best richer countries could donate or loan their reserves to benefit poorer nations. Details are expected in early autumn.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday called on the other G7 nations to find an agreement on reallocating $100 billion in SDRs to African states.

World finance chiefs agreed in April to issue new SDRs and extend a debt-servicing freeze to help developing countries deal with the pandemic, although only $34 billion of the $650 billion in new reserves will be allocated to Africa, since SDRs are issued according to the size of a member's holding in the IMF.

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When the UK hosts the G7 summit in Cornwall between June 10 and 12, it will be the first intergovernmental meeting of the worlds seven wealthiest democracies since before COVID. Playing host for the seventh time, the UK is in a slightly stronger position than in 2019, due to the success of its vaccine rollout.

Amid the pandemic and worsening threats from climate change, inequality and dictators, the 2021 summit is a diplomatic opportunity for the G7 to display a united front. The seven countries, which represent almost 40% of global GDP  are certainly more united than two years ago.

The last G7 meeting in Biarritz, France in 2019 was overshadowed by questions of unity on the environment and politics, with difficult Brexit discussions and the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord on the agenda.

The summit was largely divided, with French President Emmanuel Macron abandoning the joint communique for the first time in the groups 44 years history due to the deep crisis of democracy. Then-US President Donald Trump threw the stage-managed proceedings into disarray, throwing insults at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over trade.

The context was that Trump had abruptly left the Paris Climate Accord in 2017, despite pleas to convince him otherwise. Trumps push to reinstate Russia  a member of the then G8 until the 2014 annexation of Crimea  had been another point of contention, as was the focus on the fires in the Amazon.

Two years later, the US leadership under President Joe Biden is recommitted to multilateralism and more willing to cooperate with G7 partners on issues of trade, climate change, the role of Russia and China in intergovernmental cooperation, and the authoritarian resurgence. So are they likely to have a better summit?

The COVID dimension

The G7 countries will need to come together to tackle vaccine nationalism if there is any chance of controlling the pandemic. Though huge strides have been made in vaccinating citizens from wealthy countries, vaccines have not been evenly distributed. A citizen from a G7 country is 77 times more likely to be offered a vaccine than someone living in the worlds poorest countries, according to the Peoples Vaccine Alliance. If the slow vaccination pace continues, it could be several decades before everyone around the world has been vaccinated.

Attention is currently on India, which faces one of the worst outbreaks of COVID-19 globally, with surging cases mostly due to the discovery of a more infectious variant. India is an invited guest to the G7 summit, as it was in 2019 and was going to be in 2020, joining Australia, South Africa and South Korea.

Conspicuously absent is Brazil, which is also coping with a dire COVID-19 outbreak (and has recorded 12.3% of the worlds total deaths, with 2.7% of the global population). Brazils leadership under Jair Bolsonaro has come under fire for downplaying the severity of the crisis and exacerbating the situation.

Though including Bolsonaro may not have been productive due to his hyper-nationalist agenda, excluding key countries from the global south undermines representation in the body.

New challenges

As always, economic issues are at the forefront of the agenda. But as the G7 involves some of the largest economies in the world, there is greater acknowledgement that the glaring differences in economic security have spilled over to impact health security, and that health insecurity has a huge impact on global economic stability.

In an effort to tackle growing inequality, the G7 has reached an agreement on a 15% global minimum corporate tax. This historic step has already been criticised as far too low to make a difference, with no way of stopping the operation of tax havens.

In addition to the lukewarm response to the minimum corporate tax rate commitment, This summit is also facing a backlash for the inadequate focus on environmental security and climate finance to help developing countries commit to green energy.

This is in spite of the fact that G7 ministers already agreed to take new steps against fossil fuels in May: in a pre-meeting, the G7 announced that it would stop international financing of coal projects, mandate that corporations disclose their climate impacts, and invest more in clean energy. But climate-change campaigners have pointed to the hypocrisy of G7 countries spending over US$30 billion (21 billion) more to support oil, coal and gas between January 2020 and March 2021 than on investment in clean forms of energy.

Remarkably, the problems facing G7 leaders are even more complex and urgent than what the world faced in 2019. Addressing these issues requires greater inclusive diplomacy, coordination and follow-through, all things that the G7 forum has struggled to achieve. In spite of calls for unity, the G7 is still plagued by ideological divisions that preclude collective muscle, while also lacking dominant leadership that can actually turn its communiques into meaningful action.

Natasha Lindstaedt, Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Japans relations with are nongovernmental and practical and are based on Tokyos recognition of as the sole legitimate government, a top Japanese official said Friday, following Beijings protest over a recent reference to the island as a country.

As flexes its muscle in the Strait and the Asia-Pacific region, the issue of is a sensitive topic, especially as Japan, the United States and other democracies develop closer ties with the self-ruled island that Beijing regards as a renegade territory to be united by force if necessary.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato told a regular news conference Friday that Japans position is to maintain working relations with Taiwan at the nongovernment level, in line with the 1972 Japan- Communique, when Tokyo switched the diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China. Thats our basic policy and there is no change to that.

Katos remark came a day after China protested Prime Minister Yoshihide Sugas reference to Taiwan as a country during a parliamentary debate on Wednesday.

Suga, while answering a question about pandemic measures, made a passing reference to Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia as three countries.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Thursday the comment violated Japans solemn promise to not regard Taiwan as a country.

We strongly deplore Japans erroneous remarks and have lodged solemn complaints with Japan, demanding that immediately make clear clarifications to eliminate the adverse effects caused by relevant remarks, and to ensure that such situations will not happen again, Wang said.

On Friday, Japans upper house of the parliament adopted a resolution calling on the World Health Organization to include Taiwan in its general meetings, saying its expertise on coronavirus measures is indispensable.

China has so far blocked the move, and has increased Taiwans diplomatic isolation, leaving it with just over a dozen formal diplomatic allies. Taiwan still operates a network of trade offices around the world that act as de-facto embassies, including in the United States, and most other major nations.

Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi carefully referred to Taiwan as a region in his brief remark emphasizing the importance of including the island for the benefit of public health.

also has donated 1.24 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Taiwan as it battles its largest outbreak of infections amid a shortage of jabs. Taiwan has blamed China for interfering in a potential deal for another vaccine.

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(Reuters) -McDonald's Corp, the world's largest burger chain, said on Friday a data breach in and has exposed some customer, employee information.

The company has hired external consultants to investigate unauthorized activity on an internal security system, with the investigators discovering the data breach in certain markets.

A small number of files were accessed, some of which contained personal data, McDonald's said, adding that only Korea and had customer personal data accessed and they will be taking steps to notify regulators and customers.

The breach is the latest in a series of attacks by cybercriminals on global companies, including meat processor JBS and Colonial Pipeline oil.

(Reporting by Nivedita Balu in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur)

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Oil prices slipped on Friday but were set for their third weekly rise on expectations of a recovery in fuel demand in Europe, China and the United States as rising vaccination rates lead to an easing of pandemic curbs.

Brent crude futures edged down 4 cents, or 0.06%, to $72.48 a barrel to 0658 GMT, after closing at its highest since May 2019 on Thursday.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures also slipped 4 cents, or 0.06%, to $70.25 a barrel, after climbing 0.5% on Thursday to its highest close since October 2018.

Brent is set for a weekly rise of 0.8% while WTI is set to gain 0.9%.

U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs expects Brent crude prices to reach $80 per barrel this summer, betting that a recent oil market rally will continue as vaccination rollouts boost global economic activity and demand for the commodity.

Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter, will supply full volumes of July-loading crude to its Asian customers, Reuters reported on Friday citing sources.

"News that Saudi Arabia has unwound all its voluntary production cuts are circulating in Asia today, and that appears to have temporarily pushed oil prices lower," Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst at OANDA, wrote in a note.

"The reaction is modest, though, and if anything, the price action is bullish. It suggests that the physical market has absorbed extra Saudi production with ease and that demand globally is robust and climbing."

Gasoline inventories in the United States, the world's biggest oil consumer, rose by 7 million barrels in the week to June 4, and distillate stockpiles rose by 4.4 million barrels, both much more than analysts had expected, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration on Wednesday.

That unexpected surge spurred profit-taking as prices hit a two-and-half year high, said Margaret Yang, a strategist at DailyFX.

Additionally, data showing road traffic returning to pre-COVID-19 levels in North America and most of Europe was encouraging, ANZ Research analysts said in a note.

"Even the jet fuel market is showing signs of improvement, with flights in Europe rising 17% over the past two weeks, according to Eurocontrol," ANZ analysts said.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) reinforced the view of healthy demand, sticking to its forecast that demand in 2021 would rise by 5.95 million barrels per day, up 6.6% from a year earlier.

"Overall, the recovery in global economic growth, and hence oil demand, are expected to gain momentum in the second half," OPEC said in its monthly report on Thursday.

(Reporting by Shu Zhang and Sonali Paul; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)

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Challenging times for air travel have led to a shakeup in Ciriums on-time performance rankings for the industry, with Japan Co. and Tokyos Haneda Airport climbing to the top for punctuality.



Other standouts among carriers include Hawaiian Inc., Red Wings ZAO and Avianca Holdings SA, Cirium said in its first monthly On-Time Performance Report since February 2020. The aviation analytics company said it revived the report as air travel is returning, with 117% more completed flights in May than the same month last year, mainly driven by domestic services.

The rankings use a series of measurements, including if departures and arrivals are early or exactly on time, arrivals are within 15 minutes of schedule, and flights operate in their scheduled block time from gate to gate.

As flights have returned, it is a level playing field to analyze the on-time performance of the and again  a positive sign for the industry, Cirium Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Bowen said in a statement. While the factors that cause delays  congested airspace, taxiways or connecting passengers  simply did not exist in 2020, they are likely to return slowly in 2021 and into 2022.

In Asia Pacific, Japan Airlines rose to first for on-time arrivals in May from 10th in the previous report, followed by compatriot ANA Holdings Inc. and then Air New Zealand Ltd., Garuda Indonesia and Korean Air Lines Co. In North America, Hawaiian Airlines kept top spot and Air Canada climbed to second from outside the top 10. Southwest Airlines Co. slid from second to ninth, though it operated the most flights at 89,297.

Moscow-based Red Wings led in Europe, followed by Vueling Airlines SA, Iberia, KLM and Aeroflot, according to Cirium. Avianca was the most on-time airline in Latin America, ahead of Azul SA and Gol in second and third.

Haneda Airport achieved an on-time departure score of 96.86%. The other spots in the top five for punctual hubs were taken by Sheremetyevo International, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County and Philadelphia Out of the 20 ranked, Miami was lowest with a score of 83.14%.

The top 20 collectively handled over half a million flights in May, down just 4% from February 2020, while their on-time performance improved by three points, Cirium said.
The US has levelled sanctions against a Yemeni network that it claims was cooperating with Iran's Revolutionary Guard to illicitly transfer tens of millions of dollars to Yemen's Houthi rebels.

At the same time, the Biden administration on Thursday also announced it was lifting sanctions on three former Iranian oil executives and two companies that it said had been involved in banned petroleum sales, saying the U.S. had "verified a change in status or behaviour" on their part.

Neither the State Department nor the Treasury Department would elaborate further on the reason for the de-listings.

The departments of State and Treasury announced both moves in simultaneous statements that come as the administration is trying both to press the Iranian-linked rebels into peace talks for the war in Yemen, and close a deal returning the United States and to an accord on Iran's nuclear programme.

The money moving through the alleged Houthi financing network came from sales of Iranian petroleum and other commodities throughout the Middle East, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

officials and analysts say has increased its material support to Yemen's Houthi rebels as the war in the Arab nation passes the six-year mark. A Saudi-led coalition is trying to hold off the Houthis, who seized the country's capital and are waging an offensive now to capture a major northern city, in defiance of US and UN calls for a ceasefire.

The new US action designates 11 Yemeni individuals, alleged front companies and intermediaries and vessels involved in what it said were the illicit transfers.

The 11 included Jami' 'Ali Muhammad, a Houthi and alleged Iranian Revolutionary Guard associate who the United States says helped procure vessels, facilitate shipments of fuel, and transfer funds for the benefit of the Houthis."



The 2015 nuclear deal is based on limiting development of its nuclear program in return for the US and lifting sanctions against Iran. Ongoing talks in Vienna have focused partly on timing of the US lifting sanctions and Iranians returning to compliance with the agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA.

The administration said the lifting of sanctions on the three former officials and two companies is unrelated to the indirect discussions in Vienna that are to resume this weekend.

"There is no linkage, there is no connection to the de-listings that we announced today to the JCPOA or to negotiations that are ongoing in Vienna," State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters. However, he was unable to offer a complete explanation of the reasons behind the move, other than it was made in response to a petition for the removals.

"These petitions are reviewed very carefully," he said.

"They are verified by experts to ensure that the information put forward is factual, that it is accurate, and only after we have verified the information put forward in petitions would we undertake a de-listing. In the case of these three individuals it was the result of our ability to verify that there was a change in status or a change in behaviour that allowed us to undertake this de-listing."



Price added that the step demonstrates "our commitment to lifting sanctions in the event of a change in status or behaviour by sanctioned persons."He said that practice is "consistent with good sanctions hygiene and administrative processes." Still, he could not say what the "change in status" or "change in behaviour" had been, and Iran's national oil company, NIOC, and a number of other affiliates remain under US sanctions.

Sanctions have been removed in the past because a target has died, retired or otherwise left their position but there was no indication any of those had happened.

Critics of the nuclear deal and the administration's intent to return to it immediately denounced the lifting of sanctions as a concession in the absence of anything in return from Iran, and while Tehran continues to ignore demands from the U.N. atomic watchdog to explain elements of its nuclear program.

"The Biden administration should not be offering Iran sanctions relief at a time when Tehran is refusing to comply with the Atomic Energy Agency investigation into its nuclear program," said Andea Stricker, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

"Unfortunately, the U.S. just signalled that it is buckling on sanctions relief and the IAEA investigation before a deal is even reached. Iran will be sure to seize on this concession and try to get more."



The sanctions against Ahmad Ghalebani, a managing director of NIOC, two directors of NIOC affiliates and those companies had been imposed in 2013 by the Obama administration.

The 2015 deal with world powers allowed it to sell crude oil again on the market. President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord in 2018, leading Iran into clandestinely taking its oil abroad and selling it.

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US President is going to be hosting German Chancellor at the next month.

press secretary Jen Psaki announced Friday that Merkel, who is leaving office later this year, will visit Washington on July 15.

Psaki, in a statement, said the meeting will affirm ties between the two nations and the leaders will discuss the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and security.

Merkel will be the first European leader to visit the

She and Biden were set to meet later Friday at the Group of Seven summit, a gathering of some of the world's wealthiest nations, taking place in England.

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She recounted the story of her sisters diagnosis and treatment, and the misery she had gone through. Her sister, too, had a mass on the left side of her brain, for which she had elected surgery. The surgery and mass had left her weak and unable to speak. After the diagnosis of glioblastoma was confirmed, she had undergone chemotherapy and radiation therapy, the standard of care, which can extend survival a few months. She died a year later, and had never regained her old self.
A US senator on Thursday slammed top American companies including Amazon, and for using forced labour from China, accusing them of making Americans complicit in Beijing crimes against Uyghurs.

Speaking at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on China's crackdown on Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang region, Republican Senator Marco Rubio said: "For far too long companies like and and Amazon and Coca-Cola were using forced labour."

"They were benefiting from forced labour or sourcing from suppliers that were suspected of using forced labour," Rubio said. "These companies, sadly, were making all of us complicit in these crimes. That is why it is critical to Senate quickly passed our Uyghur forced labour prevention act to ensure that the goods made by forced labour or Uyghurs forced labour to enter our markets and make all American unwilling accomplice," he added.

Recently, several companies including H & M and said that they were concerned about allegations that forced labour has been used to produce cotton in Xinjiang.

According to a report by the Centre for Strategic and Studies, produces 22 per cent of the world's cotton, out of which 84 per cent comes from the Xinjiang region where over two million Uyghurs have been kept in mass detention camps.

has been rebuked globally for cracking down on Uyghur Muslims by sending them to mass detention camps, interfering in their religious activities and sending members of the community to undergo some form of forcible re-education or indoctrination.

Beijing, on the other hand, has vehemently denied that it is engaged in human rights abuses against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang while reports from journalists, NGOs and former detainees have surfaced, highlighting the Chinese Communist Party's brutal crackdown on the ethnic community.

Early this year, the United States become the first country in the world to declare the Chinese actions in Xinjiang as "genocide". In February, both the Canadian and Dutch parliaments adopted motions recognising the Uyghur crisis as genocide. The latter became the first parliament in Europe to do so.

In April, the United Kingdom also declared China's ongoing crackdown in Xinjiang a "genocide".

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The US' immigration agency has said that it would rescind a 2018 Trump-era policy that allowed immigration officers to reject H-1B visa applications instead of first issuing a notice of intent to deny to the applicants, a decision which will reduce barriers to "legal immigration" and would be a positive step for Indian professionals.

The H-1B visa, popular among Indian IT companies and professionals, is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in speciality occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise. Technology companies depend on it to hire tens of thousands of employees each year from countries like India and China.

In 2018, The gave its immigration officials more power to reject H-1B visa applications outright.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said in a statement on Wednesday that it was updating its policies around expedited processing of applications, changing the guidance around Requests for Evidence (RFEs) and Notices of Intent to Deny (NOIDs), and increasing the validity period for certain Employment Authorisation Documents (EADs).

The USCIS is returning to the adjudicative principles of a June 2013 memo that instructed agency officers to issue a request for evidence or notice of intent to deny when additional evidence could potentially demonstrate eligibility for an immigration benefit, the immigration agency said in a statement on Wednesday.

As part of the updated RFE and NOID policy, the USCIS is rescinding a July 2018 memo that permitted agency officers to deny certain immigration benefit requests instead of first issuing an RFE or NOID, it said.

This updated policy will ensure those benefit requestors are given an opportunity to correct innocent mistakes and unintentional omissions. In general, a USCIS officer will issue an RFE or NOID when the officer determines additional information or explanation that may potentially establish eligibility for an immigration benefit.

We are taking action to eliminate policies that fail to promote access to the legal immigration system and will continue to make improvements that help individuals navigate the path to citizenship, and that modernise our immigration system, said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas.

These policy measures are consistent with the Biden-Harris administration's priorities to eliminate unnecessary barriers to our nation's legal immigration system and reduce burdens on non-citizens who may be eligible for immigration benefits, said Acting USCIS Director Tracy Renaud.

USCIS is committed to promoting policies and procedures that ensure we operate in a fair, efficient, and humane manner that reflects America's heritage as a land of opportunity for those who seek it.

According to the 2018 policy, the USCIS adjudicators had full discretion to deny applications, petitions, and requests without first issuing an RFE or NOID, when required initial evidence is not submitted or the evidence of record fails to establish eligibility.

The USCIS also said that they will increase the current one-year validity period on both initial and renewal EADs to two years for certain adjustment of status applicants.

Increasing the validity period on EADs for certain adjustment applicants is expected to reduce the number of employment authorisation requests USCIS receives and allow the agency to shift limited resources to other priority areas.

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With the US Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) recommending Ocugen Inc, the US partner of Bharat Biotech, to go for Biologics License Application (BLA) instead of Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA), the launch of the first indigenous Indian Covid-19 vaccine in the US market may be delayed.

As additional information and data is to be submitted with BLA, the launch of Covaxin is likely to take more time.

"Our US partner, Ocugen has received a recommendation from the FDA to pursue Biologics License Applications (BLA) path for Covaxin, which is full approval. All applications have to follow the BLA process, which is the standard process for vaccines. Therefore, for BLA, data from an additional clinical trial will be required to support the marketing application submission for Covaxin. This process will extend our timelines," Bharat Biotech said in a statement on Friday.

According to Hyderabad-based company, with good herd immunity and a significant percentage of the population vaccinated, the pandemic is reducing in the US. "On the sidelines of this, the USFDA had earlier communicated that no new emergency use authorisation (EUA) would be approved for new Covid-19 vaccines."

No vaccine manufactured or developed from India has ever received EUA or full licensure from USFDA, it said. "When approved, it will be a great leap forward for vaccines innovation and manufacturing from India," it added.

Covaxin has received already EUAs from 14 countries with more than 50 countries in the process.

In February, Ocugen and Bharat Biotech had entered into a definitive agreement to co-develop, supply, and commercialise Covacin for the US market.

Ocugen will have US rights to the vaccine candidate and will be responsible for clinical development, regulatory approval (including EUA) and commercialisation for the US market, a joint statement had said.

Bharat Biotech had said that it would supply initial doses to be used in the US upon Ocugen's receipt of an EUA. In addition, Bharat Biotech will support the technology transfer for manufacturing in the US. In consideration for the exclusive license to the US market, Ocugen will share the profits from the sale of Covaxin in the US market with Bharat Biotech, with Ocugen retaining 45 per cent of the profits.

Early this month, Ocugen also received exclusive co-development, manufacturing, and commercialisation rights to Covaxin in Canada.

--IANS

ms/vd

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The (ED) on Friday said it has issued a show cause notice to the country's largest exchange for undertaking transactions worth over Rs 2,790 crore in alleged violation of the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA).

Mumbai headquartered WazirX is as a domestic crypto currency and bitcoin exchange start-up registered under the company name Zanmai Labs Pvt Ltd that was incorporated in December, 2017.

The notice issued by the central probe agency under various sections of the FEMA names the exchange (WazirX), the company and directors Nischal Shetty and Sameer Hanuman Mhatre.

The exchange and its promoters denied any wrongdoing and said they are "in compliance with all applicable laws".

The ED issued a statement saying that it stumbled upon the transactions of the exchange during an ongoing money laundering probe into "Chinese-owned" illegal online betting applications.

The show cause notice is for transactions worth Rs 2,790.74 crore, the ED said.

Shetty, also the CEO of the exchange, took to Twitter and said WazirX was yet to receive any show cause notice from the ED as mentioned in media reports.

"WazirX is in compliance with all applicable laws. We go beyond our legal obligations by following know your customer (KYC) and anti money laundering (AML) processes and have always provided information to law enforcement authorities whenever required," he posted on his handle.

He added: "We are able to trace all users on our platform with official identity information."



"Should we receive a formal communication or notice from the ED, we'll fully cooperate in the investigation," Shetty said.

In its statement, The ED described in detail its investigation



"It was seen that the accused Chinese nationals had laundered proceeds of crime worth about Rs 57 crore by converting Indian Rupee (INR) deposits into tether (USDT) and then transferred it to Binance (exchange registered in Cayman Islands) Wallets based on instructions received from abroad," it said.

Binance is considered a market leader in this domain and had acquired WazirX in 2019.

"WazirX allows a wide range of transactions with crypto currencies (CC), including their exchange with INR and vice-versa, exchange of CCs, person to person (P2P) transactions and even transfer/receipt of crypto currency held in its pool accounts to wallets of other exchanges, which could be held by foreigners in foreign locations," the ED alleged.

WazirX, it alleged, "does not" collect the requisite documents in clear violation of the basic mandatory anti-money Laundering (AML) and combating financing of terrorism (CFT) norms and also FEMA guidelines.

"In the period under investigation, users of WazirX via its pool account, have received incoming worth Rs 880 crore from Binance accounts and transferred out cryptocurrency worth Rs 1,400 crore to Binance accounts.

"None of these transactions are available on the blockchain for any audit or investigation," the ED claimed.

It was found that WazirX clients could transfer 'valuable' crypto currencies to any person irrespective of its location and nationality "without" any proper documentation whatsoever, making it a safe haven for users looking for money laundering and other illegitimate activities, the agency alleged.

The show cause notice was issued to the company, following the investigation of these alleged violations and as stated to be contravention of the FEMA, official sources said.

The Indian government has said that it was open to evaluate and explore new technologies like crypto currencies for improving governance.

A Bill in this regard could be introduced in the Parliament and recommendations made by a high-level internal ministerial committee on digital currencies could be included, the government has said.

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Shares of slipped 18 per cent to Rs 31 on the BSE in intra-day trade on Friday, amid heavy volumes, after the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) declared the company a non-performer and prohibited from participating in the ongoing and future bids for the road projects till defects and deficiencies in one of the companys projects were rectified.

At 01:38 pm, the stock of was down 11 per cent at Rs 33.70, as against a 0.34 per cent rise in the S&P BSE Sensex. The trading volumes on the counter jumped 10 times, with a combined 10.57 million shares or nearly 6 per cent of the total equity of having changed hands on the NSE and BSE so far.

On clarification on the recent announcement, Gayatri Projects informed the stock exchanges that officials had found some deficiencies in the Varanasi Sultanpur 4-laning project in UP, where Gayatri is one of the contractors.

The above project was awarded in January 2016. Out of the total 138Km section, 4-laning has been completed for 129Km, almost 93 per cent of the project, This project has been beset by the continued delay in handing over of the land by In addition, the land handover has been done in bits and pieces, resulting in overall project delay. Apart from pending land handover, certain works have been halted due to pending approvals and payments to be released by NHAI, Gayatri Projects said.

The company further said it requested for extension of completion time till October 2021 in anticipation of handing over of balance land and clearing of all pending approvals and payments. Approval of extension of time is under active consideration at NHAI, it added.

"The rectification of deficiencies identified has been delayed on account of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the company is engaged in active discussions with the relevant authorities and has raised their objections citing certain technical difficulties at the site. The company will work closely with the authorities to rectify the deficiencies at the earliest and expects the issue to be resolved in the next 2-3 months," it said. CLICK HERE FOR THE COMPANY STATEMENT
Shares of pharmaceutical companies continued their upward journey at the bourses, with the index hitting a new high for the third straight day on Friday, amid strong gain in Aurobindo Phamra, Dr Reddys Laboratories and Cadila Healthcare, which rallied up to 5 per cent, each, on the National Stock Exchange (NSE).

index rallied 3 per cent to 14,530.95 on the NSE in intra-day trade today. On Wednesday, it had surpassed its previous high of 14,282.90, touched on May 11, 2021.

and Novartis India from the S&P BSE Healthcare index zoomed 20 per cent, each. While, Necter Lifesciences, and RPG Lifesciences were up between 5 per cent and 10 per cent.

Among individual stocks, shares were locked in 20 per cent upper circuit at Rs 83.70, also its 52-week high, on the BSE, after the company announced that its board would meet on Tuesday, June 15, 2021 to consider issuance of convertible warrants on preferential basis.

The board will consider issuing 49.3 million warrants worth of Rs 365 crore in the company to OrbiMed Asia IV Mauritius. It is going to be one of the largest pharma funds. The board will also consider issuing 1 million shares at price of Rs 74 per share to one of its promoters, Mark Saldanha.

Besides, hit a new high of Rs 1,235 after rallying 10 per cent on the back of three-fold jump in trading volumes. The stock of the healthcare services has soared 15 per cent in the past two trading days. On outlook, in short term, it is likely to continue to be uncertain and be challenging till majority of global population is vaccinated and it is likely to take time till end of March 2022 quarter of the financial year 2021-22 (FY22), said in FY21 annual report. With adequate cash in hand, the company to encash the additional demand this COVID has created using its intelligent logistics and IT, it said.
By Shu Zhang and Sonali Paul

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - slipped on Friday but were set for their third weekly rise on expectations for a recovery in fuel demand in Europe, China and the United States as rising vaccination rates lead to an easing of pandemic curbs.

futures fell 16 cents, or 0.22%, to $72.36 a barrel at 0558 GMT, after closing at its highest since May 2019 on Thursday.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures slipped 9 cents, or 0.13%, to $70.20 a barrel, after climbing 0.5% on Thursday to its highest close since October 2018.

Brent is set for a weekly rise of 0.7% while WTI is set to gain 0.8%.

Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter, will supply full volumes of July-loading crude to its Asian customers, Reuters reported on Friday citing sources.

"News that Saudi Arabia has unwound all its voluntary production cuts are circulating in Asia today, and that appears to have temporarily pushed lower," Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst at OANDA, wrote in a note.

"The reaction is modest, though, and if anything, the price action is bullish. It suggests that the physical market has absorbed extra Saudi production with ease and that demand globally is robust and climbing."

Gasoline inventories in the United States, the world's biggest oil consumer, rose by 7 million barrels in the week to June 4, and distillate stockpiles rose by 4.4 million barrels, both much more than analysts had expected, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration on Wednesday.

That unexpected surge spurred profit-taking activity as prices hit a two-and-half year high, said Margaret Yang, a strategist at DailyFX.

Additionally, data showing road traffic returning to pre-COVID-19 levels in North America and most of Europe was encouraging, ANZ Research analysts said in a note.

"Even the jet fuel market is showing signs of improvement, with flights in Europe rising 17% over the past two weeks, according to Eurocontrol," ANZ analysts said.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) reinforced the view of healthy demand, sticking to its forecast that demand in 2021 would rise by 5.95 million barrels per day, up 6.6% from a year earlier.

"Overall, the recovery in global economic growth, and hence oil demand, are expected to gain momentum in the second half," OPEC said in its monthly report on Thursday.

(Reporting by Shu Zhang and Sonali Paul; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)

(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.)
Shares of locked in upper circuit of 5 per cent at Rs 11,458 on the BSE on Friday after the company announced 1:1 bonus issue, dividend of Rs 200 per share, and stock split from Rs 5 to Rs 2.

The stock had hit a record high of Rs 12,991, on June 7, 2021, after the company announced stock split and bonus issue plan on May 26. Despite the correction from all-time level, the stock has rallied 144 per cent in the past one month, as compared to 7 per cent rise in the S&P BSE Sensex. Till 10:16 am, a combined 13,000 shares have changed hands and there were pending buy orders for around 9,000 shares on the NSE and BSE.

The board of directors of Tide Water Oil, at their meeting held on Thursday, June 10, 2021, approved issue of bonus shares in the ratio of 1:1 i.e. one bonus share for every share held in the company on record date. The company also declared sub-division of the face value of equity shares from Rs 5 to Rs 2. Generally, a company plans to go for a stock split to make the shares more affordable for small retail investors and increase liquidity.

The company has fixed July 27, 2021 as record date for ascertaining shareholders for bonus issue and stock split.

The board also recommended final dividend of 4,000 per cent (Rs 200 per share) on face value of Rs 5 per share (i.e. before sub-division of shares and bonus issue) for the financial year 2020-21 subject to the approval of the shareholders absorbing a sum of Rs 69.70 crore. The dividend recommended on per share and percentage thereof will be adjusted accordingly after sub-division of shares and bonus issue and the dividend will be distributed to the eligible shareholders within 30 days from the date of the 98th Annual General Meeting, the company said.

Tide Water oil has been one of the leading players in the Indian lubricant industry. It manufactures and Veedol brand of lubricants. Its repertoire of automotive products includes engine oils for trucks, tractors, commercial vehicles, passenger cars, and two/three wheelers. It also produces gear oils, transmission oils, coolants, and greases for automobiles. For industrial application it manufactures industrial oils, greases, and specialty products like metal working fluids, quenching oils, and heat transfer oils. Tide Water has tie-ups, for the manufacture of genuine oils, with a number of renowned OEMs in the automotive and industrial equipment segment.
Mumbai-based Indian exchange WazirX, on Friday, said it hadn't received a show-cause notice from the Enforcement Directorate.



WazirX is yet to receive any show-cause notice from the Enforcement Directorate as mentioned in today's media reports. WazirX is in compliance with all applicable laws, the company tweeted.



A couple of hours before, ED had tweeted through its official handle: ED has issued Show Cause Notice to WazirX Crypto-currency Exchange for contravention of FEMA, 1999 for transactions involving crypto-currencies worth Rs. 2790.74 crore.



Hours before the ED notice, WazirX CEO Nischal Shetty had tweeted: "Day 953. Were still in the very early days of Crypto. Less than 3% of the Internet population has adopted it. Theres a lot of opportunity for new entrepreneurs, new startups & for new career opportunities. Think of India specific solutions. Build and win."

In a detailed statement, the central probe agency said it had stumbled upon the transactions during an ongoing money-laundering probe into the "Chinese-owned" illegal online betting applications.



"It was seen that the accused Chinese nationals had laundered proceeds of crime worth about Rs 57 crore by converting Indian Rupee (INR) deposits into tether (USDT) and then transferred it to Binance (exchange registered in the Cayman Islands) Wallets based on instructions received from abroad," it said.



WazirX is owned by Binance, often acknowledged as the world's largest exchange by trading volume. Chinese-Canadian Changpeng Zhao is the founder and CEO of Binance.



The ED alleged that WazirX does not collect the requisite documents for transactions in clear violation the basic mandatory anti-money Laundering (AML) and combating financing of terrorism (CFT) norms and also FEMA guidelines.



"In the period under investigation, users of WazirX via its pool account, have received incoming cryptocurrency worth Rs 880 crore from Binance accounts and transferred out cryptocurrency worth Rs 1,400 crore to Binance accounts.



"None of these transactions are available on the blockchain for any audit or investigation," the ED claimed.



In a Twitter thread, WazirX claimed it goes beyond our legal obligations by following Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) processes and have always provided information to law enforcement authorities whenever required. We are able to trace all users on our platform with official identity information.



Should we receive a formal communication or notice from the ED, we'll fully cooperate in the investigation. Please note: Your funds are absolutely safe on WazirX," it said.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading at $37,434 or Rs 27.34 lakh.
Cosmo Films rose 1.67% to Rs 871.30 after the company said its wholly-owned subsidiary has launched an after-wash laundry sanitizer for germ-free clothing.

Cosmo Specialty Chemicals, a 100% subsidiary of Cosmo Films, has forayed into the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry with the launch of Fabritizer, an after-wash laundry sanitizer for germ-free clothing.

Forming a unique protective layer that stays up to 7 days even after ironing, Fabritizer kills 99.9% viruses, germs and bacteria and is AATCC 100: 2012 and 2019 Standard certified (tested at a Mumbai lab), making it a superior product in the market. It also gives protection against human Covid viruses (tested as per ISO 18184 standards at a Lab in USA).

Live on Amazon India on 3rd of June 2021, Fabritizer will be available on e-commerce giants including Flipkart and soon be launched on its own e-commerce platform across India. Skin-friendly and ideal for bed linens, towels, baby clothing, innerwear etc., Fabritizer is compatible with all detergents as well as machine and hand laundry and works in both hot and cold water. Free from silver technology and phosphate, the product retains its effectiveness against odour causing germs and maintains a soothing and long-lasting fresh fragrance.

Fabritizer is available for Rs 299 for 480 ml and Rs 499 for 960 ml on Amazon and Flipkart from 3rd June 2021 onwards.

Cosmo Films' consolidated net profit surged 257.1% to Rs 74.45 crore on a 28.2% increase in net sales to Rs 671.80 crore in Q4 March 2021 over Q4 March 2020.

Cosmo Films is a global leader in specialty films for packaging, lamination, labeling and synthetic paper. The company is strategically expanding beyond films into specialty chemicals & polymers as well as pet care business.

The scrip hit a record high of Rs 892.30 in intraday today.

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Infosys Ltd is quoting at Rs 1447.35, up 1.62% on the day as on 12:49 IST on the NSE. The stock is up 109.14% in last one year as compared to a 58.38% gain in NIFTY and a 96.54% gain in the Nifty IT.

Infosys Ltd rose for a fifth straight session today. The stock is quoting at Rs 1447.35, up 1.62% on the day as on 12:49 IST on the NSE. The benchmark NIFTY is up around 0.36% on the day, quoting at 15794.6. The Sensex is at 52506.94, up 0.39%. Infosys Ltd has added around 9.07% in last one month.

Meanwhile, Nifty IT index of which Infosys Ltd is a constituent, has added around 9.48% in last one month and is currently quoting at 27798, up 1.83% on the day. The volume in the stock stood at 42.07 lakh shares today, compared to the daily average of 56.48 lakh shares in last one month.

The benchmark June futures contract for the stock is quoting at Rs 1450.35, up 1.64% on the day. Infosys Ltd is up 109.14% in last one year as compared to a 58.38% gain in NIFTY and a 96.54% gain in the Nifty IT index.

The PE of the stock is 33.73 based on TTM earnings ending March 21.

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Power stocks were trading with losses, with the S&P BSE Power index decreasing 16.32 points or 0.54% at 3008.05 at 13:50 IST.

Among the components of the S&P BSE Power index, Adani Power Ltd (down 5.04%), Adani Green Energy Ltd (down 1.95%),Tata Power Company Ltd (down 1.37%),Torrent Power Ltd (down 1.27%),CESC Ltd (down 1.07%), were the top losers. Among the other losers were Adani Transmission Ltd (down 1.02%), ABB India Ltd (down 0.82%), NHPC Ltd (down 0.74%), NTPC Ltd (down 0.46%), and Thermax Ltd (down 0.46%).

On the other hand, Power Grid Corporation of India Ltd (up 1.41%), Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (up 0.73%), and Siemens Ltd (up 0.56%) turned up.

At 13:50 IST, the S&P BSE Sensex was up 210.27 or 0.4% at 52510.74.

The Nifty 50 index was up 54.4 points or 0.35% at 15792.15.

The S&P BSE Small-Cap index was up 72.04 points or 0.29% at 25087.93.

The S&P BSE 150 Midcap Index index was up 5.77 points or 0.07% at 7899.71.

On BSE,1650 shares were trading in green, 1448 were trading in red and 138 were unchanged.

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BJP national vice president left his home for the Trinamool Congress headquarters here on Friday afternoon amid speculation that he might return to the ruling party in West Bengal.

Roy, the former second-in-command of the TMC who joined the saffron party in November 2017, has been distancing himself from the BJP for the last several days.

Chief Minister and TMC supremo also left her Kalighat residence, as heightened security measures were noticed at the Trinamool Congress Bhavan off the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass here.

Asked by reporters where he was going as he left his home, Roy answered "Trinamool Bhavan".

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In a blow to the prestige of the saffron brigade, Bharatiya Janata Partys Vice President along with son Subhranshu, re-joined the Trinamool Congress on Friday, with Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and other leaders of the state's ruling party welcoming him back to the fold.

Roy, who was closeted with Banerjee in Trinamool Bhavan before his formal re-induction in the party he helped set up, said he was "happy to see all known faces again".

"I have joined today. In the present circumstances, no one will remain in Bharatiya Janata Party," said Roy.

Addressing a press meet after the re-joining ceremony, Banerjee said Roy was threatened and tortured in the BJP, and that, in turn, affected his health.

"Mukul's return proves that the BJP does not let anyone live in peace and put's undue pressure on everyone," the chief minister said. Roy was seated on Banerjees left hand, with Abhishek seated after him, while Partha Chatterjee, another top leader sat on her right, indicative according to sources, of the partys future pecking order.

Speculation had been rife for some time on a possible home coming by who had crossed over to BJP in 2017 after being charged in the Narada tape sting, ever since Banerjees nephew Abhishek visited his wife at a city hospital earlier this month.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had promptly after Abhisheks visit, rung up to enquire about Roys wifes health, seen by political observers as an attempt to retain him within the BJP-fold.

Interestingly, at Fridays re-joining ceremony, both Banerjee and Roy claimed that they never had any differences.

The chief minister said we will consider the case of those who had left TMC with Mukul for BJP and want to come back. A signal that this may be the start of more defections from BJPs Bengal unit.

However, Banerjee clarified that TMC politicians and workers who left to join the BJP just ahead of the April-May assembly elections will not be taken back.

Roy, once the second-in-command of the TMC, was removed from the post of the party's general secretary in February, 2015, sometime after the Narada sting was carried out by investigative journalists where many politicians were allegedly caught accepting wads of cash from a fictitious company. He joined the BJP in November, 2017.

The move to bring him back possibly started when Banerjee at an election rally in late March had termed his conduct as not so bad.

This was in contrast to the chief ministers other election speeches, where she had branded turncoat TMC members such as Suvendu Adhikari as 'Mir Jafars, after the infamous Bengal general who betrayed Bengal's Nawab Siraj ud Dowlah in the battle of Plassey against Lord Robert Clives army.

TMC will selectively take back people who crossed over. The aim will be to organisationally weaken BJP but at the same time it will not want too many turncoats back as this would be seen as rewarding dissidence, said Rajat Roy, well-known political analyst and member of the Calcutta Research Group. is a special case as he is known to be an organisational brain.

Several former TMC MLAs including Dipendu Biswas and Sonali Guha have in recent past sent letters regretting their decision to join the BJP and sought to return back to the partys fold. Guha, who at one time was considered close to Banerjee, made an impassioned plea on camera seeking the chief ministers forgiveness.

Guha, a four-time legislator from Satgachia in South 24 Parganas, had also written in a letter the way fish cannot stay out of water, I will not be able to live without you, Didi.

Even before the formal entry of Mukul Roy, BJPs Vice President into Trinamool Congress, BJP leaders reacted angrily to the desertion.

BJP leader Dilip Ghosh reacting to news of Mukul Roys re-entry into Trinamool Congress, said he was not sure the party would lose anything from the move given that he was unsure whether we gained anything from Roys entry three- and-half years back.
leaders and party workers on Friday held symbolic protests at petrol pumps in several parts of the city, demanding a complete rollback of fuel price hike.

Party leaders K C Venugopal and Shakti Singh Gohil reached the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium petrol pump on a horse cart.

Venugopal said that under the UPA government, the tax on petrol and diesel stood at Rs 9.20. Now, it is Rs 32.

"The government should stop imposing excise duty on petrol and diesel. It should come under the purview of Goods and Services Tax. We demand a complete rollback of fuel price hike," Venugopal, who is the general secretary, said.

Ajay Maken led a against rising at petrol pumps in Rajinder Nagar and Janpath.

Party leaders said protests are being held at petrol pumps across the county by local units in compliance with COVID-19 protocols.

Petrol and diesel prices were hiked again on Friday by 31 paise per litre and 28 paise per litre, respectively.

A litre of petrol in Delhi costs Rs 95.85, whereas diesel costs Rs 86.75 per litre.

Petrol prices have crossed the Rs 100 per litre mark in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Rajasthan and Ladakh.

Sri Ganganagar district in Rajasthan has the costliest fuel in the country with petrol priced at Rs 106.94 a litre and diesel at Rs 99.80.

(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.)
Delhi Chief Minister on Friday said instead of abusing and fighting with state governments, the should work with them.

Kejriwal tagged a media report according to which Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad blamed the Kejriwal government over allegedly failing to provide ration and oxygen to the people.

In response, Kejriwal said the country will progress when 130 crore people, all the state governments and the work together as 'Team India'.

"Today people want to see such a leadership at the which, instead of abusing and fighting the state governments all day, takes everyone along.

"The country will progress when 130 crore people, all the state governments and the Centre work together as Team India, Abusing so much is not good," Kejriwal tweeted.

(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.)
Amid speculations of expansion of the Uttar Pradesh cabinet ahead of Assembly elections next year, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who is on a two-day visit to Delhi, will meet Prime Minister and BJP National President JP Nadda here on Friday.

The Chief Minister is scheduled to meet PM Modi at his residence at 7 Lok Kalyan Marg at 10:45 am. Later, he will meet Nadda at his residence at 12 noon.

Adityanath arrived in the national capital on Thursday and met Union Home Minister Amit Shah at his residence.

Ahead of the 2022 Assembly elections, there is speculation that the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government in Uttar Pradesh will reshuffle its cabinet soon.

With elections due next year, the BJP has decided to strengthen the party in the state by seeking feedback from its leaders in the wake of the outcome of panchayat polls and the murmurs from some sections over handling of the COVID-19 situation.

The party has also decided to prepare a strategy based on feedback received from its state leaders and ministers in the government, strengthen the image of the state government and resolve the issues in the state.

These efforts are also aimed at improving the coordination between the party and the government, BJP national general secretary (organisation) BL Santhosh arrived in Lucknow earlier this week and held one-on-one meetings with some of the ministers and leaders in the poll-bound state. Santhosh was accompanied by Radha Mohan Singh.

Many of these leaders had flagged issues like COVID-19 handling, disenchantment among people and lack of coordination between government and party leaders, among others.

However, the Bharatiya Janata Party's Central leadership has thrown its weight behind Yogi Adityanath, putting a stop to murmurs against the state government months ahead of the Assembly polls.

The Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections are scheduled to take place in 2022. BJP had registered a landslide victory in the 2017 Assembly polls winning over 300 seats. In the 403 member Uttar Pradesh Assembly, among the major parties, BJP has 309 legislators, SP 49, BSP 18, and Congress 7.

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Amid speculations about the resignation of Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa, leader and Leader of Opposition in Karnataka Legislative Assembly on Thursday said that the BJP has taken no action against those party leaders who spoke against Yediyurappa.

demanded a leadership change, terming the chief minister and the BJP high command in the state 'weak'.

"Both the chief minister and the BJP high command in Karnataka are weak. Arun Singh said don't talk about change then why is there no action against those who spoke against BS Yediyurappa and are demanding leadership change? Yeddyurappa is a weak chief minister. And instead of taking action, the party high command is trying to cover it. When Yediyurappa is weak, what else the high command will be?" questioned.

"We have not insisted to replace Yediyurappa. I was told that there is a discussion going on over CM change in Delhi. If the chief minister does not change, why the BJP High Command has not taken action against MLAs Basanagowda Patil Yatnal, Arvind Bellad, Vishwanath, Renukacharya and Minister Yogeshwar even after their statements against Yediyurappa?" he added.

BJP state in-charge Arun Singh had said that there is no change in the chief minister's post. However, Siddaramaiah had said that there's no smoke without fire.

Earlier, on Thursday, after some (BJP) leaders speculated about the resignation of Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa, state Revenue Minster R Ashoka had said that the chair of the Chief Minister is "perfectly occupied."

Yediyurappa had on Sunday stated that he will resign from the post the day the party high command asks him to quit.

While speaking to the media persons, he had said, "I will resign the day party high command asks me to quit. I do not speak about the rumours and the speculation created by some of the ministers and legislator."

"High command has given me the opportunity - I am trying to utilise it and I am trying to serve the people. I do not want to comment on the rumours of whoever speaks against me. If my high command wants me to resign, I will resign. I myself am involved in working for the development of the state," 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.)
Chief Minister Yogi Aditynath is meeting Prime Minister on Friday to apprise him about the political situation in the state and steps taken to control the second wave of Covid pandemic.

Adityanath has reached the Prime Minister's residence at 7 Lok Kalyan Marg in the capital. Sources said Adityanath is expected to also apprise the Prime Minister about the possible changes in in the coming days.

After meeting with the Prime Minister, Adityanath will meet BJP chief J.P. Nadda to discuss the political situation in the states ahead of next year's Assembly polls and possible cabinet expansion or reshuffle on cards, especially after Congress' Jitin Prasada joined the BJP.

On Thursday, Adityanath met Union Home Minister Amit Shah in which apart from political situation and saffron party preparation, BJP's performance in recent panchayat polls was also discussed and it was decided to focus on electing its members as 'Zila Panchayat Adhyaksh'.

Former Union Minister and Apna Dal Chief Anupriya Patel had joined the deliberation between Shah and Adityanath.

Shah also had a separate meeting with Patel after Adityanath left.

Patel, who was Minister of State in the first government but failed to make the grade in its second term, is demanding a ministerial berth for herself in the Modi cabinet and a ministerial post for her husband Ashish Patel in the state.

Sources said she is also demanding posts of Zila Panchayat Adhyaksh of five districts -- Mirzapur, Jaunpur, Pratapgarh, Banda, and Farrukhabad.

Later in the evening, NISHAD Party Chief, Sanjay Nishad and his son also met Shah.

Thursday afternoon, Adityanath reached Delhi to discuss preparations for next year's Assembly elections with the party's central leadership. The sources also said that the handling of the Covid situation during the second wave of the pandemic by the Uttar Pradesh government was also likely to be discussed during the meetings.

While the state's efforts drew flak from the opposition, the BJP leadership has appreciated the works done by the UP government.

--IANS

ssb/in

(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.)
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson greeted world leaders on a wooden boardwalk on the freshly raked sand of Carbis Bay to open the Group of Seven summit Friday, offering elbow bumps to dignitaries gathering for the first time since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The virus was set to dominate their discussions, with leaders of the wealthy democracies club expected to commit to sharing at least 1 billion vaccine shots with struggling countries.

A commitment from US President Joe Biden to share 500 million doses and one from Johnson for another 100 million shots set the stage for the G-7 meeting in southwest England, where the focus is Building Back Better From COVID-19.

We're going to help lead the world out of this pandemic working alongside our global partners, Biden said. The G-7 also includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.

The leaders hope the meeting in the resort of Carbis Bay will also energise the global economy. On Friday, they are set to formally embrace a global minimum tax of at least 15 per cent on corporations, following an agreement reached a week ago by their finance ministers. The minimum is meant to stop companies from using tax havens and other tools to avoid taxes.

It represents a potential win for the Biden administration, which has proposed a global minimum tax as a way to pay for infrastructure projects, in addition to creating an alternative that could remove some European countries' digital services taxes that largely hit U.S. tech firms. But the endorsement from the G-7 is just one step in the process; the hope is to get many more countries to sign on, and that could be particularly difficult in nations that depend on a low corporate tax base to survive.

For Johnson, the first G-7 summit in two years last year's was scuttled by the pandemic is a chance to set out his vision of a post-Brexit Global Britain as a midsized country with an outsized role in international problem-solving.

It's also an opportunity to underscore the UK-US bond, an alliance often called the special relationship but that Johnson said he prefers to call the indestructible relationship.

Climate change is also a top issue on the agenda, and hundreds of protesters gathered in Cornwall to urge the leaders to take action. Some activists sent a barge floating off the coast that was carrying large inflatable figures depicting Biden and Johnson. At one protest, demonstrators carried flags that read G7 drowning in promises and Action not words.

The official summit business kicked off Friday, with the customary formal greeting and a socially distanced group photo. Later the leaders will meet Queen Elizabeth II and other senior royals at the Eden Project, a lush, domed eco-tourism site built in a former quarry.

The G-7 leaders have faced mounting pressure to outline their global vaccine-sharing plans, especially as inequities in supply around the world have become more pronounced. In the US, there is a large vaccine stockpile and the demand for shots has dropped precipitously in recent weeks.

Biden said the US will donate 500 million COVID-19 vaccine doses and previewed a coordinated effort by the advanced economies to make vaccination widely and speedily available everywhere. The commitment was on top of 80 million doses Biden has already pledged to donate by the end of June.

Johnson, for his part, said the first 5 million U.K. doses would be shared in the coming weeks, with the remainder coming over the next year. He said he expected the G-7 to commit to 1 billion doses in all.

At the G-7 Summit I hope my fellow leaders will make similar pledges so that, together, we can vaccinate the world by the end of next year and build back better from coronavirus," Johnson said in a statement, referencing a slogan that he and Biden have both used.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she hoped the summit would show the world we're not just thinking of ourselves," while French President Emmanuel Macron welcomed the U.S. commitment and said Europe should do the same. He said France would share at least 30 million doses globally by year's end; Germany is also planning on donating that amount.

The U.S. commitment is to buy and donate 500 million Pfizer doses for distribution through the global COVAX alliance to 92 lower-income countries and the African Union, bringing the first steady supply of mRNA vaccine to the countries that need it most.

Biden said the US-manufactured doses will be shipped starting in August, with the goal of distributing 200 million by the end of the year. The remaining 300 million doses would be shipped in the first half of 2022. A price tag for the doses was not released, but the U.S. is now set to be COVAX's largest vaccine donor in addition to its single largest funder with a $4 billion commitment.

Humanitarian workers welcomed the donation but said the world needs more doses and they were hoping they would arrive sooner. Grand statements and promises need to be met with detailed plans backed by timelines for delivery, starting immediately.

If we have a stop-start supply or if we store all the supply up for the end of the year, it's very hard for low-income countries with quite fragile health care systems to then really be able to get those vaccines off the tarmac and into the arms of health care workers," said Lily Caprani, the head of COVID-19 vaccine advocacy at UNICEF. We want a coordinated, time-bound, ambitious commitment starting from June and charting the course for the rest of the year.

The global COVAX alliance has faced a slow start to its vaccination campaign, as richer nations have locked up billions of doses through contracts directly with drug manufacturers. The alliance has distributed just 81 million doses globally and parts of the world, particularly in Africa, remain vaccine deserts.

So far, among the G-7 countries, only France has begun shipping vaccines through COVAX, according one of the initiative's leaders, vaccine alliance Gavi. France has delivered a total of 628,800 doses to seven African countries with Senegal, a former French colony, receiving about 30% of that total.

Biden said Thursday that some of the 80 million doses the U.S. had previously committed to donating some of them outside of COVAX were already shipping. The U.S. has also given a few million vaccines to neighbors Mexico and Canada.

White House officials said the ramped-up distribution program fits a theme Biden plans to hit frequently during his week in Europe: that Western democracies, and not authoritarian states, can deliver the most good for the world.

China and Russia have shared their domestically produced vaccines with some needy countries, often with hidden strings attached. US national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Biden does want to show rallying the rest of the world's democracies that democracies are the countries that can best deliver solutions for people everywhere.
Another spat between India's government and U.S. big tech has exacerbated disillusion among firms which have spent billions to build hubs in their largest growth market, to the extent some are rethinking expansion plans, people close to the matter said.

The government on Saturday said Inc had not indicated compliance with new rules aimed at making social media firms more accountable to legal requests, and therefore risked losing liability exemptions for content posted on its platform.

joins compatriots com Inc, Inc and Facebook-owned WhatsApp in long being at loggerheads with the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi over data privacy bills and policies some executives have called protectionist, but tension has escalated in recent weeks.

Police visited last month to notify it of a probe into the tagging of a political tweet as "manipulated media", and in February interrogated an official about the potentially adverse social impact of a political drama. Meanwhile, WhatsApp is challenging the government in court over rules it said would force it to access encrypted data.



ALSO READ: Twitter asks govt for one more week to comply with new IT guidelines

"The fear is there," said a senior tech industry executive in India. "It weighs both strategically and operationally."

There are no indications the increasing run-ins have led to the delay or cancellation of planned investment.

Still, three senior executives familiar with the thinking of major U.S. tech firms said perceptions of India being an alternative, more accessible growth market to China are changing, and that longstanding plans for India's role in their operations are being reviewed.

"There always used to be these discussions to make India a hub, but that is being thought through now," said one of the executives, who works at a U.S. tech firm. "This feeling is across the board."

Four other executives and advisors also expressed concern about rising tension. All declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter and because discussions were private.

Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, WhatsApp and India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology did not respond to requests for comment.

Misinformation

The government has argued that its rules are needed to stem the spread of misinformation that can spark violence - such as in 2017 when kidnapping rumours shared on message apps including WhatsApp led to lynching. It also said the rules are necessary to hold large technology companies accountable for practices that hurt domestic businesses or compromise customer privacy.

India is a massive market for U.S. tech giants. It is the biggest market for both and WhatsApp by user numbers, showed data from Statista, and third for Twitter. has committed as much as $6.5 billion to invest in the country.

To attract small businesses through WhatsApp, last year invested $5.7 billion in Reliance Industries Ltd's media and telecommunications arm, Jio Platforms.

Alphabet Inc's also pumped $4.5 billion into Jio last year from a newly created $10 billion fund earmarked for investment in India over five to seven years.

Compliance

The government has tried to balance attracting high-tech investment with nationalist policies aimed at protecting local businesses and, critics say, advancing its political agenda.

A border confrontation with China prompted it to effectively ban Chinese social media apps, including TikTok and WeChat.

The government has also forced foreign firms to store data locally against fierce lobbying, and its promotion of a domestic payment card network prompted Mastercard Inc to complain https://www.reuters.com/article/india-mastercard-idINKCN1N65IS to the U.S. government about the use of nationalism.

In 2019, compliance issues with new regulations saw Amazon remove thousands of products from its e-commerce platform. The e-tailer is separately facing scrutiny by the Competition Commission of India for its retailing practices.

Twitter publicly refused to comply with some government demands to remove content, a stance which some industry executives said may have aggravated its current situation.



WhatsApp has gone to court rather than comply with a new law requiring social media firms to trace the origin of dangerous or criminal posts on their platforms. The message app operator said it cannot comply without breaking encryption, while observers said yielding could prompt similar demands in other countries.

At the same time, WhatsApp has faced regulatory delays that have limited its payment service to just 4% of its 500 million customers. Nevertheless, it is pressing ahead with hiring for a service it has called a "globally significant" opportunity.

Government officials have shown little patience for objections. IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said any robust democracy must have accountability mechanisms, such as the ability to identify the originator of messages.

"A private company sitting in America should refrain from lecturing us on democracy when you are denying your users the right to effective redressal forum," Prasad said in an interview with the Hindu newspaper published on Sunday.

Still, continued antagonism could imperil Modi's ambition of making India a go-to investment destination.

"It's a question of what you would develop in a three-to-five-year horizon," said another executive familiar with the thinking of U.S. firms. "Do you do that in India or do you do that in another country. That's where the conversation is."

(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 [India], June 11 (ANI/SRV Media): MIT World Peace University (MIT-WPU) is accepting applications to its B.Sc Economics (Honors) and M.Sc in Economics programs under the aegis of School of Economics.

The University is committed to developing ethical, spirited, and committed economic leaders for the country at all levels and from all walks of life.

Through its programs, MIT-WPU aims to ensure a balanced approach for students towards the broader range of economic knowledge and its applications backed by problem-based learning, training and emphasizing on social content in the industry.

The B.Sc in Economics offered is a three-year full-time undergraduate program, featuring internship, dissertation and field work; and the M.Sc in Economics is a two-year post-graduate program focusing on internship, dissertation, newspaper articles and research paper publication work.

Placements & Recruiters: The field of economics has grown tremendously in the last few decades due to globalization. Many companies visit the campus for placements and the university has good relations with leading industries.

The highest package offered is 10 lakhs per annum and MIT-WPU provides 100% placement assistance to students. Currently, online placements and internships are taking place and students are gaining remote working opportunities. List of potential recruiters include HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, Amazon, HSBC Bank, Aditya Birla Finance, SBI Mutual Fund and more.

Eligibility Criteria: To be eligible for the B.Sc and M.Sc in Economics programs, student needs to appear for a written exam (100 MCQs) and interview round (50 Marks), organised by MIT-WPU. Further, for the B.Sc program, student should have passed out from HSC/10+2 any stream from an AIU recognized board with a minimum of 50% marks.

On the other hand, to be eligible for the M.Sc in Economics course, students should have a Bachelor's Degree in any stream from an affiliated college in India with a minimum of 50% marks including B.Tech with Mathematics/Economics as one of the compulsory subjects.

Online Admission Process: MIT-WPU is currently accepting online applications for both B.Sc and M.Sc in Economics programs. Students can apply online and appear for all admission rounds online from the security of their homes. Due to the pandemic and the postponement of important exams, students can now apply online early in order to be considered for provisional admission offers from MIT-WPU.

Students can go fill out the online application form for B.Sc in Economics from (https://application.mitwpu.edu.in/#/_ga=2.171878560.1664352925.1623232707-502010914.1581573903)

Students can go fill out the online application form for M.Sc in Economics from (https://application.mitwpu.edu.in/#/_ga=2.256307083.1664352925.1623232707-502010914.1581573903)

Covid Policies: Keeping in mind the safety of students, MIT-WPU is conducting end-to-end online admission and running online classes to ensure that students do not miss out on critical academic time. The University has been monitoring the pandemic situation and will reopen the campus for students only when it is completely safe, in accordance with strict government regulations.

Research & International Exposure: The School of Economics offers rural immersion programs, foreign delegates visiting the university, guest lectures, a counselling club, and a journal club for the holistic development of students. In addition, students are also offered various collaborative research projects with eminent institutes, including research projects that are funded by DST, DBT, AICTE, etc.

Industry Collaborations: The School of Economics has an extensive global network. The alumni and faculty have strong connections with industry experts, which allows for the best collaborations to take place. MIT-WPU has collaborations with a number of companies from corporate, banking, and research sectors that help students to grow professionally.

has a legacy of 4 decades in educating India's youth. Known as India's 3rd best private university, MIT-WPU boasts of an acclaimed faculty and over 1,00,000 of a global alumni network while offering over 100 programs (both Undergraduate & Postgraduate).

The university is also known for its prolific placements and career support provided to students. Over 50,000 students are trailing different courses beyond 65+ Institutes of MIT World Peace University.

To apply for the B.Sc in Economics program at MIT-WPU, click here: (https://application.mitwpu.edu.in/#/_ga=2.171878560.1664352925.1623232707-502010914.1581573903)

To apply for the M.Sc in Economics program at MIT-WPU, click here: (https://application.mitwpu.edu.in/#/_ga=2.256307083.1664352925.1623232707-502010914.1581573903)

For more information, visit (https://mitwpu.edu.in/)

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.)
Swedish home furnishing retailing major IKEA on Thursday said it will launch a programme in India, Poland and China this year, helping suppliers there transit to 100 per cent renewable electricity. Under this initiative, the company would invest and support nearly 1,600 direct suppliers, IKEA said in a statement.

IKEA is striving for 100 per cent renewable energy throughout the entire value chain. By switching to renewable electricity, these suppliers will save 670,000 tonne of emissions per year, which is equivalent to approximately 3 per cent of the total climate footprint of the IKEA value chain, it added.

"The programme will be introduced in 2021 for suppliers in Poland, China and India, who represent three of IKEA's largest purchasing countries, followed by a stepwise global rollout," it said.

IKEA has around 50 suppliers in India and is one of the largest purchasing countries. "India is one of IKEA's largest purchasing countries, and we are excited to adopt this programme in this market," said Henrik Elm, Global Supply Manager, Inter IKEA group.

The programme supports IKEA's long-term commitment to become climate positive by 2030 by reducing more greenhouse gas emissions than the value chain emits, while growing the business. "We have a long-term perspective and the financial strength to invest in activities and support our suppliers to have a positive impact on people and the planet. By working together, we can make renewable electricity both more affordable and accessible," he added.

IKEA South Asia Purchasing Manager Marius Martinaitis said with this initiative in collaboration with the valuable partners, IKEA will save precious resources and reduce the climate footprint. "We have 50 direct suppliers with more than 4,00,000 co-workers in the Indian supply chain," he said.

IKEA suppliers presently cannot generate all their renewable electricity on-site - a majority still needs to be bought from the grid. Through this programme, IKEA will have a complete offer to support suppliers to generate renewable energy on-site and enable them to purchase the remaining part from the grid.

Presently, IKEA has implemented 51 per cent renewable energy consumption in its stores, offices, warehouses, factories, and other operations. "The goal is to reach 100 per cent renewable electricity in 2025 and by 2030 secure that all remaining energy, such as heating and cooling, in renewable as well," it said.

IKEA India, part of Ingka Group opened its first retail store in Hyderabad in August 2018 and second store at Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra in December 2020.

Also read: Paytm, Infosys, MakeMyTrip seek approval to conduct online COVID-19 vaccine bookings
The market is not only flooded with cheap copies of high-end luxury goods but also day-to-day products and COVID-related essentials. Counterfeiting of pharmaceutical products like PPE kits, COVID-19 medications, and sanitisers rose sharply during the COVID-19 lockdown as per an Authentication Solution Providers' Association (ASPA) report titled 'The State of Counterfeiting in India- 2021'.

Increase in counterfeiting, black marketing, and diversion of medicines and other essential medical items have made life difficult for medical professionals who are already exhausted due to manpower shortage.

Sectors like alcohol, tobacco, FMCG packaged goods, currency, and pharmaceuticals have been impacted the most by counterfeiting. These sectors together comprise 84 per cent of total counterfeiting cases reported as per ASPA. Tobacco products among the rest saw the highest rise in counterfeiting in 2020 versus 2019 and 2018, the anti-counterfeiting body said.

Also read: Wake-up Call

"According to the report, counterfeiting incidents have risen rapidly/steadily in the last few years. On average, the increase in counterfeiting incidents being reported in the last 3 years has been 20 per cent (from January 2018 to December 2020)," it noted. States like Bihar, Haryana, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal need urgent attention w.r.t counterfeit incidents.

The report further mentioned counterfeiters are infiltrating the market with fake, sub-standard, and often dangerous products by taking advantage of the high demand for products like medicines, health supplements, safety products, hygiene products and other essentials due to the COVID crisis.

Also read: Indians stack up oximeters, masks, disinfectants to fight 2nd Covid-19 wave

Unassuming customers are unable to figure out whether they've purchased an original or a counterfeit product as professional impostors employ the latest manufacturing and printing technologies for duplicating finishes, print boxes, labels, codes, and packaging that imitates genuine products perfectly.

ASPA President Nakul Pasricha warned about the impact of counterfeiting on India's economic recovery. "A big challenge is that counterfeiters are becoming smarter, better funded, and organised. In this scenario, the onus on all impacted parties to stay ahead of them is even more critical," Pasricha said.

He added fraudsters are also taking advantage of the pandemic and said, "The trends we observe are alarming and call for immediate action".

Edited by Mehak Agarwal
The Enforcement Directorate has issued a show-cause notice to Mumbai-based firm WazirX for transactions involving cryptocurrency worth Rs 2,790.74 crore. Mumbai-based WazirX and directors Nischal Shetty and Sameer Hanuman Mhatre were sent the notice under Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA).

According to ED, users of WazirX have received cryptocurrency worth Rs 880 crore via its pool account from Binance accounts and transferred out cryptocurrency worth Rs 1,400 crore to Binance accounts during the period under investigation.

"WazirX did not collect the requisite documents in clear violation of the basic mandatory Anti Money Laundering (AML) and Combating of Financing of Terrorism (CFT) precaution norms and FEMA guidelines," said the officials. The cryptocurrency exchange allows a range of transitions including exchange of cryptocurrency with rupees and vice-versa, person-to-person transactions, and transfer to crypt held in its pool accounts to wallets of other exchanges. These wallets can be held by foreigners in foreign locations.

The officials said that none of the transactions are available on the blockchain for any audit or investigation. "It was found that the WazirX Clients could transfer 'valuable' crypto-currencies to any person irrespective of its location and nationality without any proper documentation whatsoever, making it a safe haven for users looking for money laundering or other illegitimate activities," added the officials.

Also read: Bitcoin selloff: Will the cryptocurrency drop to $20,000?

Also read: Bitcoin falls to $36,279 as China blocks crypto-related accounts
An Indian court dismissed pleas on Friday by Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) and Walmart's Flipkart to quash an antitrust investigation into the business practices of the U.S. firms, dealing them a blow in their key growth market.

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) announced its investigation in January 2020 after a trader group's complaint accused the firms of promoting some "preferred sellers" and hurting business for smaller sellers.

The companies denied wrongdoing and a court put a hold on the investigation last year.

On Friday, Justice P.S. Dinesh Kumar of the high court in the southern state of Karnataka said he was dismissing the petitions by Amazon and Flipkart, and refused them any further relief.

Abir Roy, a lawyer for the trader group, told Reuters the judge's decision effectively paved the way to restart the investigation, which has been on hold for more than a year.

However, the companies are likely to appeal against the verdict.

Amazon said it would review the order "carefully and then decide on the next steps". Flipkart did not immediately respond.

When the competition panel ordered its investigation, it listed four alleged anti-competitive practices.

These were exclusive launches of mobile phones by the e-commerce firms, promoting preferred sellers on their websites, deep discounting practices and prioritising some seller listings over others.

The investigation is the latest setback for the firms, which have also battled tougher foreign investment rules, and faced accusations for years from brick-and-mortar retailers about circumventing Indian law by creating complex business structures.

In February, a Reuters investigation based on internal Amazon documents showed the U.S. firm for years had helped a small number of sellers prosper on its platform in India, giving them discounted fees and helping one cut special deals with big tech firms.

As the competition panel sought to restart the probe, it told the Karnataka court in March the Reuters report corroborated evidence it had received against Amazon.

In response, the company, which has said it "does not give preferential treatment to any seller", told the court it disagreed with the Reuters report, which should not be considered evidence.

Also Read: How Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google are shifting to hybrid work regimes
Remote work was an obvious solution for everyone from conglomerates to new-age startups last year when lockdowns were imposed across the globe to counter COVID-19 pandemic. But as time passed and the first wave abated only to be followed by the second, people started missing their workplaces.

The point was further substantiated by a survey conducted by Microsoft Work Trend Index. The recent Microsoft Work Trend Index India Findings revealed that as many as 74 per cent of Indian employees want more flexible work options and 73 per cent of them want to spend time with colleagues.

While Amazon has decided to provide its employees the flexibility to work from home, Facebook has decided to help its employees shift to other countries so that they can work from home. Google and Apple, on the other hand, decided to offer employees the option of following a flexible work schedule.

Here's how the big league is adapting to the changing work scenario:

AMAZON

Amazon said that even after COVID-related restrictions are done away with, the conglomerate's corporate and tech employees will not have to work in offices full time. "Like all companies and organisations around the world, we're managing every stage of this pandemic for the first time, learning and evolving as we go," Amazon stated in its updated return-to-office guidance.

"We've been thinking about how to balance our desire to provide flexibility to work from home with our belief that we invent best for customers when we are together in the office," the guidance added.

Corporate and tech workers at Amazon can work remotely for two days a week and will also be offered the choice to return to the office for three days a week. Besides, they will be given an option to work from a domestic location for four weeks per year.

Also read: India's hybrid work paradox: Employees seek WFH but also want to meet team

FACEBOOK

Social media behemoth Facebook said it will give its employees the option of continuing remote work for a long period of time. The company has also offered to help its employees shift to other countries so that they can work from home.

"As of June 15, Facebook will also expand remote work across international borders, supporting moves from the United States to Canada as well as shifts to Britain from other parts of Europe," Facebook said.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg had also stated that he expects the shift to remote work to be a lasting one at the social network which is planning to hire employees who are able to perform their tasks from wherever on the planet they live.

Also read: Facebook allows permanent remote work for employees as offices reopen

APPLE

iPhone maker Apple wants some of the company's employees to come to office in September for at least 3 days a week-Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Staff will be allowed to work remotely on Wednesdays and Fridays, Apple CEO Tim Cook mentioned in an internal memo.

The employees will have the option to work remotely for up to two weeks a year, "to be closer to family and loved ones, find a change of scenery, manage unexpected travel, or a different reason all your own," as per this memo.

Teams that are expected to work in person will, however, have to resume office for 5 days a week.

Also read: Apple to shift to 3-day work weeks from September

GOOGLE

Google had said that it expects 20 per cent of its workforce to continue working remotely while around 60 per cent will work a hybrid schedule which includes three days in the office and two days 'wherever they work best'.

The remaining 20 per cent can change their location to a different Google office. Google employees will also be able to work from any location other than their main office for up to 20 days per year.

In his email to employees, Google CEO Sundar Pichai mentioned when employees will have to come to the office will be decided on the basis of the team they are associated with. "The future of work is flexibility. The changes above are a starting point to help up do our very best work and have fun doing it," Pichai wrote in an email to employees.

Also read: 20% of workers at Google to work from home, 60% to be hybrid

SAP

Business software company SAP is adopting flexible working for 100,000 employees globally after positive feedback on remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic.

SAP found in an internal poll that 94 per cent of its staff wanted to take advantage of greater working flexibility while nearly 50 per cent planned to work in office for one or two days a week in the future. The company will also redesign its offices to make more space for teamwork and collaboration.

"It gives employees 100 per cent flexibility," SAP's chief marketing and solutions officer Julia White said. White added that while getting to know your co-workers personally is important, she values the flexibility that enables her to meet both her professional and personal commitments as a single mother.

Also read: Software group SAP adopts flexible working for 100,000 employees globally

Edited by Mehak Agarwal
Highlights Gates has farmlands in Louisiana, Nebraska, Georgia and other areas.

The report states that Gates has 70,000 acres of land in North Louisiana where they grow soybeans, corn, cotton.

Bill and Melinda have invested heavily in farmland but the reason behind that is not clear.

We all know Bill Gates as the co-founder and CEO of Microsoft Corporation but did you know Gates takes a keen interest in agriculture. This might not sound very believable, but Gates is America biggest farmer. Bill Gates and his estranged wife Melinda Gates have accumulated more than 269,000 acres of farmland across 18 American states.

As per the Land report and NBC report, Gates has farmlands in Louisiana, Nebraska, Georgia and other areas. The report states that Gates has 70,000 acres of land in North Louisiana where they grow soybeans, corn, cotton and rice and 20,000 acres in Nebraska, there as well as the farmers grow soybeans. Additionally, they have 6000 acres in Georgia, 14,000 acres of farmland in Washington where the farmers majorly grow potatoes.

Once Gates was asked about his farmlands on Reddit. To which he replied, "My investment group chose to do this. It is not connected to climate. The agriculture sector is important. With more productive seeds we can avoid deforestation and help Africa deal with the climate difficulty they already face. It is unclear how cheap biofuels can be but if they are cheap it can solve the aviation and truck emissions,"

Bill and Melinda have invested heavily in farmland but the reason behind that is not clear. Some reports had claimed that it could be connected to climate change. The couple had launched a new nonprofit group to help small scale farmers in countries like India with the tools and innovations they would require to deal with the effects of climate change.

On the personal front, Bill Gates and his wife Melinda became the talk of the town after their much-publicised separation. They were married for 27 years. Announcing their separation, the couple wrote on social media, "After a great deal of thought and a lot of work on our relationship, we have made the decision to end our marriage. Over the last 27 years, we have raised three incredible children and built a foundation that works all over the world to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives. We continue to share a belief in that mission and will continue our work together at the foundation, but we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives. We ask for space and privacy for our family as we begin to navigate this new life."
While the Justice Department routinely conducts investigation into leaks, including of classified information, opening such an investigation into members of Congress is extraordinarily rare. The Trump administrations attempt to secretly gain access to data of individual members of Congress and others related to the panel came as the president was fuming over investigations  in Congress and by then-special counsel Robert Mueller  into his campaigns ties to Russia. Trump called the probes a witch hunt and regularly criticized Schiff and other Democrats on Twitter.
US-based company Nanome has developed a virtual reality (VR) application that is helping scientists, doctors, and researchers in their study of new ways to combat COVID-19.

Through the app, the San Diego-based startup licenses its technology to scientists in their research of diseases as well as pharma companies aiming to design new drugs.

Nanome is one of the many companies that wants to manifest that VR is beneficial to scientists. The startup raised $3 million earlier this year, buoyed in part by new exigency for drug development amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Also Read: Possibility of COVID-19 originating in lab can't be ruled out: IIT researchers

"Wifout VR, it is difficult to comprehend the three-dimensional of a protein," Andrey Kovalevsky, a senior R&D scientist at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory told The Information.

Kovalevsky's team is doing research on one of the many unresolved mysteries surrounding the coronavirus, which is how to terminate one of the viral proteins that would stop the virus from reproducing.

Nanome's VR app is one of the tools used by Kovalevsky. Besides his COVID research, he has also used Nanome while designing antidotes against nerve agents and pesticides.

Also Read: India proud of scientists who worked on COVID-19 vaccines: PM Modi

Formed in 2015, Nanome initially started as a visualisation tool to facilitate R&D by medicinal and computational chemists and structural biologists, and has since grown as an open platform for virtual collaboration, the company said in a statement earlier.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, companies used Nanome's platform "to assess candidate molecules' ability to bind viral proteins in 3D," it added.

Nanome's main appeal lies in enabling scientists to scrutinise proteins and molecules as if they were the size of small buildings, which is not possible to do in ordinary labs.

With a few clicks in its VR menu, one can view a huge model of the main protease of the virus officially called SARS-CoV-2.

Also Read: Scientists says Centre ignored warnings of new, contagious variant amid COVID-19 surge

The protease, which is an enzyme that slashes other proteins and helps in the virus' replication, is the main subject of COVID research for scientists.

Nanome allows users to see and manipulate molecules in three dimensions, develop chemicals atom-by-atom and simulate the ways proteins move.
Highlights WazirX gets ED notice for crypto transactions.

ED issues notice to WazirX under FEMA.

Transactions of Rs 2790 crore under radar.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has issued a show-cause notice to India's leading cryptocurrency exchange platform WazirX and its directors Nischal Shetty and Sameer Mhatre under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) 1999, for transactions involving cryptocurrencies worth Rs 2,790.74 crore. The agency explained that the FEMA investigation against the platform was initiated following an ongoing money laundering probe into Chinese-owned "illegal" online betting applications.

"ED has issued Show Cause Notice to WazirX Crypto-currency Exchange for contravention of FEMA, 1999 for transactions involving crypto-currencies worth Rs. 2790.74 Crore," the law enforcement agency tweeted from its official handle.

WazirX is believed to have acquired cryptocurrency worth Rs 880 crore from Binance accounts and transferred out cryptocurrency worth Rs 1400 Crore to Binance accounts during the period of investigation.

"During the course of the investigation, it was seen that the accused Chinese nationals had laundered proceeds of crime worth Rs 57 Crore approximately by converting the INR deposits into Crypto-currency Tether (USDT) and then transferring the same to Binance (exchange registered in Cayman Islands) Wallets based on instructions received from abroad," the ED said in a statement.

For those unaware, WazirX is one of India's leading crypto exchange platforms and allows a wide range of cryptocurrency transactions including INR exchange and vice-versa, person to person (P2P) transactions, and even transfer/receipt of cryptocurrency held in its pool accounts to wallets of other exchanges.

The ED believes that the platform does not collect the required documents from the investors which is in direct violation of the basic mandatory Anti Money Laundering (AML) and Combating of Financing of Terrorism (CFT) precaution norms and FEMA guidelines.

"It was found that the WazirX Clients could transfer 'valuable' crypto-currencies to any person irrespective of its location and nationality without any proper documentation whatsoever, making it a safe haven for users looking for money laundering/ other illegitimate activities," ED's statement said.

Wazir says that it is yet to receive a notice for ED and will cooperate with the investigation.

"WazirX is yet to receive any show cause notice from the Enforcement Directorate as mentioned in today's media reports. WazirX is in compliance with all applicable laws. We go beyond our legal obligations by following Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti Money Laundering (AML) processes and have always provided information to law enforcement authorities whenever required. We are able to trace all users on our platform with official identity information. Should we receive a formal communication or notice from the ED, we'll fully cooperate in the investigation," the platform told India Today Tech in a statement.
Highlights Mi 11 Lite launch set for June 22.

Only the 4G variant is coming to India.

Snapdragon 732G SoC will power it.

Xiaomi has confirmed the launch of its next smartphone in India. This device, called Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite, will be a mid-range smartphone priced under Rs 25000. It is coming to India on June 22.

While this will be a new offering for the Indian market, it is already selling in China. The Mi 11 Lite arrived in both 4G and 5G variants in March this year. However, it seems like Xiaomi will only be bringing the 4G variant to India.

The brand has been continuously teasing the smartphone through its social media handles. In addition to that, Flipkart has created a landing page for the Mi 11 Lite launch. It is being touted as the slimmest and lightest phone of the year.

We already know the other details of the Mi 11 Lite. So as to keep you'll be updated, we decided to detail everything we know about this smartphone so far.

Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite specs and features

--The Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite is 6.8mm thick and weighs 157gms, which makes it even slimmer than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 (7.3mm) and Vivo X60 (7.3mm). India Today Tech exclusively reported about the Mi 11 Lite being the slimmest in India.

--As far as the smartphone's design is concerned, it features a rounded-square camera module on the rear. This housing holds a triple camera setup and a flash. Whereas on the front, it gets a single punch-hole display.

--Now, Xiaomi has also teased the design of the Mi 11 Lite on its Twitter channel, which confirms that it will follow the same design language as the Chinese version.

--Moving forward, all the specs are supposed to remain the same. The Mi 11 Lite will sport a 6.55-inch AMOLED display with a resolution of 90Hz. It is an FHD+ display with a screen of 1080x2400 pixels and a peak brightness of 800 nits. A layer of Gorilla Glass 5 protects this display, plus the device gets IP53 dust and water resistance.

--This mid-range smartphone is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 732G SoC. It is an octa-core SoC based on an 8nm manufacturing process and coupled with Adreno 618 GPU. This will be paired with up to 8GB of RAM and 128GB of onboard storage.

--In the camera department, the smartphone will feature triple rear cameras consisting of a 64-megapixel primary shooter, an 8-megapixel ultra-wide lens and another 5-megapixel macro camera. Whereas on the front, it will sport a 16-megapixel shooter for selfies.

--Besides this, the Mi 11 Lite will be powered by a 4250mAh battery with support for 33W fast charging. It will be housing a side-mounted fingerprint scanner for authentication. The device should be running MIUI 12.5 based on Android 11, out of the box.

--In terms of connectivity, the Mi 11 Lite will have support for dual 4G VoLTE, WiFi, Bluetooth 5.1, GPS, Infrared port and USB Type-C.

Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite India launch

Xiaomi had been continuously teasing the Mi 11 Lite hinting towards an imminent launch. Now the brand has confirmed the launch date, i.e. June 22. The smartphone will be available on Xiaomi's official website and Flipkart.

Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite India price

Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite is a mid-range 4G device confirmed to launch under Rs 25,000 in India. Xiaomi sells Mi 10i at Rs 21,999, which is a 5G device. Also, OnePlus Plus Nord CE just arrived at a starting price of Rs 22,999, again a 5G smartphone.

It will be tough for Xiaomi to cut the competition in this segment, which makes it interesting to see how Xiaomi prices the Mi 11 Lite. The Mi 11 Lite starts at 299 Euro, which converts to Rs 26,510 roughly. However, the Indian pricing is usually lesser than European pricing. Keeping that in mind, we expect the smartphone to ship at a starting price of Rs 20,999.
C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute (C3.ai DTI) today announced the second round of C3.ai DTI awards, focused on using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and digital transformation to advance energy efficiency and lead the way to a lower-carbon, higher-efficiency economy that will ensure energy and climate security.

C3.ai DTI issued this call for proposals in February 2021, and received 52 submissions. A rigorous peer review process led to 21 awards for research proposals to improve resilience, sustainability, and efficiency through such measures as carbon sequestration, carbon markets, hydrocarbon production, distributed renewables, and cybersecurity, among other topics.

The Institute awarded a total of $4.4 million in cash from this call for proposals, the second call the Institute has released since the organizations launch in March 2020. In addition to cash awards, research teams gain access to up to $2 million in Azure Cloud computing resources, up to 800,000 supercomputing node hours on the Blue Waters petascale supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, up to 25 million computing hours on supercomputers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratorys National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), and free, unlimited access to the C3 AI Suite hosted on the Microsoft Azure Cloud.

The worlds energy infrastructure will need to undergo radical changes to address the impact of global energy generation, said Thomas M. Siebel, chairman and CEO of C3 AI. In the face of this crisis, the Institute is proud to bring together the best and brightest minds and provide direction and leadership to support objective analysis and AI-based, data-driven science for climate security.

Pursuing a sustainable future via advances in science and engineering is absolutely critical, said Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientific Officer at Microsoft. Were deeply enthusiastic to join with the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute to support frontier research on energy and climate at leading universities.

The 21 projects were each awarded $100,000 to $250,000, for an initial period of one year, in one of nine categories, as listed below by project title, principal investigator, and affiliation.

Sustainability - Applying AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics to support sustainability initiatives for energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions: Learning in Routing Games for Sustainable Electromobility (Henrik Sandberg, KTH Royal Institute of Technology) AI-Driven Materials Discovery Framework for Energy-Efficient and Sustainable Electrochemical Separations (Xiao Su, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

- Applying AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics to support sustainability initiatives for energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions:

AI for Carbon Sequestration -Applying AI/ML techniques to increase the scale and reduce costs of carbon sequestration: Optimization of Agricultural Management for Soil Carbon Sequestration Using Deep Reinforcement Learning and Large-Scale Simulations (Naira Hovakimyan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Affordable Gigaton-Scale Carbon Sequestration: Navigating Autonomous Seaweed Growth Platforms by Leveraging Complex Ocean Currents and Machine Learning (Claire Tomlin, University of California, Berkeley)

-Applying AI/ML techniques to increase the scale and reduce costs of carbon sequestration:

AI for Advanced Energy and Carbon Markets - Enabling dynamic, automated, and real-time pricing of energy-generation sources: Quantifying Carbon Credit Over the U.S. Midwestern Cropland Using AI-Based Data-Model Fusion (Kaiyu Guan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) The Role of Interconnectivity and Strategic Behavior in Electric Power System Reliability (Ali Hortacsu, University of Chicago)

- Enabling dynamic, automated, and real-time pricing of energy-generation sources:

Cybersecurity of Power and Energy Infrastructure - Leveraging AI/ML techniques to improve the cybersecurity of critical power and energy assets, along with smart connected factories and homes: Private Cyber-Secure Data-Driven Control of Distributed Energy Resources (Subhonmesh Bose, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Cyberattacks and Anomalies for Power Systems: Defense Mechanism and Grid Fortification via Machine Learning Techniques (Javad Lavaei, University of California, Berkeley) A Joint ML+Physics-Driven Approach for Cyber-Attack Resilience in Grid Energy Management (Amritanshu Pandey, Carnegie Mellon University)

- Leveraging AI/ML techniques to improve the cybersecurity of critical power and energy assets, along with smart connected factories and homes:

Smart Grid Analytics - Applying AI and other analytic approaches to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of grid transmission and distribution operations: Scalable Data-Driven Voltage Control of Ultra-Large-Scale Power Networks (Alejandro Dominguez-Garcia, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Offline Reinforcement Learning for Energy-Efficient Power Grids (Sergey Levine, University of California, Berkeley)

- Applying AI and other analytic approaches to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of grid transmission and distribution operations:

Distributed Energy Resource Management - Applying AI to increase the penetration and use of distributed renewables: Machine Learning for Power Electronics-Enabled Power Systems: A Unified ML Platform for Power Electronics, Power Systems, and Data Science (Minjie Chen, Princeton University) Sharing Mobile Energy Storage: Platforms and Learning Algorithms (Kameshwar Poolla, University of California, Berkeley) Data-Driven Control and Coordination of Smart Converters for Sustainable Power System Using Deep Reinforcement Learning (Qianwen Xu, KTH Royal Institute of Technology)

- Applying AI to increase the penetration and use of distributed renewables:

AI for Improved Natural Catastrophe Risk Assessment -Applying AI to improve modeling of natural catastrophe risks from future weather-related events (e.g., tropical storms, wildfires, and floods): AI for Natural Catastrophes: Tropical Cyclone Modeling and Enabling the Resilience Paradigm (Arindam Banerjee, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Multi-Scale Analysis for Improved Risk Assessment of Wildfires Facilitated by Data and Computation (Marta Gonzalez, University of California, Berkeley)

-Applying AI to improve modeling of natural catastrophe risks from future weather-related events (e.g., tropical storms, wildfires, and floods):

Resilient Energy Systems - Addressing how the use of AI/ML techniques and markets for energy and carbon introduce new vulnerabilities: A Learning-Based Influence Model Approach to Cascading Failure Prediction (Eytan Modiano, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Reinforcement Learning for a Resilient Electric Power System (Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, University of California, Berkeley)

- Addressing how the use of AI/ML techniques and markets for energy and carbon introduce new vulnerabilities:

AI for Improved Climate Change Modeling -Use of AI/ML to address climate change modeling and adaptation: Machine Learning to Reduce Uncertainty in the Effects of Fires on Climate (Hamish Gordon, Carnegie Mellon University) AI-Based Prediction of Urban Climate and Its Impact on Built Environments (Wei Liu, KTH Royal Institute of Technology) Interpretable Machine Learning Models to Improve Forecasting of Extreme-Weather-Causing Tropical Monster Storms (Da Yang, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

-Use of AI/ML to address climate change modeling and adaptation:

From wildfires to rising seas to monster storms crippling our energy systems, increasingly extreme weather clearly represents a severe threat to our economy, infrastructure, and national security, said S. Shankar Sastry, C3.ai DTI Co-Director and Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.Improving climate resilience will require profound changes powered by a new era of technology like those C3.ai DTI is supporting today.

A number of energy companies and utilities have used enterprise AI to transform their operations, but as we can see, theres an even greater need for resilience to cyberattacks and large environmental disruptions, said R. Srikant, C3.ai DTI Co-Director and Fredric G. and Elizabeth H. Nearing Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. These projects are designed with those goals in mind.

Award Criteria

C3.ai DTI selects research proposals that inspire cooperative research and advance machine learning and other AI subdisciplines. Projects are peer-reviewed on the basis of scientific merit, prior accomplishments of the principal investigator and co-principal investigators, the use of AI, machine learning, data analytics, and cloud computing in the research project, and the suitability for testing the methods at scale. Visit C3DTI.ai to learn more about the Institutes programs, award opportunities, and selected research proposals.

About C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute

Established in March 2020 by C3 AI, Microsoft, and leading universities, the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute is a research consortium dedicated to accelerating the benefits of artificial intelligence for business, government, and society. The Institute engages the worlds leading scientists to conduct research and train practitioners in the new Science of Digital Transformation  operating at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud computing, internet of things, big data analytics, organizational behavior, public policy, and ethics.

The ten C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute consortium member universities and laboratories are: University of California, Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon University, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, National Center for Supercomputing Applications at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Princeton University, Stanford University, and University of Chicago. Additional industry partners include AstraZeneca, Baker Hughes, and Shell.

To support the Institute, C3 AI is providing the Institute $57,250,000 in cash contributions over the first five years of operation. C3 AI and Microsoft will contribute an additional $310 million of in-kind support, including use of the C3 AI Suite and Microsoft Azure computing, storage, and technical resources to support C3.ai DTI research.

About C3.ai, Inc.

C3.ai, Inc. (NYSE:AI) is the Enterprise AI application software company that accelerates digital transformation for organizations globally. C3 AI delivers a family of fully integrated products: C3 AI Suite, an end-to-end platform for developing, deploying, and operating large-scale AI applications; C3 AI Applications, a portfolio of industry-specific SaaS AI applications; C3 AI CRM, a suite of industry-specific CRM applications designed for AI and machine learning; and C3 AI Ex Machina, a no-code AI solution to apply data science to everyday business problems. The core of the C3 AI offering is an open, model-driven AI architecture that dramatically simplifies data science and application development. Learn more at: www.c3.ai.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210610005231/en/
It was announced yesterday that APC Ltd, the award-winning Irish pharmaceutical research and development company, is investing 25M and creating 120 jobs through the formation of a Global Centre of Excellence for Vaccine and Advanced Therapeutic Research and Manufacturing.

As a global medicine accelerator, APCs expanded facility will enable the rapid research and manufacture of vaccines, including Covid 19 vaccines, and other advanced therapeutics for rare diseases. It will provide supply chains nationally and across Europe with these vital medicines, positioning Ireland as a significant contributor on the international stage to the manufacture of Covid vaccines and other critical Advanced Therapeutics.

It is estimated that 8m of this investment involves the construction of an additional 12,000 sq. ft of laboratory space and associated research infrastructure at APCs existing 60,000 sq. ft headquarters in Cherrywood, Dublin.

The expansion, which plans to be fully operational by the end of June 2021, will add 50 new highly skilled jobs to the existing team of 140 people, with roles in chemistry, biology, chemical engineering, analytical sciences coming on stream immediately, along with other various professional pharmaceutical positions. The expansion will support the research acceleration of Covid-19 vaccines and other Advanced Therapeutics.

At the same time, APC is also announcing a 17m investment in the creation of VLE Therapeutics Ltd. to focus on the manufacture of Vaccines and Advanced Therapeutics, including Cell and Gene Therapies. This will be the first Irish-owned facility expressly designed to provide Ireland and Europe with a local supply chain for these critical medicines.

Welcoming the news yesterday, Taoiseach, Michael Martin said, "Todays investment will make APC the worlds first Medicine Accelerator, a place where molecules get to market at record speed through science-led expertise combined with digital innovation. This is set to revolutionise how medicines are developed and delivered to patients. The fact that this is all happening in Ireland, thanks to the work of a 100% Irish owned company, is testament to the wealth of talent and vision we have here in this country in the biotech and pharmaceutical space."

Group Chief Executive Officer to APC and VLE, Dr. Mark Barrett added, "Ireland is a global powerhouse for pharma manufacturing and we believe our technological advancements can work hand-in-hand with this track record to accelerate the development and manufacture of these critical vaccines and advanced therapeutics for people in Ireland, Europe and around the world. Were also delighted to have a strong longstanding partnership with Enterprise Ireland and their investment was integral to this entire project."

Source: www.businessworld.ie
Whats new: Northwest Chinas Qinghai province joined the cryptocurrency crackdown by ordering a shutdown of all virtual currency mining operations in the region.

No new cryptocurrency mining project will be approved in the province, and all existing operations will be closed, the provincial industry and information technology regulator said Wednesday. It cited central government directives to curtail energy consumption and pollution and to maintain financial stability.

Qinghais move followed similar decisions by authorities in northern Inner Mongolia and the far western region of Xinjiang.

The context: China, the worlds biggest Bitcoin mining nation, has intensified a crackdown on cryptocurrency mining, reflecting authorities concerns over financial risks associated with virtual currency speculation and the environmental costs of the activity, which consumes vast amounts of electricity.

Energy consumption from Bitcoin mining in China is projected to peak in 2024 at around 297 terawatt-hours, generating 130 million metric tons of global-warming carbon emissions, according to a study from researchers at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Cornell University, Tsinghua University and the University of Surrey.

As China works to implement its pledge to create a low-carbon economy and reach peak carbon emissions by 2030, policymakers are putting pressure on local governments to play their part.

Cryptocurrency mining gobbles up enormous amounts of power through the electricity consumed by the specialized computer equipment needed to solve the mathematical puzzles that produce the currency and through the energy needed to cool the machines and prevent them from overheating.

Tang Ziyi contributed to this story.

Quick Takes are condensed versions of China-related stories for fast news you can use.

Contact reporter Han Wei (weihan@caixin.com) and editor Bob Simison (bobsimison@caixin.com)

Download our app to receive breaking news alerts and read the news on the go.

Follow the Chinese markets in real time with Caixin Globals new stock database.
Heres todays ranking of the top 10 most-read international stories in China that weve compiled to help you get a sense of whats trending in the Chinese language sphere.

Chinese netizens are interested in the commerce ministrys comments on the U.S. withdrawal of its executive order banning some Chinese apps, including TikTok. They also continue to be captivated by the story of a South African woman reportedly setting a new world record by giving birth to 10 babies.

1.French President Emmanuel Macron slapped in the face by a man during a visit to the south of the country

2.South Korea exposes $3.6 billion cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme

3.South African woman reportedly gives birth to 10 babies, setting a new world record

4.French Prime Minister Jean Castex self-isolates after his wife diagnosed with Covid-19

5.Amazon founder Jeff Bezos found to have not paid any income taxes for two years

6.Indian Olympic Association drops Chinas Li Ning as its official uniform sponsor in consideration of sentiments of the people of the country

7.Pakistan rules out providing military bases to the U.S. after Afghanistan withdrawal, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi says

8.About 1.2 million Chinese citizens have been vaccinated overseas in more than 150 countries

9.Chinas Ministry of Commerce describes withdrawal of U.S. executive orders banning Chinese apps including TikTok, WeChat as a positive step

10.Jeff Bezos plans to go to outer space with his brother

Read the top 10 domestic news on the same day.

Translated by intern reporter Chen Bingyi

The daily ranking of most read news stories among Chinese people, about China and global affairs, is jointly provided to you by Caixin Insight and HANA Data, an artificial intelligence technology team.

The key indicators calculated on the list are based on mass data sourced from Chinas mainstream social media platforms and online news websites. Click here for a detailed introduction of our methodology.
Xi inspects new lives of Tibetan herdsmen

Xinhua) 16:07, June 10, 2021

XINING, June 10 (Xinhua) -- Nearly seven years after moving into his current home, Tibetan herdsman Sonam Tsering hosted an unexpected guest: Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.

On Tuesday afternoon, Xi visited Sonam Tsering's home in Shaliuhe Township in Gangcha County, Haibei Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, as part of his inspection tour of northwest China's Qinghai Province.

"At our home, the General Secretary inspected both inside and outside the house. He is very cordial, which moves us deeply," said Sonam Tsering, 50, wearing traditional Tibetan costume, in the village of Golog Tsang Gongma, where many of the local herders were relocated.

In late 2014, Sonam Tsering's family moved out of a mountainous area 17 km from the new home, a single-story brick-concrete house, bidding farewell to the nomadic life amid the grasslands that was once the norm for herders like him.

He showed Xi three pictures to illustrate how his life has been transformed. One was of his former home, a dilapidated adobe structure at the foot of a mountain, surrounded by uneven stone walls. The other two showed his family's current area of grassland and flocks of sheep.

"Life was really hard in the past. Due to poor transportation, my wife had no access to medical services. My two children received little schooling and just grazed the animals," Sonam Tsering recalled.

Despite having 30 hectares of grassland, the family raised only eight head of cattle and barely made ends meet, he said.

Their lives began to change after the relocation. In late 2015, they were registered as a poor household. With poverty-alleviation subsidies and loans, Sonam Tsering gradually increased his stock to 80 sheep and 20 cattle.

The average per-capita income of his family soared to 21,000 yuan (about 3,284 U.S. dollars) in 2020 from 2,100 yuan in 2015.

"Thanks to the Party's favorable policies, the lives of us herders are getting better every day," Sonam Tsering said.

His sense of gain is shared by his fellow herders who have moved into more than 600 houses in the village. All the houses are now equipped with flush toilets and have driveways up to the doors.

"Livestock raising and ecological tourism are booming in our village. Last year, the average per-capita income of registered poor households reached 7,678 yuan," said village Party chief Sonam Tseten.

"Great changes have taken place in the village," said Xi, as he spoke with the villagers. "We are very glad to see that every one of you is leading a happy life, and we can feel the profound bonding you have with the Party and the government."

In the campaign against absolute poverty and the drive to build beautiful villages, Qinghai has seen more than 500,000 herders relocated to new homes in county seats or townships.

In 2020, the average annual per capita disposable income for rural residents in Tibetan-inhabited areas of Qinghai reached 12,000 yuan, up 74 percent from the figure in 2015. All the remaining 257,000 poor people had shaken off poverty.

Eight-year-old Tongdri Butso, Sonam Tsering's granddaughter, studies at an elementary school in Shaliuhe Township. She wishes to become a teacher when she grows up.

"I look forward to watching the flag-raising ceremony at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and seeing all the scenery that the grassland doesn't offer," she said.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)
The ride-share driver took them to the residence of one of the victims relatives in the 8300 block of South Luella Avenue, where the Chicago Fire Department was called. The driver then went to South Chicago Avenue and Jeffrey Boulevard, where he flagged down police.
Officers responded to a call of shots fired in the 4900 block of West Wrightwood Avenue about 1:20 a.m. and found Casteel lying on a porch, unresponsive, according to a police media notification. The man had been shot in the chest and ankle and was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. The woman also was lying on the porch, with gunshot wounds to the chest and arm, and was taken to Illinois Masonic, where she was initially in serious condition.


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Authorities said Webber drugged and cut the throat of her daughter, Maggie, and cut her own wrists and wrote on the walls in blood in 2010, claiming she did so to prevent Satan from sexually attacking her daughter. The two lived in New York but were visiting Webbers mother in the western suburbs at the time.
Do you have an athlete in mind that contributes to the team or sport, holds sportsmanship and team spirit, has epic playmaker moments and/or in general makes the the sports fun? If yes, please make your nominations for our edition of Athlete Spotlight.

CLICK TO NOMINATE
But as time passed, key early supporters such as Lawlor came to oppose the extension, and tolls from the extension were projected to cover only part of the $2.5 billion cost. In 2019, the executive director of the Illinois tollways, Jose Alvarez, appointed by Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker after years of Republican control, announced that the agency would no longer continue the environmental study, halting the proposal.
FILE - This May 25, 2020, file image from a police body camera shows bystanders including Darnella Frazier, third from right filming, as former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was recorded pressing his knee on George Floyd's neck for several minutes in Minneapolis. Frazier, the teenager who pulled out her cellphone and recorded the police restraint and death of Floyd has been awarded a special citation by the Pulitzer Prizes. The Pulitzer Prizes said Friday, June, 11, 2021, that Frazier was cited for courageously recording the video, which spurred protests against police brutality around the world. (Minneapolis Police Department via AP, File)
Raul Ayala Jr., 72, of Angier, accused of sexually molesting a minor was sentenced on Thursday to 30 years in prison for making child pornography, federal prosecutors said.
Far from resting on its laurels, Nelvana continues to diversify: into original features, festival shorts, gaming licenses, and European co-productions, to name just four areas. To learn more about the companys recent changes and current strategy, we spoke to its president Pam Westman. Here are five takeaways from our wide-ranging conversation.

Accompanying the piece is a gallery of artwork showcasing just a few of Nelvanas productions from its illustrious histroy.

1. Nelvana is responding to market demand for animated features.

Last year, the company announced a pact with Duncan Studio, which was founded by former Nelvana animator Ken Duncan, to develop original features. Westman explains that Nelvana had picked up on the recent success of animated features  not Pixar-scale films, but smaller-to-middle-of-the-road ones  at theaters, as well as growing demand for them from clients like streamers.

The studio is agnostic as to whether its future features will go to theaters or streaming. It is currently sticking to films based either on its own well-known IP or on an original idea from an experienced artist like Duncan. We want to play carefully into this new area, says Westman, stressing that Nelvana is still focused on series.

2. Youtube is a good testing ground for original IP.

Debuting content on the platform helps the company understand what viewers gravitate to in terms of subject matter, says Westman. The sort of content that premieres on Youtube is typically shortform (23 minutes): the Toon Bops musical shorts, say. Some Youtube series are later developed into fully-fledged tv series, one example being the live-action Miss Persona.

Youtube is useful to Nelvana in other ways. Even when it comes to more conventional tv series, partner content will be created for the platform, because in this day and age, you cant just have content on a linear channel. Also, Youtube is a repository for titles from Nelvanas vast library, a lot of which was previously just sitting there, gathering dust  the companys Retro Rerun channel is a trove of vintage animation.

3. Gaming IP is an area of growing interest.

The competitiveness of the streaming and tv market has placed a premium on animated content based on properties with a ready-made fanbase, says Westman, and gaming is such a huge part of the younger audiences life now. In 2019, Nelvana struck a licensing deal with Monomi Park over its Slime Rancher game (albeit with an initial focus on toys and publishing, not animation); more such partnerships are in the works. The company is also developing animated shows in which the characters themselves are gamers.

The challenge, Westman adds, is that the gaming world moves fast. Characters come and go, personalities come and go quickly, and animation is not a fast art.

4. Short films are a great incubator for new ideas and tech.

In 2019, Nelvana released its 22-minute film The Most Magnificent Thing on the festival circuit. It was the first short film of its kind the studio had ever made. While it cost three or four times more than a normal 22-minute episode, the production brought several benefits. The team developed fur simulation techniques that were then used on the studios series Agent Binky: Pets of the Universe. The short has also inspired a spin-off series, Millie Magnificent (working title), which Nelvana is now bringing to the marketplace.

Crucially, the experience of making a short stimulated Nelvanas artists, says Westman. Grinding out over 200 episodes a year is a lot for a creative group of people, and every now and then, you want to be able to give them something special to work on. Nelvana is now greenlighting new shorts, prioritizing ideas pitched by its own staff. It hopes to start doing at least one a year.

5. Nelvanas animation studio is comfortable in its size.

Westman estimates that it has 200225 staff, not including the business team: Thats a number we like. She acknowledges that the studio has had opportunities to grow now that people are working remotely (the company will soon outline its long-term plan for where staff will work). Nelvana would rather outsource extra work to other Canadian studios; it is also actively exploring European co-productions.
Photo: Jake Bregolisse

While we mark National Indigenous History Month in June, we do so at a sombre time with the devastating news of the bodies of 215 children found in unmarked graves near a former residential school in Kamloops.

This is another reminder of the devastating legacy of residential schools, and I mourn alongside those who loved these children.

The Official Opposition has called on the government to take meaningful action on reconciliation, including implementing Calls to Action 71 to 76 from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report by Canada Day.

In addition, we ask the government to pass bills implementing parts of the commissions call to action such as Bill C-8, which is before this Parliament.

We need to fund investigations at all former residential schools where unmarked graves may exist, and we need to ensure that proper resources are allocated for communities to re-inter, commemorate, and honour any individuals discovered during these investigations.

In 2008, then prime minister Stephen Harper delivered an historic apology to former residential school students, their families, and communities, Canadas Conservatives will continue to work to advance the work of the TRC.

With only a few more weeks of parliamentary work before the House of Commons rises for the summer, there is a lot of activity and Ill touch on a couple of items.

Canadians were rightfully angered to hear that Julie Payette, the former Liberal-appointed governor general, would receive a generous pension and benefits for life after only a short term in office after being forced to resign in disgrace after a workplace review.

This generous pension for such a short term was something I heard a lot about from constituents in Kelowna-Lake Country, and I was more than happy to second a private members bill from my colleague, MP Marilyn Gladu, to stop this from happening again.

I also continue to hear concerns from many constituents on the governments attempts to limit free speech through Bill C-10, which would make changes to the Broadcasting Act.

It has been suggested by experts that this bill could allow the CRTC to regulate what individuals can or cannot post and view online.

On June 4, the government attempted to shut down debate on C-10 by using a parliamentary procedure that hasnt been seen in Parliament for decades.

Conservatives worked unapologetically to defend free speech and prevented this vote from occurring.

Conservative colleagues and I called for an emergency trade committee meeting to question the trade minister on the recent U.S. announcement of their intention to double tariffs on softwood lumber from Canada.

I questioned the minister on what actions she has taken and received nothing more than evasive responses. Our committee meeting received national news coverage.

Because our Canada-U.S. supply chains are so integrated, this could result in more uncertainty and less production in Canada, leading to even higher lumber prices here.

The last softwood lumber agreement was negotiated by the Conservative government and expired in 2015. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised in 2015 he would negotiate a new agreement within 100 days of forming government, which hasnt happened.

Since then, there have been three U.S. administrations, and weve seen production and jobs go south.

With re-opening, we can look forward to more activities; however, major events are still on hold, such as our large Canada Day celebrations.

I am once again offering Kelowna-Lake Country residents a Canada flag on a first-come basis. The cut-off is June 20  so be sure to reach out soon.

To request your Canada flag kit, please call (250) 470-5075, email [email protected], or visit us online at www.TracyGrayMP.ca.

If you need any assistance with federal programs or have any thoughts to share, please reach out any time.



Stay well.
Photo: The Canadian Press Linda Oswald hugs 2-year-old dog Tilly at their home in Hayden, Idaho on Tuesday, June 8, 2021. The dog vanished for two days after being ejected from a vehicle during a car accident and has been found apparently doing the job it was bred to do  herding sheep. Oswald's family and their dog, Tilly, were driving along Idaho State Highway 41 on Sunday when they crashed into another car, launching the dog through the rear window, The Spokesman-Review reported. (Kathy Plonka/The Spokesman-Review via AP)

A pet dog who vanished for two days after being ejected from a vehicle during an accident has been found apparently doing the job it was bred to do  herding sheep.

Linda Oswald's family and their dog, Tilly, were driving along Idaho State Highway 41 on Sunday when they crashed into another car, launching the dog through the rear window, The Spokesman-Review reported.

The unharmed but stunned dog then ran away, prompting an immediate search with at least six complete strangers who witnessed the crash and pulled over along the highway to help, Oswald said.

People just kept going out, Oswald said, noting that the search lasted about 10 hours on Sunday before the family went home. We were sore and exhausted.

Oswald said the family then wrote a Facebook post that included a picture of the 2-year-old border collie and red heeler mix and more than 3,000 people shared the post. That's when Tyler, Travis and Zane Potter recognized the dog in the photo as the same dog they saw on their family farm south of Rathdrum on Tuesday.

Both the Potters and Oswald think Tilly was drawn to the farm and their sheep.

I think that dog was trying to herd, Travis Potter said.

Oswald said if it weren't for the post, he would still be out there.
Photo: The Canadian Press In this artist's sketch, Nathaniel Veltman makes a video court appearance in London, Ont., Thursday, June 10, 2021 as Justice of the Peace Robert Seneshen (top left) and lawyer Alayna Jay look on. Veltman, accused of deliberately running over and killing four members of a Muslim family in London, Ont., had his case adjourned to next week. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Alexandra Newbould

The deadly attack against a Muslim family in southwestern Ontario was "a senseless act," the father of the man accused in what police believe was a deliberate hate crime said Thursday.

The family was out for an evening stroll when a man driving a pickup truck mounted the sidewalk and ran them over, killing four people and sending a child to hospital with serious injuries.

Nathaniel Veltman, 20, has been charged with four counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder.

"It was with utmost shock and horror that I came to hear of the unspeakable crime committed last weekend," Veltman's father, Mark Veltman, said in an email to The Canadian Press.

"There are no words adequate to properly express my deep sorrow for the victims of this senseless act."

Relatives have identified the dead as 46-year-old Salman Afzaal, his 44-year-old wife Madiha Salman, their 15-year-old daughter Yumna Salman and her 74-year-old grandmother, Talat Afzaal.

The couple's nine-year-old son, Fayez, was seriously wounded but is expected to recover.

Police allege the attack was a planned and premeditated act that targeted Muslims.

Court documents filed when Veltman's parents filed for divorce in 2016 suggest he took his parents' separation hard.

The oldest of six children who were homeschooled - along with his twin sister - Veltman blamed his mother, Alysia Bisset, for the divorce, the documents show.

"Nathan is combative and argumentative with me to the extent that he will follow me around the house and I have to lock myself in my bedroom," Bisset wrote in court documents.

Bisset said Nathaniel stopped following the family's rules around that time.

"Nathan has gone to the extreme of stating that he would like to move out of our home into his own apartment and has discussed his plans with (Mark Veltman)," she wrote.

Nathaniel Veltman was 15 at the time.

Mark Veltman said he wasn't to blame for his eldest son's anger, court documents say.

"Nathaniel's anger with (Bisset) is primarily due to (Bisset's) attempt to prevent Nathaniel from having any contact with me," Mark Veltman wrote.

"Nathaniel is 16 years old and very much wants to maintain contact with me."

He also wrote his son became more hostile with him, which he blamed Bisset for.

Nathaniel Veltman was 16 when he moved out to live with friends, his father wrote.

Nathaniel Veltman took the rare step of "withdrawing from parental control" when he was 17 years old, court documents show.

Earlier Thursday Veltman made a brief virtual appearance in court to face four counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder.

Veltman, wearing an orange T-shirt , orange pants and a blue face mask, spoke calmly and clearly from the Elgin Middlesex Detention Centre.

"Mr. Veltman have you retained counsel?" asked Justice of the Peace Robert Seneshen.

"I've only spoken to them," Veltman said, adding that he was in discussions with a local law firm.

Court heard that the Crown continues to work on disclosure, which will be provided to Veltman once he has retained a lawyer.

Veltman is set to return to court on June 14.

Meanwhile, calls continue to grow for a national summit on anti-Muslim hate.

The National Council for Canadian Muslims has a petition signed by more than 35,000 people calling for all levels of government to tackle Islamophobia.

"This loss of a family, the loss of a child in our community because of Islamophobia  this is a sorrow that will run deep for a long time," the council wrote in the petition. "Let that sorrow be the ground where we stand for justice and stand for change."

The group's petition echoes a call by the London Muslim Mosque, to which the family belonged.

The funeral for the family will be held at 1:30 p.m. Saturday at the Islamic Centre of Southwest Ontario that is open to the public. The family will hold a private visitation in the morning at the O'Neil Funeral Home.
I read the recent news article that ward 3-East in the Kelowna General Hospital has had a Covid-19 outbreak.

I am more than familiar with this ward. Unfortunately, my husband was a patient on this ward on four separate occasions in 2020. Let me begin by saying that we have the utmost respect and trust in the very professional and caring doctors, nurses and staff on this ward. My husband's first stay in 2020 was at the beginning of the year and I was allowed to visit him. The next three times that he was admitted, due to Covid, I was not allowed to visit him. Ward 3 is a surgical ward. Many patients are mobile with the use of a walker, wheelchair, or simply walking slowly taking along with them their IV pole.

As in 2020, today, no visitors are allowed to be in the hospital with their loved ones. But, there is an elite group of people on Ward 3. They are those patients who are cigarette smokers. The smoker leaves his room, often unmasked, many times during the day to go outside. Of course everyone carries a cell phone and arrangements can be made to meet with family, friends, even to purchase a meal from one of the many food delivery services. It also doesn't take much street smarts to see other deals transpiring. The smokers gather in front of the hospital, in groups, paying no respect to social distancing and certainly not wearing masks.

They then return to their ward and their bed, bringing along with them whatever they were given or purchased. I was at the hospital on many occasions, delivering special medical equipment as well as medicines needed by my husband. I was allowed to go, masked, inside the front entrance, where the articles were taken from me to be delivered to my husband's room. Even if I were gowned and masked, I was not allowed to go and sit by his bedside. Yet the smoker, in the bed beside him, could come and go as he pleased, meeting up with whomever he had made arrangements with. And now, ward 3 has a Covid outbreak. I am truly amazed that it did not happen sooner.

Sandy Watson, Vernon
Officer Karol Chwiesiuk, 29, was charged in a criminal complaint in U.S. District Court in Washington with five misdemeanor counts, including entering a restricted building, disrupting government business and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds with intent to impede a congressional proceeding.
Photo: Vancouver Fraser Port Authority Vancouver's cruise ship sector welcomed more than one million passengers in 2019

Utah Senator Bill Lee has tabled three bills in the U.S. Senate that take aim at B.C.'s cruise sector.

The bills' intent is to permanently change U.S. law in a way that would allow foreign-flagged cruise ships to travel directly between U.S. ports without touching a foreign country.

That would mean that Seattle-to-Alaska voyages could skip stops in B.C., such as in Victoria or Vancouver, and be a blow to the province's tourism sector.

Vancouver Fraser Port Authority has estimated that the cruise-ship sector adds about $2.2 billion to B.C.s economy through the support of 13,866 jobs and almost $700 million in wages. Officials have said in the past that each docked cruise ship brings in about $3 million in economic impact to Metro Vancouver.

The U.S. Congress recently unanimously passed a bill to temporarily allow cruise ships on Alaskan voyages to bypass B.C., after the Canadian government banned those ships from docking in Canada to limit the spread of COVID-19.

The law that allows the ships to temporarily bypass B.C. when headed to Alaska stipulates that it will cease to be in effect as soon as Canada reopens its ports.

Canada's ban on cruise ships docking at its ports is in effect until February 28, 2022, and that ban applies to all commercial vessels carrying more than 100 passengers.

Greater Victoria Harbour Authority CEO Ian Robertson told BIV on June 10 that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should be clear that the ban on foreign cruise ships docking in Canada will not be extended, and these vessels will be welcome in 2022.

"The cruise lines need some certainty, and I think it was the uncertainty that caused this whole thing to happen," he said.

Robertson said his organization originally supported Ottawa's ban on cruise travel, due to COVID-19, but things are changing and policies need to keep pace.

"We're seeing everyone, or a lot of people, getting vaccinated, and the passengers are tested, and they are vaccinated on the ships, the risk to Canadians is very, very low," he said.

The rationale for the 135-year-old Passenger Vessel Services Act (PVSA), was to protect the U.S. shipbuilding sector. In order to be a U.S.-flagged ship, the vessel must not only be registered in the U.S., and pay U.S. taxes, but it also must be constructed in the U.S.

No U.S. ship-building facilities now make cruise ships, so the reality is that there are no new ships that are eligible to travel between two U.S. ports without stopping at a foreign port.

The only exception to the restriction is for far-flung U.S. ports, such as American Samoa.

The PVSA is bad news, Lee said in a June 10 statement. This arcane law benefits Canada, Mexico, and other countries who receive increased maritime traffic, at the expense of American workers in our coastal cities, towns, and ports."

He said that the result of the law is reduced demand for jobs and travel opportunities in the U.S.

"In the context of ocean liners, this protectionist law is literally protecting no one, as there hasnt been a cruise ship built domestically in over half a century. The PVSA is bad economics and bad law, and its far past time that Congress reconsider it.

Alaska Representative Don Young had implored B.C. Premier John Horgan to urge the federal government to allow so-called "technical calls," which would allow cruise ships to dock at Canadian ports as long as no one leaves the vessels.

When Young threatened to introduce legislation in Congress to allow a temporary override to the PVSA, Horgan dismissed his effort as a "blip along the way as a result of frustration by Alaska," and something that was not likely to be successful.

When the initiative passed in Congress, Young, on May 20, tweeted to Horgan, saying "don't underestimate Don Young and the Alaska delegation. Our bill, the 'blip' as you say, is now headed to be signed into law."

The debate about whether to allow technical calls at ports, however, is long over, according to Robertson.

"Technical calls are not viable at this time," he said. "It is too late. The cruise lines have got what they wanted, and they are able to sail between Seattle and Alaska."
Photo: The Canadian Press IIO head Ron MacDonald

British Columbia's police watchdog has run into complications as it works to name an Indigenous civilian monitor for its investigation of the shooting death of a Tla-o-qui-aht man in February, its chief civilian director says.

Julian Jones, 28, was shot and killed by RCMP officers on the Opitsaht reserve on Meares Island, B.C., in late February.

The decision to have an Indigenous civilian monitor its investigation was a first for the watchdog, with an aim of helping investigators work more closely with affected communities.

But Ron MacDonald, the head of the Independent Investigations Office, says there have been issues with finding a candidate who will be comfortable following privacy protocols.

"The challenge to the civilian monitor role is while the person is given complete access to the file, they're not allowed to discuss that with anybody due to privacy laws," he said. "That's an issue the community is still figuring out."

Part of the problem, MacDonald said, is having regular citizens understand how police investigations operate. Watchdog members aren't able to comment on cases, with MacDonald having the final say on what can be released to the wider public.

He admits it's a process that can take time to get used to, especially when it involves close-knit communities.

Jones was the second of three Tla-o-qui-aht members shot by police in the past year, two of which ended in deaths.

MacDonald said the civilian monitor program in its current form may not be the "perfect fit" for this and other investigations.

"It might mean in the future, we'll go to the government and say 'we need to change the legislation' and come up with a better program or way for the community to be involved in our investigations," he said.

Judith Sayers, the president of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, said in an interview that the recent investigation into the death of Chantel Moore highlights the need for Indigenous voices in police watchdog investigations.

Moore was a member of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, which is part of the Nuu-chah-nulth council.

She was living in New Brunswick when an Edmunston police officer shot and killed her during a wellness check in June 2020. Prosecutors have ruled out criminal charges against the officer.

"We had absolutely no information or anyone on the inside to make sure that investigation went right," Sayers said about the investigation into Moore's death.

The civilian monitor role, if done properly, offers a chance for Indigenous input on a process they're often excluded from, Sayers said.

"We have to find ways to make the system better. If somebody sits on an internal investigation we might know more about how we can make this operate better."

MacDonald said his office has been working to develop a community liaison program, which would draw expertise from members from various communities.

"The whole idea would be that they would help us explain to people who we are, what we do," he said. "Similarly they would be able to give us information about their community, how we can make the correct approaches and right steps."

The issue of reaching out and forming trust between the police watchdog and other communities is important, MacDonald said, noting preliminary data shows Indigenous people are overrepresented in police complaints investigations.

Out of the 90 cases investigated by the watchdog where victims identified their ethnicity, MacDonald said Indigenous people accounted for 25.

Sayers said the shootings have taken a toll on the Tla-o-qui-aht and Nuu-chah-nulth communities.

"That's an amazing number of people who have been shot by police," she said, referring to the two deaths out of a community of 1,200. "It's huge for us to be dealing with."
Photo: TransLink

The latest addition to TransLinks Vancouver SeaBus fleet is on the water today, just a couple years behind schedule.

MV Burrard Chinook is undergoing sea trials, the next step in the process before it can go into service.

We're very excited for the launch of Burrard Chinook, said Dan Mountain, TransLink spokesman. We still have to get Transport Canada official verification but we do expect it to be in service by the end of the summer.

On the water, the Chinooks captains will be testing its speed, emergency stops, turning and docking.

Everything seems OK. We expect it to go fine. We just have to do a follow-up process, Mountain said.

TransLink ordered the new SeaBus in 2017 to support 10-minute sailings during rush hour, but it has been hampered by delays and a global pandemic.

When it arrived from Dutch firm Damen Shipyards Group in the summer of 2019, engineers determined the vessel was not seaworthy. The Chinook sat several inches lower in the water than the rest of the fleet, which would make docking difficult and could prove dangerous in choppy water. They attributed the problem to excess weight added when TransLink modified the design to include air conditioning and a more sophisticated emissions control system.

To remedy the problem, they had to install larger bulbous bows, making the SeaBus more buoyant. At the time, they hoped to have the Chinook in service by summer 2020, but the order for the parts from Singapore took more than a year when COVID-19 shut down operations overseas.

Despite the delays, re-engineering and construction, TransLink wont be under water financially, Mountain said.

We've been in a lot of contract talks with Damen Shipyards, but after everything, it's still coming in under the original budget of $29 million, he said.

The Chinook made the trip to North Vancouver's Lonsdale Quay terminal from the Point Hope Maritime Shipyard in Victoria on its own power on Tuesday.
Photo: The Canadian Press Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei, returns to B.C. Supreme Court after a break from her extradition hearing, in Vancouver, B.C., Wednesday, March 31, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

Huawei's chief financial officer is seeking a publication ban on new evidence that her legal team wants to introduce in her fight against extradition to the United States.

Meng Wanzhou's lawyers obtained the new material from HSBC through an agreement in a Hong Kong court that they say includes a stipulation that they protect confidential information.

They argue in documents filed with the B.C. Supreme Court that the ban preserves HSBC's privacy interests in relation to its business processes and it encourages the bank's participation in criminal justice proceedings.

However, lawyers for Canada's attorney general say the application goes too far by seeking a ban on all of the documents, when redacting private information would do, and it compromises the media's ability to share information with the public.

Meng is wanted by the United States on bank fraud charges that both she and Huawei deny.

She is accused of lying to HSBC about Huawei's control over another company, putting the bank at risk of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran.

"A publication ban is necessary to protect the proper administration of justice," Meng's lawyers say in the application.

A hearing over the publication ban is scheduled for Monday, while another hearing on whether the court will allow the evidence to be used in the case is set for the end of the month.

Meng has been living in one of her Vancouver homes on bail since her arrest at Vancouver's airport in December 2018.

The final set of hearings in her extradition case is scheduled to begin Aug. 3.
Photo: BC Wildfire Service

Close to 200 B.C. firefighters are heading east to assist with wildfires in Quebec.

On Friday, 120 BC Wildfire Service firefighters and three support staff are heading to Quebec, followed by another 61 people on Saturday. On Sunday, 20 firefighters and one support staff will travel to Ontario.

British Columbia is always ready to assist other provinces when they need help fighting wildfires, and we have enough resources available to do that, said Katrine Controy, Minister of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development.

We sent crews to Manitoba last month, and our firefighters are stepping up again to assist Quebec and Ontario.

According to the CBC, there were 15 active fires burning across Quebec as of Thursday, and there have been 329 fires so far this year, far more than the average of 190 at this time.

Meanwhile, Northern Ontario has seen a recent uptick in wildfire activity as well.

While much of B.C. has seen very dry conditions this spring, with Agriculture Canada recently declaring a severe drought in the Okanagan, the province has yet to see any widespread wildfire activity.

As was the case with the Manitoba deployment last month, B.C. crews will remain in their own bubble, and they'll be following COVID-19 precautions.

"The BC Wildfire Service recognizes the importance of sharing firefighting resources with other jurisdictions, and we welcome this opportunity to provide assistance to Quebec and Ontario, Conroy said.

"The crews can be recalled at any time if wildfire conditions change in British Columbia. However, given the current fire situation, we have sufficient resources in place to respond appropriately to wildfire activity here.
Photo: The Canadian Press Dr. Jean Robert Ngola is seen in his yard, Friday, June 11, 2021 in Trois-Rivieres, Que. A Black doctor who says he faced a barrage of hate and racism after being accused of breaking COVID-19 rules last year is suing New Brunswick and the RCMP. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz

A Black doctor who says he faced a barrage of hate and racism after being accused of breaking COVID-19 rules amid an outbreak last year announced Friday he is suing the New Brunswick government and the RCMP.

Lawyers representing Dr. Jean Robert Ngola told reporters the lawsuit alleges an abuse of power, defamation, negligence, malicious prosecution and a breach of the physician's charter rights. They say their client was a victim of systemic racism and anti-Black racism.

Ngola, a family doctor who was working in the northern New Brunswick city of Campbellton, was accused of violating the province's Emergency Measures Act, but the Crown withdrew the charge last week after concluding there was no chance of conviction.

Ngola had driven to Montreal in May 2020 to pick up his daughter, because her mother was travelling to Africa to attend a funeral. He did not self-isolate for two weeks when he returned, as provincial health guidelines direct, but Ngola said that was consistent with the practice of other physicians at his hospital.

He has been seeking an apology from Premier Blaine Higgs, who on May 27, 2020  without naming Ngola  linked a growing COVID-19 outbreak in the Campbellton area to "one irresponsible individual," a health-care worker, and said the matter was being handled by the RCMP.

The statement of claim filed in New Brunswick Court of Queen's Bench refers to Ngola's "banishment" from the province, which it says was brought on by the premier, the government, a police force and social media. Ngola, a Canadian citizen of Congolese descent, relocated to Quebec last summer and now practises medicine there.

"A Canadian citizen is entitled constitutionally to reside in any Canadian province or territory of choice and should not be shamed and coerced into banishment because of governmental action," the filing reads.

Lawyer Joel Etienne says the situation is unprecedented and so are the remedies being sought, saying the financial compensation is secondary seeing restorative justice measures, a public apology and a system of checks and balances to ensure such a case doesn't happen again.

"Dr. Ngola does insist on a public apology from the RCMP and the government of New Brunswick, but an apology will not be enough to make sure that such an ordeal is never again visited on a vulnerable citizen," the filing reads. "Dr. Ngolas experience was a consequence of institutional anti-Black systemic racism."

Higgs has maintained he had done nothing wrong and again Friday he declined to offer an apology. Instead he repeated his call for Ngola to waive his right to privacy so the premier can disclose what he knows about the case. "I would like for all of information to be available to the public and let the public determine," Higgs told reporters outside the legislature, adding that a court case would offer such an avenue.

The lawsuit says there was no scientific evidence to single out Dr. Ngola as a patient zero in the outbreak, but nonetheless news got out that Ngola was the worker in question after his positive COVID-19 status was leaked on social media.

"Dr. Ngola was barraged with death threats (some of which called for his lynching) and racists insults," the court filing claims. It says he was stalked by people "who called him a refugee and told him to go back to Africa."

He had to seek police protection but claims the RCMP engaged in racial profiling, as numerous false tips were sent to police reporting Ngola was breaching his quarantine.

"False sightings of Dr. Ngola, essentially of other black residents, mistakenly observed to be Dr. Ngola, would result in calls to the RCMP, and the RCMP re-attending Dr. Ngolas home to verify whether he was quarantining," the document read.

The court filing said the premier, who isn't named as a defendant, should have known his comments would lead people to connect the dots to Ngola.

Ngola had planned to remain Campbellton, where he worked at the hospital and had a private practice for eight years. But the lawsuit claims he was told by a security expert it wouldn't be possible to remain in the province and live safely.

The doctor's lawyers had repeatedly called on Higgs to apologize, first after presenting evidence he could not be patient zero in the outbreak and again after the RCMP said no criminal charges would be laid last July. One month later, he was charged violating the provincial health rule.

After the Crown withdrew that charge last week, the lawyers gave Higgs one more week to apologize or face legal action.
Photo: The Canadian Press The Parliament Hill Peace Tower is framed in an iron fence on Wellington Street in Ottawa on Thursday, March 12, 2020. After weeks of virtual hearings and often heated debate, an extensively amended Bill C-10 will go back to the House of Commons for a final vote. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

The minority Liberal government pushed forward a key piece of its legislative agenda Friday, as a House of Commons committee wrapped up clause-by-clause review of a bill to give Canada more regulatory power over digital streaming platforms.

Bill C-10 would bring global online streaming giants, such as Netflix, Disney Plus and Amazon Prime, under the auspices of the Broadcasting Act and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.

But the bill's progress has been stalled, amid sometimes heated debate in online forums and at the all-party heritage committee, because of concerns it would put too much power in the hands of the CRTC, an independent but appointed regulator.

However, the committee was forced to wrap up its work on the bill Friday, following a motion to cut short its deliberations passed last week by the Liberals, with the support of the Bloc Quebecois.

"I said at the beginning that maybe this will be so exciting that we could sell the rights to Netflix," committee chair Scott Simms, a Liberal MP, said as the committee finished dealing with dozens of proposed amendments.

"I was kidding at the time. I'm not sure if I'm kidding anymore. This has been quite an adventure."

Conservatives have warned for weeks that a Liberal amendment introduced in April, which took out a section that specifically excluded the CRTC's oversight of user-generated content, would limit individual freedom to post videos, music or opinion.

The Liberals responded with further changes at the committee level which the governing party says will now make it clear that individuals and user-generated content won't be affected.

Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault has said Bill C-10's purpose is to compel online streaming giants to promote Canadian content and to financially support Canadian cultural industries, just as traditional broadcasters are required to do.

Guilbeault has accused the Conservatives of wanting to block the bill from the outset, by using procedural stalling tactics to delay its passage through Parliament.

There will likely be more of those tactics as the bill now heads back to the House of Commons for final debate and, eventually, a final vote.

Bill C-10 is one of four priority bills the government wants to pass before the Commons breaks for the summer  and a possible election  on June 23.

While all parties profess not to want an election while the country continues to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, they're all gearing up for one, There is widespread expectation that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will pull the plug on his minority government sometime this summer.

That gives added urgency to the government's push to pass priority legislation since bills that have not passed both the Commons and the Senate die once an election is called.
Photo: Contributed Advanced Intelligent Systems Inc.'s robots can be deployed at labs and hospitals as part of an effort to fight COVID-19.

In a non-pandemic year, travellers landing at Vancouver International Airport (YVR) or staying at a Lower Mainland hotel might be greeted by a polite hello or an unnecessary sorry.

But in 2021, it may be robots greeting them upon arrival.

Burnaby-based engineering firm Advanced Intelligent Systems Inc. (AIS) has been given the nod to pilot a line of autonomous robots capable of disinfecting surfaces using ultraviolet light at YVR and at an undisclosed hotel chain.

The Orion robots can map large-scale environments like hospitals, navigate to designated points that require cleaning and then perform hands-free and human-free UV disinfection.

The greenlight from YVR and the hotel chain, which is deploying the robots at locations in Metro Vancouver, comes after AIS and non-profit Next Generation Manufacturing (NGen) split the $1.95-million costs of the project last year.

AIS got its start in 2014 trying to address labour shortage issues at horticultural nurseries through autonomous machinery, but it has since been branching out into agriculture.

The company had already developed the hardware and software necessary for robots to navigate locations and perform tasks, paving the way for a quick launch during the pandemic.

After the NGen grant was delivered in July 2020, AIS completed work on the Orion iteration of its robots within two months.

We said lets create modules  robotic modules  and lets use this module to help other companies lower their development time and development costs of creating new robots, CEO Afshin Doust told BIV in 2020.

People started reaching out to us to say, Hey, can we use your robots in order to create UV-disinfecting robots out of them? And we said, Yes, we do have the modules.

The only thing that needed to be added were the UV lights.

Other B.C. companies have been creating similar autonomous robots.

Vancouver-based A&K Robotics Inc. got its start creating janitorial robots before going on to develop a disinfecting robot four years ago. It eventually abandoned the project after the latter gained little traction in the market.

The problem was back in 2017, nobody wanted to pay for a robot that would clean whats invisible to us, CEO and co-founder Matt Anderson told BIV last year.

So we shelved it, and its basically been collecting dust ever since.

But the COVID-19 crisis upended that, prompting the company to revive the prototype known as AMRUD with financial backing from NGen.

Weve had this shift recently from cleaning for visual appearance to cleaning for public health, Anderson said.

Now as a result of that, people understand the importance of disinfecting, especially in health-care environments.

Equipped with wheels and a robotic arm, AMRUD is essentially a miniature self-driving vehicle that disinfects using low-powered UV lights capable of getting within centimetres of surfaces to clean them.

One array of lights targets floors, while fellow Vancouver tech firm Sanctuary AI has partnered on the project to help develop the arm that uses UV lights to disinfect high-touch surfaces like door knobs.

Both AIS and A&K use the business model centred on robot as a service (RaaS)  a take on SaaS (software as a service)  allowing companies to rent the machines instead of investing significant amounts of capital all at once.

What I see for AIS in the future is well probably be pivoting into creating a lot more robots for different verticals, and well also be using our modules to allow our colleagues in other robotic companies to be able to produce robots faster and at a cheaper price, Doust said.
Photo: The Canadian Press Premier John Horgan arrives to receive a dose of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine at the pharmacy in James Bay Thrifty's Foods in Victoria, B.C., on Friday, April 16, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chad Hipolito

British Columbia's premier says legislation proposed in the United States that would scrap a long-standing requirement for American cruise ships to dock at a foreign port between domestic stops doesn't change the fact people want to visit B.C.

John Horgan says the "machinations of U.S. politics" on a given day don't change the draw for people to travel up B.C.'s coast and he doesn't believe there's anything the provincial government can do about decisions made in the U.S. Senate.

Horgan told a news conference that he's passionate about making sure B.C. can welcome visitors once pandemic-related travel restrictions are lifted, but he doesn't "regret not yelling louder at people who would not have been listening."

Utah Sen. Mike Lee has introduced three bills to repeal and reform the 135-year-old Passenger Vessel Services Act, saying in a statement this week that it's an "outdated, protectionist law" that benefits Canada and harms American jobs.

International cruise ships are banned in Canadian waters until the end of February due to the pandemic and the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation last month that allows the ships to bypass B.C. ports until that restriction is lifted.

Horgan says he spoke Thursday with Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who was behind the legislation, and she assured him the law only applied until Canada lifts its restrictions, while Lee's proposed changes would not be temporary.

"We're in a global pandemic. The United States, on a good day, is difficult to a govern," Horgan said Friday. "To suggest that somehow I could have thrown myself in front of this bus and stopped it is the height of hubris in my mind."

Transport Canada stood by the cruise ship ban at the time Murkowski's legislation passed last month, saying it would reassess measures as the pandemic evolves.

Representatives with the department were not immediately available to respond on Friday to a request for comment on the latest changes proposed by Lee.

Horgan says about 1.7 million people came in on cruise ships every year to Vancouver and Victoria.

The Greater Victoria Harbour Authority has said the cruise industry has a $2.7-billion economic impact on the province.
The fact that a Chicago police officer has been charged in that attack on American democracy makes my blood boil, makes me sick to my stomach, Brown said. And yes, if these allegations are true, it breaks my heart. Participating in the siege on the Capitol in any way was a betrayal of everything we stand for, the oath (and) the law.
The US has purchased and will donate 500 million doses of Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine worldwide as it seeks to be a key player in getting other nations vaccinated, a person familiar with the move told CNN.
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CIMAF intent on west African expansion

11 June 2021

West Africa has been enjoying a period of high demand growth over the last decade, and this has been accompanied by the largely unrestrained construction of grinding plants along the coastal markets between Senegal to Nigeria. The region's cement industry has been transformed and is evolving to be highly competitive.



With limited limestone, clinker imports have served the flourishing sector, but establishing clinker capacity offers a crucial competitive advantage. One company and a major force in the region, Ciments de l'Afrique (CIMAF), is taking on the challenge.

Triple-headed capex project

Omnium des Industries et de la Promotion Group (OIP) consists of Ciments de l'Atlas (CIMAT), based in Morocco, and Ciments de l'Afrique (CIMAF), which operates in Africa outside of Morocco. CIMAF controls 13 grinding plants in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Cote d'Ivoire, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Republic of the Congo and Togo. CIMAF's total cement capacity is estimated at 8.95Mta.

In May 2021 it was announced that the subsidiaries OIP would receive EUR165m to invest in a greenfield integrated cement plant in Pout, Senegal, plus new capacity at an existing grinding plant in Dio Gare, Mali, as well as an additional grinding capacity to the Tema grinding station in Ghana.

The three capex projects are being implemented through CIMAF Senegal, CIMAF Ghana and CIMAF Mali, respectively. They are designed to meet the growing cement demand in west Africa and improve CIMAF's competitiveness. The Senegalese project will provide CIMAF with a regional source of clinker and reduce reliance on imports. It is also a bet on the future markets of Senegal and landlocked Mali that relies almost entirely on expensively imported clinker from distant coastal markets.

Total costs for the three projects are estimated at EUR235m, which is being supported by the EUR165m financing package made up of a EUR82.5m A-loan from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and an advance of EUR82.5m in B1 or parallel loans. The IFCs advisory team is also exploring the potential of engaging with CIMAF to support the design and implementation of alternative fuel and resource efficiency initiatives with the new capex projects.

CIMAF going head-to-head with the competition

CIMAF has sought to grow organically, by building greenfield plants, rather than through acquisition, and has created a modern, state-of-the-art portfolio of plants in west Africa. CIMAF's main rival for sub-Sharan cement expansion is the Dangote Group. There is also competition from companies like Vicat and Ciments du Sahel in Senegal and Mali, plus CimMetal and HeidelbergCement, all of which have the resources and positions to make west Africa even more competitive.

The latest integrated plant expansion projects in west Africa are mainly centred on Nigeria where Dangote and BUA Cement are adding huge volumes. Burkina Faso, Guinea and Senegal are also expected to see expansion projects while the number of greenfield installations is topped by Ghana and Nigeria which both have four projects under construction. Gambia has two projects cited, while single projects are reported in Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Cote d'Ivoire, according to ICR's plant database.

This proliferation of capacity will increase competition, but those with reliable and competitive local clinker sources will position themselves for a more sustainable future.

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Danville Police arrested a suspect in a pair of armed robberies; The suspect in a bizarre probe in Caswell County is behind bars; Another big vaccination clinic is set for Saturday in Danville; The slate of candidates is decided in this fall's city and county elections.
Later that night, Bush and TR had another conversation on the jails recorded phone line, according to the complaint. TR told Bush during that call, We need to put the belt to two cooperators who had testified before a federal grand jury, meaning they needed to be punished, the complaint alleged.
It was noted by the national media  and me  earlier this week when President Joe Biden failed to salute one the greatest days in Americas history. D-Day, the June 6th attack at Normandy, France, was celebrated on Sunday and what I believe was the first time in about 80 years the hard-fought triumph over evil was ignored by The White House. As I watch more and more of the woke crowd step on our ingrained beliefs and our cherished historical triumphs, it is easy for me to say evil is alive and well among those who would destroy our American heritage.

Did Biden delete Operation Overlord on purposethis I dont know  but I am more and more convinced his mind and his memory have been compromised by a disease, a sickness, that he has no control over.

His worsening gaffes  and his omission of the historic D-Day invasion -- is met with pity, not anger, and certain sadness. I believe President Bidens term will be short lived, and deeply resent the handlers who directed his advance into the Presidency and now manipulated his strings as though he was a puppet with a silly grin.

Ben Shapiro is one of the best conservative minds in America. This week on the website Dailywire.com, Shapiro wrote a short essay, The Definition of Courage Has Shifted Since Normandy, and it perfectly illustrates what I fear America is evolving into today 

* * *

TRUE COURAGE IS BETRAYED

By Ben Shapiro

Written for The DailyWire.com

Last Sunday marked the 77th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. On that day, Operation Overlord began, launching the Allied invasion of Europe that would spell the beginning of the end of the Nazi regime. At least 4,400 Allied troops died in the Normandy landings, and another 10,000 were wounded. As the invasion started, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to the radio airwaves to ask Americans to join him in prayer: Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity  let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.

Nearly eight decades later, President Joe Biden had nothing to say or tweet about the D-Day anniversary. Breaking with bipartisan precedent, Biden remained silent on that topic. The next day, however, Biden did tweet something noteworthy about bravery: To transgender Americans across the country  especially the young people who are so brave  I want you to know your President has your back.

Bravery circa 1944: young men charging from the choppy seas of the English Channel onto the corpse-strewn beaches of Normandy, hellfire raining down upon them, to liberate a continent.

Bravery circa 2021: young men identifying as women, and vice versa.

Our definitions of bravery have shifted rather dramatically.

Our old definition of courage used to comport with the Aristotelian notion of virtue. The virtue of courage  andreia, or manliness, in Greek  lay in recognition of serious risk in pursuit of a heroic telos, a final end. The courageous man withstands and fears those things which it is necessary (to fear and withstand), and on account of the right reason, Aristotle explains in Nichomachean Ethics. Courage is calculated and calm risk-taking for the sake of the noble and the good.

Not anymore.

Now, courage lies in authenticity. Authenticity has not been, until recently, conflated with courage. In fact, authenticity very often cut directly against the virtue of courage: After all, wallowing in the solipsistic generally involves ignoring the demands of a higher noble goal. But now, our higher virtue isnt in upholding and defending some standard for civilization at risk to ourselves. Higher virtue lies in finding our personal truths, and then demanding applause from the rest of the world. Heroism lies in forcing the world to bow before our subjective ideas of truth and decency.

Or perhaps theres another possibility. Perhaps the new definition of bravery does serve some higher goal: the goal of tearing down the old definition of the good. True courage lies in personally rejecting old systems of thought and objective truth and in joining with others to demand that all systems of power be brought low. In this fight, the personal is political: Subjectivism isnt the enemy of courage but a new form of courage, since the final good to be sought is the destruction of truth itself.

It remains to be seen whether a civilization obsessed with tearing down its most powerful institutions can long remain civilized, or whether a civilization that discards old-fashioned courage in favor of the newfangled bravery of authenticity can long hold. The early evidence is unpromising.

When called upon to face true enemies of freedom, civilization requires men willing to charge beaches on behalf of higher truths, not men focused finding their inner truths, many of which bear no resemblance to reality. To use the same terminology to describe both phenomena is a betrayal of true courage.

* * *

thedailywire.com is one of the nations best conservative websites.

royexum@aol.com
Two University of Tennessee, Knoxville, alumni took an idea for an innovative medical device and developed the product and pitch while enrolled in UTs MSMBA program, a dual degree offered through the Tickle College of Engineering and the Haslam College of Business.Lia Winter (19) and Preston Dishner (19) developed EasyWhip, a patented surgical needle designed to increase the speed and accuracy of whipstitching in orthopedic reconstruction surgeries. EasyWhip recently received 510(k) premarket clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration.FDA clearance is the biggest milestone we have achieved to date.We spent a lot of time in product development making sure that EasyWhip solves the problems we identified with orthopedic stitching to repair torn ligaments and tendons, like the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). Now that we have the FDA clearance, we can start marketing the product and its associated speed and ease-of-use benefits to surgeons and hospitals. We are looking forward to the opportunity to launch EasyWhip and positively impact the lives of surgeons and patients, said Ms. Winter. UT has been instrumental in our ability to achieve this FDA clearance milestone for EasyWhip just two years after completing our graduate degrees. We have received continued support and encouragement from the Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, the Haslam College of Business, and the Tickle College of Engineering.Ms. Winter initially thought of the product after watching her mother undergo two ACL surgeries 10 days apart because of complications with the stitching in her first surgery, which quadrupled the recovery process. She created the prototype of EasyWhipwhich would later become the flagship product of her company, Winter Innovationsduring her senior design engineering project at the University of Pittsburgh.At around the same time, Ms. Winter had a summer internship at an orthopedics company where she worked in product testing and became familiar with surgical stitching products. Through Mr. Dishner, who was a fellow intern, she learned of UTs dual degree program and both enrolled the following year.At UT, Mr. Dishner and Ms. Winter teamed up and began refining EasyWhips design.The duo perfected their pitch and entered the Anderson Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovations Vol Court Pitch Competition and the Boyd Venture Challenge, through which they won mentorship, legal advice and a portion of their $150,000 competition-earned capital.The money was used to file for patents, create a business plan, travel to interview surgeons to gather research and develop better prototypes.The competitions helped prepare us to raise funding from investors. We had the opportunity to present to and receive valuable feedback from expert judges who had experience in running successful businesses. We were able to use the nondilutive grants and in-kind services associated with winning these competitions to advance our business and achieve value-driving milestones before we even completed graduate school, said Ms. Winter.When Mr. Dishner and Ms. Winter did graduate, in the spring of 2019, they went on to participate in the nationally recognized ZeroTo510 medical device accelerator, a program that helps entrepreneurs with ideas for innovative medical devices navigate the regulatory environment.After they completed ZeroTo510, Tony Lettich, managing director of the Angel Round Table, invited them to pitch EasyWhip to his group of investors in East Tennessee. Mr. Lettich annually serves as a judge for the Boyd Venture Challenge, where he first heard the duos pitch.The Angel Roundtable was Winter Innovations first investor, and they committed the biggest check the group had invested thus far. I think this speaks to the strength of UTs entrepreneurship program. The Anderson Center has built an incredibly valuable network to support entrepreneurs, and the fact that those services continue even after graduation helps to ensure the success of young alumni companies like ours, said Ms. Winter.In addition to receiving FDA clearance last month, Winter Innovations was awarded a $256,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. Through the grant, the company will continue research and development on EasyWhip for orthopedic applications and begin research for other surgical applications that rely on stitching.Ms. Winters experience with the Anderson Center came full circle this year as she now serves as an entrepreneur-in-residence, mentoring current studententrepreneurs. She credits the speed of her own companys growth to the centers executive director, Lynn Youngs, who now serves as a board member for Winter Innovations.We still get a lot of support from Lynn and leverage his unique expertise in accounting and entrepreneurship, Ms. Winter said. The buzz, excitement, and support that the University of Tennessee has generated around entrepreneurs and startups in the Knoxville area have created a powerful network of resources for budding companies that we have been able to tap into. For us, like many startup companies, a key element to our success has been fundraising, and we take pride in the fact that we were introduced to several of our current investors during our time at UT.
The Catoosa County Chamber of Commerce and Catoosa County Government are inviting the public to participate in the First Annual Catoosa County Run, White & Blue 5k Road Race and 1 Mile Fun Run sponsored by Heritage Funeral Home, Ringgold Telephone Company and CHI Memorial on July 3.

Chamber President Amy Jackson said, The Chamber is excited to host this great community event. We plan to hold the Run, White & Blue annually for our citizens as well as visitors to experience more of what Catoosa County has to offer. Please come out and run, walk, or cheer the runners on. Register at Catoosa.Info/5k and get the inaugural t-shirt as part of the experience.



Beginning at 8 a.m., the 5k and 1 Mile Fun Run will kick off at The Colonnade, 264 Catoosa Circle in Ringgold. The 5k Road Race is $25 per person until the day of the race, then price will increase to $35 per person. Kids 18 and under, along with anyone participating in the 1 Mile Fun Run, have a registration fee of $20.



The 5K features a relatively flat and fast course that will be timed by Scenic City Multi-Sport, and traffic control will be provided by Catoosa County Sheriff's Office until 9 a.m.



Runners will start near the Northwest Georgia Amphitheater, run around The Colonnade, before coming back through the Benton Place Campus and taking a left onto Old Mill Road. From there, they will turn right and run along the shoulder of Battlefield Parkway and take a right at Pine Grove Road. There will be an Aid/Water Station available at this turn. Once on Pine Grove, runners will continue straight until they hook right onto Old Mill and head back towards the Benton Place Campus. A left onto Catoosa Circle leads towards a sprint to the finish alongside the Fun Runners.



All participants will receive a Run, White, & Blue race t-shirt in their packets. Packet pickup is Friday, July 2 from 4-6 p.m. at The Colonnade Pavillion or Saturday, July 3 from 6:30--7:45 a.m. T-shirts are available while supplies last to those registering after June 15.



Overall male and overall female medals will be presented to the winners at 9 a.m., along with public recognition later that evening on the Northwest Georgia Amphitheater stage at the Catoosa County Fireworks Festival concert. Fastest team trophies will be presented to the top two teams in both the Public and Business categories. These times will be calculated after the race concludes. The fastest team winners will be announced on stage at the Fireworks Festival later that evening.



 Public teams consist of employees of a public entity (i.e. City or County employees)



 Business teams consist of employees of a private company



To secure a spot in the Run, White, & Blue 5k Road Race or the 1 Mile Fun Run, sign up at www.Catoosa.info/5k or contact the Catoosa County Chamber of Commerce at 706-965-5201.
So far, theres no word on whether were going to get a Big Little Lies Season 3. But in the meantime, Hulu has a new show thats sure to appeal to fans of the HBO drama about the complicated lives of five women living in picturesque Monterey, California. Nine Perfect Strangers is about a group of people staying at a posh wellness retreat run by a mysterious woman. It stars Nicole Kidman and Melissa McCarthy.

Big Little Lies author Liane Moriarty also wrote Nine Perfect Strangers

Masha (Nicole Kidman) in Nine Perfect Strangers | Vince Valitutti/Hulu

RELATED: Big Little Lies Star Nicole Kidman Reveals What It Would Take for the Cast to Return for Season 3

Kidman starred in Big Little Lies as Celeste, a woman in an abusive marriage to Perry (Alexander Skarsgard). She plays an equally prominent role in Nine Perfect Strangers, which is also based on a book by author Liane Moriarty, though her character is very different from Celeste.

In the book, a group of strangers converge at a wellness resort headed by a Russian emigre named Masha. In an interview with CrimeReads, Moriarty explained why she set her eighth novel in a location that left her characters essentially trapped and under the control of a woman whose motives arent entirely clear.

The remote location is useful because your characters cant go running next door for help, she said. Secrets always drive any story and a charismatic leader can get away with taking the plot in crazy and unexpected directions.

What is Nine Perfect Strangers about?

RELATED: Nicole Kidman Felt Objectified in Her Marriage To Tom Cruise: It Was My Job To Be Seen and Not Heard

The trailer for Nine Perfect Strangers is full of creepy atmosphere, though it doesnt reveal much about the shows central mystery.

As Masha, The Undoings Kidman is sending off some serious cult leader vibes. Shes a health/wellness guru who runs a retreat called Tranquillum House. Masha mixes and matches her guests like a cocktail, as one person says. Supposedly, she completely changes people.

McCarthy plays Frances, a woman apparently in need of some fixing, in her words. Michael Shannon, Luke Evans, Bobby Cannavale, and Regina Hall play some of the other guests at the resort who are all trying to get on a path to a better way of living, according to Hulus synopsis. Samara Weaving, Melvin Gregg, Asher Keddie, Grace Van Patten, Tiffany Boone, and Manny Jacinto also star.

Mashas methods of healing seem a bit unorthodox, to say the least. At one point in the trailer, we see the retreats guests lying in their own graves. The journey to getting well will be unpleasant, Kidmans character says.

Nine Perfect Strangers premieres August 18

Nine Perfect Strangers, which was filmed in Byron Bay, Australia, premieres Wednesday, August 18 on Hulu. The show will have eight episodes, with new episodes streaming weekly.

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Broker Steve Gold from Million Dollar Listing New York shared that his infant daughter Rose, who was only 9 months old at the time, got Covid-19 early in the pandemic.

He opened the recent episode by sharing that his child was diagnosed with the virus, which he kept under wraps during March 2020. We decided to stay in New York City during this crazy time because in early March, Rose actually got Covid-19, Gold shared in a confessional. Cameras documented a physician in full PPE drawing blood from the infant, while Gold and girlfriend Luiza Gawlowska tried to comfort their child.

Steve Gold, Luiza Gawlowska and daughter Rose at home on Million Dollar Listing New York |Greg Endries/Bravo

Steve Gold kept his family in the city so they could be near the best hospitals

Gold continued by sharing that his daughter wasnt the only family member who got sick. Subsequently Luisa got sick, he said. And subsequently I got sick. This was pre-lockdown. And we made the decision to be in New York City, with Rose being sick because she had the best hospitals in the world. And if we needed to take her there, we wanted to be in New York City.

But, a lot of people left, he added. Indeed, Ryan Serhant and Tyler Whitman sought country homes during the lockdown as the horrors played out during the early weeks and months of the pandemic, especially in New York City. Fredrik Eklund could not return to New York from his Los Angeles home. He seemed happy to be nesting with his husband Derek and their twins.

RELATED: Tyler Whitman Was Such a Fan of Million Dollar Listing New York, He Watched Every Episode 3 or 4 Times Each

Rose didnt publicly share that he and his entire family were sick with Covid. In fact, he only posted on Instagram that he was happy to be able to spend more time with his family. Hey everyone, Ive missed you! I hope everyone is staying home, staying safe, and respecting those on the front line (THANK YOU) risking their lives to help fight this devastating virus by staying HOME, Gold shared on Instagram. In a time when it seems many are turning towards social media to stay connected, I opted not to post to social media for a month to try to reconnect. I didnt announce it or make it a big thing, I just did it to try to connect more with myself and my family.

Steve Golds daughter Rose just turned two-years-old

Golds entire family recovered and they recently celebrated Roses 2nd birthday. Hard to believe my little angel turned 2 today. Where does the time go? Its been an absolute blessing to watch Rose grow before my very eyes, Gold shared on Instagram.

The early days of the pandemic were mired with uncertainty, especially surrounding how to best treat Covid. Thankfully for the Gold family, they were not in the age range risk, but babies under the age of 1 are at a higher risk for serious disease than older children. Babies under age 1 might be at higher risk of severe illness with COVID-19 than older children, according to Mayo Clinic. This is likely due to their immature immune systems and smaller airways, which make them more likely to develop breathing issues with respiratory virus infections.

RELATED: Million Dollar Listing New York: Marc Jacobs Spent More Than $1 Million on Townhouse Upgrades  Including $300 per Light Switch

Thankfully, Rose seemed to do well and was filmed sitting on her fathers lap as he applied for his Connecticut real estate license and return back to the market.
Million Dollar Listing New York producers gave viewers a glimpse of what the city was like when the brokers returned to work.

But Tyler Whitman reflected on the overall city vibe and offered his thoughts about what New York was like when it reopened. I feel like the actual New Yorkers are here right now, he told Showbiz Cheat Sheet in August 2020. The people who really believe in it and the people who know that New York is the city that always makes the most epic comebacks. And this is something we have to make a big comeback from, dont get me wrong. But you can already feel such a difference. All the restaurants are set up in the streets, it feels very European.

Million Dollar Listing New York cast photo: Tyler Whitman, Ryan Serhant, Kirsten Jordan, Fredrik Eklund, Steve Gold | Kareem Black/Bravo

Tyler Whitman described an electric vibe in New York City

New York City was the epicenter of the virus during the early days and some New Yorkers complained that the city slid downhill after many residents fled. But it feels like theres this kind of unity when youre walking down the street, he said. But honestly, real estate is very down and its very challenging, but there are actually a lot of buyers who are being brave and know its actually really smart to take advantage of these really good opportunities.

Brokers are seen having to shift their strategies and find new ground when it came to in-person showings. Whitman described stringent Covid protocols, which meant a limited number of people could view properties at once. Gone were the days of Ryan Serhant dressed in a lion costume while greeting throngs of agents.

RELATED: Million Dollar Listing New York: Tyler Whitman Admits He Had RHONYs Kelly Bensimon All Wrong

But despite the hurdles, Whitman said buying and selling was even easier because many sellers finally accepted the reality about pricing. I would actually say, I still feel like this year is easier than last year to work, he remarked. Because last year, the biggest issue was that the market had really, really slowed down. But sellers were not accepting the reality.

Million Dollar Listing New York brokers make their way back to the city

Whitman is seen walking the city streets during the latest episode proclaiming New York City as being the best. Peoples financial situations are different, he said in a confessional. Adding, Peoples work environments are different. Peoples personal lives are completely different. As Whitman spoke, cameras captured people walking the sparse streets in masks.

Yes things will change, but the city is not going anywhere, Steve Gold added. Gold was the only broker who didnt leave the city. Unfortunately, he, his girlfriend, and their infant daughter were diagnosed with Covid-19 before lockdown. The family wanted to remain in the city so they had quick access to top hospitals. They all have since recovered from the virus.

Power suits, power ties, power brokers Dont miss #MDLNY tonight at 9/8c! pic.twitter.com/wgWczNWWqh  Bravo (@BravoTV) May 27, 2021

RELATED: Million Dollar Listing New York: Steve Golds Listing at The Ansonia Has a Haunted History

Meanwhile, Fredrik Eklund anxiously awaited his return to New York but was stuck in Los Angeles. He expressed frustration with his inability to travel.

Im so excited for the future, Serhant remarked in a confessional. Were coming out of quarantine and lockdown, hopefully healthy.

Million Dollar Listing New York is on Thursday at 9/8c on Bravo.
Despite the constant drumbeat of hearing about how New Yorkers were fleeing for Florida at a record pace, Million Dollar Listing New York broker Ryan Serhant recently asserted more people ultimately came to the city than left.

Theres just no other place with this energy  same thing with L.A. and San Francisco and with everybody, he told Fox Business. More people actually came to New York City than left during COVID-19 at the end of the day, which no one talks about because thats not a fun headline.

Million Dollar Listing New York Season 9 cast photo of Ryan Serhant | Kareem Black/Bravo

Why were Million Dollar Listings so attractive during the pandemic?

Million Dollar Listing New York broker Tyler Whitman said massive deals could be made during the pandemic, which fueled business. Many longtime renters who could typically not afford to buy were positioned to purchase a home in the city. Plus aggressively priced properties got sales moving. Whitmans team had signed 39 contracts in less than three months shortly after the city re-opened. Which is huge for us, he told Showbiz Cheat Sheet in August 2020. We sold 50 apartments all year last year. So to do almost last years volume in the last two months is telling.

He said the tough market from the previous year evaporated because sellers were ready to accept the reality of pricing too. I would actually say, I still feel like this year is easier than last year to work, he said. Because last year, the biggest issue was that the market had really, really slowed down. But sellers were not accepting the reality.

RELATED: Million Dollar Listing New York: Marc Jacobs Spent More Than $1 Million on Townhouse Upgrades  Including $300 per Light Switch

You know, they were not adjusting to the market, he added. They were like, OK, well, then Ill just hang on because know itll be fine soon. Now, I think there are differences. Its that like theyre like, oh, OK, sh*t is going down. So I need to adjust. And its like the first time that people are actually reacting appropriately.

Tyler Whitman from Million Dollar Listing New York could sense true unity in New York

Whitman also said the city radiated a sense of solidarity during the early days of the initial reopening. I feel like the actual New Yorkers are here right now, he observed. The people who really believe in it and the people who know that New York is the city that always makes the most epic comebacks. And this is something we have to make a big comeback from, dont get me wrong. But you can already feel such a difference. All the restaurants are set up in the streets, it feels very European.

But it feels like theres this kind of unity when youre walking down the street, he said. But honestly, real estate is very down and its very challenging, but there are actually a lot of buyers who are being brave and know its actually really smart to take advantage of these really good opportunities.

Power suits, power ties, power brokers Dont miss #MDLNY tonight at 9/8c! pic.twitter.com/wgWczNWWqh  Bravo (@BravoTV) May 27, 2021

RELATED: Million Dollar Listing New York: Tyler Whitman Goes for the Big Fish This Season (Exclusive)

Serhant also agreed that there is nowhere like New York. The fun headline is Everybody left, end of the world, he said. But whats interesting for us in the real estate side is we went from being local brokers in all the markets we work in to really being global real estate client advisors. Like Im working on transactions right now and in Geneva and London, of all places  and Im not even there. I can do it all totally, virtually now.
The Good Doctors Audrey Lim (Christina Chang) had an unexpected surprise when she went to Guatemala to help patients in need. She not only assisted with surgeries but also met a new love interest, Dr. Mateo Rendon Osma. Could this turn into a serious relationship?

Lim explores a relationship with Dr. Mateo on The Good Doctor

Christina Chang and Osvaldo Benavides | Jeff Weddell/ABC via Getty Images

Lim opens her heart again after meeting Dr. Mateo. At first, she wasnt really looking to start a relationship. However, she became interested in Mateo over time. After their night of passion, things began to change between them.

During The Good Doctor Season 4 Episode 20 (titled Vamos), Mateo says he thought their relationship was just going to be a fling. However, Lim keeps asking questions about his personal life. She wants to get to know him. Instead, he asks about her and what shes hiding. He asked her why she feels compelled to go running early in the morning and why she has so many alarms going off. Initially, she ignored him when he inquired about her habits, but she decides to share what she has experienced.

Lim tells Mateo about her PTSD diagnosis. She also talks about losing Melendez (Nicholas Gonzalez) and how hard it was to cope after losing so many patients to COVID-19. Mateo was hesitant to answer Lims questions because he didnt want to get too involved. However, his hesitance to be vulnerable with Lim eventually melts away. He tells her about his brush with the law and how he chose to remain in Guatemala. He was arrested for marijuana possession years ago, and he argued with the police officers.

I argued with them, and it got physical, says Mateo. When my court date came around, I skipped. And now theres an active warrant for me in the states. Thats why I havent been back.

Has Dr. Lim found love?

Right now, things look promising for Lim and Mateo. Although he is living in Guatemala, he expressed his desire to sort out his legal issues so he could come back to the United States. He wants to see where things go. He asks Lim if she would be interested in a visit, and she gives her approval.

Who plays Dr. Mateo on The Good Doctor?

Christina Chang and Osvaldo Benavides on The Good Doctor | Jeff Weddell/ABC via Getty Images

The actor who plays Dr. Mateo is Osvaldo Benavides. His character was first introduced during The Good Doctor Season 4 Episode 19. One of his early roles was in the television series El Abuelo Y Yo. He played the character Paco for five episodes. Benavides made his film debut in the 1998 movie La Primera Noche, in which he played the character Sergio. After this film, he went on to appear in the movie Dust to Dust. He played the character Rocco.

In 2011, Benavides joined the cast of The One Who Couldnt Love. He played the role of Miguel Carmona for 152 episodes until the show ended in 2012. Benavides is also known for his roles in Monarca, The Beauty and the Beasts, The Perfect Dictatorship, and SubHysteria.

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The Handmaids Tale season 4 is coming to an end. And after picking apart clues from the finale sneak peek, some fans think June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) is getting ready to make a trade with Gilead for Hannahs safe return.

[Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for season 4 episode 9 of The Handmaids Tale.]

Elisabeth Moss in The Handmaids Tale | Hulu

June gets an offer from Commander Lawrence in episode 9 of The Handmaids Tale

In the penultimate episode of The Handmaids Tale season 4, June makes a call to Commander Lawrence (Bradley Whtiford) and begs him to get Hannah out of Gilead. But the Commander is colder than ever, and suggests June just enjoy her own freedom.

But when he hears the pain and desperation in Junes voice, he makes her an offer. Lawrence asks her to trade ten Gilead children (that June helped escape) in exchange for Hannah.

Should June move on or keep fighting for Hannah? A new episode of The #HandmaidsTale premieres tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/oiGCH3QjrO  The Handmaid's Tale (@HandmaidsOnHulu) June 8, 2021

RELATED: The Handmaids Tale Season 4: Punishments are Coming for Some of Gileads Worst

When June refuses, he comes back with an offer to five children. Again, June isnt playing, so Lawrence hangs up the phone.

June and Luke know where Hannah is now, thanks to Nick

The June 8 episode of The Handmaids Tale also brings June and Nick (Max Minghella) together one more time. When the call with Commander Lawrence goes nowhere, Luke reluctantly suggests June take Nicole to meet Nick, and ask him to help her get Hannah out of Gilead.

Alliances will be forged, but will they last? pic.twitter.com/86LyjDikNM  The Handmaid's Tale (@HandmaidsOnHulu) June 9, 2021



After Tuello sets up a meeting, June and Nick reunite in a remote place. Nick hands June a file containing photos and information about Hannah, and reveals that shes now living in Colorado.

Before this, June had no idea where Hannah was. So with this information, she gets a tiny step closer to finding her daughter.

The Handmaids Tale fans find clues of a trade-off in the sneak peek

In the preview for The Handmaids Tale season 4 finale, fans spotted a few things that suggest June might make a trade with Gilead. In one shot, shes standing in a forest with dozens of car headlights glowing behind her. And in the final scene, June says she needs Fred to get what he deserves.

Some fans think she might try to trade Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) in exchange for Hannah. Because, now that hes cooperating with the Americans and Canadians, and offering to spill the beans on Gilead, he would be considered a traitor.

But others think that June might offer herself up instead. Shes trading herself for Hannah, one Reddit user wrote. Since shes not the same person anymore to the same people  Hannah is almost McKenna Graces (Ester Keyes) age. She knows thats the life shell end up with if she doesnt save her from it soon.

Its not about Juneto June, another Redditor added. Her life is nothing more to her than like, a vessel of protection for Hannah.She wont have to ever worry about that when she goes back to Gilead in exchange for Hannah being turned over to Luke in Canada. She can return to Gilead to annoy and defy them all she likes.

June is a soldier, so it wouldnt be surprising to see her go back into Gilead to fight. But ultimately, fans will just have to wait until the finale to see how things actually unfold.
Cherokee Nation Election Commissioner Elizabeth Ballew draws a name from a basket held by EC Administrator Marcus Fears on June 10 at the EC office in Tahlequah.
But in a surprise to everyone, Trutenko took the stand and said Coleman was still alive. Furthermore, he said he had not discussed Coleman with the special prosecutors handling Wilsons case  which was untrue, according to those prosecutors. When they heard the alleged perjury, they dropped the charges against Wilson altogether.
After more than 40 years leading Saddleback Church, Rick Warren has announced his retirement.

This is not the end of my ministry, Warren told his congregants on Sunday. Its not even the beginning of the end.  Were going to take one step at a time in the timing of God.  God has already blessed me more than I could ever possibly imagine. I dont deserve any of it, and so this next transition in my life is something I am anticipating with zero regrets, zero fears, zero worries.

The Southern California-based megachurch has begun looking for Warrens successor.

Warrens ministry has had national and international significance. He is the author of the best-selling The Purpose Driven Life. He championed evangelicals fighting AIDS overseas. After his son died of suicide in 2013, he and his wife Kay began a mental health ministry.

Overall, Warrens ministry has not been as polemical as many of his fellow Southern Baptist church leaders. But he faced controversy after praying at Obamas 2008 inauguration after he campaigned against same sex marriage that same election cycle. Several months ago, he apologized for Saddlebacks childrens Sunday school curriculum video which used Asian culture stereotypes to teach kids about the Bible. Last month, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler criticized Saddleback after it ordained three women as pastors.

Gerardo Marti is professor of sociology at Davidson College and the author of numerous well regarded books, including The Deconstructed Church, American Blindspot, and The Glass Church.

Marti joined global media manager Morgan Lee and news editor Daniel Silliman to discuss Southern California evangelicalism, how Warren reached the suburbs by looking at amusement parks, and what informed his political strategy during Trumps presidency.

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Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder

The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola

Highlights from Quick to Listen: Episode #268

In comparison to the rest of the country, how would you describe evangelicalism in Southern California?

Gerardo Marti: Well, something that a lot of people don't know is how religiously hot Southern California has always been.

It was founded in a place that was dominated by farms, citrus groves, and strawberry fields, and it is in this place that there came to be a stream of people from the south and the Midwestpeople who already knew church, understood what church was like, and were seeking churches.

So immediately with the flow of Southerners and Midwesterners, churches began an aggressive attempt to plant their churches immediately. And they took over every available space. So before there were buildings, they took over farms and fields and barns and funeral homes and whatever school buildings were available.

And what was interesting is that it was such an aggressive place of church competition that it forced churches to innovate about how to distinguish themselves and how to attract a faithful population and continue to grow their flocks, and then eventually to be able to expand.

And out of that base is where you get some of the most interesting developments in American religion. You get Robert Schuller, Garden Grove Crystal Cathedral, and The Hour of Power broadcast; you get Calvary Chapel with their charismatic Christianity; you get The Vineyard; you get Campus Crusade for Christ expanding to all of these campuses; you also get some specific ethnic-oriented congregationsChinese and different forms of Latino communities.

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So essentially, by the time Rick Warren shows up, he has already been schooled in what has been happening in Southern California. Specifically through his mentor, Robert Schuller, and the school of leadership there, learned church growth techniques. And so using the funding and the base offered by Southern Baptist, he moved southward into an expanding Southern Orange Countywhich residents were moving to in order to find cheaper housing but also larger housing, while still having an American dream of that fenced-in lawn, two-car garage, with lots of grocery stores, shopping malls, multiplex theaters within easy driving distance.

The new schools promised better education, new streets promised better traffic, and new churches promised better religion.

With so many people planning churches and innovating in church space, what set Warren apart early on? How did he go from one of many pastors to this standout figure?

Gerardo Marti: Well, if you've ever encountered Rick Warren, he is a person of immense personal warmth. And so I want to give at least a little credit to the fact that he is a person who knows how to connect with people, how to communicate clearly, and how to create a shared sense of ownership. But at the same time, from the beginning, he always had a sense of what it meant to be an effective church.

He started Saddleback Community Church by going door to door, just like his mentor Robert Schuller did, asking local residents what they liked and what they hated about churches. And based on his personal survey, he came up with a marketing profile: Who is it that we're trying to reach?

Famously, that person was called Saddleback Sam, and Saddleback Sam had particular characteristics from the kind of job they had, the kind of family life, the kind of attitudes and orientations that they had. And basically, you can picture a collared khaki-wearing, upwardly mobile, business entrepreneur type of person who's trying to move up the ladder. And that essentially becomes the unchurched person that's being reached, who is tremendously busy but still resonates with the notion of church.

And to do that, Rick Warren didn't assume that people were already committed to any kind of a church. And so the whole goal was to make everything very easy. An easy access church. Usually, this is called seeker-sensitive, but the idea is to make things as easy as possible, remove any obstacles that might keep people from committing to a church.

And in doing so, they also drew on the paradigms that are available from other Southern California entertainment institutions, specifically amusement parks. So a host of subsidiary tourist attractions knew how to draw a draw thousands of people daily, manage the crowds, make things very digestible and easy. And Disneyland, of course, is king of all these.

And so Saddleback was a part of meeting that standard for capturing attention, having crowd control, keeping attractions continually fresh, and offering a saturated spiritual experience that would include the whole family.

What's an example of something they would borrow from Disneyland? What are they doing thats borrowing from these local entertainment options?

Gerardo Marti: One of the things that's very interesting about the notion of crowd control is when you go to a church that you've never been to before, the first thing you want to know is where's the building, and where do I park?

And through a system of establishing lines, having ushers who are clearly uniformed and demarcated people, they would be able to almost immediately get you to a prime parking position and then be able to clearly show you how to get to the front door where then you would be continually ushered. So that the trip from not knowing where things are to getting into a seat was accomplished within a few minutes.

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And that kind of rationalizing, of formalizing, of being able to get a flow of people to integrate into a church service was highly innovative at the time. And the fact that you had very specific peoplethe parking people, the ushers, the people to greet guests, the people who then take you down to the seatall of that is seamless and you just ride the wave almost like moving along a little conveyor belt that gets you right into that place.

If you ever had a chance to visit their children's ministry, you would see a huge aquarium set up. You'd be able to see how colorful and bright it is. You'd be able to see the different options that they have for people to be able to do things. Also Saddleback allowed for things like patios, lattes, and coffee, the ability to just sit anywhere.

And eventually, they were able to create multiple church service experiences on the same campus. So you could come to one church, but if you preferred a particular kind of worship style, you would go over to this place. If you preferred a particular way of doing things that accommodated another set of sensitivities, you'd go over here. So they were able to create a surprising diversity of experiences of church on the same site.

In addition, the architecture, the color, and the scheming of things, everything was meant to feel contemporary, fresh, interesting, and very much reflective of the aspirations of what people wanted to do with their lifestyle.

So it sounds like there was the belief that we cant assume people are going to know the script of church, is that correct?

Gerardo Marti: Absolutely, because the whole point is actually not to use a church script at all. The idea is to take the kinds of experiences that people already have in urban societythe grocery stores, the amusement parks, shopping malls, theater experiencesto remove all semblance of being a church and to just be this place that you gather.

So there's no dress requirement. Rick Warren himself was famous for wearing Hawaiian shirts and that happened very early in his ministry. The idea was, you dont need to dress up in a particular way, were not going to use any formal language here, you don't need to bring a Bible with you. We're going to provide everything you need to know upfront or on the bulletins or the screens. And if you don't know the music, that's okay. We're going to make it really easy for you to follow along. We're not going to pressure you to sing. It's going to be loud enough that even if you try, nobody's going to hear you.

So there were a lot of ways that this was done so that it was just the easiest thing in the world to come and basically hear a speaker give a message, and not a pastor give a sermon.

There was a time when you couldn't read anything about Rick Warren that didn't mention his Hawaiian shirts. It was a very prominent feature of his. What was he communicating with that fashion choice?

Gerardo Marti: Rick Warren was right in the middle of what was often called The Worship Wars. And so there were churches that really felt that to do things right, you had to be traditional. You had to show respect for God, you needed to be able to have the proper, pious stance as you come in. And it's reflected in how you dress. It's reflected in what you do and how you follow directions. And it's certainly reflected in what the pastor communicates from upfront.

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And so the idea of wearing the suit, to dress nicely, is the idea of being able to be your best for God. And this is something that's just incredibly pervasive. And, in fact, is one very interesting way that he countered his mentor, Robert Schuller, because Robert Schuller did not countenance casual hippy-like people coming into the services, and ushers were meant to keep people out. And it was not unusual in churches in Southern California, that if, for example, you had a baseball hat and tried to come into the service, you were asked to remove the hat or leave.

Now at Rick Warren's church, those sentiments were totally obliterated. So what he was trying to communicate is, I'm one of you. I care. I know the circumstances of your life. I want to relate to what you're kind of dealing with on a day-to-day level. We're not going to pretend that our spiritual lives are only about a sacred moment in a sacred spot for this sacred time. Instead, what is it that we need to talk through to help you realize what it means to be in relationship with God and to live a life that has a connection to what God wants from all of us?

And so the Hawaiian shirts were the most prominent aspect, but I think that there were a lot of other things that were readily communicatedin the architecture of the place, in the style of music that they used, in the way that they would talk. I think it was a whole package that fit into what was often called a Southern California thing, but actually was being found all across the nation as this move from traditional to contemporary was the aggressive move of trying to make religion relevant, to make Christianity relevant in a new and fresh way.

Do you find or think that there is a tension in the clearly calculated and highly detailed marketing strategy and business practices and the emphasis on authenticity, vulnerability, and accessibility that Rick Warren and Saddleback are known for?

Gerardo Marti: In my mind, these things are deeply intertwined in the revivalist tradition. And so I go all the way back to Charles Finney and how he's strived in his ministry to connect with people on a deeply personal and emotional basis, and at the same time, everything that he did was calculated, formulaic, intended to move towards a particular outcome, which he was able to do over and over again.

And we see that Rick Warren adopts a generally revivalistic and primitivist evangelical orientation. And that is that faith is meant to speak specifically to you, you are to respond specifically to it, and that every issue, every problem, everything in the world can be solved as long as you give over your life to God.

But the same revivalistic tradition believes that you need to organize the church in particular ways. And so at the same time that Rick Warren was trying to reach particular peopleremember that Saddleback Samhe also cultivated an entire ministry philosophy which became church seminars and eventually became his first book, The Purpose Driven Church.

And that first thing was arranging the involvement of people into a sort of baseball diamond, where people came and they were intended to go to first base. And the church knew how to get people to first base, and then from first base, you went to second, second to third, third to home. And the notion of the entire structure of the congregation was how to involve people into deeper and deeper levels of investment. And it also was meant to correspond to an investment in their own spiritual lives.

So that organizational dynamic with that intimacy of personal conversion and change is always implicit to Rick Warren's, but it is also in my mind, implicit to all seeker-church orientations. And it goes back to the revivalist tradition.

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Plenty of pastors write books every year, but The Purpose Driven Life had a whole ministry package that developed around it. What made this book so remarkable, and why did it sell so well?

Gerardo Marti: First of all, most people don't recall that before The Purpose Driven Life was written, he had already written a bestselling book, The Purpose Driven Church and it had already reached millions of people. And I had visited pastors offices that had not only their copy but multiple copies so that they could give it away to other people.

The Purpose Driven Church was seen as the state of the art way of doing church for a whole lot of people. And that sense of intentionality about what to do with your ministry conveyed to people a genius about Rick Warren as a pastor. Because how do you solve the issue of church growth? How do you create greater stability for this thing called church? Everybody was worried about what was going to happen in the future, and he seemed to have figured it out.

So once he was able to take some of the principles that were embedded within The Purpose Driven Church and to convey it in a pastoral languageconversational, direct, personal, Nx with a whole lot of charmthat's how The Purpose Driven Life was born. It personalized a lot of the principles that Rick Warren had been working with, and it immediately fell into the hands of people who already were sold on him as a person who had figured out how to move the church into the future.

So what Rick Warren was able to do was to give these pastors, already convinced of the methodology, a new tool for reaching people. And The Purpose Driven Life isn't as much about the individual who picks it up off the shelf, it's more about the ministries who take this book and say, Let's use this, let's have a small group, or here let's work through this together. And this Purpose Driven Life book was a lot less intimidating than giving people a Bible.

So, to me, it was a way of giving these churches a new tool for making their revivalistic Christianity relevant to a new population. And it did it in such a nicely packaged way that it really took off.

What are some of the critiques that began to emerge about this particular model and what type of people love the model?

Gerardo Marti: In evangelicalism, many people don't have to go to seminary to be in ministry. You're just kind of following whatever you seem to know. You can be ordained in ministry because you care about the church, and you've served as a volunteer and been dedicated. So you're really following the model of someone else.

And so you start to go, how do I figure out budgeting issues? How do I attract people and keep them? What do I do with their kids? If you staff for growth, how do you actually work that? So all of those complications were initially solved by The Purpose Driven Church and the network of people who thought more logistically about churches. The logistic orientation became important. And that is different from how to preach homiletics. It's certainly different from how to do pastoral counseling. So for a lot of people, because of the apparent success that it had, this seemed like a breath of fresh air.

What Warren was constantly criticized about was not having depth, that depth was missing. Sunday morning was not necessarily in-depth Bible study and what he was asking people to do wasn't to go out on the mission field or things like that. And even communion, which for many churches is something that must be done every Sunday, they were distributing in small groups with no ordained pastor at all. His model didn't seem to have a lot of the demands of discipleship. So that's the critique that Rick Warren often fell into.

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There was also the belief that the music that they were using lacked any theological substanceno hymns anywhere. And there were no formal membership requirements. So it's like, where are people learning things? What does it mean to actually grow in the faith? That remained very ambiguous for a lot of people.

And I think then, a lot of others would say, Were doing it better, and they would compete with Rick Warren and his style of church. So you had people leaving churches going to Rick Warrens, and then you had some people who felt that they had outgrown Rick Warren's church and would siphon into far more fundamentalist congregations.

Was there ever any critique about the individualistic focus that much of the Purpose Driven rhetoric seems to reinforce versus asking American Christians in particular to transcend their individualism?

Gerardo Marti: No, because evangelicals don't think this way. Evangelicals think that the center of change happens among individuals and that's what's important. That's been that way for a very long time. It's just not a conversation and it's still not. So this critique doesn't exist.

And what they would say, of course it's social, people are in small groups, of course, its social, they're involved in ministry, of course, it's social. We gather as a congregation. So in their minds, they don't think of it as individualistic because they see people in interaction.

But the framework that they're missing is really to understand how history and social structures affect the lives of people. And so I don't think they even understand things like how Southern California developed to begin with, or what is the religious history that's embedded in the people that come to church, or what is affecting the work and family lives that create all of the tensions and the conflicts and the difficulties that they're trying to therapeutically preach their way out of. Those are things that just aren't even in the conversation.

The message has tremendous resonance with so many people that they don't see a need to change.

Warren is also known for his engagement with social issues. Can you talk about his involvement in politics and things like calling evangelicals attention to AIDS?

Gerardo Marti: You find that evangelicals like Rick Warren do believe that they have relevance for the world as a whole, and so they're paying attention. And what I want to emphasize upfront is that he still believes that conversion and commitment to God are primary, and has always felt that that was first and foremost of anything that he did.

In terms of the 2008 election, Rick Warren became aware that he had a very public voice and a very large following of people who were paying attention to him. And so he very quickly saw himself as more than the pastor of a local church, and he started to think that perhaps he could be a part of helping evangelicals come to a different sensibility about things. I think it was a moment of, I've got power. How do I want to use this power responsibly?

And so the attempt to play out a non-partisan approach to politics and try to not put forward a particular agenda led to him inviting Barack Obama and John McCain to the church for a public conversation. And that kind of thing was very notable at the time because it signaled what I think every pastor wants to say: my congregation matters, we talk about important things here, and we bring guests that matter. Certainly, his mentor, Robert Schuller, had done that for a very long time, and others would do it as much as possible.

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But at the same time, what he didn't talk about was politics. So it was more about connecting to forms of power than it was about looking at policies and attempting to understand structural changes. I don't think that Rick Warren ever became sophisticated about policies, but I do think that Rick Warren knows something about power. And so the attempt to play at a non-partisan political awareness is how that worked.

But overall, I think all of that hit him much harder than he anticipated. Because every time he stepped into something that was a political arena, he always discovered that the people that were supposedly a part of his constituency held highly partisan and very specific views and were far more combative and felt that the world was a moral battleground that had to be won. And so Rick Warren didn't approach things in that way, but the people that he was closest to, and in his denomination, the Southern Baptist, certainly did. And that's the back and forth tussle that he constantly had.

Even his introduction to the AIDS epidemic was not through domestic politics or policy. It was through his exposure to what was happening in Africa. So you have as a person who goes to a part of the world that's not the United States, and all of a sudden discovers there are actually large structural issues that need to be dealt with. He had no vocabulary for how to deal with structural issues once he discovered them.

And so then he starts to go, Okay, let's do something about AIDS in this foreign country. But at the moment at which you started to talk about what you need to do to address AIDSwhich has to do with sex education, distribution of condoms, and other things like thathe ran smack dab into the machinery of family-values politics n the United States.

And so that created this need to assert for himself, I cure about the conversion of people. I care about people changing and giving their lives to God first and foremost. And then, along the way, try to address these things with all kinds of different compromises and always with these conservative-culture warrior people nipping at his heels that he wasn't doing it right.

And so Warren's brand of person-centered politics always had a problem. It always ran into its limitations.

Let's pivot and talk about Warren's personal life, specifically his son's death by suicide. How did that affect Warren personally and also his ministry at large?

Gerardo Marti: When I found out about Rick and Kay Warren's sons suicide, I think I responded like many. Just a real sense of grief and sadness. Because you don't get the impression that these are people who don't care about their kids, right? This is someone who's been invested. And for anything like that to happen to anyone, I would hope we would all have deep compassion. And I think if anything, I was surprised at the time amount of grace, the willingness to talk about it publicly, and the amount of detail that was shared right away.

I think that Rick Warren accepted that he was a public person and that if he was going to deal with this kind of trauma, he needed to do it in a way that would allow people to see this is how you work through things. It's not a perfect way of dealing with things, but it is the way that we do it, thats sensitive to the lives that we've given ourselves to.

And I think that what that did was take him into understanding yet another social problem, one that deals with issues of mental health. The bridge was set. It wasn't that he came to be aware of mental health issues in some broad and abstract way. He was affected by the death of his son. And for evangelicals, the personal connection to a vast social issue like that is what allows for a bridge to then talking about a larger social issue.

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And so for many people, it allowed greater conversation about these things. It allowed further permission-giving to seek professional help and not just relying on prayer. To actually see that certain things are so significant and that can be so troublesome and that there can be things that you don't know, that can happen unexpectedly, and you can't just wish them away by being a good spiritual person.

So I think that as he walked through that, he allowed for new sensibilities that became very important for a whole lot of people. And I think that is significant, and he and his wife deserve a lot of credit for that.

Youve mentioned that he seemed to feel this responsibility in part because of his celebrity or his sort of public renown. At what point does Warren become a celebrity, and what kind of Christian celebrity is he?

Gerardo Marti: In my mind, by the mid-nineties, the name Rick Warren was already abuzz. And if Rick Warren were to come and show up somewhere there was a high level of anticipation that something good was going to happen. He was always seen as someone who stood out in his charismatic persona, that he had somehow been able to do what most people still don't quite understand how to do: how do you start a church from scratch and be able to make it financially viable and stable?

So Rick Warren's celebrity went in waves. There was the inner circle of people in the Southern Baptist and among a certain scope of mostly white evangelicals. Then people finding out about his church started to say, How do I do this? and the requests for figuring out how to do church become so burdensome that that's why he organizes conferences. Thats how Robert Schuller did it. That's how Bill Hybels did it. That's how Erwin McManus did it at Mosaic in Los Angeles, that's how's Hillsong does it.

You have all these places that once it feels like they've unlocked something, they've gone to a different level very quickly. Church circles start to knock on doors, call, email, visit, sometimes showing up in vans to just soak in what's going on and then talk the ear off any volunteer who's willing to talk. So the conferences are a way of channeling all of the curiosity and packaging the formula. It is the incessant demand from church leaders for how to do church that creates these conferences.

So once Rick Warren started to package his formula for success, that's what became The Purpose Driven Church. And The Purpose Driven Church expanded him out because church leaders who are not evangelical are also very attentive to things. They feel like they need to be attuned to what's happening in ecclesial circles. And so what makes him much bigger. S

So when The Purpose Driven Life became a bestseller, that's when I think he became more of a pop culture phenomenon. He became someone that was known in popular culture. And I think his most famous moment was when a woman was being held hostage and she talked the man through The Purpose Driven Life and led him to convert, and he ended up letting her go. That was the peak moment of Rick Warren in popular culture until the Obama-McCain thing, and when he became the one person to pray at Obama's inauguration.

Its interesting how far beyond the Southern Baptist his influence goes. What was his relationship with the SBC, and how does he relate to the SBC over the years?

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Gerardo Marti: The Southern Baptist likes to say that individual churches are free to do what they want and that they have a lot of discretion on their own. So there's always a difference between the pronouncements of the SBC as a denomination and what happens in the different churches.

So out of the thousands and thousands of churches and pastors, you have plenty who deliberately obscure their Southern Baptist connections because they don't want to be associated with the pronouncements being made by the SBC. And Saddleback is certainly one of those churches. These churches don't want to be burdened with having to answer for a body that they weren't a part of making those decisions but take the benefit of the things that they do resonate with and the things that are good for them by remaining within the SBC.

But the other thing is that the SBC often gives a lot of hands-off autonomy to churches if they are successful. Its almost like they don't want to question God's work if God is indeed doing something good. And these churches make a point of showing how they do that. Probably the most important figure in a Southern Baptist church is how many baptisms you accomplish in a year. That's more important even than the number of attendees. And Rick Warren would often say how many people have been baptized through his ministry, and they have baptized over 50,000 people through their ministry.

I don't think that there's any other Southern Baptist church that would come close to that. That's a spectacular number. And so no Southern Baptist is going to argue with what they see as the sine qua non of ministry effectiveness.

One of the most recent things to happen at Saddleback is the ordination of three women as pastors. What is the significance of Saddleback doing that, especially in light of Warren's retirement being just a couple of weeks away?

Gerardo Marti: First, I think that it should be clear that there are different levels of what it means to be ordained in a church. Many churches make a difference between being licensed versus being ordained. Licensure meaning that that you can be employed by the church, and it gives you certain tax benefits, but it's meant to be renewed on an annual basis. While being ordained is being set apart for ministry. It can also have tax benefits but is not something that has the same requirements to re-up as often.

And to my knowledge, I believe that many women in Southern Baptist churches have received ordination, but are not called pastors. These are your children's ministry people, sometimes some worship or music directors, but there are a variety of people who've worked in Southern Baptist churches who have essentially been ordained without being called pastor. So what would be different is for them to be publicly acknowledged with the same role and title of being a pastor. That, I think, might be distinctive.

But I know of husband-and-wife teams in the Southern Baptist that because the wife is under the headship of her husband, then it is okay for her to be called pastor. So I think that that might be a little bit more heat than light in what's going on there. That's my opinion.

The presence of Donald Trump and his overwhelming support from white evangelicals was a huge story over the past four years. What was the approach that Warren took to Trump? And to what extent did it change over Trump's campaign, and then eventually Trumps presidency?

Gerardo Marti: Well, we're going to continue to unpack the white evangelical support for Trump for probably the rest of our lives. I think when it comes to Rick Warren specifically, I think he took away a lot of lessons out of his involvement in the 2008 campaign and his association with Barack Obama. The backlash that he received was so strong, so persistent, so forceful that I think it burned him from being involved in national-level politics at all. And he decided to be ambivalent, at best, about Donald Trump.

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So the continuity was that Rick Warren still did not engage in issues of policy, did not understand some of the larger dynamics involved, and treated things as more of like this non-partisan politics that we're kind of involved in. He sort of affirmed some things but didn't really speak out against anything.

I think that we know that Rick Warren holds certain moral positions that would be consistent with a conservative white evangelical positionthe same ones that have been that have supported Donald Trump and have translated into certain kinds of policies, particularly affecting women, gender, and sexuality issues.

But overall I think that he immediately saw that if he had already dealt with so many issues with Obama, who in his mind seemed to be faith-friendly, and he wasn't going to touch the issues with Trump. So he kept his distance from it. And I think that that remained consistent throughout Trump's presidency.

Did his relative silence cost the church in any way or at all? Did it undermine the goals of his ministry? Or was he able to successfully sit this one out in a place when a lot of other high-profile pastors were not?

Gerardo Marti: My read of Southern California, particularly that area of South Orange County, is that its more conservative than progressive. It's whiter than other parts of Orange County. And it remains connected to the evangelicalism that was the suburban white evangelicalism that started the religiosity of Southern California as a whole.

So there is a comfortable conservative ethosa pro-capitalist, pro-family, anti-gay, homeownership, work hard, get an educationthat I think he can comfortably work within. And so there's no need to confront that. It is the lay of the land. And he can seemingly be nonpolitical and have things just continue to go that way.

So there are some people who, of course, would like to have a much more forceful demand to address certain things. But there's just not going to be the same push to try to figure out things related to immigration, for example. I think most people just think that talking about white supremacy is kind of odd. It's just not something that is discussed. It's the environment or the culture they swim in. And so there's no need to challenge that.

There's been a few times that Warren has ended up apologizing for his or the churchs insensitivity on race issues, particularly towards Asian-Americans. How did Warren generally approach the issue of racial reconciliation or racial justice?

Gerardo Marti: I think that if you know anything about Promise Keepers and the general orientation that they took to racial issues, that's exactly where Saddleback would be. And so Saddleback embraced all the things that seemed good, but they still approached it on an interpersonal level.

And so you would see a very welcome and open attempt to try to diversify the staff or to try to incorporate some racial representation perhaps liturgically or publicly, but you're not going to find a Black Lives Matter sign. You're not going to find them organizing against injustices or oppressions. That's just not going to be there.

So in that sense, you have an environment that treats the world as wanting to be racially sensitive but still mostly in a colorblind manner. And that colorblind manner is still indicative of a whole lot of white evangelical churches that want to stay out of the political realm, or at least believe that they're not political.

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In south Orange County, youre going to find professionalized Asian Americans who already a lot of sympathies with white evangelicalism. So the fact that Saddleback had to address an issue reflects not so much of their becoming sensitive, but more with the fact that professionalized evangelical Asian Americans are coming to terms with the pervasive racism that they have faced their entire lives. And rather than excusing it from their churches and from the institutions that they've been a part of, they've become more vocal about confronting that and saying it is not okay.

So I think it still becomes an interpersonal orientation of racial reconciliation, and not really an attempt to address systemic issues of racial justice.

As we look at the end of his career, what do you think Warren's legacy will be? How will he be remembered?

Gerardo Marti: We may still be revisiting the legacy of Rick Warren as we see how white evangelicalism plays itself out in the coming decades.

Certainly, Rick Warren was a part of affirming and further developing the church growth movement. The movement of being able to take a formulaic stance of targeting particular kinds of people, organizing our ministries in particular ways. Staffing them in a way that allows us to have a machinery for being able to attract people, involve them, get them invested and excited about things. Because of Rick Warren and the way he approached church life worked.

Now some people may feel like it didn't give the theological depth that they may want and that it certainly didn't address all kinds of other issues, but fundamentally he was definitely a part of affirming a church growth pattern that was especially successful in expanding suburbanized spaces. And that I think is going to be history.

When it comes to politics, Rick Warren becomes an example of one of many people who believed that politics should work in a particular way. That politics is personal, it has to do with individuals wanting to exercise particular sensitivities, and that we could solve things if we were just reasonable with each other and built relationships with each other. But he did not have an understanding of the vast histories that are embedded in the policies that the country has in the laws that are in our booksdynamics like how the Supreme Court actually works, that racial issues are far more deeply embedded and demand a more radical response.

And finally, I think that when it comes to assessing mega-churches in America, we are still unpacking the meaning and significance of mega church ministry. Mega-churches still remain some of the more unique aspects of American Christianity, and they are still new and are still rare. And whether the future of American Christianity will continue to orient itself around mega-church ministries or whether we'll even see any expansion of mega-churches, that also remains to be seen. But any attention to mega-churches will inevitably include Rick Warren and Saddleback Church.
Grieving people often say that loss clarifies whats important in life. An encounter with death can help us reorient our priorities, reorder our affections, and restore our sense of purpose. Grief offers us the opportunity to release our reliance on structured programs and embrace messy, embodied presence as the real gift we offer one another in the valley of the shadow.

In this episode, Daniel Harrell and author Clarissa Moll discuss the ministry of showing uphow welcoming death and dying to Christian spaces can help us become better neighbors, how the pandemic shutdown can offer us new perspectives on congregational care, and how intergenerational worship pictures fullness of life in Christ. Daniel and Clarissa talk about reenvisioning pastoral vocation as ministry of care, slowing down to engage with older saints in our churches, and how we can rediscover the quiet joy of being present in the midst of busy lives.

Whether youre devoted to vocational ministry or just want to learn how to show up better for hurting people in your life, this episode is for you. Special guest author Dave Meuer shares his story of caring for his mother-in-law during her declining years with Alzheimers disease.

Dave Meuer is the author of New Every Day: Navigating Alzheimers with Grace and Compassion.

Surprised by Grief is a production of Christianity Today.

Produced by Mike Cosper

Written by Daniel Harrell and Clarissa Moll

Edited and mixed by Mark Owens

Music by The Porters Gate
Earlier this morning, Wheaton College posted an exciting announcement about a new chair in evangelism. Our School of Mission, Ministry, and Leadership (MML) already has an amazing program in evangelism and leadership, but this will take the program to a new level of global impact. MML and the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center and providing significant leadership, reminding our students, and people around the world, that evangelism matters deeply at Wheaton and beyond. We are looking for a distinguished evangelism scholar of global reputation to serve in this chair, so pray for us. Of course, if you have suggestions, you can email our team at mml@Wheaton.edu and we will share them with the search committee. Here is the news, posted at Wheatons news site

A new faculty position to expand scholarship on biblical evangelism

Wheaton College announced today the establishment of an endowed chair of biblical evangelism. The Jean Kvamme Distinguished Chair of Biblical Evangelism will reside in the Colleges School of Mission, Ministry, and Leadership, and will provide an academic bridge between scriptural text and biblical evangelism. It will also help Wheaton graduate students engage more deeply with the gospel message and its contextualized proclamation in the broader world.

We are honored to recognize Jean Kvamme in this way, and we thank her husband, Floyd Kvamme, and her family for generously providing an enduring extension of Jeans legacy of studying and sharing scriptureespecially the New Testament, said Wheaton College President Philip Ryken. She led a life dedicated to sharing the love of Christ in word and deed, and this endowed chair will serve as a perpetual, inspiring reminder of Jeans commitment.

Chair endowment funds will provide for an eminent scholar of special distinction in the field of biblical evangelism and provide support for study abroad and immersion experiences at key sites, libraries, and other germane institutions.

Jean Kvamme was President/Director of The Jean and E. Floyd Kvamme Foundation, which funds Christian organizations, as well as cultural, educational, and medical institutions. Jean died in 2020, leaving a rich Christian legacy for her family and many charitable organizations.

In 1997 Jean and Floyd purchased a ranch in Felton, CA to follow her dream of riding and connecting with horses. In 2015, Jean established and directed Lichen Oaks Adaptive Riding Center (LOARC), providing therapeutic riding for special needs children and adults. Jean was born in Sacramento, CA, and lived in San Francisco from the time she was eight years old. She and Floyd Kvamme met at a San Francisco church when they were 12 years old and married in June 1959, two weeks after Floyd graduated from UC-Berkeley. After her youngest son started UC-Berkeley, Jean began a home-based computer service business in the Meeting Planning field. It grew steadily for the ten years she owned it from 1987-1997.

We thank Floyd Kvamme for this opportunity to provide significant scholarship and instruction in the vital field of biblical evangelism, said School of Mission, Ministry, and Leadership Dean Ed Stetzer. Jean Kvammes joy in the words and call of Christ will continue in this unique faculty position.
In the two years since Southern Baptists gathered as a convention, tensions around racial and political issues escalated. But just a couple weeks before their upcoming annual meeting in Nashville, another topic has taken center stage, as new documentation alleges high-ranking leaders in the denomination resisted its efforts to address abuse.

Some Southern Baptists are calling for an investigation of the Executive Committee (EC) after a series of leaked material has suggested that its leadersone of whom is the conservative pick in the current race for SBC presidentworked to hamper efforts to hear from victims in their own terms and to investigate churches with credible claims of cover-up.

What those docs did kind of reoriented and shifted what the conversations and priorities were going to be going into the convention this year, said Tennessee pastor Grant Gaines, who along with North Carolina pastor Ronnie Parrott announced plans to make a motion at the June 1516 meeting calling for a third-party investigation into the EC.

Over 16,000 Southern Baptists have registered to come, double the attendance at the 2019 conference and the largest crowd at an annual meeting in a quarter century. And outsiders are paying attention to what happens among the countrys biggest Protestant denomination because many of the issues at hand reflect broader divisions in the church and the US at large.

The recent revelations shared online could cause some Southern Baptists to scrutinize the place of prominent figures in SBC leadership and demand greater accountability for the body tasked with handling denominational business outside the convention. Or, as the newly formed Conservative Baptist Network brings ideological divides within the denomination to the forefront, the revelations could lead members to become further entrenched in their existing alliances.

Two letters written by Russell Moore and recordings provided by his former colleague Phillip Bethancourt were recently posted online and describe Moores clashes with members of the Executive Committeenamely Mike Stone and Ronnie Floyd. Stone, a Georgia pastor and founding member of the Conservative Baptist Network, was chairman of the EC at the time, while Floyd remains its president.

According to the materials, Moore and his colleagues faced pushback and veiled threats, including an investigation led by Stone, for their approach to the abuse issue, such as the decision to allow advocates such as Rachael Denhollander to criticize the SBC response at events held by the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). (The ERLC had led the SBC effort to train churches in Caring Well for victims, and Bethancourtwho left the agency last year to pastor an SBC church in Texaswas part of the denominations advisory group on sexual abuse. Moore left the ERLC at the end of May and will begin at CT in July.)

The reports of stonewalling abuse victims and downplaying the authority of the credentials committee (the group tasked with recommending if a church should be disfellowshipped over abuse) werent unheard of. A group of outspoken victims and advocates have been pleading for reform in the SBC since the #MeToo movement and the Houston Chronicle investigation that uncovered hundreds of cases of criminal abuse among SBC leaders in 2018.

But because it was from Russell Moore, a departing entity head, it carried more weight.  People took notice. Now you see prominent Southern Baptists calling for an investigation of the EC. They dont have the option of ignoring this, said Adam Blosser, a pastor in Virginia. After years of raising concerns about EC business alongside fellow bloggers at the site SBC Voices, Blosser said the recent revelations prompted him to act to bring change to the EC; hes running for recording secretary, a position that has been held by John Yeats for 24 years straight.

For some pastors, Moores letters confirmed what theyd worried was taking place in closed-door meetings of SBC leaders. For others, it was a wakeup call that they should have been listening to the victims stories all along. We were shocked, said Gaines. We shouldnt have been. These survivors, their stories are out there.

But for those who have been critical of Moore, who described being attacked and decried as a liberal while at the ERLC, the timing of the release is more reason for suspicion.

Stone is running for president of the SBC with the backing of the Conservative Baptist Network. In a video, he denied the implications of the leaked letters as inaccurate and slanderous.

He said the materials represent an attack by Moore and insisted the members of the EC who were being scrutinized had done the very best thing  that we could do with the limited resources that were available to us at that time and that still are very limited tools available to ministries of the Southern Baptist Convention.

While Stone has spoken out as a survivor of child sex abuse and considers himself committed to the issue, he and others in the Conservative Baptist Network have challenged what they see as unbiblical theology in the efforts to address abuse.

Theyre concerned that such campaigns presume guilt on the part of the accused and misrepresent a denomination where the vast majority of leaders are not predators. The network is also linked to Paige Patterson, one of the most influential figures in recent Southern Baptist history, who was fired over mishandling reports of rape. (Patterson himself was the subject of another recent bombshell, a report from his former seminary saying he had taken property and donor lists after his termination.)

In his response, Floyd originally said he didnt have the same recollection of his conversations with Moore and Bethancourt, then after the audio was released, shared additional context and apologized for any offense caused by his remarks. Moore has not spoken out about the leaked documents.

Floyd said in a statement Thursday that the EC staff is also now looking into hiring an independent firm to investigate, then on Friday announced that they had hired Guidepost Solutions to conduct an independent review. (Guidepost is also currently working with Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.)

The motion Gaines and Parrott plan to make in Nashville is backed by big names in the SBC such as pastor James Merritt and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary president Danny Akin. It would make the incoming president of the SBC the one to appoint the task force to commission this investigation, rather than allowing the EC to set the terms of its own review.

The most important thing thats going to be decided is the presidential election, said Blosser. I dont think thats normally the case, but this time, more than choosing a candidate, theyre choosing a vision for the future.

This is the first SBC presidential election since the formation of the Conservative Baptist Network. The three most prominent leaders in the presidential raceStone, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler, and Alabama pastor Ed Littonoffer different approaches to the issues plaguing the convention today, and no one has emerged as a front-runner.

Southern Baptists say itll depend on the makeup of the outsized crowd in Nashville. The Conservative Baptist Network has been lobbying its supporters to turn out for months, while a recent uptick in registration may have come from attendees who want to be there because of the abuse issue making headlines again.

During a two-year term, theres only so much influence an SBC president can have over the convention, whose 47,000 churches are autonomous. Hes largely a figurehead speaking and casting visionand appointing members to the committees that keep denominational business going. To make a real shift in the SBC, experts say, it takes back-to-back presidents with shared priorities.

Outgoing president J. D. Greear appointed the most diverse slate of committee members in SBC history and made strides in sexual abuse initiatives and racial justice efforts. Littons supporters see him building on Greears legacy, while Stone would represent a reversal.

Mohler, who originally was going to run in 2020 and stayed in the race for 2021, is the best-known name of the three and has some appeal to both sides, having both criticized the existence of the Conservative Baptist Network in the past and rallied fellow seminary presidents to sign a statement condemning critical race theory (CRT) as incompatible with Southern Baptist beliefs.

The slate of resolutions for this years annual meeting wont be released until Tuesday, but many Southern Baptist leaders expect there to be at least one resolution and possibly also a motion from the floor to clarify the denominations position on CRT. A 2019 resolution on the issue has been condemned by conservative critics as an endorsement.

The divides on many of these topicsabuse, CRT, EC leadership, Paige Patterson, Russell Mooremap atop each other. Though the recent leaks shifted the conversation ahead of the meeting, many of the supporters and critics find themselves in the same corners.

For those at the extremes, the recent flurry has no impact. However, those who were not paying attention (I believe) are beginning to do so, said pastor and former missionary Jeremy Parks, who wrote about Pattersons influence on the upcoming presidential election. They will probably show up and simply say, No, lets go in a different direction.

Leaders in the conservative subgroup, which numbers at least 6,000 members, have also spoken about the importance of the conventions direction. They allege that the SBC is drifting and blame leaders like president Greear, who leads The Summit Church in North Carolina; Dhati Lewis, who heads up the SBCs church-planting Send Network; and Akin at Southeastern. Each were referenced in a video clip the Conservative Baptist Network posted Wednesday.

Some of the leaders in our Southern Baptist family have become enamored with cultural ideologies and cultural tends that are unbiblical, and theyre wreaking havoc, said Brad Jurkovich, a Louisiana pastor and spokesman for the network. We are indeed dividing and drifting.

Meanwhile, Greear told the Baptist Press on Friday, If we dont say were a Great Commission Gospel people, were not only going to lose our [pastors of color], but the next generation of Southern Baptists. He says this years annual meeting will be a defining moment determining whether the gospel determines its mission or if it will instead be a geographical, cultural, and political voting bloc.

Akin, who has attended every annual meeting but one over the past 40 years, said the division within the denomination doesnt compare to the level of animosity during the Conservative Resurgence in the 80s, when 30,000 to 40,000 Southern Baptists attended its annual meetings. But its still a mess, he said.

One of the reasons we are a mess right now is that unfortunately social media has provided an outlet for people to misrepresentmaybe misunderstand but misrepresentone another. And as a result of that, theres a lot of suspicion and a lot of questioning that really shouldnt be taking place, said Akin.

He pointed out that the high-profile departures of Russell Moore and Beth Moore, along with the recent revelations around Paige Patterson and the Executive Committee, have impacted Southern Baptists going into the convention.

I believe it would be very helpful to clear the air, get the truth out, and have a third-party investigation of the Executive Committee, he said. Whoevers told the truth should be affirmed in their truth telling, and whoever does not tell the truth ought to be exposed.

The 86-member Executive Committee is the denominations primary body in charge of business outside the meetings and had initially formed a work group to consider the reports of abuse coverup with the SBC. As Russell Moores letter points out, the group quickly exonerated 7 of 10 churches listed by Greear in the wake of the Houston Chronicle investigation in 2018.

The credentials committee, formed the following year, had become the designated place to report congregations for wrongdoing that would disqualify them from being in friendly cooperation with the SBC, which is a voluntary affiliation and not a hierarchical body. In the past two years, just three churchesall of whom knowingly employed pastors convicted of serious sex crimes and offenseswere disfellowshipped over abuse.

Several more victims, including Jules Woodson, say they have had their reports of abuse passed over by the committee without clear explanations for the review process. The committee has declined to share the names of churches submitted or total number of reports it receives.

Advocates and victims have long challenged the idea that the SBC, the countrys biggest denomination, with billions in revenue, did not have the means or authority to do what they were pleading for: to penalize abuse and cover-up and to help survivors.

Victims have criticized the scope of the credentials committee, which defines its work as reviewing and not investigating claims. They say it has not done enough to look into credible reports of abuse and has not provided clear guidelines around its process.

There was absolute refusal by Ronnie [Floyd], most EC members and the credentialing committee, to address the issue of abuse, or even discuss best standards. No one wanted these men to emerge as strong leaders more than the survivors who desperately needed their leadership, Rachael Denhollander tweeted this week in a string of messages backing Moores letters and criticizing the approach she saw from the EC. Denhollander is not Southern Baptist but has participated in SBC advisory groups and advised SBC victims.

Some Southern Baptists see church autonomy and efforts to provide accountability and oversight as being at odds.

However, what we also know is that too often churches have covered it up. Churches have not been transparent, and therefore, a minister who commits sexual abuse in one location has had access to move to another, said Akin. [The SBC] has a responsibility to police itself to the degree that it can.  I think we just started. Theres even more we probably can do to ensure, to the best of our ability, that sexual predators are not given ready access to continue their sexual predation.

Parrott, one of the pastors planning to move to investigate the EC, says resisting sexual abuse reform in the denomination is serious. The public witness of the SBC matters for our cooperative mission together. We need the truth to prevail so that we can move together, unified around the gospel and the Great Commission.

Gospel Above All was the rallying cry for Greears presidency, meant to unify the 14-million-member body around their shared priorities. But it didnt work. 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, he said earlier this year, complaining that intra-SBC attacks and CRT claims have distracted from his work and their mission.

Critics of the Conservative Baptist Network, those who dont believe their claims of doctrinal drift, worry that a Stone presidency would lead some pastors to leave the SBC and possibly to an eventual split in the denomination. Some African American pastors such as Dwight McKissic say they are on their way out if the SBC doesnt course-correct on its stance on racial justice and CRT.

While the average member of a Southern Baptist church may not be familiar with the Conservative Baptist Network by name, and may not follow denominational happenings enough to track whos leading the Executive Committee or running for SBC president, the stances that these leaders promote reach broad swaths of evangelicals.

Jacki King, part of the steering committee for the SBC Womens Leadership Network and the wife of an SBC pastor in Arkansas, described how a member of her church came to her worried that Southern Baptists were no longer recognizing distinctions over gender. The member had come across such claims from outlets such as the Capstone Report and The Todd Starnes Show, which amplify concerns raised by the Conservative Baptist Network.

King had to explain that what the member read wasnt an accurate characterization of the ERLCs position, which still affirms male and female distinctions as created by God. If theyre only hearing whats coming up from certain Twitter accounts, they could think the SBC is going liberal, said King.

At their first gatherings after COVID-19 shutdowns, King says the women she knew were eager to process everything thats happened online, particularly Beth Moores decision to leave the denomination.

Greear has been leading weekly prayer for the past three weeks as the denomination prepares for its own, large-scale efforts to come together and process.

We are gathering together. In fact its been two years since we could do this, and wed probably be naive if we didnt realize that that absence of being together has contributed in a large way to a lot of that discord people are feeling with one another, Greear prayed on Wednesday. We want to pray that God would put in us that supernatural love, that sense of fellowship and unity in the body of Christ.
Biden admin. says it can defend Christian colleges' exemption to Title IX discrimination law

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The Biden administration says it can defend federal exemptions for faith-based colleges and opposed a motion by Christian organizations to intervene in a lawsuit seeking to strike down religious colleges' exemptions to Title IX law dealing with LGBT discrimination.

The Oregon-based Religious Exemption Accountability Project, an LGBT activist organization, filed a federal lawsuit in March on behalf of dozens of LGBT current and former students at several Christian colleges and universities who felt discriminated against because their school's upheld policies consistent with gender and sexuality beliefs.

REAPs lawsuit seeks to end what it says are sexual, physical and psychological abuses perpetrated under the religious exemption to Title IX at thousands of federally-funded schools, colleges and universities across America." It wants to strip the ability of schools that espouse traditional sexuality beliefs to be protected from sex discrimination law. Some argue the federal ban on sex discrimination includes discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Considering the exemption is utilized by dozens of prominent Christian colleges, a prominent legal organization and an association representing over 140 Christian colleges submitted motions to intervene in the lawsuit, Hunter v. U.S. Department of Education.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal group that has won several Supreme Court cases in recent years, and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities are skeptical of the administration's ability to defend the exemption, given the administration's policies and statements on prohibiting LGBT discrimination.

In the filing opposing intervention submitted Tuesday, the Justice Department said the proposed Intervenors have failed to show that either mandatory or permissive intervention is warranted here" and haven't shown that the U.S. government "will not adequately represent their interests."

"Specifically, the Federal Defendants ultimate objective is to defend the statutory exemption and its current application by [Education Department], which is the objective sought by the Proposed Intervenors here," the motion assures.

The government refuted the arguments that it can't adequately defend the religious exemption because of the "statements and actions taken by the current Administration regarding protecting LGBTQ+ individuals from discrimination in a variety of contexts." The motion argues that proposed interveners "leap to concluding" that the administration won't defend the exemption.

"[N]one of the statements cited by the Proposed Intervenors expressly discusses the Religious Exemption in Title IX or suggests that the Federal Defendants will not defend the constitutionality of that statutory exemption," the motion reads.

"To be sure, the Department of Education is conducting a comprehensive review of its regulations implementing Title IX pursuant to Executive Order 14,021, which sets forth the current administrations policy on guaranteeing an educational environment free from discrimination on the basis of sex."

The motion assures that "neither the Administrations stated policy positions nor the Departments review of existing regulations abrogate the governments duty to defend federal statutes and regulations in court as a legal matter."

Further, the government argues that the groups wanting to intervene can only "speculate" that the Biden administration will "back away from a full defense of the Religious Exemption and its challenged application."

The Christian Post reached out to the CCCU for comment and was pointed to the organization's May 12 statement on why it looks to intervene in the case.

CCCU President Shirley Hoogstra told The Washington Post that she was encouraged that the administration wants to defend the religious exemption. However, she believes Christian schools should still have a party representing them in the case.

"This lawsuit would take federal financial aid away from hundreds of thousands of students who choose to attend faith-based colleges and universities," CCCU's May 12 statement argues. "This would restrict student choice in an unprecedented way, preventing middle- and low-income students from being able to take their federal aid to these institutions."

REAP was disappointed with the filing submitted on Tuesday and objected to the strong wording found in the DOJ's original filing. The Justice Department updated the filing after objections were raised to the motion saying the administration would "vigorously" defend the religious exemption.

REAP argues against taxpayer funding for schools that it claims "discriminate against #LGBTQ students, which includes expelling them for being queer & forcing them into 'conversion therapy.'"

"The Biden administration did not need to defend this unconstitutional religious exemption, and they certainly did not need to say that it 'shares the same ultimate objective' as anti-LGBTQ extremist group Alliance Defending Freedom," REAP Director Paul Southwick said in a statement.

In a tweet, REAP claimed: "This out-of-touch position will only serve to harm more LGBTQ students at religious colleges  & permit continued taxpayer-funded discrimination at these institutions."

In May, CCCU filed its motion to intervene, stating that removing Title IXs religious exemption poses an existential threat to religious higher education.

CCCU argues that removing religious exemptions will deprive religious colleges of the oxygen that gives them life by forbidding them, on pain of losing federal assistance for their students, from teaching and expecting adherence to their core religious beliefs.

Title IX of the Civil Rights Act forbids sex-based discrimination in education. However, religious institutions with biblical definitions for marriage and sexuality can request a religious exemption that allows them to adhere to scriptural beliefs on matters of sexuality and still receive grant funding from the federal government.

Seven out of 10 CCCU students receive some federal funding, according to the association. The CCCU maintains that making these schools ineligible for funding would have a "disproportionate impact on low-income and first-generation college students, as well as students from racial and ethnic minority groups."

"CCCU institutions subscribe to sincerely held biblical beliefs, which include specific religious convictions around human sexuality and gender, and are transparent about their policies and behavior guidelines, which students voluntarily agree to when they choose to attend the institution," CCCU argues.

ADF filed a motion to intervene in the lawsuit in April on behalf of college students at Corban University in Oregon, William Jessup University in California and Phoenix Seminary in Arizona.

The very existence of Title IXs Religious Exemption is at stake here, yet none of the current parties [in the lawsuit] are religious educational institutions that benefit from this exemption, ADFs motion states.

The Court should not assess the Religious Exemptions constitutionality without hearing from the very institutions the exemption was designed to protect, the motion continued.

ADF contends the Biden administration seeks to redefine Title IX in a way that would threaten the freedom of religious schools. President Biden signed an executive order to prevent and combat discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation on his first day in office.

Last month, a judge dismissed a Christian college's lawsuit against a directive on LGBT discrimination from the Department of Housing and Urban Development that the school feared would require it to open womens' dorm rooms and showers to trans-identified male students.

However, attorneys representing HUD argued in a hearing that the memorandum was not directed at the college and does not specifically address the kinds of issues the college has raised here  showers, or roommates. The attorney further stressed that there was no immediate threat to the college.
Critical Race Theory: A make-work project for child psychologists? (pt 1)

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I was reading an article recently on Williamson County (Tennessee) schools. Why? Because I lived there for 25 years (1988-2013), and I am going back there in a fortnight after a delightful eight-year sojourn in Charlotte, North Carolina.

When I read an article on Williamson County schools, I expect it to be positive and affirming. Three of the top rated public high schools in the U.S. are located in Williamson County. Williamson County has the highest per capita income of any Tennessee county. It is an affluent slice of Americana with little if any ethnic tension.

Just last week, while dining in a nice, but far from luxurious restaurant in Franklin (the county seat), I observed three ethnically diverse couples enjoying dinner at their respective tables. (One couple was a black male with a white female companion, the second couple was a black male with an Asian female companion, and the third couple was a white male with a black female companion.) No one else in the restaurant seemed to take any notice. The only reason I did was I had just read yet another disturbing article on Critical Race Theory (CRT).

The article in question is about the controversy CRT has stirred up in Williamson County. The article pointed out that if CRT was causing controversy in Williamson County, then no portion of America was immune from CRTs societal poisonpoint well-taken.

Outraged parents discovered CRT being perpetrated on their children in elementary school (as early as second grade). One parent put a tragic human face on the damage being done to innocent children by having CRT foisted upon them at such a young age. A mother, an immigrant from Thailand, married to a Caucasian, read aloud from a letter she wrote to the Williams County School Superintendent detailing the tremendously disturbing emotional impact this curriculum had on their sever-year-old son who as a result now despises the white half of himself. She then elaborated, The story of Dr. King and his I Have a Dream speech is beautiful and uplifting. This is the world my child lived in until now. He was color bind. But this curriculum has changed that. It is far more harmful than helpful. It depresses him. It is dark and divisive. It paints a world with only white and black people. It paints a picture of poor black people being attacked by evil white people.

Telling second graders that all whites are oppressors and all blacks are victims is not a formula for positive outcomes, and it makes Dr. Kings dream of a society in which we are judged by the content of our character rather than our skin pigmentation, a more, rather than less, elusive goal. Just imagine, however, the cognitive dissonance it sets up in the minds of mixed-race children, of which there are inevitably increasing numbers given the tremendous degree of success Dr. Kings revolution has had on America.

I cannot begin to even imagine how it must feel to be told by your teacher that half your genetic code is evil and guilty. It is indeed a perpetual make-work program for child therapists across the land, trying to undo the emotional damage done by forcing such horrendous ideology on innocent children.

As I was recovering from the impact of the Tennessee mothers testimony, I was hit with a second emotional missile in the testimony of a Virginia mother, another immigrant, this time from China.

Mrs. Xi Van Fleet, speaking at a Loudoun, Virginia school board meeting, pointed out that she recognized CRT. She had seen its results before in her youth in China during the Maoist cultural revolution. She told the school board members, You are now teaching, training our children to be social justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history.

Mrs.Van Fleet went on to say, To me, and to a lot of Chinese, it is heartbreaking that we escaped communism and now we experience communism here. . . . The Communist regime used the same critical theory to divide people. . . . The only difference is they used class instead of race."

And, in a powerful illustration of Mrs. Van Fleets analogy to Maos Cultural Revolution, a group of Loudoun County parents and teachers were accused of racketeering and intimidating conservative parents who raised questions about the radical proposals. Members of the Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County allegedly compiled a list of outspoken conservatives in their community in order to track, hack and doxx them  or even scare them into self-censorship, mimicking the tactics of Maos thugs in the 1970s.

Some people have observed that they believe all politics is local. That may or may not be so. However, when politics and public policy get down to the local level, and it doesnt get much more local or personal than your childrens schools, then the rubber hits the road. Critical Race Theory has been simmering and percolating through the countrys universities and think tanks for a couple of decades. Now, the ideologues are seeking to implement this destructive and divisive philosophy on our nations children. Parents are justifiably horrified and are pushing back and pushing back hard. In the next few months, we will discover whether we really are still a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

More about that next week!
Pro-life group calls for Fauci's firing over NIAID funding of barbaric experiments on aborted babies

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A pro-life group held a rally outside the National Institutes of Health Thursday, calling for the firing of Dr. Anthony Fauci over the organizations role in funding experiments that use aborted babies.

Students for Life of America held a #FireFauci rally outside the National Institutes of Health headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, calling for the firing of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a branch of the NIH. While Fauci has received criticism from conservatives for his directives to combat the novel coronavirus, pro-lifers are seeking to hold him accountable for his role in providing funding to the University of Pittsburgh, which was used to perform experiments on aborted babies.

Attendees at the rally carried pink slips to show their support for Faucis firing. The pink slips contained phrases including Demand Fauci Resigns! Notice of Termination: Fire Fauci, as well as Notice of Termination accompanied by Name: Anthony Fauci and effective immediately, along with the hashtag #FireFauci.

The first speaker at the rally was Stephanie Stone, the Mid-East regional manager of Students for Life of America. We are here on this hot day, outside of the NIH today, to call for President Biden to fire Fauci, she said.

Dr. Fauci, as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, the NIAID, has allowed federal tax dollars to fund what should be considered a criminal act that is currently  taking place at the University of Pittsburgh. Right now, medical researchers at Pitt are undergoing a series of tests, she added.

These tests involve taking the scalp of five-month-old aborted children and grafting them on the backs of lab mice. Researchers then observed as the rats and mice grew human baby hairs.

Stone described the grant used to conduct the research as an insane misuse of not only taxpayer dollars but an absolutely abhorrent waste of precious human lives. According to Stone, Its shameful that this office has seen fit to put their stamp of approval on this project, let alone using taxpayer money to do it. Taking the lives of five-month-old [aborted] babies to graft their scalps onto lab mice is absurd, immoral and disgraceful.

We want to see Dr. Fauci fired for not only being involved but essentially giving his stamp of approval and our taxpayer dollars to something that is unethical, Stone proclaimed. She called on the Biden administration to fire Dr. Fauci and anyone involved in this inhumane scheme.

Herb Geraghty, the executive director of Rehumanize International, which he said exists to promote the protection of every human life from conception to natural death, also addressed the crowd.

Geraghty, a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, recalled how he attended a public hearing of the Pennsylvania House Health Committee on the experiments being done on aborted babies that caused him to feel shame about his alma mater: I learned that my beloved university was committing some of the most barbaric attacks against innocent human life that you could even possibly imagine.

He also lamented that the published report about the experiments involving aborted babies included photographs in which the hair of the poor innocent babies can be seen growing on the backs of rodents. He slammed the universitys experiments on babies up to 22 weeks gestation, noting that at that age, unborn babies have beating hearts and rapidly developing brains, they can respond to external stimuli, and they have all of their internal organs.

Under Pitts protocol for obtaining tissue from aborted babies, Geraghty noted that doctors conduct labor-induction abortions before immediately putting the fetal remains on ice to transport them to the laboratory where the bodies are dissected to harvest the liver. He maintained that it is possible that some of these fetuses dissected over the years were, in fact, infants who were born alive and died shortly after in transport to the research labs.

The final speaker, Alyssa Thoburn, serves as president of the Students for Life chapter in Fairfax, Virginia. Thoburn, a high school student who plans on attending college in the fall, agreed with the previous speakers that we need to fire Dr. Fauci.

Its one thing to accept whats going on. Its another entirely to know whats going on, approve of it and fund it. These taxpayer funds are responsible for the senseless deaths of five-month-old babies and the use of their bodies for nothing more than the grotesque curiosity of medical researchers, she added.

The event concluded as Stone read aloud a statement from Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins, who did not attend the event: Abusing anothers body who has given no consent and has no power to object is wrong. This is exactly why we must stand against this injustice and hold accountable those who have perpetuated and funded this inhumane practice. We call on President Biden to fire Anthony Fauci for being involved in this crime against humanity.

After urging pro-lifers to make noise about this unethical research and about Dr. Faucis involvement in it, Stone remarked that this injustice needs to stop.

The crowd chanted We are the pro-life generation while holding the pink slips and other signs expressing support for the pro-life movement and decrying medical research relying on the use of aborted babies.

The #FireFauci rally comes as the Biden administration has repeatedly expressed confidence in Fauci. At a press conference last week, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked if there was any circumstance under which Biden would fire Fauci. She bluntly responded with a No. Meanwhile, the president told a reporter that he was very confident in the head of NIAID.

In an interview with The Christian Post, Hawkins expressed hope that the event would add to the public pressure being put on NIH right now  including the Biden administration to  dramatically re-assess the role of Anthony Fauci in our government and his leadership.

While she acknowledged that the Biden administration is unlikely to fire Fauci, she stressed that the pro-life movement should not discount the effect of the grassroots movement of continuing to beat  the drum of whats happening with our government, making people aware of the ghastly research that were funding with our taxpayer dollars.

In addition to the #FireFauci rally, Students for Life is also circulating a petition asking Fauci to resign, citing the barbaric, taxpayer-funded research that has taken place at the University of Pittsburgh and the fact that Dr. Anthony Faucis office approved grants that funded it. As of Thursday afternoon, the petition had accumulated more than 1,600 signatures.

David Daleiden, the head of the pro-life group Center for Medical Progress, expanded on the research involving aborted babies' tissue conducted by the University of Pittsburgh using taxpayer dollars during his testimony before the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in early May. His organization recorded undercover video of Planned Parenthood officials discussing how they supply the university with the body parts of aborted babies that they use to conduct the experiments.

Daleiden told lawmakers that in addition to the $500,000 grant used to conduct experiments grafting the hair of unborn babies onto mice, Pitt received a $1.4M grant from the NIH to become a distribution hub for aborted fetal kidneys and bladders and other organs in the NIHs genitourinary development mapping atlas program.

In his testimony, Daleiden noted that Pitts grant application for this grant application from the NIH states that the university has unique access to a large number of high-quality aborted fetuses and can ramp up delivery of aborted fetal body parts across the country.

Appearing on Fox News Tucker Carlson Tonight last month, Daleiden suggested that the experiments conducted by the University of Pittsburgh using tissue from aborted babies might have broken the law: The fact that they were using scalps from five-month-old aborted babies, that means the heads of those children probably needed to be intact in order to get the scalps, which is an indication that those are either partial-birth abortion or even infants delivered alive and whole.

As Daleiden indicated, federal law currently prohibits the practice known as partial-birth abortion. The Partial-Birth Abortion Act was passed in 2003 and was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007.

For its part, the University of Pittsburgh has denied allegations of wrongdoing, with a spokesperson telling The College Fix that the University does not obtain fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood, does not use any of its state appropriation to fund fetal tissue research and follows all laws and regulations governing fetal tissue research.
Jack Phillips reveals abuse, vandalism and death threats after he refused to make gay wedding cake

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A Christian baker in Colorado who has been at the center of a yearslong debate after he declined to make a cake for a same-sex wedding has revealed the intense harassment and horrific response he and his business faced amid the fallout.

The emails [and] the phone calls were sometimes horrific, Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips recently told the Edifi With Billy Hallowell podcast of the events that followed his July 2012 cake refusal. Youd just hear profanity.

SUBSCRIBE: LISTEN TO EDIFI WITH BILLY HALLOWELL ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST PLATFORMS

Phillips, who shares his story in the new book, The Cost of My Faith, said he had to protect his staff and totally take over any and all incoming phone calls to the bakery, as his business was severely impacted by the anger and angst.

And before long, the nasty phone calls morphed into something far more diabolical.

"We had our store vandalized. We had death threats, he said. I had a guy call me up one day, said he was in his car, he's got a gun, he's on his way to the shop and he's going to blow my head off ... the man kept calling and calling. It was just crazy."

Listen to Phillips share his story and reveal why he wouldnt simply bake the cake as some implored:

Phillips, who has spent the past nine years amidst legal battles stemming from the refusal, recounted the day two men came into Masterpiece Cakeshop and sought a wedding cake.

I sat down, I introduced myself  I immediately knew what my answer would be, he said, noting that he said, Im sorry, guys, I dont do cakes for same-sex weddings.

The men were purportedly frustrated and left the bakery, with their anger leaving Phillips a bit shocked.

I was stunned. I tried to be polite, he said. I tried to, in that couple of sentences, let them know that Id be happy to serve them in any other capacity  but this was a cake, because of the message and my faith, that I couldnt create.

The baker said his phone started ringing within 20 minutes of the encounter and then emails started streaming in. That quick encounter was soon a national debate, and by October  just three months later  Phillips received notice that he was being sued by Colorado.

The [Colorado Civil Rights Commission] required me to change my policies, ignore my faith, Phillips explained. And when Im at the cake shop I dont get to exercise my freedom of religion.

The baker said he would have had no rights over the design of his cakes and that the incident would force him to report to the commission quarterly for two years as he retrained his staff to meet government standards. Phillips stood his ground and battled the government in court.

As the legal battle progressed, he eventually decided to simply stop making wedding cakes altogether.

We decided that the way around it was not to create wedding cakes at all, Phillips said. We were doing probably 300 wedding cakes every year. But we had to give that up.

Despite the chaotic problems that followed, Phillips has continued over the past decade to defend his decision. After years of seeing his case volley back and forth in the courts, the Supreme Court reversed Colorados punishment in 2018 and offered a victory of sorts.

Phillips still faces the fallout from a separate 2017 instance in which a customer contacted the bakery and asked for a cake to celebrate a gender transition  something Phillips declined. He has since been back in court to battle over that incident.

Despite all of the chaos, though, the baker made one thing clear: he believes God has sustained him throughout the ordeal.

Gods provided everything we needed all the way through, he said.

For more powerful and inspiring interviews, be sure to listen to Edifi With Billy Hallowell.
UK high court rules in favor of woman fired for saying men cant become women

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A U.K. high court judge has ruled in favor of a British woman who was fired from her job because she stated on social media that men could not become women.

Maya Forstaters contract with the Center for Global Development was not renewed in 2019 due to tweets opposing a government proposal to allow people to identify as the opposite sex.

In a decision released Thursday, High Court Justice Akhlaq Ur-Rahman Choudhury concluded that an earlier tribunal that had ruled against Forstater had erred in law.

Choudhury said in the written judgment that Forstater's beliefs were protected under the Equality Act because they "did not seek to destroy the rights of trans persons."

"Just as the legal recognition of civil partnerships does not negate the right of a person to believe that marriage should only apply to heterosexual couples, becoming the acquired gender 'for all purposes' within the meaning of GRA does not negate a person's right to believe, like the claimant, that as a matter of biology a trans person is still their natal sex," the judgment reads in part.

He added: We do not in any way seek to ignore or downplay the difficulties faced by trans persons seeking merely to live their lives peacefully in the gender with which they identify, irrespective of their natal sex. This case, however, is not about whether greater protection ought to be afforded to trans persons  the potential for offence (sic) cannot be a reason to exclude a belief from protection altogether.

Choudhury also said that while some might find Forstaters views on sex and gender to be offensive and even distressing, they nevertheless must be tolerated in a pluralist society.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission, which intervened in Forstater's defense, said it was right that religious and philosophical beliefs be protected.

Amanda Glassman, executive vice president of the Center for Global Development, released a statement in response to Thursdays ruling, expressing disappointment with the result.

Today's decision is a step backwards for inclusivity and equality for all, stated Glassman, as quoted by the BBC. The decision is disappointing and surprising because we believe Judge Tayler got it right when he found this type of offensive speech causes harm to trans people, and therefore could not be protected under the Equality Act.

In March 2019, Forstater was fired from her job when she posted a series of tweets on her personal account, which, among other things, pointed out that "men cannot change into women.

Forstater was also condemned for referring to a convicted pedophile and rapist as a "man" because despite being a biological male named Stephen Wood, he identifies as female and goes by the name Karen White. Prison officials allowed White to be transferred to a women's prison where he subsequently assaulted female inmates.

Celebrating the judgment, Forstater said: "Being free to hold a belief means the freedom from being harassed, discriminated against, or having your livelihood taken away from you if you express that belief. It doesn't mean the freedom to harass others. That was never what my case was about.

"Gender-critical beliefs and gender identity beliefs are both protected under the Equality Act and so, too, is lack of belief," she emphasized. "No one can be forced to profess a belief that they do not hold, like 'trans women are women, trans men are men,' and [be] punished if they refuse."

In December 2019, Judge James Tayler ruled that Forstater's dismissal was justified and that her beliefs, while grounded in biology, were not worthy of respect.

The decision had many critics, among them being bestselling author J.K. Rowling, who was berated online for expressing support for Forstater on Twitter.

Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult wholl have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill, tweeted Rowling at the time.

In April, Forstater filed an appeal, writing in an essay published on the website Medium that her case had profound ramifications regarding freedom of speech and expression.

What is at stake is the ability to have open debate, and the integrity and effectiveness of organizations that enable democracy and an open society, she wrote.
160 killed, 40 injured in Burkina Faso's deadliest attack in years amid rise in Islamic extremism

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As many as 160 civilians, including children, were killed and 40 others wounded in a violent raid on a village in Burkina Faso, marking the African countrys deadliest attack in years.

Jihadists assaulted and shot civilians, and burned down homes and the market in Solhan village in the Sahel country's Yagha province on the night of June 4, according to The Associated Press. Yagha is in northeastern Burkina Faso and borders Niger.

Hundreds of people fled to a nearby town to escape.

No group has claimed responsibility, but terrorism analysts have predicted the attack was likely carried out by al-Qaeda-linked group Jama'at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin, which has strengthened its presence in the troubled Sahel region.

The attacks were allegedly a response to volunteer fighters in the area who fight alongside the Army as community volunteers, which makes their area a more significant target.

The attack comes as Burkina Faso's military has struggled to stifle the exponential rise of Islamic extremism that has taken root in recent years and displaced thousands of people.

Agence France-Presse reports the military had virtually deserted the area in recent months.

After the attack, Burkina Faso President Roch Marc Christian Kabore called for three days of national mourning, condemning the civilian slaughter as barbaric and despicable.

The U.N.'s Peacebuilding Commission released a statement Monday saying that it's "profoundly saddened by the killing of over 160 civilians" by "unidentified armed assailants in the Sahel region of Burkina Faso."

Echoing statements issued earlier by the United Nations secretary-general, the chairperson of the African Union Commission, and other friends and partners of Burkina Faso, the commission condemns in the strongest terms the atrocious attack and expresses heartfelt condolences to the families who lost their loved ones, to the people and to the government of Burkina Faso, the statement continued.

In the face of this attack and other recent grave incidents that jeopardize peacebuilding and development gains, the commission calls for strengthening the bonds of solidarity and intensifying support to Burkina Faso and the Sahel region. It underlines the need to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Like many neighboring countries, Burkina Faso faces a security crisis due to armed raids and kidnappings across the region.

The U.N. estimates that more than 1.1 million people are internally displaced in Burkina Faso. According to the U.N., clashes between armed groups and security forces and attacks against communities prompted further displacement in recent months in northern and eastern Burkina Faso.

A spokesperson for the U.N. secretary-general said he is outraged by the killing and strongly condemns the heinous attack and underscores the urgent need for the international community to redouble support to member states in the fight against violent extremism and its unacceptable human toll.

This deadly attack in the middle of the night gave citizens no time to seek safety, a source said.

The slaughter of over 100 civilians, the highest number of casualties from a single attack in recent years in Burkina Faso, marks a shocking escalation in the violence that has engulfed the country since 2015," Manenji Mangundu, country director for the Norwegian Refugee Council in Burkina Faso, said in a statement.

"Killed in the middle of the night by armed assailants, the victims include women and children who were given no choice to flee, no chance to live."

Open Doors USAs World Watch List ranks Burkina Faso at No. 32 among countries where Christians face the most severe persecution due to a very high level of Islamic oppression.

Out of Burkina Fasos population of 20.9 million, around 4.9 million are Christian, and many Christians in the country are internally displaced persons.

Attacks on both Muslim and Christian houses of worship and religious leaders have spiked as jihadist and other militia groups expand their area of influence throughout the country, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom stated in a report last year. The government is struggling to rein in the violence, and poor performance and misconduct by government-affiliated forces are exacerbating the situation.

Suspected jihadists in Burkina Faso killed 15 Christians at a baptism ceremony last month.

In March, over 130 people were killed in a series of suspected Islamic extremist raids in neighboring Niger.
As of mid-May, more than 800 people had been killed in clashes with Myanmars junta as pro-democracy demonstrations swept the troubled country also known as Burma, according to the activist group the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. Myanmar, which had emerged from decades of military rule in 2011, has also garnered international scorn for the army-sponsored genocide of the Rohingya people, a Muslim minority in the Buddhist-majority nation.
Pro-Lifers Demand FDA Stop Buying Aborted Baby Body Parts for Mice Experiments

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Pro-Life groups are calling on the Department of Health and Human Services to put a halt to a recent contract allowing for the purchase of aborted babies' tissue for mice experiments.

CNS News reported Tuesday that the Food and Drug Administration, which is part of HHS, had signed a new contract last month to get "fresh" human fetal tissue to transplant into "humanized mice" so to give the rodents a functioning "human immune system."

"Fresh human tissues are required," explained a "presolicitation notice" for the contract CNS News quoted from, "for implantation into severely immune-compromised mice to create chimeric animals that have a human immune system."

Lila Rose, founder and president of the group Live Action, said in a statement released Tuesday that the contract acquiring aborted babies' tissue was "immoral and horrific."

"By issuing a contract to acquire human fetal tissue, the FDA is using American tax dollars to pay for human body parts that can only be acquired from aborted babies," said Rose.

"These children deserved care and protection, but instead were violently stripped of their fundamental rights and are now being sold piecemeal."

Rose also explained that the company FDA is contracting with, Advanced Bio Resources, is presently under a federal investigation regarding its potential ties to Planned Parenthood's alleged illegal sale of aborted baby body parts for profit.

"We call on the FDA to terminate its contract with ABR immediately and cease the experimentation on the bodies of aborted children," added Rose.

Cathy Ruse, senior fellow for Legal Studies with the Family Research Council, also denounced the FDA's contract for fetal tissue, calling it "shocking" and "upsetting."

"Every part of this transaction is a tragedy," said Ruse. "A woman is driven to abort her baby, too often by coercion or abandonment, and there in the shadows is a government contractor waiting to tear apart the baby's body to deliver pieces in exchange for payment."

In June, the House Appropriations Committee released a draft bill that included a ban on the National Institutes of Health from using fetal tissue acquired through elective abortions.

Ruse of FRC explained that she and her organization "agree with that restriction, and do not believe that HHS and the FDA should approve research of this kind."

"The FDA owes the American people an explanation as to how such a contract could have been approved. Americans demand to have a more ethical government  one that does not traffic in the remains of human beings," said Ruse.
Sexual harassment, assault and sending nude photos common in British schools: report

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Sexual harassment and the sharing of nude photos have become commonplace in British schools, while many children feel pressured into sexual activity, a shocking new Ofsted report has found.

The review of 900 children spanned 32 state and private schools and colleges, and concluded that sexual harassment, including online sexual abuse, has become "normalised" for children and young people.

Around 9 in 10 girls said that sexist name-calling and receiving unwanted explicit pictures or videos happened "a lot" or "sometimes."

Inspectors heard how boys use WhatsApp or Snapchat to share nude photos among themselves like a "collection game."

Around two-thirds of girls said they felt pressured to do sexual things they did not want to do, while a majority also report unwanted touching.

Children also told inspectors during the eight-week review that sexist name-calling had become "commonplace."

Yet inspectors found that many "don't see the point of challenging or reporting this harmful behavior because it's seen as a normal experience."

"The frequency of these harmful sexual behaviors means that some children and young people consider them normal," the report said.

School children also felt that teachers were unaware of the prevalence of sexual harassment.

The review recommends that schools "act on the assumption" that sexual harassment is affecting their pupils, and that they take a "whole-school approach" aimed at creating a culture where sexual harassment is not tolerated.

Chief Inspector Amanda Spielman said she was "shocked" by the review, and that the findings showed the need to "change attitudes."

"It's alarming that many children and young people, particularly girls, feel they have to accept sexual harassment as part of growing up. Whether it's happening at school or in their social life, they simply don't feel it's worth reporting," she said.

"This is a cultural issue; it's about attitudes and behaviors becoming normalized, and schools and colleges can't solve that by themselves. The government needs to look at online bullying and abuse, and the ease with which children can access pornography."

Simon Calvert of The Christian Institute said that the problem could not be addressed without also addressing sex education.

"The fact is, the sex education industry needs to take its share of the blame because it is obsessed with explicitness and hostile to the Christian sexual ethic," he said.

"It's time the government made space in sex education for a diversity of opinions instead of the monolithic socially liberal agenda that currently dominates.

"Christians should be allowed opportunities to explain the benefits of self-control and the joys of marriage."

Read his full comment here.

Originally published at Christian Today
Texas hospital will remove pastor's banner, defends chaplain program after atheist group complains

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An atheist legal organization has sent a complaint letter to a public hospital in Texas for displaying a large banner at its parking garage asking God for protection and making multiple chaplain videos with Christian content.

The hospital says it plans to remove the banner as part of its original plan, saying it was only supposed to be displayed temporarily during the pandemic.

The Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation sent the letter late last month to the University Medical Center of Lubbock, demanding that it remove the banner.

The banner includes a message attributed to Rev. Wendell Davis of Lyons Chapel Baptist Church that reads: Gracious Lord, for all of UMC I pray Your divine protection over them, guidance within them & provision for them daily. ... Firm, not fearful.

Written by FFRF Staff Attorney Christopher Line and addressed to UMC President and CEO Mark Funderburk, the letter called the banner display an unconstitutional endorsement of religion over nonreligion.

FFRF, which pressures government entities nationwide to end any perceived endorsement of religion, cites the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prevents governments from establishing an official religion.

We urge UMC to recognize its obligation to provide all citizens with an environment free from religious endorsement by removing this exclusionary display, wrote Line.

Also at issue, according to the letter and statement posted to the FFRF website on Wednesday, were a series of chaplain videos that specifically endorsed Christianity.

In addition, a concerned University Medical Center community member has reported that the Medical Center creates videos featuring chaplains that promote and endorse Christianity, stated FFRF in the statement.

By publishing overtly Christian messages, the University Medical Center violates the Establishment Clause  When a public hospital regularly promulgates religious concepts to employees and the public, it sends a message that the government supports those ideas.

UMC provided a statement from Funderburk to The Christian Post explaining that the banner will be taken down in the "near future," keeping with earlier plans for it only to be temporarily displayed.

UMC Health System recognizes diversity in our workplace and in our patient population. UMC Health System also understands the delicate balance between the free exercise of religion and government neutrality, read statement.

As per our original plan to replace the banner once our COVID-19 census diminished, it will be removed in the very near future and replaced with a new message of support, as we emerge from the pandemic.

Regarding the chaplain program and its practices, Funderburk stated that before and since the first COVID-19 patient was admitted to UMC, no patient, employee or visitor has been compelled to participate in any expression or practice of faith.

Like many hospitals, University Medical Center has a chaplain program designed to improve patients health and well-being, he continued.

These professionals skillfully and compassionately attend the spiritual and emotional needs, and support the health and welfare of UMCs patients, staff, and visitors.
Whistleblower challenges SBC leaders response to Russell Moore letters Executive Committee searching for firm to conduct independent review

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Days after Southern Baptist Convention leaders Mike Stone and Ronnie Floyd challenged claims by the former leader of the denominations Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, Russell Moore, that they mishandled a crisis of sexual abuse in the convention, a Texas pastor has come forward with evidence that he claims supports Moores claims.

Phillip Bethancourt, the lead pastor of Central Church in College Station, Texas, who at the time was an ERLC staffer, said he felt compelled to become a Southern Baptist whistleblower in a letter to Stone and Floyd published publicly on Thursday.

Floyd, who is president of the SBC's Executive Committee, said he did not have the same recollection" of accounts presented by Moore of the SBC's mishandling of sexual abuse allegations lodged against SBC churches.

Stone, a former chairman of the Executive Committee who is now an SBC presidential nominee, was accused of trying to delay the formation of a credentials committee to assess churches reported to be mishandling sexual abuse." But he dismissed the claims as scandalous, unscriptural, ungodly and outrageous. He also noted that he is a survivor of sexual abuse himself.

In his Thursday letter, however, Bethancourt suggested the SBC leaders were not being truthful.

I am writing to you in regard to your public responses to the recently publicized letters from Russell Moore. Ronnie, you said you do not have the same recollection of the events. Mike, your video called Moores claims absolutely slanderous, ungodly, and an outrageous lie, the Texas pastor began. I cannot remain quiet in light of your responses, so I am compelled to do something no one would want to do--become a Southern Baptist whistleblower.

He continued: Wouldnt the best way to get to the truth be to hear the two of you in your own words? Your own words actually corroborate the claims in Russell Moores letters--the same claims you now suggest are false. I believe that when Southern Baptists hear you in your own words, they will be wise enough to recognize the truth.

He shared three audio clips from the Nashville Caring Well Conference debrief meeting from October 8, 2019. At the conference, attorney and abuse advocate Rachael Denhollander was allowed to speak freely about sexual abuse in the denomination. In a conversation with Moore, she voiced strong words about how the SBC Executive Committee staff handled a sexual abuse survivor.

In the first clip shared by Bethancourt, Floyd appears to question why conference speakers weren't restricted on what they were allowed to say because it came off as an attack on SBC leadership.

How are we supposed to respond, in your minds, to people who would say, Why in the world, would we have a conference and let people degrade the Southern Baptist Convention, attack its leadership, our churches?'  How are we supposed to do that, and we let them say what they want to say? Floyd asked while mentioning that the Executive Committee financially supported the SBC Sexual Abuse Advisory Group.

Moore noted that the speakers were not restricted because were not in a criminal conspiracy to cover up what happened.

If we had [put parameters on what speakers could say], what you would end up with right now is three days of Washington Post stories and New York Times stories about the parameters that we put on people," Moore replied. "So that the charge would be only the people that were willing to come in and participate in the cover-up were allowed to be there."

In a second clip, Floyd asked how he should handle Executive Committee trustee complaints about how Denhollander has come after them in her Caring Well Conference interview.

Moore noted that the ERLC didnt script anybody and added that the commission wanted to "hear from everybody's heart without a muzzle put on them." He suggested that the Executive Committee not do stupid stuff again when dealing with a survivors public disclosure of abuse.

In a third clip, Floyd also explained that his primary focus was not survivors of sexual abuse but to preserve the base.

Moore replied, "What I would say to you is that we don't have one base."

Floyd had already stated that he is hearing threats that some churches may stop their Cooperative Program giving because of the Caring Well Conference," Bethancourt wrote in the letter. "So, it certainly seemed to us in the room that what it meant to preserve the base was to protect the money."

Bethancourt also shared audio clips from a May 2019 meeting in Atlanta on sexual abuse that included Stone and Floyd, in which he claims that "their resistance to the immediate formation of a standing credentials committee became a primary point of disagreement." The credentials committee was to assess churches reported to be mishandling sexual abuse allegations.

"Stones own words corroborate Russell Moores recounting of our contentious discussion on this subject," Bethancourt wrote.

Bethancourts revelations come as a growing chorus of SBC messengers call for an independent investigation of how the denominations leaders have dealt with what Moore called a crisis of sexual abuse in the denomination via two leaked letters.

Moore alleged leaders mishandled the crisis through methods such as intimidating whistleblowers into silence and exonerating churches with credible allegations of negligence of sexual abuse victims.

In a statement Thursday, Floyd said he called the May 2019 meeting in Atlanta to discuss how to handle charges of sex abuse in the denomination. He said the discussion was confidential and argued that Bethancourt's release of the audio from the meeting was an attempt to mischaracterize them as an effort to avoid addressing the realities of sex abuse."

"The fact of the matter is that immediately following the meeting and even before leaving the airport, I instructed our staff and legal team to begin the creation of an SBC Credentials Committee," Floyd explained. "That work continued throughout the weekend, and by early the next week, the framework for what we now know as the Credentials Committee was born."

"Any suggestion that the purpose of the meeting was to oppose efforts to address sex abuse is not credible when given the full context of the meeting and our immediate action to create the Credentials Committee."

Floyd said the discussions from the meeting "reflect leaders engaging in a scriptural process of coming together with others who have differing opinions on complicated issues and of discussing those differences honestly with a goal of how to best move forward.

Floyd added that following the October Caring Well Conference, he requested a meeting with Moore and Bethancourt to "better understand how to respond to churches that had questions coming out of the conference."

"That was the extent of the conversation," he stated. "However, I apologize for any offense that may have resulted from my remarks."

The executive committee president further added that since last weekend, "the Executive Committee staff leadership has been in the process of talking with and potentially securing a highly credible outside firm with the intent of conducting an independent third-party review of the accusations recently levied at the SBC Executive Committee."

Stone has denied allegations that he tried to delay the formation of the committee investigating how the SBC handled claims of sex abuse against churches. Last Saturday, he released a video stating that Moore's second leaked letter lacked credibility.

"If you take his letter at face value, then [Moore] has known about cover-up, intimidation, bullying, stonewalling, barriers, pressure, all of these sorts of things against victims of sex abuse," Stone said. "He has known about lies and back-room deals and corruption. He has known about it, not for days or weeks, or literally months. He has known about it, supposedly for years while he has not breathed a word. Russell hasn't stood behind these accusations. He doesn't even have the professional decency to issue this as a press release through credible news sources."

Stone added that his "very first act as chairman" of the SBC executive committee in the summer of 2018 was to "put together a motion to accept a request from the ERLC that we give them what ultimately was $250,000." He said he requested permission to do that because of his personal story, "not known to anybody else in the world at the time except me and the man who abused me."

"I wanted the privilege of initiating this action on the part of the executive committee. ... After that was unanimously passed by the subcommittee and I knew that it was going to be approved by the full plenary body, I left that committee room to a nearby bathroom where I vomited, not because I am weak or I was upset, but just the emotion  decades of emotion  came bubbling forth as I was so grateful to be a part of addressing this horrific and heinous injustice committed against the most vulnerable members of our Southern Baptist churches," he said.

"To think that somebody with that passion and that personal past is later going to get together in a back room with the subcommittee and conspire to cover up for pedophiles and the molestations they commit against our most vulnerable children, it's outlandish."

Ronnie Parrott of Christ Community Church in Huntersville, North Carolina, and Grant Gaines, pastor of Belle Aire Baptist Church in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, are two of the most prominent SBC voices calling for an independent investigation.

In light of the recent allegations made against the executive committee by Russell Moore, former president of the ERLC, in letters dated February 24, 2020 and May 31, 2021  we move that the messengers ask the newly elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention to appoint a task force to hire a third party to investigate the allegations made against the executive committee of the SBC in said letters, including but not limited to allegations of mishandling sexual abuse cases, mistreatment of sexual abuse victims, a pattern of intimidation, and resistance to sexual abuse reform initiatives, the pastors wrote in a statement Saturday.

We further move that the task force report back to this convention at our next annual meeting with the findings of the investigation as well as suggestions for actions to be taken by our convention.

The 2021 SBC Annual Meeting, set to take place June 15-16 in Nashville, Tennessee, is expected to draw a historic crowd. The convention is expected to address a range of disagreements on critical race theory, sexual abuse and gender issues.
Why I advocate for women church planters as biblical and necessary

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The apostle Paul ranks as the greatest church-planting apostle and missionary the world has ever known. He determined to build the church wherever Christ was not named. At great risk to himself, he entered city after city to proclaim the gospel and organize converts into churches.

Yet, the great apostle did not achieve these things alone. Paul always worked in teams. To the delight of some and the consternation of others, Pauls church-planting teams included women. When he wrote the Christians in Philippi, he instructed them to help Euodia and Syntyche. Paul describes Euodia and Syntyche as women who contended at my side in the cause of the gospel, along with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life (Phil. 4:3).

While Paul does not specify their exact role, these women labored side by side as equals with Paul, and their work was not ancillary or support work but gospel work. Paul regarded them with the same title he often uses of male partners in ministryco-workers (Rom. 16:3; 1 Cor. 3:9; Phm. 1:24).

As Michelle Lee-Barnewall observes in Neither Complementarian nor Egalitarian, The focus on authority, leadership, equality, and rights tends to lead to yes or no answers that do not prompt deeper questioning.

As Christians continue to debate the role of women in ministry, we need to ask why todays church doesnt have more teams comprised of men and women as Pauls were. We need to ask why typical debates about women and their roles end up with women being restricted from areas of service that the Bible nowhere prohibits. We need to ask deeper questions about how we regard women who do serve on ministry teams.

I fear contemporary debates obscure a vital truth: Women are essential to fulfilling the Great Commission. Their lives and ministries are not nice to have, but necessary, as Bible teacher Jen Wilkin has often observed. Or as Aimee Byrd argues in No Little Women, our sisters are necessary allies in the work God has given the church. Indeed, the Lords last words in Matthew 28:1920 are embraced as a charge for the entire churchwomen as well as men.

Perhaps many of our churches are ineffective in advancing the Great Commission precisely because we have sidelined one-half of the body of Christ. In 2011, I began arguing for substantial womens involvement in ministry work. At the time, I think I saw the problems more clearly than I saw any solutions. But following years of child- and sex-abuse scandals and increasingly misogynistic, patriarchal, and mean-spirited evangelical responses to women, that earlier diagnosis now seems quaint. The need to increase womens leadership opportunities appears more urgent to me than ever.

So when we planted Anacostia River Church in 2015, our first ministry as elders was to meet monthly with the older women in our congregation, not only to disciple them in the spirit of Titus 2:13 but also to give them direct input into our lives and ministries.

The presence, faith, courage, and perseverance of our sisters in difficult contexts provides the surest foothold we have for reaching overlooked people.

Their biblical wisdom and intuition have proven invaluable. It was the older women who suggested the elders attend womens fellowship meetings so women could have greater access to the pastors. We attend not as the teachers but as learners and brothers, benefitting from the fellowship and gifts of our sisters. Women comprise the majority of our deacons and give invaluable guidance to the church. We have committed, Lord willing, to making our next couple of staff hires women earning equitable salaries, the first of which should happen this summer.

We have not figured everything out, but the pastors and the congregation have been attempting to make the flourishing of our sisters a theological and practical priority. That has required jettisoning fear-based hesitations that have more to do with restricting women than promoting them. It has also required taking seriously how culturally bound so much of complementarian teaching is and gleaning from womens perspectives in Black and brown church communities.

Truth be told, our sisters are most often on the frontlines of gospel advance wherever the work is most difficult. Thats true on the mission field, as groups from Africa Inland Mission to YWAM report that women make up 80 percent of single people willing to enter missionary service. Its also true in neglected Black and brown neighborhoods, where membership in local churches is predominantly female, and many church starts are headed by women.

At The Crete Collective, a church-planting network that launched last year to reach neglected Black and brown neighborhoods, weve also made the decision to prioritize the leadership of godly women. We believe this priority to be a necessary correction to years of extrabiblical restriction in conservative Christian spaces, restrictions that sometimes go beyond home and church to most every area of Christian endeavor.

Our first executive-level hire is Dennae Pierre, who not only brings experience in church planting and network leadership but also her perspective as a Latina Christian and immigrant. Prioritizing womens leadership also means including more women on the board as we grow. And it means focusing our training on teams that invite and welcome women rather than solely targeting male pastors and lead planters.

Many church planting efforts assume a middle-class, white cultural norm, but the deeper we take the gospel into poor, neglected, Black and brown communities, the less that model transfers or serves the needs of those communities. In fact, if class and cultural assumptions go unexamined, even well-intentioned planters and churches can hurt communities and be stymied in their efforts to evangelize and serve their communities.

In an era of sharply divisive social and political issues, we desperately need more leadership from the diverse parts of Christs bodyespecially Black and brown women, immigrant communities, and the poor among us.

Female leaders such as Christina Edmondson and Michelle Reyes have helped to make church planting more aware of and sensitive to mental health, cultural competence, anti-racism, justice, and mercyboth within their local churches and in the church at large. And a countless number of women without national followings have done the work of evangelism, led in public worship, provided biblical counseling, offered various forms of training, used their administrative gifts, and simply made themselves available wherever needs exist.

The presence, faith, courage, and perseverance of our sisters in difficult contexts provides the surest foothold we have for reaching overlooked people. Our sisters may better reach homes headed by single women, which exist in high numbers in America. They may provide more empathetic leadership and care in communities filled with complex and acute trauma. And in a church world riddled with high-profile scandal among pastors, our sisters may be a much-needed source of insight, accountability, and health in our leadership culture.

Current disparities in funding for African American and Hispanic church plants might also point to the need for more women in leadership. It may be that the sometimes unrecognized and unpaid leadership and skills of Black and brown women provide a hidden subsidy to church plants in ethnic and sometimes neglected contexts.

We can benefit from womens leadership in all these ways and more, whether or not we believe women can or should hold the office of pastor. The flourishing of women is good for the flourishing of the church and the community.

Our sisters have much to teach us if we would listen and give them genuine leadership opportunities. Apollos learned from Priscilla and Aquila, Pauls ministry companions and co-workers. The Roman church learned from Phoebe, who is commended by Paul as a deacon and benefactor (Rom. 16:12). Which women are we learning from today?
Nikki Haley slams Kamala Harris for not going to the border: You cant fix what you cant see

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Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley called Vice President Kamala Harris border response embarrassing" because Harris has yet to visit the U.S.-Mexico border since being appointed border czar on March 24.

This is embarrassing, Haley, the former South Carolina governor, said on Fox News America Reports during a Tuesday interview, discussing Harris' travel to Guatemala and Mexico.

I dont know what the problem is, the Republican continued. Clearly, shes fearful, but Kamala Harris was given one job, one job, and that was to deal with the border. And any leader knows you cant fix what you cant see. She hasnt been on the ground. She hasnt talked to border patrol. She doesnt know what is happening there.

Vice President Harris was tasked with fixing the border crisis. Yet, she's been in office for five months and she still cant explain why she hasnt been there.



Its embarrassing.https://t.co/2R4gzwTWKo  Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) June 9, 2021

Since the vice president has received criticism for not visiting the border, NBCs Lester Holt interviewed Harris on Tuesday about whether she has plans to visit the southern border.

Do you have any plans to visit the border? Holt asked her.

At some point, Harris said as she threw her hands into the air.

We are going to the border. Weve been to the border, so this whole thing about the border, weve been to the border. Weve been [to] the border, she added, referring to other Biden administration officials.

You havent been to the border, Holt responded.

And I havent been to Europe, Harris said as she appeared frustrated by the question. I dont understand the point that youre making. Im not discounting the importance of the border  I care about whats happening at the border.

Haley criticized Harris for dodging the question about visiting the border by bringing up Europe.

So she says she wants to go to the root cause, and then she brings up Europe, Haley said. No one has given her the job of Europe. She got the job of the border.

Haley said she appreciates that Harris traveled to Guatemala and Mexico recently because both countries leaders have blamed the Biden administration as "the reason they are having all these problems at the border."

Haley noted how Harris tone on immigration has changed since she originally implored immigrants to come to the U.S. but now says, do not come.

This is the same woman that literally tweeted out, come one, come all, were open for everyone.  Now she says, do not come. Do you know what says do not come? When you show up at the border and you really have actions speak louder than words, Haley explained.

I dont know what her fear is of the border, but clearly she has one, she continued. And I dont know what Bidens fear of the border is, but he has one. What I will call it is flat-out denial. They think that if they dont go, it wont be real. Its very real.

At a press conference in Guatemala City, Harris said, I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making the dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border  do not come, do not come," Harris said.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki defended Harris during a press briefing Tuesday and said she might visit the border at some point.

I dont have any trips to preview for you or predict a timeline for that, Psaki said. But what I would reiterate is that her assignment was to work with country or leaders in the Northern Triangle to address root causes, address corruption, ensure were working together to address humanitarian concerns.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, tweeted on Tuesday that Biden and Harris could could fix the border crisis tomorrow by ending catch and release and by reinstating the Remain in Mexico policy."

"But neither Kamala or Joe are willing to do that," he said.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris could fix the border crisis tomorrow by ending "catch and release" and by reinstating the Remain in Mexico policy.



But neither Kamala or Joe are willing to do that. pic.twitter.com/eYIyL1HQxF  Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) June 8, 2021

Cruz noted how Harris laughs it off when asked about the border.

We dont have a border crisis in Europe, Cruz said during a Fox News interview, referring to Harris recent comment.

We have a border crisis on the southern border, Cruz said. Come to Texas. Come to the Rio Grande Valley. Come to McAllen. Come see the cages that the Biden Harris administration has built and then, even more importantly, stand up and be willing to enforce our laws to fix it because thats not what theyre doing right now.

Preliminary Customs and Border Protection data shows that the surge of illegal immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico southern border in the fiscal year 2021 has surpassed the totals of every year since 2006 with four months left, Axios reported.

The U.S. formally ended the Trump-era remain in Mexico policy last week. This policy required Central American asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico and wait for their asylum cases to be adjudicated in the U.S., Reuters reported.

The Biden administration has reversed many of former President Donald Trumps immigration policies and halted border wall construction.

The Biden administration said it might file a lawsuit against Texas since Gov. Greg Abbott mandated that state licenses be pulled for shelters used to house unaccompanied minors who cross the border.

A Monday letter from the Department of Health & Human Services, the federal agency responsible for caring for the unaccompanied minors, said that Texas would be violating immigration law by banning the shelters.

Abbott said HHS's letter is pressure from the White House to support its immigration policies.

The Biden administration is yet again pressuring Texas to aid its illegal immigration program and force our state to do its job, Abbott said in a statement. The federal government caused this problem and should be solely responsible for the care of these children. No child will be uncared for. Texas will remain focused on doing our jobprotecting Texans.
Burger King donating up to $250K to LGBT group in swipe at Chick-fil-A

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A prominent fast-food company announced that it's donating nearly half of the proceeds from its sales of chicken sandwiches to an LGBT activist group while taking a shot at one of its competitors.

Burger King, one of the largest and most popular global fast food companies, sent out a tweet Thursday announcing that the #ChKing says LGBTQ+ rights! The tweet, which is now pinned to the Burger King Twitter account, referred to the ChKing, the restaurant chains newly created chicken sandwich.

During #pridemonth (even on Sundays) your chicken sandwich craving can do good! We are making a donation* to @HRC for every ChKing sold!

Burger King will donate 40 cents to the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT activist group in the United States, for every ChKing sold between June 3 and June 30. The fast-food chain will donate up to $250,000 to HRC, a goal that can be reached with the sale of 625,000 chicken sandwiches.

the #ChKing says LGBTQ+ rights!



during #pride month (even on Sundays ????) your chicken sandwich craving can do good! we are making a donation* to @HRC for every Ch'King sold ??????????  Burger King (@BurgerKing) June 4, 2021

The reference to Sundays in the tweet is seen as a veiled swipe at Chick-fil-A, another major fast-food chain that, unlike nearly all of its primary competitors, does not open on Sundays because of the religious beliefs of the restaurant chains founders.

Steve Cortes, a Newsmax host and former Trump campaign employee, took issue with Burger Kings jab at Chick-fil-A for closing on Sundays: This corporation makes it clear it mocks Christians (and other religious people) and doesnt want our business.

First, Burger King food is terrible.



Second, we should welcome the acceleration of the Great Sorting. This corporation makes it clear it mocks Christians (and other religious people) and doesnt want our business. So be it. pic.twitter.com/F2I8dCHeCT  Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) June 8, 2021

In the past, Chick-fil-A has come under fire from progressives because its CEO, Dan Cathy, has expressed opposition to same-sex marriage. A recent article in The Daily Beast alleges that Cathy is among several donors to the National Christian Charitable Foundation, a charity that's opposed to the passage of the Equality Act. Supporters of the Equality Act paint the wide-reaching legislative initiative as necessary to prevent discrimination against LGBT people. Opponents of the bill worry about its implications for religious liberty and womens sports.

More than 400 major companies have signed onto the Human Rights Campaigns Business Coalition for the Equality Act, a coalition of companies that have publicly declared their support for the Equality Act. Although Burger King has made its support for LGBT activism quite clear over the years, it is not a member of HRCs Business Coalition for the Equality Act.

In addition to supporting the Equality Act, the Human Rights Campaign called on the Biden administration to strip accreditation from Christian schools that subscribe to biblical beliefs about sexuality and marriage, and therefore oppose homosexuality.

The group has also steadfastly opposed efforts by states to prevent boys who identify as female from competing in girls' sports.

In response to the passage of such a bill in Alabama, Alphonso David, the president of HRC, characterized it as a politically motivated bill designed to discriminate against an already vulnerable population. Conservative political commentator Paul Joseph Watson slammed Burger Kings partnership with HRC, which he described as a radical LGBT lobby group that supports child sex changes.

Burger King under the leadership of CEO Daniel Schwartz have begun donating 40 cents for every sale of its new chicken sandwich to a radical LGBT lobby group that supports child sex changes. https://t.co/dpkmGFCAZm  Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) June 8, 2021

Speaking to USA Today, a Burger King spokesperson defended the companys decision to collaborate with HRC: This is a community we love dearly and have proudly supported over the years, so we couldnt miss an opportunity to take action and help shine a light on the important conversation happening.

Burger Kings partnership with the Human Rights Campaign is not the first example of the restaurant chain embracing LGBT activism. In 2014, Burger King introduced a Gay Pride Whopper in San Francisco ahead of the annual Pride Parade. While the Gay Pride Whopper tasted and looked the same as a regular Whopper, it was packaged in a rainbow-colored wrapper containing the message we are all the same inside.

Additionally, the San Francisco Burger King, which was located along the parade route, handed out more than 50,000 rainbow-colored Burger King crowns to those participating in the parade. The Gay Pride Whopper was sold exclusively in San Francisco for a limited time and the proceeds from its sales went to the Burger King McLamore Foundation, which provided scholarships to LGBT high school seniors who were slated to graduate in the spring of 2015.
Judge orders Christian teacher who opposes trans pronouns be reinstated by school district

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A judge has ordered a Virginia school district to reinstate an elementary school teacher who was placed on leave after criticizing a proposed policy that would require him and other teachers to use the preferred names and pronouns of trans-identified students.

Byron Tanner Cross, a physical education teacher at Leesburg Elementary School, was put on administrative leave not long after he expressed his opposition to the proposed pronoun policy at a Loudon County School Board meeting in May.

In an order released Tuesday, Judge James E. Plowman of the 20th Judicial Circuit of Virginia granted Cross' request for a temporary injunction against the school board's decision to place him on leave, which will expire in December.

Plowman wrote that putting Cross on leave was extreme and an unconstitutional action since the teachers words, even if controversial, were nevertheless permissible.

The Court agrees with Plaintiffs analysis and concludes that Defendants actions to suspend the Plaintiff, as well as the additional restrictions placed upon him, adversely affected his constitutionally protected speech, wrote the judge.

Here, it was clear that the Plaintiff was speaking as a citizen, not in his official capacity. His speech was not conducted at his usual place of employment, occurred during non-working hours and at a forum where public comment was invited.

Alliance Defending Freedom President and CEO Michael Farris, whose legal nonprofit is representing Cross, said in a statement that he is pleased at the courts decision to halt Loudoun County Public Schools retaliation against Tanner Cross while his lawsuit continues.

Educators are just like everybody else  they have ideas and opinions that they should be free to express. Advocating for solutions they believe in should not cost them their jobs, stated Farris.

Dozens of other teachers have shared their beliefs on various policies without retaliation; Tanner deserves to be treated with the same respect.

On May 25, the Loudon County School Board held a meeting to debate a proposed policy, known as Policy 8040, that would require staff and students to use the chosen pronouns of students who identify as transgender or gender-expansive.

LCPS staff shall allow gender-expansive or transgender students to use their chosen name and gender pronouns that reflect their gender identity without any substantiating evidence, regardless of the name and gender recorded in the students permanent educational record, a draft of the policy explains.

Inadvertent slips in the use of names or pronouns may occur; however, staff or students who intentionally and persistently refuse to respect a students gender identity by using the wrong name and gender pronoun are in violation of this policy.

At the meeting, Cross argued that as a Christian, he is unable to affirm that a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa.

My name is Tanner Cross, and I am speaking out of love for those who suffer with gender dysphoria, stated Cross. I love all of my students, but I will never lie to them regardless of the consequences.

Im a teacher, but I serve God first and I will not affirm that a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa because its against my religion," he added.

Two days after the meeting, Cross was placed on administrative leave with pay "pending an investigation of allegations that [he] engaged in conduct that had a disruptive impact on the operations of Leesburg Elementary School.

Cross was prohibited from entering the property of Loudon County Public Schools for any event unless permitted to do so.

In response, Cross filed a lawsuit against the school board and other school district officials, accusing them of engaging in viewpoint-based retaliation.

 this case is not about how schools should treat students who struggle with gender dysphoria, stated the legal filing.

It is about whether public schools can punish a teacher for objecting, as a private citizen, to a proposed policy, in a forum designated for the purpose of considering whether to implement such policies, where the policy would force him to express ideas about human nature, unrelated to the schools curriculum, that he believes are false.
Pastor accused of touching at least 21 girls sues megachurch for defamation in $3.1M lawsuit

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Wayne Aarum, a pastor and operator of the Circle C Ranch Christian camp in Delevan, who has been accused of inappropriately touching at least 21 teenage girls in the past, is now suing The Chapel megachurch over what he says are manufactured allegations against him to gain control of the camps land.

In the civil lawsuit filed on June 2, Aarum, 55, who leads the First Baptist Church of Arcade, and sits on the board of the Living Waters Ministries Inc., which runs the Christian camp, is seeking a collective $3.125 million in damages from The Chapel for "harm to reputation, mental anguish, humiliation, embarrassment, and emotional injury," as well as financial damages.

For over one and a half years The Chapel has been leading an aggressive campaign against Circle C Ranch, our family, and the ministry legacy of Mr. Wes. Throughout this entire time we have done our best in trying to resolve the issues they have put forth. We have requested to meet with them several times and each time they have refused, a statement on the camps website said, explaining the reason for the lawsuit.

We have repeatedly requested to know who the anonymous accusations are coming from and again, with the exception of one instance, they have refused. When requesting that we follow the guidelines for settling disputes as outlined by Jesus in Matthew 18, we were told that Matthew 18 doesnt apply. Therefore, we have chosen to follow the instructions given by the Apostle Paul in Romans 13 to use the God-appointed government institutions and have officially lodged a legal complaint against The Chapel, the camp continued.

While this is not the path we had ever hoped for, we simply refuse to allow this unjust activity to continue any longer for the sake of the camp, our families, and the lives of so many we pray are yet to be impacted for good by the ministry God birthed over 53 years ago in the heart of Mr. Wes.

At least 21 women reportedly told lawyers hired by The Chapel that they were inappropriately touched by Aarum who worked with the church as one of the directors of student youth groups from 1990 to 2000.

A MinistrySafe investigation cited by WKBW alleged that Aarums inappropriate touching of the girls included: "stroking legs (outside clothing and on bare skin); stroking genital area outside clothing; touching vaginal area outside clothing (in shorts or jeans); touching, rubbing and stroking breasts, outside clothing; stroking labia, outside clothing; stroking from hips to breasts, clothed, on the side of the body; touching legs and knees; hand placed on upper thigh; pressing penis into back of girl (hugging from behind); rubbing penis repeatedly in a girls presence and the extended hug of a partially dressed girl."

In his lawsuit, Aarum accuses The Chapels Executive Pastor John A. Camardo and members of his staff of orchestrating the campaign to damage his reputation because he refuses to support the sale of some of the 315 acres of land connected with his camp to developers seeking to build a $500 million windmill project.

The 315 acres of land owned by Plaintiff Living Waters Ministries Inc. lies astride the most direct route for the windmill projects essential transmission line. Without a transmission line to transport the electricity generated by the windmills in an economically feasible fashion, the windmill projects economic value diminishes substantially, the lawsuit said.

The windmill project developer made efforts, beginning in 2015 and continuing in 2019 to purchase access to the land controlled by the board of directors of Living Waters Ministries Inc. both for the construction and operation of very large windmills and for the construction and operation of the very large transmission line associated with the windmill project.

On each occasion, Wayne Aarum, as spokesperson for the board of directors, refused to sell or lease any portion of the land used by the Circle C Ranch for such purposes  recognizing that the corporation was giving up hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next decade, the lawsuit says.

Aarum and the Living Waters Ministries Inc., according to the lawsuit, had maintained a peaceful, cooperative, and mutually supportive relationship with The Chapel for more than 30 years due to the founding of the two organizations by two close friends, James Andrews at The Chapel in 1961 and Wesley Aarum Sr. at the Circle C Ranch in 1968.

For thirty years, from 1968 to 1999, the close friendship between the Andrews family and the Aarum family was important for their organizations and their personal satisfaction with their work. The Chapel recommended the camp to members of its congregation and contributed funds to help expand the camps facilities and enable the camp to operate on a basis that was affordable to campers from Christian church youth groups and families at all income levels," the suit continues.

"The camp programs, which ran primarily in the summer, complemented [T]he Chapels youth programs, which ran primarily during the school year. Dr. Andrews never sought to influence the operations of the camp. He never asked for a representative on the board of directors of the Living Waters Ministries Inc. He never asked for a quid pro quo of any kind for The Chapels contributions.

When Andrew died in 1999, however, the new management at The Chapel became more expansionist and financially oriented, the suit argues.

Jerry Gillis was appointed as lead pastor of the church in 2002 and Camardo joined the staff as executive pastor in 2010. Together they worked to increase contributions from the members of the church and expand the churchs membership with three satellite locations.

The church continued to contribute financially to the camp each year and recommended it to families. But Wesley Aarum Sr. did not respect or trust Mr. Gillis and his financial ambitions, the lawsuit adds.

Aarum Sr. managed the camp's operations until his health failed in the fall of 2019. He later died in March 2020.

This testy relationship allegedly led one of Camardos staffers to recommend that he take up the cause of a woman who claimed Wayne Aarum had sexually harassed her while she was employed as a counselor at the Circle C Ranch camp in 2006, 13 years earlier.

Although he considered this womans accusation to be criminal in nature, Mr. Camardo did not make a report to any law enforcement authority or encourage the woman to do so. Instead, he used the allegation to begin a campaign to remove Wayne Aarum from his leadership at the Circle C Ranch, because he opposed the sale of camp land to a large wind project developer from Chicago.

The lawsuit stated that the Chapels leadership was aware of the increasing value of the property and embarked on a campaign to remove Aarum from the board of Living Waters Ministries Inc., to create a more favorable board of directors to control the Circle C Ranch Camp and the use and disposition of its land.

The Christian Post reached out to Aarums lawyer as well as The Chapel about the allegations Tuesday but neither party was available to immediately respond.
Facebook shuts down Evangelical Zionist prayer page amid alleged anti-Semitic cyberattack

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A pro-Israel, evangelical Zionist Facebook page for prayer and worship with around 76 million "likes" was banned after it claims to have been inundated by a cyberattack of over 2 million comments, many of which were anti-Semitic in nature.

Mike Evans, an American pastor and founder of the Friends of Zion Heritage Center and the Jerusalem Prayer Team, claimed in an interview with The Christian Post that the Jerusalem Prayer Team Facebook page was the largest online church in the world at the time it was shut down last month.

What did we do wrong? Evans said. All we were trying to do was pray. So basically, [Facebook co-founder Mark] Zuckerberg tried to cancel prayers of 77 million people. The crime was praying. Because surely they didnt write anything anti-Semitic. Because these were Christians, we combat anti-Semitism, we dont promote [it].

Jerusalem Prayer Teams Facebook page had a weekly engagement of around 3 million users per week and the page's posts received an average of 20,000 comments per day, according to the ministry.

JPT was founded in 2002 and was inspired by Corrie ten Boom (who helped save Jews during the Holocaust) and the biblical command to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, as found in Psalm 122:6.

The Facebook page hosted online church services since many of the followers, millions of whom lived in Arab countries, could not worship at home.

As Evans son was leading a Wednesday night prayer service on May 12, around 850,000 virus-like comments were posted to the page, filled with anti-Semitic, anti-Israel hate speech.

Evans shared that some of the anti-Israel posts had derogatory photos of Jesus Christ and Hitler, saying, I should have killed them all [the Jews], but I kept a couple of them alive so you could see how wicked they are.

The inundation of hate-filled comments from an outside source continued for three days, the ministry alleges.

The Facebook page was shut down on Saturday, May 15, with no notice.

Without warning or notice, Facebook deleted the largest pro-Israel group in the world from its service, the Jerusalem Prayer Team website explains. A carefully coordinated attack launched from several Muslim nations brought bogus and baseless complaints against the Jerusalem Prayer Team. Facebook believed the lies and unpublished a page with 77,000,000 followers. We are not going to be silenced. We are going to continue to take a stand for Israel and speak out.

This cyberattack was a coordinated campaign with the direct intention of bringing the page down, a spokesperson for Evans said.

Evans claims the cyberattack was traced back to a Jordanian man who coordinated the inundation of anti-Israel comments. Evans contends nothing was done about the attack by the social media platform. He said the JPTs requests for assistance were ignored.

WE DID NOTHING WRONG  and there has been no denial of that fact by Facebook and NO factual explanation by them as to why they took their amazing and devastating action, a statement from JPT reads.

The Christian Post reached out to Facebook for a comment regarding the JPT page but did not receive a response by press time.

Facebook told The Washington Times that it removed the JPT page for "violating our rules against spam and inauthentic behavior." A company spokesperson added that we are not seeing any evidence that this page was a victim of a cyberattack." However, Evans disputes that claim.

The group filed an appeal to Facebook on May 16, which was rejected. They were told the decision was final.

They have shut us down, Evans said. They robbed us of the ability of our freedom of worship, freedom of prayer, and theyre on vacation. I feel like you are saying to me, I burned your house down, I killed all your children, but dont worry about it, its no big deal because youre nobody, were Facebook.

Evans organization is headquartered in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis just signed a bill to be enacted on July 1 to provide residents recourse against social media censorship.

The legislation allows Floridians who have been affected by inconsistent and unfair actions by social media platforms to sue the companies.

Evans intends to be one of the first to utilize this new legislation to sue Facebook through multiple lawsuits. He argues that the platform has done enormous damage to the evangelicals.

By the grace of God, were going to do something about it, Evans proclaimed.

He said the corporation is hiding behind ungodly tech provisions" and "circumventing the law."

"All of thats going to end with us, Evans said.

Evans wants U.S. senators to investigate his page's removal and hopes to appear in a hearing under oath to discuss this with Zuckerberg.

This will be the last evangelical that Mark Zuckerberg will do this to, Evans boldly proclaimed. ... I have a lot of support from a lot of very, very powerful people. So everything will be just fine. The only thing thats breaking my heart is  to think that in America, the home of Christianity and a refuge for the Jews, that a Christian ministry that has a worship service  for him to attack a church and a religious ministry, it hits to the core of the very reason America was created.
At the same time, the number of domestic violence homicides in Chicago nearly doubled from 33 in 2019 to 62 in 2020, according to Chicago police data. While criminal justice experts caution a one-year increase can simply be an anomaly, they also often cite data on homicides as most indicative of overall crime trends, because the number of reported killings is largely unaffected by variables such as police staffing levels and the willingness of victims to pursue charges or make complaints.
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Vacated church properties, deferred maintenance, and deactivated utilities. Almost everything old is new again in the messy property handovers between the Episcopal Church and Anglicans who departed the denomination.

Only this time the roles have flipped.

More than a decade after the Episcopal Church initiated litigation against the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth, the Texas Supreme Court ruled one year ago in favor of the diocese, which separated from the denomination. After the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by the Episcopal Church, legal proceedings effectively reached their conclusion in February.

Five separate church properties were handed over from the Episcopal Churchs newly re-named Episcopal Church in North Texas to the Anglican Church in North Americas Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth. Much of the property within those buildings was removed by Episcopalians and remains in dispute before an appeals court.

Property wars

The property situation in the Diocese of Fort Worth in some ways mirrors other jurisdictions in which Anglicans were required to vacate properties awarded by courts to the Episcopal Church.

In other dioceses, the Episcopal Church either sold reclaimed properties or reestablished Episcopal congregations within them (shadow congregations that initially worshipped off-site). In Fort Worth, Anglicans are doing the same.

At dispute are church buildings (real property) and the contents of those buildings (personal property). Both were agreed by the two parties to be the property of the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth at the time of the 2008 split, the parties contested which entity was legally that diocese. The unanimous Texas Supreme Court decision found that the diocesan corporation now led by Anglican Bishop Ryan Reed was, for the purposes of Texas corporate law, the rightful Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth.

But legal judgment hasnt resolved everything: recent weeks have been a whirlwind for those involved, according to a laywoman and clergy spouse helping as part of the Anglican congregation which has returned to worship at All Saints Church in Fort Worth.

They stripped the building. They stripped Christ too, Cynthia Pigeon wrote in an e-mail interview about arriving at a church building emptied of nearly everything by Episcopalians, including the crucifix and altar pieces. In other churches, pews, pianos, and even small kitchen items were removed.

Until the churches began to be emptied, we didnt expect such a thing to happen, Diocese of Fort Worth Communications Director Suzanne Gill explained. Gill provided photos from All Saints of the main altar, parish hall, and parlor, each stripped bare. Nothing was left in classrooms or nurseries; all offices were emptied, and no computers or financial records have been returned.

The music library  consisting of many bankers boxes of sheet music  had been removed and seen in another building by diocesan representatives; it has not been returned.

Returning to worship

After a District Court judge ordered the personal property returned in late April, it took a lot of work over several days to restore items to their proper places, Gill described of All Saints, from the altar to hundreds of books. The Judges order was later stayed by an Appeals court, which had Episcopalians and Anglicans submit briefs in May concerning personal property (Kirk Petersen at The Living Church has a report on that here.)

Another church, St. Stephens in Wichita Falls, also reopened. Almost everything there has been returned after the building had been stripped (pictured above), except for a pipe organ that requires a technician, according to Fr. John Munson, Dean of Fort Worths Northern Deanery.

Munson describes a very cooperative return of items with the local Episcopal priest, and Sunday worship services have resumed.

Personal property isnt the only holdup: financing restoration of old buildings is a significant hurdle to reestablishing worshiping communities there. St. Elizabeths Church in River Oaks had many items returned and was beginning to prepare to host worship services. The building is in need of extensive repairs, including roofing, electrical work, and a line for natural gas.

We were very optimistic there, but we have had to face the reality of deferred maintenance, Gill assessed.

The property needed a new Certificate of Occupancy and inspections. A lack of utilities revealed major problems, according to Fr. Jay Atwood, Diocese of Fort Worth Canon to the Ordinary.

The gas line to the building was destroyed by an intoxicated driver in March and this insurance claim with her company has not been resolved resulting in no hot water. The estimated cost to replace the supply line for the gas service is $23,000, Atwood relayed. Power was restored and revealed major electrical issues which would need to be resolved including bring the electrical service up to code. Restoration of water service also revealed problems, and the building has a major roof leak due to deferred maintenance.



The problems associated with bringing the building back to a condition for establishing a new congregation were determined to be too great, Atwood wrote via e-mail to IRD. Bishop Reed, with the advice of the diocesan Board of Trustees, decided to consider a property sale, to the disappointment of the priest committed to work with the building.

An Anglican congregation is willing and ready to move into the property of St. Luke in the Meadow as soon as possible, but hardly any items have been returned and utilities were disconnected by the outgoing Episcopal congregation.

Getting the property available for services has been impossible, Atwood said. A new Certificate of Occupancy will need to be created (unless an old one can be found) which will allow resumption of utilities.

Utilities arent a problem at St. Christophers Church, as a pre-school remained in session on the property. There, most items were removed and nothing has been returned. Sunday services were begun May 16 using items gathered from other churches. Services will continue for at least a month to determine the viability of the location.

Jesus is Lord

Pigeon says that those in the congregation and the diocese are thankful to the courts for the provision of property, but there is also an awareness that All Saints is among a small minority of Anglicans whose property has been restored to them.

For our brothers and sisters across this nation, who have been stripped of their buildings, I see only a travesty of justice and religious persecution, Pigeon wrote.

Despite the property challenges, returning to the All Saints campus has been positive for the congregation.

It is an experience of restoration, of a remnant returning home from exile, Pigeon described after years worshipping off-site. It is not merely about the building. It is about being able to be in the building and worship in the Way that believes, Jesus is Lord  as it has been said and meant by all Christian believers, everywhere throughout [Anno Domini] time.





Update [6/8/2021]: Fr. Munson reports that the pipe organ was returned last night to St. Stephens Church. The church awaits an organ builder from San Antonio to assemble the pieces.

Originally published in The Institute on Religion and Democracy.

Jeff Walton is Communications Manager for the Institute on Religion & Democracy and directs the Anglican program. He graduated in 2001 from Seattle Pacific University and is a member of Restoration Anglican Church in Arlington, VA.
The curious case of the Hekking Mona Lisa

Raymond Hekking caused a sensation when he declared that the version of Leonardo da Vincis famous portrait that he owned was the real deal

In the 1950s, antique dealer Raymond Hekking discovered a portrait that, in the words of Pierre Etienne, International Director, Old Master Paintings, would change his life completely. The work was a 17th-century Italian copy that Hekking was convinced was the true Mona Lisa. He would dedicate the rest of his career to proving that the work by Leonardo da Vinci was the one he had bought for 3, while the work in the Louvre was a copy. Etienne has no doubt, It is not the Mona Lisa, it is the Hekking Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa had been stolen from the Louvre in 1914. Hekking became convinced that the painting that was returned to the gallery was not the true work. He asserted that the real painting was the one in his possession. He was also certain that the museum would be unable to prove that their painting was the right one.

Raymond Hekking

The impossibility of proving a negative feels like an important principle to remember here. In order to bolster his claim, he showed the work to renowned art historian Max Jacob Friedlander. Despite the fact that Friedlanders expertise was in Flemish painting and he was almost at the close of his career, he suggested Hekkings painting could be the Mona Lisa. This spurred Hekking on. Hekking was very talented at publicity and organised a Pathe film. The film shows him examining the painting, bringing in experts to examine it and using the beguiling setting of his house in the village of Magagnosc, close to Grasse, to lend weight to his claims. His biggest coup, however, was to launch this film while the Louvre had sent the Mona Lisa to Washington DC for an exhibition.

While it might seem improbable, the case was taken seriously by the art historical community. Etienne has uncovered correspondence and articles written in French, English and Russian, all evaluating the claim that this painting might be considered. Hekking managed to insinuate his argument into contemporary thinking through the strength of his belief and his showmanship. Even today, according to Etienne, Hekkings picture is very famous in the Louvre and is known even to the actual curators.

A selection of press clippings showing the sensation caused by the Hekking Mona Lisa
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP)  The Keystone XL is dead after a 12-year attempt to build the oil pipeline, yet the fight over Canadian crude rages on as emboldened environmentalists target other projects and pressure President Joe Biden to intervene  all while oil imports from the north keep rising.

Biden dealt the fatal blow to the partially built $9 billion Keystone XL in January when he revoked its border-crossing permit issued by former President Donald Trump. On Wednesday, sponsors TC Energy and the province of Alberta gave up and declared the line terminated."

Activists and many scientists had warned that the pipeline would open a new spigot on Canada's oil sands crude  and that burning the heavily polluting fuel would lock in climate change. As the fight escalated into a national debate over fossil fuels, Canadian crude exports to the U.S. steadily increased, driven largely by production from Alberta's oil sands region.

Even before the cancellation, environmentalists had turned their attention to other projects, including Enbridge Energy's proposal to expand and rebuild its Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota, the target of protests this week that led to the arrest of some 250 activists.

Dont expect these fights to go away anytime soon, said Daniel Raimi, a fellow at Resources for the Future, an energy and environmental think tank in Washington. This is going to encourage environmental advocates to do more of the same.

Bill McKibben, an author who was arrested outside the White House while protesting the Keystone XL in 2011, said its defeat provides a template to kill other pipelines, including Line 3 and the Dakota Access Pipeline from North Dakota's Bakken oil field.

Describing Keystone XL as a carbon bomb, McKibben said Line 3 is the same size and "carries the same stuff. How on earth could anyone with a straight face say Line 3 passes the climate test?

Enbridge said the cancellation of Keystone XL will not affect its projects, describing them as designed to meet current energy demand safely and in ways that better protect the environment.

A second TC Energy pipeline network, known simply as Keystone, has been delivering crude from Canadas oil sands region since 2010. The company says the line that runs from Alberta to Illinois, Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast has moved more than 3 billion barrels of oil.

Canada is by far the biggest foreign crude supplier to the U.S., which imported about 3.5 million barrels a day from its neighbor in 2020  61% of all U.S. oil imports.

The flow dropped slightly during the coronavirus pandemic but has largely rebounded. Import volumes have almost doubled since the Keystone XL was first proposed in 2008, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers said Thursday that it expects no immediate effect on production from Keystone XL's cancellation, but the group predicted more oil would be moved to the U.S. by rail.

A series of fiery accidents occurred in the U.S. and Canada after rail shipments of crude increased during an oil boom on the Northern Plains, including a 2013 incident in which 47 people were killed after a runaway train derailed in the Quebec town of Lac-Megantic.

The dispute over Keystone XL and other lines raised diplomatic tensions between the two countries, but Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau adopted a conciliatory tone with Biden, who canceled the pipeline on his first day in the White House.

Canada uses much less oil than it produces, making it a huge exporter, and 98% of those exports go to the U.S., according to the Natural Resources Canada.

Trudeau raised Keystone XL as a top priority with Biden while acknowledging that the president had promised in his campaign to cancel the line.

Both leaders have taken heat at home over Keystone, with Republicans slamming Biden for shutting it down while construction was underway, costing hundreds of jobs. The project was meant to expand oil exports for Canada, which has the third-largest oil reserves in the world, and provincial officials in Alberta wanted Trudeau to do more to save it.

The White House declined to comment on the cancellation. Spokesman Vedant Patel declined to say if Biden plans to address increased crude exports from Canada or intervene in other pipeline disputes.

His action on Keystone signals at least some appetite to get involved," but pipelines that have operated for years would be tougher targets, Raimi said.

Winona LaDuke, executive director of the Indigenous-based environmental group Honor the Earth, called on Biden to withdraw an Army Corps of Engineers permit for Line 3 and to order a new study.

He could stop the project, she said. Dont ask us to be nice to Enbridge. Theyre all over our land. Theyre hurting us.

The Biden administration has been disturbingly quiet on Line 3 and the Dakota Access line, said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. He urged the administration to declare both unacceptable.

Fiercely opposed by Native Americans, the Dakota Access pipeline was the impetus for protests that were quashed by law enforcement. The Biden administration has not sought to stop the line, and it's still in court after a judge revoked its permit but allowed oil to keep flowing.

Alberta sank more than $1 billion into Keystone XL last year to kick-start construction. Officials in the province are considering a trade action against the U.S. to seek compensation.

Keystone XLs price tag ballooned as the project languished, increasing from $5.4 billion to $9 billion.

Another question: What to do with pipe already in place at the U.S.-Canada border and other infrastructure along its route.

Jane Kleeb, a pipeline opponent in Nebraska, said state regulators should revoke the permit they approved for a route through the state. Otherwise, she said, TC Energy might try to sell the easements to another company.

Until the state acts, farmers and ranchers will continue to face TC Energy attorneys in court, "protecting their property from an eminent domain land grab by a foreign corporation, she said.

___

Daly reported from Washington and Flesher from Traverse City, Michigan. Rob Gillies contributed from Toronto and Grant Schulte from Omaha, Nebraska.

___

Follow Brown on Twitter: @MatthewBrownAP
LONDON (AP)  Google is offering U.K. regulators a role overseeing its phasing out of ad-tracking technology from its Chrome browser, in a package of commitments the tech giant is proposing to apply globally to head off a competition investigation.

The U.K. competition watchdog has been investigating Google's proposals to remove so-called third-party cookies over concerns they would undermine digital ad competition and entrench the company's market power.

To address the concerns, Google on Friday offered a set of commitments including giving the Competition and Markets Authority an oversight role as the company designs and develops a replacement technology.

The emergence of tech giants such as Google has presented competition authorities around the world with new challenges that require a new approach," Andrea Coscelli, the watchdog's chief executive, said.

The Competition and Markets Authority will work with tech companies to shape their behaviour and protect competition to the benefit of consumers," he said.

Google's promises also include substantial limits on how Google will use and combine individual user data for digital ad purposes and a pledge not to discriminate against rivals in favor of its own ad businesses with the new technology.

If Google's commitments are accepted, they will be applied globally, the company said in a blog post.

Third-party cookies - snippets of code that log user info - are used to help businesses more effectively target advertising and fund free online content such as newspapers. However, they've also been a longstanding source of privacy concerns because they can be used to track users across the internet.

Google shook up the digital ad industry with its plan to do away with third-party cookies, which raised fears newer technology would leave even less room for online ad rivals. The plan involves replacing individual identifiers with techniques that hide users in large online groups based on their interests while keeping web browsing histories on devices to maintain privacy.

The competition watchdog will seek feedback until July from other players in the tech and digital ad industry on Google's commitments. Then it will decide whether to accept Google's offer and close the competition case.

Google has been busy grappling with a wave tide of antitrust investigations in Europe. The U.K. offer comes days after it resolved another case involving its digital ad business, when it agreed to pay a 220 million euro ($268 million) to Frances antitrust watchdog for abusing its dominant position in online advertising.

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For all of APs tech coverage, visit https://apnews.com/apf-technology

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Follow Kelvin Chan at https://www.twitter.com/chanman
With more and more music released every day, it's a near-impossible task to keep track of all the tunes that you like. From pop to hip-hop to alternative to K-pop to country, the choices made available feel endless  but no need to fret. Chron's got you covered.

UP NEXT: Here are 5 Houston artists you should be listening to

Here's all the new music that's coming out this weekend.

1. Megan Thee Stallion, "Thot Sh*t"

(photo by Marcelo Cantu)

Megan Thee Stallion makes her big return after a brief hiatus from social media with her latest track, "Thot Sh*t." It seems as if the emcee is leaving her Hot Girl Meg persona behind and bringing back the widely adored "Tina Snow."

2. Larry June, "Orange Print"

Courtesy, The Freeminded Records / EMPIRE

California-based rapper Larry June is back with more smooth tunes with his latest project, "Orange Print." The newest project from the luxury rapper features verses from popular rappers like Money Man, Dej Loaf and Houston's very own Trae Tha Truth.

3. Garbage, "No Gods, No Masters"

Courtesy, StunvolumeInfectious Music

Garbage's "No Gods, No Masters" marks the seventh full-length studio release for the alternative rock band over their veteran career of 20+ years. "No Gods, No Masters" was co-produced with Billy Bush.

4. Pierre Bourne, "The Life of Pierre 5"

Courtesy, SOSSHOUSEINTERSCOPE  2021

The fifth installment of the rapper-producers long-running series shows growth from his last effort and gives us new work from rap's favorite rockstars, Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti.

5. Maroon 5, "Jordi"

Courtesy, 222/Interscope Records

Jordi is the seventh studio album by Maroon 5, and the album bleeds over from pop to hip-hop and R&B, with guest appearances from Megan Thee Stallion, Bantu, H.E.R., YG, and late rappers Juice Wrld and Nipsey Hussle.

6. Migos, "Culture III"

Courtesy, Quality Control Music/Umg Recordings, Inc

From their humble beginnings with projects like "No Label" to their success on mainstream radio, the rap trio Migos has always seemed to deliver catchy bars and quotables, and the group maintains that same pace with their latest release in their "Culture" series, "Culture III." The album marks the fourth studio album release from the group after all three artists have managed to make solo projects or be seen individually on other artists' albums.



7. Polo G, "Hall of Fame"

Courtesy Columbia Records

Polo G's "Hall of Fame" is the follow-up to the rapper's "The Goat" project last year, which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. Having recently earned his first No. 1 hit with RAPSTAR earlier this month, the Chicago native is well-positioned to add a No. 1 album to his list of accolades.



8. Sleater-Kinney, "Path of Wellness"

Courtesy, Mom + Pop Music

The 10th full-length studio release for the Portland, Oregon-based alternative rock duo was self-produced, a first in the duo's 27-year run. The project is the group's first release after their drummer, Janet Weiss, left the group over creative differences.
East coast transplants, rejoice.

Yuengling beers will be available in Texas soon.

SUMMER SIPS: The ultimate Texas hard seltzer ranking

The popular brewery based in Pottsville, Pennsylvania announced in January that its beer would be available in the Lone Star State in late 2021, the Houston Chronicle's Emma Balter reported. Yuengling beer is particularly popular (and only available) on the East Coastuntil now.

Starting Aug. 23, Texans will be able to pick up Yuengling's Traditional Lager, Light Lager 99, Golden Pilsner and FLIGHT by Yuengling, a light beer.

The 192-year-old, independently owned craft brewery is partnering with Molson Coors Beverage Company (the producer behind Miller, Coors, Blue Moon and more) to brew Yuengling for Texas at Molson Coors' Fort Worth brewery, Balter reported.

The official countdown is on for Yuengling fans in the Lone Star state who are anxiously waiting to enjoy our family of great beers, said Wendy Yuengling, chief administrative officer of D.G. Yuengling & Son. We are proud to announce that we are finally bringing the goods to Texas at the end of August. We have worked tirelessly to ensure our familys recipes and tradition of brewing excellence for the past 192 years will be matched as we brew Yuengling locally in Ft. Worth for the great state of Texas.

DAY TRIP: Here are 6 wineries to visit within driving distance of Houston

The brand is also hosting sweepstakes to invite Yuengling superfans in Texas to a Yuengling First Taste Party as a VIP. Other winners will get the chance to get the first case of Yuengling in their city.

If it's made in Fort Worth, does that make Yuengling an honorary Texas beer? You decide.
Courtesy of Brian Billeck, Trader's Village Marketing

This Saturday, June 12, Trader's Village debuts a much-anticipated 10-acre sunflower field, located within San Antonio. Visitors will have the opportunity to frolic and photo-op through various paths and a maze while admiring the fresh flowers.

The site will host a variety of fair-like festivities,including live music from the Fleeks, a petting zoo, and an inflatable slide free with admission. Patrons will also have the chance to consume an array of concessions. Buzz, the official 'spokesbee' for the sunflower field, will be buzzing around to say hello while you enjoy the flowers.
The public will have a chance to experience history on Saturday in Conroe, including a World War II Veteran turning 100 years old.

Conroes local WWII aircraft will continue their 2021 flying season at Conroe-North Houston Regional where local groups are working hard to get the vintage aircraft ready for aviation fans.

The one-day event will be held from 1 to 4 p.m. at General Aviation Services, 5260 Central Parkway at Conroe-North Houston Regional Airport. It is located across from the Montgomery County Fair Grounds.

It will be presented by the Commemorative Air Forces Gulf Coast Wing, Conroes own B-17 Flying Fortress Texas Raiders and two other notable warbirds. It is sponsored in part by General Aviation Services

During the event, there will be a flyover above the home of WWII Veteran George Waters, who spent 15 months as a prisoner of war and will be celebrating his monumental centennial occasion with family.

Some people who already reserved flights will have a chance to fly in the aircraft, including a couple of lucky aviation fans who will be a part of the flyover.

Nancy Kwiecien, Executive Officer of the CAF Gulf Coast Wing, commented on what an honor it is to be included in the veterans birthday celebration.

At the core of the CAF mission to Educate, Inspire and Honor is the great privilege we have to recognize veterans like George, who answered his countrys call without reservation, Kwiecien said. We offer our heartfelt thanks for his service, and wish him and his wife Mavis the best of everything.

Military aviation fans are invited to view and take part in the history experience in one of the WWII vintage warbirds, which includes a T6/SNJ advanced trainer, in which thousands of Texas airmen learned to fly for combat, and the Navy JRB transport, in which the whole family can fly together, event information stated. There are still limited seats available.

Kwiecien noted how pleased the members of the Gulf Coast Wing are to be returning to public life.

Our 2021 flying season has started off very well, and we are so happy to return to our mission of educating the public about U.S. military aviation and its role in Americas past, she said. Nothing beats being able to truly put your hands on history.

The airport is home to the B-17 Flying Fortress Texas Raiders, which is currently undergoing a maintenance inspection. The living history museum is maintained and operated by the Commemorative Air Force Gulf Coast Wing. The group of volunteer members use the aircraft as an educational tool to honor and remember those who served in WWII.

Mounted guns and radio communications equipment are still inside the 20-foot-tall, 74-foot-long plane with a 104-foot-long wingspan. The bomber was relocated to Conroe in March 2017.

Completed in 1945, Texas Raiders is one of the last 20 B-17s ever built. While World War II combat ended before Texas Raiders flew overseas, the warplane served during the Korean War. The aircrafts military career included scouting, search and rescue and weather reconnaissance. After the war, the B-17 now in Conroe went on to become a seismic survey aircraft. It was acquired in 1967 by the CAF to be restored to her military configuration.

Of the 12,731 B-17 aircraft that saw combat, only about nine B-17 bombers still fly, according to information from CAF in a previous Courier article.

The B-17s next public appearance locally will be on Fathers Day weekend on June 19-20 at Ellington Field.

For more information and reservations, visit www.B17TexasRaiders.org or by calling 855-359-2217.

mellsworth@hcnonline.com
LAGOS, Nigeria (AP)  A student has been fatally shot at a school in northern Nigeria as gunmen abducted eight students and two lecturers in yet another violent attack on an educational institution in the country, authorities said Friday.

Kaduna State Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs Samuel Aruwan said in a statement that the incident occurred late Thursday at the government-owned Nuhu Bamalli Polytechnic in Zaria.

The gunmen shot sporadically and, in the process, two students were hit and one of them died Friday morning, he said.

Two lecturers and about eight students were abducted from the institution during the attack, Aruwan said.

It is the third violent attack on a tertiary institution in Kaduna State in as many months.

In March, 39 students at the Federal School of Forestry were abducted while 22 students were abducted from the Greenfield University in April.

Five of those snatched from Greenfield University were killed as their abductors made demands for ransom.

The latest incident also comes two weeks after gunmen abducted 147 children and three teachers from the Salihu Tanko Islamic School, Tegina, in neighboring Niger State. One person was shot dead in the attack. Eleven of the children who were too young to keep pace when the gunmen moved the children into the forest were later found abandoned.

Six abductions from schools, mainly for ransom, have been recorded in northern Nigeria this year.

President Muhammadu Buhari has been under pressure to address the growing insecurity in the country.
LAKE CHARLES, La. (AP)  Federal prosecutors say a Louisiana man has been sentenced to serve a year in prison and pay more than $960,000 in restitution on federal tax fraud charges.

A news release from Acting U.S. Attorney Alexander Van Hook in Lake Charles says Alfredo Franco, 54, of Sulphur, was sentenced Thursday.
Climate change a major area U.S., China can potentially work together: U.S. expert

Xinhua) 16:55, June 10, 2021

WASHINGTON, June 9 (Xinhua) -- Climate change is a major area that the United States and China can "at least potentially work together" though U.S.-China relations are "in many ways at their worst point in almost half a century," a leading U.S. expert has said.

"There are some areas where the two countries can at least potentially work together where they have common interests. And I think one area that often rises to the top of the list in suggestions is climate change," said David Sandalow, an inaugural fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, at a recent virtual talk hosted by the Institute for China-America Studies on the U.S.-China relationship regarding climate change.

Sandalow, also co-director of the Energy and Environment Concentration at the university's School of International and Public Affairs, said that "there is some progress" towards joint work on the climate change between the two governments, but what exactly comes out of it is "uncertain" right now.

The two big countries have demonstrated a strong willingness to cooperate against the common threat, said Sandalow, who has served in senior positions at the White House, State Department, and the Department of Energy.

On April 14-17, China Special Envoy for Climate Change Xie Zhenhua and U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry held talks in Shanghai.

The two sides issued a joint statement on climate change cooperation, which Sandalow said "seems to be some progress" and "expressed the determination of both countries to do that, some specific ideas about how to do that."

"They've also indicated that there've been a number of conversations at working levels between the two governments on climate change. So there does seem to be some progress, (although) exactly what will come up is yet to be determined," he said.

"I recall hearing an entrepreneur say this is the biggest economic opportunity of our lifetimes as we redo the global energy system ... to decarbonize our economies, and we need to do it, or we're going to be in extraordinary trouble from climate change," he said.

Even during the tenures of former U.S. President Donald Trump, there was cooperation with the Chinese government, and the state of California, in particular, was active in that regard, said Sandalow, who writes and speaks widely on energy and climate policy.

"Cooperative programs included on things like emissions trading and air pollution reduction related topics," he said.

There was also cooperation in other sectors including clean energy businesses, financial firms and academic and professional exchanges, "the type that I've been involved in at Columbia University," Sandalow said.

"We have partnerships with Renmin University (of China), for example, in Beijing and the Tsinghua University and others working on these issues," he said.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)
Part of that effort is moot under the U.S. Supreme Courts 2018 Janus decision, which originated in Illinois and allows workers to decide whether to join a union. But putting a ban on right-to-work into our constitution  the only state to do so if approved  would be a mistake. The amendment if approved would, essentially, put into our states constitution a provision that would make Illinois even less desirable for employers and heighten the provisions of collective bargaining agreements to constitutional rights.
DECATUR, Ala. (AP)  An Alabama man was charged with murder in the death of his grandmother, who was found dead from multiple stab wounds early Friday, police said.

Aaron Michael Brown, 19, of Decatur was arrested in the killing of grandmother Deborah Patterson, 66, Decatur police said in a statement.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP)  A federal appeals court on Thursday said it will reconsider a panel's decision that Arkansas law requiring state contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel is unconstitutional.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted the state's request that the full court rehear the case, months after a three-judge panel ruled against the law.

The panel in February reversed a federal judges 2019 decision that dismissed the challenge to the law filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the Arkansas Times. The newspaper had asked the judge to block the law, which requires contractors with the state to reduce their fees by 20% if they dont sign the pledge.

The court said it would set an argument date later for the rehearing.

I am pleased the full Eighth Circuit will hear this important case defending Arkansass law that prohibits discrimination against Israel," Attorney General Leslie Rutledge said in a statement. I will wholeheartedly defend Arkansass law against the Arkansas Timess frivolous lawsuit."

The Times lawsuit said the University of Arkansas Pulaski Technical College refused to contract for advertising with the newspaper unless the Arkansas Times signed the pledge. The newspaper isnt engaged in a boycott against Israel.

Arkansas law is similar to restrictions enacted in other states that have been challenged. The measures are aimed at a movement protesting Israels policies toward Palestinians. Similar measures in Arizona, Kansas and Texas that were blocked were later allowed to be enforced after lawmakers narrowed the requirement so it applied only to larger contracts. Arkansas law applies to contracts worth $1,000 or more.

Courts in Kansas, Arizona, Texas, and Georgia have already blocked anti-boycott laws like the one at issue here, and we look forward to pressing our challenge to Arkansas unconstitutional anti-boycott statute," Brian Hauss, senior staff attorney for the ACLU Foundation's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said in a statement.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the federal government intends to purchase an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer that was cut from the Biden administration's defense budget for 2023.

Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine, said during an Armed Services Committee meeting on Thursday that the removal of the ship from the budget sent a shudder through the industrial base.
MARION, Ill. (AP)  A body discovered after the demolition of a landmark motel in southern Illinois has been identified as a 51-year-old man who had been missing since December, authorities said Friday.

Marion police Chief David Fitts said foul play is not suspected in the death of Russell Bozarth.
QUETTA, Pakistan (AP)  A speeding bus carrying pilgrims overturned on a highway and fell into a ravine in a remote area in southwestern Pakistan before dawn on Friday, killing at least 20 people and injuring 50 others, police and officials said.

The accident happened in Khuzdar, a district in Baluchistan province, local police official Hafeez Ullah Mengal said. Rescuers transported the dead and injured to military and government hospitals, he added.

Imam Bakhsh, one of the injured passengers, told The Associated Press by phone that passengers had repeatedly warned the driver to be more careful. He blamed the driver for the accident, saying he was enjoying music and driving recklessly.

Imran Ahmad, an official with the Levies security force said driver negligence apparently caused the accident, but that officers were still investigating.

The pilgrims were returning to Dadu, a district in the neighboring southern Sindh province, after visiting a shrine of a Sufi saint. Bashir Ahmed, a deputy commissioner in the Khuzdar district, said the driver lost control on a sharp turn.

He said the bus was overcrowded and several pilgrims were also sitting on its roof when the accident took place. Ahmed said some of the injured were listed in critical condition. He said the bus driver was also among the injured.

There is not a single passenger who does not have an injury because of the bus accident," Ahmed told the AP by phone. He said thousands of people from across the country visit the shrine every year to participate in the annual congregation at the shrine. Those who died or were injured were from Sindh province.

Deadly accidents are common in Pakistan due to poor road infrastructure and disregard for traffic laws. Last month, a bus overturned on a highway in the southern district of Sukkur, killing 13 passengers and injuring 29 others.

The latest bus accident happened days after at least 65 passengers were killed in a horrific collision of two trains in the southern town of Ghotki in the Sindh province. The collision took place on a dilapidated railway when an express train barreled into another that had derailed minutes earlier on Monday.

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Associated Press Writer Asim Tanveer contributed to this story from Multan, Pakistan
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state elected officials are getting raises.

The California Citizens Compensation Commission voted Tuesday to approve 4.2% pay hikes for Newsom, state lawmakers and other state elected officials, the Sacramento Bee reported.

The raises take effect in December. Newsom will receive an extra $8,809 per year, raising his salary to $218,556. Most state lawmakers will receive an extra $4,824, bringing their salaries to $119,701 each.

The four-member commission, which is appointed by the governor, voted raises for elected officials every year from 2013 to 2019.

The panel didn't approve raises last year as the state faced a projected $54.3 billion budget shortfall. But the shortfall didn't happen and this year, Newsom says the state has $76 billion in extra money to spend.

Newsom's office did not respond to questions from the Sacramento Bee about whether he would accept the pay increase.

Newsom is likely to face a recall election later this year that county governments expect will cost them $215 million. Democratic leaders in the California Legislature announced Thursday the state would cover the estimated cost.

Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, who is running to replace Newsom in the recall election, said Newsom should reject the pay raise.
CHICAGO (AP)  Chicago officials declared the city fully reopened on Friday, ending a requirement that people wear face masks in most indoor places and lifting capacity limits intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Chicago sometimes veered from the states restrictions and opted to be stricter or more lenient than the state required. But city officials decided to join the rest of Illinois in lifting restrictions Friday, nearly 15 months after Gov. J.B. Pritzker issued the first stay-at-home order as COVID-19 cases began to rise.

People who are not vaccinated must still wear a mask indoors, and everyone will still need to wear masks inside health care facilities, jails, shelters, schools, taxis, ride-hailing vehicles and on public transportation. And businesses can still opt to require people to wear masks on their premises.

According to the city's Department of Public Health, about 45% of Chicago residents were fully vaccinated as of Thursday. Mayor Lori Lightfoot acknowledged that the rate is lower in some parts of the city, particularly in the largely Black communities on the South Side.

Folks, get the vaccine, Lightfoot said at a news conference Friday. Its widely available, its free and its safe.

Chicago has continued to offer perks for getting vaccinated, including a concert series, and officials hope continued pop-up events and mobile vaccination efforts will reach people unable or resistant to getting inoculated.

Dr. Allison Arwady, the director of the city's Department of Public Health, said the number of new COVID-19 cases and the rate of positive test results is at the lowest levels since the pandemic began. But she also expressed concern that a resurgence of the virus would land in unvaccinated communities and unvaccinated social networks."

We're not done vaccinating, but I'm very confident again that now is the time to move ahead with that reopening, Arwady said. But we've got to keep getting people vaccinated.
MADISON, Wis. (AP)  The Wisconsin Elections Commission has decided to send postcards to more than 100,000 voters who may have moved but wont deactivate their registrations if they dont respond.

The Wisconsin State Journal reported that the commission on Thursday decided to send the first of three postcard mailings later this month to 103,010 voters who may have moved. The postcards will warn the voters their registrations may be deactivated if they dont confirm their address or register at a new one. The commission will follow up with two more mailings, one in September and one in December.
DENVER (AP)  One of the suspects in a fatal attack at a suburban Denver high school in 2019 had become such a chronic drug user in the months before the shooting that he likely couldnt think, concentrate or understand events around him that day, a toxicologist called by the defense testified Friday.

Toxicologist Wanda Guidry said Devon Erickson was severely malnourished because he ingested cocaine, marijuana and cough syrup nearly daily, and he suffered from long-term sleep deprivation and insomnia, The Denver Post reported.

I believe it created psychiatric symptoms  disruption in mood, behavior and thinking, Guidry said of the drugs found in Ericksons system hours after the shooting. He had a very difficult time figuring out or thinking of what he needed to do, what was right or what he wanted to do.

Defense attorneys rested their case Friday without testimony from Erickson. Closing arguments are scheduled to begin Monday, followed by jury deliberations.

Erickson, 20, pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and other charges in the May 7, 2019, shooting at STEM School Highlands Ranch that killed 18-year-old Kendrick Castillo and injured eight others. The other student charged in the shooting, 18-year-old Alec McKinney, pleaded guilty in February 2020 and is eligible for parole because he was a juvenile at the time of the attack.

Erickson was 18 at the time and could face life in prison without parole if he is convicted.

Chief Deputy District Attorney George Brauchler argued that Erickson agreed to participate in the attack as long as it looked like he was pressured into it and or could emerge as a hero by killing McKinney.

Brauchler said the students' concocted victim-hero strategy unraveled after Castillo rushed Erickson when he pulled out a gun inside a darkened classroom as students watched a movie. Ericksons gun went off, Castillo was killed and others tackled him, he said.

Their other possible scenario, in which McKinney killed himself, was stymied after an armed security guard apprehended him, Brauchler said.

Ericksons lawyer, Julia Stancil, said her client was manipulated into joining the attack by McKinney, a new friend who preyed on him during a family crisis.
BURLEY, Idaho (AP)  School district officials in Idaho have started offering a full summer school program to catch up all students who may have fell behind academically during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Cassia County School District was prompted to move to a full program to fill the educational gaps caused by the pandemic during remote learning, The Times-News reported.

In previous years, the district offered limited summer school to migrant programs or after-school programs, Cassia County School District spokesperson Debbie Critchfield said.

The Cassia School District hasnt offered open and full summer school programs for any student in more than 20 years and perhaps longer. Those around now cant recall it outside very specific schools or student participation, Critchfield said.

Raft River Elementary School Principal Melina Ficek, who is coordinating the full summer program for the district, said it was launched because students who recently returned to school were further behind than before.

Officials said 840 students signed up out of an average student population of 5,500 across the district.

White Pine Elementary School Principal Diana Gill said parents were thrilled when the decision was made to hold a summer program. About one in six students out of the school's 600 students showed up for the first day of summer school Monday.

The impetus was to offset learning loss that was anticipated at the end of last school year. We are no different than other districts who want to supplement learning in any form. Clearly every student experienced a disruption in learning, but it is most felt by the earliest learners, Critchfield said.

The Cassia School District estimates the program will cost about $600,000  with $490,000 coming from Republican Gov. Brad Littles learning loss money and $100,000 from federal stimulus funds.
An exemption for the nations seventh-largest polluter remains unacceptable to the governor, as well as the nearly 50 legislators that have indicated they will not support a bill that does so, the unsigned memo from the governors office says. The governor stands ready to sign this bill should the General Assembly choose to pass it next week in Springfield.
OMAHA, Neb. (AP)  The death of a man who fatally shot himself as he was being chased by police in north Omaha will be investigated as an in-custody death, police officials said.

The shooting happened after 8 p.m. Thursday when an officer spotted a car with expired plates and sought to pull the car over, police said. The driver instead fled, and a chase ensued until the car ran a stop sign and crashed into another vehicle, according to police.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP)  An officer was justified in shooting a man who fired a gun at him and attacked another officer, Salt Lake County prosecutors ruled Friday.

Officer Charles Saulnier will not face any charges in connection with the shooting of Eric Pectol, 49, on Sept. 17, District Attorney Sim Gill told reporters. Pectol was hospitalized after the shooting and survived but denied shooting the gun.
CONCORD, N.H. (AP)  New Hampshire now has an official state spider, thanks to third-graders who went from being afraid of arachnids to promoting them as symbols of the state's strengths.

Gov. Chris Sununu signed a bill Friday designating the daring jumping spider as the official state spider of New Hampshire. He was joined by students at Hollis Primary School, who drafted the legislation after a weeklong unit designed to reduce fear of spiders.
TOKYO (AP)  Japan's relations with Taiwan are nongovernmental and practical and are based on Tokyo's recognition of China as the sole legitimate government, a top Japanese official said Friday, following Beijing's protest over a recent reference to the island as a country.

As China flexes its muscle in the Taiwan Strait and the Asia-Pacific region, the issue of Taiwan is a sensitive topic, especially as Japan, the United States and other democracies develop closer ties with the self-ruled island that Beijing regards as a renegade territory to be united by force if necessary.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato told a regular news conference Friday that Japan's position is to maintain working relations with Taiwan at the nongovernment level, in line with the 1972 Japan-China Communique, when Tokyo switched the diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China. That's our basic policy and there is no change to that."

Kato's remark came a day after China protested Prime Minister Yoshihide Sugas reference to Taiwan as a country during a parliamentary debate on Wednesday.

Suga, while answering a question about pandemic measures, made a passing reference to Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia as three countries.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Thursday the comment violated Japans solemn promise to not regard Taiwan as a country.

We strongly deplore Japans erroneous remarks and have lodged solemn complaints with Japan, demanding that Japan immediately make clear clarifications to eliminate the adverse effects caused by relevant remarks, and to ensure that such situations will not happen again, Wang said.

On Friday, Japans upper house of the parliament adopted a resolution calling on the World Health Organization to include Taiwan in its general meetings, saying its expertise on coronavirus measures is indispensable.

China has so far blocked the move, and has increased Taiwan's diplomatic isolation, leaving it with just over a dozen formal diplomatic allies. Taiwan still operates a network of trade offices around the world that act as de-facto embassies, including in the United States, Japan and most other major nations.

Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi carefully referred to Taiwan as a region in his brief remark emphasizing the importance of including the island for the benefit of international public health.

Japan also has donated 1.24 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Taiwan as it battles its largest outbreak of infections amid a shortage of jabs. Taiwan has blamed China for interfering in a potential deal for another vaccine.

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This story has been corrected to remove reference to one country, two systems."
MISSION, Kansas (AP)  A judge has asked the Kansas attorney general to weigh in on significant constitutional problems raised by a state law that gives those who object to pandemic restrictions such as mask requirements the right to trigger a 72-hour review.

David Hauber, a Johnson County judge, said Tuesday that the law  which places the burden of proof on officials to demonstrate that rules protect public health in the least restrictive way possible  tips the scales of justice toward the plaintiff."

Hauber was ruling in a lawsuit filed by parents Kristin Butler and Scott Bozarth who challenged the Shawnee Mission School Districts mask requirement for students. Hauber said their challenge was moot since classes had already ended for the year. The case is among several the Johnson County court has handled since the law took effect in March.

The nature of the pandemic and its now-shifting guidelines makes it highly doubtful that the pandemic policy that was enacted in the darks days of uncertainty, will be the same policy, if any, in the months ahead before schools reopen in the fall, Hauber said.

Most of Haubers ruling was devoted to expressing concerns about the law itself.

It provides short deadlines and an immediacy that appears intended to short-circuit other court cases which often have emergent issues, such as domestic violence or business restraining orders, Hauber said.

It was passed by a GOP-controlled Legislature that has criticized Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly throughout the pandemic, suggesting she overreacted by closing schools and imposing a statewide stay-at-home order for five weeks last spring.

The court is convinced that SB-40 presents significant constitutional problems that require the intervention of the Kansas attorney general. He sent a notice to the attorney general Thursday.

The office of Attorney General Derek Schmidt said in a court filing that Schmidt would file a memorandum addressing the issue soon.

The current state of disaster emergency related to the COVID-19 health emergency will expire on June 15, 2021, unless further extended," according to the filing. The Attorney Generals submissions will address any factual developments in this regard, as well as the potential mootness issue if the disaster declaration expires without any extension."

Officials in several counties, including Sedgwick County in the Wichita area, have cited the law and the threat of litigation in voting to do away with COVID-19 restrictions earlier this spring.

According to the lawsuit, Butlers 7- and 10-year-old children received exemptions from wearing masks but were distanced from other masked children. Butler said they suffered psychological harm and ended up wearing masks so that they would fit in.

Bozarth chose not to obtain an exemption for his 14-year-old because he objects to the policy itself, Hauber said.

One of the youngsters is attending a district-run band camp, but Hauber notes that the camp is not required like school and that it is unclear what the coming months will bring.

The Shawnee Mission district said in a statement that it was pleased with the ruling, writing that Hauber recognized that the legislature improperly denied due process to school districts that are doing their best to navigate through a difficult and unprecedented public health emergency.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP)  A teen has been arrested in the shooting death earlier this week of another teen near a Kansas City park, police said.

A police news release announced the arrest Thursday night in the Tuesday afternoon killing of 15-year-old Terrell Bell near Sycamore Park in Kansas Citys Ruskin Heights neighborhood. Police have not released the name of the juvenile arrested, and The Associated Press typically does not name juveniles charged with a crime.
A migrant died due to heat-related injuries after illegally crossing the border in the area of Rio Bravo and El Cenizo, according to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Federal agents also rescued other migrants who were lost.

On Wednesday, Laredo police dispatch notified Border Patrol agents about a woman in distress. Agents searched the area and quickly found the woman, who appeared to be suffering from heat-related injuries. Agents certified as EMTs tended to her as EMS services were requested. She was taken to a local hospital, where she was later pronounced dead.

In the same area, a mobile rescue beacon was triggered, alerting agents that someone was in distress. This alert provided agents an exact location which led them directly to the lost individual. EMTs evaluated the individual and found him to be in good health.

While agents were tending to the second individual, a call from the Laredo Sector dispatch alerted agents of two more individuals who had fallen in heat-related distress. Minutes later, Zapata County Sheriffs Office dispatch informed agents of an additional individual in distress in the area.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection helicopter assisted in locating the lost individuals. Agents managed to find the individuals in good health.

Communication between our law enforcement partners in addition to the mobile rescue beacon, played a vital role in saving the lives of the distressed individuals. Mobile rescue beacons are designed to aid individuals in distress and are strategically placed in rural areas in an effort to reduce the loss of lives, Border Patrol said in a statement.

To report suspicious activity such as human or drug smuggling, download the USBP Laredo Sector app or contact the Laredo Sector Border Patrol toll free at 1-800-343-1994.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP)  A trial judge has backed a plan from Gov. Roy Cooper and the State Board of Education on how to comply with North Carolina constitutional requirements in public education, which could cost several billion dollars to carry out.

Superior Court Judge David Lee signed a court order this week approving the proposal, which calls for at least $5.6 billion in new education funding through 2028. But it cant be carried out without funding from the legislature. The Comprehensive Remedial Plan addresses failures in meeting the constitutional duty, as declared by the state Supreme Court, to provide every student the opportunity for a sound basic education.

The Democratic governor's proposed state budget and legislation filed by House Democrats would seek to fund the first two years of the plan. It is difficult for the judicial branch to force the General Assembly to spend money. Lees order suggested he would attempt to apply legal pressure for action if the plan gets idled, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported.

If the state fails to implement the actions described in the Comprehensive Remedial Plan  'it will then be the duty of this Court to enter a judgment granting declaratory relief and such other relief as needed to correct the wrong, Lee wrote, citing in part an earlier Supreme Court ruling.

The plan, which germinated from an outside consultants report, includes funding improvements to help low-income students and those with disabilities, and to hire more school support personnel. Increased pay for teachers, principals and assistant principals is included, as well as efforts to improve teacher diversity and competency and child access to prekindergarten.

Republicans in the Senate have been cool to deferring to a judges demands on funding, citing the separation of power between the branches of government. Theyve pointed to the growth in K-12 education funding since the GOP took over the legislature a decade ago.

A court has no more authority to direct the legislature to spend money or enact policy than the legislature does to direct a trial judge how to decide a case, Sen. Deanna Ballard, a Watauga County Republican and education committee leader, said in a statement Thursday. If Judge Lee wants a say in education policy, he can run for the state legislature. That is the only way his opinions will have any weight.

Lees order marks the latest development in school funding litigation known as Leandro that began in 1994. In 2004, the state Supreme Court declared the state had not fulfilled the mandate of a sound basic education. Interest in compliance picked up in 2019 when the consultant declared little progress had been made to meet the constitutional directive.

Every Child NC, composed of community groups that back state compliance as spelled out in Leandro, praised Lees order and said the state has enough money to start funding the plan.

The responsibility to implement the plan, comply with (the) order and fulfill an overdue constitutional obligation to North Carolina students now rests in the hands of the General Assembly, Every Child NC said in a statement this week.

Lee's order, dated Monday, tells state officials to submit a progress report on fulfilling his order by Aug. 6.
NEW YORK (AP)  The NewYork-Presbyterian hospital system will require all of its 48,000 employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 unless they have a valid exemption, hospital officials announced Friday.

As a leading health care organization, we believe it is essential to require vaccinations to protect our patients and ourselves against the threat of further harm from the pandemic and the possibility of more dangerous mutations, Dr. Steven Corwin and Dr. Laura Forese, the president and executive vice president of the 10-campus hospital network, said in an email to staff.
SANAA, Yemen (AP)  An explosion in Yemen's southern province of Abyan on Friday killed at least six separatist troops and wounded 15 people, including civilians, Yemeni security and medical officials said.

The source of the explosion was not immediately known and no group immediately claimed responsibility for an attack.

The officials said the blast took place moments after a convoy of the secessionist Southern Transitional Council arrived at a market that sells khat leaves. The plant is highly popular in Yemen and widely chewed by men for the plants stimulant properties.

The officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

The Southern Transitional Council is an umbrella group of militias, backed by the United Arab Emirates, seeking to restore an independent southern Yemen, which existed from 1967 until the unification of Yemen in 1990.

They are nominal allies with the forces of the internationally recognized government in Yemens years-long civil war that pits the Saudi-led, U.S.-backed military coalition and the Yemeni government side against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels who control most of northern Yemen as well as the countrys capital, Sanaa.

However, clashes have often erupted between the forces loyal to President Abdel Rabbo Mansour Hadi and the separatists. In August 2019, heavy fighting broke out between the two ostensible allies when separatists took Aden, the temporary seat of Hadis government and key southern port city.

The fighting stopped when the two groups reached a Saudi-brokered power-sharing deal months later. However, similar clashes have continued sporadically, threatening to reopen the separate front inside the larger civil war.

The conflict in Yemen, the Arab worlds poorest country, erupted in 2014, when the Houthis seized Sanaa and much of the countrys north. The Saudi-led coalition, determined to restore Hadis government, intervened the following year. The fighting in Yemen has spawned the worlds worst humanitarian crisis, leaving millions suffering from food and medical shortages. It has killed over 112,000 people, including fighters and civilians.
I think when people see that the downtown is fully reopened, and Im seeing it now, theres an uptick in the number of people taking the trains now, traffic is definitely back up. I think theres a real hunger to be back together, Lightfoot said during an appearance on WGN-TV. Just as were seeing people really excited to be in restaurants, music venues, and just outdoors, were going to see people wanting to come back downtown to work.
LONG BEACH, Calif. (AP)  Authorities on Friday night called off a sweeping air and sea search for a passenger who went overboard from a ferry off the coast of Southern California.

Crews from Los Angeles County and the U.S. Coast Guard searched Thursday night and all day Friday without success after the man was seen jumping from a boat heading from Long Beach to Santa Catalina Island.

Nearly two dozen vessels and aircraft search more than 600 square miles (1,554 square kilometers) of ocean, the Coast Guard said in a tweet.

The man was reported to have jumped from the Jet Cat Express around 6 p.m. Thursday about 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) off Long Beach, authorities said.

The high-speed catamaran is operated by Catalina Express. The companys president, Greg Bombard, told reporters Thursday night that deckhands saw the man go overboard from the stern of the vessel.

When they saw him hit the water, they threw a life ring over, he said.

A crewmember said the man was seen jumping from the boat, Long Beach fire spokesperson Brian Fisk said.

His grandmother identified him on Friday as Keion Dade, 24, of Southern California.

He did come back up," she told KTLA-TV. He was hollering for help but the boat was going too fast. They made a circle and when they came back he was gone.

Freeman said she didn't know why Dade would have jumped.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Former President Donald Trump has made no secret of his long list of political enemies. It just wasn't clear until now how far he would go to try to punish them.

Two House Democrats disclosed this week that their smartphone data was secretly obtained by the Trump Justice Department as part of an effort to uncover the source of leaks related to the investigation of Russian-related election interference.

It was a stunning revelation that one branch of government was using its power to gather private information on another, a move that carried echoes of President Richard Nixon during Watergate.

On Friday, the Justice Department's internal watchdog announced that it was investigating the records seizure. And Democratic leaders in Congress are demanding that former top Justice officials testify before a Senate committee to explain why the iPhone records of Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, both Democrats, and their family members were secretly subpoenaed in 2018. The records of at least 12 people were eventually shared by Apple.

The dispute showed that the rancorous partisan fights that coursed through the Trump presidency continue to play out in new and potentially damaging ways even as the Biden administration has worked to put those turbulent four years in the past.

White House spokesman Andrew Bates said the conduct of Trumps Justice Department was a shocking misuse of authority.

Attorneys generals only loyalty should be to the rule of law  never to politics, he said.

The disclosure that the records had been seized raised a number of troubling questions. Who else may have been targeted? What was the legal justification to target members of Congress? Why did Apple, a company that prides itself on user privacy, hand over the records? And what end was the Trump Justice Department pursuing?

The revelations also are forcing the Biden Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland to wade back into a fight with their predecessors.

The question here is just how did Trump use his political power to go after his enemies  how did he use the government for his political benefit, said Kathleen Clark, legal ethics scholar at Washington University in St. Louis.

The effort to obtain the data came as Trump was publicly and privately fuming over investigations by Congress and then-special counsel Robert Mueller into his 2016 campaigns ties to Russia.

Trump inveighed against leaks throughout his time in office, accusing a deep state" of working to undermine him by sharing unflattering information. He repeatedly called on his Justice Department and attorneys general to go after the leakers, including singling out former FBI Director James Comey and Schiff, now chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

In May of 2018, he tweeted that reports of leaks in his White House were exaggerated, but said that nonetheless, leakers are traitors and cowards, and we will find out who they are!

Schiff and Swalwell were two of the most visible Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, then led by Republicans, during the Russia inquiry. Both California lawmakers made frequent appearances on cable news shows. Trump watched those channels closely and seethed over the coverage.

Theres no indication that the Justice Department used the records to prosecute anyone. After some of the leaked information was declassified and made public during the later years of the Trump administration, there was concern among some of the prosecutors that even if they could bring a leak case, trying it would be difficult and a conviction would be unlikely, one person told The Associated Press. That person, a committee official and a third person with knowledge of the data seizures were granted anonymity to discuss them.

Federal agents questioned at least one former committee staff member in 2020, the person said, and ultimately, prosecutors werent able to substantiate a case.

For decades, the Justice Department had worked to maintain strict barriers with the White House to avoid being used as a political tool to address a president's personal grievance.

For some, the Trump administrations effort is more disturbing than Nixons actions during Watergate that forced his resignation. Nixons were done in secret out of the White House, while the Trump administration moves to take the congressmens records were approved by top Justice Department officials and worked on by prosecutors, who obtained secret subpoenas from a federal judge and then gag orders to keep them quiet.

The fate of Richard Nixon had a restraining effect on political corruption in America, said Timothy Naftali, a Nixon scholar and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. It didn't last forever, but the Republican Party wanted to cleanse itself of Nixon's bad apples and bad actors.

The Republican Party is far too aligned with Trump to do that now, but it doesn't mean Biden should let it go, Naftali said.

The reason to do this is not revenge, Naftali said. It's to send a signal to future American lawyers they will be held accountable.

While the Justice Department routinely conducts investigations of leaked information, including classified intelligence, opening such an investigation into members of Congress is extraordinarily rare.

A less rare but still uncommon tool is to secretly seize reporters phone records, something the Trump Justice Department also did. Following an outcry from press freedom organizations, Garland announced last week that it would cease the practice of going after journalists sourcing information.

The subpoenas were issued in 2018, when Jeff Sessions was attorney general, though he had recused himself in the Russia investigation, putting his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, in charge of Russia-related matters. The investigation later picked up momentum again under Attorney General William Barr.

Apple informed the committee last month that the records had been shared and that the investigation had been closed, but did not give extensive detail. Also seized were the records of aides, former aides and family members, one of them a minor, according to the committee official.

The Justice Department obtained metadata  probably records of calls, texts and locations  but not other content from the devices, like photos, messages or emails, according to one of the people. Another said that Apple complied with the subpoena, providing the information to the Justice Department, and did not immediately notify the members of Congress or the committee about the disclosure.

And the people whose records were seized were unable to challenge the Justice Department because the subpoenas went to Apple directly. The gag order was renewed three times before it lapsed and the company informed its customers May 5 what had happened.

Apple said in a statement that it couldn't even challenge the warrants because it had so little information available and it would have been virtually impossible for Apple to understand the intent of the desired information without digging through users accounts.

Patrick Toomey, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the seizure of congressional records was part of a series of Trump-era investigations that raise profound civil liberties concerns and involve spying powers that have no place in our democracy.

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Associated Press writers Jill Colvin, Mary Clare Jalonick, Nomaan Merchant and Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.
NORFOLK, Va. (AP)  To hear a military prosecutor tell it, U.S. Marine Mario Madera-Rodriguez was tasked with smashing open the bedroom door of a U.S. Army Green Beret with a sledge hammer and then turning on some music.

Another Marine was supposed to remove the Green Beret's mosquito netting from around his bed, the prosecutor said. A Navy SEAL would choke the Green Beret into unconsciousness, while a second SEAL would tie him up with duct tape.

Their plan was to haze him that night, to humiliate him, Marine prosecutor Jason Samuel said Friday at the start of Madera-Rodriguez's murder trial at a U.S. Navy base in Norfolk, Virginia. But they killed him.

The Green Beret, Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar, a native of Lubbock, Texas, died of strangulation. Madera-Rodriguez is one of four American servicemembers charged in Melgar's 2017 hazing death in Africa, where the men were serving together.

Madera-Rodriguez, who belongs to a special operations group in the Marines known as the Raiders, is the only one of the four men to plead not guilty. The others have already made plea deals and may testify at his trial.

By fighting the charges, Madera-Rodriguez has prompted what could be a weekslong court-martial that will dissect a night in which prosecutors say some of Americas most elite servicemembers betrayed one of their own.

Capt. Samuel, the Marine prosecutor, said the men were angry over Melgar's perceived slights during their time in Mali. In particular, some were upset that they missed a party at the French embassy in the capital city of Bamako because Melgar and the others got separated in traffic.

Their plan to teach Melgar a lesson grew as some of the angry servicemen retreated to a bar, then a club and then a shawarma restaurant, Samuel said.

As the drinks began to flow, their designs for humiliation came to include a Malian guard at the base who would strip naked, wear a leash and a collar and pose next to an unconscious Melgar, Samuel said.

The prosecutor walked the jury of sailors and Marines through what he said happened that night, from Madera-Rodriguez smashing the door and providing the soundtrack to Melgar's strangulation to his body going limp from the Navy SEAL's chokehold.

These four men werent terrorists, Samuel said. They werent insurgents. They werent local criminals. They were American service members, special operators ... who betrayed their fellow comrade, their brother in arms."

Madera-Rodriguez faces charges including conspiracy, murder and hazing. Opening statements made by his defense attorneys were closed to the public because they contained classified information. Defense lawyer Colby Vokey did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Friday afternoon.

The case has already pulled back the curtain on alleged misconduct in America's special operations community, while offering a brief window into how some have addressed grievances outside the law.

During his testimony in January, SEAL Tony DeDolph described the planned prank on Melgar as as a tape job." The plan had been to show Melgar a video of the incident sometime later.

DeDolph, who had applied the chokehold, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter earlier this year and received a 10-year prison sentence. His attorney said he planned to appeal the punishment.

Adam Matthews, the other SEAL, and Marine Kevin Maxwell Jr., made plea deals and were sentenced to shorter terms in military prison.

Charging documents dont state why the service members were in Mali. But U.S. Special Forces have been in Africa to support and train local troops in their fight against extremists.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP)  Opening statements have started this week for a trial against a New Mexico man prosecutors say raped and killed 6-year-old Ariana Jade Romeo in August 2018.

Jades mother, Stephanie Romeo, told a jury on Wednesday that she came home from a long night of work and climbed into the bed beside her daughter without realizing the girl was dead. Romero recounted that the following morning on Aug. 11 she tried to wake the girl up.

Court records show Ariana Romeo, who was mostly nude and bloodied, was cold to the touch, not breathing and wrapped tightly in a blanket. She also had multiple injuries to her body. The medical examiners office ruled her death as homicide by strangulation.

The Rio Rancho Police Department responded to the home where an officer encountered a man, later identified as a suspect, Leland Hust, 24, leaving a room in the home. It is unclear what, if anything, Hust told police that day.

A criminal complaint revealed detectives later interviewed Hust on Aug. 23, where he told detectives he last saw Ariana Romeo on Aug. 10 when he put on a movie for her in her room. He denied having anything to do with her death. The complaint also said laboratory results from the New Mexico State Crime Lab matched Hust's DNA to DNA found from the girl's genital swabs.

Hust is charged with intentional child abuse resulting in death and rape of a child younger than 13, both first-degree felonies. Hust could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted of either charge.

His attorney Michael Rosenfield told jurors that police botched the investigation and later coerced Hust into making incriminating statements by overstating the strength of DNA evidence implicating Hust, the Albuquerque Journal reported.

This is a murky case based on insufficient investigation, Rosenfield said, noting during his opening statement that sloppy police work destroyed evidence at the scene that could have identified the killer.

Assistant District Attorney Jannette Mondragon argued that Hust was the only member in the home who could not be eliminated as a source of the DNA. She also said he was the last person to see her alive, a claim Rosenfield disputed.

Two Rio Rancho firefighters and the owner of the home, Brenda Scates, were also called to testify.

The trial is expected to last up to 10 days.
CAIRO (AP)  More than 200 migrants bound for Europe were intercepted on Friday by Libya's coast guard just off the shore of the North African country, a U.N. spokeswoman said.

Safa Msehli, a spokeswoman for the International Organization for Migration, tweeted that the migrants were expected to be sent to Libyan detention centers where they are usually extorted and abused."
United States Postal Service

For the second year in a row, more postal workers were attacked by dogs in Houston than in any other city.

New numbers released by the United States Postal Service show that 73 mail carriers were attacked by dogs in 2020, down from 85 reported attacks in 2019. The injuries span from small bites to vicious attacks.
EL PASO, Texas (AP)  A Texas mom arrested for posing as her daughter at a middle school says she did it to push for better security on campus.

Casey Garcia, 30, was arrested on one count each of criminal trespass and tampering with government records, El Paso County Sheriffs Office officials said. She also was arrested on an unrelated traffic warrant.

Deputies were notified June 1 by San Elizario Independent School District officials of Garcia trespassing on school grounds and posing as a student, the sheriff's department said.

READ ALSO: Zombie stars and the corporatization of the galaxy

Several posts on social media showing her pretending to be a student led to an investigation, the El Paso Times reported.

She was arrested at her home in San Elizario.

In a YouTube video titled, Why I posed as my 13 year old daughter. A raw but real answer, she says she dyed her hair and used skin tanner. Garcia said she did it for a social experiment.

Garcia made it to seven out of eight classes before being recognized by a teacher. She says she was only asked for her identification number before she was allowed inside the school building, and teachers and staff were more concerned about her phone being out than in who she actually was.

I exposed the dangers of our schools and I am trying to protect my children and yours, she said, noting that she didn't do this for any other reason except to prove a point.

Are you more concerned that I, a parent, was sitting next to your child or do we really want to wait for the next person taking their Second Amendment right to the extreme? she said.

Garcia was booked on Friday into the El Paso County Jail on bonds totaling $7,908. A jail log shows she was released later that day.
On Friday, June 11, ABC's 20/20 is airing an exclusive special on Houston-born Vanessa Guillen, a 20-year-old who was murdered by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood in 2020.

San Antonio's John Quinones, an ABC correspondent, is calling the latest investigation "incredibly enlightening," and inviting viewers to tune in at 8 p.m. to watch the 2-hour special.

"What Happened to Vanessa?" will reveal details of its investigation into Guillen death, a killing that sent shock waves across the military and ignited new conversations about harassment in the armed forces. Quinones previously reported on Guillen's death in another 20/20 episode that aired last year.

READ ALSO: A year after Vanessa Guillen's murder, family and advocates say military has not changed enough

Friday's episode of 20/20 also features Guillen's finance, Juan Cruz, who speaks out for the first time ever in a television interview since Guillen's death. The show also interviews fellow soldiers of Guillen and her family.

Guillen was bludgeoned to death with a hammer in an arms room on the Texas installation by a fellow soldier, Spc. Aaron Robinson, on April 22, 2020, according to the Washington Post. He dismembered and buried her remains with the help of a girlfriend, investigators later said. The remains were discovered on June 30 as investigators zeroed in on Robinson as a suspect.

Robinson was put under guard, but fled; he later obtained a firearm and died by suicide, according to investigators.

The Texas Tribune reported a U.S. Army investigation revealed Guillen reported being sexually harassed two times by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood before she was killed. The investigation did not find evidence that Guillen's alleged killer had sexually assaulted her.

However, Guillen's supervisor and other officials failed to report the harassment up the chain. As a result of the investigation, Army officials removed five officials in the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, where Guillen also worked, from their leadership positions. They were also reprimanded.
Gov. Greg Abbott announced Thursday that Texas will build a border wall along the states boundary with Mexico  but provided no details on where or when.

Abbott declared his plans during a press conference in Del Rio. He said he would discuss the plans next week. The Biden administration issued a proclamation that stopped border wall construction on his first day of office.

Abbott announced the news while discussing a slew of border initiatives, such as a $1 billion allocation for border security in the state budget lawmakers just passed and a plan to establish a Governors Task Force on Border and Homeland Security with public safety and state government officials.

It will help all of us to work on ways to stem the flow of unlawful immigration and to stem the flow of illegal contraband, Abbott said, while seated next to officials from the National Guard, Texas Department of Public Safety and Texas Division of Emergency Management.

Abbott didnt address the ongoing conflict between himself and the Biden administration that escalated this week after federal officials threatened to sue Texas over Abbotts order to strip certain shelters for migrant children of their state licenses, which could force the shelter operators  which operate under contracts with the federal government  to move the children elsewhere.

The 52 state-licensed shelters house roughly 8,600 children, according to data from the state. In a letter to Texas officials Monday, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services attorney Paul Rodriguez asked Texas to clarify Abbotts order and said it could violate the U.S. Constitutions Supremacy Clause, which states that federal law overrides state laws. He gave Texas until Friday to respond.

Abbott has blamed the recent surge of migrants to the Texas-Mexico border on the Biden administrations immigration policies, claiming in a disaster declaration this week that new federal policies have paved the way for dangerous gangs and cartels, human traffickers, and deadly drugs like fentanyl to pour into our communities.

Two weeks ago, Abbott deployed more than 1,000 Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and National Guard members to the border as part of Operation Lone Star  an initiative he announced in March aimed at beefing up security at the border with troopers and National Guard. Abbott later expanded those efforts to also tackle human trafficking at the border, including a plan for DPS troopers and Texas Rangers to interview unaccompanied minors that cross the border to identify potential human trafficking victims.

During his first months in office, Biden paused border wall construction started under former President Donald Trump and ordered a review of the Trump administrations Migrant Protection Protocols, which required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico until their cases could be heard in U.S. immigration courts.

The Biden Administration has referred to its new policies as a way to be more humane toward migrants.

After Vice President Kamala Harris visited Guatemala and Mexico this week, she told NBCs Lester Holt, We have to understand that theres a reason people are arriving at our border and ask what is that reason and then identify the problem so we can fix it.

During her trip, she faced backlash from progressives after she told Guatemalans: Do not come.
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Allow us to introduce you to The Ultimate Learn Sign Language Bundle. Just like any other language out there, American Sign Language is pretty nuanced, so your best bet for learning is to take a reliable course. With 21 courses that focus on the most important parts of sign language, your money goes right to work with this bundle.
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News

Marion's Timbs to have vehicle returned after eight-year legal battle

After an eight-year court battle that began in Grant County and went all the way from the Indiana Supreme Court to the U.S. Supreme Court and back, a Marion man will soon have his vehicle returned to him.

On Thursday, the Indiana Supreme Court affirmed the decision made by Grant County Superior Court 1 Judge Jeffrey Todd that Timbs 2013 Land Rover LR2 should be returned to him immediately.

Todays ruling is an important victory for property rights across Indiana, Sam Gedge, an Institute for Justice (IJ) attorney who represents Timbs, said in a press release. As the Indiana Supreme Court correctly recognized, Indianas campaign to take Tysons car is just the sort of abusive forfeiture that the Excessive Fines Clause is designed to curtail. The State of Indiana has spent nearly a decade trying to confiscate a vehicle from a low-income recovering addict. No one should have to spend eight years fighting the government just to get back their car.

Timbs, of Marion, purchased the vehicle in 2013 after receiving money from a life insurance policy following his fathers death, court documents state.

Police seized the Land Rover when Timbs was arrested in 2013, claiming the vehicle was used to engage in illegal drug trafficking and noting Timbs drove the vehicle to sell drugs to an undercover officer on one occasion. Timbs later pleaded guilty to one B-felony count of dealing in a controlled substance and a D-felony count of conspiracy to commit theft, according to court documents.

The Supreme Court majority opinion notes he served a sentence of one year of house arrest and five years of probation and since then avoided any probation violations, committed no crimes, participated in treatment programs...assisted with drug task forces[and] also held down several jobs.

Since the initial arrest, Timbs and his legal counsel have argued the seizure of the vehicle, assessed at approximately $42,000 at the time, was excessive compared to the maximum $10,000 fine associated with his convictions, according to previous Chronicle-Tribune reports. Lawyers representing Timbs have cited the Excessive Fines Clause in the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which states that excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted.

In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the clause of the Eighth Amendment could be applied to the states, not just the federal government, but left the determination whether the seizure of the Land Rover was a grossly excessive fine to the local trial court, Superior Court 1.

Last April, Todd ruled the seizure of the vehicle was disproportionate to Timbs offense by a significant margin, noting his clean record since the arrest, the fact that the Land Rover was Timbs only asset, and a determination that Timbs crimes were victimless since he made sales of drugs to undercover police officers.

After the state appealed the Superior Court 1 decision, the Indiana Supreme Court independently reviewed the facts of the case and a majority opinion came to the same conclusion as Todd, that Timbs had proved the seizure was grossly disproportionate compared to his crimes.

For years, this case has been important not just for me, but for thousands of people who are caught up in forfeiture lawsuits, Timbs said in the IJ press release. The States refusal to give back my car has never made sense; if theyre trying to rehabilitate me and help me help myself, why do you want to make things harder by taking away the vehicle I need to meet with my probation officer or go to a drug recovery program or go to work? I hope that, finally, the government will move on and let me move on too.

Timbs previously told the Chronicle-Tribune he does not hold any animosity toward the officers who arrested him and he hopes to continue to use his experiences to help others through sharing his stories with state and local substance abuse task forces and the recovery community. He also said he would like to see civil asset forfeiture no longer be a part of the legal system.
Stephanie Lahr, owner of Sprinkled by Stephanie, stands next to her food truck. Lahr said while she sells a variety of options including custom creations, cheesecake on a stick is her most popular offering.
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International tertiary students will soon be allowed back onto campuses in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW), if a state government proposal announced on Thursday gains federal approval.

The students, who have been blocked from entering Australia during the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, are usually a major source of revenue to the NSW economy, with the sector estimated to have been worth 14.6 billion Australian dollars (about 11.3 billion U.S. dollars) in 2019.

Overseas students are still enrolling at Australian universities but are studying online from their home countries.

NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet said international students' education was the state's second most valuable export and "we need to do what we can to help students return and revive this sector as quickly as possible."

Under the NSW government's pilot plan, 250 international students would arrive in the capital city of Sydney each fortnight from mid-year. The students would be in addition to the 3,000 returning Australians allowed back into NSW each week.

The students would then go into quarantine at specially approved student accommodation at no cost to taxpayers.

The proposal has been made after several months' collaboration with the NSW Vice-Chancellor's Committee, one of the state's senior academic groups.

"This program has carefully considered the personal, social and academic aspects of our students, to ensure they successfully resume their studies and re-join NSW's vibrant, multicultural community as soon as possible," said committee member Professor Barney Glover.

Council of International Students president Belle Lim was also encouraged to learn that the plan has been submitted for federal review.

"We are so happy to see that international students will be welcomed back to NSW, and it sends a great message to those studying online offshore that there is hope that things will return to normal again," Lim said.

The final decision on the plan will be made by the federal education minister.
A. There needs to be a traffic light there instead.

B. A roundabout will work just fine in that location.

C. Roundabouts are confusing and terrible. It shouldn't happen.

D. That intersection is not a priority for change, so just leave it the way it is.

Vote

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The number of new immigrants dipped in April as Canada continues to lose momentum. However, we can expect a stronger finish to 2021.

Canadas immigration levels are starting to slow down The number of new immigrants dipped in April as Canada continues to lose momentum. However, we can expect a stronger finish to 2021.

Canadas immigration levels are starting to slow down The number of new immigrants dipped in April as Canada continues to lose momentum. However, we can expect a stronger finish to 2021.

Canadas immigration levels are starting to slow down The number of new immigrants dipped in April as Canada continues to lose momentum. However, we can expect a stronger finish to 2021. Kareem El-Assal Shelby Thevenot Aa Accessibility Font Style Serif

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In April 2021, Canada welcomed 21,105 new immigrants, the lowest monthly count since the start of the year.



This new Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) data show that despite a strong start to the year, Canada has been losing momentum over the past two months.

In January 2021, Canada welcomed 24,680 new immigrants followed by 23,395 in February. Levels fell further to 21,105 in March and went even lower in April. It is unknown why Canadas permanent residence intake has declined following a strong start to the year.

Canada is guided by its Immigration Levels Plan 2021-2023.

Under the plan, the country is seeking to welcome at least 401,000 new immigrants annually beginning this year. These are the highest immigration targets in Canadian history, and are due to the federal governments goal of supporting Canadas post-pandemic economic recovery.

Canada sought to welcome 341,000 new immigrants in 2020 but only managed to admit 184,000 due to coronavirus-related disruptions such as the travel restrictions it has had in place since March 2020.

Find Out if Youre Eligible for Canadian Immigration

Indeed, the travel restrictions have resulted in Canadas weakest immigration numbers since 1998. The country only managed to welcome just over 4,000 new immigrants in April 2020, potentially the weakest month for Canadian immigration since the Second World War.

Canada is no longer on pace to achieve its 401,000 target for this year. However, a number of factors still remain in play that could see the country gain momentum and come closer to achieving the target.

First, the summer months usually see higher immigration numbers due to the warmer weather and newcomers arriving before the resumption of the academic and business calendar in September.

Second, the Canadian government is beginning to openly discuss easing its travel restrictions. In recent weeks, Canada has enjoyed more success administering COVID-19 vaccines and seeing its case totals decline. Canadas prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has said the international border would open up in a phased approach, starting with fully vaccinated travellers. Health Minister Patty Hajdu also said Canada could start scaling back quarantine requirements for exempt travellers as early as the first week of July. Reducing such restrictions would allow thousands of Confirmation of Permanent Residence (COPR) holders to finally complete their landing in Canada, after being stranded overseas since the travel restrictions took effect.

Third, IRCC is currently prioritizing transitioning those in Canada to permanent residence through the likes of Express Entry, the Provincial Nominee Program (PNP), and other programs. Express Entry draws are mainly focusing on Canadian Experience Class (CEC) candidates. IRCC has already invited 81,713 candidates to apply for permanent residence in 2021, which is almost double the number of invitations issued at the same time last year. In addition, IRCC has new permanent residency streams, for up to 90,000 international student graduates and essential workers, which started accepting applications on May 6.

IRCC notes that permanent residence applicants from within Canada are less likely to face coronavirus-related challenges. Hence, the focus on domestic immigration applicants should translate in a significant increase in the number of individuals who obtain permanent residence in the second half of this year. The processing standard for Express Entry is six months or less, although it has slowed during the pandemic. Nonetheless, if IRCC is able to land achieve its goal of landing many of these applicants by the end of the year, it will at the very least exceed the 300,000 newcomer threshold in 2021.

Find Out if Youre Eligible for Canadian Immigration

 CIC News All Rights Reserved. Visit CanadaVisa.com to discover your Canadian immigration options.
The pandemic has been the great disruptor, forcing companies of all sizes across the public and private sector to respond quickly to keep their businessesand their peopleup and running. All of it has required a degree of reinvention, which I define as occurring when an organization shifts responsibilities from traditional cost and complexity management to those that enable every company to become a tech-driven company while simultaneously running and reinventing the business.

As part of a recent CIO roundtable, IT leaders discussed how they pivoted, whats important to their organizations now, and how their learnings have shaped their path forward.

Putting people first

For almost all of the attendees, people and culture were just as or more important than the tools and solutions they implemented to help their organizations adapt.

An investment firms CIO said employee buy-in is crucial to any reinvention. It's people more than anything else. It's the culture. I think that's the huge hurdle to overcome. It's the teamand the leaders who are able to sell that new strategy, the new concept, the new philosophy, and make sure that it has the right ingredientsto be palatable to the wellbeing of the staff, he pointed out.

A systems integrator for the federal government characterizes the pandemic as a great leveler, explaining, The pandemic required everybodyHR, finance, the president, the employeeto be singularly focused on keeping the business running. You think about that and the power of the enterprise and what it can do, and the fact that they looked at their IT leader to guide and lead them through this. And then the IT leader [was able to] say, I got you. This is what we're going to do.

That's a really powerful thing. We can't lose that opportunity as we go forward to accelerate all of these things that we want to doas we reinvent IT. [Reinvention] truly takes place across your usersthe way you think, the resiliency that you build into your organization, and the type of talent that you're hiring. We want [our] team to upskill so that they can turn their attention from thinking about how cables and wires connect and if lights are green to, What business problems am I trying to solve, which quickly became the pandemic, but there are other things that we need to solve, not for process and efficiency, but innovation.

We want [them] to have a curiosity [to] learn something new. That's really important to keep that refresh on technology. There's a reason to have diversity in your IT organization so that you have that diversity of thought. It does take a special set of talent that is willing to constantly be reinventing their own skillsets and moving on to something new. But once you find themyou really want to keep them.

The CIO of a business solutions company adds that empowerment is also important. Most technology people pick up on new capabilities pretty quickly. The key is organizationally empowering people and letting them be curious [and] understanding failure is only failure if you don't learn from it, he explained.

The CIO and CSO at a cloud communications company shared that change should include people at every level. The CIO, in my mind, is a chief inspiration officer role, he said. How do I inspire our community and our employees [working remote] to stay connected and engaged above and beyond the work that we do through e-mails, Slack, and Zoom-like products?

The CIO of a West Coast university is shifting the focus of his team. The big purpose for the central IT shop is to convert data into information and information into a meaningful action, he said. I take a team knowledge-centric perspective to organizational structure versus a formal hierarchy. We need to have an adaptable, flexible organization that can crystallize and improve knowledge. We set the direction, we set where we're going to go with skillsets. We provide the training opportunities for the staff to make the leap, and then we monitor.

Leading from the top-down is also important. The CTO of a business solutions organization believes leaders need to establish the guardrails and finish line. What we do as leaders is provide the timeframe, the commitment, and push. If people wait for change to occur when it feels comfortable, normal, and natural, they'll never do it. So we put an end date and we work like mad across the enterprise to make the change happen to give it a sense of urgency, he explained.

Capitalizing on investments and planning for the next disruption

As disruptive as the pandemic was, it wasnt the only disruptor. Some of the panelists shared that their evolutions before and during the pandemic prepared them for the next hurdle. And in some cases, the IT leaders were ahead of the curve, but theyre not resting on those laurels.

2020 had a global pandemic, we had five hurricanes come through the same exact path in the United States, then we had the ice age in Texas, we had Solorigate, and we had the Microsoft hack. They keep coming and you get up over one mountain and see that there's another mountain range. So we have to continue to have that resiliency and agility to be able to keep moving, said the systems integrator for the federal government.

The CTO of a business solutions organization that handles IT, finance, and HR capabilities was able to nimbly navigate the pandemic. If you had decentralized your network and adopted cloud-native things, fully adopted DevOps, automationand moved to that consumption-based financial model of technology, the pandemic would have been pretty easy for you, he explained.

Where we did those things, we found that it was relatively easy. Where we didn't do those things well, it was a scramble. As long as we follow those macro trends and we move quickly, faster than we ever have before, [were OK]. We've got to move at the speed of business.

The CIO of an integrated healthcare system said that technological preparedness is key. What is that next thing that we think might come so that we can start prepping for it before it hits, as opposed to waiting for it to happen and then trying to [react] to it, she said. Overnightpatients weren't able to come into the clinics to be seen. Telemedicine all of a sudden became incredibly important. We had already started down that path before the pandemic, so we accelerated [from] piloting telemedicine in some places [and] deployed right away to the rest of organization.

The CIO of a West Coast university said its technology investments ahead of the pandemic meant it never hiccupped. We're moving from on-prem to cloud ridiculously fast. We'll be on-prem within two years100 percent of our systems. I'm going to do infrastructure better than people who've got football fields of infrastructure. Our response to COVID was enabled by our cloud dependency, he pointed out. We were able to scale out without missing a beat. We didn't have any of the entanglements you get with having to scale out quickly with your on-prem environments.

Looking within the organization

The CIO for a California university system said the pandemic triggered a reexamination of priorities. The pandemic caused us to deprioritize things that really weren't important to the organization, reprioritize things that were truly important, [and] deemphasize those things that weren't working, he shared.

Going forward, how do we constantly do this and reinvent ourselves without having the external forcenot needing a change in management or a change in leadership to move in this direction. How do we self-motivate to keep the energy and the decisions that we're making so that we can continue on this journey?

The CTO and CISO of a financial investment firm said its about leading the charge on change. Sometimes, when we make decisions, we fall in love with those decisions and keep that relationship going longer than it should. We need to learn how to say goodbye to some of the wonderful ideas that we had, or thought we had, quicker, he explained. Thenwe can move on to other projects.

Sometime reinvention means being open to completely new busines models. The digital CIO for a commercial property investment firm saw his industry brought to its knees when the pandemic emptied office buildings. Nothing creates change in an organization [more] than when your company has an existential crisis. When [everyone] left the office, [they] stopped using my product overnight, he said.

There were a lot of conversation around what happens next. Its about letting go of the things that we hold sacred. Destroying the things we [held] sacred actually has been a good thing because it's causing us to look at things differently and talk to clients more closely. Because of the demand for flexibility, a better experience, and health and safety, we are completely rethinking the way we deliver technology, both inside and outside the company.

Conclusion

Organizations that have survived and thrived during the pandemic did so in large part because they met the challenges it created by quickly capitalizing on new opportunities and growing their business with new products, services, and channels. The pandemic forced a realization by public and private organizations alike that IT is the glue holding everything together. That realization is now driving the technology investments that will empower them to stay ahead of the competition through business agility, customer centricity, and actionable insights.
New Yorkers will be sick of me

After getting slammed for fleeing the city for his country home in New Paltzduring the pandemic, Andrew Yang warned New Yorkers that they would see him in the city around the clock  at least during his first term  if hes elected mayor. Yang vowed during a debate Thursday night that he wouldnt rely on a taxpayer-funded security detail to drive him and his family upstate. In fact, he said New Yorkers would be seeing him so much they might get sick of him. I dont expect to leave the city a single day for my first term. Im going to be here grinding it out because thats what our city requires right now, he said. Grinding is an Eric Adams catchphrase at this point, and the subtext was clear, when Adams had just released E-ZPass records showing government cars had driven him to New Jersey six times in the past year  presumably to a second home he owns there with his partner. But Yang was also drawing a contrast with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who came under fire for abandoning New Yorkers to be on the presidential campaign trail in Iowa when more than70,000 New Yorkers lost power for a few hours. New Yorkers will be sick of me, theyll be like Yang go away, because Im going to be here all the time trying to solve problems and get our city working again for us and our families, Yang said. Of course, Yangs pledge was more rhetoric than reality. He has already said hed visit Israel, and his campaign clarified that he would visit Albany and Washington, D.C., on official business.

By the Numbers

Over 50

The number of staffers working on Dianne Morales mayoral campaign who were fired on June 9, according to a spokesperson for the campaign, who said anyone who was let go this week was engaged in the work stoppage. A campaign source told the Daily News it was 45 people, and the union called it 40+, but the campaign declined to give a specific number, or share the number of people who are still working for the Morales campaign, with early voting starting tomorrow. Morales reportedly had about 100 employees at the campaigns peak, which suggests about 50 are left. But Maya Wileys mayoral campaign was eager to share that it hired 12 new organizers who had been working for Morales previously, in addition to Ifeoma Ike, a former senior adviser to Morales who decamped to Team Wiley. Morales refused her nascent staff unions demands last week, but a spokesperson said all the fired staffers had been paid through Wednesday, including the two-week work stoppage  and that the New York City Campaign Finance Board had approved it, despite Morales concerns. A fired staffer said payday is on June 15, so theyll find out for sure then.

Quart brings it in over the limit

Dan Quarts Manhattan district attorney campaign had a lucrative day on Jan. 10, 2020, bringing in $100,200 from private donors, and transferring in another $15,000 from one of Quarts older campaign committees. But he may have to return some of it, like half of the $10,000 donation from LBHD Management LLC, since LLC donations are capped at $5,000. LBHD shares an address with Tao Lu, who donated $35,000 that same day. BCYTL LLC, which gave Quart $5,000 that day, also shares an address with Lu. Neither LLC seemed to file the required paperwork with the state Board of Elections identifying its owners, but both share Lus home address and list Lu as a registered agent. A call to a number associated with Lu, who has no other history of political donations, was not returned. But if Lu does have an ownership stake in the LLCs, that would seem to put Lu well over the individual contribution limit of about $37,829. The Quart campaign has always followed all campaign finance rules and regulations, campaign manager Leslie Joy said. With nearly 1,000 donors totalling millions in campaign contributions from all corners of Manhattan, should there be any donor-caused deficiencies, we will of course work to resolve it thoroughly and swiftly.

The Wall Street person and the political scion

Ray McGuire has walked a fine line in his run for New York City mayor, saying hes not just a Wall Street guy. Hes someone who was coming from the bottom to get to this point. But its hard not to be pigeonholed when your campaign seems to have only drawn interest and donations from the citys elite, as highlighted in the latest entry in City & States For the Record series on mayoral candidates professional histories. But if Wall Street is McGuires domain, then City Hall is Stringers world, after a five-decade record of political involvement that starts not just with campaigning for his cousin Bella Abzug but with his father, who was counsel to Mayor Abe Beame, and his mother, who was a City Council member. Now if Stringer cant pull off an electoral miracle, hell be out of office in January for the first time in 29 years.

Endorsement Watch

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams endorsed Maya Wiley for mayor  the Uniformed Firefighters Association endorsed Andrew Yang for mayor  state Sen. Gustavo Rivera and Assembly Member Harvey Epstein both rescinded their endorsements of Dianne Morales for mayor following her campaigns labor dispute  The New York Post endorsed Tali Farhadian Weinsten for Manhattan district attorney  U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders released a slate of endorsements, including Brad Lander for comptroller, Tahanie Aboushi for Manhattan district attorney and Michael Hollingsworth in Council District 35 in Brooklyn  Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released a slate of personal endorsements, including Adolfo Abreu in District 14 in the Bronx, Jaslin Kaur in District 23 in Queens and a co-endorsement of Shahana Hanif and Brandon West in District 39 in Brooklyn  Assembly Member Karines Reyes endorsed Vanessa Gibson as her No. 1 selection for Bronx borough president and Nathalia Fernandez as her No. 2  and Jumaane Williams and state Sen. Leroy Comrie endorsed Al-Hassan Kanu in District 27 in Queens.

Staffing Up

Anthony Hayes has joined Dianne Morales mayoral campaign as communications consultant  and Laura Manos-Hey has joined Eliza Orlins Manhattan district attorney campaign as deputy organizer.

Got tips? Email JColtin@CityandStateNY.com or SKashiwagi@CityandStateNY.com or send a DM to @JCColtin or @SydneyKashiwagi

District Data

060221-districtmap-23.png Alt Text: City Council District 23 Title Text: City Council District 23 Caption: City Council District 23 Description: City Council District 23 Image Credit: Alex Law/City & State

City Council District 23 in eastern Queens covering neighborhoods including Glen Oaks, Queens Village and Floral Park

Current council member: Barry Grodenchik since 2015, who is not running for reelection

2010 census demographics: 36.7% Asian and Pacific Islander, 31.4% white, 13.8% Hispanic, 11.7% Black

Housing: 66.9% owner-occupied, 33.1% renter-occupied

2015 general election results: Grodenchik (Democratic): 55%, Joseph Concannon (Republican, Conservative and Reform): 37.9%, Rebecca Lynch (Working Families): 7%

2017 Democratic primary election results: Grodenchik: 79.2%, Benny Itteera: 20.2%

Whos running: Alex Amoroso, Koshy Thomas, Steve Behar, Sanjeev Kumar Jindal, Jaslin Kaur, Linda Lee, Debra Markell, James Reilly, Harpreet Singh Toor. Council Member Barry Grodenchik decided to retire at the end of his term after admitting to sexually harassing a staffer. He was subsequently stripped of his chairmanship of the Parks and Recreation Committee, which all paved the way for this years open primary race. The list of nine candidates includes a Grodenchik aide, Steve Behar. Jaslin Kaur has been endorsed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and the New York City Democratic Socialists of America. Nonprofit leader Linda Lee, Harpeet Singh Toor, who is a leader in the Sikh community and ex-City Hall official Debra Markell are also running. A source in the Democratic Party in Queens told Campaign Confidential that the race is between Behar and Lee, noting that Behar has name recognition in the district having worked for Grodenchik and so does Lee through the nonprofit she heads. As for Kaurs big endorsements on the left, the source said they dont think the endorsements will play well in the district. Thats not a Bernie Sanders or an AOC district, the source said. This is Eastern Queens, its more moderate. Its got a big Jewish population and so (Kaur) being supported by DSA is a net negative. But DSAs volunteer army has been hitting the district hard, hoping to prove it can win even in more moderate districts.

Twitter Posting
With less than a week to go before early voting starts in New York Citys primary elections this month, the very mention of the flood of texts voters receive from political campaigns elicits some strong reactions: Hate. It. Please stop. Unsubscribe.

Just when they thought theyd mastered the art of avoiding the unrelenting stream of requests for their attention, support and money  screening calls from unlisted numbers, unplugging the still-remaining landlines at dinnertime, pretending not to be home when canvassers come knocking  voters were confronted with a new frontier in campaign outreach. Texts from political campaigns, typically done through peer-to-peer texting platforms in which an actual person from the campaign is at the other end of the text message, are now ubiquitous in 2021.

Political candidates filling phones with text pleas for votes or donations can feel invasive to some. It can be very annoying and very overwhelming, said Zach Topkis, a Democratic primary voter who lives in Brooklyn. While the texts can sometimes be relatively easy to ignore and may even be preferable for some to alternatives like physical mailers, campaign texts can be maddening when they continue to come after a voter tries to opt-out from them, or when voters are targeted by texts about candidates in races outside their district. Theyre like, Can we count on you to vote? And its like, No, I dont live in your district, Topkis said. While some voters might get texts from districts they lived in previously, the outreach is sometimes more random; Topkis said he received text about a Manhattan district where hes never lived.

Others see the text message as the last bastion of personal communication, as e-mail is now oversaturated with fundraising appeals, advertisements and other messages that are automatically ignored. Of course, the personal nature of texting is exactly what makes that kind of outreach uniquely appealing to campaigns hoping to establish a relationship with voters.

When the COVID-19 pandemic shifted the primary campaign season of 2020 to mostly virtual activities, texting was an important tool to continue direct voter outreach when door-knocking wasnt a possibility. But while some in-person campaigning makes a return, as COVID-19 rates drop and vaccinations surge, the use of text banking by political candidates hasnt dissipated. The prevalence of texting as a voter contact tool has grown tremendously over the last several years, said Jake Dilemani, a managing director at Mercury Public Affairs, whose clients use text banking, including in City Council races and in citywide voter education campaigns. Each year, it becomes more and more a staple of a campaign. Candidates and consultants say that text banking hasnt necessarily become more important than other tools, such as phone banking, digital advertisements or good old fashioned door-knocking, but its increasingly one that campaigns feel they have to have in their arsenal.

If it feels like youre getting more campaign texts this year than in the last city election cycle  or even than in more recent state elections  its likely in part because the tool has become more widespread overall, but also because of the sheer number of contests happening across the city this year. This cycle, because New York is such a particularly crazy political environment, with hundreds and hundreds of candidates running, people are probably feeling a little bit of text burnout, said Doug Forand, a senior partner at Red Horse Strategies, which is consulting on Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams mayoral run, City Council Speaker Corey Johnsons comptroller run and more down ballot races. Whereas the mayoral, comptroller and most City Council seats had incumbents in 2017, wide-open mayoral, comptroller, borough president and district attorney primaries, plus dozens of City Council seats up for grabs, mean voters are likely also feeling overwhelmed by other kinds of outreach too.

In the midst of the 2018 midterm election, The New York Times observed a new texting era, in which Beto ORourkes Texas Senate run and Stacey Abrams Georgia gubernatorial bid were among the campaigns taking advantage of the increasingly popular tool. Though the Times wrote that the use of peer-to-peer texting made its national debut on Sen. Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign, one Republican strategist called texting the breakout tech of 2018.

Now, its not just in presidential and congressional runs that the tool has become somewhat ubiquitous, but in more local races, too. Peer-to-peer texting, facilitated through a proliferating number of platforms like Hustle, GetThru and RumbleUp, is attractive to political campaigns for several reasons. Voters cell phone numbers are relatively easy to find, either through voter registration files or purchased through commercial data sellers. Its optional for New York voters to provide their phone number on voter registration forms, but because the field is there, some fill it out, giving campaigns an easy way to contact them. Even voters who dont provide their number when registering to vote can still be targeted. Marketing firms can enhance voter files with the help of data brokers, which buy and sell your personal data, including phone numbers, selling that information to political campaigns and parties.

And while federal law restricts unsolicited automated texting, peer-to-peer texting is distinct because its not technically automated; a staffer, volunteer or the candidate themself is actually sending the text to the voter, with the assistance of platforms. (The peer-to-peer texting boom is in part due to this loophole, Fast Company wrote in 2020.) If you receive a text message from an unknown number purporting to be from an actual candidate, it may in fact be that candidate on the other end, but the number is a proxy generated by the platform.

Its also relatively cheap. Depending on the platform and whether campaigns use proprietary software, services might charge as low as 5 cents and as high as 15 cents per text. Email outreach is typically cheaper for campaigns, but texts tend to have much higher open rates than emails. And even for those who open a text just to see its from a campaign and then promptly delete it, five seconds of a voters attention can pay dividends in name recognition for a candidate, consultants said.

But cost isnt campaigns only concern. After all, door-knocking is free (albeit time-consuming.) Justin Krebs, a candidate in New York Citys 39th Council district who is using a texting service called Spoke, said texting makes it easier for the campaign to communicate with voters on their terms. You go to someones door, you dont know whats going on, he said. You dont know if theyre having dinner with a kid, if theyre on a Zoom call for work. Ive knocked on peoples doors who are in the middle of yoga class. But a voter can glance at a text when it comes in and respond later when its convenient.

Krebs, who is the national director of campaigns at the progressive advocacy group MoveOn, said that progressive organizations and electoral campaigns around the country started seeing high engagement from texting in 2018. Now Krebs said hes seen it in his Council run too. Krebs said that thousands of people responded to recent texts from his campaign asking voters what issues matter most to them, and he ended up having hundreds of exchanges with them. Forand, the political consultant, echoed the idea that a great advantage to texting is that it can allow people to have a direct conversation with a candidate or other campaign worker and have their questions answered, but said that its a small minority of people who actually engage in conversation.

Julie Menin, a candidate for the City Council on the Upper East Side, said that using text banking in her Council campaign was a no-brainer after she deployed it while leading the citys census outreach efforts last year. That allowed census workers to directly answer peoples questions about how to fill out the form, which ended up being an especially important service while field operations were suspended. And there are steps political campaigns can take to make it less grating. We never do texting for fundraising, Menin said, noting that her text outreach focuses on her platform issues. There are a lot of the city campaigns that are bombarding people with fundraising texts, and I think that gets annoying for people.

For those who detest political campaigns pinging their pockets, it may come as a surprise that some voters actually text back. But some actually do. Meirav Levy-Bernstein, a voter in Manhattan, said she only learned that the district attorney races were not using ranked choice voting  like other races in the city  after responding to a campaign text. And some voters prefer it to other forms of voter outreach like mailers (bad for the environment), phone calls (harder to unsubscribe to), and digital ads (completely inescapable.)

Jimmy Choi, another New York voter, said however that he hasnt found the texting to be engaging in any way. Other forms of outreach have been more successful, including phone banking, which led Choi to having a five-minute conversation with City Council candidate Elizabeth Adams, who is running in the 33rd district in Brooklyn, which he called substantive and useful.

Some voters said that a benefit of texting is that it can be easy to ignore, especially when theyre offered an opt-out or unsubscribe option, and when their choice to opt out is actually respected. But when the texts continue to flood in or no opt-out is offered, it can be exasperating. One voter suggested that the City Council pass a law to require campaigns to offer the option to opt-out of texts. Others suggested that text banking would be better leveraged for use in even farther down ballot races, like judicial elections, where most voters could benefit from learning a little bit more about the candidates running and their platforms. With less money flowing in those judicial races, text banking is not yet pervasive.

But if textings popularity keeps growing at this rate, we just might get there. Peer-to-peer texting is still just one tool that campaigns use, and its not interchangeable with in-person interactions or other forms of outreach, campaigns said. But texting has become an essential tactic, and any campaign that has the resources to use it should be doing so, Dilemani said. At least until campaigns discover some new form of communication to capitalize on. Unless the fax machine makes a comeback, texting is here to stay, at least for now, he said.
Last year, reported sightings of unidentified flying objects increased in the US, Canada, and across the globe. In August, the Pentagon reported the formation of a task force intended to investigate UFO sightings. Recently, The New Yorker printed thirteen thousand words on the history of the US governments approach to UFOs, in a piece titled How the Pentagon started taking UFOs seriously. The article explored the nature of consensus, taboo, and our collective willingness to suspend disbelief. After the publication of the New Yorker piece, The Ringer asked its author, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, whether he believed in the possibility of extraterrestrial life (he didnt commit to a simple yes-or-no answer). Forbes wrote, The Media is taking UFOs seriously. Should we?

Much of the media coverage since the New Yorker feature has taken the subject more seriously. After former president Barack Obama appeared on The Late Late Show and noted that he was aware of cases in which airborne objects had not been explained or identified, news outlets amplified the exchange. A reporter asked President Joe Biden about Obamas comments; Biden referred the reporter back to Obama. A forthcoming report from the Pentagons task force has prompted a flurry of coverage, from local news updates on UFO sightings to national deep dives into the possible implications of what the panel will reveal. 60 Minutes dedicated an episode to the presence of UFOs in restricted airspace. Last week, the New York Times offered a preview of the Pentagons report, based on interviews with anonymous sources, announcing that the U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Cant Rule It Out, Either. Earlier this week, the Scientific American asked an astronomer, a nasa researcher, an astrophysicist, and other experts to weigh in on what is known about the reports initial findings; CNN got Neil deGrasse Tysons take.

ICYMI: The lab-leak mess

Yesterday, NPR spoke to former senator Harry Reid, who has been making the media rounds, about the secret Pentagon UFO-investigation program for which he helped allocate funding in 2007. We are in a moment right now where, all of a sudden, people are taking UFOs seriously, NPRs Noel King said to Reid. I dont exactly know what happened.

Journalism tends to style itself as pragmatic, skeptical, rooted in reason. But when a premise that was once considered taboo becomes permissible, the relative subjectivity of our industry is revealed. The recent spate of UFO coverage points toward the difficulty of reporting on things that we, as a society, dont yet know or understandor, as Lewis-Krauss New Yorker piece examines, things we dont interrogate because we think we already understand them.

Much of the recent coverage asks whether we should take UFOs seriously. That the answer is no longer considered a foregone conclusion could signal something about journalisms relationship with uncertainty, or about the codependent and capricious nature of human understanding. Report it outone of journalisms core obligationssuggests that everything is, at its core, knowable. But knowledge is defined, in part, by its limitssomething a year of rapidly evolving scientific guidelines has often reminded us. That doesnt negate the possibility of good reporting; it just requires good reporters to take more into account. At times, the gap between our knowledge and the truth is wide; humility will keep us honest.

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Below, more on marginal ideas going mainstream:

Stranger than fiction: For Vanity Fair, Joe Pompeo wrote about the prevalence of mainstream stories that have migrated from the fringesincluding the recent UFO reporting, the lab leak theory, and increased attention to the possibility that various spies and diplomats have come down with a targeted neurological condition known as the Havana syndrome. He hypothesizes, among other things, that the news cycle is reeling from the loss of Donald Trumps antics. Compared to the headline-making train wreck that preceded him, coverage of Bidens presidency may feel boring by comparison, Pompeo wrote. You know whats not boring? UFOs. The Wuhan lab. Foreign agents allegedly targeting U.S. officials with microwave-pulse weapons.

For Joe Pompeo wrote about the prevalence of mainstream stories that have migrated from the fringesincluding the recent UFO reporting, the lab leak theory, and increased attention to the possibility that various spies and diplomats have come down with a targeted neurological condition known as the Havana syndrome. He hypothesizes, among other things, that the news cycle is reeling from the loss of Donald Trumps antics. Compared to the headline-making train wreck that preceded him, coverage of Bidens presidency may feel boring by comparison, Pompeo wrote. You know whats not boring? UFOs. The Wuhan lab. Foreign agents allegedly targeting U.S. officials with microwave-pulse weapons. The lab leak, continued: The resurgence of attention to theories suggesting that the novel coronavirus originated in a lab has led to more journalistic investigation, but the facts are still thin, the Washington Post reported. For The Atlantic, Daniel Engber lined up some of the possible pitfalls in reporting out the story: placing too much significance on a lack of evidence, projecting assumed motivations, doubting sources who have demonstrated credibility. The sudden rush of coverage, Engber wrote, is ensnaring readers in semantic quibbles, side points, and distractions.

The resurgence of attention to theories suggesting that the novel coronavirus originated in a lab has led to more journalistic investigation, but the facts are still thin, the reported. For Daniel Engber lined up some of the possible pitfalls in reporting out the story: placing too much significance on a lack of evidence, projecting assumed motivations, doubting sources who have demonstrated credibility. The sudden rush of coverage, Engber wrote, is ensnaring readers in semantic quibbles, side points, and distractions. A hero, villainized: Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote about a smear campaign against Dr. Anthony Fauci, suggesting that the right-wing media machine, having failed to make President Biden or Vice President Harris strong targets for ire, has made Fauci out to be a substitute villain. In a right-wing culture so often opposed to verifiable reality, Sullivan wrote, who better to target than a person who stands for science and facts?

Other notable stories:

ICYMI: Reading Up on the Race

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Lauren Harris is a freelance journalist. She writes CJR's weekly newsletter for the Journalism Crisis Project. Follow her on Twitter @LHarrisWrites.
Allianz Appoints Aviation Claims Head

Allianz Global Corporate & Speciality promoted Cristina Schoen as global head of aviation claims in New York.

Schoen previously was director of airline claims, a role she retains in her new position. She reports to Jim Turano, regional head of long tail claims, North America, and Jorg Ahrens, global head of key case management (long tail).

Schoen first worked for AGCS as senior coverage counsel and moved into roles ofincreasing responsibility, the company said in a press release. Prior to joining Allianz, she led the airline claims division of United States Aircraft Insurance Group and held associate positions at Archer & Greiner P.C. and Sweeney & Sheehan, P.C. law firms.

Schoen is recognized as an industry expert in airline emergency response protocol from the insurers perspective, AGCS said. She frequently presents at aviation industry events nationwide, including those hosted by the American Bar Association, the Aviation Insurance Association and the Regional Airline Association. Most recently, she was a keynote speaker at the Americas Claims Executive Leadership Forum.

Schoen is admitted to practice before the state and federal courts of New York and New Jersey, as well as the US Supreme Court. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame and received her juris doctor from Villanova University School of Law.

Accuro Solutions Hires Chief Strategy Officer

Accuro Solutions, a medical bill review provider based in Sarasota, Florida, has appointed George Furlong as chief strategy officer.

Furlong previously served as senior vice president of managed care for Sedgwick Claims Management. Before then, he was the chief business intelligence officer for Universal Smart Comp. He previously served as the senior vice president, program development and analytics for Bunch & Associates, and earlier as vice president of business development and analytics for Choice Medical Management Services. He started his workers compensation career in information management and analysis with MetraComp, a United Healthcare subsidiary.

Furlong holds a degree in Finance and Management from Rutgers University and is the vice chair of the Board of Directors of URAC.

ATF Medical Appoints Catastrophic Care Manager

ATF Medical, a workers compensation medical equipment and housing vendor for workers compensation insurers, has appointed Renee Espiritu as manager of catastrophic care.

Espirtu will coordinate all medical equipment and supplies and adaptive housing needs for seriously injured workers, the Woodbridge, Virginia-based company said in a press release. The position is newly created.

Espiritu has 20 years of healthcare experience, with 15 years of that in workers compensation managed care, the company said. She most recently served as catastrophic team lead fir MTI America. She previously worked for TechHealth, continuing on with the company after it became One Call.
Global solicitation for short films on biodiversity protection proposed by the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) of the UN Convention started Wednesday, as announced at an event in Kunming, capital city of southwest China's Yunnan Province.



The theme of the conference is Ecological Civilization: Building a Shared Future for All Life on Earth.

Films should focus on biodiversity protection, biodiversity beauty, peaceful coexistence between human and nature, biodiversity protection practices, etc. and the solicitation activity will end on August 15.

Entries must be in English or Chinese, but are not limited to genres, micro movies, micro documentaries and creative videos are all included. A total of 100 participants of four categories will compete for Most Creative Work, Most Popular Work, Best Story and Excellent Work.

David Ainsworth, Secretariat of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity addressed the event via video. He said he hopes participants would display biodiversity protection, the magnificent nature and peaceful coexistence between human and nature in our daily life in their works.

Yunnan, essential to biodiversity protection in China and even in the world, will hold the COP15 in October, 2021 in Kunming.
The worlds largest meat processing company says it paid the equivalent of $11 million to hackers who broke into its computer system late last month.

Brazil-based JBS SA said on May 31 that it was the victim of a ransomware attack, but Wednesday was the first time the companys U.S. division confirmed that it had paid the ransom.

This was a very difficult decision to make for our company and for me personally, said Andre Nogueira, the CEO of JBS USA. However, we felt this decision had to be made to prevent any potential risk for our customers.

JBS said the vast majority of its facilities were operational at the time it made the payment, but it decided to pay in order to avoid any unforeseen issues and ensure no data was exfiltrated.

The FBI has attributed the attack to REvil, a Russian-speaking gang that has made some of the largest ransomware demands on record in recent months. The FBI said it will work to bring the group to justice and it urged anyone who is the victim of a cyberattack to contact the bureau immediately.

The attack targeted servers supporting JBSs operations in North America and Australia. Production was disrupted for several days.

Earlier this week, the Justice Department announced it had recovered most of a multimillion-dollar ransom payment made by Colonial Pipeline, the operator of the nations largest fuel pipeline.

Colonial paid a ransom of 75 bitcoin __ then valued at $4.4 million __ in early May to a Russia-based hacker group. The operation to seize cryptocurrency reflected a rare victory in the fight against ransomware as U.S. officials scramble to confront a rapidly accelerating threat targeting critical industries around the world.

It wasnt immediately clear if JBS also paid its ransom in bitcoin.

JBS said it spends more than $200 million annually on IT and employs more than 850 IT professionals globally.

The company said forensic investigations are still ongoing, but it doesnt believe any company, customer or employee data was compromised.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
NEW ORLEANS (AP)  The offshore service vessel that capsized in the Gulf of Mexico in a deadly April disaster is cracking and will have to be brought ashore in sections, the U.S. Coast Guard said Wednesday.

A Coast Guard news release said the Seacor Power had rotated in the spot where it partially sank after capsizing April 13 off Louisianas coast. Salvage workers reported signs of cracking and separation of the hull from the superstructure, indicating the vessels structural integrity has been compromised, according to the release.

A lift boat equipped with legs, the vessel can be lowered to the sea floor to anchor it in place for work on nearby oil and gas facilities. It overturned as it was heading to a job site with 19 people aboard. Only six survived.

Six bodies were recovered from the wreckage or Gulf waters. Seven people are missing and presumed dead.

Family members were briefed on salvage efforts Wednesday by officials with the company that owns the vessel and by the salvage company, Donjon-SMIT.

The Coast Guard said efforts so far have involved removal of debris around the vessel to make room for salvage equipment. Salvage efforts will include the use of a submersible barge that can be maneuvered under larger sections of the vessel, then refloated. The Coast Guard says the largest sections could be removed by the end of June, but that could be delayed by weather or other factors.

More lawsuits were filed Tuesday in connection with the capsizing, providing harrowing descriptions of what survivors endured in the accident that killed 13 shipmates.

Bryan Mires and James Gracien are among the six who survived after the Seacor Power overturned in severe weather on April 13. The widow of a man who died also filed suit Tuesday in New Orleans.

After being slammed into an interior vessel wall while the vessel took on water and breaking a window with a fire extinguisher, Plaintiff James Gracien escaped from his living quarters aboard the capsized vessel, and then drifted in cold waters for three hours, suffering hypothermia, before he was rescued, his lawsuit says.

Mires lawsuit says he used a pocketknife to free himself from ropes that had tangled around his legs after the vessel capsized. It said he was washed into rough, frigid Gulf waters and drifted for about two hours before he was rescued.

Hannah Daspit, the widow of Dylan Daspit, had earlier filed a lawsuit in state court in Houston, Texas, where at least four other related lawsuits are pending.

With Tuesdays filings, at least nine civil suits are pending in federal courts. A federal judge began issuing orders Monday putting the cases on hold pending action on an effort by the Seacor Powers owners to limit their liability in the state and federal cases under federal maritime law.

The Seacor Power was a liftboat vessel with three legs that can be lowered to the sea floor, converting the ship to an offshore platform that can service oil and gas facilities. It had been chartered by Talos Energy LLC for work on a Gulf platform and capsized on its way there.

Defendants in the latest lawsuits are Talos and two affiliated companies described as owners and operators of the vessel, Seacor Marine LLC and Falcon Global Offshore II LLC.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
OXFORD, Miss. (AP)  Heavy rainfall this week has flooded roads and neighborhoods in parts of north Mississippi, and forecasters said Thursday that more rain was expected.

The National Weather Service said more than 15 inches (38 centimeters) of rain fell in Tallahatchie County from Tuesday to Thursday.

Rising waters forced evacuations Wednesday in the Willow Creek subdivision in Saltillo, near Tupelo.

In Yalobusha County, rain swept away a section of a road east of Water Valley. A truck crashed into the hole and crews rescued the occupant, WTVA-TV reported. Lee County officials Wednesday closed a section of road after the underside swept away but the road surface remained intact.

Oxford resident Jamie Mardis told WMC-TV that he received a text message Wednesday from the nurse who does in-home care for his 4-year-old son. Rain had fallen throughout the previous night.

She said, You might want to go close the garage door because its coming down pretty good, Mardis said.

Within the hour, rain flooded Mardis yard and water moved into the garage.

The water was all the way up to the bottom of the door seal, he said, pointing at the duct tape barrier he had created. So we started making steps to try and get the furniture up inside and get prepared for the floodwaters inside the house.

Mardis said the water kept rising rapidly.

I was scared. I was afraid I might lose everything I got, he said You know, this is what Ive been working for the last 10 years, all piled up in this house.

Mardis son, Liam, has a medical condition that requires around-the-clock care and expensive medical equipment in the home. Liam had been taken Tuesday night to Le Bonheur Childrens Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and the water never reached the inside of the house.

Flooding happened throughout Oxford and Lafayette County.

It blew out some roads, blew out some culverts, said Joe Bynum, the county roads manager.

Emergency officials in Lafayette County told residents to evacuate several homes Wednesday after heavy rain created concern about a dam on a small lake. Crews from the county fire department pumped water out of Tara Lake to relieve pressure on a levee near the Tara Estates and Gum Tree subdivisions outside Oxford. A sinkhole was forming on the levee by the lake, according to the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. The fire department said late Wednesday that people were allowed to return to their homes.

About the photo: Alex Wilcox pulls his canoe along the road of Willow Creek Drive with Scout riding along in order to get him safety following flash flooding, Wednesday, June 9, 2021, in Saltillo, Miss. (Thomas Wells/The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal via AP)

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
A wildfire in Arizona that had neighboring New Mexico breathing in smoke was one of several blazes scorching the drought-stricken Southwest, signaling what could be a devastating summer.

Residents in New Mexicos largest city woke up Wednesday shrouded again in smoke from the Arizona fires. The yellow haze stretched up the Rio Grande Valley and obscured views of the mountain ranges surrounding Albuquerque.

Firefighters in Superior, Arizona, a former mining town about 60 miles (97 kilometers) east of Phoenix, however, made significant progress overnight on the so-called Telegraph Fire. They contained 21% of the fires perimeter, up from zero the night before, officials said.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey plans to visit the area Thursday. He will take an aerial tour of the fire site and stop at a shelter. He previously issued an emergency declaration for that fire and another several miles east. The declaration will make up to $400,000 available for response efforts.

More than 750 firefighters conducted burnout operations through the night. Crews overseen by a top-tier management team focused on establishing a fire break along U.S. 60 and in the Pinal Mountains.

The blaze has burned more than 125 square miles (324 square kilometers) in Pinal and Gila counties. It was first reported Friday and is believed to be human-caused.

Thousands of residents have been stuck in various stages of the evacuation process. At least 2,500 homes in Gila County have been evacuated, with twice that number set to go with bags packed, according to county emergency officials. Hundreds more also were cleared from their homes in a community in Pinal County.

A second home near Globe-Miami that belonged to Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers was among those destroyed.

The fire also forced closures on most roads leading out of town. But U.S. 70 reopened Wednesday.

Besides enduring smoke from Arizona fires, New Mexico is dealing with its own blazes, including one that was sparked by lightning three weeks ago in the Gila National Forest in the western part of the state. It has charred more than 71 square miles (184 square kilometers) and has forced the closure of the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument and much of the surrounding wilderness.

Utah, mired in extreme drought, has multiple wildfires burning. The largest started Tuesday near the town of Price, according to fire officials.

The drought, coupled with rising temperatures, has led to widespread fire restrictions in Utah, New Mexico and Arizona, including fireworks ahead of the July 4 holiday. Some northern Arizona agencies are tightening the restrictions this week to prohibit open fires and campfires.

Associated Press writers Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Brady McCombs in Salt Lake City contributed to this report.

About the photo: In this photo provided by Rusty Bowers, Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers walks through the remains of his familys weekend home on Tuesday, June 8, 2021, that was destroyed by a wildfire the day before. Bowers used the home in the remote mountains as a family retreat and often did his artwork there. (Elijah Cardon/Rusty Bowers via AP)
Grace Louise Archer, age 90, a resident of Aurora, Colorado, a former resident of Chillicothe, Missouri, passed away on Wednesday, June 2, 2021, at Shalom Park, Aurora, Colorado. Grace was born the daughter of Maurice P. Martin, Sr., and Margaret (O'Connor) Martin on October 10, 1930, in Chi
As I walk through the hospital wards to see patients, something is shifting. The once air of tension and uneasiness stemming from this virus is now breeding a feel of hope and vibrance as we see the numbers falling. Vaccinations are decreasing new cases and attenuating the virus severity overall.
Beachwood, OH (44122)

Today

Scattered thunderstorms in the morning, then partly cloudy late. High 73F. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

A few clouds from time to time. Low 59F. Winds NNW at 5 to 10 mph.
A visitor chooses porcelain items from Poland at the 2nd China-Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) Expo in Ningbo, east China's Zhejiang Province, June 8, 2021. [Photo/Xinhua]

As a stage to promote economic and trade cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs), the second China-CEEC Expo & International Consumer Goods Fair was held in Ningbo, east China's Zhejiang Province.

The four-day event, which kicked off on Tuesday, attracted some 300 enterprises from CEECs and more than 7,000 buyers.

The expo is becoming a trade propeller between China and CEECs, providing opportunities for exhibitors and buyers from home and abroad.

On Wednesday, business talks were held between two Romanian enterprises and their Chinese counterparts via an online meeting at Ningbo International Convention and Exhibition Center.

"Although the pandemic prevented many Romanian enterprises from coming to the expo, it does not dampen their enthusiasm for the Chinese market," said Robert Mitrofan with UPR Business Romania, who took part in the meeting.

Bringing with them commodities like wine, mineral water, and snacks, the enterprises are queuing up for online negotiations with Chinese buyers, he said.

At a signing ceremony, 26 purchase deals worth nearly 2.19 billion yuan (about 342.71 million U.S. dollars) were signed, involving Chinese importers from Shanghai, Zhejiang, Shandong, and Hunan.

The deals cover products like frozen beef, dairy products, copper, timber, car parts and turbines.

China and CEECs have witnessed accelerated trade growth since the establishment of the China-CEEC cooperation mechanism in 2012.

Trade between the two sides grew at an average annual pace of 8 percent from 2012 to 2020.

Trade between China and CEECs jumped 50.2 percent year on year to 30.13 billion U.S. dollars in the first quarter of 2021, data from the Ministry of Commerce (MOC) showed.

China and CEECs deepened cooperation in a wide range of fields. To date, two-way investment has reached nearly 20 billion U.S. dollars. More than 12,400 China-Europe freight train trips were made in 2020, a year-on-year increase of 50 percent.

The potential of the Chinese market and the optimized business environment have injected more impetus and vitality into China-CEEC economic and trade cooperation.

China's opening-up momentum boosted the confidence of foreign enterprises. It is especially the case for small and medium-sized enterprises in CEECs impacted by the epidemic, said Dejan Marinkovic, consul general of Serbia to Shanghai.

"We believe our sales in China will keep growing. In the future, we will bring more Romanian products to China offline and online, so that more Chinese consumers will know us," Robert said.

For Susan Huang with Ningbo Kevi Trade, the huge potential of China's market for rescue and fire fighting equipment is a real prospect, thanks to China's improved concept of emergency management.

"Even at 3,000 to 4,000 yuan each, we sell over 10,000 fire helmets from Poland in China every year," she said.

Looking ahead, more and more experts pointed out the rosy prospects for China-CEEC economic ties.

The supply and industrial chains of the two sides are complementary, which leads to positive prospects, said Ren Hongbin, assistant minister of commerce.

According to Liu Zuokui, deputy director of the Institute of European Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the cooperation between China and CEECs has gradually changed from top-down promotion at the national level to bottom-up promotion with participation from diverse fields.

Bilateral cooperation and also the cooperation among CEECs will benefit from this transformation, said Liu.
"These analyses are truly state-of-the-art, requiring artificial intelligence and high-performance computing super-charged by the smartest young scientists around," said Scott Dodelson, the Director of the NSF AI Institute who co-leads the DES Science Committee with Elisabeth Krause of the University of Arizona. "What an honor to be part of this team."

To quantify the distribution of dark matter and the effect of dark energy, DES relied on two main phenomena. First, on large scales, galaxies are not distributed randomly throughout space but rather form a weblike structure due to the gravity of dark matter. DES measured how this cosmic web has evolved over the history of the universe. The galaxy clustering that forms the cosmic web, in turn, revealed regions with a higher density of dark matter.

Second, DES detected the signature of dark matter through weak gravitational lensing. As light from a distant galaxy travels through space, the gravity of both ordinary and dark matter can bend it, resulting in a distorted image of the galaxy as seen from Earth. By studying how the apparent shapes of distant galaxies are aligned with each other and with the positions of nearby galaxies along the line of sight, DES scientists inferred the spatial distribution (or clumpiness) of the dark matter in the universe.

Analyzing the massive amounts of data collected by DES was a formidable undertaking. The team began by analyzing just the first year of data, which was released in 2017. That process prepared the researchers to use more sophisticated techniques for analyzing the larger data set, which includes the largest sample of galaxies ever used to study weak gravitational lensing.

For example, calculating the redshift of a galaxy  the change in light's wavelength due to the expansion of the universe  is a key step toward measuring how both galaxy clustering and weak gravitational lensing change over cosmic history. The redshift of a galaxy is related to its distance, which allows the clustering to be characterized in both space and time.

"We used a variety of artificial intelligence tools to calibrate the redshift distributions of the galaxy samples," said Simon Samuroff, a physics postdoctoral research associate at Carnegie Mellon who co-led the weak gravitational lensing analysis. "This was a huge effort that people put a lot of work into. We now have a method  based on Self-Organizing Maps  that nobody has used before, and it's very robust."

Ten regions of the sky were chosen as "deep fields" that the Dark Energy Camera imaged repeatedly throughout the survey. Stacking those images together allowed the scientists to glimpse more distant galaxies. The team then used the redshift information from the deep fields to calibrate measurements of redshift in the rest of the survey region. This and other advancements in measurements and modeling, coupled with a threefold increase in data compared to the first year, enabled the team to pin down the density and clumpiness of the universe with unprecedented precision.

Along with the analysis of the weak-lensing signals, DES also measures other probes that constrain the cosmological model in independent ways: galaxy clustering on larger scales (baryon acoustic oscillations), the frequency of massive clusters of galaxies, and high-precision measurements of the brightness and redshifts of Type Ia supernovae. These additional measurements will be combined with the current weak-lensing analysis to yield even more stringent constraints on the standard model.

"We used over 30 parameters to fit this complex data set," said Andresa Campos, a physics graduate student at Carnegie Mellon who ran some of the hundreds of Markov Chain Monte Carlo analyses needed to extract constraints on the parameters. Campos and Dodelson also worked within DES to develop tools to assess consistency between DES and Planck data in these highly multi-dimensional spaces. "We used to be able to simply look at two measurements of a single number and tell instantly whether they were consistent. Now, in these multi-dimensional parameter spaces, we need the full power of Bayesian statistics and modern data science."

"One of the greatest discoveries we have made in this round is that the statistical power of DES and future data sets will require a new set of tools borrowed from, and developed in conjunction with, the data science community," said Dodelson. The AI Institute focuses on applying AI and data science techniques to advance astrophysics, subatomic physics and biophysics. "Carnegie Mellon is well positioned to take a leading role in surveys in this new era."

DES concluded observations of the night sky in 2019. With the experience of analyzing the first half of the data, the team is now prepared to handle the complete data set. The final DES analysis is expected to paint an even more precise picture of the dark matter and dark energy in the universe. And the methods developed by the team have paved the way for future sky surveys to probe the mysteries of the cosmos.

"The strength of massive surveys like DES to analyze the evolution of the universe more precisely is enhanced by this innovative use of AI tools, which leads the way to exciting results from future even larger surveys," said Nigel Sharp, a program director in NSF's Division of Astronomical Sciences.

"The real legacy of DES will be the leaps forward that were made to obtain this key result; these will be critical for the next generation of cosmological experiments starting soon," said Rachel Mandelbaum, a professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon and the spokesperson for the 1,000-member Dark Energy Science Collaboration that is charged with analyzing data from the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

The Dark Energy Survey is a collaboration of more than 400 scientists from 25 institutions in seven countries. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, Funding Authority for Funding and Projects in Brazil, Carlos Chagas Filho Foundation for Research Support of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development and the Ministry of Science and Technology, the German Research Foundation and the collaborating institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. Fermilab is America's premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC.

The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
On Wednesday, President of China Duty Free Group (CDFG) Charles Chen recognized the promising prospects of the global alcoholic beverage market and shed light on the beneficial impact of Hainan's offshore duty-free policy on the sector.

"The implementation of Hainan's offshore duty-free policy has tapped into the huge potential of duty-free shopping among Chinese consumers," said Chen via a video link at the French Association of Wine and Spirits Exporters (FEVS) Annual General Meeting. "This also puts Hainan in the spotlight of the global tourism and retail industry, drawing attention from recognizable brands around the world," he added.

China's domestic tourism and retail industry continues to boom currently. Statistics from Haikou Customs show Hainan's offshore duty-free sales amounted to 993 million yuan (about 127 million euros) during the country's five-day May Day holiday.

The market potential has been highly recognized by global top alcoholic beverage companies, and many of them intend to explore the duty-free business opportunities in Hainan.

According to Chen, CDFG has introduced some 300 alcoholic beverage brands and over 1,000 stock-keeping units to Hainan. Through analyzing the region's consuming feature on the sector, the company also brought in limited-edition products and CDFG exclusives and organized themed promotion events. All these have helped increase the influence of Hainan's offshore duty-free alcoholic beverage market among consumers.

Given the effective pandemic prevention and control efforts and the promotion of vaccines, Chen also envisioned the sector's future development when overseas travel resumes. According to a recent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), China's outbound tourism is expected to return to pre-pandemic levels in early 2024.

Before the pandemic outbreak, China used to have the highest travel and tourism expenditures. "The Chinese market is big enough and has tremendous opportunities," Chen stressed. He also acknowledged the fast-growing consumption potential among people born in the 1990s, adding that their demand will translate into thriving business opportunities for alcoholic beverage companies.

With the soaring sales revenue of alcoholic beverages in Hainan, the sector is very promising in both tourism retail sales and traditional distribution, Chen noted.

Looking ahead, with the support from its parent company China Tourism Group (CTG), CDFG plans to introduce more global brands and limited-edition products into China with better prices to meet the demand of Chinese consumers, so as to further promote the sustained and sound development of global tourism and the retail market via cooperation and innovation.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 11)  The Senate will hold another committee hearing on June 15 to scrutinize government's vaccine negotiations and procurement amid the pandemic.

Sen. Panfilo "Ping" Lacson told CNN Philippines' The Source on Friday that the Senate Committee of the Whole will resume its hearing to raise questions on the budget allocation for pandemic response, following the request of Budget Secretary Wendel Avisado to add 25 billion more on top of the 82.5 billion already intended for the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines under the Bayanihan to Recover as One Act or Bayanihan 2.

"Meron nang available na (There's already an available budget of) 82.5 billion. Doing simple math, kung (if) 82.5 billion plus 25 billion thats 107.5 billion," Lacson said.

President Rodrigo Duterte recently approved an additional 2.5 billion to the initial budget for pandemic response after Avisado said that 82.5 billion for the COVID-19 vaccination program this year is not enough.

Avisado said the amount will cover the purchase of four million vaccine doses and accompanying logistical and administrative costs.

READ: Duterte approves 2.5B more for vaccine procurement

According to Lacson, the additional 25 billion being requested by the Budget Department might now entail having "too much" doses for the government's target to achieve herd immunity for 70 million vaccinated Filipinos, especially since the World Health Organization-backed COVAX initiative already committed to donating over 44 million doses to the Philippines beforehand.

"Kapag pinagsama-sama mo yun parang sobra-sobra na," Lacson said. "So we want to keep track ano na yung progress ng vaccination natin, ilan na ba yung nabili natin, magkano na yung nailagay natin as downpayment, at ilan pa yung kailangan and that is part of the oversight function ng Kongreso."

[Translation: If you combine all of that it might be too much already. So we want to keep track of the progress of our vaccination. How many were already bought, how many were posted as our downpayment, and how many more do we need, and that is part of the oversight function of Congress.]

Lacson said Senate President Vicente "Tito" Sotto III has already sent notices to senators and resource persons who should attend the hearing next week. They last held a Committee of the Whole hearing on the matter in January, before the government started its inoculation drive in March.

So far, over 6 million Filipinos have already been vaccinated against the coronavirus. But of this number, only 1.6 million have completed their COVID-19 shots.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, June 12)  The Commission on Elections said it is targeting to have 1.6 million overseas Filipinos registered for next year's polls.

In a briefing, Atty. Philip Marin from the poll body's Office for Overseas Voting said around 1.4 million have already registered as of May 19. They are reaching out to relevant parties to encourage more to register and cast their votes, he added.

The mode for overseas voting is still being finalized, according to Marin. But out of the Philippines' 94 posts abroad, 55 want it done by postal, 27 by personal, while 12 posts want it mixed, he said.

Marin also noted that overseas voter registration has been increasing. In 2016, there were 1.3 million registered overseas voters, and 1.8 million in 2019.

The deadline for overseas voter registration is on September 30.
(CNN)  China may not be a part of the Group of Seven, the informal club made up of the world's largest and wealthiest democracies, but its presence will likely loom large over the grouping's first face-to-face summit in almost two years.

China, and the ideological challenges posed by its rise, is set to be among the most pressing topics facing leaders of the G7 when they gather in England on Friday.

In his first foreign trip as United States President, Joe Biden is expected to try and convince allies to join Washington in taking a tougher stance towards Beijing over its actions in Xinjiang, Hong Kong and the South China Sea among other areas.

Laying out his trip last week, Biden wrote in the Washington Post that "the United States must lead the world from a position of strength," including on confronting the "harmful activities of the governments of China and Russia."

In some areas, there are signs such a united front is already forming.

In a joint statement on Thursday, Biden and his British counterpart Boris Johnson vowed to support a further investigation into the origins of COVID-19, including in China.

Support from the UK and possibly other G7 members will add weight to Biden's push for a reexamination on the origins of the virus, including new scrutiny on the lab leak theory. Beijing lashed out at Biden's call last month, accusing Washington of "political manipulation to shift the blame."

The summit is also reportedly expected to see the launch of a green alternative initially pushed by Biden to rival China's Belt and Road Initiative, with an aim to support sustainable development in developing countries.

Several guest countries have also been invited to join the summit, including Australia, which will use the occasion to seek support in its escalating trade disputes with China. On Wednesday, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for G7 nations to endorse reform of the World Trade Organization to address the growing use of "economic coercion."

The emerging alliance is likely to further antagonize Beijing. On Thursday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry hit out at Biden's plan to rally allies on China, accusing it of "fanning confrontation."

"Ganging up, pursuing bloc politics and forming small cliques are unpopular and doomed to fail. We hope relevant countries will discard ideological bias and look at China in an objective and rational light," said ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin at a news briefing.

But at the same time, there is also a growing view in China that the G7 is a remnant of the past, and its influence  along with that of its participating nations  is in decline. This opinion, which has been vehemently promoted by Chinese state media, has been bolstered by China's apparent post-pandemic economic recovery.

Nor is the fact that it is the G7 reacting to China, rather than China reacting to the G7, lost on observers in Beijing.

"(The G7's) influence and power are no longer worth looking forward to. The fundamental reason is that the world's economic and political center of gravity has shifted eastward," said an op-ed published Thursday in the state-run Global Times asserting China is now setting the global agenda.

And while the G7 nations may be shifting towards something approaching a united front in certain areas, it remains to be seen whether countries will be willing to risk damaging bilateral relations with Beijing.

Chinese observers cited by the Global Times appear confident that G7 countries' "fundamental divergences" on how to deal with China will "hinder them from making any substantial moves."

Indeed, as the world begins to recover from the pandemic, many Western countries remain reliant as ever on the Chinese market and investments.

Beijing, on the other hand, is not shying from leveraging that reliance. The day before the G7 summit kicked off, China passed a law to counter foreign sanctions, a symbolic gesture to Western nations that their counter measures  be it over the issues of Hong Kong, Xinjiang, trade or technology  will be met with strong retaliation.

This story was first published on CNN.com "China may not be a member of the G7, but it's dominating the agenda"
(CNN)  A common cold virus called respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is spreading across the South, causing an unusual wave of late spring disease, the US Centers for Disease Control and prevention said Thursday.

The CDC issued a Health Advisory Network warning to doctors and other health care providers to be on alert for the virus, which can cause pneumonia, especially in very small children and babies.

"Due to this increased activity, CDC encourages broader testing for RSV among patients presenting with acute respiratory illness who test negative for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19," the CDC said in the alert.

"RSV can be associated with severe disease in young children and older adults. This health advisory also serves as a reminder to healthcare personnel, childcare providers, and staff of long-term care facilities to avoid reporting to work while acutely ill -- even if they test negative for SARS-CoV-2."

RSV is spread like most other respiratory diseases -- by small droplets and on contaminated surfaces.

"RSV is the most common cause of bronchiolitis and pneumonia in children under one year of age in the United States. Infants, young children, and older adults with chronic medical conditions are at risk of severe disease from RSV infection," the CDC said.

"Each year in the United States, RSV leads to on average approximately 58,000 hospitalizations with 100-500 deaths among children younger than 5 years old and 177,000 hospitalizations with 14,000 deaths among adults aged 65 years or older."

RSV is one of the viruses seen more commonly in fall and winter, but incidence plummeted during the pandemic.

"However, since late March, CDC has observed an increase in RSV detections reported to the National Respiratory and Enteric Virus Surveillance System (NREVSS), a nationwide passive, laboratory-based surveillance network," the CDC said.

Spread has been seen in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.

"Due to reduced circulation of RSV during the winter months of 2020--2021, older infants and toddlers might now be at increased risk of severe RSV-associated illness since they have likely not had typical levels of exposure to RSV during the past 15 months," the CDC said.

There's no specific treatment for the virus.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "CDC warns about spike in RSV cases across South."
(CNN) -- Vaccine advisers to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say there has been a higher-than-expected number of cases of a heart ailment among young people, most often males, who've recently received their second doses of the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines. The CDC says the reports of the ailment are "rare" and that "most patients who received care responded well to medicine and rest and quickly felt better."

The advisers' statement, posted June 1 on the CDC website, strikes a different note from their statement about two weeks earlier, which said that the rates of myocarditis -- inflammation of the heart muscle -- were not higher among vaccinated people than among unvaccinated people.

The new report comes as the Israeli Ministry of Health finds a "likelihood of a link" between the second dose of the Covid-19 vaccine and myocarditis, most commonly among males ages 16 to 30.

The June 1 report by a work group of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices states that within 30 days of receiving the second dose of either Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, "there was a higher number of observed than expected myocarditis/pericarditis cases in 16-24-year-olds."

This outside group of experts, many of them physicians at academic medical centers, advises the CDC, but doesn't represent the agency itself. The CDC has not said if the number of cases of the heart ailments is higher than expected.

The CDC says on its website that benefits of Covid-19 vaccination outweigh the known and potential risks "including the risk of myocarditis or pericarditis," which is swelling of the tissue around the heart. The agency says it is "actively monitoring these reports, by reviewing data and medical records, to learn more about what happened and to see if there is any relationship to COVID-19 vaccination."

The cases occurred mostly among male adolescents and young adults age 16 years or older, typically within several days after vaccination and more often after getting the second shot than after the first, according to the CDC.

The agency advises people to be on the lookout for certain symptoms following Covid-19 vaccination, such as chest pain, shortness of breath and heart palpitations.

The myocarditis assessments come at a time when the Biden administration has been encouraging young people to get vaccinated to protect themselves and others.

"For young people who may think this doesn't affect you, listen up, please: This virus, even a mild case, can be with you for months. It will impact on your social life. It could have long-term implications for your health that we don't even know about yet or fully understand yet," President Joe Biden said at a White House briefing June 2, urging young people to get vaccinated for themselves and "to protect those more vulnerable than you: your friends, your family, your community."

There's concern the President's effort could be hindered by parental worries over the risk of myocarditis following vaccination.

Medical groups, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Heart Association say even if there is a very small risk of getting myocarditis after vaccination, it is heavily outweighed by the risk of complications from Covid-19.

"Young people need to be protected, and they also need to not be a reservoir for the virus," said Dr. Nelson Michael, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, noting that his son and daughter, who are in their 20s, were vaccinated against Covid-19.

The CDC has reached out directly to state health departments and medical societies, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and other groups about the myocarditis reports. The agency has also issued several statements on its website in the past few weeks about myocarditis following the two mRNA vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna, including one for physicians and one for the public.

Aside from these pages, CDC officials have not directly communicated to the public about any possible risk of myocarditis with the vaccines. CDC declined CNN's request to speak with an expert, instead issuing a statement by a spokesman.

"In early May, CDC first received reports from these systems about cases of myocarditis and pericarditis being reported in the United States after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination," according to the statement by agency spokesman Jason McDonald. "Given the risk of COVID-19 infection in adolescents, CDC continues to strongly recommend that adolescents age 12 to 17 get vaccinated."

Jerica Pitts, a spokeswoman for Pfizer, said the company is aware of the myocarditis reports, and that "a causal link to the vaccine has not been established" and that "with a vast number of people vaccinated to date, the benefit risk profile of our vaccine remains positive."

A Moderna spokesman did not respond to a request for comment to this story.

Link or no link?

The increase in myocarditis cases could be, at least in part, because the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatricians prompted doctors to be watchful for such cases.

But a source familiar with the situation told CNN it's appearing more and more likely that there is a real link between the vaccine and the cases.

"It looks like this is a biological phenomenon rather than a chance event," the source said. "It looks to be a pattern and not just random."

"They're not sure yet whether there is a causal association, but they're keeping a close eye on this," the source said. "They're open to the notion that this may be a causal situation, but the case is not conclusive yet, and it's certainly not enough to change their recommendations -- they will continue to recommend very clearly that everyone over age 12 should get the vaccine."

Myocarditis documented early in vaccine rollout

In February, Israeli physicians reported the case of a 19-year-old man hospitalized with myocarditis five days after receiving his second dose of the coronavirus vaccine. The Jerusalem Post first reported the case, and the details of the article were confirmed to CNN by Natan Applebaum, chief executive officer of Terem, a chain of Israeli emergency clinics, where the man received care.

In March, the US Department of Defense started to receive reports of myocarditis among vaccinated military health patients, according to Military.com. As of June 9, the department has identified approximately 30 cases of myocarditis among the more than 3.6 million doses administered, according to department spokeswoman Lisa Lawrence.

In April, Spanish doctors published a report in a medical journal of a case of myocarditis in a 39-year-old physician with underlying health problems following his second dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.

In the US, 'relatively few reports' of myocarditis following vaccination

In the United States, if anything goes wrong after vaccination -- any vaccination, not just against Covid-19 -- doctors and patients are encouraged to report it to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a database managed by the CDC and the US Food and Drug Administration.

Once problems are reported, the next step is to assess whether they occurred by chance or if the vaccine is a possible cause.

First, experts have to look at the reports one by one to see what happened to the patient; reports of a particular illness might turn out to be something else or perhaps nothing at all.

Then biostatisticians and epidemiologists have to determine whether the illnesses are linked to the vaccine or just a coincidence. To do this, they compare how often the adverse event happened to people following Covid-19 vaccination versus unvaccinated people around the same age.

On May 20 a group of CDC vaccine advisers posted a report on the CDC website that there had been "relatively few reports" of myocarditis after vaccination.

In that May report, the CDC advisers wrote that the "rates of myocarditis reports in the window following COVID-19 [with Moderna and Pfizer] have not differed from expected baseline rates," indicating that the number of reports was not higher than what would be expected among unvaccinated people. The advisers continued to direct doctors to report cases of myocarditis following coronavirus vaccination.

It's not clear what changed by June 1, when the CDC advisers reported that myocarditis cases following vaccination in the 16-to-24 age group were higher than expected.

Another CDC system, the Vaccine Safety Datalink, uses health information from nine US medical centers' reports to monitor vaccine safety and conduct studies about rare and serious adverse event after immunization.

This system did not find that recently vaccinated people were more likely to get myocarditis, but "analyses suggest that these data need to be carefully followed as more persons in younger age groups are vaccinated," according to the vaccine advisers' report.

Review of seven healthy teens with myocarditis after Covid-19 vaccination

A commentary published last week in the medical journal Pediatrics reviewed a published account of seven cases of myocarditis in teen males following Covid-19 vaccination.

The authors concluded that "there are some concerns regarding this case series that might suggest a causal relationship" between the vaccine and myocarditis.

"There are some suggestions [the link] may be real, but it's not definitive yet," Dr. Sean O'Leary, a co-author of the commentary, told CNN.

O'Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at University of Colorado Medicine and Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Stanford Medicine, wrote that there were several reasons there could be a link.

The seven cases, which occurred at five medical centers among otherwise healthy males ages 14 to 19, had certain features in common.

All of the patients developed symptoms within four days after receiving the second dose of Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine.

"The consistent timing of symptoms in these seven cases after the second vaccination suggests a uniform biological process," O'Leary and Maldonado wrote.

The patients had chest pain and five of them had fevers. They were hospitalized for between two and six days and their illnesses were "mild," responding "rapidly" to medications.

"While the authors are quick to point out that a causal relationship between vaccination and myocarditis has not been established, the temporal association of these cases with vaccination as well as the striking similarity in the clinical and laboratory presentations raise the possibility for such a relationship," O'Leary and Maldonado wrote.

They added that "a causal association, if it exists, is likely extraordinarily rare."

While the cause of a patient's myocarditis is often never identified, when it is known, an infection is often the culprit. O'Leary and Maldonado wrote that a thorough diagnostic workups on the seven patients failed to find an infectious cause, and they also noted the "dearth" this year of common respiratory viruses known to cause the heart condition.

Myocarditis statistics from Israel

The Israeli Ministry of Health has released the most detailed analysis yet of cases of myocarditis following Pfizer vaccination. In a June 2 statement to the press, the ministry reported 27 cases of myocarditis following the first dose of the vaccine out of 5.4 million vaccine recipients, and 121 cases after the second dose out of about 5 million vaccine recipients.

"To date, the phenomenon has been reported mainly among young men, especially aged 16-19, usually after the second dose of the vaccine. Most cases are hospitalized for up to 4 days only and 95% are defined as a mild illness," according to the statement. "There is a likelihood of a link between receiving a second dose of vaccine and the onset of myocarditis in young men aged 16-30, and the link is stronger in young people aged 16-19 relative to other ages. The relationship weakens with increasing age. In most cases, it is a mild illness that passes within a few days."

The Israeli health officials did not specify how much more common myocarditis was among the vaccinated people compared with the rest of the population. The authors of the article about the US cases said that the incidence of myocarditis "is unknown and varies by season, geography, and age."

After a "lengthy discussion," Israeli health experts decided on June 1 to allow vaccination of adolescents aged 12 to 15, noting that the risks of complications from Covid-19 are higher than the risk of receiving the vaccine.

Concerns of a 'kibosh' on vaccinations for teens

Less than a month after becoming eligible, nearly a quarter of adolescents in the US ages 12 to 15 have received at least one shot.

But there's concern among public health experts that upon hearing of this possible myocarditis link, parents will be hesitant to take their children to be vaccinated.

"This could put the kibosh on adolescent vaccination -- everyone is concerned about it," said the source who is familiar with the situation.

There's an indication that parents have already become less enthusiastic about the vaccine.

News that CDC was investigating the myocarditis reports first appeared in the general media on May 22, with publication of a story by the New York Times, followed by stories in other media outlets.

According to a CNN analysis of CDC data, Covid-19 vaccinations for adolescents 12 to 15 years old had been rising steadily since May 12, when the CDC gave the green light for shots for that age group, but then started to decline the day after the New York Times article appeared.

The seven-day averages of first doses administered to this age group peaked at 220,401 on the day the Times article published. Then, for the first time since the CDC authorized the shot for 12 to 15 year olds, the numbers started to drop steadily, going down to 75,168 less than two weeks later on June 3, the most recent day for which data is available.

The media articles are not the only possible reason for the drop in enthusiasm for vaccinating young people, but the timing of the marked decline so early on in the rollout for this age group suggests the stories played a role, said David Holtgrave, who worked on infectious diseases at CDC for seven years.

Holtgrave told CNN in an email that vaccinations for this age group "seem to slow substantially when it was reported in the media that [the CDC advisers] and CDC expressed a need to closely monitor myocarditis in young persons after COVID vaccination."

He added that CDC could do more to increase parents' confidence in the vaccine.

While the agency has communicated directly to public health departments and professional organizations, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the only statements to the public have been on the agency's website.

Holtgrave said regular statements from CDC officials directly to parents on the possible myocarditis risk could go a long way toward increasing public confidence.

"It is useful for CDC to frequently, proactively describe in detail how it is being aggressively vigilant to monitor for vaccine-related consequences. The better this aggressive monitoring is articulated to the public, the more we can have a continued, high-level of confidence that the vaccine rollout is indeed going very well and consequences such as side effects or breakthrough infections are minor and occur at reassuringly very low levels," wrote Holtgrave, the dean of the School of Public Health at the University at Albany.

Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatric infectious disease expert at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees.

"How about a little more information about the data? Who's looking at this? What's their process for looking at it? When will we know more?" he said. "This has started to worry people, and the lack of details doesn't help. It's anxiety producing."

In his statement, CDC spokesperson Jason McDonald said "CDC is communicating in the most appropriate way in light of the actual risk of an adverse event based on the data received to date."

O'Leary, the co-author of the Pediatrics commentary, said he thought the CDC had to "walk a fine line." On the one hand, the agency has to be transparent about the myocarditis reports, but they also have to do their best to make sure parents aren't scared away from the life-saving vaccine.

"If they communicate this too broadly, it could create a public scare and cost lives," he said. "That's what they have to contend with, and I don't want to second guess how they've communicated this. I'm sure they've been thoughtful about it because there's a big downside if they do it wrong."

Offit said the key to communicating any potential risk of myocarditis is to emphasize that children can and do sometimes die from Covid-19, and that the risk of that happening is larger than any possible risk of getting myocarditis from the vaccine.

"I would vaccinate my teenager in a second. This is an extremely rare risk," Offit said.

Offit praised CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky for her description last week at a White House briefing of "troubling data" on hospitalizations of adolescents with Covid-19, especially those who needed to be admitted to the intensive care unit and put on ventilators.

"She's very emotional -- you can see it in her face, she's pleading, saying this can be a serious disease in children and here's how to prevent it. She comes off as a parent, which she is. She looks like a real person," Offit said.

This story was first published on CNN.com "A link between Covid-19 vaccination and a cardiac illness may be getting clearer".
Jaelyn Monroe did what most 20-year-old college students wouldnt even think to do  she started a business right from her Penn State dorm room and won a competition rewarding her $10,000 toward her business.

Monroe (junior-political science) started the Miss Monroe Collection brand because she noticed a gap in the hair care market: a lack of organic, protective hair products for people of color.

I really like hair care and getting creative with my natural hair, Monroe said.

Monroes mom and sister get their hair permed, but she said its bad for Black hair in particular.

Our hair is not meant to be permed Getting a perm [is] like trying to fill a societal standard, which I dont feel comfortable with, Monroe said.

Inspired by the coronavirus pandemic, Monroe said she decided to turn her passion into a business.

I saw how fast [you could] have things taken away from you during COVID This is a time where I have to be productive, Monroe said.

Monroe then worked to get her company on its feet, researching ingredients and methods meant for ethnic hair care.

Her signature product is magic growth oil, which, according to her website, has only five ingredients  rice, grape seed oil, almond oil, vitamin E and tea tree oil.

She tested her products on her mom, and when she saw an improvement in her moms hair growth, she said she was ready to get it out to consumers.

Monroe said she had genuinely no money to start, so she began fundraising and was able to raise $1,000 initially.

In the first week, I had 30 orders, Monroe said. For somebody who [has] never owned a business, thats a lot.

Moreover, Monroe is in the process of obtaining a business certificate from Penn State in addition to her political science degree to enhance her company and business skills.

Brittany Rossi is an academic adviser at Penn State who taught Monroe in a resident assistant class.

[Jaelyn] is very outgoing, very fun, Rossi said. [Shes] really good at educating people but listening to their points of view as well.

Rossi said Monroe is a go-getter and is someone to look out for because shes going to be big.

The Inc.U Competition is a Penn State program funded by a grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration along with Invent Penn State, according to Pennsylvania Technical Assistance Programs website.

Monroe said she learned about the Inc.U Competition through a GroupMe chat and decided to enter.

I had never formed a business pitch before, Monroe said.

According to Monroe, the competition was on April 10 and was held via Zoom. Three winners each won $10,000.

I was the first Black woman to win the competition, Monroe said.

Jordan Rednor, president of the Rednor Group LTD, was a judge and is a former Penn Stater. He graduated in 1975 with a degree in finance.

Rednor said Monroes business is a ground-up initiative and an embryonic opportunity.

What I look for when Im investing is the drive to be successful, Rednor said. There are lots of good ideas  ideas are a million at a time  but the drive and commitment to make something from that idea is what makes it unique.

Something that stood out to Rednor about Monroes pitch was how well she identified a niche and a need in the market.

Shes got a long road ahead, Rednor said. The judges and myself felt that giving her a spark would lead to bigger and better things.

Monroe said she hopes to travel with her winnings doing pop-up shops in different cities and [networking] with different entrepreneurs. She said she also wants to create a really nice marketing campaign using billboards.

Another goal of Monroes is to hire convicted felons  she said it is often difficult for them to find work.

Monroe said she has already reached 20 different states in the United States and has had approximately 300 to 400 orders in her first year of business.

Ive done something in such a short period of time that a lot of people struggle with.
A man identified to the FBI by anonymous witnesses as a Penn State graduate was arrested for his alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot.

Robert Morss, who is a substitute teacher for the Shaler Area School District, was arrested Thursday and charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding officers, civil disorder, robbery of personal property of the United States and obstruction of official proceeding, according to a United States District Court criminal complaint.

As Americans prepared to watch Congress certify the electoral vote on Jan. 6, rioters stormed into the United States Capitol Building, attempting to prevent the tallying of the votes following a speech from President Donald Trump.

Morss was seen on video as part of a group that was involved with throwing objects and chemical irritants and physically assaulting Capitol police officers. He was allegedly seen at the frontline of the riot on videos posted to social media and YouTube.

According to an affidavit in support of a criminal complaint against Morss, he was observed on police body camera footage grabbing an officer's baton and attempting to "rip it away."

As Morss and others in the crowd were allegedly pulling on fences and assaulting officers, Morss was observed telling officers "take a look around, back up, we are going to take our Capitol back."

Morss remained in the crowd as police lines were breached and officers began to retreat. After forming a "shield wall" with riot shields, the rioters began to enter the Capitol through the Lower West Terrace tunnel, and Morss was seen on surveillance footage attempting to block or "take out" cameras.

Morss was photographed inside the Capitol after the group of rioters broke in through a window.

As a student at Penn State, Morss served as chairman of the "nationalist" student organization, the Bull-Moose Party. As chairman, Morss said he wanted to lead the group in a more "aggressive and organized" fashion and stressed his desire to "make America great again."

Morss was the second Penn State graduate arrested for alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 capitol riot after former Frutta Bowls manager and co-owner Julian Elie Khater was charged with alleged conspiracy and assault in March.

In a criminal complaint on Jan. 19, another State College resident  Brian Gundersen  was charged with unlawfully entering a restricted building without lawful authority, engaging in disorderly conduct in the Capitol and demonstrating or picketing in the Capitol.

MORE COURTS COVERAGE
Looking forward, these are the bills that are likely to ripple across Colorado's political, economic and physical landscapes for years to come.

Senate Bill 260 - Transportation

After years of trying to put money into addressing clogged interstates and crumbling rural routs, lawmakers succeeded with a $5.4 billion investment contained in the most significant transportation legislation in at least 20 years. Now Coloradans and visitors will be paying a raft of escalating new fees on gasoline, deliveries, electric vehicles and more for years to come. The debate now shifts to asphalt versus transit and alternative modes of getting around.

House Bill 1317 - Marijuana concentrates

The bipartisan bill marked the first real effort in recent years to impose new regulations on the marijuana industry. And with the bill investing in research into the effects of high-potency THC on the developing brain, it could well mark the start of a trend, not just a blip.

Senate Bill 280 - Bias-motivated crimes

The bill sought by 18th Judicial District Attorney John Kellner, a Republican, and driven by Democratic Sen. Rhonda Fields makes it easier to prosecute hate crimes when bias is not the whole motivation but an obvious factor. The bill elevated the crime of harassment from class 3 to a class 1 misdemeanor if the harassment is deemed even partially motivated by bias based completely or in part based on the victim's race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, physical or mental disability or sexual orientation.

Senate Bill 292 - Victims services

Lawmakers provide $15 million from the federal stimulus for several victims services programs for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault, including the Department of Human Services, the Department of Public Safety and the Victims and Witnesses Assistance and Law Enforcement Fund, as well as to local district attorneys for victims and witness assistance.

Senate Bill 256 and House Bill 1298 - Gun laws

The pair of Democratic-led bills were viewed by the left as good policy to store and transfer firearms, respectively, but they also might prove to be a galvanizing factor for sagging GOP prospects in a state that has turned steadily more blue. In 2013, gun laws fired up the Republican base and cost three Democratic lawmakers, including the Senate president, their seat.

Senate Bill 137 - Behavioral Health Recovery Act

The $114 million package covered a lot of ground, including addiction services and crisis response, but it had a strong lean toward helping young people, including $2.5 million for elementary school programs and $5 million for specialized, high-quality youth residential help and therapeutic foster care.

"Gov. Polis, Reps. Dafna Michaelson-Jenet and Chris Kennedy, and Sens. Brittany Pettersen and Faith Winter and their staff have worked day and night over the last week to find the best solutions for Colorados kids," Heidi Baskfield, the vice president of population health and advocacy at Childrens Hospital Colorado, stated. "There is much more work to do in the years ahead, but we believe this bill will begin to address the state of emergency our kids are facing."

Senate Bill 87 - Farmworkers

Legislation that provides labor protections for farmworkers, including overtime pay, which could put a further squeeze on small farms and ranches, should they be reported. Republicans and other opponents predicted the worst. "The idea that the people in these cities or the state of Colorado believe that agriculture would be that cruel and mean to individuals that dont have the same economic background is saddening, said Rep. Marc Catlin, a Republican from Montrose and vice chair of House Agriculture, Livestock and Water Committee.

House Bill 1232 - Health insurance

It started out as an attempt to set up a public option, aka Medicare for All-type health insurance plan, to be developed and operated by the state government, if health insurers, doctors and hospitals could not find a way to reduce health insurance premiums in the individual and small group market by 20% over two years.

Major opposition, including a multimillion-dollar ad campaign, drove the sponsors (Rep. Dylan Roberts, D-Eagle and Sen. Kerry Donovan, D-Vail), along with the governor, to the table to negotiate.

What disappeared first was the public option, leaving a state-developed health insurance plan that would start in three years if the premiums didn't reduce by 15%. However, that insurance plan would include price caps, set by the commissioner of insurance, on the services provided by doctors and hospitals. The intent is to provide health insurance to the uninsured, the undocumented and to address historic equity issues, although that argument failed to persuade Sen. Rhonda Fields, D-Aurora, who despite voting for the bill had nothing good to say about it. It will be 2025 before anyone knows whether the health care industry was set up to fail, as health insurers have claimed.
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Apples prescence has expanded from being the brand behind a few Macs in the creative department; it is now a key mobile and productivity provider across every top enterprise. But even Apples platforms face security challenges as people work remotely. I caught up with Truce Software CEO Joe Boyle to discuss Apple in the workplace and his companys approach to managing the mobile enterprise.

Apple goes to work

It feels like Apple and the enterprise are practically synonymous today, Boyle said.

Even those companies that dont issue Macs and iPhones themselves are likely to support their use by employees. With a growing ecosystem of enterprise partners available, it has become possible to completely outsource and automate the entire lifecycle of Apple devices, he said.

The consumerization of IT has caused a seismic shift in favor of Apple's growing presence in the enterprise. From an enterprise mobility standpoint, we've seen growth and expansion of Apple devices across various industries and use cases. Companies want to leverage the power of the iOS platform to enable a more connected and better-equipped workforce.

There are other trends, too:

Employees increasingly use their own devices and computers for work.

They are more engaged than ever in the tech they use.

Businesses are adopting a mobile-first approach.

This trend has also driven a change in business processes, said Boyle. Businesses have transformed workflow processes to be mobile friendly (if not mobile first) to make workers, and operations overall, more efficient, he said.

As mobile devices are replacing legacy workflows, businesses are realizing the benefits of allowing those advanced capabilities far exceed the downfalls," he said. "Additionally, Apples stance on privacy allows companies and their employees to feel protected as they deploy and use the same mobile devices both at work and personally.

But in an asynchronous, distributed environment, security remains a challenge.

Mobile security beyond the perimeter

Classic security models rely on perimeter security, a concept loosely based on the idea that you put a fence around what matters to you and defend it. This concept hasnt translated well to a mobile world, prompting the evolution of new security models, even on Apples more-secure-than-most platforms.

The nature of mobility has forever changed how enterprises need to think about managing their environment, yet most approaches and technology are still built from a PC paradigm, Boyle said.

Traditional perimeter security is outdated in that it's fixed and does not account for the many ways today's workforce is dynamic. Workers are distributed and using different devices at different times and in different ways.

Enterprise mobility security needs to account for who is using the device, how, when, and where. We refer to that at Truce as the human element of mobility management. As a worker's environment changes throughout a shift, so too must their permissions, Boyle said.

This context-driven approach to security means the enterprise should know which workers are using which devices and where, and knows how those devices are ordinarily used. As the use of a device evolves throughout a worker's shift, based on where the employee is and what they're doing, for example, the security parameters adapt accordingly, he said.

Its also important that these security models are locationally aware. It isnt only important to know where a device is, but also other details such as time of day and proximity to high-risk equipment, and to have the ability to modify security policy as the environment changes, he said.

The challenge of privacy

The problem for many employees is that as contextual awareness grows, they become suspicious about giving employers more access to their personal data than required. This is a particular challenge when both personal and professional (digital) lives co-exist on our mobile devices.

We still commonly see that tug of war between IT needing to closely manage security of the network and safeguard data, and operations pushing for wider permissions of mobile to enable more functionality for workers, Boyle says. We also see user privacy as an important consideration in the context of mobile devices at work.

Contextual mobility management enables devices to be managed based on how the individual user's environment changes throughout a shift, with the understanding that users aren't static. It is only when businesses adapt their mobile device policies to acknowledge the fact that workers are not static that advanced workforce mobility comes to life.

"This is the new model for the modern workforce, he said.

Please follow me on Twitter, or join me in the AppleHolics bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.
Microsoft this week pushed out 50 updates to fix vulnerabilities across both the Windows and Office ecosystems. The good news is that there are no Adobe or Exchange Server updates this month. The bad news is that there are fixes for six zero-day exploits, including a critical update to the core web rendering (MSHTML) component for Windows. We've added this month's Windows updates to our "Patch Now" schedule, while the Microsoft Office and development platform updates can be deployed under their standard release regimes. Updates also include changes to Microsoft Hyper-V, the cryptographic libraries and Windows DCOM, all of which require some testing before deployment.

You can find this information summarized in our infographic.

Key testing scenarios

There are no reported high-risk changes to the Windows platform this month. For this patch cycle, we divided our testing guide into two sections:

Microsoft released a "high-risk" update to how DCOM servers communicate with their clients via RPC . The biggest change is to the RPC authentication security level  check to make sure each call registers correctly with at least RPC_C_AUTHN_LEVEL_PKT_INTEGRITY level security.

For any apps that use the CryptImportKey function and dependencies on the Microsoft Base DSS Cryptographic Provider , confirm that there are no issues.

, Because of changes to how Windows 10 handles error logs, verify that Event Tracing is working and that your common log file paths are still valid.

Changes to Microsoft OLE and DCOM components are the most technically challenging and require the most business expertise to debug and deploy. DCOM services are not easy to build and can be difficult to maintain. As a result, they are not the first choice for most enterprises to develop in-house.

If there is a DCOM server (or service) within your IT group, it means it has to be there  and some core business element will depend on it. To manage the risks of this June update, I recommend that you have your list of applications with DCOM components ready, that you have two builds (pre- and post-update) ready for a side-by-side comparison and enough time to fully test and update your code base if need be.

Known issues

Each month, Microsoft includes a list of known issues that relate to the operating system and platforms included in this update cycle. Here are a few key issues that relate to the latest builds from Microsoft, including:

Just like last month, system and user certificates might be lost when updating a device from Windows 10 version 1809 or later to a newer version of Windows 10. Microsoft has not released any further advice, other than moving to a later version of Windows 10.

There is a problem with the Japanese Input Method Editor ( IME ) that is generating incorrect Furigana text. These problems are quite common with Microsoft updates. IMEs are pretty complex and have been an issue for Microsoft for years. Expect an update to this Japanese character issue later this year.

In a related issue, after installing KB4493509 , devices with some Asian language packs installed may see the error, "0x800f0982 - PSFX_E_MATCHING_COMPONENT_NOT_FOUND." To resolve this issue, you will need to uninstall and then reinstall your language packs.

There have been a number of reports of ESU systems being unable to complete last month's Windows updates. If you are running an older system, you will have to purchase an ESU key. Most importantly, you have to activate it (for some, a key missing step). You can find out more about activating your ESU update key online.

You can also find Microsofts summary of known issues for this release in a single page.

Major revisions

As of now for this June cycle, there were two major updates to previous released updates:

CVE-2020-0835 : This is an update to the Windows Defender anti-malware feature in Windows 10. Windows Defender is updated on a monthly basis and usually generates a new CVE entry each time. So, an update to a Defender CVE entry is unusual (rather than just creating a new CVE entry for each month). This update is (fortunately) to the associated documentation. No further action is required.

CVE-2021-28455 : This revision refers to another documentation update regarding the Microsoft Red Jet database. This update (unfortunately) adds Microsoft Access 2013 and 2016 to the affected list. If you use the Jet "Red" database (check your middleware), you are going to have to test and update your systems.

As an extra note to the update to Windows Defender, given all the things going on this month (six public exploits!), I highly recommend that you ensure Defender is up to date. Microsoft has published some additional documentation on how to check and enforce compliance for Windows defender. Why not do so now? It's free and Defender is pretty good.

Mitigations and workarounds

So far, it does not appear that Microsoft has published any mitigations or workarounds for this June release.

Each month, we break down the update cycle into product families (as defined by Microsoft) with the following basic groupings:

Browsers (Internet Explorer and Edge);

Microsoft Windows (both desktop and server);

Microsoft Office;

Microsoft Exchange;

Microsoft Development platforms ( ASP.NET Core, .NET Core and Chakra Core);

Adobe (retired???)

Browsers

It seems like we are back to our usual rhythm now of minimal updates to Microsoft's browsers, as we have only a single update to the Microsoft Chromium project (CVE-2021-33741). This browser update has been rated as important by Microsoft as it can only lead to an elevated privilege security issue and requires user interaction. Rather than using the Microsoft security portal to gain better intelligence on these browser updates, I have found the Microsoft Chromium release notes pages a better source of patch related documentation. Given the nature of how Chrome installs on Windows desktops, we expect very little impact from the update. Add this browser update to your standard release schedule.

Microsoft Windows 10

This month, Microsoft released 27 updates to the Windows ecosystem, with three rated as critical and the rest rated as important. This is a relatively low number compared to previous months. However, (and this is big) I am pretty sure that we have never seen so many vulnerabilities publicly exploited or publicly disclosed. This month there are six confirmed as exploited including: CVE-2021-31955, CVE-2021-31956, CVE-2021-33739, CVE-2021-33742, CVE-2021-31199 and CVE-2021-31201.

To add to this month's troubles, two issues have also been publicly disclosed, including CVE-2021-33739 and CVE-2021-31968. This is a lot  especially for one month. The one patch that I am most concerned about is CVE-2021-33742. It is rated as critical, as it can lead to arbitrary code execution on the target system and affects a core element of Windows (MSHTML). This web rendering component was a frequent (and favorite) target for attackers as soon as Internet Explorer (IE) was released. Almost all of the (many, many) security issues and corresponding patches that affected IE were related to how the MSHTML component interacted with the Windows subsystems (Win32) or, even worse, the Microsoft scripting object.

Attacks to this component can lead to deep access to compromised systems and are hard to debug. Even if we did not have all of the publicly disclosed or confirmed exploits this month, I would still add this Windows update to the "Patch Now" release schedule.

Microsoft Office

Very much like last month, Microsoft released 11 updates rated as important and one rated as critical for this release cycle. Again, we are seeing updates to Microsoft SharePoint as the primary focus, with the critical patch CVE-2021-31963. Compared with some of the very concerning news this month for Windows updates, these Office patches are relatively complex to exploit and do not expose highly vulnerable vectors like Outlook Preview panes to attack.

There have been a number of informational updates to these patches over the past few days and it appears there may be an issue with the combined updates to SharePoint Server; Microsoft published the following error, "DataFormWebPart may be blocked by accessing an external URL and generates '8scdc' event tags in SharePoint Unified Logging System (ULS) logs." You can find out more about this issue with KB 5004210.

Plan on rebooting your SharePoint servers and add these Office updates to your standard release schedule.

Microsoft Exchange

There are no updates to Microsoft Exchange for this cycle. This is a welcome relief from the past few months where critical updates required urgent patches that have enterprise-wide implications.

Microsoft development platforms

This is an easy month for updates to Microsoft development platforms (.NET and Visual Studio) with just two updates rated as important:

CVE-2021-31938 : A complex and difficult attack to complete that requires local access and user interaction when using the Kubernetes tool extensions.

CVE-2021-31957 : This ASP.NET vulnerability is a little more serious (it affects servers, instead of a tool extension). That said, it is still a complex attack that has been completely resolved by Microsoft.

Add the Visual Studio update to your standard developer release schedule. I would add the ASP.NET update to your priority release schedule due to greater exposure to the internet.
Former student calls out Singapore professor for Islamophobia; teacher may face disciplinary action

One of the former students of Tan Boon Lee, the Ngee Ann Polytechnic engineering lecturer recently caught on video confronting an interracial couple at Orchard Road, has now come out accusing him of displaying religious and racial insensitivity, that too in the class-room.

Nurul Fatimah Iskandar, 22, said in an Instagram post that Tan began an offensive discussion about Islam in the classroom, when she was his student about four years ago.

Picture Courtesy: Nurul Fatimah Iskandar

In a post that went viral, she alleged that Tan had carried out a full-on discourse about Islam which escalated so badly during a class.

Her post came after a video posted online on Sunday by Facebook user David Parkash that showed him arguing with Tan. Parkash was with his girlfriend at that time. About the couple, Tan had in the viral video said it is "racist that the Indians prey on the Chinese girls".

Tan has since been suspended by the polytechnic.

The polytechnic has expressed deep regret over Nurul's experience. In its statement last night, the polytechnic added that it would not hesitate to take disciplinary actions against Tan, including dismissal, if appropriate.

Second Minister for Education Maliki Osman also addressed Nurul's post. "There is no place for any anti-ethnic and anti-religious remarks in our education institutions, and even more so from an educator," Dr Maliki said in a post on Facebook on Thursday evening.
Sharon Laboratories has announced the first phase of making its corporate footprint in North America.

The startup of Sharon Labs USA complements the companys organic growth strategy and is a continuation of its focus to be closer to key regions. This comes after establishing its first regional European presence in 2019.

See previous: Azelis, Sharon Laboratories Announce Partnership

Laura Mills recently joined Sharon Labs USA as business development manager, reporting to Naama Eylon, vice president personal care.

Eylon said, "The demand for clean and more natural cosmetic ingredients is consistently growing, and preservatives are an important part of the equation. Our portfolio gives preservation options that translate into value-added, proven claims such as natural, natural-like and free-of while delivering an enhanced performance.

"We look forward to working closer with our North American partners and customers. We are confident that it will further strengthen the link between the market needs and Sharon's innovation.

See related: SharoSENSE Plus 181-N by Acme-Hardesty Company
Interview: China's anti-poverty, economic feat led by CPC sets example for developing countries, says S. African party leader

Xinhua) 16:56, June 10, 2021

JOHANNESBURG, June 10 (Xinhua) -- China's poverty reduction and economic feat achieved under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) sets an example for many developing countries to follow, a leader of South Africa's ruling party has said.

"China's achievement is remarkable," Jessie Duarte, deputy secretary-general of the African National Congress (ANC), said in a recent interview with Xinhua, noting that "China is an example for many developing countries to learn from (in) areas such as poverty eradication as well as economic growth and development."

Picking up the third volume of "Xi Jinping: The Governance of China" from her desk, Duarte said the book "elaborates on China's courageous, ground-breaking development objectives which emphasize maximum quality and speed while staying true to Chinese cultural identity."

"I have read it, ... (It) is quite insightful on socialism with Chinese characteristics, poverty eradication and building a moderately prosperous society" in all respects, said Duarte.

Speaking of the efforts that China has made in building socialism with Chinese characteristics, she said, "It is important that nations adopt ideologies and developmental paths which are true to their own history, national identity, and unique circumstances instead of just following what others are doing."

Duarte believed the people-centered approach upheld by the CPC is about dedication to serving the public with unwavering diligence, an idea that resonates with the ANC, which honors the belief of Batho-Pele, or "People First."

Noting that this year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the CPC, Duarte said the past 100 years saw many achievements of the Asian country.

"On behalf of the national executive committee of the ANC and its members, I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the CPC on a highly successful century," said Duarte. "We wish you even greater success in the coming century."

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)
In Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, the right to freedom of religious belief is well protected and fully guaranteed. Religious service facilities have rights, such as establishing a democratic management organization, running internal affairs, organizing religious activities, receiving donations, managing and using property, and setting up social public welfare undertakings in accordance with law and regulations. The legitimate rights and interests of places for religious activities are protected by laws.



Islamic clerics have the right to preside over religious activities and ceremonies. They can accept donations from society and individuals. Citizens in religious places and citizens sticking to the religious customs in their homes carry out normal religious activities, such as worship, fasting and celebrating religious festivals. These activities are all managed by religious groups and citizens themselves.

In recent years, while adhering to the principle of independence and self-management of religious affairs, the Islamic Association of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has been engaged in the active communication and exchange with religious organizations around the world on the basis of mutual respect, equality and friendship, establishing, developing and strengthening friendly relations with overseas religious circles.

In 2016, famous religious figures from Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and other countries were invited to participate in the International Seminar on Moderate Thoughts of Islam in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang. In 2019, a delegation of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), as well as religious groups from Indonesia, Malaysia, Afghanistan and other countries, were invited to visit Xinjiang. In March 2019, the Council of Foreign Ministers of OIC adopted a resolution commending China's efforts in providing care to its Muslim citizens.

Since 2001, Xinjiang has sent more than 70 religious school students and clerical personnel to Egypt's Al-Azhar University and Pakistan International Islamic University and other overseas institutions for further study, with a view to improve their religious knowledge and teaching level. Xinjiang has organized the China Xinjiang Cultural Exchange Group for exchanges with countries in the Middle East, Oceania and Europe. Xinjiang's religious delegations have participated in the Chinese Islamic Culture Expo and Art Show hosted by the Islamic Association of China in Indonesia, Turkey and other countries, introducing the patriotism of Islam in China and its experiences in resisting the infiltration of religious extremism.

Great transparency

With great patience, China has time and again elaborated on the facts and truth regarding Xinjiang. China published eight white papers and Xinjiang held more than 20 press briefings to present through solid figures and facts a life of stability, solidarity and harmony enjoyed by all ethnic groups in the region. Languages, traditional cultures and customs of all ethnic minorities in Xinjiang have been well protected and inherited. There hasn't been any case of violence or terrorism over the past four years.

China has made tremendous efforts to provide training opportunities and jobs for people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang, so as to encourage, assist and support them in shaking off poverty and living a better life through diligence and hard work. During the fight against the COVID-19 epidemic, the Chinese Government puts people and life as top priority and takes resolute measures to protect the safety and health of all people, including Uygurs, to the greatest extent possible.

In 2019, domestic and foreign travelers made over 200 million trips to Xinjiang. The region has received 1,200-plus diplomats, journalists and representatives of religious groups from more than 100 countries, who witnessed unity, amity and happiness among various ethnic groups as well as the scenic views of Xinjiang.

In order to help the U.S. understand the real situation in Xinjiang, the Chinese Embassy in the U.S. held the Xinjiang Is a Wonderful Land online meeting on May 6. China had extended an invitation to U.S. lawmakers and their aides to join in the event, but none of them showed up, even though these people keep talking about human rights in Xinjiang.

Isn't it suspicious that some in the U.S. refuse to come face-to-face with local government officials and residents who best understand the real situation, but choose to believe the lies fabricated by a few institutions and individuals to tarnish the human rights situation in Xinjiang? They would rather buy the "account" of a few false witnesses and experts, yet refuse to listen to the voices far outnumbering those of false actors, and to heed the call of 1.4 billion Chinese people, including over 25 million people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang. Is this in line with democratic values?

Self-defeating tricks

We recall former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's bragging about the usefulness of lying. In an April 2019 speech at Texas A&M University, Pompeo boasted, "We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment." We listened to his incendiary allegations against Cuba, Nicaragua, his outlandish claims that Hezbollah was in Venezuela, all in the name of "Make America Great Again."

However, Pompeo and his boss, Donald Trump, did not succeed in making America great again. They did succeed in lowering the already low opinion the world had of America.

A decisive development in this downward spiral was former U.S. President George W. Bush's mega crime, the unprovoked invasion and devastation of Iraq in 2003, an "illegal war" stressed by then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, on the grounds that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties and making more than 1 million homeless. Years later, the U.S. admitted that the evidence of Iraq's holding weapons of mass destruction was nothing more than a small tube of white washing powder.

In 1964, the same method of lying was used to claim that North Vietnamese vessels had attacked U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkina claim that was used to justify the bombing of North Viet Nam and to unleash the Viet Nam War. Later, the Pentagon Papers, the memoirs of then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and NSA publications from 2005, proved that the U.S. Government lied to justify a war against Viet Nam.

In 2018, the U.S., the UK and France launched air strikes on Syria, claiming that the government forces used chemical weapons against the Syrian people. The air strikes led to hundreds of thousands of casualties and the displacement of innocent civilians. But the evidence of the so-called use of chemical weapons by the Syrian Government turned out to be nothing more than a staged video directed by the White Helmets, a group funded by U.S. and UK intelligence agencies.

Sometimes it is necessary to wait years and years before the lies of U.S. intelligence agencies are revealed. Yet numerous analysts have already revealed the U.S. lies about Xinjiang.

The plan of the U.S. is to copy the tricks used in Iraq and Syria to Xinjiang, making an issue out of thin air and exploit it. Yet this time the US will not get through, because China is not Iraq or Syria, and the world today knows better of the US tricks. Lies could no longer stand.

Accepting facts

By making unsubstantiated claims, the U.S. Government is seriously undermining its own authority and credibility to revive its role as a global leader. To play this constructive

international role, Washington should not "weaponize" human rights against China, or Russia. It should be a foreign policy dedicated to the genuine promotion of human rights, and a sincere initiative to call for international cooperation to upgrade and improve human rights. Actually the people of the U.S. and the world would hope that the Joe Biden administration will be confident enough to be receptive to investigations undertaken in response to the allegations of violations by the U.S. and its closest allies in Europe and elsewhere.

The U.S. needs to cooperate with China to reform global governance and address global problems of common concern such as the mitigation of environmental degradation, pandemics, nuclear proliferation, global economic and financial instability, global poverty, and set standards for new technologies.

The author is an op-ed contributor to Beijing Review and an expert on international studies.
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Crossville, TN (38555)

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China opposes foreign interference in Ethiopia's internal affairs, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Thursday in phone talks with Ethiopian Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Demeke Mekonnen.

Wang made the remarks after being briefed by Mekonnen on the domestic situation in Ethiopia.

Noting that China and Ethiopia are old and good friends, Wang said the two sides are each other's comprehensive strategic cooperative partners and have a good tradition of supporting each other.

China firmly supports Ethiopia in defending national peace and stability, actively exploring a development path suited to its national conditions, and overcoming the pandemic so as to resume economic and social development, Wang said.

Ethiopia's domestic issues should be resolved primarily through the efforts of the Ethiopian government, Wang said, adding that the international community should provide support while fully respecting Ethiopia's will, and should not impose unilateral sanctions on the country.

Wang said China is willing to provide assistance to alleviate humanitarian difficulties in Tigray, and has dispatched the first batch of food aid.

On the issue of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Wang said the unilization of cross-border water resources has always been sensitive and complex, and dialogue and consultation are the optimal way to resolve the issue.

China sincerely hopes that Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan will find a mutually beneficial and win-win solution through negotiations, he added.

Mekonnen, for his part, expressed gratitude to China for its precious support and sincere help in Ethiopia's anti-pandemic fight, and appreciated China's adherence to the non-interference policy.

He also expressed willingness to maintain close exchange and coordination with China on international affairs, jointly defend the legitimate rights and interests of the two sides as well as the developing countries at large, and safeguard international fairness and justice.

Mekonnen said he hopes to further strengthen friendly cooperation with China in various fields and continuously promote the deepening of Africa-China relations, so as to achieve common development and prosperity.
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TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP)  If China is to meet its tentative goal of vaccinating 80% of its population against the coronavirus by the end of the year, tens of millions of children may have to start rolling up their sleeves.

Regulators took the first step last week by approving the use of the countrys Sinovac vaccine for children aged 3 to 17, and on Friday announced the same for the Sinopharm vaccine. No date has been set for the shots to start.

Children have been largely spared the worst of the pandemic, becoming infected less easily than adults and generally showing less severe symptoms when they do catch the virus. But experts say children can still transmit the virus to others and some note that if countries are going to achieve herd immunity through their vaccination campaigns, inoculating children should be part of the plan.

Vaccinating children is an important step forward, said Jin Dong-yan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kongs medical school.

Doing so, however, may be easier said than done for reasons ranging from vaccine hesitancy to vaccine availability.

Even in countries with enough vaccines to go around, some governments are having problems convincing adults that the shots are safe and necessary despite studies demonstrating they are. Such concerns can be amplified when dealing with societys youngest.

There's also the issue of approval. Few regulators around the world have evaluated the safety of COVID-19 shots in kids, with the majority of shots approved only for adults right now. But the approvals are starting. The United States, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong are all allowing the use of the Pfizer vaccine in children as young as 12.

The Sinovac and Sinopharm announcements could open the way for the vaccines, already in use in dozens of countries from Brazil to Indonesia, to be given to children across the world.

In Thailand, where Sinovac makes much of the countrys vaccine supply, Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul welcomed the news that China had approved emergency use for children.

Once it gets approved, we are ready to provide the vaccine to cover all ages, Anutin said Monday.

Other vaccine makers are also working to expand access to younger people. Moderna is seeking permission to use its shot in children as young as 12, like Pfizer. Both companies have studies underway in even younger children, down to age 6 months.

Another obstacle to vaccinating children is that many countries are still struggling to get enough doses to inoculate their higher-risk adult populations. Thailand, for example, has vaccinated only 4% of its population so far and adult demand for vaccines far outweighs supply.

Right now given the shortages of vaccines, any available vaccine should be placed in age-based prioritization and risk-based prioritization, said Jerome Kim, head of the International Vaccine Institute in Seoul. Its really important to get this vaccine out in the places its needed now.

In many places there are also concerns among the public about the efficacy of the Chinese vaccines versus Western rivals. While efficacy rates cannot be compared directly, owing to the trials being conducted under different conditions, the Western vaccines have shown to be very effective in preventing infection in real world tests. Sinovac's shot has been shown to be effective in preventing severe disease and hospitalization. Sinopharm's shot has revealed comparatively less data.

The World Health Organization have approved both vaccines for emergency use in adults aged 18 and older, paving the way for its use in global programs aiming to distribute vaccines to low- and middle-income countries. The WHO has given no indication of when it might approve it for those younger.

Vaccines are often approved separately for adults and children because younger immune systems may react differently to the doses. Experts say inactivated vaccines are generally considered safe for children, as the technology has been in use for a long time, such as in mandatory childhood immunization programs, and have shown low risk.

Nikolai Petrovsky, a vaccine expert at Flinders University in Australia, said that while it is reasonable to assume the vaccines would safe for children, he questioned the necessity of vaccinating them against a virus they are relatively protected from using a vaccine that has yet to show it blocks transmission.

As far as I am aware there is no data to suggest the Sinovac vaccine will block transmission in children," he wrote in an email. "Without such evidence we need to ask why we are immunising the children.

China has a population of 1.4 billion, meaning it needs to inoculate 560 million people to reach its goal of 40% vaccination by June and 1.12 billion people to get to the 80% goal. It will be hard to do the latter without vaccinating many of its 254 million children who are younger than 14.

When China starts inoculating children will be determined by the government's National Health Commission in accordance with the epidemic situation, Sinovac CEO Yin Weidong told state broadcaster CCTV last week.

A spokesperson for Sinovac did not respond to a call requesting comment. Chinas National Health Commission directed the AP to a news report that summarized Yin's comments.

___

Associated Press writers Chalida Ekvitthayavechnukul and Fu Ting in Bangkok contributed to this report.
Christian Abraham / Hearst Connecticut Media

BRIDGEPORT  The driver of a moped suffered injuries in a crash on Boston Avenue late Thursday afternoon, according to a city official.

Around 5:45 p.m., the citys 911 dispatch center received multiple calls about a motor vehicle accident involving a moped in the 1800 bock of Boston Avenue, said Scott Appleby, the citys director of emergency communications and emergency management.
STRATFORD  Just as the high temperatures that marked the beginning of the week began to cool down, the race to be the towns mayor began to heat up.

Two of the three candidates who filed paperwork to run for the seat  incumbent Republican Laura Hoydick and Democrat Immacula Cann  held contemporaneous fundraisers Thursday with a view to building campaign war chests for November.

The third  Democrat Stephanie Philips, who ran against Hoydick in 2017 and recently launched a campaign website and Facebook page  said Friday shes quietly building support for her candidacy among members of her party.

3 1 of 3 Ethan Fry / Hearst Connecticut Media Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Contributed / stephanieforstratford.com Show More Show Less 3 of 3





We are focused on reaching out to the members of the Democratic Town Committee to gain their wholehearted support for the endorsement, Philips said. Our fundraising numbers are great, and we are making sure our focus will always be on Stratford, the community that I love. The people of Stratford know me, and that I stand with them.

Cann, who raised more than $31,000 immediately following the announcement of her intent to run in March, greeted supporters at Metric Bar and Grill in downtown Bridgeport alongside former New Haven Mayor Toni Harp.

The choice of venue  i.e., not in Stratford  was not lost on many of the volunteer political scientists of Stratfords social media sites, who questioned whether Cann had given her opponent a talking point with the location.

And local GOP party chairman Lou DeCilio, in a prepared statement announcing Thursdays event for the incumbent mayor at the Riverview Bistro on Ferry Boulevard, noted that it would be the first of several that are designed to be within town supporting local businesses.

Hoydick said it wasnt meant as a dig at her potential opponent in November.

Cann, who was born in Haiti, said she chose the location not only because Metric serves great Haitian foods but because I am extremely proud of my heritage and culture.

She said that she will be scheduling a formal campaign kick-off within town, and updated her website with stances on what she sees as the top issues of the campaign.

I have knocked on over 200 doors, I have spoken to over 300 people, and resoundingly, people are concerned about the way the town is moving, Cann said. Specifically regarding economic development, taxes, issues around the school system and equity.

Canns campaign has maintained a robust social media presence, with daily posts about a multitude of issues. Her husband, a Town Council member who represents the 5th District on the West Side, is an almost ubiquitous presence in Stratford-related Facebook threads.

My posts reflect what the individuals in Stratford are telling me and the concerns that people have, Cann said, noting that she recently posted about housing and responded to a comment from a person who talked about being a single mother.

I was in an abusive relationship at a very young age, and I had to leave my relationship with my ex-husband and I was a single mom, Cann said. So I can relate to that voter. And I think thats what makes me so unique in this race. I can relate to people and their needs and what theyre experiencing and the suffering theyre experiencing.

Hoydick  who began raising re-election money last year and reported about $25,000 in the bank as of April 10  said she has not yet begun going door-to-door.

But she echoed the pitch she made last month when she announced her campaign at Academy Hill.

I think the main campaign issue that people talk to me about are taxes, said Hoydick, whose administration has delivered slight decreases to the tax rate each of her years in office. Its not so much the stabilization of government any more, though theyre appreciative the (Town) Council is (as) professional as it is.

They are very thankful how we ran the town through COVID, she said. Theyre very, very appreciative of all our departments, because theyre professional too and do a really good job.

Other top issues she said she hears about include basic constituent services like ball fields, tree trimming, roads and sidewalks, as well as prominent redevelopment projects like the Army Engine Plant and Shakespeare theater property.

I havent started door-knocking yet, but groups have asked me to come and speak to them, Hoydick said. Theyve been asking me to come and speak to them for the last four years too. The support has been amazing and Im very thankful.
When I was in the foster care system, they had very few period supplies, most of which were one size and highly uncomfortable.  Many foster youth dont have access to such essential products.

I was always nervous to ask my mother to buy more pads or tampons because I knew how expensive they were, and I sat through many uncomfortable days at school just to avoid financial strain on my parents.

There exists an unspoken stigma around periods that does not justify menstrual pain as a worthy enough excuse to skip a practice, or stay in bed over seeing friends.

Human. Its the beauty that defines and deepens our existence. In a reality as isolating as the COVID-19 pandemic, humanness is our universal connection.

Many artists have sought ways to document and explore humanness, like Brandon Stanton, creator of Humans of New York. His photography and storytelling have opened thousands of windows into the lives of strangers living in New York, offering a way for people to connect despite the immense disconnect of COVID.

Humans with Periods, a social media awareness campaign that began during National Period Poverty Awareness Week (May 24 to 30), offers a similar function. With the aim to dismantle the stigma around periods by opening up about period-related struggles, menstruators all over Connecticut shared their own period stories for the public to read. Ive shared a few of the responses we received at the beginning of this piece.

Topics ranged from period poverty  a lack of access to menstrual products due to financial burdens  to the stereotypes many menstruators have had to confront, including the dismissal of cramp pains and lack of sympathy, as many believe periods are a girls issue.

Unlike other normal bodily functions, like hair growth, urination or food digestion, the menstrual cycle is stigmatized and serves as a financial burden for many.

To put this situation into perspective for those who do not menstruate: When was the last time you had to pay for toilet paper in a restroom? On most accounts, never. Imagine inserting a quarter into a machine that only gives you one usage of toilet paper. If you dont have any coins with you, youre forced to find some way to deal with soiled clothing. This is the reality for many menstruators. Period products are a necessity, and its well past time that we treat them as such.

Tampons and pads, in most places, are not free and many schools struggle to provide them. In Connecticut, 1 in 8 women and girls between the ages of 12 and 44 lives below the Federal Poverty Level, and almost 60 percent of families living in poverty struggle to keep up with their bills and cover unexpected expenses. The cost of period products makes them inaccessible for many individuals who are low-income, forcing them to resort to using unsafe and unhygienic alternatives like rags, toilet paper or even adult incontinence products.

In elementary school, I was the first person in my class to reach menarche, my first menstrual cycle. As a result, the subject of periods soon evolved into a fear: I was often too scared to talk to my mom about it, much less my closest friends. I was called an early bloomer and exercised extreme discretion every time I was on my period. The most debilitating part of the stigma was that I was ashamed of my own body, the period blood, and the acne that would pop up at the beginning of my menstrual cycle and reveal that I was on my period.

Over the years I have slowly found beauty in the menstrual cycle. How magical is it that, in preparation for pregnancy, our bodies can nurture a child? Endure so much pain and come back stronger and healthier? It is simply amazing what our bodies are capable of.

But much of the general public, my former self included, do not see it this way. One of the goals of Humans with Periods was to change that perspective, opening readers up to a discussion that many consider taboo, with insufficient media coverage and a history of inducing shame. The Humans with Periods stories also explored these inequities through a rarely perceived lens of poverty. I have been fortunate enough to live with free access to period products, but 40 percent of female public school students in grades 7 through 12 in Connecticut attend schools with high concentrations of student poverty. They likely cannot say the same.

One of the first steps towards real change is education and awareness. I invite you to learn more about period poverty, and what The Diaper Bank of Connecticuts Beam program is doing to help in our community, by visiting thediaperbank.org/beam.

But change does not end there. Lets keep this conversation going  out in the open for all to hear.

Joy Ren, of Wilton, is one of the co-creators of Humans With Periods, a project supported by the Connecticut Alliance for Period Supplies, a program of The Diaper Bank of Connecticut. To see some of the Human With Periods Project, visit facebook.com/thediaperbankct.
Yesterday, NAFCUs award-winning advocacy team monitored a Senate Banking Subcommittee hearing to examine the digital dollar. The hearing largely focused on ensuring privacy, security, and countering Chinas attempts to become the reserve currency.

During the hearing, Senators focused on the challenges and merits of a digital currency. Additionally, there was a discussion by the subcommittee on how a digital dollar could help unbanked people have access to digital dollars.

The witnesses all agreed on the need for a central bank digital currency and stressed that the digital dollar should also have the ability to be loaded on a card.

Witnesses at the hearing were the following:
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A batch of COVID-19 vaccines donated by the Chinese government arrived in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan on Thursday.

The shipment of Sinopharm vaccines are the first Chinese donation of the COVID-19 vaccine Afghanistan has received.

Afghanistan has administered about 1 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine as of early May, largely to frontline healthcare workers, security forces members, journalists, and teachers.

Amid a third wave of COVID-19 infections, currently the war-torn Asian country is suffering a vaccine shortage. The Ministry of Public Health on Tuesday announced it had run out of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Afghanistan recorded 1,822 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, raising the total tally to 87,716, the ministry said.

To combat COVID-19, the ministry has repeatedly urged the Afghan people to wear a face mask in crowded places, practice physical distancing and keep personal hygiene.


Many Nigerians outside the Synagogue family may not have known that TB Joshua's birthday is on June 12. A greater event unfolded on June 12 1993 and it must have overshadowed the late Prophet's birthday. On that historic day of June, the 12th, democracy was gloriously born in Nigeria but was murdered by a military gang led by Generals Ibrahim Babangida and the late Sani Abacha.





OZODINUKWE OKENWA

Sahara Reporters



June 9, 2021





The Nigerian popular televangelist, Prophet Temitope Balogun Joshua, popularly known as TB Joshua, the founder of the Lagos-based Synagogue Church of All Nations (SCOAN) died over the weekend in Lagos. Prophet Joshua was said to have conducted an evening service in his church and was on his way to the hospital when he died. He was said to have fallen sick two days prior. His 58th birthday was billed for June 12. His megachurch runs the popular Emmanuel TV from Lagos and viewed worldwide. Prophet Joshua was born on June 12, 1963. He hailed from Arigidi Akoko, in Akoko North West Area of Ondo State. He was married and had three children.





According to the widow, Evelyn Joshua, however, the man of miracle had spent about three long hours on the 'mountain' praying before mounting the pulpit for the evening worship. Ministering the gospel to the faithful the Prophet spoke prophetically about a time to come and a time to leave. And suddenly he took his leave retreating to his inner chambers.





As the woman, according to her narrative, waited for some time for her husband to re-emerge to continue the service she decided to check on him. Lo and behold she met the famous Prophet sitting on the chair like someone reflecting but unconscious! Efforts to revive him proved abortive.





It would seem that Prophet Joshua had a premonition of the grim reaper lurking by the corner going by the trending video in which he had exhorted his members to mark his upcoming birthday by praying and fasting. He had these to say: "As things stand, you may have realised it will not be easy for me to celebrate my birthday under the present circumstances. Some of the people who want to come are troubled by the situation all over the world. We see their fear and their worry. I feel their pain; I feel their worry.... Therefore, let us dedicate this day to prayer and fasting. Don't forget the needy. By the grace of God, more birthdays are ahead. God bless you!"





According to some online reports some soldiers and other security agents had laid siege to the Synagogue edifice as if something was wrong somewhere. They were said to have molested journalists, preventing people from getting inside the temple of God. Nigeria and her security elements never ceased to amaze the outside world with their unprofessional work ethics. Why preventing legitimate people from getting into Synagogue? Or was there a search warrant or fears of looting following Joshua's sudden demise?





Prophet TB Joshua rose from a poor parental background to become a great man. He touched lives, he empowered lives. He was controversial yet an enigma. In a nation where pentecostalism has become a billion-dollar-spinning 'business' Joshua made name and money for himself building the Synagogue to become one of the greatest christian organizations in Nigeria and Africa. His followers cut across regions and countries.





Scenes of melancholy could be seen on video online as his followers mourned his untimely passage to the great beyond. Men and women, old and young, were seen shedding tears and asking questions over their welfare since their benevolent 'breadwinner' had died. Some were even imploring God to take their lives instead and bring back Joshua!





But regrettably the stunning biblical Lazarus miracle is no longer possible in our generation post-Jesus. No mortal can boast of possessing the power wielded by Jesus the Christ when he raised the dead and buried Lazarus, his friend, from the grave. So Joshua is gone for good, never to return in flesh and blood. To those weeping we ask them to take solace in his good deeds and generosity while he lived. His pentecostal legacy would definitely outlive him from generation to generation.





The general effusion of grief towards the late prophet demonstrated his popularity and the impact he had had on the society. Yet he never endeared himself to many people in Nigeria and outside our shores. At home he was banned from membership of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN). And from Kampala, Uganda came the news that the Pastor of the Christian Life Church, Jackson Senyonga, was celebrating Joshua's death! He described him as the "biggest witch in Africa"!





Nigeria boasts of great flamboyant men of God -- Bishops, Prophets, Apostles and Pastors -- the Oyedepos, Okonkwos, Adeboyes, Kumuyis, Sulemans, Enenches, Oyakhilomes etc. But unlike most of these rich and material-conscious 'servants' of God Joshua was different in many ways. He was stupendously rich yet he lived a normal life devoid of bigmanism. He was munificient and philanthropic.





While his peers were busy buying limousines and private jets he was content living modestly. Though he possessed the financial resources to indulge in such luxurious lifestyle or fantasy he decided to be himself believing in the vanity of material possessions here on earth. Perhaps that was why he was hated by his pentecostal peers.





When he began his ministry flaks and fireworks followed almost immediately because of his unconventional methods and tactics. He started off as a man of God of questionable credibility and source of spiritual power. But he ended up convincing millions of Nigerians and non-Nigerians of his healing and deliverance powers.





Prophet Joshua courted controversy as he set his eyes on the bigger picture. He began rough and tough! His physical attribute, heavily-bearded and eagle-eyed, was not only intimidating but his manner of deliverance raised questions about his possible involvement in occultism or sorcery. Initially he was alleged to have been using alligator pepper and other traditional instruments to drive away demonic spirits. He did many miracles and predicted events of the future. Some of these predictions hit their marks while others fell by the way side.





In the Holy Book we, as Christians, are admonished against proclaiming or reaching judgement on anyone since the ultimate judgement belongs to the heavenly hosts. But we dare say here that Joshua had this myth about his personality and evangelism that was as perplexing as it was interrogatory. Doubts about his staying spiritual power and his modest academic profile persisted for years even as the membership of Synagogue multiplied.





Many years ago (precisely in 1996) the late Prophet was arrested for drug peddling in Lagos by the operatives of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency and detained for two weeks. It later turned out to be false accusation as nothing incriminating was found on him or inside his churchor home.





On 12 September, 2014, a guesthouse collapsed in the SCOAN's premises in Lagos killing at least 115 people! 84 of those that perished were South Africans. This tragedy led many into believing that a blood sacrifice could have been the cause of it all! It was not the first time a building under construction had collapsed in Lagos or elsewhere in Nigeria. But what made the Synagogue building collapse more controversial was the large number of foreign victims. Litigation followed and Prophet Joshua survived the storm.





Many Nigerians outside the Synagogue family may not have known that TB Joshua's birthday is on June 12. A greater event unfolded on June 12 1993 and it must have overshadowed the late Prophet's birthday. On that historic day of June, the 12th, democracy was gloriously born in Nigeria but was murdered by a military gang led by Generals Ibrahim Babangida and the late Sani Abacha.





Now that another June 12 is imminently upon us we must, given the Buharian slow but steady loading absolutism, return to the trenches to defend democracy in our country. Bashorun MKO Abiola could not have died in vain while trying to actualize 'Hope-93'.





As for Prophet Temitope Balogun Joshua the parting word is instructive for us, the living: 'A time to come and a time to leave'! That is the portion of every living carnivorous and omnivorous animal. From the cradle to the grave remains till eternity our existential reality. Prophet Joshua came, he saw and he conquered.





Fare thee well, Prophet. We grieve for you!





SOC Okenwa

soco_abj_2006_rci@hotmail.fr





http://saharareporters.com/2021/06/09/tb-joshua-time-come-and-time-leave-ozodinukwe-okenwa
Elizabeth City, NC (27909)

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Mostly cloudy early. Scattered thunderstorms developing later in the day. High 87F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

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Elizabeth City, NC (27909)

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Mostly cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy in the afternoon. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 87F. Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph..

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An Ulster County Department of Health mobile vaccination vehicle is shown outside the county's vaccination center at Hudson Valley Mall in the town of Ulster in May.
RED HOOK, N.Y.  The Red Hook Police Department has gotten back a car that was seized as evi
The following items are based on information provided by officials in law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
KINGSTON, N.Y.  Two city men have been indicted on a charge of murder in connection with th
Members of the Ashland Human Rights Commission stand as Mayor Matt Perkins, third from left, reads a proclamation from the City of Ashland honoring diversity during the month of June at the Ashland City Commission meeting on Thursday.

Matt Jones | The Daily Independent
Sunbury, PA (17801)

Today

Partly cloudy early with thunderstorms becoming likely during the afternoon. High 83F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms during the evening, then partly cloudy overnight. Low 57F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 60%.
Sunbury, PA (17801)

Today

Partly cloudy early with thunderstorms becoming likely during the afternoon. High 83F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%..

Tonight

Partly to mostly cloudy skies with scattered thunderstorms before midnight. Low 57F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%.
Madison, SD (57042)

Today

A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 63F. Winds NE at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 63F. Winds NE at 10 to 15 mph.
As regular readers will be all too aware, Im a pathetically addicted chain-smoker with an abiding distaste for being bossed around by the nanny state.

It may therefore come as a surprise to some that Im broadly in favour of this weeks proposal by a committee of MPs that the legal age for buying tobacco should be raised from 18 to 21.

Its not that such a law would have made much difference to me, had it been in force when I first developed a taste for the evil weed back in 1968, when the minimum smoking age was still 16 (it didnt go up to 18 until 2007).

I was 15 at the time, staying in County Durham for the summer holidays with a schoolfriend of the same age.

Isnt there just a chance that a few teenagers might be dissuaded from trying cigarettes if they were banned from buying them? And wouldnt a few be better than none?

We were up in the loft above his parents garage when he produced an illicitly acquired packet of Three Castles cigarettes (remember them?) and offered me one. After a cough or two, I soon got the hang of it and began to look forward to the next one. I havent looked back since.

Nor do I suppose that the sort of law proposed by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health would have much of an impact on the overall numbers of young people taking up my filthy habit. Thats even if the police were to make a serious effort to enforce it, as they have so signally failed to do with the law against psychosis-inducing cannabis.

Hypocrisy

Lets face it, if the young are not put off by the prohibitive price of cigarettes these days (12.70 for a packet of 20 Marlboro Reds at my local newsagent, which is cheap by London standards), then its pretty unlikely that a minimum legal age for buying tobacco would make many under-21s think twice before giving smoking a try.

That said, however, I wouldnt wish my tobacco addiction  ruinous to my health and my bank balance alike  on any young person for whom I felt the slightest affection.

And isnt there just a chance that a few teenagers might be dissuaded from trying cigarettes if they were banned from buying them? And wouldnt a few be better than none?

Yes, I know, Im a monstrous hypocrite. Indeed, a stern critic might say that the guiding principle behind all my advice to our four sons, ever since they were in short trousers, has been: Do as I say, not as I do.

But then, as I never tire of repeating, the great French moralist Cardinal Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1558-1645) had it plumb right when he said: Hypocrisy is a homage that vice pays to virtue.

In short, it is surely far better to urge others to behave well, while behaving badly oneself, than to say: You should follow my bad example.

They think anyone under the age of 21 is too immature to decide whether or not to buy a packet of cigarettes. But they are happy to entrust children five years younger with the most important decision anyone can make in a democracy

So I reckon the committee is wise when it suggests that 18 is too young an age at which to start dabbling in a habit that could cast a shadow over the rest of a teenagers life.

I would go further and say that my experience of studying my sons generation as they were growing up tells me that most 18-year-olds today (though not all of them) are incredibly immature and not to be trusted with any grown- up decision.

All of which brings me to a bit of a conundrum. Im indebted to the excellent political website, Guido Fawkes, for pointing out that no fewer than nine of the MPs on this anti-smoking committee  thats 60 per cent of them  have called for the voting age to be lowered to 16.

So lets get this straight. They think anyone under the age of 21 is too immature to decide whether or not to buy a packet of cigarettes. But they are happy to entrust children five years younger with the most important decision anyone can make in a democracy.

Of course, it will come as no surprise that all nine of the committee members who back votes at 16 belong to Left-wing parties  whether Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP or the Greens.

Clearly, they calculate that children are more likely than adults to vote for their daft ideas. Whats more, they are almost certainly right, if were to judge by voting patterns at recent elections, broken down by age. The younger the voter, on the whole, the more likely he or she is to back the Left.

Idealistic

But is it unfair to ask for a little consistency? If people are too young at 20 to decide whether or not they should buy a packet of Silk Cut, then surely they must be too young at 16 to make decisions that will affect the future of millions of their fellow citizens? Until 1970, Britons had to wait for the vote until they were 21. Was that such a bad idea?

As for why younger voters tend to lean towards the Left, a part of the reason must be that they tend to be more naive and idealistic, with less experience of real life than hardened old cynics of my age (Im 67). The fact that most 18-year-olds dont pay direct taxes must also have something to do with it. Its far less painful, after all, to see the Government redistributing other peoples hard-earned money than our own.

But I suspect that another crucial factor may be at work: the irresistible urge, felt by the young through the ages, to annoy their parents.

Yes, I know, Im a monstrous hypocrite. Indeed, a stern critic might say that the guiding principle behind all my advice to our four sons, ever since they were in short trousers, has been: Do as I say, not as I do'

Ive often suspected that it was at least partly for the sheer joy of winding his father up that our third son became a rabid Corbynista  a champion of every Marxist regime from which refugees flee in their droves, and a scourge of the capitalist countries where they seek refuge.

Something of that same urge to infuriate their elders and betters may well lie behind the current youthful fashion for tearing down statues, banishing portraits of the Queen from university common rooms and suggesting that words such as mother should be erased from the dictionary and replaced by person who gives birth.

Like Lewis Carrolls sneezing little boy in Alices Adventures in Wonderland: They only do it to annoy/ Because they know it teases.

Pander

What is so maddening is that the tactic seldom fails. Just as many of my parents generation were exasperated by the hippies and long-haired layabouts they spawned, so people like me rise to the bait when young idiots tell us that the Queen is a symbol of racist oppression, or that Chavezs Venezuela was a model society.

The answer, I suppose, is that we grown-ups should try not to get angry  hard though this often is.

We should remind ourselves that young people have always said and done silly things, and take comfort from the thought that one day, most of them will grow up.

I often think we shouldnt waste our breath on attacking these annoying young, but should reserve our anger instead for the grown-ups who pander to them.

Im thinking of the fool at Kings College, London, who apologised for causing harm to students by publishing a photograph of Prince Philip in a newsletter.

Or the Oxford dons who have said they will impose sanctions on students from Oriel until their college pulls down its statue of the colonialist Cecil Rhodes (an enlightened liberal, by the standards of his day).

Or the woke warriors who decreed that all members of the House of Lords  including the likes of the venerable 91-year-old Lady Boothroyd  should be forced to take a course in sexual harassment training.

Sadly, people like these will never grow up.

But lets be tolerant of the foolish young. Indeed, its because I care about their welfare that I think they should be strongly discouraged from taking up smoking, at least until they are old enough to make a sensible choice. So, yes, lets trying raising the legal age for buying tobacco to 21.

But while were about it, for the sake of consistency and our countrys future, shouldnt we raise the voting age to the same?
From travelling the world to spending more time with the grandkids, there is plenty to look forward to once you retire, but how do you fund your golden years?

Retiring may give you more freedom and time to spend on the things, and with the people you love the most, but it still costs money.

Without a regular salary it can be hard to adapt to life in retirement, especially as there's no guarantee that your state or private pension will maintain the standard of living you're used to.

So that's why many people turn to equity release to help provide the retirement they've been dreaming of.

From travelling the world to spending more time with the grandkids, there is plenty to look forward to once you retire

What is equity release?

An equity release product is similar to a mortgage, but is only for people aged 55 or over.

It lets older people release tax-free cash from the value of their property.

There are two types of equity release products and the most popular is a lifetime mortgage, which is a loan secured against your home.

Unlike a traditional mortgage, there are no monthly interest or repayments, depending on the plan you opt for.

Instead, everything is rolled up and only has to be repaid once the borrower moves permanently into a care home or passes away.

Alternatively, some older property owners use a home reversion plan where part, or all, of the home is sold to a provider in return for tax-free cash.

How can equity release boost your retirement?

30 per cent of those using equity release have spent the money on a dream holiday

You can spend the tax free cash on almost anything you wish.

However, if you have any outstanding mortgage or other debt secured against your home, these would need to be paid off first and you can use the money you release to do this. Using equity release to repay an existing mortgage or other debt could cost you more in the long term.

Some homeowners use it to clear debts, while others put it towards giving an inheritance to their loved ones early, so they can enjoy seeing them use it.

There is, of course, the option to just splash the cash on yourself.

Research by the Saga Equity Release Advice Service, which is provided by HUB Financial Solutions Limited, found 59 per cent of customers have used equity release for home improvements like a new bathroom, kitchen, extension or conservatory.

Another 49 per cent have used equity release to pay off debts, 30 per cent have spent the money on a dream holiday, while some use it to create an emergency fund for repairs and bills or to buy a new car.

The options are endless and you can use the money for almost anything you choose.

The benefits of equity release

Simply put, equity release lets you access tax-free cash in your later years.

This is particularly handy if you dont have other savings and if you arent getting enough from your pension.

It also means you get to stay in your home and can even use the money to make adaptions to it as you get older.

It will reduce the value of all your assets, known as your estate, which could therefore reduce any inheritance tax bills.

Equity release means you get to stay in your home and can even use the money to make adaptions to it as you get older

The risks of equity release

There is lots to think about beyond the tax-free cash.

You could lose access to benefits such as universal credit or pension credit if you suddenly receive a lump sum through equity release.

It is also important to talk to your family as it may mean sacrificing an inheritance you were hoping to leave to your loved ones.

Some providers, however, will let you reserve a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the property as an inheritance once you pass away. But be sure it's the best course of action for you, before you make a decision.

How equity release works

If you purchased your home a long time ago there's a chance it has risen in value.

That extra money is your equity and the higher the value of your property, the more equity or cash could be available to release.

The amount you can release depends on your age and the lender, but you can often borrow up to 60 per cent of the value of your home.

The minimum property value is 70,000 so this isnt a product reserved for wealthy mansion owners and could work for most older homeowners.

Depending on the plan, there are no monthly repayments with a lifetime mortgage and instead the loan and interest owed only has to be paid once you move permanently into care or by your estate.

It is slightly different with a home reversion plan as you essentially sell a portion or all of your property to the provider.

If the whole property was sold then the home reversion provider would take it over once you move into care or die.

Equity release could be the key to making your retirement all the more enjoyable.

If only a portion was sold to a home reversion provider, then the property would be sold and it would get the proceeds equivalent to its share, with the rest going to your estate.

Equity release products have become more flexible in recent years and some will let borrowers make partial repayments or access the money in different stages rather than as a lump sum.

For example, the Saga Equity Release Plan is a lifetime mortgage which gives borrowers the choice to pay back all or part of their monthly interest.

Doing this will reduce how much is owed at the end of the loan, potentially leaving more in the value of your estate for your loved ones.

Borrowers can also get the option to take a payment holiday of three months during any 12-month period.

Saga also offers a Regular Drawdown Lifetime Mortgage. This combines an initial tax-free lump sum payment with ongoing tax-free monthly payouts.

This reduces the cost of the mortgage and the amount owed overall as interest is only charged on the amount that has been accessed.

It's only available, however, to customers aged 60 to 80 with a UK property worth at least 150,000.

These two Saga exclusive equity release products are provided by Just (part of the same group as HUB Financial Solutions Limited).

All plans available through Saga also have a no negative equity guarantee.

This means you will never owe more than what your home is worth and the debt cannot be passed on to your family when you die, or move to permanent care providing you have met the terms and conditions.

How to apply

An equity release adviser can assess your finances and your retirement needs to see if the product is suitable for you and may even recommend alternative options. (Stock image)

Providers arent allowed to sell you an equity release product unless you have taken advice.

An equity release adviser can assess your finances and your retirement needs to see if the product is suitable for you and may even recommend alternative options.

They should explain any arrangement and advice fees involved and how much the loan will cost.

The Saga Equity Release Advice Service, provided by HUB Financial Solutions Limited, will also do a free state benefit check to ensure customers are receiving everything they are entitled to.

The service recommends a range of equity release products as well as Sagas own exclusive products and the usual 750 payable on completion of a recommended product is waived if you are a Saga member.

Plus, if you proceed with one of the Saga equity release plans, you wont have to pay any set-up costs or valuations fees and will get 425 towards the legal costs.

So click HERE to find out how much you could release or call 0800 056 6070 to learn more about equity release. It could be the key to making your retirement all the more enjoyable.
Australia's most tattooed doctor has revealed how her body art obsession began with a simple rose tattoo but now has a huge impact on every aspect of her life.

Dr Sarah Jane Gray, a surgical resident and tattoo shop owner from Adelaide, has been working towards having a full body suit since she was 25.

The 32-year-old has tattoos celebrating her biggest achievements including being accepted into her medical residency and to celebrate the birth of her son, Ramone.

Australia's most tattooed doctor, Dr Sarah Jane Gray, has revealed how her body art obsession began with a simple rose tattoo but now has a huge impact on every aspect of her life

Dr Sarah is pictured here with her son Ramone. Her most meaningful tattoo is dedicated to him

The mum is pictured here with her husband, Bumer, with whom she owns a tattoo shop

And while picking a favourite tattoo seems an impossible task, Dr Sarah revealed the most important one.

'My most recent one means the most to me as it's an 'R' for my son Ramone on the front of my neck,' she said.

But some of her light-hearted tattoos are important to her as well.

'I have a Nicholas Cage portrait from ConAir and Dr Nick Riviera from the Simpsons that I had done to celebrate being accepted into my surgical residency.'

Dr Sarah is Australia's most tattooed doctor and loves to break down the stigma associated with body art

The 32-year-old has been working toward a bodysuit of tattoos since she was 25

The new mum, who has brightly coloured pink and purple hair to compliment her body art, won the Miss Inked Beauty Pageant in 2017 and works hard to break down negative stigma about tattoos.

She achieves this while working in a white-collar, patient-facing job by having conversations about body art with her patients, who are never too shy to ask questions about her tattoos.

'I love talking about tattooing and helping to break down any existing negative stigma associated. Tattoos do so much more for people than just allowing them to express their creativity, they make people feel whole again,' Dr Sarah said.

And hearing their stories is just as powerful.

The 33-year-old has meaningful tattoos celebrating her biggest achievements including being accepted into her medical residency and to celebrate the birth of her son, Ramone

Dr Sarah says being tattooed doesn't impact the way you do your job or who you are

The mum says empathy and clinical skills make a great doctor, not their appearance

'Seeing a breast cancer survivor complete their journey by regaining back the anatomical appearance of their nipple and areola post mastectomy is just one example of this,' she said.

Despite having so many visible tattoos, Dr Sarah has never had a problem getting a job, including medical placements.

'I've never hidden who I am, my employers have always been really supportive of my creativity and diversity,' she said.

'It's not your appearance that defines how good of a clinician you are, it's your communication, clinical skills and empathy.

'Anyone that thinks otherwise needs to look at their own unconscious bias.'

Dr Sarah co-owns The Grim Raptor tattoo studio with her husband Bumer, who is an artist.

She prefers to give artists creative freedom when she gets a new tattoo.

Her first tattoo, a rose, has since been covered as she continues to work toward an incredible tapestry of art across her body

The doctor is the co-owner of a tattoo studio and likes to give artists some creative control when they are creating a piece for her

Her first tattoo, the rose, has since been covered as she continues to work toward an incredible tapestry of art across her body.

Dr Sarah says people's diversity, including the way they choose to express themselves artistically or physically should always be encouraged and embraced.

'Irrespective of one's age, race or gender. You can achieve anything you want if you work hard enough for it,' she said.

Dr Sarah is an ambassador for the 11th annual tattoo expo which kicks off in Brisbane in July.
A pair of best friends who started their humble business in a tiny Kennards storage shed have built a multi-million dollar beer empire.

Geoff Huens, 41, and Richard Kelsey, 39, were working together in corporate jobs in market research when they saw an opening after they struggled to find a decent beer in Australia.

Operating out of a self-storage unit, the pair started online store Beer Cartel in 2009 providing drinkers access to exclusive craft beers from all over the world.

But what started as a monthly beer delivery subscription service quickly evolved from 32 to 1,000 different types of craft beers in just a matter of years.

Fast forward 12 years, the duo made a whopping $4.1 million in revenue following a huge spike in sales during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 - recording a 75 per cent growth.

Best friends Geoff Huens, 41, (left) and Richard Kelsey, 39, (right) who started their humble business in a tiny Kennards storage shed has built a multi-million dollar beer empire

After working in a tiny shed for more than a year, they opened up their first bottle shop in Artarmon on the lower north shore of Sydney (pictured together in 2013)

How Beer Cartel grew during Covid-19 The founders of Beer Cartel made $2.6million in sales in 2019 During the global coronavirus pandemic, the business saw a huge spike in sales. They made $4.1million in sales - a 75% growth during Covid-19 Advertisement

Long before their multi-million dollar success, the idea to start their own brand simply sparked from their shared love of 'great beer'.

'At the time Australia was a bit of a beer wasteland with the same boring brews found at every pub and bottle shop. Our aim was to disrupt this and make great beers accessible to everyone, everywhere,' Richard told Daily Mail Australia.

Richard's first ever 'job' out of university was a market research study for a New Zealand craft brewery, where he got paid in 'very good beer', which opened his eyes to the aromas, flavours and untold stories of brews from around the globe.

For Geoff, he discovered 'amazing beers' during a trip to Belgium where he was 'blown away' by the quality of brew that the country produced.

The pair - who are both dads with two kids each, met through their jobs after Geoff interviewed Richard for a position at a market research company.

The pair were working together in corporate jobs in market research when they saw an opening in the market after they struggled to find 'good' beer in Australia

Their start-up business started in a tiny wine storage shed at Kennards where they packed hundreds of boxes each month to send out to homes as part of a monthly beer subscription (pictured of what a cool wine storage looks like at Kennards Self Storage)

The brand used to offer takeaway growlers of beer from the keg, which is beer sold by the measure (pictured of Geoff filling a bottle)

Their start-up business began in a cramped shed where they packed hundreds of boxes each month to send out to homes as part of a monthly beer subscription.

'It was very small. Our shed wasn't the size of your average garage, we were about a third of that. We were based in the wine storage area of Kennards which meant that we could ensure all beer was kept temperature controlled,' Richard said.

The pair thought a storage shed was a 'great option' because they didn't want to 'make a huge financial commitment right from the start'.

'We chose a storage shed as it was a very cost effective way for us to dip our toes into starting a business without paying huge monthly rents

'We chose a storage shed as it was a very cost effective way for us to dip our toes into starting a business without paying huge monthly rents,' he said.

The pair were running the business in the small space for about a year-and-a-half before they established their first bottle shop in Artarmon on the lower north shore of Sydney, and a warehouse in 2011.

'We were online even before Dan Murphy's which was a great thing, but it meant the concept of buying alcohol online was unfamiliar to most,' Richard said.

'The store allowed us to quickly accelerate our range going from just 32 when we first started to the 1,000 different beers we have today, with new beers arriving every week.'

When the business moved into a warehouse in 2011 (pictured), there was only 32 types of beer

The business now stocks more than 1,000 different types of beer from around the world

After pubs, bars, cafes and restaurants were forced to shut their doors indefinitely in response to Covid-19, Beer Cartel provided a lifeline for craft breweries.

'We knew that parts of our industry were doing it tough during covid so it was great to be able to support breweries by increasing the amount we were purchasing from them,' he said.

The brand grew so fast last year, the business doubled its workforce by employing hospitality workers who had lost their jobs.

Remarkably, the business recorded an unprecedented sales jump from $2.6million in revenue in 2019 to $4.1million in 2020.

'Our online side of the business went through the roof right from the moment Australia had its first lockdown in March,' Richard said.

The friends decided to temporarily close their bottle shop just to keep up with the huge demand via their online store.

'We were being absolutely pumped to the limit trying to keep up with online orders,' Richard said.

'The good thing was in the background we were quickly changing our processes to cope. By the time Christmas came around, which is traditionally our very busy period, it almost felt quiet - the business was just functioning perfectly.'

Every week, Beer Cartel has 1,000 options to choose from and 20 to 30 new beers being added, with many exclusive to its website and Sydney store

The brand now stocks Australia's biggest range of craft beers - and it also has the country's longest running beer subscription service

When the company first started, the craft beer industry was still in its infancy with a mere 100 breweries. Today, the robust scene boasts more than 700 craft breweries - all happily coexisting.

For those looking to start a business, Richard said: 'It's all about taking baby steps. Start small and just keep ticking things off in the background and the business will develop a momentum of its own.'

The founders of Beer Cartel are now offering Australians the opportunity to own a share in the country's largest beer store from as little as $100.

Beer Cartel is now raising up to $1.5 million from investors through its equity crowdfunding offer with Birchal. This will be used to fund the next stage of business growth, driving refinements to its website, logistics and online offering.

'We've got a bright future and can't wait to offer people a chance to be part of it,' Richard said.
Newlywed Carrie Symonds was buoyed by her 'status upgrade' as the wife of a Prime Minister and was 'determined to not shrink into the background' when she met the Bidens yesterday, a body language expert has explained.

Boris and Carrie met President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill for a beachfront stroll in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, ahead of the start of the G7 summit today.

After an awkward start where Carrie trailed behind the others as they set off on their walk, the PR guru took control of the situation and 'set the pace' and was keen to assert her position by mimicking the Bidens' confident hand-holding.

British body language expert Judi James told FEMAIL: 'New bride Carrie did look determined to register a status upgrade at the G7, appearing in an eye-catching flame red dress and matching shoes and even taking the lead to appear to be ushering the group along or setting the pace as they walked in front of the cameras.'

Later Mrs Johnson showcased her 'sense of spontaneity' when she kicked off her shoes to paddle in the water with Dr Biden, while one-year-old son Wilfred played on the shore.

BACK OF THE PACK: Boris initially strode ahead of the group and seemed unaware that his wife was trailing at the back, according to Judi, but this brief problem was soon corrected

SETTING THE PACE: When Carrie did catch up, she strode ahead of her husband and the Bidens, leading the way on the beachfront stroll in a show of confidence

Carrie, 33, cut an elegant figure in a scarlet 325 LK Bennett gown as she walked hand-in-hand with the Prime Minister and joined President Joe and his wife Dr Jill for the meeting.

Initially the new Mrs Johnson walked behind the rest of the group.

'Boris appeared oblivious of any problem at the back of the grid initially, striding ahead and entertaining his other guests,' Judi explained.

'But when Carrie did finally catch up alongside we can see her almost appear to get out front like a racing car that has finally managed to lap its opponents and get into the lead.'

Judi also suggested Boris and Carrie mirrored the Bidens hand-holding during their walk.

Boriss PDAs are usually either non-existent or awkward-looking but Carries body language here suggests she has decided to take matters into her own hands, creating the kind of firm clasp that mirrors that of the Bidens, she claimed.

MIMICKING THE BIDENS' PDA: Judi said Carrie looked determined to give a 'confident' display with her new husband and held his hand tightly in a way that mimicked the Bidens

BIDENS PUT ON A PRESIDENTIAL DISPLAY: While Carrie and Boris held hands as they walked, it lacked the sense of ease of the Bidens, who looked more 'presidential'

Her raised chin and wide, congruent smile ooze confidence. Her outfits so far also seem to reflect a more visually assertive approach, with strong block colours like the mustard dress on Wednesday and the emphatically confident and eye-catching red dress yesterday.

Judi noted that Joe and Jill a more Presidential, POTUS and FLOTUS even-handed power-broking here, walking side by side with their hands clasped in between their torsos.

This more assertive and joint-status approach to political leadership might even have inspired Carrie and made her more determined to not shrink into the background, added the expert.

After enjoying tea together, Carrie was seen removing her footwear in order to dip her toes in the water alongside her US counterpart, who did the same.

RAISED CHIN, CONFIDENT SMILE: Carrie tilted her head upwards and looked confident and in control, Judi noted, even as she strode onto the sand with Jill Biden

'FAMILY PORTRAIT' TO CREATE A SENSE OF INTIMACY: The way Mrs Johnson placed her son on the beach and stood in the shallows with Dr Biden created the impression of familiarity

'ANTI-FORMAL' BEHAVIOUR: 'Barefoot bride' Carrie was keen to create the impression of a relaxed rapport with Dr Biden during their time playing on the beach, Judi said

Both women were seen laughing and joking around together while Boris and Carrie's one-year-old son Wilfred sat happily on the sand.

Judi commented: 'It looked very much as though Carrie had set the agenda in terms of the barefoot beach walk, complete with a paddle in the sea.

'She created a very strong family vibe here, sitting baby Wilfred down on the sand between herself and Jill, making their poses look almost like a family day out at the sea-side.

'Carrie was the barefoot bride at her wedding and she looked keen to make a switch to a rather anti-formality, sense of spontaneity here, too,' added the body language expert.

'In terms of PR it created the appearance of a very fast-track rapport and getting Jill to remove her shoes and paddle while wearing a smart dress and jacket would have created a perfect, informal-looking moment between the two women with Wilfred handy to break the ice,' she concluded.
A high school principal bid the class of 2021 farewell with his emotional rendition of 'I Will Always Love You' at their graduation ceremony.

Marcus Gause stunned his students at Wingate Andrews High School in High Point, North Carolina, when he belted out the lyrics to the 1974 Dolly Parton song, which was famously covered by Whitney Houston in 1992.

Winston McGregor, a member of the Guilford County Board of Education, shared a video of the incredible moment on Facebook earlier this week, calling it 'pure gold.'

Scroll down for video

Incredible: Principal Marcus Gause stunned students at Wingate Andrews High School in High Point when he performed 'I Will Always Love You' at their graduating ceremony

Gong viral: Footage of the heartwarming moment was shared on Facebook and later Twitter, where it has been viewed close to one million times

Amazing: The viral video shows the principal standing at the podium at the Greensboro Coliseum in his cap and gown as he serenades the class of 2021

The footage shows Gause standing at the podium at the Greensboro Coliseum in his cap and gown as he serenades the graduating students, wishing them joy, happiness, and  above all  love as he sings the famous lyrics written by Parton.

McGregor urged people to help make the video go viral, writing: 'I dont have to tell you how emotional these graduations have been. Help me show them some love.'

The heartwarming clip has since been shared on Twitter, where it has been viewed close to one million times.

Inspiring: The song was written and performed by Dolly Parton in 1974 and covered by Whitney Houston in 1992. Gause admitted there was some 'nervousness' when he took the stage

'Mr. Gause has just raised the stakes for every NC principal this graduation season,' North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein tweeted on Wednesday.

'I love love love this clip!' someone else commented. 'We must show our young people love! Congratulations Principal Marcus Gause of Andrews High School in High Point, NC.'

Love: Gause said the lyrics were what he was trying to portray to his students

Another added: 'Drop the mic and give this man the Principal of the year award!!

'Talk about a memorable, unforgettable send-off for graduates whose hearts he opened wider than the sky is blue. Well done, Mr. [Gause], well done.'

Gause knocked it out of the park when he performed the ballad, but he later admitted that tackling the song on graduation day was a bit intimidating.

'Of course, there's a nervousness because nobody sings behind Whitney Houston and greats likes Dolly Parton but, the lyrics were what I was trying to portray to my students,' he explained to ABC News.

'One of the things that the pandemic has really taught us is that we need more love, that students know that we love and care for them,' he added.

Student Mekhi McRae told the news station that he will never forget the principal singing to them, saying: 'He is a big part of why I am who I am today.'
An American living in Sydney has been slammed for her 'scathing' review of Kmart, with impassioned fans calling for her visa to be revoked.

In a video uploaded to TikTok, Hannah Shuman - a travel blogger who posts as Beach Baby Travels - said there are two major reasons she prefers Target to Kmart.

The Florida native, who has been living in Australia since February 2019, complained that Kmart often has 'a lot of bare shelves' and 'literally never ever ever ever' has her size - an Australian six - in stock.

Her comments, which have been viewed more than 46,700 times since they were shared online on Thursday, have sparked outrage from Australians who have blasted her for criticising the popular discount store.

Florida-born Hannah Shuman (pictured on the Gold Coast) has been slammed for her 'scathing' review of Australian Kmart stores

Ms Shuman said Kmart often has a 'lot of bare shelves' (pictured)

'I love Kmart, no hate on Kmart, but overall I feel like Kmart is almost always lacking in stock. Like, I feel like I see a lot of bare shelves,' Hannah said in the clip.

She continued: 'With clothing, I can never ever ever ever find clothing in my size - which is a six - and they literally never have anything in a size six.'

'Overall, I know I'm going to get grilled for saying this but I do like Target better than Kmart.'

Viewers swiftly jumped to Kmart's defence, with one woman writing: 'Kmart is superior to Target. This video is un-Australian!'

Ms Shuman (pictured at the Sydney Opera House) has been living in Australia since February 2019

'Pretty scathing lol. Kmart is way better,' said a second, while a third added: 'An American complaining? I'm shocked.'

A fourth joked that Ms Shuman should have her visa revoked for disrespecting an Australian 'institution'.

'Nah you need to go back to America then, please and thanks,' said another.

The travel blogger (pictured) complained that Kmart 'literally never ever ever ever' has her size - an Australian six - in stock

Others defended the retailer by pointing out that Covid-related freight disruptions had been affecting stock levels in Kmart since the pandemic began in March 2020.

'It's because of Covid that Kmart is lacking in stock,' one person wrote.

Another viewer who works at the store agreed, saying: 'Covid is still affecting us. Target doesnt get any business so more stock.'

However a small number of viewers agreed with her opinion.

Later in the video, Ms Shuman (pictured) insisted there are many things she loves about the discount store, including its homewares department and famously affordable prices

'I'm an Aussie and not a Kmart fan,' said one.

Another added: 'Target is amazing in Australia! They have way better quality homewares and clothing,'

Later in the video, Hannah insisted there are many things she loves about the discount store, including its homewares department, trendy shoes and famously affordable prices.
Fans of Carrie Bickmore's headline-making look from The Project on Wednesday night can buy it for less by signing up to the brand's online mailing list.

The 40-year-old TV host wowed viewers in Australian fashion label Acler's 'Prospect Top', a sleeveless shirt with a button-up front and a high-necked collar fastened with a single gold button.

First-time shoppers can get the top, which usually costs $250, for $225 by subscribing to the 10 percent discount offered on Acler's website.

The halterneck style coupled with Carrie's short blonde bob put her gym-honed arms on show, leading many to compare her to Hollywood icon, Marilyn Monroe.

White hot: Carrie Bickmore wowed fans the $250 'Prospect Top' from Australian fashion label on The Project on Wednesday night

The glamorous movie star donned a similar dress in her most famous scene from the 1955 rom-com, The Seven Year Itch.

'Oh you look so beautiful!! The best shoulders too,' said fashion influencer, Emmylou MacCarthy.

'Marilyn Monroe vibes. Just gorgeous,' added another, while a third said Carrie wore the style even better.

Others said Carrie looked 'stunning', 'gorgeous' and 'so beautiful' in the elegant ensemble.

Meanwhile some said she reminded them more of Princess Diana in her heyday.

One person wrote that she looked 'very Grace Kelly circa Rear Window' and added: 'The white halter blouse is eternally stylish.'

The Acler top (pictured) has a button-up front and a high-necked collar fastened with a single gold button

But if $225 is too steep an investment, fans can copy Carrie's look for a fraction of the price with this similar $42 style from Asos

But if $225 is too steep an investment, fans can copy Carrie's look for a fraction of the price with a similar style from Asos.

The fast fashion retailer stocks a white collared top from In the Style's collaboration with reality star, Billie Faiers.

The pleated shirt, which has the same neckline and a belt similar to Acler's high-end piece, is currently reduced from $56 to $42.
One of Australia's most 'Instagrammable' cafes is once again serving decadent cocktails flavoured with Biscoff and Kinder Bueno for a limited time only.

Chefs at Milky Lane, an Australian burger chain known for serving outrageously indulgent dishes, have brought back their best-selling Biscoff drink as a 'June Special' due to popular demand.

The dessert cocktail is made from an alcohol-laden thick shake topped with Biscoff foam and a rim of crushed biscuits from the iconic Belgian biscuit brand.

Alongside this crowd-pleaser, the cafe is also offering customers a Bueno cocktail made with white rum, Frangelico, ice cream, Nutella and a Kinder Bueno bar.

One of Australia's most 'Instagrammable' cafes is once again serving decadent cocktails flavoured with Biscoff and Kinder Bueno (pictured) for a limited time only

Milky Lane continues to draw millennials to its restaurants across Australia with outrageously indulgent burgers and drinks

Both drinks will set you back $19 at any Milky Lane restaurant, which has outlets in Canberra, Surfer's Paradise and across Sydney in hotspots including Bondi and Cronulla.

Fans have been raving about the cocktails on social media, with one woman calling the Biscoff flavour her 'new obsession'.

'Just here reminiscing about last night's Biscoff cocktail,' she wrote.

'Anything Biscoff, I just have to have it!'

Another added: 'I'd risk eating dairy for this.'

The cocktails are the latest creation from the cafe to grab attention online.

Both drinks (pictured) will set you back $19 at any Milky Lane restaurant, which has outlets in Canberra, Surfer's Paradise and across Sydney in hotspots including Bondi and Cronulla

Fans have been raving about the cocktails on social media, with one woman calling the Biscoff flavour her 'new obsession'

Earlier this week, an Instagram post announced the launch of a giant spaghetti and meatball burger.

The enormous 1,090 calorie sandwich features a garlic bread bun, deep-fried cheese and two beef patties.

Balancing on top of the cheese is spaghetti bolognaise and a mountain of meatballs.

'We have dug deep to deliver you something hearty, delicious and comforting as the weather has cooled right down,' the cafe said.

They promised the burger will 'warm your soul and fill your bellies'.

Earlier this month, Milky Lane 'hit the spot ' with this giant spaghetti and meatballs burger

The cafe promises the burger (pictured) will 'warm your soul and fill your bellies'

Photos of the huge burger have gone viral, with more than 5,000 people taking time to comment on the limited-edition creation.

'Nobody: I want three blocked arteries. Milky Lane: say no more,' one person said.

'Only time a phone should be allowed at a dinner table, to call 000, that burger is a heart attack waiting to happen,' added another.

'You would need to take a bath after eating that monster,' another man said.

Others were left virtually speechless after being tagged in the post.

'Holy macaroni meatballs,' one woman said.
A birthday girl went to get her eyelashes done for her party - only for her entire eyelid to be torn off by the lash technician's chihuahua.

Kelsey Salmon, 23, from Atlanta, Georgia, had been stroking the dog while getting the beauty treatment done before it lunged at her in an unprovoked attack.

Horrifying photos show Kelsey's entire eyelid torn off, still with her brand new extensions still attached.

She ended up spending her birthday waiting hours in the hospital before she underwent emergency surgery to reattach the flesh.

A woman who went to get her eyelashes done for her birthday had entire eyelid torn off by the lash technician's chihuahua (pictured with her pet Scooby before the incident)

Her eye was sewn shut for 10 days and will take up to a year to fully heal.

Kelsey said: 'It took place at the girl's apartment, and this was the first time I'd ever met her. The living room was empty, aside from a lash bed in the middle of the room.

'I lay down to get started, and I could hear the dog barking in her room. This chihuahua runs in and jumps up on the bed. I start petting him, everything's fine.

'Eventually, she's finished with the lashes and I sit up. The dog's sitting on the floor, I look down at him and he's just staring at me.

'Then, out of nowhere - it happened so fast that I didn't have time to pull back - he jumped up, bit me in the face and broke my eyelid off.'

Kelsey Salmon, 23, from Georgia, was stroking the dog during her beauty treatment when it lunged at her in an unprovoked attack. She needed two hours of surgery to reattach her eyelid

Kelsey's eyelid was reattached but has been left bruised and dark while she's healing from the procedure

The sales development representative said there was blood 'everywhere' and her 'eyelid was on the floor'.

She added: 'I'm so lucky he didn't grab onto my actual eye because that could have been a thousand times worse.

'I was bawling my eyes out, she gave me a dirty blanket off the floor to stop my bleeding. She's calling the ambulance; I'm calling my mother to meet me at the hospital.

'When I got to the hospital, I ended up waiting for like seven hours. They didn't have any ocular plastic surgeons at this hospital.

Kelsey said doctors were 'unchartered territory' when trying to reattach her eyelid because none of them had ever seen a full one come off before

She was eventually taken to another hospital before going into surgery on May 29, a process which took two hours

'My paramedics had wrapped up my eyelid in gauze and put it on ice. The nurse felt adamant that nothing could be done.'

She was eventually taken to another hospital before going into surgery on May 29, a process which took two hours.

Kelsey's eyelid is recovering well but could take up to a year to fully heal.

Kelsey said: 'They honestly didn't think the eyelid was going to take, because none of the doctors or nurses I spoke to had seen a full eyelid come off.

'They were in uncharted territory. They were hopeful but the odds were against me.

Her eyelid will take up to a year to fully heal, and is currently stitched up with dissolvable stitches meaning that it should open eventually

Kelsey had been hoping to head on a trip to Hawaii to celebrate her birthday, which was given the go-ahead, as her surgery went better than expected

'I now take antibiotic drops four times a day, and I also put on a prescription gel four times a day - just to keep it moist.

'They wanted my eye to be able to breathe during the day, but at night I'm wearing a metal eyepatch with holes.

'At the moment, my eye is all stitched up with dissolvable stitches. It should open eventually.'

She said that doctors were 'shocked' her eye had healed because the procedure 'shouldn't have worked'.

Kelsey had been hoping to head on a trip to Hawaii to celebrate her birthday, which was given the go-ahead.

She added: 'But even whilst I was on holiday, I was advised to go see a doctor by my surgeon back home. She thought the eyelid looked super dark.

While on holiday in Hawaii, Kelsey's doctors told her to go visit a surgeon when she got home as they believed her eye was very dark. They thought she may have flesh-eating bacteria

The sales development representative said there was blood 'everywhere' and her 'eyelid was on the floor' after she was attacked

'This doctor thought I had flesh-eating bacteria which would be super detrimental. When he saw me, he told me I was fine, but put me on an oral antibiotic for seven days just in case.'

In addition to the physical discomfort, Kelsey has to deal with the judgement of others - both online and in real life.

Kelsey said: 'I didn't have any trouble flying to Hawaii, other than the fact that everybody was staring at me.

'I felt like a freak. Whilst I was travelling, it happened so much that I got to my wit's end with it.'

Kelsey has since documented her recovery on TikTok after the first video went viral and wants people to learn lessons from her experiences.

She added: 'On TikTok, I mainly get positive comments but there are still a lot of negative people. There are different types of negative people.

Kelsey has since documented her recovery on TikTok after the first video went viral and wants people to learn lessons from her experiences (pictured left with her sister Lauren)

She has taken to TikTok to show pictures of her injury and said she couldn't close her eye. She now gets migraines and eye ache from only being able to look out one eye

'There's some people who will say 'I don't want to see this, don't film this', whereas other people just make fun of my appearance and crack jokes.

'A lot of people have made assumptions that I provoked the dog by getting in its face. A lot of people were asking about the dog. How about me? Why not ask how I'm doing?'

In the video, Kelsey showed pictures of her injury and said: 'I can't even close my eye. Now it's sewn shut for ten days.'

Kelsey said: 'It's hard to see this happen to someone else, and I don't want it to happen to anybody.

'Because I'm looking out of one eye, I get an eye ache. I get migraines, I don't trust myself to drive yet. There's a lot of little things - your eye affects a lot.

'I just want people to not take their eyelids for granted. It really sucks not having one. I would also advise people not to go to anybody's house for lashes or nails. Always go to a reputable salon.

'This experience has made me look at dogs differently. I have dogs myself, and I don't think of them differently because I know they wouldn't randomly attack me.

'But everyone else's dogs, I'm hesitant around. Dogs are very unpredictable, I can see that now and I'm very careful as a result.'
Bentley has launched a new children's bike - complete with diamond-quilted handlebars and no pedals - for an eye-watering 450.

The British luxury car-maker has released a balance bike for children aged three and above, featuring the brand's wing emblem and a magnesium alloy frame inspired by the 'sleek lines' of its motors.

Balance bikes - which have no foot pedals, chain, gears, or in most cases brakes to worry about - are a relatively new phenomenon which has cropped up in the UK in recent years.

Parents - including the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge for their son Prince Louis, three - are ditching the stabilisers and instead purchasing the training bicycles to help children learn balance and steering.

Bentley has launched a new children's bike (pictured) - complete with diamond-quilted handlebars and no pedals - for an eye-watering 450

The British luxury car-maker has released a balance bike (pictured) for children aged three and above, featuring the brand's wing emblem and a magnesium alloy frame inspired by the 'sleek lines' of its motors

Bentley's balance bike features a safety locking brake system and is available in a range of colours matching those used for its luxury cars, such as, Onyx, Glacier White, Sequin Blue and Dragon Red.

The Bentley name is painted across the frame of each bike, which can support up to 35 kg of weight.

The frame itself only weighs 650g and comes complete with aluminium wheel rims and air-filled 12-inch rubber tyres.

While a normal bike with stabilisers might help children learn how to pedal, they don't pick up any skills for when the stabilisers come off, according to some experts.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge revealed their preference for balance bikes when sharing Prince Louis' third birthday portrait, which showcased the young royal on a trendy Frog balance bike.

The Bentley name is painted across the frame of each bike (pictured), which can support up to 35 kg of weight

Bentley's balance bike features a safety locking brake system and is available in a range of colours (pictured) matching those used for its luxury cars, such as, Onyx, Glacier White, Sequin Blue and Dragon Red

Designer Chris Cooke said: 'It was designed with the same meticulous level of detail that goes into every vehicle.

'The frame was inspired by the power line that can be seen on our cars and is reproduced in the key line that flows around the frame of the bike.

'The seat, an important contact point for both rider and parent, has hidden diamond knurling to improve grip when steadying the rider and the handlebars feature Bentley diamond quilting for comfort.'

The balance bike joins a range of Bentley products for children, including the Bentley Trike, teddy bears, blankets, ride-on cars, wooden garages and puzzles.
The glamorous WAGs of England's Euro stars have been seen out in Cheshire as their partners prepare for upcoming games.

Rebecca Cooke, the girlfriend of Manchester City star Phil Foden, was spotted, as well as Fern Hawkins, fiancee of Manchester United defender Harry Maguire and Annie Kilner, who is married to Manchester City's Kyle Walker.

Rebecca, who is expecting her second baby with her childhood sweetheart, sported a laidback look as she headed to Tesco for some shopping.

The glamorous WAGs of England's Euro stars are seen out in Cheshire as their partners prepare for games - including Rebecca Cooke, the girlfriend of Manchester City star Phil Foden

Fern Hawkins, fiancee of Manchester United defender Harry Maguire, was also spotted out for a coffee with a friend

She sported a floaty black dress which showed her lithe pins, and opted for both comfort and style with a pair of black Converse.

Her blonde tresses were swept back from her face in a messy updo and she looked effortlessly pretty as she appeared to go makeup free.

Meanwhile, Fern Hawkins stepped out with a friend as they enjoyed some coffees ahead of England's three upcoming matches.

Keeping her look casual, she sported some black skinny leggings and a cropped khaki jacket.

Annie Kilner, who is married to Manchester City's Kyle Walker, also headed out in an all-black ensemble to get groceries

The beauty added a pair of cool sliders to her look and carried a cream bag with think chain detailing on one arm.

Her dark locks were pulled back from her face as she chatted with her friend, while carrying a pair of sunglasses, as well as he purse and keys, in one hand.

She has been dating Harry Maguire for nine years, with the couple recently getting engaged.

Rebecca, who is expecting her second baby with her childhood sweetheart, sported a laidback look including a pretty black dress and Converse as she headed to Tesco for some shopping

The Sheffield beauty has a First Class Graduate in physiotherapy, and has been dating Harry Maguire for nine years, with the couple recently getting engaged

The Sheffield beauty has a First Class Graduate in physiotherapy and regularly posts photos of her amazing physique in bikini shots on social media.

England's first game of the tournament is on Sunday when they play Croatia at Wembley in the group stages.

They will then face Scotland on June 18 for the eagerly anticipated match and the Czech Republic on June 22.

Wearing figure-hugging leggings and a black vest top, she showcased her stunning figure as she headed out

Fern's dark locks were pulled back from her face as she chatted with her friend, while carrying a pair of sunglasses, as well as he purse and keys, in one hand

Annie Kilner was also spotted doing a spot of shopping as she left Waitrose in an all-black ensemble.

Wearing figure-hugging leggings and a black vest top, she showcased her stunning figure as she headed out.

She kept herself safe by wearing a white face mask and slipped into a pair of black flipflops.
Queen Letizia of Spain looked pretty in pink as stepped out in one of her favourite Michael Kors dresses today.

The Spanish royal looked typically polished as she attended the Women Now summit for equality and women leadership wearing an embellished, wool-blend midi dress in bubblegum pink.

Letizia, 48, is on the honorary committee of the summit and chaired the closing ceremony of the event, which sees female professionals from various industries come together to discuss their experiences.

The mother-of-two teamed the dress with blush pink suede pointed-toe pumps, a matching Magrit clutch bag and a waist-cinching silver belt.

Queen Letizia of Spain looked pretty in pink as stepped out in one of her favourite Michael Kors dresses today

The Spanish royal looked typically polished as she attended the Women Now summit in the country's capital city wearing an embellished, wool-blend midi dress in bubblegum pink

She accessorised with a pair of dainty pearl earrings and a chunky gold ring, while wearing a plain white face mask in line with Spanish Covid regulations.

The monarch wore a soft brown smokey eye and wore her dark tresses loose around her shoulders.

The in-person and online event, sponsored by Santander, takes place over three days and was organised by Spanish multimedia communications group Vocento.

The event boast guests such as author Dylan Farrow, chef Jose Andres, designer Diane von Furstenberg, astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and presenter Ana Rosa Quintana.

Letizia, 48, is on the honorary committee of the summit and chaired the closing ceremony of the event

She joined female professionals from various industries come together to discuss their experiences as she delivered a speech to the crowd

The mother-of-two teamed the dress with blush pink suede pointed-toe pumps, a matching Magrit clutch bag and a waist-cinching silver belt.

The in-person and online event, sponsored by Santander, takes place over three days and Leitiza is pictured walking with other guests of the summit before her speech

Speakers at this year's conference include - Alejandra Kindelan, the bank's Head of Research and Public Policy; Head of Responsible Banking for Santander Espana Marta Aisa and Santander Espana Chairman Luis Isasi.

The look is a favourite of Letizia's - most recently donning it mark the 125th anniversary of local paper El Heraldo de Aragon at the newspaper's headquarters in Zaragoza.

In July 2019 she donned during a welcoming ceremony at Zarzuela Palace and in June 2018 opted for a look during a state visit to the US to meet Donald and Melania Trump.

Letizia, pictured chatting before attending the closing ceremony, accessorised with a pair of dainty pearl earrings and a chunky gold ring, while wearing a plain white face mask in line with Spanish Covid regulations

The monarch wore a soft brown smokey eye and wore her dark tresses loose around her shoulders. She is pictured on her way to the closing ceremony

It's been a busy week for Letizia who yesterday attended the opening of 'Odaliscas: From Ingres to Picasso' at the Museum of Fine Arts inside the Palace of Carlos V at Alhambra, in Granada.

For the occasion, she sported a floaty number from Maje, which featured an asymmetric hemline and highlighted her slender waist.

Known for re-wearing her favourite pieces, it was the third time the monarch has sported the floral number after first wearing on a visit to Ovideo Archeology Museum in July 2019, and again last summer on a trip to Palma de Mallorca.
The author of The Devil Wears Prada has reflected on her memorable time as Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour's real-life assistant, calling her time at the fashion bible 'crazy' and 'wild.'

Lauren Weisberger, the author of eight books, captivated audiences with her 2003 novel, which was inspired by her 11-month stint as Wintour's assistant and Conde Nast.

Speaking to Jenna Bush Hager on the Today show this morning, Weisberger raised her eyebrows as she spoke about the job, calling it a 'crazy entrance into the working world of New York City.'

Iconic: The author of The Devil Wears Prada has reflected on her memorable time as Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour's real-life assistant

Inspo: Lauren Weisberger, the author of eight books, captivated audiences with her 2003 novel, which was inspired by her 11-month stint as Wintour's assistant and Conde Nast

Memories: Weisberger raised her eyebrows as she spoke about the job, calling it a 'crazy entrance into the working world of New York City'

Weisberger noted that her job at Vogue was her first out of college, and she's still surprised she landed it.

'Crazy. No idea how it happened, ended up at her desk, and I was there just under a year and it definitely informed that whole book, for sure,' she said.

'It was a crazy, crazy, crazy entrance into the working world of New York City and it was wild. Wild.'

Her time working for Wintour would go on to inspire the story for The Devil Wears Prada, which she published at age 25  with Wintour herself serving as inspiration for the boss of the fictional Runway magazine, Miranda Priestly.

Weisberger  who just released a new novel, 'Where the Grass Is Green and the Girls Are Pretty'  has certainly let The Devil Wears Prada speak for itself, but over the years has shared some more real-life stories from working at Vogue as well.

'It wasn't a one-to-one portrayal [of Wintour],' she told Event magazine. 'But of course my time at Vogue informed the book, there's no denying that.'

She spent most of her time 'faxing, filing, getting coffee, and basically keeping Annas life running as smoothly as possible.'

'No idea how it happened, ended up at her desk, and I was there just under a year and it definitely informed that whole book, for sure,' she said

'It was wild. Wild,' she said of her first job out of college

Duties: She spent most of her time 'faxing, filing, getting coffee, and basically keeping Annas life running as smoothly as possible'

It's an unwritten rule among Conde Nast staffers that no one gets in an elevator with Wintour, and Weisberger confirmed she'd never have made that faux pas.

And though she is slim, she has recalled feeling dumpy in comparison to other Vogue staffers.

'I knew I was tall and thin, but I was short and fat there,' she said.

Unlike Andy, she 'never got to raid the closet because I never had time, although the other girls did and they wore the most fabulous things to parties. And I never went to Paris. French Vogue provided Anna with assistants when she was over there,' she said.

'And unlike Andy I couldn't force myself to wear high heels. It was expected of me, but I ran all day, all over the office, up and down the building 1,000 times and to Starbucks six times a day, so there was no way I could manage even a two-inch heel.

'I wore these horrible, black platform boots with a thick rubber sole because there was no choice,' she went on. 'And even though for a couple of weeks I made the boot-to-high-heels switch under my desk, I just had to forget it in the end.'

Wintour was not pleased.

'It wasn't a one-to-one portrayal [of Wintour],' she previously said. 'But of course my time at Vogue informed the book, there's no denying that'

Informative: Over all, she says her time thee was 'a hell of a  crazy, exciting, and hard,' and she ultimately left to work for a travel magazine'

'She would stare at them in disgust and it was a stare that conveyed her displeasure pretty clearly,' Weisberger said.

Over all, she says her time thee was 'a hell of a  crazy, exciting, and hard,' and she ultimately left to work for a travel magazine.

'I'd had this crazy work experience which not a lot of people had had, so I wanted to write all the stuff down that was in my head. I hadn't even intended for it to be a book,' she admitted.

'When it was published, people kept saying "It's so brave of you to write this", but it wasn't bravery  it was stupidity and complete naivety. I didn't think anyone would read it, let alone have an opinion on it.

'Had I known about all the fuss that would ensue, I would have been paralyzed. But people attributed things to the book that I hadn't intended.'

For years, Wintour kept mostly silent on her reaction to the film, but offered a brief comment in in the Vogue documentary The First Monday In May. When asked whether she felt betrayed, she said, 'I feel grateful.'

Weisberger has said she is 'not entirely convinced by her remarks though, lets put it that way.'

*

This week, unhappy Conde Nast staffers have been referenced Weisberger's book as they picketed outside WIntour's New York City home calling for fair pay and job security

This week, unhappy Conde Nast staffers have been referenced Weisberger's book as they picketed outside WIntour's New York City home calling for fair pay and job security.

The group was made up of unionized staff members and fact checkers for the The New Yorker, along with staff from Conde Nast publications Ars Technica and Pitchfork.

They marched from Washington Square Park to Wintour's townhouse on Sullivan Street, chanting: 'Bosses where Prada, workers get nada!'

The demonstration came after the New Yorker Union released a list of demands on Monday, saying they were 'on the verge of a strike' after two and half years of bargaining.

The protest represented the highest-profile break down in talks between the New Yorker Union and Conde Nast since they began in 2018 shortly after roughly 100 of the magazine's staff, including copy editors and fact checkers, organized with the NewsGuild.

Chief among the demands are fair pay, job security, and health care benefits, with the union saying that some members make as little as $42,000, and with some who have been with the publication for more than 20 years making less that $60,000.

'People from a range of backgrounds can't afford to work there,' Genevieve Bormes, an associated cover editor at the New Yorker, told the New York Times.

A spokeswoman for the publisher said there had been progress in recent negotiations, adding: 'We hope to have a contract soon so that real wage increases find their way to our union employees.'

Much of the magazine's writers are freelancers and as contract workers are unable to unionize. The New Yorker Union asked that they not file articles for the magazine.

While Wintour does not directly oversee The New Yorker  author David Remnick has led the magazine since 1998  as global editorial director for Conde Nast, she is the most prominent figurehead of its publisher.

Surprise! Earlier this year, Anne Hathaway revealed on an episode of RuPaul's Drag Race that she was actually the ninth choice to play her character in the film, Andy

Meanwhile, earlier this year, Anne Hathaway revealed on an episode of RuPaul's Drag Race that she was actually the ninth choice to play her character in the film, Andy.

'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,' she said.

It was previously revealed that Rachel McAdams turned down the role, for which Juliette Lewis and Claire Danes were also considered.

And fans of the book and film are eagerly awaiting an upcoming The Devil Wears Prada musical, which will premiere at Chicago's James M. Nederlander Theatre on July 19, after being pushed back due to the pandemic.

Tony winner Beth Leavel is set to star as Miranda Priestly, with Taylor Iman Jones as Andy Saks. The show features music by Elton John.
Jill Biden was a vision in red today when joining her husband President Joe Biden for a meet-and-greet with G7 leaders on a Cornish beach for the official start of the summit.

The First Lady, 70, appeared elegant in a bespoke, recycled scarlet dress from Texan designer Brandon Maxwell, teamed with matching high heels.

Dr Jill - who earlier in the day sported a bright pink blazer and white dress for a visit to a Cornish school with the Duchess of Cambridge - first donned the stunning red outfit when attending a Memorial Day service in Virginia in May.

Jill Biden was a vision in red today when joining her husband President Joe Biden for a meet-and-greet with G7 leaders on a Cornish beach for the official start of the summit

The 70-year-old First Lady appeared elegant in a bespoke, recycled scarlet dress from Texan designer Brandon Maxwell, teamed with matching high heels

She accessorized her look with gold earrings, dainty necklaces, and several bracelets

It is also the second day in a row that Jill has championed the American designer, having also worn one of his creations on Thursday when she and Joe met Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his wife Carrie.

Bling: Jill also added a $20,700 Panthere de Cartier gold watch to her ensemble

For her look on Friday afternoon, the First Lady added a dainty pearl bracelet to her ensemble, as well as eye-catching golden earrings.

Adding a further touch of glitz, Jill sported bracelets and a matching necklace reading 'Mama', before finishing off her look with a $20,700 Panthere de Cartier gold watch, which she wore on her left wrist.

Cartier watches are also favored among the royal family, with Kate Middleton often seen sporting a $4,650 Ballon Bleu De Cartier, which was reportedly given to her by Prince William on their third anniversary.

Meanwhile Meghan Markle has two timepiece designs from the jeweler: a $5,800 Tank Francaise, which she purchased for herself to celebrate Suits being renewed for a third season, and a much pricier $23,000 version of the same watch, which once belonged to the late Princess Diana.

Dr Jill sported a bright pink blazer and white dress earlier in the day, when she visited a Cornish school with the Duchess of Cambridge (pictured)

Prime Minister Boris Johnson (centre left), his wife Carrie (left), President Joe Biden (centre right) and First Lady Jill (right) arrive on Friday at the G7 to take the so-called family photo

Layering: The professor later covered up her red dress with a beige trench coat as she went for a walk

As far as glamour was concerned on Friday, President Biden's wife, who wore her blonde hair coiffured away from her face, kept her makeup minimal and opted for a fine layering of mascara.

Jill was all smiles as she joined her husband Joe and the other G7 leaders and their spouses, elbow-bumping the Prime Minister upon her arrival.

Favorite: Jill wore the same red Brandon Maxwell dress for a Memorial Day service in Virginia last month (pictured)

Earlier today, Dr Jill cut an elegant figure in a white dress and bright pink $625 blazer from California-based brand L'Agence as she arrived to meet with the Duchess of Cambridge, 39, at Connor Downs Academy.

She paired the ensemble with $890 nude heels from Valentino, and wore a pale-colored face mask on her wrist.

The two chatted together as they walked into the school, with Kate matching the First Lady in a 1,125 fuchsia midi dress from Alexander McQueen and a 225 L.K. Bennett handbag.

Dr Jill and Kate heard how the school's pupils are supported through a bespoke Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) curriculum, which uses child-led teaching to help its pupils to develop as independent, confident and successful learners.

Kate wore her bouncy brunette locks styled in her signature side parting and opted for minimal makeup as she sported a simple smoky eye.

Her fuchsia pink dress, which is currently sold out online, is described as perfect for a 'first date'.

Earlier today, the Duchess of Cambridge and Jill opted for clashing pink tones as they visited a school in Cornwall

The Duchess sported a fuchsia pink dress, which is currently sold out online and is described as perfect for a 'first date'

Meanwhile Dr Jill Biden matched the royal in a bold pink jacket from Lagence Fashion (pictured, during the school visit today)

The silk dress, which was made in Italy, appears to have been slightly customised for the Duchess, with a longer hemline and a bold sixties style belt added.

For First Lady Jill, the G7 summit marks the first time she has left the US since husband Joe became president.

In the evening, the Queen and Prince Charles are set to host a reception at the Eden Project for the world leaders and their spouses.
Carrie Johnson was left beaming today after she bumped elbows with Justin Trudeau as she and Boris formally greeted G7 leaders in Cornwall.

The Canadian Prime Minister has become the unlikely political crush of women everywhere since being elected - and it seems not even Carrie is immune to his charms.

She was seen today sharing a friendly moment with Trudeau today as the newlyweds welcomed guests to the official start of the summit one by one on a beachfront board walk on Carbis Bay.

As Trudeau approached he put on a face mask before bumping elbows with Boris and turning his attention to Carrie to say: 'It's lovely to meet you Carrie'.

Carrie Johnson shared a friendly moment with Justin Trudeau today as she and Boris formally greeted G7 leaders in Cornwall

Carrie Trudeau bumped elbows as the newlyweds welcomed guests to the official start of the summit one by one on a beachfront board walk on Carbis Bay

Boris then shared some brief words with the pair, who were seen sharing having a short conversation and laughing before posing for a photograph.

The 33-year-old opted for a vibrant pink Roksanda gown, initially costing 1,395, which she hired from rental website Hurr.

Boris was last seen publicly with Trudeau when the pair met ahead of the last G7 summit held in Biarritz, France, almost two years before he and Carrie tied the knot last month.

The pair wed in a 'small ceremony' at Westminster Cathedral this May after an extraordinary cloak-and-dagger operation to keep the event secret - with a bigger celebration planned for next summer.

The pair were seen sharing having a short conversation and laughing before posing for a photograph - and Carrie was left beaming

As Trudeau approached he put on a face mask before bumping elbows with Boris and turning his attention to Carrie to say: 'It's lovely to meet you Carrie'

It was Carrie's biggest outing on the world stage today as she also met Angela Merkel, Mario Draghi, Emanuel Macron and Japans Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga.

The Prime Minister's new wife is playing a pivotal role in the summit by hosting the spouses of world leaders while their counterparts thrash out solutions to global issues.

Yesterday she even went paddling with First Lady Jill Biden and her one-year-old son Wilfred. Carrie was seen laughing with the 70-year-old as they dipped their toes in the Cornish sea.

Jill said today that it was 'wonderful' to spend time with Carrie, insisting the 'special relationship' between the US and the UK 'continues.'

The 33-year-old opted for a vibrant pink Roksanda gown, initially costing 1,395, which she borrowed from a rental website for a discounted rate

Carrie is seen in a pair of 175 pair of heels from L.K Bennett as she posed with her husband and Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau today

Carrie's bright pink midi dress is thought to be borrowed from either rental website HURR or My Wardrobe and she teamed the look with a 175 pair of heels from L.K Bennett.

Eco-conscious Carrie is also believed to have hired multiple some of her wardrobe for the event - two collections from dress hire companies My Wardrobe HQ and Hurr Collective were delivered on Wednesday and Thursday.

Experts recently told FEMAIL wearing the colour pink 'conveys kindness and understanding in a non-threatening way.'
Carrie Johnson has showcased her style prowess once again this evening as she arrived at the G7 reception in an elegant floral gown.

The newlywed, who married Prime Minister Boris Johnson on May 29, dazzled in a rented The Vampire's Wife frock when attending the event, hosted by the Queen and Prince Charles at the Eden Project, in Cornwall, following the start of the summit today.

Arriving hand-in-hand with her husband, Carrie, 33, put her best fashion foot forward in the multi-coloured dress - priced at 805 when bought new - teamed with rented yellow Prada heels.

Carrie Johnson (pictured with her husband) has showcased her style prowess once again this evening as she arrived at the G7 reception in an elegant floral gown

The newlywed, who married Prime Minister Boris Johnson (pictured together) on May 29, dazzled when attending the event, hosted by the Queen and Prince Charles at the Eden Project, in Cornwall, following the start of the summit today

Arriving hand-in-hand with her husband, Carrie (pictured right), 33, put her best fashion foot forward in the multi-coloured dress from The Vampire's Wife, teamed with yellow heels

Carrie's dress when bought as new is an eye-watering 805, however the Prime Minister's wife has shown a love for rental fashion apps and websites so far during her trip.

And she didn't disappoint this time around, with the dress, from celebrity-loved brand The Vampire's Wife, being rented from British website HURR.

Letting the statement black, red and gold silk garment do all the talking, Carrie kept her accessories to a minimum, wearing dainty drop earrings from Cornish designer Mirri Damer.

The local fashion creator makes everything herself and is inspired by the natural environment surrounding her.

Known for her vibrant outfits, mother-of-one Carrie added a pop of colour to her ensemble with a bright yellow Gucci clutch bag and matching Prada shoes rented from MyWardrobeHq.

Letting the statement garment do all the talking, Carrie (pictured) kept her accessories to a minimum

However known for her vibrant outfits, the mother-of-one (pictured with Boris) added a pop of colour to her ensemble with a bright yellow clutch bag and matching shoes

She kept hair styled loose, while wearing a smattering of glamorous makeup to complete her glamorous look.

Carrie's appearance this evening comes after the mother-of-one was left beaming earlier today after she bumped elbows with Justin Trudeau as she and Boris formally greeted G7 leaders for the first time.

The Canadian Prime Minister has become the unlikely political crush of women everywhere since being elected - and it seems not even Carrie is immune to his charms.

She was seen today sharing a friendly moment with Trudeau as the newlyweds welcomed guests to the official start of the summit one by one on a beachfront board walk on Carbis Bay.

As Trudeau approached he put on a face mask before bumping elbows with Boris and turning his attention to Carrie to say: 'It's lovely to meet you Carrie'.

Carrie (pictured next to the royal family) kept hair styled loose, while wearing a smattering of glamorous makeup to complete her glamorous look

The Queen speaks to US President Joe Biden and his wife Jill. Carrie is pictured right with Boris Johnson

Boris then shared some brief words with the pair, who were seen sharing a short conversation and laughing before posing for a photograph.

The 33-year-old opted for a vibrant pink Roksanda gown, initially costing 1,395, which she hired from rental website Hurr.

Boris was last seen publicly with Trudeau when the pair met ahead of the last G7 summit held in Biarritz, France, almost two years before he and Carrie tied the knot last month.

The pair wed in a 'small ceremony' at Westminster Cathedral this May after an extraordinary cloak-and-dagger operation to keep the event secret - with a bigger celebration planned for next summer.

Earlier today, Carrie shared a friendly moment with Justin Trudeau as she and Boris formally greeted G7 leaders in Cornwall

Carrie and Trudeau bumped elbows as the newlyweds welcomed guests to the official start of the summit one by one on a beachfront board walk on Carbis Bay

As Trudeau approached he put on a face mask before bumping elbows with Boris and turning his attention to Carrie to say: 'It's lovely to meet you Carrie'

It was Carrie's biggest outing on the world stage today as she also met Angela Merkel, Mario Draghi, Emanuel Macron and Japans Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga.

The Prime Minister's new wife is playing a pivotal role in the summit by hosting the spouses of world leaders while their counterparts thrash out solutions to global issues.

Yesterday she even went paddling with First Lady Jill Biden and her one-year-old son Wilfred. Carrie was seen laughing with the 70-year-old as they dipped their toes in the Cornish sea.

Jill said today that it was 'wonderful' to spend time with Carrie, insisting the 'special relationship' between the US and the UK 'continues.'

The VERY rock and roll brand loved by celebrities and royals alike: How Carrie Johnson opted for trendy The Vampires Wife for G7 reception

Carrie Johnson wowed in a rented The Vampire's Wife frock when attending the G7 reception, hosted by the Queen and Prince Charles at the Eden Project, in Cornwall, following the start of the summit today.

The brand, beloved by royals including Kate Middleton and Princess Beatrice, has developed a cult following, with celebrity fans including Alexa Chung, Sienna Miller, Cate Blanchett and Keira Knightley.

It's famed for pretty prairie dresses infused with a dose of gothic glam, which are frequently spotted on red carpets.

The brand was launched by former model Suzie Cave in 2014, and takes its name from an unfinished novel by her husband Nick Caves, and the clothes provide a wardrobe befitting such a title.

The Duchess of Cambridge, 38, stepped out in a 1,595 emerald gown by designer The Vampire's Wife as she joined Prince William for an evening reception at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin in March 2020

The brand is much beloved by royals, with the Duchess of Cambridge and Princess Beatrice stepping out in the label over the last few years.

Kate donned a 1,595 emerald gown by The Vampire's Wife as she joined Prince William for an evening reception at the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin in March 2020.

The ensemble closely resembled the green dress by the same designer that Princess Beatrice wore to Ellie Goulding's wedding last September.

Beatrice wore a 1,695 'The Veneration' tiered silk-blend lame dress by The Vampire's Wife to the singer's nuptials at York Minster Cathedral last year.

Meanwhile, in October 2020, H&M's collaboration with the brand sold out in just 24 hours as shoppers compared buying pieces from the line with 'getting a Glastonbury ticket'.

Princess Beatrice is also a fan of the brand, having worn a green dress from Suzie Cave's label to Ellie Goulding's wedding in September 2019

Others were left aghast after the pieces quickly appeared on resale sites such as eBay for more than four times their original price.

The limited edition line promised to be 'progressive in both attitude and fabrication', with whimsical dresses and gothic capes amoung the pieces for sale from just 9.99.

The Vampire's Wife x H&M collection was also made from sustainably sourced materials, utilizing recycled nylon and polyester.

According to H&M the collection was 'bold and feminine', featuring a mix of gothic lace dresses with chic velvet and silvery capes.

Statement pieces included the lace mystique mini dress with signature shoulders, the velvety mini dress with sensual pussy-bow and the romantic silvery lace cape.

Accessorizes were whimsical with charm necklaces, bracelets and ear cuffs featuring eye, cloud and vampire teeth iconography.
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Kate Middleton dazzled in a 3,000 white Alexander McQueen coat dress while Carrie Johnson stunned in 805 rented The Vampires Wife dress and Jill Biden matched her in florals at G7 reception tonight.

The Duchess of Cambridge, 39, appeared in high spirits as she arrived at the event hosted by the Queen and Prince Charles at the Eden Project, in Cornwall, following the start of the summit today.

The mother-of-three cut an elegant figure in a stunning white coat dress, estimated to cost 3,000, which featured double-breasted buttons down the chest and pleated detailing across the skirt.

Newlywed Carrie, 33, who married Prime Minister Boris Johnson on May 29, showcased her style prowess by wearing a 805 floral gown by the trendy brand, which is a favourite of Kate and Princess Beatrice.

Meanwhile the First Lady of the United States appeared keen to wrap up against the cool summer breeze, and donned for a tan coloured trench coat as she arrived at the event, which she wore atop a dark floral printed gown.

The Duchess of Cambridge, 39, appeared in high spirits as she arrived at the event hosted by the Queen and Prince Charles at the Eden Project, in Cornwall, following the start of the summit today

Meanwhile Carrie Johnson (pictured with her husband) has showcased her style prowess once again as she arrived at the G7 reception in an elegant floral gown from The Vampire's Wife

Meanwhile the First Lady of the United States opted for a black lined trench coat, which she wore atop a dark floral printed gown

Carrie's dress, when bought as new, comes with a pricetag of 805, however the Prime Minister's wife has shown a love for rental fashion apps and websites so far during her trip.

And she didn't disappoint this time around, with the dress, from celebrity-loved brand The Vampire's Wife, being rented from British website HURR.

Letting the statement garment do all the talking, Carrie kept her accessories to a minimum.

However known for her vibrant outfits, the mother-of-one added a pop of colour to her ensemble with a bright yellow clutch bag and matching shoes.

The royal party appeared in high spirits as they arrived for the event in Cornwall earlier this evening (pictured, alongside Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his wife Carrie)

Once inside, the Queen could be seen chatting with President Joe Biden and his wife Dr Jill, who opted to wear a tan trench coat for the evening event

Newlywed Carrie appeared to coordinate her outfit with Dr Jill for the evening event in Cornwall, with both women donning dark floral gowns for the occasion

Meanwhile the Duchess of Cambridge cut an elegant figure in the pleated midi dress from Alexander McQueen, which she paired with nude shoes and a simple white handbag

The VERY rock and roll brand that counts Kate Middleton, Princess Beatrice AND Carrie Johnson among it's celebrity fans Best known as a former model and wife of Nick Cave, frontman of the rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Susie Cave is also the designer behind fashion house The Vampires Wife. Launched in 2014, the brand takes its name from an unfinished novel by Nick. Full of ultra-feminine dresses tinged with vintage touches, the designs are timelessly beautiful rather than trend-focused. The brand has also developed a cult following, with celebrity fans including Alexa Chung, Sienna Miller, Cate Blanchett and Keira Knightley. Advertisement

She kept hair styled loose, while wearing a smattering of glamorous makeup to complete her glamorous look.

Meanwhile the Duchess of Cambridge cut an elegant figure in the pleated midi dress from Alexander McQueen, which she paired with nude shoes and a simple white handbag.

The Duchess has long been a fan of McQueen, with the luxury house designing her iconic wedding gown and becoming a go-to of the royal since her marriage to Prince William in April 2011.

Kate wore her bouncy brunette locks styled in her signature side parting and opted for minimal makeup as she sported a simple smokey eye.

The Queen and the Duchess of Cornwall also opted for floral ensembles as they attended the event today at the Eden Project in Cornwall.

While Camilla wore a midlength navy blue tunic with blue detailing, the monarch wore a colourful pink and white dress.

Both ladies accessorised with their classic pearl earrings and necklaces.

Meanwhile the Duke of Cambridge and his father the Prince of Wales were coordinated in navy suits for the occasion at the Eden Project today.

Earlier today Kate Middleton, Jill Biden and Carrie Johnson appeared to be swapping fashion tips as they all opted for bold pink outfits.

The Duchess looked stylish in the 1,125 fuschia midi dress from Alexander McQueen and carrying a 225 L.K. Bennett handbag as she arrived to meet the President's wife Dr Jill at Connor Downs Academy this afternoon.

The two chatted together as they walked into the school, with Dr Jill matching Kate by donning a recycled 440 bright pink L'Agence Fashion blazer as well as a white 2,000 Akris dress and 630 Valentino heels.

Meanwhile, newlywed Carrie was later seen wearing a 1,395 vibrant pink Roksanda gown, which she borrowed from a rental website for a discounted rate.

The Queen and the Duchess of Cornwall also opted for floral ensembles as they attended the event today at the Eden Project in Cornwall

The newlywed, who married Prime Minister Boris Johnson (pictured together) on May 29, dazzled when attending the event, hosted by the Queen and Prince Charles at the Eden Project, in Cornwall, following the start of the summit today

Arriving hand-in-hand her husband, Carrie (pictured right), 33, put her best fashion foot forward in the multi-coloured dress from The Vampire's Wife, teamed with yellow heels

How the ladies of the G7 stole the show at glittering evening event with floral dresses, rented gowns and crisp white ensembles Carrie Johnson - The Vampire's Wife dress - 805 Kate Middleton - Alexander McQueen dress Advertisement

Experts recently told FEMAIL wearing the colour pink 'conveys kindness and understanding in a non-threatening way.'

This afternoon, newlywed Carrie joined husband Boris on the beach as the G7 summit started in Cornwall.

The 33-year-old wore a bright pink midi dress from Roksanda, which she borrowed from either rental website HURR or My Wardrobe, with a 175 pair of heels from L.K Bennett.

Both are British brands and are well-known for being favourites of the Duchess of Cambridge.

Eco-conscious Carrie is also believed to have hired multiple some of her wardrobe for the event - two collections from dress hire companies My Wardrobe HQ and Hurr Collective were delivered on Wednesday and Thursday.

And earlier today, Dr Jill and Kate heard how the school's pupils are supported through a bespoke Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) curriculum, which uses child-led teaching to help its pupils to develop as independent, confident and successful learners.

Her fuschia pink dress, which is currently sold out online, is described as perfect for a 'first date'.

The silk dress, which was made in Italy, appears to have been slightly customised for the Duchess, with a longer hemline and a bold sixties style belt added.

Kate Middleton was a vision in pink as she met with Dr Jill Biden at a school in Cornwall today to discuss female empowerment ahead of the G7 summit

Meanwhile Carrie Johnson later donned a vibrant pink gown as she joined husband Boris at the G7 summit

How the Pink Ladies stole the show on Friday at the G7 Summit in stunning ensembles The Duchess of Cambridge 1,125 fuschia midi dress from Alexander McQueen 225 L.K. Bennett handbag Dr Jill Biden 440 bright pink L'Agence Fashion blazer - worn before 2,000 white Akris dress - worn before 630 Valentino heels Carrie Johnson 1,395 Roksanda gown - rented 175 L.K Bennett heels Advertisement

L.K. Bennett is also a firm high street favourite of the duchess, and the choice continued her trend of championing British brands over the past 18 months.

The two then led a roundtable discussion with a number of representatives from the early years sector who have been influential in The Duchess work in this space

They discussed why early childhood is so important to lifelong outcomes and what can be done to make a difference.

The royal has been wearing a host of pink outfits in recent months, with experts saying she was wearing the pretty ensembles after Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's bombshell Oprah interview to appear 'lovable and convey kindness'.

Kate sported a blush pussybow blouse during an appearance hours after her sister-in-law claimed the two women had a tearful confrontation days before the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's 2018 wedding.

Meanwhile she also donned a 65 pink jumper from Boden for her first in-person engagement of the year this spring.

She also wore a pink ME+EM's silk shirt dress during her recent tour of Scotland with the Duke of Cambridge.

Today marks the first time the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have attended official G7 summit events, marking another milestone in their progression as senior royals.

This will be the third time Kate has met with a President and his wife having met Barack and Michelle Obama back in 2011 and 2016.

For First Lady Jill Biden the G7 summit marks the first time she has left the US since husband Joe became president.

Eco-conscious Carrie is also believed to have hired multiple some of her wardrobe for the event - two collections from dress hire companies My Wardrobe HQ and Hurr Collective were delivered on Wednesday and Thursday

Earlier today, the Duchess of Cambridge and Jill Biden opted for clashing pink tones as they visited a school in Cornwall

The Duchess sported the fuschia pink dress, which is currently sold out online and is described as perfect for a 'first date'
Some patients who are prescribed a newly approved medication for Alzheimer's could face copayments of about $11,500 annually, according to a new report.

Aducanumab, which will be sold under the brand name Aduhelm and developed by Biogen, is the first treatment to receive FDA approval for the related brain disease in nearly 20 years.

Critics say clinical trials results were mixed, doubting the drug's effectiveness and questioning if the approval process was too quick.

The new analysis, published Thursday by the Kaiser Family Foundation, estimated that if just 500,000 Medicare recipients are prescribed Aduhelm, it would cost the program nearly $29 billion a year, far more than any other medication.

'At this price, the cost of this one drug alone could top all others covered by Medicare, if it is used widely,' said Tricia Neuman, coauthor of the report.

Vials of the drug aducanumab will be shipped out for use in the next two weeks. Biogen's controversial drug gained FDA approval despite showing little evidence of its effectiveness in clinical trials

The FDA gave approval to aducanumab, which will be sold under the name Aduhelm, despite an advisory board voting against it. Three members of the board have since stepped down

Biogen plans to ship out the drug in the next two weeks, and it will come with a hefty $56,000-a-year price tag.

The drug's approval came as congressional Democrats are trying to build consensus around legislation that would empower Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices.

The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Democratic Sen Ron Wyden of Oregon, said Thursday the list price for Aduhelm was 'unconscionable.'

Although President Joe Biden has called for granting Medicare negotiating authority, prospects for the bill are uncertain.

Medicare has not made a formal determination on covering the Alzheimer's drug, but cost traditionally does not enter into such considerations.

The drugs controversial rollout has also caused three few members of an FDA advisory board to step down from their positions, with the latest being Aaron Kesselheim, a Harvard University professor, on Thursday.

Sen Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee said the $56,000 price tag for the drug is 'unconscionable'

Kesselheim joined David Knopman of the Mayo Clinic and Joel Perlmutter of Washington University St Louis in stepping down from the advisory committee after the drug's approval this week.

'[Aducanumab] probably the worst drug approval decision in recent U.S. history,' Kesselheim wrote in a letter to FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock on Thursday, per Stat News.

'It is clear to me that FDA is not presently capable of adequately integrating the Committee's scientific recommendations into its approval decisions.'

Biogen, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, underwent two trials of the drug.

Both were stopped early when it became apparent the drug was not going to reach its goals, but after the second trial the company found data that showed the drug has actually slowed down cognitive decline in some Alzheimer's patients by 22 percent.

The drug is reported to be able to remove plaque from a patients brain that may be responsible for cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer's.

Though many in the scientific community are skeptical that the drug is at all effective, saying the data is inconclusive.

Knopman authored a study in November which analyzed the results of the clinical trials, and said he disagreed with Biogen's claim that the drugs were effective.

Knopman, Kesselheim and Perlmutter were among the 10 of 11 members of the FDA advisory board that voted against the drug's approval in November.

Aaron Kesselheim (Pictured) called the approval of Aducanumab the 'the worst drug approval decision in recent U.S. history'

Recommendations from the board are not binding, though, and the FDA is allowed to, and often does, make decisions that go against the boards vote.

It is rare that a near unanimous decision by the board is ignored, though, and the agency is generally more conservative that experts on the board - which was not the case with aducanumab.

Many experts recommend for the drug to go through a third trial before gaining approval, but that may take years.

Dr Patrizia Cavazzoni, director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said the agency was aware of the controversy in approving the drug in a statement Monday.

'We are well-aware of the attention surrounding this approval,' she wrote.

'We understand that Aduhelm has garnered the attention of the press, the Alzheimer's patient community, our elected officials, and other interested stakeholders.

'With a treatment for a serious, life-threatening disease in the balance, it makes sense that so many people were following the outcome of this review.'

While some in the scientific community oppose the drugs approval, many members of the Alzheimer's community are supportive of it.

The Alzheimer's Association is supportive of the drug, for example, hoping that it can provide temporary help for patients and create a foothold for future research into the disease.

The group is also calling for further trials of aducanumab even after approval.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered Johnson & Johnson to discard 60 million COVID-19 vaccine doses on Friday.

The shots were made at a plant in Baltimore that had several health violations and ruined million of doses of J&J vaccine during an ingredient mix-up.

People familiar with the situation told The New York Times that the FDA said the shots have to be thrown away due to potential contamination.

The contract J&J signed with the U.S. government last year priced each dose at roughly $10, meaning $600 million worth of doses are being tossed out - but it's not believed federal officials with pay the company for these jab.

Earlier in the day, the FDA allowed 10 million doses to be distributed, which a source told Reuters will be to other countries, but with a caveat that there is no guarantee the J&J shots were made under good manufacturing practices.

It has not been decided yet whether not the plant, run by Emergent BioSolutions, will be allowed to reopen after closing two months ago.

Officials say there is no cause for concern that Americans received ruined shots because all J&J doses administered in the U.S. so far were manufactured at the firm's Janssen plant in the Netherlands, not at the Baltimore plant.

Critics say this represents a colossal blunder by all parties involved - the FDA, Johnson & Johnson and Emergent - in the effort to get vaccines distributed to countries that are suffering from a shortage.

The FDA has ordered 60 million doses of Johnson & Johnson's coronavirus vaccine to be discarded on Friday Pictured: Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine vials on a table in Los Angeles, May 7

The shots were made at a Baltimore plant run by Emergent BioSolutions (above), which has come under fire after receiving several violations

The FDA has been working for weeks to come up with a solution after it was discovered that Emergent BioSolutions' plant ruined millions of J&J vaccines.

They were left unusable after workers accidentally mixed-up ingredients for the J&J shot with that of the AstraZeneca jab.

A report released by the U.S. House Oversight Committee last month found that workers producing the vaccine often failed to shower or change clothes.

What's more, despite J&J contracting Emergent in April 2020 to manufacture the vaccine, the Baltimore facility wasn't scaled for making millions of doses, according to an FDA inspection which was conducted last year.

The FDA records - released as part of the House report - described the plant as a contract testing laboratory that 'did not manufacture products for distribution.'

Further, the inspection also noted there was 'mold, poor disinfection of plant equipment and inadequate training of employees.'

Upon news of the discarded doses, shares of J&J were down 1.6 percent.

J&J has delivered 21.4 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine to the U.S., but only half have been administered compared to 129 million people fully vaccinated with Pfizer and Moderna shots

It's unclear if the ruined shots were meant to be distributed in the U.S. or to other countries.

Several hard-hit nations around the world have been asking America to send them the government's stockpile of vaccines, and the blunder means shipments could be delayed even further.

Among those countries is India, which has been facing a devastating second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, which reporting more than 6,000 deaths on Thursday - the highest number recorded in the world.

The Biden administration had been under intense pressure to send excess doses of vaccines to nations like India, which was hit by raw material shortages, limiting the number of people who could get vaccinated.

Additionally Latin America is a region in desperate need of vaccines, with eight of the 10 countries with the highest COVID-19 deaths per capita in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to The Times.

Only about two million have been vaccinated in Central America and and three million have been in the Caribbean, which is home to 44 million 34 million, respectively.

'Today we're seeing the emergence of two worlds, one quickly returning to normal and another where recovery remains a distant future,' said Dr Carissa Etienne, director of the Pan American Health Organization - part of the WHO - said at a virtual news conference on Wednesday.

'Unfortunately, vaccine supply is concentrated in a few nations while most of the world waits for doses to trickle down.'

On Thursday, it was revealed that the U.S. government had stopped all new shipments of the J&J inoculation so vaccination sites can clear a logjam of unused doses before they expire.

The bungle means doses can't be sent to India, which is facing a shortage of vaccines and a surge of COVID-19 cases and deaths

State and federal health officials told The Wall Street Journal that the one-dose vaccine won't be made available for several weeks but the cessation is believed to be temporary.

Officials in Arkansas, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan and Oklahoma say they have not been able to order new J&J vaccine supplies for several days, even weeks.

'It just hasn't been included in our weekly allocations, from the feds, which means it is not available to order,' Oklahoma State Department of Health Deputy Commissioner Keith Reed told the newspaper

Maryland Department of Health Assistant Secretary Bryan Mroz told The Journal that the state last ordered a shipment of doses several weeks ago.

When he and his team tried to order more, the government told them the vaccine was not available, and did not give a day for when it would be,

'We've been using up our inventory in the state,' Mroz said.

'We definitely have more supply than demand.'

J&J's vaccine was believed to be a game-changer in the fight against coronavirus because it only require one and does not need to be store at freezing temperatures.

It was expected to be used to inoculate hard-to-serve populations such as people living in rural areas and home bound seniors.

However, as of Friday, Pfizer and Moderna have fully vaccinated more than 129 million Americans with their two-dose shots and have made agreements with the U.S. government for enough does to vaccinate all Adults.

Comparatively, just 11 million Americans have been vaccinated with the J&J shot.

The loss of the 60 million doses means the U.S. is even more unlikely to reach Biden's goal of 70 percent of Americans with at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose by July 4.
A little gift from the NHS arrived through my letterbox this week. It contained a small plastic vial with a tiny brush and an invitation to post them a sample.

The gift is in fact a faecal immunochemical test (FIT) and is part of the NHS bowel cancer screening programme.

And while it might not be everyones idea of a great present, I was delighted, as this test can be a lifesaver.

You use the kit to collect a very small sample of poo and then post it to the NHS (it provides a stamped addressed envelope).

The gift is in fact a faecal immunochemical test (FIT) and is part of the NHS bowel cancer screening programme

The sample will be tested for signs of blood and if these are detected, you may be asked to have further tests. It is a cheap and effective way of doing mass screening and Im a big fan.

Bowel cancer is very common  but also very treatable, if caught early. But if its missed it is often fatal  16,000 people die from it in the UK every year; it is the second most common cause of cancer death, after lung cancer.

Ive known people whove had bowel cancer, including Lynn Faulds Wood, the former BBC Watchdog presenter, who died last year at the age of 72.

Although it tends to occur in people over the age of 50, thanks to junk food and rising obesity rates, its increasingly striking younger people. Rates are rising in the under-40s, but falling in older groups, thanks to screening.

In the UK, anyone aged 60 or over is automatically sent an at-home testing kit in the post (although of course whatever your age, if you have symptoms such as persistent changes in your bowel habits, talk to your GP about testing).

J ust how effective it is was confirmed in a recent study by Exeter University, where they offered the FIT kit to everyone over 50 with suspicious symptoms and found that of the 3,890 patients checked, 618 had traces of blood in their samples, and further tests revealed that 43 had bowel cancer.

Further tests generally means having a colonoscopy or sigmoidoscopy  basically a camera on the end of a flexible tube inserted via your rectum. I had this done six years ago, as part of a documentary I was making, that explored which medical screening tests are worth having. Bowel cancer screening got the thumbs up, so I agreed to give it a go, with a camera crew recording every moment.

Apart from the mild embarrassment of being filmed while it happened, the procedure was fast and painless. It helped that Maggie Vance, the nurse, was hugely enthusiastic about her work.

Things started well, but on the way out she found a polyp, a small growth on the wall of my guts.

This is nothing to worry about, but I am going to remove it and then send it to the lab anyway, Maggie told me, reassuringly. Even so, I was a little concerned.

Ive known people whove had bowel cancer, including Lynn Faulds Wood, the former BBC Watchdog presenter, who died last year at the age of 72

Fortunately, like most polyps, it was benign, but around 3 per cent become cancerous.

The point of bowel cancer screening is to pick up cancers before they spread. But what can you do to reduce your risk of developing bowel cancer in the first place?

The main risk factors include: being over 50; a family history of the disease; or a history of non-cancerous growths (i.e. polyps) in your bowel; and longstanding inflammatory bowel disease such as Crohns; or type 2 diabetes.

If youre overweight, losing a few inches round the waist can really help, as it reduces your risk of type 2 diabetes and because excess fat, particularly round the middle, means higher rates of inflammation, which can lead to cancer.

And eating plenty of fibre-rich food, such as wholegrains and vegetables, helps as it has an anti-inflammatory effect. There is also some evidence that cutting back on processed meat, such as bacon and sausages, may help, though benefits are likely to be modest.

In a study by Oxford University, which looked at the eating habits of almost half a million people aged 40 to 69 for six years, 2,609 people developed bowel cancer, with those who ate larger amounts of red or processed meat being at higher risk than those who didnt.

In the low red/processed meat group, 40 people per 10,000 went on to develop bowel cancer, while among those who regularly ate 76g or more a day of red or processed meat (the equivalent of a couple of slices of bacon or ham), the bowel cancer rate was 48 per 10,000. In other words, eating red or processed meat every day appeared to raise your risk of bowel cancer over six years by 0.08 per cent. Chicken or fish didnt have any effect.

My wife Clare and I have largely given up bacon and are cutting back on the red meat, but that is mainly for ethical and environmental reasons.

If you want to avoid bowel cancer your best bet is take part in regular, free screening. Im about to stick my sample in the post and hopefully, in the next couple of weeks, get the all-clear. Otherwise, I will probably be asked back for another sigmoidoscopy, though this time without a film crew in tow. The nation sighs in relief!

Nine steps to turn yourself into an early bird

As a medical student I used to envy the owls, people who could stay up partying to the small hours. My wife, Clare, is one, and its very hard to drag her away from late-night events.

I, on the other hand, like to be in bed by 11pm, then wake up at around 7am, when I cheerfully drag Clare out of bed.

Whether youre a lark or owl is partly down to age (we tend to get more larkish as we get older) and genes. Tests have shown that I have a number of lark genes and now it seems those genes might be protecting my mental health.

That, at least, was the conclusion of a recent study of 840,000 people by Harvard University, which found that those with genes that predispose them to getting up early had lower rates of depression. Another study, reported in the Mail, involving 450,000 Brits, found the same. It may be that because larks get up early we get far more exposure to morning light, which can improve mood. Or it could be that owls experience higher rates of depression because theyre struggling in a world where they are expected to get up at what, to them, is an ungodly hour.

So what can an owl do? Either find a way of life that allows you late lie-ins  or turn yourself into a lark. In a fascinating study from Monash University in Australia, owls did just that, and were able to get up happily two hours earlier. All it took was following these nine simple rules:

1. Wake up at 7am every day.

2. Get plenty of morning light.

3. Have an early breakfast.

4. Only exercise in the morning.

5. Avoid all caffeine after 4pm.

6. Avoid having a nap after 4pm.

7. Avoid bright lights during the evening.

8. Head to bed by 11pm.

9. Stick to this regimen for three weeks.

Yes, nasty wasps really are the good guys

June and July are when wasp nests are at their busiest and the little predators emerge with but one goal in mind: to sting me.

But Seirian Sumner, a professor of behavioural ecology at University College London, thinks theyre unfairly demonised and that wasps could be as valuable as other beloved insects such as bees, if only we gave them more of a chance.

In a recent paper she and her colleagues point out that wasps kill aphids and caterpillars that damage crops. And, like bees, they pollinate plants, with some completely dependent on wasps for this  indeed one orchid species has evolved parts that mimic the back end of a female wasp, presumably to attract more of the fellas.

On top of that, wasp venom has antibiotic properties and venom from the yellowjacket wasp has shown promise in treating cancer. Ill try to keep those good things in mind the next time Im tempted to swat them with a newspaper...
A central California cannabis dispensary is offering selected products for only one penny for any customer who shows a valid COVID-19 vaccine card as rates fall across the state.

The 7 Stars Holistic Healing Center in Contra Costa County - 40 miles west of Dan Francisco - started its promotion last week, reported the Los Angeles Times.

As of Thursday, the dispensary reports that more than 400 people have already taken advantage of the discount.

It comes as daily vaccination rates decline across the state and the country, falling by 54 percent in California and 75 percent in the U.S. - making it unlikely President Joe Biden will meet his goal to at least partially vaccinate 70 percent of adults by Independence Day.

7 Stars Holistic Healing Center is offering cannabis products for only one penny for customers who show proof they have been vaccinated

'We wanted to offer our platform to help the state achieve their goal of immunity against COVID-19,' Zee Handoush, executive director of 7 Stars Holistic Healing Center, said in a statement.

'We saw other local businesses offering vaccine incentives, and we wanted to add cannabis to that growing list.'

The business said they are offering products in the $20 to $30 range for only $0.01 if proof of vaccination is shown.

Ben Grambergu, marketing director of the dispensary, believes the effort is already helping get more people in the community vaccinated.

'It does seem to be moving the needle,' he told the Times.

'I think it actually is helping get some of these folks in the cannabis community.'

The dispensary joins a wider effort by private companies and state governments around the country offering incentives to Americans who get vaccinated.

Krispy Kreme was the first company to make national headlines with an incentive for Americans to vaccinated, in which it offered one free donut every day to anyone who showed proof of vaccination.

CVS Health later joined, holding a massive sweepstakes for anyone who got vaccinated at pharmacy locations, including cash, cruises and other trips.

Some state governments have offered vaccine lotteries, including California.

Last week, Gov Gavin Newsom drew the first winner of the state's $50,00 vaccine lottery, which is eligible to all Californians who have received the shots

The efforts come as vaccine demand has fallen in recent weeks.

In The Golden State, health department data shows a 54 percent drop from 284,000 per day last month to 129,000 per day.

Across the U.S., more than 20 million vaccines were distributed in the first week of April, while only about five million doses have been given out in the past seven days, a drop in demand of 75 percent.

Despite the drop, California is currently outpacing the rest of the nation with its vaccine rollout.

About 56 percent of Californians have received at least one shot of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to official state data, compared to about 52 percent of the national population, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Contra Costa County is about even with the rest of the state, with 57 percent of the population having been vaccinated so far.

Case rates in Contra Costa County have sharply fallen since the reached their peak over winter

The county has largely controlled its COVID situation since a spike over winter as well.

More than 100 new cases in one day have nor been recorded since April, a success for a county that has over 1.1 million people.

Cases around the state have been on a steady decline as well, and the state is now averaging around 1,000 cases a day over the past week.
In the frame: Stephen Hester is understood to be on a shortlist to replace Jan du Plessis

The former boss of Royal Bank of Scotland is a candidate to be the next chairman of BT.

Stephen Hester is understood to be on a shortlist to replace Jan du Plessis, who is leaving this summer after reportedly clashing with chief executive Philip Jansen over the pace of change at the telecoms giant which is in the midst of a huge rollout of fibre broadband across the UK.

His replacement will have to deal with a new top investor, after tycoon Patrick Drahi's Altice built up a 12.1 per cent stake.

Other names linked to the BT role, which is one of the City's most prestigious jobs, include ex-BBC Trust chief Rona Fairhead, former ITV boss Adam Crozier and ex-Barclays UK chairman Sir Ian Cheshire.

Hester, 60, succeeded Fred 'the Shred' Goodwin at RBS in 2008 and is credited with pulling the bank back from the brink in the wake of the financial crisis.

He also revived scandal-hit RSA Insurance Group in 2014. He has been linked with chief executive jobs at HSBC and Barclays but has expressed an interest in taking on a chairmanship.

BT declined to comment.
The FTSE 100 owner of Premier Inn is facing a backlash over 1.5million of executive bonuses after the company posted a billion-pound loss.

The City has been rocked by shareholder revolts this summer including a massive 70 per cent attack on grocer Morrisons this week over the chief executive's pandemic bonus.

Whitbread, the UK's second-biggest listed hospitality business, is under fire because bosses are in line for awards despite taxpayers, staff and investors taking a hit.

Backlash: Whitbread, the UK's second-biggest listed hospitality business, is under fire because bosses are in line for awards despite taxpayers, staff and investors taking a hit

In its final results, for the year to the end of March, the company posted a 1billion loss, compared to a 280million profit the year before.

Whitbread benefited from 138million of furlough cash and a 120million saving from the business rates holiday, and it laid off 1,500 staff and suspended dividends.

Despite this, Alison Brittain, the chief executive, is in line to receive a 729,000 annual bonus while finance chief Nicholas Cadbury could get 492,000.

Advisory group ISS has recommended shareholders abstain or vote against the pay report at the annual general meeting to be held on Thursday, while the Investment Association issued a 'red top' warning, its highest level.

ISS said the 'significant awards... are not considered appropriate' when staff, taxpayers and shareholders had all taken a hit.

To try to dampen opposition the company has delayed the awards until 2022, when they will be subject to another round of targets.

This means that no bonus payments will be made this year, the company said.

Bosses have told the firm's shareholders that they 'continue to optimise Government support packages'.

The tsunami of opposition to pay reports at several of this year's annual general meetings has been dubbed the 'shareholder spring'.

Investors have found new confidence in the face of record levels of Government support, a wave of job losses and the massive loss of dividends as companies have fought against global lockdowns.

Last month Rio Tinto suffered a 62 per cent vote against excessive pay packets for its outgoing bosses, while more than a quarter voted against a 66m bonus for Cineworld boss Mooky Greidinger and his brother and deputy, Israel.

There have also been rebellions at Intertek, Savills, Playtech, Pearson, BAE Systems and Glencore.

Whitbread said: 'Part of the incentive scheme that would have been paid this year is being deferred, and contingent on meeting new stretching performance targets that have been designed to drive the recovery of the business.'
My partner and I live in a converted flat and we can hear everything my neighbours do upstairs.

There are no carpets so when they're walking it sounds like an elephant is above us. When they hoover it sounds like someone is sawing through the ceiling and when they do their workouts, the windows shake.

When they are speaking loudly or watching TV, we can pretty much hear every word  and they love watching war films late at night. They also have a dog, which often barks.

This reader says that his upstairs neighbours 'sound like an elephant' when walking around

Both us and the flat above own a share of the freehold and I have spoken to them about it previously, but they just say it isn't an issue for them. Can anything be done to solve my problem?

Is there any point trying to soundproof the ceiling, or is it more effective to do so from above - and how expensive will it be? Would it increase the value of my flat?

Are there any legal avenues I can explore, and as we share the freehold would it be within my rights to ask them to share some of the costs? Via email

Ed Magnus of This is Money replies: Of all the neighbourly complaints, noise disputes are perhaps the most common.

Whether you live in a converted flat, a purpose-built apartment or a terraced house, neighbour noise can come from multiple directions.

Particularly if you live in a busy town or city, a certain level of noise is unavoidable: we have all been woken by pigeons roosting, binmen shouting or car alarms sounding.

But there is something much more invasive and unsettling about the noise of your neighbours coming through the walls, ceilings or floorboards.

The action you can take depends on the reason for the noise.

It's not always the neighbour's fault  particularly when it comes to flats that have been converted from older houses.

Only in July 2003 did soundproofing regulations for residential homes come into force.

Are your neighbours breaking the building rules with their noise? You can look at their lease to check whether they are not allowed animals, for example

These building regulations apply to both new-builds and flat conversions, as well as semi-detached and terraced housing.

They place certain requirements on the separating walls, floors and ceilings between different properties.

If you feel your home contravenes these rules, you could take legal action against the developer or builder and potentially force them to pay for improvements.

This would require you taking a sound test to prove that the noise was at an unacceptable level.

But unfortunately, the law does not apply retrospectively - so if your flat was converted before 2003, there is no legal action that can be taken.

If the noise problem can be proved to be anti-social behaviour, you are within your rights to complain to the local council on the basis of it being a statutory nuisance.

Noise, including loud music and barking dogs are examples that could justify the council investigating further, although the advice is to try and solve the problem by talking to your neighbour before contacting the council.

If the council decides your neighbour is causing a statutory noise nuisance, they must issue a notice telling your neighbour what they should do to stop or restrict the noise, and they can be prosecuted or fined if they ignore it.

However, if the noise is occurring from normal day-to-day living rather than anti-social activities, then complaining to the council will almost certainly be unsuccessful.

To help in answering our reader's dilemma, we spoke to Paula Higgins, chief executive of the HomeOwners Alliance; Stuart Miles, solicitor at Hodge Jones & Allen Solicitors; Mike Hansom, solicitor and partner for property disputes at BLB Solicitors; Phil Lyons, senior technical advisor at the Soundproofing Store; and David Westgate, group chief executive at Andrews Property Group.

What should be your first course of action?

Paula Higgins replies: It sounds like a cliche, but it's usually good to talk to your neighbours first.

When you approach them, it is a good idea to have three examples of when they were excessively noisy to hand, complete with dates.

Tell them how the noise affected you, but don't be accusatory - being calm and reasonable typically gets better results than being confrontational.

Rather than saying, 'you kept me awake', tell them, 'I could not sleep because of the noise that night.'

You should also specifically tell them how you would like the problem solved.

Are there any legal avenues to explore?

Stuart Miles replies: The lease of your neighbour should be carefully scrutinised to see if there are relevant clauses to assist here.

This can be obtained from HM Land Registry for a nominal sum.

Some leases contain clauses that may be relevant, such as not being allowed to have animals without permission; needing to have carpet and underlay; and not causing a nuisance or annoyance to other occupiers of the building.

The above clauses are just a few examples, and the wording varies from lease to lease.

Subject to the particular wording of the clauses, and whether or not the neighbour has a consent or licence confirming that they do not have to obey the relevant clauses, then legal action can be contemplated.

Even if there is no such clause in the neighbour's lease, if the noise is at an unreasonable level and frequency, you can consider a claim for nuisance and breach of your right to quiet enjoyment.

Noise pollution: Being able to hear your neighbour's every move can be a major annoyance

How does a claim for nuisance work?

Mike Hansom replies: As well as giving you a right to take legal action against your neighbour, the local authority has an obligation to investigate, and where appropriate, to bring enforcement action to prevent any statutory nuisance.

However, a nuisance claim will not succeed if the neighbours are using their flat in an 'ordinary and everyday' way.

This means you are unlikely to be able to prevent them from hoovering, walking around or talking at low volume, simply because the structure of the building is such that you can hear their every move.

Whether the dog barking and home fitness amount to a nuisance will depend on their volume and frequency You will need evidence in the form of a diary, and audio recordings to prove these activities are outside the 'ordinary and everyday'.

Am I likely to succeed in a legal claim?

Mike Hansom replies: There are multiple legal relationships at play here, because each of you is a leaseholder, and collectively you are also the landlord.

Where there is a management company, company law applies to regulate the obligations of directors and members.

Alternatively, if the freehold is owned in the individual names of the leaseholders, trust law must be considered.

This means it is common for each individual leaseholder to have different obligations and roles to play at the same time.

Whilst this legal mixing bowl provides a variety of potential angles and ways to pursue a claim, it also makes for a complex legal framework which is often very difficult to navigate.

Noisy neighbours are unfortunately something that many people have to contend with

There is no guarantee you will succeed, and even if you do, the judge may not award you costs.

For this reason, you should consider mediation as an alternative to court proceedings which could save time and expense.

You should also check whether you hold a legal expenses insurance policy that might cover the costs.

It is recommended that you check that as soon as possible, as there will likely be a time limit to report a potential claim to the insurer.

Might soundproofing completely solve the problem?

Phil Lyons replies: Silence is incredibly difficult to achieve when you are physically sharing a structure with other people.

Soundproofing in domestic environments is more about achieving a good reduction in volume and clarity, as opposed to blocking the sound out completely.

Is it possible to reduce the vibrations from above?

Phil Lyons replies: Footfall impact or moving furniture on the floor above creates a vibration.

Vibration travels easily through solid materials and therefore will travel through the floorboards, into the timber joists and straight down into your ceiling.

The only way to stop the vibration from travelling into your ceiling is by either adding a cushioning or resilient layer to the floor above to reduce the impact at the source, or building a new suspended ceiling which is 'de-coupled' or isolated from the structure so that the vibration cannot transfer into it.

Generally, it is more effective to stop it at the source on the floor if possible.

What about the sound of voices or the dog barking?

Phil Lyons replies: Dog's barking, people's voices, TV and music is what we refer to as airborne noise.

Airborne noise is only blocked by mass.

Mass comes from heavy, dense materials and therefore you need to add materials to the ceiling or floor that are very heavy and dense.

If it's a timber joist construction in which there is an empty cavity between the ceiling and floor above, it means any sound from above or below echoes, resonates and amplifies - this is called the drum effect.

To stop sound from resonating inside, you need to add acoustic insulation into that cavity space which will absorb the sound and stop it from resonating.

Is it more effective to soundproof from below or above?

Phil Lyons replies: There are many different types of soundproofing which are designed for differing construction types and levels of noise.

Soundproofing the floor tends to be the quickest, easiest and most cost-effective solution as this generally just requires adding a soundproof matting to the floor to get an improvement in sound reduction.

Soundproofing the ceiling is a much bigger job involving removing the existing ceiling and re-building it much better.

But in a perfect world you will get the best results from doing a combination of both.

What are the costs?

Phil Lyons replies: The costs will depend on the size of the floor or ceiling area, the materials you use and who you choose to install it  as well as whether your neighbour agrees to share the cost.

A local tradesman may charge around 300 per day for a two-man team, according to the online soundproofing supplier, the Soundproofing Store - and a professional sound proofing installer may charge around 500 each day.

In terms of material cost, to soundproof a timber floor to significantly reduce airborne and impact noise from above it will cost around 62 + VAT per square metre.

For those looking to install soundproofing to a timber floor sufficient to reduce both impact and airborne sounds, you should expect to pay roughly 38 + VAT per m2.

Who can carry out the job?

Phil Lyons replies: In terms of installation, most systems are straightforward enough for a good, competent DIY-er to do themselves.

A local builder or tradesman who isn't trained in soundproofing shouldn't be used for soundproofing advice or specifications, but can definitely be used to install the systems that a soundproofing company has recommended.

A specialist soundproofing installer would be the best option in terms of bringing more knowledge and experience, but will generally cost a little more.

Will soundproofing increase the value of my home?

David Westgate replies: Soundproofing your flat won't necessarily increase its value but it could help if you ever decide to sell, as an ongoing dispute with your neighbour could affect the saleability of the property.

If you have already had an informal chat with your neighbour and haven't been able to resolve the issue, then a sensible course of action might be to find a solution yourself, such as soundproofing the ceiling to reduce noise levels.

Although it might cost you money now, it will improve your living conditions immediately and most likely reduce your stress levels, and in the long run it could save you money if you did ever decide to sell.

When you put a property on the market you are required to fill in a property information form. This provides the buyer with information about your home, including the physical state, and enables them make an informed choice about the property.

The form also asks about any disputes with neighbours or issues that might lead to a dispute in the future.

If you chose to withhold information about the dispute with your noisy neighbour, and didn't answer the questions in the form accurately and honestly, the buyer could take legal action if they have a similar issue with the neighbour when they move in.

The buyer could potentially claim for the cost of resolving the problem or even compensation for any loss of value in the property, and that could end up costing you more than having the soundproofing work carried out now.
Centers for Disease Control bosses have called an emergency meeting over higher than expected cases of heart inflammation among young people who've had Pfizer and Moderna's COVID-19 vaccines.

They will gather on June 18 to discuss 226 plausible cases of heart inflammation in young people - mainly affecting teenage boys and young men - after they have received their second doses of the vaccines.

CDC bosses said Thursday the number of cases is higher than expected, although still rare.

A total of 226 cases have been reported that may meet the CDC's 'working case definition' of myocarditis and pericarditis following the shots, the agency said.

Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle, and pericarditis is inflammation of the outer lining of the heart.

Among the 226, three are in intensive care, 15 are hospitalized, and 41 have ongoing symptoms. The rest - 167 - have recovered.

It is not clear if either condition is caused by the shots and the reports of cases are extremely rare.

The CDC continues to urge everyone aged 12 and older to get vaccinated.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has called an 'emergency meeting' over 226 cases of heart inflammation in people who have had either the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines

US health officials Thursday announced they are investigating what appear to be higher than expected reports of heart inflammation in male teens and young adults after getting their second doses of the two vaccines

These types of heart inflammation can be caused by a variety of infections, including a bout of COVID-19, as well as certain medications.

There have been rare reports following other types of vaccinations in the past.

More than 130 million Americans have received both their first and second doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

This means just 0.000173846 percent of people who have been administered their second doses have reported such an effect.

Cases are reported through the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

The system accepts reports from everyone regardless of the plausibility of the vaccine causing the symptom.

In total, VAERS received 573 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis after the patient had received their second dose.

A total of 372 reports were from people who had the Pfizer vaccine, while the remaining 201 had Moderna.

A total of 226 cases have been reported that may meet the CDC's 'working case definition' of myocarditis and pericarditis following the shots, the agency said. Among the 226, three are in intensive care, 15 are hospitalized, and 41 have ongoing symptoms. The rest have recovered

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing in May

WHAT IS MYOCARDITIS? Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle. There are no specific causes of the condition but it is usually triggered by a virus. Some of the most common infections which cause myocarditis, are those called adenovirus and Coxsackie B. It can be caused by the common cold, hepatitis B and C, and herpes simplex virus. The most common symptoms of the condition include chest pain, a fever, a fast heartbeat, tiredness and shortness of breath. If the inflammation damages the heart muscle or the fibres that conduct electrical pulses to the heart, complications can develop. They can develop quickly, and include sudden loss of consciousness, an abnormally fast, slow or irregular heartbeat. In very severe cases the condition is fatal, causing heart failure or sudden death. The inflammation enlarges the heart and creates scar tissue, forcing it to work harder and therefore making it weaker. In most cases of viral myocarditis, the illness goes away and there are no complications. But in rare cases when inflammation is severe, there can be damage to the heart which needs monitoring and possibly a heart transplant. Myocarditis can reoccur, but there is no known way to prevent this. The risk of recurrence is low, around 10 to 15 per cent, according to Myocarditis Foundation. It is difficult to gauge the prevalence of myocarditis because there is no widely available test for it. In 2010, approximately 400,000 people died of heart muscle disease - cardiomyopathy that includes myocarditis - worldwide. Expert consensus opinion estimates that up to 40 per cent of dilated cardiomyopathy results from myocarditis, according to the National Organisation for Rare Disorders. Advertisement

Another 216 cases of the heart inflammation were also reported after dose one of the vaccines.

More than half of the cases reported after people had received their second dose were in people between the ages of 12 and 24, the CDC said.

This group accounts for less than 9 percent of doses administered.

Almost two-fifths of cases were in males.

The overwhelming majority of the cases have occurred within a week of vaccination.

Symptoms included chest pain and breathing difficulties.

The CDC's vaccine advisory committee will meet on June 18 to further evaluate the possible risk.

Dr. Tom Shimabukuro told a government vaccine meeting about the investigation Thursday.

'It's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison because, again, these are preliminary reports,' he said.

'Not all these will turn out to be true myocarditis or pericarditis reports.'

Shimabukuro said the CDC findings were mostly 'consistent' with the findings of Israel's Health Ministry, which first reported a likely link to the Pfizer vaccine and the condition in young men.

Doctors were first alerted to the possible link between myocarditis and vaccines back in May, amid reports of cases in young males.

The CDC urged providers to ask patients with symptoms of heart inflammation if they had taken the COVID-19 vaccine.

Earlier this month, it was reported that seven teen boys in the US had suffered heart inflammation after their second Pfizer shots.

The study found the boys, aged between the ages of 14 and 19, developed chest pain within a few days of having the second jab.

Heart imaging tests showed myocarditis.

None were critically ill, and all were healthy enough to be sent home after two to six days in the hospital.

Around the same time, the Department of Defense began to track 14 cases.

Israel claimed in early June that its research showed Pfizer's vaccine is the 'probable' cause of heart inflammation in a very small number of people who get the jab.

The Health Ministry had found 148 cases of myocarditis soon after the patient had been vaccinated.

In total, 275 cases were spotted among the more than five million people given the Pfizer jab in Israel, which has had one of the world's most successful jab rollouts.

In the remaining 127 cases, it is unclear if they are linked to the vaccine.

This was equivalent to just 0.005 per cent of recipients, or one in 20,000 people.

For the 148 cases 'probably' linked to the jab, the rate was 0.003 per cent  although half of them had other underlying health problems.

Israel was one of the first to warn of health concerns linked to the Pfizer vaccine.

In May, officials at the European Medicines Agency also reported receiving 107 reports of myocarditis following the Pfizer vaccine.

Pfizer was granted emergency use authorization for children aged 12 and over last month. It is now working on trials with children as young as six months old.

Moderna is still only available for adults.

Meanwhile, the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines have also both been investigated for possible - extremely rare - ties to blood clots.
Horrifying footage has exposed the grim reality of life for mink on a a fur farm in Latvia, with animals beaten, stamped on, and left to die of gruesome injuries.

Animal rights activists captured the footage early in 2020 during breeding season at the farm - Latvia's largest - when select male and female mink are forced together in the hopes they will produce offspring.

But the process often ends with females being mauled to death by their partners, or else left with infections that condemn them to a slow and painful end.

Those that do fall pregnant and give birth are separated for their young, which live for just eight months before being gassed to death - provided they do not die of disease or get beaten to death by workers in the meantime.

The corpses are then skinned with the fur sold into the fashion industry. The UK is one of a number of countries that imports fur from Latvia each year.

The investigation was published as the UK consults on importing fur from Europe, which animal rights campaigners hope will end with the trade being banned.

A female mink suffering from an infection after being repeatedly forced to breed is found dying of its wound at a fur farm it Latvia

A female mink that was badly mauled during an attempt at breeding is left to die in its cage

The footage was captured by an undercover investigator for the Animal Freedom Association (Dzivnieku brivibas) - a partner group of Humane Society International which shared it exclusively with Mail Online.

Claire Bass, executive director of Humane Society International, said: 'For as long as the UK provides a market for this cruel fur, these animals will continue to suffer.

'So we hope that this footage sends a clear message to Prime Minister Johnson that Britain must not trade in such obscene cruelty, and must close our borders to fur.'

The investigation was carried out during the early months of 2020, with an activist sent to work on a farm in Latvia while secretly recording the conditions there.

The farm is the country's largest, with up to 97,000 mink kept there between the end of breeding season in May and the start of the killing season in November.

The man - named only as Gatis - was sent there to work during breeding season, which typically begins in February.

A worker is bitten on the glove by a mink, moments before breaking the animal's neck in horrifying scenes at the fur farm

Mink are seen pacing in small wire cages in distressing footage captured at the fur farm

Huge lines of cages containing mink are seen at the farm in Latvia, which houses almost 100,000 animals during peak season

In the video, Gatis documents the grim conditions the mink are kept in - confined to tiny wire cages where they pace due to stress.

During the breeding process, select males and females are thrown together into cages in the hopes they will mate.

Some females are mauled during the process, with injuries including grisly head and stomach wounds that leave their brains and internal organs exposed.

While workers kill some of the wounded mink, many are simply left to die in pain.

Others end up with infections due to being repeatedly bred, with those animals often suffering drawn-out deaths with no vet on site to treat them.

Following the breeding process, most of the males are immediately gassed and skinned, with only a select few kept for breeding the following year.

Females generally give birth between April and May, with their young taken away as soon as they are weaned - around six to eight weeks later.

The young are then allowed to grow for eight months until the killing season, which generally takes place in November and December.

Most animals on the farm will generally be killed during this period, including any mink mothers that farmers do not plan to keep for breeding the next year.

As well as grim conditions for the animals, Gatis said staff are badly treated - with many suffering painful bite wounds from the mink even while in protective clothing.

During a Covid outbreak at the farm in April last year, Gatis said staff weren't given proper PPE - potentially exposing them to dangerous mutated forms of the virus, which can pass into mink and then back into humans.

A worker is bitten on the glove by a mink, which often cause injuries to the farm staff who seldom end up working there for more than a few months

A female mink is placed inside a tiny wire cage before being introduced to a male mink so they can be forcibly bred

The Covid outbreak was detected after mink at the farm tested positive, with a government report saying the virus was likely introduced by an infected worker.

It is not possible to say how many staff or mink were infected at the farm due to limited testing that was in place.

Millions of mink were culled in Denmark last year after it emerged the disease was spreading from the animals to humans, amid fears it could produce a form of the virus that is immune to the current generation of vaccines.

In total, Covid outbreaks have been reported at 407 mink farms in Europe.

Gatis added that staff are routinely exposed to violence at the farm, often become emotionally numbed, and don't generally work there for more than a few months.

He said: 'Working at the fur farm was the most degrading experience of my life but I want people to see the awful reality that these animals endure.

'Its a life of pain, injury, sickness, filth and death.

'As the UK government is right now considering whether or not to ban the import and sale of fur from countries like Latvia, I want to show him the animal suffering the UK is currently bankrolling.

'I would love Latvia to ban fur farming, but countries that import this fur are also responsible for the animal cruelty, so a UK ban would make a huge difference.'

Fur farming has been banned across the UK since 2003, and has been banned and/or is in the process of being phased-out in Austria, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Croatia, Estonia, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Norway, Luxembourg, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Earlier this month, the parliament in Estonia voted in favour of a fur farming ban.

Late last year, the government in Hungary declared a ban on the farming of animals for fur, including mink and foxes.

In France a ban on mink fur farming is currently progressing through Parliament, and the Irish government has made a commitment to bring forward legislation in 2021.
A green bird spotted out with a flock of white cockatoos has outraged onlookers who are concerned it was spray-painted.

Bruno Bouchet saw the bird in a flock of about 30 cockatoos at Campbelltown Train Station in Sydney's south-west on Thursday morning.

Colourful cockatoos have been spotted around Sydney in previous years, but painting or dyeing a bird in NSW could put you behind bars for six months.

A green cockatoo, believed to be spray-painted, was spotted at Campbelltown Train Station in Sydney

The green bird was with a flock of about 30 cockatoos

'At first I thought I was seeing things, so I stopped and looked at the green cockatoo for around two minutes before it flew away,' Mr Bouchet said.

'A mate of mine saw the green cockatoo eating out of a bin near the Campbelltown cinemas about 15 minutes later.

'Which was reassuring because I was worried I'd be thought of as a lunatic if no one else validated the fact that there was a green cockatoo flying around Campbelltown.'

Mr Bouchet said it looked like the bird had been spray-painted.

'I think it's definitely the same species, unfortunately it seems someone's sprayed this particular bird which is a cruel and disgusting thing to do,' he said.

A pink cockatoo (left) was spotted in the south-Sydney suburb of Menai in 2017

Two cockatoos painted bright pink and blue were seen in Bundeena in Sydney's south in 2020

Colourful cockatoos have turned up in Sydney before, with bright blue and pink birds being spotted at a home in Bundeena near Sydney National Park in 2020.

In 2017, a pink cockatoo was seen in nearby suburb Menai and blue, green, yellow and pink coloured cockatoos were found across the Eastern suburbs in 2016.

Spray-painting a bird is an animal cruelty offence in New South Wales with a maximum sentence of six months or a $5,500 fine.

MP Emma Hurst from the Animal Justice Party called the alleged spray-painting 'absolutely disgusting.'

'Many spray paints and dyes are toxic, and can be very harmful to animals,' she said.

'Colouring an animal can also make them more susceptible to prey animals and could risk the animals life.

'Anyone who catches and alters the appearance of a wild animal as a joke is sick and needs to learn how to respect nature.'

Animal Justice Party MP Emma Hurst (pictured) wants animal rights to be taken more seriously in NSW

Anyone accused of serious animal cruelty or bestiality will now be automatically banned from having animals for life, two years after Ms Hurst (pictured) first introduced changes to the NSW Crime Act

The NSW Parliament just passed new laws banning anyone charged with serious animal cruelty or bestiality from being around animals.

Ms Hurst fought for the provisions for the past two years.

'Shockingly, no one has ever been banned from animal guardianship or working with animals after a successful conviction of serious animal cruelty or bestiality in NSW,' she said.

'We have witnessed some chilling cases over the past two years where animal abusers have been allowed to continue to breed animals, work alongside animals and even buy animals after their convictions.

'We are a nation of animal lovers. Animal cruelty is hard to think and talk about, but it is happening. These abusers need to be held to account.'
Two passengers on the first 'fully-vaccinated' cruise from the US have tested positive for coronavirus during the Caribbean voyage.

Cruise operator Royal Caribbean said on Thursday that two guests on its Celebrity Millennium ship had tested positive but are asymptomatic and currently in isolation.

The guests, who were sharing a room, are being monitored by the company's medical team, the cruise operator said.

They tested positive during end-of-cruise testing, carried out three days before returning to the US.

Royal Caribbean added that it was conducting contact tracing and expediting testing for all close contacts of the unnamed individuals. They did not say if the infected passengers would return to the US then.

All passengers were required to show proof of vaccination before boarding the cruise in addition to a negative test taken within 72 hours before departure from the island of St. Maarten on Saturday.

The US has no standard proof of vaccination and the system relies on passengers procuring documents form their health providers.

And fully vaccinated people still have a small chance of catching the virus, although the inoculation will likely stop symptoms and reduce transmission.

The ship is now docked in Curaco off the coast of Venezuela and will return to St. Maarten on Saturday to disembark.

Two passengers on the first 'fully-vaccinated' cruise from the US have tested positive for coronavirus during the Caribbean voyage. Cruise operator Royal Caribbean said on Thursday that two guests on its Celebrity Millennium ship (pictured) had tested positive but are asymptomatic and currently in isolation [File photo]

Celebrity Millennium was one of the first cruises in North America to restart sailing last week, after more than a year of halted operations due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Around 600 guests were welcomed on board the week-long voyage - a fraction of the ship's 2,218 capacity.

Royal Caribbean started sailing this month after meeting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) comprehensive guidelines that included a fully vaccinated crew and requirements for everyone over 16 to present proof of vaccination against Covid-19.

Cruise operators are among the last to return to their pre-pandemic operations as the CDC laid out strict guidance earlier this year for the cruise industry for resuming trips, after some ships became hotbeds for the virus last year.

Ocean voyages were suspended in March last year as the pandemic cut a devastating path around the world, with hubs like Florida losing an estimated $5.6 billion.

News of the cases came as US-based cruise lines are chafing to resume voyages from Florida ports in July as the pandemic wanes - but for vaccinated passengers only - yet the state and its governor won't let them demand proof of inoculation.

So far, neither side has blinked, even as two guests on one of the first cruise ships to sail from North America since the Covid pandemic tested positive on Thursday.

Florida 'is the cruise capital of the world,' with billions of dollars of revenue and thousands of jobs at stake, said Doug Parker, editor of the Cruise Radio website.

'It would be a big blow if they couldn't come to terms.'

If neither side gives in, Parker said, cruise ships 'would have to start sailing out of other ports that would accept them... because these ships are trying to do the right thing.'

The CDC currently requires that more than 95 percent of passengers and crew be vaccinated in order for cruise lines to bypass a requirement for trial voyages.

The guests, who were sharing a room, are being monitored by the company's medical team, the cruise operator said. They tested positive during end-of-cruise testing, carried out three days before returning to the US [File photo]

The chief obstacle now for cruises departing from Florida comes from Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who made his tourism-dependent state one of the first to drop its pandemic restrictions.

Last month he signed into law a bill barring businesses from demanding vaccination 'passports,' stopping them from requiring that employees provide proof of vaccination - and threatening fines for noncompliance that could amount, for cruise lines, to $5,000 per passenger.

The measure takes effect July 1, just when cruise lines hope to resume operations after a year in which Covid played havoc with their industry.

'While the governor, on the one hand, wants to see jobs back and tourism back... (he) is kind of his worst enemy, because he's also saying, you can't ask for that same proof,' Parker said.

The governor's terse response: 'Our state policy is our state policy.'

To DeSantis's critics, his is a political decision aimed at winning the votes of Donald Trump sympathizers - many of them vaccine skeptics - ahead of a possible re-election campaign in 2022.

With the world's three biggest cruise lines all based in Miami, the coming months offer a calendar of confusing and shifting health requirements, with conflict a near-certainty.

Carnival Cruise Line will require vaccination on cruises leaving from Texas - another Republican-led state that has been quick to drop Covid curbs - but Carnival has provided no detailed information on a cruise set to leave Miami on July 4.

This Monday, Norwegian Cruise Line - which has threatened to abandon Florida ports altogether - directly defied the governor by saying it would demand proof of vaccination on all its cruises.

'We are currently in communication with his (DeSantis's) staff and legal counsel to ensure that we can offer the safest cruise experience for our passengers departing from the cruise capital of the world,' the company's CEO, Frank Del Rio, said.

The third big cruise line, the Royal Caribbean Group, meantime reversed itself.

Having initially announced that it would demand proof of vaccination, it said Friday that passengers and crew were only 'strongly recommended' to get the vaccine, and that anyone unvaccinated would face 'other protocols.'

News of the cases came as US-based cruise lines are chafing to resume voyages from Florida ports in July as the pandemic wanes - but for vaccinated passengers only - yet the state and its governor won't let them demand proof of inoculation. Pictured: Cruise ships in Miami [File photo]

Celebrity Cruises (part of Royal Caribbean) will launch the first trip from Florida, sailing out of Fort Lauderdale on June 26. A 'test' cruise six days earlier will depart from Miami.

'It's confusing,' Jim Walker, a maritime lawyer, told AFP. His Cruise Law News blog last year provided daily updates on the distress of those on cruise ships stranded at sea by the pandemic.

Now, he said, there's 'different companies trying to solve a problem differently.'

'The impression that the public have is that the cruise line is not taking appropriate steps to send out a message that their ships are safe,' said Walker, pointing to a survey by CruiseCritic.com that found that 80 percent of potential passengers would prefer to travel on ships that demand vaccination proof.

He also pointed out that ships making Caribbean port stops could spread Covid to islands lacking the vaccine access enjoyed by the US - 'although quite frankly,' he added, 'very few cruise lines seem to express concern about that potential.'

And cruise lovers, Walker continued, 'don't really seem to care if they infect people in the Bahamas or throughout the Caribbean.'

'It's so reckless and dangerous and irresponsible,' he said.

The cruise industry is hugely important to the Florida economy, generating yearly revenues of $9 billion and providing jobs for 160,000 people, according to the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA).

Since ocean voyages were suspended in March last year as the pandemic cut a devastating path around the world, Florida has lost an estimated $5.6 billion.

Both sides in the current standoff, Parker said, 'have a lot to lose.'
New South Wales Police have charged 13 people after seizing more than $1.5 million of 'ice' as well as 18kg of cannabis, cocaine and more than $220,000 in cash.

Strike Force Caprera made the seizures and arrests after executing 21 search warrants across Sydney between June 2 and Thursday.

The raids were part of Operation Ironside which used the supposedly secret criminal messaging app AN0N, which was actually created by police and used to spy on communications in the underworld.

Police have seized over $220,000 in cash as well as ice, cocaine and mairjuana

On June 2, Redfern RES investigators executed 14 search warrants at Bankstown, Bass Hill, Cabramatta West, Canley Vale, Dundas, Guilford, Mount Pritchard, Riverwood, Sefton and Villawood.

Police uncovered three hydroponic cannabis set-ups at homes at Guildford, Mount Pritchard and Dundas and seized 290 cannabis plants with an estimated potential street value of more than $1 million.

Four men - aged 26, 27, 33, 38 - and two women, aged 35 and 41, were arrested and charged. All six remain before the courts.

Redfern RES officers also arrested a 48-year-old Fairfield man on June 2 and charged him with drugs and ammunition-related offences.

On the same day, officers arrested a 64-year-old man after pulling over his car at Bass Hill.

During a search of the vehicle, police seized $105,000 cash.

Police have charged 13 men and women as a part of Operation Caprera and executed 21 search warrants

He was charged with nine offences for supplying a prohibited drug and taking part in criminal activity.

On Monday this week as part of Operation Ironside which monitored the encrypted criminal messaging app AN0N, Redfern RES investigators searched homes at Bankstown and Luddenham.

At Bankstown, officers seized a mobile phone and issued a 49-year-old Bankstown man with a Court Attendance Notice (CAN), and at Luddenham, officers seized $12,140 cash, 91g of cocaine, MDMA, cannabis and prescription medication.

18kg of cannabis as well as $1.5 million worth of ice and cocaine has been seized by police

The same day, police spoke with a 49-year-old Luddenham man at Rushcutters Bay.

The man allegedly ran from police, throwing a bag under a nearby parked car. He was arrested following a foot pursuit in Darlinghurst.

The bag was recovered and found to contain more than 115g of cocaine.

The man was charged with supplying and possessing a prohibited drug and resisting police.

He was released on bail to reappear in court on July 12.

Police then raided properties at Alexandria, Auburn, Campsie, Haymarket and Rockdale on Thursday.

During the searches, police seized more than $76,000 cash, as well as cocaine, ice, an electronic stun device, mobile phones and other electronic items.

Officers also seized a stolen medical machine valued at more than $100,000.

A 22-year-old man, 25-year-old woman and a 29-year-old man were arrested and charged with drug and firearm offences.

Police said investigations into the drug ring were continuing and 'further arrests are expected'.
The tragic 13-year-old boy who died in a horror fireball when he crashed a stolen car into a tree on Wednesday was nursing a broken heart after cancer killed his mother.

Tearful relatives revealed traumatised teen Bailey Pini spiralled out of control in the wake of the family tragedy, which ultimately led to his death in Bowen, Queensland.

When he finally proved too much to handle last month, Bailey moved into a care home where his family hoped the youngster would learn some discipline.

But he shared the home with three other teens, and sister Troydon Pini, 30, revealed: 'To him, it was like a holiday. Every day was a sleepover with his mates.'

Tragic Bailey Pini, 13, who died in a horror fireball when he crashed a stolen car into a tree on Wednesday was nursing a broken heart after cancer killed his mother, Sonia, 54 (pictured)

She told told Daily Mail Australia: 'He was always a bit mischievous - but he wasn't criminal.

'He had never even driven before he went into that home, never mind steal a car. I don't know how he made it as far as he did before he crashed.'

Troydon revealed how Bailey had last year watched on as his beloved mother Sonia, 54, was ravaged by terminal cervical cancer.

He and his mum moved in with older sister Troydon, 30, for the family to care for her in her final days but the mother-of-four went rapidly downhill.

Tearful relatives revealed traumatised teen Bailey Pini (picturede) spiralled out of control in the wake of the family tragedy, which ultimately led to his death in Bowen, Queensland

'Bailey saw the whole process,' said Troydon. 'She was barely eating, in bed the whole time and because of Covid, we were home-schooling so he was home all the time.

'He watched her decline and slip away, first hand, until I couldn't cope any more physically and mentally with what was about to happen so she had to go into hospital.

'When I told him she had died, I grabbed him in my arms and I was crying - and this is how big a heart he had - he hugged me so tight and kept it together himself.

'He told me: "It's all right, we're going to be okay because we have each other."

'And that just blew me away, because I thought, I'm the adult, you're the child and you are trying to comfort me when I should be the one to comfort you.'

Bailey was described as a little tearaway who would sneak into the lolly jar but loved fishing and studying the stars in the night sky and telling his family random facts about the solar system.

When he finally proved too much to handle last month, Bailey Pini (pictured) moved into a care home where his family hoped the youngster would learn some discipline

But in the wake of his mother's death in July, his behaviour went downhill.

Bailey's parents split up when he was a baby and for eight months after his mother's death, he lived with his sister and her four daughters, but struggled to fit in with her family's routines.

After he ran away from his sister's home, he moved in with one older brother and then another before being taken into residential care last month when none of the family could look after him any longer.

'We actually thought it would do him good,' said Troydon. 'We thought he'd have to abide by rules and it would be a wake up call for him.

'But it wasn't. He was only in there for a month and shared it with three other 14-year-old boys - but he liked it for the wrong reasons.'

Bailey is believed to have stolen a car from Sarina around 4am on Wednesday before crashing into a tree in Bowen 200km away around 6.45am.

He died in the crash, but a 14-year-old passenger was pulled alive from the wreckage.

'I am 100 per cent certain that Bailey hadn't driven before he got to that house,' said Troydon. 'I don't know if that was the very first time he drove.'

Bailey Pini is believed to have stolen the car from Sarina around 4am on Wednesday but crashed into a tree in nearby Bowen around 6.45am. His family placed a cross at the scene yesterday (pictured)

His body has now been flown to Brisbane for formal identification by his dental records while his family plan his funeral.

'Because he was so severely burnt in the accident, they couldn't do much in Townsville,' said Troydon.

'Once we get his body back, we plan to have him cremated and bury his ashes with his mother on the anniversary of her burial on July 3.'

Teachers and pupils at Bailey's Sarina State High School have been offered counselling as they deal with their grief at the teenager's death.

Principal Jane Grieger said: 'Our thoughts and sincere sympathies go out to both their families, carers, friends and loved ones during this difficult time.'
A celebrated biographer mired in an ongoing sex scandal has now been accused of sexually harassing four other women while working at a university.

Blake Bailey, 57, was accused of pestering a colleague, two students, and a visiting author while working at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, around a decade ago.

Bailey - handpicked by the late acclaimed novelist Philip Roth to write a biography that has been critically lauded - allegedly groped colleague Bridget Anderson's crotch while naked in a hot with her during an April 2010 writers retreat for college staff.

She was in the hot tub with two male colleagues, and all had removed their clothes - as they had done the previous night.

Bailey, uninvited, joined them and sat next to Anderson, who taught alongside him and remains an associate English professor at Old Dominion.

'Out of the blue, with no warning whatsoever, he grabbed right on my vagina, in one fluid motion,' she told the paper.

'I screamed.'

Anderson jumped up, but Bailey grabbed her and pulled her back, The Virginian-Pilot reported.

Blake Bailey, 57, was accused on Thursday of sexually harassing four women - two of whom he assaulted. In April the acclaimed biographer was accused of raping two women - one in 2015, one in 2003 - accusations that led his publisher to drop his eagerly-awaited Philip Roth book

Philip Roth, who died in 2018 aged 85, hand-picked Bailey to write his autobiography

Bridget Anderson, an associate professor of English at Old Dominion University, taught alongside Bailey from 2010-16. She claimed that he assaulted her, threatened to rape her and harassed her - his behavior only ending when she pulled a knife on him in a mailroom in 2012

'I had to struggle to get out of his lap,' she said, with a male colleague - Kevin Moberly - corroborating Anderson's claim that he had to rescue her from Bailey.

The following year, at the same retreat, Bailey showed up again - to Anderson's surprise.

He confronted her, asking why she had told people about the hot tub incident, and told her he would rape her if he could get away with it, she said.

She angrily recited her address and said if he had a suicide wish, he could try and make good on his threat. Bailey, through his lawyer, denied the allegation.

She avoided Bailey the next day and left early.

Maura Hametz, who now heads the history department at James Madison University, recalled Anderson talking about the rape threat.

'It was disturbing, to put it mildly,' she told the paper.

Anderson claimed that, in the summer of 2011, Bailey forcibly attempted to kiss her in her office; in November, he attended one of her lectures and harassed her during a question and answer session, she alleges.

In the spring of 2012, she claims, he repeatedly fondled her leg during a faculty meeting.

Bailey's book was published on April 6

She said she moved to another seat, yet he followed.

Eventually she got up and left, and he cornered her in the mailroom.

Anderson says she pulled a three-inch knife on Bailey, and held it to his throat, saying: 'You come any closer, I'm going to hurt you.' I 'wanted to scare him,' she told the Pilot. 'That was my only goal. And I mean, it worked.'

That moment was corroborated by Hametz. Anderson says she told university administrators, but that no action against Bailey was taken. He remained at Old Dominion for another four years.

A lawyer for the university claimed Anderson went to the beach with Bailey after the hot tub incident, and that she bragged about their encounter after.

Bailey himself has vehemently denied her claims, and branded Anderson 'delusional.'

The scandal-hit biographer was handpicked by Roth - who died in 2018, aged 85 - to write his official biography after meeting with him in 2012.

The book, titled Roth, was published on April 6, was heralded pre-publication as one of the books of the year, receiving rave reviews and widespread media coverage, and immediately rocketed onto the New York Times bestseller list.

Yet since then multiple women have accused him of assault and harassment, with two alleging rape.

Bailey's book was dropped by his publisher, W.W. Norton, at the end of April after earlier sex abuse claims emerged - but a new publisher, Skyhorse, has since taken on the book.

Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia - where Bailey taught from 2010-16. The university has denied that they were alerted to significant misbehavior, although they say they were made aware of his being 'creepy'

Roth, widely considered a giant of American literature, was awarded the National Humanities Medal in March 2011 by Barack Obama

Bailey has written critically-acclaimed biographies of John Cheever and Richard Yates

Roth on his death was described by The New York Times as 'the last of the great white males: the triumvirate of writers  Saul Bellow and John Updike were the others  who towered over American letters in the second half of the 20th century'

A second new accuser, Elizabeth Argento, was 23 when she took a graduate student class with Bailey in the spring of 2014.

She told the paper that she was bipolar and a recovering alcoholic, and that Bailey would flatter her and encourage her to write about sex - something she was reluctant to do.

She said she capitulated and wrote about one night stand she had had during mental health crisis, reading her account out in front of class.

'After class he pulled me aside and he said, "You know, that guy was lucky. He was in the right place at the right time to be with you," Argento said.

She said she was in Bailey's office to discuss her thesis when he propped his foot up on the desk, showing off his 'protruding' crotch. Argento vowed after that incident to never be alone with him.

'I was just sitting there, like, this feels wrong,' she said.

Elizabeth Argento studied in Bailey's graduate student class in 2014, when she was 23. She described disturbing and inappropriate behavior from her teacher

Bailey's lawyer said that he remembers their interactions differently, describing it as 'an entirely positive relationship'.

A second unnamed graduate student recalled Bailey being 'handsy' with her at a bar.

'I saw him getting what we would term as 'handsy,' said one student who was there, and witnessed the scene.

'He was kind of all over her. She got up to leave, he didn't want to let her leave.'

The graduate student told the paper she was scared, and was also dealing with a stalker at the time.

'I tried to slip away,' she said. 'His grip tightened on my arms.'

She used a self-defense technique, dropping her weight while turning to rip herself from his grip, and ran to the bathroom.

When she opened the door to leave the restroom, she says, Bailey was waiting for her just outside.

'I was scared, so I told him, 'You're making me uncomfortable,' she told the paper.

Bailey told her he was sorry that she had misinterpreted his behavior.

'I was upset about what happened and I went and talked to a colleague about it to try to figure out if I should do something,' she said.

'I was just afraid of - what if he does this to someone else or worse?'

The fourth woman to accuse Bailey from Old Dominion was a visiting non-fiction writer, who recounted an October 2011 incident at a Bailey's house, when he hosted a party.

Bailey showered her with attention - so much so that she asked two women present, including graduate student Tara Burke, to rescue her.

Tara Burke told the paper that she helped rescue a female visiting writer, who was accosted by Bailey during a party at his house and needed to escape

'It was fine for a little while,' Burke told the paper.

'But Blake's wife was there and she was very quiet and uncomfortable. And we were just having a very strange experience witnessing it.

'(The visiting writer) came to us and directly said, "I'm very uncomfortable. This is getting out of hand."'

She asked the two to take her back to her hotel, saying she was a little drunk and just needed to be removed from the situation.

'I wasn't thinking it was that serious,' Burke said.

Then Bailey came out of the house and grabbed the visiting writer, playfully but forcefully dragging her down the street with him. She was clearly uncomfortable but, Burke says, was trying to manage the incident without making it worse.

Burke and the other student pulled the writer away from Bailey and got her into a car.

Back at her hotel, the writer, who was married, said that Bailey had forced a kiss on her.

The university say that they would never have hired Bailey if they knew then what they know now.

They also denied that they had ignored complaints in a bid to keep their star hire happy.

'Allegations that he was a 'creep', yes. Allegations that he was a rapist or serial sexual harasser, no,' the university's lawyer, John Brederhoft, said.

Bailey's lawyer, Billy Gibbens, said in an email that Bailey met in 2012 with a university representative who 'declined to specify any reported complaint.'

'Otherwise ODU has never notified Mr Bailey about these allegations, either because they are demonstrably false or because they have been recently fabricated during the open season on Mr Bailey in the press,' Gibbens said.

The allegations from Virginia come after two named women gave detailed accounts to other newspapers, spurred on by the praise and adulation Bailey was receiving for the Roth book.

One of his accusers, Valentina Rice, 47, a publishing executive, claimed that he entered her bedroom in 2015, when they were both staying with a mutual acquaintance in New Jersey, and raped her.

The second, Eve Peyton, 40, a former student who now works in publicity at a high school in New Orleans, alleged that he raped her in June 2003 in his hotel room in the Louisiana city, when he was on vacation.

Bailey has vehemently denied both their allegations, calling them 'categorically false and libelous.'

Several more women, who were students of Bailey's when he taught in New Orleans, told The Times-Picayune that they too had sexually inappropriate encounters with the celebrated writer.

Bailey was accused of grooming students as young as 12 and 13 years old while working at Lusher High School in New Orleans, offering to 'mentor' them as writers.

He is then said to have had sex with them - or attempted to have sex with them - when they were young adults.

Bailey is said to have done so while studying Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 novel Lolita with his students, which tells the story of a middle-aged professor's infatuation with a 10 year-old girl.

When one woman, who spoke to The Times-Picayune on condition of anonymity, confronted Bailey via email about a sexual encounter that took place between them, he appeared to acknowledge that he was infamous for his behavior.

'Whatever the rumor mill says, I had sex with no minors or students who were my students at the time,' Bailey said, in the email to the anonymous woman.

'My behavior was deplorable, but I did nothing illegal.'
The farce of adult migrants posing as children is to be tackled in a crackdown by Priti Patel.

A specialist unit is to be set up by the Home Secretary to carry out expert assessments of would-be asylum seekers who claim to be under 18.

It comes after a series of high-profile cases of phonies  including a balding man who appeared to be in his 40s  ending up in school because they said they were minors.

One adult asylum seeker spent six weeks in a Year 11 class before a Home Office investigation revealed he was years older.

Siavash Shah (above), believed to be from Iran, was pictured on social media by a pupil who asked: Hows there a 30-year-old man in our maths class?

A specialist unit is to be set up by Home Secretary Priti Patel (pictured) to carry out expert assessments of would-be asylum seekers who claim to be under 18

A team of social workers will help local authorities nationwide assess new asylum claims, including those by people who arrive on small boats across the Channel.

It comes amid soaring numbers of arrivals from northern France, with 1,000 so far this month alone.

Extra 1.6m EU citizens living in UK At least 1.6 million more Europeans are living in Britain than previously thought, official figures show. The Home Office revealed yesterday that more than 5.6 million have applied to its EU Settlement Scheme, with all but 4 per cent successful. An estimate last year by the House of Commons library suggested the number was 3.4 to four million. The scheme, which closes at the end of the month, allows successful applicants to remain here indefinitely with their pre-Brexit rights. It is the first to formally count EU nationals living in Britain. Advertisement

The Border Force intercepted and brought in 179 people making the dangerous crossing on Wednesday and ten yesterday, bringing this months total to 1,008.

So far this year the total is just under 4,900, compared with a record 8,410 in the whole of last year.

Migrants who say they are under 18 obtain preferential treatment.

Weeding out false cases will make it more likely that ineligible migrants can be deported, potentially saving the taxpayer millions a year.

A Home Office source said: Age assessment experts will go around the country to help councils which are experiencing problems.

'Some local authorities are better at carrying out these age assessments than others, and we are going to improve that system considerably with the measures we are introducing.

The most troubling case of migrants lying about their age was Parsons Green bomber Ahmed Hassan.

He pretended to be 16 and posed as a model asylum seeker before setting off a Mother of Satan bomb on a London Tube train in 2017, injuring 23 people.

His real age remains unknown, but the judge who jailed the Iraqi for 34 years in 2018 said he was satisfied the bomber was over 18, and probably no older than 21.

The news comes amid soaring numbers of arrivals from northern France, with 1,000 so far this month alone. Pictured: Asylum seekers prepare to land in Dover, Kent on Tuesday, June 8

In 2018 a Home Office investigation found an adult asylum seeker spent six weeks as a Year 11 pupil at Stoke High School in Ipswich.

Siavash Shah, believed to be from Iran, was pictured on social media by a pupil who asked: Hows there a 30-year-old man in our maths class?

Other examples of apparent deception include a balding male apparently in his 40s who was being taught in a Coventry school.

The unnamed asylum seeker was moved to solo lessons in December last year after parents complained.
A rail pass for domestic tourism is to be launched later this year.

The initiative is part of a plan to reboot Britains tourist industry and encourage people to holiday in all four nations of the UK by making it cheaper to travel.

It will be similar to BritRail passes which give overseas visitors unlimited train travel around the country.

They range from 96 for two days to 568 for a month, according to retailer Trainline, and also give discounted entry to tourist attractions.

The move will come as a boost to Britons looking to book staycations amid ongoing uncertainty around international travel.

Tourism minister Nigel Huddleston said: 'The Tourism Recovery Plan is our blueprint for how the sector can build back better from the pandemic, even faster than forecasts predict.

'I encourage everyone to rediscover the UKs fantastic tourism offer.'

A rail pass for domestic tourism is to be launched later this year which will be similar to BritRail passes which give overseas visitors unlimited train travel around the country (FILE PHOTO)

The Governments plan also includes a 10million scheme involving National Lottery players being able to claim vouchers which can be redeemed at tourist sites across the UK between September 2021 and March 2022.

This is to encourage trips beyond the peak summer season, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) announces today.

Further details of the rail pass, such as the cost, and lottery vouchers will be announced at a later date.

The measures aim to bring domestic and inbound tourism back to pre-pandemic levels by 2022 and 2023 respectively.

Lord Patrick McLoughlin, chairman of tourism authority VisitBritain, said: The UK Governments Tourism Recovery Plan is a welcome and important step on the industrys road to recovery, recognising the economic potential of the sector, setting out a clear policy direction for the future and outlining the ambitions for domestic and international tourism.

Kate Nicholls, CEO of UK Hospitality, said: The Tourism Recovery Plan is a hugely positive and welcome recognition of the social, economic and cultural importance of the hospitality and tourism sector.

It is not only our third largest export earner but also domestically it delivers jobs, growth and investment at pace and scale in communities across the UK.

Tourism minister Nigel Huddleston (pictured) said that the Tourism Recovery Plan is the blueprint for how the sector can recover from the pandemic

Minister for Scotland, Iain Stewart MP, said: The launch of a new rail pass will encourage people from across the UK to come and explore our beautiful country while giving the tourism and hospitality sectors a much-needed boost.

Secretary of State for Wales, Simon Hart MP, said: Wales has so much to offer visitors, and tourism is key to our economy.

Measures announced today that apply in Wales show the UK Government is delivering for one of the sectors that has been hardest hit.

The DCMS added that there will be a new focus on technology and data, using information obtained from inbound tourists at the border to track trends and help the industry tailor its offering.

A sustainable tourism plan will be developed to consider measures to reduce the environmental impact of travel.

The Government will also consult on introducing a registration scheme for tourist accommodation in England, which would include hotels, B&Bs and short-term rentals booked through sites such as Airbnb.
Uncle ScoMo: Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his nephew by marriage Mitchell James Cole during a Christmas shindig at Kirribilli House in 2018

Prime Minister Scott Morrison's 'dodgy tradie' nephew has been threatened with arrest after a court no-show and could face three years' jail and a $500,000 fine if found guilty of wrongdoing.

It comes as Mitchell James Cole's texts to one of his clients can be revealed which show the well-connected builder offering a series of excuses for failing to turn up to work involving a fallen tree, a funeral, an infection and his grandmother's house.

Cole, 29, who is now based in Hazelbrook in the Blue Mountains, failed to appear in front of Magistrate Peter Feather on Friday over 20 charges brought by NSW Fair Trading.

The charges relate to renovation works Cole performed for four different clients in Sydney's south through 2018 and 2019.

The alleged offences include working as a builder without a license or insurance, and accepting payment without supplying goods for the second time - the charge carrying the most hefty penalty.

A representative for NSW Fair Trading told Parramatta Local Court that Cole had claimed that he had a lawyer, but refused to say who. His alleged solicitor likewise failed to show up.

Magistrate Feather warned that 'it's likely a warrant will be issued for (Cole's) arrest' if he fails to turn up again when the case returns to court on June 25.

Builder Mr Cole has been charged with 20 offences but failed to show his face in Parramatta Local Court on Friday, despite widespread publicity

Menai father-of-two James McCall is one of the alleged victims who Cole has been charged over.

Mr McCall paid Cole about $23,000 to tile his pool and erect some fencing but claims the PM's relative rarely showed up. Meanwhile, he alleged the work that was completed was riddled with issues.

Mr McCall shared a series of messages with Daily Mail Australia where Cole repeatedly offered up excuses for why he or his people couldn't attend the worksite.

Text messages exchanged between James McCall (blue) and tradie Mitchell Cole (in grey)

On July 1, 2019, McCall asked Cole what time the tilers were expected to come around.

Almost 24 hours later, Cole replied: 'Hey mate sorry I've just flown in from Queensland I had a funeral for a mate. I'll chase him up.'

On the morning of July 25, Cole was struck down by further misfortune, after being asked about delivery materials.

'I'm just going doctors an (sic) trying to get over I've had this bad virus yesterday and today. Spoke to delivery driver he's going to place materials near fence.'

Mr McCall wrote to Cole that evening, saying nothing had been dropped off by anyone.

And days later, he asked if Cole was going to be around that week.

Cole said: 'Hey mate sorry didn't get back to you. I had a blood infection. I've got 2 more tests tomorrow then I should be good by then.'

Weeks later, on August 9, Mr McCall texted to say he still hadn't heard from a tiler as promised.

Cole said: 'Hey bro just letting you know I had to leave last night an go to my mums as a tree fell down last night. Me an my cousin will be leaving shortly to come back.'

Mr McCall texted Cole almost daily to check in if 'everything's alright'. About 8am on August 16, he asked the tradesman: 'Hi mate are you around today?'

Cole replied: 'Hey mate, I'll be around tomorrow I've had a couple of dramas with myself and only got back to my nan's I'll call back shortly.'

Mr McCall still had to text him the next day to ask if he was still coming to the property.

In late July 2019, Cole claimed he had a 'virus', then a 'blood infection' to Mr McCall - but would be 'good' the next day after a couple of tests

On August 10, Cole told McCall a tree had fallen, and that was why he had to leave the worksite

'I've had a couple of dramas with myself,' Cole told McCall on August 16

Daily Mail Australia has previously printed a separate series of excuses that Cole offered to a separate client for alleged on-site no shows in September 2018.

Those excuses included being in hospital because of an acute episode of 'stress' and bleeding from his backside.

Stress an (sic) bleeding from the backside Mitchell Cole on why he had been hospitalised in September 2018

The woman, who requested anonymity, said: 'Each day he said he would either come to fix it or continue work or said he had actually been at my place (I was at work).

'He never went or did any of the things he said in the messages that he was doing. All lies.'

In September 2018, Mitchell Cole told a client he hadn't been working as 'I've been in hospital since Sunday afternoon'. Mr Cole claimed that he'd been suffering stress and bleeding from his backside

The regular excuses didn't stop Cole from bragging about his ties to the nation's leader.

The tradesman is the son of Cecily Cole, Jenny Morrison's sister, and is therefore Mr Morrison's nephew by marriage.

Mr McCall said after getting in touch via a Sutherland Shire Facebook group, Cole first came out to his home and 'genuinely came across like he knew what he was doing.

'He was reasonably priced. He had all the gear - he looked legit.'

Mr Cole has been operating under a series of business names over the past few years, including Nexo Build

James McCall alleged that he would call Cole and text him but he wouldn't show up

Mr McCall said he handed $23,000 over for work on his pool plus fencing

He then boasted of being related to the nation's leader, showing photographs of himself at Kirribilli House in Christmas 2018, barely a metre away from the Prime Minister and his wife.

Mr Morrison has previously said he was 'deeply concerned' about allegations against his nephew.

'Mitchell is my nephew by marriage and as a result occasionally attends family events,' he said.

'However, that is the extent of contact I have with Mitchell. Mitchell, like anyone else, should be held fully accountable for any of his actions.'

Cole has previously been convicted of six counts of doing building work unlicensed and fined $60,000.
Abortions hit a record high last year as large numbers of older women terminated pregnancies.

A total of 210,860 abortions were carried out in England and Wales, with women over 35 accounting for an unprecedented 40,000  up by 13,000 in a decade.

Nearly one in four of all pregnancies now ends in abortion. The 2020 total compares to 205,519 in 2019 and 190,406 in 2016.

Department of Health figures showed 40,006 abortions among women over 35  up from 27,046 in 2010. There were also large rises among women aged 25 to 35.

However, the 20,743 abortions among women under 20 was nearly half the 38,269 in 2010.

A total of 210,860 abortions were carried out in England and Wales, with women over 35 accounting for an unprecedented 40,000  up by 13,000 in a decade

The rise in abortions among older women has been linked to pressures to maintain careers and lifestyles at a time when many are in unstable relationships.

Nola Leach, of Christian charity CARE, called the record total incredibly distressing, adding: Every abortion is a tragedy.

Clare Murphy, of BPAS, the UKs biggest abortion provider, said: The pandemic has clearly impacted upon womens pregnancy choices and this is reflected in the figures.

Fewer than a quarter of all abortions last year were carried out for single, unpartnered, women, but more than half of those who underwent abortion were in unmarried cohabiting relationships.

The onset of lockdown last year saw the liberalisation of abortion law to allow telemedical abortion, in which women have only an online consultation before being supplied with abortion drugs.

The new legal regime may have contributed to increased numbers of terminations.

However the Facebook effect among younger women - said to account for lower levels of teenage sex, drinking, drug use and violence since the rise of social media in the late 2000s, appears also to have transformed attitudes to abortion.
Facebook has been blamed for fueling the border crisis as human smugglers are using its platform to organize the passage of desperate migrants into the US in exchange for as little as $1,700.

Dozens of Facebook pages and groups openly offer illegal crossings across the US-Mexico border, posting prices, routes, discount options, videos they claim show successful trips - and even testimonials from what they claim to be happy customers.

The Tech Transparency Project (TTP), which unearthed the groups in a damning report this week, said Facebook has become a 'one stop shop' for 'coyote' people smugglers and dangerous cartels and is contributing to migrants risking their lives on the perilous journey chasing the American dream.

The non-profit also revealed it had handed over details about 50 human smuggler pages in April to Facebook - at the platform's request.

Two months on, the social media giant has failed to remove them all, with 19 still in use on the platform.

One group 'Viaje para estados unidos, cumple tu sueno' translates as 'Travel to the United States, fulfill your dream' (above). Facebook has been blamed for fueling the border crisis

Many of the groups - some with tens of thousands of members - make no effort to disguise their illegal services.

Among the brazen group names are: 'El coyote lopez' and 'Viaje para estados unidos, cumple tu sueno' - translated as 'Travel to the United States, fulfill your dream.'

In one post on the 'El coyote lopez' page, a smuggler advertises travel from Nicaragua into the US for $8,000 per person.

Another post offers single mothers and children a discounted rate of $1,700 if they are willing to hand themselves over to US Border Patrol on arrival into the US.

The price rises to $7,000 to $8,500 to take the migrants all the way to Houston.

It uses flag emojis for Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua to show where the smugglers will pick up the migrants from.

The group has a WhatsApp button for customers to directly connect with smugglers.

In the 'Viaje para estados unidos, cumple tu sueno' group, TTP found smugglers were claiming to have a focus on 'safety', showing previous customers wearing life vests as they cross rivers.

A search by DailyMail.com found that both groups remain active on Facebook Thursday evening.

Pictured agents rescue migrants who were kidnapped from a house in Chihuahua state, Mexico, this week. Human smugglers are using Facebook to organize the passage of desperate migrants into the US in exchange for around $8,000 in cash

A migrant reaches for help after crawling through a gap in the US border wall in Yuma, Arizona. Dozens of Facebook pages and groups openly offer illegal crossings across the US-Mexico border, posting prices, routes and discount options

Several private groups have also been revealed to be advertising illegal border crossing services.

One group called 'Quiero cruzar la frontera' - translated as 'I want to cross the border' - has a staggering 44,000 members.

In it, a smuggler has posted multiple videos of journeys to the border and urged customers to message him privately for a quote on his services.

While Facebook is being used to arrange human smuggling, there is also evidence that the coyotes exploiting the platform's lax enforcement practices have ties to Mexican drug cartels, the TTP said.

Dr. Nilda Garcia said - based on their weapons, gang signs and language - some smugglers appear to be linked to the Sinaloa cartel, which funnels huge amounts of heroin and methamphetamine into the US.

The researchers also found posts promoting $700 fees to take a migrant across cartel territory.

In one post on the 'El coyote lopez' page, a smuggler advertises travel from Nicaragua into the US for $8,000 per person

In the 'Viaje para estados unidos, cumple tu sueno' group, TTP found smugglers were claiming to have a focus on 'safety', showing previous customers wearing life vests as they cross rivers

Failure to pay this right-of-way tax - known as 'cobro de piso' - comes with the risk of extortion, kidnapping or death by the cartels.

Cartels and criminals are exploiting migrants who are desperately trying to cross the border into America.

Dozens of migrants have died along the way. Others have been violently raped, attacked and extorted by smugglers.

So far in 2021, at least 128 people have died attempting to cross the border from Mexico into the US.

By this time last year, 45 had died, according to Dr. Corrine Stern who has tracked the data since 2007.

For those who survive the journey, many are being turned back into Mexico - after spending all their life savings.

Migrants at a shelter set up in a church in Tijuana, Mexico, all told NBC News they first made contact with smugglers on Facebook.

Five men showed the outlet screenshots from Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp where they arranged costs and travel plans with coyotes.

Several private groups have also been revealed to be advertising illegal border crossing services. One group called 'Quiero cruzar la frontera' - translated as 'I want to cross the border' - has a staggering 44,000 members (above)

There is also evidence that the coyotes exploiting the platform's lax enforcement practices have ties to Mexican drug cartels, the TTP said. Dr. Nilda Garcia said - based on their weapons, gang signs and language - some smugglers (above)appear to be linked to the Sinaloa cartel

DailyMail.com has reached out to Facebook for comment.

Facebook told NBC News the company bans content 'that offers to provide or facilitate human smuggling'.

The company said it relies on people, technology and collaboration with other stakeholders to remove content of this nature.

It said it is 'constantly evaluating ways to improve our enforcement so we can most effectively find and remove content that breaks our rules.'

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The TTP said it had handed over details about 50 human smuggler pages in April to Facebook - 19 of them have not been taken down

The federal government is struggling to cope with the influx of migrants crossing the US's southern border with Mexico since Joe Biden took office in January.

After taking office, Biden lifted the Remain in Mexico policy, which kept migrants south of the border while waiting for their hearings, effectively allowing migrants who have applied for asylum to cross into the US and begin legal proceedings.

He also narrowed the ICE's criteria for arrests and deportations and stopped the building of Trump's border wall.

These moves have led to thousands of migrants entering America in recent months, leaving the border's children's centers so full that kids are being forced to spend several days in cramped detention centers meant for adults and sparking a backlog and logistical nightmare in processing the new entrants.

A pair of migrant families from Brazil wait to be processed by Border Patrol agents in Arizona. Customs and Border Protection data released this week showed 180,034 migrants were detained along the Mexico border in May - a record not seen in two decades

At least 128 migrants have died attempting to reach the US border so far in 2021

Customs and Border Protection data released this week showed 180,034 migrants were detained along the Mexico border in May - a record not seen in two decades.

Vice President Kamala Harris visited Guatemala and Mexico this week to meet with their leaders in an effort to tackle 'root causes' of the mass migration into America.

Harris sent a clear message to migrants: 'Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border.'
Russia provoked fury yesterday by claiming jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was a US agent.

A Moscow court declared his political party extremist and banned groups founded by the activist, pictured, in the latest move to silence opponents of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The Moscow City Courts ruling prevents anyone associated with Mr Navalnys Anti-Corruption Foundation and his regional network from seeking public office.

The extremism label also carries lengthy prison terms for those who have worked with the organisations, donated to them or even simply shared the groups materials.

Russia claimed jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was a US agent yesterday, declaring his political party extremist and banning groups founded by the activist, pictured, in the latest move to silence opponents of Russian president Vladimir Putin

Amid condemnation over the court ruling from Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, the EU and the US, the Kremlin said Washington was quick to comment because the jailed critic was in fact working for them.

Navalny was arrested in January upon returning from Germany where he spent months recovering from a nerve agent assassination attempt. He was jailed for violating his parole while in hospital.

The US State Department has called the extremist label particularly disturbing and said it was part of a pattern of restricting fundamental rights in Russia.

In a radio interview, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the response showed the extent of US interference in Russias affairs.

Can you imagine seeing such an instant reaction from the State Department to a domestic or some other internal decision in another country? she said in the interview broadcast on YouTube and state radio.

Then in a few hours they make a special statement. This means that they are politically involved in the story, she said, adding that Washington was thus exposing its agents.

Amid condemnation over the court ruling from Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab (pictured), the EU and the US, the Kremlin said Washington was quick to comment because the jailed critic was in fact working for them

They show such political zeal because it touches those whom they supervised, those whom they supported politically and in other ways, Zakharova said.

In February, Navalny was given a two and a half-year prison term for violating the terms of a suspended sentence from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that has been widely dismissed as politically motivated.

The ruling by a Moscow Court to label Mr Navalnys organisations as extremist groups marks the most serious effort to date by the Russian Government to suppress the independent political opposition, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said yesterday.

Mr Raab added: The ruling that the anti-corruption foundation FBK is an extremist organisation is perverse.

It is another Kafka-esque attack on those standing up against corruption and for open societies, and is a deliberate attempt effectively outlaw genuine political opposition in Russia.
Australia will refurbish its six Collins-class submarines to keep them in service before a new fleet arrives from 2035.

The $10billion operation, which involves gutting the submarines and replacing the systems including motors, batteries and censors, will give each warship an extra decade of life.

From 2026 the submarines will be hauled in for a two-year service one after the other so Australia has at least five in the water at any time, reported The Australian.

Australia will refurbish its six Collins-class submarines (pictured is the Sheean in Tasmania in April) to keep them in service before a new fleet arrives in 2035

HMAS Rankin conducts helicopter transfers in Cockburn Sound, Western Australia in February as part of Rankin's training assessments to ensure the boat is ready to deploy

The federal government wants to enhance the country's defence capability in the face of China's increasingly assertive foreign policy which Scott Morrison has warned could lead to conflict.

The communist superpower has an estimated 70 submarines in the region.

'We need to be realistic about what lies ahead by way of threat in our own region and the submarine capacity is a significant part of how we mitigate that risk and it's important we get the program right,' Defence Minister Peter Dutton said.

The decision comes amid doubts over Canberra's $50 billion deal for 12 new submarines built by French shipbuilder Naval Group.

Australia in 2016 selected Naval Group to build a new submarine fleet to replace its aging Collins submarines and significantly expand its military to protect strategic and trade interests in the Asia-Pacific.

The deal, one of the world's most lucrative defence deals, has been beset by multiple cost and timetable blowouts due to Canberra's requirement that the majority of the manufacturing and components be sourced locally.

From 2026 the submarines will be hauled in for a two-year service one after the other so Australia has at least five in the water at any time. Pictured: The Sheean in Tasmania in April

As a result, Australian defence officials to last month said they were undertaking 'contingency planning'.

'Clearly there have been problems with the arrangements with Naval Group,' Mr Dutton told The Australian.

'There has been concern on both sides in relation to the programme and I need to make sure that we have the best capacity available to us.'

Australia first discussed replacing its trouble-plagued Collins class submarines nearly a decade ago. The Collins submarines were due to be retired in the next few years.

The first of Australia's six Collins-class submarines reaches the end of its lifespan in 2026.

This is several years before the first of the new fleet, a diesel-electric version of Naval Group's 5,000-tonne Barracuda nuclear-powered submarine, is scheduled to be delivered. The final new submarine will be operational during the 2050s.

Scott Morrison will meet with French President Emmanuel Macron next week and the two are expected to discuss the submarine deal.

Since president Xi Jinping came to power, and particularly in recent months, China has pushed an increasingly assertive foreign policy under which it has reinforced territorial claims in the South China Sea, killed Indian troops in the Himalayas and frequently flown fighter jets over Taiwan.

In a speech on Thursday, Mr Morrison said the risk of war with China in the Indo-Pacific region is growing and the world is facing uncertainty not seen since the 1930s as he rallied Australia's allies to take action against the threat posed by Beijing.

In a major foreign policy speech in Perth ahead of his trip to the UK on Friday, Mr Morrison outlined how Australia can work with international partners to counter communist China and make the world safe for liberal democracies to flourish in.

Mr Morrison has warned that the risk of conflict in the Pacific is growing. Pictured: Chinese troops in Mongolia

Mr Morrison warned that China's growing might and strategic competition with the US, combined with the economic damage and instability caused by the pandemic, means the Indo-Pacific region is facing the real prospect of war.

'The risks of miscalculation and conflict are growing,' he said in his speech.

'The simple reality is that Australia's strategic environment has changed significantly over recent years.

'Accelerating trends are working against our interests. And the technological edge enjoyed historically by Australia and our allies is under challenge.'

The risks of miscalculation and conflict are growing Australian PM Scott Morrison

Mr Morrison warned the battle for dominance between the US and China - which is expected to become the world's largest economy in 2032 - 'threatens global and regional stability, upon which our security, prosperity and way of life depends.'

The biggest threats Australia faces include 'rapid military modernisation, tension over territorial claims, heighted economic coercion, enhanced disinformation, foreign interference and cyber threats, enabled by new and emerging technologies', he said.

Last year the Prime Minister warned that a foreign state actor had launched a series of cyber attacks on Australian institutions such as banks, hospitals and government agencies. He did not name China but sources said Beijing was behind the ongoing threat.

In the face of a growing threat, Mr Morrison will remind allies that his government is spending $270billion to beef-up its defence forces over the next ten years with new 370km-range missiles, state-of-the-art drones, artillery systems and an 800 extra troops.
The Duchess of Cambridge is set to host a seminar with First Lady Jill Biden to discuss female empowerment at the G7 summit today

The Duchess of Cambridge and US First Lady Jill Biden are set to hold a discussion on female empowerment as the G7 summit gets underway in Cornwall later today.

Kate Middleton and Mrs Biden will meet for the first time and will also discuss children and early education during their seminar.

This will be the third time Kate, 39, has met with a President and his wife having met Barack and Michelle Obama back in 2011 and 2016.

For First Lady Jill Biden, 70, the G7 summit marks the first time she has left the US since husband Joe became president.

According to CNN, the pair are also set to tour a school in Cornwall as part of their meeting later today.

The summit is expected to get underway tomorrow afternoon, with world leaders convening on the beach for a 'family photo' at 2pm.

The first session is set to be about 'building back better' after the pandemic for the G7 countries and around the world.

In the evening, the Queen and Prince Charles are set to host a reception at the Eden Project for the world leaders and their spouses.

William and Kate will join the Queen, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall at the reception at the Eden Project on Friday evening.

US First Lady Jill Biden described the summit and their visit to the UK as a 'beautiful beginning'

This will mark the first time the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have attended official G7 summit events, marking another milestone in their progression as senior royals.

Prince Charles will host an additional reception where he will brief leaders on his 'sustainable markets initiative'.

The Royal Family will then depart and the leaders and their spouses will then have dinner, prepared by local chef Emily Scott before returning to the summit venue at Carbis Bay.

On Sunday, President Biden and his wife Jill will travel to Windsor Castle for an audience with the Queen - their first official meeting since he became president.

When asked about the visit, Jill Biden said: 'Well, we're hoping to focus, I think, on education.

'Joe and I are both looking forward to meeting the Queen. That's an exciting part of the visit for us.

G7 summit will get underway this afternoon with leaders meeting for a photo op on the beach

'We've looked forward to this for weeks and now it's finally here. It's a beautiful beginning.'

The Big Jubilee Lunch will form part of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee celebrations in 2022 and during Friday the monarch, joined by Kate and Camilla, will attend an event in celebration of The Big Lunch, an initiative spearheaded by the Eden Project.

The royal party will meet local Big Lunch volunteers and thank them for their efforts supporting their communities through the challenges of the past year.
Up to $400 billion in COVID unemployment relief was stolen - and more than half that cash was funneled to criminals in Russia, China and Nigeria, it was claimed.

The United States lost as much as 50% of all unemployment relief, as much as $400 billion, through fraudulent claims, Blake Hall told Axios. Hall is the CEO of ID.me CEO, a company that provides fraud prevention services.

Some experts are considering the theft a matter of national security with cash ending up in the hands of criminal groups based in Russia, China and Nigeria.

More than 70% of the $400 billion feared to have been stolen was pilfered by state-backed foreign criminal groups, Haywood Talcove told Axios.

'These groups are definitely backed by the state,' said Talcove, the CEO of LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

U.S. street gangs reportedly stole much of the rest of the money.

Fraud prevention experts have claimed that up to half of unemployment money doled out during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States may have been stolen

Blake Hall, left, said the U.S. lost as much as 50% of all unemployment relief, as much as $400 billion, through fraudulent claims. Haywood Talcove, right, said that more than 70% of the stolen funds were pilfered by state-backed foreign criminal groups

A chart shows the number of new US jobless claims fall since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic

White House economist Gene Sperling noted to Axios that much of the fraud happened during the administration of former President Donald Trump.

'Widespread fraud at the state level in pandemic unemployment insurance during the previous Administration is one of the most serious challenges we inherited,' Sperling told Axios.

'President Biden has been clear that this type of activity from criminal syndicates is despicable and unacceptable. It is why we passed $2 billion for UI modernizations in the American Rescue Plan, instituted a Department of Justice Anti-Fraud Task Force and an all-of-government Identity Theft and Public Benefits Initiative.'

Experts and politicians had assumed that some money would be stolen through fraud as unemployment systems in states across the country were not prepared to handle the demands of the pandemic.

However, the estimates provided by Hall and Talcove show the incredible extent of possible unemployment insurance fraud over the last year.

Axios explained that some thieves were likely able to defraud the government by stealing people's personal information to impersonate them and claim the money while others may have tricked real claimants into giving them their information.

Once the information was stolen, lower-level criminals, called 'mules,' would withdraw the money from ATMs and convert it to Bitcoin - which can be sent in a way that is impossible to trace - to transfer it abroad.

The U.S. Department of Labor notes on its website that most victims of unemployment identity theft 'are unaware that claims have been filed' and collected using their identities.

'Many people only find out unemployment identity theft occurred when they receive something in the mail, such as a payment or state issued 1099-G tax form thats incorrect or for benefits not received,' the website reads.

The Labor Department maintains a database of contact information for individual states for those who believe they have been a victim of unemployment identity theft.

Activists take part in a protest outside of the Old Ebbitt Grill to call for a full minimum wage with tips for restaurant workers in Washington DC.

People walk by a Help Wanted sign in the Queens borough of New York City on June 4, 2021 in New York City

In April, the IRS noted that it had documented a 'surge in fraudulent unemployment claims filed by organized crime rings using stolen identities.'

'The Department of Justice recently warned that fraudsters are creating websites mimicking unemployment benefit websites, including state workforce agency (SWA) websites, for the purpose of unlawfully capturing consumers personal information,' the IRS website reads.

'To lure consumers to these fake websites, fraudsters send spam text messages and emails purporting to be from an SWA and containing a link.'

The memo continues: 'The fake websites are designed to trick consumers into thinking they are applying for unemployment benefits and disclosing personally identifiable information and other sensitive data. That information can then be used by fraudsters to commit identity theft.'

The U.S. economy added 559,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate dipped to 5.8 percent, the Labor Department said on June 4.
Democratic Representative Adam Schiff said Donald Trump's Justice Department broke rules brought in after Watergate by secretly trawling his communications to try and identify the source of embarrassing leaks.

Schiff and his fellow representative Eric Swalwell had data from their Apple devices seized and analysed as part of a probe revealed Thursday.

And Schiff - who also sits on the House Intelligence Committee - shared his outrage with Chris Cuomo on CNN Thursday.

He told Cuomo he had never heard of a White House administration opening such a probe, adding: 'And you know we brought about these new norms after Watergate to prevent exactly this kind of abuse. But they didn't survive this presidency and -- but it is shocking.'

Schiff and Swalwell - both members of the House Intelligence Committee - had metadata taken from their devices by Justice Department prosecutors as officials tried to work out who was leaking information about meetings between Trump associates and Russian leaders.

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions began the probe in 2017, with more records seized in 2018. A dozen people with links to the House Intelligence Committee - which is privy to classified intelligence - had their metadata examined.

Their family members - including one minor child - were also targeted, amid concerns the suspected leakers may have been using children's devices to try and cover their tracks.

Justice Department prosecutors also sought a gag order to keep the probe secret, with none of those whose data was targeted aware of what was going on.

Justice Department prosecutors seized metadata records from Apple for accounts belonging to Rep. Adam Schiff, pictured, and other members of the House Intelligence Committee

Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, pictured, revealed he also had data from their Apple devices secretly seized by the Trump administration

They finally found last month, with Schiff and Swalwell both sharing their outrage in separate CNN interviews on Thursday night.

Schiff told Chris Cuomo he was 'shocked but not surprised' by the 'terrible abuse of the rule of law,' and called for an inquiry into the DoJ probe.

He added: 'I love my experience there. And to see how it was turned into this bludgeon to go after the president's enemies and a shield to protect those who lied for him, people like Roger stone and Mike Flynn and others, it's disgraceful, but it's also, such a body blow to our democracy.'

Schiff also told the Times: 'It is increasingly apparent that those demands did not fall on deaf ears.'

'The politicization of the department and the attacks on the rule of law are among the most dangerous assaults on our democracy carried out by the former president.'

Speaking on Don Lemon's show later on Thursday, Swalwell said: 'It's wrong. This is what they do - they smear.'

The subpoenas which were used to obtain the information were first revealed to the The New York Times.

Trump and his administration were infuriated after detailed conversations between his aides and the Russian ambassador to the US were leaked shortly after he took office in January 2017.

The revelations show the extent of Trump's obsession over leaks and the extraordinary lengths his administration would go through to investigate them

They are said to have identified then-FBI director James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe as possible sources for leaks, as well as the House Intelligence Committee.

Embarrassing leaks included details of Trump's first national security Michael flynn's conversations with Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Flynn was later fired and charged, then later convicted, for lying to the FBI about his contact with Russia. He was later pardoned by Trump.

The seized data ultimately did not tie members of the House Intelligence Committee - including Schiff - to leaks to the press regarding contacts between associates of Donald Trump and Russia, the outlet reported. Exactly how much was seized remains unknown.

Schiff and other members of the committee had access to secret material, including intelligence on the Trump administration's ties to Russians.

The Justice Department also secured a gag order against Apple preventing them from telling the lawmakers they were being investigated, sources told the outlet. That gag order finally expired this year and Apple told the committee members that they were investigated last month.

Those investigators, who worked under then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, discussed if the Justice Department should close its investigation into the leaks of the classified information to the press.

Schiff released a statement on Thursday addressing the revelations

Sessions, 74, was ultimately forced out as Attorney General and replaced by William Barr - who revived attempts to investigate Schiff and his alleged connection to information leaks, The New York Times reported.

He is said to have done so after accusing investigators tasked with trying to identify the leakers of deliberately dragging their heels.

Barr even moved Osmar Benvenuto, a New Jersey prosecutor, to the main Justice Department offices in February 2020 to work on the case related to Schiff and about six others, sources told the outlet.

A former Justice Department leak investigator David Laufman also condemned the probes begun by Sessions and continued by Barr.

He said: 'Notwithstanding whether there was sufficient predication for the leak investigation itself, including family members and minor children strikes me as extremely aggressive.

'In combination with former President Trumps unmistakable vendetta against Congressman Schiff, it raises serious questions about whether the manner in which this investigation was conducted was influenced by political considerations rather than purely legal ones.'

Prosecutors also subpoenaed records from news reporters at The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN in an attempt to identify their confidential sources, which also remained secret until the Justice Department recently disclosed them.

The revelations show the extent of Trump's obsession over leaks and the extraordinary lengths his administration would go through to investigate them.

The Justice Department routinely investigates leaks of classified information - though officials noted to The New York Times that they could not recall any time when a lawmaker's records had been seized.

'President Trump repeatedly and fragrantly demanded that the Department of Justice carry out his political will, and tried to use the Department as a cudgel against his political opponents and members of the media,' Schiff said in a statement released on Thursday.

'It is increasingly apparent that those demands did not fall on deaf ears. The politicization of the Department and the attacks on the rule of law are among the most dangerous assaults on our democracy carried out by the former President.'

He added: 'Though we were informed by the Department in May that this investigation is closed, I believe more answers are needed, which is why I believe the Inspector General should investigate this and other cases that suggest the weaponization of law enforcement by a corrupt president.'

News reports based on sensitive or classified information began to surface almost immediately after Trump was inaugurated in 2017.

Among the first leaks, to The New York Times, included details of conversations between Sergey I. Kislyak, then Russias ambassador to the United States, and some of Trump's top aides.

U.S. intelligence agencies had already started investigating if the Trump campaign colluded with Russians in attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. Trump's White House was resolved to prosecute anyone who leaked information to the press.

The Justice Department started to look into Obama administration national security officials and opened cases focusing on former FBI director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director deputy Andrew McCabe, sources told The New York Times.

A grand jury subpoenaed Apple and another internet service provider, which was not revealed, for the the committee's Democratic members, aides and even members of their families - including a minor, The New York Times reported.

It was not clear if any Republicans were also subpoenaed and the outlet noted that the records for members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were seemingly not subpoenaed.
A drug-fuelled mechanic who bashed and repeatedly raped an ex-girlfriend during a horrific 40-hour ordeal will likely walk free from jail in a little over five years.

Matthew Raku Raku, 26, had kidnapped his ex-girlfriend using a screwdriver after luring her out of her home on Aug. 12 2019, having refused to accept their relationship was over.

He then subjected to her a sustained period of abuse and violence.

Mathew Raku Raku, 26, kidnapped a woman and threatened to kill her during a terrifying ride into country Victoria where he repeatedly raped her

Judge Paul Higham is one of the County Court of Victoria's most experienced judges in dealing with sex offenders

He was sentenced in the County Court of Victoria on Friday by Judge Paul Higham, who expressed sympathy in jailing the violent sex offender to a minimum jail period of just six years.

Raku Raku, from Rosebud - 75kms south of Melbourne - has already spent close to a year behind bars on remand while he contemplated challenging the rape allegations.

In the end, he pleaded guilty to two counts of rape and one each of kidnapping, making threats to kill and injure, theft and other related offences.

'Mr Raku Raku, let me say this to you directly,' Judge Higham said upon delivering his sentence.

'It is a heavy duty that sits on the court to sentence a young man such as you to prison for a substantial term of imprisonment.

'I have tried to structure the sentence so that you don't lose hope and that also you (are) able to be supported in the community should you obtain parole.

'You will certainly still be - in the mind of this old judge - a young man and if you're able to give up and never use methamphetamine again, I'm sure you can turn to being the man your mum and current partner describe.'

Raku Raku's victim had been tuned into the video link hearing to watch her tormentor receive the court's definition of justice.

In her own words, her life had been completely ruined by Raku Raku.

She now lives in fear, alone and has become a drunken wreck that suffers suicidal thoughts, severe depression and terrifying flashbacks.

'I feel hopeless and that I don't deserve a happy life,' she had told Judge Higham.

The young woman had endured what Judge Higham described as nothing short of a 'nightmare' at the hands of Raku Raku.

The court heard she had engaged in a brief relationship with him before dumping the marine mechanic amid claims of violent and controlling abuse.

Raku Raku drove his terrified victim across Victoria, making her steal fuel along the way as he threatened to kill her. He would rape her repeatedly inside a cold shack

But Raku Raku, could not take 'no' for an answer.

On August 12, 2019, he arrived at his victim's home armed with a screwdriver and refused to leave.

'Once outside, her nightmare began,' Judge Higham said.

The court heard Raku Raku slammed her head into the side of the car and threw her inside.

He told the woman he had nothing to live for.

'You gave her the choice of a bullet in the head, or a body bag,' Judge Higham said.

Raku Raku drove her more than four hours to a remote shack in Glenthompson that was freezing cold.

'You brought this upon yourself,' he told the woman before raping her.

The next day he drove the woman around country Victoria before throttling and raping her again at the deserted shack.

The court heard Raku Raku would make his terrified captive fill up his car with fuel before they drove off without paying - all the while begging to be released.

After nearly two days of misery, Raku Raku let her go, warning that if she ratted him out he would kill her.

He was arrested the following day.

Raku Raku would later deny raping his victim, telling detectives she 'did not say no'.

Doctors told the court Raku Raku had believed he was 'invincible' while smashed on meth and that he could not be hurt or captured by police.

Mathew Raku Raku, 26, was sentenced in the County Court on Friday to a minimum six years' jail

The County Court of Victoria deals with some of the state's most vicious and vile rapists

Judge Higham accepted Raku Raku had been driven by a 'monstrous sense of entitlement'.

'You decided that you would show (her) who was boss. She would bend to your will or she would suffer the consequences,' he said.

The court heard the woman had every reason to fear for her life during the ordeal.

'Rape has nothing to do with desire, it has nothing to do with sexual attraction. It is quite simply a crime of invasive violence. It uses the physical expressions of intimacy to exert power, control and dominance,' Judge Higham said.

'And when used against an intimate partner it is a betrayal of any loving, mutual or respectful relationship.'

He sentenced Raku Raku to a maximum sentence of nine years and eight months in jail.
A woman who fell into a coma ten months ago has woken up to discover that she is now a mother to a baby girl.

Cristina Rosi, 37, from Monte San Savino, in Tuscany, was seven months pregnant when she suffered a heart attack and fell into a coma in July last year.

Her daughter Caterina was delivered by doctors via an emergency Caesarean section while Ms Rosi remained in a coma.

Now, ten months after the ordeal, Ms Rosi's husband Gabriele Succi, 42, described the 'real joy' that he and his wife were finally able to embrace after 'so much suffering'.

Cristina Rosi, 37, from Monte San Savino, in Tuscany, was seven months pregnant when she suffered a heart attack and fell into a coma last year

He also said that Ms Rosi's very fist word after she awoke from her coma was: 'Mamma'.

Speaking to the Italian paper La Nazione Mr Succi said: 'It's a real joy after so much suffering. Even the doctors in the room have confirmed that Cristina has said her first word.'

The first-time mother has now been transferred to a clinic in Austria where she will receive 24-hour specialist care and undergo a neurological rehabilitation programme during her recovery.

Mr Succi said that staff at the hospital have also removed his wife's tracheostomy tube in order to allow her to breathe for herself.

He continued: 'My wife breathes and swallows by herself.

'Seeing her progress and thinking about how she was only a few months ago with all the tests she had to overcome, it seems like a miracle.'

Mr Succi later told the Arezzo Notizie news website: 'Cristina is hardly recognisable now.

'She's more relaxed, they removed her tracheotomy [and] through a pump they are giving her a medicine that should lead to other physical progress.'

Ms Rosi's daughter Caterina was delivered by doctors via an emergency Caesarean section

Ms Rosi has now been transferred to a clinic in Austria where she will receive 24-hour specialist care

Ms Rosi's treatment, which sees her receive intense physiotherapy sessions, is now been funded by a GoFundMe page set up by her husband, which has so far raised more than 155,176 (180,572).

However Mr Succi is now hoping to raise the amount to 257,808 (300,000) in order to keep on financing his wife's treatment abroad.

Mr Succi added: 'So far we have been able to guarantee Cristina the therapies. We cannot stop now. My wife and daughter deserve to go home in the best possible condition.'

In an effort to boost donations, Margherita Scarpellini, the Monte San Savino mayor, wrote on Facebook last year: 'Apart from donations, it is important to tell Cristina's story so that help arrives as fast as possible from as many people as possible.'
A driver who was already banned from the roads until 2062 allegedly sped through a red light and smashed into a Mercedes.

The 52-year-old Ford Falcon driver collided with the Mercedes driven by a 37-year-old man in Huntingwood, western Sydney, about 3.55pm on Thursday.

He allegedly breezed through the intersection of Great Western Highway and Huntingwood Drive at speed and caused the crash.

Paramedics were called the to scene, but found both driver were uninjured.

The Falcon allegedly breezed through the intersection of Great Western Highway and Huntingwood Drive in Huntingwood, western Sydney, at speed and caused the crash

When police began to investigate the crash they quickly discovered the Falcon driver's license was suspended until 2062.

He was arrested and charged with driving with a disqualified license - for the second time.

The driver was charged with running a red light, and dangerous or reckless driving at speed for the second time, over the crash itself.

He was denied bail and will face Blacktown Local Court on Friday.
A man has been accused of indecently exposing himself to two young girls after making inappropriate comments on a Melbourne train.

Police were told two young female passengers were approached by a man who exposed his buttocks and made disgusting remarks on a carriage on March 20.

The man boarded the train at Caufield and got off at Bentleigh at about 7pm.

A man has been accused of indecently exposing himself to two girls on a Melbourne train. Police have released this image of a man they want to speak to

Police have released CCTV images of a man who they believe can assist with their enquiries.

The man is believed to be about 35-years-old, roughly 180cm tall with a shaved head and a tattoo on his right arm.

He was wearing light blue jeans, white runners and a grey t-shirt, carrying a blue suitcase.

Anyone who has information or recognises the man is urged to contact police.
Schools have been placed into lockdown following reports of gunshots outside a New Zealand shopping centre.

Police were called to the scene following reports a firearm had been discharged on Milson Line at Milson, in Palmerston North, at 10.50am on Friday.

The shots are understood to have been fired near the local shopping centre which is located near numerous schools in the area.

Police were called to the scene following reports a firearm had been discharged on Milson Line at Milson, in Palmerston North, at 10.50am on Friday

Police received reports of gunshots on Milson Line (pictured) at Palmerston North on Friday morning

Freyberg High School was placed into lockdown for 15 minutes following the incident.

Principal Peter Brooks said he had received a text alert on his phone.

'No one knows why we went into lockdown,' he said. 'But I saw the armed offenders squad off in the distance, across Skoglund park.'

Roslyn School, which teaches students up to Year 8, was also placed into lockdown.

The school posted on its Facebook page that it was not in imminent danger and that it was just taking a 'precautionary measure'.

'Please do not come to school to collect children they are all safe,' the post read.

'We will keep you updated as advised by the Police.'

The Armed Offenders Squad were dispatched and police have cordoned off Tweed, Ruahine and Featherston streets.

There have been no reports of injuries.
Former teacher Chris Dawson will face trial for his wife's murder after failing to permanently halt criminal proceedings due to the negative pre-trial publicity.

The 72-year-old had argued his chances for a fair trial were irreparably damaged by extensive pre-trial publicity including a podcast.

The passage of almost four decades since his wife's alleged murder in January 1982 should also render any trial unfair, he argued.

Dawson pleaded not guilty to murdering his wife, Lynette Dawson, in Bayview in Sydney's north on or about January 8, 1982.

Chris Dawson (left) is charged with murdering his wife Lynette (right) who disappeared from Sydney's northern beaches nearly 40 years ago

The NSW Supreme Court in September 2020 granted a nine-month stay on a trial but denied Dawson's bid to permanently halt proceedings.

Dawson appealed that decision to the Court of Criminal Appeal, which on Friday said permanent stays should be reserved for the 'most extreme cases'.

That occurred where a trial judge could do nothing during the trial to relieve the unfairness, the appeal court said in a written summary.

While it agreed the prejudice to Mr Dawson caused by the pre-trial publicity and delay in this case was 'very serious', it could be 'remedied or sufficiently ameliorated by careful directions which the judge at the trial will give to the jury', the court said.

Dawson argued his chances for a fair trial were irreparably damaged by extensive pre-trial publicity including a podcast

The former teacher and Newtown Jets rugby league player has repeatedly claimed Ms Dawson is alive and that several people have seen her since she vanished from their northern beaches home in January 1982

Chief Justice Tom Bathurst also noted that fairness toward the accused was a strong consideration but not the only one in deciding whether a trail proceeds.

The public interest of the community in bringing those charged with serious criminal offences to trial must also be taken into account, he said.

The court's full reasons for allowing the trail were suppressed.

Evidence and submissions made in the appeal were also shielded by a court order.
Pet owners convicted of serious cruelty such as bestiality will be banned from ever owning or working with animals.

NSW is the first state to implement such a lifetime ban after a two-year campaign by state Animal Justice Party MP Emma Hurst.

'Shockingly, no one has ever been banned from animal guardianship or working with animals after a successful conviction of serious animal cruelty or bestiality in NSW,' she said.

Abusers charged with serious animal cruelty offences such as bestiality will be banned from owning pets (Stock)

'We have witnessed some chilling cases over the past two years where animal abusers have been allowed to continue to breed animals, work alongside animals and even buy animals after their convictions.

'Now those found guilty will automatically be prohibited from having animals in their care or working with animals for life.'

In one instance, the owner of a Sydney petting zoo who went to jail for for stabbing a dog with a pitchfork six times before hanging it on a tree to die was allowed to continue to work with animals.

Other abusers have been convicted of killing kangaroos with a knife, and firing arrows into a puppy.

'Sadly nobody convicted of these acts have been banned from working with, or having animals in their care, which means animals still remain at risk to these perpetrators today,' Ms Hurst said.
Five Victorians have been caught illegally fleeing the locked down state while attempting to cross the Queensland border.

Deputy police commissioner Steve Gollschewski on Friday revealed five new people tried to illegally enter the Sunshine State.

'That has been a combination of people not getting border passes, but also in some instances, people putting false declarations on their border passes,' Mr Gollschewski said.

Two people were each slapped with $4003 fines after crossing the Goondiwindi border.

'On top of that, we have had another male person who has come into Dalby via the Coolangatta border who has also been fined for having an untrue declaration on their border pass,' Mr Gollschewski said.

Five Victorians have been caught illegally fleeing the locked down state while attempting to cross the Queensland border

Victoria has recorded no new locally acquired cases of coronavirus as Melbourne emerges from a two-week lockdown

The Health Department on Friday confirmed there were no new local cases in the state and just one new case in hotel quarantine

Victoria has recorded no new locally acquired cases of coronavirus as Melbourne emerges from a two-week lockdown.

The Health Department on Friday confirmed there were no new local cases in the state and just one new case in hotel quarantine.

It marks the first day without a local case of COVID-19 since May 24, when a family tested positive for the virus and ended the state's 86-day streak without community transmission.

It comes after Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk took a swipe at the Melbourne couple who arrived while infected with coronavirus, telling them they should never have left home.

Ms Palaszczuk says there have been no cases of community transmission so far but also warned Queensland is not yet out of the woods.

'Thankfully today zero new cases. We would have expected to see a couple of community cases from that couple if it was going to be in the community,' she told reporters on Friday.

'The next 24 to 48 hours - we'll be monitoring that very closely.'

Police are investigating the couple's decision to leave Melbourne during a lockdown and drive through NSW to Queensland.

'Everyone needs to do the right thing. There was a lockdown on ... they shouldn't have left Victoria. It just puts people at risk,' the premier said.

Friday's figures showed Queensland had no new coronavirus cases either in the community or in hotel quarantine, with almost 6000 tests carried out in the past 24 hours and more than 11,000 vaccinations given.

A temporary, walk-in vaccination hub at the Caloundra Indoor Stadium will open its doors this weekend in response to the threat.

The couple stayed with the woman's parents in Caloundra and visited sites on the Sunshine Coast before they tested positive. They also stopped at sites in Goondiwindi and Toowoomba.

Sunshine Coast mayor Mark Jamison says the community is outraged by the couple's 'foolish' actions.

'People are obviously angry and annoyed that somebody would put the health of this region and others at risk by foolishly taking that trip from Melbourne,' he has told the Nine network.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk took a swipe at the Melbourne couple who arrived while infected with coronavirus, telling them they should never have left home

Victorian authorities have revealed the couple left the state on June 1, when greater Melbourne was in a snap lockdown to control community transmission

'Clearly it's had an impact on the business community in and around Caloundra, particularly at the exposure sites.'

Goondiwindi mayor Lawrence Springborg says there appears to have been a flagrant breach of Covid-19 hotspot protocols, and his community has been put at risk as a result of that.

Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young has expressed some optimism that community transmission might be avoided in Queensland, because the couple were in the late stages of their infections when they entered the state.

Victorian authorities have revealed the couple left the state on June 1, when greater Melbourne was in a snap lockdown to control community transmission.

They were relocating permanently to Queensland so the husband could take up a new job.

Acting Victorian Premier James Merlino has said the couple did not breach any state restrictions by leaving, and moving interstate is allowed during lockdowns.

But Dr Young has said the couple didn't apply for a travel exemption to enter Queensland and it's up to police to investigate whether they came through under any other process.
Melbourne ISIS bride Zehra Duman walked free from a Turkish jail just two months into a seven year jail sentence, it was revealed today.

And the former teen Australian terror recruiter is now living a new life with her two children as a free woman in Turkey, according to an ABC investigation.

Duman fled her family in Melbourne in 2014 at just 19 to sneak into Syria after being recruited to ISIS by Australian partyboy turned jihad extremist, Mahmoud Abdullatif.

Melbourne ISIS bride Zehra Duman (left) walked free from Turkish jail just two months into a seven year jail sentence. Aged 19, Duman fled her family in Melbourne in 2014 to sneak into Syria after being recruited to ISIS by Australian partyboy turned jihad extremist, Mahmoud Abdullatif (right)

Last September Zehra Duman, now 26, was jailed by a Turkish court for recruiting brides to join ISIS and spruiking Islamic State propaganda on social media in messages like these pictured, said to have been written by Duman on Twitter

She later married him and allegedly masterminded an ISIS social media campaign ordering followers to murder Australians, Britons and Americans.

She became a key ISIS recruiter, posing with machine guns and on the bonnets of luxury cars stolen by the terrorists as she urged other Westerners to leave civilisation and join the Islamic regime.

After Abdullatif's death in a US air strike, she then married two more ISIS fighters in quick succession who each fathered a child with Duman before they too were killed.

Zehra Duman (pictured here as a young fresh-faced teenager) had dual Australian-Turkish citizenship through her family heritage

Following the fall of ISIS in 2019, Duman was one of at least 65 Australian women and children among 70,000 refugees living in squalid conditions at a camp in north-eastern Syria near the Iraq border.

She and her family begged to be allowed back to Australia - but she was stripped of her citizenship by the government because she also had Turkish citizenship.

Duman was later smuggled over the border into Turkey where she was immediately arrested by authorities.

Following the fall of ISIS in 2019, Zehra Duman (believed to be seen here wearing the burka) was one of at least 65 Australian women and children among 70,000 refugees living in a camp in north-eastern Syria near the Iraq border

Last September Duman, now 26, was jailed by a Turkish court for recruiting brides to join ISIS and sharing Islamic State propaganda on social media.

She was jailed for six years and 10 months - but just two months later she re-appeared at another court in Gaziantep in southern Turkey where she was released.

Documents unearthed by the ABC reveal the court heard she was the only person who could care for her two children, Jarrah, five, and Layla, two.

The new information reveals she was quietly released back onto the streets by the court in November and has been living at an undisclosed location ever since.

Following the fall of ISIS in 2019, Duman was one of at least 65 Australian women and children among 70,000 refugees living in squalid conditions at a camp in north-eastern Syria near the Iraq border

The papers revealed Duman told the court she was co-erced into the second and third marriages, and was even jailed as a spy by ISIS when she first tried to flee to Turkey after the death of her second husband.

An Arab-Australian managed to get her out of the ISIS jail by marrying her and fathered her second child before he too was killed.

Duman insisted to the court that despite the social media posts in her name, she had only been living in ISIS-held areas - and had no formal role with the terror group.

The Turkish court took mercy on her and released her on parole. Her Melbourne family are believed to have relocated to Turkey to now be with her.
A desperate search for a missing man who mysteriously vanished three months ago has ended in tragedy.

Anthony Roper, who suffered from dementia, went missing while on a morning walk in his home town of Cleveland, Queensland.

The 69-year-old, who had live there for more than 20 years, disappeared on March 19.

Anthony Roper (pictured left) went missing three months ago on a morning walk in his home town of Cleveland

Mr Roper had been an officer in the Australian Royal Navy before retiring.

Crews of SES personnel and community members rallied together in the proceeding days and weeks, searching in nearby bushland and rivers after his disappearance.

The week before Anthony vanished, his family had been granted additional help with his medical condition.

Roper (pictured) was found deceased on Wednesday afternoon by police

Roper was a much loved family member. His son thanked the community for their search efforts when Anthony (pictured) went missing

His family had sought assistance with his dementia worsening and a GPS tracker was being discussed.

Anthony went missing in similar circumstances in September last year. He was missing for around 24 hours but was found safe.

Anthony's son, Joel Roper, said he would stop at nothing when Anthony went missing.

'We're hopeful we're going to find him either one way or the other, and have some closure,' Mr Roper said.

Roper had dementia and his family had been seeking medical assistance as his condition worsened

'We're just trying to come together to see what's happening as far as the searching goes. I'm glad the community has come together. A lot of people keep to themselves but when things like this come out they really do come together, it's amazing.'

Once again the community rallied together to remember Anthony, lighting a candle and enjoying a warm hot chocolate, which was Anthony's favourite drink.

Police have confirmed Anthony's death is not being treated as suspicious and QLD police thanked the media and community are thanked for their assistance throughout this investigation.
The outgoing chief of Israel's Mossad intelligence service has offered the closest acknowledgment yet his country was behind recent attacks targeting Iran's nuclear program and a military scientist.

The comments by Yossi Cohen, speaking to Israel's Channel 12 investigative program 'Uvda' in a segment aired Thursday night, offered an extraordinary debriefing by the head of the typically secretive agency in what appears to be the final days of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rule.

It also gave a clear warning to other scientists in Iran's nuclear program that they too could become targets for assassination even as diplomats in Vienna try to negotiate terms to try to salvage its atomic accord with world powers.

'If the scientist is willing to change career and will not hurt us anymore, than yes, sometimes we offer them' a way out, Cohen said.

But he said of Israel's assassination campaigns: 'If the man constitutes a capability that endangers the citizens of Israel, he must stop existing.'

Among the major attacks to target Iran, none have struck deeper than two explosions over the last year at its Natanz nuclear facility. There, centrifuges enrich uranium from an underground hall designed to protect them from airstrikes.

In July 2020, a mysterious explosion tore apart Natanz's advanced centrifuge assembly, which Iran later blamed on Israel. Then in April of this year, another blast tore apart one of its underground enrichment halls.

The comments by Yossi Cohen, speaking to Israel's Channel 12 investigative program 'Uvda' in a segment aired Thursday night, offered an extraordinary debriefing by the head of the typically secretive agency in what appears to be the final days of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rule

The program describes how a remotely operated machine gun fixed to a pickup truck killed Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an Iranian scientist who began Tehran's military nuclear program decades ago

A timeline of the attacks Yossi Cohen talks about in explosive interview The outgoing chief of Israel's Mossad intelligence service, Yossi Cohen, has offered the closest acknowledgment yet his country was behind recent attacks targeting Iran's nuclear program and a military scientist. Here is a timeline of those attacks. April 2021: An explosion tore apart one of the underground enrichment halls of Iran's Natanz nuclear facility. It is here that centrifuges enrich uranium from an underground hall designed to protect them from airstrikes. November 2020: Iran's top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed by machine gun fire while travelling on a highway outside Tehran. Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards said a satellite-controlled gun with 'artificial intelligence' was used in the attack, which Tehran blamed on Israel. July 2020: A mysterious explosion tore apart Natanz's advanced centrifuge assembly, which Iran later blamed on Israel. January 2018: Israel's Mossad service seized archival document from Iran's military nuclear program. 20 agents, none Israelis, seized material from 32 safes inside a Tehran warehouse then scanned and transmitted a large portion of the documents. Advertisement

Discussing Natanz, the interviewer asked Cohen where he'd take them if they could travel there, he said 'to the cellar' where 'the centrifuges used to spin.'

'It doesn't look like it used to look,' he added.

Cohen did not directly claim the attacks, but his specificity offered the closest acknowledgement yet of an Israeli hand in the attacks.

He said more generally: 'We say very clearly [to Iran]: We won't let you get nuclear weapons. What don't you understand?'

The interviewer, journalist Ilana Dayan, also seemingly offered a detailed description in a voiceover of how Israel snuck the explosives into Natanz's underground halls.

'The man who was responsible for these explosions, it becomes clear, made sure to supply to the Iranians the marble foundation on which the centrifuges are placed,' Dayan said. 'As they install this foundation within the Natanz facility, they have no idea that it already includes an enormous amount of explosives.'

They also discussed the November killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran's top nuclear scientist who began Tehran's military nuclear program decades ago, and Cohen admitted he was watched by Mossad for years.

Fakhrizadeh was killed by machine gun fire while travelling on a highway outside Tehran.

Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards said a satellite-controlled gun with 'artificial intelligence' was used in the attack, which Tehran blamed on Israel.

Cohen said: '[Fakhrizadeh] most troubled us from the point of view of the science, the knowledge, the scientists of the Iranian military nuclear program', making him 'a target for [intelligence] gathering for many years.'

U.S. intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency believe Iran abandoned that organized effort at seeking a nuclear weapon in 2003. Iran long has maintained its program is peaceful.

In July 2020, a mysterious explosion tore apart Natanz's advanced centrifuge assembly, pictured. Then in April of this year, another blast tore apart one of its underground enrichment halls

An exterior view of the nuclear enrichment plant of Natanz, in central Iran, in November 2005

Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh (pictured) was killed on November 27 last year in a hit carried out by Israel's secret service, Mossad

While Cohen on camera doesn't claim the killing, Dayan in the segment described Cohen as having 'personally signed off on the entire campaign.' Dayan also described how a remotely operated machine gun fixed to a pickup truck killed Fakhrizadeh and later self-destructed.

Cohen described an Israeli effort to dissuade Iranian scientists from taking part in the program, which had seen some abandon their work after being warned, even indirectly, by Israel. Asked by the interviewer if the scientists understood the implications if they didn't stop, Cohen said: 'They see their friends.'

They also talked about Israel's 2018 operation seizing archival documents from Iran's military nuclear program. Dayan said 20 agents, none Israelis, seized material from 32 safes inside a Tehran warehouse on January 31, 2018, then scanned and transmitted a large portion of the documents.

'We understood they were secretly storing their nuclear secrets  things we didnt know. I decided we needed to see what the Iranians are planning for us,' Cohen said, adding 'I told my people to prepare to bring this home' because it would reveal 'the wider picture' of the Iranian program.

Dayan said 20 agents, none Israelis, seized material from 32 safes inside a Tehran warehouse (pictured) on January 31, 2018, then scanned and transmitted a large portion of the documents

Safes inside a warehouse in Shorabad, south Tehran, where Mossad agents discovered and extracted tens of thousands of secret files

Before the operation, Mossad had built a replica of the site and learned about the containers holding the secret material. The agents knew they had seven hours at the site because 'after that trucks and guards and workers' would arrive and 'you can't be jumping fences and bursting through walls'.

Cohen confirmed that the Mossad received most of the material before it was physically taken out of Iran.

It was at their Tel Aviv command center, where Cohen was running the Mossad operation, that they screened the documents and material from the safes.

'We realised that we have what we wanted, that we are "on" Iran's military nuclear program. There was incredible excitement for us all,' said Cohen.

By the morning, the Iranians knew that the warehouse had been emptied and they closed the borders.

Knowing this would be the case, most of the material was transferred digitally to their headquarters in Tel Aviv before the truck crossed the border, Dayan said.

'We knew they'd chase us,' Cohen said. 'We'd taken their most sensitive secrets.'

Cohen defended Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's decision to go public with the results of the operation, going against a long-standing practice of secrecy involving Mossad activities.

Cohen defended Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's (pictured together at the Mossad headquarters in 2016) decision to go public with the results of the operation, going against a long-standing practice of secrecy involving Mossad activities

'It was important to us that the world will see this, but this thing should also resonate with the Iranian leadership, to tell them, "Dear friends: One, you have been infiltrated. Two, we see you.. Three, the era of ... lies is over",' Cohen said.

Media in Israel operate under a decades-old policy that requires journalists to clear stories involving security matters through military censors. That Cohen's remarks apparently cleared the censors suggests Israel wanted to issue a new warning to Iran amid the Vienna nuclear negotiations.

Iran has repeatedly complained about Israel's attacks, with Iran's ambassador to the IAEA Kazem Gharibabadi warning as recently as Thursday that the incidents 'not only will be responded to decisively, but also certainly leave no option for Iran but to reconsider its transparency measures and cooperation policy.'

Iran's mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment over the comments by Cohen, who was replaced by former operative David Barnea. Cohen in the interview acknowledged he might one day seek the prime minister's office himself.
Politicizing origin-tracing of COVID-19 exposes hypocrisy of U.S.

17:51, June 10, 2021 By Yi Li ( People's Daily Online

Some people in the U.S. have recently played the old trick of politically hyping the origin-tracing of COVID-19. Along with provocative reports produced by certain media outlets and rhetoric adopted by so-called experts to stigmatize China using human rights issues as an excuse, the U.S. has put on a show of covering up its misdeeds by shifting the blame to others.

At the beginning of the outbreak in China, U.S. politicians had wrongly accused the country as being the source of the virus, instigating innocent people and U.S. allies to claim compensation from China while shifting the blame to the World Health Organization (WHO) for picking sides.

The Trump administration, while passing the buck to other countries, spared no effort in stirring up domestic confrontations by charging that the Obama administration had left it a vulnerable healthcare system and had been slow in the coronavirus testing process. It also criticized state governments for over-reliance on the federal government in coronavirus control.

The U.S. federal government and the state governments attacked each other over issues such as when to declare a state of emergency, when to restart the economy, and who had greater power and authority. What was worse, state governments were left to fight the virus alone, and even competed for medical supplies.

America is too politicized, fractured, and, above all, individualistic for a collective move to save it, said an article titled America still needs to learn from its biggest pandemic failure published in VOX, a news website based in the U.S.

Its a facet of the United States before COVID, during COVID, and Im not sure its going to change after COVID, Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

In China, epidemic control is the first priority of the government, which always puts people and their lives above everything else, and has effectively contained the epidemic as a result.

It was not by coincidence that China became the first country to walk out of the shadow of COVID-19 and secure positive economic growth, nor was it a coincidence that the U.S. not only failed to control the pandemic, but also became the country to suffer the largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths.

In addition to staying united as one to fight the epidemic, China also showed a sense of morality and justice in supporting the global battle.

In the early days of the outbreak, by upholding the vision of a community of a shared future for mankind, China immediately shared the sequence of the coronavirus genome as well as treatment and control plans with the international community. While struggling to battle the epidemic at home, China launched the largest global emergency humanitarian action since the founding of the People's Republic of China, offering assistance to 150 countries and 10 international organizations, sending a total of 36 medical teams to 34 countries.

However, the U.S., which always touts so-called universal values, points fingers at the human rights situation of other countries, and frequently pressures China using so-called human rights violations as an excuse, failed to guarantee peoples right to life, which is seen as the most basic and important human right.

While serving as "an instructor" on human rights, the U.S. lost 600,000 lives to the coronavirus. According to the real-time data provided by Johns Hopkins University, as of June 6, with a population of only 4.25 percent of the world's total, the U.S. had 19.3 percent of confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide and 16 percent of global deaths from the disease.

People's lives are the most important human right. Safeguarding millions of lives in the COVID-19 epidemic is the biggest proof of human rights in China, top epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan remarked.

The U.S. spared no effort to divert attention by stirring up the issue of COVID-19 origin tracing, but made little effort to supply vaccines, and adopted an indifferent attitude toward human rights.

While developing countries suffered a lack of vaccines, the U.S. was hoarding them. According to a report by the Washington Post, the U.S. government has purchased enough vaccines to inoculate 750 million people. There are 260 million adults in the U.S. This puts it way over the threshold needed to immunize the population eligible for vaccination. In addition to hoarding vaccines, the U.S. also restricted export of raw materials, failing to live up to its promise of sharing vaccines with relevant countries.

So far, the U.S. has exported a total of 4.5 million doses of vaccines to its neighbors Mexico and Canada. On June 3, the Biden administration, after coming under pressure from the international community, announced it would distribute 25 million doses to countries in need. However, the supplies were considered far from enough to satisfy the demand, and the parties involved had expressed hope that the U.S. could have donated more.

China has always been providing COVID-19 vaccine assistance for other countries. It has delivered over 350 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to the world, provided vaccine assistance to over 80 countries and exported vaccines to over 40 countries. The country also joined hands with other developing countries to promote the mass production of vaccines.

This time, the U.S. has again targeted China with the issue of COVID-19 origin-tracing, overturning the findings by the WHO on global tracing of COVID-19 origins and going further down the road to politicize the issue, which is widely considered a matter of science.

Michael Ryan, the executive director of the WHO's Health Emergencies Program, remarked that the whole process of origin tracing is being poisoned by politics.

The COVID-19 pandemic is like a mirror reflecting Chinas sincere attitude and concrete actions taken to contain the virus, and has exposed the selfish nature of American politicians who continue to talk nonsense. It showed the vision of a community of a shared future upheld by China, as well as the countrys responsibility as a major country to unite the world to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. It also revealed the irresponsibility and hypocrisy of certain American politicians.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Bianji)
A millionaire businessman has been arrested trying to fly to Dubai after police allegedly found $7million cash packed into Woolworths bags hidden in a bunker in a Sydney home.

Hugo Jacobs, 39, who was acquitted of the murder of Kings Cross nightclub identity Todd O'Connor in 2008 and is the son of wealthy Middle Eastern parents, was arrested on Thursday night at Sydney Airport at about 9pm.

His property in Roselands in the city's south-west was raided on Wednesday last week where police said they found a trapdoor that led to the bunker, according to the Telegraph.

A millionaire businessman has been arrested trying to fly to Dubai after authorities found $7million cash packed into Woolworths bags hidden in a bunker in his Sydney home

Hugo Jacobs, 39, was arrested on Thursday night at Sydney Airport at about 9pm after attempting to board a flight to Dubai. He's been charged with knowingly deal with the proceeds of crime

Police have reportedly been searching for Jacobs since they raided the home as part of a Strike Force Wolara investigation into the supply of prohibited drugs throughout New South Wales.

The Australian Border Force, Public Order and Riot Squad and strike force executed raids on two properties last week, including Jacobs' house in Roselands.

They allegedly found a trapdoor leading under a concrete floor inside the home, finding the $7million inside crudely stashed in Woolworths reusable shopping bags.

His property in Roselands in the city's south-west was raided on Wednesday last week where police found a trapdoor that led to the bunker with millions in cash in shopping bags

The 39-year-old was arrested attempting to board the flight to Dubai and taken to Mascot Police Station charged with knowingly deal with the proceeds of crime.

Jacobs changed his name from Hachem Ibrahim through deed poll.

He appeared in Central Local Court on Friday where he and his legal representation made no application for bail.

The case is due at Bankstown Local Court on Wednesday, June 16.
It took police seven long years to bring conwoman Karen Sandoval to some form of justice.

On Friday she walked free with not even a slap on the wrist for her despicable crimes.

In a court that is accustomed to dishing out lengthy jail sentences to scammers such as Sandoval, the 40-year old would be saved by her autistic 18-year old daughter.

Conwoman Karen Sandoval defrauded elderly Commonwealth Bank customers

County Court of Victoria Judge Justin Hannebery could not bring such hardship upon the child by separating her from her mum, who herself still lives at home with her own elderly parents.

'She needs a high level of support and supervision in many basic functions of life,' he said.

'The substantial burden of her life falls to you ... I consider that this is one of the rare circumstances where the potential hardship to your daughter of you being imprisoned is at a level that should be considered exceptional and is a matter to be taken into account as a matter in mitigation.'

It was the elderly and frail Sandoval had targeted between March 2012 and August 2013 while employed at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

She had been a 'saving specialist', but the court heard the only one to save a penny was herself.

Sandoval stole $185,808 from eight victims during her crime spree before she was detected by the bank's forensic accountants.

The court heard she tinkered with customer mailing addresses to intercept their bank statements and added her own personal details to their accounts.

It was the elderly and frail Sandoval had targeted between March 2012 and August 2013 while employed at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (stock image)

It remains unclear exactly where all the money went, with Sandoval telling police she blew it on bills, an ex-boyfriend and another associate.

Her brazen thefts would eventually get back to her bosses when some of her elderly victims complained.

Sandoval admitted to the bank that she had robbed at least five customers who she knew were either elderly or suffered some form of mental impairment.

The police were notified in 2014, but she wasn't arrested until three years later - after the bank had carried out a second internal audit which found more dodgy transactions.

Judge Hannebery condemned Victoria Police for the delays in investigating Sandoval.

'You made a confession in 2013, the matter was referred to the police in 2014. It is remarkable that in those circumstances that it has taken seven years for the matter to conclude,' he said.

'No explanation for what seems a bizarre level of police inaction over an extended period was provided.'

The court heard Sandoval maintained she had committed the crimes because she was being coerced by a drug addicted colleague of her brother to do so.

However police found absolutely no evidence of any such threats and Judge Hannebery dismissed her claims.

'Your contention that your offending was at the behest of others and that you in fact made no financial gain whatsoever because of the offending is not corroborated by any other evidence in the depositions,' he said.

Judge Hannebery condemned Sandoval for her breach of trust while working in the bank.

'You must have known full well the wrongfulness of misappropriating a customer's funds. Your culpability is made greater by the fact you selected customers who were known to you and with whom you had a trusting relationship,' he said.

Sandoval pleaded guilty to theft and obtaining a financial advantage by deception.

Judge Hannebery sentenced her to a three year community based order with 250 hours of unpaid community work.
A truck driver who killed a Victorian police officer after knowing his brakes were faulty has successfully appealed the length of his sentence.

Samandeep Singh, 30, was jailed in May for up to four years after hitting 45-year-old First Constable D'Arne De Leo as she rode her motorbike to work on January 12, 2017.

Singh's truck wasn't roadworthy and he knew the rear brakes weren't working. The front brakes were also compromised because the vehicle was loaded incorrectly.

Samandeep Singh (pictured) has successfully appealed the length of his sentence

He used his exhaust and emergency brakes in an attempt to stop but rolled down a hill and smashed into Ms De Leo's bike at a Wantirna intersection.

Justices Emilios Kyrou and Stephen McLeish at Victoria's Supreme Court on Friday re-sentenced Singh to three years in prison.

He must now serve at least one year and nine months behind bars, down from a previous non-parole period of two years and four months.

Singh knew his brakes were faulty before smashing into a Victorian police offer

Singh received his heavy vehicle licence after a one-day training course. The company he worked for, Ermes Transport, had a poor maintenance record.

He initially denied knowing the brakes didn't work properly, but pleaded guilty to dangerous driving causing death after his planned trial was delayed repeatedly.

Justices Kyrou and McLeish said Singh should have received a lesser sentence due to his guilty plea and deep remorse shown.

First Constable D'Arne De Leo was struck by the truck on her ride to work in January 2017

Singh suffered intense grief and guilt after the collision, the court was told.

He tried to take his own life eight times and tattooed much of his upper body with references to Ms De Leo, including her police number, and the crash.

But Justices Kyrou and McLeish maintained that a community correction order was not appropriate.

The truck driver received his heavy vehicle licence after a one-day course

'It was very dangerous for (Singh) to continue driving a fully-laden truck after he realised its brakes were failing, and to continue doing so for some distance rather than to stop,' they said.

The officer's partner of 13 years, Krisztina Toth, in May said she wanted Ms De Leo to be remembered as a 'kind, loving, beautiful person'.

Her father, Patrick, previously said he did not hate or want revenge on Singh, who will likely be deported to India upon his release from jail.
Kamala Harris snapped at a Univision reporter on Thursday for asking her when she will visit the U.S.-Mexico border - losing her composure once again when asked why as 'border czar' she hadn't been to the site.

Harris spoke to Colombian journalist Ilia Calderon, an anchor with the Miami-based network, the day after her return from Mexico and Guatemala, where she spoke to presidents of both countries about ways to curtail soaring arrivals at the border.

Migrant numbers are on track this year to reach highs not seen since 2006.

'I've said I'm going to the border,' said Harris, visibly irritated.

'And I - '

Calderon, speaking via video link, interrupted and asked: 'When are you going?'

Harris continued saying: 'The administration has asked...'

She paused, hearing Calderon's question, and replied curtly: 'I've not finished.

'I've said I'm going to the border. And also, if we are going to deal with the problems at the border, we have to deal with the problems that cause people to go to the border - to flee to the border.

'And that is the root causes.

'So my first trip, as vice president of the United States, was to go - in terms of a foreign trip - to Guatemala.

'To be on the ground there. To address, and to be informed of, the root causes - why are the people of Guatemala leaving.'

Harris on Thursday spoke to Univision reporter Ilia Calderon, who grilled her about when she would be visiting the U.S.-Mexico border to see the migrant situation with her own eyes. A visibly irritated Harris snapped at her for interrupting her, to press her on the question

Harris told Calderon that she had not finished speaking, accusing the reporter of interrupting her. She then explained that she had not yet visited because she wanted her first foreign trip - to Guatemala and Mexico - to be about addressing the root causes of migration

Harris wagged her finger at Calderon, telling her: 'I've not finished' - as the Spanish subtitles show. She laughed awkwardly as she reprimanded the reporter

Calderon asked: 'Do you have a date for your trip to the border, to see the situation with your own eyes?'

Harris replied: 'I will keep you posted.'

Her rebuke of Calderon, with a terse 'I've not finished', bore echoes of her dismissal of Mike Pence, when he attempted to interrupt her during their vice presidential debate last October.

'I'm speaking,' she reprimanded him, with a smile, before continuing her point.

The moment became a meme, and 'I'm speaking' was emblazed on t-shirts worn by Biden-Harris supporters.

This time round, the put down was less celebrated.

The vice president's two-day trip was dogged by questions about when she would visit the border - to her evident annoyance.

Cruz Estuardo Tunpumay (L), a 32-year-old migrant from Guatemala, stands with other asylum seekers while waiting to enter a Mexican government facility in Tijuana. There, they will be examined before being taken to the border by UNHCR and Mexican authorities. The Biden-Harris administration has promised a more 'humane' approach to the border

Harris doubled-down that she will not be visiting the border during her trip  or any time soon. 'I will continue to be focused on [addressing root causes of migration and corruption] as opposed to grand gestures'

She was exasperated by NBC anchor Lester Holt when he asked her about visiting the border.

'At some point, you know, we are going to the border,' she said.

'We've been to the border. So this whole thing about the border. We've been to the border. We've been to the border.'

He replied: 'You haven't been to the border.'

'And I haven't been to Europe,' Harris snapped, then quickly turned laughed.

'And I mean, I don't understand the point that you're making. I'm not discounting the importance of the border.'

On March 24, President Joe Biden announced: 'Ive asked her, the VP, today  because shes the most qualified person to do it  to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.'

Harris has insisted since then - but especially this week - that her focus is on the root causes of migration, rather than dealing with the crisis at the border.

CNN reported that officials were concerned within the administration that whatever progress Harris had made on the leader-to-leader level might have been undermined by her conflicting answers and PR missteps.

'Its left some of the administration officials perplexed, and the vice presidents team frustrated,' the network reported on Wednesday.

'There was hope the trip would be a success, and in the end, they feel it may have been overshadowed by some of her answers to these questions.'

Border crossings have exploded 674 per cent in May 2021 compared to May 2020.

Authorities recorded 180,034 migrants crossing into the U.S. last month.

That represented a slight increase over the approximately 178,000 migrants encountered in April, and the 172,000 encountered in March.

In February, roughly 100,000 migrants illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border into the United States.

This graph shows the number of migrants caught by the Office of Field Operation (OFO) and US Border Patrol agents in April and May

Central American migrants sit on the ground while waiting to be transported by U.S. Border Patrol agents after crossing the Rio Grande river into the United States

Chanel, 7, and her sister Adriana, 10, both unaccompanied minors traveling alone from Honduras, sits among other asylum-seeking children as they await to be transported to a U.S. border patrol processing facility

Single adults still represented the majority of border-crossers, data from the U.S. Border Patrol showed.

In May there was a decrease in the number of unaccompanied minors, from roughly 16,910 to 13,906, Border Patrol found.

CBP also said that a majority of those who crossed the border were already expelled due to Title 42, which allows the U.S. government to quickly remove people using the COVID-19 pandemic.

Of the 180,034 crossers, 112,302 had already been expelled.

CBP also pointed out, according to Fox News, that Title 42 is leading people to try to cross the border more than once, which could also factor into the high numbers.

Axios reported Tuesday that preliminary CBP data from the fiscal year 2021 showed that illegal crossings have been the most since 2006 - with four months still to go.

Additionally on Tuesday the Department of Health and Human Services reported that 16,200 children were still in custody, which is 50 per cent higher than the levels in March.

HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra appeared before the Ways and Means Committee to face questions on the border crisis.

Biden has promised to reunite families separated during the Trump administration and to expedite processing unaccompanied minors who arrived at the border in the last few months.

However, a new report from Biden's task force on reuniting families indicates that 2,127 children have 'not yet been reunified' with their parents.

The poor showing in progress at the border comes on the heels of Harris' trip to Guatemala and Mexico  where she faced backlash for laughing her way through serious topics and handing out cookies on the Air Force Two flight with her face-less likeness printed on them.

The task force progress report submitted to the president last week shows only seven children have successfully been reunited since Biden took office.

In a 22-page task force progress report, which was released Tuesday during Harris' trip, was submitted to Biden last week and shows that 2,127 children are still awaiting their reunions.

It also states, however, that 29 more families 'will be reunited in the coming weeks.'

The provision will allow the families to enter the U.S. under humanitarian parole, which lasts 36 months and can be renewed.

The dismal showings in reunification is being blamed on the Trump administration's failure to keep accurate and organized data on families and children when they were separated at the border.
Oregon state Rep Mike Nearman (pictured) was expelled from the House in an almost-unanimous vote on Thursday

Republican lawmakers voted with majority Democrats in the Oregon House of Representatives to take the historic step of expelling a GOP member who let violent, far-right protesters into the state Capitol last December.

Legislators said on the House floor that this could be the most important vote they ever cast. They then proceeded Thursday night to expel an unapologetic Rep Mike Nearman with a 59-1 vote, marking the first time a member has been expelled by the House in its 160-year history. The only vote against the resolution for expulsion was Nearman's own.

Rep Paul Holvey, a Democrat who chaired a committee that earlier Thursday unanimously recommended Nearman's expulsion, reminded lawmakers of the events of December 21, which were an eerie foreshadowing of the much more serious January 6 assault on the US Capitol.

'On the morning of December 21st, a couple hundred protesters - some of them heavily armed and wearing body armor - arrived at the Capitol for a protest, with the intent to illegally enter and presumably occupy the building and interrupt the proceedings of the Oregon Legislature,' Holvey said.

'Staff and legislators were terrified. We can only speculate what would have happened if they were able to get all the way in.'

Nearman said he let the protesters in because he believes the Capitol, which has been closed to the public to protect against spread of the coronavirus, should have been open. The assault happened during a peak of the pandemic.

But even Republicans, who are often bitterly opposed to Democratic initiatives on climate change and some other bills, said the crowd outside the Capitol that day was not made up of constituents who wanted to peacefully engage in the democratic process.

Nearman was seen on security video opening a door to protesters on December 21 as lawmakers met in emergency session to deal with economic fallout from the pandemic

The Oregon House of Representatives get set to open a session on Thursday evening to consider expelling member Rep Nearman

The only person to vote against Nearman's expulsion was the congressman himself

Some were carrying guns. Some shouted false QAnon conspiracy theories about Democrats kidnapping babies. They carried American flags, banners for former President Donald Trump and a sign calling for the arrest of Democratic Gov Kate Brown. They broke windows and assaulted journalists.

'Nobody should have opened the door to the people who were here that day,' said Rep Daniel Bonham, a Republican and a member Holvey's special committee.

The final straw for Republican House members came on June 4, when video emerged showing Nearman choreographing how he would let protesters into the Capitol a few days before it actually happened.

For his fellow lawmakers, that was proof it was a premeditated act, which Nearman acknowledged. All 22 of his fellow House Republicans wrote him on Monday, strongly recommending he resign.

As lawmakers gathered to decide Nearman's fate, a few dozen people waving American flags and one carrying a sign saying 'I am Mike Nearman' gathered outside the Capitol. One repeatedly kicked a metal door, sending booms through a marble hallway of the building.

Nearman was seen on security video opening a door to protesters on December 21 as lawmakers met in emergency session to deal with economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

Protesters barged into the building, which was closed to the public because of coronavirus safety protocols, got into shoving matches with police and sprayed officers with bear spray.

Video showed protesters barging into the building, which was closed to the public because of coronavirus safety protocols, and engaging in shoving matches with police

Police are seen gathering to fend off the protesters who tried to enter the building

'It's impossible to overstate the seriousness of the reason we are here today,' Holvey said during the committee hearing.

'Rep Nearman enabled armed, violent protesters to enter the Capitol, breaching the security of the Capitol, which was officially closed to the public, and also endangered the authorized staff and legislators inside the building.'

Hundreds of people provided written testimony to the House Special Committee On December 21, 2020, which was composed of three Democrats and three Republicans.

Some who testified excoriated Nearman as a seditionist. Others praised him for letting people into the Capitol, saying residents should be allowed to attend even though hearings are livestreamed on video.

'Mike Nearman's behavior ... was abhorrent and anti-democratic,' David Alba said. 'Furthermore, by aiding and supporting extremists, he has placed people's lives in danger. He should be removed from office and he is not fit to represent my district.'

But Nearman's supporters said they elected him and the House should not expel him. One supporter suggested the 22 GOP lawmakers who asked him to resign should be voted out of office.

'May your Republican constituents take no mercy on you,' Casey Ocupe said in written testimony.

House Speaker Tina Kotek credited riot police, who finally pushed out the December 21 protesters, with preventing a full-scale assault.

Nearman also faces two misdemeanor criminal charges and has said he will seek a trial by jury.

Pro-Trump and anti-mask demonstrators hold a rally outside the Oregon State Capitol as legislators meet for an emergency session in Salem on December 21

Far-right protesters are seen clashing with police outside the Oregon Capitol Building on December 21 as they tried to enter the building which was closed to the public
A man has been shot and killed after opening the front door of his Canberra home in eerily similar circumstances to the fatal shooting of a grandmother a day earlier.

The 48-year-old man was gunned down on Thursday night when he answered a knock at the front door of his house in the suburb of Phillip just before midnight.

The shooting comes just a day after a 61-year-old woman was shot dead as she open the front door of her Stockton home in Newcastle, NSW, on Wednesday night.

Police are now investigating whether the two shootings are linked.

In Canberra, emergency services found the man and rushed him to hospital but he was unable to be saved.

A 48-year-old man was gunned down on Thursday night when he answered a knock at the front door of his Phillip house

A man has been shot and killed after opening the front door of his Canberra home in eerily similar circumstances to the fatal shooting of a grandmother a day earlier

Police say a woman was at home at the time the 48-year-old man was killed but was not physically harmed.

'Detectives are investigating the circumstances of this incident; however, at this time the reason for the attack is yet to be established,' Criminal Investigations Detective Inspector Marcus Boorman said.

'Police have identified evidence from the scene, all of which will be forensically examined.

'We've spoken to a number of witnesses in the area and would encourage anyone who has information about the shooting to come forward to police.'

Police say a woman was at home (pictured) at the time the 48-year-old man was killed but was not physically harmed

Stacey Klimovitch, 61, (pictured) was fatally shot once in the chest at her home in Queen Street in the Newcastle suburb of Stockton at about 8pm on Wednesday night

Emergency services were called to the suburban street just after 8pm on Wednesday, however the 61-year-old grandmother (pictured) sadly died at the scene

Stacey Klimovitch, 61, was shot through the screen door of her flat in the Newcastle suburb of Stockton, two hours north of Sydney, at about 8pm on Wednesday night.

The retired swimming teacher's 31-year-old daughter and her eight-week-old granddaughter were also at the home at the time of the shocking attack.

It's understood neither saw the shooting but heard the sound of the gunshot.

Emergency services were called to the suburban street just after 8pm, however the 61-year-old woman tragically died at the scene.

The hunt for the grandmother's killer is underway, with specialist forensic police scouring the woman's property and the wider Hunter region for clues

Police sectioned off Queen Street, where the pensioner lived, and the surrounding area as the killer fled the scene.

Her devastated best friend and neighbour said she had spoken to the 'brand new' grandmother just moments before the horrifying attack.

'I've never heard a gunshot but there was no mistake what it was', she told 9 News.

'That's when I heard the noise and the screaming. I tried to call her and couldn't get her on the phone.

'She was a brand new grandmother, and so happy to be a brand new grandmother.'

The woman said her best friend's daughter had been 'distraught' having to care for the household dog while attending to her injured mother.

'I'm going to miss her. Things like this shouldn't be allowed to happen', she said.
Ben Roberts-Smith has spent the past week defending his honour in a Sydney court room as he denies allegations he committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

The claims, published in three newspapers, are made by former and serving SAS soldiers and the 42-year-old Victoria Cross recipient says they have broken his heart.

Roberts-Smith is suing the newspapers and three journalists over the allegations which include that he murdered prisoners and bullied colleagues.

While his version of various engagements will be contested, there can be no question he displayed extraordinary heroism in battle.

During one long stint in the witness box Roberts-Smith gave a first-person account of a mission that reads like a film script and puts the actions of some of his comrades in doubt.

Ben Roberts-Smith has spent the past week defending his honour in a Sydney court room as he denies allegations he committed war crimes in Afghanistan. The claims published in three newspapers are made by former and serving SAS soldiers. Roberts-Smith is pictured

Roberts-Smith is suing three newspapers and three journalists over allegations which include that he murdered prisoners. While his version of various engagements will be contested, there can be no doubt he displayed extraordinary heroism in battle. He is pictured with the Queen

During one long stint in the witness box Roberts-Smith gave a first-person account of a mission that sounds like a movie and puts the actions of some of his comrades in doubt. He is pictured at Woolloomooloo exercising before his trial

That mission resulted in two days of heavy fighting on a mountain range called Korangal, south of Chora, and in the valley below in June 2006.

Roberts-Smith was a scout and sniper in a Special Air Service patrol sent out to establish an observation post over the Chora Valley and report on enemy activities ahead of a large-scale assault by American forces.

The patrol commander is known in court proceedings as Person 33 and the second-in-command was Sergeant Matthew Locke. Roberts-Smith's fellow trooper Person 2 was a sniper. Person 1 was the machine gunner and medic.

With the Australians was Person 23, an American 'joint terminal attack controller' - or JTAC - who was on the mission to coordinate airstrikes.

The patrol was dropped off at night by vehicles which conducted a 'feint' - slowing down but not stopping for the soldiers to jump out.

The next stage of the mission was on foot. The patrol had ten hours to get from the base of the mountain to the top.

What we know about Ben Roberts-Smith and the 'trial of the century' Ben Roberts-Smith is suing Nine-owned newspapers The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, plus The Canberra Times over allegations he committed battlefield crimes including murder. His case, being heard in the Federal Court in Sydney, is expected to last ten weeks and is being bankrolled by his employer, the Seven Network's billionaire owner Kerry Stokes. Mr Roberts-Smith served six operational tours in Afghanistan with the elite Special Air Service and left the regular army in 2013 with the rank of corporal. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for actions at Tizak in June 2010 and the Medal for Gallantry for an earlier battle near the Chora Pass in May 2006. The newspapers will plead that Mr Roberts-Smith was complicit in and responsible for the murders of six people in Afghanistan, and that those actions constituted war crimes. Nine alleges Mr Roberts-Smith killed insurgents who had been captured and none of the killings was the result of decisions made in the heat of battle. Mr Roberts-Smith has also been accused of bullying other SAS troopers and punching a woman in the face at a Parliament House function in 2018, which he denies. The 42-year-old says some of his onetime colleagues who are making allegations against him are jealous of his feats of soldiering and are telling lies. He is the first witness to give evidence. His testimony will be followed by what is likely to be a week of cross-examination by lawyers for Nine. Character witnesses will then testify on his behalf, followed by witnesses for the newspapers. Mr Robert-Smith's ex-wife Emma Roberts, the mother of his two children, is expected to give evidence for the publisher after 'flipping' sides. Ms Roberts' friend Danielle Scott, John McLeod - a former bodyguard of drug smuggler Schapelle Corby - alleged Afghani eye-witnesses and 21 serving and former SAS members will also be called by Nine. Mr Roberts-Smith's team will then call evidence from his other witnesses, understood to include former SAS comrades. Advertisement

Each man carried about 70kg of equipment, including including 25 litres of water, ammunition, camouflage netting, radios and medical kits.

'Chora was a Taliban stronghold,' Roberts-Smith told Justice Anthony Besanko.

'No one had really got into Chora prior to this particular operation.

'Other squadrons before us had tried and always got into contact, and would pull out.'

The soldiers wore night vision goggles and the epic hike was arduous.

'I don't really know how else to explain it other than to say it's like looking through green toilet rolls and trying to walk up a mountain.'

The patrol arrived at the top of the ridge at daybreak on June 1 and chose a position in a saddle - a low piece of ground between two high points.

They established an observation post on the northern side of the ridgeline and a lay-up position - or LUP - about 10m away on the south.

Roberts-Smith took part in a hair-raising mission that took place on June 1 and 2, 2006 on a mountain range called Korangal, south of Chora, and in the valley below. He is pictured with ex-wife Emma

Roberts-Smith was a scout and sniper in a Special Air Service patrol sent out to establish an observation post over the Chora Valley and report on enemy activities ahead of a large-scale assault by American forces

The two-man OP would rotate every hour or two, maintaining eyes on the valley and recorded anything they saw in a log.

The vehicles that had dropped off the patrol had made their way through the Chora Pass and driven into the valley where they were visible from the observation post.

In the valley, which is about 10km long and 3km wide, they came to the 'green belt', a heavily vegetated area full of orchards, farms, aqueducts and pockets of bush.

As the vehicles approached the green belt, according to Roberts-Smith, 'the whole valley, effectively, erupted on them.'

The convey came under heavy machine gun fire and a volley of rocket-propelled grenades exploded above the vehicles in an airburst.

Person 23 was able to direct aircraft fire onto the enemy forces as one coalition solider was wounded and the cars began to pull back through the Chora Pass.

Sergeant Matthew Locke (pictured) was the second-in-command on the mission in the Chora Valley in June 2006 for which he would be awarded the Medal for Gallantry

Mr Roberts-Smith served six operational tours in Afghanistan with the elite Special Air Service and left the regular army in 2013 with the rank of corporal. Stock image of Australian special forces troops in Afghanistan

The next morning, Person 1 and Person 2 were in the observation post while Roberts-Smith was in the lay-up position with Person 33, Person 23 and Sergeant Locke.

'We became aware from what I recall was a radio transmission that there was a male approaching the observation post,' Roberts-Smith told the court.

'And the individual, from what I recall, was wearing chest webbing, but I cannot say if he had a weapon or not.'

That person, who was 50 to 60m away, suddenly stopped walking towards the OP and broke off to the left. Roberts-Smith said it was obvious he had seen the patrol.

'Person 33 said to myself and Sergeant Locke to go, which we took as an order to go after the spotter. Sergeant Locke left first and I followed.'

Sergeant Locke had a suppressed M4-203 5.56mm assault rifle fitted with a 40mm grenade launcher and Roberts-Smith had a suppressed SR-25 sniper rifle.

The pair moved out, turned right and 'caterpillared' forward, until they could put themselves into a dip formed by a waterway cut.

Sergeant Locke saw a spotter and fired at him from a range of 70 to 80m as Roberts-Smith dropped to his stomach and set up his sniper rifle mounted on a bipod.

Nine alleges Mr Roberts-Smith killed insurgents who had been captured and none of the killings was the result of decisions made in the heat of battle. Stock image of Australian troops in Afghanistan

'He was already down when I started to engage him. As I engaged him, some type of ordnance went off in his chest webbing on his chest. It was literally in the centre of his body and it started to flare up.'

The pair decided not to examine the body because it was too dangerous and because he was no longer a threat. Instead they went back to the lay-up post.

'We were all on what we call 100 per cent stand-to because a spotter had come, which means everyone has to be alert, everyone goes on the picket, so everyone is on guard duty, every other duty stops.'

After about an hour the patrol stood down from picket duty and re-occupied the observation post.

Mid-afternoon there was a radio transmission that voices were heard moving up behind the lay-up position so Sergeant Locke and Roberts-Smith joined their fellow soldiers just above that spot.

'We were all on what we call 100 per cent stand-to because a spotter had come, which means everyone has to be alert, everyone goes on the picket, so everyone is on guard duty, every other duty stops.' Stock image of Australian troops in Afghanistan

Roberts-Smith could hear the voices and saw an insurgent on the ridgeline. He and Sergeant Locke began shooting and enemy automatic weapon fire broke out.

'The fire was sporadic, because the first individual that came around the corner, we engaged and killed - and he went down - but there was still fire coming.'

Roberts-Smith thought there was a short burst of machine gun fire from the patrol then the friendly gun stopped.

'At that point, the fire kept coming in from the rear and Sergeant Locke was yelling to Person 1 to keep firing his machinegun, which didn't fire.

'And I recall seeing him cock it once or twice, but, at that point, I was not necessarily focussed on that.'

Concerned the enemy might try to flank their position, Sergeant Locke moved closer to Roberts-Smith and started to climb the side of the saddle with his rifle slung over his shoulder.

Roberts-Smith was part of a patrol that held a post above the Chora Valley against attack by insurgent forces in June 2006. Australian Special Operations Task Group soldiers are pictured during the Shah Wali Kot Offensive

Roberts-Smith said Sergeant Locke could not have used his rifle and the side of the saddle wasn't a sheer cliff - 'but it was pretty close'.

'He climbed up. He got over the top.' Then Roberts-Smith lost sight of Locke.

Roberts-Smith and Person 33 yelled out, 'Are you all right? What's happening? What do you have up there?' Locke said he was all right and more gunfire broke out.

Realising the observation post was no longer secure, Roberts-Smith got out into open ground.

'Unfortunately, when I moved out there, I started to receive fire from the enemy that was on the ridgeline to the north that Sergeant Locke was engaged with,' he said.

'For whatever reason, I could not see that individual, but he could clearly see me. But, at the same time as that was happening, I went to ground and could see enemy approaching the observation post from the front.'

Bullets were kicking up dirt around Roberts-Smith and cracking near his ears as more insurgents massed in the valley below and started moving up.

Through his sniper rifle scope Roberts-Smith could see the insurgents were 800 to 900m away - outside the weapon's effective range. He counted 16 anti-coalition militia in an arrowhead formation. Stock image of Taliban fighters

Through his sniper rifle scope Roberts-Smith could see the insurgents were 800 to 900m away - outside the weapon's effective range. He counted 16 anti-coalition militia in an arrowhead formation.

'That's why I remember that, because it was quite different to see the enemy behaving with some kind of structure and tactic.'

The insurgents, mostly armed with rifles, had an RPG on the right flank and a Soviet-designed PKM belt-fed machine gun on their left.

'Even though it was outside the range of my weapon, I started to engage them because I just wanted to slow them down,' Roberts-Smith said.

'Because if they got to a certain point, where we couldn't see them at the base, they would be able to advance up the hill with no fire, which means they could get up there very quickly because we couldn't put fire onto them.'

Meanwhile, Locke was still engaged with the nearby insurgents - 'I think Matt was keeping them pretty busy in his firefight.'

Person 33 ordered Person 2 down to Roberts-Smith's position to put further fire on the massing enemy that was trying to move up the hill.

Roberts-Smith was awarded the Victoria Cross for actions at Tizak in June 2010 and the Medal for Gallantry for the battle near the Chora Pass in May 2006. Soldiers from 3rd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment are pictured in Afghanistan in 2008

But according to Roberts-Smith when Person 2 reached him his SR-25 sniper rifle would not fire and he ejected two rounds.

'At that point, I was thinking that we were going to need all the ammunition we had,' Roberts-Smith said. 'Because I really felt that we were not in a great position, knowing that 16 ACM moving up and who knows how many else from behind.'

Roberts-Smith thought Person 2 might not have fitted the firing pin properly in his weapon and he sent him back to strip it down.

'There's no point him sitting out there in the open with me while his weapon was malfunctioning. That's all I thought at the time.'

As Person 2 stood to move back to the lay-up position another burst of fire came from the ridgeline where Locke was engaged and Roberts-Smith continued shooting onto the valley floor.

'Sometime later, roughly 10, maybe 20 minutes later, Person 2 moved back to the front to my position and laid down next to me. His weapon was functioning, and he would continue to fight.'

'We both continued to engage the enemy on the valley floor, and that went on for quite some time.'

Ben Roberts-Smiths' case, being heard in the Federal Court in Sydney, is expected to last ten weeks and is being bankrolled by his employer, the Seven Network's billionaire owner Kerry Stokes

Person 33 and Person 23 were trying to establish communications with aircraft to get support because they feared the position would be overrun.

At that time a Dutch special forces unit was engaged with the enemy in another part of Afghanistan and there was not enough air support to go around.

'For that reason, we didn't get aircraft for quite a long time, and that became a concern.'

Person 33 had ordered all packs and equipment the patrol had brought up the mountain to be put in a central position so they could be destroyed by ordnance if they had to 'bug out'.

Roberts-Smith said Person 1 was on the northern side of the observation post with a 5.56mm Minimi machine gun but he did not hear that weapon being fired.

Person 1 had not brought oil for the weapon, making it useless, Roberts-Smith said. The Minimi represented at least 25 per cent of the squad's firepower.

As the soldiers put their packs in the centre of the lay-up position, Person 33 asked Person 23 to use a code word reserved for special forces about to be overrun.

'If you use that code word, it will scramble all available aircraft to your position,' Roberts-Smith said.

Mr Roberts-Smith has also been accused of bullying other SAS troopers and punching a woman in the face at a Parliament House function in 2018, which he denies.

'At that point, Person 33 decided that was necessary, that code word was given and aircraft were scrambled to us.'

What happened next is reminiscent of the closing action in the Vietnam War film Once Were Soldiers.

'I don't have a recollection of how many aircraft, what they were,' Roberts-Smith said. 'That was all run by Person 23. I just knew they were coming in.'

At one point Person 23 called in an A-10 Thunderbolt fixed-wing aircraft to fire explosive-tipped shells from a 30mm cannon mounted in its nose.

'He had them doing strafing runs along the ridgeline on either side of where we were, which is quite the experience as it sort of explodes around you.'

'So when that happened, that effectively broke the back of the enemy and they started to retreat and... I believe at that point, it's starting to get dark.

'We had regained our security and felt that the enemy weren't likely to attack us now that we had so much aircraft support.'

Once the bombs and gun runs had finished, an AC-130 gunship was stationed over the patrol for the rest of the evening because P33 had decided they would stay put.

Roberts-Smith is pictured with another soldier drinking from the prosthetic leg of a soldier which was taken from the battlefield as a war trophy. Roberts-Smith killed its owner but did not take the leg or drink from it

The AC-130 was armed with a 105mm recoilless rifle in its side - 'basically an artillery piece with wings,' Roberts-Smith said.

'It flies a circular pattern around your location and can provide that kind of intimate artillery fire to protect you. Because we had that, obviously, it made it more of a safer proposition.'

Overnight the AC-130 illuminated the patrol's position with an infrared spotlight, which could only be seen through nigh-vision goggles, in case it had to open fire.

Roberts-Smith said that during the night Person 1 woke up behind him and started to scream, 'I'm a friendly, I'm a friendly' five or six times.

He told the court Person 1 - who he believed was asleep - turned around and pointed his Minimi machine gun straight at him until Person 33 stepped in and woke him up.

At one point in the Chora Pass mission Person 23 called in an A-10 Thunderbolt fixed-wing aircraft to fire explosive-tipped shells from a 30mm cannon mounted in its nose. Stock image of Afghan insurgents

Ben Roberts-Smith (pictured) and Sergeant Matthew Locke were awarded the Medal for Gallantry for their actions in the operation. Sergeant Locke was killed in Afghanistan in October the next year

'Person 33 eventually got Person 1 to wake up and calm him down, but that incident was obviously difficult for everyone to sort of understand.'

'The fact of the matter is if someone is pointing a weapon at you and they're asleep, there could have been a catastrophic engagement of our own forces between each other.'

Eventually, the American assault force landed and the Australians slowly made their way back down to the valley floor to be picked up before daylight.

Ben Roberts-Smith and Sergeant Matthew Locke were awarded the Medal for Gallantry for their actions in the operation. Sergeant Locke was killed in Afghanistan in October the next year. He was 33.
President Joe Biden's brother James Biden has abandoned a new clean-energy investment firm he launched in the United Kingdom after a White House ethics review and new rules aimed at banning conflicts of interest.

James Biden, and his wife Sarah Biden, had started a limited liability partnership called 2BT, Financial Times reported, which planned to invest in firms transitioning away from using fossil fuels to green energy sources instead.

The Bidens and Peter Teare, a partner at Reed Smith, established another venture called Shelbourne Partners through 2BT, but that project has since been abandoned.

Teare told Financial Times it would be 'mistaken' to think that decision to scrap the company was related to the review - but did not appear to provide another explanation for why the project was axed.

James Biden, and his wife Sarah Biden, had started a limited liability partnership called 2BT that recently launched in the United Kingdom aimed at investing in green projects

The project has since been abandoned after a White House ethics review and new rules established by the Biden administration aimed at banning conflicts of interest

Joe Biden, left, is pictured with his brother James Biden, right, at Ellen's Homemade Ice Cream in Charleston, West Virginia in 2008

He told the outlet that he could not discuss the private business affairs of the Bidens, including reasons 'why they may decide to pursue a particular opportunity or not.'

Shelbourne Partners was established to 'explore prospective investment opportunities, particularly in the clean-energy sector,' Teare told the Financial Times.

But just weeks after it was launched, the White House completed the review of the business plans to conform to strict new rules President Biden's administration has introduced.

The Biden administration has sought to draw a distinct line between his approach to the business interests of his family members and the approach of former President Donald Trump, who often faced scrutiny for his family's business interests.

He hired daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner as senior White House advisers, with son Donald Jr also acting as a campaign spokesman for his dad.

During the 2020 presidential election, Biden came under fire for revelations that his son Hunter Biden had taken a position on the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma when he was vice president during the Obama administration.

Hunter did so despite having no apparent qualifications, and was paid up to $50,000 a month until April 2019, sparking allegations that he had used his dad's name and influence to bag the job.

Before his inauguration, Joe Biden told Jake Tapper on CNN that his family members would not participate in business interests that conflict with his role as president.

'My son, my family will not be involved in any business, any enterprise, that is in conflict with or appears to be in conflict, with the appropriate distance from, the presidency and government,' Biden said.

The Financial Times explained that under Biden's new procedures, the president's family members should first reveal potential business plans to their own lawyers and notify the White House legal counsel if needed.

Hunter Biden, pictured in May, faced questions over his appointment to the board of a Ukrainian energy firm, despite having no experience in the field

The White House will then provide advice on if the business plans should proceed - but allows the family members to make the last final call, the outlet reported.

'The president adopted ethics rules and standards for his administration that surpass those of any other administration in history, and include standards for his relatives,' a White House official told the outlet.

The conclusions drawn from the ethics review into Shelbourne Partners were not revealed.

Shelbourne Partners is jointly owned by 2BT and another firm, International Capital Investment.

Ricardo Nicolas Mallo Huergo, an Argentine lawyer, launched that firm with Jose Luis Manzano - a former congress member in Argentina who is also an associate of James Biden, Financial Times reported.

Huergo and Manzano also head the Buenos Aires private equity firm Integra Capital as general counsel and president respectively. Through Integra, Huergo and Manzano already invest in traditional energy projects including oil and gas.

Huergo told Financial Times that Shelbourne Partners planned to fund projects aimed at transitioning from fossil fuels to clean energy.
The Victorian government kept children out of school for 'too long' during its recent two-week lockdown, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has said.

Victorian children were banned from their classrooms for two weeks on May 27, except for students in years 11 and 12 who were allowed back after a week.

Mr Frydenberg said it was a 'welcome relief' to take his seven-year-old daughter Gemma to school in Melbourne on Friday morning.

Josh Frydenberg is pictured at the ballot box in 2019 with wife Amie, son Blake, four, and daughter Gemma, seven

'I'm really pleased the kids are now back at school. I had the opportunity to take my daughter to school today, like so many other parents. That's a welcome relief, because the kids were out of school for too long,' he said in a press conference.

Since the start of the pandemic, Victorian children have been stopped from going to school for 23 weeks, compared to just seven weeks in New South Wales, raising fears their education will suffer.

Earlier this week Prime Minister Scott Morrison pressured the state government to re-open schools, saying: 'Kids have lost enough time out of school over the course of the last 18 months and it's very important we get those kids back to school as soon as possible.'

Mr Frydenberg also said he wants states to avoid lockdowns in the event of further outbreaks in the future.

Parents and students head back to school at Footscray City Primary School on Friday after lockdown

'Clearly this lockdown dents confidence. It hits investment. It ultimately costs jobs,' he said.

Asked if Victoria made the right decision to shut down the whole state because of 26 cases in Melbourne, he replied: 'I think it's really important we try to avoid future lockdowns because of the impact it has not just on the economy but on people's mental health and you're seeing the statistics very clearly about that.'

Following Melbourne's 112-day lockdown last winter, there was a spike in new referrals for help with anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, post-traumatic stress and domestic violence.

Mr Frydenberg said there would be no further federal assistance for gyms and dance studios who have been kept shut by the state government despite restrictions easing on Friday, suggesting they should be allowed to re-open instead.

'My view is I would love everyone to get back to work as quickly as possible,' he said.

The Treasurer revealed that about 50,000 Victorians have applied for the federal pandemic disaster payment of $500 a week because they could not work during lockdown, costing taxpayers $25million.

The payment is available for residents who cannot work after seven days of a lockdown in a place declared a hotspot by the Commonwealth's chief medical officer.
President Joe Biden is 'actively engaged' and 'extremely sympathetic' in the case of motorcyclist Harry Dunn, Boris Johnson said following their first in-person meeting.

The leaders discussed the 19-year-old, who was killed when a car crashed into his motorbike outside a military base in Northamptonshire in August 2019, ahead of the G7 summit of world leaders in Cornwall.

Mr Johnson said President Biden has 'his own personal reasons for feeling very deeply about the issue,' adding he was 'extremely sympathetic' during their discussion.

The death of Harry sparked an international controversy after suspect Anne Sacoolas had diplomatic immunity asserted on her behalf by the US Government.

Sacoolas, the wife of a US intelligence official based at RAF Croughton, has since been charged with causing the teenager's death by dangerous driving.

Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme, Harry's mother Charlotte Charles said she would welcome the opportunity to meet President Biden after their encounter with Donald Trump 'clearly didn't go well.'

Harry Dunn, 19, was killed when a car crashed into his motorbike in August 2019

Boris Johnson and President Joe Biden discussed the case in their first face-to-face meeting

The Prime Minister was asked if there had been any progress made on the case following his first face-to-face meeting with President Biden yesterday.

Speaking to the BBC, Mr Johnson said: 'You should really - when you get the chance - put your question to the president because he is actively engaged in the case.

'As you know, he has his own personal reasons for feeling very deeply about the issue. And he was extremely sympathetic, but this is not something that either government can control very easily because there are legal processes that are still going on.

'But he did express a great deal of sympathy, as indeed this government continues to do for the family of Harry Dunn.'

He added both the US executive and legal and judiciary system were 'working together'.

Harry's mother Ms Charles said she would welcome the opportunity to meet President Biden after their encounter with Trump in October 2019 'clearly didn't go well.'

She added: 'We had a pretty nasty trick played on us that has left some quite deep emotional scars to be honest. It was one horrific day.

'So absolutely, we would very much welcome a meeting with President Biden, considering he has got personal experience of what we are going through.'

Anne Sacoolas, 43, had diplomatic immunity asserted on her behalf by the US Government and was able to return to her home country 19 days after the collision

The Dunn family said they were pleased to see the case raised at the 'first available opportunity'. Pictured: Harry's parents Charlotte Charles and Tim Dunn

The Dunn family earlier said they were pleased to see Harry's case raised at the 'first available opportunity'.

Speaking yesterday, family spokesman Radd Seiger said: 'Harry's parents are very pleased to see that the PM has taken the opportunity to raise the case with President Biden at the first available opportunity.

'This rightly shows just how important this issue is and we are very grateful to the Prime Minister and his team for doing so.

How was Anne Sacoolas able to flee back to the US as British police investigated? Anne Sacoolas used a loophole to claim diplomatic immunity after allegedly killing Harry Dunn in a crash involving her Volvo SUV. It was believed that diplomatic immunity only applied to US officials - and their families - if they worked at the US Embassy in London. But it appears that because of the work done at RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire  a US intelligence hub in Britain - the same applies there. Sky News claims an immunity deal between the UK and US there started in 1994. As a result Northamptonshire Police were planning to get Anne Sacoolas to sign a 'waiver of diplomatic immunity' - but she, her husband and their children fled on a private jet. Harry's family claim that Mrs Sacoolas had promised to work with police and admitted culpability. Advertisement

'As all parties know there is no greater force on earth than the love between a mother and child. The family will continue to pursue justice until it is done.'

The Dunn family have challenged the diplomatic immunity asserted on Sacoolas's behalf, which will be heard in the Court of Appeal next year.

Harry's parents, Ms Charles and Tim Dunn, have also brought a civil claim against the suspect and her husband in the US state of Virginia.

Ms Charles today recalled her family's meeting with former US president Trump in October 2019, when she was informed that Anne Sacoolas was in a nearby room.

She said: 'We shouldn't have been shocked with Mr Trump's record prior to that.

'But it's still a massive shock when you are still in shock from having lost your son.

'We had only lost Harry seven or eight weeks beforehand. To then be told all of a sudden that she was in the room next door... it wouldn't have been good for us.

'We weren't even aware that we were seeing President Trump.

'We rocked up at the White House, having received the invitation. We were just told that we were going to see a senior official.

'Not for a second did we think that it would be Mr Trump... we had to just roll with the punches like we always do and take it in our stride and just face everything head-on, which seems to be pretty much our lives over the last 22 months.'

She added it meant a 'tremendous amount' that Mr Johnson and President Biden had discussed her son's case at the earliest possible opportunity.

'We couldn't be more grateful, it means a lot to us,' Ms Charles said.

'It's good to hear that it's being discussed at the highest of levels but we are clearly anxious to await further information to see exactly where the comments made yesterday will lead to.

The Prime Minister was asked if there had been any progress made on the case following his first face-to-face meeting with President Biden yesterday. Pictured: Mr Johnson and President Biden in Cornwall yesterday

Speaking to the BBC, Mr Johnson (above) said: 'You should really - when you get the chance - put your question to the president because he is actively engaged in the case'

'My hope, as always, my family's hope as always, is to ensure that I can complete my promise to Harry. We will not rest until justice is done.'

Asked whether a civil claim lodged in the US could represent justice for Harry, if the US continues to assert suspect Sacoolas' diplomatic immunity, Ms Charles added: 'No. Justice means standing up and accepting accountability for your actions.

'The civil claim is extremely separate to the criminal case.

'So justice still needs to be done here in the UK. That's always been my goal - that isn't going to change.

'She needs to face UK jurisdiction, it has to be done.'
Tucker Carlson has claimed healthy young people are more likely to be harmed by the vaccine than by COVID-19, as he slammed US colleges and universities for demanding proof of inoculation among returning students.

The Fox News host accused the Biden administration Thursday night of refusing to mention 'the downside of vaccination' after the Centers for Disease Control announced it was looking into higher than expected reports of heart inflammation in young people after receiving the Pfizer or Moderna shots.

CDC bosses said 226 viable cases had been reported - mainly affecting teenage boys and young men after their second dose of the shot.

Reports are extremely rare and it is not clear if the heart inflammation is being caused by the vaccine.

More than 130 million Americans have received the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which require two doses spaced three or four weeks apart.

Tucker Carlson has claimed healthy young people are more likely to be harmed by the vaccine than by COVID-19, as he slammed US colleges and universities for demanding proof of inoculation among returning students

The Centers for Disease Control announced Thursday it was looking into higher than expected reports of heart inflammation in young people after receiving the Pfizer or Moderna shots

Carlson pointed to the CDC announcement and similar findings by Israel's Health Ministry as he said it would be a 'disaster' if the risks of the vaccine turned out to be greater than the threat of COVID-19 among young people.

'Its possible that healthy young people will much more likely to be harmed by the vaccine, than by COVID itself,' he claimed.

'That would be a disaster. In fact, it would be the definition of a preventable disaster.'

Carlson, who has repeatedly dodged questions around whether or not he has been vaccinated, claimed people are 'lying' if they say they know what long-term impact the vaccine will have on young people.

'What are the long-term effects of forcing these drugs on millions of young people, many of whom dont need it?' he said.

'We dont know the answer. We dont know what the long-term effects are. Anyone who claims to know is lying. At this point, theres literally no way to tell.'

He took aim at universities and colleges who have said students must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 to come back to their campuses this fall - a move he said has left students with 'no choice but to take a drug other governments have concluded is dangerous for them to take.'

Several US colleges including Brown University, Rutgers University and Nova Southeastern University have announced COVID-19 vaccination requirements for returning students coming back for in-person tuition in recent months.

In some institutions, the rules apply only to students with vaccines not mandated for faculty and staff.

Carlson took aim at colleges who have said students must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 to come back to their campuses this fall - a move he said has left students with 'no choice but to take a drug other governments have concluded is dangerous for them to take'

'In just the last week, many American colleges and universities have announced theyll require proof of vaccination before they allow students to return to campus,' Carlson said.

'At some schools, the mandate applies only to students.

'For reasons no one has explained, or could possibly defend, it does not apply to faculty and staff. Theyre not required to be vaccinated.'

Carlson said around 20 million young people have been left with 'no escape' from getting the vaccine if they want to return to college for their education.

'As for the huge number of young people who have already recovered from COVID  and therefore likely have more robust immunity, at least as robust as they could get from any vaccine  they will be required to get the shot too,' he said.

'These are big numbers. There are close to 20 million college students in this country.

Several US colleges including Brown University (above) announced COVID-19 vaccination requirements for returning students in recent months

'In the end, most will have no choice but to take a drug other governments have concluded is dangerous for them to take.'

He added: 'It is no longer your body, it is no longer your choice. When it comes to the vaccine, there is no escape.'

Carlson accused Joe Biden of refusing to pay attention to the risks of the vaccine, and instead telling people to 'shut up and take the shot.'

He played footage of the president reassuring the public the vaccine is safe.

'The bottom line is this - I promise you: They are safe. They are safe. And even more importantly, theyre extremely effective,' said Biden.

Carlson claimed that 'if the numbers out of Israel turn out to be real and applicable to this country, that statement will live forever as one of the most destructive things a sitting president has ever said from a podium.'

A total of 226 viable cases of the heart inflammation have been reported after receiving the Pfizer of Moderna second shot

WHAT IS MYOCARDITIS? Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle. There are no specific causes of the condition but it is usually triggered by a virus. Some of the most common infections which cause myocarditis, are those called adenovirus and Coxsackie B. It can be caused by the common cold, hepatitis B and C, and herpes simplex virus. The most common symptoms of the condition include chest pain, a fever, a fast heartbeat, tiredness and shortness of breath. If the inflammation damages the heart muscle or the fibres that conduct electrical pulses to the heart, complications can develop. They can develop quickly, and include sudden loss of consciousness, an abnormally fast, slow or irregular heartbeat. In very severe cases the condition is fatal, causing heart failure or sudden death. The inflammation enlarges the heart and creates scar tissue, forcing it to work harder and therefore making it weaker. In most cases of viral myocarditis, the illness goes away and there are no complications. But in rare cases when inflammation is severe, there can be damage to the heart which needs monitoring and possibly a heart transplant. Myocarditis can reoccur, but there is no known way to prevent this. The risk of recurrence is low - 10 to 15 per cent - according to Myocarditis Foundation. It is difficult to gauge the prevalence of myocarditis because there is no widely available test for it. In 2010, approximately 400,000 people died of heart muscle disease - cardiomyopathy that includes myocarditis - worldwide. Expert consensus opinion estimates that up to 40 per cent of dilated cardiomyopathy results from myocarditis, according to the National Organisation for Rare Disorders. Advertisement

Israel said in early June that its research showed Pfizer's vaccine is the 'probable' cause of heart inflammation in a very small number of people who get the jab.

The Health Ministry had found 148 cases of myocarditis soon after the patient had been vaccinated.

In total, 275 cases were spotted among the more than five million people given the Pfizer jab in Israel, which has had one of the world's most successful jab rollouts.

In the remaining 127 cases, it is unclear if they are linked to the vaccine.

This was equivalent to just 0.005 per cent of recipients, or one in 20,000 people.

For the 148 cases 'probably' linked to the jab, the rate was 0.003 per cent  although half of them had other underlying health problems.

Young men aged 16 to 24 were most affected, with Israel concluding that one in 3000 and one in 6000 men in that age group developed the rare condition after receiving the vaccine.

Most cases were mild and resolved within a few weeks.

US health officials Thursday announced higher than expected reports of heart inflammation in male teens and young adults after getting their second doses.

CDC bosses called an emergency meeting for June 18 to discuss the cases - mainly affecting teenage boys and young men after their second dose of the shot.

A total of 226 cases have been reported that may meet the CDC's 'working case definition' of myocarditis and pericarditis following the shots, the agency said.

Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle, and pericarditis is inflammation of the outer lining of the heart.

Among the 226, three are in intensive care, 15 are hospitalized, and 41 have ongoing symptoms. The rest - 167 - have recovered.

It is not clear if either condition is caused by the shots and the reports of cases are extremely rare.

The CDC continues to urge everyone aged 12 and older to get vaccinated.

These types of heart inflammation can be caused by a variety of infections, including a bout of COVID-19, as well as certain medications.

There have been rare reports following other types of vaccinations in the past.
A man has been accused of a string of domestic violence offences, including tying up a woman and assaulting her in a forest.

The man has been charged with 14 domestic violence offences in southeast Queensland including strangulation, deprivation of liberty and assault occasioning bodily harm.

Police allege that on one occasion, the man from Gympie drove a woman to the Toolara Forest where her hands were zip tied and her feet bound with string.

The 25-year-old man then drove off before returning a short time later and cutting the woman free.

He allegedly then made her walk on a dirt track for some time, letting her re-enter the vehicle when another car approached.

A man has been accused of a string of domestic violence offences, including tying up a woman and assaulting her in a forest (stock photo)

On a separate occasion at a Gympie home, the woman was allegedly punched in the face before being grabbed around the neck and choked in a headlock.

Police allege that on another occasion the man drove the woman back to the forest, placed her in a headlock as she sat in the car and choked her.

The woman was then allegedly made to get out of the car and sit on the dirt before being allowed back in, where she was further punched and assaulted.

Police have accused the man of contravening domestic violence orders by contacting the woman, visiting her address, verbally abusing her in public and physically assaulting her.

The man was arrested on Thursday and charged with six counts of contravening a domestic violence order, three counts of assault occasioning bodily harm, two counts of strangulation or choking and one count each of deprivation of liberty, stealing, assaulting police and obstructing police.

He has been denied police bail to appear in the Gympie Magistrates Court on Friday.
A girl who reported her long-time sexual abuse at the hands of a NSW police officer has been abandoned by her family, called a liar and blamed for her grandfather's lung cancer.

The girl, aged in her teens, faced her abuser in a Sydney court on Friday to detail her life of paranoia and fear stemming from years of abuse.

The senior constable, who cannot be named, was found guilty in 2020 of two aggravated sexual assaults, four indecent assaults, child grooming and child abuse material offences.

A NSW police officer has been found guilty of two aggravated sexual assaults, four indecent assaults, child grooming and child abuse material offences

'My whole family turned their backs on me. I haven't talked to my mother in almost three years,' the victim tearfully told Parramatta District Court.

'I needed my family, especially during my teen years but none of them cared.'

Her grandfather had been particularly critical of her, going as far as blaming his lung cancer on the stress caused by the woman's reports.

In a 20-page message before the officer's trial, the grandfather let her know 'everyone' hates her and that she would go to jail 'when' the officer was found not guilty.

'My grandfather said a lot of hurtful things including that I have mental health issues and made it all up,' the teenager said.

That torment compounded the fallout she endures as a result of 11 years of abuse at the hands of the officer.

She's frightened of people in power. She's scared someone is watching when she gets undressed for a shower. She's paranoid people will identify her as she builds a new life.

'It's hard to make friends and build relationships because I'm conscious that if they ever find out, I'll be judged,' the teenager said.

'The damage is permanent and every time I'm happy, the dark shadow is behind me as a reminder that life will never be normal.'

Judge Sophia Beckett noted one of the most significant harms was the ramifications it had on her relationships with her family, describing it as a 'rather upsetting feature'.

But the Crown conceded that harm couldn't be used when determining the officer's jail term as it was out of the officer's control.

The officer worked extensively with children when employed but his crimes do not relate to his employment.

He was suspended from duty upon his arrest in 2018.

Since being remanded in custody upon the jury's verdicts in November 2020, he has lost a significant amount of weight, the court was told on Friday.

His crimes plus his old job meant he will likely be held in the strictest area of protection for his entire jail term, his lawyer Ken Buckman said.

The girl faced court on Friday and outlined her life of paranoia and fear stemming from her years of abuse

'He's going to effectively have a life of fear for a lengthy period of time in custody,' Mr Buckman said.

'He'll be looking over his shoulder whilst in custody, that's for sure.'

More than seven letters in support of the officer were tendered in his defence case, as well as a psychologist's report.

He will be sentenced on Wednesday.
London's Barbican Centre has been described as 'institutionally racist' by its own staff who claim bosses called people from black or ethnic minority backgrounds 'yellows' and 'diversity hires'.

One worker claimed they were forced to cut back their afro hair to stop workers touching it while black staff insist they were regularly muddled with colleagues of the same race by white bosses.

Others said they were regularly confused with cleaners and an employee alleged that he was only asked if he could sell someone some cannabis because he is black.

Barbican staff past and present have collated a book of more than 100 alleged racist and prejudicial incidents, often involving senior staff using racist language, and claims that 'career progress is curtailed for staff of colour' in incidents dating back six years.

Staff have publicised their claims in an article with The Guardian because they claim leaders at Europe's largest performing arts centre, in the Barbican area of the City of London, have failed to keep anti-racism promised made in 2020, in particular after the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the BLM movement in the US and the UK.

The Barbican has launched an investigation and said a statement: 'We fully recognise the pain and hurt caused by these experiences. We are committed to pursuing the ongoing programme of action which we have laid out to advance anti-racism in the organisation, and to achieve necessary change.'

It said it was 'shocked and saddened to hear the allegations' and had 'always strived to be an inclusive, welcoming and open organisation'.

London's Barbican Centre has been described as 'institutionally racist' by its own staff who have compiled more than 100 examples of discriminatory behaviour

The statement added: 'Although we have not received any formal complaints, all staff will be able to contribute to the independent review so that their experiences can be heard and those affected can get the support they need. We want everyone's voice to be listened to and respected.'

Barbican's managing director Sir Nicholas Kenyon has been accused of failing to keep his promise of 'eradicating racism in all its forms' for staff

One Asian worker alleged that a member of the senior management team referred to them as 'a yellow' while chatting - when confronted they insisted they were referring to the employee's aura not their race.

Several people said that they were openly referred to as 'diversity hires' and that that BAME people were commonly in the casual roles and white people in permanent and more senior positions.

Others said that in meetings they were upset by the number of times they were confused with another black or Asian colleague.

On one occasion an intern confused for another person of the same race pointed out the mistake by a senior manager and had 'permanently destroyed their prospects of getting a job at the Barbican'.

And staff also claimed that they were called 'n****r' by visitors.

The Barbican declined to comment on specific allegations - but promised an independent review of them.

The claims emerged after a demand for greater equality because of the rise of BLM.

After George Floyd's murder the Barbican posted three black squares on Twitter and Facebook during 'blackout Tuesday'.

Staff claimed the squares lacked meaning and were merely 'performative', the Barbican's managing director Sir Nicholas Kenyon released an anti-racism action plan admitting his organisation had not done 'enough over time to address these issues in our organisation'. It committed to 'eradicating racism in all its forms'.

But staff believed the plan was vague and released their claims today because they feel Sir Nicholas action plan has not fulfilled its promises.
Republican candidate for California governor Caitlyn Jenner has said she would take the $929million federal grant President Biden is spending on the state's high-speed train and spend it on finishing the border wall

Republican candidate for California governor Caitlyn Jenner has said she would take the $929million federal grant President Biden is spending on the state's high-speed train and spend it on finishing the border wall.

She told KABC on Thursday night: 'Right now were spending billions on a high-speed train to nowhere.

'Take some of that money, go down to the border wall and completely finish on state land. Completely finish the wall. We need protection.

'But, for those hardworking great people that are here, I want them to be able to get legal status.'

She made the comments after figures released Wednesday showed illegal border crossings have exploded by 674 per cent in a year, with 180,034 recorded in May - the fourth consecutive monthly rise.

Newly-released figures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection show the number of migrants rocketed by more than six-fold from the 23,237 who crossed from Mexico into the United States in May 2020.

Texas' Republican Governor Greg Abbott said on Thursday night he would restart building the border wall in his state and vowed to arrest more migrants.

The Biden administration late Thursday restored the almost-$1billion grant for the high-speed rail that former President Donald Trump revoked in 2019 and called a 'disaster'.

The parties, which also include the California High-Speed Rail Authority and the U.S. Transportation Department headed by Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg, agreed to restore the grant within three days, according to the settlement agreement.

Construction is slated to be completed by the end of 2021.

Talks began in March, around two months after Biden became president, to settle a suit filed in 2019 after Trump had pulled funding for a high-speed train project in the state hobbled by extensive delays and rising costs.

Trump had repeatedly clashed as president with California on a number of fronts.

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The Biden administration late Thursday restored the almost-$1billion grant for the high-speed rail that former President Donald Trump revoked in 2019 and called a 'disaster'. An unfinished bridge from the system is pictured last August

The high-speed rail link will connect Sacramento and San Diego through four different segments. The aim is for construction to be completed by the end of 2021

California's lawsuit claimed the Transportation Department lacked legal authority to withhold the $929 million the administration of former President Barack Obama allocated a decade ago but had remained untapped.

'The Biden Administration's restoration of nearly $1 billion for California's high-speed rail is great news for our state and our nation,' U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, said in a statement.

The project had over 35 active construction sites along 119 miles in the Central Valley as of March, according to the California High-Speed Rail Authority. The project had created over 5,500 jobs, authorities said in March.

Jenner, a Republican candidate for governor in California, said the funds for the train should be diverted to finish the border wall at the border with Mexico.

The funding restoration occurs as the Biden administration tries to hammer out an infrastructure spending agreement with lawmakers.

The parties, which also include the California High-Speed Rail Authority and the U.S. Transportation Department headed by Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg (above), agreed to restore the grant within three days, according to the settlement agreement

'The announcement also comes as House Democrats make progress under Chairman Peter DeFazio on a robust surface and rail reauthorization bill, which includes strong funding for intercity and high-speed passenger rail', Pelosi said.

While Trump ridiculed the California project, calling it a 'disaster,' Biden strongly supports high-speed rail and has vowed to ensure the United States 'has the cleanest, safest, and fastest rail system in the world.' Biden wants to dramatically increase funding for passenger rail networks.

California's system, which is billed by the state as the first U.S. high-speed rail project, is estimated to cost from $69 billion to $99.8 billion and aims to be completed in the 2030s.

California Governor Gavin Newsom said the funding restoration will 'move the state one step closer to getting trains running in California as soon as possible.'

California voters approved the initial $10 billion bond for the project in 2008, and $3.5 billion in federal money was allocated two years later. California previously received $2.5 billion.

California State Treasurer Fiona Ma noted in a letter Monday that the Obama administration had allocated $10.5 billion for high-speed rail projects in 2009 and 2010 and that there are still no operational U.S. high-speed rail lines.

'To be clear, a repeat effort that spends billions without getting any new lines operational after another decade will be the death of high-speed rail in America,' Ma wrote to Congressional leaders.

'There is simply no way the public will continue to support such an agenda without seeing tangible results.'

She made the comments after figures released Wednesday showed illegal border crossings have exploded by 674 per cent in a year, with 180,034 recorded in May - the fourth consecutive monthly rise. This chart shows how 2021 border crossings - pictured in blue - rocketed on crossings made in 2020, represented by the brown line (2018 is pictured in gray, with 2019 in orange)
A judge has approved a $1.2 billion settlement between robodebt victims and the federal government while blasting the scheme for being a 'shameful chapter' in public administration.

Justice Bernard Murphy on Friday said the use of flawed income averaging tools to raise debts caused vulnerable people financial hardship, distress and anxiety.

Many felt shame and hurt at being wrongly branded 'welfare cheats', he said, with some driven to take their own lives.

The settlement distribution scheme had also resulted in a 'huge waste of public money'.

'The proceeding has exposed a shameful chapter in the administration of the Commonwealth social security system and a massive failure of public administration,' Justice Murphy told the Federal Court.

A judge has approved a $1.2 billion settlement between robodebt victims and the federal government while blasting the scheme for being a 'shameful chapter' in public administration

It should have been 'obvious' to the government that many welfare recipients do not earn a stable or constant income, he said, and may only be employed on a part-time, casual or intermittent basis.

However, Justice Murphy was not convinced the federal government knew the robodebt scheme was unlawful from the start.

'I am reminded of the aphorism that, given a choice between a stuff-up and a conspiracy, one should usually choose a stuff-up,' he said.

The 648,000-strong class action was led by Gordon Legal.

Justice Murphy approved $8.4 million in costs to the firm and said the 680 people who objected to the settlement would be given the opportunity to opt out.

Gordon Legal partner Andrew Grech said the settlement approval would bring closure to the victims of the robodebt scheme, which he described as a 'callous' practice.

The automated matching of tax and Centrelink data to raise debts against welfare recipients the government claimed to have overpaid was ruled unlawful in 2019.

The Commonwealth has now settled the case without admitting legal liability.

Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg hosed down calls for a royal commission into the robodebt scheme after Justice Murphy approved the $1.2 billion settlement.

Mr Frydenberg apologised for the hurt caused, but argued that similar practices had been used by different governments in Australia over the last 20 years.

ARE YOU ELIGIBLE FOR A ROBODEBT REFUND? You may be eligible for a refund if all of the following apply: - You received an income compliance debt on or after July 2015 - The government raised your debt using averaged ATO income data - You repaid some or all of that debt. If you haven't paid any money towards the eligible debt, the government will reduce your debt to zero. You will be sent a letter letting you know when we process this. Services Australia Advertisement

He also did not appear to accept that the robodebt scheme had been linked to suicides, describing mental health issues as 'very complex'.

'Suicides, when they occur, are absolute tragedies,' Mr Frydenberg told reporters.

'We apologise for any hurt, harm, hardship, that has been caused by the administration of that scheme.'

Jennifer Miller in May said robodebt played a 'very prominent' role in her son Rhys Cauzzo taking his own life about four years ago after he was pursued by Centrelink and debt collectors.

Ms Miller objected to the settlement in a previous Federal Court hearing, arguing that no one in power had been held accountable.

'The only thing I've ever had is platitudes - I've been shown no respect,' she told the court.

'There has been no accountability. This was proven to be an illegal process early in the piece.'

Ms Miller said Centrelink pursued her son despite knowing he had mental health issues and also gave private information about him to the media.

Under the settlement, victims will receive $112 million in compensation, be repaid $720 million and have $400 million in unlawful debts wiped.

Justice Murphy earlier described it as a 'good settlement', but also questioned how fair the ultimate distribution of funds would be among the group members.

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Kent County Council leader Roger Gough

Kent County Council has warned it has 'reached the limit' for the number of unaccompanied child migrants it can look after - after the amount of people crossing the channel hit 1,000 for this month.

Council leader Roger Gough and Sue Chandler, the cabinet member for integrated children's services, said it had again reached an unsafe capacity.

They added it would no longer be able to accept any new unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) from June 14, just 10 months after it had to take similar action.

Mr Gough said: 'I am profoundly saddened to be in this unthinkable position once again in such a short period of time.

'Despite warnings, and continued dialogue with government, Kent's UASC support resources are again significantly overwhelmed,' Mr Gough said.

On Thursday, the Home Office announced measures to encourage more local authorities around the UK to take in child migrants who arrive unaccompanied.

The council has previously threatened legal action against the Home Secretary over the 'extreme pressure' on its services and said it was still waiting on a response from Priti Patel before considering its next steps.

Mr Gough said that after taking advice from its Director of Children's Services, the council would 'no longer be able meet our statutory duty to safely care for the children we support' and no further arrivals could be accepted until 'sufficient transfers have been made outside of Kent bringing our numbers back to safe levels'.

The intercepted migrants huddle in a boat as they are taken to the shore yesterday in Kent

More migrants arriving in Dover, after the Home Office said 179 people made the crossing

The council said the government's recommended maximum number of under 18-year-old UASC that Kent should care for is 231.

Kent's number of under-18 UASC in care has risen from 274 to more than 400 since the beginning of the year and the numbers are rapidly increasing on a daily basis, according to KCC.

The council said it is also dealing with 1,100 UASC care leavers over 18 who remain in care with the council until the age of 25.

Mr Gough said: 'If every other local authority in the UK were to take two or three under 18-year-old UASC who arrive at Dover into their care, Kent's numbers would reduce to the council's safe allocation immediately. This remains, a small problem for the nation to resolve but a huge and unreasonable responsibility for Kent.'

The council suggested the National Transfer Scheme had failed to meet the purpose the Home Office created it for in 2016, to keep pace with the rate of arrivals and provide timely transfers.

It called for a robust mandatory National Transfer Scheme for all local authorities.

A Home Office spokesman said: 'The Home Office is grateful for the role Kent County Council has played in supporting unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and we have provided them with substantial operational support, including transferring those in need of support to other local authorities in the UK.

'We recently announced vital updates to the National Transfer Scheme to alleviate pressures on certain areas and continue to work closely across Government on provision for unaccompanied minors.'

People aboard small boats were pictured being taken to UK shores by Border Force officials

People crossing to Dover being taken to a holding facility by Border Force officials yesterday

A man who made the Channel crossing today huddled in a blanket, as temperatures soared

It came as more than 1,000 migrants have crossed the Channel in small boats this month.

Border Force officials intercepted 179 people including children and a baby making the dangerous 21-mile journey in six boats yesterday, and 10 more arrived at the Dover Marina yesterday.

It took the total to cross the Dover Strait during the first nine days of the month to 1,008 people on board 41 boats.

Just 407 made the treacherous trip in the same timeframe last month - with May ending up smashing the monthly record as 1,619 migrants arrived in 80 boats.

French authorities also prevented a further 95 people from arriving yesterday in five boats, according to the Home Office.

Border Force are believed to be preparing for an influx of migrants over the next few days due to near perfect weather conditions at sea, as Dover temperatures hit 66F today.

So far this year, 4,725 migrants have crossed the Channel, and 8,410 made the journey in 2020.

A Home Office spokesman said: 'Criminal gangs are putting profits before people's lives through these dangerous and unnecessary crossings.

'More than 4,000 people have been prevented from making the dangerous crossing so far this year and we are cracking down on the despicable criminal gangs behind people smuggling.

'Inaction is not an option whilst people are dying. The Government is bringing legislation forward through our New Plan for Immigration which will break the business model of these heinous people smuggling networks and save lives.'

A border force vessel carries newly arrived migrants after being picked up in a dinghy in the English Channel yesterday

A Border Force official holds a young girl that arrived with other migrants after they were picked up in a dinghy yesterday

An official guided newly arrived migrants to a holding facility after they were picked up in a dinghy

The UK has been enjoying a mini-heatwave, which sent temperatures soaring to 82.4F yesterday.

It comes after a Border Force union official warned cross-channel migrants are bringing high levels of Covid with them when they arrive in the UK.

One official was seen holding a young girl who arrived in the UK, while another held a newborn baby which arrived with the other migrants.

Lucy Moreton, of the Immigration Services Union, said that staff were reporting between five and 10 arrivals every day were testing positive upon arrival.

But because the migrants are often crammed onto tiny boats to make the dash a cross from the Continent they were risking spreading the virus to many others.

It comes after a Border Force union official warned cross-channel migrants are bringing high levels of Covid with them when they arrive in the UK

More than 500 migrants arrived in the final week of May, according to the UK Home Office, adding that 3,600 people had been stopped from crossing the channel by French authorities

One official was seen holding a young girl who arrived in Dover yesterday

Another held a newborn baby wrapped in a blue blanket which arrived with the other migrants yesterday

It came as Home Secretary Priti Patel came under pressure to sort out the crisis at the UK's borders as the high season for Channel crossings gets underway.

This year the number of arrivals expected to reach the south coast from France will far outstrip last year's 8,400 if current rates continue.

Ms Moreton told the Times: 'We have positive arrivals all the time, putting staff and migrants at risk of infection.

Lucy Moreton, of the Immigration Services Union, said that staff were reporting between five and 10 arrivals every day were testing positive upon arrival (pictured: Border Force officials guide newly arrived migrants)

This year the number of arrivals expected to reach the south coast from France will far outstrip last year's 8,400 if current rates continue (pictured: A Border Force official holds a young girl that arrived with other migrants after they were picked up in a dinghy)

Dinghies were pictured stacked up while Border Force officials guide newly arrived migrants to a holding facility

'We have a handful, between five and 10 a day, testing positive, but anyone who has been in close contact with them - and that could be a lot, because of overcrowding - risks catching the virus.'

It's believed that the infection rate among arrivals could be around three per cent, compared to the UK population rate of 0.16 per cent, the Times reported.

However the Home Office denied that recent arrivals had brought Covid with them, with a spokeswoman today saying: 'These numbers are completely wrong.

Because the migrants are often crammed onto tiny boats to make the dash a cross from the Continent they risk spreading the virus to many others

Border Force officials guide a pregnant lady ahead of other newly arrived migrants to a holding facility after being picked up in a dinghy in the English Channel

Lucy Moreton, of the Immigration Services Union, said that staff were reporting between five and 10 arrivals every day were testing positive upon arrival.

'In May and so far in June no migrants arriving via small boat have received a positive Covid test.

'Testing is in place to reduce the risk of infection for staff, contractors and small boat arrivals who might come into contact with other arrivals the same day who are Covid positive.'

Some 250 minors have made the dangerous journey across the Channel this year so far, including 50 over the recent Bank Holiday weekend. They include large numbers of unaccompanied girls, leaving local authorities fearful that they will be targeted by criminal gangs.

Priti Patel has ordered social media giants including Facebook and Twitter to remove posts that 'glamorise' illegal Channel crossings

At least 4,300 migrants have landed in the country this year so far. The annual total is expected to exceed the 8,400 who made the journey in 2020

A group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, following a small boat incident in the Channel at the weekend

A view of boats used by people thought to be migrants, being stored at a warehouse facility in Dover, Kent

The numbers of migrants risking the dangerous journey are rising despite Ms Patel's pledge in March to overhaul the immigration system and to make illegal Channel crossings 'unviable'.

The Home Secretary blamed the spiralling crisis on social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter who allow people-smugglers to use their platforms to advertise their criminal services.

One video showing migrants travelling from Calais to Dover has been seen more than 800,000 on Chinese-owned TikTok.

In the strongly worded letter which has been seen by this newspaper, Ms Patel asks the internet giants to 'put an end to the exploitation of your platforms by criminals involved in organised immigration crime' as more people than ever are making 'incredibly dangerous journeys across the Channel'.

At the weekend, Ms Patel ordered an urgent investigation after a Border Force boat brought dinghy migrants from French waters to Dover.

The UK's 140ft cutter Valiant headed to the French side of the Channel and launched a fast inflatable boat to collect migrants and take them to Dover after discussions with local authorities.

The incident at the end of May was orchestrated between senior crew members of HMC Valiant and French patrol ship Athos.

During a revealing maritime radio conversation, a recording of which was obtained by the Mail this week, the officers discuss the 'legality' of the operation.
A bandit spent 90 minutes hiding inside a wheelie bin before popping out and robbing a resident as he took out the trash.

A security camera captured the robber jumping a fence and climbing into the bin at a Biggera Waters home on the Gold Coast about 6.30am on Monday.

At 8am the resident took out the rubbish.

That's when the bandit struck, popping out of the bin and demanding the resident's phone and keys.

A bandit spent 90 minutes hiding inside a wheelie bin before popping out and robbing a resident as he took out the trash

The pair ended up in a physical fight with the resident suffering a wound to his hand before the robber fled with his possessions.

Police have appealed for help to find the offender, who was caught on camera running away from the scene.

'There's nothing to suggest they knew each other. Police are at a bit of a loss,' a police spokesperson told AAP.
Passenger numbers at Heathrow have plunged to 90 per cent below pre-pandemic levels after losing more than six million travellers.

Just 675,000 people travelled through the west London airport last month compared with 6,769,000 in May 2019 - pre-pandemic.

Airpot Chief Executive John Holland-Kaye is now calling on world leaders at the G7 summit to kickstart international travel.

He said: 'With the G7 starting today, ministers have a chance to kickstart the green global recovery by agreeing how to resume international travel safely and setting a mandate for sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) that will decarbonise aviation.

'This is the time for them to show global leadership.'

 Slide me  Just 675,000 people travelled through the west London airport last month compared with 6,769,000 two years ago - pre-pandemic. Pictured: Heathrow in July 2019 (left) and May 2021 (right)

Chief executive John Holland-Kaye urged ministers to find a way that international travel can resume safely

Heathrow criticised 'ministers' refusal to provide transparency' on the data behind decision on the green travel list.

It urged the Government to 'rely on the science and restart travel to low-risk countries like the US' at the next review later this month.

SAFs are produced using materials other than crude oil, and produces around 70 per cent less carbon emissions.

They are more expensive than traditional fuel, but it is hoped technological advances will reduce costs.

Heathrow took its first delivery of SAF last week, but stated that 'the right Government policies' are needed to build confidence in demand.

It wants world leaders at the G7 to commit to requiring 10 per cent SAF use by 2030, growing to at least 50 per cent by 2050, with incentives similar to those use to kick start other low-carbon projects.

The UK currently employs a risk-based system that rates countries one of three colours to determine the quarantine and coronavirus testing requirements people face upon their return.

Ministers have advised against travel to amber and red list countries while the green list is relatively short.

But holidaymakers were plunged into chaos earlier this week after Portugal was removed from the green list with thousands of tourists scrambling to get home before the new quarantine rules came into force on Tuesday.

This was seemingly acknowledged by Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick who admitted there is a 'degree of risk involved' even when travelling to countries on the 'green list' because they could be swiftly downgraded.

Mr Jenrick said 'this isn't a normal summer for holidays' as he urged travellers to ensure their bookings to 'green' nations have 'flexibility' built in.

Meanwhile, a travel industry body said on Wednesday the 'failed and damaging' traffic light scheme must be ditched if the sector is to be saved from total collapse.

The London-based World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) said the Government must scrap the system, which has 'wreaked havoc' among consumers and businesses, in order to save hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Fears of a four-week freedom delay: Curbs could stay AFTER June 21 deadline as Britain's daily cases and hospitalisations shoot up by 40% - while Pfizer shortage threatens vaccine roll-out

The end of lockdown curbs may be delayed by as much as four weeks even though ministers are set to win their race to double-jab millions in time for 'Freedom Day'.

Figures released yesterday showed the Government is on course to hit its target to have offered a second coronavirus vaccine dose to all over-50s by June 21.

Just hours later, however, it emerged that supplies of the Pfizer vaccine will reduce throughout June.

Furthermore, the Mail understands that ministers are still considering keeping some curbs in place for a further two to four weeks amid mounting concern about the spread of the Indian variant.

While an exception is likely to be made for weddings, ministers have become increasingly pessimistic over the course of the week and are now moving closer to a delayed freedom day that could coincide with the start of the school summer holidays.

The Pfizer setback comes as a particular blow, as it makes the prospect of speeding up the vaccine roll-out to meet demand much more difficult.

Figures released yesterday showed the Government is on course to hit its target to have offered a second coronavirus vaccine dose to all over-50s by June 21 - but a setback followed just hours later

MSP Humza Yousaf told Matt Hancock in a letter that supplies of the jab are to be 'particularly tight over the next few weeks', not just in Scotland but across the UK, according to the i newspaper.

Mr Yousaf's fears are the result of the updated advice published the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation last month, which said that under-40s should be given Pfizer or Moderna jabs rather than the AstraZeneca equivalent due to concerns over a small risk of blood clots in younger patients.

And with thousands of under-30s now receiving jabs after the vaccine roll-out picked up pace, demand for doses of Pfizer has now soared beyond supply levels.

Yesterday, Health Secretary Matt Hancock revealed that the Indian variant now comprises 91 per cent of new infections.

Figures showed Covid-19 case rates have increased across every region in England in the past week. But hospital admissions have only increased fractionally  while deaths are up by just 1.9 per cent on the previous week.

NHS bosses have said vaccines appear to have broken the link between rising cases and hospitalisations. Those that are admitted are often younger and less sick than during previous waves.

According to NHS data published yesterday, more than 85 per cent over-50s in England  considered the age group most at risk  have now had two vaccine doses.

If the NHS in England continues to give doses to 1.3million over-50s a week, everyone in that age bracket should be fully vaccinated by the time all remaining covid curbs are due to ease.

Among younger age groups, 35.5 per cent of those aged 40 to 49 are now estimated to have had both doses, along with 22.6 per cent of those aged 30 to 39.

The number of people falling ill with Covid has more than doubled in a week, a symptom-tracking study warned today amid the rapid spread of the Indian variant across the UK

Boris Johnson is expected to decide whether England can go ahead with the full re-opening on June 21 at a meeting in Downing Street on Sunday evening, following the conclusion of the G7 summit in Cornwall.

Then, after flying to Brussels on Monday morning to attend a Nato summit, he will return to London in the evening to address the nation.

The Government is planning to lift the 30-person limit on weddings, Whitehall sources confirmed last night.

But they insisted the Prime Minister is still undecided about the wider lifting of measures including social distancing rules and work-from-home advice.

Yesterday, the UK recorded 7,393 new coronavirus cases and seven deaths within 28 days of a positive test. Infections have risen 63 per cent in the past seven days compared to the week before.

But the number of hospital admissions has remained steady and the average number of deaths each day has stayed below ten.

Yesterday, Health Secretary Matt Hancock revealed that the Indian variant now comprises 91 per cent of new infections

Dr Jenny Harries, chief executive of the newly-created UK Health Security Agency, said the country was going 'not quite in the right direction' and data suggested there would be a further rise in infections in the coming weeks.

But the health chief said the figures suggested that those aged 60 and above are not getting ill because they are 'doubly vaccinated'.

She added that those appearing in hospital are either unvaccinated or have had a single dose.

The Prime Minister's spokesman said: 'The point of the five-week gap between the steps [in the roadmap] is for us to analyse the data. That's exactly what we've been doing, and we will continue to do so ahead of saying something early next week.'
Aiia Maasarwe, 21, (pictured) was on her way home in Melbourne in January 2019 when she was raped and murdered by Codey Herrmann after getting off a tram in Bundoora

The man who savagely raped and killed international student Aiia Maasarwe in Melbourne won't have his jail term increased.

Victorian prosecutors appealed the 36-year maximum sentence handed to Codey Herrmann for Ms Maasarwe's horrific rape and murder in January 2019.

The Director of Public Prosecutions argued Herrmann should have received a life sentence for his crimes.

'This was a vicious, callous and intentional killing of an unsuspecting young woman who was the unfortunate and random victim of primitive male rage,' Kerri Judd QC had argued.

But five Court of Appeal judges unanimously rejected and dismissed the appeal on Friday afternoon, saying on any view the sentence - including a 30-year minimum term - represented a severe punishment.

Their judgment highlights the importance of access to rehabilitative services within Victorian prisons, noting a belief Herrmann has fair prospects of rehabilitation if given appropriate treatment, support and supervision.

The appeal judges said it was a catch cry of modern governments that community safety is the first priority.

Victorian prosecutors appealed the 36-year maximum sentence handed to Codey Herrmann (left) for Ms Maasarwe's horrific rape and murder in January 2019.

'Accepting that to be so, the protection of the community requires that offenders like (Herrmann) be given access to the support services and specialised treatment on which their rehabilitation depends,' they said.

'He must, of course, remain ready to engage with treatment, but the responsibility rests on the state, which controls his incarceration, to ensure that is made available.'

Ms Maasarwe had come to Australia in August 2018 on a one-year exchange program with La Trobe University in Bundoora.

She was on her way home from a night out, on a call to one of her siblings in Israel, when Herrmann attacked her.

'I didn't expect you to pick up,' was all Ms Maasarwe managed to say before the phone fell to the ground.

Her last words to her attacker were: 'you piece of s***' in Arabic.

Herrmann knocked the 21-year-old unconscious with a metal pole, sexually assaulted her and set fire to her.

Ms Maasarwe had come to Australia in August 2018 on a one-year exchange program with La Trobe University in Bundoora

The appeal judges rejected Ms Judd's argument that the sentence handed down by Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth had placed too much weight on Herrmann's traumatic and disadvantaged background, and not enough on community protection.

Herrmann was homeless at the time. He had a history of substance abuse and a severe personality disorder.

A forensic psychiatrist said the trauma, abuse, neglect and deprivation the young Indigenous man had experienced was so extreme the damage was done by the time he was two.

In arguing against the appeal, Herrmann's lawyer Tim Marsh said the sentence was a stern one.

Given Herrmann's prospects for rehabilitation weren't extinguished it was impossible to say if he would always be a danger to the community, he said.
American company Archer Aviation unveiled its first electric flying taxi 'Maker' in a Tesla-style debut in California on Thursday night.

The 'Maker' two-seater taxi is capable of travelling for 60 miles at 150mph across cities, the company's CEO has said, with its commercial launch expected in 2024.

The unveiling comes as an increasing number of investors and aviation companies pile into the hot but yet-to-be-approved urban air mobility space, but the vehicle has not yet been shown in the air.

Interest in zero-emission aircraft that take off and land like helicopters but fly like planes is growing as aerospace companies look for new markets and face pressure to help decarbonize their industry though the battery-operated vehicles.

Maker's debut, staged at a hangar using XR technology to simulate a ride with guests including 'Breaking Bad' actor Aaron Paul, followed news on Thursday of two separate deals involving electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft companies based in Britain and Brazil.

Archer's aircraft does not yet fly commercially but it mounted an extravagant show under a new chief creative officer who has decades of experience in experiential design and television production, Kenny Taht, to attract attention.

Archer Aviation unveiled its first electric flying taxi 'Maker' in a Tesla-style debut on Thursday. Pictured: Actor Aaron Paul (right) sits inside the Archer Aviation Maker on June 10, 2021 in Hawthorne, California

Archer expects Maker's commercial launch in 2024 in Los Angeles and Miami and is in the process of certifying the piloted four-passenger aircraft with the Federal Aviation Administration, co-founder and co-CEO Brett Adcock told Reuters.

'Our real goal is to make a mass market transportation solution in and around cities,' Adcock said.

The taxis can fly at 150 miles per hour (240 km per hour) for distances up to 60 miles (100km) at an entry level price between $3 and $4 per passenger mile.

In New York City for example, the 17-mile trip from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Manhattan would cost $50 to $70 and take around five to seven minutes versus 60 to 90 minutes in a car.

The vehicle has 12 electric motors powered by six independent battery packs, and the aircraft is 100 times quieter than a helicopter when its at altitude, generating just 45 decibels, Adcock has said.

'Here at Archer we're working on a project that has the potential to help curb carbon emissions which is important, has the potential to help fix traffic problems because even if we have electric cars on the ground we're not fixing the problems in cities about getting around,' said Adcock in an interview.

The Archer Maker is a full-scale electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL), designed to be capable of traveling 60 miles at 150 mph to provide sustainable urban air mobility in cities. Pictured: The aircraft is unveiled d on June 10, 2021 in Hawthorne, California

Interest in zero-emission aircraft that take off and land like helicopters but fly like planes is growing as aerospace companies look for new markets and face pressure to help decarbonize their industry though the battery-operated vehicles. Actor Aaron Paul (right) sits inside the Archer Aviation Maker on June 10, 2021 in Hawthorne, California

While experts estimate the eVTOL market to be worth billions over the next decade, it is not expected to immediately make money and the timing of regulatory approval remains uncertain.

Asked about the approval process, the FAA said: 'The FAA can certify new technologies such as eVTOLs through its existing regulations. We may issue special conditions or additional requirements, depending on the type of project.'

As the market heats up, so has competition.

Archer is currently embroiled in a legal battle with Boeing-backed competitor Wisk Aero, which has accused it of stealing trade secrets and infringing on its patents.

Archer last week asked a California court to dismiss the lawsuit and courtersued Wisk for 'false statements' regarding a separate criminal probe.

Archer plans to go public through a $3.8 billion merger with blank-check company Atlas Crest and has an investment and $1 billion order from United Airlines.

Archer expects Maker's commercial launch in 2024 in Los Angeles and Miami and is in the process of certifying the piloted four-passenger aircraft with the Federal Aviation Administration, co-founder and co-CEO Brett Adcock told Reuters

The taxis can fly at 150 miles per hour (240 km per hour) for distances up to 60 miles (100km) at an entry level price between $3 and $4 per passenger mile

The unveiling came as American Airlines said on Thursday it plans to invest $25 million in U.K.-based Vertical Aerospace Group and consider a $1 billion order for small, electric-powered aircraft that can take off and land like helicopters.

The American announcement came as Vertical Aerospace disclosed that it has agreed to merge with special-purpose acquisition company Broadstone Acquisition and become a publicly traded company later this year.

American, Microsoft's M12, Honeywell, Rolls-Royce and others will take stakes in Vertical through private investment in public equity, or PIPE transactions.

Another investor, Irish aircraft leasing company Avolon, said Thursday that it placed a $2 billion conditional order for up to 500 Vertical aircraft.

Vertical is working to develop a four-passenger electric aircraft that could carry people from city centers to airports. The company said it plans to conduct its first test flight later this year and hopes to gain regulatory approvals as early as 2024.

In New York City for example, the 17-mile trip from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Manhattan would cost $50 to $70 and take around five to seven minutes versus 60 to 90 minutes in a car. Pictured: Archer Aviation co-founders Brett Adcock (L) and Adam Goldstein (R) unveil the Archer Maker on June 10, 2021

American said it expects to make a 'pre-order' up to 250 aircraft - suggesting a price tag of $4 million per aircraft - with an option for 100 more. The order hinges on Vertical meeting certain terms, which the companies did not detail.

The deal is the latest move by a major airline to demonstrate interest in developing technology around electric aircraft and alternative fuels.

United announced a similar deal with Archer Aviation, in February, but critics view the announcements as greenwashing by airlines whose planes are a growing source of climate-changing emissions.
Britain's medical regulator today revealed it has not yet detected any link between Pfizer and Moderna's Covid vaccines and heart damage, despite US officials calling an urgent meeting over growing fears there is a connection.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which polices the safety of drugs in the UK, said it is 'closely monitoring reports of myocarditis and pericarditis received with the Covid vaccines'.

It has recorded just 34 cases of myocarditis after Pfizer jabs  a similar number to after the AstraZeneca vaccine  and only two after Moderna, but says numbers 'similar or below expected background levels'.

Meanwhile, US health chiefs have announced officials will gather on June 18 to discuss 226 plausible cases of heart inflammation in under-30s given the jabs in America.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bosses yesterday admitted the number of cases was higher than expected and that most were in boys and young men. However, they insisted the complication was still rare.

All the cases met the CDC's 'working case definition' of myocarditis and pericarditis but the actual number of reports made stands at almost 800. Hundreds of affected patients are still being reviewed.

Among the cases spotted in the US, three are in intensive care, 15 are hospitalised and 41 have ongoing symptoms.

The CDC continues to urge everyone aged 12 and older in the US to get vaccinated and says it is not clear if either condition is actually caused by the shots.

However, similar links were also uncovered in Israel, Canada, and the Pfizer vaccine was yesterday rejected for all children aged 12 to 17 in Germany who do not have underlying health conditions.

No10 has not yet expanded the inoculation drive to under-18s, despite officials approving Pfizer's jab for teenagers. It means there are destined to be fewer cases spotted in Britain currently, if the condition is proven to occur more often in younger adults.

The average age for people suffering the condition in the US was 24  who have yet to begin routinely receiving their jabs in Britain  and comparatively few Moderna doses have been dished out in the UK.

Last night it also emerged supplies of Pfizer's jab to the UK will be tight throughout June. More than 25million doses have already been dished out.

US health officials Thursday announced they are investigating what appear to be higher than expected reports of heart inflammation in male teens and young adults after getting their second doses of the two vaccines

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has called an 'emergency meeting' over 226 cases of heart inflammation in people who have had either the Pfizer or Moderna Covid vaccines. Pictured: A girl receives her vaccine in Harrow, London

The MHRA has received 34 reports of myocarditis and 26 reports of pericarditis in the UK following a Pfizer vaccine.

It has seen similar levels after AstraZeneca  31 of myocarditis and 51 of pericarditis  and only two after Moderna.

UK faces shortage of Pfizer vaccines throughout June Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi today admitted that supply of the Pfizer vaccine will be tight over the next few weeks but insisted that it was 'stable'. It comes after Scotland's Health Secretary Humza Yousaf warned supply of the Pfizer vaccine will be 'particularly tight' over the next few weeks. Mr Zahawi told LBC: 'I am absolutely confident, and I'll speak to Humza on this, that we will be able to deliver the Pfizer vaccines that Scotland needs to be able to meet its targets for end of July, as the United Kingdom target.' Asked if it is going to be 'tight' in the next few weeks, he said: 'It will be, there is no doubt. Every time I've come on your show I've said that the determining factor in terms of vaccine in arms is supply. 'And supply remains finite, but it is stable, and Pfizer have done a great job in being consistent on their delivery schedule.' Advertisement

Of the 14.7million people to have had a Pfizer jab, 0.0004 per cent have suffered either myocarditis or pericarditis. The rate was slightly lower in AstraZeneca recipients: 0.0003 per cent of the 24.5million people to have had a first dose.

The regulator said: 'The number of reports of myocarditis and pericarditis reported with the vaccines in the UK remains similar or below the expected background rate in different age groups within the general population and does not currently indicate an increased risk following vaccination against Covid.

'We will continue to closely monitor these events reported in the UK and internationally.'

Both types of heart inflammation can be caused by a variety of infections, including a bout of Covid, as well as certain medications.

There have been rare reports following other types of vaccinations in the past.

More than 130million Americans have received both their first and second doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

This means just 0.0002 per cent of fully-vaccinated Americans have reported the complication.

Cases are reported through the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

The system accepts reports from everyone, regardless of the plausibility of the vaccine causing the symptom.

In total, VAERS received 216 cases of heart inflammation after the first dose of an mRNA shot, and another 573 cases after the second dose.

A total of 488 reports were from people who had the Pfizer vaccine, while the remaining 301 had Moderna.

More than half of the cases reported after people had received their second dose were in people between the ages of 12 and 24, the CDC said.

This group accounts for less than nine per cent of doses administered. Almost two-fifths of cases were in males.

A total of 226 cases have been reported that may meet the CDC's 'working case definition' of myocarditis and pericarditis following the shots, the agency said. Among the 226, three are in intensive care, 15 are hospitalised, and 41 have ongoing symptoms. The rest have recovered

What is myocarditis? Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle. There are no specific causes of the condition but it is usually triggered by a virus. Some of the most common infections which cause myocarditis, are those called adenovirus and Coxsackie B. It can be caused by the common cold, hepatitis B and C, and herpes simplex virus. The most common symptoms of the condition include chest pain, a fever, a fast heartbeat, tiredness and shortness of breath. If the inflammation damages the heart muscle or the fibres that conduct electrical pulses to the heart, complications can develop. They can develop quickly, and include sudden loss of consciousness, an abnormally fast, slow or irregular heartbeat. In very severe cases the condition is fatal, causing heart failure or sudden death. The inflammation enlarges the heart and creates scar tissue, forcing it to work harder and therefore making it weaker. In most cases of viral myocarditis, the illness goes away and there are no complications. But in rare cases when inflammation is severe, there can be damage to the heart which needs monitoring and possibly a heart transplant. Myocarditis can reoccur, but there is no known way to prevent this. The risk of recurrence is low, around 10 to 15 per cent, according to Myocarditis Foundation. It is difficult to gauge the prevalence of myocarditis because there is no widely available test for it. In 2010, approximately 400,000 people died of heart muscle disease - cardiomyopathy that includes myocarditis - worldwide. Expert consensus opinion estimates that up to 40 per cent of dilated cardiomyopathy results from myocarditis, according to the National Organisation for Rare Disorders. Advertisement

The overwhelming majority of the cases have occurred within a week of vaccination.

Symptoms included chest pain and breathing difficulties.

The CDC's vaccine advisory committee will meet on June 18 to further evaluate the possible risk.

Dr Tom Shimabukuro told a government vaccine meeting about the investigation Thursday.

He said: 'It's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison because, again, these are preliminary reports.'

'Not all these will turn out to be true myocarditis or pericarditis reports.'

Dr Shimabukuro said the CDC findings were mostly 'consistent' with the findings of Israel's Health Ministry, which first reported a likely link to the Pfizer vaccine and the condition in young men.

Doctors were first alerted to the possible link between myocarditis and vaccines back in May, amid reports of cases in young males.

The CDC urged providers to ask patients with symptoms of heart inflammation if they had taken the Covid vaccine.

Earlier this month, it was reported that seven teen boys in the US had suffered heart inflammation after their second Pfizer shots.

The study found the boys, aged between the ages of 14 and 19, developed chest pain within a few days of having the second jab.

Heart imaging tests showed myocarditis.

None were critically ill, and all were healthy enough to be sent home after two to six days in the hospital.

Around the same time, the Department of Defense began to track 14 cases.

Israel claimed in early June that its research showed Pfizer's vaccine is the 'probable' cause of heart inflammation in a very small number of people who get the jab.

The Health Ministry had found 148 cases of myocarditis soon after the patient had been vaccinated.

In total, 275 cases were spotted among the more than five million people given the Pfizer jab in Israel, which has had one of the world's most successful jab rollouts.

In the remaining 127 cases, it is unclear if they are linked to the vaccine.

This was equivalent to just 0.005 per cent of recipients, or one in 20,000 people.

For the 148 cases 'probably' linked to the jab, the rate was 0.003 per cent  although half of them had other underlying health problems.

Israel was one of the first to warn of health concerns linked to the Pfizer vaccine.

In May, officials at the European Medicines Agency also reported receiving 107 reports of myocarditis following the Pfizer vaccine.

Pfizer was granted emergency use authorisation for children aged 12 and over last month in the US. It is now working on trials with children as young as six months old.

Moderna is still only available for adults in the country.

Meanwhile, the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines have also both been investigated for possible  extremely rare  ties to blood clots.

The MHRA last week approved the Pfizer vaccine for 12- to 15-year-olds in the UK but there are no plans to expand the roll-out to under-18s yet.

Pfizer's supply shortage to the UK comes as a blow, making the prospect of speeding up the vaccine roll-out to meet demand much more difficult.

MSP Humza Yousaf told Matt Hancock in a letter that supplies of the jab are to be 'particularly tight over the next few weeks', not just in Scotland but across the UK, according to the i newspaper.

Mr Yousaf's fears are the result of the updated advice published the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation last month, which said that under-40s should be given Pfizer or Moderna jabs rather than the AstraZeneca equivalent due to concerns over a small risk of blood clots in younger patients.

And with thousands of under-30s now receiving jabs after the vaccine roll-out picked up pace, demand for doses of Pfizer has now soared beyond supply levels.
Radio host Kyle Sandilands has met dashing new NSW Opposition leader Chris Minns for morning tea - despite co-host Jackie 'O' Henderson telling him they're supposed to be backing Premier Gladys Berejiklian.

Mr Minns, 41, was made leader of the NSW Labor Party after Jodi McKay resigned in an emotional press conference last month after two years as leader.

Ms Berejiklian has been a long-time friend of Sandilands and Henderson's, and has a number of interviews on their KIIS FM Kyle and Jackie O Show.

Kyle Sandilands (pictured) arrives at his Woollahra house on Friday morning after celebrating his 50th birthday on Thursday

NSW Opposition leader Chris Minns (pictured), who secured the position last month, arrives at Sandilands home on Friday

On air on Friday morning Sandilands revealed he had invited Mr Minns to his Sydney home in the exclusive suburb of Woollahra - sparking a shocked reaction from Jackie O.

'Why are you doing that, Kyle? We're team Gladys. Don't meet him,' she said.

'I know, I'm a Gladys fan. But Bruno said I need to be fair. I mean, what if he's a really nice guy?' Sandilands replied, referring to one of the show's producers, Bruno Bouchet.

'I don't think Gladys would like it,' Jackie O said.

Mr Minns secured his position last week after former Labor leader Michael Daley, 55, dropped out of the race to avoid a leadership struggle that would have distracted and divided the party.

Mr Minns, who has run for leadership unsuccessfully twice before, is from Labor's right-wing faction and believes he can win a majority at the next election on March 25, 2023.

Sandilands (pictured) parks his car before going inside for a meeting with Mr Minns

Kyle Sandilands (left) and Jackie 'O' Henderson (right) regularly interview NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian (centre) on their popular KIIS FM radio show

Mr Minns, 41, (pictured at Kyle Sandilands' house) is hoping to become NSW Premier at the next election in 2023

Supporters believe the secret weapon to his success is a combination of dashing looks and youthful enthusiasm which will help the party connect with younger voters and families.

'He's a good-looking fresh face with fresh ideas at a time when NSW Labor desperately needs both,' one Labor source told Daily Mail Australia.

Labor, like all opposition parties, has struggled for air during the pandemic as governments hog the limelight with daily press conferences to announce huge decisions that affect residents' lives more than ever before.

Mr Minns - who grew up in the St George area of southern Sydney and joined Labor aged 18 - has congratulated Ms Berejiklian for doing a 'good job' of managing Covid, but believes the next election will be decided by the cost of living and the quality of life for ordinary working families.

Mr Minns addressed supporters in a Facebook live selfie video from outside parliament after his election, telling them: 'I'm going to make sure we're in the hunt in 2023.'

He also uploaded the clip to his Instagram story.

The new Labor leader smiled at his wife Anna as they left a press conference after he was elected unopposed

Minns met Sandilands after he recorded his KIIS FM radio show on Friday morning

The new leader said it was time to end the infighting that plagued the opposition under Ms McKay.

'I believe that it's time for Labor to start the long march to regain the trust of the people of this state,' he said.

The father-of-three said he wants to develop the state's manufacturing industry, build trains, buses and ferries locally and create 'good, well-paying, middle-class' jobs.

He has previously vowed to ban political donations from coal, oil and gas companies and build a state-owned renewable energy company with the aim of producing half the state's energy from renewables by 2030 and 100 per cent by 2050.

The aspiring premier also promised to better support the state's 21,000 homeless people and later this month will be spending a night sleeping on the street alongside Treasurer Dominic Perrottet to raise money for charity.
Day will end with reception with The Queen and senior royals

And look at new digital tax for companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook

Leaders will also second earlier agreement for 15 per cent global minimum corporate tax

President Joe Biden and leaders of the G7 will pledge 1 billion shots in arms of the COVID vaccine for the world

President Joe Biden and leaders of the G7 will on Friday pledge one billion shots in arms of the COVID vaccine for the world, support a 15 per cent global minimum corporate tax, and target Big Tech with a new tax as the summit begins.

Of those billion shots, half will come from the United States and 100 million from the U.K.

'We're going to help lead the world out of this pandemic working alongside our global partners,' Biden said on Thursday, adding that the G7 nations would join the U.S. in outlining their vaccine donation commitments at the three-day summit. The G-7 also includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.

The leaders will gather on Friday for opening greetings and a socially-distanced family photo, before pivoting to a session 'Building Back Better From COVID-19.'

The world leaders of the seven industrial nations will also second an agreement made earlier by their finance ministers on the global minimum corporate tax.

The update to international tax law is intended to end a global competition that has led some countries to cut their corporate taxes much lower than others in order to attract multinational companies to their shores.

President Joe Biden and leaders of the G7 will pledge 1 billion shots in arms of the COVID vaccine for the world, support a 15 per cent global minimum corporate tax, and target Big Tech with a new tax as the summit begins

It's a big win for Biden's administration, which has proposed the global minimum tax as a way to pay for infrastructure projects. Biden wants to hike corporate taxes in the US and a global minimum will help combat fears his move could cause jobs to move overseas.

The leaders will also announce a plan to replace Digital Services Taxes, which targeted the biggest American tech companies - such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google - with a new tax plan linked to the places where multinationals are actually doing business, rather than where they are headquartered.

Later the leaders will meet Queen Elizabeth II and other members of the Royal Family at the Eden Project, a lush, domed eco-tourism site built in a former quarry pit.

Prince Charles, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince William and Kate, Duchess of Cambridge will join the G7 leaders at the reception.

On Thursday, world leaders from G7 countries arrived in Britain.

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrived at Cornwall Airport in Newquay wearing a face mask and waved from the exit of his jet beside his country's coat of arms and maple leaf flag.

European Council President Charles Michel also arrived ahead of the G7 meeting at the airport on June 10, and was met by a selection of British soldiers, sailors and airmen.

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and his wife Mariko Suga arrived in Newquay in the early hours of this morning. A typical flight from his country to Britain takes roughly 12 hours.

Prime Minister Johnson will host leaders from the USA, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and Canada at the G7 Summit to be held in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, beginning today.

Britain has invited Australia, India, South Africa, and South Korea to attend the Leaders' Summit as guest countries - as well as the EU, amid trade tensions with the bloc.

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrives ahead of the G7 Summit at Cornwall airport in Newquay, Britain, 10 June

European Council President Charles Michel (C) arrives ahead of the G7 meeting at Cornwall airport on June 10, 2021 in Newquay

President of the European Council, Charles Michel (centre) is welcomed as he arrives at Cornwall Airport Newquay ahead of the G7 summit, June 10

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and his wife Mariko Suga arrive at Newquay Airport on June 11, 2021 in Newquay
A headache, sore throat and runny nose are now the most reported Covid symptoms, scientists say.

NHS bosses only recognise three tell-tale signs of the virus - a temperature, new continuous cough and loss of taste and smell.

But King's College London scientists, who run a coronavirus surveillance project, say the disease is 'acting differently now'.

A headache is now the most reported symptom of Covid while a sore throat is the second most complained about, but neither are on the official list of virus symptoms

Scientists believe the Indian Delta variant, which has been spreading rapidly since early May, may be behind the change in symptoms.

It could also be down to younger people getting infected and them being more likely to only suffer a mild illness.

Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King's College London, warned that the Indian variant is now 'more like a cold' in younger people

Lead researcher professor Tim Spector said people should get tested if they think they have a cold to curb any potential spread of Covid.

What are the symptoms of Covid? The NHS has listed a high temperature along with a new and continuous cough as the main symptoms of the virus. It subsequently added a loss or change to smell or taste as a symptom of the virus, following pressure from Covid campaigners. Most people who catch Covid and show symptoms have at least one of these, according to the NHS. But other studies have claimed a loss of appetite, skin rashes, hives, muscle pain and diarrhoea can all be symptoms of Covid. The US recognises 11 symptoms, which also include a headache and runny nose. Around a third of people with the virus are asymptomatic and can unknowingly pass it on to others. Source: NHS Advertisement

The King's team has been tracking virus symptoms through an app called ZOE that it launched last March. It is the country's largest symptom-tracking study.

Data analysed by the ZOE app showed a cough was the most common symptom at the beginning of the pandemic, with 46 per cent of infected patients having the tell-tale sign.

But it has now been overtaken by a headache (66 per cent), sore throat (53 per cent), runny nose (49 per cent) and fever (42 per cent) in under 40s, while over 40s showed similar results, Professor Spector claimed.

Fewer people are reporting they have lost their sense of taste or small, with anosmia no longer in the top 10 most common symptoms.

Professor Spector told the Telegraph: 'People aren't realising this, and people might think they've got some sort of seasonal cold and they still go out to parties and they might spread it around.

'Since the start of May, we've been looking at the top symptoms and they are not the same as they were.

'Number one is headache followed by sore throat, runny nose and fever. All those are not the old classic symptoms, number five is cough, so it's rarer and we don't even see loss of smell coming into the top 10 anymore.

'This variant seems to be working slightly differently.'

In February, over 140 GPs wrote to Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty, urging the government to add more cold-like symptoms to the official list.

Dr Alex Sohal, a GP in Tower Hamlets, London, who was the lead writer of the letter, said patients were reporting these mild symptoms and went on to test positive for Covid within a few days.

Earlier research by the Office for National Statistics showed tiredness was the most commonly reported symptom, followed by a headache and a cough.

Their data, which was gathered through a survey of 10,000 people and released in April, revealed that around 53 per cent of people who test positive for the virus suffer no symptoms.

Britain yesterday recorded 7,393 Covid cases, an increase of 40 per cent on the week before.

Cases have been ticking upwards for several weeks because of the Indian variant, which has left June 21 'Freedom Day' in doubt.

Despite reported deaths and patients admitted to hospital still being low, there is a lag between an increase in infections. The number of infected patients needing medical treatment is slowly increasing.
The daughter of an ex-Prime Minister has apparently been spotted on a dating app - and her profile prompt suggests she could be an intimidating option for potential suitors.

Malcolm Turnbull's daughter Daisy recently split from her husband of 10 years, ex-army officer James Brown, and now appears to be on upmarket dating app Hinge.

Daisy Turnbull's Hinge profile title is the very direct, 'Will respond within a minute or totally forget about it.'

Daisy Turnbull, who recently split from her husband of 10 years, appears to be using the upmarket dating app Hinge, and kicked it off with an intimidating prompt for potential suitors

Ms Turnbull tagged her second photo with the prompt 'Lowkey flex', which is likely to be a joke about subtly bragging

Daisy (pictured at right), 36, recently revealed her marriage breakdown and split from James Brown (pictured left). Her famous ex-Prime Minister father Malcolm Turnbull is pictured second from right

Part of Hinge's marketing says the app is 'designed to be deleted', matching its reputation as an app users use to find relationships instead of casual hookups.

She added another confident prompt to her profile: 'Lowkey flex', a phrase usually associated with twentysomethings, which means to subtly brag.

Ms Turnbull's no-nonsense prompt could also be a reflection of how busy she is.

She's a mother of two, now 50/50 co-parenting with her ex-husband.

Ms Turnbull is also teacher and director of wellbeing at the exclusive St Catherines School at Waverley, and a Lifeline counsellor.

She teaches teaches history, religion and business.

She also published her first book in 2021, 50 Risks to Take With Your Kids, and has already talked about writing a guide to consent for teenagers.

Ms Turnbull, who is co-parenting with her ex-husband James Brown, recently published a book about encouraging children to take risks

Daisy Turnbull (second from right) appears to be on the dating app Hinge after splitting from her husband James Brown (far right). She is pictured with her parents Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull

Ms Turnbull, whose father was Prime Minister from 2015 to 2018 and a longtime politician before that, modelled raising her kids on her own childhood.

She and her older brother Alex were largely given the freedom to explore and make their own mistakes. They relished in the autonomy it gave them.

'I grew up in the '80s which was riskier in a good way,' Ms Turnbull told The Courier Mail.

'There weren't so many concerns around kids walking down the street or bike riding around the block. On a holiday at Northern Beaches one year  I was about 11 or 12  and I caught the bus with a friend from Palm Beach to Avalon to see a movie. Dad told us, "if you hit Wynyard you've gone too far, turn around and come back".'

Daisy Turnbull recently published a book about encouraging children to take risks

Ms Turnbull thinks the way she was raised offered a perfect balance of exploration and safety and often asks her mother, who is known as Gaga to her children (while Malcolm is referred to as Baba) for advice.

'As a kid, I remember feeling really excited by the responsibility we were given and that we were trusted by our parents,' she said.

Ms Turnbull said she wanted her own children to develop a sense of judgement and responsibility that only comes with being given the freedom to make mistakes.

Following a discussion about the differences between parenting in the 1980s and parenting now, Ms Turnbull wrote a book about encouraging children to take risks.

The self-help book details 50 risks - separated into categories of physical, social and character risks - that parents should allow their children to take.

It's also been speculated Ms Turnbull could enter politics.

She told The Sydney Morning Herald she has been approached to do so.
Police in Italy are hunting the relatives of a Pakistani girl who they think was strangled to death and buried in a shallow grave in a so-called honour killing.

Saman Abbas, 18, has been missing since May 1 when she was last seen on CCTV at a farm near the city of Reggio Emilia, central Italy, where father Shabbar, 46, worked.

Police says Shabbar conspired with Saman's mother Nazia Shaheen, 47, uncle Hasnain Danish, 33, and cousins Nomanulhaq Nomanulahq and Ijaz Ikram, 33 and 28, to kill her and bury her body behind the farm before fleeing the country.

Investigators believe the relatives hatched the plot after Saman refused to enter into an arranged marriage with a cousin in Pakistan because she had a boyfriend in Italy and wanted to live a 'Western' lifestyle.

Ijaz has since been arrested in France on suspicion of murder and extradited back to Italy. Shabbar and Nazia are in Pakistan and have denied murder of their daughter.

The whereabouts of Hasnain - who prosecutors say masterminded the killing - and Nomanulhaq are unknown.

Saman Abbas, 18, has been missing in Italy for more than a month. Police believe she was killed by her family after refusing a forced marriage to a cousin in Pakistan

Prosecutors say the case dates back to autumn last year, when the family tried to force Saman into an arranged marriage in her native Pakistan.

Saman fled the family home after an argument and since October had been living in a refuge run by social services, fearing for her safety.

But she returned home on April 11 this year, apparently to collect identity documents - though it is unclear exactly why she needed them.

Police believe that by April 26 the family had begun preparing for her murder.

That is the date on which uncle Hasnain is alleged to have bought plane tickets for her parents to fly back to Pakistan, prosecutors say.

Then, on the evening of April 29, CCTV captured three men who police say are Hasnain, Nomanulhaq and Ijaz walking into fields behind the farm around 7.30pm.

The trio are carrying two shovels, a bucket, and a blue bag with a crowbar in it. They are gone for around two hours, before returning home.

Saman (pictured) is thought to have enraged relatives by telling them she had a boyfriend in Italy and wanted to live a 'Western' life

The following day, Saman reportedly overheard a conversation between her relatives, and told her boyfriend that they were planning her murder.

Saman's boyfriend, who was not at the property, told Italian newspaper Gazzetta di Reggio Emiliano that she texted him saying she had overheard her uncle remark that murder is 'the only solution' for girls who disobey Pakistan's strict honour codes.

The boyfriend was instructed to contact police in two days if she hadn't messaged him.

The boyfriend said he tried to reassure her, but she said: 'I'm not confident.'

Police say more CCTV footage - which hasn't been published - then shows parents Shabbar and Nazia walking their daughter into the fields behind the farm at nine minutes past midnight on May 1.

The pair return just 13 minutes later, with father Shabbar carrying a backpack that Saman had previously been wearing.

Police believe the parents handed Saman over to her uncle and cousins who were waiting in the fields and who killed her and buried her body somewhere on the farm.

The family then left home - Shabbas and Nazia for Pakistan, ostensibly to visit a sick relative, while Ijaz headed into Europe.

When police called at the family farm looking for Saman on May 5, they found Hasnain and Saman's 16-year-old brother at home, who explained that the rest of the family had gone to Pakistan to see a sick relative, Corriere reports.

Then the pair also vanished. On May 9 they were stopped at the Italian border with France because the brother was not carrying his identity documents.

CCTV released by Italian police allegedly shows Saman's uncle and two cousins taking a shovel (pictured left), a sack and a crowbar into fields behind the family home before she vanished

Hasnain was released but the brother was detained. While being interviewed by police, he told them of his suspicions that Hasnain orchestrated his sister's killing with the help of his relatives.

The boy claims the whole family was afraid of Hasnain, who he believes strangled his sister to death following a row over identity documents.

He claimed to have overheard the argument on the night his sister disappeared, before seeing his father come home in tears followed by his uncle and cousins.

Based on the teenager's testimony, the police have now issued warrants for the family on suspicion of premeditated murder and concealment of a body.

A phone has since been uncovered which allegedly contains a text sent from Hasnain to a friend which reads simply: 'Job well done.' Police say this was a reference to the killing.

Ijaz was then arrested in France on June 6 while boarding a bus bound for Barcelona, where he is thought to have relatives.

He was extradited back to Italy, where he arrived on Wednesday this week. Hasnain and Nomanulhaq are also thought to be somewhere in Europe, but their exact whereabouts are unknown.

Shabbar and Nazia are in Pakistan, and have spoken to Italian journalists to deny the murder of their daughter, who they say is alive an in Belgium. Prosecutors want to have the pair extradited.

Meanwhile searches are still ongoing at the farm to try and find Saman's body.

Electromagnetic scanners have been brought in along with sniffer dogs to try and detect the remains, while waterways are also being dredged.

'The search for the remains of the injured person continues, who unfortunately we believe is dead,' prosecutor Prosecutor Isabella Chiesi told Reppublica.

'I would not give any positive feedback to what the father said, we have ascertained that the girl is not in Belgium.'

The case has shocked Italy, with the Union of Islamic Communities issuing a religious ruling denouncing forced marriages following Saman's disappearance.
Republican congressman Byron Donalds met with Donald Trump at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf course on Thursday night after claiming he was blocked from joining the Congressional Black Caucus over his support for the former president.

Daniels tweeted out a smiling image of himself and Trump, each giving a thumbs-up, on Friday, following his on-air spat with an interviewer on CNN over his support for Trump  and the CBC's apparent refusal to admit him.

The first-term lawmaker called Trump 'POTUS,' the acronym for President of the United States, and took shots at Joe Biden's policies.

'Yesterday, I had the pleasure of meeting with POTUS Trump to discuss many of the issues America is facing now that he is out of office. Under Biden, we have rising inflation, open borders, an energy crisis, a stagnant economy, & weak foreign policy.'

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) visited with former President Donald Trump at his Westminster, NJ golf club, and tweeted out a thumbs-up photo. The move came hours after Donalds clashed with host Brianna Keilar on CNN of the apparent refusal by the Congressional Black Caucus to admit him

'We miss your leadership, sir,' Donalds said, directing a comment to Trump, who is banned from Twitter and no longer has an account.

Asked for comment, the CBC did not mention Donalds by name. 'The Congressional Black Caucus remains committed to fighting for issues that support the Black community, including the police accountability bill, protecting voting rights, and a jobs bill that helps our communities,' said the statement the CBX provided to DailyMail.com.

The CBC has admitted Republicans in the past. Former Utah Rep. Mia Love attacked the group, but joined in 2015, BuzzFeed reported.

Donalds' move to pointedly link arms with Trump once again comes after he had a furious on-air clash with CNN's Brianna Keilar after the host said his ideas were 'incongruous' with those of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC).

Donalds is among the 139 House Republicans who voted to overturn one or two states' election results that were certified for Joe Biden on January 6th, the day of the Capitol riot.

The Republican said on the program he is being denied entry to the Caucus because of his continued support for Donald Trump.

Keilar, hosting Thursday's New Day, played a montage of Trump's most controversial comments, prompting Donalds to clash with the presenter.

Rep. @ByronDonalds says he is being denied entry into the Congressional Black Caucus because he is a Republican.



"My support of President Trump has been consistent, but at the same time, I have had the ability to advocate for [the] Black community in my state," he said. pic.twitter.com/A6BNFAf05n  New Day (@NewDay) June 10, 2021

Florida Representative Byron Donalds had a furious clash with CNN's Brianna Keilar after the host said his ideas were 'incongruous' with those of the Congressional Black Caucus

He began to explain why his support for the former president should not affect his membership of the caucus before being interrupted by Keilar.

Donalds then retorted: 'Please don't cut me off. I have not cut you off in this interview. Please do not do that to me. Thank you.

'As a black man in America, I'm allowed to have my own thoughts on who I choose to support and who I choose not to support.'

It has now been six months since the members who won election in 2020 were inducted into the supposedly nonpartisan CBC.

The Republican said he is being denied entry to the Caucus because of his continued support for Donald Trump

Donalds, who was elected for the first time last year, is yet to be included.

The Florida representative has approached members of the CBC to discuss joining the group who are leading talks on police reform and racial injustice in the US.

Donalds told CNN: 'I have a perspective being a 42-year-old black man who has come up in America after a lot of the battles through the civil rights movement that I think would be helpful and a helpful perspective to the CBC.

'A range of discussions from all sides of the political framework is important, not just for black America, but for all America.'

Donalds objected to Joe Biden's election wins in Arizona and Pennsylvania and also supports voter ID laws, issues which Keilar suggested were 'incongruent with the mission of the CBC'.

Keilar, hosting Thursday's New Day, played a montage of Trump's most controversial comments, prompting Donalds to clash with the presenter

The lawmaker replied: 'If you actually look at the bills that have been passed in Florida, Georgia, actually black Americans and all Americans, whether you live in those states, have more access to the ballot, not less.

'Those are the facts because I've read both bills. You say this will increase access for voters of color, for African-Americans. That's just not true.'

Donalds has previously said he wants to join the CBC to change the group's liberal dominance.

He believes he should not be excluded due to his political beliefs or support for Trump.

He said: 'My support of President Trump has been consistent, but at the same time, I have had the ability to advocate for issues, ideas, proposals and funding that have helped black community in my state.

'My support for President Trump, whether it's for or against, is irrelevant. That has nothing to do with this discussion.

'This is about whether the ideology of somebody who is conservative is welcome in the Congressional Black Caucus.'

Bidenomics is failing! President's $6T budget is driving inflation to its highest level in 13 years amid record federal spending and deficit, experts warn - as GOP predict 'green worker paradise' plan will hike up prices

Concerns are mounting that Joe Biden's $6 trillion spending spree will cause inflation, which is already at a 13-year high, to surge even further amid record federal spending and deficit - as Republicans warn his 'green worker paradise' plan will only supercharge prices.

The consumer price index rose 5 percent in the 12 months through May, which is the highest year-on-year increase since August 2008, according to the government's latest report.

Experts, including Deutsche Bank, have warned that the effects of rising prices could be 'devastating' and that huge deficit spending by Congress could supercharge inflation rates.

Biden's $6 trillion budget plan has already sparked major inflation fears given it is set to boost federal spending by 25 percent, which is the highest since World War II.

According to a monthly report from the Treasury Department, the government has already set records for spending and deficit in the first eight months of the fiscal year.

Federal spending climbed to $4.67 billion, which resulted in a deficit of $2 billion, the report says.

The consumer price index rose 5 percent in the 12 months through May, which is the highest year-on-year increase since August 2008, according to the government's latest report

According to a monthly report from the Treasury Department, the government has already set records for spending and deficit in the first eight months of the fiscal year. Federal spending climbed to $4.67 billion, which resulted in a deficit of $2 billion

Republicans blame the sharp rise in inflation on lax monetary policy and freewheeling stimulus spending by the Biden administration.

Larry Kudlow, who was the Trump administration's Director of the National Economic Council, warned on Thursday that high inflation could be permanent if Biden's plans are passed.

'If Uncle Joe Biden gets his green worker paradise, Soviet-style Bulgarian economic policies, massive tax increases, massive social spending, destroying the fossil fuel energy sector, then the dollar will collapse and leaping tax rates will choke off economic growth,' Kudlow said on his Fox News program.

Joe Biden's $6 trillion budget plan has already sparked major inflation fears given it is set to boost federal spending by 25 percent, which is the highest since World War II

'Call it the 1970s with a socialist spin. In that case, we will have permanently higher inflation. And we will have weaker and weaker economy.

'Now if, on the other hand, Mr Biden's green worker paradise does not get voted in, then I'm going to say this inflation bump is just going to be temporary. A couple more months that's all. Really a rebound from the pandemic deflation, and actually, it's a sign of strong economic growth. There will be no long-term inflation consequences. That's if we don't get the Bulgarian model.'

Biden administration officials have said they expect consumer prices to peak this summer and then begin to dissipate in the fall.

An official told Reuters that the 5 percent accelerated CPI was largely due to a 'base effect' given the low level of prices seen in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Biden administration is remained convinced that the current spike in consumer prices will be transitory.

'It's most likely that it's going to peak in the next few months. We'll probably see the worst of it this summer, and (then) in the fall, things will probably start to get back to normal,' the official said.

The official rejected concerns voiced by Republican lawmakers that President Joe Biden's proposed boost in spending on infrastructure, child care and community college would put further pressure on prices, given that the spending would only kick in around 2023 and then spread out over a decade
A dog who likes to jump on his best friend - a horse - to grab a lift and rest his legs has hit stardom on Instagram.

Kerri Westaway, from Suffolk, is owner of Teddy, a seven-year-old Maltese, and his riding partner Victoria, a 10-year-old Irish Connemara horse.

The little and large duo may seem an odd couple to strike up a friendship but they have got to know each other well over the years and Victoria, the horse, isn't worried about taking the strain for Teddy.

Kerri said that Teddy loves to pose like a jockey and ride on the back of the horse.

Teddy the dog loves to pose on top of pal Victoria said owner Kerri Westaway, from Suffolk

Kerri said that the two were friends from the start and Victoria likes to nudge Teddy on the head

Teddy isn't worried about the size of her powerful friend and that with one brusque movement she could be thrown to the ground.

Fortunately, Victoria seems like an easy-going horse.

Kerri said: 'On one of Teddy's regular visits to see Victoria I decided to see if he would sit on her back for an Instagram photo.

'He sat on her back and seemed very comfortable.

Teddy is perfectly at ease with Victoria and is not worried about the difference in size and weight

Victoria, a 10-year-old Irish Connemara horse is quite laid back and likes going for walks with Teddy

Kerri said that she decided to put Teddy on top of the horse for an Instagram snap and he immediately looked comfortable

To be on the safe side Kerri said that someone is nearby to grab Teddy if he did suddenly fall

'Victoria didn't mind at all. She is a very laid back horse.

'She just stood still and let it happen. My daughter stood behind just in case Teddy fell.

'Teddy is happy to sit on Victoria's back for as long as we like but we always have someone ready to grab him if necessary.'

The duo first met when Teddy came to see Victoria on the day she arrived at the yard where she lives.

Kerri recalls that it was instantly obvious that they had a good vibe and were keen to spend time together.

She said: 'Victoria gets excited when she sees him and often nudges him on his head if I lift him up to see her.

'They often pose for selfies together and they love to go on walks together.

'Teddy also likes to help with Victoria's feed time. He is so confident around her unlike my other dogs as they are much more wary of her size.'
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Terminally-ill assisted dying campaigner Noel Conway who suffered from motor neurone disease has died aged 71 after deciding to have his ventilator removed, a charity said today.

Dignity in Dying said the retired college lecturer and grandfather died at his home in the Shropshire village of Garmston on Wednesday, seven years after he had been diagnosed with the incurable and terminal illness.

It said he died after deciding 'to have the ventilator he had become dependent on to breathe removed in order to hasten his death, with the support of his family, his local hospice, and the breathing and ventilation team'.

Mr Conway spent years campaigning for assisted dying, with his most recent major act in November 2018 seeing him refused permission for a challenge over the law at the Supreme Court in London. Judges rejected his bid to appeal against an earlier ruling in his fight over current legislation which prevented him from being helped to die.

Today, MPs praised Mr Conway for his 'long-standing, professional, heartfelt and highly effective campaign on assisted dying', while reporters who had interviewed him described him as a 'thoughtful and courageous man'.

Terminally-ill assisted dying campaigner Noel Conway with his wife Carol at Telford Justice Centre in Shropshire in May 2018

Mr Conway is pictured with his wife Carol (left), stepson Terry McCusker (centre back) and Sarah Wootton, chief executive of Dignity in Dying (right), outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London in March 2017

Campaigners and supporters of Mr Conway stand outside the Royal Courts of Justice during a legal challenge in May 2018

'When you read this I will be dead': Noel Conway's final written statement By NOEL CONWAY When you read this I will be dead. Not because I have suffered a tragic accident or died suffering from a long-standing or painful disease. No, it will be because I have made a conscious and deliberate effort to end my own life. I suffer from motor neurone disease (MND) and was diagnosed over six years ago, knowing that at some stage I would reach a point when my muscles would have deteriorated to such an extent that I could not function effectively. MND is a terminal disease but it varies enormously between individuals, so I did not know when I would be facing the final moments. From the period of my diagnosis I was provided with a ventilator, a piece of equipment that has supported my breathing and which was essential even at that early stage to enable me to get a proper night's sleep. However, it was only about two years ago that I began to use the ventilator more and more frequently during the day as my breathing muscles deteriorated. It was about a year ago that I became totally dependent on the machine, almost 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I was able to accommodate myself to the new personal regime and a modicum of fulfilment and satisfaction, for example savouring food and drink, engaging in convivial conversation with my friends and others, and periodically visiting local hostelries with my wife Carol. But, over the past two months it has become increasingly evident to me that the balance of fulfilment in life, or if you like, my quality of life, has dipped into the negative so I can no longer do those things I could before. My voice has depleted to the extent that many people cannot now tell what I say, my eyesight recently deteriorated and I am now classified as partially sighted. I discovered quite out of the blue I had age-related macular degeneration in both eyes. So, now I cannot read normal print size and can just about make out shapes on the television. For someone who had refocused his life on being a writer, particularly of historical novels, it has become very difficult to undertake research, to the extent that my recent book has been put on hold. In addition, I am very much aware of the loss of bodily function  I'm already a paraplegic and I cannot use my hands or fingers, but I am aware that my neck muscles are weakening as are my mouth and speech muscles. I recognise that the time has come to take the decision now to do something about this. I am not leaving it until I'm completely bed-ridden and unable to communicate at all. Under UK law, it is perfectly legitimate to remove a ventilator from someone like me and it is not assisted dying, as a ventilator is a medical intervention by others to support life. By removing it my breathing will be affected so that I will begin to breathe shallower and shallower with time, and within perhaps an hour will not be breathing at all. Assisted dying is where someone actually helps me to access and take medication to bring about my death and this is currently illegal. Ironically I have spent the last several years campaigning to have the law changed but without success, although the topic itself has been aired nationally and is much more prominent now than it ever was. I am glad that Parliament is continuing to discuss it and investigate the possibilities of an assisted dying law in line with many other countries over the last few years. I now find myself in a privileged position of being able to identify the time of my death, its manner and the place. These are all objectives of assisted dying. However, this can only be done legally because I am a user of a ventilator and the whole process will be supervised and managed by medical staff from the palliative care team, for whom I have the highest regard. My heart goes out to all those people who are terminally ill with cancers and other horrible diseases which make their lives execrable because they can't find any release from their terrible suffering. Since this option was established the relief in how I would die has been remarkable. However, it is by no means an acceptable equivalent to assisted dying, as the lead up to the removal of the ventilator has revealed. I was under the impression that the whole process would be over and done with within a period of no more than two to three hours. However, it was explained to me that the ventilator would not be removed until I was thoroughly sedated and this process would take three to four hours with the use of a syringe driver. It would be at this point that the ventilator would be removed and my body would respond according to my current condition and dependency on ventilation, which means it could take from 15 minutes to over an hour before death occurs. During the course of the sedation process, if the medical team present consider I am in distress I will be given more sedatives. Consequently, the whole process may take considerably longer than I had anticipated, and may be as many as six to eight hours. Clearly this is far removed from the swift end-of-life process as practiced in Switzerland, Oregon and other countries where it is permitted. This is not something I would have chosen, but I feel that I have no alternative to ending my life without pain and suffering and without compromising others. Finally, I would like to say a great big thank you at Dignity in Dying for all their help and support over the years of the campaign. It can only be a question of time before assisted dying will be approved in the UK and I am sure we all look forward to that time. Best wishes and good luck for the future. Noel Advertisement

Mr Conway had wanted medical assistance to die when he had less than six months left to live, still had the mental capacity to make the decision and had made a 'voluntary, clear, settled and informed' choice.

Mr Conway also lost another Court of Appeal challenge in June 2018 against an earlier High Court rejection of his case that the 'blanket ban' on assisted dying was an unjustified interference with his human rights.

In a statement written to be released upon his death, Mr Conway said: 'When you read this I will be dead. Not because I have suffered a tragic accident or died suffering from a long-standing or painful disease.

'No, it will be because I have made a conscious and deliberate effort to end my own life.

'I suffer from MND and was diagnosed over six years ago knowing that at some stage I would reach a point when my muscles would have deteriorated to such an extent that I could not function effectively.'

He added: 'Over the past two months it has become increasingly evident to me that the balance of fulfilment in life, or if you like, my quality of life, has dipped into the negative...

'My voice has depleted to the extent that many people cannot now tell what I say and my eyesight recently deteriorated.

'I'm already a paraplegic and I cannot use my hands or fingers but I am aware that my neck muscles are weakening as are my mouth and speech muscles. I recognise that the time has come to take the decision now to do something about this.'

Mr Conway, who called on politicians in 2018 to change the law on assisted dying after his legal fight to die 'peacefully and with dignity' was rejected by the Supreme Court, said in his last statement that it was 'perfectly legitimate to remove a ventilator from someone like me'.

He added: 'This is not something I would have chosen but I feel that I have no alternative to ending my life without pain and suffering and without compromising others.

'However, my heart goes out to all those people who are terminally ill with cancers and other horrible diseases which make their lives execrable because they can't find any release from their terrible suffering.

'I have spent the last several years campaigning to have the law changed. The topic has been aired nationally and is much more prominent now than it ever was.

'I am glad that Parliament is continuing to discuss it and investigate the possibilities of an assisted dying law in line with many other countries over the last few years. It can only be a question of time before assisted dying will be approved in the UK.'

His wife Carol Conway said her husband had died peacefully and that the hospice team and ventilation nurses had shown empathy and concern, and ensured he had a painless and dignified death.

Mrs Conway said: 'Noel died peacefully on June 9, 2021. The hospice team, ventilation nurses and all involved were so supportive of Noel, myself and our children.

'They ensured Noel had a painless and dignified death, demonstrating empathy and concern for us all.

'Noel was in control, which was so important.

'However, the uncertainty over how long this would take for Noel and what he might experience presented us all with considerable anxiety.

'Ultimately, Noel wanted the choice of an assisted death, and I hope his campaigning will bring this option closer to becoming a reality for other terminally ill people in this country.'

And Sarah Wootton, chief executive of Dignity in Dying, said: 'Noel will be sorely missed by all of us at Dignity in Dying and we extend our sincere condolences to Carol, their family and friends.

'We are indebted to Noel, an inimitable and award-winning campaigner who helped put assisted dying firmly on the political agenda in this country.

'Noel fought in the courts, lobbied parliamentarians and spoke powerfully to the media about his suffering under the UK's blanket ban on assisted dying, all the while knowing any change would most likely come too late for him.

'Noel will be remembered as a loving husband, father, grandfather, friend, lecturer, mentor and for playing an instrumental role in bringing us closer to having a safe, compassionate assisted dying law in this country.'

Keen linguist and writer Mr Conway, who was a father, stepfather and grandfather, brought a judicial review with the support of Dignity in Dying to challenge the UK's blanket ban on assisted dying in 2017.

He argued that the current law prevented him from exercising his right to choice and control over his death and therefore forced him to suffer against his wishes.

Mr Conway called for a change in the law to enable him and other terminally ill, mentally competent adults the option of an assisted death in their final months of life, alongside high quality palliative care.

A Dignity in Dying spokesman said: 'Noel called for a change in the law to enable him and other terminally ill, mentally competent adults the option of an assisted death in their final months of life, alongside high quality palliative care.

'The High Court and Court of Appeal both reaffirmed that cases of this nature can be decided upon by the courts, thereby enabling future cases to have an easier passage.

'The courts also confirmed that the blanket ban on assisted dying is an interference with the right to respect for private life, as protected by the Human Rights Act.

Mr Conway with his wife Carol in March 2017. The campaigner went to court to challenge the law on assisted dying

Noel Conway is pictured in Snowdonia in 2012, two years before he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2014

What is the law on euthanasia and assisted suicide in Britain? Euthanasia is the act of deliberately ending a person's life to relieve suffering. For example, if a doctor deliberately gives a terminally-ill patient a drug they do not otherwise need with the sole aim of ending their life. Assisted suicide is deliberately assisting another person to kill themselves. For example, if a terminally-ill patient's relative obtained strong sedatives, knowing the person wanted to use them to kill themselves, the relative may be considered to be assisting suicide. Both euthanasia and assisted suicide are illegal under English law. Assisted suicide is illegal under section two of the Suicide Act 1961 and is punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Prosecutions can only be brought with the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Assisted dying is also illegal in Wales under the Suicide Act 1961, and in Northern Ireland under the Criminal Justice Act 1966 which says anyone who 'encourages or assists a suicide' is liable to up to 14 years in jail. There is no specific crime of assisting a suicide in Scotland, but it is possible that helping a person to die could lead to prosecution for culpable homicide. Euthanasia is regarded under law as either manslaughter or murder, depending on the circumstances, with the maximum penalty being life in prison. Attempted suicide or suicide itself are not in themselves criminal acts. Advertisement

'The Supreme Court rejected Noel's case in November 2018 but the decision acknowledged that assisted dying is 'an issue of transcendent public importance' and 'touches us all'.

'In March 2019 Noel was awarded the 'Best Use of Law' prize at the SMK National Campaigner Awards.

'Noel also changed the mind of his MP, Daniel Kawczynski, who is now a committed supporter of law change on assisted dying.

'Noel spoke with the Health Secretary in January 2021 alongside Mr Kawczynski, after he raised his constituent's case in the House of Commons in November 2020 in response to an urgent question on assisted dying.'

Mr Conway's local MP Daniel Kawczynski, Conservative representative for Shrewsbury, tweeted: 'My constituent Noel Conway from Garmston has passed away.

'This gentleman's long-standing, professional, heartfelt and highly effective campaign on assisted dying convinced me to support change in law. A matter I along with others are seeking to bring before House. Rest in Peace.'

Jo Stevens, Labour MP for Cardiff Central, added: 'Very sad news. Thank you Noel Conway for everything you did to make the case for Dignity In Dying so powerfully.'

And Channel 5 News health correspondent Catherine Jones said: 'Sad news about campaigner Noel Conway.

'I interviewed him when he went to court to fight for a change to the law to allow assisted dying - a thoughtful and courageous man.'

Other Twitter users also paid tribute to Mr Conway, including Laura Maley who said: 'Noel Conway was a brave and generous man to spend so much time campaigning at the end of his life.

'Assisted dying must be legalised; everyone deserves dignity in death.'

And David Pearce, who works in fundraising and marketing for Dignity in Death, tweeted: ' can't express in a tweet what a legend Noel Conway was to everyone who supports Dignity in Dying. It was a honour to campaign alongside him. #ImWithNoel. #RIP.'

And Twitter user @Ellifanntine said: 'RIP. Thank you for putting so much into the struggle to make things right and better for all of us.'

What is the legal position on assisted dying around the world? This information was collated by Dignity in Dying on the legal position on assisted dying in other countries: USA: Assisted dying as an option for terminally ill, mentally competent adults in their final months of life is legal in 11 Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Montana, Washington DC, California, Colorado, Hawaii, New Jersey, Maine and New Mexico Australia: Assisted dying is a legal choice for terminally ill citizens in Victoria (since June 2019), Western Australia (since December 2019) and Tasmania (since March this year). New Zealand: The country is set to legalise assisted dying as a choice for terminally ill, mentally competent citizens by this November, following a public referendum on the End of Life Choice Act in October 2020. Republic of Ireland: Assisted dying bill is currently undergoing pre-legislative scrutiny after a majority of Teachtai Dala voted to progress the Dying with Dignity Bill 2020 in October last year Spain: Passed a law allowing assisted dying in March 2021 to be implemented later this year. Austria: The country's Supreme Court ruled last December that its blanket ban on assisted dying is unconstitutional and the practice will be decriminalised in limited circumstances by 2022. Germany: Began considering potential assisted dying legalisation in January 2021 after its Constitutional Court struck down the ban in 2020. Canada: Introduced assisted dying legislation in 2016. Switzerland: Assisted dying is permitted, while broader right-to-die laws are in place in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Advertisement

Assisted dying is illegal in England and Wales under the Suicide Act 1961, and in Northern Ireland under the Criminal Justice Act 1966 which says anyone who 'encourages or assists a suicide' is liable to up to 14 years in jail.

There is no specific crime of assisting a suicide in Scotland, but it is possible that helping a person to die could lead to prosecution for culpable homicide.

Before the pandemic, on average one Briton every week travelled to Switzerland for a legal assisted death, a process which Dignity in Dying said costs 10,000 on average.

The charity added that anyone who assists in the arrangement of an assisted death overseas or accompanies someone to Switzerland for this purpose could be prosecuted for 'assisting a suicide' in England and Wales.

And Dignity in Dying said that 300 terminally ill people end their own life in England every year on average, and 17 people every day suffer as they die even with access to the best end of life care.

In the US, assisted dying as an option for terminally ill, mentally competent adults in their final months of life is legal in 11 jurisdictions - those being Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Montana, Washington DC, California, Colorado, Hawaii, New Jersey, Maine and New Mexico.

In Australia, assisted dying is a legal choice for terminally ill citizens in Victoria, Western Australia and Tasmania.

New Zealand is set to legalise assisted dying as a choice for terminally ill, mentally competent citizens by November 2021, following a public referendum on the End of Life Choice Act in October 2020.

In Ireland, an assisted dying bill is currently undergoing pre-legislative scrutiny after a majority of TDs voted to progress the Dying with Dignity Bill 2020 in October.

Spain passed a law allowing assisted dying in March 2021 to be implemented later this year.

Austria's Supreme Court ruled in December 2020 that its blanket ban on assisted dying is unconstitutional and the practice will be decriminalised in limited circumstances by 2022.

Germany began considering potential assisted dying legalisation in January 2021 after its Constitutional Court struck down the ban last year.

Canada introduced assisted dying legislation in 2016. Assisted dying is permitted in Switzerland, and broader right-to-die laws are in place in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
Devastated AFL legend Sam Newman has revealed an aneurysm suddenly killed his beloved partner of 20 years last month - and said he wishes he'd died instead of her.

A brave but gaunt-looking Newman spoke of how 'surreal' it was to come home and find Amanda Brown, 50, who he had married six months ago after 20 years together, lifeless on the floor of their Melbourne home.

'She had no illnesses or no underlying health problems,' Newman said, choking back tears throughout an interview with 7News.

A devastated Sam Newman said his beloved partner of 20 years, Amanda Brown, died of an aneurysm last month despite having no underlying health issues

The AFL great admitted he had spoken publicly in the days after Amanda Brown's sudden death because he hoped she might somehow hear him. The couple are pictured together above

'The autopsy, they said she died from an aneurysm, a stroke. I have no idea what brought that on.'

Newman admits he has 'often' thought 'I would rather it be me, but then shed probably be feeling like I do'.

He also admitted speaking about Ms Brown on his podcast in the days after her death in the hope she might hear him.

A visibly upset Newman said he'd often thought he would rather he'd died instead of his beloved wife Amanda

Sam Newman was told after Amanda Brown's autopsy she died of 'an aneurysm, a stroke', despite having no underlying health issues

The AFL great, now 75, admits he's never ever lived alone 'since I left school' and will move out of his luxury home to ease his pain because already the memories are too 'stark'.

The former co-host of the Footy Show also admitted the shocking tragedy had already changed him by making him 'a bit more compassionate'.

But he showed plenty of inner strength too.

'It won't get any worse for me, Ill get gradually better you've just got to stand up, remember who you are and push on.'

Newman also said he 'misses everything' about Ms Brown and their marriage a month after her sudden death.

Newman, previously described how he tried in vain to revive his wife after discovering her lying on the floor unresponsive in their apartment in Melbourne last month.

AFL legend Sam Newman recently revealed in a podcast he came home after picking up some takeaway and found his long term partner dead on the floor of their Melbourne apartment

Sam Newman (pictured) was in a relationship with Amanda Brown for 20 years before they tied the knot last November

On his own podcast You Cannot Be Serious, Newman, a Geelong great, revealed he was out getting fish and chips on the night of her death before quickly returning home.

He was anxious after Ms Brown failed to answer any of his calls.

Last month Newman discovered his wife lying on the floor unresponsive in their luxury apartment in Melbourne - she was unable to be revived

Newman entered his apartment and found her dead on the floor.

He performed CPR on her for 20 minutes - even though he knew it was too late.

'I get home and I walk in the door and the television's on in the bedroom. So I look down there and lying in her underwear  she'd obviously been in bed or she got out of bed to get something to eat,' he said.

'She's lying there on the tiles outside the laundry and as soon as I saw her I knew she was dead, I just knew it.

'I rang 000 and the very helpful person said you better try and give CPR and she talked me through that.

'I've got the phone on speaker and I'm pumping this poor woman who is lying there looking so peaceful, obviously dead, but the operator said keep doing it in case there's a spark of life in her.

'So for 20 minutes I'm giving CPR to what I knew was a corpse.'

Newman called his soulmate 'loyal and loving, protective and strong willed' in the podcast.
Ministers have blocked a museum's attempts to remove the statue of a 17th-century merchant who made part of his fortune from the slave trade in the latest government intervention in the debate over colonial monuments.

The Museum of Home, which opens on Saturday after an 18million revamp, was formerly known as the Geffrye Museum after Sir Robert Geffrye, a Lord Mayor of London and slave ship owner who funded the almshouses that now house the attraction.

Local campaigners had backed calls to take down the monument, which has a prominent position overlooking the road in Hackney, a multicultural area in east London, but Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden intervened to stop the move.

The Museum of Home was formerly known as the Geffrye Museum after Sir Robert Geffrye, a Lord Mayor of London and slave ship owner who funded the almshouses that now house the attraction

Robert Geffrye: Lord Mayor of London who grew rich off the backs of African slaves Sir Robert Geffrye (1613-1703) was an English merchant who rose to become Lord Mayor of London in 1685, and whose generous bequests to London's poor were partly funded by the toil of African slaves. Born to poor parents near Saltash in Cornwall, he moved to London and established himself as a prominent East India merchant. He quickly rose through high society, becoming Master of the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers, receiving a knighthood and finally being elected Lord Mayor of London in 1685. He was also president of Bethlehem Hospital, commonly known as Bedlam. Geffrye was a significant trader in tobacco, and also had investments in the forced labour and trading of slaves, including an investment in a slave ship, the China Merchant. At his death he left 10,000 to a number of charitable causes, including the almshouses that would become the Geffrye Museum, before its recent renaming to the Museum of the Home. Advertisement

Mr Dowden told curators that the government's policy is to 'retain and explain' when it comes to monuments to controversial figures, and would decline planning permission to move it from the Grade I-listed building.

When the museum opens on Saturday it will include a plaque telling visitors: 'These buildings were founded by Robert Geffrye, an English merchant who profited from the forced labour and trading of enslaved Africans.'

Tamsin Ace, director of creative programmes for the museum, told The Telegraph: 'The museum staff feel that by moving it to an alternative location on site we can explain it better.

'Having it at height on a really visible thoroughfare in Hackney is problematic.'

Museum director Sonia Solicari admitted she was in a 'very challenging situation' given that government censure could lead to a loss of the institution's main source of funds.

Mr Dowden raised the issue of funds in a letter to the museum last year, in which he warned that the 'significant support that you receive from the taxpayer is an acknowledgement of the important cultural role you play for the entire country.

'It is imperative that you continue to act impartially, in line with your publicly funded status, and not in a way that brings this into question.'

A protest against the statue is planned for Saturday, with Hackney MP Diane Abbott and Windrush campaigner Patrick Vernon due to address crowds.

The incident is the latest row over statues, which began last year when protesters inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement threw a monument to slave trader Edward Colston into the harbour in Bristol.

Local campaigners had backed calls to take down the monument, which has a prominent position overlooking the road in Hackney, a multicultural area in east London

The statue is now lying on its side in a museum, still daubed with demonstrators' graffiti.

Meanwhile, ministers yesterday weighed into the fierce row over the fate of a statue of colonialist Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College in Oxford, warning that a planned teaching boycott by 150 rebel academics could lead to students winning compensation.

Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden intervened to stop the move

Left-wing dons say they will still give lectures to Oriel's 300 undergraduates, but deny them the chance for in-depth discussion in small groups or one-to-one sessions until the monument to the colonialist is toppled.

Proponents of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign claim the small statue high up on Oriel's main building 'glorifies colonialism', but the college last month decided it would stay following a backlash from donors.

A No 10 spokesman said universities had a duty to provide good-quality teaching and that the Government would expect 'appropriate action' to be taken if that was disrupted.

Commons Leader Jacob Rees-Mogg also weighed into the row, describing the academics concerned as a 'useless bunch', adding: 'We must not allow this wokeness to happen.'

A government spokesman said when asked about the Geffrye statue: 'The Government does not support the removal of historic objects.

'The Culture Secretary has been clear that, whilst it is always legitimate to examine Britain's history, we should 'retain and explain' our heritage so that more people can engage in our shared past.'
A man has been shot in a 'critical incident' on Sydney's Northern Beaches after he threw a fire extinguisher at a police officer's head and stabbed him in the hand.

Officers were called to a house on Warringah Road in Narraweena at about 5.20pm on Friday and were approached by a man brandishing a knife.

One officer was struck in the head with the hurled fire extinguisher and then stabbed in the hand in the ensuing scuffle - prompting a second officer to shoot the assailant in the leg.

Police descended on Narraweena (pictured) on Sydney's northern beaches on Friday at about 5.30pm after an officer was stabbed

Another officer on the scene (pictured) fired a shot at the man, which hit him in the leg. Both men were rushed to hospital in a stable condition

The injured and bleeding man was then rushed to hospital under police guard, where he is understood to be in a stable condition.

The officer was also transported to hospital to be treated for his head and hand wounds, with neither injury considered life-threatening.

Detectives have established a crime scene and are investigating.

A 'critical incident' team from an independent police are command have also been dispatched to the scene.

The results of the investigation will be subject to an independent review.
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Boris Johnson today hinted 'Freedom Day' on June 21 could be delayed as he said the nation must 'make sure that we dont repeat some of the errors' that have been made since the start of the coronavirus crisis.

Speaking to his fellow world leaders at the start of the G7 summit in Cornwall, Mr Johnson said mistakes had 'doubtless' been made over the last 18 months during the course of the 'wretched' pandemic.

The PM said every country must 'learn the lessons' from the crisis amid mounting fears that the final stage in his lockdown exit roadmap could be pushed back.

Mr Johnson's comments came as SAGE estimated that England's coronavirus R rate is higher than at any time since last October and could now be 1.4 as cases of the Indian 'Delta' variant more than tripled in a week to 42,000.

Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi had earlier given his own downbeat assessment of the situation as he said the country must not 'squander those hard fought gains that we have made through the vaccination programme'.

It now appears increasingly likely that Mr Johnson will opt not to go ahead with the full and final easing of restrictions later this month, with some reports suggesting the PM could wait another month, scuppering plans to lift crowd limits at large events, weddings and bars.

Downing Street would not be drawn at lunchtime on whether there will be a delay as the PM's Official Spokesman said the Government will 'look closely at the data' over the weekend before Mr Johnson announces his decision on Monday.

SAGE experts have estimated the rate of transmission of the virus is somewhere between 1.2-1.4 up from 1.0-1.2 last week, meaning case numbers may spike significantly in the coming days and weeks.

MPs claimed 'alarm bells' should be ringing in Downing Street after the surge of more than 29,000 Delta cases in just a week and the warning they are doubling in as little as five days in some areas.

But Public Health England has published promising data showing vaccines are working well against the Indian strain, bolstering hopes that jabs will stop the NHS from being overwhelmed by a potential third wave.

Its figures show only one in 10 people admitted to hospital after getting infected with the variant had been given two doses  just 42 out of 383  while the rest had either had one vaccine or none at all. Just 1,785 out of 33,206 infections  or five per cent  were in double-jabbed people.

Vaccines are now the only weapon in Number 10's arsenal that will be able to keep Britain out of another lockdown but there are concerns not enough people are fully protected to ease restrictions completely in the face of the Indian variant.

However, supplies of Pfizer's vaccine  used for everyone under 40 and for millions of second doses  will be 'tight but stable', Mr Zahawi admitted today. One minister in Scotland admitted that restricting the use of AstraZeneca's jab for young adults is slowing down the vaccine programme, which opened up to under-30s this week.

PHE's report on the 'Delta' variant also revealed the mutant strain now makes up around 96 per cent of all cases, is approximately 64 per cent more infectious than the once dominant Kent type, and twice as likely to put patients in hospital.

A single dose of vaccine only appears to offer 33 per cent protection against illness from this variant, down from 50 per cent with the Kent strain, but two doses remain highly effective at an estimated 81 per cent down from 88 per cent.

Meanwhile, the Office for National Statistics' (ONS) weekly infection survey suggested England's Covid outbreak only actually grew by 13 per cent last week to 96,800 total cases  compared to a near-doubling 75 per cent surge the week before. But Mr Zahawi admitted No10 would have to be 'really careful' to try and avoid the virus bouncing back.

Despite calls intensifying for Mr Johnson to push back Freedom Day to ensure millions more vulnerable adults are fully vaccinated, anti-lockdown Tory MPs have urged ministers to stick to the original plan.

Speaking at the start of the G7 summit in Cornwall, Boris Johnson told his fellow world leaders that mistakes had 'doubtless' been made over the last 18 months during the course of the 'wretched' coronavirus pandemic

England's coronavirus R rate is higher than at any time since October at a minimum of 1.2 and possible high of 1.4, SAGE estimated today

Public Health England data show how it took just a matter of weeks for the Indian 'Delta' variant to smash past the Kent strain and take over as dominant in England, with it surging to make up 96 per cent of cases in just nine weeks

The Office for National Statistics' weekly infection survey suggested England's outbreak grew by only 13 per cent last week to 96,800 total cases - compared to a near-doubling 75 per cent surge the week before

Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said the UK must be 'really careful' so not to 'squander' gains made with vaccines. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to delay the end of lockdown planned for June 21

The R rate is highest in the North West, where it could be as high as 1.5. The region is the Indian variant hotspot and cases there have exploded in the past fortnight. A quarter of all the 7,400 cases announced in the UK yesterday were in the North West

Public Health England graphs show how the Indian 'Delta' variant (pink) rapidly overtook all other strains of the virus to become dominant in April and May

The North West (dark blue) has been by far the hardest hit region by the new variant while London (yellow) has experienced the second highest number of cases

Most Delta cases have been in young adults and teenagers, who are unvaccinated, while there have been significantly fewer positive tests in older people, particularly over-50s, most of whom have had two doses of a jab. The true test of the vaccine will be whether the age distribution stays this way as the outbreak gets larger

This heat map shows the hotspots for positive test samples that scientists believe are the Delta variant, with the most cases concentrated in the North West around Manchester and Liverpool

The vast majority of cases and hospital admissions triggered by the Delta variant have been in people who were unvaccinated, PHE's data show. The figures show that only one in 10 people admitted to hospital after getting infected with the variant had been given two doses of a vaccine - just 42 out of 383 - while the rest of them had either had one jab or none at all. Twelve out of 42 people to have died of the strain had been vaccinated and just 1,785 out of 33,206 infections were in double-jabbed people

Speaking at the start of the G7 summit, Mr Johnson told his fellow world leaders: 'We have all been going through the most wretched pandemic our countries have faced for our lifetimes, maybe longer, much longer.

And I actually think this is a meeting that genuinely needs to happen because we need to make sure that we learn the lessons from the pandemic, we need to make sure that we dont repeat some of the errors that we doubtless made in the course of the last 18 months or so and we need to make sure that we now allow our economies to recover.

I think that they have the potential to bounce back very strongly and there is all sorts of reasons for being optimistic.

But it is vital that we dont repeat the mistake of the last great crisis, the last great economic recession in 2008, when the recovery was not uniform across all parts of society and I think what has gone wrong with this pandemic, or what risks being a lasting scar, is that I think the inequalities may be entrenched.

We need to make sure that as we recover we level up across our societies and we build back better.

Mr Johnson faced fierce criticism over his decision in the autumn to delay the second national lockdown and Number 10 will be aware that whatever the PM decides to do regarding June 21 he is likely to face a barrage of attacks.

This morning Mr Zahawi said on Times Radio: 'There has been some really hard won battles against this virus and we don't want to squander those hard fought gains that we have made through the vaccination programme. The virus hasn't gone away, the virus will continue to mutate, to escape, to try and survive, and I think it's really important that we are really careful.'

Government critics were taken aback by 'terrible' data showing how the Delta variant is taking over so quickly and threatening a third wave of hospital admissions.

The PHE figures show that the number of positive tests linked back to the strain more than tripled from 12,431 to 42,323 in just a week.

Part of this increase was down to an improved testing system that speeds up the process of working out which variant someone is infected with, PHE said, but cases are rising in the real world, too.

The variant was only discovered in April but already accounts for 96 per cent of all positives, which is likely down to the fact that it is an estimated 64 per cent more transmissible than the Kent strain was. Experts say it appears better equipped to latch onto cells in people's airways meaning less exposure is needed to trigger an infection.

LIMITING ASTRAZENECA 'IS SLOWING DOWN' JABS ROLLOUT Insisting on giving people younger than 40 the Pfizer vaccine and not the AstraZeneca one is slowing down the UK's vaccine rollout, a Scottish MP has suggested. Ahead of a call between the British nations on Thursday, Humza Yousaf said Scotland needs more Pfizer doses if it is to 'maintain or increase' its current speed of rollout. He said he was 'conscious' that official advice that the AstraZeneca vaccine should not be used for those under 40 had placed 'increased pressure' on supplies. The JCVI, the UK's vaccines watchdog, decided that younger adults should be offered the Pfizer jab wherever possible because of the small risk of blood clotting after the AstraZeneca vaccine. Although both are proven to be safe for the vast majority of people ministers decided to err on the side of caution while the Covid risk was low and it was safe to wait a bit longer to get Pfizer. If the outbreak gets significantly worse or a more dangerous variant appears, the balance of risk might change and the AstraZeneca jab brought back for young people. Nadhim Zahawi and Pfizer tried to play down concerns about the supply chain. The vaccines minister said: 'I am absolutely confident, and Ill speak to Humza on this, that we will be able to deliver the Pfizer vaccines that Scotland needs to be able to meet its targets for end of July, as the United Kingdom target.' He added: 'Supply remains finite, but it is stable, and Pfizer have done a great job in being consistent on their delivery schedule.' Pfizer said in a statement: 'In the UK, quarter one deliveries (January-March) were completed in line with our contractual agreement and we remain on course to continue to deliver a steady supply of vaccines to the UK, in accordance with the monthly schedule.' Advertisement

Nick Thomas-Symonds, Labours Shadow Home Secretary, said: 'These figures are terrible. The pace at which cases of the Delta variant continue to rise is deeply worrying and is putting the lifting of restrictions at risk.

'The blame for this lies with the Prime Minister and his reckless refusal to act on Labours repeated warnings to secure our borders against Covid and its variants.'

And Layla Moran, Liberal Democrat MP and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus, added: 'These figures should set alarm bells ringing in government as we approach the 21st June.

'It is particularly concerning that the increased transmissibility of the Delta variant is above the worst-case scenario modelled by SAGE, with cases estimated to be doubling every 4.5 days in some regions.

'The government must immediately explain to the public whether this exponential growth suggests the country is in line for a severe third wave, and if so what it is doing to prevent this.'

On plans for June 21 Mr Johnson's spokesperson said the PM would make his final decision over the weekend: 'I am not going to get into speculation. The Prime Minister addressed the question yesterday and the vaccines minister spoke about it as well this morning.

'We are closely looking at the data and assessing against the four tests which we published in the roadmap, particularly on hospitalisations, and we will set out an update on Monday.'

Although figures for the Indian variant specifically are rocketing, numbers for the outbreak overall are increasing more slowly.

Today's weekly ONS report found that an estimated 96,800 people were coronavirus-positive last week, compared to 85,600 the week before. This was a significantly smaller increase than the near-doubling from 48,500 at May's end.

An estimated one in 560 people were carrying the virus by June 5, it said - around 0.18 per cent of the population. This compared to 0.08 per cent in Wales, 0.14 in Northern Ireland and an equal 0.18 in Scotland.

The infection rate is significantly higher in North West England, at 0.5 per cent, than in other regions, with all others recording rates of 0.2 or 0.1 per cent.

This is backed up the PHE data that showed 8,288 Indian variant cases in the North West by June 7, compared to 2,325 in London, the second worst affected area. The NW cases were almost half of all those in England.

By age, secondary school pupils had the highest infection rate in the ONS survey, at 0.5 per cent. The rate was 0.4 per cent for 17 to 24-year-olds and became lower with age to 0.1 per cent among the vaccinated over-50s.

The true test of the vaccines will be whether infection rates remain low among older age groups in the coming weeks and, if they do, ministers will likely be satisfied that it is safe to reopen normal society.

Dr Jenny Harries, chief of the UK Health Security Agency, said: 'Vaccination is our best defence. If you are eligible, we urge you to come forward and be vaccinated. Remember that two doses provide significantly more protection than a single dose.

'However, while vaccination reduces the risk of severe disease, it does not eliminate it. With data showing that Delta is significantly more transmissible than Alpha, it is just as important as ever to follow public health advice, which has not changed. Get vaccinated, work from home where you can and remember "hands, face, space, fresh air" at all times. These measures work, and they save lives.'

Vaccines are now being offered to everyone over the age of 25 but Mr Zahawi said that supplies of the Pfizer jab, which is being used for everyone under the age of 40 as well as for second doses for around half of older people, were going to be 'tight' in the coming weeks as the rollout rattles ahead.

The infection rate is significantly higher in North West England, at 0.5 per cent, than in other regions, with all others recording rates of 0.2 or 0.1 per cent

By age, secondary school pupils had the highest infection rate in the ONS survey, at 0.5 per cent. The rate was 0.4 per cent for 17 to 24-year-olds and became lower with age to 0.1 per cent among the vaccinated over-50s

People in their 20s were invited to book vaccine appointments for the first time this week and clamoured for the jabs with more than a million people getting booked in on Tuesday alone - a one-day record for the NHS.

The minister said on LBC: 'Every time I've said the determining factor in terms of vaccine in arms is supply. And supply remains finite, but it is stable, and Pfizer have done a great job in being consistent on their delivery schedule.'

It is believed that ministers are still considering keeping some curbs in place for a further two to four weeks to buy more time for the vaccine programme amid mounting concern about the spread of the Indian variant.

While an exception is likely to be made for weddings, ministers have become increasingly pessimistic over the course of the week and are now moving closer to a delayed freedom day that could coincide with the start of the school summer holidays.

The Pfizer supply setback comes as a particular blow as it makes the prospect of speeding up the vaccine roll-out to meet demand much more difficult.

Scottish MP Humza Yousaf told Matt Hancock in a letter that supplies of the Pfizer jab are to be 'particularly tight over the next few weeks', not just in Scotland but across the UK, according to the i newspaper.

Mr Yousaf's fears are the result of the updated advice published the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation last month, which said that under-40s should be given Pfizer or Moderna jabs rather than the AstraZeneca equivalent due to concerns over a small risk of blood clots in younger patients.

And with thousands of under-30s now receiving jabs after the vaccine roll-out picked up pace, demand for doses of Pfizer has soared beyond supply levels.

Yesterday, Health Secretary Matt Hancock revealed that the Indian variant now comprises 91 per cent of new infections.

Figures showed Covid-19 case rates have increased across every region in England in the past week. But hospital admissions have only increased fractionally  while deaths are up by just 1.9 per cent on the previous week.

NHS bosses have said vaccines appear to have broken the link between rising cases and hospitalisations. Those that are admitted are often younger and less sick than during previous waves.

According to NHS data published yesterday, more than 85 per cent over-50s in England  considered the age group most at risk  have now had two vaccine doses.

If the NHS in England continues to give doses to 1.3million over-50s a week, everyone in that age bracket should be fully vaccinated by the time all remaining covid curbs are due to ease.

Among younger age groups, 35.5 per cent of those aged 40 to 49 are now estimated to have had both doses, along with 22.6 per cent of those aged 30 to 39.

The number of people falling ill with Covid has more than doubled in a week, a symptom-tracking study warned today amid the rapid spread of the Indian variant across the UK

Boris Johnson is expected to decide whether England can go ahead with the full re-opening on June 21 at a meeting in Downing Street on Sunday evening, following the conclusion of the G7 summit in Cornwall.

Then, after flying to Brussels on Monday morning to attend a Nato summit, he will return to London in the evening to address the nation.

The Government is planning to lift the 30-person limit on weddings, Whitehall sources confirmed last night.

But they insisted the Prime Minister is still undecided about the wider lifting of measures including social distancing rules and work-from-home advice.

Yesterday, the UK recorded 7,393 new coronavirus cases and seven deaths within 28 days of a positive test. Infections have risen 63 per cent in the past seven days compared to the week before.

But the number of hospital admissions has remained steady and the average number of deaths each day has stayed below ten.

Dr Jenny Harries, chief executive of the newly-created UK Health Security Agency, said the country was going 'not quite in the right direction' and data suggested there would be a further rise in infections in the coming weeks.

But the health chief said the figures suggested that those aged 60 and above are not getting ill because they are 'doubly vaccinated'.

She added that those appearing in hospital are either unvaccinated or have had a single dose.

The Prime Minister's spokesman said: 'The point of the five-week gap between the steps [in the roadmap] is for us to analyse the data. That's exactly what we've been doing, and we will continue to do so ahead of saying something early next week.'
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has announced plans to build a wall along the state's southern border with Mexico.

The Republican made the announcement during a press conference at the 'Border Security Summit' in Del Rio, and said he would discuss the plan further next week.

'We have to build a border [wall]. I've been down here talking to the people in the Rio Grande Valley and the way they are being overrun is reprehensible,' Abbott told Fox News on Thursday night. 'It's disastrous what the Biden administration has done.'

In his first month in office, President Joe Biden paused construction of the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico - a key policy of his predecessor, Donald Trump.

But as the number of illegal immigrants at the southern border reaches 20-year highs, the decision to pause construction has been criticized by many Republicans.

The governor also said during the TV appearance under a new disaster declaration, anyone caught in Texas having crossed the border illegally faces arrest and jail time.

'The ability to arrest will be enhanced by building border barriers. Some of these border barriers will be built immediately, and whenever anybody tries to modify, attempt, or get through any of these border barriers, that in itself is a crime for which they can be arrested,' Abbott said.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott (pictured earlier this week) has announced plans for the state to build its own wall along its southern border with Mexico

'President Trump had adequately secured our border. He had the 'Remain in Mexico' policy and began building the border wall and now suddenly all of that disappeared and  it has led to a dramatic increase in the number of people coming across the border,' Abbott continued .

'But it's not just unaccompanied minors, it's people who are causing great damage and harm to the residents right here in Del Rio as well as up and down the entire border.'

Abbott issued a disaster declaration for 34 counties along or near Texas' border with Mexico earlier this month.

For his reasoning, he cited Biden's 'open-border policies [that] have paved the way for dangerous gangs and cartels, human traffickers, and deadly drugs like fentanyl to pour into our communities.'

Abbott made the announcement during a press conference at the 'Border Security Summit' in Del Rio, and said he would discuss the plan to build the wall further next week. Pictured: new border wall stretches along the landscape near Sasabe, Arizona, on Wednesday, May 19, 2021

In his first month in office, President Joe Biden (pictured on Thursday) paused construction of the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico - a key policy of his predecessor, Donald Trump

'The Biden administration has abandoned any pretense of border security, any pretense of enforcing our immigration laws,' Abbott told Fox News on Thursday.

'They've laughed it off, just in the exact same way that the vice president laughed it off in her interview the other day, and so it is a joke to the Biden administration.'

'They completely don't care about the border at all, and they try to brush it aside as much as they possibly can,' the governor claimed.

'They ignore it. They haven't come here, they haven't talked to us, they don't want to do anything for us. They're fighting us every step of the way.'

Abbott also revealed other initiatives, including $1 billion towards border security in the state budget, which he said was 'a good start'.

Abbott also announced the formation of a 'Governor's Task Force on Border and Homeland Security', which will consist of representatives from agencies from eight states.

Furthermore, Abbott said that he and fellow-GOP Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona would ask other states to send law enforcement officials in order to 'to assist in making arrests and jailing' of illegal migrants.

Pictured: A migrant family from Brazil waits to be processed by U.S. Border Patrol agents after passing through a gap in the border wall from Mexico in Yuma, Ariz., Thursday, June 10, 2021

By the end of Trump's presidency, the administration claimed to have completed more than 400 miles of border wall since taking office in 2017.

Various types of fences covered 654 miles were already in place on the border before he took office, running through California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

However, of the 452 miles Trump's administration claimed to have completed, only 80 miles of new barriers were built where there were none before.

This included 47 miles of primary wall, and 33 miles of secondary wall to reinforce the initial barrier, according to the BBC.

Trump claimed this should be considered new wall, because it replaced what he said were 'old and worthless barriers.'

Another cornerstone of Trump's 2016 election campaign was that Mexico would pay for the border the wall, but the U.S. government paid for all the costs associated with building the wall after Trump used emergency powers to divert funds from the Department of Defence.

As the number of illegal immigrants at the southern border reaches 20-year highs, the decision to pause construction on the wall has been criticized by many Republicans

Abbott's comments came after the Biden administration threatened on Monday to pursue legal action if Texas' governor doesn't rescind his order shutting down federally funded shelters that house migrant children who cross the U.S.-Mexico border without their parents.

In a letter obtained by The Associated Press, the deputy general counsel for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services told the Republican governor that even though the state issues the licenses for the shelter, Congress has tasked his agency with caring for unaccompanied children.

He warned Abbott not to interfere with those operations and said HHS intends to pursue legal action if the state proceeds to close the shelters down.

'(The Office of Refugee Resettlement) operates 52 state-licensed facilities in Texas, which comprise a significant portion of ORR's total operational footprint, and represent an indispensable component of the federal immigration system,' Paul Rodriguez, HHS deputy general counsel, wrote in the letter two Abbott and two other Texas officials. The 'proclamation would be a direct attack on this system.'

The letter urges Abbott to clarify by June 11 whether his proclamation last week applies to 52 shelters that are licensed by the state but funded with federal grants. It argues that federal law states these migrant children 'do not accrue unlawful presence' while they are in the United States, challenging Abbott's labeling of these children as 'unlawful immigrants.'

More than half of migrant children sheltered by the U.S. government in licensed facilities are in Texas. The last census taken on May 19 showed 4,223 children in the facilities of about 7,000 in the entire network of licensed shelters.

Abbott issued a disaster declaration for 34 counties along or near Texas' border with Mexico earlier this month. For his reasoning, he cited Biden's 'open-border policies [that] have paved the way for dangerous gangs and cartels, human traffickers, and deadly drugs like fentanyl to pour into our communities'

Experts and advocates say shutting down these shelters could seriously disrupt the program for unaccompanied children, which already faces capacity problems forcing the government to open up a dozen emergency sites to process thousands of children.

The Biden administration has worked to speed up the transfers from Border Patrol to HHS custody, and the releases of children to relatives in the U.S. In the past month, HHS has reduced the number of children in shelters or emergency sites by releasing more of them to their families.

However, as of Sunday, there are still about 16,000 children in HHS custody, and the federal government has struggled to increase the number of beds in licensed shelters, which are preferred by advocates.

The so-called emergency intake sites were opened beginning in March at convention centers, military bases and other large venues. They look like hurricane evacuation shelters, with little space to play and no privacy. Advocates and lawmakers who have visited have voiced concerns about the children's mental health.

Abbott also has been critical of emergency facilities that lack state licenses, but advocates say his directive could transfer more children to the large-scale sites.

The letter says the state would be discriminating against providers who have federal government grants to run these shelters. That would violate the doctrine of intergovernmental immunity, which impedes state interfering with federal activity, and the Supremacy Clause, which says federal law takes precedence over state or local laws.

The order to strip away licenses from shelters is part of a disaster declaration Abbott issued last week, arguing the federal government can't force Texas to keep issuing state licenses in response to a federal problem. The proclamation was a highly unusual move by the governor that comes amid criticism of record numbers of border crossings in recent months.

More recently, Abbott is saying that state troopers will soon begin arresting migrants at the border, promising an announcement later this week.

The letter sent Monday was addressed to Abbott, Texas Deputy Secretary of State Jose Esparza and Executive Commissioner of Texas Health and Human Services Cecil Erwin Young.
Jason Miller, who served as former President Donald Trump's spokesman since he left the White House, is leaving his post to join an unidentified tech start-up firm.

Miller will become the CEO of the company  which Trump is reportedly considering for his own use. The former president has been hunting for a new media platform amid ongoing bans by Twitter and Facebook.

Miller will continue to operate within Trump's circle, a source told DailyMail.com, adding that there isn't an immediate start date or official announcement. The unidentified company owns one of the social media platforms Trump is said to be considering for his next move.

Politico reported the move late Thursday Thursday.

Miller has fielded queries on Trump's behalf since Trump skipped Joe Biden's inauguration and decamped first to Mar-a-Lago then to his private club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

He also served as a senior advisor to Trump's unsuccessful 2020 reelection campaign. Since January, he has helped develop statements Trump fired off from his 'Save America' PAC that frequently skewered President Joe Biden, in a break with tradition for recent ex-presidents.

Former President Donald Trump spokesman Jason Miller is set to take a position helming a tech start-up company, it was reported Thurdsay

Miller has also kept up his own active role on Twitter, even with his boss prevented from using the platform.

On Thursday he tweeted out criticism over media coverage of first lady Jill Biden compared to Melania Trump, and blasted infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci  while using the platform to push out printed statements from Trump blasting the joint chiefs of staff and Joe Biden's handling of the 'China virus.'

Former President Trump has been eyeing a new social media platform. Last week he took down his 'From the Desk of Donald J. Trump' web site

Last week, Trump scuttled his web site, 'From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,' which had served as the vehicle for his statements, just a month after launching it, in a move that Miller hinted presaged additional moves. Trump has long eyed his own media platform or acquiring one.

On June 2, he retweeted a post that it could be a precursor for Trump joining another media platform. 'Yes, actually, it is. Stay tuned!' he wrote.
Boris Johnson today suggested rebranding the 'special relationship' between the US and the UK the 'indestructible relationship' after his first meeting with Joe Biden.

The Prime Minister is not a fan of the historic phrase, with reports this week suggesting he believes it makes Britain seem 'needy and weak'.

Speaking after bilateral talks with Mr Biden in Cornwall yesterday ahead of the formal start of the G7 summit, Mr Johnson said the alliance between the two nations has been a 'guarantor of peace and security for a long time'.

He said he would be happy to call it a 'deep and meaningful relationship' or even an 'indestructible relationship'.

Meanwhile, the US President said he believed the 'special relationship' is 'stronger than ever' after the talks - posting a photograph of himself putting a fatherly hand on the PM's shoulder in his trademark 'power pat' move.

But the White House risked cooling the evident love-in between the leaders by announcing that Angela Merkel has been invited to the US on July 15, before Mr Johnson.

Joe Biden posted a picture of himself with a fatherly hand resting on Boris Johnson's shoulder from their meeting yesterday

Boris Johnson has suggested rebranding the 'special relationship' between the US and the UK the 'indestructible relationship' following his first meeting with Joe Biden

Speaking after bilateral talks with Mr Biden in Cornwall yesterday ahead of the formal start of the G7 summit, Mr Johnson said the alliance between the two nations has been a 'guarantor of peace and security for a long time'

The term 'special relationship' to describe the links between the UK and the US moved into the mainstream after it was coined by Winston Churchill in a speech in 1946.

Speaking at Westminster College in Missouri, Churchill said that preventing war and ensuring 'the continuous rise of world organisation' would only be achieved through the 'fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples'.

'This means a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States,' he said.

The Atlantic magazine reported earlier this week that Mr Johnson told aides he disliked the phrase after it was used by Mr Biden in a phone call between the pair.

Mr Johnson insisted in an interview with the BBC 'I don't mind the phrase' but suggested he would be happy with a rebrand.

He said: 'But you know, it encompasses a reality which is that the UK and the US have a real congruence of views on some stuff that really matters to the world.

'And so we believe very strongly in, in democracy, we believe in human rights, we believe in the rules based international order, we believe in the transatlantic alliance. Joe Biden believes in that absolutely passionately.

Mr Johnson and his wife Carrie met Mr Biden and the First Lady Jill yesterday afternoon in Carbis Bay

Mr Biden tweeted after talks with Mr Johnson that he believes the 'special relationship' is 'stronger than ever'

'And we want to uphold that. We think it's been the guarantor of peace and security for a long time.'

Pushed on how he would describe the alliance, Mr Johnson said: 'We also happen to share objectives on tackling climate change and loads of other things.

'So it's a relationship, you can call it the 'deep and meaningful relationship', whatever you want, the, the 'indestructible relationship'.

'It's a relationship that has endured for a very long time, and has been an important part of peace and prosperity both in Europe and around the world.'

Mr Biden tweeted after yesterday's bilateral meeting with the PM: 'The special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom is stronger than ever. Thank you for hosting me today, Prime Minister Johnson.'

A statement released by the White House today revealed that Mrs Merkel - who is stepping down as Chancellor soon - will be visiting next month.

'Joe Biden looks forward to welcoming Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to the White House on July 15, 2021,' the statement said.

'Chancellor Merkels visit will affirm the deep bilateral ties between the United States and Germany.

'The leaders will discuss their commitment to close cooperation on a range of common challenges, including ending the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing the threat of climate change, and promoting economic prosperity and international security based on our shared democratic values.'
Experts are divided on whether Britain should begin vaccinating children this summer, with some insisting it would help deal with the Indian variant but critics suggesting supplies should be used to squash the pandemic abroad first.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) last week approved Pfizer's Covid vaccine for 12- to 15-year-olds.

But no decision has yet been taken on whether to extend the rollout to under-18s once all adults have been offered a jab.

And there are now concerns in the US that the Pfizer jab might have health risks for children that outweigh the benefits, with officials there fearing around 200 cases of heart damage among under-30s could have been linked to the jab.

The MHRA said it has not seen any such cases in the UK but the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has advised that young adults or children should not be given the AstraZeneca jab unless it's the only option because of a small blood clot risk.

The JCVI is expected to tell ministers the move to give jabs to children would be a 'political decision'.

Scientists claim rolling out the vaccine to children would help crack down on the rampant spread of the Indian 'Delta' variant.

Cases of the mutant strain have more than tripled in a week to 42,000 and the strain appears to be spreading 64 per cent faster than the Kent variant.

Dr Simon Clarke (left) said vaccinating children or teenagers 'can only help' to control the spread of the coronavirus while Professor David Livermore (right) said it was ethically difficult because children were not the ones being protected by their own jabs

Dr Simon Clarke, a cellular microbiologist at the University of Reading, told MailOnline vaccinating all children would ensure they do not spread the variant further, particularly to older people whose immunity from vaccines earlier in the year could be on the wane.

He said: 'We don't yet know how much if any of the Indian variant has gone through schools but undeniably children, particularly teenagers, are potential vectors for spreading it round.

US REGULATOR FLAGS CONCERNS ABOUT HEART DAMAGE Britain's medical regulator today revealed it has not yet detected any link between Pfizer and Moderna's Covid vaccines and heart damage, despite US officials calling an urgent meeting over growing fears there is a connection. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which polices the safety of drugs in the UK, said it is 'closely monitoring reports of myocarditis and pericarditis received with the Covid vaccines'. It has recorded just 34 cases of myocarditis after Pfizer jabs  a similar number to after the AstraZeneca vaccine  and only two after Moderna, but says numbers 'similar or below expected background levels'. Meanwhile, US health chiefs have announced officials will gather on June 18 to discuss 226 plausible cases of heart inflammation in under-30s given the jabs in America. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bosses yesterday admitted the number of cases was higher than expected and that most were in boys and young men. However, they insisted the complication was still rare. Among the cases spotted in the US, three are in intensive care, 15 are hospitalised and 41 have ongoing symptoms. The CDC continues to urge everyone aged 12 and older in the US to get vaccinated and says it is not clear if either condition is actually caused by the shots. The average age for people suffering the condition in the US was 24  who have yet to begin routinely receiving their jabs in Britain  and comparatively few Moderna doses have been dished out in the UK. Advertisement

'So if we can put a firewall in with younger people, then it can only help.'

But if children were to be invited for jabs, they would be receiving Moderna or Pfizer vaccines  the latter of which is expected to have supply squeezed over the coming month.

Vaccine minister Nadhim Zahawi this morning admitted supply of the American drug manufacturer's jab would be 'tight', which could potentially prevent children being invited this summer with second doses for those who have already had Pfizer being prioritised in the coming months.

And there are calls to donate supplies abroad to developing nations where the majority of adults have still not had a first dose.

Dr Clarke said: 'What you've got to remember is there are lots of elderly people in this country who have had the AstraZeneca vaccine.

'That appears to be not as protective certainly against milder disease and transmission.

'There are always going to be a lot of people in this country who  despite doing the right thing and getting their jabs  are not going to be protected. That's just the way these thing work.

'So the idea that it's okay because we've jabbed everybody, that doesn't mean everyone is fully protected.'

But jabbing children over the summer would rely on having enough vaccines to dish out.

With thousands of under-30s now receiving jabs after the vaccine roll-out picked up pace, demand for doses of Pfizer has now soared beyond supply levels.

Scottish MP Humza Yousaf told Matt Hancock in a letter that supplies of the jab are to be 'particularly tight over the next few weeks', not just in Scotland but across the UK, according to the i newspaper.

Mr Zahawi admitted supply would fall this month but insisted the UK remains on target to give first doses to all adults by

He told LBC: 'I'm confident that Scotland will be able to meet the target of offering every adult at least one dose by the end of July as we will in England as well.'

MailOnline analysis of official figures shows even with consistent supply and 100 per cent uptake, all adults in the UK may not have received their final inoculation until September 18  making it difficult to justify handing out first doses to children beforehand.

There are also safety concerns surrounding Pfizer and Moderna's vaccine in young people, particularly men.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US today confirmed it would be meeting to discuss 226 plausible cases of heart inflammation in the UK that have been linked to the companies' jabs.

Experts are divided on whether Britain should begin vaccinating children this summer, with some insisting jabs are safe but critics suggesting supplies should be used to squash the pandemic abroad first

Why children are less affected by Covid-19 Children are less at risk of developing severe Covid symptoms and dying from the disease due to a host of differences between the bodies and immune systems of youngsters and adults, a study shows. Australian researchers have identified several specific physiological differences which may explain why Covid-19 is rarely severe or fatal in children. These include strong, undamaged cells in their blood vessels which prevent inflammation and clotting; elevated levels of vitamin D; an immune system that is both fast acting and well-oiled; and fewer ACE2 receptors, which the coronavirus uses to infect cells. While Covid-19 causes well-documented respiratory problems in adults, particularly the vulnerable and elderly, other respiratory conditions also plague children. However, society's youngest are demonstrably less affected by coronavirus infection, making up only a tiny proportion of cases, hospital admissions and deaths. A recent study from the US looked at hospital admissions of children at seven different hospitals and found just just four per cent of children test positive for the virus. The research looked at tests of more than 135,000 children who went to hospital for various reasons before September 8. It revealed only 5,374 (4.0 per cent) of patients tested positive and, of this small percentage, only 359 (6.7 per cent) were hospitalised, with 99 in intensive care. Eight of the infected patients (0.15 per cent) later died. Six of the deaths were patients with 'complex preexisting comorbidities', the scientists say. But why this is the case has thus far remained a mystery, with scientists and doctors trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. Advertisement

The condition was seen most among people aged 24 and younger and the CDC admitted the number was higher than expected.

UK faces shortage of Pfizer vaccines throughout June Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi today admitted that supply of the Pfizer vaccine will be tight over the next few weeks but insisted that it was 'stable'. It comes after Scotland's Health Secretary Humza Yousaf warned supply of the Pfizer vaccine will be 'particularly tight' over the next few weeks. Mr Zahawi told LBC: 'I am absolutely confident, and I'll speak to Humza on this, that we will be able to deliver the Pfizer vaccines that Scotland needs to be able to meet its targets for end of July, as the United Kingdom target.' Asked if it is going to be 'tight' in the next few weeks, he said: 'It will be, there is no doubt. Every time I've come on your show I've said that the determining factor in terms of vaccine in arms is supply. 'And supply remains finite, but it is stable, and Pfizer have done a great job in being consistent on their delivery schedule.' Advertisement

But there is no evidence to suggest the condition was definitely caused by the jabs and the MHRA said numbers 'similar or below expected background levels' in the UK.

Nevertheless, there are legitimate concerns around safety, especially considering giving out vaccines to youngsters mainly serves to benefit adults rather than the children themselves, according to Professor David Livermore, microbiologist at the University of East Anglia.

Professor Livermore told MailOnline: 'The argument against vaccinating children is ethical.

'Children dont get severe Covid and so arent being vaccinated for their own protection.

'And, whilst the speed with which vaccines have been developed is a great credit to the pharma industry, it is inevitable that that they havent been through such extensive evaluation as normally required for a vaccine.'

But he added vaccinating children would 'boost the level of herd immunity in the population'.

He said: 'It would prevent schools becoming reservoirs for the virus, which might spread back to the minority of unvaccinated adults or those with waning immunity.'

Experts have also called for the UK to donate the doses that could be earmarked for children to developing nations that are significantly lagging behind in their rollouts.

Britain yesterday said it would give at least 100million surplus vaccines to the world's poorest nations. Mr Zahawi said the donations would not affect the domestic vaccine program.

He said: 'No doses that are required for Scotland, for Northern Ireland, for Wales, for England are being taken away by our announcement [on donating vaccines].'
Maya Wiley's campaign team has been forced to deny that she intends to disarm NYPD cops after the New York mayoral candidate refused to commit to a position during a debate.

Speaking alongside four other top Democrat candidates on Thursday, Wiley said she was 'not prepared to make that decision in a debate'.

After the debate, her campaign tried to clear up her answer, with spokesperson Julia Savel telling Politico: 'It's a ridiculous question; no one is even discussing taking guns away from cops  clearly Maya wouldn't.'

It comes after Wiley was ridiculed for hiring private security in her neighborhood while simultaneously encouraging calls to defund the police during a period of soaring crime in the Big Apple.

Maya Wiley's campaign team has been forced to deny that she intends to disarm NYPD cops

Scott Stringer, Kathryn Garcia, Andrew Yang, Maya Wiley and Eric Adams battled it out on the debate stage on Thursday night

The question about disarming police arose after state Attorney General Letitia James made recommendations to make use-of-force a last resort decision for law enforcement.

CBS2 reporter Marcia Kramer asked: 'Attorney General Letitia James is proposing legislation to limit cops from firing their weapons, use of force as a last resort.

'Some might ask, why not go all the way and take away the guns altogether like they do in 19 other countries where the bulk of the police force is unarmed.'

But Wiley initially dodged the question as she refused to commit to an answer on whether to remove cops' guns.

The question arose after state Attorney General Letitia James made recommendations to make use-of-force a last resort decision for law enforcement

Wiley - a former de Blasio administration official and member of the Civilian Complaint Review Board - presents herself as a reformer, and advocates cutting one billion dollars from the NYPD's budget and reform how the department operates.

'Well, look, one of the things we have to do is acknowledge that the Mayor's job is safety  safety is job one and I'm going to keep New Yorkers safe when I'm mayor,' she told the debate.

Kramer then probed again if she would take away guns but Wiley continued: 'That does mean we want smart policing. I think we know that we have a problem with illegal guns coming into this city.

'We have the strongest gun control laws in the country, the issue is how they're coming in.

Wiley - a former de Blasio administration official and member of the Civilian Complaint Review Board - presents herself as a reformer, and advocates cutting one billion dollars from the NYPD's budget and reform how the department operates

The top five Democratic candidates for mayor tackled some of the biggest problems plaguing New Yorkers during a debate on Thursday night and zeroed in on surging crime and other quality of life issues

Wiley slammed for hiring her own security while leading calls to defund police Maya Riley came under fire ahead of the Democratic debate after it was revealed she hired private security in her neighborhood while encouraging calls to defund the police. Wiley and her husband Harlan Mandel, CEO of a multimillion investment fund, pay $550 a month for a private security car to patrol the neighborhood of Brooklyn they live in, where they live in a $2.75million home. She is however calling for more cuts to the NYPD, while the rest of the city faces a spiraling crime problem. On Tuesday, her opponent Eric Adams, a 22-year veteran of the NYPD, called her a hypocrite. 'When I read that article today, to learn that a candidate in the race has private security while theyre saying to other families that are frightened over gun violence, that you dont need any more security. Thats just not fair. Thats not fair,' Adams said. 'To me, thats the highest level of hypocrisy. New Yorkers deserve public security, and its called NYPD, that gives both justice and safety.' Wiley - who is AOC's pick for the next mayor - blamed the fee on her husband, saying he'd been paying it without her knowledge and that it was 'ridiculous' but that he had also been the victim of a mugging in 2001. 'I think its ridiculous and we shouldnt have it. Its neither effective nor does it create the sense of community that I support. And I dont think it reflects the actual reality of our community in terms of whether its even needed,' she told The New York Daily News last December. 'The complicating factor is that Harlan was mugged after September 11th. To this day, if its dark out he walks down the middle of the street, he doesnt walk on the [poorly lit] sidewalk. 'And he said, one night he was coming home from work and he saw the car at the end of the block and it just made him feel better. 'And so he started paying again and then I had a very hard time saying, "dont do it."' NYC mayoral candidate Maya Wiley leaving her $2.75million home in Brooklyn Advertisement

'We do want a police department that is focused on keeping them out of the city and off our streets.'

Kramer then asked a third time: 'But will you take the guns away from the NYPD.'

Wiley, who has been endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren, responded: 'I am not prepared to make that decision in a debate.

'I am going to have a civilian commissioner and a civilian commission that is going to hold the police accountable and ensure we're safe from crime but also from police violence.'

All four other candidates on the stage, Eric Adams, Kathryn Garcia, Scott Stringer and Andrew Yang, pledged to allow police to keep carrying guns.

Adams, a former police captain who also co-founded a leadership group for black officers, has risen to the top of most polls as issues of crime and policing have dominated recent mayoral debates.

The race remains tight, though, with 2020 presidential candidate Yang, former city sanitation commissioner Garcia, city Comptroller Stringer and civil rights attorney Wiley the top contenders in a field of 13 candidates on the Democratic ballot.

Stringer said he would cut at least $1billion over four years through measures such as transferring mental health response to non-police crisis teams and reducing police overtime.

Garcia has not called for cutting the police budget, but says officers' minimum age should be increased from 21 to 25 and new recruits should be required to live in the city.

Yang backs a police residency requirement as well as beefed up oversight of the department, but rejects calls to defund the police.

'The truth is that New York City cannot afford to defund the police,' he warned.

The Times Square shooting and other high-profile crimes like last weekend's fatal shooting of a 10-year-old boy in Queens have sparked fears of a city under siege.

'Stop the Bloodshed,' screamed a recent front page of the New York Post, which warned of surrendering streets 'to homelessness, filth, crime and guns' in an editorial endorsing Adams.

Many of the most common types of crime in the city, including robberies, burglaries and grand larcenies, remain near historic lows.

Through the first five months of 2021, the total number of major crimes measured by the police department has been at its lowest level since comparable statistics became available in the 1990s.

But since the spring of 2020 the number of shootings has soared.

Through June 6, there were 181 homicides in New York City, up from 121 in the same period in 2019, an increase of 50 percent.

That's the worst start to a year since 2011.

At least 687 people were wounded or killed by gunfire through June 6. That's not historically bad.

More than 2,400 people were shot during the same period in 1993.

But it is the highest number for a winter and early spring since 2000.

Through the first five months of 2021, the total number of major crimes measured by the police department has been at its lowest level since comparable statistics became available in the 1990s

Polling has shown crime is the top issue among likely primary voters. Compared to last year, instances of many major crimes are slightly down, but murders are up 12 percent and shootings are up 68 percent.

When asked if police officers should continue to carry guns, all candidates said yes except Wiley.

Yang said: 'My first act as mayor will be to go to the police and say we need you.'

The hour-long debate focused heavily on crime, but also touched on how the candidates would work with Governor Andrew Cuomo, regulations for legal marijuana and whether to rename landmarks that bear the names of slave owners.

Aside from issues over crime, during the debate questions were asked of candidate Eric Adams after questions arose this week about where he resides.

New York City mayoral candidate Eric Adams (C) arrives at CBS television studios for the third debate among Democratic candidates for mayor of New York City on Thursday

New York City mayoral candidate Kathryn Garcia is pictures arriving at the debate

On Wednesday, Adams invited reporters to his apartment in Brooklyn in order to prove that he lived there.

'You know what people are asking about,' Adams said. 'I live in Brooklyn. I live in Bedford-Stuyvesant. I am happy to be there, it is a beautiful community, that's where I live. It's a humble place; it's a blue collar place but I am a blue-collar candidate. I live in Brooklyn.'

Andrew Yang, who has been a frontrunners along with Adams, attacked him hard.

'Unfortunately his tour of the basement raised more questions than it answered for many New Yorkers, especially me,' he said.

Adam's responded with a fierce defense.

'I was asked by Mr. Yang to produce my EZ Pass, I did,' Adams said. 'He started to say, 'produce what type of milk you have in your fridge, produce what type of vegan cheese you have.' This is silly. I live in Bed-Stuy, I'm a Brooklynite and I'm proud to be a Brooklynite.'

The debate also discussed how candidates would work with Governor Andrew Cuomo and touched upon regulations for legal marijuana.

Candidate Scott Stringer was asked about a second allegation of sexual misconduct. He is pictured on Wednesday

Stringer was asked about a second allegation of sexual misconduct.

The New York Times reported last week how a woman accused Stringer of groping her and that he made unwanted sexual advances in 1992.

Weeks earlier, another woman who had worked unpaid on Stringer's 2001 public advocate campaign made similar allegations.

Stringer said the allegations are 'not true' and said that he was 'misquoted',

'I want to be held accountable to anyone who wishes the press or otherwise to investigate what took place 30 years or 20 years ago,' Stringer said.

New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Yang said he could 'work with 'anyone who's going to help us deliver for the people of New York' in relation to a question about the state's Governor

Stringer and Yang also clashed over Yang's experience and whether he would have the right approach to working with Cuomo.

Cuomo has a notoriously bad relationship with New York's current mayor, Bill de Blasio.

Yang said he could 'work with 'anyone who's going to help us deliver for the people of New York.'

'Your approach is naive,' Stringer said. 'Albany will go after you. Albany will collapse you. You don't understand that the forces around the state do not want us to get the funding that we deserve.'

'The state needs the city, Scott. The city needs the state,' Yang said. 'It's easier to work with someone who, again, isn't trying to score political points (and) who just wants to get the job done. That's the kind of leadership that the city has been waiting for for quite some time.'
Chinese researchers have claimed they have found 24 different previously-unknown coronaviruses in bats, as China steps up its campaign to dismiss questions over whether Covid-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan.

The scientists claim their findings in a small region on Yunnan province, southwestern China, show that there are is a 'remarkable diversity' of bat coronaviruses which could spread to humans.

The researchers, from the University of Shandong, said that one novel bat coronavirus found in their sample was genetically very similar to the SARS-CoV-2 virus that is causing the current coronavirus pandemic.

But the research comes as China is fighting back against growing scrutiny over whether the virus emerged from a Wuhan lab and did not pass naturally from animals to humans at all.

And a University of Oxford-led study this week raises doubt over the Chinese researcher's claims.

They found 'no evidence' that a single bat or pangolin was kept at the Wuhan wet markets, leading them to conclude that these species - frequently blamed for Covid-19 - 'were not the likely spillover host at the source of the coronavirus'.

Chinese researchers have claimed they have found 24 different previously-unknown coronaviruses in bats as China tries to dispel theories that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan. Pictured: Scientists work inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2017

The notorious Huanan wet market in Wuhan which has been blamed for spreading the coronavirus. Most of the early theories pointed to bats - but according to the Oxford-led study, no bats were sold there

The Chinese researchers had collected samples between May 2019 and November 2020 from bats located in Mengla county, Yunnan province. They tested their feces and urine as well as taking swabs from the bats' mouths.

'In total, we assembled 24 novel 341 coronavirus genomes from different bat species, including four SARS-CoV-2 like coronaviruses,' the researchers wrote in their report, which was published in the journal Cell on Thursday. They found these four viruses in nine of the individual samples.

'These results clearly demonstrate that viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 continue to circulate in bat populations, and in some regions might occur at a relatively high frequency,' the researchers claimed.

They said one of the samples, taken from a horseshoe bat species, was genetically very similar to the SARS-Cov-2 virus and is the second-closest strain to the coronavirus.

'Our study highlights the remarkable diversity of bat coronaviruses at the local scale, including close relatives of both SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV,' the researchers said.

The Chinese researchers had collected samples between May 2019 and November 2020 from bats located in Mengla county, Yunnan province

The Oxford-led team found 'no evidence' that a single bat or pangolin (pictured) was kept at the market

Did coronavirus originate in Chinese government laboratory? The Wuhan Institute of Virology has been collecting numerous coronaviruses from bats ever since the SARS outbreak in 2002. They have also published papers describing how these bat viruses have interacted with human cells. US Embassy staff visited the lab in 2018 and 'had grave safety concerns' over the protocols which were being observed at the facility. The lab is just a few miles from the Huanan wet market which is where the first cluster of infections erupted in Wuhan. The market is just a few hundred yards from another lab called the Wuhan Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (WHCDC). The WHCDC kept disease-ridden animals in its labs, including some 605 bats. Those who support the theory argue that Covid-19 could have leaked from either or both of these facilities and spread to the wet market. Most argue that this would have been a virus they were studying rather than one which was engineered. Last year a bombshell paper from the Beijing-sponsored South China University of Technology recounted how bats once attacked a researcher at the WHCDC and 'blood of bat was on his skin.' The report says: 'Genome sequences from patients were 96% or 89% identical to the Bat CoV ZC45 coronavirus originally found in Rhinolophus affinis (intermediate horseshoe bat).' It describes how the only native bats are found around 600 miles away from the Wuhan seafood market and that the probability of bats flying from Yunnan and Zhejiang provinces was minimal. In addition there is little to suggest the local populace eat the bats as evidenced by testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors. Instead the authors point to research being carried out within 300 yards at the WHCDC. One of the researchers at the WHCDC described quarantining himself for two weeks after a bat's blood got on his skin, according to the report. That same man also quarantined himself after a bat urinated on him. And he also mentions discovering a live tick from a bat - parasites known for their ability to pass infections through a host animal's blood. 'The WHCDC was also adjacent to the Union Hospital where the first group of doctors were infected during this epidemic,' the report says. 'It is plausible that the virus leaked around and some of them contaminated the initial patients in this epidemic, though solid proofs are needed in future study.' Advertisement

The researchers suggested that the coronavirus could have evolved naturally from animals to humans - rather than coming from a Wuhan lab leak as some theories suggest.

Bats are well known reservoir that cause severe diseases in humans and have been associated with the spillovers of Hendra virus, Marburg virus, Ebola virus and, most notably, coronaviruses,' they wrote.

'Aside from bats and humans, coronaviruses can infect a wide range of domestic and wild animals, including pigs, cattle, mice, cats, dogs, chickens, deer and hedgehogs.'

The Chinese researchers claims come a day after an Oxford-led study found that no bats or pangolins were sold at Wuhan wet markets immediately before the coronavirus pandemic started.

The research documents a menagerie of nearly 50,000 animals from 38 species, including badgers and boars, peacocks and pit vipers, traded at animal markets in the Chinese city from 2017 to November 2019.

But the team found 'no evidence' that a single bat or pangolin was kept at the market, leading them to conclude that these species - frequently blamed for Covid-19 - 'were not the likely spillover host at the source of the coronavirus'.

Instead, they argued that the scores of wild animals kept in filthy cages and neglected by the merchants provided an abundance of routes for Covid-19 to pass on to humans.

Chris Newman, from the University of Oxford, told Mailonline: 'Some of these species are known to host a variety of diseases.

'A few have subsequently been identified as competent hosts of Covid-19, but the main suspected spill-over hosts, namely bats and pangolins, were not for sale in these markets.

'Our data cannot determine how humans became infected with Covid-19, only that direct contact with pangolins or bats in these markets seems highly implausible.'

The authors, whose work was published in Scientific Reports on Wednesday, said the thousands of animals that were traded in Wuhan were 'capable of hosting a wide range of infectious zoonotic diseases or disease-baring parasites.'

'The creatures were sold for huge sums. Marmot meat, for example, was five times the cost of pork.

'This is not subsistence bushmeat, but a costly delicacy,' Prof Macdonald added.

China claims it has since cracked down on these hotbeds for disease, outlawing the sale of live animals, but more than a year after the first outbreak, people still pack into these markets to buy food, including live fish, frogs and turtles.

The study authors wrote that there is a persistent desire among Chinese people to trade in so-called 'charismatic species' which are considered 'prestige items.'

'In major part this is because protective legislation has not been enforced consistently, fostering a nonchalant disregard for wildlife exploitation,' the study says.

Prof Macdonald told The Times: 'With these huge concentrations of diverse species under one roof... it would seem but a matter of time before some other unwelcome disease might skip into the human population.'

King rat snakes and Chinese bamboo rats which were on sale at the Huanan market

An Amur hedgehog and a hog badger at the Huanan market in Wuhan

Marmots and a raccoon dog at the Huanan market in Wuhan

'Rare' genome sequence suggests the virus WAS man-made Two U.S. experts have penned a damning essay saying that science strongly suggests the novel coronavirus was manufactured inside a Chinese laboratory. The claim was made by Drs Stephen Quay, CEO of biopharmaceutical company Atossa Therapeutics Inc, and Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California Berkeley, in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday. In the op-ed, the men say their proof lies in genome sequencing, or analyzing the DNA, of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. There are 36 DNA segments - made up of three-letter 'words' - that viruses use to make an amino acid known as L-arginine. L-arginine helps make proteins but is also often used in so-called 'gain of function' research, which alters viruses to make them more transmissible and more deadly. The new virus contains a segment called CGG-CGG, which is considered rare even in experiments in which researchers are trying to manipulate virus. But even more telling is that this combination has never been found naturally in any other type of coronavirus, including in SARS and MERS, both of which are cousins of the new virus. 'A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn't present in any other virus,' Quay and Muller wrote. 'The CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. Advertisement

The well-trodden theory that the virus originated from sordid animal cages in Wuhan has faced growing counter arguments over the last month since Joe Biden told his intelligence networks to redouble efforts to probe the lab leak theory.

The agencies will also investigate the competing idea that it evolved naturally and passed from animals to humans. He gave them 90 days to report back.

The move has given the investigation, previously considered a risible notion by the liberal media in the United States after it was promoted by his predecessor Donald Trump, new credence.

The Huanan wet market, where scientists say the first cluster of infections were officially reported, is just a few hundred yards from the Wuhan Centres for Disease Prevention and Control and only a few miles from the the Wuhan Institute of Virology Lab, where scientists were reportedly conducting experiments on bats before the pandemic began.

The lab is one of only a handful in the world that is cleared to handle Class 4 pathogens  dangerous viruses that pose a high risk of person-to-person transmission.

Three researchers from the institute sought medical care in November 2019, before the virus began to spread, according to a recent report from the Wall Street Journal.

There are scientists who have claimed for more than a year that the genomic sequence of the virus is such that it must have been engineered by humans.

This follows revelations that a government laboratory in California concluded last May 2020 that COVID-19 may have escaped from a facility in Wuhan.

Scientists at the the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, near Berkeley, analyzed the genetic makeup of the virus to try to understand how it evolved.

They passed their May 27, 2020 findings on to the State Department in October. The five-month delay was not explained.

On January 15 the State Department published a fact sheet about COVID-19, which said that 'circumstantial' evidence suggested a lab leak theory was possible.

The secret document the California lab produced was not known about until Monday, when The Wall Street Journal reported on its existence.

The well-trodden theory that the virus originated from sordid animal cages in Wuhan has faced growing counter arguments over the last month since Joe Biden told his intelligence networks to redouble efforts to probe the lab leak theory. Pictured: Workers inside the Wuhan Lab in 2017

Chinese scientist 'filed a patent for a vaccine BEFORE virus was declared a pandemic' A Chinese military scientist with ties to the United States reportedly filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine well before the disease was declared a global pandemic. Yusen Zhou, who worked for the People's Liberation Army (PLA), lodged the paperwork on behalf of the Chinese political party on February 24 2020, according to The Australian newspaper. That date was just five weeks after China first confirmed human transmission of the coronavirus. Zhou is also said to have 'worked closely' with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), including Shi Zhengli - the deputy director of the lab who is famous for her research on coronavirus in bats. Zhou mysteriously died less than three months after he filed the patent. The New York Post claims his death was only reported in one Chinese media report, despite the fact he was one of the country's most prominent scientists. Zhou had previously worked on research linked to the US institutions, including the University of Minnesota and the New York Blood Center, the newspaper reported. Advertisement

People familiar with the Lawrence Livermore study said that it was prepared by their 'Z Division,' which is its intelligence arm.

The California lab has not confirmed the contents of their report, which remains secret.

And last month an explosive new study obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com suggested the scientists created Covid-19 and then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats.

The paper's authors, British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Srensen, wrote that they have had 'prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China' for a year - but were ignored by academics and major journals.

Dalgleish is a professor of oncology at St George's University, London, and is best known for his breakthrough creating the first working 'HIV vaccine', to treat diagnosed patients and allow them to go off medication for months.

Srensen, a virologist, is chair of pharmaceutical company, Immunor, which developed a coronavirus vaccine candidate called Biovacc-19. Dalgleish also has share options in the firm.

The shocking allegations in the study include accusations of 'deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data' at Chinese labs, and it notes the silencing and disappearance of scientists in the communist country who spoke out.

The journal article, which has been submitted for publication, is set to make waves among the scientific community, as the majority of experts have until recently staunchly denied the origins of COVID-19 were anything other than a natural infection leaping from animals to humans.

Some experts still believe the virus was transmitted from a bat to some other species of animal, then to humans. However, its origins remain unproven.

The Wuhan lab was famed for conducting tests on bat coronaviruses, with experts who support the leak theory saying the same city being ground zero for the outbreak is too great a coincidence to ignore.

While China has tried to insist the virus originated elsewhere, academics, politicians and the media have begun to contemplate the possibility it escaped from the WIV - raising suspicions that Chinese officials simply hid evidence of the early spread

The idea the coronavirus escaped from a Wuhan lab was at best a 'fringe theory' until recently, when the Biden administration ordered a review
Paris Markham, 22, accepted 22 slips on 90 to 95 tricast bets which each made between 5,000 and 100,000, jurors heard

A crooked Ladbrokes cashier paid out more than 1million in three hours to a crime gang by recording ineligible betting slips on horse races as winners, a court has heard.

Paris Markham, 22, accepted 22 slips on 90 to 95 tricast bets which each made between 5,000 and 100,000 at the betting shop in Edmonton, London, jurors heard.

She was part of a conspiracy with ex-boyfriend Aurica Vaduva, 23, and Daniel Constantin, 28, which enabled the scammers to blow a fortune on luxury goods, the court was told.

Markham admits assisting in the plot to defraud her employers but claims she was threatened by men on the street as she made her way to work.

Constantin has admitted conspiracy to commit fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering and will be sentenced at the end of the trial at Wood Green Crown Court.

Corinne Bramwell, prosecuting, said an organised criminal gang worked together to 'defraud a betting company out of just over 1million, during the course of a few hours on June 30, 2019.'

She said the group had also worked together on 'their subsequent efforts to conceal, convert or disguise the proceeds of that conspiracy.

'Over the course of approximately three hours, between 2pm and 5pm, customer services manager Paris Markham, fraudulently paid out a series of 22 winning bets to the total value of just over a million pounds to the OCG members who posed as customers.

'In reality the monies that were obtained were transferred into the bank accounts of these defendants.

'The money was moved in this way in order to gain access and use of those stolen monies by the organised crime group.

'It was moved in credit transactions, cash withdrawals, foreign currency purchases and purchases of high value goods such as luxury motor vehicles, either on the same day of the fraud or the day after.

'The Crown's case is that each defendant undertook a specific different role.

'The Crown suggests Ms Markham took a pivotal role in the frauds, she was an employee at Ladbrokes and worked at the Edmonton branch, she was the inside woman.

Markham (pictured) admits assisting in the plot to defraud her employers but claims she was threatened by men on the street as she made her way to work

'She used her position to facilitate the transaction of hundreds of thousands of pounds to the other members, without her, the fraud would not have been possible.'

'It's not in dispute that Ms Markham made those payments or that they were fraudulent.

'She has pleaded not guilty because says she was behaving in the way she did because she was threatened on the street on the way to work, she asserts therefore that she was acting under duress.

'The horse racing betting slips were handed to Ms Markham, the bets placed are known as tricast bets, on the first, second and third place of a race.

'In this case bets placed either in sum of 90 or 95 pounds, with returns of approximately 5,000 and 100,000 for a single transaction.

'The betting slips and therefore the actual bets placed in this fraud were deliberately illegible, if the proper procedure had been followed those betting slips would have been invalidated and in the course of policy, should not have been accepted.

'Following the race, the slip was recorded as having been a winning bet, improperly and fraudulently, in abuse of Ms Markham's position as an employee, she transferred the winnings to co-conspirators.

'The prosecution case is that she was not forced and did so willingly in conjunction with her partner and father of her child.

'Ms Markham's role at Ladbrokes was as the inside woman, essentially stealing the money from her employer Ladbrokes, disguised as legitimate winnings.

'Mr Vaduva is a close associate of Daniel Constantin, and significantly, at the time of the offences he was Ms Markham's boyfriend.

'Ms Stoica was in a relationship with Daniel's brother and she received some of the proceeds into her Nationwide account, and transferred 20,000 to her boyfriend.

'Count seven relates to her Metrobank account, she was unable to dissipate any of that money and therefore was in knowing possession of it.

'Mr Radu is a friend and associate of Mr Vaduva and they worked together at the time, he received over 135,000 of the fraudulently obtained Ladbrokes money in count eight.

'He actively concealed or transferred approximately 20,000 for his own ends in count nine.'

Vaduva is accused of possessing 139,732.80 and of laundering a further 21,000.

Markham, of Barnet, and Vaduva, of Enfield, deny conspiracy to commit fraud.

Vaduva denies further counts of conspiracy to conceal, disguise, convert or transfer criminal property; possessing criminal property; and concealing, disguising, converting or transferring criminal property.

Constantin's brother's girlfriend Arabela Stoica, 22, and Vaduva's associate Somaila Radu, 29, are accused of possessing and laundering the winnings.

Stoica allegedly had two sums totalling 292,538.40 and laundered a further 173,490.

Radu allegedly had 135,556 in his account and laundered a further 20,480.

Stoica, of Leyton, denies conspiracy to conceal, disguise, convert or transfer criminal property; one count of concealing, disguise, convert or transfer criminal property; and two counts of possessing criminal property.

Radu, of Enfield, denies conspiracy to conceal, disguise, convert or transfer criminal property; one count of possessing criminal property; and one count of concealing, disguising, converting or transferring criminal property.

Constantin, of Ilford, has admitted conspiracy to defraud and will be sentenced later.

The trial continues.
US health chiefs have told the public to immediately stop using a lateral flow Covid test that Britain has spent around 2.8billion on.

Kits made by Innova have been put at the heart of the UK's twice-a-week swabbing blitz, with ministers hoping the regular testing programme would thwart the spread of coronavirus.

But the tests, which revolve around nose swabs and offer results in just 30 minutes, have been mired in huge controversy since they were given the green light.

Now the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates medical devices used in the US, has revealed it has 'significant concerns' over the accuracy of the test and has called on Americans who have bought it to throw it in the bin.

Prominent critics of the kits said the move was 'troubling'.

But the Department of Health said today the Innova kits have gone through 'rigorous checks' at Porton Down and said they remained confident they were helping to break the chain of transmission of coronavirus.

Innova's controversial tests offer quick results, but experts have voiced concerns about their accuracy rates, which some believe could be as low as 2 per cent

The FDA told Americans to stop using the tests and 'destroy' them or return the tests to Innova

The FDA accused Innova of peddling 'false or misleading' claims about how well the tests work, with the Californian-based firm claiming they were up to 98.98 per cent accurate.

Innova Medical Group is owned by private equity firm Pasaca Capital Inc, that was set up by Chinese-born American businessman Charles Huang (pictured)

SCIENTISTS URGE GOVERNMENT TO STOP USING INNOVA TEST Scientists have accused the Government of misleading the public over the accuracy of Innova's rapid test and called for its use to be stopped. Professor Jon Deeks, Dr Angela Raffle and Dr Mike Gill  from the University of Birmingham, the University of Bristol and a former regional director of public health, respectively  said in a letter published in January: 'The Innova lateral flow test is not fit for many of the purposes being proposed by the government. 'In the Liverpool pilot, the test missed infection in 60 per cent of people, and of greatest concern missed it in 30 per cent of those with very high viral loads who are at highest risk of spreading the virus to others. 'An erroneous test result may lead to people taking the wrong actions and putting themselves and others at risk of infection. This may increase and not reduce disease spread, illness and death.' They said the limitations of the test were not being made clear by the Department of Health and that it was being made out to be more accurate than it is, in some places being compared to the significantly more reliable PCR tests. Lateral flow tests do have some benefits, they argued, but the way this was being used risked too many people getting false negative results or not reporting results when they were positive. The researchers urged in their letter: 'Stop further rollout of rapid asymptomatic testing using the Innova LFD, including its use in care homes, schools, communities and self-testing by untrained people at home.' A similar, but not identical comment, is available on the British Medical Journal blog. Advertisement

The agency said the figure didn't 'accurately reflect performance estimates observed during the clinical studies of your devices'.

It added the claim 'appears unsupported by any clinical data' but did not offer any clearer accuracy figures.

But real-world statistics from Britain have revealed they miss up to 40 per cent of infectious people. They are also less accurate when self-administered, which is the main way they are used in the UK.

The FDA said the accuracy of the test 'has not been adequately established' and said the company could respond with any evidence if it disputes the findings.

The agency instigated a Class I recall - the most serious type - telling people to dispose of or return the test. It also issued a warning letter to Innova, ordering it to stop supplying the test in the US.

Announcing the recall, the agency said: 'The FDA is warning the public to stop using the Innova SARS-CoV-2 Antigen Rapid Qualitative Test for diagnostic use.

'The FDA has significant concerns that the performance of the test has not been adequately established, presenting a risk to health.

'In addition, labeling distributed with certain configurations of the test includes performance claims that did not accurately reflect the performance estimates observed during the clinical studies of the tests.'

Additionally, data it submitted about the test was 'identical' to information provided by other test makers, which raises 'significant concerns' that the accuracy of the tests has not been established, the letter states.

In its letter to Innova, the FDA said it inspected the company's premises between March 15 and April 8.

It found the company distributed its SARS-CoV-2 Antigen Rapid Qualitative Test in the US without marketing approval from the FDA.

The agency also told the company to take 'immediate action' to stop selling and distributing the tests in the US.

The FDA said it has not received any reports of harm or death associated with the test.

It has told people stop using the tests and either 'destroy them' by throwing them out, or return them to Innova.

If a test wrongly tells someone they are not infected, people could easily spread the virus.

False positive results - that tell people they have the virus when they do not - could mean people are wrongly told to self-isolate.

Jon Deeks, a medical testing expert at the University of Birmingham, said on Twitter that the FDA's announcement was 'somewhat troubling'.

Professor Deeks, who is a critic of the self-testing policy, called on the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, which approves tests in the UK, to comment.

Jo Maugham, director at the Good Law Project, tweeted: 'For reasons no one had quite been able to fathom, and without any competition, we spent 3bn on these.'

The Good Law Project has taken legal action against the Department of Health for what it described as its 'wholesale failure' to disclose details of contracts agreed during the Covid pandemic.

PCR AND LATERAL FLOW TESTS: THE KEY DIFFERENCES A PCR test can cost upwards of 180 per person, with the swab needing to be processed in a lab. The UK, on the other hand, favours faster tests which are not lab based and give a result within 15 minutes. These rapid coronavirus tests, known as lateral flow tests, are ones that can be done on the spot using portable equipment. They are faster and cheaper than lab-based PCR tests, which the government uses to diagnose people, but are less accurate. Advertisement

Innova was founded last March by Pasaca Capital, a private equity firm chaired by American businessman Charles Huang who was born in Wuhan - the Chinese city at the epicentre of the pandemic.

Innova's 'primary' factory for making coronavirus swabs is in Xiamen in Fujian. It also has three production facilities in the US, and is planning to expand to the UK.

It was hoped that lateral flow tests were a way out of the pandemic because they could identify asymptomatic cases, helping to limit the spread of the virus.

But some experts raised concerns that they could give 'false positives'.

Studies have shown the kits are less accurate than gold-standard PCR swabs, which means they can give false positives.

Senior strategist Ben Dyson, who is an adviser to Health Secretary Matt Hancock, told colleagues in emails in April that that the accuracy of the test could be as low as two per cent.

His concerns were based on data showing that as the number of cases drop in an area, the number of 'false positive' results stays the same. This means the ratio of false positives to true positives increases.

The FDA has told Americans to talk to their healthcare provider if they were tested with the Innova swab and have concerns about the results.

It advised healthcare providers to retest patients using a Covid test other than the Innova one if the test was done less than two weeks ago and suspect that the result was wrong.

Brits can order free tests online, which contain seven swabs and can be delivered to their own home, or collected them from a test site and pharmacies.

Current government advice tells people to use the tests twice a week.

Innova said in a statement that it has 'worked diligently and proactively to address the FDA findings' and implemented some corrective actions, while others are underway.

'None of the inspectional observations concern the performance of the test,' the company said.

Innova said it voluntarily recalled the products due to the labelling problems and is 'confident' that it is 'on the pathway to fully comply with FDA requirements'.

Graeme Tunbridge, the director of devices at Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said the agency authorised NHS Test and Track to use the Innova tests as a self-test device across the UK to identify asymptomatic cases.

'The MHRA are reviewing all available information and are working closely with NHS Test and Trace to ensure that a full risk assessment is undertaken, as is our normal process, to understand any implications for products being used in the UK.

'Patient safety is our main priority and we will issue safety information as and when necessary.'

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: 'The Innova test has already gone through the UK's rigorous Porton Down assessment process, and we have a robust quality assurance process in place.

'We have confidence in lateral flow tests, which help us identify people without symptoms but who could pass the virus to others - helping break the chains of transmission.'
Fatal stabbing takes number of teenagers murdered in the capital this year to 16

Suspect had been detained, said the Met Police, but provided no further details

A teenager has been stabbed to death in a fight during the morning school run in west London.

Police found a 15-year-old boy suffering from multiple stab wounds after being called to reports of a fight on Blyth Road in Hayes at around 8.30am today.

The victim died at the scene. A suspect had been detained, said the Metropolitan Police, but provided no further details.

Formal identification of the victim has yet to take place and a post-mortem examination will be held in due course, the force added.

The fatal stabbing takes the number of teenagers murdered in London this year to 16, one less than the whole of 2020.

It follows seven people being arrested following the fatal stabbing of another teenager in Streatham, south London, yesterday afternoon.

Police forensic officers are pictured on Blyth Road in Hayes, west London, where a 15-year-old has died after being stabbed. Officers were called to reports of a fight at around 8.30am today

Cordons remain in place at the scene around 500 yards from the Global Academy school.

Police patrols are also being increased in the local area in the wake of the murder.

Several police vehicles were parked near the scene and forensics officers in boiler suits were conducting a fingertip search. Forensics officers remain on the scene.

One man working close to the scene, who did not want to be named, said: 'I heard a scream so I came out and the police were already here.

'They were working on him, first of all, and then the air ambulance turned up. Loads more police started coming, the air ambulance landed - it took them a while.

'At that point the police were saying 'stand back, stand back, everyone get back' and then I think someone related turned up first, then the mum and then the dad.

'The school kids walk up here every morning and then at 3pm/3.30pm in the morning it's busy, everyone coming to school.

'It's normally all the school kids being loud and messing around, screaming and shouting, and that's all I thought it was at first.

'There were only a couple of kids out here when I came out and they were walking up the road.'

Tia Rek-Williams, a 21-year-old teacher who lives nearby, said the incident had been 'traumatising'.

Police forensic officers pictured at the scene today. Chief Superintendent Peter Gardner said: 'I am deeply saddened to hear of the tragic loss of a child's life to knife crime in Hillingdon

The victim died at the scene. A suspect had been detained, said the Metropolitan Police, but provided no further details (pictured: police on Blyth Road today)

She said: 'I didn't see the initial stabbing but I did see past the point where the boy was on the ground.

'They were saying "come on, you've just got 30 seconds, hold on, keep fighting" and as they were saying that I saw his hand drop and his eyes close.

'It was so traumatising.'

Ms Rek-Williams said emergency services had arrived around 30 seconds later and the boy had been treated with a defibrillator.

Around six people had tried to help the boy while neighbours came out of their houses and gathered in the road, she added.

'It happened in broad daylight, a 15-year-old boy, there are so many cameras. It just shows you nothing can stop these people doing these things.

'This happened literally in the middle of the street, not down a back alley, in front of people's houses. It's just awful.'

Forensic services pictured at the scene. Several police vehicles were parked near the scene and forensics officers in boiler suits were conducting a fingertip search

Two forensic officers are seen in front of a police van on Blyth Road today. A neighbour, who also did not want to be identified, claimed the road was a regular spot for fights

A neighbour, who also did not want to be identified, claimed the road was a regular spot for fights.

She said: 'Since the school was built it's been a problem. There's a lot of fights and gang-ups.'

Police commander for Hillingdon, Chief Superintendent Peter Gardner, said: 'I am deeply saddened to hear of the tragic loss of a child's life to knife crime in Hillingdon.

'This incident, that claimed the life of a 15-year-old boy, took place during this morning's school run.

'A family has been devastated and the effects of this terrible incident will reverberate throughout our communities.

'As a parent of a teenage boy myself, I cannot imagine the pain the family is going through and I offer our full condolences and support.

Cordons remain in place at the scene around 500 yards from the Global Academy school and police patrols are also being increased in the local area in the wake of the murder

'Police patrols today and throughout the weekend have been enhanced in order to provide a more visible and reassuring presence for the public. If you have concerns please do approach my officers and speak with them.

'Local officers will support our Homicide detective colleagues and I thank the public for their patience as officers deal with the crime scene and local enquiries. '

He added: 'We work tirelessly with our borough partners and communities to challenge violent crime and to stop the loss of young lives to knife crime.

'More widely, across London in the coming months, a large scale operation will run throughout the summer to challenge and suppress violent behaviour, but we need the help of parents, carers and anyone with information about those carrying knives to come forward.

'A homicide investigation will be launched following this morning's tragic incident. Please work with us to prevent further young deaths by sharing what you know.'

Anyone who witnessed the incident or has information is urged to call police on 101, tweet @MetCC quoting reference Cad 1681/11Jun or get in touch anonymously via Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.
A tour guide has told of the moment he dragged a young boy to safety after he was bitten by a two-metre bronze whaler shark at a popular tourist beach.

Warwick 'Wokka' Coles, 48, was at Five Finger Reef near Coral Bay - about 1,000km north of Perth - when he heard a spear fisherman yelling for help after the shark attacked his 10-year-old son.

Mr Coles said he pulled the boy onto the sand as he bled from the bite to his foot while his father stood guard with his spear gun to make sure the shark didn't attack again.

Warwick 'Wokka' Coles (pictured) swam out to the young boy after hearing his father's calls for help

The beach at Five Finger Reef near Coral Beach (pictured) will be closed until Saturday afternoon

'It wasn't gushing, but there was enough for it to leave a trail of blood behind as I dragged him into the shallows,' Mr Coles told The West Australian.

When they were back on the beach, he fetched gauze to bandage the wound and called an ambulance as other witnesses rushed to help.

He said the father told him he had not even realised straight away the boy had been bitten.

'He thought he was just pointing out the shark to him, but then he yelled 'it bit me'. It was a pretty big open wound, open quite wide.'

Mr Coles heard the man's calls for help about 25m offshore as he was leading tourists on a quad bike and snorkel adventure.

His initial thought was a shark had been spotted but he still selflessly dived in the water and swam out to the father and his son.

Mr Coles (pictured) dragged the boy bleeding from a foot wound to the sand. The child was then airlifted to hospital in a stable condition

He explained that although he sees sharks daily in his job, he was shaken by the extremely close call.

'When this sort of thing happens, even if it doesn't end up being that serious, you think about what could've happened,' he said.

He also praised the young boy - saying despite being slightly anxious once onshore he kept it together well - and the father - who he said calmly kept assuring the boy he was going to be alright.

The attack is particularly concerning because the shark had not been attracted to the spear fisherman's catch, who had yet to catch anything, Mr Coles revealed.

Mr Coles had been leading a quad bike and snorkel adventure for his employer Coastal Adevnture Tours (pictured) when he heroically swam out to help the boy

Authorities were alerted to the shark bite by Mr Coles colleague about 11.14am on Friday.

The young boy was then airlifted to Perth Children's Hospital by the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and his injuries are not believed to be life-threatening.

The beach at Five Finger Reef will be closed for until Saturday afternoon, WA Today reported.

Authorities were alerted to the bite at 11.14am on Friday, at Five Finger Reef just south of Coral Bay (stock image)

The tourist hotspot is popular for snorkelling and only accessible by four-wheel-drive.

The Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development said abronze whaler shark was seen about 75m off the coast in the area about 10 minutes after the boy was injured.

A spear fisherman was bitten at the same spot in March year but escaped when he punched the shark.
Google's next generation of its controversial digital advertising systems must be developed under the supervision of Britain's competition regulator, it was revealed today.

The US technology giant agreed a world-first deal with the Competition and Markets Authority to protect user privacy and ensure genuine competition and fair returns for news publishers.

Google promised that it will not discriminate against rivals when implementing its new way to target advertising that the CMA fears may harm the market.

The California-based company has pledged that it will not favour its own advertising and advertising technology businesses when designing and operating a new system which will be a major overhaul of how ads work on the Chrome browser.

Google is planning to replace so-called third party cookies with a new 'Privacy Sandbox' at some point next year, and it is already running trials.

It would mean that instead of traditional third-party cookies, where advertisers can track individuals across the websites they visit, users will be split into cohorts.

Google is planning to replace so-called third party cookies with a new 'Privacy Sandbox' at some point next year. The company's headquarters at Mountain View in California are pictured

Rather than a person's browser history being sent to a central location, their own computer will work out what they like and assign them to a group with similar interests.

Online ads will still be personalised under the system, but Google claims it will afford users greater privacy.

But rivals and regulators worry that the move could strengthen Google's stranglehold on the market for online advertising.

5 main commitments offered by Google The Competition and Markets Authority said the commitments offered by Google include: A commitment to develop and implement the proposals in a way that avoids distortions to competition and the imposition of unfair terms on Chrome users. This includes a commitment to involve the CMA and the ICO in the development of the Proposals to ensure this objective is met.

Increased transparency from Google on how and when the proposals will be taken forward and on what basis they will be assessed. This includes a commitment to publicly disclose the results of tests of the effectiveness of alternative technologies.

Substantial limits on how Google will use and combine individual user data for the purposes of digital advertising after the removal of third-party cookies.

A commitment that Google will not discriminate against its rivals in favour of its own advertising and ad-tech businesses when designing or operating the alternatives to third-party cookies.

A standstill period of at least 60 days before Google proceeds with the removal of third party cookies giving the CMA the opportunity, if any outstanding concerns cannot be resolved with Google, to reopen its investigation and, if necessary, impose any interim measures necessary to avoid harm to competition. Advertisement

CMA chief executive Andrea Coscelli said: 'The emergence of tech giants such as Google has presented competition authorities around the world with new challenges that require a new approach.

'That's why the CMA is taking a leading role in setting out how we can work with the most powerful tech firms to shape their behaviour and protect competition to the benefit of consumers.

'If accepted, the commitments we have obtained from Google become legally binding, promoting competition in digital markets, helping to protect the ability of online publishers to raise money through advertising and safeguarding users' privacy.'

In its latest update on the issue today, the CMA has broadly endorsed criticisms by Marketers for an Open Web (MOW) - a group of online publishers, advertisers, tech and data companies - that the Privacy Sandbox was anti-competitive and self-preferencing.

The regulator's solution is to allow Google to proceed with the Privacy Sandbox, but only under its supervision.

This will effectively be a trial run for the CMA's new Digital Markets Unit when it is granted statutory powers to enforce a new code of conduct.

In January the CMA, which is based in London's Canary Wharf, said it was looking into the removal of third-party cookies alongside the Information Commissioner's Office.

And a CMA spokesman said today: 'While there have been privacy concerns about their use, these cookies are used by digital advertisers to personalise and target advertisements more effectively, providing an income stream for free online content such as newspapers.

'The CMA was concerned that, without regulatory oversight and scrutiny, Google's alternatives could be developed and implemented in ways that impede competition in digital advertising markets.

'This would cause advertising spending to become even more concentrated on Google, harming consumers who ultimately pay for the cost of advertising. It would also undermine the ability of online publishers such as newspapers to generate revenue and continue to produce valuable content in the future.'

Google has now committed to develop and implement the new changes in a way that does not distort competition or imposes unfair terms on users of Chrome.

The Competition and Markets Authority is based in this building in London's Canary Wharf

The company has also promised increased transparency on how and when it will implement its new proposals and how it will assess them.

It said there would be no data advantage for Google advertising products under its proposals, and its advertising products or own sites would not have preferential treatment.

Competition and Markets Authority boss Andrea Coscelli (pictured) said tech giants have presented competition authorities 'with new challenges that require a new approach'

A Google spokesman said in a blog post: 'Today we are offering a set of commitments - the result of many hours of discussions with the CMA and more generally with the broader web community - about how we'll design and implement the Privacy Sandbox proposals and treat user data in Google's systems in the years ahead.

'The CMA is now asking others in the industry for feedback on these commitments as part of a public consultation, with a view to making them legally binding. If the CMA accepts these commitments, we will apply them globally.'

But Tim Cowen, chair of the antitrust practice at law firm Preiskel & Co in London and a critic of Google, said there were issues with the company's track record in giving undertakings, citing as an example commitments given recently to French authorities.

He added: 'If the CMA is offered undertakings they need to look at them very closely - ensure they are practically useful - and change Google's behaviour.'

The CMA's consultation with interested third parties will close at 5pm on July 8, 2021. It will then make a final decision on whether to accept the commitments offered.

The new system will be a major overhaul of how ads work on Google's Chrome browser

A spokesman for MOW said today that the CMA had listened and responded to its concerns that Google was stifling competition in digital advertising.

MOW's director James Rosewell said: 'This appears to provide a mechanism to create the conditions for both genuinely safeguarding people's privacy and choice.'

The group said it welcomed the CMA's decision to monitor Google's proposals to ensure they don't damage competition, as well as a 60-day 'standstill' period during which advertisers can voice their objections before third-party cookies are altered.

Mr Rosewell added: 'The authority must make sure that Google is not allowed to use undue influence and bully competitors as it has done in the past. We will be looking to Google to honour its undertakings given to the CMA.

'Likewise, we will be looking to the CMA and when its begins operations, the regulator's new Digital Markets Unit, to guarantee that a level playing field is created and maintained, preserving the open web for future generations.'
Seven people have been arrested after two vehicles travelling near the G7 summit were found to contain paint, smoke grenades and loud hailers, police said.

Devon and Cornwall Police confirmed officers carried out a vehicle stop on a car and a van near Loggans Road in Hayle - about seven miles from the Carbis Bay Hotel.

The force said during the stop, at about 5pm on Thursday, the vehicles were searched and the items were found inside.

A 30-year-old man from London, a 21-year-old woman from Wales and a 20-year-old man from Bournemouth were arrested on suspicion of possession of an article with intent to commit criminal damage.

Two men from London aged 25 and 27, a 45-year-old woman from London and a 26-year-old woman from Epsom were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit public nuisance.

Police officers getting prepared for a patrol on a rigid inflatable boat (RIB) off St Ives, during the G7 summit in Cornwall today

British police officers patrol outside the security fence erected around the perimeter of Treganna Castle near St Ives

Police officers on a RIB in St Ives, during the G7 summit in Cornwall today

A force spokesman said all seven remain in police custody.

He added: 'The items and the vehicles have been seized by police as part of ongoing inquiries in relation to this matter.

'We continue to support the facilitation of safe and legal protest but criminal activity and public disorder will not be tolerated.'

Police officers queuing for breakfast outside Pengenna Pasties in St Ives on the first day of the G7 summit in Cornwall

Extinction Rebellion protestors are pictured on the beach at St Ives with a boat featuring the words 'as the sea dies we die'

An Extinction Rebellion protestor is pictured wearing a blackbird costume on a beach in St Ives

Extinction Rebellion protesters in blackbird costumes are pictured in front of a Navy ship

It comes a day after a 20-year-old man from Falmouth was arrested after a bomb scare at the Falmouth Hotel after a member of staff found a suspicious package in the building's grounds.

Some 11,000 police officers and military personnel have formed a ring of steel around the summit at Carbis Bay in Cornwall.

Officers from Devon and Cornwall police are expecting up to 30 activist groups to attend Cornwall this weekend, with two sites set up for 'official' protest in Truro and Falmouth, as world leaders meet to discuss how to reduce carbon emissions for the three-day event beginning today.
A member of the Lucchese crime family has been jailed for two-and-half years for attacking the husband of former 'Real Housewives' star Dina Manzo.

John Perna, 44, of Cedar Grove, New Jersey was found guilty of attacking Manzo's new boyfriend David Cantin - now her husband - at the request of her jealous ex-husband Tom Manzo in 2015, Acting US Attorney Rachael Honig said in a statement.

Perna, a soldier in the Lucchese crime family, pleaded guilty in 2020 to a federal charge of committing a violent crime in aid of racketeering activity.

A reputed mobster John Perna, 44, (pictured) has been sentenced to two-and-half years for attacking the husband of former 'Real Housewives' star Dina Manzo (pictured together right)

In exchange for his services, Perna allegedly was given a huge discount on his wedding reception at Tom Manzon's Patterson restaurant in Brownstone.

'The reception was attended by over 330 guests, many of whom were members of the Lucchese Crime Family,' the statement seen by the New York Post said.

Perna and a mobster associate attacked Cantin with a slapjack, a club weapon favoured by mobsters, in the parking lot of a New Jersey strip mall in July 2015, according to prosecutors.

The incident left Cantin, who married Dina in 2017, with a permanent facial scar.

Dina and Tom Manzo broke up in 2012 and divorced in 2016, with their marriage on the way out at the time of the assault.

After he is released from jail, Perna will have three years supervised release. He will also have to pay almost $18,000 in restitution, the federal judge ordered.

Prosecutors say Dina's ex-husband Thomas Manzo (pictured together) hired Perna to attack Cantin because he was angry she had moved in with her new boyfriend after they separated. Manzo and Dina were married for seven years before separating in 2012 and finalizing their divorce in 2016

Perna and a mob associate attacked Cantin with a slapjack, a club-like weapon (stock image)

Both Manzo and Perna were arrested in June last year and were charged with conspiracy and committing a violent crime in aid of racketeering activity.

Manzo 56, pleaded not guilty. He was recently charged in a separate incident in which he and an associate are accused of targeting his wife and her new husband in a 2017 home invasion.

Manzo co-owns the Brownstone venue with his brother Albert. The venue appeared in episodes of the RHONJ when Dina was on the show.

The wedding Perna held was paid for by another Lucchese associate and close friend of Manzo's.

The wedding and reception, which was held in August 2015, was attended by approximately 330 people and included many members of the Lucchese crime family, prosecutors allege.

In exchange for carrying out the attack, prosecutors say Manzo allowed Perna to host a lavish wedding reception at his Brownstone Restaurant (pictured) in Paterson, New Jersey for a fraction of the price

In addition to arranging the alleged assault, Manzo was also accused of falsifying and concealing records when federal authorities investigating the assault subpoenaed the venue for documents related to the wedding.

Manzo failed to turn over relevant documents in response to those subpoenas and deliberately submitted a false document regarding the reception, the indictment says.

FBI agents raided the venue in November last year and seized invoices for the wedding reception, as well as other relevant documents, that were not previously turned over.
Fixing NHS waiting times could cost the UK up to 40billion, leaked estimates from No10 have revealed.

Downing Street documents drawn up by the Cabinet Office show Boris Johnson will have to commit between 2billion and 10billion each year for the next four years to deal with backed up waiting lists, reported The Guardian.

The huge sums come on top of core NHS funding  but will depend on the Treasury stumping up the cash to deal with growing problem.

Damning statistics yesterday revealed the NHS waiting list for routine operations in England breached 5million for the first time ever in April.

Statistics released for the first time also revealed the true extent of the NHS backlog, with almost 65,000 patients waiting at least 18 months for routine operations, such as hip and knee replacements.

Around 2,700 patients have not been treated within two years.

Hospitals turned their attention to treating coronavirus patients during the first and second waves, cancelling thousands of non-urgent procedures.

But No10 is reluctant to throw money at reducing the huge backlog, according to a Government source.

Ministers do not think the public is 'distressed' enough yet about the long delays to warrant extra spending, an insider claimed.

Damning figures yesterday showed the list of people waiting for treatment has breached 5million for the first time ever

Fixing NHS waiting times could cost the UK up to 40billion, leaked estimates from No10 have revealed. Pictured: Boris Johnson during a visit to Falmouth's Maritime Museum ahead of the G7 summit in Cornwall yesterday

The figures were drawn up by the Cabinet Office  run by Michael Gove  as part of its post-Covid planning to support the health, education and justice sectors.

Many tip Gove to take over as Health Secretary after Matt Hancock, who yesterday faced a grilling from MPs over his handling of the pandemic.

No10 will launch a comprehensive spending review in Autumn after NHS England provides it with a comprehensive analysis of how it can meet its targets.

The NHS already gets around 160billion every year from the Treasury. Last year it received an extra 60billion to help fight Covid.

CRITICS SLAM NHS WAITING LISTS AS IT BREACHES FOR 5MILLION PEOPLE FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER Critics have slammed the NHS's 'grim milestone' of reaching 5million people waiting for surgery, calling on ministers to make tackling the 'gigantic' backlog their top priority The Royal College of Surgeons of England has urged the government to make fixing waiting times their 'top priority'. Its vice president Tim Mitchell said: 'Today we have sadly reached the grim milestone in England of more than 5million people on the NHS hospital waiting list. 'Really long waits of more than a year, and in some cases more than two years, are particularly troubling. These are people waiting for operations like hip and knee replacements, or ear, nose and throat surgery. 'This is life-changing surgery were talking about. Operations that can help people get back to work, that relieve pain and mean people can enjoy a decent quality of life again. 'Surgery in many hospitals is almost at pre-pandemic levels, thanks to staff working Saturdays and evenings to catch up even though many of them are exhausted from the experience of the last year.' He added: 'Tackling this gigantic backlog requires new investment both in staff and infrastructure.' Dr Nick Scriven, former president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said 'warning signs about where the NHS was heading were glaringly visible a number of years ago and what we are seeing in recent monthly data is the result of a lack of preparedness for the inevitable'. Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, said the 'monumental delays' have likely contributed to the thousands of extra heart disease and stroke deaths in England during the pandemic. Advertisement

NHS finances expert at the Health Foundation thinktank Professor Anita Chalesworth estimates ministers will need to spend 6billion per year for three years on the health service to address the backlog.

She told The Guardian: 'The health service now has a mountain to climb.

'Reducing the backlog of long waits and getting the NHS into a position where waiting time standards are consistently met will need a major increase in funding.'

Downing Street declined to comment on the leaked figures.

The Department of Health and Social Care said: 'We're backing the NHS with 1billion to tackle the waiting lists which have built up, providing up to 1million extra checks, scans and additional operations.

'And the NHS is providing 160million to trial innovative ways to accelerate elective recovery in key areas and enable more hospitals to go further, faster.

'That's on top of an extra 7billion funding we're giving health and care services this year.'

NHS England data released yesterday showed the number of patients waiting over a year for care reached 385,940 in April.

This was a drop of 50,000 from March  but is still 240 times higher than the 1,613 who were forced to wait that long before the first wave hit.



Figures show that 223,780 people were admitted for routine treatment in hospitals in April, compared to 41,121 patients in the same month last year  when Covid began to batter the NHS.

Separate NHS England figures released today showed over 2million people attended A&E in May, the highest number since January 2020.

The number A&E visits dropped to 916,575 in April 2020, marking the lowest number since records began in 2010, as people stayed at home in the first lockdown out of fear of catching Covid.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the highest number of people attending the emergency department each month did not rise above 1.8million.

The NHS data also shows that GPs made 209,452 urgent cancer referrals in April, more than double the previous year's number of 80,031.

Urgent referrals where breast cancer symptoms were present  though not initially suspected  were up from 3,866 in April 2020 to 14,259 in April 2021.

Professor Stephen Powis, national medical director for NHS England, said it is 'encouraging' that the data shows routine operations, cancer and mental health care have 'rebounded sharply' following the 'extensive disruption' caused by the pandemic.

He said the NHS is 'committed to restoring services to pre-pandemic levels' .

Jonathan Ashworth MP, Labour's shadow health secretary, said the waiting times reinforce the party's call for an NHS rescue plan.

'The reality is years of Tory underfunding and cuts across health care left our NHS weakened and exposed entering the pandemic with patients now left waiting even longer in pain and anxiety for treatment,' he said.
The elder brother of the Manchester Arena bombers has had his bid for immunity from prosecution rejected.

Ismail Abedi wanted a promise from the Attorney General that in return for answering questions at the public inquiry into the terror attack, his evidence would not 'land him in the dock,' his lawyer told the hearing in Manchester last month.

A legal application was made to Sir John Saunders, chairman of the inquiry, asking him to consider making the application to the Attorney General in return for Abedi's co-operation.

However in his ruling, made public on Friday, Sir John refused the application and said allowing immunity to get Abedi to co-operate could outweigh any evidence he gave which might justify charges of murder against him over the deaths in the bombing.

Pictured: Ismail Abedi, elder brother of Manchester Arena bombers Salman and Hashem, asked for immunity from prosecution in exchange for co-operating with the inquiry into attack

Salman Abedi makes his way through Victoria Station on his way to Manchester Arena where he detonated a bomb and killed 22 people who were attending an Ariana Grande concert

The ruling said: 'If as a result of an undertaking from the Attorney General the applicant was to disclose material to the inquiry which provided evidence to justify charges of murder or conspiracy to murder then he could avoid trial for 22 murders and causing serious injury to many more.

'While less serious, if he were to disclose material as a result of the undertaking which evidenced a failure by him to disclose information to the authorities which could have prevented the bombing happening, a failure to prosecute would be considered by many to be a considerable affront to justice.'

Images from devices recovered at Ismail Abedi's home during a police raid the day after the bombing indicated he was 'sympathetic to the ideals of ISIS, the inquiry has heard.

He was arrested, held for 14 days and interviewed by detectives 25 times but not charged with any offence through insufficient evidence.

Lawyers for the families of the 22 people murdered in May 2017 were divided over allowing Abedi immunity to get him to co-operate and answer questions, with others who opposed the move describing it as 'unconscionable'.

Currently Ismail Abedi, who is married and lives in Manchester, is refusing to co-operate with the inquiry despite repeated requests, claiming his legal privilege not to incriminate himself. He denies any knowledge or involvement in the bomb plot.

The inquiry is soon to consider how his two younger brothers became radicalised and planned their deadly bomb plot.

Hashem Abedi who was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 55 years after being found guilty of helping younger brother Salman carry out a terrorist attack in 2017

The scene close to the Manchester Arena after the terror attack at an Ariana Grande concert

Mr Abedi is expected to be served with a legal notice soon which will 'require' his attendance in person at the inquiry, sitting in Manchester.

He will be entitled not to answer questions on the grounds that he may incriminate himself, but he will have to justify why and on what grounds he is refusing to answer.

Salman Abedi, 22, detonated a home-made shrapnel-packed bomb at the end of an Ariana Grande concert at the arena on May 22 2017, killing 22 bystanders and injuring hundreds more.

Hashem Abedi was jailed in 2020 for a minimum of 55 years before parole for his part in the bomb plot.
Boris Johnson today defended his 'huge' plan to donate 100million surplus vaccines to poorer countries as campaigners demand he goes further.

The PM rejected criticism of the gifting insisting the UK is more than doing its part to help protect people around the world from coronavirus.

Under the grand gesture, the UK will start donating vaccines within weeks, providing five million doses to countries in need by the end of September.

Around 25million more jabs will be distributed by the end of the year and the remainder will follow in 2022. The cost cannot be precisely calculated as it will depend what vaccines are gifted - but it could top 1billion.

Mr Johnson is urging other leaders at the G7 summit in Cornwall to follow his example. Joe Biden has already promised to donate half a billion Pfizer vaccines for 92 low and lower-middle income countries and the African Union.

But vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi confirmed this morning that the British public are still being prioritised.

Eighty per cent of the 100million doses will go to the Covax initiative, which is distributing vaccines to poorer nations. The remainder will be shared bilaterally with countries in need.

The donation will count as extra spending on top of the 10billion committed to the new foreign aid target of 0.5 per cent of gross domestic product.

The PM (pictured at the Falmouth Maratime Museum last night) has rejected criticism of the vaccine gifting plan insisting the UK is more than doing its part to help protect people around the world from coronavirus

But he resisted calls from campaigners to take further action, including waiving patents on vaccines, insisting that the deal to supply Oxford/AstraZeneca jabs at cost price and the UK's funding for the Covax initiative to provide doses around the world showed Britain was doing its share.

The Prime Minister told the BBC: 'I think that the people of this country should be very proud that of the 1.5billion doses that are being distributed around the world to the poorest and neediest in the world under the Covax programme, one in three come from the Oxford/AstraZeneca deal that the UK did, allowing those vaccines to be distributed at cost.

'And that's before we've talked about the 548 million that we've contributed to Covax, 1.6billion to Gavi (the vaccine alliance).

'And, yes, we're putting in five million doses by September, but we'll do  100 million before 12 months is out. That's a huge number of extra doses'

The G7 as a whole was offering a 'colossal sum of vaccines', he said.

In a round of interviews this morning, Mr Zahawi said no-one in the UK will have to wait longer as a result of the gifts.

'Our priority is to make sure that the British public are protected, so our deployment programme will not be impacted at all by our donation of 100 million doses,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

'We have got over 500million doses on order.'

Around a fifth of the doses promised by Mr Johnson will be delivered through bilateral arrangements with countries in need while the rest will go through the Covax initiative which is distributing vaccines to poorer nations.

By sharing vaccines in the coming weeks, the UK will meet an immediate demand from countries worst affected by the pandemic, No 10 said. However, this is not expected to delay completion of the domestic rollout  with all adults in the UK likely to be offered a first vaccine dose by the end of July.

Officials hope that vaccinating people around the world will save lives, reduce the spread of the virus and restrict the emergence of new variants which could potentially be more dangerous than existing coronavirus strains.

And it comes after the UK went back on a commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of national income on overseas aid.

The new target, which has been cut to 0.5 per cent, was brought about as the Government struggles to fill the black hole in the nation's finances. But the donation of vaccines will count as extra aid spending on top of the 10billion already promised under the reduced target.

Baroness Liz Sugg, who quit as a Foreign Office minister in protest at the cuts, said the vaccine pledge was a 'very welcome first step'.

But she added: 'Low-income countries will need many more vaccines this year in order to help end the pandemic and prevent variants developing that may threaten progress against the pandemic here in the UK.'

She continued: 'It's crucial that the Government cover the actual cost of these vaccines and don't just transfer their surplus orders to low-income countries.'

In total, global leaders are expected to pledge at least one billion vaccine doses to the world and expand manufacturing to reach the goal. Joe Biden has already promised to donate half a billion Pfizer vaccines.

Mr Johnson is also expected to ask world leaders to encourage pharmaceutical giants to adopt the Oxford/AstraZeneca model of providing jabs at cost price.

Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have already pledged to share 1.3billion doses with low and middle-income countries on a non-profit basis.

Joe Biden has already promised to donate half a billion Pfizer vaccines for 92 low and lower-middle income countries and the African Union

Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi confirmed this morning that the British public are still being prioritised.

The leaders  including US President Joe Biden  will spend the day discussing issues including the pandemic before a lavish reception at the Eden Project attended by the Queen.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will also take part in their first G7 events, another milestone in their progression as senior royals.

William and Kate will join the Queen, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall at the G7 leaders reception on Friday evening.

The summit, being held in Carbis Bay, begins with leaders of wealthy nations under pressure to do more to share the burden of protecting the world from the virus.
The heroic British woman who saved her sister from the jaws of a crocodile in Mexico has been seen for the first time since the attack as she described her battle to save her twin as 'fight or flight'.

Georgia Laurie was pictured with a bandaged hand on Thursday outside the hospital where Melissa is still recovering.

The 28-year-old walked around the hospital with a male companion after suffering wounds to her hand while punching off the crocodile.

It comes as Georgia has described for the first time how she risked her own life to fight off the ten-foot-long predator who had dragged Melissa under the water and tried to drown her in a death-roll.

Speaking at the hostel where she is staying, Georgia, from Sandhurst, Berkshire, said: 'It was fight or flight and you fight for the ones you love'

The heroic British woman who saved her twin sister from the jaws of a crocodile in Mexico has been seen for the first time since the attack

Georgia Laurie was pictured with a bandaged hand on Thursday outside the hospital where Melissa is still recovering

The 28-year-old walked around the hospital with a male companion after suffering wounds to her hand while punching off the crocodile

Georgia Laurie (right) has described for the first time how she risked her own life to fight off the ten-foot-long predator who had dragged her sister Melissa (left) under the water

The experienced diver told how she did not realise the severity of her own injuries until a nurse examined her at the hospital in the surfing resort of Puerto Escondido.

She explained that due to the adrenalin pumping around her body, it wasn't until the nurses opened up her fists that she saw she had lacerations on her own hands.

Up until then she had been fully focused just on her sister's well-being.

Georgia added that Melissa is out of the medically induced coma that doctors placed her in to aid her recovery.

Georgia, an experienced diver, told how she did not realise the severity of her own injuries until a nurse examined her at the hospital in the surfing resort of Puerto Escondido

Georgia praised the work of the Mexican doctors at the hospital (pictured) to save her sister and the support of British Embassy staff

She explained that due to the adrenalin pumping around her body, it wasn't until the nurses opened up her fists that she saw she had lacerations on her own hands

Georgia told the BBC: 'I just want to let you know that I saw Mel earlier and she doing really much better.

'She is doing really good.

'They took the tube out of her. She has been on her own very well.

'However she can't talk because of the soreness in her throat from the tube.

'They [medical staff] said that when they were explaining the procedure to her before they did it that she comprehended and understood everything.

'She recognised me and knew who I was.

Georgia stood outside the hospital wearing a backwards cap while on her phone as the sisters continue their recovery

The heroic sister walked with a bandaged hand after suffering cuts from punching the crocodile

The heroic British woman who saved her twin sister from the jaws of a crocodile in Mexico described her battle to save her as 'fight or flight'

Georgia added that she had checked with the tour guide whether it was a safe place to swim before she and her sister went into the water. Pictured: Manialtepec Lagoon

'She seemed happy to see me and she is doing much better.'

Georgia added that she had checked with the tour guide whether it was a safe place to swim before she and her sister went into the water.

Georgia said to the guide; 'this looks a place where crocodiles would make their nests, would make their home.'

But the guide, who it later emerged is unlicensed and inexperienced, said the area was safe to swim.

Georgia said: 'It was terrifying.'

One of her friends described how Georgia scrambled onto mangroves at the edge of the water to call for help.

A local boatman Lalo Escamilla came to their rescue.

He said: 'I pushed through the undergrowth using my oar.'

Lalo chastised the rogue guide known as Richie, who had taken the sisters in the jaws of the crocodile.

He said: 'They're not guides. They're not federally-approved experts, they don't know this place. That's the problem.'

Georgia (right) added that Melissa is out of the medically induced coma that doctors placed her in to aid her recovery

Georgia said: 'It wasn't until the nurse opened my fist to clean my hand that I realised that it had been slashed too,' Georgia said.

The 28-year-old described the harrowing moment she had to call her parents at 4am to tell them her twin had been attacked by a crocodile.

And then how she had to phone hone again when doctors told her that Melissa was fighting for her life after her condition got worse.

She said: 'When they told me her condition was deteriorating, I had to let the family know.'

But she told of the family's relief when Melissa's medical condition improved.

She said: 'We are all so happy.'

Georgia praised the work of the Mexican doctors to save her sister and the support of British Embassy staff.

I heard the girls shout 'crocodile, crocodile'... then saw the blood and teeth marks: From one of the first people on the scene, a full dramatic account of the horror and courage of the British twins who were attacked by a deadly reptile in Mexico

By Barbara McMahon in Puerto Escondido and Anthonia Hoyle for the Daily Mail

As famous for its laid-back, bohemian vibe as its golden beaches and turquoise waters, it is easy to understand why twins Georgia and Melissa Laurie gravitated towards Puerto Escondido, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, during their backpacking adventure.

The biggest draw of the idyllic fishing town, however, is its proximity to the Manialtepec lagoon, ten miles to the north, where millions of tiny plankton emit ultraviolet light, lending the lagoon an ethereal glow at night.

It was here that 28-year-old Georgia and Melissa travelled on Sunday, and their once-in-a-lifetime trip turned into a nightmare, when Melissa was attacked by a crocodile, which her twin literally fought off with her bare hands.

And it was near here, at a $19 (13) hostel, that the Daily Mail tracked down heroic Georgia this week.

Standing by the pool, surrounded by young  mostly European  people, only the bandage on her hand marked her out as the brave young woman who'd fought for her twin sister's life.

Having reportedly booked a tour of the lagoon at their hostel  with a guide it has now emerged was not licensed  the twins ventured into the water, before coming across a crocodile. Within seconds, Melissa (left) was clasped in the jaws of the reptile, which dragged her under water and tried to drown her with a 'death roll'  rolling her over in its jaws

As the crocodile pulled a terrified Melissa underwater, certified guide Gerardo Escamilla Perez heard their desperate cries for help as he was showing another group the lagoon

Back home in Sandhurst, Berkshire, the twins' parents, Sue and Sean, a business consultant, both 63, are still piecing together what happened to their girls.

'Georgia phoned us at four in the morning and she said she had had to assault a crocodile because it had attacked her sister,' Sue said.

Although Melissa had a broken wrist, bites to her stomach and badly injured legs, 'her worst injuries are in her lungs', Sue has said. 'She was half-drowned.'

Melissa then developed sepsis, a potentially fatal condition, at Puerto Escondido's Angel del Mar Hospital.

Yesterday, Georgia, a sales rep for a diving school, revealed Melissa has been taken off life support  and although still unable to speak  is breathing independently.

'She recognised me and knew who I was,' says Georgia. 'She seemed happy to see me.'

What we know of the events of that night is this: having reportedly booked a tour of the lagoon at their hostel  with a guide it has now emerged was not licensed  the twins ventured into the water, before coming across a crocodile.

Within seconds, Melissa was clasped in the jaws of the reptile, which dragged her under water and tried to drown her with a 'death roll'  rolling her over in its jaws.

Determined to come to her sister's aid, Georgia punched the crocodile repeatedly in the head before dragging Melissa away by her hair

Perez left his own tourists in a safe place and waded with his paddle towards the twins to help

Determined to come to her sister's aid, Georgia punched the crocodile repeatedly in the head before dragging Melissa away by her hair. Her hand bitten to the bone, she nonetheless then managed to carry her to safety before both were rushed to hospital.

As for the tour guide who played Russian roulette with their lives? He has been named locally as a Turkish man called Richie who spent a long time living in Germany and is still believed to be in Puerto Escondido.

So how on earth did the twins end up in the jaws of a reptile on what was supposed to be a joyous, but safe, adventure? With the help of eyewitnesses, the Mail can reveal a full account of the fateful tour.

There were 23 tourists in their group, who paid 90p each to travel by van to El Guayacan restaurant on the edge of the lagoon, where the tour started at 4pm on Sunday.

The group split into two boats  Melissa and Georgia were among 13 on a 14-seat vessel called Espatula Rosada  to travel to Puerto Suelos beach to watch the sunset. The plan was to watch before admiring the plankton's glow after dark.

But at 6pm, Moises Salinas, a 16-year-old hired to help out on one of the boats, noticed that the twins had walked away from the rest of the tour group with an Englishman and one of a pair of identical male twins they had befriended.

'They were about 150 metres away and my boss said to me, 'Hey, go and tell them to come back,' ' Salinas says.

'I spoke to one of the twins but she thought they were OK. Everyone had been told about the crocodiles and one of the things I said to her was: 'Don't swim in the river. '

The twins' father insists his daughters were not warned, however. 'The girls asked specifically if it was safe to go swimming and the guide had said it was,' Sean said this week.

Melissa and Georgia were among 13 on a 14-seat vessel called Espatula Rosada  to travel to Puerto Suelos beach to watch the sunset. The plan was to watch before admiring the plankton's glow after dark

Perez recalls seeing 'bite marks, the marks of teeth. Her head was covered in blood. They thought the crocodile was nearby and would attack again'

Elliott Scott, one of the tourists in the group, also told the Independent newspaper that they had been told they'd be safe, that 'we can't swim in the sea, but you could swim in the mangroves'.

But although swimming in some areas of the lagoon is considered safe  is encouraged, indeed, by the area's tour guides  venturing into the river that runs perpendicular to the lagoon, where the group had been taken by the tour guide, is not.

'The sisters and a group of English people were not in an area that tourists normally visit, it's further away from the Manialtepec lagoon and it's an area where we know there is a concentration of crocodiles,' said Guillermo Silva, a civil protection coordinator who is investigating the attack.

'This isn't a tourist area, it's a crocodile nesting area.'

The sisters had swum around 250 metres upriver, further away from the beach where the other tourists were, according to Silva.

As the crocodile pulled a terrified Melissa underwater, certified guide Gerardo Escamilla Perez heard their desperate cries for help as he was showing another group the lagoon.

'We started to hear shouts and noise,' he recalls. 'And we saw that there were people screaming inside the mangroves.'

Perez left his own tourists in a safe place and waded with his paddle towards the twins.

'It's a dangerous area, even more so at this time of year because animals are nesting,' he says. 'I heard them shouting, 'Crocodile, crocodile'.'

Salinas remembers one of the men rushing back 'shouting about a crocodile'. He adds: 'I jumped into the boat and got to where the ladies were. I could hear one of the girls shouting, 'My sister! My sister!' '

Salinas found Melissa being 'cradled' by her sister: 'She was conscious, breathing heavily like she couldn't get enough air.'

Although swimming in some areas of the lagoon is considered safe  is encouraged, indeed, by the area's tour guides  venturing into the river that runs perpendicular to the lagoon, where the group had been taken by the tour guide, is not

Perez recalls seeing 'bite marks, the marks of teeth. Her head was covered in blood. They thought the crocodile was nearby and would attack again.'

Georgia insisted on helping Salinas carry Melissa to the tour boat and he called 911.

'People were scared,' says Salinas. 'One man had jumped up into a tree.' Among the group on the boat was a nurse, who helped put Melissa on a chair.

Her head was slumped back and the blood was dripping down to the floor of the boat. No one spoke.

It took 25 minutes for the boat to arrive back at El Guayacan restaurant and an awaiting ambulance.

Luis Stein, coordinator of the Puerto Escondido Red Cross, which took the girls to hospital, says: 'One of the sisters had injuries on her chest, abdomen and hands. She was unconscious when we got to her.

'We put her in the ambulance and my colleagues travelled with them to the hospital.'

Both were placed on intravenous antibiotics and a shocked Georgia given morphine.

As Melissa, who had been coughing up blood and is thought may have suffered a punctured lung, was put into a medical coma, her family faced a desperate struggle to ascertain what was going on.

'The details of this awful ordeal are still not fully known to us,' the twins's older sister, Hana, a wedding photographer from Alton, Surrey, wrote online.

'What is clear, is that Mel's condition is 'delicate' having suffered an open wrist fracture, organ lacerations/internal bleeding and water on her lungs.'

She was described by Hana as 'bruised, has two black eyes and deep cuts to her face, torso and leg'.

The family soon learned that the girls' tour guide had been unlicensed. 'He has been called out locally before, apparently, but that wasn't for my sisters to know,' said Hana. 'They found out the information through their hospital.'

Yesterday, Georgia, a sales rep for a diving school, revealed Melissa has been taken off life support  and although still unable to speak  is breathing independently

When contacted by the Mail, Jose Antonio Ramirez Garcia, head of the local Protezione Civile, said that a full investigation into the incident was under way.

Local man Javier Santos owns the boat the girls travelled on but wasn't there when the incident happened. 'I am not responsible for this and I hope the twins recover quickly, ' he said.

The guide is by no means the only unlicensed guide in the area, however. 'Normally (unlicensed tour guides) get to know the tourists in the bars and nightclubs, and as they speak perfect English, the tourists prefer to do it with them,' says Perez, who adds that these guides undercut the official guides with cheaper fees.

'If they had stayed in the lagoon, this wouldn't have happened. I don't know why they were there or how they got there. What I know is that the girls were swimming in a place where no one should be swimming. It's dangerous.'

Especially at this time of year, when nesting crocodiles are more 'aggressive', says Silva.

'They were probably attacked by a female crocodile, because this is the rainy season when crocodiles are hatching their eggs. At the place we found remains of a crocodile nest, that's why the civil protection officers believe the crocodile attacked to defend her eggs.'

And this isn't the first time an accident has happened in the area recently. Research by Mexico's Del Mar University found that between 2004 and 2016 there were 24 crocodile attacks along the Oaxaca Pacific Coast. Five resulted in deaths; during the other attacks limbs were ripped off.

In January 2018, four-year-old Jose David Garcia Morales was snatched by a crocodile while walking with his holidaying family along the nearby La Blanca lagoon, and dragged into the water.

Numbers of crocodiles in tourist areas are said to have increased in part because of hurricanes forcing the reptiles out of their natural habitat, and also because building development has forced them out of their protected swamps.

In November 2019, a crocodile attacked local fisherman Amadeo Barrera Munoz, 60, biting his head and arm before he fought free. Last September, a 30-year-old tourist was reportedly bitten on the leg on a hotel beach in Puerto Vallarta. The following month a 130lb crocodile was captured in Bajos de Chila near Puerto Escondido after attacking farm animals.

The pandemic, meanwhile, has led to the closure of Mexican beaches, emboldening crocodiles to venture onto the sand for the first time in decades.

All of which will send chills into the hearts of the parents of backpackers such as Georgia and Melissa, who were by no means inexperienced travellers.

'They have done India and Australia and they are used to travelling,' says Sue. 'They're not used to dealing with crocodiles.'

On their 21st birthday Georgia described Melissa as 'gorgeous, lovely' and 'funny' on Facebook, adding: 'I'm so lucky to have been able to share everything with you.' Now, unfortunately, they have another shared memory.

'They won't forget this,' says Sue, whose husband is thought to be about to fly to Mexico, 'but I would rather it hadn't happened so they wouldn't have anything to forget.'

Additional reporting: Analuna Peralta and Stephanie Condron.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel will visit President Joe Biden in Washington on July 15 to affirm 'the deep bilateral ties' between the two countries, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday.

The visit was announced after the president decided to waive the sanctions on the Russia-backed Nord Stream 2 pipeline that runs from the Russian Arctic under the Baltic Sea - a move Republicans say is a 'gift'

Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said the US now working to make sure that Germany doesn't become energy-dependent on Russia.

Biden's State Department insisted that lifting the sanctions was in the US national interest.

'The leaders will discuss their commitment to close cooperation on a range of common challenges, including ending the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing the threat of climate change, and promoting economic prosperity and international security based on our shared democratic values,' Psaki said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will visit President Joe Biden in Washington on July 15 to affirm 'the deep bilateral ties' between the two countries, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday. The pair last met when Biden was vice president in 2009

The visit was announced after the president decided to waive the sanctions on the Russia-backed Nord Stream 2 pipeline that runs from the Russian Arctic under the Baltic Sea - a move Republicans say is a 'gift' Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said the US now working to make sure that Germany doesn't become energy-dependent on Russia

The announcement was made on the first day of the Group of Seven summit in England. Biden has hosted two other world leaders since taking office, Japan and South Korea.

Republicans have criticized Biden's decision to waive sanctions on the pipeline and argue it would hurt the US economy and geopolitical interests in Europe.

It is a new natural gas pipeline running from Ust-Luga in Russia to Griefswald in Germany across the Baltic Sea.

House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and a group of his colleagues wrote to Biden on Monday stating his 'strong objections' to the move.

They said the completion would be a 'gift' to Russian president Putin after the hack that crippled the Colonial Pipeline and caused gas shortages across the US.

'This action, which will send more Russian natural gas to Europe, also puts U.S. resources at a distinct competitive disadvantage, costing American jobs and reducing Americas geopolitical influence,' the lawmakers said in their letter.

During a meeting between Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, they discussed the building of the pipeline.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said reports of the sanctions being lifted were "a positive signal' and Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said it was a 'a chance for a gradual transition toward the normalisation of our bilateral ties'.

Republicans have criticized Biden's decision to waive sanctions on the pipeline and argue it would hurt the US economy and geopolitical interests in Europe. It is a new natural gas pipeline running from Russia to Germany across the Baltic Sea
Police have launched an urgent search to find a missing 16-year-old girl who disappeared over the weekend.

Courtney Semple was last seen around 8.50pm on Sunday, June 6 near the Blackwood area of Lanark, Scotland.

She is described as being white, around 4ft 8in tall, with long blonde hair and blue/brown eyes.

Courtney Semple, 16, was last seen around 8.50pm on Sunday, June 6 near the Blackwood area of Lanark, Scotland

It is thought that at the time of her disappearance she was wearing a green jacket, black Nike hoodie, black Nike shorts and white Converse trainers.

Lanarkshire Police believe she may be in the Glasgow city centre area.

Officers are now appealing for anyone with information on Courtney's whereabouts to get in touch.

Information can be reported to Police Scotland by contacting them on 101, quoting incident 3675 of 6 June 2021.
Boris Johnson privately blasted Priti Patel over the surging number of migrants making the perilous journey across the English Channel, it was claimed today.

The Prime Minister is said to be furious about the number of small boats arriving in the UK.

He reportedly told a minister: 'What the f*** is the Home Office doing? When is she [Priti] going to sort this out?'

An estimated 4,725 migrants have crossed the Channel this year, with 8,410 having made the journey in 2020.

Ms Patel is bringing forward new laws to try to crackdown on the journeys but ministers are apparently frustrated that officials are failing to enforce the existing rules.

Boris Johnson privately blasted Priti Patel over the surging number of migrants making the perilous journey across the English Channel, it was claimed today

Mr Johnson reportedly told a minister: 'What the f*** is the Home Office doing? When is she [Priti] going to sort this out?'

A Government source told The Times that Mr Johnson was 'increasingly frustrated at the images of boats arriving day after day' and had criticised Ms Patel.

But Number 10 has moved to downplay the claims of a rift, with a Downing Street source telling the newspaper that 'everyone is frustrated at this problem' and the recent increase in crossings is 'deeply concerning'.

'The Prime Minister and the Home Secretary both want to see an end to the illegal immigration that is taking place through such dangerous journeys across the Channel,' they said.

A Home Office source defended Ms Patel as they claimed she is the 'only home secretary since 2010 that is tackling this issue head-on'.

The Government set out plans in the Queen's Speech earlier this year to toughen migration laws to deny refugee status to any asylum seekers who have passed through a 'safe country' before reaching the UK.

The shake-up will also make it easier for the UK to deport asylum seekers who arrived in the UK illegally.

Ministers are blaming officials for the surge in crossings, amid claims they are not acting on existing Government policy to be more proactive in stopping the journeys.

One minister told The Times that Border Force officials 'nod along' in meetings with Mr Johnson and Ms Patel and commit to taking action but then 'two days later they are busy explaining to them both why it can't be done'.

More than 1,000 migrants have crossed the Channel in small boats this month as temperatures soar - making June a potential recording breaking period if calm sea conditions continue.

A group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, following a small boat incident in the Channel on June 8

An estimated 4,725 migrants have crossed the Channel this year, with 8,410 having made the journey in 2020

Border Force officials intercepted 179 people including children and a baby making the dangerous 21-mile journey in six boats on Wednesday, and 10 more arrived at the Dover Marina yesterday.

That took the total to cross the Dover Strait during the first nine days of the month to 1,008 people on board 41 boats.

Just 407 made the treacherous trip in the same timeframe last month - with May ending up smashing the monthly record as 1,619 migrants arrived in 80 boats.

Border Force are believed to be preparing for an influx of migrants over the next few days due to near perfect weather conditions at sea.
A single car parking space in Cornwall today sold for 45,000 as landowners cash in on soaring interest in the area due to this weekend's G7 summit.

The plot of tarmac in St Ives is tucked away in a small car park on top of a hill which overlooks the celebrated Porthminster Beach.

The area has been thrust into the global spotlight as world leaders - including US President Joe Biden - this week descended on Cornwall for the G7 summit.

Parking in St Ives has become increasingly difficult to secure as eager British holidaymakers flocked to the picturesque town for a staycation amid the pandemic.

The parking space in St Ives (above) is tucked away in a small car park on top of a hill which overlooks the celebrated Porthminster Beach

The spot near Porthminster Beach (highlighted in red) sold for 45,000 just a week after it was listed by Miller Countrywide

The spot near Porthminster Beach sold for 45,000 just a week after it was listed by Miller Countrywide.

It is believed to be the largest sum ever paid for a single parking space in St Ives.

The parking space is less than half a mile from the beach and is walking distance from the sought-after town's restaurants and Tate art gallery.

In its listing, Miller Countrywide said: 'A parking space for one vehicle. Situated in town close to local amenities. A good size with easy access.

'Located on Porthminster Terrace in a location close to the town. A single parking space, a good size with easy access. Ideally located close to town.'

Parking in St Ives has become increasingly difficult to secure as eager British holidaymakers flocked to the picturesque town for a staycation amid the pandemic

A Miller Countrywide spokesman said the G7 summit, in neighbouring Carbis Bay, played a part in boosting interest in St Ives.

He said: 'It's definitely a factor, it has put us on the map.

'A lot of it is down to Covid as well. Parking is a real issue in St Ives.'

The identity of the buyer has not been revealed.

The G7 summit will see representatives from Canada, France, Germany, the US, Italy and Japan gather in Cornwall alongside Ursula von der Leyen representing the EU.

Leaders will discuss global recovery following the Covid pandemic, climate change, and worldwide trade between today and Sunday.
An Iranian warship possibly en route to Venezuela that is believed to be carrying weapons and fast attack war craft, also could be transporting millions of gallons of fuel in a ploy to get around US sanctions.

The Makran vessel, a converted oil tanker that can carry three million gallons of fuel, is one of two warships currently sailing in the Atlantic Ocean after departing from the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas on April 29.

Despite fears the warships are carrying weapons as well as oil, US authorities are unable to stop them - even if they are violating sanctions like the ones imposed by the US on Venezuela - because the vessels are subject to sovereign immunity in international waters.

Ships that are government-owned or operated are granted immunity under the United Nations Convention and cannot be subject to the jurisdiction of any country, unless they threaten the coastal state.

Previous shipments of oil to Venezuela from Iran that have been carried out on commercial vessels have been seized by US authorities. The two warships - Makran and Sahand - that are currently in the Atlantic are operated by the Iran navy.

The Makran vessel, which is a converted oil tanker that can carry three million gallons of fuel, is one of two warships currently sailing in the Atlantic Ocean after departing from the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas last month

Intelligence has already indicated that the Makran is carrying Iranian fast-attack craft typically associated with its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard Corps, and has a mobile launch platform for helicopters

'Sovereign immunity' makes it impossible for the US to touch Iran's warships currently in the Atlantic - unless they threaten the coastal state US authorities are unable to stop the two Iranian warships currently sailing in the Atlantic Ocean. The ships - Makran and Sahand - are believed to be carrying weapons and millions of gallons of oil en route to Venezuela. The Makran vessel is an oil tanker that has been converted by the Iran Navy into a warship. Given the vessels are operated by the Iranian Navy, they are subject to sovereign immunity in international waters - even if they are violating sanctions like the ones imposed by the US on Venezuela. Ships that are government-owned or operated are granted immunity under the United Nations Convention and cannot be subject to the jurisdiction of any country, unless they threaten the coastal state. Previous shipments of oil to Venezuela from Iran that have been carried out on commercial vessels have been seized by US authorities. The two warships that are currently in the Atlantic are operated by the Iran Navy. Advertisement

US intelligence officials have been tracking the warships as they continue to make their way closer to the United States.

Iranian state TV released footage on Thursday of the two vessels in the Atlantic Ocean with the outlet claiming they are currently more than 500 miles off the coast of Angola.

Undated photos obtained by maritime outlet USNI News on Thursday showed Makran - the converted oil-tanker - riding particularly low in the water. One of those photos showed Sahand, the other Iranian vessel, taking on fuel from Makran.

Maritime expert Sal Mercogliano said the photos indicated that Makran was filled to maximum capacity with oil.

'She is loaded down to the gills. She is obviously loaded with fuel but much more fuel than what's needed,' Mercogliano said.

'Those ships could circumnavigate the world dozens of times. But thing you can't stop her from doing is delivering that fuel to Venezuela  that's been the big issue, getting around the embargo and getting Iranian fuel to Venezuela.

'No one is going to stop an Iranian navy vessel from delivering that oil. That's one sure way of getting around the embargo. The embargo deals with commercial vessels not navy vessels. How would you even know?'

Intelligence already has indicated that Makran is carrying Iranian fast-attack craft typically associated with its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard Corps, and has a mobile launch platform for helicopters.

Satellite images from Maxar Technologies, dated April 28, showed at least seven of the fast-attack vessels on the ship's deck.

The fast-attack craft aboard the Makran are the type that the Guard uses in its tense encounters with US warships in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

The craft were most recently seen swarming US Coast Guard and Navy ships in the Persian Gulf back in April. The incidents only resulted in warning shots.

The vessels are currently sailing in the Atlantic Ocean after departing from the Iranian port city of Bandar Abbas last month on April 29. The ships were believed to have made it halfway through their journey as of Wednesday and were headed northwest across the Atlantic roughly 1,000 miles from Cape Town, South Africa, according to a US defense official

Ships that are government-owned or operated are granted immunity under the United Nations Convention and cannot be subject to the jurisdiction of any country. The two warships - Makran and Sahand (above) - that are currently in the Atlantic are operated by the Iran Navy

It wasn't immediately clear what Venezuela's plans would be for those ships.

'If the boats are delivered, they may form the core of an asymmetrical warfare force within Venezuelas armed forces,' the US Naval Institute said in an earlier published analysis.

'This could be focused on disrupting shipping as a means of countering superior naval forces. Shipping routes to and from the Panama Canal are near the Venezuelan coast.'

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin raised fears on Thursday that the vessels could possibly be carrying weapons

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin raised fears on Thursday that the vessels could possibly be carrying weapons.

'I am absolutely concerned about the proliferation of weapons, any type of weapons, in our neighborhood,' Austin told the Senate Armed Service Committee hearing.

A senior Biden administration official told Politico that the ships are believed to be carrying weapons as part of a deal struck between Iran and Venezuela last year but did not specify what kind of armaments they could be carrying.

US State Department spokesman Ned Price would not speculate on what the vessels were carrying, saying only 'that if this is an effort to transfer weapons or otherwise to violate its international obligations we would be prepared to respond'.

'We have seen the press reports regarding this movement,' Price said. 'Were prepared to leverage our applicable authorities, including sanctions, against any actor that enables Iran's ongoing provision of weapons to violent partners into proxies.'

The Biden administration has already pressured Venezuela - and Cuba because it is another potential destination - to turn the ships away, according to US officials.

An official said the US views delivery of weapons in its hemisphere as a threat and that it will take 'appropriate measures' to prevent it.

Iran maintains close ties to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro (left) and has shipped gasoline and other products to the country amid a US sanctions campaign targeting fuel-starved Caracas. A top aide to Maduro has denied reports that the Iranian ships will dock there. Iran (President Hassan Rouhani pictured on right) has claimed that its warships will not stop at any country's port during its mission

'The delivery of such weapons would be a provocative act and understood as a threat to our partners in the Western Hemisphere,' the official said.

'We would reserve the right to take appropriate measures in coordination with our partners to deter the transit or delivery of such weapons.'

Iran maintains close ties to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and has shipped gasoline and other products to the country amid a US sanctions campaign targeting fuel-starved Caracas.

Venezuela is believed to have paid Iran, under US sanctions of its own, for the shipments.

A top aide to Maduro denied reports that the Iranian ships will dock there.

During a news conference on May 31, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh refused to say where the Makran was going.

'Iran is always present in international waters and it has this right based on international law and it can be present in international waters,' he said.

'No country is able to violate this right, and I warn that no one makes miscalculations. Those who sit in glass houses should be careful.'

Iran has claimed that its warships will not stop at any country's port during its mission, which Iran's deputy army chief Admiral Habibollah Sayyari described as the Iranian navy's longest and most challenging voyage yet.

He did not elaborate on the mission's purpose.
A sex cult killer has been sentenced to death for strangling a Nebraska woman in 2017 then cutting her into 14 pieces after luring her over Tinder.

Aubrey Trail, 54, and his girlfriend Bailey Boswell, 25, were both convicted of first-degree murder in the brutal killing and dismemberment of 24-year-old Sydney Loofe.

The pair lured her using the dating app Tinder then wanted her to participate in their lifestyle of defrauding antiques dealers and having group sex.

But Trail said Loofe 'freaked out' and he worried she would go to the authorities so he killed her with an electrical cord.

'I had no doubt she would tell people if I let her go,' said Trail, who was handcuffed, clad in orange jail garb and in a wheelchair throughout the sentencing.

The pair then cut her body into 14 pieces. Before going on the date, Loofe posted an excited selfie on Snapchat.

Trail tried to kill himself in custody by slitting his own throat but was unsuccessful.

Aubrey Trail, 54, was sentenced to death on Wednesday for the 2017 murder of Sydney Loofe, a young woman he lured on Tinder

On Wednesday, he was sentenced to death after telling a court in Omaha that he 'couldn't care less' what kind of punishment he received.

The last time anyone heard from Sydney Loofe was on November 15 when she posted a picture of herself to Snapchat, captioning the image: 'Ready for my date'

He did not apologize to the victim's family, saying it would be an 'insult' to do so. He also repeated earlier claims that Boswell is innocent and didn't take part in the killing.

She has not yet been sentenced but she also faces the death penalty and could become Nebraska's first female death row inmate.

During his 2019 trial, three women testified about how Trail would lure women into his sex cult via the dating app , then convince them he was a vampire who could fly and read minds.

The women said they were all recruited via Boswell's Tinder account between July and November 2017.

They described how Trail made them call him 'daddy' and how they engaged in group sex with him, Boswell and other women.

The women said Trail also referred to Boswell as the 'queen witch'.

One woman testified that Trail had a group of witches and that for her to become one of them she had to kill someone and 'take their last breath', the Omaha Herald reports.

She would gain more 'powers' if the person killed was tortured for hours beforehand, the woman testified.

Trail's girlfriend Bailey Boswell, 27, is awaiting sentencing for her role in the murder. She and Trail recruited women over Tinder to take part in their sex cult where they'd call him 'daddy' and her a 'witch'

The woman described going to a Walmart with Trail and Boswell to grocery shop. She said they asked her if she was ready for her first 'kill'.

A potential Tinder date showed up but they ended up leaving her at the grocery store and Trail later said they would 'save her for another time'.

'It all sounded like it was real, very convincing,' she told the court.

The woman said she left the group before Loofe was killed, and said Trail and Boswell threatened to kill her family if she told anyone about what had happened.

Another woman testified that Trail and Boswell made her follow strict rules, including making contact every three hours to let them know where she was.

She also wasn't allowed to wear clothes in Trail's home.

The woman told the court she was punished if she broke the rules, including once where he choked her with a belt and another time where he slapped her in the head more than 10 times.

Loofe was found dead in December 2017 near Edgar, south-west of Omaha, about a month after she disappeared when she failed to return from a Tinder date with Trail's girlfriend

She testified that Trail and Boswell would often speak about killing and torturing other victims because they needed to strengthen their powers.

They allegedly spoke of cutting out people's eyelids, scalping them, cutting holes in people during sex, pouring acid on them and setting them on fire.

She said Trail and Boswell had a killing bag - which they called 'Bailey's killing bag' - that included a sauna suit, hammer and pliers.

Trail, shown testifying at trial, tried to kill himself in custody by slashing his own throat

The woman said she initially agreed to take part in a killing. She also left the group before Loofe was killed.

Another part of being involved in Trail's sex cult helping the couple swindle others by buying and selling antiques.

The third woman testified that she was only interested in the antiques side of it and was never wanted to have sex with the couple.

She said she never believed Trail when he spoke about vampires and witches but testified that they regularly spoke about killing and torture.

Trail hasn't been in court to listen to testimony since last week when he slashed his neck and fell from his wheelchair in the middle of a hearing.

He was caught on camera yelling 'Bailey is innocent, and I curse you all' just seconds before swiping something across his neck.

Deputies were filmed rushing to help as Trail lay bleeding on the floor.

It is not clear how badly Trail was injured but the judge ordered the jury to return to hear testimony. His lawyer said he needed stitches but was released from a hospital.

Authorities said he'd had a stroke and two heart attacks since his arrest.

The last time anyone heard from Loofe was November 15 when she posted a picture of herself to Snapchat, captioning the image: 'Ready for my date'.

She was reported missing by her mother the following day when she failed to show up for her cashier job at home improvement store Menards in Lincoln.

Her dismembered body was found a month later stuffed into garbage bags dumped in a field.
Police seeking to identify a man killed by a train near the Cam and Dursley Station in Gloucestershire nine days ago have issued a CCTV image taken shortly before his death.

The man is described as white, with short dark hair. He was wearing a charcoal grey hoodie, dark grey t-shirt, blue jeans and black Adidas trainers.

An investigation is continuing into the circumstances of his death and police have now released an image to help identify the man.

'On Wednesday 2 June at 11pm, officers were called to an area of railway near Cam and Dursley station following reports of a casualty on the tracks,' said a British Transport Police spokesperson.

Police have released this image of the man, taken shortly before he was killed by a train, as they seek to identify him

The man was hit on the railway line close to Cam and Dursley Station in Gloucestershire nine days ago

Police are still trying to establish the circumstances surrounding his death and have asked for anyone with information to contact them

'Paramedics also attended. However the man was sadly pronounced dead at the scene.

'Officers are still working to establish the full circumstances behind the man's death. Despite a number of extensive enquiries, they've still been unable to identify him and inform his family.

'The man is described as white, with short dark hair. He was wearing a charcoal grey hoodie, dark grey t-shirt, blue jeans and black Adidas trainers.

'Officers are today releasing this image in connection in the hope it may assist in their efforts to identify the man.

'Anyone with information is asked to contact BTP by texting 61016 or calling 0800 40 50 40 quoting reference 706 of 02/06/21.'
The fiance of murdered US Army Specialist Vanessa Guillen is speaking publicly for the first time, revealing he learned about her horrific death after seeing posts on Twitter.

Guillen, 20, disappeared from a Texas Army base last April after telling her family she was being sexually harassed - and her dismembered and buried remains were found on June 30 near the Leon River.

Prosecutors said she'd been killed by another soldier, Specialist Aaron Robinson, 20, who'd been accused of sexual harassment. Robinson was detained, but escaped - when he then killed himself.

A damning Army investigation in the wake of Guillen's murder led to the firing or suspension last year of 14 officers and soldiers at the Fort Hood base in Texas after it uncovered chronic leadership failures that contributed to a widespread pattern of violence including murder, sexual assaults and harassment.

Meanwhile, Guillen's boyfriend, Juan Cruz, 22, has now revealed in an interview set to air Friday night that he didn't learn about the horrific killing of his girlfriend, Guillen, until he was scrolling on social media and saw posts about it.

'I clicked on the conversation that was happening and I started to listen to the story of what happened,' Cruz said. 'So I was at work ... I started getting anxiety attacks. I got in my car and I started to cry.'

On the 20/20 special on ABC News, Cruz spoke about the first time he met Guillen.

'At a quinceanera, she looked at me once and I said, "Man, she's pretty'" Cruz said in Spanish in a clip obtained by DailyMail.com, referring to a birthday party for a 15 year old. 'And we danced all night and that's how I met her.'

'I knew she was the one,' Cruz added in English. He said the two became engaged in March 2020.

'She was beside me ... we were all happy,' Cruz continues.

Scroll down for video

In a special on ABC News set to air Friday, Juan Cruz spoke about the time he met Guillen: Both of them are pictured

Cruz and Guillen became engaged in March 2020, a month before her disappearance

Cruz last saw Guillen on April 19, 2020, three days before Guillen went missing.

'She told me, "I love you. Goodnight." Then, the next day, she woke up, like, at 5 in the morning to leave to Fort Hood... I was still asleep but I remember she gave me a kiss and she left,' Cruz says.

The ABC story set to air doesn't detail what Cruz now does for work or where he's living; it's not clear.

Meanwhile, Guillen last year had planned to hike with a friend on the day she went missing. Investigators say she reported to work in the morning, went to the arms room and last communicated around 10:23am before friends and family became worried later in the day.

He learned about the details of Guillen's murder when he saw them pop up on Twitter

Tay Hightower, her hiking companion, learned around 10pm that the last person she was with was Aaron Robinson and spoke with him, with Robinson claiming he hadn't spoken to Guillen earlier.

The military police and the U.S. Army Criminal Investigative Division ultimately became involved as rumors swirled about what happened to Guillen.

The Army designated Guillen as being AWOL two days after her disappearance.

Robinson told investigators that Guillen left the arms room after finishing a task and he later went to be with his girlfriend, who backed up his claim.

Guillen, 20, (left) disappeared from the Texas, base in April 2020 and her dismembered and buried remains were found on June 30 near the Leon River. Officials said fellow soldier Aaron Robinson, 20, (right) was the main suspect in her killing

Meanwhile, the Army made several missteps in their investigation, from searching the wrong spot to 'mistakenly' marking her present on the day she went missing.

Gloria Guillen, Vanessa's mother, began speaking publicly about sexual harassment her daughter had been facing, blowing the story wide open.

Investigators later discovered that Robinsons phone pinged in Belton, Texas, by a bridge near the Leon River, about a half-hour from the base in the early morning hours shortly after Vanessa vanished.

When they went to the location, they found a burn pile, including a tough box, an item Guillen had been seen with earlier by eyewitnesses.

Investigators noted that Robinson and his girlfriend, Cecily Aguilar, shared multiple phone calls the night of Guillen's disappearance, which Aguilar said was because she couldn't find her phone.

Guillen, one of six children, went to her first training for the Army in June 2018

Investigators believe Robinson bludgeoned Guillen, 20, to death with a hammer, removed her body from an armory at Fort Hood, and then dismembered her and buried her remains on April 22, 2020.

Guillens remains were found near the Leon River in Bell County, Texas on June 30.

'The way that he knew that it was Vanessa was because he described her hair to me,' Mayra Guillen said of the discovery of Vanessa's remains. 'And I just dropped my phone and it was just like everything came to an end.'

According to an Army report released in April, Robinson was detained shortly after Guillens remains were found, but he was allowed to escape. A few hours later, he fatally shot himself as police were about to take him into custody.

Robinsons former girlfriend, Cecily Aguilar, has been charged with helping Robinson hide Guillens body and impeding the investigation. She told investigators Robinson admitted to the killing when she was prompted the day Guillen's remains were found.

Aguilar has pleaded not guilty and her lawyers have filed a motion to have the case tossed.

The Army report from April details the final hours of Robinsons life.

At around 5pm on June 30, just hours after workers found Guillens remains in a shallow grave, a member of the Army Criminal Investigation Command called Robinsons unit and told them to put the specialist under strict observation.

Robinson was told he was being detained for violating COVID-19 quarantine rules. He was then placed inside a conference room where an unarmed soldier was guarding the door.

Vanessa's aunt Alma Garcia (C), Juan Cruz, the fiance of US Army Specialist Vanessa Guillen and family members embrace during the public memorial service in honor of the soldier at Chavez High School on August 14, 2020, in Houston, Texas

Juan Cruz, boyfriend of Army soldier Vanessa Guillen, kneels in front of a mural honoring her

Pictured: Guillen from a Facebook photo. Her remains were found in June 2020

While Robinson was upset he was being detained, he nonetheless appeared relaxed. He spent his time in detention playing video games, according to the report. Robinson was also allowed to keep his cell phone, which was being monitored by his superiors.

A few hours later, commanders got wind of new information suggesting that Robinson would try to escape, according to the report.

In a text chain, one officer said that if he tried to escape, the guards had to tackle his a** and call the MPs [military police]'.

But the soldier guarding Robinson did not get the message, according to the Army report.

Just after 10pm, Robinson received a telephone call that appeared to be from his mother.

Dont believe what you hear about me, a guard heard Robinson say.

Several minutes later, Robinson escaped. A few hours later, he was spotted by Army and civilian police in the city of Killeen, just outside of Fort Hood.

As officers were closing in to make an arrest, Robinson pulled out a gun and shot himself dead.

Major General Gene LeBoeuf said that Robinsons escape is still the subject of an ongoing investigation.

The report blamed a communication breakdown between the soldiers unit and the criminal investigation agents which allowed him to flee.

The family of Guillen also demanded military officials release the name of a supervisor who sexually harassed her before she was killed by another soldier last year.

The Army report from April said that the sexual harassment by the superior was unrelated to Guillens murder and that the suspected killer, Robinson, 20, had also been accused of harassing another female service member.

Friday's report did not name the man accused of harassing Guillen, who is said to have asked her for a threesome, over 'privacy concerns' because of his low rank.

He was one of 21 people hit with disciplinary action over his behavior, but Army officials did not comment further on details of that punishment.

U.S. President Donald Trump listens to Gloria Guillen, the mother of slain Fort Hood soldier Vanessa Guillen who was was found dead after disappearing from the army base in Texas, during a meeting in the Oval Office at the White House on July 30, 2020

Guillen's family is relieved to have some justice, but they still don't understand why the Army has refused to release the supervisor's name.

Guillen's sister Mayra Guillen told ABC News: 'The Army keeps trying to protect this name and I want to understand why. Why not just try to take a step forward, admit that you were wrong, fix it and make yourself look better so, the nation could trust you again.'

Mayra also said that her family hopes to push the US government to address sexual harassment in the military.

'We're still looking to work very hard on this so we can put an end to it and not have what happened to Vanessa happen to anyone else ever again,' she said.

The Guillen family has also joined Congress members and other activists to fight for the passage of the I Am Vanessa Guillen Act.

The act is named after the hashtag that was used by military sexual assault survivors to denounce their experiences on social media when Guillen went missing in April 2020.

Reps Jackie Speier, a Democrat from California, and Markwayne Mullin, a Republican from Oklahoma, said the bill would make sexual harassment a crime within the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Guillens killing shocked the military and forced the high command to re-examine the extent to which a culture of sexual harassment had taken root throughout the armed forces

Guillen, one of six children, went to her first training for the Army in June 2018.

Ryan Landy, a soldier in Guillen's unit, told 20/20 that Guillen had a memorable laugh.

'I guess, apparently I'm kind of funny sometimes, and she'd crack up all the time. Like, her laugh was very, very contagious,' Landy said.

'It just seems like a nightmare when I drive through Houston,' Cruz added. 'I see her murals and I say to myself, "Damn, this is reality. Shes no longer here." On the other hand, murals arent made for just anyone. That brought me a bit of peace to my heart.'

Guillens killing shocked the military and forced the high command to re-examine the extent to which a culture of sexual harassment had taken root throughout the armed forces.

The latest findings were announced as part of an investigation into Guillens killing and the actions of officers immediately afterward.

Last year, a separate, civilian-run probe was launched examining the overall culture at Fort Hood.

As a result of the investigation, the Army fired or suspended 14 officers and enlisted soldiers at Fort Hood and ordered policy changes to address chronic failures of leadership that contributed to a widespread pattern of violence.

An independent review found that the Armys Sexual Harassment and Assault Response and Prevention Program (SHARP) failed to curb sexual assault and harassment on bases due to structural failures.

Panelists said there was a lack of training, resourcing and staffing at the SHARP office on Fort Hood.

It also found that the command climate failed to practice the programs core values below the brigade level, which led to less trust in the program.

The actions come after a year that saw at least 31 soldiers assigned to Fort Hood die due to suicide, homicide or accidents, including the bludgeoning death of Guillen.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib blasted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic leadership for a statement they put out Thursday saying Rep. Ilhan Omar was fomenting 'prejudice' by comparing the U.S. and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban.

'Freedom of speech doesn't exist for Muslim women in Congress. The benefit of the doubt doesn't exist for Muslim women in Congress,' Tlaib tweeted two hours later. 'House Democratic leadership should be ashamed of its relentless, exclusive tone policing of Congresswomen of color.'

Omar's comments earlier this week that the US and Israel were committing similar 'unthinkable atrocities' to terrorist groups has sparked a fierce internal battle between members of the progressive wing and senior leaders.

Omar accused her critics within the Democratic Party of whipping up 'Islamic hate against her' after they complained she was comparing atrocities committed by American and Israeli troops with those of terrorist groups.

The party has been thrown into disarray at the start of President Joe Biden's eight-day trip to Europe.

Beyond support from fellow Squad members Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Congressional Progressive Caucus also came out in defense of Omar, a Minnesota Democrat.

Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal called Omar a 'deeply valued member' of the Progressive Caucus in a statement sent out Thursday afternoon, several hours after Pelosi and the five top House Democrats sent out theirs.

'We cannot ignore a right-wing media echo chamber that has deliberately and routinely attacked a Black, Muslim woman in Congress, distorting her views and intentions, and resulting in threats against Rep. Omar and her staff,' Jayapal said. 'We urge our colleagues not to abet or amplify such divisive and bad-faith tactics.'

'Members of the Democratic caucus owe it to each other to pause, reflect, and engage directly with each other when misunderstandings arise, and stand together against cynical attempts to divide our caucus,' she added.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (left) defended her fellow 'squad' member, Rep. Ilhan Omar, in a Thursday tweet saying, 'Freedom of speech doesn't exist for Muslim women in Congress. The benefit of the doubt doesn't exist for Muslim women in Congress'

Tlaib's tweet came in response to a statement put out by Democratic leadership that Omar was fomenting 'prejudice' by drawing false equivalence between democracies such as U.S. and Israel and terrorist groups such as Hamas and the Taliban

Pelosi stepped in on Thursday afternoon in an effort to end the feuding.

She said legitimate criticism of the U.S. and Israel was protected by the values of democratic debate.

'But drawing false equivalencies between democracies like the U.S. and Israel and groups that engage in terrorism like Hamas and the Taliban foments prejudice and undermines progress toward a future of peace and security for all,' she said.

'We welcome the clarification by Congresswoman Omar that there is no moral equivalency between the U.S. and Israel and Hamas and the Taliban.'

Omar has frequently been at odds with members of her own party on the Middle East.

The latest row stems from her pressing Secretary of State Anthony Blinken for an International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into abuses committed by both Hamas and Israeli security forces.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has stepped into an escalating row with Representative Ilhan Omar over Omar's latest condemnation of Israel

Rep. Ilhan Omar hit back at her critics within her own party, accusing them of Islamophobia. 'The Islamophobic tropes in this statement are offensive,' she said on Twitter. The constant harassment and silencing from the signers of this letter is unbearable'

On Twitter, she went further, describing 'unthinkable atrocities' committed by the US, Israel, Hamas and the Taliban, triggering an angry backlash and accusations of 'false equivalencies' between 'imperfect' democracies and terrorist outfits.

Her office claimed the result was an increase in death threats against her.

And Omar blasted back on Twitter: 'Its shameful for colleagues who call me when they need my support to now put out a statement asking for clarification and not just call.

'The Islamophobic tropes in this statement are offensive. The constant harassment and silencing from the signers of this letter is unbearable.'

Her senior communications director Jeremy Slevin said: 'As usual, the far right is ginning up hate against Rep. Omar for a technical question about an ongoing investigation.

This has already led to an increase in death threats against her and her staff.

'And now some of her own Democratic colleagues are ginning up the same Islamophobic hate against her, accusing her of giving "cover to terrorist groups" simply for exercising oversight over a criminal investigation.'

Omar insisted her words had been taken out of context.

'To be clear: the conversation was about accountability for specific incidents regarding those ICC cases, not a moral comparison between Hamas and the Taliban and the U.S. and Israel,' she said.

'I was in no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries with well-established judicial systems.'

Even so, she was quickly back on the attack, hinting her own caucus was faster to call out anti-Israel comments with the party than Islamaphobia among Republicans.

She highlighted comments by Rep. Mo Brooks in 2019 saying: 'Muslims, more so than most people, have great animosity towards Israel and the Jewish faith.'

She asked: 'When will our caucus forcefully stand up against hate towards their Muslim colleagues and constituents?'

Omar was back on the attack by Thursday afternoon, after clarifying her earlier comments, saying she 'was in no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries with well-established judicial systems'

Fellow members of the squad raced to Omar's defense on Twitter with messages of solidarity. Tlaib condemned colleagues and 'their obsession with policing her' as sick

Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, took to Twitter to show solidarity with Omar.

'I am tired of colleagues (both D+R) demonizing,' wrote Tlaib.

'Their obsession with policing her is sick.

'She has the courage to call out human rights abuses no matter who is responsible. That's better than colleagues who look away if it serves their politics.'

An unofficial caucus of 25 Jewish Democrats met on Wednesday to discuss anti-Semitism after the provocative tweet was posted on Monday.

Omar had said: 'We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity.

'We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the US, Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.'

New York Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin said Omar should be removed from the Foreign Affairs Committee.

'She should have never been appointed to this Committee in the first place', he tweeted Wednesday night.

Brad Sherman, a senior Democrat from California who has served since 1997, denounced the comments in a furious press release.

Representative Ilhan Omar likened U.S. and Israeli actions to the 'unthinkable atrocities committed' by terrorist groups like Hamas and the Taliban

He said: 'It's not news that Ilhan Omar would make outrageous and clearly false statements about America and Israel. What's newsworthy is that she admits Hamas is guilty of "unthinkable atrocities".

'It's time for all of Israel's detractors to condemn Hamas. And it's time for all those of good will to reject any moral equivalency between the US and Israel on one hand, and Hamas and the Taliban on the other.'

'Ilhan Omar must be removed from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. She should have never been appointed to this Committee in the first place.

A number of lawmakers at the meeting of Jewish Democrats wanted to name and shame Omar in a joint statement saying she 'discredited' the party, according to The Times of Israel.

Other than Sherman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Brad Schneider were among those pushing to condemn Omar, although no one on the call said they believed the tweet to be anti-Semitic.

Others present were Jamie Raskin, who was hesitant to denounce Omar, Jerry Nadler, Ted Deutch, Jan Schakowsky, Elissa Slotkin and Elaine Luria.

In her tweet, the Minnesota congresswoman included a clip of her line of questioning with Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a hearing Monday. The questioning did not include lumping in the U.S. with terrorist organizations

Schakowsky previously joined Omar on a campaign against Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

Omar's office did not respond to a previous DailyMail.com request on what specific 'atrocities' she was referencing in her tweet that the US is responsible for.

Jeremy Slevin, a spokesman for Omar, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: 'As usual, the far right is ginning up hate against Rep. Omar for a technical question about an ongoing investigation.

'It is the congresswoman's role as a member of Congress conducting federal oversight to follow the facts, ask questions of the administration and work to make sure the public understands our government shouldn't deny any person from seeking justice.'

David Harris, the American Jewish Committee CEO, said: 'Beyond shocking. Beyond reprehensible.

Brad Sherman, a senior Democrat who has served since 1997, denounced the comments in a furious press release

'Will members of her own party speak up?'

A number of Republican lawmakers have chided in to slam Omar for the 'hateful assault'.

'This shouldn't be at all controversial: America is not a terrorist organization,' newly elected South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace tweeted on Tuesday. 'Full stop.'

'It is absolutely befuddling that Rep. [Ilhan Omar] continues her vicious, hateful assault on America, likening our country to terrorists,' she added.

Florida Representative Brian Mast tweeted: 'This is absolutely disgusting from a Member of Congress. I lost two legs and a finger defending the USA and fighting the radical Islamic terrorists that [Ilhan] Omar is now defending. She is completely unfit to serve our country.'

The 'Squad' member included a clip in her tweet where she questioned Secretary of State Antony Blinken as part of a Monday House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the State Department's budget request and foreign policy strategy.

Her line of questioning, unlike her tweet, did not include her grouping America with terrorist organizations.

Instead, she asked Blinken how the US plans to help people in areas where war crimes are being committed by Hamas and the Taliban, including places like in Israel, Palestinian territories and Afghanistan.

'I asked [Secretary Antony Blinken] where people are supposed to go for justice,' Omar tweeted of her line of questioning.

South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace said it 'shouldn't be at all controversial' to say that America is 'not a terrorist organization'. She called on Omar to resign

The American-Somali congresswoman's comments come shortly after a ceasefire was called between Israel and Hamas, operating in Gaza, following an 11-day deadly conflict.

More than 250 people were killed in the conflict and thousands others were injured.

Omar saw some backlash for her tweet, including questions of why she serves in Congress if she 'hates America.'

'If Ilhan Omar hates America so much to say that US committed atrocities equal to #Hamas and #Taliban why is she a member of US Congress?' TV reporter Trish Regan tweeted. 'She should resign!!'

Former CIA Operations Officer Bryan Dean Wright, tweeted: 'Ilhan Omar claims -- without evidence -- that America is a war criminal, sharing the honor with Hamas, the Taliban, and her favorite of all villains -- the Jewish State.'

Democrats criticized President Joe Biden's administration for not being tougher on Israel and sending more humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

After working behind the scenes on a ceasefire between the two entities, Biden assured he is focused on the two-state solution so Israel and Palestinians both have their own land.

Republicans, however, were critical of the president not doubling-down on America's commitment to defending Israel.

Omar and other 'squad' members, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, have been vocal about their support for Palestinians and critical of Israel.

Tlaib is the first woman of Palestinian descent to be elected to the U.S. Congress.

Conservative television journalist Trish Regan slammed Omar for 'hating America,' and said 'she should resign'

A former CIA operations officer said Omar's 'favorite villain' is 'the Jewish State'

Omar's comments come after an 11-day conflict between Israel and Hamas operating in Gaza, which saw more than 250 people be killed, thousands others injured and millions in damages

Last month, Omar accused Israel of committing 'war crimes' in the conflict between the Jewish state and Hamas, which ws operating in Palestinian territory of Gaza.

'We should all be grateful that a ceasefire will prevent more civilians and children from being killed,' Omar tweeted in May. 'But now what? We need accountability for every war crime committed.'

'And we need to stop underwriting crimes against humanity while doing nothing to end the occupation,' she added.

During the 11-day conflict last month, thousands of missiles were fired at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv  along with other areas in Israel  from Gaza.

Israel's Iron Dome defense system went into action and the country retaliated with missiles of their own aimed at areas where they believed Hamas was operating  like a media building.
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Extinction Rebellion have started a G7 protest march with 500 demonstrators gathering in a Cornish seaside town to urge world leaders to respect the climate.

Campaigners paraded from St Ives Leisure Centre to the high street, escorted by police who redirected cars en route, in the first of a series of demonstrations the group is holding throughout the three-day event in nearby Carbis Bay.

Extinction Rebellion says the protests are in response to G7 nations' 'failure to respect the global climate commitments they made in Paris in 2015' and 'to urge the leaders meeting at Carbis Bay in Cornwall to act immediately to address the climate and ecological emergency'.

Those living in St Ives stood outside and took photographs of the event as protesters played drums and chanted 'act now', 'sound the alarm' and 'Extinction Rebellion'.

Some campaigners wore blue gowns and veils and moved through crowd in a flowing motion, which they said represented the threat climate change has on marine life.

Campaigners paraded from St Ives Leisure Centre to the high street, escorted by police who redirected cars en route, in the first of a series of demonstrations the group is holding throughout the three-day event in nearby Carbis Bay

Extinction Rebellion says the protests are in response to G7 nations' 'failure to respect the global climate commitments they made in Paris in 2015'

Protesters dressed as blackbirds and put on a display in St Ives as they demonstrated against climate change inaction

Some campaigners wore green gowns and veils and moved through crowd in a flowing motion, which they said represented the threat climate change has on marine life

Activists from the climate change protest group Extinction Rebellion demonstrate in St Ives, Cornwall, today

Some demonstrators dressed in green to represent the sea they are trying to save in their protests

Hundreds of people gathered with Extinction Rebellion flags in St Ives to protest against inaction on climate change

A large banner held by protesters in St Ives today read 'liar, liar, earth is on fire' as they marched

The Cornwall Youth Climate Alliance are pictured during a demonstration in Falmouth this morning

Young people held signs reading 'G7 leaders we are watching' and 'resist G7 stop empty promises' in Falmouth

Demonstrators donned red outfits and marched in a procession as part of the G7 protests in St Ives on Friday

The protesters held up their hands as they donned red outfits and white face paint for maximum effect

Protesters sat and lay down in a field as they began a protest outside St Ives in Cornwall Friday morning

While G7 leaders were beginning the summit, protesters held banners reading 'sound the alarm' in St Ives

Protesters wore masks as they walked closely together for the march, ignoring social distancing rules

The Extinction Rebellion protest began to wind its way from St Ives Leisure Centre to the town centre

Protesters dressed in green to represent the sea as they called for more to be done to solve climate change

They began their protest with a rally at the leisure centre where they gave speeches and sang songs.

Halfway through the route, just before they reached the harbour, they held a few minutes' silence with their fists in the air.

'This is exciting, nothing like this ever happens in our little town,' one resident said. Senara Hodges, 51, said she was 'delighted' the campaigners were protesting.

'It's absolutely fantastic. They are not causing the disruption - the Government is with its lack of action,' the filmmaker added. 'We are severely disrupted by the G7. It's a huge imposition on a very, very busy town during peak season. It feels like a typical lack of understanding of the impact.'

Olympic sailor Laura Baldwin, 41, joined the protests as a member of Ocean Rebellion - Extinction Rebellion's sea-focused campaign group.

One hilarious sign in St Ives was in the shape of a pasty and read 'It's nearly pasty point of no return'

Protesters gathered in St Ives with signs reading 'stop', 'no more pledges climate action starts now' and 'think don't sink'

Even the animals were forced to get involved with a dog pictured enjoying a quick rest by its owners in St Ives

A trolley is wheeled uphill as protesters wait for everyone to arrive in St Ives before setting off on a march

People dressed in green hold their hands up as they lead the procession out of the leisure centre in St Ives

One little boy held up a sign that read 'stop faffing please' as his family joined the protest on Friday morning

The demonstrators dressed in green made their way through the centre of the crowds in St Ives

Hundreds of people poured into the narrow streets of St Ives to campaign for climate change action

Protesters walked behind a sign reading 'sound the alarm' as they walked through St Ives on Friday

Yellow banners were waved in the air as bemused residents took a moment to record events in St Ives

Protesters took a quick break to grab lunch at Harbour Fish and Chips shop in St Ives

Residents clapped from balconies as they celebrated the protests happening below in St Ives

Up to 500 people are thought to have gathered for the protest in one of the most popular coastal towns

Protesters took over the promenade as well as the beach itself as the march ended in the centre of St Ives

Drummers helped keep the atmosphere upbeat as protesters marched through St Ives on Friday morning

Banners read 'indigenous emergency' as drummers banged their instruments and others chanted

'I'm down here for the duration of the summit. I learnt about the climate emergency in January 2019 and I've not been able to focus on anything since,' she said.

'I've absorbed and understood the dire warnings of the world-leading scientists, academics and David Attenborough. I'm the mother of an eight-year-old son and there's constant contradictions of their words with their actions. As a result I'm terrified for the future of my child and all our children.

'I think it's wonderful to see so many people coming here today in creative ways.'

Ms Baldwin added she was more stressed about the state of the planet than any competition as an Olympian.

Boats can be seen on the beach, left by fisherman, as the march passes them in St Ives

She said: 'I'm part of Ocean Rebellion because I'm an Olympic sailor and the ocean is where my heart is. I love the water and respect it.'

Nat Squire, 24, an osteopath graduate who lives in Cornwall, said he decided to take part in the protest because the Government was not acting 'anywhere near as ambitiously as they need to be'.

'They do a lot of greenwashing. They say they're going to do something but they don't have any intention,' he said.

'They're in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires, making it difficult for them to make any changes, even if they wanted to.'

Extinction Rebellion will also hold protests in Falmouth on Saturday, where they will march through the town again. On Sunday there will be an art installation in St Ives.
The FBI has been called into investigate the leaking of a trove of IRS documents which showed some of America's richest residents paid zero federal income tax in recent years.

Details in the documents were laid bare in a bombshell ProPublica article published on Tuesday, which found that 'billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth'.

The CEOs of ProPublica - a non-profit news site - admitted in an accompanying article that they did not know the identity of the person or persons who provided them with the IRS documents.

'We have considered the possibility that information we have received could have come from a state actor hostile to American interests,' they said.

On Thursday, Douglas O'Donnell, the IRS's deputy commissioner for services and enforcement, stated that other outside agencies have been contacted as part of a probe to figure out how the confidential tax records leaked out.

The FBI has been called into investigate the leaking of a trove of IRS documents which showed some of America's richest residents paid zero federal income tax in recent years

The documents were used for a bombshell ProPublica article published on Tuesday , which revealed that 'billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Warren Buffett pay little in income tax compared to their massive wealth'

'Treasury announced yesterday that they made investigative referrals to their Office of Inspector General as well as the FBI, and the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia,' O'Donnell told a House Ways and Means committee panel Thursday.

'We fully support any investigation under taken and will urge the investigative 'authorities to keep Congress appropriately informed of their findings.'

FBI Director Christopher Wray separately told a House hearing Thursday that the FBI has not yet made any arrests or executed any search warrants in relation to the case.

FBI Director Christopher Wray separately told a House hearing Thursday that the FBI has not yet made any arrests or executed any search warrants in relation to the case

It comes after former economic council director Larry Kudlow, who served as director of the National Economic Council under President Donald Trump, called for a thorough investigation into the leaking of he documents.

Speaking on Fox Business, Kudlow suggested the leaker could have corrupt motives and called it 'a little more than coincidental' that ProPublica released its report so close to announcements by Democrats and President Joe Biden about efforts to bolster IRS funding and raise taxes on the rich.

'Tax records are supposed to be confidential, but the muckraking group ProPublica, it's kind of left-of-center, they just happened to get their hands on tax records of a number of very rich Americans,' Kudlow stated.

'Then they just happened to put this out publicly on the eve of a left-wing 'tax the rich' campaign. Now that kind of strikes me as a little more than coincidental, but truly we don't know for sure.'

Earlier this week, a Treasury spokeswoman chimed in on the leaking of the documents saying: 'The unauthorized disclosure of confidential government information is illegal'.

'Any unauthorized disclosure of confidential government information by a person with access is illegal, and we take this very seriously,' Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki also said on Tuesday.

Ex-National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow called for an investigation into the leak of tax information on the wealthiest Americans Wednesday

A report based on the leaked data revealed that the country's top earners such as Jeff Bezos (left) and Elon Musk (right) paid little to no income tax in recent years

What the data reveals

The trove of records showed that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid no income tax in 2007 and 2011, while Tesla boss Elon Musk's income tax bill came to zero in 2018.

Investor George Soros went three straight years - between 2016 and 2018 - without paying federal income tax, according to the records.

Fellow investor Carl Icahn did not pay federal tax in 2016 and 2017.

In reviewing the tax data, the site calculated what it called a 'true tax rate' for the billionaires by comparing how much tax they paid annually from 2014 to 2018 to how much Forbes estimated their wealth had grown in that same period.

The report found that, overall, the richest 25 Americans pay less in tax than the average worker does.

The median American household, in recent years, earned an average salary of about $70,000 and paid 14 percent in federal taxes per year.

Based on data from the 25 richest Americans, they collectively paid a true tax rate of 3.4 percent between 2014 to 2018 on wealth growth of $401 billion.

Warren Buffett, the CEO and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, has avoided the most tax in recent years, according to the records.

Warren Buffett, the CEO and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, has avoided the most tax, according to the records. Between 2014 and 2018, Buffet's wealth grew by about $24.3 billion but he reported paying $23.7 million in taxes. It showed a so-called true tax rate of 0.1 percent

Investor Carl Icahn, who is ranked the 40th wealthiest American with an estimated fortune of $14.9 billion, didn't pay federal income tax in 2016 and 2017. He is pictured with wife Gail Golden

TAX DATA FOR RICHEST AMERICANS: 2014 to 2018 Warren Buffett Year Total taxes paid Total income reported 2014 $7.93 million $46.8 million 2015 $1.85 million $11.6 million 2016 $3.82 million $19.6 million 2017 $4.75 million $22 million 2018 $5.36 million $24.8 million Jeff Bezos Year Total taxes paid Total income reported 2014 $85.4 million $367 million 2015 $126 million $542 million 2016 $320 million $1.35 billion 2017 $398 million $1.68 billion 2018 $43.5 million $284 million Elon Musk Year Total taxes paid Total income reported 2014 $30.4 million $165 million 2015 $78.5K $3.15 million 2016 $42 million $1.34 billion 2017 $73.7K $6.22 million 2018 $8.41K $3.85 million Source: IRS DATA OBTAINED BY PROPUBLICA

Between 2014 and 2018, Buffet's wealth grew by about $24.3 billion but he reported paying $23.7 million in taxes.

It showed a so-called true tax rate of 0.1 percent, which equates to less than 10 cents for every $100 Buffet added to his wealth in that period.

For Bezos, his wealth grew an estimated $99 billion and his total reported income was $4.22 billion between 2014 and 2018.

In that period, Bezos paid $973 million in tax, which equates to a 0.98 percent true tax rate.

In 2007 when Bezos paid no income tax, the Amazon founder - in a joint tax return with then-wife MacKenzie Bezos - reported $46 million in income, which was mostly from interest and dividend payments from investments.

He was able to offset his earnings with losses from other investments and deductions.

In 2011, his tax return showed he had lost money and he claimed a tax credit worth $4,000 for his children.

George Soros, the founder of Soros Fund Management, has an estimated wealth of $8.6 billion. He paid no federal income tax between 2016 and 2018, according to the records. He is pictured with wife Tamiko Bolton

ProPublica reported that Mike Bloomberg, who is the 13th richest American with an estimated wealth of $48 billion, hasn't paid federal taxes in recent years but did not specify when. His spokesman noted that when he was running as a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate he had advocated for tax hikes

Elon Musk's wealth grew an estimated $13.9 billion between 2014 and 2018. He reported $1.52 billion in total income and paid $455 million in taxes. It equates to a 3.27 percent true tax rate.

In 2018, Musk paid no federal income tax. The records show he paid $68,000 in 2015 and $65,000 in 2017.

Investor Carl Icahn, who is ranked the 40th wealthiest American with an estimated fortune of $14.9 billion, didn't pay federal income tax in 2016 and 2017.

Records show he reported, at the time, an adjusted gross income of $544 million. According to the IRS records, he had an outstanding Bank of America loan of $1.2 billion.

HOW CAN THE SUPER-RICH PAY LOWER TAXES? Many billionaires are able to reduce their federal tax bills using legal tax strategies. Among the ways they can reduce tax bills are: Making sizable donations to charity The rich can reduce tax bills through the use of charitable donations. They can deduct up to 60 percent of adjusted gross income with donations. Investing in stocks to avoid wage income The rich can reduce taxes by avoiding wage income, which can be taxed at up to 37 percent. They can instead benefit from investment income, which is often taxed at 20 percent. Paying themselves lower salaries If the mega-rich pay themselves a lower salary, they can then take a higher portion of the income as dividends. The lower salary is then taxed a normal rate. Dividends are often taxed the same as the capital gains rate, which is between 15 to 20 percent. Another option is to opt for part of their compensation in their company stock options. Stock is usually only taxed when the options are exercised. Advertisement

Icahn told ProPublica that his adjusted gross income is misleading because his interest on his loans is higher.

'I didn't make money because, unfortunately for me, my interest was higher than my whole adjusted income,' he said.

Icahn hit back at questions over whether he thought it was inappropriate he hadn't paid federal income tax some years.

'There's a reason it's called income tax,' he said. 'The reason is if, if you're a poor person, a rich person, if you are Apple - if you have no income, you don't pay taxes.

'Do you think a rich person should pay taxes no matter what? I don't think it's germane. How can you ask me that question?'

Michael Bloomberg's wealth grew $22.5 billion between 2014 and 2018 - a period where he reported a total income of $10 billion.

Bloomberg paid $292 million in taxes during that time, which is a 1.30 percent true tax rate.

ProPublica reported that Bloomberg, who is the 13th richest American with an estimated wealth of $48 billion, hasn't paid federal taxes in recent years but did not specify when.

His spokesman said in a statement that when Bloomberg was running as a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate he had advocated for tax hikes.

'Mike Bloomberg pays the maximum tax rate on all federal, state, local and international taxable income as prescribed by law,' a statement read.

'Taken together, what Mike gives to charity and pays in taxes amounts to approximately 75 percent of his annual income.

'The release of a private citizen's tax returns should raise real privacy concerns regardless of political affiliation or views on tax policy. In the United States no private citizen should fear the illegal release of their taxes. We intend to use all legal means at our disposal to determine which individual or government entity leaked these and ensure that they are held responsible.'

George Soros, the founder of Soros Fund Management, has an estimated wealth of $8.6 billion.

He paid no federal income tax between 2016 and 2018, according to the records.

'Between 2016 and 2018 George Soros lost money on his investments, therefore he did not owe federal income taxes in those years. Mr Soros has long supported higher taxes for wealthy Americans,' his spokesman said.

After examining the IRS records, ProPublica found that Americans earning between $2 million and $5 million per year paid an average of 27.5 percent in tax.

Meanwhile, the top .001 percent of taxpayers - the 1,400 people whose reported income came in at more than $69 million - paid 23 percent in tax.

Many billionaires are able to drastically reduce their federal tax bills using legal tax strategies.

Among the ways they can reduce tax bills is via charitable donations or by avoiding wage income, which can be taxed at up to 37 percent. Instead, they can benefit from investment income, which is taxed roughly at 20 percent.
Tim Davie will appear before MPs next week to be grilled over the Martin Bashir Panorama scandal.

The new director general will face questions about the broadcaster's handling of investigations into how Bashir, 58, obtained the world exclusive in 1995, in addition to his plans to reform the broadcaster.

A damning report by Lord Dyson recently condemned the methods used by the journalist to secure his interview, including using fake bank statements to encourage Diana's brother Earl Spencer to make introductions.

Former BBC director-generals Lord Hall and Lord Birt will also appear before the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, in addition to the corporation's chairman Richard Sharp.

Tim Davie (left) will face questions about the broadcaster's handling of investigations into how Martin Bashir, 58,(right) obtained the world exclusive in 1995, in addition to his plans to reform the broadcaster

A damning report by Lord Dyson recently condemned the methods used by Martin Bashir to secure his interview with the Princess of Wales (above) in 1995

Mr Davie has previously said that reform at the BBC needs to continue 'at pace' at the corporation, saying the organisation had made changes since 1995.

'We've had a number of new editorial guidelines going through the system. And I have say I'm very proud of the BBC today and how it operates,' he said.

'But I think you have to reflect on this. It was very, very serious.'

Mr Davie added that he has 'no intention' of airing Mr Bashir's infamous interview ever again.

Mr Davie has contacted the royal family to apologise for what happened and is also returning all awards the explosive interview accrued, including a Bafta TV gong won in 1996.

Lord Dyson's report suggested the BBC had failed to uphold 'governance, accountability and scrutiny' with its internal investigation, carried out by Tony Hall in 1996 when he was the managing director of news and current affairs and John Birt was director-general.

Lord Hall was director-general of the BBC from April 2013 to August 2020.

He was among corporation bosses who were attacked by Prince William for 'looking the other way rather than asking tough questions' in the aftermath of the interview.

Last month, the peer quit his Government-backed job as chairman of the National Gallery after he was criticised in Lord Dyson's bombshell report.

Former BBC director-generals Lord Hall (left) and Lord Birt (right) will be questioned by MPs about the events leading up to Martin Bashir's Panorama interview with Princess Diana

Ministers had viewed the Lord Hall's job at the National Gallery as untenable given the museum's close connection to Prince Charles, its royal patron.

Lord Birt, who was director-general of the BBC from 1992 to 2000, was also criticised following the Panorama interview with Diana, recorded without the knowledge of Buckingham Palace.

It emerged in May that an ex-BBC chairman, Prince Charles 'loyalist' Marmaduke Hussey, had immediately attempted to force his resignation.

Ex-BBC chairman Marmaduke Hussey wanted John Birt to quit as director-general over Martin Bashir Panorama debacle A former BBC chairman tried to force the resignation of the director-general over Princess Diana's interview, it has emerged. Marmaduke Hussey was horrified by the broadcaster's secret Panorama interview with the Princess of Wales, recorded without the knowledge of Buckingham Palace. He asked BBC governors to condemn the interview and the conduct of then director-general John Birt and attempted to force his resignation. Executives did not tell Lord Hussey about the interview until the last minute because they feared he might stop the broadcast. The Tory peer resigned two months later and wrote in his memoir that the episode had 'darkened my last months at the BBC'. He was known to be a Prince Charles 'loyalist' and had close links to the Royal Family as his wife Lady Susan is a lady-in-waiting to the Queen. The decision not to tell Lord Hussey, who died in 2006, was discussed in a BBC documentary filmed to mark the tenth anniversary of Diana's interview with journalist Martin Bashir. Lord Birt told the 2005 BBC2 Arena documentary: '[Hussey] tried to get the governors to condemn the programme, which they refused to do. 'Having failed at that he tried to get the governors to condemn the way in which I had handled the programme and particularly the fact that I hadn't alerted him as chairman. He failed to get what he wanted: a stinging rebuke which, he calculated, would force my resignation.' The documentary, The Princess and Panorama, was shown to former High Court judge Lord Dyson as part of his investigation into the 1995 interview. Advertisement

Former judge Lord Dyson's report found the BBC covered up Bashir's 'deceitful behaviour' in obtaining the interview with Diana, and labelled Lord Hall's 1996 internal investigation 'woefully ineffective'.

Bogus bank statements commissioned by Bashir 'deceived and induced' Earl Spencer to help the journalist 'to arrange a meeting with Princess Diana', it said.

His lies landed the Panorama reporter the interview of the century and multiple awards - but hastened the end of Diana's marriage to Prince Charles and saw her stripped of her HRH status just two years before her death.

The BBC made a 'full and unconditional apology' for Bashir's conduct and the subsequent cover-up in May.

Friends of Diana's have claimed she may still be alive today 'if she hadn't spoken to Bashir', who they nicknamed 'The Poison Dwarf' after his betrayal emerged, while Patrick Jephson, the Princess of Wales' private secretary at the time, said a 'line' leads from her interview with Bashir to the night she died in 1997 in a Paris car crash.

In his report, Lord Dyson, who carried out a six-month investigation, said: 'Mr Bashir deceived and induced him [Earl Spencer] to arrange a meeting with Princess Diana.

'By gaining access to Princess Diana in this way, Mr Bashir was able to persuade her to agree to give the interview.

'This behaviour was in serious breach of the 1993 edition of the BBC's Producer Guidelines on straight dealing.'

Lord Hall's subsequent 1996 investigation into claims Diana was hoodwinked by Bashir was 'woefully ineffective', the judge said, especially because their inquiry 'did not scrutinise' Bashir despite knowing he had lied three times about showing the fake bank statements to Earl Spencer.

'Lord Hall could not reasonably have concluded, as he did, that Mr Bashir was an honest and honourable man', the report said.

The BBC had 'without justification' 'covered up' Mr Bashir's tricks and 'thereby fell short of the high standards of integrity and transparency which are its hallmark', said Lord Dyson.

Lord Birt, director-general of the BBC at the time of the interview, said: 'We now know that the BBC harboured a rogue reporter on Panorama who fabricated an elaborate, detailed but wholly false account of his dealings with Earl Spencer and Princess Diana.

'This is a shocking blot on the BBC's enduring commitment to honest journalism, and it is a matter of the greatest regret that it has taken 25 years for the full truth to emerge.

'As the director-general at the time, I offer my deep apologies to Earl Spencer and to all others affected.'

Lord Hall insisted his 'integrity' remained intact despite the criticism and pointed the finger at the shamed journalist, saying he was 'wrong to give Martin Bashir the benefit of the doubt'.

Lord Birt, director-general of the BBC at the time of the interview, said: 'We now know that the BBC harboured a rogue reporter on Panorama who fabricated an elaborate, detailed but wholly false account of his dealings with Earl Spencer and Princess Diana'

He had previously excused Bashir's 'lapse' in having the fake statements produced and declared him an 'honest and honourable man'.

However, Lord Hall has since admitted his 1996 investigation 'fell well short of what was required'.

But a defiant Mr Bashir said in a statement last month: 'This is the second time that I have willingly fully co-operated with an investigation into events more than 25 years ago.

'I apologised then, and I do so again now, over the fact that I asked for bank statements to be mocked up.

'It was a stupid thing to do and was an action I deeply regret. But I absolutely stand by the evidence I gave a quarter of a century ago, and again more recently.'
Auschwitz-Birkenau, near the town of Oswiecim, in what was then occupied Poland

Auschwitz-Birkenau was a concentration and extermination camp used by the Nazis during World War Two.

The camp, which was located in Nazi-occupied Poland, was made up of three main sites.

Auschwitz I, the original concentration camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a combined concentration and extermination camp and Auschwitz IIIMonowitz, a labour camp, with a further 45 satellite sites.

Auschwitz, pictured in 1945, was liberated by Soviet troops 76 years ago on Wednesday after around 1.1million people were murdered at the Nazi extermination camp

Auschwitz was an extermination camp used by the Nazis in Poland to murder more than 1.1 million Jews

Birkenau became a major part of the Nazis' 'Final Solution', where they sought to rid Europe of Jews.

An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, of whom at least 1.1 million died  around 90 percent of which were Jews.

Since 1947, it has operated as Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which in 1979 was named a World Heritage Site by Unesco.

Treblinka, near a village of the same name, outside Warsaw in Nazi-occupied Poland

Unlike at other camps, where some Jews were assigned to forced labor before being killed, nearly all Jews brought to Treblinka were immediately gassed to death.

Only a select few - mostly young, strong men, were spared from immediate death and assigned to maintenance work instead.

Unlike at other camps, where some Jews were assigned to forced labor before being killed, nearly all Jews brought to Treblinka were immediately gassed to death

The death toll at Treblinka was second only to Auschwitz. In just 15 months of operation - between July 1942 and October 1943 - between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews were murdered in its gas chambers.

Exterminations stopped at the camp after an uprising which saw around 200 prisoners escape. Around half of them were killed shortly afterwards, but 70 are known to have survived until the end of the war

Belzec, near the station of the same name in Nazi-occupied Poland

Belzec operated from March 1942 until the end of June 1943. It was built specifically as an extermination camp as part of Operation Reinhard.

Polish, German, Ukrainian and Austrian Jews were all killed there. In total, around 600,000 people were murdered.

The camp was dismantled in 1943 and the site was disguised as a fake farm.

Belzec operated from March 1942 until the end of June 1943. It was built specifically as an extermination camp as part of Operation Reinhard

Sobibor, near the village of the same name in Nazi-occupied Poland

Sobibor was named after its closest train station, at which Jews disembarked from extremely crowded carriages, unsure of their fate.

Jews from Poland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the Soviet Union were killed in three gas chambers fed by the deadly fumes of a large petrol engine taken from a tank.

An estimated 200,000 people were killed in the camp. Some estimations put the figure at 250,000.

This would place Sobibor as the fourth worst extermination camp - in terms of number of deaths - after Belzec, Treblinka and Auschwitz.

Sobibor was named after its closest train station, at which Jews disembarked from extremely crowded carriages, unsure of their fate

The camp was located about 50 miles from the provincial Polish capital of Brest-on-the-Bug. Its official German name was SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor.

Prisoners launched a heroic escape on October 14 1943 in which 600 men, women and children succeeded in crossing the camp's perimeter fence.

Of those, only 50 managed to evade capture. It is unclear how many crossed into allied territory.

Chelmno (also known as Kulmhof), in Nazi-occupied Poland

Chelmno was the first of Nazi Germany's camps built specifically for extermination.

It operated from December 1941 until April 1943 and then again from June 1944 until January 1945.

Between 152,000 and 200,000 people, nearly all of whom were Jews, were killed there.

Chelmno was the first of Nazi Germany's camps built specifically for extermination. It operated from December 1941 until April 1943 and then again from June 1944 until January 1945

Majdanek (also known simply as Lublin), built on outskirts of city of Lublin in Nazi-occupied Poland

Majdanek was initially intended for forced labour but was converted into an extermination camp in 1942.

It had seven gas chambers as well as wooden gallows where some victims were hanged.

In total, it is believed that as many as 130,000 people were killed there.
Dominic Cummings could breach the code of conduct for special advisers if he releases a 10-a-month newsletter revealing Government information, Downing Street warned tonight.

The former aide told ITV he would be releasing evidence 'shortly' to support a number of allegations he made against Matt Hancock over his handling of the pandemic, all of which the Health Secretary has denied.

And when asked whether No 10 would be responding to any documents released by Mr Cummings, the Prime Minister's deputy spokesman pointed to the code of conduct that special advisers are expected to abide by, even after they have left post.

He said: 'I'm not going to get drawn on that issue, I don't think you'd expect me to comment on that, but as you're aware all current and former special advisers are asked to act in full accordance with the special advisers' code of conduct.'

Asked whether No 10 thought releasing his evidence would break the code, the spokesman said: 'I'm not going to get into hypotheticals, as I said, we expect all current and former special advisers to act in full accordance with that code of conduct.'

Dominic Cummings could breach the code of conduct for special advisers if he releases a 10-a-month newsletter revealing Government information, Downing Street warned tonight

The former aide told ITV he would be releasing evidence 'shortly' to support a number of allegations he made against Matt Hancock over his handling of the pandemic, all of which the Health Secretary has denied

Hancock blows up the Domshells Matt Hancock hit back at Dominic Cummings as he insisted he had not lied to the Prime Minister and was not to blame for the deaths of thousands of care home residents. Appearing before MPs for more than four hours, the Health Secretary blamed scientists for many of the mistakes that were made during the coronavirus pandemic. He defended the timing of the first lockdown, saying that taking action earlier than March 23 last year would have gone against the scientific advice at the time. And he claimed no one had died as a result of shortages in personal protective equipment. Mr Hancock also revealed that at the start of the crisis, he was told that as many as 820,000 people could die from the disease. And he demanded a thorough investigation into whether the virus had actually escaped from a Chinese laboratory. Mr Hancock appeared before a joint meeting of the Commons science and health committees, two weeks after Mr Cummings told the same hearing that the Health Secretary could have been sacked on 15-20 occasions. Advertisement

The code of conduct says special advisers 'should not disclose official information which has been communicated in confidence in government or received in confidence from others.

'The preparation or dissemination of inappropriate material or personal attacks has no part to play in the job of being a special adviser as it has no part to play in the conduct of public life.

'Any special adviser found to be disseminating inappropriate material will be subject to a disciplinary process that may include dismissal.'

It adds: 'Special advisers must continue to observe their duties of confidentiality after they have left their employment as a special adviser.'

However since Mr Cummings is no longer working in No 10, it is not clear what any sanction could be.

Mr Cummings had accused the Health Secretary of lying, failing on care homes and 'criminal, disgraceful behaviour' on testing when he appeared in front of the Commons Health and Social Care Committee and Science and Technology Committee last month.

But the committees said this week Mr Cummings' claims would remain unproven because he has failed to provide supporting evidence.

Mr Hancock said he has 'no idea' why he was targeted by the former aide but was aware he wanted him sacked, suggesting the aide briefed his desires to newspapers.

'I think the best thing to say about this, and this will be corroborated by lots of people in Government, the best thing to say, is that Government has operated better in the past six months,' the minister said.

Appearing before MPs for more than four hours earlier this week, the Health Secretary blamed scientists for many of the mistakes that were made during the coronavirus pandemic.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson, pictured around the table at the G7 summit in Cornwall, trusted Mr Cummings as a key advisor

He defended the timing of the first lockdown, saying that taking action earlier than March 23 last year would have gone against the scientific advice at the time.

And he claimed no one had died as a result of shortages in personal protective equipment.

It comes as Mr Cummings, who left Downing Street in November after a behind-the-scenes power struggle, launched a profile on Substack, a newsletter platform that allows people to charge for newsletters.

In a post on the site on Thursday, Mr Cummings said he would be giving out information on the coronavirus pandemic for free, as well as some details of his time at Downing Street.

But revelations about 'more recondite stuff on the media, Westminster, 'inside No10', how did we get Brexit done in 2019, the 2019 election etc' will be available only to those who pay 10 a month for a subscription.

He said he also intended to use the platform to campaign for answers over the Covid pandemic and the Government's handling of it.

Users can get some access for free but then can pay 100 a year, 10 a month, or 200 a year to become a 'founding member'.

Meanwhile, Mr Cummings today reignited hostilities with the minister on social media.

Mathematician Timothy Gowers had tweeted that the Health Secretary was 'still not getting that earlier => shorter' when it comes to lockdowns, and Mr Cummings replied: 'Exactly #SackHancock'.
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Kate Middleton today revealed she has not yet met her new niece Lilibet on a video call, one week after her brother-in-law Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle welcomed their second child.

Speaking while visiting a school in Cornwall during the G7 summit today, the Duchess of Cambridge said she could not wait to meet the baby girl, whose full name is Lilibet 'Lili' Diana Mountbatten-Windsor.

But the tension was palpable when she soberly declared that they haven't yet been acquainted over video, as the frays in the relationship between the Sussexes and the Cambridges appear more and more pronounced.

Earlier this year, Meghan claimed in her bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey that Kate made her cry before she married Harry, but also insisted that she had now forgiven Kate who bought her flowers to apologise.

Last month it was claimed that the pair's spat centred on whether Princess Charlotte and the other young bridesmaids at Meghan's marriage to Harry in May 2018 should wear tights.

Society bible Tatler detailed the alleged fall-out in a profile of Kate, 38, in its latest issue.

It also carries claims that Kate feels 'exhausted and trapped' by the increased workload following the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's decision to step back from royal life.

The profile, titled Catherine the Great, quotes one unnamed friend who claims Kate wanted to follow 'protocol', with the bridesmaids, including Charlotte, then three, wearing tights  but Meghan disagreed.

Appearing alongside US First Lady Jill Biden this afternoon, Kate was asked about her new niece, and told reporters: 'I wish her all the very best.

'I can't wait to meet her because we haven't yet met her yet, so hopefully that will be soon.'

Asked by DailyMail.com if she had spoken to Lilibet on FaceTime, the temperature in the room appeared to drop a few degrees as the Duchess replied: 'No I haven't.'

White House aides and Kensington Palace officials then swiftly moved to end the impromptu press conference, asking journalists to leave the school room.

Kate Middleton spoke while in Hayle, Cornwall, today (left) - one week after Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle welcomed their second child who is a younger sister to Archie (right, pictured together in South Africa in September 2019)

The Duchess of Cambridge and US First Lady Jill Biden visit Connor Downs Academy in Hayle, Cornwall, this afternoon

Today, the Duchess and Dr Biden were visiting an academy school for four to 11-year-olds today to highlight issues surrounding the early years development of children during their meeting as the G7 summit began.

The two women met for the first time at Connor Downs Academy in Hayle in Cornwall, where world leaders have gathered for their summit, as they toured a classroom and spoke to some of the younger children at the school.

They also brought carrots which were fed by the children to the school's pet rabbits. Kate and her husband Prince William are taking part in their first G7 events, another milestone in their progression as senior royals. Later today, William and Kate will join the Queen, Prince of Wales and Camilla at the G7 Leaders' reception at the Eden Project.

William and Kate attend their first G7 events The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are taking part in their first G7 events today, another milestone in their progression as senior royals. William and Kate will join the Queen, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall at the G7 leaders reception at the Eden Project this evening. Afterwards, Prince Charles, joined by his son the duke, will host a reception for the leaders and chief executive officers from some of the world's largest companies to discuss how the private sector can work with governments to tackle the climate emergency. Earlier in the day, Kate and First Lady Jill Biden conducted their joint engagement at a school. Mrs Biden was asked yesterday about meeting the royal family - with the Bidens due to have tea with the Queen at Windsor Castle on Sunday. She replied: 'Well, we're hoping to focus, I think, on education. 'Joe and I are both looking forward to meeting the Queen. That's an exciting part of the visit for us. We've looked forward to this for weeks and now it's finally here. It's a beautiful beginning.' The Big Jubilee Lunch will form part of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee celebrations in 2022 and during Friday the monarch, joined by Kate and Camilla, will attend an event in celebration of The Big Lunch, an initiative spearheaded by the Eden Project. The royal party will meet local Big Lunch volunteers and thank them for their efforts supporting their communities through the challenges of the past year. Advertisement

Prince Charles and William will host a reception for the leaders and chief executive officers from some the world's largest companies to discuss how the private sector can work with governments to tackle the climate emergency.

The Queen is then set to host Dr Biden and her husband, US President Joe Biden, at Windsor Castle for tea on Sunday, one day after celebrating her official birthday with a scaled-back Trooping the Colour ceremony.

Lilibet 'Lili' Diana Mountbatten-Windsor, named after Harry's grandmother Queen Elizabeth II and his late mother, Princess Diana, was born one week ago at the Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital in California.

Her birth comes almost a year and a half after Harry and Meghan announced that they intended to step down from their royal roles, plunging the family into crisis, and moved into an 11million mansion in Montecito.

Their relationship with the royals further deteriorated after the interview with Oprah in March, in which they accused one of making a racist remark and said Meghan's pleas for help when she felt suicidal were ignored.

Also during the interview, Meghan claimed that Kate made her cry before she married Harry in May 2018 - but Meghan also insisted that she had now forgiven Kate, who had purchased flowers for her to apologise.

The infamous row before the wedding made headlines around the world after a supposed falling out over dresses for the flower girls, with sources initially claiming Meghan had been left displeased with the 'stressful' fitting.

Accounts differ as to whether the cause of the row was a disagreement on whether the bridesmaids should wear tights - Meghan reportedly believed they should not - or over Princess Charlotte's dress not fitting.

This week, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex launched an unprecedented legal attack on the BBC after the corporation claimed the couple did not ask the Queen if they could name their daughter Lilibet.

The extraordinary row exploded after days of claim and counter-claim over whether the Queen had been consulted or just informed of her new great-granddaughter's name and when.

A spokesman for the Sussexes has said their daughter's name was mentioned by Harry in a conversation with the Queen and 'had she not been supportive, they would not have used the name'.

The Duchess of Cambridge and US First Lady Jill Biden laugh together during a visit to Connor Downs Academy in Hayle today

Kate Middleton and the First Lady at the Connor Downs Academy in Cornwall today looking at a project with the children

Dr Biden showed children a picture of the White House, where she lives in Washington with the US President Joe Biden

Harry is due to return to the UK later this month to join William for the unveiling of a statue of Diana which the brothers commissioned four years ago in her memory. It will be unveiled at Kensington Palace on July 1.

Meanwhile at the summit today, Boris Johnson said the G7 must learn from the mistakes of the pandemic as he predicted the leading economies would 'bounce back' from the Covid-19 recession.

The Prime Minister said the group of leading democracies should also avoid the errors that followed the 2008 financial crash and ensure the recovery helped all parts of society.

The G7 nations will promise a billion doses of Covid-19 vaccine to help poorer countries tackle the pandemic, with Mr Johnson promising at least 100million surplus doses from the UK over the coming year.

The leaders were met by the Prime Minister and Carrie Johnson as they arrived at the summit in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, and posed for a 'family photograph' ahead of their discussions.

The pair, who have never met before, shared a laugh as they arrived for the official visit in Cornwall this afternoon

The Duchess of Cambridge talks with children in the Hayle school's reception class during her visit this afternoon

(From left) Prince Charles, Prince William, Kate Middleton, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry in Norfolk in December 2018

It is the first face-to-face meeting for the group in almost two years as a result of what Mr Johnson called the 'most wretched pandemic'.

The Prime Minister said: 'We need to make sure that we learn the lessons from the pandemic, we need to make sure that we don't repeat some of the errors that we doubtless made in the course of the last 18 months or so.'

He said the G7 economies: the UK, US, Canada, Japan, France, Germany and Italy; had the potential to 'bounce back very strongly' from the pandemic.

'But it is vital that we don't repeat the mistake of the last great crisis, the last great economic recession of 2008, when the recovery was not uniform across all parts of society.'

There was a risk the pandemic could leave a 'lasting scar' as 'inequalities may be entrenched', Mr Johnson said. 'We need to make sure that as we recover, we level up across our societies and we build back better,' he added.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson bumps elbows with France's President Emmanuel Macron at Carbis Bay in Cornwall today

From left, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, President of the European Council Charles Michel, US President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, French President Emmanuel Macron, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, during the 'family photo' at Carbis Bay today

Prime Minister Boris Johnson greets Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with an elbow during the G7 summit today

The Prime Minister also suggested the recovery should be a 'gender neutral' or 'more feminine' one. The politicians, including Mr Biden, will later attend a lavish reception at the Eden Project attended by the Queen.

The opening of the summit saw the politicians arrive on the beach at Carbis Bay before the leaders of the UK, US, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, Italy and the EU gathered together for the customary group photo.

With the focus on avoiding the spread of coronavirus, Mr and Mrs Johnson bumped elbows with the visiting leaders in place of the pre-pandemic handshakes.

The seaside location led Mrs Biden to joke 'I feel like we are at a wedding'. while the newlywed Mr Johnson said it was like 'walking down the aisle'.

President Biden urged the watching media to go swimming, quipping 'everyone in the water'. Following the group photo, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, was seen in deep conversation with Mr Biden.

European Council President Charles Michel's wife Amelie Derbaudrenghien (left) gets an elbow bump from Carrie Johnson

Boris Johnson's wife Carrie Johnson greets German Chancellor Angela Merkel during arrivals for the G7 meeting today

US President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden are greeted by Prime Minister Boris Johnson with an elbow bump today

Mr Johnson had a diplomatic triumph yesterday when he met Mr Biden for the US President's first overseas talks.

But German Chancellor Angela Merkel will travel to Washington next month, beating Mr Johnson to the White House.

Over the coming days, Mr Johnson will have talks with Mrs Merkel and other key EU players, including Mr Macron and the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, as efforts continue to resolve the dispute over Northern Ireland's post-Brexit arrangements.

A 'sausage war' trade dispute looms if the UK unilaterally delays imposing a ban on British-made chilled meats heading to Northern Ireland which is due to come into force at the end of the month.

The pledge on vaccines comes with the leaders under pressure to do more to share the burden of protecting the world from the virus.

Under the Prime Minister's plan, the UK will provide five million doses by the end of September, with 25 million more by the end of 2021 and the rest in 2022.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson greets France's President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte with an elbow bump today

Prime Minister Boris Johnson (2-R) and his wife Carrie (R) welcome Japan's Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga (2-L) and his wife Mariko Suga (L) during the G7 summit today

Justin Trudeau arrived alone to be greeted by the Prime Minister and Carrie on the beach at Carbis Bay in Cornwall today

But he resisted calls from campaigners to take further action, including waiving patents on vaccines, insisting that the deal to supply Oxford/AstraZeneca jabs at cost price and the UK's funding for the Covax initiative to provide doses around the world showed Britain was doing its share.

The Prime Minister told the BBC: 'I think that the people of this country should be very proud that of the 1.5 billion doses that are being distributed around the world to the poorest and neediest in the world under the Covax programme, one in three come from the Oxford/AstraZeneca deal that the UK did, allowing those vaccines to be distributed at cost.'

Zoe Abrams, executive director at the British Red Cross, said the promise on vaccines was 'heartening' but added: 'While every commitment must be welcomed, more needs to be done, and fast.'

The UK has gone back on a commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of national income on overseas aid, cutting the amount to 0.5 per cent due to the economic carnage caused by the pandemic.

But the donation of vaccines will count as extra aid spending on top of the 10billion already promised under the reduced target.
An Ivy League school has dropped its investigation into medical students after it accused them of cheating during online examinations.

The Dean of Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine apologised to the 17 students that were charged with cheating in March in an email to the school community.

'I have apologized to the students for what they have been through and believe dismissal of the charges is the best path forward,' Geisel Dean Duane Compton wrote in the email sent on Wednesday.

Dartmouth charged the 17 students with cheating earlier this year based on a review of some of their online activity on Canvas - a learning management system widely-used among universities.

The school claimed that the students - during a closed book examination being held online - accessed other web-based course material at the same time.

But backlash came from students and alumni, and from the wider academic community, who argued that the data being used by Dartmouth was being misinterpreted, and did not show that the students had cheated.

The Dean of Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine has apologised to the 17 students that were charged with cheating in March in an email to the school community

Using Canvas, professors can post resources and assignments for their students, who in turn can submit their work through the system online and remotely.

The school quickly dropped cases against seven of the students after at least two argued that administrators had mistaken automated Canvas activity for human cheating.

Now, Dartmouth has dropped the allegations against the remaining ten students, who before were facing expulsion, suspension, course failures and misconduct marks against their academic records that could have ended their medical careers.

The school has now offered 10 of the students who received sanctions in April an opportunity to appeal the decision.

The decision to dismiss the charges came after an investigation that lasted months, that initially resulted in a Geisel committee recommending three students should be expelled and others receive lesser punishments.

The students argued that the medical school was misinterpreting the data about their usage of Canvas, which the university was using to track student activity without their knowledge.

Geisel Dean Duane Compton (pictured) apologised to the medical students in an email on Wednesday over the erroneous cheating accusations that could have seen them suspended

This was unusual, as Canvas was not designed to be a forensic tool, according to the New York Times, whose own review found the student's Canvas activity could automatically generate data - even when not being used.

With the clash turning the Ivy League school into a battleground over increasing school and student surveillance during the Covid pandemic, Dartmouth's practices were condemned by some of the school's alumni, along with some of its faculty and other medical students - leading to protests on campus.

In a statement on Thursday, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) wrote: 'It was a process in which Dartmouth appeared to gravely misunderstand, or willfully ignore, the highly complicated data it used as the basis of its accusations against the students.'

Dartmouth's use of Canvas raised questions, technology experts have said, and while some students could have cheated, it would be challenging for school administrates to be able to tell the difference between cheating and non-cheating.

That was down to the kind of Canvas data snapshots that Dartmouth used, according to the New York Times.

Some of the accused students said that Dartmouth had limited their ability to defend themselves, being given a 48-hour time limit to respond the charges.

A screenshot of a Canvas dashboard. Students denied accessing the remote learning platform to cheat during exams, and have now been cleared of the charges

They were also not given full access to the data logs for their exams, were advised to plead guilty despite maintaining their innocence, and in some cases given just two minutes to make their case in online hearings, according to six of the students and The Times, after reviewing documents.

But in an interview in April, Dr. Compton said that the used by the school school to identify possible cheating were fair and valid, and argued that administrators had provided the students with all the evidence the accusations were based on.

He also denied the claim that those who said they had not cheated were encouraged to plead guilty.

With the clash turning the Ivy League school into a battleground over increasing school and student surveillance during the Covid pandemic, Dartmouth's practices were condemned by some of the school's alumni, along with some of its faculty and other medical students - leading to protests on campus

But in his email on Wednesday, he took a less combative tone.

'As we look to the future, we must ensure fairness in our honor code review process, especially in an academic environment that includes more remote learning,' the dean wrote. 'We will learn from this and we will do better.'

In FIRE's statement, Foundation Program Officer Alex Morey said the school needed to introduce policies in order to protect its student's rights.

'Dartmouth's fresh commitment to 'rebuilding trust' among the students it unfairly accused in this case should start with promising a fair process to all future students who may find themselves facing a similar misconduct allegation,' Morey said.

'When it comes to trust, due process provides it: Giving everyone involved confidence that when a school reaches a result in a misconduct investigation, it's a fair one.'
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President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden greeted G7 leaders on the beach in Cornwall Friday for the official start of the summit to rebuild relationships that were 'frayed' during four years of President Donald Trump.

With a picturesque view of the Atlantic Ocean behind them, Biden joked: 'Everybody in the water.'

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson, however, suggested they gather for a group picture.

'Okay, here we are folks - right. Everybody here? Alright, weve got it,' Johnson said as photogs snapped socially distant pictures of the seven leaders standing apart from one another on a platform built on the sand.

The British PM, as host leader, took the lead in greeting the leaders of seven most industrialized nations, exchanging elbow bumps and herding them into place for the group pic.

As the leaders left the photo op for their first sit down, French President Emmanuel Macron took the opportunity to throw his arm around Biden's shoulders and begin an animated discussion.

Meanwhile, Jill Biden elbow-bumped Johnson upon arrival. Earlier Friday she toured a school with Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge.

The first lady changed from a white dress and pink blazer into a bespoke, recycled scarlet dress from Texan designer Brandon Maxwell, teamed with matching high heels for the family photo.

'I feel like Im at a wedding,' she said.

Biden was also asked about his message to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who he'll meet next week in Geneva, Switzerland after a stopover in Brussels, Belgium for a NATO meeting.

'I'll tell you after I deliver it,' the president told reporters.

Among the topics for the first formal day of meetings were delivering the COVID vaccine globally and having a 15 per cent global minimum tax on businesses.

Johnson, who opened the meeting in his role as host, outlined the agenda for the leadership, which was a focus on rebuilding in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

''Building back greener and building back fairer and building back more equal and, how shall I, in a more gender neutral and, perhaps a more feminine way,' he said.

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson (center) holds up his hands as the G7 leaders pose Friday for the family photo. He's joined by (from left) Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, President of the European Council Charles Michel, President Joe Biden, Japan's Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Italy's Prime minister Mario Draghi, France's President Emmanuel Macron, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson (center left), his spouse Carrie Johnson (left) and President Joe Biden (center right) and first lady Jill Biden (right) arrive Friday at the G7 to take the so-called family photo

British Prime Minister (center right) Boris Johnson gives a fist bump to first lady Jill Biden (center left) as their spouses look on during opening greetings during Friday's G7 summit in Cornwall

President Joe Biden (left) walks hand-in-hand with first lady Jill Biden (right) as they arrive for the official start of the G7 summit

President Joe Biden (left) put his hand on the back of French President Emmanuel Macron (right) as world leaders greeted each other at the start of the G7 Friday in Cornwall

France's President Emmanuel Macron (left) walks alongside President Joe Biden (right) at the opener of the G7 Friday

resident Macron also posted a gushing tweet of his conversation with President Biden

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson (right) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (second from right) led the pack of world leaders to the beachy scene where they would take this year's G7 family photo

President Joe Biden checks his watch as he arrives Friday for the start of the G7

Earlier, the PM and Carrie were all smiles as they formally greeted G7 leaders on the golden sands of Carbis Bay.

The PM and his new wife, wearing a vivid fuchsia dress, welcomed the guests to the official start of the summit one by one on a beachfront board walk.

Johnson, who notoriously boasted he was still shaking hands with everyone in the early stages of the pandemic, appeared to remind himself not to get too close, saying 'Elbows!'

Joe Biden was accompanied by wife Jill, while Angela Merkel was with her husband, but Justin Trudeau and Mario Draghi of Italy arrived alone. A grinning Emmanuel Macron strolled up alongside Brigitte, with Johnson warmly referring to him as 'Emmanuel' despite the French president stoking the Northern Ireland row by vowing to veto an overhaul of the protocol.

During the summit the leaders will pledge 1 billion shots in arms of the COVID vaccine for the world, support a 15 per cent global minimum corporate tax, and target Big Tech with a new tax.

Of those billion shots, half will come from the United States and 100 million from the U.K.

'We're going to help lead the world out of this pandemic working alongside our global partners,' Biden said on Thursday, adding that the G7 nations would join the U.S. in outlining their vaccine donation commitments at the three-day summit. The G-7 also includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.

The leaders gathered for opening greetings and a socially-distanced family photo, before pivoting to a session 'Building Back Better From COVID-19.'

Both Biden and Johnson use the term.

In his opening remarks Johnson said the world needed to 'build back better' after the COVID-19 pandemic, which means 'building back greener and building back fairer, and building back more equal and, how shall I, in a more gender neutral and perhaps a more feminine way.'

Johnson warned the leaders that the world shouldn't repeat the errors in handling the coronavirus pandemic and also the sluggish economic recovery after the 2008 crash.

'The recovery was not uniform' across parts of society, Johnson said.

Reporters only got a brief peek into the leaders' first session before they were ushered out, which is custom.

'This is meant to be a fireside chat between the great democracies of the world,' Johnson said. 'It's turned into a gigantic media circus in which we have to greet each other several times.'

The prime minister also said it was good to see his fellow leaders in person. Global chiefs, like many others during the pandemic, were meeting via Zoom for the past year due to COVID restrictions.

'It is genuinely wonderful to see everyone in person,' he said. 'We have been going through the most wretched pandemic.'

Carrie Johnson helped British PM Boris Johnson formally greet the world leaders

Carrie Johnson and President Joe Biden, who exchanged warm greetings on Thursday, elbow bump as Jill Biden and Boris Johnson look on

The leaders of the G7 posed for an official, yet socially distanced, photo on the beach

Italian PM Mario Draghi joined the fun as the summit got under way this afternoon, sitting with France's President Emmanuel Macron (C) and President of the European Council Charles Michel

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson, centre and wife Carrie Johnson, pose with Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, during the Leaders official welcome

President Joe Biden joked with French President Emmanuel Macron as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau followed them

French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron arrive for leader meeting

Activists wearing giant heads of the G7 leaders tussle over a giant COVID-19 vaccine syringe during an action of NGO's on Swanpool Beach in Falmouth, Cornwall

Jill Biden slips on a coat after formally greeting the Johnsons

Beyond vaccines, the world leaders of the seven industrial nations will also second an agreement made earlier by their finance ministers on the global minimum corporate tax.

The update to international tax law is intended to end a global competition that has led some countries to cut their corporate taxes much lower than others in order to attract multinational companies to their shores.

It's a big win for Biden's administration, which has proposed the global minimum tax as a way to pay for infrastructure projects. Biden wants to hike corporate taxes in the US and a global minimum will help combat fears his move could cause jobs to move overseas.

The leaders will also announce a plan to replace Digital Services Taxes, which targeted the biggest American tech companies - such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google - with a new tax plan linked to the places where multinationals are actually doing business, rather than where they are headquartered.

From left: President of the European Council Charles Michel, Japan's Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, France's President Emmanuel Macron, Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson, President Joe Biden, Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Italy's Prime minister Mario Draghi and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen attend a working sesssion at the G7 summit

President Joe Biden (right) sits alongside British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (left) at the opening session Friday of the G7

An inflatable Joe Biden (left) and Boris Johnson (right) were on display Friday morning in Falmouth, England

Kate Middleton (left) and first lady Jill Biden (right) speak to the press during a visit Friday to Connor Downs Academy in Hayle, West Cornwall

First lady Jill Biden (left) and the Duchess of Cambridge (right) look at a picture of the cover of 'Greta and the Giants'

Later the leaders will meet Queen Elizabeth II and other members of the Royal Family at the Eden Project, a lush, domed eco-tourism site built in a former quarry pit.

Prince Charles, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince William and Kate, Duchess of Cambridge will join the G7 leaders at the reception.

On Thursday, world leaders from G7 countries arrived in Britain.

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrived at Cornwall Airport in Newquay wearing a face mask and waved from the exit of his jet beside his country's coat of arms and maple leaf flag.

European Council President Charles Michel also arrived ahead of the G7 meeting at the airport on June 10, and was met by a selection of British soldiers, sailors and airmen.

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and his wife Mariko Suga arrived in Newquay in the early hours of this morning.

A typical flight from his country to Britain takes roughly 12 hours.

Johnson will host leaders from the USA, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and Canada at the G7 Summit to be held in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, beginning today.

Britain has invited Australia, India, South Africa, and South Korea to attend the Leaders' Summit as guest countries - as well as the EU, amid trade tensions with the bloc.

President Joe Biden and leaders of the G7 will pledge 1 billion shots in arms of the COVID vaccine for the world, support a 15 per cent global minimum corporate tax, and target Big Tech with a new tax as the summit begins

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrives ahead of the G7 Summit at Cornwall airport in Newquay, Britain, 10 June

European Council President Charles Michel (C) arrives ahead of the G7 meeting at Cornwall airport on June 10, 2021 in Newquay

President of the European Council, Charles Michel (centre) is welcomed as he arrives at Cornwall Airport Newquay ahead of the G7 summit, June 10

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and his wife Mariko Suga arrive at Newquay Airport on June 11, 2021 in Newquay
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's angry tweet about her grandmother's damaged home in Puerto Rico and accusations about 'blocked' Hurricane Maria aid sparked a new storm  with one right-wing commentator starting a GoFundMe page that raised $104,000 to help her 'abuela'.

But the fiery congresswoman might not have the unequivocal support of one member of her family for her online outburst.

AOC tweeted two pictures of grandmother Clotilde Rivera's ruined ceiling with the words: 'Just over a week ago, my abuela fell ill. I went to Puerto Rico to see her  my 1st time in a year+ bc of COVID.

'This is her home. Hurricane Maria help hasn't arrived. Trump blocked relief $ for PR.

'And for the record - my abuela is doing okay. It's not about us, but about what's happening to Puerto Ricans across the island.'

DailyMail.com tracked down 81-year-old Clotilde's home to a quiet community just outside the picturesque coastal city of Arecibo - located 40 miles west from capital San Juan - on the island's beautiful north coast.

And when we politely approached the two-story flat-roofed residence, we were met by a woman who told us emphatically after viewing AOC's tweets: 'I am her aunt. We don't speak for the community.'

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shared images on social media last week showing her grandmother's severely damaged house in Puerto Rico

DailyMail.com tracked down the home of AOC's grandmother to a quiet community just outside the coastal city of Arecibo on Puerto Rico's north coast

Blue tarps are seen atop Clotilde Rivera's, home which appears to still sustain damages since the passing of Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Irma in 2017

A woman who identified herself as AOC's aunt told us, 'We are private people, we don't talk about our family. We don't speak for the community'

The relative, who refused to give her name, added: 'We are private people, we don't talk about our family.' Ironically for AOC, she also refused to blame former President Donald Trump for thousands of Hurricane Maria victims being unable to get money to repair shattered homes.

However she did express sympathy for those who still need help after the 2017 disaster, which damaged 90 per cent of the island's 1.3million dwellings and killed 2,975 people.

The area where AOC's grandmother lives experienced some of the worst devastation on the island when the category 5 storm swept through after making landfall on September 20.

AOC's Puerto Rican-born mother Blanca Cortez (pictured) now lives in Eustis, Florida, and Clotilde has lived with her there. Her US-born father Sergio Ocasio Roman died of cancer in 2008 while she was at Boston College

Her aunt said: 'In this area people need a lot of help. Many people have needed it for the past four years and haven't had anything.'

Yet she did not pin that on Trump, adding: 'It's a problem here in Puerto Rico with the administration and the distribution of help. It is not a problem with Washington. We had the assistance and it didn't get to the people.'

AOC had tweeted of her abuela  Spanish for grandmother: 'She had a place to go and be cared for  what about the thousands of people who don't?'

Clotilde's house is in a quiet street about a quarter mile from the rolling waves of the Caribbean and a popular sandy beach enjoyed by locals and tourists.

AOC's tweeted photos appear to show the second floor, with a drooping ceiling. Outside, a set of iron stairs leads up to what appears a separate entrance on the upper level. A small black car was parked under cover beside the home, which is fronted by a large metal fence.

It was not clear from our visit if the aunt lived at the house as well, on the lower floor from where she emerged.

However it does appear Clotilde is still living there.

When we asked the relative if we could speak to Clotilde about her circumstances, she went back into the house on the lower level. About 15 seconds later she emerged saying: 'She's not talking to anybody.'

From the tweets, it appears the grandmother's ceiling has experienced water damage. Certainly the flat roof has a blue tarp covering some of it, still a common sight on houses in Puerto Rico that have not been fully repaired from Maria damage.

The reason why the home is still in that state if it was damaged by the hurricane remains unclear.

AOC blamed the damage on former President Donald Trump for blocking aid to the island ravaged by Hurricane Maria

One image of AOC's grandmother's home shows a room where there is a dresser and more ceiling panels falling down

Another image shows a room with just a chair and several plastic buckets to catch water coming rom the ceiling, which is falling down in several spots

Conservative Matt Walsh raised more than $104,000 to help repair the home, but the congresswoman refused it

Walsh, a blogger for Daily Wire who launched the fundraiser, confirmed on Saturday that 'someone in AOC's abuela's family told GoFundMe that she won't take the money, even though AOC previously claimed that her grandma was in dire straits (and it was Trump's fault)'

Commentator Matt Walsh, a blogger for right-wing leaning Daily Wire, created headlines when he raised more than $104,000 to help repair it through a GoFundMe appeal.

He said it was rich that someone on $174,000 a year and who drives a Tesla would beg on twitter for help  then revealed AOC's family would not take the money raised.

'This is a problem we could've solved not just for abuela but they could've taken the money, fix the ceiling, bought her some furniture she clearly needs, and then could've taken the rest of the money and helped the neighbors, they could've helped the whole community, but they didn't want to do that,' Walsh stated

Walsh had written: 'One cannot be certain of the cost to repair grandma's house, but surely most of the work could be completed for the price of AOC's shiny Tesla Model 3.

'Sadly, virtue signaling isn't going to fix abuela's roof. So we are. Let's all kick in to help save AOC's abuela's ancestral home.'

While proudly proclaiming her Puerto Rican heritage, Bronx-born AOC, 31, has said little publicly about where her family come from on the island.

However her relatives near Arecibo  which has the feel of a gentle country town - did publicly rejoice when she was voted in as US Representative for the 14th district of New York in 2018, which covers her home borough and Queens.

They gave an enthusiastic interview to the island's daily newspaper, El Nuevo Dia, and even posed in front of grandmother Clotilde's house.

First cousin Wally Allende said of AOC: 'She loves coming to Puerto Rico. As a child, she spent her vacations here with us, not at Disney or anything like that. Now he usually comes at least every year.'

And he revealed while the world knows her as Alexandria, to them she was simply 'Sandy'.

An aunt, Gladys Roman  not believed to be the relative who spoke to Dailymail.com  said: 'She is a very talented young woman. She inherited sweetness from her mother, but strength comes from her father.

'She is very persistent and brilliant, and when she believes in something no one can stop her.'

AOC's Puerto Rican-born mother Blanca Cortez now lives in Eustis, Florida, and Clotilde has lived with her there. Her US-born father Sergio Ocasio Roman died of cancer in 2008 while she was at Boston College.

Other cousins on the island are Jose and Javier Allende. Aunt Gladys added to the paper: 'She's not afraid of anything.'

Certainly AOC would have found the area she visited each year as a child somewhat different to the surroundings of her apartment in Washington DC.

Ocasio-Cortez' family comes the municipality of Arecibo, Puerto Rico (pictured). The eye of Hurricane Maria passed through Arecibo

Sandra Jimenez, 53, stands next to the ruined upper floor of the house she was finishing off constructing when Maria hit. Her roof, which had just been completed, was blown clean off

Arecibo is a municipality on the northern coast of Puerto Rico, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, located 40 miles west from the capital San Juan

Damaged homes are seen in the neighborhood of AOC's grandmother after both Hurricanes Maria and Irma ripped through the island

Behind her grandmother's home runs a road with several ruined or half repaired properties, forlornly overlooking an area of scrubby grass and trees where cars have been dumped and chickens peck and scratch around.

Bordering the charming store and cafe-lined square in Arecibo lies the city hall containing the municipal government, which has jurisdiction over where AOC's gran lives. Inside, planning director Leslie Orama offered a possible solution to the roof dilemma facing the US politician's relative.

The surrounding streets are essentially middle class, with many homes brightly painted in yellow or orange. Yet among them, many gutted houses abandoned after Maria stand out like missing teeth. Locals we talked to said their owners upped and left, unable to afford repairs after being denied financial help.

Immediately after the hurricanes, 98 per cent of homeowners with damaged property applied to the Federal Emergency and Management Agency (FEMA) for cash to rebuild. Forty per cent were turned down because of eligibility rules that include being able to prove they own the property.

Marcelina Ramos, 81, who lives 200 yards from AOC's gran in the same street, fought to get $4,000 for rebuilding after Maria tore into her roof and flooded her home.

She told DailyMail.com: 'It was crazy. Everything fell down, there was water everywhere, coming into the house from two points.

'FEMA gave me money, but it wasn't enough to fix this place. I just had to take what they offered to try to make it habitable.

'Others in this street just gave up. Their houses were destroyed and they couldn't fix them. We hear they plan to come back some day, but who knows. Many just left the island and went to Miami.'

Marcelina, who is helped by son Elier, 53, added: 'We agree with what AOC is saying. There still isn't enough help.'

Immediately opposite, Sandra Jimenez, 53, stood next to the ruined upper floor of the house she was finishing off constructing when Maria hit. Her roof, which had just been completed, was blown clean off.

She said: 'I did all the paperwork, they came and checked the house, but I received no money. It's been so long now that I have no faith I will get help.'

Marcelina Ramos, 81, who lives 200 yards from AOC's gran in the same street, fought to get $4,000 for rebuilding after Maria tore into her roof and flooded her home

Marcelina, who is helped by son Elier, 53, added: 'We agree with what AOC is saying. There still isn't enough help'

AOC also claimed in her string of tweets about her gran and Maria that eligibility rules for rebuilding cash had been tightened  and that developers were making a killing because people were forced to abandon their homes.

Proving ownership in order to get cash remains the toughest requirement for many islanders. About half of homes built on the island never had permits according to the Puerto Rican Builders Association.

Many other homes were simply built on vacant land. And inheritance on the island is often informal and without any paperwork, so it is impossible to prove a person has the title deeds to a property.

Bordering the charming store and cafe-lined square in Arecibo lies the city hall containing the municipal government, which has jurisdiction over where AOC's gran lives. Inside, planning director Leslie Orama offered a possible solution to the roof dilemma facing the US politician's relative.

She said simply: 'If we can get the name of the lady, we might be able to reach some other funding that could be helpful for her to ensure that she lives under appropriate conditions.'

Orama said if people had been refused by FEMA, they could go to the municipal government for possible help through various grants now available.

She added: 'There are City Development Block Grants and they have a lot of programs, including regular funding to help people fix their homes.

'If the citizen comes and we are able to help, we will make every effort to support them.'

She denied AOC's statement that relief 'hasn't arrived', adding 'that's not the case'. Yet she admitted problems, saying: 'It is just that it has been limited in the amount that can be handed to the people that were affected, because of the process itself.

'It might require objective evidence that people might not be able to provide. One of those is proof of ownership. What's happening is not that the money is not there, it's just the requirements to get the help makes it difficult to receive it.'

The city official also cited past corruption  but said it was in the claims, not the distribution. She added: 'I know that the federal government has been making sure that the money goes to the right places. It is not that I support the way they are acting or working, but I understand that they might be ensuring that all the support is handled correctly.

'Sometimes the claims are not real. Or people even damage their own stuff in order to get money. Some people do the right thing, some people don't.'
A furious sheriff condemned the friends and family of a gunman who murdered a grandmother and her one year-old grandson for not reporting his bloodcurdling Facebook threats to kill.

Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw could not contain the anger in his voice as he hit out at friends and relatives of Timothy J. Wall, 55, a day after he killed a 69 year-old grandma and her toddler grandson at a Publix in Royal Palm Beach, Florida.

Wall is not believed to have known either of his victims, with cops currently treating the double-murder suicide as a horrific random attack.

Bradshaw said: 'Somebody knew about it, that bad things were going to happen with this guy; and number 2 is, obviously, there's a mental unstableness involving this.'

He added: 'There was a chance this could be stopped - you know why? The reason is - he's on Facebook. He has said "I want to kill people and children." He's got friends. Obviously they saw that.'

'His ex wife say's he's been acting strange. He thinks he's being followed. he's paranoid,' Bradshaw continued. 'You think a damn soul told us about that? No.'

And if it sounds like I'm angry, I am. Because if somebody could have gotten involved and called us on the phone and said: "Hey, this may not be anything, but it may be something, because this person is talking about bad things, and he's acting strange.'

Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, pictured, could not contain the anger in his voice as he hit out at friends and relatives of Timothy J. Wall

Wall allegedly shot a 69-year-old grandmother, pictured, to death after shooting and killing her one-year-old grandson. Neither victim has been named in accordance with local laws

Timothy J. Wall, 55, of Royal Palm Beach, is suspected of using a handgun to shoot the grandmother and child Thursday morning

Wall's Facebook page has since been taken down. The grandma he killed was pictured by WPLG but neither she nor her grandson have been named in accordance with a local law allowing victims to remain anonymous at the request of their loved-ones.

Police revealed on Friday that the grandmother tried grabbing the handgun from the stranger who'd just shot her one-year-old grandson dead at a supermarket before he shot and killed her and himself.

Wall allegedly took out his gun in the produce section of a Publix at 1180 Royal Palm Beach Boulevard in Royal Palm Beach at 11:31 a.m. on Thursday and shot one round killing the child, the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office said.

'The grandmother interferes with the gunman and because of her brave actions, his gun jams. After some struggling, he then ends up shooting the grandmother and then himself,' the sheriff's office tweeted.

The gunman had pushed the grandmother to the ground as he tried to reload, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported.

A man shot and killed a woman and a toddler inside a Florida supermarket on Thursday morning before turning the gun on himself, according to authorities

The Palm Beach Sheriff's Office sent deputies at 11:40am to the Publix store on Royal Palm Beach Boulevard

Bystander photo shows an armed officer outside the site of the deadly shooting in Palm Beach, Florida, on Thursday, in the immediate aftermath

Bradshaw noted the shooting could have been prevented because Wall had made posts to Facebook 'saying he wanted to kill people and children' and that 'the shooter's own wife said he was acting strangely and paranoid.'

The Sun Sentinel reported that Wall's Facebook page had been deactivated on the day of the killing.

The 69-year-old grandmother was a retired registered nurse and her son, the father of the boy who was killed, is an evidence specialist who has worked for the Sunny Isles Beach Police Department as a civilian for more than 20 years, WPLG reported.

Police are still trying to understand the motive for the slaying - and believe the shooting was Wall's first encounter with the victims.

'There is no known relationship between the gunman and the victims, however, detectives are still investigating,' said Teri Barbera, spokesperson for Palm Beach Sheriff's Office.

However, bankruptcy and divorce court records show Wall as a financially troubled man with escalating debts.

Court records showed Wall declared bankruptcy earlier this year, with $6,000 in assets versus $215,000 in debts, according to bankruptcy records, WPLG reported.

A row of patrol vehicles are seen outside a Dollar Tree near the supermarket on Royal Palm Beach Boulevard after the shooting on Thursday

Palm Beach County Sheriff's officers stand outside of a Publix supermarket where a woman, child and a man were found shot to death

Wall once had an office just six doors down from the Publix and had operated a dry cleaning business in the same plaza, the Sun Sentinel reported - noting that his former office now has a for-rent sign on the door.

The outlet obtained an affidavit he had filed in his 2017 divorce proceedings in which he claimed he only had $250 in cash with $5 in his checking account and just $1 in his savings account. He also reportedly claimed he had $15,000 in credit card debt.

When the divorce was granted in 2018, a Florida judge told Wall he could remain in the home through the end of that year but would have to move out. He was still living in the home by May 2019 and his ex-wife sued to evict him.

The Sun Sentinel revealed that Wall was also sued by a creditor but that lawsuit was dismissed after Wall was granted Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

Deputies were called to the Publix store on Royal Palm Beach Boulevard at 11:40am after reports that at least three shots were fired.

The toddler's father was called to the scene to identify his son, reported WPLG. He would have turned two later this month.

The grandmother had been shopping with him inside the store at the time. The sheriff's office initially said it is 'possible' the gunman and the victims 'knew each other', but no connection has been released.

Three people - a man, woman and child - were found dead from gunshot wounds inside

The Palm Beach Sheriff's Office said in a tweet the incident is 'NOT an active shooter situation'

Officers stand outside the store. Officials are trying to determine if there was a relationship between the male shooter and his two victims, but none has been found

The woman and child are relatives and were with each other at the time of the shooting

At a press conference Thursday afternoon, officials said they were reviewing surveillance footage and speaking to witnesses as part of the investigation.

Officials will not release the names of the victims, as the sheriff said the family has invoked Marsy's Law - which protects crime victims and their families. There are also no plans to release the surveillance footage at the moment, cops said.

Witnesses described hearing gunshots sending staff and customers running to safety from the supermarket.

Juan Guardia told the Palm Beach Post he was near the deli when the shooting happened in the produce aisle.

'I heard, 'They're shooting!' A woman Publix worker said, 'Run! Shooting!'' Guardia said. 'I was scared. It's sad because everything happened fast. Everyone was running, some employees were crying.'

Ron Glassman, a stress management consultant, had just parked his car and was heading to another store when about 50 customers and employees ran out of the Publix yelling, 'There's a shooter, there's a shooter. Don't go in there.'

'It was pretty chaotic. People were very shaken,' Glassman said.

He said armed sheriff's deputies wearing helmets and bulletproof vests arrived about five minutes later.

The sheriff's office said it is 'possible' the gunman and the victims 'knew each other' but provided no further details about the potential relationship, with none currently found

An aerial image of law enforcement responding to the scene of the shooting Thursday morning

Timothy J. Wall, 55 is suspected of using a handgun to shoot the grandmother and child before he turned the gun on himself. The victims won't be identified publicly

Customer Lynn Waterman told the Sun-Sentinel she was at a cash register when she heard what she initially mistook for the sound of popping balloons.

Suddenly, Waterman said the cashier announced there was a shooter and took off.

A witness at a bank nearby told WPBT he saw a stampede fleeing from the Publix.

'I saw about 50 customers and staff leave in, I would say, about 10 or 15 seconds,' Glassman added.

Publix is Florida's largest grocery store chain with 817 locations. Maria Brous, a spokeswoman for the company, said in a statement that Publix was working with law enforcement.

'Our thoughts are with those who are impacted by this tragedy. We are cooperating with the local law enforcement,' she said.

'Since this is an active police investigation, we cannot confirm any additional details.'

The sheriff's office later stated that the store location would remain closed on Friday. Customers who left items at the store have a three-hour window to pick them up by noon on Friday.

DailyMail.com has reached out to the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office for more information.

Royal Palm Beach is a middle-class suburb home to around 40,000 people.
Shocking police bodycam footage has been released showing the moment two officers were shot and a suspected gunman was wounded during a shootout in Chicago.

Bruce Lua, 45, was chased by cops in Lawndale at 7am on May 16 after a gunshot detection system alerted them to him.

They followed him for several blocks at a distance while shouting at him to stop and show his hands, but he appears to ignore their instructions.

Shocking police bodycam footage has been released showing the moment two officers were shot

The video shows Lua continue to walk until he suddenly pulls out a gun and fires at an officer from point blank range.

Multiple officers then returned fire and struck the suspect in the leg.

One angle shows an officer falling to the ground as he returns fire before confirming, 'I'm hit, I'm hit.'

Lua also fell to the ground after being shot and can be heard groaning.

Bruce Lua, 45, was chased by cops in Lawndale at 7am on May 16 after a gunshot detection system alerted them to him

They followed him for several blocks at a distance while shouting at him to stop and show his hands, but he appears to ignore their instructions

The video shows Lua continue to walk until he suddenly pulls out a gun and fires at an officer from point blank range

One officer, 26, was shot in the hand while a 28-year-old cop was struck in the hip and shoulder.

The pair and Lua survived and received treatment in hospital before being released the same day.

Two days later, Lua was charged with two counts of attempted murder, two counts of aggravated battery to a peace officer and unlawful use of a weapon.

One officer, 26, was shot in the hand while a 28-year-old cop was struck in the hip and shoulder

The pair and Lua survived and received treatment in hospital before being released the same day

He was also ordered held on $100,000 bail for his pending misdemeanor assault case

He was also ordered held on $100,000 bail for his pending misdemeanor assault case.

Chicago police Superintendent David Brown said after the shooting: 'They were in uniform, clearly Chicago police officers, and this offender had no regard for their position as police officers  no regard  and began trying to kill them.

'But for the good Lord's grace that we're not here talking about planning a funeral for our officers.'

The Civilian Office of Police Accountability released the bodycam footage as part of their comprehensive use of force investigation, which is still underway.
Winston Churchill's rousing speeches inspired a nation and played a key role in maintaining Britain's morale during the dark early days of the Second World War.

His defiant and powerful words allowed ordinary Britons, soldiers, sailors and airmen to feel hope.

He replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister on May 10 1940.

Days earlier, the 'phoney war', the period of relative calm following the declaration of war on September 3, 1939, had ended with the German invasion of France, Belgium and Holland.

Churchill's first speech as premier to the House of Commons, three days later, would go down in history as one of his most famous.

Winston Churchill's rousing speeches inspired a nation and played a key role in maintaining Britain's morale during the dark early days of the Second World War

He said: 'I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

'We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.

'You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.

'You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

'Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal.

'But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. At this time, I feel entitled to claim the aid of all, and I say, 'Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength.' '

Extract from his first broadcast as PM to the country on May 19, 1940.

'I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister in a solemn hour for the life of our country, of our Empire, of our allies, and, above all, of the cause of freedom . . .

'It would be foolish . . . to disguise the gravity of the hour. It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage or to suppose that well-trained, well-equipped armies numbering three or four millions of men can be overcome in the space of a few weeks, or even months...

'Side by side, unaided except by their kith and kin in the great Dominions and by the wide empires which rest beneath their shield  side by side, the British and French peoples have advanced to rescue not only Europe but mankind from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history.

'Behind them  behind us, behind the armies and fleets of Britain and France  gather a group of shattered states and bludgeoned races: the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians  upon all of whom the long night of barbarism will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must; as conquer we shall.

'Today is Trinity Sunday. Centuries ago, words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of truth and justice, 'Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be.' '

Extract from his Commons speech on June 4, 1940, after the evacuation of 338,000 Allied troops from Dunkirk.

'I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone.

'At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty's Government  every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.

'Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail.

'We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.'

Extract from his Commons speech on June 18, 1940.

'What General Weygand [the French Allied commander] called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.

'Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us.

'Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.

'But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

'Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour." '
A Virginia father made his final child support payment last month by dumping 80,000 pennies on his ex-wife's front lawn in Virginia.

The man, who has not been identified, is seen in security footage parking in front of the Glen Allen home with a trailer before dumping pennies, which add up to $800 he owed in child support for his estranged 18-year old daughter, Avery Sanford.

In home surveillance footage captured on May 21, a woman can be heard asking: 'What are you dropping in my yard?'

The man then responds: 'It's your last child support payment.'

He then gets into the van and drives away before the woman, who also has not been identified, says, 'Are you serious?'

A Virginia mother and daughter got a shocking delivery when a man pulled up to their home and dumped 80,000 pennies on their front lawn

Avery Sanford's father dumped his final child support payment to his ex-wife in pennies

Sanford was in school at Deep Run High School, where she's a senior, during her father's visit. She was not amused.

'It's not just my mom he's trying to embarrass, it's also me and my sister and it's upsetting that he didn't consider that before he did that,' Sanford told WTVR Richmond. 'It's really hurtful and damaging to your kids when you do things like that. It doesn't matter if they're young or an adult, the actions of your parents will always have some effect on you.'

Sanford is gearing up for graduation and attending Virginia Tech in the fall.

Her mother reported the incident to Henrico Police and Lt. Matt Pecka told The Washington Post that an officer responded to 'a domestic-related incident.'

The officer found the pennies in front of the house and Sanford's mother said her ex-husband was to blame. She did not file criminal charges.

DailyMail.com could not reach Sanford's father for comment. In a phone call with WTVR Richmond, he said that he 'let his emotions get the best of him' and dumped the pennies because of '18 years of built-up frustration.'

He added that he did not want his actions to put more distance between him and his daughter.

But Sanford said it did just that. She told WTVR Richmond that she had not spoken to her father in years and has no interest in having a relationship with someone who would disrespect her mother like that.

Sanford told WTVR Richmond that she had not spoken to her father in years and has no interest in having a relationship with someone who would disrespect her mother like that

Sanford and her mother used a snow shovel to scoop up all the pennies

But she responded to the incident by paying it forward. She and her mother, with help from some friends, used a snow shovel to scoop up all the pennies before exchanging them for $800. Then, they donated the money to local domestic violence shelter Safe Harbour.

'They were able to turn such a negative experience, and what her daughter witnessed, into a positive,' Cathy Easter, executive director of Safe Harbor, told The Washington Post. 'They found a way to turn this around and not feel devastated about it.'

The story was first reported by local media outlets this week and, in the days following, Safe Harbour saw a surge in donations totaling more than $5,000 over the course of a few days. Some donors specifically mentioned Sanford as their reason for donating.

'The fact that these gifts are coming in at this time is just like a godsend,' Easter told the Washington Post. 'I'm very sorry the family experienced this, but so grateful they reached out and chose to do this and share their story.'
Police have detained an opposition activist in Moscow's Red Square after he simulated shooting himself in the head as a political protest.

Pavel Krisevich, 20, fired two shots into the air on Friday before putting the Makarov pistol, loaded with blanks, to his temple and firing in front of shocked tourists.

He was quickly surrounded by armed law enforcement, who pinned him to the ground.

The Kremlin critic and performance artist reportedly sustained burns to his face from the stunt but was otherwise unharmed.

The protest was reportedly against 'repressions' under Russian President Vladimir Putin, with the Open Media news outlet saying Krisevich had prepared a manifesto beforehand.

News source Readovka said Krisevich was initially taken to the nearby Kitai Gorod police station.

Police also detained journalist Nika Samusik who recorded the performance on video, Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe reported.

Police have detained an opposition activist in Moscow's Red Square after he simulated shooting himself in the head as a political protest

Pavel Krisevich (centre in grey coat), 20, fired two shots into the air on Friday before putting the Makarov pistol, loaded with blanks, to his temple and firing in front of shocked tourists

He was quickly surrounded by armed law enforcement, who pinned him to the ground. The Kremlin critic and performance artist reportedly sustained burns to his face from the stunt but was otherwise unharmed

'How to get rid of fear... of the repression of the machine? To run away? To hide? We have a solution for you,' the manifesto reads.

'The state labels protest with the stigma of a crime. It forces us to see ourselves as criminals inside cells...

'But what is the state without state intimidation? An empty space, clearly.'

Krisevich went on to write that 'fearlessness' was the way to respond to 'the police state'.

'There will be no more fear. There will be shots before the Kremlin curtain.'

Later on Friday, investigators where photographed examining the scene, where the gun still lay on the cobbles of the square.

Friday's stunt is not the first time Krisevich has made headlines for his dramatic protests.

He was jailed for 15 days last year and expelled from a Moscow university for posing as a crucified Christ outside the central Moscow headquarters of Russia's FSB security service.

Burning papers, symbolising criminal cases against Russian citizens, burned in front of Krisevich, who was mounted on a cross, during the protest.

He was sentenced to a further 10 days in jail in May for participating in a protest in central Moscow in support of political prisoners by displaying their paintings, Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe reported.

At the time, Krisevich's lawyer Sergei Telnov said the number of political prisoners was 'growing every year in Russia.'

Friday's stunt is not the first time Krisevich (pictured) has made headlines for his dramatic protests. He was jailed for 15 days last year for posing as a crucified Christ outside the central Moscow headquarters of Russia's FSB security service

Pictured: Investigator search Red Square in Moscow following the incident on Friday

Later on Friday, investigators where photographed examining the scene, where the gun still lay on the cobbles of the square

Krisevich, born in 2000, has previously stated that he has 'lived all my life under Putin.'

'I am not afraid that my activity will lead to a criminal case. It means that they are afraid that I am drawing attention to some problems.

'The cops live in their own world, but they understand that in one moment everything will become like Belarus,' he said, referencing ongoing mass protests that began in neighbouring Belarus last year against the government and its authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko.

'Everything will be more serious here than in Belarus, because there are more people,' Krisevich said.

His protest came on the eve of Russia Day, the country's national holiday and two days after groups linked to jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny were outlawed.

The move by the Russian court, which declared the groups as 'extremist' bans allies of the opposition figure from participating in parliamentary elections in September.

The Kremlin says it tolerates political opposition if it is done lawfully, but has portrayed Navalny and his allies as U.S.-backed trouble makers intent on triggering social unrest.

It has made no comment so far on Krisevich's arrest today.
Andrew Dymock, 24, the middle-class son of academics from Bath, told jurors 'thank you for killing me' after he was found guilty of 15 charges, including 12 terrorism-related offences, in 2017 and 2018 by a jury at the Old Bailey on Friday

A neo-Nazi student who carved a swastika into his girlfriend's buttock has been found guilty of terror and hate offences.

Andrew Dymock, 24, the middle-class son of academics from Bath, told jurors 'thank you for killing me' after he was found guilty of 15 charges, including 12 terrorism-related offences, in 2017 and 2018 by a jury at the Old Bailey on Friday.

The court heard how he promoted the extreme right-wing System Resistance Network (SRN) group, which aimed to 'stir up a race war', through a Twitter account and a website.

He used online platforms to raise money for the now-banned organisation, which 'preached zero-tolerance' to non-whites, Jewish and Muslim communities and described homosexuality as a 'disease'.

Police found a picture on one of Dymock's devices showing a swastika cut into his girlfriend's buttock and he told detectives in a January 2019 interview he had used his nail to scratch the symbol.

Dymock, who was at the time studying politics at Aberystwyth University in Wales, denied being behind the accounts, claiming he was set up by his now former partner, who had failed to recruit him to join banned terrorist group National Action.

Pictured: Image released by Counter Terrorism Policing North East of a person wearing a skull mask which was sent via an electronic device used by Dymock

The court heard how he promoted the extreme right-wing System Resistance Network (SRN) group, which aimed to 'stir up a race war', through a Twitter account and a website

Jurors were previously shown this image of a figure holding a swastika flag which was recovered from devices belonging to Dymock

He told a jury the malicious activity included 'people in the police or other agencies' who were sympathetic to NA and seeking to protect his ex-girlfriend.

But he was found guilty of five charges of encouraging terrorism, two of fundraising for terrorism, four counts of disseminating terrorist publications, possessing a terrorist document, stirring up racial hatred and hatred based on sexual orientation, and possessing racially inflammatory material.

Dymock closed his eyes and shook his head as the verdicts were delivered, then looked to his parents, Stella and Dr David Dymock, a professor of dentistry at Bristol University, who he lives with in Bath, Somerset, in the public gallery.

The Sonnenkrieg Division and System Resistance Network The Atomwaffen Division was founded in the US around 2013 with the aim of destroying civilisation in order to build a national socialist state. Its UK offshoots were known as the Sonnenkrieg Division and System Resistance Network (SRN). Jurors heard SRN was one of the organisations that filled the 'dubious gap' left after far-right group National Action was banned in 2016. The homepage of the Neo-Nazi group SRN declared objective to be the destruction of 'the system' and 'guide the European to his destiny', before quoting Hitler. SRN was banned in 2020. Advertisement

With tears in his eyes he asked to say goodbye to his mother and father before he was taken down to the cells, telling jurors: 'Thank you for killing me', while his mother said: 'National Action has done this.'

Dymock was remanded in custody by Judge Mark Dennis QC until sentencing on June 24.

Prosecutor Jocelyn Ledward earlier told jurors he was not being prosecuted for holding racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic beliefs, or for his 'adherence to a neo-Nazi creed'.

She said: 'Rather, he is facing prosecution for his encouragement of terrorist activity, of violence, as a means to shape society in accordance with his beliefs, rather than through free speech and democracy.'

An examination of Dymock's computer revealed longstanding extremist views dating back to when he was aged 17, including a Google translation of the words 'Kill all of the Jews'.

In summer 2017 posters showing racist and homophobic propaganda sprang up in at least 10 cities across Britain, including in Dundee, Southampton, Newport and Cambridge.

It was designed to intimidate gay, Jewish, black and Muslim people and bore the logo of a new extremist group.

On October 8, 2017, he wrote about the creation of SRN on a right-wing webpage stating the group was 'focused on building a group of loyal men, true to the cause of National Socialism and establishing the Fascist state through revolution'.

Ms Ledward said SRN was one of a small number of groups which filled a 'dubious gap' left following the proscription of far-right group National Action and was itself banned in 2020.

The members wore masks, which made it hard to identify them, but they are believed to retain links to NA.

There was also a connection to US-based group Atomwaffen Division as the two terror cells promoted each other.

An image released by Counter Terrorism Policing North East is shown of a person wearing a top (right) similar to one which was recovered from Dymock's home

Atomwaffen has been connected with five killings over the Atlantic and uses the most violent part of the white-power canon.

It then mixes it with Satanist-occult beliefs to portray an idea of an apocalyptic societal crash to come.

Dymock was known as Blitz, which was a name also linked to National Action - though this has never been cemented.

Jurors heard how Dymock was expelled from SRN in late February 2018, when the Blitz also split with the group.

He made an even extremer version of SRN called Sonnenkrieg Division, which looked up to Moors murderer Ian Brady and Charles Manson.

The group posted horrendous material online including for women and children to be raped and Prince Harry to be shot for marrying Meghan Markle.

Blitz even wrote in one chat Adolf Hitler should have been ashamed for 'not slaughtering the subhuman British at Dunkirk', the BBC reported.

Dymock, from Bath, Somerset, allegedly joined white supremacist groups Sonnenkrieg Division and System Resistance Network (SRN) between 2017 and 2018

Other comments included lowering sexual consent to 12 and police officers should be raped and killed.

SKD was said to have been set up as a European outfit for the Atomwaffen Division.

Leeds student Michael Szewczuk, who was in the group, said a woman he told to cut a Swastika into her body 'can't even carve her own skin properly'.

Despite their identities being concealed, the Blitz was one who left clues as to who he was.

He said he came from the west country, was in a 'very wealthy tourist town', released a date he was going to the US to meet Atomwaffen, said his 'parents pay for everything' and mentioned shopping at Morrisons.

But the biggest clue was his bedsheets, with the Neo-Nazi posting a picture in one chat of a book resting on the rainbow sheets.

They were also visible in other pictures he shared online, including one of himself and of a girl naked on the floor holding a document over her.

Dymock was arrested at Gatwick Airport in connection with other matters, where he had intended to board a flight to America in June 2018.

Police found in his luggage extreme right-wing literature including Siege, an anthology of pro-Nazi essays written by James Mason, and Mein Kampf, along with clothing bearing neo-Nazi logos.

He also had books, flags, clothes and badges with links to the extreme right wing in his bedroom at home and university.

Dymock claimed he was 'set up' by others, and that material linking him to content on the SRN website and Twitter account was 'planted in his possession without his knowledge'.

He denied being a neo-Nazi and told police: 'In fact, I am bisexual but lean towards being homosexual, in direct conflict with Nazism.'

And he told jurors he had the Adolf Hitler's autobiographical manifesto  along with books on Satanism  for 'research' on right-wing populism.
Holidaymakers can make huge savings if they choose a destination on the Government's amber list, new figures revealed today.

Average prices for breaks in Portugal in July or August fell by 64% in the week after the Government moved the country from green to amber compared with the previous seven days, price comparison website TravelSupermarket said.

Seven-night family package breaks during the school holidays are available from as little as 180 per person, according to the firm.

Beachgoers crowd Santo Amaro beach near Lisbon on a hot and sunny afternoon in Portugal yesterday

People returning to the UK from amber destinations must self-isolate at home for 10 days.

There are no viable major summer hotspots on the quarantine-free green list.

Summer holidays on Spain's Canary Islands, which are also on the amber list, are lower than before the coronavirus pandemic.

The biggest savings compared with 2019 prices are on Gran Canaria (25% cheaper), but prices are also reduced on Tenerife (23%), Lanzarote (15%) and Fuerteventura (12%).

Prices for trips to another amber destination, the Greek island of Corfu, are down 20% on pre-pandemic levels.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) does not advise against travel to any of these destinations.

However, the Government is urging people to avoid holidays to amber locations.

Emma Coulthurst of TravelSupermarket said before the pandemic it would have been 'fairly hard' to find a seven-night package holiday during the summer school holidays from less than 300 per person, but 'the industry has many holidays to sell'.

She went on: 'Prices are often the most expensive at the start of the school holidays as people are itching to get away as soon as they can.

'This year, they are some of the cheapest due to the current confusion and chaos over how the traffic light system is implemented.'

The decision to move Portugal from green to amber, and not make any additions to the green list, led to a furious reaction from the travel industry.

Many senior figures claimed data shows destinations such as Malta should have been put in the green tier, and questioned why Portugal was not put on a 'green watchlist' to highlight it was at risk of being switched.
A Virginia mom who survived China's Cultural Revolution is continuing to speak out against the teaching of critical race theory in US schools after video of her blasting the academic movement went viral earlier this week.

Xi Van Fleet - who fled China at the age of 26 before settling in the United States -made headlines after she slammed CRT at a Loudoun County School Board meeting on Wednesday, saying it had striking similarities to theories pushed by communists in her native country.

'CRT trains children to be social justice warriors and to loathe their country and their history... It is indeed the American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution,' she declared during her speech at the meeting.

On Thursday night, Van Fleet appeared on Sean Hannity's Fox News program, where she extrapolated on her comparison.

'I just want to let the American people know that what is going on in our schools and in our country is really a replay of the cultural revolution in China,' she said.

'CRT uses the same ideology, the same methodology, even the same vocabulary. The ideology is cultural Marxism.'

The Cultural Revolution - a violent political purge that occurred in China from 1966 - 1976 - began with leader Mao Zedong attempting to destroy remnants of capitalism by shutting down debate, dissent and free speech.

Mao enlisted the help of young university students, known as 'Red Guards', who torched books and artworks, and tried to 'cancel' those who were seen as 'ideologically impure'.

The purge left between 500,000 and 20 million people dead in the space of just a decade. Van Fleet was just six years old when it started.

Xi Van Fleet appeared on Sean Hannity's Fox News program continuing to speak out against the teaching of Critical Race Theory in US schools

Van Fleet says the only difference is that CRT segregates people by race, whereas theories pushed in the Cultural Revolution divided people by class before turning them against one another.

'We basically canceled the whole Chinese civilization pre-Communism and we changed our school names, street names, store names, even our personal names,' Van Fleet told Hannity.

She even said 'wokeness' was a key component of the methods used by Maoists.

'Wokeness  to be specific  we used class wokeness in China,' she also recalled.

'Your level of wokeness determines your chance to get a promotion or to get benefits and who decides your level of wokeness? The party leaders,' she stated.

The Cultural Revolution - a violent political purge that occurred in China from 1966 - 1976 - began with leader Mao Zedong attempting to destroy remnants of capitalism by shutting down debate, dissent and free speech

Speaking at the School Board meeting on Wednesday night, Van Fleet stated: 'We were taught to denounce our heritage, and Red Guards destroyed anything that is not communiststatues, books and anything else.'

'We were also encouraged to report on each other, just like the Student Equity Ambassador program and the bias reporting system,' Van Fleet added, referring to new initiatives set up in Loudoun County public schools.

After arriving in the US at the age of 26, Van Fleet says she 'felt like it was such a free country, meaning I have free access to all sorts of information  books on both sides of the issues'.

However, now, she says she feels that some of that freedom is being taken away.

'I can't really just say what I mean, even though the other side can say whatever,. To me, and to a lot of Chinese, it is heartbreaking that we escaped communism and now we experience communism here.'

Van Fleet is seen giving her impassioned speech at the Loudoun County School Board meeting

China's Cultural Revolution: A shutdown of debate, dissent and free speech that left 20M dead from 1966 to 1976 The Cultural Revolution was a violent political purge that occurred in China from 1966 - 1976. During that time, Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, tried to purge remnants of capitalism by shutting down debate, dissent and free speech. For ten years, Chairman Mao's followers burned books, tore down statues and murdered millions loyal to the 'Four Olds'  old ideas, culture, customs and habits He envisioned a 'Communist Utopia' with a massive redistribution of wealth - but what occurred was a 10-year campaign that brought widespread suffering and a destruction of much of China's ancient cultural norms. Mao pushed for the formation of 'Red Guards' - groups of militant university and high school students who were put into paramilitary units. The young recruits were fed propaganda and were relatively easy to influence because of their young age. Their goal was destroy symbols of China's pre-communist past - known as 'The Four Olds': Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Customs. The New York Times reports that 'Red Guards formed large groups that targeted political enemies for abuse and public humiliation and that 'they carried out widespread destruction of historical sites and cultural relics.' Roger Lewis wrote in The Daily Mail in 2016 that 'Mao could see the young were impressionable, easy to manipulate and eager to fight. The so-called Red Guards were a 'screaming, self-righteous band' numbering many millions, who went on the rampage. The Red Guards frequently broke into homes and destroyed paintings and books. They were also required to report dissidents, and were even permitted to inflict bodily harm on them. Universities were their chiefs targets, with the Red Guards turning into baying mobs who would publicly try to destroy those with differing points of view. Pictured: Red Guards reading Mao's Little Red Book in Beijing, 1966 Writing for The Mail on Sunday last year, professor John Gray stated: 'It is not far-fetched to compare the methods of this 'woke movement' to those of Chairman Mao's Red Guards, who terrorized the Chinese people half a century ago.' 'Hounding of people is strikingly reminiscent of Mao's Cultural Revolution, which wrecked much of what remained of the country's ancient civilization,' he wrote. 'The only way someone accused of thought-crime could escape punishment was through public confession, 're-education' and abject apology in so-called 'struggle sessions', in which they were humiliated and tormented by their accusers,' Gray continued. 'Tragically, the woke movement has reinvented this vile ritual, with teachers, journalists, professors and others seeking to hang on to their jobs by desperately begging forgiveness,' he concluded. The Cultural Revolution left between 500,000 and 20 million people dead in the space of a single decade. A Red Guard member chops off the hair of a governor during Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution in China in 1966 Advertisement

Over the past year, numerous public and private schools across the US have opted to incorporate CRT into their teachings - sparking a nationwide debate in which Loudoun County has emerged as a flashpoint.

The theory asserts that 'institutions are inherently racist and that race itself... is a socially constructed concept that is used by white people to further their economic and political interests at the expense of people of color', according to Texas A&M University professor Tommy Curry.

While Loudoun County Public School officials say they are not officially using CRT in their classrooms, they have pledged to push for 'equity' and have begun using many CRT 'buzzwords and concepts'.

That decision has angered many locals in Loudoun County - which is located just outside of Washington, DC, and is the wealthiest county in the entire country.

While Loudoun County Public Schools say they are not officially using CRT in their classrooms, they have pledged to push for 'equity' and have begun using many CRT 'buzzwords and concepts'

Lilit Vanetsyan, who teaches in neighboring Fairfax County, Virginia, also spoke at the Loudoun County School Board meeting on Wednesday night

Van Fleet's criticism was echoed by teacher Lilit Vanetsyan, who in her own fiery address Wednesday night accused school board members of enabling teachers with radically liberal lesson plans at the expense of students' education and mental health.

Vanetsyan, who teaches in neighboring Fairfax County, Virginia, also spoke at Wednesday night's meeting in Loudoun County - addressing not just school board members but also parents and students.

'Parents, the longer that you wait and don't have your child's schools accountable, gives these guys more time to dictate what's best for your child's physical, mental, and emotional health,' Vanetsyan declared.

She then also directly addressed students, saying: 'You are on the front lines of these indoctrination camps. Challenge the staff when you are presented with a ludicrous statement, and do not allow anybody to tell you that you cannot accomplish anything because of your skin color, or to hate yourself because of your skin color.

'Students, it is up to you to be the next generation of victims, or victors.'

A push to incorporate CRT 'buzzwords and concepts' has angered many locals in Loudoun County - which is located just outside of Washington, D.C. and is the wealthiest county in the entire country
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A body language expert has said Boris Johnson attempted to exert his authority with a 'bizarre John Wayne pose' at today's G7 summit and lacks a rapport with Emmanuel Macron - while Joe Biden has perfected a 'presidential pose'.

The heads of the world's seven leading liberal democracies gathered on the beach at Carbis Bay in Cornwall for a socially distanced photo this afternoon, and in so doing gave off some fascinating clues about their state of mind, according to Darren Stanton, TV's Human Lie Detector.

Mr Stanton noted Carrie Johnson's relaxed persona, suggesting that the 33-year-old mother of one appeared more at ease on her first major diplomatic function than world leaders including Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, 49. He also noted that the newly married Johnsons appeared to mirror each other's behaviour, indicating a 'deep rapport'.

Meanwhile, the body language expert contrasted President Biden's body language indicating 'openness and truthfulness' with Mr Johnson's 'primeval' displays of power to prove he was the 'Alpha male in the pack'.

'ALPHA MALE' BORIS: 'We continue to see President Biden with his open palms, however Boris has his arms above his head. This again is a territorial power gesture to signify ''this is my turf and I'm the most powerful here''. Mr Macron looks on with an amused expression on his face,' Mr Stanton says

BIDEN 'PRESIDENTIAL': 'Mr Trudeau has hit legs aside, which is a power gesture typically used by Putin and Trump. Biden has a very presidential pose. He is standing with his arms extended and hands open. We call this ''open palm gesture'' it's a gesture that goes back centuries and was principally used in the military to show others 'I have no weapons''

BORIS AND MACRON'S LACK OF RAPPORT: 'Boris is looking like he's going in for hug. The feeling is not shared by Mr Macron as his body posture still turning forward indicates a lack of rapport. The direction a person's feet are pointing is significant. When we are in rapport talking to someone else or a group, our feet point towards each other'

There has been tension between the pair over Northern Ireland, with President Biden warning Mr Johnson not to let the row over post-Brexit trading in Northern Ireland affect the peace process, but in recent days they have been speaking warmly about each other and the relationship between their two countries.

Describing the socially distanced photos featuring all the leaders, he told MailOnline: 'President Biden has a very presidential pose.

'He is standing with his arms extended and hands open. We call this the ''open palm gesture'', which goes back centuries and was principally used in the military to show others ''I have no weapons''. Its a gesture of openness and truthfulness.

'You also see that his posture is open and facing the front as if to include everyone.'

In one of the group photos Mr Johnson can be seen holding his hands over his head.

'A BIT OF FUN': This staged elbow between Macron and Carrie is staged and a bit of fun. I think Carrie seems the most naturally at ease and comfortable of the pair'

MACRON 'DISAGREEING' WITH BIDEN: 'Biden has his body close to him as he is a very tactile man. His posture is tilted towards Macron while Macron's is not. He is faxing forward, head down and his hands in his pockets. I'm not sure Macron is in total agreement our what is being presented to him by Biden'

MERKEL 'EXERTING' AUTHORITY: 'It's interesting to see that Angela Merkel has her hand splayed open. This is a subtle version of the wide leg stance when someone is trying to exert their authority. Boris has adopted a very bizarre robotic movement'

Commenting on the posture, Mr Stanton said: 'Boris has adopted this very bizarre 'John Wayne Gunslinger'' posture with his shoulders hunched up. Notice his palms are reversed and he is showing his knuckles.

'This is a primeval gesture to show power. By showing someone your knuckles, you are conveying the meaning that you are the Alpha male in the pack and the most powerful. However in my opinion his posture is not convicting and seems forced.

'You can see Mr Trudeau has his legs astride. This is a power gesture typically used by Putin and Trump. The theory is the wider the stance the more space we use and the more space we use the more powerful we feel and appear.

'The other politicians seems to be adopting rather neutral stance. We can see Angela Merkel holding her hands in front of her as if to keep warm.'

In another image, the Prime Minister, 56, can be seen greeting French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte, 68.

'Boris looking like hes going in for hug,' says Mr Stanton. 'The feeling is not shared by Mr Macron as his body posture still turning forward indicates a lack of rapport. The direction a person's feet are pointing is significant.

'When we are in rapport talking to someone else or a group, our feet will point towards each other. Here we can see Mr Macron's do not.

'Next time you are speaking to someone and want to know if you are really getting on well, look at their feet to see which direction they are pointing in.'

POWER PLAY: 'This is a fantastic picture of Mr Macron and President Biden. This could on the surface appear to be quite an innocuous picture where two men have mutual respect for each other and have become friends. Indeed that may be true however this also is what we call a power pat or power gesture we are both men are exerting authority. With both men adopting the same hand over the back posture they are demonstrating equal amounts of power'

BORIS AND CARRIE'S RAPPORT: 'I think all the way through the conference, Carrie has had the giggles as this is the first formal engagement she has attended on the world stage as Mrs Johnson. At times she has appeared to be the more the positive one out of the couple. In this pose they are looking almost like bookends. One thing is for sure they are both in deep rapport as they are matching and mirroring each others body language'

Mr Stanton also detects some tension in two photos of Mr Macron speaking with Mr Biden, where they are both seen with one arm around each other.

'Biden has his body close to Mr Macron as he is a very tactile man,' he says. His posture is tilted towards Macron while Mr Macron's is not. He is faxing forward, head down with his hands in his pockets.

'I'm not sure Macron is in total agreement about what is being presented to him by President Biden.'

Mr Johnson is also seen walking alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel, 66. There has previously been tension between the PM and EU leaders over a sausage trade war with the bloc.

Mr Stanton says: 'Its interesting to see that Angela Merkel has her hand splayed open, this is a subtle version of the wide leg stance with someone is trying to exert their authority.

'Boris has adopted a very bizarre robotic movement. This gesture looks quite odd and for me the whole summit has been centred around Boris trying to look and feel powerful or at least create in the impression that he is a very confident man.'
Terrifying video captured the moment a boat nearly slipped over a 36-foot dam in a Texas lake before emergency workers rushed in to save the four people onboard.

The incident unfolded on Thursday afternoon in east Austin's Lady Bird Lake.

Austin-Travis County EMS said callers reported a boat with four people on board about to go over the Longhorn Dam around 2.36pm, KXAN reported.

The boat, which was partially over the top of the dam at one point, was attached to another boat by rope while it pulled the vessel away from the dam's rushing waters.

Life jackets were also lowered via STAR Flight to all four passengers.

Terrifying video captured the moment a boat nearly slipped over a 36-foot dam in a Texas lake before emergency workers rushed in to save the four people onboard

Authorities said both the boat and all four passengers were safely pulled off the dam and into open water by the Austin Police Department lake patrol boat.

Miraculously, the crisis was avoided and none of the four passengers were hurt, according to the local news outlet.

Lady Bird Lake, the site of Thursday's wild rescue, is no stranger to news headlines.

Back in March 2020, EMS pulled a dead body from the lake below the Congress Avenue Bridge, Fox 7 Austin reported at the time.

Rescue crews had responded to a call about a person who was submerged in water and hadn't resurfaced.

According to the news outlet, bystanders pulled the person out of the water and administered CPR before EMS pronounced the person dead just after 6:30 p.m.

Aerial video showed the boat with its front end over the edge of the 36-foot dam

Emergency crews attached it to another boat by rope and pulled it to safety

In April, toxic blue-green algae was discovered in the lake which resulted in the death of at least five dogs, Community Impact reports.

The toxic algae was also found in 2019 and 2020, according to the outlet. The area's watershed protection department has since increased its monitoring of the lake, creating an online dashboard where water samples can be taken, uploaded and observed daily.

Amazingly, swimming in Lady Bird Lake has been banned since 1964, according to an April 6 press release.

Authorities did note that the risk to humans is low, and people can continue to boat and fish within the lakes which explains Thursday's miraculous boat rescue on Lady Bird Lake.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has hit back at what she called a 'frivolous' lawsuit over her decision to only grant interviews to 'black and brown' journalists.

Lightfoot, who is Chicago's first black female and first openly gay mayor, announced last month that she would only speak with reporters of color to mark her two-year anniversary in office.

The temporary policy - which only lasted one day - sparked anger from reporters of all races, but Lightfoot doubled down on her decision insisting it was part of her lifelong battle for diversity and inclusion.

The backlash hit a new level on May 27 when Thomas Catenacci, a white reporter from the Daily Caller, filed a lawsuit against Lightfoot in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

Lightfoot brushed off the legal action and once again defended her rule in an interview with CNN on Friday.

'The lawsuit is completely frivolous. I'd use a more colorful term if we weren't on TV,' she said.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot hit back at what she called a 'frivolous' lawsuit over her decision to only grant interviews to 'black and brown' journalists in an interview with CNN on Friday

"Everyday when I look out across my podium, I don't see people who...reflect the richness and diversity of the city," Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot says about limiting one-on-one interviews to reporters of color. "I started a long overdue conversation about diversity in newsrooms" pic.twitter.com/fbZA9WSSqc  New Day (@NewDay) June 11, 2021

'But here's the thing, I'm the mayor of the third largest city in the country. I'm and African American woman, to state the obvious. Everyday when I look out across my podium, I don't see people who look like me but more to the point I don't see people who reflect the richness and diversity of this city,' she continued.

'I started a long overdue conversation about diversity in newsrooms, in coverage. You are the mirrors on society,' she told host John Berman. 'You reflect with a critical and important lens the news of the day. You hold public officials like me, accountable.

'You must be diverse, I can't be that in a city like Chicago, with all the talent that we have, that we can't find diverse journalists of color. Of course we can. What they need is opportunity.'

'I hope my conversation has pricked the consciousness of the people who do the hiring in media rooms all across this city and hopefully across this country. We've got to do better.'

Thomas Catenacci (right), a white reporter from the Daily Caller, sued Lightfoot (left) in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois

In an open letter last week, Lightfoot detailed her decision to exclusively provide interviews with journalists of color, claiming it is part of a 'fight for diversity and inclusion'

At the time of her one-day rule, she said that it was intended to draw attention to the fact that the City Hall press corps is 'overwhelmingly white' and male in a city where white people make up only about one-third of the population.

'I have been struck since my first day on the campaign trail back in 2018 by the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of Chicago media outlets, editorial boards, the political press corps, and yes, the City Hall press corps specifically,' Lightfoot wrote in a statement.

She called it 'unacceptable' that reporters covering City Hall were mostly white.

'Many of them are smart and hard-working, savvy and skilled. But mostly white, nonetheless,' she wrote.

Critics of the decision included Fox News host Tucker Carlson who called Lightfoot 'a monster' and racist.

Lightfoot reiterated her position at a May 20 event marking the anniversary, where she also called on media organizations to diversify their staffs.

'The fact that the City Hall press corps is overwhelmingly white, has very little in the way of diversity, is an embarrassment,' Lightfoot said.

'One day out of 365, I say that I'm going to mark the anniversary of my two years in office by giving exclusive one-on-ones to journalists of color, and the world loses its mind.'

The backlash was swift, however, with a white reporter from the Daily Caller suing Lightfoot in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

The lawsuit, filed by Daily Caller News Foundation and Judicial Watch, alleged that Thomas Catenacci was denied an interview by Lightfoot.

Lightfoot tweeted last month about why she was prioritizing media requests from POC

The lawsuit claims Catenacci's First Amendment rights were violated, as well as his Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection.

Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, also commented on the lawsuit.

'Racial discrimination has no place in America, especially in the halls of government,' Fitton said.

'Mayor Lightfoot's admitted policy of race-based discrimination is flagrantly illegal and immoral. Simply put, we're asking the court to find Mayor Lightfoot's racist abuse unlawful,' Fitton added.

Lightfoot, who is Chicago's first black female and first openly gay mayor, has faced strong backlash, including from reporters and from Tucker Carlson

Catenacci, meanwhile, says that he aims to hold Lightfoot 'accountable.'

'Preventing journalists from doing our jobs in such a blatantly discriminatory way is wrong and does a disservice to our readers who come from all backgrounds,' Catenacci said.

University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone told the Chicago Tribune he expects the court to throw out the lawsuit. He noted public officials commonly pick and choose which media outlets to favor, and that Lightfoot said the decision applied to one date and wasn't a blanket policy.

'Given that she's talking only about one day, it seems to be blown out of proportion, to make a fuss over it,' Stone said.

Gregory Pratt, a Chicago Tribune reporter who is Latino, revealed he was among those who had been granted an interview by Lightfoot to explain her actions back in May, but the newspaper canceled it when Lightfoot refused to lift her ban on other reporters.

'I am a Latino reporter @chicagotribune whose interview request was granted for today. However, I asked the mayor's office to lift its condition on others and when they said no, we respectfully canceled,' Pratt tweeted.

'Politicians don't get to choose who covers them.'

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and contributing writer for the New Yorker magazine and the New York Times, suggested the move was a way to draw attention from the mayor's failures.

'Such astonishing mastery of deflection and distraction ... always hiding from her disastrous record of boldly upholding the status quo in Chicago,' Taylor, who also is a professor at Princeton University, tweeted.

Steve Cortes of Newsmax also tweeted: 'Never mind the thousands of young black men dead in my city while Lori Lightfoot presides over systemic failure  she's facilitating 'healing' by discriminating against white reporters.'

Following Lightfoot's statement, local journalist Taylor Moore said the backlash and reaction to the Mayor's decision was 'fascinating'.

'The response to this is so fascinating. White journalists are aggrieved and journalists of color are like 'lmaooooooo ok??',' she tweeted.

WGN News anchor and political reporter Tahman Bradley said: 'Lightfoot has feuded with certain reporters recently but her office says she wants to shine a spotlight on the lack of diversity in the City Hall briefing room.'
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With her hand planted firmly on her hip, a woman dressed in a cardigan and a long, flowing skirt wakes East London dockers with a peashooter.

The famous image, taken in Limehouse in 1927, shows the then well-known Mrs Mary Smith carrying out her work as a knocker upper: someone who earned money waking up industrial workers so they got to their shifts on time.

The photograph of the woman performing the long-vanished job was the first one licensed by British photographer John Topham and its success prompted him to give up his job as a policeman and spend the rest of his life taking pictures.

The image is one of many currently featuring in an exhibition of the photographer's work at the Lucy Bell Fine Art Gallery in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex. The show runs until June 26.

One of the most famous images of the Second World War - of hop pickers' children taking shelter in a trench as German and British planes fight overhead during the Battle of Britain in 1940 - is also on display.

The eclectic collection also includes an image of a British soldier wearing a woman's bonnet while sewing in 1940.

A fourth photo in the set shows a small boy with his hands covered in dirt and his shirt falling to pieces as he plays while sitting inside a car tyre. Viewers can see more of the images online at the Top Foto archive.

Topham, who died in 1991, was particularly noted for his images of the 1939-1945 war. He amassed more than 121,000 negatives during his long career.

With her hand planted firmly on her hip, a woman dressed in a cardigan and a long, flowing skirt wakes East London dockers with a peashooter. The famous image, taken by John Topham in Limehouse in 1927, shows the then well-known Mrs Mary Smith carrying out her work as a knocker upper: someone who earned money waking up industrial workers so they got to their shifts on time

The image is one of many currently featuring in an exhibition of the photographer's work at the Lucy Bell Fine Art Gallery in St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex. The show runs until July 17. One of the most famous images of the Second World War - of hop pickers' children taking shelter in a trench as German and British planes fight overhead during the Battle of Britain in 1940 - is also on display

A third photo in the set shows a small boy with his hands covered in dirt and his shirt falling to pieces as he plays while sitting inside a car tyre

The eclectic collection includes an image of a British soldier wearing a woman's bonnet while sewing in 1940

Topham, who died in 1991, was particularly noted for his images of the 1939-1945 war. He amassed more than 121,000 negatives during his long career. Above: Topham takes a photo as a tame jackdaw sits on his camera in July 1948

This image, taken in 1939, shows the difficult conditions which photographers had to work in during the Second World War. The an above is seen taking a photograph whilst wearing a gas mask to defend against Nazi attacks from the air

On the breadline: Topham also showcased the harsh realities of life for the poorest Britons. The above image, taken in 1946, shows a hop picker sheltering with young children

This image, taken in 1933, shows a small child walking down a street. Robin Bell, who curated the new exhibition, has printed the pictures for the first time as silver gelatin prints from Topham's orginal glass slides

British troops have a laugh as they do the can-can while rehearsing for the pantomime in 1941. The image was censored by the War Office when it was first released

Curator Mr Bell said hat whilst it would have been 'almost impossible' for Topham to take spontaneous photographs - because of the 'cumbersome' nature of his photography equipment, he still conveyed an appearance of 'happily being in the right place at the right time by sheer luck'. Pictured: Children are led by their father as they sit on horses at a farm in 1934. Behind them, a black cat is seen running past

Mr Bell added: 'Topham had a policemans forensic eye for detail and a rare gift for somehow pre-empting the nostalgia that his observations would no doubt inspire later generations'. Pictured: Swimmers enjoy a dip in the rain at Bexley Heath Swimming baths in Kent in 1936

A young woman riding a bicycle in 1949. Churchill joined the RAF as a staff photographer in 1941 but went on to work as a freelancer again after the conflict ended

A little boy riding a cart pulled by his pony proudly shows off the bottle of milk he is taking back to his family despite the war torn housing all around him , Eynsford , Kent , England 30 September 1940

The long arm of the law: A British policeman is seen in his then standard Custodian helmet and jacket as he directs a pedestrian in 1934

A bullock and cart holding up traffic in Sidcup, Kent, in 1938. Behind them, a bus bearing an advert for the Daily Mail can be seen. To the right, pedestrians walk on the pavement whilst a car is parked in front of them

Fancy a dip? Bathers are seen above going for a swim near London's Tower Bridge in 1933. Mr Bell added: 'Theres no chocolate box folksiness here, just a wonderful appreciation of the times in which he lived , good and bad'

Precarious: This image shows a man balancing on top of an industrial chimney as another one looms in the background

This image shows Kent miners in 1946 standing in front of a scoreboard showing how much coal they had excavate each day

Women stand outside a pawnshop while waiting for it to open in Stepney, East London, in 1933

Anti-aircraft spotter peers through a pair of binocluars on the River Thames in London during the Second World War
A university student who moved in with her boyfriend and his family during the first coronavirus lockdown took her own life after he broke up with her, an inquest has heard.

Sarah Hammond, 19, who had a history of mental health issues, had moved in with her boyfriend of eight months Harry Hadden-Wight in April 2020 after the pair decided they wanted to live together during the first lockdown.

The teenager, who was studying Sport and Exercise Science at Loughborough University, was welcomed into her boyfriend's family home and his mother Caroline Hadden-Wight was in frequent contact with Sarah's mother to organise the stay.

Mrs Hadden-Wight told the hearing at Woking Coroners' Court today that things appeared to initially go well between Sarah and her son before problems began to surface in their relationship.

On June 22 last year, shortly after Sarah and her boyfriend broke up, the student took her own life by standing in front of a train at Brookwood Station, in Surrey.

Sarah Hammond, 19, took her own life at Brookwood Station, in Surrey, in June last year

Mrs Hadden-Wight said: 'Sarah was a quiet and shy but very sweet and kind. Harry is a very thoughtful young man but he did not think she was emotionally stable, he worried about problems if they broke up.

'When she moved in I sat down with both of them and told them they needed to be able to talk to each other and say if they needed some space and to be understanding if they needed a break from each other.

Mrs Hadden-Wight told assistant coroner Anna Loxton that after Sarah moved in, she began to feel she was not welcomed by Harry's friends and found messages on his mobile phone which she did not approve of.

But Mrs Hadden-Wright told the court these rifts had been settled by a long walk together.

Mrs Hadden-Wright continued: 'On June 15 last year, I found out Sarah was going home and that Harry was unsure of the relationship. Sarah said she was going home to be with her father. I did notice that she took everything with her. Harry wanted to break up with her but Sarah did not want to accept it.'

Sarah's devastated boyfriend, Mr Hadden-Wight told the court: 'Things started to change when Sarah moved in, she would look through my phone and she did not like me seeing my friends.

'It was a relatively mutual decision for her to move back home. As time went on I realised I did not want to be in that relationship. Sarah was in denial and did not realise what was happening.'

The court heard that Mr Hadden-Wight had gone for a walk with Sarah near her home in Woking, Surrey, on June 21 to let her know they had broken up.

Mr Hadden-Wight explained: 'I went there again to let her know we had broken up. She was clinging to a park bench and would not leave. To get there to move I had to give her some hope. It was really hard and I struggled to get away.'

Sarah's boyfriend Harry Hadden-Wight (pictured with Sarah) told the court he received text messages from Sarah before she took her life

Sarah was taken to the Farnham Road Hospital, Guildford, Surrey, where she was sectioned and held overnight. However, the following day, Sarah was discharged and sent home in a taxi

The inquest heard that after they returned home Sarah's mother, Sally, who was aware of her daughter's history of mental health issues, including anorexia and self-harm, tried to lock her daughter in their house so she could keep her safe and watch over her.

However, the teenager, who was a member of the Loughborough University Cheerleading team, stole the keys to the car she shared with her brother and jumped out of an unsecured window.

Mrs Hammond then called the police to try to track down her daughter.

The student was tracked down to Mr Hadden-Wight's grandmother's house, in Sunningdale, Berkshire, where the family had been having a socially-distanced meal.

Mr Hadden-Wight explained: 'She did not want to believe what was happening. She made a threat that if I left she would take her own life. The police then came and she ran into the undergrowth.'

The coroner heard that Sarah was eventually tracked down to an open patch in the wooded part of the large property and persuaded to enter an ambulance.

Despite a number of attempts to escape the ambulance, including when she managed to escape all her restraints without anybody noticing, Sarah was transported to the Farnham Road Hospital, Guildford, Surrey, where she was sectioned and held overnight.

However, the following day, Sarah was discharged and sent home in a taxi, without her parent's knowledge.

Mr Hadden-Wight explained: 'Later that day I had about 23 missed calls from Sarah and quite a few texts. She was lovely but it had gone wrong. I put my phone on silent so I did not see the messages or that she was no longer in the hospital.'

The court heard some of the harrowing texts Sarah sent to her ex-boyfriend. In her final text, she said: 'I am sorry. I hope this does not hurt you in any way. I am sure it won't because you broke up with me.'

Mr Hadden-Wight explained that as soon as he saw this text message he knew what she had done as earlier in their relationship, she had mentioned that if she had to kill herself she would jump in front of a train.

Tragically, before she could be stopped, Sarah took her own life at Brookwood Station, Surrey shortly after 4pm on June 22 last year.

Mrs Hadden-Wight added: 'In hindsight, I wonder whether coming to live with us was the right decision. She was a broken child, she had a lot of demons and could not deal with the break up of her relationship. She was not given the chance to get out of this position she was put in.'

Throughout the harrowing evidence, Sarah's parents sat at the front of the court, supported by another family member, and listened carefully to the detailed process.

The coroner reminded the courtroom that the scope of the inquest, which will last for two days, is to examine the decision to discharge Sarah from Farnham Road Hospital and to see if there were any opportunities missed in her care.

For confidential support, call the Samaritans on 116123 or visit a local Samaritans branch. See www.samaritans.org for details
A dozen police officers on duty at the G7 summit have been forced to self-isolate after one tested positive for Covid on board a ferry where 1,000 are staying.

Devon and Cornwall Police today confirmed that one officer who is supporting G7 policing and staying on the MS Silja Europa has tested positive for the virus.

World leaders have gathered in Cornwall for the summit, which will see representatives from Canada, France, Germany, the US, Italy and Japan meet alongside Ursula von der Leyen, representing the EU.

They will discuss global recovery following the Covid pandemic, climate change, and worldwide trade between today and Sunday.

Devon and Cornwall Police today confirmed that one officer who is supporting G7 policing and staying on the MS Silja Europa (above in Falmouth) has tested positive for the virus

In a statement, Devon and Cornwall Police said: 'The officer, plus those who have come into close contact, are currently self isolating at another designated location.

'All who have come into close contact or are in the bubble of those who tested positive are also currently self isolating which equates to 12 officers in total.

'The next stage is for those who have tested positive to undertake a PCR test.

'We are continuing to follow the advice of Public Health England.'

The ferry, moored in Falmouth close to the summit in the Cornish resort of Carbis Bay, is housing some 1,000 officers who have been recruited to provide security.

The ferry, moored in Falmouth close to the summit in the Cornish resort of Carbis Bay, is housing some 1,000 officers who have been recruited to provide security

World leaders have gathered in Cornwall for the summit this weekend, which will see representatives from Canada, France, Germany, the US, Italy and Japan meet alongside Ursula von der Leyen representing the EU

The luxury cruise ship, the MS Silja Europa, typically ferries tourists along the Baltic coast but has been hired by Devon and Cornwall Police for ten days.

Rooms on board the liner, which moves between Helsinki in Finland to Tallinn in Estonia, can cost as much as 1,200-per-night for an executive suite.

Some 5,000 additional police have been brought in to Cornwall to boost its existing force of 1,500 officers between June 11 and 13.

A spokesman said previously: 'We will be deploying over 6,500 officers and staff to this event and we are supporting a vast range of local businesses and suppliers as part of our extensive logistical arrangements.

'This includes using over 4,000 rooms at almost 200 venues across Devon and Cornwall which will support local communities and accommodate police officers and staff deployed from across the UK.

They will discuss global recovery following the Covid pandemic, climate change, and worldwide trade between today and Sunday. Pictured: Boris Johnson today

US President Joe Biden (middle) gestures during the family photo during the G7 summit

'In order to secure further essential capacity, we reviewed a number of options and recently agreed to hire the MS Silja Europa, operated by Tallink; taking into account impacts to the environment, community, the operational needs, and those of our officers and staff.'

'We are working closely with the vessel owners, ports authorities and health partners to ensure the safe use of this accommodation.

'Those staying onboard will strictly follow all the applicable COVID safety guidelines, enhanced by daily testing - consistent with staff staying at all other accommodation sites across the force area.'

The G7 group is made up of the world's seven largest advanced economies - the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the US.

Cruise line Tallink describe the Silja Europa as the 'biggest and most beautiful cruise ship on the Baltic'.

The ship has had a colourful history with one website reporting in 2019 two passengers, a male and a female, were found dead onboard.

And in 1995 it ran aground near the coast of Finland.
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Freedom Day is set to be delayed, with the nation having to wait until July 19 before all Covid curbs are eased.

In a move likely to enrage MPs, business leaders and hospitality chiefs, Boris Johnson is preparing to postpone the final stage of his Covid roadmap  which was due on June 21  by four weeks.

The setback has been prompted by a sharp rise in cases of the Indian variant, and the British Medical Association calling for a delay to allow more people to receive their second jabs.

It came as it was announced that scientists and experts behind Britain's world-beating vaccine programme will take centre stage in the Queen's Birthday Honours list.

Cabinet sources last night conceded that Freedom Day on June 21 was 'not looking great', with a four-week extension to Covid restrictions now 'most likely'.

But in a bid to appease Tory MPs and ministers  including Chancellor Rishi Sunak  who are keen to unleash the economy, the Prime Minister is expected to promise a review after a fortnight.

This could allow curbs to be ditched earlier if hospital admissions remain low.

In a move likely to enrage MPs, business leaders and hospitality chiefs, Boris Johnson is preparing to postpone the final stage of his Covid roadmap  which was due on June 21  by four weeks

Under the PM's Covid roadmap, June 21 was supposed to be the day when all social distancing curbs were lifted and the work-from-home advice abandoned. Mr Johnson will make a final decision tomorrow night, before making an announcement to the nation on Monday evening.

But officials told the Mail last night that the debate in Downing Street was now concentrated on whether to 'pause' the reopening by two weeks or four.

In a significant intervention, the British Medical Association called on Mr Johnson to hold off until more people had received both doses of the vaccine.

Its council chairman Dr Chaand Nagpaul said the figures showed more time was needed to get the vaccine to more people.

'With only 54.2 per cent of the adult population currently fully vaccinated and many younger people not yet eligible, there is a huge risk that prematurely relaxing all restrictions will undo the excellent work of the vaccine programme and lead to a surge of infections,' he said.

Weddings could still get an exemption, with the 30-person cap on guests lifted on June 21 to allow the big weddings that many couples have booked to go ahead.

However, the delay to lifting the remainder of the curbs  which ban nightclubs opening, limit crowds at theatres and sporting events, restrict capacity indoors at pubs and restaurants and prevent people meeting in large groups  is likely to enrage many MPs, hospitality leaders and business chiefs.

The Mail revealed this week that Mr Sunak had told Mr Johnson he could live with a delay of 'a week or two' but would resist any further slippage as this could involve extending the furlough scheme.

On Friday, nightclubs and bars threatened to sue the Government if the planned lifting of restrictions was postponed.

Speaking at the start of the G7 summit in Cornwall, Boris Johnson told his fellow world leaders that mistakes had 'doubtless' been made over the last 18 months during the course of the 'wretched' coronavirus pandemic

England's coronavirus R rate is higher than at any time since October at a minimum of 1.2 and possible high of 1.4, SAGE estimated today

Public Health England data show how it took just a matter of weeks for the Indian 'Delta' variant to smash past the Kent strain and take over as dominant in England, with it surging to make up 96 per cent of cases in just nine weeks

The Office for National Statistics' weekly infection survey suggested England's outbreak grew by only 13 per cent last week to 96,800 total cases - compared to a near-doubling 75 per cent surge the week before

Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said the UK must be 'really careful' so not to 'squander' gains made with vaccines. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to delay the end of lockdown planned for June 21

The R rate is highest in the North West, where it could be as high as 1.5. The region is the Indian variant hotspot and cases there have exploded in the past fortnight. A quarter of all the 7,400 cases announced in the UK yesterday were in the North West

Andrew Lloyd Webber has already warned that he could take ministers to court if they do not allow theatres to operate at full capacity as planned.

And yesterday furious Tory MPs warned they will use every mechanism at their disposal to resist the delay of Freedom Day.

Julian Sturdy, the Conservative MP for York Outer, said: 'Despite what lockdown supporters claim, it is simply not just a few extra weeks. People's livelihoods, mental health and our long-term freedoms are at permanent risk.'

The move towards delaying June 21 came after the number of cases of the Indian variant  also known as the Delta variant  increased by 240 per cent in a week.

Public Health England said the infections had risen from 12,431 to 42,323 in the latest seven-day period, an increase of 29,892 cases. The majority of cases appeared to be among the unvaccinated. The R-rate of reproduction also increased yesterday to between 1.2 and 1.4.

In a further sign that a delay is likely, vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi yesterday stressed the importance of being 'really careful' in lifting coronavirus restrictions and urged against 'squander(ing) those hard-fought gains' made by the vaccination programme.

At the G7 summit in Cornwall yesterday, Mr Johnson told fellow world leaders that it was important not to 'repeat some of the errors that we doubtless made in the course of the last 18 months'. The PM has been criticised for not locking down sooner last year.

Kate Nicholls, the boss of UK Hospitality, said: 'Any delay in the roadmap would have a devastating effect on an already fragile hospitality sector.

'A one-month delay would cost the sector 3billion in sales and push many businesses even closer to the cliff edge of failure, meaning more job losses.'

Public Health England graphs show how the Indian 'Delta' variant (pink) rapidly overtook all other strains of the virus to become dominant in April and May

The North West (dark blue) has been by far the hardest hit region by the new variant while London (yellow) has experienced the second highest number of cases

Most Delta cases have been in young adults and teenagers, who are unvaccinated, while there have been significantly fewer positive tests in older people, particularly over-50s, most of whom have had two doses of a jab. The true test of the vaccine will be whether the age distribution stays this way as the outbreak gets larger

This heat map shows the hotspots for positive test samples that scientists believe are the Delta variant, with the most cases concentrated in the North West around Manchester and Liverpool

The vast majority of cases and hospital admissions triggered by the Delta variant have been in people who were unvaccinated, PHE's data show. The figures show that only one in 10 people admitted to hospital after getting infected with the variant had been given two doses of a vaccine - just 42 out of 383 - while the rest of them had either had one jab or none at all. Twelve out of 42 people to have died of the strain had been vaccinated and just 1,785 out of 33,206 infections were in double-jabbed people

No10's top scientific advisers have estimated England's coronavirus R rate is higher than at any time since last October and could now be 1.4.

Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi had earlier given his own downbeat assessment of the situation as he said the country must not 'squander those hard fought gains that we have made through the vaccination programme'.

Speaking at the start of the G7 summit, Mr Johnson told his fellow world leaders: 'We have all been going through the most wretched pandemic our countries have faced for our lifetimes, maybe longer, much longer.

And I actually think this is a meeting that genuinely needs to happen because we need to make sure that we learn the lessons from the pandemic, we need to make sure that we dont repeat some of the errors that we doubtless made in the course of the last 18 months or so and we need to make sure that we now allow our economies to recover.

US REGULATOR STOPS USE OF SWAB TEST WIDELY-USED IN THE UK OVER ACCURACY FEARS US health chiefs have told the public to immediately stop using a lateral flow Covid test that Britain has spent around 2.8billion on. Kits sold by Innova have been put at the heart of the UK's twice-a-week swabbing blitz, with ministers hoping the regular testing programme would thwart the spread of coronavirus. But the tests, which are the NHS-packaged 'self test kits', have been mired in huge controversy since they were given the green light. Now the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates medical devices used in the US, has revealed it has 'significant concerns' over the accuracy of the test and has called on Americans who have bought it to throw it in the bin. The agency accused Innova of peddling 'false or misleading' claims about how well the tests work, with the Californian-based firm claiming they were up to 98.98 per cent accurate. The FDA said the figure didn't 'accurately reflect performance estimates observed during the clinical studies of your devices'. It added the claim 'appears unsupported by any clinical data' but did not offer any clearer accuracy figures. But real-world statistics from Britain have revealed they miss up to 40 per cent of infectious people. They are also less accurate when self-administered, which is the main way they are used in the UK. The FDA said the accuracy of the test 'has not been adequately established' and said the company could respond with any evidence if it disputes the findings. Advertisement

I think that they have the potential to bounce back very strongly and there is all sorts of reasons for being optimistic.

But it is vital that we dont repeat the mistake of the last great crisis, the last great economic recession in 2008, when the recovery was not uniform across all parts of society and I think what has gone wrong with this pandemic, or what risks being a lasting scar, is that I think the inequalities may be entrenched.

We need to make sure that as we recover we level up across our societies and we build back better.

Mr Johnson faced fierce criticism over his decision in the autumn to delay the second national lockdown and Number 10 will be aware that whatever the PM decides to do regarding June 21 he is likely to face a barrage of attacks.

This morning Mr Zahawi said on Times Radio: 'There has been some really hard won battles against this virus and we don't want to squander those hard fought gains that we have made through the vaccination programme. The virus hasn't gone away, the virus will continue to mutate, to escape, to try and survive, and I think it's really important that we are really careful.'

Government critics were taken aback by 'terrible' data showing how the Delta variant is taking over so quickly and threatening a third wave of hospital admissions.

The PHE figures show that the number of positive tests linked back to the strain more than tripled from 12,431 to 42,323 in just a week.

Part of this increase was down to an improved testing system that speeds up the process of working out which variant someone is infected with, PHE said, but cases are rising in the real world, too.

The variant was only discovered in April but already accounts for 96 per cent of all positives, which is likely down to the fact that it is an estimated 64 per cent more transmissible than the Kent strain was. Experts say it appears better equipped to latch onto cells in people's airways meaning less exposure is needed to trigger an infection.

Nick Thomas-Symonds, Labours Shadow Home Secretary, said: 'These figures are terrible. The pace at which cases of the Delta variant continue to rise is deeply worrying and is putting the lifting of restrictions at risk.

'The blame for this lies with the Prime Minister and his reckless refusal to act on Labours repeated warnings to secure our borders against Covid and its variants.'

And Layla Moran, Liberal Democrat MP and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus, added: 'These figures should set alarm bells ringing in government as we approach the 21st June.

'It is particularly concerning that the increased transmissibility of the Delta variant is above the worst-case scenario modelled by SAGE, with cases estimated to be doubling every 4.5 days in some regions.

'The government must immediately explain to the public whether this exponential growth suggests the country is in line for a severe third wave, and if so what it is doing to prevent this.'

On plans for June 21 Mr Johnson's spokesperson said the PM would make his final decision over the weekend: 'I am not going to get into speculation. The Prime Minister addressed the question yesterday and the vaccines minister spoke about it as well this morning.

'We are closely looking at the data and assessing against the four tests which we published in the roadmap, particularly on hospitalisations, and we will set out an update on Monday.'

Although figures for the Indian variant specifically are rocketing, numbers for the outbreak overall are increasing more slowly.

Today's weekly ONS report found that an estimated 96,800 people were coronavirus-positive last week, compared to 85,600 the week before. This was a significantly smaller increase than the near-doubling from 48,500 at May's end.

An estimated one in 560 people were carrying the virus by June 5, it said - around 0.18 per cent of the population. This compared to 0.08 per cent in Wales, 0.14 in Northern Ireland and an equal 0.18 in Scotland.

The infection rate is significantly higher in North West England, at 0.5 per cent, than in other regions, with all others recording rates of 0.2 or 0.1 per cent.

This is backed up the PHE data that showed 8,288 Indian variant cases in the North West by June 7, compared to 2,325 in London, the second worst affected area. The NW cases were almost half of all those in England.

By age, secondary school pupils had the highest infection rate in the ONS survey, at 0.5 per cent. The rate was 0.4 per cent for 17 to 24-year-olds and became lower with age to 0.1 per cent among the vaccinated over-50s.

The true test of the vaccines will be whether infection rates remain low among older age groups in the coming weeks and, if they do, ministers will likely be satisfied that it is safe to reopen normal society.

Dr Jenny Harries, chief of the UK Health Security Agency, said: 'Vaccination is our best defence. If you are eligible, we urge you to come forward and be vaccinated. Remember that two doses provide significantly more protection than a single dose.

'However, while vaccination reduces the risk of severe disease, it does not eliminate it. With data showing that Delta is significantly more transmissible than Alpha, it is just as important as ever to follow public health advice, which has not changed. Get vaccinated, work from home where you can and remember "hands, face, space, fresh air" at all times. These measures work, and they save lives.'

Vaccines are now being offered to everyone over the age of 25 but Mr Zahawi said that supplies of the Pfizer jab, which is being used for everyone under the age of 40 as well as for second doses for around half of older people, were going to be 'tight' in the coming weeks as the rollout rattles ahead.

The infection rate is significantly higher in North West England, at 0.5 per cent, than in other regions, with all others recording rates of 0.2 or 0.1 per cent

By age, secondary school pupils had the highest infection rate in the ONS survey, at 0.5 per cent. The rate was 0.4 per cent for 17 to 24-year-olds and became lower with age to 0.1 per cent among the vaccinated over-50s

People in their 20s were invited to book vaccine appointments for the first time this week and clamoured for the jabs with more than a million people getting booked in on Tuesday alone - a one-day record for the NHS.

LIMITING ASTRAZENECA 'IS SLOWING DOWN' JABS ROLLOUT Insisting on giving people younger than 40 the Pfizer vaccine and not the AstraZeneca one is slowing down the UK's vaccine rollout, a Scottish MP has suggested. Ahead of a call between the British nations on Thursday, Humza Yousaf said Scotland needs more Pfizer doses if it is to 'maintain or increase' its current speed of rollout. He said he was 'conscious' that official advice that the AstraZeneca vaccine should not be used for those under 40 had placed 'increased pressure' on supplies. The JCVI, the UK's vaccines watchdog, decided that younger adults should be offered the Pfizer jab wherever possible because of the small risk of blood clotting after the AstraZeneca vaccine. Although both are proven to be safe for the vast majority of people ministers decided to err on the side of caution while the Covid risk was low and it was safe to wait a bit longer to get Pfizer. If the outbreak gets significantly worse or a more dangerous variant appears, the balance of risk might change and the AstraZeneca jab brought back for young people. Nadhim Zahawi and Pfizer tried to play down concerns about the supply chain. The vaccines minister said: 'I am absolutely confident, and Ill speak to Humza on this, that we will be able to deliver the Pfizer vaccines that Scotland needs to be able to meet its targets for end of July, as the United Kingdom target.' He added: 'Supply remains finite, but it is stable, and Pfizer have done a great job in being consistent on their delivery schedule.' Pfizer said in a statement: 'In the UK, quarter one deliveries (January-March) were completed in line with our contractual agreement and we remain on course to continue to deliver a steady supply of vaccines to the UK, in accordance with the monthly schedule.' Advertisement

The minister said on LBC: 'Every time I've said the determining factor in terms of vaccine in arms is supply. And supply remains finite, but it is stable, and Pfizer have done a great job in being consistent on their delivery schedule.'

It is believed that ministers are still considering keeping some curbs in place for a further two to four weeks to buy more time for the vaccine programme amid mounting concern about the spread of the Indian variant.

While an exception is likely to be made for weddings, ministers have become increasingly pessimistic over the course of the week and are now moving closer to a delayed freedom day that could coincide with the start of the school summer holidays.

The Pfizer supply setback comes as a particular blow as it makes the prospect of speeding up the vaccine roll-out to meet demand much more difficult.

Scottish MP Humza Yousaf told Matt Hancock in a letter that supplies of the Pfizer jab are to be 'particularly tight over the next few weeks', not just in Scotland but across the UK, according to the i newspaper.

Mr Yousaf's fears are the result of the updated advice published the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation last month, which said that under-40s should be given Pfizer or Moderna jabs rather than the AstraZeneca equivalent due to concerns over a small risk of blood clots in younger patients.

And with thousands of under-30s now receiving jabs after the vaccine roll-out picked up pace, demand for doses of Pfizer has soared beyond supply levels.

Yesterday, Health Secretary Matt Hancock revealed that the Indian variant now comprises 91 per cent of new infections.

Figures showed Covid-19 case rates have increased across every region in England in the past week. But hospital admissions have only increased fractionally  while deaths are up by just 1.9 per cent on the previous week.

NHS bosses have said vaccines appear to have broken the link between rising cases and hospitalisations. Those that are admitted are often younger and less sick than during previous waves.

According to NHS data published yesterday, more than 85 per cent over-50s in England  considered the age group most at risk  have now had two vaccine doses.

If the NHS in England continues to give doses to 1.3million over-50s a week, everyone in that age bracket should be fully vaccinated by the time all remaining covid curbs are due to ease.

Among younger age groups, 35.5 per cent of those aged 40 to 49 are now estimated to have had both doses, along with 22.6 per cent of those aged 30 to 39.

The number of people falling ill with Covid has more than doubled in a week, a symptom-tracking study warned today amid the rapid spread of the Indian variant across the UK

Boris Johnson is expected to decide whether England can go ahead with the full re-opening on June 21 at a meeting in Downing Street on Sunday evening, following the conclusion of the G7 summit in Cornwall.

Then, after flying to Brussels on Monday morning to attend a Nato summit, he will return to London in the evening to address the nation.

The Government is planning to lift the 30-person limit on weddings, Whitehall sources confirmed last night.

But they insisted the Prime Minister is still undecided about the wider lifting of measures including social distancing rules and work-from-home advice.

Yesterday, the UK recorded 7,393 new coronavirus cases and seven deaths within 28 days of a positive test. Infections have risen 63 per cent in the past seven days compared to the week before.

But the number of hospital admissions has remained steady and the average number of deaths each day has stayed below ten.

Dr Jenny Harries, chief executive of the newly-created UK Health Security Agency, said the country was going 'not quite in the right direction' and data suggested there would be a further rise in infections in the coming weeks.

But the health chief said the figures suggested that those aged 60 and above are not getting ill because they are 'doubly vaccinated'.

She added that those appearing in hospital are either unvaccinated or have had a single dose.

The Prime Minister's spokesman said: 'The point of the five-week gap between the steps [in the roadmap] is for us to analyse the data. That's exactly what we've been doing, and we will continue to do so ahead of saying something early next week.'
Tony Blair today urged Boris Johnson to 'look again' at 'distinguishing' between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated in order to save his June 21 'Freedom Day'.

The former Labour PM said if Mr Johnson is 'finding it difficult' to stick to the date for the final stage in his lockdown exit roadmap then he should consider jab-related restrictions.

Mr Blair said it 'really makes no sense to treat the two groups as if they are the same' as he insisted a two-tier system of rules would not be discriminatory.

He said provision would have to be made for people who are unable to receive a coronavirus vaccine for medical reasons.

But he suggested restricting the freedoms of people who can have a vaccine but opt not to would not be unfair because they have made an active choice to reject the jab.

Tony Blair today urged Boris Johnson to 'look again' at 'distinguishing' between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated in order to save his June 21 'Freedom Day'

There are growing fears that Mr Johnson, pictured today at the G7 summit in Cornwall, will opt to delay the final stage of his lockdown loosening beyond June 21 because of the spread of the Indian variant of the disease and increasing Covid-19 case numbers

Mr Blair's comments are likely to reignite a furious human rights and civil liberties debate over whether vaccination status should be used to determine access to society.

The UK's vaccination drive continues at pace, with the latest Government data showing that up to June 10 more than 70million jabs had been administered with just over 41million first doses.

Despite the success of the rollout, there are growing fears that Mr Johnson will opt to delay the final stage of his lockdown loosening beyond June 21 because of the spread of the Indian variant of the disease and increasing Covid-19 case numbers.

Mr Blair was asked by ITV News today what he would do regarding June 21 if he was still prime minister.

He replied: They have got to look at the data as it precedes, but my point is if you do get into a situation where you are finding it difficult to keep to the June 21 date then look again at distinguishing between those people who are vaccinated and those people who arent because it really makes no sense to treat the two groups as if they are the same.

And when people say well, you are discriminating against people who are unvaccinated.

You have of course got to make provision for those people who for medical reasons cant get vaccinated.

But if someone simply chooses not to get vaccinated, I mean frankly that is their choice, you are not discriminating against them, they have chosen not to do it.

Silkie Carlo, director of the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, slammed Mr Blair's suggestion and said 'medical segregation' should have 'no place in modern Britain'.

'The idea of splitting the country into the vaccinated and unvaccinated would lead to a dystopian, two-tier, checkpoint society with no benefit to public health,' she said.
Time magazine's fawning cover of Joe Biden looking younger with Vladimir Putin in his aviator sunglasses is Twitter's newest meme playground, with the president's critics ripping into the publication.

In Time's tweet introducing the cover, the magazine wrote: 'Biden takes on Putin,' which elicited an onslaught of snippy jokes about 78-year-old Biden's age and gifs of Putin laughing on Twitter.

'What in the hell kind of fan fiction comic book is this cover?' one user said.

Another tweet said it made the president look like a 'Hollywood movie villain.'

'He's wearing sunglasses because he's sleeping,' another Twitter user said, playing off Donald Trump's snarky nickname for Biden 'Sleepy Joe'.

Time published the cover as Biden prepares to meet with Putin at a summit in Geneva next week.

'Good luck to Biden in dealing with President Putindon't fall asleep during the meeting, and please give him my warmest regards,' Trump said in an emailed statement.

Time magazine has come under fire for its fawning cover of Joe Biden looking younger with Vladimir Putin reflected in his aviator sunglasses

The cover elicited an onslaught of jokes and jabs from the president's critics

Another Twitter user said Time should've used the picture of the 1989 film Weekend at Bernie's, where two guys prop up their employer - who's wearing aviator glasses - and pretend he's alive.

Biden spent his first full day on a European tour meeting British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Thursday.

He's scheduled to spend the next week meeting world leaders before sitting down with Putin on Wednesday in Geneva, Switzerland.

Biden and his officials have said they see his trip to Europe as a chance to reassert American leadership after Trump and his administration were accused by critics of being soft on Putin.

White House officials have not yet said whether the two leaders will hold a joint press conference.

Biden and his officials have said they see his trip to Europe as a chance to reassert American leadership after Trump's administration, which was criticized for being soft on Russia.

Based on replies to Time magazine's cover, Twitter doesn't think that will happen.

'Imagine thinking an establishment stooge will be able to take on a man who practically rebuilt the Russian state from scratch,' a Twitter user said.

A meme underneath the actual cover is an exact copy, except instead of Putin in the aviators, it's a picture of Biden falling up the stairs to Air Force One at the end of March.

Biden played that gaffe off with a smile and saluted the reporters and photographers. He fell again in rainy weather in May and reacted the same way.

Outside of the Twitter rabbit hole of gifs, memes and criticisms is the reason for the highly anticipated and polarizing meeting between Biden and Putin.

In 2018, Trump told reporters he accepted Putin's denial his country interfered in the 2016 election, sending officials to do public relations damage control.

'As president, I had a great and very productive meeting in Helsinki, Finland, with President Putin of Russia,' said Trump in his message.

'Despite the belated Fake News portrayal of the meeting, the United States won much, including the respect of President Putin and Russia.'

Intelligence agencies concluded that the Kremlin sought to tilt the election in Trump's favor as part of an effort to undermine American democracy and install a weaker leader than Hillary Clinton.

But Trump said it was the meddling of his own country's investigators that threatened to impede his administration.

Trump was roundly condemned for accepting Putin's denials of election interference. US intelligence agencies believed the Kremlin worked to tilt the election in Trump's favor as the least threatening candidate to their interests

In a Wednesday speech from Britain, Biden said, 'I'm headed to the G7, then to the NATO ministerial and then to meet with Mr. Putin to let him know what I want him to know.

Biden is on an eight-day swing through Europe and is due to meet Putin in Geneva, Switzerland, on Wednesday after meeting G7, NATO and European Union leaders

'We're not seeking conflict with Russia. We want a stable predictable relationship,' he said.

'I've been clear: the United States will respond in a robust and meaningful way if the Russian government engages in harmful activities.'

When he sits down with Putin, Biden will privately pressure Putin on everything from attacks by Russian-based hackers on American businesses, to the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and covert efforts by the Kremlin to interfere in elections.

Back in the Twitterverse, Biden's comments play to a meme that spoofed the popular video game (turned into a recent movie) Mortal Combat with Biden and the White House on one side vs. Putin and the Kremlin on the other.
A drug dealer who sold ecstasy to a teenager, who later died on the first day of her holiday after dabbling with the powder, was jailed on Friday.

The boyfriend of 15-year-old Mollie Nutt ordered the class A drug from dealer Dione Grech to use together before they went on holiday with their families.

However, the couple quickly realised Grech, now 24, had a reputation for giving more drugs to girls so boyfriend Stefan Scutaru cancelled his order and schoolgirl Mollie placed their order instead.

The hearing at Aylesbury Crown Court heard how the pupils visited a supermarket before they began to feel the effects of the ecstasy - something Mr Scutaru felt happened far quicker than he had experienced before.

Jonathan Stone, for the Crown Prosecution Service, said: 'On July 22, 2018, Mr Scutaru and Ms Nutt met the defendant near Bletchley Bus Station, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire.

The boyfriend of 15-year-old Mollie Nutt ordered the class A drug from dealer Dione Grech to use together before they went on holiday with their families

'Mr Scutaru was with Ms Nutt as they exchanged the drugs as he wanted to protect her.

'The next day they were together at Ms Nutt's house. At 11am, they took the drugs.'

Mr Stone added: 'Mr Scutaru remembers very little of what happened. He remembers Ms Nutt being unwell and trying to help her but nothing is clear. The next thing he remembers is waking up in hospital.'

The prosecutor revealed that Ms Nutt was found in cardiac arrest on the afternoon of July 23, 2018, the first day of her summer holiday, in a field near her home in Bradville, Milton Keynes.

Despite the best efforts of paramedics, the teenager died at the scene. A post-mortem examination revealed the student had died of MDMA ecstasy toxicity.

Recorder Power heard that on July 25, days after Ms Nutt's death, Grech was arrested at his home address.

Police found a number of drugs at his home, including cannabis and ecstasy.

Grech was charged with two counts of being concerned in supplying Class A drugs, being concerned in making an offer to supply Class B drugs, selling a controlled drug of Class A, possession of a controlled drug of Class A and possession with intent to supply a drug of Class B.

The prosecutor revealed that Ms Nutt was found in cardiac arrest on the afternoon of July 23, 2018, the first day of her summer holiday, in a field near her home in Bradville, Milton Keynes

Grech admitted the charges against him at an earlier hearing.

Defence Barrister Jon Swain explained that Grech, of Cliveden Place, Westcroft, Milton Keynes, has since become a father and has gone clean and stopped selling drugs.

Mr Swain added: 'Through his own behaviour he was thrown out of home at aged 16 years and at an important stage in life, he did not have any family support.

'He was effectively sofa surfing for some years until these events occurred. He was existing day-to-day by selling drugs, just enough to buy food and the drugs he wanted to use.'

Mr Swain explained that Grech now has a new partner, who was in court with him, and had turned over a new leaf after he head learned the consequences of his actions.

Recorder Power sentenced Grech to four years and three months in prison on Friday.

She made it clear she was not holding him responsible for Ms Nutt's death.
New DNA testing has identified a mutilated corpse found in 1994 as one of the first victims of the Hog Trail Murder serial killer.

The body has been referred to as a John Doe for 27 years but has now been identified as that of Jerry Lombard, who vanished from his home in Florida in 1991.

Police now say he was the first victim of Daniel Conahan, a convicted murderer and rapist who killed a string of men in the 1990s in what became known as the Hog Trail Murders.

Conahan would lure the men into the woods, tie them up to take bondage photos of them and then mutilate their genitals before killing them. The men were all drifters and in need of money. Police believed Conahan would promise to pay them, and that's why they'd follow him.

The body has been referred to as a John Doe for 27 years but has now been identified as that of Jerry Lombard, who vanished from his home in Florida in 1991

Conahan went undetected until 1996. He was sentenced to death in 1997 but remains on death row in Florida. It's unclear when he will be executed.

He is the killer in at least ten murders, according to police, but they have not linked him to all of them yet with solid evidence.

He was caught in 1996 after one would-be victim escaped and survived, and told police that Conahan had tried to kill him.

So far, he has been blamed for the deaths of ten people.

Police now say he was the first victim of Daniel Conahan, a convicted murderer and rapist who killed a string of men in the 1990s in what became known as the Hog Trail Murders

At his trial, prosecutors said Conahan realized as a child that he was homosexual but his parents repressed him, forcing him to go to therapy.

All of his victims were also gay men.

The newest victim was identified after one of the man's relatives submitted their DNA to a genealogy website.

In 2013, a forensic anthropologist submitted a tooth from John Doe to the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification.

In January 2020, detectives from the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office enlisted the help of the FBI. Then in February this year, cops found a match from a genealogy website.

They found DNA from one of Lombard's many relatives - he had 16 siblings - and one of them had submitted their sample.


US President Joe Biden joked with journalists today that they should go swimming during the G7 summit, feigning an order as he said: 'Everybody in the water.'

The gag by Mr Biden, who is known for taking unsubtle digs at the Press, came while the leaders were gathering for the 'family photo' at Carbis Bay in Cornwall.

Mr Biden made the comment while standing on a raised platform with Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his wife Carrie for the socially-distanced picture on the beach.

It comes after Mr Biden joked to a reporter in May that they could only ask him about the Israel-Hamas conflict if they stood in front of a pickup truck 'as I step on it'.

In Cornwall today, First Lady Jill Biden joked: 'I feel like we are at a wedding'. And Mr Johnson, whose recent marriage is his third, said it was like 'walking down the aisle'.

US President Joe Biden (second right) jokes while standing next to his wife, First Lady Jill Biden (far right) and Prime Minister Boris Johnson (second left) and his wife Carrie Johnson (left) at the start of the G7 summit at Carbis Bay in Cornwall today

US President Joe Biden and his wife Jill (R) arrive on the beach at Carbis Bay this afternoon

After the photograph was taken, Mr Biden walked arm-in-arm along the beach on the overcast day discussing democracy with France's Emmanuel Macron.

Under grey clouds, Mr and Mrs Johnson had greeted other G7 leaders and their partners on a specially constructed wooden gangway beside the Atlantic Ocean.

After the leaders returned for the group picture, Germany's Angela Merkel urged Mr Johnson ahead, telling him: 'You are the leader.'

Mr Macron held back, speaking to Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, before Mr Biden draped his arm around Mr Macron who returned the embrace.

They walked smiling, arm-in-arm along the walkway, discussing affairs of state.

The joke came while the leaders were gathering for the 'family photo' at Carbis Bay in Cornwall

The Johnsons greet the Bidens for the 'family photo' on the beach at Carbis Bay this afternoon

The Elysee Palace said Macron and Biden had talked about 'how to make democracies more efficient for the middle class and on China said there should be no confrontation but that we should defend our values and interests'.

As he opened the summit, Mr Johnson said it would be hugely significant after the 'wretched pandemic' and speculated that perhaps leaders could rebuild in 'a more gender neutral, a more feminine, way'.

Ordering the media to leave the meeting after his initial remarks, Mr Johnson said: 'This is meant to be a fireside chat between the great democracies of the world.

'It's turned into a gigantic media circus in which we have to greet each other several times.'

When asked what his message would be to Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin when the two meet in Geneva next week, Mr Biden said: 'I'll tell you after I have delivered it.'

After the photograph was taken, Mr Biden walked arm-in-arm along the beach on the overcast day discussing democracy with France's Emmanuel Macron

From left, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, President of the European Council Charles Michel, US President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, French President Emmanuel Macron, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, during the G7 'family photo' at Carbis Bay in Cornwall today

Mr Johnson also said the G7 must learn from the mistakes of the pandemic as he predicted the leading economies would 'bounce back' from the Covid-19 recession.

The PM said the group of leading democracies should also avoid the errors that followed the 2008 financial crash and ensure the recovery helped all parts of society.

The G7 nations will promise a billion doses of Covid-19 vaccine to help poorer countries tackle the pandemic, with Mr Johnson promising at least 100 million surplus doses from the UK over the coming year.

It is the first face-to-face meeting for the group in almost two years as a result of what Mr Johnson called the 'most wretched pandemic'.
A Nevada advocacy group is pushing for teachers to wear body cameras in the classroom to make sure they aren't teaching critical race theory in schools and indoctrinating students.

The proposal came from the Nevada Family Alliance - a group that describes itself as a 'watchdog organization - at a Washoe County school board meeting this week.

It is in response to a plan from the school district, which includes the cities of Reno and Sparks, to expand the K-5 curriculum and teach more about equity, diversity and racism.

The alliance's suggestion for teachers to wear body cameras followed frustration from parents about the 'lack of transparency by teachers promoting a social justice narrative'.

The Nevada Family Alliance - a group that describes itself as a 'watchdog organization - has suggested at a board meeting this week that Washoe County teachers wear body cameras to make sure they aren't teaching critical race theory in schools. A man is picturing protesting against CRT outside the board meeting

'Every day we are told of another incident where a teacher is violating the privacy of a student or contradicting the lessons taught by parents at home,' Karen England, founder of the group, said.

'Creating a record that could be viewed by appropriate parties, if necessary, might be the best way to urge teachers to stick to traditional teaching.'

The group believes the body cameras are a 'necessity'.

'We expect that the teachers' unions will reject this proposal immediately. But we should ask, what do they have to hide?' England said.

'If police do a better job interacting with the public when they are wearing body cameras, how much more important is it for teachers to do the same?'

The district hasn't commented on the body camera proposal.

The curriculum has been the subject of fierce debate, which has resulted in large crowds at local school board meetings. The district was forced to set up overflow rooms and loudspeakers to accommodate attendees.

At a packed local school board meeting on Tuesday, opponents of the curriculum proposal camped on side of the entrance wearing MAGA hats and carrying signs that read 'No CRT,' 'CRT teaches racism,' and 'The School Board works for the people!'

On the other side of the entrance, students, parents and teachers wore green T-shirts and carried signs with slogans including 'Amplify Student Voices' to signify support for 'Washoe County School District Students for Change', the group that has pushed for curriculum additions.

The school district insists critical race theory isn't part of curriculums or plans, but a nationwide discussion about it has touched down locally and stoked fears among those who doubt administrators' explanations.

Opponents say the districts' plans incorporate tenets of critical race theory, which draws a line from slavery and segregation to contemporary inequities, and argues that racism remains embedded in laws and institutions.

The proposal was put forward by the Nevada Family Alliance - a group that describes itself as a 'watchdog organization. They put out this guide on how to combat critical race theory

CRITICAL RACE THEORY: THE CONTROVERSIAL RACE IDEOLOGY BEING TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS The fight over critical race theory in schools has escalated in the United States over the last year. The theory has sparked a fierce nationwide debate in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests around the country over the last year and the introduction of the 1619 Project. The 1619 Project, which was published by the New York Times in 2019 to mark 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived on American shores, reframes American history by 'placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the center of the US narrative'. The debate surrounding critical race theory regards concerns that some children are being indoctrinated into thinking that white people are inherently racist or sexist. Those against critical race theory have argued it reduces people to the categories of 'privileged' or 'oppressed' based on their skin color. Supporters, however, say the theory is vital to eliminating racism because it examines the ways in which race influence American politics, culture and the law. Advertisement

'You say there's no CRT in this curriculum,' Sparks resident Bruce Parks said at the Tuesday board meeting in Reno.

'It is being taught in our schools right now. When you use words and language like 'white male privilege' 'systemic racism,' that's straight out of CRT.'

Superintendent Kristen McNeill ended up recommending the district form a task force to review curriculum instead of implementing the plan.

The board approved the task force on Wednesday.

It comes as some lawmakers across the country pass measures prohibiting critical race theory in schools, claiming the lesson plans constitute indoctrination and teach students to hate the United States.

Nevada has bucked that trend with lawmakers approving a proposal last month to add multicultural education to social studies curriculum standards and teach students about the historic contributions of members of additional racial and ethnic groups.

Nevada Department of Education Deputy Superintendent Dr Jonathan Moore said the laws clarified social studies 'content themes', which already included concepts like social justice and diversity.

The standards do not include critical race theory.

He cautioned against conflating the pursuit of equity with 'the idea that students are being indoctrinated with this very philosophical principle about race and how it has impacted society' and said curriculum debates were nothing new, referencing parallel disputes about teaching climate change and evolution.

'People often forget how political that standards can be when you're talking about what students need to know and be able to do,' he said.

Clashes over how to teach students about racism and its role in US history are also currently raging in other Nevada school districts.

In Carson City, a proposal to incorporate concepts like equity into the strategic plan raised parental concerns about how schools broach the topic of race.

At a Carson City School Board meeting on Tuesday, Jason Tingle said he was concerned when he heard talk about critical race theory in schools but he had reviewed district materials and concluded the fears were unfounded.

'I've yet to see anything in the curriculum that shows that we are actually going to take a hardcore approach to critical race theory,' said Tingle, who has four children enrolled in district schools.

'Until our kids come home and show us something different or tell us something different, then we should keep our faith in the school district and let them do what they were sent here to do.'

Meanwhile, in Clark County, the black mother of a mixed-race student is suing a Las Vegas charter school over a 'Sociology of Change' course that covers the concept of privilege as it pertains to race, gender and sexual orientation.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson: Nominee for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit

Brown Jackson is considered by some to be next in line for a Supreme Court nod

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has served on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia since 2013. Prior to joining the federal bench, Judge Jackson served as a Vice Chair of the United States Sentencing Commission beginning in 2010.

Judge Jackson began her legal career as a law clerk for Judge Patti Saris on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts from 1996 to 1997 and then for Judge Bruce Selya on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit from 1997 to 1998. She was an associate at Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin LLP from 1998 to 1999. She clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1999 to 2000. Judge Jackson was an associate at Goodwin Proctor LLP in Boston, Massachusetts from 2000 to 2002 and an associate at Feinberg Rozen, LLP (formerly The Feinberg Group, LLP) in Washington, D.C. from 2002 to 2003.

From 2003 to 2005, Judge Jackson served as an Assistant Special Counsel for the United States Sentencing Commission, and from 2005 to 2007, Judge Jackson served as an Assistant Federal Public Defender in Washington, D.C. From 2007 to 2010, Judge Jackson was of counsel at Morrison & Foerster LLP where her practice focused on criminal and civil appellate litigation in both state and federal courts, as well as cases in the Supreme Court.

Judge Jackson received her J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1996. She received an A.B., magna cum laude, from Harvard College in 1992.

Tiffany Cunningham: Nominee for the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

Tiffany P. Cunningham has been a partner at Perkins Coie LLP in Chicago, Illinois since 2014. She has been nominated for the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

Tiffany P. Cunningham has been a partner at Perkins Coie LLP in Chicago, Illinois since 2014. She is a member of the Patent Litigation practice and serves on the 17-member Executive Committee of the firm. Ms. Cunningham serves as trial and appellate counsel for large multinational companies, as well as small enterprises, and individuals in complex patent and trade secret disputes.

Ms. Cunningham is a registered patent attorney before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. From 2002 to 2014, she worked in the Chicago office of Kirkland & Ellis LLP as an associate until she was elevated to partner in 2007. Ms. Cunningham began her legal career as a law clerk to Judge Timothy B. Dyk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit from 2001 to 2002. Ms. Cunningham received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2001 and her S.B. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998.

Candace Jackson-Akiwumi: Nominee for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit

Candace Jackson-Akiwumi is a partner at Zuckerman Spaeder, LLP in Washington, D.C., where she focuses on complex civil litigation, white collar criminal defense

Candace Jackson-Akiwumi is a partner at Zuckerman Spaeder, LLP in Washington, D.C., where she focuses on complex civil litigation, white collar criminal defense, and investigations. From 2010 to 2020, Ms. Jackson-Akiwumi worked as a staff attorney at the Federal Defender Program in the Northern District of Illinois. Ms. Jackson-Akiwumi represented more than 400 indigent clients accused of federal crimes at every stage of the process, from investigation to trial, sentencing, and appeal.

Ms. Jackson-Akiwumi began her legal career as a law clerk to Judge David H. Coar on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois from 2005 to 2006, and then for Judge Roger Gregory on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 2006 to 2007. Ms. Jackson-Akiwumi was a litigation associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP in Chicago, Illinois from 2007 to 2010.

Ms. Jackson-Akiwumi received her A.B., with honors, from Princeton University in 2000, and her J.D. from Yale Law School in 2005.

Judge Deborah Boardman: Nominee for the United States District Court for the District of Maryland

Deborah Boardman is a United States Magistrate Judge for the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, a position she was appointed to in 2019.

From 2008 to 2019, Judge Boardman served at the Federal Public Defenders Office for the District of Maryland, including four years as the First Assistant Federal Public Defender. From 2001 to 2008, Judge Boardman worked as an associate at Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells) in Washington, D.C., where she was selected to serve as the senior associate in the firms pro bono department. Judge Boardman began her career as a law clerk for Judge James C. Cacheris of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia from 2000 to 2001.

Judge Boardman, who was born and raised in Maryland, received her J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law in 2000. After graduating with her B.A., summa cum laude from Villanova University in 1996, Judge Boardman was a Fulbright Scholar in Amman, Jordan.

Judge Lydia Griggsby: Nominee for the United States District Court for the District of Maryland

Judge Lydia Griggsby is Biden's nominee for the United States District Court for the District of Maryland

Judge Lydia Griggsby has served as a Judge on the U.S. Court of Federal Claims since 2014. Prior to her appointment, Judge Griggsby was Chief Counsel for Privacy and Information Policy and Privacy Counsel for Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, from 2005 to 2014. Prior to that, she was a counsel on the Senate Select Committee on Ethics from 2004 to 2005.

Judge Griggsby served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, practicing in the Civil Division, for the U.S. Attorneys Office in the District of Columbia from 1998 to 2004. She was a trial attorney in the Commercial Litigation Branch in the Civil Division of the U.S. Department of Justice from 1995 to 1998. Judge Griggsby began her legal career as an associate with DLA Piper in Baltimore, Maryland from 1993 to 1995.

Judge Griggsby received her J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center in 1993 and her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. She was born in Baltimore and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Julien Neals: Nominee for the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey

Julien Neals is County Counsel and Acting County Administrator for Bergen County, New Jersey. He became county counsel in January 2015 and has served as Acting County Administrator since June 2016. Mr. Neals served in various positions in the Newark, New Jersey city government between 2006 and 2014, including as Business Administrator from 2010 to 2014, Corporation Counsel from 2008 to 2010, and Chief Judge of the Municipal Court from 2006 to 2008. He was a partner at the Secaucus, New Jersey, law firm of Chasan Leyner & Lamparello from 1992 to 2006 and from 2014 to 2015. Mr. Neals began his legal career as a clerk for Judge Seymour Margulies on the New Jersey Superior Court.

A native of Newark, Mr. Neals received his J.D. from Emory University School of Law in 1991 and his B.A. from Morehouse College in 1986.

Judge Florence Y. Pan: Nominee for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia

Judge Florence Pan (pictured right with her husband Max Stier) would be the first Asian-American judge to serve on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia

Judge Florence Y. Pan has served as an Associate Judge on the Superior Court for the District of Columbia since 2009. Prior to joining the court, from 1999 to 2009, she served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of Columbia, where she also served as Deputy Chief of the Appellate Division from 2007 to 2009. From 1998 to 1999, she worked at the United States Department of Treasury, first as a Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary for Financial Markets in 1998 and then as a Senior Advisor to the Undersecretary for Domestic Finance in 1999.

Judge Pan worked for the U.S. Department of Justice from 1995 to 1998, during which time she was a Bristow Fellow in the Office of the Solicitor General from 1995 to 1996 and an attorney in the Appellate Section of the Criminal Division from 1996 to 1998. From 1994 to 1995, she served as a law clerk for Judge Ralph K. Winter, Jr., of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Judge Pan began her legal career as a law clerk for Judge Michael B. Mukasey of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York from 1993 to 1994. She received her J.D. with distinction from Stanford Law School in 1993 and her B.A. and B.S., summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988.

Judge Zahid N. Quraishi: Nominee for the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey

Zahid Quraishi is a United States Magistrate Judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, a position he was appointed to in 2019.He would be the first Muslim district judge if appointed

Zahid Quraishi is a United States Magistrate Judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, a position he was appointed to in 2019.

Prior to his appointment, Judge Quraishi was a partner at Riker Danzig where he chaired the firms White Collar Criminal Defense and Investigations Group and served as his firms first Chief Diversity Officer. Before joining Riker Danzig, Judge Quraishi served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of New Jersey from 2008 to 2013. Prior to joining the U.S. Attorneys office, Judge Quraishi served as an assistant chief counsel at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He also served as a military prosecutor and achieved the rank of Captain in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate Generals Corps, deploying to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004 and 2006. Earlier in his career, Judge Quraishi worked in private practice and clerked for Judge Edwin H. Stern, of the Superior Court of New Jersey, Appellate Division, from 2000 to 2001.

Judge Quraishi received his J.D. in 2000 from Rutgers Law School  Newark and his B.A. in 1997 from John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Regina Rodriguez: Nominee for the United States District Court for the District of Colorado

Regina Rodriguez has been a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP in Denver, Colorado since 2019. She is the Co-Chair of the Trial Practice and handles cases involving complex litigation and government investigations. From 2016 to 2019, she was a partner in the Denver, Colorado office of Hogan Lovells US LLP. From 2002 to 2016, Ms. Rodriguez worked in the Denver office of Faegre & Benson LLP (now Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP) as a special counsel until she was elevated to partner in 2005.

She served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of Colorado from 1995 to 2002, during which time she served as the Deputy Chief of the Civil Division from 1998 to 1999 and as Chief of the Civil Division from 1999 to 2002. In addition, from 1997 to 1998, Ms. Rodriguez served a four-month detail as Deputy Senior Counsel for Alternative Dispute Resolution in the U.S. Department of Justice. She began her legal career as an associate in the Denver law firm of Cooper & Kelly, P.C. (now defunct) from 1988 to 1995. Ms. Rodriguez received her J.D. from the University of Colorado School of Law in 1988 and her B.S., with honors, from the University of Iowa in 1985.

Margaret Strickland: Nominee for the United States District Court for the District of New Mexico

Margaret Strickland has been a named partner at McGraw & Strickland LLC in Las Cruces, New Mexico since 2011. She represents clients in both civil rights cases and criminal cases in both state and federal courts in New Mexico. She has represented clients in more than 70 criminal jury trials, and she has also argued before the New Mexico Supreme Court and the New Mexico Court of Appeals. From 2017 to 2019, she served as President of the New Mexico Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. Ms. Strickland started her career at the Law Offices of the Public Defender for the State of New Mexico from 2006 to 2011. She received her J.D. from New York University School of Law in 2006 and her B.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2003.

Judge Rupa Ranga Puttagunta: Nominee for the Superior Court of the District of Columbia

Judge Rupa Ranga Puttagunta currently serves as an Administrative Judge for the D.C. Rental Housing Commission.

Prior to joining the Commission in 2019, Judge Puttagunta was a solo practitioner from 2013 to 2019, representing indigent criminal defendants in trial and on appeal. Before opening her own practice, Judge Puttagunta practiced family and appellate law at Delaney McKinney, LLP from 2012 to 2013.

While working on domestic relations matters in private practice, Judge Puttagunta also provided hundreds of hours of pro bono legal services by volunteering at D.C. Superior Courts Family Court Self-Help Center and Attorney Negotiator Program and representing victims of domestic violence in D.C. Superior Court. Judge Puttagunta began her legal career as a law clerk for Judge William M. Jackson of the D.C. Superior Court from 2008 to 2010, as well as the Senior Judges of the D.C. Court of Appeals from 2010 to 2011. Judge Puttagunta received her J.D. from Ohio State Moritz College of Law in 2007 and her B.A. from Vassar College in 2002.

(source: White House)
Thousands are demanding a pardon for a woman who killed her serial rapist stepfather after years of abuse which began when her first period started.

Valerie Bacot, 40, killed her stepfather-turned-husband Daniel Polette on March 13, 2016 after years of horrific abuse.

The abuse began when she was 12-years-old and she became pregnant with their first child when she was just 17.

Her stepfather repeatedly raped Bacot, fathering children with her and forcing her to marry him.

Bacot murdered Polette in March 2016 after an encounter with a particularly brutal client

Daniel Polette began raping his stepdaughter when she was just 12 and got her pregnant at the age of 17

He also reportedly brandished a gun and threatened Bacot and her children that he would kill them if they tried to get help.

Bacot was also pimped out in the family minivan. When she met clients, she claims he would constantly threaten her via an earpiece not to ask for help and he would also peer through the window to watch her.

But, she says her 14-year-old daughter - allegedly borne of rape - was being groomed by Polette and she feared her daughter would be prostituted too.

During an interview with Le Parisien, she said, 'I deserve to go to jail, a very long time, thats normal. But this trial is not only mine but that of "the other,"' referring to Polette.

Bacot goes on trial for murder next month and more than 400,000 people have signed a petition to ask Emmanuel Macron for a presidential pardon.

The case harkens back to Jacqueline Sauvage, a French woman who fatally shot her husband after years of abuse against her and her children.

But she won a presidential pardon after being sentenced to 10 years in prison for murder.

Bacot murdered Polette in March 2016 after an encounter with a particularly brutal client.

Bacot claims to have grabbed the loaded pistol that Polette kept next to the driver's seat and shot him.

Speaking about the murder with Le Parisien, Bacot said: 'There was a loud noise; the flash, the smell.

'I got out of the car, opened the door, he fell. I thought only of saving myself because I was sure he was going to kill me.'

When Bacot told her eldest children that she had killed their father, they hugged her.

Two of her sons along with her daughter's boyfriend helped her bury Polette's remains in the forest.

Bacot claims she wanted to 'pack down the earth like crazy with my hands' because she was afraid he would 'come out to kill us'.

When Bacot told her eldest children that she had killed their father, they hugged her

But she was eventually caught after the mother of her daughter's boyfriend told police. Bacot was arrested in October 2017.

Ahead of the upcoming trial, Bacot appeared in a television interview that attracted 4.5million viewers.

She also detailed her horrific ordeal called 'Tout le Monde Savait', or 'Everyone knew'.

Bacot's lawyers Janine Bonaggiunta and Nathalie Tomasini in the preface to the book said: 'Valerie was transformed by the extreme violence she suffered into a remote-controlled puppet who, against her will, became an object for her perverse husband.'

Her lawyers told The Daily Beast they are withdrawing from the media in the weeks leading up to trial to focus on the defence.
The Justice Department's internal watchdog on Friday ordered a probe of the Department's use of subpoenas to seize communications information on at least two members of Congress as well as members of the press  following bombshell revelations about the tactics.

DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz announced the 'review' Friday afternoon, just hours after initial public reports about the EOJ use of the authority on two prominent Democratic lawmakers amid leak probes during the Trump Administation.

'The DOJ Office of the Inspector General (OIG) is initiating a review of DOJs use of subpoenas and other legal authorities to obtain communication records of Members of Congress and affiliated persons, and the news media in connection with recent investigations of alleged unauthorized disclosures of information to the media by government officials,' Horowitz's office said in a statement.

'The review will examine the Departments compliance with applicable DOJ policies and procedures, and whether any such uses, or the investigations, were based upon improper considerations. If circumstances warrant, the OIG will consider other issues that may arise during the review.'

The announcement came after Senate Democratic leaders demanded that former Trump attorneys general Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions testify about what they called a 'gross abuse of power' following bombshell revelations prosectors secretly obtained Apple communications data from House Intelligence panel members.

And the deputy attorney general of the Justice Department, Lisa Monaco, has asked the agency's nonpartisan Inspector General to probe the seizure of lawmakers' personal information during the Trump administration, the Associated Press reported.

The lawmakers demanded both men appear to testify under oath  and threatened to subpoena them if they would not cooperate. The public pressure on the Senate side of the Capitol comes hours after it was revealed that Trump nemeses Rep. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell were both targeted for monitoring as part of a leak probe.

Democrats want former Attorney General Bill Barr to testify about federal prosecutors subpoenaing Apple for information on Reps. Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff

Democrats also want former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to testify

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and Judiciary Committee Chairman Richard Durbin called the Trump Justice Department's actions in a leak probe a 'gross abuse of power'

'The revelation that the Trump Justice Department secretly subpoenaed metadata of House Intelligence Committee Members and staff and their families, including a minor, is shocking,' wrote Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and Senate Judiciary Chairman Richard Durbin of Illinois.

'This is a gross abuse of power and an assault on the separation of powers. This appalling politicization of the Department of Justice by Donald Trump and his sycophants must be investigated immediately by both the DOJ Inspector General and Congress,' they wrote.

'Former Attorneys General Barr and Sessions and other officials who were involved must testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee under oath,' they continued. 'If they refuse, they are subject to being subpoenaed and compelled to testify under oath.'

Justice Department prosecutors seized metadata records from Apple for accounts belonging to Rep. Adam Schiff, pictured, and other members of the House Intelligence Committee

Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, pictured, revealed he also had data from their Apple devices secretly seized by the Trump administration

Barr told Politico he was 'not aware of any congressmans records being sought in a leak case.'

He said Trump 'was not aware of who we were looking at in any of the cases  not withstanding Trump's regular practice of calling out 'leakers and liars' publicly.

'I never discussed the leak cases with Trump. He didnt really ask me any of the specifics,' said Barr.

The lawmakers also called on DOJ, now overseen by AG Merrick Garland, to 'provide information and answers to the Judiciary Committee, which will vigorously investigate this abuse of power.'

'The reports of the behavior of the attorney general under Donald Trump are appalling, White House comms director Kate Bedingfield told MSNBC. 'He obviously has a very different relationship with his Department of Justice than Trump did his,' she said.

Schumer and Durbin wrote: 'This issue should not be partisan; under the Constitution, Congress is a co-equal branch of government and must be protected from an overreaching executive, and we expect that our Republican colleagues will join us in getting to the bottom of this serious matter.'

The move comes as Swalwell, one of two lawmakers whose data is known to have been taken, said Trump's DOJ was 'weaponized' against political opponents. Trump regularly inveighed against Swalwell and 'liddle Adam Schiff' during the Russia probe. Both were prominent opposition figures in the matter.

Whether the lawmakers will succeed in forcing Barr and Sessions to appear in unclear. Former White House counsel Don McGahn appeared before House Judiciary last week after a two-year legal battle.

According to the New York Times, which broke the story, Apple handed over metadata and account information to the government, but did not provide photos or the internal content of the data. The data they handed over did not establish proof either man leaked the information being probed.

CNN reported that the effort began in 2018, when Sessions was serving as attorney general, despite suffering repeated attacks from Trump for recusing himself from the Russia probe. Sessions resigned his post in November, 2018.

'This is about everyday Americans who don't want to see their government weaponize law enforcement against them because of their political beliefs,' Swalwell told CNN.

Apple, one of the largest companies in the world, has yet to comment. They were under a judicial gag at the time they provided the data.

Schiff said Donald Trump's Justice Department broke rules brought in after Watergate by secretly trawling his communications to try and identify the source of embarrassing leaks.

Schiff and his fellow representative Eric Swalwell had data from their Apple devices seized and analysed as part of a probe revealed Thursday.

And Schiff - who also sits on the House Intelligence Committee - shared his outrage with Chris Cuomo on CNN Thursday.

He told Cuomo he had never heard of a White House administration opening such a probe, adding: 'And you know we brought about these new norms after Watergate to prevent exactly this kind of abuse. But they didn't survive this presidency and -- but it is shocking.'

Schiff and Swalwell - both members of the House Intelligence Committee - had metadata taken from their devices by Justice Department prosecutors as officials tried to work out who was leaking information about meetings between Trump associates and Russian leaders.

Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions began the probe in 2017, with more records seized in 2018. A dozen people with links to the House Intelligence Committee - which is privy to classified intelligence - had their metadata examined.

Their family members - including one minor child - were also targeted, amid concerns the suspected leakers may have been using children's devices to try and cover their tracks.

Justice Department prosecutors also sought a gag order to keep the probe secret, with none of those whose data was targeted aware of what was going on.

They finally found last month, with Schiff and Swalwell both sharing their outrage in separate CNN interviews on Thursday night.

Schiff told Chris Cuomo he was 'shocked but not surprised' by the 'terrible abuse of the rule of law,' and called for an inquiry into the DoJ probe.

He added: 'I love my experience there. And to see how it was turned into this bludgeon to go after the president's enemies and a shield to protect those who lied for him, people like Roger stone and Mike Flynn and others, it's disgraceful, but it's also, such a body blow to our democracy.'

Schiff also told the Times: 'It is increasingly apparent that those demands did not fall on deaf ears.'

'The politicization of the department and the attacks on the rule of law are among the most dangerous assaults on our democracy carried out by the former president.'

Speaking on Don Lemon's show later on Thursday, Swalwell said: 'It's wrong. This is what they do - they smear.'

The subpoenas which were used to obtain the information were first revealed to the The New York Times.

Trump and his administration were infuriated after detailed conversations between his aides and the Russian ambassador to the US were leaked shortly after he took office in January 2017.

The revelations show the extent of Trump's obsession over leaks and the extraordinary lengths his administration would go through to investigate them

They are said to have identified then-FBI director James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe as possible sources for leaks, as well as the House Intelligence Committee.

Embarrassing leaks included details of Trump's first national security Michael flynn's conversations with Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Flynn was later fired and charged, then later convicted, for lying to the FBI about his contact with Russia. He was later pardoned by Trump.

The seized data ultimately did not tie members of the House Intelligence Committee - including Schiff - to leaks to the press regarding contacts between associates of Donald Trump and Russia, the outlet reported. Exactly how much was seized remains unknown.

Schiff and other members of the committee had access to secret material, including intelligence on the Trump administration's ties to Russians.

The Justice Department also secured a gag order against Apple preventing them from telling the lawmakers they were being investigated, sources told the outlet. That gag order finally expired this year and Apple told the committee members that they were investigated last month.

Those investigators, who worked under then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, discussed if the Justice Department should close its investigation into the leaks of the classified information to the press.

Schiff released a statement on Thursday addressing the revelations

Sessions, 74, was ultimately forced out as Attorney General and replaced by William Barr - who revived attempts to investigate Schiff and his alleged connection to information leaks, The New York Times reported.

He is said to have done so after accusing investigators tasked with trying to identify the leakers of deliberately dragging their heels.

Barr even moved Osmar Benvenuto, a New Jersey prosecutor, to the main Justice Department offices in February 2020 to work on the case related to Schiff and about six others, sources told the outlet.

A former Justice Department leak investigator David Laufman also condemned the probes begun by Sessions and continued by Barr.

He said: 'Notwithstanding whether there was sufficient predication for the leak investigation itself, including family members and minor children strikes me as extremely aggressive.

'In combination with former President Trumps unmistakable vendetta against Congressman Schiff, it raises serious questions about whether the manner in which this investigation was conducted was influenced by political considerations rather than purely legal ones.'

Prosecutors also subpoenaed records from news reporters at The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN in an attempt to identify their confidential sources, which also remained secret until the Justice Department recently disclosed them.

The revelations show the extent of Trump's obsession over leaks and the extraordinary lengths his administration would go through to investigate them.

The Justice Department routinely investigates leaks of classified information - though officials noted to The New York Times that they could not recall any time when a lawmaker's records had been seized.

'President Trump repeatedly and fragrantly demanded that the Department of Justice carry out his political will, and tried to use the Department as a cudgel against his political opponents and members of the media,' Schiff said in a statement released on Thursday.

'It is increasingly apparent that those demands did not fall on deaf ears. The politicization of the Department and the attacks on the rule of law are among the most dangerous assaults on our democracy carried out by the former President.'

He added: 'Though we were informed by the Department in May that this investigation is closed, I believe more answers are needed, which is why I believe the Inspector General should investigate this and other cases that suggest the weaponization of law enforcement by a corrupt president.'

News reports based on sensitive or classified information began to surface almost immediately after Trump was inaugurated in 2017.

Among the first leaks, to The New York Times, included details of conversations between Sergey I. Kislyak, then Russias ambassador to the United States, and some of Trump's top aides.

U.S. intelligence agencies had already started investigating if the Trump campaign colluded with Russians in attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. Trump's White House was resolved to prosecute anyone who leaked information to the press.

The Justice Department started to look into Obama administration national security officials and opened cases focusing on former FBI director James Comey and former FBI Deputy Director deputy Andrew McCabe, sources told The New York Times.

A grand jury subpoenaed Apple and another internet service provider, which was not revealed, for the the committee's Democratic members, aides and even members of their families - including a minor, The New York Times reported.

It was not clear if any Republicans were also subpoenaed and the outlet noted that the records for members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were seemingly not subpoenaed.
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President Joe Biden and Jill Biden joined The Queen and other senior members of the Royal Family for a posh party Friday night for the leaders of the G7.

The first couple arrived arm-in-arm; the president in a dark suit and stripped tie with the first lady wearing a trench coat over a dark dress.

The bold-named reception, hosted by the 95-year-old monarch, was held in Eden Project, a lush, domed eco-tourism site built in a former quarry pit. It features several giant domes housing what the project's website calls 'the largest rainforest in captivity.'

The Bidens spoke to The Queen in a reception line. The gathering looked jovial with both members of the first couple and the monarch smiling broadly at one another.

Biden previously met with The Queen in 1982, according to the White House.

Prince Charles, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince William and Kate, Duchess of Cambridge joined the G7 leaders at the reception where Charles offered remarks at the event.

The leaders also joined The Queen for a family photo. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson escorted The Queen to the photo op with French President Emmanuel Macron at their side. Biden walked in with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The leaders were socially distanced for the pic, appropriately apart from one another while it was taken. Biden was a few seats down from the monarch.

President Joe Biden and Jill Biden joined The Queen and other senior members of the Royal Family for a posh party Friday night for the leaders of the G7. Downing Street released this photo of the first couple meeting the 95-year-old monarch

President Joe Biden and Jill Biden speak with Queen Elizabeth II. Biden previously met with The Queen in 1982, according to the White House

The G7 leaders and spouses gather around the Queen after the leaders took a photo with the monarch

President Joe Biden elbow bumps Carrie Johnson as he and Jill arrive at the reception

The leaders of the G7 pose with Queen Elizabeth II (seated center); President Biden is seated on the far right

The Queen has arrived at the Eden Project in Cornwall for a no-holds-barred dinner with G7 leaders - as Britain pulls out all the stops to dazzle the world's most powerful

Earlier in the day, Jill Biden, who was at an event with Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, was asked if she asked the Duchess for any advice on meeting the Queen.

The Bidens will get a private audience with The Queen, including tea, on Sunday.

'No I didn't,' she replied. 'We've been busy. Were you not in that room? We were talking education.'

Boris Johnson and his new wife Carrie Johnson - wearing a subdued black floral dress in contrast with the fuchsia pink number she donned to meet leaders earlier Friday - were seen greeting the Royals at the start of Friday evening's reception.

Kate cut an elegant figure in a mid-length cream gown while Camilla opted for a long sleeve black and white dress. The Queen fit the horticultural theme of the venue in a dress patterned with flowers.

The Bidens and other leaders walked underneath the leaf-covered arches to head into the dinner.

The Queen chats with various G7 leaders after they pose for a photo

Kate cut an elegant figure in a mid-length cream gown while Camilla opted for a long sleeve black and white dress. The Queen fit the horticultural theme of the venue in a dress patterned with flowers

US President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill were also seen arriving as they walked underneath the leaf-covered arches and headed into the dinner

Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and husband Joachim Sauer were also seen arriving for the dinner tonight

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and his wife Mariko were also among the arrivals today

The menu for the event has been created by chef Emily Scott of the Watergate Bay Hotel in Newquay and will include Cornish turbot and new potatoes for the main course, and local cheeses.

Afterwards, Prince Charles with Prince William at his side will host the reception for the leaders and executives from some of the world's largest companies to discuss how the private sector can work with governments to tackle climate change.

The Royals are at the centre of Britain's diplomatic mission to woo the US as Johnson pushes for a quick free trade deal with Biden as well as a quarantine-free travel corridor this summer.

Other leaders joined in the festive theme.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau donned a pink tie while French first lady Brigitte Macron wore a white shirt and skirt.

French President Emanuel Macro speaks with The Queen

Along with the President came his elaborate motorcade which wound through the Cornish countryside

Boris Johnson and his new wife Carrie Johnson were seen arriving at the Eden Project today

Carrie wore a subdued black floral dress in contrast with the fuchsia pink number she donned to meet leaders earlier today

The couple were seen clutching drinks as they arrived to attend the reception at the Eden Project

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau arrives for the reception, wearing a pink tie

French President Emmanuel Macron with wife Brigitte

Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and husband Joachim Sauer were also seen arriving for the dinner tonight

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and her husband Heiko were also seen arriving

European Council President Charles Michel and his wife Amelie Derbaudrenghien walked in hand in hand

The Queen is seen in a car ahead of arriving at the Eden Project in Cornwall for a dinner with G7 leaders tonight

Also during the summit the Queen - in a rare joint engagement with Camilla and Kate - will also attend an event at the Eden Project in celebration of The Big Lunch, which will form part of her platinum jubilee celebrations in 2022.

The charity pulls together communities at events involving food and drink.

The Bidens are getting plenty of royal time during their five-day trip to the UK. In addition to the reception Friday night, Jill Biden spent time with the Duchess of Cambridge on Friday morning learning about early childhood education.

'It's a huge honor to have you in the United Kingdom,' Duchess Kate said, thanking Dr. Biden for her interest in early education, a major part of the Duchess' platform. 'I'm very much looking forward to the conversation.'

The Bidens are close to friends of Prince Harry, who left Britain to live in California with his American-born wife Meghan and their two children.

Jill Biden has worked on veterans' issues with Harry. Both Bidens have attended his Invictus Games for wounded warriors.

In March White House press secretary Jen Psaki praised the 'courage' of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry for their primetime sit-down with Oprah Winfrey.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked about Harry and Meghan's blockbuster interview with Oprah Winfrey and Monday's press briefing

'For anyone to come forward and speak about their own struggles with mental health and tell their own personal story, that takes courage and that's certainly something the president believes,' Psaki replied when asked if President Joe Biden had any reaction to the interview.

Psaki also pointed out that both Meghan and Harry are private citizens.

'We aren't going to provide additional commentary from here on behalf of the president or others given these are private citizens, sharing their own story and their own struggles,' the press secretary said.

'And let me just reiterate that we have a strong and abiding relationship with the British people and a special partnership with the government of the United Kingdom on a range of issues and that will continue,' she added.
President Joe Biden's first day at the G7 kicked off some blossoming bromances, as the American president wrapped his arm around French President Emmanuel Macron and joked around with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

As the leaders gathered on the beach in Cornwall Friday, with the Atlantic Ocean behind them, Biden joked: 'Everybody in the water.'

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson, however, suggested they gather for a group picture.

President Joe Biden joked with French President Emmanuel Macron as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau followed them

President Joe Biden (center) walks into the G7 alongside Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (left) and French President Emmanuel Macron (right)

President Joe Biden (center) laughs as he speaks with French President Emmanuel Macron (right) and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

France's President Emmanuel Macron (left) walks alongside President Joe Biden (right) at the opener of the G7 Friday

President Joe Biden (left) put his hand on the back of French President Emmanuel Macron (right) as world leaders greeted each other at the start of the G7 Friday in Cornwall

President Macron also posted a gushing tweet of his conversation with President Biden

British Prime Minister (center right) Boris Johnson gives a fist bump to first lady Jill Biden (center left) as their spouses look on during opening greetings during Friday's G7 summit in Cornwall

President Joe Biden (left) grins as he sits alongside Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (right)

'Okay, here we are folks - right. Everybody here? Alright, weve got it,' Johnson said as photogs snapped socially distant pictures of the seven leaders standing apart from one another on a platform built on the sand.

The British PM, as host leader, took the lead in greeting the leaders of seven most industrialized nations, exchanging elbow bumps and herding them into place for the group pic.

As the leaders left the photo op for their first sit down, French President Emmanuel Macron took the opportunity to throw his arm around Biden's shoulders and begin an animated discussion.

'How that we are together, united, determined to make a difference, it's time to deliver. I'm sure we will @JoeBiden,' Macron tweeted after their friendly greeting.

The images of Biden interacting with world leaders contrast starkly with some of the imagery from President Donald Trump's four years.

During the 2018 G7 summit a photo went viral of former President Donald Trump (right), seated with his arms crossed, staring down German Chancellor Angela Merkel (left)

During a 2019 NATO summit, Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson (right), Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (second from left) and French President Emmanuel Macron (second from right) were seemingly caught on camera gossiping about Trump

During the 2018 G7 summit a photo went viral of Trump, seated with his arms crossed, staring down German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Macron is by her side, while Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe - the first world leader to meet Trump as president-elect - has his arms crossed too, watching the back-and-forth.

Then during a 2019 NATO summit, Johnson, Trudeau and Macron were seemingly caught on camera gossiping about Trump.

The leaders looked to be talking about Trump's unscripted press conferences.

'You just watched his team's jaws drop to the floor,' Trudeau uttered.

Biden, of course, has far more experience on the world stage than Trump, who was a real estate investor and reality TV star before running for office.

Biden was chosen to be President Barack Obama's vice president after serving on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for years.

Biden is meeting with some of the U.S.'s top allies at the G7 and then in Belgium, Brussels for a NATO meeting before he goes on to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva, Switzerland.

Biden was asked by reporters Friday what his message would be to Putin.

'I'll tell you after I deliver it,' the president said.
At least one female migrant died and four others were rescued by the U.S. Border Patrol after the individuals fell ill because of extreme heat encountered during their journey illegally crossing the border with Mexico into the United States.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that the migrants had unlawfully entered the U.S. on Wednesday before they got lost between the Texas border towns of El Cenizo and Rio Bravo as the heat topped 100 degreed Fahrenheit.

Agents assigned to the U.S. Border Patrol Laredo Sector's Laredo South Station were alerted by the Laredo Police Department that a woman in the area was in distress. She was rushed to a local hospital where she was pronounced dead.

Not that far from where the woman was located, a male migrant was later rescued when he alerted border authorities by utilizing a Mobile Rescue Beacon.

Migrants who need emergency help can press one of the buttons on the solar-powered beacons that the Border Patrol has placed in high-traffic areas and agents will come to help. There are four in the Laredo Sector; it's unclear how many there are along the whole border area.

When they were alerted, agents rushed to the scene with paramedics, who provided medical treatment to the male individual, who was found to be in good health. The sexes of the three other people weren't given - at least one other was female, according to pictures the Border Patrol distributed.

The migrants were then presumably detained or deported; DailyMail.com has contacted the patrol for more details.

U.S. Border Patrol and a paramedic tend to a migrant after the individual fell in and got lost near the United States-Mexico border in Texas on Wednesday. U.S. Customs And Border Protection said in a statement that a total of five migrants were located, but that a female was pronounced dead after she was rushed to a local hospital. (The female pictured isn't the person who died.)

U.S. Border Patrol's Laredo Sector recently placed five Mobile Rescue Beacon in the region it is responsible for protecting near Texas' border with Mexico

Pictured is a placard attached to a Mobile Rescue Beacons with text in Spanish and English with instructions for border crossers who may fall sick or be lost after crossing the Mexico-United States border

'Yesterday we highlighted Laredo Sector's new Mobile Rescue Beacons (MRB) in national news. Today, this new technology saved a life,' Deputy Chief Patrol Agent Carl E. Landrum said.

'The U.S. Border Patrol will always prioritize human life. It is vital to remember that the only safe place to cross the border is through a designated Port of Entry.'

The Mobile Rescue Beacon are solar-powered stations that are set up along the rough terrain located on the Texas side of the U.S.-Mexico border where many migrants have fallen sick or died because of heat-related illnesses.

A woman was among four people rescued by U.S. Border Patrol agents assigned to the Laredo Sector on Wednesday. The migrants' illnesses were caused by the extreme heat they were exposed to as temperatures soared past 100 degrees Fahrenheit

Each station has a placard with instructions in English and Spanish for the border crosses in the event they are lost or sick. All of the stations contain a reflector mounted at the end of a metal pole. It spins during the day and lights up at night, quickly drawing the attention of migrants who venture illegally across the border.

'It's not that we want them to push the button when they're near death; it's when they're out of water, they're realizing they got in over their head in terms of the journey, that's the time to find one of these, look for it and ask for help,' Laredo Border Patrol Sector Chief Matthew Hudak told KGNS television.

'We obviously encourage people not to make the illegal entry and put their lives at risk, but we want them to know if they see one of these beacons and they're tired, they're out of water, this is the thing to do to summon help, and saving your life is the most important thing at that point.'

This chart shows how 2021 border crossings - pictured in blue - rocketed on crossings made in 2020, represented by the brown line (2018 is pictured in gray, with 2019 in orange)

According to CBP, the Laredo Sector Law Enforcement Information Systems Specialists and the Zapata County Sheriff's Office Dispatch tipped U.S. Border Patrol agents to three other migrants who became sick due to the heat after they got lost in their illegal cross country voyage.

All three migrants were said to be in good health despite being exposed to temperatures that peaked over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

A new monthly report released by CBP on Wednesday showed that Border Patrol agents stopped 180,034 migrants in May, a slight increase from 178,854 the prior month, with the increase driven largely by single adults.

The Laredo Sector, which is responsible for the surveillance of 96 counties and 84,041 square miles along southwest and northeast Texas, saw arrests of migrants rise from 10,926 in April to 76,670 in May.
The teenage girl whose video of George Floyd's killing sparked international protests has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation.

Eighteen-year-old Darnella Frazier was honored at a ceremony announcing the 2021 prestigious journalism awards for her video of Floyd's May 2020 murder by then-police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis.

Darnella was recognized 'for courageously recording the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists' quest for truth and justice,' the citation said.

The girl, who was 17 at the time, said she never intended to be a hero, and had no idea of the impact the video she recorded would have around the world.

Darnella was walking her nine-year-old cousin to get a snack at Cup Foods in Minneapolis on Memorial Day 2020 when she saw four officers pulling a black man from inside a vehicle.

Eighteen-year-old Darnella Frazier, whose video of George Floyd's killing sparked international protests, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation on Friday

Darnella was recognized 'for courageously recording the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists' quest for truth and justice,' the citation said

Darnella Frazier when they found Floyd pinned to the ground by Chauvin and two other police officers

'She had no idea she would witness and document one of the most important and high-profile police murders in American history,' Darnella's attorney, Seth Cobin, told the Star-Tribune.

Darnella's attorney said she wasn't looking to be a hero but is 'just a 17-year-old high school student, with a boyfriend and a job at the mall, who did the right thing'

'If it wasn't for her bravery, presence of mind, and steady hand, and her willingness to post the video on Facebook and share her trauma with the world, all four of those police officers would still be on the streets, possibly terrorizing other members of the community.'

Cobin said Darnella wasn't looking to be a hero but is 'just a 17-year-old high school student, with a boyfriend and a job at the mall, who did the right thing. She's the Rosa Parks of her generation.'

On the anniversary of his death, she posted a touching tribute to Floyd.

'A year ago, today I witnessed a murder. The victim's name was George Floyd,' she wrote in a Facebook post.

'I didnt know this man from a can of paint, but I knew his life mattered. I knew that he was in pain.

'I knew that he was another black man in danger with no power.'

On the anniversary of his death, Darnella Frazier posted a touching tribute to George Floyd

She said witnessing the event and becoming known as the 'girl who recorded George Floyds death' had been a heavy burden to bear.

'A lot of people call me a hero even though I dont see myself as one. I was just in the right place at the right time. Behind this smile, behind these awards, behind the publicity, Im a girl trying to heal from something I am reminded of every day.'

Frazier made a touching tribute to the man who she never met until that day, and whose life she had seen be extinguished.

'I cant express enough how I wish things could have went different, but I want you to know you will always be in my heart. Ill always remember this day because of you. May your soul rest in peace.'

Earlier this year, at the trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, Darnella testified that she started filming because she felt that what she was seeing 'wasn't right'.

Darnella asserted that Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd's neck even harder as the growing crowd begged him to stop - and that he didn't remove his knee even when paramedics were searching for a pulse.

Darnella said: 'I heard George Floyd saying: 'I can't breathe, please get off of me.' He cried for his mom and he was in pain.

More than a year has passed since George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after now-convicted former police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck for nine minutes. Pictured, the convenience store where the murder took place

'It seemed like he knew it was over for him. He was terrified, he was suffering. This was a cry for help.'

When an ambulance finally arrived, Darnella claimed that paramedics treating Floyd had to tell Chauvin to remove his knee from the unconscious man's neck.

'The ambulance person had to actually tell him to lift up. He checked his pulse first while Chauvin's knee still remained on Floyd's neck,' she said. 'The paramedic did a 'get up' motion, basically telling him to remove his knee.'

Darnella has spoken publicly about her now infamous recording on May 25, 2020 but the cameras were not permitted to film her and she was referred to only by her first name in court.

At the close of her testimony Darnella broke down as she told jurors how witnessing and filming Floyd's death affected her life.

'When I look at George Floyd I look at my dad, I look my brothers, I look at my cousins, my uncles because they are all black,' she said. 'I have a black father, black brother, black friends and I look at that and I think how that could have been them.'

She also gave a brief comment to the Star-Tribune last year.

'The world needed to see what I was seeing,' she said at the time. 'Stuff like this happens in silence too many times.'

Corbin said that she didn't think twice before recording the incident when she saw the encounter between the police and Floyd.

'Because police brutality is so common in that neighborhood, and the officers rarely face consequences, she pulled out her iPhone and started recording,' he said.

Darnella is 'doing well in terms of her outlook and attitude,' said Cobin, who is based in Minneapolis. 'She's staying positive and avoiding the drama on social media.'

Cobin said Darnella 'hasn't received threats or anything like that' but acknowledged she's been the target of 'trash talking and shade' on social media since May 25.

Cobin verified the legitimacy of a GoFundMe page that was established by two women who previously had no connection to Darnella.

'In addition to the trauma of watching a black man be murdered by police, she has had to deal with trolls, bullies and ignorant people harassing her online,' they wrote on the fundraising page, which has raised more than $700,000.

'It took unbelievable courage for her to stand there and bear witness to such an awful tragedy.'

Amural of George Floyd painted downtown to memorialize the life of George Floyd is shown on the anniversary of his death on May 25, 2021 in Atlanta, Georgia. Floyd's death at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin sparked protests and movements around the world
Detectives reviewing the death of 'spy in the bag' Gareth Williams are examining new forensic leads, it emerged yesterday.

The Metropolitan Police confirmed it had launched a 'forensic review' of the MI6 analyst's mysterious death.

Mr Williams's naked body was found inside a holdall  which was padlocked from the outside  in the bath of his flat in Pimlico, central London, in August 2010. The keys were found inside the bag with him.

In 2013, Scotland Yard said the 31-year-old, a brilliant mathematician who worked for the intelligence agency GCHQ, probably died by accident after getting into the bag on his own.

Detectives reviewing the death of 'spy in the bag' Gareth Williams (above) are examining new forensic leads, it emerged yesterday. The Metropolitan Police confirmed it had launched a 'forensic review' of the MI6 analyst's mysterious death

But a year earlier an inquest ruled that he may have been unlawfully killed. His family believe he was murdered.

At the time of his death Mr Williams had been seconded from GCHQ to MI6 and is believed to have been tracing money laundering routes used by the Russian mafia. His death is one of 14 reportedly highlighted by US intelligence as potentially having Russian involvement.

Advances in DNA and forensic techniques now mean a strand of hair found on Mr Williams's hand  from which experts could not extract a DNA profile  may shed new light on the case.

Experts previously needed the root of a hair to determine a DNA profile, but leading forensic scientist

Mr Williams's naked body was found inside a holdall  which was padlocked from the outside  in the bath of his flat (above) in Pimlico, central London, in August 2010. The keys were found inside the bag with him

Professor Angela Gallop said recently that this was no longer the case, and investigators only need as little as 2mm of hair.

Traces of the DNA of two unidentified people found on the handle and padlock of the bag, plus the DNA of another unknown person on a green towel in Mr Williams's flat, could also be re-examined.

Professor Gallop and retired Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell, who oversaw the original case, have both previously called for a forensic review.

The inquiry will be led by Detective Chief Superintendent Mark Morgan, head of the Met's homicide and serious crime command team.

A Met spokesman said: 'There is an established review process for investigations whereby new information and/or forensic opportunities are considered. The Met is currently undertaking a forensic review to assess whether there are any new investigative opportunities in this case, and we await its outcome.

'We remain in close contact with Gareth's family to ensure they are fully supported.'

Mr Williams, who passed A-level maths aged 13 and secured a first-class university degree in the subject at 17, was recruited to the intelligence services while studying for a PhD at Manchester University.

Advances in DNA and forensic techniques now mean a strand of hair found on Mr Williams's hand  from which experts could not extract a DNA profile  may shed new light on the case. (Above, the scene in 2010)

At his inquest, lawyers for his family suggested evidence of foul play included the lack of fingerprints on the bath and the fact that even though it was the height of summer the heating had been turned up in his flat, which caused his body to decompose quickly.

They also queried why no one from MI6 had reported the mobile phone analyst missing, even though Mr Williams had failed to turn up for work for five days, and questioned why an MI6 officer subsequently sent to check on Mr Williams had not forced entry to his flat when no one answered the door.

Mr Campbell told The Sunday Times in March that he didn't believe Mr Williams, a keen cyclist who grew up on Anglesey, north Wales, had been murdered.

Instead he pointed to Mr Williams's private life. Officers discovered he had searched bondage and fetish websites, visited drag clubs and bought 20,000 of women's designer clothing in the two years before his death.

'This all formed part of who he was,' Mr Campbell said. 'It wouldn't be the first time in homicide and sex games that the death has caused a panic. Then there's a cover-up to avoid responsibility or to avoid shame or embarrassment.'

Detectives also found a semen stain on the bathroom floor, leading them to suspect that Mr Williams was involved in sexual activity shortly before his death.
A father in Texas is bashing a local judge after his daughter's rapist was sentenced to just 180 days in jail.

Eli Binnion, 22, could be free in as soon as 100 days under the sentence handed down by Polk County District Court Judge Travis Kitchens on June 3, which is part of a probation sentence.

Binnion pleaded guilty to the rape, which also will result in a 10-year probation and require him to register as a sex offender.

KJAS said the sentence includes three years in state prison for an assault he committed while in jail awaiting trial for the rape and 180 days in county jail for the rape.

Binnion was credited with time served, however, because he's been in jail awaiting trial on the rape charge for two years and nine months.

Eli Binnion, 22, could be free in as soon as 100 days under the sentence handed down by Polk County District Court Judge Travis Kitchens on June 3, which is part of a probation sentence

Binnion pleaded guilty to the rape, which will also result in a 10-year probation and require him to register as a sex offender

Prosecutors in the case were seeking 15 years in prison for Binnion.

'Be careful what judges you elect,' the victim's father said to FOX 26.

'What is the judge telling our children when we try to teach our children to go to the police? Let the police handle everything. Let the law do it. Thats what their job is, and then this happens. You get a slap on the wrist,' the victim's father said.

His identity and his daughter's identity were not revealed to protect the victim's privacy.

'No victim is gonna want to come forward and go through all of the struggles and all of the ordeal that they have to go through, just for the person to get out and walk free,' he continued.

Polk County District Attorney Lee Hon told FOX 26 that Binnion forcibly sexually assaulted a girl, who was 14 at the time. Binnion was 19.

Polk County District Court Judge Travis Kitchens (pictured) sentenced the rapist, but the light sentence left the victim's father furious.

On July 1, 2018, the father said the victim was at a family gathering when she decided to ride with Binnion and one other person to a Hampton Inn in Livingston, Texas, to get supplies for the party. After the hotel run, the victim was expected to return to the gathering.

But according to the district attorney, Binnion proceeded to follow the teenager into a hotel room, where he forced her onto the bed before raping her as the victim tried to fight him off.

Hon said the victim's parents wanted to testify in the trial, an idea shot down by Kitchens.

'They said that they didnt want to hear it,' the father said. 'Wouldnt do any good. He already made his mind up.'

Mike Davis, Binnions defense attorney, refutes the claim that the judge declined to hear family testimony and said such a decision would fall on the district attorney's office.

Despite Binnion pleading guilty, the judge did not make a finding of guilt when adjudicating the case.

The alleged rape took place in on July 1, 2018 at a Hampton Inn in Livingston (pictured) around a gathering for the Fourth of July

According to court records, Binnion also broke the jaw of fellow inmate Anthony William Slaton while in jail awaiting trial on the rape charge on September 2, 2018. He got three years for that attack.

He also had a history of assault and evading arrest. The father claimed he had known Binnion for years.

He shared the trauma his daughter has gone through.

'I know that I've went in the room and she's crying at night, can't sleep, jumpy, jittery, emotional at times,' he said. 'She's strong though. She's coming over it best as can be expected, I guess. But she still had something taken from her that shouldnt have been.'

He said Binnion 'made a very bad decision'.

'I pray that he doesnt regret the decision he made, cause its gonna happen again,' the father added. 'People like that dont just stop.'

'I promised my daughter justice. And obviously I was wrong because the court system is not gonna give it to her.'

DailyMail.com has reached out to Kitchens' office, with no response.
China's top legislature adopts multiple laws as standing committee session concludes

Xinhua) 08:13, June 11, 2021

Li Zhanshu, chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, presides over the closing meeting of the 29th session of the 13th NPC Standing Committee at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, June 10, 2021. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

BEIJING, June 10 (Xinhua) -- The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's top legislature, adopted multiple laws including those on data security, Hainan free trade port and countering foreign sanctions, as it wrapped up a session on Thursday.

President Xi Jinping signed presidential orders to promulgate the laws.

Li Zhanshu, chairman of the NPC Standing Committee, presided over the closing meeting of the 29th session of the 13th NPC Standing Committee, which ran from Monday to Thursday.

Lawmakers also passed a law on the protection of status, rights and interests of military personnel, a revision to the Law on Military Facilities Protection, a decision to amend the Law on Workplace Safety, and a law on stamp tax.

They adopted a decision to authorize the Shanghai Municipal People's Congress and its standing committee to formulate regulations concerning the Pudong New Area.

Legislators approved the central government's final accounts for 2020, and a resolution on promoting legal awareness through public communication and education campaigns.

They also adopted a report on deputy qualifications and personnel-related bills.

Addressing the closing meeting, Li Zhanshu called for efforts to formulate and improve supportive regulations to ensure the effective enforcement of the laws and decisions.

The enactment of the law on Hainan free trade port has provided important legal backing at the state level for the development of the port, he noted.

On the law against foreign sanctions, Li said that it has provided legal support for countering hegemonism and power politics, and safeguarding the interests of the country and the people.

Li stressed the importance of having a full and faithful grasp of provisions of the law so as to get prepared to fight against foreign sanctions through legal means in due course.

He called for efforts to speed up legislation relating to external affairs and upgrade the legal toolkit for meeting challenges and guarding against risks.

Lawmakers have voiced their support for the law in group discussion, saying the legislation is necessary, vital and in a timely manner. They agreed that it is of great significance to opposing hegemonism and power politics, as well as safeguarding China's sovereignty, security, and development interests.

Li also chaired a meeting of the Council of Chairpersons of the NPC Standing Committee before the closing meeting and presided over a lecture for lawmakers after the closing meeting.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)
Five victims received $15 million after a freezer tank containing embryos at a California fertility clinic malfunctioned.

A federal jury in California on Thursday found Chart Industries Inc. was responsible for defects in a cryopreservation tank that caused the destruction of human eggs and embryos at The Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco in 2018.

Chart will pay five victims $15 million in the first verdict to reward damages to victims who have lost their chance to have biological children due to a freezer tank malfunction, CNN reported.

Five victims were rewarded $15 million by a jury after a freezer tank containing embryos at Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco (pictured) malfunctioned in 2018

A federal jury in California found Chart Industries Inc. was responsible for defects in a tank that that caused the destruction of human eggs and embryos (pictured)

The verdict sets a precedent for other pending similar claims, said Adam Wolf, one of the plaintiffs' attorneys.

'These families have suffered an unspeakable loss and still struggle every day with the tragedy that took place more than three years ago at Pacific Fertility Center,' Wolf, of Peiffer Wolf law firm in Los Angeles, told Bloomberg Law in a statement.

On March 4, 2018 The Pacific Fertility Center said a piece of equipment in its cryo-storage laboratory 'lost liquid nitrogen for a brief period of time' leading to the destruction of certain stored frozen embryos.

'We are truly sorry this happened and for the anxiety that this will surely cause,' Pacific Fertility Center said in an apology after the incident.

On Thursday, a jury in the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that Chart, the tank manufacturer, was 90 percent responsible for the damages suffered by the plaintiffs, while Pacific Fertility Center was 10 percent at fault.

The court said claims against the center must be arbitrated.

On March 4, 2018, the Pacific Fertility Center said a piece of equipment in its cryo-storage laboratory 'lost liquid nitrogen for a brief period of time'

The jury determined the Chart Inc. knew or should have known about the defect and failed to recall the tank that led to the destruction on victim's eggs and embryos

Chart became aware of the defect after the tank was sold but failed to recall the equipment or fix the problem, according to the verdict.

The jury determined the company knew or should have known about the defect and failed to recall the tank, Bloomberg Law reported.

The five plaintiffs, which included three women and a couple, were rewarded between $2.07 million and $7.2 million each in damages for the loss of the eggs and embryos as well as their pain, suffering and emotional distress, Bloomberg Law reported.

Wolf told Bloomberg Law that nearly 200 other patients from the San Francisco clinic are awaiting their day in court or in arbitration proceedings.

In an unrelated event on the same weekend in 2018, more than 2,000 frozen eggs and embryos also were compromised at the University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center after a malfunction caused temperatures to drop in the freezers where they were stored, CNN reported.

In February 2020, two new lawsuits were filed against the Cleveland clinic.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken stressed the need for cooperation and transparency over the origins of COVID-19 in a call with Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi on Friday and raised other contentious topics, including China's treatment of Uyghur Muslims, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Yang, China's top diplomat, expressed Beijing's serious concern to Blinken that some people in the United States were spreading the 'absurd story' about the coronavirus escaping from a Wuhan laboratory, Chinese state media said.

Yang, the head of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission of China's ruling Communist Party, also told Blinken that Washington should handle Taiwan-related issues 'carefully and appropriately,' state broadcaster CCTV reported.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with China's top diplomat by phone Friday and pressed him for transparency on the origins of COVID-19. Blinken also traveled with President Joe Biden to the G7 in Cornwall

China's top diplomat Yang Jiechi expressed Beijing's serious concern to Blinken that some people in the United States were spreading the 'absurd story' about the coronavirus escaping from a Wuhan laboratory

A theory that COVID-19 originally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology gained more steam when President Joe Biden's intelligence agencies couldn't rule it out. World leaders are calling on the World Health Organization to leave a fresh probe into the virus' origins

The call came ahead of a G7 summit in Britain attended by President Joe Biden that is expected to be dominated by Washington-led efforts to counter China's growing influence.

The world's two largest economies are deeply at odds over issues ranging from trade and technology to human rights and the coronavirus.

Washington should work with Beijing to put ties 'back on track,' Yang said.

Yang, who had a fiery exchange with Blinken in Alaska in March during the Biden administration's first high-level meeting with its counterparts in China, said Beijing firmly opposed what he called 'abominable actions' over the pandemic, which he said were being used to slander China, CCTV said.

The State Department said the diplomats also discussed North Korea policy and that Blinken expressed U.S. concerns over the deterioration of democratic norms in Hong Kong and what Washington describes as the genocide of Muslim Uyghurs in China's Xinjiang region.

Blinken also called on China to stop its pressure campaign against Taiwan and to release 'wrongfully detained' U.S. and Canadian citizens, it said in a statement.

The State Department said the discussion on North Korea - an issue on which the United States is keen for more Chinese action to press its ally and neighbor to give up its nuclear weapons - focused on the need for Beijing and Washington 'to work together for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.'

It said the two diplomats also continued discussions on shared global challenges, including Iran and Myanmar, and the climate crisis.

'Addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, the Secretary stressed the importance of cooperation and transparency regarding the origin of the virus, including the need for WHO Phase 2 expert-led studies in China,' it said, referring to the World Health Organization.

Bonnie Glaser, an Asia expert at the German Marshall Fund of the United States think tank, said that although the agenda included potential areas of cooperation, the conversation appeared dominated by contentious issues.

She said Yang's call for Washington to work with Beijing to put ties 'back on track' indicated China was still putting the onus on the United States for the problems in the relationship.

'That's a non-starter, but demonstrates that the Chinese are sticking to their tried-and-true diplomatic approaches, even though they are not successful.'

A report on the origins of COVID-19 by a U.S. government national laboratory concluded the hypothesis of a viral leak from a Chinese lab in Wuhan was plausible and deserved further investigation, the Wall Street Journal said on Monday.

'We urge the United States to respect facts and science, refrain from politicizing the issue ... and focus on international cooperation in the fight against the pandemic,' Yang said.

His comments on Taiwan followed a visit to the Chinese-claimed island last weekend by three U.S. senators on a U.S. military aircraft.

Democratic Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Chris Coons along with Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan made the stop.

They met Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and announced the donation of 750,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine for Taiwan, drawing a sharp rebuke from China's defense ministry.
David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, released a new single Friday under his musical alter ego, DJ D-Sol, and many are joking that the title, Learn to Love Me, is a dog whistle to employees who are returning to in-person work Monday.

In May, Solomon sent a memo to his roughly 20,000 U.S. employees explaining that they are expected to return to the Wall Street giant's New York City offices in the Financial District, by June 14.

Earlier this week, Solomon sent employees another memo, which was acquired by the New York Times, saying that they must disclose their vaccination status by June 10, ahead of returning.

All 20,000 U.S. employees at Goldman Sachs are expected to return to work in person on June 14

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has long opposed the notion that working from home is the 'new normal' and once called it an 'aberration'

While employees dont need to provide their vaccination card, Goldman Sachs is mandating that they provide the date and maker of their vaccine.

Registering your vaccination status allows us to plan for a safer return to the office for all of our people as we continue to abide by local public health measures, states the staff memo. As a result, it is mandatory that you submit your vaccination status. While we strongly encourage you to receive a Covid-19 vaccine, we understand that the choice to get vaccinated is a personal one."

Staff were directed to log their status in the banks internal app, Canopy. The company said it could be shared with managers and used for planning.

The company first reopened its offices and buildings to employees May 17, bringing back staff gradually.

Goldman's return-to-office push gained momentum in March when Solomon said the company has an obligation to its 5,400 interns, analysts and associates to have employees working alongside each other in person.

Solomon has previously spoken out about his opposition to working from home. In February, he told a Credit Suisse virtual conference that it was an 'aberration' and said it is not the 'new normal, insisting that firm would be looking to 'correct' the remote working situation 'as soon as possible.

When he made the comments, Solomon noted that he didn't want the incoming class of 3,000 new recruits arriving remotely because he feared they wouldn't get the 'direct mentorship' they needed.

'I am very focused on the fact that I don't want another class of young people arriving at Goldman Sachs in the summer remotely,' he said.

Solomon joined Goldman Sachs in 1999 as a partner and climbed the corporate ladder until becoming its CEO in October 2018 and chairman in January 2019.

According to CNBC, Solomon earned $27.5 million in 2019, but had his pay cut by $10 million in 2020. Despite 2020 hitting its highest revenue gain since 2009 at $44.56 billion, Solomon faced the 36 percent pay cut because of the companys involvement in the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal.

Goldman Sachs raised $6.5 billion in three bond sales for the 1Malaysia Development Berhad state fund, between 2012 and 2013. Malaysian and U.S. authorities found in 2015 that $4.5 billion from the fund was siphoned by its leaders and used for a variety of personal, luxury expenses. Goldman Sachs reached a $2.9 billion settlement for its involvement in raising the money.

Solomon moonlights as DJ D-Sol and, on Friday, released his latest single Learn to Love Me, featuring One Republic's Ryan Tedder

From former interns to junior employees, Goldman Sachs has drawn public criticism and backlash throughout 2021. In January, a former intern named Emily shared a YouTube video describing her experience interning there in 2016 as being the internship from hell. She called it a traumatic and cutthroat program that included working from 5:40 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. without having her own desk.

Then, in March, a group of junior bankers made a PowerPoint presentation complaining of conditions like working 100 hours a week. A number of the 13 analysts who made the presentation said that they would quit by the summer if conditions didnt improve. One claimed that his experience at Goldman was 'arguably worse' than his childhood in foster care. The PowerPoint leaked to the media and, days later, Solomon vowed to employees that he would work harder to give them Saturdays off.

Solomon has drawn criticism from his employees for playing lavish gigs while some of them can't get a day off work

Employees said that it only rubs salt in the wound to see Solomon riding the heels of his EDM career and playing opulent gigs in the Hamptons, while they struggle to get a full day off work.

Its one thing if youre going out with your family and another to be on Page Six, an employee told the New York Post.

Solomon touted his new single, featuring One Republics Ryan Tedder, on his Instagram page before its Friday release. Ryan Tedder did not promote the song on his Instagram or Twitter accounts.

Many took to Twitter to mock DJ D-Sol's latest release, with user Joggo writing in a post that the remixes of the song will be called 'You MUST love me' and 'I don't care if you love me, as long as you LOVE our clients.'

Twitter user InnocenceCapital joked that the title was 'Learn to love me, but if you're not a PMD, look at my feet if you dare speak to me,' with PMD referring to a senior executive.

Twitter user karl yang said employees can't even escape Solomon on protected weekends, but at least analysts switch from 'addy to molly,' a reference to work-performance drugs and club drugs.

But Solomon takes his music career seriously and is signed by Payback Records, the record label he launched in 2018, and donates proceeds from his music career to nonprofits working to combat Americas opioid addiction epidemic. According to its website, Solomon launched the record label with a vision for building a socially-conscious music business.
A New Jersey school board has scrapped the names of all holidays from its calender to avoid 'hurt feelings' after backlash over renaming Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples Day.

Randolph Board of Education members unanimously voted to remove all holiday names off of the school calendar, including religious holidays such as Yom Kippur and Christmas, at a meeting that drew over 100 people on Thursday.

Instead, all holidays will be designated as simply 'days off,' in schools across the Morris County township, which is about an hour west of New York City, according to a Fox5 NY report.

'If we don't have anything on the calendar, we don't have to have anyone be hurt feelings or anything like that,' board member Dorene Roche said of the controversial change.

At a Randolph Board of Education meeting on Thursday, board members voted to remove all holiday names off of the school calendar amidst backlash from the community

'If we don't have anything on the calendar, we don't have to have anyone be hurt feelings or anything like that,' board member Dorene Roche said of the controversial change

Board members made the decision in an effort to mitigate any potential offense a group or person may feel in regard to holidays that celebrate certain historical figures or ethnic groups, while also maintaining that the board is not responsible for naming the holidays to begin with.

'I don't think really it is the board's responsibility to be naming these holidays. Either take them off or just adopt whatever the federal and state governments are doing,' board member Ronald Conti said prior to Thursday's controversial vote.

The change was not made in haste, however, as the public comment section of the meeting dragged on with dissenters from the crowd.

The jeers only grew louder after the board made the unanimous vote to strike holiday names from the school calendar.

'What did you just do? What just happened?' one man exclaimed incredulously in an audio recording of the meeting minutes and agenda.

'I don't think really it is the board's responsibility to be naming these holidays,' board member Ronald Conti said before Thursday's unanimous vote

The move came amidst backlash over changing Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day from the 100-plus people who attended Thursday's meeting

As of Friday, the town's website showed the district school calendars still had holiday names.

'The support and concern of the Randolph community is vital to the educational process,' the township's Board of Education website reads.

'We welcome the public to take the time to interact with the Board of Education. Community members are encouraged to attend public meetings, express their opinions, ask questions and communicate their needs as constituents.'
For many among the thousands picking up rubbish during the Great British Spring Clean, the weapon of choice is a litter claw.

And with demand so high, fuelled by growing enthusiasm for litter-picking during lockdown, a leading provider of the devices has had to take on 50 more staff to keep up.

The firm Helping Hand has been operating 24 hours a day since November to produce enough claws, increasing its workforce by 31 per cent.

Lara Bryant, vice-president of sales and marketing at the company, said: Litter has been a major problem for decades but the lockdown led to new types and unprecedented levels of litter.

Wrappers, cartons and bottles have been joined by PPE litter such as plastic gloves and face masks.

During lockdown, people spent significantly more time in parks than on the high street. It led to a shocking increase in the volume of litter and thats why were seen such a significant upswing in demand.

Ledbury-based Helping Hand had to hire an extra 50 staff as demand for litter picking boomed during lockdowns Pictured: The firm's Litterpicker Pro in action

Helping Hand is supporting the Daily Mail-backed Great British Spring Clean for the 12th year.

We are enormously proud to be part of such a significant campaign, said Mrs Bryant.

Those parks and green spaces are more precious than ever and we must conserve it. There is not another planet and we all have a responsibility to look after it for generations to come.

She added: It is the ever-growing number of volunteers who want to turn the tide on litter.

More than 210,000 pledged to take part in the spring clean, which finishes tomorrow.

That community spirit fostered by this pandemic has changed peoples behaviour, said Mrs Bryant.

It affects the way people consume and it affects peoples emotional health and wellbeing.

'So people can do something very simple  go out and pick up litter because you overcome the isolation issues doing that.

The firm had to increase staff numbers as growing enthusiasm for litter-picking was fuelled during lockdown

Helping Hand, based in Ledbury, Herefordshire, took on workers who lost their jobs during lockdown and has managed to double the number of devices it produces each month.

Its Litterpicker Pro, said to be used by more than 8 million people worldwide, costs 16.99.

The firms devices  which are 82 per cent recyclable  are used by 93 per cent of local authorities to help collect rubbish.

The British company, founded in 1960, has given some of its litter pickers to the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince Harry.

More than a third of adults have noticed more litter in their area since the start of the pandemic.

A YouGov poll commissioned by the Countryside Charity found 38 per cent have seen more rubbish. Three in four said they had noticed more discarded PPE.

Public Health England has endorsed litter picking as a good way to boost mental and physical health.
A long-awaited report into the unsolved axe murder of a private detective is expected to expose a culture of corruption and cover-up at Scotland Yard, the Daily Mail can reveal.

On another day of shame for Britains biggest force, leading officers in the Met are set to face personal criticism on Tuesday over their handling of the Daniel Morgan case.

According to sources, the bombshell report will reveal that at one stage police misled MPs over the 1987 murder and will be scathing of the now defunct Police Complaints Authority.

Daniel Morgan, pictured, was investigating claims of corruption within the Metropolitan Police when he was murdered in 1987

Morgan was hacked to death with an axe outside the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham, south London

At least two former provincial chief constables who had involvement in the Morgan case will be admonished, as will Hampshire Police which carried out an independent inquiry into the murder and alleged police corruption in the late 1980s.

A source briefed on parts of the report said it will expose a culture of corruption and cover-up in the Met. Last night Morgans campaigning brother Alastair said: I will be disappointed if the report did not come to the conclusion there was institutional corruption in Daniels case.

Any use of the term institutional corruption in the report would be a hammer blow to the Met, still reeling from scathing comments earlier this year by Lady Brittan, widow of former home secretary Leon Brittan, that a culture of cover-up and flick away exists in the force.

According to reports, Met boss Dame Cressida Dick is expected to be personally criticised by the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel when its report is published.

The murder of Morgan, 37, who was found with an axe embedded in his head in a south-east London pub car park 34 years ago, is the most investigated case in British history. The initial investigation was marred by allegations of police corruption. Despite five inquiries, no one has been brought to justice.

The private detective was hacked to death with an axe as he left the pub. In 2013 the then Home Secretary Theresa May ordered an independent panel to investigate Mr Morgan's murder

At an estimated final cost of 20million, the panel investigated the case for eight years and was expected to publish its findings last month. However Home Secretary Priti Patel infuriated Morgans family after she ordered that her department should first vet sensitive parts of the 1,200-page report on national security grounds.

Miss Patel is expected to come under pressure to get tough over the cover-up culture and lack of accountability at the Met not only in the Morgan case, but also in the Operation Midland Nick scandal which has seen no officers brought to book despite two judges saying the law was broken by the force.

Last month The Times reported that Dame Cressida is expected to be personally criticised over Scotland Yards alleged obstruction of the inquiry.

The Met commissioner and other senior officers will be accused of delaying the inquiry into the unsolved murder by trying to control the disclosure of sensitive police documents, it was claimed.

The Daniel Morgan Independent Panel, appointed by then home secretary Theresa May in 2013, was asked to carry out a full and effective review of corruption as it affected the handling of this case. It was expected to take just a year. It is understood that the panel will blame the delays on the failure of the Met promptly to disclose relevant files in the five failed inquiries.

Despite five police inquiries and an inquest, no-one has been brought to justice over the father-of-two's death, with the Metropolitan Police admitting corruption had hampered the original murder investigation

Morgans family believe he was on the verge of exposing police corruption when he was killed. A murder trial at the Old Bailey collapsed in 2011 after concerns about the police handling of supergrass witnesses and the Mets failure to disclose sensitive police files.

Dame Cressida, then an assistant commissioner, produced a joint report with the Crown Prosecution Service that detailed the failings in the case. When the panel was first announced, she was made the liaison between it and the Met. A source said the provision of all relevant documents to the panel came within her remit.

Alastair Morgan blames Dame Cressida for his mother not getting to see the report before she died in 2017. In 2014, the Mail published an acclaimed three-part series on the case and has championed the Morgan familys campaign for justice.

Former prime suspects Glenn Vian and Jonathan Rees were acquitted of murder in 2011. Mr Vian, who denied being the axeman, died last year. His brother Garry was also acquitted of involvement.

Mr Rees is in a long-term relationship with Daniel Morgans former lover Margaret Harrison. He has been highly critical of the police.
Officials in Georgia have offered a $350,000 legal settlement to a black man injured last year when a police officer violently slammed him to the ground after mistaking him for someone with an outstanding warrant.

Antonio Arnelo Smith, 47, filed a lawsuit against Valdosta City Council and other city officials in U.S. District Court a year ago.

A spokeswoman for Valdosta City Hall, Ashlyn Johnson, confirmed the settlement offer on Friday.

In addition to the $350,000 settlement, the city - which is in south Georgia just north of the Florida state line - also created a citizen review board to help oversee local police and make policy recommendations.

Antonio Arnelo Smith, 47, filed a lawsuit against Valdosta City Council in Georgia a year ago after he was thrown to the ground by a white officer who had mistaken him for someone with an outstanding warrant

In exchange for $350,000 and creation of a citizen review board, the city said Smith would drop all claims in his lawsuit.

Nathaniel Haugabrook, one of Smith's attorneys, said he still is reviewing the proposal.

Smith argued in his lawsuit that officers used excessive force and violated his civil rights during the ordeal on February 8, 2020.

Officers confronted Smith after a drugstore employee called police to report that a man was harassing customers and asking for money outside.

Officers found two suspects nearby who fit the description. They learned one them had an outstanding arrest warrant. The other was Smith.

Body camera footage of the incident showed Smith talking cooperatively with a black police officer as a white officer, identified as Lt. Billy Wheeler, crept up behind him.

The white officer then pinned Smith's hands behind his back and slammed him face-first to the ground.

'Oh my God, you broke my wrist!' Smith screamed on the recording as two more white Valdosta officers held him down and handcuffed him.

The white officer pinned Smith's hands behind his back and slammed him face-first to the ground. Smith screamed: 'Oh my God, you broke my wrist!'

Wheeler, the officer seen on camera wrapping Smith in a bear hug and slamming him to the ground, said in court filings that he mistakenly believed Smith was the wanted man

When an officer told Smith he was being arrested on an outstanding warrant, another immediately interjected that he was the wrong man

When an officer told Smith he was being arrested on an outstanding warrant, another immediately interjected that he was the wrong man.

Attorneys for Wheeler, the officer seen on camera wrapping Smith in a bear hug and slamming the man to the ground, said in court filings that he mistakenly believed Smith was the wanted man.

Police let Smith go without charges and he left the scene without waiting for paramedics to arrive.

Smith's attorney said on Friday that his client just 'wants to see all of this behind him'.

He said creation of a citizen panel to help oversee the Valdosta Police Department had been Smith's top priority in the lawsuit.

In a letter to city officials seeking a settlement before the lawsuit was filed, Smith's attorneys also asked for $700,000.

Filed four months after Smith's violent encounter with police, the lawsuit came amid a national outcry over police brutality against people of color, sparked by the May 2020 killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
A Chicago police officer has been charged with breaching the US Capitol and entering a senator's office during the January 6 insurrection.

Karol Chwiesiuk, 29, was arrested Friday and faces five misdemeanor counts, including entering a restricted building, disrupting government business and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds with the intent to impede a congressional proceeding.

Prosecutors allege in a criminal complaint that Chwiesiuk was among a mob of people who broke into and damaged the office of Sen Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat.

They also say that days before he traveled to Washington to attend a rally supporting then-President Donald Trump, Chwiesiuk said in a text to a friend that he was going 'to save the nation' and was 'Busy planning how to (expletive) up commies.'

He later sent photos of himself inside the Capitol, according to prosecutors.

Investigators obtained this photo of Karol Chwiesiuk, 29, inside the Capitol on January 6

Chwiesiuk was on medical leave from the police department at the time he traveled to Washington for the attack, the complaint states.

Chwiesiuk appeared in federal court in Chicago on Friday. His attorney, Tim Grace, said Chwiesiuk has been a Chicago police officer since 2018 and that he previously served as a Cook County sheriff's deputy.

He was stripped of his police powers this week and is on desk duty, Grace said.

Police Superintendent David Brown said during a news availability Friday that Chwiesiuk had his police powers stripped on June 2 after the department learned of his participation in the attack.

Brown said that if the allegations are true, it is 'a betrayal of everything we stand for.'

'What happened in DC on January 6 was an absolute disgrace,' he said. 'The fact that a Chicago police officer has been charged in that attack on American democracy makes my blood boil.'

'We have a zero tolerance for hate and extremism of any kind within the Chicago Police Department,' Brown said.

'And if you harbor such ignorance in your heart, you should take off your star now and find another line of work, or I'll do it for you.'

Five people, including a Capitol police officer, died in the attack and hundreds of people were injured. Two other officers killed themselves afterward.

More than 450 people from throughout the country have been criminally charged.

Investigators identified Chwiesiuk among the crowd in social media photos from January 6
By Trevor Grove for the Daily Mail

Cutty Sark was the Concorde of her era. As a working ship, she never made much money for her owners.

But in terms of speed, beauty and design, she was a marvel: an example of British inventiveness at which the rest of the world gasped in admiration.

Although she had not been in the water for nearly 50 years, she was one of only three historic ships in the world rigged exactly as they were when they were still at sea.

She had been lying in her dry-dock alongside Greenwich Pier in London looking much as she would have done in her Victorian heyday, waiting to load a cargo of tea at the quayside in Shanghai before racing homewards.

Alas, looks can be deceptive. Below that scrubbed deck, all was not well. Although Cutty Sark gave the impression of being as young as her voluptuous figurehead, she was, in fact, an old lady.

Her intended lifespan was 30 years when she was commissioned in 1868 by John 'White Hat' Willis, a London ship-owner who wore a white topper as he went about his business.

Cutty Sark was the Concorde of her era. As a working ship, she never made much money for her owners

His purpose in ordering the new vessel from Glasgow firm Scott & Linton was not solely commercial.

An old hand in the China tea trade, he owned many clippers, but none as fast as Thermopylae, owned by the rival White Star Line, which had been launched earlier that year and looked set to outpace everything else.

In those days, the annual race of the tea clippers to be the first back to England with the new season's crop was a national preoccupation. Large sums changed hands in bets.

So Willis wanted a match for Thermopylae, and chose a young designer called Hercules Linton to do the job. He came up with an unusual combination of features: a narrow, straight-stemmed bow like a racing yacht's, a broad, bluff stern to withstand the mountainous southern oceans and a smooth, curvaceous hull based on Firth of Forth fishing-boats.

At 936 gross tons, Cutty Sark was not a large ship. She was 280ft long and 36ft in the beam. She could spread a total of a third of an acre of canvas to the wind, controlled by 11 miles of rigging.

And she was beautifully made - so much so that her builders went bust trying to meet Willis's exacting demands for the best of everything within his meagre budget. Others had to complete the work and the clipper was launched on November 22, 1869.

At 936 gross tons, Cutty Sark was not a large ship. She was 280ft long and 36ft in the beam. She could spread a total of a third of an acre of canvas to the wind, controlled by 11 miles of rigging

She was black-painted, with much gold scroll-work at her bow and stern. Her figurehead, like her name, came from the Robert Burns poem Tam O'Shanter, in which a beautiful witch called Nannie, wearing nothing but a 'cutty sark', or short shirt, chases after a drunken farmer called Tam, but manages only to catch the tail of his horse.

That is why Nannie is carved with her left arm outstretched.

Her maiden voyage, however, was not triumphant. She had teething troubles on her way out to Shanghai, and her first passage back to England with a hold full of tea took 110 days, compared with Thermopylae's 105.

That was still pretty swift. The trouble was that however determinedly these two ships raced against each other during the coming years, their real rivalry was with steam.

The Suez Canal opened the very year Cutty Sark was launched. Only powered vessels could use it, and it meant they could do the voyage home in 60 days.

For a time, Willis and the other clipper-owners were defiant, claiming that steamer-carried tea was tainted by coal-dust. But as the price dropped, few tea-drinkers noticed the difference. By 1877, when Cutty Sark carried her last cargo of tea, it had become plain even to Willis that the days of the tea clipper were over.

For six years, Cutty Sark carried general cargoes wherever she could find business: jute to New York, buffalo horns to London, iron to Shanghai.

Willis became somewhat downhearted that his beloved ship was going nowhere, but the turning point came in 1883.

Her captain made a round-trip to Australia, out via the Cape of Good Hope in 79 days, home with a cargo of wool via the Horn in 82.

This cheered old White Hat Willis considerably. Cutty Sark had made the fastest wool passage of the entire year. The best of her racing days were still before her, after all.

But it was under a new captain, Richard Woodget, that Cutty Sark enjoyed her finest hours. From 1885-95, he made her the queen of the Cape Horn wool race. Again and again she made the quickest passage, beating her old rival, Thermopylae, five times.

But eventually, in 1895, steam-power meant she had run her last race. She was sold to the Portuguese and for the next 27 years traded humbly between Portugal, East Africa and South America. She changed her name twice, though her crews always knew her affectionately as Pequina Camisola, Portuguese for 'little shirt'.

Then, in 1922, just as it seemed she was at the end of her useful life, a Cornish shipmaster, Captain Wilfred Dowman, recognised her as she lay sheltering from a storm in Falmouth.

She was much battered, but he knew her instantly for the same ship with which he had fallen in love as an apprentice in 1894, when the Cutty Sark had stormed past his own vessel at her top speed of 17 knots or more.

So he bought her for 3,750, gave her back her old name and restored her. When he died, his widow gave her to the Incorporated Thames Nautical Training College.

She made her last sea voyage in 1938, when she was towed to Greenhithe with her old skipper, Captain Woodget, on deck.

After World War II, the old lady was no longer needed as a training ship and she ended up where she is now at Greenwich, on the beach but still very much a working ship.

Today her business is tourists, but she is, of course, very much more than that. She is a symbol of Britain's maritime history. Yesterday's fire will not be the end of the Cutty Sark: just another stage in the history of a remarkable ship.
A move to outlaw weddings for under-18s was backed by senior Tories yesterday.

The right to marry at the age of 16 is a loophole that should go because it encourages child abuse and exploitation, former chancellor Sajid Javid said.

Abolition of marriage for 16 and 17-year-olds has been a goal of campaigners who say it allows sexual exploitation of girls too young to make such decisions.

Sajid Javid, pictured, is urging the Government to change the law to prevent children aged under than 18 from getting married in England and Wales

Justice Secretary Robert Buckland is understood to have indicated he will a private member's bill from Mr Javid the government's support

Mr Javid, who comes from a Pakistani background, said: Ive seen this myself in the community I was raised in, young girls expected to enter into marriage far before they were ready to with painful consequences. Lets call this what it is: Child abuse.

Justice Secretary Robert Buckland is understood to have indicated he will give a private members bill from Mr Javid Government support and debating time in the House of Commons, both key factors in drawing support from MPs and pushing a new law through the parliamentary process.

In England and Wales 16 and 17-year-olds can marry with parental permission. By tradition, young couples without permission fled to Scotland and the border village of Gretna Green, where weddings for 16-year-olds were allowed without the approval of their parents.

However, few teenage girls now aspire to marry at such a young age. In 1972 there were 26,262 women and 3,673 men under 18 married in England and Wales. By 2017, the last year for which data is available, the figures had fallen to 140 women and 43 men.

Mr Javid said yesterday: The British Government is working tirelessly to end child marriage in the developing world and yet our own laws are permitting child marriage by the back door.

Indeed, when Bangladesh lowered the legal age of marriage from 18 to 16, ministers there were said to have directly pointed to our laws to justify their move. It is clear that we must legislate to close this loophole so that vulnerable children cannot be pushed into such serious and life-changing commitments before they are ready.

Under current legislation, children aged 16 and 17 can get married with their parents' permission

Harry Benson of the Marriage Foundation think-tank said: Even if young people are childhood sweethearts, they still need time to grow into adults and to plan how they will spend the rest of their lives together. Academic and author on family law Patricia Morgan acknowledged the problem of attitudes to women in some communities that see girls marry young, but added: This is a very minor issue. It affects only a very small number of people. I am surprised ministers think it is worth the time and effort.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said: The Government supports raising the legal age for marriage to protect vulnerable children and will outline its next steps in due course.

The move to abolish under-18 marriage comes as the Government has run into technical issues implementing a no-fault divorce regime, meaning the new system is delayed by six months and will not be introduced before next April.
A teenager from Utah has been charged with aggravated murder for allegedly stabbing his friend 26 times.

Ivan Nickolas Vetecnik, 15, was found dead on May 26. His body had been cut up and had been placed into several garbage bags which were subsequently tossed into a field.

Rowdy Lee Aguilar, 17, now faces charges for aggravated murder, obstruction of justice, and desecration of a human body for the killing.

Rowdy Lee Aguilar, 17, has been charged with stabbing his friend Ivan Nickolas Vetecnik, 15, pictured, 26 times and then leaving a bag full of his body parts in a field

Crime scene investigation tape can be seen around the home in Taylorsville, Utah

The death of Vetecnik came as shock to everyone who knew the pair who were said to be best friends, having grown up together.

Police were called after Vetecnik's body was found in a field.

Aguilar's home was searched soon afterwards. Investigators noted there was a strong smell of disinfectant in the cargo trailer he owns.

As the search continued, more circumstantial evidence was gathered including a bloody t-shirt and a knife that looked as though it might have been used in the killing and ultimately a dismembered body along with cleaning supplies inside.

The family of Vetecnik, who lost his own parents two years ago, are said to be shocked

Vetecnik's body was found to have 26 stab wounds including in the head with one wound penetrating his skull. The fatal blow was to his neck with Vetecnik's violent death was ruled as homicide.

Initially, upon questioning, Aguilar denied all knowledge including having anything the victim, but he soon admitted responsibility after being confronted with the evidence, including wounds on his own hands and blood on his clothes.

During an interview with detectives, Aguilar allegedly told investigators that that he had been at his girlfriend's house all day. The wounds on his hands, he claimed, were from preparing ribs for a barbecue.

The body of Ivan Nickolas Vetecnik, 15, was found in black and white garbage bags in a field behind the home of Rowdy Aguila, 17

Court documents seen by KSL don't reveal any motive for the killing but state how surveillance footage saw the boys heading into Aguilar's home that morning.

By the afternoon, Aguilar came out wearing a bloody T-shirt and was recorded making two trip to a field behind his house, first with a black trash bad then with a white one.

Police also found video footage that shows the pair together on the day of the murder.

Surveillance footage also sees Aguilar allegedly carrying items from his home in garbage bags that appear similar to those later found in the field.

After being confronted by police, Aguila told investigators 'I did it'.

Police noted the 17-year-old 'has little criminal history, but seemingly out of nowhere, Aguilar brutally killed and dismembered his 15-year-old friend,' according to charging documents.

Vetecnik's aunt told KUTV that the family were in shock at learning who the suspect was.

Vetecnik had lost his parents just two years before his own death making his aunt his legal guardian. He had lost his mother to cancer in 2019 and his father to a fatal heart attack in December 2020.

Ivan 'Nick' Nickolas Vetecnik as a young child. (Photo shared by Ingham family)

'Anytime they were together they were laughing, they were having fun, they would bump knuckles as they would walk away from each other,' said Vetecnik's aunt, Kerri Ingham to KUTV who described her nephew as a 'gentle giant'.

'The fact this has happened just leaves us with a huge question of why?'

'He was the most loving boy. He was a beautiful child. Biggest heart of anybody I know. He was a great kid.

'This whole thing is out of left field. We never expected this to happen. The character of the other person is the same way. I never, never in a million years thought this would happen,' Ingham said. 'We knew he was a troubled teen, but his personality, you could tell he was still a good kid.'

A GoFundMe account was started for the victim's family which has raised almost $14,000.
Nikole Hannah-Jones - author of the controversial New York Times 1619 Project - was paid $50,000 by the Oregon Education Department for two seminars where she reportedly told children: 'What we call American history is really white history.'

The Oregon Education Department (ODE) paid for the seminars out of funds for the The Every Day Matters program, which helps identity and solve students' root causes for missing school.

The polarizing Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter was also paid $25,000 for an online Zoom lecture given to the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, The World Socialist Web Site reported in April.

Both speaking gigs were revealed in separate Freedom of Information requests by the the right-wing news outlet Campus Reform and the activist group Oregonians for Liberty in Education.

The hefty price tags on both events have come under scrutiny given that Hannah-Jones' notoriety stems almost exclusively from her 1619 project - which has been widely panned by some historians for containing inaccuracies.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (left) - author of the controversial New York Times 1619 Project (right) - was paid $50,000 by the Oregon Education Department for two seminars where she reportedly told children: 'What we call American history is really white history'

During one of the seminars, Chris Riser, an Oregon teacher who was reportedly suspended for a Black Lives Matter walkout, asked Jones why the facts in her project were important for students of European descent, according to Fox.

Hannah-Jones responded, in part, by saying that 'what we call American history is really white history with a little bit of other people sprinkled in  but mostly to explain why white people have done what they do.'

The 'standard' history taught in American schools, Hannah-Jones said, depicted a 'country that doesn't actually exist. It's a country that erases all of these other people who were here.'

Hannah-Jones is represented by the Lavin Agency, which regularly books guest speakers, but it's unknown how many times Hannah-Jones was booked and what her fees are.

DailyMail.com emailed Charles Yao, Director of Intellectual Talent at the Lavin Agency who represents the New York Times reporter.

The Oregonians for Liberty Education took exception to Hannah-Jones' price tag, telling Fox: 'Spending seven months and $50,000 on these two webinars seems like a clear-cut case of counterproductive priorities.'

Marc Siegel, an ODE spokesperson, said sponsoring this event furthers The Every Day Matters program by helping black students feel welcomed and valued and added the 1619 Project is a 'valuable resource'.

The 'experiences of black students and families can and must be centered in our state, including the fullness of black histories and black futures,' Siegel said in an email, which is included in its entirety below.

'Centering the experience of black students and families helps black students feel valued and reflects blacks contribution in American history, which creates black student's sense of belonging in the classroom.

'Feeling welcome in the classroom boosts attendance, which boosts academic performance.'

'They had not seen this type of demand for a print product of The New York Times, they said, since 2008, when people wanted copies of Obama's historic presidency edition,' Hannah-Jones told The Atlantic in a December 2019 story. 'I know when I talk to people, they have said that they feel like they are understanding the architecture of their country in a way that they had not'

Nikole Hannah-Jones speaks at the 34th Annual Brooklyn Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House in New York in January 2020

What is critical race theory? The concept dividing the nation which asserts that US institutions are inherently racist The fight over critical race theory in schools has escalated in the United States over the last year. The theory has sparked a fierce nationwide debate in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests around the country over the last year and the introduction of the 1619 Project. The 1619 Project, which was published by the New York Times in 2019 to mark 400 years since the first enslaved Africans arrived on American shores, reframes American history by 'placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the center of the US narrative'. The debate surrounding critical race theory regards concerns that some children are being indoctrinated into thinking that white people are inherently racist or sexist. Those against critical race theory have argued it reduces people to the categories of 'privileged' or 'oppressed' based on their skin color. Supporters, however, say the theory is vital to eliminating racism because it examines the ways in which race influence American politics, culture and the law. Advertisement

The 1619 Project itself has been a cultural lightening rod since its highly anticipated publication in 2019, drawing criticism from some historians who said it was a cynical and biased view of American history and contained inaccuracies and generalizations.

Former President Donald Trump slammed the series as 'totally discredited' and part of the 'twisted web of lies' that has caught fire in American universities that teach American is a 'wicked and racist nation.'

He formed a '1776 Commission' in response to teach 'patriotism.' It released a report this year before being ended by President Joe Biden.

The 1619 Project has been at the center of the debate to introduce critical race theory into the classroom.

Critical race theory teaches that racism is a social construct used to oppress people of color, and that it is present in almost all aspects of everyday life.

Its supporters say the theory helps illuminate the obstacles faced by BIPOC (black, indigenous and people of color) individuals in their everyday lives, that their white counterparts do not have to worry about.

Critics claim it is unnecessarily divisive, and teaches children that they are either victims or oppressors from an early age.

Its been passionately fought by both sides, and parents have pulled students out of high-end schools across the country for including it in their curriculums.

The Oregonians for Liberty Education, who are against the teaching critical race theory in the classroom, included an advice dubbed 'How to navigate the minefields in teaching'

In this section was 'advice from a lawyer friend' who said, 'Given that there are aspects of critical race theory that conflict with religious beliefs for many, a teacher or other school district employee may be able to ask for an accommodation that lets them opt out of the "critical race theory" portion of the training, if not the training as a whole.'

The 1619 Project debate affected Hannah-Jones' tenure opportunity at The University of North Carolina, which rescinded its offer of a tenured journalism professor position after an intense backlash.

Instead, UNC officials will join its faculty this summer with a five-year contract.

A group of writers, historians, artists, athletes, and academics signed a letter supporting Hannah-Jones for the tenured position.

The New York Times has doggedly stood by its reporter even as the project has come under withering criticism by historians for its inaccuracies didn't qualify for a permanent appointment.
A man was fatally shot in the head in Brooklyn Friday morning - as an increasingly violent New York City deals with a large uptick in shootings from last year.

The NYPD responded around 5am to Miller Avenue and Fulton Street in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn and found a 39-year-old man unresponsive, with a gunshot wound to his head.

EMS responded and pronounced the victim dead. The identity of the victim has not been released.

A New York City police officer with the Crime Scene Unit stands over the body of a man who was shot and killed on Friday morning

The NYPD is investigating the shooting death of a man in Brooklyn after he was found with a gunshot wound to the head on Friday morning

Commuters on an elevated subway platform look below at the scene where a man was shot

No arrests have been made in the case as of Friday afternoon, with the investigation ongoing.

The shooting is the latest in a crime wave gripping New York City closely, particularly gun violence.

Many of the most common types of crime in the city, including robberies, burglaries and grand larcenies, remain near historic lows.

When they arrived, the man, 39, was found unconscious and unresponsive, with a gunshot wound to his head

No arrests have been made in the case as of Friday afternoon, with the investigation ongoing

The identity of the deceased is pending family notification

Through the first five months of 2021, the total number of major crimes measured by the police department hit the lowest level since comparable statistics became available in the 1990s.

But since the spring of 2020 the number of shootings has soared: Through June 6, there were 181 homicides in New York City, up from 121 in the same period in 2019, an increase of 50 percent.

That's the worst start to a year since 2011.

At least 687 people were wounded or killed by gunfire through June 6. More than 2,400 people were shot during the same period in 1993.

And it is the highest number for a winter and early spring since 2000.

Through the end of May, there have been 564 shootings, up from 318 last year which is a jump of 77.4 percent. In the final week of May, there were 33 shootings across New York City. The number of shooting victims has also risen by 76.9 percent from 360 by this time last year to 637 this year, through the end of May

Polling has shown crime is the top issue among likely primary voters in the upcoming New York City mayoral election.

When asked during a debate Thursday if police officers should continue to carry guns, all candidates said yes except Maya Wiley.

Andrew Yang said: 'My first act as mayor will be to go to the police and say ''we need you.'''

ANew York City police detective standing below the tracks of a city train overpass investigates the scene where a man was shot and killed in the Brooklyn borough of New York

Figures from the NYPD's CompStat website show serious crime rose by 23.4 percent in May, compared to the same month last year, the most recent month with complete statistics.

Robberies rocketed to 1,082 over the 28 days to May 30, up from just 726 for the same period in 2020.

Felony assaults also rose in the same period, from 1,443 in May 2020, to 1,769 in May 2021.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has repeatedly been accused of being 'pro-criminal' by critics. They said his bail reforms - intended to avoid leaving people who can't afford bail languishing in jail for months or years for petty crimes - releases suspects back onto the streets to go on to reoffend.

Through the first five months of 2021, the total number of major crimes measured by the police department has been at its lowest level since comparable statistics became available in the 1990s

Morale among the NYPD has slumped amid lukewarm support from de Blasio. Crime on the city's transit network - including its buses, subways and trains - doubled in May compared to May 2020, up from 78 last year to 154 this year.

Both shooting incidents and shooting victims are up 68 percent so far in 2021 compared to the same time last year.

A total of 13 people were shot over Memorial Day weekend including a 15-year-old boy who was killed in the Bronx.

Fears are growing that the city is harking back to the dark days of the 70s and 80s when murders and shootings were rife and it earned the nickname 'Fear City.' Governor Andrew Cuomo has said New York City is now in the throes of a 'major crime problem' which - if not tackled soon - could cause irreparable damage to the Big Apple.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Tuesday that he was enlisting the help of federal ATF agents to tackle the city's crime problem which he blames on cops getting sick from COVID, rather than the cuts he imposed on the NYPD

Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday announced a partnership between the NYPD and the ATF to try to tackle gun crime.

He has been widely blamed for the city's crime problem, with cops saying it's down to a lack of manpower caused by budget cuts.

Some 1,800 cops were cut as a result of the defund the police movement which prompted de Blasio to cut the NYPD's budget by $1billion. Nine hundred new recruits were added in November, but it's still nearly 2,000 cops off the total of the 36,900 uniform members of service from 2019.

Cops said the spike in crime is down to de Blasio disbanding the anti-crime unit - which had around 600 officers in it.

NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said at the time that the decision, along with others like cutting $1billion from the NYPD budget and banning chokeholds, showed de Blasio and others were 'bowing to mob rule.'

'Lets mark the date on the calendar and how long its going to be before were having a conversation about New York is crying out for more police.

'And I think that day has come,' he said last August in an interview.

Shea was notably absent from Tuesday's press conference where de Blasio announced his partnership with the ATF.

Instead, his deputy was there to represent the police force. When asked about it by a journalist, de Blasio became defensive.

'It all is one team fighting in common cause. This is a crucial moment talking about this partnership.

'I want to give [Deputy Commissioner] John Miller credit.

'I wanted the people of New York City to hear from him on it,' he said.
The CDC has called an urgent meeting regarding the higher-than-expected number of young men who have had heart inflammation after receiving the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines - just one week after Israel claimed it found a link between cases and the Pfizer shot.

The CDC, as well as other health regulators across the world, have been investigating links between heart inflammation cases and COVID-19 vaccines since Israel reported last week it had found a likely link to the condition in young men following the second Pfizer dose.

The emergency CDC meeting, which will be held June 18, will address the 226 plausible cases of heart inflammation in young people - mainly affecting teenage boys and young men - after receiving their second doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

While the CDC acknowledged on Thursday that the number of cases was higher than expected, they said it was still rare.

The cases reported may meet the CDC's 'working case definition' of myocarditis and pericarditis following the shots, the agency said. Myocarditis is inflammation of the heart muscle, while pericarditis is inflammation of the outer lining of the heart.

The CDC has called an urgent meeting regarding the higher-than-expected number of young men who have had heart inflammation after receiving the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines

US health officials announced on Thursday they are investigating what appear to be higher than expected reports of heart inflammation in male teens and young adults after getting their second doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine

Myocarditis - the condition that causes inflammation of the heart muscle - is usually triggered by a virus Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle. There are no specific causes of the condition but it is usually triggered by a virus. Some of the most common infections which cause myocarditis, are those called adenovirus and Coxsackie B. It can be caused by the common cold, hepatitis B and C, and herpes simplex virus. The most common symptoms of the condition include chest pain, a fever, a fast heartbeat, tiredness and shortness of breath. If the inflammation damages the heart muscle or the fibers that conduct electrical pulses to the heart, complications can develop. They can develop quickly, and include sudden loss of consciousness, an abnormally fast, slow or irregular heartbeat. In very severe cases the condition is fatal, causing heart failure or sudden death. The inflammation enlarges the heart and creates scar tissue, forcing it to work harder and therefore making it weaker. In most cases of viral myocarditis, the illness goes away and there are no complications. Advertisement

Among the 226 reported cases, three are in intensive care, 15 are hospitalized, and 41 have ongoing symptoms. The remaining 167 have recovered.

It is not clear if either condition is caused by the shots.

These types of heart inflammation can be caused by a variety of infections, including a bout of COVID-19, as well as certain medications. There have been rare reports following other types of vaccinations in the past.

More than 130 million Americans have received both their first and second doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. This means just 0.000173846 percent of people who have been administered their second doses have reported such an effect.

Cases are reported through the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which accepts reports from everyone regardless of the plausibility of the vaccine causing the symptom.

In total, VAERS received 573 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis after the patient had received their second dose. A total of 372 reports were from people who had the Pfizer vaccine, while the remaining 201 had Moderna.

Another 216 cases of the heart inflammation were also reported after dose one of the vaccines.

More than half of the cases reported after the second dose were in people between the ages of 12 and 24, which accounts for less than 9 percent of doses administered.

Almost two-fifths of cases were in males.

The overwhelming majority of the cases have occurred within a week of vaccination and symptoms included chest pain and breathing difficulties.

Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, who is the deputy director of the CDC's Immunization Safety Office, said on Thursday that the findings were mostly 'consistent' with the report put out last week by Israel's Health Ministry.

Israel claimed in early June that its research showed Pfizer's vaccine is the 'probable' cause of heart inflammation in a very small number of people who get the jab.

The Health Ministry had found 148 cases of myocarditis soon after the patient had been vaccinated.

In total, 275 cases were spotted among the more than five million people given the Pfizer jab in Israel, which has had one of the world's most successful jab rollouts.

In the remaining 127 cases, it is unclear if they are linked to the vaccine.

This was equivalent to just 0.005 per cent of recipients, or one in 20,000 people.

The CDC has been investigating links between heart inflammation cases and COVID-19 vaccines since Israel reported last week it had found a likely link to the condition in young men following the second Pfizer dose. A young boy is pictured receiving his vaccine in Jerusalem last week

Cases of heart inflammation in patients who have been reported in at least three other countries Israel Israel was one of the first to warn of health concerns linked to the Pfizer vaccine. The country claimed in early June that its research showed Pfizer's vaccine is the 'probable' cause of heart inflammation in a very small number of people who get the jab. The Health Ministry had found 148 cases of myocarditis soon after the patient had been vaccinated. In total, 275 cases were spotted among the more than five million people given the Pfizer jab in Israel, which has had one of the world's most successful jab rollouts. In the remaining 127 cases, it is unclear if they are linked to the vaccine. This was equivalent to just 0.005 per cent of recipients, or one in 20,000 people. For the 148 cases 'probably' linked to the jab, the rate was 0.003 per cent  although half of them had other underlying health problems. Canada At least one health official in Canada has also linked the Pfizer vaccine to heart inflammation. Dr Peter Liu, chief scientific officer at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute and an expert in myocarditis, last week said he has seen two cases he believes are linked to vaccination over the last month. The official health regulator has not linked cases to the vaccine. Germany The European Medicines Agency confirmed in May it was looking into cases of myocarditis and pericarditis in people who had received either the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine. 'There is no indication at the moment that these cases are due to the vaccine,' it said. Germany's vaccine advisory committee, known as STIKO, has recommended only children and adolescents with pre-existing conditions should be given the Pfizer vaccine. STIKO said it recommends a vaccination only for those youngsters with an illness that raises their risk of a serious case of coronavirus. Advertisement

For the 148 cases 'probably' linked to the jab, the rate was 0.003 per cent  although half of them had other underlying health problems.

Israel was one of the first to warn of health concerns linked to the Pfizer vaccine.

In May, officials at the European Medicines Agency also reported receiving 107 reports of myocarditis following the Pfizer vaccine.

Britain's medical regulator announced on Friday it has not yet detected any link between Pfizer and Moderna's vaccines and heart damage.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which polices the safety of drugs in the UK, said it is 'closely monitoring reports of myocarditis and pericarditis received with the COVID vaccines'.

It has recorded just 34 cases of myocarditis after Pfizer jabs  a similar number to after the AstraZeneca vaccine  and only two after Moderna, but says numbers 'similar or below expected background levels'.

Of the 14.7million people to have had a Pfizer jab, 0.0004 per cent have suffered either myocarditis or pericarditis. The rate was slightly lower in AstraZeneca recipients: 0.0003 per cent of the 24.5million people to have had a first dose.

At least one health official in Canada has linked the Pfizer vaccine to heart inflammation.

Dr Peter Liu, chief scientific officer at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute and an expert in myocarditis, last week said he has seen two cases he believes are linked to vaccination over the last month.

He told the Ottawa Citizen: 'One can never be sure, but it is more than coincidental. We are learning more about this every day.'

Doctors were first alerted to the possible link between myocarditis and vaccines back in May amid reports of cases in young males.

The CDC has been urging providers to ask patients with symptoms of heart inflammation if they have taken the COVID-19 vaccine.

Earlier this month, it was reported that seven teen boys in the US had suffered heart inflammation after their second Pfizer shots.

The study found the boys, aged between the ages of 14 and 19, developed chest pain within a few days of having the second jab.

Heart imaging tests showed myocarditis. None were critically ill and all were healthy enough to be sent home after two to six days in the hospital.

Around the same time, the Department of Defense began to track 14 cases.

Pfizer was granted emergency use authorization for children aged 12 and over last month. It is now working on trials with children as young as six months old.

Moderna is still only available for adults.

Meanwhile, the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines have also both been investigated for possible - extremely rare - ties to blood clots.
Lawmakers can once again go mask-less on the floor of the House of Representatives ending a months-long tussle between Democrats and Republicans.

The Office of the Attending Physician, Brian Monahan, sent out new guidance Friday, CNN reported, that said 'fully vaccinated individuals may discontinue mask wear and 6-foot social distance separations.'

Last month, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy sponsored a resolution to end mask-wearing in the House of Representatives after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had changed its guidance for vaccinated Americans.

In May, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (center) tweeted a photo from the House floor of the GOP lawmakers without face masks; from left Reps. Mary Miller, Ralph Norman and Thomas Massie. Massie organized the bare-faced protest

The Democrats tabled it, however, pointing out that only 75 per cent of lawmakers had been vaccinated at that point.

While 100 per cent of Democrats CNN surveyed had been vaccinated, under half, 44 per cent, of Republican lawmakers had gotten the shot, with 112 out of 212 GOP offices refusing to say.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office was waiting for both lawmakers and staff to get closer to 100 per cent.

'If Minority Leader McCarthy wants to be maskless on the Floor of the House of Representatives, he should get to work vaccinating his Members,' Pelosi spokesperson Drew Hammill said at the time.

On Friday, Forbes reported that 85 per cent of the Capitol complex is now vaccinated.

Before McCarthy's push to change the rules, some House Republicans flaunted them, going bare-faced and taking selfies on the House floor.

Three of them racked up $500 fines in the process.

'Best $500 I ever spent,' Republican Rep. Brian Mast told NBC News.

He refused to put his mask on even after a member of the House Sergeant at Arms' office approached him on the chamber floor, in full view of C-SPAN's camera, and asked him to wear one.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and three other GOP lawmakers took a selfie of themselves standing in the well of the House, bare-faced, using the hashtag #freeyourface.

'Proud to join these Patriots for a peaceful protest on the House floor against mask mandates!,' Greene tweeted with the picture.

In April, Greene had also tweeted a video of herself, mask-less, lifting weights, saying, 'This is my Covid protection.'

Exercise does not prevent the spread of COVID-19.

'Enough is enough! #FreeYourFace,' wrote Republican Rep. Mary Miller, who was in the selfie, on Twitter.

'5 Republican women and 5 Republican men are now maskless on the floor,' tweeted GOP Rep. Tom Massie.

He was also in Greene's selfie and organized the protest.

'We've had enough. We are refusing to wear our masks on the floor during this vote in spite of Pelosi's threat to take $500 from each of us. Her rule is not based on science,' Massie also tweeted.

After their anti-mask crusade, the Republican lawmakers gathered outside on the steps of the Capitol to celebrate their rebellion.

None of them would tell NBC News if they had been vaccinated.
Authorities rescued a two-month-old boy from a neighborhood drug den in west-central Brazil after a mother-of-five other allegedly pawned him over a $58 drug debt.

The Military Police was dispatched to the home in Pontes e Lacerda, Mato Grosso, on Tuesday, after the Guardian Councilship (child protective service agency) received an anonymous phone call, according to Brazilian online news outlet G1.

Online news portal VG Noticias reported that the mother appeared in court Thursday and denied that she had abandoned her boy because of a drugs related debt.

It's alleged that the woman left her son for 15 days under the care of two women who live at the residence as a promise to pay back the money she owed to one of the local drug dealers.

However, the women told lead investigator Bruna Laet that the mother had not purchased or consumed drugs at their home. They alleged she had gone to another place to purchase it.

Lieutenant colonel Sandro Barbosa walks out of an alleged drug den in Mato Grosso, Brazil, on Tuesday with a two-month-old boy who was reportedly pawned by his mother as a promise to pay for a $58 drug debt. Police said the mother is a known drug user. A judge has temporarily revoked the custody of the boy from the mother, who has two other children. The oldest child is under the care of a family not related to her. Her middle child, a daughter, is currently staying at a shelter

Lieutenant colonel Sandro Barbosa hands over the baby to a city official moments after he removed him from the home where his mother had left him as a promise to pay a drug debt

Cellphone video of the rescue shows Barbosa carrying the baby boy out of the home and placing him in the arms of a female official.

'What we found out at the time of the incident is that the mother, desperate with the drug debt, which was no more than ($58), left the child as a form of payment guarantee and the people at the house accepted it,' lieutenant colonel Sandro Barbosa said.

'But you can't measure that value of a human life.'

The women who were with the boy were not placed under arrest because they told authorities they did not take the child as a promise for future payment.

A police officer in Pontes e Lacerda, Brazil, holds the two-month-old baby, who was reportedly abandoned at a drug den as a promise to pay a drug debt

However, their home had been investigated in the past for drug trafficking.

'They claim that they know the child's mother and that they were just doing a caring favor, but we know that's not the reality,' Barbosa said. 'If the mother did not show up to pay the debt, they would keep the child.'

Barbosa revealed that the child's mother, whose name was withheld, 'is a known addict in the city for over 10 years.'

A judge for the 2nd Court of Pontes e Lacerda temporarily revoked the child's custody from the mother.

According to the Mato Gross Public Ministry, the woman's first child died at the age of two. The oldest child is under the care of a family that is not related to her. Her daughter is currently staying at a shelter.

The two-month-old baby spent most of his time with his ill maternal grandmother, who suffers from heart problems and is unable to look after him.

Sources told VG Noticias that the mother attended a drug rehab program at a local clinic and was discharged March 22.
Former President Donald Trump claims he has turned down two book deals as he is busy at work on a more important project.

Insiders suggest he has been irritated at how his vice president Mike Pence has signed a two-book, multimillion dollar deal.

Meanwhile Trump is pushing ahead with plans for a new social media platform and will appear via video screen on Saturday at My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell's political rally.

But on Friday, he issued a statement promising the 'book of all books' when the time was right.

'I turned down two book deals, from the most unlikely of publishers, in that I do not want to do such a deal right now,' he said.

'Im writing like crazy anyway, however, and when the time comes, youll see the book of all books.

'Actually, Ive been working on a much more important project right now.'

Former President Trump has stepped up his public appearances and on Friday claimed he had turned down two book deals. 'Im writing like crazy anyway, however, and when the time comes, youll see the book of all books'

Trump will be the star speaker at the MAGA Frank free speech rally on Saturday. He will address supporters in Wisconsin via videolink

Presidential memoirs attract huge advances and generate reams of column inches.

After leaving office, Barack Obama and his wife Michelle reportedly struck a joint deal worth more than $65 million.

Like all former presidents, Trump would be expected to follow suit.

However, the publishing industry has become sensitive to criticism that it risks 'normalizing' an extraordinary, tumultuous period in American history by taking on books by conservative figures.

When publishing giant Simon & Schuster announced it was releasing former Pence's book, staff responded with a petition demanding it stop publishing authors associated with Trump.

News of the two-book deal apparently grated on Trump.

'As far as Trump is concerned, Pence is the number two,' said a former adviser. 'He shouldn't be getting the chance to tell his story first.'

Trump faces his own problems connecting with supporters. He remains banned from Facebook and Twitter, and recently closed his 'From the Desk of' webpage where he posted statements.

Work continues on a new social media platform.

Lindell has become one of Trump's most outspoken supporters and has reportedly sunk $1million of his own money into Frank, a new social media platform for conservatives

Vloggers Diamond and Silk, aka Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson, are on the bill for Saturday's MAGA Frank event, hosted by My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell

On Saturday, he will directly address supporters gathered in western Wisconsin.

The MAGA Frank rally is expected to draw thousands of people to hear from a string of conservative figures and commentators, including Trump cheerleaders Diamond and Silk, and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

Lindell has become one Trump's most ardent public supporters and conspiracy theory devotees, pushing unfounded voter fraud claims.

During a recent appearance on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon's podcast he believed the 2020 election result would soon be reversed.

'Donald Trump, I believe, will be back in by the end of August,' he said.

The Saturday event is part of an effort to promote Frank, his new social media site for conservatives.

Its website describes Frank as a platform for 'Americans who want to defend life, liberty, and all the freedoms that have marked America as the longest running Constitutional Republic in the history of the world.'

In a speech last weekend, Trump repeated his election fraud claims, railed against President Biden and once again said he had proven right on the origins of COVID-19, unlike Dr. Anthony Fauci.

'He's not a great doctor, but he's a hell of a promoter,' he told the North Carolina Republican Convention.

'He likes television more than any politician in this room, and they like television, but he's been wrong on almost every issue and he was wrong Wuhan and the lab also.'
Given the worldwide interest that there is this weekend in one Cornish seaside resort, I am pleased to point out that the home address recorded on my birth certificate is Carbis Bay, Cornwall.

Boris has not told me whether this had any bearing on the choice of such a wonderful spot for the G7 summit, but I must say I am chuffed it is taking place there.

I have always been proud of my Cornish ancestry. When I was trying some time ago to be selected as a parliamentary candidate for St Ives, I fished out the birth certificate and waved it in front of the selectors eyes. It didnt do the trick. I wish it had. I might have been a junior minister by now!

Boris Johnson and his father Stanley Johnson in 2015 campaigning in Colindale and Burnt Oak

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson, his spouse Carrie Johnson, US President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden arrive for the G7 summit in Carbis Bay

My grandparents  Stanley Williams and his French wife, Marie-Louise de Pfeffel  lived in Carbis Bay in a largish house high above the beach with a magnificent view of St Ives Bay.

Virginia Woolf and her siblings used to stay there when it was a lodging house in the early 1900s. She described the outlook as the divinest view in Europe, and insisted: You wont find better though you go round the world for it. Godrevy Lighthouse, at the edge of the bay, is thought to have been the inspiration for one of her most famous novels.

I was born in August 1940. Years later, my mother  who was then staying at the house with her parents  told me: It was already late at night. I told your granny that you were on the way. Granny told Grandpa and Grandpa called for William. William barely had time to get Poppy out of the garage to run me into Penzance before you arrived!

Now, I should explain that William was my grandfathers chauffeur and Poppy his red Daimler which, owing to fuel rationing, saw very few outings during the war, though getting me to the hospital on time clearly qualified as an allowable excursion. William took Poppy out of the garage again a few days later to bring my mother and me back from hospital.

It was because my father was serving as a pilot in RAF Coastal Command, based at Chivenor in North Devon, that my mother spent extended periods during the war at her parents Cornish home. So Carbis Bay was really a second home for my three siblings and me, not only during the war, but long after, too.

Will the G7 leaders be inspired as I was as a child  by the sight of gannets far out to sea, soaring and plunging into the waves? Will the delegates have time to visit those amazing nearby beaches and coves  Porthcurno, Nanjizal, Pedn Vounder etc.  which were so much a feature of my childhood?

My siblings and I had a dormitory at the top of the house. Long after the others had gone to sleep, I would lie awake listening to the rhythmic sound of the waves beating on the beach. Sometimes, from that upstairs room, you could see great shoals of pilchards which would, quite literally, darken the surface of the water in the bay.

Virginia Woolf used to like looking from the upstairs windows at the boats. When I wake in the morning I discover first what new ships have come in to the bay, she wrote in a letter to a friend.

All day long these silent voyagers are coming and going, alighting like some travelling birds for a moment and then shaking out their sails and passing on to new waters.

But that was before my grandparents, who lived in Kent, bought the house as a holiday home and then moved in permanently after Stanley retired as a Lloyds underwriter in his 50s. I am sorry to say that I have very few memories of my grandmother, Marie-Louise, who died after an allergic reaction to a bee sting when I was four. But my memories of Grandpa Stanley are vivid.

He had a wonderful stamp collection and wed spend many a wet afternoon helping him stick in stamps which he would receive from friends and contacts in all corners of the world. He told us: Philately will get you anywhere!

He also elevated beachcombing into a high art. Two or three days a week he would walk to the beaches of Lelant or Hayle, returning with bits of driftwood or lumps of coal. A thrifty man, he once brought back a discarded sofa.

As we grew older, he would invite us to accompany him. The quickest route on foot to Hayle was along the single-track branch line running from St Erth to St Ives. I remember hopping from sleeper to sleeper between the shiny rails, then stepping smartly to the side to let the train go by.

Sometimes, when you were in the deep cutting between Carbis Bay and Lelant, you would hear the chug of the engine and the shrill whistle long before you saw the train. Or you could put your ear to the rail and sense the vibrations even earlier.

Occasionally, Grandpa would find large white shells on the beach, and he would pop these in his ever-present canvas bag.

Over time, he amassed quite a collection which he used to form the words CARBIS BAY on the grassy embankment of the little local railway station. You need to know when to get off when your journeys over, he told us. Now that Im over 80, I see his point.

Family fun: Stanley, stood behind, and siblings with Granny Butter in Carbis Bay. Left, with son Boris and, above, his grandparents Cornish home

My grandparents  Stanley Williams and his French wife, Marie-Louise de Pfeffel  lived in Carbis Bay in a largish house high above the beach with a magnificent view of St Ives Bay

My mother, Irene, was the oldest of his four daughters (he had no sons). All of them, with their families, would visit him in Carbis Bay where Jessie, the housekeeper and cook, was very much a fixture. One of her specialities was fishcakes.

We would come down to breakfast, my grandfather Stanley sitting at the head of the table with a splendid view over the hydrangeas towards distant Trevose Head on the North Cornwall coast.

My mother would sit on his right and her four children would range themselves round. Fishcakes today! Grandpa would inform us. He would ring the bell and Jessie would push a steaming plate through the hatch.

Grandpa would take the spatula and give a quick tap on each fishcake, shouting as he did so alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta (He had learnt Greek at school, though he was no scholar, taking a fourth at Oxford.)

Should you spot a fishcake you fancied, you had to call out the right letter (in Greek of course) and, provided none of your siblings had beaten you to it, that succulent item, crisply fried, with a light golden-brown tan overall, was yours.

In later life, Ive found that the Greek alphabet always comes in handy. Were on the Delta variant now, for example.

By the 1950s, my parents had started farming on Exmoor, where we still are today, and my mother would send us unaccompanied to stay with Grandpa in Cornwall.

Those were the days when the Exe Valley train line still ran from Dulverton to Exeter. One day my mother took my sister, Hilary, and me to Dulverton Station en route to Cornwall. I was ten, my sister 11. Remember to get on The Cornishman at Exeter. You cant miss it, my mother instructed.

And please be sure to change at St Erth for the branch line to St Ives. Then get out at Carbis Bay. Someone will meet you at the station there.

My sister and I did as we were told, changing trains at Exeter St Davids and boarding The Cornishman, which was conveniently waiting for us, smoke pouring from the engine into the roof.

But quite soon doubts set in. When we got to Bristol, we knew something had gone wrong. Fellow passengers were most helpful. They told us we had got on the wrong train.

In those days, the up Cornishman often crossed with the down Cornishman at Exeter St Davids! I am not sure who met us at Carbis Bay, late in the day, but no one seemed to mind very much.

My mother certainly didnt when she heard the news. I knew youd be all right, she said over the phone. She was always an optimist. There is a photo of her in her teens on the beach at Carbis Bay, with a shrimping net in hand. Shes wearing a jacket labelled CLC: Cheltenham Ladies College.

Kindly schoolmates gave her the nickname Buster thanks to her indomitable spirit. My children called her Granny Butter, because they couldnt pronounce Buster.

For me, an early indication of her positive approach came after she woke me one night when I was about four years old. At the time, my parents were renting a small house overlooking the runway at RAF Chivenor, where my fathers squadron was posted.

Look, darling! Come quickly! my mother shook me. She hustled me to the window. There is a bonfire on the runway! A plane has crashed. I recall the knock on the door the next morning. It was the RAF padre. He took off his hat as he spoke.

Mrs Johnson? Im afraid Ive some bad news. As it turned out, the spectacular plane crash we had witnessed the previous night had involved my father, Wilfred after whom Boris and his wife Carries son is named  returning home from U-boat patrol in the Atlantic.

Tragically, two of the crew had lost their lives, and two others (including my father) had been severely injured.

The good news, the padre continued, is that your husband is still alive. My mother thrust her chin out and her eyes glinted. I didnt doubt it for a moment.

It was this attitude that stood her in good stead on the farm on Exmoor. As she put it, few people can have been less qualified than I was to be a farmers wife.

She read French and Russian at Oxford and her mother was descended from a French line of aristocrats, but she had suddenly been thrown into rural reality, churning butter by hand and rescuing orphaned lambs in a kitchen that was once a medieval cow byre.

She died aged 80 in 1987 but in 2015, my younger sister Gillian (known to all as Birdie) published the book shed written, Alas Poor Johnny: A Memoir Of Life On An Exmoor Farm.

The launch took place in Dulverton Town Hall in the heart of Exmoor and Boris, then Mayor of London, came down specially to make a speech which I  and I am sure the rest of the audience  will never forget.

Granny Butters key quality, he said was her unconquerable optimism. She had no dishwasher and no washing machine and no central heating, and she had electricity supplied by a diesel generator that was constantly packing up.

She had to cope with my grandfather and four children, and everyone who was trying to help him make a living out of this spectacular but unprofitable piece of semi-moor. At one stage she had to cope with 13 dogs, not all of them perfectly house-trained!

Looking back, I would argue that Boriss conclusion, that bright morning in a crowded room in Dulverton Town Hall, was almost prophetic.

As for her own legacy, Boris said, it bobs irresistibly up and down the generations. We are now on the fourth generation of Granny Butters progeny, and there are traces of her everywhere: she is there in the beaky noses, the fair hair, the sturdy proportions.

More important, I would say that she was the ancestor and perhaps the progenitor of that spirit of optimism and exuberance that some of them exhibit  from time to time  to this day.

I like to think that her can-do attitude was forged in Carbis Bay which, sadly, was sold upon my grandfathers death in 1956, before my children could ever enjoy the house and the views from that upstairs window.

Last year, Boris declared his paternal grandmother one of his five most inspirational women.

As world leaders, chaired by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, gather in Carbis Bay, it is obvious that what Boris called her spirit of optimism and exuberance will be needed in full measure. Perhaps later he will raise a quiet glass to Granny Butter and his Cornish links. I certainly will.

Stanley Johnson, whose new novel From An Antique Land will be published by Black Spring Press in September, is International Ambassador for the Conservative Environment Network.
A lobster diver was swallowed whole by a hungry humpback whale - but lived to tell the tale because the creature didn't like how he tasted, and spat him back out.

Michael Packard, 56, had been a commercial lobster diver out of Provincetown, Massachusetts for 40 years and was going on a routine lobster dive off the coast of Cape Cod last Friday morning when he said he 'felt a huge bump and everything went dark.'

At first, he said he thought he had been attacked by a shark, but when he realized he did not feel any sharp teeth and was not in pain, he began to figure out what had happened.

'I realized, oh my God, I'm in a whale's mouth ... and he's trying to swallow me,' Packard told WBZ-TV following the encounter. 'And I thought to myself OK, this is it - I'm finally - I'm gonna die.'

Packard, who is an experienced diver, started to think about his wife and his 12 and 15 year old sons, and began to struggle inside the beast's mouth until, he said, he saw a light and the whale started shaking his head side-to side.

'I just got thrown in the air and landed in the water,' Packard recounted to the CBS affiliate. 'I was free and I just floated there. I couldn't believe... I'm here to tell it.'

He estimates he was in the whale's mouth for about 30 seconds, but continued to breathe because he still had his breathing apparatus in.

Michael Packard, 56, suffered only minor injuries after being trapped inside a humpback whale's mouth for roughly 30 seconds on Friday morning.

Experts say being eaten by a humpback whale is extremely rare, with one suggesting the whale made a mistake when it sucked Packard in and quickly spat him out (file photo)

Packard had been a lobster diver for 40 years at the time of the incident and was rescued by a crewmate who called authorities on the shore

Packard took to Facebook following the incident to thank the Provincetown rescue squad for its 'caring and help'

Packard was rescued by his crewmate Josiah Mayo who was aboard their boat 'The J n' J.'

Mayo watched in shock as the water beside the boat erupted as the whale surfaced - and Packard flew out of the mammal's mouth.

He plucked Packard out of the water, according to the Cape Cod Times, and used his radio to call authorities on the shore.

The Provincetown Fire Department later confirmed that a call came in about a diver who had suffered serious injuries to his legs 'after interacting with a whale.'

At first Packard said, he thought he had broken his legs in the incident, but doctors later told he he just had soft tissue damage and bruises, and he was released from a local hospital later that day.

In a following Facebook post, Packard thanked the Provincetown rescue squad for its 'caring and help'

He said that when he was stuck inside the whale's mouth his thoughts turned to his wife and his 12 and 15 year old sons

Experts say it is extremely rare to be swallowed by a humpback whale, Peter Corkeron, a senior scientist at the New England Aquarium estimating there is a one in 1 trillion chance someone would be eaten by a whale.

When a humpback feeds, he said, 'they do what we call gulp feeding, and they an open their mouths up incredibly widely,' which Jooke Robbins, the director of Humpback Whales Studies at the Center for Coastal Studies, said could limit their forward vision.

'Based on what was described, this would have to be a mistake, and an accident on the part of the humpback,' Robbins concluded.

'He was just unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,' Corkeron conceded.

The humpback likely hoped it would get a mouthful of sand lance fish, which live in the waters off Cape Cod.

Experts say whales are generally placid around humans, and show little aggression towards them.

But they have warned divers to stay at least 100 feet away from the powerful animals at all times, because even an accidental brush with one can be very dangerous - as Packard discovered.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday she will take no further action against Rep. Ilhan Omar for comparing the US and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban - and insisted she has 'the right to make that point'.

'I think that she clarified her remarks and we accept that, and she has a point that she wanted to make and she has a right to make that point,' Pelosi said at a press conference. 'There's some unease about how it was interpreted.'

'She made her clarification', Pelosi insisted before moving onto the next question.

After her appearance, she posed for a photo and bashed Republicans by saying: 'Can you imagine those people though? How awful they are?'

The Democratic speaker responded after Omar said the US and Israel had committed 'unspeakable atrocities' like terrorist groups and sparked an intense battle within the party.

The party has been thrown into disarray at the start of President Joe Biden's eight-day trip to Europe.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib blasted Pelosi and Democratic leadership for a statement they put out Thursday saying Rep. Omar was fomenting 'prejudice' by comparing the U.S. and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday she will take no further action against Rep. Ilhan Omar for comparing the US and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban - and insisted she has 'the right to make that point'

'Freedom of speech doesn't exist for Muslim women in Congress. The benefit of the doubt doesn't exist for Muslim women in Congress,' Tlaib tweeted two hours later. 'House Democratic leadership should be ashamed of its relentless, exclusive tone policing of Congresswomen of color.'

Omar on Thursday accused her critics within the Democratic Party of whipping up 'Islamic hate against her' after they complained she was comparing atrocities committed by American and Israeli troops with those of terrorist groups.

Beyond support from fellow Squad members Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Congressional Progressive Caucus also came out in defense of Omar, a Minnesota Democrat.

Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal called Omar a 'deeply valued member' of the Progressive Caucus in a statement sent out Thursday afternoon, several hours after Pelosi and the five top House Democrats sent out theirs.

'We cannot ignore a right-wing media echo chamber that has deliberately and routinely attacked a Black, Muslim woman in Congress, distorting her views and intentions, and resulting in threats against Rep. Omar and her staff,' Jayapal said. 'We urge our colleagues not to abet or amplify such divisive and bad-faith tactics.'

'Members of the Democratic caucus owe it to each other to pause, reflect, and engage directly with each other when misunderstandings arise, and stand together against cynical attempts to divide our caucus,' she added.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (left) defended her fellow 'squad' member, Rep. Ilhan Omar, in a Thursday tweet saying, 'Freedom of speech doesn't exist for Muslim women in Congress. The benefit of the doubt doesn't exist for Muslim women in Congress'

Tlaib's tweet came in response to a statement put out by Democratic leadership that Omar was fomenting 'prejudice' by drawing false equivalence between democracies such as U.S. and Israel and terrorist groups such as Hamas and the Taliban

Pelosi stepped in on Thursday afternoon in an effort to end the feuding.

She said legitimate criticism of the U.S. and Israel was protected by the values of democratic debate.

'But drawing false equivalencies between democracies like the U.S. and Israel and groups that engage in terrorism like Hamas and the Taliban foments prejudice and undermines progress toward a future of peace and security for all,' she said.

'We welcome the clarification by Congresswoman Omar that there is no moral equivalency between the U.S. and Israel and Hamas and the Taliban.'

Omar has frequently been at odds with members of her own party on the Middle East.

The latest row stems from her pressing Secretary of State Anthony Blinken for an International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into abuses committed by both Hamas and Israeli security forces.

Rep. Ilhan Omar hit back at her critics within her own party, accusing them of Islamophobia. 'The Islamophobic tropes in this statement are offensive,' she said on Twitter. The constant harassment and silencing from the signers of this letter is unbearable'

On Twitter, she went further, describing 'unthinkable atrocities' committed by the US, Israel, Hamas and the Taliban, triggering an angry backlash and accusations of 'false equivalencies' between 'imperfect' democracies and terrorist outfits.

Her office claimed the result was an increase in death threats against her.

And Omar blasted back on Twitter: 'It's shameful for colleagues who call me when they need my support to now put out a statement asking for 'clarification' and not just call.

'The Islamophobic tropes in this statement are offensive. The constant harassment and silencing from the signers of this letter is unbearable.'

Her senior communications director Jeremy Slevin said: 'As usual, the far right is ginning up hate against Rep. Omar for a technical question about an ongoing investigation.

This has already led to an increase in death threats against her and her staff.

'And now some of her own Democratic colleagues are ginning up the same Islamophobic hate against her, accusing her of giving 'cover to terrorist groups' simply for exercising oversight over a criminal investigation.'

Omar insisted her words had been taken out of context.

'To be clear: the conversation was about accountability for specific incidents regarding those ICC cases, not a moral comparison between Hamas and the Taliban and the U.S. and Israel,' she said.

'I was in no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries with well-established judicial systems.'

Even so, she was quickly back on the attack, hinting her own caucus was faster to call out anti-Israel comments with the party than Islamaphobia among Republicans.

She highlighted comments by Rep. Mo Brooks in 2019 saying: 'Muslims, more so than most people, have great animosity towards Israel and the Jewish faith.'

She asked: 'When will our caucus forcefully stand up against hate towards their Muslim colleagues and constituents?'

Omar was back on the attack by Thursday afternoon, after clarifying her earlier comments, saying she 'was in no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries with well-established judicial systems'

Fellow members of the squad raced to Omar's defense on Twitter with messages of solidarity. Tlaib condemned colleagues and 'their obsession with policing her' as sick

Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, took to Twitter to show solidarity with Omar.

'I am tired of colleagues (both D+R) demonizing,' wrote Tlaib.

'Their obsession with policing her is sick.

'She has the courage to call out human rights abuses no matter who is responsible. That's better than colleagues who look away if it serves their politics.'

An unofficial caucus of 25 Jewish Democrats met on Wednesday to discuss anti-Semitism after the provocative tweet was posted on Monday.

Omar had said: 'We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity.

'We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the US, Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.'

New York Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin said Omar should be removed from the Foreign Affairs Committee.

'She should have never been appointed to this Committee in the first place', he tweeted Wednesday night.

Brad Sherman, a senior Democrat from California who has served since 1997, denounced the comments in a furious press release.

Representative Ilhan Omar likened U.S. and Israeli actions to the 'unthinkable atrocities committed' by terrorist groups like Hamas and the Taliban

He said: 'It's not news that Ilhan Omar would make outrageous and clearly false statements about America and Israel. What's newsworthy is that she admits Hamas is guilty of 'unthinkable atrocities'.

'It's time for all of Israel's detractors to condemn Hamas. And it's time for all those of good will to reject any moral equivalency between the US and Israel on one hand, and Hamas and the Taliban on the other.'

'Ilhan Omar must be removed from the House Foreign Affairs Committee. She should have never been appointed to this Committee in the first place.

A number of lawmakers at the meeting of Jewish Democrats wanted to name and shame Omar in a joint statement saying she 'discredited' the party, according to The Times of Israel.

Other than Sherman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Brad Schneider were among those pushing to condemn Omar, although no one on the call said they believed the tweet to be anti-Semitic.

Others present were Jamie Raskin, who was hesitant to denounce Omar, Jerry Nadler, Ted Deutch, Jan Schakowsky, Elissa Slotkin and Elaine Luria.

In her tweet, the Minnesota congresswoman included a clip of her line of questioning with Secretary of State Antony Blinken during a hearing Monday. The questioning did not include lumping in the U.S. with terrorist organizations

Schakowsky previously joined Omar on a campaign against Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

Omar's office did not respond to a previous DailyMail.com request on what specific 'atrocities' she was referencing in her tweet that the US is responsible for.

Jeremy Slevin, a spokesman for Omar, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: 'As usual, the far right is ginning up hate against Rep. Omar for a technical question about an ongoing investigation.

'It is the congresswoman's role as a member of Congress conducting federal oversight to follow the facts, ask questions of the administration and work to make sure the public understands our government shouldn't deny any person from seeking justice.'

David Harris, the American Jewish Committee CEO, said: 'Beyond shocking. Beyond reprehensible.

Brad Sherman, a senior Democrat who has served since 1997, denounced the comments in a furious press release

'Will members of her own party speak up?'

A number of Republican lawmakers have chided in to slam Omar for the 'hateful assault'.

'This shouldn't be at all controversial: America is not a terrorist organization,' newly elected South Carolina Representative Nancy Mace tweeted on Tuesday. 'Full stop.'

'It is absolutely befuddling that Rep. [Ilhan Omar] continues her vicious, hateful assault on America, likening our country to terrorists,' she added.

Florida Representative Brian Mast tweeted: 'This is absolutely disgusting from a Member of Congress. I lost two legs and a finger defending the USA and fighting the radical Islamic terrorists that [Ilhan] Omar is now defending. She is completely unfit to serve our country.'

The 'Squad' member included a clip in her tweet where she questioned Secretary of State Antony Blinken as part of a Monday House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the State Department's budget request and foreign policy strategy.

Her line of questioning, unlike her tweet, did not include her grouping America with terrorist organizations.

Instead, she asked Blinken how the US plans to help people in areas where war crimes are being committed by Hamas and the Taliban, including places like in Israel, Palestinian territories and Afghanistan.

'I asked [Secretary Antony Blinken] where people are supposed to go for justice,' Omar tweeted of her line of questioning.

South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace said it 'shouldn't be at all controversial' to say that America is 'not a terrorist organization'. She called on Omar to resign

The American-Somali congresswoman's comments come shortly after a ceasefire was called between Israel and Hamas, operating in Gaza, following an 11-day deadly conflict.

More than 250 people were killed in the conflict and thousands others were injured.

Omar saw some backlash for her tweet, including questions of why she serves in Congress if she 'hates America.'

'If Ilhan Omar hates America so much to say that US committed atrocities equal to #Hamas and #Taliban why is she a member of US Congress?' TV reporter Trish Regan tweeted. 'She should resign!!'

Former CIA Operations Officer Bryan Dean Wright, tweeted: 'Ilhan Omar claims -- without evidence -- that America is a war criminal, sharing the honor with Hamas, the Taliban, and her favorite of all villains -- the Jewish State.'

Democrats criticized President Joe Biden's administration for not being tougher on Israel and sending more humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

After working behind the scenes on a ceasefire between the two entities, Biden assured he is focused on the two-state solution so Israel and Palestinians both have their own land.

Republicans, however, were critical of the president not doubling-down on America's commitment to defending Israel.

Omar and other 'squad' members, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, have been vocal about their support for Palestinians and critical of Israel.

Tlaib is the first woman of Palestinian descent to be elected to the U.S. Congress.

Conservative television journalist Trish Regan slammed Omar for 'hating America,' and said 'she should resign'

A former CIA operations officer said Omar's 'favorite villain' is 'the Jewish State'

Omar's comments come after an 11-day conflict between Israel and Hamas operating in Gaza, which saw more than 250 people be killed, thousands others injured and millions in damages

Last month, Omar accused Israel of committing 'war crimes' in the conflict between the Jewish state and Hamas, which ws operating in Palestinian territory of Gaza.

'We should all be grateful that a ceasefire will prevent more civilians and children from being killed,' Omar tweeted in May. 'But now what? We need accountability for every war crime committed.'

'And we need to stop underwriting crimes against humanity while doing nothing to end the occupation,' she added.

During the 11-day conflict last month, thousands of missiles were fired at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv  along with other areas in Israel  from Gaza.

Israel's Iron Dome defense system went into action and the country retaliated with missiles of their own aimed at areas where they believed Hamas was operating  like a media building.
The toddler in the video is wearing a blue one-piece suit, matching plastic clogs and a padded coat with a hood.

His family is encouraging him to speak English because they are hoping to start a new life in Britain.

Good boy Artin, his father can be heard proudly telling him in the background. Good boy.

Eventually, as the brief clip comes to an end, little Artin Iran-Nejad utters two words as he waves to the camera near his tent at a jungle refugee camp on the outskirts of Dunkirk  Bye, bye, he whispers.

Those were the only English words Artin would ever learn.

Just hours after being filmed, surrounded by broken tent poles, water bottles and the remnants of sleeping bags, 15-month-old Artin and his entire family, his parents Rasoul and Shiva, both 35, sister Anita, nine, and brother Armin, six, perished crossing the English Channel when their overcrowded boat capsized on the morning of October 27 last year.

Artin himself was declared missing. His body, recovered off the coast of southern Norway on New Years Day, was finally identified this week.

You might have seen Artins face on the TV news and the front pages over the past few days after the Norwegian authorities put a name to the anonymous youngster, washed up 700 miles away in Karmoy, near Stavanger, all those months ago, using DNA

The video in the woods in Dunkirk was recorded by a fellow asylum seeker and was handed to us after he was named. How utterly heartbreaking the footage is.

Pitiful new details about the circumstances of Artins death in the Channel catastrophe, the worst tragedy of its kind in these waters in living memory, can be revealed today.

Artin may have been one of the few migrants on board the rigid inflatable who had a lifejacket, but it was far too big for him, we have learned.

It was made for an adult in a kayak, not a tiny young boy tossed into rough seas.

In these circumstances, the life jacket can slip above a childs head and fail to keep their mouth and nose above water, or offer the correct buoyancy to keep them afloat.

Could anything epitomise the desperation of the diaspora seeking refuge here in the UK  or the iniquity of people-trafficking  more than this?

And hard though it may be to admit, Britains apparent inability to patrol her borders adequately has in effect encouraged the kind of traffic that ultimately ended the life of little Artin and his family.

Just last week, our Border Force entered French waters to pick up migrants in a dinghy and lead them to Dover, prompting condemnation from a Home Office source who told the Mail: The job of Border Force is to secure the UKs border, not facilitate illegal entry across it.

Once ushered into Britain there is no real threat of expulsion; the opposite, some might argue.

After an asylum application is under way, asylum seekers are provided with accommodation, money to live as well as free healthcare and schooling for their children, regardless of whether they have entered the country legally or not.

The authorities, critics would argue, are guilty of sending out mixed messages that could lead to more needless deaths like Artins.

You might have seen Artins face on the TV news and the front pages over the past few days after the Norwegian authorities put a name to the anonymous youngster, washed up 700 miles away in Karmoy, near Stavanger, all those months ago, using DNA.

Yet, despite the worldwide media coverage, little is known about Artin, apart from his name, age and the fact he was from the Kurdistan region of Iran.

Around 4,500 migrants, many of them children, have made the crossing from France to Britain so far this year and more than 1,000 in the past week alone.

Today, the Mail can tell the story of Artins tragically brief life thanks to close relatives and aid workers who knew the charming little boy and his family.

15-month-old Artin and his entire family, his parents Rasoul and Shiva, both 35, sister Anita, nine, and brother Armin, six, (pictured) perished crossing the English Channel when their overcrowded boat capsized on the morning of October 27 last year

He was a beautiful little boy, said his cousin Salam Ibrahimi, over the phone from Sardasht, in West Azerbaijan Province, the city where Artin grew up. What happened to him and his family has shocked the whole neighbourhood.

Its not hard to understand why they left; why countless others in their position leave and head for Europe, then on to Britain.

Kurds face both political persecution and vast economic disparity in Iran, a situation which has deteriorated since the U.S. reimposed international sanctions after withdrawing from Tehrans nuclear accord with world powers in 2018.

Sardasht, in particular, close to the border with Iraq, has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country.

Artins father  modest, kind and hardworking  had no formal education and, like most Kurds, struggled to eke out a living.

He and his wife rented a property in the city when they were married a decade ago, before buying a small house where Artin shared a bedroom with his brother and sister.

Mr Iran-Nejad worked variously as a labourer, on a chicken farm, and, at one time, as a shepherd.

However, according to his cousin, he also indulged in a much more precarious occupation to earn extra money in between casual jobs, transporting untaxed goods such as cigarettes, food, and clothes on his back across the mountainous region into Iraq.

Its high risk.

Many porters or kolbars, as they are known, are killed or wounded every year by border guards or face tough penalties if they are caught.

Who can blame the family for wanting to escape such danger, discrimination and poverty?

Rasoul was told by people who had already gone to Britain that he and his family could have a much better life there, revealed Mr Ibrahimi.

Working conditions in Britain were better, the British pound more valuable and residency permits easier to get.

'So he sold everything, the house, furniture, property, jewellery, and even borrowed money from friends and relatives which he promised to pay back when they got to Britain.

In short, enough to pay the smugglers close to a staggering 22,000 for passage from Iran to Britain.

The gangs openly advertise routes to Europe.

Examples of the lies peddled on the internet in Iran to entice would-be migrants to the UK were sent to us by the National Crime Agency (NCA) after Artins body was identified this week.

On one website, London is described as the City of Dreams.

Others feature scenic shots of Manchester and Newcastle. There are price lists in U.S. dollars and special offers such as family crossings where kids go for half price.

England, with promotional pictures of Tower Bridge and Big Ben, is the most expensive destination to travel to  costing $7,500 (nearly 5,000) per person from Tehran.

Another offer translates as: Those who want to migrate in legal and illegal ways  and take asylum  we can help them... in all directions someone will be with you as a guide. People who dont have a passport, we can get them.

The pixelated pictures of those who have made it to Britain  the promised land  are featured clutching visa application forms.

Artin had not yet celebrated his first birthday when his family set off for the so-called promised land in June 2020.

They crossed the mountains into Turkey on foot before catching a ferry to Italy and then riding lorries into France.

They arrived in the makeshift camp in Puythouck woods in Grand-Synthe, near Dunkirk, a month before the tragedy.

Charlotte Decanter, a volunteer for the Adra charity, met the family while distributing food to Kurdish migrants and refugees at the desolate site where there were no sanitary facilities, showers or toilets.

Around 4,500 migrants, many of them children, have made the crossing from France to Britain so far this year and more than 1,000 in the past week alone

Nevertheless, Artin was happy.

He was a mischievous little boy, she said. All the volunteers really loved him. His big sister and big brother were quite shy but not Artin.

He loved playing in the camp. He was very carefree.

They were a lovely family. Shiva [Artins mother] joked when I gave her meals because I said words in Kurdish.

I know they were ready to do anything to reach England in the hope of a better life. The people in the camp are told to seek asylum in France but they do not want to and its not about to stop.

Artins family made three attempts to get to Britain. The first two, via Channel Tunnel trains, failed. So they were forced to choose the most perilous way  by boat.

The economics of people-trafficking back in October last year meant that cross-Channel boats were being significantly overloaded, according to Immigration Enforcement, which reduces the price and increases the risk significantly.

Mr Iran-Nejad is still understood to have paid about 5,000 euros (around 4,000) for five places on the boat, which was crammed with 22 migrants on that calamitous final journey from the French coast, despite it being designed to carry far fewer people.

All but one of those on board were from Sardasht.

Among them was a 26-year-old university graduate from the city who was sitting next to Artins family.

He has given an eyewitness account of what happened to the Kurdish language Rudaw news website.

There cant be a more horrifying insight into the plight of migrants crossing the Channel or the gangs that exploit them.

We were in the boat for 40 minutes, he said, as he recalled the events of that terrible morning.

The weather was calm and the only problem we had was that there were too many of us.

'This was because the smuggler wanted to collect more money from the passengers. I think the capacity was for around 14 people, but we were 22 people.

We were happy and we were eating. But as we gradually moved forward, the water started getting into the boat because we were too heavy.

'Initially, we started pouring the water back into the sea with buckets, but more and more water got into the boat and the back became heavy and was becoming submerged. Then people started panicking and screaming.

I could see Artins mother holding on to her baby with the other children next to her. The mother and children were screaming. There was nothing we could do.

he Norwegian authorities put a name to the anonymous youngster, washed up 700 miles away in Karmoy, near Stavanger, all those months ago, using DNA

Moments later, the boat capsized off Loon-Plage, between Calais and Dunkirk.

It was chaos, the young graduate said, as he recounted the ordeal.

As I was swimming away from the boat, a few were hanging on to those with lifejackets.

'Someone who had a lifejacket and did not know how to swim was shouting, Please let me go, dont drown me with you, please let me go, as another one had grabbed his neck and was holding on to to him.

'There was no sign of the children and their mother.

I saw the father [Mr Iran-Nejad] by the boat. He shouted for us to help the children underneath the boat. We were too afraid.

He [Mr Iran-Nejad] took a deep breath, went under the boat, but came up again. He was tired but he dived again and went under the boat.

'Then after a while his body appeared, floating next to us. I saw it with my own eyes. He died for his children.

A sailing boat raised the alarm at 9.30am and began helping those in the water. By then, they had been in the sea for 30 minutes.

Rescuers found Mr Iran-Nejad drowned. His wife Shiva and two of their children died shortly after being pulled from the Channel. Artin was not found and was listed as missing.

News of the tragedy soon reached the camp at Dunkirk.

I was devastated by this news, said Charlotte Decanter. They were a family I will never be able to forget.

Then, two months later, the body of a little boy was discovered off the south-west coast of Norway on New Years Day.

There were no reports of missing children in the immediate area but the youngsters blue one-piece suit was identical to the one Artin was wearing in photographs published in newspapers.

It was also the one he is wearing in the new video of him learning to say bye, bye in the camp in Dunkirk.

Artins identity was finally confirmed by specialists at Oslo University through matching his DNA with a close relative.

Back in Sardasht, scores of mourners attended the funeral of Artins parents and siblings in a hillside cemetery in November. A huge photo of the family was draped over their coffins.

Artins grandmother Manijeh was at the graveside.

All she wanted, she said at the time, was that Artin would be found and returned home to be laid to rest alongside them.

At least, now, she will get her wish and the cheeky little boy who charmed all who knew him will finally be back with the family who loved him so much.

Additional reporting: Ole Dag Kvamme in Norway and Mark Branagan
The Queen insisted on using a ceremonial sword to cut a cake during a royal engagement - making the Kate and Camilla burst out laughing.

The 95-year-old Monarch carried out a rare joint engagement with the Duchesses of Cambridge and Cornwall at the Eden Project in Cornwall yesterday.

The three most-senior royal women attended the event in celebration of The Big Lunch, which will form part of the Queen's platinum jubilee celebrations in 2022.

The Queen was presented with a large cake and was handed a sword by Edward Bolitho, the Lord-Lieutenant of Cornwall, to cut it.

When told by an aide that there was a conventional knife available, the Queen replied: 'I know there is, this is more unusual'.

The Duchess of Cornwall commented: 'That's slicing through' before assisting with the final part of cutting the cake - which was loudly applauded by those at the event.

After handing the ceremonial sword back, the Queen used a knife to cut a second slice of cake and remarked: 'That looks very good.'

The Queen insisted on using a ceremonial sword to cut a cake during a royal engagement - making the Kate and Camilla burst out laughing (pictured)

The 95-year-old Monarch carried out a rare joint engagement with the Duchesses of Cambridge and Cornwall at the Eden Project in Cornwall yesterday

The three most-senior royal women attended the event in celebration of The Big Lunch, which will form part of the Queen's platinum jubilee celebrations in 2022

The Queen was presented with a large cake and was handed a sword by Edward Bolitho, the Lord-Lieutenant of Cornwall, to cut it

Earlier, the Queen hosted an open-air reception for G7 leaders at the Eden Project - and was joined by the Prince of Wales, Duchess of Cornwall and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

Britain was seeking to dazzle the world's most powerful with a royal charm offensive at a no-holds-barred reception.

The Queen proved a hit, sending G7 leaders into fits of laughter when she quipped 'are you supposed be looking as if you're enjoying yourself' while posing for a photograph.

Leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as well as Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and US President Joe Biden, were pictured chatting to the royals.

After the reception, the Queen, Camilla and Kate attended an event celebrating The Big Lunch.

The Queen attended an event at the Eden Project in celebration of The Big Lunch, which will form part of her platinum jubilee celebrations in 2022

The Duchess of Cambridge, the Duchess of Cornwall and the Queen meet people from communities across Cornwall at the event

Big Lunch pulls together communities at events involving food and drink. Pictured: A scale model of Big Lunch events that have been held over the years

The three most-senior royal women attended the event in celebration of The Big Lunch, which will form part of the Queen's platinum jubilee celebrations in 2022

After the reception, the Queen, Camilla and Kate attended an event celebrating The Big Lunch

The Big Lunch is an annual get-together for neighbours and communities, with people encouraged to share friendship, food and to get to know each other better

It has been running since 2009 and is an idea from the Eden Project, supported by the National Lottery

The Big Lunch is an annual get-together for neighbours and communities, with people encouraged to share friendship, food and to get to know each other better.

It has been running since 2009 and is an idea from the Eden Project, supported by the National Lottery.

Peter Stewart - executive director of the Eden Project - introduced around 20 guests to the three royals.

'It is like comets - they don't come around very often,' Mr Stewart said when talking about the royals' visit.

'I was trying to remember the last time that the three were on an official engagement together like this. I can only think of one at Fortnum and Mason but this was something else.

'The important thing for me was there was every reason not to do it.

The Queen, Camilla and Kate are seen arriving to attend an event in celebration of The Big Lunch initiative at The Eden Project

The Queen beamed at the event yesterday. The Big Lunch will form part of her platinum jubilee celebrations in 2022

The Queen, Camilla and Kate look at a scale model of Big Lunch events that have been held over the years during an engagement in celebration of The Big Lunch initiative at The Eden Project

The Duchess of Cambridge smiles as she meets people from communities across Cornwall at the Big Lunch event

The Queen is seen meeting people from across Cornwall at the event this afternoon

Peter Stewart - executive director of the Eden Project - introduced around 20 guests who had been invited to the event to the three royals

'The fact that they judged that with the eyes of the G7 that there was an opportunity - with the risk of missing trains and everything else - to be able to listen to some of the heartfelt stories of people here.

'It was absolutely priceless.'

The Queen spoke to people at The Big Lunch event, held outdoors at a separate area of the Eden Project, about seeing the world leaders face-to-face following a year of restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mr Stewart described how the monarch discussed 'communicating over Zoom and so-forth' due to coronavirus.

The Queen spoke to people at The Big Lunch event, held outdoors at a separate area of the Eden Project, about seeing the world leaders face-to-face following a year of restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic

'She was talking about the fact she usually meets world leaders and she hasn't met them for two years and she brought that back to the importance of everyday life and getting to know our neighbours,' he added.

The Duchess of Cornwall is patron of event and celebrated its 10-year anniversary during a lunch at the Eden Project in 2019.

Over the past two years, it has run online due to Covid-19 but next year it will form an official part of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee celebrations.

Earlier, the Queen sent G7 leaders into fits of giggles when she quipped 'are you supposed be looking as if you're enjoying it' while posing for a photograph

Britain is seeking to dazzle the world's most powerful with a royal charm offensive at a no-holds-barred reception at the Eden Project in Cornwall tonight. Pictured: The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge alongside Prince Charles and Camilla speaking to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

The Queen is seen speaking to the Prime Minister and his new wife at the Eden Project in Cornwall

The Queen was seen speaking to Joe and Jill Biden at the reception. Prince Charles was in conversation with Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

The Queen smiled as she spoke to the President and the First Lady at the reception on Friday

Mr Stewart paid tribute to the guests who attended Friday's engagement. Those chosen had been nominated for their services, particularly during the pandemic.

'There was a moment where Her Majesty was talking to a lady called Irene Rowe, who was a care worker for 20 years and caught Covid and recovered and has returned to work,' he said.

'She came home and gave Covid to her husband, who sadly died. She asked Her Majesty how she was and gave sympathy to her for losing her own husband, the Duke of Edinburgh.'

Mrs Rowe, 65, from Helston, spoke to both the Queen and Kate about the death of husband Malcolm, 62, in February this year.

The Queen beamed as she spoke to world leaders at the reception in Cornwall. Boris Johnson stood nearby

It appears the President and his wife hit it off with the Monarch, who smiled throughout their conversation

After telling the Queen about her loss, she was asked how she was coping.

'I said you have been the same - you've just carried on like I have,' Mrs Rowe, a grandmother-of-eight, said.

'I said you have to carry on. I have good work, friends and family. People have been very kind.

'Kate touched my arm when I told her about my husband and said "oh no".

'She was really caring and very nice, they both were.

'She asked if we got to see him in the hospital and I said we couldn't, we weren't allowed to.'

At the conclusion of the event, the Queen, Camilla and Kate left in separate vehicles.
Facebook has been forced to shut down dozens of coyote groups after being blamed for fueling the border crisis as human smugglers use its platform to organize the passage of desperate migrants into the US in exchange for as little as $1,700.

Dozens of Facebook pages and groups openly offer illegal crossings across the US-Mexico border, posting prices, routes, discount options, videos they claim show successful trips - and even testimonials from what they claim to be happy customers.

The Tech Transparency Project (TTP), which unearthed the groups in a damning report this week, said Facebook has become a 'one stop shop' for 'coyote' people smugglers and dangerous cartels and is contributing to migrants risking their lives on the perilous journey chasing the American dream.

The non-profit also revealed it had handed over details about 50 human smuggler pages in April to Facebook - at the platform's request. Two months on, the social media giant failed to remove them all, with 19 still in use on the platform, according to TTP.

It's not clear how many of the groups or any other content by coyotes remain online, and those identified by DailyMail.com appear to have been removed.

A spokesman for the social media giant told DailyMail.com that it has shut down the sites identified by the TTP report - but only those which violate its policies.

'We prohibit content that offers to provide or facilitate human smuggling. We rely on people and technology to remove this content, and work with NGOs and other stakeholders to combat ways our platform may be used by those who want to harm people,' a spokesman said.

One group 'Viaje para estados unidos, cumple tu sueno' translates as 'Travel to the United States, fulfill your dream' (above). Facebook has been blamed for fueling the border crisis

'We are constantly evaluating ways to improve our enforcement so we can most effectively find and remove content that breaks our rules.'

Many of the groups on Facebook that were still visible on Thursday night - some with tens of thousands of members - made no effort to disguise their illegal services.

Among the brazen group names are: 'El coyote lopez' and 'Viaje para estados unidos, cumple tu sueno' - translated as 'Travel to the United States, fulfill your dream.'

In one post on the 'El coyote lopez' page, a smuggler advertises travel from Nicaragua into the US for $8,000 per person.

Another post offers single mothers and children a discounted rate of $1,700 if they are willing to hand themselves over to US Border Patrol on arrival into the US.

The price rises to $7,000 to $8,500 to take the migrants all the way to Houston.

Facebook has been slammed for allowing the groups to operate, and has known it has been a problem for years, according to Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project.

'The biggest concern with these Facebook groups is that you have people who are in very desperate, vulnerable situations commingling with people that are parts of organized criminal networks, including cartels and gangs,' she told NBC News.

It uses flag emojis for Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua to show where the smugglers will pick up the migrants from.

The group has a WhatsApp button for customers to directly connect with smugglers.

In the 'Viaje para estados unidos, cumple tu sueno' group, TTP found smugglers were claiming to have a focus on 'safety', showing previous customers wearing life vests as they cross rivers.

A search by DailyMail.com found that both groups remain active on Facebook Thursday evening.

Pictured agents rescue migrants who were kidnapped from a house in Chihuahua state, Mexico, this week. Human smugglers are using Facebook to organize the passage of desperate migrants into the US in exchange for around $8,000 in cash

A migrant reaches for help after crawling through a gap in the US border wall in Yuma, Arizona. Dozens of Facebook pages and groups openly offer illegal crossings across the US-Mexico border, posting prices, routes and discount options

Several private groups have also been revealed to be advertising illegal border crossing services.

One group called 'Quiero cruzar la frontera' - translated as 'I want to cross the border' - has a staggering 44,000 members.

In it, a smuggler has posted multiple videos of journeys to the border and urged customers to message him privately for a quote on his services.

While Facebook is being used to arrange human smuggling, there is also evidence that the coyotes exploiting the platform's lax enforcement practices have ties to Mexican drug cartels, the TTP said.

Dr. Nilda Garcia said - based on their weapons, gang signs and language - some smugglers appear to be linked to the Sinaloa cartel, which funnels huge amounts of heroin and methamphetamine into the US.

The researchers also found posts promoting $700 fees to take a migrant across cartel territory.

In one post on the 'El coyote lopez' page, a smuggler advertises travel from Nicaragua into the US for $8,000 per person

In the 'Viaje para estados unidos, cumple tu sueno' group, TTP found smugglers were claiming to have a focus on 'safety', showing previous customers wearing life vests as they cross rivers

Failure to pay this right-of-way tax - known as 'cobro de piso' - comes with the risk of extortion, kidnapping or death by the cartels.

Cartels and criminals are exploiting migrants who are desperately trying to cross the border into America.

Dozens of migrants have died along the way. Others have been violently raped, attacked and extorted by smugglers.

So far in 2021, at least 128 people have died attempting to cross the border from Mexico into the US.

By this time last year, 45 had died, according to Dr. Corrine Stern who has tracked the data since 2007.

For those who survive the journey, many are being turned back into Mexico - after spending all their life savings.

Migrants at a shelter set up in a church in Tijuana, Mexico, all told NBC News they first made contact with smugglers on Facebook.

Five men showed the outlet screenshots from Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp where they arranged costs and travel plans with coyotes.

Several private groups have also been revealed to be advertising illegal border crossing services. One group called 'Quiero cruzar la frontera' - translated as 'I want to cross the border' - has a staggering 44,000 members (above)

There is also evidence that the coyotes exploiting the platform's lax enforcement practices have ties to Mexican drug cartels, the TTP said. Dr. Nilda Garcia said - based on their weapons, gang signs and language - some smugglers (above)appear to be linked to the Sinaloa cartel

Facebook told NBC News the company bans content 'that offers to provide or facilitate human smuggling'.

The company said it relies on people, technology and collaboration with other stakeholders to remove content of this nature.

It said it is 'constantly evaluating ways to improve our enforcement so we can most effectively find and remove content that breaks our rules.'

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The TTP said it had handed over details about 50 human smuggler pages in April to Facebook - 19 of them have not been taken down

The federal government is struggling to cope with the influx of migrants crossing the US's southern border with Mexico since Joe Biden took office in January.

After taking office, Biden lifted the Remain in Mexico policy, which kept migrants south of the border while waiting for their hearings, effectively allowing migrants who have applied for asylum to cross into the US and begin legal proceedings.

He also narrowed the ICE's criteria for arrests and deportations and stopped the building of Trump's border wall.

These moves have led to thousands of migrants entering America in recent months, leaving the border's children's centers so full that kids are being forced to spend several days in cramped detention centers meant for adults and sparking a backlog and logistical nightmare in processing the new entrants.

A pair of migrant families from Brazil wait to be processed by Border Patrol agents in Arizona. Customs and Border Protection data released this week showed 180,034 migrants were detained along the Mexico border in May - a record not seen in two decades

At least 128 migrants have died attempting to reach the US border so far in 2021

Customs and Border Protection data released this week showed 180,034 migrants were detained along the Mexico border in May - a record not seen in two decades.

Vice President Kamala Harris visited Guatemala and Mexico this week to meet with their leaders in an effort to tackle 'root causes' of the mass migration into America.

Harris sent a clear message to migrants: 'Do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border.'
The former boss of British Airways last night denounced Boris Johnson and Joe Biden for cowardly delays to easing coronavirus travel restrictions.

Willie Walsh, who now leads industry body the International Air Transport Association, accused the Prime Minister and US President of dragging their heels over the re-opening of transatlantic routes.

The aviation supremo poured scorn on the two leaders new Atlantic Charter which will set up a taskforce to examine reopening UK-US air travel.

Former British Airways boss Willie Walsh, pictured, condemned British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and US President Joe Biden for their failure to reopen trans Atlantic travel

The airline industry hoped Mr Johnson and Mr Biden would announce a loosening of travel restrictions imposed due to Covid-19

But Mr Walsh said their deal was a pale imitation of its namesake wartime agreement between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.

Its a transparently cowardly political move to kick the can down the road, Mr Walsh said. Roosevelt and Churchill... would be appalled that their 1941 vision is being associated with such a cautious approach.

The Irish businessman also urged the heads of state to show some real leadership and called on the G7 Summit to announce that July 4 will be a real Independence Day.
A callous thief infected with Covid has been jailed after terrorising a family in their home when he was supposed to be self-isolating.

In the County Court of Victoria on Friday, teenager Moses Laula was sentenced to 26 months in a youth justice centre for home invasion, theft and theft of a motor vehicle.

He was 18 when he burgled the Cranbourne North home, in Melbourne's south-east, on August 6 last year.

At the time, Melbourne was in a stage-four lockdown, with residents only allowed to leave their homes for essential reasons.

Moses Luala was jailed for 26 months on Friday in a Victorian court after a terrifying home invasion last August in Melbourne's south-east - he was also Covid positive at time of the offending (stock image)

At the time of Moses Laula's crime spree, he was Covid positive and Melbourne was in lockdown (pictured, shoppers finally returning to the CBD after the latest lockdown)

Laula, who was infected with the coronavirus, also should have been self-isolating.

The court heard Laula and another offender illegally entered the property on August 6 around 10am.

Both were wearing black hoodies and blue face masks in a bid to conceal their identity.

The mother was inside with her two children, aged five and six. When she spotted the co-offenders, she banged on the windows in a hopeful attempt to scare them off her property.

The two thieves smashed a window to gain entry into the house, before threatening the trio with a knife, according to news.com.au.

'Give me your phone or I'll stab your kid,' the other criminal, who cannot be named because he was 17, said.

The brazen youths then stole the woman's car, before fleeing the scene.

Just under an hour later, the duo were seen by police on the Princes Highway, speeding through traffic in dangerous scenes.

Next they crashed into an unmarked police car, writing off the vehicle.

An officer was also left with a concussion following the incident.

The offenders smashed into a series of others cars before they were finally arrested.

The court also heard a police dog bit Laula on the arm, with his co-offender tasered after trying to flee the scene on foot.

It was then discovered the family he robbed, police and hospital staff who treated Laula for the dog bite were all potentially subjected to the Covid infection.

Judge Kevin Doyle sentenced Laula to two years and two months in custody.
EU countries have agreed to ease summer travel restrictions that will allow fully vaccinated tourists to avoid tests or quarantines  but not British holidaymakers.

People who have been fully vaccinated for 14 days should be able to travel freely from one EU country to another, according to a proposal approved by ambassadors from the 27 members.

Restrictions for other travellers should be based on the degree to which the country they are coming from has coronavirus infections under control.

EU leaders have agreed a system of Covid passports allowing fully vaccinated citizens to travel this summer

British people have not been included in the EU scheme due to the growing threat of the Indian variant

Thanks to the spread of the Indian variant, that means the UK is currently off the list of approved countries.

The guidelines come as the EU introduces Covid certificates which will show whether a person is vaccinated, has had the virus or had a recent negative test. The system is set to be ready by July 1, although some countries will launch certificates earlier.

Non-EU members of the Schengen zone, such as Iceland and Norway, will also be able to take advantage of the scheme.
Two of the most prized gold and silver specimens in the world are on display at The Perth Mint as part of an exhibition celebrating Australia's precious metals sector.

The 'King Henry' gold rock specimen was discovered half a kilometre underground at Beta Hunt in WA's Goldfields region in 2018 by airleg miner Henry Dole.

It contains an estimated 45kg or 1400 ounces of gold worth more than $3 million.

Industry experts estimate it is likely in the top five largest of its type to ever unearthed.

Two of the most prized gold and silver specimens in the world are on display at The Perth Mint as part of an exhibition celebrating Australia's precious metals sector

Sitting next to 'King Henry' is 'The Karratha Queen', a silver nugget found in 2000 at the Elizabeth Hill mine, 45km south of Karratha in WA's Pilbara region.

It contains about 99.79kg or 3520 ounces of silver, worth $136,000 in metal alone.

The Perth Mint acquired 'King Henry' in 2019, while 'The Karratha Queen' is on a long-term loan from the Shemesian family.

Together, they form a new display opened to coincide with a major refurbishment of the mint's foyer and retail showrooms.

'The two precious displays epitomise so much of what The Perth Mint has experienced since its foundation 122 years ago,' said chief executive officer Richard Hayes.

Together, they form a new display opened to coincide with a major refurbishment of the mint's foyer and retail showrooms

'Mining, gold refining and fabricating techniques may have changed but our pursuit of the highest-quality gold and silver has withstood the test of time.'

Unlike a nugget, which is traditionally found at or near surface and mostly contains pure metal, 'King Henry' is classified as a gold specimen, which is a gold-encrusted rock recovered from an underground lode, or gold-bearing quartz vein.

The second-largest Australian gold nugget, 'The Normandy' is already on display at The Perth Mint.

It weighs in at 819 ounces or 25.5kg.

The largest existing Australian nugget is 'The Hand of Faith', which weighs 875 ounces or 27.2kg and can be viewed by the public in the Golden Nugget Casino Hotel in Las Vegas.
The risks of driving after taking medicinal cannabis are the same or lower than for many other prescription drugs, research shows.

'The risk is probably considerably less than with many medications such as antidepressants, opioids and benzodiazepines,' Professor Iain McGregor from The Lambert Initiative for Cannabinoid Therapeutics at the University of Sydney told AAP.

His analysis, published in the International Journal of Drug Policy, shows other prescription drugs such as opioids and benzodiazepines can more than double the risk of crashing.

By contrast, previous studies have shown drivers testing positive for cannabis have a slightly increased crash risk (of 1.1 to 1.4), while other recent research has shown no increased risk at all.

The risks of driving after taking medicinal cannabis are the same or lower than for many other prescription drugs, research shows

Prof McGregor said the scenario could be characterised as similar to a blood alcohol level of between 0.02 and 0.05 per cent.

Medicinal cannabis has been used to treat problems including chronic pain, chemotherapy-induced nausea and multiple sclerosis.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration has approved more than 100,000 applications for patient access as of March 2021 and recently announced some medicinal cannabis products would be downgraded, meaning they can be sold over the counter in pharmacies.

But patients prescribed these treatments have been fined and taken to court after taking the drug as directed by their doctor.

Justin Sinclair, from the medicinal cannabis company Australian Natural Therapeutics Group, says regulatory risk is putting off people in regional Australia who may benefit from the drug but rely on their cars.

'I think there certainly needs to be some regulatory clarity,' he told AAP.

He wants an exemption from drug driving laws for people who have been prescribed medicinal cannabis, similar to that available for people on prescription methadone.

TGA figures show medicinal cannabis has mostly been prescribed to women over 50.

Previous research has found older drivers with physical ailments have a lower crash risk.

Victoria is considering legislation to allow people to drive with chemicals from medicinal cannabis in their system as long as driving is not impaired - but the reforms would not cover people using illicit cannabis.

Similar legislation has been introduced in South Australia.
Australia will provide 20 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific as leaders at the G7-plus summit in the United Kingdom make a bid to distribute jabs more equally across the globe.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who arrived in the UK on Friday morning, thanked G7 host UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson 'for bringing us together to put even more effort into this area because the virus doesn't know boundaries, the virus goes where it will'.

He said Australia's contribution will feed into an effort led by Mr Johnson to vaccinate the world.

'These 20 million doses will go to support doses in our region, to ensure that we continue to exercise our responsibility as part of a broader global responsibility to combat this virus,' Mr Morrison said.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who arrived in the UK on Friday morning, thanked G7 host UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson 'for bringing us together to put even more effort into this area because the virus doesn't know boundaries, the virus goes where it will'

World Health Organisation head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said earlier this week that 44 per cent of all doses have been administered in rich countries but only 0.4 per cent in the poorest.

'Sharing vaccines now is essential for ending the acute phase of the pandemic,' Tedros said, urging G7 countries to do more to battle inequality in accessing coronavirus vaccines.

The G7 group of wealthy democracies - the UK, United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan - have invited the leaders of Australia, South Korea, South Africa and India to take part in the three-day summit in Cornwall this year.

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi will only attend the G7 virtually due to the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in his country.

Mr Morrison said Australia was in a strong position to support countries with vaccines because it had 'supply contracts many times over what is needed for the Australian population' and that the jabs would make a difference.

'These aren't going in large warehouses which essentially (is) without going anywhere - we want to ensure that we are taking responsibility for our region, our family in our region,' he said.

Mr Morrison said Australia was in a strong position to support countries with vaccines because it had 'supply contracts many times over what is needed for the Australian population' and that the jabs would make a difference

Mr Morrison's plane arrived at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire on Friday morning after heavy fog cancelled plans for it to land at Cornwall's Newquay airport, requiring a drive of several hours for the prime minister to reach the summit venue in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, in England's southwest.

'This is the third occasion that we've had the privilege to be invited to be part of these discussions and there is a lot on this agenda for Australia,' he said.

Mr Morrison was previously invited to the G7-plus 2019 summit in Biarritz, France, while the 2020 event was to be in the US but was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

'We've met on so many occasions over the past 18 months over screens,' Mr Morrison said on Friday.

'There is no substitute for leaders getting together and doing what we are doing now - and there has never been a more important time to be doing that.'
Astronomers have detected a giant 'blinking' star towards the centre of our galaxy, more than 25,000 light years away.

The star, VVV-WIT-08, was observed using the VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) in Chile.

The scientists say it decreased in brightness by a factor of 30, or by 97 per cent  meaning it nearly completely disappeared from the sky  before returning to normal.

Many stars change in brightness because they pulsate or are eclipsed by another star in a binary system (a solar system where a pair of stars orbit each other).

However, the researchers say it's 'exceptionally rare' for a star to become fainter over a period of several months and get brighter again.

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Artist's impression of VVV-WIT-08. An international team of astronomers observed VVV-WIT-08 decreasing in brightness by a factor of 30, so that it nearly disappeared from the sky. While many stars change in brightness because they pulsate or are eclipsed by another star in a binary system, it's exceptionally rare for a star to become fainter over a period of several months and then brighten again

VVV-WIT-08 may belong to a new class of 'blinking giant' binary star system, where a giant star 100 times larger than the Sun is eclipsed once every few decades by an as-yet unseen orbital companion.

Potentially, the companion, which may be another star or a planet, is surrounded by an opaque disc, which covers the giant star, causing it to disappear and reappear in the sky.

'Basically the star was getting dimmer and dimmer. And at the dimmest point it was 30 times less bright than in the beginning,' study author Dr Sergey Koposov from the University of Edinburgh told MailOnline.

The star, VVV-WIT-08, was observed using the VISTA telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) at the Cerro Paranal Observatory in Chile

THE MILKY WAY Our Solar System is in the Milky Way galaxy. But our Sun is just one of about 200 billion stars in the Milky Way. And astronomers have discovered more than 3,200 other stars with planets orbiting them in the Milky Way. The Milky Way is also just one of billions of galaxies in the universe. Advertisement

'Imagine that you have solar eclipse, but in such a way we can only less than one 30th of the Sun's disk.

'Another analogy  imagine having a light-bulb that you move 6 times further away that will also give you 30 times decrease in brightness.

'It's amazing that we just observed a dark, large and elongated object pass between us and the distant star and we can only speculate what its origin is.'

VVV-WIT-08 was found by the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea survey (VVV), a project using the British-built VISTA telescope in Chile and operated by the European Southern Observatory.

VISTA has been observing the same one billion stars for nearly a decade to search for examples with varying brightness in the infrared part of the spectrum.

'Occasionally we find variable stars that don't fit into any established category, which we call "what-is-this?", or WIT objects,' said project co-leader Professor Philip Lucas from the University of Hertfordshire.

'We really don't know how these blinking giants came to be. It's exciting to see such discoveries from VVV after so many years planning and gathering the data.'

The researchers say VVV-WIT-08 reached its dimmest in April 2012 and the total event duration was a few hundred days.

The researchers say VVV-WIT-08 reached its dimmest in April 2012 and the total event duration was a few hundred days

Nearly a decade later, the team are reporting their findings in a new paper, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

There's a very good reason for this time gap, as study leader Dr Leigh Smith from Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy explains.

'The survey in which VVV-WIT-08 was found is based on about 200,000 observations spread across 10 years,' he told MailOnline.

'Each observation is 16 separate 4 megapixel images. This set includes hundreds of repeated observations of the same fields, like frames of a movie. It's about 15 terabytes of images in total.

'Processing all these images, detecting stars, identifying single stars between the "frames of the movie" takes a huge amount of time and computation.

'We first identified VVV-WIT-08 about two years ago. Since then we've had to collect some extra data, and develop and run the software necessary to model the eclipse.'

Since the star is located in a dense region of the Milky Way, the researchers considered whether some unknown dark object could have simply drifted in front of the giant star by chance.

However, simulations showed that there would have to be an implausibly large number of dark bodies floating around the galaxy for this scenario to be likely.

One other star system of this sort has been known for a long time. The giant star Epsilon Aurigae is partly eclipsed by a huge disc of dust every 27 years, but only dims by about 50 per cent.

A second example, TYC 2505-672-1, was found a few years ago, and holds the current record for the eclipsing binary star system with the longest orbital period  69 years  a record for which VVV-WIT-08 is currently a contender.

The team also found two more of these peculiar giant stars in addition to VVV-WIT-08, suggesting that these may be a new class of 'blinking giant' stars for astronomers to investigate.
A Chinese woman who grew up during the years of Chairman Mao Zedong's communist reign and later immigrated to the U.S. condemned a progressive school board in Virginia for pushing critical race theory. The woman, a mother by the name of Xi Van Fleet likened the teachings to China's Cultural Revolution, during which Mao led a purge that killed millions of people between 1966 and 1976, details of which are still kept mostly secret to this day.

"Critical race theory has its roots in cultural Marxism-it should have no place in our schools," Van Fleet argued during a Tuesday meeting at the progressive Loudoun County School Board in Virginia, the New York Post reported. "You are now teaching, training our children, to be social justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history."

Van Fleet recounted how she grew up in Mao's China, where the communist regime "used the same critical theory to divide people." The only difference between China and America, however, is that the Chinese "used class instead of race."

The Virginia mom was concerned over how critical race theory is being taught to children, as she herself has a son who graduated from Loudoun High School in 2015. She likened the U.S.' communist CRT teachings to that of China's, in which "students and teachers turn against each other" and school names were changed "to be politically correct" and the youth were "taught to denounce our heritage," which is exactly what is happening in American classrooms today.

The Virginia mom also likened her experiences as a student during Mao's China to the kids in the U.S. today who are "encouraged to report on each other, just like the Student Equity Ambassador program and the bias reporting system," which other parents have filed cases against the school for.

Van Fleet recounted how at 26 years old, she was finally able to leave Mao's China, only to find out years later that the U.S. supports communist CRT and is teaching it at schools. When she first arrived in the U.S., the Virginia mom who survived Mao's China experienced freedoms she never did before. Now, she believes that those freedoms are slowly being taken away.

"To me, and to a lot of Chinese, it is heartbreaking that we escaped communism and now we experience communism here," Van Fleet argued, as reported by FOX News. "I just want Americans to know that their privilege is to be here living in America, that is just the biggest privilege."

The Virginia mom believes that Americans are misled into thinking they are doing the right thing, to "be against racism" but she argues that people are "basically breaking the system that is against racism."

Van Fleet is not alone in her campaign. Ian Prior, who is a father of two students who attend Loudoun schools, said that Van Fleet's arguments should serve as a "stark warning." He accused schools of teaching communist CRT without parents' knowledge and said that if it weren't for the pandemic and distance learning, most parents would likely not know that these teachings had already been going on.

The Loudoun County School Board was also in hot water recently for suspending a Christian teacher, Byron "Tanner" Cross, for rejecting the Loudoun County Public Schools' new transgender-affirming policies.

"I love all of my students but I will never lie to them regardless of the consequences. I'm a teacher but I serve God first and I will not affirm that a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa because it's against my religion," Cross declared. "It's lying to a child, it's abuse to a child, and it's sinning against our God."

A court sided with Cross and ordered his reinstatement.
Winklepickers have been a staple for British rock 'n' roll fans since the 1950s.

But a new study has found that a similar fashion for pointy shoes actually unleashed a plague of bunions in Medieval Britain.

Cambridge researchers believe a change in shoe style during the 14th century, from a rounded toe to a lengthy, pointed tip, drove the rise in foot deformities.

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Bunions: Cambridge researchers believe a change in shoe style during the 14th century, from a rounded toe to a lengthy, pointed tip, drove a rise in hallux valgus (pictured left). They studied almost 200 skeletons at the city's cemeteries (right) dating from the 11th to 15th century

The skeletons (including the one pictured) came from four burial sites around Cambridge

WHAT WERE POULAINE SHOES? Poulaines were a style of shoes with extremely long toes that were very popular in the 14th and 15th century. The arrival of this fashion in England is traditionally associated with the marriage of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia in 1382. Poulaine-toed shoes in 14th century London were mainly found in men's sizes, but 15th century art shows them being worn by both men and women, with the toes of men's shoes being the most extravagantly long. Across late medieval society the pointiness of shoes became so extreme that in 1463 King Edward IV passed a law limiting toe-point length to less than two inches in London. Advertisement

Archaeologists analysed almost 200 skeletons from the city's cemeteries and found that 27 per cent of those dating from the 14th and 15th centuries had been hobbled by longstanding hallux valgus  often called bunions.

This compared to 6 per cent of those buried between the 11th and 13th centuries.

Hallux valgus is a minor deformity in which the largest toe becomes angled outward and a bony protrusion forms at its base, on the inside of the foot.

While various factors can bunions, from genetics to muscle imbalance, by far the most common contemporary cause is constrictive boots and shoes.

The University of Cambridge study claims that the change in shoe style in the 14th century, to a type known as 'poulaines', was to blame for the outbreak of bunions.

'The 14th century brought an abundance of new styles of dress and footwear in a wide range of fabrics and colours. Among these fashion trends were pointed long-toed shoes called poulaines,' said study co-author Dr Piers Mitchell from Cambridge's Department of Archaeology.

'The remains of shoes excavated in places like London and Cambridge suggest that by the late 14th century almost every type of shoe was at least slightly pointed  a style common among both adults and children alike.'

The sole of an adult's shoe from late 14th century Cambridge, showing the winklepicker-like pointed shape

Poulaine-toed shoes in 14th century London were mainly found in men's sizes, but 15th century art shows them being worn by both men and women, with the toes of men's shoes being the most extravagantly long

He added: 'We investigated the changes that occurred between the high and late medieval periods, and realised that the increase in hallux valgus over time must have been due to the introduction of these new footwear styles.'

Fellow author Dr Jenna Dittmar said: 'We think of bunions as being a modern problem but this work shows it was actually one of the more common conditions to have affected medieval adults.'

Researchers found that the burial plots for wealthier citizens and the clergy were much more likely to have skeletons with bunions.

The skeletons came from four sites around Cambridge: a charitable hospital (now part of St John's College); the grounds of a former Augustinian friary, where clergy and wealthy benefactors were buried; a local parish graveyard on what was the edge of town; and a rural burial site by a village almost four miles south of Cambridge.

Across late medieval society the pointiness of shoes became so extreme that in 1463 King Edward IV passed a law limiting toe-point length to less than two inches in London

Researchers found that the burial plots for wealthier citizens and the clergy were much more likely to have skeletons with bunions

'Paleopathological assessments' were carried out including inspecting foot bones for the bump by the big toe that is the hallmark of hallux valgus.

Only 3 per cent of the rural cemetery showed signs of bunions, 10 per cent of the parish graveyard (which mainly held the working poor), and 23 per cent of those on the hospital site.

However, some 43 per cent of those buried in the friary  including five of the eleven skeletons identified as clergy by their belt buckles  had evidence of bunions.

'Rules for the attire of Augustinian friars included footwear that was "black and fastened by a thong at the ankle'", commensurate with a lifestyle of worship and poverty,' said Mitchell.

'However, in the 13th and 14th centuries it was increasingly common for those in clerical orders in Britain to wear stylish clothes  a cause for concern among high-ranking church officials.'

In 1215, the church forbade clergy from wearing pointed-toed shoes. However, this may have done little to curb the trend, as numerous further decrees on clerical dress had to be passed, most notably in 1281 and 1342.

Across late medieval society the pointiness of shoes became so extreme that in 1463 King Edward IV passed a law limiting toe-point length to less than two inches in London.

The majority of remains with signs of hallux valgus across all sites and eras within the study were men (20 of the 31 total bunion sufferers).

The study is published in the International Journal of Paleopathology.
China has released a selfie taken by its Zhurong rover on the surface of Mars, in celebration of its first month on the Red Planet.

Zhurong can be seen with its landing platform in the background adorned with the Chinese flag, from which the rover rolled off at the end of May to begin its exploration.

Zhurong placed a remote camera about 33 feet (10 metres) from the landing platform, then withdrew to take a group portrait, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said.

Zhurong successfully touched down on Utopia Planitia, a vast northern lava plain on the Red Planet, on May 15, after it spent about three months orbiting the planet.

It blasted off from Earth in July 2020, tucked in the belly of China's Tianwen-1 spacecraft, which entered Martian orbit in February.

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In this image released by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) on Friday, June 11, 2021, the Chinese Mars rover Zhurong is seen near its landing platform taken by a remote camera that was dropped into position by the rover

Paul Byrne, a professor of Planetary Science at NC State University, tweeted: 'Everybody!! The Chinese rover #zhurong carried a small wireless camera that it placed on the ground to take a group photo.

'Look at the rover's little face!'

Another photo released by CNSA today shows a crystal clear close-up of the landing platform amid the planet's rocky red dust, as well as the landscape of Mars captured by Zhurong.

Eagle-eyed observers will notice outlines of the mascots for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympics next to the Chinese flag on the landing platform.

In this image released by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) on Friday, June 11, 2021, the landing platform with a Chinese national flag and outlines of the mascots for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and Paralympics on Mars is seen from the rover Zhurong. China on Friday released a series of photos taken by its Zhurong rover on the surface of Mars, including one of the rover itself taken by a remote camera

The landscape of Mars captured by Chinese rover Zhurong of the Tianwen-1 mission is seen in this image released by China National Space Administration (CNSA) June 11, 2021

The first photos taken by Zhurong  one in colour and one in black and white  prior to its descent from its landing platform were released by CNSA last month.

The front view of the rover, captured in black and white, shows the flat landscape of Utopia Planitia, which appears slightly curved in the horizon.

The second colour shot, showing the rear of the spacecraft, shows its unfolded solar panels and antennas.

In this black-and-white front shot taken by China's Zhurong Mars rover and made available by the CNSA, extension arms and a departure ramp are deployed on the rover's lander on the surface of Mars

In this CNSA photo taken by China's Zhurong Mars rover, a rear view of the rover shows solar panels and antenna are deployed as the rover sits on its lander on the surface of Mars

Chinese officials plan to use the rover to analyse Martian soil and atmosphere, capture images, chart maps and look for water and signs of ancient life

INSTRUMENTS ON THE ZHURONG ROVER The Zhurong rover communicates with Earth via the Tianwen-1 orbiter which has a 'high speed data relay'. Instruments on board the rover include a high-resolution camera that will be used for navigation and sharing images of the Red Planet surface. Instruments include: Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR) imagined up to 330ft below the surface of Mars Mars Surface Magnetic Field Detector (MSMFD) to find evidence of a magnetic field and track it Mars Meteorological Measurement Instrument (MMMI) to study the weather on the Red Planet Mars Surface Compound Detector (MSCD) combines tools to study the chemical composition of rocks Multi-Spectrum Camera (MSC) to take images in different wavelengths of light such as infrared and ultraviolet Navigation and Topography Camera (NTC) to capture images and map the surface of the planet and help the rover determine where to travel Advertisement

According to CGTN, the black-and-white shot was taken by a camera on the front of Zhurong, which effectively serves as an 'eye' for the rover to detect obstacles.

The two 'arms' near the top of the photo are parts of a radar system, while two rails, extending from the platform to the ground, help guide the rover.

Zhurong is surveying Utopia Planitia for signs of water or ice that could lend clues as to whether Mars ever sustained life.

The plain is the largest impact basin in the solar system, with an estimated diameter of 2,050 miles and home to large volumes of underground ice.

The six-wheeled 530lb rover has a climate detector, subsurface radar, magnetic field detectors and a camera to capture images and chart maps of the planitia.

At 1.85 metres (6 feet) in height, Zhurong is significantly smaller than the US's Perseverance rover which is exploring the planet with the help of a tiny helicopter.

NASA expects its rover to collect its first rock samples in July for return to Earth as early as 2031, as part of an ambitious, multi-stage mission.

China is the second country to land and operate a spacecraft on Mars, after the US.

China has now sent astronauts into space, powered probes to the Moon and returned the first moon samples to Earth in more than 45 years, as well as landed a rover on Mars.

At the end of April, it also launched Tianhe, the main section of what will be a permanent space station, aimed to rival the International Space Station (the ISS).

3D rendering of the Chinese Space Station, or Tiangong Space Station, as it'll look when fully constructed. Tianhe will form the main living quarters for three crew members. Shenzhou is an existing spacecraft that would dock at the station with crew. Tianzhou is an existing cargo transport spacecraft

Chinese Space Station modules - Tianhe: Core module. Launched on April 29, 2021 - Wentian: Experiment module I. Launch planned for 2022 - Mengtian: Experiment module II. Launch planned for 2022 - Xuntian: Space telescope module. Planned launch in 2024 to co-orbit with Chinese Space Station Advertisement

China's ambitious space program plans to send the first crew to Tianhe next week.

The three crew members plan to stay for three months on Tianhe, far exceeding the length of any previous Chinese mission.

They will perform spacewalks, construction and maintenance work and carry out science experiments.

Subsequent launches are planned to expand the station, send up supplies and exchange crews.

Once finished, the Chinese Space Station is expected to have a mass between 180,000 and 220,000 pounds  roughly one-fifth the mass of the ISS, which is 925,335 pounds.

ISS, currently in orbit, took 10 years and more than 30 missions to assemble from the launch of the first module back in 1998.

The ISS is backed by five participating space agencies  NASA (US), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada)  but China was originally barred from participating by the US.
Many of us listen to music before bedtime to wind down, but a new study suggests this can seriously compromise our nightly rest.

Experts in Texas have found those who listen to more music before bed have persistent 'earworms'  catchy songs that loop in the mind  as well as poorer sleep.

Earworms commonly affect people while they're awake, but the study found that they also can happen while trying to sleep.

People who experience earworms regularly at night  one or more times per week  are six times as likely to have poor sleep quality compared to people who rarely experience earworms, the study reveals.

The results contradict the idea that music is a hypnotic and might help sleep  in fact, the sleeping brain continues to process music for several hours after the music stops.

The study used three very catchy songs  'Shake It Off' by Taylor Swift, 'Call Me Maybe' by Carly Rae Jepsen and 'Don't Stop Believin' by Journey.

The study suggests you'd be best advised to avoid listening to music before bed, especially if you're already bothered by 'earworms' - catchy songs that loop in the mind over and over

WHAT ARE EARWORMS? Earworms are when a song or tune replays over and over in a person's mind. It can often be the main hook of the song, such as the chorus. Earworms can stem from both lyrical and instrumental music. Research shows that they detrimentally impact sleep quality. Advertisement

It was led by Michael Scullin, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University, who himself had previously woken up the middle of the night with a song stuck in his head.

'Almost everyone thought music improves their sleep, but we found those who listened to more music slept worse,' he said.

'Our brains continue to process music even when none is playing, including apparently while we are asleep.

'Everyone knows that music listening feels good. Adolescents and young adults routinely listen to music near bedtime.

'But sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. The more you listen to music, the more likely you are to catch an earworm that won't go away at bedtime.

'When that happens, chances are your sleep is going to suffer.'

Surprisingly, the study found that some instrumental music is more likely to lead to earworms and disrupt sleep quality than lyrical music.

This contradicts schools of thought that instrumental music is more soothing for assisting rest, or that lyrical music generally features more prominent hooks that loop in our brains.

'What was really surprising was that instrumental music led to worse sleep quality  instrumental music leads to about twice as many earworms,' Professor Scullin said.

The study used three catchy songs - 'Shake It Off' by Taylor Swift (pictured) 'Call Me Maybe' by Carly Rae Jepsen and 'Don't Stop Believin' by Journey

HOW TO AVOID EARWORMS Professor Scullin advises people to moderate their music listening or take occasional breaks if bothered by earworms  and try to avoid it just before bed. 'If you commonly pair listening to music while being in bed, then you'll have that association where being in that context might trigger an earworm even when you're not listening to music, such as when you're trying to fall asleep,' he said. Another way to get rid of an earworm is to engage in cognitive activity - fully focusing on a task, problem or activity helps to distract your brain from earworms. Near bedtime, rather than engaging in a demanding activity or something that would disrupt your sleep, like watching TV or playing video games, maybe spend five to 10 minutes writing out a to-do list and putting thoughts to paper. A previous study found that participants who took five minutes to write down upcoming tasks before bed helped 'offload' those worrying thoughts about the future and led to faster sleep. Advertisement

Health organisations commonly recommend listening to quiet music before bedtime  but these recommendations largely arise from self-reported studies.

For example, the NHS's website mentions music as a way to beat insomnia, and the US government's National Institutes of Health also lists listening to music as a tip for getting a good night's sleep.

Professor Scullin advises people to moderate their music listening or take occasional breaks if bothered by earworms  and try to avoid it just before bed.

'If you commonly pair listening to music while being in bed, then you'll have that association where being in that context might trigger an earworm even when you're not listening to music, such as when you're trying to fall asleep,' he said.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, involved a survey and a laboratory experiment.

The survey involved 209 participants who completed a series of surveys on sleep quality, music listening habits and earworm frequency, including how often they experienced an earworm while trying to fall asleep, waking up in the middle of the night and immediately upon waking in the morning.

In the experimental study, 50 participants were brought into Scullin's Sleep Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory at Baylor University, where the research team attempted to induce earworms to determine how it affected sleep quality.

Participants were fitted with polysomnography equipment  which measures brain waves, respiration, muscle tension, movements, heart activity and more  while they slept.

But before bedtime, they were played the three annoyingly catchy songs  'Shake It Off,' 'Call Me Maybe' and 'Don't Stop Believin'.

'We randomly assigned participants to listen to the original versions of those songs or the de-lyricised instrumental versions of the songs,' Professor Scullin said.

'Participants responded whether and when they experienced an earworm. Then we analysed whether that impacted their nighttime sleep physiology.

'People who caught an earworm had greater difficulty falling asleep, more nighttime awakenings, and spent more time in light stages of sleep.'

The experimental study also used electroencephalography (EEG), a method of recording electrical activity of the brain that involves electrodes placed along the scalp.

The EEG readings were quantitatively analysed to examine physiological markers of sleep-dependent memory consolidation.

Memory consolidation is the process by which temporary memories are transformed into a more long-term form.

Participants who had a sleep earworm showed more slow oscillations during sleep, a marker of memory reactivation  where a memory is brought from an inactive to an active state.

The increase in slow oscillations was dominant over the region corresponding to the primary auditory cortex, which is implicated in earworm processing when people are awake.

'We thought that people would have earworms at bedtime when they were trying to fall asleep, but we certainly didn't know that people would report regularly waking up from sleep with an earworm,' Professor Scullin said.

'But we saw that in both the survey and experimental study.'
Antarctica's 180 trillion ton Pine Island glacier could collapse within 20 years as the floating ice shelf helping to hold it back is 'ripping apart', a study has warned.

The Pine Island ice shelf  located on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet  has been known to have been thinning now for decades as a result of climate change.

However, analysis of satellite images undertaken by researchers led from the University of Washington has shown a more dramatic loss in recent years.

From 2017 to 2020, large icebergs at the edge of the ice shelf have broken off into the Amundsen Sea, resulting in an acceleration of the glacier further inland.

The Pine Island Glacier is already responsible for a quarter of Antarctica's ice loss  and its complete loss could see sea levels rise by some 1.6 feet (0.5 metres).

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Antarctica's 180 trillion ton Pine Island glacier could collapse within 20 years as the floating ice shelf helping to hold it back is 'ripping apart'. Pictured, a view across the ice showing the crevasses that form where the grounded glacier flows into the floating ice shelf

'We may not have the luxury of waiting for slow changes on Pine Island; things could actually go much quicker than expected,' said lead author Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the UW Applied Physics Laboratory.

'The processes we'd been studying in this region were leading to an irreversible collapse, but at a fairly measured pace.'

'Things could be much more abrupt if we lose the rest of that ice shelf.'

Broadly speaking, the thinning of the Pine Island ice shelf over the last few decades has been caused by the presence of warmer ocean currents which have melting the underside of the floating ice mass.

Between the 1990s and 2019, this lead to an acceleration of the glacier behind the ice shelf, which went from moving at a rate of 1.5 miles (2.5 km) per year to 2.5 miles (4 km) on an annual basis  after which, however, its speed stabilised for a decade.

The recent changes, however, are being caused by a different process, Dr Joughin explained  one that is connected to the internal forces acting within the glacier.

'The ice shelf appears to be ripping itself apart due to the glacier's acceleration in the past decade or two,' he added.

From 2017 to 2020, large icebergs at the edge of the ice shelf have broken off into the Amundsen Sea (as pictured in this time-lapse), resulting in an acceleration of the glacier inland

Between 2017 and 2020, the Pine Island ice shelf lost around a fifth of its area in series of dramatic breaks which were captured by the European Space Agency's Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites.

In their study, Dr Joughin and colleagues analysed images of the ice shelf taken between January 2015 and March 2020  finding that the movement of two points on the glacier's surface had sped up by 12 per cent between 20172020.

An ice flow model  developed at the University of Washington  confirmed that the loss of the ice shelf was responsive for the observed speedup.

'The recent changes in speed are not due to melt-driven thinning  instead they're due to the loss of the outer part of the ice shelf,' Joughin said.

'The glacier's speedup is not catastrophic at this point. But if the rest of that ice shelf breaks up and goes away then this glacier could speed up quite a lot.'

Between 2017 and 2020, the Pine Island ice shelf lost around a fifth of its area in series of dramatic breaks which were captured by the Sentinel-1 satellites (a model of which is pictured)

'Sediment records in front of and beneath the Pine Island ice shelf indicate that the glacier front has remained relatively stable over a few thousand years,' explained paper author and ocean physicist Pierre Dutrieux of the British Antarctic Survey.

'Regular advances and break-ups happened at approximately the same location until 2017  and then successively worsened each year until 2020.'

'The loss of Pine Island's ice shelf now looks like it possibly could occur in the next decade or two, as opposed to the melt-driven subsurface change playing out over 100 or more years,' he continued.

'So it's a potentially much more rapid and abrupt change.'

It is not exactly clear whether the ice shelf will continue to crumble, Dr Joughin added  with other factors, like the slope of the land below the glacier's receding edge, having the potential to come into play as well.

The full findings of the study were published in the journal Science Advances.

The Pine Island Glacier is already responsible for a quarter of Antarctica's ice loss  and its complete loss could see sea levels rise by some 1.6 feet (0.5 metres)
It has long been thought the first person to set eyes on Antarctica was Russian explorer Fabian von Bellingshausen, who sneaked into the history books three days before British naval officer Edward Bransfield in 1820.

But a new study suggests both were actually beaten to the discovery by a Polynesian chief more than 1,000 years earlier.

Researchers say the ancestors of New Zealand's Maori sailed from the deep south to Antarctica in the 7th century, and may even have set foot on the continent.

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Discovery: Researchers say the ancestors of New Zealand's Maori sailed from the deep south to Antarctica in the 7th century, and may even have set foot on the continent. Hui Te Rangiora, a Polynesian explorer, set off from Rarotonga and is thought to have reached the Ross Ice Shelf

Antarctica: Polynesian explorers such as Hui Te Rangiora are said to have been able to traverse 'the Pacific much as Western explorers might a lake'. A new study now suggests Rangiora was the first person to set eyes on Antarctica after setting sail for the continent in AD650

RACE TO ANTARCTICA: WAS IT RUSSIA, UK OR POLYNESIANS WHO GOT THERE FIRST? Russian explorer Fabian von Bellingshausen was technically the first to spot Antarctica on January 27, 1820. However, historians did not originally recognise him as having done so because an incorrect translation of his journal meant it was assumed he had not seen land. Bransfield then saw the continent three days later, while the following year US explorer John Davis was recorded in history as becoming the first person to step foot on it. But a new study by the University of Otago now suggests it was the Polynesians who discovered it 1,000 years earlier. Hui Te Rangiora, a local Polynesian chief, set off from Rarotonga in about AD650 and reached the Ross Ice Shelf, according to researchers, making him and his crew 'the first humans to set eyes on Antarctic waters and perhaps the continent'. Advertisement

Hui Te Rangiora, a local Polynesian chief, set off from Rarotonga  the largest of the Cook Islands  in about AD650, the study claims, and described finding Southern Ocean bull kelp, marine mammals and huge icebergs resembling arrowroot powder.

The white medicinal herb looks like snow when scraped, the researchers said. Rangiora also named the ocean Te tai-uka-a-pia  meaning the frozen ocean.

Rangiora and his crew are thought to have reached the Ross Ice Shelf in their sailing boat, and were 'likely the first humans to set eyes on Antarctic waters and perhaps the continent', according to the study's authors.

Polynesian explorers such as Rangiora are said to have been able to traverse 'the Pacific much as Western explorers might a lake'.

The research team were led by Dr Priscilla Wehi, a conservation biologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

They examined oral Maori histories as well as cultural marks, such as carvings, depicting both voyagers and navigational and astronomical knowledge.

'We found connection to Antarctica and its waters have been occurring since the earliest traditional voyaging, and later through participation in European-led voyaging and exploration, contemporary scientific research, fishing, and more for centuries,' Dr Wehi said.

'Hui Te Rangiora's voyage and return are part of the history of the Ngati Rarua people, and these stories appear in a number of carvings.'

The Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research team's findings led them to believe the achievements of Polynesian explorers had been glossed over in the history books.

Voyagers: Polynesians explored the Pacific Ocean centuries before Europeans did (stock)

Claim: Rangiora and his crew are thought to have reached the Ross Ice Shelf in the 7th century

If Rangiora did indeed see Antarctica, it would end the debate over whether it was von Bellingshausen or Bransfield who discovered it first, or even whether the honour should go to an American.

Von Bellingshausen was technically the first to spot it on January 27, 1820, but historians did not originally recognise him as having done so because an incorrect translation of his journal meant it was assumed he had not seen land.

Pipped to the post? It has long been thought the first person to discover Antarctica was Russian explorer Fabian von Bellingshausen (pictured), beating British naval officer Edward Bransfield by three days in 1820

Bransfield then saw the continent three days later, while the following year American explorer John Davis was recorded in history as becoming the first person to step foot on it.

All three succeeded where Captain James Cook failed.

He looked for Antarctica from 1772-1775  and at one point had been just 80 miles from the coast  but could not find it.

Nevertheless, his attempts spurred on 19th century explorers such as Bransfield, Davis and von Bellingshausen.

All were hoping to discover the vast landmass dubbed Terra Australis Incognita, or 'unknown southern land', which it was believed at the time would 'balance out' land in the northern hemisphere.

Despite the accomplishments of Davis, von Bellingshausen and Bransfield, it would not be until almost 100 years later that explorers reached the South Pole.

Norwegian Roald Amundsen got there first on December 14, 1911, just over a month before Captain Robert Falcon Scott.

After discovering that Amundsen had beaten them to the South Pole, Captain Scott and his entire party perished as they tried to return to base during the ill-fated Terra Nova expedition.

In December last year, a variety of glaciers, bays, domes, mounts and inlets in Antarctica were named in honour of modern British scientists and explorers to mark the 200th anniversary of the discovery of the Antarctic by von Bellingshausen and Bransfield.

In all, 28 locations within the British Antarctic Territory  a section of Antarctica claimed by the UK  were named after Britons who have made 'an exceptional contribution' to scientific understanding of Earth's southernmost continent.

The University of Otago study was published in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Fish prefer to dine infeeding on their prey in waterbut amazing new footage demonstrates that a species of moray eel can snatch and swallow their victims on dry land.

The brightly colored chordate is able to achieve this astounding feat thanks to an extra set of jaws in its throat.

After years of effort, researchers at UC Santa Cruz were able to train snowflake morays to wriggle out of the water to grab a bite, proving they are quite adaptable when it comes to landing a meal.

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Researchers at UC Santa Cruz trained seven snowflake eels to slither out of the water, snatch a slice of sashimi and swallow it with their secondary 'pharyngeal' jaws. It is the first known instance of a fish that can feed on land without relying on water

All moray eels have 'pharyngeal jaws,' a second set of mandibles nestled in their throat.

The eels bite their prey with their primary 'oral' jaws, then suck it down their gullets with their interior pharyngeal jaws, which pop out briefly.

The eerie action has drawn comparisons to the terrifying secondary mouth of the Xenomorph from the Aliens movie franchise.

In a study published this week in The Journal of Experimental Biology, researchers explained how the snowflake moray uses its pharyngeal jaws to feed on dry land.

'Most fishes really need water to feed,' said lead author Rita Mehta, an ecologist at UC Santa Cruz's Institute of Marine Sciences, in a statement. 'This is the first example of a fish that can feed on land without relying on water.'

Mehta had received reports of snowflake morays reaching out of the water to feed in the wild, but wanted to observe the phenomenon in the lab.

'These particular moray eels tend to eat hard-shelled prey like crabs, and I would see reports in the literature of them moving out of the water and lunging for crabs,' she said, 'but it was unclear what happened next.'

A carnivorous snowflake moray eel crawls up a ramp to bite a piece of sashimi with its primary 'oral' jaw. The eel then yanks the tasty morsel down its gullet with its secondary jaw

Other fish are known to flirt with an amphibious lifestyle, like mudskippers, ' which come up onto mudflats 'and grab prey like small crabs and insects,' Mehta said.

But mudskippers 'cheat' by storing water in their mouths to swallow their mealssnowflake morays don't need to bother with all that, according to Mehta.

'Once the moray captures prey in its oral jaws, the pharyngeal jaws grab onto the prey again and move it further back into the esophagus.'

The snowflake moray eel's secondary jaw has drawn comparison to the terrifying Xenomorph in the 'Aliens' movies

But verifying the behavior with footage was no mean feat: it took Mehta's team more than a half-decade to train seven snowflake eels to slither up on a ramp, snatch a slice of sashimi and swallow it before slinking back into the water.

'They feel safer in the water, so at first they would just grab the fish and go straight back into the water with it,' she said.

Finally, they captured the jaw-dropping behavior on video, proving that at least one species of moray 'can utilize very different environments for food resources,' she said.

Snowflake morays, which can grow as long as 40 inches, are named for their mottled black, yellow and white coloring. They're widespread throughout the Indo-Pacific region and are also found in the eastern Central Pacific, from Mexico to northern California

Snowflake morays, which can grow as long as 40 inches, are named for their mottled black, yellow and white coloring.

They're widespread throughout the Indo-Pacific region and are also found in the eastern Central Pacific, from Mexico to northern California.

Living at depths of between 10 and 100 feet, the carnivorous fish enjoys shrimp, krill and octopus, among other prey.
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A Virgin Atlantic fleet of flying cars that could reduce the travel time of short-haul journeys by more than two thirds is set to roll out in the UK by 2024, it has been revealed.

Vertical Aerospace, a Bristol-based firm, is working towards building the fleet of electrically powered vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, as part of a 2.8 billion ($4 billion) project.

Virgin Atlantic will purchase up to 150 of the aircraft, called VA-X4, to deliver a Virgin Atlantic branded short haul network around some of the UK's busiest cities.

The 'near-silent' aircraft  100 times quieter than a helicopter  will have zero carbon emissions and a range of more than 100 miles.

Each craft will carry one pilot and four passengers, who will be seated in a luxury interior, complete with padded seats, headrests, seatbelts and ample legroom.

According to Vertical Aerospace, trips in the craft will likely end up costing travellers around 5 to 10 per mile travelled  between that of a helicopter and a private car  which they could book using an app.

Commercial operations are planned for 2024 once certified under European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).

Vertical Aerospace, which is led by a Northern Irish multi-millionaire and Formula 1 enthusiast, is also expected to work with American Airlines on flying passengers in the US.

Trips in the craft will likely end up costing travellers around 5 to 10 per mile travelled  between that of a helicopter and a private car. Concept image shows a Virgin-branded aircraft, built by Vertical Aerospace, flying over London

Virgin Atlantic, American Airlines and Irish aircraft leasing company Avolon have invested a total of 2.8 billion as part of the project.

Microsoft's M12, Honeywell and Rolls-Royce, as well as American Airlines and Avolon, are all investing in the PIPE (private investment in public equity). Rolls-Royce is also providing Vertical Aerospace electric motors.

The project should result in a total fleet of 1,000 aircraft built by Vertical Aerospace.

'With innovation and sustainability leadership firmly in our DNA, we are excited to be partnering with Vertical Aerospace to pioneer sustainable and zero emissions air travel in the UK,' said Shai Weiss, CEO, Virgin Atlantic.

The aircraft would potentially take off and land at airfields in the outskirts of a city, or even on landing pads at the top of tall buildings

THE VA-1X: THE STATS Wingspan: 49 feet (15 metres) Length: 43 feet (13 metres) Maximum payload: 992 lbs (450 kg) Capacity: 1 pilot and 4 passengers Power source: Lithium-ion batteries Noise: 100x less than a helicopter Commercial flights begin: 2024 Advertisement

'We pride ourselves on building enduring strategic partnerships and are thrilled to be working alongside Vertical in its mission to bring eVTOL travel to the UK.'

Vertical Aerospace, established in 2016, has been working on prototypes for years, but a new image from the firm shows what the Virgin-branded vehicles will look like.

The VA-X4 has four tilting advanced rotors at the front and stowable rotors at the rear, capable of speeds over 200 miles per hour.

VA-X4, which will have certification to the same safety standards as commercial airliners, is set to 'revolutionise urban mobility and electrify air travel', Virgin said.

Virgin Atlantic and Vertical Aerospace will be working together to explore a joint venture to enable passenger operations in the UK.

Vertical Aerospace and Virgin Atlantic will seek to establish short haul, electric aircraft connectivity between UK cities and airport hubs starting with London Heathrow, Manchester and London Gatwick.

For example, reducing the 56-mile journey from Cambridge to London Heathrow to just 22 minutes, in comparison to a one hour 30 minute drive by road.

The craft would take off and land at airfields in the outskirts of a city, or even on landing pads at the top of tall buildings.

With 37 towns and cities with populations over 100,000 within 100 miles of London Heathrow Airport, the VA-X4 could enable short haul transfers for 7.7 million customers outside of London, for flights to and from the UK's main hub airport.

A full-scale prototype of the VA-X4 is currently in production courtesy of Vertical Aerospace and the first test flight is planned for later this year.

The VA-X4 has four tilting advanced rotors at the front and stowable rotors at the rear, capable of speeds over 200 miles per hour. Once rolled out, the craft will have Virgin Atlantic branding in the UK and American Airlines branding in the US

A full-scale prototype of the VA-X4 is currently in production and the first test flight is planned for later this year.

Vertical Aerospace, founded by energy tech entrepreneur Stephen Fitzpatrick, has entered into an agreement for a business combination with Broadstone Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company.

The transaction will result in Vertical becoming a publicly-traded company, meaning it will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The combination is expected to close in the second half of 2021.

Concept photos from Vertical Aerospace show the craft's elegant interior, complete with padded sears and seatbelts. Each craft will carry four passengers plus a pilot

'This is the most exciting time in aviation for almost a century  electrification will transform flying in the 21st century in the same way the jet engine did 70 years ago,' said Fitzpatrick.

'Todays announcement brings together some of the largest and most respected technology and aeronautical businesses in the world and together we can achieve our aim of making the VA-X4 the first zero carbon aircraft that most people will fly on.

'The UK is already a global leader in aerospace innovation and we believe Vertical Aerospace will be the British engineering champion to drive the aviation industry forward.'

Vertical Aerospace expects that the VA-1X will begin commercial flights in 2024 - whizzing right over ground-based traffic at faster speeds than cars
Married men who don't help out around the house tend to earn higher salaries than husbands who do more domestic chores, according to a new study.

Researchers found that 'disagreeable' men in opposite-sex marriages are less helpful with domestic work, allowing them to devote greater resources to their jobs, which results in higher pay.

The team also discovered that disagreeableness - a personality trait characterised by a lack of empathy and greater self-interest - does not predict career success for men whose wives are less conscientious. Nor was it linked to higher salaries in single men who were 'disagreeable'.

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Researchers found that 'disagreeable' men in opposite-sex marriages are less helpful with domestic work, allowing them to devote greater resources to their jobs, which results in higher pay (stock image)

The research was conducted by Dr Brittany Solomon, assistant professor of management and organisation at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and colleagues.

She said: 'Across two studies, we find evidence that disagreeable men tend to earn more money relative to their more agreeable male counterparts because they are more self-interested and less helpful to their wives at home, which allows for greater job involvement and, ultimately, higher pay.

'This effect is even stronger among disagreeable men with more traditional gender role attitudes and when their wives are highly conscientious, presumably because in these cases their wives take on more household management and more seamlessly carry out the responsibilities.

Researchers found that 'disagreeable' men in opposite-sex marriages are less helpful with domestic work, allowing them to devote greater resources to their jobs, which results in higher pay (stock image)

LEADERS WITH PSYCHOPATHIC TRAITS COULD TRANSFORM YOU INTO AN OFFICE BULLY Your relationship with your boss could be changing your personality. A research team from the University of Manchester's Business School asked 1,200 participants about their own well-being, and their relationship with their boss. The people asked consisted of workers from a variety of industries across a number of different countries. The researchers found those who work for leaders who display these traits had lower job satisfaction and scored higher on a clinical measure of depression. Not only did employees' well-being suffer but incidents of counter-productive work behaviour and workplace bullying were also higher among those with narcissistic leaders. Advertisement

'Professionals often publicly thank their spouses when receiving achievement awards or earning promotion and, at least for disagreeable men, our findings quantify the truth behind this sentiment.'

She added: 'While disagreeableness in the workplace may lead some employees to success, those hoping to attain higher pay should at least hesitate before leaning into a disagreeable workplace persona.

'Indeed, if self-interested and less communal work behaviour was the only key to higher pay, then disagreeable men would tend to earn more, regardless of whether they were married, how they viewed gender roles or to whom they were married.'

But Dr Solomon and her team say their findings shouldn't necessarily conjure images of the now '50s stereotype of a working husband returning to an immaculately clean home and a wife wearing pearls.

Instead, they say, lightening the burden of house chores could be a way for bosses to get more out of staff by freeing up their energy for work.

Their suggestions for employers include greater child-care provisions and courier services.

Dr Solomon said: 'Our findings build on the conventional wisdom that organisations seem to reward disagreeable workplace behaviours and highlight the importance of social exchange at home for success at work.

'Our research suggests that organisations acknowledge the role that spousal exchange plays in individual success and points to the potential for organisations to refocus efforts to fuel job involvement on lightening the burden of at-home responsibilities.

'Doing so could allow employees to preserve resources that could then be invested in their jobs.'

She added: 'Presumably, this type of initiative would be especially beneficial to those who do not have the persona and gender that, we found, naturally drives individually advantageous spousal exchange - that is, everyone other than disagreeable, married men.

'To help those who do not have the built-in at-home arrangement that enhances job involvement and pay, organisations may consider investing in infrastructure that helps establish more level career-related playing fields.

'Practices that situate employees more equitably outside of work may offer more employees the opportunity to succeed.'

The findings were published in the journal Personnel Psychology.
Iconic tiremaker Michelin is putting its inflatable muscle to work with a new endeavor: increasing cargo ships' efficiency and limiting their greenhouse gas emissions.

The French company unveiled a system of inflatable sails than can be added to existing freighters to transform them into eco-friendly ships.

The sails automatically deploy to take advantage of high winds at sea, then retract just as quickly, making it a 'plug and play' system, Michelin boasts.

This means crew members won't have to become expert sailors to operate the hybrid ships.

Michelin claims the sails can improve a ship's fuel efficiency by up to 20 percent.

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Michelin's new Wing Sail Mobility system includes inflatable sails that can be fitted to cargo ships and quickly deploy to take advantage of strong winds

Michelin unveiled its Wing Sail Mobility (WISAMO) project last week at the 2021 Movin'On global sustainable-mobility summit.

It's a system of inflatable wing sails that can be retrofitted onto both merchant shipsespecially bulk carriers, roll-on/roll-off ships, and oil and gas tankersand yachts.

A joint venture with a team of Swiss inventors, the sails would use wind power to augment, not replace, existing oil-powered engines.

'The advantage of wind propulsion is that wind energy is clean, free, universal and totally non-controversial,' said world-renowned skipper Michel Desjoyeaux, a WISAMO ambassador.

When not in use, the sails flatten like an accordion on the ship's deck

'It offers a very promising avenue to improving the environmental impact of merchant ships.'

The 'puffy' sails automatically reposition to maximize advantage of wind conditions, New Atlas reported, and when not being used, the sails collapse like an accordion on the ship's deck.

'It has a plug-and-play system that's really easy to usewhether for a refit ... or for a newly built ship,' said Desjoyeaux. 'You lower the mast into the boat, plug it in and off you go. Once you're out of the harbor you push a button and the machine does everything.'

The 'puffy' sails automatically reposition to maximize advantage of wind conditions

The nature of the sails and their telescopic mast enable ships to easily clear bridges

That's crucial, Desjoyeaux adds, because crews are pretty small 'and they don't necessarily know much about sailboats.'

The system's dual-sided design is an improvement over traditional flat sails, the company said, and its telescopic mast is retractable, allowing ships to enter harbors and easily pass under bridges.

Michelin claims the WISAMO system can improve a ship's fuel efficiency by 10 to 20 percent.

It expects the 1,000-square-foot sails will first be fitted on a merchant ship in 2022, following an extensive trial period on a sailboard helmed by Desjoyeaux.

About 90 percent of global trade relies on sea travel, according to an August 2020 report from the UN's International Maritime Organization.

Michelin claims the WISAMO system can improve a ship's fuel efficiency by 10 to 20 percent

The report found carbon emissions from international shipping rose from 1.06 billion tons in 2012 to 1.16 billion in 2018accounting for nearly 3 percent of the world's atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The agency aims to half the industry's overall greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2050.

But according to the International Council on Clean Transportation, the shipping industry's growth is outpacing efforts to stem emissions and, without major changes, 2050 emissions would be up to 130 percent higher than 2008 levels, according to Reuters.

'Policies are needed to accelerate innovative fuel-efficiency technologies like wind-assist and hull air lubrication, along with new, low-emission and zero-emission fuels,' ICCT's marine program director Dan Rutherford said.

Also at the Movin'On Summit, Michelin introduced a racing tire nearly half made of sustainable materials.

By increasing the tire's natural rubber content and using recycled carbon black recovered from 'end-of-life' tiresas well as everyday refuse like orange rinds, sunflower oil, pine resin and recycled tin cansit was able to bump up the tire's sustainability quotient to 46 percent.

Michelin has committed to using 100 percent sustainable materials in all its tires by 2050.
Experts have yet to find to extraterrestrial life, but one researcher from the University of Oxford suggests looking for hypothetical star-sized structures known as Dyson spheres if we want to find aliens.

'What Freeman Dyson did in his Dyson sphere paper is of course point out that, actually, we might want to look for industrial activities that are not intended to communicate,' Anders Sandberg said in an interview with Vice.

'It's just that [aliens] create structures that we would not normally see in nature and that would be very visible because they're so extreme. And that was a crazy idea back in the sixties and seventies. People were not really ready for it.'

Any advanced civilization would need significant amounts of energy, if humans are any guide, which is where the Dyson sphere star-sized supercomputer would come in.

'A key question is, what do you use your Dyson Sphere for? And I think you can find a bunch of very different uses,' said Sandberg. 'Energy collection is just one. You can, of course, talk about it as living space, which is usually what science fiction tends to do, because it creates an amazing sense of awe when you get so much space.'

A researcher at University of Oxford suggests we look for hypothetical star-sized structures known as Dyson spheres if we want to find aliens

A Dyson sphere (pictured) captures the energy of a star by placing solar collectors around the star

As the number of collectors grows, they are gathered into bands, limit shading and ultimately become the Dyson sphere, an idea first proposed in the 1960s

According to Space.com, a Dyson sphere 'encircles a star with platforms in tight formation,' becoming the 'ultimate solution' for living space and energy production.

Not only is there enough room for a society to habitat, but it can capture all energy expunged by the star.

If humanity ever created a Dyson sphere, it would be a Herculean effort.

It would capture 400 septillion watts of energy per second emanating from the Sun, or approximately a trillion times more than the planet uses every year, according to Popular Mechanics.

And given the fact that these hypothetical structures have to be bigger than the stars they surround and would give off tremendous amounts of heat and energy, 'they would be visible over long distances,' Sandberg told Vice.

The science behind these hypothetical space-based structures is starting to come to fruition, though humanity is nowhere near ready to build one.

If humanity ever created a Dyson sphere, it would capture 400 septillion watts of energy per second emanating from the Sun

EarthSky.org notes it would obviously be built by an advanced civilization, with a goal to ensure that a fraction of the energy from the star would be used to benefit said civilization by hitting the surface of the sphere.

The 48-year-old Sandberg has also looked to see whether a Dyson sphere could power an advanced artificial intelligence, something he has referred to as a 'Jupiter brain.'

'The term Jupiter brain was somewhat of a joke from Keith Henson and others, when they were talking about literally converting Jupiter using nano machines into a giant computer,' Sandberg explained. 'There are some practical problems with that, mostly cooling, but the name is kind of quite cool to play around with.'

The idea of Dyson spheres was first explored in 1960 by the aforementioned Freeman J. Dyson and published in Science.

That is approximately 1 trillion times more than the planet uses every year

Sandberg himself published a paper on the topic in 1999, discussing one concept of how it would work.

He authored another paper in 2017 to help resolve Fermi's paradox, noting that Dyson spheres would likely only be built to be inactive, waiting for the future.

To look for a Dyson sphere, humanity could look for its infrared energy, but a better idea would be to look for 'normal spectrum leaking through the gaps [of the sphere' plus [infrared] light, as well as 'reflection' of unusual materials

'If a civilization wants to maximize computation it appears rational to aestivate until the far future in order to exploit the low temperature environment: this can produce a 1030 multiplier of achievable computation,' Sandberg wrote in the paper.

'We hence suggest the 'aestivation hypothesis': the reason we are not observing manifestations of alien civilizations is that they are currently (mostly) inactive, patiently waiting for future cosmic eras.'

To look for a Dyson sphere, humanity could look for its infrared energy, but a better idea would be to look for 'normal spectrum leaking through the gaps [of the sphere' plus [infrared] light, as well as 'reflection' of unusual materials, Sandberg added on Twitter.

Constructed by Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, Fermi's paradox is the contradiction between having yet to find an advanced civilization in space and the high degree of probability of finding them.

Sandberg, who is writing a book about Dyson spheres, said on Twitter that it would not be an easy thing to hide in space, should an advanced civilization choose to do so.

'Hiding a DS is perhaps doable but must be a deliberate design with some cost. Dysoned galaxies are hard to hide.'

The advanced civilization might wait for a long period of time because as Sandberg says, it would be more efficient because the universe cools as its ages.

'Time might be cheap,' said Sandberg. 'And if you only want to maximize computation, then you might want to do it slowly.'

Although it may sound like science fiction, research on Dyson spheres has increased over the past several years, including one published last year by Pennsylvania State University astronomer Jason Wright.

In Wright's paper, published prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, he looked at how feasible they are, their purposed and whether they can be detected, writing that they are a 'plausible manifestation of extraterrestrial technology with strong observational consequences.'

However, 'significant theoretical and observational work remains before upper limits on their existence can be computed.'
The U.S. Army has released a new set of recruitment ads geared towards encouraging citizens to answer "The Calling." In it, they feature five young Americans who "made the most important decision of their lives, for reasons as diverse as they are." The ads feature people of varied race, including a white woman, a Black man and woman, a woman of Latin descent, and an Asian man. But not only are the individuals racially diverse, the recruitment ads are pro-LGBT as well.

One of the woke recruitment ads for the U.S. Army features Cpl. Emma Malonelord, who is described as a young woman who was "raised by two supportive mothers" and was raised by "such powerful role models in her life." The description of her profile on the pro-LGBT recruitment ad read that she was "inspired by their courage and conviction" and was determined to "shatter stereotypes."

Cpl. Malonelord's U.S. Army recruitment ad featured an animated same-sex wedding that recounted how her two mothers wed. Her family lived in California and she claims to have a "normal" childhood, except that she had two mothers, CNS News reported. But this is not the first time the U.S. Army has engaged with woke ideology.

According to the Military Times reported that in May, Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Dan Crewnshaw, two Republicans who both served in the U.S. military, launched a whistleblower website in which troops can submit complaints on "anti-American indoctrination seeping into parts of our military," a description provided by Sen. Cotton. Through the site, they have received news on how woke ideology has infiltrated the U.S. Army.

Sen. Cotton, a former Army infantry captain, argued how one Marine reported his unit's "mandatory military history training was replaced with training on police brutality, white privilege and systemic racism." The Arkansas senator reported that this woke ideology training caused several officers to leave the unit.

In May, Rep. Crenshaw, himself a retired SEAL lieutenant commander, condemned the U.S. army's teachings of woke ideology, taking to Twitter to share his thoughts and a link to the whistleblower website, "Enough is enough. We won't let our military fall to woke ideology. We have just launched a whistleblower webpage where you can submit your story. Your complaint will be legally protected, and go to my office and @SenTomCotton."

The Hill reported that during a line of questioning by Sen. Cotton, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin denied that the U.S. military is a "fundamentally racist organization" and answered no to several of the senator's questions. Sec. Austin argued, "The military, like any organization, will have its challenges, but I do not believe it is a fundamentally racist organization."

"I would also say that diversity, equity and inclusion is important to this military now and it will be important in the future," Sec. Austin said. "And so we're going to make sure that our military looks like America and that our leadership looks like what's in the ranks of the military."

Sec. Austin also said the U.S. military is "making sure" that they stay the "the most effective and lethal fighting force in the world" no matter how diverse their recruits are.
Space fairing heroes living on the moon and Mars could one day receive transplants with 3D-printed human tissue.

Scientist from Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina constructed a cube-shaped tissue capable of functioning for 30 days in the lab.

The breakthrough was part of NASAs Vascular Tissue Challenge, a competition to create thick, vascularized human organ tissue in an in-vitro environment, and the group won first and second place.

The team created gel-like molds with 'chambers' to help cells form into tissue by allowing them to obtain enough oxygen and nutrients to survive an entire month.

Not only can 3D-printed tissue treat astronauts, but it may also be used in patients on Earth who are waiting for an organ transplant.

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Scientist from Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina constructed a cube-shaped tissue capable of functioning for 30 days in the lab

Wake Forest Institute consisted of of two teams, but Team Winston completed its trial first and will receive $300,000. The winners will also be giving the opportunity to advance their research aboard the International Space Station.

The scientists have been working on ways to turn living cells into living human body parts for at least a decade  in 2011 the team grew ears, muscles and jawbones.

The group has come a long way and accepted NASAs challenge in 2016 to develop human tissue using 3D-printing techniques.

Graca Almeida-Porada, MD, PhD, said in a statement: In the coming years, NASA has planned missions to Mars and to near-Earth asteroids, yet the potential health risks to astronauts from exposure to the unique conditions present in deep space are still not well defined.

The Wake Forest scientists used 3D printing technologies to create gel-like molds, or scaffolds, with a network of channels designed to maintain sufficient oxygen and nutrient levels to keep the constructed tissues alive for their 30-day

This research will hopefully help us gain understanding of how to prevent or lessen these negative effects.

The WFIRM scientists used 3D printing technologies to create gel-like molds, or scaffolds, with a network of channels designed to maintain sufficient oxygen and nutrient levels to keep the constructed tissues alive for 30 days.

Winston and WFIRM used different 3D-printed designs and different materials to produce live tissues that harbored cell types found in human livers.

Lynn Harper, challenge administrator at NASAs Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, said: The value of an artificial tissue depends entirely on how well it mimics what happens in the body.

The requirements are precise and vary from organ to organ, making the task extremely exacting and complex. The research resulting from this NASA challenge represents a benchmark, a well-documented foundation to build the next advance upon.

If the innovation does go to the ISS, astronauts can study how radiation exposure affects the human body, document organ function in microgravity and develop strategies to minimize damage to healthy cells while living or working in space.

When the tissue is grown in space, this could facilitate the creation of even larger and more complex engineered tissues that look and function more like those in the human body, compared to tissues constructed on Earth.

If the research makes it to the station, the combination of improved vasculature and microgravity could yield the next set of advances for tissue engineering on Earth and biomanufacturing in space.
The idea of babies being born in space might sound more like the work of science fiction.

But it could soon become a reality after a study found freeze-dried mouse sperm remained viable after being on the International Space Station (ISS) for almost six years.

Not only did radiation not affect the sperm's DNA or its ability to produce healthy 'space pups', scientists estimate it could actually be preserved in space for more than 200 years without damage.

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Discovery: A study by researchers in Japan found that freeze-dried mouse sperm remained viable after being on the International Space Station (ISS) for almost six years

'Space pups: The radiation did not affect the sperm's DNA or its ability to produce healthy mice offspring. The sperm were injected into fresh ovary cells back on Earth (pictured)

HOW DOES RADIATION AFFECT SPERM IN SPACE? To test whether radiation irreparably damages sperm, a study dispatched samples of freeze-dried mouse sperm to be stored on the International Space Station for almost six years. The sperm samples were preserved in small capsules sealed at a temperature of - 22F (- 30C). Scientists have long thought that exposure to space radiation from solar winds and cosmic rays could damage the DNA of sperm cells and lead to mutations being passed down to offspring. However, a study by researchers at the University of Yamanashi in Japan found that long-term space travel did not damage the DNA of the space-preserved samples, compared with the control samples. Not only did radiation not affect the sperm's DNA or its ability to produce healthy 'space pups', scientists estimate it could actually be preserved in space for more than 200 years without damage. Advertisement

'The space radiation did not affect sperm DNA or fertility after preservation on ISS, and many genetically normal offspring were obtained without reducing the success rate compared to the ground-preserved control,' researchers at the University of Yamanashi in Japan said.

The study allays long-held concerns that space radiation exposure could damage the DNA of cells and lead to mutations being passed down to offspring.

A lack of freezers on the ISS has always prevented long-term research into the area, while previous studies on Earth have been unable to replicate space radiation from solar wind and cosmic rays.

To overcome the problem, lead author Sayaka Wakayama and her colleagues freeze-dried sperm samples from 12 mice and sealed them in small capsules, which were then transported to the ISS without the need for a freezer.

Some of the samples were returned to Earth after nine months to confirm the experiment was working, while two more batches remained on the ISS for almost three years or nearly six, respectively.

Once back on Earth, scientists tested to see how much radiation the samples had absorbed, while also examining if there had been damage to the sperm nuclei.

They found that the stint in space, whether three years or six, did not lead to DNA damage to the freeze-dried sperm.

Researchers also rehydrated the sperm cells, injected them into fresh ovary cells, and transferred these to female mice, resulting in the birth of healthy pups.

Using RNA sequencing, they determined that there were no gene expression differences between the 'space pups' and controls born from sperm preserved on Earth.

Frozen: Scientists freeze-dried sperm samples from 12 mice and sealed them in small capsules (pictured) at - 22F (- 30C). They were transported to the ISS without the need for a freezer

Researchers injected the sperm cells into fresh ovary cells, and transferred these to female mice, resulting in the birth of healthy pups. This picture shows the embryos from the sperm

In orbit: The International Space Station is a $100 billion (80 billion) science and engineering laboratory that orbits 250 miles (400 km) above Earth

'We obtained many healthy "space pup" offspring from space-preserved spermatozoa with the same success rate as the ground controls,' the authors said.

'These space pups did not show any differences compared to the ground control pups, and their next generation also had no abnormalities.'

Looking ahead to the future, Wakayama and her colleagues said research such as theirs was 'important for mankind to progress into the space age'.

They suggested that in the far future underground storage on the moon, such as in lava tubes, could be one of the best places to preserve sperm for prolonged periods because of the protection from space radiation and any disasters on Earth.

'In the future, when the time comes to migrate to other planets, we will need to maintain the diversity of genetic resources, not only for humans but also for pets and domestic animals,' the authors said.

'For cost and safety reasons, it is likely that stored germ cells will be transported by spaceships rather than by living animals.'

The study is published in the journal Science Advances.
As drones become a bigger part of modern warfare, fighting forces are devising creative ways to disable them.

The U.S. military recently demonstrated a drone interceptor that fires pink 'Silly String'-like streamers at unmanned craft, gumming up their rotors and bringing them crashing down to Earth.

The goal is to devise anti-drone technology that doesn't cause as much collateral damage as explosives, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and would be used in populated areas.

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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently tested out a drone interceptor that fires yarn-like fibers at a drone to disable it, rather than blow it out of the sky with explosives

DARPA began developing the interceptor, known as Counter-Unmanned Air System (C-UAS), four years ago as a means to stop small self-guided unmanned aircraft without the kind of major collateral damage caused by gunfire or explosives.

In a video posted this week, DARPA demonstrated C-UAS at Eglin Air Force Base outside Valparaiso, Florida.

After being launched from a stationary vehicle, the interceptor targeted a drone floating above a field, 'using a newly-developed X band radar that automatically senses and identifies unmanned aerial system threats.'

The interceptor then shot what DARPA calls 'strong, stringy streamers' at the enemy drone's propellers, 'causing loss of propulsion.'

The C-UAS launches a volley of stringy pink streamers at the drone, tying up its rotors and causing a 'loss of propulsion'

Though video of the demo only shows the action from a distance, it's still possible to see the drone enveloped in a pink cloud before plummeting to the ground.

It's not clear what the 'streamers' are made of, but DARPA indicated the interceptors are low-cost and reusable and can be launched en masse to deal with multiple threats.

Conventional drone interceptors are armed with explosives, but C-UAS could be used to protect a military convoy moving through a populated area with less risk.

The drone plummets to Earth without the extensive collateral damage caused by typical explosive drone interceptors

'Because we were focusing on protecting mobile assets, the program emphasized solutions with a small footprint in terms of size, weight, and power,' said Gregory Avicola, director of DARPA's Mobile Force Protection program. 'This also allows for more affordable systems and less operators.'

The device was developed by Dynetics, a military contractor that also recently unveiled Enduring Shield, a mobile ground-based weapon system designed to defeat 'unmanned aircraft systems, cruise missiles, and rockets, artillery and mortars.'

The interceptor is intended to be launched from the back of small, fast-moving vehicle

The Mobile Forces Protection program, which DARPA has concluded, demonstrated other non-explosive drone interceptors at Eglin AFB, but did not share details or footage.

In May, a UN report indicated autonomous drones may have attacked humans for the first time ever last year during a skirmish between the Libyan government and rebel forces.

Kargu-2 quadcopter drones were reportedly deployed in March 2020, using their on-board cameras and AI to find and target enemies retreating from Tripoli.

The drones then slammed kamikaze-style into the combatants and detonated their explosive charge on impact.

No deaths were confirmed but similar systems have caused 'significant casualties' in other encounters, according to the report, from the United Nations Security Council's Panel of Experts on Libya.
A nearly 7,000-year-old clay impression was discovered in Israel, a seal that may have been used for a variety of reasons, including signing for deliveries.

The findings, published last month in Levant, note that the seal was discovered between 2004 and 2007, along with approximately 150 other pieces, including pottery and clay, in Israel's Beit She'an Valley.

In addition to signing and sealing deliveries, it could also have been used to close silos or barndoors.

It is the first evidence of any of those uses, according to a statement from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

When barndoors were opened, the seal would break, providing a sign that someone had been in there.

'Even today, similar types of sealing are used to prevent tampering and theft,' said one of the study's co-authors, HU's professor Yosef Garfinkel, in the statement.

A nearly 7,000-year-old seal was discovered in Israel, which could have been used for a variety of reasons, including signing for deliveries

The seal was discovered between 2004 and 2007, along with approximately 150 others, in Israel's Beit She'an Valley

Pottery and clay also were found at the excavation site, researchers said

The one-centimeter stamp sealing discovered in Tel Tsaf (pictured)

The seal was discovered between 2004 and 2007, along with approximately 150 other pieces, including pottery and clay, in Israel's Beit She'an Valley

'It turns out that this was already in use 7,000 years ago by land owners and local administrators to protect their property.'

This seal had 'two different geometric stamps on it and gives credence to 'the rise of administrative practices in the Levant during the protohistoric periods,' the authors wrote in the study's abstract.

Many ancient seals found in the First Temple Jerusalem that date back nearly 2,600 years had a personal name or Biblical figure.

But this seal is from an era when writing was not yet in use, placing an importance on the two geometric shapes, perhaps an indication that two people were involved in a transaction, perhaps further away than Israel.

'At this very site we have evidence of contact with peoples from Mesopotamia, Turkey, Egypt and Caucasia,' Garfinkel added.

'There is no prehistoric site anywhere in the Middle East that reveals evidence of such long-distance trade in exotic items as what we found at this particular site.'

Amazingly, the one-centimeter seal was found in 'great condition' because of the dry climate in the Beit She'an valley.

After analyzing the seal, the researchers determined it likely came from at least 6 miles away, Live Science reported.

In addition to the seal, there were clues at the excavation site the area was once home to people of 'considerable wealth,' building stores full of ingredients and materials.

Further research is needed to determine how influential the area was and whether people came from a great distance to visit it.

'We hope that continued excavations at Tel Tsaf and other places from the same time period will yield additional evidence to help us understand the impact of a regional authority in the southern Levant,' Garfinkel noted.
Mosquitoes infected with a unique bacteria have led to a staggering drop in dengue fever in a region of Indonesia, researchers say.

Between 2017 and 2020, scientists in Yogyakarta, Java, released millions of mosquitoes injected with Wolbachia, a bacterium that prevents them from transmitting the dengue virus.

The team found that infections were 77 percent lower in treated neighborhoods, compared to areas not exposed to the infected insects.

Dengue, a tropical virus that causes high fever and aches, infects some 400 million people each year and kills up to 25,000.

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Dengue, a tropical virus that causes high fever and aches, infects some 400 million people each year and kills up to 25,000. It is carried by Aedes aegypti, a mosquito that thrives in tropical climates and breeds in stagnant water

In a trial program coordinated by the World Mosquito Program, mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia were released into 12 randomly selected areas in Yogyakarta, a city of more than 300,000, while twelve other neighborhoods were selected as controls.

In a study published this week in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers confirmed dengue was diagnosed in just 2.3 percent of people living in neighborhoods where the modified mosquitoes had been released, compared to 9.4 percent of those in the control districts.

The study, which involved more than 8,000 individuals, also found dengue cases requiring hospitalization were reduced by 86 percent in the treated areas.

'This is a great success for the people of Yogyakarta,' said co-author Adi Utarini, a public health researcher at the University of Gadjah Mada. 'Indonesia has more than 7 million dengue cases every year. The trial success allows us to expand our work across the entire city of Yogyakarta and into neighboring urban areas.'

More than 8,000 residents were tested in a total of 24 neighborhoods in Yogyakarta, Java. Not only were dengue rates 77 percent lower in the areas where the infected mosquitos were infected, but cases requiring hospitalization were 86 percent lower

Scientists in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, infected mosquitoes with Wolbachia, a bacterium that prevents them from transmitting dengue fever. Neighborhoods where the infected insects were released reported 77 percent fewer cases

The bacteria also affect reproduction, ensuring the insects only have Wolbachia-infected offspring.

The result is a growing population of insects that don't pass on the virusUtarini said she could see a day when cities in Indonesia were free of the virus.

BUGGING OUT: THE THREAT OF DENGUE FEVER Dengue is a viral infection spread by mosquitoes. It is caught by people visiting or living in Asia, the Caribbean, and North, South or Central America. Mosquitoes in the UK do not spread the virus. In most cases, the infection is mild and passes in around a week. Symptoms usually include: Fever

Severe headache

Pain behind the eyes

Muscle and joint pain

Nausea and vomiting

Widespread rash

Abdominal pain

Loss of appetite There is no cure or specific treatment. Patients can relieve their symptoms via painkillers, staying hydrated and resting. In rare cases, dengue symptoms can develop into severe dengue. Elderly patients, or those with other medical conditions, are most at risk. Severe dengue fever symptoms can include: Severe skin bleeding with spots of blood on and under the skin

Blood in the urine and stools

Respiratory distress - when the lungs cannot provide the vital organs with enough oxygen

Organ failure

Changes in mental state and unconsciousness

Dangerously low blood pressure Severe dengue is usually treated via a blood and platelet transfusion, IV fluids for rehydration and oxygen therapy if levels are low. Advertisement

Transmitted by mosquitoes, dengue fever infects nearly 400 million people annually, according to the World Health Organization, mostly in tropical parts of the developing world.

In Indonesia alone there are more than 7 million cases each year.

The disease causes high fever, severe headaches and joint pain and can result in lethal complications that kill up to 25,000 people every year.

WHO reports cases of dengue have spiked 30-fold in the past 50 years as humans encroach into mosquito habitats and contribute to climate change.

A 2018 trial with Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes in Australia also saw rates of dengue plummet, but the effects were not compared to control areas.

A subsequent test in Vinh Luong, Vietnam, led to an 86 percent decline in dengue compared to a nearby resort town.

Scientists have called the Yogyakarta experiment a 'gold standard' trial.

'This is the result we've been waiting for,' Scott O'Neill a microbiologist and director of the World Mosquito Program, said in 2020, when the results were first tallied.

'We have evidence our Wolbachia method is safe, sustainable and reduces incidence of dengue.'

The Indonesian trial ended a few months early because of the coronavirus pandemic, but O'Neill said the results were encouraging enough that the strategy should start being deployed 'worldwide across large urban populations.'

Wolbachia occurs naturally in around 60 percent of all insect species, including dragonflies, fruit flies and moths.

Scientists first discovered it in mosquitoes living in the drainage system beneath Harvard University in the 1920s.

Aedes aegypti, the mosquito which carries dengue, thrives in tropical climates and breeds in stagnant water.

It also carries yellow fever, Zika and the chikungunya virus.

Typically, countries plagued by the pests spray insecticide, but this only keeps them away temporarily and the insects can also develop resistance.

Modifying mosquitoes to combat infectious diseases has become an increasingly popular tactic around the world, but it's not been met with universal acceptance.

In April 2021, residents of the Florida Keys protested plans to release close to a billion gene-hacked Aedes aegypti over a two-year period.

The project, a collaboration between the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District and Oxitec, a British biotech company, aims to reduce the numbers of Aedes aegypti by altering their DNA to pass on a particular protein.

When they mate, the protein ensures female offspring do not survive the next generation.

With fewer females in each subsequent generation, the hope is the overall mosquito population will decline, along with transmission rates of mosquito-borne diseases.

A worker sprays for mosquitoes in Singapore. Insecticides only keep mosquitoes away for a few days and insects can develop resistance

The modified mosquitoes are all male, and Oxitec contends that because only female mosquitoes can bite, the program poses no risk to humans.

But, says Barry Wray of the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition, 'People here in Florida do not consent to the genetically engineered mosquitoes or to being human experiments.'

Dana Perls, food and technology program manager at Friends of the Earth, called the program a 'dark moment in history' and demanded the EPA 'halt this live experiment immediately.'

Other residents say the EPA did not require peer review or preliminary trials for GE mosquitoes before releasing them into the wild.
Journalist-turned-family lawyer Antonia Kidman celebrated a milestone occasion for daughter Lucia Hawley, 23, on Friday.

Antonia, 50, announced on Instagram that her lookalike daughter had graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Sydney.

The younger sister of Hollywood star Nicole Kidman shared a sweet picture of herself with Lucia, who proudly showed off her degree.

'We're so proud of you': On Friday, Nicole Kidman's sister Antonia celebrated her lookalike daughter Lucia Hawley graduating university with a Bachelor of Arts degree

'Congratulations Lou. A big milestone. We're so proud of you,' Antonia wrote.

In the accompanying picture, Lucia smiled while holding her new degree.

Also proudly posing beside her was her stepfather, Antonia's husband Craig Marran.

'Congratulations Lou. A big milestone. We're so proud of you,' Antonia captioned the image

Lucia's father Angus Hawley died in April 2015 in New York from a suspected heart attack at the age of 46.

Antonia and Angus were married for 11 years but split in 2007.

Antonia and Angus shared four children together: Lucia, Hamish, 20, James, 18, and Sybella, 14.

Family: Antonia is a proud mother of six. Antonia and late ex-husband Angus shared four children together: Lucia, 23, Hamish, 20, James, 18, and Sybella, 14. She and husband Craig Marran have two children together: sons Nicholas, 10, and Alexander, eight

After their separation, Antonia married Singaporean-based businessman Craig Marran in April 2010 and they went on to have two children together: sons Nicholas, 10, and Alexander, eight.

Angus was married to Prue Fisher for three years before his death in 2015.

Antonia and her family recently moved back to Sydney, after almost a decade of living in Singapore.

She said in 2017 that balancing six children with a busy career can be 'tricky'.

'There really is no secret,' she told 9Honey of motherhood. 'No matter how many kids you have, it's tricky.'
Rose Byrne is about to get political in her latest role.

The Australian actress, 41, has been cast as New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in upcoming film They Are Us.

Fans will see a different side of the Bridesmaids star as she plays the political leader in the wake of the tragic 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings.

Serious role: Rose Byrne is set to play New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in upcoming film They Are Us

At the time, Ms Ardern was commended for her response to the two consecutive mass shootings. The terrorist attack was carried out by gunman Brenton Tarrant who killed 51 people.

Tarrant entered the Al Noor Mosque as Friday prayers were beginning and opened fire before driving to Linwood Mosque on the other side of the city where he continued shooting.

Tarrant, a white supremacist originally from Australia, was arrested a short time later.

He pleaded guilty to all charges and was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole on August 27 this year.

The film will be directed by New Zealander Andrew Niccol, who has also worked on award-winning films like The Truman Show and Gattaca.

'They Are Us is not so much about the attack but the response to the attackhow an unprecedented act of hate was overcome by an outpouring of love and support,' Andrew told The Hollywood Reporter.

'The film addresses our common humanity, which is why I think it will speak to people around the world. It is an example of how we should respond when theres an attack on our fellow human beings.'

The film follows Arden in the wake of the tragic 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings. At the time, Ms Ardern was commended for her response to the two consecutive mass shootings. The terrorist attack was carried out by gunman Brenton Tarrant who killed 51 people

Inspirational leader: Ms Ardern is pictured leaving Friday prayers at Hagley Park in Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019

Rose, who hails from Balmain in New South Wales, began acting at age 13 before making it big in Hollywood.

In 2014, she starred in the blockbuster movie Neighbours, with Seth Rogen and Zac Efron and was announced as the face of Oroton - which went into voluntary administration last year.

She also appeared alongside Oprah Winfrey in the 2017 TV film The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Last year she returned to live in Australia with her husband Bobby Cannavale and their two sons, Rocco, five, and Rafa, three.

The family enjoyed a brief stay in the coastal town of Byron Bay as Bobby filmed his part in the much-anticipated series, Nine Perfect Strangers, produced by Nicole Kidman.

They have since moved to Sydney and are often spotted out and about in the Eastern Suburbs.
The judges of MasterChef Australia were absolutely floored by a delicious pastry dish crafted by contestant Tommy on Thursday night's episode.

Tommy stepped up to the plate as the contestants were faced with a pastry challenge at the fancy Lune Croissanterie in Melbourne's Fitzroy.

Tommy, Depinder, Kishwar and Linda each had the opportunity to cook to gain guaranteed immunity from this week's elimination.

'I loved everything about it': The judges of MasterChef Australia were absolutely floored by a delicious pastry dish crafted by contestant Tommy on Thursday night's episode

The aspiring chefs had an open pantry and 90 minutes to choose and create a pastry dish that aligned with the Lune Croissanterie menu.

After picking from eight unique pastry shapes, the contestants then chose a base for their dish and were given proved, shaped dough ready to bake and craft.

The contestant who won the challenge would not only gain immunity, but would also have their creation added to the Lune Lab menu as well.

Stepping up to the plate: The aspiring chefs had an open pantry and 90 minutes to choose and create a pastry dish that aligned with the Lune Croissanterie menu

As the challenge began, the contestants scrambled for different shapes, with Kishwar selecting a croissant, Linda choosing a vol-au-vent, Depinder opting for a half pipe and Tommy going for a Danish.

The owner of Lune Croissanterie, Kate Reid, preemptively told the chefs that their pastries needed to have 'balance' and not be engulfed by the soft, buttery taste.

Tommy ended up creating a pastry inspired by banh mi - a staple of his Vietnamese background - which proved to be a roaring success.

Perfection: Tommy chose a Danish shape and created a Banh mi-inspired pastry, which proved to be a roaring success with the judges, including Lune Croissanterie owner Kate Reid

'This is the essence of what a Lune Lab dish is,' said Kate. 'Its delicious, its perfectly well balanced. I loved everything about it.'

'I couldnt fault any of it,' remarked judge Andy Allen, with Jock Zonfrillo adding that Tommy was a 'contender today'.

Tommy won the challenge, had his dish added to the Lune menu and - most importantly - made sure he was safe from this week's elimination.
Tom Girardi, the estranged husband of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Erika Jayne, spoke in a virtual court hearing on Wednesday centered around a conservatorship overseen by his brother Robert Girardi.

According to US Weekly, the Colorado native, 82, said in the Los Angeles County Superior Court hearing: 'Obviously, I disagree with the conservatorship altogether', before going on to call for the order to be dissolved.

The action came into place after Tom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and dementia in March amid a litany of legal problems.

During the latest hearing, he called for further probing of the currently-temporary conservatorship, in which his brother controls his financial, heath and day-to-day life.

The latest: Tom Girardi, 82, the estranged husband of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Erika Jayne, 49, spoke in a virtual court hearing on Wednesday centered around a conservatorship led by his brother Robert Girardi

US Weekly reports Tom, told the court: 'I think that we should put together the reasons why the conservatorship should be dissolved, and then we'll address it, address the court. Right now, I have nothing to say to the court.'

In the hearing, the judge ruled that Robert Girardi should oversee his brother's dealings, about eight months after Erika, 49, issued a statement following her divorce filing after 21 years of marriage last November.

'After much consideration, I have decided to end my marriage to Tom Girardi,' she said. 'This is not a step taken lightly or easily. I have great love and respect for Tom and for our years and the lives we built together.

'It is my absolute wish to proceed through this process with respect and with the privacy that both Tom and I deserve. I request others give us that privacy as well.'

Details: Girardi said in the Los Angeles County Superior Court hearing, 'Obviously, I disagree with the conservatorship altogether,' according to US Weekly

The latest news came amid a report from The Blast about the hearing, as Tom's court-appointed lawyer said in legal docs that he 'could not fully comprehend the nature of the proceedings.'

Tom didn't have any problems with his brother 'taking care of him and managing his finances,' said the lawyer, noting that he replied to the questions with short affirmative answers, the outlet reported.

Court docs contained medical records that stated that Tom 'lacks the capacity to give informed medical consent and suffers from dementia.'

The couple rose to fame on Bravo's Real Housewives of Beverly Hills

On Wednesday's edition of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, filmed in early November, Erika, who married Tom in 2000, told her castmates that she had 'filed for divorce this morning.'

In addition to the split, Tom faces a number of other legal situations, including bankruptcy and multiple civil lawsuits from his former clients.

In December, both Erika and Tom faced a $2 million class action lawsuit claiming fraud and embezzlement from the firm Edelson PC in connection with the 2018 Lion Air Flight 610 crash, in which all 189 people onboard died.

Problems: In addition to the split, Tom Girardi faces a number of other legal situations, including bankruptcy and multiple civil lawsuits from his former clients

They were sued for allegedly embezzling funds meant for families of victims.

Tom's license to practice law in California was revoked in March when he also was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease the same month.

Edelson PC reps said in court docs the divorce was orchestrated to 'fraudulently protect Tom and Erika's money' as they're 'on the verge of financial collapse.'

Tom was subsequently sued by Wells Fargo Vendor Financial Services over an unpaid $882,715 balance.

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills airs on Bravo Wednesdays at 8/7c.
An old interview with Kourtney Kardashian from 2016 has gone viral thanks to TikTok.

During the interview, which was conducted via satellite with Australia's Today Extra, Kourtney went quiet and starting ignoring host David Campbell after being questioned about her sister Kim's Paris robbery.

A short clip of the awkward moment has now made its way to TikTok, where it's racked up 3.5 million views.

Remember this? An old interview with Kourtney Kardashian from 2016 has gone viral thanks to TikTok

After David asked, 'How is Kim going?', Kourtney began talking to staff behind the scenes, ignoring him and his co-host Sonia Kruger.

She then became totally still - minus the occasional blink - leading fans on TikTok to believe she was trying to make it appear as though the satellite link had frozen.

'Hello Kourtney, have we lost you?' David asked, as Sonia added: 'Alright. It looks like Kourtney doesn't really want to go there with that question.'

Who? During the interview, which was conducted via satellite with Australia's Today Extra, Kourtney went quiet and starting ignoring host David Campbell after being questioned about her sister Kim's Paris robbery

David was less than impressed by the loss of communication, saying: 'I think she's totally blanking me on that question!'

Sonia tried to defend Kourtney, explaining it may have been a PR issue behind the scenes, before David blurted out: 'She could just say her sister is fine!'

'I mean, I think we just said that you know we're very concerned and we were onside and we hoped that everyone's fine, which I still do,' he continued.

Despite the interview cutting short, the Today Extra hosts still plugged her Manuka Doctor skincare range that she was promoting at the time.

Nice try! She became totally still - minus the occasional blink - leading fans on TikTok to believe she was trying to make it appear as though the satellite link had frozen

After returning from a commercial break, David apologised on air to the mother of three, before continuing with the interview.

'Something happened in the studio and we sort of lost contact with Kourtney. We are happy to say she's still here,' he explained, looking a little embarrassed.

'I'm sorry about what just happened there. Can we ask, first of all, is everything okay where you are right now?'

Kourtney went on to explain she had just experienced a 'bad connection'.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Co) appeared on the Victory Channel's FlashPoint to respond to questions from host Gene Bailey regarding the border situation, H.R. 1, and how Christians should respond to these.

The border crisis, Boebert said, was under control during the Trump administration, but after the switch in administrations, the Border Patrol agents she's spoken to in McAllen, Texas, have said that they've been overrun by illegal immigrants.

Boebert said that the agents are now underfunded and understaffed, and that they are unable to control the issue that has been exacerbated by Biden's policies.

When Boebert moved on to Kamala Harris' answer, she brought attention to Harris' lie that she had visited the border. When Harris was called out on it, she just laughed at the situation, claiming that she had never even traveled to Europe. Considering Harris's remarks, Boebert believes that she has no plans to visit these holding facilities, where there are thousands of children "wrapped in stuff like baked potatoes," or travel to the HHS facilities where they are shuttling "illegal aliens" out by the busload and even sending them to local airports all over the United States.

"Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have been absent while the American people are suffering," she said.

Contrasting the two administrations, Boebert noted that one year ago under President Trump, there were 1400 unaccompanied minors, being kept at the border. Now, there are 22,000 unaccompanied minors, being kept in the United States' care at the border. In President Trump's final month in office, CBP let 18 illegal immigrants into the United States but in April, the Biden Administration allowed over 26,000 illegal aliens into the neighborhoods.

"These illegals aren't just going to South Texas and Arizona. I was down there. I saw them flying and being bused to states all across America for American communities struggling with increased gangs and drugs," she argued. "This is a crisis for the ranchers in Texas who regularly have their property, damaged, and their safety threatened by these aliens. It's a crisis but like I said, Jean for Joe Biden and Katelyn Kamala, this is absolutely mission accomplished."

What's at stake with Voter H.R. 1

Gene Bailey then turned the conversation to Boebert's tweet regarding voter HR 1 and asked her to clarify what she meant.

Under HR one, she explained, politicians who run for office on taxpayer-funded campaigns, would have their campaigns matched dollar for dollar.

"Six to one by your tax dollars. This is taxpayer funded politicians. It is very swampy. It's very corrupt, and it should not take place in American politics," she said.

"This is a DC takeover of our federal elections," she added. "This is a very very corrupt system that they want to put in place and make permanent for our federal elections and hopes that they will never lose another election, again, but I think the American people are seeing through this, especially with the defeat of HR one in the Congress, and we will take back the Congress in 2022."

Christians as battle troops on the ground

Agreeing that "America is waking up," Bailey asked the representative what she wants to say to Christian conservatives.

"Well, we know that this is not a battle between people. This is very much a spiritual battle...it's flesh and blood so we absolutely need prayer warriors in this on the frontlines praying. But as a Christian, I need you to get involved," she said.

"We need Christians getting involved at every level. We need you, making phone calls. Those phone calls to your representatives and to your senators, absolutely matter," she continued.

She also encouraged "good, godly Christian leaders" to run in school board elections, where curriculums are determined for the sake of the children, and to run for government office whenever possible.

"So we need Christians involved in every area: praying, running, helping other candidates, and donating their time and their effort as well. That absolutely matters and I believe that everyone who invests in campaigns all across the nation are actually sowing into the very plan that God has for this nation," she said.

Watch FlashPoint below to hear Bailey and Boebert's talk on the matter.
She is an international modeling sensation.

And Candice Swanepoel put her credentials on display while stepping out in sunny New York City this Thursday.

The 32-year-old Victoria's Secret Angel showed off her chiseled midriff in a frilly off-white crop top that gave off a summer vibe.

Modeling sensation: Candice Swanepoel put her credentials on display while stepping out in sunny New York City this Thursday

She teamed her top with a pair of fashionably faded high-waisted jeans that emphasized her endless legs as she pounded the pavement.

Sweeping her blonde hair into a high ponytail, the South African fashionista warded off the rays with a pair of white-rimmed purple shades.

The Mooi River-born supermodel accessorized with a large black handbag and rounded off her ensemble with white sneakers.

Candice could be seen bringing a west coast vibe back east as she tipped back a green juice during her latest leggy outing.

Candice was reportedly scouted at a flea market in Durban during her teen years and then rose to fame as a Victoria's Secret Angel in adult life.

The leggy Afrikaner started her swimwear line Tropic Of C back in 2018 and has been busily plugging it on social media ever since.

Feel the heat: The 32-year-old Victoria's Secret Angel showed off her chiseled midriff in a frilly off-white crop top that gave off a summer vibe

Legs for days: She teamed her top with a pair of fashionably faded high-waisted jeans that emphasized her endless legs as she pounded the pavement

Candice and Brazilian model Hermann Nicoli share two sons - Anacan, four, and Ariel, two - but she said she was single on an Instagram Q&A last year.

The couple were reportedly together for 12 years before their purported split last year, and she picked up Portuguese during their relationship.

Earlier this week Candice swung by her Instagram to flash the flesh in a peekaboo one-piece swimsuit as she commemorated World Oceans Day.

'The ocean is a spiritual place for me, but most importantly it is our life source, supporting us and every organism on earth, we still have time to protect her .... time to be #generation #regeneration,' she urged in her caption.
Nikki Glaser will be the host of a new HBO Max dating show about women looking for love amongst a group of 'nice guys' and 'FBoys', FBoy Island.

FBoy Island will see three women attempting to find lasting love amongst a group of 24 men, half of whom are self-described 'nice guys' and the other half admitted 'FBoys' who are in it for the cash.

Created by Elan Gale, a former long-time producer on The Bachelor, the 10-episode series will begin streaming this summer, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

'Hosting this show was a true dream': Nikki Glaser will be the host of a new HBO Max dating show about women looking for love amongst a group of 'nice guys' and 'FBoys', FBoy Island

A play off the popular slang term 'f**kboy', which describes a man who engages in multiple casual sexual relations, the show is a social experiment seeking to find whether or not FBoys can be reformed, or as the saying goes, nice guys always finish last.

Everyone's true intentions, as well as who the women end up selecting, will be revealed during the finale.

In addition to Elan, who has extensive experience in the dating show genre as a former Bachelor producer, Love Is Blind and Married At First Sight: The First Year producer Sam Dean will be showrunner.

In a statement about her new role, Nikki revealed she inadvertently believed she was being cast as one of the women looking for love when she got the call about the job.

Oh boy! FBoy Island will see three women attempting to find lasting love within a group of 24 men, half of whom are self-described 'nice guys' and the other half admitted 'FBoys' who are in it for the cash

'When I first got the call to be a part of a reality dating show called FBoy Island, I said yes immediately. Then I realized they weren't asking me to be one of the girls looking for love. That is not a joke; it was embarrassing,' Nikki said.

'But as a massive fan of this genre, hosting this show was a true dream. I look forward to hosting for the next 43 seasons.

'I knew going into it that a show created and produced by the people behind my two favorite shows (The Bachelor and Love Is Blind) was going to be insanely good, but this one exceeded my expectations. I already know what happens and I can't wait to watch it every week.'

The brains: Elan Gale, a long-time former producer on The Bachelor, is the creator of the new HBO Max show

'This is an incredibly entertaining dating show full of twists and turns that will leave the audience constantly guessing,' the executive vice president of non-fiction and live-action family at HBO Max, Jennifer O'Connell, said in a statement.

'We are especially excited for viewers to watch these strong women, guided by the hilarious Nikki Glaser, team together and empower each other to say "F-Boy, F-Bye,"' head of original content, Sarah Aubrey, said.

An actress, writer, and comedienne, Nikki also has presenting experience as the host of last month's MTV Movie & TV Awards.

Nikki's many acting credits include roles in Inside Amy Schumer, the film Trainwreck, I Feel Pretty, and her television series, You Up with Nikki Glaser.

As a writer, she has worked on shows including Not Safe with Nikki Glaser, The Degenerates, and Funny as Hell.

Elan, meanwhile, worked as both a producer and executive producer on the hit ABC series The Bachelor. The show recently landed back in headlines following the departure of long-time host Chris Harrison.
Actor Rodger Corser has landed on his feet after Channel Nine chose not to renew Doctor Doctor for a sixth season.

Less than 24 hours after the network pulled the plug on the drama series, Rodger showed up on morning show Today Extra as a guest co-host on Friday.

The 48-year-old was filling in for David Campbell, who had earlier stepped in for Karl Stefanovic on the Today show.

Surprise! Actor Rodger Corser has landed on his feet after Nine chose not to renew Doctor Doctor for a sixth season. Less than 24 hours after the network pulled the plug on the drama series, Rodger showed up on Today Extra as a guest co-host. Pictured with Belinda Russell

His appearance wasn't announced beforehand, which suggests it may have been a last-minute decision.

Usually when David is filling in for Karl on Today, he is replaced on Today Extra by Richard Wilkins.

However, Richard took the day off because he was up late the night before at the Gold Dinner charity event at Sydney Airport.

Coincidentally, Karl also took Friday off because he was emcee of the Gold Dinner, which raised money for the Sydney Children's Hospitals Foundation.

Fun: Rodger's guest-presenting role was teased at the end of the Today show shortly after 9am. Host Allison Langdon (right, with David Campbell) unexpectedly clutched her stomach and pretended she was unwell, before declaring: 'There's a doctor in the house!'

Rodger's guest-presenting role was teased at the end of the Today show shortly after 9am.

Host Allison Langdon unexpectedly clutched her stomach and pretended she was unwell, before declaring: 'There's a doctor in the house!'

The broadcast then crossed to the Today Extra studio, where co-anchor Belinda Russell proudly introduced Rodger to viewers.

'Ally, we have a doctor right here': The broadcast then crossed to the Today Extra studio, where co-anchor Belinda Russell proudly introduced Rodger to viewers

'Ally, we have a doctor right here,' she said.

Back in the Today studio, David feigned annoyance over his handsome replacement, saying: 'I said get someone ugly.'

Rodger then thanked Nine for the opportunity and addressed Doctor Doctor's axing.

'I would like to thank Channel Nine for the actor retraining program,' he joked. 'That's what happens when your show has been... well, not cancelled, but not renewed.'

New role: 'I would like to thank Channel Nine for the actor retraining program,' he joked. 'That's what happens when your show has been um - well, not cancelled, but not renewed'

Nine confirmed on Thursday that Doctor Doctor - starring Rodger as heart surgeon Hugh Knight - would come to an end after its current fifth season.

The program airs on Nine on Wednesday nights, with only two episodes remaining.

The show performed well in the ratings, averaging between 700,000 and 800,000 viewers in the first season.

The May 26 episode of the current season had a decent 784,000 viewers, including encore and BVOD numbers.
Toni Collette is set to take on one of her darkest roles yet in the upcoming HBO Max series The Staircase.

And on Thursday, the 48-year-old Australian actress was pictured on the Atlanta, Georgia set of the show, in the character of murder victim Kathleen Peterson, who was notoriously killed by her husband Michael Peterson in 2001.

Toni sported a neck brace and a clear shield, which appeared to be used in between takes to keep everyone covid safe on set.

Action: Toni Collette was seen filming scenes for HBO Max's drama series The Staircase in Atlanta, Georgia on Thursday. She plays murder victim Kathleen Peterson, who was notoriously killed by her husband Michael Peterson in 2001

She wore a blue blazer and skirt with a pink top underneath and a pearl necklace.

Despite the serious nature of the show, Toni appeared to crack a smile as she walked around.

The eight-episode series has been in development for two years and is based on the 2004 docuseries of the same name, which was updated with new episodes in 2018, reports Variety.

Chilling: Toni sported a neck brace and a clear shield, which appeared to be used in between takes to keep everyone covid safe on set

The show initially premiered on Canal+ before it moved to Netflix, where it received widespread attention and garnered critical praise.

It is also inspired by various books and reports about the case of Michael Peterson, who will be played by Colin Firth.

The now 77-year-old author claimed that his spouse died after falling down the stairs at their home in North Carolina, although police suspected that he had killed her and covered up his evidence.

Controversial: The new show is inspired by various books and reports about the case of Michael Peterson (pictured), who will be played by Colin Firth. The now 77-year-old author claimed that his spouse died after falling down the stairs at their home in North Carolina, although police suspected that he had killed her and covered up his evidence

He was eventually convicted of murder, although his sentence was later reduced to voluntary manslaughter.

Meanwhile, acclaimed actress Toni has been focused on streaming content recently, having appeared in the 2019 Netflix limited series Unbelievable and the 2021 outer space drama Stowaway, which launched on the platform earlier this month.

She will also appear in the upcoming drama Pieces of Her for the streamer.

The long-time theatrical star first made a splash on the small screen with her Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning work on the Showtime series United States of Tara.
They welcomed their third daughter, Sunday, four months ago.

And proud parents Grant and Chezzi Denyer have just celebrated their first trip as a family of five.

Posting to their Instagram accounts, the TV presenter, 43, and his wife, 41, shared sweet moments from their trip to snowy Mount Panorama with daughters Sailor, 10, and Scout, five.

Making memories! Grant and Chezzi Denyer have shared sweet moments from their snow trip to Mount Panorama with their daughters Sailor, 10, and Scout, five, and four-month-old Sunday

In one video, Grant is seen teasing his daughters as they throw snowballs at him.

'I bet you can't hit me from over here,' he cheekily quipped in the clips.

The sisters appear to be amused as they peg snowballs at their dad while dressed in their warm robes and a furry onesie.

The doting dad also filmed scenes in the car while on their road trip towards Bathurst, in which his daughter is excited to see snow for the very first time.

All rugged-up! The sisters appear to be amused as they peg their ice balls as their dad, while dressed in their warm robes and a furry onesie

En route! The doting dad also filmed scenes in the car while on their road trip towards Bathurst, in which his daughter is excited to see snow for the very first time

Do you want to build a snowman? Chezzi also showed off the family's crafty skills by sharing a picture of a snow man they built in between time on the slopes

Chezzi also showed off the family's crafty skills by sharing a picture of a snowman they built in between time on the slopes.

'Spotted Olaf today... his nose was much bigger than I was expecting,' she captioned the photo.

Baby's first trip! The trip is a welcome break for the family, who welcomed new sister and daughter Sunday, four months ago. Pictured, the new parents and baby Sunday

The trip is a welcome break for the family, who welcomed new sister and daughter Sunday, four months ago.

Chezzi gave birth to the little one on February 10, and at the time she said: 'I never thought my heart could feel so full!'

The couple - who married in 2010 - are also parents to daughters Sailor, 10, and Scout, five.
They shot to stardom on the 2020 series of Love Island.

And twins Jess and Eve Gale made sure they remained the centre of attention on Thursday as they both put on leggy displays in minuscule shorts for dinner at Mr Chow in Knightsbridge.

Jess, 22, flaunted her toned legs in faux leather bottoms which skimmed her peachy posterior while her sister left little to the imagination in a plunging blazer dress and matching bottoms.

Turn heads: Twins Jess and Eve Gale both put on leggy displays on Thursday in minuscule shorts as they headed for dinner at Mr Chow in Knightsbridge

Jess also rocked a semi-sheer top which revealed her nude bra underneath.

She boosted her height with Perspex heels and draped a Gucci handbag over her shoulder.

The reality star swept her caramel tresses up in a voluminous bun and framed her visage with her fringe and bronzed make-up.

Meanwhile Eve showed off her ample assets in a white faux leather blazer which she also paired with clear heels.

Wow: Jess, 22, flaunted her toned legs in faux leather bottoms which skimmed her peachy posterior while her sister rocked a plunging blazer dress and matching bottoms

Leave little to the imagination: Jess also rocked a semi-sheer top which revealed her nude bra underneath

She clutched a Louis Vuitton handbag and styled her highlighted locks in a straight hairdo.

The star rounded off the look with full coverage make-up as she was seen entering the London restaurant.

Eve and Jess were just two of many celebrities who jetted to Dubai throughout the pandemic, as they visited the sun-soaked city in December.

They joined many other Love Islanders including Joanna Chimonides, Hayley Hughes and Francesca Allen.

Expensive taste: She boosted her height with Perspex heels and draped a Gucci handbag over her shoulder

Busty: Meanwhile Eve showed off her ample assets in a white faux leather blazer which she also paired with clear heels

Peachy: She posed up a storm outside the eatery

After Dubai joined UK's travel ban list, celebrities then began flocking to Mexico's bars and beaches as it established itself as the next COVID getaway destination.

Many stars insisted their trips were for 'work purposes' after criticism from Home Secretary Priti Patel.

Several influencers were forced to hit back at fans after they were criticised for jetting off on holiday during the global pandemic.

Jess and Eve rose to fame on the first ever series of winter Love Island back in 2020.

While Eve was booted off after less than a week, Jess made it to the final with Ched Uzor - with the pair going their separate ways shortly afterwards.

Arm candy: Eve clutched a Louis Vuitton handbag and styled her highlighted locks in a straight hairdo
They are one of many celebrity couples who frequent the Mayfair eaterie.

And Damien Hirst looked loved-up with girlfriend Sophie Cannell as the pair headed to a dinner date at Scott's Restaurant in London.

The artist, 55, was seen putting on a cosy display with the ballerina, 27, as they walked down the street arm-in-arm.

Happy couple: Damien Hirst looked loved-up with girlfriend Sophie Cannell as the pair headed to a dinner date at Scott's Restaurant in London

Damien cut a casual figure in a printed t-shirt paired with powder blue tracksuit bottoms and trainers.

He wrapped up in a black jacket and woollen hat, paired with a face mask.

Sophie wore a grey hoodie and black leggings with Prada sliders, as she wrapped an arm around her beau.

When the couple's romance first came to light, a friend close to the duo told Richard Eden at the Mail On Sunday that Damien is 'besotted' with the beauty.

Couple: The artist, 55, was seen putting on a cosy display with the ballerina, 27, as they walked down the street arm-in-arm

It was previously been reported that Damien met Sophie at the swanky Chiltern Firehouse, where she used to work as a waitress.

Damien's love life prior to Sophie included his long-term girlfriend Maia Norman, with whom he shares three sons.

The former couple are parents to sons Connor Ojala, 26, Cassius Atticus, 21, and Cyrus Joe, 16.

Although he never married Maia he referred to he as his 'common-law wife'.

After his eldest child Connor's birth the artist spent much of his time in a remote farmhouse near Combe Martin in Devon.
They are now proud parents to their first child, a newborn baby boy.

Both Chris Lane and his wife Lauren Bushnell Lane took to Instagram on Thursday to announce the birth of their son Dutton Walker, born Tuesday in Nashville, Tennessee.

Born at 11:12 a.m., Dutton weighed in at 9 lbs. and measured 19.5 inches long, People reports.

Proud pop: Chris Lane took to Instagram on Thursday to announce the birth of his son Dutton Walker, born Tuesday in Nashville

The country star, 36, shared a lovely video showing him holding his son for the first time.

'Words cant describe the love i feel inside my heart for this little man!' Chris wrote in the caption.

'Thanks for all the prayers,' he added with a prayer hands emoji. 'I will never understand how @laurenlane birthed a 9 pound baby! DUTTON WALKER LANE welcome to the world'

And mama too: Lane's wife Lauren Bushnell Lane also shared her joy on social media

As for Bachelor alum Lauren, 31, she shared a duo of shots  one of her holding her baby, and another of husband Chris with the tot in his arms.

'Dutton Walker Lane born June 8th, 2021. Your dad and I cant get enough of all 9 pounds of you,' her caption began.

'Everyone in the room, including Lauren and me, were shocked we had a 9-pound baby! Not sure where he was hiding in her belly?!' Lane exclaimed to People on Thursday.

'Everyone in the room, including Lauren and me, were shocked we had a 9-pound baby! Not sure where he was hiding in her belly?!' Lane exclaimed on Thursday; seen on Instagram

'Watching Lauren go through the birthing process - from the beginning to the moment she delivered - was the most incredible thing I've ever witnessed. I experienced an emotion I've never felt before.'

True to form, the Big Plans crooner even shared that the experience moved him to make more music.

'I've been waiting to meet Dutton for nine months now, and the easiest way for me personally to describe my feelings and emotions is to write about it!' Lane explained.

True to form: The Big Plans crooner even shared that the experience moved him to make more music; seen in a recent post in which he hinted at the title of the new song

'So naturally, I wrote a song. It's called 'Ain't Even Met You Yet' and sums up how I've been feeling over the last few months. I can't wait to share it with him one day.'

'I've never felt an immediate unconditional love like I now have for Dutton,' Lauren added. 'And going through this experience with Chris has made me love and appreciate him even more  I didn't think that was possible!'

The former reality star won Ben Higgins' heart on season 20 of The Bachelor but their engagement ended in May 2017.

She started dating Chris in 2018, having met him at an event three years earlier, and they tied the knot in a ceremony held in Nashville.

Lauren announced her pregnancy in early December, posting video of her ultrasound to Instagram.

In the caption, she wrote: 'Holding your dads hand, watching you dance around in my belly. Listening to your little heart beat. My new favorite sound. A miracle. New life. Our sweet baby.'

Chris shared the same clip and wrote: 'Prayer works! Hope you look like your Mama.'
She recently boasted of earning more in a month than most Australians get in a year, thanks to her career as a top beauty influencer.

And despite splashing her life across Instagram, it seems Martha Kalifatidis is still unusually shy when it comes to stepping out in public.

The Celebrity Apprentice star, 33, covered her face with an Akubra hat while walking through Sydney Airport on Thursday with her boyfriend, Michael Brunelli.

Why so shy? Martha Kalifatidis bizarrely covered her face and tried to hide from the paparazzi as she touched down in Sydney with her boyfriend, Michael Brunelli, on Thursday

Martha, who was nicknamed 'the Kmart Kim Kardashian' during her time on Married At First Sight, cut a casual figure in a crocodile-themed T-shirt and black pants.

She accessorised with her hat and a Fendi shoulder bag.

Michael also kept things casual in a camo T-shirt, black jeans and a beige cap.

Low-key: Martha, who was nicknamed 'the Kmart Kim Kardashian' during her time on Married At First Sight, cut a casual figure in a crocodile-themed T-shirt and black pants

Martha likes to make a scene whenever she encounters the paparazzi, and often tries to hide from snappers in Bondi Beach, where she and Michael live.

During one memorable sighting, she attempted to go incognito by covering her entire head with a towel.

But awkwardly enough, the photographers were actually waiting for A-list model Lara Worthington and only ran into Martha by chance.

Michael and Martha landed in Sydney after a flight from Cairns on Thursday, after spending a few days in Port Douglas for her birthday.

Romantic getaway: Michael and Martha landed in Sydney after a flight from Cairns on Thursday, after spending a few days in Port Douglas for her birthday

While in Port Douglas, the couple made the most of the warmer weather, with Martha showcasing her curves in a black bikini for an Instagram snap.

She teamed her look with Western-inspired accessorises, including black cowboy boots and her anti-paparazzi Akubra hat.

When it comes to reality TV influencers, Martha is arguably at the top of the ladder.

Yee-haw! While in Port Douglas, the couple made the most of the warmer weather, with Martha showcasing her curves in a black bikini for an Instagram snap

The pint-sized star has amassed more than 600,000 Instagram followers since finding fame two years ago and has racked up endorsement deals with some of Australia's biggest brands in the process.

From beauty and wellness products to activewear, liquor, shopping apps and even ice cream, Martha is making serious money on social media.

On a recent episode of Nine's Celebrity Apprentice, Martha bragged that she's so successful she earns the average yearly wage in just a month.

Success: When it comes to reality TV influencers, Martha is arguably at the top of the ladder

'I'm a beauty influencer who probably makes your yearly wage in a month. So, you should probably take some notes because this is not a fluke,' she said.

While the comment ruffled some feathers, it's easy to see how Martha became so successful by looking at her brand deals over the last two years.

The brunette got her first major endorsement shortly after MAFS when she became one of the new ambassadors for skincare brand Nip + Fab.
James Corden is being urged to end a segment on The Late Late Show titled Spill Your Guts, amid complaints that the segment 'encourages anti-Asian hate'.

The segment, which has featured stars such as Justin Bieber, Kendall Jenner and Chissy Teigen, sees participants presented with the choice of either answering a question - or dining from a plate of culinary selections including many traditional Asian delicacies, which are often dubbed 'gross' or 'disgusting'.

TikTok user Kim Saira, 24, launched the Change.org petition titled: 'Remove "Spill Your Guts" Segment On The Late Late Show With James Corden', which has garnered more than 13,000 signatures calling for the host to halt the segment.

After the petition gained traction, Kim took to TikTok to insist she did not want Corden, 42, 'cancelled' but merely held accountable, as she penned: 'There's a diff between cancel & accountability culture. lets hold him accountable'.

Shock: James Corden is being urged to end a segment on The Late Late Show titled Spill Your Guts, amid complaints that the segment 'encourages anti-Asian hate'

Corden has been seen to slam the featured foods, many of which are traditional Asian delicacies yet are presented as 'disgusting' on the show.

The petition reads: 'The foods that are presented are meant to be "gross," as they are supposed to encourage the guest to answer his questions instead. However, many of the foods that he presents to his guests are actually from different Asian cultures.'

It stated that the host has 'presented foods such as balut, century old eggs, and chicken feet, and which are often regularly eaten by Asian people. During these segments, he's openly called these foods "really disgusting," and "horrific."'

The impassioned message went on: 'In the wake of the constant Asian hate crimes that have continuously been occurring, not only is this segment incredibly culturally offensive and insensitive, but it also encourages anti-Asian racism...

The petition calls for the U.K.-born funnyman to 'completely change the food presented on his show to something else, or remove the segment entirely;' apologize for the segment and takes steps to avoid any further instances; and donate to local Asian American organizations

'So many Asian Americans are consistently bullied and mocked for their native foods, and this segment amplifies and encourages it...

'We are holding James Corden and The Late Late Show accountable for their actions, and perpetual harm this segment causes to Asian American communities...

'At the very least, Asian American communities deserve an apology and this segment to be taken off the air.'

The spike in anti-Asian crimes were pointed out, with critics adding that 'many Asian Americans are consistently bullied and mocked for their native foods, and this segment amplifies and encourages it.'

The petition calls for Corden to 'completely change the food presented on his show to something else, or remove the segment entirely'.

He is also facing calls to apologize for the segment and takes steps to avoid any further instances; and donate to local Asian American organizations.

Details: The segment has past featured stars such as Justin Bieber and Kendall Jenner

Speaking to Today about the scandal, Kim said: 'I noticed that one of the foods that he presented to someone was balut (a fertilized duck egg that is boiled and eaten from the shell), and balut is like, very specific to Filipino culture...

'It's a food that I have been eating whenever I go to the Philippines with my grandma and my cousins, so it's a very sentimental food to me, and I noticed that he was presenting it to a guest and calling it gross.

'I was just so confused and I feel like it was a moment of me just being like, 'Oh my gosh, like, this is my culture. I don't understand why he's making fun of it?'"

MailOnline has contacted James Corden's representatives for comment.

A report from the Los Angeles Times last month detailed a study that compared hate crimes aimed at Asian people from the first quarters of 2020 and 2021.

Los Angeles saw an 80 per cent increase, while hate crimes in New York totaled a 223 percent spike, and San Francisco saw a 140 per cent increase.

Background: The segment sees participants presented with the choice of either answering a revealing question or dining from a plate of varied culinary selections

Last month, President Joe Biden slammed the 'ugly poison' of racism that's 'plagued' the United States and then signed the anti-Asian hate crime bill at the White House.

He called the bipartisan passage of the legislation 'maybe the first break, the first significant break, in a moment in our history that has to be turned around.'

The White House invited 68 people to the ceremony, including one Republican lawmaker, Sen. Susan Collins, as well as family members of Heather Heyer, the young activist run over by a white supremacist in Charlottesville, and Khalid Jabara, a Lebanese immigrant who was shot by his neighbor.

Corden's latest turn in the headlines comes just weeks after he was subject to widespread scrutiny over his appearance as host of the Friends reunion.

Signed: Last month, President Joe Biden slammed the 'ugly poison' of racism that's 'plagued' the United States and then signed the anti-Asian hate crime bill at the White House

Friends fans took to social media to question why the British presenter was picked to host the sitcom's long-awaited reunion, with some suggesting that an American star should have landed the gig.

MailOnline reported that he was the number-one choice by all six of the show's cast members to host the reunion, which saw the stars look back at some of the sitcom's most iconic moments.

Corden appeared as host when the cast made their way to the show's iconic brown sofa, placed in front of a replica of the famous fountain that appeared in the opening credits.

Bewildered: James Corden's latest turn hitting headlines comes just weeks after he was subject to widespread scrutiny due to his appearance as host of the Friends reunion

Courteney Cox (Monica Gellar), Jennifer Aniston (Rachel Green), Matthew Perry (Chandler Bing), Matt LeBlanc (Joey Tribbiani), Lisa Kudrow (Phoebe Buffay) and David Schwimmer (Ross Gellar) all returned to the sitcom's original set for the show.

Corden was widely-panned for his interview with the show's stars, with one critic slamming his 'banal' questions.

While the nostalgic element has been called upon and praised by experts, the lack of awareness towards the more problematic nature of the show set tongues wagging as well as James' appearance as host.
Louisiana Pastor Tony Spell returned to the New Orleans federal appeals court on Monday with the expectation of a judge's reinstatement of the lawsuit he filed last May after being charged with breaching state-mandated restrictions.

On Monday, over 100 followers of Pastor Spell gathered at a public park across the street from the 5th U.S. Congress Building to express their support as his attorneys sought to get a case he filed last year challenging the state's coronavirus limitations reinstated, AP reports.

They prayed, listened to speeches, and held flags that said "An Appeal to Heaven." Spell was accompanied across the street by a guy holding a pole with a big cross connected to the top, while another guy nearby carried an American flag.

What's in his suit?

The Louisiana Pastor's lawsuit argues that the emergency orders restricting his services to no more than ten persons and his subsequent citation of allegedly disobeying these orders were a violation of his freedom of speech, freedom of religion and other fundamental constitutional safeguards.

"The State has brought nine criminal charges against Pastor Spell for doing what Christians have done every week for two millennia: going to church. The Governor, who has issued all of the orders relevant herein, has picked and chosen which First Amendment rights to respect and which First Amendment rights to deny. He has even refused the command of his own legislature to cease and desist from making orders," says the lawsuit.

It goes on to claim that the harassment and state restrictions unfairly single out his and other religious organizations and subject them to greater restrictions than are necessary, while businesses declared "essential" during the viral outbreak are open to far larger crowds with little effort made to maintain social distance.

"If Pastor Spell told his congregation to meet at Home Depot, Lowe's, or Walmart, then he apparently would not have been violating the Governor's orders, but since he told them to meet at Life Tabernacle Church, he is facing fines and possible imprisonment," the suit claims.

Justice Samuel Alito, however, dismissed Spell's case against Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards last November.

The Advocate reports that Spell's motion for a hearing was denied after lower federal courts in Louisiana found that Edward's coronavirus mitigation orders were "either constitutional or moot" after the expiry of his stay-at-home order.

After refusing to cancel in-person worship services during the epidemic, he was put under house arrest and fitted with an ankle bracelet.

As reported by CBN News in April last year, Spell was also charged with aggravated assault when it was reported that his church bus came dangerously close to striking a protester.

The pastor's attorney, Joseph Long, told NBC News that his client did not intend to harm a protester who was standing close.

"A fair viewing of the video will prove that Spell did not attempt to run over the protester," said Long, "and the protester did not feel threatened, as he never moved when the bus came near."

Nevertheless, Spell was accused with "aggravated assault" and "improper backing," but the charges were dropped.

Spell's visit to the New Orleans federal appeals court comes after reports of courts ruling in favor of several churches in California, even mandating the state under Gov. Newsom to pay back millions in legal fees.
Former Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop spared no expense as she dressed up for the Gold Dinner on Thursday night.

The 64-year-old fashionista stepped out in almost $2million worth of accessories for the glitzy charity event at Sydney Airport.

She looked stunning in a figure-hugging black sequin dress with a sweeping train, but it was her jewellery that really had everyone talking.

Expensive taste: Former Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop spared no expense as she dressed up for the Gold Dinner on Thursday night. Pictured with her boyfriend, David Panton

Julie wore a variety of pricey pieces by luxury French jewellers Van Cleef & Arpels.

With her shoulder-length blonde hair swept up in a chic chignon, Julie showed off the label's Magic Alhambra earrings, which retail for $41,000.

She paired them with the matching Magic Alhambra long necklace, which carries a $224,000 price tag.

Price tag: The 64-year-old fashionista stepped out in almost $2million worth of jewellery for the glitzy charity event at Sydney Airport

But the most expensive item was the A Cheval bracelet, with the diamond and platinum cuff costing a whopping $1.54million.

In total, her jewellery for the night was valued at an incredible $1,805,000 - which is more than the median house price in Sydney.

Julie was accompanied by her longtime partner, property developer David Panton, who looked handsome in a classic black tuxedo.

Over the million-dollar mark: The most expensive item was the A Cheval bracelet, with the diamond and platinum cuff costing a whopping $1.54million

The retired politician adjusted her boyfriend's bow tie as they posed for photos, giving onlookers a closer look at her expensive bracelet.

Julie is renowned for being a style icon, and boasts an expensive and often talked-about designer wardrobe.

The Gold Dinner was held at a secret venue on the airfield at Sydney Airport in support of the Sydney Children's Hospitals Foundation.
Kim Kardashian learned she had failed the baby bar a second time on the series finale of Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

Anticipation hung in the air as Kim, 40, accessed her results online with the lawyers who had been mentoring her on the phone.

But the mood in the room instantly changed when Kim learned she did not pass the test again as she admitted she had been hoping for a miracle.

'I failed!' Kim Kardashian learned she had failed the baby bar a second time on the series finale of Keeping Up With The Kardashians

A devastated Kim exclaimed: 'I failed! This is really annoying.' Making matters worse, Kim did worse than she did the first time she took the test.

'Total scaled score: 463. I pretty much got the same thing. I mean, a little bit worse,' she added.

In a confessional, Kim admitted she felt 'totally bummed' by the results but was committed to doing better the next time.

'It is what it is. I know I just have to not stress about it. There are so many other (expletive) stressful things going on, I just have to do better in the future.'

What's the verdict? Anticipation hung in the air as Kim accessed her results online with the lawyers who had been mentoring her on the phone

Letdown: 'I failed!' Kim exclaimed. 'This is really annoying'

Moral support: Kim immediately called her sister Khloe Kardashian after the disappointment

Khloe Kardashian was more optimistic about the situation as she attempted to cheer her up over the phone, reminding her of the many stressors she was juggling at the time of the test.

'Honestly, you had COVID. You had your 40th birthday. You're just dealing with so much personally in your relationship.'

'And just quarantine in itself. And I really don't think this last time counted.'

'It's a fresh start': Khloe presented a more optimistic view of the less than ideal situation

'I really don't think this last time counted': Khloe attempted to cheer her sister up, reminding her of the many stressors she was juggling at the time of the test

In a confessional, she said: 'Kim is dealing with a lot of other things at the same time. The fact that she had COVID and with the show ending and her relationship with Kanye, so I think Kim has to give herself a little credit just for taking the (expletive) baby bar. '

Khloe reminded her they all had told her it would have been 'a miracle' if she had passed this time because of COVID.

'I wanted that miracle,' Kim said. 'I believe in miracles!'

Perspective: Her sister reminded her they all had told her it would have been 'a miracle' if she had passed this time because of COVID

'Who has time for this?' Kim, whose next test was going to be in June, said she was going to take 'at least' four weeks off to devote to studying

'You know, it's a fresh start. It's a great, fresh start. You're gonna do it.'

Kim, whose next test was going to be in June, said she was going to take 'at least' four weeks off to devote to studying.

'Who has time for this?' Kim asked. 'We got to move on to other (expletive) subjects.'

Kim began a four-year apprenticeship at a law firm in San Francisco in 2018 and has been working under Erin Haney and Jessica Jackson to complete her law studies, according to NBC.

'I wanted that miracle': Kim was hopeful things would have been better her second time taking the test

In March, Kim revealed on Good Morning Vogue she's now halfway through her law degree and has just two years left of studying before she can take her bar exam and become a fully qualified lawyer.

She said: 'I'm still in law school, I have two years left. So I have two years under my belt. I actually am not doing an essay and doing this interview instead, so I'm gonna have to get up really early tomorrow to write like a two-hour essay. So that is really steady and a lot of work.'

Kim also spoke about taking a break from her studies over the past year because the COVID-19 pandemic has meant she's been unable to meet with her teachers.

'Even the work schedule, I would have worked non-stop and I would've done anything and everything at all hours and never taken into consideration just slowing down at all. This was a forced halt.'
Ryan Serhant looked for silver linings and closed deals despite the coronavirus pandemic on Thursday's episode of Million Dollar Listing New York.

In the episode titled Escape From New York, each of the show's power real estate brokers made the decision in March 2020 whether to flee the city with their families or stay in their homes until the pandemic was over.

Without a crew to film them, they each documented their quarantine experiences themselves.

Mask on: Ryan Serhant looked for silver linings and closed deals despite the coronavirus pandemic on Thursday's episode of Million Dollar Listing New York

Ryan Serhant, 36, went to Dublin, New Hampshire where his parents had a house with his wife Emilia and his baby daughter Zena.

'I'd be lying if I didn't say the business wasn't affected,' he said. 'The business is completely affected. Any contract that we have out for the most part people are holding tight. They want to see what is going to happen. ...We are using this time in finding the silver linings and planning for the future as best that we possibly can.'

Show newcomer Kirsten Jordan, 37, hunkered down in a home in Massachusetts where she worked to try and keep the business going.

She focused on setting up virtual tours to keep sellers happy and was hoping to seal deals even with her limited Internet and limited child care as her child yelled in the background.

Got away: The 36-year-old real estate agent went to Dublin, New Hampshire where his parents had a house with his wife Emilia and his baby daughter Zena

Kirsten also did virtual tours for her clients.

Tyler Whitman was sheltering in the Hampton's and he said he felt he was already ahead of the curve because pre-pandemic he started relying on marketing virtual videos to show his properties.

Fredrik Eklund, 44, spent the pandemic in Los Angeles with his husband Derek and their children.

Virtual work: Tyler Whitman was sheltering in the Hampton's and working virtually

Other state: Show newcomer Kirsten Jordan, 37, hunkered down in a home in Massachusetts where she worked to try and keep the business going

Only Steve Gold, 36, made the decision to stay in the city after his wife Rose contracted COVID-19 in early March. Subsequently, he said, his whole family got sick.

Quickly the realtors all learned to adapt to the changing business environment of buying and selling real estate.

Serhant's team held a daily Zoom meeting to check in with each other.

Got sick: Only Steve Gold, 36, made the decision to stay in the city after his wife Rose contracted COVID-19 in early March. Subsequently, he said, his whole family got sick

Ryan said 'this is a bit unprecedented. I don't think anybody ever anticipated this was going to happen.'

He told his team that they needed to prepare for life to not be going back to normal until the summer.

While he said business took a hit, Ryan said that even in quarantine his team just did an $11.7 million dollar deal earning him a $348,000 commission.

Protective gear: While he said business took a hit, Ryan said that even in quarantine his team just did an $11.7 million dollar deal earning him a $348,000 commission.

Steve also met regularly with his team on Zoom telling them he still believed that despite the circumstances that there were a lot of properties that he felt his team could put on people's radar. He was said he also was successfully able to close deals in quarantine.

The show jumped forward to June 21, 2020 with the reopening of New York City.

Steve, Tyler, Kristen, Ryan and headed back to the city.

He's back: Steve was excited to get back to the city as the show skipped to June 2020

Empty streets: New York City was shown in June 2020 with empty streets

As the city came back to life, the real estate brokers went back to the cutthroat world of selling real estate but now with added health precautions.

Tyler said to see a property he had to show a recent negative COVID test and said, 'I am walking into a whole new world of real estate.'

He toured his first property, a top 2,500 square foot three-bedroom condo with Murano chandeliers, private access elevators, and walnut cabinets in the kitchen. The client Whitney put in a half of million in upgrades into the condo but now had to move to Florida. He told her despite the fact she bought it for $4.9 million in 2017 that he could only list it $4,495,000.

New world: Tyler said to see a property he had to show a recent negative COVID test and said, 'I am walking into a whole new world of real estate'

'I have been lonely in quarantine and this apartment is giving me life,' said Tyler. 'Rainbows, color. bling. ..This apartment is piece of palm beach in New York City served with a cup of Prozac.'

Ryan also got straight back to work. He toured a $8 million, five-bedroom, 5,100 square foot townhouse listing on the upper east side. He had a team member Talia give him a tour of the listing as if she was the primary real estate agent.

'I want you to sell me this house,' he told her. 'We have to figure out how to sell this because 90 percent of our buyers have left.'

Tour practice: Ryan had a team member Talia give him a tour of the listing as if she was the primary real estate agent

Ryan also successfully sold a $15 million dollar 11,000 square foot property earning himself a $450,000 commission in a deal that he had been working on selling for three years. He also closed a deal for a $5.5 million dollar apartment earning another commission of $165,760.

Jordan had to make the tough calls to tell her clients that they needed to cut their prices because a lot of people had left the city and there was an abundance of inventory.

Instead of focusing on selling city properties, Steve drove out to see Cornelia Guest, 57, at her $4.2 million farm located in Ancramdale, a town in upstate New York, two hours from Manhattan.

Farm visit: Instead of focusing on selling city properties, Steve drove out to see Cornelia Guest, 57, at her $4.2 million farm located in Ancramdale, a town in upstate New York, two hours from Manhattan

Steve said his game plan was to concentrate his business on reaching all the people who wanted to get out of the city and were looking for more outdoor space.

'With Covid, upstate has become hotter than ever,' Steve said. 'When everyone was in lockdown, I was in business mode.'

The 456-acre property also had 35 rescue animals and Steve renamed three of the rescue pigs 'Frederik, Ryan and Tyler.'

He also pointed out the size of the property was equivalent to half of Central Park.

Huge property: The 456-acre property also had 35 rescue animals and Steve renamed three of the rescue pigs 'Frederik, Ryan and Tyler'

Things didn't go so smoothly as he ended up running out of gas right when he reached the gas station and inadvertently jumped an entire line

Fredrik, however, remained in Los Angeles and tried to sell properties remotely after he learned he would have to quarantine for four weeks if he returned to the city.

Instead, he devised a plan and sent his team coordinator Ellis to do a private showing on his behalf of a $7 million penthouse.

'Do you want to be a Jedi? Because I am Yoda,' Fredrik told him while instructing him on the importance of showing emotion to the clients during a tour.

The show ended with Ryan telling his driver to take him to the 'new office' and him announcing that he was going to be starting his own brokerage.

Million Dollar Listing New York will return next week on Bravo.
Marvel Studios' highly-anticipated She-Hulk series has added yet another cast member with Jameela Jamil coming aboard.

The 35-year-old actress signed on to portray the super-villain Titania, according to a report from Variety.

She joins Tatiana Maslany, who plays the title character in the series, with Mark Ruffalo also slated to return as Bruce Banner, a.k.a. Hulk.

She-Hulk: Marvel Studios' highly-anticipated She-Hulk series has added yet another cast member with Jameela Jamil coming aboard.

Titania: The 35-year-old actress signed on to portray the super-villain Titania, according to a report from Variety

Tatiana: She joins Tatiana Maslany, who plays the title character in the series, with Mark Ruffalo also slated to return as Bruce Banner, a.k.a. Hulk

The series centers on Maslany's character, a lawyer named Jennifer Walters who is Bruce Banner's cousin.

After receiving a blood transfusion from Banner, she also inherits his Hulk powers, though with one big difference.

Unlike Banner, who ultimately loses control of his emotions while he's Hulk, Walters retains her intelligence, personality and emotional control.

Lawyer: The series centers on Maslany's character, a lawyer named Jennifer Walters who is Bruce Banner's cousin.

The cast also includes Renee Elise Goldsberry, Ginger Gonzaga and Tim Roth, who returns as Emil Blonsky, a.k.a. Abomination, from 2008's The Incredible Hulk.

She-Hulk was first announced by Marvel at the D23 Expo in 2019, along with other shows such as Ms. Marvel, debuting later this year, and Moon Knight, set for 2022.

Jessica Gao serves as creator and executive producer for the series, with Kat Coiro directing the pilot and executive producing as well.

Introduced: She-Hulk was first announced by Marvel at the D23 Expo in 2019, along with other shows such as Ms. Marvel, debuting later this year, and Moon Knight, set for 2022

Titania is a Marvel Comics character created by writer Jim Shooter and Mike Zeck, debuting in Secret Wars #3 in July 1984.

She was born premature in Denver, and as a teenager, she was given great power by Doctor Doom, and chose the name Titania.

Titania was the primary rival of She-Hulk, possessing superhuman strength, durability, and stamina.

Comics: Titania is a Marvel Comics character created by writer Jim Shooter and Mike Zeck, debuting in Secret Wars #3 in July 1984

Jamil is best known for playing Tahani on the hit NBC comedy The Good Place, and voicing Ganda Dee on DuckTales.

She also hosts The Misery Index and voices Roxie on Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous.

She will next narrate the upcoming movie The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight.

Best known: Jamil is best known for playing Tahani on the hit NBC comedy The Good Place, and voicing Ganda Dee on DuckTales
She's the wife of Today Show host Karl Stefanovic.

But it was 37-year-old Jasmine Stefanovic's turn to steal the spotlight as she accompanied her beau at the Gold Dinner on Thursday.

Jasmine, co-founder of designer shoe label Mara & Mine, channeled old Hollywood glam in a plunging black satin frock.

Glamour: Jasmine Stefanovic, 37, channelled Old Hollywood glam in a plunging black gown as she poseed up a storm at the this year's Gold Dinner held at Sydney Airport on Thursday. Here with pals Annalise Scarf and Emma van Haandel

Jasmine showcased her gorgeous figure in the evening gown, which was cinched at her waist.

The beauty paired the dress with minimal accessories, including a pair of gold earrings.

She also carried at clutch from Sydney brand The Daily Edited to the event, which bore her initials.

At home: Jasmine offered fans a glimpse at her life at home with Karl and her baby daughter Harper, one, last month

Jasmine opted for a matte makeup base which she contrasted with dark eye makeup and she wore her blonde tresses parted down the middle.

She statuesque beauty posed with Annalise Scarf and Founder and Managing Director of EVH, Emma van Haandel, at the event.

It comes after Jasmine gave insight into her home life with Karl and one-year-old daughter, Harper.

Picturesque: Jasmine also shared a photo in which she hugged Harper as she stood alongside a rustic dinner table, with a stunning view of a bushy vista behind her last month

Taking to Instagram last month, Jasmine hopped down on the shiny floor boards to cuddle up with Harper and the family dog, Chance The Yapper.

'Floors so clean who needs chairs!' she joked in the accompanying caption.

Jasmine also shared a photo in which she hugged Harper as she stood alongside a rustic dinner table, with a stunning view of a bushy vista behind her.

Karl and Jasmine recently bought a house together in Castlecrag, on Sydney's Lower North Shore, to accommodate their growing family.

The home, which the pair are expected to renovate, boasts views over Castlecrag's north escarpment and is close to the village's cafes and shops.

Settlement will happen next month, according to the website, at which point the sale price will become known.

The median house price for Castlecrag is currently at a $3,295,000 record high.
Model Nikki Phillips is the latest influencer to breach Ad Standards after she created a sponsored post for Unilevers Magnum ice cream.

The 38-year-old had complaints lodged against her for tagging #MAGNUMluxegOLD, but failing to disclose her relationship with Unilever in a May 7 post.

The breach comes as advertising rules were updated in February by the Australian Association of National Advertisers (AANA) Code of Ethics.

Oh dear: Model Nikki Phillips is the latest influencer to breach Ad Standards after she created a sponsored post for Unilevers Magnum ice cream

The body pursued the breach and said that 'Influencer and affiliate marketing often appears alongside organic/genuine user-generated content and is often less obvious to the audience.'

Nikki has since amended the post with the '#ad' hashtag, while her client Unilever admitted that the post did not comply under the new rules.

'We acknowledge that the post was not compliant as the relationship between Unilever and the influencer was not clear,' said the consumer goods company.

They continued, 'we apologise for this non-compliance and have advised Nikki Phillips to edit the post clearly to highlight that it is a sponsored post.'

Fixed!: Nikki has since amended the post with the '#ad' hashtag, while her client Unilever admitted that the post did not comply under the new rules

The code, which was updated on February 1, forces influencers to disclose partnerships and advertisement deals on posts transparently by adding #ad or #sponsored, or other distinct markers.

'The relationship must be clear, obvious and upfront to the audience and expressed in a way that is easily understood,' reaffirmed the Ad Standards panel in relation to the Nikki Phillips' post.

A recent analysis by Hypeauditor on 2,548 Australian influencer posts that were sponsored found almost half did not disclose or use the appropriate hashtags to distinguish partnered advertisements.

The new rules in place: The code forces influencers to disclose partnerships and advertisement deals on posts. Other posts from Nikki Williams Instagram use the #sp tag, which the AANA says 'may not be sufficient'

Bachelor star Anna Heinrich was the first influencer to be busted breaching the code when her post for clothing brand Runaway The Label wasn't clearly noted as an advert.

Anna made the post on February 11, just 10 days after AANA's updated Code of Ethics came into effect.

Her manager claimed he wasn't informed about Ad Standards' concerns initially, whereupon the post was immediately amended and now has a 'paid collaboration with' disclaimer at the top.
The highly-anticipated Sex And The City sequel And Just Like That starts filming Friday in New York.

Star Sarah Jessica Parker alerted fans by posting several photos to Instagram Thursday night taken outside the Perry Street location that doubles as the exterior of her character Carrie Bradshaw's apartment building.

'Pure coincidence AND JUST LIKE THAT, we find ourselves on this street called Perry the night before it all begins again,' she captioned the snaps.

It's happening: Sarah Jessica Parker revealed filming on the Sex And The City sequel And Just Like That will begin Friday in NYC as she shared photos of Perry Street to Instagram

Familiar place: The Perry Street location doubles as the exterior of the apartment building that's home to Parker's character Carrie Bradshaw on the HBO series and spin-off movies

She then added: 'MPK, here we go. And Im thrilled and terrified. X, SJ. '

'MPK' stands for Michael Patrick King, the longtime writer-director-producer of Sex And The City who is part of the reboot.

SJP is reuniting with her original co-stars Kristin Davis as Charlotte and Cynthia Nixon as Miranda for the HBO Max series.

It promises to shed light on how the trio are continuing to navigate love and friendship in the Big Apple now that they are in their 50s.

Home sweet home: 'Pure coincidence AND JUST LIKE THAT, we find ourselves on this street called Perry the night before it all begins again,' the actress, 56, captioned the snaps

Exciting: SJP added: 'MPK, here we go. And Im thrilled and terrified. X, SJ. ' 'MPK' stands for Michael Patrick King, writer-director-producer of Sex And The City who is part of the reboot

Kim Cattrall, who had a falling out with Parker, is not returning for the new show.

However, plenty of other famous faces from the original series that ran on HBO from 1998 to 2004 will be seen in And Just Like That.

Chris Noth and John Corbett, who played Carrie's competing love interests Mr. Big and Aidan, have come on board the show.

Also signed up are Mario Cantone, David Eigenberg, Willie Garson and Evan Handler.

Update: Parker is reuniting with original co-stars Kristin Davis as Charlotte and Cynthia Nixon as Miranda for the HBO Max series which promises to shed light on how the trio are continuing to navigate love and friendship in the Big Apple now that they are in their 50s

He's back: Plenty of famous faces from the original series that ran on HBO from 1998 to 2004 will be seen in And Just Like That including Chris Noth's Mr. Big who ended up marrying Carrie

Love rival: John Corbett will also be back as Aidan, Carrie's other major suitor who went off and married someone else and had two children

Cantone will be back as Anthony Marentino, a gay wedding planner who worked with Charlotte before becoming her good friend.

Eigenberg reprises his role as the sometimes-geeky Steve, who became the most serious love interest for Miranda and later married her.

Garson played Stanford Blatch, Carrie's greatest confidante and one of the only male characters to occasionally carry a storyline on his own.

His character married Cantone's wedding planner in the second Sex And The City movie, so fans may get a chance to see what married life is like for them.

Evan Handler rounds out the returning love interests as Harry Goldenblatt, a divorce lawyer who represented Charlotte when she splits from her husband Trey MacDougal (played by Twin Peaks' Kyle MacLachlan).

Despite initially being turned off by his appearance and gruff demeanor, she falls for him and they marry later in the series.

More star power: Evan Handler will reprise his role as Harry Goldenblatt, a divorce lawyer who married Charlotte after she split from husband Trey MacDougal (played by Kyle MacLachlan)

Back for more: David Eigenberg will reprise his role as the sometimes-geeky Steve, who became the most serious love interest for Miranda and later married her
While Ewan McGregor is returning to play Obi-Wan Kenobi in a new Star Wars TV series, his beloved character's mentor is seemingly not returning.

McGregor made his debut in the Star Wars universe in 1999's The Phantom Menace, where Liam Neeson played his teacher, Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn.

Production is under way on the Obi-Wan Kenobi series, though when asked about the possibility of returning as Quin-Gon Jinn, Liam Neeson revealed on Jimmy Kimmel Live that it's not happening.

Not returning: While Ewan McGregor is returning to play Obi-Wan Kenobi in a new Star Wars TV series, his beloved character's mentor is seemingly not returning

New series: Production is under way on the Obi-Wan Kenobi series, though when asked about the possibility of returning as Quin-Gon Jinn, Liam Neeson revealed on Jimmy Kimmel Live that it's not happening

'I heard Ewan McGregor was gonna do a series. No, I dont think so. No, I havent been approached,' Neeson said.

Neeson also joked that, 'They dont have enough money,' to afford the actor's services on the series.

Kimmel mentioned that Neeson is 'such a good actor' that he could be, 'easily lying and we would have no idea,' though Neeson just laughed that suggestion off.

Not approached: 'I heard Ewan McGregor was gonna do a series. No, I dont think so. No, I havent been approached,' Neeson said

Production started back in April, with the show taking place 10 years after the dramatic events of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, the final film of the prequel trilogy.

It was in that film that Kenobi faced his greatest defeat, the downfall and corruption of his best friend and Jedi apprentice, Anakin Skywalker turned evil Sith Lord Darth Vader.

Neeson's character Qui-Gon Jinn was killed at the end of the first prequel, 1999's Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

Qui-Gon: Neeson's character Qui-Gon Jinn was killed at the end of the first prequel, 1999's Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

McGregor is joined by a cast that includes Moses Ingram, Joel Edgerton, Bonnie Piesse, Kumail Nanjiani, Indira Varma, Rupert Friend, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Sung Kang, Simone Kessell and Benny Safdie.

It was also confirmed that Hayden Christensen is returning as Obi-Wan's apprentice, Anakin Skywalker, a.k.a. Darth Vader.

The series was created by Joby Harold (Army of the Dead) with Deborah Chow (The Mandalorian) confirmed to direct several episodes.

New cast: It was also confirmed that Hayden Christensen is returning as Obi-Wan's apprentice, Anakin Skywalker, a.k.a. Darth Vader

Neeson was on Kimmel promoting his new film The Ice Road, which debuts on Netflix June 25.

He plays an ice driver who leads a crew on an impossible rescue mission in Canada to save a group of miners after a diamond mine collapses.

He also has another film entitled Black Light that is slated for release later this year, though no release date was given.
She was crowned Miss Universe Australia over a decade ago.

And Jesinta Franklin nee Campbell took a trip down memory lane on this week, sharing a throwback of her time at the world-renowned pageant back in 2010.

Jesinta, now 29, posted a sweet throwback of herself enjoying a meal with her competitors - Ireland's Rosanna Purcell, and Columbia's Tara Vaitiere.

Throwback! Jesinta Franklin nee Campbell took a trip down memory lane on this week, sharing a throwback of her time at the world-renowned pageant back in 2010

'This was after the big Miss Universe finale, the after party was in Las Vegas, but we were too young to go, so instead celebrated together in the hotel room,' she said.

This is not the first time Jesinta has taken a trip down memory lane.

In June 2020, she shared number of photos of herself starring in the pageant to Instagram.

At the time, she said she's 'forever grateful' for the doors that it opened for her.

Jesinta admitted she would have forgotten the Miss Universe Australia 2010 pageant was more than a decade ago, had she not been sent a direct message on Instagram.

Forever grateful: In June 2020, she shared number of photos of herself starring in the pageant to Instagram. At the time, she said she's 'forever grateful' for the doors that it opened for her

Gone, but not forgotten: Jesinta admitted she would have forgotten the Miss Universe Australia 2010 pageant was more than a decade ago, had she not been sent a direct message on Instagram

'Hannah Vasicek sent me some pictures of us both backstage together after I had won the Australian pageant, she's the beautiful blonde a few pics in,' she wrote at the time.

Jesinta said the photos 'bring back so many memories' and was 'forever grateful' for the platform the pageant has given her.

'Beauty pageants get a bad wrap but I'll forever be grateful for this experience. It gave me a platform to build a career I could only dream of, meet incredible people and bring me to where I am today,' she penned online.

Jesinta went on to represent Australia in Miss Universe 2010, where she placed second runner-up.

Success: Jesinta has found fame as one of Australia's most recognisable models. She made her catwalk debut for David Jones in 2015

From strength to strength: The model then went on to land lucrative deals with across fashion and TV, making her one of the most successful faces in the industry

Following her stint on the pageant circuit, her career highlights include her catwalk debut for David Jones in 2015.

The model then went on to land lucrative deals with across fashion and TV, making her one of the most successful faces in the industry.

Jesinta is now married to AFL star Buddy Franklin and the couple share one-year-old daughter, Tullulah, and three-month-old son, Rocky .

Married life: Jesinta is now married to AFL star Buddy Franklin
The Kids In The Hall are back!

Members of the iconic comedy troupe Mark McKinney and Kevin McDonald were seen on the Toronto set of the Kids In The Hall reboot in Toronto on Tuesday.

The veteran comedians were not the only ones seen on set as they were also joined by newcomer to the sketch comedy show, Jay Baruchel.

Good times: Members of the iconic comedy troupe including Mark McKinney (pictured) were seen on the Toronto set of the Kids In The Hall reboot in Toronto on Tuesday

No doubt fans should ready themselves for hilarity as McKinney, 61, and McDonald, 60, donned rather humorous ensembles.

Baruchel, 39, was not in a funny outfit but no doubt will bring some solid comedy chops to the highly-anticipated series as he has starred in several beloved comedy films including 2013's This Is The End and 2010's She's Out Of My League.

Not seen on set were series regulars Dave Foley, Bruce McCulloch, and Scott Thompson.

Interesting: No doubt fans should ready themselves for hilarity as McKinney, 61, and Kevin McDonald, 60, (pictured) donned rather humorous ensembles

New kid on the block: The veteran comedians were not the only ones seen on set as they were also joined by newcomer to the sketch comedy show, Jay Baruchel

Foley, 58, has been quite active in drumming up excitement for the reboot as he has been seen posting about the series in several social media posts throughout the past few months.

Foley shared a fabulous group shot of the comedic troupe late last month, announcing that 'filming has begun' on the 8-episode Amazon Original series revival order in Toronto.

The original beloved show ran for six seasons from 1988 until 1995.

Get ready: The long-awaited reboot of The Kids In The Hall has finally gone into production, as seen in various social media shares from comic actor frontman Dave Foley

The Kids In The Hall was an acclaimed sketch comedy featuring the Newsradio alum along with fellow actors Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney and Scott Thompson.

The show was nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards toward the end of its run in the mid-90s.

In April, Dave also shared a selfie while he was traveling to the shoot, which he noted in the caption had been delayed due to the pandemic 'pandemic pause of one year.

'Wish us luck,' he concluded.

Foley (far right) and company: The Kids In The Hall was an acclaimed sketch comedy featuring the Newsradio alum along with fellow actors Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch, Mark McKinney and Scott Thompson

In April: Dave also shared a selfie while he was traveling to the shoot, which he noted in the caption had been delayed due to the pandemic 'pandemic pause of one year'

In March of last year, Amazon Prime Video initially announced their intention to the fan-loved cult sketch show, but obviously the plan was shelved as the global pandemic reached full tilt later that month.

According to Amazons original announcement, all five cast members of the Toronto-based comedy show have returned, as has Saturday Night Live mastermind producer Lorne Michaels.

Michaels had acted as producer of the original series as well, of 102 of the 103 episodes in the first run.

Legendary: The show was nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards toward the end of its run in the mid-90s

'All of the original "Kids" will be reprising fan-favorite characters (and assuming some new ones) for the series next iteration,' read the Amazon announcement.

'The Kids in the Hall is an iconic show with a deep-rooted fanbase,' Amazon Studios James Farrell said in a statement. 'Several of our global hits, including The Boys, Tom Clancys Jack Ryan and The Expanse have been filmed in Canada and we are looking forward to continuing our work with talented producers and crew teams across the country to bring this series to our Prime members around the world.

'Even after 30 years, The Kids in the Hall has retained its brilliance and originality. We are happy to be bringing back all of the original Kids for the new series,' he added.
Throughout the pandemic, participation in a youth scouting group founded in response to disputed changes within the Boy Scouts of America has increased.

According to the Christian Post (CP), Trail Life USA, which was founded in 2014 and is based in Orlando, Florida, has dozens of new chapters and over 30,000 members.

Trail Life USA CEO Mark Hancock reported that 65 new troops have been formed so far in 2021, with over 100 more in the works.

"So far this year, we have seen a 70% increase in new members over this time last year and a 30% increase over the same period the prior year," he said. "Just this year, we have seen over 65 new troops started as men across the nation have stepped up to lead and make a difference in the lives of boys in their churches, their families, and their communities."

Why it's founded

Trail Life USA was founded in part as a reaction to the Boy Scouts of America deciding in 2013 to allow openly homosexual males to join while keeping the organization's prohibition on openly gay scout leaders, a decision that was widely criticized.

As a result of this move, many churches, which had previously been a substantial source of funding for the Boy Scouts, decided to cut their affiliations with the well-known scouting organization.

Subsequently, the Boy Scouts of America announced other reforms, such as the acceptance of openly homosexual scout leaders beginning in 2015. It also allowed girls to join, sparking a lawsuit by the Girl Scouts of the United States of America.

As Hancock explained to CP, Trail Life membership originally "came largely from individuals who had participated in the Boy Scouts" and "churches have come to see Trail Life as a distinct program."

A ministry of the Church

Hancock, who has served as a "Youth and College Pastor, Associate Pastor, Homeless Ministry Director and Global Event Director for an international ministry" explained that Trail Life USA is "a Christ-centered program that utilizes the outdoors to draw boys and their families into a closer relationship with their Creator."

"It is a significant distinction," he said, "and we are seeing unprecedented growth. Churches are attracted to our model as a means to engage men, connect fathers and sons, impact families and grow the Church."

The Christian scouting organization has just staged its National Backyard Concert and Campout event.

According to Hancock, around 20,000 individuals participated in the event. During Memorial Day Weekend, 15,000 more tuned in to watch the online broadcast.

"As Trail Life USA, we realized that boys would need a safe outlet for their rough-and-tumble, adventurous nature," said Hancock. "Many people appreciated our approach, and we saw growth last year. As things have begun to open up this year, families are flocking to the program."

How they work

According to their website, boys from Kindergarten through 12th grade are involved in a Troop setting under the supervision of male role models. Trail Life USA partners with churches and parents across the country to develop godly and responsible young men. This is also highlighted in their vision which states that they seek "to be the premier national character development organization for young men which produces godly and responsible husbands, fathers, and citizens."
Fans of the hit Paramount Plus TV series Younger wished the show a fond farewell during its series finale on Thursday night, with series creator Darren Star also revealing plans for a spin-off have all but fizzled.

Star, who created hits like Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place and most recently Younger and Emily in Paris, had been developing a spin-off focusing on Hilary Duff's character Kelsey.

While the series finale revealed exactly what would have lead into the spin-off, Star told TV Line on Thursday that's not happening anymore.

Spin-off: Fans of the hit Paramount Plus TV series Younger wished the show a fond farewell during its series finale on Thursday night, with series creator Darren Star also revealing plans for a spin-off have all but fizzled

Kelsey: Star, who created hits like Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place and most recently Younger and Emily in Paris, had been developing a spin-off focusing on Hilary Duff's character Kelsey

Thursday's finale revealed that Rob (Steven Good) had been scamming Kelsey, leading her to find a new investor for her Inkubator, which she found in Reese Witherspoon.

The new partnership would have required Kelsey to move to Los Angeles, setting up the potential spin-off that's no longer happening.

'I think thats pretty much off the table. [Kelsey moving to California] could have set up the spinoff, sure, but thats also just the way we wanted this to end,' Star said.

Kelsey moves: The new partnership would have required Kelsey to move to Los Angeles, setting up the potential spin-off that's no longer happening

'We resolved her story regardless of any notion of a spinoff,' Star added, revealing that she would have left for California even if she was still with Zane (Charles Michael Davis).

'Even if Zane had stuck around, I dont believe they would have ended up together. Her journey was taking her somewhere else,' Star said.

'It was always in our mind that she would set out for Los Angeles and start something new. There were a lot of iterations of that,' the creator continued.

Resolved: 'We resolved her story regardless of any notion of a spinoff,' Star added, revealing that she would have left for California even if she was still with Zane (Charles Michael Davis)

'If Charles Michael Davis had been available to us, things might have played out a little differently, but it was always going to end with Kelsey doing her own thing, alone, heading to Los Angeles,' Star added.

It was revealed in April that Davis and another series regular, Miriam Shor, were unable to be series regulars in the final season, 'due to scheduling and Covid related matters.'

The spin-off series was first reported back in May 2020, though it was apparently never a 'done deal,' which Star even hinted at in an interview with Variety in April.

No deal: The spin-off series was first reported back in May 2020, though it was apparently never a 'done deal,' which Star even hinted at in an interview with Variety in April

'Were talking about it. Its a big question mark whether its going to happen,' Star revealed. 'It could be great, but we never know if these things are going to happen until theyre going to happen.'

He also added that the best way to describe the show was by calling it, 'a bit of a female Entourage.'

Star's Emily in Paris recently started production on its second season in the French capitol.
Rio Ferdinand credits his intense workout regime for helping him cope with being a dad again in his 40s.

The former Manchester United captain, 42, told MailOnline exercising up to four times a week has put him in 'good stead' for handling 'sleep deprivation' following the birth of his son, Cree, who he shares with ex-TOWIE star Kate, 30.

In an exclusive interview, Rio, who's also a dad to Lorenz, 14, Tate, 12, and Tia, ten, revealed maintaining a trim physique helps him to 'look and feel good' ahead of his upcoming hectic work schedule as the Euros kickoff on Friday.

'Staying active definitely helps': Rio Ferdinand credits his intense workout regime for helping him cope with being a dad again in his 40s

He said: 'Staying active definitely helps in that respect. Staying active and being healthy and having a good lifestyle means that all these late nights, sleep deprivation  it puts you in good stead.

'I workout 2-3 times a week, sometimes four if I'm lucky. This next month is going to be difficult to get as much workouts in as I'd like a week because of the travelling and games but generally 2-3 times a week I normally get it.

'I like to look good and feel good. The gym is an hour to yourself as well where you can get your mind thinking about certain things, a lot of creative ideas come in that space.

'I was an athlete before and to just stop and not do anything wasn't what I'm about. I wanted to keep moving.

'Kate and I workout together, we work out together at times and separately. We enjoy it, it's not something we put on or force  we enjoy going to the gym so when we get the chance to we do it.'

'I like to look and feel good': Rio told MailOnline exercising up to four times a week has put him in 'good stead' for handling 'sleep deprivation' following Cree's birth, who he shares with Kate

The couple welcomed son Cree in December and Kate has since detailed the 'tears and emotions' she felt in the weeks following the birth of her first child.

Rio explained one advantage of being in lockdown meant he was able to dedicate more time to supporting Kate as she adapted to motherhood, while noting his older children have also been keen to lend a hand with nappy changing.

He said: 'The pandemic meant everyone was at home and lockdown babies have been lucky enough to have both parents there.

'It's definitely been a big difference. It's one we have enjoyed. I have definitely seen the benefits for us as a family. Life has been great in that sense.

'Kate has done really well but the kids are helping as well, which has been good. We've had extra pairs of hands to help.

'The kids love it  they're really happy, Kate's really happy  we're just a happy family at the moment and long may it continue.'

'Kate turns 30': On Thursday, the married couple seemingly had a night off from parenting duties as they celebrated Kate's 30th with a private party

'Favourite': Kate's close friends and family gave her a night to remember by decorating the venue with baby pictures of Kate, including a hilarious snap of her in the nude cuddling a dog

On Thursday, the married couple seemingly had a night off from parenting duties as they celebrated Kate's 30th with a private party.

Kate's close friends and family gave her a night to remember by decorating the London venue with baby pictures of the reality star, including a hilarious snap of her in the nude cuddling a dog.

The birthday girl was spoiled with a three-tiered cake that was situated in front of a huge photograph of her and Rio on their wedding day.

Kate, who wore an all-green outfit for her special night, said she had 'the most fabulous evening' as she posted pictures of her with Rio on Instagam after the event.

'I don't watch a game without snacks': Rio was challenged by Peperami to try some of Britain's most boring foods including a Wigan kebab and crisp sandwich, none of which tantalised his taste buds

Rio has teamed up with Peperami in their mission to ban Britain's blandest snacks.

Peperami challenged Rio to try some of the country's most boring foods including a 'crisp sandwich' and 'jellied eels', none of which tantalised his taste buds.

The sportsman created his very own 'Snackadium', which helps overly organised Rio to compartmentalise his treats, and entice Kate, who likes to mix and match, to eat one snack at a time.

He said: 'I don't ever watch a game without snacks  it's just not something I do, everybody watches snacks when they watch a game. It's about getting the right snacks.

'We've come up with a thing called Snackadium, which has little compartments in your snack stadium. I don't want any mess, so it comes into play then because you can compartmentalise all of your snacks into different areas because I don't like mixing my snacks. I need it all separate; I'm very organised like that.

'That's the big difference between me and Kate, we both love our snacks, but she eats everything at once. Sundays are usually our day when we have snacks because everyone's at home  in the week I'm busy, the kids are busy, so Sundays we have snacks on the sofa  having family time together is differently an important part.'

Rio Ferdinand has been challenged by Peperami to take on the nation's food fails and trial Britain's saddest snacks. Calling for Brits to #BanTheBland, Rio offers a solution with his very own edible 'Snackadium' to be tucked into during a summer of sport. To watch the full episode, visit @PeperamiTV on Instagram
Married At First Sight stars Martha Kalafatidis and Michael Brunelli have been enjoying a getaway in Port Douglas.

And on Friday, Michael shared a photo of the couple getting a three-hour massage in their rented villa.

The personal trainer posted a photo of girlfriend Martha wrapped in a brown towel sitting cross-legged on the massage table.

Relaxing: Married At First Sight stars Martha Kalafatidis and Michael Brunelli have been enjoying a getaway in Port Douglas. And on Friday, Michael shared a photo of the couple getting a three-hour massage in their rented villa

It comes after the couple publicly shared their engagement plans.

Speaking to WHO magazine on Thursday, Michael discussed the type of proposal Martha would like.

Despite the pair having an ostentatious presence on social media, Michael said he was planning a casual proposal.

Private: Martha and Michael revealed their engagement plans in an interview with Who Magazine this week

'I know she wants a really casual proposal. No helicopters, and no red rose petals spelling out 'Marry Me!' on the bed, or candlelit walkways,' he said.

Martha agreed, saying she just wanted to be sweetly surprised by her boyfriend of nearly three years.

'I think Michael should just leave the ring in the bottom drawer for me to find and be like ''Babe, here's your ring just grab it''' she added.

Style: 'I know she wants a really casual proposal. No helicopters, and no red rose petals spelling out 'Marry Me!' on the bed: Despite the pair having an ostentatious presence on social media, Michael said he was planning a casual proposal

The couple were 'married' on the Channel Nine series, but it wasn't legally binding.

Michael finished by saying the pair would definitely be getting married in real-life.

'For everyone who is invested in us as a couple, a real marriage is naturally the next step. I get it. It will happen.' he added.

'I think Michael should just leave the ring in the bottom drawer for me to find and be like ''Babe, here's your ring just grab it''' Martha said in the interview

Michael joked about why he hasn't proposed to Martha in a clip last month, while she berated him for his photo-taking skills.

In the video, Martha examines a photo Michael has taken of her, presumably for Instagram, and she's not impressed, insisting he did not get her best angle.

She rants in the video: 'It needs to be higher and pointed down on me, like that, like that.

'It's such a simple direction, and yet someone' the budding influencer added, trailing off. She then complaining: 'And your hand's in the photos'.

Michael additionally captioned the video: 'I quit teaching for this...'

It comes after Martha said she is sick of people asking her when she and Michael will be getting married for real, and when they plan to start a family.

Delay: It comes after Martha said she is sick of people asking her when she and Michael will be getting married for real, and when they plan to start a family

The former makeup artist turned influencer made the admission during a candid Q&A with fans in April.

'Are you bored of people asking when you are getting married and having kids?' one fan asked Martha.

She answered: 'I think it's really inappropriate unless you are really close to the person. You just never really know what others are going through. Especially when it comes to asking about starting a family.'
Tyga is sparking engagement rumors with his girlfriend Camaryn Swanson, after she stepped out rocking a massive diamond ring on her left finger in West Hollywood.

On Wednesday night, the lovebirds were seen looking happy in love while exiting their pal Zack Bia's birthday bash at Delilah together.

In addition to her eye-catching sparkler, the 22-year-old fashion designer sported a green and white paisley blouse and a pair of emerald leather pants.

Next step? Tyga is sparking engagement rumors with his girlfriend Camaryn Swanson, after she stepped out rocking a massive diamond ring on her left finger in West Hollywood

She completed her look with a pair of white slides, a silver watch and her bright blonde hair cascading just back her shoulders as she stood by her man's side.

The ex-boyfriend of Kylie Jenner sported an oversized button-down with a snake on the front over a white tee, multiple chains and black Converse sneakers.

Tyga went Instagram official with Camaryn in February, with the influencer sharing a sweet snap of their date at Disneyland Resort in California, captioned with hearts.

Wedding bells: On Wednesday night, the lovebirds were seen looking happy in love after going to their pal Zack Bia's birthday bash at Delilah together

In March, Tyga shared a collection of snaps with his new love as they enjoyed a lavish getaway.

Back in April, Tyga and Camaryn nearly had a run-in with Tyga's ex Kylie Jenner when they were both attending the same party.

Prior to his new romance, Tyga famously had a high-profile relationship with Kylie, 23, but they split in 2017.

Chic: In addition to her eye-catching sparkler, the 22-year-old fashion designer sported a green and white paisley blouse and a pair of emerald leather pants

The former couple are believed to have begun dating in 2014 but they didn't go public with their romance until late 2015, eventually splitting in March 2017.

Tyga and Kylie have remained on friendly terms ever since they split and even sparked reconciliation rumours when they were seen partying together in 2019.

However Kylie then began dating on-off boyfriend Travis Scott and she welcomed their daughter Stormi, now three, in 2018.

Tyga also has a son called King Cairo Stevenson, eight, whom he shares with Blac Chyna.

Instagram official: They have been Instagram official since early February when Camaryn shared a sweet snap of their date at Disneyland Resort in California
She's been documenting her move from town to country on Instagram after leaving London for the Cotswolds.

But Summer Monteys-Fullam, 26, was back in the capital on Thursday to dine out with a friend at STK on the Strand in the West End.

The ex of Great British Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood wore a bright white mini-skirt which hugged her impressive figure perfectly, accentuating her hourglass shape.

The comeback: Summer Monteys-Fullam, 26, was back in the UK capital city on Thursday to dine out with a friend at STK on the Strand in the West End after moving to the Cotswolds

Her ruffled off-the-shoulder top left her tanned decolletage and bust on show while her long auburn hair rested down on her back.

The beauty carried a white box-shaped purse which she hung on her shoulder by its gold chain.

She added a touch of colour to her outfit by opting for a pair of strappy red heels.

Summer stepped out to enjoy a meal at the STK steakhouse in London with her friend Rebeca Marrero.

Glamour girl: The ex of Great British Bake Off judge Paul Hollywood cut a glamorous figure dressed all in white, adding a touch of colour to her outfit with some strappy red heels

Victory: Summer flashed peace signs for onlookers as she posed with friend Rebeca Marrero during a trip out to dine at steakhouse STK on the Strand in the West End

Rebeca also looked great as she wore a funky multi-coloured dress with a bold swirl print.

She carried a black bag which matched her long dark tresses which rested over her shoulders.

The pair were happy to pose for onlookers outside the eatery, with Summer flicking peace signs as she turned people's heads.

What a pair: Summer wore a bright white mini-skirt which hugged her impressive figure perfectly, accentuating her hourglass shape, while her pal donned a funky coloured dress

It appears Summer has been making the most of the easing of lockdown restrictions as she posted a picture of herself with her companion on Instagram on Wednesday.

She captioned the image: 'To more nights like these.'

Summer recently moved to start a new life in the Cotswolds with her family and has been documenting her move on Instagram.

Public life: Summer split from her TV ex Paul Hollywood, 55, in August 2019 after he asked her to sign a non-disclosure form, and briefly dated TOWIE star Liam 'Gatsby' Blackwell afterwards

Making the most of it: Summer has been making the most of the easing of lockdown restrictions as she posted a picture of herself with her companion on Instagram on Wednesday

The Ex In The City star had a big task ahead of her as she had to move her nine horses to their new home as well as several chickens.



The beauty split from her TV ex Paul Hollywood, 55, in August 2019 after he asked her to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and she briefly dated TOWIE star Liam 'Gatsby' Blackwell later that year.

Paul has since moved on from their relationship and is now dating pub landlady Melissa Spalding, 38.
She won Strictly Come Dancing with Ore Oduba in 2016.

And Joanne Clifton was going for another winning look on Thursday evening when she looked incredible while showcasing her new brunette locks at Proud Embankment's Cabaret All Stars in London.

The professional dancer, 37, stunned in a glamorous sheer black dress as she enjoyed a night out with friends following her recent image overhaul.

Stunning: Joanne Clifton looked incredible as she showcased her new brunette locks at Proud Embankment's Cabaret All Stars in London on Thursday

Joanne was looking sensational in the sizzling black gown while she paired her ensemble with nude open toe heels and elegant drop earrings.

Her new look is a departure from her usual blonde locks and her glam makeup looked flawless with a pop of red lipstick.

Music sensation MNEK was also seen enjoying his night out at the Cabaret. The star looked stylish in a short sleeved blue shirt paired with a black T-shirt inside.

Blonde: Joanne's new look is a departure from her usual blonde locks. Pictured right in 2019

Pose: The star paired her ensemble with nude open toe heels and elegant drop earrings

Cabaret All Stars is a Vegas style show fronted by former Blue star Duncan James.

The show includes world-class jazz musicians and bands, acrobats, fire breathers and burlesque performances.

Joanne was seen thoroughly enjoying the show and MNEK was snapping some pictures in the audience.

Last month, Joanne revealed she has delayed a vital operation on her knees amid fears she may never dance again.

Beautiful: Joanne's glam makeup looked flawless with a pop of red lipstick

Star of the show: Cabaret All Stars is a Vegas style show fronted by former Blue star Duncan James

The dancer said she's refused to listen to the advice of her doctors since being diagnosed with osteoarthritis, and now requires surgery on both knees.

Speaking to the Express the star said: 'I need operating on both (knees) because they've all worn away, all the cartilage and stuff's got all holes in it and everything like that.

'So I need a little surgery on them. I just feel like if I do that I might not be able to dance the same again.

Fun night: Joanne was seen thoroughly enjoying the show and MNEK was snapping some pictures in the audience

The dancer had been encouraged to slow down following her diagnosis, but she threw herself into musical theatre after leaving Strictly Come Dancing in 2017.

'This is why I'm moving more and more into the singing and acting side, because you know that singing and acting doesn't matter if you can't really dance as much anymore.'

Osteoarthritis is a condition that causes joints to become painful and stiff. It's the most common type of arthritis in the UK.
She played Kara Milovy in the 15th James Bond movie, The Living Daylights in 1987, where she starred opposite Timothy Dalton in his first offering as 007.

And Maryam d'Abo made a rare public appearance on Thursday night as she stepped out for dinner at Scott's in Mayfair with a male friend.

The actress, 60, looked as youthful as ever and cut a chic figure in nude chinos as she left the swanky eatery after enjoying a meal.

Stunning: Former Bond Girl Maryam d'Abo made a rare public appearance on Thursday night as she stepped out for dinner at Scott's in Mayfair with a male friend

She teamed the smart trousers with a plain white T-shirt, cream leather jacket and comfy white espadrilles.

Maryam wore her blonde tresses in curls over her shoulders and opted for a natural makeup look to show off her radiant glow.

The screen star, - who married film director Hugh Hudson in 2003 - was joined by a male friend who looked smart in a navy suit.

Style: The actress, 60, looked as youthful as ever and cut a chic figure in nude chinos as she left the swanky eatery after enjoying dinner

Dinner out: Maryam puffed on a vape as she sat at her outdoor table where she donned yellow-tinted glasses

Maryam played Kara Milovy in the 15th James Bond movie, The Living Daylights in 1987.

She decided to become an actress at the age of 11 and studied at Drama Centre London, while working as a model in adverts.

When the Bond movie was released, she appeared in a Bond-themed Playboy cover for the 1987 issue, but later said 'I wouldn't do those pictures now... I've learned a lot since then' in an interview with People.

Chic: She teamed the smart trousers with a plain white T-shirt, cream leather jacket and comfy white espadrilles

Duo: The screen star, - who married film director Hugh Hudson in 2003 - was joined by a male friend who looked smart in a navy suit

Youthful: Maryam wore her blonde tresses in curls over her shoulders and opted for a natural makeup look to show off her radiant glow

In 2002, she co-wrote the book Bond Girls Are Forever, a tribute to the women who have played the role of a Bond Girl.

She went on to play the mother of Lara (played by Keira Knightley) in the 2002 TV version of Doctor Zhivago, and played Queen Hecuba in the Emmy-nominated miniseries Helen of Troy in 2003.

In 2009, Maryam had a supporting role in British period fantasy-thriller Dorian Gray, based on the classic Oscar Wilde tale.

In November 2003, she married Hugh Hudson, the Oscar-nominated British director.

Icons: Maryam played Kara Milovy in the 15th James Bond movie, The Living Daylights in 1987, when she starred opposite Timothy Dalton in his first offering as 007 (pictured together)

Details: The star accessorised perfectly with a white leather handbag which she slung over her shoulder
She announced their breakup in January, and now Emily Jade O'Keeffe has shared intimate details about her split from husband Gerard Murtagh.

In an interview with The Courier Mail on Friday, the 44-year-old Gold Coast radio host admitted she was 'blindsided' by the split.

Emily said Gerard sat her down and told her he was leaving her after 16 years of marriage, claiming her high-profile career was to blame.

Heartbreak: She announced their breakup in January, and now Emily Jade O'Keeffe has shared intimate details about her split from husband Gerard Murtagh. Both pictured

'He felt that he was losing his identity to my career and that was, I guess, part of the problem. We'd go out to functions and it's "Emily Jade O'Keeffe and guest" and that was hard,' she recounted.

Gerard told her he'd already found a place to live and informed her that he'd be moving out in a week, which left her 'crushed' and 'enraged'.

The couple had been undergoing marriage counselling for 18 months prior to their split, and despite this, Emily had been convinced 'we were doing really well'.

Speaking out: In an interview with The Courier Mail on Friday, the 44-year-old Gold Coast radio host admitted she was 'blindsided' by the split

Walking out: Emily said Gerard sat her down and told her he was leaving her after 16 years of marriage, claiming her high-profile career was to blame

'He hid what was truly going on in him very well so I was blindsided in that there was deeper stuff going on with him. And he's sharing it now,' she added.

Emily asked Gerard to leave their family home two days later, and admitted it was an adjustment for their two children, daughter Millie, nine, and son Teddy, almost three.

She admitted that she was in so much pain from the breakup that her 'bones were hurting' and she lost 10 kilos and couldn't sleep.

Keeping mum: Emily asked Gerard to leave their family home two days later, and admitted it was an adjustment for their two children, daughter Millie, nine, and son Teddy, almost three

'It's the hardest thing I've ever gone through. Honestly, I felt at times I was going to die, the pain was so much, but it gets better. And everyone told me that,' she added.

She announced their split with a slideshow of photos of them in happier times on Instagram on January 15, eight weeks after they called it quits.

'What I want to say is that I fought hard for us. We did marriage counselling for 18 months, three different counsellors, and I loved him deeply, fiercely, honestly and with all my heart and soul until the very end,' she wrote at the time.

'He hid what was truly going on in him very well so I was blindsided in that there was deeper stuff going on with him. And he's sharing it now,' she said

'That until eight weeks ago I thought our souls spoke to each other, that he was the love of my life, that no matter what life threw at us we were a team that could conquer it together.'

She added: 'He was my everything. He walked in the room, I lit up, he touched me, it felt electric, he would tell me he loved me, my soul would sing. For 16 years, it didnt waiver for me ever.'

Daily Mail Australia has reached out to both Emily and Gerard for additional comment.
Cillian Murphy has said that filming the sixth and final season of Peaky Blinders without his late co-star Helen McCrory has been 'desperately sad'.

Paying tribute to Helen, Cillian, 45, who plays Tommy Shelby in the Birmingham-based BBC show - nephew to Helen's Polly - revealed: 'She was like the matriarch of Peaky Blinders, and I think my closest colleague on the show.'

He added: 'She was without doubt one of the best actors I've ever had the pleasure of working with.'

Tragic: Cillian Murphy, 45, has said that filming the sixth and final season of Peaky Blinders without his late co-star Helen McCrory has been 'desperately sad'

Speaking to Today FM, Cillian went on: 'But on top of that just an extraordinary human being. So it's really really sad. And we're all still dealing with it like everybody else, and we really miss her.'

The Irish actor also touched upon Helen's fanbase, telling the radio station that the tragic circumstances are also difficult for her at-home admirers.

Cillian also said that scenes shot alongside Helen were always 'his favourite'.

After Helen's death was announced in April by her actor husband Damian Lewis, Cillian led the stars in paying tribute to the legendary actress saying that he was 'broken-hearted'.

Tribute: Paying tribute to Helen, Cillian, who plays Tommy Shelby in the Birmingham-based BBC show - nephew to Helen's Polly - revealed: 'She was like the matriarch of Peaky Blinders'

In a touching tribute, Cillian said at the time: 'I am broken-hearted to lose such a dear friend. Helen was a beautiful, caring, funny, compassionate human being.

'She was also a gifted actor  fearless and magnificent. She elevated and made humane every scene, every character she played.

'It was a privilege to have worked with this brilliant woman, to have shared so many laughs over the years. I will dearly miss my pal. My love and thoughts are with Damian and her family.'

Heartbreaking: It was announced in April that the actress, who played the series' matriarch Polly Gray, had tragically died aged 52 after a secret 'heroic battle' with cancer

Peaky Blinders showrunners also released a statement, saying: 'Helen's performance as Polly Gray was inspirational, joyous, transgressive, hilarious and incredibly moving.

'As a person she was off-the-scale charismatic, and deeply caring. We feel so privileged to have worked with her over the last decade.'

They added: 'All our thoughts and love are with Damian and family.'

Only recently, Cillian revealed how upsetting it had been to shoot the final scenes of Peaky Blinders without Helen. The BBC show recently wrapped series six.

The actor told Men's Health: 'We're all still deeply, deeply saddened. I'm deeply saddened and still trying to get over it. It's hard to think of the series without her.

'She was so much a part of that and always my favourite storylines were the Polly/Tommy storylines.'

The star also confirmed the entire final season of Peaky Blinders would be dedicated to Helen.

'Broken-hearted': In a touching tribute, Cillian said at the time: 'I am broken-hearted to lose such a dear friend. Helen was a beautiful, caring, funny, compassionate human being'

Helen died aged 52 after a secret 'heroic battle' with cancer, her husband Damian revealed in April.

The Homeland star tweeted: 'I'm heartbroken to announce that after a heroic battle with cancer, the beautiful and mighty woman that is Helen McCrory has died peacefully at home, surrounded by a wave of love from friends and family.

'She died as she lived. Fearlessly. God we love her and know how lucky we are to have had her in our lives. She blazed so brightly. Go now, Little One, into the air, and thank you.'

In May Peaky Blinders finished filming its sixth and final season in Cheshire.

The show's director, Anthony Byrne, 45, took to Instagram to tell his followers that work on the BBC programme was 'done & done & done' as posed on set at Arley Hall.

Touching: Only recently, Cillian revealed how upsetting it had been to shoot the final scenes of Peaky Blinders without Helen. The BBC show recently wrapped series six and decorated the show's clapperboard with a beautiful sketch of the late Helen (pictured in April)

Standing in the sunshine alongside his assistant director, Jon Midlane, and director of photography, Mathieu Plainfosse, the TV mogul clutched the show's clapperboard as he said goodbye to the iconic series.

In the photo, the show's clapperboard had been decorated with a beautiful sketch of the late Helen.

Arizona Mimi Eastwood, who is second assistant director, revealed that filming had taken place across 86 days with more than two years of preparation.

The sixth season of Peaky Blinders resumed filming in January after the show was forced to shut down set last March due to the coronavirus crisis.

Although this is the final season of the show, fans may not need to mourn just yet as the show's screenwriter has hinted the story will continue in 'another form'.

In a statement Steve Knight said: 'Peaky is back and with a bang. After the enforced production delay due to the Covid pandemic, we find the family in extreme jeopardy and the stakes have never been higher.

'We believe this will be the best series of all and are sure that our amazing fans will love it. While the TV series will be coming to an end, the story will continue in another form.'
Lauren Phillips attended the exclusive Gold Dinner in Sydney alongside Chris Hemsworth and Elsa Pataky on Thursday.

The Weekend Today weather presenter, 34, looked glamorous in a black gown that hugged her figure as she posed at the event with the A-list couple, Liam Hemsworth and his girlfriend Gabriella Brooks, and Matt Damon's wife Lucciana Barroso.

And while she seamlessly fitted into that famous social circle for the group photo at the charity event - it's quite a long way from her early days as the host of a children's show.

Hanging with the Hemsworths: Lauren Phillips (second from left) looked glamorous in a black gown at the Gold Dinner in Sydney alongside Chris Hemsworth, Elsa Pataky (centre), Matt Damon's wife Lucciana Barroso (left), Liam Hemsworth and Gabriella Brooks

In 2011, she was cast as the co-host of Channel Nine's now defunct program, Kids' WB Australia, alongside former Block star Andy Sunderland.

But the show was given the axe in November 2019 because Channel Nine's long-running deal with Warner Bros had expired.

Lauren made headlines earlier in December 2018, when she announced her split from Lachlan Spark after just one year of marriage.

At the time, her representative confirmed the marriage was over in a brief statement to The Daily Telegraph newspaper.

Remember this? And while she seamlessly fit into that famous social circle at the charity event - it is quite a long way from her early days hosting Kids' WB Australia. She was on the show from 2011 until it was axed in 2019. Pictured alongside Shane Crawford

Relationships: Lauren made headlines in December 2018, when she split up from Lachlan Spark (left) after a year of marriage. She is now believed to be dating multi-millionaire jet tycoon Paul O'Brien (right) whose celebrity clients include Matt Damon and Chris Hemsworth

Lauren is now believed to be dating multi-millionaire jet tycoon Paul O'Brien, who happens to be the ex-boyfriend of Sunrise host Sam Armytage.

Paul runs high-end aviation business AVMIN, which boasts celebrity clients including Matt Damon and Chris Hemsworth.

She has been enjoying getting to know Paul's many celebrity friends, including Hollywood superstar Hemsworth and his wife.

Surprise guest! Back in September, Lauren surprised Weekend Today hosts Richard Wilkins (left) and Rebecca Maddern (centre) with a special appearance by Chris Hemsworth in the New South Wales town of Scone

If the acting career doesn't pan out: The Thor star read her weather report live on air, and afterwards she joked the A-list star gave her a run for her money and take her job

Back in September, Lauren surprised Weekend Today hosts Richard Wilkins and Rebecca Maddern with a special appearance by Hemsworth in the New South Wales town of Scone.

The Thor star read her weather report live on air, and afterwards she joked the A-list star gave her a run for her money and may take her job.

In November, Lauren was among the small group of several women who got a tattoo with Elsa during Chris' mother Leonie's 60th birthday in Byron Bay.

Mutual pals: Then in November, Lauren was among the small group of several women who got a tattoo with Elsa Pataky during a Chris' mother Leonie's 60th birthday in Byron Bay. Lauren had in fact shared the original post from their mutual friend, Byron Bay-based Elke Ricks

Elsa was tagged in a post by Lauren, which showed her, Elsa and friends showing off the new inkings on their wrists and ankles - including a shell and a paper plane.

The Channel Nine presenter had in fact shared the original post from their mutual friend, Byron Bay-based Elke Ricks.

Since then Lauren has become part of the Hemsworth orbit and shared a number of photos that feature the Hollywood couple, their famous friends and family members on her social media.

Celebration: For her 34th birthday, Lauren posted a group photo of her Byron Bay bash. 'Totally spoilt by these legends yesterday,' she captioned a large group photo that included Chris (far left), Elsa (centre in black), and Luke and his wife Samantha (right)

Spot the famous faces! Last month, she shared photos from a lavish white party with the famous family which 'was a send-off for American TV personality Michele Merkin', according to Sydney Morning Herald

For her 34th birthday in January, Lauren shared a photo of her Byron Bay bash.

'Totally spoilt by these legends yesterday,' she captioned a large group photo that included Chris, Elsa, Liam and his girlfriend Gabriella, Luke and his wife Samantha.

Last month, she shared photos from a lavish white party with the famous family which 'was a send-off for American TV personality Michele Merkin', according to Sydney Morning Herald.

Just weeks later, Lauren shared photos from a recent holiday to the The Kimberley in Western Australia with Gabriella Brooks and Hemsworths' parents Craig and Leonie.
A faith-based group called "Cherished" in Virginia is devoted to aiding women in the sex industry by providing friendship and hope.

Carlie Gabbert, Cherished's director, and a group of volunteers visit these dance and strip clubs once a month, bringing love and presents for the ladies. In contrast to the treatment many in this industry get, the Cherished team always leaves these women with encouraging remarks.

"We go into the club, we have these little pink bags and sometimes the ladies will say, 'Oh the pink bag ladies are here," explained Gabbert.

"Beforehand, we just write notes," said Gabbert in an interview with CBN News, "and the Lord prompts us to put a scripture, or a specific prayer and that note is what has really been really wonderful in our outreaches. Oftentimes the ladies will pull it out and they'll say, 'How did you know I needed this right now?'"

As with other sorts of ministry, prayer is crucial to the effectiveness of the initiative.

"We can actually circle up inside of the club like right there in the middle of the club and pray in a circle and everyone will pray and then we hug. It's just amazing. It's like kicking Satan in the face which is wonderful to me," she said.

Their efforts bore fruit. Gabbert said that they have seen ladies quit the sex industry, with some recommitting their lives to Christ and attending church on a daily basis.

Alynna, a rape victim who attended a Christian school as a child, is one of them. While looking for employment in a strip club, she came upon the ministry.

"I was just quoting scripture," she said recalling her time with one of the volunteers. "We were quoting scripture back and forth and she was like, 'You know the word.' I said, 'You know what, it was in me.'"

Alynna attributes her peace and wholeness to God, Cherished, various ministries, and her church. She now works as an interpreter at a vaccination facility and serves as a source of inspiration for others in the sex business.

"There's a way out and God will do it for you, 'cause he did it for me. Look at me. I'm here. I'm alive. And we're here to help everybody else to survive," she assured.

Gabbert's encounter with the ministry

In an interview with CBN News, Gabbert shared that she felt compelled to support women who work in strip clubs about a decade ago.

"One day I was driving down the interstate on an overnight trip. We drove past a strip club. You know my first thought was to look away, and God really just kind of said, 'Why don't you minister to those ladies instead of looking away from them'," she said.

Gabbert learned two years later that the Cherished outreach had been started by the Established Footsteps ministry in Hampton, Virginia. The ministry emphasizes on forming friendships with stripper women. Many of them, she discovered, are simply trying to get by.

"A lot of them have a second job as an insurance rep or as a nurse's aid or dental assistant or they work in a restaurant," explained Gabbert.

Understandably, the pandemic's impact has led to an increase in the number of women seeking employment in strip clubs. Gabbert, on the other hand, sees this as an "opportunity" to help more women and show them that God cherished them.
She announced she was leaving ITVBe's The Real Housewives Of Cheshire last summer.

But Ester Dee returned to the reality show with a bang on Friday, when she marked her comeback by posing up a storm in a sizzling new photoshoot.

Slipping into a series of bondage-inspired lingerie, Ester, 35, provocatively sipped on champagne while flashing the camera a series of sultry poses.

Wow: Ester Dee, 35, returned to The Real Housewives of Cheshire with a bang on Friday, when she marked her comeback by posing in leather lingerie in a sizzling new photoshoot

With her impressive arm tattoos on display, the doting mother wore her blonde hair styled in bouncy curls and rocked heavy puffs of dark eyeshadow and liner while flaunting her rock chick credentials.

Changing out of the strappy leather two piece - complete with latex neck cuff - the reality star then worked her best angles in a tiny pair of denim hotpants teamed with a skin-tight bralet.

Adding height to her frame in a pair of sky-high stilettos, the Czech Republic-born beauty sent temperatures soaring ahead of her return to TV.

Ester's clear frames, hair extensions and eyelashes were all from her own range, stocked at www.esterdee.com.

Return: The blonde beauty announced she was leaving ITVBe's The Real Housewives Of Cheshire last summer

Wow: Slipping into a series of bondage-inspired lingerie, Ester provocatively sipped on champagne while flashing the camera a series of sultry poses

Hair down: With her impressive arm tattoos on display, the doting mother wore her blonde hair styled in bouncy curls

Ester - who is doting mother to daughter Pearl, five - revealed she would be returning for season 13 of The Real Housewives Of Cheshire in May.

She first appeared on the show in 2016, and speaking about her reasons for leaving told CheshireLive at the time that she 'had changed' and 'so had her priorities'.

Ester explained: 'I've enjoyed my time on the show and it was a great platform for me to start my TV career but I've changed and so have my priorities.'

She added: 'I have no regrets about doing Housewives and I made some good friends but I'm not the same person as I was when I started and it's not right for me at the moment.'

Rock chick: Ester rocked heavy puffs of dark eyeshadow and liner while flaunting her rock chick credentials

Bubbly: Ester provocatively sipped on champagne while flashing the camera a series of sultry poses

Standing tall: Adding height to her frame in a pair of sky-high stilettos, the Czech Republic-born beauty sent temperatures soaring

Ester shares Pearl with her ex-fiance Rob Lloyd, with the couple sharing 50/50 custody of their daughter.

Ester made a lively entrance into the show and it was later revealed that despite being engaged to Rob, she was already married to millionaire John Temple who she wed in 2015.

She had Pearl with the businessman, but John also believed he was the little girl's father, with the truth coming out in 2016, the same year she joined RHWC.

Ester is currently in a relationship with 53-year-old Glynn, a retired businessman, who lives in Spain.

Businesswoman: Ester's clear frames, hair extensions and eyelashes were all from her own range, stocked at www.esterdee.com
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Delilah Hamlin shared some stunning snapshots from her vacation in Tulum, Mexico on Thursday evening.

The eldest daughter of Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills star Lisa Rinna and LA Law actor Harry Hamlin looked to be in terrific shape as she posed in a strapless bikini then was seen topless with only her long hair covering her assets while taking in the natural beauty of the beachside tourist destination.

The fashion model was also seen kissing her longtime boyfriend Eyal Booker, 24, as she celebrated her 23rd birthday.

Beach babe down south: Model Delilah Hamlin shared some stunning snapshots from her vacation in Tulum, Mexico on Thursday evening

Her love: The looker was also seen kissing her longtime boyfriend Eyal Booker, 24, as she celebrated her 23rd birthday

' 23surrounded by beautiful people, beautiful scenery and beautiful love @papayaplayaproject,' said the runway favorite.

The sister of Amelia Hamlin - who dates Scott Disick - also said she was staying at the Papaya Playa Project in Tulum known for playing up its natural surroundings.

She wore a pea green bikini that had gold shell button in the middle for extra glam and added a straw hat. At one point she posed topless with a female friend.

Sister Amelia will be celebrating her birthday this week as well. The lingerie model is turning 20-years-old on Sunday and is expected to be with her beau Scott on the big day.

Paradise: The eldest daughter of Real Housewives Of Beverly Hills star Lisa Rinna and LA Law actor Harry Hamlin looked to be in terrific shape as she posed in a string bikini while taking in the natural beauty of the area

Sweet view: ' 23surrounded by beautiful people, beautiful scenery and beautiful love @papayaplayaproject,' said the runway favorite

In May Amelia said Scott lights up her life. The actress posted a sweet tribute to her boyfriend to mark his 38th birthday, as she described him as the 'most caring, loving, special person on this planet'.

In a gushing post on Instagram, she wrote: 'happy birthday my love. you light up my life, and make my world better. i can't imagine what i would do without you. thank you for being you. the most caring, loving, special person on this planet. i'm so lucky. i'm so blessed to have met you. i love you.'

Scott is incredibly close to his former partner, Kourtney Kardashian but Amelia isn't 'bothered' by Scott and his ex's friendship as they have children together - Mason, 11, Penelope, eight, and Reign, six.

Top free: The sister of Amelia Hamlin - who dates Scott Disick - also said she was staying at the Papaya Playa Project in Tulum known for playing up its natural surroundings; here she is seen topless with a female friend by her side

Green is good: She wore a pea green bikini that had a gold shell button in the middle for extra glam and added a straw hat

A source said: 'Amelia's not bothered by Kourtney. Scott and Amelia have been enjoying spending a lot of time together and hanging out with their friends.

'Their relationship has been heating up and you can totally tell they're serious. Scott's relationship with Amelia is different from his last in that he's spending more time with Amelia and not Kourtney. Sofia [Richie] got jealous of his relationship with Kourtney and this time around it's not an issue.'



Amelia and Delilah are the daughters of Rinna and Hamlin, who became husband and wife in 1997.

Hamlin also has a 41-year-old son Dimitri Alexander with ex Ursula Andress, 85.
Laura Dern could have been mistaken for a character straight out of her glossy drama Big Little Lies on Thursday, one who was having a more casual day perhaps.

The Jurassic Park star was pictured looking effortlessly chic as she took her husky for a walk near her home in the wealthy Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angles, California.

Dern, 54, masked up for the outing, in a cashmere sweater, black jeans, and a pair Gucci sneakers, appeared dressed down and stylish at the same time.

Chic dog walking attire: Laura Dern, 54, looked effortlessly stylish as she took her husky for a stroll in the wealthy Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angles, California, on Thursday

Playing Renata Klein in the HBO show - based on the novel by Liane Moriarty - Dern's moments were known for going viral, particularly when her character screamed the line, 'I will not not be rich.'

Excitingly, Dern is gearing up to reprise her role as role as Dr. Ellie Sattler, from Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, after last appearing as the character 20 years ago.

She will be appearing alongside her original co-stars Sam Neill (Dr. Alan Grant) and Jeff Goldblum (Dr. Ian Malcolm), in next year's Jurassic World: Dominion.

Blue skies: The actress could have been mistaken for a character straight out of her glossy drama Big Little Lies on Thursday, one who was having a more casual day perhaps

Glossy role: Playing Renata Klein in the HBO show, Dern went viral when her character screamed the line, 'I will not not be rich.'

Teasing a bit about her return to the franchise, Dern recently told People Magazine that 'saving butts might be involved' when it comes to her tough character.

'I can say that it was incredible to be back together,' she told the outlet.

'It was an amazing thing to join my original cast members and go down memory lane, from that experience in the beginning of a franchise through the whole course of these films together.'

Meanwhile, there have been ongoing reports that a season three of Big Little Lies could be on the cards, despite mixed reviews from critics.
In March Katie revealed she'd had her 12th boob job, after vowing in 2018 she'd never have surgery on her face again following a botched procedure.

But it's been reported that Katie Price plans to get a brow and face lift as well as new teeth, in addition to the full body liposuction she has booked in with Mono Cosmetic Surgery in Turkey, after gaining over two stone amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

The glamour model, 43, revealed earlier this week that she is going on a surgery holiday to have her excess fat 'sucked out' before she and fiance Carl Woods, 31, begin IVF treatment.

Surgery holiday: It's been reported that Katie Price, 43, plans to get a brow, face lift and new teeth, in addition to full body liposuction at Mono Cosmetic Surgery in Turkey

A source told The Sun: 'Katie has really struggled to lose the two stone she put on after her foot surgery, because she can't run or stand on her feet for long after her injury - so she'll get full body lipo when she goes to Turkey this summer.

'She's also planning a brow and upper face lift, and she'll get new teeth. Katie says this is the only way for her to lose weight.'

MailOnline has contacted Katie Price's representatives for comment.

On Thursday, Katie took to Instagram where she shared a behind-the-scenes video from a new photoshoot and confirmed she had chosen Mono Cosmetic Surgery for upcoming procedures.

Multiple cosmetic procedures: The TV star previously unveiled her filed-down teeth before having her bright white veneers replaced

Honest: The glamour model revealed earlier this week that she is going to have her excess fat 'sucked out' before she and fiance Carl Woods, 31, begin IVF treatment

She wrote alongside the clip: 'Here I am today on my @jyylondon clothing shoot but I have to say I'm not happy with how I look at the moment so I'm really excited for when I go to @monocosmeticsurgery to change what I'm not happy with.

'I can't wait to show before and after and I'll be filming everything for my youtube channel too to show the whole journey. And guess what ... someone you know is coming too to have something done.'

Speaking on Steph's Packed Lunch earlier this year, Katie confessed: 'I have tried so much to lose weight, obviously we want a baby and we're doing IVF. I just want to shift some weight before we do it so I am going to have surgery.'

After Steph insisted: 'But, you're not big!' Katie responded: 'For me I am. I'm normally 54kg [8.5stone] and now I'm about 68kg [10.7stone] and that is a lot for me.

'I notice it in my clothes and just for myself, I'm just going to have to do it quick, just get it sucked out.'

The struggle: 'Katie has really struggled to lose the two stone she put on after her foot surgery, because she can't run or stand on her feet for long after her injury' said a source

It comes after Katie was left wincing and temporarily bloodied when she had gold needling with radio-frequency on her face, which she filmed for her latest YouTube video.

The skin-tightening procedure stimulates the growth of the skin's collagen and elastin by sending microneedling fractionated radio frequency energy deep into the skin's layers, giving it a rejuvenated look.

The procedure left her skin looking momentarily red and blotchy before she wore an electronic white mask that produced a blue glow to complete the procedure.

The plan: While on Steph's Packed Lunch, Katie recently confessed: 'I've tried so much to lose weight, obviously we want a baby and we're doing IVF' (Pictured with three of her five kids)

Looks sore: It comes after Katie was left wincing and temporarily bloodied when she had gold needling with radio-frequency on her face

Katie also revealed that she's getting fat dissolving treatment in a bid to make her bum smaller after admitting that she 'hates it!'

The mother-of-five made the declaration as she underwent a body MOT, which included two colonic irrigations and fat dissolving treatment on her stomach.

Showing off her posterior in skintight black leggings, Katie told how that her bottom is next on the list for treatment as she declared: 'I hate it, I want it smaller!'

The former Loose Women star underwent a Brazilian Bum Lift two years ago, amid her multiple cosmetic surgeries that had left her bed bound.

Trim: Earlier in the video Katie admired her flatter stomach in the mirror, remarking that she could 'actually feel a difference', after previously being hooked up to a fat dissolving machine

Katie had jetted to Turkey in April 2019 where, in addition to the BBL, she also had liposuction, a tummy tuck, a facelift, an eye lift and an eyelid lift.

Shortly after returning to the UK, Katie unveiled her new face on Good Morning Britain while discussing her 'addiction' to plastic surgery with Susanna Reid and former host Piers Morgan, claiming she looked like a 'Space Invader'.



The star displayed her newly-smooth and taut visage, explaining that she had her own fat injected under her eyes and had the side of her face 'lifted' in a bid to look more youthful.

Surgery: Katie previously unveiled her new face on Good Morning Britain while discussing her 'addiction' to plastic surgery (pictured in May 2019)

New cleavage! In March Katie revealed she'd had her 12th boob job, after vowing in 2018 she'll never have surgery on her face again following a botched procedure

Katie, who was pictured with angry bruises, bloodied scars and a swollen face after going under the knife weeks before, appeared to be making a speedy recovery.

Detailing the procedures she'd had done, Katie said: 'Ten days ago, I had liposuction and then I had my own fat put in my bum, I haven't had implants [in my bum].'

In March Katie revealed she'd had her 12th boob job, after vowing in 2018 she'll never have surgery on her face again following a botched procedure.
Ryan Seacrest has a new woman in his life, 23-year-old up-and-coming model Aubrey Paige, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.

The 46-year-old host was seen wooing Instagram influencer Aubrey over Memorial Day Weekend late last month, as they made a stylish entrance touching down via helicopter on New York's west side highway Heliport.

Despite the 23-year-age-gap, Ryan and Aubrey appear to be getting on famously - as she was also seen posing in a leopard print bikini, lounging by the pool at his $85million Beverly Hills mansion just two weeks ago.

Aubrey boasts almost 50k followers on her Instagram page - and one of them is of course, Ryan himself - but there's currently no mention of the American Idol host there.

EXCLUSIVE: Ryan Seacrest, 46, moves on with model Aubrey Paige, 23, after vacationing in the Hamptons together... a year after split with on-off girlfriend Shayna Taylor

Stunning: Despite the 23-year-age-gap, Ryan is now dating up-and-coming model Aubrey (seen above posing at Seacrest's $85 million mansion in Beverly Hills two weeks ago)

In one of her most recent bikini snaps, Aubrey is seen making herself at home at Seacrest's Beverly Hills estate, that he put on the market for $85 million in November last year.

The steamy shot - taken just weeks ago - shows Aubrey looking relaxed in the backyard of the palatial home that was previously owned by Ellen DeGeneres.

On Valentine's Day this year, she posted the cheeky caption: 'I found my soulmate. It's me. Happy Valentine's Day lovers !!!!'

At-home: In another shot, Aubrey showed off her bikini figure in a green two-piece, while posing at a stunning home

Meanwhile, Aubrey looked absolutely stunning in a pair of Daisy Duke denim shorts as they arrived looking very much like a couple for a vacation in the Hamptons together last month.

They both seen exiting the rotorcraft with their designer luggage, and were greeted by Seacrest's chauffeur in a Range Rover.

The new romance comes a year after the TV host called it quits with Shayna, 29, after he was spotted with a mystery blonde in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

Wild thing: The model is seen modeling another bikini from her Instagram account

'Ryan and Shayna decided to end their romantic relationship amicably some time ago,' a spokesperson for Seacrest told DailyMail.com.

'They remain good friends, each other's biggest supporters and will always cherish their time together as a couple.'

The American Idol host was pictured enjoying some downtime in Mexico with his blonde companion, though they were not spotted together again.

Now it seems as though Ryan has moved on, as he appeared close to his new brunette lady Aubrey while landing in style from the helicopter.

Companion: The pair were seen over Memorial Day Weekend late last month, touching down via helicopter on New York's west side highway Heliport

Skipping traffic: Celebrities are known for arriving at The Hamptons via helicopter

Who's that girl: Ryan's glam companion Aubrey was a total knockout in a pair of denim Daisy Dukes and designer luggage

Stunning: Ryan appeared to be very comfortable around his female companion Aubrey

Last March, the radio personality had revealed he and ex Shayna had got back together for the third time in their dating history, after posting a throwback snap of the two of them to his Instagram as he wished Shayna a happy birthday.

Ryan and Shayna first met at a restaurant in LA in 2013 and have been dating on and off ever since.

In fact, the relationship seemed to be getting serious before they surprised fans by breaking up in February 2019.

I love New York: Aubrey is seen in her native NYC as she strikes a pose to her followers on IG

New romance: The couple certainly appeared to be at ease with one another

They got back together, however, after just a few months apart and decided to give their romance another shot.

During an episode of ABC's Live With Kelly and Ryan last month, Ryan wished Shayna a 'happy third anniversary', explaining: 'It is our third time together... so we've gotten together, broken up, gotten together, broken up.'

Kelly teased Ryan saying that it wasn't really an anniversary, to which Ryan responded: 'No, it's an eight-year run, but it's our third run together. So we celebrate each trial.'

Then Kelly joked further, adding: 'You know, third time's a charm!'

Ryan joked that the relationship was like a roller-coaster, explaining: 'You know, when we drive by an amusement park, I always look at the roller coaster and go, 'Look, there we are. It's all definitely upside down loops. It's no Thunder Mountain, it's definitely the Mind Bender.''

In 2019, Ryan was linked to America's Next Top Model alum Larissa Schot.
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Penny Lancaster was seen on patrol for the first time on Friday as she sported a uniform and talked to citizens in London after qualifying as a special police officer.

The model, 50, who is married to hitmaker Rod Stewart, has been working as a Special Constable with the City Of London Police force after officially obtaining her badge in April.

Penny certainly appeared hard at work as she engaged in a stern conversation with a pedestrian during her shift in the city centre. The man has apparently urinated inside a metal sculpture at Bishopsgate and found himself being reprimanded by the force's new recruit.

On the beat: Penny Lancaster was photographed on patrol for the first time on Friday as she sported a uniform and talked to citizens in London, after qualifying as a police officer

Penny even marched him to the nearest Boots, where she made him buy a bottle of water and return to wash down the sculpture.

Penny rocked a black outfit, chunky boots and a tactical vest which featured an array of pockets and handcuffs for potential arrests.

She wore the iconic police constable hat and appeared to have an earpiece whilst on duty.

Penny swept her blonde tresses back in a practical ponytail and kept make-up to a minimum.

The model raised her hands in apparent frustration as she exchanged words with a surprised passerby.

Dedicated: The model has been working as a Special Constable with the City Of London Police force after officially obtaining her badge in April

Eyes of the law: And she appeared hard at work as she engaged in a stern conversation with a pedestrian during her shift in the city centre

Gear: Penny rocked a black outfit, chunky boots and a tactical vest which featured an array of pockets and handcuffs for potential arrests

Prepared: She wore the iconic police constable hat and appeared to have an earpiece whilst on duty

During an appearance on Good Morning Britain on Wednesday she said that she hadn't made any arrests during her five duties to date, but had helped a suicidal woman, who was in 'desperate' need.

Penny told hosts Susanna Reid and Richard Madeley: 'When you think of policing, you think of the most violent crimes but were out there to help the most vulnerable.

'At this particular time theres a lot of incidents on the bridges and I did help someone who was very desperate on the bridge the other night. It can be rewarding in so many ways.'

Penny added that she's drawing on her life experience and role as a mother for her police work, insisting she has the full support of her rocker husband Rod, 76.

Cop to it: The model raised her hands in apparent frustration as she exchanged words with a surprised passerby

Scene: She stood by the gentlemen at a towering metal sculpture

Responsibility: During an appearance on Good Morning Britain on Wednesday she said that she hadn't made any arrests during her five duties to date, but had helped a suicidal woman

All in a day's work: Penny told hosts Susanna Reid and Richard Madeley: 'When you think of policing, you think of the most violent crimes but were out there to help the most vulnerable'

In her corner: Penny added that she's drawing on her life experience and role as a mother for her police work, insisting she has the full support of her rocker husband Rod, 76

When asked if he tried to dissuade her from taking the job, she said: 'Not at all. It is dangerous, but the police are the public, the public are the police.

'Theres women and men alike - brothers, sisters, uncles, aunties, were just regular people but we put that uniform on to help protect.'

Penny has managed to go under the radar while on patrol, with her saying no one has recognised her thanks to the uniform, despite her public profile.

She insists the 'stab vest, armour, baton, cuffs' ensure she's 'dressed as a regular'.

Supportive husband: The TV personality and her musician husband are pictured on holiday together last year

Symbiotic: When asked if he tried to dissuade her from taking the job, she said: 'Not at all. It is dangerous, but the police are the public, the public are the police'

United: She added: 'Theres women and men alike - brothers, sisters, uncles, aunties, were just regular people but we put that uniform on to help protect'

Incognito: Penny has managed to go under the radar while on patrol, with her saying no one has recognised her thanks to the uniform, despite her public profile

And on why she joined the force, she concluded: 'The campaigning and charity work I do, this is just an extension of working for the community and for the good of people. Its free of charge.

'Im giving up my time to help the community and thats why I wanted to become a police officer, to be out there. Weve got to look after the police and make sure when their lives are taken, punishment is given.'

Penny appeared on GMB alongside PC Harper's widow Lissie Harper, who was on to discuss Harper's Law, a mandatory life sentence for those who kill emergency workers due to a criminal act.

Lissie started the campaign after she was left 'outraged' over the sentences handed to three teenagers over her husbands death.

Work attire: She insists the 'stab vest, armour, baton, cuffs' ensure she's 'dressed as a regular'

Cause: And on why she joined the force, she concluded: 'The campaigning and charity work I do, this is just an extension of working for the community and for the good of people'

Woman in charge: Penny gave a quick smile as she offered words of wisdom

Dedication: Penny continued: 'Im giving up my time to help the community and thats why I wanted to become a police officer, to be out there'

Care: 'Weve got to look after the police and make sure when their lives are taken, punishment is given' the star added

Henry Long, 19, was sentenced to 16 years and 18-year-olds Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers were handed 13 years in custody over manslaughter, after Harper was caught in a strap attached to the back of a car driven by Long down a winding country road in Berkshire on the night of August 15 2019.

Penny revealed in April that she had become a qualified police officer after training for City Of London Police on one weeknight every week and from 9am to 5pm on Saturday and Sunday every other weekend.

She was inspired to undergo training after taking part in Channel 4's 2019 series, Famous and Fighting Crime, in which celebrities shadowed police offers on the beat.

Speaking about the experience in an Instagram Live last year, she confessed: 'It was terrifying but I never felt more comfortable in a position and I felt like this is where I was supposed to be. I have signed up to be an officer.

Raise awareness: Penny appeared on GMB alongside PC Harper's widow Lissie Harper, who was on to discuss Harper's Law, a mandatory life sentence for those who kill emergency workers due to a criminal act

Injustice: Lissie started the campaign after she was left 'outraged' over the sentences handed to three teenagers over her husbands death

Crime: Henry Long, 19, was sentenced to 16 years and 18-year-olds Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers (pictured left to right) were handed 13 years in custody over PC Harper's manslaughter

'I had to sit exams, English and maths type of exams, and go for an interview with two officers. And then I did a fitness test which was the bleep test which was pretty tricky so I had to get fit for that and I passed.'

The former lingerie model previously described her police training as being part of 'who she is'.

Speaking to The Mail On Sunday in December, Penny said: 'This is who I am. I could be walking the red carpet with Rod, or I could be in our stable with my goats.

'But there comes a time when everyone questions themselves and asks, "Who am I? Who am I at my core?" This is what I feel I should always have been doing. It's about identity.'

Where it began: She was inspired to undergo training after taking part in Channel 4's 2019 series, Famous and Fighting Crime, in which celebrities shadowed police offers on the beat

'This is who I am': The former lingerie model previously described her police training as being part of 'who she is'

Fulfilled: Speaking to The Mail On Sunday in December, Penny said: 'This is who I am. I could be walking the red carpet with Rod, or I could be in our stable with my goats'

Identity: She added: 'But there comes a time when everyone questions themselves and asks, "Who am I? Who am I at my core?" This is what I feel I should always have been doing. It's about identity'
Sarah Paulson met up with her longtime friend Diane Keaton for an Italian dinner in Beverly Hills on Thursday.

The actresses have been close ever since they co-starred in the 1999 film The Other Sister with Juliette Lewis.

Also with Sarah was her partner, actress Holland Taylor of Two And A Half Men fame.

Party of three! Sarah Paulson enjoys a dinner outing with longtime partner Holland Taylor and their friend Diane Keaton in Beverly Hills on Thursday evening

The ladies were seen making their way into a restaurant where they chatted and enjoyed each others' company for nearly three hours.

The trio of actresses all showcased their personal style for the outing, and were seen exiting as a group with to-go bags in hand.

Paulson, 46, looked elegant in black slacks and a white frilled shirt with a pair of crystal accented Mary Janes.

The American Horror Story star slipped a stylish blue plaid coat over the look with a crossbody purse, and wore her blonde long bob effortlessly waved.

Making her way behind was Keaton, 75, who looked incredible in a brown pant suit and cinching belt, with edgy heeled boots.

She sported one of her signature hats in a lighter camel shade and toted a black Louis Vuitton duffle over her shoulder.

Longtime loves: The duo have been in a committed partnership since 2015, and on Sarah's birthday in December she called her 'my one and only,' adding 'I'm grateful you were born'

And Holland, 78, was seen by Paulson's side in black pants and a matching jacket with a patterned neck scarf. She went casual with a pair of slip on sneakers and carried a takeout bag of food as they walked to their car.

The duo have been in a committed partnership since 2015, and on Sarah's birthday in December, Holland called her 'my one and only,' adding 'I'm grateful you were born.'

And in an October interview with Harper's Bazaar Paulson also spoke about their enduring partnership, both professing her love and speaking out against 'ageist' people who have criticized their 32-year age difference.

'Anybody says anything about any person I love in a way that is disrespectful or cruel and I want to cut a b***h,' she warned, before stating: 'What I can say absolutely is that I am in love, and that person happens to be Holland Taylor.'

Enduring partnership: 'What I can say absolutely is that I am in love, and that person happens to be Holland Taylor,' she told Harper's Bazaar in October; pictured February 2020

On Friday June 11, Keaton answered 25 questions from famous friends which were published by Interview Magazine  with Paulson being tapped to ask the Annie Hall star a few.

Paulson asked her to name a 'person, place, or thing that makes [her] heart sing,' cheekily adding at the end 'you can say me.'

And Keaton affirmed: 'Of course, Sarah, you make my heart sing. My friends make my heart sing,' before adding that her kids and the wine lillet blanc with 'lots of ice,' were also high up there.

The ladies acted together for the first time in The Other Sister (1999), and Keaton and Taylor have also shared on-screen moments throughout their lengthy careers, both appearing in 2001's Town & Country.
She has been able to get back to the stage since lockdown restrictions in England eased.

And Denise Van Outen has been setting pulses racing with her sizzling performances in All Stars Cabaret show.

The television personality, 47, put on a busty display in a corset and suspenders as she took to the stage on Friday night at Proud Embankment in London.

Sexy: Denise Van Outen, 47, has been setting pulses racing with her sizzling performances in All Stars Cabaret show at the Proud Embankment inLondon

Denise slipped her figure into another very racy ensemble, consisting of a black and red lace push-up bra and bodice with a thick black belt which cinched her in at the waist.

She also donned a black top hat adorned with jewels and matching long gloves and her blonde tresses were styled in a loose wave.

Black fish nets and platform heels completed the look, and she appeared in her element as she sang into the microphone.

Denise has had various famous faces attending her shows in recent weeks, with Strictly's Shirley Ballas turning up on Friday night.

Saucy: The television personality put on a busty display in a corset and suspenders as she took to the stage on Friday night at Proud Embankment in London

Saucy: Denise slipped her figure into another very racy ensemble, consisting of a black and red lace push-up bra and bodice with a thick black belt which cinched her in at the waist

Racy: She also donned a black top hat adorned with jewels and matching long gloves and her blonde tresses were styled in a loose wave

Arriving solo for the show, Shirley Ballas sizzled in a red dress Shirley which had a slit down the middle, flashing a little glimpse of her slender legs.

Instead of having her judge hat on, the ballroom guru, 60, joined other celebrities for a fun night out at the show in London.

She wore a pair of floral-pattern kitten heels for the outing and carried a nude-colour Chanel shoulder bag.

Back performing: Black fish nets and platform heels completed the look, and she appeared in her element as she sang into the microphone

Beautiful: Shirley Ballas, 60, sizzled in a red dress as she arrived for a solo visit to Denise's show in the capital

Sizzling: Covering up from the chillier London summer evenings, the Strictly judge donned a black jacket with ruffles and black buttons

Covering up from the chillier London summer evenings, Shirley donned a black jacket with ruffles and black buttons.

Accessorising the look, Shirley wore various silver jewellery items including chain link earrings and a delicate cross necklace.

The 'Queen of Latin' blowdried her brunette locks which rested just above her shoulders and coordinated her lipstick to match her striking dress colour.

She was joined by other famous faces for the evening, including Geordie Shore star Vicky Pattison and Love Island's Amy Hart.

Chic: Shirley looked radiant in the show-stopping red dress which had a slit down the middle to flash a little glimpse of her slender legs

Stylish: The 'Queen of Latin' wore a pair of floral-pattern kitten heels for the outing and carried a nude-colour Chanel shoulder bag

Star studded: Shirley was joined by other famous faces for the evening, including Geordie Shore star Vicky Pattison (pictured) and Love Island's Amy Hart

Vicky Pattison beamed from ear to ear as she arrived for the sultry show on Friyda night.

She wowed in a black and white ensemble, donned a pair of loose-fitting wide leg trousers and a vest top which she tucked into the waistband.

The reality TV star, who arrived at the event with her boyfriend Ercan Ramadan, carried a large white clutch bag which tied in with her white shoes which were just visible under her trousers.

Her blonde tresses were styled in a loose wave and draped over her shoulders.

Happy: Vicky Pattison beamed from ear to ear as she arrived for the sultry show

Loved up: The reality TV star arrived at the event with her boyfriend Ercan Ramadan

Matching: Ercan matched his girlfriend's outfit, donning a white polo shirt, a pair of tight straight leg black trousers and some black suede boots

Happy: Vicky looked incredibly happy as she and Ercan arrived for the event and had pictures taken together

Cosy: Vicky and Ercan cosied up together in their booth as they sipped on drinks and enjoyed the show

Ercan matched his girlfriend's outfit, donning a white polo shirt, a pair of tight straight leg black trousers and some black suede boots.

Love Island's Amy Hart also put on a sizzling display for the evening show in London on Friday as she amped up the glamour in a form-fitting black dress.

She flashed a little cleavage in the off-the-shoulder dress and donned a pair of open-toe heeled mules for the outing.

The Love Island star carried a small black handbag with a gold chain strap and a pair of long pendant earrings.

Little black dress: Denise Van Outen has been back on stage following a break from her cabaret show, thanks to the recent lockdown (pictured: Amy Hart arriving for the show)

Happy: The blonde beauty looked radiant in the elegant midi dress as she headed to the show

Beaming: She flashed a little cleavage in the off-the-shoulder dress and donned a pair of open-toe heeled mules for the outing

Earlier in the evening, Amy was in high spirits as she arrived at the hotel with her female pal for dinner at the Savoy Hotel ahead of the cabaret show.

The Friday night show comes after Denise decided to ride out the coronavirus storm and delay her eagerly-awaited nuptials so that she can have a grand celebration with her nearest and dearest.

The TV personality said she's happy to jump to the back of the wedding queue to allow other couples to exchange vows first, as she predicts a 'massive backlog' due to the pandemic.

Confident: Amy oozed sophistication in the form-fitting black dress as she arrived ahead of Denise's latest show

Elegant: She was a vision of beauty with her blonde tresses styled into loose waves

Speaking to The Sun earlier this month, she said: 'We're not engaged but we are preparing to get married. It will definitely happen but we're not in a rush.

'We don't want a small wedding. We want a big group of people and a big party with no restrictions.

'Plus, with all the weddings that have been cancelled because of the pandemic, there's going to be a massive backlog and I wouldn't want to get in the way of all of them. Let them all go first!'

Star studded: Denise has had various famous faces attending her shows in recent weeks, with Strictly's Shirley Ballas turning up on Friday night

Wedding delays: The Friday night show (pictured) comes after Denise decided to ride out the coronavirus storm and delay her eagerly-awaited nuptials

Denise and her commodities trader partner, 46, have been an item for seven years and currently live in Essex with her daughter Besty, nine, whom she shares with West End star Lee Mead.

Eddie also has two children from a previous relationship.

Denise gushed that she knew he was 'The One' very early on in their relationship, and that living together has only heightened her feelings.

Clocking off: Denise looked stunning as she left the theatre after her shift on Cabaret All Stars on Friday night

Gorgeous: She donned a black mini dress adorned with pink flowers and a belt which pulled her in at the waist, highlighting her hourglass figure

Say cheese: Denise looked pleased with her performance as she beamed before getting into a car after the show

While they've had to push back their wedding plans, the mother-of-one admitted they already act like a married couple.

The pair, who frequently appear together on Celebrity Gogglebox, are skipping the traditional engagement process having both been married before.

Denise first walked down the aisle to wed her father's daughter Lee, 39, in 2009, however they separated in 2013.

The former Big Breakfast presenter revealed she was planning on turning the tables by proposing to Eddie in 2020 because it was a leap year.

High spirits: Shirley appeared to have greatly enjoyed the show, looking radiant as she stepped out on to the streets of London after

Smiling: After the show, the Strictly judge posed with another female guest at the event on Friday night

Happy: Shirley flashed a little more leg as she left the show where Denise put on a top-class performance

Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic scuppered her plans as she admitted it was 'impossible' to organise and it 'didn't feel right'.

Instead, the couple came to a joint decision to skip the proposal, opting for a modern approach.

According to Denise, she said the thing that appeals to her most about marriage is the commitment between two individuals and 'feeling loved', declaring she doesn't need a 'big rock' on her finger to prove that.

Instead, the Essex-based couple are planning to exchange simple wedding bands when they meet at the alter.

Glamorous: After the show, Amy Hart looked like she had a fantastic time as she smiled for the cameras

Matching friends: Amy and her female friend who she invited along to the event left the event together wearing their matching black outfits

Pleased: Amy, who wore heart pendant earrings for the outing, spoke to several other guests outside the theatre after the show

During the interview with The Sun, Denise praised Eddie for being brilliant with her daughter and for helping out with her home-schooling during lockdown, which she admitted was really challenging.

The former Dancing On Ice contestant said Betsy found last year 'tough' after not being able to see her pals or attend school, especially as she is an only child.

Denise confirmed she has ruled out the possibility of having more children and said she has 'no regrets' about her decision, despite considering it a few years ago.

Goodnight: After stopping to chat for a little while, Amy and her friend hopped into the back of a car and headed home

Sweet: Leaving the same way as they arrived, Vicky Pattison and her boyfriend Ercan left hand in hand

Holding hands: The loved-up couple walked out wearing their matching outfits and even coordinated their face masks to tie in with their chosen looks for the night

As she approaches her 47th birthday next month, the mother-of-one said she still tries to embrace her femininity and 'looks fondly' back at her lads' mag cover shoots in the 90s.

Denise, who recently hosted her own cabaret production in London, said looking good has become a 'focus' in her life as she credited the titillating burlesque show and her glamorous colleagues for inspiring her.

She admitted during lockdown, it can be easy to succumb to the comfort of Ugg boots and tracksuits everyday, but looking good for her partner and dressing up makes her feel better.
Southern Charm alum Ashley Jacobs dropped two bombshells on Friday, revealing she is pregnant and married to her beau Mike Appel.

'We've been keeping the biggest little secret and we are absolutely over the moon share our news!,' the nurse and former reality star, 36, shared on Instagram.

The pair provided more intimate details in a conversation with People, revealing that their 'baby boy' would be coming in August.

Celebration! Southern Charm alum Ashley Jacobs, 36, revealed she is pregnant with her first child and also secretly married her beau of two years Mike Appel in recent weeks

Jacobs shared a trio of photos to Instagram that showed the couple of two years on a joint babymoon/honeymoon in Hawaii, which accompanied the announcement.

Appel, 40, lovingly cradled her bump in one snap as they vacationed at the Ko'a Kea Hotel & Resort on the island of Kauai, and in others the pair posed on the beach.

'We're having a baby! It's wild how the universe works - our first child together is due the same day we met, two years ago!' she told the publication.

The star added: 'We are over the moon to be on this adventure together, as newlyweds.'

Ashley first met Appel  the owner of Related Garments apparel company and creative agency called Nnovate  in August 2019 at a rooftop party in her native Santa Barbara.

Appel proposed in March while the pair were on a ski trip in Park City Utah, and at the time she was already several months pregnant given her summer due date.

The pair decided to discreetly tie the knot in an intimate ceremony that took place recently, but she remained mum on a date or details of where it took place.

Among a slew of congratulatory comments on her social media post, her former Bravo castmates were noticeably absent, but Ashley only appeared on season five as the girlfriend of veteran castmate Thomas Ravenel, 58.

Meant to be: 'It's wild how the universe works - our first child together is due the same day we met, two years ago!,' they told the publication; pictured November 2020

Instagram official: After only knowing each other for a few months she made the relationship official on social media as she called him a 'cutie'; pictured December 2019

Ashley had been romantically involved with Ravene l for a little over a year until they split in August 2018, and in going Instagram official with her now-husband, Appel, in December of 2019 she seemed to take a swipe at her ex.

'Found someone close to my own age,' she wrote as she debuted her new relationship to her followers.

Amid the former pair's breakup he had accused her of cheating on him, saying via Twitter that he had 'more than enough information' to move on with his life while insinuating she had been 'unfaithful,' by citing a song lyric.

'Today, my personal life just took a huge upward turn. I finally have more than enough information to move forward without any doubt or hesitation and I'll never look back,' he said at the time.

Bad blood: Ashley had been romantically involved with veteran castmate Ravenel, 58, for a little over a year until they split in August 2018, and he later accused her of cheating on him

'After 30 years I finally understand the lyrics from that wonderful Chicago tune: If she would have been faithful, if she could have been true, then I would have been cheated, I would have never known real love,' he added.

She vehemently denied the claims, telling Page Six that he was just 'hurting,' from the breakup and wanted to be 'dramatic,' adding that she only began dating other men after they split.

'He's hurting and he knew that would be the only way to get to me,' she shared after revealing she had blocked him in her phone. 'I just laughed at it...like, "Oh, God. So dramatic!"

Around that time she also had to fend off rumors she was involved with a married man who had a pregnant wife, after a photo of the pair and a female companion of hers made its rounds.
All good things must come to an end.

Angelina Jolie was seen departing from JFK Airport on Thursday with all six of her kids after a trip to New York City for her 46th birthday.

The Maleficent star kept her look simple as she sported a long brown a Christian Dior trench coat over a black maxi dress and brown Salvatore Ferragamo leather sandals.

Bonding time: Angelina Jolie was seen departing from JFK Airport on Thursday with all six of her kids after a trip to New York City for her 46th birthday

She donned a black protective face mask as she held onto a large white and navy blue monogrammed tote from Celine and lugged along a large black Louis Vuitton rolling bag.

Her signature raven-colored dresses were worn down and no doubt the family were taking an international trip as her right hand was full with passports and boarding passes.

Angelina was joined by all her children including sons Maddox, Pax, 17, and Knox, 12, as well as daughters Zahara, 16, Shiloh, 14, and Vivienne, 12.

The star was in town with all six of her children to celebrate her 46th birthday.

In the details: The Maleficent star kept her look simple as she sported a long brown a Christian Dior trench coat over a black maxi dress and brown Salvatore Ferragamo leather sandals

Runway ready: She donned a black protective face mask as she held onto a large white and navy blue monogrammed tote from Celine and lugged along a large black Louis Vuitton rolling bag

It was likely a welcome retreat for Jolie, who was left 'bitterly disappointed' last month when her ex husband Brad Pitt was awarded joint custody of their children following a long and very nasty legal battle.

In late May, the court ruled that Brad and Angelina will have shared custody of all their children with the exception of Maddox, who is no longer a minor.

According to reports from US Weekly on Tuesday, the actress feels she can 'never forgive' Brad and believes their legal battle is 'far from over'.

A source told the publication: 'She will never forgive him... She maintains it's far from over and still believes that justice will prevail.'

Organized: Her signature raven-colored dresses were worn down and no doubt the family were taking an international trip as her right hand was full with passports and boarding passes

It was also claimed that the Maleficent star will give 'everything she's got' to appeal the decision in court.

Brad's representatives declined to comment when approached by MailOnline last week and spokespeople for Angelina were also contacted for further comment.

Sources believe Angelina will continue fighting the custody arrangement, as she reportedly thinks there were 'issues' with the way Judge John Ouderkirk handled their court proceedings.

Squad: Angelina was joined by all her children including sons Maddox, Pax, 17, and Knox, 12, as well as daughters Zahara, 16, Shiloh, 14, and Vivienne, 12

The source added: 'Joint custody is not the issue that Angelina objects to, there were other issues of concern, but the court proceedings are closed and sealed.'

Angelina and her legal team claimed the judge wouldn't allow her children to testify in court.

A filing made to California's Second District Court of Appeal read: 'Judge Ouderkirk denied Ms. Jolie a fair trial, improperly excluding her evidence relevant to the children's health, safety, and welfare, evidence critical to making her case...'

On-the-go: She patiently waited in the TSA queue with her children

'They have failed to adequately consider a section of the California courts code, which says it is detrimental to the best interest of the child if custody is awarded to a person with a history of domestic violence.'

Angelina believes the court should be able to 'hear the minor teenagers' input as to their experiences, needs, or wishes as to their custody fate', but this has been refused.

However, Brad's lawyers believe the proceedings have been conducted fairly.
Southern Baptist Convention officials have reacted to former Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission President Russell Moore's leaked second letter, with some belying his claims, but he was defended by a whistleblower. This prompted a call for an independent probe to be launched.

In his second letter to SBC President J.D Greear, Moore has accused different SBC officials, both directly and indirectly, of "stonewall[ing]" demands to confront sexual abuse in the organization.

Kentucky Today (KT) reports that the letter, which is dated May 31, 2021, was made public on Friday afternoon (June 4). Greear and Ronnie Floyd, the President and CEO of the SBC Executive Committee, who was named in the letter, both released their statements soon after.

Floyd issued his statement on Saturday saying that although he takes the claims seriously, he does not remember any of the incidents described by Moore.

"I have received a copy of the letter from former ERLC president Russell Moore to our current SBC president J.D. Greear, "he said. "Some of the matters referenced occurred prior to my coming here in this role. For those matters of which I was present, I do not have the same recollection of these occurrences as stated."

"I do take seriously allegations in this letter which may raise concern for Southern Baptists," he clarified. "I have been very committed to always operate with the highest integrity and skillful hands. I am right now considering ways in which we can develop the best path forward for the sake of Southern Baptists and our God-called commitment to our unified Great Commission vision,"

Greear, also the pastor of The Summit Church in Durham, N.C., confirmed in a statement Monday (June 7) that he received Moore's letter on May 31.

"It came to me as private correspondence and I have treated it as such," said Greear. "I was aware of some things contained in the letter, but not everything, although my own struggles with the Executive Committee related to some of these initiatives are well documented. I know churches in our convention both want and deserve the truth on these matters and I expect these things to come up at our annual meeting next week."

Saturday (June 5) also saw the release of a roughly 14-minute video from former SBC Executive Committee Chair Mike Stone, which was uploaded to the YouTube account of his church, Emmanuel Baptist Church in Blackshear, Ga., reports KT. Moore's claims, he said, were "ungodly," "slanderous," and "a second back-door press release this week."

A Whistleblower

Days after Moore's statements in his two letters were called into doubt by SBC officials, a Texas preacher pitched in and said that Moore's accusations were supported, the Christian Post reported.

According to a letter to Stone and Floyd that was also made public on Thursday, Phillip Bethancourt, the head pastor of Central Church in College Station, Texas, who was then an ERLC worker, felt "compelled" to "become a Southern Baptist whistleblower."

"I cannot remain quiet in light of your responses, so I am compelled to do something no one would want to do--become a Southern Baptist whistleblower, " he wrote

In his letter, Bethancourt implied that the leaders of the SBC were not telling the truth.

"Wouldn't the best way to get to the truth be to hear the two of you in your own words?" he pointed out. "Your own words actually corroborate the claims in Russell Moore's letters--the same claims you now suggest are false. I believe that when Southern Baptists hear you in your own words, they will be wise enough to recognize the truth."

He then attached links to three audio snippets from the debrief meeting at the Nashville Caring Well Conference on October 8, 2019. He said that Floyd had used pressure tactics disguised as "I'm just asking questions."

In Clip 1, Floyd raises concerns about the lack of limits placed on speakers at the Caring Well Conference. In Clip 2, Floyd expresses dissatisfaction with Rachael Denhollander on behalf of the Executive Committee, and in Clip 3, Floyd hints that his main interest is to "preserve the base" at the expense of the survivors.

Also given were audio excerpts from a May 2019 Atlanta conference on sexual assault that featured Stone and Floyd, in which Bethancourt argues that "their resistance to the immediate formation of a standing credentials committee became a primary point of disagreement."

Clip 1 reveals that the Bylaws Workgroup had abandoned their quest of a Credentials Committee and that they considered themselves to be victims. In Clip 2, Bethancourt observes that Stone is using the precise terminology that Russell Moore used in his letter which he previously called "unseemly."

"It is a difficult decision to become a Southern Baptist whistleblower," confessed Bethancourt. "But Southern Baptists deserve to hear you in your own words so they can know the truth. That's why I believe it is necessary to not only give the courtesy of first sharing this information with you directly but also make it available publicly soon."

For anyone who may have concerns regarding the credibility of the audio clip, Bethancourt explained that they were properly obtained by him in Tennessee and Georgia, which are one-party consent states. He said that it was recorded properly in a way consistent with the Sexual Abuse Advisory Group's approach at important meetings and planning sessions.

"This audio captures relevant clips, attempting to ensure that nothing is taken out of context," he explained. "The full audio is not available because it would publicly mention the names or stories of abuse survivors without their consent. However, when a credible third party investigation is launched, I would be willing to cooperate to provide the full audio along with other relevant information."
Bennifer appear to be sharing a wardrobe.

Jennifer Lopez has cast little doubt that she is smitten again with beau Ben Affleck, after she was seen out wearing his shirt on Thursday.

The 51-year-old went very casual as she wore the oversized red and black button down flannel shirt, styling it over a white crop top and sweatpants.

However, it is not uncommon for Ben, 48, - who was seen wearing the same shirt in May this year - to swap clothes with his loved ones.

Who wore it best? Jennifer Lopez (pictured Thursday) seen wearing boyfriend Ben Affleck check shirt (the actor seen wearing the same shirt in May)

Just over a year ago, Ben and his then-girlfriend Ana de Armas were seen wearing the same green button-up shirt from designer Frank & Eileen.

Ben and Ana split after a whirlwind year-long romance in January this year, when Jen was still with her former fiance Alex Rodriguez.

The latest sighting of Jen comes after Ben has reportedly been spending time with her mother Guadalupe while he films a project in Las Vegas.

'Who wore it best?' Ben Affleck and his girlfriend Ana de Armas have been seen sharing the same button-up shirt in May last year

The 48-year-old actor has been sweetly keeping her mother company as a photo obtained by PageSix showed Ben and Guadalupe, 75, hanging out together near slots machines at Wynn Las Vegas.

In between breaks in filming, Guadalupe chatted with members of the film crew and security staff, the outlet reported.

Earlier on Wednesday, Ben had been seen playing the tables at the casino at 3 a.m. A source told E! News on Thursday: 'Guadalupe loves Ben and is happy that he is back in Jennifer's life.'

Rekindled: Lopez recently rekindled her romance with former fiance Ben Affleck; Lopez and Affleck pictured in 2002

'They enjoy gambling together and have done it in the past,' the insider added. 'Ben had the opportunity to work in Vegas this week and she came out.'

Jennifer and Ben were first spotted together in late April, with the pair famously venturing to Montana to spend some quality time.

The have since endured a bi-coastal relationship with dates in Miami and Los Angeles.

Sources told People that JLo is 'incredibly happy' in her rekindled relationship and is considering moving to LA so they can 'spend as much time together as possible.'
Ollie Locke has announced that he and his husband Gareth Locke are set to become fathers for the first time and will welcome their child via surrogacy.

Taking to Instagram on Friday, the Made In Chelsea star, 33, shared two heart-warming video montages documenting their journey to parenthood, with one clip showing the moment the couple's egg was fertilised.

Captioning one of the moving clips, Ollie gushed: 'I cannot wait to meet you little one!' as he excitedly prepared to be a dad.

Congratulations! Ollie Locke has announced that he and his husband Gareth Locke are set to become fathers for the first time and will welcome their child via surrogacy

The first clip saw the start of the reality star pair's journey, with Ollie captioning the post: 'And just like that it was the beginning!'

The star went on to share a further video, which gave more details of their experience, writing: 'I'm not crying, youre crying!

'This is the very moment our eggs were fertilised in 9 months time, after being looked after by a very wonderful human we hope to be able to show you what he or she looks like and how much love we have to give!'

He added: 'I cannot wait to meet you little one and to be your daddy with @garethplocke Xx thank you @advancedfertilitycentercancun for being so wonderful.'

Exciting: Taking to Instagram on Friday, Ollie, 33, shared two video montages documenting their parenthood journey, with one clip showing the moment the couple's egg was fertilised

The exciting first clip shows the couple holding hands as they headed to fertility clinic in Cancun, Mexico.

It then showed them going through a door in the clinic before the shot zoomed into a sample cup.

Commenting on the post, Ollie's husband of seven months Gareth playfully wrote: 'They gave you a naff plastic pot?! I got a crystal tumbler.'

Dads-to-be: Captioning one of the moving clips, Ollie gushed: 'I cannot wait to meet you little one!' as he excitedly prepared to be a dad

Meanwhile, the second video showed the couple's egg being fertilised as their road to parenthood began.

The post garnered several congratulatory messages from his fans and showbiz pals, who were keen to pass on their well wishes.

Ollie and his husband married at the Natural History Museum in November last year, between England's first and second lockdowns.

The beginning: The first clip saw the start of the reality star pair's journey, with Ollie captioning the post: 'And just like that it was the beginning!'

Sweet: The exciting first clip shows the couple holding hands as they headed to fertility clinic in Cancun, Mexico

Last month, Ollie spoke about his excitement at becoming a father and starting a family with his new husband Gareth.

Speaking exclusively to Daily Mail Australia, Ollie said that fatherhood is his top priority right now, first and foremost.

He opened up on their surrogacy plans, teasing: 'I can say we are leaving quite soon to head across the world to become pregnant.'

All set: It then showed them going through a door in the clinic before the shot zoomed into a sample cup

It's happening! Meanwhile, the second video showed the couple's egg being fertilised as their road to parenthood began

'There is nothing in my life that I am more excited or ready for,' he said.

In March, Ollie told The Times about their plans to use a surrogate to have a baby. They will use an American egg donor and a British surrogate.

The pair will also both provide sperm, but won't know whose ends up being used.

'We're mixing it up, so it'll be whoever's swims best on the day and we'll never know. Although if it comes out with yellow hair, it'll be Gareth's,' Ollie told the publication.

Baby plans: Last month, Ollie spoke about his excitement at becoming a father and starting a family with his new husband Gareth

Ollie said he had changed his mind on having children after realising Gareth was his soulmate and feeling a 'void that I couldn't fill naturally.'

He said: 'I want my own biological child. If Gareth and I can't have biological children for whatever reason, of course we can discuss [adoption] but surrogacy is our plan first.'

The couple found a surrogate from the UK who they both 'utterly adore' and flew to the US to meet their egg donor. This is because in the UK you cannot see what they look like.

'The rules in America are more progressive and it feels like what we want to do is much more accepted and regulated. I hate the idea that in the UK you can't see an egg donor's face, so for the rest of my life I'd have no idea where my child's features came from,' Ollie added.

Baby joy: In March, Ollie told The Times about their plans to use a surrogate to have a baby. They will use an American egg donor and a British surrogate

The happy couple both took to Instagram in March to announce the exciting news.

Captioning a snap of Disney princes Eric and Phillip with a baby, Ollie penned: 'So I think it might be the time to tell you all! Gareth and I are very much on our surrogacy journey to become fathers.

'We are very nearly there, with the help of the best person we could ever ask for! (you know who you are, our heavenly surrogate)

'After many months of planning, legal formalities (I cant believe it has been so difficult) and building the next stage to our home, we will soon be travelling to America (as soon as we can, sadly fertility is not essential travel!!) with our surrogate and hopefully become pregnant.

Dads: 'So I think it might be the time to tell you all! Gareth and I are very much on our surrogacy journey to become fathers'

'Whatever happens and through the ups and downs, we are going to take you all on our journey. We have waited for a long time to share this news. We felt it was a hugely important discussion telling our story of how a couple that love each other, and desperately wants a family are becoming parents!

'Through my own social media, Made In Chelsea and (Im sure) other TV platforms we will all go through this together and we couldnt be more excited to become parents'.

The couple secretly married at London's Natural History Museum in front of 13 guests including bridesmaids Binky Felstead and Olivia Bentley on November 4th.

They hastily organised the event with just 48 hours' notice before the second national lockdown began across England the following day.

So lovely: 'We are very nearly there, with the help of the best person we could ever ask for! (you know who you are, our heavenly surrogate)'

Friends and family also attended an impromptu wedding breakfast at Chelsea's Bluebird restaurant the night before their ceremony, with guests including Tiffany Watson, Lydia Bright, singer Ella Eyre and actress Pearl Mackie in attendance.

Ollie told Hello! magazine: 'As soon as you say "I do", it's the start of a great adventure. And this is something that we have wanted for a long time. Now let's see if we can create a family - that's the next stage.'

The couple previously said they will join their matching surnames to become the Locke-Lockes.

The setting: The couple secretly married at London's Natural History Museum (pictured) in front of 13 guests including bridesmaids Binky Felstead and Olivia Bentley on November 4th

Speaking about their wedding day, Ollie added: 'It was just spectacular. It was so elegant, so incredibly beautiful and so special. It was very unique and very us.

'I love living my life as a rom-com and it was exactly how we wanted it. I knew it was going to change our lives forever.'

New husband Gareth added: 'It was something I will remember for the rest of my life and it was perfect.'
U.S. revoking Chinese apps ban a positive step: MOC

Xinhua) 08:20, June 11, 2021

BEIJING, June 10 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. move of revoking previous executive orders targeting Chinese software applications, including TikTok and WeChat, was a positive step in the right direction, the Ministry of Commerce (MOC) said Thursday.

China hopes the United States can treat Chinese firms in an equal and fair manner and avoid politicizing the economic and trade issues, MOC spokesperson Gao Feng said.

The economic and trade relations between the two countries are mutually beneficial and win-win in nature, Gao said.

Both sides have their own important concerns on economy and trade, but the two countries can seek solutions on the basis of mutual respect and treating each other equally, said the spokesperson.

China is pleased to see the national economic development and sci-tech progress of other countries, Gao said, noting that it opposes politicizing economic and trade issues as well as playing zero-sum games.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)
A Lakeland youth pastor attempted to groom a teenage girl into sleeping with him but was interrupted by a maid at the last minute.

According to Fox News, investigators discovered that 29-year-old Andrew Weaver, a youth pastor had been "informally counseling" for some time a 17-year-old who had been a member of his youth group for around three years, beginning when she was around 13 years old. This progressed to the youth pastor asking to see the youth's nude photos and engaging with her in a conversation about sexual desires.

According to their report, Weaver met the young girl at the church then drove her to a hotel in Mulberry where he had reserved a room. But, according to Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, before anything physical could happen, a maid knocked on the door, frightening Weaver.

"That maid [who] went to the door, she was an angel that day because it freaked him out and the rest of that 'inappropriate counseling session' didn't take place," he said.

The youth informed the investigators that sexual contact would have happened if the maid hadn't intervened and stopped them.

"Instead of him being the adult in the room, he creates a relationship with a 17-year-old child," Judd said. "Did I tell you that he's 29, and married, and a youth pastor?"

"Let me share a little counseling with Andrew here: Jesus don't like that," Judd said of the youth pastor.

The sheriff revealed that the perpetrator, Weaver, works for Highlands Church of Christ. However, when church authorities became aware that Weaver may have been attempting to seduce a minor in his youth group, the sheriff said that they alerted police.

He said that the church did the right thing by handing Weaver over to the sheriff's office once they learned what he had done.

After being arrested by authorities, Weaver expressed regret for having "crossed a line" with the victim and admitted to having problems with impulse control. The arrest took place four days after the church contacted the police, reports Miami Herald

Weaver is facing third-degree of attempted unlawful sex with a minor and interference with child custody.

When Weaver was grilled about his alleged offenses on June 7, he confessed to having attempted the affair at the hotel.

"Weaver advised he believed he had 'crossed a line' with the victim, which he further explained that he was closer to the victim emotionally than he should have been... Weaver stated he struggles with impulse control and then drove himself and the victim to the Best Western Hotel in Mulberry, FL after discussing the VICTIM's sexual fantasies," the court affidavit said.

Weaver is presently incarcerated in the Polk County prison, where he is being held without bail.

"Youth ministers are entrusted with mentoring our children," said Judd, "This minister betrayed that trust and he must be held accountable."

"There are hundreds of thousands of youth ministers (who) do the right thing everyday and provide counsel and leadership and adult supervision to youths who are in need of appropriate leadership. This guy is an embarrassment to every one of those," Judd was also quoted as saying according to the Daily Caller.
Nacogdoches, TX (75965)

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Partly cloudy. Hot. High around 95F. Winds NE at 5 to 10 mph..

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A few clouds from time to time. Low 74F. Winds light and variable.
Chinese authorities under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership are scrambling to control what citizens are saying about a fresh wave of COVID-19 cases that broke out in the southern province of Guangdong, which is the country's manufacturing hub and largest province by economic output.

The Chinese government was taken by surprise when a surge of new COVID-19 cases broke out in the region, with more than 110 confirmed cases since May 21. Now, the CCP is trying to maintain the idea that they have it all under control.

According to Reuters, 90% of the confirmed cases are in Guangzhou, the provincial capital of Guangdong, which is why the CCP is boosting its testing capabilities among its 18 million and more citizens. Since May 26, Guangzhou has collected more than 28 million nucleic acid samples, resulting in 40 confirmed cases, a spokesperson for the city said this week. But aside from handling the spread of the virus, the CCP is also handling the spread of information.

Radio Free Asia reported that there has been "considerable public skepticism" about CCP's handling of the new COVID-19 outbreak and whether they are under-reporting the statistics.

In fact, a Wuhan resident by the name of Guo questioned why the Chinese government ordered 6,500 medical staff to be transferred into Guangzhou despite it already having about 170,000 medical staff. Guo admitted that anyone in the healthcare system would refrain from speaking out or else "they will get detained even if they just say a few words."

Meanwhile, the Shantou Daily newspaper recently reported that two Chinese men were accused of "rumor-mongering" and held under "administrative detention" by Chaonan police, who "investigated and dealt with two rumors involving the pandemic," the paper reported.

One of the two people who made comments about COVID-19 on social media was surnamed Zhuang and was detained on June 1 after he made what the Chinese media calls "inappropriate comments" on WeChat. He was accused of "spreading rumors and disrupting public order" and was held for five days.

The second man who was detained was surnamed Zhou and was captured on June 5 for claiming that he was positive for COVID-19. He was then sentenced to 10 days of administrative detention. A Beijing resident with the surname Liu told RFA that Chinese citizens are "not allowed to tell the truth in this pandemic" and that if anyone does and it gets retweeted or seen by the authorities, "you're finished."

"This goes to show how afraid the government is of the truth; it's very strict now," Liu said.

Legal scholar Li Lin adds that the CCP implements a one-way flow of information in which only the Chinese government is allowed to disseminate information. Any discussions on the release of information from the government is not allowed and dissenters will be reprimanded and detained.

CNBC reported that CCP authorities are also cracking down on those who have violated COVID-19 restrictions after the government reported a discovery of the Delta variant of the virus that was first identified in India. They now have 115 positive cases of the highly transmissible COVID-19 variant. According to the report, violations include refraining from wearing a mask in public spaces, refusing a COVID-19 test, defying quarantine and isolation orders, and spreading false information.
A new survey conducted on 1,200 American voters revealed that a majority of them support a ban on abortion at 15 weeks, especially when the patient is provided information about the unborn baby's advanced development during that stage. The survey also found that only 32% of voters supported legal abortion for all circumstances.

The survey was conduced by OnMessage Inc. for the pro-life organization Susan B. Anthony List, Christian Headlines reported. This survey comes at the heels of the Supreme Court's decision to consider a Mississippi law constitutionality, which may have damaging effects on Roe v. Wade. The Mississipi law states that abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy is illegal, except when fetal abnormality is detected or there is a medical emergency that requires it.

The OnMessage survey of 1,200 likely voters revealed that 53% of them prefer a Republican candidate who "supports limiting abortions after 15 weeks with exceptions for the life and physical health of the mother or severe abnormality of the baby." Only 28% of voters would perfer a Democratic candidate who "supports unlimited abortion up until the moment of birth."

Most voters in the survey also admitted to more likely support a 15-week abortion ban after learning information about fetal development. Up to 55% admitted they were likely to support the 15-week abortion ban after they learned that "an unborn child has the capacity to feel pain" at 15 weeks of life. 53% of surveyed voters were also more likely to support the ban on abortion at 15 weeks after learning that in that stage, "an unborn child has a beating heart, can move around in the womb, can close his or her fingers, can start to make sucking motions and hiccup, and senses stimulation from outside the womb."

Wes Anderson of OnMessage concluded how the results of the survey "demonstrate that a majority of voters reject abortion on demand throughout pregnancy." It also showed how even independent voters agree to reject abortion on demand, siding with the pro-life side of the argument and creating a center-right coalition.

But as the survey indicates that the country may move center-right, Democrats are mobilizing to place safety measures in case Roe v Wade does get overturned this year. Earlier reports indicate that, Congressional Democrats this week reintroduced the Women's Health Protection Act, which if passed would guarantee women's rights to abortion without limits. The controversial law was first introduced in 2013 and has been reintroduced since then, as it never received a vote in either chamber.

This week, Gallup also released an annual poll showing a "record high" statistic: 47% of Americans think abortion is morally acceptable. But the results also show how 46% of survey respondents believe that abortion is "morally wrong," a 1% drop from last year's 47% who believed so. But pro-life advocates warn about how the media can spin the numbers to favor the pro-choice agenda.

"The mainstream media will likely spin a few of the findings from this recent Gallup poll to argue that there has been a decrease in pro-life sentiment," Dr. Michael J. New of the Charlotte Lozier Institute wrote for Live Action News, via Townhall. "However, pro-lifers should not be misled."
The second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps over more celebs in Tollywood. This time, it is Pujita Ponnada who contracted the virus upon her return to Hyderabad from Chennai last month.

The day I returned to Hyderabad, I was in high spirits and was dancing and jumping around. But the next morning when I woke up, I knew Id test positive for the virus. I had all the symptoms, recollect Pujita.

Pujita Ponnada

After immediately messaging her family in Mumbai, Pujita rushed in for the COVID-19 test. While at first her parents panicked for her, they immediately swung into action, arranging for everything shed need during her isolation at home i.e., including food, medicines, medical advice, hospital bed if required, etc. The first two days were terrible, remembers Pujita. My condition was very bad and I was very weak.

The confining illness

Her bad condition aside, there was something else that was getting to the actress. I am very active and never like to stay indoors. With the viral attack and the isolation requirement, I suddenly felt like I was alone, she says.

On the third day, however, her mother flew down from Mumbai so she could be there for her daughter and cook. Her mothers arrival also brought Pujita the much-needed moral support during the tough time she was undergoing. Things were haywire until my mother came. I realised that even though everything I needed was arranged for, the moral support was the key to my COVID-19 recovery, which made a big difference.

But by then, Pujitas symptoms were worsening. On day five, I lost my sense of taste and smell, she adds. But the home-cooked food made a major difference. Ever since I began eating the food my mother had cooked, my appetite started developing.

Despite the symptoms that fluctuated over the first week, her oxygen levels always remained good, which meant that her home quarantine was enough and she didnt need to be hospitalised. She spent her days reading books and watching a few films.

The unending bad news

Now despite the recovery that was setting in, depressing news from around the world about COVID cases and the loss of lives were slowly getting to her. I also kept receiving messages on my phone about friends contracting the virus, remembers Pujita.

Added to it all, the physical agony she was going through because of the disease and being unable to sit or sleep properly, she began noticing all the bad thoughts that kept flashing in her mind.

But Pujitas mother was still with her and her friends  including childhood friends she had lost contact with  began calling in to check on her. She was beginning to feel good about reconnecting with all of them. She began counting her blessings and knew then that she had to turn around the negativity creeping into her mind through self-love. For starters, she started to eat well so that she could strengthen her metabolism.

She has since been recovering well. But through her recovery, the biggest lesson she says shes learnt from the experience is to never take anything for granted. After I got infected, I realised that anything can happen and nothing is permanent, she says.

Those two weeks made for the toughest phase of my life. I wish no one goes through this ordeal, but I know many have experienced more severe symptoms and had it worse than I did.

After coming out of isolation, the first thing I did was to go on a drive because Id felt like Id been imprisoned for two weeks. I am now almost recovered and getting back to normalcy. I have also started working out slowly. Ive also been reading a few scripts and look forward to soon resuming shooting for my upcoming films.
They find it hard to concentrate on studies as the houses are in a mess with offices, kitchen and house works all going on at the same time. (Representational image: PTI)

Hyderabad: Cancellation of examinations and uncertainty of physical teaching for the next academic year are pushing bright students into depression and anxiety, according to mental health experts. They are not able to cope with the situation as they find that their hard work is not recognised due to uncertainty over exams, they opined.

With schools and junior colleges already stressing on internal assessments, students are worried if next year also will see the same cycle. And for the same reasons, bright students from class VIII to class XII are getting overtly anxious. Some of them are reportedly on the verge of a breakdown at home and their worried parents are said to be in a state of helplessness.

Most of the students from the middle and the lower middle classes are studying online while the rest of their family members are around. They find it hard to concentrate on studies as the houses are in a mess with offices, kitchen and house works all going on at the same time.

Dr Charan Tej, psychiatrist at the Krishna Institute of Medical Sciences (KIMS) Hospital says, "We are getting distress calls from students as they are not able to continue in this manner. Those from class 9th to 12th find the situation difficult to handle. They cannot talk to their teachers directly, clear doubts, ask questions and are also unable to get direct feedback on their performances. In a classroom, there is motivation for bright students as they answer first, get appreciation from their teachers and shine in the class. This motivation is completely missing in online classes which is causing anxiety and depression."

This is being noted mostly in students who are preparing for competitive exams like National Eligibility cum Entrance Test and Joint Entrance Exams.

Psychiatrists and psychologists who are into online counselling say they are seeing good, normal students during the pandemic stressed due to external factors. Seventy percent of them require counselling and cognitive therapy to divert their minds from negative thinking and to cope with the present situation. There are 30 percent of them who require medical attention as they have an underlying history of mental illness in the family.

Dr I. Bharat Reddy, senior consultant psychiatrist at Apollo Hospitals, says, "The uncertainty about academic programmes is causing good students to dread another year of online studies. It is affecting their interest in studies as they have been groomed for competitive exams right from the beginning. But in the last two years, the academic schedule is such that students are not getting a chance to compete and excel."

With physical and social distance norms are in place, psychological makeovers of support, togetherness and being face to face are missing, leading to restlessness. This is one of the reasons that many students dislike online classes and this category includes bright and also not-so-bright students.

Experts state that schools must go slow on engaging students for long hours as online fatigue has set in. Students have to be divided into smaller classrooms where teachers can interact with good and not-so-good in different sessions.

It is also important that there are better assessments to keep them engaged and challenge them like it is in a classroom. Parents have to support them in terms of space, giving an area where they can concentrate and also look at the brighter picture of the possibility of going back to normal living after vaccination. Improving coping mechanisms by looking at the brighter picture will help them as they have a long way ahead, say the experts.
All India Congress Committee (AICC) and Delhi Congress protest against frequent hikes in the prices of petrol and diesel, and demand roll back of the prices at Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium Petrol Pump in New Delhi. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: Congress leaders and party workers on Friday held symbolic protests at petrol pumps in several parts of the city, demanding a complete rollback of fuel price hike.

Party leaders K C Venugopal and Shakti Singh Gohil reached the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium petrol pump on a horse cart.

Venugopal said that under the UPA government, the tax on petrol and diesel stood at Rs 9.20. Now, it is Rs 32.

"The government should stop imposing excise duty on petrol and diesel. It should come under the purview of Goods and Services Tax. We demand a complete rollback of fuel price hike," Venugopal, who is the Congress general secretary, said.

Ajay Maken led a protest against rising fuel prices at petrol pumps in Rajinder Nagar and Janpath.

Party leaders said protests are being held at petrol pumps across the county by local units in compliance with COVID-19 protocols.

Petrol and diesel prices were hiked again on Friday by 31 paise per litre and 28 paise per litre, respectively.

A litre of petrol in Delhi costs Rs 95.85, whereas diesel costs Rs 86.75 per litre.

Petrol prices have crossed the Rs 100 per litre mark in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Rajasthan and Ladakh.

Sri Ganganagar district in Rajasthan has the costliest fuel in the country with petrol priced at Rs 106.94 a litre and diesel at Rs 99.80.
Old Adilabad district has become a hub for illegal stocks of cotton seeds and also spurious cotton seeds. (Representational Photo:AFP)

ADILABAD: Shockingly, it is found that some seed companies which have approval from the government only to produce tomato seeds have also been into manufacturing cotton seeds and selling them without any hurdle for years.

Old Adilabad district has become a hub for illegal stocks of cotton seeds and also spurious cotton seeds. Police teams are now unearthing these illegal stocks and seizing spurious seeds every day.

One Tierra seed company is found supplying cotton seeds with fake approval to agencies which are in turn passing them on to gullible farmers. The agriculture department issued orders banning the company from supplying cotton seeds. There are said to be so many such companies thriving with official nexus. If the rains are intensified by joint teams of police and

agriculture officers, it would yield huge illegal stocks as well as spurious cotton seeds, say observers.

Farmers are losing heavily as fake seeds are not germinating. This came to light when Utnoor DSP Uday Reddy raided three fertilisers and pesticide shops in Ichoda and Neredigonda. He said Tierra has permission only for tomato seeds but it is also supplying cotton seeds without any approval.

Fertilisers and pesticide traders are colluding with them. Police seized cotton seeds worth Rs 19 lakh from five shops in Ichoda circle. They also sealed Algurwar and Nikhil fertilizers shops in Adilabad town on June 10. The police said Nikhil Fertilisers owner took an undertaking from farmers that he would not be held responsible if there was no germination of seeds or any loss. Algurwar owner was selling spurious cotton seeds by fixing their own prices and tampering with markers on the seed bags and lot numbers.

Adilabad police led by DSP Venkateshwarlu seized illegal cotton seeds worth of Rs 1.5 lakh in Kuchulapur village in Talamadugu Mandal. Rural CI Purushotham Chary and SI Divya took part in the raid in Kuchulapur on Friday.
China's Communist regime reportedly treats Chinese workers who work on its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects like slaves.

The Epoch Times was able to interview one of the skilled workers in China's flagship project in Turkey, the Hunutlu Thermal Power Plant, who disclosed that they are forced to work every day even Sundays on a 12-hour shift yet are underpaid.

According to the Epoch Times, the skilled worker, who hid himself by the name Liu Qiang, disclosed that the monthly offer of $2,346 enticed him to work in the plant despite the pandemic for a nine-hour "normal job."

The reality of his working conditions hit him only when he was already there in Turkey, such as not being given work contracts or permits, insurance, medical compensation, and enough time to rest. This does not include receiving his actual pay that's slashed by a third of what's promised him just because he allegedly didn't suit the job's criteria.

"We were told the scheduled working hours was nine, a normal job. "But when we came, the company did not sign contracts, nor give any permit," Qiang narrated to The Epoch times.

"We are tired, ill, and need a break, but are not allowed. They said we are only allowed to go back after a full working year. It's horrible here! What is it going to be like after a year? I have no idea. I have to live and work like a slave," he stressed.

Qiang said that it was common for the workers to become dizzy and experience fatigue due to the extended working hours amidst Turkey's hot weather. This then led the workers to make mistakes at work and even to suffer injuries.

"We are afraid that we will not earn much money but will be left with physical injuries-broken bones or other injuries-which could be a lifelong condition," he added.

Qiang explained that he had two roommates suffered leg injuries that were not properly treated medically. The roommates were just asked to lay down in their dormitory since they would not be brought to the hospital unless the leg was broken.

In addition, Qiang said there were barbed wired metal fences surrounding the construction site that prevented any one from attempting to escape. He also said they have limited movements such that they are only to stay in their dormitory after work. He stated that those who protested were still held on site since their passports were confiscated. He highlighted that the Chinese Embassy in Turkey turned them down since the matter is a labor concern and not a matter of foreign relations.

It's like a China-owned labor camp, where workers are treated like slaves, but only situated in Turkey.

The Epoch Times explained that the Hunutlu Power Plant, China's flagship project, employs 1,000 Chinese workers (with 1,800 reported during the pandemic) that were forbidden to leave the site since it follows the "closed-off" strategy of the Chinese Communist Party.

Under the multi-trillion-dollar scheme of BRI, the Hunutlu Thermal Power project was subcontracted by China Energy Engineering Group Anhui No.1 Electric Power Construction Co., Ltd. (AEPC) for main contractor Shanghai Electric Power Company that amounted to a $1.7 billion investment. AEPC was able to acquire the skilled workers to Turkey through their subcontractor Anhui Zhenjiang Holding Group (AZHG).

The Epoch Times said that neither AEPC or AZHG have responded to their invitation to clarify nor comment to the allegations made by Qiang.
TRS accepted donations of over Rs 20,000 each from 41 individuals amounting to Rs 39.92 lakh while it received Rs 89.15 crore from corporates via electoral bonds totalling Rs 89.55 crore. (Photo: Facebook @trspartyonline)

HYDERABAD: The ruling Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) received Rs 89.55 crore in donations from corporates and individuals in 2019-20, according to the latest annual funding report submitted to the Election Commission of India (ECI). Interestingly, no other regional party in both the Telugu states stands anywhere near the TRS on this count.

The ruling YSRC in Andhra Pradesh received Rs 8.92 crore and the opposition Telugu Desam Rs 2.60 crore. The All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen (AIMIM), on the other hand, received Rs 13.85 lakh donations.

The TRS accepted donations of over Rs 20,000 each from 41 individuals amounting to Rs 39.92 lakh while it received Rs 89.15 crore from corporates via electoral bonds totalling Rs 89.55 crore. However, it did not disclose the details of corporate houses which donated funds but listed the names of 41 individuals who donated amounts of over Rs 20,000 each. Among them, TRS working president K.T. Rama Rao donated the highest amount of Rs 2.5 lakh.

One K. Naveen Kumar also donated Rs 2.5 lakh. The rest of the individual donations were in the range of Rs 20,000 to Rs 2 lakh.

For YSRC, the highest amount donated by a corporate was Rs 2.50 crore. The amount was donated by JSR Infra Developers Pvt Ltd, a Chennai-based firm. Among individual donations, one P Sivakumar Reddy from Guduru town donated Rs 1 crore. Arimenda Varaprasad Reddy and his wife Vijaya Sarada Reddy, who run a chain of engineering colleges in Hyderabad, donated Rs 60 lakh each.

The TD received the highest donation of Rs 1 crore from Triumph Electoral Trust, Chennai. Balaram Vemuri from Vijayawada donated Rs 80 lakh, Janachaitanya Housing Pvt Ltd from Guntur donated Rs 20 lakh and Anil Swati Balaram Foundation donated Rs 20 lakh.

The AIMIM received donations of Rs 3 lakh each from four individuals towards helicopter rent from Jharkhand and Maharashtra, where AIMIMchief Asaduddin Owaisi held election rallies.
I love it that were a chilled-out country so accepting of dramatic contrasts. I mean that! For centuries, we have absorbed absurdities and carried on like its no big deal. Last weeks headline grabbers couldnt have been more startlingly different! One, a mysterious femme fatale in Antigua, the other a saffron-robed chief minister of our countrys most populous state. In both cases, their newsworthiness was hinged around perfect timing! Bombshell Barbara is getting her cues so on point (wonder whos tutoring this one!). So is Yogi Adityanath (err we can guess who his tutor is!). Both protagonists are armed with enough lethal ammo to blow up a few very important reputations. There is a third high-profile player. Harish Salve, wholl attract almost as much attention in the weeks to come as these two.

Lets start with Bombshell Barbara, whos living up to the old chestnut Cherchez la femme  in the ongoing extradition saga featuring a disreputable and disgraced diamantaire from India -- the infamous Mehul Choksi, maternal uncle of an equally wanted diamantaire Nirav Modi. The brilliant Harish Salve has his work cut out for him, in a way. He has announced hell succeed in getting back the fugitive diamond merchant either hiding out or being held hostage in Dominica, who ran off with Rs 3,500 crores of public money in the PNB scam. Please note, Shri Salve is saying this feat will be achieved in weeks, not months! Thats Salve for you -- brilliant, mercurial, well-connected, super-confident and successful.

While we hold our breaths for the Return of the Jewel Thief, the adventurous lady playing a starring role in the high seas action drama in the Caribbean is attracting a great deal of attention -- not just from Choksis wife Preeti, but the media at large. The official Jab we met versions keep changing, but when the kidnapping story broke, Barbara was khullam khulla described as Mehuls girlfriend. Till loyal wife Preeti protested and staunchly denied a romantic liaison, choosing to describe Barbara as a family friend who had tricked her sweet husband into accepting a dinner appointment (Preetis decription). That too, at 5.30 pm (why not call it high tea with nashta paani?). Between the wanted man and the bombshell, we expected a tad more action. What was this innocuous, chaste appointment Preeti was talking about? Please, madam, do describe it as a hot and daring dinner date a deux, then we are talking! Oh, wait a minute, when did the Bewakoof Barbara discover that shed been had by Mehul Choksi in more ways than one? When did she find out she was just one more greedy woman conned by Mehul, who she alleges wooed her with priceless diamond trinkets, which turned out to be fake! During their long walks and relaxed evenings? As they say, beware the wrath of a woman diamond scorned After the scandal broke, Barbara has been singing like a canary with a sore throat. Alas, there go her dreams of becoming a real estate tycoon in Antigua --another false promise made by Mehul to keep his lady love interested, while he figured out his next move -- some say to Cuba. Maybe what he didnt figure was the classic honey trap -- The End -- to his pyaar mohabbat!

Diamonds are forever, as the tagline goes. But Mehul was peddling cheap glass. God knows how many high net-worth customers in India have been similarly tricked by Mehul and his understudy Nirav. Funny part is, the cheated ladies cant file charges -- those supposedly priceless and rare stones were probably sold minus receipts, to greedy and gullible clients eager to park unaccounted money in easy to store heera motis. I can visualise these ladies staring glumly at their obscene rocks and wondering what to do with the useless baubles. Meanwhile, Bombshell Barbara may be busy selling the rights to her story to Netflix. This is Pirates of the Caribbean, without Johnny Depp! But with a roly poly Mehul Choksi playing Humpty Dumpty.

On the other side of the news cycle is a diminutive ascetic who is making some badass moves in Uttar Pradesh. Clearly prepping for the Assembly elections in 2022. Yogi wants it to be his solo show, not a group exhibition. Clearly, he is being backed by his RSS bosses, and encouraged to assert his individuality more emphatically, in order to defuse any argument as to who calls the shots in UP -- Modi or Yogi? Political watchers believe a new axis is forming, which pitches the Modi-Shah combo against the Gadkari-Yogi jodi. If true, this could also pave the way for new power structures across India and dent the invincibility of those currently holding the reins at the Centre. Yogi, after several disastrous errors of judgment (all that nonsense about love jihads, anti-Romeo squads), quickly got his act together and took a firm position against the anti-CAA riots in Muslim dominated areas. But then came the horrifying sight of Covid corpses floating down the rivers of Yogis vast state of 240 million! Not good! Not good! Satyanaash But hey, he bounced back swiftly! Fans and supporters are pointing out how he tamed and tackled the Covid-19 numbers, even managing to beat other states at keeping cases down. The interesting thing is this: that even the hardcore, hard-bitten BJP supporters are now uttering Yogi Adityanaths name in the same breath as Narendra Modis. Sacrilege! And hello!

Nobody is demanding their heads on a platter. They are also insisting Yogi is their guy. The main man. Which means the highest of the high commands is okay with the new narrative and is in fact encouraging such public talk. Frankly, this is a positive development -- absolute power corrupts absolutely, as we all know. Throwing in a serious challenger to NaMo at this critical stage (the run-up to Elections 2022) is a smart, shrewd move. It means all players will have to work that much harder to win this round. It also signals Yogis elevation to a more visible, pan-India position, from where he can leverage and consolidate his image before the asli biggie -- the national elections of 2024. The person who should be watching these developments closely is Mamata Didi, given her prime ministerial ambitions. These two make worthy rivals -- both come with their single-and-not-ready-to-mingle status: the guy is a Yogi and the lady is a Yogini. Their followers worship them and believe that they can do no wrong. The race to the hot seat has suddenly got hotter!
A County Derry electrical company has revealed its new-look website at an official launch event last week.

Donaghy Bros, with stores in Kilrea and Limavady, has launched the website in partnership with software firm Pinpoint Designs.

The new site includes an out-of-stock alert feature that will send a notification to customers trying to buy any item that is out of stock.

Dermot and James Donaghy.

Owner James Donaghy said he hoped the website would increase the company's ability to compete with the multi-nationals.

We have always recognised the importance of our Ecommerce site and want to give customers an online experience that matches the in-store one, he said.

We began investing substantially in our online business in 2014 in order to compete with the multi-nationals and expand our customer base beyond Northern Ireland.

With the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on the footfall within the local high streets it cemented our view to further invest in this area of our business.

The website launch comes soon after the company announced they had purchased the old Danske Bank building in Kilrea, where they hope to develop office space and a staff training centre.

The site can be accessed here.
Remo D'Souza reveals Sushant Singh Rajput wanted to collaborated with him on a dance film: 'I wish I could have"

Filmmaker and choreographer Remo DSouza relived a few memories of his interactions with late actor Sushant Singh Rajput ahead of his first death anniversary. The choreographer in an interview recalled how the actor had once expressed his desire to collaborate with him on a dance film and said that he was an amazing dancer.

Remo who was a judge on the dance reality show Jhalak Dikhlajaa when Sushant participated recalled how it surprised him that Sushant lost the competition in the finale and praised the actors skill to master any dance form he set his mind to. Talking about their discussion of doing a film together Remo told Time Of India, Sushant wanted to do a dance film. When he had come on my show, Dance+, for the promotion of one of his movies, he had asked me to work on a dance film with him. I wish I could have. Sushant was an amazing dancer.

Recalling their conversation he recalled what Sushant told him, Sir, you know I am a good dancer, lets do a dance film together. I get goosebumps when I think of that conversation.

Sushant was found dead in his Bandra based apartment on June 14 last year. His sudden demise left the film industry in a deep state of shock and launched a far reaching investigation into his mysterious death which is now being helmed by the Cnetral Bureau of Investigation and has the Narcotics Control Bureau looking into a possible drug angle.
Varun Dhawan will reunite with Bhediya team this month to shoot last leg of the film

Soon after he tied the knot with the love of his life Natasha Dalal, actor Varun Dhawan jetted off to Arunachal Pradesh to shoot for his next and much awaited film Bhediya. Helmed by ace director Amar Kaushik, the monster comedy will be the next installment in Dinesh Vijans horror comedy universe, which includes hits like Stree and Roohi. Well, back in April the actor completed shooting 90% of the film along with his co-star Kriti Sanon, before bidding adieu to the gorgeous location.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by VarunDhawan (@varundvn)

According to the latest report shared by Pinkvilla, Varun will now resume shooting for Bhediya in Mumbai on 26th of June. A source was quoted saying, Varun and the entire team of this Dinesh Vijan and Jio Studios production reunites in Mumbai for the final leg of the film. Its going to be a brief shoot before the team calls its a wrap. The team will make sure that all safety measures are followed amid the coronavirus pandemic during shoot. Bhediya is set to hit theatres on 14th April 2022.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by VarunDhawan (@varundvn)

Other than Bhediya, Varun has many other exciting scripts in his kitty. He will soon begin the shoot of Sajid Nadiadwala's action thriller Sanki after which he will move on to biographical war film Ekkis, based on the life of military officer Arun Khetarpal. Varun will also be seen in Raj Mehtas Jug Jugg Jeeyo alongside Anil Kapoor, Neetu Kapoor and Kiara Advani. Busy year!
Pearl V Puri rape case: TV actor denied bail, to remain in Thane jail till June 15

TV actor Pearl V Puri who was arrested on charges of rape and molestation of a minor last week has been denied bail. The actor was sent into judicial custody after appearing before a magistrate based on a complaint filed by the victims father.

On June 4, Waliv Police arrested the actor after registering a case against him under Section 376 of IPC and POSCO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) Act 4,8,12, 19 and 21. Puri applied for bail on June 7 and after a hearing was denied bail today.

According to a Times of India report, DCP Sanjay Patil of Zone 2, Mira Bhayander Vasai Virar informed, He did not get bail today. The court hearing for the bail plea has been postponed to Tuesday, June 15. Pearl will remain in Thane Jail till such time.

The incident date back to 2019 and Pearl has been accused of molesting a 5-year-old on the sets of his show Bepannah Pyaar. The minor is the daughter of another actor on the show.

Pearl has been receiving overwhelming support from his colleagues in the TV industry who vouched for his respectful character and alleged he is being framed with false allegations.
Facebook is a well-known tech giant and not only for their main and acquired social platforms but also because of the other tech devices that it has created or promised to create in the future that are more likely to change the world in terms of technology.The tech giant had verbally announced that is planning to create a smart watch a few months ago, however that was the only conversation that happened related to it and the tech giant after that did not comment or has commented anything on the matter as of yet.However, some inside sources have managed to reveal that Facebook is now indeed officially planning on releasing its smartwatch which is expected to have its own messaging features as well as features related to health and fitness.Though, not a lot has been said about this matter but some details have been revealed of how the watch is expected to look like and what features it may hold. According to the inside sources, the new Facebook smart watch will be launched in three different casing each of black, gold or white color and each watch may contain a heartbeat monitor for users to check their pulse or heart rate after exercise or whenever they want, it is also said to have two cameras, one which will be a front facing detachable one and the other a rear one.The company is said to have collaborated with other companies to provide the watch with services that the tech giant itself cannot provide, like for example it is working with the best wireless carriers in the States to provide the watch users with 5G connectivity as well as have collaborated with a company to provide accessories for the rear camera.All these features and the watch will be available to the public for 400 dollars per watch, which is the rate that has been decided up until now.However, the company has not spoken on this matter yet and all this is news that has been collected from inside sources so there are chances things might be different when the watch is officially released.There are also chances that the device may be a way for Facebook to come on the same level as Apple and Google devices and also provide an opportunity for the platform to distance itself from the rules that are being imposed by Apple and Google.Apple has introduced its tracking transparency feature which requires applications to ask for user consent before they collect any information as a part of their 14.5 update and there is news that Google may be introducing something similar in the coming months.Through this smartwatch, Facebook will have received an out from such rules and can easily collect information and data from users who are using its services through the smart watch as it will not be bounded towards either Apple or Google.Though, not all ties will be cut because the company has worked with Google to provide its smart watch with their Operating System.However, this is a big step by Facebook and the launch of its smart watch will be a great opening for them to follow through with their other to be released devices which will be making appearances soon. Many people believe though that is a huge risk for Facebook to release a smart watch when it has been stuck in privacy scandals of its own, however those scandals did not stop the company from going through with other new invention so we would like to believe that smart watch will be happening because from the inside sources it has been accumulated enough that the tech giant is indeed serious about its production.Though it is not known as to when will it release, news is, it may be launched by next summer. However, all this depends upon what Facebook decides.Photo: Jeff Chiu/APRead next: Mark Zuckerberg Shares Experience of Teaching Daughter How to Type and Code
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RENTON  An apartment building at 10436 S.E. Carr Road in Renton sold for over $12.9 million, according to King County records.

The seller was Avaya at Town Center 52 LLC, a California family trust, which acquired the property in 2018 for almost $12 million.





. . .
Local

CREATE Foundation experiences unprecedented growth

Thomas Wells | Buy at PHOTOS.DJOURNAL.COM Recipients of the CREATE Foundations 2020 Jack Reed Sr. Northeast Mississippi Community Leadership Award include, from left, H.L. Sandy Williams; Hassell Franklin; and Mary Childs, who accepted on behalf of her late father, Bobby Martin. Aubrey Patterson, not pictured, also received the award. The prestigious award was presented as part of the CREATE Foundations annual State of the Region meeting, held Thursday at the BancorpSouth Conference Center in Tupelo. Thomas Wells | Buy at PHOTOS.DJOURNAL.COM Hundreds of guests attended Thursdays annual State of Region meeting, held by the CREATE Foundation at the BancorpSouth Conference Center in Tupelo. Thomas Wells | Buy at PHOTOS.DJOURNAL.COM Lt. Gov. Delbert Hoseman delivers his vision of Mississippi Thursday at the annual State of Region meeting held by the CREATE Foundation. Thomas Wells | Buy at PHOTOS.DJOURNAL.COM Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley informs guests of the progress that is being made throughout the region and the state of getting high speed internet into rural areas during Thursdays annual State of Region meeting put on by the CREATE Foundation.

TUPELO  The CREATE Foundation is as financially stable as it has ever been, with some $153 million in assets, keeping the state's oldest nonprofit community foundation also its largest.

Twenty-five years ago, the foundation had just under $14 million in assets.

CREATE President Mike Clayborne, presiding over Thursday's annual State of the Region meeting, said in six of the past seven years, more contributions were made to CREATE that exceeded the total that was given in the first 25 years of the organization.

"In six months, we'll be celebrating the 50th anniversary of CREATE," he said. "In the first 25 years of CREATE, from 1972 to 1996, we had contributions of $11.6 million total. From 1997 through today in 2021, we've had contributions of $198 million."

Clayborne relayed the information to some 300 attendees at the meeting. Other speakers included Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and Northern District Public Service Commissioner Brandon Presley.

For his part, Presley spoke about what he calls Northeast Mississippi's broadband "revolution."

Presley: 'We're in the midst of a broadband revolution' TUPELO  A little more than two years ago, Brandon Presley began what he said would be a five-year plan to push for rural broadband access.

As of Thursday morning, nearly 25,000 home owners statewide have fiber-to-the-home broadband, with most of those centered in Northeast Mississippi.

Hosemann, meanwhile, spoke about the achievements of the state legislature and some of the efforts underway for the next session on how to best invest an influx of money  some $5 billion  provided to the state as part of the American Rescue Plan.

Hosemann: Invest money for the next couple of generations TUPELO  With the states budget flush with cash, its imperative that those funds are spent and invested wisely, Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann said Thursday.

"It's a critical decision for us," Hosemann said. "We don't want this to be one or two years; we want this to one or two generations. So we'll be talking to business leaders on how to spend those funds."

The CREATE meeting brings together representatives from 17 counties in Northeast Mississippi, and each county has a profile produced by the foundation providing and economic and demographic snapshot. An overall report for the region also is published.

Some findings of this year's regional profile:

Unemployment in 2020 averaged 7.7%, which was 2.7 percentage points higher than a year earlier.

Per capital income rose to $37,208, compared to $34,770 a year ago and $37,124 in 2018. Lafayette County had the highest per capital income at $43,820, followed by Lee County at $42,635 in Warren Central.

The dropout rate of high school students has dropped by some 50% since the formation of the Commission on the Future of Northeast Mississippi 25 years ago.

CREATE has some 900 total funds  including 262 endowment funds  compared to just 115 in 1996.

Clayborne said the continued growth and success of the CREATE Foundation is wholly up to donors.

"The fees off the endowment funds probably funds about 70% of CREATE's operating budget," he said. "These funds are important because they continue year after year to provide support to important things across our region."

Also at the meeting, the Jack Reed Sr. Northeast Mississippi Community Leadership Award was presented to four men: the late Bobby Martin of Ripley, Sandy Williams of Corinth, Hassell Franklin of Houston and Aubrey Patterson of Tupelo.
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Cabinet approves hike in MSP for kharif crops for 2021-22

The centre has announced a hike in the minimum support price (MSP) for paddy by Rs72 to Rs1,940 per quintal for 2021-22 crop year from Rs1,868 per quintal last year.

The decision was announced by Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar after the meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs, headed by PM Modi

In a bid to increase the farmers' income, the Union Cabinet on Wednesday approved an increase in minimum support prices (MSP) for various kharif crops or the summer-sown crops for marketing season 2021-22.

The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, approved the increase in the MSPs for all summer-sown crops for Kharif marketing season 2021-22.

Along with the hike in paddy MSP the centre announced hike in the minimum support prices for all.

The highest absolute increase in MSP over the previous year has been recommended for sesamum (Rs452 per quintal) followed by tur and urad (Rs300 per quintal each).

MSP for groundnut and nigerseed has been increased by Rs275 per quintal and Rs235 per quintal, respectively, in comparison to last year. The differential remuneration is aimed at encouraging crop diversification, an official release said.

The expected returns to farmers over their cost of production are estimated to be highest in case of Bajra (85 per cent), followed by urad (65 per cent) and tur (62 per cent). For rest of the crops, return to farmers over their cost of production is estimated to be at least 50 per cent, it added.

Union agriculture minister Narendra Singh Tomar announced the decision after the CCEA meeting.

Addressing a press briefing Tomar said, "None should have any misconception about MSP; it's continuing and increasing and it will continue."

"We had assured the Parliament that MSP will continue," he added.

The increase in MSP for Kharif Crops for marketing season 2021-22 is in line with the Union Budget 2018-19 announcement of fixing the MSPs at a level of at least 1.5 times of the All-India weighted average Cost of Production (CoP), aiming at reasonably fair remuneration for the farmers, the government stated in a release.
The Curragh are to host racegoers to the Headquarters of Flat Racing for Dubai Duty Free Irish Derby Day on Saturday June 26, one of the chosen pilot initiatives for extended capacity at outdoor sporting events.

Up to 1,000 spectators will attend on just the one day of the Derby weekend and every effort has been made to ensure as wide a spread of tickets as possible, tickets will be distributed across the various sectors as follows and proceeds from the entry fee will go to the Peter McVerry Trust.

200 tickets will go to Kildare residents; 450 will go on general release while local frontline workers will receive 50 complimentary tickets; the balance of the 1,000 tickets will go to Curragh and Go Racing in Kildare members.

The Curragh Racecourse have also decided that 10 from each ticket purchased will go to the Peter McVerry Trust, the national charity who provide accommodation for the homeless at centres across the nation.

The Curragh Racecourse reminds people who are interested in soaking up the Derby atmosphere locally that there are two festivals taking place next door to the iconic racing venue which they are supporting. Newbridge June Fest (www.junefest.ie) and the Kildare Derby Festival (https://intokildare.ie/ kildare-derby-festival/) will both be taking place with lots of activities and fun available for everyone to coincide with outdoor dining.

CEO of The Curragh Racecourse and Training Grounds Pat Keogh said It is shaping up to be a special days racing and it is great that the revised protocols will allow 1,000 members of the public to attend. In line with Government protocols this will be an outdoor event. While it will not be the Curragh as we know it, the racing will be as good as ever and we are sure there will be plenty of atmosphere on the day. All dining will be outdoors, and we will have plenty of seating for your pleasure.

To welcome everyone back, all tickets will cost 25 and will go on sale at 10am on Monday June 14 at www.curragh.ie. Residents of Kildare can register their interest by sending an email to reception@curragh.ie with their address and phone number.
A Dundalk businessman is the first in Ireland to receive a Business Network International (BNI) Master Connector Award after starting his business a month before Covid-19 hit Ireland.

Francois Van Heerden, who started his business FHC Accountants and Business Advisors in February 2020, got the award for his work in building relationships and new visitors to the BNI organisation.

Van Heerden, who is originally from South Africa but moved to Dundalk three years ago says that he is beyond honoured to receive the award.

I am beyond honoured to be receiving this award - this year more than ever. Its a great feeling to be recognised and rewarded for making a difference and I am looking forward to the prospects this award will hold for FHC, said Van Heerden.

I look forward to growing my firm. Its important to remember how effective business networks are and how much they contribute to the survival of Irish businesses, especially during these hard times.

According to clients of Van Heerden, he has outstanding knowledge and expertise in the accounting field, and passed 153 referrals, invited 12 visitors and generated 1.5 million worth of business during the pandemic.

According to BNI, there are 279,000 members across the globe, with Van Heerden belonging to the BNI Royal Navan chapter.
UK, US agree to work to reopen travel as Johnson, Biden meet

Xinhua) 08:21, June 11, 2021

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson (R) meets with U.S. President Joe Biden in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, Britain, on June 10, 2021. Boris Johnson and Joe Biden on Thursday agreed to work to resume travel between the two countries and signed a new Atlantic Charter, as they met ahead of the Group of Seven (G7) summit. (Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street/Handout via Xinhua)

FALMOUTH, Britain, June 10 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday agreed to work to resume travel between the two countries and signed a new Atlantic Charter, as they met ahead of the Group of Seven (G7) summit.

"They agreed to work to reopen travel and to continue to share information that will help defeat the spread of coronavirus in our countries and internationally," a Downing Street spokesperson said in a statement issued after the meeting that was held in Britain's southwestern seaside resort of Carbis Bay in Cornwall.

The two countries pledged to deepen cooperation through the new Atlantic Charter that echoed the original one signed by then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and then U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941.

The new Charter outlined modern-day threats including illicit finance, violent conflict and extremism, climate change, and global health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the meeting, Biden and Johnson tried to smooth over their differences on the Northern Ireland issue, but are yet to find a real solution.

"The leaders agreed that both the EU and the UK had a responsibility to work together and to find pragmatic solutions to allow unincumbered trade between Northern Ireland, Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland," said the Downing Street statement.

The British government has threatened to unilaterally extend the customs grace period on Irish Sea border checks over imports of some products to Northern Ireland from Great Britain, over which the EU is vowing retaliation.

The G7 summit will be held from Friday to Sunday, and protest groups have announced multiple protests.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)
CD Projekt Red is still grappling with the fallout from the ransomware attack it suffered in February. The Polish studio behind The Witcher has issued an update on the security breach, stating that internal data stolen during the hack is being circulated online. While the developer said it cannot confirm the exact contents of the information, it believes the files may include details on current and former employees and contractors, along with data related to its games.

As part of the breach, hackers made off with the source code for titles including Cyberpunk 2077 and an unreleased version of Witcher 3. The attackers also dumped or threatened to dump documents related to accounting, administration, legal, HR, investor relations and more.

At the time, the studio defiantly said it would not give in to the ransom demands nor negotiate with the actor behind the breach. Just days later, it was revealed that the hackers had run an auction for the stolen data on a hacking forum  with the starting price of $1 million and an option to buy it outright for $7 million  but that was apparently shut down in favor of a private offer.

In its latest statement released on Thursday, CD Projekt Red detailed a number of security measures implemented following the attack. The company said it had redesigned its core IT infrastructure, utilized new firewalls with advanced anti-malware protection, deployed a new remote-access solution and limited the number of privileged accounts. It added that it's working with a network of security and law enforcement agencies, including the Polish police and the national data regulator. The studio revealed it had also contacted Interpol and Europol as part of its efforts to take action against the perpetrators.
Darnella Frazier, the teen who recorded the murder of George Floyd last summer, has earned a special citation from the Pulitzer Prize board. If not for Frazier's actions, one of the only official records we would have had of Floyd's death was the press release Minneapolis Police published on May 25th, 2020. The nearly 200-word document doesn't mention the fact former police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd's neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. She later testified at Chauvin's trial, with her video proving instrumental in his conviction.

Reminder to all journalists...



This is how Minneapolis initially reported the death of #GeorgeFloyd pic.twitter.com/azjZUPecmH  Chris Vanderveen (@chrisvanderveen) April 20, 2021

On Friday, the Pulitzer Prize board said it decided to recognize Frazier for "courageously reporting the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists' quest for truth and justice." Frazier, who was 17 when she filmed the clip, was walking to a local store with her cousin when she saw the scene between Floyd and Minneapolis Police unfold. She captured Floyd's last moments, including his repeated pleas of "I can't breathe."

This isn't Frazier's first award for her actions. Last year, she earned recognition from PEN America. "A lot of people call me a hero even though I don't see myself as one. I was just in the right place at the right time," Frazier wrote in a Facebook post marking the one-year anniversary of Floyd's death. "Behind this smile, behind these awards, behind the publicity, I'm a girl trying to heal from something I am reminded of every day."

According to the Pulitzer Prize office, some amateur photographers have won in the past, and other winning journalism entries may have included footage that the individual shot on their phone. Still, Frazier's award says a lot about how phones have enabled citizen journalism in recent years. After all, it was Ramsey Orta and his video of Eric Garner's death that made "I can't breathe" into a rallying cry against police violence aimed at communities of color.
A security company executive has been charged for hacking into (PDF) the Gwinnett Medical Center's network on or around September 27th, 2018. According to the Department of Justice, Vikas Singla from Georgia conducted a cyberattack on the not-for-profit network of healthcare providers in part for commercial advantage and personal financial gain. Singla was the chief operating officer of a network security company in metro-Atlanta  the DOJ didn't name the company, but the profile matches that of Securolytics  that served the healthcare industry. He (and his yet-to-be-named associates) allegedly disrupted GMC's phone service, obtained information from a digitizing device and disrupted network printer service during the attack.

While the DOJ didn't dive into the specifics of the case, it was reported back in 2018 that GMC was investigating a possible data breach that led to the leak of patient information online. The attackers also threatened GMC's staff and shamed the provider on the internet. Now-deleted blog posts on Securolytics' website written by Singla describe attacking targets in healthcare, presumably to fix problems with their security. How that activity is linked to the data breach reported in 2018, or the charges filed this week, is still unclear.

The executive was indicted by a federal grand jury on June 8th and was charged with 17 counts of intentional damage to a protected computer, with each charge carrying a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. He was also charged with one count of obtaining information by computer from a protected computer, which has a max sentence of five years in prison.

Special Agent in Charge Chris Hacker of the FBIs Atlanta Field Office said:
NASA has chosen three new scientific payloads under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, which is part of the Artemis program. Of the three, two will be landing on the lunar hemisphere that always faces away from our planet. It will mark the first time NASA is landing payloads on the far side of the Moon, and the purpose is to gather data about the area as a potential future destination for Artemis astronauts.

The far side of the Moon remained untouched by machines and spacecraft until China's Chang'e-4 mission landed on it back in 2019. There's still a lot we need to find out about the hemisphere before we start sending humans to visit it. One of the proposals NASA picked, for instance, will land on an impact crater called Schrodinger basin to better understand tectonic activity on the far side.

The Farside Seismic Suite, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory project, will spend months collecting data using two seismometers. In addition to giving us more information on lunar tectonic activity, it's also expected to shed light on how the far side is impacted by small meteorites, as well as provide more data on the Moon's internal structure. The findings from this project will complement the seismic data collected by the other payload heading to the Schrodinger basin: The Lunar Interior Temperature and Materials Suite. Equipped with two instruments, it will investigate internal lunar heat flow and electrical conductivity.

One of the three chosen proposals called the Lunar Vertex, however, will head to Reiner Gamma  one of the most visible lunar swirls from Earth. We still don't understand what lunar swirls are or how they form, but they're believed to be related to anomalies with the Moon's magnetic field. Lunar Vertex, composed of a lander and a rover, will be taking measurements of the magnetic field for scientists to study.

All three projects were submitted to NASA as part of the Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon (PRISM) call for proposals last year. The teams are still negotiating with NASA over how much they're getting to make their proposals a reality, but the agency's goal is to deliver the payloads to their destination in 2024.
Netflix isn't done teasing Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness. Less than a month before the CG anime hits the service, the streaming giant has released its opening scene, which focuses on Jason and the US Army Mad Dogs. The three-minute video clip wouldn't be quite enough to give you a solid idea of what the series is about, but it shows the Mad Dogs on a helicopter and another chopper crashing in the distance. Jason and his team then decided to defy orders and engage local Penamstan soldiers in battle to rescue the survivors of the crash.

While the opening preview stopped early into the story, Netflix already revealed what the series is about in a previous release. The special forces the Mad Dogs wanted to rescue were already dead, but the team saw them moving in strange ways. They were able to escape, however, and Jason went on to become a US federal agent with Leon S. Kennedy.

Six years after the event, Jason and Leon were in the middle of investigating a hacking incident on a top secret White House file  later found to be related to a biology laboratory in Shanghai  when the lights suddenly went out, and a horde of zombies emerge. Meanwhile, in Penamstan, Claire Redfield discovers evidence of a terrifying experiment conducted during the Penamstan civil war.

Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness will premiere on Netflix on July 8th. The series will feature the voices of Nick Apostolides and Stephanie Panisello, who'll reprise their roles as Leon and Claire from the Resident Evil 2 remake that came out in 2019.
Peter and Bobby Farrelly are reportedly preparing to hit the pins again and spread laughs in a new sequel.

In the news article posted by Collider, it has been confirmed that the bowling comedy flick "Kingpin" in 1996 will finally receive a sequel after over two decades.

The Farrelly brothers' movie featured Woody Harrelson and Randy Quaid who played the roles of a pro-bowler and bowling prodigy. The duo tried to win big during a bowling tournament in Reno, Nevada.

As one of the earliest bowling comedy films, "Kingpin" received critical acclaims following the popularity of "Dumb & Dumber."

Due to its popular demand, the Farrelly brothers confirmed that the "Kingpin 2" is already in "active development" at Village Roadshow Pictures. As of the writing, it remains unknown who the cast members will or when it will be released. The involvement of the original writers Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan also remains unknown.

However, it is noted that they plan to add more creative elements both in front and behind the camera.

Where Are the Original "Kingpin" Stars?

Due to the very limited details, one cannot assume whether the original cast members will return.

Vanessa Angel, Harrelson, and Murray are still active in the industry. The latter may even return for a cameo for "Kingpin 2."

However, Quaid might not be able to come back to the club again after becoming a controversial figure in real life.

For what it's worth, the actor and his wife Evi had been on the run following the "Hollywood star whackers" issue. In 2010, the couple filed for refugee status in Canada as they reportedly feared living in the U.S.

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The two claimed that the whackers killed actors David Carradine and Heath Ledger.

Meanwhile, Quaid alone has been facing legal problems. The authorities first arrested them in 2009 for leaving a hotel in Santa Barbara, California without paying.

In the following year, they were arrested again for renting and damaging a guest house. The actor once almost got deported from Canada after losing his bid for a permanent residency.

In 2015, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents took them to separate correctional facilities with half a million dollars bail each.

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The Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton must be a huge photography enthusiast, yet Prince George, Princess Charlotte, and Prince Louis do not always like the idea of taking photos.

According to Mirror UK, Kate Middleton says her three children sometimes tells her to put the camera down, confessing during a phone call with a lucky fellow enthusiast in her "Hold Still" photography competition.

The Duchess reportedly talked to Ceri Edwards in a phone call celebrating their entry into the competition close to her heart. The photography entry of Edwards contains her daughter, Poppy, hugging her father, Mark, before he started his shift as a paramedic in Newport, South Wales.

7-year old Prince George, 6-year old Princess Charlotte, and 3-year old Prince Louis, often plead her to turn the camera off.

Kate Middleton Appears Impressed With Contestant's Entry For "Hold Still Photography Project"

The 39-year old Princess went on to say Ceri's image stood out.

Kate asked if she was a photographer. Ceri said, "No. Well, Mark would say otherwise just because I do take a lot of pictures of the family."

"It's like me. Everyone's like, 'Mummy, please stop taking photographs!'" The royal continues.

The contestant also replied, "I know, but I love it. I love looking back. I think when you have children, time seems to go into warp speed, really, and it's just a lovely thing for me.

"You look back and see how much the children have grown," the phone call can be found on their YouTube channel "Duke and Duchess of Cambridge" early June 10, and Kate admits the royal children can quickly lose patience when being snapped by her.

Other than that, People also reported the said conversation saying the Princess also got a chance to talk to Poppy, who starred in her mom's photo. "I loved seeing your big cuddle to your daddy," Kate told her.

"Cuddles are very, very important. I bet your daddy took that with him, and it helped him all the way through his day at work." Poppy responded politely, "Thank you. I was so scared about that he would get the corona."

She said it showcased "strength, courage, and resilience," and "tenderness and importance" of a family.

The Duchess said, "It's such a sensitive and tender moment between a father and a daughter."

"These simple moments have impacted so many and really resonated with so many across the country so thank you for sharing your photograph and your story."

READ ALSO: Prince Harry, Meghan Markle Break Yet Another Royal Tradition with Birth of Daughter Lilibet Diana

Royal Photographer Admires Kate Middleton's Skills Behind Camera

Also mentioned by the same article, the Duchess of Cambridge is often behind birthday portraits of her children and other family moments.

Following the death of Prince Philip in April 2021, the royal family shared a never-before-seen image of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip along with her great-grandchildren that Kate took in 2018.

Longtime royal photographer Arthur Edwards recently said he is a "great admirer" of Kate's skills behind a camera, pointing to a one-snap-shoot in particular.

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"Netflix Geeked" released the most awaited "Gundam" trailer on their Twitter account, and fans are split in half.

"Netflix Geeked" is the streaming platform's virtual fan-facing event wherein avid-anime watchers can get updates and first-reveals of upcoming series and in-the-work movie projects.

The most recent announcement includes the trailer for "Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway," which they captioned with "The next entry in the Gundam series is coming." The film will be the last installment to the Gundam franchise, according to Game Spot.

The next entry in the Gundam series is coming.



Catch the trailer for Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway. #GeekedWeek pic.twitter.com/xgfeAAe3eg  Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) June 10, 2021

However, fans are on the fence about the Gundam Series as they expressed their opinions under Netflix Geeked's tweet. One Twitter user shared their frustration by commenting, "Oh god, please do not throw this in Netflix Jail like the rest of the anime you put out. Simulcast, for gods sake!"

Oh god, please do not throw this in Netflix Jail like the rest of the anime you put out. Simulcast for gods sake!  Spindash (Greg) (@Spindash54) June 10, 2021

Other comments include fans hyping the release and getting excited to watch the upcoming live-action version, a separate entity from the animated movie.

Netflix's 'Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway' To Premiere On July 1

Netflix is gearing up for the exclusive airing of "Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway," as the delayed-release is finally given an official date for streaming.

Hypebeast reports that "Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway" will be the first out of three films adapted from the novel "Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway's Flash."

"30 years after I wrote those novels, they are finally being adapted into a film. As the author, I am so happy," the creator of the Gundam series confesses his feelings of excitement and pride for his work,

The original schedule for release was set for July 2020 but was delayed due to the emergency COVID-19 situation that occurred in Japan.

Avid Gundam fans can stream the film on Netflix beginning June 11 in Japan and July 1 for the rest of the world.

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"Netflix Geeked" Invests in Japanese Comics

"Netflix Geeked" has been updating anime fans about new releases for four consecutive days for their anime-centered projects.

According to this article, the releases include Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness, Shaman King, Godzilla: SIngular Point, and Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway.

More movies and series are set to be shown, and titles include "Exception" by Hirotaka Adachi or better known as Otsuichi, Bright: Samurai Soul directed by Kyohei Ishiguro, and "Make My Day," which is still in development.

Introducing Make My Day, a new anime film coming to Netflix.



On a cold planet of ice and snow, mysterious creatures suddenly have appeared from the dark underground and have begun to attack the inhabitants. Can humanity survive the terror lurking beyond the horizon? #GeekedWeek pic.twitter.com/lep9gLOexk  Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) June 10, 2021

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For 20 seasons, the Kardashian-Jenner clan had mastered being in front of the camera. The filming crew surrounds them almost every day for the hit reality TV series "Keeping Up With The Kardashians."

But recently, the show's executive producer reveals a shocking moment where Kris Jenner almost refused to face the camera.

TV producer Farnaz Farjam told The Daily Mail UK that the "momager" did not want the cameras around her during an episode of the show's seventh season because of her swollen lips caused by an allergic reaction.

Farjam then detailed that Jenner was later convinced that they were on a family vacation and just rolled with it. (Watch the clip below)

She also added that it is one of her favorite moments on the show.

In the episode, which aired nine years ago, the family went to the Dominican Republic for a vacation. Kris later suffered from a food allergy. Kris did not reveal the cause in the episode, but she said she would see a doctor to run some tests.

In a clip posted, Kris appears to be in bed, and then she called her children Kim and Rob to check what's happening to her upper lip.

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"My mom's lip is just bizarre, like she has an allergic reaction to something, it's just disgusting." Rob Kardashian said in the confessional. "I love her but I would never kiss her for a year," he added.

Kim also joked about the situation by saying, "Is the Dominican Republic known for plastic surgery? Did you come here to really sneak and get your lips done?" Kris clarified that she did not get lip fillers in the middle of the night.

You might think Kris had suffered enough in that episode, but she later revealed that she also got a broken toe during their trip.

Did Kris Jenner really had plastic surgery?

The reality TV star has been very open about the procedures she got in the past. Kris once documented her facelift surgery in an episode of "KWUTK." (watch the clip below)

Jenner can be seen crying in a clip where she said, "I don't wanna die." She underwent surgery for Kim's wedding with ex Kris Humphries.

In another show called "Good Work," Kris had opened up all of the procedures she had in the past. She said that she got breast implants in the '80s, botox, fillers, and laser treatments.

KWUTK Reunion to air next week

Fans will surely miss moments like this as the show had already aired their last episode after a 20-season run, but they are set to return next week for a two-part reunion episode hosted by Andy Cohen.

The reunion is expected to have explosive revelations from the family as they look back on the episodes that they filmed together.

The first part will premiere on Thursday next week and the second one will air on June 17.

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Brad Pitt will not have joint custody of his and ex-wife Angelina Jolie's kids this easy. The court might have ruled in favor of him, but Jolie is seeing to it that she won't be accepting it quietly.

According to Hollywood Life, the A-list actress will do whatever it takes to overturn a custody decision. Angelina Jolie has reportedly set forth an appeal to the custody decision that states her ex-husband Brad Pitt has the right of joint custody of their kids.

Jolie is making the appeal amid already very messy divorce proceedings

The once A-list couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are heading back to court. One could just wonder why the animosity between the two - whose love story was well-appreciated since it started in 2005, seems to be unending.

The "Maleficent" star has appealed the recent decision, which granted her ex joint custody of some of their five children. At present, they have five out of their 6 kids being minors - Pax, 17, Zahara, 16, Shiloh, 14, and 12-year-old twins Vivienne and Knox.

Based on the court docs obtained by HollywoodLife, the former couple's next hearing about this issue is around the corner already. It has been set for July 9

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Jolie's appeal will be heard by a three-justice panel, along with attorneys for both parties, who will be given ample time to argue their sides.

It is unclear why Jolie is so resistant to Brad Pitt having more time with their kids.

Therapists Think the Joint Custody is Beneficial for the Kids

Judge John Ouderkirk, however, could see nothing wrong with it, so much so that it was recently ruled that the "Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood" actor should certainly have joint custody over his five minor children. The decision was rendered on a May 26, and reports have since then been non-stop that Jolie is furious about it.

Since the former couple's eldest son, Maddox, is 19 years old, he is no longer subject to the custody arrangement.

The judge's ruling was primarily based upon extensive testimony from people closest to the children (except for Jolie), including therapists and child services professionals. Most said it would do the children well to have Pitt more present in their lives.

The appeal is not necessarily surprising though, given the rumors that Jolie was upset with it. Also, the actress has already filed a complaint with the court against Judge Ouderkirk a few weeks ago, given his refusal to have the minor teenagers testify. Jolie's camp took that refusal as a sign of the judge "improperly excluding [Angelina's] evidence relevant to the children's health, safety, and welfare, evidence critical to making her case."

Some strong words were used against the judge, based on court documents filed by Angelina and as obtained by the Associated Press, her legal team said, "Judge Ouderkirk denied Ms. Jolie a fair trial, improperly excluding her evidence relevant to the children's health, safety, and welfare, evidence critical to making her case." the documents read.

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2021-06-10

Maeci

Faced with worrying reports of worsening conditions of detention of Marco Zennaro, following the instructions of Minister Di Maio, the Italian Ambassador in Khartoum, Gianluigi Vassallo, today made a step of firm protest to the highest Sudanese authorities for the unacceptable conditions in which the compatriot is imprisoned. The Ambassador highlighted the need to ensure full respect for the detainee's human rights and appealed for the Italian entrepreneur to be transferred as soon as possible to house arrest in a hotel facility. On that occasion, Ambassador Vassallo reminded the Sudanese authorities of Italy's strong expectation for a rapid and fair solution to the judicial case and the underlying commercial dispute, which would allow Zennaro's position to be defined as soon as possible. At the same time, the Director-General for Italians Abroad, Luigi Vignali - who has been following the case from the beginning and went to Khartoum to meet Marco Zennaro, starting a discussion with the Sudanese authorities - summoned the Sudanese Charge d'Affaires to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a vigorous protest on behalf of the Italian Government.
2021-06-10

Maeci

Deputy Minister Benedetto Della Vedova met today, by videoconference, the Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs of Mexico, Carmen Moreno Toscano. Their talks focused on bilateral relations, the response to the pandemic emergency, fair and universal access to vaccines against COVID-19 in the framework of the COVAX Facility, cooperation within the G20 and the priorities of the Italian Presidency, as well as deepening scientific and technical cooperation, including in the field of renewables.

"After the slowdown caused by the pandemic," said Della Vedova, "we are ready to relaunch bilateral relations, beginning with convening the VI session of the Binational Commission, hopefully in 2022, when it will perhaps also be possible to conduct a business mission to Mexico". The two Deputy Ministers agreed on the importance of strengthening cooperation including in the multilateral sphere, beginning with the Italian presidency of the G20, which will also be an opportunity to work together on a solid global architecture in the health sector.
When is a weed not a weed?

Can native plants be weeds?

Sweet pittosporum (Pittosporum undulatum) was once a well-behaved tree growing in gullies from Gippsland in Victoria up to Brisbane in Queensland.

But it is now a major problem, leading to an almost complete suppression of native vegetation where it has invaded. Programs to clear it have successfully allowed indigenous plants to return, and within 15 years, with moderate follow up, treated sites are well on the way to successful restoration.

However, there has been some debate on whether this is good or bad for birds such as the threatened Powerful Owl.

New research by Monash University scientists from the School of Biological Sciences published today in Ecological Solutions and Evidence shows that the richness and abundance of birds is much reduced in areas with dense Pittosporum canopies.

"The almost complete absence of any understory vegetation and no ground cover means there is very little for birds to eat in invaded sites," said lead study author Dr Ben O'Leary, who conducted the surveys as part of his PhD.

"Most habitat components for birds exists within the Eucalyptus overstorey and mid canopy. The presence or removal of Pittosporum doesn't appear to greatly influence ground storey bird species, which have been in long-term decline."

The study found that there are also fewer carnivorous birds in Pittosporum-invaded sites, probably because there is less prey on the ground and the dense Pittosporum canopy makes it hard for these large birds to navigate through these areas.

"While invaded sites are not great habitat, restoration projects need to ensure that the full range of habitats continue to be available during the transition period," Dr O'Leary said.

One difficulty in overseeing the removal of an invasive tree species is that these trees, in certain circumstances, provide structural value to local flora and fauna. There is a lag time between the invaders' removal and its replacement by indigenous alternatives.

"The trick is balancing the progression of weed control with the retention of enough structure to support local plants and animals," Dr O'Leary said.

Project leader and co-author Professor Ros Gleadow also from the School of Biological Sciences, has been studying Pittosporum for over 40 years.

"It is important to get rid of the Pittosporum now," Professor Gleadow said.

"Not only does it suppress the understorey, but in all these years, I have never seen a eucalypt seedling growing under a Pittosporum canopy," she said.

"Once the old eucalypts at a site die, that's it and it of both native vegetation and birds is impossible without major intervention".

Previous work by the group showed that areas can be restored to their original state if there are healthy remnant sites nearby.

"For areas where Pittosporum is native, like around Sydney, management is philosophically complicated but there is no doubt that clearing will to help preserve biodiversity," Professor Gleadow said.

Progressively clearing the Pittosporum over time, leaving some canopy in place in adjacent areas has the double benefit of providing potential roosting sites for the Powerful Owls, as well as increasing the number of prey.

Once the new shrubs and trees have grown, then clearing could progress to the next area.

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With a national grant of about S$10 million, researchers in Singapore are working with overseas collaborators to address these challenges and develop new diagnostic and treatment options so patients can receive effective targeted therapy

Glioblastoma (GBM) is a highly aggressive type of brain cancer. Even with current standard of care, 50% of patients die within 15 months of diagnosis.

This complex cancer is difficult to treat due to its location, structure, ability to spread quickly, high recurrence rate and severely limited treatment options.

GBM tumours can look identical under the microscope but respond differently to the same treatment.

With a national grant of about S$10 million, researchers in Singapore are working with overseas collaborators to address these challenges and develop new diagnostic and treatment options so patients can receive effective targeted therapy.

Singapore, 11 June 2021 - A team of researchers from National Neuroscience Institute (NNI), National University of Singapore (NUS) and Duke-NUS Medical School (Duke-NUS) are studying new drug targets for the treatment of glioblastoma (GBM). The team received a grant under the Open Fund Large Collaborative Grant (MOH-000541), which is supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore and administered by the Singapore Ministry of Health's National Medical Research Council.

Glioblastoma is a brutal form of cancer because it spreads quickly in the brain and is difficult to treat. Common symptoms include severe headaches, seizures, personality changes and confusion (impaired cognition) which can be distressing for patients and their family members.

"A glioblastoma diagnosis is particularly grim, because even with the current standard of care, recurrence is the rule rather than the exception. This generous funding gives us an opportunity to address the many challenges posed by this aggressive tumour, opening up the possibility of better diagnostics and treatment avenues directed at specific groups of patients," explained Associate Professor Ang Beng Ti, Head and Senior Consultant, Department of Neurosurgery, NNI @ Singapore General Hospital campus and the project's Principal Investigator.

NNI sees close to 100 new cases of glioblastoma every year. Although it is rare, the precision medicine technologies and processes the team is developing to tackle this tumour have the potential to be adapted for the diagnosis and management of other forms of cancer.

The team's innovative use and development of technology has caught the attention of overseas researchers. Dr. Amy Heimberger, a Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery and the Scientific Director of the Lou and Jean Malnati Brain Tumor Institute at Northwestern University, is a leading researcher in glioblastoma and a key developer for the STAT3 inhibitor WP1066. She invited the Singapore team to join an international drug trial, termed GBM AGILE, to sub-type and stratify participants. This will be in conjunction with Moleculin Biotech, a clinical stage pharmaceutical company. Being actively involved in the research will also make it easier for NNI's clinicians to include suitable Singapore patients in the international trial, giving them access to potential new treatments.

"We are excited that all these developments and advances provide a beacon of hope for patients suffering from GBM. We truly value the collaboration and synergy between NNI, NUS and Duke-NUS that brings together multi-disciplinary expertise to advance patient care," says Professor Tan Eng King, Deputy Director (Academic Affairs) and Director of Research at NNI.

Details about the research

The multi-institution research team is fighting GBM on different fronts with four main themes:

Theme 1: Biology and identification of drug targets

Principal Investigators:

Associate Professor Ang Beng Ti, Head and Senior Consultant, Department of Neurosurgery, NNI @ SGH campus; Co-Principal Investigator, Neuro-oncology Programme, NNI; Associate Professor, Duke-NUS Medical School

Adjunct Associate Professor Carol Tang, Co-Principal Investigator, Neuro-oncology Programme, NNI; Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University (NTU)

Understanding disease pathways starts at the laboratory bench with in-depth studies of tumours. To ensure high quality specimens, the team established a brain tumour tissue bank called Glioportal. It contains patients' original tumours that are molecularly profiled, processed and banked immediately after surgery to ensure the tissue is in the best possible state for research. To date, 151 clinical specimens have been banked, all with patient consent. Tumour samples are de-identified, but patients can be re-identified and contacted if a suitable drug trial becomes available.

"With Glioportal, we are able to reform tumours in models that have the same molecular fingerprint as patients' original tumours. The relative 'purity' of these models helps us advance our understanding of glioblastoma and identify and test potential drug targets, which in turn improves the accuracy of clinical trials in the later stage." - Adj Assoc Prof Tang.

The team previously used the tumour samples to identify a signaling pathway that detects the activation of a protein called STAT3. The activation of this pathway in cells is linked with a higher likelihood of GBM recurring and spreading quickly.

Theme 2: Artificial intelligence (AI)-led drug discovery platform

Building upon findings from the first theme, the second theme has two projects that both use AI to accelerate drug discovery.

Project 1

Principal Investigator: Professor Patrick Tan, Programme in Cancer and Stem Cell Biology, Duke-NUS Medical School

The Duke-NUS team uses data-mining to identify genes linked to glioblastoma, what happens when they are turned on and off, and why this differs between patients. One key area of interest is how gene expression affects the spread and recurrence of tumours.

"One of the challenges of treating glioblastoma is the rapidity with which it spreads. Through data mining, we aim to better understand how cells at the edge of the tumour differ from those at the core, and how these cells transition, in order to discover effective new drug targets to stop the spread of GBM." - Prof Patrick Tan

Project 2

Principal Investigator: Adjunct Associate Professor Carol Tang

The NNI team is working with technology company BenevolentAI (BAI), to identify and prioritise drugs with the highest potential to de-activate the STAT3 pathway. BAI uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to filter through public and proprietary information to identify and prioritise potential drugs that might be effective on therapeutic targets within the STAT3 pathway.

"Developing a new drug and bringing it to the market takes years due to the amount of testing and regulatory approval required to ensure it is safe for humans. It is especially difficult for conditions that affect the brain because the drug must also be able to cross the blood-brain barrier. Using the AI tool to sieve through existing drugs that are already on the market to find and prioritise those with the highest potential for testing will help speed up the drug discovery process." - Adj Assoc Prof Carol Tang.

Theme 3: Bioengineering

Principal Investigator: Assistant Professor Shao Huilin, Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Institute for Health Innovation & Technology (iHealthtech), National University of Singapore

The NUS team is developing a nanosensor platform that can be used in the clinical setting to detect a tumour's complex molecular profile. The biomarkers are retrieved from patient blood samples which contain fragments (extracellular vesicles) with nucleic acids and proteins from the original tumour cells.

"The slightest difference within cell proteins can affect a tumour's response to treatment. Therefore, tumours need to be sub-typed as accurately as possible to ensure patients receive the most appropriate treatment for their tumour. Using a minimally invasive blood test to detect these complex biomarkers solves the need to surgically remove the tumour for sub-typing. This is particularly important when tumours recur as it is usually not possible to remove the tumour due to the risk of brain damage." - Asst Prof Shao Huilin

Theme 4: Adaptive clinical trials

Principal Investigators:

Associate Professor Ang Beng Ti

Dr Lin Xuling, Senior Consultant, Department of Neurology, NNI

Clinical trials of drugs identified by AI technology in Theme 2 are expected to start in Asia in late 2022. Participants will be selected based on their tumour sub-type using the nanosensor platform developed in Theme 3. An algorithm, a set of instructions used by a computer to perform a task, developed by the Singapore team will sort the patients into different categories based on their sub-type and determine which clinical trials patients should participate in. The team will adopt an adaptive clinical trial concept which evaluates the effectiveness and side-effects of treatments at different stages throughout the trial, compared to the traditional method of analysing the results only at trial completion. This allows for the trial recruitment strategy to be adapted while in progress, such as stopping the trial for non-responders to minimise adverse effects. This concept has been well-demonstrated in breast cancer clinical trials.

"Knowing each participant's tumour genetic and molecular profile when they enter the trial will make it easier to identify which treatments are effective for each sub-type. If successful, this trial will enable physicians to provide targeted therapy for their patients, thereby improving their survival while minimising unpleasant side-effects from ineffective treatments." - Dr Lin Xuling

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For more information and interview requests, please contact:

Ms Adriel Lee

Corporate Communications Department

National Neuroscience Institute

Tel: 6357 7107 / 9112 3401

E-mail: Adriel_W_Lee@nni.com.sg

Ms Margaret Perry

Corporate Communications Department

National Neuroscience Institute

Tel: 6357 7162 / 9457 8726

E-mail: Margaret_Ellen_PERRY@nni.com.sg

Ms Zehan Yu

Communications and Strategic Relations

Duke-NUS Medical School

Tel: 6601 6779 / 9839 6957

E-mail: zehan.yu@duke-nus.edu.sg

Ms Huang Yifang

Office of University Communications

National University of Singapore

Tel: 6601 3846

E-mail: yifang.huang@nus.edu.sg

About the National Neuroscience Institute (NNI)

The National Neuroscience Institute (NNI) is the national specialist and regional centre of care for the brain, spine, nerve and muscle. NNI offers Neurology, Neurosurgery and Neuroradiology services with advanced technology and multi-disciplinary care teams. Committed to improving patients' lives, NNI aims to shape neuroscience for a better tomorrow through innovation, research and education. NNI is a member of the Singapore Health Services (SingHealth) - a public healthcare cluster which manages four hospitals, five specialty centres, eight polyclinics and a network of community hospitals.

For more information, visit http://www. nni. com. sg .

About Duke-NUS Medical School

Duke-NUS is Singapore's flagship graduate entry medical school, established in 2005 with a strategic, government-led partnership between two world-class institutions: Duke University School of Medicine and the National University of Singapore (NUS). Through an innovative curriculum, students at Duke-NUS are nurtured to become multi-faceted 'Clinicians Plus' poised to steer the healthcare and biomedical ecosystem in Singapore and beyond. A leader in ground-breaking research and translational innovation, Duke-NUS has gained international renown through its five signature research programmes and nine centres. The enduring impact of its discoveries is amplified by its successful Academic Medicine partnership with Singapore Health Services (SingHealth), Singapore's largest healthcare group. This strategic alliance has spawned 15 Academic Clinical Programmes, which harness multi-disciplinary research and education to transform medicine and improve lives.

For more information, please visit http://www. duke-nus. edu. sg .

About National University of Singapore (NUS)

The National University of Singapore (NUS) is Singapore's flagship university, which offers a global approach to education, research and entrepreneurship, with a focus on Asian perspectives and expertise. We have 17 faculties across three campuses in Singapore, with more than 40,000 students from 100 countries enriching our vibrant and diverse campus community. We have also established our NUS Overseas Colleges programme in more than 15 cities around the world. Our multidisciplinary and real-world approach to education, research and entrepreneurship enables us to work closely with industry, governments and academia to address crucial and complex issues relevant to Asia and the world. Researchers in our faculties, 30 university-level research institutes, research centres of excellence and corporate labs focus on themes that include energy; environmental and urban sustainability; treatment and prevention of diseases; active ageing; advanced materials; risk management and resilience of financial systems; Asian studies; and Smart Nation capabilities such as artificial intelligence, data science, operations research and cybersecurity.
Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) and NEC Corporation jointly develop a 28-GHz phased-array transceiver that supports efficient and reliable 5G communications. The proposed transceiver outperforms previous designs in various regards by adapting fast beam switching and leakage cancellation mechanism.

With the recent emergence of innovative technologies, such as the Internet of Things, smart cities, autonomous vehicles, and smart mobility, our world is on the brink of a new age. This stimulates the use of millimeter-wave bands, which have far more signal bandwidth, to accommodate these new ideas. 5G can offer data rates over 10 Gbit/s through the use of these millimeter-waves and multiple-in-multiple-out (MIMO) technology--a technology that employs multiple transmitters and receivers to transfer more data at the same time.

Large-scale phased-array transceivers are crucial for the implementation of these MIMO systems. While MIMO systems boost spectral performance, large-scale phased-array systems face several challenges, such as increased power dissipation and implementation costs. One such critical challenge is latency caused by beam switching time. Beam switching is an important feature that enables the selection of the most optimal beam for each terminal. A design that optimizes beam switching time and device cost is, thus, the need of the hour.

Motivated by this, scientists from Tokyo Institute of Technology and NEC Corporation in Japan collaborated to develop a 28-GHz phased-array transceiver that supports fast beam switching and high-speed data communication. Their findings will be discussed at the 2021 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits, an international conference that explores emerging trends and innovative concepts in semiconductor technology and circuits.

The proposed design facilitates dual-polarized operation, in which data is transmitted simultaneously through horizontal and vertical-polarized waves. However, one issue with these systems is cross-polarization leakage, which results in signal degradation, especially in the millimeter-wave band. The research team delved into the issue and developed a solution. Prof. Kenichi Okada, who led the research team, says, "Fortunately, we were able to devise a cross-polarization detection and cancellation methodology, using which we could suppress the leakages in both transmit and receive mode."

One critical feature of the proposed mechanism is the ability to achieve low-latency beam switching and high-accuracy beam control. Static elements control the building blocks of the mechanism, while on-chip SRAM is used to store the settings for different beams (Figure 1). This mechanism leads to fast beam switching with ultra-low latency being achieved. It also enables fast switching in transmit and receive modes due to the use of separate registers for each mode.

Another aspect of the proposed transceiver is its low cost and small size. The transceiver has a bi-directional architecture, which allows for a smaller chip size of 5  4.5 mm2 (Figure 2). For a total of 256-pattern beam settings stored within the on-chip SRAM, a beam switching time of only 4 nanoseconds was achieved! Error vector magnitude (EVM)--a measure to quantify the efficiency of digitally modulated signals such as quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM)--was calculated for the proposed transceiver. The transceiver was supported with EVMs of 5.5% in 64QAM and 3.5% in 256QAM.

When compared with state-of-the-art 5G phased-array transceivers, the system has a faster beam switching time and excellent MIMO efficiency. Okada is optimistic about the future of the 28-GHz 5G phased-array transceiver. He concludes, "The technology we developed for the 5G NR network supports high-volume data streaming with low latency. Thanks to its rapid beam switching capabilities, it can be used in scenarios where enhanced multi-user perception is required. This device sets the stage for a myriad of applications, including machine connectivity and the construction of smart cities and factories."

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This research is supported by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in Japan (JPJ000254).

Reference

Authors: Jian Pang, Zheng Li, Xueting Luo, Joshua Alvin, Kiyoshi Yanagisawa, Yi Zhang, Zixin Chen, Zhongliang Huang, Xiaofan Gu, Weichu Chen, Yun Wang, Dongwon You, Zheng Sun, Yuncheng Zhang, Hongye Huang, Naoki Oshima, Keiichi Motoi, Shinichi Hori, Kazuaki Kunihiro, Tomoya Kaneko, Atsushi Shirane, and Kenichi Okada

Session: Session 11 Advanced Wireless for 5G, C11-2 (June 17,8:50JST)

Session Title: A Fast-Beam-Switching 28-GHz Phased-Array Transceiver Supporting Cross-Polarization Leakage Self-Cancellation

Conference: 2021 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits

Affiliations: Tokyo Institute of Technology, NEC Corporation

About Tokyo Institute of Technology
The British have suffered for their fashion for centuries according to a new study suggesting that a vogue for shoes with a pointed tip led to a sharp increase in hallux valgus of the big toe - often called bunions - in the late medieval period.

Researchers investigating remains in Cambridge, UK, found that those buried in the town centre, particularly in plots for wealthier citizens and clergy, were much more likely to have had bunions - suggesting rich urbanites paid a higher price for their footwear in more ways than one.

A University of Cambridge team also discovered that older medieval people with hallux valgus were significantly more likely to have sustained a broken bone from a probable fall compared to those of a similar age with normal feet.

Hallux valgus is a minor deformity in which the largest toe becomes angled outward and a bony protrusion forms at its base, on the inside of the foot.

While various factors can predispose someone to bunions, from genetics to muscle imbalance, by far the most common contemporary cause is constrictive boots and shoes. The condition is often associated with wearing high heels.

Archaeologists analysed 177 skeletons from cemeteries in and around the city of Cambridge and found that only 6% of individuals buried between 11th and 13th centuries had evidence of the affliction. However, 27% of those dating from the 14th and 15th centuries had been hobbled by longstanding hallux valgus.

Researchers point out that shoe style changed significantly during the 14th century: shifting from a functional rounded toe box to a lengthy and more elegant pointed tip.

In a paper published today in the International Journal of Paleopathology, the team from Cambridge University's After the Plague project argues that these "poulaine" shoes drove the rise of bunions in medieval Britain.

"The 14th century brought an abundance of new styles of dress and footwear in a wide range of fabrics and colours. Among these fashion trends were pointed long-toed shoes called poulaines," said study co-author Dr Piers Mitchell from Cambridge's Department of Archaeology.

"The remains of shoes excavated in places like London and Cambridge suggest that by the late 14th century almost every type of shoe was at least slightly pointed - a style common among both adults and children alike."

"We investigated the changes that occurred between the high and late medieval periods, and realized that the increase in hallux valgus over time must have been due to the introduction of these new footwear styles," said Mitchell.

First author Dr Jenna Dittmar, who conducted the work while at Cambridge, said: "We think of bunions as being a modern problem but this work shows it was actually one of the more common conditions to have affected medieval adults."

The remains came from four separate sites around Cambridge: a charitable hospital (now part of St John's College); the grounds of a former Augustinian friary, where clergy and wealthy benefactors were buried; a local parish graveyard on what was the edge of town; and a rural burial site by a village 6km south of Cambridge.

Researchers conducted "paleopathological assessments", including inspecting foot bones for the bump by the big toe that is the hallmark of hallux valgus.

They found a sliding scale of bunion prevalence linked to the wealth of those interred on each site. Only 3% of the rural cemetery showed signs, 10% of the parish graveyard (which mainly held the working poor), creeping up to 23% of those on the hospital site.

Yet almost half those buried in the friary - some 43% - including five of the eleven individuals identified as clergy by their belt buckles, carried the mark of the bunion.

"Rules for the attire of Augustinian friars included footwear that was 'black and fastened by a thong at the ankle', commensurate with a lifestyle of worship and poverty," said Mitchell.

"However, in the 13th and 14th centuries it was increasingly common for those in clerical orders in Britain to wear stylish clothes - a cause for concern among high-ranking church officials."

In 1215, the church forbade clergy from wearing pointed-toed shoes. This may have done little to curb the trend, as numerous further decrees on indiscretions in clerical dress had to be passed, most notably in 1281 and 1342.

"The adoption of fashionable garments by the clergy was so common it spurred criticism in contemporary literature, as seen in Chaucer's depiction of the monk in the Canterbury Tales," said Mitchell.

Across late medieval society the pointiness of shoes became so extreme that in 1463 King Edward IV passed a law limiting toe-point length to less than two inches within London.

The majority of remains with signs of hallux valgus across all sites and eras within the study were men (20 of the 31 total bunion sufferers). The research also suggests that health costs of foot fashion were not limited to bunions.

Dr Jenna Dittmar found that skeletal remains with hallux valgus were also more likely to show signs of fractures that usually result from a fall e.g. those to upper limbs indicating an individual tumbled forward onto outstretched arms.

This association was only found to be significant among those who died over 45 year old, suggesting youthful fashion choices came back to haunt the middle-aged even in medieval times.

"Modern clinical research on patients with hallux valgus has shown that the deformity makes it harder to balance, and increases the risk of falls in older people," said Dittmar. "This would explain the higher number of healed broken bones we found in medieval skeletons with this condition."

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Four planets locked in a perfect rhythm around a nearby star are destined to be pinballed around their solar system when their sun eventually dies, according to a study led by the University of Warwick that peers into its future

Astronomers from University of Warwick and University of Exeter modelling the future of unusual planetary system found a solar system of planets that will 'pinball' off one another

Today, the system consists of four massive planets locked in a perfect rhythm

Study shows that this perfect rhythm is likely to hold for 3 billion years - but the death of its sun will cause a chain reaction and set the interplanetary pinball game in motion

Four planets locked in a perfect rhythm around a nearby star are destined to be pinballed around their solar system when their sun eventually dies, according to a study led by the University of Warwick that peers into its future.

Astronomers have modelled how the change in gravitational forces in the system as a result of the star becoming a white dwarf will cause its planets to fly loose from their orbits and bounce off each other's gravity, like balls bouncing off a bumper in a game of pinball.

In the process, they will knock nearby debris into their dying sun, offering scientists new insight into how the white dwarfs with polluted atmospheres that we see today originally evolved. The conclusions by astronomers from the University of Warwick and the University of Exeter are published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The HR 8799 system is 135 light years away and comprises a 30-40 million year-old A type star and four unusually massive planets, all over five times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting very close to each other. The system also contains two debris discs, inside the orbit of the innermost planet and another outside the outermost. Recent research has shown that the four planets are locked in a perfect rhythm that sees each one completing double the orbit of its neighbour: so for every orbit the furthest completes, the next closest completes two, the next completes four, while the closest completes eight.

The team from Warwick and Exeter decided to learn the ultimate fate of the system by creating a model that allowed them to play 'planetary pinball' with the planets, investigating what may cause the perfect rhythm to destabilise.

They determined that the resonance that locks the four planets is likely to hold firm for the next 3 billion years, despite the effects of Galactic tides and close flybys of other stars. However, it always breaks once the star enters the phase in which it becomes a red giant, when it will expand to several hundred times its current size and eject nearly half its mass, ending up as a white dwarf.

The planets will then start to pinball and become a highly chaotic system where their movements become very uncertain. Even changing a planet's position by a centimetre at the start of the process can dramatically change the outcome.

Lead author Dr Dimitri Veras from the University of Warwick Department of Physics said: "The planets will gravitationally scatter off of one another. In one case, the innermost planet could be ejected from the system. Or, in another case, the third planet may be ejected. Or the second and fourth planets could switch positions. Any combination is possible just with little tweaks.

"They are so big and so close to each other the only thing that's keeping them in this perfect rhythm right now is the locations of their orbits. All four are connected in this chain. As soon as the star loses mass their locations will deviate, then two of them will scatter off one another, causing a chain reaction amongst all four."

Dr Veras was supported by an Ernest Rutherford Fellowship from the Science and Technology Facilities Council, part of UK Research and Innovation.

Regardless of the precise movements of the planets, one thing that the team is certain of is that the planets will move around enough to dislodge material from the system's debris discs into the atmosphere of the star. It is this type of debris that astronomers are analysing today to discover the histories of other white dwarf systems.

Dr Veras adds: "These planets move around the white dwarf at different locations and can easily kick whatever debris is still there into the white dwarf, polluting it.

"The HR 8799 planetary system represents a foretaste of the polluted white dwarf systems that we see today. It's a demonstration of the value of computing the fates of planetary systems, rather than just looking at their formation."

Co-author Professor Sasha Hinkley of the University of Exeter said: "The HR 8799 system has been so iconic for exoplanetary science since its discovery nearly 13 years ago, and so it is fascinating to see into the future, and watch it evolve from a harmonious collection of planets into a chaotic scene."

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* 'The post-main-sequence fate of the HR 8799 planetary system' is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stab1311 Link: https:/ / doi. org/ 10. 1093/ mnras/ stab1311

Notes to editors:

Artist's impression of the four planets of the HR 8799 system and its star (Credit: University of Warwick/Mark Garlick). Image is free for use if used in direct connection with this story but image copyright and credit must be University of Warwick/Mark Garlick: https:/ / warwick. ac. uk/ services/ communications/ medialibrary/ images/ junes_2021/ hr_8799. jpg

The European Southern Observatory have a pre-existing video showing the orbital motion of the HR8799 system. The video is available for media use via the link below, but it must be accompanied by the credit: J. Wang et al. - https:/ / www. eso. org/ public/ videos/ eso1905b/

For interviews or a copy of the paper contact:

Peter Thorley

Media Relations Manager (Warwick Medical School and Department of Physics) | Press & Media Relations | University of Warwick

Email: peter.thorley@warwick.ac.uk

Mob: +44 (0) 7824 540863

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is part of UK Research and Innovation - the UK body which works in partnership with universities, research organisations, businesses, charities, and government to create the best possible environment for research and innovation to flourish. For more information visit UK Research and Innovation.
Friday, June 11, 2021

by Corinne Murdock

Dr. Carol Swain appeared on the American Cornerstone Institutes latest Cornerstone Conversation episode on Wednesday, alongside Dr. Ben Carson.

The two proved a compatible pair with unique insight on critical race theory. Both were born in the early 1950s, enduring and overcoming hardships and poverty in their childhood about a decade before the abolishment of Jim Crow laws.

In his opening statements, Dr. Carson explained that standing up against critical race theory, as a black individual, requires a lot of courage. He observed that those who disagree with critical race theory are demonized.

[T]he thing that really determines who a person is, as Dr. MLK emphasized so strongly  I suspect that he would be quite disappointed with critical race theory  its the character that makes a person, not the color of their skin, said Dr. Carson. Critical race theory turns that completely upside down and says that the color of their skin makes an enormous difference in terms of who you are and what you should think.

In response, Dr. Swain reflected on her own experiences of becoming an outspoken opponent of critical race theory. She recounted the difficulties of her own beginnings and how she became a conservative. She was one of twelve children raised in rural poverty who dropped out of school after the 8th grade, got married at 16, and had three children by age 21. It was at that point that Dr. Swain got her high school equivalency and went to college, where she earned the first of five degrees.

As Dr. Swain moved into academia  first at Princeton University, then Vanderbilt University  she shared that she enjoyed her work. Everything changed, however, the moment she became a Christian. Dr. Swain shared that she became more conservative after that.

I enjoyed winning national prizes and getting lots of accolades, signing bonuses, until I became a converted Christian, [and] increasingly became more conservative, said Dr. Swain. But even when I was a Democrat, I had common sense, and I didnt see the world the way other people around me saw the world, and so I was being called conservative back then.

Critical Race Theorys Origins

The idea of critical race theory has been in academia for a while, according to Dr. Swain. She shared that shed heard about it while she was earning her degrees.

She explained further that it wasnt until previous President Barack Obama came into office that she began noticing the impact of critical race theory. Due to this, Dr. Swain explained that she dedicated her last four years teaching at Vanderbilt University to discussing the impact of communism on Americas political life and culture.

It was a class where I did not allow political correctness: it was a free-speech zone, said Dr. Swain. What I see taking place today with critical race theory, I believe it is the civil rights challenge of our time.

Dr. Carson observed that widespread change is most effectively implemented through widespread dissatisfaction. He noted that the issue of racism

The Why Behind Systemic Racism and Critical Race Theory

According to Dr. Swain, racism is a distraction and diversion tool for the political left. It prevents people from recognizing the political lefts failings. Dr. Swain asserted that systemic racism no longer exists because she watched it fail and observed its downfall through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Open Housing of 1968.

I was born into systemic racism. I watched it crumble, said Dr. Swain. What I saw develop and evolve [after that] was a system of opportunities for people like me, and I can tell you many of my mentors  most  were white.

Neither Dr. Swain or Dr. Carson alleged that racism hasnt and doesnt exist.

Dr. Carson recounted how he went from the bottom of his class to the top of his class in junior high school, simply by studying  and won the award for top academic performance. However, Dr. Carson said that one of the teachers chastised the white kids during the award ceremony.

You are obviously not working hard enough, Dr. Carson recounted the teacher saying. There is no way this young man, with all the hardships, should be number one.

When he and Dr. Swain were young, Dr. Carson said that affirmative action was necessary to allow minorities to prove themselves. Todays world is different. He said that people have proven themselves, so affirmative action is no longer necessary.

You have black admirals and generals, and CEOs of major corporations, Fortune 500 companies, universities. We have a black president, we have a black vice president, said Dr. Carson. I mean to sit there and say things havent dramatically changed  its a denial of reality.

Dr. Swain responded that the unfortunate truth was that a lot of children believe in the teachings of critical race theory: that this country was built and runs for the benefit of white people.

No longer are they saying that we want to achieve a colorblind society or achieve equal opportunity, they want to give up undeserved advantages to people because of the color of their skin, said Dr. Swain.

Dr. Carson opined that people become like animals when they view everything through the lens of race because animals lack the capacity to see things like character and individuality. Rather, animals judge solely based on what they can visualize.

Your race is not something you can control. Your character is something that you can control, said Dr. Carson. Why would you judge someone based on something they cant control versus something they can control?

How Critical Race Theory Violates Civil Rights Laws

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Open Housing of 1968  all of the laws that abolished Jim Crow in America are being violated through critical race theory. Dr. Swain suggested that white individuals harmed by critical race theory have legal recourse because of that.

Race includes whites. The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment covers all persons, said Dr. Swain.

Dr. Carson remarked that he couldnt imagine growing up a child in todays world. Not only are they inhibited from seeing facial expressions due to masks, but they are told that they may be responsible for the deaths of the elderly in their lives or at risk of death themselves. On top of all that, Dr. Carson said, white children are told that theyre the cause of all societal problems and black children are told they will always be victims.

Its almost child abuse, what were doing to them, said Dr. Carson.

Dr. Carson cited the Brookings Institute research that discovered that finishing high school, getting a full-time job, and waiting until 21 to be married and have children would severely slash an individuals likelihood of poverty. That research has become popularized as three rules or three norms.

Dr. Swain added that even if mistakes are made, this countrys wealth of opportunities allows for the possibility to turn your life around. She also noted black Americas resiliency, citing Black Wall Street  an African-American community that prospered greatly without government interference, until the Tulsa race massacre occurred.

Thats the story we should focus on: the successes we have been able to achieve as Americans working together across color lines, said Dr. Swain.

Bridging Differences of Opinion

Racial tensions of some form have always existed. Dr. Carson explained slaveholders tactics of creating divisions among their slaves by encouraging groups of slaves to believe they were better than the other groups. Dr. Carson said that today, the differences of opinion are what causes these internal tensions.

If there is systemic racism, it is on behalf of people who have very cleverly, ever since slavery, manipulated, said Dr. Carson. And now, in todays society, [those manipulators make black people believe] you cannot agree with this black person if they have a different way of thinking. You know? Lets keep the tension there, lets keep the hatred there  and people keep falling for this stuff.

Dr. Carson said that individuals need to be courageous in taking ownership of their life and speaking out against critical race theory.

You dont have to be a permanent victim. You can be a victor, said Dr. Carson. You can be somebody that inspires other people to do even better.

Dr. Swains New Book on Critical Race Theory

In closing, Dr. Swain revealed that she is anticipating the release of her book, Critical Race Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed, around August 1.

I dont believe that the school systems who are pushing a race agenda and political activism instead of education  they are not on solid ground, said Dr. Swain. I think that if you stand on principle  just principles that you know  that you can get the upper hand.

Watch the full interview here:

[embedded content]
Sometimes its hard to pinpoint the moment when a CEO begins to morph into a goner  when her decisions come under new, unforgiving scrutiny and her support starts to evaporate.

CPS Energy CEO Paula Gold-Williams isnt there yet. But she might be getting close.

The $11.6-billion organization she runs is insular and tight-lipped, overseen by a self-perpetuating board of trustees. So the resignations of CPS general counsel and her two deputies earlier this month count as a stunning development.

On ExpressNews.com: CPS Energys top lawyer bails

Its hard to read the exodus as anything other than a judgment on Gold-Williams leadership and the decision to launch a barrage of lawsuits against 17 natural gas suppliers and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas after Februarys deep freeze.

On ExpressNews.com: CPS Energy sues natural gas suppliers over winter storm bills

But Gold-Williams problems didnt start inside the city-owned utilitys sleek new headquarters on McCullough Avenue. They started with CPS customers.

Storms bitter aftermath

Four months after Winter Storm Uri brutalized Texas, ratepayers are still seething.

They havent forgotten what it was like to make do in the freezing cold without power for hours or days on end. The fact that ERCOT, Texas power grid operator, ordered the blackouts that made their lives so miserable doesnt count for much.

The utilitys public communications during the crisis were spotty and at times lacked empathy. A tweet from Feb. 16, the day the magnitude of the crisis sank in, is a prime example: Paula Gold-Williams: We arent looking at individual people. We are looking at the stability of the grid and trying to help San Antonio through this situation.

On ExpressNews.com: In the dark  San Antonio officials were unprepared for winter storm

A Bexar Facts-KSAT poll in early April charted the collapse of CPS public approval. It fell to 46 percent from 78 percent a year earlier. The share of respondents who strongly disapproved of the utilitys performance rose from 4 percent to 26 percent.

And that was before CPSs bill-credit debacle.

Many customers were insulted by the miserly, one-time rebates CPS announced in April. The utility knocked $8.75 off the monthly bills of the 250,000-plus customers who went without electricity for at least 24 hours during the freeze. No power for 48 hours or more? You got an additional credit of between $50 and $100 for your trouble.

And last month, Gold-Williams said CPS is considering a rate hike to deal with the mountain of debt  totaling more than $1 billion  it accumulated during the storm, when it was forced to buy natural gas and electricity on the wholesale market at astronomical prices.

The utility could be asking City Council to approve a rate increase of as much as 9.5 percent in the months ahead. That would add $14.60 to your monthly bill.

City Council incumbents and aspirants got an earful from irate voters as they campaigned ahead of the May 1 election and the June 5 run-offs. Gold-Williams, 58, an accountant who made it to CPS corner office in 2016 and who is prone to dry corporate-speak, was the focal point of constituents anger.

Bob Owen, Staff Photographer / Staff photographer

Its important to state the obvious at this juncture: She is the first Black woman to serve as CPS chief executive. Its impossible to say how that plays into public perceptions of her, but it must. Bad news: Racists and sexists still live among us.

On the flip side, progressives and most local elected officials are loath to criticize her publicly  because how many Black female CEOs are there in this town?

This week, I called people at City Hall and in its orbit to see how Gold-Williams and the enterprise she leads are holding up politically. The answer: badly.

At this point, insiders support for a rate increase is  understatement ahead  low, despite the obvious need for one.

With public trust in CPS in the ditch, the newly formed Rate Advisory Committee, 10 of whose members were appointed by City Council and 11 by the utilitys board, will have extra weight with council members when discussions about a rate increase get serious.

But timing could be the catch here, at least if CPS is intent on moving quickly. RAC chair Reed Williams, a former North Side councilman, has said the committee will study the utilitys rates through October before making recommendations on how they should be structured.

Among elected officials, support for Gold-Williams may be as low as their willingness to sign off on a rate hike.

Rumors have her retiring by years end. Which prompted me to ask CPS if she has any near-term plans to step down. This is the answer I received: Paula hasnt filed any paperwork with the board or company regarding retirement.

The departure of CPS General Counsel Carolyn Shellman and two of her deputies, Abigail Ottmers and Zandra Pulis, magnifies Gold-Williams troubles.

Fight for our customers

Under Gold-Williams, CPS has embarked on an all-out legal strategy to reduce its storm-related debts. It hired three outside law firms, at an estimated cost of $10 million, to sue ERCOT and 17 natural gas suppliers, which CPS accuses of taking advantage of the weather crisis to charge extortionate prices.

As Express-News Staff Writer Diego Mendoza-Moyers has reported, CPS chances in court arent great. For one thing, the natural gas market is largely unregulated. And big, presumably sophisticated companies dont count as Average Joe consumers under the states price-gouging law.

On ExpressNews.com: CPS Energy price-gouging lawsuits likely to fall flat

We dont really know why the three CPS attorneys bolted. They havent spoken to reporters, and CPS hasnt provided an explanation  or made their letters of resignation public.

I left a message on Shellmans cellphone Thursday but didnt hear back.

She tendered her resignation last week but will continue working at CPS through Wednesday. Talking with a journalist about why shes abruptly leaving the utility where shes worked since 2006 probably would have been awkward for her. Averted gazes in the hallway, deathly silent elevator rides  if shes still going into the office.

So I asked a CPS spokeswoman: Did Shellman support the utilitys decision to sue the gas suppliers and ERCOT, yes or no?

A few hours later, I got this response via text message: Carolyn actively participated in the execution of the legal strategy and our fight for our customers.

Which is different from thinking its a good idea.

Keeping up appearances

From what Ive gathered, Shellman is a conservative, cautious attorney who took her role at CPS super-seriously. It doesnt stand to reason that her decision to leave would have had nothing to do with the biggest legal gambit the utility has ever undertaken.

The stakes for CPS and Gold-Williams are enormous. After all, how high customers monthly bills ultimately rise will be tied to how much debt CPS can wipe out through the legal system.

Combined, the gas bills total roughly $700 million.

My own view: The utilitys orgy of litigation is at least as much about putting up the appearance of fighting for the little guy as it is about making a sound case that suppliers charged grossly unfair prices.

On Thursday, CPS announced Shellmans interim replacement, putting its legal battle on behalf of customers on full display.

Shanna Ramirez, our new interim Chief Legal & Ethics Officer, General Counsel and Board Secretary, will help continue to drive our ongoing efforts to protect our customers from excessive, illegitimate and illegal prices stemming from Winter Storm Uri, the spokeswoman said, again by text message.

You might ask: Why would CPS feel compelled to engage in political theater?

CPS  and its five-member board of trustees  is set up to operate mostly like a business, untainted by City Hall politics. On paper, the only concrete power council members have is to approve or reject rate increases.

But the utilitys independence is partly an illusion.

Mayor holds the key

From its start as a municipal utility, San Antonios mayor has sat on the CPS board and has wielded outsize power  by virtue of being the only one at the table put there by San Antonio voters. He or she is also the only trustee in constant contact with all 10 City Council members.

If you doubt a mayors ability to move CPS, just remember a decade ago when then-Mayor Julian Castro deftly derailed plans for a major expansion of the Matagorda County nuclear plant that CPS co-owns.

Mayor Ron Nirenberg has been nothing but publicly supportive of CPS many storm-related lawsuits.

And how does he feel about Gold-Williams leadership? Mendoza-Moyers put that question to Nirenberg on Tuesday.

We are again working towards ensuring that our award-winning utility fights for consumers, and that Paula is continuing to fight on their behalf, Nirenberg answered.

Full-throated support arent the words that come to mind.

greg.jefferson@express-news.net
Heres a look at whats new or notable in home video. Movies and TV series are available on streaming sites such as iTunes, Amazon and Vudu unless otherwise noted.

Spiral: From the Book of Saw: The new Saw movie starring Chris Rock is the first in the franchise that doesnt revolve around Jigsaw, the criminal mastermind who kept popping up even after he died in Saw III. Maybe hes missed? The movie looks great, dark but crisp, and theres still plenty of gore. But Rocks presence as a detective investigating a copycat killer who targets corrupt cops shifts the balance of Spiral from horror to police procedural. Thats not where Saw fans want to be, though a fairly spectacular and on-brand ending almost sets things right.

Available to rent on streaming services following a theatrical run.

Also streaming Recent movies "The Croods: A New Age": In this sequel to the animated hit, the prehistoric Croods encounter some evolutionary developments in their search for a new home. Now streaming, Hulu. "Pinocchio": Roberto Benigni stars as Geppetto in this 2020 version of the often-told tale of a puppet who wants to be a real boy. Friday, Amazon Prime. See More Collapse

Also: The first seven Saw movies are streaming on HBO Max. Jigsaw, the 2017 sequel, is streaming on Peacock. Saw, the first and best movie in the series, is now available on 4K UHD Blu-ray.

Notable  Now on DVD

The Lovebirds: This is a screwball comedy in a thrillers clothing. Issa Rae and Kumail Nanjiani play a couple on the verge of breaking up who witness a murder. They wont call the police for fear of being arrested for the crime  they did hit the victim with their car, at least the first time  so they decide to solve it themselves. Because they never take their predicament, which evolves to involve blackmail and a sex cult, very seriously, viewers wont either. Theyll just enjoy both the bumpy ride and Nanjiani and Raes unending, usually funny, bitchy banter.

Streaming on Netflix; now available on DVD.

On ExpressNews.com: Ayala: San Antonio movie critic faces biggest challenge - life with one kidney

Notable  Binge watch

Panic: The blunt dialogue and heightened emotions of this young adult thriller set in the nowhere town of Carp, Texas, are aimed at older teens, but it might hook anyone. High school graduates here compete in a series of physically and emotionally challenging tests  somewhere between Truth or Dare and Hunger Games. The winner gets enough money to get out of Carp. It should go without saying that theres something fishy about these games. The cast includes fresh faces such as Mike Faist, one of the stars of Steven Spielbergs West Side Story remake, and familiar ones like Bonnie Bedelia and Moira Kelly.

Season one streaming on Amazon Prime.
San Antonio, youre not alone.

Since being christened back on June 13, 1691, San Antonio, Texas, might be the biggest, baddest and most well-known San Antonio, but by no means is it the only San Antonio.

While stories of the Spanish colonialism and a rugged frontier make San Antonio, Texas, unique, the name San Antonio most definitely is not.

On ExpressNews.com: Finally Fiesta: San Antonio's citywide celebration is back for a summer fling

A search of How many cities are named San Antonio reveals more than 300 places around the world share the name, according to geotargit.com. There are seven other places in the United States and U.S. territories that share the name San Antonio.

As the naming anniversary of San Antonio approaches, heres a look at three other places named San Antonio.

San Antonio, New Mexico

San Antonio, New Mexico, is a little more than an 11-hour drive from San Antonio, Texas, about 90 miles south of Albuquerque. The U.S. Census Bureau lists the population at 11. Thats not a typo. And the Census Bureau also says the entire population of San Antonio is in the 70-74-year-old range.

The Land of Enchantments San Antonio is known as the gateway to the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, the winter home to thousands of cranes and other migratory birds. Birders from all over the world flock to San Antonio to catch a glimpse of many of the hundreds of species that call the Bosque home.

New Mexicos San Antonio also was the birthplace of hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, who was born on Christmas Day in 1887. Hilton went on to buy his first hotel about 300 miles from San Antonio  Texas  in Cisco.

New Mexicans take their chile seriously  the state question is red or green?  and in San Antonio a battle has been brewing for decades between The Owl Cafe and Buckhorn Tavern for bragging rights to serving the best green chile cheeseburger.

San Antonio, Florida

Located about 30 miles from Tampa, San Antonio, Florida, is listed among one of the best places to live by bestplaces.net.

This San Antonio's history only goes back as far as the early 1880s. Fewer than 1,500 people live in the area near Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater. The cost of living is less there than other metro areas in Florida. The median household income is a whopping $74,034. San Antonio, Texas is $52,455, according to 2019 U.S. Census numbers.

While San Antonio, Texas, is excited about Fiesta, the people of San Antonio, Florida, are looking forward to a festival of their own  the annual Rattlesnake Festival. According to Facebook, the festival is an educational family event featuring rattlesnake and other wildlife shows, including a turtle race.

San Antonio, Northern Mariana Islands

Located on the island of Saipan, the towns Facebook page says its close to the southwestern tip of the island. At one time it was a separate village, but today it is part of other nearby villages.

Tourism, with tropical vacationers having dozens of lodging choices, is a mainstay of the economy.
Memorial Day weekend offered many Texans the first opportunity to meet friends, experience nightlife and travel since COVID-19 vaccines became widely available to the public.

On top of that, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidelines on May 13 that said fully-vaccinated people can participate in indoor and outdoor activities safely without wearing masks or social distancing. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott ended the mask mandate and allowed businesses to reopen at 100 percent capacity on March 10.

According to a San Antonio Express-News analysis of TomTom traffic data, Texans in San Antonio and other major cities took advantage of these new guidelines.

TomTom, a location technology company, produces traffic data that measure the extra travel time it takes for someone to drive from point A to point B  if a city is experiencing a 50 percent traffic congestion level, it will take a driver an additional 50 percent of drive time to arrive at their destination. Auto club and insurance company AAA predicted that the easing of COVID-19 restrictions would lead to increased travel this Memorial Day weekend when compared to last year, but that traffic wouldnt reach pre-pandemic levels.

Our analysis shows that while fewer people were making the traditional out-of-town trips this Memorial Day, more people were traveling within the city.

San Antonio narrowly eclipsed 2019 traffic on the Friday before Memorial Day.

For Houston and Austin, the lead-up to the holiday weekend saw less traffic congestion than the cities experienced in 2019, indicating that the traditional mass exodus for Memorial Day was less intense this year.

Once the weekend was underway, traffic died down across all three cities when compared to the pre-weekend rush. However, when compared to 2019, traffic levels on Saturday, Sunday and Monday were up, suggesting that more people were moving around within the cities.

In all three cities, as the long weekend ended and vacationers returned home, traffic rates fell back below the 2019 level. In 2019, travelers returned home from their out-of-state vacations between Monday and Tuesday, and local commutes picked back up.

Between these three cities, travelers in San Antonio saw the greatest change in traffic congestion from 2019 to 2021 on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. For those three days, San Antonio had an average increase of 69 percent in traffic congestion, Houston a 40 percent increase and Austin 31 percent.

Vacationing out of town, celebrating and gathering without social distancing and face coverings were major causes for concern in 2020, before COVID-19 vaccines were available.

Last years Memorial Day weekend has been blamed for the 36 percent increase in hospitalizations due to COVID-19 across the state, and last years Fourth of July celebrations also brought about a surge in cases  one that contributed to a spike that topped at 10,893 statewide hospitalizations by the end of the month.

However, in spite of the prevalence of more contagious coronavirus strands, the outlook for this years Memorial Day and Independence Day gatherings arent as grim, according to Texas medical professionals and health experts. This is in large part thanks to state vaccination efforts. At this time, 35 percent of the states total population is vaccinated; 44 percent have received at least one dose.
Taylor Pettaway

A San Antonio firefighter was suspended after he was arrested in February on a prostitution charge, suspension records said.

According to the Firefighters and Police officers Civil Service Commission, Adrian Jackson attempted to solicit an undercover San Antonio police officer on Feb. 10 through a known prostitution website and agreed to pay $60 for sex.
The San Antonio Zoo on Wednesday installed the second lime green zoo sign on the side of its parking garage visible from U.S. 281.

More artwork will be put up to complete the structures design in the next few weeks, said Tim Morrow, zoo president and CEO.

Weve been talking about wanting this to be an iconic building in San Antonio, and to be able to make an iconic building out of a parking garage is a job well done by the architects, the designers and the zoo team, who all worked on that, he said.

There are currently three large giraffes on the structure, and next to be installed are a tall tiger and multiple monarch butterflies, Morrow said. He said there is also ongoing testing for nighttime lighting. The signs will be back lit and the giraffes will be illuminated by ground lighting.

It may be the nicest looking parking garage on the planet! he tweeted.

A natural and beautiful look was the goal when designing the five-level garage, the zoo said. There is a lot of greenery and trees surrounding and growing onto the structure.

The zoo unveiled parking garages outer design this time last year, but began installing the artwork just last month. The delays had to do with process of making the large signs and animals.

They got stalled a little bit because of all of the rain we had in May, and now weve seen [construction] start to pick up again, he said.

On Expressnews.com: Dolittle' - San Antonio Zoo unveils plaque in honor of 'Elephant Man'

The selected animals on the structure represent conservation efforts around the world, Morrow said. The giraffes represent the efforts across Africa, the tiger will represent efforts in Asia, and the butterflies will highlight efforts in San Antonio and the rest of North America.

Those who visit the San Antonio Zoo, Brackenridge Park or any of the surrounding sites can park in the garage for free because city funds were used to build it. Inside the garage, visitors will find colorful art and facts about animals on each parking level.

We try to make it fun and educational, inside and out, Morrow said.

Malak.Silmi@express-news.net
When 16,000 Southern Baptists convene in Nashville on Tuesday, they will again do so under a cloud of sex abuse scandals and allegations after top leaders sought to silence abuse survivors.

A series of leaked letters and audio recordings in June shed light on internal deliberations over abuse and have prompted calls for investigations into its top leaders.

Its familiar territory for the nations second-largest faith group: The SBCs 2018 meeting came amid allegations of sexual misconduct or mishandling of abuse claims by longtime denominational leaders such as Paige Patterson and former Texas Appeals Court Judge Paul Pressler. And when the Southern Baptist Convention last gathered, in 2019, it was on the heels of a Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express News investigation, Abuse of Faith, that found hundreds of children had been abused by SBC church leaders and volunteers.

On ExpressNews.com: More men accuse former Texas judge, Baptist leader of sexual misconduct

Tension and infighting among SBC leaders have only increased since then. And now, even top officials acknowledge that the denomination is at a crossroads ahead of an annual meeting that will also include a presidential election and votes on a variety of sex abuse reforms.

Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Its a pivotal meeting, said Rolland Slade, chairman of the SBCs executive committee. We will either come out headed towards revival, and will have repentance and people laying down their swords. Or well continue to kick the can down the road.

Slade has been one of the more outspoken SBC leaders on abuse in the wake of the Chronicles February 2019 report that found more than 400 SBC church leaders and volunteers had been convicted or credibly accused of sexual abuse or misconduct over the past two decades.

They left behind more than 700 victims, nearly all children.

On ExpressNews.com: 20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms

In response, SBC church delegates empowered a committee to make inquiries into churches that have been accused of mishandling or concealing sexual abuse, and they advanced an amendment to their constitution that would allow them to remove churches thatve mishandled abuses or knowingly employed predators.

The SBCs public-policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, also overhauled the theme of its annual three-day conference to deal solely with abuse issues. The ERLC has also been developing and pushing curriculum on how to care well for the abused.

Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Survivors and advocates have been critical of the SBCs response, and have called for more sweeping reforms.

Some of those proposals may face a vote at next weeks meeting. Any church delegate can make motions or recommendations at the meeting, making it impossible to predict what may happen.

Multiple pastors say theyll push for stronger abuse reforms, including for the SBC to undergo a three-year, third-party audit of abuse and responses to it.

On ExpressNews.com: 'The women are hurting': Unearthed tapes, letters show Southern Baptist leaders support for pastor who faced sex scandal

The idea has long been requested by survivors and advocates who say that SBC churches are neither equipped nor unbiased enough to investigate themselves. The SBCs executive committee shot down a similar proposal in 2008, saying it could not compel any of the SBCs 47,000 autonomous and self-governing churches to cooperate with inquiries.

Todd Benkert, the Indiana pastor who is proposing the idea, believes that local church autonomy is not in conflict with his proposal. He said many SBC pastors eyes were opened by sheer number of cases, but that the findings were likely just the tip of the iceberg.

If the SBC is going to be able to enact meaningful change, it's critical to have better information to inform those changes, he said. This resolution is intended to provide a more clear picture of what is taking place in the SBC.

Old leaders return

Benkerts motion is one of a few aimed at informing SBC church members about abuse and potential mishandling of it.

On Thursday, Phillip Bethancourt, the ERLCs former vice president and one of the denominations leaders on abuse reforms, leaked audio from a series of meetings with other officials.

In one recording, Executive Committee President Ronnie Floyd worried that allowing survivors to be critical of leadership could threaten the SBCs longevity. His comments came just after the SBC held a three-day conference in response to the Chronicles reports, at which numerous speakers and survivors were critical of current and former leaders.

I am not concerned about anything survivors can say, Floyd said on the recordings. OK. I am not worried about that. Im thinking the base. I just want to preserve the base.

In a Thursday statement, Floyd accused Bethancourt of intentionally characterization their conversations. He said the executive committee remains committed to stopping abuse, and is in the process of retaining a third-party firm to investigate the slew of accusations levied against current and former committee members.

A day prior, on Wednesday, a 2019 email sent by longtime SBC leader Augie Boto was leaked online. In the correspondence, Boto  who was instrumental to the SBCs 2008 decision not to implement abuse reforms  questioned the motives of prominent abuse survivors and advocates, as well as the seriousness of the issue.

Jon Shapley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

This whole thing should be seen for what it is, wrote Boto, who retired in 2019. It is a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism. He could not be reached for comment.

It was just the latest leaked letter: Earlier this month, the Houston Chronicle obtained a 2020 letter in which outgoing SBC leader Russell Moore outlined what he said were numerous attempts by members of the SBCs executive committee to retaliate against him for his work with abuse survivors.

Moore objected to an investigation that had been launched into him and his entity, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, by other SBC leaders in early 2020. The investigation was framed as an inquiry into Moores work, and its effects on donations.

Moore alleged it was meant to intimidate him, one of many tactics that have been used to create a culture where countless children have been torn to shreds, where women have been raped and then broken down.

One of the people behind that 2020 investigation was Mike Stone, who at the time chaired the SBCs executive committee. Stone is a frontrunner to be elected SBC president when the group meets next week. Stone could not be reached for comment, but denied Moores accusations in a video message.

Stone and other executive members are aligned with and supported by the Conservative Baptist Network, which was formed last year to combat what members say is a drift toward liberalism within the SBC. Earlier this month, disgraced ex-SBC leader Paige Patterson told Baptist Press that he helped with the creation of the CBN, which had long been suspected by denominational insiders.

In 2018, Patterson was removed as head of a Fort Worth seminary for saying he wanted to meet with a woman who said she was raped at gunpoint so that he could break her down.

The Chronicle has since published hours of video that show Patterson personally intervened when a protege faced dozens of misconduct allegations at churches throughout the 1980s. The man, Darrell Gilyard, was eventually imprisoned for sex crimes with children.

Though his stature and power has been diminished, Patterson remains a folk hero in the eyes of many for his role in the so-called battle for the Bible, the period during the 1980s when the SBC went to war with itself over literal interpretation of scripture.

Some executive committee members sought to censure President J.D. Greear for saying in an interview with the Chronicle that churches should consider Pattersons history before hosting him.

David Pittman is among the many abuse survivors who say its hard to believe much has changed in the SBC when Patterson is still being embraced. Nor is he confident that this years meeting will produce substantive change.

Maybe one day theyll act, Pittman said. Maybe not. At least when they stand in front of God, theyll no longer be able to say they didnt know.

robert.downen@chron.com
21 Pro Video

Two San Antonio police officers were fired for fabricating a call in order to avoid another incident that would have caused them to work past their scheduled shift, suspension records said.

Officers Alexander Garza and Hector Ybarra were riding in a two-man unit on Oct. 8 of last year when a call for a domestic disturbance came out at 2:37 a.m. At 2:46 a.m., they diverted to a call for service for a "stranded motorist" in the 700 block of Creighton Avenue, records said.
Gov. Greg Abbott has been saying for months that Texas is no longer restricted by the coronavirus pandemic. Face mask mandates are gone, and people are crowding back into businesses and public places.

Texas is open 100% without any restrictions or limitations or requirements, he said on Twitter.

But there is one crucial government function the Republican governor has kept limited since he declared a public health disaster last March: the release of people from Texas county jails.

Abbotts controversial order aims to stop the release of any criminal defendant accused or previously convicted of a violent crime on a no-cost bond, meaning such defendants would only get out of jail in the pandemic if they could afford to pay to get out on bail. It also disallowed those serving short, misdemeanor sentences from being released early for good behavior, a common practice in county jails.

The orders legality has long been questioned, and at least several local courts have found it unconstitutional  leading to a patchwork implementation.

Still, at least in parts of the state, the order continues to keep people in jail who may have otherwise been released before the coronavirus ravaged Texas. It is the governors only emergency order aside from requiring collection of medical data on the coronavirus that he has kept in place for more than a year.

Abbott issued his emergency order last March as Texas counties sought to combat the pandemic by lowering their jail populations  where the risk of the coronavirus was particularly high given poor sanitary conditions and close quarters. At the time, Abbott said the order was to prevent mass releases from jails.

Releasing dangerous criminals makes the state even less safe  and slows our ability to respond to the disaster caused by COVID-19, he said last March.

A spokesperson did not answer repeated questions over the last month asking why the governor has continued the order.

Some bail reform advocates and opponents of the order argue its a political play.

Even before his order suspended a large swath of Texas bail law during the pandemic, the governor for years has asked lawmakers to change state bail practices to keep more criminal suspects deemed dangerous behind bars before their trial. This year, he made it an emergency for the Texas Legislature to pass such a law. When they failed to do so last month, he vowed to bring lawmakers back soon for a special session, in part to again work on bail legislation.

It always seemed more political than directly related to the disaster response, Brian Klosterboer, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said of the order. But particularly now, when every other emergency order has ended apart from the data collection, I think it highlights even more that it is a political position that is not tied to responding to the disaster and to an emergency.

An uneven system

At the start of the pandemic, some judges across Texas began releasing hundreds of inmates on reduced cash bonds or personal bonds  which dont require money  because of COVID-19. Release on personal bonds often still requires conditions like regular check-ins and drug testing.

But some jail releases prompted concern, including the low-cost release of a murder suspect in Harris County. Abbott stepped in shortly afterward with his order.

Similar to most of the country, Texas jails have since largely returned to pre-pandemic population levels.

Abbotts restrictions for personal bonds apply to arrestees who have been accused or ever previously convicted of a crime that involves physical violence or the threat of physical violence. Prohibitions of early jail release for good behavior or release on a GPS ankle monitor applies to those currently serving or ever convicted of such a crime.

That included Preston Chaney, who was one of dozens who died from COVID-19 in Texas county jails.

The 64-year-old man was accused of stealing lawn equipment and meat out of someones garage and kept in the Harris County jail for months because hed been unable to pay $100 for bail. A court document stated he was denied cashless release because of Abbotts order. Hed previously been convicted of low-level assault.

The orders limitation on personal bonds, but not money bail, has continuously spurred legal fights from bail reform advocates and judges, who have argued it discriminates against poor people and goes beyond the governors power.

No person should be kept in jail simply because theyre too poor to afford bail, and thats what (Abbotts order) does, Klosterboer said. People can still pay their way out of the system.

In legal battles, lawyers for Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that the order is constitutional because it allows no-cost release to still be considered for health or safety reasons after a chance for a hearing is given, though some attorneys said that sometimes took weeks.

Still, at least several courts and jails began to disregard Abbotts order during the last year after local judges found it unconstitutional and an overreach of gubernatorial power.

But a lack of direct action from statewide courts has resulted in a nonuniform system, where the orders influence on jail decisions varies not only from county to county, but courtroom to courtroom.

In the civil courts, the Texas Supreme Court ruled in favor of Abbotts order in April, but it didnt weigh in on the questions of constitutionality or gubernatorial overreach. Instead, the all-Republican court said the county judges who brought the lawsuit were the wrong ones to challenge the order, though the justices did indicate judges couldnt easily be prosecuted for overriding the order on their judicial discretion.

On the criminal side, the Court of Criminal Appeals has so far avoided a ruling on the order, according to several defense attorneys and bail reform advocates, though some cases have made it to its doorstep.

If a judge wants to get around this stuff, they can do it in most instances, said Grant Scheiner, president of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association. What Im concerned about is there may be some judges in far-flung areas across the state who are unaware of the constitutional issues or perhaps not moved by them.

Scheiner says many judges in large counties have knocked down or sidestepped the order.

But in Nueces County, state district Judge Inna Klein said she abides by the order because she believes in the governors power to issue it, though she struggles with wanting to keep judges independent from the executive branch. She said her local colleagues follow the order as well. The Nueces County Jail was 98 percent full last weekend, she said.

The idea (for the order) was good and it carried good measures for the safety of the community, however I think when you put the across-the-board requirements for everybody, it creates issues, the Republican judge said.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
The Air Force now provides the coronavirus vaccine to its basic trainees, and at least 80 percent of its latest graduating class has been immunized.

One commander at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland said shes encouraged by the response. The 59th Medical Wing has been administering the vaccine since May 14, with fledgling airmen lining up for them Thursdays and Fridays, often streaming through Wilford Hall Ambulatory Surgical Center in waves.

Its a sign that Lackland has turned the corner on the pandemic, which threatened to stop or severely constrain basic training when the coronavirus arrived in early March 2020.

Commanders responded with sweeping changes, shunting new arrivals into 14-day semi-isolation and enforcing constant mask-wearing except when eating, sleeping, exercising and showering.

For recruits who have received the vaccine, some of those rules are loosening, including the mask requirement  by itself, an incentive to get the shot.

Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News

Obviously, we appreciate the fact that were seeing good cases of interest in the vaccinations, which has allowed us to look at, again, how do we best take care of our formations, and right now were really proud of the way weve been able to keep our folks safe, said Col. Megan Schafer, who served as acting commander of the 737th Training Group until Tuesday.

Its been a lot of work, she said. We watch the guidance come down and change, and we try to be very intentional, very purposeful. We take this very seriously.

The Air Force has roughly 5,000 recruits training at Lackland at any given time, organized into eight squadrons, one of which graduates about 650 new airmen each week.

On ExpressNews.com: Masked and made over

The 59th Medical Wing said Friday that it has also begun offering the vaccine to technical training students.

Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News

We expect more than 80 percent of this weeks class to be vaccinated before they graduate, a spokeswoman for the wing said via email. That number is a mixture of trainees who came vaccinated and those who opted to take the vaccine upon arrival. Right now, about 25 percent of the trainees arrive already vaccinated.

Public graduation ceremonies will resume next month, but recruits are limited to inviting two people, and attendees have to prove theyve been vaccinated. Recruits whove been vaccinated also will be allowed to go into town, a tradition that was stopped when the pandemic arrived.

Although its encouraged, the recruits are not required to be vaccinated, nor is anyone in the armed forces.

The Air Force said Friday that it has 271,187 personnel who have taken the first and second shots, more than 81 percent of a total force of around 332,000.

A Defense Department chart shows that 463,616 soldiers were fully or partially vaccinated as of June 11, or 95 percent of an Army force that stood at 485,000 last year.

The chart shows that 281,716 active-duty sailors have been fully or partially vaccinated. The Navy separately said about 55 percent of its active-duty and reserve force was fully immunized. In the Marine Corps, 105,355 have taken one or both shots, or 56 percent of the 186,000 in its ranks last year.

Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News

The Air Force Recruiting Service doesnt ask if recruit applicants have been vaccinated prior to leaving for Lackland but tells them that if that if they have received one or both coronavirus shots they should bring their vaccine card to basic training, said Leslie Brown, a spokeswoman for the service.

The Air Force said in April that about 2,100 recruits at Lackland tested positive for the virus in the 13 months after March 17, 2020, and that one recruit had been in the hospital overnight before returning to his training unit.

On ExpressNews.com: Outworking COVID in San Antonio, Air Force kept basic training going

The positive tests didnt stop the affected recruits from being among the 35,382 who graduated in that period, roughly comparable to the 37,000 who went through basic training in the pre-pandemic 2019 fiscal year.

Even if vaccinations ramp up, it is unlikely that basic training will revert to the way it was before the pandemic. The changes in exercise routines have reduced common injuries that cause some recruits to be washed back to another flight and not graduate on time. New efficiencies have reduced the need to march miles a day in formation.

Only two years ago, AETC transformed basic training to make it more physical, including fighting with pugil sticks. That was dropped to maintain distance between recruits during the pandemic, and it isnt clear if it will come back.

On ExpressNews.com: Airmen wear their warrior faces at transformed basic training

Jessica Phelps /San Antonio Express-News

Those are things were evaluating, Schafer said. What are those key components of building a ready, lethal airman? And so the last thing we want to do is make decisions in the vacuum.

Maj. Gen. Andrea D. Tullos, commander of the 2nd Air Force, is examining what is essential in basic military training and what could be instituted elsewhere, Schafer said.

Because we know everything we add to BMT or take away, everything has a cost to it, Schafer said, referring to basic military training. So yes, obviously that was one thing we removed, but versus just flipping a switch and saying, Here, were going to go back to this, were evaluating it across the scope of the training pipeline, and were doing it as part of our annual review of our curriculum.

Staff photographer Jessica Phelps contributed to this report. sigc@express-news.net
A former Schertz business manager who pleaded guilty to stealing more than $470,000 from her employer learned her punishment Thursday.

Deanna Bates Wehde of San Antonio was sentenced to 49 months in federal prison by Chief U.S. District Court Judge Orlando Garcia, according to a news release from the Western District of Texas.
Harvard has recognized noted San Antonio landscape architect Everett Fly for outstanding leadership and preservation of American culture and forgotten historical sites.

Fly is one of three recipients of the inaugural Harvard Graduate School of Design Alumni Award.

I was really flattered when they called, and they considered the preservation work that I did since it started at Harvard, he said. They feel like I took that origin and really advanced it in a way that people had not done before. I was surprised they would see my work as fitting their mission to be on the cutting edge.

Fly was the first Black graduate of the masters degree program from Harvards Graduate School of Design.

Locally, he is known for working with archivists, conservationists and volunteers to uncover African American settlements and cemeteries particularly the Hockley-Clay Cemetery and Winters Cemetery. He is a co-founder of the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum.

Kin Man Hui, Staff / Staff photographer

J. Tullos Wells, managing director of the Kronkosky Charitable Foundation, said all of the acknowledgments are justified.

Everette has been honored by the best and the brightest around the nation for what hes done in his profession and with his heart, Wells said. At the Kronkosky, we have been thrilled to play a supporting role with him and other folks on the (museum) project, which was Everettes vision initially and has informed all of the work that he has done.

On ExpressNews.com: 'Hard work'- San Antonio teacher hosts free workout camp to support kids in community

Fly has been lauded for his preservation work across the nation. Hes been instrumental in preserving more than 1,200 historic sites in places such as Idlewild, Mich.; Hobson City, Ala.; and Eatonville, Fla., the childhood home of author Zora Neale Hurston.

From 1994 to 2001, Fly served on President Bill Clintons Committee on the Arts & the Humanities. In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded him with the National Humanities Medal for his commitment to preserving African American landmarks and places across the nation.

He also received the Champion of Preservation Award and Texas Preservation Hero Award.

Flys Harvard studies changed his life.

Professors at the University of Texas at Austin had encouraged him to continue his education after receiving his bachelors degree in design. They mentioned Harvard, where he could achieve a masters degree in two years.

Flys mother, Nadine Burnim Fly, was the first person he told about applying at the university.

She was such a proponent of education and supporter, Fly said. She said, If thats what you want to do, Im happy. Ill help however I can.

Fly was accepted to the prestigious university based on samples of his work, but he also had support from a network that included high school friend Anne Mortimer Ballantyne, Harvard alumni and a UT professor.

He was 23 years old, one of the three youngest in a class of 70 students  many from countries like England, Israel, Nigeria and Thailand. He absorbed the rich cultures as they helped one another and shared their unique philosophies.

Then, an adviser insisted that Fly take a history class taught by John Jackson to satisfy a credit. The course, titled Built American Landscape since 1865, covered how cities and towns were built. Jackson lectured about roads, fences, barns, churches and how a culture represented itself in built environments.

Jackson talked about Europeans, indigenous people and African Americans, a population Fly never heard mentioned in any of his classes.

When Fly asked his professor if he could write a paper on the old Black enclaves, Jackson guided his student. Jackson provided Fly with a pass to a rare book collection in Cambridge, Mass., and put him in contact with people with the national archives, which had historical maps with Black enclaves and geographical references.

Matthew Busch / Contributor

Fly passed the class, and Jackson encouraged him to continue his research on settlements that former slaves built as their own communities.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio's historic shotgun houses get new life through pilot program

In 1977, Flys mother and aunt attended his graduation ceremony. Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan was the commencement speaker, a fact that thrilled his family members.

Fly took them to visit the chair of the department, who asked his mother what she thought of Cambridge. She impressed the chair with a detailed discussion of horticulture and a description of differences in the landscape from Texas.

Fly recalled the chair said, Now, I understand where Everett gets his interest and background.

The architect said Harvard was an unforgettable experience. Hes still amazed that incredibly gifted and powerful people took an interest in the son of a domestic maid in San Antonio.
In April 1990, the San Antonio Express-News carried a story about Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev offering to open talks with Lithuania.

In another story on the same page, Colombian drug lords were threatening to explode bombs in Bogota and target more judges, elected officials and journalists.

Below all that was a story about the new president of Nicaragua, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro. It recalled her time in San Antonio.

That bit of local history, intertwined with international politics, resurfaced recently with news that her daughter, presidential candidate Cristiana Chamorro, remains under house arrest.

It followed the raiding of her Managua home and charges of money laundering and mismanagement of a nonprofit foundation named for her mother.

President Daniel Ortega, seeking re-election, has said the charges disqualify Chamorro from the race, serving his re-election bid and what he has turned into a dictatorship.

His political story is another Nicaraguan family affair; he named his wife as vice president.

INTI OCON, Contributor / AFP via Getty Images

First, the local connection to Nicaraguas presidency.

Chamorros mother attended Our Lady of the Lake Academy, a long-shuttered boarding school. She came here in 1945, the final year of World War II.

Its not like theres loads of information about Chamorro in San Antonio. But a dogged archivist at Our Lady of the Lake University took the challenge.

Chamorro didnt graduate from the Catholic school for girls, withdrawing in 1946 and then enrolling in the Blackstone College for Girls in Virginia, a high school.

Several biographies say her parents sent her to school in the United States because they wanted their daughter to learn to speak English perfectly, though other sources maintain she never quite did.

But in a graceful hand-written letter to then-university President Elizabeth Anne Sueltenfuss in July 1990, Chamorro addressed Sister Elizabeth and thanked her for her support expressed in a congratulatory letter.

The country of Nicaragua has demonstrated its call to democracy and its eagerness for peace, Chamorro said in the letter. I assume this difficult task on behalf of my country and for the people of Nicaragua. To carry out, it is necessary to have the support of each citizen so that our country be firmly established in democracy.

Her political career was influenced by the 1978 assassination of her journalist husband Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, which helped ignite a revolution that overthrew the Somoza dictatorship and ultimately led to President Daniel Ortegas rise.

He led the Sandinistas in a civil war against a U.S.-backed coalition of right-wing former Sandinista allies and Somozistas. It was created by the CIA as a counter-revolutionary force. They were called the Contras.

The brutal war spurred cuts to U.S. aid, but the Reagan White House was undeterred, continuing to fund them through illegal weapon sales to Iran. It was a corrupt mess.

Chamorros center-right coalition was backed by the United States, too, but her presidency ended the civil war. She was called the architect of a new Nicaragua.

In my trips to that country, I didnt see a thriving economy. Too few prosper, and the press works under government threats.

Still, Chamorros win over Ortega was celebrated. Members of the Congregation of Divine Providence were proud that a student rose to a nations presidency.

In the 1990 letter, Chamorro remembered the sisters and her classmates with affection. She ended it by saying, I trust in God that He will always guide us to sow the seed of peace in all the countries of the world.

OLLUs archivist found records of Chamorros classes. She took religion, English grammar, spelling, reading and oral English. She was interested in sports, took voice lessons and sang in the choir in Latin.

That joyous 1990 story seemed like democracy was eminent.

For those whove traveled there and who have ties to Nicaragua, news reports come with remembrances of a beautiful place marred by corruption.

Former U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua Oliver Garza hasnt been back for almost two decades. But the San Antonian recalled meetings in which a member of Chamorros family played a critical role.

Garza felt Chamorro was never the real leader. A son-in-law was the policy brain behind her administration, and the president deferred to him.

He was Antonio Lacayo, the late husband of Cristiana Chamorro. She remains under house arrest and struggling to remain in the presidential race.

eayala@express-news.net
A year ago, if someone had asked you who held the record for most votes ever collected in a Texas election, what name would have come to mind?

Greg Abbott? Rick Perry? Ted Cruz?

Nope, none of the above.

The correct answer would have been Eva Guzman, who received nearly 4.9 million votes in her successful 2016 re-election bid for the Texas Supreme Court.

Guzmans record was broken in the high-turnout 2020 general election, but the fact that she held the mark until last November speaks to an oddity in our electoral system.

Texas elects its Supreme Court justices in statewide partisan elections, but even as were casting votes in those judicial races, the names of the candidates barely register for most of us.

Court hopefuls dont engage in the standard forms of political campaigning and they cant run by advocating for policies they want to see enacted. As a result, no matter how many millions of votes they get, they inevitably have tissue-thin name recognition.

On Monday, Guzman sent a letter to Gov. Abbott, informing him that she will step down from the bench effective Friday afternoon.

Although Guzman did not disclose her reason for resigning, the persistent word in Texas political circles is that she is preparing to enter the 2022 Republican primary for attorney general.

Compelling personal narrative

By joining perpetually indicted incumbent Ken Paxton and his challenger, Land Commissioner George P. Bush, Guzman would create a rare scenario in which three candidates with multiple statewide election victories on their resumes were competing in the same primary.

A race for attorney general would be quite a transition for Guzman, who won her seat on the court in 2009 by gubernatorial appointment and subsequently sailed to two easy election wins.

Apart from Abbott and U.S. Sen. John Cornyn  both of whom managed to pivot from the Texas Supreme Court to the attorney generals office  there isnt much evidence that the court is an effective steppingstone in this state.

Guzman, however, isnt your typical member of the judiciary. Shes a charismatic communicator with a warm, engaging manner and an uncommonly compelling personal narrative.

One of seven children born to Mexican immigrants who never made it past grade school, she grew up in Houstons East End and graduated from the same college (the University of Houston) where her mother worked as a custodian.

In 2010, she became the first Latina elected to statewide office in Texas. During her tenure on the states highest civil court, she established herself as an advocate for victims of child abuse and domestic violence. She also earned the respect of her colleagues, including Chief Justice Nathan Hecht, who praised her this week as a nationally recognized champion for the rule of law and justice for all.

The adult in the room

Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant who serves as chairman of the Travis County GOP, said Guzman would enter the attorney general race with unique advantages and disadvantages.

Shes obviously a Latino with a Latino surname, and I actually think thats an advantage, Mackowiak said. I know that goes against some perceptions that people have about the Republican primary electorate, but in this case its a distinguishing factor for her.

Itll give her an opportunity to win geographic regions of the state  like San Antonio, like South Texas, like El Paso  that could give her a pathway to, at minimum, making a runoff.

On the downside, Mackowiak said, Theres really not much evidence that shes going to be able to raise 5, 10, 15 million dollars to give her a chance to win this thing. If shes not in a position to be on television, at a minimum on cable, in Dallas and Houston, shes got no pathway. So to me thats the biggest question mark.

Paxton and Bush could inadvertently help her cause. They will almost certainly throw verbal haymakers at each other and jostle for position as the candidate most loyal to former President Donald Trump.

Guzman, by establishing a more positive tone, could stake out a place as the adult in the room.

A constitutional conservative

In late March, Guzman delivered a dress rehearsal of sorts with a keynote address at the Hidalgo County Republican Partys Lincoln Reagan Dinner.

She praised her husband, a retired Houston police officer, and defended law enforcement against the criticisms of social-justice advocates.

She bemoaned the partisan divisions in our country, but also went for an obvious applause line by saying Democrats have taken the Latino vote for granted.

She did not mention Trump. She alluded to his successor, Joe Biden, only by way of suggesting that the current administration refuses to admit we have a migrant crisis at the border.

I stand up for the constitution of America, she said. Im a constitutional conservative.

Very soon, she also could be a highly intriguing contender for Texas attorney general.

ggarcia@express-news.net | Twitter: @gilgamesh470
On the wall of Charlie Cotrells recently vacated third-floor office in St. Louis Hall at St. Marys University was a framed 1894 photograph of a horse-drawn carriage traveling east on the dirt road that is now Cincinnati Avenue. In the background is St. Louis Hall.

The picture hung next to a window looking out onto Cincinnati Avenue. In the window next to it, San Antonios downtown skyline is etched in the distance. Its the same window out of which Cotrell leaned, in October 1961, to catch a glimpse of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower on the front steps.

Looking out this window reminds me Im always part of a city, he said. The city is always right here.

Cotrell arrived at St. Marys as an 18-year-old student in the fall of 1958, a kid born on San Antonios South Side and raised by a single mother. They moved to Waring, in the Hill Country, where he attended a one-room school and most of his classmates were Mexican American.

When he left St. Marys  he doesnt like the word retired  this spring, Cotrell did so as a revered elder. Except for three years at the University of Arizona, where he earned earned his Ph.D., one year teaching at Texas A&I and a year-long sabbatical, this Marianist institution is where hes been, and it will always be as identified with him, as he is with it. Its where he taught and became its first lay president.

To have Charlie Cotrell as a professor for one political science course, or several, is to have a friend and mentor for life and access to a never-diminishing well of spiritual and intellectual sustenance, compassion and inspiration.

I have always admired and been amazed by Charlies deep commitment to teaching, his wife of 52 years, Abbie, said. He has held many administrative offices at St. Marys, including that of president, but his love for teaching runs through everything. In that light, I believe his greatest accomplishments are the lives that he has touched and encouraged through the years.

He wanted to be a journalist, but since St. Marys didnt have a journalism program he turned to political science.

The heart of political science for me then, and now, is a focus on people and community, involved with strategies and actions to bring about justice, equality and the common good, Cotrell, now 80, said in late May as he cleaned out his office.

These principles came alive for me, beyond textbooks, when I had the opportunity to work with the excluded and disenfranchised for 25 years as a researcher and witness in voting rights cases in many Southern, Southwestern, and Western states. These principles lived in the just aspirations of the African Americans, Latinos and Indians with whom I worked in federal voting rights cases. That moved me then and now.

Among his students were Willie Velasquez, who founded the Southwest Voter Registration and Educational Project; Jose Angel Gutierrez, who founded the Mexican American Youth Organization and La Raza Unida; and Ernesto Cortes, who founded Communities Organized for Public Service, or COPS. He was the treasurer of the charter group that founded the organization.

The Express-News once had four Metro columnists: Roddy Stinson, Rick Casey, Carlos Guerra and myself. All of us, except Roddy, had Cotrell as a professor.

Cotrell worked with Rosie Castro on voting rights. He was with her mother, Victoria, in September 1974 when she won $300 in a menudo cook-off. Victoria took her winnings to pay the bill at Robert B. Green Hospital, where her grandsons, Julian and Joaquin, had just been born.

Cotrells reach has been long, his influence deep. Hes always been the teacher and calm voice in troubled times. He said, If you want a more peaceful, prosperous world, you have to work together, and thats an art. Its an art for all of us to learn.

On his last day at St. Marys, he loaded up his 2004 Honda Element and drove east on Cincinnati Avenue from which St. Louis Hall, sitting on a rise, can be seen several miles away.

Cotrell called it a good memory.

cary.clack@express-news.net
Growing up in the Texas Panhandle, I sometimes noticed coyote carcasses hanging from barbed-wire fenceposts that marked the prickly boundary between ranchland and highway. The elders in my family explained ranchers shot the coyotes and hung their carcasses as a warning to other coyotes not to prey on cattle.

I always wondered if anybody ever explained the meaning of coyote-carcasses-on-fence posts to the other coyotes. They didnt seem to get the message.

The last few years, Ive thought about those coyote carcasses on those fence posts almost every time Ive heard about our governments response to immigration. Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser in the previous administration, grew up in California but couldve been the most sadistic rancher in the Panhandle. He devised schemes to make immigrating to the United States so horrific, prospective migrants wouldnt think of leaving their homelands. Never mind those homelands fomented violence, extortion, corruption, unemployment and poverty of epic proportions.

My organization, Fellowship Southwest, has helped shelter and feed 10,000 asylum-seekers on the U.S.-Mexico border, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. Ive spoken with many of them, hearing their stories of desperation but seeing flickers of hope in their eyes. They dont seem to get Millers message.

Now, Gov. Greg Abbott, a son of Texas, is determined to top Millers coyote-fence post toll. Abbott has announced plans to remove the licenses of more than 50 Texas shelters that house some 4,000 migrant children seeking to be reunited with their families. He either thinks worsening the plight of 4,000 children will convince other families in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras not to seek asylum in the United States or doesnt care about the plight of the weakest and most vulnerable people in the Western Hemisphere.

Standing in a church courtyard in Piedras Negras, Mexico, I asked a young mother why her family left Honduras. She told me gangs were doing bad things in her neighborhood. She called the police, asking them to patrol her street. A couple of minutes later, she answered a knock on her door. A gang member told her: Never call the police again. Fearing for their lives, she and her husband bundled up their little girl and little boy and fled north, right away.

In Tijuana, Mexico, a friend asked a mom with two sons, maybe 10 and 12, why she left Central America and walked to the U.S. border. She explained her sons had two older brothers. When they became teenagers, the local gang recruited them for membership. When they resisted, the gang murdered them  in front of her and their little brothers.

These are the lucky ones. As far as I know, those children have not been separated from those parents. The kids Abbott wants to evict are even more vulnerable and desperate, separated from family and hoping against hope for reunification. At least in the meantime, theyre living in licensed shelters, run by faith-based groups and other nonprofits committed to providing tender care for young lives.

What will happen if Abbott turns them out? That will be the federal governments problem. Most likely, the children will be pushed into massive influx facilities or backed up into border patrol buildings  neither of which is equipped to provide proper care and supervision of at-risk, traumatized minors.

Abbott has couched this policy in a concern for U.S.-born children in need of foster families, but the licenses he intends to revoke for foster care providers like Catholic Charities  that allow them to offer transitional foster care for unaccompanied migrant children  are the same licenses that allow them to run domestic foster care programs. So, he actually will harm both categories of vulnerable kids.

As a kid, I never felt sympathy for the coyotes hanging on Panhandle fence posts. Still dont. But as a follower of Jesus, I take seriously his admonition that we demonstrate how much we love God by how we treat the least of these. So, Im ashamed of federal and state officials  especially those who profess to be Christians  who seem to think they can hang childrens bodies on the border wall as a warning to desperate families facing rape, persecution, famine and murder.

Marv Knox is coordinator of Fellowship Southwest, an ecumenical faith-based organization that operates in Arizona, New Mexico, Northern Mexico, Oklahoma, Southern California and Texas. He lives in Coppell.
I have spent the past 42 years practicing and teaching principles of rationality. As I learned in my doctoral education in rhetoric, rationality is at the core of our humanity and anchors productive deliberation in a democratic society.

Over the past few years, the hope of many is that rationality and logical reasoning will be restored, serving as an effective corrective to the untruthful narratives dominating and contaminating our public discourse. However, I have become less sanguine that rationality will be restored given the current hyperpolarized political environment.

Unfortunately, the absence of rationality and logical persuasive appeals has now intruded the realm of legal decision-making  historically a place that has prided itself on nonpartisanship.

In a ruling last week that compared the AR-15 to a Swiss Army knife, a federal judge overturned Californias longtime assault weapons ban.

U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego used this questionable analogy to argue that Californias 30-year assault weapons ban violated the Second Amendments right to bear arms: Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment, Benitez said in the ruling. Firearms deemed as assault weapons are fairly ordinary, popular, modern rifles.

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Needless to say, this is a false analogy. As I taught my students at the University of Texas for decades, a false analogy is one that makes a comparison between two subjects that have more dissimilarities than similarities.

Consider: Using hairspray every day is analogous to launching a nuclear weapon. Like Benitezs comparison of a Swiss Amy knife and an AR-15, this analogy is not only fallacious but defies common sense. Therefore, we must ask Benitez: When has a Swiss Army knife ever been used to quickly kill a large number of people? Surely Benitez would realize that if a Swiss Army knife  not guns  were used in recent mass killings, there would have been fewer deaths.

Sadly, Benitezs spurious reasoning is another instance of our nations current rhetorical habit of forgoing well-accepted standards of rationality and logic. Everywhere you look, partisanship dominates and trumps  no pun intended  our discourse: something that makes deliberation less possible and therefore threatens democracy. Moreover, faith in humanity is required for faith in rationality  a poignant observation from a colleague and friend.

For me, faith in humanity is dwindling. Benitezs ruling, combined with what seems evident from congressional political skirmishes, leads me to believe we have reached an inflection point. As a scholar and teacher of rhetoric who monitors and analyzes the countrys political discourse every day, I feel less confident that Americas great experiment can withstand the onslaught of persuasion not grounded in rationality and logic.

I hope my pessimism is refuted in the near future.

Richard Cherwitz is the Ernest A. Sharpe Centennial professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin.
A substantial portion of the migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border heading north are from Central Americas Northern Triangle: El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

They pay large sums to smugglers, risk robbery, assault and death on their journey, often must evade authorities on Mexicos southern border and on the United States southern border, and frequently endure detention. And yet in spite of these obstacles, they continue to come in large numbers. While the United States is a great place to live, what primarily drives these Central Americans to migrate is less the pull factors of the United States and more the push factors from their homeland.

Three interconnected principal factors are pushing Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans to migrate: weak and corrupt institutions, endemic poverty and extreme violence. The average Northern Triangle resident lives either in poverty or barely above it, in a neighborhood infested with criminal gangs who extort, assault, rape and murder with near impunity, and within a political system where politicians often have little respect for the rule of law and are corrupt.

While in the 1970s El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras were ruled by dictatorships, today democratically elected presidents and legislatures govern. Yet the quality of these democracies leaves much to be desired, with feeble institutions, limited accountability and high levels of corruption. For example, among the countries ranked by Transparency International from least to most corrupt, El Salvador is 104th, Guatemala is 149th and Honduras is 157th. The U.S. is 25th.

All three countries have weak economies and suffer from endemic poverty, with more than one-third of Salvadorans and more than half of Guatemalans and Hondurans living below the poverty line. Per capita wealth ranges from 10 times (Honduras) to seven times (El Salvador, Guatemala) less than that of the United States.

El Salvador and Honduras are the most and fourth-most violent countries in the world that are not at war, annually averaging 52 and 39 murders per 100,000 residents. Guatemala ranks as 17th-most violent with 23 murders per 100,000, more than four times the U.S. murder rate of 5 per 100,000 residents. Brutal criminal gangs, such as MS-13 and Barrio 18, operate throughout the region, controlling almost as much populated territory in El Salvador and Honduras as the government.

There is no easy solution to the perfect storm of weak institutions, corruption, poverty and criminal violence in the Northern Triangle. To begin to remedy this situation would require actions by the United States that a majority of Americans would consider objectionable. These would include increased U.S. intervention into the political, legal and law enforcement institutions of these countries, as well as a massive investment of U.S. tax dollars. And even if the United States were to engage in neocolonial behavior and shower the countries with largesse, there would be no guarantee of success.

There are, however, some steps the U.S. can take to modestly improve conditions in the Northern Triangle and, in doing so, somewhat reduce the pressure placed on these countries citizens to flee to the United States.

First, work with the countries presidents to reduce lawlessness and violence via a twin approach of cracking down on the gangs while providing youth and young adults with enhanced educational, employment and recreational opportunities. This would, however, require the U.S. to work more with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele rather than against him, as is presently the case due to concerns about Bukeles commitment to democracy.

Second, invest in productive activities in the countries to grow the economy and create jobs in the agricultural, manufacturing and tech-based knowledge sectors. In doing so, the Biden administration would need to be careful to ensure U.S. and multilateral funds are not siphoned off by corrupt local actors, or that too much investment flows to the countries coterie of crony capitalists in a way that benefits a tiny elite to the detriment of the general public.

Third, provide a pathway to citizenship for the approximately 260,000 Hondurans and Salvadorans who have lived in the United States (40,000 in Texas) under temporary protected status, or TPS, for 20 years, but whose ability to retain that status is under threat. A majority of TPS recipients provide remittances to relatives, and deporting them, most of whom have children who are U.S. citizens, would only worsen economic conditions in the Northern Triangle, compelling even more Salvadorans and Hondurans to migrate to the United States.

Mark P. Jones is the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in Latin American Studies and Baker Institute Political Science Fellow, Rice University.
Perception. Marketers spend a tremendous amount of time and money influencing, protecting, building or spinning this simple yet complicated noun.

Now, 18 months into having the honor of leading the Express-News, I spend most of my time working on how our multimedia news organization is perceived. Since March, when many COVID-19 restrictions were lifted, I have spent nearly every lunch and dinner with business, education, nonprofit and civic leaders talking about the Express-News.

I love my job, so it is easy to talk about the vitality of the Express-News and my belief we are an essential piece of a thriving community. I start every conversation the same way. I ask for feedback, and then I ask: What is your perception of the San Antonio Express-News?

The good news is the feedback has been wonderful. While we have areas to improve upon, everyone believes we have the best intentions, that our journalism is high quality and essential to the community. The more challenging feedback is the perception that our brand needs work.

There is an ebb and flow to all businesses. Weve been publishing since 1865, and the speed bump the news business hit between 2008 and 2019 was not the first, nor will it be the last. But let the record state: We are growing subscriptions and ad revenue, and increasing newsroom investment. We are growing, and we employ the most journalists in the Bexar County region. We are the largest media business west of Houston and south of Dallas. While I am proud to talk about our growth, it is a team effort.

A few weeks ago, the San Antonio Association of Hispanic Journalists performed a diversity audit of local San Antonio broadcast anchors. The results were challenging. Last week, our associate editorial page editor, Nancy M. Preyor-Johnson, interviewed me to discuss the diversity challenges the audit uncovered and how questions about diversity apply to the Express-News.

In her column she pointed out something I should have fixed a while ago. While we have done a lot of work to embrace and drive diversity, our print masthead displayed only the names of three white men. Not any longer. Inside the walls of a newspaper, the masthead is reserved for the men and women who lead and most influence the content we publish. While Editor-in-Chief Marc Duvoisin and Editorial Page Editor Josh Brodesky oversee our news and opinion coverage, our business has greatly evolved. Our masthead fell short of recognizing this evolution and other influential editorial leaders at the Express-News. The backstory to our new masthead is the organic nature of how we have worked, and will continue to work, to build diversity and inclusion.

It is my pleasure to fully represent our three most prominent brands and platforms on our masthead and the men and women who lead the charge. Welcome Nora Lopez, executive editor of news, Preyor-Johnson, associate editorial page editor, Randi Stevenson, executive producer of ExpressNews.com, and Jess Elizarraras, executive producer of MySA.com

As I said last week to Preyor-Johnson, The work of building great teams, diverse teams, is never done. We have a long way to go.

Perception and reality. We are growing inside and out.

Mark Medici is publisher of the Express-News.
There is no bottom to Gov. Greg Abbotts cynical brand of politics, just as there appears to be no place in his heart for innocent migrant children. And if Abbott gets his way, there will be no place for these children in Texas.

By now, its clear Abbott will play the ugly politics of immigration for all it is worth, even at the expense of children.

In his stunning June 1 disaster declaration in response to the border crisis in Texas, Abbott has sought to shutter by Aug. 30 more than 50 state-licensed facilities that house more than 4,000 migrant children.

The Biden administration is now threatening legal action. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services officials have called the proclamation a direct attack on the immigration system and the Office of Refugee Resettlement that runs a network of more than 200 facilities and programs in 22 states. HHS officials have said they have no plans to close facilities.

This isnt the first time Abbott has leveraged children to posture politically about immigration. In April, Abbott held a dramatic news conference in which he made serious and unfounded claims of sexual abuse of unaccompanied migrants housed at the temporary emergency site at the Freeman Coliseum. Those allegations were never proven.

In March, Abbott created and expanded Operation Lone Star, directing Texas Department of Public Safety and Texas Rangers to conduct interviews of unaccompanied minors. So far, he has deployed more than 1,000 DPS troopers and hundreds of Texas National Guard soldiers to the border.

We wonder, what will he do next?

Regarding his declaration, Abbott told Fox News: Texas is going to start arresting everybody that comes across the border. He vowed to charge them with aggravated trespass, with up to a year in jail.

And Thursday evening, Abbott held a Border Security Summit in Del Rio, outlining his disaster declaration and efforts to beef up law enforcement and jails; a new interstate compact and a call to other states for resources; and the building of border barriers and even a border wall. Abbott tends to regard the border as either a federal or state issue when it politically suits him.

Whats particularly sad about Abbott is he is smart, politically astute and so capable of modeling a better way. This isnt Sid Miller, king of cupcakes in schools, or indicted Attorney General Ken Paxton. This is a former state Texas Supreme Court justice and attorney general. He should be better.

He knows the unaccompanied migrant children hes trying to evict are innocent victims  asylum-seekers fleeing the violence ravaging the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.

Progress also takes time and will require investment in the Northern Triangle, reforming the asylum process and genuine bipartisan work on immigration. The Biden administration is committed to investing $4 billion in four years to address the root causes of migration from Central America while trying to ensure immigrants are treated with dignity.

But back to Abbott, who has contributed nothing to reform. In his proclamation, Abbott declared the federal government used to take seriously its responsibility to enforce federal immigration laws and accused the Biden administration of failing to meaningfully partner with Texas.

A meaningful partnership begins with meaningful policies and mutual respect, and is bolstered by humanity. Punishing immigrant children? Thats a particularly mean-spirited and ugly brand of politics.
Ten Texas Democratic lawmakers will meet with Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington on Wednesday after they staged a walkout that killed Republican-proposed voting restrictions.

The Democrats who will be in attendance are:

Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, chair of the Texas House Democratic Caucus Rep. Nicole Collier, D-Fort Worth, chair of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas, chair of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus Rep. Jessica Gonzalez, D-Dallas Rep. Gina Hinojosa, D-Austin Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio Rep. Senfronia Thompson, D-Houston Sen. Carol Alvarado, D-Houston Sen. Beverly Powell, D-Burleson Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas.

Martinez Fischer said in a statement Thursday that Democrats are looking to the White House to put pressure on Congress to pass federal legislation that would override restrictions already passed and being proposed in Republican-led states.

We are deeply appreciative that Vice President Harris understands what is at stake and is leading the way to protect our democracy, he said. We are honored to stand with her, Congressional Democrats, and the entire Biden Administration.

The For the People Act appeared dead June 6 when the lone Democratic holdout, Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, said in an op-ed in The Charleston Gazette-Mail that he would not vote for it, nor for getting rid of the filibuster to push it through.

Some in my party have argued that now is the time to discard such bipartisan voting reforms and embrace election reforms and policies solely supported by one party, he wrote. Respectfully, I do not agree.

The 818-page bill still could be broken up and passed in pieces.

Turner and Alvarado said in a joint statement that they plan to thank Harris and President Joe Biden for speaking out against legislation that promotes voter suppression.

We also intend to underscore the importance of passing HR 1 (For the People Act) and other critical reforms, and urge those in power to take action as soon as possible  for the sake of all Texans and all Americans, they wrote.

cayla.harris@express-news.net
WASHINGTON  A day after Gov. Greg Abbott said the state of Texas would pick up where former President Donald Trump left off building a border wall, the White House urged Congress to cancel billions of dollars in funding for the wall  making it clear that Texas will likely be left to cover the tab on its own.

And according to the White House, it will be a costly endeavor. The Biden administration said Friday that Trump spent as much $46 million per mile on some segments of the wall.

The administration completed a review of border wall projects Friday and made clear it doesnt plan to build more. Officials said the administration will return $2 billion to military construction projects that the Trump administration had raided to fund the wall  including sending $22 million to build dining halls at Camp Bullis outside San Antonio.

The Homeland Security Department, meanwhile, announced it would spend the rest of remaining border wall funding to address urgent life, safety and environmental issues resulting from the previous administrations wall construction, including repairs on the Rio Grande Valley flood protection system that officials say was damaged by crews working to build the wall.

BACKGROUND: Gov. Abbott pledges to finish Trump's border wall and use state troopers to arrest migrants

The department also announced it will review the eminent domain actions taken by the previous administration for wall construction and return the land it does not use to its prior owners. The agency said it will begin discussions with owners of land it deems is still necessary for life, safety, environmental or other remediation work.

The news comes after the Republican governor said he will detail his plans to have the state build the wall next week, so little is known about the scope of his plan or how he proposes to pay for it.

Long term, only Congress and the president can fix our broken border. But in the meantime, Texas is going to do everything possible, including beginning to make arrests, to keep our communities safe, Abbott said at an event billed as a border security summit in Del Rio. We are going to do everything we can to secure the border, and it begins immediately.

The White House said that, in total, the Trump administration built just 52 miles of wall where no barrier existed.

The effort diverted critical resources away from military training facilities and schools, and caused serious risks to life, safety and the environment, said a fact sheet from the Office of Management and Budget. It also took attention away from genuine security challenges, like drug smuggling and human trafficking.

ben.wermund@chron.com
In a sweeping overhaul of Texas elections law that Republicans rushed toward approval in the waning hours of the legislative session, one provision stood out to critics as particularly alarming.

The hastily-added clause would have made it easy for a judge to overturn an election, even if there were only thin evidence of fraud. With former President Donald Trumps historic efforts to nullify his November loss still fresh in their minds, Democrats singled out the measure as irresponsible.

Just think about that  your election, YOUR election could be overturned without the other side being required to prove actual voter fraud, said state Rep. Julie Johnson, D-Carrolton, in an impassioned speech on the floor of the Texas House. The implications of this are unthinkable. To make matters worse, the provision was not in either the Senate or the House version of the bill.

The bill never passed, dying at midnight on May 31 after the Democrats blocked a vote on it by walking out. Yet policy debates have given way to an even more basic question: Who added the Overturning Elections section to it?

BACKGROUND: Outnumbered Democrats defeat Texas voting bill with flurry of objections, and a walkout

One of the members of the conference committee that crafted the final version of the bill, state Rep. Travis Clardy, R-Nagodoches, says he doesnt know. Other top Republicans who worked on the final draft of the legislation say they dont know either.

Whats more, Clardy  and chief author Sen. Bryan Hughes  now denounces the measures related to overturning elections and says Republicans dont plan to revive them in a future bill.

There was zero appetite or intent or willingness to create some low bar where a single judge can overturn the results of an election, Clardy said in an interview with Hearst Newspapers. That would be horrendous policy, and it would never be healthy for the democracy.

Democratic members say there is no way those provisions were inserted by mistake. They say they raised concerns about them with Republicans when there was time to spare for the bill to be revised.

The sections would have lowered the standard of proof to overturn an election from clear and convincing evidence to a preponderance of the evidence for many types of fraud allegations. And they gave judges the ability to void elections even if it couldnt be demonstrated that fraudulent ballots made a difference in the outcome.

If the bill had passed, Texas would have been one of few states to have lowered the bar so much, opening the door to a flood of potential election challenges, election law experts said.

If we deliberately design a system that says all you have to do is come up with a simple preponderance  that is, just barely more evidence than the other side  and were going to throw out the elections, when we have a whole gamut of election procedures in place that we justifiably expect to produce reliable results in the normal course, were really undermining that, said Steven Huefner, professor of law at the Ohio State University.

They had time to review it

The final version of Senate Bill 7 varied greatly from its previous iterations. Such changes are not uncommon at the Texas Capitol, where the Legislature meets once every two years for 140 days of policy-making and political point-scoring. Sometimes the results are sloppy.

When the Texas Legislative Council, the nonpartisan agency whose lawyers and researchers advise the lawmakers drafting legislation, returned the bill, Clardy said he was caught by surprise by some of the new provisions, which he said were not among revisions submitted by the bills authors.

In addition to the last-minute provision on overturning elections, another late addition said early voting on Sundays could not start before 1 p.m. Democrats decried the provision as an attempt to underminesouls to the polls events organized by Black churches. Clardy later told NPR it was a typo.

I dont want to put the blame on the Legislative Council lawyers that worked on this, Clardy said. We never intended and never asked for or wrote ourselves some section called overturning elections. That was not the desire at all.

TEXAS TAKE: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox

He added: I dont know about what input other conferees may have had with Lege Council; Im just saying that as a lawyer, and understanding the import and difference in standards, I would never agree with preponderance and would have and will insist on clear and convincing.

A legislative council spokeswoman declined to comment, saying the drafting of bills is privileged and confidential.

State Rep. Nicole Collier, one of three Democrats on the conference committee and chair of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus, wasnt buying Republicans claims that the language was added by mistake.

They had time to review it, Collier said. The fact that the conference report was signed on Saturday  the day before it went to the House floor  means that they had read it, and they approved it.

Zero public comment

A similar bill in 2019, Senate Bill 9, also authored by Hughes, contained just the provision to lower the standard of proof for nine types of fraud allegations.

The current legal standard of clear and convincing evidence in voter fraud cases is based on court precedent.

Hughes, R-Mineola, who was Senate chair of the conference committee, said Friday that in this years bill, Senators wanted to see the preponderance of the evidence standard only for civil suits in which damages are being sought, not election contests, but that section did not come out as intended.

As far as going forward, were going to make it very clear in a special that the standard for overturning wont change; itll still be the clear and convincing that its been for a long time, he said.

The overturning elections section was not in the final draft of the bill that Senators approved, Hughes said, so it must have come during edits by House members.

It was added in the last draft, and the Senate made no changes in that last draft, he said.

House Speaker Dade Phelan responded to a request for comment with a statement: The speakers office did not direct nor have we seen evidence to suggest that the House requested these changes be made to the SB7 conference.

During the final debate on the bill, House Elections Committee Chair Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park, said some amendments he supported were mysteriously missing from the final version. Cain said this week he knew as much as Clardy about where the Overturning Elections section came from, and had nothing further to add.

Elizabeth Alvarez-Bingham, the main lawyer who consulted with House Republicans on the bill, said she would not have ever recommended lowering the burden of proof.

Election contests exist as a role of the judiciary, Alvarez-Bingham said. Theyre only supposed to override the election if you can meet the highest possible burden, and thats the way it should be.

On HoustonChronicle.com: As Abbott moves to build more border wall, White House says it costs up to $46M a mile

The language in the bill lowering the standard of proof was in an earlier version the Senate approved in April, though there was little discussion about it at the time. State Rep. Cole Hefner, R-Mount Pleasant, had proposed the change in a separate bill that was withdrawn before it could be heard in committee. He did not respond to a request for comment.

State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, who served along with Clardy on the conference committee that signed the final version of the legislation, said he also does not want to see the standard of proof lowered and would prefer judges maintain their discretion.

As for the part allowing judges to void elections, no other bills filed this session included the language, according to a search of Texas legislative database.

Alvarez-Bingham noted almost identical language already exists in Texas Election Code. It can be found now within a section laying out a judges ability to compel voters to reveal their vote during an election contest.

In current law, it is posed as an alternative when the number of illegal votes cannot be calculated. Without that distinction, critics argued, and especially in combination with the lower standard, the provision could have been interpreted to mean judges could reverse an election without making any attempt to determine whether fraudulent votes were numerous enough to change the outcome.

The public never had a chance to vet the new provisions put together, said Sen. Beverly Powell, D-Burleson, another one of the Democrats on the conference committee.

Instead, like much of SB7, the provision was crafted behind closed doors and rushed through in the 11th hour without input from minority voter advocacy groups and others, Powell said in a statement. I am hopeful that minority voter advocacy groups, local election officials and the public will have a greater say and input during a special session on monumental voting legislation.

The special session, Clardy said, will give lawmakers a second chance to clean up the bill and include only the language they believe in strongly.

The proof will be in the pudding on this, he said. When we do refile the bills for election integrity, when we come back for a special, whenever the governor sets that and puts us on the call, these matters are going to be corrected.

taylor.goldenstein@chron.com
BAGHDAD (AP)  Iraqs oil sector is rebounding after a catastrophic year triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, with key investment projects on the horizon, Iraq's oil minister said Friday. But he also warned that an enduring bureaucratic culture of fear threatens to stand in the way.

Iraq is currently trading oil at $68 per barrel, close to the approximately $76 needed for the state to operate without reliance on the central bank to meet government expenditures.

Oil Minister Ihsan Abdul-Jabbar Ismail took over the unenviable job of supervising Iraqs most vital industry at the height of an oil price crash that slashed oil revenues by more than half last year. Since then, he has had to balance domestic demands for more revenue to fund state coffers and pressure from OPEC to keep exports low to stabilize the global oil market.

With the sector rebounding, Ismail told The Associated Press, he can now focus on other priorities. In the interview, he offered a rare glimpse into the inner-workings of the countrys most significant ministry  Iraqs oil industry is responsible for 90% of state revenues.

He said cutthroat Iraqi politics and corruption fears often derailed critical investment projects during his tenure and those of his predecessors  a source of long-term frustration for international companies working in Iraq.

In the Ministry of Oil, the big mistake, the big challenge are the delays in decision-making or no decision-making at all," he said, attributing indecisiveness to fears of political reprisal from groups or powerful lawmakers whose interests are not served.

He described what he said was a warped work culture where allegations of corruption are used as tools by political players to get their way. He alleged that the mere possibility is often enough to keep high-ranking officials in ministry from signing off on important projects.

This is the culture: To stay away from any case, to stay away from inspectors, to say let us not do it, he added. I think this is the corruption that slows the economy.

He said that during his time as minister he has sought to fast-track projects, he said.

Top on his list is developing the countrys gas sector, a central condition for Iraq to be eligible for U.S. sanction waivers enabling energy imports from neighboring Iran. To that end, Iraq is looking to develop long-neglected gas fields and capture gas flared from oil sites.

Ismail said he is hopeful contracts will be signed within the coming months to develop key projects that could boost Iraq's gas capacity by 3 billion cubic standard feet by 2025. But that all depends on closing the deal with oil companies; lucrative contract negotiations in Iraq have a history of stalling once commercial terms are laid out.

Iraq currently imports 2 billion standard cubic feet to meet domestic needs.

The ministry is close to signing with China's Sinopec to develop Mansuriya gas field in Diyala province, said Ismail. The field could add 300 million standard cubic feet of gas to domestic production. He hopes to finalize the deal by mid-July.

The ministry is also in talks with France's Total to develop an ambitious multi-billion dollar mega investment project in southern Iraq, including the Ratawi gas hub, development of Ratawi oil field and a scheme to provide water to oil fields required to boost production.

Early talks are also ongoing to develop Akkas gas field in Anbar province, with the American Schlumberger and Saudi Arabia's oil giant Aramco, he said, expressing hopes for an agreement there too.

Though negotiations with international companies have picked up speed, Ismail said entrenched indecision within his ministry persists. Investors have blamed glacial bureaucracy and indecision within ministry ranks for thwarting projects.

Among his deepest regrets is the collapse in talks  after five years of negotiations  between the ministry and Exxon-Mobil over a multi-billion dollar investment project that would have been key to increasing Iraq's production and exports.

For me it was a big mistake from our side, said Ismail, who was the former director-general of the state-owned Basra Oil Company.

Ismail himself came under scrutiny when lawmakers accused him of corruption. The Cabinet dismissed him as head of the Basra company in October 2019 during a purge against alleged corruption. He was reinstated a few months later.

Iraqi media are often used as a pressure tool, Ismail said

Someone sends me a contract, and it would be illegal to say yes, so I say no, and he starts to say bad things in the media, Ismail said.

Also, he said 80% of his time is spent fielding requests from political parties and individuals asking for employment, contracts or job transfers  requests he says he routinely rejects.

They say: Move this person from this position to this, we need this position, we need this department, we need this company," he said.
Arnold Gold / Hearst Connecticut Media

The states two largest electric distribution companies, Eversource Energy and The United Illuminating Co., have both filed legal appeals seeking to overturn a decision by the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority regarding their handling of power restoration in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Isaias last August.

Lawyers for Eversource filed their appeal in New Britain Superior Court on Thursday, while UIs filing came on Friday. The appeals filings came a little more than a month after PURA issued a landmark ruling that included millions of dollars in civil penalties issued against the utilities.
In preparation for her detective role in HBOs The Mare of Easttown, set in suburban Philadelphia, Kate Winslet visited the citys Kensington neighborhood to understand the opioid epidemic. As the Philadelphia Inquirer recently reported, a notorious heroin economy continues to thrive there. Some street corners gross more than $20 million annually.

In a New York Times interview, Winslet recounted heartbreaking scenes in Kensington, once described as the Walmart of Heroin. In one instance, she saw a man who had been amputated from the knee down on his right leg, and he was injecting into the toes of the other foot.

Though rarely so visible as in Kensington, opioid addiction is a brutal reality in other Pennsylvania communities, whether in suburban Philadelphia or York County, which recorded its most-ever overdose deaths last March. Overdoses reflect Americas ongoing deaths of despair, a term coined by Princetons Anne Case and Angus Deaton to describe Americas higher mortality rates caused by suicide, alcoholism, and opioid addiction. The opioid crisis afflicts not only middle-aged, white, working-class Americans but also minorities throughout urban America.

Data indicate that COVID-19 intensified the nations opioid epidemic, which claimed nearly 500,000 lives between 1999 and 2019. The Centers for Disease Control found that more than 81,000 overdose deaths occurred nationally between 2019 and 2020  the highest in any 12-month period ever measured. Overdose deaths have continued to rise.

The crisis is especially acute in Pennsylvania. Before the pandemic, the states Department of Health reported a 19% decline in overdose deaths from 2017 to 2019, which nevertheless represents 4,458 deaths in 2019  a staggering 35 people per 100,000. But the pandemic-driven recession caused overdose numbers to skyrocket. As the states Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs found, 2020 was likely the worst year on record for overdose deaths in the Keystone State.

Pennsylvanias rural areas illustrate this disturbing trend. According to the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, rural overdose rates consistently outpaced urban areas, peaking at five per 100,000 in July 2020. Meanwhile, Pennsylvanias Association of County Drug and Alcohol Administrators reported that in Blair County alone, the coroner projected a 78% spike in overdose deaths in 2020 compared to 2019. This increase partly stems from the reality that access to addiction treatment is harder to find in rural communities.

But the Keystone States cities arent spared, either. In urban Pennsylvania, black residents are consistently hit harder than whites, indicative of wider COVID-era trends disproportionately affecting black communities. Philadelphia saw an 11% increase in overdoses in the first three quarters of 2020, for example  but overdoses among black residents rose 40%. Meanwhile, overdoses in Allegheny County, home to Pittsburgh, rose 22%. As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently reported, county data indicate that fatal overdoses among black residents have begun to consistently outpace those of whites.

More from this section CA Unemployment Fraud, Backlog Still Dog Newsom

Obtaining treatment for opioid addiction, though, is difficult in both rural and urban Pennsylvania. And the COVID-19 crisis worsened the problem. Spotlight PA reported, for example, how many addiction clinics initially closed or lost funding.

But since last spring, a transformed regulatory environment has changed everything for clinics that managed to stay open. This was the case for Prevention Point Philadelphia, a nonprofit harm-reduction organization in Kensington. Theres been a pretty marked shift for us in our small clinic and in the broader community, said Kaelee Shepherd, a PPP coordinator.

For instance, the pandemic loosened restrictions on medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder, resulting in easier access to treatment. Some insurance companies no longer require urine tests for access to suboxone, and federal drug agencies now permit telehealth appointments  instead of mandatory in-person meetings  for suboxone prescriptions. Such changes benefit those who couldnt access drug treatment locations due to inhibiting factors like transportation and child-care costs.

As Shepherd told me, fewer restrictions also mirror the declining stigma of addiction. Weve started to treat opioid use disorder more in line with how we treat diseases like diabetes or high blood pressure, she noted.

Despite encouraging developments, PPP still confronts challenges. Neighborhood residents, for example, are often unsure if the clinic is open. PPP also struggles with a reduction in resources for the population it serves and the closure of welfare offices, whose dependents turned to PPP for updates on their benefits. The pandemic didnt create new problems so much as it exacerbated existing ones.

Overall, the opioid epidemic has transcended Pennsylvanias urban-rural divide. Though media coverage and public attention have stalled, Pennsylvanians cant afford to turn away from this crisis. Winslet told the New York Timess Maureen Dowd that she was staggered that there arent more  support networks in place to help with people. As the pandemic slowly fades, the deaths of despair will keep occurring.
Today

Mostly clear. Low 64F. Winds NNW at 5 to 10 mph.

Tonight

Mostly clear. Low 64F. Winds NNW at 5 to 10 mph.

Tomorrow

Sun and a few passing clouds. High 87F. Winds N at 5 to 10 mph.
Fairfield, MT (59436)

Today

Partly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low around 55F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low around 55F. Winds WSW at 10 to 15 mph.
Long before COVID-19 tuition lawsuits, a partisan divide over the value of education had already emerged. While progressives often claim that higher education is underfunded, many conservatives are increasingly skeptical of its value to students and taxpayers.

Properly formulated, performance-based funding (PBF) for higher education can reconcile these views.

Since 1979, PBF has allowed states to fund public institutions of higher education based on a schools value-add to students, taxpayers, and legislative goals. Last year, thirty states used some variation of the formula.

Despite its prevalence, nearly all current PBF models have major flaws. In some, the measured outcomes are easily gamed by schools  at times to the detriment of student success. Graduation rates, for example, can be increased by lessening the rigor of coursework, directing students toward easier degrees, or accepting fewer students from disadvantaged backgrounds. In other instances, funding formulas are simply too complex, or states allocate too little funding, to change behavior.

Earnings-based funding, on the other hand, is PBF with a focus on one primary outcome: the earnings of students who previously attended the school. The more successful students are in their careers after school, the more funding a school receives. Schools with the best methods are then able to use their extra funding to help more students succeed.

Texas State Technical College (TSTC) is the only higher education system in the U.S. that has adopted a fully earnings-based funding model. Gone are the days when it was just presumed that a dollar spent in education was a good dollar, said TSTC system chancellor Mike Reeser. Under our new system, we dont get a dollar until weve made that student successful in the workplace, so the best interests of the institution are actually linked to the best interests of the student. Since 2014, placing more students in higher-paying jobs has generated a 117% increase in combined graduate earnings.

Funding models partially based on earnings have also become more prevalent in recent years. Since 2004, for example, Kansass community and technical colleges have maintained performance agreements with the state. Current metrics include retention and graduation rates, students employed or transferring, and wages of students. Kansass performance-based funding amounts to less than 5 percent of state funding for community and technical colleges, yet the earnings of Kansas graduates have steadily increased over the past decade. Since 2010, earnings from short-term certificates increased $3,000 per student, earnings from long-term certificates increased $6,000, and earnings from associates degrees increased $3,000.

Since 2014, about 25 percent of overall state funding for Floridas public university system has been performance-based. The funding formula contains twelve metrics, including median wage of graduates, graduation rates, retention rates, and degrees in subjects important to the state. Since 2014, the median wages of Florida students one year after graduation have grown immensely: in 2015, the median annual wages of graduates from Florida universities ranged from $30,000 to $35,100; in 2021, they range from $33,500 to $44,800.

In 2018, California community colleges adopted a Student Centered Funding Formula containing eight metrics that control 10 percent of state funding. These metrics include degrees and certificates awarded, successful transfers to four-year schools, and attaining a regional living wage.

Even in 2021, earnings-based funding continued to pick up speed in state legislatures. Notably, Florida HB 1507, sponsored by Representative Yarborough and Representative Melo, bases two-thirds of performance-based funding for Florida College System industry certificates on student wages. As part of a comprehensive workforce-training package, the bill passed the House and Senate unanimously.

Any model can be modified to fit state needs or accommodate specific schools unique missions. As a starting point, the Cicero Institute suggests measuring both short-term and long-term earnings, and including low-income student enrollment and low-income student earnings to determine a schools share of state funding. Including low-income student enrollment and earnings encourages schools to do their best to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds find financial freedom after graduation.

Public higher education should provide a measurable and substantial return on investment for students and taxpayers. Earnings-based funding is quickly catching on as a solution to achieve this end. As more states adopt it, new data will only bolster its case.
The European Union is set to end the use of all cage units in egg production following an overwhelming vote by MEPs.

Battery cages were banned by the bloc in 2012, which forced egg producers using cages to switch to the enriched colony cage system.

Now European politicians are looking to phase out cages completely by 2027.

A vote was taken in the European Parliament after 1.4 million people called for an 'end to the cage age'.

The resolution was passed with the support of 558 votes. Only 37 MEPs voted against with 85 abstaining.

The 'end the cage age' initiative was co-ordinated by Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) and other animal welfare organisations across the EU.

Campaigners called for a law to ban the use of cages for laying hens, rabbits, pullets, broiler breeders; farrowing crates for sows; sow stalls, where not already prohibited; and individual calf pens, where not already prohibited.

MEPs raised the importance of listening and acting on citizens concerns on animal welfare, although many insisted that any potential phase-out of cages required proper financial support, incentives and an adequate transition period.

They also called for strict and efficient measures to avoid imports of cheaper products with lower animal welfare standards from non-EU countries.

A draft resolution was subsequently produced by the Agriculture Committee calling on the EU Commission to come up with legislative proposals to ban caged farming in the EU, possibly by 2027.

The gradual end of the use of cages should be based on a species-by-species approach that would take into account the characteristics of different animals, said the resolution.

Before any legislative changes were made, said the Agriculture Committee, proper support was needed, including adequate advisory and training services, incentives and financial programmes for farmers and livestock breeders.

And all animal products imported into the EU should be produced in full compliance with EU legislation, including the use of cage-free farming systems, it said.

This proposal has now been debated and passed by the European Parliament.

During the debate, Stella Kyriakides, Commissioner for Health and Food Safety said: We acknowledge the demand for sustainable food systems, the ethical dimensions around farming animals and the need to find solutions that involve farmers but also society at large.

Our promise under the Farm to Fork Strategy to undertake a thorough review of existing EU animal welfare legislation will be delivered into action.

All major UK retailers and some leading food firms have committed to moving away from using cage eggs by 2025 at the latest following pressure from campaigners.

In its most recent report on the progress towards cage-free egg production worldwide, CIWF highlighted how the UK was ahead of other countries in Europe and the rest of the world on the high welfare management of layers.

CIWF said in its 2020 EggTrack report that the UK, the fourth biggest egg producer in Europe, had the highest proportion of free range birds at 57.5% of the flock.

And it said the barn system developed in the UK was ahead of other countries.

"In the UK, the European food business team worked collaboratively with the British Egg Industry Council, Tesco and Noble Foods to define a higher welfare standard for UK barn eggs under the British Lion Quality Code of Practice.

"The standard is significantly better than that permitted by European legislation and improves on the German KAT system, which is used widely in Europe."

"This means the UK market offers a strong set of baselines standards for UK consumers.

Noble Foods, the UKs largest egg producer, has completed a multi-million-pound conversion of one of their enriched colony caged houses to this standard in a multi-story, multi-tier, aviary barn system.

In Europe, Compassion said that, although many companies had stood by their cage-free commitments, others were falling behind.

At least 19 companies had transitioned less than half of their supply, three of which had transitioned a quarter (or less) of their supply, said CIWF in its report.
Plant-based drink manufacturer Oatly is suing a small farm near Peterborough over alleged trademark infringement.

The Swedish brand is seeking an injunction to stop Cambridgeshire-based Glebe Farm Foods from selling its PureOaty brand.

Oatly, which went public in the US last month, claims Glebe Farm's brand is too similar to its own.

But Phillip Rayner, a farmer who owns Glebe Farm, told the BBC that the PureOaty name was 'a nod to the purity of the product'.

He told the broadcaster that he was 'surprised' by Oatly's claim that the 'name and packaging is too similar'.

The Rayner family founded the business in 2008.

A two day hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice in London ended on Wednesday (9 June) and a decision is expected in late July.

It comes as the Swedish plant-based giant is currently in the process of opening its own processing centre in Peterborough.

Oatley said oats will be sourced locally across the country, and the factory will supply the UK market.
The amount of antibiotics prescribed to treat pigs on UK farms in 2020 fell again, bringing the total reduction since 2015 to 62% despite disease outbreaks and the pandemic.

According to new figures, antibiotic use in 2020 reduced to 105 mg/PCU, compared with 110 mg/PCU in 2019 and 278 mg/PCU in 2015.

The data, from the industry's electronic medicine book (eMB), also shows that no colistin use was reported last year.

The data represents more than 95 percent of pigs slaughtered in the UK and continues the downward trend since recording started.

However, challenges with swine dysentery in 2019 and early 2020 temporarily halted progress.

There were also issues from disruption to pig flow during the pandemic that meant pigs spent more time on farm than usual.

The overall result is close to the target of 99 mg/PCU set by the UK pig industry.

The sector is working toward the target of a further 30 per cent reduction between 2020 and 2024.

AHDB Sector Strategy Director for Pork Angela Christison said that in the context of a difficult year, achieving further reductions was a good result.

The industry understands how important responsible antibiotic use is and that is why there are tough targets and we work together towards them.

"The sector has delivered sustained reductions since recording began via eMB in 2015," she said.

This continued improvement, despite disruption to pig flow during the pandemic, is a credit to collaboration between producers, vets and the industry as a whole.

Use of highest priority critically important antibiotics (HP-CIAs) remains at a very low level, although a slight increase from 0.04 mg/PCU to 0.05 mg/PCU has been recorded in 2020.

HP-CIAs, as categorised by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), are the most important for human medical health.

Reductions in their use has been a focus for all UK farm animal sectors since stewardship efforts have stepped up.

Dr Mandy Nevel, AHDBs Head of Animal Health, said: The EMA advice is that veterinary surgeons should prescribe a lower priority alternative to HP-CIAs unless there is no other option.

"This could explain why, despite the reducing trend overall, we are seeing an increase in use in some lower priority antibiotics such as neomycin.

Alternatively, these could be short term adjustments as the industry accommodates the phasing out of therapeutic zinc oxide, which treats post-weaning diarrhoea in piglets.

We must continue to monitor these trends and work to understand the reasons for changes in their use.

Dr Nevel added that collaboration within the industry has been one of the success factors behind the reductions achieved.

The challenges in the industry during the past year highlight not just the importance of this cross-industry approach in our sustained drive for good stewardship, but also the need for antibiotics to safeguard pig welfare.
Global Malaria Vaccines Industry: Opportunities in 2021





The global malaria vaccines market is expected to reach USD 134.9 million by 2026 growing at a CAGR of 33.2% during the forecast period according to a new study published by Polaris Market Research. The report Malaria Vaccines Market Size Report By Agent (Plasmodium Falciparum, Plasmodium Vivax, Anopheles Species); By Vaccines Type (Pre-Erythrocytic Vaccine, Erythrocytic Vaccine, Multi-antigen Vaccine); By Channel of Distribution (Hospitals, Clinics, Community Centers); By Regions: Segment Forecast, 2019  2026 provides an extensive analysis of present market dynamics and predicted future trends.

According to the World Malaria Report published by WHO in November 2018, the cases for malaria were 219 million in 2017 in more than 90 countries which were up from 217 million cases in 2017. The total deaths due to malaria in 2017 were 435,000 which were registered in the malaria affected regions.

The market for malaria vaccines globally has been divided based on vaccine type, agent, channel of distribution and region. Considering the vaccine type, the market is bifurcated into pre-erythrocytic vaccine, erythrocytic vaccine, and multi-antigen vaccine. The channel of distribution used for malaria vaccines include the hospitals, clinics and community centers. Considering the agent used in the malaria vaccines, the global market is divided into plasmodium falciparum, anopheles species, and plasmodium vivax. Geographically, as per the WHO report, nearly half of the worlds population was at risk in 2017, wherein the African region was the most affected one. Along with Africa, Asia Pacific region is also expected to grow at a considerable rate among all the other regions with Middle-east and Latin America likely to be the other potential regions for malaria vaccines market. North America and Europe have lower cases of malaria related diseases with regions such as Africa monitoring some of the highest deaths of children related to malaria globally.

Download for sample copy @ https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/malaria-vaccines-market/request-for-sample

Some of the major factors pushing the market include the expanding occurrences of malaria in addition to the existence of numerous companies that are introducing low profit margin vaccines throughout the world. Increasing awareness associated to the aftereffects of the disease, continuous R&D in this section and increased funding from the government of the developing and developed countries together is pushing the market for malaria vaccines globally. Weak supply chain and distribution network among some of the developing countries which are affected by malaria are creating restraints for the market growth in these regions, however companies and government organizations are working together to overcome this challenge. It is anticipated that the continuous R&D for malaria vaccines and the continuous growth of this disease will help the market to grow in the coming years.

A few key strategies adopted by companies operating in the malaria vaccines market are new technology and product development, and geographical expansion among the developing regions to focus on proving vaccines to the areas highly affected by the disease at lower cost. The leading players operating in the market globally are GlaxoSmithKline, GenVec, Inc., Nobelpharma, and Sanaria. Some other promising vendors are Cadila Healthcare Ltd., CellFree Sciences Co. Ltd., VLP Therapeutics LLC, and Genome ReS Ltd. among others.

Else Place Inquiry for Discount @ https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/malaria-vaccines-market/request-for-discount-pricing

Polaris Market Research has segmented the global malaria vaccines market on the basis of source type, application and region:

Malaria Vaccines Agent Type Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2015  2026)

Plasmodium Falciparum

Plasmodium Vivax

Anopheles Species

Malaria Vaccines Vaccine Type Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2015  2026)

Pre-Erythrocytic Vaccine

Erythrocytic Vaccine

Multi-antigen Vaccine

Malaria Vaccines Distribution Channel Type Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2015  2026)

Hospitals

Clinics

Community Centers

Malaria Vaccines Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2015  2026)
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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 --

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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.
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The highly-awaited trailer of Haseen Dillruba is finally out and it does not disappoint. The Netflix India original features actors Taapsee Pannu, Vikrant Massey and Harshvardhan Rane in the lead roles and it appears to be a twisted tale of love, lust and murder in a small town. Taapsee plays the role of Rani who is either a femme fatale or a misunderstood woman while Vikrant could either be a killer or a victim. Harshvardhan, on the other hand, appears to be a guilty secret or could he be something more? There are questions that the trailer of Haseen Dillruba leaves behind in your mind after you finish watching it.

We also finally understand Taapsees recent obsession with author Dinesh Pandit. She is often seen quoting his lines which are, at once, poetic and sinister. The YouTube introduction of the trailer has this to say about the movie: "The gruesome death of a man rocks a small town and casts a shadow of suspicion on his wife. Is she an innocent victim as she claims? Or is she the mastermind behind a cold, calculated murder? What really happened? Nothing is as it seems in this unpredictable tale of love, seduction, and deception. This is #TheUltimateKaunspiracy."

Watch the trailer below:
LONDON, June 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Despite the economic fallout caused by the pandemic, the government of the Federation of St Kitts and Nevis has been able to fulfil its payroll commitments to all its employees and pensioners. Prime Minister Dr the Honourable Timothy Harris's Team Unity managed this feat and ensured that not a single employee was laid off due to COVID-19.

During a press conference last week, the Prime Minister noted that the government currently supports the payroll of 6,400 persons and has spent over $115 million in 2021 on monthly paid employees, Government Auxiliary Employees and pensioners. Additionally, $21 million went to the Skills Training Empowerment Programme (STEP), an initiative funded by the Citizenship by Investment (CBI) Programme that provides qualifying St Kitts and Nevis citizens employment opportunities.

He added that the Poverty Alleviation Programme (PAP), another CBI sponsored initiative that provides a monthly stipend to low-income households, distributed $13.4 million to families in the previous five months. Since the commencement of PAP in December 2018, a total amount of $70.3 million was processed in PAP aid.

"Thankfully, in St Kitts and Nevis, our citizens and residents displaced by COVID-19 have access to a range of some 20 social safety net supports including food vouchers; school meal programme; Poverty Alleviation Programme; support services for foster children; medical assistance programme distinct and apart from the free access to health care at all of our community centres for young people and for the elderly including access to dental services free of cost in St Christopher and Nevis; assistance with school uniforms, books and examination fees paid for by this Government even in the context of a most dangerous pandemic that has turned even the most powerful country upside down," Prime Minister Harris said.

Navigating the economic constraints of COVID-19 has been especially difficult for small countries like St Kitts and Nevis. However, the generous support of vetted foreign investors through the CBI programme helps national development and fiscal management in the nation.

In 1984, St Kitts and Nevis became the first in the world to launch its CBI programme, enabling successful applicants to gain its citizenship, meaning a chance to travel freely to nearly 160 destinations and a Plan B in times of crisis. Those who contribute to the programme's Sustainable Growth Fund can not only live, work and study in their new home but feel satisfaction in being associated with a nation that supports its population.

The fund option is the fastest and most straightforward route to St Kitts and Nevis citizenship. It is the only path that offers a limited time discount in which families of up to four can gain citizenship for $150,000 rather than the previous $195,000. This accounts for a $45,000 price cut.

Contact:

+447867942505

pr@csglobalpartners.com

www.csglobalpartners.com
ATLANTA, GA / ACCESSWIRE / June 10, 2021 / Findit, Inc. (OTC PINK:FDIT) owner of Findit.com, a full-service social networking platform that provides online marketing campaigns and tools for members to increase brand awareness through content creation and sharing, resulting in indexing in search engines is highlighting: Global WholeHealth Partners, Velox Insurance, and US Air Purifiers.

In today's release, Findit will be highlighting three featured members that utilize Findit marketing campaigns. Each of these members on Findit has a recurring monthly marketing campaign with Findit that helps improve their overall web presence through search and social media. Findit offers a full suite of marketing services to each of these clients, from content creation to social sharing to video production and more to heighten their overall online presence, aiding them in reaching the audience that is looking for them throughout the web.

Our first featured member is Global WholeHealth Partners. Global WholeHealth Partners is the leading provider of medical grade PPE supplies including thermometers, gloves and masks as well as rapid COVID-19 diagnostic testing kits. Thanks to their partnerships with key players in the industry, they are able to source these in demand products in large quantities. GWHP has made available for wholesale purchase their rapid COVID-19 diagnostic testing kits and PPE supplies at competitive price points. Findit provides Global Wholehealth Partners with content creation through Findit. The content created provides visitors with an insight into the full range of products Global Wholehealth Partners provides to businesses, sales reps and consumers. Get in touch with Global WholeHealth Partners today by calling 877-568-4947.

Follow Global WholeHealth Partners on Findit

findit.com/covid-19-diagnostic-tests

findit.com/ppe-mask-gloves-thermometers

Our second featured member on Findit is Velox Insurance. Since 2003, they have been serving communities around Atlanta, GA with affordable insurance. Velox Insurance, Inc was established with the goal of providing competitive rates and superior customer service to meet insurance needs of their customers in the Southeast. Their commitment to excellence in providing affordable coverage and value to their customers has propelled their growth to 9 states and 40 locations throughout Georgia and Florida. Velox strives to provide reliable, fast service and to obtain the best coverage at the lowest price for your vehicle, property and business insurance needs. They are able to accomplish these goals by partnering with dozens of major insurance companies, which allows us them to select the appropriate coverage at the best rate in just a short few steps. Customers can visit their online platform to get a quote and purchase immediate coverage online in a matter of minutes. This platform has allowed them to expand to Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Indiana, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. Check rates online and compare insurance quotes with Velox to find the best insurance for your home or vehicle.

Follow Velox Insurance on Findit



findit.com/best-car-insurance-quotes

Our third featured member is US Air Purifiers. US Air Purifiers LLC is a USA based small business that is family owned by a female (WOSB) and a disabled, retired veteran. Their 5 Star Customer Rating and A+ BBB review among other certificates originate from their basic business philosophy, the backbone of their company: 'Treat each and every customer the way we want to be treated'. They have a wide range of residential and commercial air purifiers to meet your air cleaning needs. From air purifiers that purify the air in a single room to the entire home, customers can shop by brand, size, filter type, use, and price. They also have a great selection of silent air purifiers for living spaces, bedrooms, nurseries and home offices. Customers who need assistance with selecting the right purifier for their needs can call US Air Purifiers at 888-231-1463.

Follow US Air Purifiers on Findit

findit.com/airpurifiers

Claim your Name on Findit today with a Findit URL. Findit URLs are $9.95 per month, and each name only exists once on Findit. There is no limit to the number of URLs that you can have, and URLs that are not renewed on a monthly basis do have the ability to be claimed by other people or businesses.

Some of the videos embedded in this release were produced by Findit as part of the marketing campaigns provided to these companies.

Findit also welcomes individuals who are looking to post the content that they want seen and shared without censorship. Findit does not have algorithms in place that controls which posts show up and which posts do not and does not censor content unless it is of pornographic or terroristic nature or inciting violence.

Want to be a featured member on Findit? Get in touch with us at 404-443-3224 or email clark@findit.com.

Download the Findit App today and let the world see what you have to say and share with them.

Google

Apple

About Findit, Inc.

Findit.com, which is a Social Media Content Management Platform that provides an interactive search engine for all content posted in Findit to appear in Findit search. The site is an open platform that provides access to Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines access to its content posted to Findit so it can be indexed in these search engines as well. Findit provides Members the ability to post, share, and manage their content. Once they have posted in Findit, we ensure the content gets indexed in Findit Search results. Findit provides an option for anyone to submit URLs that they want indexed in Findit search result, along with posting status updates through Findit Right Now. Status Updates posted in Findit can be crawled by outside search engines, which can result in additional organic indexing. All posts on Findit can be shared to other social and bookmarking sites by members and non-members. Findit provides Real Estate Agents the ability to create their own Findit Site where they can pull in their listing and others through their IDX account. Findit, Inc., is focused on the development of monetized Internet-based web products that can provide an increase in brand awareness of our members. Findit, Inc. trades under the stock symbol FDIT on the OTC Pinksheets.

Safe Harbor:

This press release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the 'Exchange Act'), including statements regarding potential sales, the success of the company's business, as well as statements that include the word believe or similar expressions. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements of Findit, Inc. to differ materially from those implied or expressed.

CONTACT:

Clark St. Amant

404-443-3224

SOURCE: Findit, Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/651287/Findit-Features-Members-Global-WholeHealth-Partners-Velox-Insurance-and-US-Air-Purifiers-That-Have-Improved-Their-Online-Presence-With-Findit-Online-Marketing-Services
Carnival PLC - Mardi Gras First Cruise Confirmed, More CCL Ships in Aug



Carnival Cruise Line Confirms First Sailing For Mardi Gras; Announces More Ships Returning In August

MIAMI, June 10, 2021 -- Carnival Cruise Line today laid out plans for its next wave of the summer restart of guest operations, including the first cruise for Mardi Gras and the return of additional ships in August. Highlights of the plan include:

Mardi Gras will start operating her seven-day cruises from Port Canaveral on Saturday, July 31 , with pre-inaugural sailings to the eastern and western Caribbean .

will start operating her seven-day cruises from Port Canaveral on , with pre-inaugural sailings to the eastern and western . Carnival Magic will return from her dry dock - and with her new hull design - and homeport from Port Canaveral where she will pick up four- and five-day cruises to The Bahamas and Caribbean that were previously scheduled for Carnival Elation, effective Aug. 7 through Oct. 7 . Guests already booked on Carnival Elation will be re-accommodated on Carnival Magic, and because she is a larger ship, additional stateroom inventory is being made available on Carnival.com and other sales channels. Carnival Magic will also operate three new six-day cruises and one new eight-day cruise from Port Canaveral between Oct. 11-31 .

and that were previously scheduled for Carnival Elation, effective . Guests already booked on Carnival Elation will be re-accommodated on Carnival Magic, and because she is a larger ship, additional stateroom inventory is being made available on Carnival.com and other sales channels. Carnival Magic will also operate three new six-day cruises and one new eight-day cruise from Port Canaveral between . Carnival Sunrise will enter service from Miami , effective Aug. 14 , sailing four- and five-day cruises to The Bahamas and Caribbean .

, effective , sailing four- and five-day cruises to The and . Carnival Panorama will enter service from Long Beach on Aug. 21 , sailing her seven-day Mexican Riviera cruises.

on , sailing her seven-day Mexican Riviera cruises. Carnival Vista and Breeze (from Galveston), Carnival Horizon (from Miami ) and Carnival Miracle (from Seattle to Alaska ) will continue with their cruises through August that are part of the line's restart plans in July.

) and Carnival Miracle (from to ) will continue with their cruises through August that are part of the line's restart plans in July. Given the above plans, Carnival has extended its pause for other ships through Aug. 31, 2021 , as follows: Carnival Pride ( Baltimore ), Carnival Sunshine (Charleston), Carnival Dream (Galveston), Carnival Ecstasy ( Jacksonville ), Carnival Liberty (Port Canaveral), Carnival Conquest ( Miami ), Carnival Sensation (Mobile) and Carnival Glory ( New Orleans ).

, as follows: Carnival Pride ( ), Carnival Sunshine (Charleston), Carnival Dream (Galveston), Carnival Ecstasy ( ), Carnival Liberty (Port Canaveral), Carnival Conquest ( ), Carnival Sensation (Mobile) and Carnival Glory ( ). Guests and travel agents are being advised of the August schedule plans and Carnival will be providing more details directly to them next week on guidelines and protocols. Carnival plans to operate these August sailings with vaccinated guests.

"We are very excited to finally welcome guests on Mardi Gras," said Christine Duffy, president of Carnival Cruise Line. "With our desire to preserve summer vacations for our Mardi Gras guests, we are going to find a later date to formally christen her so that we can operate these pre-inaugural sailings just as soon as we can."

Duffy also noted that Carnival intends to expand its initial restart from Florida, Texas and Washington to California, with the return of Carnival Panorama from Long Beach in late August. "We are excited to resume our West Coast operations and intend to sail Carnival Panorama with vaccinated guests starting August 21. We are working with state and local officials to finalize the necessary plans," Duffy said.

Carnival will continue to ramp up more ships and homeports in September and beyond, bringing hundreds of crew on board each week to be vaccinated, complete CDC-mandated quarantine and then begin work to prepare for guests and the return to guest operations.

"Our focus remains on the health and safety of our guests, crew and the communities we serve and visit," said Duffy. "We are taking a deliberate approach so we can execute with excellence and deliver a fun experience to our guests, who have been tremendously patient and supportive throughout this pause."

CONTACT: Vance Gulliksen - media@carnival.com
Investment from Microsoft's M12, American Airlines, Avolon, Honeywell and Rolls-Royce. Conditional pre-orders for up to $4bn and 1000 eVTOL aircraft, from Avolon and American Airlines and a pre-order option from Virgin Atlantic. NEW YORKA and BRISTOL, England, June 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Vertical Aerospace is a leading UK-headquartered engineering and aeronautical business founded in 2016 by energy tech entrepreneur Stephen Fitzpatrick to develop electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft.





Microsoft's M12, American Airlines, Avolon, Honeywell, and Rolls-Royce all investing via the PIPE. Rocket Internet and 40 North key financial investors.





American Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, Avolon, Honeywell, Rolls-Royce, GKN and Solvay all providing individual expertise through partnerships with Vertical.





Up to 1000 aircraft pre-orders with launch customers American Airlines, and Avolon, with pre-order option for Virgin Atlantic, valued at up to $4bn .





American Airlines and Vertical expect to work on passenger operations and infrastructure development in the USA . Virgin Atlantic and Vertical to explore JV to develop launch of Virgin Atlantic branded short haul eVTOL network in the UK.





Outstanding in-house engineering team assembled with backgrounds from the senior levels of Rolls-Royce, Airbus, UK Ministry of Defence, Jaguar Land Rover and General Dynamics.





Targeted profitability and cash flow breakeven with annual sales of less than 100 aircraft.





Commercial operations planned for 2024 once certified under EASA; intends to be A certified to same safety standards as large commercial aircraft.





Supported by the Broadstone team, with proven investment track record, delivering 48% IRR and 3.5x MOM returns (based on the weighted averages from investments during the period March 1993 to date).





Attractive entry point for investors structured to provide alignment wit! h founder and sponsor. Stephen Fitzpatrick to remain largest shareholder.





Transaction is expected to close in second half of 2021 and values the combined company at a pro forma enterprise value of approximately $1.84 billion and pro forma equity value of $2.2 billion at the $10.00 per share PIPE price. Transaction expected to result in gross proceeds of $394 million . Vertical Aerospace Group Ltd. ("Vertical"), a leading UK-headquartered engineering and aeronautical business developing electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft, has entered into a definitive agreement for a business combination with Broadstone Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: BSN) ("Broadstone"), a special purpose acquisition company. The transaction will result in Vertical becoming a publicly-traded company, with a pro fo! rma equit y value of approximately $2.2 billion. Vertical will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange following the combination, which is expected to close in the second half of 2021, under the ticker EVTL. Vertical is also announcing today investments from American Airlines, Avolon, HoneywellA and Rolls-Royce, who have invested in the PIPE and are part of Vertical's strategic partner ecosystem; Microsoft's M12, 40 North and Rocket Internet SE have also invested in the business. Commercial partnerships and individual conditional pre-orders have also been agreed with American Airlines, Virgin Atlantic and Avolon for up to 1,000 aircraft in total, providing a direct route to market and opportunity to work together on key go-to-market workstreams. Vertical's mission is to make air travel personal, on-demand and carbon-free through designing, manufacturing, selling and servicing one of the world's best eVTOL aircraft, the VA-X4. It will travel at speeds over 200mph, be near silent when in flight, produce zero emissions and at low cost per passenger mile. The VA-X4 is expected to be certified to the same standards as large commercial airliners and therefore is expected to be 100x safer than a helicopter. Vertical intends to certify the VA-X4 to European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) standards a the most stringent global standards a in order to unlock a large UAM TAM of $1 trillion by 2040, with an upside TAM of $4.4 trillion by 2040[1]. Vertical was founded in 2016 by Stephen Fitzpatrick, an established entrepreneur best known as the founder of the Ovo Group, a leading energy company determined to create a world without carbon and which includes Ovo Energy, the UK's second-biggest energy retailer with revenues of $6.5 billion. Stephen remains the majority shareholder in this business. Over the past five years, Vertical has focused on building an experienced and senior team in the eVTOL industry who have over 1,200 combined years of experience, and have certified and supported over 30 different civil and military aircraft and propulsion systems. This includes: Michael Cervenka , former Head of Future Technologies at Rolls-Royce,

, former Head of Future Technologies at Rolls-Royce, Eric Samson , former VP Engineering and Chief Engineer at General Dynamics,

, former VP Engineering and Chief Engineer at General Dynamics, Tim Williams , former Chief Engineer of Rolls-Royce,

, former Chief Engineer of Rolls-Royce, Madhu Bhabuta, former Chief Technology Officer of the UK's Ministry of Defence,

Dr. Limhi Somerville , former Technical Manager at Jaguar Land Rover responsible for the cell facility, battery functional safety and advanced cell development,

, former Technical Manager at Jaguar Land Rover responsible for the cell facility, battery functional safety and advanced cell development, Paul Harper , former UK Chief Airworthiness Engineer at Airbus, and

, former UK Chief Airworthiness Engineer at Airbus, and Eduardo Dominguez , former CEO of Airbus' Urban Mobility. By combining this world-class team with a deliberately built ecosystem of top-tier partners, Vertical has assembled a broad mix of people and organisations ! with both commercial track records as well as experience testing, building and certifying some of the world's most advanced aircraft. Vertical's ecosystem approach draws on R&D commitments and the commercial and manufacturing expertise of partners such as Rolls-Royce, Honeywell, GKN and Solvay alongside an in-house focus on high value-add design and proprietary technology, creating an asset-light business model with highly attractive unit economics. These strategic partnerships accelerate Vertical's path to certification, de-risk execution, allow for a lean cost structure, and will enable production at scale. As a result of this, Vertical is able to achieve profitability and cash flow breakeven with annual sales of less than 100 aircraft (calculated as number of aircraft sales required to reach positive net income and cash flow in 2024). American has agreed to pre-order, subject to certain conditions precedent and future agreed upon milestones, up to 250 aircraft, and an option to order an additional 100 aircraft. Avolon has agreed to pre-order up to 310 aircraft with an option for a further 190, and Virgin Atlantic has an option to purchase between 50 and 150 aircraft. In addition, all parties will work together towards the prompt certification and deployment of aircraft in commercial operations. In the United States of America, American Airlines expects to work with Vertical on passenger operations and infrastructure development. In the United Kingdom, Virgin Atlantic and Vertical expect to work together to explore the joint venture launch of a Virgin Atlantic branded short haul eVTOL network, including operations and infrastructure development. Stephen Fitzpatrick, Vertical CEO and Founder, said: "This is the most exciting time in aviation for almost a century; electrification will transform flying in the 21st century in the same way the jet engine did 70 years ago. Today's announcement brings together some of the largest and most respected technology and aeronautical businesses in the world and together we can achieve our aim of making the VA-X4 the first zero carbon aircraft that most people will fly on. The United Kingdom is already a global leader in aerospace innovation and we believe Vertical Aerospace will be the British engineering champion to drive the aviation industry forward." Derek Kerr, Chief Financial Officer, of American Airlines said: "Emerging technologies are critical in the race to reduce carbon emissions and we are excited to partner with Vertical to develop the next generation of electric aircraft. For years, American has led the industry in investing in newer, more fuel-efficient aircraft. Today's partnership is another example of that commitment, and an investment in the future of air mobility. We are excited about the prospect of what this could mean for our customers, and our company." DAmhnal Slattery, CEO of Avolon, the world's second largest aircraft lessor, said: "Avolon is proud to be a launch customer for the VA-X4 aircraft, demonstrating our commitment to a net zero carbon economy and to driving innovation in the global aviation sector. Our order with Vertical will also accelerate the inevitable commercial roll-out of zero emissions aircraft. Before the end of this decade, we expect zero emission urban air mobility, enabled by eVTOLs, to play an increasingly important role in the global commercial aviation market." Shai Weiss, CEO of Virgin Atlantic, said: "With innovation and sustainability leadership firmly in our DNA, we are excited to be partnering with Vertical Aerospace to pioneer sustainable and zero emissions air travel in the UK. We pride ourselves on building enduring strategic partnerships and are thrilled to be working alongside Vertical in its mission to bring eVTOL travel to the UK. Our partnership includes an option for Virgin Atlantic to acquire up to 150 eVTOL VA-X4 aircraft and exploration of a Joint Venture to bring short haul, electric vehicle connectivity to cities and our UK airport hubs, starting with London Heathrow as well as Manchester and London Gatwick. Combining the design, engineering and manufacturing expertise of Vertical with the award-winning customer experience and operational excellence of Virgin Atlantic." Broadstone was founded by British entrepreneurs Hugh Osmond, Marc Jonas and Edward Hawkes, who have led and managed investments in excess of A10 billion over a 20-year period and delivered an IRR of 48% and equity multiple of 3.5x (based on the weighted averages from investments during the period March 1993 to date). The Broadstone team has a proven track record of identifying markets ready for innovation and disruption and backing exceptional management teams to create industry leading businesses, across sectors and generating outstanding returns for investors. The strength of the Vertical leadership team, coupled with a highly commercial approach and a clear route to market, are among the key attractions for the Broadstone investment team. Hugh Osmond, Chairman of Broadstone, said: "Transportation is one of the next big sectors of the global economy to be disrupted at scale. Vertical has a clear commercial plan to challenge short-haul air travel, and to create new markets where neither cars nor public transport can cope with demand. Stephen has built an outstanding management and engineering team with extensive experience in navigating the aviation regulatory approval processes. The team also has an outstanding track record of delivering projects commercially. In our assessment, Vertical has a considerable lead over competitors in this field a and has a clear business model to achieve commercialisation and significant growth." Mike Madsen, President and CEO of Honeywell Aerospace, said: "Vertical and Honeywell are great partners because our relationship combines the strengths of both companies. Honeywell brings state-of-the-art flight controls and avionics systems, and the Vertical team has a tremendous history of innovation and design excellence. We're doing more than just developing an aircraft, we're actually creating an industry together." Warren East, CEO of Rolls-Royce, said:A "We are delighted to build on our relationship with Vertical Aerospace as they take this strategic step to deliver eVTOL aircraft to a global market. Rolls-Royce is the leading supplier of all-electric and hybrid-electric power and propulsion systems for aviation and this exciting opportunity demonstrates our joint ambitions to lead the way in the new Urban Air Mobility market." Clare Barclay, CEO of Microsoft UK, said, "M12's investment in Vertical Aerospace demonstrates the market opportunity in the growing demand for urban transportation, but historically, expanding mobility hasn't been environmentally sustainable. Automation and Industry 4.0 is a clear way forward to realize more operational efficiencies and mitigate transportation congestion and pollution." Key Transaction Terms The business combination values the combined company at a pro forma enterprise value of approximately $1.8 billion and pro forma equity value of $2.2 billion at the $10.00 per share PIPE price. The boards of directors of both Broadstone and Vertical have approved the proposed transaction, which is expected to be completed in the second half of 2021, subject to, among other things, the approval by Broadstone's shareholders and satisfaction or waiver of the other conditions stated in the definitive documentation. The transaction is expected to result in gross proceeds of $394 million. The ordinary share PIPE includes commitments from institutional investors, 40 North and A Microsoft's M12 as well as the following strategic investors: American Airlines, Avolon, Rolls-Royce and Honeywell. 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 Broadstone with the Securities and Exchange Commission and available at www.sec.gov. Advisors Winston & Strawn LLP is serving as legal advisor and Citi is serving as advisor to Broadstone. Latham & Watkins LLP is serving as legal advisor and Barclays is serving as lead financial advisor and lead capital markets advisor to Vertical. Barclays and Citi acted as joint placement agents on the PIPE. Investor Call Vertical and Broadstone will host a joint investor conference call to discuss the proposed transaction today, 10 June 2021 at 18:00 ET. To listen to the prepared remarks via telephone dial 1-877-407-9039 (U.S.) or 1-201-689-8470 (International) and an operator will assist you. A telephone replay will be available at 1-844-512-2921 (U.S.) or 1-412-317-6671 (International), passcode: 13720391 through 24th, June, 2021, 11:59 PM ET. About Vertical Aerospace Vertical Aerospace's mission is to make air travel personal, on demand and carbon free. The company has an unrivalled top-tier partner ecosystem and is backed by American Airlines, Avolon, Rolls-Royce and Honeywell among others. Vertical's partnerships de-risk execution and its pathway to certification, allow for a lean cost structure, and enable production at scale. With projected speeds over 200mph, near silent when in flight, zero emissions and low cost per passenger mile, the VA-X4 is expected to open up urban air mobility to a whole new range of passengers and transform how we travel. About Broadstone Acquisition Corp. Broadstone Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: BSN) was set up by serial entrepreneurs, operators and investors, Hugh Osmond, Edward Hawkes and Marc Jonas. It was established to combine with a UK/European business with a strong management team, significant growth prospects, and the opportunity to become a market leader in its sector. Broadstone's executive team has an extensive track record in value creation. The combination of a strong internal team, a network of external resources and the experience of the management team enables us to support rapid, substantial, and lasting growth. Contacts For Vertical Investors: investors@vertical-aerospace.com Media Vertical UK - Nepean Gavin Davis , +44 7910 104660

, +44 7910 104660 Samuel Emden , +44 7816 459904

, +44 7816 459904 nepeanverticalteam@nepean.co.ukA Vertical US - ICR Phil Denning / Dan McDermott

/ VerticalMedia@icrinc.comA For Broadstone - Edelman Iain Dey , +44 7976 295906

, +44 7976 295906 Raeesa Chowdhury-King , +44 7885 802774

, +44 7885 802774 Broadstone@Edelman.com Media Package Media package download link Additional Information and Where to Find It In connection with the proposed business combination, Broadstone intends to file a Registration Statement on Form F-4, including a preliminary proxy statement/prospectus and a definitive proxy statement/prospectus with the SEC. Broadstone's shareholders and other interested persons are advised to read, when available, the preliminary proxy statement/prospectus and the amendments thereto and the definitive proxy statement/prospectus and documents incorporated by reference therein filed in connection with the proposed business combination, as these materials will contain important information about Vertical, Broadstone, and the proposed business combination. When available, the definitive proxy statement/prospectus and other relevant materials for the proposed business combination will be mailed to shareholders of Broadstone as of a record date to be established for voting on the proposed business combination. Shareholders will also be able to obtain copies of the prelimina! ry proxy statement/prospectus, the definitive proxy statement/prospectus, and other documents filed with the SEC that will be incorporated by reference therein, without charge, once available, at the SEC's website at www.sec.gov, or by directing a request to: info@broadstoneacquisitioncorp.com.A Participants in Solicitation Broadstone and its directors and executive officers may be deemed participants in the solicitation of proxies from Broadstone's shareholders with respect to the business combination. A list of the names of those directors and executive officers and a description of their interests in Broadstone will be included in the proxy statement/prospectus for the proposed business combination and be available at www.sec.gov. Additional information regarding the interests of such participants will be contained in the proxy statement/prospectus for the proposed business combination when available. Vertical and its directors and executive officers may also be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies from the shareholders of Broadstone in connection with the proposed business combination. A list of the names of such directors and executive officers and information regarding their interests in the proposed business combination will be included in the proxy statement/prospectus for the proposed business combination, which will be made available as noted in the above paragraph. Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This press release includes "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Broadstone's and Vertical's actual results may differ from their expectations, estimates, and projections and, consequently, you should not rely on these forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. Words such as "expect," "estimate," "project," "budget," "forecast," "anticipate," "intend," "plan," "may," "will," "could," "should," "believes," "predicts," "potential," "continue," and similar expressions (or the negative versions of such words or expressions) are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include, without limitation, Broadstone's and Vertical's expectations with respect to future performance and anticipated financial impacts of the proposed business combination, the satisfaction of the closing conditions to the proposed bu! siness co mbination, and the timing of the completion of the proposed business combination. These forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements. Most of these factors are outside Broadstone's and Vertical's control and are difficult to predict. Factors that may cause such differences include, but are not limited to: (1) the occurrence of any event, change, or other circumstances that could give rise to the termination of the definitive merger agreement (the "Agreement"); (2) the outcome of any legal proceedings that may be instituted against Broadstone and Vertical following the announcement of the Agreement and the transactions contemplated therein; (3) the inability to complete the proposed business combination, including due to failure to obtain approval of the shareholders of Broadstone and Vertical, certain regulatory approvals, or satisfy othe! r conditi ons to closing in the Agreement; (4) the occurrence of any event, change, or other circumstance that could give rise to the termination of the Agreement or could otherwise cause the transaction to fail to close; (5) the ability to implement business plans, forecasts and other expectations after the completion of the business combination, and identify and realize additional opportunities; (6) the potential inability of Vertical to produce or launch aircraft in the volumes and on timelines projected, (7) the potential inability of Vertical to obtain the necessary certifications on the timelines projected; (8) the potential that certain of Vertical's strategic partnerships may not materialize into long-term partnership arrangements, (9) the impact of COVID-19 on Vertical's business and/or the ability of the parties to complete the proposed business combination; (10) the inability to list Vertical'sA ordinary shares on the NYSE following the proposed business combination; (11)! the risk that the proposed business combination disrupts current plans and operations as a result of the announcement and consummation of the proposed business combination; (12) the ability to recognize the anticipated benefits of the proposed business combination, which may be affected by, among other things, competition, the ability of Vertical to grow and manage growth profitably, and retain its key employees; (13) costs related to the proposed business combination; (14) changes in applicable laws or regulations; (15) the possibility that Vertical or Broadstone may be adversely affected by other economic, business, and/or competitive factors; and (16) other risks and uncertainties indicated from time to time in the final prospectus of Broadstone for its initial public offering and the proxy statement/prospectus relating to the proposed business combination, including those under "Risk Factors" therein, and in Broadstone's other filings with the SEC. Broadstone cautions that the ! foregoing list of factors is not exclusive. Broadstone cautions readers not to place undue reliance upon any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. Broadstone 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 its expectations or any change in events, conditions, or circumstances on which any such statement is based. No Offer or Solicitation This press release shall not constitute a solicitation of a proxy, consent, or authorization with respect to any securities or in respect of the proposed business combination. This press release shall also not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any states or jurisdictions in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction. No offering of securities shall be made except by means of a prospectus meeting the requirements of Section 10 of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or an exemption therefrom. [1]A Morgan Stanley, eVTOL/Urban Air Mobility TAM Update, May 2021
BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - At 2.00 am ET Friday, the Office for National Statistics releases UK GDP data. The economy is forecast to grow 2.2 percent on month in April, following a 2.1 percent rise in March. Ahead of the data, the pound traded mixed against its major counterparts. While the currency held steady against the franc, it rose against the rest of major rivals. The pound was worth 155.17 against the yen, 1.4181 against the greenback, 0.8596 against the euro and 1.2676 against the franc as of 1:55 am ET. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.


LONDON (dpa-AFX) - The UK economy grew at the fastest pace since July 2020 as government restrictions affecting economic activity continued to ease in April, data from the Office for Statistics showed on Friday.



Gross domestic product rose 2.3 percent month-on-month in April, faster than the 2.1 percent expansion seen in March. The rate was forecast to improve to 2.2 percent.



The service sector grew 3.4 percent in April, with consumer-facing services re-opening in line with the easing of coronavirus restrictions and more pupils returning to onsite lessons.



Meanwhile, output in the production sector dropped 1.3 percent in April, marking the first fall since January 2021 as three of the four sectors contracted. The manufacturing sector shrank slightly by 0.3 percent.



At the same time, mining and quarrying output contracted sharply by 15.0 percent in April because of planned temporary closures for maintenance of oil field production sites.



The construction sector output declined 2 percent in April following a strong March. This was the first fall in construction since December 2020, when it fell by 2.2 percent.



April's GDP remained 3.7 percent below the pre-pandemic levels seen in February 2020. Nonetheless, it is now 1.2 percent above its initial recovery peak in October 2020.



Overall, GDP expanded 1.5 percent in the three months to April, mainly because of services output, boosted by strong retail sales over the three months.



Overall, the economic recovery stepped up another gear in April and GDP is on track to return to its February level before the end of the year, Thomas Pugh, an economist at Capital Economics, said. If anything, the economy could regain its pre-crisis level even sooner.



Another report from the ONS showed that the visible trade gap narrowed to GBP 10.95 billion in April from GBP 11.7 billion in March and the surplus on services increased to GBP 10 billion from GBP 9.74 billion.



As a result, the total trade deficit declined to GBP 935 million from GBP 1.96 billion in March.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 11, 2021) - Spearmint Resources Inc. (CSE: SPMT) (OTC Pink: SPMTF) (FSE: A2AHL5) (FSE: SQH) (the "Company) is very pleased to announce that it has received the Technical Report and maiden resource estimate on its 100%-owned Clayton Valley Lithium Clay Project in Nevada, USA. The Technical Report includes a maiden resource estimate of 815,000 indicated tonnes and 191,000 inferred tonnes for a total of 1,006,000 tonnes of Lithium Carbonate Equivalent (LCE). The Technical Report was prepared in accordance with the requirements of National Instrument 43-101 by Stantec Consultant Ltd. ("Stantec"). Stantec's qualified persons (Allan Turner, PGeol, and Derek Loveday, PGeo) have direct experience in the Tonopah area, which includes visiting Albemarle Corp.'s Silver Peak mine and ioneer Ltd.'s Rhyolite Ridge lithium-boron project and completing a resource estimate and technical report for American Lithium Corp. on the TLC lithium project.

To view the 43-101 Technical Report click here.

Spearmint's Project is located 55 kilometres west of the town of Tonopah. The Project is accessed off paved State Highway 265, which terminates at the Silver Peak Mine, and then by well-maintained county gravel roads. The Project consists of 26 contiguous unpatented placer claims that span from McGee 30 to McGee 55 and cover 890 acres (~360 hectares).

Drilling on the east half of the Project by Spearmint has discovered a continuous, well mineralized section up to 300 feet thick. The interpreted subsurface distribution of the mineralized claystone includes mixed sediments (tuffaceous mudstone) and green clay. The mixed sediments gradationally overly the green clays and are positively weathering relative to the green clay below. The majority (greater than 80%) of the mineralized claystone comprise the green clay unit.

The geologic model from which lithium resources are reported is a 3D block model. The resource estimates are contained within an economic pit-shell at a constant 45 pit slope to a maximum vertical depth of 535 ft (163 m) below surface, using a base case cut-off grade of 400 ppm lithium to produce an eventual battery grade lithium carbonate product.

The following costs, recoveries and revenue, in metric units and US$, were used to derive a base case cut-off grade for an eventual lithium carbonate (Li 2 CO 3 ) product:

Mining costs US$2/tonne;

Processing costs US$15/tonne;

Processing recovery 80%; and

US$10,000/tonne revenue for Li 2 CO 3 product.

The lithium mineral resource estimates are presented in Table 25.1 in U.S. customary units and Table 25.2 in metric units. Lithium resources are presented for a range of cutoff grades to a maximum of 800 ppm lithium. The base case lithium resource estimates are highlighted in bold type in Table 25.1 and Table 25.2. All lithium resources on the Project are surface mineable at a stripping ratio of 0.11 waste yd3/ton (0.09 m3/tonne) at the base case cut-off grade of 400 ppm lithium. The effective date of the lithium resource estimate is June 10, 2021.

Table 25.1

Lithium Resource Estimates - U.S. Customary Units

Cutoff

Li

(ppm) Volume

(Myd3) Tons

(Mst) Li

(ppm) tons ('000 st) Li Li 2 CO 3 Indicated 400 151 216 781 169 898 600 123 176 843 148 789 800 67 96 951 91 486 Inferred 400 34 49 808 40 210 600 31 44 841 37 197 800 17 24 952 23 120

CIM definitions are followed for classification of Mineral Resource.

Mineral Resource surface pit extent has been estimated using a lithium carbonate price of US10,000 US$/tonne and mining cost of US$2.00 per tonne, a lithium recovery of 80%, fixed density of 1.70 g/cm 3 (1.43 tons/yd 3 ).

(1.43 tons/yd ). Conversions: 1 metric tonne = 1.102 short tons, metric m 3 = 1.308 yd 3 , Li 2 CO 3 :Li ratio = 5.32.

= 1.308 yd , Li CO :Li ratio = 5.32. Totals may not represent the sum of the parts due to rounding.

The Mineral Resource estimate has been prepared by Derek Loveday, P. Geo. of Stantec Consulting Services Ltd. in conformity with CIM "Estimation of Mineral Resource and Mineral Reserves Best Practices" guidelines and are reported in accordance with the Canadian Securities Administrators NI 43-101. Mineral resources are not mineral reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability. There is no certainty that any mineral resource will be converted into mineral reserve.

Table 25.2

Lithium Resource Estimates - Metric Units

Cutoff

Li (ppm) Volume

(Mm3) Tonnes

(Mt) Li

(ppm) Tonnes ('000 t) Li Li 2 CO 3 Indicated 400 115 196 781 153 815 600 94 159 843 134 715 800 51 87 951 83 441 Inferred 400 26 44 808 36 191 600 23 40 841 34 179 800 13 21 952 20 109

CIM definitions are followed for classification of Mineral Resource.

Mineral Resource surface pit extent has been estimated using a lithium carbonate price of US10,000 US$/tonne and mining cost of US$2.00 per tonne, a lithium recovery of 80%, fixed density of 1.70 g/cm 3 (1.43 tons/yd 3 ).

(1.43 tons/yd ). Conversions: 1 metric tonne = 1.102 short tons, metric m 3 = 1.308 yd 3 , Li 2 CO 3 :Li ratio = 5.32.

= 1.308 yd , Li CO :Li ratio = 5.32. Totals may not represent the sum of the parts due to rounding.

The Mineral Resource estimate has been prepared by Derek Loveday, P. Geo. of Stantec Consulting Services Ltd. in conformity with CIM "Estimation of Mineral Resource and Mineral Reserves Best Practices" guidelines and are reported in accordance with the Canadian Securities Administrators NI 43-101. Mineral resources are not mineral reserves and do not have demonstrated economic viability. There is no certainty that any mineral resource will be converted into mineral reserve.

James Nelson, President of Spearmint Resources stated, "We are very pleased to receive our maiden resources estimate that includes 815,000 indicated tonnes and 191,000 inferred tonnes for a total of 1,006,000 tonnes of Lithium Carbonate Equivalent (LCE) on our Clayton Valley Lithium Clay Project in Nevada. This is a monumental milestone for Spearmint as we now have our initial maiden resource for the Clayton Valley Lithium Clay Project. We have only drilled a minor number of holes to date to achieve this maiden resource, and we anticipate that additional targeted drilling could increase this initial calculation. We are already formulating a plan to achieve this goal. Spearmint's recently completed drill program, that discovered lithium in all 10 out of 10 holes, was drilled directly into the shared blanket-like claystone deposit (see map) where our neighbour Cypress Development Corp. already has total measured plus indicated resource estimates of 929.6 million tonnes averaging 1,062 ppm Li or 5.2 million tonnes LCE, announced on August 11, 2020. Spearmint can now add its name to the list of companies with an in-ground resource estimate in Clayton Valley, Nevada. Clayton Valley continues to receive significant global attention as the premier lithium address in the USA, hosting the only producing lithium deposit in North America. Spearmint's project is strategically located directly between Cypress Development Corp. and Pure Energy Ltd. Pure has a partnership with Schlumberger and are building a brine pilot plant with approximately $30 million USD being spent in developments. On the other side of Spearmint's property, Cypress has recently closed a private placement for $19.55 million to develop their claystone deposit. This is a huge benefit to Spearmint to have two major adjacent projects being funded for over $50 million, allowing Spearmint the benefit of a significant outlay of research and development spending on either side of our property, without Spearmint having to commit our own money. Lithium prices remain high as we continue to see insatiable demand in batteries for Electric Vehicles without any sign of slowing down, therefore causing a massive demand for ethically sourced, domestic lithium production. Spearmint is currently in the best financial shape in the Company's history with approximately $3.5 million in the treasury, including a recent investment by Sprott Asset Management LP as a new significant shareholder. Spearmint is now fully-funded for all upcoming planned work/drill programs on 3 other projects; our 'Goose' Gold Project in Newfoundland that is the closest property to the Keats discovery zone of New Found Gold Corp. whose share price recently crossed $13 per share; a drill program on our Perron-East Gold project in Quebec in direct proximity to AMEX Exploration Inc. and Starr Peak Mining Ltd.; and on our 'Escape Lake North' PGM Project in Ontario consisting of ~4,000 contiguous acres directly bordering Clean Air Metals Inc. We are moving forward at a rapid rate right now at a time when demand for lithium is approaching all-time highs and the price of gold is showing strength. Management remains confident about the short and long-term future of Spearmint."





Figure 1: Clayton Valley Ownership Map

To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/4360/87284_6384cec3d4e6f8b6_002full.jpg

Qualified Person

Mr. Allan Turner, PGeol., a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 has reviewed and approved the scientific and technical disclosure contained within this news release. Management cautions that past results or discoveries on properties in proximity to Spearmint may not necessarily be indicative to the presence of mineralization on the Company's properties.

About Spearmint Resources

Spearmint's current projects include the 'Clayton Valley Lithium Projects' in Nevada comprised of two claim blocks totaling 1,160 acres directly bordering Pure Energy Minerals & Cypress Development Corp. where Spearmint has recently discovered lithium in all 10 out of 10 drill holes, intersecting lithium values as high as 1,840 ppm Li; the 'Goose' Gold project directly bordering New Found Gold Corp. where Spearmint has sampled up to 973 ppb gold; the 'Escape Lake North' PGM Project in Ontario consisting of ~4,000 contiguous acres directly bordering Clean Air Metals Inc.; the Case Lake South Cesium Project in Ontario consisting of ~7,300 acres directly bordering Power Metals Corp.'s Case Lake Cesium Property; the River Valley East Platinum-Palladium Prospect in Ontario consisting of approximately 4,700 contiguous acres directly bordering the River Valley Platinum Group Metals (PGM) project; the Carscallen West Gold Project in Ontario consisting of a ~2500 contiguous acres in the direct vicinity to Melkior Resources Inc.; the Perron-East Gold Project consisting of 5 mineral claim blocks covering 11,608 acres located in the Abitibi greenstone belt of northwestern Quebec in the direct vicinity of Amex Exploration Inc.'s Perron property and past-producing Normetal mine; and the 'Chibougamau Vanadium Project' comprising of 15,493 contiguous acres directly bordering the vanadium deposit of BlackRock Metal's (private) Ilmenite vanadium project.

Spearmint's current projects also include a portfolio of prospects in the Golden Triangle of British Columbia; the 'Golden Triangle Gold Prospects' comprising of five separate claims blocks totaling 8,265 acres bordering GT Gold Corp, the 2,397 acre 'NEBA' Gold-Copper Project bordering Aben Resources Ltd, and the 'EL North' Nickel-Copper Project is a land package of 1,053 acres in the Eskay Creek Camp bordering Garibaldi Resources Corp, as well as the 4,980 acre 'Prickle' property bordering Brixton Metals Corp.

Spearmint's other projects in British Columbia include the 'Safari' Copper-Gold Project consisting of 9,007 contiguous acres located in the northern Quesnel Trough in North-Central BC, and the 'Hammernose' Gold Project consisting of 8,685 acres directly bordering Westhaven Gold Corp.'s Shovelnose Property in the Spences Bridge Gold Belt located in Southern British Columbia, Canada. Management cautions that past results or discoveries on properties in proximity to Spearmint may not necessarily be indicative to the presence of mineralization on the Company's properties.

If you would like to be added to Spearmint's news distribution list, please send your email address to info@spearmintresources.ca

Contact Information

Tel: 1604646-6903

www.spearmintresources.ca

"James Nelson"

President

Spearmint Resources Inc.

The CSE has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of the content of this release.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/87284
- Regulatory guidance completed on requirements for the licensing of hemp production and high-THC products - paving the way for IOM to become a world-leader in the export of medicinal cannabis

- No changes to domestic legality of prescription medicinal cannabis or non-medical adult use of cannabis on the Island

DOUGLAS, Isle of Man, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Isle of Man (IOM) Government has confirmed that licence applications are open for the production, distribution and export of medicinal cannabis products from the Island.

The regulator for the sector - the Gambling Supervision Commission ('GSC') - has now completed the guidance to support its regulatory framework, which will provide interested parties with details on the requirements for the licensing of hemp production and high-THC products.

This marks a significant step in the IOM's bid to be a world-leading exporter of medicinal cannabis, which will provide significant economic investment and development for the Island. The sector is expected to create 250 new jobs and 3 million in annual benefit in the coming years, and considerably more through the growth of associated infrastructure - including financial and operational - to support the sector. The Government anticipates the medicinal cannabis sector to also support and bring innovation to the Isle of Man's Cleantech and construction sectors, as well as develop businesses from within and off the island. The growing global cannabis market provides significant opportunity for economic development in the Isle of Man, with the global market forecasted to account for USD 82.19 billion by 2027 growing at a CAGR of 20.25% between 2020-2017, as increasing awareness about the advantages of cannabis is expected to create new opportunity for the market.

Minister for Enterprise, Laurence Skelly MHK, commented: 'The growing global medicinal cannabis market provides significant opportunity for economic development in the Isle of Man, and the new regulatory framework and guidance will offer stringent and flexible licensing of a broad range of cannabis products, which ranges from outdoor grown industrial hemp to indoor grown medicinal products.

'The Isle of Man Government has every confidence that the GSC will provide a world class regulatory structure required to regulate this new and complex industry. I am delighted to welcome licence applications and look forward to attracting quality businesses to the Island, transforming the cannabis export sector into a key contributor to the Isle of Man's post-COVID economic recovery.'

Mark Rutherford, Director of Policy and Legislation at the GSC, commented: 'The GSC already has a sophisticated framework for supervising gambling. We have worked carefully to apply the best of that framework to the risks in the new sector and we have educated ourselves in the technical areas that are new to us. What we now have will ensure that all stakeholders will be competent, crime free and capable of building a sector that is safe, trusted and efficient.

'As regulators, we aspire to put our regulatory umbrella above as many consumers as possible so that they can benefit from regulations that are well thought out and properly supervised. Years of prohibition mean that the markets in which our licensees will be participating are still in their infancy and still contain many uncertainties. To address this situation, it is our aim to ensure that consumers who purchase Isle of Man products will be able to understand exactly what their product contains through accurate labelling and independent testing.

'The GSC recognises there are many stakeholders in this newly created field and intends to extend its ethos of cooperation with other government authorities into its approach to cannabis regulation.'

The full guidance, along with licence applications and further information is now available to view here: https://www.isleofmangsc.com/

The Isle of Man's regulations are aligned with current UK cannabis regulation and practice and do not change the Isle of Man's domestic policy toward the use of cannabis by residents.

Notes to editors:

1 - According to the Data Bridge Market Research Report on the Global Medical Cannabis Market, summarised here.

About the Isle of Man
The Federated Quantum System developed and launched in the UK with support from the UK Space Agency

LONDON, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Arqit Limited ("Arqit"), a leader in quantum encryption technology, has today announced at the G7 Leaders Conference in Cornwall, that it has formed an international consortium of companies and government organisations to provide its quantum encryption technology to government customers in a federated system concept, called Federated Quantum System (FQS). The UK, USA, Japan, Canada, Italy, Belgium and Austria are now represented.

Arqit invented a system which uses satellites to distribute quantum keys to data centres. These keys are delivered using a new patented protocol called ARQ19, which solves the "Global versus Trustless" problem which previously prevented the adoption of Satellite Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). Arqit further invented a method, called QuantumCloud to translate the benefits of this quantum key distribution to any form of endpoint or cloud machine without the need for any special hardware. The first version of QuantumCloud launches for live service to commercial customers in 2021.

Government customers typically have more stringent requirements for control and are more inclined to buy "Private Instances" of cloud technology rather than managed services. Arqit has therefore designed a different version of its technology to meet this need and has recruited a strong community of partners from allied countries to collaborate in bringing the FQS system to use.

Collaboration partners include BT, Sumitomo Corporation, Northrop Grumman, Leonardo, QinetiQ Space N.V., qtlabs and Honeywell. Other Western Allied countries are expected to announce their inclusion during 2021.

FQS has been developed with support from the UK Space Agency (UKSA through its National Space Innovation Programme). The system consists of dedicated satellites, control systems and QuantumCloud software. It will be provided to the UK's 'Five Eyes' allied governments and other international partners, allowing sovereign protection of strategic national assets and interoperability for joint operations.

The first FQS satellites are to be integrated and tested at the National Satellite Test Facility in Harwell near Oxford and are expected to be launched on Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne from Newquay in Cornwall in 2023, after the launch of the first commercial Arqit satellites. The role of Virgin Orbit in providing responsive launch services for government customers from any location is additive to the plan to deploy many FQS satellites to support the needs of a growing list of allied country partners.

Arqit'sChairman and Chief Executive Officer, David Williams said, "FQS enables collaboration between NATO-allied governments around the world to form a federated version of QuantumCloud infrastructure. It also enables the Joint All Domain Command and Control vision to come to life. The FQS system is global in its nature, and there is now strong momentum in an international consortium joining forces to bring it into use".

General Stephen Wilson, Director ofArqit Inc. said, "For Allies working together Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) is essential. For JADC2 to work, we must have a real identity, credentialing, and access management solution. Arqit's technology makes trusted data security possible".

Minister for Science, Research and Innovation, Amanda Solloway MP added, "As a global science superpower, the UK continues to make advances in quantum science which is revolutionising cyber-security across the world. Backed by government funding, Arqit is paving the way in developing a new generation of quantum technologies that defend against sophisticated cyber-attacks on national governments, strengthening our resilience and helping us all the build back better from the pandemic".

UK Space AgencyCEO, Graham Turnock added, "Space technologies have become embedded in almost every aspect of our daily lives, and UK Space Agency funding is accelerating our development as a world leader in space technology. Arqit's advances in quantum technologies will strengthen the UK's resilience against harmful cyber-attacks, helping us protect our critical services. The announcement today shows the attraction of Arqit's model to our partners".

Interim Head ofSpaceport Cornwall, Melissa Thorpe also said, "The deployment of Responsive Launch capability from Cornwall is an excellent demonstration of the need for the investment made by Cornwall Spaceport, and we welcome the strong commercial opportunities represented by the FQS partnership".

Dan Hart, CEO ofVirgin Orbit commented, "Recent headlines from across the world show how vital it is to have encrypted communications supporting our economy and our security. The team at Arqit has already demonstrated that its encryption capabilities provide a critical service to a global customer base. By adding a space layer with its Federated Quantum System, Arqit is taking that service to an even higher level. We're delighted to support the team, and to add its quantum satellites to our manifest for flights out of Cornwall".

Kevin Brown, Managing DirectorofBT Security said, "BT is pleased to be part of the first phase of the FQS project, which aligns with our wider commitment to providing security solutions for the most critical organisations. As this project advances to a global stage, it provides a clear example of how the UK is playing a leading role in developing important new technologies".

Eiji Ishida, Executive Officer and General Manager, Lease, Ship and Aerospace Business Division of Sumitomo Corporation said, "The FQS concept is important because it allows us to manage a local instance of the infrastructure and deliver the control that our defence customers will require. Sumitomo Corporation is pleased to be in this consortium, which is very far ahead of other technologies".

Professor Rupert Ursin ofqtlabs said, "Austria has been a strong supporter of the Satellite QKD technology which we have helped Arqit to build, and I am pleased that qtlabs is able to continue to represent Austria in this consortium and will try to bring the benefits of FQS to the Austrian and other government users".

Marina Mississian, Senior Director Space Payloads forHoneywell Aerospace, Canada added, "Satellite enabled quantum encryption is strategically important for Honeywell and Canada. With the support of the Canadian government, we have been pleased to be associated with Arqit's commercial mission and now to join the FQS system, which will further the collective security goals of the 'Five Eyes' community of nations".

Frank Preud'homme, Sales and Business Development Director forQinetiQBelgium said, "We have been pleased to support the Arqit space mission since 2017 and see strong potential for the creation of sovereign capabilities for a close alliance of allied countries in sharing this technology".

Norman Bone, Chair and Managing Director, Leonardo UK concluded, "Leonardo and Telespazio recognise the increasingly digital nature of UK and allied national defence and security and the expectations of our customers that their systems are secure and resilient. The rapid, collaborative evaluation of new and cutting-edge technologies such as those developed by Arqit are a key element of Leonardo's strategy to establish and deliver next generation systems to our customers enabling effective and secure multi-domain operations including in the cyber and space domains".

The fundamental science behind Arqit's solutions to decades-old problems with Satellite QKD is important, but the company's ability to translate that into usable products that meet very precisely the needs of users is very advanced. This is a major advantage in moving quickly to implement the security technology amongst allied nations that will deliver valuable security improvements immediately and underpin the future of the quantum battlespace".

About Arqit Limited:

Arqit has invented a unique quantum encryption technology which makes the communications links of any networked device secure against current and future forms of hacking - even an attack from a quantum computer. Arqit's product, called QuantumCloud, creates unbreakable software encryption keys, using satellite to deliver quantum information to data centres. The keys which are easy and efficient to use remotely with no hardware or disruption to software required. The software has universal application to every edge device and cloud machine in the world. Headquartered in the United Kingdom with subsidiaries in the United States, Arqit was founded in 2017 by UK satellite industry veteran David Williams. Visit us at www.arqit.co.uk

Media enquiries:

Arqit: Julie Moon T: +44 7769 9960 E: Julie.moon@arqit.uk
OSLO, Norway, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- DigiPlex, the Nordic leader for scalable, secure and sustainable data centers, has opened a third data center at its Fetsund campus in Lillestrm municipality in Norway. The new data center has close to 900 sqm of white space and is built to support 3 MW IT load. DigiPlex now operates eight data centers across Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

DigiPlex is expanding rapidly, and this is its third data center opening to be announced in the last nine months. It follows the opening of the second Fetsund facility in Lillestrm in September 2020 and the first data center on DigiPlex' new campus site at Holtskogen in Indre stfold municipality, south east of Oslo in October 2020.

The project was successfully delivered in under 12 months despite the disruption caused by the second Covid-19 wave. This latest facility is engineered for very high levels of service availability and is already reserved for a global client. However, with power, fibre and core infrastructure already embedded in the campus environment, DigiPlex is now developing a new 6MW dual hall data center on the campus to allow for additional growth at this popular location.

"Speed to market is a critical factor for our hyperscale clients. Our campus approach to data center design and construction allows us to be very agile and respond to these requirements with fast and flexible builds. Completing a single data center in under a year is a huge achievement, announcing the openings of three in the last nine months, whilst battling the disruptions of global pandemic is extraordinary," says Wiljar Nesse, CEO of DigiPlex.

"As the digitalization of economies and society continues to accelerate, our ability to secure land and create facilities complete with connectivity and power, ready to hand over to clients in just a few months is a significant competitive advantage," Nesse continued.

The three centers at the Fetsund campus now comprise a total of close to 6,000 sqm usable server space and support a 16 MW IT load. The campus approach used by DigiPlex at Fetsund, combined with its modular design principles, expands upon the robust physical security infrastructure already in place, increasing the campus capability for surveillance, monitoring and manned guarding delivering state of the art, environmentally friendly data centers for customers in short timeframes.

In common with other DigiPlex facilities the new data center has inherent redundancy in the power and cooling systems and is engineered to be maintained without services downtime. The facility utilises DigiPlex's award-winning air-to-air cooling system, a high-efficiency system is uniquely suited to the Nordic climate, yielding efficiencies and cost savings up to 25% beyond the industry average.

CONTACT:

Elisabeth Lennhede

Head of Communications

+46703322705

elisabeth.lennhede@digiplex.com

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/digiplex/r/digiplex-opens-third-data-center-at-fetsund-campus---now-operates-eight-nordic-sites,c3364921

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SHANGHAI, CHINA / ACCESSWIRE / June 11, 2021 / The Expo 2020 Dubai and its Official Premier Partner Terminus Group participated in the Pujiang Innovation Forum, a prestigious event under the slogan of 'Innovation, for a better life", co-sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China and the Shanghai Municipal People's Government. Wang Zhigang, Minister of Science and Technology of China, Li Qiang, Secretary of Shanghai Municipal Committee, and Gong Zheng, Mayor of Shanghai, all attended the Forum and met with the guests from the country of honour: HE Ali Obaid Al Dhaheri, the UAE Ambassador in China, HE Rashed Alqemzi, Consul General of the UAE in Shanghai and their colleagues. The meeting was held to discuss the work progress on the Expo 2020 Dubai and the arrangement of the upcoming six-months-long grand event.

Li Qiang, Secretary of Shanghai Municipal Party Committee (middle), Wang Zhigang, Minister of Science and Technology (right), and Gong Zheng, Mayor of Shanghai attended the forum, meeting with HE Ali Obaid Al Dhaheri, UAE Ambassador in China (left), HE Rashed Alqemzi, UAE Consul General in Shanghai, and their colleagues

China and the UAE have long enjoyed a friendly and stable relationship, and the Pujiang Innovation Forum reinforced the bond between the two countries. Mohammed Al Hashmi, Chief Technology Officer of Expo 2020 Dubai, delivered a speech at the meeting. He said: 'At present, all countries should move forward hand in hand and commit to future development. The Pujiang Innovation Forum is an excellent opportunity for us to reiterate our commitment to Expo 2020 Dubai. We will work together with more than 190 countries including China to show everyone the innovative achievements from all across the world.'

HE Ali Obaid Al Dhaheri, the UAE Ambassador to China (left) and Gong Zheng, Mayor of Shanghai (right) exchanging their ideas

"Diplomatic and trade relations between China and the UAE continue to flourish. The events such as the Expo world-class forum contribute to strengthening those ties. The Expo 2020 Dubai is themed as 'Connecting Minds, Creating the Future', and will help to nurture a fruitful new chapter of our friendship."

Mohammed Al Hashmi, Chief Technology Officer of Expo 2020 Dubai, delivering a speech

China will be an essential part of the Expo 2020 Dubai. In addition, the huge success of the 2010 Expo in Shanghai has also served as an excellent example. Dubai will draw inspiration and experience from it and devote itself to creating the brilliance of its own at Expo this year. Terminus Group, the Chinese tech company, thriving in leading technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics, was approved as the Official Robotics Partner by the Expo 2020 Dubai. Terminus Group will provide more than 150 programmable robots based on AI CITY facilities to interact with visitors to enhance their experiences, and support the UAE's strategy of becoming a pioneer in AI technology.

Victor Ai, Founder and CEO of Terminus Group said: 'We are very pleased to see Terminus Group robots at the Pujiang Innovation Forum as a member of the UAE's exhibition area. They are showing the world the charm of cutting-edge technologies, the power of which will be fully displayed at the Expo Dubai 2020. As one of the Official Premier Partners of the Expo, we will provide multi-service robots that are designed for AI CITY, hoping to further enhance the interaction and experience for the visitors of the Expo by deploying more intelligent devices and robots. After the Expo Dubai 2020, we will continue to contribute to transforming the Expo site into the "Future Special Park" in District 2020, and redefine the concept of a future city with cutting-edge technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence.

From Shanghai to Dubai, we have witnessed the world's top event passing on among different prime civilizations. As an important hub for the Belt and Road Initiative, the UAE is becoming an increasingly important destination for Chinese tech companies while expanding overseas. We believe that the Expo Dubai 2020 will facilitate the knowledge and experience exchange between China and the UAE in the tech field, and an increasing number of Chinese companies will be able to ride the wave created by this opportunity and involve in further exchanges and discussions with their counterparts from all over the world, opening up a wider window for all parties in the future."

The China Pavilion will be located in the 'Opportunity' Zone, covering an area of more than 4,600 square meters. It will be one of the largest pavilions at the Expo 2020 Dubai, and it is expected to be one of the most visited ones. Its design is inspired by Chinese lanterns and pays tribute to Chinese inventions in the field of technology. Paper, compass, and gunpowder among other great fruits of innovative thinking which made a profound impact on the world's history. With carefully chosen decorative elements, China aims to combine its tradition with advanced modern technology, which symbolizes hope and a bright future. The China Pavilion will also highlight Chinese achievements in IT, general technology, and transportation. The design of the pavilion also resonates with the "Belt and Road Initiative" that China has been actively engaged in.

This is the first time for the Expo to be held in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia region. The Expo 2020 Dubai will be officially open from October 1, 2021, to March 31, 2022. Visitors from all over the world are welcome to enter the new world and discover a number of life-changing innovations together. The event will offer a six-month celebration of creativity, innovative thinking, and progress mankind has made over the past decades.

Kratos Fan

001-626-4568311

fan.lvwei@tslsmart.com

United States

www.terminusgroup.com

SOURCE: Terminus Group

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/651396/The-Expo-2020-Dubai-joined-Hands-with-Terminus-Group-at-the-Pujiang-Innovation-Forum-a-showcase-of-Cutting-Edge-Innovative-Technologies
HONG KONG, June 11, 2021 - (ACN Newswire) - In the face of continuing challenges in the global economy resulting from the pandemic, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) will focus on helping businesses capture opportunities in Mainland China and other markets, especially in sectors that can ride on opportunities arising from the mainland's "dual circulation" strategy and 14th Five-Year Plan, as well as industry developments in technology, healthcare and sustainability.In addition to promoting the city's overall advantages, services and products, the HKTDC will offer online and offline services for Hong Kong companies to speed up business expansion in the mainland market, using the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) as a bridgehead. It will also explore tripartite partnerships with mainland enterprises in overseas markets, especially the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).HKTDC Chairman Dr Peter Lam said that the past few years have been full of challenges, but the HKTDC will continue to work hard in helping businesses diversify and enhance their capabilities with sustainability and the adoption of technology and innovation as a core theme. He added that as parts of the world continue to tackle the pandemic while others are gradually recovering, Mainland China and its early recovery has been driving economic growth both internally and externally."We will create opportunities for businesses in both markets and industries. Apart from large-scale events, we will also strengthen our support and training services to help Hong Kong businesses capture opportunities arising from the mainland's 14th Five-Year Plan and 'dual circulation' strategy, taking the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area as an entry point. As such, we just launched a GoGBA one-stop platform to support Hong Kong companies, and we will help them partner with mainland enterprises to tap international markets through the city's two-way platform," Dr Lam said.Market opportunities: the GBA and "Dual Circulation" strategyFollowing the launch of the GoGBA one-stop platform yesterday (10 June), the HKTDC is planning to organise SmartHK in Guangzhou on 8 December, highlighting the city's international networks and innovative professional services which are complementary to the Greater Bay Area development. Business matching meetings will be held to promote cooperation between mainland enterprises and Hong Kong services providers in the areas of finance, IT, infrastructure, design and more. A high-level mission led by senior government officials and commercial delegations will explore opportunities with their counterparts in the GBA.Chic HK will be held in Shenzhen from 10-12 December to promote quality Hong Kong brands, stylish designs and technology and innovation products. It will be held in an online-to-offline format, allowing consumers to make purchases on the spot or online. A business mission will be held concurrently to connect Hong Kong traders with potential mainland buyers and partners, helping them to expand their nationwide retail networks.The HKTDC will also introduce a new Star CEOs seminar series in which the top management of major mainland and overseas enterprises will share how the city's international business platform and professional services helps mainland companies tap opportunities in global markets, hoping this will attract more mainland companies to set up offices in Hong Kong. The HKTDC will set up a Hong Kong Pavilion in selected mainland trade fairs such as the China International Import Expo where Hong Kong's role in facilitating merchandise and service trade between the mainland and the rest of the world will be highlighted.High-potential sectors: technology, healthcare and intellectual propertyThe 14th Five-Year Plan supports Hong Kong in consolidating and enhancing its competitive advantages. In addition to the traditional sectors such as finance, maritime and trading, it also supports the city to develop into an international innovation and technology hub and a regional intellectual property (IP) trading centre.As such, the HKTDC will also launch a new Innotech Starter Programme in partnership with government agencies, incubators, R&D centres and universities to provide support and create opportunities for start-ups that are interested in expanding business in the Greater Bay Area. The HKTDC is also planning to organise seminars in Guangzhou, Nanjing and Beijing to promote Hong Kong's IP solutions in technology and innovation, as well as IP trade-related services. It will also further enrich the content of Asia IP Exchange and encourage different industries to step up adoption of homegrown innovative technology, especially patented technologies in environmental protection, sustainability, healthcare and well-being, building and construction and more.Besides, demand for healthcare services is growing in Asia. As an international financial centre, Hong Kong is now the world's second-largest bio-tech fund-raising centre through initial public offerings. Together with a sound IP protection regime and a wealth of experts in commercialising innovations, the city is ready to become a healthcare innovation and investment hub. The HKSAR Government and the HKTDC will jointly organise the inaugural Asia Summit on Global Health on 24 November to attract investment, publicise the city's technology-related achievements and promote collaboration among industry players from Mainland China, Hong Kong and overseas.Focusing on biotechnology, medical devices and drugs, digital health, community health and wellness, the Summit will help participants connect with investors and leading bio-tech companies in the Greater Bay Area.About HKTDCThe Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) is a statutory body established in 1966 to promote, assist and develop Hong Kong's trade. With 50 offices globally, including 13 in Mainland China, the HKTDC promotes Hong Kong as a two-way global investment and business hub. The HKTDC organises international exhibitions, conferences and business missions to create business opportunities for companies, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in the mainland and international markets. The HKTDC also provides up-to-date market insights and product information via research reports and digital news channels. For more information, please visit: www.hktdc.com/aboutus. Follow us on Twitter @hktdc and LinkedIn.Media ContactHKTDC Communications and Public Affairs DepartmentBeatrice Lam, Tel: +852 2584 4049, Email: beatrice.hy.lam@hktdc.orgSusanna Sin, Tel: +852 2584 4294, Email: susanna.kc.sin@hktdc.orgSource: HKTDCCopyright 2021 ACN Newswire . All rights reserved.
TOKYO, June 11, 2021 - (JCN Newswire) - Honda Motor Co., Ltd. has begun expanding its new business creation program, IGNITION, to the entire company. IGNITION is a program that gives shape to the original technologies, ideas and designs of Honda associates and contributes to solving social issues and creating new value for people.The IGNITION program was initiated in 2017 by Honda R&D Co., Ltd., a Honda research and development subsidiary. Since it began, IGNITION has received many applications with new business ideas, and several proposals that have a high degree of compatibility with Honda business are already being pursued at Honda with an eye toward commercialization.In the meantime, there also were proposals that could deliver value to society more quickly if they were pursued through a startup business venture, taking advantage of the unique characteristics of startup companies; therefore, in 2020, IGNITION added an option to strive for commercialization of new business ideas through business ventures, in addition to commercialization inside Honda. Ashirase Inc., whose establishment was announced today, is the first business venture to originate from IGNITION.Moreover, in April 2021, Honda began evolving IGNITION as company-wide program which enables all Honda associates in Japan to take on the challenge of creating new businesses. By realizing the ideas and dreams of not only engineers, but also associates from various divisions including production, sales and administration divisions, Honda will create products and experiences that do not yet exist in the world, generating a "fresh breeze" in society.IGNITION is collaborating with a venture capital firm which participates in the final round of the evaluation as one of the jurors examining each proposal from the exacting perspective of an investor. Moreover, the proposers have access to advice and support from the venture capital firm during the evaluation process.About IGNITION:All full-time Honda associates in Japan are eligible to submit proposals regardless of their length of employment and assigned divisions.Ideas that pass the final evaluation process will be commercialized within Honda or by establishing a business startup company.In principle, the decision on commercialization will be made within a 6-month period, during which a taskforce team consists of internal specialists to be formed to support each proposer.The venture capital firm will provide advice and support to each proposer throughout the evaluation process.In order to ensure independence of the startup, the ratio of capital contribution by Honda will be limited to no more than 20%.Comment by Yasuhide Mizuno, IGNITION Chief Juror / Managing Officer of Honda Motor Co., Ltd.:"At Honda, there are many associates who have a passionate desire to help people and contribute to society using their original technologies and ideas. IGNITION is a program which fosters and gives shapes to such technologies and ideas of Honda associates and enables them to create new value that contribute to solving social issues. We are now expanding the program to include all associates in Japan, offering an option to take on a new challenge to start up their own business ventures. There are an extremely high hurdles set to start business ventures, however, we are hoping that IGNITION will trigger the further energizing of Honda's challenging spirit and enable us to generate a fresh breeze by going beyond our existing business to create new products and experiences that do not yet exist in the world."Source: HondaCopyright 2021 JCN Newswire . All rights reserved.
Data supporting the positive decision demonstrated that patients treated with Alluzience for wrinkles had a rapid onset of effect starting from day one, with improvements lasting up to six months.1

Galderma today announced that Alluzience has completed its European decentralized procedure resulting in a positive decision for the first ready-to-use neuromodulator, a wrinkle relaxing injection, in Europe. National approvals will now take place across the region in line with local processes in each country. Designed for precision, Alluzience is a liquid form of botulinum toxin type A intended for use in adult patients as a treatment to temporarily improve the appearance of moderate to severe glabellar lines (vertical lines between the eyebrows), when the severity of these lines has an important psychological impact on the patient.1

"The introduction of Alluzience marks a new era in treatment innovation for upper facial lines in Europe. Like many aspects of physical appearance, glabellar lines can have a significant impact on patients' confidence and wellbeing. I've heard first-hand that the transition to living and working in a virtual world has only exacerbated these issues.

As the first ready-to-use neurotoxin in Europe, Alluzience is fit for the needs of today; it will allow me to consistently optimize results and deliver patient satisfaction with more precision. Most importantly, it will help people to feel confident in themselves again."

Dr Joanna Czuwara, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Dermatology, Warsaw Medical University, Poland

As people age, the skin and underlying muscles play a significant role in the emergence of noticeable lines and folds, including glabellar lines between the eyebrows.2 Clostridium botulinum toxin type A (BoNT-A), the active ingredient in Alluzience, is often used to smooth facial lines including glabellar lines.2 All currently approved BoNT-A products (or formulations) in Europe come in powder form and require reconstitution with sodium chloride before use.2 The ready-to-use liquid formulation of Alluzience avoids any calculations and allows for more precision, meaning it has the potential to improve safety and dosing accuracy compared with powder form BoNT-A preparations.2 Alluzience was developed using novel production technologies meaning it is free from human and animal-derived proteins such as human serum albumin and lactose.1

The European Marketing Authorization Application of Alluzience is based on pooled data from two pivotal trials of 372 patients with moderate to severe glabellar lines who were treated with either Alluzience (n=250) or placebo (n=122). These data demonstrated that >50% of patients reported an effect within two to three days, including 23% of patients within one day.1 An effect was demonstrated for up to six months after injection with Alluzience.1 The responder rate at day 29 was significantly higher for patients treated with Alluzience compared to placebo (primary endpoint) (p<0.0001).1

Additionally, patients' level of satisfaction one month following injection showed that 85.2% of the patients receiving Alluzience were either satisfied or very satisfied compared to 9% for placebo patients.1 The majority of adverse reactions reported with Alluzience in clinical trials were of mild to moderate intensity and reversible.1 The most frequently reported adverse reactions were headache and injection site reactions.1

"At Galderma we pride ourselves on developing innovative products that meet today's needs, which is underpinned by our longstanding knowledge and heritage in dermatology. We know how advantageous it is for doctors to have access to a ready-to-use liquid formulation in Alluzience. It's for this reason that today's news is an important milestone for both patients and healthcare professionals."

Alexandre Brennan Head, Global Business Unit for Aesthetics

About Galderma

Galderma is the world's largest independent dermatology company, present in approximately 100 countries. Since our inception in 1981, we have been driven by a complete dedication to dermatology. We deliver an innovative, science-based portfolio of sophisticated brands and services across Aesthetics, Consumer Care and Prescription Medicine. Focused on the needs of consumers and patients, we work in partnership with healthcare professionals to ensure superior outcomes. Because we understand that the skin we're in shapes our life stories, we are advancing dermatology for every skin story.

For more information: www.galderma.com.

About Alluzience(liquid botulinum toxin type A)

Alluzience(liquid botulinum toxin type A) is the first ready-to-use BoNT-A liquid neuromodulator formulation to be introduced in Europe. Alluzience should only be administered by a physician with appropriate qualifications and expertise in this treatment using the required equipment.1 Dosing and treatment intervals depend on assessment of the individual patient's response.1 The treatment interval should be no more frequent than every three months.1 For more information, please see the Summary of Product Characteristics.1

Alluzience is a product under license from Ipsen. Alluzience is a registered trademark of Ipsen. Galderma has an exclusive license from Ipsen to develop, promote and distribute Alluzience in the approved indication in Europe (excluding Czech Republic, Slovakia, Greece, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary).

1 Alluzience Summary of Product Characteristics.

2 Ascher B, Rzany B, Kestemont P, et al. Liquid Formulation of AbobotulinumtoxinA: A 6-Month, Phase 3, Double-Blind, Randomized, Placebo Controlled Study of a Single Treatment, Ready-to Use Toxin for Moderate-to-Severe Glabellar Lines. Aesthet Surg J. 2020;40(1):93-104.

Job code: GL-ALZ-2100026

Date of preparation: June 2021

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005195/en/

Contacts:

Media Contact

Lauren Starr, Head of Franchise Communications at Galderma

Email: lauren.starr@galderma.com

Phone: +41 79 771 52 45

Justine Brodie, Senior Account Manager at OPEN Health

Email: JustineBrodie@OpenHealthGroup.com

Phone: +44 7342 092 035
As part of the Symposium program, the Coronado Historical Association announced the much-anticipated winner of the 2021 Going the Extra Mile (GEM) Award. Dave Landon, President of the Coronado Historical Association presented the award to Anne and Taylor Stockdale for their restoration of the Stockdale family home at 547 A Avenue.


NEW YORK CITY (dpa-AFX) - Bristol Myers Squibb (BMY) and Acceleron Pharma Inc. (XLRN) announced Friday the first data from the Phase 2 BEYOND study evaluating Reblozyl (luspatercept-aamt), a first-in-class erythroid maturation agent, plus best supportive care in adult patients with non-transfusion dependent or NTD beta thalassemia.



The results showed that treatment with Reblozyl plus best supportive care improved anemia in 77% of patients compared to placebo.



The results were presented at the European Hematology Association or EHA 2021 Virtual Congress as part of its Presidential Symposium.



BEYOND is a Phase 2, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled multi-center study to determine the efficacy and safety of Reblozyl versus placebo in adults with NTD beta thalassemia.



Beta thalassemia is an inherited blood disorder caused by a genetic defect in hemoglobin. NTD beta thalassemia is a term used to describe patients who do not require lifelong regular red blood cell transfusions for survival, although they may require occasional or even frequent transfusions, usually for defined periods of time.



Reblozyl is the first and only erythroid maturation agent approved in the European Union, United States and Canada to address anemia-associated beta thalassemia and lower-risk myelodysplastic syndromes.



The companies noted that 77.7% of patients treated with Reblozyl in the trial achieved a hemoglobin increase compared to 0% of patients in the placebo arm. Changes in patient-reported outcomes also correlated with increases in hemoglobin.



Ali Taher, of American University of Beirut and BEYOND study investigator, said, 'Patients with non-transfusion dependent beta thalassemia experience chronic anemia and iron overload, which may lead to a range of clinical complications, and treatment options are greatly needed. Results from the BEYOND study show the clinical potential of luspatercept to sustain the elevation of hemoglobin levels in a majority of patients regardless of their baseline hemoglobin status, and improvements were noted in quality of life outcomes in adults with non-transfusion dependent beta thalassemia.'



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BRISTOL-MYERS SQUIBB-Aktie komplett kostenlos handeln - auf Smartbroker.de
LONDON, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- FinecoBank today announces that UK customers will have access to a new suite of funds by Wellington Management via its investing platform.

Wellington Management is one of the largest global asset managers offering investment solutions spanning across the global equity, fixed income, multi-asset and alternatives.

The latest addition to Fineco's investment platform follows a string of recent fund announcements made this year including AXA IM, Candriam and Ninety One.

Paolo Di Grazia, Deputy General Manager, Fineco: "Following the recent news that more than 70% of Fineco clients hold active current accounts on brokerage, we are determined to continue expanding our investment offerings. We are very pleased to have partnered with Wellington Management and to offer our UK customers access to their selection of quality funds through our competitively priced investment platform."

Matthew Knight, Head of UK distribution, Wellington Management: "At Wellington Management, we strive to combine the resources of a large, global asset manager with the boutique feel of an independent, privately held partnership. We look forward to working with Fineco to offer their UK clients our innovative investment solutions."

About FinecoBank

Launched in 2017 in UK, FinecoBank, the multi-currency bank and one of the most important FinTech banks in Europe, has built an integrated business model proposing customers its One-Stop-Solution: it offers from a single account banking, trading and investment services through innovative transactional platforms developed with proprietary technologies. Fineco represents a new way of banking, a smart way to invest money.

Fineco's mission is to simplify customers' lives when dealing with financial services and has developed a very powerful yet user-friendly platform. Learn more about us on finecobank.co.uk.

About Wellington Management
EP Global Opportunities Trust plc (the "Company")

The Company announces that on 10 June 2021 it purchased 50,000 of its own Ordinary 1p shares at a price of 2.90 per share. The shares have been placed into Treasury.

Following this transaction, the Company has 27,666,917 Ordinary shares held in Treasury and 36,842,725 Ordinary shares in circulation. Accordingly, the total voting rights in the Company are 36,842,725. The total number of shares in issue remains as 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.

11 June 2021

LEI: 2138005T5CT5ITZ7ZX58

Enquiries:

Kenneth J Greig

Edinburgh Partners AIFM Limited

Tel: 0131 270 3800

The Company's registered office address is:

27-31 Melville Street

Edinburgh

EH3 7JF
XINYANG, China, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- On June 9, diplomats and reporters from many countries embarked on a journey of "Discovering the Most Beautiful Tea Village on the Silk Road". They came to Shihe District, Xinyang City, Henan Province to explore the secrets of Chinese tea, according to Shihe District Bureau of Culture, Radio & Television and Tourism. In the first four months of 2021, three "China-Europe Express" trains, loaded with Xinyang tea, traveled along the modern Silk Road to Europe and Asia.

Portuguese Ambassador to China Mr. Jose Augusto Duarte said Portugal was the first European country to introduce Chinese tea. In the 16th century, Portuguese merchants brought Chinese tea back. It was so expensive that only nobles could enjoy it. Today, drinking tea is still a sophisticated lifestyle. He said that the landscape is amazing, the people are beautiful, passionate, confident, and happy.

"Tea is a gift from heaven and earth. Drinking tea is good for health and temperament," said Mr. Jingon Kim, the Minister-Counselor of the South Korea Embassy in China, "We imports a large amount of tea from China." His wife, Mrs. Jongyoung Park, is a member of the Tea Tasting Association and often participates in tea-related activities. She experienced the traditional tea picking and roasting techniques, and had an in-depth exchange with Xiao Junjing, the inheritor of Xinyang Maojian craftsmanship, national intangible cultural heritage.

Mr. Robert Quant, Ambassador of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, was impressed by the tea plantation. He said: "I will tell my friends how beautiful it is and encourage everyone to visit."

Mr. Zhai Xiaobin, deputy mayor of Xinyang, gave warm welcome to Chinese and foreign guests, and promoted tea exchange and cooperation.

Only lush mountains and clear rivers can produce good tea. Shihe is located on the division line of north and south, with forest coverage rate of 70%. It is in the hinterland of China, with villages dotted among the mountains and waters, displaying leisure and tranquility. With a contiguous tea plantation of 100,000 acres, it is the origin and main producing area of Xinyang Maojian, China's "Top Ten Famous Teas". Haojiachong village in Shihe is a representative of the beautiful countryside. Villagers grow tea for generations.

Image Attachments Links:



Link: http://asianetnews.net/view-attachment?attach-id=393641

Caption: Discovering the Most Beautiful Tea Village on the Silk Road

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1531573/Xinyang.jpg
Partners with finance industry veterans to build a leading global aviation loan servicer anchored by stable, long-term capital

Seeds platform with nearly $800 million aviation loan portfolio acquired from CIT Group Inc.

KKR, a leading global investment firm, today announced the launch of AV AirFinance Limited ("AV AirFinance"), a global commercial aviation loan servicer established by a team of experienced industry professionals together with KKR. The new secured loan servicing platform combines stable, long-term capital and decades of experience structuring commercial aircraft loan transactions to offer creative and innovative financing solutions to commercial aviation customers around the world.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005096/en/

To support the launch, KKR and AV AirFinance have agreed to purchase a nearly $800 million portfolio of aviation loans from CIT Group, including over 50 loans for approximately 60 commercial aircraft. The loans in the portfolio have an average yield in the mid-single digits and an average term remaining of approximately four years.

AV AirFinance is led by Chief Executive Officer Siggi Kristinsson, an industry veteran who most recently co-founded and served as CEO of Volito Aviation Services AB, a company providing debt origination and advisory services to Goldman Sachs and other financial institutions. Mr. Kristinsson is supported by a seasoned team of aircraft financing specialists with decades of experience in secured lending totaling over $25 billion in value across multiple market cycles. Ryan Jasinski joins the AV AirFinance team from CIT as part of the related portfolio purchase and will continue to focus on loan origination in the Americas. Per Waldelof, former president of PK AirFinance, serves as a consultant advising on loan origination and other aspects of AV AirFinance's operations.

AV AirFinance will support a wide array of commercial clients, including airlines, cargo operators, lessors, manufacturers and investors, across all aspects of the ownership cycle, including PDP, acquisition, leasing, conversion, and tear down. Through its partnership with KKR, AV AirFinance has global origination capabilities and the financial strength to arrange longer-term, flexible, and competitive financing for a broad range of single aircraft and large portfolio transactions.

"AV AirFinance is an exciting expansion of our asset-based finance strategy into directly originated commercial aircraft loans, which represent an attractive downside protected investment opportunity for our long-term capital," said Dan Pietrzak, Partner and Co-head of Private Credit at KKR. "We are delighted to be partnering with Siggi and his experienced team to build a new leading loan servicing platform for the commercial aviation market."

Mr. Kristinsson said, "We are very excited to be entering the market at this time to participate in the social and economic recovery, which is driving demand for commercial aviation and increasing the importance of the long-term financing solutions that support the industry. With our strong foundation, experienced team and the support of KKR, AV AirFinance is well positioned to deliver tailored lending options and flexible terms that enable commercial aviation customers to achieve their business goals."

Patrick Clancy, Principal at KKR, added: "The launch of a dedicated aviation lending platform marks a significant milestone for KKR in the aviation sector, building on our experience in areas including commercial aircraft leasing and private aviation. We are thrilled to partner with the AV AirFinance team to offer differentiated solutions to the market, and we see significant opportunities for future growth supported by a large market opportunity and the favorable long-term outlook for the commercial aviation industry."

The portfolio acquisition from CIT is being funded by separate accounts managed by KKR. AV AirFinance is KKR's latest investment in the aviation sector and follows investments in Altitude Aviation, Altavair, KKR DVB Aviation Capital, K2 Aviation, DCAL Aviation, Wheels Up, Global Jet Capital and JetEdge, among others.

About KKR

KKR is a leading global investment firm that offers alternative asset management and capital markets and insurance solutions. KKR aims to generate attractive investment returns by following a patient and disciplined investment approach, employing world-class people, and supporting growth in its portfolio companies and communities. KKR sponsors investment funds that invest in private equity, credit and real assets and has strategic partners that manage hedge funds. KKR's insurance subsidiaries offer retirement, life, and reinsurance products under the management of The Global Atlantic Financial Group. References to KKR's investments may include the activities of its sponsored funds and insurance subsidiaries. For additional information about KKR Co. Inc. (NYSE: KKR), please visit KKR's website at www.kkr.com and on Twitter @KKR_Co.

About AV AirFinance Limited

AV AirFinance Limited is a commercial aviation loan servicer established in partnership with KKR. AV AirFinance provides secured financing solutions to airlines, lessors, manufacturers, and investors. The team at AV AirFinance has decades of experience structuring commercial aircraft loans and, through its partnership with KKR, has the financial strength and the ability to provide competitive financing along with knowledge to successfully participate in the global commercial aviation lending space. AV AirFinance maintains offices in Ireland and the US. For more information, please visit www.avairfinance.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005096/en/

Contacts:

Media:

Cara Major or Miles Radcliffe-Trenner

(212) 750-8300

media@kkr.com
SHENZHEN, China, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- With a relentless focus on partner success, Huawei Digital Power has recently hosted the Ecosystem Partner Summit 2021 to explore how to build a competent partner system for a green and bright future through competitive zero-carbon all-scenario solutions, quality service and an innovative partner strategy. Due to Covid-19 the virtual event series, with Asia Pacific, Latin America and Europe summits, is bringing together partners from 81 countries.

"Carbon neutrality has become the world's most pressing common goal, which stirs up a revolution in power generation and consumption and accelerates the industrial upgrading as well. The energy transformation brings abundant Industrial and commercial opportunities. By integrating digital and power electronics technologies, Huawei Digital Power is pushing forward the energy revolution and joining hands with our partners to build a green and bright future," said James Li, Member of the Huawei Supervisory Board and President of Marketing, Sales & Services of Huawei Digital Power in his welcome speech.

Mr. Li added that the ecosystem strategy lies at the heart of Huawei Digital Power's development strategy. The digital energy industry is essentially an ecosystem industry. We will be committed to doing something right to bring value to partners, share benefits with them, and improve their capabilities, and join forces with every competent and ambitious partner to build a green and bright future through the multi-level and multi-business cooperative ecosystem strategy.

The digital power industry needs an ecosystem, and that's why Huawei Digital Power has come up with the '3-4-5-6' ecosystem strategy. "We divide partner services into three domains - smart PV, data center & site facility, and Huawei-inside domain - to allow every player to focus on their strengths. When cooperating with partners, we adhere to the following four principles: profitability, simplicity, enablement, and ecosystem. With this in mind, we will implement five major measures this year - building a partner system centering on the digital power industry, optimizing the IT platforms, promoting standardization, ramping up marketing and branding, and increasing resource inputs - to help partners improve six capabilities in sales, service, marketing and so on," Mr. Li emphasized in his speech.

The annual Ecosystem Partner Summit, designed to showcase the resources and tools that our partners need to drive profitability, comes as Huawei's stepping up efforts in building a zero-carbon and smart society. Presented at the summit, Zhou Taoyuan, President of Products & Solutions, Huawei Digital Power, introduced Huawei's All-Scenario Zero-carbon Solution, featuring "5 core technologies + 4 application scenarios + 1 cloud". The solution covers Smart PV Generator FusionSolar 8.0, Green Residential Power 2.0, Green C&I Power 1.0, Off-grid (fuel removal) Power Supply Solutions, Energy Cloud, Zero-carbon Data Center, Zero-carbon Site, Smart Charging Network and Modular Power.

Ecosystem partner representatives from different corners of the world have shared their insights into marketing strategy during the pandemic, market expansion strategy, business growth, among others, at the virtual summit. 72 top-performing partners globally were selected to be awarded for their dedication to value creation in 2020. Within a few years, some of the partners have expanded their business to more than a dozen countries, thanks to the cooperation with Huawei. Just as Mr. Li said: "Huawei doesn't place limits on our partners, so dream big and achieve bigger."

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Huawei Digital Power will focus on our ecosystem strategy and join forces with our partners to build a greener, more sustainable planet that we call home.

About Huawei

Founded in 1987, Huawei is a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. We have more than 197,000 employees, and we operate in more than 170 countries and regions, serving more than three billion people around the world.

Our vision and mission is to bring digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. To this end, we will drive ubiquitous connectivity and promote equal access to networks; bring cloud and artificial intelligence to all four corners of the earth to provide superior computing power where you need it, when you need it; build digital platforms to help all industries and organizations become more agile, efficient, and dynamic; redefine user experience with AI, making it more personalized for people in all aspects of their life, whether they're at home, in the office, or on the go. For more information, please visit Huawei online at www.huawei.com or follow us on:

http://www.linkedin.com/company/Huawei

http://www.twitter.com/Huawei

http://www.facebook.com/Huawei

http://www.youtube.com/Huawei

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1531449/image.jpg
Shareholders elect industry-leading financial executive Viviane Monges to Board of Directors

ADC Therapeutics SA (NYSE:ADCT), a commercial-stage biotechnology company leading the development of novel antibody drug conjugates (ADCs) to treat hematological malignancies and solid tumors, today announced that shareholders approved all of the resolutions as proposed by the Board of Directors at yesterday's Annual General Meeting (AGM).

Election of new Board member Viviane Monges

Shareholders approved the election of Viviane Monges to the board of directors. Ms. Monges has 30 years of executive-level financial leadership experience with global corporations, predominantly in the pharmaceutical industry. She is a veteran Chief Financial Officer (CFO) who has worked cross-functionally at both large and small companies deploying innovative strategies and building out finance teams.

Ms. Monges was CFO of the Business Excellence Division at Nestle. Prior to that, she spent nearly two decades leading financial operations for divisions of three pharmaceutical companies. She served as Group CFO at Galderma S.A., a multinational dermatology company. Ms. Monges served at Novartis A/G as EMEA CFO and then as Global CFO of the OTC Division. At Wyeth Pharmaceuticals/Pfizer she served as CFO of the Europe Region unit and as CFO of the Global Pharma Business unit.

Ms. Monges provides financial and leadership counsel to companies as a board member of several innovative healthcare corporations, including DBV Technologies and Voluntis in France, UCB in Belgium, and Novo Holdings A/S in Denmark. Until May 2021, Ms. Monges also served on the board of Idorsia Pharmaceuticals.

Re-election of the Board and Compensation Committee

Shareholders approved the re-election of Chairman of the Board Ron Squarer and all members of the Board who stood for re-election, for a term of one year.

Shareholders approved the proposed compensation of the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee, for a term of one year.

Shareholders approved an amendment to the Company's Articles of Association to increase the maximum size of the Board of Directors to 12 members.

Shareholders approved the re-election of all members of the Compensation Committee, each for a term of one year.

Other proposals

All financial and capital proposals were approved including the increase and renewal of the Company's Authorized Share Capital by CHF 1,170,800.

Shareholders approved the re-election of the independent proxy and statutory auditor, each for a term of one year.

For a complete overview of the results of the Company's AGM please refer to the Form 6-K filing at https://ir.adctherapeutics.com/sec-filings.

About ADC Therapeutics

ADC Therapeutics (NYSE: ADCT) is a commercial-stage biotechnology company improving the lives of cancer patients with its next-generation, targeted antibody drug conjugates (ADCs). The Company is advancing its proprietary PBD-based ADC technology to transform the treatment paradigm for patients with hematologic malignancies and solid tumors.

ADC Therapeutics' CD19-directed ADC ZYNLONTA (loncastuximab tesirine-lpyl) is approved by the FDA for the treatment of relapsed or refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma after two or more lines of systemic therapy. ZYNLONTA is also in late-stage clinical trials in combination with other agents. Cami (camidanlumab tesirine) is being evaluated in a late-stage clinical trial for relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma and in a Phase 1b clinical trial for various advanced solid tumors. In addition to ZYNLONTA and Cami, the Company has multiple PBD-based ADCs in ongoing clinical and preclinical development.

ADC Therapeutics is based in Lausanne (Biopole), Switzerland and has operations in London, the San Francisco Bay Area and New Jersey. For more information, please visit https://adctherapeutics.com/ and follow the Company on Twitter and LinkedIn.

ZYNLONTA is a trademark of ADC Therapeutics SA.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005063/en/

Contacts:

Investors

Eugenia Litz

ADC Therapeutics

Eugenia.Litz@adctherapeutics.com

+44 7879 627205

Amanda Hamilton

ADC Therapeutics

amanda.hamilton@adctherapeutics.com

+1 917-288-7023

EU Media

Alexandre Muller

Dynamics Group

amu@dynamicsgroup.ch

+41 (0) 43 268 3231

USA Media

Annie Starr

6 Degrees

astarr@6degreespr.com

+1 973-768-2170
HOUSTON, TX / ACCESSWIRE / June 11, 2021 / Evolution Petroleum Corporation (NYSE American:EPM) ("Evolution" or the "Company") announced today that Jason Brown, President & Chief Executive Officer and Ryan Stash, Chief Financial Officer will participate in the virtual East Coast IDEAS Investor Conference on June 16 & 17, 2021. Evolution's presentation is scheduled to be available at 7:00 am CST on June 16th and will be accessible through the conference site. The presentation will also be webcasted and can be accessed through the conference website, the host's main website: www.IDEASconferences.com , and in the investor relations section of the company's website: https://www.evolutionpetroleum.com/

About IDEAS Investor Conferences

The mission of the IDEAS Conferences is to provide independent regional venues for quality companies to present their investment merits to an influential audience of investment professionals. Unlike traditional bank-sponsored events, IDEAS Investor Conferences are "SPONSORED BY INVESTORS. FOR INVESTORS." and for the benefit of regional investment communities. Conference sponsors collectively have more than $200 billion in assets under management and include:Adirondack Research and Management, Allianz Global Investors: NFJ Investment Group, Ariel Investments, Aristotle Capital Boston, Barrow Hanley Mewhinney & Strauss, BMO Global Asset Management, Constitution Research & Management, Inc., Fidelity Investments, First Wilshire Securities Management, Inc., Gamco Investors, Granahan Investment Management, Great Lakes Advisors, Greenbrier Partners Capital Management, LLC, GRT Capital Partners, LLC, Hodges Capital Management, Ironwood Investment Management, Keeley Teton Advisors, Luther King Capital Management, Marble Harbor Investment Counsel, Perritt Capital Management, Punch & Associates, Westwood Holdings Group, Inc., and William Harris Investors.

The IDEAS Investor Conferences are held annually in Boston, Chicago and Dallas and are produced by Three Part Advisors, LLC. Additional information about the events can be located at www.IDEASconferences.com.

If interested in participating or learning more about the IDEAS conferences, please contact Phillip Kupper at (817) 368-2556 or pkupper@threepa.com.

About Evolution Petroleum

Evolution Petroleum Corporation is an oil and gas company focused on delivering a sustainable dividend yield to its shareholders through the ownership, management, and development of producing oil and gas properties onshore in the United States. The Company's long-term goal is to build a diversified portfolio of oil and gas assets primarily through acquisition, while seeking opportunities to maintain and increase production through selective development, production enhancement and other exploitation efforts on its properties. Our largest assets are our interest in a CO2 enhanced oil recovery project in Louisiana's Delhi field, our interest in a secondary recovery project in Wyoming's Hamilton Dome field and our interest in recently acquired properties in the Barnett Shale in North Texas. Additional information, including the Company's annual report on Form 10-K and its quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, is available on its website at http://www.evolutionpetroleum.com.

Cautionary Statement

All forward-looking statements contained in this press release regarding current expectations, potential results and future plans and objectives of the Company involve a wide range of risks and uncertainties. Statements herein using words such as "believe," "expect," "plans," "outlook," "should," "will," and words of similar meaning are forward-looking statements. Although our expectations are based on business, engineering, geological, financial, and operating assumptions that we believe to be reasonable, many factors could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations and we can give no assurance that our goals will be achieved. These factors and others are detailed under the heading "Risk Factors" and elsewhere in our periodic documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement.

Company Contacts:

Jason Brown, President & CEO

Ryan Stash, SVP & CFO

(713) 935-0122

JBrown@evolutionpetroleum.com

RStash@evolutionpetroleum.com

SOURCE: Evolution Petroleum Corporation

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/651375/Evolution-Petroleum-to-Present-Virtually-and-Host-1x1-Investor-Meetings-at-the-11th-Annual-East-Coast-IDEAS-Investor-Conference-on-June-16th-17th
Online shopping portal to launch June 15, 2021 with curated products.

RICHLAND, WA / ACCESSWIRE / June 11, 2021 / VirExit Technologies, Inc. (OTC PINK:VXIT) is pleased to announce that the Safer Place Market will launch with a focus on corporate and employee wellness, health, and safety. As businesses begin to focus on post-COVID operations, ensuring the health, safety, and welfare of employees is one our greatest challenges.

"As we return to work and to normal operations, organizations will be faced with a number of new challenges," said Dr. Leonard Wisneski, Chairman, VirExit Medical Advisory Board. "The need for a work/life balance has never been greater and the post-COVID stresses are just beginning to unravel."

The Safer Place Market was designed to help alleviate the stresses faced by both organizations and employees. By ensuring the wellbeing of both, productivity and creativity are increased, bottom-line costs associated with health time off are reduced, and more.

'We are very excited to launch our Safer Place Market," said James C. Katzaroff, CEO. "We have carefully selected each product in the market based on extensive market research and planning and curated each to focus on at least one aspect of our three-pronged approach."

The VirExit team of professionals, including Dr. Wisneski, is already looking at a variety of additional brands to onboard into the market. The variety of Safer Place products will continue to grow consistently. The company invites others to reach out with additional products they believe fit our program by emailing info@virexit.com .

NOTICE REGARDING FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

This news release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, including statements that include the words believes, expects, anticipate or similar expressions. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the company to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. In addition, description of anyone's past success is no guarantee of future success. This news release speaks as of the date first set forth above and the company assumes no responsibility to update the information included herein for events occurring after the date hereof.

About VirExit Technologies, Inc.

VirExit Technologies, Inc. (VXIT) is a diversified company focused on innovative, effective, ethical, and safe products within the health, safety, and wellness verticals. In 2020, the company purchased Safer Place Technologies, LLC, whose purpose is to create a primary sales and marketing platform as a vertical online marketplace. This new acquisition seeks to provide a single source for buyers and sellers of protective products and services which resonate with the VirExit mission statement: making the world a healthier and safer place with innovative, ethical and effective technologies. For investor relations information please contact investorrelations@virexit.com .

About Dr. Leonard Wisneski, Chairman, Medical Advisory Board

Leonard A. Wisneski, MD, FACP is Clinical Professor of Medicine at George Washington University, Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Georgetown University and also holds faculty positions in the Medicine and Nursing Departments at The University of Colorado. He has been in the clinical practice of endocrinology and for over 30 years and is a recognized leader globally in the field of integrative and whole person health.

Dr. Wisneski holds fellowship positions in The American College of Physicians and The American College of Nutrition. He was Chairman of the National Institute of Health (NIH) Advisory Board on Frontier Sciences at the University of Connecticut and Vice Chairman of the NIH Consensus Panel on Acupuncture. He has published over 30 scientific articles and a textbook, "Scientific Basis of Integrative Health, Third Edition."

Dr. Wisneski is Chairman Emeritus of the Integrative Health Policy Consortium which promotes national legislation pertaining to integrative healthcare. His medical practice in endocrinology and integrative medicine, spanning three decades, embodies the true meaning of integrative healthcare - an optimal combination of conventional and complementary medicine practiced with a whole-person approach delivered with reverence and humanism. He is also a donor to the Strauss -Wisneski Indigenous and Integrative Medicine Collection housed within the Strauss Health Sciences Library at The University of Colorado.

Dr. Wisneski graduated from Thomas Jefferson Medical College and performed his postgraduate training in the field of Internal Medicine and Endocrinology in the George Washington University healthcare system, where he served as Chief Medical Resident in Internal Medicine.

CONTACT:

Brooke Greenwald

Cornerstone Communications, LTD

brooke@cornerstonepr.net

(240) 360-0866

SOURCE: VirExit Technologies, Inc

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/651377/VirExit-Technologies-Inc-Announces-Focus-Of-Safer-Place-Market
CHICAGO, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the new market research report "Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Market by Point of Sale, Systems, Platform (Civil & Commercial, and Defense & Government), Function, End Use, Application, Type, Mode of Operation, MTOW, Range, and Region - Global Forecast to 2026", published by MarketsandMarkets, the market is estimated to be USD 27.4 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach USD 58.4 billion by 2026, at a CAGR of 16.4% from 2021 to 2026. Asia Pacific is projected to account for the largest size of the UAV market from 2021 to 2026. The incorporation of artificial intelligence in UAV has not only enhanced their capabilities but has also enabled them to carry out several activities such as takeoff, navigation, data capture, data transmission, and data analysis without human intervention. As well as rising demand for contactless deliveries of medical supplies and other essentials using drones owing to COVID-19 are some of the factors driving the growth of the UAV market.

Ask for PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=662

"The commercial segment of the market is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period"

Based on application, the UAV market has been classified into the military, commercial, government & law enforcement, and consumer. For this segment for the UAV Market, the military segment of the UAV market is projected to grow from USD 12,760 million in 2021 to USD 19,641 million by 2026, at a CAGR of 9.0% from 2021 to 2026. The commercial segment of the market is projected to grow at the highest CAGR of 28.0% during the forecast period; the growth of this segment can be attributed to the developments and advancements in drone technology.

"The special purpose drones segment of the UAV market is projected to have the largest market share during the forecast period"

Based on function, the UAV market has been segmented into special purpose drones, passenger drones, inspection & monitoring drones, surveying & mapping drones, spraying & seeding drones, air cargo vehicles, and others. Special purpose drones mainly include decoy drones, swarm drones, combat UAV, etc., that are used in military applications. The special purpose drones segment of the UAV market is projected to grow from USD 9,332 million in 2021 to USD 20,548 million in 2026, at a CAGR of 17.1% from 2021 to 2026 and have the largest market share during the forecast period. It is due to rising usage of Special Purpose Drones in military and Combat Operations.

"The OEM segment of the UAV market is projected to have a higher CAGR as compared to Aftermarket segment"

Based on point of sale, the UAV market has been segmented into original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and aftermarket. The aftermarket segment of the market has been classified into maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO), replacement, and simulation & training. The OEM segment of the UAV market is projected to have a higher CAGR as compared to Aftermarket segment. The OEM segment of the UAV market is projected to grow from USD 22.7 billion in 2021 to USD 49.0 billion by 2026, at a CAGR of 16.7% from 2021 to 2026. This is due to the fact that most of the assembly and modifications required in UAV are carried out at the OEM level. The aftermarket segment of the market is projected to grow from USD 4.7 billion in 2021 to USD 9.2 billion by 2026, at a CAGR of 14.5% during the forecast period.

Browse in-depth TOC on "Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Market"

416 - Tables

101 - Figures

418 - Pages

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"The payload segment of the UAV market is projected to grow at the highest CAGR from 2021 to 2026"

By system, the UAV market has been segmented into platform, payload, data link, ground control station, and launch and recovery system. Each of them performs a different function and ensures UAV's functioning in different applications. There are many different types of payloads that can be attached to UAVs such as cameras, infrared sensors, thermal sensors, weapons, and radars. The payload segment of the UAV market is projected to grow at the highest CAGR of 17.7 % from 2021 to 2026.The report discusses in details about six other segments of UAV market as well.

"The UAV market in Asia Pacific is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period"

The UAV market in Asia Pacific is projected to grow at the highest CAGR of 18.5% during the forecast period from 2021 to 2026. The growth of the market in this region can be attributed to the increasing demand for UAV from emerging economies such as China and India. China is estimated to lead the UAV market in Asia Pacific in 2021. The UAV market in India is also projected to grow at a significant rate during the forecast period owing to the increasing use of drones in the country for commercial applications.

Major players operating in the UAV market include General Atomics (US), Northrop Grumman Corporation (US), EHang (China), Parrot (France), PrecisionHawk (US), Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. (Israel), DJI Technology Co., Ltd. (China), Parrot SA (France), AeroVironment, Inc. (US), Lockheed Martin Corporation (US). These key players offer UAVs applicable for Defense & Government and Civil & Commercial sectors and have well-equipped and strong distribution networks across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa.

Related Reports:

Drone Package Delivery Market by Solution (Platform, Infrastructure, Software, Service), Type (Fixed-Wing, Multirotor, Hybrid) Range (Short <25 km, Long>25 km), Package Size (< 2Kg, 2-5 Kg, > 5Kg), Duration, End Use, Region- Global Forecast to 2030

Anti-Drone Market with COVID-19 Impact by Technology (Laser, Kinetic, Electronic), Application (Detection, Detection & Disruption), Vertical (Military & Defense, Homeland Security, Commercial), Platform Type, and Geography - Global Forecast to 2025

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WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The leaders of G7 countries will endorse the historic agreement reached last week by finance ministers for a global minimum corporate tax of at least 15 percent during their ongoing summit.



The U.S. proposal, agreed to by other member nations, is a critical step towards ending the decades-long race to the bottom that pushes nations to compete over who can offer the lowest tax rate to large corporations at the expense of protecting workers, investing in infrastructure, and growing the middle class.



'By making big multinational corporations pay their fair share and raising resources to fund priorities for domestic renewal - such as infrastructure, childcare, affordable housing, and education - a global corporate minimum tax is a key part of our efforts to deliver a foreign policy for the middle class, and will help support working families everywhere,' the White House said in a statement issued at the beginning of the G7 summit.



Today's agreement paves the way for the removal of Digital Service Taxes (DSTs) and other discriminatory taxes. In addition to the agreement on a global minimum tax, the G7 also reached an agreement on a plan to replace DSTs with a broader reallocation of taxing rights to the places where the largest and most profitable multinational corporations are doing business and making money.



Importantly, this applies to large multinationals broadly, both domestic and foreign, and not just the technology sector. This will ensure that big multinational companies across the economy will pay a little more in the places where they operate, whether or not they have their headquarters there. The United States and our G7 partners are actively considering a global effort to multiply the impact of the International Monetary Fund's proposed Special Drawing Rights (SDR) allocation to the countries most in need. At potentially up to $100 billion in size, the proposed effort would further support health needs - including vaccinations - and help enable greener, more robust economic recoveries in vulnerable countries, and promote a more balanced, sustained, and inclusive global recovery.



The White House said that more details will be included in the G7 Leaders' Communique.



The three-day G7 summit, attended by leaders of the world's seven largest so-called advanced economies, got off to a start in Cornwall, in south-west England, Friday.



Global coronavirus vaccinations and climate change are due to be the focus of the summit. The leaders will also touch upon the global economy, infrastructure, ransomware attacks, and cyber security. Most of the discussions over the three days will take place behind closed doors, under tight security.



Ahead of the summit, U.S. President Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson had their first face-to-face meeting Thursday.



The two leaders set out a global vision in a new Atlantic Charter to deepen cooperation in democracy and human rights, defense and security, science and innovation, and economic prosperity, with renewed joint efforts to tackle the challenges posed by climate change, biodiversity loss, and emerging health threats.



This is the first G7 Summit held since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and attended by Joe Biden.



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Company Taps 11-Year Veteran of International Division to Service 10 U.S. States

HUNTERSVILLE, NC / ACCESSWIRE / June 11, 2021 / In a move designed to maximize expertise across all regions that Daetwyler USA services, the company announced that it will be adding a new Regional Sales and Technical Manager for its Southwest Territory. Roberto Munguia formerly spent 11 years working with Daetwyler Mexico, providing insight, guidance, and product support for customers throughout Mexico and Central America. With Daetwyler USA, he will be a key point of contact for customers in California, Nevada, Idaho, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Louisiana.

"We are very pleased to be adding someone with Roberto's extensive knowledge of Daetwyler products to the Daetwyler USA team," said Marty Cansler, Daetwyler's Managing Director - Sales & Technical Support. "Roberto also knows the region well and understands what professional firms in the area need."

In addition to his years with Daetwyler Mexico, Munguia has also worked in professional property management - a fast-paced industry that requires exceptional attention to detail. His skill in careful management of highly technical processes has made him an asset to the professional printing, coatings, and adhesives world, which quickly led him to become one of the top sales representatives at Daetwyler Mexico in the new products category. Today, his expertise includes doctor blades, anilox rollers, cleaning machinery, and consumables. Munguia also holds a degree in graphic design from Diablo Valley College and studied drafting/design engineering and technologies at Napa Valley College. As well, he is fully fluent in both written and spoken English and Spanish.

"I look forward to serving the Southwest territory with the highest standards of service and knowledge," said Munguia. "My goal is to be a partner in helping businesses realize their fullest potential and be as profitable as possible."

About Daetwyler USA

Max Daetwyler, Inc. was founded in 1943 in Switzerland and expanded into the United States in 1975 to support the North American market. Today, we are a leading worldwide supplier of Doctor Blades and other pressroom products for the printing industry. For more information, please visit http://www.daetwyler-usa.com .

For More Information, Contact:

Marty Cansler

Managing Director - Sales & Technical Support

Phone: (704) 875-1200

Direct: (704) 948-1244

Fax: (704) 875-0781

mcansler@daetwyler.com

SOURCE: Daetwyler

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/651187/Daetwyler-USA-Adds-New-Regional-Sales-and-Technical-Manager-for-Southwest-US
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / June 11, 2021 / Sassy Resources Corporation ("Sassy" or the "Company") (CSE:SASY)(FSE:4E7)(OTCQB:SSYRF) is pleased to announce that as exploration crews prepare to follow-up on last fall's gold-silver discovery in first-ever drilling at the Westmore target, in the southwest corridor of the Company's 100%-owned Foremore Project in Northwest B.C.'s Eskay Camp, a geochronology study completed by Dr. Kevin Chamberlain at the University of Wyoming has put the mineralizing event at Westmore within the same geological timeline as other deposits in the district and elsewhere in the broader Golden Triangle.

Highlights:

189.6 Ma is the interpreted age of the Westmore granodiorite intrusive, meaning it was part of a major Early Jurassic magmatic event that was also responsible for the epithermal gold mineralization at Brucejack, Snip, Red Mountain and Spectrum, and porphyry mineralization at KSM;

The gold-bearing quartz veins from the Westmore discovery zone contain galena that overlaps in composition with the field of Jurassic-aged galena from the Eskay Creek mine, and these veins cross-cut the 189.6 Ma Westmore granodiorite;

Age-dating of targets within the multi-km-long More Creek VMS system and the under-explored Hanging Valley area further to the east confirms the Foremore Property experienced at least two separate periods of mineralizing events ahead of the Westmore zone (~327 Ma for More Creek and ~377 Ma for the Hanging Valley). This helps explain the very distinct styles of mineralization at Foremore and will help guide geologists in their modeling of new discovery opportunities.

Dr. Peter Lightfoot, Sassy technical advisor, commented: "The results of the study provide important new insights with respect to the age of the granodiorite that hosts gold-bearing quartz vein mineralization at Westmore, along with the quartz veins and mineralization itself. The exciting results of this study confirm that the Westmore system and associated mineralization falls within the productive peak Early Jurassic metallogenesis in the Golden Triangle."

Mr. Mark Scott, Sassy CEO, added: "This is shaping up to a busy summer for Sassy as we carry out exploration in Canada's two most exciting gold camps right now - Newfoundland and Eskay. Results from this geochronology study underscore our belief in the discovery potential at Foremore where our immediate priority will be follow-up drilling at the Westmore Discovery Zone where in 2020 the first six diamond drill holes ever drilled at Westmore intersected multiple auriferous quartz veins and wide intervals of anomalous alteration at this exciting grassroots target. Armed with the data gathered during the 2020 field season, we now understand the Westmore intrusion to be much larger than originally thought and we look forward to following up this year on the extensive high-grade gold identified at surface and the very encouraging 2020 preliminary drilling."

Foremore Gold-Silver Project Map

Qualified Person

The technical information in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Mr. Ian Fraser, P.Geo., Vice President of Exploration for Sassy Resources. Mr. Fraser is the Qualified Person responsible for the scientific and technical information contained herein under National Instrument 43-101 standards.

About Sassy Resources Corporation

Sassy Resources is an exploration stage resource company currently engaged in the identification, acquisition and exploration of high-grade precious metal and base metal projects in North America. Its current focus is the Foremore Gold-Silver Project located in the Eskay Camp, Liard Mining Division, in the heart of Northwest B.C.'s prolific Golden Triangle.

Caution Regarding Forward Looking Statements

Investors are cautioned that, except for statements of historical fact, certain information contained in this document includes "forward looking information", with respect to a performance expectation for Sassy Resources Corporation. Such forward looking statements are based on current expectations, estimates and projections formulated using assumptions believed to be reasonable and involving a number of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. Such factors include, without limitation, fluctuations in foreign exchange markets, the price of commodities in both the cash market and futures market, changes in legislation, taxation, controls and regulation of national and local governments and political and economic developments in Canada and other countries where Sassy carries out or may carry out business in the future, the availability of future business opportunities and the ability to successfully integrate acquisitions or operational difficulties related to technical activities of mining and reclamation, the speculative nature of exploration and development of mineral deposits, including risks obtaining necessary licenses and permits, reducing the quantity or grade of reserves, adverse changes in credit ratings, and the challenge of title. The Company does not undertake an obligation to update publicly or revise forward looking statements or information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless so required by applicable securities laws. Some of the results reported are historical and may not have been verified by the Company.

Contact Info:

Mark Scott

Chief Executive Officer & Director

info@sassyresources.ca

Terry Bramhall

Sassy Resources Corporate Communications/IR

1.604.833.6999 (mobile)

1.604.675.9985 (office)

terry.bramhall@sassyresources.ca

In Europe:

Michael Adams

Managing Director - Star Finance GmbH

info@star-finance.eu

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) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE: Sassy Resources Corporation

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/651248/Geochronology-Study-Highlights-Potential-of-Sassys-Westmore-Gold-Silver-Discovery
Calgary, Alberta--(Newsfile Corp. - June 11, 2021) - Hemostemix Inc. (TSXV: HEM) (OTC: HMTXF) (FSE: 2VFO) ("Hemostemix" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it closed its previously announced $2,500,000 convertible debenture order from a director of the Company for Debenture Units priced at $1,000 per Unit as detailed below.

CLINICAL TRIAL UPDATE

Hemostemix has obtained a new copy of its clinical trial data base from a former service provider who originally activated the clinical trial and who managed the data base for approximately the first two years of the clinical trial. The Company's data management firm is now integrating the data of the subjects treated in South Africa. Hemostemix's contractors are proceeding well with the completion of key tasks of the close out of the clinical trial including completion of the data base management plan, drafting of the statistical analysis plan, completing data base entry, query management and data base validation through source document verifications.

LITIGATION UPDATE

In the action pending in Florida State Court, with the Appeal still pending challenging personal jurisdiction over Hemostemix in Florida, Hemostemix and Aspire are engaging in discovery, including issuing notices for the depositions of key employees and officers. Dates for the depositions are being negotiated. Hemostemix intends to depose Aspire's witnesses in July, 2021 after the parties have exchanged documents. Hemostemix continues to aggressively defend against Aspire's claims, which are without merit.

In the action pending in Delaware Federal Court, on June 1st Hemostemix, the plaintiff, moved to dismiss Aspire's counterclaims. The parties are to begin discovery, including document collection and production, and are negotiating a confidentiality agreement to govern the exchange of documents by each party. Hemostemix will continue to aggressively prosecute its claims against Accudata and Aspire.

TERMS OF THE DEBENTURE OFFERING

The debenture offering (the "Debenture Offering") is a $2,500,000 five-year unsecured non-transferrable convertible debenture, with conversion at the option of Hemostemix, and consists of 2,500 debenture units (each, a "Debenture Unit") at a price of $1,000 per Debenture Unit. Each Debenture Unit consists of a $1,000 principal amount debenture (each, a "Debenture") and 2,500 Debenture Warrants. The Debentures mature five years from the closing date (the "Maturity Date") and bear interest ("Interest") at a rate of 6% per annum, payable quarterly in arrears in cash or Common Shares at the option of the Company. The principal amount of the Debentures may be convertible, only at the option of the Company (and not at the option of the holder), into Common Shares of the Company ("Debenture Shares") at a price of $0.40 per Common Share (the "Conversion Price"). At the election of the Company, any accrued and unpaid Interest may be converted into Common Shares of the Company at a conversion price equal to the Market Price (as such term is defined in the Polices of the TSX Venture Exchange (the "Exchange") at the time of such conversion) but not less than the Conversion Price of the Debenture. Each Debenture Warrant entitles the holder to acquire one Common Share at a price of $0.55 per Common Share for a period of 24 months from the closing of the Debenture Offering, subject to the accelerated expiry provision described as follows. If on any 10 consecutive trading days occurring after four months and one day has elapsed following the closing date of the Debenture Offering the weighted-average trading price of the Common Shares as quoted on the Exchange is greater than $0.66 per Common Share, the Company may provide notice in writing to the holders of the Debenture Warrants by issuance of a news release that the expiry date of the Debenture Warrants will be accelerated to the 30th day after the date on which the Company issues such news release.

The net proceeds of the Debenture Offering will be used to fund litigation expenses of HEM. The $2.5MM will be used as follows: (i) up to $0.6MM will be immediately available to HEM as reimbursement for past litigation expenses; and (ii) until required by the Company for litigation expenses, USD $1.5MM (approximately CDN$1.9MM) will be invested in a demand loan ("Loan") to an arm's length US company. The balance of the Debenture Offering will be available for past or potential future litigation expenses. The Debenture Units and any Common Shares resulting from conversion of the Debentures or the exercise of Debenture Warrants will be subject to a hold period, if applicable, until October 11, 2021. The Loan will have the following key features: i) Term of 2 years; ii) Payable on demand, in whole or in part, on 30 days' notice; iii) Interest at 8% per annum to be paid monthly; iv) Pre-payable, in whole or in part, without penalty; v) Immediately puttable, in whole or in part, for cash to cover upcoming litigation expenses, at face value, to an entity controlled by the Director; and vi) immediately assignable in whole or in part, at face value, to the Director as payment against such Director's investment in the Debenture Offering.

OTHER INFORMATION IN RESPECT OF THE DEBENTURE OFFERING

The subscription by the director of the Company (the "Director") of the $2,500,000 of Debenture Units in the Debenture Offering constitutes a "related party transaction" within the meaning of Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101") and the policies of the Exchange. For such participation, the Company will be relying upon exemptions from the formal valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements pursuant to sections 5.5(b) and 5.7(1)(a), respectively, of MI 61-101 on the basis that the Company is not listed on a specified stock exchange and, that at the time the Offerings are agreed to, neither the fair market value of the subject matter of, nor the fair market value of the consideration for, the transaction insofar as it involves an interested party (within the meaning of MI 61-101) in the Offerings, will exceed 25% of the Company's market capitalization calculated in accordance with MI 61-101. No special committee was established in connection with the Debenture Offering . The Board of Directors of the Company have approved the Debenture Offering and no materially contrary view or abstention was expressed or made by any director in relation to the Debenture Offering (other than the abstention of the Director as required pursuant to the Business Corporations Act (Alberta)) . The material change report to be filed in relation to the Debenture Offering will not be not filed at least 21 days prior to the completion of the Debenture Offering as contemplated by MI 61-101. The Company believes that this shorter period is reasonable and necessary in the circumstances as the completion of the Debenture Offering occurred shortly before the issuance of this news release and the filing of such material change report.

ABOUT HEMOSTEMIX

Hemostemix is a publicly traded autologous stem cell therapy company. A winner of the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer Award, the Company developed and is commercializing its lead product ACP-01 for the treatment of CLI, PAD, Angina, Ischemic Cardiomyopathy, Dilated Cardiomyopathy and other conditions of ischemia. ACP-01 has been used to treat over 500 patients, and it is the subject of a randomized, placebo-controlled, double blind trial of its safety and efficacy in patients with advanced critical limb ischemia who have exhausted all other options to save their limb from amputation.

On October 21, 2019, the Company announced the results from its Phase II CLI trial abstract entitled "Autologous Stem Cell Treatment for CLI Patients with No Revascularization Options: An Update of the Hemostemix ACP-01 Trial With 4.5 Year Followup" which noted healing of ulcers and resolution of ischemic rest pain occurred in 83% of patients, with outcomes maintained for up to 4.5 years. The Company owns 91 patents across five patent families. For more information, please visit www.hemostemix.com.

Contact: Thomas Smeenk, President, CEO & Co-Founder

TSmeenk@Hemostemix.com Tel. 905-580-4170

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Service Provider (as that term is defined under the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Forward-Looking Information: This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein are forward-looking information. In particular, this news release contains forward-looking information in relation to: the status of Hemostemix's Litigation (as defined below); and the commercialization of ACP-01. There can be no assurance that such forward-looking information will prove to be accurate. Actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such forward-looking information. This forward-looking information reflects Hemostemix's current beliefs and is based on information currently available to Hemostemix and on assumptions Hemostemix believes are reasonable. These assumptions include, but are not limited to: the successful resolution of the litigation that Hemostemix is pursuing or defending (the "Litigation"); the results of ACP-01 research, trials, studies and analyses, including the analysis being equivalent to or better than previous research, trials or studies as well as management's expectations of anticipated results; Hemostemix's general and administrative costs remaining constant; the receipt of all required regulatory approvals for research, trials or studies; the level of activity, market acceptance and market trends in the healthcare sector; the economy generally; consumer interest in Hemostemix's services and products; competition and Hemostemix's competitive advantages; and Hemostemix obtaining satisfactory financing to fund Hemostemix's operations including any research, trials or studies, and the Litigation. 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 Hemostemix 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: the ability of Hemostemix to complete its current CLI clinical trial, complete a satisfactory analyses and the results of such analyses and future clinical trials; litigation and potential litigation that Hemostemix may face; general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties; general capital market conditions and market prices for securities; delay or failure to receive board or regulatory approvals; the actual results of future operations including the actual results of future research, trials or studies; competition; changes in legislation affecting Hemostemix; the timing and availability of external financing on acceptable terms; long-term capital requirements and future developments in Hemostemix's markets and the markets in which it expects to compete; lack of qualified, skilled labour or loss of key individuals; and risks related to the COVID-19 pandemic including various recommendations, orders and measures of governmental authorities to try to limit the pandemic, including travel restrictions, border closures, non-essential business closures, service disruptions, quarantines, self-isolations, shelters-in-place and social distancing, disruptions to markets, disruptions to economic activity and financings, disruptions to supply chains and sales channels, and a deterioration of general economic conditions including a possible national or global recession or depression; the potential impact that the COVID-19 pandemic may have on Hemostemix which may include a decreased demand for the services that Hemostemix offers; and a deterioration of financial markets that could limit Hemostemix's ability to obtain external financing. A description of additional risk factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking information can be found in Hemostemix's disclosure documents on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com. Although Hemostemix 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. 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. Forward-looking information contained in this news release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking information contained in this news release represents the expectations of Hemostemix as of the date of this news release and, accordingly, it is subject to change after such date. However, Hemostemix 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.

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO U.S. NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES.



To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/87283
The Federated Quantum System developed and launched in the UK with support from the UK Space Agency

LONDON, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Arqit Limited ("Arqit"), a leader in quantum encryption technology, has today announced at the G7 Leaders Conference in Cornwall, that it has formed an international consortium of companies and government organisations to provide its quantum encryption technology to government customers in a federated system concept, called Federated Quantum System (FQS). The UK, USA, Japan, Canada, Italy, Belgium, and Austria are now represented.

Arqit invented a system which uses satellites to distribute quantum keys to data centres. These keys are delivered using a new patented protocol called ARQ19, which solves the "Global versus Trustless" problem which previously prevented the adoption of Satellite Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). Arqit further invented a method, called QuantumCloud to translate the benefits of this quantum key distribution to any form of endpoint or cloud machine without the need for any special hardware. The first version of QuantumCloud launches for live service to commercial customers in 2021.

Government customers typically have more stringent requirements for control and are more inclined to buy "Private Instances" of cloud technology rather than managed services. Arqit has therefore designed a different version of its technology to meet this need and has recruited a strong community of partners from allied countries to collaborate in bringing the FQS system to use.

Collaboration partners include BT, Sumitomo Corporation, Northrop Grumman, Leonardo, QinetiQ Space N.V., qtlabs and Honeywell. Other Western Allied countries are expected to announce their inclusion during 2021.

FQS has been developed with support from the UK Space Agency (UKSA through its National Space Innovation Programme). The system consists of dedicated satellites, control systems and QuantumCloud software. It will be provided to the UK's "Five Eyes" allied governments and other international partners, allowing sovereign protection of strategic national assets and interoperability for joint operations.

The first FQS satellites are to be integrated and tested at the National Satellite Test Facility in Harwell near Oxford and are expected to be launched on Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne from Newquay in Cornwall in 2023, after the launch of the first commercial Arqit satellites. The role of Virgin Orbit in providing responsive launch services for government customers from any location is additive to the plan to deploy many FQS satellites to support the needs of a growing list of allied country partners.

Arqit's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, David Williams, said, "FQS enables collaboration between NATO-allied governments around the world to form a federated version of QuantumCloud infrastructure. It also enables the Joint All Domain Command and Control vision to come to life. The FQS system is global in its nature, and there is now strong momentum in an international consortium joining forces to bring it into use."

General Stephen Wilson, Director of Arqit Inc., said, "For Allies working together Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) is essential. For JADC2 to work, we must have a real identity, credentialing, and access management solution. Arqit's technology makes trusted data security possible."

Minister for Science, Research and Innovation, Amanda Solloway MP, added, "As a global science superpower, the UK continues to make advances in quantum science which is revolutionising cyber-security across the world. Backed by government funding, Arqit is paving the way in developing a new generation of quantum technologies that defend against sophisticated cyber-attacks on national governments, strengthening our resilience and helping us all the build back better from the pandemic."

UK Space Agency CEO, Graham Turnock, added, "Space technologies have become embedded in almost every aspect of our daily lives, and UK Space Agency funding is accelerating our development as a world leader in space technology. Arqit's advances in quantum technologies will strengthen the UK's resilience against harmful cyber-attacks, helping us protect our critical services. The announcement today shows the attraction of Arqit's model to our partners."

Head of Spaceport Cornwall, Melissa Thorpe, added, "This is a key consortium to be involved with, placing UK companies at the forefront of cutting-edge global technologies. Arqit's products will bring high-volume international business through launch at Spaceport Cornwall with Virgin Orbit. Not only does this provide us with advancements in UK innovation, but also brings that innovation to Cornwall, supporting high-skilled jobs and economic growth."

Dan Hart, CEO of Virgin Orbit, commented, "Recent headlines from across the world show how vital it is to have encrypted communications supporting our economy and our security. The team at Arqit has already demonstrated that its encryption capabilities provide a critical service to a global customer base. By adding a space layer with its Federated Quantum System, Arqit is taking that service to an even higher level. We're delighted to support the team, and to add its quantum satellites to our manifest for flights out of Cornwall."

Kevin Brown, Managing Director ofBT Security, said, "BT is pleased to be part of the first phase of the FQS project, which aligns with our wider commitment to providing security solutions for the most critical organisations. As this project advances to a global stage, it provides a clear example of how the UK is playing a leading role in developing important new technologies."

Eiji Ishida, Executive Officer and General Manager, Lease, Ship and Aerospace Business Division of Sumitomo Corporation, said, "The FQS concept is important because it allows us to manage a local instance of the infrastructure and deliver the control that our defence customers will require. Sumitomo Corporation is pleased to be in this consortium, which is very far ahead of other technologies."

Professor Rupert Ursin of qtlabs said, "Austria has been a strong supporter of the Satellite QKD technology which we have helped Arqit to build, and I am pleased that qtlabs is able to continue to represent Austria in this consortium and will try to bring the benefits of FQS to the Austrian and other government users."

Marina Mississian, Senior Director Space Payloads for Honeywell Aerospace, Canada added, "Satellite enabled quantum encryption is strategically important for Honeywell and Canada. With the support of the Canadian government, we have been pleased to be associated with Arqit's commercial mission and now to join the FQS system, which will further the collective security goals of the 'Five Eyes' community of nations."

Frank Preud'homme, Sales and Business Development Director for QinetiQ Belgium, said, "We have been pleased to support the Arqit space mission since 2017 and see strong potential for the creation of sovereign capabilities for a close alliance of allied countries in sharing this technology."

Norman Bone, Chair and Managing Director, Leonardo UK, concluded, "Leonardo and Telespazio recognise the increasingly digital nature of UK and allied national defence and security and the expectations of our customers that their systems are secure and resilient. The rapid, collaborative evaluation of new and cutting-edge technologies such as those developed by Arqit are a key element of Leonardo's strategy to establish and deliver next generation systems to our customers enabling effective and secure multi-domain operations including in the cyber and space domains."

The fundamental science behind Arqit's solutions to decades-old problems with Satellite QKD is important, but the company's ability to translate that into usable products that meet very precisely the needs of users is very advanced. This is a major advantage in moving quickly to implement the security technology amongst allied nations that will deliver valuable security improvements immediately and underpin the future of the quantum battlespace.

About Arqit Limited:

Arqit has invented a unique quantum encryption technology which makes the communications links of any networked device secure against current and future forms of hacking - even an attack from a quantum computer. Arqit's product, called QuantumCloud, creates unbreakable software encryption keys, using satellite to deliver quantum information to data centres. The keys which are easy and efficient to use remotely with no hardware or disruption to software required. The software has universal application to every edge device and cloud machine in the world. Headquartered in the United Kingdom with subsidiaries in the United States, Arqit was founded in 2017 by UK satellite industry veteran David Williams. Visit us at www.arqit.uk.
DGAP Post-admission Duties announcement: Haier Smart Home Co.,Ltd. / Third country release according to Article 50 Para. 1, No. 2 of the WpHG [the German Securities Trading Act]

Haier Smart Home Co.,Ltd.: Announcement of Publication of the Corporate Social Responsibility Report 2020



11.06.2021 / 14:45

Dissemination of a Post-admission Duties announcement according to Article 50 Para. 1, No. 2 WpHG transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG.

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.



Announcement of Publication of the Corporate Social Responsibility Report 2020



Qingdao / Shanghai / Frankfurt / Hongkong, 11 June 2021 - Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd. (the "Company" or "Haier Smart Home", D-share 690D.DE, A-share 600690.SH, H-share 06690.HK) yesterday published the Corporate Social Responsibility Report 2020 on the website of Hongkong Stock Exchange, Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Company in accordance with applicable trading rules of respective Exchanges. The Corporate Social Responsibility Report 2020 is available at: https://www1.hkexnews.hk/listedco/listconews/sehk/2021/0610/2021061000804.pdf and

https://smart-home.haier.com/en/gpxx/esg/P020210610668752310876.pdf?appdesc=2020%20CORPORATE%20SOCIAL%20RESPONSIBILITY%20REPORT

About Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd.:

Haier is one of the world's leading manufacturers of household appliances with a focus on smart home solutions and customized mass production. Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd. develops, produces and distributes a wide range of household appliances. These include refrigerators, freezers, washing machines, air conditioners, water heaters, kitchen appliances as well as smaller household appliances and an extensive range of intelligent household appliances. The Company distributes its products through leading household brands such as Haier, Casarte, Leader, Candy, GE Appliances, AQUA and Fisher & Paykel. Haier Smart Home Co., Ltd. has launched Smart Home Experiential Cloud, which connects homes, users, enterprises and ecosystem partners, and facilitates the integration of Haier's online, offline and micro-store businesses and supports user interaction to further optimize the user experience. IR Contact:

Yao Sun (Sophie) - Haier Smart Home Germany

T: +49 6172 9454 143

F: +49 6172 9454 42143

M: +49 160 9469 3601

Email: y.sun@haier.de

11.06.2021 The DGAP Distribution Services include Regulatory Announcements, Financial/Corporate News and Press Releases.

Archive at www.dgap.de


This news release constitutes a "designated news release" for the purposes of the Company's prospectus supplement dated April 9, 2021 to its short form base prospectus dated March 31, 2021.

- Encouraging analytical test results did not translate to an ability to consistently detect the virus in clinical samples

- Company will focus resources on advancement of other rapid tests and further research with its proprietary gold nanorod technology

Halifax, Nova Scotia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 11, 2021) - Sona Nanotech Inc. (CSE: SONA) (OTCQB: SNANF) (the "Company" or "Sona") a developer of rapid, point-of-care diagnostic tests announces that it is discontinuing its previously announced clinical trial of its COVID-19 rapid, antigen saliva test after a review of the interim results data, due to inadequate test sensitivity with clinical saliva samples and challenges with patient recruitment and enrollment into the study, as local prevalence of the virus has diminished significantly.

The study was designed to evaluate the ability to detect the COVID-19 virus in saliva samples using a novel collection device and a rapid antigen test cassette. The Company plans to focus its research strategy on continuing with its other rapid test development programs and research on its proprietary gold nanorod production technology.

Clinical trial principal investigator, Dr. David Jacobs of Humber River Hospital, comments "Unfortunately, as is often the case with prototypes, the early laboratory results did not translate well into the clinical environment. While there are many possible reasons for this discrepancy, the favored hypotheses are that either there is insufficient viral concentration in saliva, or there is an interfering substance in the saliva."

"We are disappointed that our COVID-19 test failed to demonstrate sufficient ability to detect the virus in saliva in clinical samples to warrant further investigation through this trial, but we are grateful to our collaborators at Humber River Hospital and to the volunteers in the trial," said David Regan, CEO, Sona Nanotech. "We are surprised that our clinical trial did not show a corresponding level of sensitivity to our laboratory studies which showed that our saliva test was able to detect gamma irradiated COVID-19 virus at clinically relevant levels. We were attempting to blaze a new and challenging trail in adding a less invasive, saliva-based rapid test to the arsenal of tests being used to detect the virus, something for which no other company has achieved an FDA EUA or Health Canada approval. We look forward to continuing further bold pursuits in new applications that leverage both our proprietary gold nanorod technology and the considerable base of experience afforded to us by our COVID-19 test development program."

Investor Relations Contact:

Arlen Hansen

1 604 684 6730 | 1 866 684 6730

arlen@kincommunications.com

About Sona Nanotech Inc.

Sona Nanotech is a nanotechnology life sciences firm that has developed multiple proprietary methods for the manufacture of various types of gold nanoparticles. The principal business carried out and intended to be continued by Sona is the development and application of its proprietary technologies for use in multiplex diagnostic testing platforms that will improve performance over existing tests in the market. Sona Nanotech's gold nanorod particles are CTAB (cetyltrimethylammonium) free, eliminating the toxicity risks associated with the use of other gold nanorod technologies in medical applications. It is expected that Sona's gold nanotechnologies may be adapted for use in applications, as a safe and effective delivery system for multiple medical treatments, subject to the approval of various regulatory boards, including Health Canada and the FDA.

NEITHER THE CANADIAN SECURITIES EXCHANGE NOR ITS REGULATION SERVICES PROVIDER (AS THAT TERM IS DEFINED IN THE POLICIES OF THE CANADIAN SECURITIES EXCHANGE) ACCEPTS RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE.

CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION: This press release includes certain "forward-looking statements" under applicable Canadian securities legislation, including statements regarding Sona's development of rapid tests, including a rapid antigen test for COVID-19. 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, including the risk that Sona may not be successful in developing rapid tests using its gold nanorod technology that function at sufficiently high levels for market acceptance or at all, or if successfully developed, that Sona will obtain required regulatory approvals. 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. Sona disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.

Not for distribution to United States newswire services or for dissemination in the United States.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/87298
NICE uphold appeal by Kyowa Kirin, for POTELIGEO in the treatment of those living with certain ultra-rare blood cancers

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has upheld an appeal lodged by Kyowa Kirin, Lymphoma Action and Leukaemia Care, and the UK Cutaneous Lymphoma Group (UKCLG) as part of the Single Technology Appraisal for POTELIGEO (mogamulizumab) for the treatment of adults with the ultra-rare blood cancers mycosis fungoides (MF) or Sezary syndrome (SS) who have received at least one prior systemic therapy.1

The oral appeal hearing took place on 10 May 2021 in front of an independent Appeal Panel appointed by NICE. The Panel heard arguments from representatives of the appellants against the decision not to recommend POTELIGEO, as published in a Final Appraisal Document (FAD) on 4 March 2021.2

The parties involved in the appeal welcome this decision as it represents a significant and positive step forward for the cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (CTCL) community, where there is a high clinical unmet need. Kyowa Kirin remains committed to finding a solution for people living with SS or MF to have access to POTELIGEO and will continue discussions with NICE and NHS England to find a resolution.

Richard Johnson, Northern Cluster General Manager, responsible for the UK at Kyowa Kirin, commented: "The outcome of this appeal is an important step in enabling access to an innovative treatment for people with MF or SS who have few systemic treatment options. We remain committed to working with the patient and clinical community, as appropriate, and we are optimistic that future reconsideration of evidence by the Committee, could resolve the challenges with this appraisal. We strongly believe in the clinical and cost effectiveness of POTELIGEO and will continue a dialogue with NICE and NHS England."

MF and SS are two forms of CTCL3 which is a serious and potentially life-threatening form of cancer.4 Additionally, there is a significant impact on quality of life for those caring for an individual living with CTCL.5 CTCL is treatable but not curable and there is a clear unmet need for new treatment options.

Ropinder Gill, Chief Executive at Lymphoma Action commented: "We're very grateful and pleased that the NICE Appeal Panel upheld the appeal around mogamulizumab on a number of grounds. This means that by relooking at aspects such as mogamulizumab's cost effectiveness, there is an opportunity to make this treatment available to those people affected by skin lymphoma who have limited treatment options left. We are hopeful that NICE's reassessment might bring parity with the SMC's decision to make mogamulizumab available in Scotland."

About POTELIGEO (mogamulizumab)

Mogamulizumabis a first-in-class humanised monoclonal antibody (mAb) directed against CC chemokine receptor 4 (CCR4), a protein consistently expressed on cancerous cells seen in both MF and SS;6,7,8 once mogamulizumab binds to CCR4, it increases attraction of immune cells from the immune system to destroy the cancerous cells.9

Mogamulizumab has been shown to offer benefits to many patients with MF and SS.10 The MAVORIC trial compared the efficacy of mogamulizumab with vorinostat in previously treated people with relapsed or refractory mycosis fungoides or Sezary syndrome, two types of Cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (CTCL).10 Patients taking mogamulizumab experienced control over their disease for more than twice as long as those taking the comparator treatment, vorinostat*1 (7.7 months vs 3.1 months of median progression free survival), the primary endpoint of the trial.10 Levels of adverse events were similar between the two treatment groups.10 The MAVORIC trial is the largest in CTCL; it enrolled a total of 372 patients across 61 sites in 11 countries (of which 16 sites were in Europe, including three in England).10

About Mycosis Fungoides (MF) and Sezary Syndrome (SS)

MF and SS are characterised by localisation of cancerous white blood cells called T lymphocytes (T cells), to the skin.11,12 These cancerous T cells consistently express a protein called CC-chemokine receptor 4 (CCR4), which enables them to move from the blood to the skin.6,7,8 When these cancerous T cells move to the skin, they can create a localised inflammatory immune skin response, commonly resulting in visible skin symptoms of red patches or plaques 6,13,14,15,16 which can resemble psoriasis or eczema.11

MF and SS can affect the skin, blood, lymph nodes (part of the body's immune system which is spread throughout the body) and internal organs.17 All four areas of the body are used to assess disease stage,18,19 and clinically significant involvement of the blood, particularly in more advanced disease, is linked with increased morbidity and an overall reduction in patient survival.18,20,21

CTCL can take, on average, between 2 and 7 years for individuals to receive a confirmed diagnosis.22 It is critical for doctors to consider CTCL as an early differential diagnosis as the patient's prognosis can be affected if the disease progresses to later stages.23 Whilst most individuals that present with early stage disease do not progress to a more severe stage,24 patients with advanced disease have significantly poorer outcomes with only around half of patients (52%) surviving for just 5 years.18

CTCL is a ultra-rare disease that affects 0.7 per 100,000 patients across the UK.25 The annual incidence of MF in Europe is estimated to be between 1 in 110,000 to 1 in 350,000.26 The annual incidence of SS is 1 in 10,000,000.27 Together they represent approximately 65% of all cases of CTCL.17

About Kyowa Kirin

Kyowa Kirin strives to create and deliver novel medicines with life-changing value. As a Japan based Global Specialty Pharmaceutical Company with a more than 70-year heritage, the company applies cutting-edge science including an expertise in antibody research and engineering, to address the needs of patients and society across multiple therapeutic areas including Nephrology, Oncology, Immunology/Allergy and Neurology. Across our four regions Japan, Asia Pacific, North America and EMEA/International we focus on our purpose, to make people smile, and are united by our shared values of commitment to life, teamwork/Wa, innovation, and integrity. You can learn more about the business of Kyowa Kirin at:

https://www.kyowakirin.com.

KKI/UK/POT/0019

Date of Preparation: June 2021

References

1* Vorinostat is a USA FDA-licensed existing treatment for MF and SS and is currently unlicensed in the EU

1 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Single Technology Appraisal Appeal Hearing. Advice on mogamulizumab for previously treated mycosis fungoides and Sezary syndrome [ID1405]. Available from https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/gid-ta10305/documents/appeal-decision Last Accessed: June 2021.

2 NICE FAD on mogamulizumab for treating for previously treated mycosis fungoides and Sezary syndrome [ID1405]. Available from: https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/gid-ta10305/documents/final-appraisal-determination-document. Last Accessed: June 2021.

3 European Medicines Agency (EMA). POTELIGEO 4mg/mL, concentrate for solution for infusion product information. Available from https://www.medicines.org.uk/emc/product/11174. Last Accessed: June 2021.

4 National Organization for Rare Disorders: Cutaneous T-Cell Lymphomas. Available from: https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/cutaneous-t-cell-lymphomas/. Last Accessed: June 2021.

5 Williams et al (2020) Health state utilities associated with caring for an individual with CTCL. Journal of Medical Economics. 2020; 23(10):1142-1150.

6 Ferenczi K, Fuhlbrigge RC, Pinkus J, et al. Increased CCR4 expression in cutaneous T cell lymphoma. J Invest Dermatol. 2002;119:1405-10.

7 Yoshie O, et al. Frequent Expression of CCR4 in Adult T-Cell Leukemia and Human T-cell Leukemia Virus Type 1-transformed T cells. Blood. 2002;99(5):1505-11.

8 Ishida T, et al. Clinical Significance of CCR4 Expression in Adult T-cell Leukemia/Lymphoma: Its Close Association With Skin Involvement and Unfavorable Outcome. Clin Cancer Res. 2003;9:3625-34.

9 Duvic M, et al. Mogamulizumab for the treatment of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma: recent advances and clinical potential. Ther Adv Hematol. 2016;7(3):171-174.

10 Kim YH, Bagot M, Pinter-Brown L, et al. Mogamulizumab versus vorinostat in previously treated cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (MAVORIC): an international, open-label, randomised, controlled phase 3 trial. Lancet Oncol. 2018;19(9):1192-1204.

11 Cutaneous Lymphoma Foundation, Lymphoma Action and Lymphoma Coalition Europe. Cutaneous lymphoma a patient's guide. 2019. Available from: https://lymphoma-action.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/documents/2019-06/Cutaneous%20lymphoma%20-%20patient%26%23039%3Bs%20guide%20-%20English%20language%20source%20document%20-%20final%20version%20for%20publication%20-%20April%202019.pd Last accessed: June 2021.

12 Mariani M, Lang R, Binda E, et al. Dominance of CCL22 over CCL17 in induction of chemokine receptor CCR4 desensitization and internalization on human Th2 cells. Eur J Immunol. 2004;34(1):231-240.

13 Wilcox RA. Cutaneous T-cell lymphoma: 2016 update on diagnosis, risk-stratification, and management. Am J Hematol. 2016;91(1):151-65.

14 Ni X, Jorgensen JL, Goswami M, et al. Reduction of regulatory T cells by Mogamulizumab, a defucosylated anti-CC chemokine receptor 4 antibody, in patients with aggressive/refractory mycosis fungoides and Sezary syndrome. Clin Cancer Res. 2014; 21(2):274-85.

15 Kakinuma T, Sugaya M, Nakamura K, et al. Hymus and activation-regulated chemokine (TARC/CCL17) in mycosis fungoides: serum TARC levels reflect the disease activity of mycosis fungoides. J Am Acad Dermatol. 2003;48(1):23-30.

16 Girardi M, Heald PW, Wilson LD. The Pathogenesis of Mycosis Fungoides. NEJM. 2004;350(19):1978-88.

17 Olsen E, Vonderheid E, Pimpinelli N, et al. Revisions to the staging and classification of mycosis fungoides and Sezary syndrome: a proposal of the International Society for Cutaneous Lymphomas (ISCL) and the cutaneous lymphoma task force of the European Organization of Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC). Blood. 2007;110(6):1713-22.

18 Scarisbrick JJ, Prince M, Vermeer MH, et al. Cutaneous Lymphoma International Consortium Study of Outcome in Advanced Stages of Mycosis Fungoides and Sezary Syndrome: Effect of Specific Prognostic Markers on Survival and Development of a Prognostic Model. J Clin Oncol. 2015;33(32):3766-3773.

19 Willemze R, Hodak E, Zinzani PL et al. Primary cutaneous lymphomas: ESMO Clinical Practice Guidelines for diagnosis, treatment and follow-up. Ann Oncol. 2018;29(4):1-29.

20 Kim EJ, Hess S, Richardson SK, et al. Immunopathogenesis and therapy of cutaneous T cell lymphoma. J Clin Invest. 2005;115(4):798-812.

21 Scarisbrick JJ, Whittaker, S, Evans, AV, et al. Prognostic significance of tumor burden in the blood of patients with erythrodermic primary cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. Blood. 2001;97(3):624-30.

22 CL Foundation: A Patient's Guide. Available from: https://www.clfoundation.org/sites/default/files/2018-04/a_patients_guide.pdf. Last Accessed: June 2021.

23 Agar N, et al. Survival Outcomes and Prognostic Factors in Mycosis Fungoides/Sezary Syndrome: Validation of the Revised International Society for Cutaneous Lymphomas/European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer Staging Proposal. J Clin Ocol. 2010;28(31):4730-4739.

24 Krejsgaard T, Lindahl LM, Mongan NP, et al. Malignant inflammation in cutaneous T-cell lymphoma-a hostile takeover. Semin Immunopathol. 2017;39(3):269-282.

25 Gilson, D, et al. British Association of Dermatologists and UK Cutaneous Lymphoma Group Guidelines for the management of primary cutaneous lymphoma. British Journal of Dermatology. 2019. 180. pp.496-526

26 Orphanet: Mycosis Fungoides. Available from: https://www.orpha.net/consor/cgi-bin/OC_Exp.php?Lng=GB&Expert=2584Last Accessed: June 2021.

27 Orphanet: Sezary syndrome. Available from: https://www.orpha.net/consor/cgi-bin/OC_Exp.php?Expert=3162. Last Accessed: June 2021.

KKI/UK/POT/0019

Date of Preparation: June 2021

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005282/en/

Contacts:

Contacts for Kyowa Kirin Co., Ltd.:

Media

Victoria Hayes

+ 44 (0)7771107406

Email: victoria.hayes@kyowakirin.com
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Alternative asset manager Apollo Global Management, Inc. (APO) announced Friday that David Simon, chairman, president and CEO of Simon Property Group, Inc. (SPG), will be added to its Board of Directors in June. It will also add four members of retirement services company Athene Holding Ltd.'s (ATH) Board of Directors to its Board of Directors of the combined company, upon consummation of the Athene-Apollo merger. Athene Chairman and CEO Jim Belardi as well as directors Mitra Hormozi, Marc Beilinson and Lynn Swann will also join the board of the combined company upon closing of the merger, which is expected in January 2022. Meanwhile, Physician and Scientist Siddhartha Mukherjee has informed Apollo that he will not stand for reelection after his term is complete. Earlier this year, Apollo announced that the combined company will have a diverse, 18-member board, which will be two-thirds independent. 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.
NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES.

VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / June 11, 2021 / Great Atlantic Resources Corp. (TSXV.GR) (the "Company" or "Great Atlantic"), is pleased to announce that it has closed its private placement offering (the "Offering") for aggregate gross proceeds of approximately $2,060,000, consisting of: (i) $1,360,000 in flow-through units of the Company (the "FT Units") at a price of $0.68 per FT Unit, and (ii) $700,000 in units of the Company (the "Units") at a price of $0.50 per Unit.

Each FT Unit is comprised of one common share of the Company that will qualify as a "flow-through share" within the meaning of subsection 66(15) of the Income Tax Act (Canada) (the "Tax Act") (a "FT Common Share") and one common share purchase warrant of the Company (a "Warrant"). Each Unit is comprised of one common share of the Company (a "Common Share") and one Warrant. Each Warrant entitles the holder to purchase one Common (a "Warrant Share") at an exercise price equal to $0.75 at any time up to 36 months from closing of the Offering.

The gross proceeds from the sale of FT Units (other than the minimal amount allocable to the Warrants) will be used for exploration expenses on the Company's mining projects as permitted under the Tax Act to qualify as Canadian Exploration Expenses ("CEE") as defined in the Tax Act. The FT Common Shares, Common Shares and the Warrant Shares to be issued under the Offering have a hold period of four months and one day closing of the Offering.

In a second-step transaction, and part and parcel of the completion of the Offering, Eric Sprott, through 2176423 Ontario Ltd., a corporation that is beneficially owned by him, acquired 2,000,000 Units for approximate consideration of $1,000,000. Subsequent to the closing of the offering, Mr. Sprott beneficially owns or controls 2,000,000 Common Shares of the Company and 2,000,000 Warrants, representing approximately 9.2% of the issued and outstanding common shares of the Company on a non-diluted basis and approximately 16.9% of the issued and outstanding common shares of the Company on a partially diluted basis, assuming exercise of the Warrants forming part of the Units acquired. Prior to the offering, Mr. Sprott did not beneficially own or control any securities of the Company.

The Units were acquired by Mr. Sprott for investment purposes. Mr. Sprott has a long-term view of the investment and may acquire additional securities of Great Atlantic Resources, including on the open market or through private acquisitions, or sell securities of the company, including on the open market or through private dispositions in the future, depending on market conditions, reformulation of plans and/or other factors that Mr. Sprott considers relevant from time to time.

A copy of Mr. Sprott's early-warning report will be filed under Great Atlantic's profile on SEDAR and may also be obtained by calling Mr. Sprott's office at 416-945-3294 (200 Bay St., Suite 2600, Royal Bank Plaza, South Tower, Toronto, Ontario M5J 2J1).

In connection with the Offering, the Company issued Units and broker warrants to a finder. Each broker warrant is exercisable to acquire one Unit at $0.50 per Unit for a period of 36 months from the issuance date thereof.

On Behalf of the board of directors

"Christopher R Anderson"

Mr. Christopher R. Anderson "Always be positive, strive for solutions, and never give up"

President CEO Director

604-488-3900 - Dir

Investor Relations:

Please call 604-488-3900

About Great Atlantic Resources Corp.: Great Atlantic Resources Corp. is a Canadian exploration company focused on the discovery and development of mineral assets in the resource-rich and sovereign risk-free realm of Atlantic Canada, one of the number one mining regions of the world. Great Atlantic is currently surging forward building the company utilizing a Project Generation model, with a special focus on the most critical elements on the planet that are prominent in Atlantic Canada, Antimony, Tungsten and Gold.

Forward-looking statements: This press release includes certain statements that may be deemed "forward-looking statements". All statements in this release, other than statements of historical facts, that address future exploration drilling, exploration activities and events or developments that the Company expects, are forward looking statements. Although the Company believes the expectations expressed in such forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions, such statements are not guarantees of future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include exploitation and exploration successes, continued availability of financing, and general economic, market or business conditions.

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.

Great Atlantic Resource Corp

888 Dunsmuir Street - Suite 888, Vancouver, B.C., V6C 3K4

SOURCE: Great Atlantic Resources Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/651392/Great-Atlantic-Completes-20-Million-Offering-Backed-by-Mr-Eric-Sprott
France's Macron urges European sovereignty ahead of G7, NATO summits

Xinhua) 08:24, June 11, 2021

French President Emmanuel Macron attends a press conference with Secretary-General of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Jens Stoltenberg (not in the picture) at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, May 21, 2021. (Photo by Aurelien Morissard/Xinhua)

On the NATO summit next week in Brussels, French President Emmanuel Macron, who said in 2019 that the trans-Atlantic alliance was experiencing "brain death", stressed that "the strategic capability autonomy of Europeans should be recognized."

PARIS, June 10 (Xinhua) -- The European Union needs to build the framework of its strategic autonomy on economic, industrial and technological issues as well as military values, said French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday.

"For me at the heart of these days to come is the European sovereignty," Macron told a press conference at Elysee on the eve of the Group of Seven (G7) summit in the United Kingdom from June 11 to 13.

Citing "a solid record" by Europe in this regard in recent years, including progress in defense, digital governance and post-pandemic recovery plan, Macron called for a new partnership with the United States.

On the NATO summit next week in Brussels, Macron, who said in 2019 that the trans-Atlantic alliance was experiencing "brain death", stressed that "the strategic capability autonomy of Europeans should be recognized."

Macron said that "NATO must clarify its common values. NATO must build a rule of conduct among allies and NATO must clarify its concept."

"What seems to me to be very important in this context is that we, as Europeans, assume that we are the players in arms control on our soil. This is an essential subject for the months and years to come," he said.

"Europe is not simply an object or a territory of the distribution of influences. We are a subject of international geopolitics and we must assume it," he added.

Flags of the European Union fly outside the EU headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, May 21, 2021. (Xinhua/Zheng Huansong)

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)
TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / June 11, 2021 / Mongolia Growth Group Ltd. (TSXV:YAK)(OTC PINK:MNGGF) ("MGG") or ("the Company") a commercial real estate investment company participating in the Mongolian economy, announces the passage of all resolutions and the election of all nominated directors (Nick Cousyn, Jim Dwyer, Brad Farquhar, Harris Kupperman and Robert Scott) at the Company's Annual General Meeting held on June 10, 2021.

For further information on the Corporation, please visit www.mongoliagrowthgroup.com

or contact:

Mrs. Genevieve Walkden, Corporate Secretary

(877) 644-1186

gwalkden@MongoliaGrowthGroup.com

Mongolia Growth Group Ltd. is a publicly traded and leading property investment and development company in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Mongolia Growth Group Ltd. owns an extensive property portfolio in diversified segments of the property market, with an emphasis on institutional-grade commercial assets.

Forward-looking Information and Statements

This press release contains certain statements or disclosures relating to MGG that are based on the expectations of its management as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to MGG which may constitute forward-looking statements or information ("forward-looking statements") under applicable securities laws. All such statements and disclosures, other than those of historical fact, which address activities, events, outcomes, results or developments that MGG anticipates or expects may, or will occur in the future (in whole or in part) should be considered forward-looking statements. In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by terms such as "forecast", "future", "may", "will", "expect", "anticipate", "believe", "potential", "enable", "plan", "continue", "contemplate", "pro-forma", or other comparable terminology.

In particular, forward-looking statements in this press release include, but are not limited to, statements concerning MGG's upcoming annual meeting of shareholders and the timing thereof, the approval of the Rights Plan, the operation of the Rights Plan in the event of certain circumstances, and the amendments to the General By-Law.

Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of assumptions that, while considered reasonable by MGG as of the date of such statements, are inherently subject to business, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies. The assumptions of MGG used for this news release may prove to be incorrect. Forward-looking statements are based on current expectations, estimates and projections that involve a number of risks which could cause actual results to vary and in some instances to differ materially from those anticipated by MGG and described in the forward-looking statements contained in this press release.

Although MGG believes that the material factors, expectations and assumptions expressed in such forward-looking statements are reasonable based on information available to it on the date such statements were made, no assurances can be given as to future results, levels of activity and achievements and such statements are not guarantees of future performance. MGG's actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in forward-looking statements and readers should no place undue importance or reliance on the forward looking-statements. Statements including forward looking statements are made as of the date they are given and, except as required by applicable securities laws, MGG disclaims any intention or obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

SOURCE: Mongolia Growth Group Ltd.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/651405/Mongolia-Growth-Group-Announces-AGM-Results
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 11, 2021) - Bluesky Digital Assets Corp., (CSE: BTC) (CSE: BTC.PR.A) (OTCQB: BTCWF) ("Bluesky" or the "Corporation") released today a summary of its Unaudited Q1, 2021 Interim Financial Statements for the three months ended March 31, 2021. Key highlights include:

- Total Gross Revenues from the Corporation's Digital Assets Mining operations increased to $743,267 CDN in Q1, 2021 from $101,611 CDN in Q1, 2020 representing a significant increase of 631%.

- Total Gross Revenue from the Corporation's Digital Assets Mining operations increased to $743,267 CDN in Q1, 2021 from $182,054 CDN in Q4, 2020, representing a quarter over quarter significant increase of 308%.

- Total Gross Revenue from the Corporation's Digital Assets Mining operations amounted to $665,533 CDN for all of fiscal 2020 representing a monthly average of $55,369 CDN per month in Gross Revenue being generated from the Corporation's Digital Assets Mining operations. The monthly Gross Revenue generated from the Corporation's Digital Assets Mining operations average was $247,755 CDN per month for the first three months of 2021, representing a significant monthly average increase of 347% vs. fiscal 2020's monthly average of $55,369 CDN per month.

- Total available cash increased to $1,785,077 CDN in Q1, 2021 from $636,127 CDN in Q1, 2020 representing an increase of 181%.

- Digital Asset Mining operating costs amounted to $173,903 CDN in Q1, 2021.

- Total losses increased to -$1,263,233 in Q1, 2021, from -$371,735 in Q1, 2020 representing an increase of 240%. It should be noted that regarding the Q1, 2021 quarterly loss, the majority of the total operating expenses for Q1 of 2021 were due to a one-time issuance of Stock Options that were issued to consultants in connection to the completion of the Corporation's Q4, 2020 and Q1, 2021 equity financings. The valuation of the Stock Options was recorded as $1,709,000 CDN. The Corporation expects that these Stock Options will be exercised resulting in cash proceeds coming into the treasury. Furthermore, Depreciation on equipment amounted to $118,770 CDN for the quarter. It is important to note that with the removal of the Stock Options and the equipment Depreciation the Corporation would have actually realized a profit of $564,537 CDN for the quarter.

- Fully Diluted EPS remained as -$0.04 for Q1, 2021 vs. -$0.02 in Q1, 2020.

- The Corporation exited a legacy business segment in Q1, 2021. The initial investment in this legacy business segment amounted to $50,000 CDN and therefore the Corporation realized a significant gain of $269,149 CDN from the exit. With the proceeds from the legacy business exit and combined with the revenue from the Corporation's active digital crypto mining operations, the Corporation brought in a combined $1,012,416 CDN in gross proceeds from its business operations for the quarter which represents an all-time high and a corporate record for a quarterly result.

About Bluesky Digital Assets Corp.

Bluesky Digital Assets Corp, is building a high value digital currency enterprise. Bluesky mines digital currencies, such as Bitcoin and Ether, and is developing value-added technology services for the digital currency market, such as proprietary technology solutions. Offering a complete ecosystem of value-creation, Bluesky is targeting reinvesting appropriate portions of its digital currency mining profits back into its operations. A percentage of the profit will be invested in the development of a proprietary Artificial Intelligence ("AI") based technology. Overall, Bluesky takes an approach that enables the Corporation to scale, and respond to changing conditions, within the still-emerging Blockchain industry. The Corporation is poised to capture value in successive phases as this industry continues to scale.

For more information please visit Bluesky at: https://www.blueskydigitalassets.com

For further information please contact:

Mr. Ben Gelfand

CEO & Director

Bluesky Digital Assets Corp.

T: (416) 363-3833

E: ben.gelfand@blueskydigitalassets.com



Mr. Frank Kordy

Secretary & Director

Bluesky Digital Assets Corp.

T: (647) 466-4037

E: frank.kordy@blueskydigitalassets.com

Forward-Looking Statements

Information set forth in this news release may involve forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. The forward- looking statements contained herein are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements included in this document are made as of the date of this document and the Corporation disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable securities legislation. Although management believes that the expectations represented in such forward-looking statements are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities described herein and accordingly undue reliance should not be put on such. Neither CSE nor its Regulation Services Provider as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. We seek safe harbor.

- 30 -

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/87307
Phoenix, Arizona--(Newsfile Corp. - June 11, 2021) - The Stock Day Podcast welcomed Hammer Fiber Optics Holdings Corp. (OTCQB: HMMR) ("the Company"), a telecommunications company investing in the future of wireless technology. CEO of the Company, Erik Levitt, joined Stock Day host Everett Jolly.

Jolly began the interview by asking about a recent announcement detailing the Company's third quarter operational results. "We're really excited to report our earnings this quarter," shared Levitt. "We saw quarter-over-quarter growth of 20.12% and over 57% versus the same quarter in the prior year," said Levitt. "It shows that our current operations have completely replaced the revenues from our discontinued operations."

"We're just starting to see the benefits of the agreements we made last year with large operators," he continued. "We're really pleased with the growth that we have seen so far because it has all been organic," said Levitt. "We're also happy to report positive EBITDA for the quarter."

"We were able to reduce our balance sheet debt substantially in the past two quarters and we anticipate cleaning up the balance sheet further in the current quarter and in subsequent quarters," said Levitt. "Our new revenue streams and services, like HammerCall and our fixed wireless network, are going to have even stronger margins that will contribute substantially toward EBITDA."

"Last time you were on the show, we discussed Hammer's reentry into the fixed wireless market. Where are we at in that process?", asked Jolly. "We've recently completed the construction of our network in Huntsville," shared Levitt, before elaborating on the Company's first tower site. "It is 120 feet high and it provides us with substantial market potential," said Levitt. "We have over 8,000 target customers for our initial market efforts," he added, noting the Company's competitively priced services. "We're going to be leveraging our existing infrastructure to keep our fixed costs of delivery relatively low, and we expect that our first customers are going to be live on the network this month."

Jolly then asked about the Company's significant growth. "Our approach has been to provide really high-quality services to the market," said Levitt. "Our subsidiaries are really well positioned to capture business from competitors that are exiting the space," explained Levitt. "Going forward, now that there have been some consolidations and exits, as new customers enter the market, we're going to be very well positioned to handle them, which will provide growth going forward."

Levitt then elaborated on the Company's mobile-first, video-first collaboration platform, HammerCall. "We've already signed agreements with white label partners, and we expect to add more in the coming months. This will provide new revenue streams for the company," said Levitt. "We have also upgraded our traditional voice platform and continue to make updates to our SMS platform, including adding MMS services."

"What can we expect from Hammer in the next two to three quarters?", asked Jolly. "Management will be focusing on organic growth for the OTT and fixed wireless segments," shared Levitt. "We're going to be undertaking major marketing efforts in Huntsville to get as many residential business customers as possible," he continued. "On the OTT, we're going to continue to work on our HammerCall platform, our DominicaVoice platform, and our traditional voice and ITSP programs to add as many subscribers as possible."

To close the interview, Levitt expressed his gratitude for the continued support of the Company's investors. "I think we're going to see some accelerated growth and a lot of really nice, new services coming out both in the telecommunications segment and also in other segments of our business," said Levitt. "We look forward to continuing to provide expanded value to our shareholders in the future."

To hear Erik Levitt's entire interview, follow the link to the podcast here: https://audioboom.com/posts/7885126-hammer-fiber-optics-holdings-corp-discusses-third-quarter-earnings-and-operational-improvements

Investors Hangout is a proud sponsor of "Stock Day," and Stock Day Media encourages listeners to visit the company's message board at https://investorshangout.com/.

About Hammer

Hammer Fiber Optics Holdings Corp. (OTCQB: HMMR) is a telecommunications company investing in the future of wireless technology. Hammer's "Everything Wireless" go to market strategy includes the development of high-speed fixed wireless service for residential and small businesses using its wireless fiber platform, Hammer Wireless AIR, Over-the-Top services such as voice, SMS and video collaboration services, the construction of smart city networks and hosting services including cloud and colocation. For more information contact our Investor Relations Team at info@hammerfiber.com.

About The "Stock Day" Podcast

Founded in 2013, Stock Day is the fastest growing media outlet for Nano-Cap and Micro-Cap companies. It educates investors while simultaneously working with penny stock and OTC companies, providing transparency and clarification of under-valued, under-sold Micro-Cap stocks of the market. Stock Day provides companies with customized solutions to their news distribution in both national and international media outlets. The Stock Day Podcast is the number one radio show of its kind in America.

SOURCE:

Stock Day Media

(602) 821-1102

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/87306
CHICAGO, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the new market research report "AI in Computer Vision Market With Covid-19 Impact by Component, Machine Learning Models, Function, Application (Industrial, Non-Industrial), End-Use Industry (Security & Surveillance, Consumer Electronics) and Geography - Global Forecast to 2026", published by MarketsandMarkets, the AI in Computer Vision Market is estimated to be valued at USD 15.9 billion in 2021 and reach USD 51.3 billion by 2026; it is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 26.3% during the forecast period (2021-2026). The major factors driving the growth of AI in computer vision market are growing need for quality inspection and automation, increasing demand for computer vision systems in non-traditional and emerging applications, and rising need for ASICs and government initiatives to support industrial automation and integration of AI into the edge devices. However, several factors, such as rising security concerns related to cloud-based image processing and analytics can act as a key challenge in the market during the forecast period.

Ask for PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=141658064

Software is projected to witness the highest CAGR for the forecast period

Software are expected to hold a major share and is expected to grow at a higher CAGR during the forecast period. Software tools, combined with a suite of computer vision software allow an individual to interface with a camera and a production line and automatically perform image improvement, location analysis, flaw detection, character verification, character recognition, symbol recognition, and several other functions.

Non-industrial to account for the largest share of AI in computer vision market during the forecast period

In the non-industrial market, the growing demand for camera-enabled smartphones at both front and rear ends is driving the market for AI in computer vision, especially in the consumer segment. However, the industrial segment is expected to grow at a higher rate as modern technologies can help in several traffic situation systems, including toll collection, monitoring traffic flows, and identifying violations. 3D machine vision also has a huge potential for growth in non-industrial applications such as security and surveillance, postal and logistics, and intelligent transportation systems (ITS), where image quality, dimension, and orientation play a crucial role. Modern technologies can enhance several transportation systems, including toll collection systems and traffic monitoring systems.

Supervised Learning will have the highest growth in the coming years

Supervised learning is expected to account ~84% share of the overall AI in computer vision market by 2026. The growing adoption of supervised learning in various healthcare applications, especially medical imaging, and the use of different sensors and devices in modern facial recognition algorithms supplement the growth of this segment. Learning models are currently being implemented to develop various AI products and services. Some recent applications of these models are in autonomous vehicles/connected cars, virtual assistants (Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Google's Google Now), expert systems, drones, computer-aided diagnostics, video games, and image recognition systems.

Browse in-depth TOC on "AI in Computer Vision Market"

163 - Tables

71 - Figures

246 - Pages

Inquiry Before Buying: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_BuyingNew.asp?id=141658064

Consumer Electronics is expected to hold the largest share in 2026

There is an increasing demand for AI-enabled computer vision systems in consumer electronics such as smartphones, desktops, and laptops is driving the growth of the AI in computer vision market. Healthcare, however, is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period as AI-enabled computer vision technology plays a vital role in applications like radiology, medical imaging. Apart from this, increasing participation of various automotive and IT giants to develop autonomous cars is driving the growth of the AI in computer vision market for the automotive industry. In the security & surveillance industry, AI-enabled computer vision systems are increasingly being used to identify threats and people, thus boosting the adoption of AI-enabled computer vision solutions in this industry. Further, advancements in machine vision technology, such as smart cameras and automation, have increased the scope of AI in computer vision market in the manufacturing industry, which is expected to grow at the second-highest CAGR by 2026.

APAC is attributed to growing at the highest CAGR in AI in computer vision market during the forecast period (2021-2026)

APAC is expected to grow at the highest CAGR in the AI in computer vision market. Countries such China, Japan, and South Korea are expected to be the major contributors to the market in APAC. Increased manufacturing operations contribute mainly to the economic development in China, while the rising demand to incorporate Industry 4.0 and advanced manufacturing techniques for increasing automation across various applications in India is contributing to the tremendous growth of AI in computer vision in APAC. North America is expected to hold the largest share of ~40% of the global AI in computer vision market in 2021. The presence of prominent AI technology providers, such as IBM (US), Google (US), Microsoft (US), NVIDIA (US), Intel (US), and Facebook (US) is complementing the growth of the regional market. The growing concern about the security of critical infrastructure and sensitive data has increased government intervention in recent years and resulted in the adoption of AI in computer vision in security applications. Europe is likely to hold a share of ~29% of the AI in computer vision market in 2021. Germany and the UK are the major contributors to the AI in computer vision market in this region. The automotive industry in the UK is contributing to the growth of the AI in computer vision market.

In 2020, the AI in computer vision market was dominated by NVIDIA (US), Intel Corp. (US), Microsoft Corp. (US), IBM Corp. (US) and Qualcomm (US).

Related Reports:

3D Machine Vision Market with COVID-19 impact Analysis by Offering (Hardware and Software), Product (PC-based and Smart Camera-based), Application, Vertical (Industrial and Non-Industrial) & Geography - Global Forecast till 2025

Machine Vision Market with COVID-19 impact Analysis by Deployment (General & Robotic cell), Component (Hardware and Software), Product (PC-based and Smart camera-based), Application, End-user Industry & Region - Forecast to 2025

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.

MarketsandMarkets' flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "Knowledge Store" 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.

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MarketsandMarkets INC.

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Fredericton, New Brunswick--(Newsfile Corp. - June 11, 2021) - TRU Precious Metals Corp. (TSXV: TRU) (OTCQB: TRUIF) (FSE: 706) ("TRU" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that shares of its common stock have resumed trading on the OTCQB Venture Market (the "OTCQB Venture") in the United States under the stock symbol "TRUIF". This is following the filing and completion of a Change of Business regarding the Company with the TSX Venture Exchange (as announced on May 13, 2021). TRU is also pleased to announce that its common shares are now eligible for electronic clearing and settlement through The Depository Trust Company ("DTC") in the United States.

TRU Co-Founder and CEO Joel Freudman, commented: "I am pleased that TRU has resumed trading on the OTCQB Venture following the pause we underwent as we completed our Change of Business to a mining issuer. The OTCQB Venture provides TRU with access to an efficient and transparent trading platform within the United States market. I am also equally pleased that our common shares are now DTC eligible, as it represents an important additional step forward in increasing liquidity, broadening our shareholder base, and building a strong presence for our company within the US capital markets sphere".

DTC is a subsidiary of The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, based in the United States, that manages the electronic clearing and settlement of publicly traded companies. Securities that are eligible to be electronically cleared and settled through DTC are considered "DTC eligible". This electronic method of clearing securities streamlines the process of trading, enhances liquidity, and provides direct access to investors and brokers throughout the OTC Capital Markets in the United States.

About TRU Precious Metals Corp.

TRU has assembled a portfolio of 5 gold exploration properties in the highly prospective Central Newfoundland Gold Belt. The Company has an option with a subsidiary of TSX-listed Altius Minerals Corporation to purchase 100% of the Golden Rose Project, located along the deposit-bearing Cape Ray - Valentine Lake Shear Zone. TRU also owns 100% of the Twilite Gold Project, located along the same Shear Zone, and 3 under-explored properties including its Rolling Pond Property (under option) bordering New Found Gold Corp.'s high-grade Queensway Project. TRU's common shares trade on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "TRU", on the OTCQB Venture Market under the symbol "TRUIF", and on the Frankfurt exchange under the symbol "706".

TRU is a portfolio company of Resurgent Capital Corp. ("Resurgent"), a merchant bank providing venture capital markets advisory services and proprietary financing. Resurgent works with promising public and pre-public micro-capitalization Canadian companies. For more information on Resurgent and its portfolio companies, please visit Resurgent's LinkedIn profile at https://ca.linkedin.com/company/resurgent-capital-corp.

For further information about TRU, please contact:

Joel Freudman

Co-Founder, President & CEO

TRU Precious Metals Corp.

Phone: 1-855-760-2TRU (2878)

Email: ir@trupreciousmetals.com

Website: www.trupreciousmetals.com

To connect with TRU via social media, below are links:

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/TRU-Precious-Metals-Corp-100919195193616

Twitter

https://twitter.com/corp_tru

LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/company/tru-precious-metals-corp

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHghHMDQaYgS1rDHiZIeLUg/

Cautionary Statements

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 certain forward-looking statements, including those relating to the benefits of the Company's OTCQB Venture resumption of trading and DTC Eligibility. These statements are based on numerous assumptions believed by management to be reasonable in the circumstances and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including without limitation: volatility in financial markets, economic conditions, and precious metals prices; regulatory approval process; and those other risks described in the Company's continuous disclosure documents. Actual results may differ materially from results contemplated by the forward-looking statements herein. Investors and others should carefully consider the foregoing factors and should not place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements herein except as required by applicable securities laws.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/87252
Y-T-D sales total $14.6 million

CHICO, CA / ACCESSWIRE / June 11, 2021 / AmeraMex International, Inc. (OTCQB:AMMX), a provider of heavy equipment for logistics companies, infrastructure construction and forestry conservation, announced that it has received $1.5 million in equipment orders. Year-to-date, AmeraMex has announced sales of approximately $14.6 million.

AmeraMex CEO Lee Hamre commented, "We have had another great week with orders totaling over $1.5 million. These orders consist of forklifts, loaded container handlers and an ASV RT-40 Posi-track Loader. The equipment is being shipped to sawmills, a hazard waste removal company and a logistics company located in Alaska and the West Coast.

"We are pleased with our year-to-date sales and have several large to small opportunities in the pipeline. Our internal projections are on target indicating a great year for the Company, added Hamre."

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/651413/AmeraMex-International-Finishes-the-Week-with-Equipment-Orders-Totaling-15-Million
WINNIPEG, MB / ACCESSWIRE / June 11, 2021 / FP NEWSPAPERS INC. (TSXV:FP) ("FPI") today announced Jacqueline Driedger has resigned as Secretary of the Board of Directors. The Boards of Directors of both FP NEWSPAPERS INC. and FP CANADIAN NEWSPAPERS LIMITED PARTNERSHIP would like to thank Ms. Driedger for her service. Ryan Kolaski, from within the organization will take on the responsibilities of Secretary to the Board of Directors.

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
BlackRock Smaller Companies Trust plc

(LEI: 549300MS535KC2WH4082)

Results of AGM

BlackRock Smaller Companies Trust plc announces that, at the Annual General Meeting held today, all 13 resolutions were duly passed on a poll.



The full text of the resolutions can be found in the Notice of Annual General Meeting set out in the Annual Report and Financial Statements for the year ended 28 February 2021, which has previously been submitted to the National Storage Mechanism and is available for inspection at:



https://data.fca.org.uk/#/nsm/nationalstoragemechanism



The results of the poll were as follows:



Votes

For & Discretionary





%



Votes

Against





%



Votes

Total % of Available voting rights*



Votes

Withheld Resolution 1 23,917,630 100.00 380 0.00 23,918,010 48.98 1,779 Resolution 2 23,864,904 99.91 22,446 0.09 23,887,350 48.92 31,234 Resolution 3 23,917,945 100.00 380 0.00 23,918,325 48.98 1,464 Resolution 4 23,896,096 99.96 9,541 0.04 23,905,637 48.96 14,152 Resolution 5 23,788,467 99.51 117,170 0.49 23,905,637 48.96 14,152 Resolution 6 23,900,718 99.98 4,920 0.02 23,905,638 48.96 14,151 Resolution 7 23,899,434 99.97 6,960 0.03 23,906,394 48.96 13,395 Resolution 8 22,321,550 93.37 1,586,247 6.63 23,907,797 48.96 11,992 Resolution 9 23,897,219 99.95 12,166 0.05 23,909,385 48.96 10,404 Resolution 10 23,894,239 99.95 12,239 0.05 23,906,478 48.96 13,311 Resolution 11 23,888,556 99.91 21,144 0.09 23,909,700 48.97 10,089 Resolution 12 23,868,595 99.87 30,518 0.13 23,899,113 48.94 20,676 Resolution 13 22,568,251 94.36 1,348,930 5.64 23,917,181 48.98 2,608



*Available Voting Rights (exc. Treasury) equals 48,829,792



11 June 2021
CHICAGO, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- According to the new market research report "Behavioural/Mental Health Software Market by Component (Services, Software), Delivery (Subscription, Ownership), Functionality (Clinical, EHR, CDS, Telehealth, RCM, BI, Administrative, Financial), End User (Hospitals, Clinics) - Global Forecasts to 2026", published by MarketsandMarkets, the global Behavioral Health Software Market is expected to reach USD 4.9 billion by 2026 from USD 2.0 billion in 2021, at a CAGR of 19.6% during the forecast period.

Browse in-depth TOC on "Behavioural/Mental Health Software Market"



282 - Tables

21 - Figures

217 - Pages

Download PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=45953340

The major factors driving the growth of behavioral health software market are the increasing adoption of behavioral health software, availability of government funding, government initiatives to encourage EHR adoption in behavioral health organizations, favorable behavioral health reforms in the US, and high demand for mental health services amidst provider shortage. On the other hand, data privacy concerns and a shortage of HCIT personnel are expected to restrain the growth of this market.

The support services segment is expected to account for the largest share of the behavioral health software market, by components in 2021

Based on components, the mental health software market is segmented into software and support services. The support services segment is expected to account for the largest share of the market in 2021. The recurring requirement of support services (such as software upgrades and maintenance) is the major factor supporting its growth.

Community clinics segment to grow at the highest CAGR in the behavioral health market during the forecast period

Based on end users, the behavioral health software market has been segmented into community clinics, hospitals, and private practices. In 2021, the community clinics segment is expected to account for the largest share. Growing government initiatives to support these facilities and growing patient preference for community clinics are likely to drive behavioral health software adoption in this segment.

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North America to dominate the mental health software market

On the basis of region, the behavioral health software market has been segmented into four major regions, namely, North America, Europe, the Asia Pacific and rest of the world. In 2021, North America is expected to dominate the market followed by Europe. The large share of this geographical segment is attributed to factors such as the growing number of people requiring behavioral health services, behavioral health reforms in the US, and government funding for behavioral health services in the region.

Major players operating in the behavioral health software market include Advanced Data Systems (US), AdvancedMD (US), Cerner (US), Compulink (US), Core Solutions (US), Credible Behavioral Health (US), Kareo (US), Meditab Software (US), Mindlinc (US), Netsmart (US), Nextgen Healthcare (US, Qualifacts (US), The Echo Group (US), Valant (US), Welligent (US), Cure MD(US), Epic systems corporations (US), Accumedic (US), Mediware(US), Allscripts (US)

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Browse Adjacent Markets: Healthcare IT Market Research Reports & Consulting

Browse Related Reports:

Ambulatory EHR Market by Delivery Mode (Cloud-based, On-premise), Application (Practice Management, e-Prescribing, PHM, Health Analytics, Patient & Referral Management), Practice Size (Large, Small-to-Medium, Solo), End User - Global Forecast to 2025

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/ambulatory-ehr-market-235617627.html

eHealth Market by Solutions (EMR, PACS & VNA, RIS, LIS, CVIS, Telehealth, eRx, HIE, Patient Portal, Medical Apps), Services (Remote Patient Monitoring, Diagnostic Services) End User - Global Forecast to 2025

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/ehealth-market-11513143.html

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Senior officials, leaders, and experts in defense, security, and nuclear policy convene for a 3-day conference on the most-pressing challenges in nuclear arms control, nonproliferation, deterrence, and security

WASHINGTON, June 11, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- From June 22-24, 2021, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace will host its biennial International Nuclear Policy Conference virtually, including keynote addresses from:



Ine Eriksen Sreide, Minister of Foreign Affairs for Norway

Minister of Foreign Affairs for Norway Sergey Ryabkov, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation

Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Kathleen Hicks, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense



Other speakers include: Izumi Nakamitsu, UN-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs; Bishop Garrison, Senior Advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Defense for Human Capital and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; Harry Harris, former U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Korea; and Maleeha Lodhi, former UN Representative for Pakistan.

The full conference agenda can be viewed here.

All panels will be virtual this year and viewable on the online conference platform. Follow the Carnegie Endowment Nuclear Policy Program on Twitter at @carnegienpp and NukeFest for the latest updates and announcements.

Register for a complimentary press pass to the Nuclear Policy Conference here.

Please direct any media inquiries to Clarissa.Guerrero@ceip.org.

This conference is made possible through the generous support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank with centers in Washington, D.C., Moscow, Beirut, Beijing, Brussels, and New Delhi. In an increasingly crowded, chaotic and contested world and marketplace of ideas, the Carnegie Endowment offers decisionmakers global, independent, and strategic insight and innovative ideas that advance international peace.
Coronado, CA (92118)

Today

Mainly clear. Low 63F. Winds NW at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Mainly clear. Low 63F. Winds NW at 10 to 15 mph.
HAMBURG, Germany, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Future Hamburg Award 2021 was presented at the digital International Innovation Day by Plug-and-Play Hamburg on 10 June 2021.



The startups Breeze Technologies, traceless materials, and Infinite Mobility are this years winners. Based in Norway and Germany, they convinced the jury with smart solutions for sustainable cities. The three winners will join a tailor-made programme in Hamburg by the cities Startup-Unit. For the first-place, Breeze Technologies will participate Plug-and-Play's international accelerator programme in Silicon Valley. Up-and-coming businesses from 15 countries had applied for the award. Bonus prizes by the award's partner homePORT, were bestowed on Blue Atlas Robotics (Denmark) and KONVOI (Germany).

Future Hamburg Award Winners 2021:

Breeze Technologies, Germany

Based in Hamburg and Copenhagen , Breeze Technologies is already a technology leader in the area of air quality sensors, data and analysis. Their sensors allow for real-time, area-wide air quality monitoring, whether on business premises or in urban environments. Combining a successful business model with the fight against air pollution, Breeze Technologies has the potential to thrive internationally. www.breeze-technologies.de traceless materials, Germany

Traceless materials created an eco-friendly alternative to plastic. With its innovative substitute, the bio-economy startup contributes to solving the global issue of environmental pollution. The technology uses by-products of the agricultural industry for storage-stable films, solid materials and wafer-thin coatings that are fully compostable. www.traceless.eu Infinite Mobility, Norway

Infinite Mobility develops lightweight, solar-powered vehicles for urban mobility, for short inner-city journeys. The company supports the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the development of sustainable cities as their innovative solar-powered tuk-tuks are cost-effective, safe and space-efficient. www.infinite-m.no.

Happening since 2019 for the second time, the Future Hamburg Award is bestowed by Hamburg Marketing for the City of Hamburg. As centre for innovative mobility Hamburg hosts the ITS World Congress 2021. With its surrounding metropolitan region in northern Germany Hamburg is on the way to become Europe's green hydrogen hub. This makes Germany's second-largest city the ideal location for innovations and international market access.

More Information: https://future.hamburg/future-hamburg-award.

- Picture is available at AP Images (http://www.apimages.com ) -

Contact:

Hamburg Marketing GmbH

Matthias Beer

matthias.beer@marketing.hamburg.de
KARACHI, PAKISTAN / ACCESSWIRE / June 11, 2021 / In a collaboration with the Government of Sindh, District Commissioner South Irshad Ali Sodhar, and District Health Officer Doctor Raj Kumar, JS Bank lived up to its commitment of caring for the health and safety of its people through the launch of a vaccination drive for team members and their families.

From (R-L) are Jamil Memon, Head of Administration and Corporate Services - JS Bank; Imran Shaikh - Chief Operating Officer - JS Bank; Irshad Ali Sodhar, Deputy Commissioner South Karachi and Hasan Saeed, COS to COO & Head of Corporate Communications

The three-day vaccination drive is taking place at JS Bank's Head Office at Shaheen Commercial Complex and covers both front and back-end members as well as their loved ones. The activity was a resounding success with long queues of people lined up for the vaccination and was well received by everyone. JS Bank family members were appreciative of the Bank having undertaken this immunization program and were grateful to the Government of Sindh for facilitating the seamless process.

Speaking on the occasion, Tamkeen Sardar Faisal, Head of HR - JS Bank, said, 'As a socially responsible entity, we consider it our duty to keep the safety of JS Family at the forefront of everything that we do. Our Bank is nothing without our people. This drive is a small way of showing our gratitude and appreciation for our team and their families that are equally responsible for their successful contributions.'

The management of the Bank acknowledged and thanked Wajid Junejo - Head of Administration, Procurement, Security and Real Estate, and Jamil Memon - Head of Administration and Corporate Services, for their active efforts in launching and executing the drive.

JS Bank was able to take this crucial step in taking responsibility for its individuals and contributing positively to the society in which it operates.

About JS Bank:

JS Bank is amongst the fastest-growing Banks in Pakistan, with both a domestic and an international presence. The Bank is a leader in the SME space and has a substantial footprint in Digital Banking and Consumer Loans. JS Bank has been recognized on multiple international and national forums, including the prestigious AsiaMoney, Asian Banking, and Finance, DIGI, and Pakistan Banking Awards. The Bank is part of JS Group, one of Pakistan's most diversified and progressive financial services groups. For more information, please visit http://www.jsbl.com .

Media Contact:

Hasan Saeed

Chief of Staff to COO

Phone:+92 302 2331518

Email: Hasan.Saeed@jsbl.com

SOURCE: JS Bank

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/651426/JS-Bank-Government-of-Sindh-Partner-for-Covid-19-Vaccinations
SHANGHAI, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Shanghai Electric ("Shanghai Electric" or "the Company") (601727.SS and 02727.HK) announced that the first molten salt tank hydro test for the Parabolic Trough Plant-II (PT2) of the fourth phase of Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park was carried out on May 9, the positive results of which laid a crucial foundation for the next phase of the molten salt system commission. The test was followed by finalized molten salt pipeline installation inside the Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) tower, marking another key milestone in construction progress.

The fourth phase of Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park is the largest single-site Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) project in the world, which uses world-leading hybrid solar energy technologies to generate 950MW of clean energy, including a 100 MW CSP tower plant, three 200 MW parabolic trough CSP plants and 250 MW of photovoltaic (PV) capacity.

The solar tower, standing 260m-high at the center of the CSP tower plant site, will also be the world's tallest structure of its kind. Upon completion, the combined thermal energy storage of the solar tower and parabolic trough plants will allow for 24/7 energy availability, with each parabolic trough CSP plant possessing an energy storage capacity of 13.5 hours and the tower boasting up to 15 hours.

Nitrate, the heat storage medium for the Parabolic Trough Plant-II, is stored in eight tanks, with each one measuring 45 meters in diameter and 25,000 cubic meters in capacity. The harsh desert environment presented a massive challenge to the test, and labor shortages during Ramadan added another layer of uncertainty to overall progress. The test was eventually completed on time with the help of water trucks which transported and unloaded the water to provisional water tanks, through which the water was pumped into the molten salt tanks.

"I extend my appreciation to all the on-site workers for their dedication and hard work to ensure the test was completed at speed and on time, despite the tremendous difficulties caused by a labor shortage and local high-temperatures," said Zhao Hui, Project Manager of Dubai CSP Project of Shanghai Electric Power Generation Engineering Co.

"Their outstanding performance also guaranteed the smooth progress of the CSP central tower pipeline installation, which is the core and one of the most important parts of the structure. The space in the tower is extremely small, given the total length of the central tower internal pipes is over 500 meters. To make sure the work could be done on time, the project team formulated well-thought-out installation plans and overcame all unseen problems without causing any delay," he added.

The molten salt tank system is the answer to the challenges of thermal energy storage. Thermal energy storage realized by molten salt systems enables power generation on cloudy days, or long night after sunset, with high operating efficiency and low capital costs per kilowatt-hour. During the daytime, the molten salt is circulated to a heat exchanger from a cold tank to absorb heat from the high-temperature oil. The heated molten salt can then be stored in an insulated hot tank which can later send the liquid to power steam turbines at night or during unfavourable weather conditions.

In 2018, Shanghai Electric was appointed as Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) contractor for the fourth phase of Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park in Dubai after signing the agreement with DEWA (Dubai Electricity and Water Authority) and ACWA Power to undertake both the 700 MW CSP and 250 MW PV projects. Financed by China's Silk Fund and ACWA, it is a landmark project of China's Belt and Road Initiative, as well as a significant milestone of Shanghai Electric in participating in renewable energy utility construction in the Middle East and its shift of focus from coal-fired energy to renewables.

In 2021, Shanghai Electric ranks 17th in the list of top 100 international contractors, 5th in the field of electric power engineering, according to the latest evaluation released by the China International Contractors Association. In addition, the Company has also been granted "A-level international contractor", the highest rating, by the association.

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KATY, TX / ACCESSWIRE / June 11, 2021 / Neutra Corp. (OTC PINK:NTRR) is preparing to roll out several products containing Delta-8 THC now that a move to ban the compound failed to pass in the Texas Legislature.

"This was something we were watching very closely," said Neutra CEO Sydney Jim. "Retail stores have expressed a lot of interest and pent-up demand in the marketplace for products containing Delta-8 THC, so we're quite relieved this proposed bill failed to go anywhere in the state legislature. We're ready today to start production on an array of Delta-8-related products to satisfy this demand. We expect Delta-8 to be a great compliment to our CBD manufacturing line and will big contributor to our overall revenue stream in short fashion."

Delta-8 THC is a less psychoactive compound than its cousin Delta-9. Delta-9 THC is what gets users high when they consume cannabis and has always been illegal in Texas. Texas lawmakers had recently been considering a bid to make Delta-8 illegal as well. Neutra has wanted to manufacture this line of product for customers for some time but was hesitant to roll them out so long as the ban bill was active in the state legislature.

While both are cannabinoids, Delta-8 is chemically different than CBD. Delta-8 can be manufactured from hemp, which is legal in Texas and many other states. Delta-8 can be more intense than CBD, which is likely why some legislators wanted to ban it.

Delta-8 THC enthusiasts have found using products with the substance produces a mild euphoria, relaxation, calmness and a sense of delight. Users can consume Delta-8 products by themselves or in conjunction with CBD ones.

Market potential for Delta-8 is expected to grow substantially as more states legalize its use.

About Neutra Corp.

Neutra Corp. (OTC PINK:NTRR) is an early-stage research and development company with a focus on bringing modern healthy living solutions to a multibillion-dollar market. Cutting-edge technologies within the nutraceuticals, food, and drug, and environmental purification sectors are creating a new kind of world culture-one where in which consumers are demanding access to products that promote health and stave off potential health dangers. One of the nutraceutical sub-markets is the new thriving hemp-based CBD market, in which the Company intends to participate. For more information, visit the Company's website at http://www.NeutraInc.com.

NOTICE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: This news release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, including statements that include the words 'believes,' 'expects,' 'anticipate' or similar expressions. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements of the company to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements.

Neutra Contact:

Sydney Jim

888-433-4033

info@neutrainc.com

SOURCE: Neutra Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/651458/Neutra-Ready-to-Introduce-Delta-8-THC-Product-Line-after-Ban-Bid-Fails-in-Texas-Legislature
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 11, 2021) - Bell Copper Corporation (TSXV: BCU) ("Bell Copper" or the "Company") announces that further to its news release of June 9, 2021, the Company has now closed a first tranche ("First Tranche") of its non-brokered private placement to raise gross proceeds of up to CDN $2,000,000.00 (the "Financing").

In the First Tranche, the Company issued 6,746,666 units ("Units") at a price of $0.15 for total gross proceeds of $1,012,000.00, of which Crescat Capital LLC ("Crescat") subscribed for CDN $1,000,000.00. Each Unit consists of one common share and one common share purchase warrant (a "Warrant"). Each Warrant will be exercisable into one additional common share at a price of $0.25 per share for a period of two years from the date of closing of the Financing ("Closing"). At the discretion of the Company, Warrants will be subject to an accelerated expiry upon the occurrence of a Trigger Event as described in its June 9, 12021 news release.

The securities issued by the Company in this First Tranche of the Financing are subject to a statutory hold period which expires on October 12, 2021. Funds raised from the Financing will be used for the ongoing drilling and exploration program at the Company's 100% owned Big Sandy Porphyry Copper Project and for general working capital.

"Although Crescat Capital is mainly a precious metal focused fund, we have recently extended our investment strategy to include some early stage but potentially very large copper exploration projects," commented Quinton Hennigh, technical advisor to Crescat Capital. "Bell Copper holds two such projects, Big Sandy and Perseverance, both situated in the world class Arizona copper district. While Perseverance is being driven forward through an earn-in/joint venture with Robert Friedland's Cordoba Minerals, Bell is exploring Big Sandy on its own. Big Sandy is a huge target with strong evidence of a buried porphyry Cu target. Bell's technical team led by Dr. Tim Marsh, who is the former chief geologist of the massive Resolution Copper Company, also in Arizona, is the right group to explore Big Sandy. We look forward to watching this story closely as Tim and his team give Big Sandy a solid drill test this year."

About Crescat Capital LLC

Crescat is a global macro asset management firm headquartered in Denver, Colorado. Crescat's mission is to grow and protect wealth over the long term by deploying tactical investment themes based on proprietary value-driven equity and macro models. Crescat's goal is industry leading absolute and risk-adjusted returns over complete business cycles with low correlation to common benchmarks. Crescat's investment process involves a mix of asset classes and strategies to assist with each client's unique needs and objectives and includes Global Macro, Long/Short, Large Cap and Precious Metals funds.

About Bell Copper

Bell Copper is a mineral exploration company focused on the identification, exploration and discovery of large copper deposits located in Arizona. Bell Copper is exploring its 100% owned Big Sandy Porphyry Copper Project and the Perseverance Porphyry Copper Project which is under a Joint Venture - Earn In.

On behalf of the Board of Directors of

Bell Copper Corporation

"Timothy Marsh"

Timothy Marsh, President, CEO & Director

For further information please contact the Company

Tel: 1 800 418 8250

Email: info@bellcopper.net

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 includes "forward-looking statements" and "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. All statements included in this news release, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include predictions, projections and forecasts and are often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "estimate", "expect", "potential", "target", "budget" and "intend" and statements that an event or result "may", "will", "should", "could" or "might" occur or be achieved and other similar expressions and includes the negatives thereof.

Forward-looking statements in this news release include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to the expectations of management regarding the proposed Financing, the expectations of management regarding the use of proceeds of the Financing, closing conditions for the Financing, the expiry of hold periods for securities distributed pursuant to the Financing, use of proceeds of the Financing and TSX-V approval of the proposed Financing. Forward-looking statements are based on a number of assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable by management based on the business and markets in which Bell Copper operates, are inherently subject to significant operational, economic, and competitive uncertainties, risks and contingencies. 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: that the Company may not complete the Financing on terms favourable to the Company or at all; that the TSX-V may not approve the Financing; that the proceeds of the Financing may not be used as stated in this news release; actual exploration results, interpretation of metallurgical characteristics of the mineralization, changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined, future metal prices, availability of capital and financing on acceptable terms, general economic, market or business conditions, uninsured risks, regulatory changes, delays or inability to receive required approvals, and other exploration or other risks detailed herein and from time to time in the filings made by the Company with securities regulators, including those described in the Company's most recently filed MD&A. The Company does not undertake to update or revise any forward-looking statements, except in accordance with applicable law.

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES 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/87330
CLIFTON, N.J., June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Three years after the Turkish government pledged to assist in uncovering the case of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was brutally murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey has abducted an innocent man in Kyrgyzstan and holds him in its Bishkek embassy.

The Alliance for Shared Values, which represents Hizmet organizations in the United States, condemns Turkey's abduction and detention of Orhan Inandi , the former director of the prestigious Sapat schools. Mr. Inandi has been living in Kyrgyzstan since 1992 and was granted Kyrgyz citizenship in 2012. Any attempt to link him to alleged crimes in Turkey is absurd.

Mr. Inandi's car was discovered with a flat tire and doors open in the courtyard of a high-rise residential complex in the Kyrgyzstan capital, Bishkek. Inandi's son filed a missing person report after he last heard from his father on May 31, 2021. Mr. Inandi's wife appealed to Kyrgyz authorities to help find her husband, whom she believes could be subject to torture inside the embassy to compel him to forfeit his Kyrgyz citizenship to pave the way for rendition back to Turkey, a dark analogy to Khashoggi's murder.

The government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues its witch hunt against critics inside and outside Turkey in violation of international law and human rights. Turkish media, academics, minority groups, and peaceful participants of the Hizmet Movement have been targets of this persecution. On Erdogan's orders, critics are subjected to political prosecution domestically and those abroad are pursued extrajudicially and kidnapped by the Turkish National Intelligence Service.

To date, more than 100 Hizmet participants have been abducted from 20 countries and illegally transferred to Turkey. Members of the U.S. Congress , human rights organizations, the U.N. Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights and U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture all have condemned these abductions. The United Nations Working Groups have issued multiple decisions against Turkey that such transfers are violations of international law.

***
SENS ANNOUNCEMENT

(the "Notice" or "Announcement")

ISSUER

ZCCM INVESTMENTS HOLDINGS PLC ("ZCCM-IH")

[Incorporated in the Republic of Zambia]

Company registration number: 119540000771

Share Code: ZCCM-IH

ISIN: ZM0000000037

Authorised by: Chabby Chabala - Company Secretary

SPONSOR

Stockbrokers Zambia Limited

[Founder Member of the Lusaka Securities Exchange]

[Regulated and licensed by the Securities and Exchange Commission of Zambia]

Contact Number: +260-211-232456

Website: www.sbz.com.zm

APPROVAL

The captioned Notice or Announcement has been approved by:

the Lusaka Securities Exchange ("LuSE") the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") Stockbrokers Zambia Limited ("SBZ")

RISK WARNING

The Notice or Announcement contained herein contains information that may be of a price sensitive nature.

Investors are advised to seek the advice of their investment advisor, stockbroker, or any professional duly licensed by the Securities and Exchange Commission of Zambia to provide securities advice.

ISSUED: 11 June 2021

ZCCM INVESTMENTS HOLDINGS PLC

[Incorporated in the Republic of Zambia]

Company registration number: 119540000771

Share Code: ZCCM-IH

ISIN: ZM0000000037

["ZCCM-IH" or the "Company"]

TRANSACTION ANNOUNCEMENT

The Board of ZCCM Investments Holdings Plc ("ZCCM-IH" or "the Company"), wishes to advise the shareholders and the market participants that the Company has signed a Management Services Agreement ("MSA") with the Industrial Development Corporation Limited ("IDC" or the "Corporation"). As per the proposed agreement, the IDC will provide mandatory and ad hoc group services to ZCCM-IH on a per hour cost basis for a period of five years from the implementation of the agreement.

The Board wishes to inform the shareholders and the market that ZCCM-IH, with its advisors, has prepared the financial and non-finanial information which is required in the Circular to ZCCM-IH shareholders ("Shareholders") to ensure Shareholders have sufficient information to vote on the Transaction at an Annual General Meeting ("AGM"). In line with the requirements of Section 9 of the Lusaka Securities Exchange ("LuSE") Listings Requirements, the salient features of the Transaction are as follows.

Particulars of the Transaction Management Services Agreement involving ZCCM-IH and the Industrial Development Corporation Limited Conditions Precedent include: ZCCM-IH Shareholder approval. Consideration: Services to be costed on a per hour basis as defined in an appendix of the MSA. A copy of the MSA will be in the Circular and available for inspection at the Company's offices. Other significant terms of the Agreement:





IDC to provide Group mandatory and ad hoc services to ZCCM-IH;

and services to ZCCM-IH; Services to be costed on a per hour basis as defined in an appendix of the MSA; and

The agreement will be in effect for a term of five years. Effective Date Upon approval of the agreement by shareholders at the AGM Rationale for the Transaction The Industrial Development Corporation is the majority shareholder of ZCCM-IH with 60.28% of shares. The IDC group has 36 companies under its portfolio.



The IDC has a mandate to transform subsidiaries in its portfolio focusing on business remodelling, capital restructuring and financing support amongst others. This is underpinned by effective Group oversight which includes the provision of group management services to ZCCM-IH in all functional areas listed in the MSA. IDC has been providing management services to ZCCM-IH since 2017 and has increased its level of services to ensure ZCCM-IH is aligned to the vision of the IDC.



Thus, ZCCM-IH accesses and benefits from the IDC's group management services. With effect from the date of shareholder approval, the IDC formalised its arrangement for management services by entering into Management Services Agreements with subsidiaries and introducing management fees determined based on cost recovery plus mark-up. Management services by the IDC to its subsidiaries confer economic benefits to ZCCM-IH.

Considering the above, ZCCM-IH intends to sign the management services agreement with the IDC.

Before

Pro Forma Adjustments

After Percentage change (%) EPS (ZMW) 11.87 -0.20 11.67 -1.69% HEPS (ZMW) 8.59 -0.20 8.38 -2.34% NAV per share 130.16 -0.20 129.96 -0.15% NTAV per share 20,930,127 -32,313 20,897,065 -0.15% Ordinary Shares in issue 160,800,286 - 160,800,286 - Shares in issue 160,800,286 - 160,800,286 - Weighted average number of Ordinary Shares in issue 160,800,286 - 160,800,286 -



17th Annual General Meeting and the Transaction Circular

A notice of Annual General Meeting ("AGM") to consider the Proposed Transaction was published on 09 June 2021; and A circular to Shareholders giving full details of the Transaction will be mailed to Shareholders on or about Monday, 14 June 2021.

The Circular will also be available in electronic form on the LuSE's website (www.luse.co.zm) or Stockbrokers Zambia Limited (SBZ) website (www.sbz.com.zm). Alternatively, shareholders may collect the Circular from the Company's Transfer Secretaries and/or Sponsoring Broker whose details are below:

Sponsoring Broker Transfer Secretary Stockbrokers Zambia Limited Corpserve Transfer Agents Limited 32 Lubu Road 6 Mwaleshi Road Longacres Olympia Park P.O. Box 38956 Lusaka Lusaka Zambia

Shareholders are advised to continue to exercise caution when dealing in the Company's securities until completion of the Transaction which is expected on 1 July 2021.

By Order of the Board

Chabby Chabala

Company Secretary

Issued in Lusaka, Zambia on June 11, 2021

Lusaka Securities Exchange Sponsoring Broker T | +260-211-232456



E | advisory@sbz.com.zm



W | www.sbz.com.zm



Stockbrokers Zambia Limited (SBZ) is a member of the Lusaka Securities Exchange and is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission of Zambia First Issued on 11 June 2021

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Full and original release in PDF format:https://www.actusnews.com/documents_communiques/ACTUS-0-69669-zccm-ih-idc-msa-transaction-announcement-sens-11062021.pdf
DGAP Voting Rights Announcement: QIAGEN N.V.

QIAGEN N.V.: Release according to Article 40, Section 1 of the WpHG [the German Securities Trading Act] with the objective of Europe-wide distribution



11.06.2021 / 22:04

Dissemination of a Voting Rights Announcement transmitted by DGAP - a service of EQS Group AG.

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.



The AFM (the Netherlands Authority For the Financial Markets) has informed us on June 9, 2021 that a notification related to our institution has been released by the AFM. The following notification has been disclosed in the relevant register on the AFM website: Date of transaction: 07 jun 2021

Person obliged to notify: BlackRock, Inc.

Issuing institution: Qiagen N.V.

Registration Chamber of Commerce: 12036979

Place of residence: VENLO Distribution in numbers Type of share Number of shares Number of voting rights Capital interest Voting rights Manner of disposal Settlement Ordinary share 31.808.110,00 34.968.872,00 Real Real Indirectly - BlackRock, Inc. Contract for difference 303.945,00 303.945,00 Potential Potential Indirectly - BlackRock, Inc. In Cash Ordinary share 1.058.643,00 1.058.643,00 Potential Potential Indirectly - BlackRock, Inc. Physical Delivery

Distribution in percentages Type Total holding Directly real Directly potential Indirectly real Indirectly potential Capital interest 14,37 % 0,00 % 0,00 % 13,78 % 0,59 % Voting rights 15,74 % 0,00 % 0,00 % 15,15 % 0,59 % QIAGEN N.V. is not responsible for the accuracy and correctness of the notification above. The content has been taken from the relevant register of the AFM:

https://www.afm.nl/en/professionals/registers/meldingenregisters/substantiele-deelnemingen/details?id=113490

11.06.2021 The DGAP Distribution Services include Regulatory Announcements, Financial/Corporate News and Press Releases.

Archive at www.dgap.de


Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 11, 2021) - Stormcrow Holdings Corp (TSXV: CROW.P) ("Stormcrow" or the "Corporation") is pleased to provide a business updating press release, included below, which was recently issued by Highmark Innovations Inc. ("Highmark"), the proposed target for the Corporation's Qualifying Transaction (as such terms are defined in Policy 2.4 - Capital Pool Companies of the TSX Venture Exchange.

Highmark Innovations Inc. completes a brokered private placement financing, closes acquisition of BrainFx Inc. and announces future acquisitions, solidifying its position as a digital health leader in brain and mental wellness.

TORONTO, ON, June 8, 2021 - Highmark Innovations Inc. (operating as 'Highmark Interactive') ("Highmark") is pleased to announce the completion of its brokered private placement financing, along with the execution of a number of strategic acquisitions, including bringing BrainFx Inc. ("BrainFx") into the Highmark ecosystem.

On May 11, 2021, Highmark completed a brokered private placement financing of 4,636,000 unit subscription receipts and 2,500 unsecured convertible debenture subscription receipts for aggregate gross proceeds of $6,023,360, less commissions. The financing, with the subscription receipt funds expected to be released concurrently with the closing of Highmark's anticipated qualifying transaction with Stormcrow Holdings Corp., was conducted by a syndicate of agents led by Beacon Securities Limited, as lead agent, along with PI Financial Corp. and Industrial Alliance Securities Inc. Dr. Sanjeev Sharma, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Highmark, commented: "We were excited to work with some of the leading investment banks in this sector and see robust demand from the investor community to both support and participate in our company's strategic growth plans, consisting of key enterprise sales, along with strategic acquisitions to help create the new standard in the delivery of services to mental health and brain injured patients."

Highmark's business strategy is best described as:

the acquisition of best-in-class clinical businesses providing neurological, mental health and general rehabilitation services; the implementation of Highmark's FDA-cleared Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) technology within the clinical setting that best supports patients, clinicians and all stakeholders in obtaining positive outcomes; the provision of virtual, in person or hybrid delivery of clinical services to customers utilizing Highmark's technology solutions; the acquisition of medical device technology organizations whose products and skilled team will help Highmark execute on its product roadmap; the continued sale of Highmark's technology solutions to customers in various market segments; and the continued research and development of digital medicine technology utilizing the insights gained from the larger Highmark clinical services organization's day to day observations of the neurological, physical and psychological impacts of injury on their patients.

Highmark is committed to developing new models for the delivery of care for patients struggling with brain injury, neurological disorders and/or mental health issues. Fusing technology with traditional models of health service, Highmark is an emerging leader in the specialty rehabilitation sector. Its mission is to develop innovative Software as a Medical Device technology focused on human neurological and psychological function, based on the following fundamental principles:

measurement of neurological and psychological function over time in a dynamic fashion as compared to traditional standards of static assessment;

presentation of data to clinicians in an intuitive format to facilitate better clinical decision making;

utilization of mobile devices as a primary means of software interaction;

gamification as a means of encouraging utilization; and

utilization of predictive analytics and machine learning to facilitate clinician's interpretation of data.

Highmark is also pleased to announce its acquisition of BrainFx, a leader in digital and virtual neurofunctional assessment solutions. With Highmark's patient-led "EQ Brain Performance" app and growing network of virtual, in-person and hybrid clinics, and BrainFx's clinician-led virtual assessment tool, the acquisition unlocks a superior approach to brain and mental wellness along every point of the care continuum. It also supports the rapid growth of BrainFx's existing Living Brain Bank, leveraging machine learning and predictive analytics to create new possibilities for precision medicine and care.

By adding the technology developed by the BrainFx team, Highmark now has a complete, bookended solution for the market. BrainFx designs and develops mobile and virtual neurological performance testing software applications, as well as collects normative neurofunctional data focused on supporting a healthcare provider's ability to diagnose (if within their scope of practice), treat and augment. The EQ modules enable Highmark to offer a more consumer centric option, while the BrainFx products allow Highmark to provide a solution for the clinician end user. By bringing the two companies together, Highmark's software is poised to become a dominant offering in the Canadian market, with significant opportunities in the US and global markets. In addition, through the Living Brain Bank, BrainFx has created a powerful foundation for the larger Highmark ecosystem to translate the data Highmark has collected into next generation insights and knowledge.

Together, Highmark and BrainFx will deliver an even more powerful suite of digital health tools to assist providers with early detection of neurological, neurofunctional and psychological dysfunction, as well as offer personalized and precise care planning.

Dr. Sharma comments: "We are pleased to announce the acquisition of BrainFx today. Now more than ever, there is a critical need for modern brain and mental health solutions. We're proud to be blazing a new path and transforming the future of this industry. The acquisition increases our footprint by adding more than 100 new health care organizations to our network, while also generating new opportunities and accelerating our expansion into the US market."

In addition, continuing to execute its acquisitive growth strategy, Highmark has entered into definitive agreements to acquire all of the outstanding common shares of Highmark Health Mississauga Inc. ("Highmark Health"), and Complex Injury Rehab Inc. ("CIR"). In addition to being highly accretive, Highmark views both corporations as synergistic and complementary businesses.

Highmark Health is a multidisciplinary healthcare clinic delivering integrated specialty care to patients with a variety of injuries. From inception, Highmark Health's principal focus was on patients who had suffered traumatic brain injury, and all of its associated co-morbidities, with mental health issues being a predominant one. Employing a multi-disciplinary team with physician leadership, the clinic's mission is to utilize global best practices with respect to innovative diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to patient care, with a significant emphasis on the use of medical device technology. Highmark Health has rapidly established a presence in Southern Ontario as a high quality patient care service provider.

CIR was founded as a community-based multidisciplinary rehabilitation clinic focused on providing integrated specialty care to patients with a variety of injuries. It has evolved into an award-winning centre of excellence providing clinical services for patients with neurological or complex injuries, with a significant emphasis on functional cognitive and psychological performance assessment and therapy. With almost 15 years of operating history, CIR has a reputation as a high quality effective rehabilitation service provider, and is a preferred provider for complex cases from other health providers, patients and insurers, and top tier firms within the legal community.

The acquisitions of Highmark Health and CIR will be completed concurrently with the completion of the closing of Highmark's upcoming qualifying transaction.

About Highmark

Founded in 2017, Highmark was created to change the paradigm of neurological testing and management. The company's approach to brain health is focused on providing real-time data on mental health and neurological well-being to support proactive, preventative interventions.

In addition to a growing network of virtual, in-person and hybrid clinics, Highmark offers the world's first gamified, FDA-approved software that provides virtual medical assessments of individuals' mental, neurologic health and physiologic health. The technology is used in multidisciplinary rehabilitation clinics in over 30 countries globally.

Highmark's unique solution is revolutionizing how individuals experience brain and mental health care, as well as unlocking insight for precision medicine and creating a modern model for delivering mental health and neuro rehab services.

Learn more: https://www.highmark.tech/

About BrainFx

BrainFx is a neuro-health technology company that delivers clinical, digital assessments of neurofunction to detect what other tests can miss. The assessments are powered by a dynamic normative database, called the Living Brain Bank, that delivers unique insights to healthcare providers that connect to real-world function to help develop highly targeted treatment plans to promote improved health outcomes. Healthcare professionals can build a comprehensive profile of a person's neurofunction which includes cognition, mood, behaviour, sleep, nutrition, activities of daily life, quality of life, and more.

Learn more: https://www.brainfx.com/

************************

Correction to Stormcrow's May 10, 2021 Press Release

The Corporation is also providing a correction to its press release dated May 10, 2021. Under the heading Selected Financial Information therein, the Corporation provided a table providing selected financial information with respect to Highmark. The Net Profit/Loss was expressed as a net profit of $1,629,674 when it should have been expressed as a net loss of $(1,629,674).

For further information:

Highmark Innovations Inc.

Sunil Sharma

secretary@highmark.tech

Stormcrow Capital Corp.

Chris Schnarr

cschnarr@loriangroup.com

Completion of the Qualifying Transaction is subject to a number of conditions, including but not limited to, TSXV acceptance and if applicable pursuant to TSXV requirements, majority of the minority shareholder approval. Where applicable, the transaction cannot close until the required shareholder approval is obtained. There can be no assurance that the transaction will be completed as proposed or at all.

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 release 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.

The TSX Venture Exchange Inc. has in no way passed upon the merits of the Qualifying Transaction and has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this press release.

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 the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities in any jurisdiction.

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking information generally refers to information about an issuer's business, capital, or operations that is prospective in nature, and includes future-oriented financial information about the issuer's prospective financial performance or financial position.

The forward-looking information in this news release includes disclosure about the terms of the Qualifying Transaction and the results of Highmark..

Stormcrow and Highmark made certain material assumptions, including but not limited to: prevailing market conditions; general business, economic, competitive, political and social uncertainties; delay or failure to receive board, shareholder or regulatory approval; and the ability of the resulting issuer to execute and achieve its business objectives, to develop the forward-looking information in this news release. 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.

Actual results may vary from the forward-looking information in this news release due to certain material risk factors. These risk factors include, but are not limited to: adverse market conditions; the inability of Stormcrow or Highmark to complete the Qualifying Transaction; reliance on key and qualified personnel; and regulatory and other risks associated with the digital gaming industry in general. The foregoing list of material risk factors and assumptions is not exhaustive.

Stormcrow assumes no obligation to update or revise the forward-looking information in this news release, unless it is required to do so under Canadian securities legislation.

(Not for distribution to US wire services or for dissemination in the United States of America)

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/87346
SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESSWIRE / June 11, 2021 / Wikisoft Corp. (the "Company," "we," and "our") (OTC PINK:WSFT) today announced that it has entered into a Common Stock Purchase Agreement (the 'Purchase Agreement') with TRITON FUNDS, LLC, a San Diego limited liability company ('TRITON FUNDS').

The Purchase Agreement provides that the the Investor shall purchase Seven Hundred Fifty Thousand Dollars ($750,000) of Securities after a Registration Statement is declared effective by the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") at a fixed price of $1.50 per share. The Company intends to use the net proceeds from the Purchase Agreement for the expansion of working capital and other general corporate purposes in accordance with its business strategy.

The Company's Chief Executive Officer, Carsten Kjems Falk commented: 'We are pleased to announce our entry into the Purchase Agreement with TRITON FUNDS. This transaction marks a planned capital raise to accelerate development of our flagship platform Wikiprofile.com . We believe it demonstrates both the validity of our business as well as our positive long-term outlook. Looking ahead, we remain focused on laying the foundation for continuous technological development by seeking to diversify our product offerings, enlarging our customer base, and increasing our global footprint.'

ABOUT WIKISOFT CORPORATION

In line with increasing globalization, we believe that there is a growing demand for access to credible company and employee information worldwide. Wikisoft's flagship online platform, Wikiprofile.com , aims to be a powerful solution with tools and resources for businesses and business professionals to find valid information quickly and easily so that they can make informed career and hiring decisions.

Our vision is to create opportunity globally for business professionals and businesses to make informed career and hiring decisions. Manifesting this vision requires scaling information technology with high data validity across the key pillars: business professionals, businesses, job opportunities and professional skills. By pursuing this vision, we believe Wikisoft Corp. can enable users to connect to business opportunities on a global scale. In line with increasing globalization, there is a growing demand for access to credible business and employee information worldwide.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This press release contains statements of a forward-looking nature about the Company. You can identify these forward-looking statements by words or phrases such as 'may,' 'will,' 'expect,' 'anticipate,' 'aim,' 'estimate,' 'intend,' 'plan,' 'believe,' 'is/are likely to,' 'future' or other similar expressions. The Company has based these forward-looking statements primarily on the Company's current expectations and projections about future events and financial trends that the Company believes may affect Company's financial condition, results of operations, business strategy, and financial needs. There is no assurance that the Company's current expectations and projections are accurate. All forward-looking statements in this press release are based on the Company's information on the date hereof. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause the Company's actual results to differ materially from those implied by the forward-looking statements. The Company operates in a rapidly evolving environment. New risk factors emerge from time to time. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update or revise the forward-looking statements except as required under applicable law. This press release does not constitute or form part of any offer or invitation to purchase, otherwise acquire, issue, subscribe for, sell or otherwise dispose of any securities, nor any solicitation of any offer to purchase, otherwise acquire, issue, subscribe for, sell, or otherwise dispose of any securities of the Company. The release, publication or distribution of this announcement in certain jurisdictions may be restricted by law and therefore persons in such jurisdictions into which this announcement is released, published or distributed should inform themselves about and observe such restrictions.

CONTACT

WikiSoft Corp.

315 Montgomery Street, San Francisco,

CA 94104, USA

Phone: +1-800-706-0806

Email: investor@wikisoft.com

Investor site: www.wikisoft.com

SOURCE: WikiSoft Corp

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/651401/Wikisoft-Corp-OTCWSFT-Announces-Entry-Into-Common-Stock-Purchase-Agreement
Litchfield (06759)

Today

Showers and thunderstorms. High around 65F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Variable clouds with showers and scattered thunderstorms. Storms more numerous during the evening. Low 59F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - June 11, 2021) - Aion Therapeutic Inc. (CSE: AION) ("Aion Therapeutic" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the closing of a non-brokered private placement through the issuance of 16,994,475 units (each, a "Unit") at a price of $0.0875 per Unit for gross proceeds of $1,487,016.56 (the "Offering"). The proceeds of the Offering will be used by the Company for general working capital purposes.

Each Unit is comprised of one common share (each, a "Common Share") of the Company and one-half of one Common Share purchase warrant (each whole warrant, a "Warrant"). Each Warrant entitles the holder thereof to acquire one Common Share for a period of twenty-four months from the closing of the Offering (the "Expiry Date") at a price of $0.15 per Common Share. Furthermore, the Company has the right to accelerate the Expiry Date to be thirty days following written notice to the holders, if during the term of the Warrants the Common Shares close at or above $0.20 per Common Share on each trading day for a period of ten consecutive trading days on the Canadian Securities Exchange.

In connection with the Offering, the Company paid certain eligible persons (the "Finders") aggregate cash commissions of $20,874.24 and issued 238,562 broker warrants (each, a "Broker Warrant"). Each Broker Warrant entitles the holder thereof to acquire one Common Share at an exercise price of $0.15 per Common Share for a period of twenty-four months from the closing of the Offering and subject to the acceleration provisions noted above.

All securities issued in connection with the Offering are subject to a statutory hold period of four months plus a day from the date of issuance in accordance with applicable securities legislation.

The Offering constituted a "related party transaction" as defined in Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Securityholders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101"), as certain insiders of the Company acquired an aggregate of 10,264,286 Units. The Company is relying on the exemptions from the valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements of MI 61-101 contained in sections 5.5(a) and 5.7(1)(a) of MI 61-101, as the fair market value of the participation in the Offering by insiders does not exceed 25% of the market capitalization of the Company, as determined in accordance with MI 61-101. The Company did not file a material change report in respect of the related party transaction at least 21 days before the closing of the Offering, which the Company deems reasonable in order to complete the Offering in an expeditious manner. The Offering was approved by all independent directors of the Company.

This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to sell 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.

About Aion Therapeutic Inc.

Aion Therapeutic Inc. through its wholly-owned subsidiary, AI Pharmaceuticals Jamaica Limited, is in the business of research and development, treatment, data mining and state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (machine learning) techniques, focused on the development of combinatorial pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals and cosmeceuticals utilizing compounds from cannabis (cannabinoids), psychedelic mushrooms (psilocybin), fungi (edible mushroom), natural psychedelic formulations (Ayahuasca), and other medicinal plants in a legal environment for this type of discovery. In addition, Aion Therapeutic is creating a strong international intellectual property portfolio related to its discoveries.

For further information, please contact:

Public Relations

KCSA Strategic Communications

Anne Donohoe

aion@kcsa.com

Investor Relations

KCSA Strategic Communications

Phil Carlson

(212) 896-1233

aion@kcsa.com

Aion Therapeutic Inc.

Graham Simmonds

Executive Vice Chair & CEO

(416) 843-2881

DISCLAIMER & READER ADVISORY

Certain statements contained in this press release constitute forward-looking information. These statements relate to future events or future performance. The use of any of the words "could", "intend", "expect", "believe", "will", "may", "projected", "estimated" and similar expressions and statements relating to matters that are not historical facts are intended to identify forward-looking information and are based on the Company's current belief or assumptions as to the outcome and timing of such future events. Actual future results may differ materially. In particular, this release contains forward-looking information relating to the business of the Company. Various assumptions or factors are typically applied in drawing conclusions or making the forecasts or projections set out in forward-looking information. Those assumptions and factors are based on information currently available to the parties. The material factors and assumptions include regulatory and other third-party approvals; licensing and other risks. The forward-looking information contained in this release is made as of the date hereof and the parties are not obligated to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws. Because of the risks, uncertainties and assumptions contained herein, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The foregoing statements expressly qualify any forward-looking information contained herein.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/87347
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - June 11, 2021) - Axion Ventures Inc. (TSXV: AXV) (OTC Pink: AXNVF) ("Axion" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has completed the initial tranche of C$8,000,000 (the "Initial Tranche") under the convertible debenture investment agreement (the "Investment Agreement") that the Company entered into with KUAM (Hong Kong) Investment 01 Ltd. ("KUAM") for up to C$20 million by way of unsecured convertible debentures.

The Company has issued to KUAM a convertible debenture (the "Debenture") having a term of twelve (12) months with interest accruing at a rate of 4% per annum. The Debenture will also allow KUAM to convert the outstanding principal into common shares of the Company at the conversion price of $0.20 per share pursuant to the terms of the Investment Agreement. If KUAM converts the full amount of the Debenture, KUAM will be entitled to receive 40,000,000 common shares of the Company.

The Company intends to use the proceeds from the Initial Tranche to: (a) address its working capital deficiency; (b) pay audit, accounting and legal fees, (c) pay filing fees with the securities commissions and the Exchange; (d) partly repay convertible debentures; (e) pay outstanding salaries, consulting fees and professional fees, and other accounts payable; and (f) provide general working capital. Following the closing of the Initial Tranche, the Company plans to make payment to its external auditors promptly as the Company is in the final stages of waiting for its external auditors to provide its audit report for Company's annual financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2019. The Company is also working on completing the interim financial statements and related MD&A for the subsequent periods toward obtaining a full revocation of the Cease Trade Order on August 4, 2020 (the "Cease Trade Order").

The Debenture and all securities of the Company issued pursuant to the closing of the Initial Tranche will be subject to a four-month hold period. The Company confirms that there has been no undisclosed material information since the issuance of the Cease Trade Order.

The completion of the Initial Tranche constitutes a "related party transaction" as such term is defined by Multilateral Instrument 61-101 - Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transactions ("MI 61-101"), given that Yasuyo Yamazaki, the Executive Chairman of Axion, is the President and controlling shareholder of KUAM. Assuming that KUAM converts the full amount of the Debenture, Mr. Yamazaki would control 14.54% of Axion's issued common shares. The Company is relying on the exemptions from the valuation and minority shareholder approval requirements of MI 61-101 contained in sections 5.5(a), (b), and (c) as well as 5.7(1)(a) of MI 61-101, given that the Company's common shares are not listed on specified markets and that the fair market value of the Initial Tranche does not exceed 25% of the market capitalization of the Company, as determined in accordance with MI 61-101. The Initial Tranche has been approved by the independent directors of the Company. The Company has filed a material change report in respect of the Initial Tranche but not more than 21 days before the closing date of the Initial Tranche as the Company has to close the Initial Tranche on an expedited basis for sound business reasons and in a timeframe consistent with usual market practice for transactions of this nature.

The Initial Tranche is the first draw-down pursuant to the Investment Agreement, which provides for further tranches for up to a total of C$20 million. Completion of any subsequent tranche will be subject to additional approval of the Exchange. If all of the C$20 million are drawn down and converted by KUAM, a new Control Person of the Company may be created. KUAM has provided an undertaking not to convert any part or whole of debentures prior to receiving applicable shareholders' approval if such conversion would create a new Control Person.

For further information:

Axion Ventures Inc.

Grant Kim

Interim Chief Executive Officer

info@axionagm.com

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This news release may contain "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. All information contained herein that is not historical in nature may constitute forward-looking information. Forward-looking statements herein are necessarily based upon a number of assumptions that, while considered reasonable by management, are inherently subject to business, market and economic risks, uncertainties and contingencies that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied by forward-looking statements. Except as required by law, the Company disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements.

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.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/87360
NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES.

VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / June 11, 2021 / Viva Gold Corp. ("Viva" or the "Company") (TSXV:VAU) announces that it is amending certain non-financial terms of its brokered private placement disclosed in the Company's May 7 2021 press release pursuant to which it is offering up to 19,047,619 units of the Company ("Units") at $0.21 per Unit for gross proceeds of up to $4,000,000 (the "Offering"). Each Unit will be comprised of one common share of the Company (a "Unit Share") and one common share purchase warrant (a "Warrant"), each exercisable for one common share (a "Warrant Share"). Research Capital Corporation (the "Agent") is the sole agent and sole bookrunner, and has been granted the option to increase the size of the Offering by up to 15%.

On May 18, 2021, the Company received a Notice of Requisition of Meeting, compelling the Company to call a special general meeting (the "Special Meeting") to transact the shareholder business stated in the Requisition. The Company has set August 17, 2021 as the date for the Special Meeting. Details of the Special Meeting are set out in the Company's June 8, 2021 management information circular filed under the Company's SEDAR issuer profile.

As a condition of the Offering, the TSX Venture Exchange ("TSXV") requires that the Unit Shares and, if applicable, any Warrant Shares ("Voting Restricted Shares") be excluded from voting on those matters to be considered at the Special Meeting, or any meeting of the Company's shareholders held in lieu thereof (the "Voting Restriction"). Any votes attaching to Voting Restricted Shares (or to any Viva voting securities issued to the Agent in payment of Offering fees or commissions upon exercise of any compensation options issued to the Agent) will be excluded from the voting tabulation for the Special Meeting. The Voting Restriction will be in effect from the closing of the Offering until the earlier of two clear business days after the completion of the Special Meeting and September 22, 2021. As an additional condition of the TSXV, the Offering will not close before June 18, 2021.

James Hesketh, Viva's President and CEO stated, "We are pleased that Research Capital and the TSXV were willing to work with us to achieve this creative win-win approach for our shareholders. It clears the way for us to complete a financing critical to Viva and the development of our Tonopah Project. Viva remains focused on building shareholder value by continuing to develop the gold resource base at Tonopah, de-risking the project through continued essential technical study; and carrying out the pre-feasibility/feasibility study and permitting activities required to make a production decision."

To implement the Voting Restriction, Subscribers to the Offering will be required to enter into an agreement with the Company amending the subscription terms to include, and undertake to TSXV to accept and abide by, the terms and conditions of the Voting Restriction.

About Viva Gold Corp.

Viva Gold Corp. is a gold exploration and project development company with a focus on Nevada. Viva holds 100% of the advanced Tonopah Gold Project, a large land position of approximately 8,800 acres with demonstrated high-grade measured, indicated and inferred gold resources, located on the prolific Walker Lane gold trend in Nevada, about 30 kilometers south-east of the Round Mountain mine of Kinross Gold and 20 kilometers north from the Town of Tonopah. Viva's management team has extensive experience in mining exploration, development and production and are supported by a Board of Directors and advisors who are proven mine finders, deal makers and financiers. Viva trades on the TSX-V as "VAU", on the OTCQB in the US as "VAUCF" and on the Frankfurt exchange under "7PB". For additional information on Viva Gold and the Tonopah Gold Project, please visit our website: www.vivagoldcorp.com.

For Further Information, Contact:

James Hesketh, President & CEO

(720) 291-1775

jhesketh@vivagoldcorp.com

Valerie Kimball, Director Investor Relations

(720) 933-1150

vkimball@vivagoldcorp.com

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-looking Information

This news release contains certain information that may constitute forward-looking information or forward-looking statements under applicable Canadian securities legislation (collectively, "forward-looking information"). This forward-looking information entails various risks and uncertainties that are based on current expectations, and actual results may differ materially from those contained in such information. These uncertainties and risks include, but are not limited to, future events, including dissident shareholder actions that may require the Company to change the date, time or other arrangements for the Special Meeting, subscribers to the Offering refusing to accept the Voting Restriction, the strength of the global economy; the price of gold; operational, funding and liquidity risks; the potential for achieving targeted drill results, 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 are present; the risks and hazards associated with drilling and mining operations; and the ability of Viva to fund its capital requirements. Risks and uncertainties about the Company's business are more fully discussed in the Company's disclosure materials filed with the security's regulatory authorities in Canada available at www.sedar.com. Readers are urged to read these materials. Viva assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking information or to update the reasons why actual results could differ from such information 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. No stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein.

SOURCE: Viva Gold Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/651495/Viva-Gold-Amends-Financing-Terms
London, UK-based Balderton Capital is launching Balderton Growth I, a $680m dedicated growth fund to extend its support to European founders scaling the next global tech giants.

The fund will target approx. 15 companies at the early-growth stage and is sector-agnostic. Balderton expects to invest between $25m and $50m per company through both primary and secondary investments.

Balderton Growth I will be led by

Managing Partner Bernard Liautaud,

General Partner David Thevenon, and

General Partner Rana Yared.

This fund follows Baldertons launch of Europes first dedicated secondary fund, Liquidity I in 2018, and the firms seventh Series A fund in 2019, and it comes after a record year for both Balderton and its portfolio. In the 18 months since January 2020, 22 new companies have joined the Balderton portfolio, and the firm has made over 45 follow-on investments. There have been three IPOs, with THG in 2020, Darktrace in 2021; and Flywire in 2021. The firm has also seen eleven portfolio exits since January 2020, including Digital Surgerys acquisition by Medtronic, Peakons acquisition by Workday and Depops acquisition by Etsy.

In addition, companies in the Balderton portfolio have themselves raised more than $5bn since January 2020 to accelerate growth, of which close to $1.7bn has been since the beginning of 2021.

The portfolio now employs over 25,000 staff in over 50 countries around the world.

FinSMEs

10/06/2021
Faire, a San Francisco, CA- and Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada-based online wholesale marketplace, raised $260m in Series F funding.

The round, which valued Faire at $7 billion, was led by Sequoia Capital with participation from existing investors as well as new global investors Baillie Gifford and Wellington Management.

The company intends to use the funds to continue to continue to build tools and market events, hire talent to increase headcount across all global offices, as well as introduce Faire into new markets.

Founded in 2017 by Square alumni Max Rhodes (CEO), Marcelo Cortes (CTO), Jeff Kolovson (COO), and Daniele Perito (CDO), Faire is a online wholesale marketplace connecting more than 200,000 retailers across North America and Europe with 20,000 brands from over 80 countries. The company is now operating across the largest markets in Europe including the United Kingdom, Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, with plans to expand across all of continental Europe in the coming months.

The company is also located in Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Toronto, London, and Sao Paulo and has roughly 500 employees.

FinSMEs

10/06/2021
Hopin, a London, UK-based virtual and hybrid experiences platform, received an investment from LinkedIn via a Series C secondary round.

Hopin and LinkedIn plan to collaborate to create new opportunities for event organizers.

The amount of the deal was not disclosed. This follows Hopins $400m in Series C funding round in March 2021 co-led by new investors Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst, and existing investor IVP, with participation from returning investors Coatue, DFJ Growth, Northzone, Salesforce Ventures and Tiger Global. Previously, Hopin raised $125m Series B in funding announced in November 2020. Since February of last year, Hopin has raised more than $565m.

The company will use this capital to continue investing in the development of its platform technologies in areas such as video and mobile.

Founded in 2019 by Johnny Boufarhat, CEO, Hopin enables brands and communities to create all-in-one live video experiences for their audiences. Through its platforms, attendees can learn, interact, and connect with people from anywhere in the world. With Hopin, users can create live virtual and hybrid events that are interactive and immersive. Hopin acquired StreamYard, a video streaming studio, in 2020 and acquired Streamable and jamm in 2021.

Hopin is a remote-first company headquartered in London, with more than 550 employees in 42 countries.

FinSMEs

10/06/2021
Lofti, a London, UK-based property management platform for tenants, homeowners and landlords, raised $1.5m in seed funding.

Taiwanese family office fund WoodJC made the investment.

The company intends to use the funds to expand its services across the UK, further grow its team and develop its community hub.

Founded by Andreas Gkerazis in 2020, Lofti is a cloud-based property management platform for tenants, homeowners and landlords available on iOS, Android (coming soon) and a dedicated desktop web app. The company provides a cloud-based document management and communication platform to improve transparency and interactions between landlords and tenants, an on-demand fixed price booking system for vetted contractors, data analytics to predict potential maintenance issues, and a community hub to enable different groups such as landlords to share advice, provide support or exchange services.

The platform is currently available as an iOS and web app, with the Android app set to launch soon.

FinSMEs

10/06/2021
Litchfield (06759)

Today

Showers and thunderstorms. High around 65F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms during the evening followed by occasional showers overnight. Low 59F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70%.
Mondays wasnt his first drug arrest. In July 2008, Acevedo was convicted in federal court of conspiring to distribute 50 grams  1.76 ounces or more of crack and he was sentenced to five years in prison followed by 10 years of supervised release, authorities said at the time.
Jan-Pro Cleaning & Disinfecting Expands to East Tennessee

Nations premier commercial cleaning franchise looking to bring services to Knoxville and surrounding counties

June 11, 2021 // Franchising.com // KNOXVILLE - Jan-Pro Cleaning & Disinfecting is expanding its presence in Tennessee. The expansion comes at a time when Jan-Pro Cleaning & Disinfecting small business owners continue to be key players in the fight against COVID-19. JAN-PRO of East Tennessee owners, Bryan and Megan Lubaway, along with the JAN-PRO Cleaning & Disinfecting certified franchisees operating in their system, continue to play a crucial role in protecting employees and customers.

JAN-PRO of East Tennessees JAN-PRO Cleaning & Disinfecting franchisees helped disinfect and clean businesses across many industries in the Chattanooga community and surrounding areas throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, ending the year with one of the best account retention rates in JAN-PROs global system.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses of all kinds have turned to Jan-Pro Cleaning & Disinfecting as the commercial cleaning experts to keep their employees, customers, and tenants safe during this unprecedented time.

Employees and customers will continue to want to know how their local businesses and leaders are keeping them safe, said Gary Bauer, president of Jan-Pro Systems International. It will be vital for business owners and their employees to be able to explain how they are creating a safe and clean environment as the reopening process across the country continues. We hope that they will consider utilizing the experts, like the JAN-PRO Cleaning & Disinfecting franchisees at JAN-PRO of East Tennessee

SOURCE Jan-Pro Cleaning & Disinfecting

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Hao Pan told investigators he and his wife had been summoned to Connecticut by their son days earlier to help him, but he would not explain why his son needed help, court records show. He also claimed Pan had lost his phone and that he had last seen his son early that morning, but he claimed he did not know where either of those events happened.
It starts with community and how communities are necessary in order for you to survive. Then you go to family, and how essential the family is, in terms of your survival in the best sense of the word, the schools founder and principal, Tim Goodwin, said. Then each person, you are responsible for your own growth and development, and self control and other thing that will enable you to be successful. Thats part of the curriculum but its mostly lived out every day.
133 A song introduced in 1927 when it topped the charts of the day for an astounding 14 weeks was revived in 1956 but not quite with similar success... just a modest Number 19 hit. What song featured these lines? "I'll see a smiling face, a fireplace, a cozy room A little nest that nestles where the roses bloom Just Molly and me and baby makes three"

My Blue Heaven

Normally, back in the 1920s and 1930s, when Paul Whiteman's band reached Number One with a song, it would take a while for it to be dislodged. The unthinkable occurred with "My Blue Heaven". After just one week, Red Nichols knocked Whiteman's song from the top pedestal with "Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider". Then, three weeks later, "My Blue Heaven" returned to the top but this time it was a version by Gene Austin that was succeeding. It maintained that position for 13 more weeks and, as such, became the biggest hit of the entire decade! It was composed by Walter Donaldson who also scored such mega-hits as "Carolina in the Morning", "Makin' Whoopee" and "Yes Sir! That's My Baby". The lyricist was George Whiting.



Gene Austin had quite a career. Born in Texas in 1900, he lied about his age and joined the army in 1916 and was among the soldiers pursuing the Mexican renegade Pancho Villa later that year. He also participated in WWI before studying both dentistry and law at university. He eschewed further studies to embark on a musical career in vaudeville as a pianist and vocalist. He first recorded in the early 1920s and would have two of the biggest hits of all time with "My Blue Heaven" and "Ramona". Among his other popular recordings that might be recognized today were versions of "Bye, Bye Blackbird", "Yes Sir! That's My Baby" and "Tonight You Belong To Me". The latter, also a three week Number One in 1927, was covered by the 14 and 11 year old sisters Patience and Prudence in 1956. It peaked at Number Four on the Hot 100. His last charting hit came in 1934 but he continued to perform and tour right up to his death of lung cancer in 1972. In the 1950s, he established his home base in Las Vegas, one of the first entertainers to do so, and even launched an unsuccessful campaign for the governorship of Nevada in 1962.



The 1956 cover of "My Blue Heaven" was recorded by Fats Domino. Early in his career, Domino would frequently utilize old standards as material for his recordings. Five of his first 14 chart entries on the Hot 100 were "oldies", the biggest hit of which was "Blueberry Hill". It peaked at Number Two for both him in 1957 and Glenn Miller in 1940 and would have been a subject for this quiz had the lyrics suited the structure of this style of quiz. Now 83 years old at the time of this writing, Domino is no longer an active performer. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it was briefly believed that he had fallen victim to that disaster. Happily, the reports of his demise proved to be false and on the few occasions that he now makes a public appearance, generally it will be in support of causes to redevelop his beloved New Orleans.

Answer:
Galveston, TX (77553)

Today

Intervals of clouds and sunshine. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 93F. Winds W at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Mostly cloudy in the evening with scattered thunderstorms developing after midnight. Low near 80F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
Roy arrived and explained to Newton-Batchelor that police had a right to go inside and check on the welfare of all residents, the report said. Roy knocked on the bathroom door and a woman whose name was redacted in the report emerged. Garay wrote she did not see any marks on the womans body or face. The woman denied arguing with Newton-Batchelor, the report said.
They werent alone: Fifteen minutes before Jefferson was scheduled to open its doors at 11 a.m., people were already lining up on the sidewalk outside. At one point the queue had more than 25 people, and even by 11:30 it still went out the door.
Welcome to my genealogy blog. Genea-Musings features genealogy research tips and techniques, genealogy news items and commentary, genealogy humor, San Diego genealogy society news, family history research and some family history stories from the keyboard of Randy Seaver (of Chula Vista CA), who thinks that Genealogy Research Is really FUN! Copyright (c) Randall J. Seaver, 2006-2021.
Candelora, however, says he is not done. He wants an investigation into the course the proposal took to include a very bad deal to exempt one player from an open and fair process that will determine how licenses are awarded and provides for the regulation of a drug that will be sold to the public.
South Africa: President Ramaphosa participates in G7 Summit

President Cyril Ramaphosa will attend the G7 Leaders Summit in Cornwall in the United Kingdom.

The summit starts today and ends on Sunday.

President Ramaphosa will attend this gathering at the invitation of British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.

The summit brings together leaders to discuss efforts to end the COVID-19 pandemic and create a greener and more prosperous future for all.

President Ramaphosa has been invited in recognition of South Africas leadership role on the continent and globally in the fight against the pandemic, including championing vaccine equity within and between nations.

The Presidents working visit to the United Kingdom affords South Africa and the host country an opportunity to deepen the strong ties that characterise their bilateral relations.

South Africa has also been invited for its role as co-chair of the ACT-Accelerator Facilitation Council, which aims to expedite research, manufacturing and equitable distribution of vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics across the world.

President Ramaphosa and his counterparts will deliberate on proposals formulated during ministerial talks in the lead-up to the leaders summit.

The President will participate in three working sessions on Health, Open Societies and Economies, and Climate and Nature.

The summit will allow South Africa to push for a swift international response to COVID-19 that enables the equitable and affordable access of COVID-19 vaccines and medical supplies.

Such a response should include financial support from wealthy countries for the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator (ACT-A) and the adoption of a Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waiver at the World Trade Organisation.

On the issue of climate change, South Africa will argue for a global commitment to a just transition for developing economies and significantly scaled-up support for adaptation and implementation support.

President Ramaphosa is accompanied by the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Dr Naledi Pandor.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2021-06-11. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
China, ASEAN to jointly take strategic partnership to a higher level

09:03, June 11, 2021 By He Yin ( People's Daily

During the Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers Meeting in Celebration of the 30th Anniversary of Dialogue Relations and the 6th Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Foreign Ministers Meeting, both held in southwest Chinas Chongqing municipality from June 7 to 8, participants reached a general consensus on enhancing China-ASEAN cooperation and the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation, showing their wish to jointly create a brighter future through solidarity and deeper cooperation.

The Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Celebration of the 30th Anniversary of Dialogue Relations is held in Chongqing, southwest China, June 7, 2021. (Xinhua/Wang Quanchao)

Over the past 30 years, China-ASEAN relations have developed by leaps and bounds. The two sides have become each others largest trading partner, most connotative cooperation partner and most dynamic strategic partner through their joint efforts.

China-ASEAN cooperation has delivered enormous benefits to two billion people in 11 countries, provided strong support for regional peace, stability, development and prosperity, and established the most successful example of Asia-Pacific regional cooperation.

In 2020, China and ASEAN became each others largest trading partner for the first time. Their two-way investment has continuously been expanded and balanced, and exceeded $200 billion accumulatively.

The signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) signifies that Asia-Pacific nations are becoming a powerful force for safeguarding free trade and multilateralism and leading international cooperation.

It should also be noted that China and ASEAN countries have stayed united in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, vividly demonstrating close brotherhood and sound neighborly relations.

China and ASEAN have always prioritized bilateral relations with each other on their diplomatic agenda, which provides political guidance for the development of their ties.

Among ASEANs dialogue partners, China has become a number of firsts: the first to join the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation in Southeast Asia, the first to establish strategic partnership with ASEAN, the first to discuss with ASEAN to establish free trade zone, and the first to give unequivocal support for ASEAN centrality in East Asian regional cooperation, which have fully embodied Chinas policy of good-neighborliness and friendship.

Chinese President Xi Jinping put forward the principle of amity, sincerity, mutual-benefit and inclusiveness for neighborhood diplomacy, and expressed a sincere wish to work with ASEAN countries for a 21st Century Maritime Silk Road and a closer China-ASEAN community with a shared future, giving momentum to the deepening of China-ASEAN relationship.

At the Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers Meeting in Celebration of the 30th Anniversary of Dialogue Relations, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi pointed out that the two sides can discuss how to elevate their bilateral relations into comprehensive strategic partnership, showing willingness and determination to deepen solidarity and cooperation with ASEAN.

China-ASEAN cooperation is believed to embrace huge opportunities for continuous progress in the future.

At the opening ceremony of the 17th China-ASEAN Expo and China-ASEAN Business and Investment Summit held in November last year, Xi made four suggestions on cultivating a closer China-ASEAN community with a shared future.

The two sides should enhance strategic mutual trust and further synergize their development plans, elevate economic and trade cooperation and facilitate an early and full recovery of the regional economy, enhance innovation in science and technology and deepen cooperation on the digital economy, as well as strengthen cooperation against COVID-19 and enhance capacity building in public health, he said.

Xis suggestions were oriented to the needs of China and ASEAN for their respective development, showed an effective path for the two sides to upgrade cooperation, and drew a new blueprint for the development of the China-ASEAN strategic partnership.

At a new stage of development, China is promoting high-quality development and quickening its pace to build a new development pattern whereby domestic and foreign markets can boost each other, with the domestic market as the mainstay, which will bring other countries, including ASEAN countries, a bigger market, more opportunities, and stronger drivers for economic growth.

Chinas Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been increasingly synergized with the Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity 2025, and a good number of well-received key projects concerning peoples livelihood have been steadily implemented, generating tangible benefits for people in China and ASEAN countries.

Meanwhile, China and ASEAN have seen notable results in facilitating bilateral trade. Thailands Deputy Prime Minister and Commerce Minister Jurin Laksanawisit once promoted Thai fruits via live-streaming on a Chinese e-commerce platform, and helped sell nearly 5,000 durians and 20,000 tender coconuts, a perfect example of how ASEAN countries tapping into opportunities of the Chinese market.

At present, China and ASEAN are making efforts to put the RCEP into force as early as possible, which will certainly bring broader space for cooperation among countries involved.

It is the common aspiration of China and ASEAN to, with the 30th anniversary of the establishment of China-ASEAN dialogue relations as well as the fifth anniversary of the launch of Lancang-Mekong Cooperation as an opportunity, speed up high-quality construction of the Belt and Road, advance the sound development of regional cooperation, and safeguard regional peace and stability.

Looking into the future, China and ASEAN will jointly realize, maintain, and develop a road of regional cooperation with East Asian characteristics, build a higher level of China-ASEAN strategic partnership and a closer community with a shared future.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun)
When they first arrived, Kubera and Ruszas remained at the bottom of a staircase while Olivo was at the top with a large kitchen knife in one hand and some type of bladed object in the other. Olivo repeatedly told them he wouldnt drop the knife, and that he was ready to die, the report said.
On Thursday, his counsel Mihir Desai told a the division bench of Justices S.S. Shinde and N.J. Jamadar that Swamy had tested positive for Covid and hence, his stay at the private hospital should be extended.  PTI

Mumbai: The Bombay High Court on Thursday allowed a request made by the lawyer and extended Jesuit priest and activist Stan Swamy's stay in a private hospital in Mumbai till June 18, as he has been tested Covid positive.

Swamy, 84, who has been arrested in the Elgar Parishad-Maoist links case, was on May 28 shifted from the Taloja prison in neighbouring Navi Mumbai to the Holy Family Hospital here after he filed a petition, seeking interim bail on medical grounds. After being shifted to the private hospital, he tested positive for the Coronavirus infection.

On Thursday, his counsel Mihir Desai told a the division bench of Justices S.S. Shinde and N.J. Jamadar that Swamy had tested positive for Covid and hence, his stay at the private hospital should be extended.

Upon Desai's request the bench said Swamy shall remain admitted at the private hospital till June 18, and posted the petition for hearing on June 17. The court also directed the hospital to submit in a sealed envelope medical reports of Swamy by the next date of hearing.

The Elgar Parishad case relates to alleged inflammatory speeches delivered at a conclave held in Pune on December 31, 2017, which the police claimed triggered violence the next day near the Koregaon-Bhima war memorial on the Maharashtra city's outskirts. The Pune Police had claimed the conclave was backed by Maoists. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) later took over the probe into the case.

The police arrested Swamy in October 2020, and he has been in jail since then.

Last month speaking with judges via video conferencing from jail, Swamy had refused to get admitted to any hospital and had requested the judges to consider releasing him on interim bail considering his ill-health but later he agreed to get admitted to a private hospital.
After a great performance in Azerbaijan Sebastian Vettel is receiving a lot of praise. The German crossed the finish line in second place, taking his first podium with Aston Martin.

Vettel had a difficult start of the 2021 season. After four races, the German was still without points in the standings, but that changed when Formula 1 travelled to the street circuits of Monaco and Azerbaijan. In Monaco Vettel finished fifth and in Baku the German finished second.

Vettel still one of the very best

According to Gerhard Berger, it is not surprising that Vettel finished on the podium in Baku. "He is a four-time world champion, has more than 120 podium finishes. He is one of the best drivers of all time. You forget that quickly too," said Berger in conversation with F1-insider.com.

The Austrian thinks Vettel was written off too quickly after a couple of bad races and last year's dramatically flawed season. "In terms of performance, I think he is past his prime. But that doesn't mean there is no room for improvement this season."
According to rumours, Ferrari team boss Mattia Binotto has decided not to travel to the Red Bull Ring for the Styrian GP, reports the Mexican branch of Motorsport.com.

He would make this decision because of the reorganisation which is going on in the Italian team. The team already made several changes in the structure. Inaki Rueda has taken on the role of Sporting Director and Ravin Jain has been promoted to the pit lane.

Binotto may miss several races

During the Baku GP, Binotto did not join the pit wall but instead spent the race in the garage. Enrico Cardile, the man in charge of the technical side, was also present. He is busy working on the 2022 car. Therefore, it would not be a surprise if Binotto skips the Styrian GP, as the focus is on next year.

Austria will probably not be the only Grand Prix without Mattia Binotto. Last year he also missed out on a trip to Turkey and Bahrain. He also skipped the last race in Abu Dhabi, but that was due to illness.
Nikita Mazepin 's move against Mick Schumacher in Azerbaijan continues to be discussed in Formula 1. In an interview with the German RTL Haas team boss Guenther Steiner tells what he thought of the situation.

Mazepin made a dangerous move when Schumacher wanted to overtake him on the straight in Baku. Many had something to say about it, including Ralf Schumacher. Steiner is now speaking out: "I think in the end it was not too dangerous, but just the emotion involved because of the high speed," he tells in the interview. "I talked to both of them, because you have to avoid that kind of thing. If it goes wrong, it goes really wrong. We've got everything figured out. They both have to learn from it how to react," was the team boss' announcement.

Movement Mazepin was not too dangerous

Steiner believes that Mazepin's movement was not too dangerous: "I just say: this is the wrong attitude. Before he saw the video footage, he saw it differently. That was a misjudgment. And it was. If there's an understanding of that kind of thing, you have to let it go. You have to say at some point, we've talked about it, the air is cleared, let's move on."

The two Haas drivers have already discussed and forgiven the incident. "Mick listened to what Nikita had to say and respected that. I think he can tick that off. Mick is not emotionless either. At times like this, it's also good that they come out," Steiner said.
Well-known Italian F1 insider Leo Turrini hopes Ferrari's new CEO puts Formula 1 to the top of the fabled Maranello marque's priority list.

After the shock death of Sergio Marchionne in 2018, Louis Camilleri took over - but he stepped down for personal reasons at the end of last year.

John Elkann, the chosen heir to the Ferrari-linked Agnelli family, took over but only temporarily, as he has now appointed Benedetto Vigna as his permanent replacement.

Vigna, 52, will arrive at Maranello on September 1 from a company called STMicroelectronics, and other innovative high-technology appointments.

Elkann hailed Vigna's "deep understanding of the technologies driving much of the change in our industry".

A statement issued by Ferrari said his "priority will be to ensure that Ferrari continues to build on its leadership position as the creator of the world's most beautiful and technically advanced cars".

But Turrini, writing on his popular Quotidiano blog, hopes Vigna is also a major supporter of Ferrari's Formula 1 team.

"For those of us struggling around in F1, there is room for a wish," he wrote.

"Vigna was a child in the days of Lauda. He was a boy in Gilles' time. He was already in his career when Schumi inaugurated the dream team.

"If he remembers these things and they mean something to him emotionally, he will prove it to us by intervening in support of the racing department," Turrini said.

"Montezemolo and Marchionne were certainly no strangers to Formula 1 matters, so we'll see."

(GMM)
Through its order, the Supreme Court stayed the operation of an interim direction issued by the Telangana High Court on April 27 to suspend the probe against the key officials of Mahesh Bank. (PTI)

Hyderabad: The Supreme Court has allowed the Banjara Hills police to continue its investigation in the cases filed against AP Mahesh Cooperative Bank chairman Ramesh Kumar Bung, managing director Umesh Chand and vice-chairman Purushottam Das.

Through its order, the Supreme Court stayed the operation of an interim direction issued by the Telangana High Court on April 27 to suspend the probe against the key officials of Mahesh Bank.

Allegations against Ramesh Bung, Umesh Chand and Purushottam Das relate to the forging of documents; illegal disbursement of loans worth more than Rs 300 crores; and siphoning of Rs 18.30 crores from the bank.

In spite of several complaints lodged against the key officials of Mahesh Bank and a direction from the state government, police did not register an FIR against the trio.

Later, the AP Mahesh Bank Shareholders Association filed a complaint under Section 200 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) before a magistrate court, seeking its direction to the police.

The magistrate court referred the petition to the police under Section 156(3) of the Cr.PC, forcing the Banjara Hills police to register an FIR. However, the accused had got a stay from the Telangana High Court.

Though the AP Mahesh Bank Shareholders Association had on February 7 sought a High Courts direction to the Reserve Bank of India for conducting a forensic audit into the banks transactions and to suspend the incumbent Board of Directors, the court refused to intervene.

The tussle between the incumbent management of the bank and the AP Mahesh Bank Shareholders Association came to the fore during the elections conducted to elect the bank management.
On Thursday, party leaders including state in-charge Tarun Chugh and party president Bandi Sanjay, as also seniors like DK Aruna and Muralidhar Rao met at the state party office in Nampally.  Twitter

Hyderabad: In the context of Etala Rajendar's exit from the KCR ministry, the BJP in Telangana is preparing its cadre for a tough electoral fight in the Huzurabad by poll and would implement the Dubbak campaign strategy there too.

BJP sources say Rajendar and his close associates are likely to join the BJP at an event in Delhi on June 14 in the presence of national party president JP Nadda. Eatala is likely to resign his MLA post on June 12.



On Thursday, party leaders including state in-charge Tarun Chugh and party president Bandi Sanjay, as also seniors like DK Aruna and Muralidhar Rao met at the state party office in Nampally. They had an overview of at the evolving electoral strategy of the ruling TRS in Huzurabad.

Party in-charge Tarun Chugh suggested that BJP leaders visit the constituency one after another and encourage the cadre to fight the election in a coordinated manner as had happened in the Dubbaka poll.



The party high command has reportedly reviewed the states political situation in the context of the Eatala exit from the state ministry and felt this is time for the BJP to actively start preparing the party for the 2023 assembly elections.



The party state in-charge Tarun Chugh, national vice president DK Aruna and OBC National Morcha president Dr K Laxman would call on Eatala Rajendar at his residence by way of a courtesy call. They would discuss with him about the future strategies for the BJP in state polls.

The party is likely to appoint in-charges for each mandal with involvement of former ministers and former MLAs and they would visit the respective constituencies regularly and interact with the local cadre.

After the Nagarjunasagar by-poll, the party conducted a review and identified the loopholes in its campaign strategies. New strategies will be shaped in consultation with Etala.
In what was, so far, the best baseball game of the week, the Jaguars pulled their 33rd win out of the fire and salvaged a gem of a start from their star pitcher.
Amogy Inc., a developer of ammonia-based, high energy-density power solutions, announced the close of a major funding round. Led by AP Ventures, an investor in hydrogen technologies, the round included San-Francisco-based funds DCVC and Collaborative Fund, and investor Shaun Arora. Proceeds will be used for the first commercial demonstration of the high-performance clean mobility powered by ammonia.

Transportation accounts for 17% of global and 32% of the US greenhouse gas emissions. For weight- and volume-constrained applications such as heavy-duty ground/sea/air transportations it will be critical to find solutions with high energy density which deliver zero emission power, without compromising on performance.

Ammonia as an energy carrier offers a solution for these applications, due to its significantly higher energy density than batteries or conventional gaseous hydrogen storage. However, to date, ammonia as an energy carrier has been under-explored due to the lack of technology which can efficiently extract energy from ammonia in a constrained space. Amogy says that its technology unlocks the potential of ammonia for mobility applications by providing a highly efficient, lightweight, compact ammonia processor.
Plug Power plans to build a green hydrogen production plant in Camden County, Georgia, to serve customers across the southeastern United States. The announcement affirms Plug Powers continued commitment to establish the first North American green hydrogen supply network, as the Camden County plant extends Plug Powers service coverage across the entire eastern seaboard of the US.

The plant will produce 15 tons per day of liquid green hydrogen, produced using 100% renewable energy and intended to fuel transportation applications, including material handling and fuel cell electric vehicle fleets.

Plug Power is investing $84 million in the facility, which is expected to create at least 24 jobs in the local community starting in 2022.

As a focal point for Plug Powers green hydrogen network and the broader US hydrogen economy, Camden County, GA, presents many strategic advantages. With proximity to Interstate 95 (I-95), the main north-south highway on the East Coast of the US, the location enables easy access to the regions commercial and industrial centers, including Plug Power customers such as Home Depot and Southern Company.

Plug Power is working closely with local and state authorities as it moves forward with the project. Plug Power has signed a Purchase Power Agreement with Okefenokee Rural Electric Membership Corporation to source the renewable electricity needed to power the plant. Additionally, the company is entering into a Memorandum of Understanding with Camden County Joint Development Authority for land and local site support. The exact location for the plant and details about construction and job openings will be announced upon finalization later this year.

The Camden County plant will join previously announced facilities in South Central Pennsylvania and the Western New York Science, Technology and Advanced Manufacturing (STAMP) Park as key milestones toward Plug Powers goal of producing more than 500 tons per day of hydrogen by 2025.

Together with Plug Powers existing plant in Tennessee, acquired in 2020 as part of its vertical integration strategy, and its PEM stack and electrolyzer Innovation Center in Rochester, NY, this plant further strengthens the companys position in advancing the clean hydrogen ecosystem. Plug Power is already the largest buyer of liquid hydrogen globally.
Ten leading German corporations are jointly founding the Quantum Technology and Application Consortium (QUTAC). The goal of the newly founded consortium is to identify, develop, test, and share applications for quantum computing and to identify funding needs.

Specifically, applications for the technology, chemical and pharmaceutical, insurance and automotive industries are to be brought to market maturity. This is intended to create the basis for a successful industrialisation of quantum computing in Germany and Europe.

At the time of its founding, the consortium includes BASF, BMW Group, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bosch, Infineon, Merck, Munich Re, SAP, Siemens, and Volkswagen.





In the Stimulus and Future Package, the German Government has given a big boost to the development of Quantum Computers. Working together with companies and start-ups we will identify, develop, trial, and share applications. There are many highly interesting areas, e.g., in logistics, transport, chemicals and the financial sector. So, I am delighted that QUTAC has brought so many leading companies together to help Germany move forward in this key sector. Peter Altmaier, Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy

The participating companies consider an economically strong and resilient quantum computing ecosystem in Germany and Europe to be crucial to promote successful industrialization and digital sovereignty in this field. QUTACs vision is to drive such a quantum computing ecosystem.

QUTAC sees itself as a platform for action. The consortium promotes applications for the commercial use of this technology that are needed in the member companies. In doing so, they create industrial demand: The membership includes a broad cross-section of the German economy  thus the applications that are identified, developed, and tested within the consortium are trendsetting for entire industries.

The current circle of ten members allows for a pragmatic exchange and rapid decision-making in order to develop practical solutions in the short- and medium-term. The results are intended to benefit all participants in the ecosystem.

In its position paper, QUTAC sets specific steps: First, the need for quantum computing in the German economy is to be identified in order to create the basis for a cross-industry application portfolio. Currently, possible applications are being identified and their potential for industrial implementation is being evaluated. These reference applications will be jointly implemented and further developed beyond the boundaries of the consortium.




GREENWICH  Three new recruits to the Greenwich Fire Department took their official oaths of office at the fire headquarters Friday morning  in a ceremony held 10 months after they actually began working there.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the new hires were first sworn in via teleconference in the spring of 2020. But the fire department brass decided to hold a traditional ceremony for them in which they were delivered the oath of office by First Selectman Fred Camillo.

We felt it was important for them to get a proper swearing-in ceremony, and for their families, Fire Chief Joseph McHugh said.

The four had some unique challenges training in their new jobs during the pandemic, the chief said.

They had a tough road, and they did a good job adapting, he said. As to their abilities, McHugh said, The citizens of Greenwich are lucky to have these four firefighters. Theyll put in hard work every day for the protection and safety of the people and the town.

The three firefighters came from different backgrounds.

Roger Clapp began volunteering in the fire service as a 16-year-old in Deep River. He is a graduate of Western Connecticut State University and worked as a correction officer before he was hired in Greenwich as a firefighter.

Anthony Ryan studied at Western Connecticut and earned a degree in business administration. He later worked in construction, as a carpenter and site manager. He also served in the Army National Guard and deployed overseas.

John Valentini graduated from the University of Connecticut and worked in sales for Spartan Fire & Emergency Apparatus. He joined the Cromwell Fire Department as a volunteer and later worked a paid firefighter in that community for two years.

In addition to the new hires, a promotion to lieutenant was granted to Nate Schulde. He has served as a volunteer firefighter since his teenage years and was a paid member of the Waterbury Fire Deparment from 1995 through 2007. Since joining GFD in 2007, he has served on a number of committees dedicated to health and safety, as well as thermal imaging.

Ive wanted to do this since I was a kid, and Ive always wanted to help people, Clapp said after the ceremony.

Valentini added, Its a dream come true.

Camillo said he was pleased to swear in the firefighters and meet them face to face. Were happy to do it in person, he said.

rmarchant@greenwichtime.com
GREENWICH  There were some dark days during the COVID-19 pandemic at the Nathaniel Witherell, when visitors were prohibited from entering and normal recreational activities were suspended at the skilled nursing and short-term rehabilitation center.

But two musicians who work at the town-owned facility, Vincent Galizi and Michael Rinaldi, stepped up to brighten the mood by performing and singing all day in masks, which is no easy feat.

Unsung heroes, said Scott Neff, executive director of the Friends of Nathaniel Witherell.

Galizi, a guitarist, strolled the hallways to bring music to the residents in their rooms. Rinaldi, a keyboard player, performed outdoors so residents could go to their windows and listen. They both brought cheer and a positive outlook wherever they went, officials and residents said.

The administration and residents are now offering a big round of applause for the two musicians who brought much-needed comfort, cheer and normalcy during the difficult year.

Donna Calabrese, a Witherell resident who was out for a stroll on the facilitys grounds on a recent afternoon, gave the two musicians rave reviews.

Theyre fantastic, said Calabrese, who particularly appreciated hearing her favorite Broadway show tunes, among their other musical offerings. Everything they play, I like. They made a big difference. And always in a good mood.

Longtime musicians who play gigs at clubs and social events around the region, Galizi and Rinaldi say performing at the Witherell gives them a special kind of satisfaction.

Its a way to connect with someone, its very rewarding, said Galizi, a Greenwich resident. A song from the 20s, or 30s or 40s will bring out every word, they can remember all of it. So you can be the light in that persons day, on any given day. Enjoyable and rewarding. ... And the residents lit up during COVID, this slight bit of normalcy during this crazy year.

The two musicians are versatile, playing old-time music, Broadway show turns or more contemporary hits by Eric Clapton, U2 or the Eagles.

Rinaldi, a resident of Harrison, N.Y., said music has a way of sparking residents who may not take part in other recreational activities to listen. It was common to see Witherell residents dancing or singing along to familiar songs. Its a universal language, it touches people, he said.

When COVID-19 first hit, the two were prohibited from entering the facility, and they started recording videos that were projected at the facility. After they returned to the Witherell, they tried out new ways of bringing music to the residents, since their usual concert performances were no longer an option.

The whole team stepped up, Galizi recalled. We had to adapt. ... As an acoustic guitar player, I had a little more freedom, I was able to stroll to different parts of the building. Rinaldi played in the hallways for residents to listen, or set up his keyboards outside for al fresco concerts. Singing behind a mask is much harder than speaking with a face covering, they said, and their lungs got a work out.

Galizi has a personal connection to the Witherell. His mother, Rose, is a resident, and his late father, Anthony, died there a year ago.

The Greenwich guitarist recalled that when he played for his father as his health declined, Galizi saw a tear forming in his fathers eyes. He was not a man given to emotional outpouring, Galizi said, so it was a particularly moving moment for him as a musician. He also visits with his mother nearly every day, another perk of the job.

She loves to see my face, but she loves Mikes Italian music, he joked.

In the end, it was a hard year, they said. But the two musicians, who are termed recreation therapists, say they will latch onto the positive moments, and the spirit of resiliency that carried them and others through the trials imposed by the pandemic.

Whats Ill remember is the team rising up, said Galizi. The whole building, to see everyone work together, to make the program happen, to make the residents lives better  and the community support, which was tremendous  thats what Ill remember most.

The two musicians are looking forward to performing in front of a live audience again, later this month.

rmarchant@greenwichtime.com
Elk Grove, CA (95624)

Today

A few passing clouds. Low near 60F. Winds SSW at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

A few passing clouds. Low near 60F. Winds SSW at 10 to 15 mph.
NEW HAVEN  Police found a blood-like stain on a briefcase Qinxuan Pan allegedly was seen with on the night Yale graduate student Kevin Jiang was killed, according to the arrest warrant affidavit police filed in the case.

After a laboratory analysis, the stain was deemed 100 billion times more likely to have come from Jiang than an unknown person.

That piece of alleged evidence, as well as the rest of the investigation leading up to Pans arrest on a murder charge, is was detailed in a warrant released Friday in New Haven Judicial District Court.

New Haven police Detective David Zaweski wrote in the warrant affidavit, dated Feb. 26, that New Haven officers responded to the intersection of Lawrence and Nicholl streets at about 8:33 p.m. Feb. 6.

They found the body of a young man, later identified as Jiang, in the middle of the road. Jiang was holding a backpack; he had been shot in the face multiple times, the warrant affidavit says.

Arnold Gold / Hearst Connecticut Media

Officers with the departments Bureau of Investigation unit found eight .45-caliber cartridge casings at the scene and four fired projectiles, Zaweski wrote. Jiangs silver Toyota Prius was more than 100 feet from his body.

A witness told police they had looked out the window of their residence after hearing gunshots and a scream, according to the warrant affidavit.

The witness saw the shooter standing over Jiang firing two shots in a downward direction toward Jiang as he lay on the street. The witness described the shooter as tall and slender, wearing all black clothing, and a black winter hat, Zaweski wrote.

Witnesses described seeing a black SUV leaving the scene of the shooting, with one individual reporting it possibly was a black 2013 GMC Terrain, according to the warrant affidavit.

Thomas Breen / New Haven Independent pool

Police issued an alert for a dark-color SUV to surrounding police departments, possibly driven by two people; a dispatcher erroneously broadcasted that (an) occupant was possibly a black male, although no witnesses reported that, the affidavit says.

The department obtained surveillance footage from a nearby residence, according to the affidavit. In the video, a vehicle crash can be heard, with a Prius then entering the frame, followed closely by a dark-colored SUV. The Prius stopped; its hazard lights turned on. The SUV entered into reverse, leaving the frame, then can be heard striking another vehicle.

Jiang exited the Prius and walked toward the SUV. Jiang and the SUV eventually moved out of the camera frame. A few seconds later eight gunshots can be heard, a brief scream, and then additional gunshots, Zaweski wrote. Seconds after the gunshots the SUV is captured on video (traveling) past Jiangs vehicle east on Lawrence Street toward State Street with its headlights turned off.

Contributed

Further surveillance footage captured the SUV, seemingly a GMC Terrain, traveling through the area until it reached Ferry Street, heading toward the entrance ramp for Interstate 91 north.

About 90 minutes before New Haven police issued their alert, North Haven police responded to Sims Metal Management on Universal Drive, finding Pan, driving a dark blue 2015 GMC Terrain, stuck on the railroad tracks, the affidavit says.

Pan allegedly told the officers that he had made a mistake while attempting to drive to Massachusetts and become stuck on the train tracks.

Police determined the license plate on the vehicle had been reported stolen by Newington police, while the SUV was registered in Massachusetts, according to the affidavit. Pan told the police first that it was his vehicle, then that it was a rental, but could not produce the rental agreement or explain the stolen plate.

Pan was wearing a black jacket, black pants and black dress shoes, according to the affidavit, as well as a dark blue Patriots-branded neck gaiter and a gray knit winter hat with Metro PCS branding.

The SUV was towed from the scene, according to the affidavit. The tow truck driver took Pan to the Best Western Hotel at 201 Washington Ave., where, as Pan exited the vehicle, he allegedly jumped on the flatbed to retrieve his belongings from the SUV.

The driver told Pan four or five times to get off the flatbed, for his safety, which Pan ignored. Pan was adamant he needed the blue bag from the vehicle and did not want the driver to get it. At one point, the driver had to grab Pan by the shirt to get him out of the GMC, Zaweski wrote. The driver retrieved Pans items which included a computer bag, a backpack, a jacket and a blue bag. When the driver handed Pan the bags, he described the blue bag as having some weight to it.

North Haven police were called to the Arbys at 267 Washington Ave., next door to the Best Western, late the following morning, Zaweski said. An employee reported they had found a handgun, among other items, in the restaurants driveway as he arrived to work.

Arranged on a table, officers found a Ruger .45 caliber SR1911 semi-automatic pistol, a black Ruger pistol case, seven firearm magazines, numerous boxes of ammunition, a black Dell briefcase, one pair of black Sketchers (sic) sneakers, a gray knit winter hat with a MetroPCS logo, a GMC Terrain owners manual, a pair of lug nuts, a yellow Urban District jacket, Grey Hind sweat pants, a blue plastic bag labeled City of Malden, MA, three license plates and scissors.

Pan was a Malden resident at the time of the slaying, according to the affidavit.

An employee told the officers that the ammunition and magazines had been in the blue plastic bag. One of the officers, who had also responded when Pan was stuck on the train tracks the night prior, recognized the black Dell briefcase and the blue plastic bag from inside the GMC Terrain, according to the affidavit.

Pan had checked into the Best Western the night before, and was seen in surveillance footage carrying the black Dell briefcase, among other bags, but had seemingly not stayed in his room.

According to the affidavit, Zaweski spoke with Zion Perry, Jiangs fiancee, who reported she and Jiang had spent the day together ahead of the incident. As he left her apartment, she said she stood in the threshold, watching him get into his car and drive away. She heard gunshots a short time later, but believed Jiang had already left the area.

Perry told police she had met Pan in 2019, while they both attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to the affidavit. They talked at various Christian events on campus; she invited him to others as a welcoming gesture.

Perry said she never had a romantic relationship with Pan, but felt he was interested at the time, according to the affidavit.

Zaweski noted in the affidavit that Pan and Perry were Facebook friends, and that a post by Perry announcing her engagement to Jiang a week before the homicide would have been visible to him.

Seeking Pan

Arnold Gold / Hearst Connecticut Media

On Feb. 8, U.S. Marshals found that a phone number associated with Pan pinged off a phone in Garysburg, N.C. A gas station clerk showed them a black cellphone that had been found outside.

The license plate of a Lexus linked to Pans mother, Hong Huang, was also scanned crossing the Verrazano Bridge into Queens, N.Y., at 3:33 a.m. Feb. 7, Zaweski said. It later was scanned again near Grovetown, Ga., on Feb. 8.

U.S. Marshals got another hit for the license plate on Feb. 11, stopping the Lexus near Duluth, Ga., according to the affidavit. Huang and Hao Pan, Qinxuan Pans , parents, were inside, the affidavit says.

Hao Pan told marshals that Qinxuan Pan had called them four to five days before, saying he was in Connecticut and needed help, the affidavit says.

He said he and his wife then traveled from Massachusetts to Connecticut, picked up their son and had since been driving to unknown locations with him, sleeping in the vehicle along the way, according to the affidavit.

Hao Pan told police he had last seen Qinxuan earlier that morning, also in an unknown location, according to the affidavit. Huang declined to answer questions without an attorney present, the affidavit says.

Evidence

A preliminary analysis of the cartridge casings found at the scene of Jiangs death, conducted through the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, indicated they were associated with four other incidents of shots being fired in New Haven, including one on Osborn Street Feb. 5 and another about an hour before Jiangs death on Shepherd Street in Hamden on Feb. 6, one in January and one in December, according to the affidavit.

The warrant affidavit does not say who police believe fired the weapon on those occasions.

But a dark-colored SUV resembling a GMC Terrain was seen in surveillance footage of the latter two incidents, according to the affidavit.

Further, in a request for a search warrant to obtain OnStar data from the dark-blue 2015 GMC Terrain, Zaweski wrote that Pan had rented, and kept overnight, a different vehicle on the day of each shooting associated with the cartridge casings found at the scene of Jiangs death.

Police found three cartridge casings from an unspecified gun on the windshield of a vehicle Pan test drove from Feb. 5 to Feb. 6, Zaweki wrote in that request for a warrant.

The Ruger .911 found at Arbys turned up no NIBIN connection to the cartridge casings found at the scene, according to the affidavit. Police still were searching for the firearm used in the slaying when the affidavit was written, according to the document.

After obtaining search and seizure warrants, police searched the GMC Terrain Pan had been found driving for evidence, finding a reddish-brown stain on the gear shifter. The stain was found to be 100 billion times more likely to have originated from Jiang and an unknown party than two unknown parties, according to the affidavit.

Peter Hvizdak / Hearst Connecticut Media

The SUVs front license plate bracket was attached by one screw; there was a dent on Jiangs Prius consistent with the shape and positioning of the Terrains license plate bracket.

The Metro PCS-branded hat and the Dell briefcase also were sent off to be analyzed for DNA evidence, according to the affidavit. Both were found to bear DNA at least 100 billion times more likely to have originated from Jiang than an unknown party.

Fingerprints determined to match Pans were found on the Ruger, according to the affidavit. Residue consistent with gunfire was found on the yellow coat found at Arbys.

Pan was arrested by U.S. Marshals in Montgomery, Ala., on May 13 and extradited to Connecticut after a monthslong manhunt.

The affidavit released Friday does not detail that part of the investigation. Police obtained the warrant charging Pan with Jiangs death in late February.

Prosecutor Stacey Miranda had alleged at Pans arraignment May 20 that he had been renting an apartment in Alabama under a false name and was found to have been in possession of seven cellphones, seven SIM cards and his fathers passport.

He is next scheduled to appear in New Haven Judicial District court July 11, according to state records. He has not yet entered a plea.

Kevin Jiang

Jiang, 26, was a graduate student at the Yale School of the Environment, a member of Trinity Baptist Church and a West Haven resident.

Peter Hvizdak / Hearst Connecticut Media

Born in Seattle and raised in Chicago, he served as an environmental scientist/engineering officer and tank operator in the Army and National Guard and graduated from the University of Washington before coming to Yale. He was a certified fitness trainer and ran his own studio after serving in the military.

In the days following his death, friends, Yale colleagues, members of his church and fellow National Guardsmen all painted a picture of a person who brought joy to those around him, was excited about his future and devoted to his work and studies. They described him as kind, enthusiastic and open about his faith.

william.lambert@hearstmediact.com
WASHINGTON (AP)  Former President Donald Trumps signature border wall project would lose much of its funding as well as the fast-track status that enabled it to bypass environmental regulations under a Biden administration plan announced Friday.

President Joe Biden suspended construction of the wall upon taking office while his administration reviewed the project. That angered Republicans in Congress eager to see it go forward amid an increase in apprehensions of migrants along the southwest border.

The new plan does not cancel the wall project outright, but it's still likely to face opposition in Congress, where many Republicans are eager to promote a project closely associated with the former president.

Biden plans to return more than $2 billion that the Trump administration diverted from the Pentagon to help pay for the wall and use other money appropriated by Congress to address urgent life, safety, and environmental issues created by the construction. It also asks lawmakers not to provide any additional funding for what the Biden team believes is an unnecessary effort.

Building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border and costs American taxpayers billions of dollars is not a serious policy solution or responsible use of federal funds, the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement outlining the plan.

The government has built walls and other barriers along the 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) U.S.-Mexico border for decades to eliminate some of the easier routes of avoiding checkpoints. Trump turned the issue into a centerpiece of his political identity.

Trump vowed to build a virtually impenetrable wall, insisting it would be paid for by Mexico, which never happened. Instead, his administration set aside about $15 billion through a combination of congressional appropriations and taking the money from the Pentagon and other parts of the government.

The Trump administration built about 450 miles (725 kilometers) of wall, moving quickly and waiving requirements for environmental reviews and mediation, though only about 52 miles (84 kilometers) were in areas where no barrier previously existed.

Biden's decision to suspend construction prompted Republican senators to ask the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether the administration was violating federal law in not using appropriated money for its intended purpose.

The administration said Friday that it will use funds already set aside by Congress for their appropriated purpose, as required by law" but is requesting no new money for wall construction in the Department of Homeland Security's 2022 budget.

Biden is instead seeking money for increased technology at the ports of entry and elsewhere, saying there are more efficient ways to stop illegal immigration and drug smuggling at the border.

The administration said it would return $2 billion taken from the Pentagon and use it for the construction projects for which the money was originally intended. That includes $79 million for an elementary school for the children of American service members in Germany; $25 million for a fire and rescue station at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida; and $10 million to expand defenses against North Korean ballistic missiles at Fort Greely in Alaska.

It plans to use the approximately $1.9 million remaining appropriated by Congress for the wall for drainage and erosion control or other environmental problems caused by wall construction in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and elsewhere.

Dozens of advocacy organizations have called on the Biden administration to pay for the restoration of sensitive wildlife habitat and land considered sacred to Native Americans that was damaged by wall construction. This is a welcome, sensible next step to begin healing the devastation that Trump inflicted on the borderlands, said Paulo Lopes, a senior policy land specialist for the Center for Biological Diversity.

The administration doesn't explicitly say it won't build any new wall. But it says that any new construction will be subjected to environmental review and that it will review ongoing efforts to seize land from property owners by eminent domain and will return parcels to the owners if the Department of Homeland Security determines it's not needed.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, said Thursday that the state would build its own new barriers along the border with Mexico but offered no details, including precisely where or what they would look like. He has promised more details next week.

We need to recognize that the numbers of people coming across the border are just going to continue to increase unless we change the game plan, Abbott said.

___

Associated Press writers Anita Snow in Phoenix and Paul Weber in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON (AP)  A group of House lawmakers put forward a sweeping legislative package Friday that could curb the market power of Big Tech companies and force Facebook, Google, Amazon or Apple to sever their dominant platforms from their other lines of business.

The bipartisan proposals are the culmination of a 15-month investigation by the House Judiciary Committees antitrust subcommittee, led by Democratic Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island. It concluded that the four tech giants have abused their market power by charging excessive fees, imposing tough contract terms and extracting valuable data from individuals and businesses that rely on them.

Right now, unregulated tech monopolies have too much power over our economy, Cicilline said in a statement. They are in a unique position to pick winners and losers, destroy small businesses, raise prices on consumers and put folks out of work. Our agenda will level the playing field and ensure the wealthiest, most powerful tech monopolies play by the same rules as the rest of us.

The proposed legislation targets the structure of the companies and could break them up, a radical step for Congress to take toward a powerful industry. The tech giants for decades have enjoyed light-touch regulation and star status in Washington, but have come under intensifying scrutiny and derision over issues of competition, consumer privacy and hate speech.

As a candidate, President Joe Biden said breaking up big tech companies should be considered, though he hasnt spoken on the issue as president. If such steps were mandated, they could bring the biggest changes to the industry since the federal governments landmark case against Microsoft almost 20 years ago.

Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, the senior Republican on the antitrust panel, is pushing the legislation with Cicilline. Many Republican lawmakers denounce the market dominance of Big Tech but dont support a wholesale revamp of the antitrust laws.

Advancing the legislation through Congress could be a tough slog. Democrats control the House but they would need to garner Republican votes in the Senate, which is split 50-50 with the Democrats one-vote margin depending on Vice President Kamala Harris being the tiebreaker.

The proposals also would prohibit big tech companies from favoring their own products and services over competitors on their platforms. The House antitrust investigation found, for example, that Google has monopoly power in the market for search, while Facebook has monopoly power in the social networking market. The subcommittee said Amazon and Apple have significant and durable market power in the U.S. online retail market, and in mobile operating systems and mobile app stores, respectively.

The proposed legislation also would make it more difficult for the giant tech companies to snap up competitors in mergers, which they have completed by scores in recent years. And it asks Congress to boost the enforcement powers of antitrust regulators, such as the Federal Trade Commission.

The four companies have rejected lawmakers accusations of abusing their dominant market position and have asserted that improper intervention in the market through legislation would hurt small businesses and consumers.

A tech industry group, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, said Friday the legislation has the aim of regulating a selected group of American digital service providers."

These proposed regulations represent a shift from the market-oriented principles that have characterized U.S. economic policy," the group said. They would have a severe impact on U.S. economic leadership, and decrease consumers ability to enjoy free digital services."
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  California Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to spend the state's extraordinary budget surplus on correcting the most widespread financial impacts of the pandemic, pledging to give $600 payments to most taxpaying adults while committing to pay off all of their outstanding rent and utility bills.

But left out of the governor's $267.8 billion budget proposal last month: Money to rebuild local public health departments, whose staffing shortages and fragmented funding were exposed by the coronavirus, impeding a more coordinated response to the crisis.

Now public health departments are joining forces, trying to convince Newsom and the state Legislature to give them an unprecedented infusion of cash. Their campaign, dubbed California Cant Wait, seeks $200 million per year that would let them hire more people.

When things are going well in public health you often dont hear about it, said Michelle Gibbons, executive director of the County Health Executives Association of California. COVID kind of highlighted a lot of the areas where public health has been decimated without having adequate staffing capacity.

The state Legislature, dominated by Democrats, included more than $400 million for public health in its budget proposal, including the $200 million public health departments asked for plus another $115 million to address inequities in the public health system.

Lawmakers are expected to vote on their budget plan next week, but it won't become law unless they can reach an agreement with Newsom.

Newsom has not said why he did not include the money for public health departments, instead reiterating his support for health care in general  including spending $300 million on public hospitals and giving government-funded health insurance to some low-income adults living in the country illegally.

Ive not been shy in terms of my support to advance the cause of health care, Newsom said.

Newsom's budget includes $3 million for a review to assess the state's public health response, adding his administration is committed to turning lessons learned" into actionable policies next year.

That angered some local public health leaders, with Gibbons saying Newsom's budget would repeat the same mistakes California made before COVID-19, leaving local public health departments too under-resourced and understaffed to address day-to-day public health threats."

California sends money to local governments to pay for public health and indigent health, or people who don't have insurance and can't pay for medical care. State funding for public health and indigent health has declined by more than $138 million between 2006 and 2020, according to the County Health Executives Association of California.

But the decline stems from the state assuming full responsibility for indigent health care costs after the federal Affordable Care Act went into effect, said H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the California Department of Finance.

That decision, which the Legislature approved, took these costs off of the counties' books, Palmer said.

California has 61 local public health departments scattered across the state, employing hundreds of doctors and nurses whose job is to think about what makes people sick and how to keep that from happening.

These people battle viruses like Ebola and Zika, while working to contain small outbreaks of measles and other infectious diseases. That includes sexually transmitted diseases, tuberculosis, and even the plague  an ancient disease that once killed a third of the population of Europe during the Middle Ages that, nevertheless, popped up in an isolated case last year in South Lake Tahoe.

Their work is often so far removed from the public consciousness that they don't register in the public policy debates at the state capital. That changed last year, as terms such as contact tracing and morbidity entered the vernacular, changing the way people think and talk about public health.

Before the pandemic, Alameda County had just seven people whose job was contact tracing, or investigating how and where people contracted a dangerous disease so they can attempt to isolate it and keep it from spreading. That job became critical during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

We could have been better prepared had we had more investment and infrastructure already in place with people trained to do this work with connections with the community to reach people that we need to reach," said Colleen Chawla, director of Alameda County's Health Care Services Agency. It's not the kind of work that can happen overnight.

Today, the agency has 140 contact tracers, a feat accomplished in part by moving people from other jobs. But when they did that, the county forfeited the grant money that funded those jobs, leaving a hole in their budget. That hole was filled with federal coronavirus aid money  money that won't be available in the future.

In 1991, the California Legislature shifted public health responsibilities to the counties. The state has been sending local governments money each year to do this, but that money has been declining in recent years.

Local public health departments also get federal money, but it comes with strict rules on how they can spend it. A county could use a federal grant to hire people, but only if they research a certain disease: For example, HIV, tuberculosis or tobacco-related illnesses.

Its difficult to coordinate kind of a broader approach when you are stuck in these buckets, like tobacco, STDs, Gibbons said.

Negotiations between Newsom and lawmakers are ongoing. Chawla said many acknowledged the difficulty of responding to the coronavirus pandemic with limited resources. But she said there should not be any excuses for the next public health crisis.

Who is going to be forgiving of us if we are in this position again? she said.

___

This story has been corrected to say public health departments are asking for $200 million, not $400 million.
NEW YORK (AP)  Fear of crime is back as a political issue in New York City. For the first time in years it could be a prime factor in who voters pick as their next mayor.

Early voting begins Saturday in the city's party primaries. Ballots are being cast as the city is emerging, brimming with hope, after a year in pandemic lockdown, but also amid an unsettling rise in shootings.

The violence is still well short of the historic highs of the 1990s, or even in the New York of the early 2000s. But it has forced the leading Democratic candidates to balance talk of police reform with promises not to let New York backslide to its long-gone days as a crime capitol.

No one is coming to New York, in our multibillion-dollar tourism industry, if you have 3-year-old children shot in Times Square, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said at a recent debate, referring to a May 8 shooting in which a 4-year-old girl and two adult women were wounded by stray bullets.

Adams, a former police captain who also co-founded a leadership group for Black officers, has risen to the top of most polls as issues of crime and policing have dominated recent mayoral debates.

The race remains tight, though, with 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang, former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia, city Comptroller Scott Stringer and civil rights attorney Maya Wiley the top contenders in a field of 13 candidates on the Democratic ballot.

The final day of voting is June 22, with the top Democrat in overwhelmingly Democratic New York City highly likely to win the November general election and succeed the term-limited Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The Republican primary features Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels anti-crime group, versus Fernando Mateo, a restaurant owner and advocate for taxi drivers.

The Times Square shooting and other high-profile crimes like last weekend's fatal shooting of a 10-year-old boy in Queens have sparked fears of a city under siege. Stop the Bloodshed, screamed a recent front page of the New York Post, which warned of surrendering streets to homelessness, filth, crime and guns in an editorial endorsing Adams.

The reality is more nuanced.

Many of the most common types of crime in the city, including robberies, burglaries and grand larcenies, remain near historic lows. Through the first five months of 2021, the total number of major crimes measured by the police department has been at its lowest level since comparable statistics became available in the 1990s.

But since the spring of 2020 the number of shootings has soared.

Through June 6, there were 181 homicides in New York City, up from 121 in the same period in 2019, an increase of 50%. That's the worst start to a year since 2011.

At least 687 people were wounded or killed by gunfire through June 6. That's not historically bad. More than 2,400 people were shot during the same period in 1993. But it is the highest number for a winter and early spring since 2000.

A plurality of voters surveyed in a Spectrum News NY1/Ipsos poll released this week chose crime or violence as the biggest problem facing New York, with both racial injustice and police reform also in the top 10.

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who has known most of the Democratic mayoral candidates for years, said crime is a big issue in Black communities and the progressive candidates should address it more forthrightly.

You know, two weeks after I did the eulogy at George Floyds funeral I did the eulogy for a 1-year-old kid in Brooklyn killed by a stray bullet in a gang fight, Sharpton said, referring to Davell Gardner, shot while sitting in his stroller last summer. So it is not true that those of us that want police reform do not also at the same time want to deal with crime. And I think that the progressive candidates need to be more out on that.

Maria Forbes, president of the Clay Avenue Tenants Association in the Bronx, said crime has risen in her neighborhood during the pandemic and she has taken taxis in order to avoid the subway.

I do not feel safe getting on the train, Forbes said.

But Forbes, like a lot of New Yorkers, also doesn't single out crime or any one issue as the most pressing. Housing and education are also big issues, she said.

You have minimum wage people who need housing and theres six of them in a two-bedroom," Forbes said.

The candidates differ widely in their approaches to crime.

Wiley, who is competing with Stringer and former nonprofit executive Dianne Morales for the votes of the most liberal of New Yorkers, would cut the police budget by $1 billion annually and invest those funds directly into the communities most impacted by gun violence, according to her platform.

A Wiley campaign ad shows police driving into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters last year. She says in the ad that it's time the NYPD sees us as people who deserve to breathe, a reference to the deaths of Eric Garner and George Floyd.

Wiley appeared to waffle Thursday when a debate moderator asked whether she favored taking guns away from police officers.

"I am not prepared to make that decision in a debate, Wiley said. A Wiley campaign spokesperson later called the question ridiculous because no one is even discussing taking guns away from cops.

Stringer says he would cut at least $1 billion over four years through measures such as transferring mental health response to non-police crisis teams and reducing police overtime.

Garcia has not called for cutting the police budget, but says officers' minimum age should be increased from 21 to 25 and new recruits should be required to live in the city.

Yang backs a police residency requirement as well as beefed up oversight of the department, but rejects calls to defund the police.

"The truth is that New York City cannot afford to defund the police, he warned.

Adams, who spent 22 years in the New York Police Department, says he was victimized by police brutality as a teenager and joined the force to reform it from within.

A group Adams founded called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care advocated against racial profiling and for recruitment of more officers of color.

While New York City mayoral races are often unpredictable, this primary is especially hard to predict because it will be the first to use ranked choice voting, with voters ranking up to five candidates.

Turnout, usually low in mayoral primaries, will also be a factor.

The question is which issues are going to be the most important to the voters that turn up on primary day, said Susan Kang, a political scientist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Kang said crime isnt the main issue she hears about knocking on doors for a City Council candidate shes supporting in Queens.

People talk to me about all kinds of things like property tax issues, street parking, public transportation, Kang said. No one says to me, but what is this person going to do about crime?
PHOENIX (AP)  Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey on Thursday called a special session of the state Legislature to boost wildfire funding as two large wildfires continue to burn in south-central Arizona.

The Republican governor wants the Legislature to approve extra money to ensure that firefighters have the resources they need across the drought-ravaged state and to address the problems the fires will trigger once they are out.

Now it's clear that weve got a lot more work to do and the response will not end even when these fires are out, Ducey said. When this years monsoon rains come, these burned areas are prone to landslides, mudslides and flooding, which pose another threat to this community."

Arizona is not alone in reporting large wildfires this year, as much of the U.S. Southwest is deep into a prolonged drought. The National Interagency Fire Center on Thursday reported that so far this year, 23 large fires have burned across nearly 400 square miles (1,036 square kilometers) of wildlands in nine states. New large fires were reported Wednesday in California, Colorado, Michigan and Utah.

The largest fires currently burning are in Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, states hit exceptionally hard by the drought.

About 1,600 firefighters are battling the two large Arizona fires that broke out early this month and have burned at least 245 square miles (636 square kilometers) of grass, chaparral and pinyon pine forest in rugged terrain. The fires are burning west of Superior, Globe, Miami and other mining towns about 75 miles (120 kilometers) southeast of Phoenix.

The special session is expected to be held next week. The governor did not announce how much money he will request, besides mentioning it will be in the millions.

Ducey made the announcement as he visited south-central Arizona after traveling with House Speaker Rusty Bowers and another lawmaker to the area where crews supported by aircraft are working to keep the fires out of Globe and several other communities in Gila and Pinal counties.

Bowers lost his longtime family retreat home in the blaze on Monday, which was among five structures that were destroyed in one of the fires burning near Globe and Miami. He lives in Mesa, but he said his grandmother was a milkmaid in Globe when she met his grandfather and his family has deep roots in the community.

"The governor mentioned our loss. But my wife and I, when we look at the friends and the folks that have tried to help us, that are helping you, this is the character of Globe-Miami right here, and beyond over those hills, and were grateful," Bowers said at a midday news conference. Were grateful for good neighbors.

Bowers talked to the governor Monday and suggested the special session, saying the state's wildfire funds were depleted and that he was worried about flooding and mudslides to come.

With what's happened up on the mountain, its gonna be a bad, bad summer if we get a heavy monsoon, which we need, Bowers said Thursday. And so, were here to help. We want to make sure the resources (are there) and work with your emergency management folks to get prepared, to get stationed, to get pre-positioned so that we can really help you in this flooding season thats going to come up.

Ducey rode on an Arizona National Guard Black Hawk helicopter for an aerial tour of the two fires, then was briefed by fire officials and visited a Red Cross shelter for evacuees before holding a news conference.

Whether Ducey actually needed to call a special session is doubtful. The Legislature remains in session as lawmakers try to get enough votes to pass a $12.8 billion budget and massive tax cuts Republican legislative leaders negotiated with Ducey. At least two GOP lawmakers and all Democrats oppose the tax cuts, leading to weeks of no movement on the budget.

Ducey said a special session will help focus lawmakers on a single subject that has bipartisan support even as they are deadlocked on the budget.

Its a way to just stop all the other noise that is necessary in any legislative session, to get big things done and to focus on the fire and the people of Gila County, Ducey said.

The Legislature faces a June 30 deadline to pass a budget for the 2022 fiscal year that begins July 1.

The governors January budget proposal noted that the state has consistently exceeded the $4 million annual appropriation to the state Fire Suppression Fund over the past several years and sought to increase that annual amount by $2.4 million in the coming budget year. The proposal noted that in the previous five budget years firefighting costs exceeded $39 million while appropriations were only about $20 million.

The governor also sought to increase the amount of cash put into an emergency fund he controls and often uses to make up the difference in actual firefighting expenses.

Depending on where fires burn in the state, firefighting efforts may be paid for with either state or federal funding.

Ducey on Wednesday issued an emergency declaration for the two current large wildfires. The declaration will make up to $400,000 available for response efforts.

Crews increased the containment of one called the Telegraph fire burning near Superior and Miami to 40% of its perimeter as of Thursday. Containment of the so-called Mescal fire southeast of Globe was at 36% as of Thursday morning.

The Mescal fire has entered a mop-up stage. But residents shouldnt become complacent because embers could be blown over containment lines and start spot fires, fire management team spokesman David Shell said. If that happens, "were off to the races again, he said,

___

Associated Press writer Paul Davenport contributed.
GENEVA (AP)  Swiss authorities plan to temporarily restrict airspace over the city of Geneva and to deploy up to 3,000 troops and police officers as part of extra security for the summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Joe Biden next week.

Switzerland's seven-member executive body, the Federal Council, approved temporary security measures Friday that include the deployment of up to 1,000 troops and airspace surveillance by the Swiss air force during Wednesday's summit.

"Switzerland is obliged to ensure the protection of persons who enjoy special protection under international law, such as the American and Russian heads of state, the Federal Department of Defense said.

The defense department said in a statement that commercial flights to and from Geneva's airport would not be affected by the airspace restriction that runs from 8 a.m. Tuesday to 5 p.m. Thursday.

Col. Monica Bonfanti, the commander of the Geneva police department, said during a news conference outside the summit venue that 900 extra police officers would be called in from other Swiss regions, raising the police contingent in the city to about 2,000 including local officers.

Stephane Theimer, vice director of the Federal Office of Police, or fedpol, and head of the Federal Security Service, said the office had received no indication of threats or upheaval involving the summit. But he said the terrorist threat remains high in Switzerland and Europe and cited other threats from extremist violent circles.

Naturally, the respective diasporas of the two countries could want to take advantage of the visit of their president to carry out actions, Theimer said. We are at a high level (of alert)."

Elaborating on his comments to The Associated Press, he said the meeting offered a window of opportunity for opponents/

"For the moment we don't have any concrete sign when it comes to actions by the diaspora, but it's something we're taking into consideration, Theimer said.

The extra troops will have roles in the protection of foreign emissaries and support for Geneva regional police in the air and on Lake Geneva, the defense department said.

Local authorities announced Thursday that the summit, part of Biden's first overseas trip as president, will take place in an 18th-century manor house in a public park that looks out onto the lake.

The White House has played down expectations for the summit and said Biden plans to raise Ukraine, arms control, human rights and cyber ransomware attacks with Putin.

Russian officials have said their summit agenda includes strategic stability, global crises, climate change and efforts to counter the coronavirus pandemic.
FILE - In this July 3, 2016, file photo, Yossi Cohen, then the director of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, attends the funeral in Jerusalem of a rabbi killed by Palestinian gunmen. Cohen, the outgoing chief of Israel's Mossad intelligence service, offered the closest acknowledgment yet his country was behind a series of recent attacks targeting Iran's nuclear program and a military scientist in a television interview aired Thursday, June 10, 2021.




Haiti - Politic : Moise seeks the support of the OAS for the security of the elections





The 3-day Good Offices Mission to the Organization of American States (OAS), accompanied by Haitian Ambassador to Washington Bocchit Edmond, which began on Tuesday ended on Thursday, June 10.



President Jovenel Moise, who met twice with the mission, thanked the members of the delegation and declared " I took the opportunity to request the support of the Organization for the organization of the elections, especially in terms of security. The involvement of the OAS in the process will be crucial."



For its part, the mission of the OAS Permanent Council in Haiti issued the following statement on June 10, 2021 :



"A Good Offices Mission of the Organization of American States (OAS) arrived in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on June 8, 2021 for a three-day visit. Composed of the Permanent Representatives to the OAS of Canada, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and the United States, and supported by the OAS General Secretariat and the Secretary Generals Special Representative in Haiti, the purpose of the Mission was to facilitate a dialogue that would lead to free and fair elections.



The members of the Mission were received in audience by President Jovenel Moise with the participation of the Interim Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Claude Joseph. The members of the Mission also participated in several roundtable discussions, with more than 50 interlocutors from a wide range of civil society and political actors.



These meetings provided an opportunity to discuss the challenges facing Haiti and to renew the commitment of stakeholders in Haiti to an inclusive democratic process leading to free and fair elections in the coming months. In each meeting, members of the Good Offices Mission asked for a:



Commitment to representative democracy under the Inter-American Democratic Charter



Commitment to free and fair legislative and presidential elections in 2021



Transparent election process with input from all stakeholders that will be credible to the Haitian people



Agreement to compromise to reach a political accord to benefit the people of Haiti



Commitment against political violence and impunity and a commitment to respect human rights



The Good Offices Mission was grateful for the opportunity to engage directly with a wide range of stakeholders and for a frank and open dialogue.



The Mission will now consider the input that it has received and, within two weeks, will submit a report to the Chair of the Permanent Council with its findings, conclusions and recommendations.



The Good Offices Mission expresses its thanks to the President for inviting the Mission and to all those stakeholders who participated in the very productive discussions that were held."



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-33935-haiti-news-zapping.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-33836-haiti-news-zapping.html



HL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - News : Zapping...





Covid : Carrefour plant suspended for 10 days

Thursday, June 10, Evenson Calixte Director General of the National Regulatory Authority for the Energy Sector (ANARSE) informed that "6 people have tested positive for Covid-19 on the site of the new Carrefour power plant. The work was suspended for 10 days. On the same day performance tests were successfully carried out on the two turbines, which will soon produce 60 Mw."



Qatar 2022: Duckens Nazon absent against Canada ?

Striker Duckens Nazon, replaced with an injury in the 58' during the match against Nicaragua [1-0] in favor of Haiti https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-33928-icihaiti-qatar-2022-qualifiers-victory-of-the-grenadiers-%5b1-0%5d-against-nicaragua-video.html could not participate in the 2nd eliminatory phase in the match against Canada, Saturday June 12 at the Sylvio Cator stadium, Nazon seems not to be be comfortable with his left leg...



Martissant : The PNH regains control

Thursday, June 10, Leon Charles, the Director General ai of the National Police of Haiti (PNH) in a press conference declared that following the clashes of armed gangs, the National Police had taken steps to allow the resumption of the traffic in the Martissant area, its surroundings and the National Road #2. Administrative police units are deployed at Portail-Leogane up to 1st avenue Bolosse. The areas from Martissant to Fontamara are controlled by specialized units, equipped with armored vehicles that move back and forth to ensure the safety of users on this section of road.



Referendum : reaction to the US position

Reacting to the position of the American Administration which pronounces against the referendum https://www.haitilibre.com/article-33944-haiti-actualite-zapping.html, Mathias Pierre, the Minister in charge of electoral matters estimated on a radio station that as a sovereign country, "only the Haitian people will have to decide their destiny through a referendum to reject or adopt a new Constitution".



COVID : Eddy Jackson Alexis' wife passed away

Thursday, June 10 in the morning, Esther Dorestal Alexis (38) the wife of the former Secretary of State for Communication died from a complication linked to Covid-19 after 10 days of hospitalization at Delmas hospital 2.



"I extend my sympathies to former Secretary of State Eddy Jackson Alexis who has just lost his wife. Condolences and courage to the family and loved ones of the deceased," Frantz Exantus, Secretary of State for Communication. The Office of the Secretary of State for Communication associates to the pain of all those terribly affected by this disappearance in particular, her husband Eddy Jackson Alexis, her family as well as her friends and collaborators.



HL/ HaitiLibre


















By William Schwartz | Published on 2021/06/10

On June 8th "Youth of May" ended with ratings of 5.6%. Subsequent to that event actors from the program have sent closing greetings to their fans via social media for their support of the melodrama dated to the Gwangju Uprising in 1980. This includes leading actor Lee Do-hyun, who began a recent statement on the topic by thanking all the cast and crew members who helped him both with his role and the project writ-large.

According to Lee Do-hyun, the project was a difficult one and he worried greatly about doing it properly. He persisted by asking himself what he would have done as a boy had he been alive in those challenging times. Ultimately, the answer he came to was to try and express love much as he does in the present day. Lee Do-hyun described the most memorable scene as the final one where he lets go of Go Min-si's hand and is left, one flash-forward later, what might have happened if he hadn't.

Lee Do-hyun also had specific words of praise for Go Min-si, with whom he had worked on the Netflix drama "Sweet Home" last year. Lee Do-hyun said that due to their familiarity with each other they had an easy time frankly discussing what they were trying to do with any given scene. In regards to elder co-star Oh Man-seok, Lee Do-hyun described working with the actor as an honor and an inspiration, as he had a very scary, sharp vibe.

Lee Do-hyun expressed hope that one day he too could become such a believable actor. He said he would work hard to achieve this, and asked for people to take comfort from "Youth of May" when dealing with feelings of pain and nostalgia. Lee Do-hyun then quoted a line from the drama by Kim Won-hae's character about spreading wings and flying there and back again. Lee Do-hyun is currently preparing for his next drama "Melancholia" where he will co-star with Lim Soo-jung.

Written by William Schwartz
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Settlement in 29-year-old lawsuit is $59 million

A settlement in a lawsuit some 150 years in the making was settled Thursday, providing $59 million to individual Native American litigants and tribes including The Chippewa Cree Tribe of Rocky Boys Indian Reservation and The Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Montana.

Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia finalized Thursday settlement of litigation between the Department of the Interior and plaintiffs in Peltier v. Haaland, the U.S. Department of Interior announced Thursday.

The Department of the Interior is wholly committed to strengthening our government-to-government relationship with tribes, including reconciling long-standing disputes regarding proper management of tribal trust assets, a spokesman for the Department of the Interior said. The department will continue to diligently execute its trust responsibility to federally recognized tribes and enact policies that promote tribal sovereignty, self-determination and economic self-sufficiency.

The Class Action Settlement Agreement settles the claims of 39,003 individual beneficiaries against the United States for mismanagement of the Pembina Judgment Fund, a trust fund containing additional compensation for certain lands that the Pembina Band of Chippewa Indians ceded to the United States. Final approval of the CASA activates the settlement reached in the Court of Federal Claims with the four beneficiary tribes, the White Earth Band of Chippewa Indians and the the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians as well as the the Chippewa Cree Tribe and the The Little Shell Tribe.

The litigation was filed in 1992 by individual and tribal beneficiaries of the Pembina Judgment Fund, alleging mismanagement and failure to account.

The settlement builds upon the work initiated under the Obama-Biden administration, which settled the vast majority of the outstanding claims, some dating back more than a century, with more than 100 tribes and totaling over $3.7 billion, the Justice Department release said.

Receiving justice after 150 years

The settlement of the claim going back to land transfers in 1863 and 1892 was made in November 2020. The hearing Thursday finalized that settlement.

The people eligible are descendants of the Pembina Band of Ojibwe or Chippewa Indians, including eligible members of the Chippewa Cree Tribe of Rocky Boys Indian Reservation, the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, White Earth Band of Ojibwe and eligible people not members of those tribes.

The issued started in 1863 with a treaty with the Pembina Band and Red Lake Band of Chippewa, ceding land on the border of North Dakota and Minnesota, and then the McCumber Agreement of 1892, where the Pembina ceded land to the federal government on the border of North Dakota and Canada.

About 40 years later Indian tribes began to think maybe they had not gotten a good deal in their treatment by the federal government  maybe they had been cheated.

Indians began getting attorneys and trying to have their claims heard in courts, but the courts were not very available to the Indians and the federal government generally was considered immune.

So the tribes turned to Congress, and got a better reception there.

But as more and more tribes began to file claims, it began to clog up the process, so Congress created the Indian Claims Commission to look at the tribes claims.

Just more than 600 petitions were filed.

The Pembina requests actually had two claims, one for the 1863 treaty and for the 1892 agreement.

In 1964, the commission made an award on the 1863 claim, but most of that went to the Red Lake Band, with the Pembina receiving about $300,000.

But then the government had to set a process for distribution, which happened in 1971. By then, the Pembina Band no longer existed and Congress determined the award should go to the eligible members of the Chippewa Cree, Turtle Mountain and White Earth, as well as nonmember lineal descendant

Then the government had to set up distribution procedures and find exactly who was eligible. Those funds werent distributed until 1984.

In 1980, the commission ruled on the 1892 agreement and awarded the Pembina $53 million  the second-largest award made by the ICC, with the only larger settlement $200 million to the Sioux over the taking of the Black Hills of South Dakota.

The Pembina settlement included five beneficiary groups, Chippewa Cree, Little Shell, White Earth and Turtle Mountain and nonmember lineal descendants.

Waiting 30 more years for a settlement

The groups, Turtle Mountain in particular, started wondering how the government had been handling the money it was holding in trust. The tribe hired an accounting firm to look at the $53 million held in trust to see what earnings it had made in eight years.

The accounting firm said it couldnt determine that with the meager records available and its client didnt need an accounting firm, it needed a law firm.

So the tribe came to Native American Rights Fund in 1992 and Sept. 30, 1992, NARF filed a lawsuit  the first Native American class action suit filed on the issue.

Melody McCoy, the attorney who represented the plaintiffs, said the government didnt take the case very seriously, but it was a growing issued starting in the 1970s and running into the 1990s. Tribes had been going to Congress to try to get an answer on their trusts.

The federal government held billions in trust funds but no tribe ever got an accounting of trust funds and tribes were never consulted about how those funds should be invested and no tribe had ever received information about how those funds were invested by the United States.

Ultimately Bureau of Indian Affairs hired an accounting firm to do that, but the firm, after spending five years and $23 million in taxpayer money, said it could not reconcile the accounts on the information available.

But it gave a cursory view of 20 years, 1970 to 1990, which it distributed to the tribes.

When they got the reports, we were glad we were in court, McCoy said.

The federal government tried to get the claims dismissed again, she said, but the judge ruled the plaintiffs had provided enough evidence for it to go forward.

That was in 2006, and in the meantime 100 other tribes had flied lawsuits, she said.

And Eloise Cobell also had filed a lawsuit dealing with the trust funds held for individual Native Americans.

When Barack Obama became president, he promised he would seriously look at settlements.

The Pembina group held out, saying its claim was worth more than was offered, McCoy said.

It wasnt until 2018 we started serious negotiations, she added. It took nine or 10 years to negotiate the settlement we see today.

She said the Pembina claimants quickly approved the settlement  but now a new administration was in office, with Obama having termed out.

The final settlement wasnt reached until almost the end of the Trump Administration, two years after the serious negotiations began.

And now, with the hearing finalizing it, the descendants of the Pembina Tribe will receive their award  almost 150 years after the original deals.
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A retired Coast Guard captain, Murray steadying the ship as appointed D.A.

Andrew Murray

Along with every other U.S. attorney in America, Andrew Murray complied with the request from the new administration in January to resign from his job.

Effective Feb. 28, he became Citizen Murray for the first time since he donned a Coast Guard uniform 41 years ago.

It was the first time in my life since I was 12 years old without a job, he said. I was doing some honey-do list on my house, fixing it up. We took two vacations during that time.

He was scheduling interviews for a new job when he got a phone call that would make the job hunt academic.

Gov. Cooper called me and asked me if I was willing to take an emergency appointment, he said. Days earlier, Superior Court Judge Robert Ervin had removed Judicial District 29Bs elected prosecutor, Greg Newman, after a hearing into misconduct in office and two disciplinary actions by the state Bar.

As top prosecutor in the largest local district in North Carolina and then for all of Western North Carolina as U.S. attorney, Murray has plenty of experience putting offenders away, from major drug traffickers to white-collar criminals.

But asked whether he felt like he was handed a cleanup job in the judicial district made up of Henderson, Polk and Transylvania counties, he defends the operation he inherited and the assistant D.A.s who handle the crush of cases.

I think I have great personnel, he said. I think theres great relationships with our personnel with all of our external stakeholders  that is, law enforcement, probation, the judges and the clerks of court. Thats a building foundation of having a great, running, functional D.A.s office.

Why the governor chose me  hopefully its because Ive built a reputation for getting the job done and doing it with honor and integrity.  This place is running well.

The hiatus in regular court hearings and jury trials because of the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated a backlog of cases.

Here, I have great employees, great partners, but being able to cover only three counties with only nine ADAs Ive found to be a challenge, he said, noting that he had received a resignation from an assistant district attorney that week. Theres a lot of stressors when you start going down a person or two. But its great job. Ive been a public servant my entire life, from the Coast Guard to second D.A. to D.A. and then to U.S. attorney so I am made to be a public servant. I have a passion to do justice for the public. Im enjoying this job so far, although Im still swimming upstream.

He took an unusual path to his career in the law. After joining the Coast Guard out of high school in 1980, he earned an undergraduate degree in political science at UNC Charlotte in 1989 while serving on active duty. After completing officer candidate school, he earned a law degree, in 1992, from the University of North Carolina School of Law.

On active duty, he served aboard Coast Guard helicopters making sea rescues.

I was the guy on the cable or putting the person down from the cable, he said. He was promoted to operations commander of a unit based in Charleston, South Carolina, and retired from the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve in 2015 as a captain.



Wont open Pandoras box

For the past several years, family members of crime victims have assailed Newman for what they regard as his refusal to prosecute cases or for accepting light sentences in plea bargains. One activist who advocated for Newmans removal lists more than 20 instances of these aggrieved family members. While he is aware of the complaints, Murray plans no wholesale review of cases Newman resolved.

Ive had several phone calls from several individuals that I have told them I would take the time to at least review a case, he said. It is not my intention unless theres some extraordinary change of circumstances to review all cases. Greg Newman was the properly elected district attorney for this district. He got to make discretionary calls along with his staff, so I dont intend to open up a Pandoras box in going back.

There are always individuals that are unhappy with the D.A.s office, he added. Thats the nature of our job. Finding that sweet spot is not easy when youre D.A. and the sweet spot always has individuals on both sides that are not happy. Ive always received emails and phone calls on both sides that either it was too much or it wasnt enough.



Will he or wont he?

For now hes commuting from Charlotte and spending weeknights in a hotel. He and his wife love to hike in the mountains and visit waterfalls and hes looking forward to finding a home here.

Right now I havent had much time to breathe, he said.

A popular parlor game around the courthouse these days is whether Murray, a Republican who served as a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, is on the job here as an interim emergency administrator or as a candidate waiting to happen in next years elections.

Thats the question of the hour, he said, before hinting that hes thought of the positive side of running for the job. All I can tell you is I came up here to do a job, to do the best job, steadying the ship. I think thats a decision for down the road a bit. I have to assimilate into this community.

I love Hendersonville, I love Transylvania, I love Polk. Im an outside person, love mountains, so this is a place that I fit in well and quite frankly I fit in well with my politics.
NC Senate votes to ban abortions based on race, gender or Down syndrome

RALEIGH  Jaden Ng, 13, and her family sat in the gallery on Thursday morning to watch the N.C. Senate vote to ban abortions sought based on the likelihood of Down syndrome, the condition Jaden has had her entire life.

As a Down syndrome teen, she and her family worked the halls of the N.C. General Assembly in recent weeks, speaking at committee meetings and lobbying lawmakers to support House Bill 453, the Human Life Nondiscrimination Act/No Eugenics.

I know that in my heart that I am Gods child and I love my life, Jaden told the House Judiciary Committee recently. She told lawmakers she loves being homeschooled and enjoys swimming.

I wasnt really sure if she was up to the task, said her father, Dr. Wing Ng, of Jadens testimony. But Jaden was writing things down, and when we saw what she wrote we thought she should speak.

The Ngs, of Raleigh, were recognized from the Senate floor Thursday by bill sponsor Sen. Joyce Krawiec, R-Forsyth, before the Senate voted 27-20 to send House Bill 453 to Gov. Roy Coopers desk. Republicans unanimously supported the bill, and all Democrats present voted against it. During Senate floor discussion, only female senators spoke for one side of the bill or the other.

People are protected from discrimination in education, in the workplace, in housing, and yet babies with these same characteristics can be aborted simply because of their race or disability, said Krawiec on the Senate floor. This is eugenics in its worst form, and this bill will eliminate that atrocity.

The bill expands an existing law that requires abortion doctors to sign off that the woman is not seeking an abortion based on the babys gender, broadening the law to include banning motives of race or Down syndrome as reasons for the procedure.

We are not talking about women who dont want any child; we are talking about women who dont want this child, said Sen. Amy Galey, R-Alamance. This is about one human being considering the value of another human being and finding that they are not worth life.

However, the anti-discrimination element to the bill did not seem to draw Democrats to support it.

To label a persons decision to obtain an abortion as eugenics, as this bill does, is offensive, irresponsible, and warps the painful legacy of the eugenics movement in North Carolina and disrespects the trauma endured by real victims of forced sterilization, Sen. Natalie Murdock, D-Durham, said in opposition to the bill.

Across the country, six states have laws prohibiting abortions motivated by the race of the baby, and nine states ban abortions motivated by the likelihood of disability. Sixteen states, including North Carolina, prohibit abortion motivated by the gender of the baby. The bill requires doctors to attest in writing the patients motivation is not based on race, gender, or possible disability, and requires providers to collect some data on the procedure.

Sen. Sarah Crawford, D-Franklin, spoke against the bill and said the legislative focus should instead be on providing services to families with disabled children.

If we want to get serious about walking with women through their journey of a prenatal diagnosis, the prescription is not to tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her body, said Crawford. The prescription is funding for services, information for families, and comfort for families in knowing that their child will have access to education, therapies and the medical support they need.

There are, as we all know, 15,000 people in North Carolina that qualify for services like these, but they sit waiting for years, she continued.

Kraweic responded to Crawford directly on the floor, challenging her to help them get such funding for services passed in the state budget after they were lost in Coopers budget veto last year.

We do have 15,000 people on a waitlist and I want to let you know that last session we had a budget dealing with that, said Kraweic. It was vetoed by the governor, and as I recall, we didnt get support from the other side of the aisle.  We have put them in the budget again this year and, Senator Crawford, I hope I can count on your support to make sure those waivers go into effect so we can reduce that waitlist for these children and for other children.

After the passage of H.B. 453, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who is outspoken about his pro-life beliefs, ordered the bill enrolled and to be sent to the governor.

The North Carolina Values Coalition calls on Governor Cooper to sign this bill to end discrimination based on race and stigma associated with prenatal screening tests that detect a diagnosis of Down syndrome, said Julie Scott Emmons, N.C. Values Coalition Vice President. Children in North Carolina should not have to pass a genetic test to earn the right to be born.

Cooper must sign or veto the bill within 10 days, or it becomes law without his signature. The Ngs said they will try to share their story with Cooper.

Most importantly, we would like for him to see what life is like for her and for us, and we hope we can make an impact, said Wing Ng.
Josep Borrell Fontelles vice president of the European Commission in charge of coordinating the external action of the European Union, delivers his speech about the Systematic repression in Belarus and its consequences for European security following abductions from an EU civilian plane intercepted by Belarusian authorities. Strasbourg eastern France, Tuesday 8 june , 2021.
Huntington, WV (25701)

Today

Some clouds in the morning will give way to mainly sunny skies for the afternoon. High 89F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Mainly clear. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 60F. Winds NNW at 5 to 10 mph.
China urges Britain to stop interfering in Hong Kong affairs

CGTN) 09:18, June 11, 2021

Chinese authorities on Thursday voiced strong opposition and disapproval over the so-called "six-monthly report on Hong Kong" released by the British government and urged Britain to stop interfering in Hong Kong affairs and China's internal affairs.

The report distorted the truth, blatantly meddled with Hong Kong affairs and China's internal affairs at large and also trampled upon principles in international law and basic norms governing international relations, a spokesperson of the Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) said in a statement.

The spokesperson also defended the implementation of "One Country, Two Systems" and fundamental measures of the national security law and the improvement of Hong Kong's electoral system, saying they have effectively restored order and stability to Hong Kong society and tranquility and freedoms to its people, as well as protected political stability and safety of the HKSAR's body of power.

"Britain has shown total disregard for the positive momentum in the Hong Kong situation and people's longing for peace and stability, and chosen instead to openly meddle with Hong Kong affairs on the pretext of human rights, democracy and the rule of law," the spokesperson added.

Separately, a spokesperson of the Chinese embassy in the UK said the embassy has lodged solemn representation to the UK side on the report.

The spokesperson reiterated that the UK has no sovereignty, jurisdiction or right of "supervision" over Hong Kong after the handover and no foreign country has the right to take the Joint Declaration as an excuse to interfere in Hong Kong affairs.

"We once again urge the UK side to recognize the reality and major trend, respect China's sovereignty and unity, and stop any form of interference in Hong Kong affairs, which are China's internal affairs, so as to avoid further disruptions to China-UK relations," said the spokesperson.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)
Nandi Howard is now Editor in Chief at Houstonia - the city's #1 local source of premium lifestyle content and news. A native of Houston, she returns to the digital, social and print publication from New York City-based Essence, where she has been the fashion editor for print and digital since 2019 and a contributor to Fader, Playboy, The Hollywood Reporter, and Harpers Bazaar.
The earliest Jews in the North American colonies related to Africans and their American-born offspring in the same ways most other white European colonists did. These Jews, largely immigrants from Spain and Portugal, derived much of their livelihood, directly or indirectly, from the slave trade. Approximately one third held slaves themselves, though few owned large plantations, and none publicly opposed the institution of slavery, even as enslaved Blacks increasingly came to identify with the biblical Israelites and their escape from Egyptian bondage. In fact, the only southern Jewish rabbi to preach against slavery was pressed to resign by his own congregation. The highest political position yet held by a Jew in America was the vice president of the Confederacy.

This lack of concern for Black people's struggles began to change as Eastern European Jewish immigrants and southern Black migrants encountered one another in rapidly growing northern cities. These Jews, often more politically radical than the German and Spanish Jews who preceded them in America, and having experienced similar persecution in Europe, were more attuned to the economic hardship and racial violence Black Americans faced. Yiddish newspapers called Black lynchings "pogroms," and their newly organized unions and political groups were more likely than others to include Black people. In many cities, the majority of Communist Party members were African Americans or Eastern European Jews.

But while both communities established civil rights organizations to combat bigotry and discrimination, they rarely worked together. And Jewish organizations, peopled and controlled by white Jews, largely ignored the growing number of Jews of color. When Black groups approached Jewish groups for help, most Jewish groups balked, fearful of tying their fortunes to those they perceived as even more hated.

All this changed in the 1930s. Largely in response to Nazism abroad and rising anti-Semitism at home, Jewish groups reached out for allies and Black organizations responded. Black and Jewish organizations increasingly worked together to challenge employment and housing discrimination, racial and religious violence, and exclusion from social, educational and professional organizations. These cooperative efforts were driven by self-interest, but it was a far more spacious notion of self-interest than before, rooted in the recognition that if any were not safe, none could be safe.

After the war, this cooperation broadened to a fuller set of collaborations. Jewish groups filed court briefs in desegregation cases; the NAACP helped lobby U.N. delegates to support the creation of a Jewish state. Of the three well known civil rights workers killed at the start of Mississippi's Freedom Summer of 1964: Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, two were Jewish and the third African American. Along with other allies, African Americans and Jews together compelled the desegregation of medical associations, bowling leagues, beaches, restaurants, housing developments and department stores. In 1948, Black and Jewish activists convinced New York to create a public university, the State University of New York, to compensate for racial and religious discrimination at private colleges. Joint lobbying efforts promoted more robust social welfare policies and emphasized the teaching of tolerance in public schools and community organizations. And increasingly, Jews - particularly secular and Reform Jews - identified the fight for civil rights as a Jewish ethical obligation.

But during these same years, economic and racial tensions destabilized the partnership. Eastern European Jews still saw themselves as outsiders, victims of white oppression. They failed to appreciate how their white skin helped them rise economically, even in the face of persistent anti-Semitism. Many of them operated businesses in Black communities - often formerly Jewish neighborhoods - and prided themselves on their relative lack of racism. But to African Americans, these were white business owners exploiting poor and marginalized outsiders. Economic tensions between shopkeepers and customers, landlords and tenants, were often interpreted by both sides as Black-Jewish fights.

The fact that white Jews had risen economically also led to some patronizing attitudes that inflamed tensions further. Jews saw their success as proof that liberal meritocracy worked and counseled patience, moderation, and compromise. Few understood when African Americans, concluding that white liberals could not understand the depth of systemic racism, turned toward more nationalist and seemingly radical ideas, broadly known as Black Power. Even as most white Jews clung to their faith in race blindness, African Americans understood that white America and its institutions would never be, and should not be, race blind.

By the middle of the 1970s, these differences splintered the coalition that had done so much to advance civil rights in America. Black and Jewish groups continued to collaborate on issues like aid to education, expanding the social safety net and assisting groups facing ethnic and racial violence around the world. But these were smaller and less public actions than those of the civil rights era, and the bond between the communities weakened as both increasingly turned inward. While they continued to share many of the same values and commitments, and African Americans and Jews continued to be the most reliable Democratic voters, their organizations no longer acted in concert or placed those shared commitments center stage. What remained were persistent class and racial tensions, and the anger and resentment they produced were increasingly openly expressed.

By the turn of the 21st century, the situation began changing once again. As the U.S. turned more politically conservative, and as issues important to both groups came increasingly under attack, Black and Jewish groups began to tentatively reach out to each other again. White Jewish political and religious organizations also began a more robust engagement with Jews of color. Both outreach efforts expanded slowly, then exploded after the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016.

Trump's views alarmed many in both communities, who saw their hard-won political gains slip away and their deepest values challenged. Many also recognized an increasing danger to their security. Local synagogues teamed up with Black churches, national organizations reengaged with each other, and younger Jewish activists in particular energetically proclaimed their commitment to racial and economic justice. In 2019, several House members even formed a congressional Black-Jewish caucus.

In this new movement, many more groups have active, even leadership, roles, including Hispanic, LGBTQ, undocumented, indigenous and impoverished communities. Feminist groups, progressive churches and others now energetically embrace the broader and deliberately intersectional struggle for justice and inclusion. This has shifted the agenda of the new civil rights struggle as well as its political understandings. While Black-Jewish relations remains a central commitment of many Jews, both black and white, it is now only one piece of a larger community of progressive activists of all religions and ethnicities.
My social media has been full of proud parents posting pictures of their high school, college, and graduate school graduates which no doubt comes with extra meaning on the heels of a pandemic thats interrupted so many of our lives. As happy as I am for my friends and their children, I cant help but look at each of these pictures through a prism of current events in Israel.

I am proud of my daughter and son-in-law who are also graduating this year. However, in Israel, ceremonies marking their accomplishments are more toned down than they otherwise would be. In the case of my daughter who is receiving an award for excellence, the ceremony was delayed by three weeks because of the situation.

In shorthand, that means because Israel was under a barrage of thousands of rockets, nobody wanted to get together in groups greater than the capacity for nearby bomb shelters for the fear of a rocket and a mass casualty incident. This is a stark contrast to the pictures Ive seen of scores of young men and women packing in stadiums, auditoriums, or on plush quadrangles, (even socially distant) listening to inspirational remarks and receiving their degrees.

As much as my friends deeply care about and support Israel, I dont imagine any of them considered for a moment how in Israel large gatherings were not taking place, not because of a virus, but because of terrorists.

I am glad for that. Its a situation that I dont wish upon anybody. But it is jarring all the same. Im trying to imagine my own college graduation, with thousands of people packing Emory quad, running for cover to bomb shelters in any of the beautiful academic buildings on its periphery. Of course, the fact that none of the academic buildings in which I studied even have bomb shelters is evidence of a completely different reality.

All this became more vivid this week visiting Sderot, the Israeli city literally adjacent to the border with Gaza, and which has been subject to tens of thousands of rockets and missiles fired at its population over the past two decades. In our most recent conflict, some 300 rockets were fired directly at the city and its 30,000 plus residents. A certain percent got through the Iron Dome, damaging property, injuring many, increasing trauma, and even killing a five-year-old boy in his familys bomb shelter, which took a direct hit.

When I visited, his mother was still in the hospital, and his family is grieving. Surely, they are not thinking about his college graduation now. But his death is not just a loss for his family, but also a loss of the tremendous potential that we celebrate when our children graduate and become independent adults. His parents will never have that privilege.

I was moved to tears visiting a program for at risk youth. The children come from homes that are not safe, where they have suffered various kinds of abuse or neglect, whose families often have no money for food, or the parents are too traumatized themselves, and incapable of raising their own children. This is the last stop before they are taken out of their home and put into foster care, typically not a win-win scenario.

During the recent conflict, the children were unable to come to the community centers where the programs take place. So, the staff had to go door to door, wearing ceramic vests and helmets, to check on the kids and their families in between barrages of rockets.

I went there as part of the Israel Emergency Relief Campaign that was established by the Genesis 123 Foundation, to disburse some of the funds from generous Jewish and Christian donors all over the world. Our original thought was to bring physical things to engage, entertain, and occupy the children, especially at times of heightened trauma and fear. We were told that as much as it is generous to bring them things, what was necessary was funding for increased therapeutic treatments.

They currently provide animal therapy, art therapy, and even juggling as a way to engage children to be able to speak about, and manage if not overcome, their trauma. For children like this, trauma is not only in the form of rockets from terrorists, but from living in homes where they understand that their parents are not capable protecting or providing for them as other children take for granted. However, when there are physical threats from terrorists, and thousands of rockets fired overhead, their overall level of trauma increases significantly, and any achievements that have been made in their treatment take many steps back.

They also get two homemade hot meals at the center, which is two hot meals more than they would receive if they were at home under their parents care.

I asked what the greatest and most immediate needs were. The therapists had a hard time deciding between increasing the existing therapies and treatments, including psychological counseling, or offering new treatments that theyve wanted to do for a while, including dog therapy and dance therapy.

The dog therapy alone costs $25,000 just for half a year. As torn as they were about how to allocate additional funds, it became clear that the priority was to increase more of what they do already, without having the resources to make a full commitment for six months of dog or dance therapy.

I was choked up multiple times as we sat there looking at these beautiful children just needing some extra love and support. I realized that no matter how much we had to give them that day, it didnt begin to come close to what was enough.

We left grateful and inspired. These children were born into a situation of only knowing the threat of rocket fire on their homes and the resulting trauma. Thats not likely to change anytime soon. I wonder, more than rhetorically, what their parents hope for them when they reach their late teens and early 20s, the time the children typically go off to college and have life experiences as independent adults.

Forget the fact that the parents may not have capabilities to help their children implement their dreams. What does raising a child in such a situation do to a parent and his or her dreams and hopes for their childs future?

For those who just celebrated the graduation of their child or grandchild, or know somebody who did, or for those who just have a giving heart and want to help at-risk children to live their lives with trauma as a constant, the Genesis 123 Foundation needs as many helping hands as possible. Please consider giving generously. Theres a generous matching gift as well. I pray that we will raise enough money to provide abundant supplemental therapies that the children are already receiving, and to be able to provide a full year, or two, of dog or dance therapy to strengthen each of the children. I pray that we will help each boy and girl today, so when they reach the age and stage of life of those whose achievements we celebrate as graduates now, nobody will ever know the trauma of what they suffered as young children today.

To learn more about the Genesis 123 Foundation, please visit http://genesis123.co.
Josh was 8 years old when his parents sent him to Jewish summer camp for the first time. Even though he had issues like ADHD that made school challenging, they figured the informal, open environment of summer camp - together with a little extra care from staff - would enable him to find his place.

They were wrong. After just six days, he was sent home.

Meredith Englander Polsky, who had attended that same overnight camp throughout her childhood, was working there as a counselor that summer.

"I thought, is this really something that happens in the Jewish community," she wondered, "or did I just happen to stumble upon this one kid who wasn't being included?"

That question led her to ask more questions, and eventually to the realization that these types of experiences were more common than people liked to admit. Meredith discovered that there was a crisis within the Jewish community that needed to be addressed. And she decided to do something about it.

That's how Matan was born, by confronting the hard questions that challenge us as a community to look in the mirror and asking if we are really as inclusive and accommodating as we think we are, as we claim to be. It is a method that drives its successful approach to this day. Almost immediately, through Matan, Meredith began to work to bridge the gap between where we are as a community and where we want to be.

With support from funders and foundations, along with a grant from the Covenant Foundation and a fellowship for Jewish social entrepreneurs with the Joshua Venture Group, Matan slowly began making a difference by creating inclusive programming for children with special needs and others that were not being included in Jewish life.

"When my daughter got to Matan, there were so many girls, and they were her peers, and they treated her as friends. And that was an important experience for my daughter," recalls Marjorie Madfis. "I think that these other girls felt the same way. They all said, 'We never have friends.'"

Matan created a welcoming space. For the first time, many children with special needs felt included in Jewish community life. They could walk into a Hebrew school class or a JCC program, and they felt it was for them. They felt at home, not on the fringe. They felt welcomed, and they felt included in a real way that was engaging and authentic. They were given the opportunity to have normal Jewish childhood experiences and develop friendships, and their families could also be included in a way that wasn't possible before.

At this point, Matan was having a very profound impact, changing the lives of relatively few people in a very big way. Recognizing that the real opportunity lay in taking the expertise being developed and scaling it so it could be shared and replicated, after 10 years Matan pivoted to focus on providing training for Jewish educators and professionals.

As a result, Matan became a specialized resource for Jewish communities and schools everywhere. The impact of its work was multiplied a hundredfold and more. Bringing the experience and lessons learned by Matan into a curriculum and sharing it with thousands of Jewish professionals across North America with little or no background in special education meant that the children in those schools and communities could now enjoy a greater level of inclusion in Jewish life.

"Matan is a gift," relates Rina Cohen Schwartz, director of education at Congregation Habonim. "Matan provided me with a whole tool chest, and I in turn could bring that to my teachers, to my team."

"We felt that we were inclusive, and we felt really good about it," recalls Rabbi Neil Zuckerman, a rabbi at Park Avenue Synagogue. "And in the course of a conversation with some parents we felt there was a big gap between who we thought we were and who we needed to be."

Currently, Matan is training over 3,000 educators and community leaders per year. As a result, hundreds of thousands of students experience better and more holistic inclusion in Jewish life.

"As a result of Matan's training, people across the country and beyond understand the value of inclusion," reflects Meredith, who is still involved with Matan as national director of institutes and training. "And more than simply being welcome, they actually know what to do."

Another aspect of Matan's impactful work is community consultations.

"Typically, Matan is hired by a local Jewish federation to conduct an 'inclusion audit'. We spend approximately three full days on the ground in a particular community (or many hours over Zoom) in order to research the points of pride, the gaps in service, and make recommendations for concrete steps the community can take in order to be more inclusive across the lifespan," Dori Frumin Kirshner, Matan's executive director, explains. "There's been a sea change in recognizing that the Jewish community is whole when all of our members are included."

Essentially, every person touched by Matan, whether directly or indirectly, becomes an ambassador for the value of inclusion in the Jewish community. Matan is now celebrating its 20th anniversary. As the realities and needs of Jewish communities evolve, Matan continues to develop and adapt its innovative program to further the value of inclusion to ensure that every individual can be part of our collective Jewish future.

Do you believe in making sure everyone can be included in Jewish life? Matan can use your support. Matan is celebrating its 20-year anniversary with a fundraising campaign and virtual event. You can be part of it by making a donation or registering for the event at matan20years.org.

Visit Matankids.org to learn more about how Matan enables Jewish professionals, communities and families to create and sustain inclusive settings in educational, communal and spiritual aspects of Jewish life.

This is a paid post. JTA's editorial team had no role in its production.
AMSTERDAM (JTA) - In Germany, a man wearing a kippah was beaten on the street. In Austria, a student was harassed on the train for reading a book mentioning Jews in the title.

In London, a nurse said she was threatened at her hospital for wearing a Star of David necklace. And in Belgium, an Orthodox Jewish woman was told "Get away, dirty Jewess" by a man with whom she tried to share a park bench.

The full dimensions of Europe's current surge in antisemitic activity are not yet clear, but by some measures, including those by the British Jewish community, the extent is unprecedented. Meanwhile, the range and density of incidents are unusual.

Local Jewish leaders are responding with sometimes uncharacteristic pessimism.

Antisemitic incidents were already rising in Europe before the 11-day conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza that ended with more than 230 Palestinian and 12 Israeli fatalities. With the start of the hostilities, Europeans began bracing for antisemitic activity that tends to accompany Middle East tensions. It's known on the continent as "the import of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

That dynamic was prominently on display during an escalation in 2014. But this time, some prominent Jewish community leaders and longtime fighters against antisemitism are issuing unusually dour warnings that the battle may be lost.

In light of dozens of incidents in Belgium alone in recent weeks, Joel Rubinfeld, the president of the Belgian League Against Antisemitism, wrote that he doubts whether he will be able to continue living in the country with his wife and two children.

"I believed I could. Now I doubt I can," Rubinfeld, a former leader of the CCOJB, the umbrella group of French-speaking Belgian Jews, wrote in an op-ed published Saturday in the Le Vif weekly.

Brigitte Wielheesen, a well-known journalist and counterterrorism expert from the Netherlands, wrote Thursday in an op-ed for the news site Jonet that after years of battling antisemitism, she has concluded that the activity has become useless.

"The fight against this sickness has become hopeless," wrote Wielheesen, a former secretary of the Interprovincial Rabbinate of the Netherlands. "If Jews are Europe's canary in the coal mine," she said, then "that bird is no longer alive."

Dutch Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs, who for years has recommended local Jews immigrate to Israel, partly due to antisemitism, said during a lecture in the city of Nijmegen that he and his wife would leave if not for their duties.

"It made us think of a captain duty-bound to a sinking ship," one listener described it in a letter he sent to Jacobs following the lecture, Jacobs wrote on his blog.

The Israeli-Palestinian flareup came shortly after Jews in France expressed deep concerns over their future in the country in the wake of a final court ruling in the Sarah Halimi case. The nation's highest court upheld rulings that the Muslim man who killed the Jewish physician and educator while shouting about Allah and calling Halimi a demon was too high on marijuana to be criminally responsible for his actions.

"I understand your doubts and your questions about the future, and I share them," a leader from France's leading Orthodox organization said at a rally in Paris last month.

Not all communal leaders are so deeply pessimistic.

In Britain, Jews are shaken by a flurry of antisemitic incidents this month and "scarred" by the recent proliferation of antisemitism within the Labour Party, said Jonathan Arkush, the previous head of the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

"But I don't believe you should jump from that to thinking our community is not viable as it was," he said, citing Labour defeats after 2019, media vigilance about antisemitism and police efforts to curb it.

Meanwhile, news of antisemitic incidents continued to flow in throughout this week.

In the Germany incident Thursday in Magdeburg, a city situated about 70 miles west of Berlin, a group of young men allegedly harassed a 22-year-old who was wearing a kippah and proceeded to beat him, inflicting minor injuries, the news site MDR reported. A passerby intervened and the men left the scene. The passerby said they were Arabs.

Also in Germany, in the northern city of Hamburg, three people in a car hurled antisemitic hate speech at a Jewish cyclist while stopped at a traffic light, the news site TAH reported. In Bremen, a northern city located 200 miles west of Berlin, a man wearing a face mask with a Star of David pattern was insulted on the street.

In Austria, a non-Jewish woman was called a "child killer" and harassed by three men in the subway who picked on her two weeks ago because she was reading a book titled "The Jews in the Modern World," she told the ORF broadcaster Friday. One man pulled her hair, she said.

The woman said police advised her to forget the incident and that it was not antisemitic because she's not Jewish. The Interior Ministry told ORF it was looking into the incident.

In the United Kingdom, two men confronted a neonatal nurse in an elevator at her London hospital after they noticed her Star of David. They asked the nurse, Hadasa Abrams, whether she believes in "a free Palestine." She replied "I'm Jewish," prompting one to say "I want to kill all your people," Abrams wrote on Facebook.

In the Belgian city of Antwerp, a blogger described witnessing a man shouting "Get away, dirty Jewess" at an Orthodox Jewish woman who approached a park bench where the man was sitting.

On May 21, a man was assaulted on a train in Austria after asking two men, whom witnesses said had a Middle Eastern appearance, to stop making antisemitic remarks and denying the Holocaust, a local paper reported.

In London on the same day, a Jewish man was assaulted in his car because it had an Israeli flag. That followed a streak of incidents, including the serious assault of a rabbi outside his synagogue in Chigwell, near London, on May 16.

That same day, a convoy with eight cars displaying Palestinian flags drove through London, with passengers yelling antisemitic obscenities on loudspeakers. One of the passengers shouted "f- the Jews, rape their daughters" while driving through a heavily Jewish part of London.

"Antisemitism in the United Kingdom sadly always spikes when there is conflict in the Middle East, but this feels worse than ever," Luciana Berger, a former prominent Jewish Labour lawmaker who now works in public relations, tweeted that day.

British Jewry's security unit documented more than 250 antisemitic incidents in the 17 days that followed May 9 - a 500% increase over the previous 17 days. In May, that unit, CST, has logged 325 incidents - more than any month since 1984, when CST began documenting incidents. In July 2014, during Israel's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, CST recorded 317 cases.

Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement on May 21, but new incidents continue to unfold. On Thursday, one of British Jewry's biggest charities, Norwood, which helps children with learning disabilities, had its website hacked. A banner reading "Free Palestine End Apartheid" replaced the homepage.

Eye on Antisemitism Men from the CST and Shomrim security units detain the alleged attacker of a Jewish man in his car in London, May 21, 2021.

On Tuesday, Elise Fajgeles, a Jewish former City Council member from Paris - the scene of some of the worst violence during the 2014 spike - penned an open letter to Muslims in Europe pleading for their community to crack down on extremists who are perpetuating hate crimes against Jews.

(According to France's National Bureau for Vigilance Against Antisemitism, Muslims or people from a Muslim background are responsible for all the recent violent incidents where the perpetrators' identity was established or surmised. The profile of hate speech perpetrators was more diverse, with right-wing extremists accounting for half, the bureau found.)

"I'm not here to speak to you about what's going on over there," Fajgeles wrote in her open letter, published in French in The Times of Israel. "I'm going to talk about what's happening here. I'm here to tell you about me. I want to tell you I'm afraid."
In the past few weeks, the Israeli American Council has witnessed a disturbing rise in antisemitism across the United States. Israeli American and Jewish American students have experienced more and more cases of bias, harassment, and discrimination in their schools.

IAC calls on students, parents, or educators that have experienced antisemitism or encountered antisemitic or anti-Zionist content in schools to file a complaint through the SchoolWatch platform. The IAC will bring these complaints to the attention of the school or district to ensure they are properly addressed so that similar incidents do not recur. The complaints can be filed anonymously; however, in cases in which the person filing the complaint would like to remain involved, the IAC will guide them on how to approach the school.

IAC is here to support and guide you and fight these cases the behalf of our community.

For more information or to file a complaint please go to schoolwatch.me.
WASHINGTON (JTA)  A Biden administration official said the U.S. government supports restocking Israels Iron Dome anti-missile system after it was depleted by last months conflict with Hamas in Gaza.

Dozens of House members from both parties have said they would push Congress to appropriate funds to replenish the system should Israel make the request. Israels defense minister, Benny Gantz, was here on Thursday reportedly seeking $1 billion for Iron Dome.

In addition to Iron Dome funding, the acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, Joey Hood, said Wednesday that the Biden administration also would seek equality for the Palestinians. President Joe Biden separately told Gantz on Thursday that the United States expects Israel to ease the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza.

During the conflict, we saw the Iron Dome system, which our nations developed together, save the lives of countless civilians, Hood said Wednesday at an online forum organized by the Israel Policy Forum, a pro-Israel group that advocates for a two-state outcome. The president is clear about this administrations support for replenishing the system for Israels ability to defend itself in the future.

Hoods statement came a day before the one-day visit by Gantz, who was meeting with his U.S. counterpart, Lloyd Austin, along with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Axios reported this week on the $1 billion request by Gantz.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., who is Jewish, spearheaded a letter to Austin urging him to fulfill any such request.

We ask that you continue urgently engaging with Israel on this request, and that you please report to Congress regarding Israels needs as soon as possible, said the letter, which was signed by 55 House members of both parties.

It noted that in 2014 after an Israel-Hamas war, Congress appropriated funds to replenish Iron Dome, and said it was ready to do so again.

Please work closely with Congress to expeditiously fulfill this request, the letter said.

At least one member of a vocal cohort of left-wing Democrats who want Biden to cut aid to Israel said she would oppose any such appropriation.

My colleagues are rushing to give the Israeli military another billion dollars to fund apartheid, meanwhile our education system, our health care system, our housing system all remain underfunded, Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., said on Twitter. Our communities need that $1 billion. Send it to us instead.

Hamas fired about 4,500 rockets into Israel during the conflict last month, with about 1,500 heading for built-up areas. Iron Dome intercepted more than 90% of the rockets headed for those areas.

The Biden administration in its Israel-related rhetoric has moved to emphasize equality for the Palestinians. Hood in his statement to the Israel Policy Forum mentioned equal treatment for the Palestinians at least three times.

The United States supports equal measures of security opportunity and dignity for Israelis and Palestinians alike, he said.

Sullivan said in a statement after meeting with Gantz that he had highlighted the importance of ensuring that immediate humanitarian aid is able to reach the people of Gaza.

The Biden administration is determined to restore aid to the Palestinians that President Donald Trump had all but cut to zero, he said.

Hood also called on Israel and the Palestinians to avoid provocations, among them settlement building and paying compensation to families of terrorists.

We believe its critical for Israelis and Palestinians to refrain from steps that exacerbate tensions and undercut efforts to advance a negotiated two-state solution such as annexation of territory, settlement activity, demolitions, incitement to violence and providing compensation for individuals imprisoned for acts of terrorism, he said.
(JTA)  The chancellor of New Jerseys flagship public university condemned antisemitism and then, following protest from a pro-Palestinian student group, apologized for the condemnation.

On Wednesday, the chancellor of Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Christopher J. Molloy, released a statement condemning antisemitism, which spiked across the country during and after the recent fighting in Israel and Gaza. The statement also condemned all forms of bigotry, prejudice, discrimination, xenophobia, and oppression, in whatever ways they may be expressed and told students who have been affected by antisemitism or discrimination to contact the university administration.

We are saddened by and greatly concerned about the sharp rise in hostile sentiments and anti-Semitic violence in the United States, said the statement, which was also signed by Provost Francine Conway. Recent incidents of hate directed toward Jewish members of our community again remind us of what history has to teach us.

The statement also mentioned increasing violence between Israeli forces and Hamas in the Middle East leading to the deaths of children and adults and mass displacement of citizens in the Gaza region and the loss of lives in Israel.

The next day, the schools Students for Justice in Palestine group released a lengthy statement condemning the chancellors statement.

SJP said the statement conveniently ignores the extent to which Palestinians have been brutalized by Israels occupation and bombing of Gaza, and cannot be separated from widespread attempts to conflate antizionism with antisemitism and derail Palestinian voices and activism.

The statement released by Chancellor Molloy and Provost Conway thus cannot be interpreted as anything other than a deflection from Rutgers Universitys role in financially supporting the Israeli state, and thus its human rights abuses and occupation of Palestine, by direct or indirect means, the SJP statement said.

Later that day, Molloy and Conway released a second statement apologizing for the first, and promising to make sure that our communications going forward are much more sensitive and balanced.

In hindsight, it is clear to us that the message failed to communicate support for our Palestinian community members, the apology said. We sincerely apologize for the hurt that this message has caused.

The apology did not satisfy SJP, though, which released a followup statement of its own. SJP said the chancellors initial condemnation of antisemitism was unwarranted due to the absence of any publicly reported antisemitic incidents in the Rutgers New Brunswick community that had not already been addressed by the administration.

The second SJP statement also said that it demanded a condemnation of Israels actions, not of Islamophobia.

While the possibility remains that those martyred were of the Muslim faith, this does not serve as a prerogative for Chancellor Molloy and Provost Conway to address Islamophobia, the statement said. Israels occupation of Palestine is an egregious injustice which transcends religious conflict.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has reached out to Molloy for comment.
The Jewish Community Relations Council recently learned that some of Central Floridas elected officials have received calls from anti-Israel advocates. The Council has asked, via social media, the community to make phone calls to these officials listed below, beginning with your personal representatives in your district, and send a counterbalancing message.

The objective is to advocate on behalf of Israel and share that our community supports Israel and condemns Hamas as a recognized terrorist organization. It must be emphasized that our message needs to stay positive and focus on the support of Israel and not devolve into any attacks on Palestinians generally, the message states.

These elected officials track the number of calls they get supporting each issue so it is important that they arent getting a tidal wave of anti-Israel calls with no pro-Israel calls to counterbalance the information they receive.

Talking points the JCRC suggests are:

1. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East

2. Israel is the only country in the Middle East to recognize same sex marriage

3. There are Jewish and Arab members in the Israeli Supreme Court

4. The Knesset is comprised of many ethnic minorities

5. Israel has the right to defend herself like any other country. Hamas launched over 4,000 rockets at Israel during the 11-day conflict

7. Israel gives notice of buildings it is targeting to allow civilians time to evacuate

Representatives in order of priority are:

Rep. Anna Eskamani, 407-228-1451

Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith, 407-681-5433

Rep. Daisy Morales, 407-207-3840

Rep. Geraldine Thompson, 407-245-0288

Sen. Randolph Bracy, 407-297-2045

Sen. Linda Stewart, 407-893-2422

Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, 888-205-5421

Congresswoman Val Demings, 321-388-9808

Congressman Darren Soto, 407-452-1171

Rep. Kamia Brown, 407-297-2001

Rep. Joy Goff-Marcil, 407-623-1010

Rep. Kristen Aston Arrington, 407-846-5016

Sen. Victor Torres, 407-846-5187
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(JNS)  Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsas documentary film Babi Yar. Context has been selected to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in July.

The 120-minutes long film is based entirely on archival footage uncovered by Loznitsa, which depicts the events leading up to and the aftermath of the Babi Yar massacre in September 1941. In a period of two days, from Sept. 29-30, 33,771 Jewish victims were shot to death by the Nazis and left in a ravine.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainians, Roma, the mentally ill and others were later shot there throughout the Nazi occupation of Kyiv. The estimated number of victims murdered at Babi Yar is around 100,000, making it Europes largest mass grave.

Babi Yar. Context is Loznitsas seventh film to be presented in the Official Selection of the Cannes Film Festival. It will be screened in the Seance Speciale section of this years festival.

The film, which includes previously unseen eye-witness testimony, immerses viewers in the period and reconstructs the context in which Babi Yar unfolded.

Just as other Holocaust crimes, the tragedy is almost devoid of authentic visual representationNazi authorities banned photo and film cameras from the places of mass executions, said Loznitsa. However, it is possible to reconstruct its historical context through archive footage, documenting years of German occupation of Ukraine. My aim is to plunge the spectator into the atmosphere of the time.

The film is produced by Atoms & Void with the support of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Foundation, which is responsible the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (BYHMC). The center is overseeing the development of a new Babyn Yar memorial complex.

The premiere of Babi Yar. Context comes just two months before the 80th anniversary of the massacre.
(JNS)  Kamau Bobb will no longer be part of our diversity team going forward, the tech giant Google announced Wednesday, after the surfacing of an antisemitic blog post its Global Lead for Diversity, Strategy and Research wrote in 2007.

In a statement obtained by the Jewish Journal, Google said: We unequivocally condemn the past writings by a member of our diversity team that are causing deep offense and pain to members of our Jewish community and our LGBTQ+ community. These writings are unquestionably hurtful. The author acknowledges this and has apologized. He will no longer be part of our diversity team going forward and will focus on his STEM [Science Technology Engineering Math] work.

In the 2007 post, first reported by The Washington Free Beacon, Bobb, then a research associate at Georgia Tech, shared his views on how Jews people should view the conflict in the Middle East.

With regard to Israels operations in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, as well as in the Second Lebanon War, Bobb wrote that Jews have an insatiable appetite for war and an insensitivity to the suffering [of] others.

He slammed the Israeli government, then led by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and said that Jews should be tormented by Israels actions.

If I were a Jew today, my sensibilities would be tormented. I would find it increasingly difficult to reconcile the long cycles of oppression that Jewish people have endured and the insatiable appetite for vengeful violence that Israel, my homeland, has now acquired, he wrote.

If I were a Jew I would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of myself, he wrote. Self-defense is undoubtedly an instinct, but I would be afraid of my increasing insensitivity to the suffering [of] others.

Bobb said that as a Jew, his reflections on Kristallnacht, or the The Night of Broken Glass in Germany, which heralded the Holocaust, would lead me to feel that these are precisely the human sentiments that I as Jew would understand; that I ought to understand and feel compelled to help alleviate.

It cannot be that the sum total of a history of suffering and slaughter places such a premium on my identity that I would be willing to damn others in defense of it, wrote Bobb.

As a Jew, he said, I wouldnt understand the notion of collective punishment, cutting off gas, electricity and water from residents in Gaza because they are attacking Israel who is fighting against them. It would be unconscionable to me to watch Israeli tanks donning the Star of David rumbling through Ramallah, destroying buildings and breaking the glass.

In its statement on Wednesday, Google said, This has come at a time where weve seen an alarming increase in anti-Semitic attacks. Antisemitism is a vile prejudice that has given rise to unfathomable acts. It has no place in society and we stand with our Jewish community in condemning it.

Last month, a group of 250 Jewish Google employees demanded that the company express solidarity with the Palestinians and sever all contracts with businesses or organizations that support Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights, including the Israel Defense Forces.

Also in May, the Israeli government announced it had signed a $1 billion deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google to provide cloud services for the countrys public sector and military.

This article first appeared in Israel Hayom.
(JTA) - Benjamin Netanyahu will no longer be Israel's prime minister, as his political opponents announced Wednesday night that they have formed a coalition that will replace him, pending a vote in Israel's parliament.

The new coalition, dubbed the "change bloc," is an ideologically broad alliance that spans the Israeli political right, center and left. For the first time in Israeli history, it will include an Arab-Israeli party, not as an external supporter of the government, but as a full member of the coalition. It comprises 61 lawmakers, the smallest possible majority in Israel's 120-seat parliament, the Knesset.

The coalition was announced by Yair Lapid, head of the centrist Yesh Atid party, with less than an hour to go before his chance to form a governing coalition expired.

"I have announced to his excellency, the president of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, that I have been able to successfully conclude the work of assembling a government," Lapid posted on Facebook on Tuesday night, 34 minutes before the midnight deadline. "I vow that this government will work in service of all of Israel's citizens, those who voted for it and those who did not. It will respect its opponents and do everything in its power to unite and connect between all parts of Israeli society."

For the first two years-plus of its term, the coalition will be led by Naftali Bennett, head of the right-wing Yamina party. Bennett will be Israel's first Orthodox prime minister. Lapid will take over for the second half of the term.

Netanyahu has led Israel for the past 12 years.

The coalition includes eight parties in total that differ vastly on their vision for Israel, but agree on the need to end the Netanyahu era and the political crisis that has gripped Israel since 2019. Over the past two years, Israelis have voted in four elections whose results have been mostly inconclusive. Had Lapid failed to announce a coalition, Israel would have almost definitely held a fifth election later this year.

The new Israeli government, most significantly, will be the first one since 2009 not led by Netanyahu, who is the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history. He was indicted on corruption charges in 2019 and his trial is ongoing, one of the main factors that led former right-wing allies of his, such as Bennett, to join his opponents.

To agree to partner with each other, the incoming coalition's eight parties had to overcome a range of disagreements over policy and ministerial positions. In addition to Yamina and Yesh Atid, the coalition will include the right-wing parties New Hope and Israel Beiteinu; the centrist Blue and White party; the left-wing Labor and Meretz parties; and the Arab-Israeli Raam party, which is Islamist.

The new government is set to be approved in a Knesset vote sometime before June 14. Negotiations over its particulars, as well as efforts to undermine it, may continue until the vote takes place.

Following the most recent Israeli election in March, Netanyahu was given an opportunity to form another governing coalition, but failed to do so. In early May, the chance to form a coalition was passed to Lapid, Netanyahu's chief rival. Lapid was reportedly close to announcing a coalition right before Israel's recent conflict with Hamas in Gaza, but the fighting put coalition negotiations on hold.

Negotiations resumed following a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and ramped up on Tuesday and Wednesday, as Lapid's deadline neared. Even as Lapid has obtained the support of all of the party leaders in the incoming coalition, there are reportedly still disagreements that the party leaders need to resolve.

Partisan rhetoric has also heated up in recent days in Israel, and members of the incoming coalition have been provided with added security after receiving threats of violence. Tamar Zandberg, a member of the left-wing Meretz party, left her home with her baby after she received threats to their lives.

The new coalition was announced on the same day that Isaac Herzog, a former leader of Israel's Labor party, was elected president of Israel, a largely ceremonial role.
(JNS)  The National Geographic Society named University of Haifa professor Dr. Aviad Scheinin as one of its Emerging Explorers in 2021one of 15 individuals it described as changing the world one idea at a time.

In an announcement last week, it said its cohort of storytellers, researchers and conservationists are conducting innovative work focused on a range of topics such as inventing space technologies, ocean exploration, understanding the past through archaeology and anthropology, species conservation, storytelling and elevating young voices for the future of education.

Scheinin, a marine conservationist who heads the University of Haifas Marine Apex Predator Lab at the Morris Kahn Marine Research Station and is the Apex Predators Principal Investigator at the Leon Charney School of Marine Sciences, has spent two decades honing his expertise on conservation, behavioral science and long-term ecological research of coastal dolphins, sharks, rays and bluefin tunas.

The publication praised his work on the worlds first long-term research project examining the behavior of coastal dolphins, as well as for being the first to note the presence of gray whales and false killer whales in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Scheinin is only one of two Israelis selected for this honor.

The first was fellow University of Haifa professor Dr. Beverly Goodman, who received the accolade in 2009. She was recognized for work that is an amalgamation of archaeology, geology and anthropology, which explores the complex ways nature and humans interact on coastlines.

As populations on the coastline increase around the world, Goodman is at the forefront of research examining how human presence on the earths shores influences natural events like tsunamis and floods.

Professor Scheinins work is not only a point of pride for the university but for Israel, said Professor Ron Robin, president of the University of Haifa. His research spotlights how ecologically robust the Mediterranean is. Together with Dr. Goodman and others, the university is at the forefront of research bringing us closer to understanding the complex relationship between humans and our oceans.

To date, only some 200 researchers have been selected as part of the nonprofits ongoing effort to document, educate and conserve the planet and its resources. Scheinin joins the ranks of an elite group of dedicated scientists and educators that include ground-breaking individuals like Jacques Cousteau and Jane Goodall.

This is a very significant milestone, said Scheinin. After 20 years of intensive research at sea, this major demonstration of international recognition is an exciting and empowering opportunity which will provide the university access to the most impressive minds in the field.
Naftali Bennett (l) and Tamar Zandberg in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, June 3, 2021. Both have received death threats because of their opposition to Benjamin Netanyahu.

(JTA) - In the days before Benjamin Netanyahu's rival lawmakers announced that they had formed a government to replace the longtime prime minister, one fled her home with her partner and baby after receiving what she called "severe threats" against their safety.

The threats to Tamar Zandberg of the left-wing Meretz party included a fake notice of her death that circulated on social media.

Zandberg wasn't the only Netanyahu opponent to receive death threats. So did Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett, former Netanyahu allies who have turned against him. In the face of the threats, leading members of the anti-Netanyahu coalition have received added security.

"Incitement leads to murder," Labor lawmaker Emilie Moatti, a member of the incoming coalition, tweeted Tuesday. "If it doesn't stop there will be a murder here, it's only a matter of time."

The death threats, as well as heated rhetoric from Netanyahu and his allies, come during a tenuous transition period following the apparent electoral defeat of the right-wing leader. For Americans, it's a situation that may recall the weeks following the 2020 election and leading up to the storming of the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump crowed on Jan. 6. Unlike former President Donald Trump, Netanyahu has not egged on a crowd of violent protesters, and said before the March election that he would respect its results.

But he has said repeatedly this week that the coalition of his opponents poses a danger to Israel. And his Likud party called for a protest in front of a rival's home.

Israelis, however, are comparing this moment to the period leading up to the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing extremist. Rabin's assassination followed right-wing calls for his murder after he signed a peace accord with the Palestine Liberation Organization led by Yasser Arafat.

"The fact that because of a democratic process, public officials are being threatened, raises the great concern that we haven't learned our lesson, neither from baseless hatred in Jewish history nor from the Rabin assassination," Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said in a speech Monday, referring to historical internecine fighting in Jewish societies.

Gantz, who also opposes Netanyahu, added, "Now is the time for every public leader to unequivocally denounce every threat, whatever the democratic decisions may be."

There has been an echo of the pre-Rabin threats on social media, where a picture of Bennett wearing a kaffiyeh, or traditional Arab headdress, has circulated. A similar poster was famously held up at an anti-Rabin protest in 1995, where Netanyahu spoke, prior to Rabin's assassination. (Netanyahu has rejected accusations that he played a part in inciting the violent atmosphere preceding the murder.)

One Netanyahu loyalist, Likud lawmaker Miki Zohar, condemned the death threats this week.

"We must state the obvious," Zohar tweeted Tuesday. "There's no place for violent discourse and certainly not for threats against public officials and their families on the right or the left, religious or secular."

Netanyahu does not appear to have issued a similar condemnation. In speeches this week, he has repeatedly accused the new coalition of being a threat to the security and future of Israel.

On Sunday, days before the rival coalition was announced, Netanyahu compared the new government, whose members were all democratically elected, to the world's most brutal authoritarian regimes.

"A government like that is a danger to the security of Israel and is also a danger to the future of the state," Netanyahu said.

The new coalition favors a "democracy with the laws of Iran, Syria and North Korea," he said, because it may pass legislation imposing term limits, which would effectively exclude Netanyahu from again running for prime minister. It could also ban anyone under indictment from serving as prime minister, which also would disqualify Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption.

Such proposals, Netanyahu charged, are "personal laws against me."

On Thursday, his Likud party circulated a poster on Twitter calling for a "mass protest" that day outside the private home of Ayelet Shaked, a right-wing politician who recently joined with Netanyahu's opponents. A far-right lawmaker (and former Shaked ally) also promised to attend the protest.

In a deleted post on Facebook the same day, Netanyahu's son Yair also called for a protest outside the home of another right-wing, anti-Netanyahu politician.

By Israeli law, a vote installing the new coalition must be held on or before June 14.
(JNS)  Qatar prides itself on its high level of education and yet its own textbooks clearly do not meet accepted international standards, according to a new report by IMPACT-se, a research institute that analyzes schoolbooks and curricula within the prism of UNESCO-defined standards on peace and tolerance. Its updated report evaluates the current Qatari curriculum in conjunction with the London-based think tank the Henry Jackson Society.

Some of the key findings show that hatred towards Jews and clear anti-Semitism remain central themes of the curriculum. Jews are characterized as having global control. The persecution of Jews is justified by blaming the rise of the Nazi Party as a result of Jewish greed after World War I. Jews today are presented as disloyal, inherently treacherous and hostile enemies who seek to bring the Muslims downfall and the end of Islam.

In addition, the curriculum openly rejects the normalization and peace-making between Israel and Arab nations. In the fall of 2020, Israel codified ties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain as part of the Abraham Accords, followed by Sudan and Morocco.

Hamas, recognized as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, is described in the textbooks as a legitimate Islamic resistance movement, which seeks to oppose the Zionist project. Hamass firing of thousands of rockets into civilian populations is glorifieddescribed as brave and remarkable. Suicide bombings and terrorist acts by Palestinians are portrayed as a legitimate response to ongoing Israeli oppression, calling terror acts as armed operations or military operations.

David Roberts of Kings College London, author of the reports foreword and one of the most prominent Qatar experts today, told JNS a states education curriculum feeds the waters in which state policy-makers swim. He added that the Qatari curriculum is a clear reflection of the direction of Qatari foreign policy, currently going through a period of change and testing the slowly venturing forth from a radical Islamist curriculum.

He continued, There is a litany of problematic elements in Qatars education curricula, as the IMPACT-se report exhaustively documents, which contrast the stipulated norms and international standards of UNESCO. Even if the critical links and rationales underpinning Qatars foreign policies are pragmatic and geostrategic in nature, generations of teaching such extreme and relatively extreme sentiments have surely had some impact, somewhere, on the decision-making chain.

Despite the hyper-controlled nature of Qatari policymaking and its relative insulation from local pressures, no leader, however autocratic, is entirely unmoored from public opinion, he said. And a local population raised on an educational curriculum of this nature is sure to be well-disposed to its state engaging and supporting Islamist-oriented causes broadly conceived.

According to a statement published by IMPACT-se, the Qatari curriculum appears to be in a phase of transformation. While somewhat less radical than previous versions, the process of moderation is in its infancy. Some particularly offensive material has been removed after decades of radical propaganda in Qatari schools; however, the curriculum still does not meet international standards of peace and tolerance.

A slight movement away from radical jihadism

The report focuses on Qatars school curriculum for grades one through 12. It provides an assessment by measuring Qatari textbooks against international standards based on UNESCO, U.N. declarations, and other recommendations and documents relating to education for peace and tolerance.

IMPACT-se said the curriculum reflects the same overall tension facing Qatars leadership. That tension, as highlighted by Roberts, is between Qatars Islamist affinities and its desire to be seen as an open, neutral and progressive leader in the Arabian Gulf. Textbooks teach Qatari children to accept those different than themselves and advocate for peace, while at the same echoing anti-Semitic canards and reinforcing the Qatari regimes support for Salafist terror organizations.

There is a slight movement away from radical jihadism but a great amount remains, the statement said. Nevertheless, Qatars curriculum is heavily influenced by Western educatorsdisplaying the Qatari gift for embracing contradictions.

Marcus Sheff, CEO of IMPACT-se, told JNS that while they envisage themselves as leaders in international education, the Qataris own curriculum continually falls short of basic international standards of respect, peace and tolerance, and fails to propel Qatar towards its goals of modernization and globalization.

Sheff said some changes to the textbooks have been made, but the country stubbornly persists in its promotion of radical jihadi ideals.

He also said that students are encouraged to look at the world through a Muslim Brotherhood-created lens, and anti-Semitism remains a central component of Qatari education.

The Qataris might take this opportunity to promote peace in the region and stop describing Hamas firing of thousands of rockets into Israeli civilian populations as brave and remarkable in their textbooks, suggested Sheff.

It is clear what further changes need to be made, he said. If combined with peace and tolerance education, Qatar could become the leader in education it aspires to be.
(JNS)  The teachers union for the San Francisco school district voted in favor of a resolution on May 19 to boycott Israel

The United Educators of San Francisco (UESF), which is affiliated with the largest federation of unions in the United States, the AFL-CIO, is the first K-12 union of public-school teachers in America to officially back BDS. This is also the first time since 2016 that any American union has officially supported the BDS movement, according to The Jewish News of Northern California.

The resolutions last sentence calls on the union to support BDS and earlier on also asks the Biden administration to stop aid to Israel. It denounces Israels forced displacement and home demolitions of Palestinians and accuses the Jewish state of being a regime of legalized racial discrimination.

As public-school educators in the United States of America, we have a special responsibility to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people because of the 3.8 billion dollars annually that the U.S. government gives to Israel, thus directly using our tax dollars to fund apartheid and war crimes, the resolution states.

Jewish Community Relations Council executive director Tyler Gregory called the legislation factually inaccurate and inflammatory.

Rather than supporting all students whose families may be impacted by the conflictIsraelis, Palestinians, Jews and Arabsthis vote will contribute to Jewish students feeling unsafe and unwelcome in San Francisco public schools, he said. We are committed to fighting for fair and inclusive policies to support Jews and other marginalized communities in public education.

UESF passed the resolution with 23 in favor, six opposed and seven abstentions, reported The Jewish News of Northern California.
Ghufran Almusawi, proprietor of Al Basha Grocery in Tucson, Ariz., speaks with a Jewish customer. Her store sells both kosher and halal products in an effort to create a "melting pot" for Jews and Muslims.

(Jewish News of Greater Phoenix via JTA) - Tucked between a dance school and a '60s retro lounge on a quiet street in Tucson, Arizona, sits a small Middle Eastern and African foods store. But the Al Basha Grocery isn't just a place to get kosher meats and hard-to-find ingredients.

"It provides an opportunity for people to see each other as real people and have a normal interaction with people who ordinarily might not interact in their day-to-day lives," said Jesse Davis, a regular Al Basha shopper.

Ghufran Almusawi and her husband, Anas Elazrag, both Muslims, opened Al Basha in July 2019 with the intention of creating a "melting pot," Almusawi said.

"Serving kosher in our store was one of the ways that we can bring the communities together," she said. "We just want to offer services to everybody. We want to make everybody feel welcome."

Almusawi regularly witnesses dialogue between the Muslim and Jewish shoppers.

"I see a lot of customers interacting with each other, especially if they have questions," she said. "Sometimes the customers will jump in and answer as a way of them showing, 'Hey, we accept you, you're welcome here.'"

Al Basha caught Davis' eye before it even opened, with its big sign advertising halal and kosher foods.

"A halal, kosher store - somebody who's actually trying to reach out to both markets and both communities? That's pretty striking," he said. "They were definitely reaching out a hand."

Davis appreciated the gesture and has been shopping at Al Basha about three times a month since it opened.

"They're super friendly and helpful," he said. He'll often get recommendations on products and spices to use in recipes. His favorite Al Basha item is pomegranate molasses, which he described as "a sort of finisher" for meat, giving it a "sweet, tangy flavor."

Evelyn Sigafus looks forward to Al Basha's tea selection when she goes a few times a year for kosher deli meats and holiday food ingredients. Sigafus appreciates the store's efforts both to meet the need for kosher foods and foster dialogue and relationships between the Jewish and Muslim communities.

"One time I was in there and the woman there did not have other customers, so we had a wonderful conversation about kosher products, keeping kosher, halal, what I personally do, and how I cope and how she copes, and we had a wonderful little chitchat time," Sigafus said.

Sigafus said that kind of person-to-person conversation is beneficial, no matter how much exposure somebody has already had to different cultures.

Elazrag, a doctor, came to Tucson in 2008 from Sudan. He decided to open Al Basha after he had a poor shopping experience, Almusawi said. At the time, her husband wasn't convinced existing local markets had what people really needed or that they could make all customers feel comfortable.

Almusawi, an Iraqi American, grew up in Michigan and was already familiar with the grocery business.

"My dad was in the grocery world, and he was always so happy to see his customers and was welcoming," she said. "He didn't really look at a customer as being somebody other than a human that he's providing a service for. He didn't look at race, color, religion, none of that. And I kind of grew up following that. And fortunately my husband's the same way."

Almusawi said she's seen fewer Jewish customers since the recent violence between Hamas and Israel.

"I just don't think they feel comfortable coming in," she said. "I've had people come in and say, 'How could you do this? How could you sell this right now?' And I'm just like, 'OK, this company [kosher food supplier] in California has nothing to do with it. We're just one business supporting another.'"

The pushback comes from both worlds - some Muslims don't want to support the store because it supports the Jewish community, and some Jews don't want to support the store because it is owned by Muslims. She tries to focus on the positive responses and those showing support for unity.

"What both religions teach is peace," Almusawi said. "We're welcoming of everybody. We don't want to make anybody feel uncomfortable and anybody is welcome to shop. And if there are any items that are missing that they are looking for, we're always willing to bring it in."

Al Basha is in Yisrael Bernstein's regular shopping rotation. He usually makes an "east side loop" on Fridays gathering food for several Chabad rabbis. He stops at Al Basha, Trader Joe's and Costco. It can take up to six hours, depending on who joins him.

He discovered Al Basha a couple of years ago "on a lark," figuring that if they sold halal food they might also have kosher items, "and sure enough, they did."

Michael Zaccaria/Keeping Jewish The shelves of Al Basha Grocery in Tucson, Ariz., are stocked with both kosher and halal items.

Bernstein became friendly with Almusawi, and she began making sure the store carried his favorites: corned beef, pastrami and hot dogs. With his long beard, black hat and long coat, he always feels welcome.

"I really do. It makes my whole Shabbat weekend," said Bernstein, who is a medical doctor.

Almusawi and Elazrag opened their second location last month, also in Tucson. Al Basha is "not going to save the world," said Davis, but it's those little bridge-building exchanges that can."

"We can't just reduce each other to what we see on television," he said. "For all the differences that we might have, maybe we just have more in common. And you get a chance to see that in a really human context - you're shopping for what you're going to put on your family's table."

A version of this story originally ran in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix.
(JTA)  Rabbi Adar, is it dangerous to wear my Jewish star?

In 12 years of teaching Introduction to the Jewish Experience through HaMaqom | The Place in the San Francisco Bay Area, no student ever asked me that question in those words.

This year three students have asked it of me. The first student who asked it was a young woman, a conversion candidate, and she made an appointment to talk to me outside of class.

I answered with a question: Why are you asking this right now? She talked about reading about attacks on Jews in New York City, and in West Hollywood. She talked about the fact that the synagogue she attends was vandalized a few months ago. She talked about how Jewish friends are concerned about safety.

Am I being silly? she asked. Do I need to worry about this on the streets of Oakland and Berkeley?

Yes, I said, this is real. We are living through a time of increasing antisemitism. As far as the jewelry is concerned, I said, it is like any other item of personal safety: Trust your instincts. If you dont feel safe, leave it off or put it out of sight.

Then I asked another question: This happens to the Jewish People from time to time. Are you sure you want to pursue conversion? I assured her that I would not think badly of her if she chose the safer path. Confronting fears like those is how we sort out who we want to be, what we want for our children, what we want for our descendants. There is no single right answer, only the answer deep in each individual heart.

The young woman said, No, rabbi, I want to be a Jew! I recognized the passion in her voice, a passion that I still feel after 25 years as a naturalized Jew  my word for a Jew by choice. We love the Jewish people and we are not going anywhere.

Conversion to Judaism is more complex than a change of creed. Judaism is not only a religion; it has elements of culture, ethnicity and peoplehood as well. To become Jewish is to become heir to a history and a way of being in the world. It is different from conversion to Christianity in that it means becoming a target for antisemitism. In the earliest description of a rabbinical court, or beit din, for conversion, the Sages warned proselytes of the dangers inherent in becoming a Jew:

The Sages taught in a baraita: With regard to a potential convert who comes to a court in order to convert, at the present time, when the Jews are in exile, the judges of the court say to him: What did you see that motivated you to come to convert? Dont you know that the Jewish people at the present time are anguished, suppressed, despised and harassed, and hardships are frequently visited upon them? (BT Yevamot 47a)

Every convert to Judaism makes a journey across the religious, cultural and emotional frontiers of Judaism. One of the milestones on that journey is the moment when antisemitism ceases to be theoretical, when it is felt in the kishkes, in the gut.

I have never regretted becoming a Jew. I give thanks every morning that God has made me a Jew, and that the Jewish people were willing to have me. I feel sure, listening to my student, that she will say the same thing after 25 years, no matter what history brings, so I give her advice:

Go sit with the Jews, when you feel shaky. You will see, when there are frightening things on the news, synagogue services fill up, gatherings fill up, we all show up somewhere to be with the Jews. As a people, we draw strength from one another. When bad things happen, theres nowhere I would rather be than with my Jewish family.

Whether in my synagogue, or someone elses synagogue, or at the Jewish Film Festival, I feel better when I am surrounded by our people.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
(JTA)  The cease-fire agreement announced last week between Israel and Hamas conjures up the wisdom often, if dubiously, attributed to Albert Einstein: If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.

Unfortunately, ever since the Israeli government withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 with the naive expectation that it would achieve peace and quiet, the broad brush strokes of the smoldering conflict became all too familiar. Hamas launches large-scale rocket barrages targeting Israeli cities. Since Hamas embeds its military operations within its civilian population, and despite the Israeli armys herculean efforts, civilian casualties in Israels targeted strikes against military targets are unavoidable  by Hamas design. Hamas in turn blames Israel for devastating civilian losses in order to inspire the international community to intervene, pressure Israel into a cease-fire and allow Hamas to claim victory and survive to fight another day.

The mainstream media will reliably paint Israel as the Goliath; international agencies will accuse Israel of war crimes. Neither will even consider the possibility that Hamas charter supports Jewish genocide.

That formula has proven lucrative enough to earn funding from allies like Iran and commitments for humanitarian relief from international sources that would be hesitant or legally unable to provide funding to a region governed by a terrorist organization. And then shockingly, those funds are diverted (is it even worth calling it diverted?) to aggressive, offensive military capabilities for the next attack on Israeli civilians.

But the sense of deja vu does not stop with these cycles of violence. It continues into the political and diplomatic response.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken still insists, for example, that the motivation for reaching a quick cease-fire was to preserve the two-state solution. This despite the fact that Gaza currently operates as a state  albeit more akin to ISIS or the Islamic State of Gaza than a Western liberal democracy.

How do we end this Groundhog Day cycle? It comes down to the Einstein rule: knowing history, having the courage to acknowledge what has failed, thinking out of the box and, most important, ensuring that our efforts are designed to achieve peace.

This conflict has always been overlaid with religious fervor. Despite a century of evidence to the contrary, one of the strongest elements of messianic belief has been the centrality of the two-state solution as the key to resolving the conflict. Back in 1948, Israel accepted that premise completely. The next 19 years were a de facto two-state solution, which unfortunately did not result in peace. Over the next half century and despite remarkable diplomatic efforts, unrelenting international pressure and multiple Israeli offers to create a Palestinian state, that peace remains elusive, but the belief that Einstein will be proven wrong persists.

Enter the Abraham Accords.

The same school of thought that is obsessed with the two-state solution was also convinced that Israel would never be able to normalize relations with other Arab countries until it created a Palestinian state. Yet the influence of the Abraham Accords is rippling across the region and not just among other Arab countries threatened by the Iranian axis. The spectacle of Arabs and Israelis getting along publicly is making many, even among Israeli Arabs and Palestinians, reevaluate their long-held hostility toward Israel.

One of the obstacles of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that even if the leaders could come to an agreement, it is hard to imagine how the people could overcome generations of hostility and violence to arrive at peace. This is something that needs to be tilled years in advance.

In Efrat, where I have served as mayor since 2008, we have pioneered the bottom-up model of diplomacy by engaging with our Palestinian neighbors. We have seen remarkable improvement in relations over the years, as yesterdays suspicions give way to tomorrows optimism. These relationships extend back to the founding of Efrat in 1983 by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin. There is a long way to go, as the riots of two weeks ago that plagued Lod, Acre and other mixed Israeli-Arab cities demonstrated. However, that unrest is also the exception that proves the rule. These communities only resorted to violence due to the active incitement by Hamas/Iran, which view Israeli Jews and Arabs coexisting as a threat to their worldview. Lets hope this was the storm before the calm.

Upon Efrats founding, property rights of individual Palestinians were always protected, and to this day Palestinians own and develop farms within Efrats boundaries. The day that both Israelis and Palestinians drop the expectation that the other will one day be removed forcibly from this land, foundations for coexistence can flourish.

Peace will come about when we understand that our future is dependent on one another and we will never be divorced from each other, and that no Israelis or Palestinians should be forcibly evacuated from their homes. Efrat has no security fence separating it from neighboring Palestinian villages. Security is guaranteed by a mutual desire for calm, not by treaties agreed to in European hotels.

I would argue that talking about solutions is counterproductive, as it guarantees that any engagement will be viewed through a political lens: Did we just give up leverage in future negotiations? The focus on trying to achieve a particular solution has diverted us from trying to achieve peace.

The implication that the alternative to two states is one state is part of the damage that the two-state orthodoxy has wrought. We need to let relationships develop without the expectation that one of the parties will be driven from the area. We are much more likely to have Israeli and Palestinian mayors in adjoining regions working together once the national governments provide the runway and support to do so. The Palestinian Authority currently prevents any such collaboration, requiring almost all contacts to be hidden from public view.

Instead of a peace process, we need a long-term pause that will allow organic solutions to develop.

As we just witnessed, even by extending the security barrier with Gaza toward the heavens via Iron Dome, we can avoid calamity but cannot ensure tranquility. That will only come through genuine coexistence.

What passports we each will carry five, 10 or 50 years from now, I cant say. But peace will come about when we recalibrate our diplomatic efforts from trying to create a new Palestinian state that may or may not result in peace, to achieving peace that may or may not result in a Palestinian state.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
Written by ACM













*Strasbourg/Angelo Marcopolo/- Top MEPs asked, this Tuesday and Wednesday, to make an Enquiry on How the EU Faced the Deadly Virus Crisis.

EU initialy stood Far Away from that Virus, which had Started by hitting first China, But, unexpectedly, soon Became ...the Epicenter of this World-wide Pandemic, (particularly after curiously Abstaining from Protecting the European People against the Spread of Infections, followed by a Premature "Deconfinement", and the Failure to Invent a European Vaccine or Drug, etc).

A demand to Establish a special Committee of Enquiry, composed mainly by Experts, was initialy made by the President of the Socialist Group, Spanish MEP Iratxe Garcia Perez, and afterwards accepted, in principle, also by the President of the Centrist Group, Dacian Ciolos, from Romania, (former EU Commissioner).

They were Both Positive, when the were Questioned by Journalists during their Press Conferencies, on Tuesday, and Perez reiterated that also during Wednesday's debate in Plenary on the EU Summits.

But they appeared quite Uncertain, yet, on most Concrete Details, despite Press Questions.

Both claimed that their aim would not be to mainly accuse anyone, negatively, But rather to constructively examine "the Lessons" from that Crisis, and how to be prepared to act in Future Crisis.

However, given the Number of the Victims, and several Errors, it's Not Sure that Most European People would be Satisfied with Only a Superficial Look, sweeping real Problems under the carpet, (at least not as long as the Virus Crisis Persists in the EU, Contrary not only to China, but also Australia, New Zeland, etc)...





(../..)





(NDLR: A Series of Cyber-Attacks, at an Exceptionaly Important Moment of Overload in Crucial Issues to investigate and report on them, HIndered us from writing a fully-fledged Article).





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(JNS)  Whenever I get asked about Israeli politics on the radio, the first thing I do is point out that Israeli politics isnt American, its European.

Israel was controlled by the British. More of its founders were European than American. That means the same messy coalition parliamentary politics without even the benefit of regional representation and direct elections.

Its a terrible system that serves all the wrong people.

The last few years have been a grinding disaster of repeat elections because:

1. A huge chunk of Israels political spectrum wants to oust Netanyahu. Those on the left, including pseudo-centrists like Yesh Atid Party leader Yair Lapid, are motivated by ideology. Others, on the right, are scrambling for power.

2. No leader within Netanyahus Likud or outside has emerged as a viable alternative to him. Non-Likud parties have little credibility. Especially those on the left. The fake centrist parties that act as leftist stalking horses have even less credibility.

What finally happened is that one of the alternative right-wing parties got together with the left and Israels worst enemies to form a coalition. And the media is celebrating Netanyahus downfall while preparing to spin this as proof that Israel is terrible.

Im not in the business of making political predictions, but I am skeptical that a coalition so ridiculously unwieldy can hold up. And Netanyahu is far from done. There are plenty of reasons for Israelis to be disappointed by Netanyahu, but this alternative coalition is the equivalent of Never Trumpers campaigning for Hillary. Except its even worse, by a factor of a few thousand.

The only thing uniting the Never Netanyahu coalition is hatred of the man himself, and of religious Jews. Thats a weak bond and wont make for a stable power-sharing arrangement even assuming it manages to get any further off the ground.

The only thing that the coalition proves is that the Never Netanyahus have yet to come up with an alternative to him.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

This article was first published by FrontPage Magazine.
Next Sunday, June 20, is Fathers Day. In the more than 30 years I have been writing this column I have never devoted an entire column to my dad. I have often thought about it, but my feelings of loss for him have always overwhelmed my ability to write about him.

This year in November will be half a century since his passing when I was 27 years old. He had not quite reached his 61st birthday when cancer took him from me.

He was the oldest of six sons of an immigrant father and mother. Himself an immigrant arriving in the U.S. at 16 years of age, my dad grew up fatherless in Poland.

His father, seeing the growing antisemitism in Poland, in neighboring Germany and having directly experienced it in Russia, left for the U.S. to establish a life of freedom in America and to earn enough money to bring his ailing wife and four surviving children to join him as soon as possible. It took my grandfather six grueling years of peddling dry goods in New Jersey to earn the fare to bring his family to America.

Finally, together safely in America, the family expanded to six children. My father at 16 was the oldest of six sons. He had the humiliating task of progressively sitting in the lower grades of an elementary school to learn English so he could join the work force to support the family.

He met my mother, who was born in the U.S., and they married in 1938. Her parents had emigrated from Russia as parentless teenagers in the aftermath of the pogroms against Jews, which had devastated many Jewish communities in the latter part of the 19th century.

Needless to say, my father, who was a very intelligent and wise man, never received a formal education, but he imparted to his children those values of the importance of education and the ethics of hard work and honesty in living a successful and happy life.

In addition to his native Polish, he fluently spoke Yiddish and Hebrew; and we were raised in a traditional kosher Jewish home, holiday observant and regular attendees at synagogue.

He imparted to me the historical and existential importance of being part of the Jewish people, the great gift of Torah that God bestowed upon the Jewish people, and the importance of connecting with Israel.

He was a family man and patriarch in every sense of the word; and our home was the epicenter of all our extended family holiday gatherings.

He was the family disciplinarian, and as most Jewish children experienced in the 1950s and 1960s, he still maintained several attributes of a European upbringing, mainly the use of mild corporal punishment. He always tempered his actions when administering punishment with the words, This hurts me more than you! Although, I never used corporal punishment on my children, I finally understood what he was feeling when I became a dad myself!

As I grew into my teen years I developed a great deal of respect for my father as he watched with joy his growing family and his childrens accomplishments. His children were the first in our family to graduate from college. He was overwhelmed with pride when I was invited to come to Florida to work at Cape Canaveral and at the Kennedy Space Center on the Gemini and Apollo space programs.

In 1967 I took him out to see what was then only a mock-up of Apollo Saturn on Launch Pad 34A. There were tears of happiness in his eyes that in only one generation his son, whose father standing beside him had to learn English as a 16-year-old foreigner sitting in elementary school with young children, had in only one generation achieved the American Dream.

Thanks Dad, for giving me the opportunity to pursue and achieve the American Dream!

If you wish to comment or respond you can reach me at melpearlman322@gmail.com. Please do so in a rational, thoughtful, respectful and civil manner.

Mel Pearlman holds B.S. & M.S. degrees in physics as well as a J.D. degree and initially came to Florida in 1966 to work on the Gemini and Apollo space programs. He has practiced law in Central Florida since 1972. He has served as president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Orlando; was a charter board member, first vice president and pro-bono legal counsel of the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Central Florida, as well as holding many other community leadership positions.
Top Democratic leaders on Thursday decried Rep. Ilhan Omar's comments that compared the actions of the United States and Israeli government to Hamas and the Taliban.

A statement rebuking Omar's claims came from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's leadership team while also thanking her for clarifying her statements. The decision was a sharp contrast to how it dealt with the previous major uproar over the Minnesota Democrat's comments on Israel.

In less than 24 hours after Omar's Democratic colleagues criticized her, the unified statement from the top six Democratic leaders of the house was issued. The statement Pelosi's team released said some of the representative's statements drew false equivalencies.

Shortly before the leadership response, Omar issued a clarification of her comments after she attended a hearing with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. In a post on Twitter, she summed up her statements as "unthinkable atrocities" that U.S., Hamas, Israeli, Afghanistan, and Taliban officials committed.

Harsh Criticism

After Omar's statement, a dozen Democrats immediately criticized her statements, which forced Omar to quickly denounce her claims of her colleagues' heinous actions. The tension within the caucus eased by Thursday afternoon despite some of Omar's allies still unsettled by her statements, Politico reported.

Muslim women in Congress have no access to freedom of speech and the benefit of the doubt did not exist for them as well, Rep. Rashida Tlaib said in a post on Twitter. She criticized the House Democratic leadership, saying they should be ashamed of themselves when dealing with Congresswomen of color.

Read Also: Joe Biden, Boris Johnson to Sign New Atlantic Charter; to Pledge Restart US-UK Air Travel "As Soon as Possible"

New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized the top Democrats for their handling of the situation, arguing the attacks against Omar were a "mischaracterization" and were dangerous. Skipping private conversations and directly attacking the representative was indirectly putting her in danger, Ocasio-Cortez added.

On Thursday, Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Cori Bush expressed their support of Omar and her viewpoint, Fox News reported.

Accountability

Omar's statements called out administrations to have the same level of accountability and justice for the victims of crimes against humanity. Her statements come a few weeks after the chaos in the Middle East stopped with a ceasefire and reports of anti-Semitic attacks on American Jews.

But talking about the United States in the same sentence as mentioning Hamas and the Taliban group did not sit quietly among fellow Democrats. On Wednesday, the statement from other lawmakers argued Omar's statements were offensive and misguided.

They said the representative ignored the major differences between democracies following the rule of law and organizations that rely on terrorism. The statement added false equivalencies actually gave cover to terrorist groups worldwide.

Omar later issued a statement on Thursday calling out those that attacked her comments, saying they were of islamophobic nature. She argued many of her so-called colleagues were always quick to call on for her support and are now condemning her, demanding clarifications and not just calling her.

Later on, Omar also said she planned to question Blinken about incidents presented to the International Criminal Court (ICC). However, she reassured she was not equating terrorist organizations with countries implementing democracy, BBC reported.

Related Article: Afghanistan: Armed Gunmen Attack Camp, Kills 10 Mine Clearers in a Bloodthirsty Raid

Related Article: Afghanistan: Armed Gunmen Attack Camp, Kills 10 Mine Clearers in a Bloodthirsty Raid

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The United States Senate has just confirmed Zahid Quraishi as a federal judge, making him the first Muslim American federal judge in the history of the country.

Prior to his appointment as a federal judge on Thursday, Quraishi, who is of Pakistani descent, served as a magistrate judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey. The confirmation for the federal judge was held during a Senate hearing.

United States President Joe Biden nominated 46-year-old Quraishi in March for the position of a federal judge. The Democratic leader also nominated 10 other judicial candidates, who, if confirmed, will make Senate history.

Professional Diversity

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke about the historic vote regarding Quraishi before Thursday's confirmation hearing. He noted how the official will become the first American Muslim in the history of the United States to have the position of Article III federal judge.

Muslims are recorded as the third-largest religion in the United States and Quraishi will be the first of them to serve the position. America must expand its professional diversity in addition to its demographic diversity, Schumer said, ad arguing Biden supports the idea, Reuters via Yahoo reported.

New Jersey has just broken another barrier, Gov. Phil Murphy said about Quraishi's confirmation as a federal judge. The 63-year-old official congratulated the newest member of the federal bench for the district. Murphy noted how Quraishi's experiences, which include being a captain in the army, an attorney, and a federal magistrate judge, make him reliable for the position.

Murphy also congratulated President Biden for the historic confirmation, thanking both Senator Menendez and Senator Booker for their contribution to the momentous occasion.

Read Also: Top Democratic Leaders Criticize Omar For 'False Equivalencies', Comparing US With the Taliban

United States History

Quraishi has had extensive working experience serving the public in relation to legal matters, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin said in a statement on Thursday. He added the lawmaker was a son of Pakistani immigrants, CNN reported.

The vote on whether or not Quraishi would become a federal judge or not resulted in a unanimous 81-16. He received bipartisan support from the upper chamber. Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Quraishi's nomination with bipartisan support.

Additionally, the Senate also advanced Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Many consider the position to be the second-most powerful court in the United States. Officials generally consider Jackson as a frontrunner for the Supreme Court if there is a vacancy.

Many progressive groups have also been urging Justice Stephen Breyer, the oldest member of the court's liberal bloc, to retire. The vacancy would allow President Biden to name a successor. The Democratic president has previously committed to name judges to the U.S. courts to expand its diversity with regards to their background and professional experiences.

If confirmed, Judge Florence Pan would become the first Asian-American woman on the district court in D.C. and Judge Lydia Griggsby would become the first woman of color to be seated as a federal judge in Maryland if the Senate approves her nomination, CBS News reported.

Related Article: Joe Biden, Boris Johnson to Sign New Atlantic Charter; to Pledge Restart US-UK Air Travel "As Soon as Possible"

@ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Individuals briefed on the situation said a bipartisan group of senators is exploring an infrastructure deal with $579 billion in new spending as negotiators strive to reach a nearly $1 trillion compromise on President Joe Biden's top priority.

Ten senators have been meeting behind closed doors, with Biden encouraging them to keep working on the project after he withdrew from a Republican-only proposal last week due to disagreements. Senators are informing their colleagues confidentially and have warned that adjustments may be made.

The bipartisan group's agreement is a significant step in the infrastructure plan

Per US News, the senators said in a joint statement, "Our group - consisting of ten Senators, five from each party - has worked in good faith and established a bipartisan agreement on a realistic, compromise framework to update our nation's infrastructure and energy technologies."

Democratic senators informed the president on the emerging strategy, according to the White House, but concerns remain. The President and Congress have been unable to achieve an agreement on his plans for infrastructure spending, with disagreements over the scale of the package of road, highway, and other projects, as well as how to fund them.

Lawmakers believe the group's initial agreement is a significant step forward in developing a plan that can pass in this year's evenly divided Congress, but they also recognize that it may quickly collapse. The cost would be $974 billion over five years, as is customary for highway expenditure, or $1.2 trillion over eight years, as Biden proposes.

The current deal would be larger than the previous Republican-only effort, which included $330 billion in extra spending in a $928 billion package, but it would still fall short of Biden's desire for $1.7 trillion over eight years. The group looks to be having the same difficulties as Biden and Chief Republican negotiator Sen. Shelley Moore Capito in reaching an agreement on how to pay for it.

Read Also: Joe Manchin Opposes Biden's Election Reform Bill, Claiming Partisan Voting Legislation Will Further Destroy Democracy

Bipartisan Senators reaches infrastructure deal without tax hikes

While senators claim to have reached an agreement on the complex question of how to pay for infrastructure, the funding methods may yet split them. To counteract investments, Biden and Democrats have proposed raising the corporate tax rate, but Republicans have stated that they would not restore their 2017 tax cuts. The White House wants to raise the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to at least 25 percent, CNBC reported.

Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat who has joined the talks, said earlier Thursday that the plan's funding could come from a variety of sources. As Biden pursues an infrastructure measure as his second major legislative effort, the White House has maintained contact with Senate negotiators.

Initially, the president proposed a $2.3 trillion plan, but following conversations with Capito, he reduced his offer to $1.7 trillion. Senator Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican engaged in the negotiations, told reporters that Biden had requested at least $600 billion in increased spending over the baseline previously set by Congress.

Democrats, despite controlling both chambers of Congress, have a difficult road to passing an infrastructure plan. While they may pass a measure in the Senate's equally divided chamber on their own through budget reconciliation, they must enlist the support of all 50 members of their caucus.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., has stated that he wants to pass a measure that has bipartisan support. On his own, he could block a Democratic proposal. Manchin is a member of the negotiating group.

This week, the House Problem Solvers Caucus published its infrastructure plan. The $1.25 trillion would be spent, including $762 billion in additional expenditures. The organization did not specify how the investments would be paid for.

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives has passed a five-year, $547 billion surface transportation spending package, which Democrats might utilize to enact key components of Biden's infrastructure plan. Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said on Thursday that Democrats hope to vote on the bill by the end of the month.

Per NYTimes, some Republicans were angry when President Biden halted talks with Capito of West Virginia, this week after she presented a series of modest counter-proposals. Liberal Democrats, are worried about missing out on a chance to pass major policy demands such as a series of climate legislation and tax hikes on wealthy corporations and people. They have pushed their leaders to concentrate on delivering the massive investments that people demanded.

The Biden administration has expressed support for a proposal that included at least $1 trillion in additional funding, as well as the expected continuation of existing programs. However, White House officials have stated that indexing the gas tax or imposing a mileage tax on electric vehicles would violate Biden's vow not to raise taxes on those earning less than $400,000 a year.

The White House staff was informed on the evolving framework by Democrats, and administration officials are anticipated to cooperate with legislators. However, the bipartisan group of senators is part of a larger coalition of moderates who have met privately since Biden assumed office to try to find areas of agreement on a variety of issues. Moderate Democrats, in particular, have been concerned about not skipping the requirement for Republican votes on an infrastructure bill, which has long been considered as ripe for bipartisan cooperation.

Related Article: Biden Infrastructure Plan Talks With Capito End, President Turns to Centrist Senators for Support



@YouTube

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United States President Joe Biden recently warned the Russian government of "robust and meaningful" consequences if the government continues to engage in what the Democrat called "harmful activities."

Biden's statement and the alleged threat come after making his first overseas trip aimed at strengthening ties with surrounding allies. The Democrat arrived in the UK on Wednesday for diplomatic reasons.

A new "Atlantic Charter" will be discussed between Biden and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The agreement is a modern take of the old one forged in 1941 between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. The pact focused on global challenges such as climate change and security.

International Conflict

Biden will spend eight days in the European region and will meet the Queen at Windsor Castle, attend a G7 leaders' meeting, and attend his first-ever Nato summit as president of the United States. At the end of his political trip, the Democrat is scheduled to meet with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Geneva, BBC reported.

During the meeting, the White House said Biden plans to raise several issues to Putin, including arms control, climate change, military involvement of Russia in Ukraine, the country's cyber-hacking activities, and the imprisonment of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.

On Wednesday, Biden addressed U.S. troops and their families at the RAF Mildenhall airbase in Suffolk. He later went on towards Cornwall, saying he was going to deliver a clear message to the Russian president.

The United States is not seeking to start a conflict with Russia but is only looking to create a stable and predictable relationship, Biden said. He noted, however, that his government could respond accordingly if Putin allows Russia to engage in "harmful activities."

Read Also: Top Democratic Leaders Criticize Omar For 'False Equivalencies', Comparing US With the Taliban

Working with Other Countries

Biden announced this was his first trip overseas as president of the United States, telling troops he would address issues with other international leaders when he meets them. He added the United States was back to work with democratic nations to tackle global challenges together.

Before leaving on his trip, Biden told reporters his main goal during the overseas trip was to show how close the United States and Europe were, to make a statement meant for Putin and China, B World Online reported.

Additionally, Biden is bringing a gift during his trip to Europe, giving nations 500 million Pfizer Inc/BioNTech coronavirus vaccines. The distribution will last for the next two years and signals goodwill from the U.S. to European regions.

Previously, Biden opposed the Brexit movement that Johnson supported. The Democratic leader also expressed his concern for the future of Northern Ireland. He also called a British leader a "physical and emotional clone" Trump before.

However, despite their differences, the British government said Johnson and Biden had similar perspectives and viewpoints regarding several global challenges, including climate change and the need for international institutions. But Johnson has previously expressed his discontent with the lack of a new trade deal with the United States, Euro News reported.

Related Article: Joe Biden, Boris Johnson to Sign New Atlantic Charter; to Pledge Restart US-UK Air Travel "As Soon as Possible"

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Firefighters in Lawrence are combating a large blaze that engulfed houses on Thursday night. Crews were dispatched to the site on Shawsheen Court, where they discovered a row house complex and its next-door neighbors completely wrapped in dense, black smoke.

Per News7 Boston, the Massachusetts Salvation Army's Emergency Disaster Services unit is responding from Lynn to give food, drinks, and care.

The situation on the ground

The row houses' central part has entirely collapsed. The smoke could be seen for miles. No injuries have been reported, nor has it been determined what caused the fire. According to fire officials, who describe heavy fire conditions, the 3-alarm fire broke out inside a condominium complex on Shawsheen Court, with significant fire conditions throughout the structure. Around 8 pm, the fire started.

Heavy flames ripped through numerous apartments in the complex, according to a video from the scene. To combat the powerful flames from the air, many first responders used ladder trucks.

When first responders received the first calls reporting the fire, they were informed that it involved many apartments. Several adjacent towns' fire departments were dispatched to assist in the fight against the flames. From Interstate 495, the smoke and flames could be seen. There was no more information available at the time.

House fire happened nearby on Wednesday

After Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical responded to a reported home fire in central Lawrence on Wednesday, a 27-year-old woman was charged with criminal arson. According to court documents, Lisa E. Rivadeneira, of Lawrence, was formally charged in Douglas County District Court on Thursday. She was taken into custody on accusations of aggravated arson, LJWorld reported.

The fire department responded to a structure fire at 926 W. 20th Terrace at approximately 5:30 a.m. Wednesday, as per the news release. In the Douglas County booking log, the address is indicated as Rivadeneira's residence.

The release says smoke was coming from the house when firefighters found that a massive fire burnt dozen of homes in Massachusetts a month ago

Last month, a gas leak caused a massive fire in the middle of a Massachusetts street, forcing the evacuation of a dozen homes. Around 9:24 a.m. ET, the Marshfield Police Department reported a gas leak near Plain Street and shut down the street, where huge flames soared 30 to 40 feet into the sky.

Although there were no casualties recorded by the authorities, homeowners were forced to leave as firemen battled the blaze. No utility employees were working in the area when the fire started, Marshfield fire Chief Jeffrey Simpson told WCVB. But firefighters discovered a broken power line, which they believe ignited the leaking gas from a 6-inch underground main.

According to Simpson, firefighters kept the flame running to keep the gas from gathering in the region and triggering a larger explosion. Crews were able to isolate the gas line and shut it off at 7:02 p.m., and the fire was put out. Marshfield police noted that three dozen residences were left without gas. Residents were able to return home an hour later, said the police.

Related Article: Arizona Wildfires Burn More Than 150,000 Acres; Governor Issues Emergency Declaration

WATCH: Massive fire has consumed multiple row homes in Lawrence. We keep hearing constant pops! @7News pic.twitter.com/PCNhSMn621  Aisha Mbowe (@AishaMbTV) June 11, 2021

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Sterling, VA (20165)

Today

Some clouds in the morning will give way to mainly sunny skies for the afternoon. High 87F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Thunderstorms during the evening, then skies turning partly cloudy overnight. Low 61F. Winds NW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%.
Last Thursday, Eric Adams made public the records of official vehicles he used as the Brooklyn borough president to dispel any doubts over the residency controversy surrounding him.

A published article started it all?

Adams sought to clarify the issue after Politico had an article about his properties, which later led to questions if he owns property in New York City. His political rivaltook advantage of the story and pointed out the other property Adams owns is in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Fort Lee, N.J, where he lives with his partner, Tracey Collins, reported NY Daily News.

Last Wednesday, Adams received reporters at a basement apartment in his Bed-Stuyvesant townhouse, which he has owned for over 20 years to debunk claims that suggested he resides across state lines.

Andrew Yang, another mayor aspirant, said on Thursday that his rival was living in New Jersey for 20. Suggesting there is a misrepresentation, he wants proof via E-ZPass records of personal and official car used by Adams. Yang is trailing in polls taken recently.

Still not convinced

Eric Adams NYC candidate for mayor wants to show he was not hiding anything, so his rival was invited to the Borough Hall to see the records as an answer to the allegations but did not give a direct answer to the invitation to see records in person.

Read also: New Yorkers Leave NYC in Droves and the State Loses $1.4 Billion in Taxes

Borough Hall released the records on Thursday that indicate that official vehicles were used for seven excursions to New Jersey in a year, and only one of those trips happened this calendar year.

Despite this, Yang, who has been criticized for staying much of the outbreak at a second home upstate, continues to insist that Adams does not reside in Brooklyn.

Pointed out that Adams told CNN on Wednesday night that his home is on Lafayette Place, not Lafayette Ave. Adams rival stated, noted by Times News Express," The tour of his quote-unquote residence raised more questions than answers." He added, "He did not even get his address accurately. Examine that for a while. He cannot even identify the city where he supposedly lives."

Adams' spokesman Evan Thies said Adams misspoke when he said Lafayette Place, instead of Avenue.

When pressed when he would go to Borough Hall to examine the E-ZPass records, Yang refused and instead pressed on with his accusations, saying Adams also should release records on private automobiles.

On Thursday morning, Mayor de Blasio supported Adams, stating he has known him for a long time. Adam retaliated to Yang's criticism with criticism of his own. Adams disregarded the claims of his residency for the second day in a row. Instead criticized Yang for leaving the city during the pandemic.

Eric Adams NYC candidate for mayor stated he "likely" rode the bus three or four times to New Jersey since liked taking public transportation and was visiting his partner during these trips.

Related article: Bloodbath in NYC Continues With 9 Dead, 41 Injured Overnight

Related article: Bloodbath in NYC Continues With 9 Dead, 41 Injured Overnigh

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It is in the works for Raytheon and Huntington Ingalls Industries to install the Spy-6 Radar on Flight III, the U.S. Navy's USS Jack H. Lucas guided-missile destroyer to provide the newly launched ship with a more advanced capability in threat detection capability.

Improved technology for the US Navy

The introduction of the DDG-125 missile destroyer that is in the Flight III configuration comes with the new Raytheon radar which promises advances beyond the Aegis radars, said the company spokesperson last Wednesday. One feature of the new system is that it tracks missiles and planes much farther than those older systems, and can differentiate noise and interference from electronic jamming of signals to confuse other radars, reported Executive Biz.

Included in the design of the equipment is a multiple and modular system that can be customized and configured for scalability, or used for ship classes and what other mission modules are needed. According to Scott Spence, the program area director for naval radars, as noted by Raytheon Missiles and Defense," Adding new capabilities, the fleet will be getting the new radars."

The SPY-6 array deliveries were completed in October of last year enabled by an agile software development process. The ship is expected to be ready by 2024, said the Navy and its industrial partners.

Launching of the First Flight III missile destroyer

It is the first DDG 51 Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer to the first in Flight III variant, this future Jack H. Lucas (DDG 125) was launched last June 4, from the HII shipyard, cited Nav Sea. The shipbuilder is working on four more of the DDG 51, which includes the DDG 121, DDG 123, DDG 128, DD129 which are in the Flight III class. More than 20 of these guided-missile destroyers are being built at HII shipyards.

Read also: Arleigh Burke Class Destroyer: The US Navy's Deadliest Ship

The ship is built around the AN/SPY-6(V)1 Air and Missile Defense Radar, with improvements that include better electrical power output and cooling capacity, and relevant changes to the hull that makes it more than a cosmetic upgrade that goes deep into the ship's hull itself.

As the Russians and Chinese race to build new ships, this Flight III baseline begins DDG 125-126 and DDG 128 to other ships of the line.

Capt. Seth Miller, the officer assigned to the Arleigh-Burkes Missile Destroyer program, says that all the following ships after Jack Lucas in the same ship class will have next-generation Integrated Air and Missile Defense capability, longer ranges, and better tracking are crucial to the Navy.

Missions of the ship class

The DDG 51 is a multi-mission guided-missile destroyer able to operate offense and defense under multi-threat settings involving air, surface, and subsurface threats, whether independently or as part of naval groups operating in the US Fleet.

Flight III is the class's fourth flight modification throughout its 30-year service, following the first ships of Flight I, II, and IIA ships that went before it. Other ships totaling 20 DDG 51s are to be built by HII and are slated to install the Spy-6 Radar on the Arleigh-Burke class missile destroyers in their shipyards.

Related article: Weapons on the Heavily Armed US Navy Ticonderoga Class Aegis Guided-Missile Cruisers

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An autopsy report for Andrew Brown Jr., a black man slain by police as he resisted arrest outside his North Carolina house in April, was published on Thursday, confirming that he was killed by a fatal gunshot wound in the back of his skull.

Result of the Autopsy

In a recently published article in Reuters, the 11-page summary of the autopsy results corroborated the conclusions of a private autopsy done at the request of Brown's family, as well as the description provided last month by a local district attorney, who stated no charges would be filed in the case.

The autopsy report, dated June 7 and issued on Thursday by the North Carolina Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, said that the death was caused by a "penetrating gunshot wound to the skull." Additionally, a gunshot wound to the right arm was also found.

Included in the released record is a toxicology report, which revealed that Brown had a minor amount of methamphetamine in his blood, which did not play a part in his death, according to a published report by the U.S. News.

Read Also: Two North Carolina Sheriff Deputies Shot While Doing Wellness Check

Officers Will Not Be Prosecuted

Yahoo News reports, a prosecutor in North Carolina has decided not to prosecute sheriff's deputies in the fatal shooting of Andrew Brown, a black man, outside his house last month, claiming on Tuesday that the death was justifiable because Brown threatened their lives by driving at them.

In a published article in NBC News, Pasquotank County District Attorney Andrew Womble stated that his office would not pursue any criminal charges on the officers involved in the incident. Upon their investigation, they concluded that the actions of the officers were in line with their training and were permissible under the law.

According to the prosecution, deputies sought to arrest Brown the night before but he did not return to his house in a quiet area in Elizabeth City, which is roughly 35 miles south of Norfolk, Virginia. Deputies had grounds to fear Brown's automobile might be used as a lethal weapon when they met him.

Brown's Family Released a Statement

Lawyers for Brown's family said at the time that Womble was attempting to "whitewash this unjustified killing," claiming that footage of the shot revealed that the policemen were not afraid for their lives.

The family's lawyers said on Thursday that they disagreed the findings of the District Attorney's office stating, "we are confident that the truth will be revealed and justice will prevail," according to a published article in Reuters.

Furthermore, following the conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd in a widely publicized trial, the incident sparked a nationwide discussion about how police use force against Black Americans.

On the other hand, this ruling sparked additional rallies in a nation reeling from a spate of high-profile incidents involving police shooting Black males, resulting in the biggest civil-rights protest movement seen in the United States in decades.

Related Article: Andrew Brown Jr. Shooting: Court Says Deputies Did Not Violate Any Law



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An oral COVID-19 vaccine developed in Israel has shown promising results in rats, and its researchers expect it to be available as a booster shot for people within nine months. According to David Zigdon, CEO of MigVax, more than 70 rats were injected with traditional COVID-19 vaccinations and subsequently given the oral MigVax booster, and their immune systems all responded as expected.

"Everyone speaks about how we need vaccination boosters, and we expect to be able to provide many of them with our oral booster following a successful preclinical study. There were no negative effects, and their antibody levels grew significantly," Zigdon told The Times of Israel.

Research of oral COVID-19 vaccine in rats shows significant promise

In a laboratory, scientists infected blood from rats with SARSCoV2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Following the success with the oral vaccine from animal testing, human trials are being planned, with dosages potentially ready for human usage by early 2022. Booster demand is projected to be strong.

Zigdon went on to say that the technology employed in his booster makes it easy to adapt to new coronavirus strains, so if one arises that breaks through existing vaccinations, it may be administered to extend protection. Immune responses were greater in the rats that got the oral vaccination than in the control group.

Since the pandemic, scientists in northern Israel have been working tirelessly to develop a vaccine for a viral strain that causes bronchial illness in poultry so that it may be used to combat SARSCoV2. Work began at the state-funded Migal Galilee Research Institute and is currently centered at MigVax, a subsidiary of the institute.

The subject of the trial is an oral unit vaccination, unlike the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, which employ messenger RNA to transmit the coronavirus antigen to the immune system without adding pathogen particles, whole or otherwise. The vaccine was given to the rats in a boost format after a double injection of the coronavirus spike (S1) protein in the preclinical study.

According to the findings, rats who were given MigVax as a booster had significantly greater neutralizing antibody titers than rats given an oral placebo booster. Furthermore, it produced more potent neutralizing antibodies than a third S1 booster shot.

Laster, who is in charge of OurCrowd's medical technology investments, told The Jerusalem Post, "They are trying to use this as a booster for individuals who took AstraZeneca, Moderna, Pfizer, or the Chinese vaccine." MigVax's first investment round was headed by OurCrowd.

Read Also: Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 Vaccine Effective Against Virus Variants, Severe Illness

Mig-Vax-101 oral COVID-19 vaccine's advantages

Per Businesswire, Mig-Vax-101, as an oral vaccination, has many potential benefits over today's first-generation injectable vaccines such as:

Ease of administration: Oral delivery eliminates the need for healthcare providers to administer the medication.

Oral delivery eliminates the need for healthcare providers to administer the medication. Uniquely positioned to deal with new variants: The RBD subunit can rapidly adapt to new variants, which might aid in the development of more effective neutralizing antibodies. Furthermore, because the other components of the vaccine are made up of a protein that is resistant to alteration, the vaccination may last longer before requiring a booster.

The RBD subunit can rapidly adapt to new variants, which might aid in the development of more effective neutralizing antibodies. Furthermore, because the other components of the vaccine are made up of a protein that is resistant to alteration, the vaccination may last longer before requiring a booster. Applicability to a broader population: Because the MigVax-101 subunit oral vaccine does not inject people with viruses or genetic material, it will be much more acceptable to a wider range of people, including those who are wary of receiving genetic or viral material injections, as well as children, pregnant women, and other vulnerable groups.

Because the MigVax-101 subunit oral vaccine does not inject people with viruses or genetic material, it will be much more acceptable to a wider range of people, including those who are wary of receiving genetic or viral material injections, as well as children, pregnant women, and other vulnerable groups. Mucosal immunity: Preclinical studies revealed high levels of mucosal IgA in lung wash, indicating that oral vaccination provides targeted protection at the virus's entry point.

Preclinical studies revealed high levels of mucosal IgA in lung wash, indicating that oral vaccination provides targeted protection at the virus's entry point. Ease of transport and storage: While MigVax-101 does need to be refrigerated, it does not need to be frozen. This lowers the cost of distribution and storage, as well as logistics.

Related Article: Ivermectin To Undergo COVID-19 Drug Trial in the University of Minnesota as Online Interest Surges

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Kanye West was spotted with 35-year-old model Irina Shayk yesterday, after whisking her away for a "romantic retreat" in Provence, south of France, in honor of his 44th birthday, leaving ex-wife Kim Kardashian "blinded and hurt."

They were seen flying back to New Jersey on a private jet after the vacation, which occurred after Kim Kardashian filed for divorce from Kanye in February.

It verifies Kanye's romance with Irina - but the hook-up has left Kim, 40, surprised and saddened, especially because it took place in her and her ex's "special place."

Kardashian not bothered about West, Shayk romance

Last year, the pair went through a rocky moment in their marriage, during which Kanye West revealed personal information about his family in a series of Twitter outbursts. Kardashian filed for divorce in February after nearly seven years of marriage.

Kardashian's divorce with West is her third in as many years. She was previously married to Damon Thomas from 2000 to 2004 and Kris Humphries for 72 days before divorcing him in 2011. Kardashian is "doing great," a source told PEOPLE, nearly four months after her split from West.

West has moved on with Irina Shayk. The model, 35, and her ex-husband Bradley Cooper has a 4-year-old daughter named Lea. After four years together, Shayk and Cooper called it quits in 2019. Kardashian has known about West's new romance with Shayk for weeks, and it doesn't bother Kim Kardashian, said a source who told PEOPLE on Thursday.

Read Also: Aussie Man Claiming Prince Charles' Secret Son Posts New Proof; Says He Was Made to Look Less Royal

Kanye West and Irina Shayk are dating

Kanye West and Irina Shayk have confirmed speculations of a new romance following his divorce from wife Kim Kardashian. In exclusive photos obtained by DailyMail.com, Kanye can be seen having a romantic stroll with Irina, 35, in Provence, France, where they are staying at Villa La Coste, a luxurious 600-acre boutique hotel.

The couple can be seen in the photos enjoying their trip in the gorgeous peaceful countryside, with the father-of-four even stopping to snap pictures with Irina, who looked to be extremely comfortable around him. Kanye and Irina reportedly arrived at the hotel on Sunday and stayed for three nights before departing about lunchtime on Wednesday, as per DailyMail.com. The rapper is thought to have rented out the luxurious location, which was restricted to the general public throughout their visit.

Kim Kardashian tells why she's divorcing Kanye West

During the last episode of the Kardashian family's reality TV program, Keeping Up With The Kardashians, Kim Kardashian revealed what eventually forced her to divorce her husband Kanye West. The founder of KKW Beauty claimed that her marriage was destroyed because she was looking for "total happiness."

After launching in 2007, with a cast of mostly unknown sisters, KUWTK became a pop culture phenomenon. The Kardashian-Jenners now own massive business empires worth billions of dollars and are among the world's most renowned stars, 14 years and 20 seasons later.

Kim Kardashian explained to her mother, Kris Jenner, why her marriage to the famous rapper was failing on the final episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians. In scenes taped after she turned 40 in October last year, Kim revealed she was meeting with a therapist when she realized she was unhappily married.

"I simply want to be completely happy. Total happiness is not a reality for everyone, but if I can have it more of the time, that's all I desire," she told her mother, Mirror reported.

Related Article: Kim Kardashian Gets Protection Against Alleged Stalker; Denies Testing Positive From COVID-19 at Birthday Bash



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Some reports indicate that the Iranian Navy sails to support US-for Nicolas Maduro and its ships are now in transit in the Atlantic Ocean. The ships included in the force sent to support the Venezuelan leader are the Iranian destroyer Sahand and support vessel Makran, which is used to gather maritime intelligence. These two ships left the port of Bandar Abbas located on the southern coast of Iran.

Significance of this voyage

The voyage began last Thursday and is one of the crucial missions for an Iranian Flotilla, as said on Iran's State TV, reported The Sun. Released footage of the warship during their Atlantic crossing showed the Sahand crashing against the waves of the ocean. Looking at the video taken, it is assumed the Makran shot the footage, noted AP. A modified commercial oil tanker equipped with a mobile helicopter launch platform functioned as the support vessel.

Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, Iran's Deputy Army Chief, remarked the ships' mission is one of the most arduous that the Iranian Navy has experienced. It is also the longest and most challenging voyage yet. Sayyari said, "The Navy is enhancing its seafaring capabilities and showing its long-term endurance in unfavorable seas and severe weather conditions in the Atlantic."

Both vessels will be moving forward non-stop and will bypass any port on the mission, he added. No exact destination was given by authorities or when the voyage will end, but some US media stated that the Iranian Navy sailed to support US-foe Nicolas Maduro and are on a straight path to Venezuela.

Read also: US Navy Warns Foreign Ships in the Persian Gulf to Keep Distance or Face the Consequences

Planet Labs Inc. satellite images suggest that the boats left Bandar Abbas harbor on April 29. Where ships currently are is unknown.

Iran has kept close ties with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, sending gasoline as well as other products to the country throughout the midst of US sanctions, which targeted the country's gas shortages. One of the top aides of the Venezuelan leader anonymously said that the ship will be heading to Venezuelan ports, as speculated.

Saeed Khatibzadeh, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, similarly refused to disclose where Makran was sailing to, but defended their actions. "Iran has always been present in international waters, it has this right based on international agreements, and it can be present in international waters," the spokesman stated during a news conference last May 31, mentioned News Logistics. His remarks cautioned that nobody should criticize Iran's actions.

A photo that surfaced showed seven fast attack boats, which were positioned on one of the decks of the Makran. Questions were asked why they were on board the vessels. These watercraft is of the type being used by the Guard in its engagements with US warships within the Persian Gulf as well as the Strait of Hormuz. It was not clear what Venezuela's plans would be for the ships.

The use of the boats is part of the asymmetrical warfare force within Venezuela's armed forces, mentioned the U.S. Naval Institute. The Iranian Navy sails to support US-foe Nicolas Maduro is sure but no details about their purpose have been given by the countries involved.

Related article: US Ship Fires Warning Shots at 13 Armed Iranians After "Aggressive" Boat Attacks

Related article: US Ship Fires Warning Shots at 13 Armed Iranians After "Agressive" Boat Attacks

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The failure of the Keystone XL project showcased the obstacles in building new pipelines in the United States and Canada in the midst of galvanized environmental groups. It delivered a blow to oil-and-gas companies that currently must be dependent on aging infrastructure. Demonstrators targeted Keystone XL, which Canada's TC Energy Corp. abandoned on Wednesday, and other pipelines for over a decade. They were looking to choke off fossil-fuel usage by making it more difficult to transport.

The Keystone XL oil pipeline's developer has abandoned the project following President Joe Biden revoking a permit. It was a significant flashpoint in the debate over the role of fossil fuels in climate change.

Ending a Decade-Long Battle

The failure of the Keystone XL project showcased the obstacles in building new pipelines in the United States and Canada in the midst of galvanized environmental groups. It delivered a blow to oil and gas companies that currently must be dependent on aging infrastructure.

Demonstrators have targeted Keystone XL, which Canada's TC Energy Corp. abandoned on Wednesday, and other pipelines for over a decade. They were looking to choke off fossil-fuel usage by making it more difficult to transport.

The Keystone XL oil pipeline's developer has abandoned the project following President Joe Biden's revocation of the permit. It was a significant flashpoint in the debate over the role of fossil fuels in climate change.

Ending a decade-long battle

TC Energy had already suspended construction in January. The declaration ends an over a years-long battle that came to symbolize the debate over whether fossil fuels should be left in the ground because of the issue of climate change, reported NPR.

Keystone XL is an $8-billion oil pipeline that was slated to flow from Alberta to Nebraska. Although Alberta is currently on the hook for over $1 billion in lost profit following the cancellation of the expansion pipeline, there is division over the effects of its termination.The proposed pipeline expansion would have delivered over 800,000 barrels of carbon-intensive tar sands oil each day from Alberta to Steele City, Nebraska. Once positioned, the pipeline would have met with existing pipeline infrastructure to travel farther south to the Gulf Coast's oil refineries, reported Vox.

The news is reportedly appealing to environmental activists. However, critics consider it a massive geopolitical blunder by the Biden administration, which sets forth politics and ideology in front of national interests.

Read Also: United States to Buy 500 Million Doses of Pfizer Vaccines to Send to 100 Nations, Biden Declares 'US Is Back'

The Keystone XL pipeline is already part of a transnational network. It is segmented into phases that cross Canada and the US, reported Forbes.

Environmental activists and indigenous groups have fought hard against an additional pipeline slicing south from Alberta, Canada down through Montana, South Dakota, and into Nebraska. This is where it would join up with existing pipelines that would transport oil to the Gulf Coast. Almost 300 miles of the pipeline had been built following former President Donald Trump's first day in office reversing an Obama-era ban on the project.

According to TC Energy, it decided the termination after a comprehensive review of its options. It also consulted with the government of Alberta, Canada. The company stated it would coordinate with stakeholders, regulators, and indigenous groups to affirm a safe exit from the project.

However, the United States and Canada are still dependent on pipelines to carry fossil fuels that support transportation, commerce, cooling, and heating. As pipelines become increasingly hard to build, the nations will become more reliant on an older infrastructure that is susceptible to disruptions.

The news is a defeat for the oil industry. Environmentalists were opposed to the pipeline partly due to the oil it would transport -- oil sands crude from Alberta.

Related Article: President Joe Biden to Meet With Queen Elizabeth II, Queen's First Major Meeting Since Prince Philip Passed Away

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An Italian woman who went into a 10-month coma woke up to discover she was a mother to a lovely daughter she gave birth to while she was unconscious.

The 37-year-old Monte San Savino resident, Cristina Rosi, suffered a heart attack when she was seven months pregnant, which caused her to fall into a coma in July 2020. Medical doctors delivered the woman's daughter, Caterina, via an emergency Caesarean section while the patient was still asleep.

The woman's husband, 42-year-old Gabriele Succi, was able to celebrate the joyous occasion with his wife 10 months after the incident. He said he and his wife went through so much suffering to be able to hold their little girl close.

Becoming a Mother

Rosi's first word after waking up from her coma was 'Mamma,' her husband Succi said. Doctors in the room when the mother awoke confirmed her first word, he added.

Officials transferred Rosi to an Austrian clinic to receive full 24-hour specialist care. She is also scheduled to undergo a neurological rehabilitation program while she recovers from her coma.

The patient's tracheostomy tube was also removed by hospital staff to allow her to breathe for herself, Succi said. He added he was blessed to see his wife's progress and remembered back a few months where she was undergoing several tests. Shortly after, Succi said Rosi was hardly recognizable after she woke up from her coma, MSN reported.

Succi noted his wife was much more relaxed now and that medical professionals were taking care of her, giving her medicine that would help her further her physical recovery. A GoFUndMe page was put up by Succi to collect donations to pay for his wife's treatment, including intense physiotherapy, and has since raised more than $200,000.

Read Also: Newly Discovered Exoplanet Could Have Water Clouds, A Gaseous Planet Rather Than a Rocky One Like Earth

However, Succi said he hoped to raise more money and reach a milestone of more than $350,000 to ensure his wife has enough funds to receive medical treatment abroad. He said he wanted to give his wife and daughter the best care in the world.

Monte San Savino Mayor Margherita Scarpellini wrote on Facebook how important it was to share the family's story to encourage more people to help, and an attempt to boost donations to the GoFundMe page.

A Similar Incident

In 2019, a similar case was reported when a United Arab Emirates woman woke up from a 27-year coma. The patient, Munira Abdulla, was only 32 years old when she suffered a severe brain injury after getting into a vehicular crash with her then-four-year-old son, IOL reported.

Emirati hospitals spent several years treating and taking care of Abdulla while she was unconscious until April 2017. During that time, the Crown Prince Court helped Abdulla's family with getting treatment in Germany.

Schon Clinic doctors in Germany used a different approach in treating Abdulla, employing a combination of physical therapy, medicine, operations and sensory stimulation. Before waking up, Abdulla's son got into an argument with staff inside her room.

The son, Omar Webair, said his mother was making strange sounds while he was arguing with the staff. He urged doctors to examine his mother but they said everything was normal. However, three days later, he heard someone call out his name, the first her mother said when she woke up, BBC reported.

Related Article: Israeli Researchers Find Oral COVID-19 Vaccine Works as Booster

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Vice President Kamala Harris has again received criticism over an exchange with Univision anchor Ilia Calderon over when she will visit the southern border. During the Thursday interview, Calderon pressed Harris, who was designated by President Joe Biden to oversee the border crisis, on how she herself has not yet made it down to the US-Mexico border to witness the migrant crisis personally.

Harris said to Calderon, "I've said I'm going to the border. And I-" reported Fox News. She was then interrupted by the anchor, asking when she is going to the border. Upon hearing Calderon's slightly delayed question, Harris remarked that she was not yet done with what she was going to say. "I'm not finished," Harris chuckled.

"I've said I'm going to the border. And also if we are going to deal with the problems at the border, we have to deal with the problems that cause people to go to the border, to flee to the border."

Kamala Harris' Bad Week

The exchange between the Vice President and the anchor of a Miami-based network occurred a day following her return from Mexico and Guatemala. During the trip, Harris spoke to the presidents of both nations regarding ways to curtail rising arrivals at the border, reported Daily Mail. However, the trip was also characterized by missteps with the press.

The first six months of Harris' time as vice president have overall gone according to her plan. She has been a consistent messenger for Biden as she learns the possibilities (and limitations) that come with being second-in-command. That smooth ride ended this week due to a series of unfavorable events, with some within her control and others not, reported CNN.

During her interview with Calderon, Harris said that her first trip as the United States Vice President was to on a foreign trip to Guatemala in order to be on the ground and be informed firsthand of the root causes why its citizens are leaving their home country.

Read Also: VP Kamala Harris Laughs Again at Border Questions, Receives Criticism

The anchor asked if she has a date for her trip to the border in order for her to see the situation. Harris responded that she will keep her posted. The rebuke of Calderon echoed her dismissal of former Vice President Mike Pence when he attempted to interrupt her during their vice presidential debate in October 2020. She said that she is speaking when she reprimanded him with a smile prior to continuing her point.

The White House made a significant deal out of Harris' two-day trip to Central America previously this week. The VP's main goal was straightforward: To send a message to Central Americans to stop coming to the United States southern border.

Harris' scold of the Univision anchor trending on social media, where it was characterized as a "heated exchange". According to Media Research Center Latino director Jorge Bonilla, he did not have the vice president hitting Calderon with the "I'm speaking" on his bingo card.

Related Article: AOC Criticizes VP Kamala Harris for Telling Guatemalan Migrants Not To Come to the US, Tells Her Seeking Asylum Is Legal

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A new report published Thursday revealed the Chinese government is going to "extraordinary lengths" to cover up the state-backed torture of a Muslim minority group in its detention camps in the Xinjiang province.

Amnesty International, a non-government organization, released a comprehensive report that included firsthand accounts of the cruel and degrading treatment of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang "re-education" camps. The report included interviews with more than 100 people, including 55 camp survivors and several government employees who worked in the camps.

Most survivors who spoke to the organization said they were taken from their homes without any due process or reason. They also recounted being brought to a police station where they had their medical data recorded before being interrogated in "tiger chairs."

Uyghur Torture

For context, tiger chairs are steel chairs with affixed leg iron shackles and handcuffs. This device is used to restrain the victim in painful positions.

The survivors also detailed suffering from beatings, sleep deprivation, and overcrowding in the police stations. After being transferred to the camps, the survivors said they were punished using electric shocks or by being hung from a wall

.The report also revealed the lengths Chinese officials went through to cover up the torture in the camps. This included one incident where Chinese officials allegedly created a massive bonfire in 2019 to burn as many documents from an office overseeing the camps as part of an effort to paint the facility in a positive light.

Read Also: Canadian Company Behind Keystone XL Oil Pipeline Calls It Quits, Project Has Been Halted Since January

"It took five or six days to burn everything [in the office]. It was not only the [detainees'] files. It is any re-education-related materials. For example, all notes from meetings," a government cadre told Amnesty.

The burning came after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published leaked documents showing Beijing's plans of establishing the detention camps. The leaked memos included strategies to be used to "re-educate" the Uyghurs and rid them of extremist leanings by forcing them to study Marxism and renounce their religion.

Amnesty's interviews were conducted in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, and several other countries in Asia, Europe, and North America.

Chinese Cover-Up

Jonathan Loeb, the lead author of the report said that the Chinese government is still continuing its cover-up. He also said that the government is preventing people from leaving Xinjiang.

The Amnesty report is the largest compilation of firsthand accounts from survivors of the detention camps in Xinjiang and follows a series of reports about China's mistreatment of the minority group. On June 8, CNN also published more than a dozen accounts detailing the detention and deportation of Uyghur refugees in three Arab countries, including Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.

In Egypt, activists said they recorded hundreds of incidents of detentions, 20 of which resulted in deportations, in 2017. The majority of the victims were Uyghur students enrolled at the prestigious Islamic University of Al-Azhar. In Saudi Arabia, at least one Uyghur Muslim was detained and deported after performing the Umrah pilgrimage between 2018 and 2020.

The Xinjiang region is home to a wide variety of Muslim ethnic groups, with Uyghurs being the largest of these.

Related Article: El Salvador Becomes the First Country to Adopt Bitcoin, Price Jumps After it Becomes Law

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A Russian fighter aircraft intercepted a US surveillance aircraft over the Pacific Ocean as the Russian military conducted large-scale maneuvers in the area.

Russian military scrambled a Su-35 fighter jet to escort the US spy plane

In a recently published article in Newsweek, Russian Defense Ministry said on Thursday that "an air target approaching the state border of the Russian Federation was detected by Russian airspace control over the Pacific Ocean."

This target turned out to be a US Air Force RC-135 strategic reconnaissance plane. In response, the Russian military sent a Su-35 fighter jet to escort the inbound aircraft away, according to a published report in Washington News Today.

The RC-135 subsequently made a U-turn away from Russian airspace, and "violations of the Russian Federation's State boundary were not permitted," according to the statement. The Su-35, for its part according to the US, "operated in complete accordance with international airspace norms."

Read Also: Russia Denies Entry to 2 European Airlines for Planning Not To Pass Belarus Air Space on the Way to Moscow

Operational exercise of Russia in Asia

The latest incident occurred as the Russian Defense Ministry announced that an operational exercise of forces of the Pacific Fleet is being conducted in the central stretch of the ocean, some 4,000 kilometers, or nearly 2,500 miles, from the home bases of the vessels being deployed.

Up to 20 surface warships, submarines, and support vessels are expected to participate in the exercises, including the Slava-class cruiser Varyag missile cruiser, the large anti-submarine destroyer Admiral Panteleev, the Udaloy-class frigate Marshal Shaposhnikov, the corvettes Gromky, Sovershenny, and Hero of the Russian Federation Aldar Tsydenzhapov, and the missile range instrumentation ship Marshal Krylov, according to a published report in Democratic Underground.

There were roughly 20 aircraft in the sky as well, including long-range anti-submarine aircraft Tu-142MZ, high-altitude fighter-interceptors MiG-31BM, and other aircraft. In one aerial maneuver, a Russian Il-38N anti-submarine aircraft performed operations in Avacha Bay including "search, classification, and tracking of simulated enemy submarines."

Russia's exercise took place before Biden and Putin meeting next week

Russia's Pacific maneuvers are also taking place in the run-up to the highly anticipated first meeting between US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which is due to take place next Wednesday in Geneva, Switzerland. Both leaders have attempted to mend tense ties between their countries, although they remain critical of one another's policies.

Biden told US Air Force personnel stationed at Royal Air Force Mildenhall in the United Kingdom that the US did not want to have a conflict with Russia. He emphasized that both countries have responsibilities, including keeping stability and following arms control agreements. Biden said, "I take that responsibility seriously," according to a published article in MSN News.

However, Pres. Joe Biden then added a warning about what Washington perceives as aggressive conduct by Moscow, including claims of political meddling and cyberattacks on the US and its allies.

Meanwhile, during a press conference the next day in Washington, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki emphasized Biden and Putin's extensive experience dealing with one another, noting that Biden previously served as vice president and Putin has been in power as either president or prime minister for the past two decades.

Related Article: Russia Follows US, Withdraws From Open Skies Treaty Due To Lack of Progress

@ 2021 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Now Open

11 June 2021

Welcomhotel, hospitality brand from the ITC Hotels group, launches its second property in Himachal Pradesh  Welcomhotel Tavleen Chail  with 65 well-appointed guest rooms, including 18 fairytale cottages and a luxury suite. Nestled amidst lush green forests, each of the property's lodgings come with a private sit-out with breathtaking, panoramic views of the pristine mountains.

This launch follows the inauguration of Welcomhotel Shimla about six months ago. With the addition of the premier mountain resort at Chail, the Welcomhotel brand currently boasts a portfolio of around 19 properties across India.

Spread across three hills - Rajgarh, Sadh Tiba and Pandewa - the Chail region overlooks the stunning valley of Sutlej, offering panoramic views of the countryside. Soak the abundant calm and the charm of the wilderness amidst picture-perfect backdrops. The experience is heightened by aesthetically-designed, well-appointed rooms/suites with a view combined with a wholesome yet contemporary local and authentic culinary experience. Set amidst a magical oak forest, the cottages are ideal for those seeking their 'very own cabin in the woods'. Every room has a private balcony that offers enchanting views of the mighty mountains.

Welcomhotel Tavleen Chail resort's outdoor and indoor space is ideal for events, weddings and celebrations. Guests who prefer to lounge around the property can head to the cozy in-house library, laze at the temperature-controlled pool or join guided Yoga sessions and even on-site trails like the Oak Trail and Pine Trail. Kids have their own little haven in Ollie's Corner that has a host of outdoor/indoor play areas specifically designed to keep them creatively engaged and entertained. Guests who love the outdoors can go paragliding, off-roading and snow driving (in-season). Families can picnic at woods and meadows around the hotel or by the stream a short drive away.
Appointment

11 June 2021

Shutters on the Beach is pleased to announce the appointment of Richard Archuleta as Executive Chef of 1 Pico, the iconic Southern California restaurant located at the acclaimed Santa Monica hotel. Bringing over a decade of culinary expertise honed at Michelin-starred restaurants to his new role, Archuleta will lead culinary operations at 1 Pico with a focus on coastal California cuisine and fresh-market fare.

With a diverse background in Italian and French cuisine, Archuleta has helmed top restaurants across Southern California and Las Vegas. Most recently, he was the Executive Chef at Openaire restaurant, located at The LINE Hotel in Los Angeles. There Archuleta severed alongside Michelin-starred chef-partner Josiah Citrin, conceptualizing new menus with a focus on modern New American cuisine.

A Southern California native, Archuleta's culinary passion began at a young age when started working at a local bakery in high school where he discovered his love for cooking. After earning a culinary degree, he went on to elevate his skills at Michelin-starred restaurants in Southern California including Spago in Beverly Hills, The Water Grill in Los Angeles and Trattoria Tre Venezie in Pasadena. An established chef in the hospitality industry, Archeulta previously served as the Chef de Cuisine at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills cooking with Jean-Georges. Before that, he served as the Senior Sous Chef at the 3-Michelin-starred Joel Robuchon at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas and as the Executive Sous Chef at the Jean-Georges Steakhouse at the Aria Resort, also in Las Vegas.

Under Archuleta's leadership, hotel guests and locals can look forward to a redefined culinary experience at 1 Pico. Drawing inspiration from the award-winning Santa Monica Farmers Market, Archuleta will take a hyper-seasonal approach to the menu focusing on light, fresh and coastal cuisine. With a quality first attitude, Archuleta will source 1 Pico's ingredients from local farmers and purveyors including Weiser Family Farms, Pudwill Farms, JJs Lone Daughters and Lee Farms.

Archuleta earned his Associate Degree from the California School of Culinary Arts in Pasadena. Archuleta is also a certified Level One Sommelier. When he's not at work, Archuleta enjoys barbequing and spending time with his two children at home.
Event

The Professional Development Program (PDP) at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration is the premier career-building opportunity for hospitality professionals to meet their professional goals, learn from renowned faculty, share best practices with a network of international peers, and earn a Cornell credential to advance their career.

In an industry that is ever-changing, you, too, must continue to grow and evolve in order to stay on top. To be successful, you must anticipate the future of your industry and be able to effectively understand and incorporate cutting-edge best practices into your organization.

Cornell Professional Development Program (PDP) is organized by Cornell
Supplier News

10 June 2021

ALICE, the hospitality industrys leading operations technology company, has launched a new eBook for hoteliers: The A Team: A look at how ALICEs Success Team Advocates, Accelerates, Augments, and Amplifies with Amazing Advice and Acumen.

ALICEs eBook unravels how ALICEs Success Team is an essential part of optimizing hotel operations through technology. Beyond ALICEs intuitive features, interfaces, and integrations, the A Team eliminates the confusion, uncertainty, and anxiety around hotel operations.

It illustrates how ALICEs Customer Service and Success Department, built from a team of hospitality and technology pros, helps guide their customers to take operations to the next level. More than 2,500 hotels and thousands of hoteliers around the world have chosen ALICE to streamline operations and communicate through a single platform.

At ALICE, its not just about finding the right software, its about working with a team that can help your hotel run smoothly and efficiently. Youre looking for software that is user-friendly, integrates with your existing systems, and supports your team, says Maxine Karlinsky, ALICEs Vice President of Customer Success. Were the team to help your hotel succeed.

The ALICE platform offers hoteliers housekeeping, guest messaging, service delivery, guest services, and preventative maintenance tools to improve the guest experience boost guest satisfaction, and achieve operational excellence by connecting departments in one, easy-to-use platform.

Download a free copy of ALICEs The A Team: A look at how ALICEs Success Team Advocates, Accelerates, Augments, and Amplifies with Amazing Advice and Acumen, so you can reap the rewards of the best operations platform in the industry.
Press Release

11 June 2021

Gabriel Escarrer Julia: "I can assure you that we have been through very difficult crises and situations over more than six decades in business, but never has their impact been so great as to force us to close practically 100% of our hotels simultaneously."

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Gabriel Escarrer Jaume: "We are on the verge of a global recovery which Melia intends to leverage to grow, recover value and then multiply that value in the future for our shareholders, partners, employees, customers, suppliers, and society in general. After 15 months of negative results, we expect to achieve a positive EBITDA from June onwards.

After the Chairman and founder, Gabriel Escarrer Julia, described the commitment of the company to its stakeholders in the face of the greatest challenge in the history of tourism, the Executive Vice President and CEO of Melia explained the key factors behind the resilience that has characterised the company's response to Covid, and, above all, the progress made in digitalisation and operational efficiency. According to the CEO, in normal business conditions and with revenues similar to those prior to Covid, this progress would allow a significant improvement of around 300 basis points in its operating margin.

Melia Hotels International held its Annual General Meeting today, chaired by Gabriel Escarrer Julia and with shareholders attending in person or online in compliance with Covid-19 protocols and corporate governance recommendations.

The Annual General Meeting agreed to renew four directors, including the Executive Director of the company, Gabriel Escarrer Jaume, and to appoint Ms. Maria Antonia Escarrer as a proprietary director, replacing the company Hoteles Mallorquines Consolidados, S.L. The annual accounts for 2020, the proposal for the application of results (without a dividend payment) and the new Board Remuneration Policy were also approved for 2022 to 2024.

The non-executive Chairman of the company explained the most important impacts of Covid-19 on the tourism industry, highlighting the resilience of Melia, which he attributed in part to the significant strengths the company had when the pandemic began, particularly its financial solvency, the strong investment it had made in renovating and repositioning its hotel assets, its commitment to digitalisation and its effective crisis management.

65 years as Chairman

Escarrer Julia reminded attendees that MHI is celebrating its 65th anniversary this year, before highlighting the role and responsibility of family businesses - which the World Survey carried out by PWC estimates contribute more than half of global GDP - and how family values have driven the responsible and collaborative management the company has developed with its employees, customers, suppliers, hotel owners, shareholders and the third sector throughout the 15 months of the pandemic.

He summarised the support offered by Melia to employees and its efforts to preserve employment, encourage teleworking and promote training and especially online training, while also accompanying its employees on an emotional level and protecting their health in all of their different workplaces. He then described the cooperation with the owners of many of the hotels operated by the company which has led to significant savings given the closure of hotels and absence of revenue, and how the company has complied with all of the subsequent agreements and commitments. With regard to suppliers, Escarrer Julia thanked most of them for their understanding and empathy, as well as for the solidarity shown by those that offered products and services free of charge to hotels that Melia offered to be converted into hospitals.

He also highlighted the company's relationship with and proximity to its customers, ensuring maximum flexibility and support, maintaining and even extending the benefits for loyal customers despite the decrease in sales, leading to 4% growth in membership of MeliaRewards in 2020 to a total of 13.5 million members. Escarrer thanked investors and shareholders for their trust and confidence and promised them that the company would recover and increase its valuation after the crisis. Despite continuing high volatility, he also emphasised how the market has recognised the value of Melia Hotels International, with the share price recovering after its initial sharp drop and maintaining a stable and positive trend, which is expected to continue as the recovery kicks in.

The Chairman ended his speech with the commitments of the company to society, the victims of Covid and essential workers, as well as the progress made in company strategy to combat climate change, despite the setback in the global environmental agenda caused by the health emergency. In this regard, he mentioned the use of 18 hotels as centres for quarantines or for essential workers, as well as donations and other types of support for employees in developing countries. He also expressed his satisfaction with the company being named the Most Sustainable Hotel Company in the World in 2019 and the second most sustainable company in 2020 in the Corporate Sustainability Assessment published by Standard & Poors Global, and for its inclusion among the European Climate Leaders" by the Financial Times and the Statista consultancy.

Prudent management and strategic adaptation

Gabriel Escarrer Jaume began his speech with an emotional tribute to the 11 company employees who lost their lives due to coronavirus in Spain, Mexico, Brazil and the Dominican Republic. He then went on to present the negative result obtained in 2020 and the first half of 2021 due to the major impact of the pandemic on tourism, delays in the distribution of vaccines and a lack of international coordination. The Executive Vice President and CEO of the company regretted not having been wrong when he predicted at the beginning of the crisis that tourism would not recover until the third quarter of 2021.

Along with the competitive advantages mentioned by the Chairman, the vision of the company CEO and his ability to react allowed Melia to implement a highly effective contingency management system focused on key areas to ensure resilience: the safety of employees and customers, the preservation of employment and talent supported by furlough systems, and the liquidity and continuity of the business.

After recalling the key achievements in each of these areas, Escarrer explained how the company has prepared itself for the new post-Covid tourism age through a plan known as "The Day After", deciding to take advantage of the circumstances to accelerate a reset of the business in terms of digitalisation, efficiency and sustainability. The progress made in digitalisation, the evolution of the organisation towards a more digital and efficient structure, and sustainability, allowed Escarrer to affirm that in normal business conditions and with revenues similar to those achieved before Covid, the company would see an improvement of 300 basis points in its operating margin.

Escarrer also explained the transition from a contingency management situation to a new strategy designed for the post-Covid environment and until revenue levels reach those of 2019 (which experts expect around 2024). The strategy prioritises creating an even more resilient company through growth in profitability and a consequent reduction in corporate debt.

Based on the 2030 strategic vision declared in the 2020 Strategic Plan, involving the aspiration to position ourselves among the world's leading hotel groups in midscale and upscale hotels, consolidating our leadership in the resort and bleisure markets and becoming a benchmark for excellence, responsibility and sustainability", Melia will focus over the coming years on boosting its sales and distribution capacity, which, as the pandemic has shown, is one of its most significant competitive advantages. At the same time, it will continue to seek high- quality, sustainable and profitable growth in its portfolio, driven by strong brands and a new affiliated by Melia" franchise model which allows third-party hotels to be added through highly flexible partnerships, something considered fundamental given the current market conditions.

Regarding company expansion, he stated that 11 new hotels have been signed up to date in 2021, a figure which is expected to more than double over the year. All of the hotels have been added under asset-light" formulas and all of them in resort destinations, the segment that is expected to be the quickest to recover after the crisis. Escarrer praised the launch of efforts to grow through franchises and "affiliated by Melia" hotels, whose versatility and flexibility have allowed growth in holiday destinations in Spain, Greece and Italy even during the crisis. He also emphasised the positive evolution of the Innside by Melia brand, which continued to add hotels in cities such as Luxembourg, Amsterdam or Newcastle, as well as featuring in hotel rebrandings in Madrid and Mallorca. Finally, he affirmed that company strategy will continue to focus on its hotel management model or the Melia system", and on the sale of experiences and "total revenue" as drivers of greater profitability.

The prelude to recovery

The Melia CEO insisted that caution is still required given the continuing low visibility surrounding international travel and the fragility of the health situation in certain markets, although he insisted that the start of a "consistent recovery" is expected for the second half of this year. To support this, Escarrer quoted international air traffic data, the growth in bookings after the end of the State of Emergency in Spain (already 50% above the same period in 2019), and the strong performance in other markets such as Germany or France. He also highlighted the changing trend in the number of cancellations, which generated negative growth in sales during some periods of the pandemic.

Melia's exposure to the resort segment and its geographical diversification, has once again helped create a protective shield, as destinations such as China, Mexico or the Dominican Republic have long since recovered the booking levels they had prior to Covid, with resort hotels recovering far quicker than any other segment. Escarrer announced that if the recovery continues as expected, the company will not be consuming cash from July onwards and will once again begin to generate a positive cash flow.

A year of responsibility

In recent years, the leader of Melia Hotels International has also been leader of the Exceltur Tourist Alliance, and also used his speech to make an appeal to both Spanish and European institutions to support public-private partnerships given the vital role that both will have in the recovery of the tourism industry after the pandemic.

After recalling the guidelines indicated by the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, for the sustainable and competitive recovery of the tourism industry, similar to those that Exceltur has also been demanding, Escarrer regretted that the Independent Fiscal Authority has confirmed that aid to companies in Spain has generally been among the most restrictive and most delayed in Europe. Escarrer once again requested a Business Rescue Plan for tourism in the short term from the Spanish authorities, and an investment plan in competitiveness and sustainability for the medium and long term, in which the European Union Next Generation Funds will have to play a fundamental role.

As industry leaders, Escarrer insisted that Melia has shown its responsibility and been involved from day one, not only in internal contingency management, but also in supporting society and defending of the industry before public authorities.

Finally, the Melia CEO reminded shareholders that while he always said that 2020 would not be a year for thinking about profits, but rather to demonstrate the company's resilience, preserve its value and prepare for the future, 2021 will be the year in which we will see a change in trends and the beginning of the recovery. 
Press Release

11 June 2021

COVID-19 sparks a dramatic 37% fall in the sectors contribution to GDP

More than 290,000 jobs lost, while many more remain protected by the expansion of the employment scheme

However, the return of international travel this year could see GDP contribution rise sharply and jobs return

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London, UK: The World Travel & Tourism Councils annual Economic Impact Report (EIR) today reveals the dramatic impact COVID-19 had on Japans Travel & Tourism sector, wiping out $138 billion from the nations economy.

The annual EIR from the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), which represents the global Travel & Tourism private sector, shows the sectors contribution to GDP dropped a staggering 37%.

The Travel & Tourism sectors impact on the nations GDP fell from USD$ 373.0 billion (7.1%) in 2019, to USD$ 234.9 billion (4.7%), just 12 months later, in 2020.

The year of damaging travel restrictions which brought much of international travel to a grinding halt, resulted in the loss of 290,200 Travel & Tourism jobs across the country.

WTTC believes the true picture could have been significantly worse, if not for the governments job retention scheme which offered a lifeline to thousands of businesses and workers.

The Japanese government also invested significant sums to help micro and small to medium-sized enterprises through subsidies, rent support grants and reduced-rate loan programs with interest-free unsecured financing support.

These job losses were felt across the entire Travel & Tourism ecosystem in the country, with SMEs, which make up eight out of 10 of all global businesses in the sector, particularly affected.

Furthermore, as one of the worlds most diverse sectors, the impact on women, youth and minorities was significant.

The number of those employed in the Japanese Travel & Tourism sector fell from more than 5.7 million in 2019, to 5.4 million in 2020, a drop of 5.1%.

However, due to government support measures such as the Employment Adjustment Subsidy in Japan, this figure was significantly lower than the global average fall of 18.5%.

The report also revealed domestic visitor spending declined by 30.3%, while international spending fared even worse due to more stringent travel restrictions, falling by 82.9%; markedly worse than the global average decline of almost 70%. Japan is also looking to introduce a digital health pass this summer, similar to the EUs Digital Health Certificate. This new initiative is a positive step in the right direction and could significantly aid the restoration of international travel.

Virginia Messina, Senior Vice President and Acting CEO of WTTC said: The loss of more than 290,000 Travel & Tourism jobs in Japan has had a significant socio-economic impact across the country, leaving huge numbers of people fearing for their future.

WTTC believes it is critical for Japan to have a clear roadmap for the reopening of its borders and to begin relaxing travel restrictions to return these jobs to the economy. With the vaccination rollout advancing and cases continuing to decrease, there should be more flexibility for fully vaccinated travellers alongside a clear roadmap for increased mobility and a comprehensive testing scheme in place.

Another year of terrible losses can be avoided if governments around the world support the swift resumption of international travel, which will be vital to powering the turnaround of the Japanese economy.

Our research shows that if mobility and international travel resume by June this year, the sectors contribution to global GDP could rise sharply in 2021, by 48.5%, year-on-year.

As it will take a significant amount of time to vaccinate the global population, WTTC strongly believes that we should not discriminate against those who wish to travel but have not been vaccinated.

WTTC says the key to unlocking safe international travel can be achieved through a clear and science-based framework to include rapid testing before departure, as well as enhanced health and hygiene protocols, including mask wearing.

These measures will be the foundation to build the recovery of the many millions of jobs lost due to the pandemic.

It would also reduce the terrible social implications these losses have had on communities reliant on Travel & Tourism and upon ordinary people who have been isolated by COVID-19 restrictions.

Download the press release.
The largest Frito-Lay facility in Texas is about to get bigger with an expansion in Rosenberg that will bring 160 new full-time jobs, plus a new salty snack.

The Plano-based snack maker, a division of PepsiCo, announced a $200 million investment to expand its Rosenberg plant. The investment will add two manufacturing lines for Funyuns and tortilla chips and increase capacity at its warehouse in Fort Bend County. Completion is planned by 2022.

The Fort Bend plant, at 3310 Texas 36, produces Lays, Doritos, Cheetos, Tostitos, Ruffles and Fritos. Funyuns, an onion flavored corn snack, will be added to the mix in 2023.

The Rosenberg facility employs more than 750 people and produces more than 117 million pounds of snacks annually. Recent expansions will boost the size of the facility by more than 60 percent to 801,936 square feet, according to the company.

Weve called Rosenberg home for nearly 40 years, Laura Maxwell, senior vice president of supply chain, PepsiCo Foods North America, said in an announcement. Throughout that time, the support of Fort Bend County has helped us invest in the right areas so that we can continue to grow and provide jobs to the community.

The expansion follows a $138 million investment, announced in 2019, that adds a new Cheetos line, new seasoning and packaging equipment and a warehouse expansion. That expansion is set for completion by years end.

The county offered a property tax abatement of a reduced tax rate once the project meets capital and job commitments, according to Frito-Lay.

Conservancy expands

An 850-acre parcel on FM 149 in Montgomery County has a been purchased by the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, according to real estate broker Stan Creech.

The property expands the foundations nearly 6,000-acre Cooks Branch Conservancy on the north side. The family foundation supports environmental protection, social equity and economic initiatives.

Creech marketed the property, which previously served as a cattle ranch, for DD Ranch. Terms were not disclosed.

As the pandemic accelerated demand for suburban acreage, the land attracted residential developers but ultimately sold to the neighbor next door.

There were multiple offers from developers, but at the end of the day, the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation wanted to buy it and add it to their property, Creech said. The land will be perpetually in a land conservatory preserved for future generations.

Coworking coming

McCord has launched an in-house coworking brand in Generation Parks Redemption Square district in the Lake Houston area.

Nimble Workspaces will occupy the third floor of 250 Assay St. The 11,300-square-foot space will offer 36 offices targeting businesses of all sizes. It is set to open in September.

The venue will also have five meeting and conference spaces for members and day pass holders, a podcasting room, a mothers room and a 1,500-square-foot area for large teams, presentations, events and unassigned desk members. The project is close to restaurants, shops, services, parks and trails within Generation Park.

ODonnell Snider is building out the project, which was designed by architecture firm Corgan with input from Deco Group.

McCord joins other Houston-based developers offering in-house coworking, including Caldwell Cos., which launched the Work Well in Cypress in 2017, and Hines, which is expanding the Square globally.

katherine.feser@chron.com

twitter.com/kfeser
The vast majority of Houston-area employers  nearly 9 of 10  are encouraging but not requiring vaccinations against COVID-19 among their workers, with about a quarter offering bonuses, extra vacation or other incentives to get the shot, according to a survey by the Greater Houston Partnership.

More than 70 percent of the regions employers rated staff vaccinations as extremely or very important, and 65 percent said the community vaccination rate was extremely or very important, according to the survey by the business-financed economic development group. But only 8 percent are requiring employees to get vaccinated.

Companies in recent weeks have accelerated plans to bring workers back to their offices after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month determined that fully vaccinated people no longer need to wear masks or practice social distancing. Houston, Austin and Dallas are leading the nations largest cities in bringing workers back, according to Kastle Systems, an security company that has analyzed keycard access from 41,000 businesses across 47 states since before the pandemic began.

As of last month, about 43 percent of employees of Kastles Houston customers swiped into their offices.

The Greater Houston Partnerships survey found that 52 percent of companies said they are tracking employee vaccinations. A little over a third of that group is requiring proof while another third is conducting surveys.

As for social distancing protocols, 55 percent of companies said they require non-vaccinated employees to wear a mask. The rest are split  22 percent said they will require masks for all employees, and 24 percent said they will not have a mask requirement.

Only 21 percent said they have eliminated social distancing indoors altogether. About 40 percent will require social distancing among employees, while 38 percent will require it only among employees who are not vaccinated.

Some employers also appear to be open to flexible work arrangements post-pandemic. More than half said they would allow employees to work from home at least some days during the week, and 16 percent said they would allow employees to continue to work remotely over the next three to 12 months.

What we found is that there is a definitive cultural shift in how some companies are approaching issues like remote work, Bob Harvey, president and CEO of the Greater Houston Partnership, said. They also told us that vaccinations are the most important part of their return to onsite operations. This is all significant data as companies try to regain what theyve lost during the pandemic and return employees to work.

Includes previous reporting by Shelby Webb.

becca.carballo@chron.com
Anti-sanctions law to protect China's interests

China Daily) 09:28, June 11, 2021

Li Zhanshu, chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, presides over the closing meeting of the 29th session of the 13th NPC Standing Committee at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, June 10, 2021. [Photo/Xinhua]

NPC Standing Committee approves bill to better safeguard national sovereignty

China's top legislature passed a law on countering foreign sanctions on Thursday to better safeguard the country's sovereignty, security and development interests.

President Xi Jinping signed a presidential order to promulgate the law, which takes effect immediately.

After a second deliberation, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, the nation's top legislature, adopted the law on countering foreign sanctions when it concluded its session.

Li Zhanshu, chairman of the NPC Standing Committee, presided over the closing meeting and said the law is an important step in implementing Xi Jinping Thought on Rule of Law and on Diplomacy and accelerating legislation involving foreign affairs.

"China has always adhered to an independent foreign policy of peace and is committed to pursuing mutual benefits and common growth with other countries," Li said. "But we never give up our legitimate rights and interests. No one should expect China to accept any action that damages its own interests.

"The Chinese government and people resolutely oppose any sanctions and interference," he added.

The top legislature followed international practice to make and review the law, he said, noting that the law provides legal support not only to counter hegemony and power politics, but also to protect the interests of the country and people.

While emphasizing that the law should be fully and accurately understood and needed to be promptly applied to fight against sanctions, he also called for the acceleration of legislation relating to foreign affairs in order to better safeguard China's sovereignty, security and development interests.

According to the 16-article law, relevant departments of the State Council can decide to put foreign individuals or organizations on a sanctions list if they find them to have violated international law and basic norms of international relations, used various excuses or their own laws to contain or suppress China, taken discriminatory restrictive measures against Chinese citizens or organizations, or interfered in China's internal affairs. The countermeasures for those on the list include denial of visa issuance, denial of entry into China, cancellation of a visa or expulsion from the country, the law said.

The Legislative Affairs Commission of the NPC Standing Committee said in a statement on Thursday that drafting, reviewing and passing such a law in a short time met an urgent need to counter the hegemony and power politics of some Western countries as well as to safeguard China's sovereignty, security and development interests. It also will promote the rule of law at home and abroad in a coordinated way.

The law is of great practical and long-term significance, the commission said, adding that it will effectively improve China's legal capabilities in dealing with external risks and challenges and accelerate the formation of a comprehensive legal system involving foreign affairs.

It clarified that the law will not affect China's opening-up, adding that the country's determination to deepen reforms and open wider to the world is unshakable, as is its determination to safeguard its national sovereignty, security and development interests.

Besides the law, China has similar anti-sanctions measures in some current laws, such as a law on export control, and its legislation on opening-up has also been speeded up in recent years, according to the commission.

Li Qingming, an associate professor at the Institute of International Law of the China Academy of Social Sciences, said that the law was a major step forward in strengthening the rule of law in legislation concerning foreign affairs, saying that it provides a stronger legal basis for China in fighting the discriminatory measures of foreign nations.

Huo Zhengxin, a law professor from the School of International Law at China University of Political Science and Law, said, "When we fought against foreign sanctions in the past, this was mainly with administrative or economic measures, but now we have legal support against such behavior."

Major task

Meanwhile, the law implements a major task set out in the NPC Standing Committee's annual work report released in March, which was to upgrade the legal toolkit for meeting challenges and guarding against risks in order to oppose foreign sanctions, interference and long-arm jurisdiction, he said.

Both legal experts said foreign investors have no need to worry about the Chinese business environment after the law was adopted.

"The target of the legislation has never been those coming to invest and develop in proper ways," said Li Qingming. "Investors will not be affected, as China will continue promoting a market-oriented, sound, international and legal business environment to ensure liberalization in trade and investment."

Huo agreed, saying that China's determination in opening-up, the path of peaceful development and its will to embrace economic globalization will not change and China will also give stronger legal support to investors.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)
Ballerina Park Sae Eun of the Paris Opera Ballet poses after being promoted to principal dancer, or "danseuse etoile," after playing Juliet for "Romeo and Juliet" at Opera Bastille, Paris, Thursday, local time. Park is the first Asian dancer to secure the highest ranking in the dance troupe's history. Courtesy of Paris Opera Ballet



By Park Ji-won



Ballerina Park Sae Eun of the Paris Opera Ballet was promoted to principal dancer, or "danseuse etoile," Thursday (CET), after performing Juliet for "Romeo and Juliet." Park is the first Asian dancer to secure the position in the history of the troupe, which was founded in 1669.



According to the Paris Opera Ballet's official social media accounts, Aurelie Dupont, dance director of Ballet Opera Paris, and Alexander Neef, director of the Paris Opera, named Park as principal dancer on June 10, right after the opening performance of "Romeo and Juliet," which is running from June 10 to July 10. Since joining the ballet company in 2011, she served in the "corps de ballet" in 2011, as the "coryphee" or leader of the corps de ballet in 2013, as a soloist in 2014, and as "premiere danseuse," or first dancer, since 2016, which is the position right below principal dancer.



"It is a great joy and great honor to be named Etoile of the Paris Opera Ballet! A big thank you to Aurelie Dupont and Alexander Neef for your confidence in me. Thanks to my Romeo, Paul Marque, for this unforgettable evening, and well done for your first performance as an Etoile (also). Finally, thank you all for your warm messages," Park wrote on Instagram in French, Friday.



Park, who graduated from the Korea National University of Arts, performed for a year with the American Ballet Theatre's studio company in 2007 after winning the Prix de Lausanne, and has performed in the Korean National Ballet since 2009. Park also won the best female dancer prize at the Benois de la Danse ballet competition for her role in "Diamonds," choreographed by George Balanchine.



It was largely expected that she would be promoted to the highest rank of the ballet company, as the four other members of the cast who are performing Juliet this summer are all principal dancers.


Republican and Democratic senators said Thursday theyre open to considering the first change in the national gasoline tax since 1993 to help fund a bipartisan infrastructure spending package they plan to propose to President Joe Biden.

Indexing the gasoline tax -- currently 18.4 cents-per-gallon -- to a measure of inflation has been discussed by a bipartisan group of senators working on a compromise plan, according to Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican whos taken a leading role in those talks. But the White House has rejected indexing as a tax increase on the poor and middle class, according to a person familiar.

It keeps it at the same value that it has today, Romney said of indexing the tax.

Disagreement over how to pay for the biggest infrastructure bill in decades contributed to the breakdown in Bidens direct talks with GOP senators led by Shelley Moore Capito earlier this week. The focus of bipartisan negotiations has now shifted to the group including Romney, though some Democrats are eager to get moving on a go-it-alone strategy.

Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said Thursday hes in favor of indexing the gas tax. Even so, the White House has made it clear to lawmakers that such a measure, as well as any discussion about an electric vehicle mileage tax, would violate Bidens red line of not raising taxes on Americans who earn under $400,000 a year, and cannot be part of any package, according to the person.

Ill take a look at it, Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat whos a participant in the talks, said with regard to indexing the tax. The trust fund is in terrible shape, he said. Gas tax revenues go to a dedicated fund thats used to pay for roadway and transit costs.

Asked how much money indexing the gas tax would raise, Romney said not much, without specifying a figure.

Romney separately said that the bipartisan group has reached an agreement on a top-line figure for the infrastructure package, without specifying to reporters what that number is. Fellow Republican negotiator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said the agreed number covers five years. However, Tester and West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin said they were still reviewing the terms of the deal.

Meantime, White House officials met on Thursday with Democratic senators working on a bipartisan agreement. Some questions still need to be addressed, particularly around details of both policy and pay-fors, White House spokesman Andrew Bates said. Cabinet members and senior White House staff will work with the Senate group to answer those questions as we consult with other Members in both the House and the Senate, Bates said.

Bidens most recent figure was $1.7 trillion in the talks with Capito, down from an initial $2.25 trillion for his American Jobs Plan. The Capito group had proposed $257 billion in net new spending above amounts that Congress was expected to approve for coming years.

Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden, whos not been engaged in the bipartisan infrastructure talks, said he would look at any gasoline tax indexing proposal before commenting. He noted that Biden has a reservation about this as a regressive tax and highlighted the Democratic view that corporations are underpaying taxes now.

The question is how is the money to be raised and is it going to be done in a fair way, Wyden said.

Biden has pitched tax hikes on companies and the wealthy to pay for infrastructure spending, which the GOP rules out.

The last gasoline levy increase came under Bill Clintons administration, in a broad 1993 package of tax hikes aimed at reducing budget deficits at the time. It squeaked through without Republican votes.

Chuck Grassley, a veteran Iowa Republican, said Thursday about indexing the levy, Its better than increasing the gas tax and it has a better chance of getting done. He also that if that had been done in the early 1990s we wouldnt be in the situation we are in now.
Plains All American Pipeline

Houston pipeline and storage terminal operator Plains All American said this week that it will sell $850 million of natural gas storage assets to New York-based Hartree Partners, a global merchant commodities firm specializing in energy.

Plains will sell its natural gas storage facilities at Pine Prairie in Evangeline Parish, La., and Southern Pines in Greene County, Miss., which have a combined capacity of 70 billion cubic feet of gas across nine caverns.
In one of the greenest cities in the world, where electric cars abound and almost all carbon emissions will be eliminated within a decade, the debate about climate change is so poisonous that the police are investigating violent threats against one of its top officials.

Lan Marie Nguyen Berg, the Green Party politician whos a vice mayor of Norways capital Oslo and a strong voice for climate policies, has received a stream of hate messages, threats, and racist comments on social media. Shes become a target in large part for highlighting the contradiction at the heart of the Nordic nations economy.

Norway portrays itself as progressive and environmentally conscious, but is also Western Europes largest oil and gas producer. On a per-capita basis, it has more electric cars than any other country while pumping more oil than Saudi Arabia or Russia.

We are only five million people, but are still among the worlds largest exporters of oil and gas, Berg said in an email. It is very important for Norwegian climate policy that we stop looking for even more oil and gas, and stop new field developments.

Thats one of the benchmarks established in the International Energy Agencys road map to global net-zero emissions by 2050. Its also what the Green Party will demand if it becomes part of a coalition government after elections in September, setting up a political showdown that could upend Norways most important industry.

The oil and gas sector employs about 200,000 people and has filled the coffers of the $1.4 trillion sovereign wealth fund, which will underpin the welfare of generations to come. Enforcing decline on the industry could have a bigger and more lasting impact on Norwegians lives than any climate policy to date, and the issue looks set to provide some of the most heated moments in the election campaign.

Yet one of Bergs fiercest defenders against online abuse happens to be her chief political rival, Petroleum and Energy Minister Tina Bru of the oil-friendly Conservative Party. I CANT STAND IT ANYMORE, Bru posted on Facebook in May, along with screen shots of abusive messages sent to Berg. Shut up! A few days later, police decided to investigate the matter.

Theres a reason why the attacks struck a nerve. Bru has also experienced online abuse because of her support of onshore wind power, underscoring how sacred the oil industry is to Norwegian voters. The two women come from different ends of the political spectrum, but are allies in pushing for more clean-energy investmentsthey just disagree sharply on how quickly the shift needs to happen.

Bru speaks proudly of Norways green policy achievements, such as running on close to 100% renewable power, the policy-driven expansion of its electric car fleet, and ferries that run on hydrogen. But she mounts an equally robust defense of her oil policies, which are directly opposed to those of Berg.

I do not have a bad conscience for Norway being an ambitious climate nation at the same time as we have oil and gas production, Bru said. Her party wont be following the IEA road map because if we were to decide tomorrow that well stop producing oil and gas on the Norwegian shelf, other countries will say: Okay, we will supply this.

For now, Norways policy is to shave a fraction off the carbon emissions generated by oil and gas extraction by powering production facilities in the North Sea with renewable electricity. On Friday, the government will publish a paper on energy policy, including its plans for offshore wind, hydrogen, exploration for seabed minerals, and oil and gas.

Through its membership of the European Economic Area, Norway has committed to a cut of 50% to 55% by 2030 in so-called non-quota emissions from sectors including agriculture, waste and transport. While it doesnt have a net-zero goal, the nation aims to cut overall pollution as much as 95% by mid-century and touts the carbon-absorbing power of its vast forests. None of its targets take into account emissions from the oil and gas that Norway sells to other countries.

Norways state-owned oil firm Equinor aims to be net-zero by 2050 but expects oil to be needed for decades to come, requiring investments in new fields. Nonprofit Carbon Tracker rates the companys climate goals below those of rivals Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Total.

All of the major parties in Norway want the oil industry to continue to explore for and develop new fields, but the process of forming a coalition after the September elections could disrupt the status quo. Polls suggest that the Labor Party is currently in the lead, though it will need support from smaller parties to govern. That will probably include the Socialist Left Party, Green Party or Red Party, all of which advocate for less drilling.

Regardless of which side wins the election, the large oil-friendly parties will have to negotiate with smaller parties that want to stop new oil activities, said Bard Lahn, a researcher at the Cicero Center for International Climate Research in Oslo.

If her party finds itself in the position of king-maker, Berg is clear that it will take full advantage of it. The Green Party cannot support a prime minister who accepts new oil exploration or new petroleum developments in Norway, she said. This is an ultimatum.

Negotiations to form a government have ended in compromise after previous Norwegian elections. In 2018, the Liberal and Conservative parties reached a deal to keep the oil industry away from the Lofoten islands, a fragile area of natural beauty.

This time around, the oil industrys opponents may have a stronger hand, said Lahn. Its likely they could put a much larger area off limitsthe Barents Sea in the Arctic, where most of Norways undiscovered oil and gas is believed to be located.

If that happened it would be a bolder step than Norways North Sea neighbor the U.K. or the Netherlands, which have net-zero goals but don't have plans to end oil and gas exploration and production. Denmark, which produces much less oil than Norway, last year stopped offering new oil and gas licenses and vowed to end production by 2050.

For Olav Fykse Tveit, the presiding bishop in the Church of Norway who spoke at the Paris climate talks in 2015, going green domestically doesnt mean the international community will let Norway off the hook for its fossil fuel exports.

We must realize and acknowledge that our credibility is being questionedthats what Ive experienced around the world, Tveit said. Norway has greater financial resources than most countries to tackle this problem and we must do something about it, and be willing to sacrifice something.

This article is part of Bloomberg Greens Carbon Benchmarks series, which analyzes how countries plan to reach net-zero emissions. Click here to get e-mail alerts when new stories are published.
The declaration by Union Army Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger on June 19, 1865, in Galveston was short and to the point.

The people are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.

The announcement known as General Order No. 3 effectively freed slaves in Texas more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation made by President Lincoln. June 19 would become a day of celebration  known as Juneteenth  for African Americans in Texas and beyond.

However, the traditions of Juneteenth, including the community gatherings and associated barbecues, were greatly influenced by the second part of Grangers announcement.

On HoustonChronicle.com: 'This is not just about Black Texans.' 'On Juneteenth' author Gordon-Reed talks integrating Conroe schools and meaning of the holiday

The Freedmen are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

Its a curious statement. What did it mean? In other areas of the South where emancipation took place, former slaves sought out Union Army military posts for both protection as well as directions for what to do next.

NEWSLETTERS Join the conversation with HouWeAre We want to foster conversation and highlight the intersection of race, identity and culture in one of America's most diverse cities. Sign up for the HouWeAre newsletter here.

Business leaders and politicians in Galveston did not want former slaves traveling to Union Army headquarters there, so they elicited a concession from Granger: Tell the former slaves to stay where they are. Also, by keeping the former slaves on the plantations, cotton production would continue. Though former slaves were technically free, they were still in many ways bound to their former owners.

This effectively limited their freedom, especially of movement and migration, resulting in documented reports of forced labor at plantations along the Brazos River, including Sugar Land and elsewhere.

However, one opportunity for movement lay to the east. The San Felipe Trail had been hacked out of the wilderness along the southern bank of Buffalo Bayou as a way to transfer cotton and other materials from the plantations to the growing city of Houston and its access to the Gulf of Mexico.

In his book Pleasant Bend: Upper Buffalo Bayou and the San Felipe Trail in the Nineteenth Century, local historian Dan Worrall writes, Large numbers of freed slaves left the Brazos and Colorado plantations and walked east on the San Felipe Trail, headed to Houston.

They stopped just short of then-Houston proper, west of downtown, on the south bank of Buffalo Bayou in what would become Fourth Ward, also known as Freedmens Town or Freedmantown.

Love the smell of wood smoke in the morning? Join J.C. Reid, Alison Cook and Greg Morago as they discuss barbecue culture with special guests by subscribing to the Chronicle's BBQ State of Mind podcast on Apple's Podcasts, or visit houstonchronicle.com/ bbqpodcast. See More Collapse

MORE FROM J.C. REID: Blood Bros. BBQ pushes barbecue boundaries with bao and shepherd's pie

With regard to Juneteenth, former slaves were often limited in their ability to celebrate by local authorities who discouraged large gatherings because of concerns over rebellions, as codified in post-war laws known as black codes.

In response to these circumstances, local minister and former slave Jack Yates and other Black church leaders pooled $1,000 and purchased a plot of land in nearby Third Ward in 1872 that became Emancipation Park, where the earliest Juneteenth celebrations were held.

Now that a large space had been acquired for Juneteenth celebrations, there became a need to efficiently feed thousands of guests. The standard way to do this in the early 1900s was through a community barbecue. Long trenches were filled with coals and covered with grates upon which large cuts of meat were slow-roasted.

Pork, beef, chicken and wild game were served with bread, watermelon and sweet red sodas. This technique of roasting and grilling meat for large number of guests established the tradition of barbecue at Juneteenth celebrations in Texas and beyond.

Today, a renovated Emancipation Park is still a focus of Houstons Juneteenth celebrations, though the COVID-19 pandemic made it a virtual event last year and again this year.

This year, Rays BBQ Shack  a Third Ward barbecue institution  will provide 700 barbecue plates to five nearby community churches June 19. The connection among barbecue, Juneteenth and Houstons Emancipation Park is as important and relevant as ever.

jcreid@jcreidtx.com

twitter.com/jcreidtx
Jill Boullions love of the outdoors goes back to her childhood.

While growing up on the prairie in a small Nebraskan town, she developed an interest in the outdoors and sustainability that she carried with her into adulthood. Now, the executive director of the Bayou Land Conservancy is among the recipients of the prestigious Terry Hershey Bayou Stewardship Award for her efforts to protect and improve the health of Houstons waterways.

Q&A with Justin Bower: Cypress Creek Watershed Partnership discusses how to get involved with water quality efforts

Boullion moved to Houston a week after graduating from the University of Nebraska. She and her husband reside in northwest Harris County.

Ive been here a really long time and consider myself a true Houstonian, really invested in the community, she said. I love living here, I love the diversity of the people and everything about the community.

The road to becoming the Bayou Land Conservancys executive director was long and winding, she said. Before her role at the BLC, she was the executive director of the Greens Bayou Coalition for about five and a half years. Prior to that, she spent two decades in marketing and public relations.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Bayou Land Conservancy talks conservation plan

Career-wise, I went into the advertising business, so I definitely took a detour, she laughed. But back in 2004, I was going through a program called Leadership North Houston and was introduced to the concept of economic development and community development, and that really sparked my interest.

She completed a training program through the Community Development Institute hosted locally by Lone Star College. Within her first year of the CDI program, Boullion realized she had found her people.

I just really loved it, so thats when I started seeking out roles in community development, and I was hired at the Greens Bayou Coalition, she said. The Greens Bayou Coalition is a watershed organization in Harris County.

Ive always had a love for outdoors. Ive always been really interested in sustainable practices, but I had never really put that together with the whole community development focus. So it was really a crash course for me, and I got to work on a lot of really interesting projects there.

During her time at the Greens Bayou Coalition, Boullion was instrumental in bringing a $55 million flood damage reduction project to the watershed, as well as a paddling trail on the bayou.

Boullion has served in her current role as the BLCs executive director for nearly five years now.

The BLC is a land conservation organization, she explained. Through conservation agreements with willing landowners, the nonprofit aims to keep land in its natural state by permanently restricting development on the land.

We focus our efforts on land along streams and that really critical habitat that helps keep our community safe from flooding, makes the water cleaner, provides connected habitat for animals and also some really great connected recreational areas for people as well, Boullion said.

The BLC focuses its efforts on the Lake Houston watershed, which stretches from Cypress Creek to the east side of Lake Houston. However, she said that as one of the earliest land trusts in the Houston area, the BLC has conservation properties spanning from Bryan to Beaumont.

The BLC also partners with local entities to protect lands along the Spring Creek corridor.

Spring Creek Greenway is the largest continuously connected preserved area that stretches from about Tomball right now to Kingwood, and we are the nonprofit partner on that project. We dont own or have conservation easements on all of the land thats been protected, but quite a bit of it we do, Boullion said.

And we have our own 14-mile trail, (the Spring Creek Nature Trail), that starts in Harris County and ends up in Montgomery County and goes along Spring Creek from the Creekside area over to about I-45. It was built mostly by volunteers.

In addition to land conservation, the BLC is involved with community outreach programming  educating hundreds of people through their Spring Creek Greenway Ambassador Program.

We also do a lot of advocacy projects where we work with partners to encourage legislation and policies that support responsible land conservation and we were among a group of environmental organizations that advocated very hard for the Harris County Flood Bond a couple summers ago, Boullion said.

A pinnacle moment

Boullions efforts have garnered recognition from the Bayou Preservation Association who selected Boullion as the Terry Hershey Bayou Stewardship Award winner in the nonprofit sector last year.

The pandemic forced the postponement of the associations 2020 awards ceremony. Now, the association will recognize the winners during the 2020/2021 Terry Hershey Bayou Stewardship Award Luncheon to be held virtually from 12-1 p.m. on July 14.

In addition to Boullion, honorees for the 2020/2021 awards include: Terri Thomas, the private sector awardee; the Houston Parks Boards Bayou Greenways 2020 Project, a special recognition awardee; and Caoilin Krathaus and Lila Mankad, also receiving a special recognition award for their student-led initiative called Bag Free Bayous.

Because the 2020 ceremony was postponed, the Terry Hershey award recipients found out they were selected over a year ago. When Boullion first learned she was among them, she was floored.

Anybody in Houston that does environmental work owes everything to Terry Hershey and the seed that she planted in all of us, Boullion said.

Winning a Terry Hershey Bayou Stewardship Award has a layered significance for Boullion, who considers Hershey the first true environmentalist in the Houston area.

The BLC began as a committee at the Bayou Preservation Association in the early 90s and Hershey played a major role in the committees creation.

If you go back and look at our founding documents  the minutes from those early meetings of the committee and then the early meetings of the board  you can see Terry Hersheys fingerprints all over our organization, Boullion said. She was really interested in taking her passion for the bayou system to the next level with land conservation, so being recognized with the Terry Hershey award, for me, is amazing  its a pinnacle moment.

Reaching the community

The BLC currently protects more than 14,000 acres of land. The goal over the next 20 years is to add 15,000 acres to the land they protect, more than doubling their current conservation footprint.

Another priority for the BLC moving forward is reaching more parts of the community through their new Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Access committee.

Were really putting a lot of effort into finding those groups and people in our community that dont historically have a connection to land conservation, dont historically have a connection to Bayou Land Conservancy, and we want to make sure that everyone feels welcome and safe on our public preserves, she said. Thats a big focus for our organization right now.

Houston doesnt have mountains or a beach, but Boullion said it does have amazing waterways that need to be protected and restored. Its something more people have come to realize in recent years and a message the BLC plans to continue advocating.

Part of our work is to help people understand that because it makes our community healthier, it helps with urban heat island, the drought, the flooding; it has so many ecosystem services it provides the community, she said.

To learn more about the Bayou Land Conservancy, visit www.bayoulandconservancy.org. More information about the Bayou Preservation Association and the 2020/2021 Awards can be found at www.bayoupreservation.org under upcoming events.

mfeuk@hcnonline.com
Wells recognized as model school

The International Center for Leadership in Education recognized Cy-Fair Independent School Districts Wells Elementary School as a 2021 Model School for the second year in a row, the district announced in a news release June 4.

Only five elementary campuses throughout the country earned this accolade which rewards schools for its rapid growth in student achievement, diversity and setting high expectations for all students.

On HoustonChronicle.com: Cy-Fair ISD 'no longer exploring' remote learning option for 2021-2022 school year

Wells Elementary School and the other four honorees are scheduled to be acknowledged at the 2021 Model Schools Conference, June 27-30, in Nashville, Tennessee. Representatives from each school will talk about how to create a collective culture with teachers and administrators for supporting high academic achievements.

From the first year we opened, our staff has been committed to establishing and maintaining a student-centered culture where our students love coming to school to actively learn every day, Wells Principal Cheryl Fisher said via the news release. Our positive campus culture, personalized learning framework, high student achievement and focus on rigor, relevance and relationships have all led to this honor of being selected as an International Model School.

Cy-Fair Resource Guide: Food distributions and vaccinations available throughout June

We are all learners at Wells, and I am proud of our staff for collaboratively and courageously leading with a growth mindset to ensure all of our Explorers are successful in elementary school and beyond.

For more information about the International Center for Leadership in Education visit the ICLE website.

-Contributed by Cy-Fair ISD

Senior receives national scholarship

Cypress Falls High School senior Rajveer Kindra earned a $3,200 scholarship after being named a National Honor Society Scholarship national semifinalist, Cy-Fair ISD announced in a news release June 7.

Almost 10,000 applications were received from 2021 graduates but only 600 members obtained scholarships worth $2 million, including 52 from Texas which had the most national finalists and national semifinalists.

In total, one national winner, 24 national finalists and 575 national semifinalists were selected.

I was immensely honored to receive the National Honor Society Scholarship, Kindra said via the news release. Being chosen to represent the National Honor Societys core values drives me to continue my service and become the optimal leader.

-Contributed by Cy-Fair ISD

Junior honored by Sons of American Revolution

Cypress Creek High School Air Force junior ROTC Cadet Karli McMillin said it was an honor to receive an award by the Texas Society of the Sons of the American Revolution.

McMillin was chosen as the second runner-up in the Texas Society of the Sons of the American Revolution Enhanced JROTC Program contest last month, Cy-Fair ISD announced in a news release June 9.

It is such an honor to receive the Sons of American Revolution award, McMillin said via the news release. JROTC has opened so many doors for my future. As a freshman, I never thought JROTC would have such a great impact on who I am today and who I will become. I have learned to listen to my inner self and to always complete every task to the best of my ability.

Part of the Sons of the American Revolution ROTC/JROTC Recognition Program, the enhanced JROTC Program promotes the idea of the citizen-soldier as demonstrated by the Minutemen of Revolutionary War days and is meant for those cadets who are in their third year and display high degrees of merit with respect to leadership qualities, military bearing and general excellence.

Cypress Creek JROTC instructors Lieutenant Colonel Paul Hinson (Ret.) and Senior Master Sergeant John Schwartz nominated McMillin. She was presented with a medal and recognition certificate early May by Texas ROTC/JROTC State Chairman John Thompson and CFISD Board of Trustees member Tom Jackson.

McMillin also got a $500 award from the organization and a $150 honorarium from the PineyWoods Chapter, who sponsored McMillin for the statewide contest.

These are great traits to carry on through anyones life, and the JROTC program expands on the importance of these skills, McMillin said via the news release.

-Contributed by Cy-Fair ISD

Keith announces new principal

Keith Elementary School named Ault Elementary School assistant principal Julie Clements as the new principal, replacing Dawn Tryon who is now Cy-Fair ISDs director of community engagement, the district announced in a news release June 9.

Clements graduated from Baylor University with a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Science and Disorders and earned a Master of Science from the University of Texas at Dallas. She received her teacher certification via Lone Star College and finished the principal certification program at Stephen F. Austin State University.

All of Clements 18 years of education experience were in Cy-Fair ISD. She started off as a speech language pathologist, became a classroom teacher at Yeager Elementary in 2008, served as an instructional specialist at Gleason Elementary School for three years and was an assistant principal at Frazier Elementary for eight years until moving to Ault Elementary School in 2016 under the same role.

I am honored to be selected to serve as the principal of Keith Elementary, Clements said via the news release. I look forward to developing authentic relationships with the staff, students and community and working together to continue the tradition of excellence that the Keith Elementary family has established. I am proud to be a Keith Cougar!

-Contributed by Cy-Fair ISD

Aragon celebrates 20th anniversary

Aragon Middle School celebrated its 20th anniversary the week of May 24 and concluded the weeklong festivities by holding a luncheon on May 28 with administration, staff, former principals, and past staff members who originally opened the school, Cy-Fair ISD announced in a news release June 10.

The campus joined Goodson Middle School as the districts 11th and 12th middle schools in 2001.

Lloyd Turner was named the fourth principal in Aragons history this past November and recalled some of his favorite memories during the luncheon, joined by the three previous principals including Maria Mamaux, who served for nine years, and Vicki McComas, who opened the campus.

Other honored guests featured Brian Aragon and his wife Mary. Brian is the son of Jan H. Aragon who was a longtime district employee and namesake for the school. Jan passed away this past February at the age of 86.

It is a great honor to her legacy, Brian Aragon said via the news release. She was in the district for so many years, and just to see the continued legacy and the Aragon name. Thats what she was most proud ofyoung people would still be educated even after she was gone.

Gifts were also distributed to principal Turner, former principals and original staff members, and images from throughout the schools history were shown to guests via a video as well as a time capsule with pieces representing the past school year were on display.

This is a special community and the former principals before really laid the foundation, Turner said via the news release. For me, its just building on that and taking it to the next level while continuing that spirit of excellence, refining and continuing to build on what they established.

-Contributed by Cy-Fair ISD

LSC-CyFair to display spiritual art exhibition

Artist Walter Wagners sweet savors of Thy favors and blessings will be on display at Lone Star College-CyFairs summer Bosque Gallery art exhibition, LSC-CyFair announced in a press release June 9.

Wagner held a live virtual walk-through via Instagram on June 10 for those who were interested in learning how to combine colorful, two-dimensional work, with a sense of moral/spiritual responsibility.

The belief in the creation of art as a spiritual process, and recognition of the duality of the human existence, both physical and incorporeal, are crucial components in my work, Wagner said in his ethos via the press release.

Aside from going over gleanings and what motivates him, Wagner wants to promote more chances for dialogue on spiritual concepts.

Wagners art is available for online viewing and select pieces will be on display in the Center for the Arts lobby through July 15. For more information about art exhibition and Bosque Gallery visit the Lone Star College website.

This year, we felt the movement captured in a faculty artists pieces and a multitude of emotions a visiting artist created in his collective memorial sculptures, Bosque Gallery Director Jasleen Sarai said via the press release. Most recently, we saw our students talent shine in the end-of-the semester show and now we are excited to have Mr. Wagner wrap up our spring season with such a thought-provoking exhibition.

-Contributed by Lone Star College-CyFair

alvaro.montano@chron.com
ROYAL PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP)  A man fatally shot a grandmother and her 1-year-old grandson inside a Florida supermarket before killing himself, authorities said, causing dozens to flee the store in panic.

The shooting happened shortly after 11:30 a.m. Thursday at a Publix located in a strip mall that also houses small shops and restaurants.

Authorities initially said the shooter and the victims may have known each other. A later update from the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office said there was no known motive or relationship between the suspect and the victims, but detectives were still investigating.

The sheriff's office identified the suspect as Timothy J. Wall, 55, of Royal Palm Beach.

The names of the grandmother and her grandson won't be released. Their family invoked Marsy's Law, the sheriff's office said, which allows victims of crimes to block information that could be used to locate or harass them or their families from being made public.

Juan Guardia told the Palm Beach Post he was in the deli area when the shooting happened in the produce aisle.

I heard, Theyre shooting! A woman Publix worker said, Run! Shooting! Guardia said. I was scared. Its sad because everything happened fast. Everyone was running, some employees were crying.

Ron Glassman, a stress management consultant, had just parked his car and was heading to another shop when about 50 customers and employees in small clusters came running out of the Publix yelling, There's a shooter, there's a shooter. Don't go in there.

It was pretty chaotic. People were very shaken, Glassman said.

He said armed sheriff's deputies wearing helmets and bulletproof vests arrived about five minutes later.

Publix, in a statement, said, Our thoughts are with those who are impacted by this tragedy. The company added that it is cooperating with law enforcement but declined further comment. Publix is Florida's largest grocery chain and has more than 1,200 stores in the Southern United States.

The sheriff's office said the supermarket would be closed until Saturday.

Royal Palm Beach is a middle-class suburb of 40,000 residents, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) inland from Palm Beach.

__

Spencer reported from Fort Lauderdale.
President Joe Biden might have persuaded some of the world's largest economies to hike taxes on corporations, but the U.S. Congress could be a far tougher sell.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Friday that leaders of the Group of Seven  which also includes the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Germany, Italy and Japan  agreed with Biden on placing a global minimum tax of at least 15% on large companies. The G-7 leaders, participating in a three-day summit in England, affirmed their finance ministers who earlier this month endorsed the global tax minimum.

America is rallying the world to make big multinational corporations pay their fair share so we can invest in our middle class at home, Jake Sullivan, the president's national security adviser, said Friday on Twitter.

A minimum tax is supposed to halt an international race to the bottom for corporate taxation that has led multinational businesses to book their profits in countries with low tax rates. This enables them to avoid taxes and encourages countries to slash rates. The minimum rate would make it tougher for companies to avoid taxes, and could possibly supplant a digital services tax that many European nations are imposing on U.S. tech firms that pay at low rates.

Biden administration officials believe the use of overseas tax havens has discouraged companies from investing domestically, at a cost to the middle class. The president hopes a G-7 endorsement can serve as a springboard for getting buy-in from the larger Group of 20 complement of nations.

The agreement is not a finished deal, as the terms would need to be agreed upon by countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and implemented by each of them. The president needs other countries to back a global minimum tax to ensure that his own plans for an enhanced one in the U.S. don't hurt American businesses.

It has the potential to stop the race to the bottom," said Thornton Matheson, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. "It would be a huge sea change in the way things have been going in corporate taxes for the last three decades.

The idea of an enhanced global minimum tax is also an integral part of Biden's domestic agenda, but it faces resistance in Congress.

The president has proposed using a global minimum tax to help fund his sweeping infrastructure plan. His budget proposal estimates it could raise nearly $534 billion over 10 years, but Republicans say the tax code changes would make the United States less competitive in a global economy.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen framed the agreement as a matter of basic fairness after the finance ministers' meeting.

We need to have stable tax systems that raise sufficient revenue to invest in essential public goods and respond to crises and ensure that all citizens and corporations fairly share the burden of financing government, she said.

Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, said GOP lawmakers would fight tooth and nail against the tax. Republicans view lower taxes as encouraging companies to invest and hire, putting little stock in Biden's argument that improved infrastructure and better-educated workers would help increase growth.

It is an economic surrender," Brady said Friday. President Biden has managed to do the impossible -- he has made it better to be a foreign company and a foreign worker than an American company and an American worker.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has repeatedly said his party will oppose any measures that undo the 2017 tax cuts signed into law by President Donald Trump.

The 2017 overhaul did create a new way to tax companies' foreign profits with what is known as global intangible low-taxed income. Congressional Democrats said that framework encouraged firms to invest in foreign countries, instead of at home.

Biden has proposed raising that rate to 21% among other changes to the code. The administration views the G-7's 15% as a floor rather than a ceiling for rates. But the G-7's plan varies from what Biden has proposed and there are details to be finalized, with tax experts noting that there appear to be gaps in rates and the treatment of assets such as buildings and equipment.

Democrats want to dig into the fine print of any agreement before giving their full-throated approval of what comes out of the G-7, which means that Biden will have to keep making the sale to U.S. voters and their representatives.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden of Oregon favors the general idea of a global minimum tax. But Wyden said in a statement with House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal of Massachusetts that they need to dig into the agreement to see if Americans would really benefit.

We are optimistic that a strong multilateral agreement can be reached to harmonize our international tax rules, end the race to the bottom and put a stop to digital services taxes, the two Democratic lawmakers said. "We look forward to working with the administration and evaluating the outcome of these negotiations for American workers, businesses and taxpayers.
Chief Leonard Crow Dog, a renowned spiritual leader and Native American rights activist who fought for sovereignty, language preservation and religious freedom, has died at age 78.

Crow Dog, Sicangu Lakota Oyate, passed away June 6 at Crow Dogs Paradise on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota after a battle with cancer, Indian Country Today reported.

As a youth, Crow Dog learned about cultural traditions and ceremonies from his father and Lakota elders. He later became a spiritual leader for the American Indian Movement.

He did not go to school. Instead his parents enlisted four medicine men to guide his education, Rosebud Sioux Tribe President Rodney Bordeaux said in a statement. Throughout his life, Crow Dog learned from the University of the Universe, as he would say, and he shared his understanding of WoLakota with our Sicangu Oyate, the Oceti Sakowin, and Peoples of all Nations.

Crow Dog attended and spoke at countless rallies, marches and protests over the years. He also co-authored a book, Crow Dog: Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men, which tells the story of his ancestors and his life.

In 1972, Crow Dog took part in the Trail of Broken Treaties, which included the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs' headquarters in Washington, D.C. He also participated in and was arrested after the 71-day occupation at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

He was incarcerated for two years, then returned home to hold sweat lodge and peyote ceremonies, Sundances and other spiritual activities. He revived Lakota traditions, including the Ghost Dance, and counseled many people during times of loss or hardship.

Crow Dog also lobbied for the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and Indian Self Determination Act, two laws that altered the relationship between Native Americans and the United States.

In 2016, he joined and held ceremonies with Native Americans from across the country who gathered near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in the Dakotas to protest the Dakota Access pipeline.

Crow Dog gave his life for the people through ceremony, songs, Sundance, political action and bold leadership," said Nick Tilsen, Oglala Lakota and president and CEO of NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led advocacy organization.

This is a loss that hurts us all deeply," Tilsen said. "His legacy will be carried forward with what we all do with the things he taught us through his love for the people.

The Rosebud Sioux Tribe flew flags at half staff this week in Crow Dog's honor.
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Amy Baxter, Augusta University

(THE CONVERSATION) If youre among the 25% of Americans averse to needles, youre probably not surprised by the COVID-19 immunization stall. Even for those who want immunity, bribes with beer or lottery tickets may not be enough to override anxiety made worse by pervasive images of needles in the media.

As a physician specializing in pain management, I study the impact of pain on vaccination. Research-proven adult interventions for pain, fainting, panic and fear can make vaccination more tolerable. At a minimum, understanding the reasons needle fear has become common might make the embarrassment easier to bear.

Why needle anxiety has increased

Needle fear has increased dramatically since a landmark 1995 study by J.G. Hamilton reported that 10% of adults and 25% of children feared needles. In that paper, adult patients who remembered when their fear began described a stressful needle experience around age 5.

The childhood experiences of the patients usually related to an unexpected illness; at the time the Hamilton participants were in preschool, vaccines were scheduled only until age 2. For most people born after 1980, however, booster injections given between ages 4 to 6 years became a routine part of the vaccine experience. The timing of boosters maximizes and prolongs immunity, but unfortunately falls within the age window when phobias form. A 2012 Canadian study of 1,024 children found that 63% of those born in 2000 or later now fear needles. In a 2017 study, my colleagues and I confirmed this increase in prevalence: Half of preschoolers who got all their boosters on one day  often four or five injections at once  were still severely afraid of needles as preteens.

[The Conversations science, health and technology editors pick their favorite stories. Weekly on Wednesdays.]

Unsurprisingly, needle fear affects how willing teens and adults are to get vaccinated. A 2016 study found needle fear to be the most common reason teens didnt get a second HPV vaccine. Health care workers are no exception: A 2018 study found that 27% of hospital employees dodged flu vaccines due to needle fear. And most recently, an April 2021 national survey of 600 not-yet-COVID-19-vaccinated U.S. adults found that 52% reported moderate to severe needle fear.

Potential solutions for adults

For children, evidence shows that addressing their fear and pain while distracting them from the procedure is most effective in reducing distress.

While adults are not just big children, combining these concepts with findings from available adult injection studies suggest a few potential interventions. For the many who want a vaccine but need some support, heres what we know:

1. Pain reduction

Relieving injection pain may reduce needle fear by giving patients a feeling of control. For example, a group of patients in New Zealand were repeatedly missing their monthly antibiotic injections for rheumatic heart disease. Their doctors created a special clinic, offering either anesthetics, a vibrating cold device or both during the shot. The interventions in 107 adults reduced pain and fear by 50% after three months. Six months later, half the patients still used the interventions, and the special missed dose clinic was no longer needed.

Specifically for vaccination, applying a vibrating cold device to the injection site a minute prior to injection, then pressing just above the site during injection, relieved pain and improved satisfaction for adults, and was most effective for those with needle fear. A horseshoe-shaped plastic device using sharp prongs to confuse the nerves also reduced injection pain but increased anxiety, possibly due to discomfort from the prongs themselves.

Cold spray doesnt help reduce vaccination pain for children, but has been shown to be more effective than topical anesthetics for adult injections.

2. Psychological therapy

Exposure-based therapy involves asking a patient to rank anxiety caused by parts of a procedure, like seeing a picture of a tourniquet or thinking about sharp things, and gradually exposing them to these parts in a controlled environment. Free self-guided resources are available for fears ranging from flying to spiders. However, none of the three studies testing this approach on adult needle fear showed long-term fear reduction.

One of the studies that taught techniques to reduce fainting, however, was considered a success. Fainting, or vasovagal syncope, and needle fear are often conflated. While passing out due to injections is more common with anxiety, it is often a genetic response. Tensing the stomach muscles increases the volume of blood the heart can pump, keeping blood in the brain to prevent lightheadedness during needle procedures.

3. Distraction

Surprisingly, there are no studies on adults using distraction for injections. Two studies, however, have found that pretending to cough reduces pain from blood draws.

Dropping F-bombs could also help: A recent study found that swearing reduced pain by one-third compared to saying nonsense words. Distraction with virtual reality games or videos has been shown to be more effective in children, although there have been mixed results in adults.

Mentally engaging tasks may also help. A visual finding task given to children during intramuscular shots has been shown to reduce pain and fear, with 97% rating the experience more pleasant than previous blood draws. Adults may need a more complicated task, but a similar intervention could work for them as well.

Use multiple interventions and go in with a plan

To reduce needle fear, research suggests the more interventions, the better. A 2018 study summarizing research on vaccine pain concluded that patient-operated cold and vibration devices combined with distraction techniques were most effective. Canada has implemented a practical national needle fear intervention for their vaccine rollout, emphasizing preparing ahead to help make vaccine day more comfortable.

Adults who dont like needles are in the majority. Taking control of your vaccination experience may be the best way to combat needle anxiety.

Editors note: Portions of this article originally appeared in a previous article published on June 8, 2020.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/over-half-of-adults-unvaccinated-for-covid-19-fear-needles-heres-whats-proven-to-help-161636.
Unionized workers at Citibank Korea rally in front of the bank's main branch in Seoul, Tuesday, to protest Citigroup's decision to shut down consumer banking operations here. Courtesy of Citibank Korea union



Unionized workers secure legal right to go on strike



By Park Jae-hyuk



Unionized workers at Citibank Korea plan to inundate top executives at Citigroup's New York headquarters, including CEO Jane Fraser, with email messages to protest the financial giant's decision to halt consumer banking operations here and in 12 other markets, the union said Friday.





Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser
GARY, Ind. (AP)  A security guard was ambushed and killed Friday outside a bank in northwestern Indiana before two armed men entered and demanded money, authorities said.

The shooting occurred at First Midwest Bank in Gary.
A police officer in Fulshear shot and killed a man during a traffic stop Thursday after the driver tried fleeing with the officer partially in the vehicle, according to authorities.

The shooting happened around 10:30 a.m. in the 9300 block of Charger Way, where the officer pulled the man over for running a stop sign. The 53-year-old driver, the officer learned, had a felony arrest warrant for a drug charge out of Virginia.

The officer then confronted the driver about the warrant.

"The man got agitated and nervous and began to say that he had to go to work," Fulshear police Capt. Mike McCoy said.

The officer moved to handcuff the man but he began acting sick, McCoy said. The officer was on the verge of calling for an ambulance when the man suddenly shoved him away and got back behind the wheel. A struggle ensued, with the officer trying to pull the man out of the car.

He sped away with the officer partially inside the vehicle, officials said. How far he drove with the officer, McCoy did not know.

During the driver's escape, the officer managed to pull his weapon and fire on the motorist, who drove about 800 yards more before crashing into a tree because of at least one gunshot wound. Responding officers tried to save the driver, but McCoy said he died.

Police believe he may have been living in the area because of the many items found in his car, including fishing gear.

Body-worn and dash cam footage was captured of the incident, McCoy continued.

Fulshear authorities placed the officer on administrative duty pending the results of reviews by the Texas Rangers, the Fort Bend County Sheriff's Office and the Fort Bend County District Attorney's Office.

McCoy said he was aware of only one other incident in Fulshear where an officer killed someone.

nicole.hensley@chron.com
Marie D. De Jesus, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Not necessarily, said Dr. Muhammad Mujtaba, medical director of kidney and pancreas transplants at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.

As long as a patient is cleared of COVID-19  most transplant centers will wait at least four weeks  they can still donate. At Mujtabas practice, clinicians repeatedly test the donor with PCR tests to confirm they are COVID-negative and perform X-rays and CT scans to rule out organ damage.
Brett Coomer, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

The CDC released a study this month showing how the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are performing in the real world. The news was extremely good: For fully vaccinated people, the mRNA vaccines reduced the risk of infection by 91 percent. For partially vaccinated people, by 81 percent.

The study looked at more than 3,900 essential workers  among them, doctors, nurses and other health care staff  who were among the first Americans to be vaccinated. Starting in December, they were tested weekly for COVID, whether or not they had symptoms.
Elizabeth Conley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston is closing its mass COVID-19 vaccination site on Friday and handing over the responsibility of inoculation to its primary care providers amid a decline in vaccine interest, the hospital system said.

We are making the vaccine more accessible by making it available in primary care clinics and encouraging those that have questions or doubts to have a conversation with their health care provider about getting vaccinated against COVID-19, said Dr. Janak Patel, UTMBs director of infection control and healthcare epidemiology.
One person has been arrested in a shooting that injured a student Wednesday at North Forest High School, according to Houston ISD.

The incident is still under investigation, district officials said. The name and age of the arrested person is unknown.

"At this time, we cannot comment further to preserve the integrity of the ongoing investigation," district officials said in a statement.

A student was shot in the hand in the campus parking lot, Houston ISD police said. Police had detained an 18-year-old who fled the scene in a truck and were searching for occupants of another vehicle that left the area.

It's unknown whether the detained 18-year-old is the same person who was arrested.

Investigators determined the shooting occurred about five minutes after North Forest High seniors were released from a graduation rehearsal event at the campus. The injured student was not an intended target in the shooting, police said.

Several witnesses reported seeing a gray Ford truck and maroon Chrysler vehicle flee the scene. Police found a male teen inside the truck, which had bullet holes in the side panel, about 2 miles southwest of the campus. Investigators on Wednesday were searching for the Chrysler vehicle.

Anyone with more information is asked to contact the HISD Police Department at 713-892-7777.
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner on Friday asked U.S. Housing Secretary Marcia Fudge to set a 30-day deadline for the Texas General Land Office to formally request $750 million in federal flood control aid that Land Commissioner George P. Bush recently said he would seek.

Given this matter involves funds allocated in February of 2018, the rules were promulgated in August of 2019, and hurricane season has already begun for 2021, HUD (the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department) should require the GLO to submit this amendment within the next 30 days, Hidalgo and Turner wrote.

Since late May, when the GLO announced its plan to distribute an initial round of about $1 billion in mitigation funds approved by Congress after Hurricane Harvey, Houston-area officials have hammered Bush for not directing a penny of the aid to the city or the county. In response, Bush said he would ask HUD, which oversees the federal relief money, to directly send $750 million to Harris County  essentially bypassing the GLOs criteria for scoring flood project applications.

Hidalgo and Turner have said the $750 million falls well short of the $2 billion they believe the city and county should receive  $1 billion apiece  to fund projects aimed at mitigating the effects of future storms. In the letter to Fudge and at a congressional hearing Friday, they sought HUDs help in securing roughly that amount from the $4.3 billion that Congress allotted for Texas after the 2017 storm.

Were asking that HUD approve this amendment (for $750 million)  as a down payment toward an equitable share for all governmental entities within Harris County, Hidalgo said.

Turner noted that Houston still has not been promised any flood mitigation relief because Bush has said he plans to ask HUD to send the $750 million directly to Harris County. Bush said the county, which faces a $1.4 billion funding gap for its $2.5 billion flood bond approved by voters in 2018, could then decide how much to give the city.

The city and county collectively applied for $1.34 billion to cover 14 flood projects: five from the city and nine from the county.

In a letter sent Thursday to U.S. Reps. Al Green and Sylvia Garcia, both Houston Democrats, Deputy Land Commissioner Mark Havens said the GLO shares the desire to fund flood mitigation projects within Harris County and the city of Houston and that the agency was still developing the amendment to its plan in which it would seek the $750 million.

The GLO will submit this action plan amendment to HUD for approval after adhering to all federally mandated steps required prior to submission, Havens wrote. More information will be available as the new amendment is finalized.

Bush has blamed the snub on federal rules and shoddy application work by local officials, though the Houston Chronicle found that the GLO-developed criteria for scoring flood project applications discriminated against densely populated areas and was not used by other states that operated under the same federal rules.

Turner and Hidalgo have argued their governments should receive funding commensurate with the amount of damage suffered by the Houston area, which totaled nearly half of all Harvey-inflicted damage by some measures.

In the letter to Green and Garcia, Havens said HUD did not allow the GLO to use damage from Harvey as a metric for allocating the funds, writing that the agency was unable to  grade on a curve to direct funds to Houston and Harris County over applicants from the other 48 eligible counties.

However, the GLO graded projects using criteria that divided the number of people a project would benefit by the total population of the city or county that submitted the application. That metric penalized sprawling and highly populated Houston and Harris County, as did a separate social vulnerability metric that measured the city or countys wealth as a whole instead of the area being served by a particular project.

City and county officials have said those criteria helped ensure some of the areas wealthiest neighborhoods, such as those in west Houston that contained no proposed projects, counted against project applications in some of the lowest-income communities, such as those along the Halls, Greens and Sims bayou watersheds.

After the GLO came out with a draft of its scoring metrics, Houston officials recommended they change its criteria to focus only on the project area, arguing their projects would be at a disadvantage compared with those submitted by smaller, rural counties  the ones that largely ended up being awarded funds from the GLO.

jasper.scherer@chron.com
When 16,000 Southern Baptists convene in Nashville on Tuesday they will again do so under a cloud of sex abuse scandals, including allegations that top leaders sought to silence abuse survivors and stifle reforms.

A series of leaked letters and audio recordings in June shed light on internal deliberations over abuse and have already prompted investigations into current and former officials.

Its familiar territory for the nations second-largest faith group: The SBCs 2018 meeting came amid allegations of sexual misconduct or mishandling of abuse claims by longtime denominational leaders such as Paige Patterson and former Texas Appeals Court Judge Paul Pressler. And when the Southern Baptist Convention last gathered, in 2019, it was on the heels of a Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express News investigation, Abuse of Faith, that found hundreds of children had been abused by SBC church leaders and volunteers.

On HoustonChronicle.com: More men accuse former Texas judge, Baptist leader of sexual misconduct

Tension and infighting among SBC leaders have only increased since then. Meanwhile, the SBC has continued to hemorrhage members: According to Ryan Burge, an Eastern Illinois University professor of religion, the faith group lost more members between 2019 and 2020 than any other year since 1845, when the SBC was founded after splitting with northern Baptists over support for slavery.

Top officials acknowledge that the denomination is at a crossroads ahead of an annual meeting that will also include a presidential election and votes on a variety of sex abuse reforms.

Its a pivotal meeting, said Rolland Slade, chairman of the SBCs executive committee. We will either come out headed towards revival, and will have repentance and people laying down their swords. Or well continue to kick the can down the road.

Slade has been one of the more outspoken SBC leaders on abuse in the wake of the Chronicles February 2019 report that found more than 400 SBC church leaders and volunteers had been convicted or credibly accused of sexual abuse or misconduct over the past two decades.

They left behind more than 700 victims, nearly all children.

On HoustonChronicle.com: 20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms

In response, SBC church delegates empowered a committee to make inquiries into churches that have been accused of mishandling or concealing sexual abuse, and they advanced an amendment to their constitution that would allow them to remove churches thatve mishandled abuses or knowingly employed predators.

The SBCs public-policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, also overhauled the theme of its annual three-day conference to deal solely with abuse issues. The ERLC has also been developing and pushing curriculum on how to care well for the abused.

Survivors and advocates have been critical of the SBCs response, and have called for more sweeping reforms.

Some of those proposals may face a vote at next weeks meeting. Any church delegate can make motions or recommendations at the meeting, making it impossible to predict what may happen.

Multiple pastors say theyll push for stronger abuse reforms, including for the SBC to undergo a three-year, third-party audit of abuse and responses to it.

On HoustonChronicle.com: 'The women are hurting': Unearthed tapes, letters show Southern Baptist leaders support for pastor who faced sex scandal

The idea has long been requested by survivors and advocates who say that SBC churches are neither equipped nor unbiased enough to investigate themselves. The SBCs executive committee shot down a similar proposal in 2008, saying it could not compel any of the SBCs 47,000 autonomous and self-governing churches to cooperate with inquiries.

Todd Benkert, the Indiana pastor who is proposing the idea, believes that local church autonomy is not in conflict with his proposal. He said many SBC pastors eyes were opened by sheer number of cases, but that the findings were likely just the tip of the iceberg.

If the SBC is going to be able to enact meaningful change, it's critical to have better information to inform those changes, he said. This resolution is intended to provide a more clear picture of what is taking place in the SBC.

Old leaders return

Benkerts motion is one of a few aimed at informing SBC church members about abuse and potential mishandling of it.

On Thursday, Phillip Bethancourt, the ERLCs former vice president and one of the denominations leaders on abuse reforms, leaked audio from a series of meetings with other officials.

In one recording, Executive Committee President Ronnie Floyd worried that allowing survivors to be critical of leadership could threaten the SBCs longevity. His comments came just after the SBC held a three-day conference in response to the Chronicles reports, at which numerous speakers and survivors were critical of current and former leaders.

I am not concerned about anything survivors can say, Floyd said on the recordings. OK. I am not worried about that. Im thinking the base. I just want to preserve the base.

In a Thursday statement, Floyd accused Bethancourt of mischaracterizing their conversations. He said the executive committee remains committed to stopping abuse, and announced Friday that it has retained a third-party firm to investigate the slew of accusations levied against current and former committee members.

A day prior, on Wednesday, a 2019 email sent by longtime SBC leader Augie Boto was leaked online. In the correspondence, Boto  who was instrumental to the SBCs 2008 decision not to implement abuse reforms  questioned the motives of prominent abuse survivors and advocates, as well as the seriousness of the issue.

This whole thing should be seen for what it is, wrote Boto, who retired in 2019. It is a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism. He could not be reached for comment.

It was just the latest leaked letter: Earlier this month, the Chronicle obtained a 2020 letter in which outgoing SBC leader Russell Moore outlined what he said were numerous attempts by members of the SBCs executive committee to retaliate against him for his work with abuse survivors.

Moore objected to an investigation that had been launched into him and his entity, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, by other SBC leaders in early 2020. The investigation was framed as an inquiry into Moores work, and its effects on donations.

Moore alleged it was meant to intimidate him, one of many tactics that have been used to create a culture where countless children have been torn to shreds, where women have been raped and then broken down.

One of the people behind that 2020 investigation was Mike Stone, who at the time chaired the SBCs executive committee. Stone is a frontrunner to be elected SBC president when the group meets next week. Stone could not be reached for comment, but denied Moores accusations in a video message.

Stone and other executive members are aligned with and supported by the Conservative Baptist Network, which was formed last year to combat what members say is a drift toward liberalism within the SBC. Earlier this month, disgraced ex-SBC leader Paige Patterson told Baptist Press that he helped with the creation of the CBN, which had long been suspected by denominational insiders.

In 2018, Patterson was removed as head of a Fort Worth seminary for saying he wanted to meet with a woman who said she was raped at gunpoint so that he could break her down.

The Chronicle has since published hours of video that show Patterson personally intervened when a protege faced dozens of misconduct allegations at churches throughout the 1980s. The man, Darrell Gilyard, was eventually imprisoned for sex crimes with children.

Though his stature and power has been diminished, Patterson remains a folk hero in the eyes of many for his role in the so-called battle for the Bible, the period during the 1980s when the SBC went to war with itself over literal interpretation of scripture.

Some executive committee members sought to censure President J.D. Greear for saying in an interview with the Chronicle that churches should consider Pattersons history before hosting him.

David Pittman is among the many abuse survivors who say its hard to believe much has changed in the SBC when Patterson is still being embraced. Nor is he confident that this years meeting will produce substantive change.

Maybe one day theyll act, Pittman said. Maybe not. At least when they stand in front of God, theyll no longer be able to say they didnt know.

robert.downen@chron.com
An El Paso congresswoman is hoping to give the nations highest military honor to a Mexican American considered the most decorated World War I veteran in Texas.

Rep. Veronica Escobar introduced a bill that would authorize President Joe Biden to award the Medal of Honor posthumously to Marcelino Serna, who served as a private in the Army during the war. It was co-sponsored by seven House Democrats, including San Antonio congressmen Rep. Joaquin Castro and Rep. Lloyd Doggett, and sent to the House Committee on Armed Services.

Pvt. Sernas story reminds us that heroism and valor can come from anywhere, and we must ensure that we recognize and reward it, Escobar said in a tweet.

Serna volunteered to enlist in the military in 1917 and was deployed to France after three weeks of training at Camp Funston, Kansas. In a 1962 interview with the El Paso Times, Serna described how he single-handedly took down a German machine gun unit.

I jumped up and ran about 10 yards and then hit the dirt. I kept this up until I was in the machine gunners left flank. He had hit my helmet twice with bullets during this run. When I got close enough, I threw four grenades into the nest. Eight Germans came out with their hands up. Another six were in the nest dead. I held my prisoners until help arrived, Serna said in the interview that was cited in a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services profile.

Serna returned to the United States and in 1919 and got his citizenship five years later, working as a plumber at William Beaumont Army Medical Center in El Paso. He died in 1992.

While Serna met the criteria to be considered for a Medal of Honor, he was told he was ineligible because he did not know enough English to be promoted, according to a letter Escobar wrote to former U.S. Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy in September, urging the Army to review the veterans eligibility.

Prejudice has no place in our armed forces, and I recommend that Private Sernas record be fully and fairly reviewed for eligibility for the Medal of Honor, in recognition of his courageous acts of valor in service of America, Escobar wrote. It is long past time to right the wrongs of the past.

The American GI Forum, an advocacy group for Latinx veterans since 1948, has been fighting for Serna to receive the Medal of Honor since 2018. They banded together several influential organizations and politicians, including Escobar, to write letters in support of the cause, until the bill was finally introduced last week.

They didnt have such a good relationship with Mexico back then, the United States. There was a lot of discrimination against Mexicans, especially in Texas said Lawrence Romo, the forums national commander. He was a humble man, he was a proud veteran. A veteran for other people to emulate.

On the same day that Escobar introduced her legislation honoring Serna, the Texas Legislature passed a pair of controversial bills that critics have equated to propaganda, saying they whitewash history by leaving out much of its history of racism.

One bill, commonly known as the 1836 Project, will promote a patriotic education by focusing on the history of prosperity and democratic freedom in this state, according to the bill. The materials will mostly be found in informational pamphlets given to Texans receiving drivers licenses.

The other bill, however, will greatly impact the way Texas schoolchildren learn about the nations history of racism by banning classroom discussion of critical race theory, including mentions of white privilege and systemic racism.

Both were signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott this week.
Austin-Travis County EMS

Boaters got lucky Thursday afternoon after drifting too close to the edge of a central Texas dam.

Austin-Travis County EMS responded to 911 calls reporting a "boat up against a dam" that "looks like it was going to go over" on US Route 79 by Pleasant Valley Road, according to the agency's Twitter.
National Weather Service

There is a 20 percent chance of a tropical system forming in the Gulf in the next five days, according to the National Weather Service.

The system could form early next week over the Bay of Campeche and the southwestern Gulf of Mexico. The slow development would likely drift north and northwest.
It was the first glimmer of hope in a dark and destructive year: the U.S. Food and Drug Administrations approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for emergency use authorization.

The December milestone marked the beginning of the end of the COVID-19 pandemic that had already killed a million and a half people across the globe.

Several months before, on Sept. 18, Houston Methodist CEO Dr. Marc Boom issued an advance warning to more than 25,000 employees that, once there was ample supply of the vaccine, they would be required to receive it. It was a logical step for one of the regions leading health care providers, which already required flu shots.

Booms early faith has since been rewarded. The vaccines have proven to be remarkably safe. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported roughly 11 adverse reactions to the Pfizer vaccine per 1 million doses.

So, why is a small minority of 178 Houston Methodist employees, including 26 front-line health care workers tasked with patient care, rejecting the organizations requirement to be fully vaccinated, even after the administration offered bonuses to employees who received shots? We cant say for sure  and apparently, neither can some of the holdouts themselves.

Take Jennifer Bridges, a nurse at Houston Methodists Baytown campus. As recently as April, she told the Chronicle she wanted to have more thorough research on the vaccine before taking it, but lately, she has waded into the deep end of anti-vaccine rhetoric.

There is literally no way I would ever take that vaccine for the rest of my life, Bridges told the editorial board this week. If it's not keeping you from getting (COVID-19), the adverse reactions are so insane and so bad, and you don't know how its gonna affect you until you take it and then youre stuck. To me, the risk versus benefit is not worth it.

While its impossible to quantify what Bridges means by the decidedly un-medical terminology so insane and so bad, its disturbing to see a nurse rely so heavily on an oft-repeated claim among anti-vaxxers that COVID-19 vaccines arent keeping you from getting the infection itself. While there was some ambiguity on infection protections early on, a recent CDC study found that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines reduce the risk of infection by 91 percent. There is a better chance that you will be struck by lightning in your lifetime than go into anaphylactic shock from getting a COVID-19 shot.

Of course, the science was clear from the get-go that the vaccines were 94 percent effective against COVID-19 hospitalization among fully vaccinated adults. For most people, avoiding hospitalization and death are pretty big benefits.

And other popular excuses for resisting the vaccine, such as its development being rushed, dont pan out, either. While the name Operation Warp Speed was poorly chosen, the program the Trump administration put forth was never a hasty process started from scratch. It merely removed some bureaucratic hurdles to getting the vaccine to market and it built on a more than a decade-long research and development program for coronaviruses that began after the first SARS outbreak in the early aughts. That research showed how you can elicit virus-neutralizing antibodies, laying the groundwork for companies such as Pfizer and Moderna to quickly develop vaccines.

The FDAs emergency use authorization process closely approximated full approval. Yes, the vaccine was released after months of clinical trial data rather than a four-year study, but thats because, at the time, the nation was losing 3,000 lives a day to COVID-19, creating a heightened sense of urgency. And since the vaccine was released, there is now more than a years worth of data demonstrating its safety and efficacy.

If the inconsistency of Bridges reasoning isnt enough to discredit her groups claims, consider two other troubling factors. She and her comrades in (unvaccinated) arms hired Jared Woodfill, a partisan operative and former chairman of the Harris County Republican Party known for political chicanery, as their attorney. Second, the groups lawsuit against Methodist likens its vaccine mandate to a violation of the Nuremberg Code  a medical ethics standard created after World War II, designed to prevent experimentation on human subjects without consent.

It should be needless to say: a hospital requiring basic safety measures of its staff is not comparable with the Nazi governments barbaric experimentation and forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of prisoners, including children. Nurse Bridges, unlike Jews tortured in concentration camps, can leave any time she wants.

Woodfills lawsuit on behalf of the gaggle of vaccine renegades is a thinly veiled legal stunt torn directly from the anti-vaccine playbook, an effort to sow further doubt and skepticism of the vaccine.

On Tuesday, Boom took action. He suspended the 178 workers who are not fully vaccinated, without pay, for two weeks, after which time they will likely be fired if the have not yet complied. Houston Methodist also granted more than 600 employees deferrals or exemptions for medical or religious reasons.

While we dont take lightly the effect this measure will have on the livelihoods of these workers, we applaud Methodists decisive action and the message it sends to patients and the greater Houston community.

People are still getting sick and dying of COVID-19. Nearly all the patients hospitalized across the country share one trait: they are unvaccinated.

The only reason many of us are enjoying indoor dining, jet-setting to see friends and family, and hugging our grandparents again is because we got the vaccine. But none of us will be rid of this pandemic until more of us do what Houston Methodist has done: reject the lies and the politics and stand up for science.
In an era of political correctness, virtue signaling and wokeness, wisdom is in such short supply that when discovered it stands out like a beacon in a storm.

Wisdom should not be equated with information, of which we have plenty, though information is less informative than it is directive toward outcomes preferred by its providers. Scripture is full of wisdom but as church attendance declines and denominations across the theological spectrum lose members, while gaining fewer new ones, that font of ancient wisdom is not a primary source for many Americans.

What is wisdom? Dictionary.com includes among its definitions: knowledge of what is true or right coupled with just judgment as to action...

What defines true and right in 2021 when just about everything that was considered true and right for millennia is now considered outdated by the cultural bandits? How are their replacements working out?

One small publication has not relinquished wisdom or objective truth to the mob. It is called Modern Age, published by The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a self-identified conservative review, but dont put them in a pigeonhole in case that label doesnt define you.

In its spring issue, editor Daniel McCarthy makes a bold prediction. McCarthy believes Progressivism is a dying ideology, despite its hegemonic position in the nations media and most college campuses.

While some on the left see the slim victories by Democrats at the national level in the 2020 election as proof of the advancement of progressivism, McCarthy sees the opposite. He writes the Democratic Party has no leaders more appealing than a 78-year-old Joe Biden. Who will replace him? There is no second Obama.

Biden has said he wants to run for a second term. He would be 82 in 2024. Are voters ready to re-elect someone that old?

Who on the left has broad public support? Most of the nationally known progressives have loud voices, but virtually no legislative records. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is the most familiar among this small group, but some believe she and the others are largely media creations with few accomplishments.

Pre-pandemic, a Republican president and Republicans in general were on a roll. In virtually every category that matters  from the economy to immigration, to foreign policy  Republicans were winning. Were it not for the virus and Donald Trumps caustic personality, Republicans almost certainly would still be in power.

Even so, notes McCarthy, Democrats lost House seats and are tied in the Senate. In a nod to the imminent future he adds, The clearest lesson of all was that without the demonic caricature of President Trump to drive Democratic turnout in 2018 and last year, the Democrats would have no magnetic pull at all. The fateful question for Republicans, of course, is whether they can continue to attract the Trump coalition without Trump himself on the ballot.

What if Trump runs again, as he claimed he might do in a kind of revenge campaign? The field is currently frozen as potential GOP candidates await Trumps decision.

An even larger question is can Republican candidates not only keep the Trump coalition intact, but also win suburban women who largely voted for Biden because Trumps language and behavior turned them off? And will Democrats be as energized in 2024 as they were last year, not because they loved Biden, but because they couldnt stand Trump?

McCarthy is on to something, but can Republicans capitalize on progressive overreach, including culture issues like critical race theory? With the pandemic likely diminished as an issue in next years congressional races and probably not a concern in the 2024 presidential contest, it will take wisdom for Republicans to win back what they so recently had.

Thomas writes a syndicated column for the Tribune Content Agency.
Over the weekend, largely at the urging of Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, finance ministers from the Group of 7  the major advanced economies  agreed to set a minimum 15 percent tax rate on the profits of foreign subsidiaries of multinational corporations. You may wonder what thats about, or why you should care.

So let me tell you about Apple and the leprechauns.

Apple Inc. has vast global reach. Its products are sold almost everywhere; it has subsidiaries in a number of countries. It is also, of course, immensely profitable.

But where are those profits earned? Apple does very little manufacturing, mainly contracting production out to other companies, mostly in China. Much of its profits comes from licensing fees, reflecting the companys intangible assets  its patents, trademarks, brands and trade secrets. And where are those intangible assets located? From an economic point of view, thats not even a meaningful question.

For tax purposes, however, Apple needs to report its profits somewhere. Right now that means that its basically up to Apple to declare where it makes its money  and what it does, naturally, is claim that its profits accrue to subsidiaries in countries with low tax rates on those profits, Ireland in particular.

In fact, until 2014 it went even further than that: A large share of its global profits was assigned to Apple Sales International, which was registered in Ireland but for tax purposes was located nowhere at all. In 2015, however, some combination of pressure from the European Commission and changes in Irish tax laws induced Apple to reassign many of its intangible assets to its regular Irish subsidiary.

How big a deal was this? On paper, Irelands gross domestic product suddenly jumped 25 percent, even though nothing real had changed  a phenomenon I dubbed leprechaun economics, a term that has stuck. (Fortunately, the Irish have a sense of humor.)

The thing is, Apple is far from unique in exploiting its multinational status to avoid taxes, and Ireland is far from being the most egregious tax haven, even in Europe.

According to International Monetary Fund numbers, Luxembourg  which has about the same population as Vermont  has attracted more than $3 trillion in foreign corporate investment, roughly comparable to the total for the U.S. as a whole. Whats that about? Almost no real investment is involved; instead, the tiny duchy has offered many companies deals under which they can report their profits there while paying almost nothing in taxes.

So what do we learn from these stories? First, that the current international tax system offers huge scope for corporate tax avoidance.

Second, we learn that when nations try to compete with one another by cutting corporate tax rates  the so-called race to the bottom  they arent really fighting about who will get jobs and productivity-enhancing investments. Theres very little evidence that cutting profit taxes actually induces corporations to build factories and expand employment.

No, theyre really just fighting about where profits will be reported and hence taxed. And with tax rates falling and tax avoidance flourishing, the result is that tax revenue keeps dropping.

Back in the 1960s, federal taxes on corporate profits were, on average, about 3.5 percent of GDP; now they average around 1%. Thats a revenue loss of more than $500 billion a year, enough to pay for a lot of infrastructure, child care, and more.

Which brings us to that G7 deal. How would the 15 percent minimum rate work? Heres how Gabriel Zucman  who has arguably done more than anyone else to highlight the importance of international tax avoidance  summarizes it: Take a German multinational that books income in Ireland, taxed at an effective rate of 5 percent. Germany will now collect an extra 10 percent tax to arrive at a rate of 15 percent  same for profits booked by German multinationals in Bermuda, Singapore, etc.

Obviously this would immediately slash the amount of tax corporations could avoid by shifting reported profits to tax havens. And it would also greatly reduce the incentive for countries to serve as tax havens in the first place. Oh, and if you think corporations can avoid all this just by moving their parent companies to, say, Bermuda, major economies can make that difficult.

To put this in a broader context, what were looking at here is the beginning of an attempt to fix a system that is rigged against workers in favor of capital. Workers have few ways to avoid income taxes, payroll taxes and sales taxes besides actually moving to another country. Multinational corporations, which are ultimately owned in large part by a small wealthy minority, can shop for low-tax jurisdictions without doing anything real besides hiring some skilled accountants. The G7 plan would curb that practice.

So far, to be sure, all that we have is an agreement among finance ministers, with some important details still to be worked out. Turning it into legislation wont be easy: Corporations can hire lobbyists as well as accountants.

But this is still a big deal  an important step toward a fairer world.

Krugman is a columnist for the New York Times.
During normal years, we honor the lives of 11 correctional officers and staff who have lost their lives in the line of duty. This year, we are mourning the loss of 260, including 68 in Texas.

The pandemic has transformed our society and exacted a heavy toll for too many in this country. But the more than 400,000 correctional officers who work to staff the nations prisons and jails have faced unprecedented challenges and been asked to make countless sacrifices. At the beginning of the pandemic, we warned policymakers and government officials that this deadly virus, once it entered prisons and jails, would spread like a brush fire. Weve witnessed the devastating impact of COVID-19 on the people in our charge as the virus has claimed the lives of at least 2,697 incarcerated people.

Across the country, people in cities and towns rightfully celebrated the heroic doctors, nurses and hospital staff who battled COVID-19. We demonstrated our appreciation for the grocery store, delivery, restaurant and farm workers, health care workers, food workers and other first responders who put their lives on the line to save others.

But corrections officers, frontline workers who came into contact with more COVID-19 cases than many hospitals, have sacrificed without the recognition and notice from the general public. Our work, hidden behind prison walls, was just as difficult. Yet it was overlooked, just as our work has been for far too long.

Im a retired corrections officer and founder of One Voice United, an organization working to honor the experience and professionalism of correctional officers and staff and give us a voice in the national conversations about reforming the criminal justice system. As we experience the highest suicide, PTSD and stress rate of any profession in the country, we know firsthand that we need reform in the criminal justice system  and that changes must include the concerns of the officers and staff, who have critical perspectives and will be required to implement and sustain any reforms that are made.

In March of 2020, correctional officers and staff who work in prisons and jails showed up to work as the rest of the country shut down. At the time, just 7 percent of correctional officers that we surveyed at One Voice reported that they had what they needed to protect themselves from this deadly virus. Despite our vocal advocacy on behalf of correctional officers and staff, we faced an uphill battle to obtain even the most basic protections against COVID-19.

Still, we went to work without the proper personal protective equipment to keep ourselves and the incarcerated people in our charge safe. We worked overtime to accommodate public health measures as our colleagues were exposed to the virus and forced to quarantine. We went to work as prison life became harder than it already was, with public health measures limiting incarcerated peoples access to visitors, mail and recreation time. We did all of this to keep one another safe, do our jobs as best we could and uphold our oath.

Beyond the 260 lives we lost to COVID-19, we have and continue to make significant personal sacrifices. Kyle Baum lived in a trailer in his driveway for months rather than expose his family and newborn son to COVID-19  similar to what many doctors, nurses and other frontline workers have done during the pandemic. Baum celebrated his birthday and his sons first Easter through the window to the living room, unable to hug his son or his family in order to keep them safe.

So many correctional officers and staff in the nations prisons and jails have shared similar experiences. Even before the pandemic, we have worked in overcrowded facilities while significantly understaffed. One of the hardest jobs in America has become even harder, and we fear that the consequences of deteriorating conditions in the nations prisons and jails will be long-lasting.

Correctional officers and staff, who already experience disproportionately high rates of PTSD, have now spent over a year inside prison walls with even greater challenges to their mental and physical health. Our nations prison conditions are tied to the welfare of our communities and the health and well-being of correctional officers and staff is tied to the incarcerated people in our charge.

As we honor and mourn the lives of the 219 officers and 41 non-custody staff, we must also recognize and uplift the ongoing work and personal sacrifice of correctional officers and staff during this pandemic. We must commit to do better by providing meaningful support and relief to the men and women working hard despite the obstacles. Above all, the people of this country should heed this wake-up call to pay greater attention to what happens behind prison walls.

Potter is the founder of One Voice United, a campaign to give correctional officers and staff a voice in the national conversations about corrections and the criminal justice system.
Naci en Mexico y me crie en Houston, y desde nina recuerdo estar sentada al lado de mis padres inmigrantes durante las llamadas o reuniones importantes para traducirles. Mi mama me pedia que le tradujera cuando hablaba con los vendedores en las tiendas. Yo mezclaba oraciones y hacia gestos con las manos porque estaba comenzando a aprender a hablar ingles mirando programas de television estadounidenses.

En Houston se hablan mas de 145 idiomas. Ser bilingue es una de las bendiciones de vivir en la ciudad mas diversa de los Estados Unidos. Pero esto tambien implica que los ninos forman parte de conversaciones que generalmente estan reservadas para los adultos. Traducimos cuando nuestros padres tratan con las empresas de servicios publicos, cuando van al medico e incluso cuando tienen que lidiar con agencias de cobro.

En quinto grado me entere de que los ninos que viven dentro de un radio de 2 millas del Canal de Navegacion de Houston, tienen una probabilidad de un 56 por ciento mas alta de tener leucemia que los ninos que viven a una distancia de 10 millas. Asisti a la escuela primaria DeZavala Elementary en Magnolia Park, a menos de media milla del Canal de Navegacion, y mi hogar estaba a solo una milla de distancia. Tuve que decidir si estaba bien contarle esta novedad a mi madre. Lamentablemente, estaba muy al tanto de sus desafios emocionales, financieros y sociales, y no queria sumarle otra carga. Finalmente, se lo conte, pero me concentre en aquellas personas que vivian mas cerca del Canal de Navegacion.

Ya siendo adulta, me entere de que las personas de color como yo se ven desproporcionadamente afectadas por la contaminacion del aire y otros tipos de contaminantes. Sin embargo, en Houston, aquellos que no hablan ingles, quienes precisamente son los mas afectados por la contaminacion, tienen un acceso limitado a la informacion sobre los factores a los que estan expuestas las familias. Esto se debe a que la Comision de Calidad Ambiental del Estado de Texas (TCEQ), que tiene a su cargo la proteccion de nuestra salud publica, no lleva a cabo reuniones ni comunicaciones publicas en espanol.

Las zonas de Manchester y Galena Park, donde predominantemente se habla espanol, siguen teniendo niveles de contaminacion de aire mas altos que las comunidades blancas. A pesar de esto y en terminos practicos, se les ha excluido de la conversacion porque las notificaciones sobre permisos, audiencias, reuniones y cambios propuestos a las regulaciones ambientales estan casi en su totalidad en ingles. En Galena Park, que esta habitada casi en un 80 por ciento por hispanos, no hay ningun tipo de informacion de seguridad disponible en linea en espanol sobre los quimicos vertidos.

Cuando se pondra Texas al dia con la gente que compone su demografia? Una legisladora, la Representante Erin Zwiener, reconocio la necesidad de priorizar la justicia idiomatica en el Proyecto de Ley 1820 , que habria requerido un sistema de alertas toxicas para informar a las comunidades en su idioma de preferencia sobre quimicos vertidos y otros riesgos. Lamentablemente, este sistema de alerta se elimino del proyecto de ley antes de que se votara en comision.

Hay grupos que estan trabajando por llevar a Texas al presente. En respuesta a las quejas de derechos civiles presentadas por los Servicios de Defensoria de Justicia Ambiental de Texas y el Sierra Club, la TCEQ propuso reglas para aumentar los servicios de traduccion e interpretacion, y para ampliar los requisitos de uso de idiomas alternativos en avisos publicos sobre las solicitudes de permisos para desechos, tanto en el agua como en el aire. El objetivo es implementar los cambios necesarios para permitir una participacion completa a pesar de las barreras idiomaticas. Este nuevo requisito brindaria un resumen en lenguaje simple de la solicitud de permisos de la TCEQ. Ademas, la nueva reglamentacion incluiria mas informacion en los resumenes sobre los impactos de salud de la contaminacion anticipada, datos demograficos sobre los vecindarios cercanos a las instalaciones que solicitan los permisos, y otros. La reglamentacion propuesta tambien requerira la traduccion a pedido de la informacion del sitio web de la TCEQ, las agendas y los avisos de reuniones, y documentos que expliquen los posibles impactos sobre la salud.

A medida que la TCEQ decide si implementar las nuevas reglas, una solicitud pendiente muestra por que son tan necesarias. TPC Group, cuya instalacion de Port Neches exploto en noviembre de 2019 y obligo a 50,000 personas a evacuar el dia antes del Dia de Accion de Gracias, ha solicitado permisos para expandir sus operaciones en el East End de Houston, cerca de Milby Park. Esta expansion podria contribuir aun mas a la mision del alqueno cancerigeno 1,3-butadieno, en un aire que hoy en dia ya tiene demasiado. Es posible que TPC Group haya cumplido con los requisitos legales, pero eso no significa que se esten comunicando con los residentes que mas necesitan esa informacion. Enviaron correos electronicos solo a aquellas personas que ya los conocen e imprimieron avisos en un denso lenguaje legal en la parte posterior de los periodicos, uno de los cuales cubre Pasadena, no el East End, lo que genera aun mas preguntas sobre los costos de suscripcion y la brecha digital para algunas comunidades.

En terminos practicos, TPC Group y la TCEQ esperan que estas notificaciones - que incluso los abogados ambientales las encuentran dificiles de entender - sean comprendidas y traducidas por ninos y ninas como lo fui yo, para que nuestras familias esten enteradas de los danos que podrian enfrentar. Las grandes corporaciones y las agencias estatales tienen los recursos, y podemos esperar de ellas que garanticen que las comunidades que mas se veran afectadas, sean debidamente informadas.

Eso podria acercarnos un paso mas a un dia en el que todas las familias respiren aire puro.

Trevino es una residente de Houston y organizadora de EcoMadres para Moms Clean Air Force. Moms Clean Air Force es una comunidad de mas de un millon de mamas y papas que se han unido para combatir la contaminacion del aire y el cambio climatico, a fin de proteger la salud de nuestros hijos, con mas de 66,000 miembros de Texas.

In English

As a child born in Mexico and raised in Houston, I remember sitting next to my immigrant parents during important meetings and phone calls to translate. My mother asked me to translate to store clerks. I would chop together sentences and use hand gestures because I had just begun learning English by watching American TV shows.

More than 145 languages are spoken in Houston. Becoming bilingual is one of the blessings of living in the most diverse city in America. But it also means children become part of conversations typically reserved for adults. We translate between our parents and utility companies, doctors, even collection agencies.

In fifth grade, I learned that children who live within 2 miles of the Houston Ship Channel are 56 percent more likely to develop leukemia than children 10 miles away. I was attending DeZavala Elementary in Magnolia Park, less than half a mile from the Ship Channel, and my home was a mile away. I had to choose whether to share this news with my mother. I was painfully aware of her emotional, financial and societal challenges and didnt want to add another burden. In the end, I told her, but I focused on those living closer to the Ship Channel.

More Information TCEQ is accepting public comments on TPC Group's permit application through June 14. You can submit a comment at https://www14.tceq.texas.gov/epic/eComment/. Reference permit #22052. See More Collapse

As an adult, I would learn that people of color like me are disproportionately affected by air pollution and other contaminants. But, in Houston, access to information about what families are exposed to is limited for those who do not speak English  precisely those most affected by pollution. Thats because the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, entrusted with protecting our public health, does not hold enough meetings or communicate publicly in Spanish.

Predominantly Spanish-speaking Manchester and Galena Park continue to experience higher levels of air pollution than white communities. Despite this, they are functionally excluded from the conversation, because notices about permits, hearings, meetings and proposed changes to environmental regulations are nearly exclusively in English. In Galena Park, which is almost 80 percent Hispanic, there is no safety information about chemical releases available online in Spanish.

When will Texas catch up to its demographics? One lawmaker, Rep. Erin Zwiener, recognized the need to prioritize language justice in House Bill 1820, which would have required a toxic alert system to let communities know in their preferred language about chemical releases and other hazards. Sadly, this alert system was cut from the bill before it was voted out of committee and left for dead by Speaker Dade Phelan on the floor.

Some groups are working to pull Texas into the present. In response to a civil rights complaint by Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services and Sierra Club, TCEQ proposed rules to increase translation and interpretation services and extend existing alternative language requirements to public notices in waste, water and air permit applications.

The goal is to facilitate full public participation despite language barriers. The new rules would provide a plain-language summary of applications; those would explain health impacts and demographic data for nearby communities. Translation upon request of TCEQs website information, agendas and meeting notices and health documents would also be required. The new rules could be voted on this August  a sign that TCEQ is trying to catch up with the rest of Texas in this one way, at least.

As TCEQ decides whether to implement the new rules, a pending application shows why they are so necessary. TPC Group, whose Port Neches facility exploded in November 2019 and forced 50,000 people to evacuate the day before Thanksgiving, has applied for permits to expand its operations in Houstons East End near Milby Park. This expansion could lead to the emissions of even more cancer-causing 1,3-butadiene into air that already has too much. TPC Group might have met legal requirements, but that doesn't mean it is communicating with the residents who need the information the most. It sent emails to those people who already know about them and printed notices in dense legal language in the backs of newspapers.

Effectively, TPC Group and TCEQ are expecting children, like the girl I was, to be able to understand these notifications that even environmental lawyers struggle with and translate the harms our family could face. Large corporations and state agencies have the resources. They should be expected to ensure the communities who stand to be impacted the most are included first.

That could bring us one step closer to a day when all families breathe clean air.

Trevino is a Houston resident and an EcoMadres organizer for Moms Clean Air Force, a community of over 1 million moms and dads united against air pollution and climate change to protect childrens health, with over 66,000 Texas members.
WASHINGTON  Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday said the state of Texas will soon begin building a border wall and arresting migrants who cross the southern border, just a week after he declared a disaster in the region and moved to strip shelters housing migrant children of state licenses.

The moves are almost certain to draw legal challenges from the federal government, which has the sole authority to run the immigration system. They also place the governor squarely at the center of the political battle between Republicans and President Joe Biden over the new presidents handling of the border, as record numbers of migrants cross seeking asylum.

BACKGROUND: Gov. Abbott pledges to finish Trump's border wall and use state troopers to arrest migrants

Its a complicated issue with much of the nuance lost in the political back-and-forth. Heres what you need to know:

Is there a crisis on the border?

U.S. Customs and Border Protection published new data this week showing 180,034 encounters on the southern border in May, a new high for the third month in a row. Its important to note these are numbers of encounters  not individuals  and there are some key caveats to understanding the data.

The vast majority of the encounters  121,082  were with single adults, who are expelled immediately under a public health order issued during the coronavirus pandemic. This has been the case since the order went into place last spring and encounters started to climb.

Many of the encounters are also with migrants trying to re-enter: Nearly 40 percent had tried to cross the border at least once before in the past year, according to the border patrol, compared to an average re-encounter rate of 15 percent for the five years prior.

The encounters with single adults have been numerous enough to keep total encounters at record levels, even as the numbers of children and families arriving from Central American nations is declining after peaking in March.

What has Biden done since taking office?

Republicans have insisted for months that Biden created the crisis at the border by moving away from some of former President Donald Trumps stricter immigration policies and campaigning on a more lenient approach.

Biden has ended construction of the border wall and begun to rebuild an asylum system they say Trump left in shambles. The president also ended a Trump-era policy that required those seeking asylum to remain in Mexico while their cases were processed. About 25,000 people waiting in Mexico under that policy were slowly admitted beginning in February. The administration said this week that about 11,000 people have been let in so far.

UNTHINKABLE IMPLICATIONS: Texas Republicans say lowering the bar for overturning elections is bad policy. So why did they try?

But Biden has left in place a public health order Trump issued last spring that allows the federal government to immediately expel migrants because of the COVID pandemic. The Biden administration is still expelling the vast majority of those crossing  112,302 in May  but it has stopped expelling children and is increasingly letting in families, as well.

Meanwhile, the administration says it is focusing on addressing the root causes of the flow of migrants from Central America, including poverty, crime and corruption in those nations.

What is Abbotts plan?

Abbott declared a disaster in dozens of border counties and said state troopers and local police will begin arresting anyone who enters our state illegally and is found trespassing, engaged in vandalism, criminal mischief or smuggling.

Abbott also said the state will pick up where Trump left off building a border wall and he created a task force that, among other things, will work with local and county officials to expand jail capacities in border counties and help landowners sue the federal government over damages caused by migrants.

TEXAS TAKE: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox

The governor said he had signed an interstate commerce agreement with Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and that the two are asking other states to send law enforcement officials to assist in making arrests and providing jail space.

Long term, only Congress and the president can fix our broken border. But in the meantime, Texas is going to do everything possible, including beginning to make arrests, to keep our communities safe, Abbott said at an event billed as a border security summit in Del Rio. We are going to do everything we can to secure the border and it begins immediately.

The governors announcement followed an order he signed last week that prohibited state-licensed childcare facilities from housing migrants who are living in the country illegally and directed state regulators to begin revoking licenses for the facilities later this summer.

Who will pay for work on the wall?

Abbot said he will detail his plans to build the wall next week, so little is known yet about what it will entail  including how the governor plans to pay for it and where exactly the state will begin construction.

When Trump ran for the White House in 2015, he promised a wall from Texas to California  more than 1,900 miles that would be paid for by Mexico. Instead, the Trump administration mostly refurbished existing walls and fences and added only about 30 miles of barriers where there previously had not been any. Mexico did not pay for any of it. About 450 miles of border wall were built during his administration.

Can the state actually arrest migrants?

Immigration experts said the move will almost certainly face legal challenges and could open an array of practical complications, potentially causing enormous difficulties for border counties.

Texas isnt the first state to try and arrest migrants for trespassing, as Abbott has suggested. The Supreme Court in 2012 blocked a similar effort by Arizona Republicans, who passed a law that would allow state police to arrest migrants on trespassing charges, among other things. The court ruled states cannot enforce immigration law.

But the high court has changed dramatically since that 5-3 ruling  with Trump appointing three new, conservative justices  and Abbott may be betting that precedent could be overturned.

Abbott did not make clear Thursday how he plans to comply with the high courts ruling, though he did say that anybody who tries to modify or get through border barriers would be breaking state law.

What about the threat to pull state licenses of shelters housing children?

Its unclear what will happen. State-licensed shelters make up a significant portion of the capacity for housing migrant children as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services works to reunite them with family members in the U.S. or find sponsors to care for them.

Abbott gave 90 days for state regulators to begin yanking licenses, and experts note that with the number of children in federal care declining, the federal government may be able to find other accommodations. There were 16,190 children in HHS care on Thursday, down from a peak of more than 22,000 in late April.

The Biden administration, meanwhile, has threatened to sue, calling Abbotts proclamation a direct attack on the immigration system and the Office of Refugee Resettlement that runs the facilities.

ben.wermund@chron.com
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un appears in a news report by North Korea's KCTV on June 5. Yonhap



By Yoon Ja-young



The Ministry of Unification has refrained from commenting on a recent media report that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un appears to have lost weight  news that sparked speculation about his health.



According to Yonhap News Agency in Seoul, a ministry official told reporters Thursday that it analyzes Kim's photos every time new ones appear in North Korea's state media. But the official said the ministry's analysis of Kim's health is not something it would make public.



The comment comes following a recent report by NK News, an English-language news site specializing on North Korea, which said June 8 that Kim Jong-un looked thinner based on an image released by North Korea's Korean Central Television (KCTV), in which he is presiding over a June 4 politburo meeting.





The report focused on his wrist, on which he was wearing what seemed to be a Portofino Automatic watch by Swiss company IWC Schaffhausen . It noted that the length of the strap past the buckle appeared longer than in previous pictures, taken last November and March, indicating a slimming wrist.



The report added that the intelligence agencies of South Korea and the United States were closely watching Kim's weight and health.





North Korean leader Kim Jong-un appears in a news report by North Korea's KCTV on Feb. 9. Yonhap
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U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin testifies before a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the Pentagon's budget request, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S. June 10. Reuters-Yonhap



North Korea continues to develop its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, posing an increasing threat to the United States and its allies, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Thursday.



"Pyongyang continues to develop its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, posing an increasing threat to regional allies and partners and with ambitions to be able to strike the U.S. homeland," Austin said in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee before a hearing on the Defense Department's request of a $715 billion budget for fiscal year 2022.



Austin named North Korea as one of four countries that pose threats to the United States, along with China, Russia and Iran.



Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, agreed the North poses a "real danger" to the U.S.



He said the North "continues to enhance its ballistic missile capability and possesses the technical capacity to present a real danger to the U.S. homeland as well as our allies and partners across the Indo-Pacific."



"They show no signs of moderation in their focus on military capability at the expense of their most vulnerable citizens and peace of the Korean Peninsula," added Gen. Milley in his own written testimony.



Austin said the U.S. will put diplomacy first in dealing with threats from North Korea, but insisted maintaining a strong military deterrence is necessary to support such efforts.



"I am also confident that this budget will help us maintain the integrated deterrent capability and global posture necessary to back up the hard work of our diplomats and demonstrate our resolve in leadership all over the world, alongside our allies and partners," he said in the committee hearing.



The Joe Biden administration concluded a monthslong review of its North Korea policy in April, and says its new approach toward Pyongyang calls for "calibrated, practical" steps to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula through diplomacy.



North Korea remains unresponsive to U.S. overtures for engagement amid its continued shutdown of borders as a precaution against the COVID-19 pandemic. (Yonhap)


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Spotify, Payola, and steering agreements attract Congressional attention [Chris Castle]

Pay-to-play/payola has often been an issue, but Spotifys new Discovery Mode has attracted the attention of Congress.

Guest post by Chris Castle of Music Technology Policy

It will be old news to MTP readers, but Spotify has yet another feature that smacks of pay to play, or what is sometimes called payola. Weve seen all of this before in a few different manifestations over the years, but this time a couple of Congressmen sent a letter about it to billionaire Daniel Ek, Spotifys CEO. (See the Artist Rights Alliance op ed and Ashley Cullins reporting in The Hollywood Reporter.) This time its about Spotifys Discovery Mode but it could just as easily have been about Spotifys direct artist deals from a few years ago or the Pandora and iHeart steering agreements from a few years before that.

Is it payola? Not really, but maybe it should be. I havent seen the issue surface in the U.S. Congress until now, but remember that the Digital, Culture Media and Sport Committees streaming inquiry at the UK Parliament spent considerable time discussing streaming playlists, especially Spotifys enterprise playlists, as a replacement for radio. The issue is also coming up tangentially in the Canadian House of Commons debate over Bill C-10 particularly as it applies to Canadian content, indigenous peoples and culture generally. The cultural problem with Spotify is that it is the dominant music streaming platform in the world and itself is dominated by Anglo-American culture. (Of course, Spotify told the Canadian Parliament that they were all about Canadian culture because two of their top artists were Canadian. You know, Justin Bieber and Drake. Victory has a thousand fathers.)

So pay to play has a lot of ramifications. But is it payola under U.S. law? Probably not.

As the erudite David Oxenford noted a few years ago about Internet radio but could also have been speaking of Spotify:

The payola statute, 47 USC Section 508, applies to radio stations and their employees, so by its terms it does not apply to Internet radio (at least to the extent that Internet Radio is not transmitted by radio waves)But that does not end the inquiry. Note that neither the prosecutions brought by Eliot Spitzer in New York state a few years ago nor the prosecution of legendary disc jockey Alan Fried in the 1950s were brought under the payola statute. Instead, both were based on state law commercial bribery statutes on the theory that improper payments were being received for a commercial advantage. Such statutes are in no way limited to radio, but can apply to any business. Thus, Internet radio stations would need to be concerned.

Payola at U.S. law has a very specific meaning, so Spotify probably doesnt come within the payola statutes.

Yet.

Maybe it should. Representatives Jerry Nadler and Hank Johnson sure seem to think so. And given the tone of their inquiry to billionaire Daniel Ek, he may find himself in front of a Congressional committee faster than you can say Arsenal.

But if that happens, Congress should also investigate steering agreements which have been in effect for many years and still are as far as I know. These deals, like Discovery Mode, pay less the more times a track is played by Pandora or iHeart. The terms apply to certain agreements only, so Pandora knows which tracks costs them less. Sirius and Music Choice have tried similar shenanigans.

Of course the real problem is that Billboard started including streaming in the charts. I know its shocking, but people in the music business try to juice the charts. An old promotion man once was told by a distributor that his single would be 34 on the weeks sales turned into Billboard. His response was, would it matter if it were 9? So as soon as Billboard included streaming (as a radio replacement) they opened the door to liability-free payola. Liability free until it isnt.

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National Intelligence Service Chief Park Jie-won speaks during a meeting with lawmakers at the National Assembly in Seoul, Wednesday. Yonhap

By Kang Seung-woo



A recent reference by National Intelligence Service chief Park Jie-won to "significant communication" taking place between South and North Korea around the time of the South Korea-U.S. summit last month has left Pyongyang watchers scrambling to find out the North's real intentions.



Inter-Korean ties have been deadlocked since February 2019, when a summit between North Korea and the United States ended without a deal, as evidenced by the North cutting off all government and military communication channels with the South, and blowing up an inter-Korean liaison office in the border city of Gaeseong in June 2020.



On Wednesday, South Korea's top intelligence official told lawmakers in the National Assembly's Intelligence Committee that inter-Korean communication took place before or after the May 21 summit between President Moon Jae-in and U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington, D.C.



However, he did not specify when they communicated or which channels they used.



"What we found out was that communication channels between the NIS and the United Front Department (UFD) are still alive," said Park Won-gon, a professor of North Korean studies at Ewha Womans University. The UFD is in charge of the North's inter-Korean affairs.



"However, the NIS chief was not specific on the details, so we can only guess that he may have explained the results of the Moon-Biden summit, or U.S. policy toward the North, in the abstract."



He added: "Given that the NIS head unveiled the communication taking place, while the North Korean side did not issue a negative response, we can deduce that the North did not reject the South's call for communication."



Cho Han-beom, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification, said the significant communication was likely about the South once again brokering a meeting between the U.S. and the North.



In 2018 and 2019, the Moon administration brokered summits between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and then U.S. President Donald Trump.



"Both sides are open to talks. The Biden administration has openly repeated its commitment to diplomacy with North Korea, while the North has approached the U.S. on the principle of strength for strength and goodwill for goodwill, which means, should Washington be nice to Pyongyang, it could return to the negotiating table," he said.



"The question is what they can swap before deciding to resume talks, rather than whether they will meet."



The Kim regime wants an official end to the Korean War and sanctions relief from the U.S., while the Biden administration is calling on the North to scrap its nuclear weapons, according to Cho.



"A face-to-face meeting between the U.S. and the North is too risky to hold at this point, so the South Korean government is doing preliminary work to pave the way for the two sides to hold working-level talks," Cho said.



"In that respect, the NIS chief traveled to Washington late last month to discuss the issue."



During the meeting with lawmakers, the NIS director said that the North Korean regime may issue a "fiery statement" on the results of the Moon-Biden summit, which touched on its human rights violations, but he added that it would be simply a rite of passage, and the North would eventually decide to resume dialogue with the U.S.



"North Korea is more desperate to hold talks with the U.S. as its economy has been crippled by sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic," Cho said.



Ten days after the South Korea-U.S. summit, the North issued a response, but experts believed that it toned down its complaint by expressing it in the format of a Korean Central News Agency article and not by senior officials, to leave the door open for dialogue with the U.S.


The Retired Investor: Want equality? Start With Better Jobs

Jobs. They are the primary focus of the Federal Reserve Bank, the Biden administration, the Republican opposition, and most U.S. corporations. Supposedly, with all this high-powered attention, we still can't find enough workers to fill all the positions available. Has anyone questioned why?

One important reason might be that 60 percent of jobs in the U.S. are considered "mediocre" or "of poor quality," according to a recent Gallup survey. If you combine those findings with the fact that many workers in the service economy are poorly compensated, the problem begins to come into clearer focus.

If you listen to the free market critics, generous Federal unemployment checks are the root cause of the problem. These simpletons argue that these higher benefits have discouraged workers from returning to their former jobs. They ignore the obvious, which is that if the "government dole" is preferable to the offered wage, then that wage must be far too low. It is myths like these, as well as the historical focus on the number of jobs gained or lost without paying attention to the quality of employment, which obscures the truth.

American companies, especially in the service sector, have spent the last thirty-plus years cutting wages and benefits in the name of reducing costs and improving profit margins. Global competition and lower wages abroad (especially in China) have been blamed for this development. That trend has reversed in a big way, but here in the U.S. we act like it is still a fact.

Our treatment of the American worker, especially the lower-income, service worker, needs to change. A recent Gallup poll, for example, found that only one-third of low-income workers received fringe benefits like health insurance and retirement benefits. An even smaller number received paid sick leave. Is it any wonder that only 28 percent of the lowest quintile workers claimed to have a "good" job?

Remember all the fuss when the Biden Administration tried to raise the minimum wage earlier this year? No dice. Here's another myth: the federal minimum wage is meant to be a living wage. At the going rate ($7.25 per hour), a family of four is living well below the poverty line. The reality is that about half of America's working population earns less than a living wage.

Is it any wonder we have exploding rates of crime among our youth?

Parents, who just want to feed themselves and their children, are forced to work, sometimes two jobs, away from home until the early hours. That leaves their kids alone and unsupervised for much of the day and night. We all know this but choose to look the other way or worse, use the race card as an explanation. Shame on us!

But simply paying workers more is not the answer, although it certainly helps. Creating an entirely new culture around the job is the challenge we face. Not only must we, as a nation, provide higher pay and better benefits, but also a workplace culture that improves the overall lives of our employees. To me, a quality job is one that makes a person feel valued and respected with a voice in their workplace. I see it as an opportunity to shape my work life, while contributing to the goals of an organization.

If this sounds schmaltzy to you, or a job description above your pay grade, consider this: Jobs that do not meet employees' needs have a higher-than-average turnover rate, poorer employee productivity, and a lower-quality consumer experience. Amid the competition to hire workers in today's post-pandemic environment, I believe workers at all levels are seeking more than just a sign-on bonus, or a bump up over a minimum wage level.

Otherwise, chances are your new hire will consider their position as "just a job," as opposed to "a career." As such, these disengaged employees cost businesses an average of $350 billion every year in productivity, or $2,246 per disengaged employee. In a tight labor market, with traditional hiring habits of "only money counts," a high turnover of employees is a given.

The cost of replacing an employee can range from one-half to two times the employee's annual salary.

The pandemic has changed quite a few things, some temporary and others permanent.

The American worker took it on the chin during the last year and a half. Millions were unemployed, while many that did show up to work were faced with constant danger to their health and safety. Essential workers in health care, early childhood education, food production and delivery, as well as countless minimum wage workers not only showed up, but delivered in our time of need.

Many others managed to work from home, delivering to their employer extra hours, higher productivity, and lower expenses for the same, or lesser wages. Going forward, there is no need for America's workers to justify their worth. That's been proven, in my opinion.

No, the ball is squarely in the employers' court. American workers have experienced deteriorating wages and working conditions over the last few decades. As a result, fundamental pillars of our democracy have been eroded. Economic stability and opportunity have decreased dramatically, while inequality has risen to historical levels. The present polarization of this country is no accident. Our workers need and deserve better jobs with higher wages and a radical change in the quality of the workplace.
American Legion members Stan Gajda and Post 160 historian John Bordeau display the two books about Col. William Koch that the Legion is selling to support its scholarship fund.

Adams American Legion Remembers Local Veteran With Books



Col. William C. Koch Jr. ADAMS, Mass.  The American Legion Post 160 is selling two books outlining the early life and career in the military of Col. William Carl Koch Jr., an Air Force pilot and Adams native.

"The Diary of Elsie Kleiner Koch" and his autobiography, "My Dash," look back on Koch's life and long career.

"I think it is an important story," Legionnaire Stan Gajda said. "He was an Adams resident and his mother and father lived in Adams. He was brought up in Adams until he left for the Air Force ... he was a great person; a great sense of humor."

Koch, who died in 2020, flew more than 100 combat and combat support missions in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. He also ferried freight and passengers around the world, flew nearly a dozen different types of planes, was later assigned to satellite tracking and data operations and earned a master of science degree in between. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Gajda said his family was close to Koch, especially his daughter Monique Yates, who also joined the Air Force and became a pilot.

"He was a good friend and inspired her to go into the Air Force. I am very proud of her," he said. "My daughter got all of these books when he passed."

Yates compiled the two books and Gajda said "The Diary of Elsie Kleiner Koch" is a collection of journal entries from Koch's mother. The book retells Koch's childhood and is set in 1930s Adams.

"I think a lot of people would be interested in reading these diaries. They are about everything he did in Adams. Fishing in the Hoosic River," he said. "They used to eat what they caught because no one had any money back then."

"My Dash" tells Koch's story through his early years, education, and life in the Air Force.

"In the book, it tells you all the places he landed," he said.

The books can be purchased at the Adams American Legion and proceeds will go toward future scholarships for high school students.

"He would have been proud of this," Gajda said.
Principal Tracey Tierney, left, staff and pupils in Savoy celebrate year's end and their ability to stay in the classroom throughout the school year. The tiny school made it through the year without an incidence of COVID-19. High fives all around. PreviousNext

Savoy Students Conclude School Year After 170 Days In Person



The school year ends in Savoy with a wave goodbye. SAVOY, Mass.  The end of the school year is always something to celebrate, especially for the 44 Savoy pupils who spent 170 days in person in the classroom during the first global pandemic in a century.

"One hundred and 70 days ... it is just amazing," Principal Tracy Tierney said Friday before the early dismissal. "It took the support of the whole community to make this happen."

The Emma L. Miller Elementary School, like all other schools, shut down in the spring of 2020 during the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. But once they were allowed to return to in-person learning, Savoy teachers, students, and families were determined to stay.

"After that experience, we were determined to get back here," Tierney said. "It wasn't good, and we knew it wasn't good for kids ... . We had our school nurse here every day and she was tenacious. All of the teachers were willing to come in and do this, and the families supported all of the new procedures. It was quite the accomplishment."

This followed the example of other schools in the Northern Berkshire School Union that, because of the schools' smaller sizes, were able to open on schedule in the fall after a great deal of effort in ensuring safety. Savoy, Florida and Rowe were all in-person and Clarksburg was all but its middle school, which was hybrid.

Tierney said staff stuck to the new procedures and she was happy to say that with mask-wearing and social distancing and months of cleaning and sanitizing, there were zero COVID-19 cases at the school.

"Everyone has done everything they had to do to make our school year successful," Tierney said. "We have kept everyone healthy."

This allowed for a 170-day in-person education run that was only broken up by two remote snow days.

There were balloons and signs in the pre-K through Grade 6 school congratulating children and staff for accomplishing something so many larger schools could not.

Kids were queued in the hallway preparing for the OK to head out to the bus. Teachers and staff high-fived them as they waited in the hallway for the anticipated "school is out for the summer" announcement.

Tierney said there was a fear among educators that the children would fall behind with a year in remote learning. But this was not the case in Savoy.

"We just did our final assessments for the year and a lot of our kids are right where they needed to be," she said. "Everyone was here and healthy."

She said they did not only achieve their educational goals, but provided a safe space for kids during a troubling time.

"The social-emotional element is important. Even though the kids are here we know that there are challenges," she said. "For parents to know that they have a safe place for their kids to come every day I think is good. We are here to do what is best for the kids."

Tierney said although COVID-19 was a disruption, disruptions aren't always a bad thing since they force educators to freshen up how they do things.

"We have grown in our practice. Our teachers have done new things," she said. "You go along with the status quo and I think it helps to change things up."

That being said, she was happy to get the 2020 -2021 school year in the rearview mirror.

"We are excited about next year and the increased time learning," she said. "Even though we have been here, we have taken so much time handwashing, sanitizing, even lunch and recess take longer. We are excited to get back to just teaching kids."
Ban on salmon fishing on River Teno along Finland-Norway border affecting local economy and traditional livelihoods

by Saara-Maria Salonen

June 11,2021 | Source: The Barents Observer

River Teno, or Tana, is a 361 kilometre long river which marks the border of Finland and Norway for 256 kilometres. For years, River Teno has been almost synonymous with salmon fishing  during the summer months, the river banks are bustling with locals and tourists, all of whom are after the biggest catch. Natural Resources Institute Finland says that River Teno is the most diverse salmon river in the world, and it hosts approximately 30 genetically different salmon populations.



While salmon fishing is one of the most important attractions for tourists, it is a very important aspect of the local Sami culture and traditional livelihood. The Sami people around the Teno have been fishing salmon using traditional fishing methods for as long as anyone can remember  and this year, for the first time ever, they will not be able to practice their traditions.



For the fishing season of 2021 both the Finnish and the Norwegian governments have come to a decision to ban all fishing on River Teno, its tributaries, estuaries and the Finnmark sea areas between May and December. The decision puts a halt to the local summer; the normally busy hotels and restaurants remain relatively empty and the locals will not get a taste of fresh salmon this year.



The need to limit salmon fishing on River Teno is not a surprise nor the first time limitations have happened. The amount of salmon on River Teno has been rapidly declining in recent years, and temporary limitations have already happened in 2017 but a total ban has taken the locals by surprise.



Even more surprising was the Norwegian governments decision to ease the already agreed upon restrictions and allow fishing in the Finnmark sea areas, except for the estuary of River Teno.



The decision to ban salmon fishing on River Teno, but allow them in Finnmark, has been taken with mixed feelings on the Finnish side. Salmon fishing has brought a lot of life to the area and offered a much needed boost to the local economy. The decision affects traditional livelihoods of the Sami communities where they have never gone through a whole summer without salmon fishing.



Local fisherman and politician Aslat Holmberg sees the change as a double edged sword; It is a radical decision that does not have the approval of the local people, Holmberg says. Holmberg sees the decision to completely ban fishing in Teno river to be breaking the rights of the Sami people to practice their traditional livelihoods and culture. This total ban on salmon fishing seems to be a power move from the state side. It does not take into consideration us Sami rights owners, and allowing even a small amount of fishing would have had a big symbolic value, Holmberg says.



Holmberg is practicing the older methods of salmon fishing on River Teno and has spent all of his summers on the river. This year is the first one when he will not be catching any salmon and the first time he will have a summer holiday. Even though this summer will be different from all the others, he does understand the need for restrictions. I do recognise the need to protect Teno salmon, last summer was very bad and I, too, have a deep worry about the state of the salmon population. I find it good that there are restrictions, but I cannot support a total ban, Holmberg elaborates.



When asked about the decision by the Norwegian government to lift the ban in the Tana fjord where the river runs out, Holmberg underlines that he does not want to look at this through the lens of jealousy and he is happy that the Sami people living by the sea in Finnmark are able to practice their traditional livelihoods. However, he does not see this as fair; It does feel like cheating. The total ban was introduced by the Norwegian government, and this was used to convince the Finnish government to join the ban. People have wondered here if this ban will be useful if every fifth of the salmon caught on the sea is Teno salmon, Holmberg says.



Tiina Salonen is the owner of Aurora Holidays and Lohisuvannon Mokit accommodation services in Utsjoki. Salonen is equally upset about the decision to ban salmon fishing on Teno river, although she does recognise the need to preserve the salmon population. While it is important to protect the salmon, the ban has been a big blow for the industry that has already been hugely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Usually the cottages would be fully booked by now with visitors from all around Finland, some of whom have been coming to the same place every summer for over ten years. We had high expectations for the summer, we had a lot of bookings and a lot of fishers coming, Salonen says. Salonen and her team had just finished building a new restaurant and more accommodation space in December 2019, before the pandemic hit, and they were hoping that the summer could mend the losses from the previous year.



The timing of this is absurd - this is the second time when fishing has been restricted with a two month notice, she continues, referring to the restrictions on salmon fishing in 2017.



This is a similar situation as four years ago, suddenly over 70% of our bookings were cancelled, Salonen explains.



It feels like this area is often forgotten when decisions like these are made. The decision makers do not seem to care what happens to the people and businesses here. Now that Norway has decided to lift some restrictions, is Finland going to do nothing? she continues.



When asked what kind of expectations Salonen has for next summer, she says I do not believe that this will be the case only for one summer, I believe this will be continued in the future as well. Lets see if there is still a place for people to stay here then, this will have a massive impact on the businesses in the area.



The ban does not only affect the business owners and fishers of the immediate area around Teno, but it will be seen all throughout Lapland. It will affect the grocers in the area, petrol sales, accommodation throughout the main roads leading from the South to the top of the North.



Vuokko Tieva-Niittyvuopio is the municipal manager of Utsjoki municipality and has closely examined the financial effects of the ban on the municipality and its residents. This has a vast effect [on the municipality] and means approximately 5 million euro loss on the regional economics, Tieva-Niittyvuopio explains. She continues to explain that the municipality is expecting support from the Finnish government in order to make up for the losses of this sudden change in Utsjokis economics. The change will also affect the municipality and its residents in a larger scale; this affects peoples financial situation, their mental health, physical health, the effects of the decision are manifold, she explains.



The municipality has already suffered from the Covid-19 pandemic, border closures and the sudden stop of cross-border trade. We have not had any time to prepare for this  not the municipality nor the businesses of the area, Tieva-Niittyvuopio continues.



While the ban does have a large-scale effect on the local economy, it seems that the reduced salmon population has not gone unnoticed by the locals. People have been surprisingly positive about the ban, because salmon is so important that people are ready to make sacrifices for a while in order to protect the future, Tieva-Niittyvuopio concludes.



Even though sacrifices are being made this year, and salmon is arguably the biggest attraction to the area, River Tana has so much more to offer. Aslat Holmerg sums up his thoughts; It is quite strange how salmon has become the main attraction here, as if salmon is the only fish in the river, he says. People will want to go to Teno regardless, and older people have long been talking about how there is more and more pike in the river which will eat the salmon parr, he continues. Fishing for pike would have a positive impact on the salmon population in River Teno  and it is delicious, too. Holmberg has learnt how to make traditional dried pike, koskepusko, and praises the delicious graylings too.



With or without the possibility to fish for salmon, River Teno and its surroundings are areas of outstanding natural beauty  tourists might be allured to the area for hikes in the beautiful nature, fish for graylings or pike and enjoy the midnight sun in the North. Sadly, it seems that the appeal of salmon is greater for the tourists than any of the other attractions of the area. The locals are cautiously wishing that next summer will have the area back to normal, but only time will tell how the salmon population will recover.

 2002 - 2021 Publisher: The Independent Barents Observer AS

Theme(s): Communities and Organisations.
Three fishermen rescued from the Caribbean Sea

June 11,2021 | Source: Dominican Today

Three fishermen were rescued alive from the waters of the Caribbean Sea by naval units of the Dominican Navy after the boat found itself adrift 12 nautical miles from Saona Island.



They are the Dominicans Rony de la Cruz, Reynaldo Jimenez de la Cruz, and Yoriel Rijo Santana. They were rescued this Wednesday by the Atria LI-157 speedboat, which was patrolling the area.



The Navy spokesman, Captain Jose Vasquez, said that the fishermen were found in optimal conditions and received all the institutions facilities.



However, he added that the general commander of the Navy, Vice Admiral Ramon Gustavo Betances Hernandez, had ordered medical assistance to those rescued if necessary.



The three Creoles told the members of the Navy that due to the strong waves, the engine of the boat in which they were fishing broke down, leaving them adrift.



They said that both they and their families are grateful for the quick action of the Dominican Navy, succeeding in rescuing them safely from the waters of the Caribbean Sea.

 DominicanToday.com

Theme(s): Communities and Organisations.
China suspends frozen seafood import from six Indian firms after traces of virus found on packing

June 11,2021 | Source: ET

China on Thursday suspended the import of frozen seafood products from six Indian marine export companies after traces of coronavirus were detected on the packaging.



Since early last year, China has been testing imported frozen food products from all over the world. It has periodically suspended imports from companies after finding traces of the virus on the packaging.



The General Administration of Customs of China in a press release said the traces of the virus were found on the packaging.



The General Administration of Customs of China in a press release said the traces of the virus were found on the outer packages of the seafood products from the six companies and imports would be suspended for a week.



China has largely controlled the spread of the coronavirus, which first emerged in Wuhan in December 2019, with strict measures, though a handful of cases, largely attributed to those arriving from abroad, continued to be reported in the country.



On Thursday, China's National Health Commission said six more locally transmitted Covid-19 cases, all in Guangdong province, and 15 new imported cases on the mainland were reported on Wednesday.

 Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. All rights reserved.

Theme(s): Post Harvest Technology and Trade.
Malaysia facing shortage of foreign fishers

by Toan Dao

June 11,2021 | Source: SeafoodSource

COVID-19-related travel restrictions have prevented foreign workers from entering Malaysia, resulting in a labor shortage in the countrys fisheries sector.



Malaysia began a two-week lockdown, or movement control order, from 1 June to contain a surge of the coronavirus infections across the country. As a result, it has been difficult for fishing companies in Malaysia to bring in crew members from other countries, The Star reported 8 June.



Fisheries Development Authority of Malaysia (LKIM) Chairman Datuk Syed Abu Hussin Hafiz Syed Abdul Fasal said his agency is willing to help local recruiters pass foreign workers through Malaysias land borders.



LKIM has received approval from the Immigration Department to bring in crew members from Thailand and Vietnam to work in deep-sea [fisheries], he said.



Fish landings in Malaysia have declined by 10 percent during the current lockdown as a result of the shortage of foreign crews, The Star reported. But Fasal said the shortage can be covered by local fishermen and that fish supply is sufficient for domestic consumption.



LKIM also has stocks of frozen fish kept by companies that can help cover the shortage of fish supply in the market, he said at a press briefing.



Malaysia reported 5,566 new cases of COVID-19 on 8 June, bringing the countrys total to 541,319. More than 3,500 Malaysians have died from COVID-19. In Thailand and Vietnam, where Malaysia wants to hire workers for its fisheries sector, the situation is also worsening.



Thailand had 2,662 new cases as of 8 June, with a total of 182,548 people infected and nearly 1,300 mortalities from COVID-19, according to The Nation. Vietnam had more than 9,000 cases with 55 deaths as of 8 June, government data showed.

 2021 Diversified Communications. All rights reserved.

Theme(s): Communities and Organisations.




Hundreds of residents on islands off the country's south coast will receive coronavirus vaccines aboard a Navy vessel this month, the military said Friday.







The Navy conducted a mock drill with government authorities in the southwestern city of Mokpo ahead of the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine inoculation for 638 islanders aged 30 and older slated to kick off Monday.







According to the military, the Navy's 4,500-ton Hansando training ship and inflatable boats will be mobilized for the operation.







Five of the Navy's medical workers will be dispatched to the ship, which will also have two medical refrigerators ready to store the vaccines, officials said.







The inoculation will take place in the hangar and the Coast Guard's helicopters will transfer any potential patients experiencing side effects to hospitals, they said.







For the vaccination, health authorities have designated the Navy ship as a temporary vaccine inoculation center and formed a pan-government task force to oversee the operation.







"Protecting the lives of our citizens is the military's top priority," Cdr. Cho Wan-hee, captain of the Hansando, said, vowing to carry out a "seamless operation."







The Hansando is the Navy's first training vessel launched in 2018 and delivered to the military in October last year. (Yonhap)


President Moon Jae-in speaks during a Cabinet meeting in Cheong Wa Dae, June 8. Yonhap



President Moon Jae-in will leave for Britain on Friday to attend an annual Group of Seven (G-7) summit, the outset of his weeklong trip to Europe that will take him to Austria and Spain as well.



He is joining the G-7 session as a guest invited by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the host of the three-day event to take place until Sunday at the Carbis Bay Hotel in the southwestern county of Cornwall.



At the "expanded" forum on Saturday and Sunday, Moon plans to have discussions on how to address such global challenges as a health crisis, climate change and trade disputes.



Other participants include the leaders of the G-7 member states: the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Britain, as well as representatives from the European Union. The leaders of Australia, India and South Africa have been also invited as guests, while Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is taking part via video links due to the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic in his country.



Moon said the G-7's invitation for South Korea to its annual summit reflects the rise of its international stature to a "level on par with G-7 members."



"My participation in the summit itself will serve as a catalyst for upgrading our diplomacy," he said during a Cabinet meeting earlier this week.



"Our responsibility and role in the international community have now grown even larger," he added, describing the G-7 summit as an opportunity to broaden Seoul's "diplomatic horizons" and enhance its role in resolving pending global issues.



On the fringes of the summit, Moon plans to hold one-on-one talks with his British, Australian and EU counterparts.



No formal bilateral meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga is scheduled, according to Cheong Wa Dae officials. But they did not rule out the possibility of the two having informal talks, like a "pull-aside," probably joined by U.S. President Joe Biden. The White House said "virtually anything is possible in a small space where 10-12 leaders gather in one place."



Following the G-7 gathering, Moon will fly to Austria for a state visit, becoming the first South Korean president to travel there officially since the two sides established diplomatic ties in 1892.



He is to have summit talks with President Alexander Van der Bellen and a meeting with Chancellor Sebastian Kurz on improving bilateral relations.



Moon will then head to Spain on Tuesday for a three-day stay, during which he will hold a summit with Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. The two are slated to attend an event together, called the South Korea-Spain green and digital business summit. Moon is set to meet with King Felipe VI, who made a visit to South Korea in 2019. (Yonhap)


The arrests took place only a few days before the snap legislative elections of 12 June, called by the government but rejected by part of the opposition and the Hirak protest movement.

Amid on-going protests against the forthcoming elections, the government is cracking down on protesters, multiplying arrests and passing of legislation against freedom of expression and demonstration.

All three individuals arrested on 10 June have been targeted before by the regime. Ihsane El Kadi, journalist and director of Radio M and the Maghreb Emergent media, has been under judicial supervision since 18 May, accused of undermining national unity and disrupting the elections.

Freelance journalist Khaled Drareni, for his part, has been regularly targeted by the Algerian authorities for his work. He was released on 25 February after spending several months in prison for "inciting an unarmed gathering and endangering national territory."

Karim Tabbou, a figure of the Hirak, has been arrested several times for "undermining national unity" or "inciting violence".

According to the National Committee for the Liberation of Detainees (or CNLD), more than 220 people are currently in prison in connection with the protests. On 19 April, journalist Rabah Kareche was imprisoned for covering a demonstration and has not been released since.

IFJ General Secretary, Anthony Bellanger, said: The Algerian authorities must stop the crackdown on media at such a critical moment for the country. We call for the immediate release of all imprisoned media workers and urge the Algerian government to respect the right of journalists to report independently ahead, during and after the legislative elections.
IFJ in the news

Every week the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) is compiling a list of the top news articles from across the world in which it is mentioned. Check all the international media coverage of IFJ, divided by language, in the period between 4 and 11 June 2021.

English

IFJ calls on Turkey to investigate mistreatment of Yemeni journalist in detention, Stockholm center for freedom

Pro-Lukashenka media union may be expelled from International Federation of Journalists, Belsat TV

Destroyed Media Building Calls into Question Future of Press Freedom in Israel and Palestine, MediaFile

Press freedom, The Nation

Global Journalism Community Slams Southern Yemen Militancys Media Takeover, News Ghana

Checked expression in Iraq, unchecked repression in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and censoring Palestine, IFEX

Global Journalism community criticizes Myanmar, Big News Network

Journalist Union of Azerbaijan sends appeal to intl organizations on death of journalists in Kalbajar district, Trend News Agency

Rights groups call for independent probe into attack on Pak lawmaker Jugnu Mohsin, Ani News

Pakistan witnesses severe criticism after journs removal, Big News Network

Despite being arrested and assaulted, Myanmar journalists say they wont be intimidated by army, Scroll.in

Pak Journalist Hamid Mir Taken Off-Air For Criticizing Army, The Tennessee Tribune

Why India should repeal sedition law, The Week

PJS condemns extended closure of Palestine TV Office in East Jerusalem, Wafa

Why India should repeal its colonial-era sedition law, Dawn

Global Journalism community criticises Myanmar for jailing two scribes on bogus charges, Devdiscourse
March 2020 will one of those points in time that separates our lives into before and after. If, for no other reason, because very little that we remember about life before March 2020 is the same as it is now.

In many ways, it's like September 11, 2001, for those who are old enough to remember. Of course, the difference is that the world changed for literally everyone last March as the Covid-19 pandemic spread across the globe and governments told their citizens to stay home.

In a blog post, Delta Air Lines shared a note written by a pilot in what we might now think of as the before time. It's an almost eerie reminder of how little we knew then about how much and how quickly the world was about to change. It's also an important lesson about being optimistic about the future. We'll get to that part in a minute.

The pilots had just arrived at Victorville Airport, also known as Southern California Logistics Airport. The name isn't important. What matters is that it's in the California desert, which is where you take planes you aren't planning to use for a while.

That reality had started to set in for the pilot who wrote the note.

Hey Pilots,

It's March 23rd and we just arrived from MSP. Very chilling to see so much of our fleet here in the desert. If you are here to pick it up then the light must be at the end of the tunnel. Amazing how fast it changed. Have a safe flight bringing it out of storage.

At the time, everyone thought it would only be a few weeks. That turned into a few more weeks, and then months. Now, 15 months later, pilots returned to Victorville to pick up the Airbus 321 that had been parked for 435 days. What a surreal feeling that must have been. What a surprise to find that note.

And yet, what a relief. The fact that we're all reading the note means that things are returning to whatever normal looks like after 15 months of what can only generously be described as the most challenging period any of us are likely to live through. "If you are here to pick it up then the light must be at the end of the tunnel," the note says, and I think that's an important reminder to all of us.

I had what I suspect was a similar feeling just the other day when I entered our oldest daughter's school for a choir concert, something we haven't been able to do for almost a year and a half. Parents hadn't been allowed in the school for anything since last March, not that there was any reason as students attended classes on Zoom, and then gradually went back to class in person this spring.

Walking into that building felt overwhelming in a way. It felt like there might be a light at the end of this tunnel.

We often don't have the ability to see very far down the road in front of us, but humanity has an extraordinary capacity to press forward, to persevere. The tunnel has been longer than anyone anticipated, but it's important to consider that we are closer to the end than we are the beginning, and that's certainly good news.

The pilot who left that note had no idea how long it would be before someone would read it, but I think it's telling that it apparently never crossed his mind that it might be possible no one would. He assumed they would. He assumed that humans would do what they've always done, which is to walk through the tunnel one step at a time until they reach the end.

Even if he had no idea how long it would be, he believed that there would be a light at the end of the tunnel. More important, he believed the tunnel had an end.

Don't underestimate how much that can change the way you look at things. And how you look at the things in front of you can change everything.
The military junta in Myanmar has hit Aung San Suu Kyi with new corruption charges, and if found guilty she faces a 15-year sentence, the local media reported on Thursday.

The 75-year-old Nobel laureate has other charges against her, including sedition and breaching a colonial-era secrecy law.

The state-run Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper reported that the new corruption charges come after the Anti-Corruption Commission investigation into Ms Suu Kyi found her guilty of committing corruption using her rank.

Ms Suu Kyi has been in detention since a military coup on 1 February that displaced her democratically elected government. Her supporters believe charges levelled against her are politically motivated.

The Anti-Corruption Commission said Ms Suu Kyi misused her authority in renting land and a building to open the Daw Khin Kyi Foundation headquarters, where she served as chairperson, CNN reported. It said an application for the land to establish a Horticulture Vocational School as part of the foundation in the capital, Naypyidaw, was not carried out in line with the procedures but with her power and authority.

The commission also mentioned that Ms Suu Kyi illegally accepted $600,000 in cash, as well as gold, while in office. Last month, Ms Suu Kyi appeared in court in Naypyidaw for the first time since the military detained her in February.

Khin Maung Zaw, her lawyer, has called these charges of corruption and bribery absurd and groundless.

He told the media: Ive never met any statesman more honest and incorruptible as Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. She might have defects but personal greed and corruption is not her traits. Those who accuse her with greed and corruption are spitting towards the sky.

As per her legal team, the trial will start on 14 June and is expected to be over by 26 July. She has also been charged with violating Covid-19 safety protocol and possessing walkie talkies and violating a secrecy law.

Myanmar is still in political turmoil and a massive civil disobedience movement was also started in Yangon against the military junta. According to the advocacy group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, more than 850 people have been killed by the military junta since the coup and 5,941 have been arrested. These include journalists, protesters, activists, even celebrities, government officials, as well as children.
President Moon Jae-in and his wife Kim Jung-sook wave at Seoul Airport in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, June 11, before departing for Britain to attend an annual Group of Seven (G-7) summit. Yonhap



President Moon Jae-in departed Friday for Britain to attend an annual Group of Seven (G-7) summit, the outset of his weeklong trip to Europe that will take him to Austria and Spain as well.



He is joining the G-7 session as a guest invited by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the host of the three-day event to take place until Sunday at the Carbis Bay Hotel in the southwestern county of Cornwall.



At the "expanded" forum on Saturday and Sunday, Moon plans to have discussions on how to address such global challenges as a health crisis, climate change and trade disputes.



Other participants include the leaders of the G-7 member states: the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Britain, as well as representatives from the European Union. The leaders of Australia, India and South Africa have been also invited as guests, while Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is taking part via video link due to the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic in his country.



Moon said the G-7's invitation for South Korea to its annual summit reflects the rise of its international stature to a "level on par with G-7 members."



"My participation in the summit itself will serve as a catalyst for upgrading our diplomacy," he said during a Cabinet meeting earlier this week.



"Our responsibility and role in the international community have now grown even larger," he added, describing the G-7 summit as an opportunity to broaden Seoul's "diplomatic horizons" and enhance its role in resolving pending global issues.



On the fringes of the summit, Moon plans to hold one-on-one talks with his British, Australian and EU counterparts.



No formal bilateral meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga is scheduled, according to Cheong Wa Dae officials. But they did not rule out the possibility of the two having informal talks, like a "pull-aside," probably joined by U.S. President Joe Biden. The White House said "virtually anything is possible in a small space where 10-12 leaders gather in one place."



Following the G-7 gathering, Moon will fly to Austria for a state visit, becoming the first South Korean president to travel there officially since the two sides established diplomatic ties in 1892.



He is to have summit talks with President Alexander Van der Bellen and a meeting with Chancellor Sebastian Kurz on improving bilateral relations.



Moon will then head to Spain on Tuesday for a three-day stay, during which he will hold a summit with Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. The two are slated to attend an event together, called the South Korea-Spain green and digital business summit. Moon is set to meet with King Felipe VI, who made a visit to South Korea in 2019.



Moon is to return to Seoul on June 18. (Yonhap)


As Joe Biden makes his presidential debut on the international stage  albeit after years of global experience as a senator and second-in-command  he seems genuinely motivated to bring other countries along in a multilateral effort to battle the climate emergency. And hes making the argument that not doing so would be dangerous to his own country.

He explained the urgency of the issue to an audience of US Air Force servicemembers at a base in the UK when he arrived for the G7 summit.

When I first was elected vice president, with President Obama, the military sat us down to let us know what the greatest threats facing America were  the greatest physical threats.

And this is not a joke, he continued. You know what the joint chiefs told us the greatest threat facing America was? Global warming. Because therell be significant population movements, fights over land, millions of people leaving places because theyre literally sinking below the sea in Indonesia; because of the fights over what is arable land anymore.

The message is unambiguous, and it tracks with Mr Bidens early moves to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement and revoke permissions granted to the now-cancelled Keystone XL pipeline. But some in Mr Bidens party are worried about the direction of the administrations domestic climate policy agenda  or as they see it, the lack of any direction.

One of the most concerned allies is Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who for nearly nine years gave weekly climate change speeches on the Senate floor under the title time to wake up . In a Twitter thread just before Mr Biden departed for the G7, he shared just how worried hes become.

OK, Im now officially very anxious about climate legislation, he wrote. Ill admit Im sensitive from the Obama climate abandonment, but I sense trouble.

Climate has fallen out of the infrastructure discussion, as it took its bipartisanship detour. It may not return. So then what? I dont see the preparatory work for a close Senate climate vote taking place in the administration...

We need planning, organising and momentum. Its not going to be easy. And it has to work. We are running out of time.

As Mr White House mentioned, the alarm bell is ringing for climate campaigners and legislators in large part because of the wrangling over the administrations proposed infrastructure package  a trillion-dollar-plus behemoth that includes funding and tax incentives meant to steer the country away from polluting energy sources as quickly and comprehensively as possible.

There is no chance of it passing the Senate without a bipartisan compromise, and the president has walked away from the first effort to strike one with the lead Republican negotiator, West Virginias Shelley Moore Capito, whose counter-offer came in billions of dollars below Mr Bidens planned investment.

Mr Biden is now negotiating with a bipartisan group of centrist senators, among them Ms Capitos Democratic West Virginia colleague, Joe Manchin. So far, he has been the most difficult Senate Democrat for Mr Biden and the Democratic leadership to get in line  and when it comes to building climate change action into the infrastructure package, Mr Manchins solid support for the coal industry in his state does not augur well.

On the other side of the coin are progressive Democrats in both chambers of Congress who are growing increasingly worried that the administration may be prepared to water down environmental action in order to get legislation through  this after the Green New Deal featured heavily in the 2020 campaign up and down the ballot (including in Mr Bidens own campaign platform ).

As Green New Deal co-sponsor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it, the effort to find compromises on climate and other measures could be the undoing of the progressive agenda during what could turn out to be an extremely narrow window of opportunity.

Pres. Biden & Senate Dems, she tweeted , should take a step back and ask themselves if playing patty-cake w GOP Senators is really worth the dismantling of peoples voting rights, setting the planet on fire, allowing massive corporations and the wealthy to not pay their fair share of taxes, etc.

Her Senate counterpart Ed Markey, who introduced the legislative package in the upper chamber, was even more blunt. I wont just vote against an infrastructure package without climate action, he declared , Ill fight against it.

But the politics of the Green New Deal are not up to Mr Biden to dictate. In part because the Democrats have made it a core part of their platform, the Republican Party has seized on the Green New Deal as an example of left-wing government overreach that will gravely damage Americas fossil fuels industries and therefore crush the job market in areas that happen to be home to swing voters.

The GOPs effort is meant to put intense pressure on centrist Democrats representing rural and post-industrial areas to disavow the deal and promise that on their watch, fracking will not be immediately banned and coal will not be entirely eliminated. As Pennsylvania Democrat Conor Lamb told the New York Times after the November election, voters in his swing district are extremely frustrated by the message of defunding the police and banning fracking. And I, as a Democrat, am just as frustrated. Because those things arent just unpopular, theyre completely unrealistic, and they arent going to happen. And they amount to false promises by the people that call for them.

If someone in your family makes their living in some way connected to natural gas, whether on the pipeline itself, or you know, even in a restaurant that serves natural gas workers, this isnt something to joke around about or be casual about in your language.

Where does all this leave Mr Biden? He is simultaneously being forced to triangulate within his own party, to strike a compromise cobbling together factions of the two parties in the Senate, and to balance his grand international climate goal against geopolitical realities.

On that last front, the most alarming gesture for those focused on the climate emergency is the administrations decision to lift sanctions on Nord Stream 2 , a natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany that has been under construction for years. Already nearly complete, the pipeline will provide Germany with a much-needed energy as it phases out its nuclear power grid.

The Biden administration says it wants positive, stable relations with Russia, but its move has been criticised for waving through a project that will not only give Moscow much-desired leverage in Western and Central Europe but will keep a major US ally hooked up to cheap natural gas. Its hard to see how a policy like that is meant to encourage faith in the kind of climate multilateralism Mr Biden is promoting at the G7.
Many parents practise yoga both as a way to increase their strength and flexibility, and to give them a little peace and tranquility amid the chaos of family life. What they may not have thought of is getting the kids to join in too.But once children get the hang of this ancient Indian practice, not only will it increase their strength and flexibility, but it can help relax them, build their self-confidence and even help them sleep, says yoga teacher Dr Kiki Morriss, author of Nurturing Your Family With Yoga.

And whats more, says Morriss, who is also a medical doctor currently working with the Covid-19 vaccination programme, if the family does yoga together it can bring harmony to family life, as well as creating a bond through the shared interest.

Family yoga will help you foster health and wellbeing for your whole family, bringing happiness and harmony to your home, she promises.

As a doctor and yoga teacher, Im constantly inspired by the potential of yoga to prevent and treat health conditions, as well as to relieve symptoms. Through my work, Im reminded on a daily basis that yoga is powerful medicine and Im a strong advocate for making it available on prescription in the NHS.

Here, Morriss explains why getting the whole family involved with yoga is a good idea, and outlines a few moves children can try to get started

Why is yoga good for children?

Children need yoga as much as we do and there are many benefits, as it helps them build a strong and flexible body, achieve a peaceful and relaxed state of mind, sleep well, build self-confidence and improve focus, concentration and memory. Its also invaluable in helping them manage stress and anxiety, particularly as we navigate these challenging times.

By introducing children to yoga, youre giving them a gift for life.

How old should children be before they start yoga?

Mother-of-three Morriss says its never too early to introduce children to yoga, and parents can start gentle baby yoga, which reinforces the bond between parent and child, when babies are just six-weeks-old. Babies are natural yogis and you can watch them coming into poses without any need for tuition, she says.

Young children approach yoga with a wonderful sense of joy and curiosity. They have natural flexibility and a good sense of balance. With gentle encouragement, they learn to focus and concentrate over time.

Early exposure to yoga lays the foundations for the teen and adult years, she says, acting as a powerful, preventative medicine and supporting good mental, physical and emotional health.

How do you get children to focus when doing yoga?

Morriss, whos been teaching children yoga for 20 years, suggests starting by teaching children a yoga pose beginning with the first letter of their name. This always gets their attention, she says. Then you can spell out their name using yoga poses.

Morriss says many yoga poses are named after and inspired by animals and nature, so parents can encourage children to imagine they are a pride of lions, a forest of trees, a meadow of butterflies, etc. The ability to visualise and create mental imagery has been shown to reduce anxiety and build resilience in young people, she says.

Playing yoga games, which are outlined in the book, or asking kids to talk you through flowing yoga sequences, are a great way to keep children engaged, while asking them to do balancing poses is usually another winner, she says.

Children love balancing poses. See how long they can balance in Tree while brushing their teeth, she suggests.

Keep your family yoga simple and brief. Remember you can begin with just one yoga pose or a single breath in and out. Develop your own yoga practice. 

Do children enjoy yoga?

Morriss says children usually find yoga is fun, particularly if their parents practise it with them in a playful, joyful, light-hearted way.

How often does a family need to do yoga to benefit from it?

Morriss says just doing yoga once or twice a week is great, but she urges parents not to worry too much about how often theyre practising. Encourage your children to practise, but dont put pressure on them, she advises.

A single, short-lived pose experienced one day may be the seed that grows into a lifelong love of yoga for your children.

Is yoga alone enough exercise for children?

Official recommendations are that children aged five to 18 do at least 60 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity a day, as well as exercises to strengthen their muscles and bones.

Morriss says yoga poses are a great way to strengthen muscles and bones and can be used, along with other forms of exercise, to achieve the recommended level of physical activity.

What simple yoga positions can children start with?

Frog

Frog

1. Squat with your feet slightly wider than hip-width apart.

2. Lower your heels down to the floor, but dont worry if you cant bring them flat on the ground.

3. Place your hands on the floor in front of your feet.

Encourage children to squat regularly in Frog pose to keep their legs and back healthy. The pose will also support the healthy functioning of their digestive system.

Butterfly

Butterfly pose

1. Sit with the soles of your feet together and hold your ankles.

2. Close your eyes and take a few steady breaths in and out.

3. Imagine youre a butterfly and picture the colour and patterns of your wings.

Butterfly pose will calm and reassure your children, while helping to maintain the natural flexibility of their hips and strengthen their back.

Tree

A child in the Tree pose (Vanessa Berberian/PA)

1. Stand tall with your feet together.

2. Lift your right foot to the inside of your left leg.

3. Bring your hands into prayer position in front of your chest and then above your head.

4. Balance for as long as possible and then repeat on the other side.

Tree pose will strengthen childrens legs and arms, improve their balance and develop confidence, focus and concentration. It will also develop their imagination, as they imagine theyre palm trees on a sandy beach etc.

Nurturing Your Family with Yoga cover (Yoga Words/PA)

Nurturing Your Family With Yoga by Kiki Morriss is published by YogaWords, priced 16.99. Available now.
After a long day discussing global issues ranging from the Covid-19 pandemic to climate change, Group of Seven (G7) leaders will sit down together for dinner on Saturday evening.

In the past, dinners attended by the G7 summit leaders have been lavish affairs. But this year, the UK government has enlisted the services of a chef known for his informal feast nights who cooks in a hut on Porthcurnick Beach.

Simon Stallard, chef and founder of the Hidden Hut, will serve the leaders of the wealthiest nations around a barbecue on the beach in Carbis Bay.

He described his mass barbecues as being a bit like a big family picnic, where guests usually bring their own plates and cutlery and dine at shared tables.

The chef told The Times that the G7 booking came as a surprise, adding: But its so beautiful in the bay, and I think if youre on the beach you want to make the most of it.

Mr Stallards cooking uses fresh, seasonal produce, and he is passionate about sustainable dining. He is well-known for developing his own tools and techniques, from fire pits in the sand to wind-chime fish smokers.

The Hidden Hut opened 10 years ago. The Independent describes it as a first-class foodie hub and has recommended it among the top 10 things to do in Cornwall.

Anyone who wants to dine at The Hidden Hut must first get their hands on a feast night ticket, but these are notorious for selling out as soon as they are announced. In 2017, more than 22,000 people applied for just 600 tickets over the huts summer season.

According to Cornwall Live, The Hidden Hut counts actors Dame Judie Dench and Dawn French among its fans. In 2013, it was chosen as the venue for The Staves as part of Nokias Pop-up Lumia concerts.

Tonight, the lucky G7 leaders will be served scallops, Curgurrell crab claws and Portscatho mackerel canapes to start the meal.

For the main course, Mr Stallard will serve Moorland sirloin and Newlyn lobster with Cornish potato chips and St Just broccoli.

Dessert will be a Beach Hut Sundae, and the dinner guests will be encouraged to cap off the evening around the fire pits with hot buttered rum and toasted marshmallows.

Mr Stallard told The Times that he hoped the vibe will give the leaders a sense of Cornish hospitality and soften some of the edges.

He added that the opportunity was a great platform for Cornwall.

They will spend the evening being entertained with traditional songs performed by a Cornish sea shanty group, Du Hag Owr, who also entertained patrons at Mr Stallards hut.

In 2018, Mr Stallard published a cookbook in his huts namesake, which adapts his feast recipes for home cooks. The book received praise for being an inspiration for summer cooking.
A former Ukip member has been found guilty of neo-Nazi terror offences and explosive charges.

Dean Morrice, 34, had explosive substances at his home near Bristol, as well as crossbows and parts for a 3D-printed gun.

His trial at Kingston Crown Court heard that he also ran a social media channel which encouraged far-right terror attacks.

Morrice told the court that he developed an interest in politics in around 2008 or 2009 and was initially a fan of Nigel Farage, but then became more extreme.

He said he joined Ukip because he supported its views and was a member until a few years ago.

Morrice told jurors that a Facebook group dedicated to King Nigel [Farage] was his first engagement with politics online, before he became involved in neo-Nazi chat groups.

He denied all charges but was convicted of eight terror offences and two counts of possessing explosive substances on Thursday.

After 11 hours of deliberations, jurors reached unanimous verdicts on eight charges and found Morrice guilty of having materials to make incendiary thermite and possessing a terrorist document relating to weapons by a majority of 10 to two.

He was convicted of two counts of possessing explosive substances without a lawful purpose, one of encouraging terrorism, three of disseminating terrorist publications and four of possessing documents useful to a terrorist.

The defendant, wearing a dark suit and tie, stood impassively in the dock as the verdicts were read out.

Judge Peter Lodder QC remanded him in custody ahead of a sentencing hearing on Monday.

Morrice, who previously worked as a driver for the British Army, had collected items including crossbows, a tactical vest, skull mask, far-right stickers and a badge reading ban Islam.

Prosecutors said he held up the Christchurch mosque shooter Brenton Tarrant as an example to follow, and filmed himself strumming along with footage of the March 2019 massacre.

 Christchurch gunman sentenced to life in prison without parole

The court heard Morrice read and digested Tarrants manifesto, which called for further attacks by soldiers that will fight for the future of [the white] race.

Prosecutor Naomi Parsons said Morrice shared the manifesto online and ran his own channel on the encrypted messaging app Telegram that encouraged far-right terror attacks.

Ms Parsons said the channel unapologetically, unambiguously, pumped out neo-Nazi propaganda which encouraged killing of non-whites and Jewish people.

One post read: We must guarantee that our propaganda reaches every white soul on this tiny planet of ours  I call upon you once more to constantly, tirelessly carry out the great mission of our propaganda minister, Dr Goebbels, ensuring the spread of the National-Socialist Truth 24/7.

Morrice made more than 642 posts on the channel between January and August last year, including memes, videos, messages and links to publications.

By the time of his arrest on 20 August 2020, the channel had 720 subscribers.

Jurors were told that police officers who searched his home found chemicals that would make 1.3kg of the explosive blank powder and 680g of thermite.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 12 June 2021 Oxfam campaigners wearing costumes depicting G7 leaders pose for photographers on Swanpool Beach near Falmouth, Cornwall EPA UK news in pictures 11 June 2021 Members of the Vaxinol team, who are commercial, industrial and residential cleaners specialising in disinfection and decontamination, use electrostatic spray systems to deep clean the Only Fools Bar in Liverpool PA UK news in pictures 10 June 2021 A woman walks her dogs as the incoming tide begins to wash away the heads of G7 leaders drawn in the sand by activists on the beach at Newquay, Cornwall AP UK news in pictures 9 June 2021 Adam Chamberlain, 45, general manager of Big Tree pub in Sheffield, has put up over 500 flags, taking 36 hours, in preparation for Euro 2020, which kicks off this weekend Tom Maddick / SWNS UK news in pictures 8 June 2021 REUTERS UK news in pictures 7 June 2021 A pedestrian wearing a face covering walks over Westminster Bridge near the Houses of Parliament in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 6 June 2021 Isobel Salamon, founder of the Edinburgh Cinema Club, poses alongside the Leith Trainspotting murals in Quality Yard, Leith, Edinburgh, for the programme launch of the Cinescapes Festival which starts on July 4 with a Trainspotting 1 and 2 double bill PA UK news in pictures 5 June 2021 A long exposure photograph captures the rotation of the earth as the stars blur into circles over Knowlton church ruins in Dorset Nick Lucas/SWNS UK news in pictures 4 June 2021 Balloonists take flight during the opening of the Midlands Air Festival in Alcester, Warwickshire PA UK news in pictures 3 June 2021 Members of the Household Cavalry during the Major General's annual inspection of the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment in Hyde Park, London PA UK news in pictures 2 June 2021 Hannah Vitos of the Blenheim Art Foundation, poses for a photograph next to artist Ai Weiwei's Gilded Cage (2017) sculpture in the grounds of Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, Britain Reuters UK news in pictures 1 June 2021 People swim in the Sky Pool, a transparent swimming pool bridge across two exclusive residential blocks standing next to the US Embassy in Nine Elms, in London, Tuesday, June 1, 2021 AP UK news in pictures 31 May 2021 People enjoy the hot weather at Brighton beach Reuters UK news in pictures 30 May 2021 People venture into the sea as they enjoy themselves during a hot day on Brighton Beach AP UK news in pictures 29 May 2021 Swimmers at the Stonehaven Open Air Pool in Aberdeenshire, which reopens after lockdown restrictions were eased PA UK news in pictures 28 May 2021 Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures as he meets Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban at Downing Street in London REUTERS UK news in pictures 27 May 2021 White Pelicans in the sunshine in St James's Park, London PA UK news in pictures 26 May 2021 Boats are seen at Southsea Moorings in Portsmouth Reuters UK news in pictures 25 May 2021 York Glaziers Trust employees Kieran Muir (left) and Emily Price (right) remove a stained glass window panel at the start of a new five year, 5m project to conserve York Minsters South East Transept and its medieval St Cuthbert Window PA UK news in pictures 24 May 2021 Dark rain clouds above an oast house at Bewl Water reservoir near Lamberhurst in Kent during one of the rainiest Mays on record, with the UK seeing 131 per cent of the usual months rainfall already PA UK news in pictures 23 May 2021 The Premier League trophy with the Manchester City club colour ribbons on, at Etihad Stadium, prior to the last Premier League match of the season. City will finally pick up the trophy after they won the league on 11 May Getty UK news in pictures 22 May 2021 Gary Kenny lifts the Buildbase FA Vase Trophy after Warrington Rylands won the FA Vase Final against Binfield at Wembley Stadium Getty UK news in pictures 21 May 2021 A family buffeted by the wind whilst crossing the the Millennium Bridge in London, with wind and rain forecast to ravage the UK on the first Friday that people have been allowed to meet in large groups outside in England PA UK news in pictures 20 May 2021 Devon And Cornwall Police Demonstrate Their Skills For Policing The G7 Summit Getty Images UK news in pictures 18 May 2021 An employee stands before a costume for the Queen of Hearts by Bob Crowley on display at the Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London PA UK news in pictures 17 May 2021 Passengers prepare to board an easyJet flight to Faro, Portugal, at Gatwick Airport after the ban on international leisure travel for people in England was lifted following the further easing of lockdown restrictions in England PA UK news in pictures 16 May 2021 Emergency workers at the scene of a suspected gas explosion, in which a young child was killed and two people were seriously injured, on Mallowdale Ave Heysham which caused 2 houses to collapse and badly damaged another PA UK news in pictures 15 May 2021 Pro-Palestinian activists and supporters let off smoke flares, wave flags and carry placards during a demonstration in support of the Palestinian cause as violence escalates in the ongoing conflict with Israel, in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 14 May 2021 Member of staffs tighten screws and paint a Marlin skeleton, before it goes on display at the Natural History Museum in London, as the museum prepares to reopen to the public on 17 May, following the further easing of lockdown restrictions in England PA UK news in pictures 13 May 2021 A worshipper at the Baitul Futuh Mosque in Mordon, south London, ahead of Eid al-Fitr. The celebration marks the end of the Muslim month of fasting, called Ramadan. PA UK news in pictures 12 May 2021 A couple have wedding photos taken in Westminster, London Getty UK news in pictures 11 May 2021 The sun rises on Coquet Island, off Amble on the Northumberland coast, where as many as 35000 seabirds cram onto this tiny island to breed PA UK news in pictures 10 May 2021 Newly elected for a second term Mayor of London Sadiq Khan during his signing in ceremony at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on Londons Southbank PA UK news in pictures 9 May 2021 People mill around St. Michael's tower on top of Glastonbury Tor as it is seen through blooming yellow rapeseed on a day of mixed weather in Glastonbury, Somerset PA UK news in pictures 8 May 2021 Wales First Minister Mark Drakeford elbow bumps newly elected MS Labour candidates Elizabeth Buffy Williams, Rhondda, left, and Sarah Murphy, Bridgend & Porthcawl Labour, right, as they meet in Porthcawl, Wales PA UK news in pictures 6 May 2021 A group of five Sisters from Carmelite Monastery in Dysart cast their vote in the Scottish Parliamentary election at Dysart Community Hall, West Port, Dysart PA UK news in pictures 5 May 2021 Leader of the Labour Party Sir Keir Starmer (centre) with West Midlands Metro Mayor candidate Liam Byrne (far right) and Labour Deputy Leader, Angela Rayner (far left) during a visit to Birmingham, whilst on the election campaign trail PA UK news in pictures 4 May 2021 Artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey stand within 100 oak saplings which form part of a living art installation entitled Beuys' Acorns by the UK-based artist duo, outside the Tate Modern in London PA UK news in pictures 3 May 2021 Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie feeds the Gentoo penguins during a visit to Edinburgh Zoo on the campaign trail for the forthcoming Scottish Parliamentary Election on May 6 PA UK news in pictures 2 May 2021 Chelsea players celebrate their fourth goal during the Womens Champions League semi-final second leg against Bayern Munich, at Kingsmeadow Stadium in south west London. The Blues won the game 4-1, (and the tie 5-3 on aggregate) sending them through to their first Champions League final AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 1 May 2020 Demonstrators during a march through London during a 'Kill the Bill' protest Angela Christofilou UK news in pictures 30 April 2021 Shoppers queue outside Primark in Belfast as shops reopen and hospitality is able to open outdoors in Northern Ireland where lockdown restrictions have begun to gradually ease PA UK news in pictures 29 April 2021 Specialist operators at the Royal Air Force Museum Cosford, near Telford, Shropshire, clean the Hawker Hunter aircraft displayed within the museum's National Cold War Exhibition, during annual high-level aircraft cleaning and maintenance PA UK news in pictures 28 April 2021 Millions of tulips in flower near Kings Lynn in Norfolk, as Belmont Nurseries, the UK's largest commercial grower of outdoor tulips, offers socially-distanced visits to its tulip fields at Hillington to raise funds for local charity The Norfolk Hospice Tapping House PA UK news in pictures 27 April 2021 Paula Laughton checks one of the newly installed Lego models in the new Lego Mythica land at Legoland Windsor Resort PA UK news in pictures 26 April 2021 A red panda rests on a tree at Manor Wildlife park, which reopened its doors as lockdown restrictions continue to ease, in Tenby, Wales Reuters UK news in pictures 25 April 2021 Sheep climb the hillside as flames from a moor fire are seen on Marsden moor, near Huddersfield AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 24 April 2021 Supporters protest against Manchester United's owners, outside English Premier League club Manchester United's Old Trafford stadium in Manchester AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 23 April 2021 People enjoy the warm weather at City Hall near Tower Bridge in central London PA UK news in pictures 22 April 2021 Uyghurs during a demonstration in Parliament Square, London, which is being held ahead of a House of Commons debate, bought by backbench MP Nus Ghani, on whether Uyghurs in China's Xinjiang province are suffering crimes against humanity and genocide PA

The court was shown an exchange on Telegram between Morrice and a Russian neo-Nazi, where the defendant asked for help translating Russian documents from a channel regarding explosives.

If you can it would help the brotherhood more than you can know, the defendant wrote.

Morrice, who had two 3D printers, also collected instructions on making 3D-printed firearms and gun parts.

Morrice denied the offences but told the court he had fascist and neo-Nazi views.

He broke down in tears several times while being questioned during the trial, and said he felt very ashamed of his disgusting conduct.

The court heard he left the Army by the age of 18 and later worked in different jobs, and ran companies fixing gadgets and audio equipment.

Morrice denied encouraging violence or terrorism, and said he did not believe in committing acts of violence towards ethnic or religious groups.
Police have arrested seven people in Cornwall after they were found with paint and smoke grenades amid planned protests at the G7 summit.

The group were stopped and their two vehicles searched in Hayle at around 5pm on Thursday, according to a statement issued by Devon and Cornwall Police.

As well as paint and smoke grenades, loud hailers were discovered in the vehicles. Police arrested three on suspicion of possession of an article with intent to commit criminal damage, and four on suspicion of conspiracy to commit public nuisance.

A statement said: A search was carried out on the vehicles which were found to contain items including paint, smoke grenades and loud hailers.

A 30-year-old man from London, a 21-year-old woman from Wales, and a 20-year-old man from Bournemouth were arrested on suspicion of possession of an article with intent to commit criminal damage.

Two men from London aged 25 and 27, a 45-year-old woman from London and a 26-year-old woman from Epsom were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit public nuisance.

The force said they remain in police custody and their property has been seized as part of ongoing police enquiries.

We continue to support the facilitation of safe and legal protest but criminal activity and public disorder will not be tolerated, police said.

A group of around 20 activist organisations has formed a Resist G7 Coalition to protest at the G7 summit, with demonstrators previously saying that they intended to be noisy, disruptive and annoying.

Our rights werent won through quiet, polite protest. Our rights were won through being noisy, disruptive and annoying, said the Kill The Bill group, which is campaigning against proposed legislation to grant police further powers to curb protests.

Activists from local Extinction Rebellion groups are also voicing their concerns at the summit, calling for world leaders to take stronger action to tackle the climate emergency.

The protests come as Boris Johnson defended taking a private plane rather a train to get to the summit, where climate change will be a key focus. Flying creates almost five times the amount of emissions compared to the equivalent train journey, according to the governments own emission figures.

A statement on the coalitions website reads: We believe in a world where we put people and planet before profit, where justice means justice on a global scale, where wealth is shared equally and not pocketed by the 1 per cent.

Our world should not be a play thing for the rich. It belongs to all of us. And its down to us, the people, to stand together, to resist, and to create the future we want to see. The world leaders at the G7 arent going to do it for us. The system needs changing. And if we want change, we have to act.

Some 5,000 extra officers have been brought in to police the event.
Peru is to officially investigate whether drinking or injecting bleach could cure Covid-19, it has been reported.

Lawmakers in the South American countrys congress have voted to set up a committee investigating if chlorine dioxide could be used in the fight against the deadly virus.

The chemical is commonly used in industrial processes such as sterilising medical equipment, cleaning industrial machinery or bleaching wood and textiles.

Scientists across the planet have repeatedly warned against its use inside the human body pointing out that the effects  including internal bleeding, respiratory failure and acute kidney failure  could be lethal.

But in a move echoing Donald Trumps infamous suggestion that scientists should explore the idea of injecting bleach, Peruvian congress member Posemoscrowte Chagua introduced a congress motion on Thursday asking health ministers to take evidence on the subject.

Chagua, who is a doctor, dismissed concerns that chlorine dioxide is toxic and instead suggested it could prove to be a vital tool in the battle with coronavirus, reported Vice.

Lawmakers voted 49 to 39 in favour of his proposal.

The vote came as Peru continues to be devastated by the pandemic.

The country has the highest reported per capita death rates in the world and, while fatality numbers are now slowing slightly, April saw record numbers of people killed by the virus.

That followed the countrys vaccinegate scandal, which saw hundreds of politicians jump the national queue to secretly receive their jabs early, prompting considerable national outrage.

All the same, not everyone agrees that bleach is the answer to the nations woes.

Samuel Cosme, general secretary of Perus society of intensive care specialists, condemned congresss move, saying he had already had to repeatedly treat Covid-19 patients whose conditions had been worsened by consuming chlorine dioxide.

The situation with the pandemic in Peru is lamentable, and so is the situation in our congress, he said.
A replica of Noahs Ark is stuck in the UK after coastguards deemed it unworthy for the seas.

The 2,000 sqm ship - which serves as a floating museum - has been moored in Ipswich for more than a year and a half ago.

Coastguards have said the replica of Noahs Ark has been detained in the east England town.

Freedom of Information requests have revealed the Maritime and Coastguard Agency do not deem the museum seaworthy, according to the Ipswich Star.

The newspaper reported it has been receiving a fine of 500 a day since the start of April, on top of a bill of more than 12,000 before that for its detention.

According to the Ipswich Star, its detention report suggests the ship did not have key certificates when it arrived and there were concerns over overdue services for fire equipment, life jackets and life crafts.

The four-floor ship calls itself a half-sized replica of Noahs original boat.

On its website, it says it is an educational and cultural celebration of many of the Bibles legendary stories and is the  worlds only floating exhibition of Bible stories.

Local media reported that the museum had been detained by coastguards for nearly the whole of its stay in Ipswich, after arriving in November 2019.

A Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) spokesperson said:The vessel Noahs Ark will remain detained until all the deficiencies have been put right and an MCA surveyor invited back by the owners to check theyve been corrected.

The ark had visited the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Norway before arriving on British shores.

It has been open to visitors in Orwell Quay in Ipswich since its arrival.

In a statement to the Ipswich Star, the owners of the vessel said: The requirement to obtain full registration and the required certificates was and may not be achievable within the required timescales and would incur unreasonable costs and time delays to the vessel.

Towage plans have now been made for the Ark to return to the Netherlands and the vessel is still awaiting towage approval to depart from the UK.

Owners have been continuously seeking a means (of release) and (permittance) to be towed on a single voyage from the UK to the Netherlands, with an agreed towage plan.

A Department for Transport spokesperson said: We are aware of the situation and are in discussions with relevant agencies in the UK and the Netherlands. Safety remains the top priority.
Boris Johnson has hailed Joe Biden as a breath of fresh air after the pair met for the first time ahead of tomorrows G7 summit in Cornwall.

The prime minister played down differences with Biden over Northern Ireland, insisting that the US president did not use the meeting to urge him to crack on with resolving the sausage war row with Brussels.

Mr Biden, who is proud of his Irish heritage, has left no doubt that he wants Mr Johnson to avoid anything which could risk peace on the island, with reports that he ordered US diplomats to warn Brexit minister Lord Frost against inflaming the situation.

After talks lasting more than an hour in Carbis Bay, during which they signed a new Atlantic Charter enshrining US/UK friendship, Mr Johnson was keen to stress the closeness of the partnership between the two countries.

In brief comments to broadcasters, he did not mention Mr Bidens predecessor Donald Trump and his famously belligerent approach to allies at international summits.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 12 June 2021 Oxfam campaigners wearing costumes depicting G7 leaders pose for photographers on Swanpool Beach near Falmouth, Cornwall EPA UK news in pictures 11 June 2021 Members of the Vaxinol team, who are commercial, industrial and residential cleaners specialising in disinfection and decontamination, use electrostatic spray systems to deep clean the Only Fools Bar in Liverpool PA UK news in pictures 10 June 2021 A woman walks her dogs as the incoming tide begins to wash away the heads of G7 leaders drawn in the sand by activists on the beach at Newquay, Cornwall AP UK news in pictures 9 June 2021 Adam Chamberlain, 45, general manager of Big Tree pub in Sheffield, has put up over 500 flags, taking 36 hours, in preparation for Euro 2020, which kicks off this weekend Tom Maddick / SWNS UK news in pictures 8 June 2021 REUTERS UK news in pictures 7 June 2021 A pedestrian wearing a face covering walks over Westminster Bridge near the Houses of Parliament in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 6 June 2021 Isobel Salamon, founder of the Edinburgh Cinema Club, poses alongside the Leith Trainspotting murals in Quality Yard, Leith, Edinburgh, for the programme launch of the Cinescapes Festival which starts on July 4 with a Trainspotting 1 and 2 double bill PA UK news in pictures 5 June 2021 A long exposure photograph captures the rotation of the earth as the stars blur into circles over Knowlton church ruins in Dorset Nick Lucas/SWNS UK news in pictures 4 June 2021 Balloonists take flight during the opening of the Midlands Air Festival in Alcester, Warwickshire PA UK news in pictures 3 June 2021 Members of the Household Cavalry during the Major General's annual inspection of the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment in Hyde Park, London PA UK news in pictures 2 June 2021 Hannah Vitos of the Blenheim Art Foundation, poses for a photograph next to artist Ai Weiwei's Gilded Cage (2017) sculpture in the grounds of Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, Britain Reuters UK news in pictures 1 June 2021 People swim in the Sky Pool, a transparent swimming pool bridge across two exclusive residential blocks standing next to the US Embassy in Nine Elms, in London, Tuesday, June 1, 2021 AP UK news in pictures 31 May 2021 People enjoy the hot weather at Brighton beach Reuters UK news in pictures 30 May 2021 People venture into the sea as they enjoy themselves during a hot day on Brighton Beach AP UK news in pictures 29 May 2021 Swimmers at the Stonehaven Open Air Pool in Aberdeenshire, which reopens after lockdown restrictions were eased PA UK news in pictures 28 May 2021 Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures as he meets Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban at Downing Street in London REUTERS UK news in pictures 27 May 2021 White Pelicans in the sunshine in St James's Park, London PA UK news in pictures 26 May 2021 Boats are seen at Southsea Moorings in Portsmouth Reuters UK news in pictures 25 May 2021 York Glaziers Trust employees Kieran Muir (left) and Emily Price (right) remove a stained glass window panel at the start of a new five year, 5m project to conserve York Minsters South East Transept and its medieval St Cuthbert Window PA UK news in pictures 24 May 2021 Dark rain clouds above an oast house at Bewl Water reservoir near Lamberhurst in Kent during one of the rainiest Mays on record, with the UK seeing 131 per cent of the usual months rainfall already PA UK news in pictures 23 May 2021 The Premier League trophy with the Manchester City club colour ribbons on, at Etihad Stadium, prior to the last Premier League match of the season. City will finally pick up the trophy after they won the league on 11 May Getty UK news in pictures 22 May 2021 Gary Kenny lifts the Buildbase FA Vase Trophy after Warrington Rylands won the FA Vase Final against Binfield at Wembley Stadium Getty UK news in pictures 21 May 2021 A family buffeted by the wind whilst crossing the the Millennium Bridge in London, with wind and rain forecast to ravage the UK on the first Friday that people have been allowed to meet in large groups outside in England PA UK news in pictures 20 May 2021 Devon And Cornwall Police Demonstrate Their Skills For Policing The G7 Summit Getty Images UK news in pictures 18 May 2021 An employee stands before a costume for the Queen of Hearts by Bob Crowley on display at the Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London PA UK news in pictures 17 May 2021 Passengers prepare to board an easyJet flight to Faro, Portugal, at Gatwick Airport after the ban on international leisure travel for people in England was lifted following the further easing of lockdown restrictions in England PA UK news in pictures 16 May 2021 Emergency workers at the scene of a suspected gas explosion, in which a young child was killed and two people were seriously injured, on Mallowdale Ave Heysham which caused 2 houses to collapse and badly damaged another PA UK news in pictures 15 May 2021 Pro-Palestinian activists and supporters let off smoke flares, wave flags and carry placards during a demonstration in support of the Palestinian cause as violence escalates in the ongoing conflict with Israel, in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 14 May 2021 Member of staffs tighten screws and paint a Marlin skeleton, before it goes on display at the Natural History Museum in London, as the museum prepares to reopen to the public on 17 May, following the further easing of lockdown restrictions in England PA UK news in pictures 13 May 2021 A worshipper at the Baitul Futuh Mosque in Mordon, south London, ahead of Eid al-Fitr. The celebration marks the end of the Muslim month of fasting, called Ramadan. PA UK news in pictures 12 May 2021 A couple have wedding photos taken in Westminster, London Getty UK news in pictures 11 May 2021 The sun rises on Coquet Island, off Amble on the Northumberland coast, where as many as 35000 seabirds cram onto this tiny island to breed PA UK news in pictures 10 May 2021 Newly elected for a second term Mayor of London Sadiq Khan during his signing in ceremony at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on Londons Southbank PA UK news in pictures 9 May 2021 People mill around St. Michael's tower on top of Glastonbury Tor as it is seen through blooming yellow rapeseed on a day of mixed weather in Glastonbury, Somerset PA UK news in pictures 8 May 2021 Wales First Minister Mark Drakeford elbow bumps newly elected MS Labour candidates Elizabeth Buffy Williams, Rhondda, left, and Sarah Murphy, Bridgend & Porthcawl Labour, right, as they meet in Porthcawl, Wales PA UK news in pictures 6 May 2021 A group of five Sisters from Carmelite Monastery in Dysart cast their vote in the Scottish Parliamentary election at Dysart Community Hall, West Port, Dysart PA UK news in pictures 5 May 2021 Leader of the Labour Party Sir Keir Starmer (centre) with West Midlands Metro Mayor candidate Liam Byrne (far right) and Labour Deputy Leader, Angela Rayner (far left) during a visit to Birmingham, whilst on the election campaign trail PA UK news in pictures 4 May 2021 Artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey stand within 100 oak saplings which form part of a living art installation entitled Beuys' Acorns by the UK-based artist duo, outside the Tate Modern in London PA UK news in pictures 3 May 2021 Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie feeds the Gentoo penguins during a visit to Edinburgh Zoo on the campaign trail for the forthcoming Scottish Parliamentary Election on May 6 PA UK news in pictures 2 May 2021 Chelsea players celebrate their fourth goal during the Womens Champions League semi-final second leg against Bayern Munich, at Kingsmeadow Stadium in south west London. The Blues won the game 4-1, (and the tie 5-3 on aggregate) sending them through to their first Champions League final AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 1 May 2020 Demonstrators during a march through London during a 'Kill the Bill' protest Angela Christofilou UK news in pictures 30 April 2021 Shoppers queue outside Primark in Belfast as shops reopen and hospitality is able to open outdoors in Northern Ireland where lockdown restrictions have begun to gradually ease PA UK news in pictures 29 April 2021 Specialist operators at the Royal Air Force Museum Cosford, near Telford, Shropshire, clean the Hawker Hunter aircraft displayed within the museum's National Cold War Exhibition, during annual high-level aircraft cleaning and maintenance PA UK news in pictures 28 April 2021 Millions of tulips in flower near Kings Lynn in Norfolk, as Belmont Nurseries, the UK's largest commercial grower of outdoor tulips, offers socially-distanced visits to its tulip fields at Hillington to raise funds for local charity The Norfolk Hospice Tapping House PA UK news in pictures 27 April 2021 Paula Laughton checks one of the newly installed Lego models in the new Lego Mythica land at Legoland Windsor Resort PA UK news in pictures 26 April 2021 A red panda rests on a tree at Manor Wildlife park, which reopened its doors as lockdown restrictions continue to ease, in Tenby, Wales Reuters UK news in pictures 25 April 2021 Sheep climb the hillside as flames from a moor fire are seen on Marsden moor, near Huddersfield AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 24 April 2021 Supporters protest against Manchester United's owners, outside English Premier League club Manchester United's Old Trafford stadium in Manchester AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 23 April 2021 People enjoy the warm weather at City Hall near Tower Bridge in central London PA UK news in pictures 22 April 2021 Uyghurs during a demonstration in Parliament Square, London, which is being held ahead of a House of Commons debate, bought by backbench MP Nus Ghani, on whether Uyghurs in China's Xinjiang province are suffering crimes against humanity and genocide PA

But there was little doubt he had the change in White House leadership in mind when he said: Its wonderful to listen to the Biden administration and to Joe Biden because theres so much that they want to do together with us - from security and NATO to climate change.

Its fantastic, its a breath of fresh air. Theres a lot of things they want to do together.

Asked if Mr Biden had put pressure on him to crack on with resolving the situation in Northern Ireland, Mr Johnson replied: No he didnt. But what I can say is that the United States, Washington, the UK, plus the European Union have one thing we absolutely all want to do, and that is to uphold the Belfast Good Friday Agreement and make sure we keep the balance of the peace process going.

Thats absolutely common ground and Im optimistic that we can do that.

The PM added: I dont think it is any exaggeration to say that the relationship between the UK and the US is open.

The relationship between North America and Europe, which really is incarnated in that Atlantic Charter of 1941 which was renewed today by me and President Biden, is of massive, massive strategic importance for prosperity, the security of the world, for all the things we believe in together - democracy, human rights, the rule of law.

And the US and the UK stick up for those two things together, so its incredibly important that we should affirm that.
Boris Johnsons plan to host Joe Biden at St Michaels Mount in Cornwall ahead of the official start of this weeks G7 summit was scuppered on Thursday by an outbreak of afternoon mizzle.

The Cornish dialect word meaning misty drizzle was no doubt unfamiliar to the American delegation or much of the press pack, but conditions were severe enough at sea to render it unsafe for the US presidents V-22 Osprey to make the short hop from the Tregenna Castle Hotel near St Ives where he and the first lady are staying.

Instead, the prime ministers team were forced to relocate the talks on Brexit and Northern Ireland away from the historic tidal island to Carbis Bay.

Follow the latest on the G7 in our liveblog

Anyone caught in mizzle will know that despite its cute name and initial feeling of light rain it will have you saturated within seconds, Cornwall Lives chief reporter Lee Trewhela explained, later tweeting his delight that his description had been picked up by The Washington Post to define the phenomenon for its justifiably-baffled American readers.

Local MP for Truro and Falmouth Cherilyn Mackrory meanwhile tweeted her apologies to Mr Biden regarding the weather, writing: Welcome to Kernow, Mr President, sorry about the mizzle!

When Mr Johnson, Mr Biden and their wives did meet up, the US president was gifted a framed mural portrait of 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass while Dr Jill Biden was presented with a copy of Daphne Du Mauriers Gothic novella The Apple Tree (1952), the British author famous for her love of the coastal county where she set several of her best-known works.

After the quartet had strolled along the beach and were preparing to return to their hotel, Mr Biden cast a final glance out towards the iron-grey sky above the waves and commented, rather sweetly: Its gorgeous. I dont want to go home.

Asked later about what the pair had discussed, Mr Johnson was full of praise for his Washington counterpart.

Its wonderful to listen to the Biden administration and to Joe Biden because theres so much that they want to do together with us - from security and Nato to climate change, he said.

In an apparent allusion to Mr Bidens disgraced predecessor, Donald Trump, the prime minister said. Its fantastic, its a breath of fresh air. Theres a lot of things they want to do together.

Mr Johnson also championed the rude health of the special relationship - as did Dr Biden and Carrie Symonds - and denied that the US president had reproached him for jeopardising the peace in Northern Ireland over Britains messy withdrawal from the EU.

No he didnt, he answered. But what I can say is that the United States, Washington, the UK, plus the European Union have one thing we absolutely all want to do, and that is to uphold the Belfast Good Friday Agreement and make sure we keep the balance of the peace process going.

Thats absolutely common ground and Im optimistic that we can do that.

Lets hope the Bidens really did enjoy the scenery because they are now being invited to attend a beach barbecue in the company of Mr Johnson, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel, which promises to be a chilly and dismal affair should the sea breeze pick up.
Leaders of the worlds major democratic powers have agreed to work together to stamp out future pandemics within 100 days.

A new animal vaccine centre in the UK will be at the centre of a plan to prevent diseases crossing to humans and spreading through populations in the way that is believed to have caused the Covid-19 crisis.

Leaders of the G7 states gathered in Cornwall  the UK, US, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan  will on Saturday launch the Carbis Bay Declaration, committing them to a series of measures to prevent a repeat of the coronavirus crisis.

They will be briefed by the UK governments chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and philanthropist Melinda French Gates on findings from their work on the pandemic preparedness partnership.

The Carbis Bay Declaration will incorporate the recommendations of their findings, which highlight that the first 100 days after the identification of an epidemic threat are crucial to changing its course and preventing it from becoming a pandemic.

Key targets will be to slash the time taken to develop and license vaccines, treatments and diagnostics for any future zoonotic disease  one which crosses from animals to humans  to under 100 days.

And the declaration will promise to reinforce global surveillance networks and genomic sequencing capacity and support reforming and strengthening the World Health Organisation.

Prime minister Boris Johnson said: In the last year the world has developed several effective coronavirus vaccines, licensed and manufactured them at pace and is now getting them into the arms of the people who need them.

But to truly defeat coronavirus and recover we need to prevent a pandemic like this from ever happening again. That means learning lessons from the last 18 months and doing it differently next time around.

UK news in pictures Show all 51 1 /51 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 11 June 2021 Members of the Vaxinol team, who are commercial, industrial and residential cleaners specialising in disinfection and decontamination, use electrostatic spray systems to deep clean the Only Fools Bar in Liverpool PA UK news in pictures 10 June 2021 A woman walks her dogs as the incoming tide begins to wash away the heads of G7 leaders drawn in the sand by activists on the beach at Newquay, Cornwall AP UK news in pictures 9 June 2021 Adam Chamberlain, 45, general manager of Big Tree pub in Sheffield, has put up over 500 flags, taking 36 hours, in preparation for Euro 2020, which kicks off this weekend Tom Maddick / SWNS UK news in pictures 8 June 2021 REUTERS UK news in pictures 7 June 2021 A pedestrian wearing a face covering walks over Westminster Bridge near the Houses of Parliament in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 6 June 2021 Isobel Salamon, founder of the Edinburgh Cinema Club, poses alongside the Leith Trainspotting murals in Quality Yard, Leith, Edinburgh, for the programme launch of the Cinescapes Festival which starts on July 4 with a Trainspotting 1 and 2 double bill PA UK news in pictures 5 June 2021 A long exposure photograph captures the rotation of the earth as the stars blur into circles over Knowlton church ruins in Dorset Nick Lucas/SWNS UK news in pictures 4 June 2021 Balloonists take flight during the opening of the Midlands Air Festival in Alcester, Warwickshire PA UK news in pictures 3 June 2021 Members of the Household Cavalry during the Major General's annual inspection of the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment in Hyde Park, London PA UK news in pictures 2 June 2021 Hannah Vitos of the Blenheim Art Foundation, poses for a photograph next to artist Ai Weiwei's Gilded Cage (2017) sculpture in the grounds of Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, Britain Reuters UK news in pictures 1 June 2021 People swim in the Sky Pool, a transparent swimming pool bridge across two exclusive residential blocks standing next to the US Embassy in Nine Elms, in London, Tuesday, June 1, 2021 AP UK news in pictures 31 May 2021 People enjoy the hot weather at Brighton beach Reuters UK news in pictures 30 May 2021 People venture into the sea as they enjoy themselves during a hot day on Brighton Beach AP UK news in pictures 29 May 2021 Swimmers at the Stonehaven Open Air Pool in Aberdeenshire, which reopens after lockdown restrictions were eased PA UK news in pictures 28 May 2021 Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures as he meets Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban at Downing Street in London REUTERS UK news in pictures 27 May 2021 White Pelicans in the sunshine in St James's Park, London PA UK news in pictures 26 May 2021 Boats are seen at Southsea Moorings in Portsmouth Reuters UK news in pictures 25 May 2021 York Glaziers Trust employees Kieran Muir (left) and Emily Price (right) remove a stained glass window panel at the start of a new five year, 5m project to conserve York Minsters South East Transept and its medieval St Cuthbert Window PA UK news in pictures 24 May 2021 Dark rain clouds above an oast house at Bewl Water reservoir near Lamberhurst in Kent during one of the rainiest Mays on record, with the UK seeing 131 per cent of the usual months rainfall already PA UK news in pictures 23 May 2021 The Premier League trophy with the Manchester City club colour ribbons on, at Etihad Stadium, prior to the last Premier League match of the season. City will finally pick up the trophy after they won the league on 11 May Getty UK news in pictures 22 May 2021 Gary Kenny lifts the Buildbase FA Vase Trophy after Warrington Rylands won the FA Vase Final against Binfield at Wembley Stadium Getty UK news in pictures 21 May 2021 A family buffeted by the wind whilst crossing the the Millennium Bridge in London, with wind and rain forecast to ravage the UK on the first Friday that people have been allowed to meet in large groups outside in England PA UK news in pictures 20 May 2021 Devon And Cornwall Police Demonstrate Their Skills For Policing The G7 Summit Getty Images UK news in pictures 18 May 2021 An employee stands before a costume for the Queen of Hearts by Bob Crowley on display at the Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London PA UK news in pictures 17 May 2021 Passengers prepare to board an easyJet flight to Faro, Portugal, at Gatwick Airport after the ban on international leisure travel for people in England was lifted following the further easing of lockdown restrictions in England PA UK news in pictures 16 May 2021 Emergency workers at the scene of a suspected gas explosion, in which a young child was killed and two people were seriously injured, on Mallowdale Ave Heysham which caused 2 houses to collapse and badly damaged another PA UK news in pictures 15 May 2021 Pro-Palestinian activists and supporters let off smoke flares, wave flags and carry placards during a demonstration in support of the Palestinian cause as violence escalates in the ongoing conflict with Israel, in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 14 May 2021 Member of staffs tighten screws and paint a Marlin skeleton, before it goes on display at the Natural History Museum in London, as the museum prepares to reopen to the public on 17 May, following the further easing of lockdown restrictions in England PA UK news in pictures 13 May 2021 A worshipper at the Baitul Futuh Mosque in Mordon, south London, ahead of Eid al-Fitr. The celebration marks the end of the Muslim month of fasting, called Ramadan. PA UK news in pictures 12 May 2021 A couple have wedding photos taken in Westminster, London Getty UK news in pictures 11 May 2021 The sun rises on Coquet Island, off Amble on the Northumberland coast, where as many as 35000 seabirds cram onto this tiny island to breed PA UK news in pictures 10 May 2021 Newly elected for a second term Mayor of London Sadiq Khan during his signing in ceremony at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre on Londons Southbank PA UK news in pictures 9 May 2021 People mill around St. Michael's tower on top of Glastonbury Tor as it is seen through blooming yellow rapeseed on a day of mixed weather in Glastonbury, Somerset PA UK news in pictures 8 May 2021 Wales First Minister Mark Drakeford elbow bumps newly elected MS Labour candidates Elizabeth Buffy Williams, Rhondda, left, and Sarah Murphy, Bridgend & Porthcawl Labour, right, as they meet in Porthcawl, Wales PA UK news in pictures 6 May 2021 A group of five Sisters from Carmelite Monastery in Dysart cast their vote in the Scottish Parliamentary election at Dysart Community Hall, West Port, Dysart PA UK news in pictures 5 May 2021 Leader of the Labour Party Sir Keir Starmer (centre) with West Midlands Metro Mayor candidate Liam Byrne (far right) and Labour Deputy Leader, Angela Rayner (far left) during a visit to Birmingham, whilst on the election campaign trail PA UK news in pictures 4 May 2021 Artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey stand within 100 oak saplings which form part of a living art installation entitled Beuys' Acorns by the UK-based artist duo, outside the Tate Modern in London PA UK news in pictures 3 May 2021 Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie feeds the Gentoo penguins during a visit to Edinburgh Zoo on the campaign trail for the forthcoming Scottish Parliamentary Election on May 6 PA UK news in pictures 2 May 2021 Chelsea players celebrate their fourth goal during the Womens Champions League semi-final second leg against Bayern Munich, at Kingsmeadow Stadium in south west London. The Blues won the game 4-1, (and the tie 5-3 on aggregate) sending them through to their first Champions League final AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 1 May 2020 Demonstrators during a march through London during a 'Kill the Bill' protest Angela Christofilou UK news in pictures 30 April 2021 Shoppers queue outside Primark in Belfast as shops reopen and hospitality is able to open outdoors in Northern Ireland where lockdown restrictions have begun to gradually ease PA UK news in pictures 29 April 2021 Specialist operators at the Royal Air Force Museum Cosford, near Telford, Shropshire, clean the Hawker Hunter aircraft displayed within the museum's National Cold War Exhibition, during annual high-level aircraft cleaning and maintenance PA UK news in pictures 28 April 2021 Millions of tulips in flower near Kings Lynn in Norfolk, as Belmont Nurseries, the UK's largest commercial grower of outdoor tulips, offers socially-distanced visits to its tulip fields at Hillington to raise funds for local charity The Norfolk Hospice Tapping House PA UK news in pictures 27 April 2021 Paula Laughton checks one of the newly installed Lego models in the new Lego Mythica land at Legoland Windsor Resort PA UK news in pictures 26 April 2021 A red panda rests on a tree at Manor Wildlife park, which reopened its doors as lockdown restrictions continue to ease, in Tenby, Wales Reuters UK news in pictures 25 April 2021 Sheep climb the hillside as flames from a moor fire are seen on Marsden moor, near Huddersfield AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 24 April 2021 Supporters protest against Manchester United's owners, outside English Premier League club Manchester United's Old Trafford stadium in Manchester AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 23 April 2021 People enjoy the warm weather at City Hall near Tower Bridge in central London PA UK news in pictures 22 April 2021 Uyghurs during a demonstration in Parliament Square, London, which is being held ahead of a House of Commons debate, bought by backbench MP Nus Ghani, on whether Uyghurs in China's Xinjiang province are suffering crimes against humanity and genocide PA UK news in pictures 21 April 2021 People walk at the Taihaku Cherry Orchard in Alnwick REUTERS UK news in pictures 20 April 2021 People stand in front of anti Super League banners outside Anfield as twelve of Europe's top football clubs, including Liverpool, launch a breakaway league Reuters

I am proud that for the first time today the worlds leading democracies have come together to make sure that never again will we be caught unawares.

It is hoped the new UK Animal Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre at The Pirbright Institute in Surrey will stop new animal-borne diseases before they put people at risk.

The centre will be backed by 10m from the UK government and 14.5m from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, drawing on Pirbrights existing expertise to accelerate the delivery of vaccines for livestock diseases.

Dr Tedros Adhanom, director general of the World Health Organisation, said: We welcome the Carbis Bay Health Declaration, particularly as the world begins to recover and rebuild from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Together we need to build on the significant scientific and collaborative response to the Covid-19 pandemic and find common solutions to address many of the gaps identified.

Professor Bryan Charleston, director and CEO of Pirbright, said: There is a global unmet need to accelerate the development of vaccines from the laboratory to provide effective products for livestock keepers to control disease in their animals.

Preventing disease by vaccination will help secure food supplies and so improve human health and welfare.
View of Kremlin with fireworks during blue hour in Moscow, Russia / gettyimagesbank



By Andrey Kulik



Russia Day is a national holiday of the Russian Federation, celebrated on June 12. Since the adoption of the Declaration of State Sovereignty in 1990, the Russian Federation has endeavored to build friendly relations with foreign partners, including the Republic of Korea, based on the principles of the U.N. Charter, respect for the sovereign equality of states, non-interference in internal affairs, settlement of disputes by political and diplomatic means and renouncing the threat or use of force.



Currently, the international situation is greatly affected by the coronavirus pandemic that has become a grave challenge to everyone without exception. The entire architecture of global governance created after World War II is being tested.



Following Russia Day we will also mark 80 years since the beginning of the Great Patriotic War (1941-45). On June 22, 1941, one of the most tragic dates in our history, the Nazi hordes invaded the territory of the Soviet Union to kill and to spread death and pain, horror and immeasurable suffering. The Soviet people at the cost of incredible efforts defended their motherland and liberated the whole of Europe from the "brown plague." Every single family in our country cherishes the sacred memory of those who fought for our victory, and we will always be proud of their feats. History demands that we learn from it. Unfortunately, nowadays attempts are being made to revive a large part of Nazi ideology and the ideas of those who were obsessed with the delusional theory of their own supremacy.



The Russian Federation is consistently defending the international order based on the central role of the U.N. and international law.





Russian Ambassador to Korea Andrey Kulik / Courtesy of Embassy of Russia in South Korea



The Republic of Korea is one of Russia's most important partners in Asia and the Pacific. On Sept. 30, 2020, we marked a significant milestone  the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between our two countries. However, the history of our bilateral ties goes back to the 19th century when the first Russia-Korean Friendship and Commerce Treaty was signed in 1884.



For the last three decades Moscow and Seoul have developed a sustainable political dialogue, which is being strengthened and promoted by regular contacts at the top level, including the Moscow Summit on June 22, 2018, between President Vladimir Putin and President of the Republic of Korea Moon Jae-in during his state visit to the Russian Federation, and their meeting on the margins of the G20 summit in Osaka in June 2020. We will continue expanding and invigorating our bilateral exchanges with South Korea, including between parliaments and governments.



Last March Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov visited Seoul to participate in the opening ceremony of the Year of Mutual Exchanges between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Korea, which symbolized mutual sympathy between our peoples and a qualitatively new level of relations that has developed over the past decades between our nations.



Russian-Korean trade and economic cooperation also demonstrated impressive success over 30 years. The bilateral turnover has grown by almost 130 times and reached $25 billion in 2019. Last year due to the coronavirus pandemic it declined to $19.6 billion. Nevertheless, we believe that in the near future we can return to the positive trend. In this context we give high priority to realizing joint plans in the framework of the "Nine Bridges" concept initiated by President Moon, including projects in rail transportation, energy supply, nuclear power, shipbuilding, healthcare and medicine, primarily in Siberia and the Russian Far East where foreign business can enjoy special advantages in the Priority Development Areas and the Free Port of Vladivostok.





Russia National Day / Courtesy of Embassy of Russia in South Korea
The minimum legal age of marriage is set to rise to 18 in England and Wales after ministers signalled their support for the landmark reform.

At the moment 16- and 17-year-olds can marry with their parents consent. But campaigners warn some teenagers are being coerced into marrying too young.

Now the government has said it backs moves to protect them from what the former chancellor Sajid Javid described as child abuse.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Justice said: The government supports raising the legal age for marriage to protect vulnerable children and will outline its next steps in due course.

Mr Javid has said he will introduce a private members bill in the Commons next week to raise the current age limit, and is optimistic it could become law.

Mr Javid criticised what he said was the current legal loophole that saw teenagers forced into marriage.

The British government is working tirelessly to end child marriage in the developing world and yet our own laws are permitting child marriage by the back door, he told the Times.

Indeed, when Bangladesh lowered the legal age of marriage from 18 to 16, ministers there were said to have directly pointed to our laws to justify their move.

Its clear that we must legislate to close this loophole so that vulnerable children cannot be pushed into such serious and life-changing commitments before they are ready.

Ive seen this myself in the community I was raised in, young girls expected to enter into marriage far before they were ready to, with painful consequences, he said.

Lets call this what it is: child abuse.

Mr Javid said he had looked at a change in the law when he was home secretary under Theresa Mays government.

The bill is expected to attract cross party support. Natasha Rattu, director of the charity Karma Nirvana, which campaigns on child marriage, said: We are delighted that after relentless campaigning the government has listened to our joint calls to end child marriage by committing to raising the legal age to 18.

But while this is a huge step in the right direction, it remains imperative the government also makes child marriage a crime, she told the Guardian.

This would ensure maximum safeguards against all forms of child marriage and sends out the strongest possible message that child marriage is not accepted or tolerated by our government.
The UK will donate 30 million surplus vaccine doses to poorer countries by the end of the year  including five million by September  after criticism it was dragging its heels.

Opening the G7 summit in Cornwall, Boris Johnson will also pledge to release at least a further 70 million jabs within the next year, as he seeks to display global leadership on the issue.

And, after fears that the donation would count as part of the foreign aid budget  which is being slashed by 4bn this year  it will be in addition to the shrunken 10bn aid pot.

The move comes after the World Health Organisation and other global bodies pleaded with rich nations to act, to prevent dangerous new Covid variants setting back progress to end the pandemic.

In an eve-of-summit announcement, US president Joe Biden pledged to buy and donate an additional 500 million doses of Pfizer vaccine to distribute to the worlds poorest countries over the next year.

Mr Johnson said the initial 5 million gift  to help countries struggling the most  could be done without delaying completion of the UKs programme to give at least one jab to every adult by the end of July.

As a result of the success of the UKs vaccine programme we are now in a position to share some of our surplus doses with those who need them, he said.

The UK, with a 500 million-strong stockpile, would also ensure it had sufficient doses for autumn booster jabs, if needed, and to respond to any new strains of the virus.

In Cornwall, G7 leaders are expected to announce they will provide at least 1 billion vaccine doses and set out a plan to expand manufacturing, as well as measures to prevent future pandemics.

But they are under pressure to meet more of the bill, with 200 former world leaders and ministers, including Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, calling for two-thirds of the 46.6bn cost of vaccinating developing countries to be paid.

Meanwhile, there is a divide over waiving intellectual property rights for vaccines, backed by Mr Biden but not by the UK or most EU leaders.

Ahead of talks on financing, Mr Johnson will announce that 80 per cent of the UKs 100 million doses will be distributed through Covax, the world aid programme, and the remainder directly to countries in need.

They will be a mix of Oxford-AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech, Janssen, Moderna and other makes, based on the UKs supply and requirements at the time.

White House officials said the first US jabs would be shipped through the global Covax alliance in August to 92 lower-income countries and the African Union, with the goal of distributing 200m by the end of this year and the remainder in the first half of 2022.

Speaking after talks with Mr Johnson in Cornwall, Mr Biden said he expected further pledges to be made by G7 countries on Friday.

The United States is providing these half billion doses with no strings attached, said the US president. Our vaccine donations dont include pressure for favours, or potential concessions. Were doing this to save lives.

Biden vowed that America would be the arsenal of vaccines in the fight against Covid-19 in the same way that its munitions factories were the arsenal of democracy during World War Two.

The UK has argued it has shown global leadership, by funding the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and making it available at cost  rather than at a much higher price, with huge profits made.

Mr Johnson added: Over a year ago, we funded the development of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine on the basis it would be distributed at cost to the world.

This unprecedented model, which puts people squarely above profit, means over half a billion doses have been administered in 160 countries so far.
On 6 June, a 92-year-old nun named Sister Mary Joseph died in Illinois . Her son marked her passing on Twitter .

She was kind of an unusual nun, wrote Mark Miller , a cemetery administrator in San Diego .

That was an understatement. In fact, his mother had only spent the final third of her life as Sister Mary Joseph. Before that she was Ann Russell Miller, a San Francisco socialite who had ten children, hundreds of friends, and a social life that included hobnobbing with presidents and popes.

Then, one day in 1989, she gave it all up.

She used to joke with us in the family that when the youngest of us was grown, she would enter a Carmelite monastery, Mr Miller recalled. We all took it as a joke But yeah, she did.

When Ms Miller was 58 years old, three years after her husband Richard died, she told her children her plans. First at a lunch with her five daughters, and then at a lunch with her five sons, she asked each of them what they planned to do when they turned 60. After hearing their answers, she told them her own: She would become a Carmelite nun.

She said, Look, Ive devoted 30 years of my life to myself, and the next 30 to you children, and the last 30 Im devoting to God, Mr Miller said.

It should be noted that even among nuns, the Carmelites live an especially austere life. They spend most of their days in silence, and never leave their monasteries except for emergencies. At the convent Ms Miller had her eye on  Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Des Plaines, Illinois  the nuns converse with visitors through a metal grate.

Though some of her children couldnt believe it at first, Ms Miller made good on her promise. On her 61st birthday, she had a going away party at the San Francisco Hilton, which Mr Miller says 800 people attended.

Many more did not make the cut because we were at the fire marshalls limit, he recalled.

Worried she might get lost in the crowd, Ms Miller tied a Mylar balloon to her wrist that floated six or seven feet above her head, reading Here I am.

The next morning, she flew to Chicago to join the monastery. Bringing nothing with her except a prayer book and a pair of Birkenstock sandals, she moved into a small, bare room with a wooden bed, and began a quiet life of praying and making rosaries.

It was a startling change of lifestyle, especially considering what had come before. Looking back decades later, Mr Miller recalled his mothers life as a bon vivant.

She was on the phone two, three hours a day speaking with friends. She was traveling constantly, he said. When she decided to become a nun, she resigned from like 20 boards of charities and community organizations.

The Millers also owned 565 acres of farmland just south of San Francisco, including an 80-acre retreat in the redwoods where they entertained guests and dignitaries. They attended fundraisers for Republican candidates, and met presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan . When Ms Millers husband died, Richard Nixon sent condolence letters.

There were also many extravagant outings.

She was always, always planning  Oh, lets go to Hawaii , I hear theres this great place to scuba dive. Well rent helicopters, go down for a dive and come back, who wants to come? Or, I saw some beautiful pictures of this river. Lets all go float down the Snake River for four days, camp out in the wilderness.

Even back then, Ms Miller was a deeply committed Catholic, and went to mass every day. So to keep up her faith while in the wild, she would bring along friends and family  and a priest.

I got pictures sent to me in summer camp of her, the older siblings, the coterie of friends, and the obligatory Catholic priest, her son remembered. They helicoptered to a crater and went scuba diving.

Mr Miller said his mom was not a proselytizer, and never imposed her religion on her friends. With her family, however, it was a different story.

Within her own family, she was very strict about the rules, he said. If somebody got married outside of the Catholic church, in her mind that marriage did not exist. The children of that marriage were not welcome in her home. The spouses of those children were not welcome in her home.

Sadly, this harsher side of Ms Millers personality eventually caused a falling out with her own son. When he was 18, Mr Miller recalls, his mother disapproved of a relationship he was in with an older, divorced woman. One day as he got ready to visit her, his mother confronted him.

If you decide to go, do not come back, he says she told him.

Mr Miller started packing his things.

In the end, he said, the relationship didnt last, but the damage to his relationship with his mother was permanent. She disinherited him, and they seldom saw each other.

For the five years before she went into the convent, I saw her three or four times, he said.

Years later, Mr Miller took his three children to see her at the monastery. By that time she seemed more distant, like a great aunt I hadnt seen in a long time. Even so, he said, she seemed happy.

She was equally as happy as a nun as I ever saw her on the outside, he said. I mean, it was an absolute 180 in every other aspect of her life, except her happiness. She was not a miserable person on the outside, and she was not a miserable person on the inside.
A three-year-old boy has died after falling from a window in New Jersey before being mauled to death by a pair of dogs, police have said.

According to ABC7, the disturbing incident unfolded on Wednesday in Elizabeth, New Jersey, around 5.30pm.

The broadcaster reported that police said the dogs, which belonged to the family, got hold of the toddler after he fell from a window at the back of the house.

Neighbours who witnessed the attack said they didnt sleep all night following the gruesome incident, noting that the childs mother attempted to pull the dogs off her son.

"I didn't sleep all night," neighbor Maria Rocha told the outlet. "My heart is broken."

The three-year-old was transported to a local hospital and pronounced dead around an hour later at around 6.30pm.

The animals were reported to have been fenced in an area cluttered with feces, motorcycles and debris and neighbours reported that the dogs had always proved a nightmare.

"I cannot believe this happened to a little 3-year-old," Ms Rocha said. "He's a baby. Could be mine, could be somebody else. He's a baby, and killed by dogs?"

No charges have been filed. Elizabeth police officials and Acting Union County Prosecutor Lyndsay Ruotolo reportedly said the incident is under investigation.

Members of a local animal control centre arrived at the scene and secured the dogs before transporting them to an unreported location.

Anyone who may have information regarding the incident is being asked to contact Prosecutor's Office Detective Richard Acosta at 908-347-0404 or Detective Michael Tambini at 908-472-4301.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has announced its Covid-19 vaccine advisory committee will hold an emergency meeting to discuss the rare reports of heart inflammation occurring in people after they received the second dose of a Pfizer or Moderna jab.

To date, the health agency has identified 226 cases of myocarditis or pericarditis occurring after vaccination in people younger than 30 years old, the CDC said on Thursday.

The vast majority of cases have recovered from the myocarditis or pericarditis, according to a Food and Drug Administration report, with 81 per cent of people already discharged and making a full recovery.

But 41 cases were still experiencing symptoms and 15 people were hospitalised, three of whom were in the intensive care unit (ICU).

Although concerning, the cases prove to be extremely rare given more than 130 million Americans have been fully vaccinated with either Pfizer or Modernas mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccine.

But the CDC announced it would hold a meeting on 18 June to discuss the cases.

Its a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison because, again, these are preliminary reports. Not all these will turn out to be true myocarditis or pericarditis reports, said Dr Tom Shimabukuro, a CDC vaccine safety official.

Normally, fewer than 100 cases of myocarditis or pericarditis would be expected in people between the ages of 18 and 24.

But teenagers and people in their 20s accounted for a majority of the cases reported to the CDCs safety monitoring system for Covid-19 vaccinations, which Dr Shimabukuro called an imbalance.

The CDC is now working to gather more information and analysis about the cases ahead of the emergency meeting with advisers.

Myocarditis is a condition that causes inflammation of the heart muscle. It typically develops from a viral infection, and it can cause symptoms like fatigue, fever and chest pain.

Preliminary data indicates cases of heart issues following vaccination were happening in those ages 16 to 24, with young men impacted more than women. Most of the cases came after the second dose of either Pfizer or Modernas vaccine, the preliminary data revealed.

This information comes one month after Israels health ministry said there was a probable link between Pfizers vaccine and inflammation of the heart muscles in young men.

Pfizer is currently authorised for emergency use for children as young as 12 years old, while Modernas vaccine only has emergency authorisation for those 18 years or older. But Moderna is seeking emergency use authorisation from the FDA for those ages 12 to 17.
During his campaign and throughout his presidency, Donald Trump would say the world is laughing at the US. When he showed up in front of world leaders, it often was, at his expense.

Joe Bidens relatively warm welcome during an eight-day trip to Europe stands in sharp contrast to his predecessors cold and often mocked reception, following four years of political disorder and a blunt America First agenda.

Before his first overseas trip since taking office, Biden signalled a return to normal for G7 leaders with his America is back mantra, hoping to soothe over tensions and repair relationships antagonised by Trump.

French President Emmanuel Macron was filmed throwing his arm around Biden during a photo appearance. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson described the US president as a breath of fresh air following their first meeting. Theres so much that they want to do together with us, from security, NATO, to climate change, Johnson said.

He even borrowed from Bidens own build back better slogan to describe the global response to the coronavirus crisis. G7 leaders and other countries have committed to supplying more than 1 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines, including 500 million from the US, with a goal to end the pandemic in 2022.

A little more than a month after their meeting, Biden will host Germanys Chancellor Angela Merkel at the White House in July. Trump had reportedly called her a loser. She condemned his failures to accept his 2020 election loss.

During his first G7 in Quebec City in 2018, Trump refused to sign a joint statement on shared economic goals with the nations allies just moments after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau released it, upending two days of talks and accusing Mr Trudeau of making false statements.

In an address to the United Nations General Assembly later that year, Trump claimed  as he often did  that his administration had accomplished more than any of his predecessors had at that point in their presidency.

In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country, he said.

America is, Trump continued, pausing, appearing caught off guard by an audible response from the assembly.

So true, he said, laughing as the laughter continued. Didnt expect that reaction, but thats OK.

He later said officials were laughing with him  some appeared to join in by laughing at his quip. Others said it was more of a nervous laugh, or a bad joke turned laughable precisely because the guy who tells the joke doesnt realise how bad it is.

In December of that year, as officials and diplomats mulled around in Buckingham Palace during a NATO reception, three world leaders explicitly laughed at his expense.

A candid conversation among Trudeau, Macron and Johnson caught on camera captured the men joking about Trumps behaviour during the conference.

Is that why you were late? Johnson asked Macron.

He was late because he takes a 40-minute press conference off the top, Trudeau added. You just watched his teams jaws drop to the floor.

Trump, who then abruptly left the summit early, called Trudeau two-faced.

Global approval of the US president has rebounded  a median of 75 per cent of respondents in 16 allied countries are confident Mr Biden will do the right thing regarding world affairs, compared to just 17 per cent under Mr Trump, according to a survey from Pew Research Center.

Trumps approval fell to 34 per cent in his final year in office. Ahead of his first overseas trip while in office, Mr Bidens is at 62 per cent.

The election of Joe Biden as president has led to a dramatic shift in Americas international image, Pew found.

The nations favourability grew by at least 25 per cent from 2020 among respondents in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the Netherlands.
When Joe Biden sits down with Queen Elizabeth II during the G7 summit, he will be the most recent US president to be seen by the British monarch.

In fact, the Queen has met almost every US president to take office in her reign, and on 13 June will meet Mr Biden during his visit to the UK.

It follows Donald Trumps faux pas (or two) in 2018  and the most memorable of any meeting of a British monarch and US president for 70 years.

Donald Trump

A president infamous for ignoring protocol at home and abroad, it was of no surprise to observers that Mr Trump appeared to flout Royal protocol in front of the Queen in August 2018.

Mr Trump departed meetings with then-British prime minister Theresa May to turn-up at Windsor Castle and stand in front of the monarch  blocking her way.

It forced the Queen, who was then aged 91, to swerve around the six feet two inch US president, in footage that went viral across the world.

(Getty Images)

It followed he and wife Melania Trump refusing to bow and curtsey for the Queen, as tradition asks for.

Barack Obama

Michelle Obama surprised the world by embracing the Queen on her first official trip to the UK in 2009.

Fortunately for the former first lady, the Queen returned the favour by hugging Ms Obama back, in what was described as an extraordinary encounter.

It was alleged that the duo discussed each others shoes, which Ms Obama wrote in her recent memoir, Becoming, had oppressed the pair that day.

John F Kennedy

According to accounts of John F Kennedy's visit to the UK in 1961, the Queen was resentful of Jacqueline Kennedy.

Author of The Royals, Kitty Kelley, wrote that the Queens resentment was real for the famous socialite and former first lady.

As recently featured in The Crown on Netflix, the young Queen felt upstaged by Ms Kennedy.

(Getty Images)

Although there are no official accounts, it was also alleged that Ms Kennedy afterwards bad-mouthed the British monarch.

As The Washington Post reported, the Queen disagreed with the former first lady inviting her twice-divorced brother-in-law, a Polish prince, to dinner at Buckingham Palace.

Gerald Ford

In July 1976, the Queen and her late husband Prince Phillip were invited to the White House for a dinner for the bicentenary of the American Revolution against the British in 1776.

Not that the breaking away of North America from the British empire was at fault, but rather Gerald Ford referring to Her Majesty as Your Majesty, according to the Ford Presidential Library.

It followed a run-in with the Fords son, Jack, who was wearing jeans and a t-shirt.

The Queen, in apparent reference to her eldest son, Charles, told former first lady Betty Ford "Don't worry, Betty, I have one of those at home, too."

Jimmy Carter

In 1977, the following year, the British monarch invited the newly sworn-in Jimmy Carter to stay at Buckingham Palace for a NATO summit.

But in a break with Royal protocol, the former US president famously kissed the Queen Mother on the lips.

I took a sharp step backwards  not quite far enough, she reportedly commented afterwards.
The FBI are opening an investigation into the leaking of confidential tax records that revealed that billionaires paid almost no federal income tax, according to officials.

Charles Rettig, the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), told a Senate committee on Tuesday that the federal agency was investigating the leaked tax records.

It was followed by the IRSs deputy commissioner, Douglas ODonnell, who confirmed on Thursday that the US Treasury made investigative referrals to their Office of Inspector General as well as the FBI.

Referrals were also made to the United States Attorneys Office for the District of Columbia, said Douglas ODonnell.

He told a House Ways and Means committee panel: We fully support any investigation under taken and will urge the investigative authorities to keep Congress appropriately informed of their findings.

It comes after a report on Tuesday revealed that many of the worlds billionaires paid almost no federal income tax in recent years, based on confidential tax records from the IRS.

The report, by ProPublica, featured the tax records of billionaires including Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. It was delivered to the investigative outlet anonymously.

Mr Bezos, the Amazon founder, reportedly paid no income tax in 2007 and 2011 and Tesla founder Elon Musk paid no income tax in 2018.

Our tax system is rigged for billionaires who dont make their fortunes through income, like working families do, tweeted Democrat senator Elizabeth Warren. The evidence is abundantly clear: it is time for a #WealthTax in America to make the ultra-rich finally pay their fair share.

In a joint letter, a group of Republican senators wrote: [The] Treasury and the IRS must hold accountable any and all individuals who broke federal law by inappropriately sharing the confidential tax information and tax returns of multiple Americans.

Additional reporting by Associated Press.
The Donald Trump administration spied on top Democrats and their children after gaining access to lawmakers phone data, a report claims.

Phone data belonging to two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee were subject to interrogation by the Trump administration and justice department (DoJ) in 2018, The New York Times reported on Thursday.

Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell were reportely the targets of the justice department investigation, which involved a subpoena for phone meta-data from Apple.

It followed concerns of information leaking from the Robert Mueller investigation into the former presidents ties to Russia.

Data of family members and aides were also seized in the investigation, which came to light last month, when Apple informed Congress. It had previously been under a gagging order, reported the Times.

Although the data did not include messages, images or emails, according to the report, it was a rare move for the justice department to secretly interrogate members of Congress.

Top Democrats on Thursday including Mr Schiff and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, accused Mr Trump of having politicised the DoJ during the Russia investigation.

These actions appear to be yet another egregious assault on our democracy, said Ms Pelosi. The news about the politicisation of the Trump Administration Justice Department is harrowing.

Mr Schiff, the chairman of the intelligence committee, told the Times: The politicisation of the department and the attacks on the rule of law are among the most dangerous assaults on our democracy carried out by the former president.

He added, "I believe more answers are needed, which is why I believe the Inspector General should investigate this and other cases that suggest the weaponisation of law enforcement by a corrupt president.

It was found that the House intelligence committee was not behind the leaks, according to the paper, and the investigation was closed in May, Mr Schiff said.

Additional reporting by Reuters
Senate Democrats have called on former Justice Department officials under Donald Trump to testify to Congress following reports that the top prosecutors seized records from Apple to probe data from House Democrats, their aides and family members.

The inspector general at the US Department of Justice also said he will review the allegations andwhether any such uses, or the investigations, were based upon improper considerations, Michael Horowitz said in a statement.

Under Trump, the Justice Department reportedly subpoenaed the company for information from accounts belonging to at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, including prominent Trump impeachment figures Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.

Records from at least a dozen people were reportedly seized in 2017 and 2018  including at least one person who was a minor.

A gross abuse of power. An assault on the separation of powers, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Friday.

He called on former Attorneys General William Barr and Jeff Sessions to testify under oath.

Barr, Sessions, and other officials involved must testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee under oath, he said. If they refuse  they are subject to being subpoenaed and compelled to testify.

In a joint statement with Senator Dick Durbin, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, the senators condemned the appalling politicization of the Justice Department under Trump and called on his loyalists to face congressional and inspector general probes.

Congressman Schiff, who served as chair of the House Judiciary Committee and lead impeachment manager during the former presidents first impeachment trial, said in a statement on Thursday that Trump repeatedly demanded the DOJ go after his political enemies. Its clear his demands didnt fall on deaf ears.

This baseless investigation, while now closed, is yet another example of Trumps corrupt weaponization of justice, he said. And how much he imperiled our democracy.

The Justice Departments secretive effort to obtain lawmakers data reportedly followed Mr Sessionss efforts to find sources behind leaks to news media about contacts between Trump and his allies with Russia.

After replacing Mr Sessions, Mr Barr reportedly revived those attempts, promoting a New Jersey prosecutor to the Justice Department to target Rep Schiff and others, according to The New York Times.

The agency secured a gag order on Apple that expired this year, preventing lawmakers from knowing they were subjects of an investigation until last month, the newspaper reported.

Justice Department officials under Joe Biden disclosed the subpoena to news organisations in recent weeks, fuelling reporting into the depths of the Trump-era probe and his war on the press and political opponents.

The House Intelligence Committee, which investigated the Trump campaigns ties to Russia during the 2016 presidential race, was instrumental in an inquiry into the former presidents dealings with Ukraine, following a phone call in which he pressed President Volodymyr Zelensky for information on his rival Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden in exchange for promised military aid.

Mr Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for obstruction of justice and abuse of power. He was acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate.

Congressman Swalwell said Apple notified him on 1 May that his records were among those sought by  and turned over to  the Trump administration as part of a politically motivated investigation into his perceived enemies.

This kind of conduct is unacceptable, but unfortunately on brand for a president who has repeatedly shown he would cast aside our Constitution for his own personal gain, he said in a statement.

Rep Schiff and Rep Swalwell have also called on the Justice Departments inspector general to investigate the record seizures.
Local Ewenki ethnic group holds traditional wedding in Aoluguya, Inner Mongolia

Xinhua) 12:51, June 11, 2021

The wedding procession walks in the forest in Aoluguya Ewenki Township, Genhe City of north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, June 8, 2021. Local Ewenki ethnic group held a traditional wedding on Tuesday in Aoluguya, during which reindeer carrying the bride and dowry walked in the forest and Ewenki people sang and danced to celebrate it. The Aoluguya Ewenki people, known as "the last hunting tribe in China," are the only ethnic minority group in China that raises reindeer. For them, reindeer were the primary means of transportation in the past, while in modern society, many Aoluguya Ewenki herders still maintain the tradition of raising reindeer. (Xinhua/Lian Zhen)

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)




The cause of flames and smoke from the engine of a KF-16 fighter jet earlier this week was a bird sucked into an air intake of the plane, the Air Force said Friday.







On Tuesday, the jet's pilot made an emergency exit from the plane after detecting flames and smoke from its engine during a takeoff run at the 20th Fighter Wing in the western city of Seosan.







The Air Force immediately suspended all flights for aircraft inspection.







Following an inspection, the military said a bird was sucked into an air intake of the jet. The pilot sustained no injuries from the accident though the aircraft was damaged.







"The Air Force will resume the jets' operations next Monday after educating pilots on emergency action procedures and conducting preventive inspections on the aircraft," it said in a statement.







Flights for other types of jets resumed Thursday, an official said. (Yonhap)


Iranian warships have entered the Atlantic Ocean for the first time ever, raising alarms by United States officials and Washington hawks.

The Iranian ships, the frigate Sahand and the base ship Makran, reached the south Atlantic on Thursday, likely en route to Venezuela, which has increasingly become an economic and military partner of Tehran. Iran has friendly relations with Cuba, where the ships could make a port call.

"We believe that it is the absolute right of the Navy to have a presence in international waters," Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said, according to state television, which broadcast a video showing the Sahand sailing through the choppy winter waters of the south Atlantic.

The two ships left the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas on 10 May and traveled 6,000 nautical miles through the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean and around Africa to reach the Atlantic in what state television described as Irans longest maritime mission.

The 310-foot Sahand is an Iranian-made frigate. The 755-foot Makran is a converted oil tanker that includes a helicopter pad and can serve as a base for small boats. Iran claims it has electronic warfare, missiles and weapons capabilities, as well as medical facilities.

Analysts have assessed that the ships are likely carrying military equipment, possibly naval swiftboats or missiles, bound for Venezuela. There appears to be nothing in international law that bars such conventional weapons transfers between Iran and Venezuela, nor any prohibition on Iranian warships traversing international waters.

But the subject of the ships passage has been raised by well-funded Washington pressure groups and their allied lawmakers. The administration of President Joe Biden has urged both Cuba and Venezuela to turn the ships away should they arrive in the Caribbean. Last year, the US seized Iranian fuel aboard four tankers bound for Venezuela.

During a hearing on Thursday with US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin of the Senate Armed Services committee, US Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, warned that allowing the ships to dock would be a potentially perilous milestone. He said he was informed that the ships contained weapons to be provided to Venezuela as part of a deal brokered a year ago between Tehran and Caracas.

The precedent of allowing Iran to provide weapons to the region causes me great concern, he said.

Mr Austin declined to publicly reveal what if any intelligence the US has gathered about the nature of the weapons or cargo aboard the ship.

"I am absolutely concerned about the proliferation of weapons, any type of weapons, in our neighborhood," Mr Austin said. "And so, I share your concern."

The ships passage comes at a sensitive time when Iran, the U.S. and other world powers are negotiating a possible return to a deal limiting Irans nuclear pursuits which was forged in 2015 but abandoned by former administration of Donald Trump.

US officials have said they are closely monitoring the passage of the ships while at the same time continuing to negotiate the nuclear deal. A United Nations prohibition on sales and export of Iranian weapons expired in October despite the vehement opposition of the former administration of Donald Trump.

"Regardless of what these ships carry, there is no ban on the purchase and sale of weapons by Iran, Iranian government spokesman Ali Rabei said this week in comments reported by state media. America did its best to maintain the sanctions last year, but failed miserably.

But a vast array of sanctions remain on Iran, Venezuela and Cuba, setting the stage for a possible confrontation between American and Iranian ships at sea.

Were prepared to leverage our applicable authorities, including sanctions, against any actor that enables Irans on-going provision of weapons to violent partners and to proxies, US State Department Ned Price said on Thursday.

We will continue to apply pressure on Iran if it attempts to transfer any weapons to violent partners and proxies, he said. If this is an effort to transfer weapons or otherwise to violate its international obligations, we would be prepared to respond.
An eyewitness has described how a crocodile attacked a British woman three or four times before the animal was fought off by her twin sister in Mexico.

Melissa Laurie is in an induced coma in the Angel del Mar hospital in the Pacific Coast resort of Puerto Escondido, where both she and her twin sister Melissa are recovering from their ordeal.

Hana Laurie, the twins elder sister told BBC Breakfast that Melissa is in a serious condition and that she had developed sepsis after bite marks to her legs and stomach had become infected.

Her twin sister Georgia is expected to be discharged today.

Elliott Scott was part of the group swimming in the Manialtepec lagoon in Oaxaca when the crocodile struck.

The group, who had gone on a tour to the world-famous bioluminescent lagoon, was swimming a short distance from a popular tourist spot when they spotted something in the water.

We were swimming in another part of the lake and then all of a sudden somebody noticed there a was a movement  we thought it was a log  they poked their head up  nope, it [was] a crocodile, Elliot told The Independent, evidently still in shock.

As the group turned to swim to safety, Melissa was dragged under the water and started thrashing, he said.

It attacked her probably three or four times, explained Elliott, until Georgia went over and was punching it in the face, like a hero until it went away and she had to drag her sister to safety by her hair. It was terrifying.

There was nothing anyone could do, because between us and them was the [crocodile]. So, we were trying to throw things, trying to get it away but there wasnt much we could do. It was all very fast, he said.

The group were told that while there were crocodiles in the lagoon, it was perfectly safe for tourists if they stayed away from the mangrove roots and if trained tour guides took appropriate measures to ensure that local wildlife was kept away.

However, Elliott says they are unsure if the guide they used had the appropriate qualifications to work in the region. By law, qualified guides must learn how to protect tourists from crocodile attacks. When asked about the guide, he said the group were unclear as to who he actually was.

Nobody knows and now hes fled. We thought he was a guest at the hostel, the way he approached us like Oh, were going to go on a little trip, I know this Mexican family, we can take you here, we can do this - no worries - quite cheap, well do it. There was no other information.

We were told we cant swim in the sea, but you could swim in the mangroves, said Elliot.

Twin sisters Melissa and Georgia Laurie, 28 (Facebook)

Despite asking if there were crocodiles in the mangrove roots that lined the lagoon, they were explicitly told by their guide that there were not, and it was safe to swim, he said.

According to local police, the tour guide  who has not been named  has been arrested by the Guardia Civil after fleeing the scene of the attack. He is currently being held in nearby Tutepec pending further investigation.

A spokesperson for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office told Sky News earlier today that they were supporting the family of two British women who are in hospital in Mexico and are in contact with the local authorities.

Many people claim to be tour guides says Campos but they arent able and have never been trained to look after a group.
The condition of CRPF officer Chetan Kumar Cheetah who has been hospitalized with COVID-related complications has improved, the hospital has said.

According to doctors at the AIIMS Jhajjar, the officer who was put on oxygen support on May 30 has now been taken off the ventilator.

BCCL

Fighting spirit helped him recover

Only a few patients who require ventilator support after suffering from severe Covid-19 recover fully. It is the fighting spirit of Cheetah and the efforts of nurses and doctors that has made the recovery possible. If there is no serious complication, he may well be discharged soon, a doctor told The Times of India.

According to his family, the officer has no comorbidities, but they are concerned due to the amount of punishment his body has gone through in the past.

BCCL

In 2017, Cheetah, a CRPF Commandant had cheated death after being hit by at least nine bullets during an encounter in Jammu and Kashmir.

He was part of a paramilitary unit, which engaged in an encounter with a group of terrorists in Hajin area of Bandipora district of Kashmir on February 14, 2017.

While Cheetah was injured, three soldiers and one militant were killed in the encounter. Cheetah who was badly injured was first taken to the military hospital in Srinagar was later airlifted to AIIMS trauma centre due to his serious condition.

BCCL

He had bullet injuries in his head, the upper limbs were badly fractured and the globe of his right eye had ruptured.

Fighting against odds, Cheetah who underwent several surgeries made a miraculous comeback and left the hospital after two months.

Cheetah, who was awarded the Kirti Chakra, the second-highest peacetime gallantry medal for his service joined back in service in March 2018.

Due to his condition, though he wanted to go back to combat duty, Cheetah was given office-related work.
A seaside hotel about 1.5 km away from where world leaders are meeting for a Group of Seven (G7) summit in Carbis Bay in England's Cornwall this weekend has temporarily shut down due to a COVID-19 outbreak among staff members, Reuters reported on Thursday. It was being used by members of Germany's delegation to a G7 summit.

Guests might have to sleep in a tent

The Pedn Olva hotel in St Ives, a town adjacent to the location of the three-day G7 leaders' meeting in Cornwall, southwest England, had shut temporarily on advice from health officials and the local authority, the owners said.

Reuters

Among the guests were security staff for the German delegation and a media team working for a U.S. broadcaster, Sky News reported. Security staff told Sky News that they had "been told nothing" about the outbreak and might have to sleep in a tent on the beach.



Host hotel fully shut

"Following extensive discussions over the last few days with PHE (Public Health England) and Cornwall Council, we have taken the decision to fully close the hotel," said a spokesperson for the owners, St Austell Brewery.



Sky

"We fully appreciate the inconvenience given the limited accommodation options available in the area at the moment but the safety and security of our team and guests is our upmost priority."

The spokesperson said the hotel would reopen once a full COVID-19 deep clean had taken place and there were enough staff to run it.

AP

G7 leaders may donate 1 billion vaccines

Meanwhile, the Group of Seven nations may commit to sharing at least one billion coronavirus shots with the world, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Thursday.



The UK, which is hosting the big powers' gathering in southwest England, added it would donate at least 100 million surplus doses within the next year, including five million beginning in the coming weeks.

Reuters

The commitment follows growing calls for richer countries to step up their efforts to share Covid-19 shots with less developed nations, with charities warning the current situation is leading to "vaccine apartheid".



"At the G7 Summit I hope my fellow leaders will make similar pledges so that, together, we can vaccinate the world by the end of next year and build back better from coronavirus," Johnson had said.



BCCL

Meanwhile EU members have agreed to donate at least 100 million doses by the end of 2021 -- with France and Germany each committing to providing 30 million.


Thursday was the deadliest day so far for Mumbai, just a few days into the annual monsoon season when 13 people were killed in two separate incidents of building collapse in the city.

In the first incident, 2 people, including eight children, were killed and seven others injured after two floors of a three-storey residential building collapsed on an adjoining single-storey house in Malwani in suburban Mumbai. Nine members of a family were among the deceased in the tragedy.

AP

One person died in a separate incident of house crash at Dahisar, a western suburb of Mumbai, on Thursday evening.

Just a few days ago, on Monday, one person had died and five others, including a woman, were injured after the wall of a four-storey building collapsed on an adjoining two-storey house in suburban Bandra.

Old, illegal buildings

According to authorities, the first building that collapsed on Thursday was constructed illegally and had suffered damage in cyclone Tauktae, which passed close to the Mumbai coast last month.

AP

On Friday, the Bombay high court expressed its displeasure over the comments made by Mumbai mayor Kishori Pedneka who said that if everyone was responsible, the mishap would not have happened.

When a building is declared under the C category (which means it is beyond repair and needs to be demolished), the occupants must be moved out immediately. Culprits behind what happened in Malad should take responsibility for it. More than looking into whose administration was there, it should be seen that who was responsible for it. Had everyone been responsible, it wouldn't have happened," Pednekar had said.

AP

The HC, however, said that there may be buildings that are dangerous, dilapidated and unsafe and the civic bodies may not be in a position to take steps due to protection orders passed due to the pandemic. He said the court has made it abundantly clear that municipal corporations/councils/ panchayats shall be at liberty to move the court for demolition if necessary.

Result of neglect

The three incident in a week has once again put the plight of those living in dangerous and dilapidated buildings in the city on focus.

Many of these buildings that are 50-100 years old are in a very poor state and are on the verge of collapse due to the lack of maintenance.

BCCL

Residents in these buildings are forced to live there even when their houses have developed crack as they cannot afford to rent another one in the city which has one of the highest house rents in the country.

In March 2020, the Maharashtra Legislative Council was informed that incidents of building collapse claimed 106 lives in Mumbai from 2015 to 2019.

"There were 1,472 incidents of building collapse (in Mumbai city and suburbs) during 2015 to 2019 in which 106 people lost their lives while another 344 were injured," Urban Development Minister Eknath Shinde, had said in a written reply.

According to some estimates, there are more than 14,000 buildings in Mumbai that are over 50 years old and which, due to age-related instability and lack of maintenance, are at risk of collapse.
The Union health ministry's latest guideline said those who tested Covid positive should wait for three months after recovery to get vaccinated, as they have natural antibodies present.



However, now a group of public health experts, including doctors from AIIMS has recommended that there is no need to vaccinate people who had documented Covid-19 infection. This is in contrast to what the WHO and other experts have said till now.

BCCL

"There is no need to vaccinate people who had documented COVID-19 infection. These people may be vaccinated after generating evidence that vaccine is beneficial after natural infection. The overall objective of vaccination should be the control the disease at the population level," read the report, according to news agency ANI.



What do we know so far?

Here's all that we know so far:

In the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been instances of reinfections. AIIMS Delhi has conducted a study on breakthrough infection  infections after partial or full vaccination  which reveals that vaccination stops the reinfection to become severe, but it does not guarantee protection from reinfection.

Reuters

A Lancet study on reinfection has said the risk of reinfection gets reduced for up to 10 months following the first infection. The study conducted by the researchers from the University College London is based on antibody testing of people who are previously infected and those who are not. The study was conducted in the UK.

According to the Indian experts' report, there is not enough evidence that vaccine is beneficial after natural infection. "There is no need to vaccinate people who had documented Covid-19 infection. These people may be vaccinated after generating evidence that vaccine is beneficial after natural infection," the report said.

Who should be prioritised?

As the objective of the vaccination drive should be to control the disease, those who have been already infected should not be the priority, as they are naturally protected, the report suggested.

BCCL

In its report, IPHA and IAPSM said that vaccine supply to the rural primary healthcare institutions should be prioritised and recommended that vaccinating the vulnerable and at risk, instead of mass population wide immunization including children should continue to be the aim in its current phase.



Is it due to vaccine crunch?

Is the suggestion of keeping once-infected people out of vaccination for now influenced by vaccine crunch? Yes, the report clarified that the present situation of the pandemic in the country demands that prioritisation instead of opening it to all. "Moreover, we can conserve considerable resources if we exclude adults who have recovered from natural infection," it said.

AFP

What are the risks with unplanned vaccination?

Further, they have also pointed out that vaccination of young adults and children is not supported by evidence and would not be cost-effective and said unplanned vaccination can promote mutant strains.

Reuters

"Mass, indiscriminate, and incomplete vaccination can also trigger emergence of mutant strains. Given the rapid transmission of infection in various parts of the country, it is unlikely that mass vaccination of all adults will catch up with the pace of natural infection among our young population," as per the report.


Pakistan's National Assembly has approved a bill allowing Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav to appeal his conviction in the high courts of the country. The bill seeks to provide further right of review and reconsideration in giving effect to the judgment of the International Court of Justice.

The bill was adopted by the National Assembly on Thursday after approval from the 21-member standing committee. It has been named 'International Court of Justice (Review and Re-consideration) Act.

File

The Pakistan government had brought an ordinance in the National Assembly earlier in view of the ICJ's ruling in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case. The Act will extend to the whole of Pakistan and shall "come into force at once".

What the bill says

According to the bill, the High Court has the power to review and reconsider where the ICJ in relation to a foreign national passes an order in respect of rights under the Vienna Convention of Consular Relations or a foreign national is aggrieved in respect of the rights available under the same.

File

Such a foreign national, either himself, through his authorised representative or through a consular officer of a mission of his country, may file a petition before a High Court for review and reconsideration, in terms of Section 3, in regard to an order of conviction or sentence of a Military Court operating under the Pakistan Army, 1952.

Earlier this year, a larger bench of the Islamabad High Court (IHC) had resumed hearing of the case related to Jadhav and four other Indian prisoners who were under detention even after completion of their respective sentences.

File

In January, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had slammed Pakistan for not acting upon the ICJ's 2019 judgment that had upheld India's claim of the Pakistani regime committing the grievous violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations on several counts regarding Jadhav. India has also lashed out at Pakistan for failing to provide consular access to Jadhav.

Jadhav, a retired Indian Navy officer, was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court in April 2017. Pakistan claims that Jadhav was arrested from Balochistan in 2016 on charges of espionage. India has rejected Pakistan's allegations and said he was kidnapped from the Iranian port of Chabahar.
In today's edition of 'things that happen only in UP,' a priest who went to a government procurement centre to sell wheat grown on temple land was asked to produce the Aadhaar card of none other than God.

According to an IANS report, the incident took place two days ago in Kuraha village in Attara tehsil in Banda.

Times Now

The priest and chief caretaker of the Ram Janki temple, Mahant Ramkumar Das, said he wanted to sell 100 quintals of wheat in a government mandi.

He arrived at the government mandi to sell the crops and was asked to produce the Aadhaar card of the deity in whose name the land was registered.



The seven-hectare land is registered in the name of the deity, in this case, Lord Ram and Janki.



Amarujala

The registration was cancelled as I could not produce the Aadhaar card, where do I get Aadhaar of the Lord? he asked. The priest said that he spoke to the sub divisional magistrate (SDM) Saurabh Shukla.

He told me the registration cannot be done without Aadhaar and that is why it has been cancelled by his office, he said.

The priest also revealed that last year, he sold 150 quintals of produce at the government mandi. He added that he has been selling the produce for the last several years, but never faced a situation like this.

On the other hand, district supply officer, Govind Upadhyaya said the rules were clear that produce from mutts and temple could not be purchased.

He said the purchase policy did not have any such provision either and added that khatauni (land records) were admissible but now registration has become compulsory. For registration, one must have the Aadhaar card of the person on whose name the land was registered. The SDM said that the priest was not asked to produce the Aadhaar card of the deity, but he was explained the protocol.

The policy has been decided at the government level and purchase was being done on the basis of that policy, he said.



The priest said, How are we to meet the expenses and get our food if we cannot sell the crops in the mandi?

PTI

Left with no other option, the priest said he would now sell the produce to the commission agents at a throwaway price.

Facebook image for representational purposes only.




Immigration detention centers in South Korea, where foreign nationals are held till deportation, will start welcoming back visitors for the first time in seven months, officials said Friday, in accordance with changing COVID-19 circumstances.







The Hwaseong Immigration Detention Center in Gyeonggi Province and the Cheongju Immigration Detention Center in the central province of North Chungcheong said they will partially lift the ban on visitors Monday and permit visits booked through advance reservations.







The two centers have completely prohibited in-person visiting of inmates since November last year, as part of efforts to stem the spread of the coronavirus.







Meetings with visitors will be granted only to foreigners who have spent more than 14 days at the centers and visiting hours are limited to 10-11 a.m. and 2-4 p.m., the officials said, noting that people who are vaccinated against COVID-19 or test negative for the coronavirus will be prioritized in reservations.







An official at the Hwaseong Immigration Detention Center said that a growing number of vaccinated people and its enhanced preparedness against the pandemic have led to its decision to welcome back visitors.







Meanwhile, the Yeosu Immigration Office in the southwestern city of Yeosu reopened its meeting room for visitors early this month in accordance with regional authorities' downgrade of social distancing rules.







The Ministry of Justice last month allowed ordinary correctional facilities across the country to ease COVID-19-related regulations on the number of visitors and the frequency of their meetings with inmates. But the immigration detention centers were excluded from the deregulatory policy, prompting migrant human rights groups to appeal to the National Human Rights Commission of Korea. (Yonhap)


The Economic Offences Wing of the Chennai Police said June 11 that it has arrested Ravi Parthasarathy, the former Chairman of IL&FS Group, in the Rs. 1 lakh crore scam, which triggered a liquidity crisis in the financial services market in 2018. (photo via IANS)
Etablissements Gallois started upgrading its graphite mine in Tamatave, Madagascar in May. The program is expected to be completed in July.

The operation upgrade will increase monthly graphite output to around 15,000 tonnes from July, representing a 50% increase from its current output at 10,000 tonnes. This means the companys annual flake...
Lee Jun-seok, left, hails after being elected as the leader of the main opposition People Power Party at the party headquarters in Seoul, June 11. Yonhap



Lee Jun-seok, a 36-year-old politician with no experience as a lawmaker, won a victory Friday to take the helm of the main opposition People Power Party (PPP) as the youngest-ever leader of a mainstream party in modern South Korean politics.



Lee was announced the victor in the party's convention to elect its new chairman to be in charge of steering the biggest conservative party through next year's presidential election in March.



Lee secured 43.8 percent of the ballots cast online and by telephone by party members and private citizens from Monday-Thursday, defeating his four established senior rivals, including two high-profile former party floor leaders.



With no record of serving a parliamentary term, Lee entered the PPP's leadership race as an underdog.





Lee Jun-seok makes a speech after being elected as the leader of the main opposition People Power Party at the party headquarters in Seoul, June 11. Yonhap
A New Jersey bill that would allow business interruption insurers in the state to add a rider for virus and pandemic coverage is moving forward, with some in the industry saying it could encourage more insurers to provide this coverage.

I would hope this bill might spur some insurers to consider bringing to the marketplace the pandemic-related BI coverage sooner than we anticipate, said Steven C. Radespiel, owner of The Insurance Center of North Jersey Inc. in Maywood, New Jersey, and immediate past president of Professional Insurance Agents of New Jersey (PIANJ).

The bill, Assembly Bill 4551, was initially introduced in August by Assemblyman Roy Freiman and was approved by the Assembly Financial Institutions and Insurance Committee earlier this month. It now awaits a second reading in the state Assembly.

Over the past year, we have seen just how significantly a business can be affected by a global pandemic with the untimely permanent closure of valued businesses throughout our state, Freiman said in an emailed statement to Insurance Journal. Limited staff availability, temporary shut-downs, supply chain interruptions and necessary safety precautions that may take place during a pandemic can all ultimately impact a companys revenue.

If passed, the bill would take effect immediately and apply to insurance policies issued on or after the date that the New Jersey Commissioner of Banking and Insurance approves a rider for global virus transmission or pandemic coverage. It would allow the Commissioner of Banking and Insurance to review and approve these riders on an expedited basis.

Insurers are already permitted to file policy forms with the state Department of Banking and Insurance (DOBI) that would allow for global pandemic coverage. However, one of the main benefits of this bill is that it allows DOBI to review and approve policy riders on an expedited basis, Radespiel said.

This will allow the product to reach the consumer that much quicker, if and when insurers decide to offer it, he said.

This proposed bill is the latest move by Freiman in the state of New Jersey to tackle concerns over business interruption coverage during the global COVID-19 pandemic.

A New Jersey bill sponsored by Freiman that requires business interruption insurers to provide policyholders with a summary of coverage for loss of use and occupancy of a commercial property was signed into law by Governor Phil Murphy in May.

The bill  A-4805  was introduced in October of last year and aims to achieve greater transparency between insurers and their clients during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It requires that DOBI publish on its website a one-page summary of common insurance clauses regarding coverage for loss of use and occupancy of a commercial property and business interruption that may be used in a commercial insurance policy.

Another New Jersey bill proposed by Freiman in March of last year aimed to create business interruption insurance coverage for COVID-19 related claims despite virus exclusions in many policies. It was the center of controversy in the industry at the start of the pandemic as it drew concern among insurers about the constitutionality and financial impact of this type of legislation.

The bill  New Jersey Bill A-3844 is still active in the legislature but has not moved forward. If enacted, it would be retroactive for any insured with a business interruption policy in place from March 9, 2020, when New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy first declared a public health emergency and a state of emergency due to the virus. The bill would apply to New Jersey businesses with less than 100 eligible employees, meaning full-time employees working a normal week of 25 hours or more.

Radespiel said he believes this latest proposed bill is a better solution than A-3844 because it is a voluntary move that does not require carriers to retroactively cover a pandemic-related business interruption loss.

[A-4551] is better in two main ways: it is not retroactive and does not force an insurer to offer the coverage if they do not want to, he said. I wouldnt expect much objection from the insurance industry.

Although pandemic-related BI coverage doesnt yet exist on a mass level, Radespiel said, he believes this could change.

insurers are not going to file a rider for global pandemic coverage during a global pandemic, he said. As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is likely you will see this coverage being offered more.

This is because insurers will have more historical data and experience to create actuarily sound rates for the coverage, he added.

After the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic has presented our business community, it is prudent for us to find ways to mitigate these losses in the event of any future pandemics, Freiman said in his statement to Insurance Journal. Allowing businesses to seek out insurance coverage for business interruption caused by global virus transmission will help accomplish that going forward.

Topics COVID-19 New Jersey
A former Connecticut police officer, who shot and killed an 18-year-old motorist during a traffic stop, received a $100,000 payout from Wethersfields municipal insurer when he resigned from the department, according to documents obtained by the Hartford Courant through a Freedom of Information Act request.

It is unclear if the money paid is a part of earned vacation or sick time or other benefits.

Layau Eulizier shot and killed Anthony Vega-Cruz in April 2019 after an officer discovered the license plates on Vega-Cruzs vehicle belong to a different vehicle.

Eulizier was ordering food at a nearby restaurant and joined the pursuit of Vega-Cruz, who authorities say was attempting to elude officers.

When Vega-Cruzs vehicle came to a stop, Eulizier exited his cruiser and ran out onto Silas Deane Highway repeatedly yelling show me your hands.

Police said Eulizier stepped in front of Vega-Cruzs car as he was attempting to drive away and fired into the windshield, hitting Vega-Cruz once in the head. He died two days later.

Officer Eulizier discharged his firearm in fear that the operator was about to run him over and that he would lose his own life, then-Hartford States Attorney Gail P. Hardy wrote in her report clearing Eulizier of wrongdoing in March 2020.

Eulizier, who had been with Wethersfield police for eight months, had previously been involved in another deadly shooting as an officer in Manchester. It was determined that his bullets never hit the suspect and the New London States Attorney determined that the use of force was justified.

Town Manager Gary Evans declined to comment on the settlement, citing ongoing litigation.

Vega-Cruzs father, Jose Vega-Cruz, has filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit against the town.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Connecticut
BRASILIA  A regional labor judge has ordered Brazilian miner Vale SA to pay 1 million reais ($197,240) in compensation to each of the families of 131 employees killed in the collapse of a mining dam in 2019.

The disaster in Brumadinho, Minas Gerais state, killed 270 people in Brazils most deadly mining tragedy has hampered Vales performance for two years as it was forced to curb production amid new safety protocols.

Judge Vivianne Celia Ferreira Ramos Correa on Wednesday agreed to the request of the Brumadinho iron mining workers union that the compensation be paid to the estate or heirs of the victims of the disaster, according to the ruling seen by Reuters.

Her decision can be appealed by the company. Vale said it will study the judges decision.

Vale said in a statement that it is sensitive to the situation of those affected by the collapse of the B1 dam and has been reaching agreements with the workers families since 2019 to guarantee quick and complete reparation.

The company argued that it has already paid more than 2 billion reais in civil and labor indemnities associated with the disaster, after having signed agreements with more than 1,600 relatives of victims.

The unions lawyer, Maximiliano Garcez, welcomed the ruling as humanist and told Reuters he originally asked for compensation of 3 million reais per deceased worker.

The dam collapse destroyed houses and other building and polluted rivers causing lasting environmental damage in the region.

In February, Vale said it had reached a 37.7 billion real ($7 billion) agreement with prosecutors and the state of Minas Gerais to settle claims stemming from the disaster.

The government of Minas Gerais said the agreement did not set a ceiling on potential costs associated with environmental cleanup, which Vale will have to cover.

($1 = 5.0700 reais) (Reporting by Anthony Boadle, editing by Nick Zieminski)

Photograph: In this Jan. 28, 2019 file photo, firefighters are resupplied as they search for victims of the Vale dam collapse in Brumadinho, Brazil. The Jan. 25 breach of the dam, which is owned and operated by Vale SA, unleashed tens of thousands of pounds (kilograms) of reddish-brown mud over a wide area in Brumadinho. Photo credit: AP Photo/Leo Correa, File.

Related:

Topics Legislation Mining
French mutual insurer Covea and reinsurer SCOR finally laid down their legal swords this week  opting instead for peaceful relations by signing a binding settlement agreement.

The agreement, which implies no admission of liability on either side, is designed to create the conditions for a return to a mutually beneficial relationship over the long term.

The settlement is credit positive for both SCOR and Covea as it ends a conflict which has been a distraction for both companies management teams  Moodys analyst Christian Badorff.

Covea and SCOR wish to restore peaceful relations, based on professionalism and in keeping with their respective independence, said the agreement.

These two major players in the insurance and reinsurance industry in France have decided to renew the relationship based on trust and mutual support that they enjoyed for many years, it continued.

The settlement agreement will end the acrimonious battle between the companies, which began in 2018 when Covea initiated a hostile takeover of SCOR  an 8.3 billion bid that was abandoned in early 2019 but has led to lawsuits and a public war of words.

Next month, a criminal trial in front of the Paris Criminal Court was due to be held against Coveas CEO Thierry Derez and Covea  for breach of trust and concealment of breach of trust, respectively, at the Paris Criminal Court.

It has been a complicated relationship: Derez once sat on SCORs board at the time of the hostile takeover bid (he was later forced to resign) and Covea is currently SCORs largest shareholder.

Legal Actions Abandoned

But, as a result of this weeks peace accord, in a section titled Restore peaceful relations in order to move forward, Covea and SCOR have agreed to immediately abandon, with regard to all persons concerned, all legal actions and claims linked to the combination proposal made by Covea in 2018.

In addition, Covea has agreed to pay SCOR an indemnity settlement of 20 million (US$24.3 million) before tax.

Covea to Exit SCORs Shares

Another part of the agreement covers the orderly exit by Covea from the share capital of SCOR. In this section, Covea grants SCOR a call option on its SCOR shares, which are transferable to any third party designated by SCOR, in compliance with regulations, at an exercise price of 28 per share and for a period of five years, so that SCOR can organize this exit in its best interests.

In order to prevent any further takeover attempts  at least in the short term  Covea agrees to renounce for a period of seven years any submission of an offer, formal or informal, official or unofficial, public or private, direct or indirect, relating to a takeover of SCOR, and  any public communication regarding an expression of interest, an acquisition of a stake or a takeover of SCOR, unless at the express and prior request of the board of directors of SCOR.

Re/insurance Agreement

And last but not least, the companies have agreed to a re/insurance business partnership going forward. The agreement implements quota share retrocession treaties whereby Covea will underwrite, and SCOR will cede, 30% of all in-force business carried by SCORs Irish Life entities as of Dec. 31st, 2020, in exchange for a purchase price [of $1.014 million] that will be paid by Covea upfront.

Under the terms agreed, SCOR will transfer to Covea 30% of all future premiums, commissions, claims and expenses with respect to this business until expiration of the underlying reinsurance treaties.

[T]he quota-share agreement in the life reinsurance business is positive for Covea as it allows the company to diversify its business profile into biometrical risks which are not correlated to property/casualty risks, commented Moodys analyst Christian Badorff, in a statement.

This quota share agreement also benefits SCOR because it provides the capital to grow its business in the P/C reinsurance market, where rates have been hardening recently, he added.

The settlement is credit positive for both SCOR and Covea as it ends a conflict which has been a distraction for both companies management teams, Badorff explained.

Re-establishing Dialogue

The peace accord between the companies was moderated by Jean-Paul Faugere, vice president of the Autorite de Controle Prudentiel et de Resolution (ACPR), the independent administrative authority responsible for monitoring the conduct of French financial institutions.

The ACPR has asked that the dialogue between Covea and SCOR be re-established and lead to a binding agreement formalized by the signature of a settlement agreement, said SCOR and Covea in their agreement.

As a result, the companies were able to reach a settlement, which was approved by the boards of directors of Covea and SCOR on June 9 and 8, 2021, respectively, and signed by representatives of the two companies on June 10 in the presence of Faugere.

Covea and SCOR firmly believe that this course of action will open up a new period of trust, in the interests of both parties, their stakeholders, and more generally the insurance sector in France and the Paris marketplace, said the agreement.
Catastrophe excess of loss reinsurance contracts never anticipated an event like a pandemic, but cedents can still expect compromises from their reinsurers, an industry executive said Thursday.

While cedents and reinsurers may often disagree about how the reinsurance contracts apply, reinsurers cant afford to let that drive a wedge through their relationships with long-term clients, according to Joseph Brandon, president of Alleghany Corp. and chair of Alleghanys TransRe subsidiary, speaking at an S&P Global Ratings insurance conference.

It reminds me very much of trying to adjust business interruption claims for hurricane or earthquake. Across the world, there were many more events canceled than adjusters.

Ceding companies understandably would like to aggregate as many claims as they could to maximize cessions. On the other hand, the contracts are limited in terms of time, geography and scope. Thats going to lead to some interesting questions and negotiations as reinsurers seek an appropriate compromise with their ceding company clients, he said.

Its easy to say, you can always take this to arbitration, but in Brandons view, going through that long, protracted process doesnt make sense on COVID claims for which longtime clients are seeking recoveries. Unlike insurers that have hundreds of thousands or even millions of policies, reinsurers clients number in the hundreds or low thousands.

A substantial dispute is not healthy for the relationship, or in the interest of either party. That means contract disputes will likely be worked out through negotiated compromises over time.

Our approach is not to take any general sweeping positions but rather to work with our clients, one at a time, he said. Eventually business people will have to reach a resolution.

Before Brandon participated in a virtual fireside chat with Taoufik Gharib, an S&P Global senior director and lead analyst, John Iten, S&Ps P/C sector leader, led off the days events with some insights on industry financials, noting that global reinsurers took the brunt of losses related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last April, S&P estimated the U.S. P/C market would see $15-$30 billion in losses from the pandemic  an estimate that several chief risk officers speaking at last years conference thought was light. Iten said that to date, however, U.S. primary insurers rated by S&P have only taken about $6 billion in charges for COVID. Also noting that several U.S. carriers have reported that most of the reserves they have are in IBNR (incurred-but-not-reported loss reserves), Iten said, There is the potential of reserve releases if anticipated claims dont materialize.

Globally, Iten said, primary insurers and reinsurers have recognized close to $37 billion of COVID losses overall. Its fair to assume that a good portion of the $31 billion difference between those numbers is for U.S. losses that are being picked up by reinsurers and also by foreign insurers with U.S. operations.

Obviously, companies are incented to tell rating agencies and investors that most of their COVID reserves are IBNR, Brandon told Gharib when the analyst later asked the executive what percentage of industrywide COVID losses he thought has been paid to date vs. case reserves and IBNR. Brandon explained that there isnt a lot of comparability across companies in how they classify reserves.

Giving the example for event cancellation claims, he said that a company taking an event-by-event approach would put up more case reserves than one that estimated its bulk liability number as a percentage of limits.

Biggest Surprise

Breaking down losses by coverage, Brandon said, the event cancellation line was the biggest surprise. With the benefit of hindsight, the industry by and large missed the fact that these contingency covers or event cancellation covers could systematically aggregate over 18 months, he said.

He explained that event cancellation underwriters who considered potential exposure for the NCAA Final Four, were accustomed to thinking about how terrorism or a weather risk might postpone a single event, but they failed to aggregate that loss by connecting that event to a canceled Super Bowl or Tokyo Olympics.

The rates on line for the coverage were terribly thin, and the loss amounts are stunningly large, particularly compared to the premium that was collected, he said, echoing remarks made at last years S&P conference by TransRes Chief Strategy and Risk Officer Greg Richardson, who remarked that event cancellation losses were a nice little pop in the jaw for TransRe.

At this years conference, Brandon said that resolving event cancellation claims turned out to be much more subjective and difficult than he anticipated, in part because there was demand surge for event cancellation adjusters.

It reminds me very much of trying to adjust business interruption claims for hurricane or earthquake, he said. Across the world, there were many more events canceled than adjusters. So, the payment process was slow getting launched, he said, reporting, however, that the industry is moving in more orderly manner today.

Brandon told the S&P virtual audience that roughly 35-45% of TransRes COVID losses relates to event cancellation, with another 35% from property business interruption, and the remainder spread across lines like accident and health, mortgage, and trade credit. He also estimated that roughly 15% of TransRes $412 million in net incurred losses have been paid as of March 31, 2021, with 15-20% of the total in case reserves, leaving 65-70% in IBNR.

Returning to Gharibs question and extrapolating from the TransRe experience, he guessed around 25% of the COVID losses have been paid globally across the insurance and reinsurance sectors, noting that reinsurance loss payouts lag behind primary insurance.

Business Interruption Uncertainties

Some big question marks remain for insurers and reinsurers, he indicated, highlighting the ultimate resolution of business interruption losses across continental Europe as one area of uncertainty.

In the U.S., we have, for the most part, fairly standardized coverage language, thanks to the long history of rating bureaus, he said, referring in particular to the Insurance Services Offices, or Verisk.

It never occurred to me, well, where exactly does the policy language come from in France, in Germany, in South Africa? Whos taking responsibility for making sure thats rational and the coverage grant is what the industry intended, he continued, without hazarding a guess about how that might play out or how Europes losses might end up being split between insurers and reinsurers.

In Australia, Brandon reported his understanding of a unique situation that has primary insurers unable to recover from reinsurers. According to the reinsurance executive, some primary policies had an exclusion that would negate coverage, but the language of the exclusion references a law that lapsed a few years ago.

The reinsurers, he believes, also had exclusions in their catastrophe treaties that referenced the proper and newly updated law.

Across the globe, he said, business interruption is likely to be the largest source of coverage losses but there is more certainty about how coverage disputes will play out in the U.S. and UK than elsewhere, he said, noting that while case trends continue to move favorably for insurers in U.S. federal courts, the UK Supreme Court decision on the FCA test case early this year, was largely unfavorable for the insurance industry.

He also referenced a poor decision in South Africa from the industry perspective, but said that adverse decision wont have any large impact on the global reinsurance industry.

This article first was published in Insurance Journals sister publication, Carrier Management.

Topics COVID-19 Profit Loss Reinsurance
Lee Jun-seok waves the flag of the main opposition People Power Party at the party headquarters in Seoul, Friday, after being elected as its new chairman. Yonhap



Young politician to head main opposition as youngest-ever leader



By Jung Da-min



Lee Jun-seok, a 36-year-old politician who has never won a seat in the National Assembly, has rewritten the nation's modern political history by becoming the youngest-ever leader of the main opposition People Power Party (PPP)  the first time for a politician in his 30s to be elected to head either the ruling party or the main opposition party.



The young politician's rise in the conservative bloc is shaking the political landscape, according to political watchers, as it is reflecting growing public calls for change and innovation in politics, with the presidential election nine months away in March 2022.



In the PPP's party convention held Friday, Lee, a former member of the PPP's Supreme Council, was elected chairman, garnering 43.82 percent of the vote. Na Kyung-won, former floor leader of the PPP's predecessor, the Liberty Korea Party, followed him with 37.14 percent, and Rep. Joo Ho-young, another former floor leader of the PPP, trailed them with 14.02 percent. The other candidates, five-term lawmaker Rep. Cho Kyoung-tae and four-term lawmaker Rep. Hong Moon-pyo, received 2.81 percent and 2.22 percent of the votes, respectively.



Political circles have noted the young politician's rise, with heavyweights and potential presidential candidates issuing congratulatory messages to the young new leader.



"President Moon Jae-in told Lee on the phone that his election was wonderful and it will go down as something in the nation's political history," said Park Soo-hyun, senior presidential secretary for public communication.





Lee Jun-seok, right, then a member of the emergency committee of the Saenuri Party, a predecessor of the main opposition People Power Party, watches an exit poll broadcast after the 19th general election, seated beside Park Geun-hye, center, then-leader of the Saenuri Party, in this April 2012 file photo. Yonhap



Lee, a Harvard graduate who majored in computer science, was a young entrepreneur before beginning his political career in 2011. At age 26, he was recruited by Park Geun-hye, then-leader of the Grand National Party, a PPP predecessor, and became the youngest Supreme Council member in the party's history. But Lee joined Yoo Seong-min, a former four-term lawmaker who ran for the 2017 presidential election on the ticket of the minor conservative Bareun Party, after Park faced impeachment in 2017.



Although Lee has never been elected as a lawmaker during his decade in politics, he has expanded his political presence in the conservative bloc as a commentator and reform-minded politician. He has especially gained media attention recently following his outspoken and controversial comments on gender and other issues.



Political watchers said Lee's election has brought the party a new opportunity to present an alternative political force that can hold the supermajority ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) in check.









As a new leader of the PPP, Lee is facing daunting tasks to reform the PPP and integrate the conservative bloc, a prerequisite for winning the presidential election next year.





Lee Jun-seok, the new chairperson of the conservative main opposition People Power Party, rides a "Ttareungyi" bike, which is part of a bicycle-sharing service run by the Seoul Metropolitan Government, to get to the National Assembly from a nearby subway station, Sunday, two days after being elected to lead the party. He said he has often used the bike-sharing system, and he has not hired a driver yet, even though a vehicle has been provided to him by the party. Yonhap



Political commentator Park Sang-byoung said the growing public distrust in established politicians was a major factor in Lee's election, and this public sentiment was expressed in the April 7 by-elections, in which the PPP took the mayoral seats of the countries' two largest cities of Seoul and Busan.



Following the by-elections, many political watchers noted that negative sentiment has grown toward the ruling DPK among young people in their 20s and 30s, many of whom voted for PPP candidate Oh Se-hoon, now the mayor of Seoul.



"There is a high possibility that young people in their 20s and 30s will hold the casting vote in the next presidential election, supposing that people in their 40s and 50s would vote for the liberal ruling DPK and those in their 60s or older would vote for the conservative main opposition PPP, based on public opinions shown in recent elections," Park said.



"It seems that PPP supporters have chosen Lee, not Na or Joo, as the new party leader who could win young people's votes. They also expect that Lee could expand the scope of the party's support base by embracing centrists, as Lee's messages have been differentiated from those by hard-line conservatives of the party who have been its main force."



But political watchers said the influence of the PPP's established politicians will not be diminished significantly, as many party members still support them. In the party chairperson election, Na garnered 40.93 percent support among party members, while Lee received 37.41 percent support from them, although Lee had 58.76 percent and Na had 28.27 percent among general voters outside the party.



Cha Jae-won, a professor of special affairs at the Catholic University of Pusan, said Lee's first task as the new party leader is to unite the party members, and expected him to assign both Na and Joo to important positions.



"In particular, Lee said he would bring Kim Chong-in, the veteran economist and politician who formerly headed the PPP as emergency committee chief, back to the party. I see Lee is a prepared leader for the party seeing the strategic value of borrowing experience and knowledge from veteran politicians like Kim, while promoting his own energy as a young politician."





The new leaders of the main opposition People Power Party (PPP) pose during the party convention at party headquarters in Seoul, Friday. From left are the party's Supreme Council youth member Kim Yong-tae, and five Supreme Council members  Rep. Bae Hyun-jin, Rep. Cho Su-jin, new PPP Chairman Lee Jun-seok, former three-term lawmaker Kim Jae-won and former two-term lawmaker Jung Mi-gyeong. Korea Times photo by Oh Dae-geun
This wrap-up of international People Moves details recent appointments at three brokers: Miller, Lockton Re and McGill and Partners.

A summary of these new hires follows here.

Miller, a London-based independent specialist re/insurance broker, announced the appointment of Erik Manning as head of Insurance-Linked Securities (ILS).

Manning is due to commence his role in the third quarter, subject to approval by the Bermuda Department of Immigration. He will report into Charlie Simpson, head of Bermuda.

Manning, who brings significant industry experience, will concentrate on developing best-in-class ILS and other insurance risk-to-capital solutions to the benefit of Millers clients. His appointment builds on the recruitment of Simpson earlier this year as head of Bermuda as the firm applies a continued focus to reinsurance expansion.

Manning has over 20 years experience in the sector and joins from Peak Capital where he was CEO. Prior to that, he was managing director at Aon Bermuda and has also held senior roles at Markel Re and Guy Carpenter. Erik holds a Ph.D. from the University of London.

Manning will be joined in Bermuda by Sebastian Alexander, who relocates from Millers London office, and Francesca Cacace. Alexander has extensive market and client relationships and has experience in the ILS arena, placing industry loss warranties (ILW) and also in the traditional markets in London, Europe and North America. Cacace will provide support to Millers Bermuda team, bringing her diverse experience and local Bermudian knowledge.

***

Lockton Re, the global reinsurance business of the worlds largest privately held independent insurance broker, announced that Ollie Jones will be joining Lockton Re in London later this year as a broker in the Marine & Energy Division.

Jones will join from Guy Carpenter where he was most recently a vice president in the Global Marine & Energy practice. Prior to that he was a Broker at JLT Re, where he started his career.

***

McGill and Partners announced that Warren Mula has joined the London-based broker as a non-executive director of McGill Global Risk Solutions LLC and a strategic adviser to McGill and Partners.

McGill and Partners has grown significantly in its first two years of operation, and Mulas role will be to support this growth with a particular focus on the specialist brokers U.S. plans, encompassing talent, clients, markets and intermediary partners.

Mula joins McGill and Partners after 40 years service with Aon, most recently as president of Aon Risk Solutions. This included responsibility for all of Aons Global Specialty business strategies as well as global carrier relations. This position was held alongside his ongoing responsibilities as the Global CEO of Aon Broking.

Mulas previous experience also encompassed a variety of senior management and leadership positions, including chairman of Aon Risk Services Companies Inc., managing principal of the U.S. Northeast region, national U.S. head of the Strategic Account Management Group and managing director of the Baltimore/Washington D.C. offices.

Topics Mergers Aon Lockton
An Indianapolis police officer was speeding and made an illegal lane change just before his patrol car struck and killed a pregnant woman last year near a highway ramp, the womans boyfriend alleges in a federal lawsuit.

Attorneys for Marcus Lewis Jr. allege that Officer Jonathan Henderson was driving 33 mph over the speed limit moments before he hit 23-year-old Ashlynn Lisby on May 6, 2020, killing her, The Indianapolis Star reported.

If a civilian drove this recklessly and killed two people, that person would likely face criminal charges, attorney Stephen Wagner said in a news release. That person would also lose his or her job if driving a vehicle for an employer at the time of the accident.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Indianapolis, alleges Henderson was never disciplined by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department for the incident that killed Lisby.

Lisby was more than eight months pregnant with Lewis child, according to the complaint, which said the child was born alive through an emergency cesarean section but died moments later. The suit seeks compensatory damages for Lewis for the death of his child, and punitive damages against Henderson.

The citys Office of Corporation Counsel said it does not comment on pending litigation.

Lisby was struck as she and Lewis were walking on the shoulder of a street just south of an Interstate 465 ramp on Indianapolis southwest side, headed to their motel room, the suit states.

Her death and the fatal police shooting of two Black men in three separate incidents hours apart prompted protests against Indianapolis police.

Henderson, a 22-year veteran of the force at the time, was in uniform and driving in a police vehicle and on his way to roll call when he struck Lisby.

Lewis lawyers say black box data obtained from the crash shows Henderson accelerated to 78 mph  33 mph above the posted speed limit  and made an illegal lane shift over a solid white line as he positioned his vehicle into the right turn lane.

The suit alleges that Henderson checked his rearview mirror as he prepared to turn onto I-465 and his car drifted over the right fog line when he struck Lisby, whose body left an elliptical dent in the hood of his car and cracked his windshield.

Lewis lawyers allege that IMPD attempted to cover up the incident by preparing a crash report that lists the primary cause of the accident as the pedestrians action. That crash report states that none of Hendersons actions played a contributing role in the accident, they allege.

The accident report does not mention that Henderson was speeding, made an illegal lane shift, and was driving partially on the shoulder  when he struck Ashlynn, according to the complaint.

IMPD said after the accident that Henderson called for backup, rendered first aid to Lisby, and collaborated with investigators, submitting to a blood draw to rule out impaired driving as a factor.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Indiana
A man died after becoming stuck in a manure tank on an eastern Iowa cattle farm, authorities said.

The death occurred on June 8 at a farm in Stockton and was reported by authorities there the next day, the Quad-City Times reported.

New Liberty Fire Chief Chad Petersen said his volunteer fire department responded around 10 a.m. to the scene at Sievers Family Farm in Stockton. Petersen said the man was doing some work in the tank when he got stuck.

The New Liberty department called for help from other area fire departments, and firefighters retrieved the mans body from the tank late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning, Petersen said.

The mans name had not been released by Thursday morning.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Agribusiness Iowa
A judge has ruled in favor of a utility in a lawsuit filed over a 2017 natural gas explosion in southwestern Indiana that killed two women and injured three other people.

A Vanderburgh County judge granted CenterPoints motion for summary judgment on June 8 in the civil lawsuit.

The judge found that the plaintiffs failed to produce evidence the utility was negligent and that their negligence directly resulted in the two victims deaths and injuries to three others, the Evansville Courier & Press reported.

The June 2017 explosion leveled a house in Evansville, killed Sharon Mand and Kathleen Woolems and wounded a man, a woman and her 10-year-old son.

The three surviving victims and representatives of Mand and Woolems estates alleged in their 2019 complaint that the utility, then known as Vectren, was negligent by failing to properly inspect gas lines and warn occupants of a leak. Two of the plaintiffs later withdrew their claims.

CenterPoint filed a motion for summary judgment, alleging there was no basis for the lawsuit.

A senior claims investigator for the utility said in an affidavit that an investigation showed that no Vectren employees had performed work at the residence for at least a year or more before the explosion, and that in the blasts aftermath, pressure tests on the gas lines did not reveal any leaks.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Legislation Indiana
Companies and organizations that are victims of ransomware attacks shouldnt pay hackers to unlock their data and should quickly contact law enforcement, which opens up the possibility of creative solutions, FBI Director Christopher Wray said.

It is our policy, it is our guidance from the FBI, that companies should not pay the ransom, Wray told the House Judiciary Committee at a hearing Thursday.

U.S. companies and government agencies are reeling from recent ransomware attacks that have disrupted critical services, from a major oil pipeline to a beef producer and hospitals. The attacks have ignited a national debate over whether victims should pay ransom, which can reach millions of dollars.

The National Security Council also issued a statement saying the administration has been very clear: Private companies should not pay ransom. It encourages and enriches these malicious actors, continues the cycle of these attacks, and there is no guarantee companies get their data back.

Meat producer JBS USA said it paid $11 million to criminals responsible for a May 30 ransomware attack that disrupted its operations across North America and Australia. Colonial Pipeline Co. paid $4.4 million, or 75-Bitcoin, in ransom after a hack that forced it to shut the largest fuel pipeline in the U.S. on May 7, driving up gasoline prices and sparking shortages at filling stations.

The Biden administration basically gave a wink and a nod to paying off the thugs, Representative Steve Chabot, an Ohio Republican, said during the hearing with Wray. Dont we need to clarify the policy relative to paying off criminals?

At a separate hearing Thursday in the Senate, two nominees for top cybersecurity jobs in the Biden administration said they, too, believed companies shouldnt pay hackers extortion demands.

It is not appropriate to pay ransom, said Chris Inglis, who President Joe Biden nominated to serve as National Cyber Director. Unfortunately we get into a place where that is the only thing that is the remedy  feasible to save lives or to bring back critical capabilities.

He advocated holding companies accountable not so much for paying the ransom, but for being at a position where they had to pay the ransom in the first place  for the failure to prepare for that.

Voluntary Guidelines Not Working

Jen Easterly, nominated to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said she believes her role would be to prevent companies from being victimized by ransomware in the first place, by providing the private sector with information and best practices protect themselves. However, both she and Inglis agreed that simply asking companies to follow voluntary cybersecurity standards hasnt been effective. It seems to me that voluntary standards are probably not getting the job done and that there probably is some sort of role for making some of these standards mandatory to include notification, Easterly said.

The White Houses National Security Council issued a statement Wednesday saying the administration has been very clear: Private companies should not pay ransom. It encourages and enriches these malicious actors, continues the cycle of these attacks, and there is no guarantee companies get their data back.

But last month Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technologies, told reporters that typically that is a private sector decision, and the administration has not offered further advice at this time.

Wray said companies under attack should contact the Federal Bureau of Investigation as soon as possible so that law enforcement can help take action in response, potentially obtaining encryption keys used by hackers.

JBS Paid Hackers $11 Million

Referring to ransomware and other cyberattacks, Wray said, The scale of this is something I dont think the country has ever seen anything quite like it, and its going to get much worse.

The Justice Department recouped 63.7 Bitcoin that hackers stole from Colonial. Because of the declining value of Bitcoin since the Colonial ransom was paid, the U.S. seizure in late May amounted to $2.3 million, just over half the ransom paid weeks earlier.

Dividing along partisan lines, lawmakers pursued other controversies in questioning the FBI chief.

Democrats cited apparent intelligence failures leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump.

Representative Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, asked Wray whether the FBI is investigating provocation of the crowd by Trump, who Cohen called Mr. Big  No. 1. Wray declined to comment on specific investigations.

Republicans questioned Wray on whether what they called Bidens open border with Mexico is leading to a surge of criminals and potential terrorists coming across the southern border. Wray said he would have to get back to the lawmakers with specific information.

(Updates with comments from Biden cyber nominees starting in sixth paragraph)

With assistance from Rebecca Kern and Jennifer Jacobs.

Top Photo: FBI Director Christopher Wray

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.

Topics Cyber
Wine grape growers in Texas and surrounding states have filed a lawsuit against drug maker Bayer-Monsanto and chemical giant BASF for the damage their cotton herbicide has caused to vineyards.

Attorneys for the grape growers say cotton seed systems created by Bayer-Monsanto and BASF that use the highly volatile herbicide called dicamba to kill weeds is drifting to nearby vineyards and crippling the nonresistant grapes.

The lawsuit, filed in Jefferson County, claims that some family-owned vineyards have reported losses of more than 90% since Bayer-Monsanto and BASF began selling their dicamba-based genetically modified seed system to cotton growers.

More than 85% of all the wine grapes grown in Texas are grown within one hour of Lubbock, and the grapes are produced, sold or used by the states $13.1 billion wine industry, according to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.

The vineyards have seen their production fall dramatically, and what grapes do grow are often rejected for poor quality, the lawsuit says.

According to the suit, the existence of many High Plains vineyards is under threat because of the dicamba herbicide being sprayed on more than two-thirds of the 3 million acres of cotton in the Texas High Plains.

Dicamba has been the subject of many lawsuits, mostly by farmers, who claim their crops are not dicamba-resistant and the herbicides use is damaging and killing their crops. In February 2020, Bayer and BASF were ordered to pay $265 million to a Missouri peach farmer who said the herbicide drifted from nearby cotton fields and damaged thousands of his trees.

In a statement response to the most recent lawsuit, Bayer said it has great sympathy for growers suffering crop losses but that there could be many reasons for the losses and that it would therefore continue to defend the use of dicamba.

The lawsuit seeks to recover the $114 million in damages, plus $228 million in punitive damages from Bayer-Monsanto and $228 million in punitive damages from BASF based on the companies knowing the damages it could cause.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Texas
A South Carolina Supreme Court opinion published last week nullifies auto insurance policy provisions that step down the maximum payout in instances where the insured was committing a felony or attempting to flee a law enforcement officer.

The 3-2 decision provides an additional $250,000 in insurance coverage to the victims of a 2008 crash that killed one person and seriously injured the driver and two passengers. The majority overturned a Court of Appeals ruling that found Nationwide was liable only for the $50,000 statutory minimum instead of the $300,000 policy limit.

The two dissenters said the majority was overreaching. In so ruling, the Court is legislating. Make no mistake about it, the dissenting opinion written by Justice John W. Kittredge said.

Sharmin Christine Walls was a passenger in her car, a Chevrolet Lumina, while she and several friends drove around Anderson, South Carolina on July 11, 2008. Korey Mayfield was driving.

When a South Carolina state trooper spotted Mayfield speeding and crossing the yellow center line, he flashed his emergency lights and siren. Instead of stopping, Mayfield speeded up. The trooper followed in a chase where speeds exceeded 100 mph.

The trooper abandoned pursuit for public safety reasons, but Mayfield didnt stop speeding. The passengers in the car begged him to stop, but Mayfield refused. He lost control of the vehicle and crashed, killing passenger Christopher A. Timms and injuring Walls, Deborah Timms and Randi Harper.

Mayfield was paralyzed by the crash. He pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide in 2010. Judge Cordell Maddox sentenced him to two years of unmonitored home incarceration and five years probation, according to a report by the Independent Mail newspaper.

Walls policy with Nationwide had a $300,000 per occurrence and $100,000 per person coverage limit. But after the accident, the insurer sought declaratory judgment that it could reduce the total benefit to $50,000 because of a provision in the policy that reduced the maximum benefit to the statutory minimum if the accident occurred while the insured was committing a felony or fleeing law enforcement. Both parties agreed that Mayfield was insured because he was a permissive user of Walls car.

The Circuit Court Judge refused, but Nationwide appealed. The Court of Appeals ruled that the policy language reduced the amount of coverage owed and ruled in favor of the insurer.

United Policyholders and the South Carolina Association for Justice filed amicus briefs when the case was appealed to the state Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court majority said its ruling was required by Section 38-77-140 of South Carolina statutes. That law states that any policy provision which purports or seeks to limit or reduce the coverage afforded by the provisions required by this section is void.

The state Supreme Court had cited that law to restrict the use of step-down provisions once before. In Williams v. Government Employees Ins. Co. (2014) the high court ruled that reduced benefits to the statutory minimum when a family member of the at-fault insured was the claimant.

The Supreme Court majority said the same reasoning requires it to void the step-down provision in Nationwides policy.

The dissenters said the court majority was using judicial sleight of hand to create policy under the guide of interpreting a statute.

The dissenting opinion says every other jurisdiction in the United States that follows a similar statutory scheme permits criminal conduct exclusions that reduce liability coverage to the statutory minimum where the injury is caused by an insured.

Topics Auto South Carolina
A retired high-ranking official with the Drug Enforcement Administration has testified that three large opioid distributors had a systematic failure in monitoring suspicious pill orders.

Joe Rannazzisi, former head of the Office of Diversion Control for the DEA from 2006 to 2015, testified Tuesday in Charleston in a landmark civil case brought by Cabell County and the city of Huntington that accuses AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp. of fueling the U.S. opioid epidemic.

The companies say poor communication and pill quotas set by federal agents are to blame, along with a rise in prescriptions written by doctors.

Rannazzisi testified that the defendants didnt report suspicious orders to the DEA due to a failure with their monitoring systems, The Herald-Dispatch reported. He said the DEA asked the companies in 2005 to rein in their distribution practices. A follow-up review of pill shipping data found the flow of pills was not reduced.

He testified that McKesson later told the DEA that its suspicious-pill monitoring system was not picking up generic drugs in the hydrocodone class.

The failures led to suspension orders being issued against McKesson in 2006, AmerisourceBergen in 2007 and Cardinal Health in 2007 and 2012, Rannazzisi testified.

Rannazzisi did not personally review distributors monitoring systems, participate in on-site visits or speak to any distributors but McKesson in 2005, McKesson attorney Paul Schmidt said.

Rannazzisi also testified that he did not know of any investigations showing the defendants had shipped orders they believed were suspicious.

Topics USA Drugs
Check out Insurance Journals recent special edition on Florida including a special report on new legislation to help Floridians who are battling the states property insurance crisis. This legislation aims to solve some of the issues plaguing Floridas homeowners insurance market, which lost $1.5 billon last year. Three homeowners insurers have also dropped thousands of policies in the state adding to the problem.

Also, dont miss an update explaining Floridas new statute which provides immunity for COVID-19 related lawsuits from Ryan Burns of the law offices of Marshall Dennehey Warner Coleman & Goggin in Fort Lauderdale.

Plus, Jamie Allen Cole and Eric Stettin from the law firm Weiss Serota Helfman Cole + Bierman provide an update on the potential liabilities that cities and insurers face from Floridas new anti-riot law.

Click here to view the Special Edition on Florida.

Topics Florida Insurance Journal
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday officially signed into law reform legislation on property insurance and roofing contractor practices, a measure some say is having a positive impact even before it goes into effect.

DeSantis signed the measure during a morning roundtable with sponsors and business groups in Sarasota. The measure  known as SB 76 will officially go into effect July 1.

But, according to several participants at the roundtable, including Insurance Commissioner David Altmaier, some effects are already being realized.

AM Best: Floridas Property Insurance Market Hit 5-Year Financial Low in 2020

Already there is a lot of positive as a result of this bill, Altmaier said. He said insurers and reinsurers have both reacted positively and that he has seen that private carriers are beginning to pick up more homeowners policies across the state.

Rep. Bob Rommel, who worked on the House version of the bill, also said insurance carriers are already showing a willingness to again invest and come into the state since the bill passed.

DeSantis said Florida is uniquely susceptible to having to respond to natural disasters and that naturally has an impact on insurance.

He said the bill is a response to many problems that he and the sponsors of the bill saw in the system.

Many of you know over the last decades, theres been a lot of ups and downs in this property insurance market in Florida, he said. We saw a lot of problems. Youve seen major premium increases and you even see some homeowners, their policies get canceled. They get dumped onto Citizens. So, we wanted to do something to stabilize that.

DeSantis said the state wants to encourage more private sector involvement and give homeowners policies that are more affordable and that will protect them from whatever mother nature throws our way.

I think we were able to do that, the Republican governor added.

Supporters hope SB 76 will begin to reduce litigation and control home insurance premiums.

Sen. Jim Boyd, also owner of Boyd Insurance & Investments in Bradenton, said his insureds have been seeing rate increases of 20, 30 and 50%. So we needed to do something, he said.

Boyd said it may take a year to 18 months for rates to come down but he is confident it will happen.

DeSantis revealed his intentions to sign the measure during a meeting of the Enterprise Florida board of directors Wednesday. He said then that he thinks the legislature did a pretty good job addressing the insurance market but that the state is probably going to have to do more, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

Too Little, Too Late? Breaking Down Floridas Latest Property Insurance Reforms

Some stakeholders agree with DeSantis that more needs to be done to lower costs and reduce litigation, citing the omission of two provisions the insurance industry said were essential.

The legislation, which passed on the last day of the legislative session, includes changes to the states one-way attorney fee statute, the eligibility and glidepath of Citizens, and the deadline to file claims. It also places new requirements and restrictions on roofing contractors.

But two provisions the industry and experts identified as critical to addressing cost drivers and stabilizing the market were left out of the final bill  the elimination of the states attorney fee multiplier and a provision allowing insurers to implement policy language to mitigate roof replacement costs. The provisions were sticking points in both legislative chambers.

Industry groups in Florida applauded the signing of SB 76.

When Florida accounts for only 8 percent of the nations property insurance claims but 76 percent of national property insurance litigation, you know there is a problem, said Mark Wilson, president and CEO, Florida Chamber of Commerce. Wilson said the measure addresses some of the root causes that are rapidly increasing homeowners insurance rates.. He cited specifically attorney fee reform and roofing solicitation practices that he said have been were driving lawsuits.

As Governor DeSantis has said before, Floridas legal system should resolve real disputes and not be used as a game, said William Large, president of the Florida Justice Reform Institute (FJRI), a legal reform lobbying group. Large also cited the reform of the attorney fee formula. FJRI believes the new attorney fee formula will encourage more reasonable settlement offers by all parties and discourage non-meritorious claims, and we look forward to seeing the positive impact of this new approach in practice, said Large

In its key provisions, the legislation signed by DeSantis:

Changes the eligibility, rate glidepath and actuarily sound rate indication for Citizens Property Insurance Corp.

Replaces the one-way attorney fee-statute to make the recovery of attorney fees and costs contingent on obtaining a judgment for indemnity that exceeds the pre-suit offer made by the insurance company.

Reduces the claims deadline on all claims to two years from the date of loss, except for on supplemental claims which will have an additional year.

Requires plaintiffs to file a pre-suit demand at least 10 days before filing a lawsuit against an insurer that includes an estimate of the demand, the attorney fees and costs demanded and the amount in dispute; disallows pre-suit notices to be filed before the insurance company can make a determination of coverage; and allows an insurer to require mediation or other form of alternative dispute resolution after receiving notice.

The bill also makes several changes to tackle what insurers claim has been an explosion of roofing claims and litigation, including making it illegal for roofing contractors or any person acting on their behalf to make a prohibited advertisement, including an electronic communication, phone call or document that solicits a claim. Offering anything of value for performing a roof inspection, an offer to interpret an insurance policy or file a claim or adjust the claim on the insureds behalf will also be prohibited. Additionally, contractors are prohibited from providing repairs for an insured without a contract that includes a detailed cost estimate of the labor and materials required to complete the repairs. Violations could result in fines of $10,000.

Topics Florida Property




Unification Minister Lee In-young on Friday expressed hope that a project to build a "farmland of peace" in an inter-Korean border area would be a meaningful starting point for cooperation between the two Koreas in farming and environmental sectors.







Lee made the remarks in a speech at a rice-planting event near the Gunnam Dam in the northwestern border town of Yeoncheon for the project by a farmers' association to grow environmentally friendly rice for North Korea.







"Securing food, which is the basis for our life, is a task that the people of the South and the North should tackle no matter what, as they have to live together as a community of life on the Korean Peninsula," Lee said.







"In that sense, I hope that the project of building a farmland of peace can be a meaningful starting point for cross-border cooperation in farming, livelihood and environment sectors," he added.







Lee added that the Gunnam Dam region, in particular, reminds people of the importance of cooperation in effectively coping with natural disasters, such as flooding.







The two Koreas signed an agreement in October 2009 under which the North promised to notify the South in advance of its plans to open its floodgates following a deadly accident that killed six South Koreans after the North discharged water from Hwanggang Dam without notice.







North Korea, however, discharged water from its border dam several times last year without notifying the South in advance.







"The experience of last summer demonstrated that it is surely necessary to jointly and effectively cope with flooding and other natural disasters for the sake of the coexistence of the South and the North," he said. (Yonhap)


Crest Insurance has acquired SJS Insurance LLC in Arizona.

Owner and CEO Jason Sheahan, and Chad Suter, owner and president, as well as their team, will be working from Crests Scottsdale, Ariz., offices at 7272 E. Indian School Rd.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

SJS Insurance offers tailored support in the areas of finance and accounting, human resources, information systems, carrier relations, communication and marketing and growth operations.

Crest has offices throughout the Southwest and holds licenses in all 50 states.

Topics Mergers Arizona
A civil lawsuit between Montana residents and an oil company that dragged on for more than a decade has ended quietly after a judge dismissed the case as a result of a settlement agreement.

District Court Judge Katherine Bidegaray referenced a settlement between state residents and the Atlantic Richfield Co. but provided no details of the agreement, The Montana Standard reported. A motion to dismiss the case was filed jointly, she said.

The lawsuit was initially filed against ARCO in April 2008 by 98 people living in the cities of Opportunity and Crackerville, near Butte and about 70 miles southwest of Helena. It alleged that smelter waste was contaminating the rural communities soils and threating residents wells and claimed common law trespass, nuisance and strict liability against ARCO.

The residents sought restoration damages to pay for a more thorough cleanup than what was planned by ARCO under the federal Superfund law, also known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980.

Lawyer Mark Kovacich and his firm, Odegaard Kovacich Snipes, and lawyers from a Bozeman firm represented the residents. Kovacich declined to comment on the settlement terms because they are confidential.

The case traveled through state and federal courts since it was first filed, including through the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019, before concluding in a state district court.

Its been 13 years, said Serge Myers, a 76-year-old resident of Opportunity, who worked at the smelter for 16 years. Its been a long haul. We did the best we could. Our lawyers did the best they could.

Neither John Davis, a lawyer who represented ARCO, nor two company employees familiar with the Anaconda Co. Smelter site were immediately available to comment on the case or settlement.

Charlie Coleman, the Environmental Protection Agencys remedial project manager for the site, said testing and cleanup continues in the rural area. The EPA has said it hopes to complete remedial construction activities on the smelter site by December 2025.

Copper King Marcus Daly and the Anaconda Copper Mining Co. began smelting copper ore from Butte in the 1880s, The Montana Standard reported. Around 1902, ore processing and smelting operations began at the Washoe Smelter, which was designed to disperse smoke from the smelter to try to reduce pollution.

In 1977, ARCO purchased the Anaconda Co. and inherited vast lands polluted with arsenic, lead, copper, cadmium and zinc from ore-processing operations and stack emissions. Later, under the federal Superfund law, ARCO became retroactively liable for that contamination.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits
A fire has destroyed much of a resort on the Rogue River in Southern Oregon, authorities said.

The Rural Metro fire department in Josephine County confirmed a major fire incident around 10:30 a.m. Tuesday at the Galice Resort west of Grants Pass, The Statesman Journal reported.

Local, state and federal agencies responded to put out the blaze. The resorts restaurant, store and boat shed burned, while the lodge may have been less impacted, authorities said.

Oregon Forestry officials said the blaze spread to the wildland, igniting five small fires around the property and that helicopters and a plane were used in addition to firefighting on the ground to stop the fire from spreading.

Rural Metro firefighters are investigating the cause of the fire. Fire officials said no injuries were reported.

Galice Resort has been at the center of Rogue River rafting and outdoor culture. It has a restaurant overlooking the river, cabins for rent, and offers shuttles, river trips and rentals.

Mary Lou Thomason, whose family has owned the combination restaurant, store and rafting service since 1981, told the Grants Pass Daily Courier, It went so fast.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Oregon
Thorough probes needed to find out root cause of collapse accident



It is astounding that a five-story building being demolished for redevelopment collapsed suddenly atop a bus killing nine people and seriously injuring eight more in Gwangju Wednesday. The victims were aboard the bus which had stopped just next to the demolition site. Diverse evidence from black box footage and surveillance cameras proves this was a man-made disaster.



This means the tragic accident could have been prevented, had the workers at the demolition site and relevant authorities paid more attention to safety. The workers allegedly heard a strange sound while they were drilling and evacuated the building hurriedly. Yet, passengers on the bus were totally unaware of that and had no time to avoid the sudden collapse.



Supervisors and the onsite workers should have closed the roads around the building immediately after reporting the signs of instability. On Thursday, the police booked four construction-related officials including the excavator operator on suspicion of negligence of duty. According to the investigation so far, relevant authorities had never taken any safety measures to prevent citizens and vehicles from passing by the urban renewal site where the disaster occurred.



The investigation also revealed that the developer failed to abide by the demolition manual as submitted to the district office. It violated rules that required setup of scaffolding for each floor and carrying out demolition in stages from the top down and from the outside wall to slab. Witnesses said the workers began the demolition from the third and lower floors of the five-story building though they were supposed to do it from the upper floors.



The authorities also failed to notify bus companies and the general public about the dangers of the demolition though the site was right behind a bus stop. The recent accident reminds us of a similar one which took place in May 2019 in Jamwon-dong, southern Seoul, in which a building undergoing demolition rained debris down on cars passing by, killing one woman. That disaster was also due to lapsed safety.



President Moon Jae-in ordered a swift and thorough investigation to find out the cause of the recent collapse and who are to blame. "President Moon instructed police and related agencies including the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport to embark on an immediate and thorough investigation into the collapse," presidential spokeswoman Park Kyung-mee said in a press briefing Thursday.



Investigations should also be focused on possible connections between the developer and construction-related officials of the district office. There is a high possibility that the workers might have sped up the demolition with the concept of "time is money." Many developers have engaged in competition by promising speedy urban renewal to maximize their profits from development amid soaring real estate prices under the Moon administration.



From the onset, Moon has emphasized his administration would make its best efforts to realize a "Safe Republic of Korea" which can cope with any possible disasters around the clock. Yet this slogan has fallen flat. The authorities should find out the root cause of the recent accident to prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future. The investigation should also be conducted to find out who should take responsibility.








Burma 27 Myanmar Junta Soldiers Killed in Chin State Clashes

Villagers shelter in the forest due to the shootouts in Thantlang, Chin State on Thursday. / CJ

Around 27 junta soldiers, including an army captain, were killed by civilian resistance fighters during clashes in Chin State on Thursday. The shootouts took place in Hakha and Thantlang townships and resulted in over 1,000 villagers fleeing their homes.

At about 3pm on Thursday, fighters from the Chinland Defense Force ambushed 70 regime troops patrolling the Hakha- Gangaw Highway, some 30 miles south of Hakha, the Chin State capital.

During 30 minutes of fighting, junta forces used explosives against the civilian resistance fighters. Around ten junta soldiers were killed and at least five others wounded in the firefight, according to the Chinland Defense Force spokesperson.

Earlier on Thursday morning, a group of 26 military regime soldiers clashed with the Chinland Defense Force in Thantlang Township, 18 miles to the north of Thantlang town. Around 17 junta troops, including an army captain, were killed, while no resistance casualties were reported, according to a statement from the Chinland Defense Force  Thantlang.

More than 100 junta reinforcements continued fighting with the civilian resistance fighters until Friday, causing more than 1,000 residents from four nearby villages to flee their homes, the spokesperson for the Chinland Defense Force told the Irrawaddy on Friday.

In Hakha, more than 80 residents have been detained for staging anti-regime protests and having anti-regime protest photos or activities on their cell phones and social media accounts. Junta security forces in Hakha are inspecting people entering the town, as well as checking the cell phones of local residents.

On Thursday, the Chinland Defense Force warned that it will carry on conducting intense defensive actions against junta troops across Chin State until the 80 detained Hakha residents are released.

No matter how many more soldiers the junta uses against us, we will keep resisting them, the spokesperson of the Chinland Defense Force told the Irrawaddy.

Since early May, shootouts between civilian resistance fighters and regime forces have been reported in over half of Chin State. Clashes have occurred in six of Chin States nine townships: Kanpetlet, Mindat, Hakha, Thantlang, Falam and Tedim.

Over 100 regime soldiers have reportedly been killed, while the civilian resistance fighters have suffered more than 24 casualties.

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Burma Bomb Explodes at Chinese-Backed Factory in Myanmar

Huabo Times Textile and Clothing Company in 2018.

A bomb exploded at a Chinese-backed clothing factory in Ayeyarwady Region on Friday morning.

It is the latest attack on a Chinese-owned business in Myanmar after arson attacks on factories in the Hlaing Tharyar Industrial Zone in Yangon in March.

The blast in Pathein, the capital of Ayeyarwady Region, came less than a month after coup leader Min Aung Hlaings assurance to Chinese-language Phoenix TV that the junta will protect all foreign investments.

Witnesses said the explosion occurred at Huabo Times Textile and Clothing Company. Details about damage and casualties are not known.

The security forces arrived shortly after the blast.

According to the junta-controlled Directorate of Investment and Company Administration, the factory registered to make clothing in Myanmar in 2016.

Three Chinese citizens are listed as company directors.

In March, during bloody crackdowns on protesters in Hlaing Tharyar, some Chinese-owned factories burned down.

The Global Times, a Chinese government mouthpiece, claimed 32 factories built with Chinese investment had been attacked, looted or burned, causing around US$37 million (61 billion kyats) in damage. Beijing demanded that the junta act against the perpetrators and protect Chinese citizens and interests.

The junta blamed anti-regime protesters. Activists condemned Beijings demands and denied the allegations, saying the arson attacks were a plot by the military to justify harsher crackdowns.

Min Aung Hlaing visited the destroyed factories in Hlaing Tharyar in April.

Late last month, 28 people were sentenced to 20 years in prison with hard labor by a military court for arson attacks on two Chinese-backed factories in March.



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Myanmar Junta Jails Disabled Student, Denies him Medical Treatment

Ten Myanmar Junta Troops Killed in Sagaing Region Ambush

Tortured to Death in Myanmar Regime Custody
Burma More Schools Closed in Myanmar's Chin State Amid COVID-19 Spike

A basic education high school in Paletwa. / Paletwa News Facebook

All schools in Paletwa Township, Chin State, have been closed since June 9 after COVID-19 cases were reported.

Schools in Sagaing Regions Tamu and Kale townships and Chin States Tonzang, Hakha, Thantlang, Falam and Tedim townships were closed on June 7 after coronavirus cases were reported a week after schools reopened nationwide.

According to the junta-controlled health ministry, 528 cases were reported in Sagaing Region from Feb. 1 to June 4. Chin State saw 319 cases with six deaths in the same period.

A man from Myitwa village near the Indian border tested positive for coronavirus at Paletwa Township hospital on June 8.

Six others, including fellow villagers who accompanied him to the hospital and their boatman, tested positive, according to Paletwa residents.

Among those infected are two teachers and a student.

The township education officer has instructed us to close the schools, U Kyaw Win Naing, a teacher from Paletwa, told The Irrawaddy.

The officer instructed teachers to avoid traveling until further notice.

A teacher said he does not know when the schools will reopen, said a students father from Samee in Paletwa.

The seven COVID-19 patients are being treated in Paletwa and the authorities have sealed off the guesthouse they used.



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Bomb Explodes at Chinese-Backed Factory in Myanmar
Burma Myanmar Junta Jails Disabled Student, Denies him Medical Treatment

Ko Liang Phyo Aung. / CJ

A student from Magwe badly wounded in a junta crackdown on anti-regime protesters and at risk of going blind in one eye has been denied medical treatment by the military regime and imprisoned instead.

Ko Liang Phyo Aung, a 22-year-old second-year engineering student at Magwe Technological University, was severely injured in his right eye after a violent crackdown by junta forces on an anti-regime demonstration in Magwe on March 27. He also lost his right hand, his left arm was broken and his mobility severely impaired by the wounds he suffered from being hit in the legs by multiple rubber bullets.

He received treatment for those injuries while in detention at a military hospital, where in April the junta charged him with incitement under Section 505(a) of the Penal Code.

The student was then sent to Magwe Prison on June 7, after the military hospital said that he is recovering from all his injuries except for his injured eye. But the military hospital stated also that his eye needs to be treated at Yangon Eye Hospital because the military hospital lacks a specialist eye doctor.

His eye is oozing pus and is in urgent need of surgery. There is no eye specialist at the military hospital and he needs to be sent to Yangon for a cornea transplant, said the elder brother of Ko Liang Phyo Aung.

The medical report by the military hospital said his eye needs to be treated at Yangon Eye Hospital. But they sent him to prison right after the medical report was released, he added.

The report also said that Ko Liang Phyo Aung still needs rehabilitation as he could not walk well due to his leg injuries inflicted by rubber bullets.

U Myat Thu Win, chairman of the Shwe Minn Tha Foundation, a group advocating for the rights of persons with disabilities, requested that Ko Liang Phyo Aung be given treatment under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which Myanmar has ratified, and under Myanmars own law protecting the rights of persons with disabilities.

He used to be normal and became disabled only a few months ago. It will be hard for him to get used to it and perform daily activities. What is important is that he has every right to continue receiving treatment. I would like to request that he is given further treatment, said U Myat Thu Win.

Under the Code of Criminal Procedure, Ko Liang Pyo Aung has the right to apply for bail to receive emergency health care.

Citing Section 497 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, lawyer U Khin Maung Myint said the judge can grant bail for accused people who are sick if there are reasonable grounds for believing that they have not committed an offence punishable with death or with transportation for life.

The maximum penalty for violating Section 505(a) of the Penal Code is three years. As the case has not yet been brought to the court, bail can be applied for at the relevant police station and through the township police head, said the lawyer.

He is a disabled person now and was made disabled by their torture. It is too inhuman to prosecute him after making him disabled, said the elder brother of Ko Liang Phyo Aung.

The regime has detained at least 15 physically or mentally disabled persons across the country, according to rights groups.

As of June 10, at least 860 people have been killed by the junta since their Feb. 1 coup, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. More than 4,800 people remain in detention.



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Ten Myanmar Junta Troops Killed in Sagaing Region Ambush

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Burma Regime Destroys Food and Medicine for Refugees in Southeastern Myanmar

A local searches for rice among the wreckage of rice sacks and medicines burned by the Myanmar military on June 8. / PKPF

Myanmar junta troops destroyed supplies of rice and medicine intended for over 3,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) in Pekon, southern Shan State, who were forced to flee their homes after intense fighting broke out between regime forces and civilian resistance fighters last month.

More than 100,000 villagers from over 150 villages and downtown areas in Pekon and Demoso, Hpruso and Loikaw townships in Kayah State have now been displaced for weeks.

Locals told The Irrawaddy that on June 8 junta forces burned 80 bags of rice, three barrels of cooking oil, dried food, medicine and two vehicles being stored at Loi Ying village in Pekon Township. The vehicles were an ambulance from the Mobye (Moebyel) free funeral services association and a private car.

Junta forces and people defense forces (PDF) were involved in heavy fighting on June 7. On that day we gathered food supplies for the refugees in the village. As the PDF members withdrew, we were left with the food. But we were forced to flee when the military entered the village. They torched everything on June 8, said one local.

Medicines to treat diarrhea were among the items burned. Currently, over 3,000 IDPs are sharing what little rice they have. They fled from their homes due to the fighting that followed the PDFs seizure of Mobye police station, he added.

Loi Ying village, which is home to ethnic Kayan people, is located over 15 miles from Pekon town. The whole village fled the fighting, which began in Kayah States Demoso Township, which borders Pekon.

Villagers have sought shelter at monasteries, churches and nearby villages by displaying white flags. But their temporary shelters have been attacked by the military regimes artillery, with junta forces accusing the PDF of taking cover in them. An artillery attack on a church in Kayan Thar Yar village on May 24 killed four civilians sheltering there, prompting residents to flee into nearby forests and hills.

The IDPs are reportedly sheltering at ten different locations and are living on the support provided by local civil society groups. But many places lack adequate supplies of food, medicine and clean drinking water.

Fighting halted on Thursday and Friday, but locals are still fleeing whenever they see soldiers entering their villages, according to a spokesperson for the IDPs management committee in Pekin Kaw Khu in Loikaw Township.

He said they could not buy petrol, while donated food supplies are being held up by military checkpoints and the closure of the road linking Aung Pan and Taunggyi in Shan State.

Junta forces have set up checkpoints along the transport routes within Kayah State, blocking local transport. All vehicles travelling between Kayah State and Pekon and from Taunggyi are also being inspected.

Pekin Kaw Khu IDP camp is currently hosting more than 1,500 people and they only have food for one week.

If they continue blocking the road, all the IDPs could face going hungry, added the spokesperson.

He urged that food, medicine and materials for shelters should be allowed past the checkpoints.

Myanmar regime troops are trying to eliminate the local PDF force. For about a week, they have cut off electricity, internet and cell phone access in areas where they suspect the PDF to be operating.

Junta troops have been accused of targeting civilians as well as the PDF.

A total of 131 locals have been detained since March 10, according to the Progressive Karenni People Force. Seven of those were arrested while on their way to the IDP camps.



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Specials In Myanmar, Pro-Junta Vigilante Groups Wage Campaign of Violence, Disinformation

Pro-junta groups stage a counter-demonstration against anti-regime protesters in downtown Yangon in late February. / The Irrawaddy

In response to the increasingly organized public resistance to the Myanmar military following its takeover on Feb. 1, Pyu Saw Htee groups have been formed across the country, reportedly with support from the military, to counter the anti-regime movement.

The first Pyu Saw Htee groups were formed in mid-May after the parallel government, the National Unity Government (NUG), called for the formation of Peoples Defense Forces to resist the regime. The groups emerged at a time when attacks on military-appointed ward administrators and ward administration offices were erupting in the country.

In a leaked letter to Pyu Saw Htee groups across the country, leaders of the movement instructed the groups to bomb schools across the country and spread misinformation on social media and at teashops, markets, banks and so on claiming that the attacks were carried out by the NUG.

They intend to smear the NUG and the CRPH, said NUG Deputy Defense Minister Daw Khin Ma Ma Myo. The NUG was formed by the CRPH, a committee representing lawmakers elected in the 2020 general election who were unable to take their seats due to the coup.

U Tin Soe, a former village administrator and National League for Democracy member in Kachin States Hpakant, was assassinated on June 2. Locals said he was murdered by a Pyu Saw Htee. Pyu Saw Htee are also suspected of torching schools in Yangon and elsewhere.

There are reasons for such suspicions. Streetlights were turned off before the fires. Normally, streetlights are controlled by ward administrative bodies. School principals turned a deaf ear when they were informed about the fires at their schools. Nightwatchmen didnt seek help as the schools burned, and ward administrative bodies made no effort to put out the fires.

Widely viewed as military stooges, Pyu Saw Htee are reportedly formed by township-level offices of the General Administration Department. The groups consist of active and retired military personnel, civil servants, members of the military proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party, ultranationalists and people hired for a wage of 5,000 kyats (about US$3) per day.

Posts have circulated on social media claiming to show letters in which Pyu Saw Htee headquarters instruct members to use fake accounts to spread misinformation, infiltrate anti-regime groups and provide information to security forces. The Irrawaddy has been unable to independently verify the letters.

In an interview with independent media outlet Mizzima, Ko Thura, who described himself as the information officer of a Pyu Saw Htee group, said: We have formed combat teams, but only to protect the people on the front line in case of emergency. But we will not be acting alone. With the approval of the state leaders, we intend to provide assistance to the Tatmadaw [Myanmars military] as its auxiliary force if they need us.

The Pyu Saw Htee remind many people of the Swan Arr Shina vigilante group formed by police, soldiers, firefighters, lower-level administrators and the Union Solidarity and Development Association, the predecessor of the USDP. The Pyu Saw Htee have thus been referred to as new versions of the Swan Arr Shin.

This is not the first time the name Pyu Saw Htee has been associated with pro-military vigilante groups. Amid instability and insurgency during the rule of the Anti-Fascist Peoples Freedom League (AFPFL) government, the idea of forming a vigilante group to help restore law and order was presented at a conference held by the Myanmar military on Sept. 14, 1955.

The idea led to the Pyu Saw Htee scheme, named after a semi-legendary king of the Bagan period, and launched with the approval of the National Defense Council chaired by then Prime Minister U Nu.

The group however earned a bad name as it bullied the people with guns instead of protecting them. Widely viewed as stooges of the AFPFL, the group committed every crime in the book, from kidnapping and robbery to rape and murder, not to mention assassinating politicians of opposition parties in broad daylight.

Some of the most notorious crimes committed by the Pyu Saw Htee of that era in order to get rid of the AFPFLs political rivals included a quadruple murder in Minhla town, Tharyawaddy District in Bago in 1956, and a mass murder in the village of Si Taung Eaing in Myeik District in 1957. In some cases, women had to hide in monasteries for fear of being raped.

Opposition parties including the National United Front as well as the people repeatedly called for disbanding the Pyu Saw Htee, but their demands went unheeded by the AFPFL government and military. Only after the AFPLF split into two in 1958 did Prime Minister U Nu hold talks with the military on reducing the size of the Pyu Saw Htee. It was agreed the groups numbers would be halved, and that it would eventually be disbanded.

The military and Home Affairs Ministry were not willing to disband the Pyu Saw Htee, however, as the group had been useful in maintaining public order despite its notorious name. Finally, high-ranking military and police officers agreed to transform it into an auxiliary police force, and it lingered on in that capacity for a time, but the curtain had already come down on the Pyu Saw Htee as far as being an actor on Myanmars political stage. Though the groups of today bear the same name, there is no direct link between them and the group formed in the 1950s.



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Thursday, Floridas State Board of Education approved a set of rules to implement changes which for the first time, allows college athletes to receive money for their names, images and likenesses.

Florida is one of five states to allow college athletes to receive compensation. The other states are Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and New Mexico.

Shortened to NIL, the legislation goes into effect July 1 and has rules for college athletes in the Florida College System, often referred to as the states community college system. (Regulations for Floridas universities regarding compensation for an athletes name, image and likeness would come from the Florida Board of Governors.)

The rules for college athletes state that they may earn compensation for the use of their NIL if the compensation is provided by a third party unaffiliated with the athletes postsecondary educational institution.

Students must notify their college of a contract for compensation for their NIL, in a manner designated by the postsecondary educational institution.

As for the individual colleges, the adopted rules require they create or adopt their own policies on how athletes are compensated. Minimally, the policies or procedures must include the process student athletes must follow to notify the institution of a contract for compensation for their NIL, the rule says.

These rules also prohibit a college from restricting a student athlete from receiving compensation for their NIL. But the rules also states that a student may not enter into a contract for compensation for their NIL if the contract conflicts with a clause found in the student athletes team contract.

Adopted rules also state that colleges must provide financial literacy and life skills at the beginning of a student athletes first and third academic years. The rule states that this is a requirement for all student athletes, not just the ones receiving compensation for their NIL.

This report first appeared on the website of the Florida Phoenix, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to coverage of state government and politics from Tallahassee.
No better place for an end-of-the-work week spot in Dade than Key Biscayne! And our participating #tasteofkeybiscayne restaurants have that perfect burger and more ready for you!

#Meal-Deals for #burgerfriday, June 11, 2021

Brasas KB

#burgerfriday special. delicious Half-Pound Hamburger, with one side and a soda, only $10.99 - loaded it up with a fried egg, bacon, cheese and pickles to make it a "completa" for only $4 more! Can't beat the quality! Unmatched value!

Have you tried our Peruvian Chicken Rotisserie for lunch or dinner that include 2 sides and sauce of your choice: huancaina, aji amarillo, huacatay and olivas negras peruanas.

Open for Outdoor Dining, Takeout or Delivery.

Call (786) 615-2399 to place a takeout order. Open Noon to 8 p.m.

328 Crandon Blvd, Galleria Shopping Center

D'Lite Bistro & Bakery

Who says eating healthy means sacrificing taste and flavor? Not at DLite!

We are a unique and healthy restaurant that serves salads, wraps, sandwiches, bowls, protein smoothies and cold press juices made fresh every morning  including gluten-free, vegetarian and keto options.

Better than a burger for Meat Lovers... our grilled picanha is a must try with this delicious Fattoush Salad!

We open at 7 a.m. daily and close at 8 p.m. everyday except Sat and Sun when we close at 6 p.m.

DLite is located in the Arcade Mall, 180 Crandon Blvd. To place an order, call (305) 882-9284 or visit us online by clicking here.

Pops Burger

What better place to dine on #burgerfriday than a burger joint? At Pops, we love burgers, made with 100% certified Angus beef. We offer everything from the most basic burger or cheeseburger, to our new Signature Burgers!!

Visit us today and enjoy a delicious double-cheeseburger! And do not forget to add our unique crinkle fries.

We also serve Hot Dogs, nachos with chili and many other favorites, in addition to shakes and desserts in a safe and family style setting and we are pet friendly!

Pops Burger is located in the Square Mall, at 260 Crandon Blvd, Key Biscayne

We are open at Noon to 9 p.m. seven-days a week. We close at 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.

To place an order, please call 786-401-7474 or to order online, click here.

We offer dine-in, takeout and delivery via UberEats and Postmates

DUNE Burgers on the Beach

Our burgers are so good that once youve tried you will come back for more! Nothing screams Friday like a burger by the beach!

DUNE is the stylish, yet casual, beach lounge at The Ritz-Carlton's beach for global appetizers, gourmet burgers & champagne.

Located in the Ritz-Carlton Key Biscayne, 455 Grand Bay Dr, Key Biscayne. You can reach them at (305) 365-4500.

They are open Thursday to Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

For more information, click here.

La Scala

Fridays are Osso Bucco days at La Scala and ours has the reputation of being the best on the island. Guaranteed.

Open for Indoor & Limited Outdoor Dining (reservations recommended) and Takeout

The popular Italian Bistro now offers their delicious meals to enjoy at home and thanks you for the great support from the community while they enjoy La Scala cuisine at home.

To place a takeout order call (786) 773-3633 or visit us online by clicking here.

Open 5 to 10 p.m.

180 Crandon Blvd  Arcade Shopping Center.

Artisan Kitchen & Bar

Join us. Open for Indoor dining & expanded Outdoor dining, Takeout or FREE Delivery.

We ask you please wear a mask and observe social distancing.

An Artisan burger makes Friday perfect.

We deliver our famous craft beers. Call for your favorite, or take advantage of our Wine sale! All our white & red wine bottles are $12 - and we will deliver

Hours of operations: Mon - Sat 8 AM to CLOSE

Sunday Brunch 9 AM to 4 PM

Call us directly at (305) 365-6003 to place an order.

Place your Order Online here

PANNA

At PANNA we like to say we offer a taste to remember, the place you love. We are serving the most delicious Venezuelan food combined with other traditional delights from Colombia and Argentina in a fast-service, friendly and casual setting.

TEQUEBURGER is all you need this Friday. We combine two of your favoritesTequenos + Burger what you get is our exclusive Tequeburger!

We offer a dine-in or grab-and-go menu for you to enjoy at home.

Convenient order online for takeout or delivery. Click here.

We are located at 600 Crandon Blvd, Suite 130, Key Biscayne next to Winn Dixie. You can reach us at (305) 456-0886

AMICI At Key Biscayne

From San Marino, the oldest & smallest republic in the world located in the center north of Italy, now in Key Biscayne.

In Italian, AMICI means friends and that is what you will find at AMICIs a friendly atmosphere surpassed only by the excellent Authentic Italian cuisine.

To make a reservation call (786) 453-0974 or Email info@amiciatkeybiscayne.com

And for today, try our Amicis Burger 8oz lean beef, Burger, provolone cheese, romaine lettuce, tomatoes, onion, bacon, brioche bun, fries! Gourmet burger for only $13.99

To see the complete email and the history of the family behind the excellence that is AMICI, click here.

Boaters Grill & Lighthouse Cafe / Bill Baggs

The restaurants inside Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park  the popular Boaters Grill, located at No Name Harbor and accessible by boat, and the beachside Lighthouse Cafe are open and ready to serve.

What says Burger Friday more than a perfectly cooked burger and fries, enjoyed beachside under the shadows of the Lighthouse?

Outdoor dining is our specialty.

Boaters Grill is open Sunday through Wednesday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. and Thursday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Lighthouse Cafe is open 7-days a week, from 9 a.m. to Sunset

The restaurants are located inside Bill Baggs State Park, at 1200 Crandon Blvd., Key Biscayne.

You can reach them at (305) 361-0080

Costa Med Bistro

Sometimes all you need is a loaded burger and a lot of fries! A Costa Burger is the solution for this Burger--Friday  and the islands place to see and be seen has the best burger in Key Biscayne

Place your takeout order online by clicking here!

Costa Med, a TripAdvisor Traverlers Choice nominated restaurant, is located in the Square Shopping Center. 260 Crandon Blvd. Offering Indoor & Outdoor Dining with expanded seating, Takeout.

Reservations suggested. Call Antonio or Harold at (305) 361-7575

Hours.

Lunch Mon to Sat: Noon a.m. to 4 p.m.

Dinner Mon to Sat: 6 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. / Sun 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

Open Seas Cafe

Beach. Burger. Friday. Perfection.

This Friday, try our delicious cheeseburger. Only $8.95. Add sweet potato fries! Order from the beach and we will deliver to you!

Come and tantalize your senses in a true beachside setting at OpenSeas Cafe, you local favorites, like our signature conch fritters or our renowned fish tacos for a treat you wont forget. Our frozen daiquiris or flavorful margaritas are the perfect combination for beach and sun.

We are located in Crandon Park / South Beach at 6747 Crandon Blvd. Key Biscayne. We are open 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. (weather permitting).

Call or text us at (786) 305 4747 for more information or order. Visit us online by clicking here.

Ayesha Indian Restaurant

Open for Indoor & Outdoor Dining, Takeout or Delivery.

Friday! What a perfect day for a perfectly cooked delicious South Indian meal. How spicy do you like it.

And no matter what dish you try, experience our signature dessert, Gulab Jamun!

For our full menu or to order online, please click here.

FREE APPETIZER when you spend $50 and FREE DELIVERY

Tuesday  Sunday 5 to 9:30 p.m.

Call (786) 953-4761 to place a takeout order

328 Crandon Blvd - #115 Key Biscayne

The Golden Hog

Eat Local. Help local. Shop Safely. Email us your order! Click here.

Want to treat yourself to something truly uniquely delicious? Try our Burger! Grilled to perfection while you wait!

Todays menu:

Soups & Creams: Chicken Tortilla / White Beans / Tomato Basil

Main Course: Asado Negro (Eye Round) / Chicken Caprese / Salmon Fillet / Pasta Evoo

Side Dishes: Paella / White Rice / Zucchini Yellow Squash / Patata Brava

The Golden-Hog has a complete line of specialty groceries for delivery.

Golden Hog puts safety first, and has taken steps to ensure the safety of employees and customers, investing in shields, masks and gloves for safety, and the store is set up for social distancing. Shop with confidence.

Call (305) 361-1300 to place a delivery or take out order; you can order online here.

Novecento

Deep in the heart of the island, Novecento is the neighborhood hotspot.

Friday. Beer. Burger. Outdoor seating. Novecento. Perfection!!! Try our HAMBURGUESA NOVECENTO. Grilled hamburger, mozzarella, ham, bacon, butter lettuce, tomato, green olive-mayonnaise and fried egg on sesame brioche bread with our hand cut fries

Place your takeout or delivery order at 305-362-0900

Novecento Key Biscayne Bistro Argentino is located at 620 Crandon Blvd in Key Biscayne.

Open daily Noon to 10 p.m.

You can order online by clicking here

Sake Room

This Friday, we are featuring our unique Ichiban tuna tartar! A must try!

Or try us for lunch. Specials starting at $10.99

Open for Indoor & Outdoor Dining, Takeout or Delivery.

Or still enjoy Sake quality at home!

FREE* Crunchy Crab Salad!!!

New hours! 3 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Call (305) 456-0488 to place a takeout or delivery order directly

Following all CDC safety protocols

328 Crandon Blvd Ste 108, Galleria Shopping Center

Grub hub  UberEats also available. Please if you can call us first

*Offer good on any $50+ order

KEBO

Open for Indoor & Shaded Outdoor Dining, Takeout or Delivery.

Today, try a KEBO Wagyu Burger! Quality at its best!

While picking up your order, visit our Kebo-Store with some Spanish delicacies like virgin olive oil, chorizos and more. Call us to place your order.

Call (305) 365-1244 to order a KEBO meal. Kebo is a TripAdvisor Traverlers Choice nominated restaurant

Randazzos Italian Seafood and Classics

Open for indoor & outdoor dining, Takeout or delivery. Reservations recommended

Do not settle. What is better than a burger this Friday? Randazzos famous homemade meatball!

Call us directly to order at (305) 456-0480. Offering Randazzos own delivery service. Local and safe

Open Monday, Wednesday to Sunday from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Open until 11 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays

Closed Tuesdays

328 Crandon Blvd Ste 112, Galleria Shopping Center

Outside the island delivery via @Postmates or @UberEats

Tacopolis

Tacopolis, where everyday is Taco-Day!! Only eat tacos on days that end in a Y but today, we are featuring our delicious loaded Burger al Pastor - or our loaded burger, unique and delicious

Tacopolis was born as an idea in Cancun Mexico with the goal of creating a casual and relaxed atmosphere, serving authentic Mexican dishes

Open 7-days a week, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Open for Outdoor dining, Takeout or delivery but our own service of find us on UberEats

They are located in the Square Shopping Center at 260 Crandon Blvd, Key Biscayne.

To place a phone order, call 786) 703-5523. To order online, please click here.

Tutto Pizza & Pasta

Open for Indoor & Outdoor Dining, Takeout or Delivery.

Fridays Burger burger special! Give me a burger!!! Or two!!!

Lunch special. Burger Friday Twofer - Two Classic Burgers plus two Soft Drinks for only - $22.00

Also offering Tutto Family Meal day! Order from 4 delicious options. Family meals include main dish, salad and they throw in some yummy homemade bread. Feeds 4-6 for only $45.00

Offering No Contact Delivery  simply request that when ordering online  click here  or by calling (305) 361-2224.

Sun- Thur 11:30 am -10:30pm

Fri-Sat 11:30 am  11pm

328 Crandon Blvd #111, Key Biscayne / Galleria Shopping Center

Kazumi

Open for Indoor & Outdoor seating, Takeout or Delivery!

Make it a Wagyu Beef Slider Friday! We top it off with a fried egg for perfection!

Modern Japanese fusion restaurant, offering creative treatments & creativity in our dishes for takeout and delivery by our own employees. Available for lunch and dinner.

Open Monday through Saturday from Noon to 10 p.m.

Only accepting credit card payments.

To place an order call (305) 361-2675 or order online here.

Check back tomorrow for more specials as we add more restaurants to #tasteofkeybiscayne-To-Go

And please remember to order from the restaurant directly before using one of the apps  this way we support the local restaurants by saving them the commission they are charged, which at times is as much as 30%




By Baek Byung-yeul







Hyundai Motor Group will provide its hydrogen fuel cell system to the world's first touring race for electric vehicles (EVs). The Korean automotive giant said Friday it hopes to showcase its cutting-edge technology in mobile fuel cell power generators at the Electric Touring Car Racing (ETCR) event.







The ETCR is intended to be a competition for pure electric cars. The automotive group said it will join the event as a competitor and will also provide its HTWO fuel cell power generators to help all participating teams operate their high-performance EVs.







"The ETCR event will play the role of a test bed for our high-performance electric car so that we can further upgrade electric systems in EVs. Also, we will seek new business opportunities for our fuel cell power generation system," the company said.







Hyundai has been recognized for its world-class fuel cell technology featured in its NEXO hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV). The company expects its HTWO mobile fuel cell power generators will play a major role in developing emergency electricity in remote areas where a power supply is difficult to find.







Its mobile fuel cell power generation system is a 160-kilowatt power generation module that can charge two EVs at the same time in less than an hour. The ETCR event will be held in Vallelunga, Italy, from June 18 to 20.







"It is meaningful that the hydrogen fuel cell system will play the role of charging EVs joining the ETCR, an inaugural racing event for high-performance EVs," a group official said. "We will continue providing HTWO to various industries to gain a solid edge in the hydrogen power market."







Aiming to make clean energy become its next growth engine, Hyundai Motor Group is expanding its lineup of products to EVs and fuel cell power systems.







On Thursday, the company agreed to set up a fuel cell council with other conglomerates including SK, POSCO and Hyosung to accelerate the energy transition with hydrogen power.


A security vulnerability was spotted on Google Chrome browsers, and unfortunately, it is categorized as a zero-day exploit. Google quickly sent out a patch fix for Chrome 91, available for download today.

Apply the fix on your desktop and Android browsers immediately before you fall victim to the highly targeted attacks of malicious developers.

The popular web browser, Google Chrome, is currently under attack by a few identified bugs. One of the bugs is reported as a zero-day exploit, meaning that this bug was only discovered after it has successfully infiltrated the Google Chrome system--giving developers zero days to counter with security fixes. Unfortunately, Google did not disclose how long this bug was hiding inside Chrome browsers before it got discovered.

Google is also withholding details of the attack. It is undetermined whether this bug is the type that steals your data, corrupts your system, or adds malicious malware to your device. Regardless of the attack type, Google confirms that bugs have been spotted, and they are classified under High, Critical, and Medium threat levels.

Google Chrome Bug Is Attacking Your Browser -- Zero-Day Exploit

The Hacker News reported the bugs found, labeled under their respective Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) ID number. The list also includes the threat level on each bug and their date of discovery:

CVE-2021-30544 - Critical - 5/24/21

CVE-2021-30545 - High - 4/21/21

CVE-2021-30546 - High - 5/9/21

CVE-2021-30547 - High - 5/18/21

CVE-2021-30548 - High - 5/18/21

CVE-2021-30549 - High - 5/23/21

CVE-2021-30550 - High - 5/23/21

CVE-2021-30551 - High - 6/4/21

CVE-2021-30542 - Medium - 4/20/21

CVE-2021-30545 - Medium - 5/17/21

Note that CVE-2021-30544, the critical level threat, is the identified zero-day exploit. According to Android Police, the security researchers who discovered it, Rong Jian and Guang Go, reported that this bug takes advantage of a "use-after-free flaw in the V8 JavaScript engine" and specifically on BFCache. As a result, the attacker could compromise your computer system by executing arbitrary code to create a "use-after-free error" when you visit a malicious site.

Read Also: Google Play Movies Shutting Down: How to Keep Your Films After July 15th

How to Update Desktop, Android Versions With Google Chrome Update

Fortunately, Google is addressing these security issues with its latest updates. Aside from the bugs identified, it would also fix some of the older bugs like CVE-2021-21148, CVE-2021-21166, CVE-2021-21193, CVE-2021-21206, CVE-2021-21220, and CVE-2021-21224.

Download the newest fix now and protect yourself from these system threats! Update your Chrome to the latest version (91.0.4472.101) by following the steps How to Geek provided:

Desktop Chrome: Chrome automatically gets updates whenever you restart your computer. However, you could also manually check for updates and install them, if necessary. Click the three-dot menu on the top right of the screen, go to "Help" and "About Google Chrome." You will be redirected to a page that shows your current Chrome version. This automatically prompts your browser to search for updates and install them. "Relaunch" the application to complete the process.

Android Chrome: For Android browsers, head to your "Google PlayStore" to update an app. Open your PlayStore "Profile" and open the "My Apps & Games" section. Scroll down until you see "Chrome" and "Install" any new updates available.



Related Article: Google Suffers Epic Fail in Argentina: Tech Giant Fails to Pay Domain Name, Guy Snags It for $5!
The Marvel "Loki" series has officially debuted on Disney Plus, and it looks like Thor's little brother has found himself in a bit of trouble.

'Loki' Episode 1 Spoilers: 'Glorious Purpose'

The story follows Loki (Tom Hiddleston) after he steals the Tesseract back in 2012.

This is the timeline Iron Man, Captain America, and the Ant Man went back to in "Avengers: Endgame" which got botched after Hulk busted through the lobby from the emergency exit staircase, making the briefcase holding the Teserract fling across the lobby and land on Loki's feet.

Now a fair warning, the rest of the article will contain spoilers. You can just head over to Disney Plus and watch the episode yourself, as it has been out since Wednesday.

But if you're still here, let's go right ahead and talk about the first episode.

Loki's Escape

Anyone who has seen "Endgame" has asked the question: "Where'd Loki go?"

Well, he found himself in the Mongloan part of the Gobi Desert, and the Time Variance Authority or TVA agents nabbed him.

Also, the Infinity Stones aren't all that and are actually very effective paper weights. Who knew?

It took everything.. and theyre using them as paperweights  #Loki pic.twitter.com/ENnodMCURy  Kegie  (@SubparKeg) June 11, 2021

The Other Variant

Introduced to us in the trailer, the TVA is like the timeline police, and Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) is Loki's "handler." In the episode, Loki accepted he can't weasel his way out of the TVA.

But here's the kicker: our 2012 Loki isn't the only Loki variant going around creating timeline chaos, no!

There's another one, and this one is killing teams of TVA agents in various eras and stealing their reset charges.

This means TVA employees can be killed, Cnet noted. You just have to be Loki-clever enough to counter their gadgets and deliver the blow.

The Multiverse of Madness

In the episode, Loki and the audience were talked through how the "Sacred Timeline" was made and how anyone who deviates from the predetermined parth creates a "Nexus Event" or a branch in the timeline that could pretty much go out of control.

That's where the TVA comes in to arrest the offenders to trurn the timeline to its original path.

It turns out, the Avengers jumping through space for "Endgame" was supposed to happen! But poor Loki, escaping wasn't.

The narrative of the Multiverse becoming more canonical in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is really opening up so many doors for how the next "Doctor Strange" and "Spider-Man" movies could possibly pan out.

MCU Loki

Mobius also revealed to our Loki what the "Sacred Timeline" has in store for him.

He found out he's responsible for his adpotive mother, Frigga's death. Mobius revealed Loki's final moments with his adoptive father, Odin. Loki also got to reconcile with his brother Thor.

He saw the reconciliation, redemption, and ruination waiting for him in that "Sacred Timeline."

Clearly, he's not going to return to that just yet. We've got five more episodes to go! But wow, that must have given him a time-space-continuum whiplash.

Seeing Tom Hiddlestons face do the Macarena after getting punched in the mouth was priceless! #loki pic.twitter.com/UBBH8mSRLh  Kevin Bennett (@KevinSonofOlen) June 11, 2021

'Loki' Easter Eggs

Here are some fun Easter Eggs Cnet pointed out that you might enjoy. The MCU really loves hiding them in plain sight.

We've got a Skrull variant reporting to the front desk. Looks like these alien shapeshifters are everywhere.

Loki smelled the cologne of the Tony Sarks. That's how he relalized the Avengers had probably time travelled back to 2012. Quite a sniffer on that one.

Mobius' spiffy look is taken from the late marvel Comics editor and community expert Mark Gruenwald, who has an excellent mustache. In fact, in the comics, the TVA agents are clones of Gruenwald.

Loki is the MCU's D.B. Cooper. The mystery of D.B. Cooper is a classic to fans of unsolved crimes and mysteries. The unknown man who went by D.B. Cooper on his ticket jumped from the airplane with only a parachute and a bag full of cash when the plane was flying over to Mexico City. He wasn't found after that. Now we know why! He lost a bet with Thor and had to be sent back to Asgard.

Loki doesn't know Agent Phil Coulson is alive. Pretty sure Mobius would bring him up to speed about that soon enough. With another Loki Variant running amock, surely, other Loki versions from the comics will be making a guest appearance, right?

Read Also: Marvel 'Loki' Trailer: 4 Weird and Epic Moments to Watch Out for in Disney+ Series

'Loki' Episode 2 Release Schedule

The next episode of Marvel's "Loki" series will be released on June 16, Wednesday, midnight PT/3.a. ET/8 a.m. GMT, according to Tech Radar. The other four episodes to follow will then be available every Wednesday after.

Episode 2: June 16

Episode 3: June 23

Episode 4: June 30

Episode 5: July 7

Episode 6: July 14

The "Loki" series is six episodes in total and will be streamed exclusively on Disney Plus.

Related Article: Marvel 'Loki' Series: Complete Release Dates Per Episode, Trailer, Where to Watch Online
The 2022 Toyota GR 86 is looking to be quite popular in the tuner scene. HKS, specializing in aftermarket high-performance auto parts, is ready to go with their kit to upgrade the coupe, giving it an edgier look and definitely more power.

2022 Toyota GR 86 Engine, Top Speed and Specs

Off the factory, the speedy coupe houses a 2.4-liter flat-four engine, one that it shares with its cousin, the Subaru BRZ. It can go up to 0-62 miles per hour in 6.3 seconds

The flat-four can deliver up to 228 horsepower at 7000 rpm and 184 pint-feet of torque at 3,700 rpm, a good upgrade from its predecessor--the 2020 Toyota 86.

It comes in standard six-speed manual transmission and an optional automatic transmission which brings power to the rear wheels.

In the first ride with MotorTrend, the professional drifter Ken Gushi was behind the wheel, and both he and the news outlet noticed the more pronounced exhaust note--louder but not too intrusive.

Gushi also noted that the steering feels even more balanced and accurate.

Design-wise, the second generation 86 boasts improved aerodynamics and air management with functional air vents on the front bumper and fenders to help cool the engine better.

Read Also: 2022 Subaru BRZ vs. Toyota GR 86: Price, Release Date, Aero Upgrades and Other Unique Features

Toyota GR 86 Supercharger Kit From HKS

HKS (named after its founders Hasegawa, Kitagawa and Sigma) was established in Japan in 1973. The company focuses on performance with forward-thinking turbocharged applications and bolt-on solutions, and later on aero options, MotorTrend highlighted.

The brand HKS is quite a reputable name in the car tuning scene.

Still in its concept stage, the Japanese aftermarket kit maker is looking to give the GR 86 a supercharged treatment with their GT2 supercharger system, Motor1 reported.

In addition to the supercharger, HKS fitted the GR 86's boxer engine with a catalytic convert-equipped GT SPEC exhaust manifold. It leads to the group's Hi-Power SPEC-L II exhaust system, MotorTrend adds.

Other programmable add-ons are also in the mix, and all these upgrades combined should total to about 60 to 100 hp gain, depending on the upgrades the tuner chooses to get.

Although no real numbers can tell us just how much boost the second-generation 86 is getting, the first generation 86 got to 289 hp and 233 lb-ft. of torque. The stock GR 86 promises 228 power. Let your imagination run wild with those numbers.

The HKS concept also did its own redesign of the GR 86's original lines.

They scrapped the flared fenders and a front lip spoiler attaches to the bottom of the front bumper and wraps around its edges. The GR 86 also gets upturned winglets that extend the piece outwards a few inches.

A carbon fiber panel covers the front fender vents and, of course, these pieces bolt directly to the HKS-brand side skirts that sweep up toward the rear quarter panel. This gives a more pronounced, sharp look due to the integrated diffusers.

Handling will also be taken care of by HKS by using Hipermax S coilovers with adjustable camber plates. MotorTrend also said the company ditched the stock wheels and tires for a set of bronze 19-inch Advance Racing GT Beyonds. The tires are four sticky 255/30-19 Advan Neova AD08R rubber.

Of course, the breaks got fitted with something other than the stock ones with blue-painted six-piston front calipers that clamp down on 14.6-inch rotors. Four-piston calipers and 12.6-inch Carbing slotted rotors reside at the car's rear.

Although the GR 86 hasn't come out yet, leave it up to HKS Japan to have an aftermarket kit ready for its people in the tuner community.

Related Article: 2022 Toyota GR 86 US Release Date, Price: Complete Power Specs, Interior Design and More Features
AttackIQ, vendor of Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) systems, is working with VMware to provide security protection to its customers.

AttackIQ partners with VMware to enable VMware NSX customers to improve the way they validate the efficacy of their network security controls.

Using the AttackIQ Security Optimisation Platform with the Mitre Att&ck framework, AttackIQ says mutual customers can now leverage the power of automation to emulate realistic attacks and prove that controls are working as expected to help protect them from breaches and attacks.

As we have seen from supply-chain and ransomware intrusions, organisations need to assume breach and adopt advanced security capabilities to prevent successful attacks, notes Carl Wright, AttackIQ chief commercial officer. VMware is excited to work with the VMware team to elevate our mutual customers security program performance.

While traditional penetration testing and red teaming can provide useful insights into security control effectiveness, their infrequent scheduling and limited scope fail to provide holistic, up-to-the minute data during security proof of values, says Chad Skipper, VMWare global security technologist. AttackIQ will enable VMware NSX customers to validate NSX Advanced Threat Prevention controls against emulated adversary behaviours, with the end result being increased confidence in their cybersecurity performance.

AttackIQ conducts automated security testing to improve program performance

AttackIQ operates under the assume breach mindset, recognising it is not a question of if but when an intruder will break past an organisations perimeter defence.

Aligned to the Mitre Att&ck framework, AttackIQs Security Optimisation platform contains a deep library of adversary emulation scenarios to emulate post-breach adversary behaviours and validate an organisations defences. The Security Optimization Platform tests and validates security controls continuously, safely, at scale and in production.

By combining AttackIQ with VMware NSX, teams are said to gain comprehensive data-driven control over their security program through continuous testing. With clear performance data generated from AttackIQs automated testing capabilities, security teams identify program challenges, adjust their security program operations, and make data-informed decisions about their security investments.

The outcome: the organisations security controls work as intended, resources are aligned to address the most important threats, and the organisation will be able to maximise its return of investment.

AttackIQ says VMware simplifies network security by leveraging the infrastructure to protect apps and data from endpoint to cloud. By virtualising the network security stack, companies are said to gain better protection built into the infrastructure to help mitigate risks and enable compliance, lower costs, and simplify operations.

The VMware NSX security family includes the VMware NSX Service-defined Firewall, a distributed, scale-out internal firewall purpose-built to protect east-west network traffic, and VMware NSX Advanced Threat Prevention for network detection and response capabilities with network traffic analysis, distributed IDS/IPS, and advanced malware analysis.

These solutions, AttackIQ says, provide deep visibility into network traffic regardless of whether it is north-south or east-west and are coupled with advanced machine learning techniques. As a result, cybersecurity teams can respond to advanced threats by providing alerts with a very low rate of false positives, plus visualise the entire attack chain.
The Department of Health has been using Qliks data visualisation and analytics solution to give more perspective on COVID-19 related information and support public announcements.

The Australian Government Department of Health leverages Qliks technology to deliver data analytics capabilities to support the departments reporting of COVID-19 related information to key stakeholders, Qlik announces.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic in Australia in early 2020, the Department of Health has been using Qlik to provide health officials a perspective on COVID-19 related statistics. Qliks data visualisation and analytics solutions support COVID-19 public announcements, pandemic incident management, and COVID-19 updates on the Department of Health website.

Qlik says the Department needed a rapid data solution that was external facing, easily adaptable and could support the National Incident Room to provide curated data on a daily basis so as to keep the Australian public informed on the unfolding COVID-19 situation. This meant clear and swift reporting with no room for error.

Qlik offered an end-to-end solution, allowing health to join to many disparate datasets quickly and produce a wide range of reporting formats. As soon as the pandemic hit, it took not more than three weeks for a prototype platform to be built for the Department of Health. A live public website was available shortly after to provide up-to-date information built to support half million hits a day and up to 5,000 hits a second.



The Health team were challenged to develop new and innovative data products for many different audiences with the key guiding principles of accuracy, reliability, availability and consistency, all delivered rapidly.

Qlik solutions were used across the following areas:

COVID-19 public announcements: At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr Nick Coatsworth, deputy chief medical officer, was delivering twice weekly updates via social media channels and required updated information available to inform the public of the escalating COVID-19 situation. Using Qliks NPrinting reporting solution, the Department was able to supply accurate data and a flexible solution for every instance.

Informatic Placemat: Qliks data generation supported rapid response requests for internal and external information and decision making. Originally, the Placemat was built as a manually constructed visual dashboard highlighting key figures related to the spread of COVID-19. However, Qlik says this was extremely slow and exposed a risk for error. The Qlik solution enabled automated reporting. Qlik says it reduced time spent by staff in the National Incident Room to curate the information by five to six hours daily.

Pandemic Incident Management (PIM): A dashboard was created by combining different data models and Qlik apps to create analytics for internal use. The Departments internal pandemic management team was able to monitor and respond to information on the Departments own workforce volumes, IT capacity, and staff movement to identify and manage employees working remotely or onsite.

COVID-19 Impact Assessment: Through analytics, the Department was able to provide a view of the availability of medical devices such as ventilators and PPE, as well as measure hospital capacity. This was achieved by integrating data from a range of sources including the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods (ARTG) and hospital data from Critical Health Resource Information System (CHRIS). Information was updated daily to facilitate strategic decision making.

COVID-19 Vulnerability Assessment: A separate Qlik application helped integrate data sets from 18 different vulnerable cohorts such as those with chronic disease, disability, or those in remote areas. The dashboard enabled the Departments Data and Analytics Branch to easily find correlations and trends in the data sets by drilling down into age, gender, and geography to find areas and people that were most at risk and to aid Department decision making.

Collaboration for success

For its pioneering work, the Australian Government Department of Health was recently presented the Qlik Excellence in Healthcare Award at Qliks Australia and New Zealand Health & Public Sector Digital Transformation Awards 2021.

Australias approach to the COVID-19 pandemic is well-regarded globally and this can largely be attributed to a well-coordinated and collaborative effort across government, the healthcare sector, as well as the private sector that was underpinned by data-driven decision making, says Charlie Farah, Qlik director of industry solutions for healthcare and public sector.

He concludes: This enabled the government to swiftly act and provide clear communication to citizens and state authorities on the rapidly changing situation to help limit the spread of COVID-19 within the community.
Analyst firm GlobalData attributes the mobile gaming markets growth to the maturity of streaming, cloud gaming services, and mobile esports. The firm says that more companies are moving into mobile game publishing.

The mobile gaming market is estimated to reach US$272 billion by 2030, and is seen to record a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11% over the ten years, according to a report from analyst firm GlobalData.

GlobalDatas report, Thematic Research: Mobile Gaming, reveals that the mobile gaming market will be worth US$272 billion by 2030, up from US$98 billion in 2020.

Rupantar Guha, GlobalData associate project manager for thematic research, says: Mobile gaming is already bigger than the console and PC gaming markets combined, contributing nearly 57% of global video games revenue in 2020.

The growing maturity of streaming (supported by 5G), cloud gaming services, and mobile esportscombined with the fact that mobile platforms are close to technical parity with PCs and consolesmeans most gamers will embrace mobile gaming in the next few years. As a result, it will continue to account for the lions share of the global video games revenue over the next ten years, he adds.

Guha continues: Mobile gaming expertise is a must-have for all games companies. Traditional console and PC game publishers such as Activision Blizzard and EA are increasingly focused on the popular mobile gaming and its lucrative revenue opportunities. They compete with companies such as Tencent, Sea, and Perfect World, which primarily focus on mobile gaming. Social media companes (e.g., ByteDance) and online advertisers (e.g., AppLovin) are also moving into mobile games publishing.

5G will drive the next wave of innovation in mobile gaming. 5G networks allow games to be downloaded faster than current 4G networks and aid the development of mobile-based cloud gaming services and augmented reality (AR) games. With the ability to support one million devices within a single square kilometre, 5G will drive more users towards mobile gaming, especially multiplayer titles. This, in turn, will boost the growth of mobile esports, Guha concludes.
In a new report, Greenpeace acknowledges that Telstra emerges first among companies using renewables. The report is also urging other telcos to switch to renewable energy.

Telecommunications firm Telstra takes the top spot in a new ranking by Greenpeace Australia Pacific that reveals which Australian telcos, data centres, and tech companies are moving ahead in the race to renewables, and which companies are still behind.

The fact sheet, Solar streaming: whos leading the telco, tech and IT race to renewables? found that Telstra, which is said to be Australias 14th biggest electricity user overall, leads the ranking with a commitment to 100% renewable electricity by 2025.

In 2017, Telstra inked a power purchase agreement with Murra Warra wind farm in Victoria. Recently, it signed a power purchase agreement worth $100 million and a 58MW extension with Crookwell wind farm near Goulburn in New South Wales. The agreements signify Telstras transition to green energy.

Telstra was followed by TPG Telecom, which owns brands such as Vodafone and iiNet, and has also vowed to be 100% renewable by 2025. Optus, Australias second largest telco, is missing in action, with no renewable electricity target to date.

Lindsay Soutar, Greenpeace Australia Pacific REenergise campaign director, says telecommunications are emerging as one of the leading industries in Australias renewable energy transition.

As this new ranking reveals, some Australian telcos and tech companies, such as Telstra and TPG Telecom, are on a super-fast stream to clean energy. But some of the local tech industry is still buffering, with big players such as Optus and NextDC yet to say yes to a 100% renewable electricity target, she says.

Soutar adds: Telco, tech, and data centre companies use vast amounts of electricity, and emissions from the sector are escalating along with Australians' insatiable appetite for internet services. Telcos and IT services consume approximately 4% of Australias electricitythis is equivalent to 580,000 homes, more than all the homes in Adelaide.

The good news is that 98% of the reported carbon emissions of telcos and data centre companies comes from electricity, which means most of these companies can cut a massive swathe through their carbon pollutionsimply by switching from coal power to 100% clean electricity, she suggests.

Trent Czinner, TPG Telecom Group executive, legal and external affairs, says that making the switch to renewables was a logical move for his company.

"We made the move to be powered by 100% renewable electricity because it is the right thing to do, and to meet the growing expectations of our customers, employees and the wider community. We are very proud to be on this journey to be a more sustainable business, he says.

The Greenpeace Australia Pacific fact sheet also looked at emerging trends in the Australian telco industry. Green, renewable-powered telcos are a growing force in the Australian market, with new polling showing that majority of Australians (59.8%) would be more likely to purchase a mobile plan from a telco powered by clean energy.

Greenpeace says dirtier telcos are also beginning to switch, with fossil fuel giants AGL and Origin making forays in the telecommunications space.

Lindsay Soutar graded the overall report card for Australian telcos and IT services as improving, but could do better.

Australian data centres in particular are a growing source of greenhouse gas emissions. Of the data centre companies, Global Switch is leading with a commitment to 100% renewable electricityhowever, NextDC and Equinix still need to set hard timelines for the renewable energy transition and Fujitsus target year of 2050 is woefully inadequate, she concludes.

Greenpeace is now calling on Optus to dial in to the telco race to renewables and commit to 100% renewable electricity by 2025, and to sign up to the global RE100 initiative.
Macquarie Telecom business unit Macquarie Government has welcomed the Morrison Governments announcement that all government data will soon require storage only in onshore data centres that are Certified Strategic or Certified Assured.

The certification categories - designed to improve the protection and security of Australian government data - are a feature of the newly released Hosting Strategy, administered by the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA), and have been championed by Minister for Government Services Stuart Robert.

As well as ensuring this information is moved onshore into certified data centres, the strategy will require government data to be managed by cloud and managed service providers that are based in Australia, ensuring stronger government controls are in place across supply chains that support the storage of government data.

Managing Director of Macquarie Government Aidan Tudehope said the requirement for government information to be stored in certified data centres will ensure greater security of Australias sovereign data.

Recent events demonstrated the importance of protecting Australias critical sovereign data, and the infrastructure and hosting arrangements that store, protect and manage that data, he said.

Ensuring sensitive information is kept within Australian borders is vital to protecting our national security and privacy interests. We are delighted to be on the podium and among the first to be certified Strategic under the DTAs new Hosting Certification Framework. Our campuses are controlled and accessed only by Australian Government security-cleared specialists, ensuring the highest sovereign controls are in place for our government customers.

According to Tudehope the governments intent to prioritise local cloud and data storage service providers will set a strong example for the private sector to invest locally, ensuring Australia works towards enhancing its sovereign digital ecosystem that serves the national economy by providing world-class security for Australias sovereign data.

The announcement from Minister Stuart Robert is the latest in a series of initiatives that are geared towards protecting Australias national interests.

With the government, as the largest collective buyer of ICT services in Australia, signalling its intent to move its information onshore in the interests of stronger security controls, the private sector may be encouraged to do likewise.

This will provide a catalyst to Australias bourgeoning cyber security and data storage sectors, creating local jobs and investment, and supercharging a digital-led economic recovery in Australia.

Group Executive of Macquarie Data Centres David Hirst said that Macquaries portfolio of Australian data centres, including the recently completed IC3 (Sydney) and IC5 Bunker (Canberra), are ideal for supporting both government workloads, and also hyperscale and SaaS that indirectly support and house government data.

Our facilities continually measure up against rigorous global certification standards in terms of mechanics, engineering and build. These certifications, along with the fact that we are one of the few integrated service providers to government, mean we are best placed to host critical information.




By Yi Whan-woo







Despite the size of their sprawling business empires, Korean conglomerates, known as "chaebols" in Korean, have had distinct business boundaries.







For instance, Samsung is noted for its semiconductor and smartphone businesses, Hyundai Motor for cars, SK for oil refining and telecommunication, Lotte for shopping and POSCO for steel.







But such boundaries are blurring fast, as the conglomerates are crossing over into each other's territories to harness next-generation technologies, many of which are associated with low-carbon and eco-friendly business practices.







"It can be said that the chaebols face an innovative phase where their flagship businesses will evolve or will change into something completely new in accordance with industrial trends," said Lee Jae-gon, a professor at Myongji University's Department of Distribution Industry Management.







Among the promising industries are electronic vehicle (EV) batteries and related materials, hydrogen energy and unmanned air mobility (UAM).







The conglomerates appear to have their own approaches to dominating their targeted industries.







Some already have embarked on such missions and seek to consolidate market leadership through expanded investments, as seen from the case of LG which entered the battery business in the 1990s.







Others are trying to capitalize on the know-how of their affiliates to enter new and lucrative industries. Such attempts can be seen with POSCO using its steel manufacturing expertise to produce cathodes and anodes for EV batteries, as well as hydrogen.







The third group of conglomerates does not mind starting from scratch as late comers, as seen with GS which is reportedly thinking about starting an EV battery materials business. The conglomerate is believed to have had its oil refining arm GS Caltex form a partnership with Cosmo Advanced Materials, a mid-sized battery materials manufacturer.







For battery, LG and SK are expanding their presence in the United States. During a summit between leaders of Korea and the U.S. in May, their respective affiliates  LG Energy Solution and SK Innovation  vowed to spend a combined $14 billion to build EV battery production plants of their own and also in the form of joint ventures with U.S. firms.







The EV battery-related business of POSCO is represented through "Autopos," a brand launched in January for its products and business systems related to EVs and other eco-friendly cars.





The conglomerate plans to produce 220,000 tons of lithium and 100,000 tons of nickel by 2030. This will make it possible for the firm to manufacture 260,000 tons of cathode materials and 400,000 tons of anode materials each year.







Lotte Chairman Shin Dong-bin announced plans in May to have affiliate Lotte Chemical be equipped with facilities exclusively for the production of EV battery materials.







The chemical arm of Lotte has been importing organic solvents that are needed for EV battery manufacturing.







And Shin's remark was interpreted as an expression of willingness to become self-reliant in solvent production and accordingly expand Lotte's presence in the EV battery materials market.







GS Caltex and Cosmo Advanced Materials are expected to create synergy through possible partnerships in the form of a joint venture or equity investment, among others.







"It seems GS has been inspired by other conglomerates to enter the EV battery materials business," an industry source said, adding, "The group will need to think fast and take action accordingly to catch up."







Hyundai Motor, SK and POSCO are among the firms racing for dominance in the hydrogen energy industry.







Hyundai Motor is dedicated to its fuel cell system, called HTWO, which stands for the hydrogen molecule H2, to target Korea, the U.S., Europe, China and other global markets.







On June 3, SK invested in Monolith, a U.S. company specializing in the manufacture of affordable, hydrogen.







The investment will be a part of SK's plan to create a value chain of production, distribution and sales of hydrogen.







The group's affiliate, SK E&S, is Korea's biggest importer of LNG, including CH4  a major raw material containing hydrogen.







Also, hydrogen is generated as a byproduct at SK Incheon Petrochem, while SK Energy's gas station networks could be used to offer green energy.







The latest step taken by POSCO on hydrogen energy was the groundbreaking for a plant in Gwangyang, South Jeolla Province in May to carry out lithium hydroxide extraction.







The 1,960-square-meter plant will be able to produce 43,000 tons of lithium hydroxide annually once construction is finished by the end of 2023, enough to make batteries for around 1 million EVs.







Hyundai Motor, Hanwha and Hanjin are interested in Urban Air Mobility (UAM), a futuristic mode of transportation.







UAM services are designed to travel 30 to 50 kilometers in urban areas, offering flying transportation services in connection with buses, the subway and other ground transportation modes.







The country is seeking to commercialize services in the domestic market in 2025 to better tackle traffic congestion in major cities.







Hyundai Motor Chairman Chung Euisun wants to shift from a car-oriented business model and make UAM accountable for 30 percent of the conglomerate's business portfolio while lowering its dependency on car manufacturing to 50 percent.







Related projects include the launch of a UAM business division in September 2019, a partnership with British mobility firm Urban-Air Port in August 2020 and planned launch of unmanned cargo aircraft by 2026.







Hanwha Group's UAM business is led by Hanwha Systems, its defense and information technology arm.







In January, Hanwha Systems acquired a 30 percent stake in U.S. air taxi startup Overair. The two are jointly developing a personal air vehicle, titled Butterfly.







The Hanwha affiliate also plans to launch "verti-hub," a city terminal for the takeoff and landing of air taxis, at Gimpo International Airport in western Seoul, in cooperation with Korea Airports Corp.







Hanjin Group's flagship affiliate Korean Air launched an internal taskforce in May, with aerospace experts in charge of developing drones and unmanned aircraft, and training aviation control employees.


Software and MarTech hosting company Dataweavers has appointed Josh Dickerson to the newly created role of APAC regional sales director.

"Josh has also managed multi-digital technical teams, in particular developing and growing a Sitecore ANZ practice which makes him perfectly placed to lead the next phase of our business growth and to support clients in key markets," said Dataweavers and Triggerfish co-director Anthony Hook.

Dickerson has nearly 18 years of experience in digital marketing and strategy.

He joins Dataweavers from GrowthOps where, among other things, he built a Sitecore practice before moving into business development.

Dickerson previously served as general manager at KDIS, branch manager at Fireworks Websites, business development director at Fyve, and management roles at Infoxchange.

He started his career in the industry by founding his own web design company, JD Designs.

Dickerson holds a bachelor of design from RMIT University.

"I'm extremely excited to take on this new challenge, not only to build the brand in new markets, but to help businesses realise a new level of success when it comes to integrating their marketing and technology functions and the powerful results this can yield," said Dickerson.

In related news, Dataweavers recently hired Alex Angas to manage its UK operations. Several US appointments are planned for the coming months.
COMPANY NEWS: Gigamon , the leader in cloud visibility and analytics, today announced ThreatINSIGHT Guided-SaaS NDR (network detection and response), which was purpose built to improve SOC (Security Operations Center) effectiveness and reduce analyst burnout.

ThreatINSIGHT Guided-SaaS NDR, which redefines how SaaS-based security solutions are delivered, arrives at a critical juncture in threat defence as exponential growth in infrastructure complexity, and ever-increasing cyber threat activity, is negatively impacting InfoSec teams ability to efficiently do their jobs, ultimately contributing to high burnout rates.

ThreatINSIGHT alleviates the three most common problems that continue to plague SOC analysts and incident responders.

They are often working in the dark without foundational visibility to observe adversary movement, leading 69% of IT and security practitioners to cite network visibility as the top reason for SOC ineffectiveness.

They continually face the distraction of burdensome tool maintenance, prompting 43% of SOC analysts to indicate that maintaining, tuning and providing updates to their security tools is their core responsibility.

Finally, they are often operating alone, without expert support, which is a factor CISOs must consider when addressing why 70% of their SOC analysts report burnout due to high-pressure environments.

Gigamon ThreatINSIGHT removes these burdens that otherwise prohibit teams from focusing on effectively identifying adversary activity across the MITRE ATT&CK framework. In addition, during high-pressure, active incidents, customers benefit from access to expert-level guidance from the experienced security analysts and incident responders on the Gigamon Technical Success Managers (TSM) team.

Security analysts are consistently overwhelmed, stressed, and understaffed, leaving the majority pretty much unable to anticipate, recover from, or adapt to new attacks (without reaching burnout, which is common), wrote analyst Allie Mellen from Forrester in a recent series of blog posts.

Security tools must support security teams in doing their jobs better, from the people side, the process side, and the technology side.[1https://www.gigamon.com/research/applied-threat-research-team.html" Gigamon Applied Threat Research (ATR) team

By continuously delivering QAd and tuned advanced machine learning, behavioural analytics, and proprietary threat intelligence for true positive adversary detection, clients are not distracted with laborious false-positive tuning.

Expertise. ThreatINSIGHT guides SOC analysts via product and people. The solution guides investigative workflows built by our expert responders, on top of a powerful and flexible Insight Query Language. TSMs, included as part of the service, are security analysts and incident responders themselves who provide best practices and threat knowledge to directly assist clients when they need it most.

As hybrid cloud and hybrid workforces become the new normal and as threat actors continually increase their sophistication, the job of security analysts and incident responders becomes even more complex, said Michael Dickman, Chief Product Officer at Gigamon.

The rise in recent ransomware attacks is a strong reminder that security teams need defence-in-depth with visibility, focus, and expertise. Now, with the world's first Guided-SaaS NDR, customers no longer have to fight this battle alone, or without full visibility of their adversary. InfoSec teams now have the tools and expertise to respond with speed and confidence.

For more information on the efficiency and effectiveness of ThreatINSIGHT, read the ESG Technical Review to learn how ESG independently validated the efficacy of Gigamon ThreatINSIGHT.

About Gigamon

Gigamon helps the worlds leading organizations run fast, stay secure and innovate. We provide the industrys first Guided-SaaS NDR (network detection and response) solution which closes the Security Operations Center (SOC) visibility gap, removes unnecessary distractions and provides expert advisory guidance when it matters most. With visibility into network traffic across their entire hybrid cloud infrastructure, organisations eliminate security blind spots while benefiting from Gigamon security expert guidance, helping improve SOC effectiveness and reducing burnout of their security teams.

Gigamon has been awarded over 90 technology patents and enjoys world-class customer satisfaction with more than 4,000 organisations, including over 80 percent of the Fortune 100 and hundreds of government and educational organisations worldwide. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Gigamon operates globally. For the full story on how Gigamon can help you to run fast, stay secure and innovate, please visit www.gigamon.com and follow us on Twitter. and LinkedIn.
Telstra and Naturgy, through its international power generation subsidiary Global Power Generation (GPG), announced they have signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) to build a 58 megawatt (MW) wind farm located near Goulburn in Crookwell, NSW.

The wind farm, called Crookwell 3, will commence construction in the last quarter of 2021 and is expected to be fully operational in the first half of 2023. GPG will invest approximately $120 million to develop the Crookwell 3 wind farm.

Under the long term PPA, Telstra has committed to procure 80% of the energy generated by the wind farm. The project fully complies with Naturgys investment and profitability criteria.

GPG CEO Francisco Bustio said, GPG is committed to playing an important role in the development of Australias renewable energy industry and supporting the energy transition through the generation of clean, renewable energy. GPG said, the wind farm is designed to generate the energy needed to power the equivalent of 40,000 households. It will also contribute to the local economy and help build capabilities within Australias renewable energy industry. Approximately 95 direct jobs will be created during the construction phase, and a further 6 permanent jobs will be created to support the ongoing operations of the wind farm.

The Crookwell 3 wind farm will be Naturgys sixth investment in Australia, through its subsidiary GPG. Already one of the top 3 independent renewable energy companies in Australia, this new project will see Naturgy reach 750 MW of renewable energy generation projects in the country with secured PPAs. GPG currently operates the Crookwell 2 wind farm (91 MW), in New South Wales, with a PPA awarded by the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Government.

In addition, the Berrybank 1 wind farm (180 MW) in Victoria, which was awarded a PPA by the Victorian Government, has recently commenced operations.

The Berrybank 2 wind farm (109 MW), with a PPA awarded by the ACT Government, has started construction, and is due to be completed in the second half of 2022. As part of the commitments associated to this project, GPG is constructing a 10MW/20MWh battery located in the ACT that will support energy distribution on the ACT electricity grid.

GPG has already secured Corporate PPAs with other tier one corporate off-takers for two additional wind farm projects that will be located in Victoria: the Ryan Corner wind farm (218 MW) and the Hawkesdale wind farm (97MW).

Naturgy has an additional portfolio of more than 650 MW of projects in Victoria and New South Wales in different stages of development which will drive the sustainable growth of GPG in Australia.

Chris Coughlan
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U.S. President Joe Biden delivers a speech on the COVID-19 pandemic, as Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla stands alongside him, in St Ives, Cornwall on June 10 ahead of the three-day G7 summit. AFP-Yonhap



President Joe Biden urged global leaders Thursday to join him in sharing coronavirus vaccines with struggling nations around the world after he promised the U.S. would donate 500 million doses to help speed the pandemic's end and bolster the strategic position of the world's wealthiest democracies.



Speaking in England before a summit of the Group of Seven world leaders, Biden announced the U.S. commitment to vaccine sharing, which comes on top of 80 million doses he has already pledged by the end of the month. He argued it was in both America's interests and the world's to make vaccination widely and speedily available everywhere.



''We're going to help lead the world out of this pandemic working alongside our global partners,'' Biden said. He added that on Friday the G-7 nations would join the U.S. in outlining their vaccine donation commitments.



British Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote in The Times of London newspaper that it was now time for wealthy countries to ''shoulder their responsibilities'' and ''vaccinate the world.'' His country has yet to send any doses abroad or announce a solid plan to share vaccines. Johnson indicated Britain had millions of doses in surplus stocks.



French President Emmanuel Macron welcomed the U.S. commitment and said Europe should do the same.



''I think the European Union needs to have at least the same level of ambition as the United States'' and be able to make a similar announcement, he said at a news conference.



Biden said the U.S. was sharing its doses ''with no strings attached'' or ''pressure for favors.''



''We're doing this to save lives, to end this pandemic, and that's it,'' he said.



Biden had faced mounting pressure to outline his global vaccine sharing plan, especially as inequities in supply around the world have become more pronounced and the demand for shots in the U.S. has dropped precipitously in recent weeks.



''In times of trouble, Americans reach out to offer help,'' Biden said, adding that the U.S. doses would ''supercharge'' the global vaccination campaign. ''Our values call on us to do everything that we can to vaccinate the world against COVID-19.?



The U.S. commitment is to buy and donate 500 million Pfizer doses for distribution through the global COVAX alliance to 92 lower-income countries and the African Union, bringing the first steady supply of mRNA vaccine to the countries that need it most. A price tag for the 500 million doses was not released, but the U.S. is now set to be COVAX's largest vaccine donor in addition to its single largest funder with a $4 billion commitment.



The global alliance has thus far distributed just 81 million doses and parts of the world, particularly in Africa, remain vaccine deserts. White House officials hope the ramped-up distribution program can be the latest example of a theme Biden plans to hit frequently during his week in Europe: that Western democracies, and not rising authoritarian states, can deliver the most good for the world.



White House officials said the 500 million vaccines will be shipped starting in August, with the goal of distributing 200 million by the end of the year. The remaining 300 million doses would be shipped in the first half of 2022.





Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson, his wife Carrie Johnson and U.S. President Joe Biden with first lady Jill Biden walk outside Carbis Bay Hotel, Carbis Bay, Cornwall, Britain, ahead of the G7 summit, June 10. AP-Yonhap
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.
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The Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) will draw inspiration from its vast collection of artworks when hosting a virtual exhibition that showcases the contemporary landscape of social beliefs and politics, and how these intertwine in a modern context.











Dubbed Ngoma II: Cosmology in African Modernities, the digital exhibition curated by Khwezi Gule seeks to explore the interrelation between art and spirituality, cultural practices, mythologies and cosmologies while demystifying intricacies of African modernity.

Gule, a Chief Curator at JAG, will host visitors on a virtual walkabout of the exhibition on Sunday, 13 June between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. The event will also feature a live performance from the Medumo Ya Afrika ensemble, billed to play alongside Masello Motana. The event will stream live from JAG in the Inner City and members of the public can attend through this link: https://web.facebook.com/JoburgCulture.





A sequel to the Ngoma: Art and Cosmology exhibition initially held at the historic gallery two years ago, Ngoma II features existing works from JAGs extensive library of contemporary and antique artworks to interpret a modern-day social context.





The artworks assembled in this exhibition offer us glimpses into how our ancestors and present-day artists have adapted to modernity, coloniality and the shifting landscape of spirituality, explains Gule.





He says art in the African context has always been woven into the fabric of both spirituality and mundane existence, and this is what Ngoma II seeks to dissect, adding that the exhibition represents deeply held societal beliefs and how this is evolving.





Modernity and colonialism not only changed the African way of life but also how we understand the cosmos and our place in it. Art is not only a decorative endeavour but it is also a way of knowing, a means of representing that which is beyond the everyday speech, Gule says.

Although some of the artworks on display are not devotional objects, the JAG Curator notes that they represent ways in which life, morality, futurity and imagination come together.

Some Africans converted into the denominations of the missionaries including Catholics, Methodists and Anglicans. Others chose to retain their traditional beliefs and customs. Others started independent African churches such as the Shembe Church and the Zion Christian Church.

Gule asserts that modernity also brought with it new artistic materials. Hence we see artists substituting traditional glass beads with plastic beads and incorporating text and modern objects like aeroplanes into the imagery, he says.

He argues that for some, art offers possibilities, both overt and covert, of resisting the colonial ways of being and colonial forms of representation or misrepresentation.

In this way, art is not only a means of contending and contesting the place of African people in global modernities but also a way of writing themselves into the history of the world, he explains.

Gule says Ngoma II will also explore the fact that Africans are no longer mere objects of Western acquaintance but producers of indigenous knowledge.

The Member of the Mayoral Committee (MMC) for Community Development, Cllr Margaret Arnolds encourages residents of Joburg to explore the exhibition online.

The works in Ngoma II: Cosmology in African Modernities bring to the fore the entanglements of historical, physical, metaphysical and existential spheres of existence, Cllr Arnolds enthuses.





Telephone Colin Groenewald, JAGs Education Officer on 011 725 3130 or email coling@joburg.org.za for more information.











Written by Dr Karabo Semenya

11/06/2021


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There were emotional scenes of joy and celebration as Member of Mayoral Committee (MMC) for Housing in the City of Joburg Cllr Mlungisi Mabaso issued hundreds of title deeds to proud, new RDP home-owners in the south and west of Joburg this week.







On Wednesday 09 June, the MMC was welcomed by joyful beneficiaries to Kanana Park in Region G, south of Joburg, where 700 title deeds were distributed. Hundreds of residents braved the cold to bear witness as the MMC turned them into instant homeowners.



Title deeds are legal documents that prove legal ownership of property under South African law. We need to make sure that right people are allocated within the housing needs register so that when we issue out these title deeds, we give them to the rightful beneficiaries, said Mabaso.

Title deeds are legal documents that prove legal ownership of property under South African law. We need to make sure that right people are allocated within the housing needs register so that when we issue out these title deeds, we give them to the rightful beneficiaries, said Mabaso.





On Thursday, similar scenes unfolded in Sol Plaatjie, west of Joburg, where 720 beneficiaries received their title deeds. There were tears of joy, ululation and singing as residents took ownership of, and pride in, their new homes.





I urge all those that have received title deeds to protect them at all costs to avoid a situation where it is stolen and youre evicted from your home because a fraudulent person has managed to get their hands on it and changes the ownership of the house without your knowledge, Mabaso urged beneficiaries.





Nyaniso Mukansi, a 69-year-old beneficiary who was unable to attend due to ill-health, agreed with the MMC.





People are very untrustworthy nowadays... During our time, we did not get up to mischief to a point where we would get into trouble because of fraud. Today, we are walking over those that we trusted and respected, so I will definitely keep this document safe so that I do not find myself without a home, said a cheerful Mukansi.





The MMC said he had tasked officials of the Department of Housing to continue issuing out title deeds to the rightful beneficiaries before the end of the financial year. If there are disputes within the houses that have been allocated, we will intervene.





The Government of Local Unity (GLU) has delivered and does not end here. The GLU is determined to provide our residents with home ownership through various means and rapidly through the issuing of title deeds, said the MMC. The City has started issuing title deeds robustly and we will continue to issue them in all seven regions to ensure residents are given dignity.









11/06/2021


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The Joburg Property Company (JPC) has increased its focus on the development of informal markets that help stimulate entrepreneurship for small business owners.







A municipal initiative in association with the Inner City Partnership Forum, the Metro Mall is a unique model that uses old Metro Rail carriages to build trading stalls. It is a business incubator for small township businesses to sell their products and services.

The municipal entity has completed the revitalisation of the Metro Mall, which incorporates formal and informal stalls. The street mall at the intersection of Gwigwi Mrwebi and Pixley ka Isaka Streets in the Inner City will benefit informal traders who operate from the Metro Mall Taxi Rank Block B and C, in the Johannesburg Inner City.A municipal initiative in association with the Inner City Partnership Forum, the Metro Mall is a unique model that uses old Metro Rail carriages to build trading stalls. It is a business incubator for small township businesses to sell their products and services.

Lungelo Ramatselela, the Project Manager says the JPC is central in ensuring municipal facilities like the Metro Mall are utilised to assist formal and informal traders to showcase their product offerings and services.

Ramatselela says the decision to upgrade the facility is guided by the need to provide access to adequate trading stalls and ensure they are compliant with health and safety regulations. The area has been subdivided into 65 cooking stalls with a dining area.

On the East Wing project there are 56 cooking stalls, 9 of the stalls have hand washbasins and there are 20 toilets available for the facilities. The scope of work entailed brickwork and plastering, plumbing, repairing dining tables and benches, new kitchen fixtures and equipment, gas installation and steelwork, he explains.

One of the traders, Sophie Mazibuko, sells fat cakes (Magwinya) in the morning and traditional local cuisine at lunchtime. Mazibuko says the revamped Metro Mall is a timely boost for local businesses as it now attracts tourists because of its cleanliness.

As the whole world is struggling with the Covid-19 pandemic, I feel as traders we were most affected. We had to observe the lockdown regulations as everyone else and leave our businesses and we couldnt provide for our families, she says.

Mazibuko notes that the newly refurbished street mall used to be overcrowded, with no demarcated trading space for traders. This was a huge concern for safety and cleanliness.

She applauds the City for sprucing up the place and says it is now abuzz with traders. Business is booming, thanks to the City of Joburg, a World Class African City.













Written by Luyanda Lunika



11/06/2021






A spokesman for the IMF on Thursday warned of the risks of using bitcoin for day-to-day transactions after El Salvador, which is in negotiations for additional funds from the crisis lender, approved the cryptocurrency's use.







An IMF team is scheduled to meet with El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele later Thursday as the international organization weighs another relief package for the country amid its recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic.







"Adoption of bitcoin as legal tender raises a number of macroeconomic, financial and legal issues that require very careful analysis," spokesman Gerry Rice told reporters Thursday.







"What we have said in the past, in general, is that crypto assets can pose significant risks, and effective regulatory measures are very important when dealing with them," he said.







The IMF in April 2020 approved $389 million in emergency aid for El Salvador as the coronavirus crisis swept the globe.







The Washington-based crisis lender is currently in talks with the government following a request for an additional loan.







"The IMF staff team will communicate at the end of this mission, which is taking place virtually," Rice said.







El Salvadoran lawmakers on Tuesday approved a bill that will eventually allow the famously volatile digital currency to be used for many aspects of daily life, from property purchases to tax contributions.







That made the country the first to approve bitcoin as legal tender for everyday use, prompting celebration from Bukele.







"The #BitcoinLaw has just been approved by a qualified majority" in the legislative assembly, President Nayib Bukele tweeted. "History!" (AFP)


PhD student devotes eight years to protecting critically endangered snub-nosed monkeys

People's Daily Online) 13:22, June 11, 2021

Chen Yixin (1st R) and forest rangers have lunch during a break from conducting field research. (Photo courtesy of Central South University of Forestry and Technology)

Chen Yixin, a PhD student at the Central South University of Forestry and Technology in central Chinas Hunan province, has devoted eight years to protecting the Nujiang snub-nosed monkeys, a critically endangered species, located in the mountainous areas of southwest Chinas Yunnan province.

Since May 2013, Chen and Professor Xiang Zuofu, his supervisor, have been conducting field research on the snub-nosed monkeys at the Pianma station situated within the Gaoligong Mountain National Nature Reserve in Yunnan, the natural habitat of the species.

But its not easy for them to track down the Nujiang snub-nosed monkeys, even with the help of veteran forest rangers at the reserves Pianma station, since they still have only a limited understanding of the animal.

On Oct. 17, 2013, Chen observed the Nujiang snub-nosed monkeys through telescopes for the first time, but they quickly disappeared into the forest after a few minutes. Days later, Chen and other members of the research team came across an all-male unit of 19 to 21 snub-nosed monkeys but then lost track of the animals several hours later.

Starting in November of that year, the research team set up 30 infrared cameras throughout the nature reserve under the guidance of the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In January 2014, when Chen and two forest rangers sorted through pictures and video clips on an infrared camera, he found a photo taken on Dec. 7, 2013 showing an adult male Nujiang snub-nosed monkey swiftly crossing through a bamboo forest. It was the first photo of a Nujiang snub-nosed monkey captured by an infrared camera in China.

Four months later, Chen gathered together photos and video clips of a unit of female snub-nosed monkeys accompanied by one male as captured on infrared cameras.

On Nov. 18, 2020, the research team captured video clips showing almost the entire Nujiang snub-nosed monkey population that was living in the nature reserve for the first time. After reviewing the video clips, Chen confirmed that there were at least 149 snub-nosed monkeys, which led him to project that the actual population might be even larger than first expected.

More importantly, Chen found that almost half of the monkeys were juveniles, which indicates a relatively sound population structure for the snub-nosed monkeys in the reserve.

According to Chen and his supervisor, it was good news for the future of the critically-endangered species because its population is expected to continue increasing so long as more conservation efforts are consistently carried out.

Chen has published several research papers on the Nujiang snub-nosed monkeys and biodiversity in the Gaoligong Mountains, but he has meanwhile insisted on maintaining his fieldwork with forest rangers at the Pianma station. While continuing to carry out his research, Chen has also continued to participate in regular patrols and nature education in the reserve.

I have a personal attachment to the Gaoligong Mountains and the Nujiang snub-nosed monkeys, and hope that they can survive and thrive, Chen said, adding that the research team will provide the world with a better understanding of the species through their persistent efforts.

It is of great significance to conduct research on wildlife conservation even if the process is arduous, said Xiang, explaining that they can provide basic data for the protection of the Nujiang snub-nosed monkeys by monitoring their activities over a long duration of time and by studying their natural habitats and regular behaviors.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun)
BTOB will officially release the cinema version of their digital single "Blue Moon," which they performed in Mnet's competition show "Kingdom."

BTOB to Digitally Release Their "Kingdom" Song "Blue Moon"

On June 11 at midnight KST, BTOB shared a poster on social media, announcing that they will release "Blue Moon" (Cinema Version) as a digital single.

"Blue Moon" is one of the B-side tracks included in BTOB's 2018 album "This Is Us." This song received hot response from fans around the world at the time it was originally released, hence it was the number one request for Mnet's "Kingdom."

BTOB performed "Blue Moon" in a cinema-like version in the third round of Mnet's "Kingdom," called "No Limit." Round 3 has two parts, the second one involving the six groups performing any song of their choosing and bringing in any featuring artist they liked.

At that time, BTOB had a special guest for their "No Limit" stage, and it was (G)I-DLE Miyeon. The boy group ended up placing third in the final results for Round 3.

BTOB member Minhyuk was the one who composed and produced "Blue Moon." He also wrote the lyrics with his bandmate Peniel. From Broadway-style big bang swing to funky jazz and bebop jazz, the cinema version of the track features a deeper jazz feel than the original song.

The original rendition of BTOB's "Blue Moon" highlights the members' high notes and powerful voices, which are also visible in their performance on Mnet's "Kingdom."

BTOB's "Blue Moon" (Cinema Version) is due out on June 13 at noon KST.

BTOB Last Comeback Ahead of Members' Military Enlistment

Meanwhile, only four members of BTOB are currently active in the music industry, namely Eunkwang, Minhyuk, Changsub, and Peniel. The other two members, Sungjae and Hyunsik, are currently completing their military service.

Prior to the military enlistment of all the members, their last group comeback was with the release of "This Is Us" back in June 2018. The album was physically released in two versions: See and Feel.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: BTOB Changsub & Peniel Criticized for Showing Support for OT7 in Recent Online Concert

"This Is Us" is BTOB's eleventh mini-album and features eleven songs including the title track "Only One for Me" and the B-side song "Blue Moon." The group contributed to the making of this album, which they define as "This is BTOB's color."

The tracks in "This Is Us" are chosen by the members so that they can show BTOB's self-confidence. The boy group said that through the album, listeners will be able to feel the unchanging appearance of BTOB and raw BTOB that is capable of doing various genres, from tropical sound dance song to electronic pop genre.

Following its release, BTOB's "This Is Us" peaked at No. 2 on the Gaon Weekly Album Chart and ranked 15th on the Billboard World Albums chart. The album went on to place fourth on Gaon's monthly chart and took the No. 37 spot on the year-end chart for 2018.

"This Is Us" sold more than 115,000 copies in South Korea at that time.

Watch the music video for BTOB's "Only One for Me" below!

For more news updates about other K-Pop news, always keep your tabs open here at Kpopstarz.

Owned by Kpopstarz.

Written by Mhaliya Scott
NCT's China-based unit WayV will debut its first sub-unit consisting of members Xiaojun and Kun. The duo will release their first single album this June.

Keep on reading to know the release date of their single album.

WayV to Debut First Sub-Unit Consisting of Xiaojun and Kun This June

On June 11 at midnight KST, WayV shared an image featuring members Kun and Xiaojun dressed in all white and walking along the shores with their bicycles.

ALSO READ: WayV Slammed for Promoting Chinese Song on Korean Music Shows

Along with the photo is a caption that says Xiaojun and Kun will release a single album entitled "Back To You." This album will mark the debut of WayV's first sub-unit, composing of Kun and Xiaojun, after more than two years since their debut in January 2019.

WayV has been gaining global popularity for their sensuous music color and splendid performance. As such, interest from music fans is expected to get high.

Reports say that the single album will contain a total of three songs including the emotionally attractive title track, also called "Back To You." One of the B-sides is a pop ballad titled "Sleepless."

News outlets also stated that "Back To You" by WayV's Kun and Xiaojun will be released through various global music platforms on June 16 at 6 p.m. KST.

Kun is the leader and main vocalist of NCT's China-based unit, WayV. He was initially introduced as an SM Rookie in December 2015 and was later announced to join NCT in 2018.

READ MORE: WayV Gets Mobbed in The Airport Despite the Pandemic

Xiaojun is another main vocalist in WayV. He was introduced as an SM Rookie in July 2018 and became part of NCT, particularly WayV later that year.

What do you look forward to the debut of WayV's first sub-unit, comprising Xioajun and Kun? Tell us in the comments!

WayV's 2021 Comeback with "Kick Back"

This past March, NCT's China-based unit, WayV, returned with their third mini-album "Kick Back," which showcases the mature side of the members - Hendery, Kun, Lucas, Ten, Winwin, Xiaojun, and Yangyang.

Released on March 10, WayV's latest album includes six songs, one of which is the title track, also called "Kick Back." Member Winwin described it as a song with a catchy melody and has easy-to-follow dance moves.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: WayV to Possibly Join Filipina Actress Nadine Lustre in Fashion Magazine Cover

WayV's "Kick Back" is a progressive R&B dance track featuring a fusion of a vibrant vocal charm and calm flow of rap. The song contains a message of gathering in a secret place where they can be free and plan their future together.

On March 15, the music video for WayV's "Kick Back" rose to No. 1 on the QQ Music Mainland MV chart. The song itself debuted at No. 7 on Tencent Music's UNI Chart and recorded the highest-paid score for that week. With this feat, NCT's sub-unit became the first group to land inside the Top 10 of the chart this 2021.

In addition to this, WayV's "Kick Back" album debuted on the top spot on the Gaon Album Chart. It eventually received a platinum certification for selling more than 250,000 copies in South Korea. This is the group's first album certification.

Watch the music video for WayV's "Kick Back" below!

For more news updates about other K-Pop news, always keep your tabs open here at Kpopstarz.

Owned by Kpopstarz.

Written by Mhaliya Scott
US congresswoman Ilhan Omar faced broad condemnation Thursday including from her Democratic Partys leadership after the Muslim lawmaker accused the United States and Israel of unthinkable atrocities comparable to those of Hamas and the Taliban.

Omar, who in 2016 became one of the first two Muslim women elected to the US Congress, has antagonized members of her party in the past with comments denounced as anti-Semitic or anti-Israel.

But top Republicans and Democrats alike have seized on her recent criticism of the United States to demand she clarify her remarks, with some calling outright for punishment including being stripped of her House of Representatives committee assignments.

Twelve Jewish House Democrats issued a public letter of disapproval against a member of their own party, writing that equating the United States and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban is as offensive as it is misguided.

The United States and Israel are imperfect and, like all democracies, at times deserving of critique, but false equivalencies give cover to terrorist groups, wrote the group, led by Brad Schneider of Illinois.

We urge Congresswoman Omar to clarify her words.

At a House hearing on Monday, Omar  who was born in Somalia and immigrated to the United States as a refugee in the mid-1990s  grilled Secretary of State Antony Blinken over accountability for victims of crimes against humanity.

She then followed up with a tweet that read: We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the US, Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.

Amid the firestorm, the six-member House Democratic leadership team headed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a rare public rebuke of a fellow Democrat, even as they acknowledged that criticism of US human rights policy is protected speech.

But drawing false equivalencies between democracies like the US and Israel and groups that engage in terrorism like Hamas and the Taliban foments prejudice and undermines progress toward a future of peace and security for all, they said.

Top House Republican Kevin McCarthy offered more vehement criticism.

Rep. Omars anti-Semitic & anti-American comments are abhorrent, he said.

Speaker Pelosis continued failure to address the issues in her caucus sends a message to the world that Democrats are tolerant of anti-Semitism and sympathizing with terrorists, he added.

Its time for the Speaker to act.

 Walk it back 

The 38-year-old Minneapolis congresswoman, who has repeatedly criticized Israels policies towards Palestinians, pushed back Thursday.

She said her earlier remarks were related to an open case against Israel, the United States, Hamas and the Taliban in the International Criminal Court.

But with colleagues fuming, Omar issued a statement insisting her comments were not a moral comparison.

I was in no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries with well-established judicial systems, she said.

Lawmakers from both camps were nevertheless fierce in their condemnation.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton said Omar, a naturalized US citizen, was welcome to leave if she believed America was hateful.

She should immediately be removed from her committees, Cotton said, echoing several House Republicans demanding such action, especially removal from the influential House Foreign Affairs Committee.

More Democrats also began calling on Omar to tone down her rhetoric.

She ought to walk it back, congressman John Garamendi told CNN. This kind of language incites violence here in the US.

Anti-Semitic attacks increased sharply in May in the US, amid a deadly conflict between Israel and Islamist movement Hamas, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

Omar received support from the other Muslim woman in Congress, Rashida Tlaib, who said she was tired of colleagues demonizing Omar.

Their obsession with policing her is sick, Tlaib said.

Omar said she recently received death threats, and endured brutal attacks by then-president Donald Trump, who branded her a rabid anti-Semite while questioning her loyalty to America.
The letter is signed by Mammorr Ceesay, a Gambian citizen residing in London, UK. Ceesay said he was speaking on behalf of MBai as a family member and trusted advisor. This letter was written in response to our article When legal junglers defend their role under military rule, published on May 3, 2021. This article was republished in the Gambian newspaper The Standard, which also published this letter from Mr. Ceesay.

The article in question can be found here: https://www.justiceinfo.net/en/76670-gambia-legal-junglers-defend-their-role-military-rule.html

We reject the allegations in this letter that our correspondent in The Gambia violated the rules of honesty, balance and good faith in his reporting of the hearing. This article represents a report of a hearing that does not require the journalist to go and interview each of the people involved to confirm the public exchanges before the Truth Commission. Our correspondent has reproduced Mr. MBais arguments and responses to the TRRC legal counsels questioning. At no time did he violate the rules of balance and fairness, nor did he serve any plot against anyone. We strongly reject the allegation that this article is promoting hate or inflammatory in nature.

The questions raised about MBais role in the early months of Yahya Jammehs military regime are the result of investigations and a decision by the Truth Commission. They are a matter of public record. The Justice Info article simply reflects the highlights, key facts and documents discussed at the hearing. In the interests of transparency and fairness, we reproduce here the entire letter as it was sent to us.
Ivory Coasts former president, Laurent Gbagbo, returns home next week after almost a decade in which he was tried and acquitted of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court.

Gbagbo was ousted in April 2011 after a conflict sparked by his refusal to accept electoral defeat at the hands of Alassane Ouattara, the current president.

Around 3,000 people died in the brief war, which divided the West African state along north-south lines.

Today, trauma and bitter memories mingle with mounting joy among Gbagbos supporters at his imminent return. His homecoming is widely seen as a crucial test of stability.

Here we look at some of the key issues behind his return:

 A statesmans role 

Gbagbo is aged 76, but few expect this wily political veteran to go into retirement.

He is a cult figure for many in the party that he built, the Ivorian Popular Front (FPI), which has been calling vociferously for his return ever since his acquittal was pronounced in 2019. Prosecutors appealed the ruling, but it was upheld by the ICC on March 31.

The FPIs campaign for Gbagbos return gained traction last year after Ivory Coast spiralled into electoral violence, triggered when Ouattara declared he would bid for a third term  a move that critics said violated the constitution.

After scores of deaths and a ballot largely boycotted by the opposition, Ouattara found himself re-elected by a landslide  but presides over a divided country fearful of another descent into bloodshed.

Against this background, Ouattara has tendered an olive branch to his former rival, offering Gbagbo a role in national reconciliation  a policy yet to be detailed in full  and promising him the rewards and status due to a former head of state.

Gbagbos supporters insist he will return in peace and help the country to heal, but commentators wonder whether he will stick to his alloted role of statesman.

The wounds are still open and the authorities are worried that Gbagbo will stir up the crowds again, which is one of his hallmarks, said Rinaldo Depagne, a researcher at the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank.

If Gbagbo actively worked on reconciliation, this would be a good thing, because he carries considerable weight, he said.

It would also be in Gbagbos interest, said Depagne, enabling him to end his career, with all its ups and downs, on a high note.

 Ageing trio 

Much of what happens after Gbagbos return will depend on the chemistry between him, Ouattara and former president Henri Konan Bedie, 87.

They form a trio of powerful men who have dominated Ivorian politics for decades, forging friendships or rivalries with one other according to need.

Bedie succeeded Ivory Coasts post-colonial founding father, Felix Houphouet-Boigny, on his death in 1993. In 2010, he teamed up with Ouattara against Gbagbo.

Today, he is undisputed head of the Democratic Party of the Ivory Coast (PDCI)  once-ruling but now in opposition.

Bedie has played a key role in calming tensions since the October 31 elections.

He forged a historic alliance with Gbagbos FPI in legislative elections in March and teamed up with it to organise the former presidents homecoming.

Whatever dance now unfolds between the three, the countrys political scene will remain in generational stasis.

Gilles Yabi, founder of the Wathi political think-tank, said the advanced age of the top figures embodies a lack of renewal of the political class and political practices in Ivory Coast.

The general feeling is that the future of the country is doomed to be an extension of the distant past, said William Assonvo, an Abidjan-based researcher at the Institute of Security Studies (ISS).

 Popularity 

Gbagbos popularity has remained undimmed in the decade he has been away, reaching well beyond his home region of Gagnoa.

He fought to secure multi-party elections as the top opponent to Houphouet-Boigny and later Bedie in the 1980s and 90s, suffering prison and exile for leading demonstrations that were violently put down by the authorities.

A socialist from a humble background in a country whose politics is dominated by well-off families, Gbagbo spoke for the poor and those left behind by development, and people dont forget that, ICG expert Depagne said.

He remains a rare orator gifted with words in a country where people love to talk and love humour, Depagne added.
The fate of an elderly Rwandan widow, who has spent decades trying to avoid a trial for genocide while living in France, is one of the key sticking points in the delicate process of reconciliation undertaken by Paris and Kigali in recent months.

Rwandan former first lady Agathe Habyarimana is the widow of Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana, whose plane was shot down in April 1994, an event that acted as a trigger of the 1994 genocide.

The two countries turned the page on a quarter century of tensions over the Rwandan genocide on May 27 when President Emmanuel Macron recognised Frances responsibilities over the slaughter of some 800,000 mostly Tutsi Rwandans.

During a visit to Kigali, Macron admitted that France, which under Francois Mitterrand backed the Hutu regime ahead of the genocide, had for too long favoured silence over the examination of truth and asked Rwandans for forgiveness.

He also promised to ensure that no genocide suspects would be able to avoid justice in France, where dozens of suspected Hutu extremists fled after the killings.

For Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who led the Tutsi rebellion that ended the massacres in July 1994, Agathe Habyarimana is top of the list of suspects he wants brought to justice.

 Waiting for her to die? 

Days after her husbands death, Rwandas first lady was airlifted to safety in the Central African Republic with a dozen family members on the orders of Mitterrand.

Genocide survivors accuse her of being one of the leaders of a group of extremists within her husbands inner circle, known as the akazu (little house), that masterminded the killings  allegations she denies.

After a first stay in France in 1994, the woman who was widely regarded as the power behind the throne in Rwanda, returned in 1998 to take up residence in a small town on the southern outskirts of Paris.

For the past 13 years she has been under investigation over the bloodshed that caused her to flee her homeland.

Habyarimana, 78, has demanded that the case against her be thrown out  a request she renewed this week at the Paris Court of Appeal after her first bid to have the case dismissed was rejected last year.

The appeal courts decision is expected on August 30.

Jean-Luc Habyarimana, one of her sons, accused the French judiciary of hounding his mother.

Are they waiting for our mother to die in order to say they have nothing on her? he asked AFP in a rare interview.

 Symbol of inaction 

But French investigators say they have failed to assemble enough proof against her to bring charges.

The years-long probe has frustrated activist Alain Gauthier, who has spent two decades building cases against genocide suspects, together with his Rwandan-born wife Dafroza.

It was the Gauthiers who filed the complaint against Habyarimana in 2007 that triggered an investigation for complicity in genocide and crimes against humanity.

Agathe Kanziga (her maiden name) has become a sort of symbol of the inaction of the justice system on the Rwandan genocide, Alain Gauthier told AFP.

The Collective of Civil Plaintiffs for Rwanda (CCPR), founded by the Gauthiers, accuses Habyarimana of being a key financial backer of Rwandas infamous Radio des Mille Collines station, which incited the slaughter of Tutsi cockroaches in vitriolic broadcasts.

It also accuses her of helping draft a hit list of influential Tutsis and moderate Hutus, of ordering the killings of seven employees of an orphanage that she founded and of approving a wave of assassinations conducted by the presidential guard after her husbands death.

A group of historians commissioned by Macron to examine Frances role in the genocide described her in a landmark report in March as an extremist character.

Speaking to France Culture radio at the time, the president of the commission, Vincent Duclert, claimed that she ran the Zero Network  another name for the akazu, so-called because the purported goal of Habyarimanas entourage was a Rwanda with zero Tutsis.

 Inconvenient person 

But French investigators, who have visited Rwanda six times, have failed to come up with compelling evidence against her, according to their reports on the case, which AFP has seen.

The Habyarimana family has cast doubt on the reliability of Rwandan witness statements and accused France of keeping the case open out of political considerations, to appease Kagame.

Jean-Luc Habyarimana noted that his mother had never been prosecuted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and that her brother, Protais Zigiranyirazo, accused of being one of the leaders of the genocide, had been acquitted by the court.

For years after the Rwandan genocide, France was accused of shielding fugitives but in recent years, as relations with Rwanda improved, it has sped up prosecutions.

Since 2014, a former Rwandan spy chief and two former mayors have been jailed over their roles in the massacres and several other suspects have been charged.

In the case of Habyarimana, however, the authorities appear unsure what to do.

Frances highest court has refused to extradite her and dozens of other suspects to Rwanda on the grounds that the crime of genocide was not on the Rwandan statute books at the time of the massacres.

But French authorities have also refused to grant her asylum, leaving her in legal limbo.

Habyarimanas lawyer Philippe Meilhac is convinced that France is letting the case drag on because Mrs Habyarimana is an inconvenient person for diplomatic relations between France and Rwanda.
An NGO campaigning for human rights in the Gulf has filed a complaint in France against a top UAE official, accusing him of being responsible for the torture of a prominent dissident, its lawyer said on Friday.

The Lebanon-based Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR) filed its complaint against Major General Ahmed Nasser al-Raisi, inspector general at the UAE interior ministry, at a Paris court on Monday.

The complaint accuses Raisi, who is a member of Interpols executive committee, of being responsible for torture and barbaric acts against the prominent UAE dissident Ahmed Mansoor who it says is being held in an Abu Dhabi jail in mediaeval conditions.

Mansoor was arrested in 2017 and sentenced to ten years in prison the following year on charges of criticising the UAE authorities and tarnishing the image of the country on social media.

Amnesty International describes Mansoor as a prisoner of conscience.

According to the complaint, he has since March 2017 been held in solitary confinement in Al-Sadr prison in a tiny cell without access to a doctor, hygiene, water and sanitary facilities.

Raisi is regarded a possible figure to become president of the France-based global police body Interpol when candidacies are presented at its general meeting in November, a prospect that has horrified activists.

In a joint statement last month, Human Rights Watch and the GCHR warned that his candidacy may jeopardise the global police organisations commitment to its human rights obligations.

Mansoor has been detained in inhumane conditions since 2017, more than four years, William Bourdon, lawyer for GCHR, told AFP.

What can only be qualified as acts of torture must today be firmly denounced and condemned by the courts.

He said an imminent visit of Raisi to France as part of his (Interpol) campaign could make prosecution in France possible on the basis of universal jurisdiction.

French judicial authorities can in theory judge crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture under universal jurisdiction if suspects are on French territory, regardless of where the crimes took place.

According to the complaint, Raisis role in the alleged torture of Mansoor is established due to his position which puts him in control of the UAE security forces.

An Interpol spokesman told AFP that candidacies for president would only be presented when the general assembly takes place but there was no obligation for hopefuls to come to France to make their case.

Contacted by AFP, the UAE embassy in Paris said its staff were not authorised to speak to the press.

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Two former members of Bosnian forces were sentenced to prison on Friday for war crimes, including murder and rape, committed against Serb civilians who remained in Sarajevo during the 1990s siege.

Crimes against Serbs in the Bosnian capital during the bloody siege from 1992 to 1995 have rarely resulted in convictions.

With more then 11,000 dead, including 1,600 children killed by bombs or snipers, the Sarajevo siege remains a symbol of crimes committed by Bosnian Serb forces during the inter-communal war that followed the collapse of former Yugoslavia.

But some of the Serbs who lived in multi-ethnic Sarajevo before the conflict were also victims of rogue defenders of the city.

Senad Dzananovic, who ran several detention facilities set up in the Alipasino Polje neighborhood, was given 11 years in prison, while Edin Gadzo, one of his subordinates, received five years, the Bosnian State Court said in a statement.

The two men were part an initially paramilitary special unit, founded by Jusuf Juka Prazina, one of the warlords in the Sarajevo siege, and killed in Belgium in December 1993.

They were found guilty of participating in the illegal incarceration of Serb civilians () in detention facilities set up in the basements of buildings () where they were killed, raped, tortured and forced to work.

Prosecutor Vladimir Simovic accused Dzananovic of seven murders and participation in three others.

A woman, who was a protected witness, accused him of regularly raping her over several months, sometimes also with other members of his unit.

According to the indictment, more than 100 Serb civilians were detained by Dzananovic between May and July 1992.

The remains of some of the missing were never found.

For some people, we simply dont know what happened, the prosecutor said during the trial.

Other units also committed crimes against Serb civilians determined to stay in Sarajevo during the siege, despite the decision of a large proportion of the capitals Serbs to leave shortly before the conflict began.

There is no reliable estimate of the number of these victims, with figures ranging from a few dozen to several hundred.

The remains of several dozen were found in the Kazani pit on the city heights.
Air Canada said it will recall more than 2,600 employees to prepare for the increase in demand for flights, and will also extend the deadline for COVID-19 refunds.

The airline stated that the recalled employees will include various roles, including flight attendants, and will be recalled in stages in June and July.

Air Canada spokesperson Peter Fitzpatrick (Peter Fitzpatrick) said that the airline took action to recall employees because of the increase in the number of vaccinations, the reduction in COVID-19 cases and the governments relaxation of restrictions.

He said the recall is part of his efforts to rebuild the airline network and meet anticipated travel demand.

As the pandemic swept the country, Air Canada laid off tens of thousands of workers, including 16,500 when the crisis began in March last year.

In April, the airline reached an agreement with Ottawa to provide a $5.9 billion assistance program.

Watch | Some of the executive bonuses returned by Air Canada:

Air Canada stated that its president and chief executive officer and executive vice president have voluntarily refunded the 2020 bonus in response to public disappointment. 2:09

Extension of refund period

The countrys largest airline also stated that it has extended the deadline for submitting a flight or vacation package refund request by 30 days until July 12.

Since the refund policy went into effect on April 13, about 40% of eligible customers have requested refunds, and 92% of the requests have been processed.

Chief Commercial Officer Lucie Guillemette (Lucie Guillemette) said: The number of customers requesting refunds is lower than expected, and most people retain travel points. She added that this is a vote of confidence in the airline.

Customers can choose a transferable travel voucher with no expiry date, or convert the value of the ticket to Aeroplan points and receive a 65% reward. Customers who receive these refunds can also exchange the original payment method for a refund.

Air Canada stated that if the airline cancels or reschedules the flight for more than three hours, its new refund policy for all purchased tickets will be to choose coupons or award Aeroplan points.
The National Peoples Congress of China hastily passed a new law on Thursday aimed at countering the sanctions imposed by foreign governments on Chinese officials and companies, intensifying the ongoing legal battle with the United States and the European Union.

The law was passed secretly by the Standing Committee of the National Peoples Congress through two readings instead of the usual third reading, and was established on Earlier measures The Chinese Ministry of Commerce announced in January. The January Blockade Regulations prohibit Chinese companies and individuals from complying with foreign government sanctions against China.

These actions mark a further escalation of the situation Legal war Between China and the United States, said Zhang Anqi, director of the Chinese Law Research Center of the University of Hong Kong.

Last week, President Joe Biden updated the Trump administrations rules prohibiting Americans from investing in dozens of Chinese companies.Biden is now in the UK G7 summit, He hopes to unite American allies there to deal with the challenges posed by China and Russia.

The fact that the law was introduced after last week [Biden administration] The announcement of the amendment to the securities trading ban is consistent with Chinas recent reciprocal sanctions announcements against foreign measures, said Nick Turner, a lawyer at Steptoe & Johnson in Hong Kong.

The Trump administration also threatened to impose sanctions on companies that provide financial services to Chinese officials, saying that these companies are responsible for Beijings crackdown on Hong Kong. Democratic movement Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, northwestern China. Later, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam complained that the domestic banks ignored her and left her in trouble. Pile of Cash In her government residence.

Respected

According to the new draft law issued after its adoption, Beijing can take countermeasures, including asset seizures, against individuals and organizations involved in imposing foreign sanctions, which may put foreign investors businesses in China into trouble.

in case [the commerce ministry] According to the law, it is illegal for a subsidiary of Bank of America or any company to comply with US sanctions in China, Turner said.

According to the countermeasures announced by the Ministry of Commerce in January, Beijing has not targeted any foreign investors. It also did not list any multinational companies as unreliable entities-it threatened for the first time two years ago that if they did anything that harmed Chinas national interests, such as selling military equipment to Taiwan, they would do so.

The main purpose of using these regulatory tools is to deter the US government, not to actually punish foreign companies, Zhang said. Chinas countermeasures are costly will lead to more decoupling. [from the US], This is not in Chinas interest. 
The Conservative Senate leader Don Platt has asked the Speaker to rule on whether it is acceptable for members of the House of Lords to hold a eagle feather while speaking in the chamber, saying that he is worried that the use of such props may violate regulations.

When Manitoba Sen. Mary Jane McCallum delivered a speech on Thursday, Platt stood up on a procedural issue. He is a Cree senator. Parliamentarians and boarding school survivors are speaking on Bill C-15, which incorporates government legislation (UNDRIP) into Canadian law that incorporates the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

McCallum, who is participating in the debate through Zoom, held an eagle fan during his speech. A few minutes after she spoke, Platt interrupted.

I asked this question very, very reluctantly. Very reluctantly. But we have rules in this room, one of which is that no props of any kind are allowed. I will consider what props Senator McCallum has. I You will be asked to rule on this, Platt said.

Conservative Senate leader Don Platt asked the Speaker on Thursday to make a ruling on whether it is appropriate for a senator to hold a feather when speaking in the chamber. (Chris Lands/Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)

After being opposed by other senators, Platt later withdrew his procedural questions, saying he did not want to appear insensitive in view of the current situation. He said he had no intention of offending McCallum by asking this question.

But he asked the speaker to make some rules around what is appropriate and what is inappropriate I believe we have rules for this.

Generally speaking, props, objects or displays of any kind are not allowed to enter the council.

This House of Commons procedure and practice Said, Speakers consistently exclude any type of disorderly display or presentation that members use to explain their remarks or emphasize their positions.

Similarly, any form of props used as a way to make silent comments on issues is always considered unacceptable in the chamber. The Senate generally followed this ban.

The question is whether the eagles feathers are props or an integral part of a personal cultural identity.

The eagle is considered sacred in Native and Native American cultures because it is said to be the highest flying bird closest to the creator.

Its feathers are used in many rituals, such as conversation circles, healing rituals and powwows. They represent honesty, truth, majesty, strength, courage, wisdom, power and freedom.

Recognizing the importance of these feathers to certain indigenous peoples, provincial courts in Alberta, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador have provided them to crime victims , Witnesses, police and others, so that they can take an oath legally without the Bible.

Ilya Harper, Manitoba Provincial Assemblyman and Congressman played a key role in defeating the Lake Mitch Agreement. When Harper refused to support Winnipegs Lake Mitch Agreement in 1990, he folded an eagle feather to gain spiritual power. (Wayne Glowacki/Winnipeg Free Press/Canada News)

Former Manitoba lawmaker Elijah Harper was known for holding up his eagle feathers when he vetoed the Meech Lake agreement in 1990voting against a motion to debate constitutional amendments in the legislature and derail the approval process. He worried that the amendment was drafted without first consulting with the indigenous people, and that the amendment would allow Quebec to join the constitution.

This is not a prop

McCallum said on Thursday that when talking about profound and profound themes like UNDRIP, she clung to the feathers of the eagle because the elders advised her to do so.

They said its important, you carry it with you, which is why I carry it with me today, McCallum said in response to Platts objections.

This is me, this is what was taken from me, I wont give up again Not a prop, this is a ritual weapon.

Progressive senator Pierre Dalfand defended McCallum by saying that the eagles feathers have no signs other than her own culture and her own identity.

Our colleagues wear turbans on their heads, and our colleagues wear them in a certain way that fits their culture or tradition, so I certainly dont think this is a procedural issue, he said.

After Platt withdrew his procedural questions, McCallum continued her speech, holding feathers. I do understand the rules, and I also understand that they need to change, and this change will come, she said.
Health consultants say that PPE in the UK costs approximately 6.7 million a week

The Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Health and Social Care, Sir Chris Wormald, told MPs that it currently spends about 6.7 million a week to store the UKs personal protective equipment (PPE) inventory.

The current situation-we bought about 32 billion pieces of personal protective equipment during the pandemic, at a cost of about 15 billion pounds, he told the Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons.

Among them, 11.7 billion pieces have been distributed to the front line so far, 12.6 billion pieces are in the UK as a central inventory, and 8.4 billion pieces are not yet in the UK. It is ordered from other parts of the world.

I think todays figures, of course, these figures will fluctuate up and down, we need to spend about 6.7 million pounds a week to store our PPE core inventory.

The rate of decline is very fast now, the equivalent figure on January 21 was 11.6 million pounds, so we have achieved some considerable efficiencies in storage, but this is still a huge cost.
Tokyo, Japan- The Japanese government injected itself into the increasingly tense confrontation across the Taiwan Strait.

Last Friday, Japan Send Taiwan 1.24 million doses AstraZenecas COVID-19 jab came after Taiwans President Tsai Ing-wen accused China of preventing the territory from obtaining a vaccine during the worst coronavirus outbreak since the pandemic began.

Beijing considers Taiwan-an autonomous island 161 kilometers (100 miles) from the coast of China-as part of its territory and does not rule out the use of force to achieve its goals. Since Tsai Ing-wen was first elected in 2016, it has taken an increasingly tough stance, claiming that she wants the independence of the 23.6 million people on the island, and tensions have escalated as traditional allies, including the United States, unite to support Taiwan.

For decades, Japan has adopted a quieter approach.

However, as Chinas economic and military strength continues to increase, and Japan continues to challenge the sovereignty of the Senkaku Islands (called the Diaoyutai Islands by the Chinese), the Tokyo government is changing its strategy.

Daniel Sneider, a lecturer in East Asian Studies at Stanford University, said: Japanese conservatives do indeed regard the Taiwan issue as a way to draw a line from the Chinese.

The rise of China has worried many Japanese.

In recent years, Beijing has become increasingly tough in the Asia-Pacific region, demonstrating its military strength in the East China Sea and the South China Sea to support its maritime and territorial claims in disputed waters.

Taiwan also claims sovereignty over the South China Sea Feel the heat of Beijing.

In the past year, the Chinese military sent fighter jets to the airspace of the island almost every day. On April 12, 25 Chinese military aircraft flew over the airspace of the island.

Caring about Taiwans security

In order to counter Chinas growing influence, Japan is establishing security relations with countries such as Australia and India, and strengthening alliances with the United States, which also regards Beijing as a strategic competitor.

When US President Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga met in Washington in April this year, China was the primary focus of their talks.For the first time in more than half a century, the leaders of the two countries issued a joint statement Include right The importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.

In addition, the Japanese Ministry of Defense mentioned the Taiwan issue for the first time when it released the draft of its annual white paper last month.

The draft document says: The stability of the situation around Taiwan is essential to the security of Japan and the stability of the international community.

Beijing condemned Japan and the United States for interfering in their internal affairs on the Taiwan issue, and accused the two countries of collaborating and inciting group confrontation. Chinese officials have previously described concerns about its military and economic influence as part of the Cold War mentality trying to contain it.

It is against this broad background that Japan, which once ruled Taiwan as a colony, jumped to the aid of the island while scrambling to ensure the supply of coronavirus vaccine.

As Snyder said, This is to prove Japans interest in Taiwans continued de facto independence and security. Its that simple.

Beijing condemned Japans move.

When the first reports that Tokyo was considering shipping vaccines to Taipei appeared in late May, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin responded sharply. He said: We are firmly opposed to those who use the epidemic to perform political performances or even interfere in Chinas internal affairs. I noticed that Japan can hardly ensure enough vaccine supplies in the country.

He added: I want to emphasize that vaccine assistance should resume its original purpose, which is to save lives, and should not be reduced to a tool for personal gain.

Wangs argument involving politics is not entirely wrong.

Several reports in the Japanese and Taiwanese media have emphasized the role of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in accelerating the delivery of vaccines to Taiwan. He is a long-term Chinese hawk.

The Sankei Shimbun reported on June 3 that Abe, who stepped down in September last year, has been closely participating in the discussion and noted Taiwans generous donations to Japan at that time. The devastating earthquake and tsunami of 2011.

Taiwan wins a big win

In Taiwan, the Japanese donation is a victory for the Cai government.

Tsai Ing-wen won global praise for handling the epidemic early, but after experiencing a Sudden surge in COVID-19 infections That started last month. To date, the island has recorded 11,968 infections and 333 deaths, the vast majority of which were reported in the past month.

Since less than 3% of the public in Taiwan have been vaccinated, there is growing anger over the shortage of COVID-19 vaccine.

Taiwan says that China has exacerbated the crisis.

On May 26, Tsai Ing-wen accused China of using its influence to prevent the massive delivery of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

However, Beijing denied this claim and stated that Taiwan actually refused to accept the vaccine it provided. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Yi also accused Tsai Ing-wens Democratic Progressive Party of putting political manipulation above cooperation in the fight against the epidemic.

Lev Nakhman, a visiting scholar at National Taiwan University, said that the DPP faces a dilemma.

The reality is that Taiwan needs vaccines, he said, and Catch 22 is that the DPP government is politically unable to purchase vaccines from China.

He pointed out that if the independent DPP turns to the mainland for help, it may undermine the partys legitimacy as an autonomous force.

But vaccinating from Japan, compared to vaccinating from China, the political burden is much lighter, this is of course a major victory for Taiwan, Nachman said.

Moreover, the process of introducing vaccines from Japan has made DPP politicians rarely show unity, showing that they are responsible for the interests of the people-although the Taiwan authorities still have a long way to go in ensuring vaccines for the entire population of the island .

Even supporters of the pro-Beijing opposition party, KuomintangNachman said they feel a quiet appreciation for Japan.

When news of the Japanese donation came through, many Taiwanese also expressed their gratitude on social media. Brian Chee-Shing Hioe, editor of New Bloom, an online magazine that reports on youth culture, said that some people posted photos of themselves traveling in Japan during the pre-pandemic era to express their appreciation and closeness to their neighbors on the northern islands. Politics in Taiwan and the Asia-Pacific region.

Hioe also considered the broader strategic context and pointed out that a few days after Japans donation, the United States promised to provide further 750,000 doses.

The United States is coordinating this matter behind the scenes, Niie asserted, to consolidate this relationship between Japan and Taiwan, which is beneficial to regional security and the United States.
Michelle Bachelet, the head of UN human rights affairs, said that the military government has the sole responsibility for violence and must take responsibility.

The head of human rights affairs at the United Nations warned that violence in various parts of Myanmar is intensifying and criticized the military government of the country as having a single responsibility for the human rights disaster.

in a statement The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, said in a statement issued on Friday that multiple reports indicate that armed conflicts are still continuing, including in Kayah, Chin State and Kachin State, where violent incidents are occurring. Areas with important ethnic and religious minorities are particularly intense.

Speaking of the regional group composed of 10 member states, Bachelet said: It seems that there is no effort to ease the situation, but to gather troops in key areas. This runs counter to the militarys commitment to ASEAN to stop violence. 

In just over four months, Myanmar has gone from a fragile democracy to a human rights disaster, Bachelet added. The military leadership bears the sole responsibility for this crisis and must take responsibility.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has led major international diplomatic efforts to find a way out of the Myanmar crisis as the country fell into political turmoil after the February military coup toppled Aung San Suu Kyis democratically elected government1.

The seizure of power by the military has triggered daily democratic protests that have been subjected to bloody security crackdowns, strikes that paralyzed the countrys economy, and battles between the armed forces and ethnic armed groups in border areas.

ASEANs mediation has so far achieved Little progress has been made. Last week, two EU envoys visited Myanmar and met with senior military officials, including military chief Min Aung Lai. The trip was criticized by democratic groups, who said they were turned away.

The United Nations, Western countries, and China all support ASEANs peace efforts, but the Burmese army, known as Tatmadaw, is indifferent to this and touted the progress of its own five-step plan to achieve new elections.

Demonstrators protested against the military coup and demanded the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, the elected leader of Yangon, Myanmar [File: Reuters]

A human rights disaster

The UN Human Rights Office stated in a statement that more than 108,000 people have fled their homes in Kayah State in the past three weeks. Many of them have taken refuge in forest areas with little food, water, sanitation or medical assistance.

Bachelet cited credible reports, saying that security forces shelled civilian homes and churches and prevented access to humanitarian aid.

Bachelet said: The international community needs to demand a unified request for the Burmese army to stop the shameless use of heavy artillery against civilians and civilian objects.

She also said that the newly formed civilian forces, namely the Peoples Defence Forces and other armed groups, must take all measures to keep civilians away from harm.

Her office stated that Bachelet will update the Human Rights Council, the highest human rights institution of the United Nations, at the next session in July.

The statement also increased the number of people killed by security forces since the coup to 860, most of whom were protesters. At least 4,804 people are still being arbitrarily detained  including activists, journalists, and military opponents  according to reports, detainees and activists families have been tortured and punished respectively. According to the UN office, the mother of an activist was sentenced to three years in prison on May 28 to replace her son.

As the military takeover unfolded, Aung San Suu Kyi was detained and charged with a series of charges, including New one On suspicion of corruption Thursday.She is due On trial on Monday.
Amanda Owens neighbor revealed that Revenseat Farm has become a hot spot for visitors to our Yorkshire Farm fans.

shepherd Amanda, 40, Living on the farm with husband Clive and their nine children, they recorded their daily lives on the popular Channel 5 show.

4 Fans flocked to Yorkshire to see Amandas style Credit: PA

Now thanks Our Yorkshire FarmAccording to the familys neighbors, the area is quickly becoming a tourist hotspot.

Patricia and Ronald Tyler have been living in the home next door to Owens for more than two decades and have witnessed the expansion of the family.

The 66-year-old and 67-year-old couple described Owens home as a great neighbor and they are always on standby if they need help due to their remoteness.

However, Patricia and Ronald, who moved to the area from London, told Yorkshire Live They have noticed that it is becoming more and more popular.

4 Channel 5 stars make the area more popular Credit: Getty

Since the first documentary series about the Irving family was broadcast in 2018, the number of visitors has increased rapidly.

The couple said that more and more people are heading to the Svalaidale area, hoping to get a glimpse of the stars and their beautiful area.

Amanda has a huge fan base, the neighbor revealed. We let those who come down, if she closes, they will go home and come back the next day.

Patricia went on to talk about Amandas reputation throughout the region and beyond: I think people just want to see her.

4 Neighbors said that fans came from afar to try to meet her Credit: PA

Previously, Countryfile star Julia Bradbury (Julia Bradbury) has brought light to rural areas by visiting the show and writing related articles.

It all started when Julia Bradbury did one of her shows here and Amanda met her, Patricia told Yorkshire Live.

Now she has written the book, done everything, and people are coming a lot now. Its almost like a pilgrimage, she added.

Earlier this week, Amanda posted a photo of swimming in a local river on Twitter, confirming her popularity.

4 Amanda showing off while swimming in a local stream Credit: Twitter

The dilemma of the TV chef Tom Kerridge closes his bar, sells Porsches and fears that he will never reopen ch cha change It takes two years for strict Janet Man Lara to withdraw from hosting after eight years magic The psychic who predicted the pregnancy and engagement of Stacey Solomon revealed the sex of the baby Exploded! The four fans who slept in bed felt sick because they found a problem with breakfast I loved him once Martin Roberts of Homes Under The Hammer is distracted by the death of his beloved dog Cruel honesty Katie Price blushes as her 7-year-old son Jett, saying that she is just somewhat a good mother

After posting to her 168,600 fans, they immediately flooded in comments asking her where she was.

Asked about the picturesque location, one wrote: I can know the location of this place. It is now on my list of visits this summer.

Another person just interjected, Where is this, please?

Svaldale, North Yorkshire. See you soon, Amanda replied. There is no guarantee of full sun, but you can always see amazing views, and there is still enough space for you to use.

Our Yorkshire Farm is broadcast on Channel 5.


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to the employee. Drivers participate in a profit sharing program with option to purchase company stock through a stock purchase plan. Questions about this position? Email us at careers@abf.com!



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Amnesty International stated that the arrests of Khaled Drareni, Ihsane El Kadi and Karim Tabbou are evidence of a chilling escalation in the suppression of dissidents.

Just days before the Algerian parliamentary elections, the Algerian authorities arrested two well-known journalists and a well-known opposition figure.

Since former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was forced to step down due to mass protests in 2019, Algeria will hold its first legislative election on Saturday. Demonstrations against long-term leaders reelection quickly turned into demands for systemic change.

On Friday, Amnesty International stated that the arrests of journalists Khaled Drareni and Ihsane El Kadi and popular activist Karim Tabbou proved that the crackdown on dissidents was a chilling escalation.

The National Commission for the Liberation of Detainees said that Tabu, a group of lawyers defending imprisoned pro-democratic Chirac activists, was arrested at their home in the southwestern suburbs of the capital Algiers on Thursday night.

The famous Chirac member Tabu was previously imprisoned from September 2019 to July 2020 and spent more than a month under judicial supervision, prohibiting him from engaging in any political activities.

On Saturday, Algeria will hold its first legislative elections since former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was forced to step down in 2019 after 20 years in power [File: Ryad Kramdi/AFP]

An Algerian court sentenced Tabbou to a one-year probation in November for inciting violence and damaging the image of the army. A ruling on his appeal is expected on June 19.

The group of lawyers said that since Thursday night, El Kadi has been detained at the Anta police station for questioning. He is the head of Maghreb Emergent and Radio M, an online news site that speaks for members of the opposition. He is also an active member of the democratic movement.

Algerias Minister of Communications, Ammar Belhimer, accused El Kadi of disclosing information that may be detrimental to national unity.

El Kadi was placed under judicial supervision on May 18 and was ordered to appear at the police station once a week. His passport was confiscated.

The independent journalist Dela Reni was detained in a military camp on the outskirts of Algiers. His lawyer Zoubida Assoul said his only contact with his family was at 1:30 in the morning.

The reporter was arrested in March last year when reporting on a large-scale demonstration in the capital and was released on bail in February. He is expected to face a new trial.

Amnesty International condemned the arrest of the three, saying they were likely to retaliate for their connection with the Chirac protest movement.

Instead of rounding up journalists and political opponents to suppress dissidents and intimidate members of the Chirac protest movement, the Algerian authorities should focus on respecting their human rights obligations, Amna Guellali Africa, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement. .

Chiracs supporters have pledged to boycott the election, and President Abdelmadjid Tebboune called it part of his commitment to fight corruption and build a New Algeria because they condemned the suppression of the opposition and the increase. The degree of pressure on protests.
After an amazing meeting with President Joe Biden, Boris Johnson praised Britains unbreakable relationship with the United States.

The Prime Minister said that decades later he will classify the term special relationship-but hope that the British and Americans will establish an unbreakable bond.

?Follow us Boris Johnson live broadcast Get all the latest news and updated blog

1 Boris Johnson said he wanted to remove the word special relationship to describe the relationship between Britain and the United States Photo Credit: Andrew Parsons / 10 Downing Street

In an interview with BBCs Laura Kuenssberg after talking with Biden at G7, Mr. Johnson said: This relationship has been going on for a long time, and it has always been a peaceful and prosperous one in Europe and surrounding regions. An important part of the world.

Yesterday, Boris and Biden joked to the camera together when they met their wife for the first time.

The president told reporters: I told the prime minister that we have something in common. We are all married.

Mr. Johnson-secretly married two weeks ago-replied: I will not disagree with the president thereor anything else.

After their meeting, Mr. Johnson stated that the alliance between Britain and the United States is an indestructible relationship.

It was reported that Mr. Biden was prepared to rebuke him over the tension between the Northern Ireland Agreement and the European Union, adding: The President has not said anything similar.

He said these people discussed Harry Dunns tragic case-Mr. Biden was very sympathetic and actively involved.

The G7 summit started today, but Mr. Johnson and President Biden met a day earlier to consolidate the long-term alliance between the two countries.

Close business Despite the introduction of a world-class vaccine, Theresa May lifted the holiday ban Crossed sausage Panicked EU leaders cool down on threat of sausage trade war with Britain Fire G7 leaders will enjoy informal barbecues, including sea sheds and flying over Very harmful The term offensive Empire should be removed from awards such as OBE and MBE Boqiao loves PM said Biden breathed fresh air when Trump swiped his card and cheered the great conversation Under pressure Matt Hancock hints that lockdown may return with new Covid variants

Over the weekend, Cabis Bay, a typical sleepy town in Cornwall, welcomed the G7 circus with its reporters and security personnel.

A steel ring was thrown around the town, and security guards crawled on the street.

President Bidens heavily armed beast Cadillac was discovered.
Newest:

The leaders of the Group of Seven nations will pledge at the summit to share at least one billion doses of coronavirus vaccines with troubled countries around the world-half of which are from the United States and 100 million doses from the United Kingdom

The vaccine sharing pledges of US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson laid the foundation for the G7 meeting in southwest England. Leaders will shift from opening greetings and family portraits to from the new coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19): New Coronary Pneumonia (COVID-19): COVID-19.

Biden said: We will work with our global partners to help lead the world out of this pandemic. G7 also includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan.

G7 leaders are facing increasing pressure to develop a global vaccine sharing plan, especially as the issue of global supply inequity becomes more apparent. In the United States, there is a large stock of vaccines, and demand for vaccines has fallen sharply in recent weeks.

Biden said that the United States will donate 500 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine, and it indicates that developed economies will work together to provide wide-ranging and rapid vaccinations everywhere. The pledge is on top of the 80 million doses of vaccine that Biden has pledged to donate by the end of June.

As far as Johnson is concerned, he said he will share the first 5 million doses of the UK vaccine in the next few weeks, and the rest will be provided next year. He said that he expects G7 to commit a total of 1 billion doses.

A government official said in the background on Friday that Canada will Share up to 100 million doses of vaccineIt is expected that there will be more details on how the government will achieve this goal over the weekend.

It is expected that major democracies in the world will announce a 1 billion dose sharing plan on G7.From @Murray_Brewsterhttps://t .co/6lcgWDnBOi @CBC Politics

French President Macron welcomed the United States commitment and said that Europe should do the same. He said that by the end of the year, France will share at least 30 million doses of vaccines worldwide.

The global COVAX alliances vaccination campaign started slowly because rich countries locked in billions of vaccine doses through direct contracts with drug manufacturers. The alliance has distributed only 81 million doses of vaccines globally, and parts of the world, especially Africa, remain a vaccine wasteland.

-From the Associated Press and CBC News, the last update time is 8:10 am EST

Whats happening in canada

Watch | Alberta reopens gyms, cinemas and indoor restaurants:

Justin Trudeau made his first diplomatic visit since the pandemic began, arriving in the UK for the G7 summit next week. Canada is under pressure to donate more vaccines to poorer countries. 2:02

As of early Friday morning, Canada had reported 1,398,278 confirmed COVID-19 cases, of which 19,257 were considered active. The death toll on CBC News is 25,873. To date, more than 27.7 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been vaccinated across the country. CBCs vaccine tracker.

On Friday in Atlantic Canada, health officials reported 23 new cases of COVID-19, including:

15 new cases COVID-19 in Nova Scotia , Including another case related to a high school in Halifax.

, Including another case related to a high school in Halifax. Five new cases COVID-19 in Newfoundland and Labrador , Three of them are connected to a cluster in the Western Health area.

, Three of them are connected to a cluster in the Western Health area. Three new cases COVID-19 in New Brunswick Before the province enters the first phase of reopening, health officials are still struggling to achieve the goal of giving 75% of eligible people the first dose of vaccine.

Before the province enters the first phase of reopening, health officials are still struggling to achieve the goal of giving 75% of eligible people the first dose of vaccine. No new cases reported Prince Edward Island.

in Quebec On Thursday, health officials reported 2 new deaths from COVID-19 and 189 cases.

Health officials in Ontario On Thursday, 11 deaths and 590 new COVID-19 cases were reported. According to the dashboard, the number of hospitalizations in the province is 516, and 450 are living in the intensive care unit due to COVID-19.

As Ontario enters the first phase of its economic reopening plan, most parts of Ontario can today resume outdoor dining and shopping in non-essential retail stores. In recent weeks, the number of new COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations has declined, causing the province to relax some pandemic restrictions.

In the prairie provinces, Manitoba Announced the reopening plan On Thursday, health officials reported 6 deaths and 251 new cases COVID-19.

Watch | The governor of Manitoba stated that the details of the restrictions in the reopening plan will be announced when the vaccine target date is approaching: Alberta enters the second phase of its summer COVID-19 reopening plan, which includes allowing gyms, movie theaters, indoor restaurants and bowling alleys to open with limited capacity. 2:42

Saskatchewan At the same time, another death and 77 new cases COVID-19.

Alberta Thursday reported the lowest number of active COVID-19 cases since October, with approximately 3,810 active infections in the province. Those ones, 178 cases It is new since Thursday, and six more people have died.

Crossing the north on Thursday, Yukon Territory Three new cases of COVID-19 were reported, and Nunavut with North-west region Both have reported a new case.Health officials in the Northwest Territories stated that the case was in Out-of-town workers in Yellowknife.

British Columbia 153 new cases of COVID-19 were reported on Thursday, as the vaccination rate for eligible adults is slightly less than 75%.

-From CBC News and Canadian media, the last update time is 7:10 am EST

What is happening around the world

On Wednesday, a nurse vaccinated an elderly man with a dose of the Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine in the 23 de Enero community in Caracas, Venezuela. The country is trying to vaccinate its population. (Ariana Kubilos/Associated Press)

As of early Friday morning, Johns Hopkins Universitys COVID-19 case tracking tool showed that the total number of reported cases worldwide exceeded 174.8 million. The global death toll exceeds 3.7 million.

inside Asia Pacific In the region, Bihar, India, has increased the number of COVID-19 deaths after thousands of unreported cases have been detected, raising concerns that more deaths have not been officially recorded. The health department of Bihar, one of the poorest states, revised its COVID-19 death toll from 5,424 to more than 9,429 on Thursday, an increase of more than 70%.

Officials stated that there were 3,951 unreported deaths in May, which reflected reported deaths in private hospitals, on the way to medical institutions, in isolation at home, and deaths from complications following COVID-19. death toll.

Health experts say there are still many undocumented deaths of COVID-19 in India, especially during the latest surge in April and May, when hospitals were overcrowded and oxygen supplies were insufficient.

At the Mylab Discovery Solutions manufacturing plant in Lonafra, southeast of Mumbai, a technician holds a sample absorption strip of a self-use rapid antigen detection kit for the detection of novel coronavirus. (Indraniel Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images)

inside AmericaChile once again announced a complete blockade of the capital and stated that it has approved the emergency use of the vaccine developed by the Belgian laboratory Janssen for the US pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson.

in AfricaTanzania has asked the International Monetary Fund to provide US$571 million in loans to the United States to help it deal with the challenges posed by the pandemic.

inside middle EastAccording to local media reports, the people of Kuwait are seeking a second dose of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine because the Ministry of Health has begun vigorously pushing for more people to receive the critical second dose.

in EuropeThe number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Russia continues to rise, and the authorities reported 12,505 new infections on Fridaya 25% increase from the number registered on Monday.

-From the Associated Press, Reuters and CBC News, the last update time is 7:15 AM EST
According to the Lehigh County prosecutor, an Allentown woman who claimed her husband had abused her tried to hire a killer to kill him, but eventually reached an agreement with an undercover police officer.

Authorities said 44-year-old Claudia F. Carrion was charged with homicide on Friday after meeting with police officers on Thursday.

A confidential informant told the police that Carrion was asking if he wanted to find a killer to kill her husband. The Allentown police sent a deputy detective to meet with Carion, who allegedly agreed to pay $4,000 for her spouse to be murdered. The prosecutor said that Carrion could not pay all the money in advance, so she gave the detective $100 and told him that she would pay $100 in weekly installments to cover the balance.

The authorities detained the carrion after the interaction.

The prosecutor did not specify whether Carions allegations of abuse are under investigation.

The carrion was sent to the Lehigh County Jail with a bail of US$500,000.
U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar hit back after her Democratic colleagues rarely condemned her remarks. Her remarks seemed to classify the U.S. and Israel with the Palestinian resistance group Hamas and the Afghan armed group Taliban. .

The Muslim American congresswoman wrote on Twitter on Monday: We have seen the unimaginable atrocities committed by the United States, Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan and the Taliban, which aroused condemnation from both parties and even saw her. Accused of being anti-Semitism.

We must hold the same degree of accountability and justice to all victims of crimes against humanity, she wrote on Twitter, and attached a video of her questioning Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the United States Oppose the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into the so-called war. Crimes of Israel and Afghanistan.

More than a dozen Jewish lawmakers called on Omar on Wednesday to clarify what she said, believing that equating the United States and Israel with Hamas and the Taliban is an offense and misleading.

Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi interjected: Drawing wrong equivalence between democratic countries such as the United States and Israel and groups engaged in terrorism such as Hamas and the Taliban will incite prejudice and undermine the realization of peace and security for all. Future progress, Pelosi said in a statement.

But Omar fought back, attacking the Jewish legislators comments as shameful and Islamophobic.

The Islamophobic metaphor in their statement is offensive. The continued harassment and silence from the signatories of this letter is unbearable, the Minnesota representative wrote on Twitter.

For those colleagues who call me when they need my support, it is shameful to issue a statement now asking for clarification instead of calling directly.

Omars spokesperson, Jeremy Slevin, said in a statement statement On Thursday, the group of lawmakers has the same Islamophobic hatred against her, just as they initially attacked Omars far-right enemy through her tweets.

Slavin said earlier that Omar contacted the organization to provide clarification before their statement was released, but her call was not answered.

For those colleagues who call me when they need my support, it is shameful to issue a statement now asking for clarification instead of calling directly. The Islamophobic metaphor in the statement is offensive. The constant harassment and silence of the signer of this letter is unbearable. https://t.co/37dy2UduW0 -Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) June 10, 2021

As criticism intensified, Omar clarified her position in a statement on Thursday: On Monday, I asked Secretary of State Anthony Brinken about the ongoing ICC investigation.

To be clear: the conversation is about responsibility for specific events in those ICC cases, not a moral comparison between Hamas and the Taliban, and the United States and Israel.

I will never equate a terrorist organization with a democratic country with a sound judicial system, she added.

Omar also shared threatening voicemails received in her office. She said in a tweet: Every time I speak up for human rights, I am overwhelmed by death threats.

Such incitement and hatred can lead to real violence. like this. https://t.co/ddSQUiQG10 https://t.co/ggygJWUtb7 -Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) June 10, 2021

Extensive support

Despite criticisms of Omar, many lawmakers still defended her.

U.S. representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the progressive legislators criticizing U.S. policy toward Israel. She claimed that Omar continued to target and slander.

The New York Democrat said on Twitter: I am very tired of the constant defamation, deliberate mischaracterization and public attacks from @IlhanMN from our core team.

They didnt know that they put her at risk by skipping private conversations and jumping to cheer for targeted news cycles around her.

On continued defamation, deliberate mischaracterization, and public targeting @BrothersMorning From our core team. They didnt know that they put her at risk by skipping private conversations and jumping to cheer for targeted news cycles around her.  Alexander Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 10, 2021

Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, also defended her, criticizing the House Democratic leaders statement, saying in a tweet: There is no freedom of speech for Muslim women in Congress. For Congress. For Muslim women in China, the benefit of skepticism does not exist. Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives should be ashamed of their ruthless, exclusive tone of supervision of women members of color.

There is no freedom of speech for Muslim women in Congress. For Muslim women in Congress, the benefit of doubt does not exist. The Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives should be ashamed of its ruthless, exclusive tone of regulation of women members of color.  Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) June 10, 2021

Rep. Ayanna Pressley condemned malicious attempts to take Omars words out of context, while Rep. Jamaal Bowman urged fellow Democrats to recognize the prejudices that promote personal attacks and defend our colleagues.

When a woman, a person of color or a Muslim publicly opposes injustice, there will be strong opposition, Bowman wrote on Twitter. When [Omar] Speaking out, she is these three people, which is even more ironic. 

When women, people of color, or Muslims openly oppose injustice, it arouses strong opposition.When @BrothersMorning Speaking out, she is these three people, which intensifies the irony. As Democrats, we must recognize the prejudices that encourage personal attacks and defend our colleagues. pic.twitter.com/KUPl81XgyO -Jamal Bowman (@JamaalBowmanNY) June 10, 2021

The Progressive Democrats continued to express support for Omar throughout the day on Thursday. The Congressional Progressive Caucus issued a statement stating that Omars voice is critical and necessary.

We cannot ignore a right-wing media echo chamber, which deliberately and frequently attacked a black Muslim woman in Congress, distorted her views and intentions, and led to opposition [her] And her employees, the statement said. We urge our colleagues not to instigate or magnify this divisive and malicious strategy. 

At the same time, Democratic leaders said they welcome Omars clarification that there is no moral reciprocity between the United States and Israel, Hamas and the Taliban.

This is not the first time Omars criticism of Israel has caused her to disagree with members of her party. In 2019, she apologized after members of both parties accused her of suggesting that money supports Israel as anti-Semitism.

Israel has waged an 11-day war on the besieged Gaza Strip, resulting in the deaths of more than 250 Palestinians, including 66 children. A few weeks after reaching a fragile peace agreement, there has been recent commotion in the US Congress. At least 12 people, including two children, were killed in Israel in a rocket attack by Palestinian armed factions.
Accounts inside Chinese detention camps where millions of Uyghur Mullins were brainwashed and tortured portray the Xinjiang region as a dystopian hell landscape.

Amnesty International stated in a new 160-page report that Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities face systemic and state-organized mass detention and torture, which are equivalent to crimes against humanity.

6 Earlier this year, members of the Uyghur community living in Turkey staged a protest near the Chinese Consulate in Istanbul Credit: Associated Press

6 A watchtower on a heavily guarded facility in Xinjiang, China. The camp is believed to be mainly a re-education camp where Muslim minorities are detained. Credit: AFP or licensor

Like we are enemies in war: Chinas mass detention, torture and persecution of Muslims in XinjiangPublished on Thursday, it described how minorities were forced to abandon their religious traditions, language and culture and were subjected to mass surveillance.

These reports support previous allegations of genocide and Ethnic cleansing,

Last year, Uyghur women Zumret Dawut told The Sun Before being sterilized, how she was restrained, beaten and given a mysterious injection in one of the camps so that she could no longer have children.

Her statement is in line with recent reports in which China is accused of adopting a family planning policy against ethnic minorities, which aims to reduce the number of births by 26,000 to 4.5 million within 20 years.

The Amnesty International report interviewed more than 50 former concentration camp detainees, all of whom were said to have been detained for what appeared to be perfectly legal behavior.

The report stated that the reasons for their detention included possession of religious-themed photos or exchanges with people abroad.

Many witnesses were closely interrogated by the police, beaten and deprived of sleep, and were forced to sit on the so-called tiger chair for up to 24 hours, which has leg and hand restraint devices that put the detainees in painful positions.

Witnesses said that many of them underwent severe interrogation at the police station, which included beatings and sleep deprivation.

The two detainees interviewed for the report said they were forced to wear heavy handcuffs-in one case for a whole year. Others said they were electrocuted by electric batons or sprayed with pepper spray.

The Amnesty International report detailed a case in which a detainee is believed to have died as a result of being confined to a tiger chair.

He sat in a chair for 72 hours, during which time he urinated and defecate to himself.

The interviewee gave a detailed account of the conditions and treatment of Uyghurs and other groups.

6 Drone footage that appeared last year is believed to show dozens of Uyghurs being loaded onto a train

6 Uyghur community members and human rights activists demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament in London Credit: Getty

Agnes Callamard, Secretary-General of Amnesty International and a former UN human rights investigator, said: The Chinese authorities have created an astonishing dystopian landscape in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

A large number of people are subjected to brainwashing, torture and other degrading treatment in detention camps, and millions of people live in fear in huge surveillance equipment. This should shock the conscience of mankind.

Karamad said: China must immediately dismantle the detention camps, release those arbitrarily detained in detention centers and prisons, and end the systematic attacks on Muslims in Xinjiang.

The international community must speak out and take concerted action to end this abhorrent behavior once and for all.

In addition to the Uyghurs and Kazakhs, Hui, Kyrgyz, Uzbek and Tajik ethnic groups across Xinjiang have also been detained and tortured.

China has previously denied allegations of genocide and ethnic cleansing, saying that these camps are actually vocational training centers designed to reduce the threat of extremism.

But according to the report, a large number of Uyghur men and women  and other ethnic minorities  have been detained or imprisoned.

This includes hundreds of thousands of people sent to prison, as well as one million Chinese who were sent to detention camps by the United Nations.

On Thursday, the U.S. Senate committee held a hearing to discuss the so-called Xinjiang concentration camp. Uyghur advocates and American researchers testified.

U.S. legislators are considering banning the import of solar panels and other products manufactured by forced labor, and plan to investigate the role of U.S. technology companies in facilitating Chinas massive crackdown in Xinjiang. Al Jazeera reported.

Senator Tim Kane said: We can take some very specific steps, including the amnesty report as part of the Senate hearing record.

Terrible fear McGrady was killed a few hours after disappearing, and the body will be found in the Portuguese forest Pink lady Kate smiled at Jill as they visited the school to discuss the development of G7 children Kill two kills A 15-year-old boy was stabbed to death in a fight while going to school in West London Postpartum depression Kate revealed that they did not receive a video call between Harry and Meg, and they saw Lily Bate during the discord. Symptom Checker The 8 monkeypox symptoms you need to know are two cases reported in Wales inspiration Rashford and Reid pay tribute to the 17-year-old star YouTuber who died after surgery

In March of this year, the United States joined the ranks of the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada to impose specific sanctions on Chinese officials for what Secretary of State Antony Blinken called genocide and crimes against humanity.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has previously defended Beijings allegations, denying reports of genocide, forced labor or religious oppression.

At the same time, Amnesty International said it will step up its actions and promise to ensure the release of dozens of missing persons believed to be detained in Xinjiang from the Muslim minority.

6 The building of the Vocational Skills Education and Training Service Center in Atux City is believed to be one of many re-education camps Credit: Agence France-Presse
President Joe Biden met with Queen Elizabeth II in the UK on Friday-this is his first meeting with the British monarch as commander-in-chief. The President, accompanied by First Lady Jill Biden, was photographed chatting with the Queen at the head of state event at the G7 summit in Cornwall. The photo shows the queen wearing pearls, white gloves and a floral dress, while talking to the first lady outside the huge dome of an ecological park called the Eden Project, smiling warmly and the leaders gathered there for the dinner . Biden is the 13th American president to meet with the Queen, whose reign began in 1953.

/ AP

In 1961, Queen Elizabeth II and President John F. Kennedy took a group photo at Buckingham Palace in London.

The 95-year-old monarch met with every American leader during her reign, except Lyndon Johnson. Her first meeting as a queen was in 1957 with Dwight Eisenhower, and that same year, she met Herbert Hoover more than two decades after he left the White House. In 1951, when she was a princess, she also met Harry Truman. Biden had previously met the Queen when he was a U.S. Senator in 1982.

Bob Doherty/Associated Press

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan and Queen Elizabeth II rode horses at Windsor Castle, England.

Fridays meeting was held two months after the queen lost her husband. Prince Philip died on April 9 At the age of 99. Also attending the G7 event were Prince Charles from the British Royal Family; Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall; Prince William, Duke of Cambridge; and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. In the photo, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson can be seen talking with Ursula von der Lein, President of the European Commission, while Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is talking with Prince Charles.

Jack Hill-WPA Pool/Getty Images



Friday was the first full-day meeting of the summit. Johnson told those present that it was an opportunity to upgrade in our society and rebuild better. Coronavirus pandemic. He also said that leaders need to address economic inequality and climate change. I actually think we have a huge opportunity because, as the G7, we are united in our vision of building a cleaner and greener world and addressing climate change issues, he added. Before the evening reception, the Queen posed for a photo with Biden and other world leaders. She asked them, Should you look happy? Yes, Johnson replied. Although on the surface, we always enjoy it.
Sancho ranked second in the UTD payment list

After reaching a personal clause on a 91 million contract, Manchester United will make Sancho the second highest paid player.

SunSport revealed this week that the Red Devils have reached an agreement with the England winger to be worth 350,000 a week for five years.

Dortmund insisted that Manchester United increase their offer from 61 million pounds to 78 million pounds, with a surcharge of 10 million pounds, but this is expected to happen.

After they refused to meet the German clubs 110 million pounds price last summer, Manchester United hoped that the deal would proceed smoothly.

And Sancho will return to Manchester after the European Cup, he will be ranked behind David De Gea on the clubs payroll.

The Spaniard continues to top the list, earning 375,000 a week-a total of 19.5 million per year.

The arrival of Sancho means that 14 first-team players will earn 100,000 or more per week, including Paul Pogba (290,000), Anthony Martial (250,000) and Marcus Rashford (200,000) earns 200,000 or more per week.

If Juan Mata agrees to another contract to extend his stay at Old Trafford, this number will rise to 15.
On Thursday, the Philadelphia City Council voted unanimously to close loopholes for illegal use of off-road vehicles and ATVs on city roads.

The bill amended the traffic laws to classify these bicycles as illegal street vehicles-just like all-terrain vehicles. This is both a safety measure and a way to soothe community members who think they are annoying.

This legislationSponsored by councillors Allan Domb, Mark Squilla and Derek Green, awaiting signature from Mayor Jim Kenney.

The residents of every community come to us with their worries and experience about the dangerous situation caused by illegal driving of vehicles, Domb SayWe also found that illegal activities are driving people out of the city when we need people to return to the city. We will continue to have people discuss this issue, including weighing members of the riding community in this bill, and find A solution that keeps everyone safe.

The bill merges all three vehicle types, so the consequences are the same: the Philadelphia Police Department fines and confiscates $2,000, WHYY report.

By early May, Philadelphia police had confiscated more than 200 vehicles, including off-road vehicles, Billy Payne reports.

Although these vehicles have long been considered a noisy engine trouble, many riders believe that the citys thriving rider culture keeps them out of trouble.

The lawmakers said they are also working to create a space in the city where people can safely ride on all-terrain vehicles, off-road vehicles and ATVs. Domb and Squillia recently visited a potential location in southwest Philadelphia.

To create such a site, the city must find a way to transport vehicles to the site, register the vehicle locally, and determine who will own the park.

We know that there are many obstacles to overcome, but we do need to consider changes in residents recreational activities and find some common ground, Domb said.
The teenager took out his cell phone to record the restraint of the police and the death of George Freud, and helped launch a global campaign against racial injustice. He was awarded a special prize by the Pulitzer Prize on Friday.

The Pulitzer Prize stated that Danela Frazier was quoted for bravely documenting the murder of George Floyd. This video sparked protests against police brutality around the world, highlighting citizens Journalists have a key role in seeking truth and justice.

Frasers public relations staff did not immediately respond to the Associated Presss request for comment.

Fraser recorded the arrest of the 46-year-old black man Freud on May 25, 2020, when she was 17 years old.

Her video was posted to Facebook hours after the incident, triggering the reckoning of the American race and calling for an end to police brutality.

This video was widely circulated around the world and was prominent in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Freuds neck and nailed him 9 minutes and 29 seconds on the sidewalk because he repeatedly said that he could not breathe.

Xiao Wan was found guilty in April Second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and manslaughter. He will be sentenced on June 25.

Changed the course of history

Fraser was also commended last year by the American PEN, a literary and human rights organization. She was awarded the PEN/Benensen Courage Award.

In this photo taken on May 25, 2020, Fraser, the third from the right, used her mobile phone to photograph Freuds death outside Cup Foods in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Minneapolis Police Department/Associated Press)

Susanna Nossel, the chief executive of PEN America, said at the time: Danella changed the course of this countrys history with just a mobile phone and sheer courage, triggering a bold campaign to end the systematic anti-black race. Doctrine and violence. Police.

Fraser also testified in Chauvins trial, Told the jurors that she looked at her father and the other black men in her life and thought how could that be one of them.

She testified: I have stayed up late and apologized and apologized to George Floyd because he did not do more, did not interact physically, and did not save his life, she testified, adding : But its like, this is not what I should do, this is what he should do.

The other three police officers involved in the arrest of Freud are scheduled to face trial next year on charges of aiding and abetting.All four officials are Also accused of violating Freuds civil rights.
Employment & Training Specialist - Heartland Works, Inc., a regional not-for-profit employment and training organization as well as an equal opportunity employer, is seeking a professional to fill an Employment & Training Specialist position located in the Topeka Workforce Center.

The Employment & Training Specialist (ETS) is responsible for interviewing career seekers, determining if they are appropriate for official enrollment into funded services, whether they need career counseling, referral to another service provider, or if they are job ready and in need of job referrals. The ETS consults with customers through face-to-face conferences as well as phone and written correspondence. The ETS works with customers to identify barriers and strengths in order to empower them to select appropriate resources and develop strategies related to their employment goals and self-sufficiency plans. In addition, the ETS works closely with employers to ascertain employment needs.

For a more detailed job description and how to apply, please visit our website: www.workforcecenters.com/heartland works.

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According to the New York Times, the Justice Department prosecutors obtained data on two Democratic lawmakers from Apple.

According to a report by the New York Times on Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors under the leadership of former U.S. President Donald Trump obtained data from Apple on two Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee, their staff and their families. .

The newspaper said that the subpoena for communications metadata was directed at California Congressman Adam Schiff, who is Trumps enemy, was the top Democrat of the group at the time, and is now the chairman of the group.

The record-breaking seizures occurred in 2017 and early 2018 because the department investigated Contact person According to the report, there are differences between the Trump administration and the Russian government.

Trump has repeatedly asked the Justice Department to track down his political opponents. Obviously, his request has not fallen on deaf ears. Although this baseless investigation has now ended, it is yet another example of Trumps weaponization of judicial corruption. And to what extent he has endangered our democracy. -Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) June 11, 2021

Congressman Eric Svalwell told CNN on Thursday that he is the second Democratic congressman on the committee to be targeted.

I was told Apple did confiscated my records. This is wrong, he said.

The newspaper reported that one of the family members was a minor.

According to The Times, the prosecutor working under the then Attorney General Jeff Sessions made an unusual effort to find the source of the leaked confidential information.

Department of Justice officials not only target the electronic data of lawmakers, but also the electronic data of their staff and family members, possibly against minors, because investigators believe that the lawmakers are using the devices of their colleagues or children to hide contact with reporters.

Like many of the most despicable dictators in the world, former President Trump has shown complete contempt for our democracy and the rule of law. My statement: pic.twitter.com/Pvvb1xYiLn -Representative Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) June 11, 2021

The Justice Department and Apple have not yet commented on the report.

The New York Times stated that in the end, there was no data or other evidence linking lawmakers or the House Intelligence Committee to the leak.

But according to the report, a year later, Attorney General Bill Barr (Bill Barr) resumed the leak investigation.

Outside of corruption investigations, such records are rarely seized.

Weaponization of Law Enforcement

Although Schiff did not confirm that he was the target of the investigation, he called on the Inspector General of the Justice Department to investigate this case and other cases that indicate that a corrupt president has weaponized law enforcement.

Trump trying to use the department to crack down on his political opponents and members of the media. It is increasingly clear that these requests have not fallen on deaf ears, Schiff said in a statement.

Supreme Democrat Nancy Pelosi also called for an investigation, calling the New York Times report distressing.

These actions seem to be another serious attack on our democracy by the former president, she said in a statement.

The newspaper said that the Justice Department issued a gag order against Apple that expired this year, meaning that lawmakers were unaware of the investigations until the tech giant notified them last month.

Schiff led the Democratic prosecution team during Trumps first Senate impeachment trial in early 2020 and has long criticized the former president, calling him a dangerous man.

he Handle the case In early 2020, Trump will be removed from office for abusing his power and obstructing Congress. Trump was later acquitted. He was later impeached by the House of Representatives and acquitted by the Senate because he was suspected of inciting the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
At about 3 in the morning, when Sean McQuillan was sleeping next to his wife, two pugs were dozing off at the end of the bed and his cell phone began to buzz. Three RCMP cruisers quickly stopped in front of their homes in Coquitlam, British Columbia, and neighbors in pajamas stood groggy in front of the window, widening their eyes, filming the cause of all this.

Two skinny black bears were overturning a McQuillan gray Chevrolet Tahoe parked in their driveway. When the animal was working under the street light, the drivers side and rear passengers door were suddenly opened.

McQuillan, his wife, their two young children and two dogs all missed the whole thing.

They fell asleep peacefully throughout the ordeal because [did] Us, McQueen said, referring to the pugs Winston and Hannah.

The bear may be looking for food

McQuillan detailed the story on Twitter earlier Friday.

He and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police believed that the two bears entered his unlocked car in search of food  in particular, McQueen suspected that the wreckage of his two-and-a-half-year-old son, the maverick, had been thrown on the back seat.

No one was injured, but these animals left dusty paw prints, broken car seats, and a lingering bear smell-which McQueen described as like a stronger wet dog smell.

The neighbor who heard the commotion repeatedly tried to contact the family by phone and nearby WhatsApp groups. A witness saw that the garage door was also open and called the police.

Watch | Surveillance video captures bears wandering in dead ends:

Early on Thursday morning, surveillance cameras and suspected neighbors caught a small black bear breaking into an SUV in Coquitlam, British Columbia. 0:38

When the RCMP arrived, the bear was already gone. The police officer knocked on the front door and joined the list of people trying to call their family. Nevertheless, the whole family slept all night.

We woke up in the morning to find all this news was saying,What happened? What happened? We were like,Uh, I dont know what happened,' McQueen said.

A neighbor started to send footage from their security camera to fill the gap.

There are three or four policemen [in the video] They are all in front of our house in a dead end, McQueen said.

Eventually you will see this strange character in the back of our vehicle. This character has all four paws. This is where we realized it was just a very thin juvenile bear.

On Thursday night, a pair of black bears entered the McQuillan family Chevy Tahoe in Coquitlam, British Columbia. Although the neighbors and the police called, the family members did not hear any sound. (Submitted by Sean McQueen)

Bear break-in is rare, but not impossible

McQuellen witnessed the loss firsthand when he went down to the garage.

He said: The interior of our car was torn apart the garbage in the garage was pulled away, everywhere.

They definitely used the handlebars, he said, referring to how the bear got into the SUV. You can see a paw print in the corner of the drivers side door.

Unable to reach the family, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police secured the garage and the vehicle before leaving the scene-smelling the unfortunate smell of a unique wildlife bouquet.

The bear used to get in a car in BC, Including the most recent last year, But the RCMP stated that it is rare to see two animals doing this at the same time.

This is a very rare call, RCMP officer Const said. John Graham.

No one was injured, but the bear left a broken car seat. (Twitter/@luckysean)

Officials reiterated the importance of locking vehicles to protect them from thieves (whether people or other people).

Graham said: The Coquitlam RCMP wants to encourage bears and people not to enter or drive any vehicles without the permission of the registered owner.

As for the family, McQuillan said he had some explanations with his insurance company, British Columbia Insurance Company.

Now lets see if ICBC will cover the bear market, he wrote on Twitter.
So far, US President Joe Biden has confused left-wing critics by experimenting with a domestic agenda that is very bold for lifelong centrists and traditional Democrats. His stimulus and infrastructure bills promote an unabashed freedom agenda. Although the voting rights and environmental bills he favored depend on the cooperation of more conservative Democrats such as Joe Manchin, the direction is clear.

Biden has obviously learned important lessons from the Obama era. Tactically speaking, he didnt seem to want to get caught up in futile negotiations with malicious Republicans. In essence, he did not apologize or downplay policies that both basic and intermediate voters like, such as raising the minimum wage or increasing taxes on high-income earners.

In both respects, Biden differs from his two most direct Democratic predecessors in the White House, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, who often acted as if their first priority was to obtain approval from the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

All this is good news. However, in the field of foreign policy, at least with regard to Israel and Palestine, Biden is still a Democrat in the 1990s, that is to say, an unreserved and uncritical supporter of Israel. His governments response or lack of response to the latest round of Israeli atrocitiesfrom forced evictions to the leveling of residential apartment buildings and media officesis shameful.

If Biden adopts the same posture on the Israeli-Palestinian issue that has been more commonly adopted since taking office, the foreign policies of the Palestinians, Israel, the Middle East, and the United States will all be in a healthier position: fearless, advancing with the times, and Respond to the base.

The moral and strategic failure of Israels U.S. policy

Of course, if the United States had any humanitarian or moral reason to clearly stand on Israels side, it would have been extinguished a long time ago. Despite the propaganda rhetoric to the contrary, more than half a century ago, the image of the brave little Israel was haunted by enemy nations hoping to erase it from the map.

The brutality of Israels occupation and the ruthlessness of its settlement projects, not to mention its status as the sole nuclear power in the Middle East, makes it a ruthless bully rather than an unfortunate victim. When this kind of rhetoric is more suitable for Palestinians, it will never stop hearing the language of the victims by Israels staunchest supporters in the United States and elsewhere.

In addition to the obvious and obvious moral taint, the U.S. continuously subsidizing Israels bad behavior has little strategic benefit to the U.S. The only thing it gets is negative news.

Washingtons reluctance to deal with conflicts more fairly, or even to imply that Israel is subject to the usual transactional nature of international politics, should be surprising to few people. There is no collective willingness within the Ring Road to publicly criticize Israels actions, such as those we saw last month. Although under Trump/Kushners approach, US support for Israel has become ridiculous and almost stupid, but as early as 2016, blank checks became a feature of the modus operandi of the US-Israel relationship.

Promote fair international and domestic incentives

If Biden hopes to change course from these long-standing moral and strategic failures, then the three developments together provide an opportunity to do so.

The first is geopolitics: the past decade has overturned many traditional camps in the Middle East. The Arab Spring, the rise of ISIL, the Iran nuclear deal, and changes in the domestic distribution of major regional powers such as Turkey have all brought the former alliance into chaos and produced alternative arrangements. Are Turkey and the United States friends because of common NATO members or rivals because of the Syrian civil war? Saudi Arabia and Israel are enemies because they have not had formal diplomatic relations, or are they partners, because how do they view Iran?

Because the Palestinian issue has less resonance, it is no longer the central fault line in the region-if nothing else, Trumps hyped Abraham Agreement confirms the symbolic demotion of the Palestinians in the Arab capital-Biden The government should have more room for maneuver.

The second structural change is the domestic politics of the United States. Israel has gone from a problem of a heated and sharp consensus between the two parties to a problem with more partisan influence. This is partly because the political mobilization of a new generation of liberals was hatched in an era of black fate and systemic inequality, and partly because of Benjamin Netanyahus abominable character, his dislike and dislike of Barack Obama. Democratic voters have not easily forgotten the full support of Donald Trump from one right-wing nationalist to another right-wing nationalist. In summary, these developments mean that Israel can no longer count on broad support from all political fields.

In addition to the partisan perspective, the American media and cultural environment is more conducive to a more balanced approach.

To be sure, the dominant weight of the report continues to support the Likud or AIPAC-style talking points. But print, television, and social media are all emerging. The New York Times and MSNBC are broadcasting Palestinian voices. Mainstream Democrats such as Tim Kaine and Chris Murphy are competing with people such as Bernie Sanders and the so-called squad (Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Members of Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib together opposed the unconditional support of the United States for Israel. Supporting the rights and dignity of Palestinians is no longer a marginal position.

The third force that prompted Israel to change course was the global reputation of the United States. The Biden administration has always spared no effort to emphasize that Trump is an abnormal person, especially for external audiences. Regardless of the truthfulness of this statement-in important domestic and international arenas, Trump is a continuation of American politics, not a contradiction-Trump is almost a show of disregard for human rights for Biden Provides an excellent opportunity. If he really wants to prove that America is back and will never see anything like Trump or Trumpism again, then what better way than to hold Israel accountable?

Bidens appalling record in Israel

Nonetheless, even if the political cost of Israeli policy changes has been reduced, Biden will be one of the most unlikely leaders to take advantage of. In short, he has a shocking record when confronting Israel.

As the vice president of Barack Obama, Biden has repeatedly weakened his bosss policy toward Israel, either publicly or privately. For example, throughout 2009 and 2010, Biden advised Obama to oppose his strategy of publicly applying pressure on Netanyahu to freeze settlements, but instead urged no daylight between the United States and Israel.

In 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressed Netanyahu on the phone to completely freeze the settlements and reliably assured him that he would advance negotiations on a two-State solution. Biden then called a more conciliatory Call to encourage Netanyahu to ignore what he saw as a divided government. Similarly, Biden opposed Obamas 2016 desire to abandon rather than veto a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements.

Recently, on the eve of the 2020 general election, progressives believed that they had been assured that the partys program at the convention would include references to Palestinians under occupation. This was the first time in history. But Biden personally intervened to ensure that the word was deleted.

Be bold, Joe

In general, Biden is unwilling to exert even the slightest pressure on Israel. His actions reflect his enduring view that the Palestinians are not worth spending political capital to truly advance their aspirations.

This timidity is wrong in 2021. No one expects that the United States will vocally support the establishment of a Palestinian state like Kosovo, or sanction Israel like Venezuela.

But at least, the United States can provide billions of dollars in aid and advanced military equipment on the condition that Israel does not violate US official policies. It can show in its words that it also cares about the lives of Palestinians and Israels right to self-defense. It can stop providing diplomatic protection to Tel Aviv at the United Nations, where it consistently vetoed resolutions condemning Israeli actions. And it can stop sitting idly by when the clients country commits serious human rights violations and war crimes, even far away from its self-proclaimed values ??or interests.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the U.S. Department of Justice will review and challenge a series of new laws proposed and passed by Republicans that will restrict voting rights in major U.S. states.

The right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy and the source of all other rights, Garland said on Friday.

Garland, the top law enforcement official of the Biden administration,s new attention to the federal implementation of the voting rights law emerges among Republicans Georgia, FloridaSince the 2020 presidential election, Arizona and Arkansas have passed new laws, which critics say will make it more difficult for people to vote.

A dozen other states have proposed or are advancing similar bills, including Texas, Is considering a far-reaching election bill that, among other things, will allow judges to overturn the results of the election.

Garland said that the Department of Justice will double the number of lawyers assigned to it to enforce U.S. voting rights. We are reviewing new laws designed to restrict voter access. If violations are found, we will not hesitate to adopt action.

The Ministry of Justice will conduct a special review of post-election audits, like processing Garland warned that Arizona now has the support of the states Republican-controlled Senate to ensure they comply with federal laws.

Trumps false statement is a catalyst for the Republican Party

Former President Donald Trump accused widespread election fraud without evidence and filed more than 40 lawsuits in major US states to try to overthrow President Joe Bidens 2020 election victory.

These lawsuits were dismissed by the judge, but Trump continued to insist that the election was rigged and continued to push Republicans across the country to push for stricter voting laws.

For example, a bill to be passed by the Texas legislature will restrict the so-called soul voting activities of black churches, criminalize common voting activities, and prohibit local officials from sending mail-in ballot applications.

The bill disproportionately affects people of color, said Mimi Marziani, chairman of the Texas Civil Rights Project, one of the groups opposed to the legislation.

After being blocked by Democrats at a special legislative session last month, the bill was criticized and scrutinized, and Texas Republicans have begun to abandon certain provisions of the bill.

Even the initiators of the bill actually didnt bother to read the bill, Marziani told Al Jazeera.

Congressional Democrats try to fight back

Democrats in the U.S. Congress are seeking legislation to restore the Justice Departments enforcement power overthrown by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013.

Majority leader Chuck Schumer announced this week that the Senate will vote on a comprehensive electoral reform plan at the end of March, but the bill Facing opposition from the Republican Party And it is unlikely to pass.

In the House of Representatives, legislators are enacting a narrower bill specifically designed to restore the Department of Justices ability to review, approve, or oppose changes to voting rights in states with a history of discrimination.

Democrats are filing lawsuits in 14 states to protect voting rights, the partys chief election litigator Marc Elias tweeted.

My team is currently suing to protect voting rights in 14 states. ?? Arizona

Arkansas

Florida

Georgia

Iowa

Kansas

Louisiana State

Michigan

Montana

New Hampshire

North Carolina

Pennsylvania

Texas

the state of Wisconsin  Mark E. Elias (@marceelias) June 8, 2021

Restore Trump?

At the same time, the fiction of election stolen leads to Trump supporters Overrun The US Capitol on January 6 remained active in Trumps Republican base.

In a recent Politico-Morning Consult survey, 29% of Republicans said they believe Trump will become restore As president.

According to the New York Times, the former president told his colleagues that after the 2020 election results in Georgia, Arizona and other states are reversed, he will resume the presidency.

No real prospects will happen. The US court rejected dozens of Trumps allegations that there was widespread fraud due to lack of evidence.

The election results in these states have been certified by the state authorities. In any case, there is no provision for such restoration in the U.S. Constitution.

Last week, Trump delivered a speech at a Republican rally in North Carolina and once again became the focus of American politics. At the meeting, he reiterated the widespread fraud and called the 2020 election a crime of the century.
On Monday, 30 leaders and heads of state will hold the NATO summit in Brussels, Belgium, where the security alliance was headquartered in 1949.

At Joe Bidens first NATO summit as president of the United States, he will eagerly assure his allies that the United States is back. Previously, former US President Donald Trump declared NATO outdated and called member states deadbeats. After four turbulent years, it initially refused to explicitly support NATOs principle of mutual defense.

It is expected that a new 2030 Strategic Concept will be launched, outlining how the alliance plans to deal with the various challenges it faces now.

James Goldger, a professor of international relations at American University and former director of Russia, said that NATOs current strategic vision can be traced back to 2010, but not enough attention has been paid to the prospect of Russian aggression, and China is hardly mentioned. Staff of the National Security Council of Ukraine and Eurasian Affairs.

French President Emmanuel Macron (Emmanuel Macron) raised the need to reflect the ever-changing security situation. In 2019, he criticized the alliance for being brain-disabled and no longer suitable for its purpose.

Experts said that NATO Chairman Jens Stoltenberg will propose to expand attention to issues such as cyber warfare, China, Russia, strategic competition with authoritarian countries, and the impact of climate change on international security.

Here are five things to know:

Afghanistan

One of the most pressing themes on the agenda is how NATO will ensure stability in Afghanistan as it gradually ends its operations in the region.

The US military and its NATO allies will withdraw their 9,600-man mission before Bidens September 11 deadline-after nearly 20 years of conflict in the region.

Critics, including former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, warned that the Taliban might regain control.

According to the UN Security Council, the Al-Qaida network-which provided the reason for the US invasion of Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks-still has 400 to 600 members fighting the Taliban.

In an interview with CNN in April, Al-Qaeda agents stated that unless war is waged against the United States on all other fronts.

NATO plans to provide continuous financial support to the Afghan security forces. However, the question remains whether the allies will promise to provide millions or even billions of dollars in funding to provide Afghanistan with equipment and serious training programs.

US military officials are also discussing establishing bases in neighboring countries so that they can return to Afghanistan if Al Qaeda or ISIL threatens.

The United States wants to do business in Pakistan, but given the often tense relations between Islamabad and Washington, this is unlikely under Bidens leadership.

He added that the Pentagon also agreed to return to bases in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, a move that requires the support of China and Russia.

This will be much more difficult than it was 10 years ago, he said, because the relationship between the United States and these two powers has deteriorated.

Russia

Kristine Berzina, a senior researcher at the German Marshall Foundation in the United States, said that leaders will also discuss strengthening NATOs collective defenses, with a focus on a more aggressive Russia.

Last year, it was reported that Russia sent 150,000 soldiers to its border with Ukraine. This was the largest Russian army buildup since Moscow annexed Ukraines Crimean Peninsula in 2014. This prompted NATO to warn Russia to update  Aggression will have consequences.

In August last year, the Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny was nearly fatally poisoned, and the rift between the Western government and Russia intensified, and many people blamed it on Moscowbut Russia denies this. statement.

Jamie Shea, a senior researcher at Think, based in Brussels, said that at the summit, the United States may be asked to prepare to send more troops and tanks to Europe, deploy more equipment in Europe, and deploy more on the European continent. Multiple air defense systems. -tank Friends of Europe and former NATO staff.

Romania, Bulgaria and other countries definitely want to see the United States strengthen its defenses in the region.

China

In a recent speech, Stoltenberg pointed out that NATO does not consider Beijing to be an adversary, but the rise of China has a direct impact on the security of the transatlantic alliance.

China itself is not seen as a threat, but as something that may turn hostile, Belzina said.

NATO allies condemned Chinas human rights violations, including the suppression of dissidents in Hong Kong and the detention of more than 1 million Uyghurs, who are mainly Muslims in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.

Other concerns of NATO include Chinas threat to invade Taiwan, Beijings increasing militarization, and US Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. Kathleen Hicks calling it an increasingly coercive and aggressive approach to the Indo-Pacific region.

Belzina said that under Trumps leadership, Europe has some hopes to maintain an equal distance between the two powers, rather than getting involved in the conflict with the United States, especially when relations with the United States are so bad.

Although Belzina said that Europe has delayed more on the China issue than the United States hoped, Shay expects there will be more agreement on the Beijing issue.

Europe is aware of Chinas challenges, he said.

In March of this year, the European Union imposed sanctions on Chinese officials for the first time in 30 years on the Uyghur issue.

Rafael Loss, coordinator of the European Councils pan-European data project, said that France, Germany and the United Kingdom have recently sent warships to the Indo-Pacific region, which shows that Europe has an interest in a free and open Indo-Pacific region. Diplomatic relations.

NATO may seek closer cooperation with partners such as Australia, India, Japan, and South Korea. It should also seriously consider how to contribute to the protection of democracy in Taiwan, said Lowes.

Defense expenditure

NATO member states will decide whether to increase the organizations common budget to obtain more joint capabilities, such as training, exercises, and stronger cyber defenses.

Stoltenberg called on allies to invest more and better, and proposed that they jointly contribute $20 billion to the common budget in the next 10 years.

Currently, the common pot accounts for 0.3% of the total defense spending of the Allies, or about $2.5 billion.

French officials have expressed opposition to the proposal to cancel the joint funding.

French Defense Minister Florence Pali told Politico this month: All of this money will not be used to increase the national budget and benefit NATOs European defense efforts. And what to do? No one can tell you.

Berzina expects that spending will become a concern for some NATO member states: There will always be leaders and laggards in spending. There will be compromises, but I think it will be challenging, especially in the economic landscape of COVID-19. 

Then, the EU summit

One day later, on Tuesday, Biden and EU senior figures will hold a summit in Brussels.

Experts said that tariffs and trade related to aircraft and metals are a key theme and how to implement the new global minimum corporate tax rate in accordance with the historic agreement reached by the G7 finance ministers on June 5.

Other issues will include data transmission, pandemic recovery, climate policy and carbon pricing plans.

Although Europe is eager to welcome Biden into the region, the previous administration has shown that Washingtons priorities can change quickly.

Goldgeier said that European leaders are not yet sure how Bidens middle class foreign policy strategy differs from Trumps America First agenda.

This will be a key issue for Europe.
Do Jae Jin (Lee Do Wan) wanted to set Lee Dam (Hyeri) on a blind date after learning she was turned down by the man she likes. But the supposed date didn't happen after all.

Yang Hye Sun Becomes Lee Dam's Dating Guru

When they were out for their "Date Project," Do Jae Jin asked Yang Hye Sun (Kang Han Na) a favor if she could give advice to Lee Dam before going on a blind date.

And luckily, she was willing to do it.

As the only person who knew about Lee Dam and Shin Woo Yeo's (Jang Ki Yong) situation, Yang Hye Sun showed her genuine side in helping the lady student to be at her best during her blind date.

Do Jae Jin also helped in asking possible questions that Lee Dam might encounter on her date.

But no matter how hard they tried, Yang Hye Sun frankly told Lee Dam she would eventually fail in her first bilnd date.

Lee Dam's First Blind Date

Lee Dam arrived at the resto where she met her date. Since she mentioned to Do Jae Jin that she prefers older men, a guy who was in his 30s appeared. They began to talk about each other, but the guy kept on sharing stories related to his job, which made Lee Dam less interested in him.

After they had their meal, they decided to go to a cafe to spend more time together. During that time, Shin Woo Yeo was also staying in the coffee shop where they were heading to. And the male gumiho was also occupied thinking of Lee Dam's first blind date.

He accidentally sent a message to Lee Dam, which made her call and askes what the message was all about. Shin Woo Yeo just wanted to check on her but was hesitant to ask for more since it was her personal life.

Not until Lee Dam and Shin Woo Yeo saw each other inside the cafe. And unexpectedly, they were sitting next to each other.

This time, Lee Dam's date started to become arrogant, saying his standards in life, which made Lee Dam feel intimidated.

Shin Woo Yeo heard what the guy had said to Lee Dam, that was why when he was about to leave, the male gumiho used his magic in teasing Lee Dam's date, which made the customers inside the cafe laugh.

Shin Woo Yeo Takes Lee Dam on a Museum Date

To lessen her sadness due to what had happened on her first blind date and to make his apology to Lee Dam, Shin Woo Yeo took Lee Dam on a museum date.

It was late night and the museum was already closed, but thanks to his power, Shin Woo Yeo was able to enter, alongside the female university student. She was amazed to see lots of memorabilia all over the place and couldn't contain her happiness upon having a tour with the male gumiho.

Shin Woo Yeo told Lee Dam not to worry about the things that her blind date had said to her earlier and continue in pursuing her dreams. Shin Woo Yeo's words encouraged Lee Dam to be positive in life.

Shin Woo Yeo Meets Lee Dam's Mother

While Lee Dam was having a snack with her friends, she received a message from her mom, asking for her address so she could send new packages from abroad. Since her mother resides in America, Lee Dam was confident and sent her her current address.

Not until her younger brother called her and said that their mom arrived in Seoul. Lee Dam called Shin Woo Yeo in a flash, but her phone battery died, making her panic.

Meanwhile, Shin Woo Yeo met a new visitor inside their house. The woman introduced herself, and there, the male gumiho found out that she's Lee Dam's mother.

He was nervous and didn't know what to explain about Lee Dam living with him.

Minutes later, Lee Dam came and her mom began to question them but they always came up with opposite answers.

Shin Woo Yeo made the first move and confessed why Lee Dam was with her.

Later on, her mother explained that she was not worried about Lee Dam since she's a strong woman - she just wanted to know the truth. When she was satisfied, she went back to the airport for her flight.

Have you watched the latest "My Roommate is a Gumiho" episode? What can you say about it? Tell your thoughts with us in the comments!

For more K-Drama, K-Movie, and celebrity news and updates, keep your tabs open here at Kdramastars.

Kdramastars owns this article.

Written by Shai Collins


Auditor-Accountant Technician I Salary - $41,040.00 - $52,380.00 Annually Location - 96001, CA Job Type - Full-Time Regular Department - Auditor-Controller Department Job Number - 1203_AC_060721 Closing - 6/20/2021 11:59 PM Pacific SALARY INFORMATION Auditor-Accountant Technician I: $3,420 - $4,365 APPROXIMATE MONTHLY* / $19.73 - $25.18 APPROXIMATE HOURLY* *Please refer to the appropriate Bargaining Unit Memorandum of Understanding for potential future salary increases* ABOUT SHASTA COUNTY Shasta County offers all of the amenities of the big city while retaining a comfortable small town atmosphere. With its natural beauty, diversified culture, affordable housing, excellent educational system, abundance of recreational opportunities, and excellent quality of life, Shasta County is a great place to live, work, and raise a family. ABOUT THE DEPARTMENT The Auditor-Controller serves as the chief accounting officer for the County. The office acts as ex-officio Auditor and/or Controller for various schools, special districts, and County joint powers agencies. The Auditor-Controller's office also draws warrants from and makes deposits to the County treasury, prepares County and some district payrolls, and provides accounting supervision over all County departments and districts maintaining funds in the County treasury. The Auditor-Controller's Office also tabulates the County Budget, accounts for property taxes and special assessments, apportions collections, and prepares financial reports and audits. ABOUT THE POSITION Under close supervision, interpret and process financial or statistical records submitted by County departments, schools, and independent special districts. This includes audit and approval of vendor payments, employee expense reimbursements, purchasing card reconciliations, deposits, and journals to ensure that they are consistent with existing policies and procedures. This position is the subject matter expert in the areas above and assists fiscal staff from other departments, schools, and special districts in learning the requirements for these processes. In addition, under general supervision, this position will perform complex bookkeeping or financial recordkeeping work involving the maintenance of financial and statistical records. DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS This is the entry level position in the Auditor-Accountant series in the Auditor-Controller's office. An incumbent in this class serves in the Auditor-Controller's office and has the responsibility for the independent maintenance and processing of financial or fiscal records and transactions involving a variety of items submitted in different forms, requiring examination of accounting details and supporting documentation. Work entails solving difficult problems, acting as a final check, and serving as the subject matter expert on the countywide financial system. Incumbents may have extensive contact with employees, departments, special districts, schools, and the public, which entails providing an explanation of, and ensuring that departments follow, government regulations, contract requirements, Shasta County and Auditor-Controller policies, collective bargaining agreements, and generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). With considerable latitude, incumbents are responsible for the accuracy and timely processing of vendor payment requests, contract payments, purchasing card payments, deposit postings, and journals. An Auditor-Accountant Technician I may be delegated responsibility to act for the supervisor in that person's absence. Positions in this class may be required to supervise clerical assistants with such supervision usually being limited to the assignment and review of work. Incumbents serve in the Auditor-Controller's office and are required to have a broad knowledge of the functions of individual County departments and are responsible for the review, audit, correction, and feedback of work submitted by others in the County, cities, schools, or special districts. Training and feedback to members outside of the Auditor-Controller's office is a critical function of all audit positions. EXAMPLES OF ESSENTIAL DUTIES Audit, review, and verify various financial transactions for accuracy, correct account coding, and compliance with State Controller guidelines, GAAP, state regulations, County policies, and Auditor-Controller policies; approve financial transactions for posting to ledgers or accounts utilizing automated or manual systems; work with County departments, schools, special districts, and vendors, to research, resolve, reconcile, and make adjustments for discrepancies between payments, receipts, or various accounts; maintain expenditure and revenue records, including monitoring budgets, conformance to contract terms, checking and balancing records for arithmetic errors, etc.; process employee reimbursements and documentation ensuring they are correct and in the format required for public disclosure; process payroll and personnel related transactions for independent special districts and schools; manage year-end cut-off procedures for accounts payable; audit and appropriately apply coding to transactions for year-end reporting requirements (accruals, 1099-MISC reporting); assist with research, testing, and implementation of upgrades to the finance and/or payroll modules of the countywide financial system; provide orientation, assistance, and ongoing training for department and special district fiscal staff regarding the County's financial system and procedures; provide technical assistance and accounting support for County departments and special district; perform other related duties as assigned. TYPICAL QUALIFICATIONS Any combination of education and experience sufficient to directly demonstrate possession and application of the following: Knowledge of: Generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and State Controller's Guide to Accounting for Counties; principles and practices of accounting and mathematical computations; Shasta County organization, operations, policies, and procedures; Shasta County accounting and budget systems; personal computers utilizing a variety of software applications; office methods, procedures, and equipment; procedures, practices, and terminology used in bookkeeping, financial, and statistical record keeping; business English usage, spelling, grammar, and punctuation; principles and techniques of supervision and training may be required for certain assignments.



Ability to: Perform difficult clerical accounting work involving independent judgment, accuracy, and speed; assume responsibility for complex records utilizing computerized and/or manual systems; make decisions in procedural matters and provide corrective feedback; assemble and organize data and prepare and maintain accurate and complete financial and statistical records and reports; operate standard office equipment including computerized systems to enter and/or retrieve data; recommend work improvements as necessary; establish and maintain cooperative working relationships with other departments, cities, schools, special districts, outside agencies, coworkers, and the public; communicate effectively orally and in the development of written documents, reports, and financial information; train and schedule the work of staff as required for some assignments; maintain confidentiality; type and 10-key accurately at a moderate rate of speed; interact with the public, county departments, schools, cities, special districts, and other agencies; handle multiple tasks with shifting priorities. These standards are typically attained with two (2) years of experience preparing, processing, and maintaining accounting documents and records in a position where these activities were the primary duties of the position and which provides the required knowledge and abilities listed above. Education, professional training, or professional certificates that are directly related to the knowledge and abilities standards may be substituted. SPECIAL REQUIREMENT A valid State of California driver's license is required. IDEAL CANDIDATE The ideal candidate will have two years of experience preparing, processing, and maintaining accounting documents and records in a position where accounting or financial duties were the primary responsibility and/or will have a college degree that includes the successful completion of four college level accounting courses. SUPPLEMENTAL QUESTIONS Responses to the following must be submitted with a completed application. Do you have two years of experience preparing, processing, and maintaining accounting documents and records, which provides the required knowledge and abilities listed above? Yes___No___ If yes to question #1, please LIST the names, dates, and duties of each position where you obtained the experience. If none, please type "n/a." Please provide a LIST of each college level accounting course successfully completed. If none, please type "n/a." Provide your understanding of the difference between an accounting position that has audit responsibilities versus an accounting position that does not. What experience, education or training have you had that demonstrate you would be a good candidate for an auditing position in the Auditor-Controller's Office? If none, please type "n/a." Being able to communicate, provide positive corrective feedback, and facilitate ongoing department training is critical to being successful in this position. Please give an example that demonstrates your strong communication skills and the ability to handle difficult conversations with tact and professionalism. I understand if I answered "yes" to the above questions, but did not give the requested details, my application may be considered incomplete and could screen out? Yes___No___ PHYSICAL DEMANDS AND WORK ENVIRONMENT The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions. While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to sit and use hands to finger, handle, or feel. The employee frequently is required to talk or hear. The employee is required to speak fluent English. The employee is occasionally required to stand and walk. The employee must occasionally lift and/or move up to 25 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision and color vision. The noise level in the work environment is usually moderate. OTHER CONSIDERATIONS All new employees are required to have their paycheck directly deposited to a bank account.

Some positions may require a valid California driver's license and acceptable driving record according to County policy.

Reasonable accommodations may be made for those persons who are disabled under the Americans with Disabilities Act to perform the essential functions of the position.

As part of the selection process, all individuals provided with a preliminary offer of employment with Shasta County will be subject to a background investigation, including a criminal history check (primarily completed through the taking of fingerprints). An image of your fingerprints will be captured and sent to the California Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The resulting report of your conviction history, (if any), will be evaluated along with the other information received in connection with your application. Except as otherwise required by law, a criminal conviction will not necessarily disqualify you from the position. The nature of the offense, the date of the offense, the surrounding circumstances, and the relevance of the offense to the position applied for may, however, be considered.

Based on the results of the background investigation and criminal history check, applicants may then be provided with an offer of employment conditioned on the results of a medical examination, which includes drug/alcohol testing. Shasta County participates in E-Verify. For more information click here (Download PDF reader). If you do not have internet access, contact Personnel at (530) 225-5515 to request a flier. In accordance with Government Code Section 3100, County employees, in the event of a disaster are considered disaster workers and may be asked to respond accordingly.

Positions in this classification are covered by a collective bargaining agreement between the County and the United Public Employees of California (UPEC)  General Unit. Employees in this classification are covered under the CalPERS retirement program. Depending on the provisions of the California Public Employees Pension Reform Act (PEPRA) and other applicable laws, an employee in this classification will be covered under one of the following CalPERS retirement formulas: (1) 2% at 55, (2) 2% at 60, or (3) 2% at 62. An employee in this classification will also contribute up to 8.75% of his/her pay to this plan,or will contribute such other amount to the plan as authorized by PEPRA and other applicable laws. Please visit our employees benefit page at Employee Benefits for additional information regarding benefits and CalPERS coverage information. The provisions in this flyer and on the Countys website are for information purposes only. To the extent the provisions of the flyer or the Countys website are inconsistent with PEPRA and other applicable laws, PEPRA and other applicable laws shall govern. APPLICATION AND SELECTION PROCEDURES Shasta County Personnel will accept applications and responses to the supplemental questions until 11:59 p.m., on June 20, 2021. A Resume and/or Cover Letter will be accepted in addition to the application form but will not serve as a substitute for a completed application. It is not acceptable to complete the application with statements such as, Refer to Resume and/or Cover Letter, or See Attached Resume and/or Cover Letter the employment application must be completed in its entirety prior to submission. Incomplete applications will not be processed. Closing date postmarks or faxes will NOT be accepted. This recruitment will establish a list that may or may not be used by other departments. Prior applicants must reapply to be considered. Applicants will be screened and those considered best qualified will be invited to appear for an oral and/or written examination. Meeting the announced requirements does not guarantee inclusion into the selection process. Depending upon the number of applications received, the selection process may consist of additional application screening, written and/or practical exam(s), oral interview, or any combination thereof. Veterans' Credit: Veterans (as defined by California Government Code section 18973) who have been discharged from military service under conditions other than dishonorable and who receive a passing score on all components of the employment examinations (up to and including oral examinations) shall receive credit for an additional five points to be added to their final examination score. To be considered for this credit, a veteran MUST provide a copy of his or her discharge document (DD-214 or equivalent) and information as to the type of discharge (honorable, dishonorable, etc.) WITH THE EMPLOYMENT APPLICATION ON OR BEFORE THE FINAL FILING DATE. Applicants are encouraged to apply on-line by clicking APPLY NOW or submit an application to the Shasta County Personnel Office. Arrangements may be made to accommodate applicants with disabilities. Requests for accommodations may be made to the Shasta County Personnel Office by the filing deadline posted on this bulletin. Shasta County does not discriminate on the basis of disability. If you feel you are being denied service based on a disability, our ADA Coordinator may be reached at (530) 225-5515; relay service (800) 735-2922; fax (530) 225-5345. SHASTA COUNTY IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER

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"Parasite"star Song Kang Ho will go international again as he will be participating in the 74th Cannes Film Festival!

Cannes Film Festival Invites Actor Song Kang Ho to be Part of the Jury

Song Kang Ho will participate in the forthcoming 74th Cannes International Film Festival as a judge. The prestigious event is scheduled to take place in July 2021.

On June 10, as per a media report, Song Kang Ho received an offer from the jury in the said competition category from the Cannes Film Festival. Then, the "Parasite" actor expressed his gratitude and accepted the offer.

This will be the second time for a Korean actor to participate as a judge in the competition section of the known film fest.

Award-winning actress Jeon Do Yeon was the first South Korean actor to appear as a judge in the Cannes Film Festival in 2014.

"The King's Letters" star first had his visit and appearance in the Cannes Film Festival when his "Parasite" team attended the prestigious ceremony. They also won the Palme d'Or at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival in 2019.

Meanwhile, aside from being part of the jury, Song Kang Ho will represent their movie "Emergency Declaration," directed by Han Jae Rim.

The 54-year-old South Korean artist is the nation's representative, also dubbed as the "National Actor." He's received invitations from the famous Cannes Film Festival for his six films, "Monster" (2006), "Secret Sunshine" (2007), "The Good, The Bad, The Weird" (2008), "Thirst" (2009), "Parasite" (2019), and "Emergency Declaration" (2021).

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: 'Parasite' Director Bong Joon Ho Reveals That He Is Gearing Up for New Exciting Films

Things to Know about the 74th Cannes Film Festival

The international film festival will be held from July 6 to July 17 in Cannes, a place in Southern France.

For the meantime, there are no single Korean films included in this year's competition. However the influence of the Korean film industry will still be present through the South Korean artists who will be attending the event.

Director of "In Front of Your Face" Hong Sang Soo is also expected to attend the Cannes premier section which was newly established this year.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: 'My Roommate is a Gumiho' Episode 6: Kim Do Wan and Kang Han Na Set Hyeri on a Blind Date

What can you say about Song Kang Ho's upcoming participation in the 74th Cannes Film Festival? Don't forget to share your thoughts with us in the comments!

For more K-Drama, K-Movie, and celebrity news and updates, keep your tabs open here at Kdramastars.

Kdramastars owns this article.

Written by Shai Collins
SALEM, Ore  Mark Nearman is now a former State Representative. In 59-1 vote the Salem area Republican was expelled from the Legislature. This is the first time in Oregons 160-year history that a member of the Legislature has been voted out.

Nearman is facing criminal charges for allowing protestors into the state capitol during a session that was closed to the public. There is also video that shows Nearman appear to plan the breach. He called the breach Operation Hall Pass.

Nearman has said repeatedly that the Legislature did not have legal authorization to keep the public out of the session. Nearman was the only House member not to vote in favor of his removal.
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SNAP Outreach Coordinator

The Rhode Island Community Food Bank is looking for a SNAP Outreach Coordinator responsible for connecting our member agencies and their guests to SNAP and other benefit programs. Qualified candidates must be comfortable with providing one-on-one support, public speaking, and capable of understanding the requirements for state and local assistance programs. Fluency in Spanish is required and experience working with diverse populations is a definite plus. A bachelors degree and extremely strong communication skills are required. See full job description at www.rifoodbank.org.

The Food Bank offers competitive salaries and benefits packages. The benefits package includes medical and dental benefits, employer-paid life and disability insurance, paid holidays, paid time off, a 401 (k) retirement plan with employer match, an employee educational assistance plan, a flexible spending plan, an employee assistance plan, and supplemental insurance.

Since 1982, the Rhode Island Community Food Bank has been distributing millions of pounds of food to those in need of assistance through our network of member agencies across the state.

The RICFB is an equal employment opportunity employer.

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EUGENE, Ore. -- Eugene residents are sharing their thoughts after a bill affecting the homeless population passed in the state legislature this week.

House Bill 3115 is headed to Gov. Kate Brown. It would allow homeless people to sit, lie, sleep and keep warm and dry in public places without facing punishment.

RELATED: OREGON LEGISLATURE APPROVES MEASURE TO PROTECT HOMELESS CAMPERS

Springtree Apartments in Eugene is located across the street from one of the most prevalent campsites on 13th Avenue and Chambers Street. Janice Workman, the apartment's manager, said they've seen negative impacts of homelessness.

"Trash is a big thing, trespassing is a big thing. We've had thefts from vehicles and from patios," said Workman. "I've had people who made appointments and drive by and call and say they are no longer interested."

People living in the apartments said they've also had negative experiences.

"At any given time, people are yelling, screaming, swearing," said resident Peter Strawbridge. "We care about homeless people here. We know Eugene is a compassionate place to be in particular. But there has to be a limit."

MORE: POTENTIAL EUGENE HOMELESS CAMPING/PARKING SITES REVEALED

However, advocates believe this legislation is an important first step to solving the homeless crisis. Heather Sielicki is the development manager at Carry It Forward, an organization seeking to bridge the gap in unhoused services.

"The laws have to consider the impact of enforcement on those experiencing homelessness," said Sielicki. "We want them to have housing. But when governments don't provide appropriate care, we don't have a way to hold them accountable."

Among those championing the bill was Jimmy Jones, executive director of the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency, which assists those experiencing homelessness.

The bill before you will regulate the time, place, and manner that public camping can be policed. It will give us a chance to give the people living in these conditions a little dignity, a few more services, and it will give us a chance to show that we believe that the Constitution applies to all of us, Jones testified to a House committee in March.

Community members said they believe everyone should have a place to live. However, many said they believe this bill would make the homeless problem worsen.

"I think it would promote them from coming all over the place," said Eugene resident Ryan McKinnon.
EUGENE, Ore.  A Eugene man who was reported missing after not returning from a beach trip was located Friday afternoon.

Officials say Adam Specht, 56, has been transported to an area hospital for evaluation.

He had last been seen at about 9 a.m. on Thursday. He had told family members he was headed to the coast, but he has not returned to his home in North Eugene.

His vehicle and cell phone were found in the North Jetty parking lot near Florence.

Family members told police its unusual for Specht to be away from home for a long time without contacting them, and they are worried for his well-being.

Eugene and Florence police, Siuslaw Valley Fire, and the United States Coast Guard have been assisting with the search, the Lane County Sheriffs Office said.

Police said Specht is white, about 6 feet 2 inches tall, and 145 pounds. He has graying hair and a light gray beard.
By Ritah Kemigisa

RwandAir has announced that it has suspended flights to and from Entebbe International Airport in Uganda with immediate effect.

According to the New Times, the suspension follows a surge in Covid-19 cases in Uganda.

Affected customers have been asked to rebook and fly at a later date, once flights resume or request a refund.

Due to a surge in Covid-19 cases in Uganda, RwandAir announces the suspension of its flights to Entebbe effective 10 June 2021, until further notice, Rwandas national carrier said in a statement.

Uganda has seen an upsurge in new confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths in recent days, forcing the President on Sunday to order a partial lockdown for 42 days.

On Thursday, the ministry of health confirmed 1,438 cases of covid19 from tests carried out on June 8th 2021.

Uganda now has a total of 56,949 cases of covid19 with 402 related deaths.

The country has registered over 47,000 recoveries while currently, a total of 784 people are on admission.

757,664 people have so far been vaccinated against covid19.

Uganda received 964,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine from covax facility and the government of India.

Meanwhile, the ban on flights from Uganda to The United Arab Emirates also takes effect today.

According to the order issued recently, the ban applies to transit passengers, in addition to passengers who have travelled through Uganda, Zambia and DRC in the last 14 days prior to their arrival in the United Arab Emirates.
The Kakumiro Woman MP and Prime Minister-designate of Uganda, Hon. Robinah Nabbanja, has asked Ugandans to trust her because leadership comes from God. Nabbanja says Ugandans should give her some time before critiquing her so that she proves to them that she can work.

There is no leadership that does not come from God. People still undermine me because I am a woman but let them give me two years before they start critiquing, Hon Robinah Nabbanja said.

President Museveni earlier released the cabinet list and Hon Nabbanja was named the Prime minister something that caused many people of various social media platforms to doubt her capabilities. However, Museveni defended his choice of ministers saying that they are loyal and hardworking.

New cabinet members are loyal, hardworking When Jesus started his movement, there were intellectuals like the Pharisees. But, Jesus went for the fishermen. So, when you see my list, know that Im in the path of Jesus Christ, he said.

Nabbanja on the Mwasuze Mutya show on NTv assured Ugandans that she will work and promised not to embarrass women.

Women have proven to work when given opportunities. Kadaga has been my boss and she has done some good work. Jennifer Musisi also tried. I will work, I wont embarrass you, she said.

She has also revealed that people should stop saying that she has no experience because she has worked with a team of experts before, something that has greatly made her popular.

I worked with a team of experts including auditors, lawyers and we audited the Auditor Generals office and we made Parliament transparent. The audit committee made me popular and I believe thats how I got appointed Health Minister for State, Robinah Nabbanja emphasized.

Hon Robinah Nabbanja becomes the first female prime minister of Uganda. She was born in Kakumiro, Kamusenene and she is the 7th born of 11 children. Hon Nabbanja grew up in a regular homestead and was raised by her father who was a farmer and tailor.
Cruinniu na nOg, the annual day of creativity for children and young people is taking place this Saturday (June 12).

Craobh Osrai, Marble City Branch of Comhaltas, is delighted to be getting involved in this years event by organising free masterclass videos featuring a number of traditional musical instruments.

Given the Covid regulation guidelines, the masterclasses were pre-recorded in the Lanigan Room at Rothe House, Kilkenny with celebrated traditional musicians Majella Bartley and Jackie OConnor. The recordings consist of 30 minutes of whistle for beginners/improvers and one hour of flute for intermediates with Majella and one hour of concertina classes with Jackie. The recordings will be available to access for free via the Craobh Osrai branchs social accounts - Facebook (@OsraiComhaltas) / Twitter (@ComhaltasKK).

Craobh Osrai has been teaching Irish music and promoting the Irish culture to young people in the local community since 1987 and welcome any opportunity to encourage young people to get involved. PRO Nicholas Dunphy remarked We were delighted to welcome Jackie and Majella to Kilkenny to record these masterclasses and on behalf of the branch I would like to thank them both for taking the time to visit the Marble City. We are thrilled to be taking part in Cruinniu na nOg this year and to able to make these masterclasses available to anybody who is interested. Our involvement in this years event was made possible by the support of Kilkenny County Council and Creative Ireland and we would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their support in making these recordings and also to extend our appreciation to Rothe House for providing us with a beautiful venue to record in.
One way to avoid a post-Covid economic black hole is to invest in space exploration, recommends a secondary school student who has just been named Young Economist of the Year overall winner 2021.

Hugo Phelan is the son of Tom and Sara Phelan, from Kilkenny. The second-year student at Limerick boarding school Glenstal Abbey is the youngest-ever winner of this accolade.

This years event comprised entries from over 200 schools countrywide ranging from first year to Leaving Cert students.

Hugos winning project was a research study on government policy and space exploration. His research led him to recommend that the Irish government should invest in space exploration as part of its economic policies aimed at the Irish economic recovery from the effects of the coronavirus crisis.

Hugo was awarded a specially designed trophy and judges commented on the excellent research conducted in his project which reflected his great interest in space and space technology from a young age.

Headmaster Fr Martin Browne said: We are all very proud of Hugo here at Glenstal Abbey School.

Principal Carmel Honan said: We are delighted with Hugos achievement as he has always been a boy who strives for excellence in everything he does.

Glenstal has a proud history in the Young Economist of the Year competition since it was founded in 2013.

Other success stories from the Murroe-based school this year was TY student Daniel Hughes from Ahane. He was awarded a gold medal for his project on the current housing crisis. TY student Aonghus Cooke, Galway, received a bronze medal for his research on the economic effects of the coronavirus.
There's a new Mayor of Kilkenny today following the election of councillor Andrew McGuinness at City Hall this afternoon.

McGuinness was elected unopposed following nomination by councillor Joe Malone, seconded by councillor Martin Brett.

Councillor McGuinness is taking the Mayorship over from councillor John Coonan, who wished him well in the role.

Outgoing Deputy Mayor David Fitzgerald nominated councillor Martin Brett to assume his position, seconded by councillor Joe Malone.

There was an emotional atmosphere in City Hall during proceedings, not only owing to the political significance of the occasion but also due to the fact that the last time councillors had convened in the building was mid-summer last year.

In his speech, Mayor Andrew McGuinness paid tribute to outgoing Mayor John Coonan for serving with "incredible professionalism and decorum" in what was "a different year to be Mayor".

Councillor David Fitzgerald noted that outgoing Mayor Coonan remained a real Mayor when life went virtual during the pandemic.

"You were out and about, walking the streets, meeting people throughout these very difficult times, showing great leadership," he said.

Coonan explained the pride he had serving as Mayor in his outgoing address and commended frontline workers, local authority members, local taskforces, Kilkenny Chamber, Kilkenny Gardai and all those who kept the city and county running through the worst of the pandemic.

Local highlights under his Mayorship, Coonan noted, included the opening of the Butler Gallery, the new skatepark and riverside walk, outdoor seating provisions, the Irish Business Against Litter (IBAL) win for Kilkenny and the one-way system to enable social-distancing.

He was also honoured to be Mayor during the Friary Street Ambush Centenary and for the unveiling of the Thomas Woodgate Memorial statue.

Andrew McGuinness spoke emotionally about how much the Mayorship means to him during his acceptance speech.

"It's not about the person that wears the chain. It's about the people the chain represents and the responsibility that comes with it," he said.

"We have a duty to preserve the civic nature and values that have been preserved for generations in Kilkenny.

"We are entering a phase of new-found determination and you can sense the excitement as we get closer and closer to normality."

McGuinness paid special tribute to local musicians during his speech, who he felt were let down during the pandemic and pledged to represent them as Mayor.

He also commended the work of local publicans, the Kilkenny Vintners' Association and President of the Vintners' Anthony Morrisson for their role in helping to get the Smithwick's Experience to a stage where "there is light at the end of the tunnel".

"Kilkenny has done particularly well with coping with Covid," McGuinness said, insisting that there's no reason why this should not continue to be the case going forward.

"Mental health is the next big challenge," he emphasised, "and young people are particularly affected".

Andrew's father, John McGuinness TD, was in attendance and Andrew thanked him for instilling in him a passion and pride in the city.

He also paid tribute to his partner, children and wider family members for their continued support, noting that he was honoured to contribute further to the McGuinness legacy in local politics.

Cllr Eugene McGuinness personally paid his dues to the new Mayor.

"I stand here as the son of Mick McGuinness and I know he'd be proud of you today," he said.

Cllr Maria Dollard commended the new Mayor on behalf of herself and Minister Malcolm Noonan noting that Andrew brings with him "passion, interest and support" to the role.

Speaking as newly elected Deputy Mayor, councillor Martin Brett spoke of how his many years in office in local politics has never softened his resolve to represent local people.

"I've enjoyed every second I've ever had the honour of serving here," he told members.

"I look forward to working alongside Andrew who has accrued a wealth of experience over the years and who will no doubt work tirelessly in the role."
MASON CITY, Iowa - In the last month, area farmers have had to deal with two extremes in weather: the frost over Memorial Day weekend, and the extreme heat we're under right now. Now, the weather is putting some stress not only on crops, but also wallets.

Dave Bernhardt with Mason City All-Risk Insurance has been fielding calls from concerned farmers about how this year's crop will turn out as the summer progresses. Before turning the crop into silage, replanting or any other actions, he urges farmers to notify their agents immediately. In addition, having documentation like seed receipts is crucial to have on hand, as your claim could be denied without it.

"An agent will submit a claim, it doesn't cost anything to submit a claim. A company person or adjuster will call you and tell you the hoops you'll have to jump through to complete your replant or the rules of the policy."

With the wild weather pattern this year, he says a policy will arguably be one of the most important documents for farmers to have on hand.

"We have a certain amount of bushels covered, on every farm every field, at a set price per bushel. As these market prices increase, many of these policies will increase also."
MASON CITY, Iowa  A broken tree limb is being blamed for starting a house fire in Mason City.

Firefighters were called to the 900 block of Tennessee Place at 10:17 pm on Wednesday. Crews arrived to see fire coming from the roof where electrical wires entered the structure. The flames were extinguished and damage was limited to the attic of the house.

The Mason City Fire Department says a tree limb broke off and fell on the electrical service line to the home and that is was started the fire.

Firefighters were on the scene for less than two hours.
MASON CITY, Iowa - The searing heat outside can cause exhaustion in any profession that's primarily outdoors. That also goes for first responders.

At the Mason City Fire Department, hydration is key during extreme heat events. When it comes to gear, it's a full set of standard gear, complete with helmet, fire jacket and boots, no matter what the weather is outside. With working fires, extra personnel are requested immediately.

Thanks to having an in-house paramedic and EMS service, firefighter/paramedic Tim Cahalan says it takes a coordinated effort to make sure first responders get attention immediately if the first signs of trouble like heat exhaustion arise.

"We're pretty good at monitoring heat stress and recognizing if someone needs a break or rehab. People are given 10-15 minutes to take a break and get our vitals analyzed, and we can switch out with other personnel that are fresh."

With this early season heat in place, could it fuel more fires? Cahalan says some recent rainfall last month has helped lower the risk.

"Depending on how dry we stay, we could go back to those levels. Right now, it seems we're still green enough that we're not dealing with the wild or grass fires."

While they have run their typical amount of medical calls, Cahalan says on the shifts he's worked, he has yet to see any increase in heat-related calls.
Police Patrol Officer

The City of Scottsbluff will conduct a Civil Service Examination to establish a Police Officer Eligible List. Seeking individuals with integrity who are committed to public service, dedicated and professional, with a willingness and compassion to work together with the citizens of Scottsbluff to maintain a healthy and safe community.

Job requirements: High School Graduate or GED, must be 21 years of age by date of appointment, possess a valid driver's license, and must pass a written exam, an oral interview, a psychological exam, a physical agility test, and extensive background check. Officers currently certified in Nebraska will be granted lateral entry upon completion of FTO program. Officers certified in other states will be granted lateral entry upon successful completion of NLETC requirements for reciprocity certification and FTO.

Application deadline: 4:00 P.M., Friday, August 6, 2021

We are an Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, gender, age, veteran status, political affiliation, sexual orientation, marital status or disability (in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act) with respect to employment opportunities.

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MILWAUKEE (AP)  A federal judge has halted a loan forgiveness program for farmers of color in response to a lawsuit alleging the program discriminates against white farmers.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports U.S. District Judge William Griesbach in Milwaukee issued a temporary restraining order Thursday suspending the program from President Joe Biden' administration for socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers. The program pays up to 120% of direct or guaranteed farm loan balances for Black, American Indian, Hispanic, Asian American or Pacific Islander farmers.

Conservative law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty filed suit in April on behalf of 12 farmers from Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas, Oregon and Kentucky.
MASON CITY, Iowa  An arrest has been made for a winter robbery in Mason City.

Dalles Benjamin Dodge, 43, is charged with one count of second-degree robbery.

The criminal complaint states that Dodge forced his way into a home in the 400 block of East State Street on January 29, damaging the door. Dodge is accused of then stealing items from the home while the homeowner was assaulted by another person.

The criminal complaint was filed Tuesday and Dodge was arrested on Thursday. Online court records do not list any charges filed against the person who allegedly assaulted the homeowner.
NORTHWOOD, Iowa  A second sentence is handed down for a big drug bust in Worth County.

Alexander Jordan Kew, 28 of Cedar Rapids, has been given seven days in jail and ordered to pay $830 in restitution. Kew pleaded guilty to possession of methamphetamine-1st offense, eluding, and driving while barred.

Kew and Constance Myah Jennings of Corwith were arrested on October 27, 2020, after an attempted traffic stop on Highway 65 turned into a chase to Villa Woods Apartments. Authorities said they found a "large" amount of methamphetamine and a .357 revolver were found in Kew and Jennings' vehicle.

Jennings previously pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana-1st offense and was given two days of jail time and a $250 fine.
STILLWATER, Minn. (AP)  Prosecutors have charged two men in a fatal shooting at a Woodbury graduation party.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that 19-year-old Jaden Townsend and 23-year-old Enrique Davila were charged late Thursday in Washington County with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and various assault charges in the death of 14-year-old Demaris Hobbs-Ekdahl on Saturday. According to court documents, Townsend and Davila remain at large. A 17-year-old referred to as a juvenile defendant is also at large.

The charging documents don't provide a motive for the slaying or say who fired the fatal shot. Hobbs-Ekdahl's stepfather has been charged for allegedly firing the shots that started the incident.
WORTH COUNTY, Iowa  A popular recreation spot has been closed to the public after days of bad behavior.

The Worth County sheriffs Office says it was called out to Kuennens Quarry just after 6 pm Thursday for an 18-year-old male who was passed out and turning blue. CPR was performed on the teen until emergency personnel arrived. The Sheriffs Office says NARCAN, a medicine used to treat drug overdoses, was used on Collin Scot Clark Johnson, 18 of Hallandale, Minnesota, and he recovered.

Johnson was then arrested for public intoxication. Mason City Fire Ambulance, Northwood Fire and Rescue, and the Worth County Conservation Department assisted with this incident.

The Sheriffs Office says it has responded to numerous problems at Kuennens Quarry since June 1, including vandalism, thefts, fights, drug sales, brandishing of firearms, assaults, littering, and alcohol violations. Because of this, Worth County Conservation says it is closing Kuennens Quarry until these recurring issues can be discussed and plans put in place to prevent their reoccurrence.
Peninsula Pride Farms is a producer-led watershed-protection group in southern Door and Kewaunee counties. It has hosted two field events in spring 2021. Called Conservation Conversations the informal events provide farmers an opportunity to openly discuss topics. Mike Vandenhouten, a crop farmer in southern Door County, hosted Apr. 24 a Conservation Conversation at his farm to discuss the next steps after planting 100 pounds of oats and 2.5 pounds of tillage radish as a cover crop in fall 2020. He recently began planting oats as a cover crop in fall 2020 and is no-till-planting this spring.
Shenandoah, IA (51601)

Today

Intervals of clouds and sunshine. Hot. High 94F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

A few clouds from time to time. Low 64F. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph.
This is my favorite photo from our two days in New York City last week with our granddaughter Sara who turned 5 at the end of May. We took her to see the Statue of Liberty for her birthday because she had learned about it at preschool and really wanted to see it.
Hold the line: Uncle Sam listens in to unsuspecting European allies

People's Daily) 13:37, June 11, 2021

Citing news from Danish state broadcaster DR, Reuters reported on May 30 that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) used a partnership with Denmarks foreign intelligence unit to spy on senior officials of neighboring countries, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Swedish Defence Minister Peter Hultqvist told Swedish media that he demanded full information. Norwegian Defence Minister Frank Bakke-Jensen meanwhile told the media that he took the allegations seriously. A spokesperson for the German chancellery said it only became aware of the allegations when asked about them by journalists, and declined to comment further.

According to the investigation, which covered the period from 2012 to 2014, the NSA used Danish information cables to spy on senior officials in Sweden, Norway, France and Germany, including former German opposition leader Peer Steinbruck who told media that he thought it was grotesque that friendly intelligence services are indeed intercepting and spying on top representatives of other countries. Politically I consider it a scandal, Steinbruck said.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Liang Jun)
Kendallville, IN (46755)

Today

Plentiful sunshine. High 79F. Winds NW at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

Clear skies. Low 54F. NNW winds at 10 to 20 mph, decreasing to less than 5 mph.
(ST. JOSEPH Mo.) Much like the pioneers of the old west, many people right now are looking to get out and explore, and more are choosing St. Joseph as a starting point.

Gina Camp and her family said they just had to stop in on their way home to Los Angeles, she said the city has left a good impression.

"We drove from Kansas here on our trip back to the west coast because we wanted to stop into this town specifically," Camp said.

"Its a very historic feel. "I really think this area is pretty."

The Pony Express Museum is seeing a major boost in business as more people from all around the country and beyond are showing up.

"I wouldn't say its the normal anymore, its just the new fun." Cindy Daffron, executive director, Pony Express Museum said.

The boost has also been seen in the revenue for the museum, after a financial drought last year.

Daffron said in the past year she's seen revenue increase ten-fold.

Natives of the city whove left for bigger cities said they havent forgotten the history here.

"I think St. Joe has so much to add," Elaine Taylor St. Joseph native and Texas resident said. "It is literally the jumping-off place for the west."

Travellers said they're also eager to see the Jesse James Museum and experience our local cuisine.
ROME, JUN 11 - An 18-year-old woman died at Genoa's San Martino hospital on Thursday after suffering a blood clot following vaccination with the AstraZeneca jab on May 25. A causal link between the death of Camilla Canepa and the vaccination has not been established, however. Canepa, who was from the town of Sestri Levante in Liguria, was given the jab during a vaccination 'open day' for over 18s. The case has raised concerns about the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine on young people. The AstraZeneca jab has been approved for all over-18s, but in Italy it is only recommended for over-60s due to links to rare cases of blood clots in younger people. This, however, is not an outright ban and the AstraZeneca jab is widely being used in Italy for under-60s, especially since the government made it possible for all adult age groups to book vaccinations, not just the oldest and people considered vulnerable. The question has come to the fore with many young people keen to get vaccinated on a voluntary basis to obtain the Green Pass enabling them to travel and attend certain events. Liguria Governor Giovanni Toti said Friday that Canepa's case should not be used for point scoring, stressing that that "the option of using AstraZeneca for everyone on a voluntary basis was not invented by the regional governments or by a Dr Strangelove, it was suggested by the top technical-scientific bodies in order to increase vaccinations and, therefore, prevent deaths". (ANSA).
(see related story on weekly monitoring report) ROME, JUN 11 - Most of Italy's regions are set to be classed as low COVID-19 risk white zone next week thanks to improved COVID-19 data in the weekly coronavirus monitoring report of the health ministry and the Higher Health Institute (ISS), sources said Friday. As a result five regions, Emilia Romagna, Lombardy, Lazio, Piedmont and Puglia, plus the autonomous province of Trento, will become white zones on Monday joining Abruzzo, Liguria, Umbria, Veneto, Molise, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Sardinia. This means that many of the nation's coronavirus restrictions can be eased in these regions, except for the obligation to wear facemasks and respect physical distancing. The rest of the country is set to remain a moderate-risk yellow zone in the nation's tiered system of COVID restrictions. Health Minister Roberto Speranza will sign the orders revising the region's COVID-risk classifications on the basis of the data in the monitoring report, which will be presented later on Friday. (ANSA).




Salary $37,460.80 - $57,200.00 Annually Location Arlington, VA Job Type Full-Time Department Department of Parks and Recreation Job Number 2152-21C-DPR-KH Closing 6/24/2021 11:59 PM Eastern Position Information

NOTE: This recruitment may be used to fill comparable vacancies within Arlington County.



Arlington County's Department of Parks and Recreation is seeking an experienced Trades Worker to perform park maintenance functions within a specified geographic Neighborhood Service Area. These employees work with a team engaged in refuse collection, basic horticultural functions, park maintenance, and enhancement projects. The positions are in the Park Service Area Section of the Parks and Natural Resources Division.



Specific duties include: Using hand and power tools;

Driving tractors and trucks, including pickups, dump trucks and refuse trucks;

Cleaning rest rooms and picnic shelters;

Repairing park equipment;

Collecting refuse; and

Hauling materials; and

Reporting and recording completed work data into work order system using tablet.

The employees will interact on a regular basis with park users and during the winter months assists in snow removal. Work is conducted in a team environment and employees will periodically provide leadership to other trades workers for small projects, special assignments, maintenance and weather emergencies.

Selection Criteria

Minimum: Six (6) months' experience performing general labor duties.



Desirable: Preference may be given to candidates with experience one or more of the following: Operating dump trucks, pick-up trucks, refuse trucks and/or tractors

Providing training in general labor duties to other team members;

Cleaning and maintaining tools and vehicles; and

Possession of a valid Registered Technician license or other certified pesticide applicator certification.

Special Requirements

Applicant must possess, or obtain within nine months of appointment to this position, a valid Class "B" Commercial Driver's License (CDL). Any employee hired without this license will be appointed as a trainee, at grade 3, until the license is obtained. The applicant must authorize Arlington County to obtain, or the applicant must provide a copy of the applicant's official state/district driving record. Any offer of employment will be contingent upon a favorable review of the applicant's driving record. Prior to the time of appointment, the successful applicant must pass a pre-employment drug screening. The successful applicant will be subject to drug screening, at such times during employment, as required by federal, state and local standards and policies. Applicant must obtain a valid Virginia Registered Technician's License within 180 days following appointment to this position if the applicant does not already possess a valid Certified Pesticide Applicator's License (Category 3A, 3B, or 6) or registered technician's license with the state of Virginia. Employee will be required to follow all applicable federal, state, and county safety requirements when performing duties and may be required to wear various types of personal protective equipment . Employee will be required and must have the ability to work outdoors in various weather conditions. The work environment includes exposure to drafts, noise, dust, grease and dirt with extended periods of sitting, bending, and lifting light to very heavy objects and equipment, weighing up to 50 pounds. A pre-hire background check will be made on all candidates who are selected for employment. It may include checks of the following: criminal record, driving record, education, professional licensure, and credit history. You may be required to sign a release authorizing the County to obtain your background information.

Additional Information

Work Hours : 40 hours week, core hours 6:30am - 3:00pm, Monday through Friday. Employee may be required to work some evening and weekend hours. Employee must be available for callback and holdover in emergency situations including those that are weather related.



Please complete each section of the application. A resume may be attached; however, it will not substitute for the completed application. Incomplete applications may not be considered. Arlington County Government employee benefits depend on whether a position is permanent, the number of hours worked, and the number of months the position is scheduled.



Specific information on benefits and conditions of employment can be found on the Arlington County Human Resources Department website: (see application details)



Permanent, Full-Time Appointments

All jobs are permanent, full-time appointments unless otherwise stated in the announcement. The following benefits are available:



Paid Leave : Vacation leave is earned at the rate of four hours biweekly. Leave accrual increases every three years until eight hours of leave are earned biweekly for twelve or more years of service. Sick leave is earned at the rate of four hours biweekly. There are eleven paid holidays each year.



Health and Dental Insurance : Three group health insurance plans are offered - a network open access plan, a point-of-service plan, and a health maintenance organization. A group dental insurance plan is also offered. The County pays a significant portion of the premium for these plans for employees and their dependents. A discount vision plan is provided for eye care needs.



Life Insurance : A group term policy of basic life insurance is provided at no cost to employees. The benefit is one times annual salary. Additional life insurance is available with rates based on the employee's age and smoker/non-smoker status.



Retirement : The County offers three vehicles to help you prepare for retirement: a defined benefit plan, a defined contribution plan (401(a)), and a deferred compensation plan (457). The defined benefit plan provides a monthly retirement benefit based on your final average salary and years of service with the County. You contribute a portion of your salary on a pre-tax basis to this plan. General employees contribute 4% of pay; uniformed public safety employees contribute 7.5% of pay. Employees become vested in the plan at five years of service. The County also contributes to this plan.



For general employees, the County also contributes 4.2% of pay to a defined contribution plan (401(a)) . The County also matches your 457 contribution, up to $20 per pay period, in this plan. The 457 deferred compensation plan allows you to set aside money on either a pre-tax (457b) or post-tax (457 Roth) basis up to the IRS annual limit. New employees are automatically enrolled with a pre-tax contribution equal to 2% of your base pay.



Other Benefits: The County also offers health, dependent care, and parking flexible spending accounts; long-term care insurance; tuition assistance; transit and walk/bike to work subsidies; a college savings plan; wellness programs; training opportunities; and a variety of other employee benefits.



Permanent, Part-Time Appointments:

Part time employees who work ten or more hours per week receive paid leave and benefits in proportion to the number of hours worked per week.



Limited Term Appointments:

Benefits are the same as permanent appointments except that the employees do not achieve permanent status.



Temporary Regular Appointments:

Temporary regular employees who work 30 hours or more per week are eligible for health, dental, and basic life insurance as described above. They are also eligible for vacation, sick leave, and paid holidays.



Temporary Seasonal and Occasional Appointments:

Temporary employees who work on a seasonal basis or variable hours receive sick leave, but do not normally receive other paid leave or benefits. Exceptions are noted in individual announcements.


(ANSAmed) - MILAN, JUN 11 - Carabinieri police in Milan on Friday arrested a 34-year-old Ghanaian man for allegedly murdering a 25-year-old Nigerian woman, Tunde Blessing, on May 12. The victim was found dead on May 12 in a green area next to a road in the Milanese district of Mazzo di Rho. Tunde Blessing in mid-April had broken up with the suspect after a year-long romantic relationship. Milan Carabinieri police placed the man in preventive custody at the order of preliminary investigations judge (GIP) Angela Laura Minerva. An autopsy on the woman indicated she had been murdered, police said. The man has not yet been named. (ANSAmed).
ROME, JUN 11 - Italian police said Friday that they have busted a gang that supplied false documents to Islamist terrorists and foreign fighters, arresting seven people in Milan and other cities in Lombardy. The group allegedly provided fake documents to around 15 terrorists and sold them to many others. It was allegedly headed by Turko Arsimekov, a 35-year-old Chechen who was arrested in Varese last year and is linked to Kujtimi Fejzulai, the gunman who killed four people in a shooting spree in Vienna on November 2. (ANSA).
LODI, JUN 11 - A man was in serious condition in hospital at Pavia Friday after violent clashes at a workers' sit-in near Lodi on Thursday night, local sources said. The sit-in was staged at a logistics hub at Tavazzano con Villavesco by workers who had been fired by another logistics company based in Piacenza, FedEx TNT. Union sources said the workers, on their arrival at Tavazzano, found suspected private security guards who "attacked them with tasers and truncheons". Nine people needed medical treatment on the spot after the clashes, union sources said. One man was taken to Pavia's Policlinico Hospital with a "serious facial trauma," the sources said. (ANSA).
(ANSAmed) - ROME, JUN 11 - Police in Castel Volturno, near Caserta, on Friday said they have placed a couple under house arrest for allegedly abusing children at a local nursery school. The pupils were not educated and nurtured but punished violently, including breaking their nails, putting chili pepper in their eyes and keeping them segregated in dark rooms, investigative sources said. The suspects are a Ghanaian married couple aged 35, who managed the illegal nursery school, the sources explained. The alleged victims, between the ages of five and six, mainly of Nigerian origin, reported the abuse, helping police in the investigation that led to the arrest of the couple, whose identity has not been released yet. There have been several cases of physical abuse of nursery school children in Italy over the past few years. (ANSAmed).
ROME, JUN 11 - Prosecutors in the Sardinian city of Oristano have opened a murder probe into the case of Marina Castangia, a 60-year-old hairdresser who went missing earlier this year. The woman's partner has been put under investigation to make it possible to search his home in the town of Mogorella. The woman's disappearance was reported to the police by her son and siblings, who said they had not herd from her since February. The partner said she went missing on May 1, sources said. (ANSA).
ENNA, JUN 11 - An Italian priest accused of sexually abusing children was sent to an 'immediate' trial on Friday. Father Giuseppe Rugolo of Enna in Sicily was arrested on April 27 on charges of abusing children in his care. He allegedly abused them during and after religious education lessons. He is on trial for sexual violence aggravated by taking advantage of the psychological inferiority of the victims. The trial starts on October 7. (ANSA).
ROME, JUN 11 - Italy's vaccination campaign has been unsettled by the case of an 18-year-old woman who died at Genoa's San Martino hospital on Thursday after suffering a blood clot following vaccination with the AstraZeneca jab on May 25. A causal link between the death of Camilla Canepa and the vaccination has not been established, however. Canepa, who was from the town of Sestri Levante in Liguria, was given the jab during a vaccination 'open day' for over 18s. The case has raised concerns about the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine on young people. The AstraZeneca jab has been approved for all over-18s, but in Italy it is only recommended for over-60s due to links to rare cases of blood clots in younger people. This, however, is not an outright ban and the AstraZeneca jab is widely being used in Italy for under-60s, especially since the government made it possible for all adult age groups to book vaccinations, not just the oldest and people considered vulnerable. The question has come to the fore with many young people keen to get vaccinated on a voluntary basis to obtain the Green Pass enabling them to travel and attend certain events. Liguria Governor Giovanni Toti said Friday that Canepa's case should not be used for point scoring, stressing that "the option of using AstraZeneca for everyone on a voluntary basis was not invented by the regional governments or by a Dr Strangelove, it was suggested by the top technical-scientific bodies in order to increase vaccinations and, therefore, prevent deaths". Toti also made public a letter from the CTS panel of experts advising the government on its battle against COVID-19 that gave the green light to using the Astrazeneca jab for vaccination open days for people of all ages. The regions of Lazio and Umbria have halted use of the Astrazeneca jab in open days for under-60s pending clarification. Health Minister Roberto Speranza and CTS Coordinator Franco Locatelli.are set to speak about the situation on Friday. Canepa's organs, meanwhile, were removed from her body on Friday so they can be use for transplants, sources said. (ANSA).
ROME, JUN 11 - The Bank of Italy said Friday that it expects the Italian economy to grow by 4.9-5% this year, 4.5% in 2022 and 2.3% in 2023. It said the driving force of the recovery will be resurgent levels of investment, with consumer spending expanding more gradually. It said Italy's growth prospects were dependent to a large decree on the effective use of the cash coming from Europe to finance the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). It said these measures could lift GDP by around four percentage points in the 2021-2023 period. (ANSA).
ROME, JUN 11 - The government's CTS COVID panel on Friday said the AstraZeneca vaccine is strongly recommended for the over 60s while for those under 60 and has already had an AZ jab, the second dose will be with the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine. The ruling came after the death of an 18-year-old girl after getting her first AstraZeneca jab. CTS chief Franco Locatelli said one Italian in four had received both jabs and Health Minister Roberto Speranza said almost one in two had had the first one. Speranza said Friday he would sign an ordinance making Emilia Romagna , Lazio, Piemonte Puglia and the autonomous province of Trento low-COVID-risk white zones from Monday, saying 'we are on the right track, we have an incidence of 26 cases, second best in the EU". The four regions and the province will join Abruzzo, Liguria, Umbria, Veneto, Molise, Friuli Venezia Giulia and Sardinia, making two thirds of the Italian population, over 40 million people, subject to the lowest COVID restrictions. Speranza said the good results were the fruit of a vaccine rollout that has now seen almost one in two Italians get their first dose of the jab. (ANSA).
Magnolia, AR (71754)

Today

Partly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 74F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 74F. Winds light and variable.
New Delhi [India], June 9 (ANI): India administered more than 24 crore COVID-19 vaccine doses till today, informed the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

The country has administered cumulatively more than 24 crore (24,24,79,167) vaccine doses as per the 7 pm provision report on Wednesday.

19,24,924 beneficiaries of the age group 18-44 years received their first dose and 86,450 beneficiaries of the same age group received their second dose of COVID vaccine today.

Cumulatively, 3,38,08,845 persons across 37 States/UTs have received their first dose and a total of 4,05,114 have received their second dose since the start of Phase-3 of the vaccination drive. Bihar, Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal have administered more than 10 lakh beneficiaries of the age group 18-44 years for the first dose of COVID vaccine.

The total of 24,24,79,167 beneficiaries include 1,00,12,624 Healthcare Workers (HCWs) who have taken the first dose and 69,11,311 HCWs who have taken the second dose.

Adding up to the list, 1,64,71,228 Frontline Workers (FLWs) were administered their first dose and 87,51,277 FLWs were administered their second dose.

As many as 3,38,08,845 persons for 18-44 years of age group took the first jab and 4,05,114 persons for 18-44 years of age group took the second jab.

Also, 7,33,23,267 beneficiaries between 45 years to 60 years old were innoculated their first dose of vaccine and 1,16,22,718 beneficiaries between 45 years to 60 years old were innoculated with the second dose of vaccine.

Further, 6,16,38,580 persons above 60 years took the first jab and 1,95,34,203 persons above 60 years took the second jab of vaccine.

As on Day-145 of the vaccination drive (June 9, 2021), a total of 31,31,759 vaccine doses were given. 28,37,572 beneficiaries were vaccinated for first dose and 2,94,187 beneficiaries received second dose of vaccine as per the provisional report till 7 pm. (ANI)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
37-year-old Jasibi fled her hometown in Honduras after a gang killed her parents and gave her 24 hours to leave the country.



She headed north, hoping to seek asylum in the U.S., but was blocked by a Trump-era health order left in place by President Biden https://t.co/w9ZusRUd5o Reuters (@Reuters) June 10, 2021

(SocialLY brings you all the latest breaking news, viral trends and information from social media world, including Twitter, Instagram and Youtube. The above post is embeded directly from the user's social media account and LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body. The views and facts appearing in the social media post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY, also LatestLY does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.)
Emma Coronel Aispuro, the wife of Sinaloa Drug Cartel's Juaquin Guzman also known as "El Chapo," pleaded guilty to federal charges that stemmed out from assisting to run the notorious Mexican Drug Cartel.

Coronel Aispuro, a 31-year-old former beauty queen, pleaded guilty on Thursday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., according to an Al Jazeera report. Speaking through a Spanish translator before U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, CBS News reported that Coronel Aispuro admitted to the three criminal charges she was facing, including her involvement in her husband's rambling drug cartel.

READ NEXT: Idaho Mom Lori Vallow Accused of Killing Her 2 Children Committed to Mental Facility

Wife of "El Chapo" Pleads Guilty

Judge Contreras asked Coronel Aispuro whether she was involved in the charges the federal government filed against her that can be proven at trial, El Chapo's wife responded "yes." The former beauty queen pleaded guilty to three counts of conspiring to distribute illegal drugs, conspiring to launder money, and engaging in financial dealings with the Sinaloa drug cartel. She also admitted that she helped her husband escape from a prison in Mexico in 2015.

Because of this, Coronel Aispuro is facing a maximum of life imprisonment for the drug distribution charge. Meanwhile, a maximum of 20 years in prison can be sentenced against EL Chapo's wife for conspiring to launder money, while a maximum of 10 years of imprisonment for engaging in transactions with a designated foreign drug trafficker.

Apart from the sentences, Emma Coronel Aispuro was also subject to fines of more than $10 million for the three counts.

Meanwhile, Coronel Aispuro's attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman said that El Chapo's wife is at ease with her decision. Furthermore, Lichtman argued that his client had a "very minimal participant' in a larger scheme of the drug cartel and is not a cooperator.

Coronel Aispuro is being held without bond and is scheduled to be sentenced in September.

Joaquin Guzman's Wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro: Arrest and l"Life Before Being With "El Chapo"

Emma Coronel Aispuro was a former beauty queen and a journalism student. She had dual U.S.-Mexico citizenship. Coronel Aispuro became the wife of Joaquin Guzman also known as "El Chapo," who was a long-time leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel, and responsible for smuggling cocaine and other drugs in the United States. The former beauty queen's husband is currently held at a maximum-security prison located in Florence, Colorado.

Coronel Aispuro was arrested at Dulles International Airport, which is located outside Washington, in February. Prosecutor Anthony Nardozzi accused her of aiding her husband regarding the Sinaloa drug cartel's operation.

Furthermore, she was also accused by Nardozzi to cooperate with El Chapo's sons, to coordinate Guzman's prison break in 2015 through a one-mile-long underground tunnel.

But being the wife of El Chapo was not only her connection to Joaquin Guzman. It was reported that Emma Coronel Aispuro's father, Ines Coronel Barrera, was El Chapo's top lieutenants before he was arrested in Mexico in 2013.

READ MORE: Jasmine Hartin, Daughter-in-Law of British Billionaire Lord Michael Ashcroft, Set To Be Charged Over the Death of Belize Cop

WATCH: Emma Coronel, wife of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, pleads guilty to U.S. narcotics, conspiracy charges - from Los Angeles Times
Texas Governor Greg Abbott said the state of Texas would soon be starting the construction of border barriers in the areas where most migrants can easily cross the Rio Grande border with Mexico.

According to a Breitbart News report, Abbott noted that the barriers would enable state law enforcement to arrest migrants for violations of state law.

The Republican governor had pointed the blame on the Biden administration for the migration influx across the border, saying that it has shown that it will not step up and do its job.

Greg Abbott had picked Del Rio for the Border Summit due to the huge peak in illegal border crossings in the region, with the Del Rio Sector agents apprehending 27,890 migrants, a 1,118 percent increase over the May 2020 report of 2,289.

READ NEXT: Notorious Jalisco Cartel Eyed in Kidnapping, Killing of 3 Siblings in Mexico

Border Security Initiatives of Texas

Greg Abbott said that Texas lawmakers had allotted a $1 billion budget to support border security efforts. He also announced the creation of a new governor's task force on the border and homeland security, which he said will meet every two weeks to create a solution to make the border safer.

The task force will include members of his office, the attorney general's office, as well as the Texas Department of Public Safety, according to a Border Report.

Texas Division of Emergency Management, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and law enforcement and jail standards will also be joining the task force.

Abbott had made disaster declarations in 34 border counties due to the increased number of migrants trying to cross the border.

Migrant advocates responded to the move in the Rio Grande Valley by issuing their own counter-declaration. The advocates said that Abbott's move was an obvious attempt to distract from his failed leadership. They also asked for more support for those communities and not more law enforcement.

Meanwhile, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas, Kate Huddleston, called Abbott's plan "unlawful", adding that it threatens to harm families at the border and create trauma for young kids.

Huddleston said that the government is undermining the right to seek asylum by jailing those escaping danger and punishing them for seeking refuge in the U.S.

Border Crisis

In a statement, Greg Abbott earlier said that President Joe Biden's open-border policies had paved the way for dangerous gangs and cartels, as well as human traffickers.

The Texas governor noted that landowners along the border are seeing their property damaged and vandalized daily, adding that the Biden administration does nothing, New York Post reported.

Abbott also said that the president had abandoned the rule of law at the Texas border. He added that his disaster declaration had cost the state around $3.5 billion on border security since 2014.

The Texas governor also announced plans to legalize the criminalization of the manufacture or delivery of fentanyl.

In May, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that it had apprehended 180,034 migrants, mostly single adults, BBC News reported. The number slightly rose from 178,854 in April and 172,000 in March.

READ MORE: Mexican Drug Cartels Use TikTok to Smuggle Migrants, Recruit Them for Crimes, Abbott Says

WATCH: INSIDE LOOK: Life in Texas Border Town Amid Surge - From CBN News






After walking into the produce section of a Publix supermarket filled with lunchtime shoppers in Florida, a shooter fatally shot a woman and her grandson before turning the gun on himself, police said Thursday, June 10.

The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office said the shooting happened at around 11:30 a.m. ET in a Publix supermarket at 1100 block of Royal Palm Beach Boulevard in Royal Palm Beach, which is around 15 miles west of Palm Beach in Florida.

Publix Shooting Incident in Florida

Based on the officials at the scene, NBC News reported that a gun was found close to the body of the man who they believe had injuries that were self-inflicted.

On late Thursday, the sheriff's office identified the gunman as Timothy J. Wall, 55, of Royal Palm Beach, Florida. But the police have yet to identify the two victims, a woman and a toddler, who would have turned two years old this month.

Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office Spokeswoman Teri Barbera said investigators believe that the woman was shopping with her grandson when the Publix shooting incident happened.

Barbera noted that authorities are now trying to determine the relationship between the woman and the gunman. She added that it is possible they knew each other.

One of the witnesses, Juan Guardia, said he was near the area when the shooting incident happened. Guardia recalled that a woman Publix worker was shouting to run because there was a shooting incident.

The witness also shared that everything happened fast and everyone was running, and some of the employees were crying.

During a news conference, Barbera said that detectives were interviewing witnesses and reviewing surveillance-camera video as part of the shooting incident's investigation.

As of Thursday night, authorities said there was "no known motive or relationship between the gunman and his victims."

READ NEXT: Emma Coronel Aispuro, wife of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman Pleads Guilty to Drug Charges in U.S., Faces Potential Life Sentence

Royal Palm Beach's Witnesses and Residents

Meanwhile, onlookers present outside the shopping plaza expressed that they were shocked about the deadly Publix shooting. It is also happened days before the 5th anniversary of the deadly rampage at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which killed 49 people and wounded 53.

One of the regulars at the shopping center, Tracy Greene, said the place is a friendly Publix, and it is crazy that the shooting incident happened there, the USA Today reported.

Even Tracey Cohron, another Royal Palm Beach resident who often shops at the Publix, said she has been in the place for more than 20 years, and she cannot believe what happened. She noted that she knows so many people who work there, and it is scary. And if she left her home earlier, she added that she might be inside the store when the shooting happened.

County Commissioner Melissa McKinlay expressed sympathy for the victims, families, those who witnessed the shootings, and first-responders. She said there is a need for a conversation to prevent another shooting violence.

The sheriff's office sought to calm people's worst fears because of the incident. They posted on social media that detectives are investigating the shooting that took place inside the Publix.

They also noted that deputies located three individuals who died from gunshot wounds upon arrival - one adult male, one adult female, and a toddler.

They have also confirmed that the shooter is one of the deceased. They also said that it was no longer an active shooter situation, Palm Beach Post reported.

READ MORE: California Cops on Leave After Video Caught Footage of Suspect Punched, Kicked During Arrest

WATCH: Several Unanswered Questions After 3 people Fatally Shot at Publix in Royal Palm Beach - From WPTV News
Jasmine Hartin, the daughter-in-law of British billionaire Lord Michael Ashcroft, was seen strolling past a memorial site of the Belize cop she is accused of killing after a bail visit to a police station, a report said.

According to The Sun, the 32-year-old socialite was walking with an armed security guard that carried a pistol as she checked in at the San Ignacio prison as part of her bail conditions.

Jasmine Hartin had been freed after posting a $15,000 bail on Wednesday, June 9. She had claimed that she accidentally shot Superintendent Henry Jemmott when practicing reloading his gun while drinking.

One of her bail conditions requires Hartin to surrender her travel documents, including her passport and ID. Judge Herber Lord also ruled that Hartin should not leave Belize until her trial has concluded, the Independent reported.

Belizean authorities said that Hartin posed as a "serious flight risk." As a foreign national accused of a crime, she would likely leave the country to escape justice. The Belize cop's family was also in attendance when the ruling was released.

Jasmine Hartin was initially denied bail. The socialite is facing five years in jail for manslaughter by negligence.

RELATED ARTICLE: Jasmine Hartin, Daughter-in-Law of British Billionaire Lord Michael Ashcroft, Set To Be Charged Over the Death of Belize Cop

Belize Cop's Accidental Shooting

Detectives said that Jasmine Hartin had attended a party last month in Ambergris Caye and went for a walk with Henry Jemmott. The two sat together on a pier.

Henry Jemmott reportedly showed off to her his Glock service pistol, and it accidentally went off when she passed it back to him, The Guardian reported.

Hartin said that she had been giving the Belize cop a massage. Her defense lawyer Godfrey Smith noted that the daughter-in-law of British billionaire Lord Michael Ashcroft had not tried to flee the scene nor dispose of the weapon when the accident took place.

Hartin screamed for help, alerting some nearby security guards. Hartin, who is married to Lord Michael Ashcroft's son Andrew, reportedly pleaded with people arriving at the scene to help her find her friend, Daily Mail reported.

Jasmine Hartin and Henry Jemmott had been reportedly friends for years, from 2014 to 2019. The Belize cop would dine with Hartin occasionally where he was stationed in San Pedro, but the two had seen less of each other after his transfer to the town of San Ignacio on the mainland.

The daughter-in-law of British billionaire Lord Michael Ashcroft said she struggled to eject the magazine clip, but it was stuck, and the gun suddenly went off. She added that she had no idea that it still had a bullet in the chamber.

One person reportedly picked up the gun while Jasmine Hartin was in a state of shock. The socialite was found distraught and covered in blood.

Jasmine Hartin's In-Laws Reactions

One source said that the Ashcroft family had been left devastated by the incident, saying that Lord Michael Ashcroft had devoted his life to Belize. Henry Jemmott has five kids, two teenagers and three young ones from his current partner.

Lord Michael Ashcroft is known to be the top donor to the United Kingdom Conservative Party. The British billionaire is a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. His fortune comes from buying and selling several companies.

He is also a major investor in Belize and served as the Belizean Ambassador to the United Nations from 1998 to 2000.

Reports said that the alternative punishment for manslaughter by negligence in Belize could be a fine of about $10,000 in U.S. dollars.

READ NEXT: Jasmine Hartin: Lord Michael Ashcroft's Daughter-in-Law Could Avoid Jail Time in Belize Cop's Fatal Shooting

WATCH: Jasmine Hartin Reportedly Confessed to Shooting After Drug Charge Threat - From New York Post
Former President Donald Trump has asked President Joe Biden to give his "warmest regards" to Russian President Vladimir Putin when they meet next week.

According to a The Telegraph report, Donald Trump also said in a statement on Thursday, June 10, that he did not trust U.S. intelligence on Russia's meddling in the 2016 election as he again denied that the Russian government interfered in the poll to aid his campaign.

The former president noted that it "should be obvious" that American intelligence on Russian election meddling should not be trusted.

In his "Save America" campaign statement on Thursday, Trump fondly remembered the 2018 Helsinki summit where he met Putin, who denies Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Donald Trump had also attacked Joe Biden, suggesting that his successor might fall asleep during the upcoming summit with the Russian leader. Despite this, the former president still wished Joe Biden good luck in dealing with Vladimir Putin.

Trump had given Biden a nickname of "Sleepy Joe" during last year's presidential campaign while repeatedly claiming that the president was in mental decline, New York Post reported.

After meeting Queen Elizabeth II this weekend at Windsor Castle, Joe Biden is set to meet Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, June 16, in Geneva, Switzerland. The president will also be attending a NATO summit in Belgium.

Donald Trump's Distrust

The former president complained about the investigation into Russian election interference, which was confirmed not just by U.S. intelligence agencies but also by foreign allies and a Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee, according to a Business Insider report.

Donald Trump maintained his claims that Russia did not meddle with the 2016 election. He noted that because of the "phony Russia hoax made up and paid for by the Democrats" and former presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, the United States was put at a disadvantage that he overcame, The Hill reported.

Antony Blinken, Secretary of State, earlier said Biden would be warning Putin during the meeting about the U.S.' action against Russia if it continues to do cyberattacks against the U.S.

Joe Biden is also set to warn the Russian president of the consequences of any meddling in future U.S. elections.

READ NEXT: Tech Giants to Collaborate to Protect U.S. Election Process

Russia Meddling in 2016 Presidential Election

In 2018, the U.S. special counsel had accused 13 Russians of an elaborate plot to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, charging them with handling a huge but hidden social media trolling campaign.

The said campaign was aimed partly at aiding Donald Trump to defeat Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, according to an Associated Press report.

Special counsel Robert Mueller brought the federal indictment, detailing allegations of illegal Russian meddling during the campaign.

It also noted the first criminal charges against Russians believed to have secretly worked to influence the election outcome.

The indictment also stated that the Russian organization was funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is a wealthy businessman based in St. Petersburg, with alleged ties to the Russian government and Putin.

Donald Trump earlier tweeted that the Trump campaign did nothing wrong, adding that there was "no collusion" that took place.

The indictment did not focus on the hacking but targets the social media propaganda effort that started in 2014 and continued past the election.

READ MORE: State Department Confirms Texting Russians, Iranians for U.S. Election Interference Info

WATCH: What Biden-Putin Summit May Mean for China-Russia-U.S. Relations - From CGTN




A truck driver from Canada revealed in Great Falls federal court Thursday, June 10, about the drug trafficking crime he committed for hiding cocaine in boxes of bananas.

Behind Banana Boxes

The Canadian truck driver, Gurpal Singh Gill, 39, admitted to hiding cocaine in the trailers of bananas that he was transporting.

According to CBC Canada, the acting U.S. Attorney Leif M. Johnson shared during a news release that U.S. Customs & Border Protection agents discovered 211 pounds of cocaine in a trailer loaded with bananas. The authorities have found the illegal drugs during an inspection as the Canadian driver, Gill, was trying to enter Canada.

Based on the court documents, officers of the CBP allegedly targeted commercial drivers that are entering the Sweetgrass Port in Toole County. The said drivers were destined for Canada from the U.S.

ALSO READ: Mexican Cartel Activity Suspected in Largest Drug Bust in Los Angeles' Sheriff Department's History

Moreover, at around 8 p.m, CBP officers saw a Freightliner semi-truck with license plates from Alberta traveling north on Interstate 15 at the Sweetgrass Port of Entry. The officers checked the documents of the semi-truck and identified the driver as Gill and the only occupant of the Freightliner truck.

While inspecting the semi-truck, officers learned that Gill was transporting a load of fresh bananas collected from California to be brought to Calgary. But they noticed that there was a missing rear seal on the trailer of the truck, which prompted them to conduct a secondary inspection.

The officers inspecting the truck saw seven unmarked boxes placed on top of bananas in the back of the trailer. They also noticed that the unmarked boxes were not the same as the boxes of bananas, as they were different in color and size.

Furthermore, when the CBP officers opened the boxes, they found a white powdery substance, which they initially suspected as cocaine. They have determined based on the analysis made by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration that the packages found in the unusual boxes were cocaine. The packages contained a net weight of 95.7 kilograms or 211 pounds of cocaine.

The 39-year-old Canadian driver pleaded guilty to possession of illegal drugs with intent to distribute cocaine as charged in superseding information. Gill faces a mandatory minimum of five years to 40 years in prison, with a $5 million fine. He also faces at least four years of supervised release.

Meanwhile, Chief U.S. District Judge Brian Morris presided and set the sentencing for September 30. Gill was currently detained pending further proceedings.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica A. Betley is currently prosecuting the case while being investigated by Homeland Security Investigations and U.S. CBP.

On the other hand, it is not the first time that drugs were included in a banana shipment.

In January, more than 20 bricks of cocaine hidden in bundles of bananas were delivered to grocery stores in Canada. The first report came from the small town of Kelowna, Central Okanagan in British Columbia, where the owner of a small shop discovered dozens of packages of coke tucked inside his banana shipment, The Independent reported.

RELATED ARTICLE: Colombia Chops Coca Crop Region in 2020; Cocaine Production Still Increases, UNODC Says

WACTH: Cocaine worth up to 184m found in banana shipment from Colombia -from The Independent


A former prison sergeant in Minnesota was sentenced to be an inmate in 120 days in jail and seven years of probation after he was discovered exchanging a McDonald's meal for sex from a female prisoner he was transporting.

Dakota County District Judge Tim Wermager on Wednesday had passed sentence to Randy Beehler, 54.

Beehler had pleaded guilty in March to fourth-degree criminal conduct with a detainee, according to a Law and Crime report.

Judge Wermager had also ordered Beehler to participate in a sex offender treatment program aside from jail time and probation.

Beehler would also be registered as a predatory sex offender.

READ MORE: El Chapo's Wife Emma Coronel Aispuro to Plead Guilty to Helping Him Run Notorious Sinaloa Cartel

McDonald's In Exchange For Sexual Favors

Beehler had reportedly stopped at an abandoned business after getting food in Cannon Falls at a McDonald's.

He then uncuffed the victim and brought her up to the front seat, and they drove through Dakota County. He reportedly unzipped his pants and had the victim perform oral sex on him.

The victim reported the incident the same day, according to a CBS Local report.

Beehler initially denied all allegations when an investigator questioned him. He also denied any inappropriate contact.

However, he eventually admitted to getting the food with the victim and had the victim performed sexual acts on him.

The victim told authorities that they stopped at a park to clean up and threw away napkins in a trash can.

The complaint states that the officers went to the park and located the napkins in the trash can like the victim said, according to KSTP report.

The officers then collected the said napkins for scientific testing.

Beehler denied the victim's statement that he also "digitally penetrated" her.

Dakota County Attorney Kathy Keena said that she is pleased that Beehler is being held accountable for his actions.

Keena added that Beehler was entrusted with the victim's care and protection while transporting her. She noted that the suspect had violated his position of authority by engaging in sexual acts with a woman who was in a very vulnerable situation.

Abuse in Women's Prison

In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy had plans to close the state's only women's prison, which is Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, for reported violent attacks on female inmates for several years.

State Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal had charged former DOC officers Luis Garcia, Amir Bethea, and Anthony Valvano for alleged abuse.

Their charges include aggravated assault, official misconduct, and tampering with public records and information, according to an Amsterdam News report.

Murphy said that he ordered an independent investigation to determine what happened after learning about the violent attacks that allegedly took place on January 11.

The governor added that the individuals in state custody deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. He noted that the officers involved in the incident abused their power.

U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito said that sexual abuse cannot be tolerated in any setting, including prisons and jails.

READ NEXT: Killer Dad Chris Watts Spends 36th Birthday Alone in Prison: 'He's an Outcast,' Says Source

WATCH: Beyond Punishment: Abuse and neglect in nation's biggest women's prison - from Miami Herald




Key Takeaways

With the increase in significance and promotion of foreign investment in India, the government moves towards deregulation and liberalization of the Indian economy.

The government has adopted various methods to broaden Foreign Direct Investment in India.

India is emerging as an attractive destination for foreign investors due to laxity in its laws.

However, there is a growing concern among the countrys recipients for the legal recourse they might have against these investors.

The concern becomes even more grave when one realizes that the investors are foreign-state controlled and a thick veil of sovereign immunity protects them.

Introduction

India just like all other countries of the world recognizes the concept of sovereign immunity to foreign state corporations, this doctrine is based on the legal maxim of "par in parem non habet imperium "which translates to "one sovereign state is not subject to the jurisdiction of another state".

Even while Indian law affords such protection to foreign state actors, The Indian courts have placed an exception to this doctrine under Section-86 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 in to not let genuine claims be defeated and have been actively narrowing the scope of sovereign immunity, and have placed many restrictions on the same. The principle of sovereign immunity covers the entire judicial process from the initiation of the proceedings up to the judgment and decisions passed by a court as well as their execution.

Provisions relating to suit against foreign entity

In India, the procedure for enforcement of foreign judgments and decrees is laid down under The Indian Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 (CPC). The basic principle followed while enforcing a foreign judgment or decree is to ensure that such a decree or judgment is conclusive and it has to be passed on the merits of the case by a superior court having competent jurisdiction. The following are the various provisions provided under it-

A foreign judgment is defined under section 2 (6) of the CPC as a judgment of a foreign court.

A foreign decree is defined in Explanation II to section 44A of the CPC as, "Decree" concerning to a superior court means any decree or judgment of such court under which a sum of money is payable, not being a sum payable in respect of taxes or other charges, but it shall not include an arbitral award, even if such an award is enforceable as a decree or judgment.

Section 86 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 states that no suit can be filed against a Foreign State/Corporation without obtaining prior written consent from the government. An entity will be identified as a Foreign State depending on the nature of its constitution and the extent of control that the government has over that particular entity. The scope of Section 86 under the CPC does not make any clarification on whether sovereign immunity is applicable on transactions that are commercial in nature and have been entered into by a Foreign State for commercial purposes.

Exceptions to sovereign immunity: when a foreign state/entity can be sued

S. 86 recognizes the condition where any person can sue the foreign state/entity in any court, but then it carved out the exception and made it mandatory to obtain the consent of the Secretary; Central Government in writing. Another exception carved out is that a tenant of immovable property may sue the foreign state from which he holds the property.

Judgments on section 86 of Code of Civil Procedure, 1908

Cases, where government consent is required

There have been several judgments wherein consent of the Central Government was required to be taken for sovereign immunity. Some of these cases are as followed-

1. Mirza Ali AkbatKashani vs. the United Arab Republic and anr- In this case, a suit was filed against the Republic of United Arab and the Ministry of Economy and the Supplies Department of the Republic of Egypt for recovery of damages because of breach of a contract. The court initially discussed whether India recognizes the State or not and having answered the question in the affirmative, moved forward to discuss the law.The court discussed whether or not the consent provided under Section 86 was required in this case or not. It held that the Indian Legislaturerecognizes the sovereign immunity of foreign states, thus the provision of Section 86 was indeed required to be followed in this case.

The Supreme Court held that permission is required under section-86 of the Civil Procedure Code, 1908 to pursue the case. However, it was also of the opinion that if Central Government does refuse to permit to pursue the case, then it must also provide a coherent reason in writing for the same. It cannot refuse to grant permission based onpolitical groundsonly. Furthermore, it also stated that althoughSection-86 of this act is administrative in nature, it must follow the principle of natural justice, since it decides the right of the parties.

2. Kenya Airways v. Jinibai B Kheshwala-The High Court of Bombay in this case held that since the ownership and control of Kenya Airways was vested with the Republic of Kenya, it would fall within the protection of Section 86 of the CPC. However, the above proposition as developed in Kenya Airways would no longer be considered as a valid law in light of the distinction between sovereign activities and commercial activities brought by later judicial precedents.

Cases where the government consent is not required- There have been several cases where the requirement to obtain the consent of central government was waived by the defendant. Here are some examples of the same-

1. Ethiopian Airlines v. Ganesh Narain Saboo,2011- In this case due to a delay in the consignment by Ethiopian Airlines the respondent suffered damages. Aggrieved by the delay, the Respondent filed a Complaint before State Commission filed under Consumer Protection Act, 1986.The Commission rejected the case as it held that it didnt have consent under Section 86 of CPC. The Respondent challenged this appealed before the National Commission where the Commission maintained that section-86 does not apply to the Consumer Protection Act. The Petitioner further appealed to the Supreme Court against the decision of the National Commission. The Supreme Court observed that the Consumer Protection Act 1986 and Air Carriage Act 1972 were specific Act while the Code of Civil Procedure 1908 is a General Statute therefore Specific Acts will prevail over the General Statute. The Supreme Court further explained its verdict against Ethiopian Airlines and stated that the Air Carriage Act, 1972 was adopted to give effect to the Warsaw Convention 1929 in which Ethiopia is also the signatory. Therefore, it was clear after reading the Warsaw Convention, 1929 along with the Air Carriage Act, 1972, that these provisions further extend to the airlines of any nationality.

2. Qatar Airways v. Shapoorjipallonji and Co,2013-In this case, the Bombay High Court held thatbased on Ethiopian Airlines, that the claim was founded on a purely contractual and commercial dealing between the parties. It was noted that Qatar Airways is a separate legal entitythat was recognizedwhen it entered into acontractual relationship. Therefore, the Court held that such contractual relationships accompanied by its business activities in India were subject to the jurisdiction of a competent court in India. The Court further stated that the foreign companies have contractual and commercial obligations which they assume and these are governed by the discipline of their commercial and business operations.

Conclusion

From the above analysis, it may be concluded that Section 86 of the CPC is not applicable in the case of commercial transactions between a foreign government corporation/entity as the nature of the same is not covered under the ambit of the provisions of this section. Such complications are also avoided to encourage foreign investments which would otherwise hamper the trade and business activities.
A dozen serious complaints by Portlaoise Prison inmates against staff that alleged serious ill-treatment went missing in 2018 a new report reveals.

This finding is contained in the Report of the Office of the Inspector of Prisons for 2020. Signed off by Patricia Gilheaney, Inspector of Prisons, in March 2021, it outlined what was found in the section on the handling of complaints by the Irish Prison Service (IPS).

"In July 2020, the Inspectorate received notification from IPS Headquarters that investigators had been appointed to investigate 12 Category A complaints made in Portlaoise Prison, dating back to 2018," it said.

Category A complaints involve allegations made by a prisoner alleging serious ill-treatment, use of excessive force, serious intimidation/discrimination or threats by a member of staff.

The report said a review was initiated in Portlaoise which houses gangland inmates and paramilitaries.

"The Inspectorate was informed that a review of local procedures in Portlaoise Prison was underway to ensure a similar situation would not occur in the future. The total number of Category A complaints reported by the Inspectorate in our 2018 Annual Report was 79 and should, having regard to the notifications received in 2020, have been 91," said the report.

The 2020 report found that there were 933 complaints in that year. More than half of these were Category C service complaints. There were 67 Category A reports.

Portlaoise Prison accounted for 24 complaints while the neighbouring Midlands Prison had 194 complaints, the highest number in the country.

Ms Gilheaney's report found that the prison complaints system is not fit for purposes. READ MORE HERE.
Semi retired farmers Jim and Frances Delaney from Derrygarron attended the IFA tractor protest in Portlaoise last Friday June 11.

Their son Liam, who featured in a Mcdonalds television advertisement promoting their use of Irish beef is taking on their farm into the next generation, but the couple say others farms may shut down due to lack of income.

We are here on behalf of all our neighbours and friends and everybody involved in the agriculture scene. As well as farmers theres other people involved. They depend on farmers to make their living as well," Jim told the Leinster Express.

This is all about whats coming up. What they are proposing in Europe to do is going to destroy the agriculture sector and all associated with it.

We are not out here today to be causing trouble or fighting over prices, its trying to get the people to see whats going on, Jim said.

He believes farmers will be forced to just shut up shop.

Its definitely going to happen. If people are not able to make a living they cant stay going."

Many have jobs off the farm to make enough money he said.

And a lot of farmers are coming to retirement age and maybe dont have their children taking over farming, Jim said.

He said the CAP payment was essential to make enough money from farming.

People in beef farming over the last 40 years if they didnt get the CAP they wouldnt live at all because the beef is at a loss all the time.

Moving to a new profitable use of land is not easy for farmers, said Frances.

If youre in that situation it's hard to hop and chop, its expensive to change, she said.

The European Union Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) gives a payment per hectare of farming land, to supplement incomes and support rural development. It is reformed every seven years and is under discussion now again.

The Climate Action Bill, currently going through the Dail, commits the State to halving carbon emissions by 2030 and reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 in law and also proposes five-year carbon budgets set by Government.
Over 50 Laois tractors and farm machines held a convoy through Portlaoise town last Friday June 11, in protest at feared further income cuts.

Among them was Liam Brophy, 25 who has spent years studying to be a farmer and wants it to be his lifetime's work.

He studied agriculture and dairy farm management and worked on farms in different countries before returning to work with his father on their Vicarstown farm.

I was brought up with it. Its what you know. Ive worked on farms in different countries. Theres a good lifestyle to be had but you have to be able to make money at what youre doing.

I want to see money being fairly distributed to productive farmers and farm families.

Up to last year we were dry stock farmers, beef, sheep, tillage, a totally mixed farm. The changeover to dairy has been on financial grounds. A massive part of sustainability is financial sustainability. If you cant make a living, wheres the future?

He does see a future in farming for him, and one that cares for the environment.

I imagine the future as grass based farming, making use of all the best technologies to make a living and farm in an environmentally sustainable way.

There are costs to changing to sustainable environmental methods but farmers are spending. Theres been hedgerows planted at home, we are part of the GLAS scheme. If we get a chance, we are going to do our best.

Theres no one any closer to the environment than farmers. Its us thats going to suffer if things go wrong like droughts.

Theres 300,000 people directly employed in agriculture in rural Ireland. Yes the CAP goes directly to farmers but if its taken out its a massive loss to the rural economy," Liam Brophy said.

The European Union Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) gives a payment per hectare of farming land, to supplement incomes and support rural development. It is reformed every seven years and is under discussion now again.

The Climate Action Bill, currently going through the Dail, commits the State to halving carbon emissions by 2030 and reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 in law and also proposes five-year carbon budgets set by Government.
A wind farm project on a former Bord na Mona bog not far from Laois in Offaly will deliver 'jobs, energy and amenity' according to a Laois Offaly Minister of State Pippa Hackett.

The Green Party Senator who has a seat at the Government Cabinet table welcomed progress on the Cloncreen Wind Farm Project which will be owned by taxpayers.

Minister Hackett has highlighted what she claimed were the gains that would flow from to Offaly and the rest of the Midlands.

Bord na Mona received planning permission three years ago for the 21-turbine wind farm located on its peatlands in east Offaly. The project is expected to cost 100 million. Up to 100 are expected to be working directly on the wind farm by the end of 2021.

The Cloncreen Project is a terrific example of how moving from a brown to a green economy can benefit everyone, said Minsiter Hackett, following a visit to the site.

When it is complete, it is claimed that the Cloncreen Wind Farm will supply 55,000 homes with renewable energy. Expressions of interest are now being accepted through Bord na Mona for a range of roles in its development.

I am really proud of the part the Midlands is playing in helping us meet our renewable energy targets, said Senator Hackett. In the past, these peatlands supported many Offaly families through peat extraction. Now, even though extraction has finished, they continue to do so.

It was wonderful to see the plans for rehabilitation, as well as the regeneration that is already taking place. This land is being revived to create a healthier environment, and a healthier source of energy. And, on top of all this, we are going to see great amenities and high-quality jobs," she said.

The wind farm will have a footprint of just 4% of the site area, while the remaining 96% will be rehabilitated peatland and amenity.

The windfarm footprint will only take up a tiny percentage of the site area here, and the plans for the rest of it are really exciting, added Minsiter Hackett who lives near Geashill.

I welcome Bord na Monas commitment to deliver a range of benefits for the local community and other visitors. These will include the provision of 20km of walkways and cycleways through the rehabilitated peatland site, a site which will also provide an extensive new habitat for native plant and animal species.

I know Bord na Mona estimates that over the entire Midlands area their Climate Action projects will deliver at least 26million in community gain for local and community projects by 2030, and I expect a fair chunk of that to be realised here in the Cloncreen area. It is wonderful to see that being achieved by a project which also helps deal with the climate emergency, cuts carbon emissions and delivers on green energy targets," said the Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture.

Bord na Mona says the wind farm is located on Cloncreen bog in eastern Co. Offaly, about 4.5 kilometres southwest of Edenderry and 4km east of Bord na Monas 84 MW Mountlucas Wind Farm. The villages of Clonbullogue and Rhode are located approximately 2.0 km south east and 7 km north-west of the site.

Cloncreen bog comprises of approximately 960 hectares (c. 2,400 acres) and was formerly utilised for peat harvesting by Bord na Mona to provide fuel for the Edenderry peat fired power station. The maximum permanent footprint of the development measures 40.1 hectares, which represents approximately 4% of the site.
Embrace FARM, the farm accident support network, is hosting a #HereForYou campaign to acknowledge the support networks of those left bereaved by, or who have survived farm accidents.

Following the success of the organisations first ever online Remembrance Service last year, Embrace FARM will host its eighth annual Remembrance Service for those affected by farm accidents via live stream on www.embracefarm.com at the end of June.

At the online Remembrance Service last year, over 220 names were honoured and the founders of Embrace FARM. Brian and Norma Rohan from Laois are calling on Irish families to submit names of loved ones who were lost or injured in farm accidents to be remembered at the 2021 Service.

Speaking about the Remembrance Service, Brian Rohan, Founder Embrace FARM said: We are pleased to confirm that our annual Remembrance Service will be live-streamed on our website again this June following the successful online ceremony in 2020. Similarly, it is not possible to host a physical event due to social distancing guidelines but we understand the importance of carrying on virtually for the many people who take comfort in remembering their loved ones each year at our service.

"The annual occasion offers bereaved families, friends and accident survivors a safe space for them to honour those whose lives have been lost or affected by farm accidents. We will continue to speak their names and would like to encourage anyone from the Irish farming community, family members or friends to send us your loved ones name and a photograph for inclusion in our upcoming ceremony, he said. MORE BELOW PICTURE.

Embrace FARMs Here For You campaign honours the people, communities and businesses who have supported those impacted by farm accidents and the work of Embrace FARM over the years. The campaign acknowledges the community support systems across Ireland, the unsung heroes, many businesses, those who have died or were injured in farm accidents and those who have been left behind in times of tragedy.

Speaking about the campaign, Norma Rohan, Founder Embrace FARM said: This year, we chose the theme Here For You for our annual remembrance campaign to highlight the importance of support in times of great loss, bereavement or accidents. For many people, this past year has been a particularly difficult one, but in difficult times we see a rise in support and togetherness, a sense of community when people need it the most. For this online initiative, we are encouraging people to honour those who have been there for them during the hardest of times.

"On behalf of Embrace FARM, we too would like to acknowledge and thank those who have hugely supported the work we have done since 2014. Without sponsorships, fundraising events and dedication from local community groups, our work to support those affected by farm accidents would not be possible," she said.

People are encouraged to get involved in the Here For You campaign on social media by expressing what support means to them and how it has helped during hard times. Join the conversation online by using the hashtag #HereForYou and tag @EmbraceFARM.

The Online Remembrance Service 2021 takes place on Sunday, June 27 at 2pm. To add a loved ones name to the remembrance list please WhatsApp 085-7709966 or email info@embracefarm.com with name, county, year of death or accident and a photograph if available.

For further information follow @embracefarmsupport on Facebook and Instagram, @EmbraceFARM on Twitter, find us on LinkedIn or visit www.embracefarm.com.

The picture below of the Remembrance Service flyer was designed by 8-year-old Nicole Murray who lost her grandfather in a farm accident. MORE ABOUT EMBRACE AND FARM ACCIDENTS BELOW FLYER.

Statistics

From the period 2011 to 2020 there have been 210 lives lost due to farm related accidents in the Republic of Ireland according to the Health and Safety Authority (HSA). A further 27 lives were lost from a similar period 2015-2020 in Northern Ireland according to the Health and Safety Executive for Northern Ireland (HSENI). Teagasc research carried out between 2012-2017 estimates an average 2500 accidents per year that result in some level of injury or fatality. Agriculture remains one of the most dangerous industries to work in Ireland.

About Embrace FARM

Embrace FARM (Farming Accidents Remembered & Missed) was established by Brian Rohan and his wife Norma in 2014, following the tragic loss of Brians father Liam in a farming accident.

The not-for-profit organisation is the first of its kind to support the farming community and families of Ireland who, like them have experienced the impact of farm accidents. Each year, an ecumenical remembrance service takes place for those who have lost a loved one or suffered serious injury in a farming accident.

Embrace FARM is supported by a voluntary board of directors who give their time freely in the development of the organisation.
The IFA held a 'Day of Action at in Kildare today as part of a nationwide campaign to highlight the twin attack on Irelands farming sector from EU CAP reform and the Irish Governments Climate Action Bill.

It is the first large scale demonstration by IFA since the pandemic.

Farmers gathered in Naas and 29 other towns across the country to warn against the dangers in the current CAP proposals and the Climate Action Bill.

Irish farmers are committed to climate action, but policies and targets are being pursued at EU and national level without any assessment of the economic and social impact they will have on farmers and rural Ireland, he said.

IFA President Tim Cullinan said, The farming and food sector employs 300,000 people across the country and contributed 13bn in exports in 2020. Outside of Dublin and the mid-east region, the sector provides between 10% and 14% of employment. This is being forgotten in a rush to sterilise Irish farming.

Last week, I met the Taoiseach Michael Martin, Minister Eamon Ryan and Minister Charlie McConalogue. I warned them that unless there is a change in the current direction of the CAP and changes to the flawed Climate Action Bill, farming in Ireland, as we know it, will cease to exist.

A cohort of productive farmers are being hit with huge cuts under the CAP. The EU wants farmers to do more environmental actions, but they wont fund it. To deflect from this, they have come up with proposals designed to divide farmers, he said.

The Irish Government have to secure the maximum flexibility under the CAP and fully honour their Programme for Government commitments to co-finance the CAP and allocate 1.5bn from the Carbon Tax to fund environmental measures, he said.

In addition, the flawed Climate Bill contains anomalies which are likely to increase global warming rather than reduce it, he said.

Tim Cullinan said farms remove carbon from the atmosphere, but this is not recognised in the definition of carbon budgets in the proposed Climate Bill.

The Bills overall goal is to be climate-neutral by 2050 on a net carbon basis. However, the proposed definition of carbon budgets in the Bill only refers to emissions and not removals. As it is currently drafted, it will also result in carbon leakage. Less food will be produced in Ireland, with more being produced in countries with a higher carbon footprint, which will increase global warming. Its environmental showmanship with no regard for the real impact of the measures on actual global warming, he said

The Programme for Government and the Climate Bill refers to taking account of the distinct characteristics of biogenic methane in setting climate budgets. Yet it appears that the Government now want to walk away from this commitment, he said.

We have tried to engage constructively with the Government and Minister Ryan, but he says the Government wont take amendments. Its complete nonsense, and its time that rural TDs from Government parties stood up for Irelands largest indigenous sector, he said.

Farmers want to do more on climate action, but current farming environmental schemes are completely over-subscribed. Furthermore, a comprehensive renewables strategy, which incorporates the agricultural sector, is non-existent. Currently, there is no option for farmers interested in micro-generation to feed into the national grid. The forestry licensing system is in complete disarray. Supports for those considering a switch to organic production is inadequate, to say the least.

We want to work with Government on climate action, but there has to be real engagement. Setting targets without any regard for the consequences and any supports wont work, he said.
Kildare's Senator Mark Wall has urged the Minister to reconsider his policy of not using the provision of married quarters at the Curragh Camp.

Speaking following the receipt of a response from the Minister for Defence regarding the upgrade of vacant houses in the Curragh camp, Senator Mark Wall asked the Minister to change his policy.

Senator Wall through his Labour Party Colleague , Deputy Duncan Smith had asked the Minister what was the up to date position with the houses and if the Minister had met or discussed the matter with the Minister for Housing.

In his reply the Minister stated that his Department has not met with the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage in relation to the matter referenced by the Deputy. It has been a long standing policy introduced in the 1990s to discontinue the provision of married quarters to serving personnel. It is not intended to reverse this long standing policy.

The Minister did state that his Department had engaged with Kildare County Council on a number of houses in the Orchard Park estate on the Curragh and were prepared to working with the Council on some remaining properties there.

Senator Wall concluded,  At a time when we have a housing crisis in this country we need to look at every opportunity that is available or could become available. I will continue to raise this matter with the Minister as other Public Representatives in the area have also done. I continue to work with many Defence Force personnel who are struggling to find housing for themselves and their families and I believe that this opportunity must not be lost to create family homes once again in the Curragh Camp.
Gardai have repeatedly broken the law by accessing illegally retained mobile phone data, a barrister has argued at the trial of four men accused of falsely imprisoning and causing serious harm to Quinn Industrial Holdings director Kevin Lunney.

Michael O'Higgins SC told the Special Criminal Court this morning (FRI) that despite a finding by the Court of Justice of the European Union that mass retention of phone data is a serious breach of citizens' privacy rights, the government has done nothing.

He added: "That has left another arm of the executive, law enforcement, breaking the law repeatedly, for years and years and years."

Responding, Sean Guerin SC for the Director of Public Prosecutions, said the mass collection of data is "not a breach of anything". It is, he said, an interference with privacy rights which is permitted in certain circumstances such as to "shed light on serious crime."

He said European Union directives have stated that data retention is a "valuable tool" and an appropriate method of criminal investigation.

The court has heard that following rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the Irish courts, gardai can no longer access mobile phone data through the Communications (Retention of Data) Act 2011. Gardai investigating Mr Lunney's abduction and assault therefore used search warrants to obtain call data records.

Mr O'Higgins said the material gardai uncovered should be ruled inadmissible because it was unlawfully obtained. Lawyers for the three other accused have adopted Mr O'Higgins' arguments.

A 40-year-old man who cannot be named by order of the court, Alan OBrien (40), of Shelmalier Road, East Wall, Dublin 3, Darren Redmond (27), from Caledon Road, East Wall, Dublin 3 and Luke OReilly (67), with an address at Mullahoran Lower, Kilcogy, Co Cavan have all pleaded not (NOT) guilty to false imprisonment and intentionally causing serious harm to Mr Lunney at Drumbrade, Ballinagh, Co Cavan on September 17, 2019.

Mr Lunney has told the court that he was bundled into the boot of a car near his home and driven to a container where he was threatened and told to resign as a director of Quinn Industrial Holdings. His abductors cut him with a Stanley knife, stripped him to his boxer shorts, doused him in bleach, broke his leg with two blows of a wooden bat, beat him on the ground, cut his face and scored the letters QIH into his chest. They left him bloodied, beaten and shivering on a country road at Drumcoghill in Co Cavan where he was discovered by a man driving a tractor.

Mr O'Higgins, for the unnamed accused, said the mobile phone data was extracted from a database in a way that the European court has said is not permitted. He said that if the mass retention of data is unlawful then the manner in which gardai accessed that data cannot be lawful.



Mr O'Higgins said it was "probably unprecedented" for states to have failed to respond where the courts "at the apex of a legal system" have decided that something is unlawful. He said: "As a member state there is an obligation, and a very pressing obligation, to give effect to rights and to abide by rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union."

He said that even after the State's arguments defending the 2011 Act were rejected by the High Court, "they continued to take the benefit of a piece of legislation that the EU has pronounced as being a particularly serious breach of rights under the EU Charter."

The Special Criminal Court is bound, counsel said, by the finding of the European court that the mass retention of mobile phone data is a "serious breach" of the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Mr O'Higgins said the Supreme Court has ruled that where investigators breach the law inadvertently, a judge might permit the evidence, but where the breach is reckless or negligent it should be ruled inadmissible.

In this case, Mr O'Higgins said, the "absence of legality" in what investigating gardai did was "not only reckless or negligent. It was beyond that."

Gardai were aware of the court rulings and had sought legal advice, he said. The accused, counsel said, has a right to privacy and while the State might think their inability to use mobile phone data is the loss of a "valuable tool" and that the court ruling "confounds all sorts of ideas about common sense," he said, "under the rule of law you must accept it."

Mr Justice Tony Hunt, presiding, said it "offends any notion of balance and fair play" that criminals are free to use the technology with "complete impunity". He said that while people have freedoms, they come with responsibility. He added: "But I don't think it's heresy to say there's something a bit odd about the conclusions reached there."

Mr O'Higgins said the court is entitled to hold that view and say, "it's a rotten law or judgement," but the rule of law must still be applied. Justice Hunt replied: "The idea that we must accept these uncritically doesn't sit easily with me."

Besides arguing that mass retention is unlawful, the defence teams said the garda applications for search warrants contained inadequate, inaccurate or insufficient information and that search warrants are not an appropriate way to access mobile phone data.

Giollaiosa O'Lideadha SC, for Alan O'Brien, said that the warrants were disproportionate as they allowed gardai to enter the premises of the mobile phone companies and access "all data which was reasonably suspected to be evidence of an arrestable offence."

Mr Guerin will continue his submissions on Monday in front of Mr Justice Hunt, presiding, Judge Gerard Griffin and Judge David McHugh.
A serial sex attacker has appealed against his 18-and-a-half-year jail term for three premeditated, random attacks on women over a five-year period in south Dublin.

The father-of-two was jailed in 2018 for the violent attacks, which the judge described as primal and brutal. He has already lost an appeal against his convictions.

One of the attacks was carried out in broad daylight, with the man putting a hunting knife to his victims throat as she made her way to work.

The other two attacks involved a sexual assault and took place late at night as the women walked home after a night out.

The 37-year-old attacked all three women at locations in the same Dublin suburb in 2011, 2015 and 2016. Neither the man, nor the area of Dublin, can be named for legal reasons at this time.

He pleaded not guilty to nine charges, including false imprisonment, sexual assault, assault and possession of a hunting knife with intent to intimidate.

Following the final attack, witnesses identified a suspect van which Gardai linked to the man. His DNA was subsequently matched to DNA found under the nails of one of his victims and on semen found on the clothes of another. Inside his van, Gardai found duct tape and cable ties. Similar items were used on his second victim and were found near to where the third assault occurred.

After a trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court, a jury returned unanimous guilty verdicts on all counts.

Judge Pauline Codd labelled him as clearly a dangerous man. She said that the involvement of a leather belt, a hunting knife, duct tape and cable ties were aggravating factors.

She imposed consecutive sentences of eight years, nine and a half years and five years. She suspended the final four years on condition that he successfully complete sex offender programmes in custody. Following his release he will be subject to a nine-year supervision period and will have to obey a curfew.

He appealed against his conviction to the Court of Appeal last year, but lost that appeal in January.

His barrister, Desmond Dockery SC, returned to the court today (Friday) to appeal against his sentence.

Mr Dockery first acknowledged that his client did not accept his guilt. His not guilty plea and trial always meant that any sentence would be severe, he noted.

However, he said that the headline sentence imposed for the false imprisonment in the third attack was unduly severe, so the overall sentence was somewhat excessive. He explained that this was a headline sentence of 11 years, which was eventually reduced to eight years after mitigation and other legal factors were considered.

However, Counsel said that this offence was ancillary to the very serious assault he carried out with a knife on that occasion, but was double the sentence handed down for that crime.

She wasnt entitled to do that, he said of the judge.

She had to start with a headline sentence for false imprisonment, which bore some proportionality to the sentence available to her for assault, he said.

He noted that the available sentence for assault was not as high as that available for false imprisonment, but said that should have been considered before deciding which charges he should face.

She seems to have treated this offence as the main offence and in my submission it was not, he said.

Roisin Lacey SC responded on behalf of the DPP. She said that this was the first case of a serial attacker to come before the circuit court here and perhaps before any Irish court.

However, she said there was a precedent for giving a larger sentence to the false imprisonment aspect of an attack than to the actual assault. She drew the courts attention to the case where the precedent was set.

Court President Justice George Birmingham, who sat with Justice Patrick McCarthy and Justice Aileen Donnelly, reserved judgment.
Dragon Boat Festival holiday expected to generate 100 mln trips in China

Xinhua) 13:38, June 11, 2021

BEIJING, June 11 (Xinhua) -- People in China are expected to make 100 million trips during the 2021 Dragon Boat Festival holiday, roughly equal to the same period in 2019, China Daily reported Friday.

Trip.com, an online travel service provider, said its platform has seen a surge in tour package reservations ahead of the three-day holiday starting Saturday.

Fang Zexi, an analyst at the group's research center, said that despite sporadic cases of COVID-19 in some areas, domestic tourism's growth momentum remains high, which is a result of efficient epidemic control measures.

In terms of destination preferences, short-distance tours have proved popular for the holiday. According to Lvmama, another online travel agency, reservations for hotels and resorts near big cities are already in short supply on its platform.

Attractions such as museums and ancient villages are also popular among tourists, with bookings for tailored tours to ancient villages on Trip.com up 30 percent compared with the same period in 2019.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)
Teagasc, through its research, advisory, education, training, and media programmes, supports Mens Health Week 2021, running from Monday, June 14 - Sunday, June 20 and are keen to highlight some notable findings.

While males constitute almost 50% of the population in Ireland, they experience a disproportionate burden of premature mortality, have poorer lifestyles that are responsible for a high proportion of chronic disease, and present late to health services leading to many problems having poorer outcomes.

Among farmers in Ireland, research by Dr Breda Smyth MD has shown that farmers experience 5 times higher cardiovascular, 3 times higher cancer and 7 times higher mortality in the working age range than white collar workers.

Teagasc is currently sponsoring two PhD Walsh Scholarships on farmer health.

Diana van Doorn is researching approaches to assist farmers to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease in a study called Farmers Have Hearts.

Conor Hammersley is researching the design of a famers health training programme called On Feirm Ground.

Both scholars are attached to the National Centre for Mens Health, Institute of Technology, Carlow. Findings of both studies are available on the Teagasc Website and further research findings will be published later in 2021.

According to Teagasc Health and Safety Specialist, Dr John McNamara research by Teagasc has shown that disability arising from ill health or injury massively interferes with farmer lifestyle and can jeopardise the livelihood of farm families due to reduced capacity to farm efficiently which consequently reduces income.

He also stated that recent research indicates that farmers give health issues less attention than aspects of safety implementation.

Dr McNamara stated that reluctance to get a regular health check could lead to farmers suffering outcomes that are more serious in the longer term.

Getting a regular health check by a medical doctor is a vital cornerstone to maintaining health as it allows issues to be monitored and picked up before progressing to serious issues.
Patients attending the Emergency Department, outpatient and other appointments at Sligo University Hospital are facing significant delays as the impact of the ransomware attack on the HSE IT systems continues to affect the delivery of hospital services.

Although progress has been made to get priority systems back up and running including radiology, diagnostic/laboratory and patient information systems, many of the supporting systems are still being worked on. This means that there are many manual processes in place for example ordering X-rays and laboratory tests and also getting results back. The hospitals email system hasnt been restored which makes communication between different areas of the hospital and outside the hospital more difficult and also much slower.

Dr Karen Harris, Consultant in Emergency Medicine said, We want to advise patients that they will face delays when they come to the hospital. We regret these delays and are working very hard within the hospital and with HSE IT Services nationally to restore the rest of the systems we need to function efficiently. There are around 80 different interconnected IT systems in use at the hospital making it a complex process to restore and the workarounds in place in the meantime are slowing us down.

It is simply not an option to postpone appointments and wait until all the systems come back fully. Already weve had to cancel a high proportion of appointments since 14 May and it will take many weeks to catch up, particularly as services are running so slowly currently.

Our advice to patients is to come to appointments if called and to be prepared to face delays. Patients attending the Emergency Department are facing extremely long delays because essential services like blood tests and diagnostic services are taking much longer than usual and this is significantly increasing turnaround times for our patients. Patients needing urgent care will be prioritised.

We ask patients to contact their GP or GP Out Of Hours Service in the first instance if their health problem is not urgent. We would like to thank all our patients and their families for their support at this difficult time and apologise for the current disruptions and delays.
Moy Park has announced that its community outreach initiative, Chicken Run, is returning this summer, with the company delivering its products to doorsteps across Connaught for the first time.

Moy Park took to the roads last year delivering food hampers to households across Northern Ireland and the East Midlands, in order to show its support for key workers, the elderly in the community and those most affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

This year, Chicken Run is back with a BBQ theme and will visit households across the island of Ireland, with the winning nominees receiving a Moy Park hamper just in time for barbecue season.

Ellen Wright, Moy Park Brand Manager commented: We are excited to reveal that Moy Park will be visiting households in the South of Ireland for the first time! This summer, Moy Parks Chicken Run is expanding and adopting a BBQ theme  we felt it was important to reflect on the past year and appreciate what our consumers have been through and how their lifestyles have changed. Now that we can meet outdoors with family and friends again, we would love to see Moy Park products playing a role in creating new memorable and meaningful moments.

Visit the Moy Park Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/MoyParkChicken to keep up to date and for Ts&Cs.
Over 100,000 has been awarded in research bursaries from An Chomhairle um Oideachas Gaeltachta agus Gaelscolaiochta (COGG) to six postgraduate students at Mary Immaculate College (MIC).

The bursaries, which are valued at 17,612 each, will support PhD students at MIC to engage in critical research on key aspects of Irish-medium and Gaeltacht education.

The bursary awardees include Helena Nic an Fhaili, advisor at the PDST (Professional Development Service for Teachers) and seconded teacher from Gaelscoil Liatroma in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Leitrim.

In welcoming these bursaries from COGG, Professor Michael Healy, Vice-President of Research at MIC, said, Mary Immaculate College is immensely proud of our M Oid san Oideachas Lan-Ghaeilge agus Gaeltachta programme and the work of an Dr TJ O Ceallaigh, Comhordaitheoir an Chlair, and his colleagues who deliver this programme. Since its inception, the programme has gone from strength to strength, and this new development, involving sponsorship of merit-based Ph. bursaries by An Chomhairle um Oideachas Gaeltachta agus Gaelscolaiochta, further underpins the excellence of the programme right through to doctoral level. The College is delighted to welcome the awardees who will join our thriving postgraduate research community and acknowledges the contribution of COGG.

Commenting on the calibre and potential impact of the PhD research proposals, Muireann Ni Mhorain, Chief Executive of An Chomhairle um Oideachas Gaeltachta agus Gaelscolaiochta, said, A key function of An Chomhairle um Oideachas Gaeltachta agus Gaelscolaiochta is to support a wide variety of research and action initiatives aimed at the development of the Gaeltacht and Irish-medium sector and the teaching of Irish in all schools. Research is critically needed to guide and stimulate a more comprehensive, cohesive, systematic and future-ready approach. These PhD research proposals have the potential to provide a distinctive and significant contribution to the field. COGG is delighted to support such research initiatives and wishes the awardees all the best with their research trajectories.

Thanking COGG for its support, Dr T.J. O Ceallaigh, Director of Taught Postgraduate Studies in Education at MIC, indicated that research-informed educational provision is critical in the evolution of effective language immersion education in Ireland. He said, Our knowledge base in relation to Irish-medium and Gaeltacht education is growing constantly and there continues to be a core base of support for immersion education among parents, educators and policymakers at all levels. However, a complex and interacting multitude of variables initiate, influence and impact on the development of such programmes. High-quality provision powered by scholarship and research is key for the continued success and growth of immersion education. Specific targeted research efforts are needed at this time to advance the field. It will be a privilege to support PhD bursary awardees in these efforts.
AFTER penning 14 books since the turn of the century, the former Abbot of Glenstal, Fr Mark Patrick Hederman has oft been asked, Why dont you write something we can read?

The Benedictine monks literary retort is Crimson and Gold: Life as a Limerick.

Most people find them boring if not incomprehensible, he candidly admits but I hope this book is hilarious, at least in parts.

I hope that no one will take offense at what I write but that many will have a good laugh at this well-meaning and uproarious ride through the countryside of Limerick from Knockfierna to the Shannon, from the river Maigue to the Atlantic Ocean.

Nor do you have to be from Limerick to connect with this particular slice of humanity; anyone who has lived on this planet will be able to identify with the bewilderment of this one child finding his way through the second half of the twentieth century, he continued.

Is this book as close to the autobiography of Mark Patrick Hederman as there will be?

Although I am the narrator of this story, this is meant to be a portrait of County Limerick rather than a history of myself. County Limerick, as I remember it growing up, was one of the quaintest, craziest, most colourful, most outlandish sitcoms anyone could have been born into.

I wanted to describe this as accurately as possible, doing justice to the hilarity of it, the exotic and endearing texture of it, the whole anachronistic misplacement of it, and the cast of characters who made it so exotic and extravagant. It was like growing up in some forgotten tribe cut out of the pages of a history book, or living as throwbacks from a previous chronological time-warp.

Fr Hedermans mother was American who came from Boston to study at Trinity College for a degree in Arts. Invited for a weekend to a farm in County Limerick, his father fell in love with her as she was getting out of the car.

He knew that she was only staying the weekend, so he plucked up his courage and asked her to marry him. That is how and why I came to be born in Limerick on June 18, 1944.

The future headmaster of Glenstal Abbey and abbot grew up in Ballyneale House  a seven bedroom mansion  in Ballingarry. Limerick is in the title of the book but what does Limerick mean to Fr Hederman?

I dont suppose anyones Limerick is the same. Mine is the most unusual collection of memories, experiences, personalities and realities, that I dont imagine correspond with anyone elses. We, each of us, create our own world.

None of us is responsible for the location or the circumstances in which we land on this planet without our permission; although many of us spend the rest of our lives coming to terms with this happenstance. Some are dealt a royal flush; others draw a very short straw.

I happened to arrive in County Limerick in 1944. Unlike Frank McCourt who came back to Limerick from America ten years before that in 1934, my Limerick was something of a paradise, a privileged place; his was the opposite, as he describes in Angelas Ashes. Both of us have one thing in common, that we can tell the story with a sense of humour.

Ireland was the most Catholic country in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century yet, very confusingly, for a child living on a stud farm in County Limerick was that it was, for the most part, a Protestant enclave within a Catholic quantum.

Life with The Limericks, for most of my fathers friends, meant foxhunting. The people in charge were Protestant. They had created for themselves a world of pageantry and excitement which gave meaning to their lives and filled their days. Perhaps they were escaping from a post-war Labour government in Britain and living in ways which would have been impossible under similar circumstances in the England of that time.

They were a sublime assortment of oddity and eccentricity who formed an elite but not a clique. They invited any who lived around them, with the same interests, to join in the fray as spectators or as participants. If you owned or could borrow a horse or a pony, you were one of the Limericks. Horses were the medium and horses the common denominator. And the assembly of riders and followers was as bizarre as Barnum and Baileys Circus.

Fr Hederman tells the story of a man paralysed on one side of his whole body who had to be hoisted onto his horse each morning of the hunt. Sometimes the hoister misfired and he would career over the saddle and land on the other side. Undaunted, once he got in the saddle he would stay there until evening. In his will he left instructions that his body was to be fed to the hounds so that he might enjoy one more days hunting in the belly of a hound.

Similarly, an elderly blind lady could not be stopped from hunting. Riders in front would shout, Duck to your left when there was an overhanging branch above the bank she was about to jump. Fr Hederman also addresses the rather controversial subject of the paternity of Eamon de Valera.

As he describes it in his book, Limerick has a triple meaning.

As well as the Limericks of foxhounds and the hunt, there is the city which is over a thousand years old, one of the oldest in Ireland going back to the Vikings of 922; it has a wealth of history and folklore.

But a Limerick can also mean poetry and especially a certain kind of witty and humorous poetry. Using the book by Matthew Potter, The Curious Story of the Limerick, which came out in 2017, I develop this theme of poetry as the language of memory, and the best way to convey the atmosphere of what John McGahern called the weather of the times. It is through stories and poetry that we best convey the history we have lived. Facts and figures are, of course, vitally important, but they cant convey the smell of day-to-day existence.

But at the heart of Crimson and Gold: Life as a Limerick is a pact a young Mark Patrick made with God in a fairy fort at Knockfierna.

It was in that place that I became aware of God as a reality in my life, as a person genuinely hoping for a relationship with me as a young boy. I have spent 65 years, more or less, trying to square this epiphany with the official teaching of the Catholic Church into which I was also born and baptised. Much of what I write is based on that search.

This book is certainly in defence of that person I met on the mountainside. Whatever has happened to religion, to the Church, to the faith of Ireland, this book makes a plea to not abandon our deep connection with our God who can be, and is, revealed to us in every corner of our country and at every moment of our lives. Is giorra cabhair De na an doras.

For me it was on Knockfierna, which became my hill of truth, but there are so many other places where truth can be disclosed. I am sure that everyone has their own Mount Tabor or can identify their own particular burning bush.

Crimson and Gold: Life as a Limerick is published by Columba books; is available in OMahonys and Easons or can be ordered online at Columbabooks.com or from any good bookshop.
ON a day when farmers would have expected to be out cutting silage, several dozen of them turned up in Newcastle West to play their part in the IFAs National Day of Protest.

With colourful placards and leaflets entreating people to Stand Up for Farming, the tractors, cars and trailers made a noisy but cheerful and trouble-free circuit of the town.

It is one of the busiest times of the year to get the silage harvest in, acknowledged Limerick IFA president, Sean Lavery who was leading the cavalcade.

The Newcastle West protest was one of 30 being held across the country, Mr Lavey pointed out, in order to emphasise the importance of farming to the whole economy.

Farming, he explained, supports 300,000 jobs nationally and the prosperity of towns like Newcastle West flows from a prosperous hinterland with people buying goods and using services such as vets, chemists, accountants and solicitors.

The twin targets of Fridays protest were the current CAP reform negotiations and the Climate Bill.

Only about 30,000 farms in the country are viable, Mr Lavery pointed out, and he argued the current direction of both CAP and the Climate Bill would be to reduce this number even further, The remaining farmers have to rely on outside jobs, he said.

The average farm size in Limerick is 34 hectare or about 70 acres, he continued. Under the CAP reform proposal about convergence, many of these farmers could lose up to 30% of their payments and in some cases up to 40%.

We have asked the Department of Agriculture and Food to model the impact of the convergence proposal, and that would show how many farmers would be affected. But we know from individual case studies what the impact will be, Mr Lavery said.

Under the Eco-schemes proposal, farmers could also lose out financially, he said and he wants the Programme for Government promise of 1.5b over 10 years, for agric-environment measures, to be honoured. Farmers support climate action but they cannot do more environmental actions with less money.

I am coming out today because farmers are being wrongly blamed for everything, said Cappamore farmer, David Thompson.

Agriculture is Irelands most profitable industry, export-wise, and we are going to destroy it. Mr Thompson, who is a former Limerick IFA president and National Council member, argued that the science relating to methane gas is wrong. There is a six-fold miscalculation in the conversion of methane gas to carbon dioxide, he said, and it places an unfair burden on agriculture.

To think they want to get rid of our beef farmers, and replace it with the beef from South America at ten times the carbon footprint we produce here, he continued.

If they were interested in the climate situation, they would increase production in Ireland in order to decrease production in the high carbon countries.

I am here to support farm families, said Mary Breen from Oola. Our incomes are being eroded. At the end of the day, they are the backbone of the country.

She was confident that non-farm people would understand their campaign. They all know the farmers stood behind everyone during the pandemic. They kept the country going. They got no time off.

Mary Ita Keane, from Ardagh was also out on the protest. We want people, the politicians to listen to what we are saying, she said.
IFA will hold a nationwide rally this Friday, June 11, to highlight the importance of commercial farming to the rural economy.

It will be the first large scale demonstration by IFA since the pandemic and Limerick hasnt been found wanting.

Limerick IFA county chairperson Sean Lavery said they will gather from 10.30am opposite the Tesco car-park in Newcastle West. Farmers from across the county are asked to arrive in tractors or jeeps with trailers. At 11am they will set off.

The objective is not to cause disruption, it is to emphasise the importance of agriculture to rural towns like Newcastle West, said Mr Lavery.

The route will take them up by St Itas, down Bishop Street, towards The Square, down Maiden Street, North Quay and proceed back onto the Limerick road and return to where they started. It will take less than an hour and be conducted in a socially distanced manner.

Farmers are gathering in county towns across the country to warn against the dangers in the current CAP proposals and the Climate Action Bill.

The farming and food sector employs 300,000 people across the country and we contributed 13bn in exports in 2020. The county towns that we will visit on Friday rely heavily on our sector. Any reduction in activity in agriculture will hit them hard, said IFA President Tim Cullinan, who met Taoiseach Michael Martin last week, where he told him that the current direction of the CAP and the Governments Climate Action Bill could shut down commercial farming in Ireland.

We will be making a strong statement across the country on Friday that policies must support our largest indigenous industry. A cohort of farmers, many of who are the most productive farmers, are being hit with huge cuts under the CAP. In addition, the Climate Bill, the subsequent carbon budgets and sectoral targets could result in huge additional regulation being imposed on the same group of farmers, said Mr Cullinan.

He said farms sequester carbon and this has to be fully factored into the calculation of carbon budgets and sectoral targets.

We will not accept any attempt to remove credits from our sector, he said.

According to the Teagasc National Farm survey, only one-third of farmers in Ireland are viable.

The EU and our own Government policies are targeting these farmers and will make them unviable.

The Programme for Government and the Climate Bill refers to taking account of the distinct characteristics of biogenic methane in setting climate budgets. Yet it appears that the Government now want to walk away from this commitment.

Farmers want to work with the government on climate action, but there has to be real engagement. Setting targets without any regard for the consequences wont work, said Mr Cullinan.
A MOTORIST has been fined after she admitted rear-ending another vehicle which then struck a pedestrian after it was shunted forward.

Limerick District Court was told the incident occurred on January 8, 2020, near a pedestrian crossing at Ellen Street in the city centre.

Sergeant Sean Murray said a Nissan Qashqai collided with an Opel Corsa which had stopped to allow a number of pedestrians cross the road.

He said the Corsa was shunted forward following the impact and that one of the pedestrians sustained minor tissue damage to one of their legs.

The driver of the Qashqai  Elizabeth Diaz, aged 33, of Glenside, Newtown, Annacotty pleaded guilty to driving without reasonable consideration.

Solicitor John Hebert said there had been a momentary lapse in concentration and he said the accident, which was relatively minor' occurred at a location where pedestrians can come out quickly given the narrow footpaths and enclosed nature of the street.

Judge Patricia Harney said she had a certain amount of sympathy for Ms Diaz and she accepted there were no aggravating factors in the case.

A 100 fine was imposed.
AS our country takes another step towards returning to normality it is poignant to remember all who have lost their lives to Coronavirus.

One was John Fitzgerald who passed away in the care of the incredible ICU staff in UHL on January 27. He was only in his sixties. Originally from Mungret, John moved to Crecora but he was loved wherever he went.

The Fitzgerald family wanted to show their gratitude for the care and compassion the staff showed John in his final days. Their Journey for John began. His family set up GoFundMe and Facebook pages and embarked on a 15,051km virtual walk to Perth.

It was the journey John himself was looking forward to the most, to meet his newest grandson Jackson, but sadly never got the chance to make.

Ellen Moloney, a niece of Johns, said they asked the frontline staff in the ICU to provide a wish list of items that would make a real difference to the staff and patients in their care. The response to the fundraiser surpassed all the familys expectations with their first two targets being reached within days. In total, an incredible 27,000 was raised.

Thanks to the generosity of so many people who donated we were able to provide every item on the nurses wish list, said Ellen.

Last Wednesday, the Fitzgeralds delivered the items to the hospital and many of the staff met outside to receive the items and show their gratitude. It was a very special day for the Fitzgeralds who were reunited with some of the nurses and doctors who cared for John in his final days.

The items delivered were 12 new iPads to ensure patients can videocall their families and allow staff speak face-to-face with concerned family members. 28 table-top mirrors for each bed in ICU and HDU. IV arm and mannequin screening equipment worth 15k to facilitate training newer staff.

16 Get to Know Me boards to inform staff of personal information about the patient so they will be able to see past their critical care needs. A Littmans core digital stethoscope; 50 Fairy Footprint memory boxes to families who have lost a loved one in ICU; medical books and 200 care packs for frontline workers.

Ellen said none of this would have been possible without the generosity of so many people.

Thank you to Eithne ORiordan of EM Services, Adare; Aideen Fitzpatrick of Elm Court, Ballyneety; Pat Lucey of Aspira Consulting and It Services, Cork; and OBrien Facilities, Limerick for sponsoring iPads. Thank you to Zoni Jatt for providing iPad covers and screen protectors. Thank you to Ziaja skincare, BPerfect, Sweet King, Spicy B and Aiden Corcoran of Lynoslife pharmacy whose donations have provided 200 incredible care packs for our frontline heroes.

A final thank you to everyone who has given their time, walked in all weathers and generously donated to our Journey for John. We are incredibly grateful to you all for helping us to show our thanks to our frontline staff in honour of an incredible gentleman who would be so proud of what has been done in his name, said Ellen.

The Fitzgerald family was named the Limerick Persons of the Month for February.
DEPUTY Chief Medical Officer Dr Ronan Glynn has appealed to Limerick people to continue to adhere to "core protective measures" over the course of the weekend.

In a series of tweets this Friday evening, Dr Glynn stated the incidence rate of Covid-19 in Limerick "remains very high" but that it's clear there has been "a concerted effort by all to arrest this pattern".

The profile of #COVID-19 has continued to improve nationally over the last week. While incidence in Limerick in particular remains very high (879 cases over past fortnight) it is clear that there has been a concerted effort by all to arrest this pattern. 1/3 @roinnslainte June 11, 2021

"Over the coming days it remains very important that people nationally, but particularly in Limerick, continue to adhere to core protective measures - meet outdoors, avoid crowds, keep distance from others and come forward for testing if you have any concerns," wrote Dr Glynn.

"Continued adherence to public health advice, along with our excellent uptake of the vaccine continues to give great hope and is one more example of the vast majority of people acting in solidarity with one another. Please take the Covid Vaccine when it is offered to you," he added.
Soodesh Callichurn a particpe le 10 juin 2021 aux travail de la session pleniere de la 109e session de lInternational Labour Conference

Allow me at the very outset to extend my congratulations to you, Mr. President and the Vice-Presidents upon your elections.

Let me seize this opportunity to express our sincere gratitude to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) for their continuous guidance in addressing the labour market and health issues arising from the Covid-19 pandemic.

In fact, as World Health Organizations (WHO) Africa office reported, Mauritius took just five weeks to bring down the coronavirus infections from a cluster of local cases to zero cases, becoming the first in Africa to contain the viruss spread after reporting its first case in March 2020.

Mauritius, with the view to mitigating the proliferation of the first wave of Covid-19, took the bold decision to proceed with the closing of its frontiers and a complete lockdown of all economic activities from 24 March to 01 June 2020, and a partial lockdown from 10 March to 30 April 2021.

Furthermore, to prevent untimely closure of businesses and massive laying-off of workers, Government introduced the Wage Assistance Scheme and Self Employed Assistance Scheme to financially support employers, both in the formal and informal sectors, during and after the lockdown period, to safeguard employment and keep the economy afloat.

To this end, the Government of Mauritius committed 15.2 billion rupees (369 million US dollars) to support businesses and workers in 2020 alone. As our borders are still closed, one of our main economic pillar, our tourism sector, is still benefitting from this wage assistance schemes and this year, 4.3 billion rupees (105 million US dollars) have been disbursed to that effect.

To ensure business continuity in the new normal, our government is encouraging new measures like flexi-time and work-from-home concept to minimise physical presence of workers at the workplaces.

Moreover, necessary legislative amendments were brought to act as a strong deterrent to the laying-off of workers and to enhance the Transition Unemployment Benefit to laid-off workers. Additionally, inspections have been reinforced on sites of work to ascertain that sanitary measures being observed guarantee that the workplace does not contribute to the propagation of the virus in society.

On the economic front, Government came forward with a Recovery Programme, which includes among others, the National Training and Re-Skilling Scheme which targets unemployed persons and focuses on reskilling for re-employment.

Mr President,

With the aim of maintaining our stance against the virus, government has decided to invest massively in the public health sector during the next five years. Our efforts are relentless, our priority remains the sanitary well-being of our population.

Before concluding, allow me Mr President, to congratulate the ILO for putting high on the agenda the World Day celebration against Child Labour I am also pleased to announce that the instrument for the ratification process of Violence and Harassment Convention No 190 has been deposited to the ILO.

I would like to take this opportunity to raise a special concern on access to vaccines. The war against Covid is not only being waged by G7 countries but is a war for all countries. I therefore make a vibrant appeal for vaccines to be made available to ALL countries so as to ensure a more level playing field in the current global vaccine race.

Thank you for your attention.
It's the weekend and Ronan O'Meara has been scouring the TV schedules to find movies to watch over the next seven days.

Here are 17 to choose from....enjoy!

Donnie Brasco: Saturday, TG4 @ 9.20pm

Going undercover in the mob takes guts and Joe Pistone has them in spades. His job gets awkward though when he becomes friends with a man he'll eventually have to take down. Johnny Depp may play the lead role but Al Pacino owns the film. He's in phenomenal in it, so much so that you'll forget it's him playing the part. A stressful watch laced with dark humour and carried by a fine cast that includes Anne Heche and Michael Madsen.

Kinky Boots: Saturday, BBC2 @ 11.40pm

Charlie has inherited his father's shoe business but he hasn't a notion about it. Lola is a drag queen who hates the footwear used in her job. Together they make unlikely partners. Kinky Boots is thoroughly enjoyable and absorbing watch that conveys a lovely message and it's one that's populated with warm, well sketched, interesting characters. Chiwetel Ejiofor, Joel Edgerton and Sarah Jane Potts all do stellar work.

I, Daniel Blake: Saturday, RTE One @ 11.40pm

After a health scare issue prevents him from working, Daniel finds himself tied up in the red tape of the UK benefits system. A system designed to rip the humanity away from a person. Ken Loach's 2016 drama is a maddening, upsetting & nightmarish watch but one filled with humour and a deep humanity too. A horribly believable film. Dave Johns & Hayley Squires are excellent.

Presumed Innocent: Saturday, RTE2 @11.50pm

Rusty Sabich is a lawyer who finds himself accused of the very murder he's investigating. The fact he had an affair with the victim stacks the odds of being prosecuted against him. Alan J.Pakula's courtroom thriller is a real old school watch. Intelligent, grown up, compelling and hard to predict. Harrison Ford is fine in a part rather different to his usual roles and Raul Julia, Bonnie Bedelia and Greta Scacchi back him up nicely.

Raw: Sunday, Film4 @ 1.10am

Justine has just arrived in college to begin her veterinary education. It's a whole new world for her. A hazing ritual designed to humiliate new students has a strange effect on her. Things get kind of disgusting. This 2016 French horror is a fantastic watch but it's definitely only suitable for those with an iron constitution as it's gore and dark sexuality are.......well things get explicit. Garance Marillier is a first rate lead.

Paddington 2: Sunday, BBC1 @ 5pm

Paddington bear is living his best life. He's popular in his community, he's doing a job he loves and he's lashing into the marmalade. Then he ends up in jail. It's time to start fashioning your toothbrush into a shiv Paddington. 100 minutes of pure bliss. A clever, funny and full hearted adaption of a childhood fave into something even the most miserable person will enjoy. Ben Whishaw, Sally Hawkins and Brendan Gleeson all have a ball.

Hush........Hush Sweet Charlotte: Sunday, Talking Pictures TV @ 10pm

In a creaky rundown old plantation in the deep American south a woman name Charlotte lives a reclusive life following a tragedy years before. She's rarely seen, locals are suspicious of her and one day someone new arrives to talk...... Bette Davis, Olivia De Havilland and Joseph Cotton lead a packed cast in a brilliantly melodramatic and highly camp slice of American gothic that will please anyone with an interest in grand guignol cinema.

The Daughter: Monday, Film4 @ 1.20am

An older man is about to marry a much younger woman in an Australian town and family members are arriving home for the ceremony. Two of them reconnect and discover a turn of events that may well devastate the town. This moody and tense drama from 2015 has a pace that may be offputting to some but stick with it and it will worm it's way into your head. Geoffrey Rush, Anna Torv, Sam Neill and Odessa Young do well here

Triangle: Monday, The Horror Channel @ 10.45pm

The yacht Jess and her friends are on has been damaged in a storm and now they are floating aimlessly. Eventually they come across a deserted ship and climb aboard. Before long they realise floating aimlessly had it's upsides. A well made psychological thriller that will scare you and confuse you in equal measure but the pay off is worth it. Melissa George does well as a woman very out of her depth.

Badlands: Monday, TCM @ 10.55pm

In the heartlands of the United States, a young couple go on a crime spree that brings them to national attention. The first film from Terence Malick is a classic slice of Americana and one that is still being homaged over 40 years later. A dreamy, beautiful written but stark and brutal film. Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen are both amazing in a tale that paved the way to stardom for both them and the director.

Shadow Of A Doubt: Tuesday, Great! Movies Classic (formerly Sony Classic) @ 10pm

Uncle Charlie is home and his niece Charlotte is delighted. He's mysterious, he's worldly, he doesn't treat her like a child, he's funny and because it's an Alfred Hitchcock film, of course he has a deep dark secret. 75 years old and still an absolute pleasure to watch, this post war murder mystery is less whodunnit and more how and when will he be caught. Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotton both play their parts wonderfully.

Brick Lane: Wednesday, Film4 @ 1.15am

An arranged marriage has left Nazeem dying inside. She stuck in a tiny London flat, thousands of miles from family and friends with a man who has no time for her. Then one day there's a knock on the door. A look at love from a perspective rarely seen in western cinema, filled with well written and well realised characters. Tannishtha Chatterjee and Christopher Simpson deliver heartfelt performances.

Howl: Wednesday, The Horror Channel @ 10.50pm

A passenger train crosses the English countryside under a full moon. A deer is struck and blood spills. Blood that attracts the attention of something monstrous. Now the passengers have to team up and fight for their lives until sunrise. A good creature feature is always a laugh and this one gets the job done with a decent blend of nastiness and dark humour crossed with a bit of kitchen sink drama. Ed Speelers and Holly Weston make for an engaging pair of leads.

I, Origins: Thursday, Channel 4 @ 2am

A group of scientists working on the evolution of the human eye find their research is leading them to some strange and profound places. An unusual and original premise in a drama that's a bit all over the place but it's one that's full of ambition, intrigue, intelligence and one that is surprisingly entertaining and pretty mischevious in places. Michael Pitt, Brit Marling and Steven Yeun lead a solid cast.

Bad Times At The El Royale: Thursday, Film4 @ 9pm

In a run down motel on the shores of Nevada's lake Tahoe, a group of disparate strangers check in and intermingle and eventually come to blows. Drew Goddard's star studded 1969 set thriller is an interesting watch. It's not as clever as it think it is but it's still stylish, humorous, vicious and full of metaphor for the tumultuous period it's based in. Chris Hemsworth, Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson and many more have loads of fun.

McCabe And Mrs Miller: Friday, TG4 @ 9.05pm

At the start of the 20th century a gambler named McCabe turns up in a mining town and creates a prosperous business with a madam named Mrs Miller. All goes well until the town's success attracts the attention of big business. Robert Altman's 1972 revisionist western is one of the best. A sedate, astute, beautiful and intensely atmospheric film with pitch perfect performances from Julie Christie & Warren Beatty.

The Fan: Friday, Talking Pictures TV @ 10.20pm

Everybody loves Sally Ross, especially Douglas. She's a famous actress and he's her biggest fan. But the heartfelt letters he's been writing to her are being ignored and his infatuation is turning into something darker lately. Parts of this 1981 thriller have not aged well at all but it's still a suspenseful and unsettling look into the horrors dwelling in the minds of men. Lauren Bacall, James Garner and a creepy Michael Biehn are all good here.

As always visit hamsandwichcinema.blogspot.com/ for more film and tv chat.
Congress will hold a symbolic protest at petrol pumps across the country on Friday against the rising fuel prices that have crossed the 100-mark at several places, including Mumbai.

According to party general secretary KC Venugopal, the protests will be organised by the local units of the party in compliance with all Covid safety protocols prescribed by the administration.

Venugopal has said that the demonstration is to highlight public interest such as problems being faced due to the spiralling prices of petrol, diesel and cooking gas.

In addition to this, the party's focus is also on the unprecedented economic slowdown, the rising unemployment and skyrocketing prices of all essential commodities, he said.

Even during the pandemic, BJP's great India loot continues.



With 47 hikes in 2021 alone, Indian pockets are on fire.



Raise your voice against BJP's tyranny.



11 June 2021, 10 am onwards.#BJPLootingIndia pic.twitter.com/gPiTXtEYBd  Congress (@INCIndia) June 10, 2021

The Congress leader said that the people of the country have been battling against Covid-19 for the last 15 months due to the wrong policies of the BJP-led government at the Centre.

"On one hand they could not get medicines and health facilities at the right time, on the other, they have been suffering because of the failing economy and widespread unemployment," he said in a statement.

"Instead of sympathising with the problems of the commoners, the BJP government has decided to disregard the sufferings of the people and continue to inflict pain by raising the prices of petrol and diesel every other day," he said.

The BJP government has increased excise duty by 23.87 per litre on petrol and 28.37 on diesel in comparison to the previous UPA regime, Venugopal said.

"Because of the wrong policies and hefty taxes, petrol prices in many parts of the country have crossed 100 per litre these days, while diesel prices are on the verge of reaching 100 per litre," said Venugopal.

Petrol, diesel prices

Petrol and diesel prices were hiked again on Friday 31 paise per litre and 28 paise per litre, respectively.

After the increase, a litre of petrol in Delhi is retailing at 95.85, whereas diesel costs 86.75 per litre. In Mumbai, petrol is being sold at 102.04 per litre, while diesel has reached 94.15 per litre.

Petrol is retailing above the 100 per litre mark in six states and union territories -- Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Ladakh.

Sri Ganganagar district of Rajasthan near the border with Pakistan has the costliest fuel in the country -- petrol is priced at 106.94 a litre and diesel at 99.80.

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Boulders on asteroids can be three-quarters hollow or more, a discovery that could help yield insights on the way in which Earth and other planets formed, a new study finds.

The earliest stage of planetary formation started with building blocks known as planetesimals, chunks of rock ranging in size from asteroids to dwarf planets. Previous research suggested planetesimals might have begun as very porous, fluffy clumps of dust that heat, gravity and impacts compacted over time. But this idea remains unproven, study lead author Naoya Sakatani, a planetary scientist at Rikkyo University in Japan, told Space.com.

Recently, Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft discovered that Ryugu, a diamond-shaped 2,790-foot-wide (850 meters) near-Earth asteroid, is covered with rocks that are about 30% to 50% porous. Now Sakatani and his colleagues have found that those boulders may be more than 70% empty space, or about as porous as prior work suggested ancient planetesimals were, suggesting the rocks may contain remnants of the early solar system.

Related: Samples of asteroid Ryugu arrive in Japan after successful Hayabusa2 capsule landing

The researchers used Hayabusa2's thermal infrared camera to analyze Ryugu's surface and discovered two isolated hotspots. The spacecraft's telescope captured high-resolution images from one of them, revealing it possessed a cluster of boulders located near the center of a crater about 30 feet (9 m) wide.

The more porous areas on Ryugu are, the less matter they have and the easier they are to heat. Based on the heat from these hotspots, the scientists estimated the cluster of boulders in that first hotspot were 72% to 91% porous. Although they could not confirm whether the other hotspot had boulders, the heat they detected suggested the rock there was about 71% porous.

The researchers noted that Ryugu's hotspot boulders are about as porous as the bodies of comets. Prior work noted that comets are likely remnants of the original planetesimals, and Sakatani and his colleagues suggested that Ryugu's hotspot boulders may similarly be remnants of ancient planetesimals, which cosmic impacts blasted out from under Ryugu's surface.

One possible origin for these extremely porous boulders is that they formed after cosmic impacts. However, Hayabusa2 had fired a cannonball at Ryugu and did not see any similarly porous boulders appear in the aftermath of that artificial impact, suggesting the porous boulders on the asteroid did not arise from collisions.

Related: Strange bright rocks reveal glimpse of asteroid Ryugu's violent past

Uncovering details about the original nature of planetesimals could shed light on how the planets formed. For example, the scientists previously noted that if planetesimals are as fluffy as researchers increasingly suspect, then they might have crumbled more easily during impacts, making them less likely to eject fragments with great force to shatter other asteroids.

In 2019, Hayabusa2 captured samples from Ryugu's surface and successfully returned these specimens to Earth in December 2020. Bits of highly porous and likely extraordinarily ancient rock may be included within these samples, potentially helping reveal more about the nature of the solar system's building blocks. However, analyzing this rock will prove difficult "because of its fragile properties," Sakatani said.

The scientists detailed their findings online May 24 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
The Giant Arc. Grey regions show areas that absorb magnesium, which reveals the distribution of galaxies and galaxy clusters. The blue dots show background quasars, or spotlights.

A newly discovered crescent of galaxies spanning 3.3 billion light - years is among the largest known structures in the universe and challenges some of astronomers' most basic assumptions about the cosmos.

The epic arrangement, called the Giant Arc, consists of galaxies, galactic clusters, and lots of gas and dust. It is located 9.2 billion light-years away and stretches across roughly a 15th of the observable universe.

Its discovery was "serendipitous," Alexia Lopez, a doctoral candidate in cosmology at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) in the U.K., told Live Science. Lopez was assembling maps of objects in the night sky using the light from about 120,000 quasars  distant bright cores of galaxies where supermassive black holes are consuming material and spewing out energy.

Related content: Cosmic record holders: The 12 biggest objects in the universe

As this light passes through matter between us and the quasars, it is absorbed by different elements, leaving telltale traces that can give researchers important information. In particular, Lopez used marks left by magnesium to determine the distance to the intervening gas and dust, as well as the materials position in the night sky.

In this way, the quasars act "like spotlights in a dark room, illuminating this intervening matter," Lopez said.

In the midst of the cosmic maps, a structure began to emerge. "It was sort of a hint of a big arc," Lopez said. "I remember going to Roger [Clowes] and saying 'Oh, look at this.'"

Clowes, her doctoral adviser at UCLan, suggested further analysis to ensure it wasn't some chance alignment or a trick of the data. After doing two different statistical tests, the researchers determined that there was less than a 0.0003% probability the Giant Arc wasn't real. They presented their results on June 7 at the 238th virtual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

A depiction of the structure of the Giant Arc shown in grey, with neighborhood quasars superimposed, shown in blue. A tentative association can be seen between these two datasets. (Image credit: Alexia Lopez/UCLan)

But the finding, which will take its place in the list of biggest things in the cosmos, undermines a bedrock expectation about the universe. Astronomers have long adhered to what's known as the cosmological principle, which states that, at the largest scales, matter is more or less evenly distributed throughout space.

The Giant Arc bigger than other enormous assemblies, such as the Sloan Great Wall and the South Pole Wall , each of which are dwarfed by even larger cosmic features.

"There have been a number of large-scale structures discovered over the years," Clowes told Live Science. "They're so large, you wonder if they're compatible with the cosmological principle."

The fact that such colossal entities have clumped together in particular corners of the cosmos indicates that perhaps material isnt distributed evenly around the universe.

But the current standard model of the universe is founded on the cosmological principle, Lopez added. "If we're finding it not to be true, maybe we need to start looking at a different set of theories or rules."

Lopez doesn't know what those theories would look like, though she mentioned the idea of modifying how gravity works on the largest scales, a possibility that has been popular with a small but loud contingent of scientists in recent years.

Daniel Pomarede, a cosmographer at Paris-Saclay University in France who co-discovered the South Pole Wall, agreed that the cosmological principle should dictate a theoretical limit to the size of cosmic entities.

Some research has suggested that structures should reach a certain size and then be unable to get larger, Pomarede told Live Science. "Instead, we keep finding these bigger and bigger structures."

Yet he isn't quite ready to toss out the cosmological principle, which has been used in models of the universe for about a century. "It would be very bold to say that it will be replaced by something else," he said.

Originally published on Live Science.
The ice shelf on Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier lost about one-fifth of its area from 2017 to 2020, mostly in three dramatic breaks.

Pine Island Glacier, one of the fastest-shrinking glaciers in Antarctica , hastened its slide into the sea between 2017 and 2020, when one-fifth of its associated ice shelf broke off as massive icebergs, a new study reveals.

The glacier sped up another time in recent history, between the 1990s and 2009, when warm ocean currents ate away at the underside of the ice shelf, destabilizing its structure and causing the glacier to accelerate toward open water, according to a 2010 report in the journal Geophysical Research Letters .

The ice shelf lies at the seaward edge of the glacier and scrapes against the land on each side, as well as some of the seafloor beneath, thus slowing the flow of glacial ice into the Amundsen Sea off of West Antarctica. As this frozen barrier melted away over the course of two decades, the glacier's movement toward the sea accelerated from 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) per year to 2.5 miles (4 km) per year, according to the 2010 study.

Related: 10 signs that Earth's climate is off the rails

But whereas melting of the ice shelf caused this past acceleration, this time around, a more sudden, dramatic process drove the speed-up, according to a new study published Friday (June 11) in the journal Science Advances. Essentially, as the glacier moved, surface-level cracks and deep rifts appeared in its ice shelf; this network of fractures gave out in several locations, periodically causing huge chunks of the ice shelf to break free, first author Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington (UW) Applied Physics Laboratory, told Live Science.

As the ice shelf's area shrank by about 20%  representing a loss of 251 square miles (651 square km) of area  the glacier's speed increased by 12% near its edge, the team found. In high-resolution videos of the glacier, stitched together from satellite data, the sides of the ice shelf can be seen grating against the coastline, while large cracks break out across the center of the shelf and then suddenly snap.

Calving, when icebergs break free of an ice shelf, "has been known to be important for a long time, but this study demonstrates that floating ice loss from some locations has a much more dramatic impact on the glacier than if it breaks off in other regions," Christine Dow, Canada research chair in glacier hydrology and ice dynamics at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, told Live Science in an email.

"This is an interesting finding and explains a lot of recent change in the glacier. However, a bit more work is required to find out how fast the glacier will collapse," said Dow, who was not involved in the new study. For instance, it's unclear exactly what drives the formation of the troublesome cracks, whether they will appear more frequently in the future or how the flow of water beneath the glacier itself might contribute to this process, she said.

The finding does hint that the Pine Island ice shelf may collapse more rapidly than previously projected  over the course of decades, rather than centuries, Joughin said. This could hasten the whole glacier's collapse, in turn. But as Dow mentioned, the exact timing of that breakdown remains uncertain. "The changes are rapid and concerning, but not immediately catastrophic," he noted. "Nothing's going to happen overnight."

This photo of the Pine Island Glacier was taken in January 2010 from the east side of the glacier, looking westward. (Image credit: Ian Joughin/University of Washington)

Satellite images capture ice shelf retreat

Pine Island Glacier and the neighboring Thwaites Glacier contain enough ice to raise global sea levels by about 4 feet (1.2 meters), should all that vulnerable ice collapse into the sea, according to the NASA Earth Observatory . Currently, Pine Island Glacier contributes about 0.006 inches (0.167 millimeters) of sea-level rise each year, but that rate may increase in the future, Joughin said.

Past studies showed how melting at the so-called grounding line  the point where the floating ice shelf first loses contact with the seafloor  drove previous accelerations of the glacier. These speed-ups occurred in "fits and starts" as the grounding line retreated, since this loss of ice caused the glacier to jut forward until it got snagged on a new ridge in the seafloor, Joughin explained. And after this series of accelerations, the glacier's speed remained fairly stable between 2009 and mid-2017.

To understand what the glacier has been up to more recently, Joughin and his colleagues used images from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites, which are operated by the European Space Agency and equipped with synthetic aperture radar (SAR). SAR images look like black-and-white photographs, but instead of taking a snapshot of visible light, SAR satellites project radio waves at the landscape and record the signals that bounce back, Joughin said.

Starting in 2015, the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites took snapshots of Pine Island Glacier every 12 days, and then after fall 2016, they began collecting data every six days. The researchers examined all the data collected between January 2015 and September 2020 and used the multitude of images to create detailed videos of the ice flow.

Related: Antarctica: The ice-covered bottom of the world (photos)

The team found that the calving rate of the ice shelf more than doubled in that time frame and that starting in September 2017, the disintegrating shelf lost significant contact with the shoreline on its southern margin. This appeared to coincide with a sudden acceleration of the glacier, which continued to speed up as more icebergs calved from the shelf over the next three years. At the same time, available data indicated "no obvious change in the ocean temperature variability" in the region, hinting that melt-driven thinning of the ice shelf likely wasn't to blame, the team noted.

To better understand what triggered the acceleration from 2017 to 2020, the team crafted an ice flow model of the glacier and ice shelf, taking into account local environmental conditions. They tested what the model would do if none of the outermost shelf had broken off into the sea, and they found that the speed-up wasn't as dramatic as what they saw in the SAR footage. The team then tried lopping off huge chunks of the shelf, as occurred in real life, and the glacier accelerated accordingly.

"The only change I made is that I removed that part of the ice shelf," Joughin said. "The speed of the model was very close to that which was observed in nature."

That said, although the model came very close to reflecting the SAR footage, there is "still a mismatch" in the true and modeled flow speeds of the floating ice, particularly toward the ice shelf's seaward edge, Dow said. This hints that some physical systems may be acting on the ice flow but are still missing from the model, she said.

"It's not yet clear how important those missing pieces are for determining the future of Pine Island Glacier," Dow told Live Science.

For instance, Dow's own research group is currently investigating what role water flow beneath the glacier plays in the melt rates of the ice above. This subglacial water accumulates due to friction from the moving glacier and geothermal heat from the earth below; eventually, the fresh water slips out from under the glacier and enters the cavity beneath the ice shelf, thus mixing up the salty seawater found there. This may drive more warm water toward the grounding line and "potentially lead to faster retreat" of the ice shelf, but the new model doesn't take this process into account, Dow noted.

And there's another missing puzzle piece that scientists must address: When deep fractures appear in the ice shelf, what ultimately causes icebergs to snap free?

While scientists can model melt-driven thinning fairly well, "the part about the shelf breaking up gets into fracture mechanics," a tricky physical factor that also comes into play in earthquake prediction, Joughin said. "The bottom line is  it's hard to say when something is going to rupture or break," he said. Being better able to predict when the icebergs might calve off the ice shelf would allow scientists to better predict the subsequent speed-up of the glacier, as well as the related sea-level rise, he noted.

But even if the glacier speeds up again in the near future, its contribution to sea-level rise shouldn't suddenly spike to a catastrophic level in the realm of several feet a year, Joughin said. Again, the glacier currently contributes about 0.006 inches of sea-level rise annually, so "even if you tripled that, we'd only be at half-a-millimeter [0.02 inches] a year," he noted.

Originally published on Live Science.
In 2002, on a cold March night in Wyoming's Teton Range, a young wolverine slipped inside what looked like a miniature log cabin in search of a meaty morsel and heard the dull thud of a log door dropping shut. The young male settled into the cozy leaves lining the bottom of his log cabin to sleep off the evening feast.

A team of Wildlife Conservation Society scientists led by Bob and Kris Inman opened the trap to discover a familiar friend. The wolverine had been captured there the year before and fitted with a GPS collar that allowed the scientists to track its wanderings in search of food and love as far as the Idaho town of Pocatello. Pocatello Pete, as he was dubbed, looked down on the lights below and, apparently unimpressed with what he saw, high-tailed it back to the Tetons.

Pete was not the only wolverine in the study that journeyed far and wide. They fitted another collar on another wolverine in December, 2008, which they called "M56," in northwest Wyoming ; M56 then disappeared until he was located in the southern Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem at the southern end of the Wind River Range near Lander, Wyoming. After negotiating the Great Divide Basin south of the Wind River Range in Wyoming where he was observed scavenging a cow, the wolverine island-hopped south to cross Interstate 89 on Memorial Day, 2009.

Within a few days, M56 made his way to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, where he became the first documented report of a Colorado wolverine since 1919. A wolverine here was exciting because habitat analysis suggests a potential for recovery in Colorado and New Mexico to secure this amazing critter's future in the lower 48.

The wolverine (Gulo gulo) is an endurance athlete. With snowshoe feet and crampon-like claws, wolverines prefer high elevations in the mountainous western U.S. As they face growing threats from loss of denning habitat caused by melting snow and a warming climate, and increasing development in valley bottoms that could sever movement between mountain ranges. WCS scientists hope to help them find a new foothold in the rugged terrain of the Colorado Rockies.

Wolverines live in low population densities, occupying huge home ranges scattered among island-like habitats in the high peaks of dispersed mountain ranges. There, they find persistent spring snow cover crucial for cozy dens to rear their cubs, an abundance of marmots and other prey, refrigerated food storage, and potentially less competition with predators like grizzly bears and wolves .

Wolverines are made for mountain life, with their snowshoe feet and crampon-like claws. (Image credit: Peter Mather)

The adventures of Pete and M56 required traversing roads, ranches and scrubby sage as the animals moved between isolated mountain ranges. Such movements are crucial to wolverine survival so they can diversify their genes, and yet are increasingly challenged by a voracious human footprint and climate change .

Rather than focus on a single park or even ecosystem to support the wolverines' survival, biodiversity conservation must look at how ecosystems are interconnected so the animals can exchange genes between isolated groups.

The scattering of wolverines among semi-isolated mountain islands presents challenges for wolverine survival because no single island can support enough breeding individuals to sustain a population over time. Wolverines must be able to carry their genes between island habitats to maintain a population large enough to survive into the future.

Today, we believe the Southern Rockies alone contains 21% of the potential wolverine habitat remaining in the lower 48 states, which could significantly bolster the population that is currently believed to be fewer than 300 individuals. Further, Southern Rockies habitat encompasses higher elevations that might provide more resilience against climate change and loss of persistent snow cover; the area also may pose fewer challenges for maintaining connectivity since the habitat is more connected than the dispersed mountain ranges to the north.

Although M56 proved that wolverine males are capable of moving to the Southern Rockies on their own, there is no evidence suggesting females would accomplish a similar journey. As such, we think that recovery in Colorado would require active rewilding.

If we want human imaginations to light up and jaws to drop at the sight of the small but mighty wolverine, we need action now. Let's work together to bring wolverines back to Colorado after a century-long absence and ensure their long-term survival as an iconic ambassador for the Wild Rockies.
CARBIS BAY, England (AP)  Group of Seven leaders brought pledges to share vaccine doses and make a fairer global economy Friday to a seaside summit in England, where British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the coronavirus pandemic should not be allowed to leave a lasting scar on the world.

The wealthy nations leaders were all smiles and unity as Johnson greeted them on the freshly raked sand of Carbis Bay, but they jostled over who was doing most to help the worlds poorer nations fight COVID-19.

Recovery from the pandemic was set to dominate their discussions, and members of the wealthy democracies club committed to sharing at least 1 billion vaccine shots with struggling countries. That includes a pledge from U.S. President Joe Biden to share 500 million doses, and a promise from Johnson for another 100 million shots.

Host Britain said the G-7 will also announce a package of measures aimed at reducing the chances of another pandemic. The U.K. government said the grandly titled Carbis Bay Declaration will aim for a 100-day goal to develop vaccines, treatments and diagnostics for future disease and to bolster surveillance for new illnesses.

The group will also pledge to strengthen the World Health Organization, which former President Donald Trump pulled out of and Biden rejoined.

Johnson said the goal of the measures was to make sure that never again will we be caught unawares.

Opening three days of talks in Cornwall, southwest England, Johnson warned that world leaders must not repeat errors made over the past 18 months  or those made in the recovery from the 2008 global financial crisis.

It is vital that we dont repeat the mistake of the last great crisis, the last great economic recession in 2008, when the recovery was not uniform across all parts of society, he said after leaders posed for a formal family photo by the sea.

And I think whats gone wrong with this pandemic, and what risks being a lasting scar, is that I think the inequalities may be entrenched, Johnson added.

The leaders of the G-7  which also includes the United States Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan  hope the meeting at the resort will also energize the global economy. Beneath moody dark skies, the group walked away from the photo as cheerful as children who had just built a sand castle.

As Johnson led the politicians off the beach, French President Emmanuel Macron threw his arm around the shoulders of Biden, whom he was meeting for the first time. The White House later said the two men discussed COVID-19 and counterterrorism efforts in the Sahel region of Africa and would have a meeting on Saturday.

Facing criticism that they are hogging vaccines, the leaders are competing to be the global champion of so many wounded by the virus. With 3.7 million people lost in the pandemic, the worlds richest democracies are eager to show themselves the champions of the afflicted.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she hoped the summit would show the world were not just thinking of ourselves." Macron sought to underscore that, noting that France had already shipped vaccine doses to the worlds poor  and gently chiding countries that have not by urging in a tweet for clear goals and concrete commitments.

For Johnson, the first G-7 summit in two years  last years was scuttled by the pandemic  is a chance to set out his vision of a post-Brexit global Britain as a mid-sized country with an outsized role in international problem-solving.

On Friday Queen Elizabeth II  Britain's biggest global star  traveled from Windsor Castle near London for a reception with the leaders and their spouses at the Eden Project, a futuristic botanical garden housed inside domes that features the world's largest indoor rainforest.

The 95-year-old monarch drew laughter from her guests as she chided them during a group photo session: Are you supposed to be looking as if youre enjoying yourself?

Senior royals  including heir to the throne Prince Charles, his son Prince William and Williams wife, Kate  joined the leaders for the reception and a dinner of roasted turbot, Cornish new potatoes and greens with wild garlic pesto cooked by a local chef.

The choice of an ecologically themed venue was deliberate. Climate change is also a top issue on the agenda, and hundreds of protesters gathered in Cornwall to urge the leaders to act, some dressed as sea creatures such as jellyfish. Demonstrators deployed a barge off the coast with two large inflatable figures depicting Biden and Johnson on board.

The G-7 is also set to formally embrace a global minimum tax of at least 15% on multinational corporations, following an agreement reached a week ago by their finance ministers. The minimum is meant to stop companies from using tax havens to shift profits and to avoid taxes.

It represents a potential win for the Biden administration, which has proposed a global minimum tax as a way to pay for infrastructure projects, and it dovetails with the president's hope to focus the summit on ways the democracies can collaborate to build a more inclusive and fair global economy to help compete with rising autocracies like China.

But the main issue of the day was vaccines and the mounting pressure to outline global vaccine-sharing plans, especially as inequities in supply around the world have become more pronounced. In the U.S., there is a large vaccine stockpile, and the demand for shots has dropped precipitously in recent weeks.

Biden said the U.S. will donate 500 million Pfizer vaccine doses in the next year, 200 million of them by the end of 2021. That commitment was on top of 80 million doses Biden has already pledged to donate by the end of June. A price tag for the doses was not released, but the U.S. is now set to be the larges donor to the international COVAX vaccine effort, as well as its biggest funder.

Johnson said the first 5 million U.K. doses would be shared in the coming weeks, with the remainder coming over the next year. Macron said France would share at least 30 million doses globally by years end. Germany plans to donate the same amount. White House officials said the G-7 leaders on Friday committed to 1 billion doses in all.

The COVAX vaccination campaign got off to a slow start as richer nations locked up billions of doses through contracts directly with drug manufacturers. The alliance has distributed just 81 million doses globally, and large parts of the world, particularly in Africa, remain vaccine deserts.

Humanitarian workers welcomed the new donations but said the world needs more doses and sooner.

We are still far from getting there, said United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who is due to attend the summit Saturday as a guest.

We need a concerted effort. We need a global vaccination plan, he added. If not the risk is there will still be large areas of the developing world where the virus spreads like wildfire.

Biden will wrap up his eight-day journey by meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva. Asked on the beach Friday what his message would be, Biden said, I'll tell you after I deliver it.

Putin, in an interview with NBC, said Russia's relations with the U.S. had deteriorated to their lowest point in recent years.

Asked if he agreed with Bidens assessment in March that he is a killer, Putin laughed and said the criticism was part of America's macho attitude. Ive gotten used to attacks from all kinds of angles and from all kinds of areas under all kinds of pretext, and reasons of different caliber and fierceness and none of it surprises me," he said, adding, "So, as far as harsh rhetoric, I think that this is an expression of overall U.S. culture."

___

Kirka reported from Falmouth, England. Associated Press writers Sylvia Hui in Falmouth and Jonathan Lemire in Plymouth, England, also contributed to this report.
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When costume designer Cristina Spiridakis was building the wardrobe for Betty cast member Rachelle Vinberg, she had one guiding question for her: What is your worst nightmare?

The second season of the HBO skate culture comedy finds its five protagonists  Camille (Vinberg), Kirt (Nina Moran), Janay (Dede Lovelace), Honeybear (Moonbear) and Indigo (Ajani Russell)  stepping into womanhood and tackling all the challenges that brings. For Camille, that means coming to head, yet again, with sexism in skating. But this time its through a sponsorship deal.

Especially designing a show like this, it becomes so clear how different the womens lines are, Spiridakis tells Variety, referencing the haul of free, but not functional clothes Camille receives in exchange for branded social media posts. I think a lot of brands tend to not think that women have to move in the same way as men to skate. The pants are all incredibly tight, and its tons of crop tops.

The Betty skate crew was initially corralled for the 2018 film Skate Kitchen because they are real-life skaters and then brought together again for the series, which first premiered in 2020. (Crystal Moselle directed the film and writes, executive produces and directs the series, as well.) When it comes to the shows costume design, the actors own styles inform what their characters wear. For Vinberg, and therefore Camille by extension, comfort is key to ensure she can easily skate. Early on, the character is particularly horrified by tight, low-rise white pants with cutouts on the hips.

Theres tons of girls that skate in clothes like that, Spiridakis explains, but it was really getting to the crux of the inherent gender bias in skating because its still there like any other industry. And what I love about this show is that its just constantly flattering that these women are incredible athletes.

Betty Season 2 began production in October 2020 and wrapped just before the holidays. Spiridakis was new to the show for its sophomore outing, but joining the team gave her the opportunity to put her personal knowledge of skate style to use. Growing up in the New York-New Jersey area, she describes skate style as prevalent during her high school days in the 90s. And while certain elements of fashion have changed, she knows iconic brands like Vans and Dickies will remain scene staples forever.

In addition to the inherent challenges of shooting during the COVID-19 pandemic, Spiridakis and her team had to dress the skateboarders to adhere to colder weather conditions. It was a tough balance to exude personal style, remain nimble and stay warm.

You have to think about every single player and also their agility for skating and how  making sure they still look good on camera  they dont look bulky, the outfits still cool and youve still got these character details, even on the days we didnt anticipate were going to be cold, Spiridakis says. The individuality of skate culture lends itself to a lot of different prints and patterns and graphics with the t-shirts.

One of Spiridakis top priorities across her work is to use smaller designers and local artisans. Especially in light of the rippling pandemic effects, an overall focus of the show became to include small business, BIPOC designers. This commitment is reflected in the storyline of the new season, which brings up the governments abandonment of Black and brown communities throughout the pandemic. The Black Lives Matter movement and the death of Breonna Taylor trickle into the show without becoming soapbox moments.

In their makeshift skate spot, the crew hangs posters with calls-to-action, including Protect Black Women and Say Her Name. Its all thanks to their de facto leader Janay, who finds support from (and a budding romance with) Sylvester (Andrew Darnell) after the group is kicked out of their usual meet-up spot. Her wardrobe highlights include custom-painted Breonna Taylor earrings and a cropped sweater from Create the Cultures Krystle Collins. The top features an embroidery of a woman with braids that mirror Lovelaces own hair in the show.

Her storyline this season is strong and she becomes like a leader and a force with the girls, so we wanted to bring in some stronger pieces for her, Spiridakis says.

Moselles natural ability to tell a real story makes a show like this successful, she adds. I think it inspires the creative department heads to bring it in in the same natural way, and we tried very hard to do that. But I think that starts with Crystal wanting to tell stories and really highlight whats happening right now in skate culture  in youth culture  because whats happening in the world right now, socially, especially within that age group  theyve been such a massive force in the world for social change.

Betty Season 2 premieres June 11 at 11 p.m. on HBO.

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Hong Kong on Friday issued new amendments to its film classification rules, effectively injecting Beijings strict censorship standards on the previously liberal territory.

Hong Kong censors previously screened content merely to rate it for typical metrics like violence or obscenity, classifying them into one of three categories to indicate age appropriateness.

Now, they will have to actively intuit what will displease Beijing. and remain vigilant in flagging potential national security threats posed by cinematic works, the new guidelines state.

Hong Kong has long been a bastion of creative freedom and freedom of speech, and a haven for artists and dissidents fleeing suppression in mainland China.

Last June, however, Beijing imposed a controversial National Security Law that has allowed it to rapidly dismantle those freedoms. The law has been used to forbid public protests, muzzle the press, jail activists, change the system of elections and, most recently, forbid public commemorations of the June 4 Tiananmen Square crackdown anniversary.

The new film rules have been imposed as part of the NSL implementation process, the official guidelines state. They come into effect on Friday, the same day of their publication.

To comply with the NSL, local censors must be guided by an awareness of the fundamental importance of safeguarding national security and the imperative of effectively preventing or suppressing any acts that could endanger it, the guidelines said.

They must guard against any film content that is objectively and reasonably capable of being perceived as endorsing, supporting, promoting, glorifying, encouraging or inciting destabilizing acts.

Films whose content or whose very act of screening could be interpreted as an incitement to secession, subversion or collusion with foreign countries, advocating terrorism, publishing or displaying seditious publication should be banned from exhibition, it stated.

The document framed the new regulations as essential for the public good. The measures will help Hong Kong balance the protection of individual rights and freedoms on the one hand, and the protection of legitimate societal interests on the other, it stated.

It explained: Although fundamental rights including the right to freedom of expression should be respected, the exercise of such rights may be subject to restrictions that are necessary for pursuing legitimate aims such as the protection of national security or of public order, or of public health or morals.

Although the new guidelines mark a shocking about-face for cinematic freedoms in Hong Kong, and were seemingly announced without giving the film industry a chance to provide feedback, they do not come as a surprise.

In March, the sold-out theatrical premiere of protest documentary Inside the Red Brick Wall was pulled at the last minute after the venues were pressured by pro-China media outlets. Days later, the big-budget Hong Kong-mainland co-production Where the Wind Blows was pulled from its spot as gala opener at the Hong Kong International Film Festival for technical reasons  a euphemism for Chinese state censorship.

In April, the islands top network TVB declined to televise the Oscars for the first time since 1969, even though Hong Kongs submission Better Days had the rare honor of being nominated for best international film. The decision came after Beijing ordered its channels to do the same, given that one of the nominated documentary shorts, Do Not Split chronicled Hong Kongs pro-democracy protests.

Last week, in what was a clear fore-runner of Fridays announcement, local censors admonished a trade union for organizing screenings of two Tiananmen Square-related films. It warned the group that one of the titles had not yet been rated by censors, and the other was set to screen in a venue that had not been issued a letter of approval, which could result in fines.

Filmmakers have reported difficulties finding finance or crew for projects that could conceivably touch on subjects deemed politically sensitive by Beijing. Increasingly, residents are even afraid to accept press interviews or show their face TV news.

The new changes to the film censorship rules do not mean, however, that Beijing itself is directly carrying out the task. For the time being, films seeking the right to screen in Hong Kong will still ostensibly be vetted by local bureaucrats, not the mainlands Film Bureau or propaganda authorities.

Given the rapid rate at which Hong Kongs freedoms are being eroded, however, time will tell how long this particular version of One Country, Two Systems will endure.

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Oscar-winning actors Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore are set to headline a new drama from acclaimed director Todd Haynes.

May December will see the heavyweights pair for the story of a Hollywood actress (Portman) who travels to the picturesque coast of Maine to study the real-life woman (Moore) shes set to play in a film. The woman in question was the subject of a tabloid scandal two decades prior, for marrying a man 23 years her junior. As Moores character and her husband prepare to send their twin girls off to college, the family dynamic begins to unravel under Portmans outsider lens.

Samy Burch is writing the script, based on a story from herself and Alex Mechanik. The project is launching international sales via Rocket Science at this years Virtual Cannes Market. UTA Independent Film Group and CAA Media Finance are handling domestic sales.

Jessica Elbaum and Will Ferrell of Gloria Sanchez Productions (Hustlers, Booksmart, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar) and Christine Vachon (Shirley) and Pam Koffler of Killer Films will produce alongside Portman and Sophie Mas under their MountainA banner. Shooting is set to commence in 2022.

What so appealed to me about Samy Burchs exceptional script was how it navigated potentially volatile subject matter with a kind of observational patience that allowed the characters in the story to be explored with uncommon subtlety, said Haynes.

Haynes reunites with his Far From Heaven lead Moore for the sixth time on this project, and also counts a film in the official selection at this years Cannes Film Festival, the Apple Studios original documentary The Velvet Underground. He is represented by CAA and Cinetic Media.

Portman is a three-time Oscar nominee who took best actress in 2011 for Black Swan. She just completed production on Marvels Thor: Love and Thunder from Taika Waititi. She is repped by CAA and Agence Adequat.

Moore is a five-time Academy Award nominee with a best actress win for the 2015 drama Still Alice. Shes currently playing in the Apple original Liseys Story and will be seen later this year in Universals musical adaptation Dear Evan Hansen. Moore is repped by WME and Management 360;

Screenwriter Burch is represented by Grandview. Elbaum, Ferrell and Gloria Sanchez are represented by UTA, Mosaic and attorneys Jackoway Austen Tyerman Wertheimer Mandelbaum Morris Bernstein Trattner & Klein.

Rocket Sciences Cannes slate includes Sean Penns Flag Day, the competition title which was just acquired by MGM, and Eva Hussons Mothering Sunday. Recently announced projects include Zach Braffs A Good Person with Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman and the Robbie Williams biopic Better Man from director Michael Gracey.

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Invest Africa (www.InvestAfrica.com), a Pan-African business and investment platform, aims to build constructive dialogue between policy makers and business leaders from the UK and Africa during the Forum. James Duddridge MP, Minister for Africa, Emma Wade-Smith OBE, H.M. Trade Commissioner for Africa, and His Excellency Ken Ofori-Atta, Minister of Finance of the Republic of Ghana will feature in the programme.

The Forum will feature Dr Mo Ibrahim in conversation with CNBC Africa, discussing why supporting good governance is essential to driving growth and improving livelihoods across the continent. Speaking earlier this month, the Sudanese-British businessman called attention to the impact of Covid-19 on governance in Africa, highlighting job creation, improved education and healthcare and investment in economic development as essential conditions to building healthy democracies.

The Forum brings together speakers from Invest Africas membership, including Absa international; DHL; Casa Orascom; TTRO; Mischon de Reya; Tysers; Pernod Ricard and Afreximbank.

An explosion of trade with Africa

The Forum comes at an opportune time as trading under the AfCFTA commenced on the 1 January 2021, accelerating intra-African trade, and boosting Africas trading position in the global market.

This, combined with the UKs departure from the European Union, has seen a rise in investment interest in Africa. The UK trade envoy to Egypt was recently quoted in the UK press, saying that Egypt can be the gateway to an explosion of trade with Africa. Earlier this year, Helen Grant, Conservative MP and trade envoy to Nigeria claimed a trade deal with the country could be significant for the UK. Ms Grant boasted of Nigerias emerging economy and the impact it could have for British business (https://bit.ly/3z9gQ5g) in terms of financial services, agriculture, and tech.

In March 2021, the UK signed a trade partnership agreement with Ghana, that secures tariff-free trade and provides a platform for greater economic and cultural cooperation. In practical terms, it means that Ghanaian products such as bananas, tinned tuna and cocoa will benefit from tariff-free access to the United Kingdom.

In fact, as of June this year, the UK Government website lists over 15 trade agreements that the government has concluded in Africa. Where the agreement has not yet been ratified, provisional application or bridging mechanisms have been put in place to ensure continuity of trade. African countries with deals in place come from across the continent, including Egypt and Morocco in the North, Botswana and Lesotho in the South, Kenya in the East and Ghana in the West.

The private sector sees the potential too. Cheryl Buss, CEO of Absa International and a speaker at the Invest Africa Forum next week, was recently interviewed by a London financial newspaper and was optimistic about trade between the UK and Africa. She stated that the UK is in a position to strengthen its relationships with Africa post-Brexit. This will lead to a more collaborative relationship based around trade and investment. Moreover, international trade opportunities into Africa are often facilitated via London, with the majority of European-African capital flows going through the City. 

Regulatory frameworks are fundamental to investors

Karen Taylor, CEO of Invest Africa and Lord Popat, UK Trade Envoy to the DRC and other panellists took part in an international trade webinar this month, hosted by the Congolese Chamber of Commerce in Great Britain. The event looked at regional integration and UK strategic investments in the DRC and the Republic of Angola.

Taylor echoed Dr Mo Ibrahims support of good governance during the event, making the following comments: UK and international global investors are very much looking at ESG factors, critical to their decisions on which countries they are going to invest in and which companies they are going to invest in, so good governance is crucial for facilitating investment. Regulatory frameworks are also fundamental to the investors, and we need to make sure that they are in place to attract them in the first place so that they have that confidence and if it is not there it will hinder capital flow.

Intra-African trade optimism is tempered by an acknowledgement of the challenges that investors face, ranging from logistical issues to regulatory frameworks. These challenges  and opportunities  will be discussed in the Invest Africa UK-Africa Forum.

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Jon & Vinnys is offering pizza with extra chess this weekend. As part of Netflixs For Your Consideration campaign for its limited series The Queens Gambit, the streamer has partnered with the popular local pizza chain to hand out custom pizza boxes promoting the shows awards hopes.

As part of the campaign, the Jon & Vinnys green and white cardboard pizza boxes have been redesigned into chess boards. And each pizza order will include a 32-piece black and white plastic chess set in a branded The Queens Gambit bag. Those bags also include a hang tag featuring star Anya Taylor-Joy on the front with a QR code on the back linking to The Queens Gambit FYC site.

Every Jon & Vinnys pizza order across its Fairfax and Brentwood locations in Los Angeles from Thursday, June 10, to Sunday, June 13, will receive the boxes and chess set.

The idea for the promo came out of the notion that interest in chess has seen a resurgence since the premiere of The Queens Gambit in October. The streamer reports that Google search queries for chess doubled while searches for how to play chess hit a nine-year peak. Inquiries for chess sets on eBay went up 250% and chess set sales increased by nearly double.

Along with the pizza campaign, Netflix also launched a digital spot of a Chess Monthly magazine that morphs into Russian.

The Queens Gambit is a front-runner in the limited race, having already won top prizes at other awards shows including Golden Globes for limited series, anthology or TV movie and limited series/TV movie actress for star Anya Taylor-Joy. She also won the Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a female actor in a television movie or limited series.

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U.S. regulators are allowing the release of about 10 million doses of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine from a troubled Baltimore factory, but many more doses can't be used and must be thrown out.

The Food and Drug Administration announced Friday that it had determined that two batches could be released from the plant, which is owned by Emergent BioSolutions and has been shuttered for eight weeks. But it said several other batches are not suitable for use and additional batches are still under review.

The agency wouldn't specify the size of those batches or why they can't be used, but a person familiar with the decision told The Associated Press that they could have yielded tens of millions of doses and that they possibly were contaminated. Another person familiar with the situation said the doses to be discarded were made about the same time as a vaccine batch equal to about 15 million doses that was contaminated earlier this year and thrown out.

Neither person was authorized to release details about the decision and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

J&J and Emergent wouldn't give any details on the size of the batches that are usable, nor those being discarded.

The two batches from the factory known as Bayview can be used in the U.S. or exported to other countries. They are the first J&J vaccines from Bayview approved for use.

The FDA said if any of the vaccine is exported, J&J and Emergent must allow the agency to share information about the manufacture of those batches confidentially with regulators in other countries.

The FDA statement implied that the batches didn't meet all of the agency's manufacturing quality standards. This review has been taking place while Emergent BioSolutions prepares to resume manufacturing operations with corrective actions to ensure compliance with the FDAs manufacturing requirements, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDAs Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a statement.

The agency said the vaccines are critically needed, given the current public health emergency, and that it made the decisions after reviewing records and the results of quality testing.

The FDA, however, stopped short of allowing the plant to restart vaccine production. The agency said it was working through issues there with J&J and Emergent BioSolutions management.

Emergent is one of several J&J contractors that produce its one-shot vaccine in bulk. The concentrated vaccine then is shipped to other factories for final steps, including diluting them to the correct strength, putting them in vials and packaging them up.

Roughly 100 million doses made from bulk vaccine produced at Emergents factory, including those just approved for use, had been set aside for additional review by FDA staff after factory employees accidentally contaminated an earlier batch.

That contamination led the FDA to shut down the factory in mid-April and send in a team of inspectors. They spent a week going through the factory and reviewing security camera footage that showed employees carelessly handling vaccine materials. The inspectors reported unsanitary conditions, poorly trained employees and other problems.

The lapses have hampered J&J's efforts to be a major player in vaccinating people, particularly in remote areas and poor countries, given that its the only drugmaker with an authorized vaccine that only requires one dose and standard refrigeration. It's also cheaper than some other vaccines.

The productions problems have forced J&J to import millions of doses from its factory in the Netherlands to the U.S. and to miss supply commitments.

Emergents factory had a history of FDA citations for problems including mold, dirty walls and floors, poorly trained employees and an inadequate strategy to prevent contamination, yet it was given a huge role in COVID-19 vaccine production by the Trump administration. Emergent was handed a lucrative contract to make many millions of COVID-19 vaccines for both J&J and AstraZeneca at the Bayview factory.

Emergents chief executive has blamed the contamination and other problems on the complexity of scaling up the factory in just months to make two different vaccines.

The Biden administration is working to find a different American manufacturing partner for the British drugmaker, which has yet to request authorization to distribute it in the U.S.

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Associated Press writer Matthew Perrone contributed. Follow Linda A. Johnson at https://twitter.com/LindaJ_onPharma.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in Laredo arrested two men wanted for sexual offenses against children.

The first case unfolded on June 8 at the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge. A CBP officer referred Rodolfo Angel Tienda, 59, for secondary inspection.

Further biometric verification through law enforcement databases confirmed that Tienda, a U.S. citizen, had an outstanding felony warrant for sexual abuse of a child younger than 14 years old out of the Zapata County Sheriffs Office.

Tienda was turned over to the Sheriffs Office to await criminal proceedings.

A second case occurred later that evening.

CBP officers processing buses at the Juarez-Lincoln International Bridge arrested 29-year-old Juan Carlos Martinez, a U.S. citizen. Martinez was referred to secondary for further inspection. Authorities then confirmed that he had an outstanding felony warrant for indecency with a child by sexual contact out of the Dallas County Sheriffs Office.

CBP officers took Martinez to the Webb County Jail, where he awaits criminal proceedings.

Crimes involving sexual, physical or psychological abuse are particularly serious and can have a lasting effect on the victims. CBP collaborates with other law enforcement agencies to bring those persons we encounter facing outstanding warrants for allegedly committing these offenses to justice, said Acting Port Director Eugene Crawford, Laredo Port of Entry.
A 6-month-old boy was thrown out of a vehicle and three people were injured after a two-vehicle crash reported Wednesday night along Bob Bullock Loop, according to Laredo police.

LPD officers responded to an accident with injuries at about 9:20 p.m. Wednesday in front of the Laredo International Airport in the 5200 block of Bob Bullock Loop.

Officers encountered a white Chevy Malibu and silver GMC Sierra that had crashed at the intersection when the northbound Malibu attempted to make a U-turn to head south on Loop 20 and failed to yield the right of way to oncoming traffic, according to police.

A 6-month-old boy was thrown out from the Malibu and was located near the west sidewalk of the 5200 block of Bob Bullock Loop. Laredo Fire Department crews transported the child to a local hospital to be treated for his injuries. Once at the hospital, the child was stabilized and airlifted to a San Antonio Hospital in critical condition.

Authorities said they found a seat at the scene. Investigators are trying to determine if the boy was strapped in. A man, 42, and a woman, 23, riding in the Malibu and a man, 22, driving the GMC were taken to Laredo Medical Center with non-life threatening injuries, according to police.

LPDs crash team has taken over the investigation. Toxicology results for both drivers involved in the crash are pending.

The Laredo Police Department stresses the importance of buckling up all occupants of the vehicle at all times, especially children in child safety seats. The safety seats should always be secured with the safety belt of the vehicle and not just lay on top of the seat, LPD said in a statement.

Separate DWI arrest made at crash site

While officers were blocking off the loop during the two-vehicle crash, a black Chevy Malibu disregarded officers who were blocking off southbound traffic, according to police.

Officers at the crash scene had to signal the car to stop before he went into the crash site, authorities said.

The driver of the black Malibu ignored the officers and went into the airport terminal. Airport police stopped him. Police said he had signs of intoxication.

Authorities identified him as Jose Clemente Gutierrez Jr., 43. He was charged with driving while intoxicated, refusal.
The City of Laredo and District VI Councilmember Dr. Marte Martinez proudly unveiled the Manadas Creek: the Lifeblood of North Central Park art mural at North Central Park on Thursday morning.

The art installation was completed in collaboration with the City of Laredo Fine Arts and Culture Commission, Keep Laredo Beautiful Commission, the Citys Environmental, Parks and Recreation, Laredo Public Library, and Utilities departments. The City of Laredo Utilities Department invested $11,000 toward this project.

The large-scale mural was completed by muralist and artist Francisco Pancho Farias, a native Laredoan and resident artist at the Childrens Advocacy Center of Laredo-Webb County. A professional artist since 1977, Farias conducts art-as-therapy classes at the Childrens Advocacy Center to children and adolescents. He has also finished murals in other locations around the City such as Asadas Restaurant, Kickers Country and Western bar, and Nixon High School. Over the years, Farias has also developed large scale backdrops for theatrical stage presentations.

During summer of 2020, a public call for artists was issued to submit art proposals for this venue to promote protection and appreciation of the environment. The Manadas Creek: the Lifeblood of North Central Park was one of the submissions that was selected.

Within 160 square feet, the art mural showcases the citys native flora and fauna. The production aims to educate the community about the diversity of wildlife sustained by Manadas Creek, natural environment of the watershed, as well as the many species that inhabit and co-exist and often occupy the park.

The artwork was finished using free hand and was painted by brush.

My relationship with this natural area goes way back before it became a park, Farias said. When this area was truly wild, I encountered a mountain lion in these brush lands. I was simply astonished by his majestic beauty and presence. Since then, my goal has been to educate the public about the diversity of wildlife sustained by Manadas Creek, the lifeblood of North Central Park.

We continue to invest in the public arts because we believe that is our responsibility as a community, Martinez said. We see that there is a commitment to public arts around the whole city. That is a testament of what I believe to be one of the most crucial things a city government can do: to improve quality of life for its constituents with not only things to do, but also things to experience. I hope that this particular piece inspires people and educates on how our interaction with the park matters. I want people to understand that we are responsible for our water systems, rivers and creeks. How we treat our park and environment matters.

The installation of the mural began in November 2020 and was completed by January 2021. A ribbon-cutting ceremony took place on Thursday, June 10 at North Central Park in the Chimayo area. During the event, a congratulatory certificate from U.S. Congressman for Texas 28th Congressional District, Rep. Henry Cuellar, was given to Farias in honor of his inspiration and contribution to the community.

The City of Laredo congratulates Mr. Farias on his latest work and for the depiction of the citys environment through this mural.
McDonald's has become the latest company to be hit by a data breach after unauthorized activity on its network exposed the personal data of some customers in South Korea and Taiwan.

McDonald's Corp. said Friday that it quickly identified and contained the incident and that a thorough investigation was done.

While we were able to close off access quickly after identification, our investigation has determined that a small number of files were accessed, some of which contained personal data," the burger chain said.

McDonald's said its investigation determined that only South Korea and Taiwan had customer personal data accessed, and that they would be taking steps to notify regulators and also the customers who may be impacted. No customer payment information was exposed.

McDonald's said it will look at the investigation's findings, coupled with input from security resources, to identify ways to further enhance its existing security measures.

Businesses across various sectors are being targeted by cybercriminals, including some very high profile cases in recent weeks. On Wednesday, JBS SA, the worlds largest meat processing company, revealed that it had paid the equivalent of $11 million to hackers who broke into its computer system last month.

And Colonial Pipeline, which transports about half of thec fuel consumed on the East Coast, last month paid a ransom of 75 bitcoin  then valued at roughly $4.4 million  in hopes of getting its system back online. On Monday the Justice Department announced that it had recovered most of the ransom payment.
BERLIN (AP)  Opposition parties accused the German government Friday of hampering the work of a parliamentary investigation into a 2016 truck attack in which an Islamist extremist killed 12 people and injured dozens more at Christmas market in Berlin.

A cross-party panel is due to deliver its final report on the attack soon. But lawmakers from the Greens, the Free Democrats and the Left party alleged that witnesses dodged questions on what intelligence agencies knew about the attacker, Anis Amri. Security officials portrayed him as a lone culprit although the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack.

Benjamin Strasser, a lawmaker for the centrist Free Democrats, accused Germany's governing parties of trying to put a lid on this case and asserted that the government had repeatedly withheld important files from parliament.

The opposition lawmakers said evidence showed that Amri, a failed asylum-seeker, had been part of a "network" of extremists in Germany and abroad who provided training, logistical and financial support.

Irene Mihalic, a Green party representative on the investigative panel, said lawmakers were unable during three years of hearings to get answers about Amri's meeting shortly before the attack with two other known Islamists, one of whom was later spotted at the scene.

DNA found in the driver's cabin of the hijacked truck used in the attack so far hasn't been linked to anyone, while the source of a gun Amri used to kill the truck's driver remains unclear, Mihalic said.

Amri managed to flee Germany but was killed in a shootout with Italian police days after the attack. Mihalic noted that Amri had a large sum of cash on him when he died, the source of which also hasn't been determined.

Martina Renner of the Left party said the case showed that important information wasn't shared between various state and federal security agencies, while key decisions by police and intelligence officials weren't documented.

A separate inquiry in 2017 concluded that security agencies may have missed an opportunity to arrest Amri months before the attack.

The three opposition parties called for Germany to recognize March 11 as the official day of remembrance for victims of terrorism. The European Union adopted such an observance day on the anniversary of the 2004 bombings by Islamic extremists in Madrid that killed 191 people.
LAREDO  PNC Bank, N.A. recently announced the appointment of Susana Melendez-Valencia to the role of regional president and head of Commercial Banking for the Texas Border Market, which is comprised of Laredo, the Rio Grande Valley and Corpus Christi and spans to El Paso, where PNC is expanding through its acquisition of BBVA USA. Completion of the acquisition was announced June 1, with PNC emerging as the fifth-largest U.S. commercial banking organization with more than $560 billion in assets and a coast-to-coast presence in 29 of the 30 largest markets in the country.

Melendez-Valencia brings 25 years of banking experience to the regional president position, including most recently serving as CEO for the Texas Border and Gulf Coast for BBVA USA. As regional president in the Texas border markets, she will lead the efforts of the combined organization to provide customers and clients in the market with access to a full range of products and capabilities through PNCs Main Street Bank model. In addition, Melendez-Valencia will be responsible for delivering on the banks commitment to supporting local communities across the Texas border markets, where the combined organization will rank fourth in deposit market share in the state.

I am very excited for this new chapter in my career with PNC and the amazing impact I know we will continue to have on our communities and with our employees, said Melendez-Valencia. Given PNCs strength, their commitment to the communities they serve and the culture they have fostered within the company, this acquisition is a win for everyone.

Joining Melendez-Valencia are additional members of the market leadership team, including:

Juan Loya, market executive for the Upper and Lower Valley area, formerly city president for Brownsville for BBVA USA. Hector Villegas, market executive for El Paso, formerly city president for El Paso for BBVA USA. Juan Garcia, Retail market manager for South and Central Texas, formerly regional sales executive for BBVA USA. Kashif Pathan, Retail market manager for Colorado/New Mexico/West Texas, formerly regional sales executive for BBVA USA.

These executives combined represent more than 40 years of industry experience, and together they will lead PNCs growth in the market by continuing to build on the strong foundation already in place through their work with BBVA USA. Specifically, they will further drive market share by focusing their efforts across the many opportunities offered by each unique market along the Texas border region and looking to capitalize on economies defined by international commerce, defense, aerospace, manufacturing, healthcare, education and more.

At PNC, we take pride in our Main Street bank model, and our market leadership teams are where PNC meets Main Street, said Louis R. Cestello, executive vice president and head of PNCs Regional Markets. Our local delivery of products, services and expertise guides everything we do to support our customers and the community. We know the Texas border area has a wealth of opportunity, but we also recognize how unique each market is, which is why embedding local leadership that knows the community is key part of our strategy.

PNC is committed to supporting the Texas border markets, and consistent with its other markets across the country, takes a localized approach to help bolster and sustain the communities it serves. In the market, which has a predominant Hispanic population, PNC will introduce its commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion to guide the efforts around economic empowerment with the help and cultural expertise of its regional leadership team.

Also in support of its communities and in connection with its acquisition of BBVA USA, PNC recently announced a Community Benefits Plan to provide $88 billion in loans, investments and other financial support to create economic opportunity for low- and moderate-income (LMI) individuals and communities, people and communities of color, and other underserved individuals and communities. This four-year plan will be largely carried out at a local level by PNCs Community Development Banking teams in all its markets across its nowexpanded national footprint.

Additionally, as part of PNCs focus to move all forward financially, the bank plans to expand the reach of its innovative banking products and initiatives. This includes the company's recent announcement of its groundbreaking Low Cash Mode digital offering, which is designed to help PNC's Virtual Wallet customers avoid overdraft fees and remain in the banking system through unprecedented account transparency and Payment Control features to manage through low-cash moments or mis-timed payments. Following conversion, Low Cash Mode will be available to BBVA USA customers with Virtual Wallet accounts.

PNC is providing BBVA USA customers comprehensive information relating to the anticipated conversion of their accounts in October 2021. Until conversion, customers will continue be served through their respective BBVA USA and PNC branches, website and mobile apps. Over the coming months, PNC and BBVA USA will continue to operate as separate entities and brands while working together closely to ensure a smooth transition for BBVA USA employees and customers.

PNC Bank, National Association, is a member of The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. (NYSE: PNC). PNC is one of the largest diversified financial services institutions in the United States, organized around its customers and communities for strong relationships and local delivery of retail and business banking including a full range of lending products; specialized services for corporations and government entities, including corporate banking, real estate finance and asset-based lending; wealth management and asset management.

For information about PNC, visit www.pnc.com.
The Latest on the Group of Seven nations meeting being held in England:

FALMOUTH, England  Queen Elizabeth II has hosted the Group of Seven leaders at an evening reception where Britains royals mingled with some of the worlds most powerful politicians.

The event, which was closed to most media, saw royals, world leaders and their spouses enjoying drinks at Cornwalls Eden Project, an attraction that features the worlds largest indoor rainforest within giant domes.

Three generations of the monarchy attended the event, held on the first evening of a three-day summit in Cornwall, southwest England. Prince Charles and his wife Camilla were joined by Prince William and his wife Kate, who were taking part in G-7 events for the first time.

The leaders and their partners, including U.S. President Joe Biden and wife Jill Biden, will have a dinner of roasted turbot, Cornish new potatoes and greens with wild garlic pesto cooked by a local chef.

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CARBIS BAY, EnglandU.S. President Joe Biden had a pull-aside meeting Friday with French President Emanuel Macron ahead of their Saturday meeting.

The White House says the two leaders discussed the coronavirus pandemic, the counterterrorism efforts in the Sahel region of Africa, the transatlantic alliance and the partnership between the United States and France.

The White House says Biden had productive conversations at the Group of Seven summit with a focus on creating a more inclusive and fairer global economy.

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FALMOUTH, England  U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres has welcomed commitments by the U.S. and Britain to share millions of coronavirus vaccine shots with struggling countries. But he says its not enough.

Without a global effort, Guterres says the coronavirus could spread like wildfire in much of developing world.

Leaders from the Group of Seven wealthy democracies are expected to commit to share at least 1 billion vaccine shots with poorer countries, with half the doses coming from the U.S. and 100 million from the U.K.

Guterres says to defeat the virus, countries producing vaccines need to form an emergency task force to coordinate an effective response to COVID-19.

We need a concerted effort, we need a global vaccination plan, says Guterres, who will join the summit. If not, the risk is there will still be large areas of the developing world where the virus spreads like wildfire.

Guterres stressed we are on the verge of the abyss regarding climate change. He says leaders of developing economies need to urgently commit to net zero emissions by the middle of the century.

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FALMOUTH, England  British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said that the Group of Seven wealthy democracies must learn lessons from the pandemic, and not repeat errors made over the past 18 months and during the recovery from the 2008 global financial crisis.

Opening three days of talks with fellow G-7 leaders in Cornwall, southwest England on Friday, Johnson said there was a risk the pandemic could leave a lasting scar as inequalities may be entrenched.

He said it's vital that governments and international institutions don't make the same mistakes they did after the financial crisis, when the recovery was not uniform across all parts of society.

The British leader said the goal should be to level up across our societies and build back better.

Leaders of the G-7, which include Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Japan, are expected to commit to sharing at least 1 billion vaccine doses with countries that are struggling to secure enough shots.

The pledge includes commitments from U.S. President Joe Biden to share 500 million doses and from Johnson for another 100 million shots.

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CARBIS BAY, England  British Prime Minister Boris Johnson greeted leaders from the Group of Seven nations and the European Union on a wooden boardwalk on the freshly raked sand of Carbis Bay to open the G-7 summit on Friday.

Johnson wore a charcoal gray suit and light blue tie. The prime minister's wife, Carrie Johnson, was in a hot pink mid-length dress.

The couple greeted leaders with elbow bumps and small talk about social distancing and the weather, under typically moody English skies.

Johnson, who wed the former Carrie Symonds last month, later joked it was like walking down the aisle.

Reporters asked U.S. President Joe Biden what his message was for Russian leader Vladimir Putin, whom Biden is scheduled to meet with next week. The president replied, Ill tell you after Ive delivered it.

The G-7 leaders posed for a group photo. As the group walked away, led by Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron threw his arm around Bidens shoulder and began an animated discussion.

Macrons office said the French leader and Biden discussed China, agreeing there should be no confrontation but Western democracies must defend their values and interests. The two men, who were meeting for the first time, talked for several minutes while heading to a meeting room.

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PARIS  Leaders of European Union nations who are attending the Group of Seven summit in England gathered before the official start of the event with top EU officials.

French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Italian Premier Mario Draghi, EU Council President Charles Michel and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen talked about relations with China. They plan to discuss the topic later with U.S. President Biden, who also is at the summit.

The European position is clear: China is a systemic rival, a partner on global issues and a competitor, Macron's office said in a statement.

The European leaders also discussed ways to finance and donate COVID-19 vaccines, with the aim of getting 60% of the people living in the world's poorest countries vaccinated by March 2022, according to Macrons office.

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FALMOUTH, England  Hundreds of people have gathered for climate change protests near the site of the Group of Seven leaders' summit in southwest England.

Ahead of the official start of the three-day talks, some activists sent a barge carrying inflatable caricatures of U.S. President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson floating off the coast of Cornwall on Friday. The figures had messages written on their hands reading Wave of Hope and Crack the Crises.

Later, around 500 people joined a rally in St. Ives organized by the Extinction Rebellion climate activism group. Protesters wore blue and green gowns and headdresses while holding flags that read G7 drowning in promises and Action not words.

Climate change is a top issue on the G-7 summit agenda, along with recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

Dozens of young people also joined a protest on behalf of Fridays for Future, a youth climate movement kicked off in 2018 by activist Greta Thunberg.

Im inspired by the youth who are leading Fridays for Future. I think they are amazing, and if we have any hope, the hope is with them and not with our rich, greedy, lying leaders of the world meeting for the G-7, said Jill Eastland, 56, who joined the protest.

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CARBIS BAY, England  German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she hopes Group of Seven leaders achieve very good results on coronavirus vaccines and show the world were not just thinking of ourselves.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said ahead of a leaders' summit starting Friday that he expected the G-7 to commit to sharing 1 billion doses with countries around the world.

Germany has said it plans to donate 30 million of its vaccine doses by the end of the year, part of a commitment of 100 million by the European Union. Merkel's government has noted that Germany has been a major donor to the U.N.-backed COVAX facility, which is supplying doses to poorer countries, and that the EU has been a major exporter of vaccines.

Merkel said after arriving at the summit: I hope that we will achieve very good results to show that were not just thinking of ourselves, but were also thinking of those who dont yet have the opportunity to get vaccinated -- above all, African countries, but others, too.

She didnt elaborate on what those results would be.

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CARBIS BAY, England  German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she expects the Group of Seven to send a strong signal for values-based multilateralism, but she cautioned that problems such as climate change wont be solved without China.

Merkel said after arriving at a G-7 leaders' summit in southwest England on Friday that U.S. President Joe Biden represents the commitment to multilateralism that we have been missing in recent years.

The chancellor added: We will put in a strong word here for multilateralism here, and for values-based multilateralism. She said that puts the G-7  Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States - at odds with Russia and also in some aspects with China.

Merkel is attending whats expected to be her last G-7 summit after nearly 16 years in power.

We need everyone in the world -- we want to work together, particularly in the areas of climate protection and biodiversity. We will never achieve solutions there without China, she said.

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FALMOUTH, England  British police say seven people were arrested after officers found two vehicles carrying paint, smoke grenades and loudspeakers close to the Group of Seven summit venue in southwest England .

Police said Friday that officers searched a car and a van about seven miles (11 kilometers) from the Carbis Bay Hotel on Thursday afternoon and found the items inside.

Four men and three women were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit public nuisance and possessing an article with intent to commit criminal damage. All seven remain in police custody.

Police said they support safe and legal protests but criminal activity and public disorder are not tolerated.

Security is tight around the G-7 venues near St. Ives, England, where leaders of the world's wealthy nations are gathering for three days of talks. Armed soldiers guarding the main sites and some 5,000 extra police officers from around the U.K. deployed to the area.

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HAYLE, England  U.S. first lady Jill Biden and Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, are touring a preschool in southwestern England and learning how the children care for some rabbits.

The women also plan to take part in a talk about early childhood education. The White House says its the first time theyve met.

Biden and the former Kate Middleton are visiting with 4- and 5-year-olds at Connor Downs Academy in Hayle, England. Biden carried a bowl of carrots when they went outside to see the bunnies.

Biden is a longtime English teacher who focuses on education, as does Kate, a mother of three young children.

The first lady is traveling with her husband, President Joe Biden, who is attending a Group of Seven summit of the worlds largest economies opening Friday in Carbis Bay.

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CARBIS BAY, England  Workers are carefully raking the sand on the beach where British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will greet Group of Seven leaders at the start of their summit in southwestern England.

The backdrop for the greetings and family photo on Friday is an idyllic view of Carbis Bay, with the event's huge security operation just out of sight.

A Royal Navy destroyer is moored in the bay, and armed police and snipers are ringing the seaside resort where leaders of seven wealthy nations are meeting for the first time in two years.

The G-7 nations are f Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

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PLYMOUTH, England  U.S. President Joe Biden is going to be hosting German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the White House next month.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced Friday that Merkel, who is leaving office later this year, will visit Washington on July 15.

Psaki, in a statement, said the meeting will affirm ties between the two nations and the leaders will discuss the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and international security.

Merkel will be the first European leader to visit the White House.

She and Biden were set to meet later Friday at the Group of Seven summit, a gathering of some of the worlds wealthiest nations, taking place in England.

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FALMOUTH, England  The mother of a British teenager killed in a road accident involving a U.S. diplomats wife says she is hopeful of progress in the stalled case after Prime Minister Boris Johnson raised the case with President Joe Biden at the G-7.

Harry Dunn, 19, died in 2019 when his motorcycle collided with a car driven by Anne Sacoolas near a military base in England used by the U.S. Sacoolas claimed diplomatic immunity and returned to the United States after the crash. She has been charged in England with causing death by dangerous driving but is refusing to come back to Britain.

The U.K. government said Johnson discussed the issue with Biden when they met Thursday, and reiterated that the U.K. wants to see justice done for the family. Johnson said the president was extremely sympathetic to the familys plight.

Dunns mother, Caroline Charles, said she hoped Bidens personal experience of similar tragic loss would help U.S. authorities take a different view of the case.

Bidens first wife and their 1-year-old daughter died in a car accident in 1972.

It is almost two years since we lost Harry in August 2019 and it would be lovely to think that all parties can now come together to help bring this living nightmare to an end so that we can try to rebuild our shattered lives, Charles said.

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BERLIN  The German government says a member of the countrys advance team to the G-7 summit has gone into precautionary quarantine after a coronavirus case was reported in their hotel in the Cornish town of St. Ives.

The government said in a statement Friday that the incident would have no impact on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her delegations trip to the summit in Carbis Bay.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The Justice Department's internal watchdog launched an investigation Friday after revelations that former President Donald Trump's administration secretly seized phone data from at least two House Democrats as part of an aggressive leaks probe. Democrats called the seizures harrowing and an abuse of power.

The announcement by Inspector General Michael Horowitz came shortly after Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco made the request for an internal investigation. Horowitz said he would examine whether the data subpoenaed by the Justice Department and turned over by Apple followed department policy and whether any such uses, or the investigations, were based upon improper considerations.

Horowitz said he would also investigate similar Trump-era seizures of journalists' phone records.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and another Democratic member of the panel, California Rep. Eric Swalwell, said Apple notified them last month that their metadata had been subpoenaed and turned over to the Justice Department in 2018, as their committee was investigating the former president's ties to Russia. Schiff was then the top Democrat on the panel, which was led by Republicans.

While the Justice Department routinely investigates leaked information, including classified intelligence, subpoenaing the private information of members of Congress is extraordinarily rare. The disclosures, first reported by The New York Times, raise questions about what the Justice Department's justification was for spying on another branch of government and whether it was done for political reasons.

In a statement, White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said the Trump administration's conduct is shocking and clearly fits within an appalling trend that represents the opposite of how authority should be used.

Bates said one of President Joe Biden's top reasons for seeking the presidency was his predecessors unjustifiable abuses of power, including the repugnant ways he tried to force his political interests upon the Department of Justice.

The Trump administrations secretive move to gain access to the data came as the president was fuming publicly and privately over investigations  in Congress and by then-special counsel Robert Mueller  into his campaigns ties to Russia. Trump called the probes a witch hunt, regularly criticized Democrats and Mueller on Twitter and dismissed as fake news leaks he found harmful to his agenda. As the investigations swirled around him, he demanded loyalty from a Justice Department he often regarded as his personal law firm.

Swalwell and Schiff were two of the most visible Democrats on the committee during the Russia probe, making frequent appearances on cable news. Trump watched those channels closely, if not obsessively, and seethed over the coverage.

Schiff said the seizures suggest the weaponization of law enforcement by a corrupt president" and urged the Justice Department to do a full damage assessment of the conduct of the department over the last four years.

Senate Democratic leaders immediately demanded that former Attorneys General Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions, who both oversaw Trump's leak probes, testify about the secret subpoenas. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin said in a statement that this appalling politicization of the Department of Justice by Donald Trump and his sycophants must be investigated. They said Barr and Sessions are subject to a subpoena if they refuse.

Prosecutors from Trumps Justice Department had subpoenaed Apple for the data. The records of at least 12 people connected to the intelligence panel were eventually shared by the company, including aides, former aides and family members. One was a minor.

The subpoena, issued in February 2018, requested information on 73 phone numbers and 36 email addresses, Apple said. It also included a non-disclosure order that prohibited the company from notifying any of the people, the company said in a statement. The subpoena didnt include any context about the investigation and it would have been virtually impossible for Apple to understand the intent of the desired information without digging through users accounts, the company said.

Apple informed the committee last month that the records had been shared and that the investigation had been closed, but did not give extensive detail. The committee official and the two others with knowledge of the data seizures were granted anonymity to discuss them.

The Justice Department obtained the metadata  often records of calls, texts and locations  but not other content from the devices, like photos, messages or emails. The order prohibiting Apple from discussing the subpoena, or notifying the people whose records were being seized, was extended three times, one each year, Apple said.

We regularly challenge warrants, subpoenas and nondisclosure orders and have made it our policy to inform affected customers of governmental requests about them just as soon as possible, the company statement said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement that the data seizures "appear to be yet another egregious assault on our democracy by the former president.

The news about the politicization of the Trump Administration Justice Department is harrowing," she said.

The committee official said the House intelligence panel will ask Apple to look into whether additional lawmakers were targeted. The Justice Department has not been forthcoming on questions such as whether the investigation was properly predicated and whether it only focused on Democrats, the official said.

It is unclear why Trump's Justice Department would have targeted a minor as part of the probe. Swalwell, confirming that he was told his records were seized, told CNN on Thursday night that he was aware a minor was involved and believed that person was "targeted punitively and not for any reason in law.

The Senate Intelligence Committee was not similarly targeted, according to a fourth person who was aware of the probe and granted anonymity to discuss it.

There's no indication that the Justice Department used the records to prosecute anyone. After some information related to the Russia investigation was declassified and made public during the later years of the Trump administration, some of the prosecutors were concerned that even if they could bring a leak case, conviction would be unlikely, one of the people said.

Federal agents questioned at least one former committee staff member in 2020, the person said, and ultimately, prosecutors werent able to substantiate a case.

The news follows revelations that the Justice Department had secretly seized phone records belonging to reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN as part of criminal leak investigations. Following an outcry from press freedom organizations, the Justice Department announced last week that it would cease the practice of going after journalists sourcing information.

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Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.
The beginning of the school year when you got to show off your new duds, new cars, new looks!

Sports! Playing, cheering, watching high school athletics.

The arts: Dramatic arts, musical groups and shows, graphic arts groups, debate, etc.

The prom! No dancing the night away or punch bowl antics.

The daily interactions. Just being with the group, hanging with friends and classmates.

Access to college recruiters and advisors  its harder to line up higher education.

Walking onstage to get a diploma while all the family is watching with everyone elses family.

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The Still Voices Summer Series continues this week with an in-depth interview with Longford writer and filmmaker John Connell.

John sits down with film critic and journalist John Maguire to discuss his career to date, including his award-winning film work while based in Australia. The interview will be available on stillvoicesfilmfestival.com from June 11 at 8 pm.

John Connell is a multi-award winning author, documentary producer and investigative journalist. At 33 he is a United Nations (Australia) Media peace prize winner and two time Walkley winner for his human rights documentaries.

He worked for several years as an investigative journalist covering the Sri Lankan Civil War and indigenous human rights cases and his work lead to the freeing and resettlement of 17 Tamil Refugees from wrongful imprisonment by Australian authorities.

An award-winning filmmaker, his documentary programmes have won over a dozen international awards and screened internationally.

His no. 1 bestselling memoir The Cow Book was published to international acclaim spending 37 weeks in the Irish bestseller list and is currently being adapted to documentary by RTE Ireland's national broadcaster and Tile Films.

John Maguire is a film critic, journalist and broadcaster with more than 15 years experience writing and talking about film in Ireland. An astute and intuitive critic, for the last 8 years he has written a weekly film review column, feature interviews and film articles for The Sunday Business Post, Irelands premier business and politics newspaper.

For many years, he contributed a weekly film review to Irelands most popular breakfast radio show, Ian Dempsey on Today FM, among other long-standing national radio and television contributions.
Gardai have repeatedly broken the law by accessing illegally retained mobile phone data, a barrister has argued at the trial of four men accused of falsely imprisoning and causing serious harm to Quinn Industrial Holdings director Kevin Lunney.

Michael O'Higgins SC told the Special Criminal Court this morning (Friday, June 11) that despite a finding by the Court of Justice of the European Union that mass retention of phone data is a serious breach of citizens' privacy rights, the government has done nothing.

He added: "That has left another arm of the executive, law enforcement, breaking the law repeatedly, for years and years and years."

Responding, Sean Guerin SC for the Director of Public Prosecutions, said the mass collection of data is "not a breach of anything". It is, he said, an interference with privacy rights which is permitted in certain circumstances such as to "shed light on serious crime."

He said European Union directives have stated that data retention is a "valuable tool" and an appropriate method of criminal investigation.

The court has heard that following rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the Irish courts, gardai can no longer access mobile phone data through the Communications (Retention of Data) Act 2011. Gardai investigating Mr Lunney's abduction and assault therefore used search warrants to obtain call data records.

Mr O'Higgins said the material gardai uncovered should be ruled inadmissible because it was unlawfully obtained. Lawyers for the three other accused have adopted Mr O'Higgins' arguments.

A 40-year-old man who cannot be named by order of the court, Alan OBrien (40), of Shelmalier Road, East Wall, Dublin 3, Darren Redmond (27), from Caledon Road, East Wall, Dublin 3 and Luke OReilly (67), with an address at Mullahoran Lower, Kilcogy, Co Cavan have all pleaded not guilty to false imprisonment and intentionally causing serious harm to Mr Lunney at Drumbrade, Ballinagh, Co Cavan on September 17, 2019.

Mr Lunney has told the court that he was bundled into the boot of a car near his home and driven to a container where he was threatened and told to resign as a director of Quinn Industrial Holdings. His abductors cut him with a Stanley knife, stripped him to his boxer shorts, doused him in bleach, broke his leg with two blows of a wooden bat, beat him on the ground, cut his face and scored the letters QIH into his chest. They left him bloodied, beaten and shivering on a country road at Drumcoghill in Co Cavan where he was discovered by a man driving a tractor.

Mr O'Higgins, for the unnamed accused, said the mobile phone data was extracted from a database in a way that the European court has said is not permitted. He said that if the mass retention of data is unlawful then the manner in which gardai accessed that data cannot be lawful.



Mr O'Higgins said it was "probably unprecedented" for states to have failed to respond where the courts "at the apex of a legal system" have decided that something is unlawful. He said: "As a member state there is an obligation, and a very pressing obligation, to give effect to rights and to abide by rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union."

He said that even after the State's arguments defending the 2011 Act were rejected by the High Court, "they continued to take the benefit of a piece of legislation that the EU has pronounced as being a particularly serious breach of rights under the EU Charter."

The Special Criminal Court is bound, counsel said, by the finding of the European court that the mass retention of mobile phone data is a "serious breach" of the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Mr O'Higgins said the Supreme Court has ruled that where investigators breach the law inadvertently, a judge might permit the evidence, but where the breach is reckless or negligent it should be ruled inadmissible.

In this case, Mr O'Higgins said, the "absence of legality" in what investigating gardai did was "not only reckless or negligent. It was beyond that."

Gardai were aware of the court rulings and had sought legal advice, he said. The accused, counsel said, has a right to privacy and while the State might think their inability to use mobile phone data is the loss of a "valuable tool" and that the court ruling "confounds all sorts of ideas about common sense," he said, "under the rule of law you must accept it."

Mr Justice Tony Hunt, presiding, said it "offends any notion of balance and fair play" that criminals are free to use the technology with "complete impunity". He said that while people have freedoms, they come with responsibility. He added: "But I don't think it's heresy to say there's something a bit odd about the conclusions reached there."

Mr O'Higgins said the court is entitled to hold that view and say, "it's a rotten law or judgement," but the rule of law must still be applied. Justice Hunt replied: "The idea that we must accept these uncritically doesn't sit easily with me."

Besides arguing that mass retention is unlawful, the defence teams said the garda applications for search warrants contained inadequate, inaccurate or insufficient information and that search warrants are not an appropriate way to access mobile phone data.

Giollaiosa O'Lideadha SC, for Alan O'Brien, said that the warrants were disproportionate as they allowed gardai to enter the premises of the mobile phone companies and access "all data which was reasonably suspected to be evidence of an arrestable offence."

Mr Guerin will continue his submissions on Monday in front of Mr Justice Hunt, presiding, Judge Gerard Griffin and Judge David McHugh.
The Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) has today published its advice to the Health Service Executive (HSE) on the potential impact of different testing scenarios and durations of mandatory home quarantine for people travelling to Ireland from non-designated countries (that is, countries for which hotel quarantine does not apply upon entering Ireland).

After travelling into Ireland from a non-designated country, passengers are required, by law, to quarantine at home for fourteen days.

There is however an option to test-out of quarantine by availing of a free RT-PCR test taken no less than five days after arrival and subject to receiving a negative or not detected test result.

HIQA has advised the HSE that the timing of this test should not be extended. HIQA found that extending the timing of testing beyond five days would only slightly reduce the risk of transmission, but would substantially increase the burden on passengers in terms of time spent in quarantine.

Dr Conor Teljeur, HIQAs Chief Scientist, said: The risk of importing variants in people travelling to Ireland is concerning. To manage this, we need information on the countries passengers travelled through before arriving in Ireland. By improving the content, accuracy and coverage of the Passenger Locator Form, it will be possible to better manage and monitor the current quarantine policy.

There appears to be a low uptake of free post-arrival testing in passengers arriving in Ireland from non-designated states. HIQA has advised that better data collection on eligibility and uptake of post-travel tests, as well as data on adherence to quarantine, is needed to understand if the existing quarantine policy is effective.

Dr Teljeur continued: Mandatory home quarantine was introduced in Ireland to minimise the risk of introducing SARS-CoV-2, including variants of concern, from overseas into our local communities. Coordination is needed across government departments and agencies to ensure the legal duty to quarantine is clearly communicated to passengers. Providing clear and consistent information on how and where to access free post-arrival testing could increase uptake and allow more passengers from non-designated states to exit quarantine early and, more importantly, safely.
Data compiled from the state and Philadelphia health departments, as well as from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, show that almost 7.7 million Pennsylvania residents have received at least one of the 13 million shots administered, accounting for 69.4% of the 12-and-over population. Almost 5.88 million of them  53% of those eligible  are fully vaccinated, while another 1.81 million are waiting for their follow-up shot.
(Alliance News) - UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Thursday played down reported tensions with US President Joe Biden over the impact of Brexit on the fragile peace in Northern Ireland, after the pair met for their first face-to-face talks on the eve of the G7 summit.

The two leaders were all smiles as they posed for the media before 90 minutes of closed-door discussions, overshadowed by claims Biden had ordered a rebuke to London amid its row with the EU over new trading arrangements in Northern Ireland.

According to The Times, Washington's most senior diplomat in London, Yael Lempert, told Brexit Minister David Frost the UK government was "inflaming tensions in Ireland and Europe with its opposition to checks at ports in the province".

US national security advisor Jake Sullivan insisted the president a a proud Irish-American with distant family still in Ireland a would not make "threats or ultimatums" to Johnson.

But he said Biden was "rock solid" in the belief that the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended three decades of violence over British rule in Northern Ireland must be protected.

Adding to the pressure on Johnson, EU leaders said they would also bring up the row when they meet the British leader on Saturday, as member state Ireland said it welcomed US support.

French President Emmanuel Macron warned Johnson, who he is to meet on the sidelines of the G7 meeting, that "it is not serious to want to revisit, in the month of July, what we finalised after years of work on December".A

Before heading to the summit in southwest England, Macron added: "I believe in the power of treaties. I believe in seriousness. Nothing is renegotiable. Everything is applicable."

Johnson denied however that Biden raised alarm over Northern Ireland and insisted there was "absolutely common ground" on all sides in upholding the landmark peace accord.

"I'm optimistic we can do that," he told reporters in Carbis Bay, Cornwall.

By Jerome Cartillier, Jitendra Joshi and Sebastian Smith

source: AFP

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
(Alliance News) - Supreme PLC on Friday said it has acquired Irish battery and lighting products distributor Vendek Ltd for up to EUR1.8 million.

The move is Supreme's first acquisition since its initial public offering on AIM in February. The company described the deal as "an excellent platform from which to further penetrate the European markets."

The cash deal will see Supreme pay EUR1.1 million on completion, EUR300,000 in deferred payments over a two-year period and up to EUR450,000 subject to performance targets.

Manchester-based Supreme supplies products across batteries, lighting and vaping, in addition to brands it owns including 88Vape.

The acquisition is expected to be immediately earnings enhancing.

"We are delighted to be announcing what we believe to be a strategic acquisition in Vendek," commented Chief Executive Sandy Chadha.

"I have personally known this business for a number of years and firmly believe the combination of our two Ireland operations will significantly accelerate our growth aspirations and foster potentially stronger levels of cross-sell opportunities across our categories."

Shares in Supreme were up 1.3% at 202.50 pence in London on Friday.

By Will Paige; willpaige@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
(Alliance News) - The following is a round-up of updates by London-listed companies, issued on Friday and not separately reported by Alliance News:







Zephyr Energy PLC - Berkshire-based oil and gas developer - Filing application for trading on US-based OTCQB Market, also known as Venture Market. Zephyr adds: "The company believes that having its ordinary shares traded on the OTCQB will provide enhanced investor benefits, including easier trading access for investors located in the US, and greater liquidity due to a broader geographic pool of potential investors. A market maker will be appointed in the US to support the trading on the OTCQB."







Good Energy Group PLC - Wiltshire-based renewable energy supplier - Says investee Zap-Map launches new subscription service for electric vehicle drivers. New subscription platform includes additional features such as in-car support. Good Energy notes both Zap-Map Plus and Zap-Map Premium are among new subscriptions. Good Energy says: "Zap-Map's Plus offering helps drivers plan their journeys quicker. Drivers will be able to use enhanced options to filter by new charge points, multiple locations, user ratings and more detailed location types. Zap-Map Plus also enables EV drivers to view new chargers installed in the last 30 days, save more user filters and route plans, and to add multiple vehicles." "In addition to receiving all the Plus features, Zap-Map Premium subscribers can use the app within the in-car dashboard, via Apple CarPlay (with Android Auto available soon). This means users can locate suitable charge points, view live charge point status, and access route plans whilst on the move." Zap-Map Plus priced at GBP2.49 per month and Zap-Map Premium is GBP3.99 per month.







Jarvis Securities PLC - stockbroker - Says claim submitted to High Court to cancel outstanding GBP3.1 million from share premium account. "If confirmed by the court, this amount would then form part of the company's distributable reserves," Jarvis adds. Initial hearing to take place on June 18 with final hearing on June 29. Jarvis says: "If confirmed, the cancellation of the company's share premium reserve will become effective on the following business day, after the necessary registration of the court order with the Registrar of Companies has taken place."







Walls & Futures REIT PLC - London-based designer and developer of specialist social housing - Says pleased over 90% of shareholders have not accepted Virgata Services Ltd's takeover bid. As of second closing date, Virgata had support of 9.3% of Walls & Futures shareholders.







Cambridge Cognition Holdings PLC - Cambridge, England-based neuroscience technology - Joining University of California, San Francisco Brian Health Registry as partner in cognitive assessment field. Cambridge Cognition adds: "The Brain Health Registry is an online platform designed to speed up the discovery of treatments for Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other brain disorders."







Predator Oil & Gas Holdings PLC - Jersey-based oil & gas company - Says construction and civil works at MOU-1 site completed. Adds: "A further update on the mobilisation of the Star Valley Rig 101 to Guercif is expected next week."







Trident Royalties PLC - growth-focused mining royalty and streaming company - Updates on Mimbula copper royalty. Says operator of project, Moxico Resources PLC, seals USD73 million equity financing. Proceeds going towards expediting developing of standalone processing operation at the Namibian project. Trident adds: "Copper production to date has been from the processing of ore from the Mimbula surface stockpiles via toll treatment at the nearby KCM Tailings Leach Plant." Adds Moxico plans to boost output with electrowinning processing facility. New facilities to boost copper output run-rate to 30,000 tonnes by late-2022. Trident adds: "The financing underscores the robustness of the Mimbula copper mine, which is set to deliver a material increase in production against the backdrop of an exceptionally strong global market for base metals."







Vulcan Industries PLC - company aiming to develop precision engineering group - Raises GBP100,000 through issue of 6.0 million shares at 1.675 pence each. Also settles loan arrangement fees worth GBP36,750 through issue of 896,342 shares. Adds: "The company will use the proceeds from the equity issue for general working capital purposes."







By Eric Cunha; ericcunha@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
(Alliance News) - The UK Competition & Markets Authority on Friday said it has halted progress on CHC Group LLC's planned acquisition of Babcock International Group PLC's oil & gas aviation business as it mulls whether to launch an investigation.

The London-based aerospace, defence and nuclear engineering company announced the sale of its oil & gas aviation business in March. The business, part of Babcock's aviation segment, is headquartered in Aberdeen and provides offshore oil and gas crew transportation services in the UK, Denmark and Australia.

Texas-based helicopter services company CHC planned to purchase the businesses for an undisclosed sum, and the deal was expected to close in the second quarter of 2021.

"CHC will seek clearance for the transaction from antitrust authorities in the UK and Australia, but completion is not conditional upon such clearances being received," the two said at the time of announcing the deal in March.

The UK CMA's initial enforcement order was issued on May 26. The CMA said the order prevents both parties from integrating the businesses whilst the regulator decides whether it has grounds to open an investigation.

The regulator said it has "reasonable grounds for suspecting" that the acquisition would result in CHC's UK, Australia and Denmark helicopter businesses ceasing to be distinct from the three Babcock businesses included in the proposed deal.

Babcock in April said it planned to raise GBP400 million from disposals over the next 12 months as it decided to skip dividends for the 2021 and 2022 financial years to focus on building a strong balance sheet.

Babcock shares were trading 1.6% higher at 303.70 pence in London on Friday.

By Scarlett Butler; scarlettbutler@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2021 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Lawyers for the officers and police department wanted U.S. District Judge John M. Gallagher to strike sections of the lawsuit that referred to the officers unruly conduct during the trial where John Perez was acquitted of resisting arrest and disorderly conduct in February 2020. Perez was charged after an encounter with police in September 2018, when, he alleges in a federal civil rights suit, the officers assaulted him and conducted a sham investigation to cover up their actions.
Now then, lets see - when was it? Ah yes, the twenty-ninth of April. That would be seven weeks ago. The British Ambassador, Hugh Elliott, had arrived in Mallorca for the first time ever. He had a meeting with President Armengol and tourism minister Iago Negueruela. And what did he say? Well, he couldnt say more. Those were his words.

He was unable to say more about green-list separate treatment for Mallorca and the Balearics, although he did observe that the request for green listing from the Balearic government was well founded and he highlighted, for example, the virus sequencing capacity and enormous efforts made to contain the pandemic in Mallorca.

The ambassador couldnt say more, as he was in no position to say more, even if he knew where the Balearics stood apropos the UK travel traffic lights, which he may or may not have done.

On Wednesday this week, he was again in no position to say more (even if he didnt actually say this), apart from having quite a bit to say about something he may or may not know about. The initial inability to say more at the end of April was prior to the grand unveiling of the green list. So much attention had been paid to this that the BBC or Sky surely missed a trick by not broadcasting it live as an awards ceremony: And the winners are.

Treatment

There has of course since been Green List Mark II, remarkably similar to Green List I with the exception of the demoted Portugal, and we now await Green List Mark III. Hence, we have to go through precisely the same process as we did in the lead-up to both Mark I and Mark II. Ambassadors are unable to say any more, other than to suggest that requests for separate treatment for the Balearics are well founded (which Hugh Elliott pretty much repeated on Wednesday) and therefore raise hopes and expectations that may or may not be met.

Other than ambassadors, we have Balearic and Spanish government figures highlighting diplomatic efforts, low incidence rates, improved vaccination, etc., etc., etc. The fateful day will duly arrive, the awards envelope will be opened, and the latest winner will include some island in the Pacific that no one has the slightest intention of visiting. Naturally enough, we all hope that the Mark III winners will include islands with which we are much more familiar.

In this respect, the Netherlands may (or may not) have provided the UK government with some guidance. The Balearics and the Canaries, it was announced earlier this week, have been given separate treatment. The islands have been placed on the Dutch yellow list, the equivalent of green but with no test requirement for returning. President Armengol has been doing her diplomatic best not to upset the UK by saying that she understands that there is an internal issue caused by the current health situation.

Meanwhile, her predecessor, Jose Ramon Bauza, has been telling the European Parliament that there are national political interests behind the UKs travel policy.

Bauza certainly isnt alone in this regard. The head of easyJet Spain and Portugal, Javier Gandara, is just one other to have suggested that the green versus amber (plus red) lists are all about making British holidaymakers take staycations.

Environment secretary George Justice more or less confirmed this as official policy when, the other day, he urged the public to holiday at home. Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary backed him up: This isnt a normal summer. Opportunities for international travel are going to be more limited, so why not enjoy everything this country has to offer. Yes, and they were saying much the same thing last summer.

Advantages

Regardless of what Hugh Elliott had to say about Balearics advantages in terms of geographical location, Green List Mark III, according to Paul Charles of the PC Agency, will not be favourable to the islands because the UK government hasnt the slightest intention of opening up further travel until the end of July. And this, in his opinion, will be a very political decision, not based on data at all.

Charles has offered a rather different perspective than the mere economic one of staycationing. There are ministers, he suggests, who have lined up to protect their future careers and potentially benefit from an upcoming cabinet shakeup. This means sacrificing foreign travel, even if it also means risks to thousands of jobs.

Charles believes that there is an internal battle, with transport secretary Grant Shapps being stamped on by Matt Hancock and Priti Patel. It is several weeks since Shapps said that he was in favour of an islands approach, and it has indeed been a mystery to understand why he has appeared to have forgotten ever having said this. Perhaps we now know.

Another way of looking at the politics of all this was alluded to by Jose Ramon Bauza when he spoke about the UK being the main source of tourists in Europe. The Germans may have something to say about this, but Bauza wasnt wrong in highlighting the UKs touristic muscle.

Is it just all about the politics? Armengols diplomatic language has restricted her to saying that objectively the Balearics should be green-listed. She knows full well that the UK holds the aces and that there is a government with its specific European agenda. If Charles is right, then it will be Green List Mark IV at the earliest, and the British ambassador will doubtless be asked for his observations about a Mark IV listing, even if he cant say more.

Tourism ball park figure

As well as green list talk, no week is passing without forecasts as to tourist levels this summer and to the spin given to these. As examples this week, we have had a report regarding the programmed number of flight seats for Spain. These indicate, suggested one source, that there will be a massive arrival of tourists from July. But it depends on how one defines massive, as the programmed seats are almost 40% down on the June-August 2019 period.

The Spanish government, according to tourism secretary of state Fernando Valdes, is predicting between 14.5 million and 15.5 million foreign tourists between July and September - 40% lower than 2019. The timeframe is different, but these two forecasts do coincide, with the Valdes one not taking into account an increase in numbers if the UK places Spain on the green list.

Forty per cent down means 60% of 2019, and this is roughly the ballpark that has been forecast for Mallorca.
In the footprint of one of the proposed warehouses is a colonial-era burial ground that contains the remains of some of the areas earliest residents and is believed to be the gravesite of one of the areas only known Black slaves. The site also contains areas with prehistoric archaeological significance, according to a survey of cultural resources in the area.
The proposed changes would have a variety of effects on elections, and experience in other states has shown that it can be difficult to predict real-world impact. A change meant to strengthen election security, for example, can make it more difficult to vote  but also anger and energize voters, leading to a backlash as resources are poured into combatting potential disenfranchisement. Similarly, changes meant to expand ballot access can have little impact on voter turnout, making voting more convenient but not expanding the electorate.
Sinclairs SUV was headed south on Route 563, just north of Deerwood Lane, at 11:38 p.m. when it collided with a sedan driven by Michael Blackmon, 25, of Ottsville, Bucks County. A state police accident report indicates that Sinclair would be cited for driving outside of his lane.
Pans body was found on May 22 alongside 55-year-old Jingzhen Gao, a woman from Flushing, on the side of Eckley Road in Lausanne Township. The two were buried under a pile of debris that state police said appeared to come from a commercial business. Police announced Gaos identity on June 3 and said then that though they knew Pans identity, too, they had been unable to reach family members to notify them of the death.
China opposes foreign interference in Ethiopia's internal affairs: Chinese FM

Xinhua) 15:04, June 11, 2021

BEIJING, June 11 (Xinhua) -- China opposes foreign interference in Ethiopia's internal affairs, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Thursday in phone talks with Ethiopian Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Demeke Mekonnen.

Wang made the remarks after being briefed by Mekonnen on the domestic situation in Ethiopia.

Noting that China and Ethiopia are old and good friends, Wang said the two sides are each other's comprehensive strategic cooperative partners and have a good tradition of supporting each other.

China firmly supports Ethiopia in defending national peace and stability, actively exploring a development path suited to its national conditions, and overcoming the pandemic so as to resume economic and social development, Wang said.

Ethiopia's domestic issues should be resolved primarily through the efforts of the Ethiopian government, Wang said, adding that the international community should provide support while fully respecting Ethiopia's will, and should not impose unilateral sanctions on the country.

Wang said China is willing to provide assistance to alleviate humanitarian difficulties in Tigray, and has dispatched the first batch of food aid.

On the issue of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Wang said the unilization of cross-border water resources has always been sensitive and complex, and dialogue and consultation are the optimal way to resolve the issue.

China sincerely hopes that Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan will find a mutually beneficial and win-win solution through negotiations, he added.

Mekonnen, for his part, expressed gratitude to China for its precious support and sincere help in Ethiopia's anti-pandemic fight, and appreciated China's adherence to the non-interference policy.

He also expressed willingness to maintain close exchange and coordination with China on international affairs, jointly defend the legitimate rights and interests of the two sides as well as the developing countries at large, and safeguard international fairness and justice.

Mekonnen said he hopes to further strengthen friendly cooperation with China in various fields and continuously promote the deepening of Africa-China relations, so as to achieve common development and prosperity.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
The Legislature wanted more of a say in how the state operated during the pandemic. It got its wish when voters changed the balance of power and gave them more authority.
Call for application: Audit Manager RDC LUBUMBASHI  REF MGRAUDITLSHI-062021

As part of the strengthening of its audit department, KPMG in DRC is recruiting an audit Manager. The position is based in Lubumbashi (Democratic Republic of Congo).

This position requires mature, self-motivated individuals who are well organized, hardworking, enthusiastic and professional. Candidates must be able to demonstrate these attributes and that they are capable of working with a minimum of supervision and be able to cope with demanding situations that require the ability to multi-task on a daily basis. This is a highly demanding environment with very tight reporting deadlines; therefore, the willingness and capacity to work overtime at short notice is essential

A Manager in the Audit department must have the following qualifications, skills and attributes:

Functions and responsibilities:

Reporting to the partner in charge of the Audit department, the main missions are as follows:

Organize, plan and manage audit engagements



Ensure compliance with procedures and the technical quality of the audit work



Execute unresolved complex issues



Perform independent reviews and supervision of work, reports and communication intended for clients



Check the successful completion of assignments in terms of deadlines and budget



Manage team organization according top employee skills while encouraging them to progress further



Identify opportunities and promote the KPMG offer to potential clients and develop the professional network



Repere des opportunites et valorise loffre KPMG aupres des clients potentiels et developpe le reseau professionnel

Required profile:

* Technical skills :

Higher degree (accounting, finance), experience in an international audit firm minimum 6 years



An internationally recognized accounting qualification would be considered an asset



English speaking (imperative)



Written and oral expression in French (would be considered an asset)



Knowledge of auditing techniques and experience of the entire audit process



A strong, current knowledge of IFRS



Knowledge of local gaap (syscohada) would be considered an asset



Good knowledge of the mining sector (would be considered an asset)



Excellent presentation skills to produce and review complex financial reports and proposals



Advisory experience (would be considered an asset)



A high degree of competence in Microsoft Word, Excel etc.

* Personal skills:

Team spirit and ability to manage



Strong communication and inter-personal skills, both verbal and written



Established strong leadership skills and proven ability to provide clear directions and constructive feedback



A keen interest in providing high quality service and in being an effective and proactive member of a team



Good resistance to work under pressure with tight deadlines and deliver in a pressured environment



Strong analytical and synthesis skills



Business development skills



Dynamic and autonomous



Rigorous and methodical



Must demonstrate gravitas and impact to earn trust and respect amongst senior leadership and the team



Commitment to building the reputation of KPMG through the quality of work, knowledge and experience relevant to the industry

At KPMG our goal is to be the Clear Choice for our Clients, our People and our Community.

Application : send applications to the following address CD-Recrutement@kpmg.com specifying Ref. : MGRAUDITLSHI-062021.

Deadline for applications : 30 June 2021.

The application form must contain the following elements:

A cover letter

References

A Curriculum Vitae (CV) with photo

By submitting your resume and application information, you authorize KPMG to transmit and store your information in the KPMG recruitment database, and to circulate that information as necessary for the purpose of evaluating your qualifications for this or other job vacancies.
JOB OPPORTUNITY

DRC MECC/21.006

Provincial Data Collection Supervisor, DRC

Please note: All applicants who applied prior to June 11th, 2021 must re-submit their applications online for consideration.

About Us

We are International Business & Technical Consultants, Inc. (IBTCI), a global consulting firm working some of the most complex and impactful development problems worldwide. We work on programs that help government agencies, private companies and donors improve the lives of others. At IBTCI you will be part of an inclusive team that provides expert solutions and advice to understand and address critical problems while giving you opportunities to succeed and grow.

Assignment Title: Provincial Data Collection Supervisor, DRC

Department/Location: Democratic Republic of the Congo

Technical Point of Contact: Chief of Party

Type: Consultant

Classification: Consultancy

Overview:

The Monitoring, Evaluation and Coordination Contract (MECC) Project at IBTCI has been tasked by USAID with conducting an assessment of the GDRCs free primary education for all (Gratuite) policy. The key stakeholders and the primary audience for the analysis will be USAID/DRC and USAID/Washington. The geographic scope of this assessment is still to be determined, but is assumed to be national.

Supervisors for data collection will be recruited in each administrative province of DRC. The Supervisor will work under the direction of the evaluation team based in Kinshasa. The position will supervise the data collection in the field in the province where s/he resides or in a neighboring province.

This consultancy is expected to start immediately with an estimated 15 days of LOE over the course of a three-month period of performance. There will be potential travel to various territories within the province for field work. Candidates will be recruited from the provinces in which they reside.

Responsibilities

Using your expertise and subject matter skills, perform assigned tasks on specific task orders and/or contracts. Tasks could include, but not be limited to:

Scope of Work:

Oversee and provide quality control of local data collectors work and findings.

Assist local data collectors in liaising with stakeholders such as local academic institutions, school administrators, parents of students, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), DRC government officials at provincial and local levels, implementing partners, and program beneficiaries.

Ensure data submitted to IBTCI is the correct format, is complete and free from errors.

Inform IBTCI of any logistical or procedure issues that could hinder or affect the data collection.

Oversee the logistics of data collection, including scheduling interviews, reserving transportation, securing venue space for interviews if necessary, obtaining recording devices and other equipment, if necessary.

Other tasks according to need.

Serve in the above consultant capacity to support the IBTCI technical practice of Crisis, Conflict & Governance.

This position does not authorize/require the consultant to directly communicate with IBTCI clients.

This position does not authorize/require the consultant to have decision making authority on final work product.

Qualifications

Minimum Requirements:

At least 4 to 5 years of experience in data collection or community studies.

Knowledge of the primary education sector and principle stakeholders in the province of residence.

Experience with data collection in the field, including qualitative data.

Fluent in written and spoken French.

Fluent in at least one national language spoken in the province of residence, and additional local languages preferred.

Education: Graduate degree in political science, sociology, anthropology, international relations or other related field in social sciences.

Preferred Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

In-depth knowledge of DRC and the Great Lakes region, in particular at least one province.

Familiarity with programming and approaches of USAID/DRC in DRC.

Ability to conduct interviews and direct large and diverse group discussions.

Strong oral and written communication.

Experience in data collection methods, including FGDs, KIIs, surveys, etc.

Ability to work in a multicultural team.

Skilled in facilitation and conducting discussions within large and diverse groups.

Knowledge of the local context to help organize travel and security, organize meetings, rent secure meeting spaces and monitor developments in the security situation and related procedures.

Ability to translate documents, data and key interviews from local language to French.

Working knowledge of English.

Supervisory Responsibilities: This position does not have supervisory responsibilities.

Physical Requirements: This position requires the incumbent to be mobile and agile at moments notice in case of emergency. This is largely a sedentary position that requires the ability to speak, hear, see, and lift small objects up to 20 lbs. In case of an emergency situation, must be able and willing to duck and seek cover, which may require the individual to exit the vehicle, unaided, and hurriedly seek shelter elsewhere, as needed, in the event of a roadside emergency.

Travel: International and In-country/provincial travel may be required and may include travel to fragile or conflict prone zones.

How to Apply:

Please apply for this job online and send a copy of updated CV along with three contact persons under pdf or Word format at https://careers-ibtci.icims.com/jobs/2986/provincial-data-collection-supervisor%2c-drc/job with a copy to meccrecruitment@gmail.com (specify the job title in the subject) by the deadline of June 25th, 2021.

About the Organization:

IBTCI has been in business since 1987. We specialize in Monitoring, Evaluation, Research & Learning (MERL), Institutional Support (IS), Financial & Risk Management (FRM), Supply Chain Management & Procurement (SCMP); Social & Behavior Change (SBC) and Capacity Building. We provide these services across many sectors including, but not limited to, agriculture, resilience & food security, conflict & crisis, democracy & governance, economic growth & trade, education, energy & Infrastructure, environment & climate change, global health & WASH and humanitarian and disaster assistance. At IBTCI, our colleagues are encouraged to collaborate and be part of the solution while getting the tools and guidance needed to grow and support our clients' missions.

Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities and activities may change at any time with or without notice.

IBTCI is committed to a policy of equal employment opportunity for all persons without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identification, age, marital status, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, disabled veteran or Vietnam-era veteran, or any other classification protected by applicable anti-discrimination laws. We prohibit and do not tolerate any form of discrimination or harassment. VEVRAA Federal Contractor.

If you are an applicant with a disability that requires a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process or are limited in the ability, or unable to use the online application system and need an alternative method for applying, you may contact the Talent Acquisition team at TalentAcquisition@ibtci.com (Do not send your resume to this account, for consideration please apply in our career page).
Actor Manoj Bajpayee, who was recently praised for his performance in The Family Man 2 recalled a time when a journalist ignored him at an event. The incident took place a few years ago when a was going through a rough patch in his professional life.

Manoj also expressed how he felt bad for a couple of seconds and then he quickly realized that he is just not content for the journalist and moved on. He also said that everyone should embrace failure in the same way they embrace success.

Speaking to radio host Siddharth Kanna, Manoj said that he was attending an event and a journalist was present there, capturing guests on video and was also talking to them.



He said, I was going through a very rough patch at that time. Saare journalists bhi gayab ho gaye the, offers toh gayab ho hi gaye the (Not only did the offers disappear but the journalists too).Aisa please mat karna kisi ke saath, bhaiya, bohot bura lagta hai (Dont do this with anyone else, it feels really bad).

He added, Jab main apne aap ko taiyaar kar raha hoon ki bhai ab yeh mujhse baat karega (When I was getting myself ready to talk to him), he turned his back to me as if he didnt see me and he told the cameraman, Yeah, yeah, thats alright. Just switch it off now. It kind of bit me for five seconds. After that I realized, nahi hai, ab woh samay chala gaya tera (your time has gone), you are not content for him. And I moved on. But I always remember that, not for any other reason but that when failure or downfall comes, you should be ready to accept it, embrace it as you embrace and accept your success. You should have the ability to treat it in the same fashion, as a part of your life.

Fans loved him in The Family Man 2. And now his humility has won us over too. What do you think? Let us know in the comments section below!
In another episode of this happens only in India, an anomalous incident took place where a 29-year-old woman was found after 11 years of going missing.



The weirdest part of the incident is that she was living just about 500 meters away from her parent's house and it took the police 11 years to find her.

Yes, you read that right.

 Unsplash

She went missing when she was 18 years old from Ayalur Village and was recently found living 500 meters away from her parents home. She spent the past decade in a tiny room with a man she was in love with. Also, the mans parents were living in the same house and claim that they were unaware of the womans presence in the house.



Sajithas family had given up hope of ever finding her but they got a cue when Alinchuvattil Rahman, now 34, suddenly went missing from his house around three months ago and his family filed a complaint.

However, then his elder brother Basheer spotted him and then they found the couple living in another village on rent.

 Unsplash

Police then presented them in front of a local court who permitted them to live together when the woman herself said that she wanted to be with him.



Nenmara Police Station House Officer Deepa Kumar A said, Their story sounds unusual, but we took the couple to Rahmans house and they told us how Sajitha had lived secretly in a single room for all these years.

He added, Nobody knew about their affair. In any elopement, both persons go missing.

Now, this can only happen in our country and its like someone took hide and seek to another level. What do you think? Let us know in the comments section below!
Burley, ID (83318)

Today

Clear skies. Low around 60F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Clear skies. Low around 60F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.
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Major Chinese mills offered back-to-back cargoes of HRC at $1,000 per tonne cfr Vietnam this week. Shagang issued export offers of $970 per tonne fob China for its HRC.Major Indian steel mills were asking for $1,030-1,040 per tonne cfr Vietnam this week.Offers for distressed cargoes sitting at a major Vietnamese port, or in the process of loading in China, have fallen to $930-950 per tonne cfr Vietnam. In contrast, offers for position cargoes were around $950-970 per tonne cfr Vietnam last week."Buyers are not interested in prompt-shipment materials because they have sufficient stock," a buyer source in Vietnam told Fastmarkets on Friday June 11.

Bids from buyers in Vietnam were reported at $900-920 per tonne cfr Vietnam, although many were not in the spot...
Ambassador of Belarus S.Terentiev visits Sudan

On June 7-9, 2021, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Belarus to the Arab Republic of Egypt and the Republic of Sudan (concurrently) Sergei Terentiev paid a working visit in Khartoum.

Within the framework of the visit, the Ambassador of Belarus met with representatives of the Government and business circles of Sudan  Minister of Energy and Oil Jadein Ali Hassan, Minister of Agriculture and Forestry Eltahir Ismail al-Harbi, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Mohammed Sharif Abdallah, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Industry Ismail al-Shawi, Undersecretary for planning of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning Amin Saleh Yassin, management of the Agricultural Bank of Sudan and GIAD Industrial Group.

At the meeting with Undersecretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Sudan Mohammed Sh.Abdllah, a list of high-level bilateral events for the current year was agreed, including the holding of the fifth meeting of the Joint Belarusian-Sudanese Commission on Cooperation and political consultations at the level of deputy foreign ministers. The issues of implementation of previously signed bilateral documents on cooperation in various fields were also considered.

During the conversations with senior representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, the Ministry of Energy and Oil, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Finance of the Sudan, the sides discussed the possibilities of intensifying the Belarusian-Sudanese cooperation in a number of promising areas, including industrial cooperation, interaction in agriculture and forestry, adoption of advanced technologies in agricultural production.

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State celebrates June as Youth Employment Month, encourages students to seek summer jobs

State celebrates June as Youth Employment Month, encourages students to seek summer jobs

Friday, June 11, 2021

CONTACT: Camara Lewis, 517-930-4928

LANSING, Mich. - A projected 43,000 Michigan youth, ages 16-19, will seek summer employment and find jobs this season, and to help raise awareness about the importance of youth earning valuable skills and training for the future while doing so safely and legally, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer proclaims June 2021 as Youth Employment Month in Michigan.

During the month of June, the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity (LEO) encourages Michigan employers to offer meaningful, safe and valuable work and volunteer opportunities to our youth. We urge them to recognize that hiring young people, including those with disabilities, even if only for a summer, is an investment in the future of our state and growing economy. We also encourage students and young people to explore training and employment services available to them.

"We have a duty to protect minors who are eager to seek employment and ensure their safety while gaining invaluable knowledge and skills that better prepare them for future careers," said LEO Acting Director Susan Corbin. "The state offers a wealth of programs and services to support young talent that puts them on a path to success now as they seek part-time employment, and in their future career endeavors."

LEO has resources for businesses, schools and parents seeking information about legally and safely employing minors under the age of 18, and can provide guidance on the Youth Employment Standards Act that ensures all minors obtain and provide a completed worker permit to their employer prior to starting work to ensure their working conditions are safe and legal.

Employers are responsible for knowing and following the law while employing minors, and the state encourages employers who need additional understanding to watch the Youth Employment Standards Act webinar.

LEO also has a wealth of programs that prepare youth with training and services that help them land meaningful employment opportunities.

The contributions of local businesses, as well as LEO services and programs through the Michigan Works! Network, are essential to developing and promoting productive opportunities for youth and young adults. Summer employment opportunities, including for those with disabilities, are offered within many Michigan industries including agriculture, amusement and recreation services, lodging, camping, retail and food service.

"Activities such as career exploration, job shadowing and skills training can help young people - our future workforce leaders - gain valuable experience and build a network of professional referrals, oftentimes while earning wages," Corbin added. "We know these employment experiences can be transformational to a young person as they begin their career pathway."

Vocational Rehabilitation services through the Michigan Rehabilitation Services (MRS) and Bureau of Services for Blind Persons (BSBP) include MRS Pre-Employment Transition Services, MRS Young Adult Services and BSBP Pre-Employment Transition Services. All are geared toward providing equal opportunities for success to youth with disabilities.

Additionally, programs such as Jobs for Michigan Graduates and the Young Professionals initiative prepare students for both education and career success.

As Michigan's economy recovers from the pandemic, now is a critical time to engage young job seekers in career preparation and exploration activities. Join the state in encouraging both youth and local businesses to take part in gainful employment opportunities, using #MIYouthEmployment to follow the conversation online.

To learn more and to find resources on youth employment, including a digital toolkit and student success stories, visit Michigan.gov/YouthEmployment.

Additional resources for Wage and Hour can be found at Michigan.gov/WageHour or by phone at 855-464-9243.

Student and employer quotes

"I'm grateful to have had the chance to work in the Young Professionals program. It helped me gain experience in the real world and gain money management skills," said Kaylee Stevens, Young Professionals Participant, Great Lakes Bay Michigan Works! "I just want to thank them for never giving up on me and encouraging me to go after my dreams!"

"I'm thankful for all the help and encouragement the staff gave me, and I am so happy to be working," said Kendra Lucas, Young Professionals Participant, Ogemaw Michigan Works! "Your future self will thank you for the moments that you have tried something new."

"A young man that stands out to me came to us as a summer work experience participant, with a strong work ethic that was recognized by his immediate supervisor," said David Cartwright, assistant division director of parks, Wayne County Parks. "He was given the opportunity to apply for a permanent position and has been with us about three years now. He has shown growth throughout his employment and strength to advocate for himself."

About Vocational Rehabilitation and Independent Living

The Vocational Rehabilitation and Independent Living programs described in this press release are funded 78.7% through a VR grant from the U.S. Department of Education and 21.3% through State funding. Total Federal funding for Federal Fiscal Year 2020 was approximately $19,170,588.00. The Pre-Employment Transition Services provided under the Vocational Rehabilitation program are funded 100% through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. For federal fiscal year 2020, the total amount of grant funds used exceeded $2 million.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP)  The outgoing chief of Israel's Mossad intelligence service has offered the closest acknowledgment yet his country was behind recent attacks targeting Iran's nuclear program and a military scientist.

The comments by Yossi Cohen, speaking to Israel's Channel 12 investigative program Uvda in a segment aired Thursday night, offered an extraordinary debriefing by the head of the typically secretive agency in what appears to be the final days of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rule.

It also gave a clear warning to other scientists in Iran's nuclear program that they too could become targets for assassination even as diplomats in Vienna try to negotiate terms to try to salvage its atomic accord with world powers.

If the scientist is willing to change career and will not hurt us anymore, than yes, sometimes we offer them" a way out, Cohen said.

Among the major attacks to target Iran, none have struck deeper than two explosions over the last year at its Natanz nuclear facility. There, centrifuges enrich uranium from an underground hall designed to protect them from airstrikes.

In July 2020, a mysterious explosion tore apart Natanz's advanced centrifuge assembly, which Iran later blamed on Israel. Then in April of this year, another blast tore apart one of its underground enrichment halls.

Discussing Natanz, the interviewer asked Cohen where he'd take them if they could travel there. Cohen said to the cellar" where the centrifuges used to spin.

It doesn't look like it used to look, he added.

Cohen did not directly claim the attacks, but his specificity offered the closest acknowledgement yet of an Israeli hand in the attacks. The interviewer, journalist Ilana Dayan, also seemingly offered a detailed description in a voiceover of how Israel snuck the explosives into Natanz's underground halls.

The man who was responsible for these explosions, it becomes clear, made sure to supply to the Iranians the marble foundation on which the centrifuges are placed, Dayan said. "As they install this foundation within the Natanz facility, they have no idea that it already includes an enormous amount of explosives.

They also discussed the November killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an Iranian scientist who began Tehran's military nuclear program decades ago. U.S. intelligence agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency believe Iran abandoned that organized effort at seeking a nuclear weapon in 2003. Iran long has maintained its program is peaceful.

While Cohen on camera doesn't claim the killing, Dayan in the segment described Cohen as having "personally signed off on the entire campaign. Dayan also described how a remotely operated machine gun fixed to a pickup truck killed Fakhrizadeh and later self-destructed.

Cohen described an Israeli effort to dissuade Iranian scientists from taking part in the program, which had seen some abandon their work after being warned, even indirectly, by Israel. Asked by the interviewer if the scientists understood the implications if they didn't stop, Cohen said: They see their friends.

They also talked about Israel's operation seizing archival documents from Iran's military nuclear program. Dayan said 20 agents, none Israelis, seized material from 32 safes, then scanned and transmitted a large portion of the documents. Cohen confirmed that the Mossad received most of the material before it was physically taken out of Iran.

Cohen defended Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's decision to go public with the results of the operation, going against a long-standing practice of secrecy involving Mossad activities.

It was important to us that the world will see this, but this thing should also resonate with the Iranian leadership, to tell them, Dear friends: One, you have been infiltrated. Two, we see you.. Three, the era of ... lies is over,' Cohen said.

Media in Israel operate under a decades-old policy that requires journalists to clear stories involving security matters through military censors. That Cohen's remarks apparently cleared the censors suggests Israel wanted to issue a new warning to Iran amid the Vienna nuclear negotiations.

Iran has repeatedly complained about Israel's attacks, with Iran's ambassador to the IAEA Kazem Gharibabadi warning as recently as Thursday that the incidents not only will be responded to decisively, but also certainly leave no option for Iran but to reconsider its transparency measures and cooperation policy.

Shahrokh Nazemi, a spokesman for Iran's mission to the United Nations, told The Associated Press early Saturday that Cohen's comments reflected a long-running pattern of criminal sabotage against Tehran that includes the Stuxnet computer virus attack on Natanz over a decade ago.

This lawlessness has reached a point when the former official of this regime is shamelessly and blatantly threatening our nuclear scientists with death, Nazemi said. This madness must not be tolerated.

Cohen, who was replaced by former operative David Barnea, acknowledged in the interview he might one day seek the prime minister's office himself.

___

Associated Press writer Karin Laub in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.
Years after returning to Bad Axe, Briynne McCrea is returning to the Bad Axe District Library.

McCrea once worked at the library as a clerk for current Director Mimi Herrington before eventually becoming director for the Columbia Township Library in Unionville. By months end, McCrea will assume the same role in Bad Axe and replace her former supervisor.

I always knew I would love that job, McCrea said. It was a dream job for me.

McCrea is a Bad Axe High School graduate who traveled east to attend George Washington University and later North Carolina University-Chapel Hill. When she returned to the Upper Thumb area, she started her first role at the library in her hometown, which now seems like a bit of foreshadowing.

I clerked at the Bad Axe library when I first moved back and worked with (Herrington) at the White Pine cooperative, McCrea said. She was my boss and weve had a great working relationship.

Nearly six years ago, McCrea became director for the library in Unionville and was part of a facility expansion that helped the location keep pace with technology. One of those efforts was the start of a hotspot program that provided an internet option to residents of rural areas who may have limited high-speed resources.

We recently had a complete overhaul of the facilities, put on an addition that more than doubled the size of the building, McCrea said. Its now more up-to-date and we updated the technology. We have mobile hotspots available to try and combat the issue of limited connectivity in rural areas like this.

The library in Bad Axe faces not only the same challenges of keeping pace with technology, but also the challenges of funding resources. Now, McCrea will face those challenges at a location with twice the service population of the Columbia Township Library.

Its definitely one of the big challenges of all libraries, she said. Society and technology are changing repeatedly so we all work with that. There are interesting grant opportunities through the American Recovery Act and I hope we can tap into some of that funding. But I think if we get creative, we can find additional funding opportunities.

McCrea will have the benefit of working with Herrington for about two weeks when she begins work in Bad Axe on June 21, which she said shell appreciate. Herringtons final day on the job is scheduled for June 30 and McCrea said shell make the most of that time.

I have appreciated (Herringtons) mentorship and having her as a resource, McCrea said. Im excited about the new job but not about (Herrington) leaving.

Im extremely pleased to be taking over at the library in Bad Axe and theres so much potential with a really great community. Id like to continue the good work that has been done there.
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Daniel Baldwin Hess, University at Buffalo and Jeffrey Rehler, University at Buffalo

(THE CONVERSATION) For urban planners, parking rules established decades ago have become a contentious 21st-century challenge. Parking takes up about one-third of land area in U.S. cities; nationwide, there are an estimated eight parking spaces for every car.

In 2017 Buffalo, New York, became the first U.S. city to stop requiring development projects to include at least a minimum amount of parking. Other cities followed, including Hartford, Connecticut, and Santa Monica, California. Many cities are now considering reforms, and a bill pending before the California Legislature would remove minimums for new buildings near public transportation across the Golden State.

But despite growing support for parking reform, there is little data showing how such changes affect urban development. As part of ourwork on urban planning, we quantified changes in construction during the first two years after Buffalo adopted its new Green Code, repealing minimum parking requirements citywide.

We found that the Green Code is changing Buffalos urban form in ways that had been difficult, if not impossible, under former zoning rules. As local leaders seek to reenergize the urban core and spark a post-industrial renaissance, public transit is now a priority. Inactive storefronts, underutilized historic structures and former industrial buildings are being rehabilitated, and vacant parcels are being developed in fragmented neighborhoods.

Most building codes prioritize cars

With rapid post-World War II development and an explosion in car ownership, cities and towns across the U.S. introduced minimum parking requirements during the 1950s. These zoning ordinances required new buildings to include off-street parking lots. The mandates remain nearly universal across America, raising real estate prices, bringing more cars into cities, increasing air pollution and carbon emissions and lowering use of public transportation.

Parking standards were created arbitrarily, without adequate data. Zoning laws usually require one parking space per apartment, one per 300 square feet of commercial development and one per 100 square feet for restaurants. For context, a parking space measures 160 square feet on average, plus additional area for driveways and driving lanes, so an eaterys parking lot may be three times the size of its dining area.

Since the 2005 publication of UCLA urban planning scholar Donald Shoups The High Cost of Free Parking, many people have begun to question the amount of precious urban land currently used for storing cars. Planners, developers, urbanists and nonprofits are now offering market-driven strategies to realign off-street parking supply and demand.

Prioritizing cars limits space for housing, businesses, parks and other land uses that benefit citizens and contribute to local tax bases. It also increases construction costs, which are then passed on to tenants and buyers. In Los Angeles, for example, each parking space costs developers at least US$50,000  a price tag that has scuttled some development projects.

In 2016 Portland, Oregon, waived parking requirements for affordable housing developments, showing how zoning changes could make urban housing more available and affordable.

Buffalos natural experiment in parking reform

Buffalos long-standing zoning code, established in 1953, reflected the emergence and dominance of the automobile as Americas transportation mode of choice. Inflexible minimums ensured plentiful parking at bowling alleys, dance halls and skating rinks. The code did not ease parking provisions for mixed-use development or offer flexibility to reduce parking at small businesses providing neighborhood necessities.

The result: Nearly half of downtown Buffalo was converted to parking lots. Locals joked about parking: If the goal was to destroy downtown, we only halfway succeeded.

Our review of the Green Codes initial effects found that from April 2017 to April 2019, the amount of off-street parking included in new building projects varied widely. Developers of 14 sites mixing retail space and residential units incorporated 53% fewer parking spaces than required under previous zoning. Four added no parking, opting instead to share parking with other properties.

In contrast, many single-use developers maintained or exceeded former parking requirements. Despite city leaders ambitions for more accessible transportation options, the car remains king in development plans for office buildings and townhomes, hampering reform in a region characterized by suburban sprawl and travel habits based on car ownership.

Despite these challenges, we found that developers of 36 major projects  including two large housing complexes targeted to graduate students, with over 200 units apiece  included 47% fewer parking spaces than previous zoning required. One-third of the developments in our study made parking an amenity, charging user fees rather than bundling it into rent or purchase prices. Overall, the Green Code encouraged less parking in transit-rich locations along primary commercial corridors.

Optimizing land use

The COVID-19 pandemic has slowed development projects worldwide. Though personal automobile use dominated COVID-19-era transportation for many, there is broad support now for returning to a pre-pandemic focus on making urban places more dense, with a focus on walkable neighborhoods. Millennials and Generation Zers drive less than previous generations. Growing numbers of people working from home and shopping online are reshaping traditional urban commutes and travel.

Without minimum requirements, costly and land-consuming off-street parking becomes an option instead of a mandate, paid for by those who use it. Rethinking car-centric urban planning allows for more green space, transit-oriented development and active living.

Rethinking urban landscapes

Zoning is just one piece of a larger urban design puzzle that also must factor in location, market demand for parking and land use priorities. Good public transportation is also key to eliminating parking capacity. The Biden administration has signaled a commitment to public transportation.

Though development slowed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the desire for livable urban places has not. Nor has the need for affordable housing. U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has introduced a bill that highlights the need for equitable development to address the nations affordable housing crisis. It would withhold funds from development in areas that require parking minimums.

Meanwhile, parking reform is gaining momentum. In May 2021 Minneapolis struck down minimum parking requirements for new development as part of its climate and greenhouse gas emission goals. From San Diego and Salt Lake City to Raleigh, North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia, cities are considering similar changes. In the future, U.S. cities could look quite different, designed for citizens rather than parked cars.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/parking-reform-could-reenergize-downtowns-heres-what-happened-when-buffalo-changed-its-zoning-rules-159683.
RENO, Nev. (AP)  Nevada has become the latest flashpoint in a national debate over how to teach students about racism and its role in U.S. history, with parents clashing over curriculum proposals.

People wore MAGA hats and waved signs outside a packed school board meeting this week in Reno, while trustees considered expanding K-5 curriculum to include more teaching about equity, diversity and racism.

Opponents say the proposal would lead to the teaching of critical race theory, which seeks to reframe the narrative of American history. Critics say such lesson plans teach students to hate the United States.

A conservative group even suggested outfitting teachers with body cameras to ensure they arent indoctrinating children with such lessons.

You guys have a serious problem with activist teachers pushing politics in the classroom, and theres no place for it, especially for our fifth graders, Karen England, Nevada Family Alliance executive director, told Washoe County School District trustees Tuesday.

District officials there and in Carson City, where a similar debate is playing out, say critical race theory is not part of their plans.

The clashes mirror fights underway throughout the U.S.

In GOP-controlled statehouses, lawmakers have passed measures prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory, a reaction to the nations racial reckoning after last years police killing of George Floyd.

Nevada has bucked that trend. Gov. Steve Sisolak signed legislation this week to add multicultural education to social studies curriculum standards and teach students about the historic contributions of members of additional racial and ethnic groups.

Dr. Jonathan Moore, deputy superintendent of Nevada's education agency, said the laws clarified social studies content themes, which already included concepts like social justice and diversity. The standards do not include critical race theory, which draws a line from slavery and segregation to contemporary inequities and argues racism remains embedded in laws and institutions.

Meanwhile, the Black mother of a mixed-race student is suing a Las Vegas charter school over a Sociology of Change course that covers the concept of privilege as it pertains to race, gender and sexual orientation.

In Reno, the Washoe County School District arranged overflow rooms and set up loudspeakers outside Tuesday's school board meeting to accommodate a large crowd.

Opponents gathered outside carrying signs that read No CRT, CRT teaches racism and The School Board works for the people!

You say theres no CRT (critical race theory) in this curriculum, Sparks resident Bruce Parks told trustees. It is being taught in our schools right now. When you use words and language like white male privilege, systemic racism, thats straight out of CRT.

On the other side of the entrance, students, parents and teachers wore green T-shirts and carried signs with slogans including Amplify Student Voices to signify support for Washoe County School District Students for Change, a group that has pushed for curriculum additions.

These are systemic issues, and theyve been here for a long time. But I think the protests last year really gave light to how divided people were and how polarized people were, said Michael Arreygue, a college student who attended Washoe County schools. Theres people who dont want to acknowledge that these problems exist  that there is systemic racism and injustice.

Superintendent Kristen McNeill recommended the district form a task force to review curriculum instead of implementing the plan. The board approved the task force on Wednesday.

In Carson City, a proposal to incorporate concepts like equity into the strategic plan raised concerns about how schools broach the topic of race.

At a Tuesday school board meeting, parent Jason Tingle said he was worried when he heard talk about critical race theory in schools.

But he reviewed district materials and concluded the fears were unfounded.

"Ive yet to see anything in the curriculum that shows that we are actually going to take a hardcore approach to critical race theory," said Tingle, who has four children enrolled in district schools.

Until our kids come home and show us something different or tell us something different, then we should keep our faith in the school district and let them do what they were sent here to do.

___

Sam Metz is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

___

This version corrects the last name of the college student. It is Arreygue, not Arreyguy.
Sayre, PA (18840)

Today

Partly cloudy in the morning followed by scattered thunderstorms in the afternoon. High 78F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms in the evening. Partly cloudy skies overnight. Low near 55F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%.
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Susan C. Faircloth, Colorado State University

(THE CONVERSATION) As an American Indian and first-generation college graduate, I know how difficult it can be to successfully navigate higher education.

For me, going to college meant leaving my family, my community, my tribe and all that I knew. Few people on my campus looked or sounded like me. I struggled financially. I was scared, alone and far from home. Many times, I thought of leaving.

But what if I had been given the opportunity to remain in my community and experience a culturally relevant education that reflected Native values, beliefs and ways of doing and being?

As a former director of policy analysis and research at the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, a national organization that advocates for Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), I saw firsthand the lasting impacts these colleges make on the educational, cultural, physical and economic well-being of tribes and their citizens.

As Cheryl Crazy Bull, president and CEO of the American Indian College Fund, put it, tribal colleges provide a restorative education that offers access to language, socialization, relationships and Indigenous knowledge that is inherently empowering to students and their families.

The first tribal college

TCUs emerged in the 1960s during the self-determination era, in which Native Americans sought greater autonomy and self-governance.

The self-determination movement also sought to end assimilationist policies enforced by the federal government in its effort to civilize Native peoples.

It wasnt until I was pursuing my doctoral degree in education at Penn State University that I really understood the extent to which American Indians and Alaska Natives fought to shape their own education. It was a right that had been long denied by education policies that aimed to kill the Indian  and save the man, as described by the founder of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a boarding school for Native students, in 1892.

The fight for self-determination led to increased educational opportunities for Native peoples at all levels.

The first tribal college, Navajo Community College, now known as Dine College, was established in 1968 by the Navajo Nation. Located on the Navajo Reservation in Tsaile, Arizona, the college provided culturally relevant, geographically accessible and affordable higher education to members of the Navajo Nation from Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

Tribal colleges grow

In 1971, Congress passed the Navajo Community College Act. The legislation provided funding for the school, which had previously been financed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs under the 1921 Snyder Act, also known as the Indian Citizenship Act.

Several years later, in 1978, the Tribally Controlled Community College Assistance Act was passed, paving the way for new tribal colleges. It defined TCUs as institutions of higher education that are formally sanctioned, or chartered, by the governing body of an Indian tribe or tribes and serve a majority of students who are American Indian or Alaska Native.

Schools that met those criteria could receive federal funds based on the number of American Indian and Alaska Native students enrolled.

In addition to the TCUs authorized under these acts, the Bureau of Indian Education, within the U.S. Department of the Interior, operates and funds three additional tribal colleges. These institutions  Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and Southwest Indian Polytechnic Institute and the Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico  serve students from tribes located across the U.S.

Supporting whole communities

Today, about 40 TCUs are spread across 16 states.

Nearly 17,000 students  approximately 80% of whom are American Indian or Alaska Native  attend these schools each year. In addition to degree programs, TCUs offer an array of nondegree programs and services such as childcare, GED preparation, health care, job training, economic development, and language and cultural programming.

TCUs provide pathways to higher education that many Native students would not otherwise have due to geographic isolation, family and community responsibilities and poverty. A 2019 survey of students from seven tribal colleges found high rates of food and housing insecurity compared to their peers at other types of colleges and universities.

To offset their students financial needs, TCUs try to keep tuition rates low  less than US$3,000 per year on average.

The American Indian College Fund, established by tribal college presidents in 1989, also provides scholarships and awards to eligible students, as well as a range of programs in collaboration with the TCUs. These include grants and initiatives for teaching early childhood education, preserving Indigenous cultures and languages, addressing environmental issues and building new infrastructure within the colleges.

Chronic underfunding

However, more than 50 years after the establishment of Navajo Community College, TCUs remain chronically underfunded. This is due, in large part, to a federal formula that determines funding based on the number of American Indian or Alaska Native students they enroll, rather than the total student enrollment.

Although TCUs were established to serve the academic and cultural needs of Native peoples, many enroll significant numbers of non-Native students. Approximately 21% of TCU students were non-Native in the 2018-19 school year.

Failure to provide funding for non-Native students places an additional financial burden on these institutions. On top of that, TCUs receive little or no local or state funding for core operations. The result is often poorly maintained housing, classrooms, libraries, laboratories and other facilities.

President Bidens pledge to increase financial support for minority-serving institutions, including TCUs, is much-needed.

Trust responsibility

TCUs have a unique relationship with the federal government that is grounded in the governments trust responsibility for Native peoples.

This trust responsibility is a legal obligation to provide for the education, health and welfare of federally recognized tribes and their members. It is based on treaties entered into between the federal government and tribal nations between the 1770s and 1870s.

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As was evident with the establishment of the first tribal college in 1968, the future of tribes and tribal citizens is closely linked to their access to affordable, culturally relevant, community-based and adequately resourced education. In the words of Sherry Allison, president of Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, tribal colleges are stewards of opportunities to steer our Native nations in a direction that fosters well-being and survival.

The federal government has a legal, political and  I believe  moral obligation to ensure TCUs not only survive, but thrive.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/tribal-colleges-empower-native-students-with-an-affordable-culturally-relevant-education-but-need-more-funding-160578.
MIDDLETOWN  A local resident is raising concern about rain eroding the earth beneath some headstones at Calvary Cemetery.

A walk through the cemetery, which abuts the State Veterans Cemetery, shows at least a half-dozen toppled gravestones and dozens of headstones that are leaning precariously. With graves dating back to the late 1800s, but most from the 20th century, the Catholic cemetery is the final resting place for many people of eastern and southern European descent.

Kristen Rzasa, who has family buried in the cemetery, is a member of St. Mary of Czestochowa Church, which owns and operates Calvary. She has noticed flooding in the area of their burial site for some time.

Thats what disturbed me so much about this, she said, noting that several headstones have fallen over and dozens more are heavily leaning.

Certainly, nobody is notifying the family members, she said.

Rzasa sent emails last year to church administrators, expressing concern about the pooling of rainwater in that part of the cemetery. Rzasa said she was told it was the familys responsibility to maintain the headstones.

The issue first came to her attention in January 2020, when her family members headstone was damaged, Rzasa said. While a family member eventually paid for the repairs, she believes the church should do something  such as raise the land  to prevent other stones from falling over.

St. Mary staff declined to comment and referred Hearst Connecticut Medias questions to the Diocese of Norwich.

Wayne Gignac, director of communications for the diocese, also declined to answer questions about the cemetery, and referred Hearst Connecticut Media to Dale Fiore, general manager of Evergreen Cemetery and Crematory in New Haven.

Fiore, who is also the former president of the Connecticut Cemetery Association, said he was not familiar with the specific issues at Calvary Cemetery, but said it is not the responsibility of a cemetery to maintain headstones.

But, here in New Haven, we do, he said. If a stone is a little crooked or eroding, you clean it up, because it makes the whole place look poor. We wouldnt charge families for it. I dont believe in that.

Fiore said if there is a larger issue causing degradation of the headstones, it probably should be addressed to the cemetery.

As a member of the Connecticut Cemetery Association, every cemetery has different maintenance and management practices, he said. Were not the cemetery police.

Rzasa also had concerns that the flooding could be getting into caskets and causing damage to the deceased, but experts say that is unlikely.

David MacDonald, president of the Connecticut Funeral Directors Association, said almost every cemetery in the state requires caskets to be put in an outer burial container or a vault. He said a burial container is made of cement, while the vault also has a rubber lining.

Burial vaults  many are lined and sealed  meaning they are considered protected and keep the elements out, he said. Then theres others that are just concrete, which arent considered protected, but it covers the casket in the ground.

MacDonald said using these coverings has been common practice for as long as he has been in the field. More than protecting the casket, he said, burial vaults serve to keep the ground stable at cemeteries. Having that concrete container prevents the ground from settling over time, or stones becoming crooked.
Fresh from the passage of a new state budget hailed for winning Republican support, Gov. Ned Lamont sat down Friday to interview a consequential and controversial figure in GOP politics, former U.S. House Speaker John Boehner.

The online conversation by the Wesleyan RJ Julia book store in Middletown, billed as a bipartisan discussion between two politicians of diverging parties, was also an opportunity for Boehner, who left Congress in 2015, to plug his new memoir. On the House is filled with colorful stories from his time in Washington.

Boehner, an Ohio Republican, was known for strongly conservative views mixed with old-style tactics of compromise, or at least congeniality across the aisle. Lamont is preparing to campaign for re-election as a dealmaker and unifier with moderate politics, willing to disappoint the progressives in his Democratic Party.

One of the first questions Lamont posed to Boehner was about his relationship with President Barack Obama.

Boehner, who became House speaker in 2011, midway through Obamas first term as president, said the key was finding common ground without either side going against his principles.

I never expected President Obama to violate his principles. and I dont think he expected me to violate mine, Boehner said. I knew what he couldnt do. He knew what I couldnt do. The question was what could we do.

Lamont knows something about competing principles. The governor had to deal with liberal members of his own party pushing him to add taxes on the rich and spend more state money to help the working poor, as Republicans prepared to wage a battle against any proposals to raise taxes.

In these days of governing, with a 24/7 news cycle and the flood of information  much of it false  on social media, the loudest voices, Boehner said, get the most attention.

Id go see the president, oh my God the media would go crazy. They would go crazy on the right side on me, and then the left side would go crazy on President Obama. Before we ever came to any agreement on anything, we had both sides ready to kill each other, Boehner said.

Boehner said his approach to politics stems from his upbringing  the second oldest of 12 children raised in small-town southern Ohio. By mopping floors, waiting tables, and eventually tending bar at the pub owned by his dad, he learned the art of being able to disagree without being disagreeable.

Despite that, the former speaker, who calls himself a regular guy who used to have a big job, has certainly had his share disagreeable moments.

When he got to the House in the 1990s, he joined a group of young conservatives who promoted a dangerous style of smashmouth partisanship that ignored traditional norms of governance, the New York Times reported. That group took control of the House under Newt Gingrich, who became speaker in the Clinton era.

In 2013, Republicans, with Boehner by their side, would not hold a vote on the debt ceiling until the Democrats repealed Obamacare. He acquiesced to calls from the Tea Party, whom he publicly decried at times, to shut down the government that year.

Boehner resigned from Congress in 2015 amid an attempt by anti-government Tea Party members to oust him as an establishment member of the old Republican party.

Boehner said Friday that he had no regrets about when and why I left. As for whether hed ever run again for political office, he said: Id rather set myself on fire.

Lamont, a wine glass filled with pomegranate juice in front of him  perhaps an ode to Boehners love for Merlot  sought advice for a rookie governor. Boehner said establish close relationships with Democrats and Republicans in both legislative chambers.

Where they have a clear idea of what youre trying to accomplish, and you have a clear idea of what their challenges are or desires are in terms of helping you accomplish them, Boehner said.

Perhaps that advice will be useful as Connecticut lawmakers tackle one of the lingering issues of the 2021 legislative session: whether the state will establish a recreational cannabis for adults  the focus of a special session likely to happen in the coming week.

Boehner, asked to comment on Connecticuts prospect of legalization, said his views have changed since his time as speaker. Hes now a lobbyist for the cannabis industry.

Listen, if people want to smoke a joint or eat a gummy, what do I care? Boehner said. Hell, I smoke cigarettes and drink red wine.

I dont advocate states should or shouldnt do whatever they want to do, he continued, but I think Ive got a pretty good idea of where Connecticut is going and what the views of the people in Connecticut are  but not like the governor. Im sure he and the legislature will figure it out.

I think we will figure it out, Mr. Speaker, Lamont said.
Some 789 Americans have reported heart inflammation following their mRNA COVID-19 vaccinations, and 275 of those cases are in ages 16-24, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday.

To date, 143 million Americans have received the vaccine. The cases of inflammation, known as myocarditis in young Americans "exceeded the expected amount," said Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, with the CDC's Immunization Safety Office, in a Thursday briefing. The CDC had put the expected rate between 10 and 102 cases.

Given that nearly half of all American adults have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, the occurrence remains a rare event. But it warrants following, Shimabukuro said. CDC officials also said they plan to hold an "emergency meeting" June 18 to discuss the cases.

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"It's still early. ... We are still gathering information, and I believe we will ultimately have sufficient information to answer questions. We will have updated information next Friday that will put it in the context of benefit and risk," he said.

The findings, he added, are "consistent with surveillance data that has emerged from Israel, as well as case series reports and the Department of Defense."

According to the briefing, the majority of myocarditis cases were reported in men, in individuals who received a second vaccination, and in those who received the Pfizer vaccine, which Shimabukuro said has been used in more Americans than the Moderna vaccine.

The median time to the onset of inflammation symptoms is two to three days, he added.

The briefing was conducted as part of a review to discuss safety issues of the COVID-19 vaccines in pediatric patients.

The CDC began looking into cases of myocarditis in a small number of Americans vaccinated against COVID-19 in late May.

The move followed an announcement in late April by Israel's Health Ministry that it was reviewing cases of myocarditis in young people after they received the Pfizer vaccine and an April 24 report by Military.com of 14 cases being tracked within the DoD health system. The DoD now has at least 17 cases.

During Thursday's briefing, Peter Marks, director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, cautioned that his organization still doesn't "know whether this is truly related to the vaccine."

Myocarditis can be caused by a virus, and cases have been linked to COVID-19. But several of the individuals reported to the CDC tested negative for COVID-19 at the time of their diagnosis.

According to the CDC, 81% of the reported cases that were reviewed have made a full recovery. As of May 31, 15 people remain hospitalized, with three in intensive care.

Health officials maintain that the risk of contracting a severe case of COVID-19 currently outweighs any risks associated with the vaccine.

-- Patricia Kime can be reached at Patricia.Kime@Monster.com. Follow her on Twitter @patriciakime.

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NEW ORLEANS  The offshore service vessel that capsized in the Gulf of Mexico in a deadly April disaster is cracking and will have to be brought ashore in sections, the U.S. Coast Guard said Wednesday.

A Coast Guard news release said the Seacor Power had rotated in the spot where it partially sank after capsizing April 13 off Louisiana's coast. Salvage workers reported signs of cracking and separation of the hull from the superstructure, indicating the vessel's structural integrity has been compromised, according to the release.

A "lift boat" equipped with legs, the vessel can be lowered to the sea floor to anchor it in place for work on nearby oil and gas facilities. It overturned as it was heading to a job site with 19 people aboard. Only six survived.

Six bodies were recovered from the wreckage or Gulf waters. Seven people are missing and presumed dead.

Family members were briefed on salvage efforts Wednesday by officials with the company that owns the vessel and by the salvage company, Donjon-SMIT.

The Coast Guard said efforts so far have involved removal of debris around the vessel to make room for salvage equipment. Salvage efforts will include the use of a submersible barge that can be maneuvered under larger sections of the vessel, then refloated. The Coast Guard says the largest sections could be removed by the end of June, but that could be delayed by weather or other factors.
Frustrated over a lack of community support for a proposed gun range, the executive director of Joint Base Cape Cod, Massachusetts, emailed the local chamber of commerce last week, threatening to prevent his soldiers from patronizing area businesses.

Retired Brig. Gen. Christopher Faux threatened a "conditional confinement" for thousands of troops in an email to Chris Adams, chief of staff of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce.

The proposed multi-purpose machine gun, or MPMG, range at Camp Edwards, located on Joint Base Cape Cod, would be the first in Massachusetts.

Access to an MPMG range is key to meeting weapons qualifications standards and training requirements, officials say. Currently, the closest range is 270 miles away at Camp Ethan Allen in Jericho, Vermont, according to a study by the Massachusetts National Guard.

"With our impact on local business, it is hard to believe we have heard nothing in support. For that reason, I will be recommending a conditional confinement for the thousands of soldiers that train here each weekend over the summer to The Adjutant General," Faux said in the email. "It truly saddens me to even consider taking these steps, but I am more saddened by the lack of support from the businesses on Cape."

However, Maj. Gen. Gary W. Keefe, the adjutant general of the Massachusetts National Guard, rejected Faux's proposal for conditional confinement, according to the Boston Globe, which first reported on Faux's actions.

Capt. Aaron Smith, a spokesman for the Massachusetts National Guard, said that, "General Faux's comments were not authorized and do not reflect the Massachusetts National Guard's decades-long commitment to support local business on Cape Cod."

The Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce called Faux's statement "shocking" and "extremely insensitive given the last 15 months of pandemic-induced closures and restrictions on local businesses," in a June 4 response obtained by Military.com.

"If General Faux is truly seeking community input at a broad level, he needs to engage the wider community in an effort to go beyond the bare minimum, not issue a threat which is deemed punitive to local businesses," the chamber added.

The Massachusetts National Guard has "remained deeply committed" to "responding to the concerns of our neighbors," Smith told Military.com. "During the range's nine-year design process, which began in 2012, the Guard has convened several conversations to understand the community's concerns, commissioned independent experts to study every environmental impact, and taken time to thoughtfully modify the design to address those factors."

The range has drawn criticism from some community members who are concerned that it will cause environmental damage. It would require up to 170.5 acres of tree clearance and about 5,197 acres to accommodate ammunition falling to the ground.

"Cape Cod has endured a great many impacts from base-sited activities related to water quality, noise and land use access," the chamber of commerce said.

However, a Guards study found that the range would have "no significant impact" on wildlife or people.

Camp Edwards received a 2020 First Place Award from the Secretary of the Army for Environmental Restoration for its mitigation efforts, and the range proposal has design modifications that protect the environment, Smith said. These include "reducing the design footprint and incorporating organic materials [to] allow soldiers to complete their requirements and steward the land entrusted to our care."

"In every initiative at [Joint Base Cape Cod], we remained deeply committed to transparency; understanding and responding to the concerns of our neighbors; and creating opportunities to strengthen our shared community life on Cape Cod," he added.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates  An Iranian destroyer and support vessel are now sailing in the Atlantic Ocean in a rare mission far from the Islamic Republic, Iran's state TV reported on Thursday, without offering the vessels' final destination.

The trip by the new domestically built destroyer Sahand and the intelligence-gathering vessel Makran comes amid U.S. media reports, citing anonymous American officials, saying the ships were bound for Venezuela. The Associated Press could not immediately confirm the ships' destination.

The vessels departed last month from Iran's southern port of Bandar Abbas, said Adm. Habibollah Sayyari, Iran's deputy army chief. He described their mission as the Iranian navy's longest and most challenging voyage yet, without elaborating.

Iranian state TV released a short clip of the destroyer cruising through the Atlantic's rough seas. The video likely was shot from the Makran, a converted commercial oil tanker with a mobile launch platform for helicopters.

"The Navy is improving its seafaring capacity and proving its long-term durability in unfavorable seas and the Atlantic's unfavorable weather conditions," Sayyari said, adding that the warships would not call at any country's port during the mission.

Images from Maxar Technologies dated April 28 appear to show seven Iranian fast-attack craft typically associated with its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard on the deck of the Makran. Satellite images from Planet Labs Inc. suggest it left a port at Bandar Abbas sometime after April 29. It wasn't immediately clear where the Makran and the destroyer are now.

In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price would not speculate on what the vessels were carrying, saying only "that if this is an effort to transfer weapons or otherwise to violate its international obligations we would be prepared to respond."

"We have seen the press reports regarding this movement," Price said. "We're prepared to leverage our applicable authorities, including sanctions, against any actor that enables Iran's ongoing provision of weapons to violent partners into proxies."

The website Politico first reported in late May, citing anonymous officials, that the ships' final destination may be Venezuela. Iran maintains close ties to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and has shipped gasoline and other products to the country amid a U.S. sanctions campaign targeting fuel-starved Caracas. Venezuela is believed to have paid Iran, under U.S. sanctions of its own, for the shipments.

A top aide to Maduro has denied press reports that the ships will dock there. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive geopolitical issues.

During a news conference May 31, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh declined to say where the Makran was going.

"Iran is always present in international waters and it has this right based on international law and it can be present in international waters," he said. "No country is able to violate this right, and I warn that no one makes miscalculations. Those who sit in glass houses should be careful."

The fast-attack craft aboard the Makran are the type that the Guard uses in its tense encounters with U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf and its narrow mouth, the Strait of Hormuz. It's not immediately clear what Venezuela's plans would be for those ships.

"If the boats are delivered, they may form the core of an asymmetrical warfare force within Venezuela's armed forces," the U.S. Naval Institute said in an earlier published analysis. "This could be focused on disrupting shipping as a means of countering superior naval forces. Shipping routes to and from the Panama Canal are near the Venezuelan coast."

Earlier this month, fires sank Iran's largest warship, the 207-meter (679-foot) Kharg, which was used to resupply other ships in the fleet at sea and conduct training exercises. Officials offered no cause for the blaze, which follows a series of mysterious explosions that began in 2019 targeting commercial ships in Mideast waterways.

The unusual voyage comes ahead of Iran's June 18 presidential election, which will see voters select a successor for the relatively moderate President Hassan Rouhani.

___

Associated Press writers Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, Matthew Lee in Washington and Joshua Goodman in Miami contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON -- House and Senate lawmakers voiced concern Thursday over the acting Navy secretary's move to cancel the service's nuclear sea-launched cruise missile in fiscal 2023 as top defense leaders said they had not been briefed on the decision.

"I think we're all shocked to have heard the news of the acting secretary of the Navy appearing to take action to zero out the sea-launched cruise missile. This is something that is incredibly important," said Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee subpanel on strategic forces.

"We know that the Nuclear Posture Review isn't underway, and yet we have the first steps toward actions that would be unilateral disarmament," Turner said during the committee's hearing to review the fiscal 2022 budget proposal for nuclear forces.

Multiple media outlets reported this week that acting Navy Secretary Thomas Harker directed the service in a June 4 memo to "defund [the] sea-launched cruise missile."

The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review -- an examination of U.S. nuclear policy that occurs when a new administration takes office -- supported pursuing this type of missile. The strategy under former President Donald Trump's administration called for expanding the role and capability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

The Defense Department's Melissa Dalton testified Thursday that the review by President Joe Biden's administration is "on the cusp" of commencing. Biden has said he wants to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons.

"The sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be deterring -- and if necessary, retaliating against -- a nuclear attack," Biden's campaign said in an online statement before the president's election.

In a Senate Armed Services Committee budget hearing Thursday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said they had not been briefed on the memo about the sea-launched cruise missile.

At the House hearing, Turner asked whether Vice Adm. Johnny Wolfe, the Navy's director of strategic systems programs, had been consulted about the missile.

"I was not privy to it before it was actually signed. But my understanding is, for the [Navy secretary] it was part of a deliberate process to start the dialogue for building the next [Program Objective Memorandum] ... in starting that dialogue he does point out that it is not a decision," Wolfe testified.

"It's a hell of a way to start a dialogue, to call for the canceling," Turner replied.
The body of a Marine who went missing June 5 while swimming off Okinawa has been recovered and identified, U.S. and Japanese officials said Friday.

Cpl. Eric John Niss-De Jesus, 24, of Mountain Lake, Minn., was a military working dog trainer, Marine Corps Installations Pacific 1st Lt. Ashleigh Fairow told Stars and Stripes in an email.

Niss-De Jesus, assigned to Camp Kinser, went missing while swimming with colleagues near a reef, according to a spokesman for the Japan coast guard in Naha who spoke on a customary condition of anonymity. The Marine had been swept out to sea by a large wave.

The coast guard, which received a call about the incident at about 4:45 p.m. that day, used helicopters and patrol boats to search for Niss-De Jesus until noon June 7, the spokesman said. Japanese fireman also searched on land.

The body was found Wednesday afternoon in the sea about 1,000 feet off Odo Beach in Itoman, according to the spokesman.

"Marine Corps is working closely with local officials to determine the facts surrounding Cpl. Niss-De Jesus death," Fairow said in her email. "Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family and friends of the Niss-De Jesus family."

Niss-De Jesus, who had a bachelors degree in animal science from the University of Minnesota, was recently selected for the enlisted commissioning program, the Marine Corps announced in April. He was slated to attend officer candidates school later this year and aspired to be a combat arms officer.

"Eric was incredibly loved and we have felt it from each of you," his mother, Jessica Blom, wrote on social media, according to a Thursday report by CBS News affiliate WCCO in Minneapolis. "God has blessed us with a community that knows exactly how to lift up and support each other."
BAGHDAD (AP)  Multiple rockets targeted two Iraqi military bases hosting U.S.-led coalition troops and foreign contractors Wednesday, Iraqi security officials and the military said.

Three rockets hit Balad airbase, north of Baghdad, without causing any casualties or damage, an Iraqi military statement said. The base housed foreign contractors.

Hours later, at least one missile hit close to a military base next to Baghdad airport, two Iraqi security officials said. It was unclear whether the explosion was caused by a rocket or a drone strike.

One Iraqi security official said they had heard two rockets. The second said preliminary findings indicated it had been a drone attack and a trailer belonging to the coalition was set on fire by the attack. There were no casualties, they said.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the strikes, but U.S. officials have previously blamed Iran-backed Iraqi militia factions for such assaults.

The attacks are the latest in a string that continue to target the U.S. presence in Iraq. Over a dozen have targeted Iraqi military bases and Baghdad's highly fortified Green Zone since U.S. President Joe Biden assumed office this year. More than 10 people have been killed, including two foreign contractors.

Lockheed Martin announced last month that it was withdrawing contractors maintaining Iraq's F-16 fighter jets from Balad base over security reasons.

Recent attacks have featured more sophisticated weaponry, such as drones, which has alarmed U.S. and Iraqi military officials. The attacks occur as Baghdad and Washington work on drawing up a timetable for the withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq.
SIOUX FALLS, S.D.  Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota will be the home of the next-generation nuclear bomber, the B-21 Raider, the U.S. Air Force indicated Wednesday.

The Air Force plans to build and eventually operate over 100 of the stealth bombers, which are capable of launching nuclear strikes around the globe. U.S. Sens. John Thune and Mike Rounds said they heard from the Air Force Wednesday that it has officially designated Ellsworth the bomber's main operating base.

Thune said the planes will eventually be housed at several Air Force bases, including locations in Texas and Missouri. However, Ellsworth was selected by the Air Force to house the bomber's training program and first squadron, Thune said.

The announcement represents an economic boon for the western part of South Dakota, with the bomber expected to potentially double the size of the base's personnel by bringing 3,000 more service members, Thune said. Construction projects for bomber hangars and other facilities are also expected. It currently hosts two squadrons that operate B-1 bombers, which are expected to eventually be phased out of military use.

"It's a once in a generation, historic opportunity for South Dakota," Thune said, adding that it will ensure Ellsworth remains a vital part of the nation's military.

The base, located near Rapid City, is already one of the largest employers in the state. According to a 2017 estimate, it had an annual economic impact of over $350 million.

Ellsworth faced the possibility of closure in 2005 when it was briefly put on the Pentagon's list of military bases that should be closed or relocated. But since then, South Dakota politicians have worked to keep it on the shortlist of sites for the B-21 bomber. The Air Force had announced in March 2019 that it was leaning towards the base as the location to develop its B-21 Raider program.

Rounds credited West River communities for rallying to make sure the base stayed open. He added the development would create a ripple effect of construction for schools, infrastructure, and housing.

The Republican senators emphasized that it will be an important piece of the United State's military rivalry with both Russia and China. The bomber is expected to have a range long enough to attack targets on other continents.

"It will let (China) know that we can reach out and touch them should they misbehave," Rounds said.

However, the bomber is not expected to be flying over the Black Hills until 2027, and many of the details of the aircraft, currently being developed by Virginia-based Northrop Grumman, remain unknown or classified.

Rounds was briefed several weeks ago on the project and said that so far it was "on time and on budget."
Two deployed Louisiana National Guard soldiers died in unrelated incidents in different countries this week, according to Defense Department officials.

Spc. Joshua Robinson, 22, of Baton Rouge died Thursday at Camp Buehring, Kuwait, as a result of a non-combat incident. The Pentagon did not issue details on what led to his death; the incident is under investigation.

Officials with the Louisiana National Guard did not immediately return a request for comment or provide Robinson's career record. He served with 3rd Battalion, 156th Infantry Regiment within the Louisiana Army National Guard, based in Lake Charles.

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On Tuesday, 1st Sgt. Casey Hart, 42, of Baton Rouge died at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, after a non-combat incident at Al-Tanf Garrison, Syria, on May 9.

Hart also served with the 156th Infantry Regiment, but in the 2nd Battalion.

The specifics surrounding Hart's incident are also under investigation, according to a statement from the Pentagon. WAFB 9, a Baton Rouge news outlet, reported that he went into cardiac arrest while running last month.

Hart, a mortarman, enlisted in the Army in July 1997. He joined the Louisiana National Guard in May 2000.

He was also a 14-year veteran of the Baton Rouge Police Department.

-- Steve Beynon can be reached at Steve.Beynon@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @StevenBeynon.

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When the USS Jimmy Carter sailed into its home port in Washington state in September 2017, it was flying an unusual flag: the distinctive skull and crossbones of a Jolly Roger.

Theres no telling exactly what the Jimmy Carter was doing at sea, as its missions are probably among the most closely guarded secrets in the U.S. Navy, but submarines fly those pirate flags when they return from a mission after some kind of operational action.

While no one outside of the crew can tell you what that operational action entailed, the history of Western submarines flying the Jolly Roger upon a successful return is a funny bit of history.

Submarines havent always been an accepted part of naval warfare. When they first became a viable technology, some old sailors thought they were a less-than-gentlemanly act of war. They compared the idea of silently striking the enemy from under the waves to an act of piracy.

Whether the old salts liked it or not, submarines were here to stay. And as if to prove you cant just call sailors anything you happen to find derogatory, those early submariners adopted the pirate theme and made it their own.

Sir Arthur Wilson was the first sea lord of Englands Royal Navy when submarines entered active service. He was a great naval officer and Victoria Cross recipient while at sea. But by land, even as first sea lord, Wilson wasnt impressing anyone. Hes mostly remembered for a short tenure, marked mostly by being a loud crank.

No matter how cranky Wilson was, he was still in charge. If he thought submarines were a dirty way of fighting, one would think hed ax the program. Instead, he did the opposite, actually promoting the use of submarines as a future for the Royal Navy.

Being the first sea lord that no one seemed to like might have been the reason he gets credited for saying submarines were underhanded, unfair and damned un-English. Theres no actual proof he said this, but history isnt kind to unlikable people.

What Wilson did say about submarines came long before he was the one making the decisions for the navy, because it also flies in the face of what he actually did as first sea lord:

Theyll never be any use in war and Ill tell you why. Im going to get the First Lord to announce that we intend to treat all submarines as pirate vessels in wartime and that well hang all the crews.

When World War I broke out in 1914, the Royal Navys submarines got its first taste of naval combat. A contemporary of Wilsons, Lt. Cmdr. Max Horton was out to sea aboard one of Englands earliest submarines, the HMS E9. Horton and the E9 were off the coast of German islands in the North Sea when they came upon the German light cruiser Hela.

Horton torpedoes Hela from 600 yards, and the cruiser was soon at the bottom of the sea. The E9 evaded German anti-submarine efforts for the entire voyage back to safer waters, but once it arrived back in port, Horton hoisted a large Jolly Roger flag, a nod to Wilsons threat of hanging his triumphant crew.

For every subsequent enemy he sunk, Horton intended to raise another pirate flag, but he ran out of room. Instead, he increased the size of his boats Jolly Roger and started adding symbols and other information to denote the submarines victories, similar to how airmen marked their kills on the nose of an aircraft.

Thus, a new tradition for submarines was born. By World War II, the practice not only grew, but pirate flags actually were issued to submarine crews. Submariners from Allied nations also joined in on the practice and have flown their Jolly Rogers ever since.

The personnel of the British submarine HMS Utmost showing off their Jolly Roger in February 1942. (Royal Navy/Imperial War Museum)

While some of the markings on these pirate flags are self-explanatory, others will be known only to the crew. When the Jimmy Carter returned to its Washington port flying one, there was a symbol on the flag -- but good luck finding out what that means.

-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on Facebook.

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Military members might not look at a corporate middle manager and think he or she has what it takes to make a non-commissioned officer. The same is true in the reverse. Just because someone served in the military doesnt qualify them automatically to work in a Fortune 500 corporation.

The gap between the two worlds isnt as wide as anyone might think. Sure, theres a different culture, different expectations and a different way of life, but theres a lot about these two worlds that overlap.

A lot of that overlap is learned behavior. Luckily for veterans, the U.S. military is instilling those behaviors into each of its alumni. While veterans may not appreciate these right away, it pays to have some or all of the following traits.

1. Being on Time

They say 50% of success is showing up, but as anyone in the military knows, showing up when youre supposed to is equally important. From day one, timeliness is embedded in the psyche of the military member. Being where youre supposed to be when youre supposed to be there is so important that veterans are programmed to believe that being 15 minutes early is on time while being on time is actually late.

The good news for veterans headed into the civilian world is that employees capable of being on time (which will appear to be early to civilians) are a much sought-after commodity. Showing up on time to events, presentations or even just the daily grind is noticed, recognized and appreciated in large companies.

2. Manners

Todays offices can be a pretty informal place, especially as one ventures into the western parts of the United States. No matter how informal the workplace gets, some universally respected practices always are going to be there when it comes to manners, and veterans are taught most of them in basic training.

Referring to people by their official titles is not only good manners; its a sign of respect. The same goes with holding doors for others, standing for someone important and not falling asleep during a presentation. These are all things vets are programmed to do (or not do). Everyone in civilian corporations notices these small gestures, and they note the person whos making them.

3. Time Management

Just like in the military, civilian corporate employees have a lot to balance. They have their human resources responsibilities, mandatory corporate training and anything else expected of them. This all comes on top of their normal responsibilities.

If that sounds familiar to you as a veteran, thats because veterans have to juggle the same responsibilities on top of their everyday jobs as well. Military members have to do their jobs, complete computer-based training, on-the-job training and maintain their physical fitness. Juggling these responsibilities is great preparation for any civilian job, to be completed between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.

4. Teamwork

Most military activities are group activities, from an everyday job to training exercises. People who serve in the military know the importance of an individuals role in a group exercise and will work to make sure they fulfill whats expected of them for the good of the unit as a whole. Civilian groups work much the same way.

On its face, the goal of a corporate civilian working group might seem like its not as important, but its part of a greater effort. Military members know the importance of doing their part, even if they dont entirely understand the greater strategy at play, and they act accordingly. Corporate employers notice and recognize their efforts.

5. Proactivity

The idea that people should anticipate unforeseen events and respond in a meaningful way that allows the mission to continue seems absurd, but its an essential element in military life. Veterans know their job and will come to know an operational tempo. Like a sixth sense, it gives military members the ability to see potential obstacles to mission success. Corporations appreciate this quality in their employees.

The word proactive is itself rooted in corporate-speak, but it perfectly describes the way veterans are programmed to anticipate their own needs and act accordingly. Most importantly, veterans act independent of management when given the resources they need. Corporate managers see this as leadership ability -- because thats what it is.

6. Tracking Success

Throughout their military career, veterans were asked to keep track of their own successes and personal achievements for the purposes of awards, performance reports and medals. While these come regularly throughout the year, it should be second nature for vets to note them.

This trait comes with one important caveat. Veterans tend to list their successes as a group effort, except when putting in for individual awards and medals. The group-oriented mentality actually can hold veterans back in corporate life. The corporate world wants and expects you to achieve on your own. Its all well and good to be part of a team, but when it comes to raises, bonuses and promotions, its time to highlight how integral you personally are to any process.

-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at blake.stilwell@military.com. He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on Facebook.

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Adam Duvall, whom the Marlins signed to a one-year, $5MM deal on February 9, has slotted in as Miamis primary right fielder this season. Evidently, the front office also discussed the possibility of filling that position via a trade for then-Red Sox outfielder Andrew Benintendi. In early February (presumably before signing Duvall), the Marlins discussed a potential three-team deal, also involving Boston and the Padres, that wouldve sent Benintendi to Miami, report Barry Jackson and Craig Mish of the Miami Herald. Utilityman Jon Berti would have gone to San Diego had that deal been finalized, per Jackson and Mish, but the Marlins eventually backed out of the arrangement. Benintendi, whom the Red Sox wound up trading to the Royals instead, has hit a solid .284/.342/.412 in Kansas City. Duvall, on the other hand, is off to a poor .207/.254/.410 start. Given those respective performances, its easy to conclude in retrospect the Marlins shouldve pushed harder for Benintendi, although its impossible to malign the front office without knowing precisely who else the club wouldve had to part with to push those talks over the finish line.

More out of Miami:
Regional

Congress MP urges fast track recruitment of police in Mlaya

Correspondent Shillong, Jun 10 | Publish Date: 6/10/2021 1:25:55 PM IST

Voicing concern on the alarming rise in the rate of unemployment in Meghalaya, veteran Congress parliamentarian, Vincent H Pala on Thursday sought an effective intervention of chief minister Conrad Sangma to fast track the recruitment process for vacant positions of newly approved 7th and 8th Battalions of Meghalaya Police. Quoting the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) report, the sitting Lok Sabha member from Shillong parliamentary seat, informed the Chief Minister that the current unemployment rate in the State is about 13 per cent which is the highest ever in the history of Meghalaya.

Every year, the Colleges and Universities are producing educated youths who do not have adequate opportunities for employment, Pala said, urging the Chief Minister to expedite the recruitment process of the duly approved two Battalions, which will to some extent mitigate the unemployment crisis in the State. In addition, approximately 2 million youths who were studying or working in other parts of India have returned to the state. Although some who were working outside have returned and re-joined their previous employment, there are many who were compelled to stay back as their employers have stated their inability to pay salaries, the MP wrote in an obvious reference to those who have returned due to the pandemic.
The Mets announced theyve claimed right-hander Nick Tropeano off waivers from the Giants. Hes been optioned to Triple-A Syracuse. Reliever Tommy Hunter was transferred from the 10-day to the 60-day injured list to open 40-man roster space. The Giants designated Tropeano for assignment last week.

This marks the second time in nine months the Mets have snagged Tropeano off the waiver wire. New York claimed him from the Pirates after the conclusion of last season. Ultimately, they decided not to carry him over the winter, non-tendering him a little more than a month later. Tropeano then signed a minor league deal with the Giants and was selected to the major league roster on May 21.

The 30-year-old wound up appearing in four games with San Francisco, tossing six innings of relief. He only allowed one earned run in that time, but Tropeano also managed just a pair of strikeouts. While he didnt punch many batters in his limited work in San Francisco, he flashed some bat-missing ability with Pittsburgh last season. Tropeano struck out a strong 28.8% of opposing hitters in 15 2/3 innings with the Pirates, allowing just a pair of runs in that time. He generated swings and misses on a strong 14.9% of his offerings in 2020, and that bat-missing ability and recent run of strong run prevention clearly holds some appeal to the Mets front office.

While Tropeano has only worked in relief at the major league level the past two seasons, he could serve as either rotation or bullpen depth for New York. He was a decent back-of-the-rotation arm for the Astros and Angels earlier in his career, and hed started all three of his appearances with the Giants Triple-A affiliate this season (albeit without ever working into the sixth inning).

By claiming Tropeano, the Mets assume the remaining balance of his $1.1MM contract. He remains under team control via arbitration through 2022, so he could be a multi-year piece for New York if he performs well enough for the club to tender him a contract. Tropeano is in his final minor league option year, so he can be shuttled back and forth between Queens and Syracuse for the rest of this season if he sticks on the 40-man roster.

Hunter was placed on the IL on May 19 with the rather nebulous diagnosis of lower back pain. Its not precisely clear when the team expects him to return this season, but hell now be out of action until at least late July. He has made four scoreless appearances in 2021.
Nigeria's celebrated female acts, Tiwa Savage and Seyi Shay were caught in a near fisticuff during a quarrel between them in a Lagos salon.

In a video, which went viral on social media on Tuesday, they were seen being pulled apart from each other.

Their quarrel reportedly started after Seyi Shay greeted Tiwa, hi, upon entering the salon. But that did not sit well with the mother of one because she had not forgotten what Seyi and Victoria Kimani had done to her in the past.

In 2019, Seyi and Victoria, the Dailypost Nigeria reported, released their covers of Kizz Daniel's hit song, 'F**k You', where they had both dissed Tiwa Savage.

In her lyrics, Seyi Shay said, You know I'm not Savage, I pay my bills.

Victoria Kimani, on her part, accused Tiwa of prostitution and blocking her from a show.

Don't come to me and think you can say 'hi' with the dirty and disgusting spirit that you have. You think I have forgotten what you guys did? How many years ago? You and Victoria Kimani. You think I can forget? Tiwa said.

In response, Seyi fired back, The only reason why I greeted you is to try and squash all that is going on and to say sorry. I am not going to listen to this because you got your facts wrong.

Tiwa, how about the things that you have done? You want me to open everything here? I am not like you. I am not going to do that. If you want to start acting up and acting like an 'agbaya' right now, carry on.

The two female acts continued exchanging words and had to be pulled apart.
Ghana's 2020 Most Outstanding Teacher and the Author of Best Time Computing textbooks Mr. Eric Asomani Asante has taken delivery of 2000 copies of science practical textbooks to support his educational project.

The books worth fifty thousand Ghana cedis (Gh50,000) were given him by Mr. Ruben Ggbedema, the CEO of Ruben Series which is a publishing firm located in Tema.

Before Mr. Eric Asomani Asante was adjudged the winner of Ghana's Best Teacher award scheme for the year 2020, he had already embarked on a number of philanthropic projects to promote education in Ghana.

He has never relented in his philanthropic efforts at promoting education after being adjudged the 2020 Most Outstanding Teacher.

As an ICT enthusiast, Mr. Asomani Asante has used his position as the Best Teacher to solicit for and donated 50 laptops and 100 desktop computers to six Schools between 22nd and 26th March, 2021.

In pursuit of his vision, he is currently constructing a modern Science and ICT Laboratory Complex at Akuasi in the Eastern Region which is at the roofing stage.

Eric Asomani Asante again, has and still using his Digital Age IT Fun Club to provide IT training to a lot of teachers and students across the country.

As it is said, one's good deeds shall always carry his name along the path of life, Mr. Ruben Gbedemah heard the good works of his colleague publisher, Eric Asomani Asante is embarking upon and has today Tuesday 8th June, 2021 donated 2000 pieces of Science Practical textbooks worth Gh50,000 to support the 2020 Most Outstanding Teacher.

Mr Eric Asomani Asante in receiving the books thanked Mr Gbedemah for his kind gesture and assured him that the books would be put into good use.

He added in consultation with his project committee head, the Tema Metro Education Director, Mrs Bernice Ofori, 1000 copies of the books will be donated to schools in Greater Accra Region while 1000 copies would benefit some schools in the Central and Volta regions.

In an interview on the sidelines of the programme, the Metro Director of Education and 2020 Best Teacher Project Committee Chairperson, Mrs Bernice Ofori said, "Material resources are very important in modern day education and the 2000 science textbooks are going to benefit thousands of Ghanaian children in their Education".

Mr Abednego Neuttey, the Tema Metro GNAT Chairman also in attendance indicated that teachers are going to benefits from this donation that will be made available to over 30 public schools across the country.

He further pledged his support to provide fuel to the Best Teacher as he distributes the books to those deprived Schools identified under his project.

Other dignitaries at the function were the ICT coordinator, Mrs Rita Brown, Mr Ransford Narteh, SMIE Coordinator, Ekua Attah Obimpeh PRO, Beatrice Ofori Adu (S&M) and Mrs Afua Serwah Debrah, the headteacher of Naylor SDA Junior all in the Tema Education Directorate.
Dr Yao Archibald Letsa, the Volta Regional Minister has applauded Keta Senior High Technical School (KETASCO) in the Keta Municipality of the Region for emerging winners in the 2021 Zonal Regional Mathematics and Science Quiz competition.

The authorities of the school who were led by Volta Regional Director of Education, Madam Enyonam Afi Amafugah visited the Regional Minister to present the award to him on Monday June 7.

Ketasco won the competition after competing with schools from both Volta and Oti regions.

Miss Lamini Francisca, Master Senyo Bright Gadzo and Master Lutterodt James were the reps for the school.

Madam Amafugah said it was an exciting moment for her and the directorate.

Mr Isaac Kofi Dzidzienyo, the headmaster for Keta Senior High Technical School expressed his gratitude about the performance of the student and further appealed to the minister to help the school get assess to WiFi for research in their studies.

He also asked the minister to help the school with a mini van to help in transporting contestants to quiz centres.

He also mentioned that he was not surprised about the performance of his students since their high level of cooperation, discipline and readiness exhibited during their preparations gave them more assurance.

Dr Yaw Archibald Letsa express happiness about the visit and congratulated the leadership of Keta SHS for the massive preparation of the contestants.

"On behalf of the Volta Regional Coordinating Council and on my own behalf, l congratulate you the management and students of KETASCO for being the winners of this year's NSMQ competition," he added.

Dr Letsa pledged that he will do his possible best to help the school in its preparations for the upcoming national competition.

He suggested a fund be established in order for philanthropist, well-wishers, past students and the general public to contribute to help establish a formidable National Mathematics and Science Quiz Competition team that will win the prize for Volta.
French national Juan Remy Quignolot has been accused of spying and conspiracy by prosecutors in the Central African Republic, nearly a month after he was arrested in the capital, Bangui, according to public prosecutor Eric Didier Tambo.

"The accusations are of espionage, illegal possession of military and hunting weapons, criminal association, harming domestic state security and conspiracy," Tambo told French newswire AFP, adding that any trial would take place within the next six months.

"In cases of harming domestic security, you're talking about lifetime forced labour," he said, referring to the Central African punishment if he is convicted.

When he was arrested on 10 May, Quignolot allegedly had a large quantity of weapons in his possession while he claimed to be a journalist. A photo of his arrest shows his hands bound behind his back, sitting behind a mound of weapons and military clothing.

France called the arrest and photos manipulation.

The Frenchman reportedly worked occasionally as a security guard for several aid organisations in the country.

Russian ruse?

Former colonial power France froze budgetary aid and military cooperation with CAR two days ago, calling his arrest and charges part of an anti-French disinformation campaign backed by Moscow.

"The Russians are involved, but the CAR is an accomplice at best," said the French foreign ministry.

"The CAR authorities have several times made commitments which they haven't upheld, both politically with regard to the opposition and in its behaviour towards France, which is being targeted by a massive disinformation campaign," the ministry added.

Russian Valery Zakharov, a close adviser to CAR President Faustin Archange Touadera, tweeted about the arrest.

France had a military presence in the country, Operation Sangaris, to help quell the conflict after then-president Francois Bozize was toppled in 2013. Sangaris pulled out in 2016, following elections.

However, a strong Russian presence has grown in the unstable country over the past three years  weapons and "instructors" were sent in 2018 to train CAR forces.

It has made sizeable investments in CAR's minerals sector, which include gold, diamonds, copper and uranium.

Last December, Moscow and Rwanda sent hundreds of military personnel to work on behalf of Touadera as a coalition of armed groups mounted an attempted coup ahead of presidential elections. He was able to regain control over a large part of the country that had previously been in militia hands.

Late last month, French President Emmanuel Macron told France's Journal du Dimanche newspaper that "anti-French talk has provided legitimacy to predatory Russian mercenaries at the apex of the state, with a President Touadera who today is a hostage of the Wagner group," referring to the Russian paramilitaries who carry out operations for the Kremlin.
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Mr. Maxwell Amedi, Food Security and Resilience Technical Programme officer at World Vision International Ghana has described ecosystem as the lifeline for habitats on earth and that there is the need to protect it so as to make the globe a place worth living.

Mr Amedi noted that humans has the responsibility to protect the earth's ecosystem to show the love humans has for their creator.

He said God in his wisdom loves the earth he has creator, however man must ensure all things in it are protected through the ecosystem which is its central point of life.

Mr Amedi made the remark when the WVI joined the United Nations (UN) and other organizations to celebrate this years World Environmental Day at Zebilla in the Bawku West District of the Upper East Region.

World Environment Day is a day set aside annually on 5th of June to remind us to take care of the Environment, create awareness and take action for protection of the environment he noted.

Mr Amedi indicated that this marks the formal launch of UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, 2021  2030, which is essential in working to building the ecosystem.

Touching on the theme; Ecosystem restoration with special focus on creating good relationship with nature, Mr Amedi mentioned that This means we all have roles to play to make this years observance of World Environment Day relevant.

He charged organizations, youth, faith leaders, traditional authorities towards ecosystem restoration to be crusaders and agents in helping to protect the environment through the ecosystem as the WVI has it as one of its core values to protect the ecosystem.

Mr Amedi pointed out that the organization has a duty to care for Gods creation hence it would act in ways that would restore and protect the environment, indeed the organization would continue to celebrate its achievements in ecosystem restoration through its Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) project model.

He urged stakeholders to support the protection of the ecosystem as the WVI continues to advocate on behalf of children and their parents for greener environment for sustainable livelihood

Mr Amedi assured the WVI renewed actions, commitments and choices towards a better ecosystem restoration.

GNA
The US and EU issued an impassioned plea Thursday for greater international efforts to tackle an emerging famine in Ethiopia's Tigray and end the conflict wracking the region.

"Famine may already be happening in certain areas, threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands. It's unconscionable," US ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told a roundtable event, decrying the failure of the UN Security Council to hold a public meeting to end the crisis.

The Security Council will discuss the conflict on Tuesday, diplomats said, but the session will be held on an informal basis because of Ethiopian opposition to the council taking up the matter -- a view shared to varying degrees by several members including Russia, China, Vietnam, India and African countries.

It will be the UN body's first session on the crisis since April 22. Since then, the ambassador of one council member said, speaking on condition of anonymity, "The situation has not improved, nor has humanitarian access."

Thomas-Greenfield said the stakes were high, adding, "We are witnessing a humanitarian nightmare.

Map showing the Tigray region of Ethiopia.. By Aude GENET (AFP)

"We cannot let Ethiopia starve. We have to act now" to resolve what she called a "man-made" emergency.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, sent troops into the northern region in November to detain and disarm leaders of the Tigray People's Liberation Front, the region's former ruling party.

He said the move came in response to TPLF attacks on federal army camps.

Though he vowed the conflict would be brief, fighting continue more than six months later and reports of atrocities -- including the widespread use of rape -- are proliferating. Many leaders have warned of a major catastrophe.

'There is famine now'

The UN has said that more than 90 percent of the more than five million people in the Tigray region need emergency food aid, and has urgently appealed for more than $200 million to scale up its response.

"Every expert you speak to will tell you this is going to get a lot worse," UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock says. By EDUARDO SOTERAS (AFP/File)

"There is famine now in Tigray," UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock told the event.

"And every expert you speak to will tell you this is going to get a lot worse."

Lowcock said fresh data showed the number of people classified as being in famine conditions was "higher than anywhere in the world at any moment since a quarter of a million Somalis lost their lives in 2011".

He said that two million more people "were just a step away from those extreme conditions" and lamented the fact that some of the key UN agencies seeking to tackle the crisis have "essentially no money".

"We really do need everybody to step up," he said.

The US has announced $181 million of additional funding to "deliver life-saving food, agricultural supplies, safe drinking water, shelter, health care and essential services" to those in need in Tigray.

But international aid organisations have complained repeatedly that they are being denied access to the region by Ethiopian forces and troops from neighbouring Eritrea.

"To avoid humanitarian catastrophe, the entire international community must act directly and indirectly, quickly and robustly," EU crisis management commissioner Janez Lenarcic said.

The head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, said Ethiopia's military allies "have burned and looted seeds and farm equipment and slaughtered oxen to ensure that the fields lay fallow, so determined are they to eliminate livelihood".

"Millions of people urgently need food," the UN World Food Programme warns. "Without it, many of them will die". By ASHRAF SHAZLY (AFP/File)

"These same forces have threatened, intimidated, detained and even killed aid workers attempting to feed the hungry," she said.

A statement Thursday from the UN World Food Programme underscored the need for greater access if the world is to "avoid a catastrophe".

The Rome-based agency said it had rapidly bolstered its aid efforts but is still being blocked by armed groups from reaching areas of great need.

"Millions of people urgently need food," it said. "Without it, many of them will die."
French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday announced an overhaul of France's military operations in the Sahel, where a long-running jihadist insurgency has spread to three countries.

Here is a snapshot of the situation:

Nine-year-old crisis

Fighting in the vast semi-arid region began in 2012, when Islamist militants joined a local insurgency in northern Mali, capturing swathes of territory.

France intervened in January 2013 to beat them back, in an operation called Serval.

Serval was succeeded on August 1, 2014 by the broader Barkhane mission, which currently has some 5,100 soldiers deployed across the Sahel.

After being routed in northern Mali, Islamist militants regrouped to spill into the centre of the country, where they inflamed ethnic tensions, and then into neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger.

Thousands of soldiers and civilians have died and more than two million people have been displaced, adding to the woes of an already impoverished region.

Civilian massacres

Last weekend, at least 138 men, women and children were killed in northern Burkina Faso in one of the worst civilian massacres since the outbreak of the Sahel conflict. Local sources cite a death toll of about 160 people.

Military deployments in the Sahel. By (AFP)

Such mass killings are far from isolated. In January, militants linked to the Islamic State group slaughtered 105 people in two villages in western Niger.

Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso are among the poorest nations in the world, and government authority in many rural areas is often in name only.

Jihadists have benefitted from a sense of abandonment among rural populations and exploit pre-existing tensions between ethnic groups.

The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) Project, an NGO that records statistics on political violence, said 2,248 civilians were killed in the central Sahel in 2020 -- 400 more than the previous year.

The UN said in January that more than two million people have now been displaced.

Militarised societies

Jean-Herve Jezequel, the Sahel director for the International Crisis Group (ICG), says militarisation of Sahel countries is now "very difficult" to curb.

Civilian self-defence groups have sprung up alongside jihadist outfits across the region.

Some of these groups are small and local.

But others, such as Burkina Faso's Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland, are large auxiliary organisations for the conventional armed forces.

In central Mali, an ethnic Dogon militia named Dan Nan Ambassagou controls swathes of territory, with officials in the capital Bamako fearing the group is rivalling the army.

These two organisations fill a "glaring state vacuum," said a UN official in Mali, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Weak states

Sahel armies are no longer suffering the huge casualties of a few years ago, and the French government believes they are becoming more self-reliant despite persistent weakness.

But on the political front, crises are common.

Chad's veteran leader Idriss Deby Itno was killed on the frontline against rebels in April.

And in Mali, the army launched a coup against the civilian leaders of a transitional government last month.

That coup followed a putsch last August, when the military ousted president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita after weeks of anti-government protests.

"The security crisis is simply the symptom of a deeper crisis of state governance," said Jezequel.

Huge tracts of Mali also lie outside of government control: Only nine percent of civil-servant positions in the north and centre of the country are filled.

Before announcing Macron's announcement on Thursday, France had already suspended military cooperation with Malian forces in response to the latest coup.

Jihadist spillover

Fears have grown that the insurgency could swing south, destabilising countries on the Gulf of Guinea.

French intelligence has released footage of a meeting between Al-Qaeda commanders in the Sahel where they mention plans to expand towards the coast.

Ivory Coast has suffered four jihadist-linked attacks this year, the latest of which occurred on Monday on the border with Burkina Faso, when a soldier died of wounds.

In June last year, jihadists killed 14 soldiers in an attack on a frontier post.

A Dutch security report said on Thursday that jihadists near Benin's northern borders could meddle in communal conflicts.

The UN Security Council warned in a report in February that Al-Qaeda-aligned militants had "established themselves in Senegal," on the western fringe of the Sahel.
French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday announced an overhaul of France's military operations in the Sahel, saying today's Barkhane force would no longer exist in its current form.

The time has come  the continuation of our commitment in the Sahel will not be in the same way, Macron told a press conference, calling for a profound transformation and a new international force for the region.

Macron said the overhaul would entail the closure of some French army bases.

Following discussions with partners, he said, the fight against Islamist terrorists in the region would be carried on instead by special forces, including a significant French component of several hundred soldiers, as well as forces from other countries in Europe, Africa and elsewhere.

Their mission will be interventions strictly in the combat against terrorism, Macron told journalists.

France currently has 5,100 troops in the Sahel region, which stretches across Africa beneath the Sahara desert encompassing Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger.

Macron has pushed for years for other Western states to share more of the burden of security operations that see French soldiers, backed by air power, intervening against jihadist groups alongside local forces.

Opponents of Barkhane

He also faces pressure at home to end a deployment that began in January 2013, while in the Sahel region itself the presence of French forces is opposed by some politicians and locals who see it as a colonial throwback.

Macron's announcement could force the issue of security in the Sahel onto the agenda of the meeting of G7 leaders in Britain set to run from Friday to Sunday and a summit of the NATO military alliance in Brussels on June 14.

The Sahel is seen by many Western politicians and experts as a major risk area because of the growing strength of jihadist groups there, as well as its role as a crossroads for arms and people-smuggling.

In February, Macron announced his intention to reduce French troops but said that a "massive withdrawal of men, which is a possibility I have considered, would be a mistake".

At a virtual summit held at the time, the leaders of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, known as the G5 countries, warned him against the dangers of a rapid pullout.

Since then veteran Chad leader and close French ally Idriss Deby Itno was killed in battle while Mali saw a second coup that has complicated relations with Paris.
President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday announced a major drawdown of France's military presence in the Sahel where forces have been battling jihadist insurgents for nearly a decade.

At a news conference, Macron said the existing Barkhane operation would end, with France's presence becoming part of the so-called Takuba international task force in which "hundreds" of French soldiers would form the "backbone".

France currently has 5,100 troops in the arid and volatile Sahel region, which stretches across Africa under the Sahara desert and spans half a dozen countries.

"The time has come: Our commitment in the Sahel will not continue in the same way," Macron said. "We will undertake a profound transformation of our military presence in the Sahel."

Details of the framework would be given in coming weeks, he said.

The Barkhane operation dates back to an initial deployment undertaken from January 2013 as Paris sought to respond to growing instability in the region caused by Islamist militants.

For years Macron has tried to get Western allies to help shoulder the burden of an anti-terror fight that aims to stop Islamist extremists from exploiting anger over poverty and ineffective governments.

The killing in April of the veteran leader of Chad, a close Paris ally, and a coup in Mali last month have also underlined the threat posed by continued political instability in the region.

'Cannot be substitute'

The drawdown would mean the closure of French bases and the use of special forces who would be focused on anti-terror operations and military training, Macron said.

The Takuba operation, which is to take over from Barkhane, for now consists of around 600 European special forces based in Mali, half of whom are French, with 140 Swedes and several dozen Estonians and Czechs also taking part.

Macron has failed to secure significant contributions from larger European allies.

Macron said the French drawdown had been decided because the "longstanding presence of France... cannot be a substitute for political stability".

He stressed that France could not be involved in nation-building and expressed frustration with local partners, particularly Mali.

"I don't think that we can substitute ourselves for a sovereign people in order to build their place for them," Macron said.

Despite some successes for France's Barkhane force including last year's killing of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) leader Abdelmalek Droukdel, insurgents have continued to carry out deadly attacks.

The anti-insurgency effort has cost the lives of 50 French soldiers, prompting calls in France for a review of Barkhane's mission.

In the Sahel region itself the presence of French forces is also rejected by some politicians and locals as a colonial throwback.

Macron's announcement could force security in the Sahel up the agenda of a meeting of G7 leaders in Britain from Friday to Sunday, and a summit of the NATO military alliance in Brussels on June 14.

'Putschist'

The Sahel is seen by many Western politicians and experts as a major risk because of the growing strength of jihadist groups there, as well as its role as a crossroads for arms and people-smuggling.

Local Sahel leaders have warned they would be hard pressed to keep insurgents from making further inroads in case of a rapid French pullout.

Since then, the veteran leader of Chad and close French ally, Idriss Deby Itno, has been killed, while Mali's coup has badly strained relations with Paris.

Last week, France suspended its joint military operations with Malian forces and stopped providing defence advice, pending "guarantees" that the country's military rulers will hold elections in February and not negotiate with jihadists.

"We cannot endure ambiguity. We cannot conduct joint operations with powers that decide to talk with groups who shoot on our young," Macron said.

He also comdemned the recognition by the 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) of Mali's military strongman Colonel Assimi Goita, who was was sworn in as transitional president on Tuesday.

The recognition of this "putschist" risked creating a "bad legal precedent" for the ECOWAS and its neigbours, said Macron.
Mr Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, National Chairman, National Democratic Congress (NDC), has called for unity as the Party marked its 29th Anniversary Celebration.

He said everyone in the NDC needed to work together to overcome challenges to enable the Party to win the 2024 general election.

The figure should be handsome; the margin in Parliament should be beyond doubt, such that we will all celebrate and say that NDC has come, development has come, progress has come

Mr Ofosu-Ampofo made the appeal on Thursday at the NDC's 29th Anniversary Flagraising Ceremony and Photo Exhibition in Accra.

He paid tribute to the founding fathers and mothers of the Party for their pioneering role in the establishment and building of the NDC.

Among the tall list of men and women Mr Ofosu-Ampofo cited was the late former President Jerry John Rawlings, the NDC's Founder.

We, therefore, want to use this occasion to celebrate our founding fathers, especially the founder of the Party, the late former President Jerry John Rawlings for the towering and pioneering role that he played in firmly establishing the NDC Party, which has grown from strength to strength, which continues to be the only political party that provides hope for the people of Ghana, Mr Ofosu-Ampofo said.

So, as we celebrate our 29th Anniversary Celebration, we have a lot to celebrate and we have a lot to thank the good Lord for how far he has brought us.

This is the time for us to put our acts together. To build unity of purpose and to work as one people with a common destiny.

He noted that the Party must pursue its agenda of rescuing Ghana, saying this is because the Ghana that we wanted to rescue in 2020, it is getting worse by the day.

And so, the clarion call for us to put our shoulders to the wheel and work hard to rescue this country is more urgent than ever.

The Chairman commended all structures of the Party, from the branch, to the constituency, to the region, to the national executives, the cadres and all progressives, the youth and the women who had contributed to making the Party great.

He urged Party members to work harder to prove their detractors wrong by convincingly winning the 2024 general election.

He noted that the NDC had not done badly at all as a political party and that the Party had a lot to showcase for over the past 29 years.

Mr Ofosu-Ampofo cited a number of projects and socio interventions that the NDC executed when it was in Government such as the creation of the GETFund and the eradication of guinea worm in the country.

Others include the construction of regional hospitals, the expansion of the Ridge Hospital, the building of the University of Ghana Medical Centre, and the conversion of the nation's Polytechnics into Technical Universities.

Mr Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, General Secretary, NDC, who gave the historical overview of the Party, noted that the NDC emerged from the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) military regime of President Rawlings, which govern the country from December 31st, 1981 to January 6th, 1993.

He said upon the decision of the PNDC Government to return the country to a Constitutional role, a Consultative National Assembly was formed, which consisted of ordinary Ghanaians to draft the 1992 Constitution, which was subsequently overwhelmingly approved in a national referendum.

He said, as a result, the NDC was formed out of the PNDC to participate in the 1992 general election with President Rawlings as its flagbearer, who eventually won the Presidential election.

Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, the Vice-Presidential Candidate of the NDC in the 2020 general election, paid tribute to the founding fathers and mothers of the Party.

She urged politicians to put aside negative propaganda that does not bring anything helpful to anybody.

---GNA
The lack of potable water in some rural communities in the Upper West Region has compelled women and children in such communities to compete with animals and reptiles for water for their domestic use.

Reports by the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in some of these communities including Damwaataeon and Zanko Paani in the Wa West District and Kaleo-bile in the Wa East District'Mobilizing the Media for Fighting covid-19" project being implemented by the Journalists for Human Rights in collaboration with the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA), revealed a very pathetic situation about access to water and other sanitation facilities as a right.

Madam Mercy Dasaa, a resident at Damwaateon, , told the GNA that the streams which is their only source of water often dried-up during the harmattan leaving them with no choice than to dig dugouts before they could get water to fetch.

Sometimes, if you are not lucky, you will dig and fetch some water and the time you will return the next day, animals would have come to drink and destroy it. You will have to dig again to fetch, she said.

Madam Dasaa said the only borehole in the community could not produce enough water during the dry season to serve the water needs of the community with more than 500 inhabitants.

Madam Agnes Diesob, another resident of the community said the situation impeded their economic activities in the community as the women had to spend several hours at the stream or borehole in search of water for their domestic use.

At Zanko Paani, residents said they currently resort to pond water for domestic purposes such as cooking and drinking as the only borehole in the community had broken down.

Madam Iddrisu Marriama, a resident told the GNA in an interview that they were aware of the health risks associated with drinking from the pond but they have no option.

She said the population of the community overweighed the single borehole, which caused it to easily break down due to the excessive pressure on the facility.

You have come to see our problem. Our borehole often breaks down, so we fetch water from this pond unfortunately, we are sharing this pond with animals, she said.

I have been having stomach pains. I know it's because of the water, but there is nothing I can do, she emphasized.

Mr Iddrisu Daluo, another resident told the GNA that they have been contributing almost every month to fix the borehole, which had brought unnecessary financial pressure on the people.

At Kaleo-bile, a locally dug well and a nearby stream serve as the only source of water for residents in the community, which often get silted in the dry seasons making access to water a very big challenge for them.

According to members of the community, the situation has exposed them to waterborne diseases, thereby, affecting their productivity levels especially the women.

MAIN PROBLEM

The problem of some rural communities is poor health coupled with limited access to potable water.

The situation is further compounded in the dry seasons during which women cover long distances and spending hours competing with animals for water from streams and other open sources.

According to the Global Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment Report, over one billion people across the World do not have access to adequate and safe drinking water facilities with women and children being disproportionately affected.

Water is an essential prerequisite for development and growth, however, the situation where rural women spend hours every day, collecting and carting water directly from streams in competition with animals is a worrying development challenge.

Water is an essential basic need that must be available in order for human beings to survive and this must not be a luxury to these communities particularly women and children as they run their daily household chores.

SANITATION AND HEALTH

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), safe and readily available water is important for public health, whether it is used for drinking, domestic use, food production or recreational purposes.

Improved water supply and sanitation, and better management of water resources, can boost countries' economic growth and can contribute greatly to poverty reduction, it said.

Also, it estimated that globally, at least 2 billion people use a drinking water source contaminated with faeces, adding that contaminated water can transmit diseases such as diarrhoea, cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and polio.

Again, it said contaminated drinking water is estimated to cause 485,000 diarrheal deaths each year and that by 2025 half of the world's population will be living in water-stressed areas.

In 2010, the UN General Assembly explicitly recognized the human right to water and sanitation saying; Everyone has the right to sufficient, continuous, safe, acceptable, physically accessible, and affordable water for personal and domestic use.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 6.1 calls for universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water.

The target is tracked with the indicator of safely managed drinking water services  drinking water from an improved water source that is located on premises, available when needed, and free from faecal and priority chemical contamination.

IMPROVED SANITATION BENEFITS

Benefits of improved sanitation extend well beyond reducing the risk of diarrhea according to the WHO. It include reducing the spread of intestinal worms, schistosomiasis and trachoma which are neglected tropical diseases causing suffering for millions across the globe.

Again, it includes the severity and impact of malnutrition; promoting dignity and boosting safety, particularly among women and girls; promoting school attendance: girls' school attendance is particularly boosted by the provision of separate sanitary facilities; and potential recovery of water, renewable energy and nutrients from faecal waste.

THE GHANA CONTEXT

Mr Eric Banye, Executive Director of Savannah Alliance Ghana noted that for many communities in Ghana, this target is far from reach.

In Ghana, sharp geographic, socio-cultural and economic inequalities persist, not only between rural and urban areas but also in towns and cities where people living in low-income, informal, or illegal settlements usually have less access to improved sources of drinking-water than other residents, he emphasized.

According to Mr Banye, the Sustainable Water Supply project is a dream comes true for the communities that were carefully selected in collaboration with the respective district assemblies.

He said the high rate of water borne diseases sometimes leading to deaths has therefore become a major concern for stakeholders, hence, the initiation of the Direct Aid Project (DAP).

THE DIRECT AID PROGRAMME

The Sustainable Water Supply Project is one of the projects funded by the Australian High Commission under the DAP, which is a flexible, small grants programme.

The project is being implemented directly by Savannah Alliance Ghana, a local NGO in the Upper West Region with support from Azumah Resources, a mineral exploration and mining company operating in the region.

The aim is to support projects with a strong development focus that contribute to inclusive, sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction.

The primary objective of the DAP is to achieve a practical and tangible humanitarian or developmental outcome in vulnerable communities.

The areas include improving sanitation, waste services and facilities; improving services for people with disability or mental illness; strengthening accountability, transparency and good governance in the extractives sector; and promoting gender equality and empowering women and girls by supporting female-led organisations.

The project demonstrate consideration to gender and disability inclusion in the design and implementation by ensuring women and people with disabilities are consulted and included in the development of project proposals, as well as in their implementation.

PROJECT OBJECTIVES

The project seeks to ensure these beneficiary communities especially women, children and the physically challenged have access to potable water whilst their health status particularly with regards to waterborne diseases would also be improved.

This is expected to increase productivity as women, children and the physically challenged will now spend lesser hours in accessing and carting water from unsafe sources for their domestic use.

PROJECT OUTCOMES

Mr Eric Banye, Executive Director of Savannah Alliance Ghana said the project would ensure the drilling of seven boreholes and also train and equip seven Water and Sanitation (WATSAN) Committees with skills on water facility management as well.

He said in the end, a total of 5,000 women would have access to potable water whilst long distances covered and time spent in accessing water would be significantly reduced to enhance productivity.

EQUITY AND INCLUSION

Mr Banye noted that in line with the Australia High Commission's focus on equity and inclusion, the project had a strong inclusion and equity agenda.

Women are fully involved in the site selection, drilling and management of the boreholes. The project also takes into consideration other vulnerable groupings including people with disability, he said.

BENEFICIARIES

In all, the Executive Director of Savannah Alliance Ghana said seven rural communities were selected across four districts in the Upper West Region to benefit from the project.

They include, Leli, Musama, and Konne-Kakala communities in the Nadowli-Kaleo District; Jangfiang and Zinye communities in the Wa East District, Bapila community in the Nandom Municipality and Orifan community in the Jirapa Municipality.

CONCLUSION

The DAP being implemented by the Savannah Alliance Ghana and funded by the Australian High Commission through the Sustainable Water Supply Project to ensure beneficiary communities have access to safe sources of drinking water and sanitation facilities is commendable and worth emulation.

This is because tackling rural water and sanitation accessibility challenges must be a concern for all and the necessary resources galvanized to drive the agenda.

Government is doing well through the Sustainable Water Management Project but it is not over until all rural communities gain access to safe and sustainable access to potable water.

Rural women also have equal rights and must not continue to compete for water with animals which puts their health and that of their families at risk.

---GNA
The Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) has made a call to the Attorney-General to intervene and stop the needless harassment of the alleged 21 members of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community who were arrested in Ho, Volta Region.

Some 21 alleged activists of LGBT+ were arrested on May 20, 2021, by the Volta Regional Police Command.

Comprising 16 women and 5 men, they were arraigned before the Ho Circuit Court on May 21, 2021, and charged with unlawful assembly under Section 202 of the Criminal Offences Act, 1960 (Act 29).

Despite several attempts by their counsel to secure bail, the 21 have on multiple occasions been denied [by both the Ho Circuit Court and High Court].

After following the case keenly, CDD-Ghana has in a statement say it is appalled at how the Courts and the State have handled this matter and have allowed these young Ghanaians to be incarcerated for 19 days and counting.

"In a democratic dispensation where the rights of all persons, including social minorities, are guaranteed under the Constitution, targeting and singling out LGBT+ persons for such harsh and unfair treatment, merely for associating and assembling with each other for noncriminal purposes, including to plan advocacy for better treatment under the law, further marginalizes and victimizes them and sets a dangerous precedent for the treatment of unpopular minorities in general, parts of a release from CDD-Ghana reads.

CDD-Ghana insists that it is time the Attorney-General stepped in to ensure the right thing is done for all forms of harassment the 21 alleged LGBT+ activists have suffered to stop.

The Center calls on the Attorney-General who is clothed with the States exclusive prosecutorial power under the Constitution to intervene in this matter and stop the needless continuing harassment and violation of the constitutional rights of these 21 compatriots, the CDD-Ghana release adds.

In addition, the Centre has called on the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) to take proactive steps, including public education, to ensure that all citizens, regardless of social approval or disapproval of their personal choices and preferences in purely private matters, are able to exercise and enjoy the rights guaranteed equally to all persons under the Constitution without social or official harassment.

Find below the full press release from the advocacy think tank:
Egypt is banking on a $500-million Gaza reconstruction project to shore up its influence in the Middle East, capitalising on clout it garnered by brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi pledged the cash injection to rebuild the Gaza Strip after it was left in ruins during an 11-day exchange of Hamas rocket fire and devastating Israeli air strikes.

Sisi was widely praised for playing a pivotal role in negotiating an end to the deadly hostilities between Israel and Gaza's Islamist rulers Hamas on May 21, including by US President Joe Biden.

The aid package is in the form of construction undertaken by Egyptian firms -- a playbook that Sisi has used to great effect domestically since taking power in 2014.

Sisi has employed the military's engineering arm for large-scale infrastructure projects such as the construction of a new administrative capital, as well as dozens of flyovers and highways nationwide.

"Sisi no doubt sees this reconstruction aid as an investment in exchange for political influence -- both on Egypt's border in Gaza and at the international level," Sarah Smierciak, a Middle East political economist, told AFP.

Egypt's heavily secured Rafah crossing is Gaza's only passage to the outside world not controlled by Israel, which has blockaded the enclave since 2007.

In a rare move, Cairo opened the crossing during intense fighting to allow wounded Palestinians to be treated in Egyptian hospitals.

"This pledge will make Egypt's voice heard among Palestinian ranks," said Mustapha Kamel al-Sayyid, a Cairo University professor of political science.

"It (the reconstruction) is definitely a part of Egypt regaining its regional role," he added.

Wider thaw

The move is part of a wider thaw this year in Egypt's relations with foes such as Qatar and Turkey, which back Hamas -- while Cairo regards it with suspicion.

Cairo also considers Hamas an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, which it outlawed in 2013 after the Sisi-led military's ouster of former president Mohamed Morsi.

Egypt "changed its outlook towards Hamas", Sayyid said, after the group renounced its ties with the Brotherhood in 2017.

Egyptian workers use bulldozers to remove the rubble of Gaza City buildings destroyed by Israeli air strikes in this picture taken on June 8, 2021. By MOHAMMED ABED (AFP)

It has also overseen a tentative national reconciliation between Hamas and its political rival Fatah, which runs the Palestinian Authority from Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

"The reconstruction aid could make Egypt an acceptable partner for Hamas... and soon we could see Hamas helping Egypt in securing the border," he added.

Cairo for years has accused Hamas of smuggling weapons to insurgents in its restive province of North Sinai through cross-border tunnels.

But Smierciak said Egypt could leverage the sizeable aid package to sideline Hamas which it "views as a threat" to the country's national security.

Last week, Egypt said it sent an aid convoy to Gaza with cranes, diggers and trucks to "prepare the ground for reconstruction" of the enclave.

But so far no public information has been given on the companies assigned to rebuild the densely populated territory.

"The president's office hasn't announced which Egyptian companies will be tapped to implement the reconstruction, but military-owned firms will almost certainly play a central role," Smierciak said.

However, a Gaza reconstruction forum is to take place in Cairo in coming days, bringing together politicians and entrepreneurs from the region.

Who'll 'pocket the money'?

Mohamed Samy, head of the Egyptian Federation for Construction and Building Contractors, said "work won't start until the security situation is stable in Gaza".

"Gaza has a massive labour force, so I don't think they (Gazans) will stay in their homes and let others from the outside do the work," he added.

Samy explained that for the construction industry the mammoth project would be an "extension of the national projects in terms of the production and export of building materials as well as providing jobs".

Palestinian boys cycle past a convoy of bulldozers provided by Egypt arriving at the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Palestinian Gaza Strip enclave on June 4, 2021. By SAID KHATIB (AFP/File)

For some Egyptians, who bore the brunt of harsh austerity measures implemented by the government since 2016, Sisi's Gaza aid package has been met with scepticism.

"It's better not giving so much aid away. We deserve it more given our limited wealth and large... population," wrote one Twitter user.

Another social media user saw the upside.

"Allocating $500 million for the reconstruction of Gaza is a wonderful step... The important thing is that the money remains under Egypt's control so that Egyptian companies, labour and products are used," they wrote on Facebook.

Smierciak was also cautious in her assessment of the much-feted reconstruction.

"We have to understand why it makes sense economically. We have to see who will 'win' the multi-million-dollar contracts -- that is, who will actually pocket the money," she said.
A 27-year-old man was nearly lynched by a mob at Offinso-Abofour in the Ashanti Region on Thursday, June 10, after he was accused of attempting to kidnap two minors.

According to police, the suspect, Kwaku Boahen, was seen with two female children between the ages of three and four years at the outskirts of the town.

The suspect sustained injuries and is currently on admission at the St. Patrick Hospital at Offinso on Police guard.

The Offinso Divisional Police Commander, Chief Superintendent Benedict Wonkyi, told Citi News the minors have been handed over to their parents.

The suspect by the name Kwaku Boahen, aged about 27 years, was with the said victims in a nearby bush on the outskirt of the township. He was suspected to have kidnapped the two children, and when an alarm was raised, he bolted and was later apprehended. He was severely beaten by his captives and he sustained injuries. Hes currently on admission at the St. Patrick Hospital under police guard responding to treatment.

However, the victims are safe and they have been handed over to their parents. Meanwhile, investigations are ongoing to find his accomplices.

In a similar incident, Prince Osei , a 38-year-old driver, accused of kidnapping his two kids has appeared before an Accra Circuit Court.

Osei is said to have picked the kids after they closed from school on March 23, 2021, and failed to tell the police, their whereabouts.

Osei, who is being held on two counts of kidnapping his kids aged 11 and 7, and two counts of engaging in domestic violence to wit  a conduct or behaviour that endangers the safety and well-being of another person.

He has pleaded not guilty.

citinewsroom
The President of the National House of Chiefs, Ogyeahoho Yaw Gyebi II, has encouraged Ghanaians to come out in their numbers to plant trees as part of the Green Ghana Project today, Friday, June 11.

He has also urged persons participating in the project to ensure that they nurture the trees after planting them.

Ogyeahoho Yaw Gyebi II in a Citi News interview in Kumasi called on Ghanaians to support the project.

According to him, it is for the collective good of all Ghanaians and that all must endeavour to join.

We all resolve to take part in the greening of the whole country and we will also try to go to our respective traditional areas to educate our people. So I advise all Ghanaians to go out in their numbers to do the tree planting.

On the same exercise, the Lands and Natural Resources Minister also charged Ghanaians to take part in the exercise.

Mr. Samuel Abu Jinapor encouraged all and sundry to be part of the all-hands-on-deck approach to help Ghana recuperate its depleted tree cover.

I encourage every one of you to join hands with the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources as we go planting five million trees across the country. It is said that when the last tree dies, the last man also dies. One way of fighting climate change is to plant trees which will go a long way to help future generations.

The Ministry will make seedlings available at the various Forestry Commission district offices across the country.

The Ashanti Regional Manager of the Forestry Commission, Augustine Gyedu, said the seedlings have been distributed to districts and other communities within the region ahead of the tree planting exercise on Friday.

He added that all who are willing to help in the exercise will be given the seedlings to plant.

We are ready and we have supplied about 900,000 seedlings to the various communities, and we will continue early on Friday morning and a lot of people can join in the exercise."

citinewsroom
The National Executive Committee of the striking Senior Staff Association of Universities of Ghana has resolved to call off its strike action.

National Chairman of the association, Zakaria Mohammed, has therefore directed members to resume work on Monday June 14, 2021, without further delay.

This action follows a fruitful meeting the leadership of the association had with the National Labour Commission and the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission on Wednesday.

Mr. Zakaria Mohammed said they hope to bring finality to all their concerns by July 9, 2021.

We had deliberations with the National Labour Commission and the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission. We have agreed to resolve all the outstanding issues from June 30, and it is expected to end latest by July 9, so there will be no outstanding concerns responsible for the strike we had embarked on. So we want to tell our members that in principle the strike is off today so work will resume on Monday.

The association declared an indefinite strike on May 18, 2021 over the failure of government to pay their members Tier 2 pension contributions.

Members of the association are also asking for the award of market premium and non-basic allowance as well as the finalization of negotiations of their conditions of service.

This compelled the National Labour Commission and the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC) to meet with them on Wednesday, June 9, to resolve their grievances.

While on strike, the association, in a statement, noted that management in some universities had resorted to using vigorous intimidation and threat tactics against some of its striking members, with the sole aim to coerce and create fear and panic amongst its rank and file.

The association warned that the approach, if not ceased, could possibly destabilise the industrial harmony within the public universities in the country.

citinewsroom
G7 leaders meet on Friday for their first in-person talks in nearly two years, with an expected pledge to donate one billion Covid vaccine doses to the world's poorest countries, as part of a show of Western democratic unity against the planet's most pressing issues.

The club of leading economies -- Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and United States -- say a joint approach is the world's best chance for recovering from the global health crisis, and tackling climate change.

President Joe Biden set the tone on Wednesday, ditching Donald Trump's isolationist stance on global affairs to ram home a message of resolve by the G7 and NATO against both Beijing and Moscow as he heads on to his first sit-down with Russian President Vladimir Putin next week in Geneva.

"The driving animating purpose of this G7 summit is to show that democracy can deliver against the biggest challenges we're facing in the world," a senior US administration official said.

A sand drawing of the G7 leaders in Cornwall by activists who called on nations to 'share the vaccine and waive the patents'. By Ben STANSALL (AFP)

Campaigners say the G7's inoculations pledge for this year and next -- including 500 million US doses -- is far too little, too late to end a pandemic that has claimed over 3.7 million lives worldwide.

"If the best G7 leaders can manage is to donate one billion vaccine doses then this summit will have been a failure," Oxfam said, insisting the world needs 11 billion doses instead.

But the G7 has recognised it needs to mobilise against the "vaccine diplomacy" launched by the rollout of Chinese and Russian jabs, with the Biden administration stressing it expects nothing in return.

The leaders, meeting at the seaside resort of Carbis Bay in Cornwall, southwest England, are also expected to outline more help for developing nations to build up infrastructure, as a counterpoint to the debt-fuelled spending by China in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The initiative "will embrace a high standards, transparent, climate friendly, non-corrupt mechanism" for infrastructure investment in the developing world, the US official said.

"It will be an alternative to that which other countries, including China, are offering."

'Indestructible relationship'

Underpinning the US-led diplomatic revival, Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Thursday adopted a new "Atlantic Charter", modelled on the pact signed by their World War II predecessors to help build a new world order.

Progress of Covid-19 vaccinations. By Valentin RAKOVSKY (AFP)

Johnson dislikes the decades-old phrase "special relationship", arguing it makes Britain look subservient to Washington, telling the BBC instead that it should be viewed as "indestructible".

He also played down any differences with Biden over Northern Ireland, ahead of showdown talks between the prime minister and EU chiefs on Saturday to tackle deep fissures opened up by Brexit.

British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab hit back Friday after French President Emmanuel Macron launched a broadside over UK backpedalling regarding special post-Brexit arrangements for the restive province.

Raab told Sky News that "change must come from the European Commission side" and that "we are not negotiating or haggling the integrity of the United Kingdom".

Late Thursday, more than 3,000 pro-UK loyalists staged a protest in Belfast against the "protocol" that effectively keeps Northern Ireland in the EU customs union and single market.

Marshmallows by sea

Johnson will be hoping to lighten the mood at a beach barbecue on Saturday, joined by his new wife Carrie and other G7 spouses, with a sea shanty band and toasted marshmallows around fire pits.

Johnson (2R) and his wife Carrie Johnson (R) met with Biden and US First Lady Jill Biden in Cornwall on Thursday. By Brendan SMIALOWSKI (AFP)

That will follow a reception for the G7 leaders on Friday evening hosted by Queen Elizabeth II at Cornwall's Eden Project, an exhibition that showcases the world's ecological riches.

Safeguarding global biodiversity is another G7 theme this weekend, with the leaders set on agreement to protect at least 30 percent of the world's land and oceans by 2030.

They will also debate aiding poorer nations to transition out of fossil fuels, in the buildup to the UN's COP26 summit in November in Scotland.

Like the G7, Britain wants COP26 to be held in person, and announced that it plans to offer vaccine doses to delegates from poorer nations if they cannot get them otherwise.

The G7 is also expected to adopt a UK plan to ensure schooling for another 40 million girls by 2025, after the pandemic destroyed educational opportunities for many around the world.

The G7 chiefs will be joined over the weekend by the leaders of Australia, South Africa, South Korea, the United Nations and European Union, with India joining remotely.

"This is a compelling agenda for global recovery, ambitious yet achievable, provided we summon the will and the ingenuity," Johnson said.

"Britain is privileged to chair the G7 and to play our part, alongside our kindred democracies, in setting this immense effort in train. The scale of the challenge demands no less."
Member of Parliament for Juaboso, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh says the Minister for Health, Kweku Agyemang Manu will be dragged before Parliaments Health Committee following the governments procurement of Sputnik V vaccines at an expensive price.

Mr. Akandoh, who is also the Ranking Member on the Health Committee, said the action will be taken because the ministrys justification for securing the vaccines at an above-standard price is unacceptable and very difficult to believe.

Speaking on Eyewitness News, the Juaboso legislator said the matter must not be taken lightly.

We are going to invite the Minister to appear before the committee so that he answers relevant questions because, as for the press release and the things they are saying, it is very difficult to believe, he told Umaru Sanda Amadu, host of Eyewitness News, on Thursday, June 10, 2021.

A Norweigian news tabloid, Verdens Gang reported that Ghana has made a request to purchase 3.4 million doses of the Sputnik V vaccine through two businessmen who are selling it to Ghana at $19 per dose instead of the $10 per dose on the international market.

The government had explained that it could not secure the vaccines directly from the manufacturer, hence the need to go through some middlemen, and that explains why the cost is higher than the standard price of the Russian vaccine.

The Chairman of Parliament's Health Committee, Dr. Nana Ayew Afriyie, on Wednesday said the pandemic presents a desperate situation that requires that Ghana procures the vaccine even if it is above the regular price on the international market.

We have not been swindled as a State. Yes, the factory price is US$10 but when you get expatriates, it gets out of the factory, there are a lot of factors that come in including the profit, commission and freight to Ghana. So you don't expect a vaccine that costs US$ 10 at the factory to be the same price when it arrives in Ghana, especially when a middleman is getting it, he said.

But Mr Akandoh said the government is only trying to justify its cause to milk the situation.

He said the government must immediately abrogate the deal.

These are grave issues, and we cannot sit down for the government to milk the situation as and when they desire. We have spent about GHS 19 billion on COVID-19 but before the committee, the Minister for Finance was only able to account for GHS 600 million. The contract must be suspended immediately because it is unconstitutional and must be declared null and void and a bipartisan probe must be instituted on this matter for us to get to the logical conclusion on this matter, he added.

---citinewsroom
Ivory Coast's former president, Laurent Gbagbo, returns home next week after almost a decade in which he was tried and acquitted of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court.

Gbagbo was ousted in April 2011 after a conflict sparked by his refusal to accept electoral defeat at the hands of Alassane Ouattara, the current president.

Around 3,000 people died in the brief war, which divided the West African state along north-south lines.

Today, trauma and bitter memories mingle with mounting joy among Gbagbo's supporters at his imminent return. His homecoming is widely seen as a crucial test of stability.

Here we look at some of the key issues behind his return:

A statesman's role

Gbagbo is aged 76, but few expect this wily political veteran to go into retirement.

He is a cult figure for many in the party that he built, the Ivorian Popular Front (FPI), which has been calling vociferously for his return ever since his acquittal was pronounced in 2019. Prosecutors appealed the ruling, but it was upheld by the ICC on March 31.

The FPI's campaign for Gbagbo's return gained traction last year after Ivory Coast spiralled into electoral violence, triggered when Ouattara declared he would bid for a third term -- a move that critics said violated the constitution.

Anger: A poster of President Alassane Ouattara after clashes in Yamoussoukro following the October 31 elections. By SIA KAMBOU (AFP)

After scores of deaths and a ballot largely boycotted by the opposition, Ouattara found himself re-elected by a landslide -- but presides over a divided country fearful of another descent into bloodshed.

Against this background, Ouattara has tendered an olive branch to his former rival, offering Gbagbo a role in "national reconciliation" -- a policy yet to be detailed in full -- and promising him the rewards and status due to a former head of state.

Gbagbo's supporters insist he will return in peace and help the country to heal, but commentators wonder whether he will stick to his alloted role of statesman.

"The wounds are still open... and the authorities are worried that Gbagbo will stir up the crowds again, which is one of his hallmarks," said Rinaldo Depagne, a researcher at the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank.

Ivory Coast. By Laurence SAUBADU (AFP)

If Gbagbo actively worked on reconciliation, "this would be a good thing, because he carries considerable weight," he said.

It would also be in Gbagbo's interest, said Depagne, enabling him to "end his career, with all its ups and downs, on a high note".

Ageing trio

Much of what happens after Gbagbo's return will depend on the chemistry between him, Ouattara and former president Henri Konan Bedie, 87.

They form a trio of powerful men who have dominated Ivorian politics for decades, forging friendships or rivalries with one other according to need.

Bedie succeeded Ivory Coast's post-colonial founding father, Felix Houphouet-Boigny, on his death in 1993. In 2010, he teamed up with Ouattara against Gbagbo.

Ouattara, left, and Bedie, right, form with Gbagbo a trio who have dominated Ivorian politics for decades. By Issouf SANOGO (AFP)

Today, he is undisputed head of the Democratic Party of the Ivory Coast (PDCI) -- once-ruling but now in opposition.

Bedie has played a key role in calming tensions since the October 31 elections.

He forged a historic alliance with Gbagbo's FPI in legislative elections in March and teamed up with it to organise the former president's homecoming.

Whatever dance now unfolds between the three, the country's political scene will remain in generational stasis.

Gilles Yabi, founder of the Wathi political think-tank, said the advanced age of the top figures "embodies a lack of renewal of the political class and political practices" in Ivory Coast.

"The general feeling is that the future of the country is doomed to be an extension of the distant past," said William Assonvo, an Abidjan-based researcher at the Institute of Security Studies (ISS).

Popularity

Support for Gbagbo remains strong despite his long absence. Above: Celebrations in his home town of Gagnoa after his acquittal by the International Criminal Court in January 2019. By Sia KAMBOU (AFP)

Gbagbo's popularity has remained undimmed in the decade he has been away, reaching well beyond his home region of Gagnoa.

He fought to secure multi-party elections as the top opponent to Houphouet-Boigny and later Bedie in the 1980s and 90s, suffering prison and exile for leading demonstrations that were violently put down by the authorities.

A socialist from a humble background in a country whose politics is dominated by well-off families, Gbagbo "spoke for the poor and those left behind by development, and people don't forget that," ICG expert Depagne said.

He remains "a rare orator... gifted with words in a country where people love to talk and love humour," Depagne added.
Meteorologists at AccuWeather are keeping a careful eye on the Atlantic basin for the possibility of two named storms developing in the coming weeks. The Atlantic hurricane season has only been underway for a week, yet things are lining up in such a way that two storms might form, both in entirely different parts of the basin.

Forecasters have identified one region over the Gulf of Mexico, another over the western Caribbean Sea near Central America, and a stretch off the East Coast of the United States near the Carolinas as possible danger zones. There's even a 50 percent probability that a disturbance may emerge and intensify over the eastern Pacific Ocean in the coming weeks, influencing how things play out.

Regardless of whether it builds into a tropical storm or not, any disturbance that develops off the East Coast is expected to go out to sea. However, suppose a tropical storm emerges around Belize or southern Mexico. In that case, it may move northward into the United States' Gulf Coast, a region of the country that has been prone to flooding due to recent heavy rains.

Related Article: Atlantic Hurricane Season 2021: Here's What to Expect



Gyre

A gyre, or a vast circulation region that causes air pressure to dip below its surrounding environment, is forecast to occur, allowing thunderstorms to erupt. Thus, a tropical system can gradually assemble whenever thunderstorm complexes form and persist over warm seas.

Wind Shear

A decrease in wind shear is another aspect that will increase the likelihood of tropical growth. But, according to Senior Meteorologist Dan Pydynowksi, a combination of variables might be the impetus for development. "Lowering wind shear, warm water, and a moistening environment may be enough," he added, to develop anything strong enough to be recognized.

Wind shear is the shift in direction and speed of winds at various altitudes of the atmosphere, and it can stifle the development of tropical systems and impact their path. While tropical systems can form when wind shear is severe, most tropical systems arise when wind shear is moderate.

Tropical Storms Bill and Claudette

Bill and Claudette are the next two tropical storms on the list for the 2021 season. Ana, the first name on this year's list, formed on May 22 and dissipated on May 24 over the central Atlantic.

On the Atlantic side, if a tropical system forms around Central America or southern Mexico, forecasters contemplate several options following development.

Possible Trajectory

One possibility is that the system will just travel inland over Central America or southern Mexico, then fade away.

In a second possibility, the system might drift northwestward over land and re-emerge over Mexico's southern Gulf, regaining power. A third scenario, which is becoming increasingly likely, is that the system originates over the south of the Gulf of Mexico rather than the Caribbean Sea. As a result, meteorologists upgraded the risk of development to roughly 50% on Thursday afternoon.

Another option mentioned by meteorologists is that tropical development might occur along the coast over the Eastern Pacific. That storm may then travel inland and spin-off a system on the Atlantic side, similar to what Amanda did last year about this time with Cristobal.

Because it crosses from one basin to another, the occurrence is also referred to as a crossover storm. As of Thursday, the chances of this situation occurring seems to be dwindling.

Also Read: Storm Anxiety: How to Handle Extreme Weather Phobias During Hurricane Season

For more climate and weather updates, don't forget to follow Nature World News!
The fate of an elderly Rwandan widow, who has spent decades trying to avoid a trial for genocide while living in France, is one of the key sticking points in the delicate process of reconciliation undertaken by Paris and Kigali in recent months.

Rwandan former first lady Agathe Habyarimana is the widow of Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana, whose plane was shot down in April 1994, an event that acted as a trigger of the 1994 genocide.

The two countries turned the page on a quarter century of tensions over the Rwandan genocide on May 27 when President Emmanuel Macron recognised France's responsibilities over the slaughter of some 800,000 mostly Tutsi Rwandans.

During a visit to Kigali, Macron admitted that France, which under Francois Mitterrand backed the Hutu regime ahead of the genocide, had "for too long favoured silence over the examination of truth" and asked Rwandans for forgiveness.

Last month, President Emmanuel Macron recognised France's responsibilities over the slaughter of some 800,000 mostly Tutsi Rwandans. By Ludovic MARIN (AFP/File)

He also promised to ensure that no genocide suspects would "be able to avoid justice" in France, where dozens of suspected Hutu extremists fled after the killings.

For Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who led the Tutsi rebellion that ended the massacres in July 1994, Agathe Habyarimana is "top of the list" of suspects he wants brought to justice.

'Waiting for her to die'?

Days after her husband's death, Rwanda's first lady was airlifted to safety in the Central African Republic with a dozen family members on the orders of Mitterrand.

Genocide survivors accuse her of being one of the leaders of a group of extremists within her husband's inner circle, known as the "akazu" (little house), that masterminded the killings -- allegations she denies.

After a first stay in France in 1994, the woman who was widely regarded as the power behind the throne in Rwanda, returned in 1998 to take up residence in a small town on the southern outskirts of Paris.

For the past 13 years she has been under investigation over the bloodshed that caused her to flee her homeland.

Habyarimana, 78, has demanded that the case against her be thrown out -- a request she renewed this week at the Paris Court of Appeal after her first bid to have the case dismissed was rejected last year.

The appeal court's decision is expected on August 30.

Jean-Luc Habyarimana, one of her sons, accused the French judiciary of "hounding" his mother.

"Are they waiting for our mother to die in order to say they have nothing on her?" he asked AFP in a rare interview.

'Symbol of inaction'

But French investigators say they have failed to assemble enough proof against her to bring charges.

The years-long probe has frustrated activist Alain Gauthier, who has spent two decades building cases against genocide suspects, together with his Rwandan-born wife Dafroza.

It was the Gauthiers who filed the complaint against Habyarimana in 2007 that triggered an investigation for complicity in genocide and crimes against humanity.

For the past 13 years, Habyarimana, 78, has been under investigation but she has demanded that the case against her be thrown out. By STF (FILES/AFP/File)

"Agathe Kanziga (her maiden name) has become a sort of symbol of the inaction of the justice system" on the Rwandan genocide, Alain Gauthier told AFP.

The Collective of Civil Plaintiffs for Rwanda (CCPR), founded by the Gauthiers, accuses Habyarimana of being a key financial backer of Rwanda's infamous Radio des Mille Collines station, which incited the slaughter of Tutsi "cockroaches" in vitriolic broadcasts.

It also accuses her of helping draft a hit list of influential Tutsis and moderate Hutus, of ordering the killings of seven employees of an orphanage that she founded and of approving a wave of assassinations conducted by the presidential guard after her husband's death.

A group of historians commissioned by Macron to examine France's role in the genocide described her in a landmark report in March as an "extremist character".

Speaking to France Culture radio at the time, the president of the commission, Vincent Duclert, claimed that she ran the "Zero Network" -- another name for the "akazu", so-called because the purported goal of Habyarimana's entourage was a Rwanda with zero Tutsis.

'Inconvenient person'

But French investigators, who have visited Rwanda six times, have failed to come up with compelling evidence against her, according to their reports on the case, which AFP has seen.

The Habyarimana family has cast doubt on the reliability of Rwandan witness statements and accused France of keeping the case open out of "political considerations", to appease Kagame.

Jean-Luc Habyarimana noted that his mother had never been prosecuted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and that her brother, Protais Zigiranyirazo, accused of being one of the leaders of the genocide, had been acquitted by the court.

For years after the Rwandan genocide, France was accused of shielding fugitives but in recent years, as relations with Rwanda improved, it has sped up prosecutions.

France's highest court has refused to extradite Habyarimana, while French authorities have also refused to grant her asylum, leaving her in legal limbo. By Thomas SAMSON (AFP/File)

Since 2014, a former Rwandan spy chief and two former mayors have been jailed over their roles in the massacres and several other suspects have been charged.

In the case of Habyarimana, however, the authorities appear unsure what to do.

France's highest court has refused to extradite her and dozens of other suspects to Rwanda on the grounds that the crime of genocide was not on the Rwandan statute books at the time of the massacres.

But French authorities have also refused to grant her asylum, leaving her in legal limbo.

Habyarimana's lawyer Philippe Meilhac is convinced that France is letting the case drag on "because Mrs Habyarimana is an inconvenient person for diplomatic relations" between France and Rwanda.
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The death of a rape victim after she was referred to the Tamale Teaching Hospital even as the Police continue their hunt for the human predator is not an impressive picture of our society today.

We are poles apart from what our society used to be before modernity.

The 18-year-old girl dying neither setting eyes on her aggressor nor hearing about justice being meted out to him is contrary to what we would have wished.

Unfortunately the foregone is the painful reality we are living with until the justice system catches up with the rogue. She will sadly, not be alive to relish the development anyway.

Society which should have offered her protection against human predators failed her as it has others who were abused and continue to be, their cases hushed up by so-called elders in breach of the law.

The Savelugu rape victim is no more among the living but her death should wake us up from the slumber of not doing enough to stem the unfortunate incidence of rape and defilements now commonplace in society.

It is putting many young girls in particular in danger in the society.

Although we are pleased that the Police know who they are looking for, we cannot say same for the seeming indifference of members of the community in which the aggressor lived.

Members of society could have done better than we are witnessing. Some of them might have assisted the Police which of course led to the law enforcement personnel acquiring his details we think that when all join in the search it would not take long for the undesirable element to be fished out.

It is shameful that so many days after the dastardly act the criminal is still out of reach.

We are pleased to learn that the Northern Regional Police Headquarters has taken up the matter a suggestion that the case has been elevated to an appropriate pedestal where it of course belongs.

It is our wish that having been moved to this notch it would not be long before results pop up.

A rapist/predator outside the four walls of a prison is dangerous and makes females unsafe especially since he can pounce from all directions without notice.

We urge the chiefs in the surrounding areas of Savelugu to engage their town criers to beat the gong gong and announce the presence of a human predator who must be arrested and handed over to the police. We must return to the old time basics if that would unearth the criminals now prowling the public space and make us safer especially our girls.

We are standing by for news about the arrest of the human predator.

---Daily Guide
Mozambique should combine its military response to a spiralling jihadist insurgency with aid to disenchanted communities and dialogue with militants to offer them an exit from violence, the International Crisis Group (ICG) said Friday.

The Brussels-based think tank urged Maputo to "use force wisely" in tackling the brutal campaign unfolding in its gas-rich north.

The authorities should accept outside offers of military assistance but focus on containing the insurgency and protecting displaced civilians, it said in a report.

"There needs to be an appropriate level of military support to pressure this group... to consider surrendering, but also to offer them a pathway out," its main author, Dino Mahtani, told AFP.

Mozambique would need to resolve "the set of local factors that have spurred... militants into battle" in order to stem the violence, the report stressed.

Islamic State-linked jihadists known locally as Al-Shabab have been terrorising impoverished Cabo Delgado province since 2017, ransacking villages and towns.

The conflict has claimed more than 2,800 lives, half of them civilians.

Troubled province: Cabo Delgado. By Kun TIAN (AFP)

In March, fighters launched an assault on the town of Palma, overwhelming security forces and causing French energy giant Total to suspend work on a nearby gas project.

The United Nations' refugee agency on Friday said some 70,000 people had fled Palma since the attack, bringing the total number of displaced up to nearly 800,000.

Thousands are reportedly stranded "in very insecure areas around Palma with restricted humanitarian access," the UNHCR said.

"Many others" have attempted to cross into neighbouring Tanzania, it said.

The raid, which killed dozens, is considered one of the worst acts of Islamist militancy in southern Africa.

The ICG urged the government to use donor money to fund development that could "soothe local tensions" and provide alternative livelihoods for the poor and jobless who are being wooed by the jihadists.

Bordering Tanzania and more than 1,500 kilometres (930 miles) from the capital Maputo, Cabo Delgado is a "crucible" of socio-economic factors that stoked the insurgency, Mahtani said.

Frustration there grew when local communities felt excluded from the discovery of vast deposits of natural gas and rubies, he said.

Young men began to rebel against traditional religious leaders in the Muslim-majority province.

Jihadists fleeing a security crackdown in Tanzania then latched on to their movement, which was also stoked by ethnic divisions and enmeshed with drug trafficking.

Dialogue

Mahtani said aid would open a "keyhole" for urgently-needed dialogue with the jihadists and pave the way for discussions about a potential amnesty.

Mozambique's government has so far focused most of its attention on a military response.

But its president, Filipe Nyusi, appears wary about accepting assistance from regional neighbours and Western countries.

ICG urged Nyusi to accept "measured" external intervention to support and train local troops, avoiding a "heavy deployment" of foreign boots.

"That could end up just being a lightning rod for international jihadists to come and fight an international intervention," Mahtani warned.
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Minister of Education, Dr. Yaw Adutwum has called on faith-based organizations running schools to introduce universal principles and practices that will benefit students of all faiths.

He made the call when the Executive Director of Child Rights International, Bright Appiah paid a courtesy call on him.

The meeting was to discuss some pertinent issues impeding the rights of children in the educational sector.

Addressing some of the issues which border on safety and religion, the Minister said the introduction of universal principles and practices will benefit students of all faiths and would not interrupt the education of students.

I cannot take religion out of it, but you should create what I call universal principles and practices that ensure that children whose faith may be different from the schools that they attend will still get quality education.

With regard to textbooks for schools, the Minister such materials are now being procured and publishers have been called throughout this week, so textbooks are coming to compliment the material that was developed for teachers.

We are rolling out the National Standardized Test, something that is going to help improve our education system. So what the President has directed is that they administer exams from primary two, four, and primary six to give an idea of their performance. If students are not reading, we will have an intervening year for intervention but because of the pandemic we decided to only test fourth-graders, he added.

The Executive Director of Child Rights International Bright Appiah also called on the Ministry of Education to regulate the private schools to guarantee the safety of children enrolled there.

We realised that our school environment is more or less becoming a threat for the development of children, so it is important that we look at the security issues in terms of people who participate in the school environment and how the private sector too can secure the welfare of children.

We all know that in the last few months we recorded two deaths as a result of negligence in our schools. How do we practice religion in our schools? We felt that gradually its becoming a ground for battles of supremacy in terms of what religion rules, and we felt that, the school environment must be regulated so that no child will be discriminated against under bases of religion, he added.

---citinewsroom
The Director of the Institute for Environment and Sanitation Studies at the University of Ghana, Professor Chris Gordon says one of the factors that may threaten the trees being planted across the country under the Green Ghana Project is the phenomenon of stray animals in Ghana.

The government intends to plant five million trees today [Friday], June 11, to kick-start a campaign under its Green Ghana Project.

Ghanaians are being mobilised to plant trees on the day and nurture them to maturity as a way of contributing to the preservation of the environment.

Environmental factors that affect plant growth generally include light, temperature, water, humidity, and nutrition. It is therefore important to understand how these factors affect plant growth and development.

But according to Prof. Gordon, in the case of Ghana also, stray domestic animals like cattle, goats, and other animals pose the biggest threat to young seedlings.

Although Ghanas bye-laws generally prohibit animals from wandering, enforcement of the laws by the various assemblies has been weak.

Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show, Prof. Chris Gordon stated that the Green Ghana Project is a great initiative while advising that an ordinance should be made to keep these stray animals from the streets and from wandering and grazing so openly.

I think this is a fantastic initiative that I would say should be 50 million not five million trees. When you look at the amount that we lose annually, we need 50 million plantings every year to make up for the losses. At Legon, we had our own tree planting project which I was part of some years back. There were 50 of us, and we planted about 1,500 trees in one morning.

There is a point I would like to raise on this issue of concern, and the point is that we are planting these trees and somebody made a comment about cutting trees and things like that, but really the biggest danger to these trees is the animals which are free and wandering around. We have sheep, goats, cattle even in Accra, and the next thing you realise they will decimate all these young seedlings, so I think we have to look at this as a totality. Just as we have an ordinance that looks at how many trees you need to plant, we also must have an ordinance looking at how animals in these urban areas can be kept away from the roads and these trees, he stated.

Prof. Gordon further stated that real estate companies need to consider tree planting in their plans, adding that there is the need for Ghanaians to also change their mindset in order to make this project a success.

Somebody also raised the issue about real estate companies. You often see them fixing roads with no pavements for pedestrians to walk on, and they do not even leave a space between the houses and the roads for people to plant avenue trees. My fundamental issue is that we need to change our mindset away from car-friendly environment to ones which are people-friendly because what the car does is to add pollution to the environment, what the tree does is to take pollution out of the environment.

---citinewsroom
Minister of Communications and Digitalization, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, has called for the collective protection of Ghanas forests.

According to the Minister, trees are key to ensuring human survival.

Madam Owusu-Ekuful made the call in an interview with the media in Accra on Friday, June 11, 2021, after she led staff of the Ministry of Communications and Digitalization in planting trees.

She and the Ministry staff planted several trees in line with the Green Ghana Day program.

Madam Owusu-Ekuful stated that without trees the human specie is threatened.

She noted that through human activities, we have destroyed a lot of the vegetative cover in our country. We have destroyed our forest and our green surrounding. Now we can be part of the solution.

She charged the Kofi Annan ICT Centre to develop an application that will help monitor the health of the five million trees being planted nationwide.

---DGN online
The Upper West Region Office of the Food and Drugs Authority (FDA), in collaboration with the Upper West Regional Pharmacy Council, has seized an undisclosed quantity of tramadol from three Over The Counter Medicine Sellers (OTCMSs) in the Wa Municipality.

The OTCMSs were fined administrative charges of GH5000.00 each per the dictates of the Public Health Act, Act 851 (2012).

Mr Albert Ankomah, the Upper West Regional Head of the FDA, who disclosed this to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in an interview in Wa, noted that they acted upon a tip-off, conducted their investigation and sourced the drugs, which were secretly sold to consumers.

The Upper West Regional office of the FDA received a consumer complaint, indicating that there are some Over The Counter Medicine Sellers within the Wa Municipality who are secretly selling tramadol to people and so the office quickly investigated this complaint, he explained.

Section 111 of the Act says, A person commits an offence if that person sells a drug, herbal medicinal product, cosmetic, medical device or household chemical substance which, has the potential to cause injury to the health of the user".

Mr Ankomah noted that tramadol was a prescription only medicine and ought to be sold in only pharmacy shops, and that selling the drug in OTCMSs was highly illegal.

He, therefore, urged OTCMSs that were selling tramadol to their customers to desist from the act saying, when the law catches up with them they will be sanctioned.

He stressed that per the Ghana Health Service regulations, tramadol was not supposed to be prescribed by health facilities that were below the status of a district hospital.

Also we are informing the general public that tramadol has its own harmful effects when they are abused, so the fight against the abuse of tramadol is still on, the Regional FDA Boss added.

He noted that the abuse of tramadol had serious adverse effects on the health of the individual, especially his or her brain, and that it would make their future bleak.

---GNA
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Three persons have lost their legs in a fatal motorcycle accident at Faaso Bator in the Eastern Region.

The accident, involving an unregistered Apsonic tricycle and an Apsonic motorcycle, occurred last Tuesday afternoon and the victims were rushed to the Tease Presbyterian Health Centre for attention.

Upon learning about the accident, a police team proceeded to the health facility where it met the victims, Mumuni Yakubu, 27, Derrick Narh, 16 and Ebenezer Obiri, 20, on their sick bed.

Two of the victims, 16-year-old Derrick Narh and Ebenezer Obiri had mutilated legs.

Mumuni Yakubu also spotted a lost leg which was later found at the accident scene by a police team.

After an initial first aid treatment, the victims were referred to the Donkorkrom Presbyterian Hospital for further treatment.

On the same day, DAILY GUIDE learnt about how the rider of the Apsonic tricycle, a certain Daniel Djomoah, aged 21, reported at the police station complaining about bodily pains and was issued with a police medical form to go to the Tease Presbyterian Hospital for attention.

When the police proceeded to the accident scene, they found the unregistered Apsonic tricycle and unregistered motorcycle in a bush close to the road.

The amputated leg of Mumuni Yakubu was found at the scene, which suggested that the victim lost the limb in the course of the accident.

The leg was photographed by the police and taken to the Donkorkrom Presbyterian Hospital morgue for preservation and the tricycle and motorcycle taken to the police station to await examination by officials of the DVLA.

The accident appears to have been caused by a head-on collision between the tricycle, also known as Aboboyaa and the motorcycle, both unregistered.

The accident has been attributed to careless and inconsiderate riding, leading to negligently causing harm.

---Daily Guide
On June 11, 2021, U.S. Ambassador to Ghana Stephanie S. Sullivan commemorated Green Ghana Day by planting a Lignum Vitae tree on the U.S. Embassy grounds.

The chosen tree is commonly referred to as the tree of life or wood of life, due to its traditional medicinal use as a remedy for arthritis and coughs.

Ambassador Sullivan also launched a tree nursery at the Embassy for indigenous and non-native species to contribute to our collective efforts to reforest Ghana with rich and diverse trees that provide vital products and amenities, including quality habitat for wildlife, biodiversity of plant and animal communities that form a vital part of the ecosystem, and recreational opportunities.

During the event, Ambassador Sullivan appreciated the initiative of His Excellency President Nana Akufo-Addo, along with the enthusiasm of Minister for Lands and Natural Resources Hon. Samuel Abu Jinapor, for highlighting the critical need to restore Ghanas forest cover and to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere.

The U.S. Embassy looks forward to working with Ghanaians to support policies and programs that restore and conserve forests and water bodies, stop illegal logging, mining (galamsey), fishing (Illegal, Unreported, Unregulated [IUU] fishing) and plastic pollution.

Prompt reforestation is critical. The goal of 5 million trees set by the Government of Ghana is an ambitious but necessary one, so we must all do our part, one tree, or many at a time. I strongly encourage Ghanaians to embark on restoring Ghanas forest cover, repair degraded landscapes, and protect water bodies.  U.S. Ambassador to Ghana Stephanie S. Sullivan.
Forest rangers in olive-green fatigues snap to attention, ready for their commander's orders.

Their presence gives a military feel to a campaign to help Ivory Coast regain the emerald forests it has catastrophically lost, along with the elephants and other wildlife that once teemed there.

Here, in the Tene Forest in southern-central Ivory Coast, are nurseries of seedlings aimed at restoring the West African nation's green jewels.

Ivory Coast is the world's largest producer of cocoa and a major producer of coffee.

The crops generated wealth but the cost was disastrous for the forests, which were ripped up to make way for plantations.

Forests covered more than 50 percent of the country's area at independence in 1960 -- today, it is just 11 percent.

Forest rangers are an important partof the effort to protect Ivory Coast's dwindling forests. By Issouf SANOGO (AFP)

Of those that remain, all 234 forests officially classified as protected are being nibbled away by global warming, natural disasters, soil impoverishment and population expansion.

By some estimates the country's deforestation rate is at around three percent annually -- a trend that, environmentalists warn, could wreck ecosystems and threaten the livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers.

"By 2030-2035, Ivory Coast won't have any forests left if we do not fight against abusive exploitation," the minister of water and forests, Alain Richard, told AFP.

Military-style operation

Tene, a forest of 30,000 hectares (75,000 acres) is the largest site where the state-owned Company for Development of Forest Plantations (Sodefor) grows seedlings to replant teak, African whitewood, Ivory Coast almond and other coveted species.

Ivory Coast. By Laurence SAUBADU (AFP)

The day's work in the lush haven of cashew and teak trees begins with the rangers -- paramilitaries with the Water and Forestry Service -- saluting the orange-white-and-green national flag.

After receiving their orders, the rangers then go to supervising dozens of workers as they descend on the nursery to tend to their leafy charges.

Every year, millions of seedlings are sent from Tene to areas scheduled for reforestation.

"Reforestation affects the entire territory of Ivory Coast," explained Colonel Mathieu Oulea of the Water and Forests service. "This nursery is where we raise the plants to do it."

Public support

The goal is to replant six million hectares (15 million acres) by 2030 -- equal to a fifth of the country's area.

Half of this area will be forests, for which some three billion trees will be needed, said Donwahi.

Ivory Coast has set down an ambitious reforestation programme -- billions of trees are to be planted over the next decade. By Issouf SANOGO (AFP)

To meet the challenge, the authorities have established a public-private partnership requiring 616 billion CFA francs (939 million euros / $1.1 billion) of investments over 10 years.

As in other countries in Africa, they are also counting on public support.

Two years ago authorities launched a "National Tree Day" in which millions of seedlings are replanted over 24 hours.

"Each Ivorian has to become be a tree planter. Everyone will have to participate in reforestation -- we have destroyed more than 80 percent of our forest cover," Donwahi said.

"This is not an option, it is a necessity to save Ivory Coast."

'Green brigade'

Last year, the country set up its first "green brigade" -- a unit of 650 soldiers assigned to fight against deforestation and other forest crimes.

A woman prepares cuttings for reforestation. By Issouf SANOGO (AFP)

One of its companies defends the forests, another the nation's water resources and the third Ivorian elephants and other fauna.

Extensive deforestation has destroyed the natural habitat of endangered wildlife, including elephants, whose numbers have dropped by half in 30 years. Today fewer than 500 remain.

According to the minister of water and forests, the new policy has provided for "a corridor to enable elephants to move from one place to another and the creation of sanctuaries for the pachyderms to live protected."


A Nile crocodile named Osama, believed to be more than 75-years-old, between 1991 and 2005 the crocodile wiped off a tenth of the population in the small Ugandan village of Luganga. It even jumped on vessels of fishermen.

The Nile Crocodile

An "immortal" murderous crocodile named after Bin Laden has consumed 80 villagers, terrorizing both grown-ups and children for years. Osama, a Nile crocodile believed to be more than 75 years old, inhabited Uganda's Lake Victoria almost all its life.

Between 1991 and 2005 the 16ft-long beast eliminated a tenth of the population in the small village of Luganga. The Daily Star reports said the reptile used to capture children as they filled bowels of water at the lakeshore or swim under fishing boats and capsize them knowingly.

At a point, it also began to jump into wooden vessels of fishermen before taking off people to kill them.

Also Read: The Great Predator: Facts About Florida's New 'Man-Eating' Invader, Nile Crocodile

Victims of Osama's Attacks

One of the victims of Osama's attacks was a local fisherman whose torn clothing was found floating on the water, according to reports. Another man witnessed and got through an attack by the terrifying reptile, but his brother was not that lucky.

The Sydney Morning Herald conversed with Paul Kyewalyanga, who was rowing in the back of his boat as Peter - his brother - fished from the forepart when the crocodile leapt in and took him away. "The crocodile just came out from the water vertically and flopped into the boat.

"The back of the boat where I sat was flooded," He recalled.

He attempted to seek aid but Osama had latched onto Peter's leg with his massive jaws and started to pull at him, making attempt to get him into the water. Paul added that Peter was clutching the side shouting. They struggled for about five minutes until I heard a tearing noise.

"Peter screamed, 'He's broken my leg.' Then he let go and was pulled into the water. A few days later his arm and his head was discovered."

The Crocodile Was Captured in 2005

Locals started asking for aid and in 2005 Osama was captured with the assistance of 50 local men and wildlife officials. Some wanted to take the life of the reptile, but wildlife officials told locals they could not kill the beast "with impunity".

So, the reptile was handed to the owners of Uganda Crocs so it can be used in their breeding programme.They hope that he will parent hundreds or even thousands more enormous crocodiles whose skin can be used in producing handbags for fashionistas in countries like Italy and South Korea. The farm also became a tourist attraction, and members of the public can visit to witness the 5,000 crocodiles being fattened up ready for slaughter.

Related Article: Revenge of the Wildlife: Nile Crocodiles Devour Man Who Kills Wild Animals for 'Trophy'

For more news, updates about crocodiles and similar topics don't forget to follow Nature World News!
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The Bole District Branch of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) has today Friday June 11, 2021 planted sixty (60) trees as part of the National tree planting exercise led by the President of Ghana.

The Green Ghana project, which is a Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources initiative spearheaded by sector Minister Samuel Abu Jinapor, aimed to plant five million trees in a single day.

The Bole branch of the National Health Insurance Authority planted 60 various types of tree species on the premises of the NHIA led by the scheme Manager Mr. Mohammed Suraj-Deen and his staff.

Mr. Suraj-Deen, speaking to the media following a brief event to plant seedlings at the NHIS complex, noted that in line with the Presidents directive that government institutions and individuals should assist in greening Ghana, we have gone ahead to implement our own version of greening Ghana on the NHIS compound.

We planted trees which included acacias, thick and others. Already, we have started our own afforestation before the coming of greening Ghana and we are going to continue NOT only to plant trees but to take good care of them until they become matured and needs no care, Syrah-Deen added.

Earlier in June, 2021, President Akufo-Addo called on Ghanaians to plant more trees to preserve the countrys forest cover and the environment.

The President stressed that We cannot sit by and watch as our trees, flora and fauna are wiped out. Our very existence is tied directly to the survival of trees. Without the oxygen produced by trees, we cannot survive as humans.

Lend your support to the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources as it executes this ambitious national assignment. I will be planting a tree and I expect you too to plant one. Let us make Ghana green."
More than 350,000 people in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region are suffering famine conditions with millions more at risk, according to United Nations agencies and aid groups, which blamed the recent conflict for the worst catastrophic food crisis in a decade.

"There is famine now in Tigray," UN aid chief Mark Lowcock said on Thursday after the release of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis, which the IPC noted has not been endorsed by the Ethiopian government.

"The number of people in famine conditions...is higher than anywhere in the world, at any moment since a quarter-million Somalis lost their lives in 2011," Lowcock said.

Most of the 5.5 million people in Tigray need food aid.

Fighting broke out in the region in November between government troops and the region's former ruling party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF). Troops from neighbouring Eritrea also entered the conflict to support the Ethiopian government.

The violence has killed thousands of civilians and forced more than 2 million from their homes in the mountainous region.

The IPC said more than 350,000 people in Tigray are in phase 5 catastrophe - the highest level - meaning households were experiencing famine conditions, but less than 20 percent of the population is affected and deaths and malnutrition have not reached famine thresholds.

For famine to be declared at least 20 percent of the population must be suffering extreme food shortages, with one in three children acutely malnourished and two people out of every 10,000 dying daily from starvation or from malnutrition and disease.

'Nightmare'

Famine has been declared twice in the past decade: in Somalia in 2011 and in parts of South Sudan in 2017.

"If the conflict further escalates or, for any other reason, humanitarian assistance is hampered, most areas of Tigray will be at risk of famine," according to the IPC, which added that even if aid deliveries are stepped up, the situation is expected to worsen through September.

The Ethiopian government disputed the IPC analysis, saying food shortages are not severe and aid is being delivered.

Ethiopian Foreign Ministry spokesman Dina Mufti told a news conference on Thursday that the government was providing food aid and help to farmers in Tigray.

"They (diplomats) are comparing it with the 1984, 1985 famine in Ethiopia," he said. "That is not going to happen."

But US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield said a humanitarian nightmare was unfolding.

"This is not the kind of disaster that can be reversed," she told a US and European Union event on Tigray on Thursday.

Ceasefire

Referring to a previous famine in Ethiopia that killed more than 1 million people, she said: "We cannot make the same mistake twice. We cannot let Ethiopia starve. We have to act now."

World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley said that to stop hunger from killing millions of people in Tigray there needed to be a ceasefire, unimpeded aid access and more money to expand aid operations.

According to notes of a meeting of UN agencies on Monday, seen by Reuters, the IPC analysis could be worse as "they did not include those in Amhara-controlled areas" in western Tigray.

Mituku Kassa, head of Ethiopia's National Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Committee, said on Wednesday: "We don't have any food shortage."

(Reuters)
Mali's Colonel Assimi Goita is under intense pressure after French President Emmanuel Macron announced a troop drawdown in the war-torn Sahel, describing the West African state's strongman as a "putschist".

On Thursday, Macron said he would wind down the 5,100-strong Barkhane force that has battled jihadists in the semi-arid African region since 2013.

The announcement comes after Goita launched an internationally condemned coup against Mali's civilian leaders last month -- angering the former colonial power France.

France has undergirded the military response to the Sahel's long-running jihadist insurgency, which first emerged in Mali in 2012 but has since spread and now threatens the whole region.

At a news conference in Paris, Macron stressed that France "cannot be a substitute for political stability".

Map of Mali.. By (AFP)

Details of the pullback have yet to be made public, but Macron said that several hundred French troops will stay in the region as part of the so-called Takuba international task force.

In the Sahel, some are interpreting the announcement as a wake-up call for the region's ossified elites.

"Assimi Goita and his brothers in arms are going to have to tie their shoelaces tightly," said Le Pays, a leading newspaper in Burkina Faso, a Sahel country also plagued by Islamist violence.

Goita, who had already led a coup last August, was sworn in as Mali's transitional president on Tuesday.

Bowing to international demands, the colonel this week appointed a civilian prime minister and stood by a promise made by the leaders he ousted that elections would be staged next February.

By Friday, neither Goita nor his prime minister had publicly responded to news of the French troop drawdown.

'Putschist'

Last August, Goita led young army officers in ousting elected president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita after weeks of protests over perceived corruption and a bloody jihadist insurgency.

After the West Africa bloc ECOWAS imposed sanctions, the junta handed power to a civilian-led transitional government, which promised to restore civilian rule in February 2022.

But Goita deposed its leaders on May 24 after they carried out a government reshuffle that sidelined some junta figures, provoking diplomatic uproar.

Army troops took control in capital Bamako at the end of May, the second time in a year. By Michele Cattani (AFP/File)

The African Union and 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) suspended Mali, a country dependent on international partnerships.

One of the world's poorest states, Mali's security forces suffer from poor equipment and training.

On Wednesday, Goita appeared to have earned a reprieve after ECOWAS said it had been "reassured" by his promises to stage elections.

But France took a harder line. It suspended military cooperation with Mali pending guarantees that the army would quit politics.

On Thursday, Macron announced the end of Barkhane but also slammed ECOWAS for setting a "bad legal precedent" by recognising a "putschist".

Ornella Moderan, the head of the Sahel programme at the Institute for Security Studies, said France is not conducting a complete withdrawal from Mali.

Despite the critical tone, "dialogue has not broken down" she said.

'Honourable way out'

Mohamed Coulibaly, a Malian security consultant, said the latest coup simply provided a pretext for the French to disengage.

For years, Paris has pushed Western allies to contribute troops to the Sahel in a bid to lighten its burden in the seemingly intractable conflict.

"Faced with the fear of getting bogged down in the Sahel, (France) was looking for an honourable way out," Coulibaly said.

France troops have been deployed in Mali since 2013. By DaphnA BENOIT (AFP/File)

There are fears that the French move will further destabilise fragile Mali, however.

Thousands of people have been killed in the conflict to date, and hundreds of thousands more have fled their homes.

Alpha Sow, a retired Malian soldier, told AFP that a French pullback from outposts in the lawless north will "create a big void".

Seeking to allay these concerns, French Defence Minister Florence Parly pointed on Friday to the increasing capabilities of local troops.

France's military commitment to the region "will remain very significant," she also said.

'Deaths upon deaths'

Aboubacar Siddick Fomba, a politician viewed as close to the military junta, said France's intervention had failed.

But the way is now open for military cooperation from Russia, China or Turkey, he said.

Some Malians have demonstrated against France's continuing military presence. By Michele CATTANI (AFP/File)

The sentiment has long struck a chord in Mali, where France's military involvement has led to protests and is often criticised on social media.

Yaya Koulibaly, a bricklayer in the capital Bamako, said French troops made no difference.

"Every day there are deaths upon deaths, (the French army) can leave without any problem," he said.

"We will work and defend ourselves," he said.
Algerian police deployed heavily in the capital Friday ahead of parliamentary elections to block protesters disrupting the polls, as activists criticised a "climate of repression" amid arrests of opposition figures.

Large numbers of police officers patrolled the streets of Algiers, blocking roads to preempt any attempt by supporters of the long-running Hirak pro-democracy movement to gather, AFP correspondents reported.

Saturday's poll comes as authorities seek to bolster their legitimacy and take the wind out of the sails of the Hirak, which returned to the streets in February following an almost year-long break due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Algerian League for the Defence of Human Rights said seven leading protest movement figures had been arrested on Thursday evening, five in Algiers and two in other parts of the country.

"This repressive atmosphere and the restrictions placed on human rights and freedoms mean these elections have no democratic value," its vice president Said Salhi told AFP, adding they did not know "the grounds for these arrests".

'Chilling escalation'

Key dates in the Algerian anti-government protests since 2019. Parliamentary elections are held on June 12. By Maryam EL HAMOUCHI (AFP)

Back in 2019, the Hirak mobilised hundreds of thousands to force longtime president Abdelaziz Bouteflika to resignation, after he launched a bid for a fifth term.

It has urged boycotts of all national votes since then.

A presidential election 18 months ago, won by Abdelmadjid Tebboune, attracted a turnout of less than 40 percent, even according to official figures.

Among those detained in Algiers were leading opposition figure Karim Tabbou and independent journalist Khaled Drareni, as well the director of a pro-reform radio station, Ihsane El Kadi.

Drareni was being held in a barracks on the outskirts of the capital. His only contact with his family was a 1:30 am phone call, his lawyer Zoubida Assoul said.

The journalist was only released on bail in February after being detained while covering a mass demonstration in the capital in March last year.

Tabbou and Ihsane El Kadi were being held in the same barracks, their lawyers said.

Campaigns have been largely lacklustre -- but some have held lively rallies, such as the Movement of Society for Peace (MSP) party, on June 8. By RYAD KRAMDI (AFP)

"These arrests mark a chilling escalation in the Algerian authorities' clampdown on the rights to freedom of expression and association ahead of the elections," Amnesty International said in a statement, reporting over 200 people were in detention in connection with the Hirak movement.

"Instead of rounding up journalists and political opponents in a bid to crush dissent and intimidate members of the Hirak protest movement, Algeria's authorities should focus on respecting their human rights obligations."

Roadblocks

Algerian police have recently been deploying to stop anti-government demonstrations, as seen in this picture from Algiers taken on March 30. By RYAD KRAMDI (AFP)

On Friday, security forces set up roadblocks on key routes into the capital, with police trucks parked at major junctions.

The streets were largely quiet -- with many in the capital heading to the city's beaches instead.

But in two towns in Algeria's northeastern Kabylie region, Tizi Ouzou and Bejaia, hundreds of marchers chanted slogans saying the upcoming vote was flawed, and accusing the current administration of links to Bouteflika.

The International Crisis Group said in May that Algeria's situation had "deteriorated", noting that the authorities had "stepped up repression" against Hirak supporters ahead of the polls, "quashing demonstrations and arresting scores".

Since last month, the government has clamped down on the weekly protests of the Hirak reform movement, detaining hundreds of activists who have defied new restrictions on public gatherings.

Prior approval is now required from the interior ministry, an impossible demand for a movement that prides itself on having no formal leadership, making all of its demonstrations effectively illegal.

A presidential decree published in the official gazette on Thursday opens a new avenue for the prosecution of Hirak activists by changing the penal code's definition of acts of terrorism.

It establishes an official blacklist of individuals and entities suspected of terrorism that could be used against activists, opposition leaders or journalists.

"In Algeria, the authorities no longer pretend to organise serious elections," Reporters Without Borders chief Christophe Deloire said on Twitter, criticising the arrest of Drareni and other Hirak members.

"Yesterday, President Tebboune broadened the notion of terrorism by decree to facilitate repression," Deloire added.
A total of 250,000 seedlings were on Friday planted across the Northern Region as part of the government's Green Ghana project to help restore the country's vegetative cover.

Ya-Na Abukari (II), Overlord of Dagbon joined by government officials including the Northern Regional Minister, began the exercise at Yendi where they planted various seedlings including acacia, mango, rosewood, shea, nim.

A number of faith-based organisations, institutions, non-governmental organisations, students and some citizens also participated in the exercise by planting trees in various communities across the region.

The seedlings were provided by the Forestry Commission and distributed to the institutions and faith-based organisations to plant.

Alhaji Shani Alhassan Saibu, Northern Regional Minister, in a message, expressed excitement at the exercise and said his excitement stemmed from peculiar weather conditions in the region and the general degradation of the environment.

The Green Ghana project is an initiative of the government for all citizens to plant five million trees across the country today (June 11) as part of efforts to protect the environment.

Alhaji Saibu said he would follow up on all Metropolitan, Municipal and District Chief Executives (MMDCEs) to check on the survival of the trees, saying this would form part of his assessment for the MMDCEs.

Ya-Na Abukari (II) lauded the Green Ghana project and said it would go a long way to restore the country's lost forests.

He called on the people of the area to stop the indiscriminate Bush burning, and felling of trees to help protect the environment.

---GNA
A fellow at the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD), Kwame Sarpong Asiedu has criticised government for its decision to procure Sputnik V vaccine through middlemen.

He said the action is not prudent and goes against the World Health Organizations ideal way of procuring vaccines.

A Norwegian news tabloid, Verdens Gang, reported that Ghana has made a request to purchase 3.4 million doses of the Sputnik V vaccine through two businessmen who are selling it to Ghana at $19 per dose instead of the $10 per dose on the international market.

The government has explained that it could not secure the vaccines directly from the manufacturer, hence the need to go through some middlemen, justifying why the cost is higher than the standard price of the Russian vaccine.

Kwame Sarpong Asiedu said the calibre of persons involved in the transaction makes it questionable.

He said the government could have procured the vaccine through a bilateral agreement or with a State actor that has the vaccine.

The WHO frowns on the use of middlemen because sometimes you dont know whether they have access to the right stock of vaccine. The question we are asking is that should the State be having deliberations with characters like this in an attempt to protect citizens? The impression is being created that Sputnik V cannot be purchased unless you go through a middleman. Our checks have showed that countries like Turkey have done it and even Guinea has done it. The best option would have been a bilateral agreement either with a State actor that has the vaccines or with the manufacturers or the produce licence holders.

Pressure is mounting on the government to abrogate the contract with the businessmen, although it insists that the move was necessary and in the best interest of the country.

The Member of Parliament for Juaboso in the Western North Region, whos also a Ranking Member on Parliaments Health Committee, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, has indicated his resolve to ensure that the Minister for Health, Kweku Agyemang Manu, is dragged before Parliament's Health Committee over the procurement.

He said the deal must be investigated thoroughly.

We are going to invite the Minister to appear before the Committee so that he answers relevant questions because, as for the press release and the things they are saying, it is very difficult to believe, he told Umaru Sanda Amadu, host of Eyewitness News, on Thursday, June 10, 2021.

---citinewsroom
The Tunisian navy and coastguards rescued 54 migrants Friday on a boat heading to Europe that was about to sink in Mediterranean waters, the defence ministry said.

The migrants, aged between 15 and 40 and almost all men, left from neighbouring Libya late Thursday.

But their boat began to founder in waters off the southern Tunisian port of Ben Guerdane, the defence ministry said in a statement.

The migrants -- who include citizens of multiple nationalities, many from sub-Saharan African countries -- were taken to Ben Guerdane, before heading to a detention centre.

Tunisia and Libya are key departure points for migrants attempting the dangerous crossing from the North African coast to Europe, particularly Italy.

At least 700 people have died trying to cross the central Mediterranean this year, up until May 17, the UN's refugee agency UNHCR said.

Numbers leaving Libya have also increased significantly, with 11,000 departures from January to April 2021, over 70 percent more than in the same period last year, according to UNHCR.
Ghana has submitted her bid for the presidency of the African Organization for Standardization (ARSO), the intergovernmental body in-charge of harmonizing standards and conformity procedures to facilitate seamless intra-trading on the continent.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration submitted the country's bid in late April to advance the country's vision if elected.

ARSO's 2021 elections are slated for June 15 in Rwanda's capital, Kigali.

This year's congress has become crucial as the African Union Commission seeks to significantly increase intra-trading through its ambitious vehicle  the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

In a paper on AfCFTA in 2020, the World Bank said the success of the ambitious trade deal hinges on a harmonized quality infrastructure which will remove some of the technical barriers to trade.

Ghana already plays host to the AfCFTA secretariat and winning the elections will boost Ghana's prominence in the 1.2 billion population market.

If Ghana's candidature gets endorsed by member-states, it will be the first time a Ghanaian will head the intergovernmental body since its formation.

The furthest Ghana had been in the leadership of ARSO in the organization's 44-year journey is the treasury portfolio, despite being a member-state since its formation in Accra in 1977.

---GNA
The Teacher Trainees Association of Ghana (TTAG) has expressed the utmost gratitude of teacher trainees to President Akufo-Addo and his government for restoring teacher trainee allowance.

Following the cancellation of teacher trainee allowance by the erstwhile NDC government, its restoration was a major campaign promise by then candidate Akufo-Addo, and he duly fulfilled the promise to restore the allowance, alongside that of nursing trainees, when he assumed office in 2017.

At a visit to the Jubilee House on Thursday June 10 2021 to pay a courtesy call on the Vice President, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, the teacher trainees commended the Akufo-Addo government for the restoration of the allowance.

The teacher trainees said, the restoration of the trainee allowance has cushioned many students in teacher training colleges, and described the intervention by the government as "an unforgettable legacy."

Addressing them, Dr Bawumia assured the teacher trainees of government's continuous support and investment in education at all levels, to ensure easy access to Ghanaians.

The group presented a framed portrait of the Vice President to him with an inscription of their unforgettable appreciation of government's restoration of teacher trainee allowance.
Todays nationwide exercise will not be a one-off event. We intend to enhance ongoing afforestation programmes, and see to the sustainable exploitation of our forest resources.

These were the words of the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, on Friday, 11th June 2021, when he planted a tree at the forecourt of Jubilee House, as part of Green Ghana Day, a day set aside to plant some five million trees across the country.

Speaking at the event, President Akufo-Addo explained that the forest is one of the most important natural resources of Ghana, as its continuous existence creates jobs, provides incomes for local communities, is a source of foreign exchange earnings through timber product exports, and offers environmental protection, including watershed protection and climate change regulation.

However, the exploitation of forest resources for national development has not been sustainable over the years. Deforestation and forest degradation are the greatest challenges to sustainable forest management in Ghana today, the President said.

He continued, The consequential effect of deforestation and forest degradation is severe climate change, which has dire consequences for our livelihoods, specifically the drying up of our water bodies, the pollution of our waters, loss of our prime timber species, loss of biodiversity, and change in rainfall patterns and weather conditions in the country.

To this end, President Akufo-Addo indicated that there is an urgent need to reverse the trend, and restore the countrys forest resources, as much as possible, back to their original state.

We do not have tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow to do this. We have to act now! he stressed

The President, thus, reiterated his determination to restore the lost forest cover of the country, with the attempt to regulate and sanitize the small-scale mining industry being one such initiative to help keep Ghanas forest cover and reserves intact.

I assure the Ghanaian people that Government is determined to ensure the survival of the five million trees being planted today. Together, we must and will protect our environment and ecosystem, and we must contribute to the worlds agenda at combating global warming. We have to protect planet earth and our homeland, Ghana, President Akufo-Addo said.

He appealed to all Ghanaians to embrace the Green Ghana Initiative introduced by Government, adding that it is an ambitious initiative, and we will make the necessary effort to sustain it. God willing, this event will be an annual one, and planting targets will be reviewed upwards every year.

The President extended his appreciation to the First Lady, Vice President, Second Lady, the Speaker of Parliament, the Chief Justice, the Chief of Staff at the Office of the President, the Asantehene, the Overlord of Dagbon, the Okyenhene, the National Chief Imam, and other prominent citizens of our country, who have embraced this initiative, and committed themselves to support this national endeavour, by planting a tree each.

He was equally grateful to the leaders of the Church of Pentecost, the Presbyterian Church, the Methodist Church, the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, and other faith-based organisations for their support and commitment to this noble project.

Whilst we all plant trees today, let us resolve to nurture, grow, and protect them to maturity. We have a collective responsibility to leave future generations and their communities with richer, more valuable forest and wildlife endowment than we inherited, he added.
An Aspiring National Youth Organiser of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Prince Kamal Gumah, joined Ghanaians to plant trees in the much anticipated Green Ghana Project with a call to make the exercise an all-time event.

According to him, it is not enough to just plant a tree on June 11, 2021 but must be made a lifetime event to protect the environment and lives; today and that of future generations.

He noted that the country has been noted for cutting more trees than it planted. To this end, everyone should make it a point to plant more every year to reverse the trend.

Prince Kamal Gumah commended the President for the initiative; describing it as wonderful, transformational and a good legacy for future generations.

He noted that through human activities, we have destroyed a lot of the vegetative cover in our country. We have destroyed our forest and our green surrounding. Now we can be part of the solution.
Sincere Tony is again on the stump, promoting his vision of how best to return to a lovely, unruffled world of capitalist endeavour, circuit lecturing and summit meetings that no longer need to be held online. And when Blair has visions, they are bound to be highly selective and keen in terms of his own bank account, not to mention his PR services.

In February this year, he told BBC Radio 4s Week in Westminster that a digital health certificate or passport of some sort covering vaccination and testing status was bound to happen. It was a matter of national security. Never mind the deaths and the illness, it was the damage to our economy and the global economy that proved massive.

This month, Blair went one step further. In Less Risk, More Freedom, a report authored by his firm the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the authors remark that vaccine status matters. They write of a robust Covid pass that could be used to facilitate virtually unhindered mobility. In terms of international movement, we propose that anyone who is fully vaccinated should be free to travel to and from any country currently designated green without any quarantine or testing required. In terms of domestic settings, the authors proposed that any venue or setting that wants to admit only those who have been vaccinated be permitted to do so.

The report, and the spruiking of the vaccination pass, exude a striking creepiness. The gist to all of this: It was time to start discriminating between vaccinated and the unvaccinated. On the BBCs Andrew Marr Show, Blair insisted that discrimination was unavoidable. So far, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his cabinet seem cold to the idea.

Some of the governments advisers are also sceptical. Professor of social psychology John Drury, who is also a member of the Independent Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B) also takes issue with creating a division between those who have the passport and those who do not, a state of affairs that was bound to reinforce and reproduce existing group inequalities. Drury also noted other factors that would militate against the use of such a pass: the large number of people yet to be vaccinated, including those unable to be vaccinated for medical reasons, those not on the priority list, those who havent found the opportunity, those who are hesitant, and those who are anti-vaxx. Sod them, Tony seems to be suggesting.

Another member of the SPI-B, Susan Michie, also suggests keeping such passes on ice. The idea of vaccine passports when not everyone has been offered the vaccination and when there are disparities that have not been adequately addressed is very problematic. An increase in social divisions between different sectors of society was bound to arise.

It is little wonder Blair wants to get moving, meeting and greeting. In 2014, for instance, it was revealed that he earnt 41,000 per month from the Saudi oil company PetroSaudi, in addition to a 2% commission on any deal secured through his services. In 2016, the Guardian obtained access to documents on how various Chinese political leaders heaped praise upon Blair for his efforts to forge business deals with them and PetroSaudi.

In doing so, the line between making contacts, and actually overseeing deals, was blurred. The bank, co-owned by Prince Turki bin Abdullah  had itself insisted in discussions about retaining Blairs services in November 2010 that the former British Prime Minister do more than just make the intros  he would also help deliver transactions. Because doing so might fall foul of the Financial Services Authority, Tony Blair Associates would assist in delivering transactions but cannot have it on paper that this might be the case (which no doubt still causes potential problems with the FSA).

For the time of its operation, the TBA client roster was extensive, spanning Kuwait, Vietnam, Peru, Colombia, the Abu Dhabi investment fund Mubadala, and the authoritarian government of Kazakhstan. All of this suggests a curious take on the mumbo jumbo that is often spouted in Whitehall about a rules-based order, which, as ever, affords rules in accordance with how money and services change hands in the opaquest way possible.

In 2016, the cloak of controversy regarding TBA and its advisory services was getting so heavy, Blair decided to cut and run. In closing the advisory firm, he told staff that he would keep a number of private clients, including the investment bank JPMorgan. But there would be a renewed focus on charity work. It is now time to expand to a new level, Blair said in a statement. I want to expand our activities and bring everything under one roof. I also want to concentrate the vast bulk of my time on the not-for-profit work we do.

In responding to COVID-19 Blair, through his Institute for Global Change, evangelises with characteristic zeal. As the world works to defeat COVID-19, we have dedicated our 200-strong team to the fight. The firms Government Advisory Practice is directly supporting leaders in their on-the-ground fight against COVID-19, and our Policy Futures unit is delivering analysis and advice to help countries mitigate economic impact, source essential equipment, harness the power of technology and position themselves for the rebuilding to come. The sound of money in the making.

For any readers in doubt about the value of Blairs advice on matters of pressing concern, a dip into the Chilcot Report should suffice. Covering the reasons why Britain invaded Iraq, along with the United States and its allies, it found that the prime minister reached a decision based on flawed intelligence and assessments. Saddam Hussein and his fabled Weapons of Mass Destruction posed no imminent threat. This would be a decent summary on Blairs attitudes to a vaccine passport: views uninformed by advice and marked by a certain flawed intelligence.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]
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Is it a curse come upon some Ghanaian PhD holders or professors to behave unwisely in a manner unbefitting of highly educated persons? Truly, education bestows knowledge upon people but does not obligatorily acquire them wisdom. Akan elders often say, Esono efie nyasan na esono nwoma nyansa, to wit, wisdom acquired through home upbringing is different from knowledge acquired through formal education They rate ones home-acquired wisdom higher than their formal education knowledge.

In a short while, we shall see if our elders were, or are, right to hold on to their belief. There is this Professor Kenneth Agyemang Attafuah, the Executive Director of the National Identification Authority (NIA), and a principal royal of the Juaso stool, casting doubt on the integrity of highly educated Ghanaians. He goes on air to reveal to the nation a conversation he allegedly held with His Excellency the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo. He says the president has instructed him not to employ New Patriotic Party (NPP) loyalists at NIA. Therefore, he will not employ any but others, presumably, people who are apolitical (not interested in or connected with politics, or not connected to any political party).

Assuming the president had that conversation with him, in the hope of living behind an appreciable legacy of having built a powerful state institution which is neutral and devoid of partisanship, should the professor have to come on air to announce it to the whole nation and the world? By announcing it on air, what did the professor intend to achieve?

If the president wanted the world to know about his secret intention of not employing any NPP loyalist at NIA, would he not have gone on air himself to divulge it? Was it not for a good reason that he confided in Attafuah alone, rather than disclosing it to the public?

How could Attafuah tell a Ghanaian who is partisan from the one who is apolitical, before offering them a job at NIA? Does he know that some Ghanaians do hold both National Democratic Congress (NDC) and NPP membership cards and always claim to be a member of the ruling party by presenting that partys membership card?

Will a person desperately looking for a job disclose to the interviewer or employer his political affiliation once knowing they will not be employed when such information is revealed? How then could the professor tell the true nature of the person in terms of their political inclination? Does he understand that There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face?

Does the learned professor understand what is positive discrimination and when and how it is applied? From my experience or understanding of positive discrimination as happened in both the United Kingdom and South Africa, Positive discrimination is the process of increasing the number of employees from minority groups in a company or business, which are known to have been discriminated against in the past

I have in the past alerted Ghanaians to how Ashantis were being discriminated against in the public sector employment under the NDC regimes of the late President Professor Fiifi Evans Atta Mills and former President John Dramani Mahama. I had better quote the references of such publications below than to go back narrating the whole story over again.

https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/features/artikel.php?ID=234317

Read More: Is Asantehene Now Awakening To The NDC Government Policy Of Discrimination Against Ashantis?

Would it therefore be wrong for a public institution under say NPP, to employ more of Ashantis, who unfortunately happen to be NPP loyalists? If an institution under NPP fails to employ more of those people who had earlier been discriminated against but happen to be their strong supporters, then NPP is committing political suicide.

If anything at all, why not balance the number of employees with respect to their political or apolitical background than to say, I will not employ NPP loyalists because the president has said so

Do the president and Attafuah want to see the ongoing rotational cycle of 8 years in power 8 years in opposition between the NDC and NPP broken, or they want to ensure it continues? Is Attafuahs behaviour any good towards breaking that devilish pull Ghana down cyclical rotation of 8 years in power 8 years in opposition as is ongoing between NPP, the visionaries, and NDC, the visionless?

He is alleged to have sold his piece of land to finance NPP to come to power. Good, and thank you to him. However, does that grant him the licence to seek to bring NPP down by his thoughtless revelation? I, Rockson Adofo, have helped in my own little way to bring NPP to power in 2016. I had by spending money in the little ways as I could, writing to persuade people to vote for NPP, especially Nana Akufo-Addo, organising prayer crusades, etc., I have immensely played a role in the success story of NPP like any other electorate that voted for NPP.

DJ Sarkodie of Sources radio in London, had helped canvass for NPP and garnered the party more votes to bring her to power than Attafuah could have achieved through the sale of his so-called piece of land. Is winning an election not by majority numbers garnered? Sources Radio got more votes for NPP yet, he has NEVER been recognised, let alone, had a thank you said to him or offered any job by any member of the NPP leadership. He is completely unknown to them but one day, the NPP will realise their folly for being so ungrateful to biting the hand that fed or feeds them.

Do those members of the NPP leadership who are now holding lucrative positions in government and in other parastatal companies care if NPP went into opposition today? NO! Why because they would have made their money by then.

I see the statement by Attafuah as very stupid and politically incorrect at this time that the president and the NPP government are incurring the wrath of the public for the economic hardships they are going through as brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic but not necessarily, any fault of theirs.

Why could he not apply common sense as he may have gained through proper Akan home upbringing, thus, wisdom? To many an NPP loyalist or sympathiser, it has become the situation of monkey de work, baboon de chop, to wit, the ordinary person is doing all the hard and dirty work while someone more important sits down in comfort somewhere enjoying the fruits of the sweat and toil of the commoner.

Once bitten, twice shy. NPP loyalists will learn a lesson from this. I hope the NDC will not capitalise on this in their play of populist politics for all bad reasons.

For how long will many a Ghanaian PhD holder or professor behave awkwardly stupidly without being chastised? I shall entreat readers to read my recent online publication titled, Why this shameless anti-Law, anti-Supreme Court and anti-EC attitude by some Ghanaian scholars and CSOs? under the web link:

Read More: Why this shameless anti-Law, anti-Supreme Court and anti-EC attitude by some Ghanaian scholars and CSOs?

I hope you have not forgotten how Kpessa-Whyte, a PhD holder and a lecturer at the University of Ghana, made a mockery of himself as a principal witness for former President John Dramani Mahama at the Supreme Court when he mounted the witness box for cross examination. As one of the appointed NDC guys to go into the ECs strong room to ensure the integrity of the collation of the 2020 presidential election, we were only to be shocked as a nation and discerning Ghanaians what this lecturer was there doing other than what he was supposed to do. A PhD holder indeed!

Actually, something is wrong with some Ghanaian PhD holders, especially, the professors. Why do they seem to lack wisdom, concluding from the behaviours of those mentioned in my recent publications? Anyway, let me leave them to wallow in their own stupidity.

Rockson Adofo

Friday, 11 June 2021
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On 07 June 2021, the USA Elephants in Ghana (USAEG) issued a statement in response to Prof. Naana Jane Opoku Agyemangs candid take on the ongoing problems facing the Ghana educational system under President Akuffo-Addo. We find the said statement by USAEG to be mind-boggling and preposterous, to say the least, as it is full of factual inaccuracies as well as unfortunate, misleading, and mischievous remarks about the person and views of the learned Prof. Opoku Agyemang.

We therefore want to put records straight as follows:

To start with, it appears the members of USA Elephants in Ghana were probably absent minded when Prof. Opoku Agyemang granted that interview to the XZY TV. As an astute Educationist, a former Minister of Education and running mate to HE John Dramani Mahama (JDM), Prof. Naana Jane Opoku Agyemang knows exactly what she was talking about with respect to the abysmally implemented Free SHS (fSHS) by the governing NPP party. This fire-fighting approach adopted by the Akuffo-Addo-led government to the running of the fSHS policy is very worrying to Ghanaians particularly parents and students for obvious reasons. It is thus a palpable falsehood and dishonesty on the part of USAEG to impugn the integrity of the learned Prof. Opoku Agyemang for speaking nothing but the truth on the matter. Alternative suggestions on how to properly implement fSHS programme were loudly expressed by HE JDM and the NDC to solving the NPPs self-inflicted problems of the fSHS. It cannot therefore be true for USAEG to suggest that no alternative views were offered by Prof. Opoku Agyemang. Under the leadership of Prof. Opoku Agyemang, teacher absenteeism was drastically reduced, free speech in schools enhanced, etc as opposed to what is happening now in our various secondary schools.

Secondly, it must be made clear that the current educational system is being endangered if not destroyed in terms of quality by this government. If not because of the impressive school infrastructure built by HE JDM and NDC, the fSHS program could not have kick-started in the first place. Rhetorically, how do you think of increasing access to education when the space to accommodate the students are non-existent or woefully inadequate? The NDC government better managed Ghana's educational system under HE JDM by implementing a progressively fSHS program, among others, than what is happening now. The claim of cancellation of Teacher Trainee allowances by HE JDM and NDC was done with good intentions. This allows for creating more job opportunities for new teachers and nurses to gainfully be employed after completion. However, this was misconstrued by the voting public, and HE JDM and NDC suffered dearly for it in the 2016 General elections. What sense does it make to complete school and no work available to apply your acquired skills? Unfortunately, under the Akuffo-Addo-led government, teachers and nurses no longer gain automatic employment after graduation but rather do national service. The teaming Ghanaian youth deserve better treatment than what is going on with our educational system under Nana Akuffo-Addo!

Thirdly, apart from the poor management of our educational system, the country is experiencing enormous economic mismanagement, youth unemployment, injustice, and a high tendency of state capture due to the abysmal performance of this current government. Instead, it is a patriotic duty for citizens to speak about these societal ills to be addressed timeously to not trigger extremism in the country. Therefore, although the fSHS is an essential educational program for the teaming Ghanaian youth, we must point out mismanagement of the policy for immediate redress.

Furthermore, the members of USAEG are simply majoring in the minors by indicating that Dr. Adutwum took a phone number from a Reporter to engage him later. This is an inconsistent submission. Since the implementation of the fSHS policy in 2017, why is it that the government is so reluctant or impervious to suggestions to review the current state of the fSHS policy with critical stakeholders? Is there something to hide? It is clear Akuffo-Addo, and his government is averse to genuine criticisms. For the good of our country, a blueprint for the fSHS policy should be developed by Dr. Adutwum and his team for a proper public discourse and instead stop celebrating mediocrity in implementing the fSHS program. As Prof. Opoku Agyemang rightly said, Dr. Adutwum and, for that matter, the government must admit that there is a problem with the fSHS program and seek constructive opinions on how to fix it. The sustainability of the fSHS policy is indeed in question, as the government is heavily dependent on borrowing to fund the fSHS coupled with unsustainable wholesale free funding idea and poor feeding of students, and rampant exam leakages for the first batch of fSHS graduates.

In conclusion, people with good judgment in the country and beyond are in sync with what the good Prof. Naana Jane Opoku Agyemang has expressed. It will be in the interest of Akuffo-Addo and his government to listen to Ghanaians' cries and immediately address the prevailing disturbing economic mismanagement/corruption, youth unemployment, injustice, high tendency of state capture and deficit in the school infrastructure, and double track issues of the fSHS policy. The prevailing culture of silence, the politicization of state institutions, and name-calling are not the way to go. Instead, broadened citizen engagements should be encouraged for sustainable nation-building. The country indeed needs FIXING; so, let's FIX it!

Signed

NDC Germany Dachverband e.V
In support of the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources through its Forestry Commission, Green Ghana Day initiative to plant 5million trees as a part of the Green Ghana Project, the Danquah Institute on the 11th of June 2021 had a tree planting exercise.

The Institute earlier publicized the activity by advertising on all its social media platforms. A variety of tree seedlings were secured from the Forestry Commission and they included coconut, lemon, eucalyptus and orange.

The Acting Executive Director of the Institute, Dr. Antoinette Tsiboe-Darko led the DI team to plant 3 ceremonial trees to mark the day. The trees were named after the Iconic fathers of the Institute, Danquah, Busia and Dombo.

In an interview with media present, Dr. Tsiboe-Darko reiterated the importance of this national exercise as necessary, exciting and very inclusive.

She noted that in the past similar exercises had been more exclusive and as such, this open invitation to all and the publicity with this years event is amazing and must be commended.

I observed that in Accra a lot of individuals on their own been very involved in this exercise and the euphoria in planting trees has really caught on. I am exceptionally happy because this is how Johannesburg, the city with the most trees in Africa became what it is today.

She continued, "The Green Ghana Day Project itself is heightened by the need and desire to reverse the effects of years of degradation of mined lands and indiscriminate felling of trees and deforestation and this should be applauded by all.

"In an effort to ensure the activity is sustained, it is recognized that there will have to be an intentional dedication of more resources to the nurturing of seedlings of fruit trees especially from the government to sustain the demand. Individuals should be encouraged to intentionally commit to planting the seeds of fruits they consume as a part of the effort to ensuring sustainability of tree planting.

"The Danquah Institute congratulates the Honourable Minister and his office, the Acting CEO of Forestry Commission and all Staff at the regional and district levels who worked tirelessly to ensure the day is successful. The exercise in future will be remembered as being a significant contribution to reducing the cancer of degradation and increasing the protection of the environment for the unborn generation."
James Oppong-Boanuh, Inspector General of Police (IGP), has encouraged Ghanaians to take part in the "Green Ghana Campaign," to help restore the country's lost vegetation.

"Plant a tree, take a picture and share and together let's green Ghana," he added.

He called on Ghanaians when he planted a tree to commemorate the event observed on Friday, at the National Police Training School.

Mr Oppong-Boanuh said the Police Service would be planting 5,000 seedlings nationwide in support of the nation's Project to plant five million trees to reclaim the forests.

In all, 50 ornamental trees, shade trees and fruits would be planted at the National Police Training School, he explained.

The IGP said Regional, Divisional and Unit Commanders, as well as Station officers, would replicate it by planting three trees each, at their various areas whilst the six training schools would plant 50 seedlings each, across the country to encourage the rest of the citizenry to do the same.

Mr Oppong-Boanuh emphasized that the exercise would not only address the adverse degradation but also achieve goals of protecting the forest as well as beautify the environment.

He noted that there was a monitoring and reporting team that would go round to ensure the plants were nurtured and taken care of.

Apart from the IGP, Commissioner of Police Nathan Kofi Boakye, Director General, Legal Prosecution planted one on behalf of the Police Management Board.

Apostle Alexander Kumi Larbi, General Secretary, Church of Pentecost also planted for religious bodies.

---GNA
A total of 4, 908 tree seedlings are set to be planted by the Kwadaso Municipal Assembly as part of measures to improve the ecosystem.

The tree species range from guava, teak, coconut, royal palm to mahogany.

The environmental initiative is in line with the 'Green Ghana Project', being spearheaded by the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources to help improve the country's lost forest cover.

Without oxygen, mankind will not survive, Dr Kingsley Nyarko, Member of Parliament (MP) for Kwadaso, told the Ghana News Agency (GNA), after planting a symbolic tree at Beposo in the Kwadaso Municipality to commence the Project.

More than one million trees are expected to be planted across the Ashanti Region in line with the Project, according to the Forestry Commission (FC), which nursed and provided the seedlings.

Emphasizing the importance of trees, the MP explained that the varied species were critical to the sustenance of life on earth.

He indicated that the ecology and biodiversity could not thrive without the availability of trees, which help in regulating one's breath.

Dr Nyarko tasked the FC to monitor and supervise the seedlings to ensure successful growth, urging all stakeholders to join in the campaign to protect the environment.

He lauded the government for playing an instrumental role in the fight against unhealthy environmental practices such as deforestation, illegal small-scale mining and tree felling.

Mr Richmond Agyenim Boateng, the Municipal Chief Executive (MCE), speaking to the GNA on the sideline of the programme, welcomed the government's bold decision to reverse the harm caused to the environment.

There is the need for Ghanaians to ensure that the ecosystem is kept in balance, he noted.

According to the MCE, trees influenced everything from our environment to our physical health.

Without trees to regulate and maintain the environment, there will be no life, he observed.

He called on Ghanaians to plant more trees to restore the country's lost forests, repair the damaged ecosystems and mitigate climate change.

Mr Bannor Duodu, Urban Forestry Coordinator for Greater Kumasi, said the time for tackling the issue of climate change was now.

According to the Forestry Coordinator, the Green Ghana Project ought to be embraced by all stakeholders given the importance of trees in combating environmental challenges.

---GNA
Sexual and Gender-based Violence (SGBV) is a major threat to women and girls development, and instituting pragmatic measures and interventions to curtail SGBV has become more pertinent than ever before.

The North-East Region of Ghana is one of the hard-hit regions in the country, witnessing an increasing number of girls dropping out of school due to SGBV.

According to the East Mumprusi Municipal Guidance and Counseling Coordinator, Rev. Grace Ato Wuni, more girls are dropping out of school than boys because of child marriages and unplanned pregnancies.

The Equal Rights and Opportunities Project (EROP) is a girl and women protection project that seeks to eliminate the numerous human rights challenges of women and girls in communities within the North-East region and further advocate for better opportunities for them to thrive.

Challenges and Formation of EROP Support Clubs

Inadequate information regarding SGBV protective measures was mentioned as one of the factors undermining the fight against SGBV in the region.

Ayamdavla Cynthia, a student of the Gambaga Girls Junior High School said, before the EROP training, she did not know how to prevent SGBV.

I thought issues like rape and forced marriages which has been happening in my community is limited to the community members to handle, I did not know I could call social justice institutions such as the Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit to help, she said.

Iddrisu Alhassan, a member of the Equal Rights and Opportunities Project (EROP) support team opined that, the inability of community leadership to be fair in judgement on issues of SGBV is a threat to ending the menaces.

Prominent persons in our communities are always favoured when they or their relations commit SGBV offences whiles the ordinary community members are made to pay for their crimes, he lamented.

Iddrisu Alhassan added that our leaders have to desist from this unfair practice to pave way for SGBV free communities.

A participant who pleaded anonymity said, a man who raped a schoolgirl in his community is currently roaming without charges due to political interference. The participant, therefore, charged politicians to desist from interfering in the justice delivery process.

It is in this regard that, Savana Signatures as a partner of the GH SRHR Alliance for Young People is forming EROP support teams composed of community leaders, women leaders, market women and members of the assembly to aid in curtailing SGBV issues in the project communities.

These teams were trained on girls and women protection mechanisms to enable them tackle issues of SGBV.

Rev. Grace Ato Wuni lauded the initiative and stressed the need to have SGBV education that targets both genders, however, she emphasized that more focus should be on the girl-child including empowering her to make informed decisions.

As a counsellor, she advised that the guidance and counselling units should be resourced enough to handle issues of SGBV in schools.

Parents should also be invited to meet in schools and discuss ways of helping to prevent SGBV among girls to enable them have a successful education.

She called on other members of the EROP Support Teams to effectively apply the women and girls protection mechanisms acquired from the training to champion issues of SGBV in their respective communities.
The District Chief Executive for Adansi Akrofuom, Honorable Maurice Jonas Woode joined the Member of Parliament for the area, Hon. Alex Blackson to launch the Green Ghana Project which will oversee the Planting of over 9,000 trees in the District.

The Green Ghana initiative championed by the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources and the Forestry Commission is aimed at planting over 5 million trees across the country to preserve and protect the countrys forest cover

Hon. Maurice Jonas Woode revealed that the District has taken stock of 9,000 seedlings as well as 3,000 Oil palm seedlings to be planted in degraded mining sites in the District as part of measures to restore forest cover in Akrofuom.

He added that the district is also collaborating with Adansi Progressive Association (APA) to grow bamboo seedlings at the bank of the Jimi river to offer some protection.

United Nations report under the Sustainable Development Goals among other things estimated that by 2050, more than half of the worlds population will live in water stressed regions. In view of this, Hon. Woode cautioned " if we do not protect water bodies, it will be difficult for us to get water in future. This is part of the reasons why the President has initiated this project. "

On measures put in place to protect the seedlings once planted, the Akrofuom DCE said they will collect data of those who will access the seedlings. With the support of the Forestry Commission, he said, they will make a follow up to ensure that the plants are protected and properly maintained to achieve the project's intended purpose.

The Member of Parliament for Akrofuom Constituency Hon Alex Blankson eulogised the President for the project which he believes will deal with climate change which is as a result of depletion and damage to the forest.

He bemoans the level of destruction to land and forest areas by illegal mining but said the Green Ghana Project will help replace the depleted forest areas.

He pledges his support to the sustainability of the project by ensuring that the seedlings given out are used for their intended purpose, nurtured and well maintained.

Chiefs, Heads of Department, Staff of the Forestry Commission were all present.
First Lady Mrs Rebecca Akufo-Addo Friday joined Ghanaians across the country to commemorate the Green Ghana Day by planting a Tree of Life in Accra.

"Let's all plant hope by planting a tree today, "she said, stating that: "As the old saying goes, when the last tree dies, the last man dies.

Through the Green Ghana initiative, spearheaded by the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources in partnership with the Forestry Commission, five million trees are expected to be planted across the country on Friday.

The initiative is to become an annual event, hoping to help restore Ghana's ecosystem.

---GNA
FDA extends shelf life of Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine amid expiration controversy

Xinhua) 15:08, June 11, 2021

WASHINGTON, June 10 (Xinhua) -- Johnson & Johnson said on Thursday the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has extended the shelf life of its single-shot COVID-19 vaccine from 3 months to 4.5 months, as millions of unused doses nationwide are set to expire this month.

Photo taken on Dec. 11, 2020 shows the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in Silver Spring, Maryland, the United States. (Photo by Ting Shen/Xinhua)

The announcement came as state officials warned that millions of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine doses in storage would expire before the end of June.

Expiration dates for vaccines are determined based on data the manufacturer submits to regulators proving how long the shots stay at the right strength. FDA originally authorized that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine can be stored for up to 3 months at normal refrigerator temperatures of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius.

Johnson & Johnson said the FDA's decision of extending shelf life of its vaccine is based on data from ongoing stability assessment studies, which have demonstrated that the vaccine is stable at 4.5 months when refrigerated at temperatures of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius.

"Evidence from our Phase 3 ENSEMBLE study demonstrates the efficacy of our single-shot COVID-19 vaccine, including against viral variants that are highly prevalent. Regardless of race and ethnicity, age, geographic location and comorbidities, these results remain consistent," the company said in a statement.

Hospitals and state health departments across the United States are racing to decide how to use up millions of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine doses that are previously set to expire soon.

Many states have considered shipping excess doses to other states or overseas, but said they faced legal and logistical hurdles.

The stockpile is, in part, an unintended consequence of the U.S. decision in April to temporarily suspend administration of Johnson & Johnson doses to assess a rare blood-clot risk, according to The Wall Street Journal report.

Uptake of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in the country has also been hurt by contamination problems at a Baltimore factory that helps manufacture the shots. The facility was shuttered after an FDA inspection uncovered multiple problems in April, and none of the vaccines made there have been distributed.

Of the 21.4 million Johnson & Johnson doses distributed nationwide as of Wednesday, only 11.2 million doses have been administered, according to data of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It means half of the doses produced for the United States sitting unused.

While so many Johnson & Johnson doses have the risks of being wasted in the United States, many developing nations are in desperate need for COVID-19 shots to protect its people and walk out of the pandemic.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
The economic offences wing (EOW) of Chennai Police on Friday arrested Ravi Parthasarathy, former chief of crisis-hit Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS) in the Rs200 crore cheating and criminal breach of trust case filed by 63 moon technologies ltd. Mr Parthasarathy was presented before the special Tamil Nadu Protection of Interests of Depositors (In Financial Establishments) Act (TNPID) court, which sent him to 15 days judicial custody at Saidapet police jail.

In a statement, the EOW says, "The king pin and the master mind of the Rs1 lakh crore IL&FS scam Ravi Parthasarathy has been arrested by EOW in connection with Crime No.13 of 2020 dated 20 September 2020. The IL&FS group, which consists of more than 350 group companies was used as a vehicle to perpetrate fraud by then management of IL&FS group, which was headed by the then chairman and MD CEO Mr Parthasarathy."

A team was formed under the supervision of R Dinakaran, inspector general of Police (IGP) with the support of deputy superintendent of Police Prakash Babu. On 9 June 2021, Mr Parthasarathy was arrested in Mumbai and brought to Chennai. Earlier, the Madras High Court had dismissed anticipatory bail petition filed by Mr Parthasarathy.

In its complaint, 63 moons had alleged offences of cheating and criminal breach of trust in the repayment of Rs200 crore invested by the company in debentures of IL&FS Transportation Networks India Ltd (ITNL). During 2014 and 2015, ITNL had notified issuance of 1,000 and 2,000 non-convertible debentures with a face value of Rs10 lakh each, aggregating to Rs100 crore and Rs250 crore respectively, on private placement basis.

"To lure investors, ITNL falsely promised guaranteed annual return of up to 11.8% payable half yearly until redemption to its investors against their deposits with ITNL. We relied on the representations and assurances made by the ITNL and key managerial personnel and invested Rs200 crore in debentures," 63 moons had stated in its complaint.

In 2018, IL&FS defaulted on its obligations and ITNL too defaulted in repaying interest on debentures to investors.

Earlier in January this year, the EOW had arrested Ramchand Karunakaran, former managing director, and Hari Sankaran, former vice-chairman, and director of ITNL from Mumbai.

Based on complaint filed by 63 moons, the Chennai EOW had registered a first information report (FIR). The EOW says, it has been receiving complaints from other depositors of ITNL. It has also asked aggrieved depositors and investors of ITNL to forward their claims to the Chennai EOW.
High sugar exports for the second sugar season (SS; October-September) in a row, coupled with increased supplies of ethanol - and at remunerative prices - for blending with petrol, will improve the operating profitability of integrated sugar mills by 75-100 basis points (bps) to 13-14% this fiscal, an analysis by CRISIL Ratings shows.

Also, the ratings agency says, recent announcement by the government to advance the ethanol-petrol blending target of 20% by two years to 2023, could help sustain this momentum over the medium term.

Additionally, sugar closing stocks are expected to decline to their lowest levels in the past four SSs to 9-9.5 million tonnes (MT) in SS 2020-21, resulting in lower working capital borrowings.

"The improvement in profitability and controlled debt levels will, in turn, bolster the credit profiles of CRISIL-rated integrated mills this fiscal. The credit outlook on non-integrated ones, at the other end, will remain largely stable," it added.

Anuj Sethi, senior director at CRISIL Ratings says, "The improvement in profitability of integrated sugar mills will be supported by higher sugar exports, with remunerative prices and increasing proportion of more profitable ethanol, which will offset impact of lower profitability in domestic sugar sales, and subdued returns from co-generation of power."

Over the past six months, global white sugar prices, which are currently higher than domestic sugar prices (see graph below), increased by 14.3% to about Rs33.6 per kg, excluding export incentives, in June 2021. These prices are likely to remain firm given continuing supply deficit this season, caused by lower contribution from Brazil and Thailand  the two leading sugar exporters.

CRISIL says, this will help domestic mills meet, and perhaps exceed their export target of around 6 million tonnes by the end of SS 2020-21. Therefore, the recent reduction in export subsidy by Rs2 per kg, from Rs5.9 per kg, announced earlier will not materially impact the profitability of sugar exports as 90-95% of sugar exports were already contracted before the cut, it added.

In a bid to enhance the ethanol-petrol blend mix with target advanced to 20% by 2023 from 2025, sugar mills are being incentivised by the government to supply ethanol to oil marketing companies (OMCs).

This is reflected in a consecutive rise in procurement price for ethanol (see chart below) made from B-heavy molasses and sugarcane juice  prices were hiked by 6.2% and 5.3%, respectively, in the current SS. Besides, sugar mills have received interest benefits over the past two fiscals for investing in distillery capacity.

According to the ratings agency, rising revenue contribution from ethanol through these routes  which are more profitable than the traditional one using C-heavy molasses  will sweeten profitability of the distillery business (75% of operating profits) of integrated players.

"That said, operating profitability from domestic sugar sales, which are about 65% of sector revenues, will be moderately impacted due to a 4% increase in fair and remunerative price (FRP) for sugarcane, while there has been no upward revision in the minimum support price for sugar that remains at Rs31 per kg. Non-integrated players will be more impacted compared with integrated players as they dont have more profitable ethanol sales," CRISIL says.

The ratings agency expects, inventory levels for the industry to improve despite similar sugar production of about 30 million tonnes in next season assuming healthy exports, and higher supplies of ethanol for blending with petrol resulting in lower working capital borrowings. About 2 million tonne sugar production is expected to be diverted for manufacture of ethanol in the current SS, and about 3-3.5 million tonnes in next SS.

Sushant Sarode, associate director at CRISIL Ratings says, The credit profiles of integrated players will benefit from better profitability, prudent funding of capex and lower working capital borrowings, leading to improvement in interest coverage ratio to 4.5-5 times in current fiscal from about four times in the last fiscal. For non-integrated players, however, interest cover is likely to decline to 1-1.3 times from 1.5 times estimated for last fiscal, due to moderate impact on profitability. Nevertheless, lower working capital borrowings, will help keep the credit outlook for these players stable as well.

Also, advancing of blending target by two years will necessitate increase in ethanol capacity in the country from both grain based and sugar diversion over next two years. "Continuation of incentives and soft loans for ethanol, and progress on changes in automobile engine for higher blending will remain monitorable and decide pace of further capacity addition in ethanol," CRISIL concludes.
"Greed is the main reason for people becoming victims of financial frauds or cheating. In fact, I was aghast to see people from all parts of the society falling prey to such schemes just because someone has promised them huge returns," says S Jayakumar, the Deputy Commissioner of Police in the Economic Offences Wing in Mumbai. He was speaking at the eighth session under the "Police & You" series.

Moneylife Foundation with Police Reforms Watch and support from Saraswat Bank have launched the 12-week program (every Wednesday) that aims to spread knowledge about protecting yourself, your rights, the Indian Penal Code (IPC), cybercrime and economic offences. This was the eighth such session.

Mr Jayakumar, who has a commendable track record with postings at Malegaon as Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) after the bomb blast and Naxal-infested Gadchiroli as Superintendent of Police (SP) during the elections, says, "Irrespective of their reputation and achievements, people put their money into fraudulent schemes. I agree we are lagging behind in alerting people. However, since we have to deal with people from across the strata, it becomes difficult to reach out to everyone. But we are doing our best and would do more to create awareness about these financial scams".

The event was held in the well-appointed auditorium of Saraswat Bank headquarters, Eknath Thakur Bhavan.

The eighth session of the 12-week series on "The Police & You- Economic Offences: When to approach the EOW" was conducted by Mr Jayakumar and Mahesh Aathavale, a former officer from Mumbai Police.

The former police officer shared details of action taken or being taken on MLM companies, like QNet across the globe. He told the audience, how in 2002 the Australian government named QNet, GoldQuest and QuestNet as pyramid schemes. Similar action was taken by the governments of Nepal, Sri Lanka, Iran, Rwanda, Sudan, Syria, and Turkey.

"In 2010 the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Commerce and Industry banned QNet, accusing the company of theft, falsification, and failure to register, and warned citizens to avoid involvement in fraudulent schemes, mentioning QNet specifically. In 2012, the Dar Al-Iftaa issued a Fatwa against QNet stating the MLM Companys business in Egypt is haram (forbidden under Islamic law) and could harm the country's economy," Mr Aathavale informed the audience.

He also informed about several action taken by enforcement agencies, like the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Enforcement Directorate (ED), Mumbai Police and Delhi EOW against QNet. (Read: Noose Tightens around QNet after 12 Long Years

Mr Aathavale then highlighted selling techniques used by such MLM and Ponzi schemes under the pretext of product sale. He said, "Many of the products sold by MLMs are virtual products. Even if the products are physical, there is no quality control by states on its production, there are no regulations followed and all the company or its agents or distributors sell is golden dream under the pretext of product."

He explained roles played by promoters, financiers, web designers, chartered accounts, leaders or agents and subscribers in establishing and promoting such schemes. He explained roles played by promoters, financiers, web designers, chartered accounts, leaders or agents and subscribers in establishing and promoting such schemes.

Mr Aathavale, who was instrumental in probing Speak Asia, the online survey company that duped lakhs of people using the money circulation scheme, shared the modus operandi of the company and its promoters.

"Speak Asia successfully enrolled 23 lakh panellists across the country in just 18 months and collected over Rs2,300 crore. There were doctors, engineers, bankers, police officers, lawyers vis-a-vis handcart puller, domestic help, and small shop owners were among the gullible investors or victims of this scheme. Panellists were portrayed as role model via aggressive marketing and advertising by the Company through their advertisements for earning extra income or for generating jobs for lakhs of people. When the scheme was subsequently closed, it had an assured payout of over Rs30,000 crore," he said.

Moneylife was the first publication to expose Speak Asia way back in 2010. On 8 October 2010, Moneylife exposed Speak Asia and its modus operandi. (Read: Moneylife was the first publication to expose Speak Asia way back in 2010. On 8 October 2010, Moneylife exposed Speak Asia and its modus operandi. (Read: Another MLM scam in the happening, this time under the pretext of an online survey

Mr Aathavale then touched upon various provisions under the law to act against MLM, Ponzi or money circulation scheme and its promoters and agents. He said Section 2 of the Prize Chits and Money Circulation Schemes (Banning) Act, 1978 (PCMCS Act) defines money circulation scheme in clear wordings.

Sec 2 (c) "money circulation scheme" means any scheme, by whatever name called, for the making of quick or easy money, or for the receipt of any money or valuable thing as the consideration for a promise to pay money, on any event or contingency relative or applicable to the enrolment of members into the scheme, whether or not such money or thing is derived from the entrance money of the members of such scheme or periodical subscriptions

He also explained section 3 and section 4 of the PCMCS Act that deals with banning of prize chit and money circulation schemes and penalty for contravening the provisions of the section. Mr Aathavale also highlighted Section 8 of the Act that allows forfeiture of newspaper and publication for helping in promoting such schemes. He also explained section 3 and section 4 of the PCMCS Act that deals with banning of prize chit and money circulation schemes and penalty for contravening the provisions of the section. Mr Aathavale also highlighted Section 8 of the Act that allows forfeiture of newspaper and publication for helping in promoting such schemes.

Section 8 of the PCMCS Act says, "Where any newspaper or other publication contains any material connected with any prize chit or money circulation scheme promoted or conducted in contravention of the provisions of this Act or any advertisement in relation thereto, the State Government may, by notification in the Official Gazette, declare every copy of the newspaper and every copy of the publication containing such material or the advertisement to be forfeited to the State Government."

Mr Aathavale also explained in details, the Maharashtra Protection of Interest of Depositors (MPID) Act, which takes care of the criminal aspect of MLM, Ponzi and money circulation schemes. Among important features of the MPID Act, there is a provision to convict every person responsible for the management of the establishment including the promoter, partner, director, manager or an employee of a company for fraudulent default by a financial establishment. Also, the government on a complaint or otherwise, can order the attachment of money or property of a financial establishment and appointment of a competent authority to control the same, he added. Mr Aathavale also explained in details, the Maharashtra Protection of Interest of Depositors (MPID) Act, which takes care of the criminal aspect of MLM, Ponzi and money circulation schemes. Among important features of the MPID Act, there is a provision to convict every person responsible for the management of the establishment including the promoter, partner, director, manager or an employee of a company for fraudulent default by a financial establishment. Also, the government on a complaint or otherwise, can order the attachment of money or property of a financial establishment and appointment of a competent authority to control the same, he added.

"There are some frauds so well conducted that it would be stupidity not to be deceived by them," Mr Aathavale concluded.
A few weeks back when the country was dealing with the gruesome second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic with hospitals running over-capacity along with massive shortage of health care facilities, medicines and oxygen, many corporates across India pitched in to help in COVID relief efforts. Moneylife has been tracking this in a special series. Here is the latest in the series.

Ambuja Neotia and ICICI Lombard have jointly opened the Vinod Neotia COVID Care Centre  a 58-bed first-line COVID care facility in New Town, Kolkata. ICICI Lombard, has provided the medical equipment to the COVID Care centre, which comprises 48 oxygen-aided beds for mild or moderately affected COVID-19 patients and 10 high dependency unit (HDU) beds. The centre will provide nursing assistance and lab support 247, HDU beds for treating critical as well as mild COVID cases requiring hospitalization.

It will have specialist consultants on call, and provide phone triaging (interactive process between the nurse and the caller which is the patient in this case, to seeking guidance and query resolution multiple times in a day to minimize physical contact)  all in a protected area following infection control protocols and international standards.

In case of patients requiring critical care treatment, they will be referred to a step-up COVID hospital. In that case, to extend support to those patients till they are transferred to the Critical Care Hospital, the HDU has been equipped with 7 ventilator cardiac monitors along with qualified nurse and technicians, in addition to the doctors.

In its efforts to provide support amid the current pandemic, ICICI Lombard is conducting a vaccination drive in Mumbai by covering around 60,000 disadvantaged people. It has also provided 1,000 oxygen concentrators across Nagpur, Delhi, and Lucknow, which have seen high number of COVID positive cases.

Finolex Industries has pledged more than Rs9 crore for the second wave of COVID-19. The manufacturing company, along with its corporate social responsibility (CSR) arm Mukul Madhav Foundation (MMF), has mobilised resources, globally and in India to augment COVID relief efforts in the country in collaboration with other corporates, non-government organisation (NGO) partners, philanthropic institutions, and like-minded individuals.

Through this collaboration, 945 oxygen concentrators, 218 ventilators, thermal scanners, PPE suits, oximeters, gloves, masks, sanitizers, and paracetamol tablets have been donated to COVID care centres, municipal hospitals, and rural hospitals across the country, especially in areas that have witnessed a surge in cases.

The relief effort has safeguarded the accredited social health activist (ASHA) and auxiliary nurse midwife (ANM) workers along with frontline COVID warriors in their fight against the virus. Support has been extended to many states including Maharashtra, Gujarat, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Goa, Orissa, Jharkhand, and Punjab.

A large part of the relief operations success is attributed to the support received from Qatar Airways, which has flown in the equipment free of cost. The ground support provided by Ashok Leyland ensured that the equipment crossed the length and breadth of the country safely and urgently even to the most remote corners.

Finolex has been instrumental in helping with import licensing and volunteers from Finolex have driven the coordination effort with local authorities and verified appeal requests to get the relief to the right places.

Embassy group, one of Indias largest real estate conglomerates has rolled out a free vaccination drive for its employees across India. Through the initiative that kicked off on 1st June, the company aims to inoculate all 1,867 employees located in the Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, and NCR offices. The vaccine being administered is Covishield.

Along with awareness programs on following COVID related protocols at construction sites and work places, Embassy has also set up medical camps and regular health checks for construction workers.

The Integrated Health and Wellbeing Council (IHW Council) has launched a dedicated COVID-19 relief project titled Our Positive Fight for frontline workers and their families.

The project includes setting up of use and return oxygen concentrator bank along with other useful medical devices such as pulse oximeters, thermometers, and other disposables such as masks, sanitisers, PPE kits especially for the benefit of frontline workers.

Keeping in mind the risks that media professionals are facing in the line of duty, the IHW Council has joined hands with the Press Club of India to provide benefits of the project to the community. As part of the project, an initial batch of five oxygen concentrators has been provided to the club that in turn will ensure to allocate them to those in need on a free of cost use-and-return basis. Another batch of five oxygen concentrators has been provided to the Delhi police for its personnel.

At present, the project is supported by Bharat Serums and Vaccines Ltd, Impactguru.com and Delhi-based health focussed public relations firm Teamwork Communication Group but the Council is reaching out to corporates for support and has initiated crowd-funding on fund-raising platforms such as Ketto.org.

Joining Indias fight against the pandemic, Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) provided healthcare, medical-grade liquid oxygen, meals, and masks. It repurposed the Jamnagar plant to provide 1,000 tonnes oxygen per day free of cost to states, meeting the needs of nearly one lakh patients per day.

The company distributed more than 5.5 crore meals to over 27 lakh beneficiaries, supported over 2,300 beds for COVID care and treatment across locations including setting up of Indias first COVID hospital in Mumbai, distributed 81 lakh reusable masks to 50 lakh frontline warriors and essential service providers across 21 states and 2 union territories and provided 5.5 lakh litres of free fuel to more than 14,000 notified ambulances and vehicles engaged in COVID-19 services across 249 districts in 18 states.

A manufacturing facility in Silvassa, Gujarat was ramped up to produce 1,00,000 PPE kits and masks every day to serve frontline workers.

To help address urgent healthcare needs in India brought about by the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country, networking and telecom company Ericsson announced its support to UNICEFs COVID-19 humanitarian response in the country.

Ericsson made an upfront donation to UNICEF and launched a month-long company matching employee donation drive globally in May, which resulted in a total donation amount of $971,567 to UNICEF. Ericsson employees from more than 95 countries donated towards this UNICEF initiative for India.

Ericssons donation will go towards providing critical medical supplies and equipment in India. This includes increasing the number of RT-PCR testing machines to boost identification of new COVID-19 cases and providing oxygen generation plants as well as procuring other critical supplies for health facilities in areas with the greatest needs in the country. These supplies and equipment will ensure continuity and sustained access to immediate health services for children and their families and contribute to strengthening the health system in the future.

Duroflex, a premium mattresses brand, has donated thousands of mattresses, ventilators and oxygen concentrators to medical facilities across the country.

Duroflex has donated 2000 mattresses towards COVID-19 relief in Shanthinagar Constituency  Bengaluru; Hemkunt Foundation in Mumbai for their COVID care facility in the Gurudwara; Kasturba Hospital, Mumbai, St. Josephs School Bengaluru, entrepreneurs organisation setting up COVID facilities, childrens COVID facilities through Dream India Network and to Piramal Swasthya to help smaller towns such as Vidhisha and Sigrauli in Madhya Pradesh; Pakur and Sahibganj in Jharkhand and Jaipur have access to better healthcare facilities.

Duroflex has also supported hospitals with supply of ventilators. The Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore was supported with one ventilator while five ventilators were donated to Holy Spirit Hospital in Mumbai. Oxygen concentrators have been donated to Sion Hospital, Mumbai.

Additionally, Duroflex joined hands with Nalapad Ahmed Harris and Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) at Shantinagar in Bengaluru to help them re-open a COVID care centre at the Government Arts College Hostel at Primrose Road, Bengaluru. The centre was supported with the supply of mattresses.

Legrand Group India, a specialist in electrical and digital building infrastructure along with Mid-Town Rotary club Chennai jointly donated twenty five oxygen cylinders to Omandarur Medical College, Chennai.

Earlier too, Legrand India had initiated various activities like providing PPE kits, masks, sanitizers, medical infrastructure, formation of isolation wards and quarantine centres in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Delhi, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, and Haryana in fight against COVID-19.

Legrand is extending support this year too by providing various levels of medical infrastructure support to different states including oxygen concentrators, ventilators, and ICU beds.

When the COVID-19 cases were at their peak in April-May 2021, relief aid from private companies helped the Karnataka state government to quickly upgrade health infrastructure in at least five hospitals over the last month. Three government hospitals located at Yelahanka, KR Puram and Anekal too are likely to get better facilities within the next two weeks as a Bengaluru-headquartered IT major has committed to fund the efforts.

So far, corporates have committed about Rs55 to Rs60 crore for upgrading medical infrastructure. Under this arrangement, the Karnataka government identifies the hospitals that need facilities while the donor corporates directly fund the work.

The companies, which came forward include Texas Instruments, which contributed to establishing a modular ICU unit with 86 critical care beds at the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Chest Diseases, the Embassy Group who collaborated with McAfee, AXA, Yahoo, Capital Land SwissRe to donate about 100 ICU beds and Goldman Sachs which contributed Rs20 crore.

Wistron Manufacturing India has launched the Wistron WeCare India CSR program. The focus of the phase one program will be the district of Kolar. As part of the program, 1,000 face shields and 10,000 masks were handed over to the district police.

The company has launched a month-long CSR program to extend support and relief through emergency equipment, health kits, safety kits, food rations, as per need, to government agencies and centres, frontline workers, the poor and marginalized in the communities we operate.

The other CSR initiatives include hundreds of food ration kits and health kits to the poor and the marginalized living in and around the industrial area where the facility is located, an oxygen generator plant at a district or taluk hospital and distribution of oxygen concentrators at primary health centres.

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Promoters of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the real entrepreneurs in India, because they put their personal assets on the line to build an enterprise that provides some value to society. Yet, when the chips are down, they end up making costly mistakes that often destroy their finances and their business. What are the various financial issues that a small or medium entrepreneur can expect to encounter in business and how can he give himself a fighting chance of survival and revival during bad times?

This is a situation that most entrepreneurs do not think about until it is too late. Advocate Manoj Harit, a multi-faceted personality who practises at the Bombay High Court and has specialised in helping businesses to deal with various recovery actions, offered some invaluable lessons to entrepreneurs at a unique seminar organised by Moneylife Foundation and Capital First on 30th March in Mumbai.

India has 49 million SMEs that employ 40% of our workforce and contribute 45% of our gross domestic product (GDP) and, yet, lenders use recovery laws with draconian efficiency against them, while large defaulters, like Vijay Mallya and Nirav Choksi, manage to flee the country. Advocate Harit says that the laws provide plenty of opportunity for entrepreneurs to successfully defend themselves without being dispossessed of their homes and other assets pledged with the bank. But it is up to the entrepreneurs to avoid traps that end up closing their legal options for a successful defence.

His first, and obvious, lesson was to tell entrepreneurs that every loan is sanctioned on the basis of the project report and an assessment of the projected ability of a business to generate revenue and profits and add value to society. So after the loan is sanctioned, there is no need for additional collateral like a personal guarantee or mortgage of home and other personal property. The fact that entrepreneurs are asked to pledge personal assets is only an additional security and not the basis of the bank loan. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) acknowledges this too and its master circulars provide clear guidance on how to deal with SMEs when there is a downturn. But this works only when SMEs themselves avoid dangerous mis-steps. Here are some tips from advocate Harit on how to avoid becoming sick and dealing with a downturn.

Under-financing: The seeds of sickness are sown right at the beginning when an SME under-finances the project to get it going. Often, this is based on the expectation that he will be able to get expanded credit limits once the business is operational. Sometimes, bankers themselves misguide SMEs to get started with less than essential funding and it, eventually, destroys the business. So never under-finance your business; this is the first lesson for successful entrepreneurship, says advocate Harit.

Do Not Avoid Your Lender: Often, entrepreneurs fail to understand the first signs of sickness. When they are unable to repay their lenders, SMEs begin to avoid the banker instead of discussing the situation with them and working at a resolution. Many entrepreneurs also fail to understand the gravity of recovery proceedings and fail to respond in time.

The debt recovery tribunal (DRT) has a set procedure to handle recovery cases. Advocate Harit said, When an account becomes non-performing, the lender issues notice under Section 13(2) of the Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Securities Interest (SARFAESI) Act. It is unfortunate that many borrowers fear responding to the 13(2) notice or, sometimes, indulge in prolonged discussions with the bank to resolve the matter by way of a onetime settlement.

Under the SARFAESI Act, the remedies provided to the borrower against the recovery measures invoked by the bank are within a clear timeframe; the bank is vested with unilateral powers under the statute to initiate action without the intervention of any court. Hence, when the borrower is occupied in negotiations, the bank officer has his eye on the calendar all the time and catches him/her off-guard by promising to enhance credit limit if he pays certain dues. The fate of the borrowers case depends on how swiftly he responds to every measure, else the bank will overpower him even before he is prepared for the contest, says advocate Harit.

Many borrowers fail to understand and respond to this notice and run to a lawyer only when recovery proceedings begin. Many are in such a sad financial condition at that time that they dont even have funds to pay a lawyer. The entrepreneurs failure to respond to the first notice also makes it difficult to defend him. And his lawyers end up pleading for time instead of arguing on merit to help the unit find its feet again.

Measures under Section 13(4) include symbolic possession, physical possession, takeover of management, appointment of an agent or manager, sale, and transfer of the asset after sale. The borrower can file appeal after 45 days before the DRT, but it should be accompanied with a written application giving sufficient cause to condone the delay. However, when an appeal is beyond the first chance of 45 days, the borrower loses a huge opportunity to contest with all valid grounds right from the inception of the recovery action.

Do Not Fudge Your Accounts: An all too common problem, which kills the defence of SMEs, is the tendency to fudge books to paint a rosy picture. Advocate Harit says, this is usually done at the instance of chartered accountants, who inflate earnings and reduce costs to fit into the formula that makes it eligible for SMEs to borrow more. This eventually goes against them during recovery proceedings and prevents them from taking advantage of RBIs circulars that protect them in bad times.

Avoid Borrowing from Private Lenders: Never borrow from private lenders to raise additional funds when in trouble and do not take personal loans to pump money in the business, because of mistaken notions about public appearances. This is a frequent mistake made by entrepreneurs that drags them further into debt. Avoid Borrowing from Private Lenders: Never borrow from private lenders to raise additional funds when in trouble and do not take personal loans to pump money in the business, because of mistaken notions about public appearances. This is a frequent mistake made by entrepreneurs that drags them further into debt.

Cut Costs, Keep the Business Going: When a business runs into trouble, many entrepreneurs are focused on getting the bank to extend more credit rather than on their business. That is the time to focus on the business. Cut all unnecessary costs and run a tight ship, advised advocate Harit. He said that many entrepreneurs stop paying employees and suppliers to pay the last rupee to a bank in the hope of raising more funds. If they desert the company, it eventually damages the business irrevocably, if the bank does not cough up additional funds.

RBI Circulars that Help SMEs: RBI is clear that banks must identify sickness at the incipient stage and must restructure the debt, or rehabilitate the unit with additional finance, or take measure to nurse it until it comes out of sickness (RBI Circular RPCD. No. PLNFS. BC. 88/ PS.72-91/92).

There are master circulars and guidelines issued by regulators; but banks do not follow them. For example, a debt is considered a non-performing asset (NPA) if there is no repayment over a 90-day period; it also specifies how the 90-day period is to be calculated. But this is often ignored. On 8 February 2018, RBI has extended the 90-day deadline to 180 days for MSMEs; but they are still being dubbed as NPAs after 90 days.

Advocate Harit mentioned three other important circulars issued by RBI that are relevant for MSMEs. 1) Prudential Norms on Income Recognition, Asset Classification and Provisioning pertaining to Advances dated 1 July 2015 ( https://goo.gl/fJzfkA ), 2) Lending to Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSME) Sector dated 1 July 2014 ( https://goo.gl/NKN9eA ) and 3) Master Circular on Wilful Defaulters dated 1 July 2015 ( https://goo.gl/eDf1Sf ).

MSMEs are providing employment and generating revenues for everyone, including the government. Unfortunately, under-financing at each stage, besides unacceptable practices followed by banks, lead to failures of MSMEs, advocate Harit concluded.
We had mentioned in previous weeks closing report that Nifty, Sensex were trending up. The major indices were volatile this week but closed with decent gains.

The trend of the major indices in the week is given in the table:

On Monday, the indices opened higher and ended with decent gains. On the NSE, there were 1,409 advances, 637 declines and 70 unchanged.

Bajaj Finance said it may see higher non-performing assets in the first six months of FY22 due to the Covid-induced lockdowns.

The National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) has approved the resolution plan of Piramal Capital & Housing Finance Ltd for Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Ltd (DHFL).

Reliance Infrastructure plans to raise Rs 550 crore via preferential allotment of equity shares to promoters and Varde Investment Partners, LP, at a price of Rs 62 each based on SEBI (ICDR) regulations.

Easy Trip Planners is enabling the travel industry to bounce back by offering a special travel discount for customers who have been vaccinated against Covid-19.

On Tuesday, the indices opened higher but ended with minor losses. On the NSE, there were 1,055 advances, 915 declines and 60 unchanged.

Asian Hotels West announces temporary shut-down of Hyatt Regency, Mumbai after the company defaulted on its Yes Bank dues instalment on 28 April, 2021.

Max Financial Services reported net profit of Rs 62 crore in the Jan-Mar 2021 quarter compared to a net loss of Rs 36.09 crore in the corresponding period of the previous financial year. Total Income rose 128% YoY to Rs 9,760 crore from Rs 4,265 crore in the previous year.

Equity shares of Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Ltd will be delisted from the stock exchanges going ahead, as part of the resolution plan of Piramal Capital & Housing Finance Ltd.

On Wednesday, the indices opened higher but ended with major losses. On the NSE, there were 713 advances, 1,217 declines and 328 unchanged.

Tata Power Company's proposed purchase of 51% stake each in three power utilities in Odisha has been cleared by fair trade regulator CCI.

The board members of Punjab National Bank (PNB) including its independent directors may seek more clarity on the PNB Housing Finance fund raising deal.

Forbes & Company has entered into agreement for sale with Equinix India for sale of 3.804 acres of land at Chandivali, Mumbai for a consideration of Rs 200 crores.

GAIL (India) net profit for the Jan-Mar 2021 quarter declined to Rs 2,487 crore from Rs 4,728 crore in the corresponding period of the previous financial year. Revenue declined to Rs 15,738 crore against Rs 17,923 crore YoY.

On Thursday, the indices opened higher and ended with decent gains. On the NSE, there were 1,523 advances, 439 declines and 294 unchanged.

Bata India reported a 23.2% fall in its Jan-Mar 2021 quarter net profit at Rs 29.4 crore compared to Rs 38.4 crore in the corresponding period of the previous financial year. Revenue was down 4.9% to Rs 589.9 crore versus Rs 620.5 crore YoY.

Reliance Industries received Rs 13,150.7 crore as the first call on partly paid-up equity shares, representing around 99% of the total amount due.

Hindustan Unilever announced the appointment of Kedar Lele, currently Chairman & MD of Unilever Bangladesh, to the HUL management committee as Executive director, Customer development.

On Friday, the indices opened higher and ended with decent gains. On the NSE, there were 1,038 advances, 960 declines and 51 unchanged.

eClerx Services reported net profit of Rs 98.75 crore, up 78.25% from the corresponding period of the previous financial year. The board recommended a dividend of Re 1 per share.

NHPC reported net profit at Rs 464.60 crore against Rs 258.83 crore, YoY. The board at a meeting on June 10 approved a proposal for raising of debt up to Rs 4300 crore for the current fiscal.

National Fertilizers reported a net loss of Rs 9.53 crore compared to Rs 248.65 crore in the same quarter of the previous year. Revenue from operations fell 2% YoY to Rs 2,961.17 crore.
Innumerable RTI (Right to Information) activists and users across the country have sought information since April 2020, regarding various issues related to the catastrophic COVID-19 pandemic that directly affects every citizen of this country. But information has been denied by the ministry of health & family welfare (MoHFW) particularly under the various exemption clauses of Section 8 of the RTI Act.

In an embarrassing turn of events for the Central government, the Supreme Court in its order of 31 May 2021, has directed the former to file an affidavit, to provide much the same information that the RTI activists have been seeking, with emphasis regarding its vaccination policy, to be submitted by the 15th of June. Interestingly, the SC has also specifically stated that, while filing its affidavit, the Centre should ensure that copies of all the relevant documents and file notings reflecting its thinking and culminating in the vaccination policy are also annexed on the vaccination policy. Just what you should be able to procure under the RTI Act as a citizen!

What if the government provides all information in its affidavit, as required by the SC? Shailesh Gandhi, former Central Information Commissioner (CIC) and RTI activist states vociferously that, not giving information under the RTI Act even if the public authority has it, is complete disregard of the fundamental rights of the citizen. While appreciating Supreme Courts order to make the vaccination policy transparent along with file notings and documents, I feel it should ask the central government to upload all this information directly on its website and ask it to update it on a daily basis as is mandatory under suo motu disclosures under Section 4 of the RTI Act. This would ensure that information on an issue of such a large public interest is available at the click of the mouse for all citizens. For, even if citizens ask for such information to be given in 48 hours under Section 7 of the RTI Act, it would still take more time. So, better that it is uploaded on a daily basis

Earlier, in a series of hearings/orders, the Court had also given detailed orders to the government to make transparent/modify, the supply of essential drugs, supply of medical oxygen, the Co-Win App amongst other issues, after the centre had placed its say before the court. The SC order dated 6th May constituted a National Task Force to provide a public heath response to the COVID-19 pandemic on the basis of a scientific approach.

Much that was denied under RTI has been sought by the Supreme Court order now in its 31st May order as well which the centre has to provide by 15th June. This includes:

The data on the percentage of population that has been vaccinated (with one dose and both doses), as against eligible persons in the first three phases of the vaccination drive. This shall include data pertaining to the percentage of rural population as well as the percentage of urban population so vaccinated;

The complete data on the central governments purchase history of all the COVID-19 vaccines till date (Covaxin, Covishield and Sputnik V). The data should clarify: (a) the dates of all procurement orders placed by the central government for all three vaccines; (b) the quantity of vaccines ordered as on each date; and (c) the projected date of supply; and

An outline for how and when the central government seeks to vaccinate the remaining population.

While filing its affidavit, UoI (central government) shall also ensure that copies of all the relevant documents and file notings reflecting its thinking and culminating in the vaccination policy are also annexed to the vaccination policy.

The SC order has also brought to the notice of the Centre the grave digital divide between rural and urban India and has sought clarification on vaccination drives through the CoWin App which is not accessible to all citizens of India.

Referring to a survey on `Household social consumption with focus on equality of education by the National Statistics Office (July 2017-June 2018) the SC observed in its 31st May order that:

(i) Around 4% of the rural households and 23% of the urban households possessed a computer. In the age group of 15-29 years, around 24% in rural households and 56% in urban areas were able to operate a computer; and

(ii) Nearly 24% of the households in the country had internet access during the survey year 2017-18. The proportion was 15% in rural households and 42% in urban households. Around 35% of persons in the age group of 15-29 years reported use of internet during the 30 days prior to the date of survey. The proportions were 25% in rural areas and 58% in urban areas.

The SC, in its 31st May order, also referred to a report by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India which states that:

Out of the total population of 1.3 billion, only 578 million people in India (less than 50%) have subscription to wireless data services. The wireless tele density in rural areas is 57.13% as compared to 155.49% in urban areas as on 31 March 2019. The report stated that: [this] reflects the rural-urban divide in terms of telecom servicesaY penetration. Since, the number of wireless data subscribers are less than 50% of the total wireless access subscribers, the number of wireless data subscribers in rural areas would be much lower.

The report also noted that in a few Indian states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Assam the tele density is less than 75%; and

The monthly income of persons living below the poverty line in urban areas and rural areas is Rs 1316 and Rs 896, respectively. However, to access internet data services, a minimum tariff plan would cost around Rs 49, which includes 1 GB data every 28 days. This would constitute 4-5% of the months income of such persons accessing data. As such, the report notes that this would bear a considerable cost for persons living below the poverty line.

The SC further observed in its order dated 31st May that, according to the Annual Report of Common Service Centre (CSC) programme for 2019-20, published by the ministry of electronics and information technology, while there are 2,53,134 gram panchayats in India, as on 31 March 2020 only 2,40,792 gram panchayats are covered with at least one registered CSC. Hence, approximately 13,000 gram panchayats in India do not have a CSC.

Hence, the SC commented that, It is clear from the above statistics that there exists a digital divide in India, particularly between the rural and urban areas. The extent of the advances made in improving digital literacy and digital access falls short of penetrating the majority of the population in the country. Serious issues of the availability of bandwidth and connectivity pose further challenges to digital penetration. A vaccination policy exclusively relying on a digital portal for vaccinating a significant population of this country between the ages of 18-44 years would be unable to meet its target of universal immunization owing to such a digital divide. It is the marginalized sections of the society who would bear the brunt of this accessibility barrier. This could have serious implications on the fundamental right to equality and the right to health of persons within the above age group.

Hence, the SC has asked the Centre to clarify on the following:

It may not be feasible to require the majority of our population to rely on friends/NGOs for digital registrations over Co-WIN, when even the digitally literate are finding it hard to procure vaccination slots.

The issue of over-crowding may also arise at CSCs in rural areas where people would have to visit constantly in the hope of a vaccine slot opening up.

The Co-WIN platform and other IT applications like Aarogya Setu should be made available in regional languages. The timeline for ensuring the availability of the platform in multiple regional languages.

Conducting a disability audit for the Co-WIN website and other IT application like Aarogya Setu to ensure that they are accessible to persons with disabilities.

Lets hope the facts come before the public, in a matter of such paramount importance.

Vinita Deshmukh is consulting editor of Moneylife, an RTI activist and convener of the Pune Metro Jagruti Abhiyaan. She is the recipient of prestigious awards like the Statesman Award for Rural Reporting which she won twice in 1998 and 2005 and the Chameli Devi Jain award for outstanding media person for her investigation series on Dow Chemicals. She co-authored the book To The Last Bullet - The Inspiring Story of A Braveheart - Ashok Kamte with Vinita Kamte and is the author of The Mighty Fall.)
The lady on the street implicitly trusts public sector banks (PSBs) for their sarkari parentage and presumes her deposits are safe, since a bank owned by the government will not be allowed to go under and cause any loss to the public in any eventuality. That may be true in respect of the fixed deposits and savings accounts but may not extend to money raised through different type of bonds, which banks are increasingly issuing and which many a middleclass housewife is investing in as the deposit rates have declined.

The way the YES Bank's Additional Tier-1 (AT-1) bonds were dealt with in the recapitalisation exercise and the case of LVB (Lakshmi Vilas Bank), which involved a merger by a government fiat, are examples of how all forms of investment in banks are not treated alike. There could be legal distinctions in a case like AT-1 bonds; but that is not the purpose of raising it here.

The short point is that even in the case of PSBs there is no definite position that, in a crisis, the government would rescue bond-holders, even if they are part of the general public. To that extent, the implicit sovereign guarantee is not a given, and public awareness about the true financial and solvency position of the entity is not only relevant but critical as well.

Therefore, even PSBs have an obligation to be scrupulously diligent in the way the business performance and financial information are presented. The public needs to know whether as direct investors or as investors through mutual funds, the real worth of the PSBs. Are the PSBs' annual reports and information available in public domain trust worthy and representative of its true state of affairs?

If one were to consider the case of Union Bank of India, it would appear that the annual report drapes a char-woman and presents her as Cinderella!!

So, what is this discovery? How valid is a statement that the annual report, which is a legal document prepared as required under relevant laws cannot be trusted, when the same bears the signature of a host of directors and officers of the bank, and the seal of sanctity of true and fair affixed by not one, but a group of six statutory auditors, who swear allegiance to the discipline of none less than the ICAI (Institute of Chartered Accountants of India)?

This is a journey worth the time and effort for any professional or public-spirited person and the burden has been lightened by the tireless efforts of Girish Mittal, who has steadfastly pursued the task of getting the bank inspection reports in the possession of Reserve Bank of India (RBI) through the Right to Information (RTI) Act. One such report shared by RBI is that of Union Bank of India for the period 2015-16. Although dated, it is worth an analysis.

Thanks to the availability of the bank inspection report and the annual report for the same period, it becomes relatively straightforward to look at disclosures in the latter and the observations and findings in the former, and be amazed at the extent of differences and discrepancies.

It cannot lie in the mouth of any professional worth her salt to pretend that the respective reports have different spheres to occupy or roles to perform. The annual report, in its summation of the directors report, financial statements, the auditors report and the notes that are provided as explanation to the financials, cannot leave out anything of salience that touches on any part of the business or operations.

The inspection report of RBI doesnt concern itself on the hygiene levels in the toilets or the quality of food served in the canteen if any, but on the core operations of the bank!

Like Schrodingers cat, that appears both dead and alive at the same time, depending on who sees it and from what perspective. Union Bank is presented as a veritable piece of delicious cheese in the annual report and as a fistful of nauseating chalk powder by RBI inspectors!

In order not to disappoint anyone keen and diligent to test the truth of the assertion made here, the reports are attached and made accessible along with this article. The annual report sings paeans to the exemplary functioning of management and lists out an awesome clutch of awards secured in almost every conceivable area of the Banks functioning!

It is those very areas of risk management, information technology (IT) security, human resources (HR), digital banking where Golden Peacocks and what not were showered on the Bank, the RBI inspectors have found not just gaps but yawning moats of lapses, inefficiencies, non-compliance, and total callousness to recognise the problems and demonstrate an intent to improve!

Thankfully, the chief executive officer (CEO) of the Bank was not decorated with the entrepreneur of the year award that many a media house or professional firms shower!

The list is long and leaves out no area of the Bank as outside the perimeter of mismanagement and maladministration. The worst is the total lack of diligence and commitment at the level of the board of directors to acknowledge that the Bank is a tinderbox and very many children were roaming in the vicinity with lighted matchsticks!

The annual report gives the total number of meetings held by the board and its various committees and it is a recommended exercise for someone diligent to compare with other banks and check if some of those, or all of them are typographical errors. The chairman could not have done anything other than attend meetings, going by the number presented!

The key question is, What was done and discussed in those and how did the minutes not capture the issues, resolutions, actions and follow-up? The inspection report has slammed the management of not having any semblance of risk management, succession plan for key positions, IT security, review of frauds and ballooning bad loans, just to annotate a few as the list is like lord Hanumans tail!

Internal audit was found to be grossly inadequate and even what little was done and reported by them was not dealt with by the concerned departments and over 300 internal audit reports are said to have piled up for disposal!

One of the key risk areas being cyber and IT security was found to be seriously impaired in terms of control and checks and even the basic-level password controls were not found.

Know your customer (KYC) process was standing out by its absence!!

Overseas operations, being out of sight, had very little focus at the board level and the Bank had little in terms of policy to address recruitment needs at the senior level and manage staff rotation, which is very critical in banking industry.

Lack of separation of front and mid office in treasury management, ad hoc way of dealing with large bad accounts and spiraling increase of 257% in frauds, embellished what comes out as a quality of management that even a pawn-broker in Pydhonie will be ashamed of!

The board and the risk management committee failed to lay down proper polices for asset liability management, an area that is the fulcrum of financial services business and the Bank was juggling liquidity with chunks of 14-day deposits, almost like a ponzi scheme. Anything more on the subject will test the patience and sanity of the readers!!

The annual report which found mention earlier for the glowing board comments, also brings out the aspect of the statutory audit. That six firms from different parts of the country could, in their professional judgement, give a clean report speaks volumes about the need for and the efficacy of external audits in banks!

As RBI often looks to auditors to solve all problems in the financial sector, this should be a benchmark for them to frame their future policies!

One cannot fathom the role played by the directors, especially, the shareholder directors and the two representatives, one each of RBI and the Central government!

They have, indeed, attended the meetings as shown in the annual report. If they knew of the problems and yet stayed on, they are guilty of abetment; if they didnt know what was happening in the Bank then they, like the statutory auditors, are guilty of surviving like stowaways!!

In summary, RBI cannot escape the direct responsibility of failing to address such issues in a bank that handled almost Rs2.5 lakh crore of public deposits at the relevant point in time. The need of the hour is to divest RBI of the supervisory role it plays and limit it to framing the regulations only.

A new statutory body should be formed, partially with existing resources from RBI, to become the agency to appoint, supervise, direct the audit process, and jointly work with accredited chartered accountant (CA) firms to report on all PSBs. This body, over time, shall cover the entire financial services (FS) spectrum as the watch dog. The focus of audit shall change to fraud detection than mere clerical verification transactions and observance of accounting guidelines. The body shall function under the aegis of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of the country.

The adoption and reliance on technology to completely eliminate discretion in provisioning and categorisation of non-performing loans is critical so that the capital adequacy checks are uniform across all banks and complete uniformity and comparability exists across the industry. The role of the board shall be to apply risk mitigation processes and focus on talent augmentation and create the right succession plans for all key roles in the organisation.

It is vital that the alarm bells go off in the corridors of RBI and the finance ministry to course correct on a war footing and not disappoint crores of savers in the country who depend on these banks.

Note: I thank my friend and senior professional R Raman (FCA) for his insightful inputs about bank audits.

Here is the RBI's inspection report for FY2015-16...

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The US Food and Drug administration has denied approval for emergency use of Covaxin, developed by Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech, and has asked for additional data, biopharmaceutical Ocugen, the US partner of the Indian vaccine maker has said.

The FDA recommended Ocugen to "pursue a Biologics Licence Application (BLA) submission instead of an EUA application" and "requested additional information and data".

The company anticipates that data from an additional clinical trial will be required to support the submission.

"Although we were close to finalising our EUA application for submission, we received a recommendation from the FDA to pursue a BLA path. While this will extend our timelines, we are committed to bringing Covaxin to the US.

"This differentiated vaccine is a critical tool to include in our national arsenal given its potential to address the SARS-CoV-2 variants, including the delta variant, and given the unknowns about what will be needed to protect US population in the long term," said Shankar Musunuri, Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-founder of Ocugen, in a statement on Thursday.

Ocugen recently announced that it secured exclusive rights to commercialise Covaxin in Canada and has initiated discussions with Health Canada for regulatory approval.

"The Company will pursue expedited authorisation for Covaxin under the Interim Order Respecting the Importation, Sale and Advertising of Drugs for Use in Relation to Covid-19 in Canada," the statement said.

Covaxin has so far emerged safe in clinical trials to date, said Bruce Forrest, Acting Chief Medical Officer and member of the vaccine scientific advisory board of Ocugen.

The "Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of Republic of India reported no potential thromboembolic events following the administration of over 6.7 million doses of Covaxin," Forrest added.

Bharat Biotech developed Covaxin in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) - National Institute of Virology (NIV).

It is an inactivated vaccine that is manufactured using a vero cell manufacturing platform. Covaxin has showed strong results in all the studies conducted to date including a vaccine efficacy rate of 78 per cent overall efficacy and 100 per cent in severe Covid-19 disease, including hospitalisations, in second interim results of Bharat Biotech's Phase 3 clinical trial.

Covaxin studies show that it effectively neutralised the Brazil variant of SARS-CoV-2, B11282, the alpha variant, B117, which was first identified in the UK, as well as the delta variant, B1617, which was first identified in India.

More than 30 million doses have been supplied in India and other countries. Itis currently being administered under emergency use authorisations in 13 countries, and applications for emergency use authorisation are pending in more than 60 additional countries.

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.
June 11, 2021 Another 'Nuclear Iran' Claim By David Albright Gets Debunked Two days ago FOX News ran another sensational story about Iran's nuclear program. Satellite images of Iran nuclear site raise alarms as IAEA meets in Vienna However the claims in that story are based on a report by David Albright's Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS). Albright is known for his false or misleading conclusions about mostly random 'evidence'. The story: Fox News has obtained new satellite images that show unusual activity at Irans Sanjarian site, which has been exposed in the past as a suspected manufacturing site for "shock wave generators"  devices which would allow Iran to miniaturize a nuclear weapon. The new images obtained from Maxar show 18 vehicles at the site on October 15, 2020, more vehicles and excavation in January along with a new access road that was later covered up in March of this year. All that is visible by satellite now are excavation swirls and new trenches, according to analysis from Itay Bar Lev of The Intel Lab who worked in conjunction with the Institute for Science and International Security. The site, which is 25 miles outside Tehran and has a population of 361, was first revealed when Israel's Mossad obtained Iran's secret nuclear archive in 2018: 50,000 computer files and 50,000 documents outlining Iran's Amad project, the scientific program to build a nuclear weapon which the IAEA says was halted in 2003. The pictures FOX News presents are supposed to show the site on October 15 2020 and on January 18 2021. There are only slight differences.

bigger

bigger Remarks on the pictures note that there are "18 vehicles", "concealment sheeting" and "bulldozer scarring". How those are supposed to be related to alleged manufacturing of "shock wave generators" for nuclear weapons is beyond me. The Times of Israel adds some quotes: According to the institute, also known as ISIS, the nuclear archive smuggled out of Iran by Israels Mossad spy agency in 2018 contained information about Sanjarians role in plans to produce shockwave generators, which are key components in the miniaturization of nuclear weapons.

...

Apparently following that development, activities renewed at the Sanjarian site in October 2020, where excavations continued until January 2021, according to the ISIS. The burial site was reopened, but placed under a white sheeting that covered the excavated area, concealing whats underneath from outside observers, including satellites, it said Wednesday. Less than two months later, the area appeared abandoned, with only empty trenches left behind. Then in just the past month, the area was bulldozed and graded over, like nothing ever happened [t]here.

...

The insinuation appeared to be that Iran, spooked by the IAEA inspecting previously unknown nuclear sites using information obtained by the Mossad, has allegedly attempted to cover up any incriminating evidence from the Sanjarian compound. There is a history of such insinuation by David Albright's ISIS. The ones in 2008 about an alleged North Korean reactor in Syria turned out to be false. In 2013 Albright's ISIS issued a report about alleged Iranian imports of magnets which, ISIS claimed, were for Uranium centrifuges. There was only one problem with that claims. The magnets Iran allegedly ordered would not have fit for that purpose. In 2015 Albright was very concerned about a massive nuclear explosion chamber in an Iranian building which was covered with a pink(!) tarp. Several media reported about it. When finally people went there they found the building empty. It is therefore not astonishing that the most recent claims about the Sanjarian (Jajrud) site also turn out to be false. The Unhappy Scientist explains:

bigger Machine translated from Farsi and edited for readability: Unhappy Scientist - @ResindScientist - 5:20 AM  Jun 10, 2021 Iran Nuclear Program: What do the satellite images of Jajrud show?

Short answer: The filming scene of the series "Nun Kh" Recently the team @TheIntelLab in collaboration with the team @TheGoodISIS have published satellite images of Sanjarian village. 2 / They claimed that they have observed excavations 100 meters away from the Sanjarian site. These activities took place between the fall of last year and the spring of this year. Satellite images show parked cars. In addition to leveling the ground, surface excavation and covering the excavated surface. 3 / The behind-the-scenes film of the series "Nun Kh", which was apparently broadcast during the Eid holidays, shows that the filming took place at exactly the same point between autumn and spring. And these changes are nothing but logistics and filming scenes.

Youtube: Behind the scenes of Noon Kh 3, which is to be broadcast on TV during Nowruz 1400 (video)

... The location pictures shown in the video are consistent with the satellite pictures. The TV series production time frame fits exactly with the rearranged dirt.

bigger A production company finds a fitting location for its TV series. Satellite pictures show that some dirt was moved around. "Nuclear, nuclear, something," screams David Albright. The usual media report the nonsense. One wonders how long it will take Fox News to issue a correction for this one. Posted by b on June 11, 2021 at 17:50 UTC | Permalink Comments
Crude prices cemented their recovery from last years market crash  including one day at negative-$38 a barrel  by ending the week above $70 a barrel.

Bloomberg reported prices also got support from a warning from the International Energy Agency that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and allied nations will need to increase production to keep the market adequately supplied, though the agency said demand wont reach pre-pandemic levels until late next year.

West Texas Intermediate on the New York Mercantile Exchange overcame two days of losses  Monday and Wednesday  to rise 1.9 percent this week, the third weekly gain, according to Bloomberg. WTI added 62 cents Friday to close at $70.91 per barrel, the highest since October 2018. The posted price ended the week at $67.39 per barrel, according to Plains All-American.

Natural gas also recorded a strong week, rising four of the five trading days and remaining above $3 per Mcf all week. Prices on the NYMEX ended the week with a nearly 15-cent jump, closing at $3.296 per Mcf.

Oil prices at $70 illustrates the fact the industry is in a stronger place this year, Shad Frazier, vice president, operations at Endeavor Energy Resources, told the Reporter-Telegram following his speech at the Shale Energy Conference and Trade Show.

Despite the higher prices, he said Endeavor will wait to see what the future holds and when the company  which has doubled its rig count to 12 rigs this year  may want to increase activity. Until then, he said, we plan to live within cash flow.

RELATED: Rig count moves steadily higher

The challenge facing the industry is consolidation within its ranks, Frazier said, listing a number of producers that have been acquired  Concho Resources, Parsley Energy, Double Eagle, Noble Energy, WPX and Cimarex among them.

The new entities formed by those consolidations are not running rigs, Frazier said, putting more drilling permits in the hands of private companies like Endeavor.

Were getting back to the old days when wildcatters with a little money and a little land could drill faster than large public companies, he said. Private companies will drive the shale revolution again.

He said the Permian Basin will continue to grow production and will replace the production lost at other producing basins.

Kirk Edwards, president and chief executive officer of Latigo Petroleum, told the Reporter-Telegram by email that These $70 prices are great and hedging in these levels is incredibly smart for everyone to have a great 12 months of revenue ahead. Plus, the natural gas price is rebounding incredibly well, too. That is icing on the cake.

He continued, To me it is always supply and demand. Since Saudi Arabia and OPEC+ have decided to limit their production it has caused the world and especially the United States to tighten on inventories.

Edwards added that Permian drillers are maintaining a more disciplined rig schedule when in times past they would be putting out every rig they could find.

He continued, This is a great time to be drilling, but everyone is going to be so cautious for a year or two because of COVID limiting some countries like India from being fully opened again and also knowing that Saudi Arabia can flood the markets at any moment they want. Minus $37 dollar oil still seems pretty recent to all of us in the business.

Jason Modglin, president of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers commented to the Reporter-Telegram by email, This is certainly welcome news for oil producers that are able to produce and sell at these prices. Natural gas prices are also attracting more investment, drilling permits are up, and this is a good thing for our economy and the state of Texas. The world relies on oil and gas to restart the global economy after COVID and Texas producers are meeting that need.
Drilling activity continues to move steadily higher as the rig count rebounds from last years record lows.

Oilfield services firm Baker Hughes and data analytic firm Enverus reported Friday the US rig count rose five to 461 for the week. There are 182 more rigs at work nationwide than this time last year, when the rig count was 279.

There were 365 rigs seeking crude oil, up six for the week and 199 more than the 166 rigs drilling for crude last year. The number of rigs drilling for natural gas dipped by one to 96. There were 78 rigs drilling for natural gas last year, 18 fewer than today.

Texas added three rigs for 219, 105 more than the 114 drilling statewide last year. New Mexico added two rigs for 75 rigs. West Virginia and Wyoming joined Texas and New Mexico as producing states to see gains this week while Alaska, Ohio and Pennsylvania saw slight declines.

RELATED: $70 oil is proof of industry in stronger place

The Permian Basin gained four rigs for 236 rigs at work across the region, 99 more than the 137 reported last year.

Lea County, New Mexico, was the most active county in the Permian, leaping 11 rigs  the biggest jump of any counties this week -- for a rig count of 44 rigs. Midland County followed with 35, up three for the week.

Eddy County, New Mexico saw its rig count sink by nine rigs  the steepest decline of any counties this week  for 30 rigs. Reeves County added two rigs for two, followed by Martin County with 16, down one. Loving County fell by three rigs to 14 while Howard County had 13 rigs, unchanged for the week. Upton County reported 12 rigs, down one for the week.

Enverus Rig Analytics, which has a different reporting schedule and criteria than Baker Hughes, said the number of rigs running in the U.S. rose by seven in the last week to 534 as of June 9. The count is down 1 percent in the last month, but up 87 percent year over year.

According to Enverus Rig Analytics, the Williston Basin hit a 2021 high of 20 active rigs. Continental is the most active operator in the basin at seven rigs. In the last month, the company has added two.

Along the Gulf Coast, drilling activity is down by 14 rigs, at 55. The number of operators running rigs in the region fell from 69 a month ago to 56 currently. The most active operators are EOG Resources, BP and ConocoPhillips, running four rigs each.
Luke Sharrett /Bloomberg

Theres a new leader for the most expensive gas among larger metropolitan cities in Texas.

AAA Texas reported this week that the average price of gasoline in El Paso jumped by 26 cents and drivers there are paying an average of $3.12.
A former California police chief and five other men have been indicted on conspiracy charges in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to court documents made public Thursday.

The men  four of whom prosecutors say identify as members of the Three Percenters antigovernment extremist movement  are accused of plotting with one another to block the certification of President Joe Bidens victory.

Among those charged is a former La Habra police chief and founder of a far-right group called the American Phoenix Project, which was formed to protest pandemic-related restrictions and has helped pushed the lie that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

In court documents, authorities describe how the group's founder, Alan Hostetter, in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6 called for violence against those who supported the results of the election. During a Stop the Steal rally held in Huntington Beach on Dec. 12, Hostetter warned that Trump must be inaugurated on Jan. 20th."

And he must be allowed to finish this historic job of cleaning out the corruption in the cesspool known as Washington D.C. The enemies and traitors of America both foreign and domestics must be held accountable. And they will. There must be long prison terms, while execution is the just punishment for the ringleaders of this coup," Hostetter said, according to the indictment.

Bilal Essayli, Hostetters lawyer, said his client surrendered to authorities.

A judge on Thursday allowed Hostetter to keep any guns he had inside his home after his attorney argued that the family had received death threats, and the judge set his bail at $20,000, the Orange County Register reported.

From what I can tell in the indictment, my client is not accused of committing any violence, Essayli said. He did not enter the actual Capitol building, so were very troubled with the nature and the extent of the charges that are brought.

Authorities say communications show how the men coordinated their travel to Washington and efforts to block the peaceful transition of power. In late December, one of the men, Russell Taylor, posted in a Telegram chat in response to a question about when to be at the Capitol on Jan. 6: I personally want to be on the front steps and be one of the first ones to breach the doors!

The six men joined a Telegram chat called The California Patriots-DC Brigade along with more than 30 other people ahead of the riot, authorities said. Taylor wrote that the chat was being used to organize a group of fighters to have each other's backs" and asked them to identify if they had any pervious law enforcement or military experience or special skills relevant to our endeavors.

Days before the Capitol breach, Hostetter warned in a post on the American Phoenix Projects Instagram account that things are going to come a head in the U.S. in the next several days.

Four of the men  Erik Scott Warner, Felipe Antonio Tony Martinez, Derek Kinnison and Ronald Mele drove across the country together from California to D.C.

Warner, Mele and Kinnison appeared via video for a federal court hearing in Riverside where each was ordered released on $25,000 bond, while Martinez was freed on bond at a Texas hearing, authorities said.

This is nothing more than Big Brother trying to make criminals out of law-abiding citizens who were exercising their constitutional liberties, Kinnisons attorney, Nic Cocis, said in a statement, the Register reported.

Taylor was taken into custody Thursday evening and was to be held overnight pending a scheduled court hearing Friday, said Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles.

The night before the Capitol breach, Taylor sent a photo in a chat that showed gear, including two hatchets, a walkie-talkie-radio, a stun baton and a knife, authorities said. In the caption, Taylor wrote, Now getting ready for tomorrow.

As the mob swarmed the Capitol on Jan. 6, Taylor  who authorities say was carrying a knife in a pocket  and Hostetter were part of the group trying to push through a line of officers on the lower West Terrace, authorities say. When they got to the upper West Terrace, Hostetter declared that the people have taken back their house while Taylor yelled to the rioters, Inside!

That night, Taylor boasted in messages about storming the Capitol but said he didn't go inside because he had weapons, authorities said. Someone asked Taylor what happens next and he responded, Insurrection!

Messages were left for the attorneys listed on the courts website for Warner and Mele.

The U.S. Department of Justice has brought similar conspiracy cases against members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys far-right extremist groups in its sweeping prosecution of the insurrection. More than 450 people across the U.S. are facing federal charges stemming from the riot. Two defendants have pleaded guilty so far.

____

Associated Press reporter Amy Taxin contributed to this report from Orange County, California.
Midland County Judge Terry Johnson said Thursday he has apologized to Democratic Party Chair Cathy Broadrick after emailing her F--- Beto in response to an invitation to Beto ORourkes event in Midland last week.

Broadrick posted screenshots of her invitation and Johnsons response on her candidate Facebook page last Saturday. A Reporter-Telegram public records request shows Johnsons message was sent from his county email address.

I wrote it. I fessed up to it. I did not realize, which is not an excuse, who was on the receiving end of my response, Johnson said in an interview.

He said he has four email accounts linked to his phone and believed Broadricks email was either a prank or automated message sent to one of his personal accounts.

I found it humorous that somebody would invite me to a Beto rally, he said.

Johnson said he called Broadrick to apologize immediately after realizing the email had gone to her. When asked if he ever uses expletives in his responses to constituents, he said certainly not.

During his campaign for county judge, Johnson ran as a hardline conservative Republican. Broadrick said she had accepted Johnsons apology but was still concerned by his strong animosity toward a potential Democratic candidate for governor.

Texas Republican lawmakers are expected to call a special session this summer to vote on Senate Bill 7, which would add voter restrictions in the name of election security. It would also limit the power of local election boards to certify elections, Broadrick said.

County judges are going to play a role in that, and especially Republican county judges are going to be used to count votes that they think are not fair, she said. It really is concerning to me that Terry Johnson could play that role.

She said Johnson has made his support clear for former President Donald Trump and the idea that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent.

Some Midland Democrats have filed complaints about Johnsons email with the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, according to Broadrick.

I am going to move on, she said. But I just want his bias to be documented so that later on when he does some things that I think are just wholly and completely unfair, then I can say he has a history of very strong bias against Democratic candidates.
WASHINGTON (AP)  President Joe Biden ended talks with a group of Republican senators on a big infrastructure package on Tuesday and started reaching out to senators from both parties in a new effort toward bipartisan compromise, setting a summer deadline for Congress to pass his top legislative priority.

The president is walking away from talks with lead Republican negotiator Sen. Shelley Moore Capito after the two spoke Tuesday, but would welcome her in the new bipartisan group, according to an administrative official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private negotiations.

Shortly after the Biden-Capito talks collapsed, 10 senators huddled late Thursday over pizza  five Republicans, five Democrats  emerging after three hours with some optimism their new effort could create a viable path forward, said a person familiar with the closed-door talks and granted anonymity to discuss them.

At the same time, with anxiety running high as time slips by, Democrats are laying the groundwork to pass some or all of the ambitious package on their own. Biden conferred Tuesday with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer about launching the budget resolution process for Senate votes in July, the White House said.

The President is committed to moving his economic legislation through Congress this summer, and is pursuing multiple paths to get this done, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement.

The breakdown in the White House's efforts with GOP senators comes after weeks of prolonged infrastructure talks between the president and Capito as the two sides failed to broker the divide over the scope of Biden's sweeping infrastructure investment and how to pay for it.

The Republican senators offered a $928 billion proposal, which included about $330 billion in new spending  but not as much as Biden's $1.7 trillion investment proposal for rebuilding the nation's roads, bridges, highways and other infrastructure, including Veterans Affairs hospitals and care centers.

Biden has proposed raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, a nonstarter for Republicans, and rejected the GOP senators suggestion of tapping unspent COVID-19 aid money to fund the new infrastructure spending.

In a statement, Capito said she was disappointed Biden ended the talks, but also expressed interest in ongoing bipartisan work.

While I appreciate President Bidens willingness to devote so much time and effort to these negotiations, he ultimately chose not to accept the very robust and targeted infrastructure package, and instead, end our discussions," she said. However, this does not mean bipartisanship isnt feasible.

As Biden aims for a compromise deal, he has begun reaching out to other senators, including Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and two key centrist Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, whose votes will be crucial in the evenly split Senate.

Those senators receiving phone calls from Biden were among the group of 10 assembled with Sinema and Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, late Tuesday in Portman's office for what was described as a productive meeting, the person familiar with the session said.

Portman and Sinema have been engaged for months with Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, on a sizable infrastructure proposal that is expected to include proposed ways to pay for it.

The senators' group has expanded in recent weeks to include the others from both parties. Romney has described it a back burner group, in case the administration's talks with the GOP senators faltered.

Psaki said the president urged the senators in his conversations to continue their work to develop a bipartisan proposal that he hopes will be more responsive to the countrys pressing infrastructure needs. Biden tapped Cabinet and White House aides to meet with the senators in person.

Ahead of Bidens announcement, the White House had also spoken to other lawmakers, including from the House.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., the co-chairs of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, spoke late Monday with Brian Deese, director of the White House National Economic Council, about bipartisan efforts to reach an infrastructure deal, according to an aide who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversations.

The Problem Solvers group has agreed to $761.8 billion in new spending over eight years as part of $1.2 trillion plan, according to a draft obtained late Tuesday by The Associated Press. The one-page draft does not include any proposed ways to pay for the package.

Gottheimer is also working with Cassidy and Sinema from the senators group, the aide said.

With the narrowly split House and the 50-50 Senate, the White House faces political challenges pushing its priorities through Congress with Democratic votes alone. Biden's party holds a slight majority in the Senate because Vice President Kamala Harris can break a tie.

The special budget rules could provide Biden with an alternative path, particularly in the Senate, because they allow legislation to be approved with a 51-vote threshold, rather than the 60 votes typically needed to advance a bill past a filibuster  in this case, led by Republicans against the Biden package.

Democrats are watching warily as time passes and anxiety builds toward an agreement, with many lawmakers worried they are not fulfilling their campaign promises to voters who put the party in control of Congress and the White House.

During a private discussion of Democratic senators at lunch Tuesday, there were differing views over whether they should keep talking with Republicans or pursue an approach that would allow them to pass a bill on their own, through the budget reconciliation process.

Schumer told reporters afterward that Democrats are pursuing a two-path approach.

The bipartisan talks led by Sinema with the other senators are underway, Schumer said, while the budget committee is preparing the legislation that would allow passage through the reconciliation process.

It may well be that part of the bill that is passed will be bipartisan, and part of it will be in reconciliation, he said. But were not going to sacrifice bigness and boldness.

The president is expected to engage with lawmakers while he sets out this week on his first foreign trip for an economic summit of the Group of Seven industrialized nations in Europe.
CHICAGO  Illinois is lifting all capacity limits on bars, restaurants, businesses and other venues Friday, nearly 15 months after the first stay-at-home order during the coronavirus pandemic.

Businesses still can have their own rules for capacity, masks and social distancing. Masks are still required on public transportation and in airports, schools and hospitals.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Thursday that as we take this next step forward, lets do so with a renewed commitment to empathy, to community, and to making each day together count.

State health officials say more than 68% of Illinois residents who are 18 or older have received at least one dose of vaccine against the coronavirus, and 51% of adults are fully vaccinated.

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MORE ON THE PANDEMIC:

 US FDA officials extend expiration date on Johnson & Johnson shots

 Biden lays out vaccination play, asks G-7 leaders to do the same

 Germany rolling out digital European Union vaccination pass

 No audience, new venue, but Westminster dog show barks on after pandemic canceled show last year in New York

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 Follow more of APs pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine

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HERES WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:

WASHINGTON  U.S. health officials are investigating what appear to be higher than expected reports of heart inflammation in male teens and young adults after they get a second dose of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

Its not clear if the inflammation is caused by the shots and the reports still are rare, the CDC says. It urges everyone 12 and older to get vaccinated.

A CDC official said Thursday that as of May 31, the agency had 275 preliminary reports of such inflammation in 16- to 24-year-olds,.Thats out of more than 12 million second-dose injections of the vaccines.

The official says the cases seem to occur more often in men and in younger people, and most already have fully recovered.

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DENVERColorado Gov. Jared Polis has announced the first five winners of $50,000 scholarships in a program designed to encourage students to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

The state is offering 25 student scholarships for students ages 12 to 17 who have received at least one vaccine dose.

Winners selected in random drawings can use the scholarships at the post-secondary educational institutions of their choice. That includes colleges and technical, occupational and credential programs inside and outside Colorado.

Five winners will be chosen each week through July 9. Colorado also is offering a $1 million lottery program for five adults who get at least one shot.

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ATLANTA  Georgians receiving unemployment benefits will once again be required to look for work and will be able to earn less before unemployment payments drop beginning June 27.

Labor Commissioner Mark Butler announced the changes Thursday, also saying that employers with many laid-off workers collecting benefits will face higher unemployment insurance taxes after that date.

Georgia announced last month that beginning June 27 it would cut off federal programs that provide a $300-a-week pandemic boost to people on the jobless rolls as well as programs that pay federal money to people not usually eligible for state unemployment.

Butler earlier signaled he would reinstate work-search requirements, a move underway in more than three-quarters of states.

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CONCORD, N.H.  New Hampshires nearly 15-month pandemic state of emergency will end Friday night, Gov. Chris Sununu said Thursday.

Sununu first declared a state of emergency over the coronavirus on March 13, 2020. He renewed it every three weeks until two weeks ago, when he indicated he would let it expire at midnight June 11.

In the governors words: Weve kind of checked all the boxes and we feel very confident that moving away from it tomorrow still keeps us in a very strong position.

Sununu thanked public health officials as well as citizens for volunteering during the pandemic, balancing safety with maintaining a strong economy and getting vaccinated.

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ST. IVES, England  President Joe Biden is calling on global leaders to follow his lead in sharing coronavirus vaccines with struggling nations around the world.

He promised the U.S. would donate 500 million doses to help speed the pandemics end and bolster the strategic position of the worlds wealthiest democracies.

In Biden's words: In times of trouble, Americans reach out to offer help."

Speaking before the meeting of the Group of Seven, Biden announced the U.S. commitment to vaccine sharing, which comes on top of 80 million doses he has already pledged by the end of the month.

He says the other G-7 nations will join the U.S. in outlining their vaccine donation commitments Friday.

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WASHINGTON  Johnson & Johnson says U.S. health officials have extended the expiration date for millions of doses of its coronavirus vaccine by an extra six weeks.

The drug maker says the FDA approved a longer shelf-life for the one-dose shots. State officials recently warned that many unused doses would reach their original three-month expiration by the end of June.

The extension comes as the rate of new U.S. vaccinations continues to slip. The U.S. averaged about 800,000 injections per day last week. Thats down from a high of nearly 2 million per day two months ago.

President Joe Bidens goal is 70% of American adults partially vaccinated by July 4. The CDC says about 64% of Americans 18 and above have received at least one dose.

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ANKARA, Turkey  Turkey is expanding its vaccination drive to include restaurant workers, barbers and hairdressers.

Health Minister Fahrettin Koca announced on Twitter that food production and distribution sector workers as well as employees of cafes and restaurants will be included in the inoculation program starting Friday.

Turkey is currently vaccinating those 45 and older as well as people in the health sector, police, teachers, journalists and tourism sector workers. Earlier this week, musicians, other performers and academics were added to the list of priority occupations.

The country of 84 million has administered some 32 million shots since starting its vaccination campaign on Jan. 14. Some 13.5 million have received two doses.

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CHICAGO  United Airlines says more than 830,000 people have entered the contest it started last month to encourage people to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

People who upload pictures of their vaccination card to the airline have a slim shot at free flights.

The airline says the largest bloc of contest entrants are people in their 50s, and about one in eight are between 18 and 28.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif.  Californias workplace regulators have withdrawn a controversial mask regulation.

Their second such reversal in a week gives them time to consider a rule that more closely aligns with Gov. Gavin Newsoms promise that the state will fully reopen from the pandemic on Tuesday.

But some business leaders on Wednesday kept up their pressure on Newsom to override the board. The California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Boards rule would have allowed workers to forego masks only if every employee in a room is fully vaccinated against the coronavirus.

That contrasts with the states broader plan to do away with nearly all masking requirements for vaccinated people.

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NEW DELHI  India is asking China to facilitate essential two-way travel between the countries and grant visas to Indian nationals working and studying there.

Indias External Affairs Ministry says people from China, including the Chinese nationals, have been able to travel to India despite the absence of direct air connectivity. But Indian nationals have not been able to travel to China since November.

The Chinese Embassy in India in March issued a notification about facilitating visas for those who have taken Chinese-made vaccines. The Indian ministry says several Indian nationals have applied for Chinese visas after getting vaccinated in that manner, but they are yet to be issued visas.

There was no immediate comment by Chinese officials.

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LONDON -- British Health Secretary Matt Hancock is defended his handling of the coronavirus pandemic following a series of allegations from a former top adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Facing questioning from lawmakers, Hancock says he has no idea why Dominic Cummings has a dispute with him.

Two weeks ago, Cummings told the same lawmakers investigating the coronavirus outbreak in the U.K. that Hancock should have been fired for a series of alleged lies and litany of errors during the pandemic.

After a devastating winter surge of infections, deaths have recently fallen sharply after months of strict lockdown and the rapid rollout of vaccines. However, the U.K. reported 7,540 new infections Wednesday, the biggest daily increase since Feb. 26.

The U.K. has recorded nearly 128,000 confirmed coronavirus-related deaths, more than any other nation in Europe.

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BERLIN  Germany has started rolling out a digital vaccination pass that can be used across Europe as the continent gears up for the key summer travel season.

The countrys health minister says starting this week vaccination centers, doctors practices and pharmacies will give out digital passes to fully vaccinated people.

The CovPass will allow users to download a proof of their coronavirus vaccination on an app to their smart phones, which will allow them to easily enter restaurants, museums or other venues that require proof of vaccination.

Health Minister Jens Spahn says the vaccination passport should be available to everyone in Germany who is fully vaccinated by the end of this month.

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CAPE TOWN, South Africa  Health officials and experts around the world are welcoming a U.S. plan to donate 500 million more COVID-19 vaccines to developing countries.

Two hundred million doses  enough to fully protect 100 million people  will be provided this year, with the balance donated in the first half of 2022, according to the White House.

The U.S. will work with the U.N.-backed COVAX alliance to deliver the shots. Some have noted that since the Pfizer vaccines require extremely cold storage, they present an extra logistical challenge for countries with struggling health systems and poor infrastructure.

U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to talk about the plan later Thursday in a speech on the eve of the Group of Seven summit in Britain.

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The World Health Organizations Europe director warned that the highly transmissible COVID-19 variant first identified in India is poised to take hold in the region, as many countries prepare to ease restrictions and allow more social gatherings and travel across borders.

During a press briefing on Thursday, WHOs Dr. Hans Kluge said the variant also known as the delta variant, has shown signs of being able to evade some vaccines and warned that many vulnerable populations, particularly those over age 60, remain unprotected.

We have been here before, warned Kluge, WHOs European regional director. Over the course of last summer, cases gradually rose in younger age groups and then moved into older age groups, contributing to a devastating resurgence, he said. Kluge said that spike in COVID-19 ultimately led to more lockdowns and deaths in the fall and winter of 2020. Lets not make that mistake again.

Kluge didnt say people shouldnt travel, but urged any travelers to do so wisely. He also called for vaccination and other public health measures to be stepped up across the continent, saying even immunization coverage is far from sufficient to protect the region.
The court will allow a Meredosia man facing first-degree murder charges to represent himself at trial.

Judge Jack Davis granted a motion Thursday made by Dustin A. Finlaw, 21, of Meredosia after giving him a week to reflect on the request as well as to research and review documents regarding his rights to represent himself and waive his right to counsel.

Finlaw presented a written statement to the court in which he said he understood his rights to counsel, but still wished to proceed, citing differences in opinion on how to proceed with appointed counsel Tom Piper.

I already know and understand that Tom Piper has been an attorney for a long time, but just because he has a lot of experience doesnt mean he is trying to help me. ... Tom Piper is ineffectively assisting me as counsel because of a serious conflict of interest between us, Finlaw said in a statement read in court by Davis.

Finlaw said he doesnt believe he and Piper could agree on a defense when the trial proceeds.

Tom Piper told me that as long as he represented me, he was going to make me plead insanity, Finlaw said. I told him that I refuse to plead insanity because I didnt kill Robert Utter, and Ill prove Im not guilty on my own if necessary. Tom Piper told me that if I wanted to plead not guilty, then Ill have to represent myself  which I am prepared to do.

Finlaw is charged in the stabbing death of Robert L. Utter, 42, of Rushville, who was found dead May 24, 2018, in a car in Meredosia. Finlaw also is facing charges of aggravated assault on two police officers, resisting arrest and obstructing justice/destroying evidence.

Finlaw said he is prepared to move forward.

I have evidence ready to present at my trial to defend my opaque alibi. I can discredit the circumstantial evidence against me that lead detectives to believe I was the culprit. I also have a list of witnesses I intend to call to stand to cross examine, fact witnesses, rebuttal witnesses and character witnesses, he said.

In addition to asking to proceed on his own behalf, legally known as pro se, Finlaw asked the court to appoint a standby counsel. That request that was granted after caution from Davis that while the attorney is there to answer basic questions, the attorney is not allowed to assist in many aspects of the trial.

Piper, as the Morgan County public defender, was appointed to be the standby counsel.

Also granted Thursday was a motion by the state to collect a DNA sample from Finlaw to compare it to potential evidence found during the investigation. Finlaw did not object.
Community members gathered together Wednesday evening for plans to take action to save Murrayville-Woodson school.

Concerns arose after District 117 released their Vision 117 plan proposals of the next phase of improvements for District 117 in a video. Since the video has been released there has been a lot of discussion and some concerns raised about decisions regarding Murrayville-Woodson Elementary School.

A few of the options in the Vision 117 plan include closing Murrayville-Woodson school. Murrayville would either get closed causing all students to be pushed to go to South Jacksonville Elementary or a new school would be built in Jacksonville to accommodate them.

The Murrayville community met together at Murrayville United Methodist Church to learn about what the proposals are and what actions to take next.

As people walked in, they had the option to sign a petition. The petition stated that those who signed it do support and recommend that the District 117 board of education modernize and renovate Murrayville-Woodson school building using sales tax funds and any other source of monies available to complete the job, while the petition also stated it did not support the closing of the school.

The community let their voices be heard during the meeting. Community members were encouraged to contact District 117 school board members to express their concern in a positive light.

Theres a lot of options on the table, but what it all boils down to is that we dont want to lose our school, said Woodson Village President, Bruce Milner.

Milner said it concerns him as he is trying to make improvements to the town such as the streets and sidewalks. Murrayville school is at the heart of Murrayville and Woodson. Taking the school away would have effects on generations to come.

If you take the heart out of the community, its hard to survive, Milner said.

I think what you saw tonight was a concerned community, said Jeremy Johnson, concerned community member and speaker during the meeting. We just want the best for our students.

This is my community, this is where I grew up. I dont want my kids to have to ride the bus to South (South Jacksonville Elementary), said Taylor Suttles, organizer of the meeting and Noon Supervisor for Murrayville-Woodson Elementary School.

She said she encourages people to look at the facts from the Vision 117 proposals and think about how it will affect them.

A final decision from the District 117 school board will be determined later in the year regarding the future of the school.
BEIJING (AP)  Chinas Ministry of Commerce said Thursday that a U.S. move to revoke the Trump administrations executive orders intended to ban apps like TikTok and WeChat was a positive step, amid strained relations between the two countries.

We hope that the US will treat Chinese companies fairly and avoid politicizing economic and trade issues, ministry spokesperson Gao Feng said at a regular news briefing Thursday.

Gao said the U.S. move to revoke previous government actions against apps such as TikTok and WeChat was a positive step in the right direction.

The White House on Wednesday revoked some blanket-style orders made under former President Donald Trump against Chinese apps including the messenging app WeChat, short video app TikTok and the Alipay payments app. A new executive order from President Joe Biden said the U.S. would conduct an evidence-based analysis of transactions involving apps that are created, supplied or controlled by China.

Chinas Ministry of Foreign Affairs reiterated at a daily news briefing that China will continue to defend its interests. It urged the U.S. to stop generalizing the concept of national security and abusing state power to suppress Chinese technology enterprises.

Courts blocked the Trump administrations efforts last year to ban TikTok and WeChat, but the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is still conducting a national-security review of TikTok.

The Biden administrations stance reflects concern that users personal data could be exposed by popular apps tied to China if the ruling Communist Party pressures companies to share data.

The administration said in February that it was replacing Trumps approach with a more targeted strategy. It has not actually weighed in yet on whether TikTok and other apps pose a danger to Americans.

A senior administration official said Wednesday that the Trump actions werent always implemented in the soundest fashion. The aim of the review is to set clear criteria to evaluate specific data security and privacy risks for each app, he said.

That could lead to a range of potential future actions on an app-by-app basis.

We want to take a tailored, tough approach here, he said.

CFIUS had set deadlines for TikTok to divest its U.S. operations, but such a sale has not happened.

Last week, the Biden administration expanded a list of Chinese companies on a blacklist from the Trump era purported to have links to Chinese military and surveillance. American companies and individuals cannot invest in these companies, which include telecommunications gear supplier Huawei and Chinese oil company China National Offshore Oil Corp.

Chinese officials and companies have denied that their products and services pose a security threat.

Relations between Beijing and Washington remain testy, with each side having imposed sanctions including tariffs on each others exports.

Chinas legislature passed legislation Thursday laying down the legal basis for retaliation against foreign sanctions over issues such as Hong Kong and the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where China is accused of curtailing freedoms and committing human rights abuses. The anti-sanctions law allows China to refuse to issue visas, deny entry, cancel visas and deport those responsible for formulating and implementing sanctions as well as to seize their assets within China and forbid financial transactions and other interactions with them.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said the law aimed to resolutely safeguard national sovereignty, dignity and core interests and oppose Western hegemonism and power politics. and to provide legal support and guarantees for the country to counter discriminatory measures by a foreign country in accordance with the law.

Wang lashed out over calls from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for greater attention to Chinas growing military power, accusing Washington of playing the China card as a pretext for increasing U.S. military spending and seeking to contain China.

He also protested Japanese Prime Minister Prime Minister Yoshihide Sugas reference to Taiwan as a country during a parliamentary debate Wednesday. China considers the self-governing island democracy as its own territory and is quick to chastise anyone or any company that refers to it as a country.

Suga made a passing reference to Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia while answering a question about pandemic measures, and then referred to them as three countries.

Wang said the comment violated Japans solemn promise to not regard Taiwan as a country.

We strongly deplore Japans erroneous remarks and have lodged solemn complaints with Japan, demanding that Japan immediately make clear clarifications to eliminate the adverse effects caused by relevant remarks, and to ensure that such situations will not happen again, Wang said.

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This story has been corrected to show the anti-sanctions law does contain specific measures to punish those formulating and implementing sanctions on Chinese indiviuals and organizations.
Hannah Dambacher has joined Cass-Morgan Farm Bureau as a summer intern.

She is the daughter of Bridget Dambacher of Virginia.

Hannah Dambacher will assist with Ag in the Classroom as well as the Cass-Morgan Farm Bureau Young Leaders Program, and develop skills in agricultural communications.

She is also the 2021 Missouri Teach Ag Ambassador, which requires her to attend the Missouri Future Farmers of America camp and discuss the importance of agriculture.

Hannah Dambacher will be a junior at Southeast Missouri State University this fall, with plans to major in agricultural education and minor in soil science and equine science. She is active in Alpha Chi Omega sorority, Delta Tau Alpha agricultural scholastic honor society, and the volleyball club.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The wife of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin El Chapo Guzman pleaded guilty Thursday to charges in the U.S. and admitted that she helped her husband run his multibillion-dollar criminal empire.

Emma Coronel Aispuro, wearing a green jail uniform, appeared in federal court in Washington and pleaded guilty to three federal offenses as part of a plea deal with federal prosecutors.

The charges include knowingly and willfully conspiring to distribute heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine for several years. She also pleaded guilty to a money-laundering conspiracy charge and to engaging in transactions with a foreign narcotics trafficker.

The 31-year-old was arrested in February at Dulles International Airport in Virginia and has been jailed since then.

She is very happy to put this behind her, Coronel Aispuros attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman, said outside the courthouse. She didnt expect to get arrested after her husband received life in prison. So, this is obviously a troubling time. But were going to get past it.

Prosecutors have alleged Coronel Aispuro worked closely with the command-and-control structure of the Sinaloa cartel and conspired to distribute large quantities of drugs, knowing they would be smuggled into the U.S.

As Mexicos most powerful drug lord, Guzman ran a cartel responsible for smuggling cocaine and other drugs into the United States during his 25-year reign, prosecutors say. They also said his army of sicarios, or hit men, was under orders to kidnap, torture and kill anyone who got in his way.

The prosecutor, Anthony Nardozzi, said his wife had aided and abetted the Sinaloa cartels objectives to smuggle drugs into the U.S. and helped to import more than 450,000 kilograms of cocaine, 90,000 kilograms of heroin, 45,000 kilograms of methamphetamine and about 90,000 kilograms of marijuana.

Lichtman insisted that Coronel Aispuro was a very minimal participant in the drug empire. She was a very small part of this much larger thing, he said

Her arrest earlier this year was a surprise in part because authorities had made no move to arrest her over the past two years, even after she was implicated in her husbands crimes. During Guzmans trial in 2019, prosecutors said she helped orchestrate Guzmans two prison breaks in Mexico.

Nardozzi said Coronel Aispuro served as a go-between to deliver messages to cartel members after her husband was arrested and also conspired with Guzmans sons to plan and coordinate his prison escapes.

Coronel Aispuro listened quietly as prosecutors described how they could prove her illegal activity if she chose to go to trial.

Yes, she said through a translator, when asked by the judge if she had actually committed the crimes the government described.

Litchman said his client did not agree to cooperate with federal investigators but hoped she would receive below a statutory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison when she is due back in court in September for sentencing.

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Associated Press journalists Dan Huff and Nathan Ellgren contributed to this report.
We dont often think that how the U.S. conducts itself at home has much impact on how we face the world, but it does. When its messy at home, its hard to sustain the strength and readiness to turn our attention outward.

Doing so is especially important right now because what weve come to term the international order is under stress. Its not collapsing by any means, but U.S. leadership faces challenges and if were divided and unsettled at home, it will be much more difficult to respond appropriately.

What is the international order? Its essentially the set of structures and values that evolved during the 20th century to resolve disputes, promote commerce and free trade, undergird economic development and investment, and protect human rights.

These days, no aspect of the order we once took for granted isnt at least facing questions. China and Russia are asserting their interests and, often, working actively to undermine ours. Our allies, especially after the four years of the Trump administration, are uncertain of our commitment to global leadership and wonder how much they can count on us. And forces beyond the control of any government are reshaping the global picture, including nationalism and a popular taste for authoritarianism.

In this situation, its crucial that democracies such as the U.S., Europe, Japan, and Canada recognize the importance of the role they play in sustaining and revitalizing the international order. It will require a concerted effort that blends both cooperation and firmness. We have to strengthen our alliances, of course, as well as shore up and broaden arms control efforts. Countering authoritarianism in all its facets will be an ongoing challenge. And we need constantly to gauge how best to be a benign world power, helping to resolve conflicts and using force only when necessary.

Finally, as I suggested at the beginning, our strength on all these fronts will come from making sure that we are strong at home: that our economy is robust, our finances and debt are manageable, our elections are fair and well run, our infrastructure is revitalized, we invest in the future of our businesses through R&D, and we invest in the future of the American people by focusing attention on education and skills development.

If we can do all that, then we will have earned the right to lead the world in navigating the challenges facing the international order.

Lee Hamilton is a senior adviser for the Indiana University Center on Representative Government. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.
Although weve made significant progress over the last two centuries to expand the freedom to vote, self-interested politicians in numerous states are trying to turn back the clock to a dark period in our history and create significant barriers to voting for certain Americans, especially Black and Brown voters.

Using the former presidents Big Lie about a stolen election as a pretext for voter suppression  the same Big Lie that led to a violent insurrection at our Capitol to overturn a free and fair election  many Republican state legislatures are trying to reverse progress. At least 14 states have already passed nearly two dozen restrictive voting bills this year, and many others are trying to do so.

As we approach the anniversary of the Supreme Courts 5-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which gave a green light to state voter-suppression efforts, national standards are needed now more than ever to ensure that all Americans can have the freedom to vote. The For the People Act, which passed the House of Representatives in March and which the Senate is scheduled to vote on this month, is just the remedy we need. It would set uniform guidelines so that all Americans, regardless of their age, race or ZIP code, can have the freedom to vote.

The For the People Act is a transformative bill that would give voters more choices in how they cast their ballot. It would ensure at least two weeks of early voting, create same-day and automatic voter registration, and stop nearly all of the state voter suppression efforts currently being considered. The For the People Act also contains bold reforms to stop gerrymandering, get big money out of politics, and hold public officials to high ethical standards.

The For the People Act continues to be popular with Republican, independent and Democratic voters. In fact, many components of the bill have already passed in red, blue and purple states, often with strong bipartisan support. Recent polling shows that it is popular with conservative voters, even in purple and red states like Arizona and West Virginia. Because this bill is wildly popular, corporate special interests and dark money voter-suppression groups lie, deceive and distort to try to erode its support. Opponents of the bill admitted in a recently recorded secret call that the bill is popular, even among conservatives.

However, despite that the For the People Act has strong bipartisan support among Republican voters, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans want to keep a stranglehold on the status quo and have vowed to filibuster the bill. In Democratic senator Raphael Warnocks maiden Senate floor speech, he noted, It is a contradiction to say we must protect minority rights in the Senate while refusing to protect minority rights in our society.

Following the attack on our democracy on Jan. 6, Senate Republicans recently filibustered legislation to create an independent, bipartisan commission, which McConnell urged Republicans to oppose as a personal favor, its become abundantly clear that McConnell will continue to hijack the filibuster to block truth, justice and progress. The filibuster was frequently used to block progress on civil rights and voting rights legislation. We cannot let the filibuster stand in the way of progress yet again, and the Senate must do anything it can to pass the For the People Act.

This isnt just a policy disagreement. This is bigger than protecting our freedom to vote, getting big money out of politics, and stopping gerrymandering. This fight is fundamental to our democracy. If we let states take away our freedom to vote by targeting largely Black and Brown voters, what would prevent states from restricting the right to vote for other groups of people?

As the parent of four boys, this fight is personal to me. This fight is about ensuring that our children, grandchildren and future generations can live in a democracy that respects the rule of law and the will of voters, instead of trying to rig the rules, and about the type of government we leave for our children and grandchildren. Do we want them to live in a country in which one party continues to ignore the rule of law and lead us toward authoritarianism? Or do we want to strive for a democracy that encourages everyone to vote? Ill choose democracy each time, and thats why we need the For the People Act immediately before its too late. Our children and our democracy depend on it.

Karen Hobert Flynn is the president of Common Cause. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.
Chinas children may be next in line for COVID-19 vaccines View Photo

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP)  If China is to meet its tentative goal of vaccinating 80% of its population against the coronavirus by the end of the year, tens of millions of children may have to start rolling up their sleeves.

Regulators took the first step last week by approving the use of the countrys Sinovac vaccine for children aged 3 to 17, and on Friday announced the same for the Sinopharm vaccine. No date has been set for the shots to start.

Children have been largely spared the worst of the pandemic, becoming infected less easily than adults and generally showing less severe symptoms when they do catch the virus. But experts say children can still transmit the virus to others and some note that if countries are going to achieve herd immunity through their vaccination campaigns, inoculating children should be part of the plan.

Vaccinating children is an important step forward, said Jin Dong-yan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kongs medical school.

Doing so, however, may be easier said than done for reasons ranging from vaccine hesitancy to vaccine availability.

Even in countries with enough vaccines to go around, some governments are having problems convincing adults that the shots are safe and necessary despite studies demonstrating they are. Such concerns can be amplified when dealing with societys youngest.

Theres also the issue of approval. Few regulators around the world have evaluated the safety of COVID-19 shots in kids, with the majority of shots approved only for adults right now. But the approvals are starting. The United States, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong are all allowing the use of the Pfizer vaccine in children as young as 12.

The Sinovac and Sinopharm announcements could open the way for the vaccines, already in use in dozens of countries from Brazil to Indonesia, to be given to children across the world.

In Thailand, where Sinovac makes much of the countrys vaccine supply, Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul welcomed the news that China had approved emergency use for children.

Once it gets approved, we are ready to provide the vaccine to cover all ages, Anutin said Monday.

Other vaccine makers are also working to expand access to younger people. Moderna is seeking permission to use its shot in children as young as 12, like Pfizer. Both companies have studies underway in even younger children, down to age 6 months.

Another obstacle to vaccinating children is that many countries are still struggling to get enough doses to inoculate their higher-risk adult populations. Thailand, for example, has vaccinated only 4% of its population so far and adult demand for vaccines far outweighs supply.

Right now given the shortages of vaccines, any available vaccine should be placed in age-based prioritization and risk-based prioritization, said Jerome Kim, head of the International Vaccine Institute in Seoul. Its really important to get this vaccine out in the places its needed now.

In many places there are also concerns among the public about the efficacy of the Chinese vaccines versus Western rivals. While efficacy rates cannot be compared directly, owing to the trials being conducted under different conditions, the Western vaccines have shown to be very effective in preventing infection in real world tests. Sinovacs shot has been shown to be effective in preventing severe disease and hospitalization. Sinopharms shot has revealed comparatively less data.

The World Health Organization have approved both vaccines for emergency use in adults aged 18 and older, paving the way for its use in global programs aiming to distribute vaccines to low- and middle-income countries. The WHO has given no indication of when it might approve it for those younger.

Vaccines are often approved separately for adults and children because younger immune systems may react differently to the doses. Experts say inactivated vaccines are generally considered safe for children, as the technology has been in use for a long time, such as in mandatory childhood immunization programs, and have shown low risk.

Nikolai Petrovsky, a vaccine expert at Flinders University in Australia, said that while it is reasonable to assume the vaccines would safe for children, he questioned the necessity of vaccinating them against a virus they are relatively protected from using a vaccine that has yet to show it blocks transmission.

As far as I am aware there is no data to suggest the Sinovac vaccine will block transmission in children, he wrote in an email. Without such evidence we need to ask why we are immunising the children.

China has a population of 1.4 billion, meaning it needs to inoculate 560 million people to reach its goal of 40% vaccination by June and 1.12 billion people to get to the 80% goal. It will be hard to do the latter without vaccinating many of its 254 million children who are younger than 14.

When China starts inoculating children will be determined by the governments National Health Commission in accordance with the epidemic situation, Sinovac CEO Yin Weidong told state broadcaster CCTV last week.

A spokesperson for Sinovac did not respond to a call requesting comment. Chinas National Health Commission directed the AP to a news report that summarized Yins comments.

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Associated Press writers Chalida Ekvitthayavechnukul and Fu Ting in Bangkok contributed to this report.

By HUIZHONG WU

Associated Press
Fight over Canadian oil rages on after pipelines demise View Photo

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP)  The Keystone XL is dead after a 12-year attempt to build the oil pipeline, yet the fight over Canadian crude rages on as emboldened environmentalists target other projects and pressure President Joe Biden to intervene  all while oil imports from the north keep rising.

Biden dealt the fatal blow to the partially built $9 billion Keystone XL in January when he revoked its border-crossing permit issued by former President Donald Trump. On Wednesday, sponsors TC Energy and the province of Alberta gave up and declared the line terminated.

Activists and many scientists had warned that the pipeline would open a new spigot on Canadas oil sands crude  and that burning the heavily polluting fuel would lock in climate change. As the fight escalated into a national debate over fossil fuels, Canadian crude exports to the U.S. steadily increased, driven largely by production from Albertas oil sands region.

Even before the cancellation, environmentalists had turned their attention to other projects, including Enbridge Energys proposal to expand and rebuild its Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota, the target of protests this week that led to the arrest of some 250 activists.

Dont expect these fights to go away anytime soon, said Daniel Raimi, a fellow at Resources for the Future, an energy and environmental think tank in Washington. This is going to encourage environmental advocates to do more of the same.

Bill McKibben, an author who was arrested outside the White House while protesting the Keystone XL in 2011, said its defeat provides a template to kill other pipelines, including Line 3 and the Dakota Access Pipeline from North Dakotas Bakken oil field.

Describing Keystone XL as a carbon bomb, McKibben said Line 3 is the same size and carries the same stuff. How on earth could anyone with a straight face say Line 3 passes the climate test?

Enbridge said the cancellation of Keystone XL will not affect its projects, describing them as designed to meet current energy demand safely and in ways that better protect the environment.

A second TC Energy pipeline network, known simply as Keystone, has been delivering crude from Canadas oil sands region since 2010. The company says the line that runs from Alberta to Illinois, Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast has moved more than 3 billion barrels of oil.

Canada is by far the biggest foreign crude supplier to the U.S., which imported about 3.5 million barrels a day from its neighbor in 2020  61% of all U.S. oil imports.

The flow dropped slightly during the coronavirus pandemic but has largely rebounded. Import volumes have almost doubled since the Keystone XL was first proposed in 2008, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers said Thursday that it expects no immediate effect on production from Keystone XLs cancellation, but the group predicted more oil would be moved to the U.S. by rail.

A series of fiery accidents occurred in the U.S. and Canada after rail shipments of crude increased during an oil boom on the Northern Plains, including a 2013 incident in which 47 people were killed after a runaway train derailed in the Quebec town of Lac-Megantic.

The dispute over Keystone XL and other lines raised diplomatic tensions between the two countries, but Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau adopted a conciliatory tone with Biden, who canceled the pipeline on his first day in the White House.

Canada uses much less oil than it produces, making it a huge exporter, and 98% of those exports go to the U.S., according to the Natural Resources Canada.

Trudeau raised Keystone XL as a top priority with Biden while acknowledging that the president had promised in his campaign to cancel the line.

Both leaders have taken heat at home over Keystone, with Republicans slamming Biden for shutting it down while construction was underway, costing hundreds of jobs. The project was meant to expand oil exports for Canada, which has the third-largest oil reserves in the world, and provincial officials in Alberta wanted Trudeau to do more to save it.

The White House declined to comment on the cancellation. Spokesman Vedant Patel declined to say if Biden plans to address increased crude exports from Canada or intervene in other pipeline disputes.

His action on Keystone signals at least some appetite to get involved, but pipelines that have operated for years would be tougher targets, Raimi said.

Winona LaDuke, executive director of the Indigenous-based environmental group Honor the Earth, called on Biden to withdraw an Army Corps of Engineers permit for Line 3 and to order a new study.

He could stop the project, she said. Dont ask us to be nice to Enbridge. Theyre all over our land. Theyre hurting us.

The Biden administration has been disturbingly quiet on Line 3 and the Dakota Access line, said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. He urged the administration to declare both unacceptable.

Fiercely opposed by Native Americans, the Dakota Access pipeline was the impetus for protests that were quashed by law enforcement. The Biden administration has not sought to stop the line, and its still in court after a judge revoked its permit but allowed oil to keep flowing.

Alberta sank more than $1 billion into Keystone XL last year to kick-start construction. Officials in the province are considering a trade action against the U.S. to seek compensation.

Keystone XLs price tag ballooned as the project languished, increasing from $5.4 billion to $9 billion.

Another question: What to do with pipe already in place at the U.S.-Canada border and other infrastructure along its route.

Jane Kleeb, a pipeline opponent in Nebraska, said state regulators should revoke the permit they approved for a route through the state. Otherwise, she said, TC Energy might try to sell the easements to another company.

Until the state acts, farmers and ranchers will continue to face TC Energy attorneys in court, protecting their property from an eminent domain land grab by a foreign corporation, she said.

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Daly reported from Washington and Flesher from Traverse City, Michigan. Rob Gillies contributed from Toronto and Grant Schulte from Omaha, Nebraska.

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Follow Brown on Twitter: @MatthewBrownAP

By MATTHEW BROWN, JOHN FLESHER AND MATTHEW DALY

Associated Press
Lisbon mayor criticized after Russian dissident data shared View Photo

MADRID (AP)  Lisbons mayor has come under fire after admitting that municipal employees shared with Russian officials personal details of at least three Lisbon-based dissidents who organized protests in support of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

The municipal government obtained the personal data when the Russian activists applied to hold a rally in the Portuguese capital against Navalnys arrest in January, one of the three, Ksenia Ashrafullina, told The Associated Press Friday.

City ordinances require organizers to inform authorities about upcoming protests.

Ashrafullina, who also holds Portuguese nationality, said that names, ID numbers, home addresses and telephone numbers were submitted so that police could contact them if anything went wrong during the event.

But the 36-year-old said that email exchanges in the run-up to the protest that she was shown revealed that municipal employees had forwarded the data to Russian diplomats in Lisbon and Russias Foreign Ministry in Moscow.

Lisbon Mayor Fernando Medina on Thursday apologized for what he said was an unfortunate mistake that he blamed on the municipal chambers workers.

The mistake was due to the bureaucracy of the services that applied to this protest the same protocols as for scores of other protests that take place in the municipality, Medina said, according to comments carried by Portugals Diario de Noticias.

Medinas political opposition has called for the mayor to resign.

In a statement, his office acknowledged the breach of data protection rules but said that it vehemently rejects any accusations and insinuations of complicity with the Russian regime.

It also added that the Lisbon City Hall had asked the Russian government to delete the data.

Other campaigning groups, including an association supporting Palestinians, had criticized the Lisbon municipal chamber in the past for also sharing potentially sensitive data ahead of previous protests, Portuguese media outlets Expresso and Observador reported on Friday.

But the latest development comes at a sensitive time for the opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Navalny, Putins most ardent political foe, was arrested in January and given a 2 1/2-year prison term for violating the terms of a past sentence for embezzlement  which he dismissed as politically motivated.

All organizations founded by Navalny were outlawed this week by a Moscow court that labeled them extremist, effectively crushing the hopes of many of Navalnys allies to run for parliamentary seats later this year.

According to Diario de Noticias, Portuguese authorities were assessing Friday whether the data handover was endangering the activists and whether police protection should be granted to them.

The press office of Portugals Public Security Police didnt respond to an AP request for comment.

In response to a request for comment, the Russian Foreign Ministry pointed to a statement by the Russian embassy in Portugal, which blamed the controversy on attention-seeking activists.

Neither the embassy in Lisbon nor Moscow has any interest in such individuals with unhealthy imagination, the Facebook statement said. It added: The female activist can come home with peace of mind.

Ashrafullina said that she wanted to believe that the protest organizers had been victims of evil by incompetence by a bureaucrat rather than meaning to put them in danger, but that the consequences for Russian dissidents are always present.

I am just a regular citizen who is trying to influence other people around me by saying, well, we shouldnt tolerate injustice and we should protest in order to have a better, a more fair Russia, said Ashrafullina, who has been living in Lisbon for the past eight years.

There are millions of people like myself, but there is petty vengeance, she added. Anything can happen or nothing can happen, its completely random.

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AP journalists Helena Alves in London, Harriet Morris and Daria Litvinova in Moscow contributed to this report.

By ARITZ PARRA

Associated Press
New Melones Reservoir View Photo

Sonora, CA  The Bureau of Reclamation warns that the water will be moving swifter along the lower portions of the Stanislaus River.

The BOR reports that the annual increased flow releases are underway at New Melones Reservoir. They are done this time of year with a stated desire to improve the health of the Delta and its habitat.

It is unclear how long the increased pulse flows will last. They started yesterday and the BOR only says they will last for an extended duration. The increased flow equates to about 1,500 cubic feet per second.

The BOR warns, Increased river flow can create hazardous conditions including higher water levels, fast currents, colder water, and potential entrapment. Portions of the lower Stanislaus River have limited cell phone coverage and hazardous terrain that can delay rescue efforts. Recreationists and visitors should take safety precautions when near or on the lower Stanislaus River during these increased flows.

The increased pulse flows come as California is in the midst of a drought. The Department of Water Resources reports that New Melones is currently at 55-percent of capacity and 87-percent of its historical average for the date.
Markley Van Camp and Robbins View Photo

Sonora, CA  Beginning Monday, June 21, KVML Radio in Sonora, California will introduce a new show to the local airwaves. Its Markley, Van Camp and Robbins.

The Rush Limbaugh Show, which held the weekday timeslot from 9 AM to Noon on KVML for over three decades, is coming to an official end on Friday June 18th. Limbaugh passed away from lung cancer last February.

KVML Program Director Mark Truppner said, Limbaugh was the King of the Talk Radio format as we know it today. There will never be another Limbaugh. Weve mourned his passing as listeners and as an industry for the past several months. The last Rush Limbaugh show will air next week. Its truly the end of an era.

Taking over the Limbaugh time slot, Jamie Markley, David Van Camp and Scott Robbins (MVCR) will carry on a new form of the talk show format. The three men will discuss the biggest stories in news, politics and current events. They will do so with an enjoyable style of intelligence and humor. Together, they will guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with entertaining conversations, fun banter and sharp opinions.

Whether it is political issues from Washington D.C. or noteworthy events in California, MVCR will make sure that you are aware of whats going on  and they will share their takes on every topic.

As far as introductions, Scott Robbins is a radio legend and is the oldest of the three. He started in radio working at Top 40, Rock and Classic Hits stations before shifting over to News/Talk. Scott was enjoying great success hosting the Robbins & Markley show in 2015, when back-to-back heart attacks left him clinging to life for the better part of six weeks and in the hospital for six months. He had lost his voice due to complications with a tracheotomy. He was put on a waiting list for a kidney transplant, and was on dialysis 3 days a week. The doctors didnt know if hed make it out of the hospital, let alone ever get behind a microphone again. Against incredible odds, Scotts kidney function started to come back after a year, along with his voice. After grueling therapy, he could walk again and regained his voice. Many have called him a walking miracle.

And the other two?

David Van Camp on Jamie Markley:

Markley is one Of the most unique people Ive ever met in this business. He looks at and breaks down topics in a way that no one else in the media does. Thats not to say he doesnt know what hes talking about; its to say he is able to take complex topics and drill down to the heart of every topic, and approach it in a way that gets me thinking about it differently. Hes also a walking encyclopedia, whos not afraid to drop random facts at a moments notice.

Jamie Markley on David Van Camp:

Van Camp is interesting. He is a football guy from Texas, a Star Wars nerd, a guitarist, a singer-songwriter, a foodie, and will tell you that a real man eats his steak, rare. Hes truly one of a kind. As a former news guy whos now unleashed, he brings a unique perspective to whats happening in the world. He sees right through peoples bull, and is not afraid to call them out. David works his butt off, leaving no stone unturned. Its funny to hear him go off on his own generation. But if I criticize millennials, hell be quick to defend them and call out my generation (Ive got 20 years on him). I like that. The dudes got spirit. And a whole lot of intelligence and humor. It keeps this gig fun every day.

KVML Radio is broadcast on both 102.7 FM and AM 1450.
Governor tours Arizona fires, calls for special session View Photo

PHOENIX (AP)  Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey on Thursday called a special session of the state Legislature to boost wildfire funding as two large wildfires continue to burn in south-central Arizona.

The Republican governor wants the Legislature to approve extra money to ensure that firefighters have the resources they need across the drought-ravaged state and to address the problems the fires will trigger once they are out.

Now its clear that weve got a lot more work to do and the response will not end even when these fires are out, Ducey said. When this years monsoon rains come, these burned areas are prone to landslides, mudslides and flooding, which pose another threat to this community.

Arizona is not alone in reporting large wildfires this year, as much of the U.S. Southwest is deep into a prolonged drought. The National Interagency Fire Center on Thursday reported that so far this year, 23 large fires have burned across nearly 400 square miles (1,036 square kilometers) of wildlands in nine states. New large fires were reported Wednesday in California, Colorado, Michigan and Utah.

The largest fires currently burning are in Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, states hit exceptionally hard by the drought.

About 1,600 firefighters are battling the two large Arizona fires that broke out early this month and have burned at least 245 square miles (636 square kilometers) of grass, chaparral and pinyon pine forest in rugged terrain. The fires are burning west of Superior, Globe, Miami and other mining towns about 75 miles (120 kilometers) southeast of Phoenix.

The special session is expected to be held next week. The governor did not announce how much money he will request, besides mentioning it will be in the millions.

Ducey made the announcement as he visited south-central Arizona after traveling with House Speaker Rusty Bowers and another lawmaker to the area where crews supported by aircraft are working to keep the fires out of Globe and several other communities in Gila and Pinal counties.

Bowers lost his longtime family retreat home in the blaze on Monday, which was among five structures that were destroyed in one of the fires burning near Globe and Miami. He lives in Mesa, but he said his grandmother was a milkmaid in Globe when she met his grandfather and his family has deep roots in the community.

The governor mentioned our loss. But my wife and I, when we look at the friends and the folks that have tried to help us, that are helping you, this is the character of Globe-Miami right here, and beyond over those hills, and were grateful, Bowers said at a midday news conference. Were grateful for good neighbors.

Bowers talked to the governor Monday and suggested the special session, saying the states wildfire funds were depleted and that he was worried about flooding and mudslides to come.

With whats happened up on the mountain, its gonna be a bad, bad summer if we get a heavy monsoon, which we need, Bowers said Thursday. And so, were here to help. We want to make sure the resources (are there) and work with your emergency management folks to get prepared, to get stationed, to get pre-positioned so that we can really help you in this flooding season thats going to come up.

Ducey rode on an Arizona National Guard Black Hawk helicopter for an aerial tour of the two fires, then was briefed by fire officials and visited a Red Cross shelter for evacuees before holding a news conference.

Whether Ducey actually needed to call a special session is doubtful. The Legislature remains in session as lawmakers try to get enough votes to pass a $12.8 billion budget and massive tax cuts Republican legislative leaders negotiated with Ducey. At least two GOP lawmakers and all Democrats oppose the tax cuts, leading to weeks of no movement on the budget.

Ducey said a special session will help focus lawmakers on a single subject that has bipartisan support even as they are deadlocked on the budget.

Its a way to just stop all the other noise that is necessary in any legislative session, to get big things done and to focus on the fire and the people of Gila County, Ducey said.

The Legislature faces a June 30 deadline to pass a budget for the 2022 fiscal year that begins July 1.

The governors January budget proposal noted that the state has consistently exceeded the $4 million annual appropriation to the state Fire Suppression Fund over the past several years and sought to increase that annual amount by $2.4 million in the coming budget year. The proposal noted that in the previous five budget years firefighting costs exceeded $39 million while appropriations were only about $20 million.

The governor also sought to increase the amount of cash put into an emergency fund he controls and often uses to make up the difference in actual firefighting expenses.

Depending on where fires burn in the state, firefighting efforts may be paid for with either state or federal funding.

Ducey on Wednesday issued an emergency declaration for the two current large wildfires. The declaration will make up to $400,000 available for response efforts.

Crews increased the containment of one called the Telegraph fire burning near Superior and Miami to 40% of its perimeter as of Thursday. Containment of the so-called Mescal fire southeast of Globe was at 36% as of Thursday morning.

The Mescal fire has entered a mop-up stage. But residents shouldnt become complacent because embers could be blown over containment lines and start spot fires, fire management team spokesman David Shell said. If that happens, were off to the races again, he said,

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Associated Press writer Paul Davenport contributed.

By BOB CHRISTIE

Associated Press
Justice Dept., Congress probing Trump seizures of Dems data View Photo

WASHINGTON (AP)  The Justice Departments internal watchdog launched an investigation Friday after revelations that former President Donald Trumps administration secretly seized phone data from at least two House Democrats as part of an aggressive leaks probe. Democrats called the seizures harrowing and an abuse of power.

The announcement by Inspector General Michael Horowitz came shortly after Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco made the request for an internal investigation. Horowitz said he would examine whether the data subpoenaed by the Justice Department and turned over by Apple followed department policy and whether any such uses, or the investigations, were based upon improper considerations.

Horowitz said he would also investigate similar Trump-era seizures of journalists phone records.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and another Democratic member of the panel, California Rep. Eric Swalwell, said Apple notified them last month that their metadata had been subpoenaed and turned over to the Justice Department in 2018, as their committee was investigating the former presidents ties to Russia. Schiff was then the top Democrat on the panel, which was led by Republicans.

While the Justice Department routinely investigates leaked information, including classified intelligence, subpoenaing the private information of members of Congress is extraordinarily rare. The disclosures, first reported by The New York Times, raise questions about what the Justice Departments justification was for spying on another branch of government and whether it was done for political reasons.

In a statement, White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said the Trump administrations conduct is shocking and clearly fits within an appalling trend that represents the opposite of how authority should be used.

Bates said one of President Joe Bidens top reasons for seeking the presidency was his predecessors unjustifiable abuses of power, including the repugnant ways he tried to force his political interests upon the Department of Justice.

The Trump administrations secretive move to gain access to the data came as the president was fuming publicly and privately over investigations  in Congress and by then-special counsel Robert Mueller  into his campaigns ties to Russia. Trump called the probes a witch hunt, regularly criticized Democrats and Mueller on Twitter and dismissed as fake news leaks he found harmful to his agenda. As the investigations swirled around him, he demanded loyalty from a Justice Department he often regarded as his personal law firm.

Swalwell and Schiff were two of the most visible Democrats on the committee during the Russia probe, making frequent appearances on cable news. Trump watched those channels closely, if not obsessively, and seethed over the coverage.

Schiff said the seizures suggest the weaponization of law enforcement by a corrupt president and urged the Justice Department to do a full damage assessment of the conduct of the department over the last four years.

Senate Democratic leaders immediately demanded that former Attorneys General Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions, who both oversaw Trumps leak probes, testify about the secret subpoenas. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin said in a statement that this appalling politicization of the Department of Justice by Donald Trump and his sycophants must be investigated. They said Barr and Sessions are subject to a subpoena if they refuse.

Prosecutors from Trumps Justice Department had subpoenaed Apple for the data. The records of at least 12 people connected to the intelligence panel were eventually shared by the company, including aides, former aides and family members. One was a minor.

The subpoena, issued in February 2018, requested information on 73 phone numbers and 36 email addresses, Apple said. It also included a non-disclosure order that prohibited the company from notifying any of the people, the company said in a statement. The subpoena didnt include any context about the investigation and it would have been virtually impossible for Apple to understand the intent of the desired information without digging through users accounts, the company said.

Apple informed the committee last month that the records had been shared and that the investigation had been closed, but did not give extensive detail. The committee official and the two others with knowledge of the data seizures were granted anonymity to discuss them.

The Justice Department obtained the metadata  often records of calls, texts and locations  but not other content from the devices, like photos, messages or emails. The order prohibiting Apple from discussing the subpoena, or notifying the people whose records were being seized, was extended three times, one each year, Apple said.

We regularly challenge warrants, subpoenas and nondisclosure orders and have made it our policy to inform affected customers of governmental requests about them just as soon as possible, the company statement said.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement that the data seizures appear to be yet another egregious assault on our democracy by the former president.

The news about the politicization of the Trump Administration Justice Department is harrowing, she said.

The committee official said the House intelligence panel will ask Apple to look into whether additional lawmakers were targeted. The Justice Department has not been forthcoming on questions such as whether the investigation was properly predicated and whether it only focused on Democrats, the official said.

It is unclear why Trumps Justice Department would have targeted a minor as part of the probe. Swalwell, confirming that he was told his records were seized, told CNN on Thursday night that he was aware a minor was involved and believed that person was targeted punitively and not for any reason in law.

The Senate Intelligence Committee was not similarly targeted, according to a fourth person who was aware of the probe and granted anonymity to discuss it.

Theres no indication that the Justice Department used the records to prosecute anyone. After some information related to the Russia investigation was declassified and made public during the later years of the Trump administration, some of the prosecutors were concerned that even if they could bring a leak case, conviction would be unlikely, one of the people said.

Federal agents questioned at least one former committee staff member in 2020, the person said, and ultimately, prosecutors werent able to substantiate a case.

The news follows revelations that the Justice Department had secretly seized phone records belonging to reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN as part of criminal leak investigations. Following an outcry from press freedom organizations, the Justice Department announced last week that it would cease the practice of going after journalists sourcing information.

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Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.

By MARY CLARE JALONICK and MICHAEL BALSAMO

Associated Press
Unemployment benefit recipients can no longer claim the COVID-19 pandemic as reason for refusal of employment.

State and federal laws require recipients to actively seek employment. Refusing a suitable offer can result in loss of benefits starting the week of June 26, according to a news release from the Texas Workforce Commission.
JERUSALEM (AP)  In what appear to be the final days of his historic 12-year rule, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not leaving the political stage quietly.

The longtime leader is accusing his opponents of betraying their voters, and some have needed special security protection.

Netanyahu says he is the victim of a deep state conspiracy. He speaks in apocalyptic terms when talking about the country without his leadership.

They are uprooting the good and replacing it with the bad and dangerous, Netanyahu told the conservative Channel 20 TV station this week. I fear for the destiny of the nation.

Such language has made for tense days as Netanyahu and his loyalists make a final desperate push to try to prevent a new government from taking office on Sunday. With his options running out, it has also provided a preview of Netanyahu as opposition leader.

For those who have watched Netanyahu dominate Israeli politics for much of the past quarter century, his recent behavior is familiar.

He frequently describes threats both large and small in stark terms. He has belittled his rivals and thrived by using divide-and-conquer tactics. He paints his Jewish opponents as weak, self-hating leftists, and Arab politicians as a potential fifth column of terrorist sympathizers. He routinely presents himself in grandiose terms as the only person capable of leading the country through its never-ending security challenges.

Under his term, identity politics are at an all-time high, said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a non-partisan think tank.

It is a formula that has served Netanyahu well. He has led the right-wing Likud party with an iron fist for over 15 years, racking up a string of electoral victories that earned him the nickname, King Bibi.

He fended off pressure by President Barack Obama to make concessions to the Palestinians and publicly defied him in 2015 by delivering a speech in Congress against the U.S.-led nuclear agreement with Iran.

Although Netanyahu was unable to block the deal, he was richly rewarded by President Donald Trump, who recognized contested Jerusalem as Israels capital, pulled out of the nuclear agreement and helped broker historic diplomatic pacts between Israel and four Arab nations.

Netanyahu has waged what appears to be a highly successful shadow war against Iran while keeping Israels longstanding conflict with the Palestinians at a slow boil, with the exception of three brief wars with Gaza's militant Hamas rulers.

The situation with the Palestinians today is remarkably the same as when Netanyahu took office, Plesner said. "No major changes in either direction, no annexation and no diplomatic breakthroughs.

But some of Netanyahus tactics now appear to be coming back to haunt him. The new Biden administration has been cool to the Israeli leader, while Netanyahus close relationship with Trump has alienated large segments of the Democratic Party.

At home, Netanyahus magic also has dissipated  in large part due to his trial on corruption charges. He has lashed out at an ever-growing list of perceived enemies: the media, the judiciary, police, centrists, leftists and even hard-line nationalists who were once close allies.

In four consecutive elections since 2019, the once-invincible Netanyahu was unable to secure a parliamentary majority. Facing the unappealing possibility of a fifth consecutive election, eight parties managed to assemble a majority coalition that is set to take office on Sunday.

Israeli politics are usually split between dovish, left-wing parties that seek a negotiated agreement with the Palestinians, and religious and nationalist parties  long led by Netanyahu  that oppose Palestinian independence. If any of the recent elections had centered on the conflict, then right-wing parties alone would have formed a strong, stable majority.

But the Palestinians hardly came up  another legacy of Netanyahu, who has pushed the issue to the sidelines.

Instead, all anyone seemed to talk about was Netanyahu's personality and his legal troubles, which proved to be deeply polarizing. The incoming government includes three small parties led by former Netanyahu aides who had bitter breakups with him, including the presumed prime minister, Naftali Bennett.

Bennett and his right-wing partners even broke a longstanding taboo on allying with Arab parties. A small Islamist party, which Netanyahu had also courted, is to be the first to join a ruling coalition.

Netanyahu and his followers in Likud have grown increasingly desperate. Initially, Netanyahu tried to lure some defectors from his former allies to prevent them from securing a parliamentary majority.

When that failed, he resorted to language similar to that of his friend and benefactor Trump.

We are witnesses to the greatest election fraud in the history of the country, Netanyahu claimed at a Likud meeting this week. He has long dismissed the corruption trial as a witch hunt fueled by fake news, and in the TV interview he said he was being hounded by the deep state.

His supporters have held threatening rallies outside the homes of lawmakers joining the new government. Some of the parliamentarians say they and their families have received death threats, and one said she was recently followed by a mysterious car.

Netanyahus ultra-Orthodox partners have meanwhile cast Bennett as a threat to their religion, with one even calling on him to remove his kippa, the skullcap worn by observant Jews.

Online incitement by Netanyahus followers has grown so bad that several members of the incoming government were assigned bodyguards or even moved to secret locations.

Some Israelis have drawn comparisons to the tensions that led to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in January, while others have pointed to the incitement ahead of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

In a rare public statement, Nadav Argaman, the head of the Shin Bet internal security agency, recently warned of a serious rise and radicalization in violent and inciting discourse" on social media that he said could lead to violence.

Netanyahu has condemned the incitement while noting that he too has been a target.

Late Thursday, Netanyahus Likud Party issued a statement on Twitter in English saying his fraud comments were not directed at the vote counting process and that he has full confidence in it. There is also no question about the peaceful transition of power, it said.

Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at Hebrew University, said she expects the coming months to remain volatile.

Were going to see a very assertive and aggressive head of the opposition, meaning Netanyahu, determined to make sure that this coalition of change would be a short-lived one and that we will have another election as soon as possible, she added.

We dont have even a memory of what normal politics looks like, Talshir said.

___

Associated Press writer Joseph Krauss in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
MADRID (AP)  Lisbon's mayor has come under fire after admitting that municipal employees shared with Russian officials personal details of at least three Lisbon-based dissidents who organized protests in support of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

The municipal government obtained the personal data when the Russian activists applied to hold a rally in the Portuguese capital against Navalnys arrest in January, one of the three, Ksenia Ashrafullina, told The Associated Press Friday.

City ordinances require organizers to inform authorities about upcoming protests.

Ashrafullina, who also holds Portuguese nationality, said that names, ID numbers, home addresses and telephone numbers were submitted so that police could contact them if anything went wrong during the event.

But the 36-year-old said that email exchanges in the run-up to the protest that she was shown revealed that municipal employees had forwarded the data to Russian diplomats in Lisbon and Russias Foreign Ministry in Moscow.

Lisbon Mayor Fernando Medina on Thursday apologized for what he said was an unfortunate mistake that he blamed on the municipal chamber's workers.

The mistake was due to the bureaucracy of the services that applied to this protest the same protocols as for scores of other protests that take place in the municipality, Medina said, according to comments carried by Portugals Diario de Noticias.

Medina's political opposition has called for the mayor to resign.

In a statement, his office acknowledged the breach of data protection rules but said that it vehemently rejects any accusations and insinuations of complicity with the Russian regime.

It also added that the Lisbon City Hall had asked the Russian government to delete the data.

Other campaigning groups, including an association supporting Palestinians, had criticized the Lisbon municipal chamber in the past for also sharing potentially sensitive data ahead of previous protests, Portuguese media outlets Expresso and Observador reported on Friday.

But the latest development comes at a sensitive time for the opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Navalny, Putins most ardent political foe, was arrested in January and given a 2 1/2-year prison term for violating the terms of a past sentence for embezzlement  which he dismissed as politically motivated.

All organizations founded by Navalny were outlawed this week by a Moscow court that labeled them extremist, effectively crushing the hopes of many of Navalnys allies to run for parliamentary seats later this year.

According to Diario de Noticias, Portuguese authorities were assessing Friday whether the data handover was endangering the activists and whether police protection should be granted to them.

The press office of Portugals Public Security Police didnt respond to an AP request for comment.

In response to a request for comment, the Russian Foreign Ministry pointed to a statement by the Russian embassy in Portugal, which blamed the controversy on attention-seeking activists.

Neither the embassy in Lisbon nor Moscow has any interest in such individuals with unhealthy imagination, the Facebook statement said. It added: The female activist can come home with peace of mind.

Ashrafullina said that she wanted to believe that the protest organizers had been victims of evil by incompetence by a bureaucrat rather than meaning to put them in danger, but that the consequences for Russian dissidents are always present.

I am just a regular citizen who is trying to influence other people around me by saying, well, we shouldnt tolerate injustice and we should protest in order to have a better, a more fair Russia, said Ashrafullina, who has been living in Lisbon for the past eight years.

There are millions of people like myself, but there is petty vengeance, she added. Anything can happen or nothing can happen, its completely random.

__

AP journalists Helena Alves in London, Harriet Morris and Daria Litvinova in Moscow contributed to this report.
FRIDAY: Med-Trans flew over to Covenant Hospital, picked up a patient, then flew to Lubbock and back in their Bell 407 jet helicopter. Arlan Schmitz flew in from Portales, New Mexico for fuel, business, and later left for Las Cruces, New Mexico in his Cessna 185 Skywagon. A customer departed for Kanab, Utah in his Beech Bonanza. Mike Dezendorf flew in from Pagosa Springs, Colorado for fuel, then flew to Roanoke in his Bellanca Viking. Cody Williams flew to Carlsbad, New Mexico in his Cessna 172 Skyhawk. Trey Weathers, pilot for Barr Air Patrol, flew in from Bartlesville, Oklahoma for fuel, lunch, then flew to Libby, New Mexico to pick up the pipeline, and later back to Bartlesville in their Cessna 182 Skylane. A customer flew down from Amarillo for the VOR approach, then flew back to Amarillo in his Cirrus SR-22. A customer flew in from Walnut Ridge, Arkansas for fuel, then flew to Page, Arizona in his Beech 58 Baron. A customer flew in from Lancaster for fuel, then flew to Clovis, New Mexico in his Experimental RV-7. Ron Lowe flew locally in his Ercoupe. Tim Hardage flew to Lubbock and Horseshoe Bay in the Cessna Citation Bravo jet. A customer flew in from Brenham for fuel, then flew to Telluride, Colorado in his Cessna 340. Med-Trans flew over to Covenant Hospital, picked up a patient, then flew to Lubbock and back in their Bell 407 jet helicopter.

SATURDAY: Mike Hicks flew in from Lubbock for fuel, then flew back to Lubbock in his Cessna 182 Skylane. A customer flew in from Albuquerque, New Mexico for fuel, then flew to Paris in his Piper Cherokee 180. A customer flew in from Fort Worth for fuel, then left for Santa Fe, New Mexico in his Bell 407 jet helicopter.

SUNDAY: A customer flew in from Lubbock for instrument approaches, and later flew back to Lubbock in his Beech A-36 Bonanza. A customer flew in from Albuquerque, New Mexico for fuel, then flew to Dallas in his Experimental A&M 7. A customer flew in from Temple for fuel, drop off passengers, then flew back to Temple in his Grumman Tiger. A customer flew in from Alamosa, Colorado for fuel, pick up the passengers, then flew back to Alamosa, Colorado in his Piper Cherokee 180. A customer returned from Fort Worth in his Aerostar. A customer flew in from Dallas in his Experimental Kitfox for fuel, and to spend the night. Med-Trans flew to Covenant Hospital and back in their Bell 407 jet helicopter.

MONDAY: Cody Williams gave dual instruction to a student, flying locally in his Cessna 172 Skyhawk. Med-Trans flew to Lubbock in their Bell 407 jet helicopter for some training, returning later in the day. Ron Lowe flew locally in his Ercoupe. A customer departed for Albuquerque, New Mexico in his Experimental Kit Fox. Brian Rose and a customer flew in from Lubbock for fuel, then flew back to Lubbock in a Piper Saratoga. A customer flew in from Denver, Colorado for fuel, then flew to San Angelo and Fort Worth in his Cessna 206 Turbo Stationair. A customer flew in from Durango, Colorado for fuel, then flew to Mineral Wells and Grand Prairie in his Eurocopter BK-117 jet helicopter. Med-Trans flew to Dimmitt, picked up a patient, then flew to Lubbock and back in their Bell 407 jet helicopter. A customer flew in from Telluride, Colorado for fuel, then left for Houston in his Cessna 340.

TUESDAY: Cody Williams gave dual instruction to Landry Thornton and Cole Martin, flying locally in his Cessna 172 Skyhawk. A customer flew in from McKinney for fuel, then flew to Durango, Colorado in his Experimental RV-10. Bell Textron flew in from Amarillo for a couple of touch and goes, then flew back to Amarillo in their V-22 Osprey Tiltrotor jet helicopter. Hawkeye Helicopter flew in from Greeley, Colorado and Borger in their Cessna 182 Skylane for fuel, and to spend the night. A customer flew in from Shallowater for fuel, then flew back to Lubbock in his Avipro Bearhawk. Med-Trans flew locally for flight training in their Bell 407 jet helicopter. Eagle Med flew up from Lubbock to pick up a patient, then flew to Odessa in their Beech 200 King Air prop jet. A customer flew in from Cortez, Colorado in his Piper Navajo for fuel, and to spend the night.

WEDNESDAY: Hawkeye Helicopter departed for the Denver City area to patrol pipeline, and later flew back to Greeley, Colorado in their Cessna 182 Skylane. A customer flew in from Liberal, Kansas and Dumas to pick up a passenger, then flew to Austin in his Cessna 441 Conquest II prop jet. A customer flew in from Mesquite, Nevada for a quick turn on fuel, then flew to New Orleans, Louisiana in his Eclipse 500 jet. A customer departed for Meridian, Mississippi in his Piper Navajo. Med-Trans flew up to Kress, picked up a patient, then flew to Lubbock and back in their Bell 407 jet helicopter. A customer flew in from Reno, Nevada for a quick turn on fuel, then flew to in his Aero Vodochody L-39 Albatros jet. Danak Spradlin flew in from Petersburg and Lubbock on business, and later back to Petersburg in his Turbine 602 Air Tractor prop jet. A customer flew in from Slaton for a touch and go, then flew back to Slaton in his Cessna 172 Skyhawk. Med-Trans flew locally for training purposes in their Bell 407 jet helicopter. A customer flew in from Dallas Addison in his Beech V-35A Bonanza for fuel, and to spend the night.

THURSDAY: A customer flew in from Denton for fuel, then headed for Flagstaff, Arizona in his Beech Bonanza. A customer departed for Bullhead City, Arizona in his Beech V-35A Bonanza. A customer flew in from Austin to drop off a passenger, then flew to Dumas and Liberal, Kansas in his Cessna 441 Conquest II prop jet. Aurora Cooperative flew in from Aurora, Nebraska for fuel, business, and later to Perryton and Aurora in their Pilatus PC-12 prop jet. Med-Trans flew to Littlefield, picked up a patient, then flew to Lubbock and back in their Bell 407 jet helicopter. Cody Williams gave dual instruction to a student, flying locally in his Cessna 172 Skyhawk. John Speck flew locally in his Beech Bonanza. A customer flew in from Austin and San Antonio for fuel, drop off two dogs, then back to Austin in his Cirrus SR-22. A customer flew in from Colorado Springs, Colorado for fuel, then flew to Horseshoe Bay in his Piper Saratoga. A customer flew to Tulsa, Oklahoma in his Aerostar. A customer flew up from Lubbock for the GPS approaches, then flew back to Lubbock in his Pilatus PC-12 prop jet. Med-Trans flew to Clovis, New Mexico and back in their Bell 407 jet helicopter. A customer flew in from Tulsa, Oklahoma for fuel, then flew to El Paso in his Cessna 172 Skyhawk. A customer flew in from Denton for fuel, then flew to Amarillo and back to Denton in his Beech Bonanza. A customer flew in from El Paso in her Diamond 40 for fuel, and to spend the night. Med-Trans flew to Dimmitt, picked up a patient, then flew to Amarillo and back in their Bell 407 jet helicopter.
WALLINGFORD  Highland Elementary School Principal Victoria Reed is retiring at the end of the month, leaving a legacy of pride in the school she helmed for 20 years.

Reed recalled the 50th birthday of the school in 2008, when the building housed grades K-5.

That was an awesome day, she said Wednesday while sitting outside, near a tree with a 50th anniversary marker stone at its base.

Each grade level took a decade and performed using the towns bandshell stage, she said. We had retirees, former principals come back, and they were in the audience, and then we had a special reception for them.

Fourth- and fifth-grade students made a colorful mosaic art piece of the school mascot  a tiger  that was permanently installed in the cafeteria.

Literacy projects and events were a staple of her time as principal.

I'll miss doing our reading programs and our curriculum nights, she said. Of course we couldn't do those things, when the parents come in at night with their children, because of COVID, but I'll miss some of those there. Theyre a little bit of work, but they're fun, and parents and students enjoy them, so I'll miss that.

Reed has been principal of the pre-K-2 school since 2001 and was the school districts administrator of the year in 2013. Her last day is slated for June 30.

The Board of Education appointed Emily Banach, Rock Hill Elementary Schools social worker, as the new Highland principal in April.

Arguably the biggest change to Wallingford schools came 10 years ago, when the district created separate elementary schools for grades K-2 and grades 3-5.

Reed oversaw the transition of Highland from a K-5 school to a sister school partnership, with Mary G. Fritz Elementary School  then called Yalesville Elementary School  taking on grades 3-5.

She worked closely with Kent Hurlburt, who was Yalesvilles principal, as students, staff and PTOs merged with the theme Two Schools, One Community.

There were some tears at the end, she said, of teachers that had to leave that were teaching grades 3, 4 and 5, and then I'm sure there were tears for the teachers at the other school coming here.

Since the transition, Reed has focused on making Highland an early learning building.

I added on pre-K, she said. First it was part time, and now I have two full-time classes. We're in (a nationally) accredited program here, and we're family.

Active in professional groups

Reed grew up in in Goshen, New York, and earned her undergraduate degree at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont. She earned a master's degree from SUNY New Paltz and another master's degree from Teachers College, Columbia University.

She taught first and second grade in Newburgh, New York, before becoming assistant principal at Mary Morrisson Elementary School in Groton, where Naval Submarine Base New London is located.

At the time, 98 percent of the students were Navy dependents, she said, so we had a lot of transitions.

Students came from all over, she said, transferring from Department of Defense schools wherever there is a submarine base, like Reykjavik, Iceland, Kings Bay, Georgia, Bremerton, Washington and Kittery, Maine.

It was a very good experience, she said.

Reed is active in associations for education professionals, serving on the board of directors of the Connecticut Association of Schools, a state association for schools and principals.

Through that group, she became active with the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP), and earlier this year concluded a three-year term on its board of directors, representing all of the principals in New England.

Participation in both of those associations has provided a wealth of opportunities for me to meet lots of well-known educators in the field, to get to know principals in other states, she said.

Reed visited Washington, D.C., many times with NAESPs Connecticut group

(We) would go and we'd set up appointments with the Connecticut congressional delegation, she said. We just did a virtual one in March, because no one's allowed at the Capitol right now. That has been a joy, to be down there and to let people know the needs of principals, the issues in education, funding and the usual.

In 2018, Reed participated in an NAESP international conference in South Africa.

I took a little vacation and went on safari, she said, but I also got to visit the public schools, and then I visited the American International School. It was the most amazing experience. It was a long flight, but it was well worth it.

In July, Reed plans to attend the NAESP conference in Chicago for the 100th anniversary of the associations founding.

Respect, kindness

Reed is one of two minority administrators in Wallingford, along with Sashi Govin, director of Wallingford Adult Education.

She said she hopes the district works to increase diversity among staff across the board.

I'm sure they're going to be working hard to bring in more diverse candidates, as far as in the teaching staff and non-certified staff as well, she said, and I know that personnel is working hard to do that.

Reed lives in Southington, and said she is looking forward to doing home improvement projects in her retirement.

I don't know what the future holds, she said. I'm not taking anything off the table, but I haven't made any firm decisions.

School Superintendent Salvatore Menzo, who is also departing Wallingford at the end of the month, said this week that Reed is an exceptional professional with passion for her students, families, and staff.

Vickie has worked so hard to create a culture characterized by respect and kindness, Menzo said. I will always remember her incredibly moving Veterans Day ceremonies. Each year, I looked forward to being a part of this event.

Reed will also be remembered for Highlands annual reading programs.

She took so much pride in developing a theme with which students would connect, he said.

On a personal note, he said, Vickie has the most contagious laugh that everyone will miss.

I wish her all the best in retirement, he said. I hope that she remains involved in education in the state and nationally. She has so much more to offer students, families, and staff.

Reed is among several long-time Wallingford schools employees to retire this year, including Highlands speech-language pathologist, Patricia Gormley, who has been with the district since 1987.

A going-away party is planned for Friday morning for Reed and Gormley, called Donut Miss Us Too Much with refreshments provided by Neils Donuts.

More than 300 students and 60 staff members participated in a countdown over the last 20 days of school, and decorated Reeds office with posters, signs, souvenirs, crafts and trinkets.

Her office is completely stuffed with tokens of appreciation and it is a sight to see, said Liza Kennedy, a second-grade teacher at Highland.

LTakores@record-journal.com203-317-2212Twitter: @LCTakores
San Antonio, TX. (May 10, 2020)  For book lovers, COVID-19 quarantine gave them the perfect reason to read more. While ZOOM and TEAMS meetings may have led to what is referred to as digital fatigue, it seems to have had the opposite effect on people purchasing printed books.



According to Statista.com, a leading provider of market and consumer data, 2020 print sales rose 8.2 percent over 2019, the most significant annual year-on-year increase since 2010.



Now that people can get out of the house and do something other than sitting on the couch reading, what are they doing with all those books taking up space on their shelves and bedside tables?



As Gunn Auto Groups Gunn Gives corps of volunteers recently found out, they are donating them.



Gunn Auto Group and KSAT-12 TV partnered to hold a book drive to provide gently read books, both paperback and hardbound, new homes with military service members serving our country throughout the world, as well as those recuperating in Veterans hospitals and living in VA homes. San Antonio, known as Military City USA, has been home to a military presence for close to 300 years and has one of the nations largest active and retired military populations.



San Antonians were encouraged to drop off books at all Gunn Auto dealerships and collision centers in San Antonio and Denton, Texas.



This project was important to the Gunn family for many reasons. Gunn Auto Groups founder, Pop Gunn, was a Lt. Colonel in the Army who served during World War II in the 13th Armored Division under General George S. Patton and was awarded the Bronze Star.



His son, Curtis C. Gunn, Jr., was a Navy Lieutenant serving as a navigator and operations officer on the destroyer USS Joseph Boyd. Currently, the Gunn Auto Group collectively employs more than 50 former service members and reservists.



Gunn knows firsthand the sacrifices made by our military service members and truly appreciates their service to our great nation, said Sean Gunn, CEO, Gunn Auto Group. This book drive is just one of the many ways we support our military heroes, but weve never seen this much community involvement before. It just proves that San Antonio truly is Military City USA.



The drive took place April 5-10, 2021 with the goal of collecting 3,000 books. Due to the overwhelming response from San Antonio, Gunn Gives volunteers sorted, boxed, and shipped 544 boxes weighing more than 12,000 pounds which equate to 25,000 books that have been shipped to many foreign locations, including Afghanistan, Canada, Iraq, Korea, Kuwait, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. Closer to home, books shipped to Travis AFB, Ft. Bliss, the 7-17 Air Cavalry Squadron, the 61st Quartermaster Battalion at Ft. Hood, and Travis Fisher House. Veteran medical centers, including John Pershing VAMC and Carl Vinson VAMC received books. More books went to those serving on US aircraft carriers, the USS Ronald Reagan and the USS Iwo Jima, to name a few.





About Gunn Automotive Group

What began as a horse-drawn wagon company more than 100-years ago has evolved into a third-generation, locally owned automotive company representing six of the top-selling automobile brands; Acura, Buick, Chevrolet, GMC, Honda, and Nissan. The Gunn Automotive Group employs approximately 600. Their philanthropic arm, Gunn Gives, has provided millions of dollars to nonprofit organizations since its inception.

-END


Designing concert clothes for a rock star is not a simple task, especially if that rock star is as specific as Mick Jagger about the message he wants to send.

So back in 2013 when designer LWren Scott, Jaggers then-partner, was creating designs for the Rolling Stones frontman to wear at the bands historic first performance at the Glastonbury Festival, Jagger wanted something special.

Seeing the show as a culmination of our British heritage, he asked for something very British  an oak leaf. And so Scott designed a glittery green sequined jacket based on an oak leaf pattern, something she jokingly called glamouflage. Jagger said later that few people recognized the oak leaf when he sauntered onstage to open with Jumpin Jack Flash  But I did. Its important.

The jacket is one of two Jagger items going on sale this week at Christies in London as part of the LWren Scott Collection, featuring 55 creations from the late designer who took her own life in 2014. Included are red-carpet gowns worn by the likes of Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Jessica Lange, Sarah Jessica Parker  and Scott herself.

Proceeds will go to the LWren Scott MA Fashion Scholarship at Central Saint Martins, set up by Jagger in 2015 to help one student each year reach their potential in the highly competitive environment of fashion.

The online sale, which lasts until July 1, is a celebration of LWrens remarkable work and a wonderful opportunity for the public to see and enjoy her creations, Jagger said in a statement. LWren was a talented and passionate designer with a keen eye for detail... She created beautiful pieces that were the epitome of elegance and sophistication, yet with a contemporary feel.

The two Jagger jackets, each expected by Christies to sell for 20,000-30,000 pounds, also include a blue sequined number with a butterfly motif, worn at the Hyde Park concert of the bands 50 & Counting tour in 2013. Chosen by Jagger for the song Miss You, it commemorated the moment the Stones honored late bandmate Brian Jones in Hyde Park in 1969, just two days after his death, when real butterflies were released into the air.

Scott was raised in Roy, Utah, then left as a teenager to become a model in Paris and later a top Hollywood stylist and costume designer before launching her label in 2006 with a collection based on the little black dress. She was known for her elegant creations in lush fabrics, as well as her high-end fashion shows  more like intimate lunches. Among her many influential customers was former first lady Michelle Obama.

The 6-foot-3 designer cut a striking figure on red carpets herself, and several items she wore are included in the Christie's collection: a black silk crepe knee-length dress with scarlet wisteria embroidery, and an embroidered kimono tailcoat ensemble in ivory silk crepe.

The sale also features a blue sequined gown worn by Tina Fey to host the Golden Globes in 2013, along with a lace cocktail dress Fey wore the same night on the red carpet. Theres also a gown worn by Lange, embroidered and sequined from neck to hem with peony blooms in shades of red.

A pink lace evening gown with rhinestone shoulder embellishments was worn by Cruz, who recounts that she met Scott when she was still a stylist and they immediately connected. She was a true visionary and a beautiful soul, Cruz said in a statement released by Christies.

Also featured is a rainbow-striped, silk cocktail dress worn by Parker, who hailed Scotts permanent romanticism and predicted: She will be a beacon for young, dreaming designers.

A number of gowns worn by Kidman highlight her long association with Scott, including a blush sequined sheath and a black-and-gold sequined gown she wore to the 2013 Oscars.

We actually have about 12 looks that were worn by Nicole Kidman, and she has said herself that there wasnt one LWren Scott look that she could pick as her favorite  there were just so many," said Caitlin Yates, of Christie's, who is working on the collection. "They were quite similar in build and structure, and Kidman said once that whatever LWren Scott will wear, I will wear.

Yates added that Scott was pure luxury in the materials that she used. You would never see synthetic fabrics... it was always silk and satin. And I think that is very reflective in this collection. The material is absolutely phenomenal and everything has been hand done.

The clothes, on public view at Christies from June 11 to June 16, are being sold online until July 1.

___

Noveck reported from New York. AP video journalist Cristina Jaleru in London contributed to this report.
Robin Jerstad

During the month of June, many organizations and companies sport a rainbow-themed logo, sell colorful merchandise, or host events recognizing Pride. For the first time ever, the San Antonio Zoo will get in on the celebrations.

The zoos new Night Out At The Zoo event will be an opportunity for members of the LGBTQ+ community, along with their friends, family, and allies, to explore the zoo during evening hours. The event, which will be held Friday, June 25 from 6 to 9 p.m., will include live music, animal encounters, vendors, and more.
Elotitos Corn Bar

Elote en vaso (we'll translate for y'all: corn in a cup) is just one of those foods that you either love or hate.

Not because its not lacking in flavor, but because theres so many different ways to make it  or at least theres a solid bit of variety in how its made and sold. From the type of corn thats used and the level of spiciness to the amount of crema and other puro-approved toppings, theres a lot to get right (or wrong).
Update: In true San Antonio fashion, people started lining up at 9 a.m. to get their Turkey Leg Hut orders in, the company says. That's two hours before start time. The Houston restaurant, which is hosting a weekend pop-up event, shared video showing a line stretching through the Freeman Coliseum parking lot.

Original story is below:

Houston's famed Turkey Leg Hut is officially in San Antonio for the weekend.

The popular Houston restaurant, known for over-the-top turkey legs loved by celebrities like James Harden, Kevin Hart and 50 Cent, is ready to fill in and fill up San Antonio on the buzzworthy bites.

RELATED: Houston's famed Turkey Leg Hut is coming to San Antonio

The Houston crowd usually flocks to the brick and mortar located in the city's Third Ward. Though the San Antonio pop-up is serving out of TLH Express, the food truck, the attention is expected to rival that of our I-10 neighbors.

Courtesy, Turkey Leg Hut

READ MORE FROM MADALYN: Houston's famed Turkey Leg Hut is coming to San Antonio

We rounded up a few key details to give you a leg up on the occasion. See below for what to know before you go.

When can I get it? Turkey Leg Hut Matt Young Turkey Leg Hut will serve San Antonio 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday through Sunday.

Where exactly at Freeman Coliseum? Turkey Leg Hut, the popular Houston restaurant, known for over-the-top turkey legs, will host a pop-up weekend event at the Freeman Coliseum Parking Lot from June 11-13. Courtesy, Turkey Leg Hut The Turkey Leg Express is parked in Lot 9 of the Freeman Coliseum (3201 E Houston Street) for the weekend. For easier access, guests should enter through Gate A on East Houston Street.
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP)  Efforts by Cambodia to assuage U.S. concerns about China's right to use a naval base on the Gulf of Thailand suffered a setback Friday when an American diplomat invited to inspect it was allowed only limited access, according to the U.S. Embassy.

The embassy said Defense Attache Col. Marcus M. Ferrara traveled to the Ream Naval Base in coordination with Cambodian authorities, but was denied full access to the facility, leading him to cut short his visit and ask for it to be rescheduled without any limits to what he could see.

Cambodian government spokesman Phay Siphan said Cambodia fulfilled its commitment to allow a visit as requested, and if U.S. officials were not satisfied, they could request another visit as long as it did not involve spying or violating Cambodian sovereignty.

Officials of Cambodia's Defense Ministry hit back at the embassy's statement.

They are pretending. They should know that the kingdom has sovereignty and laws, but they have their hidden agendas for geopolitical gains, Gen. Nem Sowath, special adviser to Defense Minister Tea Banh, was quoted as saying by Fresh News, a website close to the government. What the embassy wrote has violated the truth.

Fresh News quoted Lt. Gen. Suon Samnang, the deputy director of the Defense Ministrys foreign affairs department who accompanied Ferrara, as saying that after he was taken to several sites, He tried to search for other places that were not necessary and not in their requests.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen agreed in a June 1 meeting with visiting U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman to allow the embassys defense attache to make regular visits to the base, the embassy said in a statement.

An earlier State Department statement about Shermans visit said she expressed serious concerns about Chinas military presence and construction of facilities at the base and sought clarification of why two U.S.-funded buildings there had been demolished without notification or explanation.

Sherman said a Chinese military base in Cambodia would undermine its sovereignty, threaten regional security, and negatively impact U.S.-Cambodia relations, the statement said.

Hun Sen and other Cambodian officials have consistently maintained that China has been given no special privileges at the base.

Sherman later told journalists she had candid conversations with Hun Sen about the direction the country is headed, including Chinas presence at Ream and Cambodia's human rights and anti-democratic record. Hun Sen has been in power since 1985 and has a history of repression that in the past few years has focused on intimidation through the legal system of his critics and political opponents.

Controversy over the Ream Naval Base sprang up two years ago when The Wall Street Journal reported that an early draft of a reputed agreement seen by U.S. officials would allow China 30-year use of the base, where it would be able to post military personnel, store weapons and berth warships.

China is Cambodias biggest investor and closest political partner. Beijings support allows Cambodia to disregard Western concerns about its poor record in human and political rights, and in turn Cambodia generally supports Beijings geopolitical positions on issues such as its territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Basing rights in Cambodia would extend Beijings strategic military profile considerably and tilt the regional balance of power, putting pressure on countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations whose security concerns historically been aligned more closely with the United States.

Routine and frequent visits by U.S. and other foreign military attaches to Ream Naval Base can be an important step towards greater transparency and mutual trust, the U.S. Embassy statement said.

Cambodian government spokesman Phay Siphan said his country has shown transparency and accountability by responding to the U.S. request for a visit.
PORTLAND, Maine (AP)  The estate of pop artist Robert Indiana has reached a settlement that keeps intact a longstanding relationship with Morgan Art Foundation, which holds the copyright for his iconic 1960s LOVE series, to promote and preserve his work, officials said Friday.

New York-based Morgan Art Foundation intends to work with the Maine-based Star of Hope Foundation, which aims to transform Indianas island home into a museum to celebrate his work.

While the museum takes shape, the two organizations will work to display Indiana's artwork at venues around the country.

Weve done a lot of good stuff, but its overshadowed by the litigation, said Larry Sterrs, chair of the Star of Hope Foundation. Completion of the museum is likely years away, he said.

Indianas estate, which is valued at upward of $80 million, had been entangled in a lawsuit brought by Morgan Art Foundation. The lawsuit was filed the day before Indianas death on May 19, 2018, at age 89 on Vinalhaven Island, 15 miles (25 kilometers) off Rockland, Maine.

It accused the reclusive artist's caretaker and an art publisher of taking advantage of Indiana and producing forgeries  accusations the pair denied. That led to more claims and counter claims.

Under the agreement, Morgan dropped its lawsuit against the estate and Indianas caretaker but not against the art publisher.

It also doesnt resolve a case brought by Maines attorney general, who claims the estate paid excessive legal fees during litigation. That lawsuit contends $3.7 million paid to four law firms and about $400,000 collected by the estates personal representative were excessive.

Indiana created a lifetime of art but hes best known for LOVE, spelled with two letters to a line and with a tilted O.

Its been transformed into sculptures around the world, and was featured on a U.S. postage stamp.

The goal is display such artwork in a home museum that's going to be created at Indiana's former residence in a converted Odd Fellows Hall, a Victorian-style building, on Vinalhaven. Indiana also had several other properties that could be utilized for the art museum, art education and artist-in-residency programs, Sterrs said.

In the meantime, though, Morgan Art Foundation and the Star of Hope Foundation will work together to get the artwork in front of people at venues around the world, Sterrs said. Most of the estate's $80 million worth cited in court documents comes from the art collection.

The future is bright for the market and legacy of Robert Indiana, and the estate is pleased to have helped create this success, said James Brannan, a Rockland attorney for the estate.
BOISE, Idaho (AP)  A man who stabbed nine people at a toddler's birthday party  killing the 3-year-old birthday girl and leaving several others gravely injured  will spend the rest of his life in prison for the crimes, a judge said on Thursday.

Fourth District Judge Nancy Baskin sentenced Timmy Kinner to two life terms in prison plus another 120 years on Thursday after a heart-wrenching hearing that included a grim description of the attack and a recording of a 911 call made by a terrified 8-year-old boy who had been stabbed. At one point, the slain toddler's mother threw a water bottle and tissues at Kinner, prompting court officers to briefly clear the courtroom.

The judge said she didn't think Kinner could ever safely be released into society, and said his sentence needed to be balanced against the lifetime of pain that his surviving victims are experiencing.

Timmy Kinner, 33, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and 11 other counts including aggravated assault, aggravated battery and use of a deadly weapon in March as part of a plea deal with prosecutors, who agreed not to seek the death penalty.

The mass stabbing on June 30, 2018, was among the most brutal in Boise's history, police said at the time. The victims were all refugees from Syria, Iraq and Ethiopia who fled conflict in their homelands and were resettled in Boise in hopes of a safer life. The attack left many with life-altering injuries.

Kinner, a homeless man originally from Tennessee with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, had been staying at the Boise apartment complex with a new acquaintance when he was asked to leave because of bad behavior. Police said he returned the next day and committed the mass stabbing, targeting a group that was outside the complex at the toddler's birthday party.

Little Ruya Kadir was turning 3 and her mother Bitifuu Kadir had just gone inside the complex to get the girl's birthday cake when the attack began. Prosecutor Dan Dinger said a young boy was the first to be stabbed, followed by his aunt who was holding her 2-year-old daughter in her arms. The aunt was stabbed more than a dozen times, and the toddler was stabbed in the chest.

The young boy, meanwhile, ran for help, warning others and calling 911.

Meanwhile, Kinner chased the boy's mother as she fled with her 6-year-old daughter. Dinger said Kinner managed to stab both the mother and daughter and slashed a 7-year-old child across the face. At one point Kinner entered an apartment, and a man was able to force him out of the building despite being stabbed multiple times.

Kinner next attacked a 12-year-old boy, and at some point, attacked Ruya.

He picks her up, he stabs her in the heart, and he throws her to the ground, Dinger said.

Kinner also stabbed Ruya's mother, Bitifuu Kadir, as well as the mother of the 7-year-old child who was slashed in the face. He eventually fled the scene. Police found the knife in a nearby canal.

After Dinger described the attack on Ruya, the child's mother screamed and threw a water bottle and tissue box at Kinner. She repeatedly called Ruya's name as court staffers tried to subdue her. Kinner wasn't hit by the thrown items.

Earlier, Kadir told the court that she wished Kinner had killed her instead, describing her daughter as a very happy girl.

She learned of the attack when a child ran into her apartment.

My daughter was laying by the door. Her eyes were open, my daughters eyes were open, she said. That day I tried to close her eyes. I just didnt want to see her open-eyed. I ran. I just couldnt make it. I just could not rescue her.

Kadir said she would regularly go to the cemetery in the morning to say hello to Ruya, and return at night to say goodnight. She vowed to outlive Kinner.

I will go to where you are buried and I will spit on it, she told him, but that will not bring my daughter back.

Kinner has a history of violent behavior, including a shooting and a slashing incident, Dinger said.

He is a violent person, and he is not afraid to lash out at others, Dinger told the judge.

Defense attorney David Smethers said Kinner was in the midst of a psychotic episode when he attacked the group. He called Julia Yackel, a capital mitigation specialist who researched Kinner's history and childhood, to describe his chaotic upbringing and troubled adulthood.

Yackel said Kinner and his younger siblings were found abandoned in a storage unit when Kinner was just 2, and that he acted as a caretaker to his siblings in early childhood. Both parents were addicted to drugs, she said. As an adult he was committed to a mental health facility for a time because police determined he was a danger to himself and others, Yackel said, but was released without being psychiatric medication.

He was really homeless and flying solo with a major mental illness, Yackel said.

Kinner apologized for the pain he caused, and said he hopes the victims understand that he was having a mental breakdown and didn't intend to attack anyone.

I didnt have any plans to throw my life away and I definitely didnt have any plans to hurt these people, Kinner said. I hate that I took their baby away from them.
While the social media scrollers may be getting a kick out of a Clark High School graduation that has gone viral, Northside Independent School District was less than amused.

The pomp and circumstance was interrupted during the June 8 event when the student unzipped the black gown to reveal a lace outfit beneath then carried out an uproarious performance, tossing confetti and blowing kisses to the crowd, before being directed off stage by beleaguered faculty members. Those watching the live feed of the ceremony provided by the district captured screen recordings of the situation.

A Facebook share of the moment picked up more than a 1,000 reactions. The original person who posted the video said the graduate "stole the whole damn show." The clip also made its way to TikTok, where users inserted their commentary, most of which were lighthearted.

RELATED: Somerset graduate goes viral with Toy Story-inspired graduation photo

District spokesman Barry Perez says each NISD high school hosted rehearsals where students were made aware of procedures, including behavioral expectations.

Perez is unable to share disciplinary actions taken towards individual students, but says the disruption was not overlooked.

"While we can not discuss individual student discipline, administrative action was taken to address the disruption," he says.

The graduate has not received their diploma. It's unclear if this is due to the student being ushered off stage before it was handed over or is part of the "action" taken.

READ MORE FROM MADALYN: San Antonio-area district responds to controversy behind Mexican flag use at graduation ceremony

"It is my understanding that the diploma was not issued at the graduation event and remains with the campus," Perez adds. "Graduates receive their diploma cover on stage. After they have walked the stage and have their name announced, they receive their actual diploma as they exit the stage."

NISD wrapped up its commencement ceremony schedule on Thursday with Jay High School, in what seems to be an interruption-free event.

"Graduation ceremonies are family events intended to honor and celebrate the many achievements of our graduates," Perez says. "Disruptions detract from this celebratory environment. However, we will not allow the actions of one individual to take away from how proud we are of the Graduates of 2021."
International

EU Parliament calls for more sanctions on Belarus

Strasbourg, Jun 11 (IANS) | Publish Date: 6/11/2021 1:47:21 PM IST

Following the May 23 forced landing of a Ryanair plane travelling between two EU capitals and the arrest of blogger Roman Protasevich in Belarus, the European Parliament has called for further sanctions on the hardline regime in Minsk.

Punitive measures should be taken against the crude oil-processing industry, the production of petroleum products, and the potash, steel and wood-processing industries, it said in a resolution adopted on Thursday.

In addition, cooperation with state-owned Belarusian banks should be stopped, reports dpa news agency.

Consideration should also be given to temporarily excluding Belarus from the Swift payment system.

Josep Borrell, the EUs foreign affairs commissioner, said during Tuesdays plenary debate that he hoped the blocs member states would adopt further punitive measures on Belarus at the next summit. For the first time, targeted economic sanctions had been agreed upon.

Belarusian authorities forced the Ryanair passenger plane on its way from Athens to Vilnius to make a stopover in Minsk and arrested the government critic Protasevich and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega on board.

The EU then reimposed sanctions on the former Soviet republic. Since last Saturday, Belarusian airlines are no longer allowed to fly into the blocs airspace.

Due to the ongoing repression of the democracy movement in Belarus, the EU had already adopted several packages of sanctions targeting President Alexander Lukashenkos supporters last year.

Russias possible role in the case should be investigated and, if necessary, sanctions imposed on those responsible, they said.

MEPs also backed a call by Belarusian opposition activist Svetlana Tikhanovskaya for the establishment of an international criminal court to hold the leadership in Minsk accountable.
By Daniel Baldwin Hess, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, University at Buffalo, and Jeffrey Rehler, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University at Buffalo. Originally published at The Conversation.

For urban planners, parking rules established decades ago have become a contentious 21st-century challenge. Parking takes up about one-third of land area in U.S. cities; nationwide, there are an estimated eight parking spaces for every car.

In 2017 Buffalo, New York, became the first U.S. city to stop requiring development projects to include at least a minimum amount of parking. Other cities followed, including Hartford, Connecticut, and Santa Monica, California. Many cities are now considering reforms, and a bill pending before the California Legislature would remove minimums for new buildings near public transportation across the Golden State.

But despite growing support for parking reform, there is little data showing how such changes affect urban development. As part of our work on urban planning, we quantified changes in construction during the first two years after Buffalo adopted its new Green Code, repealing minimum parking requirements citywide.

We found that the Green Code is changing Buffalos urban form in ways that had been difficult, if not impossible, under former zoning rules. As local leaders seek to reenergize the urban core and spark a post-industrial renaissance, public transit is now a priority. Inactive storefronts, underutilized historic structures and former industrial buildings are being rehabilitated, and vacant parcels are being developed in fragmented neighborhoods.

Most Building Codes Prioritize Cars

With rapid post-World War II development and an explosion in car ownership, cities and towns across the U.S. introduced minimum parking requirements during the 1950s. These zoning ordinances required new buildings to include off-street parking lots. The mandates remain nearly universal across America, raising real estate prices, bringing more cars into cities, increasing air pollution and carbon emissions and lowering use of public transportation.

Parking standards were created arbitrarily, without adequate data. Zoning laws usually require one parking space per apartment, one per 300 square feet of commercial development and one per 100 square feet for restaurants. For context, a parking space measures 160 square feet on average, plus additional area for driveways and driving lanes, so an eaterys parking lot may be three times the size of its dining area.

Since the 2005 publication of UCLA urban planning scholar Donald Shoups The High Cost of Free Parking, many people have begun to question the amount of precious urban land currently used for storing cars. Planners, developers, urbanistsand nonprofits are now offering market-driven strategies to realign off-street parking supply and demand.

Prioritizing cars limits space for housing, businesses, parks and other land uses that benefit citizens and contribute to local tax bases. It also increases construction costs, which are then passed on to tenants and buyers. In Los Angeles, for example, each parking space costs developers at least US$50,000  a price tag that has scuttled some development projects.

In 2016 Portland, Oregon, waived parking requirements for affordable housing developments, showing how zoning changes could make urban housing more available and affordable.

On the left: a shopping center filled with stores, fronted by a sea of parking. On the right: homes that sit 100 feet from the stores, with no direct connection for walking. This is in Kennesaw, GA, but its also all over. Dependence on cars, enforced by zoning. pic.twitter.com/sy0q4q5Bjn  Darin Givens (@atlurbanist) May 27, 2021

Buffalos Natural Experiment in Parking Reform

Buffalos long-standing zoning code, established in 1953, reflected the emergence and dominance of the automobile as Americas transportation mode of choice. Inflexible minimums ensured plentiful parking at bowling alleys, dance halls and skating rinks. The code did not ease parking provisions for mixed-use development or offer flexibility to reduce parking at small businesses providing neighborhood necessities.

The result: Nearly half of downtown Buffalo was converted to parking lots. Locals joked about parking: If the goal was to destroy downtown, we only halfway succeeded.

Our review of the Green Codes initial effects found that from April 2017 to April 2019, the amount of off-street parking included in new building projects varied widely. Developers of 14 sites mixing retail space and residential units incorporated 53% fewer parking spaces than required under previous zoning. Four added no parking, opting instead to share parking with other properties.

In contrast, many single-use developers maintained or exceeded former parking requirements. Despite city leaders ambitions for more accessible transportation options, the car remains king in development plans for office buildings and townhomes, hampering reform in a region characterized by suburban sprawland travel habits based on car ownership.

Despite these challenges, we found that developers of 36 major projects  including two large housing complexes targeted to graduate students, with over 200 units apiece  included 47% fewer parking spaces than previous zoning required. One-third of the developments in our study made parking an amenity, charging user fees rather than bundling it into rent or purchase prices. Overall, the Green Code encouraged less parking in transit-rich locations along primary commercial corridors.

Optimizing Land Use

The COVID-19 pandemic has slowed development projects worldwide. Though personal automobile use dominated COVID-19-era transportation for many, there is broad support now for returning to a pre-pandemic focus on making urban places more dense, with a focus on walkable neighborhoods. Millennials and Generation Zers drive less than previous generations. Growing numbers of people working from home and shopping online are reshaping traditional urban commutes and travel.

Without minimum requirements, costly and land-consuming off-street parking becomes an option instead of a mandate, paid for by those who use it. Rethinking car-centric urban planning allows for more green space, transit-oriented development and active living.

Rethinking Urban Landscapes

Zoning is just one piece of a larger urban design puzzle that also must factor in location, market demand for parking and land use priorities. Good public transportation is also key to eliminating parking capacity. The Biden administration has signaled a commitment to public transportation.

Though development slowed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the desire for livable urban places has not. Nor has the need for affordable housing. U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has introduced a bill that highlights the need for equitable development to address the nations affordable housing crisis. It would withhold funds from development in areas that require parking minimums.

Meanwhile, parking reform is gaining momentum. In May 2021 Minneapolis struck down minimum parking requirements for new development as part of its climate and greenhouse gas emission goals. From San Diego and Salt Lake City to Raleigh, North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia, cities are considering similar changes. In the future, U.S. cities could look quite different, designed for citizens rather than parked cars.
I began my journalism career in Nashville in 1990, with my current position with Nashville Post having evolved since October 2000 (when I was with the now-defunct The City Paper, a sister publication of the Post starting in 2008).

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(Natural News) New video footage has surfaced to show that back in 2016, EcoHealth Alliance head Peter Daszak, a friend of Tony Fauci, was openly admitting that his colleagues in China were developing killer SARS-like coronaviruses as bioweapons.

At a forum on emerging infectious diseases and the next pandemic, Daszak confessed that illegal gain of function research was taking place at the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), defying continued claims by Fauci that no such research has ever taken place there.

According to Daszak, mad scientists have for years been insert[ing] spike proteins into viruses to see if they could bind to human cells. Such research, we now know, is what ultimately led to the creation and unleashing of the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19).

Then you get a sequence of a virus, and it looks like a relative of a known nasty pathogen, just like we did with SARS, Daszak further stated, his revelations back then exposing Fauci as a liar today.

We found other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS. So we sequenced the spike protein: the protein that attaches to cells. Then we  Well, I didnt do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work.

Daszak went on to talk about pseudo particles, also known as spike proteins, that he admitted can be genetically engineered into viruses to make them infectious in humans.

At each step of this you move closer and closer to this virus, which could really become pathogenic in people, Daszak stated. You end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers.

Tony Fauci might even be worse than Bill Gates, if that were possible

Fauci himself has been personally involved in this type of mad science for decades. He spearheaded the AIDS psy-op that aimed to produce AIDS vaccines, and was behind SARS, MERS, and nearly every other plandemic since.

Failing each and every one of those times to really inflict the type of harm he intended, Fauci went all out with the Wuhan Flu, paying his cohorts to genetically engineer it with AIDS components and inserting it into vaccine vials for injection into as many humans as would agree to take it.

So far, hundreds of millions of people around the world have taken Faucis injections, which are being pushed by everyone from former President Donald Trump to Southern Baptist head Al Mohler as the cure for the plandemic.

Faucis National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has long maintained deep financial and personal ties to both Daszak and the WIV, despite his continued denial. Fauci has been funneling gobs of American taxpayer dollars straight to Wuhan to conduct the very research that unleashed the plandemic in the first place.

Now, we are all supposed to believe that Fauci has our best interests at heart with his constant barking about face masks, social distancing and more recently the Operation Warp Speed injections that he says everyone needs to take in order to bring about the new normal.

Fauci is a criminal who not only must be ignored at all costs but also punished for his crimes against humanity. The same is true of Daszak and all others associated with Fauci who are responsible for perpetrating perhaps the biggest psy-op on humanity that the world has ever seen.

Over a dozen research papers carried out under a $3.7 million National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) grant list the Wuhan Labs Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Director Shi Zhengli as a co-author alongside Daszak, reported Natalie Winters for The National Pulse.

Shi has included these Fauci-backed grants on her resume.

The latest news about Fauci, Daszak and other Chinese Virus criminals can be found at Evil.news.

Sources for this article include:

TheNationalPulse.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) As has become clear in recent weeks, the establishment media and Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe were never particularly interested in doing accurate reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic.

(Article by Alexander Marlow republished from Breitbart.com)

As I document in my new bestselling book, Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Medias Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption, the press sought to turn the virus into Gods gift to the left (thats Jane Fondas terminology, not mine), pushing a narrative that we are all victims of the Trump Virus and the former presidents supposed incompetence. The only solution, we were told, was a massive expansion of government and more corporate control over our lives.

It became clear early on in the pandemic that the pro-Democrat media establishment was not going to do the Bad Orange President any political favors, even if that meant that they would have to ignore obvious leads on the biggest news story in decades. After all, the incentives for getting to the bottom of the origins of the virus were seemingly low for ideologically leftist reporters. If the crisis was seen as Trumps fault, it would make it all the more likely he would lose his reelection bid in November 2020. And if it the plan was to portray the outbreak as the Trump Virus, it certainly couldnt be the Wuhan Flu or China Virus too.

Perhaps more interesting, though, is that many of the newsrooms and tech platforms that control the vast majority of the flow of information on the pandemic have deep financial ties to China  or would like to have them one day.

Take NBC News for example. NBC News is part of the multinational conglomerate NBCComcastUniversal. Why would NBC News do a big expose? on, say, Chinese concentration camps when there is a Universal Studios in Beijing? Or why would NBC make it clear to their readers and viewers that China is the worst human rights abuser on Earth when, say, the latest movie from the Fast and Furious franchise is set to open and Universal is handling the international distribution? (Now all of a sudden actor John Cenas groveling to the communist nation makes a lot more cents, I mean sense, doesnt it?)

My reporting also confirms that news outlet with even a small amount of access to China are under near-constant fear of being thrown out of country, or even disappeared.

How about ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company. Disneys business interests in China are vast, including billions of dollars in revenue from movies and theme parks. Recall that the end credits of the recent live-action remake of Mulan featured a thank you to a Chinese government security bureau linked to Uyghur concentration camps. Now you know why.

Laurene Powell Jobs, the Soros-esque tech heiress and multi-multi-billionaire that funds much of Americas media from The Atlantic to Axios to Mother Jones to Pro Publica and much more, derives much of her incalculable wealth from Apple and Disney, two massive businesses that have deep financial ties to China. In other words, a large portion of her net worth, and thus the capital used for those news outlets, is connected to Chinese money and labor. She makes piles of sweet, sweet commie cash, then she funds Democrats and left-wing media outlets.

Do you believe that any of these outlets (or politicians) were really going to dig deep to uncover the origins of the coronavirus, especially in an election year? Of course not. Because if they uncovered the truth, it just might be harmful for the businesses prospects of their bosses/benefactors. And of course, it might have helped Trump win.

I list a number of other news outlets in Breaking the News with disturbingly deep ties to China, with Bloomberg being perhaps the most shockingly intertwined. Mini Mikes mega financial news business breathlessly reported Chinas victory over COVID-19, uncritically accepting CCP propaganda on the issue, even touting Chinas economy during this time, suggesting the communist nation is heading toward world dominance. Absurdly, China topped Bloombergs list of COVID Zero havens.

As I reported in my dramatic opening bombshell from Breaking the News, Bloomberg News parent company is subject to regulation by the Chinese government. Bloomberg Newss own editors repeatedly met with Chinese propagandists to discuss how to present China to the world, among other issues. The CCP entity that controls Bloombergs access, the SCIO, is the exact same office that is responsible for the regimes talking points.

In February, the China-tied World Health Organization (WHO) named Mike Bloomberg as a global ambassador.

The collusion isnt even subtle at this point.

The New York Times reporting has been typically low-integrity on the China virus. They reported that the communist nation had a miracle recovery from COVID, paying little mind to the fact that few countries, if any, are less credible on virus data than China. The Gray Lady even disgustingly praised the Communist Party(!) for beating the virus. An actual passage from a February 2021 Times article:

In the year since the coronavirus began its march around the world, China has done what many other countries would not or could not do. With equal measures of coercion and persuasion, it has mobilized its vast Communist Party apparatus to reach deep into the private sector and the broader population, in what the countrys leader, Xi Jinping, has called a peoples war against the pandemic  and won.

Did the CCP really suppress the virus, thus achieving victory over COVID-19? More likely, they suppressed the facts, which benefits the Chinese regime. But we dont really know for sure, which is exactly what the CPP wants. After all, China has perhaps the least free press on Earth.

While the New York Times tried to convince their readers that China was winning the war with the virus, they desperately sought to prove Florida was losing it. They touted the mostly discredited claims of Florida Woman Rebekah Jones, who accused DeSantis of fudging Floridas low virus numbers. They mocked Floridas relatively-lax mask policies. They stoked fear that re-opening the Sunshine State would lead to a massive resurgence in the virus. They even appeared to try to keep families from enjoying Disney World. Every one of the aforementioned examples was framed in a way that suggested star Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis was mishandling the crisis, and every one turned out to be anti-science fake news.

The Times skewed coverage works to the benefit of our geopolitical rivals in China, but there is method to this madness, as I document in Breaking the News. After all, the New York Times Company board is comprised of many members of worlds biggest companies like Facebook, Verizon, and AIG, among others, that have present or future business interests in the Communist nation.

And, of course, the worse China looks, the better Trump looks.

Last week, a New York Times reporter said the lab leak theory had racist origins, even as many of her colleagues in establishment journalism have come around to the idea.

Now, were told that the lab leak theory suddenly became credible. This is a sleight of hand. The theory was always credible; its the coverage itself that has lacked trustworthiness.

When it comes to the pandemics origin, whos to say that even the most dogged journalist could have unearthed bombshells? It appears as though China only allowed the WHO to conduct anything remotely resembling an investigation. Foreign Policy called the WHO a willing international partner of Beijing and a coronavirus accomplice to the Communist regime.

Virtually the entire news media has been compromised when it comes to China. Social media isnt to be trusted either. While many of those Big Tech publishers are banned or heavily censored by Beijing, they would one day like to have unfettered access to the Chinese people (and all that sweet, sweet commie cash), so assume they will not do anything to compromise future business prospects.

Still, there was yet another major factor that further cut revenue to those who dared tell the true story of the Wuhan Flu: the demonetizing of pandemic content due to online activism from far-left activists.

Last March, Buzzfeed reported: Coronavirus Ad Blocking Is Starving Some News Sites Of Revenue. Major online advertisers had begun depriving sites discussing any controversial topics of ad revenue. This new blacklisting tactic was pioneered by Sleeping Giants, a radical left-wing activist group which originally targeted Breitbarts advertisers with a brand safety hoax (I explain this in deep detail in the book).

However, the boycotts backfired on the Sleeping Giants. It soon became clear they had reset the advertising industry to blacklist a lot of content their pals on the left were monetizing, including posts on the coronavirus.

Meanwhile, Breitbart News was still striving.

In a rare moment of self-awareness, Sleeping Giants co-founder Nandini Jammi owned up to the fact that her movement was apparently bankrupting newsrooms filled with typical liberal journalists:

Hey folks, Nandini here. As keyword blacklisting coronavirus continues to decimate the news industry, I have had the sinking feeling that Sleeping Giants (a campaign which I co-run) has something to do with it.

Jammi acknowledged she made a mistake, but its okay because they only wanted to target bigotry  or more accurately, her definition of bigotry, which is presumably normative conservative thought. But much of what we now know about COVID was labeled as racist early on. A couple examples of many from the first few months of the pandemic:

January 31 , CNN: As the coronavirus spreads, fear is fueling racism and xenophobia Bonus : The article refers to the virus as Wuhan Coronavirus.

, CNN: As the coronavirus spreads, fear is fueling racism and xenophobia February 27, Slate: Thats because the rumors of a lab escape or a bioweapon stem from historical amnesia, a caricatured villain, and good old-fashioned racism.

Slate: Thats because the rumors of a lab escape or a bioweapon stem from historical amnesia, a caricatured villain, and good old-fashioned racism. March 3, NPR: When Xenophobia Spreads Like A Virus

There are many more examples in Breaking the News.

Another article (title: Italy Shows Just How Crazy Coronavirus Panic Can Get) published by The Daily Beast chastised Italy for being too xenophobic about COVID:

Italians refused to go to Chinese restaurants and shops when the virus first emerged. Now they are being shunned worldwide. The stigma is spreading faster than the virus itself.

Those same supposedly monstrous Italians went on to experience the highest death toll from COVID-19 in all of Europe. Thats pretty cruel, Daily Beast!

Of course, the real victims of the medias overwhelming failure to cover the coronavirus pandemic accurately arent poor, innocent journalists: Its the American citizens who were fed fake news and pro-Beijing talking points; and many of those who dared to question them were memory-holed from the social web entirely. Perhaps they lost their livelihoods.

Further dis-incentivizing reporting on the coronavirus origins was that social media platforms, especially Facebook, censored or banned information related to the Wuhan lab, even if it was accurate.

And now we learned this week that none other than St. Dr. Fauci himself knew the lab leak theory was a possibility, even as he watched a mass censorship campaign unfold, keeping the public misinformed.

And perhaps, this epic fake news saga is what ensured Joe Bidens victory.

Read more at: Breitbart.com and Biased.news.
(Natural News) Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak, Democrat, had a kneejerk reaction to President Trumps optimism about a malaria drug that might be an effective treatment for the Wuhan coronavirus. Trump was hopeful about the drug, so anti-Trump Democrats like Sisolak were against it. Gov. Sisolak banned (hydroxy)chloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, ostensibly over concern of hoarders stockpiling the medicine and causing shortages for patients who use the drug for other ailments like Lupus and Rheumatoid Arthritis. But while the governor restricted the public from receiving the potentially life-saving drug, Nevadas Department of Corrections began stockpiling the drug for prisoners.

(Article by Bronson Stocking republished from TownHall.com)

(Via 360 News Las Vegas)

According to sources at the drug maker, Concordia Pharmaceuticals Inc, Nevada prisons ordered a large number of their anti-malaria Hydroxychloroquine drug under the name, Plaquenli. Nevada prisons has literally ZERO cases of prisoners infected with the COVID 19 virus to date. The Nevada Board of Pharmacies and the Governor claimed the rule barring doctors from prescribing the drug outside of hospitals was to stop hoarding. After Sisolaks ban went into effect, the State Prison hoarded the drug in a mass just in case they had break out. Gov. Sisolak refused to reverse his order even after the FDA issued an emergency order earlier this week approving the drug for use against COVID 19.

Unbelievable. And Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is no better. When reports that (hydroxy)chloroquine showed promising signs as a safe treatment for the coronavirus, and after President Trump expressed his optimism over the drugs efficacy, Whitmer moved immediately to block Michiganders from gaining access to the potentially life-saving treatment. Both governors cited concerns over shortages, but alternative medicines are available to treat lupus. And if they havent noticed, were kind of in the middle of a pandemic.

Drugmakers have already ramped up production of (hydroxy)chloroquine in response to increased demand, and people still need a prescription from a doctor to obtain the medicine. The FDA has now issued emergency-use authorization of (hydroxy)chloroquine for COVID-19, so the focus at this point should be making more of this promising drug, not restricting its use amid a global pandemic for which we currently have no vaccine.

Read more at: TownHall.com and JusticeDemocrats.news.
China hopes to ink BRI cooperation documents with Burkina Faso soon: Chinese FM

Xinhua) 15:20, June 11, 2021

BEIJING, June 11 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Thursday expressed hope that China and Burkina Faso will sign documents on the Belt and Road cooperation as soon as possible and strengthen bilateral cooperation in such areas as healthcare and infrastructure.

Wang made the remarks in a phone conversation with Burkina Faso's Foreign Minister Alpha Barry, adding that the signing of such documents will provide new impetus and create new space for the two countries to deepen practical cooperation.

Since the two countries resumed diplomatic relations three years ago, their ties have witnessed rapid development, Wang noted, adding that since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the two sides have been supporting each other, and their friendship has been cemented and enhanced.

It has been proved that the resumption of diplomatic relations between China and Burkina Faso fully serves the interests of the two countries and their people, Wang added.

Wang also said that China firmly supports Burkina Faso's efforts in developing its economy, improving people's livelihood, and safeguarding its national security.

China stands ready to continue offering support for the African country's anti-pandemic fight, and to share its experience in state governance with developing countries including Burkina Faso, so as to accelerate common development, he added.

Wang said that China opposes all forms of terrorism, and is willing to continue to provide assistance within its capacity to Burkina Faso in fighting terrorism and safeguarding national security.

China is ready to work with Burkina Faso to safeguard their common and legitimate rights and interests in the international and multilateral arenas, and continue to staunchly support each other on issues concerning their core interests, Wang added.

Not long ago, China and Africa jointly launched the Initiative on Partnership for Africa's Development, which meets the concerns of Africa and has produced positive results, he said.

China is willing to work with African countries including Burkina Faso to encourage more countries to join the initiative and build a momentum that the international community works together to help Africa's development, he said.

China also stands ready to strengthen coordination with Burkina Faso under the framework of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), so as to make a joint contribution to the success of this year's FOCAC.

Barry, for his part, thanked China for providing strong support in Burkina Faso's economic and social development, especially in its pandemic fight.

China has been honoring its promises in its cooperation with Burkina Faso, which yielded remarkable results, Barry noted, calling China a reliable friend and good partner. He said the two countries have forged a profound friendship with a shared future.

Burkina Faso is ready to deepen cooperation with China in the Belt and Road construction, and to push the bilateral relationship to new levels, Barry added.

Expressing gratitude to China for the active contribution it has made to accelerating the development of Africa and safeguarding the continent's interests, Barry said that he looks forward to greater support and assistance from China in anti-terrorism cooperation.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
(Natural News) Discrimination against people who have not received the COVID-19 vaccine is already under way in New York City, where segregated dining is being used in many restaurants to reward people who get the vaccine with better seats and keep those who are unwilling to take on its risks tucked away in less-desirable areas of the restaurant.

Last month, bars were given the green light by the state of New York to operate at full capacity and stay open until 4:00am. Although state law says that vaccinated people in restaurants and bars do not have to practice social distancing, these establishments are still required to allow six feet of distancing or use other appropriate physical barriers for customers who are not vaccinated.

This has compelled many bars and restaurants to ask guests for proof of vaccination in order to maximize the number of people they can fit inside. However, because state regulations prohibit venues of less than 250 people from asking for proof of vaccination, customers could just as easily claim that they are vaccinated in order to get those more desirable seats. And health experts have said that even if these venues did enforce it, social distancing and segregation inside wont do much to reduce the risk of spreading the disease.

Nevertheless, some bars are going to great lengths to segregate the groups, and it is almost always the unvaccinated people who are ending up with the short end of the stick. For example, at the Italian American wine bar Carroll Place in the West Village, the main floor is being reserved for vaccinated guests, while those who are not vaccinated will be required to stay upstairs in socially distanced seating that uses barriers.

Owner AJ Bontempo told the New York Post that he actually wants to reward people who get vaccinated.

I started thinking, once everything starts reopening, people want a sense of normalcy. When you first walk in, Id like there to be an energy, without all that plexiglass, and to reward people for being vaccinated  to give them that experience.

While we cant speak for Bontempo, he seems to be saying that people who are not willing to become human guinea pigs and subject themselves to an experimental vaccine that has already killed many people somehow do not deserve to enjoy the energy of dining in a restaurant.

On a similar note, at Carolines Comedy Club in Times Square, guests are being asked for their Excelsior pass upon entry, which is the states digital vaccine passport. Those who do not have that are being asked for a vaccination card; beyond that, the honor system is used. Owner Caroline Hirsch told the New York Post that vaccinated people are being given seats closest to the performers. In the future, she is hoping to hold shows that are exclusive to vaccinated people with more relaxed restrictions throughout the entire venue. This means that those who dont want to get the jab would be unwelcome at the club.

Regulations mean some venues must either be vaccinated-only or stay closed

In some cases, bar and restaurant owners feel they have no choice but to go vaccinated-only thanks to the regulations. The owner of Evil Twin, a popular Queens brewery that opened a second location in Dumbo recently, came under fire for implementing a vaccinated-only policy at the newer spot. He says that he is not trying to say that those who dont get vaccinated are wrong, but this approach was the only way to open up because there is no outdoor seating there and the indoor layout of the bar makes social distancing nearly impossible.

He said: We did this because we felt that we were forced to. We had a choice to not open at all or open in this way I wish we didnt have to do this.

The decision, not surprisingly, attracted a lot of negative comments on social media, along with boycott threats and accusations of discrimination.

This week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that most of the COVID restrictions that are still in place in the state will be lifted when 70 percent of New York residents aged 18 and above have gotten the first dose of the vaccination. Right now, that figure stands at 69 percent.

Sources for this article include:

?DailyMail.co.uk

NY.Eater.com

NYPost.com
(Natural News) A professor at New York University is under attack from 19 of his colleagues. Professor Mark Crispin Miller has been socially ostracized, put through administrative reviews, had his class canceled, and threatened with termination for simply urging his students to investigate the scientific rationale behind the mask mandates. In September of 2020, Professor Miller asked his students to assess the propaganda behind the mask mandates.

Nineteen of Millers colleagues conspired against him and signed a letter to the school dean, demanding a review of his conduct. The letter accuses Professor Miller of inciting explicit hate speech and advocating for an unsafe learning environment. His colleagues libeled his name and claimed that his anti-mask views are an attack on students. One student went online and slammed Miller for promoting conspiracy theories. The dean, Jack Knott, and the schools COVID rule advisor, Carlo Ciotoli, privately emailed the students and said Professor Miller gave them dangerous misinformation while providing them with authoritative public health guidance from the CDC.

Apparently, no one is allowed to question the science or challenge the hand of force behind the covid mandates.

Professor has no choice but to sue his colleagues for libel and for suppressing academic freedom

For the past twenty years, Professor Miller has taught a course on propaganda at the universitys Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. This is the first time Professor Miller has ever been attacked in such an Orwellian fashion for the simple act of promoting critical thinking on a topic that impacts everyones way of life. This is the first time that real life propaganda would be used as a weapon against Professor Miller, as his colleagues organized and attacked him personally. Isnt it ironic that the professor who understands propaganda would be attacked by colleagues who are controlled by propaganda?

Now Professor Miller is fighting back and suing these nineteen colleagues for libel. Higher education should teach students how to think, not what to think. What is an education if independent thinking is forbidden? What is an education if state and corporate power can dictate individuality and thought? These nineteen colleagues only desire more indoctrination and blind subservience to authority. To intimidate, socially ostracize and censor one of their own, these hysterical thought controllers show just how far they will go to protect their oppressive ideologies and cult-like belief systems.

The exploitation of human psychology and behavior using digital surveillance and propaganda

Propaganda is an organized attempt to get large numbers of people to think or do something  or not think or do something. Thats really all it is. Thats an informal definition but its a good one, Professor Miller says.

Miller said propaganda is a form of sub rational manipulation. It is not like traditional rhetoric, which uses persuasion through argument. The fundamental principles of good communication are being destroyed by Big Tech propaganda and academic censorship.

Its been with us for a long time [propaganda], but the rise of the digital world, our absorption into the digital universe, has radically intensified this kind of effort and made it successful beyond the wildest dreams of Dr. Goebbels or Edward Bernays.

The digital surveillance of individuals, the target marketing, and the algorithmic control over information is only exploiting human psychology, implanting subconscious belief systems into the masses. Miller says, This incredible technological sophistication enables them, first of all, to move people at the deepest level. It also enables them to suppress dissidents with remarkable efficiency, [for example], spotting the word vaccine in a post and then blocking it.

At the same time, it gives them an astonishing advantage when it comes to surveillance of every single one of us, he warned. He said its going to require a tremendous amount of skill and sophistication on our part, to organize under that watchful eye.

For more, visit Millers site.

Sources include:

ChildrensHealthDefense.org

YouTube.com

MarkCrispinMiller.com
(Natural News) German researchers claim to have solved the mystery behind the blood clots caused by the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccines.

In a preprint article posted May 26 on Research Square, the team reported that the problem lies with the adenovirus vectors used by the two vaccines to deliver genetic instructions inside cells. The researchers said that due to the mechanisms involved in this type of technology, mutant versions of the spike protein are generated in the nucleus and are then secreted outside of cells. They believe that it is these mutant proteins that trigger the blood clots in healthy people who received the AstraZeneca or J&J vaccines.

Adenovirus-based vaccines and their adverse effects

The formation of blood clots in the brains venous sinuses  also known as cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST)  was first associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine. In Europe, around 150 cases of this thromboembolic event were reported after different countries successfully administered about 17 million doses of the said vaccine.

Under normal circumstances, CVST is considered a rare form of stroke, affecting only five people in one million each year. Studies show that since the middle of the 20th century, the mortality rate of CVST has gone down from 50 percent to a mere 8.3 percent due to advances in modern medicine. But since mass vaccinations have begun, CVST has caused the death of one-third of all affected vaccinated individuals in Germany alone.

Due to the alarming rise in the incidence of CVST, many European countries abruptly halted the administration of AstraZenecas vaccine back in March. Meanwhile, in the U.S., reports of a similar adverse effect emerged following the J&J vaccine rollout. A total of six cases of CVST were confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration on April 13, which led to a pause on the use of the J&J vaccine 10 days later. (Related: Denmark PERMANENTLY BANS Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine over blood clot deaths.)

According to the German researchers, the AstraZeneca and J&J vaccines share striking similarities. Both cause CVST and some cases of splanchnic vein thrombosis (SVT)  a type of blood clot that involves one or more abdominal veins  and both affect mostly young women: between 20 to 60 years for the AstraZeneca vaccine and between 18 to 48 for the J&J vaccine. But most importantly, both vaccines were developed using adenovirus vector technology.

Adenovirus vector technology makes use of a virus that has been stripped of the genes it needs to replicate in order to deliver a harmless piece of another viral pathogen  in this case, the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19)  inside cells. The goal of this technology is to induce cells to reproduce the viral protein and trigger the immune system to produce antibodies specific to it. The benefit of doing this is that the body will then be prepared to mount a robust response to the COVID-19 virus once a real infection occurs.

The adenovirus vectors used in both the AstraZeneca and J&J vaccines were engineered to deliver genetic instructions on how to produce the spike protein. This protein is found on the surface of the COVID-19 virus and is recognized by ACE2 receptors, which are naturally present on the surfaces of different types of human cells. The COVID-19 virus is able to infect healthy cells via this protein-receptor interaction.

How AstraZeneca, J&J vaccines trigger blood clots

In their report, the German researchers pinpointed the delivery mechanism of adenovirus vectors as the primary source of error that leads to blood clotting events. According to studies on the COVID-19 virus, replication of the viruss genes always happens in the cytosol  the fluid inside cells  of infected cells. However, adenovirus vectors transport viral genes inside the nuclei of cells, where these genetic sequences are spliced, or cut, by enzymes, resulting in mutant forms of the spike protein. These shorter variants are unable to bind to the cell membrane, so instead of being displayed on the surfaces of cells, they are secreted outside, where they trigger a strong inflammatory response on endothelial cells.

The researchers also noted that some of the mutant spike proteins floating in the extracellular space are still capable of binding to ACE2 receptors. Hence, there can be instances when endothelial cells will not only bind spike protein variants, but would also be decorated with newly formed antibodies. This event is sure to trigger severe inflammation, such as by complement-dependent cytotoxicity (CDC). During CDC, red blood cells are recruited by antibody-covered target cells as part of the complement cascade, which eventually leads to cellular disruption or cell lysis. These immune-related responses could be what triggers the thromboembolic events associated with the AstraZeneca and J&J vaccines.

In contrast to adenovirus-based vaccines, mRNA-based vaccines like those produced by Pfizer and Moderna rely on lipid nanoparticles to deliver viral genes to muscle cells. These vectors release their cargo into the cytosol as soon as they are taken up by cells. Because of this, translation of the viral mRNA into the spike protein occurs without any modifications to the final product. This, according to the researchers, is why the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are not associated with CVST.

To circumvent the threat of blood clots caused by AstraZeneca and J&J vaccines, the researchers recommend modifying the gene sequence that codes for the spike protein in such a way that it will not be susceptible to splicing. They believe this is the only way the developers can ensure the safety of those who receive either of the two vaccines.

Based on our findings, we strongly suggest that the Spike open reading frames  wildtype or codon-optimized  in vector-based vaccines [have] to be re-optimized to avoid unintended splice reactions and to increase the safety of these pharmaceutical products, the researchers wrote in their report.

For more news on coronavirus vaccines and their adverse effects, visit VaccineInjuryNews.com.

Sources include:

FT.com

HopkinsMedicine.org

AHAJournals.org

FDA.gov 1

FDA.gov 2

CDC.gov

ResearchSquare.com
(Natural News) The U.S. and Canada have launched formal inquiries on the actual origins of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19). Alongside these investigations, lawmakers in both countries are now scrutinizing how the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) used federal funds from both countries. The WIV is believed to have been the facility where the pathogen responsible for COVID-19 originated.

American and Canadian legislators have zoomed in on the WIV and its connections to different groups. In the U.S., Congress has investigated the US$3.7 million grant given by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the EcoHealth Alliance. Of the amount mentioned above, $600,000 was channeled to the WIV over a five-year period. The research grant given to the EcoHealth Alliance sought to understand the risk of bat coronavirus emergence.

The NIH and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) denied approving any gain-of-function research grants for coronaviruses. EcoHealth Alliance equally denied channeling grant money to the WIV for such purposes. Gain-of-function research involves the study of viruses and other pathogens to make them more transmissible.

However, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) insisted that NIH grant money was used for gain-of-function research performed in the WIV. The lawmaker said in a May 25 statement: We dont know whether the pandemic started in a lab in Wuhan or evolved naturally. While many still deny funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, experts believe otherwise.

Also on May 25, Paul and other GOP senators sponsored an amendment to a bill permanently banning the funding of any gain-of-function research in China. The U.S. Senate passed the bill on the same day. The Kentucky senator said: No taxpayer money should have ever been used to fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan, and now we permanently have put it to a stop.

NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci defended U.S. funding of gain-of-function research. He said that the endeavor generates important knowledge as to what happened with the earlier Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome to prevent future pandemics. The infectious disease experts recent comments contradicted his earlier remarks that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the WIV.

A day after Paul made his remarks, U.S. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) asked Fauci during a May 26 Senate hearing: How do you know [the WIV] didnt lie to you and use the money for gain-of-function research anyway? The NIAID head answered: Theres no way of guaranteeing that, but in our experience with  Chinese grantees, they are very competent, trustworthy scientists.

Canada also launched an investigation on the origins of COVID-19  involving its own lab

The Parliament of Canada has also launched a similar investigation. However, its scrutiny centered on the National Microbiology Laboratory (NML) in Winnipeg, Manitoba province. Canadas NML and the WIV in Wuhan are both level four laboratories  which meant both facilities are ready to handle serious infections.

The Canadian parliaments probe also focused on scientist Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng, who were both fired from the NML in January 2021. Furthermore, it looked at Qius several trips to the WIV and the transfer of deadly pathogens from Winnipeg to Wuhan.

On May 10, Canadian Conservative Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs Michael Chong pointed out Qius travels to China to train WIV personnel and how it connected to the pandemic. Dr. Qiu trained people at the [WIV] so that it could be registered as  the only level four lab in China. Why is that relevant? Its because the [U.S.] State Department  said earlier this year that the standards at the lab were not upheld. [They] werent operating to level four criteria  and often [operated] with very dangerous viruses at level two or three, he said.

Chong later told The Epoch Times that members of parliament (MPs) ought to know the connection between the Winnipeg and Wuhan facilities. If the intelligence community concludes that the virus did emerge from the lab in Wuhan, then the role  [of the NML] in helping build that lab becomes a critical question, he added.

The Canadian parliament also touched on gain-of-function research during a March 2021 session. MPs asked NML Acting Scientific Director General Guillaume Poliquin about possible research done by the WIV on deadly virus samples from Canada. The head of the Canadian laboratory said it would not approve sending samples for such studies in the first place.

Conservative MP John Williamson pressed on if NML does any investigation to ensure the Chinese laboratory is not conducting illegal gain-of-function research. Poliquin responded that there was no way to found out as further scrutiny into the WIV is not possible. Neither Canada nor the [NML] has the standing to investigate or audit laboratories, he said.

Williamson called Poliquins response an astonishing admission. He added: Youre taking a request from a nations that has a history of theft and lies, and accepting that because its what the law in this country says  at a time when our national security institutes are warning academia in general to be careful.

Visit Pandemic.news to read more articles about investigations done by different countries on the origins of COVID-19.

Sources include:

TheEpochTimes.com

NIH.gov

Paul.Senate.gov

Kennedy.Senate.gov
(Natural News) Alameda County California recently reduced its covid-19 death toll by 25 percent. An investigation found that these fatalities were not a direct result of SARS-CoV-2. The previous death toll of 1,634 was reduced to 1,223 fatalities OVERNIGHT. Just like that, health authorities admitted to widespread medical fraud when making a final determination for 411 deaths in one county alone. This sudden revision for hundreds of death certificates should make any rational person question a doctors diagnosis and think twice about the official story behind the death of their loved one(s). This seismic reduction in covid-19 mortalities vindicates so-called conspiracy theorists who understood that the medical system was defrauding the public all along and failing to properly diagnose and treat patients.

Alameda County previously included any person who died while infected with the virus in the total COVID-19 deaths for the County, health officials said in a statement. There are definitely people who died from reasons that were clearly not caused by COVID, said Neetu Balram, a spokesperson for the county health agency.

State diagnostic guidelines for COVID are not clearly defined, permit mass medical fraud

Even though changes have been made to the diagnostic criteria and even though the COVID-19 death count is falling; the newly-revised guidelines still DO NOT clearly define a COVID-19 fatality. The guidelines say the county will align with the states definition and still count deaths as COVID-19 deaths, even if COVID-19 is a contributing cause of death or if COVID-19 could not be ruled out. This lax definition for COVID-19 is a convenient way to conceal widespread medical malpractice and diagnostic fraud. Death from any infection is a complex formula, involving multiple underlying factors of the patients individual immune system, the level of inflammation in their body, the state of their microbiome, etc. What immune suppressant drugs contributed? Was the patient given adequate treatment early on?

More importantly: How many COVID-19 diagnoses were written on death certificates out of an abundance of caution because the patient came in contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19? How many patients were sedated and neglected, their condition made worse at the hospital, with no family member or advocate there to support them  only to be classified as COVID deaths? How many thousands of patients were left untreated, their lungs destroyed on ventilators? How many hospitals cashed in on financial incentives by including COVID-19 on the death certificate, without any proof of specific symptoms? How many patients contracted super bug infections or pneumonia at the hospital but COVID-19 could not be ruled out as the cause.

Medical fraud in Alameda County California is a microcosm of wide scale medical malpractice taking place across the world

In California, hospitals were NOT required to publish the number of cycles used in their PCR tests. A cycle count (Ct) greater than 17 will automatically turn up a set percentage of false positives in any cohort of patients. A patient who tests positive and dies later on from other health issues could simply have non-infectious viral RNA in their sinus cavity that is from a previous coronavirus infection. The previous infection has nothing to do with the patients current health situation, yet covid-19 is recorded as the cause of death, with no hard evidence. Most of the covid-19 PCR tests were calibrated with cycle counts greater than 28, with some tests as high as 45! These fraudulently calibrated tests can turn up false positives up to 97 percent of the time, and can pick up fragments of other respiratory viruses that signal a false positive for covid-19.

Like many counties and municipalities across the United States and the rest of the world, Alameda County California failed to properly diagnose covid-19 for over a year. The countys covid-19 death total included anyone who tested positive for covid-19 during a hospital stay that preceded their death. In this case, medical authorities used the falsely-calibrated PCR tests on dead patients, often classifying COVID as the cause of death in accordance with the false positivity rate. The inevitable tally of false positives in dead patients were listed as the primary cause of the persons death and were fraudulently factored into the states total death count from covid-19. This diagnostic fraud occurred on a global scale, distracting from the real health issues caused by this bioweapon and covering up countless deaths caused by a systemically broken system of medicine.

Sources include:

NYPost.com

Marie, Olszewski Erin. Undercover Epicenter Nurse: How Fraud, Negligence & Greed Led to Unnecessary Deaths at Elmhurst Hospital. Hot Books, 2020.

Mercola.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) In an effort to get as many young people as possible injected for the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is once again fabricating data about hospitalization rates to scare parents into stabbing their children.

The CDC under career criminal Rochelle Walensky is claiming a spike in teen hospitalizations associated with the Chinese Virus, which can only be fixed, the private corporation claims, by jabbing all children over the age of 12.

The truth, however, is that there is not a spike in teen hospitalizations at all. Worse yet, children have a near-zero risk of testing positive for the Wuhan Flu and developing any noticeable symptoms, so vaccinations are all but useless for them, as well as harmful.

Walensky and her crew are not about to let a little bit of truth get in the way of their injection agenda, though. The CDC is aggressively pushing Chinese Flu needles on Americans using every scare tactic in the book, hoping that some parents will simply obey without doing their own due diligence.

I am deeply concerned by the numbers of hospitalized adolescents and saddened to see the number of adolescents who required treatment in intensive care units or mechanical ventilation, Walensky said in a statement filled with feigned concern for the children.

Until they are fully vaccinated, adolescents should continue to wear masks and take precautions when around other [sic] who are not vaccinated to protect themselves, and their family, friends, and community.

CNN parrots false CDC claims, pretends to care about American children

Not to be outdone in the lying department, fake news giant CNN was quick to pounce on the CDCs fake news, warning in its Breaking News section that children aged 12 to 17 will die if their parents fail to get them injected with one of Donald Trumps Operation Warp Speed vaccines.

The only people who are not falling for any of this tripe are those who actually look deeper than the headlines, which in this case shows that the CDC is manufacturing fake hospitalization numbers to spread fear about the long-gone Chinese Virus.

The CDCs own data show that hospitalizations among all groups have plummeted over the past six weeks, The Blaze reports.

It turns out they picked arbitrary start and end points  an old trick theyve used with mask studies  which coincides with a period of increased hospitalizations among all age groups, including those with high vaccination rates.

Conveniently, the CDC pulled data specifically from March 1, 2020, and April 24, 2021, the latter date being one of the hospitalization peaks  likely from people getting injected with toxic poison that they were falsely told would keep them safe against the virus.

Hospitalizations for sickness across all age groups were up a whole lot more back in December, right when Chinese Virus injections were first released, and Walensky was not pretending to cry then about the poor teens she says are now dying because they have not been vaccinated for her scary Chinese Flu.

The whole thing is a ridiculous circus act, if you have not figured that out by now. None of these clowns deserve any airtime, let alone a headline, and yet they continue to ram down Americans throats the idea that the only way to save yourself from Chinese Germs is to get a Big Pharma needle.

Its quite evident that the pandemic in America is over with and it never affected children, even during its peak, says The Blaze.

However, the pandemic of lies, fear, panic, and emotional abuse is continuing indefinitely until Pfizer and Moderna satiate their rapacious appetite for childrens blood. Who will defend our children?

Americas government does nothing but lie about Chinese Germs, along with pretty much everything else. To keep up with the latest, visit Deception.news.

Sources for this article include:

TheBlaze.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) After the Fauci emails were released, it is now clear that top public health officials conspired to conceal the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, a laboratory toxin which is now being injected as messenger RNA and translated in human cells. The inflammatory spike proteins are now being replicated in human cells, subverting the natural protein synthesis of the cells, while leaking into the bloodstream and accumulating in vital organs. One study shows the spike protein can invade and live in the neural tissue, infecting neurons and causing neurotropism.

The S1 sub-unit of the spike protein enters the parenchymal tissue of the brain in murine models. The brains endothelial cells attempt to hide the spike protein in the brain capillary glycocalyx, which can lead to degradation of the glycocalyx, dysfunction of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and cerebral edema.

Spike proteins cause brain damage, are ten times more potent when injected

When these spike proteins cross the BBB, they induce neuron-inflammation and impair basic function of the central nervous system. A study from Nature Neuroscience finds the S1 spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 is engineered to attach to the angiotensin-converting enzyme-2 (ACE2), cross the BBB, and cause damage to the cardiovascular and central nervous systems. The spike protein can manipulate the central nervous system, causing an influx of cytokines, and setting off a cytokine storm. This influx of cytokines can also cross the blood-brain barrier, doing further damage to the immune response. When the viral binding protein crosses the blood-brain barrier, it enables the virus to cross the blood-brain barrier as well, allowing the virus to directly influence regions of the brain that regulate respiratory function. According to the study, injected spike proteins breach the BBB roughly ten times greater compared to intranasal exposure.

The spike protein primarily attaches to ACE2 but can attach to other proteins as well. The spike protein not only crosses the blood brain barrier, but it also travels through the bloodstream, causing blood clots. This toxin also attacks the olfactory bulb, liver, spleen and kidneys.

Spike proteins deployed via vaccines mimic a bioweapon delivery system

Byram Bridle, a viral immunologist and associate professor at University of Guelph, Ontario said the medical community made a big mistake deploying spike protein programs through mass vaccination campaigns. Dr. Bridle was one of the scientists who worked on covid-19 vaccine development. Dr. Bridle points to a bio-distribution study that shows how the spike protein escapes into the blood post-vaccination, and circulates for several days, accumulating in organs and tissues. The spike protein can attack the spleen, bone marrow, the liver, adrenal glands, and in quite high concentrations in the ovaries.

We have known for a long time that the spike protein is a pathogenic protein. It is a toxin. It can cause damage in our body if it gets into circulation, Bridle said. Scientists assumed that the vaccine would only affect the deltoid muscles, reproduce spike proteins in cells at the vaccination site, and elicit an immune response locally. However, the spike proteins do escape the vaccination site and escape into the blood circulation. These toxins can cause blood to clump or cause brain bleeds.

The methods of deployment for these experimental covid vaccines are not indicative of medicine, either. There is currently NO informed consent for these shots and NO respect for human dignity or self-decision. The methods of its deployment are tactics of war, and our own governments and medical systems are being weaponized against us. The vaccine can more accurately be described as a bioweapon delivery system because it is deployed through coercion, medical fraud, bribery, intimidation, discrimination and segregation.

Governments have repeatedly forced citizens into lock down to force uptake. Citizens are told their life will not go back to normal until they submit. Governments have stolen money from taxpayers and are now flaunting it as prizes in vaccine lotteries. The CDC is trying to use vaccine passports to divide the nation, profiling and controlling the vaccinated while segregating and persecuting the unvaccinated.

Learn more in the interview with immunologist Byram Bridle:

Sources include:

Nature.com

NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov

NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov

NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov

NaturalNews.com

Brighteon.com
(Natural News) The recently released emails from White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci showed that, at the beginning of the pandemic, a leading virus expert had warned him that the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) may have been engineered in a laboratory. Fauci was warned about this while he was publicly disparaging the theory that the coronavirus may have accidentally leaked from a lab in Wuhan.

The hundreds of emails were released as part of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests submitted by mainstream media outlets. They cover the first few months of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Many of the topics discussed in Faucis emails involve the  at the time  ongoing and deteriorating coronavirus situation in the United States. (Related: Email: Researcher who funded Wuhan lab admitted to manipulating coronaviruses, thanked Fauci for dismissing lab leak theory.)

Fauci knew scientists were speculating whether coronavirus was engineered

On Jan. 31, 2020, Fauci forwarded a copy of a Science magazine article titled, Mining coronavirus genomes for clues to the outbreaks origins to two people. This was more than two months before even the World Health Organization had characterized the worldwide COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic.

The email recipients were American virus researcher Kristian G. Andersen and British medical researcher Sir Jeremy Farrar. Andersen is the head of Andersen Lab, a viral genomics lab, at Scripps Research. Farrar is the director of a Britain-based global health charity.

This just came out today, wrote Fauci. You may have seen it. If not, it is of interest to the current discussion.

Andersen wrote back, telling Fauci that he and other researchers analyzed the coronavirus genome and found some unusual features in the virus.

The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered, wrote Andersen.

The virus researcher added that, after discussions with other scientists, they all agreed the genome of the coronavirus is inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.

But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so these opinions could still change.

Andersen and his team of researchers at Scripps later wrote an article for the peer-reviewed medical journal Nature Magazine wherein they supported the hypothesis that the coronavirus was naturally transferred from animals to humans. But he added that it was currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origins.

The article later added that more data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another.

Republicans call for Fauci to be fired after release of emails

Since the release of Faucis emails, many have begun calling for him to be fired from his position as President Joe Bidens chief medical advisor and as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

On Wednesday, June 2, the hashtag #FireFauci gained popularity on Twitter thanks to several notable Republican personalities and politicians like Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

Told you #firefauci  Cant wait to see the media try to spin the Fauci FOIA emails, wrote Paul.

Its time to fire Fauci! he wrote in a different tweet. Emails that have been released now under Freedom of Information Act show two very important things: 1. FAUCI has been lying. 2. Ive been right all along.

Faucis leaked emails are shocking to say the least, wrote Greene on her Twitter account. He needs to be FIRED! I introduced a bill to do just that  HR 2316, the Fire Fauci Act.'

Weve been needing to #FireFauci for months now, but after these #FauciEmails we simply cannot wait another day, tweeted Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado. How many lives could have been saved if these people were worried about science rather than PR?

Other individuals that have commented on Faucis emails include Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and former adviser to former President Donald Trump and conservative radio host Sebastian Gorka.

Read the latest articles discussing the details of Faucis emails by subscribing to Pandemic.news.

Sources include:

DailyMail.co.uk

Newsweek.com 1

Newsweek.com 2
(Natural News) The lead author of a seminal paper promoting the theory that SARS-Co-V-2 evolved in nature deleted 5,000 tweets  and then his entire Twitter account on June 6  after a trove of emails obtained by BuzzFeed News revealed the researcher, who originally believed the virus originated in a lab, changed his mind after corresponding with Dr. Anthony Fauci.

(Article republished from ChildrensHealthDefense.org)

Emails show Dr. Kristian Andersen, author of The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2, published March 17, 2020 in Nature, was thanked by Fauci after he flipped his position on the origin of COVID. Five months later, Andersen received nearly $2 million in government funding for virus research.

The emails also show Fauci admitted masks are best suited for sick people to help stop the spread of the virus and are not effective in protecting healthy people from COVID, and that those who have had COVID have natural immunity, so they dont need the vaccine.

1. Microbiologist flip flops on COVID origin theory, then gets millions in NIH funding

Private emails obtained by BuzzFeed via the Freedom of Information Act show Andersen, professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research Institute, told Fauci in an email on Feb.1, 2020, that SARS-CoV-2 has unusual features that potentially look engineered.

Two months later, Andersen reversed his position and published a paper stating COVID did not come from a lab and was not a purposefully manipulated virus.

Scientist Kristian Anderson told Fauci SARS-CoV-2 has unusual features that potentially look engineered. Not long after this email, the scientists authored a piece insisting the virus was natural and Fauci said the same publicly. This is a massive cover-up. (Buzzfeed FOIA) pic.twitter.com/BD3OUzgDzR  Sharri Markson (@SharriMarkson) June 2, 2021

As The Defender reported last week, Andersens paper played a key role in shaping the mainstream media narrative that COVID evolved naturally, and also in making certain anyone who suggested the virus might have originated in a lab was branded a conspiracy theorist.

According to Gateway Pundit, Andersens paper helped protect Fauci, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is directed by Fauci, from potential probes into those agencies funding of controversial gain-of-function virus research.

Five months after the paper was published, Andersen received $1.88 million from the NIH to fund Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a global network of emerging infectious disease research that studies pathogen transmission, immune system responses and pathogen/host surveillance.

Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance received $1.54 million in gain-of-function research funding. Daszak is a virus hunter and mastermind behind a bullying letter signed by 27 scientists attacking anyone who challenged the narrative, established by Andersens paper, that COVID originated in nature.

2 months later he reverses course and publishes his "Proximal Origin" paper, helping shield NIH/NIAID from potential probes into its GOF funding. 5 months after that, he gets $1.88 million in CREID funding, along with Daszak who gets $1.54 million more.https://t.co/PFPIMxZd7o pic.twitter.com/7JmapgRNTm  Radical Centrist, wrathful tantric deity (@RadCentrism) June 2, 2021

After his emails with Fauci went public, Andersen deleted 5,000 tweets. Andersens account was no longer accessible on June 6, according to the internet archive The Wayback Machine, Newsweek reported.

This is a lie, because all tweets preceding March 7th, 2021 are deleted. This isn't some tool to auto-delete tweets after n time elapses pic.twitter.com/JMS9PcFLiw  CHT (@PrometheusAM) June 6, 2021

2. Fauci tells U.S. Department of Health and Human Services secretary masks are only for the sick  but tells public something else

According to the BuzzFeed emails, in February 2020, Fauci did not believe paper masks  the kind sold at drugstores and worn by millions  protected healthy people from catching COVID. Instead, Fauci told Sylvia Burwell, former U.S. Department of Health and Human Services secretary:

Masks are really for infected people to protect them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material.

The truth about masks. We were right. Fauci knew from the start that masks arent really effective in keeping out virus because the virus "is small enough to pass through the material." #Fauciemails pic.twitter.com/1l3bX7AINh  Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) June 2, 2021

That statement in Faucis private emails is far different than what he told the American public, which was that everyone may need to mask up until 2022, to stay protected from COVID and its variants.

3. Fauci admits people who have had COVID have substantial immunity

When oncologist Dr. Zeke Emanuel, former health advisor to then-President Barack Obama and a former member of Bill Clintons Health Care Task Force, asked Fauci via email if people who have recovered from COVID are immune to getting the virus again, Fauci replied:

No evidence in this regard, but you would assume that there would be substantial immunity post infection.

If people who have recovered from COVID have natural immunity to the virus, that would mean they dont need to be vaccinated for it. Yet Fauci told Americans something very different when he said people who have had COVID still need to get the vaccine.

Fauci said people who have had COVID should get at least one dose of the vaccine. He also said people who have already had COVID should get one dose of the vaccine because they may have more protection from highly contagious variants.

Read more at: ChildrensHealthDefense.org and Deception.news
(Natural News) Pretty much every person in leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) needs to go, according to Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), because of their constant stream of lies about the Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19).

In a recent Twitter post, Massie wrote that the private corporation known as the CDC is nothing but a propaganda machine that pushes lies and deception for ulterior motives that have nothing to do with public health.

If the government response to this virus has taught us anything, its that everyone at the top of @CDCgov needs to be fired, Massie wrote. Its being far too generous to characterize their constant stream of lies as misinterpretations and typos.'

Rochelle Walensky, the current head of the CDC, is one such leader who should be fired immediately. All she does is lie, lie, and lie some more, spreading fake news and fake science about Chinese Virus scariants that will supposedly kill us all.

The CDC also terrorized the nations children by forcing them to stay out of the classroom for most of last year, only to let them later return with severe restrictions such as mandatory face masks and social distancing.

Since children have a nearly zero percent chance of testing positive for the Chinese Virus and presenting symptoms, there is absolutely no reason to torture them by keeping them separated from their friends and teachers during their important developmental years.

Much of the next generation will likely develop severe mental illness thanks to hacks like Walensky who demanded that Americas youth live in total isolation, which caused many of them to commit suicide.

Keeping schools closed or even partially closed, based on what we know now is unwarranted, is harming children, and has become a human rights issue, a team of medical researchers wrote in an op-ed back in March.

Walensky, CDC guilty of mass murder

We also now know that the CDC lied about the risk of outdoor transmission, greatly inflating the numbers to spread fear within the population about catching the Wuhan Flu while exercising outside.

It turns out that there is a near-zero percent chance that a person will catch Chinese Germs outdoors, which means the CDC also spread mental illness among many adults who are still deathly afraid to go outside without a mask because they think they might drop dead without one.

The CDC relied on false data from a study out of Singapore that supposedly identified outdoor transmission of the Chinese Flu as a risk factor. The truth, however, is that the Singapore study said no such thing  the CDC basically made the whole thing up like it usually does.

Massie also wants to see Tony Fauci removed from his post. The original cosponsor of the Fire Fauci Act, Massie says that Fauci has continually failed to provide Americans with accurate information about the COVID19 pandemic and has shown distrust in the American private sector and American ingenuity.

With Faucis stamp of approval, the CDC also lied about Pfizers mRNA injection, falsely claiming it to be efficacious in people who had already tested positive for the Wuhan Flu and recovered. It turns out that once a person has already had the Chinese Virus, he or she will not gain any additional immunity from a pharmaceutical injection.

Instead of fixing it, they proposed repeating it and just phrasing their mistake differently, Massie says about the CDCs deception.

So, at that point, right now I consider it a lie. I think the CDC is lying about the efficacy of the vaccine based on the Pfizer trials for those who have already had the coronavirus.

The latest news about Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) tyranny can be found at Pandemic.news.

Sources for this article include:

FoxNews.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) Law enforcement officers have been fighting Mexican cartels wanting to smuggle drugs into the U.S. In turn, the cartels have devised a number of ways to outsmart authorities in the U.S. and Mexico. But the war on drugs has now taken a different turn as cartels utilized drones for both surveillance and offensive purposes.

An incident just over a month ago in Mexicos Michoacan state showed the cartels use of weaponized drones for nefarious reasons.

State law enforcement officers were clearing blockades placed by feuding cartels along the highway in the town of El Aguaje as part of a routine operation when a drone suddenly flew over police officers and dropped a gunpowder bomb, wounding two in the arms and legs.

Mexican officials said they believe the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) was responsible for the April 20 attack. The CJNG had upgraded its arsenal by including weaponized drones to fight its adversaries. But not to be outdone was its main rival Carteles Unidos (CU), which also tapped drones in its war against the larger CJNG.

Mexican Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval also pointed his fingers at CJNG for the incident. He added that the person who used the drone against Michoacan law enforcement was arrested. During a briefing in Mexico City, the secretary acknowledged that such attacks were concerning  but havent been as effective as the cartels would like.

Sandoval noted that the drones used by cartels cannot carry sufficient explosives to seriously injure a person or destroy a building.

Speaking to the Courier-Journal, one anonymous CU drone operator said his group has about 100 drones. He added that a man nicknamed Lord of the Skies had been training other CU members since last year. The operator said: We have many drone models. Theyre not sophisticated  but [they] can carry a considerable amount of explosives.

According to the operator, CU deploys drones to surveil its territory and attack CJNG members. Despite the drones capability to deliver items, he remarked that both cartels do not use drones to transport drugs because of their inefficiency. The operator continued that the drones they use come legally from the U.S. [through] groups in Michoacan that support [CU] and have [legitimate] money to buy the drones.

Drugs and drones are definitely a bad combination

The incident in El Aguaje was not the first attack linked to CJNG. It has been accused of conducting many such offensives in the city of Tepalcatepec in Michoacan. CJNG has also been blamed for an attack in Baja California that targeted the residence of the states Public Safety Secretary Gerardo Manuel Sosa Olachea. (Related: UN report: Killer AI drones with no remote pilot hunted down humans.)

El Aguaje is located within the Aguililla municipality, which CJNG considers as its territory. The municipality is where CJNG leader Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes  also known as El Mencho  was born. Cervantes is suspected of being Mexicos most powerful drug lord. Outside its links to CJNG, Aguililla has also become a strategic hub for methamphetamine production.

Aside from methamphetamine, CJNG is also blamed for the spread of other drugs such as fentanyl and heroin to the U.S. According to the 2020 National Drug Threat Assessment by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the Cervantes-led cartel and its rivals produce fentanyl in clandestine laboratories. The DEA report added that they also produce and traffic the overwhelming majority of the heroin available in the U.S. (Related: Mexican drug cartel labs are smuggling mass quantities of meth into America.)

The use of drones by cartels such as CJNG and CU is part of their larger strategy to arm themselves like rogue militaries. Because of this, experts in both the U.S. and Mexico worry that more militarized cartels will translate to more casualties, more drugs entering the U.S. and a harder battle for law enforcement.

Former DEA Special Operations Division Agent Derek Maltz told the Courier-Journal: Ive been a strong advocate of designating the Mexican cartels as terrorist groups because theyre acting like [them] and theyre equipped like [them.] Theyre distributing record levels of poisonous drugs in America.

The erstwhile DEA agent added that the cartels will use the latest and greatest technology to defeat their foes in Mexico, go after police officers and fight for territory and better routes to smuggle drugs into the U.S.

Theyre killing our citizens as weve never seen in the history of the country, Maltz said.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention supported Maltzs remarks. The public health agency said more than 81,000 people in the U.S. died from drug overdoses in the 12-month period ending May 2020. It added that this was the highest number of overdose fatalities ever recorded in a 12-month period.

Head over to DrugCartels.news to read more stories about violence involving Mexican organized crime groups.

Sources include:

News.Yahoo.com

Courier-Journal.com

CDC.gov
(Natural News) On Monday, May 31, the Nevada legislature approved a sweeping clean energy bill aimed at increasing spending on electric vehicle infrastructure in the state.

State Bill (SB) 448 passed in the state assembly in a 31-10 vote after it passed in the Senate unanimously. The puts legislative backing behind the planned Greenlink Nevada transmission upgrade, which would build two new 525-kilovolt transmission lines essentially linking the entire state.

Under the new bill, utility NV Energy would have to complete construction on the project by the start of 2029, earlier than the original 2031 completion date.

SB 448 advances Nevadas green energy goals

Introduced by state Sen. Chris Brooks, a Democrat from Las Vegas, SB 448 advances Nevadas goal to reach 100 percent carbon-free resources by 2050. This was first introduced in a 2019 bill that also raised the states Renewable Portfolio Standard to 50 percent by 2030.

The new bill goes further. It requires utilities to forecast a path to achieve an 80 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from 2005 levels by the end of the decade.

An important part of SB 448 is the accelerated construction of the Greenlink Nevada projects, which involves the laying down of 600 miles of new transmission lines connecting the eastern and western parts of the state to Las Vegas. The new lines will effectively create a transmission triangle that connects the states population centers to open areas with significant potential for solar and geothermal energy production.

The Greenlink West line, which connected Reno to Yerington to Las Vegas, was approved for construction by the Public Utilities Commission in March. But the second Greenlink North line was only approved for permitting. This was due to concerns from the gaming and resort industry that the project would raise customer costs. The approval of SB 448 puts the weight of the legislature behind the project.

This could give Nevada access to huge amounts of renewables that are currently not able to reach the grid because of transmission constraints, said Cameron Dyer, a Nevada-based staff attorney for Western Resource Advocates. This is the only path forward to a fully decarbonized Nevada.

SB 448 also sets the state on a path towards joining a competitive wholesale energy market with other western states. It creates an 18-member task force to examine the steps Nevada would need to participate in a retail transmission organization (RTO).

The bill sets a requirement for the state to join an RTO by 2030, but there are options to delay or bypass that requirement.

Bill could save Nevada billions

Should Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak sign SB 448, it will require the states largest utility, NV Energy, to invest $100 million in charging infrastructure for light-, medium- and heavy-duty electric vehicles (EV) over the next three years.

This amount of investment is seen as providing much-needed economic stimulus without straining the state budget. The latter, alongside the states economy, has been hit hard by the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

A minimum of 40 percent of these investments will also be made in communities that have borne a disproportionate share of transportation pollution and have suffered most from COVID-19, which is made more deadly by exposure to local air pollution.

The bill is also seen as helping the state save money by encouraging drivers to switch to EVs. According to a report by MJ Bradley & Associates, commissioned by NRDC, Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, and Western Resource Advocates, Nevada could save up to $21 billion in avoided expenditures on gasoline and maintenance, reduced utility bills and environmental benefits by 2050. (Related: Clean energy is now the cheapest source of electricity, according to the open market.)

EVs can save families money as driving on electricity is cheaper than gasoline. This is on top of electricity rates being more stable than gasoline prices, as the former are regulated by state public utility commissions. In addition, EVs are also cheaper to maintain due to having fewer moving parts.

For more on state efforts to switch to clean energy, follow NewEnergyReport.com.

Sources include:

CleanTechnica.com

UtilityDive.com 1

UtilityDive.com 2

MJBradley.com[PDF]
(Natural News) In order to attend their prom this year, senior students at Exeter High School in New Hampshire were required to get marked and tracked based on their Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccination status as part of some bizarre Tony Fauci mass worship ritual.

According to reports, non-jabbed students at the school were forcibly numbered with Sharpie markers like cattle, and followed around throughout the evening by snitches who apparently tried to observe whether or not the Chinese Virus was floating around their bodies.

Like some kind of scene out of a Holocaust movie, unvaccinated prom attendees were intentionally humiliated and treated like social pariahs as school officials made a visibly uncomfortable display in response to their presence.

Every three songs, unvaccinated students were told they needed to stop dancing, disengage from their partner, and raise up their arm tattoo so they could be identified and logged for contact tracing purposes.

They also left the list of student names (first and last) with the info on whether they were vaccinated or not on a table outside after the prom, reported New Hampshire Rep. Melissa Litchfield, quoting a constituent who informed her about the disturbing details.

I found it the next morning. This information should 1. Not have been shared and 2. Should never be left where anyone can have access to it. I have a photo of the list.

Exeter High School violated HIPAA protections

Another constituent told Litchfield that she was appalled how the children were treated, likening it to fascist regimes of the past that treated the undesirables like second-class citizens.

Marking them, thus singling them out, and then having to raise their hands is beyond tolerable, this person said.

First, the school could be looking at lawsuits for violation of [HIPAA] rights. They have no business asking for a vaccine card  last Thursday masks were no longer required outside and if this is in effect it should not have mattered if they were vaccinated or not.

Litchfield is asking others to come forward with their stories so she can look into the matter further. Apparently there has been much talk at the state level concerning state residents being asked for vaccination status.

Perhaps the worst part is that Exeter students and their parents were not told beforehand that unvaccinated students would be tagged and tracked throughout the evening.

The kids were told it was optional to provide a copy of their vaccine card, another parent reported. When they showed up at prom check-in they were marked and had a number written on them in black Sharpie if they were not vaccinated.

Those that were vaccinated had a different color mark and no number assigned to them. Underclassmen were given the role of writing the numbers down on the dance floor. After every 3-4 dances kids were asked to raise their hands so the underclassmen could record the numbers.

The school did, however, threaten students beforehand that if they tested positive for Chinese Germs in the week leading up to prom, that they would not be able to participate and would miss graduation and all their senior week activities per the schools contact tracing policy.

It is not right that kids are feeling pressured from peers, school and government to get vaccinated, another parent said. Kids should not feel they need to get the vaccination or they will potentially miss out on events. It is a personal choice and should remain that.

It has become a way to separate and cull out those that wont follow along  its a scary, slippery slope and I guess I hope that if attention is brought to it, people might think twice about whether we want to start down that slope or not.

So much for live free or die, which is New Hampshires state motto.

More related news stories about Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccine holocaust can be found at VaccineHolocaust.org

Sources for this article include:

Newspunch.com

NaturalNews.com
(Natural News) When the American Civil Liberties Union was founded, the organization legitimately was a civil rights leader.

The ACLU took on all sorts of cases that involved sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle, violations of the Constitution. The ACLU has, in fact, even defended the free speech rights of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, both of whom are filled with abhorrent people spouting wildly unpopular rhetoric  but rhetoric that is nevertheless protected speech under the First Amendment.

That said, the legal org has historically been far more liberal than it has ever been conservative, being quicker to take on cases defending, say, abortion and gay rights than gun cases and conservative campus speech.

Now, however, there is a growing faction within the organization to go full woke libtard because they believe that legal rights for the far left are all that matter and that any political opponents dont deserve representation or even co-existence under the law and our founding document.

The New York Times, certainly not a bastion of right-wing extremism, is even reporting the internal confict:

It was supposed to be the celebration of a grand career, as the American Civil Liberties Union presented a prestigious award to the longtime lawyer David Goldberger. He had argued one of its most famous cases, defending the free speech rights of Nazis in the 1970s to march in Skokie, Ill., home to many Holocaust survivors.

Mr. Goldberger, now 79, adored the A.C.L.U. But at his celebratory luncheon in 2017, he listened to one speaker after another and felt a growing unease.

Speaker after speaker, he said, talked about how conservatives did not deserve to have their right to free speech defended. Others claimed that blacks suffer far more exposure to hateful speech than do whites, which is another lie. But thats what this once-prestigious organization has turned into: Just another woke lefty org with a penchant for authoritarianism on the Marxist scale.

Goldberger, meanwhile, is a Jew  and yet, he defended the rights of those Nazis to speak anyway, because the Constitution does not make exemptions like that.

I got the sense it was more important for ACLU staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle, he told the Times. Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind.

The leftward lurch began in recent years; the American Civil Leftist Union filed something akin to 400 lawsuits against the Trump administration, leaving many to believe that the org has left behind its founding mission: To steadfastly defend the First Amendment.

Its national and state staff members debate, often hotly, whether defense of speech conflicts with advocacy for a growing number of progressive causes, including voting rights, reparations, transgender rights and defunding the police, the Times reported.

Those debates mirror those of the larger culture, where a belief in the centrality of free speech to American democracy contends with ever more forceful progressive arguments that hate speech is a form of psychological and even physical violence, the Times added.

And while there is an old saying  the pen is mightier than the sword  speech is not about inflicting violence, per se (at least it wasnt prior to the proliferation of social media, which has become a cultural toilet). Speech is not violence, its speech; the communication of ideas that our founders so cherished because they were part of a monarchy whose head of state tolerated no dissent.

Todays American leftists are like King George in that way; they falsely make the certain speech is violence argument to assuage their natural authoritarian tendency to quash opposing views and ideas because they really are convinced that their positions are the only rational, correct ones.

Its a lie. And even some old ACLU hands, as well as the New York Times, know it.

Sources include:

NYTimes.com

NewsTarget.com
ECA GROUP on June 10, 2021, announces the fulfillment of the first milestone within the modernization program of 3 mine countermeasures vessels belonging to the Latvian Navy, 8 months after winning the contract for the modernization of the Navy's MCM capabilities. This first milestone consists of disassembling the legacy equipment of mine countermeasures vessels. Following this successful phase, and the Critical Design Review of ship architecture, teams will begin installing the new, upgraded equipment in October 2021.

Follow Navy Recognition on Google News at this link

Mine countermeasures vessels of Latvian Navy. (Picture source ECA Group)

ECA GROUP will install and configure its UMIS Unmanned Mine Countermeasures Integrated System on the 3 vessels. The UMIS Toolbox is a comprehensive suite of state-of-the-art technology for unmanned, mine clearance operations, while removing the need for the ship to enter the minefield (stand-off concept). For the Latvian Navy, ECA GROUP will replace the vessels' conventional mine detection systems based on a hull sonar with a more compact, mobile and evolutive unmanned system UMIS, consisting of AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) A18-M drones fitted with the latest generation ECA GROUP synthetic aperture sonar UMISAS for detection, and several underwater robots, the Seascan MK2 and K-STER C for mines identification and neutralization. The new Ultra Short Baseline positioning system installed in place of hull sonar enables not only tracking but also acoustic communication, replacing the previous acoustic modem which had to be launched from the deck.

ECA GROUP will modify the vessels to accommodate the new equipment with the support of its subsidiary MAURIC, specialized in naval architecture, and Latvian industrial partners, in order to install these new generation mine countermeasures systems. Several Latvian companies have been consulted for the supply of equipment and coordination of on-site activities and works. Other Latvian companies will also be consulted for procurement of racks, trolleys, launch and recovery systems of drones. MAURIC will make a valuable contribution in ensuring the operability of the equipment installed on board, guaranteeing enhanced performance of the ships following their upgrades.

An integral part of the upgrade by ECA GROUP and MAURIC will be the complete renewal of the Combat Room to integrate cabinets and consoles necessary for operating the new navigation systems (WECDIS, USBL positioning system and Inertial Navigation System by iXblue), new Autopilot (by SIREHNA), and ECA GROUP's UMISOFT software suite for Mission Management, Data Management and Drone Control. A new Iridium and Wi-Fi antenna will be installed on each ship for communicating with the A18-M drone at the surface.

Naval forces around the world are faced with economic restrictions and the need to rationalise resources whilst enhancing their capabilities in order to fulfil their increasingly challenging missions of fighting threats and protecting populations.

By upgrading mine warfare equipment on existing vessels, ECA GROUP brings state of the art capabilities to navies while enabling them to prolong the life of their fleet already in service. (In the case of the Latvian Navy, they had acquired their vessels from the Royal Netherlands Navy in 2006.) The UMIS Toolbox can also be installed on other models of conventional mine countermeasures vessels or on ships that are not used for mine countermeasures.

ECA GROUP offers this modernisation solution to all navies that intend to keep and optimise their conventional mine countermeasure vessels or consider the acquisition of pre-owned vessels.
Steve engaged Willden in conversation, instead of engaging him with the handgun he keeps hidden in his wheelchair, KTXL reported. After 20 minutes, he convinced Willden to step outside, then locked the door and called the cops.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Sugar mills in India have exported 4.25 million tonnes of the sweetener so far in the ongoing 2020-21 marketing year ending September, with maximum shipments to Indonesia, trade body AISTA said on Friday.

Mills have contracted to export 5.85 million tonnes of sugar so far, as against the 6 million tonnes quota assigned by the food ministry in January this year, All India Sugar Trade Association (AISTA) said in a statement.

About 1,50,000 tonnes of sugar is left to be exported under the quota and some sugar mills are finding it difficult to locate small quantities left with mills, it said and requested the government to publish the unshipped export quota left with mills as on May 31.

The sugar marketing year runs from October to September.

According to AISTA, mills have exported a total of 4.25 million tonnes of sugar from January 1 till June 7, 2021.

Of the total exports undertaken so far, maximum exports have been undertaken to Indonesia at 1.

40 million tonnes so far this year, followed by Afghanistan at 5,20,905 tonnes and the UAE at 4,36,917 tonnes and Sri Lanka at 3,24,113 tonnes.

About 3,59,665 tonnes of sugar is under loading.

An additional 4,98,462 tonnes of sugar is in transit and delivered to port-based refineries, it said.

"The US has withdrawn oil restrictions on Iran and there are chances of sugar exports to Iran. India's highest sugar exports were to Iran last year," AISTA Chairman Praful Vithalani told PTI.

Maharashtra has failed to sell in the domestic market the allotted quota in a month.

There can be more than 2 million tonnes of additional unsold stock at the end of the sugar year ending September 2021, he added.

The association noted that monsoon has set in and sugar is a highly hygroscopic commodity as it catches moisture very fast.

It is necessary that sugar stored in port areas or sugar reaching at the port for export get evacuated immediately.

While Hazira port trust has decided to accord priority to sugar vessels for berthing, similar instructions need to be issued to other ports also, it said.

AISTA has already written to the ports from where major sugar exports are taking place to give priority to vessels for sugar exports on lines of Hazira ports, it said and added the Union Food Ministry may also take up the matter with Shipping and Commerce ministries in this regard.

The international sugar prices have softened a little as expectation of rains in Brazil has brightened the chances of rise in sugar production, it said.

AISTA said the sugar export without subsidy has started and about 2 lakh tonnes has been traded so far.

AISTA has revised sugar production to 35 million tonnes for the 2020-21 marketing year from earlier projections of 29.9 million tonnes.

Consumption will be pegged at 25.5 million tonnes.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Earthmoving and construction equipment major JCB India on Friday said it will support the education of the children of its employees who succumbed to COVID-19 besides extending medical insurance for their families to 10 years as part of a relief package for its staff.

Under the initiative, JCB India said, apart from the term insurance policy benefits, the company will be supporting the education of the children of deceased employees to the tune of Rs 1 lakh per child, per year for their schooling and Rs 2 lakh per child, per year for three years for their graduation.

"The medical insurance for their families has also been extended to 10 years. For contractual employees, there will be one-time support of Rs 3 lakh," JCB India said in a statement.

JCB India CEO and MD Deepak Shetty said, "The past few weeks have been a phase of intense learning. Virtually all our organisational resources were deployed towards supporting the health and safety of our employees and their families. Unfortunately, we also went through the painful phase of losing some of our colleagues to the virus. We are fully committed to supporting their families through a relief package."

The company said, from April, over 2,000 employees and their families have been vaccinated at camps held across its Ballabgarh, Pune and Jaipur facilities.

It is now ensuring that all its employees in India are vaccinated over the next few weeks.

With the company witnessing a surge in COVID-19 cases in its factories between April and May during the second wave, JCB India said it temporarily paused all manufacturing operations to stop the spread of the virus.

It also extended a telemedicine facility for all its employees in different parts of the country.

Over 7,600 tests were conducted during this phase and in addition to managing beds, oxygen and ambulances, JCB created a COVID relief centre on its factory premises, the statement said.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: State-owned power giant NTPC on Friday said its board will consider a proposal to enhance its borrowing limit to Rs 2.25 lakh crore from the existing Rs 2 lakh crore in its meeting later this month.

"A meeting of the Board of Directors of the Company is scheduled to be held at New Delhi on Saturday, 19th June 2021 to, inter-alia, consider and approve the Annual Standalone and Consolidated Financial Statements for the financial year ended on March 31, 2021, after these results are reviewed by the Audit Committee of the Board," it said in a BSE filing.

According to the filing, the proposal for the enhancement of the borrowing limit from Rs 2,00,000 crore to Rs 2,25,000 crore is listed on the agenda of the board meeting on June 19.

The board will also consider a proposal for the recommendation of a final dividend for 2020-21 in the meeting.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Passenger vehicle wholesales in India declined by 66 per cent to 88,045 units in May as compared to April this year as lockdowns across various states impacted dispatches to dealers, auto industry body SIAM said on Friday.

Passenger vehicle wholesales in April stood at 2,61,633 units.

As per the latest data by the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM), two-wheeler dispatches to dealers dropped by 65 per cent to 3,52,717 units, compared to 9,95,097 units in April.

Motorcycle sales declined 56 per cent last month to 2,95,257 units, as against 6,67,841 units in April.

Similarly, scooter sales were down 83 per cent to 50,294 units, from 3,00,462 units in April this year.

Three-wheeler sales declined by 91 per cent to 1,251 units, as compared to 13,728 units in April.

Vehicle sales across categories witnessed a dip of 65 per cent to 4,42,013 units last month, as against 12,70,458 units in April this year.

Commenting on the sales data, SIAM Director General Rajesh Menon said that many states were under lockdown due to COVID-19 cases for most part of May thus impacting overall sales and production during the month.

"Many members (auto cos) had also shut down their manufacturing plants to divert oxygen from industrial use for medical purposes," he added.
Omjasvin MD By

Express News Service

CHENNAI: Children expressed their gratitude to doctors and nurses of the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital here by gifting about hundred hand-painted thank you cards which are displayed at the hospitals COVID-19 ward premises.

On Friday, doctors of the hospital stood alongside the display of cards and clicked pictures. Dean of the RGGGH Dr E Theranirajan said the children are related to parents who serve at the Inner Wheel NGO that has been distributing free food for the hospital staff during the pandemic.

ALSO READ: Chennai man arrested for swindling people through fake company with top ratings on web portal

All the doctors are happy to see such an effort by children to thank us, he told The New Indian Express.

The cards include cartoons of Captain America, Spiderman and Superman, showing them as doctors who saved the lives of patients.

A young girl had written in her card, Dear doctors and nurses who work in the hospital, thank you for risking your life for us. It is the most kindest thing anybody has done.

Cartoons and artwork such as doctors protecting the earth were also displayed.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Delhi's first drive-through COVID-19 vaccination facility, which opened with much fanfare two weeks ago, is being shut as the Centre's price cap for vaccines has made operation unviable, officials said on Friday.

The drive-through centre at Vegas Mall in Dwarka, an initiative by the Delhi government and Aakash Healthcare Super Speciality Hospital, was inaugurated by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on May 26. A vaccine shot at the drive-through facility cost Rs 1,400.

On June 8, the central government set the maximum price private hospitals can charge for the three COVID-19 vaccines currently available in the country -- Covishield Rs 780 per dose, Covaxin Rs 1,410 and Sputnik V Rs 1,145.

"Delhi's First Drive Thru, a highly safe, convenient way for public, which we ran non-stop for 15 days, we have decided to stop now, owing to new vaccination pricing, as running it has become non-viable now," Aakash Healthcare Super Speciality Hospital said in a statement.

In a letter to all states and union territories on June 8, the Union health ministry had suggested that strict action be taken against private vaccination centres overcharging for vaccines.
By Express News Service

HYDERABAD: Telanganas Osmania General Hospital will now go down in history for having saved a 17-year-old severely malnourished girl with a rare disease called Rapunzel syndrome. In this syndrome, the patients tend to consume their own hair due to psychological issues.

In this case, the girl from Shamshabad had been doing so for the last 5 months and the doctors' team which included the superintendent of the hospital Dr Nagendar B himself retrieved nearly 2 kg of hair which was 150 cm long -- the longest ever reported worldwide from patients stomach and small bowel.

So far, only 68 such cases have been reported worldwide and the case operated in Osmania General Hospital has the longest ever specimen reported in the world so far as it went up to small bowel as well. In the hospital we have previously treated Rapunzel syndrome once before, said Dr Nagendar.

Of the 150 cm of hair, 30 cms was in the stomach and 120 cm in the small bowel.

The patient was operated on the June 2. She had come to the hospital nearly a month ago with complaints of pain in the abdomen and vomiting. The sister informed us that she had a history of eating her own hair. At that time her treatment could not begin as she was tested Covid positive. She successfully recovered in the Gandhi Hospital and was sent here for surgery, added Dr Pandu Naik, Department of Anesthesia.

The biggest challenge for the doctors was managing the anesthesia in the malnourished patient who had poor nutrition absorption due to the hair in her digestive system. There were five senior professors from the surgery department and anesthesia department including Dr Pandu Naik, Dr K Rani, Dr G Anil Kumar, and Dr Pavan involved along with various PG Doctors.

Such cases highlight the potential of the hospitals and the service we are rendering as the only tertiary care and non-Covid hospital in the state during a pandemic, added Dr Nagendar.
Rajesh Abraham By

Express News Service

KOCHI: As steps are being taken to develop tourism in Lakshadweep on the lines of Maldives, Jose Dominic, the pioneer of sustainable and responsible tourism who ran his resort on Bangaram, a tiny teardrop-shaped island near Agatti and Kavaratti for 20 years from 1988, warns the proposed model will spell an ecological and social disaster in the fragile and beautiful islands.

When the Casino Group of Hotels (now CGH Earth) won the bid to run its resort at Bangaram on a 25-year lease, to be renewed every five years (it ended after 20 years), Dominic said it was the beginning of a new concept of tourism that was not very popular then. One which focuses on retaining nature at its original self without compromising on the quality of service  the sustainable eco-tourism model.

The rules stipulated that Bangaram should not have a carrying capacity of more than 100 people at a time  60 people for its 30 rooms and 40 support staff. What CGH Earth did then was revolutionary in the industry, which considers luxury as opulence of built space offering a range of services.We went a step further to decide that our resort will be as close to nature as possible and will not offer facilities such as AC, swimming pools, room service, telephone and television. We even told our guests to remove their watches and enjoy passing time, watching sunsets, said Dominic.

We didnt even use LPG for cooking. We used coconut debris and firewood, which gave a unique taste to our cuisines. We also bought fish from the local community, Dominic said.Audaciously, the group priced its rooms on par with the five-star Oberoi Hotels in Mumbai. By the end of its term, the group was charging $400/night for a standard room, and $750/night for deluxe rooms. The Oberoi group used to charge $180/day. In 1986, international tourists would land in Mumbai via Frankfurt, stay overnight at the Oberoi, before flying down to Kochi and take a ship or flight to Agatti. We felt if the guests could stay in Mumbai and fly down to Kochi to reach Bangaram, they could very well pay the same rate, he said.

The risk paid off. Some of the high-profile clients at Bangaram resort include Hollywood star Richard Gere, A B Vajpayee, Sonia Gandhi, and a legion of Bollywood stars.Dominic said the Kochi-based hotel changed its ethos too to an eco-sensitive group and changed its brand to CGH Earth to reflect its new priorities viz. clean, green and healthy, realising the importance of preserving nature and the eco-sensitive model, mastered from the Bangaram experience.

The Maldives is hardly a model to be emulated. They have so many islands uninhabited there that they can follow the Slash and Burn practice, Dominic said.Travellers come all the way to Lakshadweep to experience its natural beauty. For the habitant, Disney World-like water villas may be a spectacular experience. But for all else, its paradise lost. To build water villas in a natural lagoon is aesthetically and environmentally a disastrous step, he added.
By Express News Service

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The free vaccination policy of the Central government will help the state to reduce the quantum of borrowings, Finance Minister KN Balagopal has said. He was replying to Opposition Leader V D Satheesan who asked the government to reveal the future plan on the Rs 1,000 crore allocation in the budget and the money collected to the CMDRF for vaccine purchase.

The minister said he did not intend to hide the financial crisis of the state. The LDF could return to power because of the sterling performance of the first Pinarayi Vijayan Government. Kerala is far ahead of other states in terms of sustainable development index. He refuted allegations of slashing the benefits for minorities.

When the Centre reduces its share in centrally sponsored projects, the states share would also come down proportionately. The government will protect the automobile sector. Projects will be devised to support small scale industrialists and traders. The finance department has given sanction to the takeover of the newsprint factory at Velloor. Rs 145 crore will be sanctioned for this.

STEPS TAKEN TO FILL VACANCIES FROM PSC LIST: CM

The government has taken steps to fill maximum vacancies reported before the expiry of the published PSC rank-lists published. Due to Covid, the Public Service Commission could not conduct some competitive examinations, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan told the assembly. However, it had not affected system of reporting vacancies.

Reply to MLAs question appears on social media, speaker seeks action

TPuram: Speaker M B Rajesh has asked the government to conduct a comprehensive departmental inquiry into the June 7 incident in which the response to a question in the Assembly appeared on social media before being made available in the House. The Speaker also ruled that disciplinary action should be taken against those who committed the lapses.

Individual login ID for students, teachers: Min

Teachers and students in public schools will be provided individual login ID to attend online classes. Education Minister V Sivankutty said special facilities will be set up in schools for students who lack facilities to attend online classes at home. The changes will be introduced in phases. Meanwhile, Sivankutty, who is also Labour minister said unemployment rate has gone up in the wake of Covid,

Drive against illegal taxi services: Antony Raju

Transport Minister Antony Raju has directed officials to initiate action against people operating private vehicles as taxi. The decision was taken after it was noticed that private vehicles were being operated for public sector units, companies and banks on contract basis. Operating private vehicle as taxi is an offence. People who travel in such vehicles are unaware they will not get any insurance cover if involved in accidents.

Major tourist spots to be made 100% vaccinated zones

The Tourism Department is planning to make major tourist destinations in the state 100 per cent vaccinated zones by July 15. Tourism Minister P A Mohammed Riyas told the assembly that his department, with the help of the Health Department, is planning to vaccinate all the stakeholders involvedin the major destinations to tide over the Covid blues.

State will start courses in SNGOU this year: Minister

The state government will offer various courses in the Sree Narayana Guru Open University (SNGOU) this year itself, said Higher Education Minister R Bindu. The state government requires the recognition of the distant education bureau of the UGC to start courses and it has completed the formalities to get the recognition. Due to the prevailing Covid situation, the UGC approval for the courses is getting delayed.
By IANS

MUMBAI: Actress Urvashi Rautela recently informed on Instagram that she is pitching in with her bit to solve the oxygen crisis during the ongoing Covid pandemic.

The Urvashi Rautela Foundation has donated 47 oxygen concentrators, she said in the social media post.

Opening up on the subject, the actress shared: "India is grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic, people out there are in agony running about to arrange life-saving medications, ICU beds, ventilators and, most crucial, oxygen to save their loved one. Arranging these essentialities is arduous today because the availability of all these things is way less than what the country actually requires to win this battle."

"With Covid-19 infecting about four lakh people on a daily basis, these concentrators can really help the Indian healthcare system from disintegrating. To my knowledge, concentrators can operate and produce oxygen 24 hours a day continuously, and may last up to five years. I and my team hope to ensure that no one loses his or her life due to oxygen deficit," the actress added.
By Express News Service

After a series of feature films, writer-director Samit Kakkad has made his first nine-episode finite series for OTT.

Titled Indori Ishq, the series explores the concept of unrequited love and delves into the modern-day dynamics of commitment and fidelity in a boy-girl relationship.

The nine-episode show, which launched on June 10 on MX Player, follows a young boys collapse after being cheated by his girlfriend.

Samit has previously directed films like Ashcharya Chak It, Aayna Ka Bayna and Half Ticket. The filmmaker chose Indori Ishq to leap into the space of digital storytelling. He has also signed a two-film-deal with Sanjay Guptas production company.

Theres no storyteller in the country who is not charmed by digital platforms, Samit shared.

One of my earlier films, Ashcharya Chak It, was a direct-to-digital release on Netflix when people were still warming up to the idea of watching content on platforms in India. As a filmmaker, Ive honed the art of crafting stories in an edgy and realistic style - the emotions, the pain, the pleasures are all as real as it gets."

With Indori Ishq, Samit wanted to delve into the psyche of a young couple.

I had a great time shooting this show in Mumbai and Indore, exploring untapped locations with an extremely dedicated team. We had extensive schedules, and weve tapped both the cities in shades that have never been seen before, Samit added.

The filmmaker, poised to start his new Hindi film in the next few months, has also been adding final touches to his impending Marathi project, 36 Gunn.

The film is an experiential story based on true events. It was shot with a crew of nine individuals across Central London, York, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Mumbai.

Talking about his diverse filmography, Samit said, Ive never been the sort of person who chases money. If Im dipping my fingers into so many different pies, its because I love the content I have on hand. I enjoy the process of being able to bring stories to life without compromising on quality, tonality, and technique.

The filmmaker also runs his production banner, Samit Kakkad Films.
Sowmya Mani By

Express News Service

PUDUKKOTTAI: Taking care of patients during the pandemic risking their own lives is the true mark of heroism. Despite encountering rude behaviour by patients or attenders at government hospitals and facilities, healthcare workers have been showing up for duty in an unfailing manner. In an expression of gratitude, a lawyer from Aranthangi showered petals at the feet of two nurses to thank them for all the service they have rendered.

Manimaran, a lawyer, was admitted to the isolation ward at Aranthangi Government Hospital after testing positive for Covid. He complained of cough and shortness of breath. Initially hesitant and scared about seeking treatment at a government facility, Manimaran says his fears were proven wrong by the wonderful staff at the hospital.

When he was discharged after a five-day stay, Manimaran bought flowers from a nearby shop, called the two nurses who treated him and showered the petals at their feet . When I came out, I happened to hear a couple of nurses talking. One of them was saying that even if she fell sick or unconscious, there was no one at home to take notice of it or take care of her.

I felt bad hearing that and actually realised that had people like us been more careful, perhaps we would not be posing a threat to their health. These workers risking their health to attend to patients like us every day, says Manimaran.

As he wasnt in a position to offer any monetary support, Manimaran says he decided to shower petals on their feet like they were God. The nurses, doctors and sanitary workers did a stellar job. They took good care of me and every patient. The nurses kept enquiring how we felt and giving us medicines at the right time. They checked my oxygen levels regularly. If they arent God, I wonder who is, Manimaran says.


By PTI

LONDON: The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, known in India as Covishield, may be associated with a very small risk of developing a blood condition characterised by low platelet counts, according to a nationwide study in the UK.

The increased risk of the condition, known as idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP), is estimated to be 11 per million doses, similar to figures seen in vaccines for flu, and measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR), the researchers said.

A low number of platelets -- blood cells that help prevent blood loss when vessels are damaged -- can result in no symptoms or can lead to an increased risk of bleeding or, in some cases, clotting, they said.

The team, led by researchers at the University of Edinburgh in the UK, noted that people at most risk from ITP tended to be older -- a median age of 69 years old -- and had at least one underlying chronic health problem such as coronary heart disease, diabetes or chronic kidney disease.

The researchers were unable to establish a definitive link between other forms of clotting -- including the rare form called cerebral venous sinus thrombosis or CVST -- due to the very low number of cases in vaccinated people included in the study.

The study of 5.4 million people in Scotland, of whom 2.5 million had received their first vaccine dose, is the first analysis of ITP, clotting and bleeding events following vaccination for an entire country. The authors of the study, published in the journal Nature Medicine on Wednesday, emphasised that the increased chance of developing ITP after receiving the vaccine remains smaller than the risk of developing it because of COVID-19.

They noted that the rare risk should not deter the roll out of the vaccine programme. The same risk of ITP was not found for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Other vaccines were not included in the study. The researchers analysed a dataset as part of the EAVE II project, which uses anonymised linked patient data to track the pandemic and the vaccine roll out in real time.

They investigated data up to April 14, 2021 for people in Scotland who had received the first dose of either vaccine. By this date, over 1.7 million had an Oxford-AstraZeneca jab and some 800,000 had a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

Experts recommend that recipients of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine should be made aware of the slight increased risks of ITP, but also stress that the risk of developing these disorders from COVID-19 is potentially much higher.

UK's Medical and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) had previous reported low platelet counts in combination with blood clots following vaccination with the AstraZeneca vaccine, estimated to occur at a rate of approximately 13 per million first doses.

The researchers, including those from the universities of Strathclyde, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Oxford, Swansea and St Andrew's, also looked at health records dating back to September 2019 to investigate any previous issues with ITP, clotting or bleeding disorders.

The data was then compared with those who were yet to be vaccinated to determine if any clotting events were outside what would have been expected pre-pandemic.

The analysis indicated that there was a slight increase in ITP in the second week following vaccination for those who received the AstraZeneca vaccine and possibly also increased risk of arterial clotting and bleeding events.
By PTI

KOLKATA: BJP national vice president Mukul Roy left his home for the Trinamool Congress headquarters here on Friday afternoon amid speculation that he might return to the ruling party in West Bengal.

Roy, the former second-in-command of the TMC who joined the saffron party in November 2017, has been distancing himself from the BJP for the last several days.

ALSO READ | Buzz grows on BJP vice-president Mukul Roy's return to TMC after Abhishek Banerjee's hospital visit

Chief Minister and TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee also left her Kalighat residence, as heightened security measures were noticed at the Trinamool Congress Bhavan off the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass here.

Asked by reporters where he was going as he left his home, Roy answered "Trinamool Bhavan".
Manish Anand By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: Amid hectic parleys within the BJP to control damage in Uttar Pradesh after the second wave of the pandemic left a devastating trail, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Thursday called on Union home minister Amit Shah. Adityanath is slated to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday, with indications suggesting the CM may not be able to avoid a state Cabinet reshuffle.

Earlier, BJP chief J P Nadda briefed Modi on the inputs collated by party general secretary (organisation) B L Santhosh and state in-charge Radha Mohan Singh, who had camped in Lucknow for two days. Modi is reportedly closely monitoring the BJPs preparations for the state polls next year, with regular exchange of inputs between him and Nadda as well as RSS leaders.

ALSO READ: MLAs feel CM Yogi Adityanath aloof, relies more on babus

While the CM had recently termed the buzz of a Cabinet reshuffle as media speculation, sources said he will eventually have to fall in line as the top leadership is keen on a few changes ahead of the February 2022 state polls. A K Sharma, MLC and former official in the Prime Ministers Office (PMO), is widely speculated to get a key portfolio in the state Cabinet.

While the CM hasnt been amenable to the idea so far, a top ranking BJP functionary told this newspaper that Sharma would be given an important assignment in the state. Sharma, incidentally, was in the national capital when Adityanath called on Shah.

Sources said BJP leaders and top RSS functionaries concur that while Adityanath should lead the party in the polls, a few changes in his ministerial team are needed to dispel the perception that hes running a highly centralised administration, against which even the MPs and MLAs reportedly nurse grievances. However, the CM is known to enjoy the patronage of the RSS leadership. For the record, Adityanath described his meeting with Shah as a courtesy call, saying he sought guidance.

Raut lauds modi amid maha pawar point

Mumbai: Days after Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray had a one-on-one with the prime minister in Delhi, Shiv Senas Sanjay Raut lauded Narendra Modi, saying he is the top leader of the country and the BJP. But tamping down speculation, NCP chief Sharad Pawar said their government will not only complete its term, the allies will contest the LS and the state elections together

Stay with amarinder as CM, says panel

Chandigarh: The report of a Congress panel set up to address the ongoing rift in its Punjab unit, suggested continuing with Amarinder Singh as the CM and making him the face of the state elections. It also recommended accommodating rebel Navjot Singh Sidhu and revamping the state unit. The report was submitted to party president Sonia Gandhi on Thursday
By Express News Service

NEW DELHI: The Union government has asked Bihar to share the date and district wise details of the COVID-19 deaths, two days after it reconciled data and reported 3,971 new deaths within a day due to the infection disease.

The Centre also said that states have been advised repeatedly through multiple mediums and through deployment of Central teams for recording of deaths in accordance with the laid down guidelines.

The government also emphasised that as early as May last year, to avoid inconsistency or confusion in the number of deaths being reported, ICMR had issued "Guidance for appropriate recording of COVID-19 related deaths in India" for correct recording of all deaths by states as per ICD-10 codes recommended by WHO for mortality coding.

The Union Health Ministry has regularly emphasized the need for a robust reporting mechanism for monitoring district wise cases and deaths on a daily basis, the government said in a statement. It clarified that while the government reported a total of 6148 COVID-19 deaths on June 10, this spike in deaths was on account of 3971 deaths reported by Bihar due to data reconciliation.

"In the instant case, the Union government has written to the state of Bihar to provide a detailed date and district wise break-up of the reconciled number of deaths to the Union health ministry," the statement added.
By PTI

SUKMA: Thirteen Naxals, including a couple, surrendered in two districts of Chhattisgarh's Bastar region on Friday, which was the last day of the outlawed movement's 'Jan Pituri week', police said.

While eight ultras turned themselves in before police and CRPF officials in Sukma district, five surrendered in neighbouring Dantewada, they said.

"Of the eight surrendered cadres, Vanjam Bheema is a member of the Naxals' platoon number 4 in section B and carried a reward of Rs 2 lakh on his head. His wife, Madavi Kalawati, a member of the Maoists' cultural outfit Chetna Natya Mandali (CNM), also surrendered," Sukma Superintendent of Police KL Dhruv said.

The six others, identified as Ravi, Kosa, Deva, Dirdo Ganga, Sodi Dula and Kawasi Deva, were active as lower-rung members of the banned outfit, he said, adding that Deva handed over a muzzle-loading gun.

In their statement, the surrendered ultras cited disappointment with the "hollow" Maoist ideology as well as the exploitation of lower-rung cadres by senior Naxal leaders, Dhruv said.

All eight were given an encouragement amount of Rs 10,000 each, he said.

In Dantewada, five 'jan militia; members surrendered at Kirandul police station as a part of the police's rehabilitation drive 'Lon Varratu', another official said.

With this surrender, 368 Naxals, including 96 carrying rewards on their heads, have laid down arms in the district under the campaign, the name of which means return to your home/village in the local Gondi dialect.

Naxals observe Jan Pituri week from Hune 5 to June 11 to pay homage to their slain colleagues, and during this period, security forces step up patrolling to thwart any untoward incident, officials said.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi here on Friday.

Adityanath met Modi at his residence, a day after meeting Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

The chief minister, who is on a two-day visit to the national capital from Thursday to meet the BJP top brass, is also scheduled to meet party president JP Nadda in the afternoon.

His visit comes close on the heels of the party holding a series of review meetings in Lucknow, which had fuelled speculation of a ministerial reshuffle in the state.

During his meeting with Shah, Adityanath presented a copy of the report 'Solution of Migrant Crisis'.

His visit to the national capital started a day after Jitin Prasada quit the Congress and joined the BJP.

After Adityanath met Shah, Prasada called on the Uttar Pradesh chief minister here.

ALSO READ: MLAs feel CM Yogi Adityanath aloof, relies more on babus

BJP MLC A K Sharma, a former IAS officer who is seen as a trusted hand of Modi, is also in Delhi to meet party leaders and allies.

Though there is no official word on whether there will be a Cabinet expansion in Uttar Pradesh, sources said Prasada, who comes from a noted Brahmin family of the state with political heft, and Sharma may be accommodated in such an eventuality.

BJP's general secretary (organisation) B L Santhosh had earlier this month visited the state to review the party's preparations for the assembly elections and held meetings with key ministers and organisation leaders.

Senior BJP leader Radha Mohan Singh, who is in-charge of the party's affairs in Uttar Pradesh, had also visited the state.
By Online Desk

Congress leaders and party workers on Friday held symbolic protests at petrol pumps in several parts of the country, demanding a complete rollback of fuel price hike.

Party leaders K C Venugopal and Shakti Singh Gohil reached the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium petrol pump on a horse cart.

Venugopal said that under the UPA government, the tax on petrol and diesel stood at Rs 9.20. Now, it is Rs 32.

"The government should stop imposing excise duty on petrol and diesel. It should come under the purview of Goods and Services Tax. We demand a complete rollback of fuel price hike," Venugopal, who is the Congress general secretary, said.

Ajay Maken led a protest against rising fuel prices at petrol pumps in Rajinder Nagar and Janpath.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday tweeted, "GDP crashing, Unemployment soaring, Fuel prices skyrocketing. In how many more ways is #BJPlootingIndia?"

Petrol and diesel prices were hiked again on Friday by 31 paise per litre and 28 paise per litre, respectively.

"At least Rs 25 can be reduced in fuel prices by cutting excise duty. Where are those who once used to criticise UPA govt over fuel price hikes? With rising fuel prices, consumer goods are also getting expensive," said Congress leader Digvijaya Singh in Bhopal, according to ANI.

Meanwhile, Tamil Nadu Congress president KS Alagiri along with party workers held protests in Kilpauk, Chennai against the rising fuel prices.

Punjab, Rajasthan, Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka are among the other states that took out protests in solidarity with the national party's stand.

Petrol prices have crossed the Rs 100 per litre mark in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Rajasthan and Ladakh.

(Inputs from agencies)
Prasanta Mazumdar By

Express News Service

GUWAHATI: The Congress in Assam criticised Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma for his statement that if the states population explosion continued, one day the land of even Kamakhya temple and his house would be encroached upon.

The Congress said the statement was unbecoming of a CM who is expected to be well versed in the demographic facts of the state.

Sharing the data of a survey, the party said the fertility rate of women in Assam declined over the last five years.

The Congress said as per the latest National Family Health Survey, undertaken by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and released in December 2020, the total fertility rate (TFR) across most Indian states declined in the last five years.

The total fertility rate is defined as the average number of children that would be born to a woman by the time she ends childbearing. A TFR of 2.1 is known as the replacement rate. The fertility rate of less than 2.1 implies that the total population will be less than the existing population which is also called the negative growth rate

ALSO READ | Adopt 'decent family planning policy' for population control: Assam CM to minority community

As per the same survey, the fertility rate of women in Assam has declined from 2.2 in 2015-16 to 1.9 in 2020-21 and 1.9 is less than 2.1 which means the future population of Assam will only be less than the current population, the Congress said.

It said Sarmas statement was misleading as there was no question of an increase in population as per the Ministrys data.

If he is referring to population explosion that may happen in future due to immigration of people from Bangladesh and Pakistan after the implementation of Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), then his concern is valid, the Congress said sarcastically.

Continuing with the sarcastic attack, the party assured the CM that it would take definite steps and do its best to save Kamakhya and his house from such encroachment.

Sarma had on Thursday called upon the states migrant Muslims to practise small family size for poverty reduction. He had warned that there would be conflicts over space for living in the future if the states population continued to explode.

The statement was made against the backdrop of eviction drives carried out at some places which drew criticism from some minority-based organisations.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: A decrease in the number of Covid cases should never inculcate a sense of complacency among the public, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said on Friday, underlining that the behavioural pattern of putting masks on and off intermittently, improper wearing of masks and not following Covid-appropriate behaviour contributed to the second wave of the viral disease.

Vardhan said this after inaugurating the newly-revamped Hardayal Municipal Heritage Public Library at Chandni Chowk here, according to a statement issued by the health ministry.

He dedicated the library, which has an enormous collection of rare books, to the nation. The library has been renovated with a public investment of more than Rs 3 crore.

The MP from Chandni Chowk said the steadily declining number of active coronavirus cases in the country, a trend sustained for 28 days, and less than one lakh fresh cases for the fourth consecutive day have allowed a sliver of opportunity to him to be with the people of his constituency physically, according to the statement.

He expressed his admiration for the rare collection of books in the library such as the Persian Mahabharata, translated by Abul Fazl and composed in the court of Mughal emperor Akbar, a copy of "The History of World" from 1677 AD, handwritten Bhagavata Purana of 1810 AD, Bhrigu Samhita, an old copy of the Quran in Hindi, the first book ever written in "Braj Bhasha", the native language of the Yamuna plains.

Started in 1862, the library has archived copies of the Delhi Gazette from 1917 to 1988 and has many rare gems in its collection, including 350 manuscripts and 8,000 old books that were in need of proper archiving and storage before the reconstruction, the statement said.

The minister was apprised that several court cases, including one involving the fate of a village on the eve of the country's partition, was settled in court in favour of India sourcing evidence from the library, it added.

Strongly advising adherence to Covid-appropriate behaviour to everyone present on the occasion, Vardhan said the decrease in the number of active cases of the infection should never inculcate a sense of complacency among people.

"This behavioural pattern of putting masks on and off intermittently, improper wearing of masks and not following Covid-appropriate behaviour contributed to the second wave of Covid. When many of our doctors, nurses became corona warriors in an act of self-sacrifice to protect us, with many of them eventually succumbing to Covid, it is our moral duty to do the maximum to support them," he was quoted as saying in the statement.

Speaking on the government's digitisation drive in the context of digitalisation of library archives, Vardhan said, "Prime Minister Narendra Modi has relentlessly pursued the mission of a Digital India. In the entire lockdown, people could get government benefits directly transferred to their accounts. The JAM trinity has enabled the Direct Benefit Transfer to the account of 10 crore farmers at the push of a button.

Similarly, the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) currently being implemented in the Union territories will bring speed, transparency and accountability in our health system. Such digital interventions in other areas have vastly improved the lives of Indians." He observed that these interventions have shattered the popular saying of the 1980s that for Re 1 allocated by the Union government, only 15 paisa actually reach the intended beneficiaries.

Vardhan also said the Centre would soon have enough Covid vaccines at its disposal to fully vaccinate every person aged 18 years and above in the country. "With the increase in the production capacity, we have more vaccines in June compared to May. As the capacity improves, the supply would ease and soon, there will be enough vaccines to immunise every citizen," he said.

North Delhi Mayor Jai Prakash said the library would be reopened to the readers, in accordance with the directions of the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) in view of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The single-storey structure is one of the heritage buildings of the national capital and its restoration work was completed in a year.

Prakash said over Rs 2.83 crore were spent on the restoration work of the library. He said the digitisation and conservation work of the rare books of the library was done by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts.

A reading area, a news-reading area, a computer room, a staff-seating area and a book-keeping space have been made on the ground floor and a reading area, a conference room and a book-keeping space have been made on the mezzanine level, he added.

There are nearly 1.25 lakh books in the library, including 8,000 rare texts and 350 handwritten manuscripts, the mayor said. The library comes under the North Delhi Municipal Corporation.

Former Union minister Vijay Goel, senior BJP leader Shyam Jaju, South Delhi Mayor Anamika and East Delhi Mayor Nirmal Jain were present on the occasion among others.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Protesting farmer unions Friday announced they will organise dharnas at governor houses across the country on June 26 to mark the completion of seven months of their agitation against the three new Central agri-marketing laws.

The Samyukta Kisan Morcha, an umbrella body of over 40 farmer unions, said they will show black flags during their June 26 protest and send memorandums to President Ram Nath Kovind. Farmer leader Inderjit Singh of SKM told a press conference that the day will be observed as "Kheti Bachao, Loktantra Bachao Diwas (save farming, save democracy day)".

"We will protest by showing black flags at Raj Bhavans and giving memorandum to the President through the governor of each state, who is the President's representative. "It (June 26) is also the day when Emergency was declared in 1975 and we will complete seven months of our protest. Along with farming, democratic rights of the people have also been attacked in this environment of dictatorship. This is an undeclared emergency," Singh said.

Thousands of farmers, mainly from Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, have been camping at Delhi's borders for more than six months now in protest against the three laws that they say will leave them at the mercy of big corporates and end the MSP regime.

The government has said all these concerns are baseless and that the new laws are pro-farmer. The Supreme Court has put on hold the implementation of the laws till further orders and set up a committee to examine the issues.

Addressing the concerns of women protestors, farmer leader Suman Hooda said special committees will be formed by Saturday evening which will be dedicated to the women at the protest sites.

"We received some complaints from our women protesters. I want to assure them that these committees will only work to address any problems faced by them. Their contact numbers will also be shared by Sunday," he said.
By PTI

AHMEDABAD: BJP general secretary in-charge of Gujarat, Bhupender Yadav, on Friday chaired a meeting of the state party unit's core group to take stock of the work done by the cadres to help people during the coronavirus pandemic and Tauktae cyclone.

Chief Minister Vijay Rupani, Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel, Gujarat BJP president C R Paatil, union minister Parshottam Rupala and state Education Minister Bhupendrasinh Chudasama were some of the key members of the state BJP's core group, who attended the meeting.

During the meeting, the party leaders also discussed the measures to deal with a possible third wave of COVID-19, Paatil told reporters at the party headquarters in Gandhinagar after the meeting.

He added that "primary discussions" about the party's preparations for the upcoming Assembly election next year were also held during the meeting.

"The core group members apprised Yadav of the work done by the party workers in helping people during the second wave of coronavirus.

We also informed him about how the party cadres arranged kits and other essential items for the cyclone-hit people," said Paatil, adding that the core group also offered condolences to those who lost their lives in the pandemic.

"We discussed the preparedness of the state government as well as the BJP organisation to cope with the possible third wave of coronavirus.

Some primary discussions about the 2022 Assembly election were also held during the meeting of the core group," said Paatil.

The state unit chief added that Yadav, who is on a three-day Gujarat visit starting Friday, also gave some suggestions to the members after listening to them.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Friday said it would pass orders on June 15 on disbursal of Rs 10 crore compensation to family members of two Indian fishermen allegedly killed by Italian Marines off the Kerala coast in February 2012 and made it clear that Italy would prosecute them.

A vacation bench of justices Indira Banerjee and M R Shah said that it may ask the Kerala High Court to ensure proper disbursal of compensation to the heirs of the victims.

The top court would also pass an order on quashing the pending criminal case against the Italian Marines in India for killing the fishermen on Tuesday.

It said that the Republic of Italy will prosecute the accused Italian Marines as per the International arbitral award.

Earlier, the Centre had told the court that Italy had initiated the transfer of Rs 10 crore compensation to be given to the kin of the fishermen.

In February 2012, India had accused the two marines on board the MV Enrica Lexie -- an Italian flagged oil tanker -- of killing two Indian fishermen who were on a fishing vessel in India's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).
Prasanta Mazumdar By

Express News Service

GUWAHATI: Calling upon the minority community to practise small family size to reduce poverty, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Thursday warned of conflicts for living space in future if the population continued to explode.

The statement came against the backdrop of the eviction of 200 encroachers, mostly immigrant Muslims, drawing criticism from some quarters. Urging the minority-based political party AIUDF and All Assam Minority Students Union to work on population control, Sarma said a day would come when people would settle down on the land of Kamakhya Temple, leading to conflicts.

He said his government would take steps to encourage population control. The government stands for the development of all communities but it will need community support, he said. To remove poverty, we have to educate Muslim women and control population. We are there to educate women. However, poverty will never get reduced unless you control your population, Sarma said.
Sudhir Suryawanshi By

Express News Service

MUMBAI: The Maharashtra health department revised its total COVID-19 death toll by adding up more than 10,693 deaths in the total tally of COVID-19 fatalities deaths across the state. The total deaths in Maharashtra were calculated 1,06,367 since the outbreak of the pandemic.

However, the opposition BJP alleged that the Maharashtra government concealed these deaths numbers and now in the name of technical glitches they are adding up now. Leader of Opposition Devendra Fadnavis said that he was warning the Maharashtra government not to conceal any positive cases or the deaths as well.

"This is not the issue of pride or insult, but the transparency is very important to fight against this deadly virus. I have also written several occasions to the government to be transparent during the pandemic," Fadnavis said.

ALSO READ| COVID-19 death toll crosses 10,000-mark in Maharashtra's Thane district

Sources in the government said that the total COVID-19 deaths tally can go further so each day and new death figures will be added in the total COVID-19 death tally of the state government.

According to the state health department, they collect data on positive cases and death tally from various government sources at various platforms. "Sometimes, the private hospitals do not share the information about the positive cases and deaths caused by COVID-19 on time and that piled up data is later collaborated. So, it is not a deliberate attempt but it is part of the system. As and when they receive the information then it is immediately added in the total tally of the positive cases and deaths," said a health department official.

"In the month of May, there were large numbers of positive cases and deaths and though administration was to maintain the daily data, they were busy making beds and other services to tackle the pandemic. Therefore, most of the left of the numbers are from May," said an official from the state health department.

He added that the situation is normalized and therefore they have asked the local administration to verify and cross-check the given and left out information about the positive cases and deaths. Chief minister Uddhav Thackeray also said that the Maharashtra government will not hide any information related to COVID.
I am 18 now and I still hold the weight and trauma of what I witnessed a year ago. Its a little easier now, but Im not who I used to be. A part of my childhood was taken from me, she wrote. My video didnt save George Floyd, but it put his murderer away and off the streets.
Pronab Mandal By

Express News Service

KOLKATA: Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjees decision to welcome BJPs national vice-president Mukul Roys 'ghar wapsi' on Friday appears to be more focused on causing damage to the saffron camp than strengthening her own party.

Sources in the ruling party said the induction of TMCs former second-in-command, the first blow to the BJP since its poor performance in the recent Assembly elections, would deliver a message for others who defected to the saffron camp. "Many TMC leaders jumped ship and became prominent BJP faces. Roys return to the TMC will deliver a message to the turncoats which includes at least three MPs and several MLAs of the BJP," said a senior TMC leader.

Bringing the saffron camps "Chanakya" back to its fold, the ruling party is now aiming to shake the BJPs foundation in Bengal which already received a jolt in the recent Assembly elections. The saffron camp emerged as the TMCs only opposition in the Assembly polls. It bagged 77 seats, much behind the partys projection of more than 200 seats, and the Left Front and Congress have no representative in the state Assembly. The newly-formed Indian Secular Force, an ally of LF-Congress, secured victory in only one constituency. In a landslide victory, the TMC bagged 213 seats in the House of 294 MLAs.

"The triumphant performance of the TMC was without Roy, who used to be known for managing elections. Our party has nothing to gain by inducting Roy but it will damage the BJP organisational setup. It was Roy who had poached many of our leaders on behalf of the saffron camp. It is expected that those who followed Roys footprint will shortly make a beeline to return to the TMC," said another TMC leader.

The ruling party, however, is yet to make a decision about other turncoats willing to return to the TMC. "Mamata Banerjee will take the final decision. She will decide whether all turncoats will be allowed to rejoin the party or they will be inducted selectively," said the leader.

Since Roy had shifted his political allegiance to the BJP in 2017, a total of 33 TMC MLAs joined the BJP and the exodus continued till before the Assembly elections held in March-April. Roys return to the TMC is the first defection from the saffron camp since the election.
By Express News Service

JAIPUR: One of India's top neurologist and Padma Shri awardee Dr. Ashok Panagariya passed away on Friday in Jaipur. For the past several weeks, 71-year-old Panagariya was battling post-COVID complications and was on ventilator support for a long time.

His lungs were damaged due to the infection which gripped him towards April-end. After battling the illness for 48 days, he succumbed on Friday afternoon. Though his condition had deteriorated sharply in the afternoon, he was sent home on ventilator support but barely an hour later, he was declared dead.

According to his close friends, he had got the second dose of Covishield vaccine from SMS Hospital. 10-12 days after getting the vaccine, he felt the symptoms of COVID and and was declared positive when tested.

The famous neurologist suffered serious damage to his lungs because of COVID-19 infection and although several teams of expert doctors came in to treat him both from within the country and abroad, Pangariya finally succumbed to his illness.

Dr. Ashok Panagariya made a mark as an outstanding neurologist. His pioneering work in the medical field will benefit generations of doctors and researchers. Saddened by his demise. Condolences to his family and friends. Om Shanti.  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) June 11, 2021

Many leading personalities including PM Narendra Modi have expressed deep shock at the doctor's death. "Dr. Ashok Panagariya made a mark as an outstanding neurologist. His pioneering work in the medical field will benefit generations of doctors and researchers. Saddened by his demise. Condolences to his family and friends. Om Shanti," he tweeted

Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot also expressed his deepest condolences at the passing of the renowned neurologist. He said that his going away is a personal loss to him and his family.

        ,                Ashok Gehlot (@ashokgehlot51) June 11, 2021

Dr Pangariya was the first Indian doctor to become DM in Neurology. In 1992 he received a merit certificate from Rajasthan government and headed the Neurology department of SMS Hospital which is Rajasthan's top government hospital for several years.

Between 2006-2010, he was Principal of SMS Medical college and in 2002 the Medical Council of India gave him the prestigious Dr. BC Roy award. In 2014 he was awarded the Padma Shri.

He has had more than 90 research papers published in national and international journals. Giving his medical and social commitments, he was also given the UNESCO award apart from several lifetime achievement awards by leading organisations of the country.
By PTI

MUMBAI: The Bombay High Court on Friday sought a reply from the state on a petition alleging that Rakesh and Dheeraj Wadhawan, arrested in the over-Rs 6,000 crore Punjab and Maharashtra Co-operative (PMC) Bank scam, are enjoying many unauthorized privileges at hospital.

A bench of Chief Justice Dipankar Datta and Justice G S Kulkarni asked the Maharashtra government to file an affidavit by next week, and also directed the state-run KEM Hospital here to submit latest health reports of the two accused.

The HC also allowed the petitioner, advocate Iram Sayed, to make the hospital a party.

Sayed claimed that the Wadhawans have been getting admitted to hospital from time to time since their arrest by the Enforcement Directorate in 2019.

Rakesh Wadhawan was at the KEM hospital since April this year, she alleged.

When she visited the hospital earlier this month, she saw Rakesh Wadhawan conducting his business affairs and signing office documents from the hospital bed, she said.

"He has been running his office from the 11th floor of the KEM hospital," Sayed told the HC.

She also submitted photographs and videos to support her claim.

The state's lawyer told the court that Rakesh Wadhawan was suffering from COVID-19 and hence he was hospitalised.

Advocate Sayed, however, said in that case he should have been in an isolation or COVID ward.

The court will hear the plea next Thursday.
Sudhir Suryawanshi By

Express News Service

MUMBAI: Noted political strategist Prashant Kishor met Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar on Friday, setting off speculations that a non-BJP, non-Congress national front comprising regional parties is in the offing ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

The meeting over lunch at Pawars residence was also attended by NCP state president Jayant Patil and party MP Supriya Sule. The meeting lasted for more than three hours, sources said. According to the sources, who were privy to the discussion, NCP chief Sharad Pawar and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee want to form a non-BJP, non-Congress front of all regional parties to fight against the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and the Fridays meeting focused on the prospects of it.

Prashant Kishor, first of all, gave a presentation and told us that there are more than 400 Lok Sabha seats where non-BJP and non-Congress parties can fight strongly. Congress is no more in a position to defeat the BJP. Every alternate day, some Congress leader is either joining the BJP or other parties. Therefore, if we want to defeat the BJP, the regional forces have to come together.Otherwise, the authoritarian leadership of the saffron party will, steps by step, destroy Indias federal structure and its cultural diversity, said a source.

Prashant Kishor has shown that if all the forces are brought together, then the BJP can easily be defeated. He has shown it in West Bengal and other states as well. Besides, he is also in touch with other regional parties likes DMK, YRS Congress, Shiv Sena, Samata Party, etc. He can work as a catalyst on the larger front, said another source.

The agenda of this regional federal front will be to protect the regional identity of these regional parties and their federal structure. Prashant Kishor earlier said that he will no more work as a strategist for one party and may work on a bigger goal and platform and a federal front could be in making for 2024, said the source. Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut said many leaders are in touch with Kishor, while NCPs Chhagan Bhujbal said he was no aware of the agenda of the meeting.

Kishor was a successful political strategist. Sharad Pawar will take into account Kishors suggestions, he added. Kishor had met Uddhav Thackeray in 2019 before the latter became chief minister It was Kishors first meeting with Pawar after the victory of the DMK and the TMC in the assembly elections in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal respectively. He had helped craft the election strategy for these parties in the Assembly elections. After the assembly poll results, the election strategist had said that he was quitting this space.
By PTI

KOLKATA: Dispelling rumours, Late President Pranab Mukherjee's son, Abhijit Mukherjee, on Friday made it clear that he is not leaving the Congress unlike his friend Jitin Prasada.

Television channels and a few newspapers had reported he would be joining the Trinamool Congress on Friday afternoon.

"I remain in the Congress and reports that I am joining Trinamool or any other party are not correct," Mukherjee, a former Lok Sabha MP and Congress Campaign Committee chairman during the assembly elections, told PTI over phone.

Mukherjee had good relations with Jitin Prasada, who recently joined the BJP, when they were colleagues in the Congress Parliamentary Party, and the Late President was also known to be fond of him and his father Jitendra Prasada.

Mukherjee, an engineer-turned politician who won twice from Jangipur constituency, said in a lighter vein: "I am nearly 300 km away from the Trinamool Bhavan right now, sitting in Jangipur House. So, unless someone can teleport me, it would be impossible for me to join any party this afternoon."

He said the rumours probably arose after some of his father's former Congress colleagues "who are now in Trinamool" had come to have tea with him.

"They included MP Khalilur Rahman from Jangipur, MP Abu Taher Khan from Murshidabad and TMC ministers Akhrruzzaman and Sabina Yesmin.

"But, I have known them for long, as they were close to my father. To speculate that just because friends came to meet me, I will join TMC, is stretching it too far," Mukherjee said.

Pranab Mukherjee had won from Jangipur twice in 2004 and 2009, before becoming President of India.

Several projects started by him, including a branch of the Aligarh Muslim University in the district, an Army cantonment and a management college, are now bearing fruit.

Abhijit Mukherjee said he had also been involved with some of these projects as an MP, and most of his interactions with state leaders are based on these developments, "besides normal social relations with old friends".
By PTI

MUMBAI: The Shiv Sena on Friday described as ''hilarious the BJP's celebration over the induction of Uttar Pradesh leader Jitin Prasada into the party fold, but also said that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi will have to create a strong team in his party.

In a shot in the arm for the BJP, Prasada, a Congress leader joined the saffron party on Wednesday, months ahead of the Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh scheduled for early next year.

The 47-year former Union minister comes from a well-known Brahmin family of UP.

In an editorial in party mouthpiece Saamana', the Shiv Sena said Prasada, a young leader, was of no use to the Congress and will remain so to the BJP.

"Jitin Prasada, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin pilot were young leaders and there were high expectations from them. There is already a vacuum in the Congress after the death of Ahmed Patel and Rajeev Satav. It is not good that young leaders are going the BJP way," the Sena said.

"Prasada, who had faced defeat in Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, has finally joined the BJP. Prasada's family members were Congress loyalists. He was a minister in former prime minister Manmohan Singh's cabinet. However, he kept losing Assembly and Lok Sabha elections. The BJP has now started celebrating his induction into the party fold. The caste politics of Uttar Pradesh is behind it. Eye on UP's Brahmin vote bank is being said to be behind Prasada's induction into the BJP," it said.

"But if Prasada had a hold over the Brahmin votes, why these votes weren't transferred to the Congress?" it asked.

The Sena said that BJP's traditional upper caste vote must be drifting away from the party.

"Till now, the BJP did not require any arithmetic or face in UP. Narendra Modi was everything. Ram mandir or Hindutva were the issues to win votes. But now, the situation is so bad that it wants support of Prasada, it said sarcastically.

The Uddhav Thackeray-led party said the important issue is why are the Congress leaders jumping ship.

Talking about the defection of Jyotiraditya Scindia to the BJP and the rebellion of Sachin Pilot, the Sena said that in Punjab, too, there is a rebellion in the Congress.

It, however, said that rebellion and factionalism is not restricted to the Congress alone.

"Despite being in position to win Kerala and Assam, the Congress couldn't do so.

It lost Puducherry.

But there is no discussion on what the Congress should do next and how it should resurrect itself .

Except in Maharashtra, Kerala and Karnataka, the Congress is fighting for its survival everywhere else.

This political imbalance is harmful to the democracy," it said.

The Congress has done a lot of work in the pre-Indepedence era and even after that.

The Congress has a contribution in building the nation.

Even today, the Nehru-Gandhi' identity of the country cannot be obliterated The Congress has a strong hold at the grass root level, it said.

"Congress president Sonia Gandhi has ably carried out her responsibility in the party. Now, Rahul Gandhi has to create a strong team, which will be the answer to the challenge before the party," the Sena added.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court Friday said it is "shocking" that former Mumbai Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh, who has served the state for over 30 years, is now stating that he has no trust in state police and is seeking transfer of all inquiries against him to an independent agency outside Maharashtra.

"It is commonly said, the person who lives in glass house should not throw stones at others," said a vacation bench of Justices Hemant Gupta and V Ramasubramanian while hearing Singh's plea seeking transfer of inquiries against him outside Maharashtra.

After the apex court observed that it will pass an order dismissing the petition, Singh's counsel said he would withdraw the plea and would avail other appropriate remedy.

Singh, a 1988-batch IPS officer, was removed from the post of Mumbai Police Commissioner on March 17 and was made the General Commander of Maharashtra State Home Guard after he levelled allegations of corruption and misconduct against the then Home Minister and senior NCP leader Anil Deshmukh.

Senior advocate Mahesh Jethmalani, appearing for Singh, said the petitioner can't keep on facing one case after the other just because he is a "whistleblower" in the matter.

He said Singh is seeking directions for transferring all inquiries which are already ordered against him outside the state and also that the investigation be transferred to an independent agency like the CBI.

"This is surprising us. You have been a part of Maharashtra state cadre and served it for over 30 years. Now you are saying that you have no trust in your own state police. This is shocking," the bench observed.

During the hearing conducted through video-conferencing, Jethmalani said that the Bombay High Court had ordered a CBI probe into allegations of Singh against Deshmukh.

He argued that Singh has been pressurised by the inquiry officer to withdraw his letter in which he had levelled allegations against the former minister.

"These are two different things. The inquiry against the former minister is different and the inquiry against you (Singh) is different. You have served in the police force for over 30 years. You should not have doubt on the police force. You cannot say now that you want inquiries to be done outside the state," the bench said.

Jethmalani told the bench that Singh is not living in a "glass house" and false cases have been lodged to frame him.

The Bombay High Court had earlier ordered a CBI probe into allegations of Singh against Deshmukh who had to resign as the minister.

In his plea filed in the apex court, the senior police officer has alleged that he has been made to face several inquiries by the state government and its instrumentalities and sought their transfer outside Maharashtra and a probe into them by an independent agency like the CBI.

Singh has been facing inquiries, including the one under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act in a case of 2015 and he has termed this as a witch-hunt by the state agency.

Singh, in his earlier plea filed before the top court, had sought a CBI probe against Deshmukh who, he claimed, had asked police officers, including Sachin Waze, to extort Rs 100 crore from bars and restaurants.

The top court had then asked him to go before the Bombay High Court which later ordered CBI probe into Singh's allegations.

The state government and the NCP leader subsequently filed an appeal in the apex court but failed to get any relief against the high court order.

Deshmukh denied any wrongdoing and had said there was not an iota of substantive evidence to even prima facie establish that any of the allegations made by Singh had an element of truth.

In its 52-page judgement passed earlier, the high court had said that Singh's allegations against Deshmukh had put at stake the citizen's faith in the state police.

Such allegations, made by a serving police officer, against the state home minister could not be left unattended, and were required to be probed into, if prima facie, they made a case of a cognisable offence, the high court had said.

The high court's verdict had come on three PILs including one filed by Singh seeking several reliefs as also a CBI probe into the matter.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: The health ministry on Friday said it has regularly emphasised on the need for a robust reporting mechanism to monitor district-wise Covid cases and deaths on a daily basis, two days after Bihar revised its COVID-19 death toll by including 3,951 unreported fatalities.

The COVID-19 death toll in Bihar was on Wednesday revised drastically upwards by the state health department which put the total number of fatalities caused by the pandemic at 9,429.

In a statement, the ministry said states and union territories have been advised to report Covid deaths in accordance with the prescribed guidelines.

This spike in deaths was on account of the 3,971 fatalities reported in Bihar after data reconciliation by the state government, the ministry said.

"States and UTs have been advised repeatedly through formal communications, multiple video conferences and through the deployment of Central teams for the recording of deaths in accordance with laid down guidelines," the ministry said.

The Union government has written to Bihar to provide a detailed date and district-wise break-up of the reconciled number of deaths to the health ministry.
By PTI

HYDERABD: In a setback to Bharat Biotech's COVID-19 vaccine Covaxin, the US Food and Drug Administration has "recommended" Ocugen Inc, the US partner of the Indian vaccine maker, to go for Biologics Licence Application (BLA) route with additional data, nixinghopes of Emergency Use Authorisation.

Ocugen in a statement on Thursday announced that as recommended by theFDA,it will pursue submission of a biologics licence application (BLA) for Covaxin.

BLA,isa "full approval" mechanism by the FDA for drugs and vaccines.

"The company will no longer pursue an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for Covaxin. The FDA provided feedback to Ocugen regarding the Master File. The company had previously submitted and recommended that Ocugen pursue a BLA submission instead of an EUA application for its vaccine candidate and requested additional information and data," Ocugen said.

The development may delay the Covaxin launch in the US, Ocugen said.

Ocugen is in discussions with the FDA to understand the additional information required to support a BLA submission.

The company anticipates that data from an additional clinical trial will be required to support the submission.

"Although we were close to finalising our EUA application for submission, we received a recommendation from the FDA to pursue a BLA path. While this will extend our timelines, we are committed to bringing Covaxin to the US," Dr.

Shankar Musunuri, Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Ocugen said.

"This differentiated vaccine is a critical tool to include in our national arsenal given its potential to address the SARS-CoV-2 variants, including the delta variant, and given the unknowns about what will be needed to protect US population in the long term," he added.

Ocugen recently announced that it secured exclusive rights to commercialise Covaxin in Canada and has initiated discussions with Health Canada for regulatory approval.

The company will pursue expedited authorisation for the vaccine under the Interim Order Respecting the Importation, Sale and Advertising of Drugs for Use in Relation to COVID-19 in Canada.
By Express News Service

LUCKNOW: The recent Lucknow visit of BJP national general secretary (organisation) BL Santosh and the outcome of his deliberations with state party functionaries, ministers and legislators is likely to figure prominently during Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanaths meetings with top leaders in New Delhi.

A report summing up the deliberations is believed to have been submitted by Santosh to the partys national leadership. According to insiders, party functionaries who met the central leaders, had voiced concern over the dominance of select bureaucrats in governance, which has resulted in a large number of MLAs not getting concerns of their areas addressed by their own government.

Importantly, Santosh and the partys UP in-charge Radha Mohan Singh, during their recent Lucknow visit, had patiently heard state party leaders, including organisation functionaries, senior ministers and MLAs to take stock of the situation on ground ahead of next years Assembly polls.

ALSO READ: Cabinet shuffle buzz on, Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath to meet PM Modi today

They told the leaders from Delhi that with work in their areas not done by their own government, many MLAs have told party bosses about the difficulty they would face going back to the voters before the polls with unfulfilled promises.

The deliberations during the recent visit by Santosh had also taken stock of the partys not so encouraging performance in the recently held panchayat polls. If informed sources are to be believed, then the party-supported candidates performed badly in 50-plus assembly segments, which presently have BJP MLAs.

The CM met Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday and is likely to meet BJPs national president JP Nadda and PM Narendra Modi on Friday. Before leaving for Delhi, the CM had a meeting with state party president Swatantra Deo Singh and state party general secretary (organisation) Sunil Bansal. The meeting happened just a few hours after ex-Union minister and Congress leader Jitin Prasada joined the BJP in Delhi.
The goal is display such artwork in a home museum thats going to be created at Indianas former residence in a converted Odd Fellows Hall, a Victorian-style building, on Vinalhaven. Indiana also had several other properties that could be utilized for the art museum, art education and artist-in-residency programs, Sterrs said.
Pranab Mondal By

Express News Service

KOLKATA: A division within the West Bengal unit of the BJP over the question of imposing the presidents rule in the state has come to the fore in recent days. While a section of BJP functionaries is in favour of imposing Article 356 in the state citing incidents of post-poll violence, others, including party state unit head Dilip Ghosh, want to strengthen the partys organisation at the grassroots level by organising mass movements.

Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari and three BJP MPs from the state-Nishith Pramanik, Saumitra Khan and Arjun Singh-met the partys central leadership and placed their demand for presidents rule in West Bengal. After meeting Amit Shah, Adhikari said on Tuesday the post-poll violence in West Bengal is much worse than the situation that deserves Article 356 to be imposed in any state.

Meanwhile, Ghosh, addressing a meeting of the party organisation told the party workers to fight against the TMC politically. Those who are against imposing Article in 356 say it would be a wrong decision. The ruling party has come to power with massive support of the states voters. If we derail the government, it would be an insult to peoples verdict. Instead of doing this, we should build up movements involving common people at the grassroots level on different issues, said a senior BJP leader.

BJP leader Rajib Banerjee, too, came out against the idea of imposing Article 356 in the state. Repeated demands for the imposition of presidential rule will not go down well. It will be a foolish act, he said in a social media post. Another BJP leader, who is close to Ghosh, said, If we repeatedly demand for Article 356, common people will think that we are power-hungry. Besides, we may receive a blow in the court as well.

Another section within the party is prepared to use all means necessary to get the presidents rule imposed, including implementation of the CAA in the state. West Bengal government will not allow it since Mamata said on a number of occasions that she will never allow the CAA in Bengal. When the state administration will be against the CAA, it can be easily used as a tool to impose Article 356 in Bengal, said a BJP functionary.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: A Delhi Court on Friday remanded an alleged close-aide of Olympic wrestler Sushil Kumar to 4-day police custody in connection with the murder of a 23-year-old former junior national wrestling champion at Chhatrasal Stadium here.

Anirudh was arrested by Delhi Police's Crime Branch from the national capital on Thursday.

In all, 10 people, including Sushil Kumar, have been arrested so far in connection with the incident.

The police produced Anirudh before Metropolitan Magistrate Divya Malhotra and sought his custody for seven days.

The court, however, allowed his police interrogation for only four days.

During the course of proceedings, Additional Public Prosecutor Atul Shrivastava, representing the police, told the court that his custody is required as he has to be taken to Jammu.

The court was also apprised that Anirudh has been spotted in the purported video of the brawl.

Kumar and his associates allegedly assaulted wrestler Sagar Dhankar and two of his friends Sonu Mahal and Amit Kumar on the intervening night of May 4 and 5 over a property dispute.

Dhankar, 23, succumbed to injuries later.

The two-time Olympic medallist faces charges of murder, culpable homicide, kidnapping and criminal conspiracy.

Police have called him the "main culprit and mastermind" behind the alleged murder and said there is electronic evidence in which he and his associates could be seen beating Dhankar with sticks.

Earlier on Friday, the district court extended his judicial custody till June 25 in connection with the case.

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Anuradha Goyal By

Prolonged lockdowns and visible grief all around have started impacting everyone, even the most optimistic among us. We saw many people seeking ideas to stay engaged and remain positive, while dealing with a whole lot of bad news that left us with a sense of helplessness. To some of my social media friends, I suggested indulging in creative pursuits - be it writing, painting, embroidery or creating anything, maybe even new recipes that were the flavour of the first lockdown. The responses that I received reminded me of my corporate career days when I used to lead innovation initiatives. When we used to conduct sessions on being creative, people enjoyed the workshops and the break that it brought to their otherwise mundane lives, but they could rarely apply creativity in their everyday work.

It took me a while to understand this. Employees in large organisations are trained to follow SOPs - the standard operating procedures. As soon as they enter corporate life, and maybe even before that, they are trained to follow the policies and processes. Any deviations are looked down upon and may even be seen as obstacles in their well-defined growth path. Now processes work well in a purely manufacturing environment, but the same models were exported to the service industry that can do with a lot of creativity, intuitiveness and spontaneity. Nonetheless, the disconnect was that a mind that is taught to blindly follow the process was suddenly expected to let go of all that training and come up with creative ideas within the walls of a training room or perhaps a resort, and then revert to processes back on the job. I see the same has permeated our day-to-day living as well. When we are reminded to do something creative, we suddenly go blank.

When we look at what all we missed during this pandemic, the biggest answer was the festivals, festivities and celebrations of all kinds. We missed our extended family and friends, family events and meeting new people who always come in our lives like a breath of fresh air. With it we also missed our regular sojourn with creativity. Our festivals are a big source of inspiring creativity, in a very subtle organic way. Think of Ganapati pandals that are put up across Western India and how they are created in a new way each year, carrying forward a tradition but with a dash of current situations and modern sensibilities infused in them. In Goa, last year during Deepavali, I saw all the Narakasur effigies wearing face masks, a mark of the times they were created in.

If we look at the calendar of Indian festivals, most, if celebrated traditionally, give us windows to not just be creative but also to showcase our creative expression to a larger audience. Look at the intricate Kolam designs in the streets of South India, walls of Madhubani homes in Bihar, Aipans of Uttarakhand or Mandawa of Central India, mostly drawn during festivals, that let you experiment and express your creativity. In fact, festivals let you be creative on multiple dimensions - dressing up, food, finding and wrapping gifts, writing or designing greetings innovatively, decorating the home and most importantly creating the festival space from scratch - be it designing the Durga Puja pandal with the chosen theme or performing Ram Lila for 10 days and creating effigies of Ravana et al. to burn on Dussehra or making a rakhi for your sibling. Personal festivities like weddings and birthdays intersperse with the regular flow of festivals through the year. Basically, our festivals were ensuring that we get a regular dose of creative pursuits, and a fair percentage of these involved working with ad hoc teams of whoever was around and available, bringing in the diversity of age and skill sets, breaking hierarchies and using role reversals for a while.

Can this regular brush with raw creativity be brought into our professional lives, especially those who work in the organised corporate world? It may be far more effective than the innovation workshops offered as single-shot doses to induce creativity in the environment. Can some rituals be introduced that allow or maybe force people to step out of their comfort zones, form their own teams from within or outside the organisation, work on projects without really having a defined plan or budget but a defined output at a defined time? It has the ingredients of an innovation project where you work within the constraints of budgets and available resources but your end goal must be delivered within the broad boundaries. Can this lead to a basket of new ideas to experiment with? Can new synergies between diverse teams be leveraged to create intersectional innovation, where ideas from across the verticals meet and create new ones? The idea is to keep the creative juices flowing and leverage them for the organisation as well as society in general.

The question that remains open though: Do organisations have the fluidity and flexibility to absorb the ideas that these bursts of creativity would bring out?

(The writer is an author and founder of IndiTales. She can be rached on Twitter: @anuradhagoyal)
Jawhar Sircar By

Like all federalisms, India's too is like a marriage between equals, the Centre and the states, and both thrive and prosper as they emerge stronger after each crisis. Though the 299 members of the Constituent Assembly did a commendable job in three and a half years, they could not provide for every foreseeable contingency. The Constitution is gently tilted in favour of the Centre, but a greater maturity has now evolved in the handling of the Brahmastras like President's Rule in states under Article 356 or in demanding secession. The federation has also learnt to accord greater respect to regional aspirations, cultures and pride.

The Constitution's federal characteristics must constantly pass tests and battles like the one we have at hand in the state of West Bengal. Its ultimate outcome will affect all other states and the Union as well. To cut through the clutter and controversies, let us come straight to May 24, when the Centre agreed to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's proposal to extend the services of Alapan Bandyopadhyay, who was about to retire as chief secretary of the state on May 24. This was for three months - to provide continuity in COVID control in the state. Such short-tenure extensions are not usual. Thereafter, Cyclone Yaas devastated coastal Odisha and adjoining West Bengal, and on Friday (May 28), Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to make an aerial survey. Though this programme clashed with the announced visit of Mamata to survey the coastal belt by helicopter, she altered her schedule to be present at Kalaikunda, the major air base of these parts in West Bengal. She promised to visit Digha, the states most battered coastal town, only after attending the PM's meeting at 2:30 pm. Both the VIP air travellers were, however, cutting it too fine and Mamata's helicopter was not allowed to fly out of the Sagar Island by Air Traffic Control (ATC). Since the PM's craft had taken off from Odisha towards Kalaikunda, the skies were closed for 'VIP movement'. A state Cabinet minister received the PM at Kalaikunda and as soon as Air Traffic permitted, Mamata flew in and landed there. This is now severely criticised by a section as "having kept the PM waiting for 15 minutes". Though the CM had not "formally received the PM", she was well in time for the scheduled meeting. No fudging of these timings is possible by either party, as every minute of what happened has been logged and recorded by multiple agencies - the ATC, the PM's SPG (security), the Kalaikunda Air Force Station, the state police, East Medinipur Police Headquarters, etc.

It appears that the CM or chief secretary had corresponded with the PMO and conveyed her objection to the presence of Suvendu Adhikari, the Leader of the Opposition. Mamata had requested for a direct meeting between the PM and her and felt that if one MLA was invited, others from worse-affected areas could also have joined the meeting. Actually, Adhikari had been her own right hand before he defected to the BJP just before the elections. He had not only trounced her in his own traditional Assembly constituency, Nandigram, but has emerged thereafter as her bete noire. Since the prime minister was keen to include Adhikari in his meeting, she felt there was little point in these 'optics and politics'. She entered the meeting room on time, but declined to sit down and simply handed over a damage report to the PM. She said a few words and begged excuse to fly onward to Digha, along with her chief secretary - who was always at her side. He, too, left the meeting along with his boss, but while the prime minister did not object then, all hell broke loose over the next few days.

The Centre suddenly transferred Bandyopadhyay to Delhi, where he had never worked before - on the very last day of his service. The Bengal chief minister refused to release him, which they constantly do under the IAS Cadre Rules, including by the current prime minister when he was a chief minister. Mamata's refusal is, however, being condemned now by Modi supporters, well after Bandopadhayay has retired. The state declined the 90 days' extension of service given by the Centre, and the CM issued an order giving him a three-year post-retirement term as her 'Adviser'.

The Centre retaliated immediately by issuing a notice under Section 51 of the Disaster Management Act on Bandyopadhyay for "refusing to comply with the direction given by or on behalf of the Central Government". This is unprecedented, as this provision to jail offenders for terms upto two years was never meant to spite ministers and officers. Incidentally, both the Central and state governments have exactly the same powers and the real disaster would have struck if the temperamental CM had issued a tit-for-tat order on some Central official or on Adhikari.

The interesting question we have now is whether the Centre expects IAS officers to defy the state government. The matter will soon move to the courts and the federal Constitution looks forward eagerly to a direction. Should officers serving states continue to be loyal to them? Or is it now legitimate for them to undercut the latter - whenever Delhi gets miffed with a chief minister? That is the crux of this battle.

(The writer is a retired civil servant, former Culture Secretary and ex-CEO of Prasar Bharati. He can be contacted at sircar.j@gmail.com)
Covid-19 has been a harsh teacher. It has shaken the Telangana government out of complacency. As a possible third wave could strike anytime, the government is trying to take short-term and long-term measures to improve medical infrastructure. It has made a beginning by opening 19 diagnostic centres and announcing the setting up of seven more medical colleges in districts and an equal number of nursing colleges affiliated to them. The pandemic has reminded the government that it cannot leave people to the mercy of the predatory private health sector. The Cabinet, at its recent meeting, decided to spend a whopping Rs 10,000 crore on improving medical infrastructure in the public sector and sent a team to Sri Lanka to study the best practices employed in tackling Covid.

As the CM delved deep into the labyrinth of issues dogging the medical sector at the Cabinet meeting, he became painfully aware that only a surgical treatment would work as many district-level hospitals do not even have facilities like dialysis. Apart from fortifying the existing health facilities such as Gandhi Hospital, Nizams Institute of Medical Sciences and Telangana Institute of Medical Sciences, the government has decided to upgrade the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Hospital in Warangal into a super-speciality one. The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) located on the highway between Hyderabad and Warangal will be requiring support from both the state and the Centre as it has a long way to go.

The doctors in the districts did well even under the tough circumstances. The Gandhi Hospital in Hyderabad, which took the most load, put up a good performance despite the fact that all dialysis patients in the state are sent there. The recovery rate in the second wave was a very impressive 95.34%. If the government can walk the talk by improving facilities in the near term in hospitals apart from laying a strong foundation for the long term, even the third wave may not be all that unnerving. The immediate need is to increase the number of doctors, facilities and support staff at district-level hospitals as any laxity would have a direct impact on the quality of medical care.
Divya Cutinho By

Express News Service

MANGALURU: Mangaluru city police have detained 38 Sri Lanka nationals who were staying in various lodges in the city after entering India illegally without valid documents.

Mangaluru city police commissioner N Shashi Kumar told the media that based on a Tamil Nadu intelligence report, the CCB and city police conducted an operation and detained 38 citizens of Sri Lanka from a lodge at Azaruddin Road near Bunder and lodges at Rao and Rao Circle and Kadaba Bengre.

"According to the Tamil Nadu intelligence wing, there were 39 nationals from Sri Lanka who had been promised jobs in Canada. They had paid Rs 5 to Rs 10 lakh to the agents and arrived in Toothukudi in Tamil Nadu in a boat in March. Later they went to Madurai, Salem and then to Bengaluru. Later they were taken to Mangaluru and kept in lodges. We have taken six locals here into custody for giving shelter to these Sri Lankan nationals," he said.

The commissioner added that out of 39 nationals, one who is aged between 50 and 60 has gone back. "We have continued our investigation and will trace him. They were supposed to move out of India to Canada in cargo or private boats. But due to elections in Tamil Nadu they stayed back. There are agents in Mangaluru also who are helping these people to gain entry inside the country illegally. Tamil Nadu police is also probing the case and they have detained 40 people already as there is a racket who are cheating people promising jobs and allegedly trafficking them to other countries," he said.

They have been booked under IPC sections 120(b), 370,420, section 14 of the Foreigners Act of 1964 and section 12(1)(a) of the Passport Act 1967.
By Express News Service

BENGALURU: Hoping to put a stop to the political drama unfolding in Karnataka over leadership change, BJP general secretary in-charge of Karnataka Arun Singh on Thursday said that BS Yediyurappa was doing well as Chief Minister and will continue to hold the post.

Speaking to reporters at his residence in New Delhi, Arun Singh said that Yediyurappas resignation was not before the partys central leadership. While his statements on change of leadership were monosyllabic answers to questions by reporters, Singh insisted multiple times that the Chief Minister, cabinet ministers and party leaders were doing a good job managing the Covid-19 pandemic.

Nothing like that, Arun Singh said when asked if talks of leadership change in Karnataka were true. He is correct. Leaders should say they are bound by the high commands decision and they trust the high command. He hasnt said anything wrong, Singh said, when asked about Yediyurappa claiming he would resign from the Chief Ministers post if asked to by the central leadership.

Yediyurappa is doing a good job as CM and is working hard. So are the ministers. He will continue, Singh said, when asked if discussions about his resignation were on the table for the partys central leadership. Singh categorically said no party leaders should be making political statements in the media or public.

If any MLA has a grievance, I will go to Karnataka, I will listen to them. They have to work for the party and peoples welfare. I will see about the legislature party meeting, he said, insisting that only one or two persons were making out-of-turn remarks. He also added that murmurs of replacing Nalin Kumar Kateel as Karnataka unit chief were also imaginary.

CM for full term, says Renukacharya

Davanagere: Chief Minister BS Yediyurappas political secretary MP Renukacharya on Thursday targeted minister CP Yogeshwar and said the statement by state in-charge Arun Singh on change of guard is quite clear. Addressing the media at Honnali, he said some people are dreaming about changing the cm, but it will not happen in the near future. He also said the BJP government will complete its full term and Yediyurappa will be Cm for the full term. Those who dont have the capacity to win elections and come to power through the backdoor are making these baseless allegations, he added.
By Express News Service

BENGALURU: The Karnataka High Court on Friday directed the state government to submit a final report within two months into the FIR registered by the Anti Corruption Bureau (ACB) into alleged preferential treatment given to VK Sasikala, aide of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, when she was serving her sentence at the central prison at Bengaluru, violating prison norms.

A division bench of Chief Justice Abhay Shreeniwas Oka and Justice Suraj Govindaraj passed the order after the state government informed the court that an FIR was registered by the ACB in 2018 and four months time was required to file the report in view of the Covid-19 pandemic.

ALSO READ: Yet another Sasikala audio released days ahead of AIADMK's legislature party meeting

Noting that there was a delay in the investigation, the court declined to give four months time sought by the government to file the final report. It directed the state government to submit the final report as expeditiously as possible within two months.

In her public interest litigation petition, social worker and educationist KS Gita (65), from Alwarpet in Chennai, had prayed to the court to issue directions to the authorities to submit a final report on the alleged corruption in providing facilities to Sasikala when she was serving her sentence with regard to the multi-crore corruption case against Jayalalithaa.

In response to it, the court had issued a notice to the Chief Secretary, secretaries of the departments of Law and Parliamentary Affairs and Home, Director General and Superintendent of Prisons, on the last date of hearing. In response to it, the government on Friday informed the court that the ACB had registered an FIR in 2018 into the allegations.

In the petition, the petitioner drew the attention of the court to the detailed report with findings submitted by a retired IAS officer, Vinay Kumar, after holding an inquiry into allegations of providing preferential facilities to Sasikala and her sister-in-law J Ilavarasi.The petitioner also claimed that no final report was submitted on the investigation done so far.
Raghottam Koppar By

Express News Service

GADAG: Strange are the beliefs that sometimes make people feel immune to any danger. Now, villagers of Dawal Malik in Gadag district are averse to taking the Covid-19 vaccine, for they feel blessed by saint Dawal Malik, after whom the village is named. They revere Dawal Malik as God. Fortunately, the village  with a population of a little over 500  has so far reported zero Covid cases.

However, irrespective of the villagers claim, the health and family welfare department made a bid to convince them to take the jab, but to no avail. The staff of Mulgund primary health centre too have been trying to persuade them.Gram panchayat staff and health officials explained to the villagers about deaths caused due to ignorance and severity of the second wave of the pandemic. But still, the villagers showed a steely resolve for they believe that no virus can kill them.

Coronavirus will not enter our village. Even if it enters, it will not be able to kill us because we are living near the God who attracts thousands of devotees. God will protect us from all diseases... hence we are not taking any vaccine. They (government) do not have to worry about us, a resident said.

Mulgund PHCs medical officer said, We are creating awareness on vaccination in rural areas...but villagers of Dawal Malik are not coming forward. They have some wrong notions about vaccination. We will convince and vaccinate all within a few days.
By Express News Service

KOCHI: Martin Joseph Pulikottil, accused of raping and assaulting a 27-year-old fashion designer after detaining her in a luxury flat in Kochi for nearly a month, was caught on Thursday evening, ending a four-day intensive search by the police. The 33-year-old stock trader was caught from deep inside the forest in Mundoor, Thrissur, with the help of local residents.

The police said he was hiding at Ayyankunnu, a forest area, after escaping from the Kochi flat. He was moving from one location to another and we caught him with the help of local residents and the Thrissur police, said an officer with Kochi city police. The officers had combed the forest using drone cameras. The investigation team received information regarding his whereabouts from the three persons who were arrested on Wednesday night.

The trio left the flat in Kakkanad early Wednesday morning along with Martin. Though we could catch his friends from Mundoor on Wednesday night, Martin managed to escape. We came to know that he took shelter in the forest and combed the area for hours, said the officer. Martin was brought to Kochi by midnight. Since the arrest was made on Thursday evening, we have to produce him before the court only by Friday evening. We have enough time to question him.

We have to find the involvement of other persons in the crime, said the officer. The three persons arrested earlier  Dhanesh, 29, Sreerag, 27, and John Joy, 28, all belonging to Thrissur  shuttled Martin between Thrissur and Kochi frequently to escape the police net. Questioning revealed that they helped Martin by shifting him from one location to another after search was intensified on Monday.

Two-wheeler, three cars used to help Martin flee seized

They were his intimate friends. They not only provided a hiding place, but arranged transportation facilities as well to escape from the police. Ever since the police issued a lookout notice and the matter hit the headlines, these three have been helping him. They are said to have several safe havens in Thrissur and Kochi, said C Nagaraju, city police commissioner. The police also seized a two-wheeler and three cars  a BMW, an Innova and a Swift  in which they were travelling.

While Dhanesh helped Martin arrange a flat in Kochi, Sreerag and John took care of his transportation and food. Martin was missing since the woman filed a complaint with the city police on April 8. The police managed to collect the CCTV footage of Martin from an apartment in Kakkanad. We carried out surprise inspections in several areas in Thrissur district. We have received information that other friends too were helping him during these days, said a police officer.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court Friday said it would pass orders on June 15 on closure of proceedings in India against two Italian marines, accused of killing two fishermen off the Kerala coast in February 2012, and the disbursal of Rs 10 crore compensation to the heirs of the victims.

Referring to the international arbitral award and the terms of the agreement among India, Italy and the Kerala government, a vacation bench comprising justices Indira Banerjee and M R Shah said the case against  marines Massimilano Latorre and Salvatore Girone  for the offences would be now pursued by Italy there.

As per the scheme on disbursal of compensation, the top court was informed by the Kerala government that Rs 4 core each would be given to the heirs of two deceased fishermen and the rest Rs 2 core would be paid to the owner of the fishing vessel St.Antony on which the two were shot dead.

Keeping the plea of the Centre seeking closure of the case here pending for orders on Tuesday, the bench said it was of the view that the compensation money be transferred to the Kerala high court for disbursal and ensuring that the amount does not fritter away.

In February 2012, India had accused the two marines on board the MV Enrica Lexie -- an Italian flagged oil tanker -- of killing two Indian fishermen who were on a fishing vessel in India's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

At the outset, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Centre, told the bench that Republic of Italy has deposited Rs 10 crore with it over and above the ex-gratia paid earlier and the same has been deposited by the Union Ministry of External Affairs with the apex court's registry as directed.

There was an award by International Tribunal, which we as a Nation have accepted.

The agreement is among Republic of Italy, India and the Kerala government, the law officer said, adding, Now, the question of apportionment of the compensation amount remains and it can be left to the Kerala Government.

 The dispute before the international tribunal was as to which country, Italy or India, has the jurisdiction to prosecute the marines and it was decided that both the nations have the concurrent jurisdiction, Mehta said.

But based on facts it was decided that India would not pursue the criminal case and proceedings would be started in Italy, he added.

Senior Advocate Sohail Dutta, appearing for Italy, urged the bench to pass an order to quash the criminal proceedings pending against the marines as per the award of the International Tribunal.

Earlier, the Centre had told the court that Italy had initiated the transfer of Rs 10 crore and as soon as the money is received, the government will deposit it with the apex court as per the April 9 direction.

The Centre had earlier told the top court that Italy has assured the Indian government that it would prosecute the marines there as per law and that maximum compensation will be ensured to the victims' family members.

The Centre had referred to the last year's ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) at The Hague which held that India was entitled to get compensation in the case but can't prosecute the marines due to official immunity enjoyed by them.

It had said the arbitration under United Nation Convention on the Law of Sea (UNCLOS), which was instituted on a request from Italy, has delivered its Award on May 21, 2020.

Latorre, who had suffered a brain stroke on August 31, 2014, was first granted bail and allowed by the apex court on September 12, 2014 to go to Italy for four months and after that, extensions have been granted to him.

In Italy, Latorre underwent a heart surgery after which the top court granted him extension of his stay in his native country.

On September 28, 2016, the apex court had allowed Latorre to remain in his country till the international arbitral tribunal decided the jurisdictional issue.

On May 26, 2016, Girone was also granted bail with certain conditions and allowed by the top court to go to his country till the jurisdictional issue was decided.

The complaint against the marines was lodged by Freddy, the owner of fishing boat 'St Antony' in which two Kerala fishermen were killed when marines opened fire on them allegedly under the misconception that they were pirates.

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By Express News Service

BARGARH/BHUBANESWAR: A Maoist cadre was killed in an exchange of fire with security forces inside a forest near Bhanjaguda village under Padampur block in Bargarh district in the wee hours of Friday.

Sources said a group of ultras opened fire when the combing operation was being carried out jointly by a team of SOG jawans and District Voluntary Force (DVF) in the forest. As the left-wing extremists started firing indiscriminately, the security forces retaliated killing the Maoist cadre on the spot. Others in the camp managed to escape.

Odisha DGP Abhay confirmed that the Maoist was killed in the crossfire. Security forces have recovered an AK-47 rifle, three magazines, and other arms and ammunition from the spot.

"Since only senior cadres in Maoist organisation carry AK 47 rifle, we suspect the deceased could be a senior cadre. Efforts are on to ascertain his identity," he said.

Stating the Odisha government has introduced a very generous rehabilitation policy, the DGP appealed to Maoists to surrender and return to the mainstream. The search operation was on at the spot.
By Express News Service

COIMBATORE: The district on Thursday recorded a 12.7 per cent test positivity rate for the first time since March 2020, when the total RT-PCR tests crossed the 15 lakh-mark. According to the health department, results of 1,93,037 of the 15,14,493 tests done so far have yielded positive results.

On Wednesday, the daily case count was 2,319 and a total of 11,000 RT-PCR samples were tested. It may be noted that the number of samples tested increased from 7,000 during early May to 13,000 per day in the first week of June.

About handling more samples, the officials said that those collected in government health camps are being sent to private labs to avoid delays. Deputy Director of District Health Services S Senthilkumar said that the fresh cases are decreasing in Coimbatore and that it is expected to come down below 1,000 by the fag end of June. He also requested the people with symptoms to get an RT-PCR test done soon.

50 persons infected

Coimbatore City Municipal Corporation has revealed that 50 residents of a street in Nanjundapuram have contracted Covid. Following this, the officials cordoned off the area.

Dont delay RT-PCR test results: Lenin Bharathi

Coimbatore: Indian Scientists Forum member K Lenin Bharathi on Thursday urged the district administration to expedite the revelation of RT-PCR test results. He claimed that the results are delayed at least by 72 hours in Coimbatore, which could further the spread of Covid. Usually, a delay beyond 12 hours in the test result will not help break the chain. In Coimbatore, it takes three to four days to receive the sample status. It is high time to address the delay to control the spread, he said and requested the administration to on bring down the daily count by not delaying the test results.
By Express News Service

CHENNAI: Tourism Minister M Mathiventhan on Thursday directed officials to form an expert committee to frame a post-Covid tourism recovery plan. The aim of this initiative is to revive Tamil Nadu tourism, which was adversely affected by the pandemic, subsequently impacting livelihoods of many who were dependent on it.

Tourist destinations in the State saw a drastic decline in the arrival of tourists in the last 18 months owing to the pandemic. As a result, tourism stakeholders lost a substantial income, an official statement said. The recovery plan, which is being taken up based on the advice of Chief Minister MK Stalin, will take into account the safety of tourists visiting the State in the near future, besides appropriate measures to enhance the income of the stakeholders.

Mathiventhan has directed the officials to prepare a project report for a landmark lighting and projection show at the statue of Thiruvalluvar in Kanyakumari district, to attract tourists, including foreign nationals. He also sought a proposal to improve the art gallery and infrastructure in the tourism complex at the ancient port town of Poompuhar, which was ruled by the Cholas.
By Express News Service

CHENNAI: After days of suspending the Statewide vaccination drive against Covid-19, Tamil Nadu on Thursday received 85,000 doses of Covaxin under the State order. The drive was suspended in 36 districts due to an acute shortage of vaccines. On Thursday, only Chennai had 1,060 doses of vaccines, said Health Minister Ma Subramanian.

Speaking to reporters at Guindy, the minister said that the received supply was being distributed to all districts. We are expecting 6.5 lakh doses more from the Centre in another two days, he added. Meanwhile, the health department also held a meeting with the Union Health Ministry on the day. Health Secretary J Radhakrishnan said that the Central officials were informed that Tamil Nadu needed at least two crore doses per month so that the pace of the vaccination drive can be increased. The State aims to inoculate at least six lakh people per day.

Meanwhile, fresh cases have been on a decline in the State, and nearly 42,000 beds are lying vacant currently, said Subramanian. The health department also has stocked up on medicines, including those to treat black fungus, he said, adding that action is being taken against 40 private hospitals for various violations, including overcharging patients.

The minister further stated that the doctors and nurses were being given quality food and good accommodation, as compared to the situation during the first wave. At that time, he said, food was ordered from people who didnt even run a hotel, and was priced at Rs 550 to Rs 600 per person in a few districts. Extra money was also being paid to sub brokers for accommodation.

However, after complaints from health workers, Subramanian said the earlier orders were cancelled and quality food was ordered for Rs 350 to Rs 450 per person. They are also being accommodated in reputed hotels. By these measures, the government could save Rs 30 lakh a day, and it runs up to crores on a monthly basis, he said, adding that people involved in the scam will face legal action.
Omjasvin MD By

Express News Service

CHENNAI: During the first week of May, ambulances were queuing up outside government hospitals in Chennai due to the lack of beds. The waiting time was up to six hours for a patient to get admission.

On May 7, the new government took charge but the states cases continued to climb rapidly to a peak of 36,184 people testing positive on May 20, the highest the state had ever recorded. Following this, the overall cases began declining.

The New Indian Express takes a look at the measures taken by the government to bring down the cases in its battle against Covid-19.

Health Secretary Dr J Radhakrishnan says cases came down because of a combination of factors.

Apart from focusing on health infrastructure and human resources, a maximum number of samples was collected from Chennai and its adjoining districts, he said.

As a result, Chennai and Chengalpet had their peak much earlier than other districts, on May 12, followed by Kancheepuram on May 15.

The Health Secretary said that in Chennai, 21 screening centres were introduced while 27 functional COVID care centres were re-established.

ALSO READ: Lockdown in TN extended till June 21; Tasmac shops, saloons to open in 27 districts soon

Additional bed facilities were created by the Chennai Corporation and medical colleges were equipped with extra oxygen support, he said, adding that private COVID care centres were opened and even student doctors were roped in for telemedicine and tele-counseling.

The Health Secretary said that similar measures were done in districts as well.

Additional medical officers were introduced and the enforcement of the COVID-19 protocols was tightened by the district collector. There was also an online meeting of officials through a web conference, he added.

He said makeshift ambulances were created in many districts including those in the western belt.

Coimbatore saw its peak on May 27 followed by Erode on May 30. While cases are declining here, officials said they were waiting for two incubation cycles to evaluate if the districts are free from COVID.

Just like Chennai, there are 24 districts which have done a similar kind of containment work such as traiging, testing and early detecting, the Health Secretary said.

In Kanyakumari, PHC officials even took a boat across a reservoir to a mountainside to test and screen the tribal population.

Officials said that the COVID-19 war rooms were also decentralized and each district had its own war room to augment oxygen supply and bed availability.

Apart from the fieldwork, theres an analytical team that researches, documents and analyses daily COVID-19 figures. They give a summary statement of disease spread, weekly area by area reports, positive rates, district wise hotspots data, number of index cases based on the source of infection, the Health Secretary added.

Officials and experts said that despite the governments success in reducing cases, people still need to follow COVID-19 appropriate behaviour.

Former Director of Public Health Dr K Kolandasamy said that cases are coming down mainly due to the effect of the lockdown.

We will have to wait and see how it is when the relaxation measures come. People must practise COVID appropriate behavior such as mask-wearing, social distancing, and handwashing till we reach a point of adequate immunization, he said.

He said that closed and contained areas should not be allowed to reopen and even non-essential places like theatres and malls could be closed for a while.

Hospitals too must be divided into COVID wards, non-COVID wards, and pregnant mothers ward, added Dr Kolandasamy.

Speaking to The New Indian Express, Chennai Corporation Commissioner Gagandeep Singh Bedi, said the main reason for the decrease in cases in the city was lockdown.

Earlier, Chennai Corporation used to miss out on cases. Patients with symptoms used to roam around and spread the infection to relatives, he said.

To resolve this issue, Bedi said the civic body sent a circular to private labs to inform about patients' details of all who took CT scans and all medical shops were directed to inform on patients getting paracetamol. He said that the patients were followed up through calls.

Additionally, we also triaged patients below 45 at their doorsteps. All these measures ensured people do not miss from our ambit, he said.

Dr Radhakrishnan also said that people must not be casual about the cases coming down and must continue to follow Covid-appropriate behavior.

I see many people not wearing masks and walking in and out of COVID-19 containment zones. People must not relax and let their guard down, cautioned Dr Radhakrishnan.
By Express News Service

KRISHNAGIRI: Mango farmers across the district are severely hit by poor yield and lack of returns because of the lockdown. Farmers accused the Horticulture department of failing to help them to market the fruits and that the lack of modern technology in cultivating mangoes has led to massive losses.

Mango capital

Krishnagiri is known as the Mango capital of India where over 40,000 hectares is used for mango cultivation. Krishnagiri's mango produce is the most sought after in countries like Russia, Singapore, Australia, France, said sources. A wide variety of mangoes - Totapuri, Alphonsa, Neelam and Sendura - are cultivated and exported.

Produce affected

Guru Shiva, a farmer, said, "This year's mango cultivation has been severely affected by pest attack during the flowering season. This, coupled with unfavourable climate and untimely fertilising, has resulted in most farmers facing a 50 per cent decline in yield." Guru who cultivates mango in his two-acre orchard said that on average the orchard would have produced up to four to six-tonne yield per acre.

Pulp industry

Guru also said that pulp industries had cut down procurement because of losses. "Pulp industries are offering Rs 10,000 per tonne. There are over four cycles of pesticides sprayed every season and this price merely helps break even with the cost of pesticide," he said.

Chinnasamy, another farmer, said that most of the locals were ignored by pulp industries and that they were procuring from Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh for lower prices. He further said those mangoes were of poor quality and that this trend could hurt Krishnagiri's reputation.

Plea for aid

The farmers collectively urged that the Horticulture department should bring in more innovation into mango cultivation to protect yield from insect attack and improve fructose content. When The New Indian Express spoke to senior officials in the Horticulture department, they said, "As far as the retail market is concerned, we provide the best price in Uzhavar Sandhai. But, we cannot interfere with private industries and their rates. We can offer advice, but at the end of the day the decision is with the farmers."

Officials also added that farmers leasing out their land to private cultivators and the maintenance of orchards have drastically reduced. They noted a decrease in mango cultivation area by almost 4000 hectares.

On pulp industries choosing mangoes from other states, officials cited that mango season starts early in other states and that their prices were competitive.
By AFP

CARBIS BAY (UNITED KINGDOM): G7 leaders on Friday opened their first in-person talks in nearly two years, with an expected pledge to donate one billion COVID vaccine doses to poor countries on the agenda in a show of Western democratic cohesion.

The club of leading economies -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and United States -- say a joint approach is the world's best chance for recovering from the global health crisis, and tackling climate change.

Welcomed by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to the beachside summit venue in Carbis Bay, southwest England, the leaders posed for a family photo before opening their first session of talks on "building back better" after the pandemic.

The meeting presents a "huge opportunity" for global pandemic recovery, Johnson told his fellow leaders in opening remarks, as they sat socially distanced and without masks at a round table. It would focus, he said, on "building back greener, building back fairer and building back more equal", with an emphasis on gender equality.

US President Joe Biden had set the tone, ditching Donald Trump's isolationist stance to ram home a message of resolve by the G7 and NATO against both Beijing and Moscow, as he heads into his first sit-down with Russian President Vladimir Putin next week in Geneva.

"I'm looking forward to reinforcing our commitment to multilateralism and working with our allies and partners to build a more fair and inclusive global economy. Let's get to work," Biden tweeted from the G7 in Cornwall.

COVID and climate

Campaigners say the G7's vaccine donations pledge for this year and next -- including 500 million US doses -- is far too little, too late to end a pandemic that has claimed over 3.7 million lives worldwide. "If the best G7 leaders can manage is to donate one billion vaccine doses then this summit will have been a failure," Oxfam said, insisting the world needs 11 billion doses.

But the G7 wants to rise to competing "vaccine diplomacy" efforts launched by China and Russia, with the Biden administration stressing it expects nothing in return for its donated jabs. The leaders are also expected to outline more help for developing nations to build up infrastructure, as a counterpoint to the debt-fuelled spending by China in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The initiative "will embrace a high standards, transparent, climate friendly, non-corrupt mechanism" for infrastructure investment in the developing world, a senior US official said. "It will be an alternative to that which other countries, including China, are offering," he said.

'Indestructible relationship'

Underpinning the US-led diplomatic revival, Biden and Johnson on Thursday adopted a new "Atlantic Charter", modelled on the pact signed by their World War II predecessors to help build a new world order.

Johnson dislikes the decades-old phrase "special relationship", arguing it makes Britain look subservient to Washington, telling the BBC instead that it should be viewed as "indestructible".

He also played down any differences with Biden over the restive British province of Northern Ireland, ahead of showdown talks between Johnson and EU chiefs on Saturday to tackle deep fissures opened up by Brexit.

British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab hit back Friday after French President Emmanuel Macron launched a broadside over UK backpedalling regarding special post-Brexit arrangements for Northern Ireland.

Raab told Sky News that "change must come from the European Commission side" and that "we are not negotiating or haggling the integrity of the United Kingdom". Late Thursday, more than 3,000 pro-UK loyalists staged a protest in Belfast against the "protocol" that effectively keeps Northern Ireland in the EU customs union and single market.

Marshmallows by sea

Johnson will hope to lighten the mood at a beach barbecue on Saturday, joined by his new wife Carrie and other G7 spouses, with a sea shanty band and toasted marshmallows around fire pits. That will follow a reception for the G7 leaders Friday evening hosted by Queen Elizabeth II at Cornwall's Eden Project, an exhibition that showcases the world's ecological riches.

Safeguarding global biodiversity is another G7 theme this weekend, with the leaders set on an agreement to protect at least 30 percent of the world's land and oceans by 2030. They will also debate aiding poorer nations to transition out of fossil fuels, in the build-up to the UN's COP26 climate summit in November in Scotland.

Like the G7, Britain wants COP26 to be held in-person, and announced that it plans to offer vaccinations to delegates from poorer nations if they cannot get them otherwise. Greenpeace UK released a video shot with 300 illuminated drones over Cornwall, creating a startling display of endangered animals, to urge G7 leaders to stop mass extinctions.

"We need to see action, not just warm words, to tackle the climate and nature emergency. We need to see those tangible commitments this weekend -- otherwise our world leaders are failing us," Rebecca Newsom, head of politics for the environmental group, told AFP.

The G7 is also expected to adopt a UK plan to ensure schooling for another 40 million girls by 2025, after the pandemic destroyed educational opportunities for many around the world.
By PTI

KATHMANDU: India on Friday handed over medical equipment, including ventilators and ambulances, worth over Rs 18 crore to Nepal as a gesture of solidarity and close cooperation with the Himalayan nation in its fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vinay Mohan Kwatra, Ambassador of India to Nepal, handed over medical supplies to Nepal Army chief Gen Purna Chandra Thapa during a ceremony at the Nepali Army Headquarters in Tundikhel.

"Fighting COVID-19 Together. As a gesture of solidarity & close cooperation, medical equipment including ventilators & ambulances was handed over today by Ambassador Kwatra to General Purna Chandra Thapa, Chief of the Nepali Army," the Indian Embassy in Nepal tweeted.

"The medical supplies were provided by the Indian Army," the Nepal Army spokesperson said in a tweet.

As part of its Neighborhood First' policy, medical equipment and supplies worth Nepali Rupees 28.80 crore (about INR 18,01,09,000) provided by the Indian Army, the Indian Embassy said in a statement.

The ambassador reaffirmed India's support to the Nepali Army in its fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The medical equipment, including ventilators, ambulances, ICU beds, PPE Kits, PCR test kits etc was delivered to Kathmandu on June 10.

The Indian Army has been assisting the Nepali Army to fight COVID-19 through various kinds of assistance since last year, including 1 lakh doses of COVISHIELD vaccines which were provided in March 2021.

The latest assistance is another testament to the close cooperation between the two armies and the two countries, particularly in times of need, the statement said.

Nepal's coronavirus caseload surpassed 600,000-mark on Thursday with 2,874 more people testing positive for the infection.

Meanwhile, 59 fresh fatalities pushed Nepal's total death toll to 8,238.

The country's active Covid-19 case count currently stands at 77,858.
By PTI

WASHINGTON: The US Senate has approved the historic nomination of Pakistani-American Zahid Quraishi to the District Court in New Jersey, making him the first Muslim federal judge in the country's history.

The Senate voted 81-16 on Thursday to confirm Quraishi, 46.

As many as 34 Republicans joined the Democrats in confirming the first-ever Muslim-American as a federal judge.

Currently, a magistrate judge for the District of New Jersey, Quraishi would now make history when he will be sworn in as the Judge of the US District Court of New Jersey.

"Judge Quraishi has devoted his career to serving our country, and his story embodies both the rich diversity of New Jersey and the promise of America as a place where anything is possible," said Senator Robert Menendez during a speech on the Senate floor before the confirmation vote.

Menendez is Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"Zahid Quraishi is a man of integrity, a consummate public servant, and a trailblazer for Asian-Americans and Muslim-Americans across this country who dream of one day presiding over a court of their own," he said.

"We should all draw inspiration from his story because it is a story that could only take place in the United States of America," Menendez said.

The US District Court of New Jersey is one of the busiest in the country, with 46,000 cases pending before it and with judges facing individual caseloads more than triple the national average.

Quraishi was appointed as a US Magistrate Judge for the District of New Jersey in the Trenton Vicinage on June 3, 2019.

Quraishi, who is of Pakistani ancestry, is the first Asian-American to serve on the federal bench in New Jersey.

"Judge Quraishi has devoted his career to serving our country, and his story embodies both the rich diversity of New Jersey and the promise of America as a place where anything is possible.

He was born in New York and grew up in Fanwood, New Jersey with his parents, both immigrants from Pakistan who came to this country to build a better life," Menendez said.

Before his appointment, he was Chair of Riker Danzig's White Collar Criminal Defence and Investigations Group and his firm's first Chief Diversity Officer.

Before joining Riker, Quraishi served as an Assistant US Attorney in the District of New Jersey for over five years.

He previously represented the United States as an Assistant Chief Counsel and trial attorney with the US Department of Homeland Security.

He also served as a military prosecutor and achieved the rank of Captain in the US Army Judge Advocate General's (JAG) Corps.

The Muslim Public Affairs Council applauded this historic moment as Judge Quraishi is now the first American Muslim to serve as an Article III federal judge.

The Biden administration is fulfilling its promise to make the federal government more representative of the rich diversity of America, it said.

"In the past few months, we have seen an American Muslim woman, Deputy Director of the National Economic Council Sameera Fazili, speak from the White House dais on economic policy," the council said.

President Joe Biden has also nominated Dilawar Syed for the Small Business Administration and Lina Khan for the Federal Trade Commission.

"Judge Zahid Quraishi's confirmation is a hallmark in this new era of progress for American Muslims, breaking barriers by filling roles that have not been historically filled by Muslims," the statement said.
By PTI

SINGAPORE: The Singapore police are investigating an incident in which a 48-year old woman was filmed interrupting her neighbour's Hindu prayers by banging a gong.

Police confirmed that a report was lodged and the woman is assisting the police with investigations, reported The Straits Times on Thursday.

On Wednesday evening, Livanesh Ramu posted a 19-second video clip of the incident on Facebook, which shows a bespectacled man ringing a bell - a common practice in Hindu prayers - while conducting rites outside his apartment unit in the public housing estate of state-run Housing and Development Board.

A woman then emerges from the flat next door, picks up a stick from the ground and bashes it vigorously against a small gong for around 15 seconds.

After the man stoops down and the sound of the bell becomes inaudible, she continues hitting the gong a few more times before returning to her unit.

Livanesh said in his Facebook post: "Like many other Hindus, this has been a part of our family's five-minute, twice-a-week prayer routine."

"Having lived in this home for more than 20 years, we never had any issues. I guess with COVID-19, we have a new norm." Livanesh said that he and his family have given statements to the authorities.

"While we await their findings, I do not wish to speculate on behalf of my neighbour with regard to her actions," The Straits Times quoted the Indian-origin Livanesh as saying.

He added: "In the meantime, it is indeed heartening to see fellow Singaporeans in solidarity against intolerance." Meanwhile, Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam on Thursday said that people may have racial preferences and that in itself is not racism.

But if they bring it out into the public sphere and impose it on others, then it crosses the line, he added.

"You should call out, you should frown against it, and you should take action if it breaches the law. Because it is cancerous, it is divisive, and it undermines the values of our society," he said.

The Minister was speaking on the Singapore Today programme on radio station CNA938, following a recent spate of racial incidents.

Last Saturday, polytechnic lecturer Tan Boon Lee, 60, lashed out at an interracial couple in public and said Indian men should not be "preying on Chinese girls".

Business owner Dave Parkash, 26, and his girlfriend, Jacqueline Ho, 27, the target of the comments, filmed the encounter and later posted the video on Facebook.

The open display of racist behaviour, among several other recent incidents, has sparked criticism and debate among Singaporeans.

Asked by the radio presenters if racial harmony is under threat in Singapore, Shanmugam said he did not think so.

"Name me a society where there is no racism which is multiracial," he said, adding that Singapore has made tremendous progress in building racial harmony and is better than most other multiracial societies.

He noted that Singapore's leaders have always recognised the existence of racism here, whether it is in the form of deep racial fault lines, outright racism, and even overt racial preferences, and stressed that the key is in mitigating it.

"Many of the Government's policies proceed by accepting that there is both racial preferences, as well as racism, and how do we mitigate that to make sure that meritocracy works, and that people of all races have fair opportunities," he said.

The incident involving Parkash, half Indian-Filipino, and Ho, half Chinese-Thai, is being investigated by the police.

It has also sparked discussion about whether Singapore's longstanding CMIO - Chinese-Malay-Indian-Others - classification framework may be an issue, according to a report in The Straits Times on Thursday.
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ROXBURY  The Minor Memorial Library, 23 South St. in Roxbury, will host the New Chordtet Band on June 26 at 3 p.m., on the librarys lawn. There will be a Pop-up bar for cocktails and drinks. Picnics are welcome, and lawn chairs and a blanket. This program is free.

Band member Peter McEachern (trombone) has toured and recorded with Blues legend Clarence Gatemouth Brown, worked and recorded with minimalist composer Lamonte Young and is featured on Insomnia with the Thomas Chapin Trio on Knitting Factory Works. McEacherns newest project Code 2 will be released on Steeplechase Records Aug. 15, and features Noah Preminger on sax along with Sarin and Pavone.
NEW YORK (AP)  The Latest on the 2021 Pulitzer Prizes:

RICHMOND  Michael Paul Williams of Virginia's Richmond Times-Dispatch won this years prize for commentary for a series of penetrating and historically insightful columns about the process of dismantling the state capital city's Confederate monuments.

Williams winning work was written after the killing of George Floyd, which ignited removals of monuments to Confederates, colonizers and tyrants around the world. The issue was particularly resonant in Richmond, a former capital of the Confederacy steeped in Civil War history and Lost Cause iconography.

Williams wrote in July in one of his winning columns that Richmond was now a city in search of heroes and causes we can all rally around and that Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson's likeness was lifted from a perch it never should have occupied in a just and evolved society, after workers removed the first of many Confederate statues the mayor ordered off city property.

The newspapers leadership said in a joint statement that Williams commentary was the centerpiece of its coverage of Richmonds legacy of inequity and that he wrote with a voice that spoke to the trauma of yesterday and the hope for tomorrow.

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MORE ON THE PULITZERS:

 Pulitzers honor coronavirus pandemic, US protest coverage

 AP wins 2 Pulitzers for photos of pandemic pain, US unrest

 The Night Watchman, Malcolm X biography win arts Pulitzers

 Teen who recorded Floyds arrest, death wins Pulitzer nod

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NEW YORK  One of the countrys most esteemed novelists, Louise Erdrich, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Night Watchman. Other winners for books include the late Les Payne and daughter Tamara Payne for their Malcolm X biography The Dead Are Arising.

Marcia Chatelains Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America won for history. Natalie Diazs Postcolonial Love Poem was the poetry winner and David Zucchinos Wilmingtons Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy was cited for general nonfiction.

Tani Leons composition Stride was the winner for music.

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NEW YORK  The Pulitzer board recognized two winners in the Explanatory Reporting category that touched on the major stories of the year.

Ed Yong of The Atlantic won for a lucid, definitive series on the pandemic which the board said anticipated the course of the disease, synthesized the complex challenges the country faced, illuminated the US governments failures and provided clear and accessible context to the scientific and human challenges it posed.

Andrew Chung, Lawrence Hurley, Andrea Januta, Jaimi Dowdell and Jackie Botts of Reuters won for an investigation of the legal concept of qualified immunity and how it shields police from prosecution. The board cited the examination of court cases powered by a pioneering data analysis.

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BOSTON  The Boston Globe received the investigative reporting Pulitzer for a series demonstrating how poor government oversight imperils road safety.

Matt Rocheleau, Vernal Coleman, Laura Crimaldi, Evan Allen and Brendan McCarthy were recognized for reporting that uncovered a systematic failure by state governments to share information about dangerous truck drivers that could have kept them off the road, the Pulitzer board said.

The investigation reported how the increasingly deadly trucking industry operates with minimal federal government oversight.

Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory praised his staffs winning coverage for the investigative reporting Pulitzer, highlighting their tireless shoe-leather reporting and the reforms their work produced.

Brendan McCarthy, the editor on the series, said the Globe quickly found that this kind of tragedy had been happening year after year for decades. The problems were in plain sight but had never been addressed.

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NEW YORK  The Hot Wing King by Katori Hall, a play set around a hot wing cooking competition, has won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for drama during a theater season that saw most venues largely shuttered.

The Pulitzer board hailed The Hot Wing King for its look at masculinity and how it is filtered by the experiences of a loving gay couple and their extended family as they prepare for a culinary competition

Finalists included Circle Jerk by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley, and Stew by Zora Howard.

With most theaters closed during the pandemic, the Pulitzer Prize Board altered the requirements for this years drama award, allowing postponed or canceled works, as well as plays produced and performed in places other than theaters. The Hot Wing King opened off-Broadway just days before the citys theaters were closed.

Hall is the author of the Olivier Award-winning The Mountaintop and is a Tony Award-nominated co-playwright of Broadways Tina  The Tina Turner Musical.

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NEW YORK  The Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism has been awarded to The New York Times for its reporting on the coronavirus.

The Times reporting on the pandemic stood out in 2020 for its depth and accessibility.

The paper provided a wealth of data in easy-to-digest forms, including graphs on new cases and hospitalizations, a map of hot spots and a table on trends by state.

The Pulitzer committee said the Times was recognized for courageous, prescient and sweeping coverage of the coronavirus pandemic that exposed racial and economic inequities, government failures in the U.S. and beyond and filled a data vacuum that helped local governments, health care providers, businesses and individuals to be better prepared and protected.

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MINNEAPOLIS  The teenager whose video documenting the death of George Floyd set off a global movement over racial injustice has been awarded a special citation by the Pulitzer Prizes.

Darnella Frazier was cited for courageously recording the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality, around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists quest for truth and justice.

Frazier was 17 when she recorded Floyds death in May 2020 at the hands of Minneapolis police.

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NEW YORK  The Associated Press has won two Pulitzer Prizes for photography for its coverage of racial injustice protests in the U.S. and the coronavirus pandemics toll on the elderly in Spain.

APs chief photographer in Spain, Emilio Morenatti, won the feature photography prize for documenting the impact of COVID-19 on elders.

One of his winning images captured an older couple hugging and kissing through a plastic sheet.

Work by 10 AP photographers won the breaking news prize for covering protests that roiled U.S. cities after the May 2020 death of George Floyd, a Black man killed by a police officer.

Photographers dodged rubber bullets and tear gas to capture close-up images of demonstrators with fists in the air and sometimes violent conflicts with police.

With the wins, AP has now received 56 Pulitzer Prizes, including 34 for photography.

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MINNEAPOLIS  The Star Tribune, of Minneapolis, has won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for its coverage of the May 25, 2020, killing of George Floyd and the resulting civil unrest that tore through the city.

Floyd, a Black man, died as he was being pinned to the ground by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

Video of Chauvin kneeling on Floyds neck for 9 minutes, 29 seconds sparked a wave of protests, first in the Twin Cities and then nationwide.

Star Tribune journalists covered the rage in Minneapolis, where protesters burned buildings including a police station. The Pulitzer board called the coverage urgent, authoritative and nuanced.

Chauvin was later convicted of murder.
South Africa: Progress made in implementing economic recovery plan

President Cyril Ramaphosa says progress has been made in implementing the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan.

The Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan is a necessary response to the severe economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Plan aims to ensure a swift and lasting economic recovery, with measures to limit the immediate impact of the pandemic on vulnerable workers and households, and to revive economic growth in the short-and medium-term.

Significant progress has been made since the announcement of the plan less than eight months ago, said the President, when responding to oral questions in the National Council of Provinces on Thursday.

The President said the Infrastructure Fund has been established, and its investment committee has been constituted.

A total of R18 billion has been allocated to the Infrastructure Fund over the next three years for blended finance arrangements that will leverage private sector funding.

To achieve greater energy security, a total of 1 200 MW of new generation capacity has now been connected to the grid from projects approved through Bid Window 4 of the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producers (IPP) Programme.

A request for proposals has been issued for 2 600 MW of power from wind and solar PV projects through Bid Window 5.

Eleven preferred bidders have been approved as part of the emergency power procurement programme, which will together deliver nearly 2 000 MW of power to the grid over the next 18 months.

As I announced earlier this afternoon, Schedule 2 of the Electricity Regulation Act will soon be amended to increase the licensing threshold for embedded generation projects from 1 MW to 100 MW, said President Ramaphosa.

Presidential Employment Stimulus

The Presidential Employment Stimulus, meanwhile, has supported close to 700 000 work opportunities across a range of programmes, through the creation of new work opportunities, the protection of existing jobs in vulnerable sectors, and support for livelihoods.

Four sector Masterplans are currently in implementation in the automotive, sugar, poultry, and clothing, textiles, footwear and leather sectors.

This approach, which relies on close collaboration with stakeholders to develop a tailored action plan for high-growth sectors, is already demonstrating results.

According to data released by the South African Revenue Service, South Africa experienced a cumulative trade surplus of close to R150 billion for the first four months of this year.

This reflects a massive increase in our exports to the rest of the world, driven largely by the unique strategic value of our mineral resources, President Ramaphosa said.

The President said funding for the measures contained in the Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan is included in the budgets of all national departments for their areas of responsibility, ensuring that the plan is mainstreamed in the work of government.

Through the effective implementation of this plan, as well as the structural reforms that form part of Operation Vulindlela, we are reviving our economy and placing South Africa on a new growth trajectory.

The success of the recovery plan is based on a strong partnership with business, labour and other social partners, as a whole-of-society effort to promote our economic recovery.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2021-06-11. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Commissioner's office of Chinese foreign ministry urges Britain to stop interfering in Hong Kong affairs

Xinhua) 15:33, June 11, 2021

HONG KONG, June 10 (Xinhua) -- The Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Thursday urged Britain to stop interfering in Hong Kong affairs and China's internal affairs.

The commissioner's office made the statement in response to the so-called "six-monthly report on Hong Kong" released by the British government, which distorted the truth, blatantly meddled with Hong Kong affairs and China's internal affairs at large.

The office expressed strong disapproval of and firm opposition against the so-called report, which also trampled upon principles including that of non-interference in international law and basic norms governing international relations.

A spokesperson for the office said it is the Chinese government that has initiated, practiced and preserved "one country, two systems". The implementation of the Law of the People's Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the HKSAR has effectively restored order and stability to Hong Kong society and tranquility and freedoms to its people.

The improvement of Hong Kong's electoral system at the state level and the smooth completion of local legislation by the HKSAR this year have plugged loopholes in the legal system, protected political stability and safety of the HKSAR's body of power, and started a new chapter of good governance in Hong Kong, the spokesperson said.

Both are fundamental measures that stay true to the original aspirations of "one country, two systems" and safeguard the enduring success of the principle. Several million Hong Kong people signed petitions to show support, and such popular will is simply unstoppable, the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson pointed out that Britain has shown total disregard for the positive momentum in the Hong Kong situation and people's longing for peace and stability, and chosen instead to openly meddle with Hong Kong affairs on the pretext of human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Meanwhile, though, it has turned a blind eye to the dark past of its colonial rule in Hong Kong, when Hong Kong people were never guaranteed genuine rights and freedoms back then.

The spokesperson said that the legal grounds for the Chinese government's governance of the HKSAR since Hong Kong's return are the Constitution of the People's Republic of China and the HKSAR Basic Law, not the Sino-British Joint Declaration.

The spokesperson emphasized that Hong Kong is part of China, and its affairs are China's internal affairs. Any external force wishing the HKSAR and China at large ill is doomed to be disillusioned.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
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The AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG), the largest global HIV research network, today announced the launch of A5386, a phase 1 HIV cure study evaluating two promising therapies. A5386 will study whether N-803 (a clinical-stage biologic also called Anktiva?) can control HIV alone or together with combination broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) after participants stop their antiretroviral therapy (ART) and they are carefully monitored.

In pre-clinical and clinical research, N-803 (an IL-15 superagonist) has exhibited three activities that may help the immune system eliminate HIV reservoirs or control virus rebound. First, N-803 has been shown to reverse HIV latency (the process of no reproduction of HIV within long-lived cells in the immune system), allowing it to be detected by the immune system. Second, it activates NK cells and CD8+ T-cells, two elements of the immune system that specialize in killing virus-infected cells. Finally, it enables NK cells and CD8+ T-cells to move to lymphoid tissues where they will encounter and hopefully eliminate HIV-infected cells.

The actions of bNAbs (or antibodies that neutralize different variants of HIV) are well-matched to that of N-803. bNAbs neutralize HIV that is produced upon reactivation, preventing new infections; target (label) HIV-infected cells for destruction by NK cells; and may act to boost CD8+ T-cell responses. A5386 will utilize an array of virologic and immunologic tests to evaluate the degree to which each of these expected activities are induced in study participants. Ultimately, the study will test whether this approach results in immune control of HIV when ART is paused with careful monitoring.

HIV cure clinical trials remain a fundamental element of the ACTG's research agenda. A5386 is particularly exciting as it marries two of the approaches in the HIV cure research space with the most potential. We believe this study will provide important insights as we continue to pursue our ultimate goal of identifying a cure for HIV and making it available to the millions of people living with HIV around the world." Judith Currier, M.D., M.Sc., ACTG Chair, University of California, Los Angeles

A5386 is a phase 1, open-label, randomized study evaluating the safety, tolerability, and efficacy of N-803 both with and without combination bNAbs. It will enroll 46 people living with HIV (23 in each study arm) whose virus has been suppressed by ART for approximately two years, including at least 30 percent cisgender women or transgender men. Participants will undergo leukapheresis (a medical procedure in which white blood cells, or leukocytes, are separated from the blood) to measure their HIV reservoirs and a subset will undergo optional lymph node fine needle aspirations to assess the effect of N-803 on lymphoid tissue. They will then be randomized to one of two arms: N-803 alone or N-803 with combination bNAbs. After receiving treatment, participants will stop taking ART and will be followed closely to monitor for signs that they need to restart ART. Most participants will be followed for approximately 100 weeks after receiving treatment.

"Pre-clinical studies have shown that this approach enables the immune system to control viral replication and suggest that N-803 and bNAbs will have a complementary effect on each other," said A5386 Protocol Vice-Chair Richard Brad Jones, Ph.D., Weill Cornell Medicine. "We hope A5386 will demonstrate whether this new approach can enable us to safely decrease the amount of participants' HIV."

A5386 is led by Timothy Wilkin, M.D., M.P.H. (Weill Cornell Medicine), Marina Caskey, M.D., (The Rockefeller University) and Dr. Jones. It is funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and N-803 is provided by ImmunityBio, Inc. NIAID and collaborating NIH Institutes fund the ACTG.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear the importance of understanding precisely how diseases spread throughout networks of transportation. However, rigorously determining the connection between disease risk and changing networks--which either humans or the environment may alter--is challenging due to the complexity of these systems.

In a paper publishing on Thursday in the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, Stephen Kirkland (University of Manitoba), Zhisheng Shuai (University of Central Florida), P. van den Driessche (University of Victoria), and Xueying Wang (Washington State University) study the way in which changes in a network of multiple interconnected communities impact the ensuing spread of disease. The four researchers were hosted as a Structured Quartet Research Ensemble by the American Institute of Mathematics.

A common mathematical model uses several interconnected patches to represent separate geographical regions that are connected by transportation networks. Diseases are often transmitted along these kinds of networks via insects like mosquitoes and ticks, which may hitch rides on people or goods. Pathogenic microorganisms, such as bacteria and protozoa, can also spread diseases through river networks.

This disease transmission could increase due to flooding, which could possibly create a new shortcut. How would disease dynamics then change in response to this change in the network?" Zhisheng Shuai, University of Central Florida

To answer this question, the researchers sought to measure the basic reproduction number R 0 of the network as a whole. R 0 determines a disease's invasibility -- if it is greater than 1, the number of infections will most likely grow; if it is less than 1, the disease will eventually die out. "When the dispersal between patches is faster than the dynamics of the disease or population, it turns out that the network reproduction number R 0 can be approximated as a weighted average of the individual patch reproduction numbers," Wang said. For example, if pathogens in a river are infecting people with cholera and the water is moving faster than the pathogens decay, one can approximate R 0 for the entire river network as a combination of the basic reproduction numbers for each separate community along the river. This is important because the value of R 0 can guide disease control strategies -- though the information it provides is limited, and it cannot predict the actual size of an outbreak.

The authors developed new techniques based on several areas of applied mathematics to determine how R 0 changes when the structure of a network is altered. Their mathematical approach enabled analysis on two different types of model networks: a star network, which contains several branches that stem from a central hub, and a path network, which consists of several communities that are located sequentially along a track. "A star network can represent human transport between one hub--like a large city--and several leaves, which would represent small cities or suburbs," Wang said. "A path network can represent communities along a river or stream." These frameworks are also flexible -- for example, the star network is useful for modeling multiple possible scenarios. "In the star network, we can think of a central water source--the center of the star--with several communities supplied by that source," van den Driessche said.

It is possible to add an arc to the path network that bypasses several locations along the river, which could represent a major flood. If a new arc appears that connects a downstream patch to an upstream patch, for instance, the team's model indicated that the disease transmission risk decreased at downstream locations and increased at upstream locations. The model also incorporated a certain "hot spot" along the river at which the disease transmission rate is higher; the bypass could potentially avoid this location. In an example scenario of a path network with five patches numbered 1 (most upstream) through 5 (most downstream) in which there is a bypass from patch 2 to 4, hot spots at different locations produce different effects. When patch 3 is the hot spot, there is no change in R 0 for the whole river network; a hot spot at patch 1 or 2 leads to a decrease in R 0 , while a hot spot at patch 4 or 5 leads to an increase in R 0 .

The authors utilized their results to explore possible strategies for controlling disease outbreaks by introducing new connections on a network or changing the strength of existing connections. "Our findings from both the star and the path networks highlight that the placement of the hot spot and the connections among patches are crucial in determining the optimal strategy for reducing the risk of an infection," Wang said. The researchers' techniques quantified the effectiveness of different approaches in controlling invasibility and found the mathematical conditions under which it is best to change the amount of movement between certain locations.

The insights from this study could be helpful in forming future disease intervention strategies. "In some practical settings, we may not have much control over the level of invasibility in the individual patches, but we may have better control over the structure of the network connecting those patches -- for example, in a network of airports," Kirkland said. "The insights gained from our research may inform network-based strategies to control the invasibility of disease."
The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) is funding more than 50 new interdisciplinary projects to carry out research into epidemics and pandemics. This is the outcome of a broad interdisciplinary call for proposals launched by Germany's largest research funding organisation and central self-governing body for research following the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. While the first projects were able to start work at the beginning of this year, the final funding decisions have now been made under this call for proposals, with funding of 31.5 million going to a total of 51 projects.

The DFG responded to the COVID-19 outbreak after just a few weeks at the end of March 2020 with the largest call to date for new research projects relating to epidemics and pandemics. The aim was to promote a broad spectrum of research projects, ranging from the medical and biological foundations including preventive and therapeutic measures to questions of economics, logistics and communication, as well as the social, psychological, cultural, legal and ethical implications that are currently the subject of intense debate. The DFG's call attracted some 280 funding proposals by 1 September 2020.

The funded projects cover a wide spectrum of topics and disciplinary perspectives (see below for the link to the list of projects). These range from modelling the occurrence of infections to healthcare under pandemic conditions and global causes such as land use. A whole series of projects focus on the impact of COVID-19 on research itself and the research system, or look at the role of science and the humanities and science communication in times of crisis.

The work of the funded projects will be supported by the interdisciplinary DFG Commission for Pandemic Research, which was likewise established in spring 2020. The aim of this body is also to further strengthen the role of basic research in the field and identify new, urgently required areas of research. In recent months, the DFG has announced seven so-called Focus Funding calls to address these latter areas - a new funding format that has provided resources for at least 50 additional new research projects to date.
The annual number of new HIV infections among men who have sex with men (MSM) in England is likely to have fallen dramatically, from 2,770 in 2013 to 854 in 2018, showing elimination of HIV transmission by 2030 to be within reach - suggests work by researchers from the MRC Biostatistics Unit at the University of Cambridge and Public Health England (PHE), published in The Lancet HIV.

To manage the HIV epidemic among MSM in England, enhanced testing and earlier treatment strategies were scaled-up between 2011 and 2015 and supplemented from 2015 by pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). The researchers examined the effect of these interventions on the number of new infections and investigated whether the United Nations (UN) targets for HIV control and elimination of HIV transmission by 2030 might be within reach among MSM in England.

A complexity in this assessment is that HIV infections are not observed. Routine surveillance collects data on new HIV diagnoses, but trends in new diagnoses alone can be misleading as they can represent infections that occurred many years previously and depend on the testing behaviour of infected individuals.

To estimate new HIV infections among adult MSM (age 15 years and above) over a 10-year period between 2009 and 2018, the researchers used a novel statistical model that used data on HIV and AIDS diagnoses routinely collected via the national HIV and AIDS Reporting System in England, and knowledge on the progression of HIV. Estimated trends in new infections were then extrapolated to understand the likelihood of achieving the UN elimination target defined as less than one newly acquired infection per 10,000 MSM per year, by 2030.

The peak in the number of new HIV infections in MSM in England is estimated to have occurred between 2012 and 2013, followed by a steep decrease from 2,770 new infections in 2013 to 1,740 in 2015, and a further steadier decrease from 2016, down to 854. The decline was consistent across all age groups but was particularly marked in MSM aged 25-34 years, and slowest in those aged 45 years or older. Importantly, this decrease began before the widespread roll-out of PrEP in 2016, indicating the success of testing and treatment as infection prevention measures among MSM in England.

Through extrapolation, the researchers calculated a 40% likelihood of England reaching the UN elimination target by 2030 and identified relevant age-specific targeting of further prevention efforts (i.e., to MSM aged ?45 years) to increase this likelihood.

This is very good news and suggests that prevention measures adopted in England from 2011 have been effective. With the rollout of PrEP, England looks on course to meet the goal of zero transmissions by 2030. Our study also shows the value of regular estimation of HIV incidence to recognise and respond appropriately to changes in the current downward trend. The challenge now is to achieve these reductions in all groups at risk for HIV acquisition." Daniela De Angelis, Senior Author, Professor, Deputy Director of the MRC Biostatistics Unit, University of Cambridge

Valerie Delpech, Head of National HIV Surveillance at Public Health England, said:

"We have made good progress towards ending HIV transmission by 2030 in England. Frequent HIV testing and the use of PrEP amongst people most at risk of HIV, together with prompt treatment among those diagnosed, are key to ending HIV transmission by 2030.

"You can benefit from life-saving HIV treatments if you are diagnosed with HIV and it also means you cannot pass the virus on.

"HIV and STI tests are still available through sexual health clinics during the COVID pandemic. Many clinics offer online testing throughout the year - people can order tests on clinic websites, take them in the privacy of their own home, return by post and receive results via text, phone call or post."
Black people have a higher risk of colorectal cancer than white people, but this risk is likely not due to genetics. Data from a recent study by researchers from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine adds more data to the existing evidence.

"The next step is determining what is behind this increased risk," said lead author Thomas Imperiale, M.D., Regenstrief Institute research scientist, VA investigator and professor of gastroenterology and hepatology at IU School of Medicine. "Lifestyle and healthcare-related behaviors may explain some of the difference."

In the study, the research team looked at more than 90,000 veterans who underwent a colonoscopy at 18 VA facilities during a seven-year period. In the overall study population, Black veterans had a higher risk of colorectal cancer. However, in a subgroup of people who got routine screenings, the risk was equal for Black patients and white patients, which suggests that the difference is not biological.

It could be that Black patients are not getting screened, as suggested by guidelines, or that they respond to early symptoms differently. Screening is one of the most powerful tools for preventing or detecting colorectal cancer early, when it is curable." Dr. Thomas Imperiale, Lead Author

Regenstrief Research Scientist NiCole Keith, PhD, who was not involved in this project, studies health disparities.

"Often, Black patients do not have access to screening or the ability to attend an appointment. Historically, this population has also had trust issues with healthcare, all of which could contribute to these disparities," said Dr. Keith. "We need to develop a way to make these important tests more accessible to everyone and improve trust in healthcare."

The study also found that the risk of colorectal cancer increases for all patients with age.
Digitalization is moving forward fast in every field, including medicine. But how can digital tools be integrated into healthcare processes, and how should data be visualized to personalize patient care? These are only two of many questions that Professor Dr Jochen Klucken will analyze over the upcoming five years. Supported by a 3.3 MEUR FNR PEARL Chair, Prof. Dr Klucken will develop digital health concepts for Luxembourg through a joint research program involving the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg, the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH) and the Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg (CHL).

Data-driven medicine and innovative digital tools are on the verge of complementing existing healthcare procedures and change the way patients, healthcare providers, and researchers will work together in the near future. New digital patient-centered healthcare services will address the patients' needs, continuously monitor and accompany individual patient journeys, and support healthcare providers in making clinical decisions.

Real-life healthcare data will become available, and thus, add value. Its application in medicine has an enormous potential to reduce disease burden, improve healthcare and generate new solutions and services. Yet, aspects pertaining to the integration into healthcare pathways and the evidence proving the benefit of these new services for patients, healthcare providers and society are not sufficiently clear - this will therefore be the focus of the FNR Digital Medicine Research Project.

Composed of experts in medicine, data science, health economy, IT engineering and social science, the Digital Medicine Group (dMed), led by Professor Dr Klucken, will address the medical benefits, structural and procedural changes, and social acceptance of the resulting digital healthcare services. "We want to understand how patient-centered, personalized healthcare technologies can be tailored to patient needs and integrated into the existing healthcare structures and procedures," says Prof Dr Klucken, "We believe that shaping the rising age of digitalization in medicine requires the development of new evaluation methods."

dMed will use Parkinson's disease as an example to develop and unlock the potential of digitalization. Building on the experiences of Prof. Dr Klucken with sensor-based gait analysis in Parkinson's disease, the first task will be to understand how patients, doctors and therapists could make use of the data that are continuously recorded in the patient @home environment. From these first experiences, the use of other patient-centered digital tools, including wearable sensors and smartphone apps, will be evaluated and integrated into the management of the everyday healthcare process. Thus, not only patients and caregivers, but also doctors, therapists and professional care providers are warmly welcomed to participate in shaping and evaluating new digitally-supported integrated healthcare management processes.

The Digital Medicine Group will align with digital health strategies in Luxembourg to combine innovative digital healthcare technology solutions and health informatics with the needs of patients and healthcare services providers. We will contribute to the innovation in digital healthcare solutions and improve healthcare by enabling fast, efficient and transparent information for patients and their healthcare teams." Professor Dr Jochen Klucken

Luxembourg provides a unique environment to shape this digitalization process in medicine. It boasts a comprehensive healthcare ecosystem with close interaction of policymakers, healthcare providers, academic institutions and society/patients. This also aligns with the present changes in medical education, specializations in medicine and the interdisciplinary research activities in biomedicine and medical engineering underpinning the multidisciplinary nature of digitalization in medicine. The FNR PEARL Chair in Digital Medicine will support this process with a strong understanding of patient-centered applications and integration into existing and future healthcare services.

The Digital Medicine Group was set up in March 2021 and works in very close collaboration with the NCER-PD project. It is supported by the FNR-PEARL Program at the LCSB (Luxembourg Center for Systems Biomedicine) of the University of Luxembourg, the LIH (Luxembourg Institute of Health) and the dMed Research Clinic at the CHL (Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg).
CRISPR Researchers from Aarhus University and University of Copenhagen have developed a new method, which makes CRISPR gene editing more precise than conventional methods. The method selects the molecules best suited for helping the CRISPR-Cas9 protein with high-precision editing at the correct location in our DNA, the researchers explain.

It eventually became a Nobel prize-winning revolution when researchers first engineered CRISPR as a gene editing technology for bacterial, plant, animal and human cells. The potential of the technology is great and span from curing genetically disposed diseases to applications in agricultural and industrial biotechnology, but there are challenges.

One such challenge consists of selecting a so-called gRNA molecule which should be designed to guide the Cas9 protein to the right location in the DNA where it will make a cut in relation to the gene editing.

Typically, there are multiple possible gRNAs and they are not all equally efficient. Therefore, the challenge is to select the few that work with high efficiency and that is precisely what our new method does." Yonglun Luo, Associate Professor, Department of Biomedicine, Aarhus University

The new method is developed from the researchers' new data and implementation of an algorithm, which gives a prediction on what gRNAs that work most efficiently.

"By combining our own data with publicly available data and including knowledge on the molecular interactions between gRNA, DNA and the CRISPR-Cas9 protein, we have succeeded in developing a better method," says Jan Gorodkin, professor at the Department of Veterinary and Animal Sciences at the University of Copenhagen.

Data, deep learning molecular interactions

Jan Gorodkin's research group with Giulia Corsi and Christian Anthon have collaborated with Yonglun Luo's research group in order to achieve the new results. The experimental part of the study was conducted by Luo's group while Gorodkin's group spearheaded the computer modelling.

"In our study, we have quantified the efficiency of gRNA molecules for more than 10.000 different sites. The work was achieved using a massive, high throughput library-based method, which would not be possible with traditional methods," says Yonglun Luo.

The researchers took their starting point concerning data generation in the concept of having a virus express gRNA and a synthetic target site in one cell at a time. The synthetic target sites have exactly the same DNA sequences as the corresponding target sites in the genome. Thus, these synthetic target sites are used as so-call surrogate target sites to capture the CRISPR-Cas9 editing efficiency. Together with colleagues from Lars Bolund Institute of Regenerative Medicine in BGI-Research and Harvard Medical School, they generated high quality CRISPR-Cas9 activity for over 10,000 gRNAs.

With this dataset of gRNAs with known efficiencies from low to high, the researchers were able to construct a model that could predict efficiencies of gRNAs which has not been seen before.

"In order to train an algorithm to become precise, one has to have a large dataset. With our library of viruses, we have obtained data that constitutes the perfect starting point for training our deep learning algorithm to predict the efficiency of gRNAs for gene editing. Our new method is more precise than other methods currently available," says Jan Gorodkin.
Children with documented child protection concerns are four times as likely to die before they reach their 16th birthday, according to confronting new research from the University of South Australia.

The world first study identifies the extreme seriousness of familial child abuse and neglect, measuring for the first time the excess risk of death that children with documented child protection concerns face.

Child abuse and neglect are prominent worldwide public health concerns affecting 20-50 per cent of children worldwide. In Australia, 20-25 per cent of children endure child maltreatment.

Published in JAMA Open today, the study analysed deidentified data on more than 600,000 children born in South Australia between 1986 and 2017, comparing the death rates of children who had documented child protection concerns recorded by the SA Department for Child Protection, and children with no such concerns.

While all children encountering the child protection system were at increased risk, boys with child protection concerns were more than four times as likely to die before the age of 16 than boys with no documented child protection concerns; the excess risk for girls was also high at 3.4 times.

The study found that children with the most serious child protection concerns  those who had ever been placed in our-of-home care were five times as likely to die before their 16th birthday than children with no child protective system contact. A minority of these deaths (27%) occurred while the child was in care.

After adjusting for other adversities (such as poor birth outcomes, young age of mother, and socioeconomic status), the rates directly attributable to chid maltreatment were 3.4 times for males and 2.5 times for females, and for children who had spent some time in out-of-home care 3.8 times that of children with no child protection system contact.

Lead researcher, UniSA's Professor Leonie Segal says the excess risk of death is extreme.

The association between child maltreatment and death has generally been studied through detailed case reviews and coroners' inquests which, while identifying the shocking impact of familial child abuse and neglect, has not been studied at the population level until now." Leonie Segal, Study Lead Researcher and Professor, University of South Australia

"Drawing on more than 30 years of data, our study found that children with documented child protection concerns are at considerably higher risk of premature death before their 16th birthday.

"These children are known to child protection agencies, but also likely in contact with a range of health workers  GPs, paediatricians, maternal and child health workers, as well as child-care workers/early childhood educators and school teachers  so there are many people in the child's network who can identify concerns.

"But where are the services that can disrupt these disastrous outcomes?

"Knowing the extreme seriousness of the consequences that could follow, the imperative for a more effective service response is clear, and never more so than during the COVID-19 pandemic with the heightened stresses on families potentially exacerbating child protection concerns."

The importance of child maltreatment in child deaths has been under-stated in cause of death coding practices. The study found that coding of cause of death rarely identified family circumstances. In nearly 30 years of data and 1635 child deaths, child maltreatment was coded as a contributing cause in just two children's deaths.

Professor Segal says that these coding practices need to change.

"There is rich information from coroners' inquests, police reports and the like, on most child deaths  information that needs to be better incorporated into coding practices. This would help focus attention on these disturbing and potentially preventable child deaths, and the need for a more effective service response," Prof Segal says.

"The service response must start early in life and be proportionate to the highly distressed circumstances of these most vulnerable children and their struggling families.

"This will require scaling up of services in terms of intensity, inter-disciplinary nature, skill-level and reach to better support our most vulnerable children, who desperately need our help.

"Too many children are suffering; too many children have become a statistic.

"If we are to make a difference to the shocking outcomes faced by children suffering child maltreatment, policy must be informed by accurate and transparent data.

"When government departments  commonwealth and state  and associated child and family health and human services can more effectively work together; we will be better able to prevent these avoidable child deaths."
As COVID-19 restrictions ease nationwide and more people host indoor gatherings, investing in a high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) purifier might not be a bad idea, says a University of Cincinnati College of Medicine researcher.

Several published studies evaluating aerosols and submicron particles similar in size to the SARS-CoV-2 virion have shown that portable HEPA purifiers are able to significantly reduce airborne COVID-19 particles, says Ahmad Sedaghat, MD, PhD, director of the UC Division of Rhinology, Allergy and Anterior Skull Base Surgery.

Sedaghat identified the medical literature showing published studies on the effectiveness of HEPA purifiers. His review is available online in the scholarly journal of the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation.

Air purifiers could benefit hospitals and physician offices where aerosol-generating procedures occur, but they are also useful for reducing COVID transmission anywhere that large groups of individuals congregate.

One of the issues with COVID-19, is when physicians perform an aersol-generating medical procedure any asymptomatic COVID-19 positive patient may release SARS-CoV-2 laden aersols into the air. Guidance from the Centers for Disease Control indicates that we can rely on our HVAC systems to slowly decontaminate the air during an hour timeframe. Studies in the medical literature are showing us that we can use portable air purifiers to do a better and faster job of decominating these airborne particles to keep our patients and staff safe." Ahmad Sedaghat, MD, PhD, Director, UC Division of Rhinology, Allergy and Anterior Skull Base Surgery

"Air purifiers with HEPA filters can be used as very effective means to decontaminate the air above and beyond what many HVAC systems may offer," says Sedaghat who also published studies documenting COVID-19 infection leading to reduced taste and smell in patients and possibly attacking the central nervous system.

"If people are walking around coughing or sneezing because it is allergy season and by chance they happen to be one of these asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19, there is a danger of transmission in individuals not vaccinated," says Sedaghat. "People are catching the disease from asymptomatic carriers."

"The results of this study can be applied to our daily lives outside of a physician's office," says Sedaghat. "If you want to host larger gatherings you should consider putting the air purifiers into your living room to help decontaminate anything that is released into the air. HEPA based air purifiers work the best. HEPA based air purifiers decontaminate these airborne particles much faster and more effectively than non HEPA filters."

"They aren't terribly expensive and you can buy these at any home improvement or department store to help decontaminate air borne coronavirus," says Sedaghat. "This may be more important for controlling the spread of COVID-19 for people who are still not vaccinated."

Air purifiers offer added protection but UC researchers also found that better-fitting facemasks greatly improve protection against COVID-19 as well.
Have you ever been cut off in traffic by another driver, leaving you still seething miles later? Or been interrupted by a colleague in a meeting, and found yourself replaying the event in your head even after you've left work for the day? Minor rude events like this happen frequently, and you may be surprised by the magnitude of the effects they have on our decision-making and functioning.

In fact, recent research co-authored by management professor Trevor Foulk at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business suggests that in certain situations, incidental rudeness like this can be deadly.

In "Trapped by A First Hypothesis: How Rudeness Leads to Anchoring" forthcoming in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Foulk and co-authors Binyamin Cooper of Carnegie Mellon University, Christopher R. Giordano and Amir Erez of the University of Florida, Heather Reed of Envision Physician Services, and Kent B. Berg of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital looked at how experiencing rudeness amplifies the "anchoring bias." The anchoring bias is the tendency to get fixated on one piece of information when making a decision (even if that piece of information is irrelevant).

For example, if someone asks, "Do you think the Mississippi River is shorter or longer than 500 miles?," that suggestion of 500 miles can become an anchor that can influence how long you think the Mississippi River is. When it happens, it's difficult to stray very far from that initial suggestion, says Foulk.

The anchoring bias can happen in a lot of different situations, but it's very common in medical diagnoses and negotiations. "If you go into the doctor and say 'I think I'm having a heart attack,' that can become an anchor and the doctor may get fixated on that diagnosis, even if you're just having indigestion," Foulk explains. "If doctors don't move off anchors enough, they'll start treating the wrong thing."

Because anchoring can happen in many scenarios, Foulk and his co-authors wanted to study more about the phenomenon and what factors exacerbate or mitigate it. They have been studying rudeness in the workplace for years and knew from previous studies that when people experience rudeness, it takes up a lot of their psychological resources and narrows their mindset. They suspected this might play a role in the anchoring effect.

To test their theory, the researchers ran a medical simulation with anesthesiology residents. The residents had to diagnose and treat the patient, and right before the simulation started, the participants were given an (incorrect) suggestion about the patient's condition. This suggestion served as the anchor, but then throughout the exercise, the simulator provided feedback that the ailment was not the suggested diagnosis, but instead something else.

In some iterations, before the simulation started, the researchers had one doctor enter the room and act rudely toward another doctor in front of the residents.

What we find is that when they experienced rudeness prior to the simulation starting, they kept on treating the wrong thing, even in the presence of consistent information that it was actually something else. They kept treating the anchor, even though they had plenty of reason to understand that the anchor diagnosis was not what the patient was suffering from." Trevor Foulk, Professor, Robert H. Smith School of Business ,University of Maryland

This effect was replicated across a variety of other tasks, including negotiations as well as general knowledge tasks. Across the different studies, the results were consistent - experiencing rudeness makes it more likely that a person will get anchored to the first suggestion they hear.

"Across the four studies, we find that both witnessed and directly-experienced rudeness seemed to have a similar effect," says Foulk. "Basically, what we're observing is a narrowing effect. Rudeness narrows your perspective, and that narrowed perspective makes anchoring more likely."

In general, the anchoring tendency is usually not a big deal, says Foulk. "But when you're in these important, critical decision-making domains - like medical diagnoses or big negotiations - interpersonal interactions really matter a lot. Minor things can stay on top of us in a way that we don't realize."

To provide additional insights into this phenomenon, the researchers also explored ways to counteract it. Rudeness makes you more likely to anchor because it narrows your perspective, so the researchers explored two tasks that have been shown to expand your perspective - perspective-taking and information elaboration.

Perspective-taking helps you expand your perspective by seeing the world from another person's point of view, and information elaboration helps you see the situation from a wider perspective by thinking about it more broadly. Across their studies, the researchers found that both behaviors could counteract the effect of rudeness on anchoring.

While these interventions can help make rudeness less likely to anchor people, Foulk says these should be a last resort. The best remedy for the rudeness problem?

"In important domains, where people are making critical decisions, we really need to rethink the way we treat people," he says. "We never really did allow aggressive behavior at work. But we're fine with rudeness, and now we're learning more and more that small insults are equally impactful on people's performance."

And it needs to stop, he says.

"We tend to underestimate the performance implications of interpersonal treatment. We hear 'If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.' It's almost like being able to tolerate people's treatment of you is like a badge of honor. But the reality is that this bad treatment is having really deleterious effects on performance in domains that we care about - like medicine. It matters."

This is the fourth paper in a string of Foulk's research showing that rudeness negatively impacts medical performance, where the impacts can be much bigger - and much more dire - than the insults, he says.

"In simulations, we're finding that mortality is increased by rudeness. People could be dying because somebody insulted the surgeon before they started operating."
The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) today announced the publication of new guidance on COVID-19 vaccines for people with cancer, intended to clear up confusion for patients and caregivers. The new four-page patient guide is based on the latest expert review of evolving evidence.

We're happy to provide plainspoken answers for people with cancer and their loved ones that directly address concerns about the COVID-19 vaccines. We know people with cancer are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19, and also that vaccination is a safe way to reduce infection. One of NCCN's biggest strengths is our ability to quickly bring together leading national experts in order to share their collective knowledge and insights on the evidence in straightforward, non-medical language." Robert W. Carlson, MD, Chief Executive Officer, NCCN

The newly-published guidance for patients and caregivers covers:

A brief overview of all approved vaccines in the United States;

Answers to Frequently Asked Questions;

The importance, effectiveness, and safety of COVID-19 vaccinations in people with cancer and their caregivers, households, and close contacts;

An explanation of which specific types of cancer treatments should appropriately result in a slight delay before vaccination;

And the importance of continued mask wearing after vaccination for vulnerable populations.

"We want to reinforce that the decision to get vaccinated against COVID-19 should be something that isn't scary or confusing for people with cancer," said Brahm Segal, MD, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Co-Leader of the NCCN COVID-19 Vaccine Advisory Committee.

"The members of this NCCN committee have devoted our lives to studying how to reduce infectious diseases and improve outcomes in people with cancer. I personally was happy to get whichever vaccine was first available to me; we want our loved ones, patients, and community at large to have that protection too."

Visit NCCN.org/patientguidelines to access the COVID-19 patient guide and for additional free, trusted resources that empower people with cancer and their caregivers with unbiased guidance from some of the world's leading cancer experts.

Updated recommendations on COVID-19 vaccination for oncology care providers

The new patient resource is launching alongside new updates to the NCCN: Cancer and COVID-19 Vaccination recommendations for healthcare providers, which were first published in January. The newly-updated clinician guidance was published at NCCN.org/covid-19 on June 9 and includes emerging information on vaccination in younger people plus discussions around vaccine effectiveness in people with cancer.

The updated clinical recommendations include a note about counseling patients with a history of heparin-induced thrombocytopaenia and/or thrombosis to consider mRNA vaccines instead of the AdV-type 26 vector vaccine. The committee also cautions against antibody testing outside of a study, and encourages more research on the topic of booster shots.

Visit NCCN.org/covid-19 to learn more about how the coronavirus interacts with cancer, including documents, videos, and self-care tips in English, Spanish, and Chinese. Learn why experts agree that recommended cancer screenings are safe and essential, now more than ever.
Researchers have made progress towards a G7 commitment to establish safe standards for the release of antimicrobials into the environment, by developing a new framework that establishes safe thresholds.

The threat of bacteria developing resistance to antimicrobial drugs (often called antibiotics) used to treat infection is one of the greatest global health challenges, potentially resulting in 10 million deaths per year by 2050.

A major issue is the spread of antimicrobials and resistant bacteria through water systems. When we take antibiotics, 70 per cent passes through our bodies into wastewater. Farm animals are treated with antibiotics which can also end up in aquatic systems through run-off and flooding.

University of Exeter research has previously shown that even when antimicrobials are present in these waters at low levels, they can contribute to the evolution of resistant bacteria. These bacteria can make their way into our guts, potentially causing health problems.

Last month, the G7 Climate and Environment Ministers' Meeting Communique recognised that the release of antimicrobials into the environment can select for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and have an impact on human, animal and environmental health.

The communique reads: "We note with concern that there are currently no international standards on safe concentrations of antimicrobials released into the environment from, inter alia, pharmaceutical manufacturing, healthcare facility effluent, agriculture and aquaculture.

We also acknowledge the work of the AMR Industry Alliance in this regard. We commit to accumulate knowledge on AMR in the environment. We will work with our ministerial colleagues with responsibility for health, food, farming and medicines regulators where independent of government, as appropriate to develop and agree such standards."

Now, in a paper published in Water Research, the Exeter team worked with global pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca to make a significant step towards meeting this need. After reviewing the available evidence in the field, they have developed a framework which effectively provides guidance on how to perform a risk assessment to ensure the levels of antimicrobials released into the environment are safe.

Currently there are no thresholds for safe levels of antimicrobials in wastewater and aquatic systems, although the EU and UK government are monitoring the emerging evidence.

Dr Aimee Murray, of the University of Exeter, lead author on the paper, said: "Over the past few years, our research has helped understand the urgent threat posed by the evolution of AMR in our waters and in the environment.

We're delighted to see the G7 Climate and Environment Ministers' Meeting commit to taking action. Our new paper is a significant step towards informing policy that can ensure the levels of antimicrobials we release into the environment are safe."

The Exeter team's review summarises and critically appraises the current approaches that study the concentrations of antimicrobials that increase AMR. They have consolidated terminology and recommended how data (including data generated at Exeter) on selection for AMR can best be analysed to establish safe thresholds for release into the environment. By collating and assessing available data, they have recommended what these safe thresholds could be, to enable governments to act to reduce them.

Professor Will Gaze, of the University of Exeter, said: "if we don't take action now, AMR could be a greater threat to humanity than COVID-19 over the coming decades. Our work over the last decade represents a significant contribution to understanding the role of the environment in the evolution and transmission of AMR.

There is still uncertainty regarding the complex processes that lead to antimicrobial resistance genes being mobilised from environmental bacteria to human pathogens and how the presence of antimicrobials in natural environments drives this phenomenon."

This framework is the latest output from our partnership with the University of Exeter, which has helped us over the past eight years to establish science-driven, risk-based targets for discharge concentrations for antibiotics, both to meet our commitments as a company and for our industry, addressing critical knowledge gaps in support of science-based policy to address environmental risks associated with AMR." Jason Snape, Professor and Global Head, Environment, AstraZeneca
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), first emerged in Wuhan City, China, in December 2019. The virus is thought to have originated in horseshoe bats and jumped to as yet unverified intermediate hosts before spilling over to human hosts  a process known as zoonosis.

Now, researchers in Italy identified a case of reverse zoonosis wherein animals contract the virus from humans. The team detected SARS-CoV-2 in a healthy poodle living with four family members who had COVID-19.

The study, published in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)s journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, highlights the need to monitor cases involving human-to-animal viral transmission.

Human to animal transmission

Over the past year, some cases of human to animal SARS-CoV-2 transmission have been reported. These involved companion animals like dogs and cats, big cats, mink on farms, gorillas, and few other mammals.

Most of these animals were in close contact with infected humans in homes or in zoos and sanctuaries. However, only rare cases were reported in cats and dogs, making them at low risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission.

It is crucial to monitor infections in animals to shed light on their epidemiological significance for animal and human health. Evidence from epidemiological investigations, experimental studies, and risk assessment show that animals do not play a significant role in the spread of SARS-CoV-2, which is sustained predominantly by human-to-human transmission.

Infected dog

In the latest report of human to animal transmission, a 1.5-year-old female poodle who lived with four family members in Bitonto, Italy, contracted SARS-CoV-2. All family members developed signs and symptoms of COVID-19, including fever, cough, and loss of smell and taste.

The family members collected oral and nasal swab samples from the dog on November 4, 2020. The pooled samples tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 via the real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test, which was selective for the N gene.

Over the next 11 days, the owners collected oral, nasal, and rectal samples from the dog. Of the 20 samples collected between November 6 and 15, four samples, which were all collected between November 6 and 9, tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection. Though the dog tested positive, it exhibited no symptoms.

Next, the team tested a serum sample collected by the veterinarian on November 27 with two commercial multispecies ELISA tests. Further, a plaque reduction neutralization test (PRNT) and a virus neutralization test (VNT) were performed.

From there, the team used serologic assays to confirm the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. They also used next-generation sequencing genomes, and complete genomes were obtained using the pipeline SARS-CoV-2 RECoVERY.

The team identified two strains within the GV Clade and the B.1.177 lineage, which was detected in Italy during that period.

In a nutshell, the team concluded that infection in dogs and other animals is scarce, reflecting their low susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. In the current case, the dog was asymptomatic, produced limited titers, and had a reduced duration of viral shedding.

Delayed sampling of animals, caused by restrictions on human and animal movement during the pandemic, probably contributed to the negative results of molecular testing in that study, the team emphasized.
The Justice Department obtained metadata  probably records of calls, texts and locations  but not other content from the devices, like photos, messages or emails, according to one of the people. Another said that Apple complied with the subpoena, providing the information to the Justice Department, and did not immediately notify the members of Congress or the committee about the disclosure.
(Newser)  With California facing one of the worst drought years in its history, many more salmon will be traveling to the Pacific Ocean by truck this year. Waterways that young Chinook salmon would normally use to migrate have dried up and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife is trying to save the species by trucking around 17 million young salmon from hatcheries to be released into the San Francisco Bay, CBS News reports. With much of the salmon's habitat destroyed by damming, the trucking operations are not new, but around 20% more salmon will be transported by tanker this year in a total of 146 temperature-controlled loads, reports the Guardian.

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"Trucking young salmon to downstream release sites has proven to be one of the best ways to increase survival to the ocean during dry conditions," North Central Region Hatchery Supervisor Jason Julienne said in a statement, citing lessons learned from the last drought. Authorities say the operation will cost more than $800,000, but it could help save thousands of jobs in the fishing industry. "In the short term, this gives us hope. And we're happy that they're moving these fish," says John McManus, president of the Golden State Salmon Association, which represents fishermen and other groups. "But it's also a very sad testament to what's happening with our rivers in the middle of this state." (Read more California stories.)
(Newser)  US plans to donate 500 million more COVID-19 vaccines to developing countries were met Thursday with both celebration and hesitation amid questions over whether the effort will be enough to help poor regions desperate for doses. Some health officials and experts expressed hope that the pledge would encourage more donations to ease the inequities in vaccine supplies that have become pronounced in recent months, the AP reports. Other observers stressed that the doses need to roll out quickly. "Saving lives requires shots in arms now. Not at the end of 2021, not in 2022, but now," said Kate Elder, senior vaccines policy adviser to Doctors Without Borders. Hours after President Biden's administration committed to the donation, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the Group of Seven nations will share at least 1 billion coronavirus shots with the world, with half coming from the US and 100 million from the UK. The announcement on the eve of the G-7 summit previewed a coordinated effort by advanced economies to make vaccination available everywhere.

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Inoculation campaigns in several richer countries have surged ahead while efforts have barely begun in many poorer nations. The surge in cases in India offers a searing reminder of how COVID-19 can devastate entire countries when vaccines are scarce. The pandemic is not over, said the head of vaccines advocacy for UNICEF, though it may seem like it in countries where many are vaccinated. "But in other parts of the world, the virus is still absolutely raging out of control," said Lily Caprani. The Biden administrations decision to donate Pfizer vaccines raised doubts about whether the doses would reach the poorest of the poor because those doses need to be stored in ultra-cold conditions. Many low-income countries with limited infrastructure will probably be unable to take them to the most remote areas. The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it would advise its countries to use the Pfizer shots in cities. Still, the administration's promise was "clearly a cause for celebration," said Dr. John Nkengasong, director of the Africa CDC, adding, "It's going to be a big help."

(Read more coronavirus vaccine stories.)
(Newser)  Two warships from Iran have popped up in the Atlantic Ocean this week, though no one is saying where they're going or what their objective is. Per the Hill, the arrival of the Sahand destroyer and its support vessel, the intel-gathering Makran, in Atlantic waters was announced by Iran on Thursday, with Rear Adm. Habibollah Sayyari telling reporters the development showed "the power and robustness of the Islamic Republic of Iran," according to state media. Sayyari noted the ships wouldn't be stopping at any ports of call, and that their sailing was "the Iranian navy's longest and most challenging voyage yet," per the AP, which adds the rare mission far from home comes the week before Iran is set to hold its next presidential election. One theory that's popped up is that the vessels are headed for Venezuela, loaded with arms and fast-attack boats.

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US officials told Politico this week that the Biden administration has issued warnings to both Venezuela and Cuba to turn the ships away if they show up in port, noting they're a "threat" to US partners in the Western Hemisphere and that the US will take "appropriate measures" to deal with them. A senior Biden administration official tells the outlet the arms said to be on board the two vessels appear to be part of an arrangement between Iran and Venezuela made last year during the Trump administration. Meanwhile, a deal has also reportedly been struck between Iran and Russia, with officials saying the latter is getting ready to provide the former with a sophisticated satellite system that will help Iran keep tabs on military targets across the Middle East and elsewherean "unprecedented" perk for Iran, per the Washington Post. (Read more Iran stories.)
(Newser)  A Bitcoin conference in Miami last week was one of the biggest events in the US since the pandemic beganand it may end up serving as a reminder that the pandemic isn't over. There have been reports of dozens of attendees testing positive, with one attendee warning that it may have been a "superspreader event," CNBC reports. The event at the Mana Wynwood convention center, which started June 4, was billed as the biggest cryptocurrency event, and it drew at least 12,000 attendees from all over the world for three days of conferences and parties. No proof of vaccination was required and masks were rarely seen. Part of the event took place outside, but attendees also crowded auditoriums and numerous side events and afterparties, reports Bloomberg.

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"Everyone who I hung out with in Miami got covid," tweeted Larry Cernak, research director for crypto news site the Block. "Luckily for me I hung out about one feet above everyone." There has been no comment from the mayor's office, and Florida stopped reporting daily COVID case numbers this week. Organizer BTC Media said the event was held at a time when vaccines had been freely available for months. "We provided all attendees with the current recommendations of the CDC and State of Florida and expressed to our audience that those who were high risk or hadnt been vaccinated should consider waiting until next year," the organizer said in a statement. (Read more COVID-19 stories.)
(Newser)  The "debacle" over an Alzheimer's drug recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration continues, or at least that's how the commotion is being described by a third adviser to the agency who's now quit over it. Mayo Clinic neurologist Dr. David Knopman and Washington University neurologist Dr. Joel Perlmutterexperts who were on an advisory panel that voted in November that the FDA shouldn't give the green light to Aduhelm (Biogen's brand name for aducanumab)resigned earlier this week, upset that the agency ignored the panel's recommendation. Now Harvard Medical School professor Aaron S. Kesselheim is also stepping down, calling the FDA's decision on Monday to OK Aduhelm "probably the worst drug approval decision in recent US history," reports the Wall Street Journal.

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Kesselheim's resignation letter touches on a "pivotal question": the "debatable premise" that Aduhelm's ability to reduce harmful amyloid beta proteins in the brain would have any real effect on Alzheimer's patients. That premise "was specifically excluded from discussion," Kesselheim notes. Bloomberg reports that two major clinical trials involving the drug produced unclear results on whether it could actually slow cognitive decline. Late last month, before the FDA approved the drug, Kesselheim told the Washington Post that "the worst thing for people with Alzheimer's would be to put out a product that doesn't work." In his resignation letter, Kesselheim notes that the FDA's decision to move ahead with Aduhelm "will undermine the care of these patients, public trust in the FDA, the pursuit of useful therapeutic innovation, and the affordability of the health care system." (Read more Alzheimer's Disease stories.)
(Newser)  Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar defended herself Thursday after taking flak from members of her own party over a remark mentioning the US and Israel in the same breath as the Taliban and Hamas. "We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the US, Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban," Omar said in a Monday tweet calling for the "same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity." The tweet included video of a question she asked Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. A dozen Jewish Democrats issued a statement urging Omar to "clarify her comments," saying likening the US and Israel to extremist groups "is as offensive as it is misguided," the New York Times reports.

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In a tweet Thursday, Omar accused her Democratic critics of using "Islamophobic tropes," the Guardian reports. "Its shameful for colleagues who call me when they need my support to now put out a statement asking for clarification and not just call," wrote Omar. In a statement later Thursday, she said she had been referring to specific cases before the International Criminal Court, not trying to draw "a moral comparison between Hamas and the Taliban and the US and Israel." "I was in no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries with well-established judicial systems, she said. The BBC notes that Omar's original remark is being compared to an early 2017 remark from Donald Trump. The then-president said that while he agreed that Vladimir Putin is a killer, "we've got a lot of killers. What, do you think our countrys so innocent?" (Read more Ilhan Omar stories.)
(Newser)  Kid Rock came under fire for using a homophobic slur while performing at a Tennessee bar over the weekend, but the rocker does not appear to be apologetic about it. "If Kid Rock using the word [slur redacted] offends you, good chance you are one," he tweeted Wednesday. "Either way, I know he has a lot of love for his gay friends and I will have a talk with him. Have a nice day. -Bob Ritchie." (Kid Rock, whose real name is Bob Ritchie, normally signs his tweets with his stage name.)

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As TMZ reported at the time, Ritchie was apparently upset Saturday night that people were filming his performance with their phones, and called some audience members "f---ing [slur]s" while flipping off the cameras and making other vulgar gestures. As the New York Post reports, not many seemed impressed with Ritchie's follow-up tweet, with some slamming the 50-year-old as a bigot. Ritchie, a Trump supporter, has also been accused of racism in the past, Fox News reports. (Read more Kid Rock stories.)
(Newser)  Jill Biden is sending a sartorial message of "love" as she accompanies her husband President Biden overseas. The first lady wore a black jacket with the word "love" outlined on the back in silver beading as she and the president met with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his wife Thursday. She wore the same jacket more than two years ago to kick off Bidens presidential campaign. Were bringing love from America, she told reporters, explaining her fashion choice. "This is a global conference and we are trying to bring unity across the globe and I think its needed right now, that people feel a sense of unity from all the countries and feel a sense hope after this year of the pandemic," she said, per the AP.

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The first lady is accompanying her husband during the UK leg of his foreign trip, where she'll participate in spouses' activities at the Group of Seven summit, and a couple of events focused on military veterans and their families. She joined Johnson's wife, Carrie Johnson, for tea Thursday and tweeted a photo of the two and Johnson's son, Wilfred, on the shore. On Friday, Jill Biden, a community college English professor, and Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, plan to appear together at a preschool in Cornwall and participate in a roundtable discussion on early childhood education, the White House said. The Bidens are set to meet with Queen Elizabeth II on Sunday at Windsor Castle.

(Read more Jill Biden stories.)
(Newser)  Nevada prison officials disclosed Thursday that they want to use a never-before-tried combination of drugs for the states first lethal injection in 15 years, including the powerful opioid fentanyl, the sedative ketamine, and a heart-stopping salt, potassium chloride. Deputy federal public defenders representing convicted murderer Zane Michael Floyd promised courtroom challenges of the plan. A just-completed execution manual provided to a federal judge said a similar-acting drug, alfentanil, might substitute for fentanyl and potassium acetate might substitute for potassium chloride, the AP reports. In an alternate four-drug procedure, the muscle paralytic cisatracurium would also be used to stop the condemned mans ability to breathe before he receives the heart-stopping agent.

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US District Judge Richard Boulware II said he may issue a stay of execution ahead of a possible late-July death date to allow time to review the choice of drugs and the 65-page execution manual. A state judge in Las Vegas on Monday gave the go-ahead for prosecutors and prison officials to plan Floyds execution for the week of July 26. Floyd, 45, killed four people in a supermarket mass shooting in 1999. He lost state and federal appeals and the US Supreme Court declined to hear claims including that his mothers use of alcohol while she was pregnant left him with a diminished mental capacity. His defense attorneys have promised to appeal again to the Nevada Supreme Court. A court fight about the choice of drugs also could push back an execution date. (In 2019, a Nevada inmate killed himself after his execution was called off.)
(Newser)  A speeding bus carrying pilgrims overturned on a highway and fell into a ravine in a remote area in southwestern Pakistan before dawn on Friday, killing at least 20 people and injuring 50 others, police and officials said. The accident happened in Khuzdar, a district in Baluchistan province, local police official Hafeez Ullah Mengal said. Rescuers transported the dead and injured to military and government hospitals, the AP reports. Imam Bakhsh, one of the injured passengers, told the AP by phone that passengers had repeatedly warned the driver to be more careful. He blamed the driver for the accident, saying he was enjoying music and driving recklessly. Imran Ahmad, an official with the Levies security force said driver negligence apparently caused the accident, but that officers were still investigating.

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The pilgrims were returning to Dadu, a district in the neighboring southern Sindh province, after visiting a shrine of a Sufi saint. Bashir Ahmed, a deputy commissioner in the Khuzdar district, said the driver lost control on a sharp turn. He said the bus was overcrowded and several pilgrims were also sitting on its roof when the accident took place. Ahmed said some of the injured were listed in critical condition. He said the bus driver was also among the injured. There is not a single passenger who does not have an injury because of the bus accident," Ahmed told the AP by phone. He said thousands of people from across the country visit the shrine every year to participate in the annual congregation at the shrine. Those who died or were injured were from Sindh province.

(Read more Pakistan stories.)
(Newser)  A Florida customer who may have been trying to avoid crowds by heading to the post office in the dead of night encountered a different kind of inconvenience instead. Per a Hernando County Sheriff's Office statement, the unidentified patron showed up at the Spring Hill post office around 3:30am Wednesday to mail a package and got quite a shock: Inside the building, "roaming the lobby area," was a 7-foot-long alligator, nonchalantly acting as if it had just come to pick up some stamps. While it isn't yet clear how the gator made its way inside, the sheriff's office notes that the post office has automatic double doors that open into the lobby, suggesting the creature didn't pass up the chance when the sensors cleared the way for its entrance.

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The Tampa Bay Times notes that, per the state's Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which sent one of its trappers to remove the animal, an alligator is officially considered a "nuisance" if it's 4 feet or longer and if it may be a danger to people, pets, or property (at which point people should call the agency). Per People, the unexpected visitor prompted reactions of disbelief and laughter online. "Oh my God, unbelievable," wrote one user. Another wondered where the alligator came from, as the nearest body of water wasn't that close to the post office and was located across a busy thoroughfare. And, while the alligator was unexpected, jokes after such an incident aren't. "Checking to see if his shipment of Gatorade has arrived," one person couldn't resist. (Read more alligator stories.)
(Newser)  Celebrity Cruises' maiden voyage from North America since the start of the pandemic has not ended up remaining COVID-free. NBC Miami reports the company on Thursday confirmed that two people aboard the Celebrity Millennium cruise, which originated in St. Maarten on Saturday, have tested positive for COVID-19. With the exception of children, all those aboard had to provide proof of vaccination, and all passengers had to show a negative COVID test taken within 72 hours prior to departure before boarding. The full crew is vaccinated as well. CNN reports the pair are asymptomatic, and the diagnosis came about as a result of required testing prior to the end of the cruise.

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Contact tracing is underway and a small number of the 500 passengers have reportedly been quarantined and are being tested. But the panic level is low, at least according to one passenger who spoke with NBC Miami. "You would think, well, if people were concerned, you'd see fewer people at dinner around the ship, but the show is ongoing. The different dinners and the different restaurants have been ongoing. No one is wearing masks." The first major cruise ship slated to depart from US waters will be the Celebrity Edge, which will leave from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on June 26. (Read more cruise ships stories.)
(Newser)  People who've recently visited Wells Beach in Maine have often gone home to find their feet stained blackand scientists say they've figured out the gross reason. State officials say it's millions of dead bugs, washed ashore to form a black, slimy substance that resembles tar. Local Ed Smith first reported the odd ooze to the state Department of Environmental Protection this week, and marine geologist Steve Dickson, of the Maine Geological Survey, was one of the experts the DEP sent the pictures to, per the Portland Press Herald. Dickson, in turn, sent the evidence to Linda Stathoplos and John Lillibridge, a married couple who live near the beach and who happen to be retired oceanographers. They headed down to the shore, collected some samples, and stuck them under the microscope. "It was clearly little bugs," says Stathoplos.

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Jim Britt of the state's Department of Agriculture, Conservation, and Forestry says the bug is probably "a harmless common kelp fly that feeds on decaying seaweed," per the Boston Globe. He adds that officials don't think the bugs cause any health problems if they come into contact with human skin. Lillibridge notes the hard-to-wash stain soon fades on its own, too. "Like henna dye, it wears away eventually," he says. "Like getting berry stains on your fingers." Some good news: The bug slickswhich the New York Times notes have also been reported on other Maine beaches, as well as in New Hampshire and Massachusettsappear to have washed out to sea again at Wells Beach. But why did people's feet get stained in the first place? Dickson explains that bugs often chow down on pigment-heavy plants, filling their tiny bodies with those pigments. (Read more strange stuff stories.)
(Newser)  "Leakers are traitors and cowards, and we will find out who they are!" So declared then-President Trump in 2018, notes Matt Stieb at New York. Now, a scoop by the New York Times reveals the unusual lengths to which the Trump White House went to make good on that pledge. Coverage:

The scoop: The Justice Department under Trump subpoenaed Apple for data on at least two prominent Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell. The 2018 subpoena also covered their staffers and family members, including one minor.

The Justice Department under Trump subpoenaed Apple for data on at least two prominent Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell. The 2018 subpoena also covered their staffers and family members, including one minor. The reason: Trump wanted to figure out who was leaking classified information to reporters about the investigation into contacts between associates of Trump and Russia, per the Washington Post.

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Rarity: Such a move is highly unusual, according to both outlets. A subpoena would typically be used for a corruption investigation, not to figure out the source of a leak. Swalwell confirmed to CNN that he and family members were targeted. "Not for any reason in law but because Donald Trump identified Chairman Schiff and members of the committee as an enemy of his," he said.

Such a move is highly unusual, according to both outlets. A subpoena would typically be used for a corruption investigation, not to figure out the source of a leak. Swalwell confirmed to CNN that he and family members were targeted. "Not for any reason in law but because Donald Trump identified Chairman Schiff and members of the committee as an enemy of his," he said. Investigation: The Justice Department's internal watchdog will investigate the data seizure, reports the Hill. The review will examine the Departments compliance with applicable DOJ policies and procedures, and whether any such uses, or the investigations, were based upon improper considerations, said Michael Horowitz, DOJs inspector general, per the Hill.

The Justice Department's internal watchdog will investigate the data seizure, reports the Hill. The review will examine the Departments compliance with applicable DOJ policies and procedures, and whether any such uses, or the investigations, were based upon improper considerations, said Michael Horowitz, DOJs inspector general, per the Hill. Compliance: Apple complied with the order, though it turned over metadata and not emails or photos, per the Times. Apple also was under a gag order that only recently expired, and it informed the targets of the subpoena at that point. The investigation found no evidence of leaks. The inquiry reportedly withered under Sessions before being revived by his successor, William Barr.

Apple complied with the order, though it turned over metadata and not emails or photos, per the Times. Apple also was under a gag order that only recently expired, and it informed the targets of the subpoena at that point. The investigation found no evidence of leaks. The inquiry reportedly withered under Sessions before being revived by his successor, William Barr. One view: What the Justice Department did isn't illegal, but this kind of thing is rare for good reason, notes Ed Morrissey at the conservative site Hot Air. "Given that the House Intelligence Committee was investigating Donald Trump and his campaign at the time, this at least has the smell of either retaliation or surveillance of the probe, either of which would constitute an abuse of power," he writes. If nothing else, it suggests "the Trump-era DoJ was on a world-record fishing expedition."

What the Justice Department did isn't illegal, but this kind of thing is rare for good reason, notes Ed Morrissey at the conservative site Hot Air. "Given that the House Intelligence Committee was investigating Donald Trump and his campaign at the time, this at least has the smell of either retaliation or surveillance of the probe, either of which would constitute an abuse of power," he writes. If nothing else, it suggests "the Trump-era DoJ was on a world-record fishing expedition." Investigations, II: Democratic leaders including Chuck Schumer called for Sessions and Barr to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, reports the AP. Nancy Pelosi also wants to investigate what she calls Trump's "weaponization of law enforcement," per the Wall Street Journal.

(This comes on the heels of the revelation that Barr's Justice Department subpoenaed the records of journalists at multiple news organizations.)
(Newser)  Jill Biden, on her first trip abroad as first lady, met up with Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, to visit a school on Thursday. The school is in Cornwall, where the G7 summit is being held. Biden and Kate dropped in on the 4- and 5-year-old kiddos while they were reading Greta and the Giant, CNN reports. They did their homework before the visit, too, and came prepared with a bowl full of carrots. The kids at Conor Downs Academy look after bunnies, and the carrots were for them, per People.

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Biden, whose Ph.D. is in education, also joined the duchess in a roundtable discussion about early childhood education, which the first lady called a very important foundation for higher learning. Kate and her husband, Prince William, have worked for causes championing childrens well-being. Biden also hosted a roundtable for military spouses, and will, with her husband, meet with the queen on Sunday. (Read more Jill Biden stories.)
(Newser)  Florida's state Board of Education banned "critical race theory" in public school classrooms Thursday, adopting new rules it said would shield schoolchildren from a curriculum that could "distort historical events." The state joined a national debate about how race should be used as a lens in classrooms to examine the country's tumultuous history. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis appeared by video at the top of the board's meeting, urging its members, many of whom he appointed, to adopt the new measures, the AP reports. DeSantis said the proposal would serve students with the facts rather than "trying to indoctrinate them with ideology." The Black Lives Matter movement has helped bring contentious discussions about race to the forefront of American discourse, and classrooms have become a battleground.

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Supporters contend that federal law has preserved the unequal treatment of people on the basis of race and that the country was founded on the theft of land and labor. Opponents of critical race theory say students should not be taught that the US is fundamentally racist. Republican-led states are considering or have approved laws limiting how teachers can frame American history. Current events, including the killings of Black people by police, have intensified debates. The new Florida rules say instruction "must be factual and objective, and may not suppress or distort significant historical events." They call "theories that distort historical events" inconsistent with board policy. The rules also prohibit use of the 1619 Project.

(Read more Florida stories.)
Agustina Canamero, 81, kisses husband Pascual Perez, 84, through a plastic film screen to avoid contracting the coronavirus at a nursing home in Barcelona, Spain, June 22, 2020. The image was part of a series by Associated Press photographer Emilio Morenatti that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for feature... (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Agustina Canamero, 81, kisses husband Pascual Perez, 84, through a plastic film screen to avoid contracting the coronavirus at a nursing home in Barcelona, Spain, June 22, 2020. The image was part of... (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)
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Gov. Mike Dunleavy talks with the media outside the Westmark Hotel after meeting Thursday with the Greater Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce. Photo courtesy of Kevin Goodman, Office of the Governor
The Daily News-Miner encourages residents to make themselves heard through the Opinion pages. Readers' letters and columns also appear online at newsminer.com. Contact the editor with questions at letters@newsminer.com or call 459-7574.

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TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

The health situation is reassuring, and Bahrain is well on its path to recovery, said His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa yesterday, who also thanked the citizens and residents of Bahrain for their commitment to the national vaccination drive.

HM King further hailed the medical staff, frontline workers and associated parties for keeping up their battle against the pandemic. HM King Hamad was receiving His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, the Crown Prince and Prime Minister, at Al Safriya Palace in the presence of His Highness Shaikh Abdulla bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, His Majesty the Kings Personal Representative, Supreme Council for the Environment President, and His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa.

Their highnesses reviewed several issues, foremost being the latest developments in battling the COVID-19 outbreak. King Hamad praised the diligent works of the Bahrain team, led by HRH the Crown Prince, in addressing the pandemic and affirmed that the measures are proving vital to reducing the caseload of infections.

HM King praised the role played by the medical and health team and all frontline workers and support agencies, stressing that their noble humanitarian efforts are a source of pride and appreciation for everyone.

King Hamad called on all to continue working with determination and perseverance to ensure peace and safety for all in the Kingdom.
Bahrain's crowd has a way of vanishing when the cops arrive

TDT | Manama The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com Crowds are considered a fertile ground for transmission of the deadly coronavirus pandemic. Despite this knowledge and the government cautioning people not to let their guard down, people are crowding the streets of Bahrain, also making it hard for authorities to enforce the restrictions. By extending the nationwide restrictions to another two weeks until June 25, authorities had made it clear that the battle is far from over. According to the National Taskforce for Combating the Coronavirus (COVID-19), all the COVID-19 measure are to stay in place until June 25. However, people are yet to get the hang of it.

Tribune found people flouting COVID-19 norms in several areas here. Cops carrying out their rounds on the streets too voiced their concerns. It seems like they are also unsure how to deal with this menace. The moment we reach the spot, people vanish into thin air and springs back five to ten minutes after we are gone, said two officers when our reporter approached them with the pictures of the crowd. They keep on coming back, no matter what we do. This incident also points fingers at the enormous burden the frontline police officers are bearing, whose activities are much broader and not just limited to enforcing social distancing.
TDT | Manama

The Daily Tribune  www.newsofbahrain.com

As all this turmoil goes on, the National Taskforce for Combating the Coronavirus (COVID-19) had announced starting efforts to administer booster doses to people. Dr Manaf Al-Qahtani, the Infectious Disease Consultant & Microbiologist at the BDF Hospital and Member of the National Medical Taskforce, said the third dose of vaccines are for high-risk groups, who had completed three months after receiving the second dose.

People over 50 years of age, those who are obese, those suffering from immunodeficiency and those battling in the frontline are eligible to receive the booster dose now.

However, Dr Manaf Al-Qahtani also clarified that all the vaccine types as having their booster doses. The government, he said, would announce this at a later stage.

He also revealed that the Kingdom is in touch with vaccine companies for making available booster doses. Refuting reports that Sinopharm vaccines are weak against COVID-19, Dr Al-Qahtani said there is no basis for such allegations. Bahrains decision to vaccinate those inoculated with Sinopharm is aimed at further enhancing immunity, not because the vaccine is ineffective. Besides, the World Health Organisation had approved the Sinopharm shot for emergency use.

The WHO has also said a Phase III trial had shown that its two doses, administered at an interval of 21 days, had an efficacy of 79% against symptomatic infection, 14 or more days after the second dose.

Tribune reported earlier that Bahrain is allowing people to register for booster shots through the BeAware mobile app for either the Pfizer or the Sinopharm jabs. The Pfizer shots, an mRNA vaccine, contain a piece of genetic code that trains the immune system to recognise the spiked protein on the virus. On the other hand, the Sinopharm vaccine is an inactivated shot made by growing the whole virus in a lab and then killing it.
DANBURY  Some school employees, including administrative cabinet members, will get 3 percent raises next academic year.

This is part of the education budget the school board finalized on Wednesday evening. About $200,000 will go toward these raises for exempt employees, which includes the cabinet.

Al Russo, one of two school board members to vote against the raises, argued any salary increases should be deferred given Danburys tight budget.

If we have the money in our budget, that extra $200K in our budget already, lets put it back to the students and consider the needs of the many  the students  over the wants of the few, he said.

But board member Joe DaSilva argued students would benefit indirectly.

I believe this is an investment in kids, he said. What we invest in our curricula director or special [education] director is an investment in kids. Its an investment in leadership. It's an investment in making sure were doing a good job serving all of our kids.

Russo agreed the employees deserve a raise, but noted that several unions in the city went without raises due to the city and taxpayers financial challenges during the coronavirus pandemic, so these educators should do the same.

Theyre taking the zero because revenues are down, he said.

The board agreed to an almost $172 million spending plan for next fiscal year that includes the $137 million in education dollars that City Council approved last month. The district will also use $2.44 million in non-lapsing funds from the city, $17.4 million in state aid and a combined $14.9 million in federal coronavirus relief funds.

Danbury schools saw state funding increase by about $2.58 million under the budget the legislature approved on Wednesday.

Thats not enough, board members said.

Danbury and other school districts are not expected to get the full amount they are due under the states education cost sharing formula until 2028.

Most of our kids will be graduated by then, school board member Rachel Chaleski said.

These federal grants, meanwhile, run out in 2025-26, which would leave an estimated $32.9 million hole in the budget if the city were to keep education funding flat over the next few years, according to calculations from the districts finance director.

The raises will make it a touch harder for Danbury to fill that gap, Russo said.

All were doing is creating a bigger cliff, he said.

Chaleski said she was torn on the raises, but ultimately voted in favor because of how hard staff have worked through the challenges of COVID.

I think 3 percent is a little high but it is very, very deserved, she said. They work so hard. They work around the clock and, especially this year, theyve built something from nothing, essentially, so that our kids can keep learning all year.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The Justice Department will scrutinize a wave of new laws in Republican-controlled states that tighten voting rules, Attorney General Merrick Garland said Friday, vowing to take action on any violations of federal law.

He announced plans to double staffing within the departments civil rights division and said the department would send guidance to states about election-related activity, including mail voting and post-election audits. He also pledged to investigate and prosecute those who would threaten election workers, noting a rise in such cases.

There are many things open to debate in America, but the right of all eligible citizens to vote is not one of them, Garland said in his first direct response to the restrictive voting laws being passed in more than a dozen states where Republicans control the legislature and governor's office.

Speaking to staff of the agencys civil rights division, he said the resources of the Justice Department must be rededicated to "meet the challenge of the current moment.

His message was clear: The department doesnt plan to stay on the sidelines of the voting battles that have erupted in statehouses across the country. Along with reviewing new state laws, Garland said the department also will examine existing ones for their potential to discriminate against minority voters.

He also reiterated the administration's support for two proposals pushed by congressional Democrats that would create minimum federal standards for voting and would restore the ability of his agency to review changes to state election laws in places with a history of racial discrimination. A 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision effectively set aside this preclearance requirement, and Democrats say it has resulted in a proliferation of restrictive voting laws in recent years.

Garland said false claims of voter fraud were being used to justify the new voting restrictions despite law enforcement and intelligence agencies having refuted those claims. He expressed concern that disinformation surrounding the 2020 election was fueling abnormal post-election audit methodologies to conduct partisan ballot reviews, like the one underway in Arizona.

Seven months after the election, former President Donald Trump continues to falsely insist that he won and demand that states investigate his unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. Those claims have been resoundingly rejected by state officials who certified the results, judges who dismissed multiple lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies, and a coalition of federal and state officials who called the 2020 election the most secure in U.S. history.

Trumps own attorney general said at the time there was no evidence of widespread fraud that would change the outcome.

But Republican state lawmakers in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Texas and elsewhere seized on Trumps claims, pointing to concerns among his supporters as justification for a wave of new bills tightening voting rules. As of mid-May, 22 restrictive laws had passed in at least 14 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, which researches voting and supports expanded access.

Republicans in Texas are expected to call for a special session to push through an election overhaul that was derailed by Democrats on the last day of the regular session.

Republicans who support the new laws said action was needed to safeguard voting and restore public confidence in elections.

Americans have been clear: they support laws making it easy to vote and hard to cheat in states across the country," said Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action, which has been working to advance the legislative proposals. "Despite the false narrative coming out of the White House and now the Department of Justice, Americans support secure, fair elections, even if the Left does not.

Voting right groups already have filed several lawsuits challenging the laws.

Garland's comments come as the Justice Department is shifting its priorities to focus more on civil rights issues and ensuring equal protection under the law after a tumultuous four years in the Trump administration.

Along with tightening voting rules, Republicans also have pushed measures to expand the role of poll watchers, following complaints that their monitors did not have adequate access during the 2020 election. In Florida, a new law allows each candidate to have one watcher present during canvassing board meetings, which caused concerns about overcrowding and slowing ballot tabulation.

In a bill that eventually failed but is expected to be revived during a special legislative session, Texas Republicans pushed broad new criminal penalties for election workers who impede poll watchers.

Trumps claims also have led Republican state senators in Arizona to use their subpoena power and launch a partisan review of the 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County. The audit will not change the outcome of the election, which was certified by the states Republican governor after multiple reviews, a standard procedure following every election. But Trump has called for more reviews in other states he lost, including Georgia and Pennsylvania.

The Justice Department has sent a letter expressing concern about the Arizona review, and Garland vowed that his department would ensure any post-election review abides by federal law to protect election records and avoid the intimidation of voters.

Election experts have pointed to major flaws in the process unfolding in Arizona and said the Republican effort could further erode confidence in the democratic process.

___

Cassidy reported from Atlanta.
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Melissa N. Stuckey, Elizabeth City State University

(THE CONVERSATION) Protests have been taking place in a small North Carolina city for the past two months, sparked by the early morning report on April 21, 2021, that Andrew Brown Jr., a local African American man, had been shot and killed by county sheriffs deputies serving search and arrest warrants.

Eleven months after the murder of George Floyd and just one day after former police officer Derek Chauvins conviction, Browns killing immediately became part of a larger national story about African Americans being killed by law enforcement agents and subsequent demands for accountability and reform.

For weeks, protesters have held daily marches along Road, Ehringhaus, Main and Water Streets in Elizabeth City. They have also marched through the Shepard Street-South Road Historic District, a historically African American neighborhood that Andrew Brown called home and where his life was taken.

Protesters have also staged rallies at nearby Waterfront Park and in front of the county sheriffs office. Some have engaged in acts of civil disobedience, challenging a city-imposed curfew and blocking traffic at key intersections.

The intersections  Morgans Corner, located outside of town, and Elizabeth and Water streets, which front the Camden Causeway Bridge  are key transportation arteries in this part of North Carolina. Respectively, they connect Elizabeth City to U.S. Highway 17 and to the Outer Banks, an iconic North Carolina vacation spot.

The shooting and ensuing protests have brought international attention to Elizabeth City and, for many Americans, this fraught moment is their first exposure to the North Carolina city.

However, as a resident of Elizabeth City and a history professor at Elizabeth City State University, I know that todays protesters are not the first to march here. Instead, they follow in the footsteps of previous generations of freedom seekers.

From Road Street to Water Street, from Ehringhaus Street to Elizabeth Street, this picturesque city has long been a site where quintessential African American struggles for freedom have taken place.

Maroons and fugitives

Elizabeth City is located on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp. During the era of slavery, this dense wetland served as home to unknown numbers of escaped slaves, known as maroons.

The Great Dismal also offered respite to slaves who were lying out  temporarily escaping the brutality of plantation life. In addition, the swamp was a way station along the Underground Railroad, hiding many fugitive slaves along their journeys to free states.

In The Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, the life story of a former slave, Grandy described the privations of many who sought refuge in the Great Dismal Swamp. One such person was his sister, Tamar.

Tamar escaped from a slave trader by hiding in the swamp. For several years she lived in a den she made for herself in the woods. Occasionally she hid in a hollow under the floor of her mothers home at the edge of the swamp, Moses Grandy wrote.

Tamar remained hidden in the Great Dismal long enough to bear three children. Eventually she was caught, returned to bondage and transported to Georgia. After securing his own freedom, Moses Grandy spent years trying to free Tamar and other family members from slavery.

Today, the Great Dismal Swamp and the Pasquotank River, whose tributaries connect the swamp to Elizabeth City, are listed as part of the National Park Services Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, a group of sites throughout the country with a verifiable connection to the Underground Railroad.

United States Colored Troops

During the Civil War, the roads and waterways surrounding Elizabeth City were used for the large-scale liberation of slaves.

The U.S. Navy captured Elizabeth Citys port in 1862. The following year, the U.S. Army twice deployed several regiments of U.S. Colored Troops to the city.

In December 1863, the Black soldiers marched from southern Virginia to Elizabeth City. Many of them were from the area and knew it well. They confidently navigated the Great Dismal Swamp and maneuvered down roads that today form part of U.S. 17. As they moved through the territory, they raided plantations and freed slaves, including their own family members.

Once in Elizabeth City, these U.S. Colored Troops encamped on the waterfront near Elizabeth and Water streets. The Black soldiers patrolled and held drills along these and other downtown streets. Freedom-seeking slaves flocked to their camp.

Describing the scene, a New York Times correspondent wrote, The lately deserted streets of the city were thronged with liberated slaves that came pouring in from the country in every direction.

In the aftermath of Andrew Browns killing, the streets near this former U.S. Colored Troops encampment have become a staging ground for police who have arrested protesters for violating curfew and for blocking the bridge.

After the Civil War, Elizabeth Citys Black veterans paraded annually on Emancipation Day, Jan. 1, and on Memorial Day. Long before any monument to the Confederacy was erected here, Elizabeth Citys African American community commemorated its freedom by marching from the Shepard Street-Road Street neighborhood to the courthouse and other downtown destinations.

Just like todays marchers, they laid claim to the streets of Elizabeth City by filling these spaces with their bodies and their voices.

Desegregation, picketing and sit-ins

During the civil rights era, a new generation of Black freedom seekers followed in these veterans footsteps.

Local residents, along with students at what was then Elizabeth City State College, picketed and staged sit-ins on Main Street to desegregate Elizabeth Citys downtown businesses.

College student Willie Thurman battled through fear and complacency to participate in the 1963 protests. Describing what he was feelings while marching to town, Thurman wrote, There is no choice. Who wishes to remain lost, except a fool? I dont. Consequently, I am following the mass, one hundred twenty demonstrators.

Thurman was one of the hundreds of Elizabeth City State students jeered at, threatened, assaulted or arrested while protesting against segregation.

In the footsteps

Since April 21, with the exception of a brief pause on a quiet Monday in early May, protesters have moved along these same streets every day. They have done so while crying for accountability and reform in the name of Andrew Brown and chanting in unison that Black lives matter in their city. City councilors voted in May to paint the phrase on Colonial Avenue, in front of the county sheriffs office.

The pause from daily protests took place on May 3. On this day Andrew Brown Jr. was memorialized. A public viewing of his casket was held at the Museum of the Albemarle. The museum faces Waterfront Park, a regular starting point for marches.

[Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend. Sign up for our weekly newsletter.]

After the viewing, the very roads that have borne the feet of three centuries of Black freedom seekers in Elizabeth City bore Brown on a final journey. In solemn procession, a horse-drawn carriage carried Browns coffin down Water and Ehringhaus streets.

The journey ended at a church on U.S. 17 where his funeral was held. The Rev. Al Sharpton delivered the eulogy. Later, Sharpton reflected on the ongoing protests.

Elizabeth City is not a, quote, activist town. [And yet], he said, theyve been marching every day.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/protesters-marching-in-elizabeth-city-n-c-over-andrew-browns-killing-are-walking-in-the-footsteps-of-centuries-of-fighters-for-black-rights-161563.
WINDSOR, ON, June 11, 2021 /CNW/ - Across the country, Canadians are feeling the impact of COVID-19, on their families, their livelihoods, and their way of life. Together, Canada and Ontario are working to reduce the impact of the pandemic, ensure health and safety, rebuild businesses, and promote job creation, growth and investment.

Today, Irek Kusmierczyk, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion and Member of Parliament for WindsorTecumseh, on behalf of the Honourable Catherine McKenna, Federal Minister of Infrastructure and Communities; the Honourable Caroline Mulroney, Ontario's Minister of Transportation and Member of Provincial Parliament for York-Simcoe, on behalf of the Honourable Laurie Scott, Ontario's Minister of Infrastructure; and Anne Dube, Past President of the Serbian Heritage Museum, announced joint funding for renovations and repairs to the Serbian Heritage Museum in Windsor, Ontario.

The Government of Canada is investing over $43,000 in this project through the Community, Culture and Recreation Infrastructure Stream of the Investing in Canada plan. The Government of Ontario is providing more than $36,000, while the Serbian Heritage Museum is contributing more than $29,000 toward this project.

The Serbian Heritage Museum houses the Serbian heritage collection and serves as a hub for community events for Serbians in Canada and the United States of America. Renovations to the museum will include upgrades to the HVAC system, construction of new storage and hanging units, installation of barrier-free doors, and repairs to sections of the roof. These renovations will improve the functionality of the museum and prevent water and humidity damage to traditional clothing and artifacts.

All orders of government continue to work together for the people of Ontario to make strategic infrastructure investments in communities across the province when needed most.

Quotes

"Investments in cultural spaces are essential to celebrate diversity and inclusion. The renovations to the Serbian Heritage Museum will provide members of the Serbian community with an updated space to preserve and display artifacts that celebrate their heritage and culture. Canada's infrastructure plan invests in thousands of projects, creates jobs across the country, and builds cleaner, more inclusive communities."

Irek Kusmierczyk, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion and Member of Parliament for WindsorTecumseh, on behalf of the Honourable Catherine McKenna, Federal Minister of Infrastructure and Communities

"The Serbian Heritage Museum is an important space for Ontario's growing Serbian community. This investment from the Government of Ontario and the Government of Canada will play a pivotal role in helping the museum preserve its heritage collection and continue to serve as a hub for community events. I know this investment will be appreciated by the Serbian community, while also promoting job creation, growth and investment in Windsor and neighbouring areas."

The Honourable Caroline Mulroney, Ontario's Minister of Transportation and Member of Provincial Parliament for York Simcoe, on behalf of the Honourable Laurie Scott, Ontario's Minister of Infrastructure

"We are so very pleased to be selected for an ICIP grant. As the only Serbian Museum in Canada, we want to ensure the longevity of our heritage collection for members of the local Serbian community and for many of the more than 65,000 Serbians living in Ontario who visit or follow the Museum. By adding a suitable HVAC system, building a new storage and hanging units, and replacing sections of the roof, we will be protecting the artifacts and traditional clothing over time. Our growing number of senior visitors, event goers and volunteers, as well as community members, will also greatly appreciate our efforts to make the Museum fully accessible."

Anne Dube, Past President of the Serbian Heritage Museum

Quick facts

Through the Investing in Canada plan, the federal government is investing more than $180 billion over 12 years in public transit projects, green infrastructure, social infrastructure, trade and transportation routes, and Canada's rural and northern communities.

plan, the federal government is investing more than over 12 years in public transit projects, green infrastructure, social infrastructure, trade and transportation routes, and rural and northern communities. Across Ontario , the Government of Canada has invested more than $13.9 billion in over 3,200 infrastructure projects.

, the Government of has invested more than in over 3,200 infrastructure projects. Over the next ten years, the Government of Ontario is investing approximately $320 million across the province, and the federal government is investing approximately $407 million under the Community, Culture and Recreation Infrastructure Stream of the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program. This stream supports the construction of new facilities and upgrades to existing facilities that improve community infrastructure (e.g. community centres, libraries), recreational venues (e.g. arenas, recreational spaces) and cultural spaces (e.g. theatres, museums).

is investing approximately across the province, and the federal government is investing approximately under the Community, Culture and Recreation Infrastructure Stream of the This stream supports the construction of new facilities and upgrades to existing facilities that improve community infrastructure (e.g. community centres, libraries), recreational venues (e.g. arenas, recreational spaces) and cultural spaces (e.g. theatres, museums). Ontario is investing over $10.2 billion under the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program to improve public transit; community, culture and recreation; green, and rural and northern community and other priority infrastructure.

Associated links

Federal infrastructure investments in Ontario

https://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/plan/prog-proj-on-eng.html

Investing in Canada Plan Project Map

http://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/gmap-gcarte/index-eng.html

Ontario Builds Project Map: https://www.ontario.ca/page/building-ontario

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn

Web: Infrastructure Canada

SOURCE Infrastructure Canada

For further information: Michelle Johnston, Director of Communications, Office of the Minister of Infrastructure and Communities, 613-298-7386, [email protected]; Christine Bujold, Press Secretary, Office of the Honourable Laurie Scott, Ontario's Minister of Infrastructure, 416-454-1782, [email protected]; Sofia Sousa-Dias, Communications Branch, Ontario Ministry of Infrastructure, 437-991-3391, [email protected]; Anne Dube, Past President, Serbian Heritage Museum, 519-819-5819, [email protected]; Media Relations, Infrastructure Canada, 613-960-9251, Toll free: 1-877-250-7154, Email: [email protected]

Related Links

www.infrastructure.gc.ca


MARKHAM, ON, June 10, 2021 /CNW/ - Enghouse Systems Limited (TSX: ENGH) today announced its second quarter unaudited financial results for the period ended April 30, 2021. All the financial information is in Canadian dollars unless otherwise indicated.

Financial and operational highlights for the three and six months ended April 30, 2021 compared to the three and six months ended April 30, 2020 are as follows:

Revenue achieved was $117 .3 and $236 .4 million, respectively, compared to record revenue of $140 .9 and $251 .6 million;

.3 and .4 million, respectively, compared to record revenue of .9 and .6 million; Results from operating activities was $36 .9 and $77 .6 million, respectively, compared to $46 .3 and $77 .1 million;

.9 and .6 million, respectively, compared to .3 and .1 million; Net income was $20 .7 and $41 .4 million, respectively, compared to $27 .1 and $43 .2 million;

.7 and .4 million, respectively, compared to .1 and .2 million; Adjusted EBITDA was $40 .2 and $84 .7 million, respectively, compared to $49 .3 and $84 .6 million;

.2 and .7 million, respectively, compared to .3 and .6 million; Cash flows from operating activities excluding changes in working capital was $42 .6 and $84 .3 million, respectively compared to $50 .0 and $85 .2 million.

Although revenue achieved for the quarter was $117.3 million, compared to record revenue of $140.9 million in the same period in the prior year, Enghouse continues to generate positive cash flows, operating income and profitability. The decline in revenue was driven primarily by the previous year's significant increase in our Vidyo business that has now returned to levels that are more consistent with pre-COVID volumes. Enghouse continues to expand its cloud offerings and has implemented new initiatives aimed at increasing sales of cloud-based products while offering choice to its customers by providing multi-tenant cloud, private cloud and on-premise solutions to the market.

As previously announced on April 28, 2021, Enghouse signed a $29 million multi-year agreement with the Norwegian Government to update its National Emergency Fire Services Technology System. The eight-year agreement builds on the success in the Norwegian market with the $55 million, 12-year agreement with Norwegian Health Care announced in October 2020.

The Company closed the quarter with $169.6 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments and no debt after paying $90.5 million in dividends during the quarter. As always, Enghouse prioritizes its long-term growth strategy over quarter-to-quarter results, investing in products while ensuring continued profitability and maximizing operating cashflows. As a result, Enghouse has replenished its acquisition capital, while returning $83.2 million in special dividends to shareholders.

Quarterly dividends:

Today, the Board of Directors approved the Company's eligible quarterly dividend of $0.16 per common share payable on August 31, 2021 to shareholders of record at the close of business on August 17, 2021.

Enghouse Systems Limited

Financial Highlights

(in thousands of Canadian dollars)









For the period ended April 30 Three months

Six months

2021

2020 Var ($) Var (%)



2021

2020 Var ($) Var (%) Revenue $ 117,334 $ 140,900 (23,566) (16.7)

$ 236,434 $ 251,556 (15,122) (6.0)



























Direct costs

33,533

39,699 (6,166) (15.5)



65,041

72,176 (7,135) (9.9) Revenue, net of direct costs $ 83,801 $ 101,201 (17,400) (17.2)

$ 171,393 $ 179,380 (7,987) (4.5) As a % of revenue

71.4%

71.8%







72.5%

71.3%































Operating expenses

46,852

55,046 (8,194) (14.9)



93,362

100,806 (7,444) (7.4) Special charges

57

(121) 178 147.1



440

1,455 (1,015) (69.8) Results from operating activities $ 36,892 $ 46,276 (9,384) (20.3)

$ 77,591 $ 77,119 472 0.6 As a % of revenue

31.4%

32.8%







32.8%

30.7%































Amortization of acquired software and customer relationships

(10,854)

(11,600) 746 6.4



(21,628)

(21,680) 52 0.2 Foreign exchange gains (losses)

1,587

(393) 1,980 503.8



(1,523)

(46) (1,477) (3210.9) Interest expense  lease obligations

(277)

(300) 23 7.7



(606)

(562) (44) (7.8) Finance income

36

131 (95) (72.5)



116

482 (366) (75.9) Finance expenses

17

(16) 33 206.3



(64)

(34) (30) (88.2) Other (expenses) income

(1,122)

811 (1,933) (238.3)



(1,446)

397 (1,843) (464.2) Income before income taxes $ 26,279 $ 34,909 (8,630) (24.7)

$ 52,440 $ 55,676 (3,236) (5.8) Provision for income taxes

5,540

7,820 (2,280) (29.2)



11,059

12,451 (1,392) (11.2) Net Income for the period $ 20,739 $ 27,089 (6,350) (23.4)

$ 41,381 $ 43,225 (1,844) (4.3)



























Basic earnings per share

0.37

0.49 (0.12) (24.5)



0.75

0.79 (0.04) (5.1) Diluted earnings per share

0.37

0.49 (0.12) (24.5)



0.74

0.78 (0.04) (5.1)



























Operating cash flows

39,155

57,533 (18,378) (31.9)



59,702

77,466 (17,764) (22.9) Operating cash flows excluding changes in working capital

42,600

50,033 (7,433) (14.9)



84,317

85,216 (899) (1.1)



























Adjusted EBITDA

























Results from operating activities

36,892

46,276







77,591

77,119































Depreciation

758

758







1,493

1,645



Depreciation of right-of-use assets

2,492

2,368







5,195

4,391



Special charges

57

(121)







440

1,455



Adjusted EBITDA $ 40,199 $ 49,281 (9,082) (18.4)

$ 84,719 $ 84,610 109 0.1



























Adjusted EBITDA margin

34.3%

35.0%







35.8%

33.6%































Adjusted EBITDA per diluted share $ 0.72 $ 0.89 ( 0.17) (19.1)

$ 1.52 $ 1.53 ( 0.01) (0.7)



Condensed Consolidated Interim Statements of Financial Position (in thousands of Canadian dollars)

(unaudited) As at April 30, 2020 As at October 31, 2020 ASSETS







Current assets:







Cash and cash equivalents $ 165,666 $ 244,792 Short-term investments

3,907

6,999 Accounts receivable

98,381

90,789 Prepaid expenses and other assets

14,457

14,772



282,411

357,352 Non-current assets:







Property and equipment

6,191

6,301 Right-of-use assets

33,947

42,832 Intangible assets

120,624

123,616 Goodwill

220,767

217,426 Deferred income tax assets

19,524

16,119



401,053

406,294

$ 683,464 $ 763,646









LIABILITIES AND SHAREHOLDERS' EQUITY







Current liabilities:







Accounts payable and accrued liabilities $ 68,161 $ 80,339 Income taxes payable

9,395

13,245 Dividends payable

8,879

7,472 Provisions

7,345

5,697 Deferred revenue

104,341

89,927 Lease obligations

9,763

9,914



207,884

206,594 Non-current liabilities:







Income taxes payable

2,925

3,829 Deferred income tax liabilities

19,881

14,782 Deferred revenue

5,324

7,021 Net employee defined benefit obligation

2,734

2,855 Lease obligations

23,910

32,242



54,774

60,729



262,658

267,323 Shareholders' equity







Share capital

104,483

99,405 Contributed surplus

7,130

6,583 Retained earnings

321,378

379,378 Accumulated other comprehensive (loss) income

(12,185)

10,957



420,806

496,323

$ 683,464 $ 763,646



Condensed Consolidated Interim Statements of Operations and Comprehensive Income (in thousands of Canadian dollars except per share amounts) (unaudited) Three months Six months Periods ended April 30 2021 2020 2021 2020









Revenue







Software licenses $ 25,167 $ 48,791 $ 53,467 $ 77,191 Hosted and maintenance services 70,402 72,024 142,645 136,377 Professional services 18,468 16,087 34,297 31,270 Hardware 3,297 3,998 6,025 6,718

117,334 140,900 236,434 251,556 Direct costs







Software licenses 1,485 3,937 2,686 6,387 Services 30,143 33,080 58,615 61,426 Hardware 1,905 2,682 3,740 4,363

33,533 39,699 65,041 72,176 Revenue, net of direct costs 83,801 101,201 171,393 179,380









Operating expenses







Selling, general and administrative 22,208 29,612 45,159 54,294 Research and development 21,394 22,308 41,515 40,476 Depreciation 758 758 1,493 1,645 Depreciation of right-of-use assets 2,492 2,368 5,195 4,391 Special charges 57 (121) 440 1,455

46,909 54,925 93,802 102,261









Results from operating activities 36,892 46,276 77,591 77,119









Amortization of acquired software and customer relationships (10,854) (11,600) (21,628) (21,680) Foreign exchange gains (losses) 1,587 (393) (1,523) (46) Interest expense  lease obligations (277) (300) (606) (562) Finance income 36 131 116 482 Finance expenses 17 (16) (64) (34) Other (expenses) income (1,122) 811 (1,446) 397 Income before income taxes 26,279 34,909 52,440 55,676









Provision for income taxes 5,540 7,820 11,059 12,451









Net income for the period $ 20,739 $ 27,089 $ 41,381 $ 43,225









Items that may be subsequently reclassified to income:







Cumulative translation adjustment (18,274) 10,140 (23,142) 12,460









Other comprehensive (loss) income (18,274) 10,140 (23,142) 12,460









Comprehensive income $ 2,465 $ 37,229 $ 18,239 $ 55,685 Earnings per share







Basic $ 0.37 $ 0.49 $ 0.75 $ 0.79 Diluted $ 0.37 $ 0.49 $ 0.74 $ 0.78



Condensed Consolidated Interim Statements of Cash Flows (in thousands of Canadian dollars) (unaudited) Three months Six months Periods ended April 30 2021 2020 2021 2020 OPERATING ACTIVITIES







Net income for the period $ 20,739 $ 27,089 $ 41,381 $ 43,225 Adjustments to reconcile net income to net cash provided by operating activities















Depreciation 758 758 1,493 1,645 Depreciation of right-of-use assets 2,492 2,368 5,195 4,391 Interest expense  lease obligations 277 300 606 562 Amortization of acquired software and customer relationships 10,854 11,600 21,628 21,680 Stock-based compensation expense 835 893 1,445 1,625 Provision for income taxes 5,540 7,820 11,059 12,451 Finance expenses and other expenses (income) 1,105 (795) 1,510 (363)

42,600 50,033 84,317 85,216









Changes in non-cash operating working capital 2,440 10,836 (8,915) 536 Income taxes paid (5,885) (3,336) (15,700) (8,286) Net cash provided by operating activities 39,155 57,533 59,702 77,466









INVESTING ACTIVITIES







Purchase of property and equipment (666) (1,005) (1,344) (1,444) Acquisitions, net of cash acquired* (3,810) 1,235 (32,300) (47,664) Purchase consideration for prior-year acquisitions 444 - 1,105 (546) Purchase of short-term investments (932) (1,795) 1,614 (1,802) Net cash provided by (used in) investing activities (4,964) (1,565) (30,925) (51,456)









FINANCING ACTIVITIES







Issuance of share capital 4,028 788 4,180 5,572 Repayment of loans - - - (62) Repayment of lease obligations (2,091) (1,586) (4,921) (4,452) Dividends paid (90,502) (6,048) (97,974) (12,069) Net cash used in financing activities (88,565) (6,846) (98,715) (11,011)



















Impact of foreign exchange on cash and cash equivalents (5,937) 1,757 (9,188) 2,567









(Decrease) increase in cash and cash equivalents (60,311) 50,879 (79,126) 17,566 Cash and cash equivalents - beginning of period 225,977 111,451 244,792 144,764 Cash and cash equivalents - end of period $ 165,666 $ 162,330 $ 165,666 $ 162,330



* Acquisitions are net of cash acquired of nil and $1,463 for the three and six months ended April 30, 2021, respectively, and nil and $6,906 for the three and six months ended April 30, 2020, respectively.

Enghouse Systems Limited

Segment Reporting Information

(in thousands of Canadian dollars)









Three months ended April 30, 2021 IMG AMG Total Revenue $ 65,879 $ 51,455 $ 117,334 Direct costs

(16,930)

(16,603)

(33,533) Revenue, net of direct costs

48,949

34,852

83,801 Operating expenses excluding special charges

(24,074)

(12,214)

(36,288) Depreciation of property and equipment

(624)

(134)

(758) Depreciation of right-of-use assets

(1,666)

(826)

(2,492) Segment profit $ 22,585 $ 21,678 $ 44,263 Special charges









(57) Corporate and shared service expenses









(7,314) Results from operating activities







$ 36,892









Three months ended April 30, 2020 IMG AMG Total Revenue $ 89,925 $ 50,975 $ 140,900 Direct costs

(20,874)

(18,825)

(39,699) Revenue, net of direct costs

69,051

32,150

101,201 Operating expenses excluding special charges

(25,632)

(15,412)

(41,044) Depreciation of property and equipment

(518)

(240)

(758) Depreciation of right-of-use assets

(1,386)

(982)

(2,368) Segment profit $ 41,515 $ 15,516 $ 57,031 Special charges









121 Corporate and shared service expenses









(10,876) Results from operating activities







$ 46,276









Six months ended April 30, 2021 IMG AMG Total Revenue $ 136,182 $ 100,252 $ 236,434 Direct costs

(32,387)

(32,654)

(65,041) Revenue, net of direct costs

103,795

67,598

171,393 Operating expenses excluding special charges

(46,737)

(24,339)

(71,076) Depreciation of property and equipment

(1,295)

(198)

(1,493) Depreciation of right-of-use assets

(3,484)

(1,711)

(5,195) Segment profit $ 52,279 $ 41,350 $ 93,629 Special charges









(440) Corporate and shared service expenses









(15,598) Results from operating activities







$ 77,591









Six months ended April 30, 2020 IMG AMG Total Revenue $ 152,798 $ 98,758 $ 251,556 Direct costs

(36,088)

(36,088)

(72,176) Revenue, net of direct costs

116,710

62,670

179,380 Operating expenses excluding special charges

(46,851)

(28,080)

(74,931) Depreciation of property and equipment

(973)

(672)

(1,645) Depreciation of right-of-use assets

(2,444)

(1,947)

(4,391) Segment profit $ 66,442 $ 31,971 $ 98,413 Special charges









(1,455) Corporate and shared service expenses









(19,839) Results from operating activities







$ 77,119

About Enghouse

Enghouse is a Canadian publicly traded company (TSX:ENGH) that provides enterprise software solutions focusing on remote work, visual computing and communications for next-generation software-defined networks. The Company's two-pronged growth strategy focuses on internal growth and acquisitions, which, to date, have been funded through operating cash flows. The Company is well capitalized, has no long-term debt and is organized around two business segments: the Interactive Management Group and the Asset Management Group. Further information about Enghouse may be obtained from the Company's website at www.enghouse.com.

Conference Call and Webcast

A conference call to discuss the results will be held on Friday, June 11, 2021 at 8:45 a.m. EST. To participate, please call +1-647-689-4521 or North American Toll-Free +1-833-235-7649. Confirmation code: 8298201. A webcast is also available at: https://www.enghouse.com/investors.php.

****

The Company uses non-IFRS measures to assess its operating performance. Securities regulations require that companies caution readers that earnings and other measures adjusted to a basis other than IFRS do not have standardized meanings and are unlikely to be comparable to similar measures used by other companies. Accordingly, they should not be considered in isolation. The Company uses Adjusted EBITDA as a measure of operating performance. Therefore, Adjusted EBITDA may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other issuers. Adjusted EBITDA is calculated based on results from operating activities adjusted for depreciation of property and equipment and right-of-use assets, and special charges for acquisition related restructuring costs. Management uses Adjusted EBITDA to evaluate operating performance as it excludes amortization of software and intangibles (which is an accounting allocation of the cost of software and intangible assets arising on acquisition), any impact of finance and tax related activities, asset depreciation, foreign exchange gains and losses, other income and restructuring costs primarily related to acquisitions.

SOURCE Enghouse Systems Limited

For further information: Sam Anidjar, Vice President, Corporate Development, Tel: (905) 946-3200, Email: [email protected]

Related Links

http://www.enghouse.com


Today, the Honourable Melanie Joly, Minister of Economic Development and Official Languages, and Minister responsible for Western Economic Diversification Canada (WD), announced a federal investment of $1,025,773 for Prairie Fava to scale-up its production capabilities and capture new opportunities in North America for the fava bean food market.

The Glenboro, Manitoba based Prairie Fava is an innovative leader in the agri-food and fava bean industry. In response to evolving plant-based dining patterns around the world, Prairie Fava has created and promoted fava-based products that are easy to use, and make an excellent healthy and flavourful addition to meal planning.

WD funding will enable Prairie Fava to scale-up its operations to capture new opportunities within the fava bean market. This investment will result in the purchase of new equipment and support the creation of six jobs. It will also help Prairie Fava commercialize new value-added food ingredients and consumer products for a greater reach in the consumer packaged goods, food service, and food manufacturing markets.

Quotes



"The Government of Canada recognizes that western Canadians are entrepreneurial, resourceful, and innovative. Today's announcement is a reflection of our commitment to restore business confidence, create jobs, and ensure that growth is being sustained through innovation and long-term productivity as we emerge from this pandemic. Our message to business owners and workers is clear: we will be there to support you for as long as it takes, with whatever it takes, and we will get through this together."

- The Honorable Melanie Joly, Minister of Economic Development and Official Languages, and Minister responsible for Western Economic Diversification Canada

"Fava is of great interest to the food industry right now and the support received through WD's Business Scale-up and Productivity program will allow us to scale-up our operations and enter larger markets. This is just the beginning of fava as a star ingredient in plant-based meats to gluten-free baking and beyond."

- Hailey Jefferies, Co-Founder/CEO

Quick facts

Prairie Fava is the Canadian industry expert in fava beans, dedicated to growing and crafting high quality fava ingredients for the plant-based market.

Prairie Fava supplies whole fava, dehulled split fava, raw fava flour, and precooked flour.

Fava ingredients are gluten-free, nutrient-rich, have high-density protein, and come from an environmentally sustainable, non-GMO pulse crop.

Prairie Fava is located in Glenboro , a community of 656 located in the Westman region of Manitoba approximately 170 km west of Winnipeg .

, a community of 656 located in the Westman region of approximately 170 km west of . This investment highlights the Government of Canada's commitment to build a stronger Western Canada by supporting small- and medium-sized enterprises to increase productivity, grow their market share, and create new high paying jobs.

commitment to build a stronger by supporting small- and medium-sized enterprises to increase productivity, grow their market share, and create new high paying jobs. WD's Business Scale-up and Productivity (BSP) program supports high-growth businesses that are scaling up and producing innovative goods, services, or technologies. It offers interest free, repayable funding to incorporated businesses.

Associated links

Stay Connected

Follow the department on Twitter: @WD_Canada

WD Homepage

WD Toll-Free Number: 1-888-338-WEST (9378)

TTY (telecommunications device for the hearing impaired): 1-877-303-3388

SOURCE Western Economic Diversification Canada

For further information: Catherine Mounier-Desrochers, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Economic Development and Official Languages, [email protected]; Nathalie Leroux, Director of Policy, Planning and External Relations, Manitoba Region, Western Economic Diversification Canada, 204-984-8472, [email protected]

Related Links

http://www.wd.gc.ca/


L'Oreal Canada announced the implementation of a solidarity plan to support the fight against the coronavirus in Canada last March 2020. This program aimed to support various actors: hospitals and health professionals who are fighting on the front line to limit the spread of COVID-19; hair salons, distributors and suppliers with a microenterprise or SME status, who are particularly exposed and fragile in the face of the economic crisis caused by the pandemic; and associations that support the most disadvantaged, especially women in situations of domestic violence.

Frank Kollmar, President and CEO of L'Oreal Canada, said, "This gesture of solidarity is a continuation of our efforts to participate in the fight against COVID-19. L'Oreal Canada is pleased to contribute to the recovery by supporting vaccination efforts, notably with our corporate vaccination clinic in partnership with CAE, as well as through this donation of hand sanitizing gels to the Canadian Red Cross."

"The Canadian Red Cross would like to thank L'Oreal Canada and Garnier Canada for their generous donation of 150,000 bottles of disinfectant gel. This donation will allow the Canadian Red Cross, as part of its humanitarian coordination mandate in response to COVID-19, to contribute to the reduction of the effects of the pandemic in the Greater Montreal area by supporting local organizations working with vulnerable people as well as vaccination awareness teams present in some 20 neighborhoods and boroughs on the Island of Montreal, in Laval and in the Longueil agglomeration," adds Pascal Mathieu, vice-president of the Canadian Red Cross, Quebec.

"It was only natural for Garnier Canada to support the Red Cross in the fight against COVID-19. It is by joining forces and helping front-line workers that we can make a real contribution to protecting the community. With this partnership, we are making our local commitment a reality, as the gel is manufactured here in our Canadian plant, which is certified carbon-free. We are offering a formula that is both effective and environmentally friendly," says Laura Branik, General Manager of Garnier Canada.

About L'Oreal Canada

L'Oreal Canada is a wholly owned subsidiary of L'Oreal Group, the largest cosmetics company in the world. Headquartered in Montreal, the company had sales of $1.18 billion in 2020 and employs more than 1,450 people. The company holds a portfolio of 36 brands, encompassing all aspects of beauty, and is present across all distribution networks: mass market, department stores, salons, pharmacies, drugstores, and branded retail. L'Oreal Canada, whose operations are carbon neutral, supports the L'Oreal Foundation's programs such as L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science, which has promoted the advancement of women in science in Canada since 2003, Beauty for a better life, a social reintegration program in hairdressing for immigrant women since 2017.

About the Canadian Red Cross

Whether at home or abroad, the Red Cross is there for people before, during and after a disaster. As a member of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, which comprises the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the International Committee of the Red Cross and 192 National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the Canadian Red Cross is committed to improving the lives of vulnerable people by mobilizing the power of humanity in Canada and around the world.

SOURCE L'Oreal Canada Inc.

For further information: Media contacts: L'Oreal Canada, Virginie Hotte-Dupuis, Phone : 514 287-4618, [email protected]; Croix-Rouge canadienne, Quebec, Jean-Sebastien Pariseau, Phone : 1 888 418-9111, [email protected]
OTTAWA, ON, June 10, 2021 - Digital Government

/CNW/ - The Government of Canada is committed to providing Canadians with the online service experience they expect in a digital age.

Today, the Honourable Joyce Murray, Minister of Digital Government, released the Digital Government Strategy, "Secure, Reliable and Easy to Access: Transforming your Experience with the Government of Canada." This is the first iteration of a strategy detailing the work underway to modernize the digital capabilities of the federal government to deliver quality digital services to Canadians.

From July 2020 to February 2021, the Minister of Digital Government met with 60 stakeholders from the private sector, academia and various levels of government from across the country and around the world through a series of roundtables to talk about how the government can most effectively accelerate the move to digital. These conversations have helped shape the strategy and will inform the government's continued efforts. Ongoing engagement with digital government stakeholders will inform future iterations of the Digital Government Strategy.

Under the strategy, the work is organized into four areas:

Modernizing the way we replace, build, and manage major IT systems

Providing services to people when and where they need them

Taking a coordinated approach to digital operations

Transforming how we work by tackling long-standing institutional barriers to change and innovation

Work in these four areas will ensure the Government of Canada complements its existing in-person services with convenient, seamless digital services that are easier to access for citizens and businesses.

Quote

"Digital government is about modernizing and adapting the way we work to make the Government of Canada more responsive, resilient and better at serving people and businesses. This strategy unifies our efforts with partner departments and stakeholders to provide digital services that are secure, reliable and easy to use. It's a strong foundation on which to build now with the investments in digital transformation proposed in Budget 2021. I am pleased to release this strategy and look forward to the work ahead."

- The Honourable Joyce Murray, Minister of Digital Government

Quick Facts

The Digital Government Strategy is operationalized through the renewed Digital Operations Strategic Plan (20212024) and supported by other foundational policy pieces, like the Digital Standards , the Policy on Service and Digital and the Policy on Government Security .

, the and the . The Digital Government Strategy is informed by Canada's engagement under the Digital Nations Charter, which Canada signed in November 2020 . The Charter commits Canada to work towards core principles of digital development, focusing on user needs, open government, and a commitment to share and learn from other Digital Nations.

engagement under the Digital Nations Charter, which signed in . The Charter commits to work towards core principles of digital development, focusing on user needs, open government, and a commitment to share and learn from other Digital Nations. Budget 2021 outlines an ambitious next phase for Canada's digital transformation, with over $2.5 billion in proposed investments in the highest impact services, like benefits, taxes and immigration, and over $1 billion of that amount in proposed investments dedicated to establishing a coordinated and informed centralized approach to this government-wide transformation effort.

Associated Links

Stay connected

Twitter: @DigitalCDN

YouTube: Digital government playlist

Web: Canada.ca/GCdigital

SOURCE Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat

For further information: Contacts (media): Erik Nosaluk, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Digital Government, 613-790-0373, [email protected], Media Relations, Digital Government, Telephone: 613-369-9400, Toll-free: 1-855-TBS-9-SCT (1-855-827-9728), Teletypewriter (TTY): 613-369 9371, Email: [email protected]

Related Links

http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca


From: Environment and Climate Change Canada

GATINEAU, QC, June 11, 2021 /CNW/ - "On this day, I am honoured to congratulate Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) on 50 years of achievement in protecting and conserving our environment in Canada and abroad.



"On June 11, 1971, Canada became one of the first countries in the world to formally establish a department for the environment, responsible for preserving the natural environment, providing meteorological services, and coordinating environmental policies and programs. Since then, the department has evolved to address the increasingly complex and changing environmental priorities of Canada, and their economic and social impacts on our communities and our way of life.



"Today, Environment and Climate Change Canada is a champion of Canadian global leadership in the environmental and economic transition and protection of biodiversity that must define a nature-positive, carbon-neutral 21st century. ECCC administers more than a dozen statutes relating to diverse topics such as the trade of endangered species, the licensing of dams on international rivers, and the regulation of chemicals and greenhouse gases.



"ECCC has dedicated employees across Canada, from Victoria to Yellowknife, Eureka to Iqaluit, Calgary to Saskatoon to Churchill, Man.; from Burlington, Ont., to Dorval, Que., to Sackville, N.B., and Mount Pearl, NL. Their expertisecovering areas as diverse as biology, hydrology and meteorology, law enforcement, informatics, and engineeringinforms our policy decisions and helps protect Canada's natural environment.



"Thanks to our committed employees, today's ECCC is a national and an international leader in anticipating and addressing the most pressing environmental issues. This includes the challenge of our time: climate change.



"As Minister of Environment and Climate Change Canada, I congratulate the department's employeespast and presentfor their contributions over the last 50 years. Their work helps ensure Canadians have a clean and sustainable environment today, tomorrow, and for generations to come.

"I invite Canadians to visit www.Canada.ca/ECCC50years and follow our department on social media as we celebrate our history, our passionate people, and the many important milestones in our department's history."

 The Honourable Jonathan Wilkinson, Minister of Environment and Climate Change

SOURCE Environment and Climate Change Canada

For further information: Moira Kelly, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, 819-271-6218, [email protected]; Media Relations, Environment and Climate Change Canada, 819-938-3338 or 1-844-836-7799 (toll-free), [email protected]

Related Links

http://www.ec.gc.ca


OTTAWA, ON, June 11, 2021 /CNW/ - Government of Canada officials will hold a news conference to provide an update on coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and the roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines.

Participants will be available to answer questions from the media following their remarks.

Date

June 11, 2021

Time

12:00 PM (EDT)

Location

The news conference will be virtual only.

Media will be able to ask questions via teleconference.

Toll-free (Canada/US) dial-in number:

1-866-206-0153

Local dial-in number:

613-954-9003

Passcode: 1622050#

To obtain the briefing material under embargo, please RSVP by email at

[email protected].

NOTE: To help ensure optimal simultaneous interpretation sound quality, journalists are encouraged to use a microphone (headphones/headset) or, when possible, a landline, and to avoid using speaker mode if queuing up for questions.

Twitter: @GovCanHealth

Facebook: Healthy Canadians

SOURCE Public Health Agency of Canada

For further information: Media Inquiries: Media Relations, Public Health Agency of Canada, 613-957-2983, [email protected]
OTTAWA, ON, June 10, 2021 /CNW/ - The Government of Canada is committed to addressing systemic inequities in the criminal justice system, specifically for Indigenous Peoples, Black Canadians, and other groups disproportionately affected by having a criminal record.

Today, the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, the Honourable Bill Blair, introduced legislation, Bill C-31 An Act to Amend the Criminal Records Act and make consequential amendments to other acts, which proposes to reduce barriers to pardons for individuals with criminal records who have served their sentences and are living law-abiding lives. A pardon helps remove the stigma of a criminal record so people can access housing, employment, volunteer opportunities, and education, which are key to safe and successful reintegration as productive members of society. This improves public safety through reduced re-offending and victimization.

To help ensure that the pardons program works fairly and effectively, the legislation proposes to amend the Criminal Records Act to reduce wait periods for obtaining a pardon to three years for summary offences and five years for indictable offences. It would also streamline the decision-making process for less serious offences, so these applications can be dealt with more quickly and simply. In keeping with the aim of protecting public safety, some particularly serious offences would be ineligible. These ineligibilities would include convictions for sexual offences against a child; terrorism offences for which a sentence of 10 years or more has been imposed; and offences for which a life or indeterminate sentence has been imposed. The legislation also proposes that late payment of a fine or any other monetary penalty that was included in the sentence, does not restart the wait period.

In addition to these legislative amendments, the Government also intends to:

Significantly reduce the application fee to an amount as low as $50 to make pardons more affordable, because the current cost of applying for a pardon ($657.77) is a financial barrier for many.

to make pardons more affordable, because the current cost of applying for a pardon is a financial barrier for many. Invest in program modernizations for the Parole Board of Canada (PBC), including developing a new online portal to make the application process simpler and quicker.

(PBC), including developing a new online portal to make the application process simpler and quicker. Provide $22.2 million over 5 years for community based organizations to offer support services to help people complete pardon applications, and increase awareness of these support services, as well as of the PBC's role as the federal agency responsible for the administration of the pardons program and its information resources for applicants. This will help ensure people have access to the right information about the pardons process and reduce reliance on third-party, for-profit companies that provide misleading information and charge high fees.

In an effort to further remove barriers to pardons, the Government will explore the automated sequestering of some criminal records for less serious offences for those living crime-free, in consultation with provinces, territories and municipalities, as well as other key criminal justice stakeholders. In other countries, including Australia and the United Kingdom, similar systems set aside criminal records for less serious offences after specific periods of time for those living crime-free, removing the need to apply for a pardon. This review will explore how such a system could be implemented in Canada.

The PBC, an independent administrative tribunal responsible for the timely, gradual, and safe reintegration of offenders into society and the sustained rehabilitation of individuals through pardons, recognizes the importance of diversity in carrying out its important public safety mandate. As part of the PBC's commitment to bias-free and evidence-based decision-making, Board members consider systemic and background factors that have contributed to bringing an offender into the criminal justice system. The Corrections and Conditional Release Act, also requires that Board members be sufficiently diverse in their backgrounds to allow them to represent community values and views in their decision-making. As such, the PBC is, in effect, a "community board", which represents Canada's rich diversity of people and communities, with decision-makers that are reflective of the Canadians they serve.

Quote

"For those who have served their sentences and are living a law-abiding life, a pardon can mean the difference between successfully reintegrating into the community or returning to crime. Our Government is taking action to improve access to pardons and address systemic inequities in the criminal justice system that have a disproportionate impact on Indigenous Peoples, Black Canadians, and other overrepresented or marginalized groups. These evidence-based reforms will prioritize public safety by helping to sustain the reintegration of individuals who have proven to be law-abiding citizens, while ensuring that victims' needs are taken into consideration."

- The Honourable Bill Blair, Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness

"Our government is committed to combating systemic racism and discrimination in all aspects of society. We know that the criminal justice system disproportionately impacts racialized communities. For individuals who have completed their sentence and demonstrated to be law-abiding citizens, this legislation would reduce barriers to accessing a pardon, giving them a better chance to succeed and contribute in meaningful ways to society. As we stand together against all forms of discrimination, we need to dismantle systemic barriers so that our criminal justice system is more fair, effective, and keeps all Canadians safe."

- The Honourable Bardish Chagger, Minister of Diversity and Inclusion and Youth

Quick Facts

Since 1970, only five percent of pardons or record suspensions awarded for eligible offences have been ceased or revoked, demonstrating that the recognition of sustained rehabilitation and successful reintegration in awarding record suspensions/pardons is effective, while maintaining public safety.

As of January 2020 , data from the previous 5 years indicated the majority of individuals  74 percent  who apply for a pardon or record suspension are those whose crimes were not serious enough to warrant a prison sentence.

, data from the previous 5 years indicated the majority of individuals  74 percent  who apply for a pardon or record suspension are those whose crimes were not serious enough to warrant a prison sentence. Over the past three years the PBC has taken steps to increase the diversity of its Board members through expanded recruitment efforts among Indigenous people, visible minorities, LGBTQ2+ and women. Of the PBC's 80 current Board members, 58% are women, 13% are Indigenous and 10% are visible minority, compared to just 5% (Indigenous) and 1% (visible minority) in 2014.

Budget 2021 proposes $88.2 million over five years, starting in 2021-22, with $13 million ongoing, for the Parole Board of Canada , the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Public Safety Canada to reduce pardon application fees, create an online application portal, and support community organizations that help people navigate the application process.

over five years, starting in 2021-22, with ongoing, for the Parole Board of , the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Public Safety Canada to reduce pardon application fees, create an online application portal, and support community organizations that help people navigate the application process. In 2018, the House of Commons Public Safety Committee unanimously recommended making pardons more accessible.

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SOURCE Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada

For further information: James Cudmore, Director of Communications, Office of the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, [email protected]; Media Relations: Public Safety Canada, 613-991-0657, [email protected]

Related Links

https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca


OTTAWA, ON, June 11, 2021 /CNW/ - The Honourable Joyce Murray, Minister of Digital Government, participated in the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Ministerial Steering Committee meeting, hosted by current Steering Committee co-chairs, the Government of South Korea and lead civil society chair Maria Baron from Directorio Legislativo.

The committee focused discussions on leveraging the OGP platform to advance COVID-19 response recovery reforms, and how members can work towards a stronger global coalition of governments to advance open government in 2021.

Minister Murray emphasized Canada's interest in leveraging the OGP process to advance reforms stemming from the COVID-19 response and find innovative ways to apply the Partnership's overarching principles and values. Canada continues to focus on developing and implementing a meaningful 5th National Action Plan on Open Government and has adopted an inclusive approach by collaborating with the Multi-stakeholder on Open Government and other stakeholders to design the plan.

The Partnership was encouraged to advance ambitious reforms through the development of their own National Action Plans, as one of the main vehicles to achieve some of the OGP objectives in a visible and accountable way. Minister Murray also discussed how members could gradually integrate open government in everything they do and committed to championing open government in her role as Minister of Digital Government.

Minister Murray also confirmed Canada's commitment to advocate domestically and globally for the OGP platform, tools, and principles at global summits in 2021. Canada will help forge and mobilize a stronger political coalition for open government and democracy leading up to the OGP's 7th Global Summit that will be held in December 2021, as well as at other key 2021 global summits, focusing on strengthening democracy.

Minister Murray reflected on the OGP's role as a connecting group internationally, for instance with members of the G20 and G7. The OGP's platform also allows for exchanging good practices on common areas of interest and the Minister encouraged the OGP to create more information networks to connect and learn from peers to strengthen open government reforms.

Minister Murray outlined how the Partnership has allowed Canada to commit and deliver on important reforms and stating that civil society partners have been key in driving these efforts forward. The Minister provided the example of Canada's Algorithmic Impact Assessment tool that was created as part of Canada's 4th Open Government National Action Plan to help institutions better understand and mitigate risk associated with automated decision-making systems and the government's use of artificial intelligence.

As a proud member of the OGP, Minister Murray reiterated the importance of the OGP process in Canada's response and recovery from COVID-19, and the importance of embedding the principles and values of accountability, transparency, inclusion and openness in everything that we do as the government continues to find innovative ways to better serve Canadians and to build back better.

Quick Facts

The OGP is a global initiative focusing on open government, which includes 78 national member nations and 76 local governments, along with hundreds of civil society organizations.

Its objective is to secure commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance, in partnership with civil society and the private sector.

The OGP Steering Committee is made up of representatives from 11 governments and 11 civil society members.

Associated Links





Stay connected

Twitter: @DigitalCDN

YouTube: Digital government playlist

Web: Canada.ca/GCdigital

SOURCE Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat

For further information: Contacts (media) : Erik Nosaluk, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Digital Government, 613-790-0373; Media Relations, Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Telephone: 613-369-9400, Toll-free: 1-855-TBS-9-SCT (1-855-827-9728), Teletypewriter (TTY): 613-369-9371, Email: [email protected]

Related Links

http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca


USFDA last month came out with a revised guideline for covid vaccine approval that said it will no longer grant emergency authorization to new applications. In some countries, people vaccinated with both the doses of Covaxin have been treated as unvaccinated.

Bharat Biotechs proposal for emergency use authorisation (EUA) of Covaxin has been declined by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). FDA has asked Ocugen, the US partner of Bharat Bio, to launch an additional trial so that it can file for full approval.

The FDA provided feedback to Ocugen regarding the Master File the Company had previously submitted and recommended that Ocugen pursue a BLA submission instead of a EUA application for its vaccine candidate and requested additional information and data, Ocugen said to NYSE. Furthermore, it was added that the company is in a discussion with FDA about the additional documents required.

Besides, Bharat Biotechs vaccines are declined in many other countries. In some countries, people vaccinated with both the doses of Covaxin have been treated as unvaccinated. According to a report, disapproval of Bharat Biotechs vaccine is caused by the companys late submission of partial data from the Covaxin trial.

USFDA last month came out with a revised guideline for covid vaccine approval that said it will no longer grant emergency authorization to new applications. Despite this revised guideline from FDA, Ocugen in a statement to investors on 26 May said that the company will be eligible to submit its EUA in June.

Now the global status of Bharat Biotechs Covaxin sets many questions among millions of Indians.
Choksi's wife was a willing participant in his unlawful operations and performed a key role in the overall scam. Priti Choski is accused of actively swindling PNB loot money through several shell firms. She allegedly used money from the PNB fraud to buy real estate in Dubai.

Fugitive Businessman Mehul Choksis wife Priti Choksi was a key figure in the PNB fraud and is now one of the biggest recipients of the benefits of crime. A probe by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has revealed that Priti Choksi is actively involved in money laundering that was looted from Punjab National Bank. Although Priti Choksi has asserted that her husband is innocent in recent media interviews

Priti met CD Shah and his assistant Neha Shinde in 2013 to form three offshore businesses for her with the help of Dion Lily-White, a Gitanjali Gems officer in the UAE. CD Shah ran a firm called Magus Consultancy. Ms. Charing Cross Holdings Ltd, Ms. Colindale Holdings Ltd, and Hillingdon Holdings Ltd are the three offshore entities. Magus Consultancy provided nominee directors for all three businesses, while Al Shalmali acted as their registered agent. On November 24, 2013, Hillingdon Holdings was established in the Jabel Ali Free Zone, with Priti Choksi as the Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO).

According to the documents, Choksis wife was a willing participant in his unlawful operations and performed a key role in the overall scam. Priti Choski is accused of actively swindling PNB loot money through several shell firms. She allegedly used money from the PNB fraud to buy real estate in Dubai.

And in the meantime, according to lawyer Michael Polak, Mehul Choksis legal team in London has asked the Police Department under the universal jurisdiction rule to examine his alleged kidnapping from Antigua and Barbuda to Dominica.
The Twitter account of the scientist, who found an 'engineered-look' for Covid-19, has disappeared. The reason for it is yet to be found.

The Twitter account of Kristian Andersen, a Virologist of Scripps Research Institute, who told Dr. Anthony Fauci in an email that Covid looks engineered has disappeared. Before the account got deleted, the scientists email thread with Fauci was leaked on Twitter.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. The exchanges between Anderson and Fauci started as early as January 2020. They talked about the potential possibility of Covid-19 being engineered.

It is said that Andersen wrote in his email in support of the engineered theory: I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. However, at a later stage,in the month of March 2020, he, along with a couple of other scientists, stated that the Covid-19 virus was not purposefully manipulated.

The emails of Andersen and Fauci came to light as US President Joe Biden asked the intelligence agencies to speed up their investigation regarding Covid-19 origin. Fauci even said that he was not convinced with the findings that Covid-19 is a result of animal to human transmission. It added to what Dr. Li-Meng Yan and former President Donald Trump, believed to have  engineered origin for Covid-19. On June 3, Li- Meng Yan said that she emailed Fauci last year to state that covid-19 is not merely a natural occurrence. It is instead used as a bioweapon.

In addition to all these, a twitter spokesperson said that the account was deactivated by the user. No action was taken on Twitters part.
French President Emmanuel Macron states that NATO should work out a strategy for Russia and that China shouldn't be the priority. NATO allies are expected to meet for a summit in Brussels next week.

Nearly a year after stating the trans-Atlantic alliance as brain dead, French President Emmanuel Macron says that NATO still needs to have clarity regarding its strategic priorities. We need to know who our enemies are and where, Macron told a news conference. He added that NATO should work out a strategy regarding Russia and that China should not be the alliances priority.

He prioritises on a Russia strategy that is demanding, intractable even, when Russia launches incursions, cyber attacks or intimidates, but which also makes it possible to take into account the geography of Europe. It is expected that NATO allies will meet for a summit in Brussels next week.

Report says that a $20 billion plan will give NATO more flexibility in facing challenges like the rise of China and climate change. France resisted this move.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg suggested in the month of February that allies should put more money directly into existing, despite small common budgets. This can be considered as a response to the long-term tension existing with the United States. This further adds that the European allies have not contributed enough in their own defense.
The directive clearly showed Austins intent to supervise the DoDs China-related policies, operations and intelligence. President Joe Biden in last February announced the establishment of a task force. The task force did many interviews, reviews and in April finally submitted their primary assessment.

Llyod Austin, US Secretary of Defence, has recently addressed directives on challenges posed by China. Considering the final recommendation submitted by the DoD China Taskforce, Austin addressed a directive initiating several major Department-wise efforts to better address the security challenges posed by China. He also regarded it as the number one pacing challenge for the United States.

The initiatives I am putting forward today are nested inside the larger U.S. government approach to China and will help inform the development of the National Defense Strategy we are working on, said Secretary Austin. I am enormously proud of the work put forth by members of the China Task Force, Austin said. I asked a lot of them, and they delivered. Now it is time for us to move forward. The efforts I am directing today will improve the Departments ability to revitalize our network of allies and partners, bolster deterrence, and accelerate the development of new operational concepts, emerging capabilities, future force posture, and a modernized civilian and military workforce.

The directive clearly showed Austins intent to supervise the DoDs China-related policies, operations and intelligence as the Task Forces recommendations are incorporated into ongoing reviews and Department-wide processes.

President Joe Biden in last February announced the establishment of a task force which has a two-fold mission: to conduct a baseline assessment of China-related programs, policies, and processes at the Department of Defense; and to provide the Secretary with a set of top priorities and recommended courses of action for the Department.

During its tenure, the task force did many interviews, reviews and in April finally submitted their primary assessment to Secretary Austin and to DoD civilian and military leadership, including at the spring Senior Leaders Conference.

However, secretary Austin seemed to be thankful towards the force. I want to thank everyone on the Task Force for their hard work and the skill they lent to what was a sprint-like effort, said Austin. I especially want to note the leadership of Dr Ely Ratner, who superbly organized and managed this body of work. Now, it is up to the Department to get to work.
STAMFORD  The Hoyt Bedford apartments, a 350-unit complex across the street from the citys courthouse, has sold for approximately $99 million, in Stamfords second-largest property sale of 2021.

Located at 98-140 Hoyt St., Hoyt Bedford was acquired by Lakewood, N.J.-based Hoyt Bedford LP, according to city property records. A message left for Hoyt Bedford LP was not returned.

The seller was Stamford Apartment Co., which lists a business address in Freeport, N.Y. The firm declined to comment on the sale.

Hoyt Bedfords sale price compares with a total appraised parcel value of about $46 million, according to property records. Those records do not indicate the reasons for the disparity between the sale price and the appraisal value.

The sale generated $493,509 in local conveyance taxes. It was exempted from state conveyance taxes.

Hoyt Bedfords sale shows the sustained investor interest in Stamfords multifamily-housing market.

About three months ago, in the citys largest property sale so far this year, the 101 Park Place apartment complex in the South End sold for $105 million.

In April, The Fairfield apartments on the edge of the downtown changed hands for $84 million.

Also in April, the Harbor Landing apartment complex in the Waterside section sold for $73 million.

Local economic development officials have said that the multifamily-housing sector is boosting the single-family housing market, which has surged in the 16 months as buyers from New York City and other urban areas have sought out properties in suburban communities amid the coronavirus pandemic.

pschott@stamfordadvocate.com; twitter: @paulschott
MILFORD  The Connecticut Audubon Society is asking for help watching over endangered birds that nest at Milford Point, as repeated flooding wiped away a number of nests over Memorial Day weekend.

Piping plovers, American Oystercatchers, least terns and common terns, all considered endangered, threatened or of special concern in the state, nest on the sandbar at Milford Point, officials said in a statement.

But high tides during the full-moon period combined with a days-long storms washed away 14 nests there in recent days and eroded chunks of the sandbar, leaving the birds with significantly less space to nest.

Nine pairs of birds have been observed trying to make new nests, which means the nesting season might not be a total loss, officials said. But help from the public will be required to allow their fledgling efforts to succeed.

With a smaller area for the birds to nest on, a successful subsequent attempt will require Connecticut Audubon to increase patrols by coastal rangers, officials said. It also will require people who visit the sandbar to be extra careful to avoid nesting birds, and roosting migrant flocks, to obey the signs and fences, and to heed the suggestions of Connecticut Audubon staff who are patrolling the beach.

These birds all have small, vulnerable populations, and theyre protected by the federal and state government, Patrick Comins, executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society, said. We know that everybody cares about their well-being but that still requires visitors to observe the signs and fences weve put up to protect the birds, and to heed the instructions of our staff on the beach to keep your distance.

The nests of piping plovers are particularly well-camouflaged, officials said.

People walking along the beach can step on them or drive parents away from their nests, exposing the eggs to predators and the elements. The baby birds, once hatched, are also tiny, out on their own, and vulnerable to numerous threats.

Before the flooding, there were 13 pairs of piping plovers at Milford Point, 10 of which were nesting, along with four pairs of American Oystercatchers, officials said.

But storms and high tides left the sandbar nearly covered for three days when the water was high, according to Katerina Gillis, Connecticut Audubons coastal ranger at Milford Point.

You should see what it looks like right now  the spit is almost completely level with the water. It caused a lot of erosion, said Gillis in the release.

The piping plovers and one pair of Oystercatchers are now trying to nest again, officials said.

To give them the best chance, Connecticut Audubon will be working on a plan to increase patrols to help visitors avoid disturbing the birds.

Connecticut Audubon asks visitors to keep their distance from nesting and roosting birds. And if one of the Coastal Rangers asks you to keep your distance, please heed their advice, officials said.

According to Connecticut Audubon, Milford Point is one of the most important wildlife sanctuaries in New England, and one of the best birding locations, for diversity and abundance, with well over 300 species seen there, including more than 40 species of shorebird.

william.lambert@hearstmediact.com
House Majority Leader Jason Rojas was reminded of a bill that still hadnt been called in the House of Representatives when he pulled into the Capitol complex Wednesday morning, the last day of the legislative session.

Standing in his parking spot was the family of Corey Hausman, a Westport resident who died in 2018 after a skateboarding accident at the University of Colorado Boulder only 15 days into his freshman year, and the reason they were there was to urge the East Hartford Democrat to call Senate Bill 954.

The request was personal  the bill would require CT colleges and universities to include campus accidents that result in death or serious physical injury in the annual crime and safety report the institutions are required to provide data for.

No, pressure, right? Rojas joked minutes after the state House voted 131-0 on the legislation spurred by the family.

I work in higher education, so I know how personal and devastating these types of issues can be for families when they lose a child or experience some type of accidental injury when they are at college.

Months before the legislative session began, Nanette Hausman, Coreys mother, contacted Sen. Will Haskell, D-Westport, who at the time was the co-chair of the higher education committee, to share what happened to her son, leading to the creation of the bill.

During a March public hearing, Nanette and her husband Joel told the higher education committee that when they tried to find out how common student deaths and serious accidents are at the college Corey attended after his death, they learned that school did not have a finite number of how many kids died.

Under the Clery Act, colleges and universities that receive federal funding are required to submit a report that includes campus crime statistics. The crimes covered include homicides, sexual assault, destruction of property and weapons violations, but does not require them to include accidents that happen on campuses that result. in death or serious injuries.

This bill would change that in Connecticut by having colleges and universities add data on accidental deaths as a reporting requirement.

I believe that the universities, there is a lot of people that would benefit from this information, Nanette said during the hearing. I believe just reporting this one new number on a spreadsheet for the public for the school for everyone to see will help us drive the investment in safety that we need.

The bill overwhelmingly passed out of the Senate in April and received the same support when it was voted out of the House on Wednesday. The legislation now heads to the governors desk.

People like the lieutenant governor, the other day, pulled me aside [and said] were going to get Nanettes bill done,' Haskell said. The majority leader of the House of Representatives, when I went down to the House chamber today to thank him for calling the bill, he said, we need to make sure we get Nanette on the phone and tell her, because she really has created a memorable and incredibly touching story thats associated with this issue that sticks in the mind of every legislator up here.

The bill was a priority for Rojas as he headed into the final day of the legislative session, but when Hausmans family met him in his parking spot he was reminded why.

That is the human part of this process. I couldnt help but be moved, he said after the vote. He looked around to see if they were still standing outside the building, lobbying legislators to vote on the bill.

They werent.

I wish I could see them to tell them the news.
China passes law to protect status, rights of military personnel

(Global Times) 15:36, June 11, 2021

PLA Air Force soldiers stationed in Dandong, a Chinese city bordering North Korea, present flowers at a memorial hall on Fri as China commemorates the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Peoples Volunteers army entering the DPRK for the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea. Photo: Cui Meng/GT

A special law aiming to protect the dignity and rights of military personnel in China was approved on Thursday at the 29th session of the Standing Committee of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC).

No organization or individual may in any way slander or belittle the dignity of soldiers, insult or slander the honor of soldiers, and must not damage or defile the honors given to soldiers, Xinhua News Agency reported on Thursday.

The law says that honors obtained by a soldier shall be enjoyed for life, and shall not be revoked except for statutory reasons or through statutory procedures.

China implemented an amendment to the Criminal Law on March 1, regulating that those who infringe on the reputation and honor of martyrs, severely damage the dignity of martyrs, and damage the image of soldiers on the national border, should be prosecuted according to law.

On May 31, Qiu Ziming, known as "Labixiaoqiu" online, who has more than 2.5 million followers, received a jail term of eight months for defaming martyrs. It was China's first such reported case since a new amendment was attached to the Criminal Law.

In September 2016, a blogger was asked to make a public apologyafter he challenged the story of Qiu Shaoyun, a soldier who was said to have chosen to burn to death rather than betray the positions of his fellow soldiers during the Korean War (1950-53).

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Liang Jun)
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  California's governor denounced in starkly personal terms a federal judge's upending of the state's restrictions on assault weapons as officials announced the filing Thursday of a formal notice that they will appeal the decision.

They described last week's ruling by U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez as an outlier that conflicts with at least six other federal decisions upholding assault weapons laws in California and elsewhere, a ruling that is designed to get the issue before a recently more conservative U.S. Supreme Court.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, the son of a judge, denounced Benitez as a stone cold ideologue. He is a wholly owned subsidiary of the gun lobby of the National Rifle Association.

The state already is appealing the same judge's 2017 ruling against the states nearly two-decade-old ban on the sales and purchases of magazines holding more than 10 bullets, and his ruling last year blocking a 2019 California law requiring background checks for anyone buying ammunition.

We need to call this federal judge out. He will continue to do damage, mark my word, Newsom said. This is a very focused agenda to work through this judge, where the decision's already made before its even presented, who writes press releases on behalf of the gun lobby.

Gun owners rights groups have made no secret of their effort to get firearms restrictions before the nations high court.

But the Firearms Policy Coalition, which led plaintiffs who won at the trial level, condemned the governor's outrageous and callous personal attacks on the judge.

Newsoms verbal assaults on a long-respected member of the judiciary shows his deep and continuing disrespect for the rule of law, the judiciary, the Constitution, and the human rights of California citizens, the group said.

Benitez was appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, and Newsom, a Democrat, also assailed Republicans who don't support gun restrictions.

A three-judge appeals court panel agreed with Benitez on his ammunition magazine ruling, but the decision is being reconsidered by a larger appellate panel.

Attorney General Rob Bonta filed the three-page notice of appeal and plans to ask the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for a stay so the current 32-year assault weapons ban will remain in effect throughout the appeals process.

Benitez ruled on Friday that the states definition of illegal military-style rifles violates the U.S. Constitution because it deprives law-abiding Californians of weapons commonly allowed in most other states.

Critics of the ruling including Bonta and Newsom were particularly upset with the judge's comparison of assault weapons to a common tool: "Like the Swiss Army knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment. Good for both home and battle, the judge wrote.

Pocket knives were not intended to kill as many people as possible," said Mattie Scott, Brady California state president, whose 24-year-old son was killed with an assault weapon in 1996.

State officials announced their appeal at San Francisco General Hospital, a Level I Trauma Center, where trauma surgeon Dr. Andre Campbell vividly described the damage that can be done by a high-speed rifle round fired from an assault weapon.

An AR-15 is a weapon of mass destruction ... used in warfare," Campbell said. It causes absolute devastation to the human body. It is as if a bomb went off in the tissues of the patient."

California first banned specific brands of weapons in 1989 after a mass shooting at a Stockton elementary school killed five children and injured more than two dozen others. The state has updated the law several times since then and overall has some of the nation's strictest firearms laws.

As a result, we have one of the lowest gun death rates in the entire country, said Robyn Thomas, executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

The Firearms Policy Coalition said it will oppose any stay of Benitez' order. It had argued in part that assault weapons are no more deadly than some other weapons that are not banned by the state.

The States desire to continue imposing its ban should not be allowed to prevail over the fundamental rights of law-abiding gun owners, the group said.

Newsom and Bonta, both Democrats, are longtime supporters of what they term commonsense gun restrictions. The governor likely faces a recall election this fall largely driven by his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Bonta took office in April to fill a vacancy and faces several more conservative challengers in next year's election.

Their move was backed earlier by 10 Democratic state lawmakers who said the restrictions help control gun violence.

Democrats who control the state Assembly on Thursday revived for future consideration a bill that would raise taxes on the sale of guns and ammunition.

The bill requires a two-thirds vote because it would raise taxes, and last week it failed to muster enough votes. It would impose a 10% tax on the sales price of handguns and an 11% tax on the sales price of rifles, precursor parts and ammunition, using the money for gun violence prevention and recovery programs.

___

Associated Press writer Adam Beam contributed to this story.
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP)  How can governments keep multinational companies from avoiding taxes by shifting profits to subsidiaries in low-tax countries?

Years of international discussion over the issue gathered momentum after U.S. President Joe Biden proposed a global minimum corporate tax rate of at least 15% and possibly higher. The Biden proposal has found support among the Group of Seven wealthy democracies, raising the prospect that a new approach to international taxation might be reached this year.

That, at least, is the goal set by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, which is overseeing talks among more than 135 countries.

Here are some key questions:

___

WHAT IS A GLOBAL MINIMUM CORPORATE TAX?

Countries would change their tax laws so that if their companies profits go untaxed or lightly taxed offshore, the company would face an additional, top-up tax back home to bring its rate up to the minimum.

That would remove the incentive for companies to shift profits to low-tax countries, so the thinking goes, because if those companies escape taxes abroad, they would have to pay it at home anyway. And the minimum would weaken the motivation for countries to enact rock-bottom tax rates to attract companies in the first place.

At home, Biden has proposed raising the U.S. tax rate on companies foreign earnings to 21%. This would mark an increase from legislation passed under his predecessor Donald Trump, which had a range of 10.5% to 13.125%. Critics argued that the overseas rate passed under Trump, coupled with exemptions, was too low to deter corporations from profit-shifting.

Even if the U.S. rate winds up above the global rate, the difference could be small enough to eliminate most room for tax manipulation.

___

HOW BIG IS THE PROBLEM?

For decades, corporate earnings have been migrating to tax havens, often through complex avoidance schemes. From 1985 to 2018, the global average corporate tax rate fell from 49% to 24%. And by 2000-2018, U.S. companies booked half of all foreign profits in just seven low-tax jurisdictions: Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Singapore and Switzerland. Though small countries levy a low rate, they may capture what is for them significant revenue.

And theres some money at stake to be sure. U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has asserted that that a global minimum would end a destructive race to the bottom in international taxation. According to the London-based Tax Justice Network advocacy group, governments lose $245 billion annually to tax havens. If that money were instead available to governments, they could use it for, among other things, managing their heavy costs for pandemic relief.

___

HOW DOES THIS AFFECT ORDINARY PEOPLE?

Several ways. Taxes on the earnings of multinational companies are ultimately paid by the shareholders in those companies  a group that is, in general, wealthier than average. As the tax load on corporate revenue has declined, the overall tax burden has tended to shift to wages and labor  in other words, from generally affluent shareholders to ordinary workers. Another reason to care: According to the OECD, large companies that operate across borders enjoy an unfair competitive advantage by capitalizing on international tax avoidance strategies that arent available to local-only companies.

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HOW DO COMPANIES MOVE PROFITS TO FIND THE LOWEST TAX RATE?

Though some tax avoidance schemes are illicit, most are perfectly legal. Part of the issue is the nature of the modern economy: It is increasingly based on intangible assets, like trademarks, software and other intellectual property. Those are easier to move around than tangible assets, such as factories.

One way of shifting tax liability is through a profit-sharing agreement. This involves assigning a share of costs and profits to a subsidiary in a low-tax jurisdiction. Another way is to attach earnings from copyrighted software or other intellectual property to legal entities in tax havens.

___

THE DISPUTE OVER DIGITAL TAXES

One part of the OECD talks has focused on taxing companies that do business in countries where, often because the companies businesses are Internet-based, they have no physical presence and thus pay little or no tax on those sales. France has passed a 3% digital services tax on revenue that is deemed to have been earned by big companies in France  a measure aimed at U.S. tech giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon. Other countries have followed suit. Washington, though, has branded such unilateral taxes as improper trade practices that unfairly target U.S. companies.

The Biden administration has proposed to resolve the issue by producing a list of 100 of the worlds biggest and most profitable companies  no matter what their line of business  and letting countries tax them based on their local sales. The idea would be for other countries to repeal their unilateral digital taxes and end the trade tensions they incite.

___

WHERE DOES THIS PROCESS GO FROM HERE?

Any agreement faces hurdles. One key sticking point could be where to set the global minimum rate. Low-tax countries such as Ireland, which are also part of the talks, may resist a higher rate. Advocates such as the Tax Justice Network say 15% is too low and would severely limit revenue gains.

Another contentious issue is how to define the list of the biggest and most profitable enterprises, and how to resolve disputes if countries disagree over what share of their profits each can tax. The G-7 finance ministers who met in London June 4-5 left their position on those issues blank, to be filled in later.

Any deal could come at a meeting of the countries in the OECD process this summer, followed by endorsement by the Group of 20 finance ministers meeting in Venice in July and then a final decision at the G-20 leaders summit in October in Rome. Meanwhile Biden would need Congress to approve his proposed U.S. rate.

Even if theres no negotiated global agreement to sign, coordinated unilateral action by governments could, in effect, impose a minimum tax. If enough major economies that are home to multinationals, like the United States and large European countries, make clear that they will tax profits stashed in tax havens, this could achieve much of what the talks are intended to do.
LAS VEGAS (AP)  Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak on Friday signed a law that would make Nevada the first state to vote in the 2024 presidential primary contests, bumping Iowa and New Hampshire from their leadoff spots.

Signing the law is a gamble.

It's likely to set off maneuvering by other states, especially Iowa and New Hampshire, to move up their contests. The national political parties would need to agree to changes in the calendar, or state parties could risk losing their delegates at presidential nominating conventions.

The Democratic National Committee has not yet signaled whether it would support the calendar shakeup and isn't expected to start writing rules for its nominating process until next year. Republicans in four early presidential nominating states this week all jointly opposed the move, saying they're committed to preserving the historic schedule.

Democrats in Nevada, including former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, launched the push this year to boost their state after the 2020 primary contest left members of the party questioning the process. They noted Iowa's problem-plagued caucuses and the fact that the two traditional early states are overwhelmingly white, unlike Nevada.

Before he went on to win his party's nomination, President Joe Biden performed poorly in Iowa's caucuses and New Hampshire's primary. In Nevada, with a much more racially diverse population that mirrors the U.S. as a whole, he finished second.

That gave Biden momentum heading into South Carolina's primary, which then catapulted him to a string of Super Tuesday victories.

The new law changes Nevadas contest from a party-run, in-person caucus meeting to a government-run primary election. Democrats nationally started shifting away from caucuses to primaries before 2020, citing the difficulty of attending an in-person meeting and the fiddly math involved to determine who wins the most delegates.

The law will require the presidential primary to be held on the first Tuesday in February in a presidential election year.

Nevada represents a diverse constituency that presidential candidates need to talk to. It is not just for us. It is for candidates to vet their issues and communicate with the kind of communities that theyre going to be asking to vote for them in the national presidential election, Jason Frierson, the Nevada speaker of the House who pushed the change, said Friday at a bill signing ceremony in Las Vegas.

Frierson said he's confident Nevada can make its case and persuade both national parties to let it go first. He said those conversations have already started and will continue, but he did not offer more details.

Iowa and New Hampshire have signaled they're willing to fight to protect their status. New Hampshire has a state law requiring its presidential primary to be held at least seven days ahead of any other similar contest. The law also gives the New Hampshire secretary of state the exclusive power to set the primary date.

Harry Reids been doing this for over half a century now, and were just waiting for him to run out of steam, said New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, a Democrat who's served as the state's top election official since 1976.

Given that two of the last four New Hampshire primaries have been in January, Nevada shouldnt count on being first with a February date, he said.

It could be the seventh, Gardner said Friday.

Racially diverse South Carolina could make a bid to move up as well. The Southern state is seen as a bellwether for candidates abilities to appeal to Black voters, who play a key role in the Democratic electorate. The state has the benefit of one of its own, Jaime Harrison, as the new chair of the Democratic National Committee.

We are going to continue to let the process play out, as it does every four years, and look forward to hearing the insight and recommendations from all interested parties on the 2020 reforms, and on the 2024 calendar at the appropriate time in the process," Harrison said in a statement Friday.

Biden has a huge influence on the process as head of the party, but its not clear where he stands on shaking up the calendar. White House press secretary Jen Psaki declined this week to comment on the order of presidential primary contests.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, a mentor of Harrison's who is also a close ally of Biden's, told The Associated Press in an interview this month that there is clear and convincing evidence that having Iowa and New Hampshire create candidate momentum is not a good thing.

Those candidates on both sides  Democrats and Republicans  have not fared well when they get into the general elections," Clyburn said.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu said Nevada's maneuvers to be first in the nation were futile.

The New Hampshire presidential primary will remain first in the nation," the Republican governor declared. "What happens in Nevada stays in Nevada.

___

Associated Press writers Darlene Superville in Washington, Holly Ramer in Concord, N.H., and Meg Kinnard in Columbia, S.C., contributed to this report.
The pandemic made everyone into a worse driver. Alternatively, the traffic jams we all complain about likely save thousands of lives a year.

Recently released federal data showed traffic deaths were up 7 percent in 2020 compared to a year earlier, despite lockdowns keeping many people off the roads. Fatal accidents were caused by people who were, among other problems, more likely to be speeding, which is an unfortunate consequence of wide-open highways.

The past year showed that many people (though far from all) can do their jobs and buy groceries without leaving home, which is a net gain for their safety. But because of the way our towns are laid out, if you want to socialize with anyone outside of your immediate family youre very likely going to need to drive to do it. Connecticut doesnt offer much in the way of non-auto-dependent lifestyle, meaning everyone is at some level of risk every time they leave home.

The recently concluded legislative session offered a few opportunities to change that calculus, with bills to increase pedestrian safety and, separately, make driving cost more as a means to cut emissions. As is their wont, our elected leaders found a way to underwhelm in spectacular fashion, passing a safety bill that, while welcome, doesnt change a whole lot, and by declining to act at all on the climate proposal.

The pedestrian safety bill allows communities more say in setting lower speed limits and puts increased onus on drivers to keep pedestrians safe. But as Trumbull resident Thomas Broderick wrote in a CT Mirror essay, unless the bill is paired with changes to our road design and zoning, our streets will continue to be dangerous places for pedestrians and cyclists. Our roads, with few exceptions, are designed for cars, not people.

Then there was the Transportation Climate Initiative, touted all year by environmental groups and the governor as a way forward on the most pressing policy challenge of our time. Republicans fought it, calling it a gas task. Democrats, who control both chambers by wide margins, decided to walk away from the plan, apparently worried theyd be accused of costing people money.

Maybe next year. Surely the climate will wait around for us to act.

TCI would have imposed fees on fuel producers, with the proceeds, more than $60 million per year, to go toward encouraging transit of a less-polluting variety  trains, bike trails, electric vehicle charging stations, that sort of thing.

The failure of TCI is simultaneously shocking, given that nearly everyone in a position of authority proclaimed it to be a good idea, and also retroactively predictable. It followed a similar trajectory as highway tolls, the issue that dominated much of Gov. Ned Lamonts early tenure, which similarly died not because legislators think its bad policy but because they dont want to be blamed for increasing the cost of anything.

A release from the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters placed the blame on one person  the top Senate Democrat. Martin Looney is singlehandedly blocking the Transportation Climate Initiative, the group said in the sessions waning days.

Looney was quoted referring to TCI as a tax, which environmental advocates dont like, because calling it a tax makes it politically unpalatable. No matter what you call it, though, increasing the price of gasoline hits harder for people with lower incomes.

Looney linked the governors pledge not to raise taxes on the rich to the death of TCI. If were not talking revenues, then were not talking revenues, Looney said, with the implication that if anyone should be asked to pay for meaningful reforms, its not the people at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Its a fair point. Plenty of people who said there was no reason to raise taxes in 2021 were perfectly fine asking the poorest in the state to pay more to get around.

But now were in a situation where even a modest step toward cutting emissions in a state dominated by Democrats is impossible, all because theyre worried about accusations of hiking taxes.

Not that Republicans were any better. This is not about environmental policies, this is about pick-pocketing the residents of Connecticut, said House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora, helpful as always. Connecticut Republicans continue to shine with a positive vision for the state.

Connecticut is suburban-centric, with cars just about the only way to get around. It works for many people, but far from everyone, and also presents safety risks and environmental challenges. Given the record in the recently concluded legislative session, these are problems we appear wholly incapable of solving.

Hugh Bailey is editorial page editor of the New Have Register and Connecticut Post. He can be reached at hbailey@hearstmediact.com.
Gov. Ned Lamont signed into a law Thursday a controversial bill that wipes out the records of criminal convictions after 10 years, including some felonies  but his approval has strings attached.

The law is seen by supporters as a major step toward criminal justice reform, and by opponents as a violation of victims rights.

The governor delayed acting on the so-called clean slate bill, and formally asked for a fix, because he was concerned about a firearms provision, as reported last week by Hearst Connecticut Media. A person convicted of illegally possessing a firearm, a Class D felony, could have that record expunged after 10 years  then apply for a gun permit.

Lamont didnt like that, especially because it didnt make an exception for illegal possession at a school.

In a letter to lawmakers Thursday, Lamont said he is concerned that more felonies were not excluded from the legislation and that the erased records will not be available to criminal justice agencies to consider in determining whether to issue a gun permit or to the Judicial Branch in the event the individual is someday back in court.

Without offering any specifics, he added, I call on the legislature to address these concerns.

The bill maintains Connecticut as a national leader in criminal justice reform, Lamont said, and addresses well-documented collateral consequences of a criminal conviction and lowers barriers for people seeking to move on with their life and past their involvement with the criminal justice system.

Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, the chief sponsor of the bill, did not respond to a request seeking reaction to the signing and the request for the fix.

Starting in 2023, people convicted of most misdemeanors and class D and class E felonies will have the charges expunged from their records after seven or 10 years from the time of conviction, depending on the charge, if they dont commit any other crimes, even minor ones, during that time period.

The bill does not include convictions involving the actual use of a firearm  only illegal possession  nor, for the most part, crimes involving children and other vulnerable victims, nor violent crimes.

Lamont was wary of the legislation from the start, preferring to begin with a smaller set of misdemeanors before branching out to felony convictions  an idea that drew some Republican support.

If he had vetoed the bill, he would have faced harsh and potentially lasting backlash from advocates  including the most influential lawmakers from the cities that Lamont or any Democrat needs in order to win election in Connecticut.

Republicans criticized the bill for its reach, saying the measure applied to a broad list of crimes including hate crimes and illegally possessing a firearm, which could apply to a student who brought a gun to school. An earlier version adopted by the Senate had to be amended because some Democrats House thought it went too far.

If you bring a firearm with you to school, that shouldnt just disappear, Rep. Jason Perillo, R-Shelton, said recently. There are a lot of legislators here that are concerned about that, and if you asked 100 residents in the state of Connecticut how they felt about that, the vast majority would be opposed.

Perillo singled out the clean slate bill Thursday as an example of overreach by Democrats in a year when, he and House GOP Leader Vincent Candelora said, debates were skewed by coronavirus restrictions keeping legislators in separated silos.

Rep. Rep. Steve Stafstrom, D-Bridgeport, during the debate in the House a few weeks ago, emphasized the checks and balances that would still be in place if someone, charged with illegal possession of a firearm, went to apply for a pistol permit after the conviction was wiped clean.

The person would still need to pass a background check and suitability review, and maintain a pristine record for a decade, he said.

julia.bergman@hearstmediact.com
CHICAGO (AP)  Illinois Democrats used inadequate data and an opaque process to draw new legislative districts, a Latino civil rights organization argued in the latest lawsuit seeking to block the maps from being used for statehouse elections over the next decade.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund sued top Democrats and state election officials late Thursday on behalf of five Latino registered voters from Illinois, saying the new maps are malapportioned, or not drawn to ensure equal representation of all populations. That could result in Latinos and other minority groups not being equitably represented in the Illinois General Assembly, according to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago.

Top Illinois Republicans also challenged the maps this week in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Chicago after Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the new boundaries into law despite a campaign pledge not to approve politician-drawn districts. The Democratic-controlled Legislature late last month approved the maps  drawn to favor Democrats  with all Republicans voting no.

Pritzker and other Democrats who control Illinois state government dismissed the GOP lawsuit as partisan politics and said the maps are fair because they "ensure representation for diverse communities. But the challenge from MALDEF expands the source of objections to the very groups whose voting rights Democrats say they are protecting.

The answer is we don't know, said Thomas Saenz, MALDEF president and general counsel. We don't know because of a lack of data and because of using wrong data.

The group is suing Pritzker, House Speaker Emanuel Chris Welch, Senate President Don Harmon and members of the Illinois State Board of Elections. A Pritzker spokeswoman said the governor believes that these maps preserve electoral power and fair representation for diverse communities.

The lawsuit asks the court to order lawmakers to throw out the maps and to draw new maps using 2020 census data.

By law, political maps must be redrawn after each decennial census to reflect changes in population and ensure the protection of voters rights. The districts must be compact, contiguous and of equal population, among other things.

Historically, districts have been drawn using data from the latest census, which counts an area's population down to a block level. That provides detailed data on where district boundaries may be drawn to ensure maps comply with the one-person, one-vote standard mandated by the Constitution, the lawsuit states. But the pandemic delayed the count this year, and the U.S. Census Bureau has said it won't have data available to help with redistricting until August.

In Illinois, if the governor doesn't sign legislation establishing new maps by June 30 the job shifts to a bipartisan commission. So Democrats, citing June 30 as their deadline, used the American Community Survey to draw the boundaries  something MALDEF and more than 50 other human and civil rights organizations have opposed.

Unlike the census, which seeks to count each person, the ACS is an annual sample of a fraction of households used to estimate household characteristics, such as education level and household income. The estimates used by the General Assembly come from data gathered over a five-year period, making it less current than the census, MALDEF argues.

Saenz said he's concerned about getting an accurate count because if Latino residents are overrepresented in a district it's a missed opportunity and obligation to create another Latino district. There is no way to know for sure if Illinois Democrats accurately drew the lines  or for residents to weigh in on them  because the full data for each district hasn't been released, he said.

Pritzker said during his 2018 campaign for governor that an independent commission should draw political boundaries and that he would veto politician-drawn maps. But he noted in recent weeks that no commission had materialized and instead promised to veto any map that was unfair.

Upon signing the new maps, Pritzker said they align with both the federal and state Voting Rights Acts, and that they ensure that communities that have been left out and left behind have fair representation in our government.

Most states are waiting for the census data to draw new maps. In Oregon, where Democrats also control both chambers of the Legislature, lawmakers faced a July 1 deadline for new maps but the state Supreme Court granted a bipartisan request to extend the deadline.

The Illinois Legislature did not approve new boundaries for congressional districts, with Democratic leaders saying they will wait for census data to draw those maps. Under Illinois law, Democrats do not lose control over federal map drawing after June 30.
NEW HAVEN  Allowing accessory dwelling units attached to or on the same property as existing homes may seem like an innovative way to increase housing, and affordable housing in the city, but the City Plan Commission discovered that its not without mines and pitfalls.

While many of its suburban neighbors long ago approved accessory dwelling units, or ADUs  sometimes nicknamed mother-in-law apartments  as a way to keep elderly residents at home with their families, residents from several city neighborhoods are questioning parking, density, whether the proposal would do what it aims to, and whether it might simply provide a way for large absentee landlords to further increase their housing stock.

City Plan Director Aicha Woods said this week that the proposal to allow ADUs without requiring additional parking, and reduce minimum lot size from 5,400 square feet to 4,000 square feet, was part of a larger zoning proposal that came out a list of Affordable Housing Task Force recommendations.

Its goals include to increase the number of affordable housing choices in the city, provide housing that responds to changing family needs, provide accessible housing for seniors and people with disabilities, and increase the amount of housing in the city while respecting the historical fabric of neighborhoods, Woods said.

She called it one small measure in creating additional housing options in the city. ADUs can be either attached basement or attic units or detached garages or carriage houses, but in all cases are within the same envelope as an existing structure, Woods said.

The purpose and intent ... is to increase affordable housing choices for people of all income levels and in all neighborhoods, Wood said. ... It provides accessible housing for seniors and people of all ages. Its a very sustainable approach ... and brings illegal units into compliance.

ADUs have been part of our city for a long time, but this change would bring them more into compliance, she said.

Several speakers at a hearing raised questions, particularly because while the first phase envisioned by city staff would require owner occupancy of one of the units, a later phase might remove that requirement.

James Paley of Neighborhood Housing Services told the commission he fears that ADUs might be abused by some larger property management companies that are becoming increasingly prevalent in New Haven. He also said the density of the neighborhood should be taken into consideration. This is not a one-size-fits-all situation.

Several concerns were raised by residents of the Hill section, which is among the densest sections of New Haven.

Theres a lot of property being purchased in recent years by big companies ... and the rents are not affordable, said Howard Avenue resident Teysha Poindexter.

Wilson Street resident Pamela Delerme said, I kind of object to a blanket approval for the whole city.

In this densely-populated area where she lives, everybody does not have the luxury of off-street parking. To add some additional units where there is no additional parking would simply make it more dense, she said. I dont think its fair.

Howard Avenue resident Claudette Kidd said ADUs are needed. She said

hundreds of families are facing eviction and currently, we do not have enough housing. This is why Im in favor of accessory dwelling units, she said. This can also (provide) opportunities for the landlords to have legal rooming houses, which she thinks would be a good idea.

A Hill resident named Angela said she was not against ADUs as an idea, but said in the Hill South section where she lives, our houses are so close together. ... If you dont have a parking requirement with these ADUs, youre aggravating an existing problem. ... Youre just inviting trouble.

She also had a problem with decreasing minimum lot size to 4,000 square feet. Right now, we can hear each others phone conversations when were in our house, she said. We are a dense neighborhood!

City Point resident Anna Mariotti asked for clarification as to whether ADUs would be solely owner-occupied or would include larger companies.

Woods reiterated that the current proposal would include an owner-occupancy restriction at least for the first phase.

Donnell Hilton, who is building a second dwelling unit on his Parkside Drive property off Valley Street, spoke in favor of the proposal, which he said hes able to keep affordable because hes doing the construction himself.

It gives people like me a chance to give back, he said.

Quinnipiac Avenue resident Chris Ozyck wondered if you can separate out decreasing lot size from modifications of an existing building. He said he thinks the system as it stands has been working for people.

Ozyck said he would prefer ADUs be owner-occupied because I personally think that homeowners are directly accountable to their tenants. ... When you have and absentee landlord, you dont have the same quality housing.

Anstress Farwell, president of the New Haven Urban Design League , told the commission, Weve advocated for ADUs for a long time. ... Its really a great step in the right direction.

She said it could be helpful to do more public outreach before the proposal goes to the Board of Alders, however, because this is such a major change to our zoning.

Central Avenue resident Donna Hall, who works for City Plan as a senior project planner but spoke as a resident, expressed concerns about the proposal, including that the owner-occupancy requirement might be eliminated in a later phase.

I think this is trying to solve a problem that New Haven doesnt have, Hall said. While the stated intent is that its to broaden housing choices, I think that one of New Havens greatest strengths already is the great number of housing choices.

The ADU proposal will eliminate single-family houses in all zones, she said.

Beyond that, I dont see anything in the proposal that relates to affordability, at all, Hall said. I dont see how an accessory dwelling unity on St. Ronan Street or Westville is going to be affordable when the rents in those areas are not affordable, she said.

I really dont see what the benefits are of taking the very last single-family neighborhoods that we have left in New Haven and making them multifamily, too, Hall said. I think its solving a problem that we do not have.

With regard to owner-occupancy, I think its not completely honest to say that this is not a valid concern when the intent is to take this in the future and say that ... developers and investors will be able to build ADUs that are not owner-occupied, Hall said.

I think it really needs more thought. ... I think it needs more work, she said.

Zoning attorney Ben Trachten said he has no issue at all with the minimum lot size, but said he bought his home in Westville, and paid a premium for it, with the expectation of reduced density ... and this proposal would thwart that.

... Im deeply opposed to the proposal for ADU. ... They have all sort of unintended consequences, Trachten said.

I dont believe that the current proposal will create any additional accessory units, he said. The type of units that are going to be created are going to be luxury units within single-family houses which then are going to be rented at premium prices.

Among letters the commission received was one in favor of ADUs from the Rev. Heidi Thorsen, assistant rector of Trinity Church on the Green.

Yale Law School professor Anika Singh Lemar, meanwhile, submitted a letter suggesting that the owner-occupancy requirement  which one of the citys lawyers later told the commission currently is in place in neighboring Woodbridge and Branford, among others  is unlawful on its face.

Such requirements are in contravention of state law, Lemar wrote. New Haven can only exercise those zoning powers authorized by the state. Notably, nothing in Connecticuts zoning enabling act (Section 8-2 et seq of the Connecticut General Statutes) entitles towns to regulate whether a home (or the housing unit to which that home is attached) is rented or owned.

Second, such requirements violate the federal and state Fair Housing Acts, Lemar wrote. As a result of centuries of racism and segregation, there is a massive racial wealth gap as well as a homeownership gap in this country. Any policy that favors homeowners at the expense of renters imposes a disparate impact on people of color and other protected classes, the members of which are less likely to be homeowners.

She attached an additional letter, submitted to the General Assembly in connection with the legislatures recent passage of ADU legislation, that makes this argument on behalf of myself, the Connecticut Fair Housing Center, and the Open Communities Alliance.

The City Plan Commission, which was referred the plan to offer an opinion to the Board of Alders, took no action during a nearly four-hour public hearing and Zoom meeting this week. It will take the matter up again at its regular meeting at 6 p.m. June 16.

mark.zaretsky@hearstmediact.com
NEW HAVEN  The tenants were ready to move into the renovated building, but there was one problem: There was no certificate of occupancy.

The apartment complex at 66 Norton St. made news in February 2017 when the original tenants, with only a few hours notice, were ordered out because of structural problems uncovered in a routine city inspection.

Those problems included severely notched and unsupported floor joists, as well as buckling cast-iron waste pipes, officials said, noting they appeared to be supporting the structural load.

Building Official Jim Turcio Thursday said only two of four floors have passed electrical inspections to date, the owner was still working on the fire alarms and the fire escape work was not finished.

A spokesperson at Paris Realty confirmed that 11 tenants, who were planning to move in on June 1, have not been able to do so.

They jumped the gun, Turcio said.

Messages seeking comment left for Mendy Paris at the realty company and the owner of the apartments, Michael Zolty of Brooklyn, were not returned.

In an article in the New Haven Independent, both men blamed the city for being hard to reach on inspections.

Turcio disagreed and said his staff had made 61 visits to the apartments, where, often, after making an appointment, the work was not ready to be inspected or it failed an inspection.

The building official said his staff worked through the pandemic.

A ... job like that should take half as many inspections, Turcio said.

What is adding the most time was an inspection on June 1 by personnel in the fire marshals office in which Jennifer Forslund, the deputy fire marshal, ordered extensive repairs to the fire escape, officials said.

The city had been sent a report in November by an engineer, according to city documents, where he submitted a one-page review of the rear fire escape initially declaring it structurally sound.

But in a June 3 letter to Forslund, the initial inspection letter was retracted and the letter listed more than two pages of detailed work on the fire escape that should be undertaken.

The work includes: replacing all of the first-floor steel framing; directions on repairing holes; extensive welding and masonry work; at the railings, make sure the pin attachment to the wall is cemented using hydraulic cement.

Turcio said his staff does not drop in unannounced on projects. He said three of his staff members have gone to other employment, while one retired.

Asked whether he needed more help, Turcio said that is something he would never say no to.

We are doing over 10,000 inspections a year in the city, he said. We are all doing five to six inspections a day.

The city of New Haven, the building department and the Fire Department, we take our jobs seriously, Turcio said. We look at everything.

The building inspector said all the serious internal structural problems have been repaired and it wont be long before the missing work is completed on the 100-year old structure, now upgraded from low-income apartments.
MADRID (AP)  Spain is in shock after investigators combing the seabed near the Canary Islands found the body of one of two young sisters taken by their father weeks earlier without the mother's permission.

Coroners have confirmed that the body found in a bag and tied to an anchor at a depth of some 1,000 meters (3,200 feet) belonged to 6-year-old Olivia, the older of the two sisters.

Another similar bag that was empty was found nearby by a special oceanographic research vessel helping in the search, Spain's Civil Guard said, adding that the search for 1-year-old Anna and their father, Tomas Gimeno, is still ongoing.

Numerous political figures and civil society groups on Friday condemned Olivias death and showed support for the girls mother, Beatriz Zimmermann.

I cannot imagine the pain of the mother of little Anna and Olivia, tweeted Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. My hug, my love and that of my whole family, who today sympathizes with Beatriz and her loved ones.

Gimeno and the girls went missing on April 27 in Tenerife, the largest island in the archipelago off West Africa.

Their mother, who is divorced from the girls' father, alleged he told her she would never see them again.

Investigators launched a wide search on land and sea but narrowed in on the waters off Tenerife after Gimeno's boat was found empty and drifting at sea.

Interpol also joined the search, publishing the photographs of the two girls and issuing so-called yellow notices" aimed at locating missing persons.

The girls mother had posted several videos of her daughters online in an effort to help find them.

Speaking at a womens forum on Friday, Queen Letizia expressed pain and sadness for the deaths of Olivia and a 17-year-old woman killed by her partner in southern Spain earlier this week.

I dont think there is anyone this morning who is not trying to put themselves in the shoes of the people who love these murdered girls, Letizia said.

Womens rights organizations have called for protests later on Friday across Spain against the recent uptick of violence against women.

Men have killed at least 18 women so far this year in Spain, according to data from the Equality Ministry, which has recorded 1,096 deaths since 2003, when the country started keeping data on crimes of gender violence. Abusers often use children as means to inflict harm on their partners or ex-partners: since 2013, 39 minors have been murdered in the country by their biological fathers.
A student was killed in an attack by gunmen on Nuhu Bamalli Polytechnic, Zaria, Kaduna state. The main campus better known as UPE ...

A student was killed in an attack by gunmen on Nuhu Bamalli Polytechnic, Zaria, Kaduna state.

The main campus better known as UPE and located along an expressway just at the entrance of Zaria was attacked on Thursday night.

Zaria is about 45 minutes drive from Kaduna metropolis.

The Kaduna state government confirmed the attack, promising further update on the development.

Habila Nasai and Adamu Shika, both lecturers, were said to have been abducted. The number of students kidnapped is not yet known.

A source said the gunmen who were in large numbers shot sporadically upon entering the school.

The bandits invaded our school at about 11pm yesterday (Thursday) and abducted two academic staff and three students. The wife and two children of a staff were also kidnapped but Alhamdullah they were released this morning (Friday), he said.

Two students were shot by the kidnappers, one of them, a HND II Statistics student, died this morning (Friday) while the other is receiving medical attention.

A statement issued by Aliyu Kofa, publicity secretary of the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnic (ASUP), said the wife of another lecturer, Ahmed Abdu, and two of his children were kidnapped but released on Friday morning.

He did not provide details as to how they were released, adding that two students sustained gunshot wounds.

One of them, Ahmed, from the department of statistics, died in the hospital from the injuries, Kofa said in the statement.

While the other is still receiving medical attention at the clinic.

The police in Kaduna state are yet to comment on the incident. Mohammed Jalige, spokesman of the command, did not repond to calls or to a text message sent to him.

This development comes after the abduction of students from the Federal College of Forestry Mechanisation in Afaka and Greenfield University  both in Kaduna.
The Kogi State Government has told those planning to protest in the State on Saturday, June 12, to desist or face the full wrath of the la...





The Kogi State Government has told those planning to protest in the State on Saturday, June 12, to desist or face the full wrath of the law.

Commodore Jerry Omodara, the State Security Adviser, gave the warning on Friday while briefing newsmen on the proposed nationwide protest by some aggrieved individuals in the country.

Omodara said the information at the governments disposal revealed that no group of persons have indicated interest to protest in any part of the State.

He said there is no reason for anyone to come out and protest in the state, adding that residents should go about their daily activities without fear or intimidation; stressing that whoever that protest in the State will have him or herself to blame.

Omodara maintained that Kogi State under the leadership of Gov. Yahaya Bello will not allow anyone to disrupt the peace the people are enjoying in the State; adding that the State Government would do all it can to maintain the prevailing peaceful atmosphere that exists.

Available data before us have shown that Kogi is the safest State in Nigeria. As we feel the pulse of the nation, we narrow it to Kogi. The pulse of the nation right now is that there are so many online reports of a nationwide protest on June 12th 2021.

We have looked at it, and we have done our check through the Commissioner of Police, and there is no association, group or individuals that have applied for permission to protest, or carry out any walk. The police have not granted any permission.

I have cross-checked with other security agencies, and we have seen that as a government, there is no reason for anyone to come out in Kogi or in any part of the State to protest on Saturday, June 12.

It is a known fact that the State has remained peaceful. When it was Covid-19 time, the government did not shut down the State. We continued with our legitimate business.

When it was the time for EndSARS the Governor Alhaji Yahaya Bello came out to support the youths but the State didnt join the EndSARS protest.

This is because the government is with the people. If we are enjoying unlimited security in the State compared to what we are seeing in other parts of the country, it is important we give peace a chance.

I have also crosscheck with the student body and they met with the Commissioner of Police on Wednesday and they stated categorically that they wont be part of the protest. Any youth we see tomorrow Saturday coming out to protest should have himself to blame. The governor is not going to allow anyone to disrupt the peace we are enjoying in Kogi State, he said.

He, however, urged parents to warn their children and wards to give peace a chance, adding that the responsibility of the government is to continue to fight insecurity.

It is not that the challenges we are having in other States are not feeling it here, but the government is making a serious effort to nip them before they emanate.

Just three days ago, three suspects with army uniform came out in Ajaokuta Local Government, the security agency came out and confronted them, and they brought them down.

The Government will keep on appreciating what the people of Kogi State are doing. Giving us relevant information, as well as supporting the security agencies will go a long way in combating insecurities.

Let no one obstruct businesses, or obstruct the movement of people. This is a warning. I have instructed the security agencies. If you see them patrolling, dont be afraid. They are only going out to keep peace. People should continue their normal businesses he added.
The Lagos State Police Command on Friday said it was not aware of any planned protest to commemorate 2021 Democracy Day on June 12 and vow...

The Lagos State Police Command on Friday said it was not aware of any planned protest to commemorate 2021 Democracy Day on June 12 and vowed to quell any of such.

Acclaimed Yoruba activist, Sunday Igboho has told his members to be ready for massive protest on June 12, 2021 to demand for Yoruba nation.

But the police said the public should disregard any sit-at-home order called by certain groups which is being circulated in the social media.

A statement issued by Police Public Relations Officer, Lagos Police Command, Muyiwa Adejobi said residents should go about their lawful businesses as the police and other security agencies have made necessary arrangement to maintain law and order across the state.

The Lagos State Police Command wishes to state clearly that it is not aware of any planned protest in Lagos State to commemorate the 2021 Democracy Day on Saturday, 12th June, 2021.

In this regard, the Commissioner of Police, Lagos State, CP Hakeem Odumosu, therefore appeals to members of the public to disregard any sit-at-home order called by certain groups which is being circulated in the social media.

They should go about their lawful businesses as the police and other security agencies have made necessary arrangement to maintain law and order across the state.

While assuring the general public of adequate security of lives and property in Lagos State, the Commissioner of Police, reiterated that police personnel in the command will religiously discharge their duties within the ambit of the law, the statement said.
Niger Government has reiterated its continued commitment to bringing banditry and other forms of criminality to an end in the state. Alhaj...

Niger Government has reiterated its continued commitment to bringing banditry and other forms of criminality to an end in the state.

Alhaji Ahmed Matane, the Secretary to the State Government (SSG), said this when he received Victims Support Fund (VSF), an NGO, led by its Executive Director, Prof. Nana Tanko, in his office in Minna on Friday.

He said that the government was worried by the activities of bandits, kidnappers and cattle rustlers, and as such, it would leave no stone unturned in tackling the dastardly act in the state.

He expressed the governments readiness to partner with any non-governmental organisation toward fashioning out strategies that would forestall any breach of security in the state.

Matane said that seven local government areas in the state namely: Munya, Shiroro, Rafi, Mariga, Wushishi, Rijau and Mashegu were affected by banditry, kidnapping and cattle rustling.

He commended VSF members for their tremendous support to victims of insurgency, vulnerable persons and urged them not to relent as the act would assist in dealing with insurgency in the country.

Earlier in her remarks, Prof. Tanko said that VSF responded to urgent needs to promote community recovery and stability by facilitating the restoration of livelihood.

She said that VSF, which is a knowledge-driven and programme-based organisation, had also built a partnership for support and transformation of victims of terrorism and insurgency in Nigeria

The VSF entourage includes the Director-General, Niger State Emergency Management Agency, Alhaji Ibrahim Inga, and other directors of the agency.
Brigadier General Mohammed Yerima, Director of Army Public Relations said the rejig is in line with the Chief of Army Staffs vision to have...

Brigadier General Mohammed Yerima, Director of Army Public Relations said the rejig is in line with the Chief of Army Staffs vision to have the military arm ready to accomplish assigned missions.

Those affected include Major General FO Omoigui from Headquarters Theatre Command, Operation HADIN KAI to Land Forces Simulation Centre Nigeria and appointed Director-General; Major General CG Musa from Nigerian Army Resource Centre to Headquarters Theatre Command Operation HADIN KAI and appointed Theatre Commander; Major General OR Aiyenigba from Defence Headquarters to Headquarters Nigerian Army Corps of Military Police and appointed Provost Marshal (Army).

Major General IM Jallo from Defence Space Administration to Headquarters Theatre Command Operation HADIN KAI and appointed Deputy Theatre Commander 1; Brigadier General NU Muktar from Nigeria High Commission Islamabad to Office of the Chief of Army Staff and appointed Director of Procurement; Brigadier General O Nwachukwu from Defence Headquarters (Director Defence Information) to Headquarters Directorate of Army Public Relations and appointed Director.

The list includes Brigadier General AE Abubakar from Department of Training and Operations( Defunct) to Headquarters 22 Brigade and appointed Commander; Brigadier General KO Ukandu from Office of the Chief of Army Staff (Director Procurement) to National Defence College and appointed Directing Staff; Brigadier General IB Abubakar from Nigerian Army Armour School to Army Headquarters Department of Army Operations and appointed Deputy Director Operations.

Brigadier General AM Umar from Army War College Nigeria to Office of the Chief of Army Staff and appointed Chief of Staff to the Chief of Army Staff; Brigadier General AJS Gulani from Nigerian Army Armour School to Headquarters 24 Task Force Brigade and appointed Commander.

Also, Colonel KE Inyang from Headquarters Department of Army Logistics moves to Office of the Chief of Army Staff and is appointed Military Assistant to the Chief of Army Staff; Colonel OO Braimah from Headquarters Theatre Command Operation HADIN KAI to Nigeria High Commission Islamabad and appointed Defence Attache.

However, Colonel IP Omoke from Office of the Chief of Army Staff to Defence Intelligence Agency and was appointed Assistant Director Foreign Liaison/ Liaison Officer (Army).

Army Chief, Major General Faruk Yahaya urged the officers to justify the confidence reposed on them.

According to Yerima, all postings and appointments are with immediate effect.
Watertown, NY (13601)

Today

Mostly cloudy skies early, then partly cloudy in the afternoon. High 72F. Winds SW at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 57F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.
The Ashe Cultural Arts Center, a Black-operated gallery, theater, and community gathering place in Central City, has received a $3 million grant from the Warner Music Group/Blavatnik Family Foundation Social Justice Fund.

Ashe director Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes, said the money will be spent both on programs within the 22-year-old institution and racial equity activism elsewhere.

Ecclesiastes pointed out that, unlike some higher-profile arts and culture institutions that serve tourists, Ashe basically serves locals. Its an institution linked to our living, breathing creative culture bearers, she said.

Like many small, nonprofit arts and culture institutions in New Orleans, the management of Ashe stretches the annual budget of roughly $2.2 million as far as possible, covering staff payroll, overhead, maintenance and as much programming as possible.

+4 A new era begins at the Ashe Cultural Arts Center as poet, neighborhood advocate takes helm New Year's Day marks a watershed moment at the Ashe Cultural Arts Center, the busy Afrocentric institution on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard. C

You dont know how much youre worried, Ecclesiastes said of the financial constraints. The grant money makes you feel secure. The money will allow the center to build a financial reserve and to think about the future in a different way, she said.

Equity, Ecclesiastes said, is expensive.

The generous grant was established in June 2020 in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, during the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement. The selection process began just before the pandemic, when, Ecclesiastes said, she was interviewed for a Slate Magazine podcast about the future of cities.

After the podcast aired, she was contacted by Tulane University graduate Paul Henderson, a board member of the $100 million Warner Music Group/Blavatnik Family Foundation Social Justice Fund.

Ecclesiastes said that Henderson, the executive director of the San Francisco Department of Police Accountability, recalled the Ashe Center from his Tulane days and suggested the institution would qualify for a grant in the $50,000 range. Instead, Ecclesiastes boldly applied for millions. To her surprise, she said, We got the stamp of approval.

Ashe is located on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard, but the center is involved in projects across the city. Some of the grant money will be used to help bring Black-owned businesses back to the Claiborne Avenue corridor, to help guard Black residents from gentrification, to address lower life expectancy among Black people and to allow lower-income residents to invest in real estate developments in their neighborhoods.
The French Quarter restaurant Eat opened in the tumultuous year after Hurricane Katrina, part of a new wave of homegrown businesses to start up as the city rebuilt. It has now closed, but another restaurant is preparing to open in its place.

Wakin Bakin, the exquisitely-named breakfast spot with locations in Mid-City and Uptown, is slated to open here in late summer. Renovation work is now underway inside the small corner spot at Dauphine and Dumaine streets.

+7 Pop-up hit Bubs Burgers opens Mid-City restaurant, with gratitude for a lost friend Bubs Burgers opens its new restaurant in Mid-City on Tuesday (June 8) with a short menu of smash burgers and a remarkable story of a business

This new Wakin Bakin will serve a similar menu as the others, with breakfast burritos and tacos, bowls and parfaits, sweet pancakes and savory sourdough pancakes, vegan dishes and traditional bacon-egg-and-biscuit breakfast plates.

Proprietor Conrad Chura said hes planning to add some new facets tailored for the foot traffic of the French Quarter location.

One will be an "express menu" and counter for walk-up service and breakfast on the go, for items like breakfast burritos. The new restaurant will also have a frozen drink machine for icy specialty coffees.

Like its predecessor Eat, the restaurant will not have a liquor license.

+23 At a Haitian restaurant in New Orleans, deep Creole flavor, a glimpse of something more At a glance, you can tell the namesake sandwich at Fritai will gush flavor, with rough-hewn chunks of fried pork between discs of fried planta

While brunch spots are abundant in the French Quarter, this Wakin Bakin will add a more straight-ahead, diner-style breakfast option, operating 7 a.m. to 2 p.m.

I think its a great location for what we do, Chura said. You want to meet the needs of the neighborhood around you.

He said it may also open one night per week for special dinners that could have different themes or highlight different ideas and talent week to week.

Wakin Bakin got its start as a takeout and delivery operation for breakfast plates, based in the tavern kitchen at the Holy Ground Irish Pub (3340 Canal St.) in Mid-City. A year later it had a stand-alone location not far away at 4408 Banks St., taking over what was originally the breakfast spot Huevos.

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In late 2018, a second Wakin Bakin opened at 3625 Prytania St., in the former Coulis, which for two decades prior had been home to a beloved Uptown diner called the Bluebird Cafe.

The new French Quarter location, at 900 Dumaine St., had been a cafe called the Quarter Scene from 1981 until Hurricane Katrina.

Jarred Zeringue opened Eat here as his first restaurant, serving a menu of Southern and Creole dishes like shrimp and grits, fried catfish with white beans and poached eggs over fried green tomatoes.

More recently, he took over Wayne Jacobs Smokehouse, one of the old-school Louisiana butcher shops famous for its andouille sausage in LaPlace. Its one of the many stops on the Andouille Trail, a network of River Parishes businesses serving traditional flavors.

He had been working more of Wayne Jacob's smoky butcher shop products into the Eat menu lately, especially at brunch. But the lack of a liquor license had always been a limitation for the French Quarter restaurant, and when its lease came due this year Zeringue said he came to the conclusion that Eat had run its course.

Zeringue also has a cookbook scheduled for release next fall.

Wakin Bakin

900 Dumaine St.

Projected opening late summer 2021

+24 On the Andouille Trail, exploring a River Parishes obsession link by link With a hint of fall in the air and the cane standing tall in the fields all around his butcher shop La Bon Boucon, Lester Folse knew he was in
Preservation Hall was born June 10, 1961. Exactly 60 years later, it was reborn.

The famed French Quarter shrine to traditional jazz opened its doors to paying customers Thursday for the first time since the start of the coronavirus shutdown 15 months ago. Just after 5 p.m., an all-star ensemble led by trumpeter Wendell Brunious, smartly turned out in a suit, tie, hat and two-toned shoes despite the evenings humidity, arrived on the bandstand.

Facing a sold-out, reduced-capacity audience of 30, all wearing face masks, Brunious exclaimed, What a wonderful feeling to be here and open up this place again. He then called for Canal Street Blues, a King Oliver composition dating from the dawn of jazz.

And with that, another part of New Orleans night life was restored.

Not fully, however. For now, Preservation Hall will be open Thursdays through Sundays only, instead of seven nights a week. The schedule includes only three sets per evening, starting at 5, 6:15 and 7:30 p.m. Capacity is limited to 30 people instead of the normal 90.

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Much to the staffs relief, every show this week sold out soon after tickets went on sale.

For reopening night, only the first two sets were open to the public. The third was reserved for friends, relatives and patrons of the hall.

Tucked away in a corner near the musicians was Sandra Jaffe, who founded Preservation Hall with her husband, the late Allan Jaffe, and built its international reputation. Now 83, she recently moved back to New Orleans after living in Florida for several years. She proudly showed off a newspaper article about the clubs reopening.

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Her son, Ben Jaffe, is Preservation Halls creative director and the sousaphone player in its namesake band. As a child, he lived with his parents in the building at the rear of Preservation Halls courtyard. In the early days of the pandemic shutdown, when the French Quarter was mostly empty, Ben Jaffee spent the night at the club for the first time as an adult.

I got to hang out at Preservation Hall in silence, he said. It felt like it must have felt when my parents first came here.

That said, he was happy to open the doors once again.

The 60 or so musicians who regularly perform at Preservation Hall lost a sizable percentage of their income when the club shut down. Preservation Halls nonprofit foundation hosted a star-studded, livestreamed benefit, which included appearances by the likes of Paul McCartney and the Foo Fighters Dave Grohl, to raise money for them.

Staffers still came in regularly, as the ancient building still needed to be cared for and the venues resident cat, Sweets, needed to be fed. Sweets, unfortunately, did not live to see Preservation Hall reopen.

That the Quarter still isnt its fully amplified self, especially at 5 p.m., suited Ben Jaffe just fine Thursday. For once, the unamplified music being made inside the St. Peter Street venue wasnt in danger of being drowned out.

Preservation Hall was louder than Bourbon Street, he said after the first show. Did you ever think youd be able to hear Preservation Hall on Bourbon Street, instead of Bourbon Street in Preservation Hall?

The decision to reopen the club was based partly on City Hall easing New Orleans' COVID-19 restrictions, and partly on how the venues musicians felt about performing in such close quarters again. We might have been ready, but the musicians might not have been all the way there, Jaffe said.

Brunious, for one, was ready. Now 66, he first performed at the venue in 1978, and has been a regular ever since.

To all of a sudden not do it ... that was much worse than retirement, he said. When youre forced not to work ... oh, man. All of a sudden, it was nothing.

During the pandemic, he replaced some of his lost income with porch concerts, movie soundtrack work and other projects.

For Thursdays reopening, he was joined by trombonist Freddie Lonzo, whom hes known for 50 years, bassist Richard Moten, drummer Shannon Powell and pianist Kyle Roussel.

After Canal Street Blues, Lonzo sang Louis Armstrongs Hello Dolly. Brunious coaxed the audience to participate in the refrain of the traditional Mama Dont Allow No Music Playing in Here. Forty-five minutes after they started, they wrapped up the set with Tootie Ma Is a Big Fine Thing.

Returning to the Preservation Hall stage after such a long layoff, Brunious said after the show, was like something was at the back of your memory, and all of a sudden it comes to light.

"It felt so good. Im just glad to be jump-starting something again.
As the last rubble is cleared and the streets finally reopen where the partially built Hard Rock Hotel collapsed in October 2019, local officials and families of the three workers killed in the tragedy are calling for criminal charges before the case starts to fade from the citys collective consciousness.

We know that the office of Inspector General has done a report on what has happened and has done a tremendous amount of research. We want the Office of Inspector General to turn this information over to the District Attorney's Office for criminal charges, City Councilwoman Kristin Gisleson Palmer said last week.

Palmer is right that an investigative report was written last year recommending criminal charges, and that it still hasnt been turned over to District Attorney Jason Williams.

But what she didnt know until just last week is the inspector generals lead investigator on the case, Kristen Morales, was suspended in December and fired in January. And multiple sources with knowledge of the investigation tell WWL-TV that Morales firing has forced a significant delay in what could be the most important, most public investigation ever conducted by the New Orleans Inspector Generals Office.

There are two parallel tracks for the criminal investigation, according to these sources. One track is being led by agents from the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration, investigating allegations that negligence or corner cutting may have caused the building to collapse.

OSHA issued safety violations and fines against several contractors working on the Hard Rock project but has declined to release a final investigative report to law enforcement while some of the citations are being challenged.

+5 Hard Rock Hotel re-do? Developer of collapsed building says he wants to try again Almost 20 months after the Hard Rock Hotel disaster, its lead developer on Thursday urged the City Council not to "kill a project" by placing 

The sources who spoke to WWL-TV on condition of anonymity say Morales was assisting OSHA in its investigation while leading the other investigative track in the Hard Rock case -- looking at the role of city building inspectors who allowed allegedly improper work to move forward.

Those sources say Morales finished her work investigating the Hard Rock inspectors last year, but the OIG has had to go back and replicate some of it in the months since Morales was fired. (The OIG, which has the authority to investigate and audit city government, has its own dedicated funding stream and is not under the mayors authority.)

+4 Hard Rock Hotel supplier warned more supports were needed days before the collapse: records A key supplier of materials for the Hard Rock Hotel construction project tried to warn the builders they needed more steel supports on the upp

Asked how Morales firing has affected the Hard Rock investigation, Walter Becker, general counsel for the Inspector Generals Office, said: "The OIG investigation is not shut down. It is ongoing. The OIG has very experienced and very competent investigators working on this matter."

The investigation could still be finished and turned over soon to the DA for possible criminal charges, the sources say.

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A joint investigation by WWL-TV and The Times-Picayune | New Orleans Advocate in February 2020 found at least three city inspectors filed false inspection reports for the Hard Rock in the weeks and months before the collapse. The trio claimed they had gone to the construction site and taken photographs of the work even though GPS in their city vehicles indicated otherwise.

+5 1 years after Hard Rock Hotel collapse, these New Orleans streets set to reopen The intersection of Canal and North Rampart streets in New Orleans, closed since the Hard Rock Hotel collapsed more than 1 years ago, is expe

The photographs were allegedly taken by the Hard Rock construction team and three inspectors passed them off as their own. The city suspended and moved to fire all three of those inspectors.

Morales is appealing her firing through the Civil Service Commission. At her civil service hearing in April, William Bonney, deputy inspector general for investigations, testified that Morales violated several city policies:

She gave away an old office cell phone in 2015, which she says she got approval to do because it was surplus.

She accepted a trip to the Heisman Trophy ceremony in New York on a private jet, which she says belonged to a family friend who had no business with the city.

She allegedly stood too close to Bonney in the copy room last year, in violation of COVID social distancing rules. She disputes Bonneys description of what happened.

She worked from her boyfriend's apartment in Kenner last year, allegedly violating city residency requirements. But she says that's just where they quarantined when they both had COVID. She offered utility bills, photos and a statement from her landlady to prove she still resided in New Orleans.

She allegedly retaliated against fellow IG employees and was insubordinate.

Palmer questioned why Morales firing would require the OIG to re-investigate matters that Morales had already wrapped up.

If she was dismissed because of investigatory issues, then I could understand having to go back and investigate the work, the body of work, Palmer said. (But) if (the reason she was fired) has nothing to do with her body of work, then can't some of this information be released?

Morales suspension and firing came at a time of turmoil at the OIG, capped by the resignation of IG Derry Harper in September. Harper had been criticized for the offices low productivity during his tenure.

Morales appeared to be one of the offices high performers: The OIGs 2019 annual report praised Morales for obtaining high-level certifications as a fraud examiner. The report listed 14 city employees suspended as a result of investigations. Eleven of them were suspended based on Morales investigation of the Safety and Permits Department.

Most significantly, her years-long investigation of corruption inside the citys Department of Safety and Permits netted a federal bribery conviction in 2019 and another federal indictment against two inspectors this year.

Former Safety and Permits Director Jared Munster said Morales was the driving force rooting out a web of corruption by inspectors and building contractors over the last decade.

Our relationship over the years with Kristen Morales was truly an integral part of finding the problems in the Department and working to clean them up, said Munster, who left City Hall in 2018 and now lives in Florida.
The New Orleans Police Department sent their SWAT team to arrest a man wanted in connection to a homicide in Mississippi after he barricaded himself inside a building in Mid-City on Friday afternoon.

Police said the SWAT team went out to the 3900 block of Tulane Avenue around 1:45 p.m. in an attempt to take the suspect into custody after he refused to leave the building.

In a statement, the U.S. Marshals, who also participated in the standoff, identified the suspect as Anthony Hunt. Hunt was accused of helping Jamichael Jenkins murder Devonte Carson in Moss Point, Mississippi, on May 27, said Deputy U.S. Marshal Brian Fair.

Officials identified the suspect as Anthony Hunt, who was wanted for his alleged involvement in a homicide in Moss Point, Mississippi.

Hunt surrendered to New Orleans police, the U.S. Marshals and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on Friday around 3:30 p.m. without incident, some five hours into the standoff.

The standoff came after the NOPD sent its SWAT team to New Orleans East after an armed robbery suspect refused to surrender when confronted at 12345 N. Interstate 10 Service Road.

The suspect in that other case, Randy Lewis, 30, ultimately turned himself over to officers peacefully, police said.

No additional information on either standoff is available.
A woman accused of having a role in a June 3 shooting in the Lower 9th Ward has surrendered to authorities, New Orleans police said Friday.

Tierra Wright, 23, turned herself over to officers on Thursday after police announced that they had obtained a warrant for her arrest.

Police said Wright participated in the shooting in question by firing a gun in the 6200 block of North Robertson Street while riding in the passenger side of a dark-colored newer model Dodge Charger with a Louisiana handicapped license plate.

A man who has not yet been identified was driving when they pulled up and began firing at women and an infant, police said. The woman was grazed in her upper back.

Wright and the man accompanying her drove away in the vehicle police are still looking for. The driver of the vehicle also remains at large, police said.

Anyone with information on the case can call Crimestoppers at (504) 822-1111. Tipsters may be eligible for a cash reward.
Covington Mayor Mark Johnsons gaffe in naming a new police chief has thrown the confirmation process into turmoil.

The City Council is scheduled to take up the nomination of Michael Ferrell at a special meeting Tuesday night. And while Johnson says he thinks his nominee will be confirmed, the council recently sent the mayor a letter voicing its displeasure over the process.

The brewing squabble comes weeks after the Covington Police Departments chief stepped down and the No. 2 ranking officer was arrested on charges of child pornography.

Johnson, in a press release and email blast last month, named Ferrell as the departments new chief to take over for Stephen Culotta, who stepped down from the post May 13 while remaining in the department. But Johnsons press release didnt refer to Ferrell as acting or interim chief  and that irked the council.

The seven council members fired off a letter to Johnson reminding him that they must confirm his nomination and that Ferrells fate ultimately rests with them.

You failed to make it clear that (Ferrell) was merely the appointed Police Chief  This violates the spirit of the (city) charter. Additionally, it is our understanding that after his appointment, he was provided access to the police department and began assuming the duties of the Police Chief  before any of the Council had even met him, the letter states.

Johnson said Thursday that his omission of the word acting or interim was an oversight.

Ferrell, meanwhile, said its always been his understanding that he is the acting chief until the council vote.

I havent worn a uniform since I was appointed, Ferrell said. Thats not something you do unless youre sworn in.

The confirmation flap is the latest turn in Johnsons search for a new chief. Johnson said he had been poised to appoint Culottas chief deputy, Joseph Trey Mahon, as interim chief when Culotta stepped down.

Johnson said he twice called Mahon on May 12, but that Mahon didnt pick up either time.

What Johnson didnt know at the time was that Mahon had been arrested by the Louisiana Attorney Generals Office and accused of five counts of possessing child porn.

By the grace of God, he didnt answer because he was in jail, but we didnt know that at the time, Johnson said.

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Johnson said he interviewed two candidates for the chiefs job, one of them being Ferrell, a 28-year law enforcement veteran who worked with the St. Tammany Sheriff's Office until late 2020 and since had been working as a felony investigator for District Attorney Warren Montgomery's office until being appointed by Johnson. The mayor said he had been considering Ferrell for the post since Johnson took office in July 2019.

But at least one council member, Rick Smith, has publicly raised questions about Johnson's choice.

Im not comfortable with his selection, Smith said. I think a bigger net should be cast. Im not telling him (Johnson) who. But I think the people deserve something more.

Johnson said Smith, who he defeated in the mayoral race in 2019, wants former Police Chief Tim Lentz to be chief.

We have one councilman who wants his buddy to be chief again, Johnson said. Tim Lentz was a great police chief for the city of Covington, and Im sure he could be again. But my choice for the job is Mike Ferrell, and I think hell be a great police chief for the city, too.

Smith said he and Lentz are friends, but denied trying to push him on Johnson.

Meanwhile, Councilman Mark Verret said the councils letter was sent so that Johnson is clear about the process.

(Ferrell) might be the best person for the job, but the process has been screwed up," Verret said

Ferrell said he's concerned the hubbub might prevent him from being confirmed.

"This is a good police department," he said. "If the mayor and council can't come to an agreement, I hope they they can put someone in place as soon as possible to lead this department."

Johnson is standing by Ferrell.

"I consulted people in law enforcement who I have long-standing relationships with," the mayor said, "and I've received numerous unsolicited recommendations for Mike Ferrell."
The Orleans Parish public school district has sued the nonprofit organization that ran Mary D. Coghill Charter School for years until its charter was canceled, claiming the organization's board misappropriated public funds and still owes the school district nearly $1 million.

The lawsuit was filed in Orleans Parish Civil District Court last month against the Better Choice Foundation, which operated the F-rated school until NOLA Public Schools Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. refused to renew their contract and ordered the district to take it over.

The suit also names six individual board members and says they could be personally liable for the money.

In response, Better Choice Foundation said the organization had spent some of the money during a legitimate process of closing out business after being shut down.

The lawsuit marks the latest controversy to embroil the former elementary school in Gentilly Woods, which Lewis flagged for district takeover in 2019 because of the school's "F" grade from the state Department of Education. Orleans Parish school rules say charter contracts cannot be renewed if they have a failing grade in the final year of the current agreement, or if they are chronically D- or F-rated schools.

The school was supposed to follow a standard closure checklist outlined in contracts for charters operated by the district, which authorizes nearly 80 publicly-funded schools, the school district said in the suit. That includes "a contractual and legal obligation" to return any unused funds and assets within 30 days of ceasing operations.

Citing an annual financial report filed with the Louisiana Department of Education, the school district said Better Choice had a general fund balance of $933,876 when the district terminated its charter effective June 30, 2020, but that the group had spent about $490,000 of those funds by December.

The Orleans Parish School Board sent several letters to the organization seeking the money, but Better Choice Foundation instead hired a liquidator and used about half to pay out "outstanding debts and obligations."

That's a move district officials say is prohibited under its charter contracts and Louisiana law, which prohibits donations of public funds to any persons, associations or corporations, either public or private.

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"OPSB shall not be liable for charter school's unpaid debts," Stuart Gay, the district's chief financial officer, wrote in a February 2021 letter to Better Choice Foundation.

Camille Bryant, an attorney for Better Choice Foundation, said in an emailed statement that the charter group "is in the process of being legally dissolved in accordance with Louisiana law and the Operating Agreement."

She directed further questions to Erin Springer, another attorney and the group's "appointed liquidator." Springer wasn't immediately available for comment on Friday morning.

The school district seeks a judge's order demanding Better Choice Foundation return the amount of money it had on June 30, 2020, and an injunction forbidding the charter group to spend any more public funds.

This isn't the first time tensions flared between Better Choice Foundation and the district. Coghill had previously been cited for financial mismanagement.

The district in July 2019 had accused the charter group of inappropriate reimbursements to board members, teacher appreciation day expenses that neared $9,000 and other violations. Later that summer, the district said the school had failed to properly educate students with special needs.

During contentious board meetings in 2019, the School Board unsuccessfully tried to derail Lewis' decision to yank Coghill's charter amid protest from the school's community. But with one board member absent, the board couldn't muster enough votes to overturn the decision.

NOLA Public Schools ran the elementary campus last year after no other charter operators agreed to take it over.

The Hynes Charter School Corp., a nonprofit that runs an A-rated elementary school in Lakeview and a school that opened in 2019 in Gentilly, is slated to run Coghill starting this upcoming school year.
A contractor has resumed building a floodwall to plug a major low spot in the Mississippi River levee  at the Army Corps of Engineers' own New Orleans headquarters at Riverbend - after water levels in the Mississippi River dropped below 11 feet in late May.

The $8.9 million project includes installation of sheet piling and long H-shaped batter piles to support the permanent and movable walls. It will elevate one of the last segments of the river levee system to assure protection from a river flood with a 1 percent chance of occurring in any year, a so-called 100-year flood.

The existing, mostly earthen levee running through the Corps campus at 7400 Leake Ave. is 3 feet to 5 feet lower than the 100-year levee. Water topping the levee system there could flood much of New Orleans' east bank.

The movable floodwall segments will allow room for parking and other work to occur on some parts of the campus, except when theres a river flood threat. The project also adds concrete scour protection on the batture and extending into the river.

The long-delayed project is one of the last segments of the east bank river levee in the New Orleans area to be elevated to protect against the potential combination of high river water and hurricane storm surges. The protection includes 3,000 feet of levee system that is supposed to be at least 24 feet above sea level, but 500 feet or more is at least 5 feet lower, and the rest is 2 to 5 feet too low.

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+2 Army Corps hires contractor to build floodwalls at New Orleans headquarters for $8.9 million The Army Corps of Engineers has hired an Algiers construction firm to build a combination of permanent floodwalls and temporary structures to 

In recent years, the Corps has station sand-filled Hesco baskets and other materials in the headquarters parking lot, in case they needed to be moved quickly into place along the low areas to prevent the river from topping the levee.

Proposed in the 1990s and funded by Congress in 2019, the project has been delayed by high river periods during the past few years. Construction is expected to be complete in early 2022.

Construction was halted in March when the river rose above 11 feet at the Carrollton gauge, which is at Corps headquarters. The water stayed above 11 feet for 79 days.

The official flood level there is 17 feet, though levees and floodwalls protect to water heights of 25 feet - except at the headquarters campus.
Experts unconvinced by COVID-19 lab-leak theories: media

Xinhua) 15:46, June 11, 2021

WASHINGTON, June 10 (Xinhua) -- Many scientists, including top U.S. infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci, still believe that COVID-19 most likely occurred in nature and jumped from animals to humans, according to The Associated Press on Wednesday.

No new key scientific evidence that might make the lab-leak hypothesis more likely has been publicly identified by virus researchers, it added.

The World Health Organization said in March that COVID-19 introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an "extremely unlikely" pathway, refuting lab-leak theories.

"The great probability is still that this virus came from a wildlife reservoir," said Arinjay Banerjee, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in Saskatchewan, Canada, according to the report.

Spillover events -- when viruses jump from animals to humans -- are common in nature, and have been seen in previous cases, he said.

Many scientists believe that it's unlikely the 90-day investigation by the intelligence community at the request of U.S. President Joe Biden will yield definitive new answers, the report added.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
Beyond the substance of the questions, the fusillade of attacks also reflected Mr. Adamss standing in the race: He has increasingly led available surveys as he presses a message that he says is focused on issues of both public safety and criminal justice. More than any other candidate, Mr. Adams has discussed issues of rising gun violence and other crime, at a time when polls show public safety to be a top priority for New York Democratic voters. At the debate, the contenders focused on issues of gun violence as well as hate crimes.

We have seen an uptick in anti-Asian hate crime, but weve also seen an uptick in anti-Semitism, said Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, who was a far more forceful presence in Thursdays debate than she has been in previous contests. She went on to sketch out plans for confronting mental illness and homelessness as part of the solution.

And as in previous debates, some of the clearest distinctions in the field emerged over issues of public safety, as Ms. Wiley staked out some of the most left-leaning positions on the stage.

Asked about the idea of taking guns away from New York Police Department officers, every candidate except for Ms. Wiley said no. She did not answer directly, instead discussing the importance of smart policing.

I am not prepared to make that decision in a debate, she said, even as she also said that the mayors job is safety. Safety is job one, and Im going to keep New Yorkers safe when Im mayor.

The answer stood in contrast to one offered by Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, who, like Ms. Wiley, has sought to appeal to the most progressive voters in New York.

Were not taking guns away from the police, Mr. Stringer said flatly. Were going to make sure that we create a police force that focuses on rooting out violent crime, and at the same time ensures the civil rights of our young people.
Many people are surprised to learn a number of iconic places in our city are named after individuals who held people as slaves, Mr. DuBois said. Should New Yorkers have to live on streets or go to schools or buildings named for slave holders or should those names be changed?

Mr. DuBois referred to people like Peter Stuyvesant, a director-general of New Netherland who owned slaves; a large apartment complex on Manhattans East Side is named for him. Rikers Island, which houses New York Citys main jail complex, is named for the Riker family, which includes Richard Riker, who sent Black Americans into slavery.

We should not honor people that have had an abusive past, Mr. Adams said.

Ms. Wiley, who previously worked as a civil rights lawyer, said that symbols mattered and that these places should be renamed. But she added that it was also important to ensure that all of communities of color finally get the attention, the investments and the change that they deserve.

Maya Wiley cast herself as the top progressive candidate.

Ms. Wiley was able to cast herself as the leading progressive candidate in the debate, helped in part by Mr. Stringers scandals and Dianne Moraless absence on the debate stage.

Nowhere did she do that more decisively than on the question of the police and their use of guns.

Attorney General Tish James is proposing legislation to limit cops from firing their weapons, use of force as a last resort, Ms. Kramer said. Now, some might ask, why not go all the way and take away the guns all together like they do in 19 other countries where the bulk of the police force is unarmed?

Ms. Wiley did not rule out the idea, as every other candidate did. Instead, she equivocated.

First, she said that the mayors No. 1 job was safety.

Ms. Kramer interjected to ask if she would take the officers guns away from them.

Ms. Wiley responded by talking about the importance of getting illegal guns off the street. Ms. Kramer tried one last time: But will you take the guns away from the N.Y.P.D.?
All five leading candidates for mayor agreed on Thursday night that New York City should consider renaming sites named for slaveholders.

Many people are surprised to learn a number of iconic places in our city are named after individuals who held people as slaves, said Maurice DuBois, one of the events moderators. Should New Yorkers have to live on streets or go to schools or buildings named for slave holders or should those names be changed?

Mr. DuBois referred to people like Peter Stuyvesant, a director-general of New Netherland who owned slaves. A large apartment complex on Manhattans East Side is named for him. Rikers Island, which houses New York Citys main jail complex, is named for Richard Riker, who sent Black Americans into slavery.

Each of the five candidates agreed that New York City should revisit such names.

We should not honor people that have had an abusive past, said Eric Adams, Brooklyns borough president.
That said, one must admit that Senate Republicans, especially Mitch McConnell, effectively blocked infrastructure spending even when Trump was in the White House. The main reason infrastructure week became a gag line was the Trump administrations haplessness and lack of seriousness, its inability to formulate anything resembling a coherent plan. But McConnells passive-aggressive resistance also played a role.

So what was that about? Ever since Reagan Republicans have been committed to the view that government is always the problem, never the solution  and, of course, that taxes must always be cut, never increased. Theyre not going to make an exception for infrastructure. Indeed, the very fact that infrastructure spending would be popular counts against it; they fear that it might help legitimize a broader role for government in general.

Finally, the modern Republican Party seems deeply allergic to any kind of public program that doesnt give profit-making private players a big role, even if its hard to see what purpose those private players serve. For example, unlike the rest of Medicare, drug coverage, introduced under George W. Bush, can be accessed only through private insurance companies.

When Trumps advisers unveiled their infrastructure plan (it was little more than a vague sketch), I immediately noticed that it carefully avoided suggesting that we might just, you know, build infrastructure the way Eisenhower did. Instead, it proposed a complex and surely unworkable system of tax credits to private investors who would, it was hoped, build the infrastructure we needed.

If Trumps people had ever gotten around to an infrastructure plan, it would probably have looked like the one investment program the administration did put into effect, the creation of opportunity zones that were supposed to help Americans living in low-income areas. What that program actually ended up doing was provide a bonanza to wealthy investors, who used the tax break to build things like luxury housing.

Put it this way: The modern G.O.P. just wont do public programs unless they offer vast opportunities for profiteering.
Dartmouths Geisel School of Medicine says it is dropping an online cheating investigation that led the school to erroneously accuse some students, allegations that prompted an outcry among faculty, alumni and technology experts.

In March, Dartmouth charged 17 students with cheating based on a review of certain online activity data on Canvas  a popular learning management system where professors post assignments and students submit their work  during remote exams. The school quickly dropped seven of the cases after at least two students argued that administrators had mistaken automated Canvas activity for human cheating.

Now Dartmouth is also dropping allegations against the remaining 10 students, some of whom faced expulsion, suspension, course failures and misconduct marks on their academic records that could have derailed their medical careers.

I have decided to dismiss all the honor code charges, Duane A. Compton, the dean of the medical school, said in an email to the Geisel community on Wednesday evening, adding that the students academic records would not be affected. I have apologized to the students for what they have been through.
The ships 650 crew members and 600 or so passengers (including a New York Times reporter) were required to be vaccinated before boarding, and had to show proof of a negative coronavirus test taken within 72 hours before sailing from St. Maarten last Saturday.

Two passengers on a Mediterranean cruise operated by MSC Cruises also tested positive. Both passengers on the MSC Seaside were asymptomatic when they tested positive during routine testing two days ago, the communications manager Paige Rosenthal said. Immediately after testing positive, the two passengers, who were not traveling together, were isolated along with their parties. They all disembarked in Syracuse, Sicily.

All passengers on the vessel were required to take two coronavirus tests before boarding; vaccines were not required.

The major cruise lines are preparing to restart operations from U.S. ports this summer. Celebrity Edge is poised to be the first, sailing out of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on June 26, with all crew and at least 95 percent of passengers fully vaccinated, in accordance with guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, cruise ships were sites of some of the largest concentrations of coronavirus cases. The return of cruises and large gatherings such as conferences is a sign that the pandemic is ending in the United States, as the steady pace of vaccinations  43 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated, and 52 percent have received at least one dose, according to a New York Times database  gives some event organizers the confidence to resume business.
WASHINGTON  The Biden administration on Thursday lifted sanctions on three former Iranian government officials and two Iranian companies involved in the countrys oil industry, a conciliatory gesture days before a potentially decisive round of nuclear talks in Vienna.

The administration cautioned against reading too much into the move. Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, said there was absolutely no connection between the sanctions and discussions among several world powers and Tehran.

Those talks are intended to bring the United States and Iran back into compliance with the 2015 deal that sought to limit Irans nuclear program in return for an end to many of the international sanctions that have squeezed the countrys economy.

In the same statements announcing that the United States had lifted some sanctions, the State and Treasury Departments also said they were imposing new ones on a dozen Iranian individuals, entities and vessels for providing financial support to the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who are backed by Iran.
In 2017 and 2018, a grand jury subpoenaed Apple and another internet service provider for the records of the people associated with the Intelligence Committee. They learned about most of the subpoenas last month, when Apple informed them that their records had been shared but did not detail the extent of the request, committee officials said. A second service provider had notified one member of the committees staff about such a request last year.

It was not clear why family members or children were involved, but the investigators could have sought the accounts because they were linked or on the theory that parents were using their childrens phones or computers to hide contacts with journalists.

There do not appear to have been similar grand jury subpoenas for records of members or staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to another official familiar with the matter. A spokesman for Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee did not respond to a question about whether they were issued subpoenas. The Justice Department has declined to tell Democrats on the committee whether any Republicans were investigated.

Apple turned over only metadata and account information, not photos, emails or other content, according to the person familiar with the inquiry.

After the records provided no proof of leaks, prosecutors in the U.S. attorneys office in Washington discussed ending that piece of their investigation. But Mr. Barrs decision to bring in an outside prosecutor helped keep the case alive.

A CNN report in August 2019 about another leak investigation said prosecutors did not recommend to their superiors that they charge Mr. Comey over memos that he wrote and shared about his interactions with Mr. Trump, which were not ultimately found to contain classified information.

Mr. Barr was wary of how Mr. Trump would react, according to a person familiar with the situation. Indeed, Mr. Trump berated the attorney general, who defended the department, telling the president that there was no case against Mr. Comey to be made, the person said. But an investigation remained open into whether Mr. Comey had leaked other classified information about Russia.
Bipartisan Group of Senators Say Tentative Infrastructure Deal Reached The statement from the senators, five Democrats and five Republicans, offers few details about the agreement, and the Biden administration has not said whether it would support it.

Centrist senators announce realistic agreement on an infrastructure plan. The bipartisan group of senators hashing out an infrastructure deal includes, from left, Senators Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah; Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire; Susan Collins, Republican of Maine; and Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat from Arizona. Credit... Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times A bipartisan group of centrist senators announced on Thursday that they had reached a tentative agreement on a framework for an infrastructure plan, as they mount a precarious bid to secure the blessing of the Biden administration, congressional leaders and rank-and-file lawmakers. The statement, released by five Democrats and five Republicans, offered few details about the substance of the agreement, beyond that it was a realistic, compromise framework to modernize our nations infrastructure and energy technologies that would be fully paid for without tax increases. But the preliminary framework is expected to include about $579 billion in new spending, as part of an overall package that would cost about $974 billion over five years and about $1.2 trillion over eight years, according to two people familiar with the details, who disclosed them on condition of anonymity. The Biden administration had previously signaled support for a package that spent at least $1 trillion in new funds over eight years, on top of the expected maintenance of existing programs. The announcement came after a dizzying day on Capitol Hill, where senators involved in the discussions offered conflicting assessments of their progress. It was unclear how soon the group would unveil specific details or release legislative text, though members of the group said they were discussing the proposal with their colleagues and the White House. The preliminary agreement, which sketches out funding for traditional physical infrastructure projects, faces steep headwinds, despite direct encouragement and personal outreach from President Biden. Lawmakers and aides in both parties remain skeptical that the group can muster the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster in the Senate, given deep divisions over funding levels and how to pay for such a package.

Austin supports a shift in how the military handles sex crimes, but declines to support Gillibrands bill. Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, left, and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff appeared before a Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington on Thursday. Credit... Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III suggested to lawmakers on Thursday that he supported changes to the laws that govern how the military handles sexual assault cases, but he declined to endorse a measure by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, that would cut out the military chain of command from other serious felonies. Mr. Austins support for changes around sexual assault cases represents a major shift for military leadership, which has long resisted such changes, but his opposition to Ms. Gillibrands proposed changes to the military justice system could set up a potential showdown between a large group of senators and the Pentagon. Clearly, what weve been doing hasnt been working, Mr. Austin said in his opening remarks before the Senate Armed Services Committee. One assault is too many. The numbers of sexual assaults are still too high, and the confidence in our system is still too low. Mr. Austin instead appeared to endorse the recommendations of a panel he appointed to study the issue earlier this year. That panel recommends that independent military lawyers take over the role that commanders currently play in deciding whether to court-martial those accused of sexual assault, sexual harassment or domestic violence.The issue of sexual assault and sexual harassment, Mr. Austin said, are the problems we are trying to resolve and improve. President Biden has endorsed Ms. Gillibrands approach, at least for now, and her bill has gained support from at least 70 members of the Senate  including many who voted against the same bill in 2014, arguing it would undermine commanders  and key members in the House. Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, believes Ms. Gillibrands bill goes too far and has been working behind the scenes with Pentagon officials to change it. I want to be sure that whatever changes to the U.C.M.J. that I recommend to the president and ultimately to this committee, that they are scoped to the problem we are trying to solve, have a clear way forward on implementation, and ultimately restore the confidence of the force in the system, Mr. Austin said, referring to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is the foundation of the American military legal system. You have my commitment to that, and also my commitment to working expeditiously as you consider legislative proposals. Mr. Austins remarks Thursday could set off an intense political battle that will test the power of Ms. Gillibrand among her bipartisan Senate allies including Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, who could be forced to pick sides in determining the measures fate, and the White House. In either event, it seems clear that commanders are all but certain to lose full control over sexual assault prosecutions. Change is coming to the department, Mr. Reed said Thursday in reference to the issue. Ms. Gillibrand and one of her Republican colleagues on the committee, Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, an Army veteran, pressed Mr. Austin further on his views of the issue during the hearing. Ms. Gillibrand suggested that keeping other crimes off the table would contribute to racial disparities in court-martial cases, an argument that could be part of a new strategy to appeal to both remaining skeptical members of Congress and Mr. Austin. But while Mr. Austin took pains to praise Ms. Gillibrands work, crediting her incredible dedication for any changes that are made, he also made it fairly clear that he did not support the broad nature of her legislation. As you know, Senator, I always have an open mind to solving any tough problem, he said, but added that his commission had been focused only on sexual assault and harassment. When he was confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Austin made sexual assault one of his first priorities. In February, he appointed the independent commission to examine the issue and give recommendations that he and the service chiefs could consider. The members of the panel are seeking a new career track in the Defense Department in which judge advocates general  military lawyers  would be specially trained to deal with such cases. This alone would be a major shift in how the military does things. Mr. Austin has said he wants the service chiefs to review the recommendations. In 2019, the Defense Department found that there were 7,825 reports of sexual assault involving service members as victims, a 3 percent increase from 2018. The conviction rate for cases was unchanged from 2018 to 2019; 7 percent of cases that the command took action on resulted in conviction, the lowest rate since the department began reporting in 2010. Jonathan Weisman contributed reporting.

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As ransomware attacks rise, the Senate questions Bidens nominee to be the first national cyber director. The White House has tapped Chris Inglis to be the first national cyber director. Credit... Charles Dharapak/Associated Press A Senate committee weighed President Bidens nominations on Thursday to fill two top cyberdefense positions, amid a rising number of ransomware attacks that have shut down critical American businesses, including the nations largest meat processor and a major East Coast pipeline company. Congress last year agreed to create a new national cyber director, a White House position that is supposed to improve defenses and coordinate responses to attacks on both the federal government and the private sector. The White House tapped Chris Inglis, a former National Security Agency official and a member of the commission that proposed the creation of the position, to become the first national cyber director. The administration also nominated Jen Easterly to lead the Department of Homeland Securitys Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency. Together, the two positions are at the forefront of the nations cyberdefenses. Ransomware attacks go after the weaknesses of companies information technology, which must be improved, Mr. Inglis said. But he repeatedly added that the United States must confront countries that give safe harbor to criminal groups conducting the attacks and see that the hackers are brought to justice. Mr. Inglis said his role would be to make sure the administration has a consistent strategy for pushing companies to improve their defenses and for imposing consequences on ransomware groups. It will not stop of its own accord; its not a fire raging across the prairie that, once its consumed the fuel, it will simply stop, Mr. Inglis said. We must create resilience and robustness not simply in technology but in people. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, said the Colonial Pipeline attack had shown a lack of accountability for the private sector, particularly for firms that control critical infrastructure. Ms. Easterly replied that voluntary standards were inadequate. Its important that, if theres a significant cyber incident, that critical infrastructure companies have to notify the federal government, Ms. Easterly said. An executive order signed by Mr. Biden last month aimed at improving hacking defenses, required government contractors to report any breach. But lawmakers are looking at broadening reporting requirements through legislation. Questioned by senators, Mr. Inglis and Ms. Easterly said private companies should not pay ransoms. But Mr. Inglis said it was not a simple yes or no question. The solution, he said, was to improve companies defenses, making them harder targets, and removing the sanctuaries that hacking groups enjoy. Its not appropriate to pay ransom, Mr. Inglis said. Unfortunately we get into a place where that is the only remedy feasible to save lives or to bring back critical capabilities.

An expose has Congress refocusing on how to tax the superrich. My intention as the author of the 2017 tax reform was not that multibillionaires ought to pay no taxes, said Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania. Credit... Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times A jaw-dropping report by ProPublica detailing how Americas richest men avoided paying taxes has intensified interest in Congress, even among some Republicans, in changing the tax code to ensure that people like Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett pay their fair share. For Republicans, the idea that the tax code should give preferential treatment to investment has been sacrosanct, ostensibly to promote economic growth and innovation that could benefit everyone. But the news this week showed how the treatment of stocks, bonds, real estate and huge loans taken off those assets has sent the tax bills of the richest Americans plummeting. My intention as the author of the 2017 tax reform was not that multibillionaires ought to pay no taxes, said Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, who helped write the law that slashed taxes by more than $1 trillion. I believe dividends and capital gains should be taxed at a lower rate, but certainly not zero. Democrats, especially in the Senate, have been hard at work on a tax package to finance President Bidens costly domestic agenda, including a major infrastructure plan, climate change measures and the expansion of education and health care benefits. Much of that work  vehemently opposed by Republicans  has been focused on clawing back tax cuts lavished on corporations by the 2017 tax law, President Donald J. Trumps signature legislative achievement, and on preventing multinational corporations from shifting taxable profits offshore. The ProPublica report, analyzing a trove of documents detailing the tax bills of household names such as Mr. Bezos, Mr. Buffett, Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg, showed that the nations richest executives paid just a fraction of their wealth in taxes  $13.6 billion in federal income taxes during a time period when their collective net worth increased by $401 billion, according to a tabulation by Forbes. Americans knew that billionaires played these kinds of games, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee, said on Wednesday. What was significant yesterday was it was all laid out in stark detail about the most affluent people in America. He said he was working on an array of proposals to get at the issue, possibly including a return to some kind of minimum tax, and would soon unveil specific proposals. Billionaires are going to have to pay their fair share, every year, he said. Jonathan Weisman and

Ilhan Omar compares the actions of Israel and the U.S. to Hamas and the Taliban. Rep. Ilhan Omar addressing the media at a news conference in Brooklyn Center, Minn., in April. Credit... Nicholas Pfosi/Reuters Representative Ilhan Omar is again at odds with her Democratic colleagues over Israel, but this time, she has brought her own country into the mix. The latest contretemps began on Monday, when Ms. Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, wrote on Twitter about a virtual exchange she had with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. In the actual exchange, Ms. Omar pressed for an investigation of human rights abuses both by Israeli security forces and by Hamas. But on Twitter, she seemed to compare Israel and the United States not only to Hamas, considered a terrorist group by the State Department, but also to the Taliban. We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity, she wrote. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban. The analogy prompted outrage from a dozen Jewish Democrats in the House. They issued a statement saying that equating the United States and Israel to Hamas and the Taliban is as offensive as it is misguided, and, in congressional parlance usually meant to elicit an apology, they asked her to clarify her words.Ignoring the differences between democracies governed by the rule of law and contemptible organizations that engage in terrorism at best discredits ones intended argument and at worst reflects deep-seated prejudice, they wrote. The United States and Israel are imperfect and, like all democracies, at times deserving of critique, but false equivalencies give cover to terrorist groups. Rather than apologize, Ms. Omar fired off a defiant response on Thursday morning. Its shameful for colleagues who call me when they need my support to now put out a statement asking for clarification and not just call, wrote Ms. Omar, one of two Muslim women in the House, accusing her detractors of bigotry. The Islamophobic tropes in this statement are offensive. The constant harassment & silencing from the signers of this letter is unbearable. A House Democratic aide familiar with the back-and-forth said Ms. Omars anger stemmed from her treatment by the dozen colleagues who publicly upbraided her. She had heard that they were going to publicly call for a clarification of her remarks and reached out to some of them several times on Wednesday. They did not respond before their public chastisement, said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.

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Biden and Johnson renew a World War II accord, pledging to unite against new challenges. President Biden with Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain before their meeting at Carbis Bay on Thursday. Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times With the world confronting the immediate crisis of a pandemic and the long-term challenge of climate change, President Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain on Thursday turned for inspiration to another period of peril and deep uncertainty. After meeting face to face for the first time since Mr. Biden assumed the presidency, they announced a renewal of the Atlantic Charter  the declaration of cooperation that Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt laid out during World War II. While the two current stewards of the special relationship between Britain and the United States have disagreed on critical issues, on Thursday they stressed the enduring strength of the alliance. When the original Atlantic Charter was signed on Aug. 14, 1941, the Nazis had conquered much of Europe, Britain stood largely alone and the United States had yet to join the war. But the symbolic import of the Atlantic Charter declaration had been backed up by the passage of the Lend-Lease Act only a short time earlier, allowing the United States to provide critical military equipment to allies. Before Mr. Biden and Mr. Johnson signed the new document, a senior United States official called it a profound statement of purpose that echoes the 80-year-old charter by underscoring the original declaration: that the democratic model is the right and the just and the best one for confronting the worlds challenges. The official, who spoke to reporters on the condition of anonymity before the meeting between the two leaders, said the charter did not envision a new Cold War between great powers, but rather a world whose problems  including climate change, pandemics, technological warfare and economic competition  are complex and often nuanced. However, at the core of the presidents message during the trip is a central animating theme: The United States and its allies are engaged in an existential struggle between democracy and autocracy. Video transcript Back bars 0:00 / 0:46 - 0:00 transcript Johnson Welcomes Biden on His First International Trip as President President Biden met with Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain ahead of Fridays meeting of the Group of 7 leading industrial nations. The bilateral meeting kicks off Mr. Bidens first international trip as president. Thank you. All right. Wow, well its a great pleasure, Mr. President, to welcome you to Cornwall. Its a great pleasure to be here. Fantastic to see you, you know, in what I think is your first big overseas trip since youve been  It is  Ive been to your great country many times, but this is the first time as president of the United States. Everybody is absolutely thrilled to see you. I told the prime minister, we have something in common. We both married way above our station. Im not going to dissent from that one. Im not going to disagree with the president or indeed on anything else. President Biden met with Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain ahead of Fridays meeting of the Group of 7 leading industrial nations. The bilateral meeting kicks off Mr. Bidens first international trip as president. Credit Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times I believe were in an inflection point in world history, Mr. Biden said on Wednesday evening in a speech to troops stationed at R.A.F. Mildenhall at the start of his European visit. A moment where it falls to us to prove that democracies not just endure, but they will excel as we rise to seize enormous opportunities in the new age. In what he hopes will be a powerful demonstration that democracies  and not China or Russia  are capable of responding to the worlds crises, Mr. Biden announced that the United States would donate 500 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine to 100 poorer nations, a program that officials said would cost $1.5 billion. By playing a leading role in the effort to vaccinate the world and providing resources to confront the gravest public health challenges, officials said the United States was reclaiming a role it has sought to play since the end of World War II. Mr. Johnson, who is eager to use the summit as a showcase for a post-Brexit identity branded Global Britain, has also outlined ambitious plans to help end the pandemic. In the run up to the summit, Mr. Johnson called on leaders to commit to vaccinating every person in the world against the coronavirus by the end of 2022. Yet while Mr. Johnson and Mr. Biden may find common ground on key issues including the pandemic, fundamental divisions remain. Mr. Biden opposed Britains drive to leave the European Union, a push that Mr. Johnson helped lead. The American president is also concerned about Northern Ireland, since the Brexit deal has threatened to reignite sectarian tensions in the territory. Marc Santora, Michael D. Shear and

When is a jacket not just a jacket? When a first lady uses it to send a message. Video transcript Back bars 0:00 / 0:35 - 0:00 transcript First Lady Wears Jacket to Send Message on International Trip Jill Biden, the first lady, wore a black jacket with the word LOVE on the back during President Bidens first in-person meeting with Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Thursday. Dr. Biden said her jacket choice and message was to bring love from America. Take away the message on the back of your jacket, if you will. Oh, the love. Yeah, well, I think that were bringing love from America. I think that this is a global conference and were trying to bring unity across the globe. And I think thats important right now, that people have to feel a sense of unity for all the countries and feel a sense of hope after this year of the panda. Jill Biden, the first lady, wore a black jacket with the word LOVE on the back during President Bidens first in-person meeting with Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Thursday. Dr. Biden said her jacket choice and message was to bring love from America. Credit Credit... Doug Mills/The New York Times It seems that the back of a first lady is now the hot place for White House messaging. During President Bidens first in-person meeting with Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Thursday, Jill Biden, the first lady, wore a black jacket over her black-and-white polka dot dress as the leaders and spouses met on a scenic overlook in the south of England. The jacket had a single word on it: LOVE. The delivery method  if not the content of the message itself  was an unmistakable echo of the time that Melania Trump, then first lady, famously wore a jacket during a visit to children separated from their parents at the southwestern United States border that said I really dont care, do u? Image Melania Trump, then first lady, on a trip to the southwestern United States border in 2018. Credit... Kevin Lamarque/Reuters That message, written in white letters on a green jacket, instantly became a sensation as people sought to find meaning in the harsh-sounding words. Mrs. Trumps spokeswoman later said that the message was intended as a slap at journalists, not a comment about the conditions that the migrant children were being kept in after her husbands policy of separating them from their parents. But it was clear that Mrs. Trump  like Dr. Biden on Thursday  was well aware that her jacket would be noticed. Unlike her predecessor, Dr. Biden was quick to provide an immediate explanation and context for her choice of a jacket and the message she was trying to send. In comments to reporters traveling with the president, she said that the jacket was intended to offer a sense of hope to a world gripped by Covid. I think that were bringing love from America, she said. This is a global conference, and we are trying to bring unity across the globe. And I think its needed right now, that people feel a sense of unity from all the countries and feel a sense of hope after this year of the pandemic. She did not, however, say whether her jacket was intended as a rebuke of sorts to Mrs. Trump, or even inspired by the previous incident. Asked about the comparison, her communications director referred to her comments to reporters.

House panels open an inquiry into the health effects of tear gas used by police. A demonstrator kicked a tear gas canister back at federal officers during a Black Lives Matter protest in Portland, Ore., last summer. Credit... Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press A year after racial justice protests around the country touched off violent clashes between activists and law enforcement, House Democrats on Thursday opened an investigation into the health effects of the use of tear gas by police. Two subcommittees of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform began the investigation by asking companies that manufacture and sell tear gas and some government agencies to produce a wide range of documents, seeking to determine whether the federal government has done enough to ensure that the substance is safe to use on humans. The United States has agreed not to use tear gas in war, four Democrats, including the chairmen of the subcommittees, wrote in a letter to the agencies and companies. However, tear gas is frequently used in this country by law enforcement as a riot control agent. Given this domestic use, we would have expected an analysis demonstrating that tear gas products are safe to use on humans, but we have not seen this, they wrote. In fact, evidence suggests that tear gas may be connected to long-term adverse health impacts for those exposed. The letter was signed by Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, Democrat of Illinois and the chairman of the subcommittee on economic and consumer policy; Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and the chairman of the subcommittee on civil rights and civil liberties; and two high-profile progressives on the subcommittees, Representatives Cori Bush of Missouri, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. The lawmakers said they had been unable to determine whether there is any federal oversight regarding the composition or safety of these products. Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the committee, said she supported the inquiry. At least 100 law enforcement agencies  many in large cities  used some form of tear gas against civilians protesting police brutality and racism last summer, according to an analysis by The New York Times. The brief period saw the most widespread domestic use of tear gas against demonstrators since the long years of unrest in the late 1960s and early 70s, The Times reported. In their letter, the lawmakers cited reporting by The Associated Press that military personnel exposed to tear gas in basic training were 2.5 times as likely of being diagnosed later with acute respiratory illness after their exposure to tear gas compared to before the exposure. Researchers have expressed concerns about tear gas formulations having gotten stronger over time and how that might factor into long-term health risks of exposure, they wrote. The Democrats are seeking information from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice, and the companies Safariland, Combined Systems, and Pacem Defense. Safariland announced last year that it was leaving the tear gas business after its product was used on protesters in Washington. The lawmakers asked the federal agencies for any research into the effect of tear gas products on human health and the feasibility of establishing standards for the substances. For the companies, their requests included a list of all the U.S. entities they sold tear gas products, a description of safety testing performed and all internal documents relating to any negative health effects on humans from tear gas.

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Biden administration lifts restrictions on number of federal employees allowed in the office. A carefully spaced line of people waiting for assistance at a Social Security Administration office in March 2020. Credit... Joshua Bright for The New York Times The Biden administration lifted restrictions on the number of federal employees permitted to work from the office while maintaining a flexible telework policy that was expanded during the pandemic, according to guidance issued on Thursday. The memo from the Office of Management and Budget reversed a policy issued in January that imposed a 25 percent cap on the number of employees that could work in the office. The new guidance comes as the nation works toward President Bidens goal of having 70 percent of the country vaccinated by July 4 and reopening offices, schools and businesses throughout the United States. The policy issued on Thursday followed up on an announcement the day before directing agencies to not require workers to get vaccinated in order to return to the office. Agencies may establish occupancy limits for specific workplaces as a means of ensuring physical distancing between unvaccinated individuals, according to the guidance issued Thursday. The loosening of the restrictions will facilitate planning for an increased return of Federal employees to physical workplaces, and it clearly reinforces that the safety of the Federal workforce remains a top priority, according to a statement from Jason Miller, deputy director for management for the Office of Management and Budget. But there will not be an immediate surge back to federal offices. The heads of agencies will need to complete a phased plan for the return of employees by July 19 while fulfilling obligations to respective labor unions, some of which have pressed for clean work environments and flexible schedules for employees. When each department does fully re-open, it will continue to allow employees maximum telework flexibilities, according to the directive issued Thursday. Republicans have recently pressed Mr. Biden to lift the restrictions. Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia, ranking member of the subcommittee on government operations, wrote a letter to the Office of Management and Budget claiming the lack of face-to-face services during the pandemic has had real, negative impacts on veterans, Social Security beneficiaries, and others who need prompt, attentive service from public servants at federal agencies.

Californias recall election could cost taxpayers more than $215 million, state officials say. Kevin Faulconer, a Republican candidate for governor in Californias recall election, during an appearance in Downey, Calif., last month. Credit... Michael R. Blood/Associated Press A special election to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom of California will cost the state more than $215 million, state finance officials said Thursday. The price tag is about twice what had been expected, but less than the $400 million predicted by local elections officials earlier this year. Although recall attempts against governors are common in California, they rarely qualify for the ballot. The campaign against Mr. Newsom, which reached critical mass during the pandemic, is only the second in state history to gather enough signatures to trigger a special election. So far, 46 candidates have officially announced their intention to challenge Mr. Newsom in the recall. The most high-profile candidates are Republicans, including Kevin Faulconer, the former mayor of San Diego; Doug Ose, a former congressman from Sacramento; Caitlyn Jenner, a reality television star and former Olympic athlete; and John Cox, a San Diego businessman who recently distinguished himself by touring the state with a live Kodiak bear. Voters who signed the petition had until June 8 to change their minds, and counties have until June 22 to adjust their signature tabulation. Several procedural steps, including an official cost estimate, remain before the recall election is scheduled, probably this fall. In April, the California Association of Clerks and Elected Officials put the price of a recall at about $400 million, based on the costs of the November 2020 election. The estimate released on Thursday came in a memo to the Legislatures joint budget committee and was drawn from a survey of election officials in the states 58 counties. A separate, official cost estimate is still required under the states rules for recall elections, but legislators needed a preliminary number in order to meet a June 15 state budget deadline, said H.D. Palmer, a spokesman for the state finance department. The estimate does not include costs to the Secretary of States office, for example, but helps lawmakers determine how much to appropriate to cover the costs of 58 counties.

The Supreme Court limits the reach of mandatory minimum sentences law. The Supreme Court Building in Washington. Credit... Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times The Supreme Court on Thursday narrowed the reach of the federal Armed Career Criminal Act, a kind of three-strikes statute, ruling by a 5-to-4 vote that violent felonies committed recklessly  as opposed to intentionally or knowingly  do not count as strikes. The law requires mandatory 15-year sentences for people convicted of possessing firearms if they have earlier been found guilty of three violent felonies. An offense qualifies as a violent felony if it involves the use, attempted use or threatened use of physical force against the person of another. The majority featured an unusual coalition, with Justice Neil M. Gorsuch joining the three-member liberal wing and Justice Clarence Thomas voting with that plurality on different grounds. The case concerned Charles Borden Jr., who pleaded guilty to a federal gun crime. Prosecutors sought to impose the mandatory 15-year sentence based on three earlier convictions, one of them in Tennessee for reckless assault. That conviction, Mr. Borden argued, should not count as a strike. Lower courts rejected his argument, and he was sentenced under the career-criminal law. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for four justices, disagreed, saying the law excluded crimes in which the defendant had merely been reckless. The words against the person of another, she wrote, requires volitional conduct and demands that the perpetrator direct his action at, or target, another individual. In addition to Justice Gorsuch, Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined Justice Kagans plurality opinion. Justice Thomas agreed with the pluralitys bottom line, but for a different reason. A crime that can be committed through mere recklessness does not have as an element the use of physical force, he wrote, quoting from an earlier opinion, because that phrase has a well-understood meaning applying only to intentional acts designed to cause harm. In dissent, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote that the courts decision overrides Congresss judgment about the danger posed by recidivist violent felons who unlawfully possess firearms and threaten further violence.

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New data shows that fewer migrant children arrived alone at the southern border last month. Migrant families seeking asylum in the United States are escorted to the main road to turn themselves in to the U.S. Border Patrol after crossing the Rio Grande near Roma, Texas, on Wednesday. Credit... Go Nakamura/Reuters The number of migrant children and teenagers arriving alone at the United States border with Mexico decreased last month compared to a month earlier, according to newly released Customs and Border Protection data. There was a slight increase in the number of border crossings, encounters and apprehensions overall during the same time period, a sign that the record surge of migrants trying to get into the country this spring could be starting to stabilize. But the problem is far from over for the Biden administration, which is currently trying to safely place more than 16,000 migrant children in government custody with family members living in the United States. The administration on Monday threatened to sue the state of Texas if Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, follows through with his threat to shut down more than 50 shelters in the state where thousands of migrant children have been living. Mr. Abbotts action, which was part of a disaster order issued at the end of last month, was seen by many as a deliberate swipe at the Biden administrations more compassionate posture on immigration compared to the restrictive measures of the Trump administration. It is typical for the number of migrants traveling to the United States through the southern border to increase during spring months, but this year the turnout has been much higher, with a nearly 50 percent increase in border crossings, encounters and apprehensions in March, April and May compared to a similar surge over the same period in 2019. In a call with reporters Thursday afternoon, administration officials said 38 percent of encounters at the border in May involved a migrant who had crossed the border at least once in the last year, compared to an average recidivism rate of 15 percent from 2014 to 2019. Republicans have seized on the surge along the southern border, calling it a crisis  a term the Biden administration has avoided. Most of the adult migrants who have been arriving at the southern border this year have been barred from entering the country because of a public health rule put in place during the Trump administration, which is responsible for more than 463,000 expulsions on the southern border between January and May of this year. While the last administration also barred children for public health reasons, the Biden administration has been allowing migrant children to enter the country and stay in shelters overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services until they can be placed with a family member or other sponsor. Since the beginning of the year, more than 65,000 migrant children and teenagers arrived alone on the southern border, with record numbers arriving during the spring months. Nearly 2,900 fewer migrant children arrived alone at the southern border in May compared to a month earlier. Because of a shortage of shelter space at the federal governments network of state-licensed facilities earlier this year, migrant children were forced to stay in overcrowded holding cells along the southern border long past the legal limit. Earlier this year, the Biden administration moved to set up about a dozen emergency shelters where the children could stay in Health and Human Services custody until they are placed with a family member or sponsor inside the United States. Recently, migrant children and teenagers have been staying in H.H.S. custody for an average of 37 days, according to government statistics. Childrens advocates have said ideally a child would not have to stay more than 20 days in a government shelter.

Trumps political legacy will be on the ballot in Virginia this fall. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican candidate for governor, at an event in Richmond, Va., last month. Credit... Steve Helber/Associated Press Former President Donald J. Trump wont be on the ballot in Virginia, but his political legacy will be. His shadow on the states political landscape could have profound implications for the election of a new governor, a contest that figures to be the only major competitive race in the country this fall. Glenn Youngkin, an affable former private equity executive, is testing whether a Republican can sidestep Mr. Trump without fully rejecting him and still prevail in a state the former president lost by 10 points but where he remains deeply popular with conservative activists. And in what could be equally revealing, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat seeking to reclaim his old job, is going to determine whether the strategy of linking Republicans to Mr. Trump  a tactic that helped turn Virginias suburbs a deeper blue the last four years  is as potent when hes no longer in the Oval Office, or even on Twitter. Both questions reflect a larger issue: how strong a tug the countrys polarized and increasingly nationalized politics can have on an off-year state race thats usually consumed by debates over taxes, transportation, education and the economy. Its a real-life political science experiment that is all the richer because its taking place in a state that only supported Republicans for president between 1964 and 2008, and where for many years it was the Democrats who had to distance themselves from their national party. If Republicans are to win back the governorship and reclaim a foothold in this increasingly Democratic state, this would seem to be the year.
For three days, beginning Friday, some of the worlds most powerful leaders have descended on a small Cornish village for a series of meetings as part of the Group of 7 summit, which brings together the heads of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States.

So what exactly is the G7, and why does it matter?

The nations belonging to the club are the worlds wealthiest large democracies, close allies and major trading partners that account for about half of the global economy.

With broadly similar views on trade, political pluralism, security and human rights, they can  when they agree  wield enormous collective influence. Their heads of government meet, along with representatives of the European Union, to discuss economic issues and major international policies.

Those attending this years gathering include leaders from the G7 member countries plus the European Union and guests Australia, South Africa and South Korea, along with India via video link.
Back in April, Italy, acting on a report by Europes drug regulator of a possible link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and rare blood clots, recommended not giving the shots to people under 60.

But in the ensuing months, as the country put its inoculation campaign into overdrive, AstraZeneca vaccines became the featured attraction of open days or open nights, which offered shots to younger people weeks ahead of where they would have fallen in the priority schedule. The events  some featuring D.J.s and group selfies  were praised as a great success. But they also raised concerns that Italy seemed to be promoting the AstraZeneca vaccine to younger people despite the regulators recommendations.

On Wednesday, the government muddled matters further by publicly mulling whether to introduce stricter limitations on the use of the AstraZeneca shots that would effectively prohibit such events for younger people in the future.

I think new indications would be appropriate, Pierpaolo Sileri, an undersecretary at the Italian Health Ministry, told the Italian news website Fanpage, adding that the government would consider a block on administering the vaccine to people under the age of 30 or 40.
After three years of courtroom hostilities, the estate of the artist Robert Indiana and the artists former business partner said Friday that they had agreed to settle the legal disputes that cost the estate millions of dollars and clouded the market for a man known for such works as the sculpture, LOVE.

In a filing in United States District Court in Manhattan, Morgan Art Foundation, the business partner, James W. Brannan, the personal representative for Indianas estate and Jamie L. Thomas, Indianas former caretaker, said they were dropping the claims and counterclaims that began around the time of Indianas death in Maine in May 2018 at age 89.

The terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

The legal back-and-forth drained assets that would otherwise have gone to a project designated by the artist in his will, an endeavor to convert his old home on the remote island of Vinalhaven, more than an hours ferry ride off the Maine coast, into a museum to memorialize his artistic legacy.

Larry Sterrs, chairman of the Star of Hope Foundation, a nonprofit that Indiana created in his will to shepherd the conversion, said he was happy to be a part of the conversation that had facilitated the final settlement.
The Juilliard School, one of the worlds leading performing arts conservatories, is better known for recitals than picket lines. But students protesting a planned tuition increase occupied parts of its Lincoln Center campus this week and, when they were later barred from entering a school building, led music- and dance-filled protests on West 65th Street.

The protests began Monday when a group of students, objecting to plans to raise tuition to $51,230 a year from $49,260, occupied parts of the schools Irene Diamond building and posted photos on social media of dozens of sheets of multicolored paper arranged to form the words TUITION FREEZE.

On Wednesday, students said, they received an email from the administration saying that school space could not be used for nonschool events without permission. Posting signage, posters or fliers, tabling in the lobby, solicitation or distributing print materials also requires advance authorization, the message added.

Students returned to the Diamond building that day, marching through the halls and stopping outside the door of the schools president, Damian Woetzel. At one point, some said, they knocked on his door, chanting: We know youre in there. Will you meet students needs and freeze tuition?
In the first moments of Physical, a new series debuting June 18 on Apple TV+, Sheila (Rose Byrne), a homemaker in San Diego, Calif., looks in the mirror. She doesnt like what she sees. Look at you, she says to herself in a vicious voice-over. I mean, seriously. Do you really think youre pulling this whole thing off? The disco sex kitten look? At your age?

A kohl-black comedy about keeping up appearances, Physical, which begins in 1981, tracks Sheilas discovery of aerobics. The exercise offers her a new way to inhabit her body. (Is a way that involves leg warmers a better way? Debatable.) The series explores the continual pressure exerted on women  and the particular pressure that women exert on themselves  to achieve an impracticable ideal.

Its not just about body size. Its not just the pressure to be thin, said the creator Annie Weisman (The Path). Its telling the truth about what it takes to maintain a certain look and body, and thats something Im really interested in.

While elaborating on empowerment and its illusions, Physical is the rare series  comedy or drama  to take a profound look at disordered eating. Though she presents as SoCal breezy and poised, Sheila contends with severe bulimia. The project is to really take it as seriously as a lot of cable shows take other addictions, Weisman said.
Noah Isenbergs is not the first book on Casablanca but, published on the occasion of the movies 75th anniversary, it is likely to remain definitive  deftly exploring the making, the reception and the afterlife of classic Hollywoods quintessential production.

J. Hoberman is the author of the Found Illusions trilogy: An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War; The Dream Life: Movies, Media and the Mythology of the 60s; and Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan.

Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.
Reading James Ellroy is like being dragged into hell. This, I should stress, is both a compliment and a curse. The best of Ellroy seems to echo Dantes Inferno, spiraling down circle after circle into the depths of mid-20th-century depravity where some greater meaning can be found  only to be upended and refracted. The worst of his work, however, devolves into monotony, the staccato prose more repetitive than ruminative, the characters sliding into ugly caricature.

His latest, WIDESPREAD PANIC (Knopf, 336 pp., $28), lacks the magisterial force of the L.A. Quartet or American Tabloid, or the damning pathos of his memoir My Dark Places, but its nowhere near as convoluted (nor as long) as The Cold Six Thousand or Perfidia. Here, the energy inhabiting a fictional funhouse-mirror version of the private investigator Freddy Otash, known in real life (and here) for his devil-work on Confidential magazine, is more entertaining than annoying.

And yet. By the novels end, after Freddys endless conquests of cardboard cutout women (celebrity, real, or imagined), after too many brutal murders of said conquests, Ellroys brand of hell seems tuckered out. It may be purgatory, or perhaps, like his progenitor Mickey Spillane, this was camp all along.
Up in Arms

To the Editor:

I was relieved, near the end of his review of The Second, by Carol Anderson (May 30), to come across Randall Kennedys rejection of Andersons assertion that the Second Amendment was written to appeal to slave owners whose need to bear arms was primarily to protect themselves against the threat of a slave revolt.

James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 46, published in 1788, that the reason to permit citizens to arm themselves was rather to be ready to fight against an armed force sent against the states by the federal government. He guessed that such an army might amount to 30,000 men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands  fighting for their common liberties.

Robert Davey

Bridgeport, Conn.



To the Editor:

In his review of The Second, Kennedy states that Anderson argues unconvincingly, in the face of formidable scholarship to the contrary, that the aim to protect slavery was the predominant motive behind the Second Amendment. But Anderson has a point. James Madison drafted the Second Amendment during Virginias debate over ratification of the Constitution to appease the Virginia governor Patrick Henry, who feared that if slave states did not retain the right to their own well regulated Militia, they would be unable to suppress slave uprisings and pursue runaway slaves.

And, of course, it was conservative Justice Antonin Scalia who took a cleaver to the amendment to create the modern N.R.A. interpretation of the Second Amendment, extending the state right to individual citizens.
Bidens approaches to Europe

President Biden will convene with European leaders today in Cornwall, England, where he is expected to make a show of partnership and solidarity. But it is not clear how much more open the U.S. will be to a give-and-take with Europe than it was under Donald Trump.

Biden met yesterday with Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, where the pair unveiled a new Atlantic Charter as they sought to focus the worlds attention, before todays Group of 7 summit, on emerging threats from cyberattacks, the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change. Here are the latest updates.

Few Europeans question the sincerity of Bidens outreach, with his decades of involvement in European concerns. Yet the presidents more aggressive approach to China will find limited enthusiasm in Europe, given the commercial interests of Germany and other countries.

Quotable: Americas foreign policy hasnt fundamentally changed, said Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the British Parliament. Its more cooperative and inclusive, but substantially its the same.
The problem is not just Britains stricter immigration rules. Other workers, in Britain and elsewhere, have left the hospitality industry looking for more stable employment, said Kate Shoesmith, the deputy chief executive of the Recruitment & Employment Confederation, which represents recruitment companies and agencies.

Restaurant and hotel workers, who cant work from home, have been scarred by unexpected changes in lockdown rules that have pulled them in and out of work at short notice. Despite the success of Britains vaccination program, the delta coronavirus variant is threatening to delay the full lifting of social distancing restrictions in England later this month.

Some people are not confident there wont be another lockdown, Ms. Shoesmith said.

Many workers have moved on to less strenuous jobs that dont require such late nights and long shifts, such as in call centers or in retail or other customer service roles. Adecco, a large recruitment agency, sent out a request to tens of thousands of job seekers to gauge their interest in working in hospitality. Just 1 percent responded.

Ms. Shoesmith said recruiters expected some European Union nationals to eventually return to Britain to work, but the vast majority wont; thats the anticipation.

To help fill the gap, there is a broad sentiment that the industry must make hospitality an appealing career for Britons, one worth aspiring to, with training and opportunities for promotion. For now, though, this work is often considered just a job you do in between other things, as Ms. Shoesmith put it.

UKHospitality has teamed up with work coaches in government job centers. It wants them to promote hospitality as a career of choice and think beyond entry-level or front-of-house positions.

Until then, the shortage of workers is a drag on countless businesses.

In more than three decades in the industry, said John Crompton, the director at Hillbrooke Hotels, he had never known a staff shortage like this. The company, which has four quirky luxury hotels and inns in eastern and southern England, needs to hire at least 50 people.
The police in the Chinese region of Xinjiang are still buying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of American DNA equipment despite warnings from the U.S. government that the sale of such technologies could be used to enable human rights abuses in the region.

The U.S. government has tried to prevent the sale of DNA sequencers, test kits and other products made by American firms to the police in Xinjiang for years, amid concerns raised by scientists and human rights groups that the authorities could use the tools to build systems to track people. In 2019, the Trump administration banned the sale of American goods to most law enforcement agencies in Xinjiang unless the companies received a license. And in 2020, Washington warned that companies selling biometric technology and other products to Xinjiang should be aware of the reputational, economic and legal risks.

But Chinese government procurement documents and contracts reviewed by The New York Times show that goods made by two American companies  Thermo Fisher and Promega  have continued to flow to the region, where a million or more residents, mostly Muslim Uyghurs, have been incarcerated in internment camps. The sales are happening through Chinese firms that buy the products and resell them to the police in Xinjiang.

It is not clear how the Chinese firms acquired the equipment, and the documents do not show that either American company made direct sales to any of the Chinese firms. Still, experts say the fact that the Xinjiang police continue to acquire and use U.S.-made DNA equipment raises questions about the companies diligence regarding where their products end up.
Alaskan senators and governors have long maintained that lifting the roadless rule protections in their state would provide a sorely needed economic boost.

Among them is Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, who has argued in the past that sections of Tongass can be responsibly developed in ways that would not necessarily lead to the loss of major swaths of forest. She has attacked the roadless rule as a one-size-fits-all regulation that hurts the timber industry as well as mining, transportation and energy.

It is not clear whether the Biden administration intends to fully replace the roadless rule protections in the Tongass or whether it would replace protections in some areas while leaving others open to economic development.

Ms. Murkowski is also a key player in efforts to negotiate a bipartisan agreement on a sweeping infrastructure bill and the White House has been careful to avoid antagonizing her. Already this year, President Biden  seeking to strike a balance between his vows to fight climate change and protect the environment, while also securing the support of Ms. Murkowski for a signature legislative effort  has alternated between policies that approve fossil fuel drilling in some parts of Alaska while banning it in others.

Any action to repeal the final rule and reimpose the roadless rule will cost jobs, diminish income, keep energy prices high, and cripple the ability of the communities in the region to develop a sustainable, year-round economy, Ms. Murkowski said in a statement. The Trump administration, through the Forest Service and USDA, put considerable work and effort into the final rule and now the Biden administration is literally throwing it all away. We need to end this yo-yo effect as the lives of Alaskans who live and work in the Tongass are upended every time we have a new president. This has to end.

Mike Dunleavy, the Republican governor of Alaska, wrote on Twitter, Disappointed in the @POTUS latest suppression of AK economic opportunity. From tourism to timber, Alaskas great Tongass National Forest holds much opportunity for Alaskans but the federal government wishes to see Alaskans suffer at the lack of jobs and prosperity.
Rachel Fabi has come to my rescue. Im very pleased to announce that beginning on June 14, she will take over the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday Wordplay columns, helping newer solvers learn the art of deciphering clues. You may have read her puzzle analyses on Diary of a Crossword Fiend and Rex Parker, and she is a very talented puzzle constructor in her own right.

A little more about her: During the day, she is a professor of bioethics and a Jeopardy! champion who loves bad puns, good trivia and arguing about health policy and ethics on the internet (@faBioethics on Twitter). She is a member of the USA Today constructor roster, and has also been published in various other places, including The New York Times, American Values Club Crossword, Queer Qrosswords, the Inkubator, Lollapuzzoola 2020 and the Boswords Spring Themeless League. With her fellow constructor Claire Rimkus, she also publishes her own independent crossword puzzles on their site Just Gridding! In her noncrossword life, she enjoys hiking, biking, rock climbing and taking care of her three pets (a cat, a dog and a sourdough starter).

Im very excited to see what she does with her beat, and I think youll enjoy her enthusiastic voice as much as I do.

So why are we making this change, other than the fact that you must be getting tired of me by now? There are a couple of reasons.

The most important one has to do with my health. You already know a lot about my life  I have two grown children, an extremely spunky Border terrier and a fiance I refer to as the Resident South African  so I see no reason not to be transparent here, too. In November, I was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and my doctors have advised me to significantly lower my stress levels. Im fairly asymptomatic right now, and thankfully C.L.L. is a slow-progressing form of cancer. But I just cant follow doctors orders while trying to make daily deadlines, in addition to handling the other parts of Wordplay that I manage.
Good morning. Its not high summer yet. Its not even summer yet. But my thoughts about cooking are running very July. Id like to be grilling this weekend, in a park or sideyard, or down on a beach burying clams and lobsters and corn under a cloak of coals. Id like to have some fat Jersey tomatoes warm from the sun, and Id like to slice them thick, douse them with brown butter and serve them with toast.

Barbecue pulled chicken while Im at it? Macaroni salad? Yes, please, and a glass of Vallery Lomass sweet tea (above) to wash it all down. Im as Southern as Angus King, but a good summertime sweet tea, strong and punchy with lemon, can make me nostalgic for the Georgia meat-and-threes I didnt grow up with, but deeply admire.

For dinner tonight, though: bulgogi cheese steaks with shishito peppers, outrageously good. Or, taking matters in another direction entirely: grilled tofu with a hot garlic, ginger and soy marinade that, thanks to a pinch of sugar, caramelizes nicely on the grill (or in the grill pan). I like that one with rice and blistered scallions.

Saturday you could endeavor to take on a project: lamb biryani, for instance, or pecan coffee cake with warm caramel sauce. Im thinking of gathering up some blue crabs to make spaghetti with crabs, a riot of flavor, mess and pleasure that pays homage to one of the patron saints of South Brooklyn, Tony Durazzo.
Surfaces pose minimal risk for coronavirus transmission, and disinfectants needlessly applied to them can also wind up in the air and can be toxic when inhaled. So in most ordinary workplaces, wiping down your desk with bleach is likely to do more harm than good, Dr. Farmer said. (Some specific workplaces  such as hospitals, laboratories or industrial kitchens  may still require disinfection, experts noted.)

Nor is there any particular need for special antimicrobial wipes or cleansers, which may fuel the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria and wipe out communities of benign or beneficial microbes. As tempting as it may be to try to sterilize everything, its never going to happen, and there may be some real serious consequences, said Erica Hartmann, an environmental microbiologist at Northwestern University.

Dont depend on desk shields

In the early months of the pandemic, plastic barriers sprang up in schools, stores, restaurants, offices and other shared spaces. They can be great to stop the bigger droplets  really theyre big sneeze guards, Dr. Huffman said.

But the smallest, lightest particles can simply float over and around them. These barriers may not provide enough benefit to justify their costs, said Martin Bazant, a chemical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They may even raise the risk of disease transmission, by encouraging riskier behavior or impeding air flow.

There are some environments in which these kinds of barriers may still make sense. It can be a really good idea for people who would otherwise have very close face-to-face contact, like grocery store workers at cash registers, Dr. Farmer said. But past that, in offices where youre sitting for a lengthy period of time, there is no benefit to putting yourself in a plexiglass cage.
Just seeing the city reawakening and people enjoying life again was surprising, she said. It was like, This place isnt gone. 

The team spent a month sifting through thousands of photos, then editing the more than 80 that appeared in the issue with Ms. Bichler; the digital art director, Kate LaRue; and the designer Claudia Rubin, who created the look and feel of the print issue. Maridelis Morales Rosado, 25, a Brooklyn-based photographer from Puerto Rico, took more than 10,000 photos alone.

Join Michael Barbaro and The Daily team as they celebrate the students and teachers finishing a year like no other with a special live event. Catch up with students from Odessa High School, which was the subject of a Times audio documentary series. We will even get loud with a performance by the drum line of Odessas award-winning marching band, and a special celebrity commencement speech.

This was a large team collaboration among art, photo and digital departments, Ms. Ryan said. We gathered in the New York Times office on Eighth Avenue for the first time since the pandemic began to work on the issue together, printing out boards and layouts of images.

Unlike a typical issue, Ms. Geisler said, staff members didnt plan a specific image for the cover.

We tried to keep an open mind and see what the photographers were shooting, she said.

Victor Llorente, 24, who grew up in Spain and lives in Queens, landed the cover image with his shot of Little Islands opening day on May 21.

When Ms. Geisler called him last month to deliver the news, he immediately told his partner, Emily.

Not going to lie, I started crying, he said.

Mr. Llorente recalled that his grandfather, who was born and raised in the Bronx, used to bring him and his siblings to see the city.
This years two-part Berlinale is also a bold experiment in how to structure a film festival. By holding its industry-oriented events  press screenings, jury prizes, a film market for distributors  online and separately from those for the broader public, it has raised the question of whether such a two-pronged strategy might allow film festivals to not only preserve but expand their overall impact, even beyond the pandemic.

Tobias Goltz, 34, who was attending the screening with friends, said that the summer festival was an improvement over the regular edition. It feels more Berlin, less commercial. There arent 150 camera teams. He added that, for better or worse, the lack of international visitors had made it into a more local affair. You feel like you are among Berliners.

The Berlinales two directors, Carlo Chatrian and Mariette Rissenbeek, settled on the two-part structure last November in order to prevent the festival from being canceled entirely. At that point, Rissenbeek recalled recently by phone, it had become clear that the rapidly spreading coronavirus would prohibit a regular Berlinale. They decided to delay all in-person events until the summer in the hope that vaccinations and other measures would drive down infections and allow the event to proceed.

Rissenbeek said that there had been some advantages to holding a digital edition for the film industry in March. She said the online version of the European Film Market, generally one of the largest trade fairs for films and television shows, had more participants this year, and the online screenings for critics had allowed the festival to be covered by media that it isnt usually covered by.
In 2013, Tanisha Davis, a 26-year-old woman from Rochester, N.Y., was sentenced to 14 years in prison for killing her boyfriend, at whose hands she suffered, she said, nearly seven years of abuse, including choking, death threats and a beating on the night he died. The judge agreed that she was a victim of domestic violence but said her response did not merit leniency. You handled the situation all wrong, he told her. You could have left.

In 2021, because of a new law that allows survivors of domestic violence more nuanced consideration in the courts, the same judge released Davis, thanks in part to a documentary that helped frame her case.

Its not uncommon for documentary projects to have an impact on legal proceedings, once theyve found an audience and built public attention. But the film that helped Davis, And So I Stayed, was not yet released  it wasnt even finished  when the filmmakers, Natalie Pattillo and Daniel A. Nelson, put together a short video for the court, describing her life.

You could see the strength of the ties she had to her family and the strength of the support she would have if she were released, said Angela N. Ellis, one of her lawyers. The prosecutor and judge both mentioned watching the footage when they agreed, in March, to set her free.
Eight months after introducing the world to Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and Chewbacca, George Lucas invited Steven Spielberg and the screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan to his assistants home in Los Angeles to pitch a new name for adventure.

Indiana Smith, Lucas said. Very Americana square.

Sighed Spielberg, I hate this, but go ahead.

Over the next five days, according to a story conference transcript, the three concocted a swashbuckling archaeologist who fused Humphrey Bogart to James Bond. They gave Indy a bullwhip and a passport  and they tweaked his name.

Jones, Lucas conceded, people can call him Jones.

That brainstorming session, of course, led to Raiders of the Lost Ark, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this month (and is streaming on Paramount+). Four decades later, the iconic hit has become the pivot point between cinemas past and present. Indiana Joness narrow escapes from Nazis, boulders, blow darts, poisoned dates, speeding trucks and, of course, snakes, tip a fedora to the cliffhanger serials of the 1930s  the kiddie adventures that shaped his creators  even as they calibrated their nostalgia into a cross-promotional blockbuster that would define Hollywoods future.

What were just doing here, really, is designing a ride at Disneyland, Spielberg said at that first meeting. Prophetic words. Yet, like Indys exploits around the globe, the films production history is itself a tale of misadventure, lucky breaks and inspiration. Here are four secret stories from the set.
At first, Long Weekend looks like a traditional rom-com. Bart (Ryan Murphy regular Finn Wittrock) is an endearingly struggling writer reduced to living in the garage of his best friend (Damon Wayans Jr.). One day he meets-cute with Vienna (Zoe Chao), who comes dangerously close to being a manic pixie dream girl, complete with cool bangs and quirky attributes  she doesnt have a credit card or a cellphone!

The director Stephen Basilone (a writer on the TV series The Goldbergs) is self-aware enough to include a metajoke about said stock character. The relaxed, fluid rapport between the two leads is more important than any meta irony, though: Its easy to root for Bart and Vienna, while wondering what kind of obstacles Basilone will throw their way.

Join Times theater reporter Michael Paulson in conversation with Lin-Manuel Miranda, catch a performance from Shakespeare in the Park and more as we explore signs of hope in a changed city. For a year, the Offstage series has followed theater through a shutdown. Now were looking at its rebound.

Which, of course, is exactly when the movie twists the romance into a sci-fi pretzel. Best of all, the ending feels earned.

Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula

Stream it on Shudder; buy or rent it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.
Herb Sturz, a self-taught expert in criminal justice and urban planning who profoundly but inconspicuously influenced public policy across a remarkably broad range of issues in New York and beyond, died on Thursday in Tucson, Ariz. He was 90.

His niece Lisa Sturz said the cause was congestive heart failure. He lived in Manhattan, where he was injured in a fall two months ago and was recuperating in Tucson under his nieces care.

Over decades, in his various private and government incarnations, Mr. Sturzs agenda was wide and deep. He lobbied to release low-risk defendants who were being jailed for months before trial because they could not afford bail. He galvanized opposition to the Bloomberg administrations aggressive policing strategy, called stop-and-frisk. He secured a commitment from Mayor Bill de Blasio to eventually close the citys notorious short-term detention complex on Rikers Island. And as chairman of the New York City Planning Commission in the early 1980s, he set the stage for the transformation of Times Square into a thriving tourist destination.

Mr. Sturz was the founding director of the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonpartisan think tank; New York Citys deputy mayor for criminal justice; and a member of The New York Times editorial board.
Even as her cases became more intense  she started working murder trials in 2013  Ms. Langs ambitions for improving the office became grander. After she won a wiretap case against 35 people for selling angel dust, heroin and cocaine, she successfully pitched the offices leadership team on a program promoting alternatives to incarceration for young offenders. (It later became a unit that provides some defendants the chance to participate in community-based programs in lieu of prison.)

By that time, Ms. Lang said, she was not nervous presenting to the offices leaders; she knew them all.

In January 2017, Ms. Agnifilo promoted Ms. Lang, giving her a special position leading policy at the office. That fall, Ms. Lang piloted the first version of what would become the Inside Criminal Justice initiative, a series of seminars that brought prosecutors and incarcerated people together to talk about the justice system and how to improve it.

Jarrell Daniels, a participant in the initiative who had recently been released from prison, was so intrigued by the program that he asked to return to the facility to continue with it. He remembered sitting around a table in a cramped conference room, watching as the participants grilled Ms. Lang.

Shes either brave or shes crazy, or she might be both, he remembered thinking.

She sat there kind of poised as they gave it to her about the district attorneys office and vented about their personal experiences with the justice system, he said. Although that wasnt what she was there for, she kind of allowed them to share their piece.

What are we waiting for?

Ideas about the criminal justice system changed rapidly during Mr. Vances time in office.

In 2010, he was seen as one of the more liberal district attorneys in the country. When he leaves office, at the end of this year, he will do so as a seeming moderate  not because he has necessarily changed, but because a wave of more recently elected prosecutors have moved aggressively to take on what they consider fundamental injustices in the system. (Mr. Vances defenders respond that he has cut prosecutions by nearly 60 percent and established one of the nations first conviction integrity programs, among other accomplishments.)

More than a dozen of those recently elected prosecutors have endorsed Ms. Langs candidacy, including Marilyn Mosby, the states attorney in Baltimore. She said that Ms. Lang was one of the more prominent people behind the scenes in the progressive prosecutor movement, particularly through her work at the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution, a role she took on in 2018 and left last year.
A concern for officials is that a resistance to the vaccine in Orthodox neighborhoods could play a part in endangering the citys long-term prospects for a health and economic recovery.

While vaccine hesitancy has been seen in many Latino and Black neighborhoods in the city, the resistance in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods may be more difficult to combat because of the insular nature of the community, according to community activists and health department officials.

Fears about the vaccine and fertility have caught on in the Orthodox community like wildfire, said Dr. Bat-Sheva Lerner Maslow, a reproductive endocrinologist and founding board member of Jewish Orthodox Womens Medical Association, or JOWMA, a grass-roots group that has taken the lead on combating misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine circulating in Orthodox circles.

Esther Ita Holt, a 33-year-old Orthodox mother of three who is several months pregnant, said she was bullied on a WhatsApp group intended to provide support to Orthodox Jewish mothers when she posted a recently published study indicating that vaccines are safe.

One group member accused her of spreading rumors that could threaten the lives of pregnant women and infants. Ms. Holt, who said she already faces vaccine skepticism within her own immediate family, decided to leave the group.

Miriam Leah Zisman, a 23-year-old Orthodox sales associate who is expecting her first child, said the conversations in her community about the possible dangers of the vaccine discouraged her from getting vaccinated.

I come from a home where we vaccinate, said Ms. Zisman, who is from the Midwood area of Brooklyn. We believe in science and medicine. Still, when it comes to her pregnancy and future fertility, the unknowns about the vaccine loom too large, she said. Im going to wait it out.
Zahid N. Quraishi, a federal magistrate judge and the son of Pakistani immigrants, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate for a federal judgeship in New Jersey on Thursday, becoming the first Muslim Federal District Court judge in the nations history.

Judge Quraishi acknowledged his history-making status after President Biden announced his intention to nominate him in March. Candidly, the judge said, I would prefer to be the hundredth, if not the thousandth. He added, I understand what it means to the community.

The Senate confirmation on Thursday, by a vote of 81 to 16, touched off a wave of congratulatory messages on social media from Democrats and progressives. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey called Judge Quraishi an excellent addition to the court. Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii said Congratulations Judge Quraishi! The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, and Senator Gary Peters of Michigan released congratulatory messages too.

Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey called Mr. Quraishi a man of integrity, a consummate public servant, and a trailblazer for Asian Americans and Muslim Americans across this country who dream of one day presiding over a court of their own. He added: We should all draw inspiration from his story, because it is a story that could only take place in the United States of America.
The program culminated with a deep dive into the criminal justice system  we met corrections officers, visited prisons and went to the Michigan State Capitol, Alexis Lewis, who graduated from Spring Arbor this spring and participated in the program, told me. She said that the discussions could sometimes get uncomfortable but that she was surprised by the honesty and mutual understanding participants expressed. I think we dehumanize each other when we have different opinions, but in Bridging the Gap we started with telling our stories, and that made you care about the other person, she said. It wasnt about trying to change someones views but realizing that the truth you have might not be the whole truth.

Im convinced (well, Im trying to convince myself) that most Americans are like Ms. Lewis. They are tired of the culture wars; they want to understand and get along with people different from themselves. Its true that a zealous few turn political ideas into inerrant dogmas because they seek the sense of community once offered by traditional religion and because they crave ideological surrogates for the doctrines of original sin, predestination and divine justice  that perverse blend of control and victimhood that tempts humans when the prospect of taking real responsibility becomes too frightening.

But a much larger proportion of Americans want their sense of free will back. They belong to what More in Common, the organization I mentioned earlier, calls the exhausted majority. The consistent theme in my conversations with young religious believers on the left and the right is their yearning for the freedom to escape political tribes. Their refusal to be bound by the habits and fears of their parents generation echoes the special role that young Americans played in the detente between Catholics and Protestants two generations ago  and maybe the history of interfaith conflict has something to teach us about rebuilding working relationships between Republicans and Democrats.

When todays hatreds seem ineradicable, its heartening to remember how far Americans have come since, say, 1960, when John F. Kennedys presidential campaign prompted evangelical Protestants to organize a media blitz warning voters that a Catholic president would be a pawn of the Vatican, that fecund Catholic families were taking over the country and that patriotic Protestants shouldnt let charges of anti-Catholic bigotry keep them from sounding the alarm. Are we moving into an era of Roman Catholic domination in America? Harold Ockenga, a prominent evangelical pastor, asked in a rousing speech several weeks before the election. Will there be a denial of rights, freedom and privileges for non-Roman Catholics?

Although a casual anti-Catholic prejudice persists in some circles today, many Americans greeted the Catholic faith of our 46th president with a collective shrug. Over the decades, a complex series of socioeconomic, cultural and ideological shifts smoothed the way for Protestants and Catholics to recognize one another as fellow humans capable of cooperating in the democratic process and even merging their families. Young lay believers contributed at least as much to interfaith understanding as bishops and theologians did. Protestants and Catholics funded by the G.I. Bill sat next to each other in college classrooms after World War II; they marched side by side in the civil rights movement; they worshiped together in the charismatic renewal movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when Pentecostal-style revivals swept all Christian denominations and made a special impact on college campuses.

Its crucial to see that young Catholics and Protestants were not merely emissaries of inevitable generational change. In the interfaith friendships they made, the spouses they chose despite their ethnic last names  in the innumerable small, compassionate interactions that distinguish a thriving civilization from a crumbling one  they made deliberate decisions to reject the prejudices and assumptions of older generations.

I think a lot has changed with my peers, Aberdeen Livingstone, a rising junior at the Kings College, a Christian liberal arts school in New York City, told me. Theres this rise in wanting to be engaged politically but also a rising awareness of the dangers of tribalism. A lot of my friends are trying to get back to something that defines their values other than politics.
The authorities could try to roust them out  earlier in the week, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection helicopter hovered above a group of protesters, throwing up a huge cloud of dust, an action that the federal government says is now under investigation. But its not just the climate thats changed in the last few years; its also the political climate. In an era when officials talk constantly about coming to terms with the dark parts of American history, I doubt Mr. Biden actually wants to sic the cops on Native elders as they sit at the headwaters of one of Americas most storied rivers, on land that, as Native leaders are pointing out, by treaty should fall under Native control.

Instead, the administration should pause construction on Line 3 and re-examine the river-crossing permits granted by the Army Corps of Engineers. The Department of Justice should stop trying to uphold the last administrations decisions, which were made by people who thought climate change was a hoax. And the Biden administration should issue standards to make sure that new fossil fuel infrastructure has to pass a climate test  a test that takes into account Americas theoretical commitment to the Paris accords.

That pact commits us to trying to hold the planets temperature increase to as close to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit as possible. Climate scientists say emissions must fall 45 percent this decade to meet that goal. Thats why the International Energy Agency said last month that new fossil fuel investment must end this year. But the Biden administration also has to take a hard look at any new infrastructure, from liquefied natural gas export terminals on the Oregon coast to gas compressor stations in suburban Boston.

The headwaters of the Mississippi are also, at least for now, the place where Mr. Bidens climate commitment will be judged. Yes, Republicans will attack him if he blocks the pipeline, and so will some of the unions whose workers are likely to fill many of the 8,600 jobs that Enbridge says would be created over a two-year period. But the polls make clear that the people who elected Mr. Biden expect action on the climate. He cant go backward; the climate test of 2015 means that Line 3 in 2021 is an anachronism that must be blocked.

What well find out next is whether Keystone lives up to its name  whether, with its demise, much of the rest of the elaborate architecture of fossil fuel expansion begins to topple. If so, then it will have been a victory not just for a decade but also for the ages.

Bill McKibben, a founder of the climate advocacy group 350.org, teaches environmental studies at Middlebury College and is the author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
The road to this particular hell was paved with rosy public forecasts, which the Pentagon Papers catalog even as they document internal doubts that were ignored or suppressed. As early as May 1965, with the infusion of U.S. combat troops still in its early stages, a top Defense Department official was warning of a widely and strongly held sense among the public that the Establishment is out of its mind. Among Vietnam-era policy elites, both military and civilian, the light at the end of the tunnel, however contrived, never dimmed.

On the 50th anniversary of their release, the Pentagon Papers invite us to reflect on how little they ended up mattering. The canonical lesson of the Vietnam War was to avoid another Vietnam. But a half-century after the Pentagon Papers exposed the misguided thinking that got us into that war, delusions and dishonesty regarding the role of military power persist.

In present-day national security circles, the conviction that armed force holds the key to untangling historys complexities remains an article of faith for many. In Vietnam, race, religion, ethnicity, ideology, geopolitics and national identity, sharpened by a colonial past, numbered among those complexities. While some qualified for passing mention in the Pentagon Papers, they did not budge members of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations from their insistence on aligning South Vietnam with Americas purposes.

The methods the United States employed included arming and advising South Vietnamese forces, protracted bombing of the North and having thousand of troops conduct search and destroy missions in the South. While some 58,000 Americans and far greater numbers of Vietnamese died as a result, none of the generals grand plans delivered the promised results. It was that dismal reality that prompted Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, in June 1967, to commission the Pentagon Papers.

Crucially, however, the quest for the formula that would translate U.S. military might into favorable political outcomes didnt end. Even as excerpts from the Pentagon Papers were making headlines, the United States was illegally bombing Laos and Cambodia, waging a war that Congress had not authorized and about which the American people knew little.

More such episodes of questionable legality and logic were to follow, even after the South Vietnamese government finally fell. Among the most prominent: the Reagan administrations illegal sales of arms to Iran to illegally fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua; clandestine U.S. support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s; Bill Clintons ill-conceived assault in Somalia culminating in the infamous Mogadishu firefight of October 1993; the Bush administrations manipulation of intelligence to create a pretext for invading Iraq in 2003; and Barack Obamas embrace of targeted killing as an executive power.

Capping this sequence of events was the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani of Iran. Much as the Kennedy administration concluded in 1963 that President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam was expendable, so too President Donald Trump decided in January 2020 that General Suleimani should die.
The way to hold off the barbarians on the right should be pretty simple. A unified Democratic message  helping people live better lives with a targeted hand from government  is hugely popular. Its the essence of both the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act and Bidens proposed infrastructure bill. And it should be the essence of what voters think about when they think about Democrats.

Another message, on cultural issues, is much less popular. In a recent congressional race for an open seat in New Mexico, Democrats won in a landslide by emphasizing economic fairness while directly confronting attacks on law and order. The winner, Melanie Stansbury, ran an ad that featured support from a former sheriffs deputy.

The rise in violent crime is now the top concern of many voters across the country, according to a Yahoo News/YouGov survey, and in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, according to a recent poll by Spectrum News NY1/Ipsos. Polling also shows that a majority of Americans oppose defunding the police, and Maloney says its a pernicious lie to label Democrats as the party of defund. But lies, fueled by lefty overreach in some cities as well as social media amplification, tend to have a much longer shelf life than boring talk about infrastructure.

On race, the great reckoning that began with George Floyds death last year should continue to expose the overlooked lowlights of history and work to get rid of the bias built into the system.

But in promoting the teaching of critical race theory  a term so misunderstood that its best known now as a Republican weapon  some educators have played into the hands of the Trumpers, even those less talented in the dark art of demagoguery. At the annual Lincoln Reagan Dinner in New Hampshire in early June, former Vice President Mike Pence said that children are being taught to be ashamed of their skin color, a popular Republican talking point.

If the message is that being born white is something akin to the Roman Catholic concept of original sin, then theres bound to be a backlash among the moderate voters who came around to Democrats in the Trump era.

The longtime liberal strategist Ruy Teixeira warned of this very thing in his newsletter in May and said moderates are afraid to push back. The administration is doing nothing to head off this impending culture war in the schools because to do so would bring the wrath of the stridently woke sector of the Democratic Party down upon Bidens head, he wrote.
Jeff Godfrey, who spent the last 11 years living in Brooklyn, realized a longtime dream this spring: He moved to Manhattan.

I just always wanted to try living in Manhattan, said Mr. Godfrey, a 34-year-old artist and bartender, who scoured various listings sites for months after realizing that, thanks to plummeting rents, the borough was finally within reach. In April, he pounced on a spacious, newly renovated two-bedroom on the Lower East Side that rents for $2,400 a month  the same price he was paying for an unrenovated two-bedroom off the Halsey J train stop in Bushwick. The new place is even rent stabilized.

Which is perfect, as he plans to stay for decades.

Theres creative energy, human energy  not just artists but many different types of people. You see more people on the streets, said Mr. Godfrey, who shares his apartment with a roommate, but hopes one day to have the space to himself. All of New York has that, but Manhattan has this compressed energy.

Which is a far different vision of Manhattan than the one that has been widely broadcast over the past year: hollowed out by the pandemic, a place of empty office towers and boarded-up storefronts, many of its residents having fled to the suburbs or Florida, never to return.
Jamila Ross and Akino West both work in the food and hospitality business, but thats pretty much where the similarities end.

When the pair, who had dated off and on for several years before becoming a couple, opened the Copper Door Bed & Breakfast in Miami in 2018, their schedules were grueling. We were at it 24/7, Ms. Ross said. Our differences were not situational, but there were times when we didnt want to be near each other.

Both 29, Ms. Ross is the more creative of the two; Mr. West is methodical. She is chatty and outgoing; he is more reserved.

Being in close quarters while taking care of others proved to be somewhat challenging.

I didnt always agree with her vision and vice versa, but we learned that one of us had to let go and be the bigger person, Mr. West said.
The Futurists also put forth the idea that creative energy should be embedded in everything, from furniture to politics to city planning to food. To that end, Marinetti held Futurist events and even wrote a Futurist cookbook, warning that pasta made men sluggish and anti-virile. This sort of machismo aligned with the Italian Fascist party, with which Marinetti eventually joined forces, though he spoke out against anti-Semitism and was often at odds with the movement, especially once it began to glorify the past, as represented by the Catholic church and the Roman Empire, rather than the future. Futurisms proximity to and overlap with Fascism tainted how it was seen for many years. Recently, though, art historians have been re-examining it in all its complexity. And not all Futurists were Fascists. Balla started out as a staunch socialist. After World War I, he embraced patriotic and populist ideologies but, by the end of the 30s, had withdrawn his support from both Fascist and Futurist circles.

Nonetheless, one might argue that it was Balla who managed to create the most complete Futurist universe. As early as 1912, he was designing mens clothes that would still be considered avant-garde today  a jacket, with an asymmetrical lapel, thats covered in a black, orange and fiery red geometric pattern with matching pants, for instance, as well as decorative fabric pins that he called modifiers. In 1915, Balla and the artist Fortunato Depero wrote a manifesto of their own, Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe, which went even further, expanding the boundaries of art to include dishes, rugs and childrens toys, among other everyday items. At the same time, Balla started to transform his then apartment, on Via Nicolo Porpora, into a kaleidoscopic environment filled with painted cabinets and interchangeable patterned lampshades, which were meant to spark surprise and joy in all who encountered them. Beginning in 1919, Balla opened the apartment up to the public on Sunday afternoons. I dont know of another artist at that time who advertised in the newspapers to publicize his own home, said the art historian Fabio Benzi, who believes the Futurists, and Balla in particular, influenced other avant-garde art flourishings of the time, from the Bauhaus school in Germany to the de Stijl movement in the Netherlands. If he were alive today, hed love Instagram.
In 1952, the photographer Gordon Parks worked with Ralph Ellison to translate the writers novel, Invisible Man, published earlier that year, into a series of images for Life magazine. One of the photographs depicts the books nameless narrator in his retreat beneath the city, amid the 1,369 light bulbs that, he tells the reader, illuminated the blackness of my invisibility. In Parkss photograph, the lights are arrayed on the walls behind the figure in a modernist and rhythmic arrangement that reads as an extension of the music emanating from his two turntables (presumably Louis Armstrong, whom the narrator listens to while eating vanilla ice cream and sloe gin). The world up above  represented by tiny lights nearly swallowed up by the night  barely exists by comparison. But his clean, well-lighted place is a beginning, not an ending. He is biding his time. A hibernation, he says, is a covert preparation for a more overt action.

This sort of creative overlap wasnt unusual for Ellison, who occasionally worked as a photographer himself and was steeped in the arts of his day. After leaving the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama (where he studied music and played trumpet) for New York in 1936, he apprenticed with the Black sculptor Richmond Barthe, and by midcentury found himself among a cadre of Black artists and writers, including Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Catlett, Albert Murray, Dorothy West, Richard Wright, Roy DeCarava and Romare Bearden. Beardens collages, in particular, represented Ellisons artistic ideals. In an essay on the artist published in 1968 to accompany an exhibition at the Art Gallery of the State University of New York at Albany, Ellison wrote admiringly of the way Beardens work gives voice to the Black experience while also exploring the possibilities of form. The artists magisterial treatment of image and technique  in his textural collage-paintings and projections expressive of jazz and blues, Southern rural life and Northern cities, ritual and myth  allowed him, Ellison wrote, to express the tragic predicament of his people without violating his passionate dedication to art as a fundamental and transcendent agency for confronting and revealing the world.
On Feb. 6, 2018, Apple received a grand jury subpoena for the names and phone records connected to 109 email addresses and phone numbers. It was one of the more than 250 data requests that the company received on average from U.S. law enforcement each week at the time. An Apple paralegal complied and provided the information.

This year, a gag order on the subpoena expired. Apple said it alerted the people who were the subjects of the subpoena, just as it does with dozens of customers each day.

But this request was out of the ordinary.

Without knowing it, Apple said, it had handed over the data of congressional staff members, their families and at least two members of Congress, including Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, then the House Intelligence Committees top Democrat and now its chairman. It turned out the subpoena was part of a wide-ranging investigation by the Trump administration into leaks of classified information.

Around the same time, The Times reported on Sunday, Apple also turned over data on Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel to former President Donald J. Trump. It was unclear what the department was investigating.
Hall, 40, the author of the Olivier Award-winning The Mountaintop, wrote a play that was full of frenetic action (stirring pots, dismembering chickens, spicing sauces), emotional exchanges and sitcom-style ribbing.

She also co-wrote the book for Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, which is nominated for numerous Tony Awards (including best musical and best book of a musical), and created the Starz drama P-Valley, which follows a crew of dancers at a strip club in the Mississippi Delta. Hall is currently working on Season 2 of the series, which is based on one of her plays.

With theaters across the country closed during the pandemic, the Pulitzer committee made some adjustments to its qualifications: Finalists were allowed to include works that were performed virtually or those that were canceled or postponed during the pandemic. The Hot Wing King opened at the beginning of March 2020 but was not able to finish its run because of pandemic closures.

Whats refreshing here, Ben Brantley wrote in his review for The New York Times, is the matter-of-fact depiction of Black gay characters who may be dissatisfied, to varying degrees, with their own behavior but not, ultimately, because of their sexuality.

Watching Cordell and Dwayne casually snuggle and kiss, he went on, draping their bodies over each other, you sense a bond in which erotic attraction has segued into something both more relaxed and more complex.
Rezo Gabriadze, a playwright, screenwriter and director whose fanciful avant-garde stage works, many using puppets, were presented at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York and numerous other outlets as well as at the theater named for him in his home country, Georgia, died on Sunday in its capital, Tbilisi. He was 84.

The Rezo Gabriadze Theater in Tbilisi confirmed his death. The cause was not given.

Mr. Gabriadze was known for unconventional works that challenged the audiences imagination. In his play Forbidden Christmas, or the Doctor and the Patient, for instance, which was staged at Lincoln Center in 2004 and toured the United States, Mikhail Baryshnikov, branching out into acting, portrayed a man who thought he was a car.

More often, though, Mr. Gabriadzes stage works were populated not by human performers but by puppets. Perhaps his best-known creation was The Battle of Stalingrad, a puppet play first staged in Dijon, France, in 1996. It examined that pivotal World War II battle, but obliquely, through individual stories. Some involved human characters, but there was also a love story between two horses, as well as an ant with a dying daughter.
Its a 13-hour trip, so they have a captive audience for that long and still dont prepare you for what you get when you land, she said. It was mayhem at the airport.

She said people were separated into different lines: one for residents; another for visitors, which then split into separate lines for vaccinated travelers and unvaccinated travelers. She saw that many travelers had not completed parts of the onboarding process, which is supposed to be done before boarding the flight: answering a questionnaire about their health in the 24-hour period before flying or uploading their test results to the Safe Travel site. Stopping the line while they completed those steps led to delays for everyone, she said.

Those charged with checking traveler credentials seemed irritated with travelers and travelers seemed irritated with them, Ms. Flagg said.

For the people who do make it out of the airport, there is still a chance of having to quarantine.

Betsy Blair, a health psychologist who lives in Milwaukee, traveled to Hawaii with her wife this month. The couple prepared their documents, got a negative test from a state-approved test provider and headed to Hawaii. They flew into Kona on the Big Island without hassle, then to Maui for a few nights and then to Hilo, back on the Big Island. Ms. Blair said that she repeatedly asked people at her hotel in Maui if she and her wife would need a test to get back to the Big Island, but were told they would not.

Between scouring the website and asking people we thought would know the rules, we went to Hilo, she said. They were promptly quarantined, though they were allowed to sit things out at their Airbnb. Making matters worse, their car rental was immediately canceled because the quarantine and reservation information is connected in the states Safe Travels app.

The states Tourism Authority said that Hawaiis rental car fleet decreased by more than 40 percent during the pandemic because many car companies sold off their cars. Janice Berman, who recently traveled to Maui, said she got quoted a price of $3,000 to rent a car for 12 days.

The cost of ride shares with services including Uber and Lyft is also extremely high. The Tourism Authority is urging travelers to use other modes of transportation to navigate the islands.
The Great Reopening

With vaccination rates rising and virus cases declining, there is a hopefulness to this summer that feels exciting and unique. Millions of Americans, after 15 months of heartbreak and sacrifice, are returning to prepandemic activities for the first time.

We didnt want to let this hard-earned moment pass us by, so we asked readers to send us photos of the first moments they felt that something had changed, and that life was returning to something resembling normal.

For Zak Baumann, of Los Angeles, (below, far left) that moment came when he attended the University of Southern Californias in-person commencement ceremony.
The following day, three boys hiking along the Sun River in Great Falls found Mr. Bogles body in an area that was known as a rendezvous spot for teenagers.

He was face down, and had been shot in the back of the head. His hands had been tied behind his back with his own belt. The ignition switch, radio and headlights on his car were on, and the car was in gear. His expensive camera had not been taken.

Investigators initially feared that Ms. Kalitzke had been kidnapped.

But the next day, Jan. 4, 1956, a county road worker found her body off a gravel road about five miles north of Great Falls. She had been shot in the head and had injuries that were consistent with a struggle or a sexual assault, Sergeant Kadner said.

Newspaper headlines described the teenagers as lovers lane slaying victims and recalled a wide search for a brutal killer.

Over the next half century, detectives investigated about 35 potential suspects, including James (Whitey) Bulger, the notorious South Boston mobster who was convicted in 2013 of participating in 11 murders. Mr. Bulger, who died in 2018, had lived in Great Falls in the 1950s and had been arrested in a rape there in 1951, Sergeant Kadner said.

But no one was ever charged, and the case went cold.

Investigators turned to genetic genealogy in 2018, after the authorities arrested Joseph James DeAngelo, known as the Golden State Killer, and accused him of committing 13 murders and nearly 50 rapes that terrorized California in the 1970s and 80s. It was the first high-profile case to be cracked with genetic genealogy.

Thats when we really started looking at what evidence we had, and if we could potentially do the same thing, Sergeant Kadner said.
Police departments face severe challenges in retaining and recruiting officers, according to new data outlining the steady exodus from an occupation that was the target of protests last year after several high-profile police killings.

We have lost about one-third of our staff to resignation and retirement, said Chief David Zack of the Asheville Police Department in North Carolina  more than 80 officers out of a full complement of 238. Certainly with the way that police have been portrayed and vilified in some cases, they have decided that it is not the life for them.

Those reductions in Ashville echo a nationwide trend. A survey of about 200 police departments indicates that retirements were up by 45 percent and resignations by 18 percent in the period between April 2020 and April 2021, when compared with the preceding 12 months. The percentage of officers who left tended to be larger for departments in big or medium-size cities, according to the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington policy institute that will release full data next week.

It is an evolving crisis, said Chuck Wexler, the organizations executive director.

Last years departures came against the backdrop of protests that erupted nationwide when George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, along with the police killings of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta. The aggressive tactics some officers used against protesters often compounded the vitriol against the police.
WASHINGTON  Federal regulators said on Friday that millions of doses of Johnson & Johnsons coronavirus vaccine produced at a troubled Baltimore factory could not be used, the latest in a series of setbacks for a company whose single-shot vaccine was once considered crucial to the nations inoculation campaign.

The Food and Drug Administration will still allow about 10 million doses from the factory to be distributed in the United States or sent to other countries, but with a proviso that regulators cannot guarantee that Emergent BioSolutions, the company that operates the plant, followed proper manufacturing practices, according to people familiar with the agencys decision. About 60 million doses will not be usable because of possible contamination.

The agency has not yet decided whether Emergent can reopen the factory, which closed two months ago because of concerns about cross-contamination with another vaccine manufactured at the same site. That verdict is most likely a few weeks away, according to people familiar with the situation.

All 21 million Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses distributed in the United States so far were manufactured at Johnson & Johnsons plants in the Netherlands, not by Emergent. Still, the shot has suffered in popularity after the government investigated its possible link to a rare clotting disorder. And state health officials have in recent weeks scrambled to use Johnson & Johnson doses before they expire.
WASHINGTON  It should have been an easy question.

In Guatemala this week, Vice President Kamala Harris sat with NBC anchor Lester Holt, who grilled her about why she had not visited the U.S.-Mexico border as part of her work examining the root causes of migration. After the third border-related question, the vice president appeared to have had enough.

Ive never been to Europe, Ms. Harris said. I dont understand the point youre making.

That response perplexed several administration officials who knew she had prepared at length for the question. By veering away from the script, Ms. Harris gave Republicans grist for a news cycle that lasted longer than her two-day trip. In another appearance, her blunt message to migrants on behalf of President Biden  do not come  was criticized by lawmakers in the progressive wing of her own party.

The trip crystallized something crucial about Ms. Harriss vice presidency: Whether she stays on message  as she did by telling migrants not to come  or goes off script, she will not be able to satisfy everyone. With two of the most polarizing issues, migration and voting rights, now in her portfolio, the risk of missteps is so high and the problems so intractable that even her allies say she is in a no-win situation.

A politician who has always struggled to define herself, Ms. Harris is now trying to do so in real time, with two issues that could complicate her own political future and potentially upend some of Mr. Bidens central ambitions for his legacy.
William F. Clinger Jr., a nine-term Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who vigorously pursued two investigations into wrongdoing by the Clinton administration and two decades later said that Donald J. Trump, his partys nominee, was unqualified to be president, died on May 28 in Naples, Fla. He was 92.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Eleanore (Bijou) Miller. Mr. Clinger had lived in Florida for several years since moving from Virginia.

Mr. Clinger, the only freshman millionaire member of the House of Representatives when he was first elected in 1978, was a relatively moderate Republican, a former appointee of President Gerald R. Ford as chief counsel of the Commerce Departments Economic Development Administration and a proponent of public works.

His signature legislation, though, was a plank from the Contract With America, the conservative legislative agenda successfully advanced by Speaker Newt Gingrich and his fellow Republicans during the 1994 midterm elections, in which they seized control of the House for the first time in 40 years.
A city engineer was obsessed for years with perceived workplace grievances before killing 12 people in a 2019 shooting at a municipal complex in Virginia Beach, the F.B.I. said this week, releasing the findings of a behavioral analysis that provided new insight on a motive for the attack.

The gunman, DeWayne Craddock, who was fatally wounded by the police, had become alienated from his co-workers over how they viewed him and his own perception of his job performance, according to the findings by the bureaus Behavioral Analysis Unit.

The shooters inflated sense of self-importance contributed to this conflict and led him to believe he was unjustly and repeatedly criticized and slighted, the bureau concluded. Violence was viewed by the shooter as a way to reconcile this conflict and restore his perverted view of justice.

The findings, which were released on Wednesday, offer a measure of explanation for what can be inexplicable for those investigating some of the nations deadliest mass shootings: the mind-set of a gunman. Several of those shootings remain mysteries, with investigators unable to determine a motive.
MELBOURNE, Australia  The 3-year-old girl was born in Australia, in a tiny town called Biloela, far from the big cities of Sydney and Melbourne. But her parents were asylum seekers from Sri Lanka and living in a country that heavily discourages illegal migration, so the government sent them to a faraway island while deciding their fate.

This week the girl, Tharnicaa Murugappan, returned to mainland Australia, but not for the reason her family had hoped  she was medically evacuated to Perth, where she is now battling a blood infection in a hospital after a lengthy illness. Supporters of the family say she was given only painkillers for nearly two weeks at the remote government detention facility while her fever rose, and she now suffers from pneumonia, which led to her blood infection.

Tharnicaa and her family, often called the Biloela family among Australians, are the most high-profile asylum seekers in Australia. In a country that is inured to criticism from international human rights organizations over its draconian immigration policy, the detentions of Tharnicaa and her older sister have drawn outrage.

Tharnicaas illness has renewed calls for the family to be released from detention and prompted candlelight vigils and protests across Australia. Over half a million people have signed a petition demanding the family be returned to Biloela, a town of about 5,800 that is 260 miles northwest of Brisbane. Politicians from both sides have called for the family to be released from detention while maintaining support for the hard-line immigration policies that put them there. Karen Andrews, the home affairs minister, has been so inundated with calls about the case that her voicemail specifies that anyone wanting to speak to her about it should do so in writing.
For decades, Hong Kongs movie industry has enthralled global audiences with balletic shoot-em-ups, epic martial-arts fantasies, chopsocky comedies and shadow-drenched romances. Now, under orders from Beijing, local officials will scrutinize such works with an eye toward safeguarding the Peoples Republic of China.

The citys government on Friday said it would begin blocking the distribution of films that are deemed to undermine national security, marking the official arrival of mainland Chinese-style censorship in one of Asias most celebrated filmmaking hubs.

The new guidelines, which apply to both domestically produced and foreign films, come as a sharp slap to the artistic spirit of Hong Kong, where government-protected freedoms of expression and an irreverent local culture had imbued the city with a cultural vibrancy that set it apart from mainland megacities.

They also represent a broadening of the Chinese governments hold on the global film industry. Chinas booming box office has been irresistible to Hollywood studios. Big-budget productions go to great lengths to avoid offending Chinese audiences and Communist Party censors, while others discover the expensive way what happens when they do not.
The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email.

For the past two weeks, Ive been trying to nudge my parents into getting the vaccine. Theyve been eligible since the beginning of May and can book an appointment through their G.P. whenever they want. Theyre going to get it. Theyve just been putting it off.

Ive been hugely frustrated at the slow pace of Australias vaccine rollout, especially watching from Melbourne, where we are just coming out of a two-week lockdown that might not have been necessary if more people had been inoculated.

Damien, our bureau chief, is working on a big-picture article about how Australia and Asia, so successful in the early containment of the virus, are now lagging behind in their vaccine rollouts and facing months more of isolation and uncertainty. (Look out for that in the coming days.)

On a micro level, I think my parents  and a seemingly sizable number of Australians who have a similar mentality  are another element of the story: people who have no issues with vaccines, but due to complacency and the perception that were more or less safe from the virus here in our island fortress, have little incentive to get vaccinated.
MOSCOW  She was one small step away from finishing law school. Post-university life was dawning, seemingly full of promise. Friends planned parties and summer vacations.

But Sofia Sapega, 23, instead now sits in a cell in Belarus, showing how a life can be abruptly upended by the harsh recent pivot in Belarusian and Russian politics, even for a young woman who was relatively apolitical, according to acquaintances.

Ms. Sapega was arrested last month after Belarusian authorities forced down a Ryanair flight in the countrys airspace as she was traveling between Greece and Lithuania.

Belarusian authorities have not formally disclosed their accusations, but, informally, the reason for her arrest seems clear enough: Her crime was having a boyfriend, Roman Protasevich, who was prominent in the post-Soviet countrys opposition. The two were detained together while returning from a vacation.
LONDON  The news media call it freedom day, the fast approaching moment when Englands remaining coronavirus restrictions are scheduled to be cast off at last, allowing pubs to fill to capacity, nightclubs to open their doors and the curtain to rise in theaters around the country.

But a recent spike in cases of the highly transmissible coronavirus variant called Delta has prompted such alarm among scientists and health professionals that the country now seems destined to wait a little longer for its liberty.

For Prime Minister Boris Johnson, oft accused of doing too little, too late to combat the virus, the stakes are high. The question is not so much whether to postpone freedom day  June 21  but to what degree. Four weeks seems to be the maximum under consideration, with some advocating going ahead with a limited version of the full opening and others favoring a two-week delay.

An announcement on the next steps is scheduled for Monday, and Mr. Johnson plans to study the data through the weekend. But many health professionals have already made up their minds over the seriousness of the threat from the Delta variant, first detected in India.
Were living in an era of diminished trust, said Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to the United States who runs the Munich Security Conference, where Mr. Biden has been a regular speaker.

Germans, he said, used to think it did not matter much to the trans-Atlantic alliance if the president was a Democrat or a Republican. Now, Mr. Ischinger said, We are, for the first time in 70 years, confronted with a new question: What happens if a resurrected Trump reappears on the stage?

White House officials have carefully choreographed Mr. Bidens trip to make it a summer festival of alliance repair. But back in Washington, analysts say its personnel moves show a more marginalized role for Europe.

The White House has named prominent officials to coordinate Indo-Pacific and Middle East policy in the National Security Council. There is no counterpart for Europe, nor has the administration made diplomatic appointments, like an ambassador to NATO or an envoy to handle Northern Ireland.

Mr. Biden has welcomed the leaders of Japan and South Korea at the White House, though not yet any major European leader.

On the eve of his visit to Britain, a senior American diplomat expressed blunt concerns to Mr. Johnsons chief Brexit negotiator about how Britain was handling tensions over post-Brexit trade arrangements in Northern Ireland.

There is a similar sense of limited expectations on both sides about Russia, even with Mr. Biden set to meet President Vladimir V. Putin next week in Geneva. Relations between Washington and Moscow soured swiftly in the early months of the administration, as the United States faced a Russian hacking operation, evidence of continued Russian interference in the 2020 presidential campaign and Mr. Putins massing of troops on Russias border with Ukraine.
Germany on Friday moved to ensure that women are represented in the upper echelons of some of Europes largest publicly traded companies, advancing a measure in Parliament that would set a quota for women on management boards.

Under the proposal approved by the Parliament, public companies in Germany with four or more board members would be required to have one female board member, and government-controlled firms with boards of three or more members would also be required to have one woman.

The measure is expected to receive final passage by Germanys upper house this summer. Companies will face financial penalties for failing to meet the new law.

Highly qualified women still come up against glass ceilings far too often, said the minister for justice and family affairs, Christine Lambrecht. This is a milestone for women in Germany and at the same time offers a great opportunity for both society and companies.
Italy will stop administering AstraZenecas Covid vaccine to people under the age of 60, the Italian government announced on Friday, amid a drop in the countrys level of infections that meant the risks of distributing the vaccine to younger people was judged to outweigh the benefits.

The AstraZeneca vaccine has been under scrutiny after a smattering of reports of rare and severe blood clots in those who had received the vaccine emerged in Europe.

Younger Italians who have already received one dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine will get a different shot for their booster dose, said Francesco Paolo Figliuolo, an army general in charge of Italys vaccination effort, during a news conference. He added that the change would have minimal impact on the countrys vaccination rollout.

The announcement was the latest in a series of reversed decisions about the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was developed with Oxford University. Some doctors worry that the back and forth could further undermine the trust in the vaccine, and hamper Italys inoculation campaign.
Using bank funds freed from American sanctions, Iran has paid $16.2 million in delinquent dues owed to the United Nations, diplomats said Friday, a step that restored Irans suspended voting rights at the world body.

Irans restored ability to gain access to those funds, which had been impounded at a Korean bank under sanctions imposed by former President Donald J. Trump, was apparently a conciliatory gesture by the Biden administration, which wants to restore the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran that Mr. Trump had scrapped.

The United States Treasury Departments Office of Foreign Assets Control must grant a license for such transactions under the American banking sanctions imposed on Iran. Asked for comment, the Treasury said in an emailed statement that the government typically authorizes the payment of U.N. dues, including through O.F.A.C. general licenses and specific licenses.

Under Article 19 of the United Nations Charter, a country that owes the previous two years worth of dues loses its vote in the General Assembly. Word that Iran was among the delinquent countries that had fallen into that category was disclosed last week by the office of Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
ERBIL, Iraq  Basim Razzos apartment in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Erbil is pristine, with none of the clutter of most family homes. The spotless kitchen cupboards hold cans of Maxwell House coffee, a brand he and his wife, Mayada Taka, became fond of when they lived in the United States in the 1980s.

In the living room next to a wide-screen TV, a pink plush unicorn and other stuffed toys are neatly stacked on a blue armchair, awaiting the next visit of his 3-year-old granddaughter, who Mr. Razzo says is his life now.

The little girl is also named Mayada, after her grandmother, Mr. Razzos late wife. Mayada Taka and the couples 21-year-old daughter, Tuqa, were killed in an airstrike on their home in the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2015 by the U.S.-led coalition fighting the militant group ISIS.
JERUSALEM  A new Israeli government united in its determination to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but in agreement on little else, is set to take office Sunday under a right-wing leader whose eight-party coalition includes the left and, for the first time, an independent Arab party.

It looks like a recipe for chronic instability.

Even Sundays confidence vote in the Knesset, or parliament, that would usher in the first change in Israeli leadership in a dozen years is not a done deal, given the razor-thin majority of Naftali Bennetts coalition with its 61 seats in the 120-member chamber. But every indication is that the votes to make Mr. Bennett prime minister are locked in, absent some 11th-hour drama.

A signed coalition agreement was formally presented to the Knesset secretariat Friday, the last step before a vote and the swearing-in of the new government.

Survival will then become the issue. Israels parliamentary democracy veered in a presidential direction under Mr. Netanyahu. In the end, his increasingly dismissive style had alienated too many people, especially among nominal allies on the right.
Bowie, a Maryland city of about 60K people, wants to hire a firm to develop a unifying brand strategy to guide its outreach and communications.
Altus Marketing is named agency of record by Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries and Union Rescue Mission in Wichita, KS. Altus will provide direct marketing solutions to increase brand awareness and maximize fundraising revenue to advance the missions of the organizations to provide food, shelter and services for people who are abused, disadvantaged and homeless in their communities. Founded in 1909, DRMM provides services including emergency shelter and job training to more than 1,800 men, women and children in the Detroit community annually. Union Rescue Mission offers help to individuals and families in Wichita who struggle to make ends meet, thanks to funding from individuals, churches, businesses and civic groups. Were confident in our choice of a new agency because of the deep experience and the strong leadership this team brings to the table, said Detroit Rescue Mission Ministries president Dr. Chad Audi.

BizCom Associates lands LINE-X, a manufacturer of high-performance protective coatings, as well as automotive and lifestyle accessories. BizCom will assist the company with PR and media relations, educating its consumer base about its range of coatings, industrial applications and accessories. LINE-X joins Getaround and asTech on BizComs automotive-focused client roster. . The pandemic has created a new segment of novice, first-time truck enthusiasts who are spending money on vehicles and getting back to the great outdoors, said BizCom president Monica Feid. We are excited about the opportunity to introduce the brand to this emerging market.

Hollywood Agency takes on South Shore Conservatory, the largest community arts school in New England. The agency will work with the Conservatory to reinforce its brand through earned media, social media engagement and events. Incorporated in 1970, SSC has campuses in Hingham and Duxbury, MA and provides performing arts including music, dance and drama. As South Shore Conservatory emerges from a challenging year of COVID, we look forward to returning to the communities we serve in full force, said SSC president Robert Cinnante.
10/06/2021 - Strong education, good governance and the rule of law, a clean environment, and dynamic economies offering opportunities were designated as the most important dimensions of a positive future in the national workshops feeding the report launched today by the OECD Development Centre.

The first of its kind dedicated to a region, the Multi-dimensional Review (MDR) of the Western Balkans combines the assessments of five economies: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Serbia.

With impressive unanimity, quality education ranked topmost in all inception workshops. Rule of law and quality public services are also very important to citizens, especially in Albania, Kosovo and North Macedonia, indicating the importance of strong institutions. In Kosovo, North Macedonia and Serbia, access to and quality of health services rank very high. Reflecting differences in development across geographical areas, decentralisation ranks high for citizens in Serbia. Access to quality jobs and environmental considerations are also important.

According to the report, the Western Balkans have achieved remarkable progress over the last two decades, including significant economic and social development, poverty reduction and improved living standards. Geographical proximity to important European markets and production networks, and the ongoing integration with the European Union (EU) have offered additional opportunities for the region to attract international investment, boost competitiveness, develop attractive tourism destinations, and facilitate democratisation processes.

However, entrenched social, institutional and environmental challenges in the region remain pressing. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic poses another huge challenge for the region. While the Western Balkans have managed an effective response overall, the economic fallout has been severe in some economies and a return to more stringent measures is possible. As the countercyclical imperative will necessitate large-scale public spending, identifying strategic priorities become more urgent than ever to ensure that resources are well spent.

The report proposes ten priorities for enhancing the development prospects of all economies in the region:

Further integration with the EU, an overarching priority that supports the regions development and regional cooperation

Combine education with practical training, investment promotion and proactive creation of partnerships with firms, academia and other stakeholders

Strengthen social cohesion and resilience by reforming social protection, delivering services more effectively and making labour market institutions more supportive

Ensure access to sustainable and reliable energy supply and address excessive air pollution. Given the small size of each economy and the variation in their endowments in terms of natural resources and energy opportunities, a resilient, climate-friendly and high-performing energy mix only seems attainable at the regional level.

Boost digitalisation to make economies more competitive and productive, and transform governments and public service delivery

Recognise diasporas significant potential through investment programmes development, sponsorships and incentives for return migration

Seize the opportunities to increase demand for qualified labour, including female labour

Address challenges created by current land management and registration of property rights to counter deleterious consequences for rural development, revenue generation and the environment

Focus on local governments, their funding, incentives and capacities

Strengthen commitment to effective public delivery and good governance

For more information, journalists are invited to contact the OECD Development Centres Press office: Bochra Kriout (bochra.kriout@oecd.org ; Tel.: +33 145 24 82 96).
U.S. virologist who warned of seemingly "engineered" features of COVID-19 closes Twitter account: media

Xinhua) 15:59, June 11, 2021

WASHINGTON, June 10 (Xinhua) -- A U.S. virologist deleted his Twitter account after his email exchange with top U.S. infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci was exposed, which included claims that some of the novel coronavirus' features "(potentially) look engineered," according to a recent report by U.S. magazine Newsweek.

The account of Kristian G. Andersen, a professor at the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research, was no longer accessible on June 6, Newsweek quoted the Internet archive The Wayback Machine as saying.

In an email sent to Fauci on Jan. 31, 2020, Andersen said some of SARS-CoV-2's features "(potentially) look engineered."

He later added that the "unusual features of the virus" made up a "really small part" of the genome.

The email exchange between him and Fauci had been released by The Washington Post and Buzzfeed.

Andersen noted that following discussions with his team, they "all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change."

On March 17, 2020, Andersen and his colleagues published a paper in Nature Medicine in which they claimed COVID was not created in a lab or "purposefully manipulated," according to the report.

While defending the findings in his research paper, he also told Newsweek that the Wuhan lab leak idea was "based purely on speculation" and that he had not found any "credible evidence" to back it up.

(Web editor: Zhong Wenxing, Liang Jun)
Chief Executive of the HSE Paul Reid has given a very positive update on Covid-19 numbers in hospitals.

Mr Reid described the trend as "an amazing decline" with just 59 people with Covid-19 now being treated in hospitals in the Republic of Ireland.

#COVID19 inpatients in hospital continues an amazing decline. Down to 59 cases with 23 of those in ICU. This is a remarkable benefit of our strong vaccination programme & public support overall. We all deserve to cherish and protect these great moments. @HSELive  Paul Reid (@paulreiddublin) June 10, 2021

23 patients are in ICU with the virus.

"This is a remarkable benefit of our strong vaccination programme and public support overall. We all deserve to cherish and protect these great moments," he added.

Paul Reid went on to say that one of the busiest hospitals in the country, St James's Hospital in Dublin is now free of Covid-19 patients for the first time since March 2020 at the onset of the pandemic.

"A special shout out to Clinical Nurse Manager, Bernie Waterhouse. Bernie and her team deserve huge credit, as does everyone there. Thank you all so much," Paul Reid said.

Meanwhile, in Northern Ireland, just 18 patients are being treated in hospital with zero patients in ICU.
JUDGE Catherine Staines said there was only one reason why someone would carry a knuckle duster and ''we all know what that is.''

Szymon Skorka, (21) 131, The Sycamores, Edenderry pleaded guilty to the offences before the court at last week's sitting.

On January 4, 2020 at 11.40pm Garda Mark Shine spoke to the defendant and got a smell of cannabis from him. The defendant was found to be carrying a flick knife, a black expandable baton and a knuckle duster along with a joint. He had one previous conviction.

Solicitor for Mr Skorka said the defendant got the items because they looked interesting.

He said he was an out of work landscaper.

Judge Catherine Staines said maybe he could do some community service by landscaping in the local graveyard.

She imposed 120 hours community service in lieu of six months in prison.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has completed a trip to Singapore and is now on his way to Cornwall to meet with world leaders at the G7 summit.
SBS 11 Jun 2021

Victoria has recorded no new local cases of coronavirus for the first time since late May, as Queensland and NSW also recorded zero..
Crown Resorts will face an additional 10 weeks of scrutiny in Victorias royal commission after new evidence of potential wrongdoing cast further doubt over its suitability to hold its Melbourne casino licence.
Queenslands health minister has issued a scathing warning to Melburnians trying to enter the state after five Victorians were found entering the sunshine state recently without an exemption.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she plans to go to Tokyo to make the final bid to secure the Olympics as long as there isnt a local virus outbreak.
SWNS STUDIO 14 May 2021

The footage shows a crew of Australian hikers travelling to the tallest peak of the Madeira mountain in Portugal.Jackson Groves and..
The outgoing German chancellor is set to travel to Washington for talks with the US president on COVID, climate change and bilateral ties.
The news came in separate statements from the RKI and the foreign minister on Friday. Only a few countries, such as India and the UK, remain banned due to high infection rates.
The US and EU have issued an impassioned plea for greater international efforts to tackle an emerging famine in Ethiopia's Tigray and end the conflict wracking the region.
US President Joe Biden had a productive meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson Thursday. Plus, the humanitarian crisis in Tigray is being exacerbated by previous crises. And, a look at the history of Alaskas Denali National Park.
A massive bill laying out the long-term U.S. strategy for competing with China is making its way through Congress. There is even a long section in it about Canada. As Alex Panetta explains, the bill presents potential challenges as well as some opportunities for this country.
The Duchess of Cambridge has said she "can't wait to meet" her new niece Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor and hopes it will be soon.
The Israeli army said there was a riot at Beita, near Nablus, and soldiers' lives were in danger.
Lakshadweep Police on Thursday filed a sedition case against actor-model Aisha Sultana for saying that the Modi government used administrator Praful Khoda Patel to deploy COVID-19 as a 'bio weapon' against people of island.
Indian external affairs minister S Jaishankar on Thursday assured the worried diaspora in Kuwait that the second wave of Covid-19 was receding in India and the government "really moved mountains" to contain the pandemic. Jaishankar addressed the Indian community after concluding his meetings in the country.
(MENAFN - Gulf Times) The man accused of mowing down a Muslim family with his pickup truck in what Canadian police are calling a hate-motivated attack will appear in court on Thursday, with few details having emerged so far about the suspect in the deadly hit-and-run. Nathaniel Veltman, 20, was arrested on Sunday in a London, Ontario, mall parking lot, a short distance from the city's oldest mosque. He was wearing what appeared to be a body-armor-type vest at the time, police said. The virtual court appearance at 9:15 a.m. (1315 GMT) is procedural and is unlikely to last more than a few minutes, a court official said. Veltman faces four charges of first-degree murder and one of attempted murder. He was initially in court on Monday when he was remanded to custody. It was not yet known if he had a lawyer. The front part of the pickup truck was severely damaged and was stained with blood, said Hasan Savehilaghi, president of a taxi firm, recounting details provided by one of his drivers, who was at the scene of the arrest. Savehilaghi said that as the suspect was dragged from his truck by police, he was chanting, but his words were not clear. Veltman yelled at the taxi driver to film the arrest. He was enjoying the scene, like it was important for him to be recorded, said Savehilaghi. Police said on Monday that Veltman was not known to have links to any hate groups, but added that they were still investigating. On Tuesday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the killings a terrorist attack and vowed to clamp down on far-right groups and online hate. Scant details about Veltman's life have come to light. He worked part-time at an egg-packing plant in Strathroy, Ontario, near London. Neighbors at his downtown London apartment said he could often be heard playing video games at high volume late at night, the London Free Press reported. London is about halfway between Toronto and Detroit. As a teenager, Veltman participated in a number of road races, ranging from 5k to 10k, according to records available online. The suspected attacker does not appear to have much of a social media presence. A blank Facebook page with roughly a dozen friends was taken down by the social media company on Monday. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, a non-profit focused on monitoring hate groups, said the lack of a social media footprint was unusual for someone Veltman's age. The group has not yet linked Veltman to any known hate groups. We''ve spoken with people who knew him. None of us know how ... (Veltman's) head got filled with hate in the first place, said the group's executive director, Evan Balgord, calling on the police to release more information. Four members of one family, spanning three generations, were killed when the truck ran them over while they were out for an evening walk near their home. A fifth family member, a 9-year-old boy, remains in a hospital with serious injuries. MENAFN10062021000067011011ID1102246573
First lady Jill Biden will meet with the Duchess of Cambridge for the first time on Friday during her husbands first trip abroad as president.
As the G-7 Summit gets underway, the action is in Cornwall, England, but all eyes are on Geneva. That's where President Biden will meet one-on-one with Russian President Vladimir Putin next week at a time when many experts say bilateral relations are at an historic low.
The latest shortage is that of rental cars. Consumer reporter John Matarese looks into what you can do to make sure you don't run..

WCPO Cincinnati 10 Jun 2021
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Daily Record 11 Jun 2021

The Prime Minister emerged beaming from his first meeting with Joe Biden having avoided a lecture on the US President's concerns..
Dan Lawrence was left stranded on 81 not out as England were dismissed for 303 by New Zealand on the second morning of the second Test at Edgbaston.
Boris Johnson will hold talks with the European Unions key players on Saturday as the dispute over Northern Irelands..

Belfast Telegraph 11 Jun 2021
Queen Elizabeth II has hosts G-7 leaders at a reception where Britain's royals mingled with some of the world's most powerful politicians. The event was held at Cornwall's Eden Project - which features the world's largest indoor rainforest. (June 11)


The Group of Seven nations are set to commit to sharing at least 1 billion coronavirus shots with the world, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Thursday, with half coming from the US and 100 million from the UK as President...
Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister, has previously urged G7 leaders to commit to vaccinating the whole globe by the end of 2022.
The tax is aimed at tech giants like Google, but the City of London and Switzerland worry their finance outsize sectors will be caught up as well.
Cover Video STUDIO 13 Jun 2021

Andrew Lloyd Webber will risk being arrested in order to open his theatres if Covid-19 restrictions are extended.
Eurasia Review 13 Jun 2021

Following an expansion of Congressional role in foreign policy decision-making under Trump, the influence of progressive Democrats..
Vaccination Lotteries: the Wave of the Future?

Published June 11, 2021 by Lee R

Minor resistance will not be enough to stop the leveraging of lotteries to incentivise subsiding vaccinations in the US.

An interesting incentive is being offered to lotto players across America: getting vaccinated.

Trending Out of Ohio

The trend set by the state of Ohio has some states offering residents with at least one shot the opportunity to participate in exclusive lotteries paying out big bucks.

Oregon's Participation

Oregon is the latest state to join the movement with governor Katie Brown announcing the creation of a $1.9 million lottery for vaccinated residents, with the grand prize the proverbial cool $1 mil.

Using Federal Funds

The $1.9m used for the rewards will come from COVID-19 stimulus funds. Ohio started the trend of using stimulus friends for exclusive lotteries for the vaccinated by offering 5 $1 million federal funded prizes.

The Oregon Vaccination Lottery

In addition to the $1 million grand prize, the state of Oregon will further issue $10,000 to 36 more adults, one for each county in the state. Further, Oregon will duplicate Ohio by offering the youth a chance to win as well, with five kids aged 12 to 17 who have received at least one dose selected for $100,000 college savings plan scholarships.

Waning Vaccination Rates

These new offerings are in fact necessary outreach programs in light of Oregon and most other states seeing the vaccination rate tail off of late. Johns Hopkins data in fact reports that seven-day daily average vaccinations rolling averages fell from 47,625 on April 8 to 32,350 as of last Friday May 21st.

In Oregon, over 1.6 million residents have been vaccinated, or approximately 39.3 percent of the population.

State Funds in Maryland

In the state of Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogan announced a state VaxCash promotion running through July 3, where the state will daily draw the name of one vaccinated $40,000 recipient, culminating July 4th with a $400,000 grand prize drawing. The $2 million for those funds are being drawn from the state lottery promotional budget.

Outlook

Kentucky and New York are among other states joining the vaccination lottery movement, with some bills likely to be introduced to shutter the programs; but in the mean time, the movement to use the lottery as a tool to encourage vaccinations looks to be expanding across the individual states of America.
DUBAI, June 10: Setting up a company in the Ras Al Khaimah Economic Zone (abbreviated as RAK EZ) has now become easier, thanks to business setup consultant A&A offering special packages for company formation in RAK EZ. Awarded the Best Free Zone for SMEs in the Middle East for 2020, the Ras Al Khaimah Economic Zone today is home to a staggering 14,000 companies from 100 countries around the world. And 
Norwell, MA - USA | June 10, 2021 -- Advance Dental Arts, a leading dental healthcare company, is pleased to announce its newly designed website https://southshoredentalimplants.com. The modern design provides easy navigation, user-friendly, and offers engaging content to visitors to better understand the services. The new site features allow customers to access vital information in the needs of emergency easily. The website will help outpatients to reach out to the doctors. After 
Following up on their EP Monkey Speedway, the Swiss Hardrock Artist Pesticide releases a new single Lockdown on 1th of Juli 2021. Distributed world wide via iMusician Switzerland. "Roland Zenger" describes the new Single Lockdown with these words: We are so bored from sitting around living with the restrictions, we just needed some music to make us feel normal again. it will soon be over, in one or the other way For 
Holy See press release



The Holy See welcomes the MONEYVAL Report published [on 9 June] and the invitation to continue on the path already undertaken. While noting the efficacy of the measures adopted by all the authorities involved in the fight against money laundering and the financing of terrorism, the Holy See renews its commitment to continue working towards full compliance with the best international parameters and, to that end, it will consider carefully the recommendations contained in the Report.

* * *

For the first time, Moneyval expresses its opinion on the effectiveness of the Holy See/Vatican City States system for preventing and countering money laundering and the financing of terrorism. The evaluation that emerges from the recently published report is positive: the Vatican jurisdiction has in fact obtained five judgments of substantial effectiveness and six of moderate effectiveness; in no case was a judgment of low effectiveness given. Vatican News spoke about this with the President of asif (the Supervisory and Financial Information Authority), Carmelo Barbagallo, who led the Vatican delegation during the evaluation process.

President, can you first explain what the Moneyval report is?

The Moneyval Mutual Evaluation Report is a document of over 200 pages that is of great importance because it assesses compliance with the main international anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing ( aml/cft ) standards of the more than thirty jurisdictions evaluated by it. Moneyval is a permanent body of the Council of Europe, and one in which the Holy See/Vatican City State has participated since 2011. In order to facilitate reading the report, a summary has been prepared and published on this site.

What aspects are covered in the report that has just been published?

In order to evaluate the adequacy of national aml/cft systems, Moneyval examines two general aspects: technical compliance and effectiveness, applying a very precise and rigorous methodology developed by the fatf , the intergovernmental body that sets international standards that aim to prevent money laundering and terrorism financing. fatf monitors the implementation of these standards by the more than 200 countries and jurisdictions that have committed to implementing them.

Can you elaborate on the differences between these two assessment profiles?

Certainly. Technical compliance addresses the specific requirements of the fatf Recommendations (40 in total), mainly as they relate to the relevant legal and institutional framework of the jurisdiction, and the powers and procedures of the competent authorities. Effectiveness addresses the adequacy of the implementation of the fatf Recommendations, and identifies the extent to which a jurisdiction achieves a defined set of immediate outcomes (11 in total). Technical compliance is assessed more frequently than effectiveness.

Is this Moneyval assessment different from previous assessments?

Yes, it is different. This is the first evaluation that looks at effectiveness since the Vatican jurisdictions participation in Moneyval. It was a particularly significant test case, the result of an evaluation process that, as is typical in such cases, was very thorough and intense and included an on-site inspection of about two weeks. To give an idea of this intensity, consider that the Moneyval evaluation process has required our constant engagement from the end of 2019 until today.

What specific aspects were taken into account by the report?

Focusing only on the effectiveness side, which, as mentioned, is the distinctive aspect of this evaluation, the assessment covered all eleven immediate outcomes. These outcomes range from risk awareness, to levels of national and international cooperation, to the quality of supervision and the financial system, to the adequacy of financial intelligence and the judicial system. As you can see, this is a wide-ranging review, involving many national authorities and financial players.

Lets talk about the results: what judgments emerge from the evaluation?

I would say that it went well. I would like to point out that Moneyval expresses a judgment on each point of evaluation of effectiveness at four levels: low, moderate, substantial or high. The Vatican jurisdiction has received five judgments of substantial effectiveness and six of moderate effectiveness; in no case has a judgment of low effectiveness been expressed.

Can you explain why you judge the Moneyval report so positively?

This is an objective evaluation, which stems from the comparison that everyone can make by consulting the fatf website. Analyzing the effectiveness ratings expressed so far at a global level in the last round of evaluation of over 100 countries, the ratings given to the Vatican jurisdiction are among the best, better than many countries that are economically advanced and much larger in size. In order to correctly evaluate the results achieved, it should also be borne in mind that, with one exception, Moneyval has not so far expressed judgments of high effectiveness and that those of substantial effectiveness are rare. It should also be borne in mind that judgments of substantial effectiveness have been obtained by the Vatican jurisdiction on very important aspects, i.e., international cooperation, supervision, the financial system, legal persons and the fight against the financing of terrorism. Even more significant is the fact that judgments on supervision and the financial system (which, for the Vatican jurisdiction, corresponds almost exclusively to the ior, the Institute for the Works of Religion) are very rare at the international level. This report acknowledges what has been built up over the years, the fruit of great teamwork. I would like to thank all those who participated in the evaluation, a process that took place mostly during the pandemic.

What are the factors that led to this positive outcome?

There are many. Among them, let me mention, first of all, the incisive impetus and coordination carried out by the Financial Security Committee, chaired by the Assessor for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State. The Financial Security Committee, created in 2013, has an important role in guiding the competent authorities in the fight against money laundering and the financing of terrorism. It is in this sphere that, among other things, the intensification of collaboration between the different Vatican Authorities has been given impulse, as evidenced by the signing of several Memoranda of Understanding between the end of 2019 and 2020 (which involved the Secretariat of State, the Secretariat for the Economy, the Offices of the Auditor General and the Promoter of Justice, the Gendarmerie Corps, asif , and the Governorate).

What other positive aspects deserve mention?

One aspect that I would like to emphasize with pride is the process of strengthening asif at both the operational and organizational levels, a process which began with the rapid revocation in early 2020 of the suspension from the Egmont Groups secure communications network, and which proceeded through the end of 2020 with the approval by the Holy Father, Pope Francis, of the Authoritys new Statute. Also, it is worth mentioning the quality of the ior s process of adopting the best international aml/cft standards; the ior may be able to benefit from the recent addition by the United States of the Vatican jurisdiction to its list of countries whose know-your-customer rules have been approved. The jurisdiction has also been rewarded for its decision to extend the perimeter of the aml/cft regulations to all legal persons and public authorities, not just to the only financial entity operating in the jurisdiction, namely, the ior.

Moneyvals assessment of the Vaticans judicial system was eagerly awaited. What emerges from the report?

The judgment expressed by Moneyval on this aspect is of moderate effectiveness, which means that some corrective action is necessary to achieve further improvement. To evaluate this judgment well, consider that, among the countries evaluated only by Moneyval in the last round of evaluation, none obtained a higher rating (of substantial or high). In addition, the actions recommended by Moneyval are not difficult to implement since they are, for the most part, procedural in nature and aimed at strengthening resources, a process that has already found significant responses. The same report, in highlighting the most critical aspects, such as the length of investigations, recognizes that the efficiency of the Vatican jurisdiction partly depends on the responsiveness of foreign jurisdictions in rapidly providing the information required for the completion of investigations. As for another aspect criticized by Moneyval, i.e., the limited dissuasiveness and proportionality of sentences, I believe that the judgment should be supplemented in light of a recent and well-known judgment of the Vatican Court, which the report could not take into full consideration for a mere timing factor: in fact, it is a sentence that came after the on-site visit.

In your opinion, what other critical aspects should be pointed out?

By their very nature, Moneyval assessments are designed to highlight critical aspects, in the face of which remedial action is suggested. This is normal, because the ultimate goal of these controls is to improve the ability to prevent and combat money laundering and terrorist financing. It is for this reason that the recommended actions are numerous, even in cases where, as in the case of the Vatican jurisdiction, a particularly positive judgment has been made. Among these recommendations is that of improving the analysis of risks resulting from potential financial abuses by internal Vatican personnel (so-called insiders). The report also acknowledges that since 2014 there have been many actions that demonstrate the attention of the Vatican jurisdiction on this issue through important investigations or significant legislative initiatives. Among these initiatives, I recall the identification of the Office of the Auditor General as the anti-corruption authority and, even more recently, the introduction of a procurement code. The latter initiative is a milestone in the fight against possible abuses in the jurisdictions major spending decisions.

President, in summary, what message do you think emerges from the report?

The recommendations expressed by the Moneyval report with regard to the Vatican jurisdiction are an encouragement to do even better, to always keep the quality of the human resources high and to strengthen the activities of all the authorities involved in the fight against money laundering and terrorism financing. They are suggestions that help the Vatican to contribute to the realization, in conditions of maximum transparency and financial fairness, of the ultimate goal of the Churchs mission.
On Thursday, 10 June, Pope Francis wrote a letter to Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich and Freising, rejecting the resignation that had been presented by the Cardinal in a letter dated 21 May and later published. The German Cardinal had explained that he sought to step down from the leadership of the German diocese because of the abuse scandal in Germany and the response of the episcopate, which he considered insufficient.

Pope Francis responded with his own letter, written in Spanish and published in Spanish and German, in which he thanked Cardinal Marx for the Christian courage that does not fear the cross, that does not fear being humiliated before the tremendous reality of sin. Francis recalled that the whole Church is in crisis because of the abuse issue, maintaining that the Church today cannot take a step forward without addressing this crisis. Indeed, he explained, the politics of the ostrich leads nowhere, and the crisis must be addressed by our Paschal faith and by taking up the crisis, personally and communally, which is the only fruitful way, because we do not come out of a crisis alone but in community.

The Pope agreed with the Cardinals description of the sad history of sexual abuse, and the way the Church has dealt with it until recently, as a catastrophe. To become aware of this hypocrisy in the way we live our faith is a grace, it is a first step we must take, he said. We must take ownership of the history, both personally and as a community. We cannot remain indifferent to this crime. Taking it up means putting ourselves in crisis. It is true, Pope Francis continued, that historical situations must be interpreted with the hermeneutics of the time in which they occurred, but this does not exempt us from taking ownership of them and taking them up as the history of sin that besets us. Therefore, the Pope added, in my opinion, every bishop of the Church must take it upon himself and ask himself: what must I do in the face of this catastrophe?.

Today, he explained, We are asked for a reform, which  in this case  does not consist in words but in attitudes that have the courage to face the crisis, to assume reality whatever the consequences may be. And every reform begins with oneself. This, Francis said, is the only way, otherwise we will be nothing more than ideologues of reform who do not put their own flesh on the line as Jesus did, with His life, with His story, with His flesh on the cross. And this, he acknowledged, is the way that you yourself, dear brother, have taken in presenting your renunciation, because burying the past gets us nowhere. Silence, omissions, giving too much weight to the prestige of institutions only leads to personal and historical failure.

If you are tempted to think that by confirming your mission and not accepting your resignation this Bishop of Rome (your brother who loves you) does not understand you, the Pope continued, think of what Peter felt before the Lord when, in his own way, he presented his resignation: presenting himself as a sinner, he received the answer, Tend my sheep.
Together in love, we Christians can change the world, we can change ourselves, because God is Love, Pope Francis said in a video message to participants in an ecumenical spiritual retreat promoted by the John 17 Movement, on Wednesday 9 June. The following is the English text of the Holy Fathers video message, which he addressed in Spanish.

Dear Friends of the John 17 Movement,

I know that you are gathered in New York at Saint Josephs Seminary, whose Rector is Bishop James Massa, with the participation of Cardinal Joseph Tobin. I greet you cordially and thank you for your commitment to John 17. It is a special retreat on Relational Reconciliation, a New Way to Christian Reconciliation (cf. Jn 17: 13-17).

At the Pentecost vigil, organised by the charis Commission for Christian Unity, at the moment broadcast to the whole world from Jerusalem, I recalled just how moved I was by the expression in the Acts of the Apostles with which those who met the first Christian community described it: See how they love each other.

The John 17 Movement is about those who, around the table, drinking a cappuccino, dining or eating an ice cream, discover they are brothers, not on account of their colour, nor their nationality, nor their place of origin, nor the different forms in which they live out their faith, but as children of the one same Father. And even if there is no table, even if there is no cappuccino, even if there is no ice cream, even if there is no coffee, because there is poverty and war, we are still brothers, and we must say this to each other. Without thinking of our place of origin, or of our nationality, or of the colour of our skin: we are children of the same Father.

Love has no need for profound theological knowledge, which is however necessary. Love is an encounter of life, first with the Lord Jesus, with the person of Jesus, and from there on, from that encounter of love, arise friendship, brotherhood and the certainty of being children of the same Father. Life that is shared and dedicated to a higher purpose: love can change the world! Everything starts from there, from a fraternal encounter, love can change the world, but first it changes us.

Together in love, we Christians can change the world, we can change ourselves, because God is Love!

I know that we had a date to meet in recent months and the pandemic did not permit this. We will meet later, hopefully soon, before the end of the year.

I urge you to continue to walk together, sharing life and brotherly love. The John 17 Movement and the testimony you have shared with me each time we have met gives me hope and gives me joy. As Joe Tosini says, love is the most important thing in the world, yet no one teaches how to love! Whether you love or not, the love that became flesh, the love that gave its life for us, that is the way. Very often we confuse love with a kind of platonic, idealistic philosophy. Love is concrete, love gives its life for others, as Jesus gave it for us. Perhaps because love is not taught, it is lived, and you are teaching us by living it.

May God bless you! See you soon! And please do not forget to pray for me, because this work is not easy at all. See you soon!

Francis
The pandemic helped draw Sanford native Chris Krause back home from his acting career in New York City.

Now, he's brought his career to Sanford with a movie that he and filmmaker Jerry Aquino will be producing this summer.

Krause is starting a 30-day GoFundMe campaign on June 16 to try to raise $30,000 to help with the production of "Followers," a horror movie for which he wrote the script and will be one of the actors, while Aquino directs.

With a principal cast of four actors, it will be filmed from Aug. 15 to Sept. 3.

Krause's background

Krause graduated from Meridian High School in 2008, earned a theater degree at Central Michigan University, and attended Atlantic Acting School in New York.

"I lived in Brooklyn for six years as a professional actor," he explained. "I auditioned for TV things, for off-off-Broadway, for regional theater.

"But the pandemic shut the theater industry down. So I thought, 'It doesnt make sense for me to stay out here right now.' So I moved back home last August," Krause said.

But he didn't give up on acting. Like so many people over the past year, he is now just working from a different place.

In addition to acting, Krause has been writing movie scripts over the past several years. And he finally decided, why keep waiting for someone else to buy his script?

"I was like, 'Im just going to do it myself,'" Krause said.

Looking for support

Krause and Aquino, who have worked together on some independent films in New York, are each investing $5,000 of their own funds into the movie and hoping to raise an additional $30,000 through GoFundMe.

"That ($40,000 total) is a very small budget for a film," Krause noted. "Most indie films are in the $1 million to $10 million range.

"The concept has to sell the film because you can't get the big names. I cant afford Jeff Daniels in this movie," Krause continued with a laugh. "We're going as low-budget as we can while still being as professional as possible and not sacrificing the product."

Krause said he is also talking with local businesses to seek support for the movie, such as hotels and catering companies.

As a Sanford native, he would also be happy to bring positive attention to an area hit so hard by last year's dam failures.

"Sanford is my home. I know friends who lost their houses," Krause said. "Making this movie can bring awareness (about Sanford to more people). The community might be excited to help support it, too."

Details about the GoFundMe account will soon be announced on the movie's Facebook page, which is facebook.com/followersfilm2021.

What the movie is about

"Followers" could be termed a thinking person's zombie movie.

The Facebook page gives this description of it: "Followers is a film in the vein of Get Out meets The Walking Dead. In a world where the infected target their victims based on the color of their skin, would you help those most at risk...or stand back and be a Follower?"

"It's exploring the feeling of what you do when you feel you no longer know the people you love, and trying to examine what turns someone into a follower," Krause said. "Are people willing to let others get hurt if it will keep them safe?"

And the movie is a commentary on race relations in the United States, he said.

"The main theme is even though there are these zombies, the actual tension is between the main characters, two of which are people of color and the other two of which are white," Krause said. "*A good movie can plant a seed that can lead to good discussions."

A lot of what happens in the movie will be implied rather than actually seen, Krause said.

"I use a lot of tension building," he said. "We dont have the budget to do 500 fully made-up zombies. But its also interesting to me when you dont see the zombies as much. The viewer will always imagine something scarier than what they can see. Thats what I love playing with."

The director's view

For his part, Aquino was impressed enough with Krause's script that he chose "Followers" as his first feature film to direct.

"I was amazed by the context that inspired him to (write) that film," Aquino said.

Aquino said the script resonates for him personally, describing himself as an "Afro-Latino" who grew up in the United States and whose parents are from the Dominican Republic.

He hopes the message of the film will resonate with viewers.

"Sometimes it has to start in your home. The antidote (for racism) starts there," he said. "You can't treat the world if you cant treat it inside your own household."

In terms of production of the film, Aquino emphasized that they will be carefully following health protocols to keep everyone involved safe from COVID-19: testing and sanitizing, among other things.

"Its costly, but its definitely worth it to have peace of mind while we shoot (the film)," he said, adding, "New York was ground zero for the pandemic, and its definitely in the back of everybody's minds (who has lived in New York)."

In terms of the GoFundMe campaign, Aquino said he is grateful for any donations.

"If people cant support it with monetary contributions, we ask them to tell a friend about it," he said. "We'll take any type of donation.

"Hopefully, everybody likes the film," Aquino added.
LANSING, Mich. (AP)  The Republican-controlled Legislature can repeal a law that was the backbone of Gov. Gretchen Whitmers coronavirus orders, without her interference, after a unanimous decision Friday from the Michigan Supreme Court.

The order to certify the ballot measure came after two Democrats on the Board of State Canvassers opposed ratifying it in April, despite a finding from the elections bureau that enough signatures  460,000  had been collected. The justices, four Democrats and three Republicans, said the panel has a clear legal duty to certify the petition.

The board's Democrats had called for further investigation into alleged wrongdoing by paid circulators.

For months, the Democratic governor acted under the 1945 emergency powers law to issue and keep intact restrictions on the economy to reduce the spread of COVID-19. The Supreme Court  then controlled by Republicans  declared the law unconstitutional in a 4-3 ruling last fall, but the conservative group Unlock Michigan wants to kill it to prevent a future court from deciding differently.

Since the decision, Whitmer has turned to the state health department to tighten and ease restrictions under a public health law. Indoor capacity limits will go away on July 1, as will most mask requirements.

The canvassers will meet soon to certify the petition. The GOP-controlled Legislature will likely enact the measure rather than let it go to a public vote in 2022. The governor could not veto it.

We urge the Michigan House and Senate to act promptly to finally strike this awful law from the books forever, said Unlock Michigan spokesman Fred Wszolek. Gov. Whitmer used this law recklessly to crush businesses, families and lives. No governor should be able to do so ever again.

Whitmer has said her orders curbed the spread of the virus and saved lives. They were backed by medical officials.

Since Michigan's current constitution took effect nearly 60 years ago, lawmakers have approved citizens' initiatives nine times  all since 1987. Republicans most recently did so in 2018 as part of an unprecedented maneuver to scale back voter-proposed minimum wage and paid sick leave measures to make them more business friendly.

Critics say the process makes Michigan an outlier and has been abused by special interest groups that can get around a governor by gathering signatures from voters who represent as little as 8% of the most recent gubernatorial vote. Supporters counter that the provision has been in the constitution for a long time and people who criticize it reverse course if there is an initiative they like.

Michigan Democratic Party Chairwoman Lavora Barnes said the ruling opened the door for the illegal conduct to continue on future ballot drives. She noted the GOP's support for an expected initiative to tighten voting rules and bar unsolicited mass mailings of absentee ballot applications.

Democratic state Attorney General Dana Nessel has said investigators found "sleazy tactics by Unlock Michigan circulators and trainers but nothing that would stand up in court as crimes.

Unlock Michigan spent nearly $1.9 million to gather the signatures. Nearly $1.1 million came from Michigan Citizens for Fiscal Responsibility, a nonprofit linked to a political firm that works with the Senate GOP. The nonprofit does not have to publicly disclose its donors. Michigan! My Michigan!, which also is tied to the firm and Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, gave $550,000.

___

Follow David Eggert at https://twitter.com/DavidEggert00
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP)  Hungarys governing conservative party has prepared new legislation that bans showing pornographic material and any content portraying or promoting sex reassignment or homosexuality to anyone under 18.

Fidesz, the party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, described the legislation as part of an effort to protect children from pedophilia.

But LGBT rights activists denounced the bills as discriminatory, with some comparing the proposed legislation to a 2013 Russian law banning gay propaganda. Human rights groups have described the Russian law as a tool of discrimination and harassment.

These proposals, which have dark echoes of Russias anti-gay 'propaganda law,' will further stigmatize LGBTI people, exposing them to greater discrimination in what is already a hostile environment," said David Vig, director of Amnesty International Hungary. He used the acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people.

Fidesz submitted the legislation to the Hungarian Parliament on Thursday. It includes a measure aimed at fighting child abuse along with various amendments prohibiting transmitting information about LGBT people or same-sex relationships.

The bills are scheduled to be debated Monday and to be voted on Tuesday. They are expected to pass easily given that Fidesz has a majority in parliament.

Tagging these amendments to a bill that seeks to crack down on child abuse appears to be a deliberate attempt by the Hungarian government to conflate pedophilia with LGBTI people," Vig said Friday.

Luca Dudits, an executive board member with the Hatter Society, a Budapest-based LGBT rights group, said there is no similar law anywhere in the European Union that is so hostile to lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people.

We are very worried about the outcome, Dudits told The Associated Press by phone.

Gabriella Selmeczi, a lawmaker with Fidesz who is among those who introduced the legislation, denied that it is discriminatory or anti-liberal.

True liberalism is when children are left alone with questions about their sexual orientation until the age of 18, she said.

Orban's government in the past has depicted migrants as a grave threat to Hungary and the nation's Christian identity, a theme the prime minister has successfully used to win past elections. With the next elections scheduled for 2022, and fewer migrants entering Europe, the ruling party has increasingly depicted the LGBT rights movement as a threat.

Human Rights Watch denounced the legislation, saying that Orbans government has sought to scapegoat LGBT people as part of a wider strategy to sidestep human rights obligations and cement Orbans brand of authoritarianism.

The legislation prohibits making pornographic content available to anyone under the age of 18, as well as content that depicts sexuality for its own sake, or promotes or displays deviations from the identity of the sex of birth, gender reassignment or homosexuality.

The ban also applies to advertisements and education.

Marton Pal, a representative of the Foundation for Rainbow Families who has adopted children with his same-sex partner, described his shock at learning of the new bills on Thursday.

Yesterday was a hard day. We went to sleep with a lot of anger, Pal told Hungarian TV channel RTL. When we read these amendments to the law, we gasped for air at what is happening around us, and why there is this stigma. We are trying to process what opportunity this law creates for power.

___

Gera reported from Warsaw, Poland.
SALEM, Ore. (AP)  Republican lawmakers voted with majority Democrats in the Oregon House of Representatives to take the historic step of expelling a Republican member who let violent, far-right protesters into the state Capitol on Dec. 21.

Legislators said on the House floor that this could be the most important vote they ever cast. They then proceeded Thursday night to expel an unapologetic Rep. Mike Nearman with a 59-1 vote, marking the first time a member has been expelled by the House in its 160-year history. The only vote against the resolution for expulsion was Nearmans own.

The facts are clear that Mr. Nearman unapologetically coordinated and planned a breach of the Oregon State Capitol, House Speaker Tina Kotek, a Democrat, said after the vote. His actions were blatant and deliberate, and he has shown no remorse for jeopardizing the safety of every person in the Capitol that day.

Rep. Paul Holvey, a Democrat who chaired a committee that earlier Thursday unanimously recommended Nearmans expulsion, reminded lawmakers of the events of Dec. 21, which were an eerie foreshadowing of the much more serious Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.

On the morning of Dec. 21st, a couple hundred protesters  some of them heavily armed and wearing body armor  arrived at the Capitol for a protest, with the intent to illegally enter and presumably occupy the building and interrupt the proceedings of the Oregon Legislature, Holvey said. Staff and legislators were terrified. We can only speculate what would have happened if they were able to get all the way in.

Nearman said he let the protesters in because he believes the Capitol, which has been closed to the public to protect against spread of the coronavirus, should have been open. The assault happened during a peak of the pandemic.

But even Republicans, who are often bitterly opposed to Democratic initiatives on climate change and some other bills, said the crowd outside the Capitol that day was not made up of constituents who wanted to peacefully engage in the democratic process.

Some were carrying guns. Some shouted false QAnon conspiracy theories about Democrats kidnapping babies. They carried American flags, banners for former President Donald Trump and a sign calling for the arrest of Democratic Gov. Kate Brown. They broke windows and assaulted journalists.

Nobody should have opened the door to the people who were here that day, said Rep. Daniel Bonham, a Republican and a member Holveys special committee.

The final straw for Republican House members came on June 4, when video emerged showing Nearman choreographing how he would let protesters into the Capitol a few days before it actually happened. For his fellow lawmakers, that was proof it was a premeditated act, which Nearman acknowledged. All 22 of his fellow House Republicans wrote him on Monday, strongly recommending he resign.

As lawmakers gathered to decide Nearmans fate, a few dozen people waving American flags and one carrying a sign saying I am Mike Nearman gathered outside the Capitol. One repeatedly kicked a metal door, sending booms through a marble hallway of the building.

Nearman was seen on security video opening a door to protesters on Dec. 21 as lawmakers met in emergency session to deal with economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. Protesters barged into the building, which was closed to the public because of coronavirus safety protocols, got into shoving matches with police and sprayed officers with bear spray.

Its impossible to overstate the seriousness of the reason we are here today, Holvey said during the committee hearing. Rep. Nearman enabled armed, violent protesters to enter the Capitol, breaching the security of the Capitol, which was officially closed to the public, and also endangered the authorized staff and legislators inside the building.

Hundreds of people provided written testimony to the House Special Committee On December 21, 2020, which was composed of three Democrats and three Republicans.

Some who testified excoriated Nearman as a seditionist. Others praised him for letting people into the Capitol, saying residents should be allowed to attend even though hearings are livestreamed on video.

Mike Nearmans behavior ... was abhorrent and anti-democratic, David Alba said. Furthermore, by aiding and supporting extremists, he has placed peoples lives in danger. He should be removed from office and he is not fit to represent my district.

But Nearmans supporters said they elected him and the House should not expel him. One supporter suggested the 22 GOP lawmakers who asked him to resign should be voted out of office.

May your Republican constituents take no mercy on you, Casey Ocupe said in written testimony.

Kotek credited riot police, who finally pushed out the Dec. 21 protesters, with preventing a full-scale assault.

Nearman also faces two misdemeanor criminal charges and has said he will seek a trial by jury.

___

Follow Andrew Selsky on Twitter at https://twitter.com/andrewselsky
Karyl Bertuleit has been chosen as the Senior Services Volunteer of the Month for June.

Bertuleit began volunteering in 2003 upon retirement from 32 years at Dow. She started out as a transportation driver for six years, then took a few years off for medical reasons and is now currently a Meals on Wheels driver with her daughter, Jill. In total, she has contributed over 1,500 hours.
The League of Women Voters of Michigan this week filed an amicus brief with the Michigan Supreme Court in support of the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commissions proposed extended timeline for adopting final redistricting plans.

The league is supporting the commissions proposal of adopting final plans for new Congressional and legislative districts by Jan. 25, 2022 instead of the current Nov. 1, 2021 deadline.

Extending the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commissions deadline would ensure the Commission has all of the information it needs to draw fair, non-gerrymandered Congressional and legislative maps, stated Christina Schlitt, president of the Michigan League. We must allow this important democratic, citizen-led process to work by giving the Commission the time it needs.

The redistricting commission asked the Michigan Supreme Court for a deadline extension due to a delay in obtaining needed Census Bureau data caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The redistricting commission is leading Michigans political boundary redistricting process. The Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission is holding public hearings until July 1 to receive public feedback on this process.

The commission, made up of citizens, has compiled the following FAQs in efforts to educate Michiganders on this process.

The Basics

Q: What is the citizens redistricting commission?

A: In November 2018, Michigan voters amended the Constitution with Proposal 18-2 or the "Voters Not Politicians" ballot proposal, a constitutional amendment to "establish a commission of citizens with exclusive authority to adopt district boundaries for the Michigan Senate, Michigan House of Representatives and U.S. Congress, every 10 years." Now, the Michigan constitution empowers an independent commission of citizens to draw district lines for the Michigan Legislature and Michigan's members of Congress for the 2022 election and beyond.

Q: Who serves on the citizens redistricting commission?

A: The constitutional amendment establishes a commission of 13 registered voters randomly selected through an application process. Of the 13 commissioners, four affiliate with the Democratic Party, four affiliate with the Republican Party, and five do not affiliate with either major political party.

Q: When did the citizens redistricting commission begin meeting?

A: The commission was convened Sept. 17-18, 2020, and has continued meeting since then.

Q: When will the district lines proposed by the citizens redistricting commission take effect?

A: The commission will use data from the 2020 federal decennial census and citizen input to determine district lines no later than Nov. 1, 2021 (if no extension is granted). These district plans will take effect prior to the 2022 primary and general elections.

Q: Can I apply to be a member of the citizens redistricting commission?

A: The application period to serve as commissioner has closed for the 2020-21 redistricting cycle.

The Commission

Q: What if I don't want to be a commissioner or if I wasn't randomly selected  can I still be involved?

A: Yes. Citizen involvement throughout the redistricting process is critical to ensuring it is independent and fair. If you were not selected to serve as a commissioner, you will still be able to submit maps to the commission for consideration and otherwise advocate for your interests before the commission.

Q: Who are the commissioners?

A: The 13 randomly-selected commissioners are from communities across Michigan and from a diverse array of backgrounds. You can view a copy of each commissioner's "Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission Application" at RedistrictingMichigan.org, under the heading "Meet the Commissioners."

Q: What are the specific tasks and responsibilities of a commissioner? Is there any prior experience, educational background or other qualification required?

A: Each commissioner is expected to work with their 12 colleagues in good faith to engage citizen input and determine state legislative (state house and senate) and U.S. congressional districts for the entire state of Michigan.

You can view materials from previous meetings of the commission to see their work so far, or sign up for updates on future meetings on the commission's website.

Q: When does the commission meet?

A: To view the commission's 2021 meeting schedule, visit the "Meeting Schedule" section of RedistrictingMichigan.org.

Q: Who are the commission staff members?

A: The commission currently employs three staff members: Suann Hammersmith, executive director; Julianne Pastula, general counsel; and Edward Woods III, communications and outreach director.

Q: How can I stay updated on commission activities?

A: You can stay updated on commission activities, including notifications of upcoming meetings and events, by subscribing to the email distribution list. Information on upcoming meetings and events will also be posted at RedistrictingMichigan.org and on social media @RedistrictingMI on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

All Commission meeting materials, including meeting notices, minutes and agendas, are made available in the Meeting Material and Archive section of the commission's website.

Q: Where can I watch commission meetings?

A: All Commission meetings are livestreamed and available for public viewing at YouTube.com/MichSoSOffice.

Details on how to view or attend upcoming commission meetings are contained within each public meeting notice document posted in the "Meeting Material and Archive" section of RedistrictingMichigan.org. To view replay recordings of past commission meetings, visit the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission YouTube Playlist.

Q: Where can I view commission meeting materials?

A: All commission meeting materials, including meeting notices, agendas, minutes and public comment submissions, are posted for public viewing in the "Meeting Material and Archive" section of RedistrictingMichigan.org.

Q: How can I contact the commission?

A: To submit public comment to the commission, email Redistricting@Michigan.gov.

Details on how to provide live or written public comment for a meeting are also contained within each public meeting notice document and posted in the "Meeting Material and Archive" section of RedistrictingMichigan.org at least 18 hours in advance of the meeting start time, in accordance with the Open Meetings Act.

Q: How do I know my written public comment was received by the commission?

A: All written public comments submitted to the commission are received and reviewed by commissioners.

All written public comments are compiled into a document that is publicly posted by the meeting date in the "Meeting Material and Archive" section of RedistrictingMichigan.org. To confirm your comment is received by the commission, review the posted written public comment documents.

District Maps

Q: Why is the commission using a mapping and line-drawing consultant?

A: Because redistricting and map drawing is a complex process that requires expertise in mapping software, it is common practice  including among citizen-led redistricting commissions  that a map drawing expert be hired to aid in this process. This expert map-drawing consultant will work for the commission to perform the line drawing function at the express direction of the commission.

Michigan's Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, in its authority, will instruct the line-drawing consultant on how and where to draw the lines. The map-drawing consultant will use their software to draw the maps and lines as the commission instructs. While the line-drawing consultant may draw on their redistricting expertise and experience to advise the commission, all line-drawing decisions are made by the commission itself. Each map-drawing session will also occur during open public meetings, and the commission will solicit public input throughout the process.

Q: When will the map-drawing phase of the commission occur?

A: The Michigan Constitution requires that the commission adopt a redistricting plan (i.e. electoral district maps) no later than Nov. 1. The commission's current timeline anticipates map drawing will occur through this fall.

Q: What data will the commission use to create the maps?

A: The commission will use data including the 2020 federal decennial census and citizen input to determine district lines.

Q: What criteria will the commission use to create district maps?

A: The Michigan Constitution outlines the specific criteria the commission must utilize when proposing and adopting a redistricting plan. The constitutional criteria are listed below in order of priority.

(a) Districts shall be of equal population as mandated by the United States Constitution, and shall comply with the voting rights act and other federal laws.

(b) Districts shall be geographically contiguous. Island areas are considered to be contiguous by land to the county of which they are a part.

(c) Districts shall reflect the state's diverse population and communities of interest. Communities of interest may include, but shall not be limited to, populations that share cultural or historical characteristics or economic interests. Communities of interest do not include relationships with political parties, incumbents, or political candidates.

(d) Districts shall not provide a disproportionate advantage to any political party. A disproportionate advantage to a political party shall be determined using accepted measures of partisan fairness.

(e) Districts shall not favor or disfavor an incumbent elected official or a candidate.

(f) Districts shall reflect consideration of county, city, and township boundaries.

(g) Districts shall be reasonably compact.

Q: How can I provide suggestions or feedback to the commission?

A: The public has the right to address the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, which welcomes the public's comments. Written public comment may be submitted to the Commission by emailing RedistrictingMichigan.org. Live public comment may be provided during any meeting or hearing of the commission.

In addition to regular meetings, the commission is hosting at least 15 public hearings throughout the state to solicit public input and feedback on redistricting plans. The dates, times and locations of these public hearings will be posted at RedistrictingMichigan.org as details are finalized. The commission's meeting schedule is posted in the "Meeting Schedule" section of RedistrictingMichigan.org.

Q: How will the commission inform the public about its redistricting plans?

A: Prior to proposing a redistricting plan, the commission must hold at least 10 public hearings throughout the state for the purpose of informing the public about the redistricting process and for soliciting information from the public about potential plans.

Once the commission produces proposed redistricting plans for each type of district, the plans will be made available to the public for review and feedback. Additional public hearings (at least five) must then be held by the commission for the purpose of soliciting feedback from the public.

Q: Where can I view a map of Michigan's current electoral district lines?

A: 2011 State Reapportionment Districts may be viewed at mcgi.state.mi.us/districtlocator/

Q: How will a final plan be selected by the commission?

A: Before voting to adopt a redistricting plan, the commission must publicly post each plan (i.e. electoral district map) and provide at least 45 days for public comment on the proposal.

In order to adopt a redistricting plan, the Michigan Constitution requires a majority vote of the commission including at least two commissioners who affiliate with each major party, and at least two commissioners who do not affiliate with either major party.

Q: When will the commission's redistricting plan go into effect?

A: Redistricting plans adopted by the current commission will go into effect no later than Dec. 31, and will be in effect for the 2022 primary and general elections.

Consequently, the demographic questions on the application were required fields and necessary for fulfilling the constitutional requirements of the selection process. Using statewide data from the American Community Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau, Rehmann LLC, an independent accounting firm hired by the Secretary of State performed the random, statistically-weighted selection, utilized weighing methods so that the pool of 200 semi-finalists was representative of the state. To learn more, please view our random selection frequently asked questions, view the random selection of 200 semifinalist, which was livestreamed, or read a detailed account of the random selection process.

Meetings and hearings

Q: How will the commission use public comment when drawing the maps?

A: The Michigan Constitution provides rank criteria the commission must use when drawing electoral district maps. One such criteria is that "Districts shall reflect the state's diverse population and communities of interest. Communities of interest may include, but shall not be limited to, populations that share cultural or historical characteristics or economic interests. Communities of interest do not include relationships with political parties, incumbents or political candidates."

To fulfill this criteria for the drawing of Michigan's electoral district maps, the commission will utilize several data sources, including testimony and map submissions provided by members of the public at in-person hearings and via the Commission's Public Comment Portal.

Q: Can I attend commission hearings and meetings virtually?

A: Yes, each in-person hearing and meeting of the commission has remote attendance and participation options via Zoom and by phone.

Q: What COVID safety measures are being taken at in-person hearings?

A: The commission values and prioritizes the safety of members of the public. Each in-person meeting and hearing of the MICRC features socially distanced seating. Hand sanitizer is made available for public use, and microphones used for providing public comment are cleaned and sanitized in-between speakers. The Commission honors and enforces the mask policy of each hosting venue.

Each in-person hearing and meeting of the commission also has remote attendance and participation options via Zoom and by phone. For information on how to sign-up for remote participation at an upcoming Commission hearing or meeting please view each event's meeting notice, posted at least 18 hours in advance of the meeting start time in the Meeting Notices and Materials Page.

Q: How do I sign up for live public comment?

A: For information on how to sign up for live public comment at an upcoming commission hearing or meeting, view each event's meeting notice, posted online at least 18 hours in advance of the meeting start time on the Meeting Notices and Materials Page. Further detail on providing public comment is provided below.

Sign-up for in-person public comment at a commission hearing or meeting opens one hour before the event start time. To sign up for in-person public comment, check in with the Public Comment Sign-Up table upon arrival at the hearing or meeting venue. Speaking order is determined on a first-come first-served basis. Once signed up for in-person public comment, you will be issued a sticker with your speaking order number. This number is how you will be called upon to speak during the Commission hearing or meeting. For each Commission hearing starting at 5 p.m., sign-up for in-person public comment will open at 4 p.m. and will close at 7 p.m.

Sign-up for remote or virtual public comment (via Zoom or phone) for commission hearings close at noon the day of the hearing. Information on how to provide remote or virtual public comment during a hearing or meeting, including a link to sign up, may be found on the Meeting and Hearings Schedule Page and in each event's meeting notice, posted at least 18 hours in advance of the meeting start time on the Meeting Notices and Materials Page. Individuals who sign-up to provide remote or virtual public comment will receive an email shortly before the meeting or hearing start time containing their speaking order number and further instructions on remotely joining the event.

Q: How long do I have to speak during live public comment?

A: The commission's rules of procedure allot 2-minutes per public comment participant, however, the commission reserves the right to extend or shorten this speaking time allotment for public comment participants at the beginning of each public hearing or meeting. Any changes to public comment speaking times will be publicly announced at the beginning of the hearing or meeting.

Q: If I sign up to speak to the commission at a hearing or meeting, can I change my mind?

A: Yes, if you sign up for live public comment but no longer wish to address the commission, notify a staff member or volunteer. If a public comment participant is not present when their number is called, they will be skipped in line, but will be provided another opportunity to give live public comment once all speakers are called upon.

Q: If I sign up to speak to the commission at a hearing or meeting, can I leave the venue and come back when it is my turn to speak?

A: Yes, if you sign up for live public comment, you may leave the venue and return later (for example, if your speaking order number is very high). If a public comment participant is not present when their number is called, they will be skipped in line, but will be provided another opportunity to give live public comment once all speakers are called upon. However, due to capacity limitations at venues, the commission cannot guarantee you re-admittance to the venue if capacity at the venue is reached.

Q: Can I give a printed map or document to the commission when providing in-person public comment?

A: Yes, all documentation provided to the Commission during live public comment at a hearing or meeting will be viewed by commissioners and also scanned and uploaded at Michigan.gov/MICRC on the Meeting Notices and Materials Page. The Commission encourages all members of the public providing live public comment to also submit their comments in writing and/or create a map using the commission's Public Comment Portal.

Q: Can I ask the commission questions during live public comment?

A: Live public comment during Commission hearings and meetings is primarily for the purposes of making statements to the Commission. To ensure a timely response to your question, the commission recommends you email all questions to Redistricting@Michigan.gov.

Q: How can I submit written public comment or maps?

A: To submit public comment to the MICRC, visit Michigan.gov/MICRC and select "Submit Public Comment.

Public comments submitted through the Commission's Public Comment Portal are reviewed by the commission and are viewable by the public.

You may also provide live public comment to the commission at an upcoming hearing or commission meeting. For a full list of upcoming Commission events, visit the Meeting and Hearings Schedule Page.

To learn about drawing or submitting a map of your plan or community, visit Michigan-mapping.org/#draw for brief tutorial videos.

Q: How do I draw a map using the Public Comment Portal?

A: The Commission's Public Comment Portal features map drawing capabilities using Districtr.org. Districtr is free, open-source software designed just for public input in the redistricting process. To learn about drawing or submitting a map of your plan or community, visit Michigan-mapping.org/#draw for brief tutorial videos.

Maps made on other software, such as Representable or Dave's Redistricting App, are welcome as well. Just use the "Other link" option in the submission form.

Q: Can I view other public comment submissions in the Public Comment Portal?

A: Yes, the public comment portal provides a transparent forum to submit public comments and view other submissions. A gallery of submissions is available for viewing by scrolling to the bottom of the Commission's Public Comment Portal. You can also comment on other public comment submissions using the portal.

Q: What are tags and how do I use them?

A: Tags are available to add to any form of submission in the Commission's Public Comment Portal (Maps, written testimony etc.). These tags create searchable categories for submissions.

For example, if you are submitting a community of interest map for the Port Huron area, you may add the "#Port Huron" tag to your submission, or any other categorization tag that best describes your community. A Commissioner or member of the public wanting to search for submissions having to do with the Port Huron area may then easily locate your map when searching for submissions containing a "#Port Huron" tag.

Tags may also be used to identify organizational or group submissions. If you are part of a group or organization submitting maps, your group may create their own unique tag to aid in identifying submissions from other members of your group (for example #Mackinaw City Hiking Club).

When typing in a tag for your submission, you may select from a list of auto-generated tags that appear below the text box, or you may create a new tag. Adding a categorization tag to your submission is entirely optional, but it is encouraged. You can also add tags to other people's submissions by opening their submission and adding a comment.

Q: What does it mean that "my public comment is a public document"?

A: The Michigan Constitution requires that "The commission shall receive for consideration written submission of proposed redistricting plans and any supporting materials, including underlying data, from any member of the public. These written submissions are public records."

This means that each public comment submission provided through the Commission's Public Comment Portal is posted in an open and transparent public comment forum within the portal for members of the public and the Commission to view. Disclosure of personally identifying information in the body of written testimony, including phone numbers and residential addresses, is not encouraged.

While public comment submissions are a public document, any email address provided in the "Tell Us About Yourself" section will be kept confidential to the extent authorized by law.

Q: How do I know my public comment submission has been received?

A: Once you submit your public comment through the Commission's Public Comment Portal, you will receive a verification email at the email address you provided when submitting your comment. Follow the prompts in the email to verify your email address. Once your email has been verified, your public comment submission may be viewed in the submission gallery on the Commission's Public Comment Portal (towards the bottom of the page). If you are having trouble locating your verification email, check your spam or junk folder in your email. All public comments received are reviewed by the commission.

If your submission to the portal was in the form of a file upload, your comment will not appear in the submission gallery of the Commission's Public Comment Portal. All file uploads must be scanned for security prior to being posted online at Michigan.gov/MICRC.

Q: Why is my file upload not appearing in the Public Comment Portal submission gallery?

A: If your submission to the Portal was in the form of a file upload (such as a PDF or Shapefile), your comment will not appear in the submission gallery of the Commission's Public Comment Portal. All file uploads must be scanned for security prior to being posted online at Michigan.gov/MICRC. All public comment submissions in the Public Comment Portal, including file uploads, are reviewed by the commission.

Other

Q: How did the Department of State work to ensure this process is truly open to Michiganders of every background?

A: The Department of State took several steps to ensure transparency of the applicant pool and encourage applicants from a wide range of backgrounds to apply. These steps include:

Periodically publishing data about the applicant pool online. This included information about the number of applicants and the demographic and geographic background of those applicants.

Providing applicants with information and resources on where and how to get their application notarized  as required by the Michigan Constitution  free of charge.

Working with partner organizations to spread the word about the opportunity to apply.

Hosting and attending community meetings, workshops, and town halls in communities across the state.

Ultimately, over 9300 Michiganders from all 83 counties and diverse backgrounds applied to be part of this historic effort. It is critical that people participate in the map drawing process after the commission is formed. This includes, for example, by, for example, attending a commission public hearing or submitting a map to the commission for consideration.

Q: How does the random selection process work? What role does the Legislature play?

A: The Michigan Constitution outlines a specific process for the random selection of the final 13 commissioners. The Secretary of State must randomly select commissioners from the pool of eligible applicants. This process was completed between June and August 2020. There are a three primary steps in that process.

Step 1: Following the closure of the application period, the Secretary of State's Office must randomly select 200 semifinalist applicants and provide those applications to the Michigan Legislature for review. Of the 200 randomly selected applicants, 60 people must affiliate with the Republican Party, 60 people must affiliate with the Democratic Party and 80 must not affiliate with either of those political parties. The Secretary of State's Office was required to use statistical weighting methods to ensure the pool of 200 semifinalists mirrors the geographic and demographic makeup of the state, as specified by the state constitution.

Step 2: In July 2020, the minority and majority leaders in the Michigan Senate and the Speaker of the House and minority leader in the Michigan House removed 20 applicants from the semifinalist pool, as permitted by the State constitution.

Step 3: In August 2020, from the remaining pool received from the Legislature, the Secretary of State's Office randomly selected four people who affiliate with the Republican Party, four people who affiliate with the Democratic Party and five people who do not affiliate with either major political party to serve on commission.

Q: Is the selection process truly random?

A: Yes. The Secretary of State plays a purely administrative role in the random selection process. Applicants drawn in various stages of the selection process will are selected at random, and the random-ness of that selection will be verified by external, independent firms as well as public observers.
The following list includes recent reports from the Midland County Sheriffs Office and the Midland Police Department. Compiled by reporter Andrew Mullin.

Tuesday, June 8:

10:21 p.m. Officers responded to a traffic license violation in the area of Eastman Avenue and Burrell Street.

10:19 p.m.  Deputies conducted a traffic stop at a Jerome Township location for a defective brake light. Deputies contacted the 42-year-old male driver. Upon further investigation, it was determined the vehicle wasn't insured. The male was cited for no insurance and given a warning for the brake light. A report is being sent to the Midland Prosecuting Attorneys Office.

9:36 p.m.  A citizen called 911 to report a possible domestic assault. The caller advised they observed a white car on Eastman Road near Monroe Road. The female had possibly punched the male while driving. The caller did not get a license plate number. A deputy checked the area, but no vehicles matched.

9:04 p.m.  Officers responded to a two-vehicle crash in the area of Whitman and Towsley Street.

9:02 p.m.  Deputies responded to a Jerome Township residence for a 52-year-old Jerome Township male who was found deceased by his roommate. The investigation showed the death was from natural causes and nothing suspicious was found.

4:09 p.m.  A 31-year-old reported an ongoing property line dispute with her 53-year-old neighbor. The female wished to have the property line photographed by deputies. The complainant complained of being harassed by the neighboring property owner. The complainant was advised to contact the courts for a personal protection order.

4:00 p.m. Officers responded to a domestic verbal situation at Alpine Drive.

3:07 p.m. An animal control deputy received a call from a city resident advising that his cat had killed a bat in his house. The bat was collected and submitted for testing.

12:33 p.m. Officers responded to a case of fraud at Glendale Street.

11:22 a.m.  A 34-year-old Jerome Township male reported his 33-year-old ex-girlfriend stole his medication after a recent breakup. Deputies spoke with both parties about the missing medication. A report will be forwarded to the prosecutor's office for review.

11:03 a.m.  An animal control deputy received a call reference direct exposure by a cat to a bat inside the home. An isolation notice issued to the animal owner. The bat was collected and submitted for rabies testing.

10:44 a.m.  A 23-year-old female reported she was receiving unwanted text messages from her aunt. She asked deputies to contact her aunt, who resides in Clare County. Deputies left a voicemail advising the aunt not to contact the complainant. The complainant was referred to the courts for a personal protection order.

10:27 a.m.  Deputies responded to a Jerome Township residence for a burglary alarm. Deputies confirmed the residence was secure and determined it to be a false alarm. A key holder did not respond.

9:58 a.m.  A 63-year-old male reported his neighbors were trespassing onto his property on ATVs. The complainant also reported the neighbors cut trees which he believed were on his property. Deputies spoke to the property owner, a 40-year old Bay City female. The property owner denied cutting the complainant's trees. The owner agreed to stay off the complainants property. The owner advised a registered survey would be completed to establish true property lines.

6:50 a.m. Officers responded to an assault on Cherry View Drive.

4:00 a.m.  Deputies were dispatched to a domestic assault complaint at a Homer Township residence. A 20-year-old Homer Township male was assaulted by his 21-year-old City of Midland girlfriend. The male had minor injuries. The female was arrested for domestic assault.

12:41 a.m.  Deputies were dispatched to a suspicious situation. A 33-year-old Homer Township female advised she heard what sounded like kids screaming in her backyard. Deputies checked the area and located two cats that were making the noise she was hearing.
Rockville, Maryland, is a suburban area close to Washington, D.C. Many people choose to live here to enjoy suburban small-town life while only being a short Metro ride away from the big city. Whether you want to rent an apartment close to the local nature preserve or want a home within walking distance to the Metro station, you can find what you want in Rockville. Take a closer look at the Rockville, Maryland cost of living.

Since Rockville is in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area, the Rockville, Maryland cost of living can be quite high. According to BestPlaces, Rockville has a cost-of-living ranking of 143.6 on an index based on an average of 100. It is the eighth-most expensive city in Maryland, and the cost of living is 23% above the Maryland average when looking at cost of living in Montgomery County, Maryland. All living areas, including groceries, utilities, transportation, and housing, fall above the state average. Only health care costs are below the state average.

To give you some perspective, explore some average costs of miscellaneous items in Rockville:

A single meal at an inexpensive restaurant will cost an average of $13

A monthly fee for a local gym will cost about $52

A gallon of gasoline costs approximately $2.42

Remember, the cost of living will vary depending on your job salary, lifestyle choices, where you rent an apartment, and your family size. Think about these different factors before choosing a place to rent.

How expensive is an apartment in Rockville?

Having roommates in Rockville may be necessary since the average rent in Rockville, Maryland for a studio is $1,459. A three-bedroom apartment may be more manageable as it costs an average of $2,246, which isnt too expensive if you split among roommates. Apartment costs will fluctuate depending on the neighborhood you choose and its proximity to the downtown area. Rockville has two Metro stops, and apartments conveniently located near these stops cost a lot more. Apartments outside the city center are about $300 cheaper than those in the city center.

Remember, when renting an apartment, you have more costs than rent alone. Be sure to research parking fees, HOA fees, and renters insurance before signing a lease. If you are leaning toward renting a house, Rockville has many options. Renting a four-bedroom home will cost about $3,900.

How do I find cheap apartments in Rockville?

The best way to find a cheap apartment anywhere is to write down what you are looking for and begin your search. Look at your yearly budget and determine your essential lifestyle needs. Use Zumpers resources to help you search for an apartment based on your specific preferences. Set a maximum budget that you are willing to spend on monthly rent and do not go over your budget.

If you are a single person, consider living with roommates to keep your rental costs down. If you have a family, make sure it is in a neighborhood that suits all family members needs. Be sure to visit all the neighborhoods you are considering before signing a lease.

Browse apartments for rent in Rockville

What is the cheapest rent in Rockville?

In Rockville, avoid areas such as Luxmanor, Lakewood Estates, and Falls Chapel Way. These most expensive neighborhoods in Rockville have more houses for sale rather than apartments to rent. Instead, explore areas such as Derwood, Rollins Park, and Glenora Hills. These neighborhoods are affordable, close to public transportation, and close to the Rockville city center.

How much do utilities cost in Rockville?

Just like Washington, D.C., Rockville is in the U.S. mid-Atlantic region. During the summer, this regions characteristic heat and humidity can bear down on residents. Air conditioning is a must-have necessity in Rockville during the summer, and you will likely spend most of your utility budget keeping your home cool. A basic utility bill for a 900-square-foot apartment will cost about $112. These costs include electricity, heating, cooling, water, and garbage. Since Rockville is a suburban city near an even larger metropolitan area, the internet is not an enormous cost. One month of internet at 60 Mbps will cost about $57.

Transportation is another cost to consider when youre moving to Rockville. While Rockville is a suburban area with plenty of parking, many people live here and commute to larger cities such as Washington, D.C., using public transportation. The Red Line Metro service has two stops in Rockville, and many people use this comfortable suburb as a place to live and commute to the District for work. A monthly Metro pass will cost approximately $140. Think about whether this price is worth it for your needs or whether commuting by car is a better option for you.

What are some fun activities in Rockville?

Rockville, Maryland, has the perfect combination of local community activities only 20 miles away from a city that hosts large, international events throughout the year. The Rockville Town Square, a mixed-use development area, has affordable apartments, restaurants, and shops in the downtown area. Or check out the Rio Washingtonian Center in Gaithersburg, a family-friendly area with a playground, a ridable train for children, and a movie theater.

If you are interested in spending time outdoors, Rockville has you covered. The Croydon Creek Nature Center features more than 120 acres of meadows, creeks, and trails to explore, along with an abundance of wildlife in the area. For those who want to spend time near the water, you can visit Lake Needwood in Rock Creek Regional Park. Here you can rent kayaks, canoes, or rowboats and spend the entire day at the 75-acre lake.

The city has also recently dedicated resources toward making Rockville a more bike-friendly city. With more than 34.6 miles of shared-use paths and 3.9 miles of bike lanes, the city is becoming a safe and fun place to cycle. Rockville, Maryland, offers something for every resident.

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The post Cost of Living in Rockville, Maryland appeared first on The Zumper Blog.
Dakar, Senegal (PANA) - The Pan-African Parliament has asked the European Parliament not to get involved in the crisis between the Kingdom of Morocco and Spain, stressing that this crisis between the two countries is a bilateral one that can be resolved through diplomatic means or direct bilateral negotiation
Yesterday Kara Swisher of the New York Times interviewed the EU Competiton Commissioner Margrethe Vestager who has over the years investigated and/or charged Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook with massive fines. Our report focuses on the part of the interview that relates to Vestager's work against Apple and more specifically on the work focusing on ending the App Store as we know it.

Although Apple won their case in Europe over a $15 billion Irish tax bill, Vestager made it clear that the new laws in Europe are close to being finalized, intimating that the appeal should go their way against Apple. Vestager was also happy to say that President Biden's policies will now support their positions taken against U.S. tech companies.

Swisher: So I want to also know whats going on with the Spotify case. Youve accused Apples App Store of antitrust violations, basically alleging the App Store gives preferential treatment to Apples music streaming service. If Apple loses, it could face a fine of up to 10% of its annual turnover. Fines make good headlines, but are fines the right remedy when its really needed is to change bad behaviors? Talk a little bit about this case.

Vestager: Yeah, the Apple music streaming case is about the way Apple treats competitors to their own products. Here, you have Apple Music. Then you have Spotify, Deezer, SoundCloud  those will be familiar European names, at least. And here, if you want to subscribe, you will have to pay a 30% commission fee. And also, if for instance, youre then Spotify, you cannot tell your subscribers that you can get it without the commission fee if you sign up via the Spotify website. And that lack of communication that is simply forbidden of course makes it really difficult, because if you sign up for Apple music, youre not paying the commission fee.

So even though you could avoid the commission fee signing up via the website, youre not being told that this is possible. And that squeezes, of course, the margins for the other music streaming providers, and it makes the competition unfair. For most things, if you subscribe to it, and you stop subscribing, they would come back and, say, why were you not happy, is there something we can do for you. Not even that can you do. And that, of course, makes it very difficult.

Swisher: What are your chances of succeeding here?

Vestager: Well, I think its really important, because what we see is also that in Europe, Apple would hold like 30% of the marketplace. But the thing is that once you have an iPhone, they hold a de facto monopoly of you getting apps on your phone. And of course, its really important, because its a case about what should be the acceptable de facto monopoly behavior in these markets. And the second thing is that, hopefully, it can also pave the way for a proposal we have tabled that if you are in such a position as Apple are, they should allow for another app store on their phone. If Im not happy in the supermarket with the prices or the choices, I just go to the next one. This, we have accepted not to be the case in app stores for a really, really long time.

Swisher: What do you make of their argument that theyre providing safety, security, theyre vetting apps and things like that.

Vestager: Of course, thats a really important argument, because we want things to be safe. We want them to be tested. But we dont want safety and testing to be something that you can use to make life difficult for your competitors. And in the Apple Music streaming case, well, you see very different conditions depending on what kind of apps youre dealing with. So I think its an important argument, but neither safety and security nor privacy should be used as a dike against competitors.

Swisher: So what do you think of the current Apple Epic case here in the US? Thats another case that goes after Apple on antitrust concerning the App Store. Are you talking with their lawyers? Or do you just hope that theres all kinds of lines of attack on the same issue.

Vestager: No, we follow, for instance, the hearings on the Epics case very close, because there are a lot of similarities. And I think part of the Epics complaint could be solved by allowing a second App Store, because then they are looking for some specificities in how they engage with their customers.

Swisher: So when youre looking at cases like this, when youre saying a second App Store, Apple could say, look, why should we let another company take advantage of our platform that we built and let them run wild on it? That would be their argument. We believe in privacy. How do we know theyre going to be private? How do we know theyre going to be safe? We paid all this money to create this thing and are taking economic advantage from that

Vestager: But its  its fair enough. But on the App Store, as you see it by now, well, here you see the different treatment of different apps. Some apps you dont pay for, theres no commission fee. Other apps you pay for, theres a very high commission fee that Apple do not pay themselves for where they compete against

Vestager continues and stumbles: And I think every one of us, we would expect if we were to place another app store on our phone, that the people responsible for that app store, well, they would, of course, deliver us a safe place to do our business. But there is a thing when you are in a dominant position, as you are when you provide an operating system, and you put your own products in that rein of that operating system. And that, of course, is what is at stake here, because if we do not have a marketplace that gives room for that kind of innovation, well, then were kind of stuck in the situation that were in right now.

Vestager: Is there any other solution besides the second app store? Could you regulate them, or regulate the commission fees? Or is there any other way to deal with this and not have a second app store  or you think thats the only way?

Vestager: Now, I think a second app store, that is in the future. That will take time, because its in a legislative proposal that we have tabled in front of the European Parliament. But I would hope that we could conclude this case in good time. And then wed see how to remedy this. Depends, of course, very much on the Apple answer to our concerns. Some of the music streaming services, the smaller ones, theyre not doing too good. And no one can judge what would actually be the market performance of those who are still doing quite well. We have seen in other cases how damaging it can be if things takes a lot of time  then the market moves on. So obviously, we never compromise on the quality of our case work and on due process, but we need speed, because a digital marketplace and a digital world is a world where things are moving fast.

For more on this, read the full New York Times report titled "Meet Big Tech's Tormentor in Chief."

It's pretty clear that Vestager's vision is to force a second App Store within Apple's App Store which would be equal to hijacking the App Store for European companies. It's one thing to lower commissions on the App Store, it's another to overtake it with legislation.

It's easy to see why Vestager expressed her pleasure in seeing the Biden administration supporting the same legislation going before Congress shortly. It gives Vestager the green light to force a second App Store in Europe knowing full well that there won't be any blowback from the U.S.
Apple TV+ has revealed a teaser trailer for the second season of its epic post-apocalyptic series See, which will premiere globally on Friday, August 27 on Apple TV+, with a new episode premiering weekly, every Friday thereafter. The series also received an early renewal for a third season, with filming currently underway in Toronto, Canada.

The second season will introduce Dave Bautista ("Guardians of the Galaxy") as Edo Voss, the brother of Jason Momoas character, Baba Voss.

In season 2, the great Baba Voss is storming into new territory to confront his old enemy, his brother.

Season 2 of Home Before Dark starts Tonight





As a remnder, season 2 of Home Before Dark begins tonight. In season two, when a mysterious explosion hits a local farm, reporter Hilde Lisko begins an investigation that will lead her to fight a powerful and influential corporation  with the health of her family and Erie Harbor in the balance.

Archive: Apple TV News
The Deputy Trade and Industry Minister nominee, Nana Ama Dokua Asiamah-Adjei has disclosed that, through the establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), Africas quest for rapid industrialization will soon be achieved.



Appearing before the Appointments Committee of Parliament on Friday, the venerable lawmaker said the establishment of AfCFTA will serve as the catalyst of speeding up Africas Industrialization Drive.



I see this as very feasible and extremely possible because initially, because of the various fragmented markets, it was always difficult for ECOWAS member States to ship to Eastern Europe and other parts of the world on the duty-free quota-free basis. With the provision AfCFTA gives, there are opportunities for each Member State to implement its policies and programmes in boosting the development of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs). With this, it is very possible to get to that target of Africa speeding up on its industrialization drive.



The nominee noted that Ghana has started its export on the AfCFTA, with some companies in line going through the necessary training to be able to produce at the market requirements.



The AU refer to the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) as the backbone to Africas industrialization. It has about 80% of private-sector businesses and employs close to 70% of all employees in the private sector. Once we implement policies and programs to retool our MSMEs, Africas industrialization target will be achieved, she said.



Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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The government has received $1.16 million in royalties from Frontier Healthcare Services (FHS) from COVID-19 testing procedures at the Kotoka International Airport.



The amount, which was received by the Ghana Airports Company Limited (GACL) on behalf of the government, accrued between September and December last year.



The Minister of Transport, Mr Kwaku Ofori Asiamah, disclosed this on the floor of Parliament yesterday, and said the total amount raised by FHS over the period under review was $17.36 million.



"Mr Speaker, I want to inform this august House that from September to December 2020, the total amount realised from the COVID-19 testing at the Kotoka International Airport was $17,359,500," the minister noted.



Mr Asiamah was responding to an urgent question asked on behalf of the Minority Leader, Mr Haruna Idrissu, by the Member of Parliament (MP) for Ketu North, Mr Jame Klutse Avedzi.



He explained that the amount was raised before a directive from ECOWAS to member countries to reduce fees for the testing protocols from $150 to $50.



Governments share



Mr Asiamah said the government  through the GACL  received $10 for each payment made by a passenger at the airport, while the remaining $140 went to FHS.



Some 117,187 persons came through the KIA over the period under review.



The remaining sum of about $16.32 million would go to FHS, from which it would meet other statutory obligations such as corporate taxes and overheads.



Per the contractual agreement, Ghana Airports Company was supposed to receive $10 of royalty per test done, and Frontier Health Services was to keep the rest as their service charge," he said.



The minister said the private healthcare company, apart from paying royalties to the government of Ghana, was also paying rent for space to the GACL.



Mr Asiamah also noted that FHS and the GACL were the only parties involved in the concession agreement for the COVID-19 testing procedure at the KIA.



Mr Speaker, it is worthy of mention that the only parties of the concession were the FHS and the GACL, he said.



Background



In September 2020, the GACL and FHS signed a contract to allow FHS undertake COVID-19 antigen tests at the Kotoka International Airport.



The company started operations with the reopening of the KIA to regular passenger travels after months of shutdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic.



The two-year contract grants FHS the exclusive right to provide mandatory Covid-19 testing on passengers on arrival.









Source: Graphiconline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The Chief Executive Officer of the Zongo Development Fund, Dr. Arafat Sulemana Abdulai has urged inhabitants of Zongo Communities to endeavor to participate fully in the upcoming 2021 population and housing census.



He said the census exercise is a national programme and every member of the Zongo community must not be left unaccounted for.



Dr. Arafat made the call, today, at a stakeholders engagement forum on the 2021 Population and Housing Census, organized by the LIGHT FOUNDATION, an advocacy and social support organization, at the Police mosque, Cantonments, Accra.



Dr. Arafat noted that the government of President Nana Addo Danquah Akufo-Addo has established the Zongo Development Fund in order to promote development in zongo communities and to ensure a more inclusive development agenda for all Ghanaians, irrespective of religion, tribe, social status and cultural affiliation.



It is therefore incumbent, he added, upon all muslims and inhabitants of Zongos, particularly, to ensure they are fully counted in the population census. He reminded Zongos of the direct relationship between the population of a community and the allocation of national resources by the central government.



Dr. Arafat assured all stakeholders of the support and collaboration of the Zongo Development Fund in the exercise and expressed his readiness to embark on a nation-wide campaign in Zongo communities, in order to further educate inhabitants on the importance of the census programme.



He said the Fund completely appreciates the necessity of the exercise, because it will facilitate an appreciation of the accurate number of people living in Zongos. It will also assist the Fund in the allocation of projects to various communities.



He pledged to also intensify the completion of on-going projects in the provision of safe and potable drinking water for all; construction and renovation of basic school infrastructure; establishment of ICT Labs, Teaching and Learning materials; vocational skills training and entrepreneurial support for the youth; provision of financial support for Tertiary education; construction of access roads and drains; construction of community recreational parks; upgrading of maternal and child health care centres, and community lighting programmes.



So far, Dr. Arafat concluded,the Fund has fully completed 198 projects across the country.



Meanwhile, over 300 projects spanning various areas of activities of the Fund are at various stages of completion.











Source: Ahmed Ayuba, Zongo Development Fund









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Ghana Boundary Commission marks 11th African Border Day under the continental theme Arts, Culture and Heritage: Levers for Building the Africa We Want



The Ghana Boundary Commission (GhBC) marks the annual commemoration of African Border Day, a day set aside by the African Union (AU) to sensitize Member States, Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and relevant stakeholders on border issues, as well as the importance of continental, regional integration and cross-border cooperation.



The day, celebrated annually on 7th June, aims at highlighting the role of the AU Border Program (AUBP) and the AU Convention on Cross-border Cooperation (the Niamey Convention) which facilitates and supports the demarcation and delimiting of African boundaries and the development/promotion of cross-border cooperation among States; while also encouraging additional efforts for their implementation.



As part of efforts to comply with and implement both the AUBP and the Niamey Convention as necessary mechanisms for the transformation of boundary zones and cross-border areas into spaces conducive to regional and continental integration, the Ghana Boundary Commission was reconstituted by the Government of Ghana with the mandate of determining, demarcating and delimiting Ghanas land and maritime boundaries; as well as settling boundary disputes all in accordance with accepted principles of international laws and good neighbourliness. 



The Commissions establishment is particularly important due to growing boundary issues and challenges such as removal or displacement of international boundary pillars and disputes over trans-boundary resources among others.



Recognising the key role of Africa's rich culture, arts and heritage as catalysts for integration, resilience and socio-economic development of the African continent and also in helping to promulgate the AU Agenda 2063 of a continent of seamless borders and management of cross-border resources through dialogue, this years Africa Border Day celebration is on the theme Arts, Culture and Heritage: Levers for Building the Africa We Want. African arts, culture and heritage has proven its resilience, having not only survived through the Covid-19 pandemic, but also contributing to the fight against it. Indeed, they were the instrumental avenues for Covid-19 information dissemination and the perfect companions during the lockdown periods, having adapted to the pandemic and employing the use of modern technology such as digital platforms to create new borderless spaces.



Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and the diverse boundary issues that many African countries are grappling with, the theme presents African States with an opportunity to consider the Creative Arts Sector as mechanism to bridge the artificial borders.



Especially with borders closed and movement restricted, African societies can begin to explore creative and innovative ways through their shared culture, arts and heritage as channels for educating stakeholders on boundary management issues, border sensitization, integration, resilience and post-Covid recovery.



In commemoration of the 11th African Border Day, the Ghana Boundary Commission calls for a re-examination of the role of the Cultural and Creative Arts industry in boundary management. More so with the signing and coming into force the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) which is aimed at accelerating intra-African trade and boosting Africas position in the global market, investing in the Creative Arts and employing it as tools for conflict prevention and cross-border cooperation is a creative, forward-looking, and innovative way of bridging and rebuilding African economies across borders in the midst of this Covid-19 pandemic.



About Ghana Boundary Commission: The Ghana Boundary Commission is a Government of Ghana entity responsible for demarcating, delimiting and managing Ghanas international boundaries; as well as settling boundary disputes between Ghana and her neighboring countries in accordance with accepted principles of international law. The Act establishing the Ghana Boundary Commission (Act 795) was passed by Parliament and the gazette notification issued 26th March, 2010. Since its establishment, the Commission has undertaken a number of activities including physical boundary pillar audits, survey of boundaries among others; with the aim of promoting regional integration, improving peace and security, and advancing cross border cooperation with its neighbouring countries.

























Source: Peacefmonline.com









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The Forestry Commission of Ghana has committed to putting in place a comprehensive monitoring mechanism to provide advice and technical support to persons who collect and plant seedlings under the government's Green Ghana Project.



The CEO of the Commission, Mr John M. Allotey said a dedicated telephone line will also be announced to ensure that the investment made in acquiring the over seven seedlings for the project does not go waste.



He made known today at a ceremony that saw members of the diplomatic corps plant trees at the National Seismological Observatory at Achimota in Accra.



"We are happy this project is taking off but we are more concerned about the nurturing and protection of the trees that will be planted.



The British High Commissioner, Iain Walker planting a tree



"It is not worth it to spend money and effort to plant all these trees and not help it to grow and so the Forestry Commission will take all the records and GPS locations where the trees will be planted and visit them regularly and publish quarterly reports about the progress of the project.



Tree planting



A total of 33 leaders from diplomatic missions comprising Ambassadors, High Commissioners and their representatives participated in the tree planting exercise.



The Acting Nigerian High Commissioner, Gambo Hamza



They included the Head of European Union (EU) Delegation to Ghana, H.E. Diana Acconcia, the outgoing British High Commissioner to Ghana, H.E. Iain Walker, the Ambassador of Colombia to the Republic of Ghana, H. E. Claudia Turbay Quintero, the Acting Nigerian High Commissioner to Ghana, H.E. Gambo Hamza, the Ambassador of Mexico to Ghana and Enrique Escorza, the Brazilian Ambassador to Ghana, H.E. Maria Elisa de Luna, the Italian Ambassador to Ghana and Togo, H.E. Daniela dOrlandi, the Rwandan Ambassador to Ghana, H.E. Dr Aisa Kirabo Kacyira and the Ambassador of France to Ghana, H.E. Anne Sophie Ave.



In an address, the Dean of the Diplomatic Corps of Ghana, H. E. Claudia Turbay Quintero commended President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo for championing the Greening Ghana Project which she said would safeguard Ghana's environment for many years to come.



"President Akufo-Addo had such a wonderful and important initiative that will have an impact not only on nature and the soil of Ghana but also strengthen Ghana's potential of having forests, water bodies and nature".



She said the participation of the diplomatic corps was an endorsement of the Greening Ghana Project and would also strengthen the relationship between Ghana and the over 33 missions that are backing the project.



Background



President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo announced the Green Ghana Project in the 2021 State of the Nation Address in March to mobilise Ghanaians for an aggressive nationwide tree planting exercise.



Subsequently, the Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Mr Samuel Abu Jinapor, on March 23, this year, launched the greening project as part of activities to mark this years International Day of Forests, which fell on March 21.



The ministry plans to institute June 11 each year as a tree-planting day.



As part of the project, more than five million tree seedlings of different species are to be planted and nurtured to maturity as an aggressive measure to preserve the countrys forest cover and the environment and roll back climate change and its debilitating impact.









Source: graphiconline.com









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Nigerias justice minister has told the Vanguard newspaper that the government never intended to prosecute citizens still using Twitter after the micro-blogging site was banned in the country last week.



Abubakar Malami, who is also the countrys attorney general, told the newspaper that the government would only go after anyone, whether individual or corporate institution that enables Twitter to circumvent the ban.



For the record, let it be made amply clear that Abubakar Malami is not after any Nigerian, tweeting from Nigeria or anywhere in the world but that any Nigerian company or entity that gives a helping hand for Twitter to escape the ban placed on it, will be dealt with, he said.



Last week, the ministers aide had told the BBC that a statement released by Mr Malami threatening to prosecute violators of the ban included Nigerian citizens who defied the order and continued using the app.



Most Nigerians have been tweeting since the ban came into effect last Friday, using virtual private networks to bypass a block on the Twitter site after telecommunications companies heeded the government warning.



But Mr Malami told Vanguard that his initial statement did not call for prosecution against those using Twitter or any social media platform to express their view.



But we are going to use the legal instruments at our disposal to go after those who aid and abet Twitter to continue to threaten our corporate existence as a nation, he said.



It is not clear if Mr Malami is referring to the VPN companies that Nigerians have been using to bypass the Twitter ban.



There has been widespread condemnation since the suspension was announced, the latest coming from the United States.

Source: BBC









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Grottoes in central China welcome vistors at dusk

People's Daily Online) 16:03, June 11, 2021

(People's Daily Online/Zeng Xianping)

The Longmen Grottoes in Luoyang city, central China's Henan Province, launched a new activity inviting visitors to enjoy its mysterious and tranquil vista in the evening.

The grottoes are the world's largest treasure trove of stone carvings and represent the world's largest collection of Buddhist statues.

(Web editor: Xian Jiangnan, Liang Jun)
Over the past years, successive governments have designed housing projects to help address the age-old problem of Ghanas housing deficit.



Ghanaians have witnessed a lot of housing projects in the name of affordable housing but most often, these initiatives are not actualized and they end up being stalled in the process.



It is against this background that indigenous Ghanaian company, RevealedTruth Properties has engineered the Diaspora City project to offer green climate standard homes away from the usual pollution in the cities and its accompanied noises.



The Diaspora City is sited on a 300-acre land, a well-planned modern designed community to provide the green environment, secured natural environment, renewable and sustainable energy and comfortable homeownership for anyone who desires to live in Ghana or owning a home Ghana from the Diaspora.



The ultra-modern green urban city is expected avail its residents with world-class infrastructures, serene environment, on-site high spec amenities.



Located in Apirede Akwapim in the Eastern Region of Ghana, the Diaspora City development accesses a lot of amenities including educational centers, medical center, shopping mall, transportation and shuttle services.



According to the Chief Executive Officer of RevealedTruth Properties, Bridgette Opoku Sarkodie, the designated area for the project is embedded in Apirede a town in the Akwapim range which boasts of natural mountains covered with thick greenery.



What makes its location prime is its proximity to Koforidua, Somanya and Aburi all within the range of about 1-hour drive from the Kotoka International Airport.



Touching on how the project came into reality, she said they saw an opportunity and a gap to fill when it comes to housing for people who live and work abroad who want to come back and settle or need a home here



Now there is a cry for a Green environment and we have realized that when you live in such an environment it naturally prolongs your life; diseases go down, and generally ensures a better quality of life and so we decided to explore. We decided to build for those coming from the diaspora so that they can have a better natural environment when it comes to the weather and also put in place that kind of community and neighbourhood setting since those abroad always live together in communities.



Touching on Ghanas housing problems, she lamented that though a lot of housing projects have come and gone nothing has come out of such initiatives.



From the records, we know that Ghanas housing deficit stands at two million and it is because not much has been done. Most of what has been done in the past four years has been affordable housing; all the years for over 20 years, is the affordable housing; however, most of them have not actualized much. Now when you dont have much housing units for your natives or nationals to sleep in how do you invite people from the diaspora to come in to settle here?



Most of them when they are coming back, they want something comparable to what they have over there or even better when it comes to the environment or facilities. These people have a certain kind of lifestyle, weather-wise or even the facilities they use. You dont see lights going off abroad, you dont see any water problems there so if they come here and you put them in an environment like that, it becomes difficult for them to stay. Most of the homes that we have here should meet the standard up to what you can probably get in London or the USA, she said.



She said with the diaspora City project, the ultra-modern green urban city with world-class infrastructures, serene environment, on-site high spec amenities would address these challenges the diaspora returnees face when they settle in Ghana.

Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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The Gbese Mantse, Nii Ayi-Bonte II has beaten the Odadao twin drums to signify the lifting of the month-long ban on drumming and noise-making in Ga Mashie and areas under its jurisdiction.



The Gbese Mantse beat the Odadao drums three times today at Gbese Blohum, Accra to lift the ban. This brief act was greeted with the firing of musketry, drumming by the Tesaa Cultural Troupe and cheers by some indigenes.



The traditional ritual which heralds and ushers in the annual Homowo festival, by people of Ga Mashie was witnessed by royalty, indigenes and tourists at the forecourt of the Gbese Mantse Palace at Gbese Blohum in Accra.



The lifting of the ban means that people living in towns and villages under Gbese, Otublohum, Sempe, Akamajen, Asere, Abola and Ngleshie Alata can now use musical instruments, clap and play loud music during their social and religious activities.



According to the spokesperson of the Gbese Mantse Palace, Nii Annan Agbo, the ritual also serves as a signal that the annual Homowo festival was imminent.



He said the ban was to allow the traditional priests to meditate and pray for a bumper harvest prior to the Homowo festival.



The festival which means hooting at hunger has its origins in the migration and settlement of Ga's in their present location when they experienced drought and famine.



After overcoming those challenges they marked the festival to commemorate their defeat over hunger.









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A French court on Thursday sentenced a man who slapped French President Emmanuel Macron across the face this week to a prison term of 18 months, 14 of which were suspended.



Damien Tarel, a 28-year-old medieval history enthusiast, has been in custody since the assault on Tuesday which a prosecutor called "absolutely unacceptable" and "an act of deliberate violence".



The court gave Tarel a sentence of 18 months in jail, but 14 of those months were suspended, the broadcaster reported.



Earlier, Tarel told the court in Valence in southern France, that he acted because the president stood for all that was rotten with France, the news channel said.



Tarel said that several days ahead of Macron's visit to the Drome region of southern France, he had thought about throwing an egg or a cream tart at the president, but added the slap was not premeditated.



"I think that Macron represents very neatly the decay of our country," he told the court, according to BFM TV. "If I had challenged Macron to a duel at sunrise, I doubt he would have responded."



Macron has described the attack as an isolated incident and said violence and hate were a threat to democracy. His office did not respond to a request for comment on Tarel's courtroom remarks. Tarel faced a charge of assault against a public official, an offence which carries a maximum sentence of three years in jail and a 45,000 euro fine.



'Patriot'



Tarel struck Macron after the president came over to greet a small crowd of onlookers after visiting a vocational college during a trip to take the pulse of the country as it emerges from the pandemic and ahead of presidential elections in 2022.



Macron reached out to Tarel who was standing behind a security barrier, Tarel then shouted "Down with Macronia" ("A Bas La Macronie") and slapped Macron on the left side of his face.



He could also be heard shouting "Montjoie Saint Denis", the army's battle cry when France was still a monarchy.



"It's a patriot's slogan," he was quoted as telling the court.



Tarel told police investigators that he had been close to the anti-government "yellow vest" protest movement which shook the Macron presidency, and held ultra-right wing political beliefs.



Acquaintances of Tarel described a man who loved period role-play and was not a trouble-maker. The prosecutor said he was not a member of any political or militant group.



Tarel was arrested along with a second man from his hometown of Saint-Vallier.



Police found weapons, a copy of Adolf Hitler's autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf and a red flag with golden hammer and sickle that is the symbol of the communist movement in the second man's home, local prosecutor Alex Perrin said.



The second man will not face any charges related to the slapping but will be prosecuted for illegal possession of arms in 2022.









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The Minority in Parliament has called for the immediate termination of the contract agreement between government and Frontiers Healthcare Services for COVID 19 testing at Kotoka International Airport.



It follows a revelation by Transport Minister, Kweku Ofori Asiamah that per each US$150 testing done at the Airport, government of Ghana only takes US$10 as against US$140 for the company.



The Minister disclosed this when he attended upon the house to answer a question in the name of Minority Leader, Haruna Idrissu but asked on his behalf by Deputy Minority Leader, James Avedzi Klutse.



According to Mr Asiamah, between September and December last year, total amount made from testing at the airport sums up to over US$17 million. Out of this, US$16 million went to Frontiers Healthcare Services while Ghana had a little over US$1 million.



The Member of Parliament for South Dayi, Rockson Dafeamekpor told Class News Parliamentary Affairs reporter, Charles Akrofi that the ministers explanation was convincing to the extent that, that is the fact. We have always known. You know, it is taking about a year for the features of this transactions to be known to the public.



In his view, it was not a reasonable contract for government to enter into with a company to offer such facility or services which we think Noguchi could have offered and these proceeds could have gone to improve Noguchi or we could have even built another Noguchi in another location in this country. We're paying to a private man, as much as US$140 for every US$150 fee charged. That is the tragedy of the situation.



Describing the transaction as a completely needless agreement, he noted that I think that the government is taking the country for grantedYou cannot offer such an agreement for services to a company for which it is generating proceeds and then the percentage of proceeds that is coming to us is about 15 percent. It is most unacceptable.



Mr Dafeamekpor further stated that in the coming days some members of the health committee will bring the issue up in Parliament for thorough deliberations.



He called for the termination of the agreement because, given the terms, it doesn't make economic sense to maintain this agreement.





Source: classfmonline.com









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A 34-year-old Nigerian man recently separated from his wife attacked her parents' home in Douglasville, Georgia, killing her and his mother-in-law before taking his own life.



Udoamaka Nwamu, of East Point, Fulton County, took a handgun to his in-laws home in Douglasville on Sunday, June 6, where his estranged wife, Kaliyah Nwamu, was staying, and fired shots into the front and back of the house on Long Lake Drive.



Douglas County Sheriff Tim Pounds said in a news release on Tuesday, June 8, that the gunshots resulted in multiple 911 calls and deputies were dispatched to the house. Before they arrived, Nwamu forced his way inside the home.



Deputies were met with gunfire from the house and were forced to take cover, while an emergency response team and hostage negotiator were sent to the scene.



"During the course of the negotiations with Udoamaka, a single gunshot was heard," Pounds said.



The response team then entered the house and found Nwamu dead from what Pounds described as a self-inflicted gunshot wound.



Deputies also found the bodies of Nwamus estranged wife, 24-year-old Kaliyah Nwamu, and her mother, 46-year-old Nikita Green.





The case remains under investigation, Pounds added.









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The Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) has condemned the arrest and detention of 21 young lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists in Ho.



The suspects, made up of 16 females and five males, were rounded up at a workshop on 20 May 2021 and have since been on remand.



In a statement, the civil society organisation said the rights of the activists are being abused because they have not flouted any laws of Ghana.



First, it is clear that gathering to educate people at a hotel venue on LGBT+ issues is not a criminal act or crime under the constitution or any statute. At the time of their arrest, the arrestees were not engaged in or found to have engaged in any unlawful act or in possession of any unlawful or prohibited items.



The Constitution does not prohibit any group of citizens from banding together to advocate for better treatment under the law, including for reform of the law or of law enforcement to enhance their lives as equal citizens, the CDD-Ghana statement said.



Below is the full statement:



On May 20, 2021, the Volta Regional Police Command arrested 21 young Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) activists in Ho.



The accused persons, comprising 16 women and 5 men, were arrested after Police invaded a hotel where a conference on human rights was ongoing.



On May 21, 2021, the accused persons were brought before the Circuit Court, Ho, on the charge of unlawful assembly under Section 202 of the Criminal Offences Act, 1960 (Act 29).



Their bail application was denied by His Honour Felix Datsomor on grounds that the Police required more time to investigate the matter. The accused persons were remanded in police custody. Counsel for the accused persons appealed the decision on the bail application at the High Court but this appeal was also refused on grounds that the accused persons were a flight risk.



On June 4, 2021, the Prosecutor, Chief Superintendent Ayamga, told the Circuit Court, Ho, that the matter had been referred to the Attorney-General for advice. A second application for bail made by counsel for the accused persons was unopposed by the prosecutor. The Circuit Court Judge, His Honour Felix Datsomor, adjourned the case to June 8, 2021 to consider the arguments made by counsel. The accused persons were once again, remanded in police custody. When the court reconvened on June 8, 2021, the Circuit Court judge refused the bail application again on grounds that a High Court had already decided on the matter and the Circuit Court was unwilling to deviate from it.



The accused persons continue to remain in police custody.



The Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) is appalled at how the Courts and the State have handled this matter and have allowed these young Ghanaians to be incarcerated for 19 days and counting. First, it is clear that gathering to educate people at a hotel venue on LGBT+ issues is not a criminal act or crime under the Constitution or any statute. At the time of their arrest, the arrestees were not engaged in or found to have engaged in any unlawful act or in possession of any unlawful or prohibited items.



Their arrest and subsequent mistreatment are, therefore, a clear violation of their constitutional right to freedom of assembly and association. Second, given the charge that has been preferred against them, which is, at worst, a misdemeanor, and the facts of the case (facts which hardly support the charge), the inferior court judge ought to have been guided by the prevailing law on the determination of bail applications.



The circuit courts refusal to grant bail on three (3) different occasions unfairly prejudices the accused persons even before their trial. This is at variance with the Supreme Court decision in Martin Kpebu v Attorney-General (2016), Section 96 of the Criminal and Other Offences (Procedure) Act, 1960 (Act 30) and the Practice Direction for the Determination of Bail and Consequential Matters issued by the Chief Justice in 2019.



The occasional use of archaic colonial legal relics like Section 202 of Act 29 by the police to undermine constitutional rights, particularly the right to assemble, exposes the stagnation we continue to experience in efforts to promote and protect human rights in Ghana. In a democratic dispensation where the rights of all persons, including social minorities, are guaranteed under the Constitution, targeting and singling out LGBT+ persons for such harsh and unfair treatment, merely for associating and assembling with each other for noncriminal purposes, including to plan advocacy for better treatment under the law, further marginalizes and victimizes them and sets a dangerous precedent for the treatment of unpopular minorities in general.



The Constitution does not prohibit any group of citizens from banding together to advocate for better treatment under the law, including for reform of the law or of law enforcement to enhance their lives as equal citizens.



The Center calls on the Attorney-General who is clothed with the States exclusive prosecutorial power under the Constitution to intervene in this matter and stop the needless continuing harassment and violation of the constitutional rights of these 21 compatriots.



The Center also calls on the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) to take proactive steps, including public education, to ensure that all citizens, regardless of social approval or disapproval of their personal choices and preferences in purely private matters, are able to exercise and enjoy the rights guaranteed equally to all persons under the Constitution without social or official harassment.















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Some dedicated New Patriotic Party (NPP) youth in the Awutu Senya West Constituency have descended heavily on their former Member of Parliament(MP), George Andah for attempts by the former Legislator to stain persons who can challenge him in the 2023 elections.



In a statement released by the group, George Andah should accept he is the sole reason for his defeat in the 2020 parliamentary elections.



Read below the full statement:



9th June 2021.



DEDICATED NPP MEMBERS OF AWUTU SENYA CONSTITUENCY



Dear Patriots,



We have noted with disdain how attempts are being made to rewrite the history of the fortunes of Awutu Senya West constituency in the 2020 elections. Over the last few days the former MP Nenyi George Andah has began a submarine campaign to destroy persons who can challenge him in the 2023 elections and is finding people to blame for his defeat in the 2020 elections.



The people of Awutu Senya West are wide awake. George Andah should accept he is the sole reason for the defeat in 2020 parliamentary elections.



Awutu Senya West NPP will not forget that: was



1. George Andah exhibited arrogance and pomposity to the very people who assisted him to get to parliament.

2. George Andah went insulting community elders at Bawuanum.

3. George Andah used his walking stick to beat one of our polling station executives near the church premises

4. George Andah told NPP party people to keep quiet when they see NDC guys being assisted to get employment or assistance

5. George Andah engineered the suspension of constituency party executives

6. George Andah allegedly used campaign funds to erect security installation at his house at Prampram which cost almost GHc120,000

7. George Andah made an advance payment of GHc8,000 for victory party when we needed money to secure the victory in the first place.

8. George Andah gave NPP slots into police, prisons, army , fire service and other employment opportunities to Accra Boys and girls

9. George Andah and his cohorts kept sewing machines, barbering machines, hair dryers, trays and other campaign materials meant for the campaign; materials which are still in possession of certain individuals

10. George Andah invited musicians to come and tell the constituents what they want when we needed money to run campaign activities at the polling station

11. George Andah described party people as indiscipline

12. George Andah disrespected our chiefs, including the paramount chief of Awutu Traditional Area.



These are fact that are indisputable and we cannot forget about them.



As every soul here on earth was affected one way or the other by this deadly novel COVID-19 virus, and NOT READY to witness it again in our life time, we the people of Awutu Senya West dont want to witness that reign of George Andah, now christened Tobge Kokotako again in our political life.



George Andah is the deadliest virus ever in political leadership. Not even Adolf Hitler can be compared to him. Even the said wicked Hitler did not deprive his relative of work. He bribed his doctors to change the medical report of his own brother to say that his own brother is suffering from hernia, just to deprive him of a legitimate opportunity he failed to secure for him.



For George Andah to come back again in ASWC, we prefer covid19. The novel covid19 has some safety measures that when we adhere to it measures, we can live forever.



May Almighty Allah Bless ASWC and make Us GREAT & STRONG



signed



Nenyi Kobina Quaye

Dedicated NPP Youth in ASWC









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A Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) sign is seen in Calgary, Alta., Thursday, Aug. 1, 2019. A union representing Canadian Border Service Agency staff says more than 9,000 personnel will start voting next week on whether they should go on strike. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair responds to a question during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill, in Ottawa, Friday, Dec. 11, 2020. Liberals table bill to make criminal pardons quicker, cheaper

The Liberal government is tabling legislation to make it easier and less expensive to obtain a criminal pardon. THE CANADIAN PRESS/ Patrick Doyle
Most of you already know I had a bad crash down in Mexico from my stories, but I havent shared a post on it yet. Story below, but ended up shattering my hand and dislocating it from my wrist. On the mend now, got a long, slow recovery ahead. Thanks so so much to all of you who reached out after or helped at the event, the mtb community rules.



So basically I had showed up late to the long jump competition, our hotels were overbooked and we had to switch hotel rooms so we left to go do that. By the time we got back they were down to the final 2 riders on the long jump and going to give a 100 bucks to the winner. I saw the distance and decided I could clear it pretty easily and decided that I should probably take a warm up, just in case the lip was gonna buck me because it was short n steep, and it was windy so I wanted to feel it out. Everybody else was starting from the top of the hills so I figured if I started halfway and took 1 or 2 pedals I could feel it out. When I got to the lip I saw the line of paint on the ground and figured out I could probably make that at this speed so I preloaded, and as soon as I preloaded I realised that it was not great. Ended up going up over the bars and just enough lean from the wind to wipe out and right away knew I probably broke my wrist and hurt myself pretty bad.



Ended up with a series of really bumpy dirt road ambulance rides and hospitals without pain meds in Mexico and doctors telling me different diagnosis and wrong information and all this kind of crap. Left the hospital in an ambulance back to the event to get meds from the event doctor. Thought I was gonna get a shot of morphine when offered a shot but instead got a tequila shot in the ambulance...



Finally managed to get an early flight home get home to the states and find out that I need emergency surgery and that there's some small internal bleeding and it just doesn't look good. Finally got the surgery about 3 days after it happened and it's healing up the gonna be some complications from it but it should be good. My nerves were compressed for 3 days and I ripped all my muscles and tendons off the bones but they're healing!

Wil White shared on Instagram that he shattered his hand and dislocated it from his wrist at the Fireride Festival in Mexico. The injury resulted in torn muscles and tendons, plus the nerves were compressed for three days before he was able to get surgery, so his recovery may be complicated. The full story, as told on Instagram, is copied below.We wish Wil all the best in his recovery and hope to see him back to breaking records soon.
KAMPALA  The Emirates Airlines has suspended passenger flights from Uganda and Zambia as of Friday, June 11, citing UAE government directive.

The UAE authorities on Wednesday suspended entry for travellers coming from Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda as part of efforts to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

The measure applies to transit passengers, in addition to passengers who have travelled through these countries in the last 14 days prior to their arrival in UAE.

Emirati citizens, diplomatic passport holders, and official delegations are exempt from the measures.

Fly Emirates in their statement on Thursday said transit flights from the UAE (Dubai) to the affected countries, in addition to cargo flights, will continue to operate.

The UAE decision was announced by the National Emergency Crisis and Disaster Management Authority and the General Civil Aviation Authority.

The General Authority of Civil Aviation confirmed that travellers coming from Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda through other countries are required to have a period of stay in those countries of not less than 14 days in order to be allowed to enter the country, with the continuation of cargo flights between the UAE with the three countries, the crisis and disaster authority said.

Full statement

In line with UAE government directives, Emirates will be suspending passenger flights from Zambia and Uganda to Dubai, effective 11 June 2021, until further notice. Emirates flights from Dubai to Lusaka, continuing on to Harare and flights from Dubai to Entebbe will continue to operate as normal.

Furthermore, passengers who have connected through Zambia and Uganda in the last 14 days will not be accepted to travel from any other point to the UAE. UAE Nationals and their first degree relatives, holders of UAE Golden Visas and members of diplomatic missions accredited by the UAE and the two countries who comply with updated COVID?19 protocols, as well as delegations and businesspeople who have received prior approvals, will be exempt for travel.?

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Ed Asner & Son Have Poker in Their Blood; Ready for Celebrity Charity Event

June 11, 2021 Chad Holloway

This weekend, a celebrity poker tournament will take place for a good cause. At 5 p.m. PT on Saturday, June 12, the 9th Annual Ed Asner & Friends Poker Tournament will raise much-needed funds for special needs families.

I learned to play poker with my brothers, Ed Asner told PokerNews. They were such great players, and I wanted to be like them so it was just something I naturally wanted to do. They both had poker in their blood.

The event, which will take place on the all-new Poker 501 platform complete with live video, will benefit the Ed Asner Family Center, which is an all-encompassing resource for special needs families, creating an oasis of thought, interaction, acceptance, and education.

Registration is already closed for the tournament, which was limited to 300 seats and cost $250 to enter. Now, poker fans will have their chance to sweat the action as the online event will be live-streamed for free on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter with hosts Maria Ho, Phil Gordon, and Nick Gerber.

Among the dozens of celebrities slated to participate are BD Wong, Brad Garrett, Daryl Hannah, Haley Joel Osment, Lou Diamond Phillips, Michael Shannon, Richard Kind, Rosie ODonnell, Stephen Moyer, Tom Arnold, and even Triumph the Insult Dog. There will also be a special musical performance by Aimee Mann.

To donate, text POKER to 707070.

Click here for more information on the charity event!

Q&A with Matt Asner

The Asner Family is ready for some fun!

PokerNews had the opportunity to chat with Eds son, Matt Asner, who is the President and CEO of The Ed Asner Family Center.

PokerNews: When and how did you first learn to play poker?

Matt Asner: My answer is quite similar to my dads. My dad was such a poker fan then I saw it as a way to get closer to him so I picked it up and asked him to help me learn it.

What inspired you to create the Ed Asner & Friends Celebrity Poker Night?

This is our ninth tournament. I was early into a job as a fundraiser for another organization, and I wanted to find something that we could do together. It had to make sense to have my dads name on it. So, I discussed it with him and we came up with a few ideas. But it was a discussion with a friend and colleague that brought up the idea of poker. We got very excited about it and this crazy event was born. It was always our intention to create something that would last and be run every year. It was important to us that we create an event that had a clear social element to it and that was attractive to both players and non-players alike.

What are some of your favorite memories from the event over the years?

Well, anything can happen at one of these poker nights. Rosie has always been great fun to have there. Its wonderful to see people greet people they have always wanted to meet. We had Lou Diamond Phillips bow down to Randy Rainbow. I think he shined his shoes. I think everyone bowed down to Randy. There was the year that Ed came straight from the hospital to play. He didnt want to miss it. Its just a great place to relax, leave your ego at the door, and have a ton of fun.

In your opinion, who is the best celebrity poker player?

I think Dave Foley is a killer. Lou Diamond Phillips is a card king. So are Jason Alexander and Willie Garson. Clancy Brown showed a natural talent last year. Kelly Hu is an amazing player.

What's your favorite poker-related story of memory?

I dont know about stories. Most of them we cant print in this fine publication. What I can tell you is that poker is the great equalizer. It puts everyone on the same level. When this happens, we can all appreciate each other and take the time to learn about each other. Poker is a wonderful life lesson. A lesson that keeps progressing every time you play.

PokerNews Qualifier Daniel McEleney

One player who will be in action is Daniel McEleney, who won a seat in the charity event in a PokerNews social media giveaway.

I have been aware of the Ed Asner Charity Poker event for several years due to following Ed and other participants on social media, McEleney told PokerNews after winning the contest. I have played poker since I was a teenager during the poker boom of the early 2000s. Currently, I play in a neighborhood game once or twice a month.

While the event will be a fun experience, its also a bit of an opportunity for McEleney.

I played in some online tournaments years ago with big prize pools but have never won anything. My biggest poker win was the first time I played at a casino (Foxwoods) at 21 when I sat all night and ended up $1,200.

Like many entering the event, McEleney is excited to play against some Hollywood celebrities.

The celebrity guest list is amazing and I am a big fan of a lot of the participants like Ron Funches, Dave Foley, and even Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, but if I had to choose one person I was most excited about it would have to be Diedrich Bader. Office Space is an all-time great and his career spans decades of amazing TV and movies... he was also a great Batman.

*Images courtes of The Ed Asner Family Center.
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President Joe Bidens pick to lead the National Nuclear Security Administration recently endorsed plans to process metric tons of plutonium and entomb the final product in New Mexico, a means of disposal that South Carolina officials have criticized.

Nominee Jill Hruby in testimony published last month described whats known as dilute-and-dispose as a safe, secure and environmentally responsible approach to ridding of excess plutonium, a hazardous nuclear-weapons ingredient.

The method, she said, uses existing, proven technologies, and will allow the United States to meet its disposition commitments in less time and at half the cost of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, which was canceled in late 2018 after billions of dollars and years of work had been invested at the Savannah River Site footprint.

Dilute-and-dispose is also known as downblending, and is considered the way forward after the MOX fiasco. The time-consuming process involves converting the plutonium into an oxide, adulterating it and, ultimately, shipping the mixture to southeastern New Mexico for burial at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a Department of Energy repository resembling a salt mine.

The multi-state and -site endeavor has been estimated to cost roughly $18.2 billion  markedly less than MOX, according to Hruby and Trump-era officials. It will take decades to complete, leaving it vulnerable to swings in workforce, resources and public opinion and education.

In a preface to a recent National Academies study, Robert Dynes, the chairman of the Committee on Disposal of Surplus Plutonium at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, said the dilute-and-dispose plan is not technically complex. But, he continued, the true challenges lay in the many mostly nontechnical threads that are connected to the technical plan.

It is important to stress that the program was and is evolving in real time, he added.

Gov. Henry McMaster and Sen. Lindsey Graham, two South Carolina Republicans, have attacked the dilute-and-dispose approach, describing it as immature, conceptual, half-baked. Canceling MOX, Graham has said, was a colossal mistake.

Hruby last month pledged to work with New Mexico and other officials to help educate the public on the dilute-and-dispose process.

Hruby will need to be confirmed by the full Senate.
COLUMBIA  A scenic Saluda River waterfront trail is set to formally open to the public, a milestone toward what Columbia officials expect will become one of the Midlands' top attractions.

The Saluda Riverwalk has long been known to regular visitors who have walked and jogged along the water before the path was finished.

But now the approximately 3-mile stretch from the junction of Interstates 26 and 126 to where the Saluda River meets the Broad and Congaree rivers is complete, under the jurisdiction of the city of Columbia as a public park and includes parking and restroom facilities.

The 140 parking spots and public facility on Candi Lane near Riverbanks Zoo will open for the first time at 6 a.m. June 12. A more formal grand opening is planned later in the summer, said Columbia City Councilman Howard Duvall, a board member of the nonprofit River Alliance that has long advocated the project.

"This is going to be one of the biggest draws for recreation in the Midlands that we've ever seen," Duvall said during a council meeting June 1.

The riverwalk headed east toward downtown Columbia ends near a connection to Boyd Island, which is accessible to visitors and offers views of the rivers converging and local wildlife. Work to formally connect the current end of the riverwalk to the Boyd Island bridge will begin later in June.

"It's going to be a wonderful place to go out and get back to nature within five minutes of maybe the largest city in South Carolina," Duvall told The Post and Courier.

A second, $5-million phase of the Saluda Riverwalk has already begun planning and permitting and would connect the trail to downtown as part of the larger Three Rivers Greenway. The Richland County penny transportation tax from 2012 paid for the completed portion of the riverwalk, and funding for the second phase is still being worked out, Duvall said.

The River Alliance has led an effort for more than 20 years to build the network of walkways along the rivers of the Midlands. Alliance director Mike Dawson said in 2020 that connecting the complete system has long been a goal of the project.

Connectivity is the trick to all of this, Dawson said. You can count the people that go in the zoo, you can count the number of people that go in the museums down there, and you say, What happens if were able to move back and forth?
GREENVILLE  Vice President Kamala Harris will visit Greenville on June 14 to promote the government's COVID-19 vaccination campaign.

The trip to Greenville comes as part of the "Month of Action" and a "nationwide tour to reach millions of Americans who still need protection against the virus, highlight the ease of getting vaccinated, encourage vaccinations, and mobilize grassroots vaccine education and outreach efforts," according to a White House advisory.

Exactly where the vice president will be was not detailed in the advisory.

South Carolina ranks in the bottom half of states for vaccination rate. As of June 10, just under 46 percent of the state's population has received at least one dose, according to the state Department of Health and Environmental Control's vaccine dashboard.

The rate of vaccination has declined as President Joe Biden pushes his goal of having 70 percent of the U.S. population vaccinated by July 4.

On June 7, Gov. Henry McMaster lifted the state of emergency established in South Carolina at the start of the pandemic as the number of positive cases has continued to decline.

McMaster criticized Harris on Twitter for focusing on vaccination efforts in the state instead of addressing immigration along the Mexican border.

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We are always happy to welcome visitors, but I believe the Vice Presidents valuable time would be better spent at the border trying to fix the mess created by the Biden administrations failed immigration policies. https://t.co/7vco2idUV8  Gov. Henry McMaster (@henrymcmaster) June 11, 2021

While easing in March, the number of immigrants entering the country illegally along the U.S. border has increased sharply in recent months, severely challenging the Biden Administration, according to the Associated Press.

The AP reported this week there were 180,034 encounters on the Mexican border in May, slightly up from the 178,854 reported a month earlier.

Total encounters on the border are near 20-year-highs, but its difficult to compare today's numbers to the past.

President Joe Biden has kept in place Trump-era rules that allow border crossers to be expelled for public health reasons to try and prevent spread of the coronavirus. People expelled under pandemic-related powers are denied the ability to seek asylum, and thus suffer no legal consequence for attempting to cross the border multiple times.

During a visit to Guatemala City on June 7, Harris delivered a message to those thinking about making the journey to the U.S. border: "Do not come."

Steve Garrison contributed to this report.
The month of May closed on a high note for Justin Winter Sothebys International Realty, a Salem agency which handled the sale of $3 million Lake Keowee homes on back-to-back days.

Winter Sothebys represented the seller on May 20 in the closing of a $3.51 million home at 208 Deep Cove Point in The Reserve at Lake Keowee, according to Western Upstate MLS. One day later, Winter Sothebys represented the seller in the closing of a $3.15 million home at 106 Prince Lane, also in The Reserve at Lake Keowee.

The five-bedroom home at 208 Deep Cove Point features intricate exterior stonework, an adjacent peninsula, and nearly 180-degree views of the lake. Designed by Kevin Culhan and built in 2013 by Ron Tolley, it includes nearly 6,000 square feet of living space. The five bedroom Nantucket-style home at 106 Prince Lane, constructed in 2016 by Ridgeline Builders, features nearly 300 feet of shoreline and over 5,000 square feet of living space.

Earlier in May, Winter Sothebys represented both the buyer and the seller in the sale of a $4.199 million home at 207 Sunrise Pointe Way, and represented the seller in the transaction of a $3.5 million home at 104 Nine Bark Way. Both homes are also waterfront residences on Lake Keowee, where Winter Sothebys has operated since 2004.

Allen Tate names Colombo branch leader

Leigh Colombo has been named the new branch leader and broker-in-charge of the Allen Tate Realtors office in Greer. She replaces Virginia Henrie, who is retiring as branch leader but will remain with Allen Tate as a Realtor.

In her new role, Colombo will oversee branch operations and lead a team of more than 25 agents and staff. An accomplished real estate professional, Colombo has worked at Allen Tate since 2001, earning distinctions such as Masters Circle, Winners Circle, Rookie of the Year, Branch MVP, Client Relations Associate of the Year, Insurance Partner of the Year, Mortgage Partner of the Year and Outgoing Referral Partner of the Year.

Prior to her real estate career, Colombo worked as a college program coordinator and advisor and teacher. She earned a bachelors degree in mathematics from Florida Atlantic University.

Commercial transactions announced

Jordan Skellie, Adam Padgett and Matthew Reynolds of Lee and Associates Greenville/Spartanburg office closed a pair of deals to lead recent Upstate commercial real estate transactions.

Skellie, principal and senior associate, Padgett, principal and executive vice president, and associate Reynolds represented the seller in the sale of a 95-acre development site in Landrum. The trio also represented the buyer in the sale of an 8.5-acre industrial site in Wellford.

Cardinal Commercial Properties also announced a pair of recent transactions. The firm represented THG314, LLC, in leasing an executive office suite to DGIF, LLC. It also represented FAFARD Inc. in the sale

of 909 Amity Road in Anderson, which consists of a 13,00-square-foot industrial building positioned on 17.41 acres.

Upstate firms announce new agents

Several Upstate real estate firm recently announced the addition of new agents.

Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices C. Dan Joyner Realtors of Greenville announced the addition of Thomas Wilson Pace and Roseanna Rueda to its North Plesasantburg office, and Kensley Owens to its Simpsonville office. Pace is a University of Georgia graduate who previously managed retail stores, while Rueda comes from the IT field.

Coldwell Banker Caine recently welcomed Cynthia Jones as a residential agent to its Greenville office. Jones also most recently worked in the IT field. Marchant Real Estate adds Christy Vogel, who recently graduated from Clemson University with a veterinary degree. And Nest Real Estate has added Kate Anderson, a New Jersey native who built a custom home on 23 acres in Fountain Inn.

Revitalization Award nominees sought

The Greater Greenville Association of Realtors is seeking nominees for the 2021 Revitalization Awards, which celebrate those who have invested a substantial amount of time and money into a property and seen it greatly impact an area of the community.

Eligible properties include but are not limited to individual residential homes, subdivisions, commercial businesses, multifamily dwellings, public property such as parks and trails, or historic homes or landmarks. Deadline for entry is July 30. Contact GGAR at (864) 672-4427 for further information.

Agent Spotlight and open house ads

Upstate real estate agents can now be featured on The Greenville Post and Couriers website, as well as place free ads for open houses.

Realtors interested in being showcased in The Greenville Post and Couriers Agent Spotlight can submit their information here. Required information includes a short bio as well as contact information. A different agent will be spotlighted each week on the real estate homepage.

Agents interested in placing a free ad for open houses can submit their information here. The ads run free for seven days in The Greenville Post and Couriers open house listings.
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MYRTLE BEACH  Two men were killed after a shooting in Myrtle Beach on June 10, and authorities have three people in custody.

No formal charges have bee filed as of June 11 at 6:30 p.m., so the names of those arrested were not released.

The Myrtle Beach Police Department responded to Willoughby Lane located near 44th Avenue North at 8:15 p.m. for reports of shots fired, Myrtle Beach police said.

An altercation reportedly involving drugs occurred between several people, leading to gunshots being fired, authorities said. The victims were struck by gunfire and a vehicle fled the scene, police said.

The victims were later identified by Horry County Deputy Coroner Tamara Willard as JaLeel Stephens, 19, and Kanon Cook Melvin, 21, both of Fayetteville, N.C.

Myrtle Beach police credited the network of traffic cameras as been key to the progress made in the case.
Jim Booth, the wildly popular and prolific artist based on Johns Island, died on June 2 after an illness. He was 75.

An ardent outdoorsman and conservationist, Booth was widely celebrated for his evocative, intricately detailed paintings that captured the natural and architectural splendors of the South Carolina Lowcountry past and present.

From its swirling romantic coastlines to its treasured, and sometimes threatened, historic structures, Booth's extensive body of work included an estimated 10,000 paintings over the course of his life. For many in the state and well beyond, the iconic works are emblematic of a properly appointed South Carolina home.

"He brought the Lowcountry to life," said Pamela Roe, Booth's accountant.

She first him almost 50 years ago when he lived down the block from her, and started collecting his work. Among the original paintings she purchased is one of the Morris Island Lighthouse.

Booth's most widely known work, The Storm, depicts the Charleston Battery on the evening of Sept. 21, 1989, just before the electricity went out during Hurricane Hugo. More than 100,000 copies of the painting have been sold.

The reach that such prints allowed was something of particular importance to the artist, as he felt strongly that everybody should be able to afford to put something meaningful to them in their home.

"Everyone wanted to own a Jim Booth," Roe said.

Inspired by a Norman Rockwell painting on the cover of the magazine "Boys' Life," Booth embraced the world of art at a young age. When he attended Clemson University, he took art classes while studying architecture, which enthralled him all the more.

From then on, Booth could often be found sketching or painting. After leaving school to join the Marine Corps, during which time he was engaged in combat in Vietnam, Booth regularly created works.

According to his daughter, Diana Booth, that experience in the military also led him to his chosen vocation as an artist.

"What he always told customers is that after Vietnam, he was never going to let anyone tell him what to do again," she said. "He had to follow orders (that were not) pleasant. That's when he said he was going to be his own boss."

His daughters also shared that Booth took the business side of art as seriously as he did the creation of it. After his military service ended in 1970, a month later he married his wife Virginia and got to work.

After taking business classes, the two headed up north for around a year to sell his paintings, living out of their VW bus while doing so.

They then moved to Folly Beach, later relocating to James Island and together opening an own art gallery in 1977. There, he kept steady hours as if it were an office, painting in his studio from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. According to his daughters, Booth would become so absorbed in his work he would often remark at the end of the day that he had no idea where the hours had gone.

"I found him refreshing because he was very practical," said Roe, adding that his business acumen was such that it caught the attention of another Charleston artist, John Doyle. "He wanted to know how Jim did it."

In off hours, he was known to quietly relax in the yard with a glass of sweet tea, enjoying the nature around him. He was also a whiz at fixing almost anything, a skill he picked up during his military service working on jet engines. He relished tinkering on classic cars and motorcycles, and was a fan of '60s-era music.

He was a man who possessed a big, booming laugh while on the job, engaging with patrons who loved it when he was in the gallery when they came in. At the same time, his family described him as having a quiet, introspective nature when he was off the clock. He enjoyed spending time with his family, fishing and taking boat excursions with them to places like the Morris Island Lighthouse off Folly Beach, which became both a subject for him and a cause when it faced the threat of collapse.

An avid philanthropist, Booth also created several special limited edition collector's prints, donating them to charities to bolster their fundraising efforts. Among the organizations he supported are Wild Turkey Federation, Ducks Unlimited, South Carolina Wildlife Federation and South Carolina Waterfowl Association, as well as many local schools.

In earlier years, he was also involved in the Southeastern Wildlife Exposition. SEWE President Jimmy Huggins met him through the organization during the mid- to late-'80s, when his participation helped to establish the organization's extensive arts component.

Jim Booth was an artist that resonated with so many in the Lowcountry," said Huggins, adding that the artist should be remembered for his contributions to conservation organizations and nonprofits as much as for his expansive body of work.

"While he only participated in SEWE in its early years, we celebrate those artists that have slowly and collectively helped mold Charleston into an arts destination. Surely Jim inspired many artists that are sharing their work today," Huggins said.

For Booth, the true mark of a painting's success was when someone would tell him how a detail in the work resonated with them. He viewed his customers, many of whom are avid collectors, as extended family.

And while he elected a career path to elude taking any orders, Booth remained a proud former Marine. According to his daughters, he eventually opened up about his experiences in Vietnam in order to discuss the work he created while there. He was also known to proudly display military stickers and wear branded hats, and also devoted some time to projects for Wounded Warriors.

At the same time, his daughters said he did not have much of a filter, that he like to laugh and joke and call it like he saw it. The two were regularly on alert should he start to say something others would deem politically incorrect.

Even so, his daughter Tracey Tennant said he would never want to hurt someone's feelings.

"He was just a kind spirit," she said.

Booth was born in Charleston on Nov. 25, 1945, the son of Lewis George and Ula Mae Anderson Booth. He was predeceased by his wife of almost 50 years, Virginia McDonnell Booth. He is survived by his daughters, Tracey Booth Tennant of St. Simons Island, Ga., and Diana Lynn Booth of Charleston; brothers Ricky Booth (Kaki) of Soddy Daisy, Tenn.; Lewis Booth (Emma) of James Island; sister Connie Booth of James Island; and his grandchildren, Virginia Anne E. Tennant and Whitmarsh Booth Tennant of St. Simons Island, Ga.

The family has requested that those who are interested in connecting with the artist's work on his website please do so after June 21.
From fast passes to dunk tanks, Charleston-area colleges and universities are looking to incentivize students and staff to get their COVID-19 vaccine.

At the College of Charleston, the incentive has taken the form of the "Vax on the Bricks" program, which outlines a series of prizes for the student body as they work to reach a 90 percent vaccinated goal.

The program outlines a set of events or prizes the student body will receive if they reach 70, 80 or 90 percent vaccinated. At 70 percent, the students will have access to puppy therapy, have fully open kitchens and lounges in residence halls, and be able to host in-person recruitment for fraternities and sororities.

At 80 percent, the students will get a pizza party with college President Andrew Hsu, have residence hall visitation open to all students, and get to use the library and study rooms at full capacity.

The grand prize at 90 percent will involve a campuswide celebration on George Street, which will include a dunk tank for Hsu.

We wanted to look at different ways to keep our community safe and, obviously, the way to keep people the safest is through a high percentage of students vaccinated, particularly in the residence halls but also throughout the community, said Melantha Ardrey, director of residence life at the college.

The students are able to upload proof of their vaccination by using a QR code on the colleges website until July 31. The college officials then go through and verify the students vaccination proof to measure how close they are to the 90 percent goal.

As the year progresses, the college will add more prizes and incentives for students who get vaccinated, Ardrey said.

The hope is that the Vax on the Bricks events will help students be able to participate in traditions they missed out on during the pandemic. All of the events will take place during the colleges welcome week at the start of the school year, which is typically full of festivities.

It was a very difficult year last year, Ardrey said. So (were) just recognizing that and helping our students who last year didnt have a traditional experience and then our new students a chance to socialize and see each other.

The college isnt Charlestons only higher education institution to push vaccine uptake through new programs. A team of developers at ECPI University in North Charleston created an electronic VAX PASS for students and faculty.

The pass, which is uploaded via an app on a persons phone, allows students and faculty to skip COVID-19 screening when they enter the school buildings. James Weaver, ECPIs North Charleston campus president, likened the experience to a Fast Pass at Disney World.

We wanted to figure out a way to identify students, staff and faculty who have been vaccinated, Weaver said. This was a quick way for them to upload their proof of vaccination and receive that certificate.

Because neither school is requiring the vaccine, those who opt out of it will have a slightly different experience than those who did get it.

At both schools, students who are not vaccinated will be required to wear masks indoors. At the College of Charleston, students who are not vaccinated will also have to be isolated or quarantined if they are exposed to the virus, said Lee Penny, practice manager of student health services at the college.

The programs fall in line with a national push to get more young people vaccinated. On June 2, the White House announced the "COVID-19 College Vaccine Challenge" as a way to get more young people vaccinated by engaging students, faculty and staff members; organizing college communities; and offering the vaccine to all.

The College of Charleston is one of many universities and colleges across the country that have signed up for the challenge.

Penny said shes seen COVID-19 protocols factor into recruitment and retention at the college.

That has been a big portion of students decisions, Penny said. They dont want to enroll in a school that eventually may close because they dont have strong plans.
A judge and law partner to a top South Carolina legislator is no longer facing a drunken driving charge, but his career on the bench has apparently come to an end, as well.

A magistrate in Chesterfield County dismissed charges against attorney Cody T. Mitchell after a June 1 hearing at the Chesterfield County Central Magistrates Office, according to the S.C. Highway Patrol. He had been charged with driving under the influence and driving with an open container after a May 8 traffic stop, authorities said.

The dismissal came six days after Mitchell, 34, resigned as a municipal judge for the communities of Bethune, Bishopville, Hartsville, Jefferson and McBee. He submitted his resignation on May 26, said Ginny Jones, a spokeswoman for the South Carolina Court Administration.

The arresting trooper and counsel for the Highway Patrol argued against the charges being dropped, but the magistrate ruled for the dismissal after hearing from them and Mitchell's attorney, Lt. Bill Rhyne said in a statement that offered no further details about the hearing.

Efforts to reach the magistrate who presided over the case were unsuccessful June 11, and it remains unclear why the judge opted to toss the case.

Mitchell is a law partner of House Speaker Jay Lucas, a Hartsville Republican, and manages the Hartsville office of Lucas, Warr, White & Mitchell.

Mitchell did not return a message left with an assistant at his office or respond to an email seeking comment.

The May 8 incident began when deputies with the Chesterfield County Sheriffs Office pulled Mitchell over on U.S. Highway 1 north of Old Creek Road in McBee after watching his vehicle swerve out of its lane around 11:30 p.m., authorities said.

The deputies called troopers for backup. Thats when authorities concluded Mitchell was under the influence, troopers said, and found an open alcohol container in the car. After Mitchell refused to take a breath test, he was booked into the Chesterfield County Detention Center on two misdemeanor counts. He was later released on a personal recognizance bond.

The charges appear to have been wiped from his record following the June 1 hearing in magistrate court. They have been removed from the 4th Circuit's court website, leaving no trace of the episode in the judicial archives.
NORTH CHARLESTON  A mental health facility that was cited by state regulators for failing to report the assault that landed Jamal Sutherland in Charleston County jail on Jan. 4 is taking steps to make sure such a lapse doesn't happen again.

Palmetto Lowcountry Behavioral Health turned in a corrective action plan to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control on June 10. Officials reviewed the plan and approved it the following day, said Derrek Asberry, a spokesman for the agency.

DHEC inspectors visited Palmetto after regulators got a complaint on May 18 about Sutherland's arrest following the January fight at the facility, according to a health department report.

The 31-year-old Black man had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia as a teenager.

Sutherland's symptoms flared in the days before New Year's Eve 2020 and his parents checked him into the facility, which had treated their son in the past.

But on the night of Jan. 4, a fight broke out between another patient and staff. Sutherland was accused of joining in the altercation after it escalated.

Staff at the facility called 911, and North Charleston police took him and the other patient to the Charleston County jail.

Under state law, incidents resulting in serious injury or death must be reported in writing to DHEC within 10 days of occurring, but that notice never occurred, inspectors found.

"Jamal was right where he was supposed to be, which they knew, and it's exactly why they failed to report his unlawful arrest," said Mark Peper, an attorney representing the Sutherland family.

According to the corrective action plan, Palmetto staff will now take the following steps after such incidents:

Submit incident reports through an online portal.

A facility risk manager will review the reports each day.

Facility risk manager will start the investigatory process for all incidents that meet criteria.

Give all incidents a rating from one to four, with one being the least severe and four being the most.

Report all level three and four incidents to the facility's CEO immediately.

The CEO will review all level three and four cases, oversee the investigation and report the incidents to regulatory agencies.

Complete internal investigations within seven days of each incident.

DHEC issued Palmetto the citation on May 20 after conducting an investigation. It was the first time the facility had been cited since 2018.

Palmetto Lowcountry Behavioral Health CEO Timothy Miller said on June 11 that he and his staff are committed to "always working closely with DHEC in following guidelines and reporting requirements."

"The plan was accepted and we look forward to implementation," Miller said. "We remain committed to providing quality care to patients with special, and oftentimes complex, mental health needs. The facility is licensed and accredited, and upholds high standards for quality, safety of care and safety of the environment in which care is provided."

Sutherland died Jan. 5 after jail deputies used pepper spray, Tasers and physical force against him when he refused to leave his cell to attend a bond hearing on one count of third-degree assault and battery, a misdemeanor.

The incident sparked outrage among activists, clergy and others in the Charleston area. Videos documenting the fatal encounter were released by authorities in mid-May, prompting protests.

Charleston County Sheriff Kristin Graziano has since fired the two deputies involved in his death.

Ninth Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson is currently finalizing an investigation that will determine whether the deputies face criminal charges.
A new South Carolina regulation now makes it illegal to possess, reproduce or bring Argentine black and white tegus into the state without the authorization of the Department of Natural Resources.

There have been 11 confirmed sightings of the reptile throughout the state since last year. And while there is no evidence that the lizards have been established in South Carolina, the SCDNR moved forward with the ban to protect native wildlife.

State Herpetologist Andrew Grosse said the species is a large predator that was essentially dropped into South Carolina's ecosystem.

The ground-dwelling lizards can weigh more than 10 pounds and reach up to 4 feet in length. Since they are omnivores, the animals are open to eating pretty much anything they come across, Grosse said.

Tests on carcasses confirmed that tegus in South Carolina have been scavenging native plants and animals, including toads, insects and muscadines.

The species has been established in Georgia and Florida, but Grosse does not believe they are free-roaming in South Carolina yet.

"Of course, there were released or escaped pets, but it's still something that we want to ensure doesn't become an issue here in South Carolina," Grosse said.

New regulations will require current tegu owners in the state to register the animals with DNR by Sept. 25. This includes having the tegus microchipped. After this date, DNR said no unregistered tegus may be possessed, and no tegus may be bought, sold or traded in South Carolina.

Violators could be fined up to $2,500 and serve a year in jail.

It is free to register tegus with DNR, and applications can be found on the agency's website, along with more information about the restrictions. Permits for registered tegus will expire after three years.

Will Dillman, the state DNR's assistant chief of wildlife, said tegus have gained popularity in the pet trade due to their large size, intelligence, docile nature and hardiness.

Black and white tegus and their hybrids have been added to the state's list of restricted nonnative wildlife.

Grosse said DNR has received a few reports of tegu sightings so far this year. Folks who spot a tegu in the wild should report the sighting to the agency through its website.
Terry Darnell Kelly Jr., who harassed his ex-girlfriend for months in 2018 before fatally stabbing her outside her apartment complex in North Charleston, has been sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Kelly, 44, pleaded guilty June 7 to murder and a weapons charge for killing Tennille Grant on April 22, 2018, outside Ashton Woods apartments, 9525 U.S. Highway 78. Kelly ambushed Grant when she exited her vehicle, stabbing her 11 times before fleeing the scene.

The 41-year-old mother of three lived in fear of Kelly in the final months of her life, her family told The Post and Courier after her death. She stored work clothes in the trunk of her car so she could move between relatives' homes at a moment's notice, and sometimes slept with a chair propped against the door while staying at her daughter's place.

Her family said she did everything she could to avoid her former boyfriend, reporting his harassing behavior to North Charleston police at least four times in the months before her slaying.

At Kelly's sentencing, North Charleston police detective Charlie Benton told Judge R. Markley Dennis Jr. that Kelly deserved more than the minimum sentence for murder, citing his pattern of abuse and the brutal nature of the crime, according to a press release from Solicitor Scarlett Wilson.

"Tennille Grant did everything the justice system asks of domestic violence victims, and she still died a violent death at the hands of her abuser," the detective said.

South Carolina routinely ranks as one of the top states in the nation for women killed by men. The Washington, D.C.-based Violence Policy Center ranked South Carolina 11th in the nation in its most recent report on gendered violence, "When Men Murder Women."

Dennis sentenced Kelly to 30 years for murder, and an additional five years for using a weapon in the offense.
Before dipping your toes into the Savannah River, make sure the water is safe with the free SwimGuide app.

The app provides free access to the results of weekly water quality tests at 20 different sites along the Savannah River. These samples are taken by volunteer civilian scientists in the award-winning Veterans for Clean Water program.

Samples are tested on Tuesdays through Thursdays each week until Labor Day and tested at a water quality lab at the Savannah Riverkeeper headquarters in Augusta.

Tonya Bonitatibus, the Savannah Riverkeeper, encourages everyone to check the water before recreation activities.

Summer is a fantastic time to be on and in our waterways, she said in a news release. But knowing if potentially harmful bacteria is in the water is information you need to keep you and your family safe.

North Augusta Stormwater Manager Tanya Strickland agrees.

"Before swimming in the river, consider how long since we had a storm. If it has rained within the last 12 hours, it might be better to wait," Strickland said. "Water quality is impacted during rain events, as all animal wastes are washed into the streams and creeks. Not just dogs and cats, but all animals that use our wooded areas near streams as shelter during hot summer days."

The app has determined six South Carolina access points safe for entry: Modoc, Stevens Creek, Sandbar at Riverview, North Augusta Boat Ramp and Hammonds Ferry Dock.

The SwimGuide app is free and available to download in app stores.

For more detailed water quality tests, visit savannahriverkeeper.org/swimguide.
Syndicated and guest columns represent the personal views of the writers, not necessarily those of the editorial staff. The editorial department operates entirely independently of the news department and is not involved in newsroom operations.
After South Carolina lost the Charleston Naval Base and Naval Shipyard and the Myrtle Beach Air Force Base in the 1990s, state leaders got organized to guard against future rounds of Base Realignment and Closure.

The Pentagon provided states with wish lists of laws that would help them earn the coveted military friendly title. South Carolina already checked a lot of the boxes, and over the years the governor and other top officials have pushed for more  and the Legislature has passed more  to keep us in the generals good graces.

Military leaders said they wanted service members to be able to pay in-state tuition to attend S.C. colleges, and the Legislature granted their wish. They wanted surviving spouses to receive the same property tax exemption on vehicles that disabled veterans received, and the Legislature complied. And the list went on.

Most recently, the Legislature passed a bill last year to let cosmetologists, physical therapists, nurses and other professionals licensed in other states work temporarily in South Carolina while their spouses are assigned here, checking another item off the list.

Somehow, though, we never paid much attention to the militarys interest in good schools.

But according to The Post and Couriers Thomas Novelly, one of South Carolinas highest ranking military leaders recently told Charleston business leaders that our states poor reputation for education is worrisome because it's turning off active-duty airmen and retired service members.

Col. Marc Greene, commander of the 628th Air Base Wing and Joint Base Charleston, didnt actually say South Carolina could suffer in the next round of BRAC as a result, but other military leaders have left no doubt that they consider subpar schools a threat to military recruitment and preparedness. Service members are more likely to leave the military when their children are stuck in bad schools.

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As Mr. Novelly reports, the former secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force told the National Governors Association in a 2018 letter that the Defense Department will encourage leadership to consider the quality of schools near bases and whether reciprocity of professional licenses is available for military families when evaluating future basing or mission alternatives.

To be fair, you cant just snap your fingers and fix our schools. Our schools arent doing a good enough job because of generations of inadequate leadership, inadequate laws and inadequate funding.

And simply fixing the schools near military bases  which tend to be particularly bad, because they tend to be in low-income neighborhoods  isnt the answer. Military leaders look at state rankings, not individual schools, when making decisions about which states are military friendly.

The Legislature continued to make progress this year on a menu of reforms that should improve our schools, and the 2021-22 state budget will include hefty raises for teachers  although pay was so far behind that its unlikely to be enough to stem the growing teacher shortage.

So lawmakers have to keep plugging away at that, and at nip-and-tuck reforms working their way through the process  and at expanding pre-kindergarten programs, which will make more difference than all the other improvements combined. Most of all, our lawmakers need the unshakable commitment to improving our schools that too many still havent developed.

One reason to provide a good education to all S.C. children is moral, which you either buy or you don't. The other reason involves enlightened self-interest, which no rational person dismisses: When we dont provide children with a good education, they can grow up to be a drain on society. They end up in dead-end jobs, relying on government support to care for their families. Or they turn to crime, and either we have to pay more for police and courts and prisons to protect ourselves from them or else we become their victims. Or both.

To that self-interest argument we can now add another point: If South Carolina doesnt do a better job of educating the next generation, we could lose military bases to states that do, creating another self-inflicted blow to our economy.
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.
COLUMBIA  Days after losing the support of a state Senate panel that asked him to resign, the troubled leader of South Carolinas juvenile justice agency did not appear at a routine two-hour policy meeting held by a group appointed by his boss, Gov. Henry McMaster, where the controversy was never addressed.

Members of the Governor's Juvenile Justice Advisory Council instead spent the time on June 11 talking about traveling to Tacoma, Wash., for a conference in November; Medicaid reimbursement opportunities; and development of a three-year strategic plan.

There was no public response to a recent vote of no confidence by a state Senate panel in S.C. Department of Juvenile Justice Director Freddie Pough.

Pough did not attend the advisory council meeting, instead issuing a prepared statement through a staffer addressing ongoing problems.

The agency is continuing to address various concerns," Pough said in the statement. "Right now, its all hands on deck as we are working within our facilities and trying to address those concerns."

The council's silence in the midst of a dysfunctional climate at DJJ did not sit well with lawmakers, who took the rare step of voting no confidence in Pough's leadership on June 9.

Pough sat through a four-hour Senate corrections subcommittee hearing June 9, where he was criticized by lawmakers as current and former staff members complained about shifts of more than 24 hours, critical employee shortages and unsafe working conditions.

Im disappointed that they dont get the seriousness of any of this," state Sen. Katrina Shealy, a Lexington Republican who's leading a Senate panel examining problems at the agency, told The Post and Courier on June 11. "Are they waiting for somebody to die? Are they waiting for somebody to get seriously injured? What is their problem?"

Sen. Dick Harpootlian, a Columbia Democrat who has twice asked Pough to step down and also serves on Shealys subcommittee, told The Post and Courier following the June 11 meeting that members of the 46-year-old advisory council should also be removed.

The fact they didnt discuss that at all indicates theyre totally oblivious to what their job is. They should have had questions for him, like we had questions for him, Harpootlian said. If these folks arent even talking about this, that indicates that theyre complicit in the failure of this agency.

Established in 1975, the council is charged with recommending improvements in juvenile services and offering technical assistance to state and local agencies in planning and implementing programs for the improvement of juvenile justice, according to state statute. The panel, made of up of between 21 and 33 volunteers, are all picked by the governor.

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Jay Elliott, a Columbia-based attorney and advisory council chairman, said at the meeting that his group remains committed to ensuring the safety of all within DJJ facilities.

I assured the director of DJJ 18 months ago that if there are things the department needed that the council would be eager to assist, he said.

Elliott and others on the council have spoken about the need for DJJ reform in the past.

"The department has struggled mightily to maintain a safe, healthy environment in its institutions for the youth confined there and the staff charged with their care," Elliott wrote in its January 2020 annual report.

"Director Freddie Pough has called on leaders in law enforcement and the judicial system to assist with keeping the numbers of youth confined to that minimum which serves the public safety and principles of accountability, avoiding needless commitment of low risk children. These entreaties have have mixed results," Elliott wrote.

One of the most tumultuous weeks in the departments history started June 4 when more than two dozen workers gathered in the parking lot outside the gates of DJJs Broad River Road facility, holding hastily written signs protesting long shifts, a lack of breaks and general frustration with Pough, whos led the agency since January 2017.

Only Poughs boss, McMaster, can remove him since DJJ is a Cabinet-level agency, but the governor has given no indication he has plans to do so.

The governor is sympathetic to the issues being raised by DJJ staff members today. Changes are being made, McMaster spokesman Brian Symmes said June 9. In the short term, a private security firm will provide 40 guards to address DJJ staffing shortages.

Symmes did not directly address the no-confidence vote.

Shealy said she hasnt been in contact with McMasters administration in the days since her subcommittees no- confidence vote.

If the people outside the legislative branch doesnt think its serious, when something does happen, it is not on our shoulders. It is on their shoulders. They will be responsible, she said.
Looking at the Pride Month exhibit near the Legislature, I admire Guam's support for political pluralism and the free expression of people. My Read more
The Left controls almost all of Americas public schools, as well as its allegedly elite private schools. Leftists are moving rapidly to refashion education to inculcate our children in a bizarre revisionist history that is intended to cause them to hate their own country. This effort proceeds mostly under the banner of Critical Race Theory. It represents, I think, an existential threat to our countrys future.

Critical Race Theory is essentially racism, circa 1850. It holds that 1) the most important thing about a person is his or her skin color, 2) you have rights as a member of a racial group, not as an individual, and 3) members of the same racial group have similar personality and character traits. John C. Calhoun must be smiling, wherever he now resides. He was the intellectual leader of the Democratic Party in 1840, and he still is today.

The rot in Americas public schools can be stopped only by a grass roots effort that educates parents and drives activism on a school district by school district basis. Here in Minnesota, that effort is being led by Center of the American Experiment. We are in the midst of a 17-city tour of the state, hitting six towns in Southern Minnesota this week.

The events were nuclear, with 100 or more fired-up activists at most stops.

I attended three of them, but Catrin Wigfall, an American Experiment Policy Fellow specializing in education, was the main presenter.

Kendall Qualls of Take Charge MN is also participating in around half of our events. The Washington Times did a nice write-up of our tour and Kendalls role in it.

We got good press coverage in most towns, and a local television interview in Rochester. But in Mankato, a college town, the reporter went to a local professor for a quote. He said that attending our event was like a Klan rally without the robes.

This is almost indescribably stupid. Apart from the obvious points, Catrin is married to a black man and is 5 1/2 months pregnant with what will be a mixed-race child. But if you think that such considerations would deter a liberal from genuflecting to the party line, you dont know liberals.

At several stops on our tour, Education Minnesota, the insanely far-left Minnesota teachers union, sent stooges to try to disrupt our events. Happily, they didnt succeed, mostly because they were overwhelmed by the numbers of concerned citizens who turned out. But in Mankato, an apparent teachers union plant got up during the Q and A period to complain about our event. He was actually relatively coherent until he started ranting about our organization being funded by Goldman Sachs. If only it were true! This poor guy is so out of it that he apparently doesnt understand that Goldman Sachs is on his side.

This brief video shows his contribution and my response to it, along with our audiences:

Next week, our team is off to northern Minnesota, where they will put on programs in St. Cloud, Alexandria, Moorhead, Thief River Falls, Bemidji, Hibbing and Duluth. The schedule is here, if you happen to be within driving distance of these venues. After next week, we move on to the Twin Cities metro area, where we have planned four events. Hundreds of people have already signed up, even though we have not yet begun to promote them.

I dont know whether groups in other states are carrying out similar campaigns. I hope so, but dont know of any. In my opinion, this is the kind of grass roots effort it will take to stop the far Left from taking over our schools and mis-instructing our children. If you would like to support our campaign, you can go here to donate.
Arise and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time. Winston Churchill

Proclaim Liberty throughout All the land unto All the Inhabitants Thereof. Inscription on the Liberty Bell
Ammo Grrrll has a few LEFT-OVERS. She writes:

For reasons I do not at all understand, leftovers have gotten a bad reputation. Now, I get it that there can be a limit. I once saw a cartoon in which a housewife, confronting an unhappy husband at the dinner table is saying, Monday you liked beans. Tuesday you liked beans. Wednesday you liked beans. Now, all of a sudden, on Thursday, you dont like beans?

The great writer Bill Bryson claimed in The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid that his mother ONLY served leftovers and nobody had been able to document the source of the original meal. But there are things that just get better with age: chili, beef stew, spaghetti sauce, meat loaf, all make desirable leftovers. In fact, in my young housewife days, the cookbook writers often called these things plan-overs.

Anyway, some experiences are so deep and profound that it takes a while to process them. And such was our recent road trip. These are some of the random left-over observations and highlights from that great adventure, little tidbits that do not merit a full column apiece:

I cannot say too many times that most Americans are kind, generous, open-hearted, and willing to give everyone a fair chance and an even break. The vicious slander that there are thousands of domestic terrorists or white supremacists loose in the land is deliberate, relentless, and dangerous bovine excrement. It is Pravda- or Der Sturmer-worthy propaganda in service of power-hungry America-haters. RESIST!

The Resistance to Mindless Authority fights back in small but significant ways. In my favorite tourist gift shop in Alexandria, Minnesota, a sign on the door read: Masks not necessary if you have a medical excuse. And, under that, another sign: HIPAA prevents us from asking about your medical excuse. But certainly in late April and early May Minnesota compliance with masks was still very high. I went to a hair salon twice while I was visiting Daddy, once for the cut, once for the color, and both my stylists had already had COVID. One did not care if I wore a mask and one asked me to do so.

You never can tell when youre going to catch a break. When we drove from Tuscaloosa to Aiken, South Carolina, we were strongly advised to just grit our teeth and go through Atlanta. There are bypasses, but our experts told us they were just as crazy as the route through town. We planned to grit our teeth, but we neednt have risked TMJ  we sailed through Atlanta at noon on a Tuesday like we were on a Sunday drive on a country road!

To balance out the universe, however, just past Beaumont, Texas, a sudden plague of brake lights up ahead portended an hour-long bumper to bumper 3 mph crawl due to an overturned truck which HAD been loaded with watermelons. Oh my. Rarely have I ever seen such a discouraging mess. What I love in those situations are the crazed lane switchers who believe that their sanity, their future erections, or their very lives depend on getting one car-length ahead by wedging into a different lane. Wave to them as the slow-moving lane suddenly spurts ahead 6 car lengths, leaving them in the dust, or in this case, the watermelon rinds.

To top it off, a driver in the opposite lane was apparently attempting either to text or take a photo of the mess and left the highway at a high rate of speed, flipping his pickup in the median. At the gas station a few miles past the mess, everyone was still talking about it in a kind of debriefing bonding experience. A young black guy pumping gas next to me shared how he and his wife had gone on a Date Night in Louisiana just across the state line and had got caught up in a multi-car disaster on the way home which had them on the freeway from midnight to 6:30 a.m. Had that happened to us, I could have driven Max straight to an insane asylum once traffic got moving again.

Trying to get from our lovely old Southern hotel in South Carolina down to the Brewery where three of us were meeting two others, we all had phones with GPS. Now I am infamous for being unable to find my way back to the freeway when I get gas, but both fellas were smart and tech-savvy and it was exactly six-tenths of a mile to our destination. We wandered for quite a while, getting many steps on my little clicker. But the Cajun Pasta I ordered when we finally hooked up was worth it, believe me, not to mention the company.

Living in South Dakota as a child, and as a Minnesota neighbor for decades, I never realized that Sioux Falls contains an ACTUAL falls. (People often name things without regard to veracity. Witness both Joy Behar and Joy Reid. On one street over in my DLV, for example, the street is named Ocean Breeze when we are over 300 miles from the nearest ocean.) Oh, the waterfall in Sioux Falls is no Niagara, but its pretty and sweet and part of a very nice park. We walked there from the hotel in late April wearing many winter clothes.

On a gorgeous pontoon ride in Tampa, organized by TonyP and his lovely bride, we passed the $21 Million dollar home of Derek Jeter. It was literally not possible to get it all in a photo. Around the same time, we learned that Oprah has a new yacht that is bigger than the Titanic. If that be systemic racism, I want in on it. Im pretty sure when I lose the seven pounds I put on with the trip, I will have high cheekbones.

If you EVER get the chance to meet any of our regular commenters on Power Line, TAKE IT.

Lastly, 2020 so distorted regular life that we didnt get my 6th year column compilation book out at all. Frankly, I am surprised and impressed that you, dear readers, have been able to carry on, but worry no more because HERE IT IS!! Our traveling book company VWAM (Selling out of our trunk since 2021) has its latest edition on offer, Ammo Grrrll Reloads!

Highlights include the Jussie Smollett disgrace, several columns about our LAST road trip in 2019, and the Hunter Biden influence-peddling for BIG MONEY in the Ukraine. The last three columns presage the COVID disaster, although they are quite jaunty and naively optimistic columns featuring the infamous two-week lockdown to flatten the curve. That curve is now flatter than CNNs ratings, flatter than Wile E. Coyote after the Road Runner runs over him with a tank, flatter than Joe Bidens brain scan. You get the idea

So we invite you to order this, the sixth book in my series, in time for Fathers Day, the 4th of July, Labor Day or Rosh Hashanah. Whatever floats your boat as a reason to celebrate. And we thank you in advance. To receive your 20 percent Power Line discount, just enter PLDISCOUNT (one word, ALL CAPS) at checkout. Seriously, we have hundreds of books in the hall closet, relegating our suitcases to the living room, which you never see in the finer homes. Please help. Should you not fancy the book, could I interest you in a used suitcase?
Rapid City, South Dakota held elections for its school board this week. The result? Two incumbents, including the school board president, went down to defeat. Insurgent candidates won all four contested seats.

I understand that an organization called South Dakota Parents Involved in Education (SDPIE) played a major role in this election. I understand the issues it raised included opposition to the teaching of critical race theory and disrespect for the American flag and pledge of allegiance. (Reportedly, some of the teachers in this district have been discouraging students from saying the pledge.) I understand the results to be a rejection of wokeness in the citys schools.

My understandings dont come from local media reports on the election. This account by the Rapid City Journal doesnt mention any issues. All we get by way of explanation for what seems like a startling result is this:

This years school board election was contentious; candidates and some campaign organizers said the race was political despite the nonpartisan nature of the school board. A number of Republican state lawmakers donated to all four of the winning campaigns.

Oh, and turnout was low.

My understanding of the election comes instead from a blurb I received by email via United States Parents Involved in Education (USPIE) of which SDPIE is the South Dakota branch. (I tried to follow the link provided, but was blocked). USPIE states:

An enthusiastic coalition of parents, grandparents, taxpayers, businesspeople, and Christians rallied around the American flag to win 4 out of 4 positions up for election on the 7-member School Board. Displaying the American flag appeared to be a key element in these successful races. . . . SDPIE also reported that the local Republican Party awoke from their years of slumber discovering to their surprise that the current school board members were mostly registered Democrats. They began to weigh-in, joining the old warriors of the Tea Party movement, SDPIE, South Dakota Citizens for Liberty, Family Heritage Alliance Action and the homeschooling network. This collaboration was fundamental to the success of the election upset, which unseated even the Boards president. Racism was an underlying theme for the Liberal incumbents defending their seats as they sought to place more Native Americans on the Board who previously held 1 of 7 seats on the Board. Ironically, one of the newly elected Conservatives has a Native American background but chooses not to exploit it. As we have all become too far familiar, color, to the Left, is a political pigmentation not an actual characteristic. . . . This news is just one amazing example of what is happening all over our country. Parents and taxpayers are organizing to take back their local school boards. . . .

I have no first-hand knowledge of what is happening at schools in Rapid City. But I know that the woke agenda has made huge strides in Americas public schools (for a report on this development in Loudon County, Virginia schools, go here). It has penetrated Red States, including South Dakota.

Stanley Kurtz has reported that the draft revised South Dakota social studies standards embrace action civics and call on students to, among other leftist agenda items, raise awareness of how minority groups face bias in the mainstream media. Thats why Gov. Kristi Noem is working to ban action civics and critical race theory in South Dakota schools.

Thus, its heartening to hear about the election in Rapid City. Its also encouraging that SDPIE is talking about targeting the city counsel there. And its great that John and the think tank he heads are combatting wokeness in schools at the grassroots level in Minnesota.

But while grass roots organizations are working from the bottom up, the left is working from the top down. It plans to have the central government withhold federal money from school districts that reject action civics and critical race theory.

An epic battle seems to be brewing  one with enormous implications for the future of America.
Over the last few years, it has been considered a truism that the energy in the Democratic Party comes from the far Left, largely in the person of the Squad headed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. The conventional wisdom has also been that the extremism of that wing of the party is a problem, and that the partys leaders need to tamp it down without alienating what is, by far, the most energetic portion of their base.

This balancing act has never been easy, and it looks like it may be collapsing in the wake of Ilhan Omars crazed denunciation of the United States and Israel, which I wrote about here. To save you a click, this is the tweet that started the current controversy:

We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity. We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban. I asked @SecBlinken where people are supposed to go for justice. pic.twitter.com/tUtxW5cIow  Rep. Ilhan Omar (@Ilhan) June 7, 2021



Omars allegation of unthinkable atrocities brought pushback from some saner House Democrats. My impression is that the reaction related mostly to her denunciation of Israel rather than her denunciation of the United States, which I dont really understand. In any event, criticism ensued.

That, in turn, generated this self-pitying response from Rashida Tlaib, who now is in overt opposition to House leadership:

Freedom of speech doesn't exist for Muslim women in Congress. The benefit of the doubt doesn't exist for Muslim women in Congress. House Democratic leadership should be ashamed of its relentless, exclusive tone policing of Congresswomen of color.  Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) June 10, 2021



It would be hard to imagine a more absurd claim. If there is anyone whose freedom of speech has been, not just respected, but amplified out of all proportion by the liberal media, it is the members of the Squad. Still, it is fun to see Tlaib accusing Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer of being racists.

Ocasio-Cortez joined in, likewise declaring war on the Democratic Partys leadership:

Pretty sick & tired of the constant vilification, intentional mischaracterization, and public targeting of @IlhanMN coming from our caucus. They have no concept for the danger they put her in by skipping private conversations & leaping to fueling targeted news cycles around her.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 10, 2021



The other Squad members chimed in, as did the Democrats Congressional Progressive Caucus:



This looks like open warfare between the Democratic Partys two wings: 1) the Old Guardand in this case, I really do mean oldwho are extreme leftists but think it is strategically smart to conceal their extremism until they consolidate their power, and 2) the Young Turks, who are out and proud about being extreme leftists.

As Steve likes to say, get out the popcorn.
Yes, no matter what

Yes, but it depends on variety

No, for medical reasons, uncertainty

No, principle

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Active users of telecommunications services in the country decreased by 5.96 per cent in the first quarter of the year 2021, the National Bureau of Statistics has said.

The Bureau disclosed this in its Telecoms Data: Active Voice and Internet per State, Porting and Tariff Information Q1 2021 published Thursday.

The report said telecoms data for the first quarter showed that a total of 192,413,613 subscribers were active on voice as against 204,601,313 in Q4 2020.

This represented a -5.96% decrease in voice subscriptions QoQ, it said.

Similarly, a total of 144,949,194 subscribers were active on the internet as against 154,301,195 in Q4 2020.

This represented a -6.06% decrease in internet subscriptions QoQ, the report said.

The report said Lagos State had the highest number of subscribers in terms of active voice per State in Q1 2021 and is closely followed by Ogun and Kano states respectively, while Bayelsa and Ebonyi States have the least number of subscribers.

In terms of active internet per state in Q1 2021, it said Lagos State had the highest number of subscribers, closely followed by Ogun and Kano States respectively, while Bayelsa and Ebonyi States had the least number of subscribers.

The telecoms company, MTN, had the highest share of subscriptions.

It was closely followed by GLO, AIRTEL, and EMTs respectively.
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The Nigerian government is counting on Standard Chartered Plc for funding as it moves on with the ambition to develop two key rail lines in the countrys south, a departure from its original resolve to source the loan from a syndicate of lenders based in China.

It is now in the midst of negotiation with the British multinational bank, which focuses on providing financing to African, Asian and Middle East markets, with a view to funding an upgrade of a narrow-gauge track in the South-East and the building of a standard-gauge on the coast, both projects estimated at $14.4 billion, Minister of Transportation Rotimi Amaechi told Bloomberg in an interview.

The railway infrastructure will be constructed by China Civil Engineering Construction Corp (CCECC), which has entered pact with the government.

Weve moved away from China in some of our projects, the minister said on Saturday in Abuja, and added during his discussion with Bloomberg that Zainab Ahmed, his counterpart in the finance ministry, would lead Nigerias talks with Standard Chartered.

Choosing not to borrow from China could be a ploy by the government to cut Nigerias exposure to the country, which stood at $3.4 billion as of the end of March, going by the figures issued by the debt office on Wednesday.

Nigeria spent about 12.6 per cent or $195.5 million of the entire money it used to service its external debt last year to pay part of its debt to China.

Mr Amaechis spokesperson did not respond to phone calls by PREMIUM TIMES, requesting comment.

Standard Chartered commenced operation in Nigeria 22 years ago, and midwifed the inflow of investments in the sum of $2.5 billion into Africas largest economy in 2020 alone of the total $9.7 billion, the biggest by any bank, Bloomberg said Thursday, citing data from the statistics office.

Mr Amaechi had in March said at the groundbreaking of the CCECCs revamp of the Eastern Line connecting Port Harcourt to Maiduguri that a consortium of Chinese financiers would support the project.

State-owned CCECC inked a deal valued at $11.2 billion with Nigeria in 2014 for the building of the Coastal Line that would link Lagos with Calabar in the South-South.

President Muhammadu Buhari disclosed in 2017 Chinas Export-Import Bank would soon endorse a $3.5 billion facility to help tee off the development of the standard-gauge line, spanning 1,400 kilometres, planned to be constructed in segments.
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President Muhammadu Buhari has said the ruling APCs decision making process regarding its leadership and 2023 elections would be bottom-up. He also refused to comment on power shift to the southern part of the country.

He said decisions would be made by the party in a way that includes party members, not as dictated by anybody just sitting in Lagos, an apparent dig at former Lagos Governor Bola Tinubu.

Mr Tinubu is believed to be eyeing the presidency in 2023 and has been involved in struggles to control the APC.

The president made his comment during his Arise TV interview broadcast on Thursday. He was asked a question on which part of the south would APC support to control the presidency when he leaves office in 2023.

In his reply, Mr Buhari, however did not comment on power rotation but suggested the party would decide. He then spoke about a participatory bottom-up decision making process, which he said would afford members a sense of belonging.

Should we allow the party to decide?, he queried as he tried to evade the question on which part of the south would have the presidency in 2023.

I just told you we started from bottom up. And I gave the acting Chairman (Mala Buni) the end of this month of Juneto give me report on the convention we are going to conduct and then arrange the elections and started this from bottom up.

So, members of the party will feel they are involved in decision making. Nobody is just sitting in Lagos and asking them what to do.

But he was further asked, whats your succession plan?

Again, he said, succession plan depends on the party. We are going to leave it to the party. The party will sit and make a decision.

Since 2015 when APC came to power, Mr Tinubu has continued to face challenges from other party leaders, denying him a firm grip on the party.

He was instrumental to the exit of former chairman John Odigie-Oyegun but his struggle to save Mr Odigie-Oyeguns successor, Adam Oshiomhole, failed last year. Mr Oshiomhole is a key ally of Mr Tinubu.

Backed by Mr Buhari, a group of governors and transport minister Rotimi Amaechi, were able to ensure the fall of Mr Oshiomhole, paving the way for an interim committee led by Mala Buni, the Governor of Yobe State, and former party secretary.
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The Kaduna State Government has confirmed the kidnapping of some students of the state-owned Polytechnic in Zaria.

PREMIUM TIMES had reported how bandits attacked the UPE campus of the institution, kidnappings lecturers, with many students missing.

An HND student, who earlier sustained injuries from a gunshot, died in the early hours of Friday.

According to a statement by the Kaduna State Commissioner for Internal Security and Homeland Affairs, Samuel Aruwan, who visited the school, some students are still missing.

The Kaduna State government has been briefed by security agencies of an attack by armed bandits at the main campus of the Nuhu Bamalli Polytechnic, Zaria, late on Thursday night.

According to the briefing, the bandits invaded the staff quarters of the campus, shooting sporadically. In the process, two students were hit and sustained gunshot injuries. They were identified as:  Ahmad Muhammad,  Haruna Isyaku Duniya.

They were rushed to the hospital for medical attention. Sadly, Ahmad Muhammad succumbed to his wounds and died early this morning. Haruna Isyaku Duniya is still receiving treatment.

Two lecturers and about eight students were abducted from the institution during the attack.

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Governor Nasir El-Rufai received the briefing with sadness and prayed for the repose of the soul of the student killed, while sending condolences to his family. He wished the injured student a speedy recovery.

As at the time of this update, senior government officials and security agencies are conducting security assessments and interfacing with the management and students of the institution, Mr Aruwan said.

Meanwhile, a staffer of the institution told PREMIUM TIMES that many students are currently announcing that some of their classmates are missing.

Students are checking on their roommates and friends, some are still not found, and their numbers are switched off, many of which rang at first.
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In the midst of the furore surrounding the ban on Twitter and other moves to regulate social media, President Muhammadu Buhari has declined to appoint Armstrong Idachaba as the substantive Director-General of the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC).

Mr Idachaba was appointed acting Director-General of the commission, replacing Modibbo Kawu, who was suspended for alleged financial impropriety in February 2020.

However, on Friday, the ministry of information and culture announced the appointment of Balarabe Shehu Ilelah, a broadcaster, as the substantive Director-General of the NBC, contrary to the expectation by many that the President would confirm Mr Idachaba as the substantive head of the agency.

The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, announced the appointment in a statement issued in Abuja on Friday.

He said Mr Ilelahs appointment is for a tenure of five years in the first instance.

He was, however, silent on the reasons the president did not consider Mr Idachaba for the position in a substantive capacity.

The announcement comes amid the moves by the regulatory body to censor social media and the reportage of broadcast media organisations.

The government had earlier banned the operations of Twitter in the country and threatened to prosecute citizens who still use the social media platform despite the ban.

The Nigerian government, through the NBC, ordered radio and television stations to deactivate their Twitter accounts.

In a newspaper advertorial, the NBC asked all social media platforms and online broadcasting service providers in Nigeria to apply for the broadcast licence.

The announcement was placed in the TheNation newspaper and signed by Mr Idachaba.

Mr Idachaba said the application is in line with the provision of the National Broadcasting Act CAP N11, Laws of the Federation 2004, section 2(1)(b)).

The Commission shall have responsibility of receiving, processing and considering applications for the establishment, ownership or operation of Radio & Television Stations including cable television services, Direct Satellite Broadcast (DSB), and ANY medium of Broadcasting.

The National Broadcasting Commission hereby directs every Online Broadcast Service provider and Social Media Platforms operating within the Nigerian State to apply and obtain broadcast Licence for their Service(s), the official said.

The Twitter suspension and the moves to censor social media have been criticised by many Nigerians, civil society organisations and the international community as stifling freedom of expression and shrinking the Nigerian civic space.
President Muhammadu Buhari, on Thursday, subtly called out two south-west governors for incompetence over their handling of the farmers-herders clashes rocking the region.

Mr Buhari, who spoke during an interview with Arise TV, said he recently sent two South-west governors back to their states when they came to Aso Villa to complain about insecurity in their states.

The president was responding to a question on the establishment of state police in Nigeria.

Two governors from the South-west came to tell me that the cattle rearers in some of the forests are killing farmers while their cattle are eating their crops, Mr Buhari said.

I told them you campaigned to be elected and you are elected. I told them go (to) back and sought out themselves.

While the president did not mention the names of the governors, PREMIUM TIMES checks show that he was referring to Governors Seyi Makinde of Oyo State and Rotimi Akeredolu of Ondo State.

Multiple sources, who are close to the two governors, told PREMIUM TIMES that the response Mr Buhari gave during his interview was exactly what he told Messrs Makinde and Akeredolu in January when they visited him.

The visit

Following the herdsmen crisis rocking the South-west region of Nigeria, the two governors, on January 27, 2021, met with Mr Buhari at the presidential villa, Abuja.

Although Mr Akeredolu refused to make comments at the end of the meeting, his Commissioner for Information and Orientation, Donald Ojogo, in a statement issued to journalists in Akure, said his principal secured a presidential nod to evict criminal elements in Ondo.

The governor met with the President and it centred on issue of security in the South West, especially Ondo State. It was a huge opportunity for the governor to put the records straight as regards the erroneous impression that Governor Akeredolu had asked all Fulani and herdsmen to vacate the state.

The meeting afforded both leaders a great window to explore ingenious methods to tackle the issue of insecurity in the region.

In particular, Governor Akeredolu sought, and indeed, obtained the Presidents support and encouragement to flush out criminals in (from) the forests of Ondo State, the state government statement read then.

On his part, Mr Makinde spoke with journalists after his meeting with the president, saying he requested for more squadrons to be deployed to Oyo State and also ask for support for the joint security outfit, because the underlying issue here has to do with limited opportunities.

The meeting held few days after Mr Akeredolu asked all Fulani herdsmen in Ondo to vacate forest reserves within the state. He also issued a seven-day ultimatum to the herdsmen.

He said the activities of the herdsmen have long been a threat to security in the state.

The president outrightly told Aketi (Akeredolu) when they met in January that he should go back to other governors and face their challenges. This was the same day Makinde met with him. He told them to tackle issues in their states, an associate of Mr Makinde who spoke under anonymity told PREMIUM TIMES.

This newspapers findings also showed that asides from Messrs Akeredolu and Makinde, another southwest governor who met Mr Buhari over insecurity this year was Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti state.

He met the president in March as the Chairman of Nigerias Governors Forum (NGF) and the matters discussed were not peculiar to South-west.

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Other south-west governors

PREMIUM TIMES understands that Governor Gboyega Oyetola of Osun State has not visited President Buhari on insecurity in the state this year.

His spokesperson, Ismail Omipidan, told PREMIUM TIMES Friday that the president would not have referred to his principal.

Also, the last time Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos State visited Mr Buhari was early January.

He was in Aso Villa to seek collaborations from the federal government in rebuilding Lagos State following the aftermath of the #EndSARS protests which led to the destruction of properties in the state.

Also, Lagos does not experience farmers-herders clashes, at least, not on the scale of other South-west states.

In February, Ogun State governor, Dapo Abiodun, met with the president to present a report on the farmers-herders crisis rocking his state to him.

Mr Abiodun, who shared pictures of the meeting on Twitter said At State House Abuja, I presented the Report on Farmer-Herder Crisis in Ogun State to President Muhammadu Buhari, GCFR.

This was after the governor had doused tension in the state and already set up committee to look into the crisis.

Makinde, Akeredolu react

When contacted for reaction about the statement by the president, Mr Makindes spokesperson, Taiwo Adisa, told PREMIUM TIMES that Mr Buhari was merely running away from taking responsibility as leader of the country.

The much that all of us know about the constitution of Nigeria is that there is only one commander-in-chief. Theres no even deputy commander-in-chief but let me say that the visit of governor then was on the incident on Sasha market then.

But as to what the president said on Arise TV, I think the president is shifting blame and trying to shy away from his responsibilities and power. People have raised issues about the management of security in Nigeria and about his nepotism.

Why is it that the name of a particular ethnic group keeps coming up when insecurity incident arise and the government of the day is not doing anything on that? The president should see it as a wake-up call and not shifting blames.

On his part, Mr Akeredolu spokesperson, Olabode Richard, said his principal and Mr Buhari know how to resolve their thing.

President Buhari did not mention anybodys name and after that January, many other Southwest governors have seen the president. I know governor Fayemi has seen the president.

Aketi went there with already prepared solution. I know my boss did not go to Villa to complain. Leave my boss out of this. The president is his father and they know how to resolve their thing, he said as he declined to make further comments.

Governors take actions

The 17 southern governors in May declared a ban on open grazing, asking the mainly Fulani herders to practise a settled form of livestock production to control their incessant violent conflicts with farmers and host communities over resources.

But in the wake of that declaration, the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister for Justice, Abubakar Malami, controversially challenged the governors and set an equivalence between banning open grazing and banning auto parts trading in the north.

This newspaper also reported how Mr Malamis comparison was seen as a false equivalence and disguisedly targeting the Igbo group, who are known for auto parts trading, prompting protests on social media.

After Mr Malami, Garba Shehu, presidential spokesperson, also said the ban by the southern governors was lawless and his principal had a better plan.
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An activist and newspaper publisher, Agba Jalingo, has been arrested by the police in Calabar, Cross River State, Nigerias South-south.

Mr Jalingo is the publisher of Cross River Watch, an online newspaper with focus on Cross River State.

He was arrested at the police headquarters, Calabar, on Friday where he went to honour an invitation by the Commissioner of Police in the State, Kayode Sikiru, Cross River Watch said in a report.

The newspaper said Mr Sikiru invited Mr Jalingo to the police headquarters to discuss the planned nationwide June 12 protest which the latter is said to be coordinating in the state.

After discussions, Mr Jalingo was reportedly referred to another officer who informed him that the police had received a petition which accused him of being an arms dealer, the newspaper said.

There was a petition against him that he is a member of drug dealers, so we called him to question him, the police spokesperson in Cross River State, Irene Ugbo told PREMIUM TIMES on Friday, at about 3:44 p.m.

He is still writing his stuff (response to the petition). When he finishes well let him go if we find him not wanting, she added.

Mr Jalingo was accompanied to the police headquarters by Jonathan Ugbal, the news editor of Cross River Watch.

It is unclear, for now, if Mr Ugbal is also being questioned by the police. His phone line was switched off when PREMIUM TIMES tried to contact him by 4:16 p.m.

Mr Jalingo, accused of attempting to overthrow the Cross River State Government, is standing trial for terrorism and treasonable felony after he authored an article in 2019 alleging that Governor Ben Ayade could not account for N500 million belonging to the Cross River State Government.

June 12 is celebrated as Democracy Day in Nigeria in honour of the June 12, 1993, presidential election that was won by Moshood Abiola.

The election, said to be the fairest and freest in Nigeria, was annulled under controversial circumstances by the military regime of Ibrahim Babangida.

Mr Abiola later died under controversial circumstances in detention in 1998 after he was arrested by the military regime for declaring himself president of Nigeria.
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Nigerias President Muhammadu Buhari has repeated his belief that Nigeria should have special courts to fight corruption.

Fighting corruption was one of the three major campaign promises of Mr Buhari while campaigning for his first term in 2015. However, six years since he assumed office, the president has made no major step to establish such courts.

On Friday, Mr Buhari restated his belief in special courts to fight corruption.

Special courts are very important especially in the case of corruption, he told the NTA in an exclusive interview.

Details later
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President Muhammadu Buhari has stated that individuals who finance terrorism in various parts of the country do so to remain relevant.

The president stated this on Friday in an interview with the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) and monitored by PREMIUM TIMES.

Mr Buhari, while responding to a question about the alleged financiers of terrorism his administration recently apprehended, stated that most of them are wealthy individuals who are no longer relevant in government.

He said such people will be made to face the law.

Their motive is that they are made irrelevant and they want to use their resources they accumulated over the years to prove that they are still around and the administration will deal with them. Anybody caught will be dealt with, the president said.

About 400 businessmen, including bureau de change operators, were recently arrested for allegedly funding Boko Haram terrorists.

No one has been convicted in Nigeria for funding Boko Haram, the terror group that has caused tens of thousands of deaths in Northern Nigeria since 2009.

According to Daily Trust newspaper, the recently arrested businessmen were arrested in an operation being coordinated by the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), in collaboration with the State Security Service (SSS), Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

The operation was said to have been approved by President Muhammadu Buhari in 2020.

The newspaper reported that an initial list of 957 suspects comprising bureau de change (BDC) operators, gold miners and sellers and other business persons was acted upon. The prosecution of the arrested persons was stalled because of the two months strike by judiciary workers which was called off two days ago, the attorney general had said.
A lawyer, Monday Ubani, on Thursday, wrote to the Senate Committee on INEC objecting to the confirmation of a residential aide, Lauretta Onochie, as commissioner for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

Mr Ubani, a former 2nd vice-president of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), contended that the nomination of Ms Onochie, whom he described as an unapologetic member of the ruling party, the All Progressives Congress is ultra-vires and unconstitutional.

Screening

The Nigerian Senate had on Wednesday commenced the screening of Ms Onochie alongside three other nominees who were nominated as INEC commissioners by President Muhammadu Buhari.

The nomination of Ms Onochie as an INEC resident electoral commissioner to represent Delta State generated a torrent of outrage last October. Many individuals and civic groups have called on the president to withdraw the nomination on grounds that Ms Onochie is partisan and so it would be unconstitutional for her to be appointed into such an office.

Ubanis criticism

In his letter, Mr Ubani objected to the nomination and intended confirmation of Ms Onochie citing the Section 152 of the Electoral Act in defending his argument.

It is important, according to him, the person who is going to serve as INEC commissioner, chairman or as an unbiased umpire for National elections to be seen by the general public as nonpartisan and uncompromised in any form or manner.

Sir, Section 152 of the Electoral Act, provides that.

No person holding an elective office to which this act relates or a registered member of a Political Party shall be eligible for or be appointed to carry out duties of a returning officer, an electoral officer, presiding officer or Poll Clerk, the lawyer wrote.

Therefore, the nomination of Mrs Lauretta Onochie, a clearly partisan individual by the President, an individual who has in recent years publicly displayed her partisanship and undying support for the ruling party in her utterances, conduct and interaction with the public cannot and should not serve as INEC commissioner, a role reserved for an unbiased umpire.

I, on-behalf of the Nigerian public, urge the Senate to righteously reject her nomination and confirmation forthwith, the letter read in part.

Card carrying person unfit to be INEC commissioner

He contended that as a card carrying member of the ruling party or any other party for that matter, Ms Onochie is unfit for the position she is nominated for.

Accordingly, Mr Ubani doubts if section 154 (3) of the constitution was complied with, this section prescribes, that the President nominates INEC commissioner in consultation with the Council of State Paragraphs B of Part 1 of the 3rd Schedule of the constitution provides that the Council of State shall have power to advise the President in the exercise of his power with respect to (iv) the INEC including the appointment of members of the commission. When was this Section and paragraph complied with? If I may ask.

Most importantly paragraph 14 of part I of the third schedule of the constitution as amended, a member of INEC should be non partisan, can Mrs. Lauretta Onochie be regarded by anyone in Nigeria, knowing her antecedent as the Special Assistant to the President as non partisan under the Nigerian context? The right answer is No, he said.

Background

Mr Buhari in a letter to the Senate in October 2020 announced the appointment of Ms Onochie seeking the lawmakers confirmation.

Her appointment violated Section 14(2a) which said that appointees to INEC must be non-partisan and also not a card-carrying member of any political party.

The section states that a member of the commission shall be non-partisan and a person of unquestionable integrity.

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And Section 14(3b) of the same Schedule states that there shall be for each state of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja, a Resident Electoral Commissioner who shall be a person of unquestionable integrity and shall not be a member of any political party.

Ms Onochie had openly displayed partisanship and total support for the president and the All Progressives Congress in general especially during the 2019 general election.
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The U.S. government has called on the federal government of Nigeria to respect its citizens right to freedom of expression by reversing the indefinite suspension of Twitter.

The United States made the call on Thursday condemning the Nigerian government for its decision and targeting individuals who use the social media site, including Nigerian broadcasters.

Unduly restricting the ability of Nigerians to report, gather, and disseminate opinions and information has no place in a democracy, U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement.

Freedom of expression and access to information both online and offline are foundational to prosperous and secure democratic societies, the statement read

We support Nigeria as it works towards unity, peace, and prosperity. As its partner, we call on the government to respect its citizens right to freedom of expression by reversing this suspension, the U.S. added.

The Nigerian government suspended Twitters activities in the country last Friday after the social media giant deleted a tweet by President Muhammadu Buhari which it deemed as inciting violence.

Rights activists and opposition parties have criticised the government for its decision, but the Nigerian government said it was to protect the corporate existence of the country.

The Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, has said violators of the ban who continue to use Twitter will be charged to court.

On Monday, Nigerias broadcasting regulator directed all TV and radio stations to delete their Twitter accounts and described its use as unpatriotic, a move media experts categorised as an illegal one.

The Nigerian government, however, continued its controversial move to regulate social media platforms on Thursday when it asked Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others to apply for broadcast licenses.

I will keep that to myself, Mr Buhari said about his stance on the Twitter ban, in an Arise TV exclusive interview broadcast on Thursday morning.
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Damien Tarel, the man who slapped French President Emmanuel Macron during a walkabout on Tuesday, told the court Thursday that his action was not done with intent.

He said while he considered doing something notable like throwing an egg or cream tart, slapping Mr Macron was an act of impulse.

He claimed that although he belonged to the anti-establishment gilets jaunes (yellow-vests) movement, which staged anti-Macron protests during the early years of his presidency, he acted instinctively.

When I saw his friendly, lying look, which sought me out as a voter, I was filled with disgust, he reportedly told the court.

But prosecutors said that it was a deliberate act of violence and they called for 18 months in prison for assaulting a public official.

The three judges said Mr Tarel should be sentenced to 18 months, 14 of which will be suspended.

His four months in jail term will start immediately, but the rest will only be enforced if he commits another offence, the BBC reported.

Although friends described Mr Tarel as apolitical, the court heard that Mr Tarel subscribed to far-right politics as well as medieval French history.

Mr Tarel, 28, described himself on his Instagram page as an European martial arts enthusiast with an avatar of himself dressed in costumes from the Middle Ages and carrying a long sword.

Mr Tarel was arrested outside a hotel school in south-east France alongside another accomplice, a man suspected of filming the assault on Mr Macron.

Both mens homes were searched after the attack in Tain-lHermitage.

Investigators reportedly found weapons and a copy of Hitlers anti-Semitic text Mein Kampf at the home of the second man, according to the BBC.

Mr Tarel had slapped President Macron as he shouted Montjoie and Saint-Denis! Down with Macronism, a medieval battle-cry.

Mr Macron was attacked on camera during a walkabout in Tain-lHermitage which his office said was to feel the pulse of the country.

The president had dismissed the attack as isolated, but be stressed that ultra-violent people should not be allowed to hijack public debate.

There have been moments of very high tension and violence in our country which Ive had to experience as president, during the gilets jaunes crisis. But society is in a different place today, he said.
Pharmaceuticals  drugs used to prevent or treat human and animal diseases  are essential for health and well-being. But the increasing use of these drugs means that remnants of them are showing up in the aquatic environment. They are contaminating our waters.

Pharmaceuticals are part of a group of substances known as emerging contaminants. Although they are potentially harmful to human and ecological health, they are yet to be regulated and routinely monitored in the environment. Most conventional treatment plants typically do not remove emerging pollutants because they were not originally designed for them. These contaminants can enter oceans, rivers, streams, dams and groundwater through waste water and sewage treatment plants, human excretion, landfill leaching, healthcare facilities, pharmaceutical industry effluents and veterinary drug applications.

The contaminants may be transported in water to other places or accumulate in sediments  rocks, sand, soils, decaying materials and vegetation under water  and in creatures that live in water. Some of the effects of these drugs on aquatic organisms include DNA damage, disruptions to hormonal systems and formation of antibiotic resistant microbial strains.

There have been several studies of pharmaceuticals in aquatic environments across the world but only a few studies in African countries. So in our study, we investigated the occurrence of selected pharmaceuticals in water and sediments of Usuma dam in Abuja, Nigerias capital. We also assessed the risk of the harm they could do.

We found traces of pharmaceuticals in water and sediment of the dam and that is not good for ecological and public health.

Sink for pollutants

The dam is an important source of potable water and fish for people living in Abuja. It is also a major receiving water body, so acts as a sink for pollutants from the environs. It is surrounded by large unplanned settlements and is the major drain for household, municipal and agricultural wastes in the area.

Our research investigated the occurrence of selected antibiotics and analgesics (painkillers) in water and sediments of Usuma dam.

We looked for antibiotics in water samples and found amoxicillin, ciprofloxacin and metronidazole. Trimethoprim was found in the sediment samples. These antibiotics are used to treat or prevent bacterial infections. Ibuprofen, detected only in sediments, was the only painkiller detected in the study.

We found that amoxicillin and ibuprofen presented a high risk to aquatic life in the dam. Ciprofloxacin constituted medium risk, while metronidazole constituted low risk.

Pharmaceuticals are designed to exert maximum effects at low concentration. Therefore, any concentration found in water and soil is not good for public and ecological health. If these drugs negatively affect the fishes in the dam through accumulation, they may also affect humans who eat them and drink water from the dam. Any consumption of drugs other than a prescribed dose for a particular ailment is a health risk.

We observed that the chief source of pharmaceuticals in the dam is human excretion. Sewage from unplanned settlements that lack basic sanitation and sewage treatment facilities around the dam is disposed of directly onto the ground and eventually drains into the dam. Other likely sources include improper disposal of medical and veterinary waste.

Going forward

The occurrence of pharmaceuticals in the Usuma dam is not an isolated case in Nigeria. Similar studies have reported the presence of pharmaceuticals in Lagos and Ogun state waters and even in sachet water that many Nigerians drink.

The solution to this budding environmental challenge should therefore be a national response.

In 2019, the Nigerian government signed an executive order to tackle open defecation. This is a step in the right direction and should be implemented. It should also be followed up by providing people with sewage and sanitation facilities.

Healthcare centres and hospitals should ensure efficient management of medical wastes according to existing laws and regulations. The government must also strictly monitor sewage from drug manufacturing plants. Finally, government can do more to monitor contamination of water systems and improve awareness of the issue.

Ifenna Ilechukwu, Lecturer of Environmental Chemistry, Madonna University, Nigeria

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Ahmed Lawan, Nigerias Senate President, has broken his silence on the federal governments decision to indefinitely ban the operations of Twitter in Nigeria.

While he refused to give a definite stand on the ban, the lawmaker said he is optimistic that the matter will be resolved soon just as the federal government is currently in talks with Twitter.

Mr Lawan made this comment during a media briefing with journalists at the National Assembly on Friday.

The event, organised by his office, is to mark the second anniversary of the ninth assembly.

The federal government had, on June 4, announced the indefinite suspension of Twitter operations in Nigeria  two days after the site took down a controversial tweet by President Muhammadu Buhari. Twitter had said the tweet violated its rules and many Nigerians viewed it as a threat of violence against the Igbo ethnic group.

The announcement triggered controversies and condemnation from within and outside Nigeria, with many describing the ban as an attempt to gag the media, an attack on press freedom, freedom of expression and attempt to pass the controversial Social Media Bill.

Mr Lawan was asked why the Senate has been silent on the matter as well as his thoughts. He reminded journalists present that the federal government was working towards resolving the issue.

The Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, has informed Nigerians that they are talking with Twitter to resolve this matter.

Nigeria needs Twitter just as much as Twitter needs Nigeria. I believe this engagement between Twitter and the government will yield fruitful results.

I am an optimist. I believe all of us would have learnt our lessons, he said.

His comment comes barely 48 hours after the Senate held a special session without discussing the #TwitterBan, a contrast to their counterparts at the House of Representatives, who summoned the Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed over the ban.

Members of the main opposition party, PDP, in the House also walked out of plenary after the Speaker, Femi Gbajabiamila, turned down an attempt to ask the federal government to review the #TwitterBan.

Nigerians had expected the Senate to discuss the issue during plenary on Tuesday but mum was the word. The subject was not listed for discussion on the Order Paper neither was a motion or Point of Order raised to that regard.

The lawmakers, who began plenary at 11:02 a.m., went into a closed door meeting shortly after opening prayer. The executive session lasted for over half an hour and the Senate President, thereafter, announced that the discussions behind closed doors bothered on the workings of the Senate.
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The Senate Chief Whip, Orji Kalu, has asked the masterminds of insecurity in the South-east region to refrain from wreaking havoc in the region.

This is even as he warned against the repetition of the 1967 genocide, which he said would not be tolerated.

The lawmaker described as strange, the rising insecurity in the region as he said Igbos are not known for burning homes to punish enemies.

Mr Kalu said this in a statement sent to PREMIUM TIMES.

His comment comes amidst incessant attacks on security personnel and police stations across the states in the South-east region.

There have also been attacks on INEC offices in the region. Other INEC facilities, courts and correctional facilities have also been destroyed by gunmen in the states.

The lawmaker, who was formerly a governor of Abia State, questioned the sense in the killing of policemen and military officers.

The policemen and military officers being killed are fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, children and relatives. Anyone (who) has lost a close relative knows what it means to lose parents or children. I am more concerned about the lives lost because of the trickle-down effects on families.

Our people are not known for burning homes to punish enemies. Destroying police stations and infrastructure can never be the best path to express grievances. Whenever the 1967  1970 Civil War is mentioned, its an emotive experience for any peace-loving Nigerian. not just an Igbo man, he said.

Instead of destructions, he said, it is better to hold negotiations and choose peace.

We need investments; we dont need hostilities. So we are pleading with you to stop and embrace peace.

He also asked the security agencies to desist from harassment, molestation and killing of innocent young people in the region and noted that the need for a national dialogue is imminent, to douse tensions in the country.
In October 2020, many Nigerians, mostly the youth, staged the #EndSARS protest in different parts of the country against the notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), and the rising police brutality cases in the country.

In response to the protest, SARS was dissolved, and the government agreed to set up judicial panels of enquiry, now popularly referred to as #EndSARS panels, to probe cases of human rights violations perpetrated by the police.

About eight months after the historic national event, some Nigerians speak with PREMIUM TIMES on the impact of the protest.

FESTUS OGUN, Lawyer, legal affairs analyst and human rights activist

Has there been a drop in police brutality cases following the #EndSARS protest?

The historical #EndSARS protest, in truth, has not affected the rate of police brutality in our country partly because the rots in our police force are foundational. The gross abuses of human rights and dignity are as rife as ever. Truth is, the scrapping of the SARS unit was a Greek gift. The only way out is a complete overhaul of our policing system which should ideally be a Service and not a Force. The colonial system of policing we maintain is unsustainable.

Effectiveness of #EndSARS panels

Again, without prejudice to the efforts of the distinguished members of the panels, the reality is that the EndSARS judicial panels of inquiry have not in any way helped in reducing police brutality. The panels appear to be a calculated strategy by the authorities to give false hope for victims of police gangsterism. My position hinges on the fact that the law places the implementation of the findings of the panel at the discretion of the President who himself has a stained human rights record.

How do we forget the experience with Oputa Panel in a hurry? In 1999, following the return to constitutional democracy, former President Olusegun Obasanjo constituted the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission of Nigeria (Oputa Panel) to investigate human rights abuses during the period of military rule from 1984 to 1999. After the panel submitted its report in 2002, the recommendations are yet to be implemented, almost two decades after. I fear if the same fate will not befall the current ENDSARS panels.

MONSROH ABDULSEMIU, student, Lagos State University.

Has there been a drop in police brutality cases following the #EndSARS protest?

I would say yes when what we have now is compared to the alarming number of police brutality cases that Nigerians recorded and reported online before the #EndSARS protest and the eventual scrapping of SARS. It is evident that police brutality cases like the violent stop-and-search operations, unlawful arrests and detention have reduced fairly.

Are the #EndSARS panels accessible?

I wouldnt say yes because Ive not attempted to reach or access the panel in my state. But I would also not say no because evidence of accessibility has been displayed according to the number of petitions that they have received and worked on as gathered by Premium Times and other credible media outfits.

Are the panels effective?

Well! To some extent, I would say yes. The panel has been instrumental to the settlement of wrongly accused, harassed and injured protesters. But it has been months since the massacre at the Lekki toll plaza. I believe they are taking too much time to uncover the covered, and justice delayed is justice denied.

WOLE OLUBANJI, a social commentator and activist

Has there been a drop in police brutality cases following the #EndSARS protest?

We continue to have reports of the brutality of protesters and other agitators across the country by the police. Very little has changed about policing since the #EndSARS protest.

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Perhaps the only change is in the increased awareness of citizens, who now resist police brutality in some places where it occurred, especially against commercial drivers in Lagos. There is also the animosity some police personnel have towards young people seeking police interventions, who are regularly reminded of the protest to end SARS, and it goes to show the insincerity towards promises of changes to policing that were made in October 2020.

Accessibility, the effectiveness of #EndSARS panels

The #EndSARS panel in Lagos has been accessible to members of society. Determining its effectiveness will now depend on its final report. However, it left so much to doubt as to its neutrality when it ordered the reopening of the Lekki toll plaza, even as investigations are ongoing.

KAZEEM ISRAEL, a political scientist in Ibadan, Oyo State.

Has there been a drop in police brutality cases following the #EndSARS protest?

There has been no drop in police brutality throughout the country since the #EndSARS panels commenced their sitting. And, this makes it appear as if theres no end in sight against police brutality.

Accessibility, the effectiveness of #EndSARS panels

The #EndSARS panels across the states are not accessible by citizens, most especially those affected because it is not open to everyone.

And, based on the foregoing, the panel does not seem to be ready for any positive effect on the people in serving justice. To end police brutality, the Police Service Commission must introduce rules to ensure that those to be recruited into the Force are sane to handle guns.

ABASS OYEYEMI, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun state

Impact of #EndSARS protest

#EndSARS saw the rebranding of SARS. They renamed them (SARS) and dissolved them into other units. However, extortion and brutality are still happening across the country. I was picked up by police officers in Ibadan on March 28, 2021, for having the Binance cryptocurrency app on my phone. They didnt leave me until they got N20,000.

Effectiveness, accessibility of #EndSARS panels

For me, Ill say while the cases of brutality dropped after #EndSARS, it has been on the rise ever since the beginning of the year.

The End SARS panel isnt accessible. An average man doesnt even know how hell get to table his case before the panel. The effectiveness is lacking this way; just a few persons out of many victims of police brutality are getting justice.
A coalition of civic groups has urged the Nigerian government to respect the right to peaceful protests.

The group said Nigerians who have chosen to protest peacefully on June 12 must be allowed to do so without harassment from security agencies.

The government and its security services must play by the rules and conduct themselves in ways that guarantee the safety and wellbeing of peaceful protesters, the coalition of 40 civic groups said in a statement sent to PREMIUM TIMES.

Read the full statement below.

#JUNE12PROTEST: The Nigerian Government and its Security Services must play by the rules

Nigerians from across the country have widely publicised a peaceful #June12Protest to register their displeasure at the way the country has been governed. By this statement, the Civil Society Consortium on Civic Space wish to remind the Nigerian Government and its security services that every citizen has a constitutionally guaranteed right to protest.

Making this known in a statement, Mbasekei Martin Obono, the coordinator of the Secretariat stated that, the government and its Security Services must play by the rules and conduct themselves in ways that guarantee the safety and wellbeing of peaceful protesters. He went further to state that, We align ourselves with the Federal High Court judgement in the case of Charles Oputa alias Charley Boy Vs. Nigerian Police Force & 2Ors delivered on the 22nd day of October 2018, where the learned Honourable Justice John Tsoho held that using teargas or water cannons on peaceful protesters was inhuman and degrading treatment. We wish to remind the Federal Government and its security services to abide by this judgment, the constitution they swore to protect and other international instruments and desist from carrying out arbitrary arrests and use of disproportionate or unjustified force on peaceful protesters.

We wish to remind the government of President Muhammadu Buhari that the murder of innocent citizens during the #ENDSARS protest in Lekki and other parts of Nigeria is still fresh in the minds of Nigerians and the international community. Therefore, any violation or inhumane treatment to protesting citizens will be redressed before national courts if possible or before international courts where necessary.

We also wish to remind the government of the provisions of section 17(2)(c) of the Nigerian constitution which require that governmental actions shall be humane.

We also call on friends of Nigeria and the international community to pay close attention to the #June12Protest and help to avert an any dangers.

1. Members of the Consortium

2. Tap Nitaitive For Citizens Development

3. African Centre For Information and Literacy (AFRICML)

4. Global Rights Nigeria

5. Dataphyte

6. Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria

7. Al-habibiyyah Islamic Society

8. Inibehe Effiong Chambers

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9. Cross River Watch

10.Nigerian Bar Association, Unity Bar

11.Agba Jalingo

12.Basic Rights Council

13.HRM Dr. Etim Okon, Chairman Cross River Traditional Rulers Council

14.HRH Eze Ositadinma Nwokocha, Imo Traditional Rulers Council

15.HRH Chief Michael Akpabio, Akpabio Traditional Rulers Council

16.DASS Emirate, Bauchi State

17.Advocacy Centre For Development

18.Network of Yobe Civil Society Organizations, Yobo

19.Association of NGOs, Gombe State

20.Gombe Emirate Council

21.Rule of Law and Accountability Advocacy

22.Premium Times Centre For Investigative Journalism

23.International Centre For Investigative Journalism

24.Citizens Gavel

25.Connected Development

26.Dorothy Njemanze Foundation

27.Dinidari Foundation

28.Lawyers Alert

29.CDD West Africa

30.Medley Project

31.YIAVHA Nigeria

32.Education as Vaccine

33.Centre for Liberty

34.Adopt a goal

35.Bauchi State Network of CSOs

36.TIERS

37.Destiny Youth Foundation

38.Before 40 Youth Foundation

39.KIMPACT Development

40.AC4D

41.Jennon Pius & Co Legal practise

42.Accountability Lab Nigeria

43.Centre for Impact Advocacy (CiA)
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Right activist and newspaper publisher, Agba Jalingo, has been released by the police in Cross River State, Nigerias South-south.

Mr Jalingo, the publisher of Cross River Watch, an online newspaper, was arrested earlier on Friday at the police headquarters, Calabar, where he had gone to honour an invitation from the Commissioner of Police in the state, Kayode Sikiru.

The police said they had a petition which accused Mr Jalingo of being an arms dealer.

Mr Jalingos lawyer, James Ibor, who confirmed his release, said the accusation was fake and that the petition was intended to prevent his client from mobilising residents for the nationwide June 12 protest in Cross River.

He was released about 30 minutes ago, he is here with me, Mr Ibor said.

The letterhead (of the petition) was designed with the name concerned citizens of Cross River State, and with an address that cannot be verified, no house address, and signed by persons that cannot be verified, and there are no phone numbers.

They alleged that Agba Jalingo is doing gun running and keeping bombs, and he is mobilising non-Cross Riverians to make Cross River State ungovernable.

The commissioner of police has agreed with us that the petition was frivolous and not worthy of any investigation and has released him, he said.

Mr Jalingo, accused of attempting to overthrow the Cross River State Government, is standing trial for terrorism and treasonable felony after he authored an article in 2019 alleging that Governor Ben Ayade could not account for N500 million belonging to the Cross River State Government.

June 12 is celebrated as Democracy Day in Nigeria in honour of the June 12, 1993, presidential election that was won by a popular businessman, Moshood Abiola.

The election, said to be the fairest and freest in Nigeria, was annulled under controversial circumstances by the military regime of Ibrahim Babangida.

Mr Abiola later died under controversial circumstances in detention in 1998 after he was arrested by the military regime for declaring himself president of Nigeria.
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The United States embassy has asked its citizens in Nigeria to avoid potential protest grounds ahead of the June 12 demonstrations being planned by some Nigerian civic groups.

The mission in an advisory posted on its website on Friday noted that such protest locations in Lagos and Abuja would likely have police presence.

Several groups have announced their intentions to protest nationwide on June 12, Democracy Day, the advisory read in part.

It added, Police presence and response can be expected nationwide, including in Abuja where government events are scheduled to celebrate the national holiday and in Lagos where simultaneous protests are planned.

The likely locations for the protests in Abuja will be at Unity Fountain (Hilton Hotel area), Wuse, Berger Roundabout, Aguiyi Ironsi Way, Airport Road, and British Circle. In Lagos, the likely locations for protests will be Lekki Toll Gate and Gani Fawehinmi Park. Calls for the protests suggest they may begin as early as 07:00 a.m, the chancery wrote.

The U.S. embassy then advised American citizens to avoid the areas of the demonstrations, exercise caution if unexpectedly in the vicinity of large gatherings or protests, monitor local media for updates, and keep a low profile.

June 12 protest

The June 12 protest deliberately planned by civic groups and activists to coincide with Nigerias Democracy Day aims to pressure the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration to address the worsening state of governance and the alarming rate of insecurity in the country.

The federal government and the authorities in various states have indicated their disapproval of the protest.

But civic groups, including the #RevolutionNow movement led by Sahara Reporters publisher, Omoyele Sowore, have insisted that the demonstrations will hold in major cities including Lagos and Abuja.

Meanwhile, a coalition of civic groups on Friday urged the Nigerian government to respect the right to peaceful protests.

The coalition said Nigerians who have chosen to protest peacefully on June 12 must be allowed to do so without harassment from security agencies.

The government and its security services must play by the rules and conduct themselves in ways that guarantee the safety and wellbeing of peaceful protesters, the coalition of 40 civic groups said in a statement sent to PREMIUM TIMES.
Days after being criticised for bypassing the federal governments ban on Twitter, Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, a federal cabinet member, has denied threatening to prosecute Nigerians still tweeting on the microblogging site.

Mr Malami, who had earlier issued the prosecution threat against Nigerians defying the Nigerian governments ban on Twitter, made a dramatic turn about it in an interview with Vanguard newspaper.

His denial came days after he unknowingly exposed himself in a Facebook post which showed he too had bypassed the Twitter ban like many other Nigerians.

It is within their guaranteed fundamental right to tweet from anywhere in the world. Nigeria, being a democratic nation, cannot stop its citizens from exercising their rights of freedom of expression, the Vanguard quoted Mr Malami as saying on Thursday.

Mr Malami, who doubles as the Minister of Justice, added, But our position on Twitter is clear: Anyone, whether individual or corporate institution that enables Twitter to circumvent the ban the Federal Government of Nigeria placed on the company, will be prosecuted.

He added that the statement from his office did not ask the Director of Public Prosecutions to prosecute Nigerians using Twitter or any social media platform to express their view.

But we are going to use the legal instruments at our disposal to go after those who aid and abet Twitter to continue to threaten our corporate existence as a nation.

It is clear from the barrage of insinuations and falsehood being orchestrated by some Nigerians and those trying to change the clear position of the Government of Nigeria to suit their whims and caprices and to whip up sentiments to hoodwink the people, that they are up to some mischievous and sinister games, which the Federal Government will not condone, Mr Malami also said.

#TwitterBan

Nigerian government suspended Twitter operations indefinitely on June 4, after it alleged that the micro-blogging site was being used to undermine Nigerias corporate existence through the spreading of fake news that have violent consequences.

The ban came two days after Twitter took down a controversial tweet by President Muhammadu Buhari which was seen by many as threatening violence against Igbo people.

Many Nigerians ignored the ban and bypassed it by using Virtual Private Network (VPN) applications to remain active on the microblogging site.

Displeased with the development, the AGF, through his spokesperson, Umar Gwandu, on June 5, ordered the Director of Public Prosecution of the Federation (DPPF), Umar Muhammed, to begin the prosecution of those bypassing the ban.

Speaking with PREMIUM TIMES through his spokesperson, Mr Gwandu, hours after issuing the prosecution threat, the AGF insisted that using Twitter had become a crime, adding that alleged violators bypassing the ban would be told the law they were violating when charged to court.

Many Nigerians continue to tweet in defiance of Mr Malamis threats.

On Tuesday, Mr Malami took to his Facebook wall to post a screenshot of a notification for the deactivation of his Twitter account in an apparent show of leadership by example.

Thousands of Nigerians besieged his Facebook wall posting replies that questioned how he was able to access his Twitter page despite the ban.

The vigilant ones among them quickly pointed out the VPN logo appearing on the ministers screenshot, a confirmation that he too had used a backdoor channel to access Twitter.

The screenshot also showed an app used to trade in cryptocurrency, which has also been banned by the Nigerian government.

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By Friday evening, the Facebook post by Mr Malami had been shared 1,800 times and attracted 21,000 comments.

Malami blames mischief makers

In his interview with the Vanguard, Mr Malami said his office did not threaten any religious leader for using Twitter to express themselves nor did we indicate in any way that we were going after them.

But mischief-makers were quick to mention names of religious leaders and give the impression that we were already in court to try them.

Let it be made clear that the Buhari administration, being a people-centred government that relies on the rule of law, will never adopt any policy or programme that seeks to add pain or injury to the very people who elected it to serve them.

For the record, let it be made amply clear that the AGF, Abubakar Malami, is not after any Nigerian, tweeting from Nigeria or anywhere in the world but that any Nigerian company or entity that gives a helping hand for Twitter to escape the ban placed on it, will be dealt with, he added.
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When Gani Fawehinmi died in September 2009, I put together an extended tribute for distribution in Calabar, Lagos, and wherever the funeral would be. The centres of distribution in Calabar included our home and my office. Comrades, compatriots, and friends were asked to come to any of these centres to collect copies for themselves and for others. A young lady with whom I had worked in Calabar chose to come to the house. I did not see her but I heard her say something like this to a member of the household: Oga is always writing tributes for his comrades. I hope someone will write for him. I did not hear any response. Even now I cannot describe what I felt at this comment. But I remember that I smiled and shook my head. The person who received the comment on my behalf did not report it, and I did not ask. We both kept quiet. But now, almost 12 years later, I have a response for the lady.

That response is this: With what my comrades, compatriots and friends did on and around May 15, 2021, the 75th anniversary of my birth, there will be no need for special or elaborate tributes when I eventually depart. For more than adequate tributes have been paid to me in my lifetime and I dont think anything can surpass May 15, 2021, in magnitude or in quality. All I need to do from now on, between now and my departure, is to try and maintain good conduct. And when I finally depart, all my comrades need do is to inter me, in a secular and non-sectarian manner, wherever they consider the centre of gravity of my entire ideological-political life.

The main event of Saturday, May 15, 2021, was the international conference: Edwin Madunagu @ 75. I could not participate in that event because, as I informed its inspirers and organisers, I would at that time be attending to the health needs of my partner, Comrade Bene Madunagu. Since then, however, I have been collating and going through the records and reports of the various activities of that very significant day of my life.

It is impossible for me to respond to all the messages and tributes. It is even impossible to list all the persons that sent messages or paid tributes  at the conference or outside the conference. And I have decided not to make a selection. I am therefore left with one option: to file the records and reports I have collated and refer to aspects of them as the issues they raised come up or become relevant again. Meanwhile, in lieu of responses, I shall reproduce a slightly abridged and edited version of the message I sent to the conference Edwin Madunagu at 75.

Here it is: Forty-five years ago, as I turned 30, I left Lagos for Ibadan. From Ibadan, together with a comrade of the same age, I left for a rural community lying somewhere between Gbongan and Ile-Ife in present Osun State. There we joined others, similarly inspired like us, about ten in number, male and female, excluding two kids whom we took turns to baby-sit in order to free the mother to participate fully in revolutionary duties. We assembled to inaugurate an underground Marxist revolutionary vanguard embedded in the peasantry. While some members were fully in residence, others were semi-resident, but continually in touch with the Headquarters. I was not only fully in residence, but disappeared from the outside world for between 9 and 12 months.

The strategic objective of that Extraordinary Expedition was to inaugurate an armed struggle in a socialist revolution which we recognized had been going on at a certain level in our country, Nigeria. The armed struggle did not happen. But it almost did. And in an attempt to force it to begin, we also almost ended up in self-liquidation. It was when I was leaving the Headquarters after the collapse of the Expedition that our peasant comrades knew, through my contact address and full name, that not only was I not an Ijesha man, but that I was not even of Yoruba parentage. For I had integrated completely with them and had been one of their conscientisation discussion leaders in the Yoruba language for at least the preceding six months. The scene of separation was very emotional.

The Extraordinary Expedition had profound effects on all the participants. But, as expected, the effects were of different kinds on different comrades, with some differences less significant than others. It was this variation in differences that made it possible for BJ and I, then Bene, to regroup almost immediately after the collapse of the Expedition.

For me, personally, the effects of that Extraordinary Expedition were completely transforming. I emerged from the commune a professional revolutionary: where to be a professional revolutionary was not conceived mechanically, for instance, in the way one is a professional teacher or a professional soldier, that is, in terms of training and occupation. It was not even conceived in the sense of making revolution the primary interest in ones life. Rather, to be a professional revolutionary was conceived in the sense of compelling every other interest or commitment  including nationality, sub-nationality, religion, family, friendship and engagements for material sustenance and reproduction to find accommodation and justification in the commitment to revolution.

But that is just one side of a professional revolutionary as conceived by me. The other side is the commitment to what Karl Marx, in his youthful days, called categorical imperatives, that is, the struggle to overcome all circumstances in which the human being is humiliated, enslaved, abandoned and despised. And later I added the commitment to struggle to extend immediate and unconditional solidarity to the wretched of the earth and ameliorate the human condition anywhere a professional revolutionary finds herself or himself. A professional revolutionary is thus a contradiction in the real world: simultaneous toughness and softness.

The requirement sketched above is definitely not a necessary one for every Leftist or even for every revolutionary. But it is a self-imposed requirement for every vanguard in the struggle against capitalism, capitalist social formations and imperialism. Some would say that for a sustainable revolution to take place there must be a substantial number of this category of revolutionaries. But I would modify this and say that at least the revolution should be capable of rapidly reproducing its own professionals as it proceeds.

My life as a professional revolutionary since the 1977 collapse of the Extraordinary Expedition has therefore been a contradictory one at least in the sense described in the preceding paragraphs. And it has been tough for that person who, in addition to having to share that life as a wife, a comrade and a lover, also has to live her life as an academic, an intellectual, a mother, a social activist, a Leftist-feminist and a revolutionary socialist. If there is any particular person who, since 1977, has kept me on my feet, stood with me as equal, pointing out what can be done today in anticipation of tomorrow, and correcting my frequent tactical and strategic errors, that person is Comrade Professor Bene Madunagu.

About two weeks ago, on the eve of 2021 May Day, Comrade Bene and I made a re-affirmation and executed a long-standing decision of ours. The former was the re-affirmation of our subscription to Marxism, our commitment to socialist revolution in Nigeria and world-wide and our equal commitment to revolutionary internationalism. And the latter was the decision to transfer our Combined Archives and Libraries, built up since 1973, to the Nigerian Left. The transfer took effect from May 1, 2021.

That was my message to the Nigerian Left through the birthday conference. My only additional message at this moment to the Nigerian Left is this: Wherever you are today, use all your intellect, use whatever levers you have, as individuals and as groups, to prevent Nigeria fully enacting a second edition of the (1966-1970) tragedy.

Edwin Madunagu, mathematician and journalist, writes from Calabar, Cross River State.
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I am pleased that the Sultan and the Cardinal have been working together so hard to promote inter-faith peace but many of their battle commanders are simply not willing to listen to them. I say to the couple: Keep trying, keep the faith until the truth of these documents are revealed to the uneducated religious soldiers.

If we can talk of human fraternity at the global level, why cant we talk about it at the Nigerian level?  John Cardinal Onaiyekan

The citation above is from a Tripartite Consultation on the State of the Nation held on Wednesday June 9 in Abuja. The consultation was jointly convened by the National Peace Committee, Nigerian Working Group on Peacebuilding and Governance, and the Inter-Faith Initiative for Peace (IIP). The convenors were, His Excellency, General Abdulsalami Abubakar; His Eminence, Cardinal John Onaiyekan; and His Eminence, the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Saad Abubakar. In his welcome Address, His Eminence, John Cardinal Onaiyekan drew attention to the fact that the state of our nation is a major cause of concern against the backdrop of the manifest challenges that the country confronts, which is generating a strong sense of despair. Amidst these challenges, not much has been done by the government (both executive and legislature), to provide the much-needed leadership that should inspire confidence in the people. In the light of these challenges, the tripartite consultation is convened as part of efforts by concerned groups to work towards a pathway for peace in the country.

In his opening remarks, His Eminence, The Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Saad Abubakar III reminded participants that we are advocates and believers in dialogue as a key medium for engagements in our country. The fact that the leadership of the three groups is known in the country, has credibility that is backed by huge public acceptance and respect, provides justification for the intervention. His Eminence added that an open and frank discussion represents an important pathway for the group to collaboratively work towards finding sustainable solutions to the prevailing crisis in the country.

On his part, the former Head of State, His Excellency, General Abdulsalami Abubakar commended participants for their individual and collective efforts towards a peaceful country and reiterated the commitment of the National Peace Committee to work with all well-meaning citizens and groups in the endeavour fo finding a durable solution to the prevailing crisis facing the country.

The major outcome of the crisis facing the country has been the erosion of public trust. A toxic atmosphere has developed in which different actors are suspected of developing plots to destroy others. Action of whatever type by governments and private institutions are no longer taken at face value but are re-interpreted within narratives of coordinated plots

In our presentation as the National Working Group, we drew attention to the fact that Nigeria is dangerously adrift and has never faced a greater risk to its corporate existence as it does today. There is widespread violence, stretching the capacity of the Armed Forces and the Police Force to cope with. Governance is in crisis at all levels  federal, state and local government. The health and education sectors are in crisis and jobs are not being generated for the youth. Meanwhile, the political class is focused on retaining or getting power in view of the 2023 timeline, and the people are facing a real existential crisis that is pushing them towards losing hope in the continued common existence and lashing out at their fellow citizens. Many among the youth have gained agency and decided to get out of the life of extreme poverty and deprivation by acquiring arms and engaging in terrorism, banditry, mass kidnapping and sexual assault on their fellow citizens, while the state and its agencies looks on with frightening inability and maybe unwillingness to carry out their constitutional roles of providing for the security and welfare of Nigerians.

The major outcome of the crisis facing the country has been the erosion of public trust. A toxic atmosphere has developed in which different actors are suspected of developing plots to destroy others. Action of whatever type by governments and private institutions are no longer taken at face value but are re-interpreted within narratives of coordinated plots by some groups to destroy or eliminate others or to take their land. Lately, poor or non-responses by governments to unfolding events have further exacerbated this crisis of eroded public trust.

The Sultan of Sokoto is the first signatory to the A Common Word initiative (see www.acommonword.com), which has become the worlds leading interfaith dialogue initiative between Christians and Muslims specifically, and which has achieved historically unprecedented global acceptance and traction as an interfaith theological document. It was launched in 2007 as an open letter signed by leading Muslim scholars and intellectuals (including such figures as the Grand Muftis of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Oman, Bosnia, Russia, Chad and Istanbul) to the leaders of the Christian Churches and denominations all over the world, including H.H. Pope Benedict XVI. In essence it proposed, on the basis of verses from the Holy Quran and the Holy Bible, that Islam and Christianity share at their core, the twin golden commandments of the paramount importance of loving God and loving ones neighbor. Based on this joint common ground, it called for peace and harmony between Christians and Muslims worldwide.

As Cardinal Onaiyekan correctly said in the quote above, our religious leaders at the top are very conscious that Christians and Muslims come from the same Abrahamic family and traditions, and they regularly meet to affirm these principles. Sadly, on the ground in our dear country, our local religious leaders see Islam and Christianity as enemies that must seek to destroy each other.

On February 4, 2019, during the apostolic journey of His Holiness the Pope to the United Arab Emirates, Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar (Cairo), Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, signed the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together, also known as the Document on Human Fraternity. In order to implement the Document, the Higher Committee on Human Fraternity (HCHF) was established on August 20 of the same year. There is a project to create an Abrahamic Family House, with a synagogue, a church, and a mosque, on Saadiyat Island, the cultural heart of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

The HCHF established the Zayed Award for Human Fraternity in honour of Sheikh Zayed, one of the UAE founders. The award committee consists of prominent personalities. In 2019, it was symbolically awarded first to Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Ahmad Al-Tayyeb. On October 3, 2020, in Assisi, Pope Francis signed Fratelli tutti, the Encyclical Letter on Fraternity and Social Friendship. The present Encyclical takes up and develops some of the great themes raised in the Document that we both signed. On December 21, 2020, the United Nations General Assembly declared February 4 as the International Day of Human Fraternity (IDHF), to be celebrated as each country sees fit.

As Cardinal Onaiyekan correctly said in the quote above, our religious leaders at the top are very conscious that Christians and Muslims come from the same Abrahamic family and traditions, and they regularly meet to affirm these principles. Sadly, on the ground in our dear country, our local religious leaders see Islam and Christianity as enemies that must seek to destroy each other. Some push the idea that killing the other is the shortest pathway to paradise. I am pleased that the Sultan and the Cardinal have been working together so hard to promote inter-faith peace but many of their battle commanders are simply not willing to listen to them. I say to the couple: Keep trying, keep the faith until the truth of these documents are revealed to the uneducated religious soldiers.

A professor of Political Science and development consultant/expert, Jibrin Ibrahim is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Democracy and Development, and Chair of the Editorial Board of PREMIUM TIMES.
While campaigning for office, President Buhari presented himself as a born-again democrat and, once elected, swore to abide by the Nigerian Constitution. On the contrary, most of his actions and public positions, with regard to individual freedoms, are unmistakably those of a dictator. He seems to act speedily only when there is a political enemy to be punished, retreating into a habitual lethargy as soon as the threat is eliminated. To many people within and without Nigeria, the Buhari of 2021 is different from the Buhari of 1984, only to the extent that the latter is older and not wearing khaki!

This state of affairs is unacceptable, but it is not inevitable. Clearly, on the evidence of the global response to the Twitter ban, the government cannot hope to get away with this willful traducement of individual rights that are enshrined in the Constitution.

The first step towards checking this situation is to insist on the primacy of the separation of powers between the three arms of government, and the practical checks and balances it affords. The current national assembly is alarmingly in lockstep with the executive, merely rubberstamping the latters propositions, and for all practical purposes, sitting idly by at a time of serious national emergency. The judiciary seems astonishingly rudderless, proof of which is to be found in a variety of anomalous developments, the most recent being a strike by federal judicial workers, which went on for weeks.

Secondly, in bourgeois-liberal terms, the media are recognised as the fourth estate, with the intellectual and professional wherewithal to forestall acts of executive lawlessness, and failing that, having the means to sensitise the public to embracing the means of redressing such acts. Although the press in Nigeria has an impressive history of standing as a vanguard of public interest, of recent it has lost its old lustre. Of note is the general decline in the quality of public discourse and the susceptibility of media to misinformation, driven no doubt by the nature of new technologies of dissemination. Rather than bemoan this state of things or roll out censorious requirements, a truly democratic system should see in it an opportunity for a vibrant public sphere where, as the saying goes, the cream will rise to the top.

we have those who see the current Constitution as flawed, and have called for its overhaul. Such calls have even assumed the approach of insisting on restructuring. Although the exact parameters of such restructuring would need to be worked out, we support the broad principle of restructuring, in so far as it is meant as a holistic national conversation and makeover

Thirdly, we have those who see the current Constitution as flawed, and have called for its overhaul. Such calls have even assumed the approach of insisting on restructuring. Although the exact parameters of such restructuring would need to be worked out, we support the broad principle of restructuring, in so far as it is meant as a holistic national conversation and makeover to address, and where possible repair, undeniable historical injustices, unhealed historical injuries of war and colonial and postcolonial political configurations, socioeconomic inequities, and sundry structural imbalances. While no constitution is perfect, there is a sense in which the current geopolitical structure of the country, founded on the juridical principles of the 1999 constitution, and polices arising therefrom, unduly concentrates power at the centre to the detriment of the states and other constituent units. Restructuring, properly defined and stripped of political posturing, needs to be taken seriously, but restructuring is only one of several necessary interventions needed to rescue and reinvigorate the union.

We are of the view that a transparent and consistent pursuit of the principles in the first two items serves as a starting point in addressing these ills, i.e. the lack of separation of powers; the degraded  and degrading  quality of public discourse in the media; and the persistent, if sometimes confusing, agitation for restructuring . This is because, in the final analysis, among the most important duties of a government is the guarantee of the safety of its citizens and their individual freedoms. On this count, the Buhari government has failed woefully, and the responses of its officials have been divisive, high-handed, and insensitive. A more equitable Constitution stands to improve the discharge of these duties, but the task of stemming the tide of widespread insecurity, political disorder, and lack of economic opportunity cannot wait.

President Buhari and his officials swore to uphold the Constitution as it is. Their first task is to keep the oath of office, and this should not be done at the expense of the interests and rights of citizens. So far, they have done little to dismiss fears in certain circles that fidelity to the oath of office is secondary in their calculations.

To the proliferating calls in certain quarters for the dissolution of the union, we have two responses. First, centrifugal, separatist, and other varieties of self-determination agitation are not in and of themselves dangerous and should not be criminalised as seditious, traitorous sentiments to be violently crushed. Such agitations, which are legitimate expressions of the internationally recognised right to self-determination and are understandable products of justifiable disillusionment with the deepening dysfunction, should be handled delicately, so as not to inflame a volatile polity and so that we can separate legitimate and thoughtful struggles for regional autonomy, local developmental freedoms, and alternative national aspirations from bellicose nationalist posturing. Second, we are blessed with an incredibly rich, vibrant, complex and productive country that is worth preserving and reforming in the direction of justice, inclusion, and equity. It is true that these potentials have been routinely wasted, undeveloped, when not made to serve narrow sectional or parochial interests. The more creative option to salvage our broken nation, we are convinced, is to work for a positive change for the benefit of all, now and for the future. It is such resolve that has seen the country weather previous periodic storms, and there is nothing unusual or insurmountable about our problems. It is in this spirit that we issue this statement. Nigeria is ours to make.

Abimbola Adelakun, The University of Texas at Austin

Akin Adesokan, Indiana University

Kunle Ajibade, The News, Lagos

Ebenezer Obadare, University of Kansas

Moses Ochonu, Vanderbilt University

Olufemi Taiwo, Cornell University

Olufemi Vaughan, Amherst College

Jacob Olupona, Harvard University

Simeon Ilesanmi, Wake Forest University

James Yeku, University of Kansas

Oka Obono, University of Ibadan

Farooq Kperogi, Kennesaw State University

Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin

Akanmu Adebayo, Kennesaw State University

Adedoyin Ogunfeyimi, Dartmouth College at Hanover

Peyibomi Soyinka-Airewele, Ithaca College

Samuel Zalanga, Bethel University, Saint Paul, Minnesota

Ainehi Edoro-Glines, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Mojubaolu Olufunke Okome, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Rotimi Suberu, Bennington College, Vermont

Oyeronke Oyewumi, Stony Brook University, New York

Tade Ipadeola, The Khalam Collective, Ibadan

Saheed Aderinto, Western Carolina University

Ibrahim Abdullah, Fourah Bay College, Freetown

Asonzeh Ukah, University of Cape Town

Iruka Okeke, University of Ibadan

Jibrin Ibrahim, Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Niyi Afolabi, University of Texas at Austin

Chiedo Nwankwor, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

Cajetan Iheka, Yale University

Nimi Wariboko, Boston University

Nwando Achebe, Michigan State University

Akin Ogundiran, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Omolade Adunbi, University of Michigan

Rita Kiki Edozie, University of Massachusetts  Boston

Saeed Husaini, Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Biko Agozino, Virginia Tech

Folu Ogundimu, Michigan State University

Funso Afolayan, University of New Hampshire

Tola Olu Pearce, University of Missouri, Columbia
In short, the central government did not enact any grazing law. The best the central government has done was the promulgation of National Commission for Nomadic Education, Decree 25, 1989 and National Commission for Mass Literacy, Adult and Non-formal Education, Decree 17, 1990. These two decrees were promulgated by General Ibrahim Babangida (rtd.; GCFR).

President Muhammadu Buhari (GCFR) has often referred to the gazette which published the grazing laws in Nigeria. In his television interview to mark his sixth anniversary in power, he made reference to the so called gazette. The President was echoing what his Chief of Staff, Professor Ibrahim Gambari said on April 1, 2018 when he was the Chancellor of the Kwara State University in Ilorin. On that day, Professor Gambari referred to existing laws on grazing and that the major problem facing us now is the non-implementation of the grazing laws as contained in the gazette.

My understanding is that both the President and his Chief of Staff were equating the laws of Northern Nigeria on grazing, as if they were laws passed by the central government. The grazing laws, which the two men referred to, were passed into a decree by the then the Premier of Northern Nigeria, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto. The laws were not operative in the West, Mid-West and Eastern regions.

According to Dr. Ismaila Iro, grazing reserves in Nigeria started during the pre-colonial era. Although formally introduced by the British, grazing reserves were demarcated by the Fulani who conquered and ruled Northern Nigeria. The attempt by the British in 1940 to separate the grazing land from the farm land, however, faltered because the Europeans imposed land use controls divorced from economic and demographic dynamics in the pastoral system.

Formal grazing reserves in Nigeria started accidentally in the 1950s when Hamisu Kano, working with pastoralists on livestock vaccination, foresaw the shortages of grazing land in Northern Nigeria. Supported by the government, he initiated the grazing reserve scheme from the abandoned government resettlement schemes (Fulani Settlement Scheme). The resettlement schemes collapsed because the government had neither the financial nor the managerial ability to continue with the financially burdensome scheme, and the best alternative use of the land, the government thought, was to convert it into grazing reserves that were less financially committed.

The grazing reserve hatched in 1954 after a study of the Fulani production system contained in the Fulani Amenities Proposal. The proposal suggested the creation of grazing reserves, the improvement of Fulani welfare, and the transformation of the herd management system.

By 1964, the government had gazetted about 6.4 million hectares of forest reserve, ninety-eight per cent in the savanna. Sokoto Province had twenty-one per cent of the land, followed by Kabba, Bauchi, Zaria, Ilorin, and Katsina, with 11 to 15 per cent each. The Wase, Zamfara, and Udubo reserves followed in succession.

In 1965, the Northern Nigerian Government incorporated the Fulani Amenities Proposal into the Grazing Reserve Law.

Before the enactment of the Grazing Reserve Law of the Northern Nigeria, the pastoral Fulani relied on the goodwill of the farmers, who conferred upon themselves the lordship of occupied and unoccupied land. Because interpersonal and kinship affiliations governed the dispensation of land, the Fulani worried about being evicted from the land when their relationship with the hosts becomes strained.

The planners, however, applied a top-down approach that excluded the Fulani from formulating and implementing this well-intentioned programme. Accordingly, the Fulani gave less than the expected cooperation in the scheme. Professor Gambari, coming from Kwara State, had in mind the Kwara State grazing laws that were in existence years ago.

In an article by Professor Ade Olomola, he said the grazing laws in Kwara State was in operation only in the State. According to him, the main focus of the settlement policy is the development of grazing reserves in the State. The objectives of the policy were: (i) to provide feed and water for pastoralists on a year-round basis; (ii) to eliminate nomadism, improve cattle production and raise the living standards of pastoralists

In an article by Professor Ade Olomola, he said the grazing laws in Kwara State was in operation only in the State. According to him, the main focus of the settlement policy is the development of grazing reserves in the State. The objectives of the policy were: (i) to provide feed and water for pastoralists on a year-round basis; (ii) to eliminate nomadism, improve cattle production and raise the living standards of pastoralists; (iii) to ensure efficient use and protection of environmental resources; and, (iv) to prevent or minimise incessant clashes between herders and farmers, which often result in bloodshed and the loss of life.

The procedures involved in the implementation of the policy include land acquisition, demarcation, surveying, gazetting of grazing reserves, development of grazing reserves and settlement of pastoralists. The following are the grazing reserves, at various stages of acquisition, in Kwara State: Nweri, Kinikini, Gidan Magajia, Moli, Wuru, Okuta , Olodan, Igbaja, Alapa, Babanla, Chita, Lata, Oro, Sharagi, Shao, Kaiama and Omi-Eran (LSC).

The Gidan Magajia is one of the two grazing reserves that have been gazetted in the State. It is the largest in the State and the focus of attention. Two implementation committees were set up for the purpose of development and management of the reserve, as well as settlement of pastoralists. They are the policy committee at the state level and grazing reserve management committee at the local government level.

The former is charged with the responsibility of formulating and defining development policy and ensuring that the management committee is provided with the means to achieving management objectives. The latter is to advise and assist on matters affecting the settlers on a day-to-day basis, as well as identifying settlers for the reserve.

The Order setting up the reserve stipulates that it should be maintained through proper grazing management and improvement activities, such as water development, fodder conservation plan, range reseeding and fertilisation, control of undesirable weeds and fire tracing. Other development activities include the construction of earth dams, boreholes and wells to provide watering facilities; construction of roads, office and residential quarters; establishment of livestock services centre and pasture development.

Moreover, efforts are to be made to ensure that the highest possible level of productivity is achieved without endangering the reserve. To this end, the government stipulates that soil and water conservation and other erosion control methods should be used to prevent degradation, desertification and overgrazing, and to maintain the carrying capacity of the reserve.

Both the Federal and Kwara State governments are supposed to play active parts in the development of the grazing reserve. The Federal Government is to be involved in the provision of infrastructure, such as dams, roads and means of transport for range guards through the agency of the National Livestock Projects Division (NLPD). The Kwara State government has the responsibility to acquire the land, following stipulated legal procedures, and provide staff for the management of the reserve. As at 1992, five government officials, consisting of a project officer, a veterinary assistant, two range guards and a security guard were operating in the reserve.

On November 22 last year, the Executive Secretary for Nomadic Education, Professor Bashir Usman said out of the estimated population of 9.4 million nomads in Nigeria, 3.3 million are children of school age. The participation of the nomads in the existing formal and non-formal education programmes is abysmally low, with a literacy rate ranging between 0.2 per cent and 2.9 per cent.

In short, the central government did not enact any grazing law. The best the central government has done was the promulgation of National Commission for Nomadic Education, Decree 25, 1989 and National Commission for Mass Literacy, Adult and Non-formal Education, Decree 17, 1990. These two decrees were promulgated by General Ibrahim Babangida (rtd.; GCFR). The Minister of Education at that time was Professor Babatunde Aliu Fafunwa (September 23, 1923  October 11, 2010). All the military governors at that time were ordered by General Babangida to launch it in their states.

I remember at that time that there were public outcries about the decree; that it favoured the Fulani people. I think it was the best thing at that time that the central government ever did for the Fulani people. The Commission devised a series of innovative approaches and strategies.

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The broad goals of Nomadic Education Programme are: To integrate nomads into national life through relevant, qualitative and basic functional education and to raise both the productive and income levels of nomads, as well as boost the national economy through improved knowledge, skills and practices of nomads. The NCNEs mandate includes, among other things, the following function: to formulate policy and issue guidelines in all matters relating to nomadic education in Nigeria; provide funds for: the research and personnel development for the improvement of nomadic education in Nigeria, the development of programmes on nomadic education and the provision of equipment and other instructional materials, construction of classrooms and other facilities relating to nomadic education.

Other mandates include establishment, management and maintenance of primary schools in the settlements and grazing reserves carved out for nomadic people, to determine the standards of skills to be attained in nomadic schools, to arrange for effective monitoring and evaluation of activities of agencies concerned with nomadic education; to liaise and co-operate with other relevant ministries and agencies; to receive block grants and funds from the Federal Government or any agency authorised on that behalf and allocate same to nomadic school based on any formula approved by the Federal Executive Council.

Also, to act as an agency for chanelling all external aids to nomadic schools in Nigeria; to ensure effective inspection of nomadic education activities in Nigeria through the sections in the Federal and State Ministries of Education performing duties relating to nomadic education; to collate, analyse and publish information relating to nomadic education in Nigeria; and to undertake any other action desirable for the promotion of nomadic education.

The objectives of the nomadic education programme are to: Expose the nomadic child to the elementary forms of modern education; enable the nomadic child take part in the development of his immediate environment, in particular, and the country in general; make the nomadic child self-reliant to improve his living conditions, thus eliminating the hardships and constraints in his/her life; help him/her modernise his/her techniques of herdsmanship on animal management, fishing or farming as the case may be; assist the nomadic child develop rapidly and fully both physically and intellectually, to cope with the demands of the contemporary world; and develop the initiative of the nomadic child and stimulate in him/her scientific and analytical modes of thinking.

On November 22 last year, the Executive Secretary for Nomadic Education, Professor Bashir Usman said out of the estimated population of 9.4 million nomads in Nigeria, 3.3 million are children of school age. The participation of the nomads in the existing formal and non-formal education programmes is abysmally low, with a literacy rate ranging between 0.2 per cent and 2.9 per cent.

Eric Teniola, a former director in the Presidency, writes from Lagos.
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She was until recently a UN Women Nigeria Senior Advisor, and is currently a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Africa Leadership Center, Kings College, London. She compliments her husband so well in the areas of good governance. It is a common saying in Ekiti that we got two for the price of one.

Erelu Bisi Fayemi, an international figure, gender and human right activist, is the wife of Dr Kayode Fayemi, Ekiti State governor. I wrote to celebrate her when she turned 50, eight years ago; and between then and now, she has done a lot to more improve the lives of women and children in Ekiti State. Protecting and fighting for women and children, especially the girlchild, is what she has been doing all her life.

Ekiti State is lucky to have this woman.

She has dedicated her life to defending vulnerable women and children, ever before her husband became the governor of Ekiti State. She brought this noble pastime into governance and this had given her a larger platform to impact positively on the lives of many women, widows, victims of abuse, rape, and other Boko Haram insurgency.

She was doing this through an organisation she co-founded in Ghana called, African Womens Development Fund (AWDF), with which she had lifted many vulnerable women across Africa. She assisted many widows in Enugu State and they expressed their appreciation to her when she was honoured with the title of Ochiora (leader of the people) in Umezi Owa in 2008. She also established the African Womens Leadership Institute (AWLI), a training and networking forum for young African women. The leadership institute she developed has become such a powerful legacy that today, the AWLI has trained over 6,000 women across Africa, and most of these women are now in senior decision-making positions as Ministers, Members of Parliaments, academics, civil society leaders and employees of international organisations.

When she became the wife of the governor of Ekiti State between 2010 and 2014, she sponsored and influenced many bills in the state House of Assembly aimed at giving legal teeth to the protection of women and children.

She did a lot to improve the lives of women through many empowerment programmes across the state. She launched Ekiti Development Fund (EDF) in 2011, a platform through which she assisted many categories of women, giving them grants and tools to improve their busineses. She also introduced the Multiple Trust Fund where money and cash gifts were given to mothers with multiple births. She assisted the market women and donated a bus each to Iyalojas in the 16 local governments of the State. She visited the rural areas and donated cash, materials and also influenced the sinking of boreholes in many of the remote areas.

When her husband lost re-election in 2014, she was neither deterred nor discouraged from assisting Ekiti women through her private organisation. Perhaps, this is why God rewarded her husband with a second tenure in October 2018, four years after he lost re-election. She is back in the saddle as the wife of the governor for the second time.

In the over two years she has spent in this present dispensation, she has done a lot to fight the cause of vulnerable women. Just as she sponsored the Gender Based Violence Prohobition law (2011), Equal Opportinities Bill (2013) and HIV anti-Stigma Bill (2014), she has sponsored and influenced the passage of the following Bills into law: A Law to Repeal The Ekiti State Gender- Based Violence (Prohibition) Law (2011) and Re- enact the Ekiti State Gender Based Violence (Prohibition) Law, 2019; A Law to Prohibit Discrimination Against Persons With Disabilities (2020); Ekiti State Gender-Based Violence ( Prohibition, First Amendment Law, 2020); and the Ekiti State Sexual Violence Against Children ( Compulsory Treatment and Care ) Law, 2020.

She has settled the hospital bills of many indigent women and has resettled many victims of domestic violence at the Ekiti State transit home, a building she initiated in conjunction with the Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Welfare, which was completed and commissioned last year. Recently, she came up with another novel idea of a Pad Bank, which is aimed at keeping girls in school. She had in the course of research and advocacy visit to schools, discovered that many female students of secondary schools stay way from school during their menstrual periods because of the lack of decent sanitary towels to use and this made such poor female students depressed. She, therefore, came up with the idea of the Pad Bank where she will give secondary school girls reusable sanitary pads thus solving this problem. Erelu is always thinking about how to solve problems. She is witty, intelligent and good natured. She is a cheerful giver and kind to a fault.

Apart from the above, she is an intellectual of repute and a prolific writer who has authored thought provoking books such as, Speaking Above a Whisper, Speaking for Myself, Loud Whispers, Where Is Your Wrapper? and Power and Soul, which she co-edited with Jessica Horn. She was once invited to address the United Nations on gender issues, and she has received many reputable International awards for her contribution to improving lives of women.

She was until recently a UN Women Nigeria Senior Advisor, and is currently a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Africa Leadership Center, Kings College, London. She compliments her husband so well in the areas of good governance. It is a common saying in Ekiti that we got two for the price of one. Little wonder she is nicknamed Mother-General.

As this Ekiti jewel of inestimable value celebrates her birthday today, I join others to rejoice with her. She is worthy of all encomiums. Happy Birthday Mother-General!

Hakeem Jamiu is the Deputy Speaker of Ekiti State House of Assembly.
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Apart from the USA trying to turn the world on its head and running international relations as a terrorist enterprise, the Alex Saab case shows that America sees Africa as a hostage continent it can water board at will.

Some years ago, as Secretary General of the Organisation of African Trade Union Unity (OATUU), I had diplomatic immunity provided directly by my host, Ghana; my country, Nigeria; and the African Union, which extended to me the privilege of its diplomatic passport. With the AU passport, I entered and exited countless African countries without visa and with ease. My hubs were Accra, Addis Ababa, Nairobi and Johannesburg.

I travelled so frequently through South Africa that one day, as I transited from Gabs (Gaborone) in a moment of forgetfulness, I walked towards the exit rather than the transit. I had a flight to connect, but it was too late to walk back. I simply sprinted to the diplomatic section, got my passport stamped to enter the country, walked to the departure and got stamped out, all within a few minutes, which enabled me catch my flight.

Those are some of the privileges of having a diplomatic passport, which also goes with having immunity, including from prosecution, even for spying or murder. All a host country can do is to expel the suspect.

All these are contained in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961), which provides for the inviolability of mission premises; protection of the diplomat and his or her family from any form of arrest or detention; protection of all forms of diplomatic communication; the basic principle of exemption from taxation; immunity from civil and administrative jurisdiction, but states that diplomats must respect the laws of the host state.

This has worked well for international relations, promoted multilateralism and protected the representative of any country or recognised international institution, from harassment by security agencies and governments of the host countries.

Cape Verde knows the implication of food shortages and would not ordinarily seek to block another country from buying food. But given the lack of support or protection from other countries, including the AU, and being quite vulnerable, when America told it to jump, it leapt up like a leopard to snatch Saab

It is these basic convention and principles that the United States of America (USA), a big single tree that sees itself as constituting a forest, chose to attack in a manner bordering on terrorism.

The U.S.A rested its giant frame on a tiny African country, Cape Verde, threatening to suffocate it unless it violates the Vienna Convention and fundamental human rights by seizing and extraditing to its territory, Venezuelan Special Envoy, Alex Saab, who was transiting through Cape Verde. The American establishment, in its avowed mission to ruin Venezuela and starve its people, had unilaterally imposed sanctions on that country, forbidding it from buying its basic needs, including food, petroleum products and medicines, from any part of the world. With Venezuela facing starvation, Saab had undertaken a humanitarian Special Mission to purchase food and medicines from Iran. The Americans claimed that the funds the diplomat was moving from Venezuela to Iran for the basic purchases, amounted to money laundering and ordered hapless Cape Verde to seize him on June 13, 2020, when the aircraft he was travelling in made a stopover to refuel. Ambassador Saab has been held since then; an hostage of American impunity. This is despite the fact that Switzerland, whose UBS Bank America that Saab used for the alleged money laundering, had thrown the case out. The Geneva Public Prosecutor had declared that: there is no additional element to continue the investigation on the count of Money Laundering

Cape Verde was an easy target for the American bullies. It is a tiny territory of 4,033 square kilometres and a population of 549,935 in 2019. At independence from Portugal on July 5, 1975, it was part of the larger Guinea Bissau. In fact, it was Cape Verde that produced Amilcar Cabral, one of the most intelligent, resourceful, knowledgeable and committed black leaders in history. It was Cabral who mobilised and led the armed struggle against colonialism that led to the independence of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. Today, it is classified as a poor country importing 82 per cent of its food needs.

So, Cape Verde knows the implication of food shortages and would not ordinarily seek to block another country from buying food. But given the lack of support or protection from other countries, including the AU, and being quite vulnerable, when America told it to jump, it leapt up like a leopard to snatch Saab who, apart from having diplomatic immunity, also had his mission covered by the United Nations Special Missions Convention of 1969.

But America, even under President Joe Bidden, who, compared to his predecessor, Donald Trump, looks like an angel, has neither respect for international conventions, nor compunction that it is trying to starve 27.95 million Venezuelans. The sin of Venezuela is that it had a radical President Hugo Chavez who stopped oil transnational corporations from exploiting Venezuelan oil and gas, redistributed wealth to the poor and was a friend to Fidel Castro of Cuba whom America saw as mortal enemy. After Chavez passed on March 5, 2013, Venezuelans, in the eyes of America, compounded their sins by electing a Chavez protegee, Nicholas Maduro to continue the Chavez tradition. More annoying is the fact that Maduro continues to win undisputable elections. America, before resorting to starvation as a weapon against Venezuela, tried on January 23, 2013, to impose then Venezuelan Speaker, Juan Guaido as the countrys Interim President, then sent warships in a failed attempt to prevent Iran selling oil to Venezuela.

On March 15, the ECOWAS Court ruled that Ambassador Saabs detention is illegal, as there was not even an INTERPOL Red Notice nor an arrest warrant made out before his arrest. It also ordered the extradition process initiated at the request of the U.S.A to be terminated immediately.

Ambassador Saab, who is also Venezuelas Alternate Permanent Representative to the African Union, said while in detention in Cape Verde: they tortured me and pressured me to sign a declaration of voluntary extradition and make false statements against my government. Through the Nigerian international lawyer and former President of the West African Bar Association, Mr Femi Falana, he approached the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to which Cape Verde belongs, for the enforcement of his human rights to dignity, liberty, fair hearing and freedom of movement guaranteed by Articles 5, 6, 7 and 12 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights respectively.

On March 15, the ECOWAS Court ruled that Ambassador Saabs detention is illegal, as there was not even an INTERPOL Red Notice nor an arrest warrant made out before his arrest. It also ordered the extradition process initiated at the request of the U.S.A to be terminated immediately. It further ordered Cape Verde to pay him US$200,000 in compensation.

But America refused to let go of Cape Verdes throat, so the choking country has agreed to violate the ECOWAS judicial decision and the conventions of the AU and United Nations by extraditing the hostage to the U.S.A. To show the political nature of the case and further compound its bizarre dimensions, there is even no bilateral treaty between America and Cape Verde to validate the request for the extradition.

Apart from the U.S.A trying to turn the world on its head and running international relations as a terrorist enterprise, the Alex Saab case shows that America sees Africa as a hostage continent it can water board at will.

Owei Lakemfa, a former secretary general of African workers, is a human rights activist, journalist and author.
Dear Hassan,

Thank you so much for making out time to reach across. Coming from a place buffeted by the twin evil of Boko Haram and armed bandits, we know life has not been that easy for you and your people in the North-East. Yet you made out time to engage Ndigbo in a way that only a true brother could. Daalu rinne!

Truth be told, I have never even heard your name, let alone know who you are. You see, Igbo culture is pretty heavy on respect and so naturally one would be inclined to ask for your bona fides to address umu chukwuokikeabiama. But you know, today we are living in perilous times and so I will not pass up any opportunity to engage, after all, one might argue that most of the problem we faced yesterday and are facing today could have been resolved if only we had taken more interest in talking with each other and listening to one other. Am sure you are also aware that democracy has existed in this part of the world, dating back to pre-colonial times and so its not in our nature to drown out soft voices, no matter how inconsequential. Certainly, some of the issues raised lent itself to further interrogation.

My dear brother Hassan, Ndigbo like every other group, for sure, have their own unique challenges. But make no mistake; we are definitely not Nigerias problem. Yes, not even a revisionist history can change that. Except of course if you are a Danladi Umar or Mr. Spareparts and am hard pressed to believe that you are either of those.

Hassan, you have to know that I chuckled all the way till the end as I read through your piece. Silly me! I was particularly drawn to those little sprinkles of nwanne m and ndewo. It was such a simple gesture, which yet meant a lot to me. Not even the occasional patronising and sometimes frankly condescending tone of your letter could succeed in minimising the joy I felt deep in my heart. They evoked some kind of childish giddiness, reminiscent of the day I walked into a white mans home and he offered me plantain and yam. We both know that such things rarely happen and are already used to having it the other way.

Except for the few instances where you didnt let even truth get in your way, your letter could easily have passed for one of my recent articles on the subject your sought to address. But then, you are not alone. Many in Nigeria, most especially from your part of the country claim they do not have the slightest idea what the Igbos want.

After reading your letter, my first instinct was to invite you to my home state of Enugu, for a little working tour. Just as an incentive, I would want to drive you around the major South-East cities where you could potentially grow your NEPTUNE NETWORK. But on a second thought, I had to erase the idea. What if in the process of showing you around, we chance into some of the violent hotspots and you get injured? How will I convince your kith and kin that you arent just another Northerner targeted in a pre-meditated IPOB attack? Im sure none of us want another Nigeria-Biafra war.

Now, in case you think am bluffing, I even had your itinerary carefully pencilled down in black and white, per chance you make it here. First off, Im hoping to take you to the recently renovated Akanu Ibiam International Airport, a project completed by the Buhari government and commissioned by the Hon. Minister of Aviation, Hadi Sirika. As a smart kid, maybe you could help us comprehend how after a total lockdown of one of the only two airports in Ala-Igbo for an inexcusable 370 days, all that N10 billion naira could do was a runway upgrade, while the entire place is still looking like a shitty piece of abandoned real estate. Obviously, the money was so little to provide even the logistics needed to support international operations and so you will also get to see an international airport with zero international flight in view.

Of course, we will drive down to Onitsha through our beautiful federal roads, though I have to warn you that our federal roads are a little different from what you are used to in Abuja and most of the northern states. But dont worry, I will stock up for the five-hour drive from Enugu. Its true that the 114-kilometre journey used to take just a little over two hours but its no ones fault that we have to take the diversions through all the treacherous alleys. But hey, you need to thank me. At least I didnt plan on driving you to Port Harcourt via Aba. Like I said, I got your back. While in Onitsha, Im sure you would like to see the famed Onitsha Main Market and marvel at the volume of containers of goods causing an insane traffic snarl, coming in daily from Lagos. Perhaps that will get you to convince your brothers on how an Eastern Sea port would have made a huge difference to the lives of my people and bring in more non-oil revenues, so Abuja could borrow less.

While at it, you can also help remind President Buhari that he may have forgotten that the South-East is still part of Nigeria, while designing the New Railway Plan of the Federal Government. Normally that should even make more economic sense than the $1.96 billion Kano-Maradi rail project. I think.

Almost all Igbo leader worth a name or title have come out to condemn the killing of the police, the destruction of security infrastructures and the descent to anarchy. But, of course, such will not trend. Nnamdi Kanu has a megaphone and is ready-made for the camera and so Nigeria loves to hear him

Instead of having police check points positioned at every nook and cranny of Ala-Igbo and treating us like a bunch of conquered people, please help us tell owners of Nigeria that we would rather have the Federal Government site a factory or two in Igboland so our young men and women could work and contribute to nation building. You see, that would keep them busy and steal them away from the indoctrination by IPOB/ESN. Win, win right?

Hassan, I get it that an average Nigerian cant fathom the Igbo man as a victim in this country. I know you look around and all you see are CEOs of big businesses and owners of choice real estates. But I ask, is it fair to appropriate to one what belongs to all for whatever reason? Does it matter that your brother is rich or poor, is he too not entitled to a share of the family estate? Should you need him only when its time to bear the family expenses? Bros, you dont get high-fives for robbing anyone, just because you believe the victim is a Dangote.

Whereas other Nigerians, especially Northerners, find it difficult to own land or landed properties in the South-East, major viable towns in both the North and South of the country have your brothers as major landowners. A lot of big businesses and the hospitality sector are Igbo-dominated as well.

Bro. Hassan, I laughed so hard to the point of cracking my sternum when I read those lines. Hands down, it was the most ludicrous thing I have read in a long time. Im sure you didnt have enough time to think that one through. How did you arrive at such a silly conclusion, sir? Who in your opinion is preventing the Northerners or any human being created by God from owning properties in the South-East? If you are aware of any law forbidding non-Igbos from ownership of real estate or running a legal business in Igbo land, please come forward and let the world know. As far as am concerned, an Igbo man will leave his father off and sell to you as long as you make him a better offer. But dont take my word for it, just arrange the cash and I guarantee I will personally sell you mine. Pronto. What is true is that the Igbo man does not observe federal character while trying to earn a living, running his business.

I think its rather unfortunate that many like you are unwilling or unable to understand the whole picture about Nnamdi Kanu, IPOB, Ndigbo and the nuances. Many have asked why Ndigbo would allow the group to destroy our land. Well, its not a secret that many Ndigbo, more especially younger ones are sympathetic to IPOBs underlying message, highlighting decades of official marginalisation and discrimination. Thats a fact. What is also true is that most Igbos completely condemn and despise Mr. Kanus caustic rhetoric. We are very worried and frankly disgusted by any call to arms in our soil, after the genocide that was the Nigerian-Biafran civil war. That said, outside of all the extra-judicial killings, the government security agencies have up until the time of writing this, neither made any arrest nor have they prosecuted anyone regarding what is happening in the South-East. Without such, you and I can only speculate who is behind those attacks. I believe we all witnessed the #EndSARS protest and lived through the Abacha years to realise to what extent the state could go sometimes.

Almost all Igbo leader worth a name or title have come out to condemn the killing of the police, the destruction of security infrastructures and the descent to anarchy. But, of course, such will not trend. Nnamdi Kanu has a megaphone and is ready-made for the camera and so Nigeria loves to hear him and then turn around to ascribe whatever gibberish he spews as the official position of Igbos. No one seem to care about what Ohaneze President or other Igbo leaders have to say. Why is that Hassan?

Who in his right mind will make his homeland a theatre of war? Tufiakwa!

Is it not the injustice and indignity against a people looking like an official state policy that elevated a nobody to the status of a cult figure? Please blame Nigeria and those that continue to fight the civil war, more than 50 years after the fact. Enthrone justice and equity and IPOB will fizzle out like a billow of smoke.

If you say Ndigbo are silent, its because you dont understand the predicament many sane voices face, which is pretty surprising for someone who has lived through the scourge of Boko Haram. If Kanu and IPOB were to come after me, should I trust the Nigerian Police or Army, owned and operated by your brothers to come to my rescue? Therein lies the ugly predicament, my friend. Its like blaming the woman in an abusive relationship. She may not be seen crying every day, not because she loves her ugly situation, but most times out of fear for her own life and safety. Compassion is in order here, my brother.

Is it not the injustice and indignity against a people looking like an official state policy that elevated a nobody to the status of a cult figure? Please blame Nigeria and those that continue to fight the civil war, more than 50 years after the fact. Enthrone justice and equity and IPOB will fizzle out like a billow of smoke.

To tell you the truth, with all the talks about having an Igbo President, we dont really care so much about who is the President to the extent that Okechukwu has same opportunity as Ahmed in Nigeria. Of course, it doesnt feel good to live under some kind of glass ceiling but a Nigerian President of Igbo extraction, thrown up by Northern oligarchs would replicate the Hope Uzodimma catastrophe on a national scale and Igbos are not looking forward to that. Believe it or not, we are not as stupid as we look, brother.

Before independence, a Fulani man from Sifawa, and a Prince of the Sokoto Caliphate, Mallam Umaru Altine, was elected as the first mayor of the city of Enugu, the political capital of the then Eastern region. He was first elected in 1952 but won subsequent re-elections and remained in office for six years. Meanwhile, prior to that, he was the president of the Enugu branch of the youth wing of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) and even married an Igbo girl named Esther. Cool right? Well, it might interest you to know Hassan that this was right around the time when the late Saduana of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, in a highly televised interview granted to a foreign journalist, told the world that he would rather hire an expatriate to fill a vacant position in the North than Nigerians of other tribal persuasions. Oh well!

In 2004, Gab Agu as chairman of Enugu North Local Government invited the Altine family to celebrate their late fathers achievement and for telling the Igbo story, the once forgotten Nigerian story. I bet you didnt hear that in your local news. But anyway, I dont blame you at all because we Igbos are not good at telling our stories either.

My dear brother Hassan, Ndigbo like every other group, for sure, have their own unique challenges. But make no mistake; we are definitely not Nigerias problem. Yes, not even a revisionist history can change that. Except of course if you are a Danladi Umar or Mr. Spareparts and am hard pressed to believe that you are either of those. You are way smarter. It is my hope, however, that you will do a little more digging next time instead of trafficking in platitudes and dwelling on cliches.

May the future of our country be worthy of her dream.

Aboki na, sai wata rana

Osmund Agbo, a public affairs analyst is the coordinator of African Center for Transparency and Convener of Save Nigeria Project. Email: eagleosmund@yahoo.com
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Authorities of the Nuhu Bamalli Polytechnic Zaria have announced the suspension of all academic activities in the institution hours after the school was invaded by bandits who kidnapped some staff and many students.

According to a statement by the information and protocol officer of the polytechnic, Mahmud Kwarbai, the institution has suspended all academic activities indefinitely.

This is to inform all students and the entire Polytechnic Community that following the sad incidence of attack by kidnappers that occurred last night which created serious tension amongst students, the Management of the Polytechnic has suspended all academic activities indefinitely.

Students are to vacate the school premises immediately.

However, IJMB students are excluded as their external examination which is conducted by Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria will commence on Tuesday 15th June 2021.

PREMIUM TIMES had reported how bandits attacked the UPE campus of the institution, reportedly kidnapping some lecturers and many students.

According to a statement by the institution one Ali, an HND student died as a result of gunshot wounds.
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A 2016 graduate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN) has secured foreign investment in excess of one billion naira, from the creation of three startup companies.

The UNN Vice-Chancellor, Charles Igwe, disclosed this at the universitys 49th convocation ceremony on Friday in Nsukka.

I am happy to tell this distinguished audience that a 2016 graduate of this institution, from the Department of Electronic Engineering created three startup companies and has already secured foreign investment in excess of one billion naira, he said.

Mr Igwe said UNN graduates have been doing the university proud.

He urged the graduating students to be good ambassadors of their alma mater.

According to Mr Igwe, 186 of the graduating students made first class grade.

He said a total of 11,010 first degree and diploma students were graduating at the event.

The vice-chancellor said 4,048 got second class honours (upper division), while 5,118 were graduating with second class honours (lower division).

He added that 1,101 graduated with third class while 79 secured ordinary pass and 40, unclassified.

Mr Igwe congratulated all the graduating students whose dreams of earning first degree from UNN had materialised through their dedication and hard work.

He also commended parents and guardians for denying themselves of certain pleasures of life to fund the students education, and the staff of the university for their roles.

Our society is in dire need of educated men and women like you who will contribute their quota to move the country to a greater height.

As you leave this university to face the real world, I challenge you to always go for the best for yourself and for others.

It is my hope that sooner or later, you that have graduated today, will be in a position to give back to UNN that gave you a head to start life, he said.

The Ooni of Ife, Adeyeye Ogunwusi, who is the Chancellor of the university, congratulated the graduating students and their parents.

He urged them to work toward achieving economic development, peace and harmony in the country.

(NAN)
Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu on Thursday donated 150 vehicles, four high-capacity troop carriers, 30 patrol cars, and two anti-riot water cannon vehicles to the police as part of efforts to strengthen security responses across the State.

President Muhammadu Buhari, who was visiting the state, personally took inventory and commissioned the security equipment before Governor Sanwo-Olu handed over the equipment to the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Usman Baba, for the use of Lagos Police Command.

The gadgets were procured through the Lagos State Security Trust Fund (LSSTF)  an autonomous agency that partners with the private sector and individuals to provide vital support to security agencies.

Mr Buhari said the equipment would go a long way in boosting the morale of the police, and enhance their capacity to fight crime.

Timely intervention

Mr Sanwo-Olu said the investment in the security gadgets was timely, given the setback recorded in security operations occasioned by the violence that followed the EndSARS protests, last October.

The states police command, the governor said, suffered losses in infrastructure and logistics, while the morale of the personnel dropped as a result of the impact.

Since then, the governor pointed out that Lagos had felt the negative effects of the loophole in security architecture, accounting for a rising wave of criminal activities by hoodlums seeking to take advantage of vulnerability.

No society can survive without a motivated and well-equipped Police Force, the governor said.

Hoodlums and criminals know this; hence, the relentless attacks on police installations nationwide. It is our responsibility as Government to ensure that criminals nefarious aims are not achieved. They seek to demoralise and destabilise the police and other law enforcement agents, but we will continue to boldly proclaim, Not on our watch.

Today, Lagos State Government is handing over brand new crime-fighting equipment to the State Police Command as our own way of assisting the Police Force to rebuild after the violence and massive destruction that followed the EndSARS protests last October.

We are determined to stabilise the security situation in Lagos State, as our own contribution towards lasting national security.

Other interventions

In addition to the supply of hardware to the police and other security agencies, Mr Sanwo-Olu said the Lagos Government had been building capability in cutting-edge security technology in line with his administrations security and governance pillar, which seeks to transform the State into a 21st century economy.

The governor said the state government had started the phased rollout of security cameras across the metropolis, stating that the objective was to install the 2,000 surveillance cameras connected to fibre optic network.

The state government, in conjunction with the local government, has expended enormous resources on the crime fighting equipment and other apparatus being handed over today, he said.

I urge the police to do everything in their power to ensure that these assets are handled with care and a sense of true ownership and responsibility, so that the gears can last long and maximally deliver the intended outcome, which is sustained security in Lagos.

Special Economic Status

Mr Sanwo-Olu requested for a Special Economic Status for Lagos in order to bolster the states capacity and efficiency in managing critical infrastructure servicing the national economy.

The governor thanked the president for infrastructure projects sited in Lagos, saying the Lagos-Ibadan Railway line commissioned by the president remained the most momentous any federal government has made in the state.

Meanwhile, President Buhari praised Mr Sanwo-Olu for the investment, saying the governor had shown a true resilient spirit in the face of the massive destruction Lagos suffered last October.

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Mr Buhari said the governor did not allow himself to be deterred by the severe setback, instead had started to boldly rebuilding the confidence of residents and investors in the State.

He also acknowledged the Rebuild Lagos initiative kick-started to replace assets torched by arsonists in the wake of violence, describing the move as very laudable. He enjoined other State Governments to emulate Lagos bold and proactive actions.

Let me commend Lagos State for what it is doing in the areas of reinforcement and support for the security agencies in the State, the president said.

I also commend all the private sector partners who have risen up to the challenge and partnered with the State Government in its ongoing battle to quell the upsurge of crime and insecurity. It is my hope that this public-private sector partnership will be an example to others to demonstrate similar acts of generosity and responsibility.

Other gadgets donated by the Sanwo-Olu Government to the police include two Armoured Personnel Carriers (APCs), 200 security patrol bikes, 1,000 units of ballistic vests, 1,000 ballistic helmets, 1,000 handheld walkie-talkies, office furniture, and other ancillary resources.

While in Lagos, President Buhari, joined by Governor Sanwo-Olu also commissioned the 156Km Lagos-Ibadan Standard Gauge Rail, and Deep Blue Security Assets Project to secure the nations Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and the Gulf of Guinea.
Inheritors of Chinas wonderous intangible cultural heritage

People's Daily Online) 17:22, June 11, 2021

China will hold several colorful activities to celebrate this years Cultural and Natural Heritage Day, which falls on June 12, aiming to promote the countrys intangible cultural heritage.

In order to protect these invaluable cultural assets, the country has established a tiered system for its intangible cultural heritage, spanning the national, provincial, municipal and county levels. More than 100,000 items have been registered in the system, and over 90,000 individuals are currently identified as representative inheritors of intangible cultural heritage. Lets discover the stories behind some of these inheritors.

 File photo shows one example of Yang Huazhens many embroidery works.

 Fu Leilei (R) works on a velvet flower handicraft. (Peoples Daily/Yao Xueqing)

 File photo shows a velvet flower handicraft made by Zhao Shuxians team.

 Photo shows a completed lacquer work. (Photo/Zhang Qiang)

 File photo shows a traditional handmade kite.

 Photo shows a piece of sugar-figure blowing art. (Photo/Zhang Qiang)

 Photo shows clay figurines modelled in the image of the Rabbit God. (Photo/Zhang Qiang)

Yang Huazhen, inheritor of Tibetan and Qiang Embroidering

Yang Huazhen, 63, is a national-level inheritor of Tibetan and Qiang Embroidering, a blend of Tibetan weaving, cross-stitching techniques and Qiang embroidery.

Born in Xiaojin county of the Aba Tibetan and Qiang autonomous prefecture, southwest Chinas Sichuan province, Yang inherited this traditional embroidery craft from her family.

She used to be a teacher and a photojournalist as well as running her own photo studios. After the magnitude-8 earthquake struck Wenchuan county in Sichuan in 2008, Yang began to operate an embroidery business to help the victims of the earthquake. She, along with 18 other embroiderers began the project in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan.

The woman incorporates a wide range of themes into her embroidery works, including natural scenery and human activities, as well as unique scenes from Tibetan and Qiang daily life. Her works featuring strong ethnic elements soon rose to fame.

Yangs handicrafts and designs have inspired some international brands to introduce products adopting some of the elements found in her ethnic-inspired fashion. Her embroidery works have been taken up by over 20 famous brands at home and abroad.

In addition to delivering the embroidering tradition to the world stage, Yang has also taught the inherited craft to local women, helping them to increase their incomes. So far, she has trained 58 apprentices and has provided guided instruction to about 4,000 people, including 500 rural embroiderers in Wenchuan.

Fu Leilei, apprentice of velvet flower-making techniques

The 28-year-old Fu Leilei, who once worked in a factory in Nanjing, capital of east Chinas Jiangsu province, is an apprentice of Zhao Shuxian, a representative inheritor of local velvet flower-making techniques, an intangible cultural heritage of the province.

According to Fu, the process for making a velvet flower is quite complicated, as a skilled craftsperson needs to combine colorful silk with copper wires to fashion together the velvet sticks.

Sticking to the traditional handiwork, Fu has begun to incorporate Morandi's color palettes, which have become popular among young people, and new materials such as freshwater pearls into his works, which have come to enjoy great popularity in the market.

In addition to headwear, the young man has also made velvet products in many other forms, including bonsai works and decorative pictures.

A younger generation of people working as velvet flower handicraft makers will contribute to new innovative approaches and ensure the inheritance and continued development of intangible cultural heritage in China, Zhao said.

So far, Zhaos studio has 16 employees, including seven velvet flower handicraft makers, who were all born in the 1990s.

Pema Dorje, craftsman of Regong arts

This year marks the third year for Pema Dorje, 36 years old, since he started learning how to model clay figurines at an arts and culture company established by a skilled craftsman, Kelsang Tsering, in the Huangnan Tibetan autonomous prefecture, northwest Chinas Qinghai province.

Seeking a better life for his family, Pema Dorje came to the company three years ago to train in the traditional craft.

Huangnan is the cradle of Regong arts, a UNESCO-listed intangible cultural heritage, which includes clay figurines.

We can create high-quality artwork only by taking each procedure seriously, from clay selection and sculpting to wiping and coloring, said Pema Dorje, who can earn 160 yuan (about $25) per day and receive up to 30,000 yuan in bonus earnings each year, which has helped him to get out of poverty. The man plans to run his own company selling clay figurines after mastering the techniques.

Kelsang Tserings company has trained over 100 apprentices just like Pema Dorje. Five of them are running their own companies, Kelsang Tsering introduced.

Kelsang Tsering also makes sculptures of plants and animals, among other subjects. His products have been sold in many provinces, including in Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan.

In Huangnan, the art of modeling these clay figurines has gained new vitality and has enabled many people to increase their incomes while remaining close to home.

At the beginning, I learned the craft to make a living. But now I have fallen in love with the intangible cultural heritage and believe that we can carry it forward, Pema Dorje said.

Zhang Qiang, director of documentaries on intangible cultural heritage

Apart from the direct inheritors of intangible cultural heritage, directors of documentary films can also play their part in ensuring the inheritance and promotion of these invaluable cultural assets. Zhang Qiang, now in his thirties, is one of these filmmakers.

In March 2020, Zhang became the director of a documentary on lacquer art that was financially backed by the regional intangible cultural heritage protection center in Xicheng district, Beijing.

Over the past year, Zhang visited several hundreds of people, including representative inheritors of the lacquer art, lacquer tree growers, and lacquer researchers located in Beijing and three provinces in China, having recorded the ancient techniques for making raw lacquer.

The documentary records the entire process for carving raw lacquer for the first time, boasted Ma Ning, a representative inheritor of lacquer carving, a traditional Chinese folk art.

In collaboration with the center, Zhang also filmed an 80-episode documentary on intangible cultural heritage as well as another standalone documentary on Chinas famed culinary culture, having covered nearly 100 different items of intangible cultural heritage, including the face-changing techniques of Sichuan Opera.

(Web editor: Hongyu, Bianji)
Medical doctors employed by the Ondo State Government have begun a two-week warning strike to press for better working conditions.

The doctors, under the National Association of Government General Medical and Dental Practitioners, said the state government had failed to pay their salary arrears for some months. They also alleged that the state had failed to resolve the issue of the exodus of doctors and other health workers, among other issues.

They gave the notice in a letter addressed to the state governor, Rotimi Akeredolu, after its meeting on June 9, 2021.

The letter was signed by the state chairman and secretary of the NAGGMDP, Roland Arohunmolase and Richard Obe respectively.

With due respect to your office, we write to notify your office of the immediate withdrawal of service by our members working under Ondo State Government Civil Service, the letter, titled the Notice of Withdrawal of Service, read.

Following Ordinary General Meeting of our association held on Wednesday 9th of June, 2021, members resolved at proceeding on two weeks warning strike starting from 8:00 am, 10th of June, 2021.

The doctors went further to list the nonpayment of salary arrears being owed health workers in Ondo State (January 2017, March, April and May 2021), gross understaffing of government hospitals following mass exodus of doctors and other health workers from the state, non-regular payment of salaries and non-harmonization of doctors grade level in Ondo State Civil Service as approved by the Governor as contained in the letter written to Nigerian Medical Association Ondo State in March, 2021.

The doctors also complained of percentage payment of salaries to health workers, non-payment of the third tranche of COVID-19 allowance, and non-implementation of Group Life Insurance for all Health workers.

Against this backdrop, we wish to let you know that our members have been overstretched and their emotional intelligence badly affected, the letter further read.

Ondo State is being overpopulated and this has increased the numbers of patient patronage at various government-owned health facilities.

Invariably, it has become unbearable to cope with the deplorable state of things in Ondo State Government-owned hospitals.

We hereby state that it is not the wish of our members to proceed on this industrial action, but it is necessary to draw your attention and that of the citizenry to the afore-mentioned.

The Association hopes Mr. Governor will do the needful in addressing our dissatisfaction as contained in this letter.

Mr Akeredolu had reached an agreement with state workers on the need to pay a percentage of their salaries, pending improvement in revenues.

But the doctors had rejected such payments, prompting a reaction from the governor, who said the doctors could not be treated differently from other state workers.

The governors outburst had also met with a rebuke from the Nigeria Medical Association, who called the governor to order.

PREMIUM TIMES, however, gathered that efforts by a government team on labour issues were underway to assuage the striking doctors.

The Chief Press Secretary to the Governor, Richard Olabode, said a clearer picture on the matter would be made known on Friday.

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The police in Lagos say they are unaware of any planned protest on June 12 in the state and urged Lagosians to move on with their daily businesses.

This is contained in a statement released on Friday by Muyiwa Adejobi, the police spokesperson.

There have been calls for protests against bad governance, insecurity, killings, and the gag of the media by the Nigerian government to coincide with the June 12 Democracy Day event.

The Lagos State Police Command wishes to state clearly that it is not aware of any planned protest in Lagos State to commemorate the 2021 Democracy Day on Saturday, 12th June, 2021, the police said in the statement.

The Lagos police added that there is no sit-at-home order in the state, contrary to rumours in the public space that people should stay at home on Democracy Day.

The Commissioner of Police, Lagos State, CP Hakeem Odumosu, therefore appeals to members of the public to disregard any sit-at-home order called by certain groups which is being circulated in the social media and go about their lawful businesses as the police and other security agencies have made necessary arrangement to maintain law and order across the state,  the police said.

June 12 is a day set aside by the government to celebrate the restoration of democracy in the country.

It was a day in honour of Moshood Abiola, the presumed winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, who later died in military detention.

In 2018, Muhammadu Buhari, the President of Nigeria moved Democracy Day from its earlier May 29 date to June 12.

Call for protests

Several Nigerians, including organised groups such as agitators for Yoruba Nation have called for peaceful rallies across Nigeria against bad governance and insecurity.

Nigerian youth in different states also teamed up to coordinate the June 12 peaceful protests.

The protest is expected to hold in states including Lagos, Kano, Oyo, Osun, Cross River, Ogun, Ondo, Ekiti, Abia Akwa Ibom, Delta and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.

While right to peaceful assembly is a fundamental human right, the Nigerian government under Mr Buhari has been known in the past to crack down on such gatherings deemed confrontational by state officials.
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As Nigeria marks the 2021 Democracy Day on Saturday, the All Progressives Congress (APC) national leader, Bola Tinubu, has urged Nigerians to remember M.K.O Abiola whose victory in the June 12, 1993, presidential election was annulled.

Mr Tinubu made the call in a congratulatory message to the nation on Friday.

Abiola remained steadfast and surrendered his own life so that we all might enjoy the democratic victory that was taken from him, he said.

Mr Tinubu said that without Mr Abiolas efforts and sacrifices, June 12 would not have been declared the nations Democracy Day.

He urged Nigerians to remember others who sacrificed so much to bring democracy to Nigeria.

We best honour these people not by reciting their names but by injecting the spirit and hope of democracy into our words and deeds.

In becoming better democrats, we also become better at being Nigerians.

Mr Tinubu further called on Nigerians to stand for democracy.

According to the APC leader, democratic good governance offers solutions to national challenges.

He urged that in spite of the challenges Nigerians were going through, they must stand for democracy.

Democratic good governance offers the only reasonable solution to the challenges confronting Nigeria.

Thus, we must stand for democracy today. We must stand for it, even more, tomorrow, he said.

The former governor of Lagos State also urged Nigerians to stand against whatever could hinder democracy.

He urged them to stand against those engaging in insurrection and violence as well as those trading in bigotry and hatred.

We contend against those who would render the people ignorant and poor.

We celebrate Democracy Day not only because we have come far but to help give us the social fuel and encouragement to continue onward because we have farther to go and even greater things to achieve as one nation and one people, Mr Tinubu said.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Nigeria now marks its Democracy Day on June 12 annually instead of May 29.
A Lagos-based lawyer and human rights activist, Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa, has called on Nigerians, civil society organisations, and non-governmental organisations to boycott any event organised by the government in celebration of June 12 Democracy Day.

President Muhammadu Buhari moved Democracy Day from May 29 to June 12 every year, to honour Moshood Abiola, the winner of the June 12, 1993, presidential election.

Mr Adegboruwa, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), said it would be hypocritical of the government to claim to celebrate the ideals of the June 12 mandate, when the same government is in gross violation of the freedom of expression by people it claims to govern.

Making reference to the ban of Twitter and the unwarranted censorship of media organisations by the Nigerian government, the lawyer said the acts contravene the ideals of democracy.

June 12 represents total freedom, the free expression of the will of the people, justice, equality and respect for human rights.

We cannot continue to live in a nation where the exercise of the fundamental and constitutional rights of citizens depends on the personal idiosyncrasies of those in power, where the institutions of State are deployed whimsically, to settle personal grievances, as President Buhari is doing in respect of his personal dispute with Twitter, for which all Nigerians are now subjected to forced solidarity, Mr Adegboruwa said.

The lawyer called on Nigerians to isolate themselves from government activities by boycotting all programmes and events scheduled for June 12 celebration.

Nigerian youth and organised groups across Nigeria had disclosed intentions to hold peaceful rallies and protests against bad governance, insecurity and other societal ills.

The protests are scheduled to hold in almost all the states of Nigeria.

Defend lives and human rights

In another statement, the Coalition for Revolution (CORE) called on Nigerians to arise and defend human rights which are the tenets of democracy using the June 12democracy day.

The group said following the controversial death of Mr Abiola in military detention and the eventual return to civilian rule in 1999, Nigeria has suffered gross violations of human rights and other vices.

Unfortunately, since 1999, a very venal and criminal-minded class of politicians has seized Nigerians by the jugular, subjecting the country to an unprecedented regime of looting of public resources, destruction of public services especially education, healthcare, potable water and electricity while they literally stole national assets and companies worth trillions of dollars in bogus privatization exercises.

June 12 today is a clarion call for us to all rise up and restate the reasons why we and our fathers and mothers fought for democracy, CORE said in the statement.

The group added that the insecurities and unrest rocking different parts of the country are results of use of bandits and armed criminals by politicians to rig elections.

After the elections, the armed bandits become terror on the rest of society. This results in terrible insecurity all over the country while farmers are terrorized to abandon the farms. Prices of food have skyrocketed while mass unemployment of young people is rife.

The group urged Nigerians to fight for their rights and reject all forms of oppression and suppression.

We call on all Nigerians to resist the Buhari government descent to totalitarianism marked by the vicious mass killing of peaceful protesters during the Endsars Protests and the recent ban on Twitters and the regimes quest to restrict free speech.

We call on all Nigerians to also learn from our history and resist moneybag politicians. They serve themselves and not the 99% of the masses. We must kick them out and throw off the burden of their exploitative system that threatens to destroy the poor working people,  the group said.

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CORE demanded that as Nigeria marks democracy day, there should be increased funding of basic public goods especially education, healthcare, potable water supply and electricity.

The group also demanded a more concerted war on the bandits armed by politicians causing mayhem all over the country, adding that communities should be encouraged to arm and protect themselves from the bandits.
PARIS, May 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- MediaConnect, an AFP subsidiary, will offer an innovative service that will facilitate and simplify relations between journalists and public relations professionals from businesses, institutions and NGOs.

Through this platform, which will also be available for mobile, journalists will be able to freely access a wide range of content: press releases, photos, audio, video, live events, broadcasters' agendas, archives and image banks.

They will be able to receive notifications about their choice of topics and customize how they use the platform according to their priorities.

MediaConnect will use encryption technology to ensure the absolute security of sensitive material and prevent the publication of fake statements.

With MediaConnect, public relations professionals will be able to promote, enhance and target their messages in both French and English.

The platform, which mainly will target the French market in the first instance, also offers the possibility of managing the distribution of content on an international scale and to measure its impact through a series of tools.

The public will have access to MediaConnect and will be able to consult announcements from companies, institutions and organisations at source.

The platform will be fully operational by mid-June. MediaConnect will then become available to business, institutions and organisations and will offer newsroom training.

AFP chairman Fabrice Fries said: "With this new subsidiary, we continue to develop media services with a unique tool, in line with our core business and areas of expertise."

The platform was designed in partnership with the company Epresspack, one of the main suppliers of turnkey press sites to companies and institutions. This technological expertise complements AFP's know-how in multimedia content management and its understanding of journalists' requirements.

"We are very proud of this technological, commercial and financial partnership with AFP", said Antoun Sfeir, CEO and founder of Epresspack. "It is a recognition of the innovative solutions we have been developing for 10 years for the benefit of companies and their reputations".

AFP has named Anne Boussarie as managing director of its new subsidiary. This media industry professional has over 20 years of international sales and marketing experience.

"Our ambition is to offer the largest virtual media centre for public relations professionals and a working tool for journalists, which will become indispensable to them all", she said.

About AFP

AFP is a leading global news agency providing fast, comprehensive and verified coverage of the events shaping our world and of the issues affecting our daily lives. Drawing from an unparalleled news gathering network across 151 countries, AFP is also a world leader in digital verification. With 2,400 staff representing 100 different nationalities, AFP covers the world in six languages, with a unique quality of multimedia storytelling spanning video, text, photos and graphics.

About Epresspack

Epresspack is the communication showcase for 300 major brands and multi-sector companies (30% in the CAC 40 and 10% in the FOOTSIE 100). A publisher and SAAS specialist, this French tech player deploys content platforms (publication, certification, distribution, live, audience analysis, workplace) dedicated to the reputation issues of brands and companies. Founded and chaired by Antoun Sfeir, the start-up - whose economic model is based on subscriptions - has a turnover of 4M (+20%) and 50 employees (Paris, London, Milan and Madrid).

About MediaConnect

An independent subsidiary of the global news agency AFP, MediaConnect is a platform that seeks to facilitate and optimise relations between information professionals and communications officers for companies, institutions and NGOs. For journalists, access will be free for content where the source is certified, in an environment which allows them to customise content and be alerted about the information of their choice. For communications officers, it will be the ideal tool to showcase their messages in front of their target audience.

SOURCE AFP
DUBAI, UAE, May 30, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- No one is too small to make a positive impact on the planet. This is what a new Dubai based start-up, Olive Gaea, is ready to prove as it launches the first carbon offset platform in the MENA region today.

Having the sixth largest per capita carbon footprint in the world, UAE residents and businesses will now be able to become carbon neutral or even carbon positive by removing their own carbon emissions from the atmosphere in just a couple of clicks.

"Climate change is a real, urgent threat. We all share the responsibility to act in order to preserve our planet and, ultimately, our very future. The good news is that each one of us can now actually help solve this problem," says Olive Gaea's Founder and CEO, Vivek Tripathi.

Olive Gaea calculates the carbon footprint of any individual or business through a simple yet science-based questionnaire. It then provides dedicated plans and a list of carbon offsetting solutions and verified climate projects, and allows users to track progress and get rewarded driving more positive change through monthly and annual subscriptions. Moreover, the platform allows customers to offset purchases made on e-commerce businesses including grocery orders, food and fuel delivery, and online stores, among others.

Accountability, trustworthiness, and transparency are at the heart of the process. Olive Gaea only supports carbon offsetting projects that are handpicked and verified by third party agencies like Verra and Plan Vivo. The platform is also powered by precise geo-tagging and QR code tracking, so users can know the exact location and the impact they help to generate with new plantation projects in just a few clicks.

"We launched Olive Gaea to create a world where people can feel proud about their climate story. Our goal is to make carbon offsetting affordable, helping everyone, anywhere, anytime to build a resilient climate future," says Vivek.

Olive Gaea's carbon offsetting is not about paying to eliminate a sense of guilt for excessive emissions or an unsustainable lifestyle. According to Vivek, offsetting carbon emissions must always go hand in hand with sustainable strategies that aim at reducing the environmental footprint in the first place. Yet, carbon credits are still needed to offset the remaining carbon emissions's balance.

In fact, while some of the carbon emissions can be prevented and reduced, both businesses and individuals find that with the current technologies it is still impossible or way too expensive to fully eliminate their emissions. That's where carbon offsetting solutions like Olive Gaea come into play.

Vivek explains: "With our platform, we aim to generate the awareness needed to act sustainably; understanding and measuring our own environmental footprint is the first step to a more conscious lifestyle. We believe in action and in the power of each individual's choices to preserve our planet and our future."

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nearly 200 countries have endorsed the global goal of limiting the rise in average temperatures to 2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and ideally 1.5 degrees. To meet this target, global greenhouse-gas emissions should be cut by 50 percent of current levels by 2030 and reduced to net zero by 2050.

The UAE is one of the signatories of the Paris Agreement and has recently reaffirmed its goal to become a global leader in the green economy and address climate change. Having launched prominent strategic initiatives spanning from the National Agenda 2021 to the Energy Strategy 2050 and the Dubai 2040 Master plan, just to name a few, the country still faces an extremely high per capita carbon footprint.

UAE residents, in fact, generate around 22 tonnes of CO2 emissions annually on average against a global average of 4.8 tonnes, way above the limit that would allow the world to meet the Paris Agreement's targets and limit global warming. Olive Gaea, while supporting the UAE's strategy to focus on sustainable development and green economy, helps both companies and people to balance out their carbon emissions.

Research shows that, alongside cutting CO2 emissions, carbon offsetting and voluntary carbon credits can help achieve the net zero target by financing climate-action projects that generate additional benefits including biodiversity protection, pollution prevention, and local community support and development. According to the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets (TSVCM), the demand for carbon credits could increase 15 times or more in the next decade, pushing the global carbon credit market's value to no less than $50 billion by 2030.

To know more about Olive Gaea, visit www.olivegaea.com

About Olive Gaea

Founded by Vivek Tripathi and Apurva Bhandari, Olive Gaea is a web/mobile application where businesses and individuals can calculate their carbon footprint and choose to offset it through easy subscription plans in a couple of clicks.

Carbon footprint is a measure of GHG emissions released due to a particular activity, such as cooling your home, heating your lunch, or taking a flight from Dubai to London. Some of the activities, like producing phones, flying planes, or eating meat are particularly carbon-intensive. Staked together over a certain period of time, those activities make up your individual or business carbon footprint. Calculating your personal or business footprint is the first step to owning your climate story. Olive Gaea developed simple and accurate tools that let you find out the exact sources of emissions from your lifestyle and business operations and what can be done about them.

SOURCE Olive Gaea

Related Links

https://www.olivegaea.com/


Westinghouse is first to join IAEA Nuclear Saves Partnerships -- uniting the best of science and technology to improve lives around the world

CRANBERRY TOWNSHIP, Pa., June 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Westinghouse Electric Company is joining the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)'s "Nuclear Saves Partnerships", a new initiative designed to mitigate the impacts of climate change via investment in nuclear power technology, renewable integrated energy systems and climate smart agriculture, among others.

"I am grateful to Westinghouse Electric Company for becoming the first partner of Nuclear Saves. Funding from Westinghouse will bolster our efforts in the area of climate change mitigation and clean energy. I am keen to ensure that the IAEA, with the support of Westinghouse and others, will remain at the forefront of deploying nuclear science and technology to address global challenges," said IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi.

"This partnership is another demonstration of our commitment to the fight against climate change, and an important step in deepening the relationship between Westinghouse and the IAEA," said Westinghouse President and Chief Executive Officer Patrick Fragman. "We are proud to serve as a model for future public-private partnerships as the world joins together in seeking to combat the effects of climate change."

Nuclear power is the world's largest source of carbon-free energy and is critical to help reverse climate change trends and meet decarbonization deadlines established by the world's leading climate scientists. Operating at full power nearly 93% of the time, nuclear power plants reliably fill the renewable energy void that intermittent sources such as wind and solar alone cannot fill.

The Nuclear Saves Partnerships is an opportunity for companies to support the IAEA in transferring nuclear science and technology to countries to improve the health and prosperity of millions of people around the world. The IAEA unites the best of global science, technology and human ingenuity to help its 173 Member States in addressing some of the world's most pressing challenges. Funds from Nuclear Saves Partnerships will enable the IAEA to accelerate the peaceful uses of nuclear energy for cancer diagnosis and treatment, the prevention and control of zoonotic diseases, as well as climate change adaptation, mitigation and transition to clean energy. For more information please write to: [email protected].

Westinghouse Electric Company is the world's pioneering nuclear energy company and is a leading supplier of nuclear plant products and technologies to utilities throughout the world. Westinghouse supplied the world's first commercial pressurized water reactor in 1957 in Shippingport, Pa., U.S. Today, Westinghouse technology is the basis for approximately one-half of the world's operating nuclear plants. For more information, please visit www.westinghousenuclear.com.

Contact: Sheriece Dick

Director, Strategic Communications

Westinghouse Electric Company

Telephone: +1 571-489-1351

Email: [email protected]

Related Links

www.westinghousenuclear.com



SOURCE Westinghouse Electric Company
The Calcium Chloride market is poised to grow by USD 0.23 Billion, progressing at a CAGR of almost 3.71% during the forecast period.

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This Calcium Chloride procurement intelligence report has enlisted the top suppliers and their cost structures, SLA terms, best selection criteria, and negotiation strategies.

Zirax Ltd.

Nedmag BV

Tiger Calcium

Ward Chemical Ltd.

Jafcco

SpendEdge suggests three forecast scenarios (optimistic, probable, and pessimistic) considering the impact of COVID-19. SpendEdge's in-depth research has direct and indirect COVID-19 impacted market research reports.

Request for a FREE sample to access the definite purchasing guide on Calcium Chloride procurement.

Related Reports on Materials Include:

Aluminum - Forecast and Analysis: The aluminum will grow at a CAGR of 4.79% during 2021-2025. Prices will increase by (1.5)%-3.5% during the forecast period and suppliers will have a moderate bargaining power in this market. Plastic Bags and Pouches Sourcing and Procurement Report: This report evaluates suppliers based on product portfolio, ability to provide tested products, logistics and distribution, and innovations. Pallets - Sourcing and Procurement Intelligence Report: This report evaluates suppliers based on global accessibility of distribution network, production capacity and capacity utilization, capability to track the delivery shipment, and immediate receptiveness to manage supply chain disruptions.

To access the definite purchasing guide on the Calcium Chloride that answers all your key questions on price trends and analysis:

Am I paying/getting the right prices? Is my Calcium Chloride TCO (total cost of ownership) favorable?

How is the price forecast expected to change? What is driving the current and future price changes?

Which pricing models offer the most rewarding opportunities?

Table of Content

Executive Summary

Market Insights

Category Pricing Insights

Cost-saving Opportunities

Best Practices

Category Ecosystem

Category Management Strategy

Category Management Enablers

Suppliers Selection

Suppliers under Coverage

US Market Insights

Category scope

Appendix

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SOURCE SpendEdge

Related Links

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BEIJING, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- This is a report from China.org.cn:

On Wednesday, President of China Duty Free Group (CDFG) Charles Chen recognized the promising prospects of the global alcoholic beverage market and shed light on the beneficial impact of Hainan's offshore duty-free policy on the sector.

"The implementation of Hainan's offshore duty-free policy has tapped into the huge potential of duty-free shopping among Chinese consumers," said Chen via a video link at the French Association of Wine and Spirits Exporters (FEVS) Annual General Meeting. "This also puts Hainan in the spotlight of the global tourism and retail industry, drawing attention from recognizable brands around the world," he added.

China's domestic tourism and retail industry continues to boom currently. Statistics from Haikou Customs show Hainan's offshore duty-free sales amounted to 993 million yuan (about 127 million euros) during the country's five-day May Day holiday.

The market potential has been highly recognized by global top alcoholic beverage companies, and many of them intend to explore the duty-free business opportunities in Hainan.

According to Chen, CDFG has introduced some 300 alcoholic beverage brands and over 1,000 stock-keeping units to Hainan. Through analyzing the region's consuming feature on the sector, the company also brought in limited-edition products and CDFG exclusives and organized themed promotion events. All these have helped increase the influence of Hainan's offshore duty-free alcoholic beverage market among consumers.

Given the effective pandemic prevention and control efforts and the promotion of vaccines, Chen also envisioned the sector's future development when overseas travel resumes. According to a recent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), China's outbound tourism is expected to return to pre-pandemic levels in early 2024.

Before the pandemic outbreak, China used to have the highest travel and tourism expenditures. "The Chinese market is big enough and has tremendous opportunities," Chen stressed. He also acknowledged the fast-growing consumption potential among people born in the 1990s, adding that their demand will translate into thriving business opportunities for alcoholic beverage companies.

With the soaring sales revenue of alcoholic beverages in Hainan, the sector is very promising in both tourism retail sales and traditional distribution, Chen noted.

Looking ahead, with the support from its parent company China Tourism Group (CTG), CDFG plans to introduce more global brands and limited-edition products into China with better prices to meet the demand of Chinese consumers, so as to further promote the sustained and sound development of global tourism and the retail market via cooperation and innovation.

CDFG President Charles Chen: Global alcoholic beverage market highly promising

http://www.china.org.cn/business/2021-06/11/content_77563023.htm

SOURCE China.org.cn
SHENZHEN, China, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a major international provider of telecommunications, enterprise and consumer technology solutions for the mobile internet, and China Unicom have done a commercial trial of the industry's first Intelligent Radio Network Orchestration Solution, with both user orchestration and network orchestration, in Dalian, China.

At the beginning of 2021, ZTE released the industry's first Intelligent Orchestration Radio Network Solution, based on the ZTE's vision and the work for 5G network development. Powered by base station native intelligence, this solution improves user experiences by virtue of user orchestration and network orchestration, meeting more diverse requirements of both B2B and B2C services.

The results show that user orchestration can achieve improvement in both 5G user experiences and 5G camping ratio. The uplink NR low-throughput user ratio is reduced by 50% while the handover delay is reduced by 50% and the 5G camping ratio is increased significantly.

Furthermore, when 4G/5G dynamic spectrum sharing is on, the network orchestration can automatically adjust the spectrum configurations according to the traffic requirements. The average 5G user throughput is increased by 20%-130% adapting to spectrum configuration, while the 4G user number and traffic remain unaffected. This brings new possibilities to NR user experience improvement and O&M simplification in the 4G/5G dynamic spectrum sharing scenario.

To date, ZTE and China Unicom have made great progress in various innovation pilot fields. For instance, ZTE won the ICT China 2020 Annual Excellent Solution Award for its trusted sharing solution based on the blockchain technology in the 5G RAN sharing scenario, and was rewarded the Best Practice Award for 5G Network and Terminal Coordination for its 5G low-altitude private network.

Moving forward, ZTE and China Unicom will collaborate further with each other in intelligent radio network orchestration from standards, products and services to facilitate research, development and commercial applications, aiming at building 5G networks with enhanced user experiences and network efficiency.

Media Contacts:

Margaret Ma

ZTE Corporation

Tel: +86 755 26775189

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE ZTE Corporation

Related Links

www.zte.com.cn


AARHUS, Denmark, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- APX10, a Nordic based SaaS company specialized in helping water utilities make valuable decisions based on its market leading asset management and big data analytics platform, data|APX, today announced a partnership with Aliaxis Ventures by way of an investment agreement signed with private equity owner Cimbria Capital. Aliaxis Ventures - the corporate venture capital arm of Aliaxis, a multinational business specializing in pipe solutions with over 14,000 employees in 45 countries - possesses worldwide connections in water management markets and will assist APX10 expand internationally alongside Cimbria. Both Aliaxis and Cimbria integrate unique value-add initiatives to support water innovators like APX10 through a combination of capital, global networks, and customized growth programs.

APX10 provides advanced data analytics through its proprietary platform - data|APX. The platform ensures that water utilities translate critical information into actionable insights for decision-makers aiming to optimize their water and sewage networks reinvestment. APX10's data analytics platform is uniquely positioned to meet the digital transformation needs of European and North American water infrastructure markets. By its plug-and-play data sourcing, the platform maximizes value through utility costs savings, investment optimization, and optimized digital workforce.

"This new strategic collaboration with Aliaxis will help provide additional access to global water infrastructure markets. Based on our experience and growing market share in the Nordic markets we are eager to pursue opportunities in new markets where we together with Aliaxis can create actionable and sizable impact for water utilities," said Ulrich B. Hansen, CEO of APX10. "Given the large industrial influence of Aliaxis, we are positive their involvement will prove valuable for water utilities seeking a digital solution for precision reinvestment priorities as well as being positive for our own growth ambitions."

"APX10's data-driven overview of network performance including financial and operational visualization is exemplary for the water industry," stated Fabian Seunier, Head of Aliaxis Ventures who will join the board of APX10. "Thanks to APX10's data analytics platform, the investments and maintenance in water piping networks can be better targeted, thereby increasing their impact on water preservation and on preventing water leakages and consequences of piping systems failures. APX10 offers a smart and easy-to-adopt analytical platform for water and wastewater utilities to rely on digital and data-driven decision support tools; and we are proud to collaborate with APX10 to support the deployment of their platform."

"Since inception, Cimbria has prided itself on generating value for portfolio companies via its far-reaching networks and domain expertise in the Water Economy," said Brian V. Iversen, Managing Partner of Cimbria Capital. "Aliaxis' participation in APX10 is indicative that by merging financial and sector connections Cimbria can collaboratively accelerate the water-focused companies of the future."

About APX10 A/S: APX10 is a SaaS company with core competences in the water and wastewater industries. The firm helps utilities make valuable decisions based on their proprietary digital asset management and big data analytics platform data|APX.

About Aliaxis and Aliaxis Ventures: Aliaxis Ventures invests in innovative and collaborative companies active in solving water-related challenges. The firms support value creation for both startups and its own parent company, the Aliaxis Group - a global leader in advanced piping systems for building, infrastructure, industrial and agriculture applications. The company is privately owned, with its global headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

About Cimbria Capital:

Cimbria Capital is a private equity investment firm conducting growth capital buyout investments focused on the Water Economy in North America and the Nordics. Cimbria allocates capital to visionary companies and supports these businesses with operational expertise through its value-add Acceleration Program.

Related Images

image1.jpg

SOURCE APX10
Attendance far exceeds expectations for the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair and the Canada-Wide Science Fair, but ProjectBoard rises to the occasion and delivers!

TORONTO, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Engineering.com (engineering.com) announces the successful execution and support for two of the world's largest and highly attended virtual STEM conferences in the same week. During the third week of May, ProjectBoard, developed by engineering.com, provided the platform and resources to successfully deliver and manage both the 2021 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (Regeneron ISEF) and the Canada-Wide Science Fair (CWSF), hosted by Youth Science Canada (YSC).

"The importance of cultivating young scientific minds cannot be overstated," says Frank Baldesarra, engineering.com's Co-Founder & CEO. "Organizations that provide outlets for STEM students to compete and showcase their inventions often lay the foundation for future careers and achievements in engineering and related fields. We developed ProjectBoard to showcase student projects while creating meaningful connections through engagement, recognition, and feedback. We're excited that it also serves as a strong resource for online events. The platform helps bring some excitement from the physical world into the virtual, allows real-time conversations, and builds lasting impressions that extend beyond the event."

According to ProjectBoard Co-Founder and engineering.com Chief Technology Officer Renata Vaccaro, "the size, scope, complexity, and timing of Regeneron ISEF and CWSF required an extraordinary amount of preparation and effort by our team before and during the events. We are delighted with the results and proud to be associated with such great organizations. The ProjectBoard platform has proven to be a unique and valuable solution since its launch in 2019 and we continue to see new and exciting opportunities for different applications. The platform, in addition to hosting major STEM events, supports Project Based Learning initiatives, community sites like makeprojects.com , and corporate sites like engineering.com.

During their conference, the Regeneron ISEF finalists competed for nearly $5 million in awards, prizes, and scholarships. There were 154,429 new user visits to the site, along with 10,648 registered users for the event in addition to the 1,861 finalists and 1,727 judges. YSC's Canada-Wide Science Fair had an impressive 8,559 registered users and 17,948 new user visits to the platform. This year, over 1,500 finalist projects were submitted between the two events, and perhaps aided by the nature of the online format, there were more female participants in the CWSF than males. A positive sign for the future of women in engineering fields.

About Engineering.com

Engineering.com is a global online publisher and discussion forum host for problem-solving, trends, technology news, innovation, and tools. As the "ultimate resource" for engineers across disciplines, the company's simple mission is to inspire engineering minds to be and do better. With over 2 million monthly visits to the digital properties in the platform, the company also offers additional resources, including Eng-Tips.com , the world's largest engineering messaging board; TenLInks.com , a directory of CAD, CAM, and CAE; and projectboard.world , which supports STEM schools, universities, and leading maker organizations across the globe.

About the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair

The Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (Regeneron ISEF), a program of Society for Science for over 70 years, is the world's largest global science competition for high school. Through a global network of local, regional and national science fairs, millions of students are encouraged to explore their passion for scientific inquiry. Each spring, a group of these students is selected as finalists and offered the opportunity to compete for approximately U.S. $5 million in awards and scholarships. In 2019, Regeneron became the title sponsor of ISEF and is supported by a community of additional corporate and charity-based sponsors. ISEF alumni have gone on to have world-changing careers in science and engineering and earn some of the most esteemed honors. Many have gone on to become highly successful entrepreneurs. Learn more at https://www.societyforscience.org/isef/.

About Society for Science

Society for Science is dedicated to the achievement of young scientists in independent research and to public engagement in science. Established in 1921, the Society is a nonprofit whose vision is to promote the understanding and appreciation of science and the vital role it plays in human advancement. Through its world-class competitions, including the Regeneron Science Talent Search, the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, the Broadcom MASTERS, and its award-winning magazine, Science News and Science News for Students, Society for Science is committed to inform, educate, and inspire. Learn more at www.societyforscience.org and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat (Society4Science).

About Youth Sciences Canada

Youth Science Canada fuels the curiosity of Canadian youth through STEM projects. A registered charity incorporated in 1962, YSC delivers on its mission through national programs including mySTEMspace, the National STEM Fair Network, Canada-Wide Science Fair, STEM Expo, "Team Canada" representation at international fairs and Smarter Science professional development for teachers. Through these programs, YSC provides direct support to the more than 500,000 students who do STEM projects in any given year. For more information, visit youthscience.ca.

SOURCE engineering.com

Related Links

https://projectboard.engineering.com/


DALLAS, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- In this era of transformation, the pull for businesses and member-driven organizations to think digital first grows stronger. The changing world requires leaders in every industry to reassess roles and responsibilities. Going digital doesn't lessen the importance of communities; in fact, it increases the need for people to feel belonging. Communities are year-long, while events are just a few days.

Five Pillars of Community is the latest ebook from JUNO for leaders of member-driven organizations, associations and their engagement, membership, marketing and events professionals.

The new ebook Five Pillars of Community: Connecting Humans for Organizational Growth outlines this imperative. JUNO, a hybrid events and 365 engagement software platform, aims to guide the transformation for communities and present new opportunities for growth with this guide from human connection expert Josh Hotsenpiller.

"A major component to success in this evolving environment is accepting and adapting to the change," says Hotsenpiller, CEO and Founder of JUNO. "Now is not the time to be stagnant or revert to comfortable pre-pandemic mindsets and activities -- organizations must embrace this evolution while looking for new ways to define their value in the digital era.

"Introducing the 5 Pillars of Community to your organization, in conjunction with utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) recommendation tools, is imperative in the current and future digital arena. In the fast-changing setting of the workplace, adopting a common mindset builds community and maintains a team-oriented environment as a strong foundation for your organization."

The ebook is available for download at https://www.junolive.com/five-pillars-of-community. It covers the five pillars:

Direction and Desired Outcome

Shared Responsibility

Rewards and Recognition

Progress Awareness

Ongoing Infrastructure

"In a constantly shifting environment, organizations and their members, employees and followers must be ready to embrace the new digital landscape," Hotsenpiller said. "Adopting the Five Pillars of Community is a great option to set yourself and your organization up for success in the ever-changing digital era and evolutionary workplace environment.

ABOUT JUNO

JUNO is a transformational digital experience platform that connects people at events and creates 365-day community ecosystems. JUNO is a service company with software that unlocks the interactive power of communities, removing boundaries and accelerating engagement. Learn more at www.junolive.com. For details or interviews, contact Dana Freker Doody at [email protected] or 972.349.0015.

SOURCE JUNO

Related Links

www.junolive.com


LONDON, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Arqit Limited ("Arqit"), a leader in quantum encryption technology, has today announced at the G7 Leaders Conference in Cornwall, that it has formed an international consortium of companies and government organisations to provide its quantum encryption technology to government customers in a federated system concept, called Federated Quantum System (FQS). The UK, USA, Japan, Canada, Italy, Belgium and Austria are now represented.

Arqit invented a system which uses satellites to distribute quantum keys to data centres. These keys are delivered using a new patented protocol called ARQ19, which solves the "Global versus Trustless" problem which previously prevented the adoption of Satellite Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). Arqit further invented a method, called QuantumCloud to translate the benefits of this quantum key distribution to any form of endpoint or cloud machine without the need for any special hardware. The first version of QuantumCloud launches for live service to commercial customers in 2021.

Government customers typically have more stringent requirements for control and are more inclined to buy "Private Instances" of cloud technology rather than managed services. Arqit has therefore designed a different version of its technology to meet this need and has recruited a strong community of partners from allied countries to collaborate in bringing the FQS system to use.

Collaboration partners include BT, Sumitomo Corporation, Northrop Grumman, Leonardo, QinetiQ Space N.V., qtlabs and Honeywell. Other Western Allied countries are expected to announce their inclusion during 2021.

FQS has been developed with support from the UK Space Agency (UKSA through its National Space Innovation Programme). The system consists of dedicated satellites, control systems and QuantumCloud software. It will be provided to the UK's 'Five Eyes' allied governments and other international partners, allowing sovereign protection of strategic national assets and interoperability for joint operations.

The first FQS satellites are to be integrated and tested at the National Satellite Test Facility in Harwell near Oxford and are expected to be launched on Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne from Newquay in Cornwall in 2023, after the launch of the first commercial Arqit satellites. The role of Virgin Orbit in providing responsive launch services for government customers from any location is additive to the plan to deploy many FQS satellites to support the needs of a growing list of allied country partners.

Arqit's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, David Williams said, "FQS enables collaboration between NATO-allied governments around the world to form a federated version of QuantumCloud infrastructure. It also enables the Joint All Domain Command and Control vision to come to life. The FQS system is global in its nature, and there is now strong momentum in an international consortium joining forces to bring it into use".

General Stephen Wilson, Director of Arqit Inc. said, "For Allies working together Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) is essential. For JADC2 to work, we must have a real identity, credentialing, and access management solution. Arqit's technology makes trusted data security possible".

Minister for Science, Research and Innovation, Amanda Solloway MP added, "As a global science superpower, the UK continues to make advances in quantum science which is revolutionising cyber-security across the world. Backed by government funding, Arqit is paving the way in developing a new generation of quantum technologies that defend against sophisticated cyber-attacks on national governments, strengthening our resilience and helping us all the build back better from the pandemic".

UK Space Agency CEO, Graham Turnock added, "Space technologies have become embedded in almost every aspect of our daily lives, and UK Space Agency funding is accelerating our development as a world leader in space technology. Arqit's advances in quantum technologies will strengthen the UK's resilience against harmful cyber-attacks, helping us protect our critical services. The announcement today shows the attraction of Arqit's model to our partners".

Interim Head of Spaceport Cornwall, Melissa Thorpe also said, "The deployment of Responsive Launch capability from Cornwall is an excellent demonstration of the need for the investment made by Cornwall Spaceport, and we welcome the strong commercial opportunities represented by the FQS partnership".

Dan Hart, CEO of Virgin Orbit commented, "Recent headlines from across the world show how vital it is to have encrypted communications supporting our economy and our security. The team at Arqit has already demonstrated that its encryption capabilities provide a critical service to a global customer base. By adding a space layer with its Federated Quantum System, Arqit is taking that service to an even higher level. We're delighted to support the team, and to add its quantum satellites to our manifest for flights out of Cornwall".

Kevin Brown, Managing Director of BT Security said, "BT is pleased to be part of the first phase of the FQS project, which aligns with our wider commitment to providing security solutions for the most critical organisations. As this project advances to a global stage, it provides a clear example of how the UK is playing a leading role in developing important new technologies".

Eiji Ishida, Executive Officer and General Manager, Lease, Ship and Aerospace Business Division of Sumitomo Corporation said, "The FQS concept is important because it allows us to manage a local instance of the infrastructure and deliver the control that our defence customers will require. Sumitomo Corporation is pleased to be in this consortium, which is very far ahead of other technologies".

Professor Rupert Ursin of qtlabs said, "Austria has been a strong supporter of the Satellite QKD technology which we have helped Arqit to build, and I am pleased that qtlabs is able to continue to represent Austria in this consortium and will try to bring the benefits of FQS to the Austrian and other government users".

Marina Mississian, Senior Director Space Payloads for Honeywell Aerospace, Canada added, "Satellite enabled quantum encryption is strategically important for Honeywell and Canada. With the support of the Canadian government, we have been pleased to be associated with Arqit's commercial mission and now to join the FQS system, which will further the collective security goals of the 'Five Eyes' community of nations".

Frank Preud'homme, Sales and Business Development Director for QinetiQ Belgium said, "We have been pleased to support the Arqit space mission since 2017 and see strong potential for the creation of sovereign capabilities for a close alliance of allied countries in sharing this technology".

Norman Bone, Chair and Managing Director, Leonardo UK concluded, "Leonardo and Telespazio recognise the increasingly digital nature of UK and allied national defence and security and the expectations of our customers that their systems are secure and resilient. The rapid, collaborative evaluation of new and cutting-edge technologies such as those developed by Arqit are a key element of Leonardo's strategy to establish and deliver next generation systems to our customers enabling effective and secure multi-domain operations including in the cyber and space domains".

The fundamental science behind Arqit's solutions to decades-old problems with Satellite QKD is important, but the company's ability to translate that into usable products that meet very precisely the needs of users is very advanced. This is a major advantage in moving quickly to implement the security technology amongst allied nations that will deliver valuable security improvements immediately and underpin the future of the quantum battlespace".

About Arqit Limited:

Arqit has invented a unique quantum encryption technology which makes the communications links of any networked device secure against current and future forms of hacking  even an attack from a quantum computer. Arqit's product, called QuantumCloud, creates unbreakable software encryption keys, using satellite to deliver quantum information to data centres. The keys which are easy and efficient to use remotely with no hardware or disruption to software required. The software has universal application to every edge device and cloud machine in the world. Headquartered in the United Kingdom with subsidiaries in the United States, Arqit was founded in 2017 by UK satellite industry veteran David Williams. Visit us at www.arqit.co.uk

Media enquiries:

Arqit: Julie Moon T: +44 7769 9960 E: [email protected]

SOURCE Arqit Limited

Related Links

http://www.arqit.co.uk


Promising to tackle some of the most challenging and often avoided policy issues, after a soft proof-of-concept launch earlier this spring, WPMP hit the ground runningdemonstrating its bold mission and candid approach with its third podcast, "Are Heroes Worth More Than $12.50 an Hour?" focused on championing opportunities for Direct Support Professionals (DSP). During this podcast, Joseph MacBeth, National Alliance of Direct Support Professionals (DSP) and Pennsylvania State Representative Stephen Kinsey question the integrity of policy that supports an abysmal pay scale and limited career ladders that currently has more that 50% of DSPs in the U.S. relying on some type of public assistance.

"These essentials workers are on the job every day helping our neighbors with complex medical histories and significant challenges not only navigate in our community, but be valued contributors to it," said Rantanen. "They are true heroes who rise to the occasion, including risking their personal health to stay on the job during the pandemic, every day yet struggle to make ends meet. This is exactly the type of eye-opening issue WPMP sets out to bring to the forefront so that every member of our community can understand and do their part to help bring about critical change."

The DSP podcastwhich also discusses ways the pandemic heightened the issue and includes insights from a JEVS career professional in the fieldas well as the first two WPMP episodes are available at https://www.jevshumanservices.org/category/podcast/ and on podcast platforms.

SOURCE JEVS Human Services
PHILADELPHIA and CLEVELAND, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The investor rights lawyers at Goldman Scarlato & Penny, PC law firm ("GSP") are evaluating potential claims for compensation on behalf of investors who lost money in LJM Preservation & Growth Fund (LJMIX) following recent allegations of misconduct by the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") and the Commodity Futures Trading Commissions ("CFTC").

LJM Funds Management, LJM Partners, and certain of their principals including Anthony Caine were recently accused by the SEC and the CFTC of misleading investors regarding risk management practices and the worst-case loss estimates. In parallel, the regulators settled the charges against LJM's Chief Risk Officer Arjuna Ariathurai for his role in the LJM alleged misconduct.

In February 2018, the LJM Preservation & Growth Fund suffered trading losses allegedly exceeding $1 billion, which reportedly represented 80% of fund's value. The losses were reportedly caused by overexposure to volatility risk. Shortly thereafter, LJM Fund closed to new investors and liquidated.

The LJM Fund was reportedly sold and/or recommended to investors by many broker-dealer and registered investment advisory firms. Recently the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority sanctioned three broker-dealers for their alleged failure to conduct adequate due diligence before permitting the sale of the LJM alternative mutual fund and failure to supervise their representatives' recommendation of LJM.

LJM Investors May Have Options to Recover Losses

Investor rights attorneys Alan Rosca and Paul Scarlato have been investigating this matter and are evaluating certain recovery options for LJM investors. Investors in LJM may contact attorneys Rosca or Scarlato for a free, no-obligation evaluation of their options at 888-998-0530, [email protected] or by leaving a message on https://investorlawyers.org/ljm-funds-investor-center/.

The GSP securities attorneys have decades of combined experience representing investors who lost money as a result of investment fraud. They are evaluating potential options on behalf of victimized LJM investors, in addition to any recovery from other, unrelated proceedings. They take most cases of this type on a contingency fee basis and advance the case costs. There are no fees or costs if no recovery.

Visit https://investorlawyers.org for more information about the firm and GSP attorneys' background and admissions to practice law. This release may be deemed to include Attorney Advertising. There has been no finding of liability as to the allegations herein.  GSP 2021.

SOURCE Goldman Scarlato & Penny, P.C.

Related Links

http://www.investorlawyers.org


TSX andOTCQX: MPVD

TORONTO and NEW YORK, June 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Mountain Province Diamonds Inc. ("Mountain Province", the "Company") (TSX: MPVD) (OTCQX: MPVD) today announces the results of its second quarter diamond sales and the Company's upside share of profits from the Diamond Sales Agreement with Dunebridge dated June 11, 2020. All figures are expressed in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted

The Company is pleased to report the completion of its sales for the quarter, with 718,549 carats sold for total proceeds of $64.5 million (US$52.6 million), resulting in an average value of $90 per carat (US$73 per carat). This Q2/21 sales result represents a 3% increase in US$ terms relative to the 603,000 carats sold for C$ 54.2 million (US$42.7 million) in Q1/21 at (US$71 per carat). The mix of diamonds sold varied across the quarters and on a direct comparison basis, second quarter market prices are approximately 18% higher than those achieved in the first quarter.

Demand in the rough diamond market is robust, supported by polished diamond price increases and buoyant jewelry retail sales in the US and China. At our most recent sale held over the past two weeks in Antwerp, Belgium, the Company saw high demand and increased customer interest across all rough diamond categories.

In addition to the Company's sales, in Q2/21 Dunebridge also completed the sale of all diamonds purchased from the Company in 2020 (see news release dated June 11, 2020 for details on the agreement). After fees and expenses the Company received C$10.4 million (C$7/carat) this week being its total share of the value uplift. The Company believes this further confirms the growing demand and pricing trends in the natural rough diamond market.

The improved cash in-flow from Dunebridge has resulted in the Company reducing the planned US$10M draw on the final tranche of the Dunebridge term facility (see news release dated May 12, 2021), down to US$8M. The lower draw on the second tranche will result in lower fees as well as a lower interest expense.

Mountain Province President and CEO Stuart Brown commented:

"This is an excellent result for the Company. Producers are reporting strong demand and higher diamond prices at their sales which we have also seen with our latest offering. This is additionally supported by the results from the Dunebridge sales. We remain optimistic that as the global economy continues to recover that the current positive pricing and demand momentum throughout the diamond industry will continue and translate into improved margins for the Company."

About the Company

Mountain Province Diamonds is a 49% participant with De Beers Canada in the Gahcho Kue diamond mine located in Canada's Northwest Territories. The Gahcho Kue Joint Venture property consists of several kimberlites that are actively being mined, developed, and explored for future development. The Company also controls 106,202 hectares of highly prospective mineral claims and leases that surround the Gahcho Kue Joint Venture property that include an indicated mineral resource for the Kelvin kimberlite and inferred mineral resources for the Faraday kimberlites.

For further information on Mountain Province Diamonds and to receive news releases by email, visit the Company's website at www.mountainprovince.com.

Qualified Person

The disclosure in this news release of scientific and technical information regarding Mountain Province's mineral properties has been reviewed and approved by Matthew MacPhail, P.Eng., MBA, and Tom E. McCandless, Ph.D., P.Geo., both employees of Mountain Province Diamonds and Qualified Persons as defined by National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects.

Caution Regarding Forward Looking Information

This news release contains certain "forward-looking statements" and "forward-looking information" under applicable Canadian and United States securities laws concerning the business, operations and financial performance and condition of Mountain Province Diamonds Inc. Forward-looking statements and forward-looking information include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to operational hazards, including possible disruption due to pandemic such as COVID-19, its impact on travel, self-isolation protocols and business and operations, estimated production and mine life of the project of Mountain Province; the realization of mineral reserve estimates; the timing and amount of estimated future production; costs of production; the future price of diamonds; the estimation of mineral reserves and resources; the ability to manage debt; capital expenditures; the ability to obtain permits for operations; liquidity; tax rates; and currency exchange rate fluctuations. Except for statements of historical fact relating to Mountain Province, certain information contained herein constitutes forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are frequently characterized by words such as "anticipates," "may," "can," "plans," "believes," "estimates," "expects," "projects," "targets," "intends," "likely," "will," "should," "to be", "potential" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may", "should" or "will" occur. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made, and are based on a number of assumptions and 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. Many of these assumptions are based on factors and events that are not within the control of Mountain Province and there is no assurance they will prove to be correct.

Factors that could cause actual results to vary materially from results anticipated by such forward-looking statements include the development of operation hazards which could arise in relation to COVID-19, including, but not limited to protocols which may be adopted to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and any impact of such protocols on Mountain Province's business and operations, variations in ore grade or recovery rates, changes in market conditions, changes in project parameters, mine sequencing; production rates; cash flow; risks relating to the availability and timeliness of permitting and governmental approvals; supply of, and demand for, diamonds; fluctuating commodity prices and currency exchange rates, the possibility of project cost overruns or unanticipated costs and expenses, labour disputes and other risks of the mining industry, failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated.

These factors are discussed in greater detail in Mountain Province's most recent Annual Information Form and in the most recent MD&A filed on SEDAR, which also provide additional general assumptions in connection with these statements. Mountain Province cautions that the foregoing list of important factors is not exhaustive. Investors and others who base themselves on forward-looking statements should carefully consider the above factors as well as the uncertainties they represent and the risk they entail. Mountain Province believes that the expectations reflected in those forward-looking statements are reasonable, but no assurance can be given that these expectations will prove to be correct and such forward-looking statements included in this news release should not be unduly relied upon. These statements speak only as of the date of this news release.

Although Mountain Province has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Mountain Province undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or management's estimates or opinions should change except as required by applicable securities laws. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Statements concerning mineral reserve and resource estimates may also be deemed to constitute forward-looking statements to the extent they involve estimates of the mineralization that will be encountered as the property is developed.

Further, Mountain Province may make changes to its business plans that could affect its results. The principal assets of Mountain Province are administered pursuant to a joint venture under which Mountain Province is not the operator. Mountain Province is exposed to actions taken or omissions made by the operator within its prerogative and/or determinations made by the joint venture under its terms. Such actions or omissions may impact the future performance of Mountain Province. Under its current note and revolving credit facilities Mountain Province is subject to certain limitations on its ability to pay dividends on common stock. The declaration of dividends is at the discretion of Mountain Province's Board of Directors, subject to the limitations under the Company's debt facilities, and will depend on Mountain Province's financial results, cash requirements, future prospects, and other factors deemed relevant by the Board

SOURCE Mountain Province Diamonds Inc.

Related Links

http://www.mountainprovince.com


MAKKAH, Saudi Arabia, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Muslim World League sealed a groundbreaking agreement on Thursday of government ministers and senior scholars from Afghanistan and Pakistan that creates a roadmap for resolving the decades-long conflict in Afghanistan.

The "Declaration of Peace in Afghanistan" was signed following a full-day conference in the Holy of City of Makkah. Supported by the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the agreement establishes the religious parameters to achieve a just and comprehensive peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan, in line with Islamic principles.

MWL Secretary General Sheikh Dr. Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa led the effort. Noor-ul-Haq Qadri, Federal Minister for Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony of Pakistan, and Mohammad Qasim Halimi, Minister of Hajj and Religious Affairs of Afghanistan, signed the accord.

"This brotherly meeting was characterized by determination, love and harmony, and reflected the strong resolve of our brothers in the meeting to advance peace in Afghanistan," Dr. Al-Issa said. "Brotherly peace which is characterized by strong faith, sincere determination and responsibility, and this agreement was reached in the most sacred place on earth by religious scholars. There can be no stronger declaration of peace, and it will prove successful, God willing."

Among other things, the declaration does the following:

Condemns all acts of violence and extremism, regardless of the perpetrator or motivation, and judges all attacks against civilians as a violation of the fundamental principles of Shariah.

Commits all sides to finding common ground on political, social and economic issues to ensure a final and sustainable end to the Afghan conflict.

Rejects any attempt to justify violence on the basis of religion, nationality, civilization or race.

Recognizes the unique role of religious scholars to ensure peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan .

. Leverages the influence of the religious scholar communities in Afghanistan and Pakistan to ensure compliance by all parties to the conflict.

and to ensure compliance by all parties to the conflict. Demonstrates the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's long-standing efforts to achieving peace in Afghanistan and steadfast commitment to the people of the country.

long-standing efforts to achieving peace in and steadfast commitment to the people of the country. Reflects the status of reconciliation as the optimal resolution for conflicts and disputes as laid out in the Noble Qur'an.

"Saudi Arabia has always been there for Afghanistan and is leading the effort to ensure we achieve peace," Qadri said.

He added: "Our religion teaches us how to be united and harmonious with one another, and advocates for international cooperation in all charitable work. Islam focuses on protecting the nation, encouraging development and progress, promoting peace and preventing subversive acts."

"We are truly fortunate for the unity and accomplishment of this declaration, and its potential for ending the bloodshed that has lasted for years," Halimi said. "The obstacles to reconciliation in Afghanistan have been removed completely and there are none now."

Pakistani and Afghan scholars, many of whom participated virtually from their home countries, thanked the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and Crown Mohammad bin Salman for the Kingdom's support for peace and stability in Afghanistan. They commended the Kingdom's efforts to bring together scholars from both countries and build bridges that unite Afghans.

SOURCE Muslim World League
A native of Houston, Ms. Howard returns to the publication from New York City-based Essence, where she was the fashion editor for print and digital, helping to grow the e-commerce, beauty, and fashion verticals, and providing key support for the magazine's Generation-Z platform, Girls United. She has worked for BET Digital, Coveteur and Houstonia, and has bylines in Fader, Playboy, The Hollywood Reporter and Harper's Bazaar.

"As a fellow native Houstonian, Nandi and I share a similar vision for Houston taking its rightful and sometimes overlooked place on the national stage," said Nicole Vogel, CEO and co-founder of SagaCity Media. "I feel confident that Nandi is the right person to help celebrate and showcase this teeming metropolis through Houstonia's vibrant omnichannel platform."

She went on to say, "At this unique and arguably fragile time in our nation's history, the most diverse city in America has something incredibly important to present to our country and our world."

"I am really excited to join the Houstonia team and to be in this position," said Ms. Howard. "The pandemic continued to push Houston on an amazing path where every industry is growingfrom the space and medical fields on one side to bars and nightlife on the other. From a media perspective, I am in awe of the diversity this city brings. I am ready to tackle and cover all the exciting things happening here. Utilizing my New York style of editorial, it is my mission to foster opportunities for creatives in the South."

"I am overjoyed that Nandi has decided to bring her considerable talent and creative energy to Houstonia," said Marty Patail, Senior Vice President of Editorial Content and Strategy at SagaCity Media. "She brings deep experience in digital media, content creation and online commerce at the national level. She commands a vast network of creatives and a deep love of her hometown.

"There's no other way to put it: She's a major talent and I cannot wait to get to work with her," he said.

Houstonia is the city's #1 source of premium lifestyle content, and Ms. Howard will focus on refining the media brand's role as the true local tastemaker in fashion, food, culture, and everything else that matters to Houstonians.

About SagaCity Media, Inc.

SagaCity Media, Inc. is the parent company of the preeminent lifestyle media brands in Seattle, Portland, Houston, Sarasota, Aspen, Vail, and Park City. In their respective markets, they produce the most-visited local lifestyle websites, largest-selling magazines, and industry-dominating social media followers. SagaCity is also the preeminent leader in content solutions for travel and tourism organizations across the U.S.

SOURCE SagaCity Media, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.sagacitymedia.com/


For the MAGIC Autonomous Corridor Project event, the on-road demonstrations were conducted with GreenPower Motor Company's AV Star  the world's first and only fully autonomous, all-electric, ADA compliant, FMVSS certified and Buy American shuttle integrated with Perrone Robotics' autonomous vehicle retrofit kit, TONY. Perrone Robotics developed the complex operational design domain (ODD) route with the approval of the Maryland Department of Transportation, the City of Westminster Police Department, county government officials and various other public stakeholders. The complex ODD route required the AV shuttle to successfully navigate a designated neighborhood, left and right turns, around a city park, a 4-way stop and through a historic city neighborhood.

"Perrone was able to deploy its AVs over a two-day period across Westminster, Md., in an impressive proof of concept demonstration," said Graham Dodge, executive director at MAGIC. "The vehicles performed flawlessly on our public roads and represent a promising milestone for autonomous transportation."

Charlottesville, Va. Albemarle County Regional Demonstration

In addition to the ODD demonstration in Maryland, Perrone Robotics also completed a series of demonstrations in the Charlottesville, Va. area, that included multiple roundabouts, a stop-off at a post office, busy town intersections and county roads.

Perrone's Autonomy provides a scalable solution built around a patented full-stack platform, MAX, the TONY (short for "TO Navigate You") retrofit kit and a safety certifiable framework, Perrone's Safety Watchdog. The result is an AV retrofit kit that integrates seamlessly into any vehicle for any job applications for use in the autonomous transit of people and goods in geo-fenced and localized operations. Customers are able to accelerate the global deployment of autonomous vehicle fleet solutions across their gas-powered, diesel and electric passenger and cargo shuttles.

Perrone Robotics received national recognition several years ago for technically reaching Level 5 autonomy in its 2019 public road demonstrations in Albemarle County, Virginia. The company operated for several months throughout the summer and fall on public roads with zero driver interventions. For more information and the results, please visit: https://www.perronerobotics.com/news/county-shuttle-report .

Today the company continues to build on that success with over 30 vehicle types outfitted, 40,000 autonomous miles driven, additional patents and AV applications. Perrone has additional AV transit, cargo and delivery shuttles under development and will be ready for use in public fleets by late summer 2021.

"We have been operating in a driverless fashion with our autonomy since 2005, including the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge," stated Paul Perrone, founder and CEO of Perrone Robotics. "It's great to see our pioneering research take hold as a reliable commercial solution that's deployable now."

Autono-MaaS

Performance milestones like these and continued collaboration with automated mobility service providers are crucial to developing the emerging Autono-MaaS (autonomous-mobility as a service) marketplace. Through real-world demonstrations with Low Speed Vehicles (LSVs), and large shuttles, cargo and delivery vehicles integrated with Perrone Robotics, the company continues to prove that reliable AV technology can help provide innovative mobility and access options for transit and transportation solutions providers.

About Perrone Robotics, Inc.

Perrone is a leading provider of fully autonomous vehicle systems. The company delivers mobility excellence via TONY (short for "TO Navigate You"), a vehicle independent retrofit kit for use in the autonomous transit of people and goods in geo-fenced and localized operations. TONY embeds inside any vehicle for any job to provide a complete "artificial driver" solution that brings full autonomy in a safety certifiable framework. Proven, piloted and in commercial production, Perrone autonomous systems help commercial, municipal, and governmental customers increase transportation efficiencies, enhance safety, and accelerate zero-emission electric vehicle deployment. The company also offers a portfolio of existing turnkey autonomous shuttles and vehicles pre-integrated with the TONY retrofit kit. Learn more at www.perronerobotics.com or follow us @perronerobotics.

Contact

Eric Becker

104 West Partners for Perrone Robotics, Inc.

[email protected]

SOURCE Perrone Robotics Inc

Related Links

http://www.perronerobotics.com


NEW YORK, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Below are experts from the ProfNet network who are available to discuss timely issues in your coverage area.

EXPERT ALERTS

How to Thwart Phishing Attacks

Watch Expert for National Watch Day

Economic and Environmental Benefits of Hemp

Bridging Political Division

Staying in Touch with your College Student Child

How to Eat Vibrantly and Support Local Farmers

Corporate Transformation Expert

Forgiveness Tips for Father's Day

Things to Ask Your Obstetrician

MEDIA JOBS

RT TV, TV Reporter-Presenter  RT TV ( Moscow )

) RT.com, Fun Financial & Crypto Journalist  RT.com (Remote)

OTHER NEWS & RESOURCES

Pride Month & Beyond: 8 LGBTQ+ News Sites to Start Following

Blog Profiles: LGBTQ+ Parenting Blogs

How to Thwart Phishing Attacks

Eyal Benishti

CEO

IRONSCALES

"Phishing is an epidemic, and everyone is a target today. It's not just a large enterprise's problem anymore; it's everyone's problem."

Eyal can discuss the current state of Phishing attacks and offer expert insight on why current solutions aren't going far enough to stop them and what companies can do to address it.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/eyalbd1/

Website: ironscales.com

Media contact: Matt Scofield, [email protected]

Watch Expert for National Watch Day

Bob Moulton

Owner

National Pawn

Bob Moulton is widely considered one of the USA's top pawnbrokers and an avid watch collector.

National Watch Day is June 19th. My subject matter experts can answer engaging questions, feedback, and photos that explore common questions about this universal accessory including: Do luxury watches hold their value in the time of Apple Watch and fitness trackers? How can I care for a luxury watch? What's a great first piece for someone who wants to start a watch collection? What is a good gift for a watch collector or aspiring watch collector? Should I buy a luxury watch off of marketplace or Offerup?

Website: www.nationalpawnshops.com

Media contact: Cyndee Harrison, [email protected]

Economic and Environmental Benefits of Hemp

Matthew Harmon

Author

Matthew Harmon

"The recent Farm Bill that de-scheduled hemp could benefit the US in many ways, like providing an economically and environmentally sustainable option for several products, providing jobs, and boosting the economy. We are already witnessing this in many other countries, as they make full use of industrial hemp and reap the benefits."

Can discuss economic and environmental benefits of hemp, what the US can do to become hemp self-sufficient, and how investors can get in on this lucrative business opportunity.

Website: hempguide.com

Media contact: Klaudia Simon, [email protected]

Bridging Political Division

Jeff Krasno

CEO

Commune Media

"The cultural chasm that gapes between Americans has never been wider or deeper. We are bunkered in tribes of political identity, tethered by our ankles to the thoroughbred of social media dreck that gallops toward one extreme or another dragging us along, leaving our nation drawn and quartered. In the pursuit of common ground, it may be time for both the left and right to turn a critical eye on itself."

Can discuss finding a middle path in a politically polarized landscape and bridging political division.

Website: jeffkrasno.com

Media contact: Anita Jakab Kovacs, [email protected]

Staying in Touch with your College Student Child

Tracy Schactman

Founder

SendingSun

3 tips for staying connected to your college student, from a mom who's been there. "Let's face it, by the time our kids enter college, we are no longer the CEO of their lives. They've long since fired us from that role. But if we, as parents, are open to change, healthy communication, and a little effort, we'll eventually be lucky enough to be rehired in a new role, as a trusted consultant. Which, I have to say, is pretty great."

Staying in kids' lives when they go off to collegewithout being intrusive.

Website: www.SendingSun.com

Media contact: Anita Jakab Kovacs, [email protected]

How to Eat Vibrantly and Support Local Farmers

Allison Smith

Founding Partner

Olivette Riverside Community and Farm

"Community Supported Agriculture is a great way to support local agriculture by helping farmers offset operational expense, and reduce the environmental impact of the long distances food travels to go from a farm to your plate."

Can discuss how eating locally and eating seasonally go hand in hand; agrihoods, a nationwide trend of communities designed to foster connections between people, their food, and the environment; and Post-pandemic housing solutions.

Website: olivettenc.com

Media contact: Anita Jakab Kovacs, [email protected]

Corporate Transformation Expert

Joey Klein

International Corporate Transformation Expert

The Inner Matrix

"If you learn and practice the skills and tools to master your inner matrix, you can shift your mental, emotional, physical, and intuitive state to realize any vision you have for your life."

Within each of us is untapped potential, as well as limiting patterns that can be detrimental to our potential and best selves. Unveiling these core areas and learning to shift their established paradigm within will lead to a far happier, more productive and fulfilling life. Joey guides CEOs and other leaders to harness the power of emotion, focus, intuition, and vision to face daily challenges such as: Mindfully addressing inboxes packed with hundreds of emails, compassionately fielding questions from new hires and maintaining team morale while leading workers back to the office after more than a year at home.

Website: http://JoeyKlein.com

Media contact: Klaudia Simon, [email protected]

Forgiveness Tips for Father's Day

Dr. Bradley Nelson

Holistic physician and author

Dr. Bradley Nelson

"Many people have a hard time letting go of painful memories and feelings associated with their childhoods. How can we heal the hurts of the past so that we can restore relationships and move forward? The key may lie in learning to identify and release Trapped Emotions, unresolved troubling feelings from difficult experiences in our past."

Dr. Nelson can expand on these tips for releasing emotional baggage: 1. Take into account your parents' emotional baggage. Heart-Walls are energetic barriers made of accumulated trapped negative emotions that can prevent people from freely giving and receiving love. When we understand that our parents' hearts may be blocked by fear, anger, or other negative emotions, it can help us to have compassion, forgive, and let go of our own emotional baggage. 2. Speak your mind without creating drama. Dr. Nelson shares how to cope with insensitive family members  and where to draw the line. The key: "Make it a non-emotional situation." 3. Learn from your parents' mistakes. Look at mistakes in a positive light  they helped you learn what NOT to do.

Website: DrBradleyNelson.com

Media contact: Jennifer Thomas, [email protected]

Things to Ask Your Obstetrician

Dr. Alan Lindemann

Obstetric physician and maternal mortality expert

Dr. Alan Lindemann

"Choosing an obstetrician is one of the most important decisions we make when it comes to healthcare, and one that we make at a critical moment in our lives: when we are expecting a baby. Whether you are picking the doctor who will see you through your first pregnancy or your sixth, be sure to ask these questions when choosing your physician: 1. What is your C-section rate? 2. Do you have any maternal deaths associated with your deliveries? 3. Will you be the one to deliver my baby?"

Learn How to Steer Your Pregnancy - Knowing that we can choose our goals makes it possible to change what we don't like. Steering pregnancy helps moms, dads, and babies do better.

Website: LindemannMD.com

Media contact: Jennifer Thomas, [email protected]

MEDIA JOBS:

Following are links to job listings for staff and freelance writers, editors and producers. You can view these and more job listings on our Job Board: https://www.cisionjobs.com/jobs/united-states/

OTHER NEWS & RESOURCES:

Following are links to other news and resources we think you might find useful. If you have an item you think other reporters would be interested in and would like us to include in a future alert, please drop us a line at [email protected]

PRIDE MONTH & BEYOND: 8 LGBTQ+ NEWS SITES TO START FOLLOWING . Top LGBTQ+ news sites showcasing audiences' unique stories and voices that include all sexual orientations and gender identities.

BLOG PROFILES: LGBTQ+ PARENTING BLOGS . We're celebrating Pride Month and #LGBTQFamiliesDay by recognizing a few outstanding parenting blogs by and for the LGBTQ+ community.

PROFNET is an exclusive service of PR Newswire.

To contact ProfNet: [email protected] or 800-776-3638, ext. 1

Source: ProfNet

SOURCE ProfNet

Related Links

http://www.profnet.com


"We're looking forward to introducing our unique dining concept and Brazilian fare to guests in this rapidly growing community and are excited to bring a special destination along one of the most famous driving routes in America," says Salim Asrawi, president of Texas de Brazil.

The new restaurant features soaring ceilings with unique light fixtures and an extravagant salad area made of white marble and adorned with a lavish flower arrangement. Guests can enjoy a drink in the intimate lounge area or browse for their favorite wines in the elegant wine cellar. The restaurant features one exclusively private dining room decorated with elegant furnishings and complete with a stunning wood table that accommodates up to 14 guests. Patio dining is also available for regular seating and for private events.

The highlights of this rodizio-style dining experience are the continuous servings of fire-roasted meats and unlimited plates from the chef-crafted salad area.

The experience begins with a visit to the expansive salad area where hot and cold side specialty dishes offer delicious variety.

Salad Area Selections include artisan breads, imported cheeses, grilled vegetables, Brazilian hearts of palm, spicy shrimp salad, couscous pasta, sauteed mushrooms, feijoada (black beans), jasmine rice, lobster bisque and much more.

The main course or star of the show - a savory variety of flame-grilled meats that are expertly prepared and carved at the table by the restaurant gauchos.

Churrasco Selections include cuts of beef, lamb, pork, chicken and Brazilian sausage, such as filet mignon, barbecued pork ribs, leg of lamb, Parmesan drumettes and the guest's favorite, picanha.

A good wine nicely complements the flavors of churrasco and Texas de Brazil's curated wine list includes acclaimed varietals from California and South America vineyards as well as Texas de Brazil's exclusive private label collection of six varietals bottled in Chile.

A full bar offers craft cocktails including the traditional Caipirinha in a variety of flavors plus a full selection of distilled spirits and beer (domestic and Brazilian).

For those with a sweet tooth, no meal is complete without dessert and guests can indulge in selections including house-made flan, triple layer chocolate mousse cake, cheesecake and more, all served a la carte.

Service hours include - Dinner: Wed. -Thurs. 5 - 8:30 p.m., Fri. 5  9:30 p.m., Sat. 4  9:30 p.m. and Sun. 4  8:30 p.m.

Regular dinner, which includes the meat and salad service is $49.99 per person. The salad area only option is $29.99. When purchased with a full-price meal children 2 years and under dine complimentary, 3-5 years are $5.00 and 6-12 years are 50% off regular dinner price.

For reservations or more information, visit https://texasdebrazil.com/locations/rancho-cucamonga/ or call 909.488.4500.

About Texas de Brazil

Texas de Brazil is an authentic churrascaria featuring a continuous dining experience that blends the unique culture of Brazil, with the generous hospitality of Texas. The menu features a vast selection of grilled meats, a 50-item salad area, an award-winning wine list and a la carte dessert selections. Founded as a family-owned business in 1998, Texas de Brazil is now the largest Brazilian-American steakhouse brand in the world, with restaurants in 21 states and eight countries. Stay connected. Follow @texasdebrazil on Instagram and Twitter, and Texas de Brazil on Facebook. For information, visit http://www.texasdebrazil.com.

SOURCE Texas de Brazil

Related Links

http://www.texasdebrazil.com


DALLAS, June 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Texas Trees Foundation (TTF) is proud to announce that the first Dallas Urban Forest Master Plan has officially been adopted by the Dallas City Council. This long-term strategic effort is a major milestone for the city and will provide the framework for action steps to maximize the value of our urban forest.

Texas Trees Foundation commends Mayor Eric Johnson and Dallas City Council members Omar Narvaez and Chad West for their leadership and role in developing the UFMP and obtaining unanimous approval from the Dallas City Council.

Texas Trees Foundation

As the need for strategic management of the tree canopy and urban forest in Dallas came to the forefront, the collaborative work began between the Texas Trees Foundation and the City of Dallas to create the first plan of this type with funding provided by the Lyda Hill Philanthropies and Oncor.

Dr. Bobby Lyle, Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Texas Trees Foundation noted, "This collaborative effort represents a major step forward for our city. It emphasizes the strategic importance of our urban forest and provides guidance for our community as the City of Dallas sets the standards and takes the lead in urban forestry management in North Texas."

This long-term strategic document specifically addresses urban challenges such as pests and disease control, rapid urban development, and inequitable distribution of tree canopy.

"We want to thank all of the stakeholders that contributed to the success of the Dallas Urban Forest Master Plan," said Janette Monear, President and CEO of the Texas Trees Foundation. "We are dedicated to advancing the 14 recommendations and 56 action items in the plan, and the Texas Trees Foundation looks forward to implementing those solutions. I join my voice with Dr. Lyle, Lyda Hill, and our entire Board of Trustees in commending the Dallas City Council for adopting this important plan."

When properly managed, trees provide a variety of important benefits to communities, including water-quality improvement, stormwater mitigation, erosion control, heat reduction, air-quality improvement, health and wellness benefits, wildlife habitat, and jobs. Trees add to the vibrancy and overall quality of life whether they exist in residential, recreation or business districts.

For more information about the Dallas Urban Forest Master Plan, please email Joshua Wilbanks at [email protected].

Related Images

dallas-urban-forest-master-plan.png

Dallas Urban Forest Master Plan

SOURCE Texas Trees Foundation
On June 11, United Imaging is part of the first day of the event with a Satellite Symposium featuring speakers from Emory University School of Medicine, UC Davis Health, and UT Health Science Center. These speakers will discuss the cutting-edge clinical and research impacts of ultra-high-resolution digital PET, including the most recent clinical and research impacts of total-body PET, the clinical use of high-resolution digital cardiac PET with Rb-82, and the impact of PET AI reconstruction in routine PET imaging. We'll also moderate an interactive Q&A.

The company also has mutiple distinguished experts from the United States, South Africa, and China speaking as part of its global user meeting on June 14th entitled "Clinical Experiences With United Imaging."

The company's SNMMI theme this year is "Forward Thinking. Forward Innovation." which encompasses the vision behind everything United Imaging is presenting at SNMMI in terms of products and business programs.

Among these is the newly-minted uAI HYPER DPR (Deep Progressive Reconstruction), which is the only AI PET reconstruction technology in the market trained on high-count, total-body PET data to support small lesion detectability and improve quantitative accuracy. In addition, United Imaging has introduced HYPER FOCUS, which reduces respiratory motion artifacts and increases SNR by using respiratory signals to generate a single PET image that is registered to the CT using 100% of the acquired PET data, without requiring additional scan time. Both uAI HYPER DPR and HYPER FOCUS are available on uMI 550 and uMI 780 PET/CT systems in the U.S. as part of United Imaging's All-In Configurations model that includes all available functionality in new systems so customers have additional clinical tools to expand care to more patients. This technology is being rolled out in a way that breaks with industry traditions, a process which normally adds significant costs to customers and delays their ability to bring meaningful technology to patient care. To accelerate that process and help these AI technologies reach patients faster, United Imaging is providing them to the installed base at no charge as part of their award-winning Software Upgrades for Life program.

Jeffrey M. Bundy, Ph.D, CEO of United Imaging Healthcare Solutions, commented on the unique strengths of the company's approach to artificial intelligence. "We actually develop our uAI technologies across modalities from the ground up, not siloed in each modality. That leads to better learning and more standardized, scalable implementation for customers, and the ability to connect AI benefits across modalities over time to impact patient care. It's also worth pointing out that in Molecular Imaging, because our uEXPLORER technology is the foundation of our AI algorithms and it is still the only total-body scanner out there, our AI algorithms are the only ones in the world trained on total-body data. And, we know data is the foundation of all AI algorithms and the results are only as good as the training sets that are utilized."

Bundy went on to say that United Imaging was also forward-thinking in the way it chose to approach the Molecular Imaging and its other modality portfolios in line with its mission. "The core uEXPLORER technology is embedded in our most financially accessible digital PET/CT system before we move up the portfolio  that 'forward innovation' is part of how we create equal healthcare for all, and it's different from traditional industry norms." United Imaging also put the uMI 550 in a mobile trailer last year to meet demand for patient access to digital PET/CT. In the full year that the uMI 550 was the first and only digital mobile PET/CT on the market, it has served patients at dozens of hospitals across the USA.

Cheri Gottke, VP of Molecular Imaging in the U.S., explained that this year's SNMMI is a way for United Imaging to demonstrate forward thinking and forward innovation in other areas as well. "Having a system that can compete with others that are more than double the investment because of the way we build the best innovation into our equipment at all ends of the portfolio is game changing. When we tell a customer that our uMI 550 PET/CT system is AI enabled to do a total body PET exam in five minutes, the first reaction is 'but what about image quality.' Then they look at the images, and they're blown away."

ABOUT UNITED IMAGING

At United Imaging, we develop and produce advanced medical products, digital healthcare solutions, and intelligent solutions that cover the entire process of imaging diagnosis and treatment. Founded in 2011, our company has subsidiaries and R&D centers across the world. Our North American headquarters in Houston includes our corporate offices, factory, product showroom, service training center, and service parts distribution center. With a cutting-edge digital portfolio and a mission of broader access to healthcare for all, we help drive industry progress and bold change.

To learn more, visit united-imaging.com or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter @UnitedImagingHC .

SOURCE United Imaging Healthcare Co., Ltd.

Related Links

www.united-imaging.com


HOUSTON and COLUMBIA, Md., June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- NASA recently announced the selection of Goddard Space Flight Center's DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) mission as part of its Discovery Program. Universities Space Research Association's (USRA's) Drs. Justin Filiberto and Walter Kiefer at the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) are science co-investigators on the team that will analyze Venus' atmosphere to understand how it formed, evolved, and determine whether Venus ever had an ocean.

Scientists think that in an earlier time, Venus may have been more like Earth, a world with water oceans that was potentially habitable for life, perhaps for billions of years. They hypothesize something caused a "runaway greenhouse" effect in Venus' atmosphere, cranking up the temperature and vaporizing its oceans. NASA's DAVINCI mission is set to explore Venus to determine if it was habitable and understand how these similar worlds ended up with such different fates.

"A return to Venus is long overdue as we try to answer the question of why are Earth and Venus  often described as twins in size and composition  so different today?" says Dr. Lisa Gaddis, Director of the LPI. "The LPI is very pleased and proud to be part of this adventure with the DAVINCI team as they address this and many other questions about how the extremely hot, arid and acidic environment on Venus came to be."

The science impact of DAVINCI will reach even beyond the solar system to Venus-like planets orbiting other stars (exoplanets), which are expected to be common and will represent important targets for NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. But these planets may be difficult to interpret, especially if they are enveloped in thick Venus-like clouds.

The mission will consist of a carrier spacecraft and a probe. The carrier spacecraft will track motions of the clouds and map surface composition by measuring heat emission from Venus' surface that escapes to space through the massive atmosphere. The probe will descend through the atmosphere, sampling its chemistry as well as the temperature, pressure, and winds. The probe will also take the first high-resolution images of Alpha Regio, an ancient highland twice the size of Texas with rugged mountains, looking for evidence that past crustal water influenced surface materials.

"DAVINCI will make detailed measurements of the chemistry of the atmosphere of Venus, revealing key features of its evolution for the first time," says Walter Kiefer, a planetary geophysicist at the LPI and a member of DAVINCI science team. "These observations will tell us about the origin of the atmosphere, whether or not Venus had an ocean early in its history, and how the rate of volcanic activity has varied with time."

Launch is targeted for 2029 with two flybys of Venus prior to the probe's descent into and through thick clouds of Venus atmosphere. The flybys are the initial phase of the remote-sensing mission to study the atmospheric circulation and map the surface composition. Approximately two years later, the probe will be released to conduct its investigation of the atmosphere during a descent that will last about an hour, and take hundreds of measurements, before landing at Alpha Regio.

"The Alpha Region landing site is one of the oldest and most geologically complex regions of Venus, similar to continents on Earth," says Justin Filiberto, a planetary geologist, and another member of the science team, at the LPI. "DAVINCI will provide the highest resolution imaging ever obtained for Venus, which will reveal the rock composition, the surface weathering environment, and the tectonic processes that shaped this part of Venus."

The probe will contain four instruments. Two of them  the Venus Mass Spectrometer (VMS) and the Venus Tunable Laser Spectrometer (VTLS)  will undertake the first complete compositional study of the entire cross-section of Venus' atmospheric gases, searching for clues as to how, when, and why Venus' climate may have changed so dramatically. The third instrument, the Venus Atmospheric Structure Investigation (VASI), will measure the pressure, temperature, and winds from about 43.5 miles (70 kilometers) in altitude to the surface at 10 times higher resolution (or more) than any previous Venus probe. After the probe drops under the thick cloud layer, the Venus Descent Imager (VenDI) instrument will take hundreds of near-infrared images of the Alpha Regio highlands, which the team will use to make maps of topography and composition. These images will show landscapes unique to Venus at the high resolutions typical of landers (near the surface). The probe also carries a student collaboration experiment, Venus Oxygen Fugacity (VfOx), which will measure the abundance of molecular oxygen in the atmosphere.

The carrier spacecraft will have one instrument, a suite of four cameras called VISOR (Venus Imaging System from Orbit for Reconnaissance). One camera will be sensitive to ultraviolet light to track cloud motions in the atmosphere. Additionally, a suite of three cameras sensitive to near-infrared light will be able to identify surface composition at regional scales by analyzing near-infrared heat emission from the surface when the spacecraft is over the night side of Venus. Since rock composition can be influenced by water, these images will give clues to how ancient oceans may have shaped the crust of Venus. The camera suite will provide the first compositional maps of Ishtar Terra, the high latitude "continent" on Venus with a range in height of up to 6.8 miles (11 kilometers). Ishtar may be the last manifestation of a kind of plate tectonics on Venus that shut off when the oceans dissipated about one billion years ago. The carrier spacecraft also carries a technology demonstration experiment, the Compact Ultraviolet to Visible Imaging Spectrometer (CUVIS), which will measure the radiation balance, physical properties, and composition of the Venus clouds.

James Garvin of NASA Goddard is the principal investigator. Goddard will perform project management and project systems engineering for the mission.

About USRA

Founded in 1969, under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences at the request of the U.S. Government, the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) is a nonprofit corporation chartered to advance space-related science, technology, and engineering. USRA operates scientific institutes and facilities, and conducts other major research and educational programs, under Federal funding. USRA engages the university community and employs in-house scientific leadership, innovative research and development, and project management expertise. More information about USRA is available at www.usra.edu.

About LPI

The Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI), operated by Universities Space Research Association, was established during the Apollo program to foster international collaboration and to serve as a repository for information gathered during the early years of the space program. Today, the LPI is an intellectual leader in lunar and planetary science. The Institute serves as a scientific forum attracting world-class visiting scientists, postdoctoral fellows, students, and resident experts; supports and serves the research community through newsletters, meetings, and other activities; collects and disseminates planetary data while facilitating the community's access to NASA science; and engages and excites, and educates the public about space science and invests in the development of future generations of explorers. The research carried out at the LPI supports NASA's efforts to explore the solar system. More information about LPI is available at www.lpi.usra.edu.

PR Contact:

Suraiya Farukhi, Ph.D.

[email protected]

410-740-6224; 443-812-6945

Julie Tygielski, [email protected]

Technical Contact:

Dr. Justin Filiberto, [email protected]

Dr. Walter Kiefer, [email protected]

SOURCE Universities Space Research Association

Related Links

http://www.usra.edu


VALLEY FORGE, Pa., June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- World-class plan design, including automatic enrollment, annual automatic deferral increases, and target-date funds helped defined contribution (DC) participants stay the course during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the most-recent edition of How America Saves. Now in its twentieth year, Vanguard has continued to expand the catalog of How America Saves research with Insights to Action, a supplementary report delivering expert recommendations shown to improve plan efficacy and employee participation.

"The unwavering investment focus and discipline demonstrated by Vanguard 401(k) participants throughout the COVID-19 pandemic is a powerful illustration of the benefits and value of thoughtful plan design," said John James, managing director and head of Vanguard Institutional Investor Group. "Together with Vanguard, plan sponsors continue to make incredible progress expanding access to the tools and resources employees need to improve their financial well-being."

Smart plan design encourages greater retirement savings

Adoption of DC plan features such as automatic enrollment, automatic escalation, and target-date funds helped more participants save for retirement and keep their focus on the long term, even in the wake of last year's unprecedented market uncertainty. Specifically:

Participants' increasing use of target-date fundswhich offer a risk-adjusted, all-in-one portfolio solutionled to a 75% decrease in extreme equity allocations among participants over the last 15 years.

Target-date funds tamped down frequent trading96% of participants holding a single target-date fund did not make a trade last year.

Automatic enrollment helped employees save 50% more for retirement than those at companies offering voluntary enrollment.

Annual automated deferral increases resulted in participants saving 20-30% more after three years than employees without automatic increases.

Driving better retirement outcomes

How America Saves has served as a benchmarking tool and blueprint for best practices in DC plan design for plan sponsors for two decades. Last year, drawing on the data from the flagship report, Vanguard Strategic Retirement Consulting (SRC) launched How America Saves: Insights to Action, a supplementary report offering effective plan design recommendations that can meaningfully improve participants' outcomes.

This year's Insights to Action encourages plan sponsors to focus on four key areas: automatic features, adoption of advice and retiree-friendly policies, and the curtailing of frequent loans and withdrawals. Combined, these plan design features can meaningfully improve participation and savings rates and keep participants on track for retirement.

"Retirement savings is just one piece of a participant's broader financial picture, and they are increasingly looking to their employer plans for customized advice and solutions that take a more comprehensive approach to financial well-being," said Mr. James. "Through both continuous investment and evolution of our capabilities, Vanguard has an advice suite designed to address each participant's unique circumstances. Combined with our reimagined client experience, world-class thought leadership, and top performing investments, Vanguard is well-positioned to meet plan sponsors' and participants' needs both now and for years to come."

With more than $1.7 trillion in DC assets under management, Vanguard serves as recordkeeper and strategic partner to 1,400 plan sponsorshelping them build smarter, stronger DC plans for 4.7 million participants. Long recognized as an industry leader in DC plan design, Vanguard is focused on providing plan sponsors with leading advice and investment solutions and cutting-edge technology, research, and client experiences that help more participants save for retirement.

About Vanguard

Vanguard is one of the world's largest investment management companies. As of April 30, 2021, Vanguard managed $7.8 trillion in global assets. The firm, headquartered in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, offers 439 funds to its more than 30 million investors worldwide. For more information, visit vanguard.com.

All figures as of April 30, 2021 unless stated otherwise.

For more information about Vanguard funds, visit institutional.vanguard.com or call 800-523-7064 to obtain a prospectus or, if available, a summary prospectus. Investment objectives, risks, charges, expenses, and other important information about a fund are contained in the prospectus; read and consider it carefully before investing.

All investing is subject to risk, including the possible loss of the money you invest. Diversification does not ensure a profit or protect against a loss.

Investments in Target Retirement Funds are subject to the risks of their underlying funds. The year in the fund name refers to the approximate year (the target date) when an investor in the fund would retire and leave the workforce. The fund will gradually shift its emphasis from more aggressive investments to more conservative ones based on its target date. An investment in a Target Retirement Fund is not guaranteed at any time, including on or after the target date.

Vanguard Marketing Corporation, Distributor.

SOURCE Vanguard
This dental sutures market report encapsulates not only the healthcare industry value chain analysis, but also features overall validation techniques employed for deriving the most accurate data insights.

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The dental sutures market will witness a positive impact during the forecast period owing to the widespread growth of the COVID-19 pandemic. As per Technavio's pandemic-focused market research, market growth is likely to increase in 2020 as compared to 2020.

With the continuing spread of the novel coronavirus pandemic, organizations across the globe are gradually flattening their recessionary curve by leveraging technology. Many businesses will go through response, recovery, and renew phases. Building business resilience and enabling agility will aid organizations to move forward in their journey out of the COVID-19 crisis towards the Next Normal.

Key Considerations for Market Forecast:

Impact of lockdowns, supply chain disruptions, demand destruction, and change in customer behavior

Optimistic, probable, and pessimistic scenarios for all markets as the impact of pandemic unfolds

Pre- as well as post-COVID-19 market estimates

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Global Dental Surgical Equipment Market - Global dental surgical equipment market is segmented by product (dental systems and equipment and dental lasers) and geography (North America, Europe, Asia, and ROW).

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Major Three Dental Sutures Market Participants:

Advanced Medical Solutions Group Plc: The company offers dental sutures under the brand name RESORBA.

B. Braun Melsungen AG: The company offers absorbable dental sutures by brand names Monosyn, MonoPlus, Monomax, Novosyn, and Safil.

Ergon Sutramed Srl: The company offers absorbable dental sutures by brand name DARVIN.

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Dental Sutures Market 2021-2025: Segmentation

Dental sutures market is segmented as below:

Product

Absorbable Sutures



Non-absorbable Sutures

Geography

North America



Europe



Asia



ROW

The dental sutures market is driven by the increasing prevalence of dental conditions. In addition, new product launches are expected to trigger the dental sutures market toward witnessing a CAGR of almost 4% during the forecast period.

Gain more insights about the global trends impacting the future of the dental sutures market, Request Free Sample @ https://www.technavio.com/talk-to-us?report=IRTNTR43728

Market Drivers

Market Challenges

Market Trends

Vendor Landscape

Vendors covered

Vendor classification

Market positioning of vendors

Competitive scenario

About Us

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focuses on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

Contact

Technavio Research

Jesse Maida

Media & Marketing Executive

US: +1 844 364 1100

UK: +44 203 893 3200

Email: [email protected]

Website: www.technavio.com/

Newsroom: newsroom.technavio.com/news/dental-suturesmarket

Report: www.technavio.com/report/dental-sutures-market-industry-analysis

SOURCE Technavio

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SAN FRANCISCO, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- AAA insurance sales agents across Northern California have voted overwhelmingly to join Teamsters Local 665. The election was conducted by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) via mail-in ballot and votes were tabulated today.

The 460 insurance sales agents with AAA Northern California work at 77 locations across six regions, stretching from Merced, Calif., to the Oregon border.

"These workers stood united because they deserve a strong voice and a secure future at AAA Northern California," said Tom Woods, Business Agent with Local 665. "They want the stability and strength that comes with a Teamster contract, and we're ready to get to work to negotiate an agreement."

"I want my fellow workers in the insurance and financial services industries to understand that they can protect themselves with union representation. It's time to take control of your future," said Jeff Wilkinson, a 29-year AAA Northern California insurance sales agent.

The workers had far-reaching support in their campaign to organize, including from dozens of California political leaders, California Central Labor Councils and the California Labor Federation. That support was on display at a rally held in downtown San Francisco in April.

AAA Northern California workers, who have the expertise to provide customers with insurance to protect themselves and their families, sought out union representation to ensure their own futures.

Insurance sales agents who have been with the company for decades report feeling pushed out and fear termination over changing and unrealistic sales targets. Meanwhile, new hires are being paid a fraction of what tenured commissioned sales agents earn.

The insurance sales agents, who work and live spread out in a wide geography across Northern California, came together during the pandemic to build their campaign to organize. They remained united over regular, well-attended Zoom calls.

"It Is beyond question that the workers exceeded any reasonable expectation of perseverance and grit to get themselves to this point and this is their win," said Tony Delorio, Secretary-Treasurer of Local 665. "I want to thank President Rome Aloise and Teamsters Joint Council 7, and the International Union for their full effort and commitment to assisting in this organizing effort. We are excited to begin the work of negotiating a first agreement on behalf of these incredibly hardworking Teamsters."

Founded in 1903, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters represents 1.4 million hardworking men and women throughout the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. Visit www.teamster.org for more information. Follow us on Twitter @Teamsters and "like" us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/teamsters.

Contact:

Kara Deniz, (202) 497-6610

[email protected]

SOURCE Teamsters Local 665

Related Links

http://www.teamster.org


BOSTON, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Activ Surgical , a digital surgery pioneer, today announced the introduction of ActivInsights software suite, a proprietary augmented reality (AR)-based bundle that offers real time tissue assessment in the form of previously unavailable visual overlays. The new software suite, along with the company's interoperable imaging module, ActivSight, are the first commercially-available products of the ActivEdge platform, which is being designed to transform massive amounts of data gathered intra-operatively to provide surgeons real-time guidance in the operating room.

The ability to detect blood flow is critical in most surgical procedures today. Currently, surgeons need to depend on their skill and training to make a decision or acquire expensive surgical visualization towers and inject a dye into the patient in order to see blood flow or determine if tissue is viable. The first offering from the ActivInsights software suite that will be made available to surgeons is the Perfusion View Insight, which will provide the ability to see blood flow and perfusion in real time, without the use of traditional dyes. The Perfusion View Insight will allow surgeons to visualize blood flow in real-time without the injection of dye for procedures, including anastomosis in colorectal cases.

The ActivInsights augmented reality software suite will be underpinned by the industry's largest annotated data set to be developed by the company over the next 12 months. Currently, ActivInsights' Perfusion View Insights visual overlays are derived from proprietary sensing technologies. Its Perfusion View Insights will be based on mulit-spectral imaging, with the goal of integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities in the future as more annotated data is collected and processed through Activ Surgical's platform.

"I founded Activ Surgical in 2017 with the goal of democratizing surgical care by extending insights from leading surgeons to all surgical systems, regardless of location," said Dr. Peter Kim, founder and Chief Science and Medical Officer, Activ Surgical. "Bringing our ActivInsights offerings to market is a significant step in realizing this goal as it will provide meaningful visual data that was previously unavailable in the OR to surgeons all across the globe."

The ActivInsights software suite will be made available to healthcare systems worldwide via a technology-as-a-service (TaaS) pricing model, and will include ActivSight, an intraoperative hardware that enables and delivers enhanced surgical visualization. ActivSight software powers ActivInsights, serving as the "eyes" of the platform, allowing surgeons to visualize blood flow in real time. Activ Surgical received 510(k) clearance from the Food and Drug Administration for ActivSight in April 2021. To date, 13 major healthcare systems around the world have committed to the ActivInsight software suite's initial launch, which is planned for the second half of 2021. Activ Surgical expects the ActivInsights augmented reality software suite to be commercially available to surgeons around the world in 2022.

For more information on Activ Surgical and its technologies, please visit https://www.activsurgical.com/#about .

About Activ Surgical

Activ Surgical is the pioneering digital surgery company that completed the world's first autonomous robotic surgery of soft tissue in 2018. The company is revolutionizing surgical vision, enabling a future of augmented reality-based and artificial intelligence-driven surgery that is safe, smart, and accessible to all. Its patent-protected surgical software platform--ActiveEdge--reduces unintended and preventable surgical errors by enhancing a surgeon's intraoperative decision making via the aggregation of surgical data from around the world. Activ Surgical is privately held, and backed by DNS Capital, GreatPoint Ventures (GPV), Artis Ventures, Tao Capital Partners, LRVHealth, Rising Tide VC, SONY Innovation Fund and 8VC. Learn more at www.activsurgical.com.

SOURCE Activ Surgical

Related Links

https://www.activsurgical.com


CHICAGO, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Aetna, a CVS Health company (NYSE: CVS), announced it has received approval to expand its existing Illinois Medicare-Medicaid Alignment Initiative (MMAI) demonstration health plan (Aetna Better Health Premier Plan MMAI) to serve the entire state.

The MMAI is a groundbreaking joint effort by the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services (HFS) and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to reform the way care is delivered to individuals eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid services ("dual eligibles"). The MMAI demonstration project began providing coordinated care to dual eligible enrollees in the Chicagoland area and Central Illinois beginning March 2014.

The statewide expansion is the result of extensive planning initiated in 2019 by HFS in collaboration with CMS, health plans and community stakeholders. The MMAI integrated delivery system and payment model aims to improve the quality, coordination and cost-effectiveness of care for dual eligibles. Aetna's approval to operate statewide comes after the company passed a readiness review and secured contracts with a robust network of providers to meet the Medicare and Medicaid service needs of dual eligible members. At this time, Aetna is the only health plan approved to operate the MMAI program across all Illinois counties.

"Aetna Better Health Premier Plan MMAI is committed to supporting additional dual eligible customers across the state of Illinois through our MMAI product offering," said Corey Taliaferro, Executive Director for the plan. "We consistently receive positive feedback from our dual eligible members who enjoy the convenience of having all of their Medicare and Medicaid benefits in one plan. They tell us having a designated care coordinator goes a long way in helping them to successfully meet their individual health care needs and goals."

Customers eligible to enroll in MMAI in the expansion counties may opt-in beginning in June 2021. They can make an active selection for a July 1, 2021 effective date. The MMAI passive enrollment1 implementation for the statewide expansion will occur in phases for multiple cohorts. Enrollment materials for the first passive enrollment cohort will be mailed in June 2021 with a September 1, 2021 effective date. For more information, see MMAI Provider Notice.

Aetna was originally selected via a competitive procurement and has served as an MMAI health plan in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Kankakee and Will counties since the program's inception. Aetna provides the full spectrum of Medicare and Medicaid covered services through an integrated care delivery system to seniors and adults (aged 21 and over) with disabilities who are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid. Aetna welcomes current eligible Medicare Advantage and HealthChoice Medicaid members residing in expansion counties into the MMAI program where they can receive all covered services in one integrated health plan with care coordination. For more information, see Aetna Better Health Premier Plan MMAI.

1Passive enrollment means that if a customer does not choose a health plan, the customer will be auto assigned to a health plan.

###

About Aetna

Aetna, a CVS Health business, serves an estimated 34 million people with information and resources to help them make better informed decisions about their health care. Aetna offers a broad range of traditional, voluntary and consumer-directed health insurance products and related services, including medical, pharmacy, dental and behavioral health plans, and medical management capabilities, Medicaid health care management services, workers' compensation administrative services and health information technology products and services. Aetna's customers include employer groups, individuals, college students, part-time and hourly workers, health plans, health care providers, governmental units, government-sponsored plans, labor groups and expatriates. For more information, visit www.aetna.com.

Aetna Better Health Premier Plan MMAI is a health plan that contracts with both Medicare and Illinois Medicaid to provide benefits of both programs to enrollees.

Aetna Medicare operates a Medicare-Medicaid Plan (MMP) under a three-way contract with Aetna Better Health of Illinois, Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services (HFS) and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Aetna Medicare has expertise serving members who are dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid in 24 states. Enrollment in our plans depends on contract renewal. Participating physicians, hospitals and other health care providers are independent contractors and are neither agents nor employees of Aetna. The availability of any particular provider cannot be guaranteed, and provider network composition is subject to change.

2021 Aetna Inc.

H2506_21SAE PR

Media contact

Charlie Rice-Minoso

224-213-1135

[email protected]

SOURCE CVS Health

Related Links

https://www.aetna.com/


The "aoppella!?" project began on March 4, 2021 and has reached its 100th day today, Friday, June 11. The project's first J-Pop cover medley of "Hakujitsu / Pretender" surpassed the 1 million view mark (currently 3 million views) in just one week. The "aoppella!?" project continues to grow and gain support among fans from all over the world.

In commemoration, the series' first web radio series is scheduled for early July 2021. The series' very first web radio series "aoppella!? Radio" will air on the official Youtube channel with hosts Tetsuya Kakihara, voice of Luka Shihou, and Daiki Hamano, voice of Yui Nekoyashiki.

In addition, there will be a social media cheer campaign to reach goals and unlock "aoppella!?" content. There is also a summer campaign to unlock the summer uniforms for the cast so be sure to check the official Twitter ( @aoppella ).

Fan Works Contest "AoCon"

We are looking for a wide range of fan created works such as illustrations, novels, and more based on the themes of the "aoppella!?" original songs "Playlist" and "Think About U". Special prizes will be awarded to winners and participants of the contest and outstanding work will be displayed on the official website at a later date.

Entry Period: Friday, June 11, 2021 to Sunday, August 1, 2021

Contest Website:

https://www.aoppella.com/lp/aocon/

Guidelines:

https://www.aoppella.com/guideline.html

*The content of the campaigns and contest are subject to change without notice.

*The official website and social media are Japanese language only.

About "aoppella!?"

"aoppella!?" is KLab's latest original multimedia music project built on the themes of "youth" and "a cappella".

Official Website: https://www.aoppella.com/

Official Twitter: @aoppella

Official YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/aoppella

Copyright: KLab

SOURCE KLab Inc.

Related Links

https://www.klab.com


ArcLight Clean Transition Corp. Announces Shareholder Approval of Business Combination with Proterra Tweet this

ArcLight plans to file the meeting results of the extraordinary general meeting, as tabulated by an independent inspector of elections, on a Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") today.

About Proterra

Proterra is a leader in the design and manufacture of zero-emission electric transit vehicles and EV technology solutions for commercial applications. With industry- leading durability and energy efficiency based on rigorous U.S. independent testing, Proterra products are proudly designed, engineered and manufactured in America, with offices in Silicon Valley, South Carolina, and Los Angeles. For more information, visit: http://www.proterra.com and follow us on Twitter @Proterra_Inc.

About ArcLight Clean Transition Corp.

ArcLight Clean Transition Corp., led by Chairman Daniel Revers and President and Chief Executive Officer Jake Erhard, focuses on market leading companies that facilitate the decarbonization of industrial, government and consumer segments, targeting large addressable markets with differentiated technology and sustainable competitive advantages that enable the creation of substantial long-term value for shareholders. ArcLight prioritizes companies led by experienced management teams that embrace the potential to utilize ArcLight's industry experience to maximize the value to shareholders.

Additional Information

In connection with the Business Combination, the Registration Statement on Form S-4 (File No. 333-252674) (the "Registration Statement") which includes the related proxy statement and prospectus of ArcLight with respect to the Extraordinary General Meeting, has been declared effective by the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"). This communication is not a substitute for the Registration Statement, the definitive proxy statement/prospectus or any other document that ArcLight has or will send to its shareholders in connection with the transactions contemplated by the Business Combination. ArcLight's shareholders and other interested persons are advised to read the Registration Statement and the related proxy statement/prospectus and any documents filed in connection therewith, as these materials will contain important information about Proterra, ArcLight, and the Business Combination. The definitive proxy statement and related materials have been mailed to ArcLight's shareholders who were holders of record as of May 4, 2021. The documents filed by ArcLight with the SEC may also be obtained free of charge at the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. In addition, the documents filed by ArcLight may be obtained free of charge from ArcLight at https://www.arclightclean.com or by directing a request to: ArcLight Clean Transition Corp., 200 Clarendon Street, 55th Floor, Boston, MA 02116.

Disclaimer

This communication is for informational purposes only and is neither an offer to purchase, nor a solicitation of an offer to sell, subscribe for or buy, any securities or the solicitation of any vote in any jurisdiction pursuant to the Business Combination or otherwise, nor shall there be any sale, issuance or transfer or securities in any jurisdiction in contravention of applicable law. No offer of securities shall be made except by means of a prospectus meeting the requirements of Section 10 of the Securities Act.

SOURCE ArcLight Capital Partners, LLC

Related Links

arclightcapital.com


NEW YORK, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- ATSG, a tech-enabled managed services and solutions company, announced today that CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, has named ATSG to its 2021 Solution Provider 500 list. CRN announces its top 500 solution providers list each year, ranking the leading IT channel partner organizations across North America by revenue. This year's impressive list represents a remarkable combined revenue of over $403 billion, underscoring the immense impact and influence these partners have on the IT industry today.

ATSG's continued growth and evolution into a holistic Managed IT services company, illustrates its ongoing commitment to offering the highest level of technical enablement to its clients. ATSG's targeted acquisition model integrates industry-leading technologists into its unified organizational platform. This expansion of capabilities and offerings includes public and private cloud, collaboration, unified communications, contact center, digital workplace, mobility, hybrid infrastructure, and security. As the markets' digital priorities continue to accelerate, ATSG continues to execute on its vision to deliver the most reliable, scalable, and secure services that take advantage of the best technology stacks available.

"ATSG is once again honored to be featured on this prestigious list for the 4th consecutive year. Our industry recognition and global success can be attributed to providing exceptional experiences for our clients and our culture of innovation, combined with our digital and operational expertise, to deliver proven results," said Anthony J. D'Ambrosi, Chief Executive Officer, ATSG. "I am very proud of how our diverse teams continue to drive our mission through effective collaboration, focusing on delivering on our promises, going above and beyond for our clients each and every day."

"CRN's Solution Provider 500 list serves as the industry standard for top-performing technology integrators, strategic service providers, and IT consultants, which makes it a valuable resource for technology vendors looking to partner with today's best-of-breed IT solution providers," said Blaine Raddon, CEO of The Channel Company. "On behalf of The Channel Company, I'd like to congratulate these companies for their incredible contributions to the growth and success of the IT channel."

The complete 2021 Solution Provider 500 list is available online at www.CRN.com/SP500 and a sample from the list will be featured in the June issue of CRN Magazine.

About ATSG

ATSG is a global tech-enabled managed services and solutions company focused on innovative solutions to enhance today's digital enterprise and end-user experiences. ATSG provides Intelligent IT through Technology Solutions as a Service (TSaaS) to a variety of customers; leveraging an offerings portfolio of rediTech, rediManage, rediCloud, and rediSecure, which delivers reliable, elastic, dynamic infrastructure, collaboration, applications, as well as world-class IT operations.

Headquartered in Manhattan, New York, ATSG is a portfolio company of RunTide Capital, a private equity firm focused on building tech-enabled growth companies.

ATSG is a privately held company headquartered in Manhattan, New York. For more information on ATSG, please visit us on the web at http://www.atsg.net/, like us on LinkedIn, follow us on Twitter, or become a fan on our Facebook page. #AboutATSG

About The Channel Company

The Channel Company enables breakthrough IT channel performance with our dominant media, engaging events, expert consulting and education, and innovative marketing services and platforms. As the channel catalyst, we connect and empower technology suppliers, solution providers, and end-users. Backed by more than 30 years of unequaled channel experience, we draw from our deep knowledge to envision innovative new solutions for ever-evolving challenges in the technology marketplace. www.thechannelcompany.com

 2021. CRN is a registered trademark of The Channel Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Press Contact:

Elizabeth Kubycheck

[email protected]

SOURCE ATSG

Related Links

http://www.atsg.net


DALLAS, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Trailblazing immigration firm BAL ranks in the highest Tier 1 category among all immigration law firms nationwide, according to the newly released rankings by The Legal 500.

BAL provides "top-end service on business immigration matters," and "remains the first choice of call for clients in this area," declared The Legal 500, a pre-eminent publication that conducts comprehensive research of law firms worldwide.

"We are honored to be a top-ranked firm once again," said Jeremy Fudge, Managing Partner. "It recognizes the impact our incredible team makes on clients all over the world. During this challenging year, we helped clients navigate unprecedented travel lockdowns and immigration backlogs and obtained travel ban exceptions for key players in COVID vaccine development. We're living out our mission to make a positive difference in people's lives."

BAL clients who were interviewed by The Legal 500 called the firm "best in class" and "exceptional." Clients were particularly impressed with BAL legal team members providing "superb customer service and subject matter expertise," and stated BAL achieved "extraordinarily high approval rate for our H-1B petitions and RFEs" (Requests for Evidence).

More than ever, the challenges of the past year highlighted the successful "oneBAL" philosophy as all BAL offices worked together as one unit to streamline case filings. Attorneys and staff remained flexible and agile to meet client demand, even in the most difficult immigration environmentwhile maintaining the highest level of customer service.

Clients touted the firm's focus on service and attentiveness to their employees' needs. As one client told The Legal 500 "The team is customer oriented, strive to deliver best services and keep the client population at ease."

Nine BAL attorneys are recognized for their standout contributions. Founding Partner David Berry and Managing Partner Jeremy Fudge continue their multi-year enshrinement in The Legal 500 Hall of Fame. BAL Partner Lynden Melmed, who oversees the firm's Government Strategies Team in the Washington D.C. office, is distinguished as a Leading Lawyer, whom clients applaud: "The BAL government affairs team is exceptional. They proactively inform us of news developments that could impact our immigration program, and strategies to navigate any changes or challenges."

Several BAL Partners ranked as Recommended Lawyers, including Frieda Garcia in San Francisco, Ruth Clark in Houston, and Roberto Caballero, who is "noted for complex advisory work across a range of industries, including energy and technology." Partner Nassim Mahzoon in Santa Clara is singled out for being "knowledgeable and a delight to work with." Partner Kortney Gibson, who leads the Dallas Center of Excellence, is named a Next Generation Partner. Senior Associate Tiffany Martinez in San Francisco is recognized as a Rising Star.

The firm's deep expertise, innovative proprietary technologies and people-centered service enable BAL to offer clients unparalleled legal insight and transformative program management. With BAL's harmonized, personalized service around the world through its strategic relationship with Deloitte U.K., BAL clients have constant access to world-class legal representation.

Another client summed up BAL's unique, collaborative approach: "I think what makes Berry Appleman & Leiden (BAL) unique in the legal market is their genuine pursuit of the exceptional. In terms of collaboration, my impression is that the team works very well together. They celebrate their team wins, and also are always willing to take on constructive feedback with humility and a positive attitude."

SOURCE Berry Appleman & Leiden LLP
Technavio's in-depth market research reports include value chain analysis and validation techniques to help industry leaders improve their business.

Download FREE Sample Report

The beer market will witness a Neutral impact during the forecast period owing to the widespread growth of the COVID-19 pandemic. As per Technavio's pandemic-focused market research, market growth is likely to increase in 2021 as compared to 2020.

With the continuing spread of the novel coronavirus pandemic, organizations across the globe are gradually flattening their recessionary curve by leveraging technology. Many businesses will go through response, recovery, and renewal phases. Building business resilience and enabling agility will aid organizations to move forward in their journey out of the COVID-19 crisis towards the Next Normal.

This post-pandemic business planning research will aid clients to:

Adjust their strategic planning to move ahead once business stability kicks in.

to move ahead once business stability kicks in. Build Resilience by making effective resource and investment choices for individual business units, products, and service lines.

making effective resource and investment choices for individual business units, products, and service lines. Conceptualize scenario-based planning to mitigate future crisis situations.

Download the Post-Pandemic Business Planning Structure

Key Considerations for Market Forecast:

Impact of lockdowns, supply chain disruptions, demand destruction, and change in customer behavior

Optimistic, probable, and pessimistic scenarios for all markets as the impact of pandemic unfolds

Pre- as well as post-COVID-19 market estimates

Quarterly impact analysis and updates on market estimates

Major Three Beer Market Participants:

Anheuser Busch InBev SA/NV

Anheuser Busch InBev SA/NV offers beer through global brands such as Budweiser, Stella Artois, Castle Lager Hoegaarden and Corona.

Asahi Group Holdings Ltd.

Asahi Group Holdings Ltd. offers beer brands like Asahi Super Dry.

Carlsberg Breweries AS

Carlsberg Breweries AS offers beer through different brands. International brands include Amstel, Desperados, Sol, Tiger, Tecate, and Red Stripe.

If you purchase a report that is updated in the next 60 days, we will send you the new edition and data extract FREE! Get report snapshot here to get a detailed market share analysis of market participants during COVID-19 lockdown: https://www.technavio.com/report/beer-market-industry-analysis

Beer Market 2021-2025: Segmentation

The beer market is segmented as below:

Distribution Channel

On-trade



Off-trade

Geography

APAC



Europe



North America



South America



The Middle East and Africa

The beer market is driven by the increasing demand for premium beers. In addition, the rising demand for low-alcohol beer is expected to trigger the beer market toward witnessing a CAGR of over 2% during the forecast period.

Get more insights about the global trends impacting the future of the beer market,

Request Free Sample @ https://www.technavio.com/talk-to-us?report=IRTNTR40198

Related Report on Consumer Staples Include:

Craft Beer Market in Europe- The craft beer market in Europe is segmented by product (IPA-based craft beer, seasonal-based craft beer, pale ale-based craft beer, amber ale-based craft beer, and others), distribution channel (off-trade and on-trade), and geography (Germany, UK, Poland, Russian Federation, and Rest of Europe).

Download FREE Sample Report

Global Low-Alcohol Beer Market- The low-alcohol beer market is segmented by distribution channel (off trade and on trade) and geography (Europe, APAC, North America, South America, and MEA).

Download FREE Sample Report

Market Drivers

Market Challenges

Market Trends

Vendor Landscape

Vendors covered

Vendor classification

Market positioning of vendors

Competitive scenario

About Us

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focuses on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

Contact

Technavio Research

Jesse Maida

Media & Marketing Executive

US: +1 844 364 1100

UK: +44 203 893 3200

Email: [email protected]

Website: www.technavio.com/

Report Page: https://www.technavio.com/report/beer-market-industry-analysis

SOURCE Technavio

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Led by Brian Russ, the team is focused on providing BMO's broad array of banking services and industry expertise to a wide variety of local industries

DENVER, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - BMO Harris Bank announced today the opening of a new commercial banking office in Denver, Colorado. Led by Brian Russ, the team will be focused on providing mid-market businesses throughout Colorado with access to BMO's full array of financial services and industry expertise.

"This new office will provide local businesses with another option for their banking services, one that we believe is a market differentiator," said Ray Whitacre, Head, Diversified Industries, BMO Harris Bank. "With its strong demographic and economic indicators, to say we're bullish on Colorado would be an understatement. We already bank a number of business customers in the area, so we're building on a solid foundation, and with the strength and local market knowledge of the management team we've put in place, led by Brian, we fully expect the team to experience significant growth."

The new commercial banking office will be focused on a wide variety of industries, including manufacturing, wholesale, distribution, engineering and construction, food and business services.

With more than 20 BMO employees already in the area, including a BMO Capital Markets office in downtown Denver, this isn't a new market for BMO; however, the opening of this new commercial banking office provides an opportunity to accelerate the growth of BMO's market presence, and brand, in Colorado.

"We are building a team that has the optimal balance of business expertise and local market knowledge," added Russ. "I am thrilled to bring BMO's unique service offering and client experience to the Colorado market. We are already seeing tremendous success."

About BMO Harris Bank

BMO Harris Bank provides a broad range of personal banking products and solutions through more than 500 branches and fee-free access to over 40,000 ATMs across the United States. BMO Harris Bank's commercial banking team provides a combination of sector expertise, local knowledge and mid-market focus throughout the United States. For more information about BMO Harris Bank, visit the company fact sheet. Accounts are subject to approval. BMO Harris Bank N.A. Member FDIC. BMO Harris Bank is part of BMO Financial Group, a highly diversified financial services provider with total assets of CDN$950 billion as of April 30, 2021.

SOURCE BMO Harris Bank
California Manufacturing Facility Receives Local Approval

VANCOUVER, BC, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Body and Mind Inc. (CSE: BAMM) (OTCQB: BMMJ) (the "Company" or "BaM"), a multi-state operator, is pleased to provide an update on development and license approval of the Ohio production facility and an update on California manufacturing and distribution.

BaM and NMG Ohio, LLC have completed construction of the Ohio production facility and have received a certificate of occupancy and approval from the Department of Commerce to commence processing operations comprising manufacturing of extracted products, oils and edibles. The production facility is located next to the Body and Mind dispensary west of Cleveland and anticipates producing a wide variety of Body and Mind branded offerings for the Ohio market.

"As early dispensary operators in Ohio we've had significant feedback from customers and patients around non-flower choices and are looking forward to bringing our award-winning Body and Mind offerings to Ohio," stated Michael Mills, CEO of Body and Mind." We have seen interest in the Ohio market growing for non-flower product categories including shatter, badder, oils and edibles and our strategy of licencing a BHO production operation will allow us to produce a wide range of products for the growing Ohio market."

California Manufacturing Facility

The Company has executed a lease and received local approval for a cannabis manufacturing facility in California. "We have been working with the property owner and local and state representatives for months to advance a wholly-owned manufacturing facility, which will also include a distribution license," stated Trip Hoffman, COO of Body and Mind. "Our development team has done a fantastic job with the Ohio facility and are looking forward to advancing the California opportunity which is anticipated to be funded from cashflow. Our sales data has outlined the success of our Body and Mind branded products and our focus on revenue growth and increased margins points to the benefit of advancing our own operation. We look forward to moving forward with development of our 100% owned manufacturing and distribution operation."

The Company has applications in process with the California Bureau of Cannabis Control (BCC) for a type N manufacturing license, and with the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) for a distribution license, which is anticipated to allow the Company to manufacture and distribute its BaM branded flower products, extracts, oils and edibles. In preparation for a change in manufacturing operations, Body and Mind has provided increased inventory to its ShowGrow dispensaries and other California customers, is reviewing bridging manufacturing options, and has terminated prior brand director agreements.

Arkansas Cultivation

Cultivation operations are advancing in West Memphis, Arkansas with Comprehensive Care Group. The cultivation facility has sprouted the initial batches of seeds and have advanced many of the seedlings into soil media to accelerate the vegetative state. The first harvest is estimated to occur in 16 weeks.

FY2021 Q3 Financial Results

The Company anticipates filing its Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the nine month period ended April 30, 2021 on or before June 21st, and details of an earnings call will be disseminated around the same time.

About Body and Mind Inc.

BaM is an operations focused multi-state operator investing in high quality medical and recreational cannabis cultivation, production and retail. Our wholly owned Nevada subsidiary was awarded one of the first medical marijuana cultivation licenses and holds cultivation and production licenses. BaM products include dried flower, edibles, oils and extracts as well as GPEN Gio cartridges. BaM cannabis strains have won numerous awards including the 2019 Las Vegas Weekly Bud Bracket, Las Vegas Hempfest Cup 2016, High Times Top Ten, the NorCal Secret Cup and the Emerald Cup.

BaM continues to expand operations in Nevada, California, Arkansas and Ohio and is dedicated to increasing shareholder value by focusing time and resources on improving operational efficiencies, facility expansions, state licensing opportunities as well as mergers and acquisitions.

Please visit www.bamcannabis.com for more information.

Instagram: @bodyandmindBaM

Twitter: @bodyandmindBaM

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Safe Harbor Statement

Except for the statements of historical fact contained herein, the information presented in this news release constitutes "forward-looking statements" as such term is used in applicable United States and Canadian laws. These statements relate to analyses and other information that are based on forecasts of future results, estimates of amounts not yet determinable and assumptions of management. Any other statements that express or involve discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance (often, but not always, using words or phrases such as "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", "plans, "estimates" or "intends", or stating that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved) are not statements of historical fact and should be viewed as "forward-looking statements". Such 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 be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such risks and other factors include, among others, the actual results of activities, variations in the underlying assumptions associated with the estimation of activities, the availability of capital to fund programs and the resulting dilution caused by the raising of capital through the sale of shares, accidents, labor disputes and other risks. 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. 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 contained in this news release and in any document referred to in this news release.

Certain matters discussed in this news release and oral statements made from time to time by representatives of the Company may constitute forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in such forward-looking statements are based upon reasonable assumptions, it can give no assurance that its expectations will be achieved. Forward-looking information is subject to certain risks, trends and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Many of these factors are beyond the Company's ability to control or predict. Important factors that may cause actual results to differ materially and that could impact the Company and the statements contained in this news release can be found in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company assumes no obligation to update or supplement any forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy securities.

SOURCE Body and Mind Inc.

Related Links

https://bamcannabis.com/


LOS ANGELES, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Chef Jet Tila and prominent Italian Chef Laura Vitale have launched a new YouTube episode of Thai Food at Home with Jet Tila (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV-iJMYx8Qw). The dynamic duo cooks a three-course menu: Thai Green Curry Chicken by Chef Jet, Thai Basil Chicken Pasta by Chef Laura, and an authentic Pineapple Coconut Colada. The show demonstrates that Thai ingredients can be used in Italian food. In a moment of nostalgia, Chef Laura Vitale reveals she is fond of fish sauce. The umami-rich fish sauce from Thailand reminded her of growing up in Italy, with her grandfather who was a sardine fisherman. Thai fish sauce is made from sardines!

"Chef Laura Vitale has a genuinely dedicated following for Italian cuisine. We invited her to try cooking Thai food, and to do experimental Italian cooking with Thai ingredients," says Ms. Kwanapa Phivnil, Executive Director of Thai Trade Center Los Angeles (TTCLA), who produced the video.

To reach the maximum audience possible, an omnichannel distribution strategy was used. The episode debuted on "Laura in the Kitchen" on YouTube (www.youtube.com/user/LauraVitalesKitchen), to reach its 3.8 million followers. Alternate versions of the video were then published on Chef Jet Tila's YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjySgWzK6k4), and Thai Trade USA's social media pages.

Thai Food at Home with Jet Tila is cooking video series showcasing variety of Thai healthy ingredients from Thailand that Chef Jet Tila uses all the time. These include but are not limited to premium Hom Mali Jasmine Rice, palm sugar, tamarind, fish sauce and coconut products. Most of the products have on their label, next to Product of Thailand, an emblem, "Thailand Trust Mark" ("TTM"). This means they are from Thai manufacturers who are serious about producing excellent quality products that consumers can trust. After rigorous inspection by concerned Thai government agencies, the products were awarded the right to claim this prestige emblem.

The Department of International Trade Promotion (DITP) is an agency of the Thailand Ministry of Commerce. Through Thai Trade Center, their overseas offices are located worldwide including four in the United States: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Miami. DITP works closely with international trade communities, both in Thailand and abroad, to create good business relationships that would result in mutual benefit.

SOURCE Thai Trade Center
LOS ANGELES, June 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Michael Richman will be the first featured guest in a new long-form conversation format for Pragertopia, The Dennis Prager Show Podcast. Dr. Richman will talk about current trends in cardiovascular disease, lipid management and patient advocacy. On this special show, he will cover cardiovascular disease, advanced lipoprotein testing and his healthcare firm, PaladinMDs.

As a cardiovascular surgeon, Dr. Richman brings a broad perspective to The Dennis Prager Show. Having performed everything from open heart surgery to offering simple blood tests, Dr. Richman knows what's best for your health. Colleagues consider Dr. Richman an outstanding patient advocate; someone who fights for what's right and "goes to the mat for his patients". Known in the heart health community for his straight-forward, "Zero B.S." approach to medicine, he offers advice for you and your loved ones regarding the complex medical topics covered by the news.

Michael F. Richman, MD, MMM, FACS, FCCP is a is a double board-certified cardiothoracic and general surgeon, lipid specialist, and is the Co-founder and Chief Clinical Officer of PaladinMDs, as well as the founder of The Center for Cholesterol Management and the Elite Laser Vein Centers in Beverly Hills and Los Angeles, California. Dr. Richman was the cholesterol expert for WebMD and has made several national and local television appearances on heart health. He is internationally recognized in the lipid community and is the co-author of literature that teaches physicians how to diagnose and treat complex cholesterol cases.

www.paladinmds.com

Entrepreneur and PaladinMDs Co-founder Jennifer Martucci is the founder and CEO of Incentient, Inc. She has served as a strategic consultant to Pfizer and as CEO of GPSTracks, LLC. She has been awarded 27 technology patents and two method patents.

Dennis Prager is one of America's most respected radio talk show hosts. He has been broadcasting on radio in Los Angeles since 1982. His popular show became nationally syndicated in 1999 and airs live, Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM to Noon (Pacific Time) from his home station, KRLA.

www.dennisprager.com

CONTACT

Web www.paladinmds.com

Email [email protected]

Phone 310-481-3939

SOURCE PaladinMDs

Related Links

http://www.paladinmds.com


RADNOR, Pa., June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The law firm of Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP announces that securities fraud class action lawsuits have been filed against Danimer Scientific, Inc. (NYSE: DNMR) ("Danimer") f/k/a Live Oak Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: LOAK) ("Live Oak") on behalf of those who purchased or acquired Danimer securities between October 5, 2020 and May 4, 2021, inclusive (the "Class Period").

Investor Deadline Reminder: Investors who purchased or acquired Danimer securities during the Class Period may, no later than July 13, 2021 , seek to be appointed as a lead plaintiff representative of the class. For additional information or to learn how to participate in this litigation please contact Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP: James Maro, Esq. (484) 270-1453 or Adrienne Bell, Esq. (484) 270-1435; toll free at (844) 887-9500; via e-mail at [email protected]; or click https://www.ktmc.com/danimer-scientific-class-action-lawsuit?utm_source=PR&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=danimer

Live Oak was a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company. In December 2020, Live Oak consummated a business combination with Meredian Holdings Group, Inc. ("Meredian"), doing business as Danimer Scientific ("Legacy Danimer"), a performance polymer company specializing in bioplastic replacements for traditional petrochemical-based plastics (the "Business Combination"). Following the Business Combination, Live Oak changed its name to "Danimer Scientific, Inc.," changed its business to Legacy Danimer's business, and replaced its management with Legacy Danimer's management.

The Class Period commences on October 5, 2020, when Meredian announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement for the Business Combination. On December 30, 2020, Danimer issued a post-market press release announcing the completion of the Business Combination. That press release represented that "[Danimer's] signature polymer, Nodax PHA (polyhydroxyalkanoate), is a 100% biodegradable, renewable, and sustainable plastic" that "is the first PHA polymer to be certified as marine degradable, the highest standard of biodegradability, which verifies the material will fully degrade in ocean water without leaving behind harmful microplastics." The press release also touted that Danimer was partnering with blue chip companies to "introduce more sustainable alternatives to straws, food and beverage containers, and flexible packaging, among others." Throughout the Class Period, Danimer touted Nodax's environmental benefits, its viability as a fully biodegradable alternative to conventional plastic, the level of demand for Nodax, and the average selling price for Nodax.

The truth began to emerge on March 20, 2021, when the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled "Plastic Straws That Quickly Biodegrade in the Ocean, Not Quite, Scientists Say" addressing, among other things, Danimer's claims that Nodax breaks down far more quickly than fossil-fuel plastics. Specifically, the article reported that "many claims about Nodax are exaggerated and misleading, according to several experts on biodegradable plastics," and that, despite breaking down more quickly than traditional fossil-fuel plastics, "[b]iodegradable straws, bottles and bags can persist in the ocean for several years." Following this news, the price of Danimer stock declined by $6.43, from $49.98 per share on March 19, 2021 to $43.55 per share on March 22, 2021, approximately 13%.

On April 22, 2021, research firm Spruce Point Capital Management ("Spruce Point") issued a report demonstrating that Danimer's annual report disclosures regarding the purchase price of the Kentucky Facility were inconsistent with city records. Then, on May 4, 2021, Spruce Point issued a follow-up report which revealed that Danimer's production figures, average selling price, and financial projections had been "wildly overstated." Following this news, Danimer's stock price fell $4.48, or 20%, over three consecutive trading sessions to close at $17.66 per share on May 6, 2021.

The complaint alleges that throughout the Class Period, the defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) the defendants overstated and/or misstated the biodegradability and environmentally-friendly nature of its Nodax product; (2) the defendants misrepresented the size of Danimer's facilities, production capacity and actual production amounts, and costs; (3) the defendants misrepresented Danimer's growth, financial results, and financial projections; (4) Danimer had deficient internal controls; and (5) as a result, Danimer's public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times.

Danimer investors may, no later than July 13, 2021 , seek to be appointed as a lead plaintiff representative of the class through Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP or other counsel, or may choose to do nothing and remain an absent class member. A lead plaintiff is a representative party who acts on behalf of all class members in directing the litigation. In order to be appointed as a lead plaintiff, the Court must determine that the class member's claim is typical of the claims of other class members, and that the class member will adequately represent the class. Your ability to share in any recovery is not affected by the decision of whether or not to serve as a lead plaintiff.

Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP prosecutes class actions in state and federal courts throughout the country involving securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duties and other violations of state and federal law. Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP is a driving force behind corporate governance reform, and has recovered billions of dollars on behalf of institutional and individual investors from the United States and around the world. The firm represents investors, consumers and whistleblowers (private citizens who report fraudulent practices against the government and share in the recovery of government dollars). The complaint in this action was not filed by Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP. For more information about Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP please visit www.ktmc.com.

CONTACT:

Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP

James Maro, Jr., Esq.

Adrienne Bell, Esq.

280 King of Prussia Road

Radnor, PA 19087

(844) 887-9500 (toll free)

[email protected]

SOURCE Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP

Related Links

http://www.ktmc.com


DALLAS, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Comerica Bank and Southern California nonprofit PF Bresee Foundation are demonstrating how financial education can serve as a catalyst for change with the creation of the Women in Charge Financial Empowerment Camp. Mothers and their daughters will participate in a six-week camp designed to educate and empower with the goal of improving credit and increasing savings.

The inaugural Women in Charge Financial Empowerment Camp, beginning June 14, will share the importance of budgeting, credit impact and debt management with the help of Comerica's Money $ense curriculum. The camp will also leverage FamilySource Center CARES counselors to educate participants on how to take advantage of private and public benefits programs such as CalFresh, SoCal Gas utility discount and DWP energy savings programs.

"Financial education is a powerful tool and we are excited to partner with PF Bresee Foundation to share these important lessons in a unique and impactful way," said Comerica Bank Chief Community Officer Irvin Ashford, Jr. "Comerica is committed to building up its communities and there is no greater way to make a lasting impact than investing in individuals to help them achieve financial stability."

At the conclusion of the program, participants will look to increase their credit score by 10 points and increase savings by $100. Those achieving the two goals will receive $100. The camp's six lessons include: Making A Budget Work; Shopping for Groceries on a Budget; Debt Management; Programs to Help Reduce Expenses; Credit Scores and Reports; and Identity Theft.

"In a time where a pandemic has exacerbated the financial security of our families, Women in Charge provides tools necessary to thrive," said Seth Eklund, Executive Director of the PF Bresee Foundation. "Focusing on the women and budget implementers of their households is to strengthen the success of each family."

Support for the Women in Charge Financial Empowerment Camp was developed as a result of Comerica's COVID-19 relief contributions which focused on nonprofit organizations targeting women, young girls and seniors. Earlier this year, Comerica and the Comerica Charitable Foundation announced a commitment of $16 million aimed at supporting small businesses and communities impacted by the pandemic. Comerica's two-year total of COVID-19 contributions has reached $27 million spread across its five-state footprint of Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan and Texas.

About Comerica Bank

Comerica Bank is a subsidiary of Comerica Incorporated (NYSE: CMA), a financial services company headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and strategically aligned by three business segments: The Commercial Bank, The Retail Bank, and Wealth Management. Comerica focuses on relationships, and helping people and businesses be successful. In addition to Texas, Comerica Bank locations can be found in Arizona, California, Florida and Michigan, with select businesses operating in several other states, as well as in Canada and Mexico. Comerica reported total assets of $86.3 billion as of March 31, 2021.

About PF Bresee Foundation

Founded in 1982, Bresee was created by community leaders to address systemic disadvantages faced by local residents. Over the past 39 years, Bresee has grown from a grassroots drop-in tutoring program to keep local youth off the streets after school, to a robust organization offering a holistic approach to uplift Central Los Angeles residents to achieve not only immediate socio-economic stability, but long-term prosperity.

Today, Bresee's mission is to battle poverty by empowering youth and families in Los Angeles with the skills, resources and relationships necessary to thrive. To pursue this mission, Bresee offers diverse services under three program divisions: Youth Services, Family Services and Gang Prevention.

SOURCE Comerica Bank

Related Links

http://www.comerica.com


"We see every day that having people of varying backgrounds and perspectives is essential to innovating, problem solving and providing excellent service," said Joan Jacobs, Con Edison's vice president, Learning and Inclusion. "We have a long tradition of emphasizing fairness and respect for everyone, but the events of 2020 and early 2021 have caused us to reflect and recommit to the fight against racism, systemic discrimination, and bias of all kinds."

Con Edison reacted to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the inequalities the coronavirus pandemic exposed, and other tragedies with bold actions.

The company established a new Corporate Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Action Plan to use data to better understand where it can improve.

Employee groups, such as Blacks United in Leadership and Development (BUILD) and the Asian Professional Alliance of Con Edison (APACE) have held virtual meetings at which employees share their experiences and support each other.

A group called Cultivating Leadership and Actively Realizing Opportunities (CLARO) sponsored "Get Out the Vote" with the Hispanic Federation and other programs.

LGBT+ Pride sponsored a Transgender Day of Remembrance and Resilience, including an informative resource guide to encourage awareness, and Celebrate Pride: A Virtual Tour of Pre & Post Stonewall Activism.

The company has recently publicly expressed its solidarity with the Asian-American and Jewish communities, which have been targets of demeaning misinformation and racist and anti-Semitic attacks, including violent assaults.

Read more about Con Edison's efforts.

In 2020, 52 percent of the company's employees were people of color and 22 percent were women. Of the nearly 400 people hired during the year, 57 percent were people of color and 32 percent were women.

Con Edison purchased $322 million in goods and services from minority-owned and women-owned firms and spent $503 million with small businesses.

Con Edison was third among all U.S. energy companies on the DiversityInc list.

Con Edison is a subsidiary of Consolidated Edison, Inc. [NYSE: ED], one of the nation's largest investor-owned energy companies, with approximately $12 billion in annual revenues and $62 billion in assets. The utility delivers electricity, natural gas and steam to 3.5 million customers in New York City and Westchester County, N.Y. For financial, operations and customer service information, visit www.conEd.com.

SOURCE Con Edison of New York

Related Links

http://www.conEd.com


CALGARY, AB, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Decibel Cannabis Company Inc. (the "Company" or "Decibel") (TSXV: DB) (OTCQB: DBCCF), a premium cannabis producer, is pleased to announce the results of its annual general meeting of shareholders held on June 10, 2021 (the "Meeting").

Results of the Meeting

Decibel's shareholders approved all matters submitted by the Company for consideration at the Meeting.

Due to the special circumstances arising from the global COVID-19 pandemic, and following the guidance of local health authorities for social distancing, Decibel encouraged shareholders to vote in advance of the Meeting using the instructions provided in the Notice of Meeting and Management Informational Circular and Proxy Statement. The Company also provided remote access to the Meeting via an audio webinar.

At the Meeting, Decibel's shareholders:

(i) fixed the number of directors of the Company to be elected at the Meeting at three directors;



(ii) elected each of Cody Church, Paul Wilson, and Michael Kelly to serve as directors of the Company; and



(iii) appointed KPMG LLP, Chartered Professional Accountants, as the Company's auditors.

About Decibel

Decibel is uncompromising in the process and craftsmanship needed to deliver the highest quality cannabis products and retail experiences. Decibel has three operating production houses along with its wholly owned retail business, Prairie Records. The Qwest Estate in Creston, BC is a licensed and operating 26,000 square foot cultivation, processing and distribution space which produces the widely championed, rare cultivar-focused brands Qwest and Qwest Reserve, which are sold in six provinces across Canada. The Thunderchild Cultivation Facility, is a licensed and operating 80,000 square foot indoor cultivation facility in Battleford, SK. The Plant, Decibel's extraction, processing and manufacturing facility, in Calgary, AB has 15,000 square feet of Health Canada licensed extraction and product development space. This production house will fuel the growth of our brands Qwest, Qwest Reserve, and Blendcraft, into new and innovative product formats like concentrates, vapes, edibles and beyond.

www.decibelcc.com

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE Decibel Cannabis Company Inc.

Related Links

https://decibelcc.com/


LONDON, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Earlier this week, the Commonwealth of Dominica handed over ten housing units to families in the village of Cochrane. As part of the nation's Housing Revolution, the homes are climate resilient meaning that they are constructed to withstand weather disasters. During the handing over ceremony, Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit and several other cabinet members highlighted how improving the housing infrastructure will positively impact other facets of beneficiaries' lives, contributing to a higher standard of living.

The Housing Revolution is one of the most extensive projects funded by the nation's Citizenship by Investment (CBI) Programme. Revenue generated under the programme is contributing to the construction of over 5,000 hurricane-resilient homes across the island as part of Dominica's feat to become the world's first climate resilient nation. Not only will these homes contribute to achieving climate resilience but will also help eliminate poverty  both of which fall under the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.

Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit spoke on the importance of providing stable housing to its citizens: "Once you have decent accommodation with access to the amenities, like water and light, your standard of living automatically improves. As part of human nature and in the animal kingdom, the pre-occupation is to find shelter," stated PM Skerrit.

"It would cost money, but it is an investment that is believed to be worth it as human life is more precious than anything else. After this ceremony, there will be 10 families that would claim a piece of land in Dominica as theirs. These people can also pass it to their children through the will," he added.

This initiative is made possible by foreign investors who have contributed to Dominica's Citizenship by Investment Programme. The Programme offers an attractive route to second citizenship for high net-worth individuals and their families once they make an investment into either the government fund or through the purchase of real estate. Established in 1993, the CBI Programme has been particularly popular amongst the Asian market for wealthy investors seeking a Plan B.

Once undergoing its multi-tiered vetting procedure, those who are successful gain access to increased global mobility to over 140 destinations, the right to live, work and study in the nation and the ability to pass down citizenship for generations to come.

Despite being a small island, Dominica has channelled significant resources into the betterment of its citizens. This is accredited to the nation's stable governance, transparency and its commitment to its population. Aside from housing, the government have used CBI funds to build multiple health centres and hospitals, a geothermal plant and is in the process of developing an international airport.

Contact:

+447867942505

[email protected]

www.csglobalpartners.com

SOURCE CS Global Partners
MINNEAPOLIS, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- BJC HealthCare has entered an agreement with Excelera, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Shields Health Solutions and the company behind the Excelera Network, making it the first Excelera Network member in Missouri. Excelera specializes in improving complex patient care through expanded access to limited distribution drugs (LLDs) and optimizing participants' existing specialty pharmacies to broaden its services to patients.

BJC HealthCare is one of the largest non-profit health care organizations in the U.S., primarily serving members in the greater St. Louis, southern Illinois and mid-Missouri regions. The largest provider of charity care, unreimbursed care and community benefit in Missouri, BJC HealthCare is committed to improving the health and well-being of the people and communities serve through leadership, education, innovation and excellence in medicine. BJC HealthCare is recognized as a leader in patient advocacy, clinical quality and medical research and has been a pioneer in integrated care delivery, including pharmacy services.

"We are pleased to welcome such a well-respected and forward-thinking health system to the Excelera Network," said Troy Polan, acting CEO at Excelera. "We look forward to working with BJC HealthCare to further optimize its specialty pharmacy programs to provide high quality care for complex patients, reduce overall costs and improve outcomes."

BJC HealthCare offers a range of specialty services across age groups, including home infusion, immune globulin therapies and inotrope therapies. Through the new agreement, Excelera will primarily work with the following pharmacy programs within BJC HealthCare: BJC Home Infusion, St. Louis Children's Hospital Outpatient Pharmacy, and St. Louis Children's Specialty Care Center.

To learn more about the Excelera Network, visit https://www.excelerarx.com/

About BJC

BJC HealthCare is one of the largest nonprofit health care organizations in the United States, delivering services to residents primarily in the greater St. Louis, southern Illinois and mid-Missouri regions. Serving the health care needs of urban, suburban and rural communities, BJC includes 15 hospitals and multiple health service organizations. Services include inpatient and outpatient care, primary care, community health and wellness, workplace health, home health, community mental health, rehabilitation, long-term care and hospice. BJC's nationally recognized academic hospitals, Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children's hospitals, are affiliated with Washington University School of Medicine.

About Shields Health Solutions & ExceleraRx, LLC

Shields Health Solutions is a specialty pharmacy integrator and care provider dedicated to helping hospital leaders create, grow and manage hospital-owned specialty pharmacy programs. With a purpose-built technology platform, access to over 80 percent of all limited distribution drugs (LDDs), as well as most (health insurance) payors in the nation, Shields provides the fastest, lowest risk model for standing up health system-based specialty pharmacies.

ExceleraRx, LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Shields Health Solutions and the creator of the Excelera Network, which is comprised of integrated delivery networks, health systems and large academic medical centers with a deep commitment to caring for complex patients. Through national-scale collaboration, the Excelera Network more efficiently gains access to LDDs and utilizes tools, technology and best practices at scale to improve health outcomes and decrease healthcare costs.

SOURCE ExceleraRx Corp.

Related Links

https://www.excelerarx.com


VANCOUVER, BC, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Galiano Gold Inc. ("Galiano" or the "Company") (TSX: AKG) (NYSE American: AKG) (formerly Asanko Gold Inc.) announces today that all the resolutions put to shareholders at the Company's Annual General Meeting (the "Meeting") held on June 11, 2021 were duly passed. The results for each of the matters voted upon at the Meeting are set out below:

Election of Directors

The seven nominees listed in the Company's Management Information Circular dated April 27, 2021, were elected at the Meeting as directors of Galiano.

Director Name Votes For % Votes For Votes Withheld % Votes

Withheld Greg McCunn 132,945,505 99.91% 121,581 0.09% Marcel de Groot 127,826,927 96.06% 5,240,159 3.94% Gordon Fretwell 132,621,122 96.66% 445,964 0.34% Shawn Wallace 105,334,038 79.16% 27,733,048 20.84% Michael Price 132,625,474 99.67% 441,612 0.33% Judith Mosely 132,946,574 99.91% 120,512 0.09% Paul N. Wright 132,949,427 99.91% 117,659 0.09%

Appointment of Auditors  KPMG LLP

KPMG LLP was re-appointed as auditor of the Company for the ensuing year and the directors were authorized to fix the remuneration paid to KPMG LLP.

Votes For % Votes For Votes Withheld % Votes Withheld 146,267,718 99.97% 48,091 0.03%

Advisory Vote on Executive Compensation

The non-binding advisory resolution accepting the Company's approach to executive compensation was approved.

Votes For % Votes For Votes Against % Votes Against 117,373,003 88.21% 15,694,083 11.79%

A report on all matters voted on at the meeting has been filed on SEDAR.

About Galiano Gold Inc.

Galiano is focused on creating a sustainable business capable of long-term value creation for its stakeholders through organic production growth, exploration and disciplined deployment of its financial resources. The company currently operates and manages the Asanko Gold Mine, located in Ghana, West Africa which is jointly owned with Gold Fields Ltd. The Company is strongly committed to the highest standards for environmental management, social responsibility, and health and safety for its employees and neighbouring communities. For more information, please visit www.galianogold.com.

Neither Toronto Stock Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

SOURCE Galiano Gold Inc.

Related Links

https://www.galianogold.com/home/default.aspx


The first announcement of a new lode gold discovery on Otter Creek was made by British Columbia Geological Survey (BCGS) geologists in a 2017 published paper titled "A new lode gold discovery at Otter Creek: another source for the Atlin placers." Garibaldi had previously acquired 100% ownership of the hard rock mineral rights on the discovery section of Otter Creek. Placer operations enabled geologists to sample and map the bedrock in excavated pits before backfilling, allowing access to the BCGS geologists who published the lode gold discovery.

The Otter Creek lode gold discovery provides strong evidence that Atlin's rich coarse crystalline gold placers are sourced from proximal high-grade gold veins rather than previously assumed eroded distal listwanite deposits. Garibaldi's new acquisition in the Atlin Gold fields consolidates a core land package that occupies nearly the entire 10 km length of Otter Creek. Significantly, Garibaldi's geology team considers the expanded claims package covering the Otter Creek placers as an important exploration priority. With excellent road access and infrastructure, the discovery of bonafide in-situ bedrock-hosted gold, is a remarkable find with enormous potential.

Otter Creek Project Highlights

In 2017, the British Columbia Geological Survey published a paper titled "A new lode gold discovery at Otter Creek: another source for the Atlin placers." (BCGS paper 2017-1pg.179-193) by Mihalynuk, M.G. Zagorevski, A., Devine F.A.M., and Humphrey, E.

placers." (BCGS paper 2017-1pg.179-193) by Mihalynuk, M.G. Zagorevski, A., Devine F.A.M., and Humphrey, E. Placer mining uncovered significant mineralization in bedrock, resulting in multiple samples of in-situ bedrock gold along Otter Creek. Bonanza grade gold is hosted in quartz veins emplaced along structures in phyllite bedrock. The coarse gold in bedrock supports a new placer source for the Atlin gold Fields.

gold Fields. A large north-south trending fault, with a series of secondary faults extends along Otter Creek providing a key structural setting for lode gold deposits. Rich placer deposits have been mined along these creeks and faults since the mid 1800's.

Otter Creek and neighboring creeks including Spruce, Birch, Pine, Ruby and Wright creeks have produced some of the largest gold nuggets discovered in British Columbia , weighing from 24 to 83 oz of gold.

, weighing from 24 to 83 oz of gold. Garibaldi's Otter Creek database includes 2282 MMI samples, a compilation of 1,884 historic soil samples, 15 IP lines, 143 km of walking mag, 263 line km airborne magnetic and electromagnetic (DIGHEM) surveys.

Drill target development will utilize the historical database, bedrock exposure of gold-bearing quartz veins, geophysical data, and analysis of a 728 sample SGH survey, used successfully in Red Lake Ontario .

Steve Regoci, Garibaldi CEO, stated: Similar to the Eskay Camp, Atlin has a long history of gold mining back to the 1860's Cariboo and klondike gold rushes. Our strategy to acquire claim groups centered in the heart of mineral rich districts in B.C. during the last downturn has been very successful. The Eskay claim group is exceeding our highest expectations, while our other projects as well as the new expanded Otter Creek have exceptional potential."

Jeremy Hanson, Garibaldi VP Ex, stated "Otter Creek emerges as another high priority gold project in Atlin, joining the Grizzly in NW BC, Red Lion in the Quesnel Trough and ToraTora within the Spences Bridge Gold Belt (SBGB). Each of these projects are in well-endowed mineral districts with strong potential for discoveries. The company's focus remains E&L and the Eskay claim group, however the expansion of the Atlin discovery is exciting news, reminding shareholders about our other great projects, which we'll be updating as they're advanced."

Qualified Person

Jeremy Hanson, P.Geo., VP Exploration Canada for the Company and a qualified person as defined by NI- 43-101, has supervised the preparation of and reviewed and approved of the disclosure of information in this news release.

About Garibaldi

Garibaldi Resources Corp. is an active Canadian-based junior exploration company focused on creating shareholder value through discoveries and strategic development of its assets in some of the most prolific mining regions in British Columbia and Mexico.

We seek safe harbor.

GARIBALDI RESOURCES CORP.

Per: "Steve Regoci"

Steve Regoci, President

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider accepts responsibility for the adequacy or the accuracy of this release.

SOURCE Garibaldi Resources Corp.

Related Links

http://www.garibaldiresources.com


Ariz, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- On Thursday, May 27th, Glamour Dolls Inc. filed a federal lawsuit against Lisa Frank and Lisa Frank Inc. (LFI) for fraud, undue enrichment, defamation, breach of contract, and other causes of action.

Glamour Dolls is based in New Jersey.

Defendants Lisa Frank and LFI are based in Arizona.

In 2016, Glamour Dolls entered into a licensing agreement with LFI to launch a collection of Glamour Dolls beauty products with Lisa Frank's artwork. Based on that agreement, Glamour Dolls secured a four-product deal with Ipsy. Glamour Dolls also launched a successful Kickstarter campaign with Lisa Frank's participation in February 2017 to create an additional ten products.

Thousands of customers and backers supported and shared the campaign which featured an introduction video by influencer Kandee Johnson and a special collaboration with YouTube star Wengie. The success of the crossover generated press and retail interest with nationwide in-store launches planned for 2018.

The lawsuit alleges that Lisa Frank and LFI did not deliver on their side of the agreement. Glamour Dolls paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to LFI, yet, on account of ongoing LFI/Frank intentional delays, recklessness and fraud, Glamour Dolls never received its benefit of the contract. As a result, customers and retailers did not receive orders.

In the fall of 2020, many of those same backers and customers were outraged when they saw Lisa Frank launch a collection based on the products Glamour Dolls had developed.

The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the District of Arizona, alleges, inter alia, the following:

- Lisa Frank and LFI made numerous false representations, which were material and upon which Glamour Dolls relied to its detriment

- Lisa Frank and LFI forced early payment of guaranteed royalties which they had not yet earned, deceitfully knowing they would immediately cancel the contract after receipt of payment.

- In an effort to change the narrative, Lisa Frank and LFI published false and defamatory statements, thereby causing ongoing, severe damages to Glamour Dolls.

Peter Georgotas, CEO of Glamour Dolls, commented:

"It is surreal that Lisa Frank and her company LFI can behave the way they do and continue to get away with it. Not only did they take our money, but also our ideas. The financial, reputational, and personal damages that we have faced as a result are staggering, and we believe it is important to shine a light on what feels like predatory behavior.

Our hope is that this lawsuit exposes some of the tactics that we have learned big-name companies and artists use to take advantage of small indie brands and creators. Reading other negative stories about Lisa Frank's seemingly deceptive business practices, after our experience, only redoubled our efforts and we are looking forward to trial."

Glamour Dolls seeks a range of damages including compensation for direct harm, punitive damages, and disgorgement of defendants' profits.

The case is being handled by Marc W. Garbar, Esq., Head of the Business Litigation Group at Brandon J Broderick, Attorney at Law, River Edge, New Jersey. A link to the Complaint is available at https://glamourdollsmakeup.com/pages/lisa-frank-lawsuit. Legal and media inquiries can be sent to [email protected] or [email protected] .

SOURCE Glamour Dolls Inc.
DUBLIN, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "CNC Controller Market with COVID-19 Impact by Offering (Hardware and Software & Services), Machine Type, Axis Type (2-Axis, 3-Axis, 4-Axis, 5-Axis, and Multi-axis), Sales Channel, Industry, and Region - Global Forecast to 2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global CNC controller market size was valued at USD 2.8 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach USD 3.4 billion by 2026; it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 3.6% from 2021 to 2026.

The growth of the CNC controller market is majorly driven by the rising adoption of industrial automation in manufacturing industries and the increasing demand for mass production across the automotive industry, COVID-19 has emerged as a global pandemic that has spread in several countries worldwide and disrupted various industries around the world.

The prominent players across industries have been affected by this pandemic. The foreseeable decline in the growth of end-user applications may have a considerable direct impact on the CNC controller market.

Indirect sales channels expected to grow at highest CAGR during the forecast period.

Manufacturers majorly provide CNC controllers to end users through indirect sales channels or third-party providers. Most key players in the market have well-established sales networks and distribute their products worldwide. End users may lack the expertise required to integrate CNC controllers into CNC machines; thus, installations are majorly undertaken by system integrators or third-party providers appointed by companies. Owing to these factors, the indirect sales channel segment is projected to grow at a higher CAGR during the forecast period.

Automotive industry is expected to contribute largest share of market during the forecast period.

The automotive segment is estimated to account for the largest share of the market in 2021. To ensure enhanced power consumption and safety, modern automobile manufacturers adopt IoT and V2X communication technologies which enable vehicles to communicate with smart traffic signals.

Thus, such advancements in automotive manufacturing technologies and increasing investments by key automotive manufacturers are some of the factors expected to drive the growth of the market in the automotive industry during the forecast period.

APAC is expected to contribute the largest share of market during the forecast period.

APAC is estimated to account for the largest share of the CNC controller market in 2021. The growth of the market is majorly driven by the growing manufacturing sector in the region.

Continuous advancements and technological innovations in various industries; economic development in major economies such as China, Japan, and India; increasing infrastructural developments in Southeast Asian countries such as Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia, among others; and rising foreign investments in this region is expected to fuel market growth.

FANUC (Japan), Siemens (Germany), Mitsubishi Electric (Japan), DMG MORI (Japan), Haas Automation (US), Hurco Companies (US), and Okuma (Japan) among others, are some of the key players in the market.

Premium Insights

APAC to Offer Lucrative Growth Opportunities for the CNC Controller Market in the Coming Years

The Software & Services Segment to Grow at the Higher CAGR During the Forecast Period

The 3-Axis Segment Accounted for the Largest Market Share in 2020

The Automotive Segment to Lead the Market During the Forecast Period

Mexico CNC Controller Market to Grow at the Highest CAGR During the Forecast Period

Market Dynamics

Drivers

Risen Adoption of Industrial Automation in Global Manufacturing Industry

Increased Demand for Mass Production of Identical Parts Across Automotive Industry

Reduction in Operating Costs and Enhanced Production Efficiency of Manufacturing Plants with Deployment of CNC Machines

Restraints

Decline in Demand for New CNC Machine Installations Owing to Adverse Impact of COVID-19 on Global Manufacturing Sector

High Capital Requirements for Installation and Maintenance of CNC Machines

Opportunities

Increased Retrofitting and Reconditioning Requirements of CNC Controllers

Integration of 3D Printing Technology with CNC Machining

Challenges

Lack of Skilled Manpower to Operate Complex CNC Machines

Case Study Analysis

Automating Process Using Custom CNC System

Designing Emb-80S Odm Industrial Motherboard for CNC Machines

Technology Analysis

Digital Twin

Industry 4.0

Pricing Analysis

Trade Analysis

Patent Analysis

Regulatory Landscape

Company Profiles

Key Players

Fanuc Corporation

Siemens

Mitsubishi Electric

Dmg Mori

Haas Automation

Hurco Companies

Okuma

Bosch Rexroth

Fagor Automation

Yamazaki Mazak

Other Players

Machine Tool Technologies (Mtt)

Wuhan Huazhong Numerical Control

Num

Lincoln Electric

Powermatic Tools

Heidenhain

Centroid

Global Machines

Buildbotics

Tormach

CNC Masters

Avid CNC

Adtech CNC Europe

Luna Bearings

Zen Automation

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/a053ei

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: 646-607-1904

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets

Related Links

http://www.researchandmarkets.com


ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Solar Energy World invites the public to a special, Live Residential Installation event to showcase how green jobs are growing rapidly in Virginia. From June 14  17, Solar Energy World will be installing solar panels on four homes simultaneously in North Arlington. This unprecedented project employs 4 crews totaling 22 employees. The live installation provides an opportunity for homeowners in the area, legislators, and others to learn more about how a solar installation is properly executed and how solar works.

Solar Energy World began serving Northern Virginia in August 2018 when it was chosen by the Local Energy Alliance Program to be the installer for SolarizeNOVA and has continued to participate in Virginia-based Solarize programs since 2018. The company has also signed up hundreds of other individual residential customers. To better serve Northern Virginia's homeowners and businesses, Solar Energy World has expanded its operations with a new facility in Alexandria.

Historically, Virginia has been ranked near the bottom for statewide renewable energy deployment. This began to change last year when Virginia legislatures passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA). In addition to better incentives for green focused businesses, the financial benefits and energy cost savings for homeowners in the area have improved greatly due to Virginia's increasing consumer demand for cleaner energy. For example, Virginia now offers better financial benefits for homeowners like net-metering, a program where homeowners can get money back from the utility company for the excess energy their solar system produces. There are also new property tax exemptions and a growing SREC (Solar Renewable Energy Credit) program in Virginia

To attend Solar Energy World's Live Solar Installation Event, contact Ray Meyer, [email protected] or 410-579-1672.

About Solar Energy World: Founded in 2009, Solar Energy World is an award-winning, regional leader in Solar Panel System design and installation for residential and commercial property owners serving Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Florida, and Washington DC. We are the fastest growing, independently owned solar installation company in the region. Solar Energy World currently installs approximately 125-130 new solar systems each month. For more information, visit www.SolarEnergyWorld.com

SOURCE Solar Energy World
NEW YORK, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Health Enterprise Partners ("HEP"), a healthcare private equity firm, today announced that it has completed a significant recapitalization of its portfolio company AllyAlign Health ("AAH") by an investment syndicate led by New Enterprise Associates, Inc. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

AllyAlign Health is a Medicare Advantage insurance company focused on improving the health and wellbeing of residents of senior housing communities. AAH is working to establish a healthcare ecosystem in senior housing that creates better outcomes and experience for senior housing residents, senior housing communities, physicians, and other caregivers. HEP partnered with Will Saunders, CEO of AllyAlign Health, at the company's founding in 2014.

"This investment has been a prime example of HEP's ability to proactively source an attractive investment opportunity and to help drive significant value creation throughout our investment period," said Pete Tedesco, Managing Partner at HEP. "We are proud to have supported AllyAlign Health and its passionate team in building a truly unique care model that has improved health outcomes for senior housing residents across the country. We look forward to watching the company continue to transform the care of this vulnerable population in its next phase of growth."

"HEP has been a tremendous partner to AllyAlign Health and our team," commented Will Saunders, founder and CEO of AllyAlign Health. "Their insight, guidance, and connections have been vital in every step of our journey. We look forward to significantly scaling our unique model across the skilled nursing and senior housing ecosystem as we emerge from the pandemic."

About Health Enterprise Partners

Health Enterprise Partners provides expansion capital to the most innovative healthcare services and healthcare information technology companies. Central to HEP's strategy is its unique and extensive hospital system and health plan network, 36 members of which are investors in HEP's funds. HEP seeks to invest in companies that improve the quality of the patient experience, expand access, and reduce the cost of healthcare.

For more information, please visit www.hepfund.com.

About AllyAlign Health

AllyAlign Health began working to improve the long-term-care ecosystem in 2014 by helping leading long-term care providers find success with value-based care models for their vulnerable senior populations. Today AAH manages Medicare Advantage institutional special needs plans, chronic care special needs plans for dementia, and dual-eligible special needs plans to reduce healthcare costs and improve patient quality of life. Founded by Will Saunders in Richmond, Virginia, the innovative turnkey solutions and propriety technology power health plans across the U.S. Learn more at www.allyalign.com or reach out by emailing AAH at [email protected].

SOURCE Health Enterprise Partners

Related Links

http://hepfund.com/


NACKA STRAND, Sweden, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Hexagon AB, a global leader in sensor, software, and autonomous solutions, today announced it will host a Capital Markets Day on 29 September 2021. If permitted, the event will be held in person. Time and location will be announced later. President and CEO Ola Rollen will, together with members of Group Management, hold presentations on current market trends, growth opportunities, and key strategic focus areas.

Those unable to attend the Capital Markets Day in person can follow the online broadcast live as well as on-demand at hexagon.com. More information on the event and how to register will be provided closer to the event.

Contact:



Maria Luthstrom, Head of Sustainability and Investor Relations, Hexagon AB

+46 8 601 26 27,

[email protected]



Kristin Christensen, Chief Marketing Officer, Hexagon AB

+1 404 554 0972,

[email protected]

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/hexagon/r/hexagon-to-host-a-capital-markets-day,c3364881

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Main/387/3364881/1430400.pdf Press Release

SOURCE Hexagon
LOUISVILLE, Ky., June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- HSG, a national healthcare consulting firm, will partner with leadership from Mon Health System on Tuesday, June 15, at a webinar hosted by the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) titled, "Employed Physician Network Transformation: Evolution and Integration." This continuing education webinar will discuss how HSG and Mon Health System addressed the challenges associated with the evolution of Mon Health's hospital-employed physician networks into a cohesive multispecialty group supportive of the health system's strategy and mission.

The trend of physician practice acquisitions along with the consolidation of health delivery organizations has elevated the impact that internal culture and administration have on a healthcare system's ability to deliver services to its community. In fact, employed physician alignment has put a spotlight on the importance of evolving from a group of independent practices and service lines into a cohesive, culturally, and strategically aligned multispecialty group.

"We frequently find gaps in alignment and integration between the network and the health system," said Dr. Terry McWilliams, Director and Clinical Chief Consultant at HSG. "While health system leadership teams recognize these imperatives, there is not always a shared understanding of the capabilities the employed network must strive to develop to make the health system successful. The leadership at Mon Health System understood the potential positive impact that developing a Shared Vision of the future success of the medical group within the context of the health system's mission and strategy could have on its ability to provide care in the community and took action."

Webinar attendees will have the opportunity to hear from not only the healthcare consultants at HSG but also from David Goldberg, President and CEO at Mon Health. Their program will include information on the journey they took to integrate strategy and execution between employed physician networks and its health system. It will also address how to assess the current state of a health system's employed physician network and define core elements of a successful and engaged employed physician network.

For more information on the webinar or to attend the program, register at the ACHE.org learning center section of the website or follow this link. The program is scheduled from 11 a.m. to noon Central time on Tuesday, June 15, 2021. Presenters include Travis Ansel, Managing Partner at HSG; Terrence McWilliams, MD, Director and Chief Clinical Consultant at HSG and David Goldberg, President and CEO, Mon Health System.

About HSG

HSG builds high-performing physician networks so health systems can address complex changes with confidence. HSG, a Louisville-based, national healthcare consultancy firm, can be reached via their website, LinkedIn, by emailing [email protected], or by calling (502) 814-1180.

Media Contact: Karolyn Raphael, [email protected]



Related Images

hsg-logo.png

HSG Logo

hsgadvisors.com National Healthcare Consultants





SOURCE HSG
Easy to mix and perfect for cocktail experimentation, BOMBAY BRAMBLE is the first flavored gin from the brand and is set to add a twist of crimson color and flavor to the classic G&T and a host of creative cocktails this year.

The finest innovation and craftmanship sets this new gin apart. Instead of using artificial flavors, colors or additional sugar after distillation, freshly harvested blackberries and raspberries are used to create a rich fruit infusion, capturing the essence of the fruits when they are most ripe. BOMBAY BRAMBLE is then created by marrying the brand's vapour distilled gin with 100% natural berry infusion, giving a distinct color and flavor. This process allows the botanical and juniper notes of the gin to shine through for a more sophisticated taste.

Ivano Tonutti, BOMBAY SAPPHIRE Master of Botanicals, commented: "The color and flavor of BOMBAY BRAMBLE comes only from botanicals and 100% natural fruit ingredients. The craftmanship required to create the new gin took time and consideration. Master Distiller Dr. Anne Brock and I worked together to blend our gin with an alcoholic infusion of berries that have been harvested at their ripest moment, resulting in a unique, rich flavor profile."

The eponymously named Bramble cocktail is an example of a modern classic that allows BOMBAY BRAMBLE to shine. Served with crushed ice, this cocktail is an ideal drink to enjoy on a summer's day. Due to the ripe, berried flavors at the heart of the gin, this modern twist on the classic cocktail does not require blackberry liqueur and contains less sugar than an original Bramble recipe. The gin also plays the perfect role as the base in a reimagination of the classic Clover Club cocktail, championing its bold raspberry heritage whilst adding a twist of blackberries.

BOMBAY BRAMBLE is best enjoyed simply with tonic, poured over ice and garnished with a squeeze of lemon. A flawless accoutrement for the approaching summer season, the BOMBAY BRAMBLE & Tonic is an ideal option for those that enjoy a touch of fruit in their G&T. The BOMBAY BRAMBLE and 'Sonic' (equal parts tonic and soda water) offers a lighter alcohol option without compromising on flavor. The subtle crimson hue drawn from the gin creates a visually striking drink with a light, fresh and balanced taste.

Ryan Wainwright, National Ambassador BOMBAY SAPPHIRE North America, commented: "The launch of BOMBAY BRAMBLE means we can now offer even the most discerning gin drinkers a sophisticated fruit flavored gin, while maintaining a balanced, premium taste profile that makes it ideal for cocktail creativity. We look forward to gin lovers discovering this new flavor, the rich-berried taste is bursting with natural flavors and is delicious served with tonic and a squeeze of lemon or in a selection of cocktails, with the added benefit of no artificial flavor or color."

BOMBAY BRAMBLE (RRP $22.99) is now available in bars across the country and to buy at Drizly .

43% ABV

Bramble Cocktail

Ingredients

1  oz BOMBAY BRAMBLE

 oz freshly pressed lemon juice

 oz simple syrup

Lemon wedge & blackberry

Method

Build ingredients into a rocks glass

Top with crushed ice

Garnish with a fresh lemon wedge and blackberry

Bramble & Tonic

Ingredients

1  oz BOMBAY BRAMBLE

4 oz premium tonic water

Fresh lemon wedge

Method

Build over cubed ice in a balloon glass or wine glass

Garnish with a fresh lemon wedge

Bramble & Sonic

Ingredients

1 oz BOMBAY BRAMBLE

2 oz soda water

2 oz premium tonic water

Lemon twist

Method

Build over cubed ice in a highball glass

Garnish with lemon twist

For press inquiries:

Nike Communications

Zara Biggs, [email protected]

NOTES TO EDITOR:

Recipes for all drinks / cocktails mentioned above are available upon request.

Bombay Bramble is a 100% natural fruit infusion with no added sugar.

About BOMBAY SAPPHIRE brand

BOMBAY SAPPHIRE is the world's number one premium gin by value and volume (IWSR). Based on a 1761 recipe, BOMBAY SAPPHIRE gin is created by perfectly balancing a unique combination of 10 hand-selected exotic botanicals from around the world. The BOMBAY SAPPHIRE distillery at Laverstoke Mill has won a BREEAM award for sustainability and is the home of the unique Vapour Infusion process, where the natural flavours of the botanicals are skillfully captured, resulting in the fresh and vibrant taste with which BOMBAY SAPPHIRE is synonymous.

BOMBAY SAPPHIRE has recently been awarded the prestigious Double Gold and Gold medal at the 17th San Francisco World Spirits Competition (SFWSC).

The BOMBAY SAPPHIRE brand is part of the portfolio of Bacardi Limited, headquartered in Hamilton, Bermuda. Bacardi Limited refers to the Bacardi group of companies, including Bacardi International Limited.

Enjoy BOMBAY SAPPHIRE responsibly

For the facts: www.BombaySapphire.com.

BOMBAY SAPPHIRE AND BOMBAY BRAMBLE ARE TRADEMARKS

ABOUT BOMBAY SAPPHIRE AND CREATIVITY

Launching the 'Stir Creativity' campaign in 2018, BOMBAY SAPPHIRE is leading a global mission - a call to arms for everyone to engage with their creativity and unlock their creative potential. From advocacy programmes including World's Most Imaginative Bartender competition running in the US for the last 11 years to hosting The Glasshouse Project, a global advocacy programme bringing together the world's top bartenders in a series of creative workshops designed to push the boundaries of cocktail creativity.

For nine years, BOMBAY SAPPHIRE ran The Artisan Series, an art competition created by the brand to provide emerging artists with an international platform. The brand has also partnered with well-known artists and creators such as Tracey Emin, Thomas Heatherwick and Tom Dixon for the BOMBAY SAPPHIRE Designer Glassware Competition.

BE BRILLIANT AND INSPIRED. DRINK RESPONSIBLY

2021. BRAMBLE IS A TRADEMARK.

IMPORTED BY THE BOMBAY SPIRITS COMPANY U.S.A., CORAL GABLES, FL. FLAVORED GIN  43% ALC. BY VOL.

SOURCE BOMBAY SAPPHIRE

Related Links

https://www.bombaysapphire.com/


RADNOR, Pa., June 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The law firm of Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP is currently investigating potential violations of the federal securities laws on behalf of shareholders of Oscar Health, Inc. ("Oscar") (NYSE: OSCR).

Oscar provides health insurance products and services to individuals, families, and businesses in the United States. The company was formerly known as Mulberry Health Inc. and changed its name to "Oscar Health, Inc." in January 2021.

On March 3, 2021, Oscar sold about 37 million shares of common stock in its initial public stock offering (the "IPO") at $39.00 per share, raising nearly $1.4 billion in new capital. Shortly thereafter, on May 13, 2021, Oscar reported earnings for the first time since the IPO. Oscar reported an $87.4 million loss or a loss of $0.98 per share in its first quarter of 2021.

If you are an Oscar investor and would like to learn more about our investigation, please contact Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP: James Maro, Esq. (484) 270-1453 or Adrienne Bell, Esq. (484) 270-1435; toll free at (844) 887-9500; via e-mail at [email protected]; or please visit the following link to fill out our online form https://www.ktmc.com/oscar-health-inc-investigation?utm_source=PR&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=oscar_health

Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP prosecutes class actions in state and federal courts throughout the country involving securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duties and other violations of state and federal law. Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP is a driving force behind corporate governance reform, and has recovered billions of dollars on behalf of institutional and individual investors from the United States and around the world. The firm represents investors, consumers and whistleblowers (private citizens who report fraudulent practices against the government and share in the recovery of government dollars). For more information about Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP, please visit www.ktmc.com .

CONTACT:



Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP

James Maro, Jr., Esq.

Adrienne Bell, Esq.

280 King of Prussia Road

Radnor, PA 19087

(844) 887-9500

[email protected]

SOURCE Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP

Related Links

http://www.ktmc.com


JOLIET, Ill., June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- KODOCARE Pharmacy Owner and Pharmacist Chad Kodiak, RPh, PharmD, has been recognized as a Champion of Humanistic Care by the Arnold P. Gold Foundation at their Annual Gala on June 10, 2021. The recognition was awarded to medical professionals for their extensive work on ensuring COVID-19 vaccinations for the community.

KODOCARE specializes in the proper and safe administration of vaccines and has been vaccinating for over 20 years. The pharmacy serves patients with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (I/DD), living in Community Integrated Living Arrangements (CILA's). Additionally, they serve Assisted Living Facilities, Supportive Living Programs and Senior living communities throughout Illinois. In January, KODOCARE began a partnership with the University of St. Francis' Leach College of Nursing in order to increase COVID-19 vaccine administration across the Chicagoland area. Within the first three days, the partnership allowed for the vaccinations of over 1,600 CILA and I/DD residents and have since surpassed 30,000 shots to Illinois residents.

"Thank you to the Gold Foundation for this incredible honor," said Dr. Kodiak. "I wish to extend my sincere congratulations to Kim Gibson and Annette Mattea, without whom this partnership would not be so successful. KODOCARE's mission has always been to enhance the health of the communities we serve, which we would have never been able to accomplish without our partners at USF. Leach College of Nursing's staff and students have played a pivotal role in the pharmacy's successful vaccination effort."

Kodiak, and USF Leach College of Nursing representatives Kimberly Gibson, BSN, RN, and Annette Mattea, DNP, RN, APN/CCNS, CNE, were presented with Champion of Humanistic Care recognition as part of an event that also recognized Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Wayne Riley, and Dr. Eric Topol with National Humanism in Medicine Medals. The three local honorees each received a certificate from the Gold Foundation and were celebrated at the Gold Foundation's Annual Gala, through recognition on the Gold Foundation website and in the digital gala program.

ABOUT KODOCARE

KODOCARE Pharmacy is owned and operated by the pharmacy's second-generation CEO, Chad Kodiak, RPh, PharmD. Since 1969, KODOCARE has balanced caring and attentive service with cutting edge Pharmaceutical practice and technology. As a full-service pharmacy, KODOCARE specializes in the proper and safe administration of vaccines and has been vaccinating for over 20 years. They were selected as one of the first pharmacies in the country to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. The pharmacy also offers the KODOPAK which delivers to their patients a 4-week supply of medications (prescriptions, OTC's and vitamins) in easy to open paks, sorted by time and day. They continue to expand and grow through their mission to enhance the health of those in their care.

Visit www.kodocare.com for more information.

ABOUT THE ARNOLD P. GOLD FOUNDATION

The Arnold P. Gold Foundation infuses the human connection into healthcare. They engage schools, health systems, companies, and individual clinicians in the joy and meaning of humanistic healthcare, so that they have the strength and knowledge to ensure patients and families are partners in collaborative, compassionate, and scientifically excellent care.

Dr. Arnold Perlman Gold and his wife, Sandra, co-founded The Arnold P. Gold Foundation in 1988 with an aim toward sustaining the human connection in medicine and ensuring all patients received compassionate care. The Arnold P. Gold Foundation's programs, such as the White Coat Ceremony and the Gold Humanism Honor Society, are now found in nearly every medical school in the country.

Visit gold-foundation.org for more information.

ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. FRANCIS

The University of St. Francis, in Joliet, Ill., serves close to 4,000 students nationwide and offers undergraduate, graduate, doctoral and certificate programs in the arts and sciences, business, education, nursing and social work. There are over 51,000 USF alumni across the globe. For information, call 800-735-7500 or visit stfrancis.edu.

University of St. Francis: Bigger thinking. Brighter purpose.

Media Contacts:

Julie Ferguson

312-385-0098

[email protected]

Agustina Manrique

407-953-4447

[email protected]

SOURCE KODOCARE
The Bronco II is designed for ultimate mission flexibility. The aircraft's unique internal Interchangeable Multi-Mission System Bay (IMSB) allows for a single airframe to be easily and rapidly re-configured to perform multiple roles (e.g. ISR, SCAR, FAC(A) CAS) incorporating high-performance sensors, network communication systems, precision weapons, an electronic self-protection suite, and mission planning systems.

"Our team combines decades of experience both integrating and manufacturing cutting-edge airborne solutions for the warfighter," said Gerry Fasano, Leidos Defense Group president. "We are thrilled to have been selected to compete in the final phase."

"We believe that Bronco II is the definitive next generation aircraft, which has been designed to be future-proofed against evolving operational requirements in the asymmetrical battlespace specifically inhabited by SOCOM," said Ivor Ichikowitz, Chairman of global aerospace and technology company, Paramount Group. "Through our partnerships with Leidos, we are looking forward to building upon our 27-year legacy of designing and producing rugged technologically advanced systems. Our team has designed and developed an America centric platform for the world market, and we are looking forward to bringing Bronco II back to America."

"Vertex has a 50-year legacy of supporting warfighter missions," said Ed Boyington, President and CEO of Vertex Aerospace. "Vertex's highly skilled employees will assemble the aircraft and provide the final systems support integration and launch the Bronco II for customer delivery from our Crestview, Florida facility. We are proud to be an integral part of this team."

For more information visit www.bronco-usa.com

About Paramount Group USA

Headquartered in Dallas-Ft. Worth, Paramount Group US Inc. is the U.S. entity of the Paramount Group, the global aerospace and technology company, providing fully integrated and turn-key air, maritime, and land solutions. Paramount Group USA is also the parent company of Paramount Aerospace Systems USA, its wholly-owned US subsidiary. Since its inception in 1994, Paramount Group has built strong relationships with governments in more than 30 countries around the world. It is a leading innovator in the design and development of state-of-the-art technologies that it manufactures in locations globally. Please visit paramountgroup.com/usa or follow us on Twitter.

About Vertex

Vertex Aerospace offers a global capability and complete solution for aftermarket aerospace services for government and commercial customers. The Company's international presence and vast range of services has distinguished itself from competitors for over 45 years. The Mississippi-based company operates in over 100 locations worldwide and is proud to have a 50 percent veteran employee rate. Information about Vertex can be found at vtxaero.com.

About Leidos

Leidos is a Fortune 500 information technology, engineering, and science solutions and services leader working to solve the world's toughest challenges in the defense, intelligence, civil, and health markets. The company's 40,000 employees support vital missions for government and commercial customers. Headquartered in Reston, Va., Leidos reported annual revenues of approximately $12.30 billion for the fiscal year ended January 1, 2021. For more information, visit www.Leidos.com.

Statements in this announcement, other than historical data and information, constitute forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. A number of factors could cause our actual results, performance, achievements, or industry results to be very different from the results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Some of these factors include, but are not limited to, the risk factors set forth in the company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the period ended January 1, 2021, and other such filings that Leidos makes with the SEC from time to time. Due to such uncertainties and risks, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date hereof.

Contact:

Melissa Duenas

(571) 526-6850

[email protected]

Thomas Doheny

(571) 474-4735

[email protected]

Jalen Drummond

(571) 992-5046

[email protected]

SOURCE Leidos Holdings, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.Leidos.com


INDIANAPOLIS, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) will host a webcast on Thursday, July 1, 2021 to discuss the company's diabetes portfolio and its presentations at the American Diabetes Association's Virtual 81st Scientific Sessions. The webcast will begin at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time and remarks will focus on results from the tirzepatide SURPASS clinical trial program and expected next steps for tirzepatide, as well as Lilly's once-weekly basal insulin and early-phase incretins in people with diabetes.

Investors, media and the general public can access a live webcast of the conference call through a link that will be posted on Lilly's website at https://investor.lilly.com/webcasts-and-presentations. A replay will also be available on the website following the conference call.

About Eli Lilly and Company

Lilly is a global healthcare leader that unites caring with discovery to create medicines that make life better for people around the world. We were founded more than a century ago by a man committed to creating high-quality medicines that meet real needs, and today we remain true to that mission in all our work. Across the globe, Lilly employees work to discover and bring life-changing medicines to those who need them, improve the understanding and management of disease, and give back to communities through philanthropy and volunteerism. To learn more about Lilly, please visit us at www.lilly.com and www.lilly.com/news . F-LLY

Lilly Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements (as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995) about tirzepatide as well as Lilly's once-weekly basal insulin and early-phase incretins and reflects Lilly's current beliefs and expectations. However, as with any pharmaceutical product, there are substantial risks and uncertainties in the process of research, development, and commercialization. Among other things, there can be no guarantee that the studies will be completed as planned, that future study results will be consistent with the results to date or that medicines will receive regulatory approvals or be commercially successful. For a further discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties, please see Lilly's most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, Lilly undertakes no duty to update forward-looking statements to reflect events after the date of this release.

Refer to:

Molly McCully; [email protected]; 317-478-5423 (Media)

Kevin Hern; [email protected]; 317-277-1838 (Investors)





SOURCE Eli Lilly and Company

Related Links

http://www.lilly.com


PHILADELPHIA, June 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Livent Corporation (NYSE: LTHM) ("Livent" or the "Company"), today announced that it has priced its underwritten public offering of 13,000,000 shares of its common stock, $0.001 par value ("Common Stock"), at a public offering price of $17.50 per share of Common Stock. In addition, Livent granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 1,950,000 shares of Common Stock. The offering is expected to close on June 15, 2021, subject to customary closing conditions.

Livent expects to receive net proceeds of approximately $219.4 million (or approximately $ 252.4 million if the underwriters exercise in full their option to purchase additional shares of Common Stock) in the offering, after deducting the underwriters' discounts and commissions and estimated offering expenses. Livent intends to use the net proceeds from the offering, including any net proceeds from the underwriters' exercise of their option to purchase additional shares of Common Stock, primarily for growth capital expenditures, including lithium capacity expansion, and for general corporate purposes and to repay amounts outstanding under its revolving credit facility.

Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC and J.P. Morgan are acting as joint book-running managers and representatives of the underwriters in connection with the offering. BofA Securities, Citigroup, Credit Suisse and SMBC Nikko are also acting as joint book-running managers in connection with the offering. Citizens Capital Markets, Loop Capital Markets and Raymond James are acting as co-managers in connection with the offering. The shares of Common Stock are being offered and sold pursuant to an effective shelf registration statement on Form S-3 previously filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"). The offering will be made only by means of a preliminary prospectus supplement and the accompanying base prospectus, which may be obtained free of charge on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov, or by sending a request to Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, Prospectus Department, 200 West Street, New York, NY 10282, telephone: 1-866-471-2526, facsimile: 212-902-9316 or by emailing [email protected]; or J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, c/o Broadridge Financial Solutions, 1155 Long Island Avenue, Edgewood, New York 11717, telephone: 1-866-803-9204, or by emailing [email protected]. Affiliates of Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC, J.P. Morgan, BofA Securities, Citigroup, Credit Suisse and SMBC Nikko are joint book-running managers, Citizens Capital Markets is a co-manager in connection with this offering, and each is a lender under the Company's revolving credit facility and therefore will receive a portion of the net proceeds of the offering.

This press release does not constitute an offer to sell, or the solicitation of an offer to buy, any shares of Common Stock or any other security and shall not constitute any offer, solicitation or sale in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, purchase or sale is unlawful.

About Livent

For nearly eight decades, Livent has partnered with its customers to safely and sustainably use lithium to power the world. Livent is one of only a small number of companies with the capability, reputation, and know-how to produce high-quality finished lithium compounds that are helping meet the growing demand for lithium. The company has one of the broadest product portfolios in the industry, powering demand for green energy, modern mobility, the mobile economy, and specialized innovations, including light alloys and lubricants. Livent employs more than 900 people throughout the world and operates manufacturing sites in the United States, England, India, China and Argentina.

Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995

Certain statements in this news release are forward-looking statements. In some cases, you can identify these statements by forward-looking words such as "may," "might," "will," "will continue to," "will likely result," "should," "expect," "expects," "intends," "plans," "anticipates," "believe," "believes," "estimates," "predicts," "potential," "continue," "could," "forecast," "future," "is confident that," "plans," or "projects," the negative of these terms and other comparable terminology. These forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions about Livent, may include projections of Livent's future financial performance, Livent's anticipated growth strategies and anticipated trends in Livent's business, including without limitation, our capital expansion plans and development of the Nemaska project and statements about whether Livent will be able to consummate the offering, the terms of the offering and the satisfaction of customary closing conditions with respect to the offering. These statements are only predictions based on Livent's current expectations and projections about future events. There are important factors that could cause Livent's actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to differ materially from the results, level of activity, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Currently, one of the most significant factors is the adverse effect of the current coronavirus ("COVID-19") pandemic on our business. The ultimate extent to which COVID-19 impacts us will depend on future developments, which are highly uncertain and cannot be predicted with confidence, including the scope, severity and duration of the pandemic, the actions taken to contain the pandemic or mitigate its impact, and the direct and indirect economic effects of the pandemic and containment measures, among others. Additional factors that could cause Livent's actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements to differ materially from the results, level of activity, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements include a decline in the growth in demand for electric vehicles; volatility in the price for performance lithium compounds; adverse global economic conditions; competition; quarterly and annual fluctuations of our operating results; risks relating to Livent's planned production expansion and related capital expenditures, including any further suspension of our expansion efforts; the potential development and adoption of battery technologies that do not rely on performance lithium compounds as an input; liquidity and access to credit; reduced customer demand, or delays in growth of customer demand, for higher performance lithium compounds; the success of Livent's research and development efforts; risks inherent in international operations and sales, including political, financial and operational risks specific to Argentina, China and other countries where Livent has active operations; customer concentration and the delay or loss of, or significant reduction in orders from, large customers; failure to satisfy customer quality standards; fluctuations in the price of energy and certain raw materials; employee attraction and retention; union relations; cybersecurity breaches; our ability to protect our intellectual property rights; the lack of proven reserves; legal and regulatory proceedings; including any shareholder lawsuits; compliance with environmental, health and safety laws; changes in tax laws; risks related to our separation from FMC Corporation; risks related to ownership of our common stock, including price fluctuations and lack of dividends; events outside our control that could prevent us from achieving our sustainability goals; as well as the other factors described under the caption entitled "Risk Factors" in Livent's 2020 Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 26, 2021 and our subsequent Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 6, 2021. Although Livent believes the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, Livent cannot guarantee future results, level of activity, performance or achievements. Moreover, neither Livent nor any other person assumes responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of any of these forward-looking statements. Livent is under no duty to update any of these forward-looking statements after the date of this news release to conform its prior statements to actual results or revised expectations.

Media contact: Juan Carlos Cruz +1.215.299.6170

[email protected]

Investor contact: Daniel Rosen +1.215.299.6208

[email protected]

SOURCE Livent Corporation

Related Links

https://livent.com


HOUSTON, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Lopez Negrete Communications, the nation's largest independently owned and operated Hispanic marketing agency, has been awarded two of the nation's most prestigious public relations honors: a Silver Anvil in the Content Marketing for Government category and a Bronze Anvil in the Creative Tactics category as a result of their "YES! to Census 2020" campaign and murals created for the City of Houston and Harris County.

Of the hundreds of entries submitted for a Silver Anvil, only 148 organizations were selected as finalists with the "YES! to Census 2020" campaign winning the Silver Anvil Award of Excellence. The campaign was designed to encourage Census participation from traditionally underserved communities by garnering trusted third-party endorsements through a multimedia mix of communications vehicles: news, social media, hyperlocal influencers, trusted voices, and elected officials, and a community-inspired effort that produced branded murals across the city in undercounted neighborhoods.

The Bronze Anvil recognizes and honors the very best public relations tactics executed each year and honored the "YES! to Census 2020" art murals as the winner of the Creative Tactics category. This year's competition drew a total of 358 entries. Of those, only 33 organizations were selected as Bronze Anvil winners. The series of colorful, life-affirming, "YES! to Census 2020" multicultural murals were strategically designed and installed in areas in Houston where Census participation was low.

Lopez Negrete Communications worked in collaboration with several local agencies to create and oversee a strategic approach to improving Census response:

The agency also took home the first annual PRSA Audience Choice Award in the Silver Anvil category. The full list of winners can be found here.

"Honored. Humbled. And beyond thrilled to be recognized by the Public Relations Society of America for creating and curating the City of Houston and Harris County's Census outreach efforts," said Lopez Negrete Communications Co-Founder, CEO and President, Alex Lopez Negrete. "Census response affects all of us by determining funding for many services we take for granted. While the positive impact we had on the city we call home is reward enough, winning the Bronze and Silver Anvil awards reinforces our founding principle of being a voice and positive influence on the diverse and vibrant communities we serve."

The Public Relations Society of America is the nation's leading professional organization serving the communications community.

SOURCE Lopez Negrete Communications, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.lopeznegrete.com


WASHINGTON, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- According to new data published today by the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges), the United States could see an estimated shortage of between 37,800 and 124,000 physicians by 2034, including shortfalls in both primary and specialty care.

"The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted many of the deepest disparities in health and access to health care services and exposed vulnerabilities in the health care system," said AAMC President and CEO David J. Skorton, MD. "The pandemic also has underscored the vital role that physicians and other health care providers play in our nation's health care infrastructure and the need to ensure we have enough physicians to meet America's needs."

Projected Physician Shortages by 2034

Specialty Area Shortage Range Primary care (e.g. family medicine, general

pediatrics, geriatric medicine) Between 17,800 and 48,000 physicians Nonprimary care specialties Between 21,000 and 77,100 physicians -- Surgical specialties (e.g. general surgery,

obstetrics and gynecology, orthopedic

surgery) -- Between 15,800 and 30,200 physicians -- Medical specialties (e.g. cardiology,

oncology, infectious diseases, pulmonology) -- Between 3,800 and 13,400 physicians -- Other specialties (e.g. anesthesiology,

neurology, emergency medicine, addiction

medicine) -- Between 10,300 and 35,600 physicians

The seventh annual study, The Complexities of Physician Supply and Demand: Projections from 2019-2034, was conducted for the AAMC by the Life Science division of IHS Markit, a global information company. This analysis, conducted in 2019 prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, includes supply and demand scenarios and was updated with the latest information on trends in health care delivery and the state of the health care workforce, such as data on physician work hours and retirement trends.

"Physicians and other health professionals dedicate their careers to keeping people healthy and caring for us when we are sick. During the past year, these individuals and their families have made enormous personal sacrifices as they responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and we owe them an immense amount of gratitude," Skorton said.

In his testimony during a recent congressional hearing on addressing the dire health care workforce shortage, Skorton noted that the issue of increasing clinician burnout, which has been intensified by the pandemic, could cause doctors and other health workers to cut back their hours or accelerate their plans for retirement.

Other key findings from the report include:

Demographics  specifically, population growth and aging  continue to be the primary driver of increasing demand from 2019 to 2034. During this time, the U.S. population is projected to grow by 10.6%, from about 328 million to 363 million, with a projected 42.4% increase in those aged 65 and above. Therefore, demand for physician specialties that predominantly care for older Americans will continue to increase.

During this time, the U.S. population is projected to grow by 10.6%, from about 328 million to 363 million, with a projected 42.4% increase in those aged 65 and above. Therefore, demand for physician specialties that predominantly care for older Americans will continue to increase. A large portion of the physician workforce is nearing traditional retirement age, and supply projections are sensitive to workforce decisions of older physicians. More than two of every five active physicians in the U.S. will be 65 or older within the next decade. Their retirement decisions will dramatically affect the magnitude of national workforce shortages. Additionally, according to the AAMC's 2019 National Sample Survey of Physicians, 40% of the country's practicing physicians felt burned out at least once a week before the COVID-19 crisis beganand the issue of increased clinician burnout could cause doctors and other health professionals to reduce their hours or retire sooner.

More than two of every five active physicians in the U.S. will be 65 or older within the next decade. Their retirement decisions will dramatically affect the magnitude of national workforce shortages. Additionally, according to the AAMC's 2019 National Sample Survey of Physicians, 40% of the country's practicing physicians felt burned out at least once a week before the COVID-19 crisis beganand the issue of increased clinician burnout could cause doctors and other health professionals to reduce their hours or retire sooner. If marginalized minority populations, people living in rural communities, and people without health insurance had the same health care use patterns as populations with fewer barriers to access, up to an additional 180,400 physicians would be needed now. COVID-19 has put a spotlight on disparities in health and access to care among underserved populations, and this analysis underscores the systematic differences in health care services by insured and uninsured individuals, individuals in urban and rural locations, and individuals of differing races and ethnicities. These estimates, which are separate from the shortage projection ranges, help illuminate the magnitude of current barriers to care and provide an additional reference point when gauging the adequacy of physician workforce supply.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, physician shortages were being felt by patients across the country. In 2019, the U.S. Health Resources & Services Administration estimated that an additional 13,758 primary care physicians and 6,100 psychiatrists would have been needed to remove Health Professional Shortage Area designations for areas with primary care and mental health shortages. According to public opinion research conducted by the AAMC in 2019, 35% of survey respondents said they or someone they knew had trouble finding a doctor in the past year or two. This is a 10-point increase from when the question was asked in 2015.

At the end of 2020, Congress took an important step to address the physician shortage by adding 1,000 new Medicare-supported graduate medical education (GME) positions200 per year for 5 yearstargeted at underserved rural and urban communities and other teaching hospitals nationwide, ending a nearly 25-year freeze on Medicare support for GME. Bipartisan legislation recently introduced in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, the Resident Physician Shortage Reduction Act of 2021, would build upon this historic investment and help expand the physician workforce by adding 2,000 federally-supported medical residency positions annually for seven years.

"Addressing the physician shortage requires a multi-pronged solution that starts with ensuring that our nation educates and trains enough physicians to meet America's needs, and includes improving access to care, diversifying the physician workforce, and ensuring our nation is prepared to address current and future public health crises," Skorton said. "Now more than ever, the nation must make a long-term investment in the health care workforce. The time to act is now."

Related Resources:

This press release is available online here.

The AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) is a not-for-profit association dedicated to transforming health through medical education, health care, medical research, and community collaborations. Its members are all 155 accredited U.S. and 17 accredited Canadian medical schools; more than 400 teaching hospitals and health systems, including Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers; and more than 70 academic societies. Through these institutions and organizations, the AAMC leads and serves America's medical schools and teaching hospitals and their more than 179,000 full-time faculty members, 92,000 medical students, 140,000 resident physicians, and 60,000 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the biomedical sciences. Additional information about the AAMC is available at aamc.org.

SOURCE Association of American Medical Colleges

Related Links

https://www.aamc.org/


NORTH CHICAGO, Ill., June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV) today announced results from a four-year follow-up analysis of the Phase 3 CLL14 trial, which showed that previously untreated patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) with coexisting conditions who were treated with VENCLYXTO/VENCLEXTA (venetoclax) plus obinutuzumab continued to show longer progression-free survival (PFS) and higher rates of undetectable minimal residual disease (MRD) compared to patients receiving a standard of care chemoimmunotherapy regimen of obinutuzumab and chlorambucil. The data were presented for the first time today during the virtual 26th European Hematology Association (EHA) Annual Congress (abstract #S146).

"The CLL14 trial results observed after four years of follow-up with treatment of venetoclax plus obinutuzumab show that these patients can experience long-lasting responses without disease progression, years after stopping treatment," said Mohamed Zaki, M.D., Ph.D., vice president and head, global oncology development, AbbVie.

After a median follow-up of more than four years (52.4 months), patients treated with the VENCLYXTO/VENCLEXTA and obinutuzumab combination (n=216) continued to demonstrate longer PFS compared to patients on treatment with obinutuzumab and chlorambucil, the risk of disease progression or death was reduced by 67 percent (n=216; median not reached compared to 36.4 months; hazard ratio [HR] 0.33 [95% CI 0.25-0.45]); results are descriptive. At four years after randomization, the PFS rate for patients treated with the VENCLYXTO/VENCLEXTA-based combination was 74 percent compared to 35.4 percent for patients treated with obinutuzumab and chlorambucil. The improvement in PFS was observed across all clinical and biological risk groups, including patients with TP53 mutation, 17p deletion and unmutated IGHV status.1

Additionally, assessment of MRD in peripheral blood 30 months after the end of treatment showed that 26.9 percent of patients treated with the VENCLYXTO/VENCLEXTA-based combination still had undetectable MRD (<10-4) compared to 3.2 percent of patients in the obinutuzumab plus chlorambucil arm.1 Undetectable MRD occurs when less than one CLL cell per 10,000 lymphocytes can be detected in the blood or bone marrow using sensitive analytical methods.2

No new safety signals were observed in the four-year follow-up analysis.1 The most frequently occurring serious adverse reactions (>=2%) in patients receiving venetoclax in combination with obinutuzumab were pneumonia, sepsis, febrile neutropenia, and TLS.3

"CLL is considered an incurable disease and becomes more difficult to treat each time a patient experiences a relapse, so a key treatment goal is to maintain remission for as long as possible. The four- year results of the CLL14 study show that 74 percent of patients treated with fixed-duration venetoclax-obinutuzumab remain without PFS event, more than three years after treatment cessation," said Othman Al-Sawaf, M.D., abstract lead author, hematologist-oncologist at the University Hospital Cologne in Germany, and study physician at the German CLL Study Group. "This highlights how durable the remissions are after 12 treatment cycles in the vast majority of patients, suggesting the venetoclax-obinutuzumab combination regimen as an effective option for patients with previously untreated CLL."

CLL is a slow-growing form of leukemia, or blood cancer, in which too many immature lymphocytes (a type of white blood cell) are found predominantly in the blood and bone marrow. CLL is the most common form of leukemia in the Western Hemisphere, accounting for approximately one third of new leukemia diagnoses and nearly 95,000 new cases in Europe each year.4,5,6

VENCLYXTO/VENCLEXTA is being developed by AbbVie and Roche. It is jointly commercialized by AbbVie and Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, in the U.S. and by AbbVie outside of the U.S.

About the CLL14 Phase 3 Trial3,7,8

The prospective, multicenter, open-label, randomized Phase 3 CLL14 trial, which was conducted in close collaboration with the German CLL Study Group (DCLLSG), evaluated the efficacy and safety of a combined regimen of VENCLYXTO/VENCLEXTA and obinutuzumab (n=216) versus obinutuzumab and chlorambucil (n=216) in previously untreated patients with CLL and coexisting medical conditions (total Cumulative Illness Rating Scale [CIRS] score >6 or creatinine clearance <70 mL/min). The therapies were administered for a fixed duration of 12 months for VENCLYXTO/VENCLEXTA in combination with six cycles of obinutuzumab. The trial enrolled 432 patients, all of whom were previously untreated according to the International Workshop on Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (iwCLL) criteria. Efficacy was based on PFS as assessed by an independent review committee.

Key secondary endpoints were rates of MRD in peripheral blood and bone marrow, overall and complete response rates, MRD in complete response in peripheral blood and bone marrow, and overall survival.

The four-year, follow-up analysis showed an OS rate of 85.4% with Ven-Obi versus 83.1% with chlorambucil in combination with obinutuzumab (Obi-Clb; HR 0.85, 95% CI [0.54-1.35]; P=0.49).

In patients with CLL receiving combination therapy with obinutuzumab, serious adverse reactions (ARs) were most often due to febrile neutropenia and pneumonia (5 percent each). The most common ARs (20 percent) of any grade were neutropenia (60 percent), diarrhea (28 percent), and fatigue (21 percent). Fatal ARs that occurred in the absence of disease progression and with onset within 28 days of the last study treatment were reported in 2 percent (4/212) of patients, most often from infection.

About VENCLYXTO (venetoclax)

VENCLYXTO (venetoclax) is a first-in-class medicine that selectively binds and inhibits the B-cell lymphoma-2 (BCL-2) protein. In some blood cancers, BCL-2 prevents cancer cells from undergoing their natural death or self-destruction process, called apoptosis. VENCLYXTO targets the BCL-2 protein and works to help restore the process of apoptosis.

VENCLYXTO is being developed by AbbVie and Roche. It is jointly commercialized by AbbVie and Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, in the U.S. and by AbbVie outside of the U.S. Together, the companies are committed to BCL-2 research and to studying venetoclax in clinical trials across several blood and other cancers. Venetoclax is approved in more than 80 countries, including the U.S.

Indication and Important VENCLYXTO (venetoclax) EU Safety Information3

Indications

Venclyxto in combination with obinutuzumab is indicated for the treatment of adult patients with previously untreated chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL).

Venclyxto in combination with rituximab is indicated for the treatment of adult patients with CLL who have received at least one prior therapy.

Venclyxto monotherapy is indicated for the treatment of CLL:

In the presence of 17p deletion or TP53 mutation in adult patients who are unsuitable for or have failed a B-cell receptor pathway inhibitor, or

mutation in adult patients who are unsuitable for or have failed a B-cell receptor pathway inhibitor, or In the absence of 17p deletion or TP53 mutation in adult patients who have failed both chemoimmunotherapy and a B-cell receptor pathway inhibitor.

Venclyxto in combination with a hypomethylating agent is indicated for the treatment of adult patients with newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) who are ineligible for intensive chemotherapy.

Contraindications

Hypersensitivity to the active substance or to any of the excipients is contraindicated. Concomitant use of strong CYP3A inhibitors at initiation and during the dose-titration phase due to increased risk for tumour lysis syndrome (TLS). Concomitant use of preparations containing St. John's wort as Venclyxto efficacy may be reduced.

Special Warnings & Precautions for Use

Tumour Lysis syndrome, including fatal events, has occurred in patients when treated with Venclyxto. For CLL and AML, please refer to the indication-specific recommendations for prevention of TLS in the Venclyxto summary of product characteristic (SmPC).

Patients should be assessed for risk and should receive appropriate prophylaxis, monitoring, and management for TLS. The risk of TLS is a continuum based on multiple factors, including comorbidities. Venclyxto poses a risk for TLS at initiation and during the dose-titration phase. Changes in electrolytes consistent with TLS that require prompt management can occur as early as 6 to 8 hours following the first dose of Venclyxto and at each dose increase.

Neutropenia (grade 3 or 4) has been reported. Complete blood counts should be monitored throughout the treatment period.

In patients with AML, neutropenia (grade 3 or 4) is common before starting treatment. The neutrophil counts can worsen with Venetoclax in combination with a hypomethylating agent. Neutropenia can recur with subsequent cycles of therapy. Dose modification and interruptions for cytopenias are dependent on remission status.

For CLL and AML, please refer to the indication-specific recommendations for dose modifications for toxicities in the Venclyxto SmPC.

Serious infections including sepsis with fatal outcome have been reported. Monitoring of any signs and symptoms of infection is required. Suspected infections should receive prompt treatment including antimicrobials and dose interruption or reduction as appropriate.

Live vaccines should not be administered during treatment or thereafter until B-cell recovery.

Drug Interactions

In CLL and AML CYP3A inhibitors may increase Venclyxto plasma concentrations.

In CLL, at initiation and dose-titration phase, Strong CYP3A inhibitors are contraindicated due to increased risk for TLS and moderate CYP3A inhibitors should be avoided. If moderate CYP3A inhibitors must be used, please refer to the recommendations for dose modifications in the Venclyxto SmPC.

In AML, please refer to the AML-specific recommendation for dose modifications for potential interactions with CYP3A inhibitors, in the VENCLYXTO SmPC.

Avoid concomitant use of P-gp and BCRP inhibitors at initiation and during the dose titration phase.

CYP3A4 inducers may decrease Venclyxto plasma concentrations. Avoid coadministration with strong or moderate CYP3A inducers. These agents may decrease venetoclax plasma concentrations.

Co-administration of bile acid sequestrants with VENCLYXTO is not recommended as this may reduce the absorption of VENCLYXTO.

Adverse Reactions

CLL

The most commonly occurring adverse reactions (>=20%) of any grade in patients receiving venetoclax in the combination studies with obinutuzumab or rituximab were neutropenia, diarrhoea, and upper respiratory tract infection. In the monotherapy studies, the most common adverse reactions were neutropenia/neutrophil count decreased, diarrhoea, nausea, anaemia, fatigue, and upper respiratory tract infection.

The most frequently occurring serious adverse reactions (>=2%) in patients receiving venetoclax in combination with obinutuzumab or rituximab were pneumonia, sepsis, febrile neutropenia, and TLS. In the monotherapy studies, the most frequently reported serious adverse reactions (>=2%) were pneumonia and febrile neutropenia.

Discontinuations due to adverse reactions occurred in 16% of patients treated with venetoclax in combination with obinutuzumab or rituximab in the CLL14 and Murano studies, respectively. In the monotherapy studies with venetoclax, 11% of patients discontinued due to adverse reactions.

Dosage reductions due to adverse reactions occurred in 21% of patients treated with the combination of venetoclax and obinutuzumab in CLL14, in 15% of patients treated with the combination of venetoclax and rituximab in Murano, and in 14% of patients treated with venetoclax in the monotherapy studies. The most common adverse reaction that led to dose interruptions was neutropenia.

AML

The most commonly occurring adverse reactions (>=20%) of any grade in patients receiving venetoclax in combination with azacitidine or decitabine in the VIALE-A and M14-358, respectively, were thrombocytopenia, neutropenia, febrile neutropenia, nausea, diarrhoea, vomiting, anaemia, fatigue, pneumonia, hypokalaemia, and decreased appetite, haemorrhage, dizziness/syncope, hypotension, headache, abdominal pain, and anaemia.

The most frequently reported serious adverse reactions (5%) in patients receiving venetoclax in combination with azacitidine were febrile neutropenia, pneumonia, sepsis and haemorrhage. In M14-358, the most frequently reported serious adverse reactions (5%) were febrile neutropenia, pneumonia, bacteraemia and sepsis.

Discontinuations due to adverse reactions occurred in 24% of patients treated with venetoclax in combination with azacitidine in the VIALE-A study, and 26% of patients treated with venetoclax in combination with decitabine in the M14-358 study, respectively.

Dosage reductions due to adverse reactions occurred in 2% of patients in VIALE-A, and in 6% of patients in M14-358. Venetoclax dose interruptions due to adverse reactions occurred in 72% and 65% of patients, respectively. The most common adverse reaction that led to dose interruption (>10%) of Venetoclax in VIALE-A, were febrile neutropenia, neutropenia, pneumonia, and thrombocytopenia. The most common adverse reactions that led to dose interruption (5%) of venetoclax in M14-358 were febrile neutropenia, neutropenia/neutrophil count decreased, pneumonia, platelet count decreased, and white blood cell count decreased.

Special Populations

Patients with reduced renal function (CrCl <80 mL/min) may require more intensive prophylaxis and monitoring to reduce the risk of TLS at initiation and during the dose-titration phase. Safety in patients with severe renal impairment (CrCl <30 mL/min) or on dialysis has not been established, and a recommended dose for these patients has not been determined.

For patients with severe (Child-Pugh C) hepatic impairment, a dose reduction of at least 50% throughout treatment is recommended.

Venclyxto may cause embryo-fetal harm when administered to a pregnant woman. Advise nursing women to discontinue breastfeeding during treatment.

This is not a complete summary of all safety information. See Venclyxto (venetoclax) SmPC at www.ema.europa.eu. Globally, prescribing information varies; refer to the individual country product label for complete information.

About AbbVie in Oncology

At AbbVie, we are committed to transforming standards of care for multiple blood cancers while advancing a dynamic pipeline of investigational therapies across a range of cancer types. Our dedicated and experienced team joins forces with innovative partners to accelerate the delivery of potentially breakthrough medicines. We are evaluating more than 20 investigational medicines in over 300 clinical trials across some of the world's most widespread and debilitating cancers. As we work to have a remarkable impact on people's lives, we are committed to exploring solutions to help patients obtain access to our cancer medicines. For more information, please visit http://www.abbvie.com/oncology.

About AbbVie

AbbVie's mission is to discover and deliver innovative medicines that solve serious health issues today and address the medical challenges of tomorrow. We strive to have a remarkable impact on people's lives across several key therapeutic areas: immunology, oncology, neuroscience, eye care, virology, women's health and gastroenterology, in addition to products and services across its Allergan Aesthetics portfolio. For more information about AbbVie, please visit us at www.abbvie.com. Follow @abbvie on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn.

Forward-Looking Statements

Some statements in this news release are, or may be considered, forward-looking statements for purposes of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The words "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "project" and similar expressions, among others, generally identify forward-looking statements. AbbVie cautions that these forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, competition from other products, challenges to intellectual property, difficulties inherent in the research and development process, adverse litigation or government action, and changes to laws and regulations applicable to our industry. Additional information about the economic, competitive, governmental, technological and other factors that may affect AbbVie's operations is set forth in Item 1A, "Risk Factors," of AbbVie's 2020 Annual Report on Form 10-K, which has been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. AbbVie undertakes no obligation to release publicly any revisions to forward-looking statements as a result of subsequent events or developments, except as required by law.

1 Al-Sawaf O, et al. Venetoclax-obinutuzumab for previously untreated chronic lymphocytic leukemia: 4-year follow-up analysis of the randomized CLL14 study. Presented at the European Hematology Association Annual Meeting; June 11, 2021. 2 Hallek M, et al. Guidelines for diagnosis, indications for treatment, response assessment and supportive management of chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Blood. 2018;131(25):2745-2760. 3 Summary of Product Characteristics for VENCLYXTO (venetoclax). Ludwigshafen, Germany: AbbVie Deutschland GmbH & Co. KG. 4 International Agency for Research on Cancer. World Health Organization. Europe Globocan 2018. https://gco.iarc.fr/today/data/factsheets/populations/908-europe-fact-sheets.pdf. Accessed February 2020. 5 NCI Dictionaries. NCI Dictionary of Terms. Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms. Accessed January 2020. 6 World Health Organization. 2014 Review of Cancer Medicines on the WHO List of Essential Medicines. http://www.who.int/selection_medicines/committees/expert/20/applications/CLL.pdf. Accessed January 2020. 7 VENCLEXTA (venetoclax) [Package Insert]. North Chicago, Ill.: AbbVie Inc. 8 Fischer K, et al. Venetoclax and obinutuzumab in patients with CLL and coexisting conditions. N Engl J Med. 2019;380:2225-2236.

SOURCE AbbVie

Related Links

abbvie.com


NEW HAVEN, Conn., June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- "The Knights of Columbus are poised to lead the way toward recovery and a future of renewal," said Knights of Columbus Supreme Knight Patrick E. Kelly Friday morning at the Knights' Meeting of State Deputies, its first in-person gathering since the start of the pandemic.

Knights leaders from every U.S. state and around the world attended the meeting in New Haven, site of the Knights' founding. In addition to the joint installation of Supreme Knight Kelly and all attending state deputies, a first for the Knights, the meeting also included the installation of new Deputy Supreme Knight Paul G. O'Sullivan. In another historic first for the Knights, Patrick T. Mason, a member of the Osage Nation, was installed as the first Native American supreme secretary.

During his opening address, Supreme Knight Kelly outlined his vision for the Knights. "The coronavirus pandemic is finally receding.  What a time to continue the work that Blessed Michael McGivney began. What a time to be a Knight."

Kelly thanked Past Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson for his leadership during his 20 years as supreme knight.

"No one has done more to serve and strengthen the Order than our past supreme knight, Carl Anderson," Kelly said. "For two decades, he led the Knights from strength to strength in Charity, Unity and Fraternity."

That strength was reflected in the Knights' response to the pandemic. "Knights across the world poured their energies into the Leave No Neighbor Behind initiative," Kelly said. "We helped neighbors near and far, through millions of dollars in direct relief, hundreds of thousands of pounds of donated food, and countless acts of kindness and concern. We proved that 'leave no neighbor behind' isn't just a phrase."

A Look Ahead

As shutdowns end and economies recover, Kelly also emphasized the importance of Knights assisting their parishes with getting parishioners back to Church.

"Our goal is to get our councils and our parishes back to normal as quickly as possible," Kelly said. "Nothing is more important right now to fulfilling our mission of strengthening Catholic families, providing for their financial needs and helping the vulnerable. Equally important is serving the Church in this difficult time. Our pastors can count on us to help get their parishioners back in the pews.  The more we dedicate ourselves to Christ in the Eucharist, the more we will be a sign of unity in an age of division and disbelief."

Kelly outlined two ways the organization plans to inspire the next generation of Knights through charity and spiritual growth.

"Young Catholic men are looking for ways to make a difference in the lives of others," Kelly said. "They should find what they seek with us. When they see us doing our work, serving on earth as the hands and feet of Christ, they will be motivated to join us."

He added that the Knights will seek to inspire ways for men to become better husbands and fathers. "It's a model for future work," he said.

Later in the day, during his installation address at St. Mary's Church in New Haven, where recently beatified Father Michael J. McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus in 1882, Supreme Knight Kelly consecrated his administration to St. Joseph and highlighted him as a singular model for the Knights in his roles as "Guardian of the Family" and "Guardian of the Truth."

"The family faces an unknown and precarious future," Kelly said. "Catholic families are struggling to live out their faith and raise their children amid a culture that is increasingly hostile to our beliefs. Catholic husbands and fathers, especially fathers of young children, need the encouragement and support of the Knights of Columbus. We can inspire them with the creative courage needed to keep their families strong in the faith. So let us, like St. Joseph, embrace our role as guardians of the family."

He then went on to discuss St. Joseph's role as a guardian of truth: "The truth that Joseph protected had a name: Jesus Christ, who is the Truth incarnate. As Knights, we too must serve this Truth. This is not easy in our day. Truths about marriage, about life in the womb, about the nature of the family and the meaning of freedom are often denied and even vilified. Yet, this makes our commitment to truth all the more important."

"By standing for truth," he continued, "We as an Order will continue to be a sign of unity  the lasting and true unity that comes from a commitment to Christ above all other things. This unity in truth is grounded in the truth of the Eucharist, what the Second Vatican Council called the 'source and summit of the Christian Life.'"

As his address came to a close, Kelly prompted the Knights to remember the following when carrying out their work in their jurisdictions: "We know that Jesus Christ is really, truly present  body, blood, soul and divinity  in the Blessed Sacrament. Committed to our principle of Unity, let us strive to serve Christ in the Eucharist."

About the Knights of Columbus

The Knights of Columbus is one of the world's leading fraternal and service organizations with 2 million members in more than 16,000 parish-based councils. During the past year, Knights around the world donated more than 77 million service hours and $187 million for worthy causes in their communities. The organization also offers extensive life insurance services to members and their families, resulting in more than $114 billion of life insurance in force. Knights of Columbus Asset Advisors offers investment services to individuals and institutions in accord with Catholic social teaching and has over $26 billion in assets under management. From helping children in need, to providing wheelchairs for the disabled, to helping stock food banks, to offering top-rated and affordable insurance products to its members, to creating a legacy of giving, the Knights of Columbus has supported families and communities for more than 138 years. To learn more please visit us at kofc.org.

SOURCE Knights of Columbus

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Firing Line with Margaret Hoover's weekly podcast will highlight guests who appear on the television program along with exclusive and extended audio-only content and conversations. The podcast is hosted by Spotify's Anchor platform and will be distributed on major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Breaker, Castbox, Overcast, Pocket Casts and RadioPublic. Listen to the trailer on Spotify and Apple .

"At Firing Line, we believe that civil discourse is a civic responsibility."  Margaret Hoover

"At Firing Line, we believe that civil discourse is a civic responsibility. I'm committed to putting ideas to a rigorous, yet respectful examination," says host Margaret Hoover. "Podcasting is the ideal platform to allow these vital conversations to develop even further."

The podcast launch comes as the series prepares to enter its fourth season on PBS in July on a ratings high. Firing Line viewership increased 19% in the first three quarters of the 2020-21 season* and YouTube views increased 453% in the last six months.

"Our audience has responded to programming that sheds light and not heat, and we are looking forward to giving people more ways to consume our content," says executive producer Alyssa Litoff Gordon. "The podcast represents the next stage in Firing Line's multi-platform expansion."

On June 1, Firing Line dropped its podcast trailer highlighting Hoover interviewing leading voices representing a range of perspectives, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, Fair Fight's Stacey Abrams, California gubernatorial candidate Caitlyn Jenner and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY).

Firing Line with Margaret Hoover airs nationwide Fridays on PBS (check local listings) and is co-produced by The WNET Group.

*Source: TV  Nielsen Metered Market P2+ Impressions July 2020 - March 2021 v. July 2019 - March 2020

PODCAST TRAILER

PODCAST PROFILE

ABOUT FIRING LINE WITH MARGARET HOOVER

"Firing Line with Margaret Hoover" is a reprisal of William F. Buckley Jr.'s iconic PBS program. The series maintains the character of the original, providing a platform that is diligent in its commitment to civility and the rigorous exchange of opinion. Margaret Hoover is an American political commentator, author, feminist, and gay rights activist. "Firing Line" is produced by the Oscar-nominated Tom Yellin at The Documentary Group and is co-produced by The WNET Group. Executive Producer and Showrunner is Emmy-, duPont- and Murrow-winning producer Alyssa Litoff Gordon.

Support for "Firing Line for Margaret Hoover" is provided by The Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, Robert Granieri, Charles R. Schwab, The David Tepper Charitable Foundation Inc., The Fairweather Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and Rosalind P. Walter. Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc. and Morgan Stanley.

Find "Firing Line" on YouTube , Twitter, Facebook , and Instagram

Contact: Melanie Starling, [email protected]

SOURCE Firing Line with Margaret Hoover

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CINCINNATI, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- In a year where a pandemic brought unthinkable economic uncertainty, one surprising bright spot was the record amount of venture funding for U.S. startups--$143 billion in 2020, up 12 percent from the previous year. But that good fortune was not shared evenly, according to Crunchbase , because in that same year funding to venture-backed companies founded solely by female entrepreneurs dropped 22 percentrepresenting $1 billion in lost funding.

With this funding gap in mind, P&G Ventures , the internal startup studio of Procter & Gamble, is joining forces with The Riveter to launch Open for Business: Women Building the Future, a free event series focused on bridging that gap. These virtual events will provide female entrepreneurs with resources, insights and inspiration to help them overcome any obstacles standing in the way of growing their businesses. A group of over 20 seasoned start-up executives at XFactor Ventures , a seed fund for female founders built by female founders, are also joining the series to provide expertise, experience and meaningful feedback.

This month-long series of conversations will bring together experts and stakeholders from different sectors of the entrepreneurial landscape, including venture capital investors, female founders of technologically superior fast-moving consumer goods, accelerator leaders, and both university and federal labs.

The series is comprised of four main events :

The Big Idea [ Thursday, June 17 at 4:00 pm ET ] will feature female founders who have successfully scaled their own consumer product businesses sharing advice and takeaways from their personal experiences. How We Scaled [ Thursday, June 24 at 4:00 pm ET ] will focus on sharing stories from individuals and entities that foster networks, funding and ideas. We are thrilled to partner with Clubhouse's incredible Women Founders Club led by Liana Fricker of Inspiration Space and Katherine Lynn of Nextsteps for this audio-only discussion. Speed Mentoring [ Wednesday, June 30 at 4:00 pm ET ] will give attendees the chance to connect with experienced mentors who can help them advance their entrepreneurial journey. We are excited to partner with XFactor Ventures for this event, a venture capital fund led by female founders across the world. Start-Up Showcase [ Thursday, July 8 at 7:00 pm ET ] will close out the month of programming and give four female-founders the chance to showcase their fast-moving consumer goods innovations while sharing their ideas with mentors and an audience of peers and potential investors.

"P&G believes in equality for everyone. Having representation in the startup space is not only the right thing to do, but it's good for business," said Betsy Bluestone, Senior Director of Global Scouting and Partnerships for P&G Ventures. "We are proud to be teaming up with The Riveter on this series to support and encourage female founders. The disparity of resources available to women-led businesses can seem insurmountable, but we hope these kinds of conversations bring us one step closer to a more level playing field."

"At the Riveter we partner with those who share our goals of bringing awareness to and breaking down the barriers women in the workforce face every day," said Amy Nelson , founder of The Riveter . "We are so excited to be partnering with P&G Ventures for this project, because we believe these events will bring women together to help each other succeed."

Additional panelists, judges and other featured participants will be shared as they are confirmed.

This series will be shared across The Riveter's platform, which includes their website and newsletter. Register for the series here . For updates on these events and more, follow P&G Ventures on Twitter and LinkedIn , and The Riveter on Twitter and LinkedIn .

About P&G Ventures

P&G Ventures is an early-stage startup studio within P&G that creates new brands and businesses by partnering with entrepreneurs, visionaries, and startupswith customized partnerships, unique to them, to deliver a win-win, and create products, brands and businesses that solve consumer needs in new categories for P&G.

About Procter and Gamble

P&G serves consumers around the world with one of the strongest portfolios of trusted, quality, leadership brands, including Always, Ambi Pur, Ariel, Bounty, Charmin, Crest, Dawn, Downy, Fairy, Febreze, Gain, Gillette, Head & Shoulders, Lenor, Olay, Oral-B, Pampers, Pantene, SK-II, Tide, Vicks, and Whisper. The P&G community includes operations in approximately 70 countries worldwide. Please visit http://www.pg.com for the latest news and information about P&G and its brands.

About The Riveter

The Riveter is an online community and media company sharing stories, skills and tools for women working to advance their lives and careers. The Riveter's newsletter reaches hundreds of thousands across the world and focuses on the amazing work women are doing in emerging and traditional industries. The community works together to champion and elevate the conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion in work and in business.

Media Contact:

Jennifer Byrne, [email protected]

Taylor Anderson, [email protected]

SOURCE Procter & Gamble
SAINT PETERSBURG, Russia, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- PhosAgro Independent Director Jim Rogers participated in a panel session at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum entitled 'Lessons Learned during the Pandemic: Stories of Business Successes and Failures', where he offered his perspective on the personal, professional and social experience gained from the coronavirus pandemic.

Opening the session, Andrey Sharonov, President of the Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO and Member of PhosAgro's Board of Directors, noted that the pandemic forced businesses to address new challenges and dilemmas, in which they often had to balance human and economic factors. Health hazards for employees, supply chain disruption, remote working, restrictions on business travel - all these and many other contributing factors affected companies and caused them to rethink their priorities.

Jim Rogers said that the business community's concern, openness and participation can and should become a key part of corporate culture, and only then would the world be able to avoid the large-scale consequences of such crises. "In Russia, I have seen such team spirit and companies fighting to keep their employees healthy. PhosAgro, for example, has spent more than RUB 3.5 billion fighting coronavirus. After the first signs of the pandemic emerged, the Company quickly developed an action plan aimed at protecting the health of employees in several regions at once," said Jim Rogers. "It was essential for us to communicate with everyone on the team and to make sure they felt safe in their workplace. Timeliness, clarity and appropriateness of action in the early days of the pandemic, when the situation was constantly changing and we had little knowledge of the virus, bought time and minimised the number of people infected. Thanks to its strategic focus on people, the Company managed to avoid disruption to significant business processes, and moreover avoided having to shut down operations. At the end of 2020, PhosAgro not only did not reduce production, but increased output, created additional jobs, and in a challenging situation, was able to remain a guarantor of its employees' well-being. PhosAgro has done a great job," concluded Jim Rogers.

Christina Tikhonova, President of Microsoft Rus, agreed that during the pandemic, strengthening corporate culture, maintaining cooperation within companies and building effective teams were particularly important.

Mikhail Karisalov, the CEO of SIBUR LLC, noted that the pandemic and the shift of a large proportion of employees to remote working have made the issue of comfortable working conditions particularly relevant. Access to technical equipment and software and the ability to organise one's work and space while working remotely are important efficiency factors both during and after the pandemic.

During the discussion, Andrey Sharonov also said that he was impressed by the way many companies, including PhosAgro, supported all residents in the cities where they operate, without limiting their assistance to just their employees. According to Sharonov, this is a shining example of the corporate social responsibility that Russian companies have shown during a difficult crisis period.

About PhosAgro

PhosAgro (www.phosagro.com) is one of the world's leading vertically integrated phosphate-based fertilizer producers in terms of production volumes of phosphate-based fertilizers and high-grade phosphate rock with a P 2 O 5 content of 39% and higher. PhosAgro's environmentally friendly fertilizers stand out for their high efficiency, and they do not lead to the contamination of soils with heavy metals.

The Company is the largest phosphate-based fertilizer producer in Europe (by total combined capacity for DAP/MAP/NP/NPK/NPS), the largest producer of high-grade phosphate rock with a P 2 O 5 content of 39%, a top-three producer of MAP/DAP globally, one of the leading producers of feed phosphates (MCP) in Europe, and the only producer in Russia, and Russia's only producer of nepheline concentrate (according to the RAFP).

PhosAgro's main products include phosphate rock, more than 50 grades of fertilizers, feed phosphates, ammonia, and sodium tripolyphosphate, which are used by customers in over 100 countries spanning all of the world's inhabited continents. The Company's priority markets outside of Russia and the CIS are Latin America, Europe and Asia.

PhosAgro's shares are traded on the Moscow Exchange, and global depositary receipts (GDRs) for shares trade on the London Stock Exchange (under the ticker PHOR). Since 1 June 2016, the Company's GDRs have been included in the MSCI Russia and MSCI Emerging Markets indexes.

SOURCE PhosAgro
DALLAS, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The financial services industry can be a tough field where only the strong and focused will survive. The rewards, however, are huge when you succeed. There are a select few who have cracked the code and are earning fortunes in this industry. Though one would think they would keep the secrets to themselves, as leaders, they know that helping others succeed is a win-win proposition.

How would you like to learn from these exceptional leaders?

Financial independence achieved by building and owning your own insurance agency has never been more attainable. As the business world rapidly evolves, more people are seeking outlets for their talents and escape being just another cog in a machine of corporate America. Gone is the era of having few options other than being chained down by corporations and working 9-5 jobs that may not support your long-term goals.

As people look for ways to survive in a changing economy, more are turning towards entrepreneurship. Many have the desire but lack the knowledge, insider tips, and connections to do so. The all-new PHP Agency Podcast fills that void.

The PHP Agency Podcast is a weekly live online show that tells the real stories of PHP Agency agents and their path to success through entrepreneurship. The podcast educates and inspires listeners on the path to economic freedom. It also emphasizes the importance of life insurance and ensuring that loved ones are taken care of. Discover the story of how PHP Agency transformed its part in an outdated industry, which has historically been homogeneous, to an ethnically and culturally diverse one where people of all walks of life can thrive. PHP has created many millionaires who came from non-traditional paths and proves that anyone, regardless of age, ethnicity, or education, can create a successful business and generational personal wealth.

The PHP Agency Podcast is co-hosted by two successful agents, Matt Sapaula and Marlene Gaytan. Both came from humble beginnings, and with the help of PHP Agency, they have grown to manage multiple locations and earn seven figures annually. Matt has appeared on cable news programs such as Fox and Fox Business. He has a YouTube channel called Seven Figure Squad with over 100k subscribers, and a multi-location agency within PHP that is setting sales records each month. Marlene is a Latina entrepreneur, who has paved her own way by showing the world that women are just as capable of being successful in what has been a male-dominated industry. With a background in real estate and an indomitable spirit, she has set an example for women entrepreneurs as she has built a successful multi-location agency within PHP.

Every week, Matt and Marlene welcome high-performing, successful agents from PHP Agency Inc. to tell their stories. These individuals include top earners and agency builders who have years of success. The podcast's agent-guests come from all over the country sharing stories that will motivate and inspire you-- no matter where you are in your career.

What better way to learn about the industry than listening to and even asking questions to those who will share their expertise. You will be updated on current events and campaigns, and learn why they chose PHP Agency. The subjects discussed are thought-provoking and provide insight into the life insurance and financial services industry. These individuals will show you how PHP Agency has helped many to grow their businesses to million-dollar agencies and become financially free.

PHP Agency has challenged the insurance industry with a mission to help middle-class Americans, including women and minorities, to succeed in the financial services industry. Their YouTube channel will give you the latest updates on marketplace. No matter what level you are, with a fresh feel and new topic each week, there is an episode for you on the PHP Agency podcast.

Watch their YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/PHPAgency for exclusive footage of financial services professionals discussing their journey and be sure to subscribe to receive notifications of newly posted content.

Why search for the winning formula when all you need to do is tune in each week?

www.phpagency.com

Contact - [email protected]

Related Images

image1.png

SOURCE PHP Agency, Inc.
NEW YORK, June 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Pomerantz LLP announces that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Aterian, Inc. fka Mohawk Group Holdings, Inc. ("Aterian" or the "Company")(NYSE: ATER) and certain of its officers. The class action, filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and docketed under 21-cv-05163, is on behalf of a class consisting of all persons and entities other than Defendants that purchased or otherwise acquired Aterian securities between December 1, 2020 and May 3, 2021, inclusive (the "Class Period"). Plaintiff pursues claims against the Defendants under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the "Exchange Act").

If you are a shareholder who purchased Aterian securities during the Class Period, you have until July 12, 2021 to ask the Court to appoint you as Lead Plaintiff for the class. A copy of the Complaint can be obtained at www.pomerantzlaw.com. To discuss this action, contact Robert S. Willoughby at [email protected] or 888.476.6529 (or 888.4-POMLAW), toll-free, Ext. 7980. Those who inquire by e-mail are encouraged to include their mailing address, telephone number, and the number of shares purchased.

[Click here for information about joining the class action]

Aterian purports to be a "technology-enabled consumer products platform that builds, acquires and partners with e-commerce brands. The Company's proprietary software and highly agile supply chain helps creating for a growing base of data empowered e-commerce customers. Aterian predominantly operates through online retail channels such as Amazon and Walmart, Inc."

The complaint alleges throughout the Class Period, Defendants made materially false and misleading statements regarding the Company's business. Specifically, Defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (i) the Company's organic growth is plummeting; (ii) the Company's recent, self-lauded acquisitions were overpayments for flawed assets from questionable sources; (iii) Aterian's purported artificial intelligence software is a flawed product that lacks customer interest; (iv) Aterian uses rebate programs and paid or artificial reviews to pump up their product offerings; and (v) as a result, the Company's public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times.

On December 1, 2020, the Company announced that it had acquired the assets of "leading e-commerce business brands Mueller, Pursteam, Pohl and Schmitt, and Spiralizer" from 9830 Macarthur LLC, ZN Direct LLC, and Reliance Equities Group, LLC. On this news, shares jumped from their December 1, 2020 close of $6.89 per share to a December 2, 2020 close of $8.12, representing a one-day surge of nearly 18%. Shares continued to soar, closing at $17.21 per share on December 31, 2020, and eventually approaching nearly $49.00 per share in mid-February 2021.

On May 4, 2021, analyst Culper Research published a scathing report entitled: "Aterian (ATER): Bought from Felons & Fraudsters, Sold to You." In this report, Culper wrote that "the Company has ties to convicted criminals and is promoting what we believe is an overhyped 'AI' narrative and a string of garbage acquisitions to mask the failure of its already ill-conceived core business." Culper continued that "Aterian has been largely unsuccessful in convincing other Amazon sellers to pay for its 'AIMEE' AI platform, and at least 5 former employees and a former customer have expressed doubts regarding AIMEE's legitimacy. We think that Aterian's underlying business has failed, forcing the Company to obscure its poor performance with a series of questionable acquisitions."

Culper further wrote: "[w]e believe that there are serious problems with Aterian's claims to maintain strong organic growth and to drive M&A synergies: to us, neither of these appears to be the case. . . . In our view, this suggests not only that Aterian is unable to growth EBITDA at acquired businesses, but that its core business is also failing to produce."

On this news, the price of Aterian stock fell from its May 3, 2021 close of $20.66 to a May 5, 2021 close of $15.72 per share, a two-day drop of $4.94 per share or approximately 24%.

The Pomerantz Firm, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, the Pomerantz Firm pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 80 years later, the Pomerantz Firm continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomerantzlaw.com

CONTACT:

Robert S. Willoughby

Pomerantz LLP

[email protected]

888-476-6529 ext. 7980

SOURCE Pomerantz LLP

Related Links

www.pomerantzlaw.com


SAO PAULO, June 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Companhia de Saneamento Basico do Estado de Sao Paulo  Sabesp ("Company"), in compliance with Rule No. 358 issued by the Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commission ("CVM"), dated as of January 3, 2002, as amended, hereby informs its shareholders and the market in general that, on this date, it was approved, in the 942th meeting of the Board of Directors of the Company, the 28th issuance of simple, unsecured and non-convertible debentures, in up to three series, for public distribution, with restricted placement efforts, pursuant to CVM Rule No. 476, dated as of January 16, 2009, as amended ("CVM Rule 476"), in the total amount of up to one billion and two hundred million reais (R$ 1,200,000,000.00) ("Debentures" and "Offer", respectively), on the respective issuance date, provided that it shall be admitted partial distribution of the Debentures, noted that the issuance is conditioned to the issuance of, at least, one billion reais (R$ 1,000,000,000.00), being, at most, three hundred million reais (300,000,000.00) of the first series.

It shall be adopted the procedure for collecting the investment intentions of the potential professional investors (bookbuilding procedure) in the Debentures, in order to define together with the Company, (i) the number of series of the Offer; (ii) the number of Debentures to be placed in each series of the Offer, according to communicating vessels system; (iii) the final interest to be used in connection to the remuneration of each series; and (iv) the total amount of the Offer, through the cancellation of any Debentures not placed.

The Offer will target professional investors only, in compliance with Articles 11 and 13 of CVM Resolution 30, of May 11, 2021, and Article 2 of CVM Rule 476. According to Article 3 of CVM Rule 476, the Offer will be presented to a maximum of seventy-five (75) professional investors, though the Debentures may only be subscribed by a maximum of fifty (50) professional investors. The process of structuring the Offer and distribution of the Debentures will be undertaken by a consortium of financial institutions belonging to the Securities Distribution System.

The proceeds from the issuance and offering of the Debentures will be used to the refinance of its financial commitments maturing in 2021 and to replenish the Company's cash position.

This Material Fact is disclosed by the Company exclusively for informative purposes, in accordance with current regulations, and should not be interpreted or considered, for all legal purposes, as a material or effort to sell or offer.

In accordance with the applicable regulations and according to the rules of conduct set forth therein, additional information about the Company and the Offer shall be viewed on CVM's website (http://www.gov.br/cvm) and the Company's website (https://ri.sabesp.com.br).

IR Contacts:

Mario Arruda Sampaio  (55 11) 3388-8664 ([email protected])

Angela Beatriz Airoldi  (55 11) 3388-8793 ([email protected])

SOURCE Sabesp

Related Links

https://ri.sabesp.com.br


HAMILTON, Bermuda, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Seadrill Limited ("Seadrill" or the "Company") (OSE: SDRL, OTCPK:SDRLF) and the Issuer announce that restructuring discussions have continued with certain holders (the "Noteholders") of the Issuer's 12.0% senior secured notes due 2025 (the "Notes") and good progress continues to be made.

The restructuring discussions include SeaMex Ltd ("SeaMex"), a 50/50 joint venture which Seadrill established with an investment fund controlled by Fintech Holdings Limited ("Fintech") in 2014.

The Issuer has agreed in principle the key terms of a restructuring proposal in relation to SeaMex with a majority of the Noteholders and which provides for a refinancing of the secured bank debt of SeaMex. The key terms of this proposal include:

materially deleveraging SeaMex's balance sheet by equitizing all or a significant proportion of the approximately $454 million of subordinated debt controlled by the Issuer; and

of subordinated debt controlled by the Issuer; and injecting short-term liquidity into SeaMex in order to bridge towards a refinancing of SeaMex's senior bank debt as part of a comprehensive restructuring of SeaMex's balance sheet.

Seamexholding International, Inc. (a wholly owned subsidiary of Fintech) served a petition to place SeaMex under provisional liquidation in Bermuda. In the absence of a consensual agreement with Fintech on restructuring terms, the Issuer and a significant majority of the financial creditors of SeaMex are nominating their own provisional liquidators in order to be able to implement a creditor supported restructuring of SeaMex to maximise value for creditors and other stakeholders. The need for the provisional liquidation and restructuring has arisen as a result of Petroleos Mexicanos ("Pemex") not having paid material receivables to SeaMex over a prolonged period of time as well as an objective to deleverage SeaMex's balance sheet.

The financial creditors of SeaMex remain fully supportive of SeaMex. Such a restructuring is only at the SeaMex holding company level and will not impact the operational activities of the business. There will similarly be no impact to employees, customers or suppliers. Any use of a court supervised process in Bermuda will benefit from funding and result in an orderly restructuring of SeaMex's balance sheet for the benefit of all stakeholders, including employees, customers and suppliers.

About Seadrill

Seadrill is a leading offshore drilling contractor utilizing advanced technology to unlock oil and gas resources for clients across harsh and benign locations across the globe. Seadrill's high quality, technologically advanced fleet spans all asset classes allowing its experienced crews to conduct its operations from shallow to ultra-deep-water environments. The company operates 43 rigs, which includes drillships, jack-ups and semi-submersibles.

Seadrill is listed on the Oslo Brs and OTC Pink markets. For more information, visit https://www.seadrill.com/.

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 to the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act.

CONTACT:

[email protected]

020 3745 4960

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

SOURCE Seadrill Limited
PORTSMOUTH, N.H., June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The Service CU Impact Foundation, the non-profit charity arm of Service Credit Union, announces 16 students have been selected as the foundation's inaugural scholarship recipients. Over $50,000 in scholarships were awarded to students who demonstrated exceptional commitment to their communities and academics.

"The foundation is thrilled to support such deserving and resilient young leaders in furthering their education," said David Araujo, Service CU Impact Foundation President/Chair. The pandemic presented challenges for everyone, and has especially challenged students. I am amazed by the accomplishments of each recipient and cannot wait to see where their bright futures take them."

The scholarship program is open to high school seniors planning to attend, or students already attending a two or four year university accredited by the U.S. Department of Education, who are members of Service Credit Union.

Five students will receive a $5,000 scholarship and 11 will receive a $2,500 scholarship.

The $5,000 winners include:

Natalie Williams , Saint Michaels College  Psychology

, Saint Michaels College  Psychology Grayson Benton , Georgia Institute of Technology  Electrical Engineering

,  Electrical Engineering Luis Prada , University of Texas Rio Grande Valley  Biology/Pre-Med

, Rio Grande Valley  Biology/Pre-Med Maximus Genio , Georgia Institute of Technology  Industrial Engineering

,  Industrial Engineering Bettina Wagner , University of Virginia  Neuroscience

The $2,500 winners include:

Ariann LeCours , Westfield State University  Movement Science

, Westfield State University  Movement Science Julia Acker , Undecided  Health Science

, Undecided  Health Science Steven Thompson  Undecided, Psychology

 Undecided, Psychology Kate Kelly , Boston College  Elementary Education and Sociology

,  Elementary Education and Sociology Abigail Palmer , Sacred Heart University  Strategic Communication, Public Relations and Advertising with Sociology

,  Strategic Communication, Public Relations and Advertising with Sociology Molly Ewing , Undecided  Public Policy, Humanitarian Studies, Political Science

, Undecided  Public Policy, Humanitarian Studies, Political Science Alexa-Skye Simon , University of the Arts  Extended Drawing and Print Making

,  Extended Drawing and Print Making Jarrett Bregler , Southern NH University  Graphic Design

, Southern NH University  Graphic Design Heather Calder , University of Portland  Nursing

,  Nursing Morgan Pulliam , still undecided

, still undecided Andrew Villalobos , Colorado School of Mines  Chemical Engineering

The application required each student to provide a college acceptance letter, a high school transcript, detail out their school and community involvement and answer an essay question. The long essay prompted the students to think about the top issue facing their generation and what the credit union could do to help. Many of the top-scoring responses revolved around themes of food insecurity, homelessness, global warming, education and inclusion.

"I believe that a person's academic ability should not be limited by their financial situation; however, higher education continues to get more expensive and further out of reach. Scholarships not only allow students in strained financial situations to continue their education, but they can also enable students to afford top-tier institutions that match their potential," wrote Grayson Benton.

"Access to food shouldn't stop once a school is closed for the weekend. The student body is a community and it is imperative that students such as me and institutions such as Service CU do our part to respond to this community crisis. Vulnerable children deserve their minds to be eased by having what they need for a healthy daily life," wrote Jarrett Bregler, Pinkerton Academy Senior.

The Service Credit Union Impact Foundation is committed to assisting deserving students in pursuing higher education and preparing for an exciting future.

About Service CU Impact Foundation

The Service CU Impact Foundation promotes community development by funding initiatives that deliver solutions and solve problems facing our membership and communities in which we serve. The foundation funds initiatives beyond what Service Credit Union supports, broadening the community reach and having a larger impact. We conduct charitable activities and partner with service providers who align with our philanthropic areas of focus: education, human services, and emergency care for veterans and the military. To learn more about the Service Credit Union Impact Foundation, visit www.servicecuimpactfoundation.org.

Contact: Anna Baskin

Service Credit Union

603-559-2921 or [email protected]

SOURCE Service CU Impact Foundation
NEW YORK, June 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Pomerantz LLP is investigating claims on behalf of investors of CooTek (Cayman) Inc. ("CooTek" or the "Company") (NYSE: CTK). Such investors are advised to contact Robert S. Willoughby at [email protected] or 888-476-6529, ext. 7980.

The investigation concerns whether CooTek and certain of its officers and/or directors have engaged in securities fraud or other unlawful business practices.

[Click here for information about joining the class action]

In September 2018, CooTek conducted its initial public offering ("IPO"), issuing 4.35 million American Depositary Shares ("ADSs") priced at $12.00 per ADS.

Then, on December 15, 2020, CooTek announced its unaudited financial results for the third quarter of 2020. CooTek disclosed an operating loss of $1.1 million, which the Company stated "mainly relates to compensation payment to victims of alleged misconducts of certain third-party advertisers perpetrated on the Group's platform that the Group deposited to an escrow account controlled by a local authority conducting investigation on the advertisers."

On this news, CooTek's ADS price fell $1.99 per ADS, or 31.44%, to close at $4.34 per ADS on December 15, 2020.

Then, on June 3, 2021, CooTek announced its unaudited financial results for the first quarter of 2021. CooTek disclosed, among other results, non-GAAP earnings per share of -$0.18, missing consensus estimates by $0.02.

On this news, CooTek's ADS price fell $0.28 cents per share, or 13.59%, to close at $1.78 per share on June 3, 2021.

The Pomerantz Firm, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, the Pomerantz Firm pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 80 years later, the Pomerantz Firm continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomerantzlaw.com.

CONTACT:

Robert S. Willoughby

Pomerantz LLP

[email protected]

888-476-6529 ext. 7980

SOURCE Pomerantz LLP

Related Links

www.pomerantzlaw.com


Portuguese Ambassador to China Mr. Jose Augusto Duarte said Portugal was the first European country to introduce Chinese tea. In the 16th century, Portuguese merchants brought Chinese tea back. It was so expensive that only nobles could enjoy it. Today, drinking tea is still a sophisticated lifestyle. He said that the landscape is amazing, the people are beautiful, passionate, confident, and happy.

"Tea is a gift from heaven and earth. Drinking tea is good for health and temperament," said Mr. Jingon Kim, the Minister-Counselor of the South Korea Embassy in China, "We imports a large amount of tea from China." His wife, Mrs. Jongyoung Park, is a member of the Tea Tasting Association and often participates in tea-related activities. She experienced the traditional tea picking and roasting techniques, and had an in-depth exchange with Xiao Junjing, the inheritor of Xinyang Maojian craftsmanship, national intangible cultural heritage.

Mr. Robert Quant, Ambassador of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, was impressed by the tea plantation. He said: "I will tell my friends how beautiful it is and encourage everyone to visit."

Mr. Zhai Xiaobin, deputy mayor of Xinyang, gave warm welcome to Chinese and foreign guests, and promoted tea exchange and cooperation.

Only lush mountains and clear rivers can produce good tea. Shihe is located on the division line of north and south, with forest coverage rate of 70%. It is in the hinterland of China, with villages dotted among the mountains and waters, displaying leisure and tranquility. With a contiguous tea plantation of 100,000 acres, it is the origin and main producing area of Xinyang Maojian, China's "Top Ten Famous Teas". Haojiachong village in Shihe is a representative of the beautiful countryside. Villagers grow tea for generations.

Image Attachments Links:



Link: http://asianetnews.net/view-attachment?attach-id=393641

Caption: Discovering the Most Beautiful Tea Village on the Silk Road

SOURCE Shihe District Bureau of Culture, Radio & Television and Tourism
CRESTVIEW HILLS, Ky., June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- St. Elizabeth Healthcare has received a nearly $2.4 million grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to connect people with substance use disorder to career-building resources in Northern Kentucky.

The five-year grant, known as the Lift Up Project, helps individuals find the healing they desire, the hope they need and a promising, self-sustaining future through rehabilitation, education, training and employment opportunities.

The Lift Up Project is led by St. Elizabeth Healthcare and St. Elizabeth Physicians Journey Recovery Center in collaboration with the Northern Kentucky Workforce Investment Board (NKWIB), Life Learning Center and Brighton Center, which operates the Kentucky Career Center.

"Everyone deserves a fair chance, and at St. Elizabeth, we want to help ensure that every person in our region has access to the care they need and the resources to help them on their journey to a healthier lifestyle," said Dan Cole, Assistant Vice President of Operations at St. Elizabeth Physicians. "The receipt of this grant means that we can continue working alongside our community partners to further provide life-saving and life-sustaining opportunities in the communities we serve."

"We know that many employers today are seeking talent," said Tara Johnson-Noem, Director of the Northern Kentucky Workforce Investment Board. "It's critical that we help every member of our community to reach their full potential for their own success and for the overall economic development of our region. The Lift Up Project supports alignment of resources for individuals in recovery and local businesses willing to be transformational employers. Both the NKWIB and the Kentucky Career Center  NKY that we oversee are proud to be a part of this work."

The St. Elizabeth Physicians Journey Recovery Center provides individualized treatment with licensed medical professionals known for best practices in disease management, including withdrawal. In addition, psychological and emotional needs are addressed with licensed therapists. Case managers and peer support specialists help individuals navigate their journey and locate community resources for recovery support.

Life Learning Center assesses participants' strengths and provide training to increase their readiness for the workplace. This includes building necessary communication skills and addressing personal issues including financial, housing, identity, legal or other issues that may impede the pathway to employment and independence.

Brighton Center, which operates the Northern Kentucky Career Center Network assists job seekers to assess their skills and connect individuals to employment and educational opportunities through its extensive partnership network across eight counties of Northern Kentucky.

The Northern Kentucky Workforce Investment Board (NKWIB) funds and oversees the local Kentucky Career Center network as the regional recipient of federal workforce funds. For the Lift Up Project, the NKWIB convenes partners and employers, leveraging resources and technical assistance to meet businesses' needs while supporting the dignity of its clients.

Residents of Northern Kentucky interested in participating in the Lift Up Project should call the Journey Recovery Center at (859) 757-0717.

About St. Elizabeth Physicians

St. Elizabeth Physicians is a nationally recognized multi-specialty physician organization of St. Elizabeth Healthcare. With 452 physicians, 245 advanced practice providers and more than 1,500 non-provider associates, St. Elizabeth Physicians serves more than 370,000 patients in 15 counties located in Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana. It includes 41 specialties and services. Learn more at www.stedocs.com or call 1-800-737-7900.

About St. Elizabeth Healthcare

St. Elizabeth Healthcare operates six facilities and more than 160 primary care and specialty office locations throughout the Northern Kentucky, Southeastern Indiana and Greater Cincinnati region. Sponsored by the Diocese of Covington and a member of the Mayo Clinic Care Network, St. Elizabeth is a mission-based organization committed to improving the health of the communities it serves, providing more than $130 million in uncompensated care and benefit to the community each year. For more information, visit www.stelizabeth.com.

Public Relations

Phone: (859) 301-6300

Fax: (859) 301-6340

SOURCE St. Elizabeth Healthcare

Related Links

http://www.stelizabeth.com


CI Capital Partners has employed an active expansion strategy for Summit during its three and a half years of ownership, completing 51 total add-on acquisitions, including 12 in 2021 to date. Summit was founded in 1999, and prior to CI Capital Partners' ownership, operated primarily in the upper Midwestern United States. As a result of the execution by CI Capital Partners and management of Summit's strategic plan, the company has dramatically expanded its geographic footprint and today operates in 18 states. Simultaneously, Summit has made investments in infrastructure to support its rapid growth.

Overview of Recent Acquisitions:

Reliable Fire Protection strengthens Summit Fire & Security's presence in the Southern U.S. with expansion into three new states  Arkansas , Louisiana , and Tennessee . Reliable specializes in fire sprinkler and fire alarm systems

, , and . Reliable specializes in fire sprinkler and fire alarm systems Lepper Alarm Communications, related to the purchase of Reliable Fire Protection, enhances Summit Fire & Security's fire alarm and security monitoring capabilities in the Arkansas market

market Protection Systems specializes in low voltage systems including fire alarm, CCTV, nurse call and access control systems, and strengthens Summit Fire Protection's presence in Fargo, ND and St. Cloud, MN

and AllStar Fire Protection and Fidelity Fire Protection both enhance Summit Fire & Security's suppression offerings in Salt Lake City, UT

Red Arrow Fire Extinguisher expands Summit Fire Protection's presence in Michigan

Sierra Fire & Communications enhances Summit Fire Protection's current operations in Arizona

& Communications enhances Summit Fire Protection's current operations in Phoenix Fire Protection and Casper Fire Extinguisher, two Wyoming -based businesses, expand Summit Fire & Security's business into Wyoming , as the first two offices in the state

Fire Protection and Fire Extinguisher, two -based businesses, expand Summit Fire & Security's business into , as the first two offices in the state Bay Area Fire & Safety, based in Houston, TX , expands Summit Fire & Security's existing presence in Houston

"We are very pleased to welcome these ten new teams to Summit, each of whom have built impressive organizations with strong reputations for excellence in their respective market segments. We are proud to expand and improve relationships with customers nationally, while offering them an increasingly comprehensive service platform," said Jeff Evrard, CEO of Summit Companies.

"Through these recent acquisitions, we continue our strategic expansion plans to build a premier fire and life safety business with a national footprint and best-in-class service standards," added William Swayne, Managing Director of CI Capital Partners.

ABOUT SUMMIT COMPANIES

SFP Holding, Inc. (Summit Companies), through its subsidiaries, provides premier fire and life safety services with an expanding national presence. Since 1999, Summit has been a leader in the fire and life safety space with experience and capabilities that create a one-stop-shop solution for fire detection and fire suppression on a local and national scale. Summit Companies' subsidiaries meet all of a customer's requirements for fire protection, fire security, consulting and engineering services. SFP Holding, Inc., the parent company of the Summit Companies subsidiaries, is owned by management and CI Capital Partners, a leading North American private equity investment firm with approximately $1.3 billion in assets under management. Learn more at: www.SummitCompanies.com

ABOUT CI CAPITAL PARTNERS

CI Capital Partners LLC is a leading North American private equity investment firm with approximately $1.3 billion in assets under management that has invested in middle-market companies since 1993. CI Capital forms partnerships with experienced management teams and entrepreneurs to build substantial businesses through add-on acquisitions, organic growth and operational improvements. Since inception, CI Capital and its portfolio companies have made over 395 acquisitions representing approximately $10 billion in enterprise value. For more information on CI Capital Partners, please visit www.cicapllc.com.

Media Contact:

Daniel Yunger

Kekst

212.521.4800

SOURCE CI Capital
Ni Qian, Vice Director of Suzhou Industrial Park Administration Committee (SIPAC), delivered a warm congratulatory speech on behalf of SIPAC. Director Ni said, "Frontera is an innovative international gene therapeutics company, bearing the mission of bringing treatment solutions to patients with rare diseases in China as well as in the world. Suzhou Frontera has made rapid progress and remarkable achievements, as several products have already been promoted to preclinical animal experiment stage."

Dr. Dai Yong, Co-Founder and CEO of Frontera, faraway in Boston now, expressed his gratitude to the leaders of SIPAC and bioBay for their strong support as well as the investors for their trust. Dr. Dai pointed out that in today's world, the total amount of patients with rare diseases caused by genetic genes has exceeded that of AIDS and cancer. Rare diseases are not rare, but facing the predicament of difficult diagnosis and lack of medicine. Over 95% of rare diseases are in the lack of effective treatment. While the gene therapy industry in China has just started, the enterprises are facing great challenges in optimizing production process and expanding the scale of commercialization. Since its establishment, Frontera has rapidly built up a strong team consisting of CMC upstream and downstream processes, preclinical, IND application and clinical trial talents, showing its amazing growth speed and development potential to the outer world.

About Frontera

Frontera was established by Creation Capital and OrbiMed Capital, which are well-known funds in biotech industry. Frontera's product pipeline covers ophthalmology, blood, genetic and metabolic neuromuscular diseases and so on. Relying on its leading scientific research team and professionals with rich experience in innovative drug R & D, clinical research, registration and production management in China and the United States, Frontera already started to promote products to preclinical animal experiment stage in less than one year. The construction of Suzhou manufacturing facility has also been officially started.

SOURCE Frontera Therapeutics
TAMPA, fla., June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Tampa General Hospital announced today that its Infection Prevention Team received the 2021 Heroes in Infection Prevention Award in the Infection Prevention and Control Operations category from the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC). APIC is the leading professional association for infection preventionists. The hospital's entire infection prevention team was recognized for quickly and effectively responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition to the team award, Benjamin D. Galvan, infection preventionist at Tampa General, was also recognized as an emerging leader for 2021. Galvan is awarded for his work as a project manager on three separate performance improvement initiatives focused on hospital cleanliness, hand hygiene compliance and innovation.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Tampa General's infection prevention team provided:

Training on personal protective equipment (PPE) for the clinical teams' safety.

Dissemination of hygiene and disinfection practices to every hospital department, including non-patient care units.

Educational resources, including video modules, and tip sheets.

New processes were developed and implemented on proper usage of PPE, safe transportation practices for COVID-19 patients, and correct mask usage.

On-going communications to ensure that TGH team members were apprised of real-time changes and CDC guidelines.

These resources were readily available on Tampa General's internal infection prevention website and were continually updated hospital wide as new guidance and information became available.

"Infection prevention and control has always been a critical part of any hospital's quality and care," said Dr. Laura Haubner, senior vice president and chief quality officer, Tampa General Hospital. "In 2020 with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, our infection prevention and control team was hit with a rapidly changing and difficult situation that required them to be both focused and flexible. They went above and beyond to provide innovative ways to protect our patients, team members and physicians and I am so proud of their heroic efforts."

To advance this essential work, Tampa General created two new infectious disease teams to assist with the COVID-19 response, as well as any future infectious diseases. Through a generous donation, the hospital opened the Global Emerging Diseases Institute (GEDI), the first institution of its kind in Florida, to treat patients suffering from COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. A collaboration between Tampa General and USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, the team includes expert physicians and clinical team members from both organizations who support the institute's care, ranging from inpatient clinical care and outpatient clinics, to teaching and research.

During this global pandemic, Tampa General also launched the TGH Prevention Response Outreach (TPRO) program, which provides infectious disease expertise and recommendations to community organizations. TPRO works in collaboration with dozens of organizations to ensure they are protecting both their employees and patrons. In addition, TPRO helps to manage their day-to-day operations within strict safety protocols. TPRO's clients include some of the largest companies and organizations in Tampa Bay and beyond, from the Florida State Senate to the Florida Aquarium, to the Tampa Bay Lightning, and Hillsborough County Public Schools.

"The Heroes award is especially meaningful because it recognizes the commitment shown by the infection protection team during extraordinarily challenging circumstances," said Kimberly Atrubin, director of infection prevention for Tampa General. "The timely education and training the team provided gave us the opportunity to work across all hospital departments as well as into the community. Through this process, we formed strong and lasting relationships, and I am very grateful to APIC for this recognition." This is the first time Tampa General received the APIC Heroes award as a team.

ABOUT TAMPA GENERAL HOSPITAL

Tampa General Hospital, a 1007-bed non-profit academic medical center, is one of the largest hospitals in America and delivers world-class care as the region's only center for Level l trauma and comprehensive burn care. Tampa General Hospital is the highest-ranked hospital in the market in U.S. News & World Report's 2020-21 Best Hospitals, and one of the top four hospitals in Florida, with five specialties ranking among the best programs in the United States. It is one of the nation's busiest adult solid organ transplant centers and is the primary teaching hospital for the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine. With five medical helicopters, Tampa General Hospital transports critically injured or ill patients from 23 surrounding counties to receive the advanced care they need. Tampa General houses a nationally accredited comprehensive stroke center and its 32-bed Neuroscience Intensive Care Unit is the largest on the West Coast of Florida. It also is home to the Jennifer Leigh Muma 82-bed Level IV neonatal intensive care unit, and a nationally accredited rehabilitation center. Tampa General Hospital's footprint includes 17 Tampa General Medical Group Primary Care offices, TGH Family Care Center Kennedy, TGH Brandon Healthplex, TGH Virtual Health and 19 outpatient Radiology Centers. Tampa Bay residents also receive world-class care from the TGH Urgent Care powered by Fast Track network of clinics, and they can even receive home visits in select areas through TGH Urgent Care at Home, powered by Fast Track . As one of the largest hospitals in the country, Tampa General Hospital is first in Florida to partner with GE Healthcare and open a clinical command center that uses artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to improve and better coordinate patient care at a lower cost. For more information, go to www.tgh.org .

Media Contact: Karen Barrera

Assistant Director of Communications & Partnerships

(813) 844-8725 (direct)

(813) 928-1603 (cell)

[email protected]

SOURCE Tampa General Hospital
Partnering with TBWA\Worldwide Chief Strategy Officer Agathe Guerrier, to whom they will also report, Horn and Stevens will be jointly tasked with shaping and delivering the vision of a future TBWA collective that is exceptionally connected, finding opportunity in cultural change and focused on business impact. Their appointments are effective immediately.

"Alyson and Michael's mission will be to orchestrate a practice of intelligence and data grounded in Disruption: designed to understand change, not current states; and to imagine what could be, not just what is, ultimately propelling our clients towards a greater share of the future," said Guerrier.

Stevens is tasked with further elevating TBWA's Intelligence and Knowledge practices, solidifying the company's credentials as a proactive partner for clients in understanding the biggest drivers shaping growth opportunities across categories and brands. She will also connect the dots between different sources of Intelligence within the collective: TBWA\Worldwide, local agencies, centers of excellence, as well as cultural (Backslash), social (65dB) and data-based primary research. Partnering with Guerrier and Horn, Stevens will also work with external data suppliers as well as partners like Gartner and Forrester to develop new and proprietary methodologies and create proprietary IP.

Horn will leverage data and technology to fuel TBWA's creative product and client business growth, as the agency collective continues to expand its remit from communications partner to business partner, and advances beyond advertising to brand orchestration and experience design. He'll be charged with further developing the company's data services and products, supporting its DisruptionX methodology, which applies Disruption across brand experience. Horn will also lead TBWA's global data capabilities and partner with Omnicom's internal data suppliers and partner agencies, including Annalect, Omnicom Media Group, Omnicom Precision Marketing Group, and Sparks & Honey, as TBWA further integrates Omnicom's Omni platform into its ways of working.

"We fundamentally believe that better inputs lead to greater outcomes, which is why we've continued to democratize knowledge and intelligence across our collective and invest in the best talent to connect our 10,000+ creative minds," said Troy Ruhanen, CEO, TBWA\Worldwide. "Ultimately our goal is to use intelligence and data to inspire disruptive creative ideas that create impact. Alyson and Michael will help us do just that."

Stevens joins TBWA from Publicis Media, where she served as SVP and Director, Insight & Analytics. In her role she connected capabilities across the agencies of Publicis Groupe, with a focus on understanding emerging consumer behaviors. Prior to her role within Publicis Groupe, Alyson served different roles at Starcom MediaVest Group for 16 years, including SVP, Global Director, Human Experience Strategy. There, she played a key role in developing the Human Experience Center, the agency's first co-creation studio, in which she pioneered efforts to bring people into the experience design process. She started her career as a media planner at Leo Burnett.

"TBWA has a tremendous depth of expertise and knowledge of culture, consumers and categories," said Stevens. "I'm excited to work with our internal community to harness the power of this collective intelligence to drive disruptive growth for our clients around the world."

Horn joins from Huge, where he served as Chief Data Officer, leading the data strategy, analytics, research, and personalization practice for the digital experience and product strategy firm. While there he led a high-performing team of 50+ analysts and researchers supporting all of Huge's global offices, transforming experiences for brands such as Google, Spotify, Vanguard, and Fiat Chrysler Automotive. Prior to that, he served as SVP, Chief Analytics Officer at Resonate, where he directed a team of analysts and researchers to build and scale the largest consumer research and digital targeting platform in the U.S., working across brands, political campaigns, and public affairs. Earlier agency experience includes UM, where he created the agency's Decision Sciences practice, R\GA and OMD. He started his career at NPR as a user experience analyst, working at the intersection of culture and content and launching the network's first podcast offerings.

"TBWA's focus on culture and creativity creates amazing opportunities for data to humanize and respect consumers as well as the talent which powers leading brands," added Horn. "Now is the moment for agencies to embrace a broader role for ethical and inclusive data in driving creative and business outcomes."

About TBWA\Worldwide

TBWA is The Disruption Company: the cultural engine for 21st-century business. Named one of the World's Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company for the past three years, we create disruptive ideas that locate and involve brands in culture, giving them a larger share of the future. Our collective has 11,300 creative minds across 275 offices in 95 countries, and also includes brands such as Auditoire, Digital Arts Network (DAN), eg+ worldwide, GMR, The Integer Group, TBWA\Media Arts Lab, TBWA\WorldHealth and TRO. Global clients include adidas, Apple, Gatorade, Henkel, Hilton Hotels, McDonald's, Nissan and Singapore Airlines. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, and like us on Facebook. TBWA is part of Omnicom Group.

SOURCE TBWA\Worldwide

Related Links

http://tbwaraad.com


We're grateful to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce for this recognition and proud of our incredible Castle family. Tweet this

"The same values we've brought to our work every day since day one  passion, creativity, proactivity and our scrappy spirit  helped us meet the challenges of the past year, not just to survive, but to grow meaningfully," said Sandy Lish, Castle principal and co-founder. "Over the past year, more than ever, we doubled down on our commitment to support and advocate for other businesses and nonprofits, especially those owned and led by women and minorities. Our businesses are critical to our region's economy, and we're grateful to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce for recognizing that, honored to be in fantastic company with the winners in the other categories, and proud of our incredible Castle family."

"This award is for our entire Castle team, who worked hard day in and day out to ensure that we thrived despite the challenges of the past 18 months," said Wendy Spivak, Castle principal and co-founder. "We hope to exemplify the value of relationships, and, in particular, the moral and business imperative to be a true community partner. Businesses of any size can make a tremendous impact. This honor is a wonderful recognition of the ability of small businesses to meet the challenges of the moment, and to represent staying power despite changing, and sometimes challenging, circumstances."

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Castle's events business transitioned rapidly to remote events, learning and interacting with new technology at the same time that they were implementing it for client events. On the public relations side, Castle helped more than 60 clients navigate the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic, developing both internal and external communications strategies and helping organizations address connected issues including racial equity, diversity and inclusion.

The company also redoubled its efforts on DE&I and employee health and wellness, committing to anti-racist workplace discussions and training and implementing a more flexible time off policy to help employees balance the challenges of working from home during the pandemic.

Castle has been a Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce member for many years. Lish has been honored with the Chamber's Pinnacle Award for Entrepreneurship and serves on its Board of Directors and Executive Committee and Castle EVP Hilary Allard is a long-serving member of its Women's Network Advisory Board.

Over the last 25 years, Castle has developed long-term valued partnerships with other small businesses. Along with the more than 50 global "sister and brother" agencies in Castle's proprietary Public Relations Global Network, Castle collaborates on best practices and business development, particularly in the areas of mentorship, DE&I, events and crisis management. Castle is known for consistently punching above its weight, with deep connections in the business, nonprofit and public sectors, providing support for many organizations both publicly and behind the scenes. Castle supports small businesses in particular through its relationships with the Women's Business Enterprise National Council, Center For Women & Enterprise, Initiative For a Competitive Inner City, Foundation For Business Equity, Latino Equity Fund and many others.

Castle also wishes to congratulate all the other 2021 Small Business of the Year winners: Coils to Locs (Diversity & Inclusion), Strategy Matters (Cultural Excellence), Forward Financing (Community Impact), tonneson + co (Innovation & Growth) and Moonshine 152 (CEO Leadership).

About The Castle Group

Headquartered in Boston with offices in Atlanta and on Maui, The Castle Group leverages its local connections and global reach to create communications strategies that deliver business results through PR, events management, crisis communications and social media. With a client roster that covers Fortune 500, high-growth start-ups, social justice and equity-focused nonprofits, privately held, education and health care, Castle is supremely skilled at navigating complex organizations and surfacing unique ways to powerfully deliver clients' messages. A certified women-owned business founded in 1996, the firm is a member of the Public Relations Global Network, 50 exclusively selected affiliates representing the world's major media markets. Castle, its leadership and teams have won numerous industry, civic and professional awards, are devoted corporate citizens, and pride themselves on infusing an entrepreneurial spirit and scrappy attitude into every endeavor. Find Castle and its clients online, in person, in their communities and around the world.

Media Contact:

Amanda Albert

The Castle Group

[email protected]

617.337.9521

SOURCE The Castle Group, Inc.
DUBLIN, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Internet of Things (IoT) Market 2020-2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global IoT Market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 21.3% during the forecast period. The increasing development of wireless networking technologies, rise in cloud platform adoption, miniaturization, and the emergence of advanced data analytics are the factors that are driving the global IoT market. The other factors that are propelling the growth of the market including advancement in data analytics, computing economies, and demand from varied domains including manufacturing, automotive, energy, and others. IoT brings different physical objects to be linked by a common network. The IoT market is split into various major segments such as analytics, security, cloud, mobile technologies, and platforms. integration, automation, and cloud computing are major driving forces behind the IoT market. The issues such as Security and Privacy are restraining the market growth.



Further, the IoT technology also assists in connecting various devices to provide ease in the operation and sharing of data amongst themselves. The IoT market caters to every sector from retail, energy, healthcare, infrastructure, and so on. smart homes, wearable's, and smart cities are the most effective and high-growth applications in the IoT market. Apart from it, due to the recent outbreak of COVID-19, IoT investments and deployments are certainly slowing down. The major disruption in the global healthcare and supply chains, hospitals, insurers, governments, and logistics providers are reacting quickly for a more connected world that could support better address the current crisis and mitigate future ones.



Segmental Outlook



The global IoT market is segmented based on infrastructure and end-user. Based on the infrastructure, the market is segmented into the platform, mobile networks and access technologies, cloud solutions/storage and processing, analytics, and security. Based on the end-user, the market is segmented into BFSI, manufacturing, transportation, retail, healthcare, energy & utilities, government & defense, residential, and others. The healthcare segment held the significant market share in 2019. IoT healthcare allows augmented asset monitoring and tracking. Several enterprise grade technologies including distributed computing and big data analytics, asset management beside M2M communication and cloud platforms possess capabilities to provide drastically efficient and cost-effective results by IoT applications.



Global IoT Market Share by Vertical, 2020 (%)



IoT BFSI segment is anticipated to grow significantly due to its ease of access services

BFSI industry is showing fast digital transformation and mobilization. For reducing the security risk and leveraging the high amount of generated data, the banking and services businesses are exploring its opportunities in the financial sector. The key factors that are growing the market include an increase in the benefit of the technology in BFSI such as easy access of debit and credit cardholders. For instance, Banks can track the ATMs in specific areas and accordingly install the machines based on the usage volume provided with the support of solutions.



Regional Outlooks



The global IoT market is further segmented based on geography including North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Rest of the World. North America is the largest market in the IoT market followed by Europe and Asia-Pacific. The growth of the market can be mainly attributed to the increasing role of IoT among the significant revenue-generating companies of the region, additionally driven by the deployment of connected cars, home automation, smart energy projects, and a focus on smart manufacturing. Further, increasing digitalization and technology development across industry verticals is also propelling the growth of the market in the region. The region also has strong IoT Vendors such as IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp, Cisco Systems Inc, which are contributing to the growth of the market

Market Players Outlook



The key players in the global IoT market include Amazon Web Services, Cisco Systems Inc., ARM Holding PLC, Honeywell International Inc, Robert Bosch GmbH, Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., and others. The market players are considerably contributing to the market growth by the adoption of various strategies including mergers, and acquisitions, collaborations, and new product launches, to stay competitive in the market. For instance, in January 2020, Cisco Systems Inc. launched security architecture for the Internet of Things (IoT). This security architecture will improve visibility around IT and operational technology.



The Report Covers

Market value data analysis of 2020 and forecast to 2027.

Annualized market revenues ($ million) for each market segment.

Country-wise analysis of major geographical regions.

Key companies operating in the global Internet of Things (IoT) market. Based on the availability of data, information related to new product launches, and relevant news is also available in the report.

Analysis of business strategies by identifying the key market segments positioned for strong growth in the future.

Analysis of market-entry and market expansion strategies.

Competitive strategies by identifying 'who-stands-where' in the market.

Key Topics Covered:



1. Report Summary



2. Market Overview and Insights



3. Competitive Landscape

3.1. Key Company Analysis

3.1.1. Overview

3.1.2. Financial Analysis

3.1.3. SWOT Analysis

3.1.4. Recent Developments

3.2. Key Strategy Analysis



4. Market Determinants

4.1. Motivators

4.2. Restraints

4.3. Opportunities



5. Market Segmentation

5.1. Global IoT Market byInfrastructure

5.1.1. Platform

5.1.2. Mobile Networks and Access Technologies

5.1.3. Cloud Solutions/Storage and Processing

5.1.4. Analytics

5.1.5. Security

5.2. Global IoT Market byEnd-User

5.2.1. BFSI

5.2.2. Manufacturing

5.2.3. Transportation

5.2.4. Healthcare

5.2.5. Retail

5.2.6. Energy& Utilities

5.2.7. Residential

5.2.8. Government & Defense

5.2.9. Others



6. Regional Analysis



7. Company Profiles

7.1. 3rings Care Ltd.

7.2. 8power Ltd.

7.3. ABB Ltd.

7.4. Accelya Holding World S.L.

7.5. Accenture PLC

7.6. Adaptive Wireless Solutions, LLC

7.7. AdhereTech Inc.

7.8. Adroit Technologies

7.9. Advantech B+B Smartworx Inc.

7.10. Aeris Communications, Inc.

7.11. Aeron Systems Pvt. Ltd.

7.12. Afero Inc.

7.13. Alphabet Inc.

7.14. Altiux Innovations Pvt. Ltd.

7.15. AltizonInc.

7.16. Ansys, Inc.

7.17. Apple Inc.

7.18. Aria Systems Inc.

7.19. Aricent Inc.

7.20. Asavie Technologies Ltd.

7.21. AT&T, Inc.

7.22. Atlas Systems Inc.

7.23. Atos SE

7.24. Augmedix, Inc.

7.25. Augury Inc.

7.26. Auvesy GmbH

7.27. Avnet Inc.

7.28. Awarepoint Corp.

7.29. Ayla Networks Inc.

7.30. Ayyeka Technologies Ltd.

7.31. B&R Industrial Automation Corp.

7.32. Bacsoft Ltd.

7.33. Bae Systems PLC

7.34. Balluff GmbH

7.35. Bastille Networks, Inc.

7.36. Bayshore Networks Inc.

7.37. Beckhoff Automation GmbH & Co. KG

7.38. Belkin International, Inc.

7.39. Bitdefender Box LLC

7.40. Blackberry Ltd.

7.41. Borqs Technologies, Inc.

7.42. Bsquare Corp.

7.43. C3 Inc.

7.44. CalAmp Corp.

7.45. Capgemini SE

7.46. Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp.

7.47. Control4 Corp.

7.48. Dell Technologies, Inc.

7.49. Deutsche Telekom AG

7.50. Digicert Inc.

7.51. DreamOrbit Softech Pvt Ltd.

7.52. DXC Technology

7.53. Eaton Corp.

7.54. Emerson Electric Co.

7.55. Enlighted Inc.

7.56. Ericsson Inc.

7.57. Eseye Ltd.

7.58. Evrythng Ltd.

7.59. ExositeLLC

7.60. Flextronic Corp.

7.61. Flutura Decision Sciences and Analytics

7.62. FogHorn Systems Inc.

7.63. FuGenx Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

7.64. Fuji Electric Systems Co., Ltd.

7.65. Fujitsu Ltd.

7.66. Gambit Communications Inc.

7.67. General Electric Co.

7.68. Gooee Ltd.

7.69. Google Inc.

7.70. Greenwave Systems Inc.

7.71. Harbinger Systems

7.72. HCL Technologies Ltd.

7.73. hIOTron

7.74. Hitachi Ltd.

7.75. HMS Holdings Corp.

7.76. Hologram Inc.

7.77. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP

7.78. Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.

7.79. IBM Corp.

7.80. IDEMIA

7.81. Infineon Technologies AG

7.82. Infosys Ltd.

7.83. Infogain Corp.

7.84. Ingenu Inc.

7.85. INRIX Inc.

7.86. Intel Corp.

7.87. InterDigital Inc.

7.88. Inven Sense, Inc.

7.89. ioTium, Inc.

7.90. IoTracXPvt. Ltd.

7.91. Itron, Inc.

7.92. iRhythm Technologies Inc.

7.93. Iridium Communications Inc.

7.94. Jabil Inc.

7.95. Johnson Controls International PLC

7.96. Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd.

7.97. KMC Controls Inc.

7.98. KONUX GmbH

7.99. KORE Wireless Group Inc.

7.100. KPIT Technologies Ltd.

7.101. Karamba Security

7.102. LG Electronics

7.103. Libelium Comunicaciones Distribuidas S.L.

7.104. Litmus Automation Inc.

7.105. Locbit Inc.

7.106. LogFuze Inc.

7.107. LogMeIn, Inc.

7.108. Losant IoT, Inc.

7.109. McRock Capital

7.110. MediaTek Inc.

7.111. Meritech Co. Ltd.

7.112. Microsoft Corp.

7.113. Mitsubishi Electric Corp.

7.114. Montavista Software, LLC

7.115. Motolingo LLC

7.116. Moxa Technologies Co., Ltd.

7.117. National Instruments Corp.

7.118. NEC Corp.

7.119. Nexiot AG

7.120. Nokia Corp.

7.121. Notion Labs, Inc.

7.122. Nwave Technologies Ltd.

7.123. NXP Semiconductors N.V.

7.124. Oliver Wyman Group

7.125. OMRON Corp.

7.126. On Track Innovations Ltd.

7.127. Optimal Design Co.

7.128. Oracle Corp.

7.129. Orange S.A.

7.130. Orbcomm Inc.

7.131. Orbita Inc.

7.132. Panasonic Corp.

7.133. PAS Global LLC

7.134. Pepper IoT

7.135. Preva Systems, Inc.

7.136. Prodapt Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

7.137. Prodea Systems Inc.

7.138. Proteus Digital Health Inc.

7.139. PTC Inc.

7.140. PureLiFi Ltd.

7.141. Qualcomm Inc.

7.142. Qulix Systems

7.143. Rakon Ltd.

7.144. Ralph Lauren Corp.

7.145. Real-Time Innovations

7.146. Relayr Inc.

7.147. Reve Automation LLP

7.148. Rockwell Automation Inc.

7.149. RtTech Software Inc.

7.150. Salesforce.Com Inc.

7.151. Samsara Inc.

7.152. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

7.153. SAP SE

7.154. Schaffner Holding

7.155. Schneider Electric S.E.

7.156. Secomea

7.157. Semtech Corp.

7.158. Senet Inc.

7.159. SenseGrow Inc.

7.160. Senseonics Holdings, Inc

7.161. SensorComm Technologies, Inc.

7.162. Sensoria Inc.

7.163. Siemens AG

7.164. Sierra Wireless, Inc.

7.165. Singtel Inc.

7.166. Sigfox SA

7.167. Software AG

7.168. Sony Corp.

7.169. Sotera Wireless Inc.

7.170. SparkCognition Inc.

7.171. Sphero, Inc.

7.172. Splunk Inc.

7.173. Strobilanthes Technology Solutions India Pvt. Ltd.

7.174. Stryd, Inc.

7.175. Symantec Corp.

7.176. Synapse Wireless Inc.

7.177. Tata Consultancy Services

7.178. Tata Communication (Teleena Holding)

7.179. TE Connectivity Ltd.

7.180. Tech Mahindra Ltd.

7.181. Tele Tracking Technologies, Inc.

7.182. Telit Communications PLC

7.183. Tenable, Inc.

7.184. Teradata Corp.

7.185. Tesla Inc.

7.186. Texas Instruments Inc.

7.187. ThingLogix Inc.

7.188. ThingStudio Ltd.

7.189. Toshiba Corp.

7.190. Totalmobile Ltd.

7.191. TrakITNow Inc.

7.192. Transatel SA

7.193. Traxoid Automations Pvt. Ltd.

7.194. Traxroot Intelligent Telematics

7.195. T-Systems International GmbH

7.196. Tuya Smart

7.197. Ubisense Group PLC

7.198. Urbiotica S.L.

7.199. Valarm

7.200. Veniam Inc.

7.201. Verizon Enterprise Solutions, Inc.

7.202. VersaSense

7.203. Virtustream Inc.

7.204. Vitria Technology, Inc.

7.205. VMware, Inc.

7.206. Vodafone Group PLC

7.207. WaterSmart Software, Inc.

7.208. Wibu-Systems AG

7.209. Winjit Technologies

7.210. Wipro Ltd.

7.211. WiSilica Inc.

7.212. Zebra Technologies Corp.

7.213. ZTE Corp.

7.214. Zuora Inc.



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/mqw6k2

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



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SOURCE Research and Markets

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DUBLIN, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Global Smartphone Sensors Market 2020-2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global smartphone sensors market is growing at a significant CAGR of 6.2% during the forecast period (2021-2027). Smartphone sensors are the electronic element that enables smartphones to work intelligently. Smartphones and devices have various types of sensors such as gyroscope, light sensor, proximity sensor, and biometric sensor such as fingerprint sensor, face recognition, iris scan, and magnetometer among others. Sensing technology is getting advanced over the years and every sector has various requirements of smartphone sensor that is driving the growth of the market. Rising smartphone users across the globe are one of the major reasons for the growth of the smartphone sensors market. Further, smartphone sensors are getting advanced according to the users that are pushing the market upwards.



The rising demand for IoT-based technology, rising demand for sensors in the development of smart cities is surging the growth of the smartphone sensors market. The higher competition among the smartphone manufacturers to gain higher market share is motivating them to increase their R&D expenditure on the advancement of sensors in smartphones to make them compact and efficient. Additionally, the key smartphone manufactures are constantly making attempts to improve the overall user experience to topple each other.



Camera, biometrics, battery performance, display, gaming, and hardware performance are the key area of concern for smartphone manufacturers. Every upgrade in the smartphone is targeted at improving the above-mentioned features. High-end and high-quality sensors play a key role in achieving this goal. Sensor manufacturers are also getting into partnerships with major smartphone manufacturers to gain financial leverage and improve R&D capabilities. However, data privacy concerns and data security are the key factors that may restrain the growth of this market during the forecast period.



Segmental Outlook



The market is segmented based on type and application. Based on type, the market is segmented into biometric sensors, image sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, GPS (Global Positioning System), and ambient light sensors. Further, based on the application, the market is segmented into high-end, mid-range, and low-end.



Global Smartphone Sensors Market Share by Application, 2020 (%)



Based on application, the application of high-end sensors in smartphones held a major market share in 2020. The adoption rate of smartphones in the premium range to get access to additional features is a key factor contributing towards the high share of this market segment. Furthermore, the high efficiency of sensors in performing high-end applications is further anticipated to drive the growth of this market segment.



Regional Outlooks



Based on the geography, the market is divided into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Rest of the World. North America is growing at a very significant pace owing to increasing sales of high-end smartphones in this region. Apart from that, rising awareness amongst consumers regarding smartphone hardware and sensors, increasing per capita income, and technological advancement and adoption in this region are the major motivating factors in the growth of the global smartphone sensors market during the forecast period.



Market Players Outlook



Panasonic Corp., Samsung Group, Sony Corp., STMicroelectronics International N.V., AMS AG, Broadcom Ltd., Dyna Image, Epson Europe Electronics GmbH, and Omron Inc. among others are the key players operating in the global smartphone sensor market. To survive in the market, these players adopt different marketing strategies such as a merger, acquisitions, product launch, and geographical expansion so on. For instance, in 2020, Honor a Chinese smartphone-making company has launched its new product in China with a temperature sensor. The products are named Honor Play 4 pro. The infrared temperature sensor features of the smartphone will allow people to measure the temperature of the body or the object. The smartphone can measure the temperature between -20 degrees Cel. to 100 degrees Cel.



The Report Covers

Market value data analysis of 2020 and forecast to 2027.

Annualized market revenues ($ million) for each market segment.

Country-wise analysis of major geographical regions.

Key companies operating in the global smartphone sensors market. Based on the availability of data, information related to new product launches, and relevant news is also available in the report.

Analysis of business strategies by identifying the key market segments positioned for strong growth in the future.

Analysis of market-entry and market expansion strategies.

Competitive strategies by identifying 'who-stands-where in the market.

Key Topics Covered:



1. Report Summary

2. Market Overview and Insights

3. Competitive Landscape



4. Market Determinants

4.1. Motivators

4.2. Restraints

4.3. Opportunities



5. Market Segmentation

5.1. Global Smartphone Sensors Market by Type

5.1.1. Biometric Sensors

5.1.2. Image Sensors

5.1.3. Accelerometer

5.1.4. Gyroscope

5.1.5. Magnetometer

5.1.6. GPS (Global Positioning System)

5.1.7. Ambient Light Sensor

5.2. Global Smartphone Sensors Market by Application

5.2.1. High-End

5.2.2. Mid-Range

5.2.3. Low-End



6. Regional Analysis

6.1. North America

6.1.1. United States

6.1.2. Canada

6.2. Europe

6.2.1. UK

6.2.2. Germany

6.2.3. Italy

6.2.4. Spain

6.2.5. France

6.2.6. Rest of Europe

6.3. Asia-Pacific

6.3.1. China

6.3.2. India

6.3.3. Japan

6.3.4. South Korea

6.3.5. Rest of Asia-Pacific

6.4. Rest of the World



7. Company Profiles

7.1. AMS AG

7.2. Broadcom Ltd.

7.3. Epson Europe Electronics GmbH

7.4. Epticore Microelectronics (Shanghai) co., Ltd.

7.5. Everlight Europe GmbH

7.6. Heptagon Technologies Inc.

7.7. Maxim Integrated Products Inc.

7.8. Meggitt Sensing Systems, Inc.

7.9. Melexis Microelectronic Integrated Systems N.V.

7.10. Murata Electronics Oy

7.11. Next Biometrics Group ASA

7.12. Omron Inc.

7.13. Panasonic Corp.

7.14. Samsung Group

7.15. Sharp Corp.

7.16. Silicon Sensing Systems Ltd.

7.17. Sitronix Technology Corp.

7.18. Sony Corp.

7.19. STMicroelectronics International N.V.

7.20. Vishay Inter Technology, Inc.

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/3oxcdt

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: 646-607-1904

Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716

SOURCE Research and Markets

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BEIJING, June 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Thundercomm, a world-leading IoT product and solution provider, introduces its new product: TurboX CM2290/C2290 SOM (System On Module), which is purpose-built for intelligent products such as retail point-of-sale (POS), industrial handheld, and tracking and camera applications, to help customers to reduce cost and time to market throughout their product development.

"Thundercomm has years of experience in the fields of AI and IoT. We have created many helpful tools for our clients. The TurboX CM2290/C2290 SOM is the latest outcome," said Hiro Cai, CEO, Thundercomm. "This new product provides a more cost-efficient alternative to clients, meanwhile enable a better developing experience. In future, We will continue our efforts on new products research and come out with more outstanding products for customers across the world."

TurboX CM2290/C2290 SOM

The CM2290/C2290 SOM is designed based on the Qualcomm QCM2290/QCS2290 platform, which is the upgrade of Qualcomm MSM8909 and QCM2150 and features on reliable performance, power-conservation with LTE connectivity plus upgraded memory support and low power consumption. It brings high-value features to entry-tier devices, delivering greater performance, higher graphics capabilities, better quality images, and improved power performance. The form factor of the module is 35mm*35mm (C2290) and 51mm*35mm (CM2290) LGA package. It is an ideal platform for both industrial and consumer applications requiring high rate multimedia function.

Besides, Thundercomm also introduced TurboX C865 SOM a few days ago. This product is a small size (45mm x 56mm), production ready, pre-certified(CE, FCC, ROHS)module, powered by 7nm Qualcomm premium-tier processor QCS8250, supports SA/NSA dual mode 5G network with Thundercomm T55 module via PCIE interface.

About Thundercomm

Thundercomm, headquartered in San Diego, is a joint venture between ThunderSoft and Qualcomm. Thundercomm was established to accelerate innovation in the Internet of Things and automotive industry, providing one-stop solutions powered by Qualcomm Technologies. Through its capabilities in operating systems including Android, Linux, and others, abroad software and on-device AI technology portfolio acquired from ThunderSoft, and a global sales and support network, Thundercomm is a valuable and trusted partner to global customers aiming to build high-quality, next-generation products and shorten time-to-commercialization. Learn more at www.thundercomm.com

SOURCE Thundercomm
NEW YORK, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- As the 47th G7 summit commences in the UK marking President Biden's first official foreign trip, world-leaders have collectively promoted the need for a united front on global issues. But with tax reforms high on the agenda, tech and telecoms entrepreneur David McCourt, author of bestselling book Total Rethink, has warned "these defensive moves miss half the point."

The introduction of seismic tax reforms taking aim at multinationals and big tech firms in particular, outlines the G7's hope to force tech giants to share their wealth to fill the public purse.

McCourt, who spoke exclusively to the Irish Independent, commented: "With all the G7's attention on tax reform, what we're seeing is policymakers on the back-foot, acting defensively, as opposed to looking at where technology could take us a civilization.

"The burning question now is should US policymakers continue to be the protector of big tech and allow it to continue to self-police? Or should the US join the EU in trying to force tech firms to take more responsibility around transparency, interoperability, use of data, discrimination and truthfulness? Clear, specific revolutionary regulation must be a priority for world-leaders.

"Right now, China has a tech vision. Europe and the USA do not. That means the West is playing defence on this issue while China goes on the offensive. The West's dominance in tech could disappear as fast as American and Europe's industrial strength did unless both sides immediately rebuild the transatlantic rift caused mostly by Mr Trump."

Described by The Economist as possessing "incredible credentials as a telecoms revolutionary" McCourt has spent his 30-year career at the intersection of public policy, business and society. Having founded the first competitive phone company in America, McCourt invented the triple play that is voice, video and data  today considered the norm. In the process, McCourt led the charge for number portability  meaning people own their own phone number. Now we need to own our own data.

In a series of articles, Irish-American McCourt, who is chairman of NBI delivering the Irish Government's $5billion National Broadband Plan  issued a stark warning to policymakers attending the summit.

"At this pivotal time, we must be considering more offensive moves. These would include much more support for Western research and development, as well as a unified transatlantic approach to issues such as the balance of data rights between tech companies and citizens. What's now needed is a total rethink among business and policymakers."

About David McCourt

David McCourt is the Chairman of National Broadband Ireland delivering Ireland's National Broadband Plan. A telecoms entrepreneur and Emmy Award-winning television producer, he is the author of the best seller Total Rethink (Wiley, 2019) and inaugural economist in residence at USCs Annenberg school.

Visit:

www.granahanmccourt.com

www.davidmccourt.com

Follow David on social media:

Twitter: @dcmccourt

LinkedIn: David McCourt

Instagram: @dcmccourt

SOURCE The Office of David McCourt
WILMINGTON, Del., and NEW YORK, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- TransPerfect, the world's largest provider of language and technology solutions for global business, today applauded the decision of the Delaware Supreme Court to create the Delaware Bench and Bar Diversity Project. This new initiative, announced by Chief Justice Collins J. Seitz, Jr. and Justice Tamika Montgomery-Reeves, has a stated goal of "working to build and sustain a more diverse Delaware bench and bar."

"The higher up the judicial ladder you go, racial diversity drops," reported WHYY News, noting that the "Delaware Justice of the Peace Court, which is responsible for bail decisions for most defendants, is 65% white, while the state's top business panel, the Court of Chancery, is 100% white."

The announcement of the new diversity project failed to credit the lobbying effort of TransPerfect employees as a motivating factor driving the Court's new initiative. However, observers of the Delaware courts recognize that the lack of judicial diversity in the Delaware court system had been a long-standing pattern that continued unchecked until the TransPerfect employee-led group called attention to the shocking racial imbalance.

The call for diversity came amidst questionable decision-making by ex-Skadden Partner Bob Pincus while acting as Chancery Court appointed custodian. During the three-year period that TransPerfect was controlled by the Chancery Court Custodian, two minority C-level officers were targeted, had their compensation held, and were thus forced to sue the company. Mr. Pincus also cut employee benefits in a manner that disproportionately harmed minority workers. These acts drew widespread criticism and publicity, not only for the controversy they created, but also for their expenseas Mr. Pincus paid himself, his law firm, and his other agents more than $40 million.

Roy Trujillo, Chief Operating Officer at TransPerfect, commented, "We are far from the most affected victims of the lack of diversity in the Delaware court system, but I feel a personal duty to use my voice and energy to shine a light on a problem that has existed for far too long. We are pleased that the Delaware Supreme Court has finally heard the voices of TransPerfect employees, and taken these first steps toward progress. The fight for meaningful and systematic change in Delaware has only begun."

About TransPerfect

TransPerfect is the world's largest provider of language and technology solutions for global business. From offices in over 100 cities on six continents, TransPerfect offers a full range of services in 170+ languages to clients worldwide. More than 5,000 global organizations employ TransPerfect's GlobalLink technology to simplify management of multilingual content. With an unparalleled commitment to quality and client service, TransPerfect is fully ISO 9001 and ISO 17100 certified. TransPerfect has global headquarters in New York, with regional headquarters in London and Hong Kong. For more information, please visit our website at www.transperfect.com.

SOURCE TransPerfect

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CHICAGO, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Trilogy Real Estate Group, a Chicago-based real estate investment, property management and development firm, earned national recognition today as a top property management company in the National Apartment Association's 2021 NAA Best Places to Work award program, which identifies member organizations that encourage employee engagement and performance and foster collaborative and innovative work environments.

Winners were determined based on scores gathered from a Net Promoter Scores (NPS)-based anonymous employee satisfaction survey, launched as part of the awards program. Employees themselves determine where their organization ranks, providing employers with valuable feedback about their workplace.

"We are immensely honored to have received this recognition from our employees' own feedback," said Neil Gehani, CEO of Trilogy Real Estate Group. "We feel certain that our engaging and fulfilling work environment translates to our residents and is reflected in the numerous awards our property management team has received over the years."

"Congratulations to Trilogy for building an organization focused on employee engagement and performance," said Bob Pinnegar, NAA President and CEO. "Your employees made it clear  Trilogy is a great place to work that cares about, listens to and acts upon the needs and ideas of their employees. Congratulations to the entire team."

About Trilogy Real Estate Group

Trilogy Real Estate Group is a vertically integrated real estate investment and property management firm with a focus on multifamily apartments and commercial real estate. Trilogy has been recognized as one of the Top Property Management companies for 8 consecutive years and has an "A" rating in the epIQ Index. Since 2002, the principals of Trilogy have completed over $4 billion in transaction volume. Trilogy has been tested in multiple real estate cycles and consistently sources and manages attractive real estate investments in major markets around the United States.

About NAA

The National Apartment Association (NAA) serves as the leading voice and preeminent resource through advocacy, education and collaboration on behalf of the rental housing industry. As a federation of 151 state and local affiliates, NAA encompasses over 93,000 members representing more than 10 million apartment homes globally. NAA believes that rental housing is a valuable partner in every community that emphasizes integrity, accountability, collaboration, community responsibility, inclusivity and innovation. To learn more, visit www.naahq.org.

Contact: Jennifer Franklin

Spotlight Marketing Communications

(949) 427-1385

[email protected]

SOURCE Trilogy Real Estate Group
TALLAHASSEE, FLA., June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ - Trulieve Cannabis Corp. (CSE: TRUL) (OTCQX: TCNNF) ("Trulieve" or "the Company"), a leading and top-performing cannabis company based in the United States, announced today the opening of a new Florida dispensary, the Company's 89th nationwide.

The dispensary will be located next to the Citrus Park Town Center and helps meet Trulieve's goal of ensuring medical cannabis patients across Florida have safe, reliable access to the medications they rely on. The facility joins four other Tampa dispensaries, as well as several more in nearby Clearwater, St. Petersburg, and Largo.

In honor of the Company's newest dispensary, all patients  from those new to Trulieve to the dedicated Truliever community  will be eligible for a 25% in-store discount at the new dispensary on opening day.

ANNOUNCING: Trulieve Tampa  Citrus Park Grand Opening WHERE: 8625 Citrus Park Drive, Tampa, FL 33625 WHEN: Saturday, June 12, 2021, at 9:00 a.m.

In stores and online, patients will find Florida's largest selection of THC and CBD products in a variety of delivery methods, including edibles, smokable flower, concentrates, tinctures, topical creams, vaporizers, and more. Trulieve also offers home delivery statewide for patients and convenient in-store pickup at each of its 83 dispensaries in Florida.

To assist patients with ordering, Trulieve's entire catalog of products is available now for online ordering, with in-store pickup or statewide home delivery options available depending on patient preference. Additionally, Trulieve offers complimentary 30-minute virtual consultations with a Trulieve consultant to help navigate questions on products, devices, or review their doctor's recommendation. Appointments can be made on Trulieve's website and are open to all patients, whether starting their journey with medical cannabis or those with experience looking for alternative treatment options.

At this time, all visitors are required to wear masks for the duration of their dispensary visit. Only patients and their state-approved caregivers will be allowed inside the waiting room and dispensary until further notice.

For more information, please visit www.Trulieve.com.

About Trulieve

Trulieve is primarily a vertically integrated "seed-to-sale" company in the U.S. and is the first and largest fully licensed medical cannabis company in the State of Florida. Trulieve cultivates and produces all of its products in-house and distributes those products to Trulieve-branded stores (dispensaries) throughout the State of Florida, as well as directly to patients via home delivery. Trulieve also holds licenses to operate in California, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and West Virginia. Trulieve is listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the symbol TRUL and trades on the OTCQX market under the symbol TCNNF.

To learn more about Trulieve, visit www.Trulieve.com.

SOURCE Trulieve Cannabis Corp.
RIVERHEAD, N.Y., June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Acton Academy Eastern Long Island today announced the first phase of the Autism Studio launching July 6, 2021 in Riverhead, NY. It is a revolutionary new program that seeks to unlock this highly intelligent, grossly misunderstood population. By offering an educational environment that will tap into the deep and complex thoughts, ideas and inner lives of non-verbal autists, the trajectory of their lives (and ours) will be forever changed.

S2C enables communication for non-speaking autistic students The intelligence of this population is grossly underestimated

Utilizing an emerging, innovative communication modality called Spelling to Communicate (S2C), autistic students will learn to express their thoughts, ideas and feelings, thereby "tapping into" their inner world.

S2C is a program designed to support communication for nonspeaking, minimally-speaking, and unreliably-speaking individuals with sensory-motor differences. While the motor skill of speech may be a challenge for this population, we know that their language is intact.

Through S2C, we teach those with motor difficulties to coordinate their brain and body to communicate by spelling. This practice builds new neural pathways in order to create an alternative outlet for communication. As students practice these motor skills, they grow from pointing to letters on letterboards to typing on keyboards  many spellers have even gone on to write books and create blogs expressing a common thread in their experiences.

They are trapped inside a body that is disconnected from their brain. Their mind understands everything, but they cannot get their body to do what they want. They are locked in with no way for anyone to understand that their cognition/intelligence is completely intact.

"The unrealized potential in this population is enormous. The Autism Studio at Acton ELI is the first program of its kind to presume intelligence and offer curriculum that will enable autistic individuals to bring their gifts to the world," says Andrea Libutti, MD the founder and head of school. "My 17-year-old minimally-verbal autistic son has been doing 11th grade honors classes since implementing S2C last year. I have witnessed the profound abilities of non-verbal autists using S2C and it is incomprehensible how they know what they know. They have so much to offer and we will give them a place in society that will enable them to reach their full potential."

Andrea started Acton ELI for typical children in 2019 as an affiliate of the Acton brand, which has become a global alternative education movement. Acton is a learner-driven, experiential school, dedicated to helping each child find their calling. The Autism Studio, phase one, will begin this July, inviting non-speaking and minimally-speaking autistic individuals to learn S2C.

Andrea has published two books on autism, Autism A New Humanity (Hay House 2015) and Autism: A New Perspective (KDP 2019) which she co-authored with a non-verbal autist from Portugal. She is also a practicing part-time emergency physician employed at Stony Brook Eastern Long Island Hospital and the mother of three boys. The oldest has autism.

More information:

www.actoneli.org

Media Contact:

Andrea Libutti, MD

Owner Acton Academy Eastern Long Island

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 917-304-3791

SOURCE Acton Academy Eastern Long Island
DUBLIN, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The "US Healthcare CDMO Market 2020-2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The US healthcare CDMO market is estimated to grow significantly during the forecast period. The major factors that are projected to contribute to the growth of the market include the presence of contract manufacturers in the US that has significantly minimized costs and reduce product development time.

Moreover, the growing demand for generic drugs, the rising number of drug development processes, and the emergence of several new market players in the pharmaceutical industry are some other crucial factors that are propelling the market in the US.



The US market for healthcare CDMO is segregated on the basis of services and region. Based on services, the market is further classified into contract development and contract manufacturing. The contract manufacturing services segment is projected to have a significant share in the US healthcare CDMO market owing to the significant adoption of outsourcing services by pharmaceutical companies across the globe.

The contract development services are further classified into clinical, preclinical, and laboratory services. The clinical segment is projected to have significant growth in the market owing to increasing clinical research. Moreover, the contract manufacturing services segment is further classified into API, finished dosage formulations, and medical devices. The API contract manufacturing services segment is significantly contributing to the growth of the market during the forecast period.



The companies which are contributing to the growth of the US healthcare CDMO market include AbbVie Inc., Baxter International, Inc., Catalent, Inc., Pfizer Inc., Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., Jabil Inc., and others. Product launch, merger, and acquisition, collaborations with government, and technological advancements through which market players are considerably contributing to the market growth to stay competitive in the market.

For instance, in May 2019, Catalent, Inc. completed the acquisition of Paragon Bioservices, Inc., a contract research and manufacturing organization, for $1.2 billion. With this acquisition, paragon brought its unique development and manufacturing capabilities, which is anticipated to improve Catalent's biologics business and projected to provide a significant presence in the market.

Key Topics Covered:



1. Report Summary

1.1. Research Methods and Tools

1.2. Market Breakdown

1.2.1. By Segments

1.2.2. By Geography



2. Market Overview and Insights

2.1. Scope of the Report

2.2. Analyst Insight & Current Market Trends

2.2.1. Key Findings

2.2.2. Recommendations

2.2.3. Conclusion

2.3. Rules & Regulations



3. Market Determinants

3.1. Motivators

3.2. Restraints

3.3. Opportunities



4. Market Segmentation

4.1. US Healthcare CDMO Market by Services

4.1.1. Contract Development

4.1.1.1. Clinical

4.1.1.2. Preclinical

4.1.1.3. Laboratory Services

4.1.2. Contract Manufacturing

4.1.2.1. Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients( API)

4.1.2.2. Finish Dosage Formulations

4.1.2.3. Medical Devices



5. Company Profiles

5.1. AbbVie Inc.

5.2. Baxter International, Inc.

5.3. Catalent Inc.

5.4. Covance Inc.

5.5. Cambrex Corp.

5.6. Hisun Pharmaceuticals Inc.

5.7. Jabil Inc.

5.8. Pfizer Inc.

5.9. Stason Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

5.10. Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/3mrjtq

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

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Request a Free Sample Report to Know More

Leading global suppliers can assist buyers in realizing high-cost savings through their efforts on areas such as forward integration, reducing total ownership cost, manage ad hoc spend, negotiate on pricing and contractual terms, conference participation, managing labor price volatility, level of automation, quality management, and reduction in ad-hoc spend. Collaborations with global suppliers will also help buyers in cost-saving and ensure high-quality procurement in the dynamic market.

The report also offers information on the upcoming trends and challenges that will influence

market growth.

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Supply Chain Insurance Market in India: Key Price Trends

According to the Supply Chain Insurance price trends, higher anti-dumping duties imposed by the governments in countries such as China , the US, France , Germany , and India will increase the price of exported Supply Chain Insurance.

, the US, , , and will increase the price of exported Supply Chain Insurance. The steady increase in crude oil prices will drive the prices of raw materials such as optical fiber, PE, PVC, steel, and aluminum. This will propel Supply Chain Insurance suppliers' manufacturing costs.

Insights Offered in this Supply Chain Insurance Market Report

Top Supply Chain Insurance suppliers and their cost structures

Top Supply Chain Insurance suppliers in the US and their cost structures

Supply Chain Insurance market spend analysis in the US

Supply Chain Insurance price trends, and forecasts

Cost drivers influencing the Supply Chain Insurance prices

Explore more about market opportunities: Enquire about the report before purchasing

Some of the top Supply Chain Insurance suppliers listed in this report:

This Supply Chain Insurance procurement intelligence report has enlisted the top suppliers and their cost structures, SLA terms, best selection criteria, and negotiation strategies.

Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Munich RE

Allianz SE

Marsh LLC

If P&C Insurance Ltd

Regional Analysis

Further breakdown of the market segmentation at requested regions.

Market Player Information

Detailed analysis and profiling of additional market players, vendor segmentation, and vendor offerings.

Know the strategies adopted by vendors during the COVID-19 Recovery Phase.

Speak to our Analyst for a Customized Report

Related Reports on Financial Services Market:

Banking Services- Sourcing and Procurement Market Intelligence Report: The banking services will grow at a CAGR of 8.32% during 2021-2025. Prices will increase by 6%-8% during the forecast period and suppliers will have a moderate bargaining power in this market.

Credit Collection and Collection Agency Services - Sourcing and Procurement Market Intelligence Report: This report offers key advisory and intelligence to help buyers identify and shortlist the most suitable suppliers for their credit collection and collection agency services requirements. Some of the leading credit collection and collection agency services suppliers are profiled extensively in this report.

Payments Processing - Sourcing and Procurement Intelligence Report: This report evaluates suppliers based on assess service providers capabilities in terms of pci compliance, assess security measures used by service providers while collecting cardholder information, ability of service providers to offer plug-ins or apis to integrate payment processing solution with the software used by buyers, and assess price-rate plans offered by service providers.

To access the definite purchasing guide on the Supply Chain Insurance that answers all your key questions on price trends and analysis:

Am I paying/getting the right prices? Is my Supply Chain Insurance TCO (total cost of ownership) favorable?

How is the price forecast expected to change? What is driving the current and future price changes?

Which pricing models offer the most rewarding opportunities?

Table of Content

Executive Summary

Market Insights

Category Pricing Insights

Cost-saving Opportunities

Best Practices

Category Ecosystem

Category Management Strategy

Category Management Enablers

Suppliers Selection

Suppliers under Coverage

US Market Insights

Category scope

Appendix

About SpendEdge:

SpendEdge shares your passion for driving sourcing and procurement excellence. We are the preferred procurement market intelligence partner for 120+ Fortune 500 firms and other leading companies across numerous industries. Our strength lies in delivering robust, real-time procurement market intelligence reports and solutions.

To know more https://www.spendedge.com/request-for-demo

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Report: www.spendedge.com/report/fiber-optic-cables-procurement-market-intelligence-report

SOURCE SpendEdge
Shareholders who attend the meeting will be asked to present valid picture identification, such as passport, a state drivers license or other government issued photo identification. Further you must present proof of ownership of your Veltex Corporation common shares as of the record date to be admitted to the Annual Meeting. Proof of ownership can be any of the following: a Veltex Corporation account statement, a brokerage account statement, or a letter from the bank or broker who holds your shares. If you are a beneficial owner and plan to vote at the meeting, you must bring the legal proxy that was provided to you by the institution that holds your shares. If you are an authorized proxy, you must present the proper documentation. In all cases, valid photo identification will be required.

Cameras, cell phones, recording devices, and other electronic devices will not be permitted at the meeting. Rules of the meeting will be printed on the back of the agenda, which will be provided to you at the meeting.

Shareholders may receive proxy materials via the internet if your broker provides such services. Your broker can inform shareholders how to access and review the information contained in the proxy materials and how to vote via the Internet, by mail or in person. By utilizing this method of delivery, Veltex Corporation avoids the cost and environmental effect of printing proxy materials.

The Notice will contain:

A Notice of the 2021 Annual Meeting of Shareholders;

A Proxy Statement with a description of the items to be voted on at the Annual Meeting of Shareholders and the recommendation of Veltex Corporation's Board of Directors with regard to each item, if applicable.

The Notice of Meeting and Proxy Materials will be made available to shareholders on or about July 6, 2021, and mailed on or about that date to those shareholders who previously requested written materials.

Any shareholders who own Veltex Corporation common stock at the close of business on Thursday, June 25, 2021 may vote. This will be the record date for the meeting. If you are a shareholder of record, you may vote your shares in person at the 2021 Annual Meeting. If you are a beneficial owner of shares held in street name (i.e., your shares are held in a stock brokerage account or by a bank or other holder of record), as stated above, you must present a valid picture identification and a legal proxy provided by the institution, which holds your shares in order to vote in person at the 2021 Annual Meeting. If your shares are held under one of the company's Employee Savings Plans, only the Trustee for the Plans can vote your plan shares, even if you attend the meeting in person. To allow sufficient time for the Trustee to vote your shares, your voting instructions must be received by 6:00 a.m. Pacific Time, July 20, 2021.

If you have additional questions regarding the 2021Annual Meeting of Shareholders, please contact Shareholder Services at [email protected] or by phone at 1-312-235-4014.

Veltex Corporation, incorporated in Utah September 17, 1987, is a public holding corporation, which maintains its corporate headquarters in Chicago, Illinois. The company's common shares trade OTC Markets under the symbol VLXC. Veltex Medical, Inc., a Delaware corporation and Veltex Properties, Inc., a Delaware corporation, are both wholly owned subsidiaries of Veltex Corporation.

Corporate and Company Contact: Stephen G. Macklem, CFO, Veltex Corporation 312.235.4014 www.Veltex.com

Safe Harbor Statement

Forward Looking Statement

Safe Harbor Statement; Certain of the above statements contained in this press release are forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Such forward looking statements are within the meaning of that term in Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Readers are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, and that actual results may differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors. This press release includes forward-looking statements intended to qualify for the safe harbor from liability established by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements generally can be identified by phrases such as Veltex or its management "believes," "expects," "anticipates," "foresees," "seeks," "forecasts," "estimates" or other words or phrases of similar import. Similarly, statements herein that describe Veltex's business strategy, outlook, objectives, plans, intentions or goals also are forward-looking statements. All such forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. Any statements made in this press release which are not historical facts contain certain forward-looking statements; as such term is defined in the Private Security Litigation Reform Act of 1995, concerning potential developments affecting the business, prospects, financial condition and other aspects of the company to which this release pertains. The actual results of the specific items described in this release, and the company's operations generally, may differ materially from what is projected in such forward-looking statements. Although such statements are based upon the best judgments of management of the company, Veltex, as of the date of this release, significant deviations in magnitude, timing and other factors may result from business risks and uncertainties including, without limitation, the company's dependence on third parties, general market and economic conditions, technical factors, the availability of outside capital, receipt of revenues and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the company. The company disclaims any obligation to update information contained in any forward-looking statement. This press release shall not be deemed a general solicitation.

SOURCE Veltex Corporation

Related Links

https://www.veltex.com


The tribute tables boasted antiqued photos of babies, weddings, men and women in uniform, sunbathing beauties, and skilled athletes. A faded bowling pin perched proudly, symbolizing a near-perfect game bowled more than forty years ago, while bold certificates highlighted two spectacular hole-in-ones on the golf course. Talented artists shared original artwork and needlepoint, while proud business owners displayed unique tools of their trade from a hair salon, to an ice cream shop.

"Our residents have a wealth of knowledge, experience, and wisdom to share and it is our privilege to foster an environment at Watercrest which celebrates their individuality, and provides opportunities for connection," says Kim Haddon, Executive Director of Watercrest Santa Rosa Beach.

Watercrest Santa Rosa Beach is a newly-constructed senior living development project partnered between Watercrest Senior Living Group and The St. Joe Company. The 92,000 square foot luxury senior living community is conveniently located at 205 West Hewett Road along the Emerald Coast in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida. For information, contact the community at 850-660-7130.

Watercrest Senior Living recognizes the importance of connecting each resident's cherished memories to their daily activities through the Personal Life Silhouettes program. When a new resident joins the community, the care team connects with family and friends to discover that resident's life story, including favorite music, personal interests and talents, treasured memories and beloved holidays. Celebrating the momentous occasions of each resident's life instills joy, purpose, and personal connection amongst residents, associates, and family members.

Watercrest Santa Rosa Beach offers 75 assisted living and 32 memory care apartments with resort-style service and world-class care. Residents enjoy pampering in elegant Spa W, savor private label Watercrest wines at the bistro, and relish the flavors of locally grown, seasonal ingredients and organic fare whether dining outdoors, bistro-style, or in the chef's private dining room.

The unique architecture and design boast a stunning promenade, fireplace, signature water wall, multiple dining options, pool, salon and spa, children's play space, grand balconies, and Florida-style outdoor living spaces. Additionally, Watercrest's Market Street Residence showcases an innovatively designed 'outdoor' streetscape with numerous LifeBUILT programming touches; a highlight and crucial element of their multi-sensory memory care programming.

About The St. Joe Company

The St. Joe Company, together with its consolidated subsidiaries, is a real estate development, asset management and operation company. The Company owns land concentrated primarily in Northwest Florida and has significant residential and commercial land-use entitlements in hand or in process. More information can be found at www.joe.com. Information on the Company's current project pipeline can be found at www.joe.com/project-updates.

About Watercrest Senior Living Group

Watercrest Senior Living Group was founded to honor our mothers and fathers, aspiring to become a beacon for quality in senior living by surpassing standards of care, service and associate training. Watercrest senior living communities are recognized for their luxury aesthetic, exceptional amenities, world-class care, and innovative memory care programming offering unparalleled service to seniors living with Alzheimer's and dementia. A certified Great Place to Work, Watercrest specializes in the development and operations of assisted living and memory care communities and the growth of servant leaders. For information, visit www.watercrestseniorliving.com.

SOURCE Watercrest Senior Living Group

Related Links

http://www.watercrestseniorliving.com


SACRAMENTO, Calif, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Penney and Associates Partner Kevin Elder recently finished trying a disputed liability personal injury case in Stanislaus County, California. This is not unusual for the highly experienced partner of Penney and Associates, but this case was unique as it was one of the first jury trials in that county where jurors had to be spread around the courtroom masked up while making sure that everyone in the courtroom practiced good social distancing. Stanislaus County was very strict in following the CDC guidelines when it came to Covid-19 rules and regulations. This historic and bizarre way of prosecuting a case was at best a little bit unorthodox. https://www.stanct.org/sites/default/files/Coronavirus_Policy_Statement_Public_3.11.20_0.pdf.

Two very experienced veteran trial attorneys took their battle before a masked up socially distanced California jury. The experienced defense lawyer and the experienced former insurance company defense trial lawyer Kevin Elder from Penney and Associates had to navigate unorthodox court procedures to proceed with their trial. https://www.penneylawyers.com/kevin-l-elder/. Mr. Elder's co-counsel was associate Garrett Penney. https://www.penneylawyers.com/garrett-penney/ . Both lead trial lawyers were members of the American Board of Trial Advocates which is a prestigious organization where only the most experienced trial lawyers are allowed to become members. It is a national association of experienced trial lawyers and judges. https://www.abota.org/Online/Directories/Lawyer_Search.aspx. This is important as having equally experienced lawyers made it so that no party had any advantage over the other with the change of court procedure.

SETTING UP IN COURT IS MUCH DIFFERENT

Normally, attorneys arrive a few days early to set up the courtroom, get the lay of the land so to speak, and figure out where everything is for that particular courtroom. With Governor Newsom still not completely opening the courts as of the date of this article, the California Courts have the latest news and information concerning the process and rules concerning court procedure and health safety for each county. Each county has their own rules and regulations listed on the state's court website. https://newsroom.courts.ca.gov/covid-19-news-center . There were several very significant changes to the way that the trial was conducted. The typical jury box was not used due to social distancing rules. There were only four jurors sitting in the jurors box that can hold up to 16. When choosing a jury, the court normally brings in a large number of people who all sit in the audience and wait to see if their name is called to come to the jury box and be questioned by the court and lawyers. Also, the lawyers generally give a very brief one- or two-minute overview of the case to the large audience of potential jurors. In this case there were no potential jurors stacked up sitting next to each other in the large gallery area behind the wood separated court room stage area. Instead, the court had the jurors sitting in other court rooms socially distanced and brought in between 14 and 16 potential jurors at a time into the courtroom where the judge and jurors would be asked questions (this is called voir dire) and be chosen or released by the court or attorneys. Meanwhile the other potential jurors were waiting in the other courtrooms. This made the process more time consuming as the attorneys and judge had to give instructions and give brief opening statements on three different occasions. Another procedural change is that normally attorneys are allowed to test computer equipment and set up the day before, but this was denied for many reasons including what must have been issues with contaminating the area around the court. Nothing was really explained but it was obvious that the rejection of the request to set up early was probably due to the pandemic rules. The attorneys improvised and set up and practiced with the technology between the jury selection sessions. An unusual way of doing things, but it worked out.

PICKING A JURY AND STARTING THE TRIAL BROUGHT ON CHALLENGES

As stated, instead of giving the normal "mini-opening" to the whole group, the attorneys would have to give multiple similar openings to 3 different sets of 16 potential jurors. An interesting thing is that the court representative previously went through the hardships for jurors and eliminated them prior to the attorneys seeing them or discussing the hardship issues in their courtroom. Having the jurors masked up during voir dire made it a little more difficult for all the attorneys to get a read on the jurors' expressions when asked questions. At times gestures or body movements are studied to see if a potential juror's expressions do not coincide with what they are saying. This is truly an art that experienced attorneys have studied and practiced.

Once the jury was empaneled the court had the jurors sit all throughout the courtroom. Four jurors were seated in the jury box socially distanced. The other jurors were sitting in the audience or gallery area behind the attorney's table. Thus, it became difficult for the attorneys to see and talk directly to the jurors behind them. This was especially difficult when a witness was on the stand directly in front of the attorney. Because civil trials are open to the public the court had to live stream the trial on YouTube, more changes had to be implemented. If any attorney wanted to get up to walk around or personally show the judge or a witness an exhibit they would have to pick up and carry a portable microphone while talking with a mask on hoping that everyone, including the jurors spread throughout the courtroom, could hear. As an experienced lawyer I would think that it would be quite a challenge to look at all the jurors to determine if they are paying attention. Are the jurors sleeping, wide awake, look bored, looking down as if not lot listen? This would be difficult to read as the jurors were scattered throughout the courtroom. Sometimes when cross examining a witness the expression on the jurors faces might indicate that you have gone long enough or that their answer may not be forthright. This was not possible with the spacing of the jurors and the fact that they were all donning masks.

My understanding after talking to the Penney and Associates attorney's is that there were some minor problems with the portable microphone. This was compounded by the judge, witness, and clerk having Plexiglas in front of them, which made it a little more difficult to hear them while having a mask on. Because of this, the judge would have to take off his mask so everyone could hear what he was saying.

Following the proper COVID-19 safety rules basically multiplied the number of tasks to perform to just have a witness testify. The fear by the attorneys was that individuals, including jurors, were not able to understand what was being said unless they really concentrated. The attorney's task was to make sure that the jury heard them, the witnesses, and the judge. It was also awkward trying to pass the judge and the witness documents around the plexiglass. Fortunately, the one positive thing was that the witnesses were able to take off their masks during their testimony because the bailiff's new job during COVID-19 was to completely clean and sanitize the witness stand area prior to the next witness taking the stand.

INTERVIEWS OF PLAINTIFF'S LAWYER KEVIN ELDER

Frederick Penney: Was this the first time you tried a case before a jury during the pandemic?

Kevin Elder: Yes.

Frederick Penney: Was this the first personal injury jury trial in that county during the pandemic?

Kevin Elder: To my knowledge, no. It is my understanding that there was one in December, but I know our case was one of only a few personal injury jury trials in Stanislaus County. I do know that this was the first personal injury jury trial that this judge handled during the pandemic.

Frederick Penney: What pre-trial preparations did you have to do that you would not normally have done because of the court pandemic rules or regulations?

Kevin Elder: Several things, the court had plexiglass around the witness box and around judge and clerk as well as markers throughout courtroom seats that showed where potential jurors were and were not allowed to sit. Almost all civil trials are public hearings, so the court prearranged for YouTube audio, so the lawyers had to carry a handheld microphone if you walked away from the table.

Frederick Penney: What was the most interesting and difficult thing to deal with once you noticed how the courtroom was set up? Do you think it gave either party an advantage or disadvantage?

Kevin Elder: It was first addressing the jury for voir dire and opening and closing statements because they were spread out, 4 were in the jury box and the other 8 in the audience. If you sat at your table and have a witness testifying it was weird having jurors sitting behind you. You had to stand and turn around to address the jurors and hold the handheld microphone and talk while wearing a mask. This made it difficult to communicate with the jurors. With the jurors wearing masks during voir dire it was hard to read their faces when they answered. Sometimes you can read a person by their expressions. When it came down to jury selections there were 2 panels of 14 people at a time brought in and one panel of 16 and we had to repeat our mini opening statements for each group. It seemed like I had to ask the jury the same questions three different times. This was time consuming and awkward.

Frederick Penney: What do you think was the most difficult thing to deal with during the trial because of the COVID-19 restrictions?

Kevin Elder: The handheld microphone, wearing the mask and always keeping my head on a swivel because jurors were located throughout the courtroom. The plexiglass was awkward because when we were talking to the judge he was behind the plexiglass, and we were wearing masks. It was more difficult to communicate. In general, everything was more time consuming. After each witness left the stand, the bailiff had to take the time to clean and sanitize everything on and around the witness stand.

Frederick Penney: Did you notice that the jury acted any differently than other cases that you have tried in the past?

Kevin Elder: Not really, but it was hard to evaluate how they were reacting because of the face mask. They did not have a deliberation room that could accommodate social distancing, so they deliberated in the courtroom, which was different as normally a jury has their own deliberation room. We purchased two clear shields instead of the masks and the court did not allow us to wear them. The judge had his mask on the entire time except when he read the jury instructions, but witnesses were allowed to take off their masks while testifying, so that was one positive thing.

Frederick Penney: How much longer do you think the trial went because of the COVID-19 restrictions?

Kevin Elder: It probably took 30 to 40 percent longer.

Frederick Penney: Do you believe either side had an advantage because of the COVID-19 restrictions?

Kevin Elder: No, both parties had to deal with the difficulties of trying the case.

FREDERICK PENNEY'S FINAL THOUGHTS ABOUT JURY TRIALS DURING COVID

Several lessons were learned from Mr. Elder's trial. These have been discussed and the issues raised some real problems going forward with jury trials if the COVID-19 restrictions continue to be in place. However, the main question that was not answered was how long this will continue? Will the courts use similar restrictions in the courtroom after the pandemic passes? Are there things that may be implemented or continue to be used by the courts to keep people physically healthy? Will the social distancing continue for a short time or become the mainstay? Only time will tell.

SOURCE Penney and Associates

Related Links

www.penneylawyers.com


"For Shell, this ruling does not mean a change, but rather an acceleration of our strategy," van Beurden said.

"People would fill up their cars and delivery trucks at other service stations"

PLC ( ) has said it will speed up its transition away from fossil fuels after a landmark court case in the Netherlands last month.

Ben van Beurden, chief executive, said that doing so would see the business shrink considerably and it could yet win the case on appeal, but added Shell was prepared to take bold but measured steps over the coming years.

Ina case brought by seven activist groups, Shell was ordered to amend its plans to reduce its fossil fuel emission to comply with the Paris Climate Agreement.

To do that, it would have to reduce its carbon emissions by 45% by 2030 from 2019 levels.

The Anglo-Dutch giant had proposed its own plan that would have seen a 20% reduction by 2030, by 45% by 2035 and 100% by 2050 from 2016 levels, but this was rejected by the court.

"For Shell, this ruling does not mean a change, but rather an acceleration of our strategy," van Beurden said.

"Now we will seek ways to reduce emissions even further in a way that remains purposeful and profitable.

Shell was also ordered to cut absolute emissions, rather than upping its pending on renewables and carbon offset measures, something that van Beurden has criticised.

"Imagine Shell decided to stop selling petrol and diesel today. This would certainly cut Shell's carbon emissions. But it would not help the world one bit. Demand for fuel would not change. People would fill up their cars and delivery trucks at other service stations," van Beurden said.

"A court ordering one energy company to reduce its emissions  and the emissions of its customers  is not the answer," he added.

Analysts have said the ruling could lead to a 12% decline in the company's energy output, including a sharp drop in oil and gas sales.

Shell is one of a number of energy companies in the crosshairs of climate activists.

US giant Exxon has seen three directors replaced by nominees of activist group Engine One, with BP, Chevron and Total also under pressure.
Dialogue, self-restraint consensus approach to South China Sea issue: Chinese FM

Xinhua) 17:30, June 11, 2021

CHONGQING, June 10 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Thursday that the countries involved in the South China Sea issue have agreed on continuing to resolve disputes through dialogue and consultation, exercising self-restraint and avoiding additional unilateral action.

Wang made the remarks in an interview after a special ASEAN-China foreign ministers' meeting in celebration of the 30th anniversary of dialogue relations held in Chongqing.

Calling the South China Sea the common homeland of China and the ASEAN countries, Wang said maintaining peace and stability in the region serves the common interests of both sides.

Wang said all parties at the meeting reaffirmed their commitment to fully and effectively implementing the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC), steering clear of disturbances, deepening cooperation and enhancing mutual trust.

All parties have also pledged to overcome difficulties incurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and accelerate the formulation of the Code of Conduct in the South China Sea (COC) based on the DOC, Wang said.

He also mentioned the 19th Senior Officials' Meeting on the Implementation of the DOC held on its sidelines, where all parties have agreed to resume the second reading of the Single Draft COC Negotiating Text and accelerate the negotiations in a flexible and pragmatic manner.

"Against the special backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, the aforementioned progress has fully demonstrated the common will and firm determination of China and the ASEAN countries to uphold peace and stability in the South China Sea," Wang added.

Wang said compared with the DOC, the coming COC will be more substantive, effective and operable.

The COC provisions will be in line with international laws including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and will better guarantee the legitimate rights and interests enjoyed by all countries in the South China Sea in accordance with international law, Wang added.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Hongyu)
Neo Lithium (CVE: NLC  OTCQX: NTTHF  FSE: NE2) CEO Waldo Perez joined Steve Darling from Proactive to share details the company has announced an updated resource estimate for the Tres Quebradas lithium project in Catamarca Province, Argentina.

Perez telling Proactive the 3Q Project deposit continues to improve, confirming that it is one of the largest and highest-grade lithium brine deposits in the world. Perez also telling Proactive this news will not affect their ongoing work toward the completion of the Feasibility Study in Q3.
Operator Moxico has just raised US$73,m to develop the site

( ) noted the completion of a US$73mln equity finance round by Moxico Resources, the operator of the Mimbula copper project in Zambia.

Trident acquired a gross revenue royalty over Mimbula in June last year at a gross rate of 1.25% that decreases to 0.3% after payments of US$5mln.

Moxico will use the funding proceeds to fast track the development of a standalone processing operation to increase production to 30,000 tonnes a year.

Mimbula has JORC (2012) compliant Measured and Indicated Resources of 668,000 tonnes of contained copper with an additional 130,000 tonnes of inferred resources.

To date, Trident said it had received US$453,707 in royalty payments.

Adam Davidson, chief executive, added: The financing conducted by Moxico to materially expand copper production at the Mimbula copper mine underscores the value of acquiring royalties over quality assets being advanced by experienced management teams.

The Mimbula Copper Royalty provides Trident's investors with long-life copper exposure - a key base and battery metal - from an operating asset with further upside potential located in a prolific copper district."
"This acquisition represents an important addition to our licence portfolio, said chief executive Martyn Churchouse

PLC ( ) completed the acquisition of PR Ploutonic Resources Ltd, adding three advanced copper-gold exploration licences in the Republic of Cyprus.

The licences - Troulli, Kokkinapetra and St. Nicholas  each host clear evidence of historic production and all three properties have excellent potential for discovery of further high-grade VMS copper-gold and epithermal gold deposits, the company said in a statement.

Caerus agreed the deal in April and has now received the backing of shareholders through a vote.

"This acquisition represents an important addition to our licence portfolio, said chief executive Martyn Churchouse. We are especially excited about the very promising initial exploration observations at Troulli that indicate the presence of both an epithermal Au deposit and scope for a further Cu-Au VMS deposit.

The objective is to quickly establish the physical limits of both mineralisation types before undertaking work to determine a mineral resource that, combined with the mineralised dumps, ore stockpiles and tailings on the licence, will convert into a stand-alone project that fits the entry criteria for Jubilee Metals Group under the terms of the option agreement announced on 04 may 2021."

The company is paying 750,000 to acquire the licences, paid in shares (3.31mln shares priced at 22.65p each).

In the statement, Caerus highlighted that exploration activity since April conducted for due diligence purposes helped move the project forward, in the assessment of the extent and depth of the gold-bearing epithermal zones and the Volcanogenic Massive Sulphide (VMS) mineralisation beneath.

It said that significant progress has been made and the company anticipates it will update shareholders in the very near future.
Diabatou mineralisation is within the East Lodes inferred resource comprising 48,000 ounces at 3.2 g/t gold and is 7 kilometres from the Central Lodes, which comprise the bulk of the global Kouri resource of 2 million ounces at 1.3 g/t.

Kouri drilling will be postponed during the rainy season with the focus switching to Kada Gold Project in Guinea which has all-weather access.

( ) latest diamond drilling results from Kouri Gold Project in Burkina Faso, West Africa, have extended the high-grade Diabatou gold shoot from 140 metres to 190 metres below surface.

Notably, a new high-grade gold intersection of 3 metres at 10.9 g/t gold from 201 metres, lies 50 metres beneath the bottom of the current mineral resource pit shell.

Diabatou mineralisation lies within the East Lodes inferred mineral resource which comprises 48,000 ounces at 3.2 g/t gold and is just 7 kilometres from the Central Lodes, which comprise the bulk of the global indicated and inferred mineral resource at Kouri of 2 million ounces at 1.3 g/t gold.

With the next mineral resource update, the extensions to the Diabatou shoot are expected to be added to the East Lodes resource inventory and a portion of this resource is expected to be upgraded from inferred to indicated using the infill drilling results.

Potential to extend shoot further

The high-grade Diabatou Gold Shoot remains open at depth, with the strongest portion of the shoot now interpreted to plunge almost vertically.

Golden Rim managing director Craig Mackay said: Our diamond drilling has successfully extended the high-grade Diabatou Gold Shoot at depth and at least 50 metres beneath the bottom of the current mineral resource pit shell.

The drilling has confirmed that the shoot has a near-vertical plunge and we believe the shoot can be extended further with drilling beneath diamond hole DDH004, which returned 3 metres at 10.9 g/t gold.

The diamond drilling has now moved to the Central Lodes area, where follow-up drilling on several other exciting zones of high-grade mineralisation is underway.

Diabatou Gold Shoot Longitudinal Section with the new diamond drill holes.

Central Lodes diamond drilling

Diamond drilling has now moved to the Central Lodes area at Kouri and is targeting extensions to other zones of high-grade gold mineralisation (in addition to Diabatou) obtained in previous drilling:

6 metres at 25.2 g/t including 1-metre at 114 g/t;

7 metres at 8.4 g/t; and

6 metres at 8.3 g/t and 4 metres at 8.2 g/t.

However, with the onset of the rainy season in Burkina Faso, Kouri drilling will be postponed.

The company intends to focus its exploration effort on the Kada Gold Project in Guinea which has all-weather access and where the maiden mineral resource drill-out is expected to continue into the rainy season.
( ) (FRA:WKU) is progressing its wholly-owned Ovoot Coking Coal Project (OCCP) in Mongolia, with the front-end engineering and design (FEED) study contract awarded and recent lab tests confirming the product is high-quality premium fat coking coal.

The Ovoot Coking Coal Project contains a JORC 2012-compliant total coal reserve of 255 million tonnes of high quality (fat) coking coal, which can be used to blend with other coking coals to produce coke, an essential component of producing steel using the blast furnace production route.

This type of coal is in increasing demand in China, Mongolia's southern neighbour, particularly as China's relationship with Australia is strained which impacts the amount of coal imported from Australia.

The companys Ovoot Early Development Plan (OEDP) and pre-feasibility study is focused on a truck and rail operation to deliver up to 4 million tonnes per annum to end markets in China and Russia - and with no signs of China reversing its policy on Australian coal imports Aspire looks well-placed to cater to Chinese demand.

Infrastructure map showing Ovoot transport route to steel customers.

Phased FEED study

Last month the company awarded the FEED contract on Coal Handling and Preparation Plant (CHPP) infrastructure in Mongolia to CIMIC Group Ltds (ASX:CIM) (FRA:WKU) wholly-owned minerals processing company, Sedgman Pty Limited.

The FEED Study will be conducted in a phased approach over a period of around five months.

Stage 1 will comprise trade-off analyses to identify the most appropriate concepts and technologies, which will take about eight weeks, and Stage 2 will then focus on the agreed path and will produce accurate estimates of capital and operating costs and designs to enable tendering for construction.

This work will be completed under a schedule of rates arrangement with the total cost estimated at A$600,000.

The intended CHPP infrastructure to be investigated will be based on existing modular designs and will enable low impact processing of approximately 1.5 million tonnes per annum of run-of-mine (ROM) coal with capability for later expansion.

Aspire will also work with Sedgman on identifying opportunities for the CHPP infrastructure construction to qualify for export credit finance assistance.

Premium fat coking coal

The company recently received fresh laboratory results confirming the OCCP is a high-quality premium fat coking coal of high value and that is in demand in neighbouring China.

A 60-kilogram sample of fresh coking coal indicative of Ovoots Upper Seam, which will be the focus of the Ovoot Early Development Project, was tested by SGS in Tianjin China.

Key results are consistent with earlier laboratory tests and reaffirm the attractiveness of Ovoot Fat Coking Coal as having outstanding caking, fluidity and plastic properties across a wide temperature range.

The company will now work with Chinese and Russian institutes to pre-qualify the coal prior to marketing activities commencing.

Five-year price chart showing the price of fat coking coals are around the same as hard coking coals in Tianjin China. Source: sxcoal.com.

Making up Chinese shortfall

High-quality fat coking coals have an important value in use in the Chinese steel industry, particularly at present with import limitations being put on Australian hard coking coals.

China is not self-sufficient in sourcing hard coking coals and since 2009 has relied on imports to make up the shortfall.

Adding quality fat coking coals allow steel mills to add lower quality coking coals into the batch, more than what hard coking coals could carry to make quality coke.

Fat coking coals like Ovoots would be used between 5% to 10% of a coke batch in order to support the carrying ability of the limited supply of prime hard coking coals.

Notably, fat coking coals are priced at around the same as hard coking coals in Tianjin China.

The company is confident that the development of the Ovoot Coking Coal Project will benefit the shift from China away from Australian coal.
Ion Energy (CVE: ION  OTCQB: IONGF) CEO Ali Haji joined Stephen Gunnion from Proactive to discuss the commencement of exploration at its Baavhai Uul lithium salar project in southeastern Mongolia.

Haji telling Proactive that staff and a drilling rig are on site and that core drilling has already commenced.

Baavhai Uul is one of the worlds largest lithium salar holdings where no modern exploration has ever been completed.
Paris, June 11 : A man who slapped French President Emmanuel Macron during a public event has been sentenced to 18 months in jail, but with 14 months of those as a suspended sentence.

The 28-year-old was also banned from holding public office or possessing any weapons, television station BFMTV reported from the courtroom in Valence.

Damien T slapped the 43-year-old president on Tuesday during a visit to Tain-l'Hermitage, south of Lyon. The incident caught on camera caused consternation throughout the country.

The 28-year-old did not deny the act in court and, according to the TV station, said he was a victim of injustice, DPA news agency reported.

Macron stands for the decline of France, the broadcaster quoted him as saying. Previously, he had also considered throwing an egg or a pie, he said.

Macron talked about the incident in a TV interview on Thursday, stressing it was an "isolated act".

He went on to talk about violence against women and comment on how there had been "moments of very high tension in our country," for example during the "Yellow Vest" protests.

About a year before national elections, and less than two weeks before regional elections, Macron is on a tour through the country to meet voters.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Lucknow, June 11 : Well-known Sunni cleric, Maulana Khalid Rashid Farangi Mahali has urged the Yogi Adityanath government to allow religious places to reopen allowing 50 per cent devotee occupancy with full adherence to Covid protocols.

The Maulana, who is also the Imam of Aishbagh Eidgah, said that people should be allowed to visit their religious shrines since the Covid curfew has been lifted on weekdays.

"All religious places were shut for the public during the two waves of Covid. Now people are reeling under emotional stress and depression and will find solace in places of worship. Both medicine and prayer are required in these hard times for healing," he said.

The cleric said that "Even during Ramzan and Eid, Covid norms were strictly followed and mosques had remained off limits."

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Lucknow, June 11 : With the second wave of Covid-19 receding and the monsoon season around the corner, the Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh is now gearing up to combat water-borne diseases, such as encephalitis and malaria.

"From June 15, a special campaign to send medical kits door-to-door to children will be started. In this regard, the administration is making all the necessary preparations," said a government spokesman.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has already asked officials to make special efforts to improve surveillance and keep the spread of these diseases in check.

He directed that medicines should be purchased at company rates and transparency should be maintained.

Special attention should be paid by the Medical Corporation to the quality, packing, and convenience of supply.

He also asked officials to ensure regular sanitation and fogging drives to curb the threat of water-borne diseases.

"Uttar Pradesh will be using its experience of controlling the Japanese encephalitis. Our experience in tackling this disease will also help us in curbing the spread of the third wave of Covid-19. For this, the government has prepared an action plan to effectively check the third wave," the spokesman said.

The Japanese encephalitis death rate has been reduced to 95 per cent and now there are hundreds of health wellness and encephalitis treatment centres, which will help control the diseases that get triggered in the rainy season.

The action plan is also being made by the Yogi Adityanath government to increase dialysis units in every district on the PPP model.

The state government is also planning to establish blood banks so that patients do not face trouble in getting blood.

It has also ramped up the health infrastructure for better treatment of children as facilities have been provided in PICU (Paediatric Intensive Care Unit) for children above one month, NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) for children below one month, and SNCU (Sick New-born care Unit) that have been established at maternity hospitals.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
June 11 : With the Maharashtra government gradually unlocking and relaxing lockdown restrictions in the state, filmmakers are slowly taking their incomplete films to floors and resuming shootings. While some filmmakers and actors are still hesitant to resume work as the coronavirus pandemic is still at its peak, the makers of Varun Dhawan and Kriti Sanon starrer Bhediya have decided to resume shooting this month.

Varun and Kriti were in Arunachal Pradesh for two months and had completed the major portion of the upcoming film Bhediya in the real locations surrounded with nature. Still about 10 per cent of the film is left to be completed, which will be completed in the last leg of the shoot. The makers have reportedly decided to resume shoot on June 26, and complete it at one go.

Reportedly, Varun and Kriti are all set to resume shoot in Mumbai and will wrap up the film after this last leg. Led by Dinesh Vijan, the team will follow all COVID-19 protocols while shooting amid the pandemic. Earlier, during a live session on Instagram with a doctor, Varun had revealed that he will get vaccinated before he goes on the sets.

Directed by Amar Kaushik and produced by Dinesh Vijan, the comedy horror film also features Deepak Dobriyal and Abhishek Banerjee besides Varun and Kriti in the leads. The film started shooting in Arunachal Pradesh in March 2021, and was shot on Ziro, Sagalee and Pakke-Kessang districts. Over 70 percent of the artists in Bhediya are from Arunachal Pradesh, including a lead character, Jomin. The film is slated to release theatrically worldwide on April 14, 2022.

Bhediya is a part of Dinesh Vijans horror comedy universe consisting of films like Stree, Roohi and Munjha. A rapper from Arunachal, K4 Kheko, who features in the film, has also sung and written the lyrics for the theme song of the film.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Varun had shared a glimpse of his day as he enjoyed the Mumbai rains. The actor shared a video on his Instagram stories, wherein he was seen out for a pretty wild drive in the Mumbai rains. The Street Dancer 3D actor also recalled his childhood memories of playing in the rain.
Dharamsala, June 11 : Faith leaders from around the world, including Tibetan spiritual head the Dalai Lama, have written an open letter to Boris Johnson and G7 leaders ahead of their summit on Friday, calling for vaccine patents to be waived and an increase in funding to ensure vaccines reach the poorest countries and prevent the spread of further Covid variants.

The letter was also signed by former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who now chairs Christian Aid; Emmanuel, the Elder Metropolitan of Chalcedon who represents the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate; Martin Junge, General Secretary of the Lutheran World Federation; and Thabo Makgoba, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town.

In the letter they praised the work of the World Health Organisation's Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) which has delivered vaccines to more than 100 countries. But they point out that there remains a huge lack of vaccine equity between rich and poor.

The letter called for additional funding and for bold steps to increase production.

They wrote: "Low-income countries account for less than one per cent of the 900 million doses administered to date. More affluent countries account for more than 83 per cent. The vaccine gap between the richer and poorer parts of the world is growing by the day." They also gave their backing to the calls for vaccine patents to be waived to make it quicker and easier to distribute in countries with low vaccine coverage.

"Waiving intellectual property rules -- a proposal which is gaining the support of a growing number of G7 countries -- gives us the opportunity not only to boost production but also to diversify the sites of production. This will reduce the period of time before herd immunity is achieved, a period during which potentially dangerous variants can emerge." Despite the successes of the ACT-A scheme, they warn that without an injection of funding from G7 leaders progress will stall.

"While many G7 countries have been generous in their contribution to ACT-A, it is a matter of grave concern to us that the financing gap for ACT-A is $19bn this year. As countries seek to increase vaccine coverage rates, the funding gap will grow unless countries step up support.

"We need action to lower costs through intellectual property waivers and the sharing of skills and resources with generic producers.

"The G7 has a special responsibility in both of these areas. As a group of the world's largest economies, your financial commitments will make or break ACT-A's ambition. We therefore urge you to agree to the burden- sharing formula proposed by Norway and South Africa and sent to 89 countries, under which the G7 would collectively agree to underwrite 63 per cent of the cost of closing the financing gap." The G7 summit, which begins on Friday in Cornwall in England, will be a crucial moment to accelerate the global vaccination effort and is being seen as a key test for the UK government, and G7 as a whole.

The faith leaders conclude their letter: "We believe that more equitable approaches to vaccination in the world's poorest countries is both an ethical obligation, and an epidemiological imperative if we are to protect vulnerable people wherever they live, including the citizens of the G7.

"The old axiom that 'our life and our death are with our neighbour' has never been more apt, and we urge you to respond speedily and effectively to this challenge."

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Brussels, June 11 : The European Parliament (EP)has passed a resolution calling for an end to funding to Agrofert, a business conglomerate of Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, over alleged conflicts of interests.

"(The EP) insists that further disbursement of funds, either from the EU or Czech national budget, to the companies ultimately controlled by Babis, or members of the Czech government must be halted until the cases of conflict of interests are fully resolved," the EP resolution passed on Thursday, said.

A majority of 505 MEPs supported the legally unbinding resolution, reports Xinhua news agency.

Only 30 MEPs were against the resolution and 155 abstained from the vote.

Firms owned by Babis, which he insists were placed in trust funds and thus meet local legal obligations, are among the biggest recipients of EU subsidies earmarked for agriculture.

An audit by the European Commission released in April concluded that Babis still maintained effective control over Agrofert, a conglomerate holding company headquartered in Prague, and was thus in conflict of interest.

A fact-finding mission by the EP last year reached similar conclusions.

In responde, the Prime Minister has accused Brussels of undue meddling in the Czech Republic's internal affairs over the matter.

"This is the continuation of the EP's interference in the internal affairs of the Czech Republic. We are a sovereign country and a political struggle is going on here.

"The elections are approaching and the EP is attempting to influence them," he added.
Phoenix, June 11 : Four people were killed and multiple others injured in a road accident in the US state of Arizona involving a commercial truck transporting milk and seven other vehicles, authorities said.

The incident took place on a freeway in Phoenix at 10.09 p.m. on Wednesday night, Xinhua news agency quoted the Arizona Department of Public Safety as saying on Thursday.

The commercial truck-tractor pulling a tanker trailer filled with milk failed to slow for traffic congestion in the area of 52nd and Van Buren Streets and collided with the other seven vehicles, the Department said.

The truck's trailer separated and crossed over the concrete median wall into the westbound traffic lanes where it came to rest on its side within the high-occupancy vehicle lane.

The truck ignited and was destroyed by the fire, according to the Department.

Authorities said four people died as a result of injuries sustained during the collision and several patients were transported to local hospitals with serious to life-threatening injuries.

An investigation of the crash is under way.

Officials said they have ruled out the possibility of impairment.
Tehran, June 11 : Two Iranian war ships have entered the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, a top official confirmed here.

In a statement on Thursday, Deputy Iranian Army Coordinator Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said the two ships, including the Makran port ship and the domestically-built Sahand destroyer, had left the southern port of Bandar Abbas on May 10 and have now arrived at the Atlantic Ocean without calling at other countries' ports, Xinhua news agency reported.

He said said the ships have so far sailed some 6,000 nautical miles, about 12,000 km, going around the Cape of Good Hope during their 30 days of traveling in high seas.

"We consider our presence in international waters an inalienable strategic right of the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy, and we will continue on this path with strength," Sayyari was quoted as saying.

The ships will continue their course toward the North Atlantic Ocean, making the country's longest maritime mission, he said.

Western media have reported that the destination for the Iranian ships is Venezuela.

On Wednesday, US political news site Politico reported that "the Joe Biden administration is urging Venezuela and Cuba to turn away two Iranian warships believed to be carrying arms intended for transfer to Caracas".

There is no immediate comments from the Iranian side on the claims.
Moscow, June 11 : Just days ahead of the much-anticipated meeting between Russian President Vladmir Putin and his US counterpart Joe Biden, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has signed an order to nullify the Moscow-Washington Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on "open ground" that facilitated travels for diplomats in their host country.

Mishustin on Thursday asked the Russian Foreign Ministry to inform the US side of the termination, reports Xinhua news agency.

The MoU signed in Washington in June 1992 allowed Russian and US diplomats to tour their host country simply on notification, without seeking permission.

The intention to terminate the agreement was first announced by the Russian Foreign Ministry on April 16, when it unveiled a slew of countermeasures to "hostile US actions".

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had said that in accordance with the document, certain categories of diplomats, from counsellors and all the way down, are supposed to notify the authorities of the host country each time they plan a trip beyond the 25-mile zone around the general consulate's host city.

According to Lavrov, the Americans "completely ignored" this requirement".

The Putin-Biden summit on June 16 in Geneva comes at a time of great tension between Washington and Moscow.

Relations between Washington and Moscow have been adversarial in recent years.

The two sides have obvious differences on issues related to Ukraine, cybersecurity, human rights, and US election interference.
New Delhi, June 11 : Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Aditynath is meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday to apprise him about the political situation in the state and steps taken to control the second wave of Covid pandemic.

Adityanath has reached the Prime Minister's residence at 7 Lok Kalyan Marg in the national capital. Sources said Adityanath is expected to also apprise the Prime Minister about the possible changes in Uttar Pradesh in the coming days.

After meeting with the Prime Minister, Adityanath will meet BJP chief J.P. Nadda to discuss the political situation in the states ahead of next year's Assembly polls and possible cabinet expansion or reshuffle on cards, especially after Congress' Jitin Prasada joined the BJP.

On Thursday, Adityanath met Union Home Minister Amit Shah in which apart from political situation and saffron party preparation, BJP's performance in recent panchayat polls was also discussed and it was decided to focus on electing its members as 'Zila Panchayat Adhyaksh'.

Former Union Minister and Apna Dal Chief Anupriya Patel had joined the deliberation between Shah and Adityanath.

Shah also had a separate meeting with Patel after Adityanath left.

Patel, who was Minister of State in the first Narendra Modi government but failed to make the grade in its second term, is demanding a ministerial berth for herself in the Modi cabinet and a ministerial post for her husband Ashish Patel in the state.

Sources said she is also demanding posts of Zila Panchayat Adhyaksh of five districts -- Mirzapur, Jaunpur, Pratapgarh, Banda, and Farrukhabad.

Later in the evening, NISHAD Party Chief, Sanjay Nishad and his son also met Shah.

Thursday afternoon, Adityanath reached Delhi to discuss preparations for next year's Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections with the party's central leadership. The sources also said that the handling of the Covid situation during the second wave of the pandemic by the Uttar Pradesh government was also likely to be discussed during the meetings.

While the state's efforts drew flak from the opposition, the BJP leadership has appreciated the works done by the UP government.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Washington, June 11 : The US Treasury Department has sanctioned members of a smuggling network that helps fund the Houthi militia in Yemen and Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF).

In a statement on Thursday, the Department said the network, led by Iran-based Houthi financier Sa'id al-Jamal, generates tens of millions of dollars in revenue from the sale of commodities, like Iranian petroleum, a significant portion of which is then directed through a complex network of intermediaries and exchange houses in multiple countries to the Houthis in Yemen.

"The revenue helps fund the destabilising regional activities of the Houthis, IRGC-QF, and others, including the Lebanon-based Hezbollah." Al-Jamal directs a network of front companies and vessels that smuggle Iranian fuel, petroleum products, and other commodities to customers throughout the Middle East, Africa and Asia, according to the Treasury.

Andrea M. Gacki, Director of the Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, said the smuggling network's financial support enables the Houthis' "deplorable attacks threatening civilian and critical infrastructure in Yemen and Saudi Arabia".

"These attacks undermine efforts to bring the conflict to an end and, most tragically, starve tens of millions of innocent civilians.

"Ending the suffering of millions of Yemenis is of paramount concern to the US, and we will continue to hold accountable those responsible for widespread misery and deny them access to the global financial system," she added.

The Department further said in the statement that since the onset of the conflict in Yemen, the "Houthis have relied on support from the IRGC-QF to wage their campaign against the internationally recognised Yemeni government and the Saudi-led coalition".

The Treasury also claimed that Houthis have used ballistic missiles, explosives, naval mines and drone to strike military targets, population centres, infrastructure and commercial shipping in Saudi Arabia, along key international trade routes.

Yemen has been mired in a civil war since late 2014 when the Houthi rebels seized control of several northern provinces and forced the internationally recognised government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi out of the capital Sanaa.

A recent UN-brokered negotiation between Yemen's warring sides and other relevant parties has failed to produce any agreement of ceasefire.
Chennai, June 11 : When parents choose names that are rare and symbolic, children become famous.

On Sunday, June 13, Socialism will be tying the knot with Mamata Banerjee and the marriage will be solemnized at Amani Kondalampatti area in Kattur, Salem.

The groom A.M. Socialism is the son of K.A. Mohan, a Communist Party of India (CPI) leader who hails from a traditional communist family while the bride is from a Congress family and daughter of K.Palaniswami and P. Neelambal couple.

Communism and Leninism are the brothers of Socialism and his nephew is Marxism.

Both the groom's family and the bride's family are closely related.

Mohan, 52, who is the Villupuram district secretary of the CPI, had contested the 2016 assembly elections as a candidate of the People's Welfare Alliance. Mohan told IANS over the telephone: "When Communism took a turn for the worse in Soviet Union people used to rebuke us and then I decided even before my marriage that I would name my children that reflect the ideology and named my children Communism, Socialism, and Leninism. My grandson is Marxism." Socialism shared with IANS its pitfalls: "It was not rosy for me and my brothers to have these unique names during our school days. We faced a lot of humiliation and flak in our village. But when we reached College, situations changed and we were centres of attention." While Socialism and Leninism are into trading of anklets and silver ornaments, Communism is a practicing lawyer.

Socialism said, "I'm happy that my would-be wife is also having a peculiar name -- Mamata Banerjee, named after the present Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress leader. Her parents are Congress supporters and hence named their daughter Mamata Banerjee, who was and still is a firebrand leader. She was with the Congress party before floating the Trinamool Congress." The CPI Tamil Nadu state secretary R. Mutharasan and deputy secretary K. Subbarayan will attend the wedding.
Johannesburg, June 11 : South Africa has "technically" entered the third wave of the coronavirus pandemic, the country's National Institute for Communicable Diseases said.

The national seven-day moving average incidence, which reached 5,959 cases, exceeded the new wave threshold defined by the Ministerial Advisory Committee of the government, Xinhua news agency quoted the Institute as saying on Thursday.

The threshold was defined as 30 per cent of the peak incidence of the previous wave.

The Institute also reported 9,149 new Covid-19 cases, bringing the national tally to 1,722,086, while the death toll stood at 57,410.

The positivity testing rate was 15.7 per cent, it said.

The majority of new cases were from the Gauteng province, which hosts the nation's economic hub Johannesburg and the administrative capital Pretoria, accounting for 61 per cent of the infections, according to the statement.

Western Cape province, home to the legislative capital Cape Town, came second with 10 per cent of the new cases, it read.

Previously, four of South Africa's nine provinces, including Northern Cape, Free State, North West and Gauteng, had already entered a third wave at the provincial level.

On Thursday morning, Western Cape said it was entering the third wave.

The nation plans to vaccinate about 67 per cent of the population by the end of this year with three phases to achieve herd immunity.

Following the first phase for healthcare workers only, the current second phase inoculates persons aged 60 years and above first, who will be followed by other groups of people including essential workers, persons in congregate settings and persons over 18 years of age with co-morbidities.

South Africa, which has the highest Covid infection tally in Africa, moved to lockdown level two from the previous level one from May 31 as the number of infections began to rise sharply in several parts of the country and the positivity rate more than doubled in a month, from around 4 per cent to more than 11 per cent.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
New York, June 11 : US pharmaceutical Pfizer's vaccine against Covid-19 can effectively neutralise Beta, Gamma variant of the Coronavirus disease, according to a study.

The study led by researchers from the New York University, US, showed that the Pfizer BNT162b2 vaccination worked well against the majority of variants as the earlier virus, but the vaccine neutralised the South African variant and the Brazil variant with a 3-fold decrease in titer.

"Our interpretation of the results is that the vaccine antibodies are very powerful, and even if you lose 3-fold of the titer, there is still plenty of antibody there to neutralize the virus. We believe the findings demonstrate that the vaccines will remain protective against the variants that we tested," said Nathaniel "Ned" Landau, Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, in New York City.

The study, published in the journal mBio, also found that monoclonal antibody cocktail consisting of casirivamab and imdevimab might be less effective against SARS-CoV-2 variants in laboratory experiments.

Lab experiments on Regeneron pharmaceuticalsaAs REGN-COV2 -- a 2 recombinant monoclonal antibody cocktail -- showed that casirivamab had lost some of its neutralising activity against the South African and Brazilian variants and the cocktail was 9- to 15-fold decreased in titer, the team said.

"One of the Regeneron antibodies is affected by the E484K mutation, and as a result the cocktail loses some of its neutralizing activity," said Landau.

"The question with this work is 'how do the laboratory findings translate into clinical effects, that is what will happen when you treat a patient infected with one of the variants?' We cannot say for sure. We will only know when the clinical data comes in," Landau noted.

The team created a panel of pseudotyped viruses using the spike proteins from six different variants of SARS-CoV-2: the B117 lineage variant identified in the UK, the B1351 lineage variant identified in South Africa, the B11248 lineage variant identified in Brazil, the COH.20G/677H lineage variant identified in Columbus Ohio, the 20 EUs variant identified in Spain and later found elsewhere in Europe, and the Mink cluster five spike proteins located in minks in Denmark.

Similar experiments in Moderna's Covid vaccine also produced the same results, Landau said.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Paris, June 11 : The European Union (EU) needs to build the framework of its strategic autonomy on economic, industrial and technological issues as well as military values, said French President Emmanuel Macron.

"For me at the heart of these days to come is the European sovereignty," Macron told a press conference at the Elysee on Thursday on the eve of the G7 summit in the UK from June 11 to 13.

Citing "a solid record" by Europe in this regard in recent years, including progress in defence, digital governance and post-pandemic recovery plan, Macron called for a new partnership with the US.

Regarding the NATO summit next week in Brussels, Macron, who said in 2019 that the trans-Atlantic alliance was experiencing "brain death", stressed that "the strategic capability autonomy of Europeans should be recognized".

Macron said that "NATO must clarify its common values. NATO must build a rule of conduct among allies and NATO must clarify its concept".

"What seems to me to be very important in this context is that we, as Europeans, assume that we are the players in arms control on our soil. This is an essential subject for the months and years to come," he said.

"Europe is not simply an object or a territory of the distribution of influences. We are a subject of international geopolitics and we must assume it," he added.

The G7 Summit will be the first time world leaders will assemble in person since the coronavirus pandemic.

The NATO Summit will be hled on June 14 in Brussels.
Hyderabad, June 11 : The Covid war room comprising of IIIT-Hyderabad alumni and students, has saved many precious lives during the second wave of Covid-19 pandemic.

The Covid War Room (CWR) was set up in response to a deluge of appeals for crucial assistance for Covid patients during the second wave in April-May.

The team comprising alumni and students of International Institute of Information Technology-Hyderabad (IIIT-H) has so far resolved 1,107 requests and processed over Rs 40 lakh in financial aid.

CWR founder Sriharsha Karamchati created a technical eco-system of support through a volunteer army and crowd-sourced data and funding. "Our basic purpose is to take the mental load off the patient's attendant and give him/her precious time with the patient, while we provide remote assistance and hand-holding till the problem is resolved," he said.

The CWR processes the requests for hospital beds, ventilators and oxygen support devices, medicines or blood, through its extensive data base of resources and verifies its availability. The verified information is then relayed back to the attendant for immediate action.

"We take the request, calm the attendant down and ask them to spend time with the patient. Once we source the request, we verify the details, set up the bed, ambulance or oxygen support and organize crowd-funding, if the person is unable to pay, as per the need," explained Sriharsha.

IIITH's alumni, IT whiz-kids, working professionals, start-up founders and college students came together to work as a team. The group also has doctors, IIITH engineers, parents who are nodal officers, NGO heads, hospital owners and IAS officers.

The backend processes were conceptualized and designed by core team member Mohit Jain, IIITH alumnus and Sudhir Yarram, a Ph.D scholar working in the computer vision space. "We used a Ziffy platform to set up the helpline," informed IIITH alumnus Anupriya Inumella of Microsoft, who put together the call center to process requests from across the nation.

Sriharsha Karamchati, co- founder of the start-up Questbook, created a website called Covid.questbook.app which offered creative services in return for monetary donations for any Covid cause. He offered to make an ad for a company if it donates Rs 50,000 for any Covid cause. This enabled Rs 60 lakh worth of donations till date.

Sriharsha through his Twitter-Instagram posts mobilised Rs.6 lakh for a daughter who had lost her mother to Covid and needed to raise 1.5 lakhs a day for her critically ill father. 'Donate 350 rupees that you would spend on a Swiggy meal' was an Insta post that touched hearts.

He then reached out to his close friends and put his request for volunteers to join him, in the IIITH Life Facebook page. The next day he had 250 volunteers from IIITH students and alumni. They converted the forum into a high tech platform overnight, creating slack groups, building slack bots and automating several processes.

The core 10-member team includes Goodclap, the fund-raising venture who were one of the first members on the CWR team. The verification of resources is undertaken by the parents of volunteers, 40+ age group members who bring their time-tested people-skills to create connections with reliable sources in different domains.

The team created a Data Studio where people can actually see where the funds go. "We have donated Rs 5.5 lakh towards setting up of 45 oxygen beds and 15 ICU beds in Kukatpally," said Anupriya Inumella. In Agra, 350 ration kits were distributed among the rickshawallah families who had lost their main breadwinner. The CWR has raised an equivalent of Rs 60 lakh and bought 20 oxygen concentrators from Australia, now being leased as a free service.

The call center processed patient requests from cities like Ajmer, Bhopal, Delhi, Rajasthan, Bangalore, Hyderabad and districts within Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. "We had 2,000 requests of which 1,700 have been processed with a 60 per cent success rate", said Anupriya.

Anyone who needs help can reach out to the Covid War Room Helpline 6304296587 or DM their Covid-related requests to the Instagram handle https://www.instagram.com/sriharshakaramchati/ or tag the Twitter handle https://twitter.com/HarshaKaramchat

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Berlin, June 11 : Germany's ruling conservative union was gaining voters' favour and was clearly ahead of the second-placed Greens, according to a Politbarometer survey published by the public broadcaster ZDF.

After a historical low in polls, the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union(CDU/CSU) gained four percentage points compared to the last survey almost three weeks ago and reached 28 per cent, while the Green Party lost three percentage points and only reached 22 per cent, according to the survey issued on Thursday.

Germany is heading for federal elections in September, reports Xinhua news agency.

Chancellor Angela Merkel had already announced in 2018 that she would not run for office again after four consecutive terms.

Germans' opinions on who would be a suitable chancellor also shifted.

After scoring an approval rating of 43 per cent in May, only 28 per cent believed that Green Party leader Annalena Baerbock was suitable as chancellor, according to the survey.

CDU leader Armin Laschet was seen by 43 per cent as ready for the chancellorship, a plus of six percentage points.

Of the three candidates, Minister of Finance and Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) was in the lead, with 48 per cent considering him suitable for the chancellorship.
Jaipur, June 11 : Following Centre's decision to cancel the Class 12 examinations of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), the Rajasthan government on June 2 also cancelled the state board examinations for students of Class 10 and 12, which has evoked a mixed response.

Rajasthan's Education Minister Govind Singh Dotasra announced the cancellation of the RBSE board exams to keep students safe in the wake of the Covid pandemic.

Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot also announced a mass promotion without exams for Classes 1 to 6, as well as for Classes 8, 9 and 11.

Haryana, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand are among other states to have announced cancellation of their respective board exams.

These decisions have attracted mixed responses from the people from all walks of life.

While many educators and students expressed relief that their concerns about health and safety were addressed, others are apprehensive about whether the move can fix the uncertainties that have plagued the education system since the onset of the pandemic.

There are also concerns also about how the academic performance of students will be evaluated now. What about those who had worked hard to improve their previous scores? Will percentage discrepancies end up impacting the future prospects of millions of students? Mental health expert Akhilesh Jain (HOD Psychiatry, ESI Model Hospital, Jaipur) said, "Ever since March 24, 2020, schools have remained closed and online classes have replaced classroom teaching in the country. This is unprecedented and its impact on children and adolescents is yet to be understood fully.

The dependence on technology for learning and recreation is almost complete and social interactions, outdoor activities have been severely curtailed.

Daily routines have been disrupted and home confinement is likely to impact mental health. According to WHO, 50 per cent of all mental health conditions can surface as early as 14 years of age. These often go untreated and undetected." He said this figure is even more troubling when you consider that, at over 253 million, India has the largest adolescent population in the world. In rural India, these issues may be even more severe as children do not have access to technology and, in many cases, even proper nutrition at home. They may be suffering from gaps in learning and development.

The decision to cancel Class 12 exams, though logical, is a short-term fix. It is still unclear that how are we going to help the student population in rural and urban areas to continue learning without impediments? How will our academic system adapt to the pandemic? Are we equipped to address the mental health issues of our students and quell their anxieties? We need to have a trustworthy methodology that can assess a student correctly.

Divya Santhanam, Senior State Programme Manager at Population Foundation of India said, "When we talk about students being impacted by the cancellation of the exams, we only think of urban students. We have forgotten that millions of rural students have already been impacted by the pandemic.

Many have dropped out because of digital incapacity and for many even studying till Class 12 is an impossibility." She highlights the need to reach out to young people to hear their concerns and address them accordingly.

"We need to gather feedback from students about the questions that are plaguing them about their current situations and future. In this way, we can address the urgent need to implement trpansparent policies and open up communication with students.

Experts are required to formulate strategies and prepare a roadmap so that students know their academic future is safe. We may no longer need a pen and paper mode of examination but we still need a plan about how students are going to cope up with the pandemic going forward.

Young people are tomorrow's leaders who will shape the narrative of society, and hence, they must be given the tools to deal with their anxieties. To address this challenge effectively, however, we must understand and acknowledge it first," she added.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Riyadh, June 11 : Top Islamic scholars from Pakistan and Afghanistan have signed the Declaration of Peace in Afghanistan in the Saudi city of Mecca, the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported.

The deal paves the way for a solution to the long-standing Afghan crisis, by supporting negotiations between the warring factions and rejecting all acts of violence and extremism in all its forms and manifestations, Xinhua news agency quoted the SPA report as saying.

The signing took place on Thursday at the conclusion of the Islamic conference that was held near the Grand Mosque in Mecca.

The conference was held with the support of the Muslim World League and Saudi Arabia, bringing the senior scholars of Afghanistan and Pakistan together to achieve reconciliation for the Afghan people.

The declaration offers reconciliation between the conflicting parties in Afghanistan, and bringing them to a common ground, by addressing all political, social, economic, and other related issues.
Berlin, June 11 : The special task force (SEK) in the German city of Frankfurt will be disbanded because of right-wing extremist statements in chat groups, a top official said.

The announcement was made on Thursday by Peter Beuth, Interior Minister of the federal state Hesse, where Frankfurt is located, reports Xinhua news agency.

"The unacceptable misconduct of several staff members, as well as the turning away by immediate superiors in the Frankfurt SEK has made its complete dissolution necessary," Beuth said in a statement published by Hesse's Ministry of the Interior.

On Wednesday, criminal and disciplinary proceedings were made public against 18 active duty officers and one former police officer of the SEK.

Three of the men were superiors who were accused of not intervening as members of the chat groups, according to the statement.

Most of the chat messages dated back to 2016 and 2017.

Some text messages and pictures sent would "raise the suspicion that some members of the Frankfurt SEK have a right-wing extremist attitude", the statement noted.

A team of experts would now organize the restructuring of the special unit.

A "fundamental restart" was being initiated for the SEK unit and a "completely new management culture has to be created" at lower and middle supervisory levels, said Beuth.
Kolkata, June 11 : China seems to be on the verge of recognising Myanmar's military regime, reversing its previous policy of choosing a side in the country's ongoing political crisis.

On June 5, junta leader Min Aung Hlaing and his Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin met Chinese Ambassador Chen Hai, after which the Chinese Embassy's Facebook statement identified the senior general as the "Leader of Myanmar".

Chinese state-run media outlet Global Times also made the shift, referring to Min Aung Hlaing as the "Myanmar leader" in an article on Sunday.

The comment section of the post was hit by avalanche of angry messages from Myanmar users, most of whom described Min Aung Hlaing as "democracy-killer" and "power-grabber".

"Utterly disgusting to see. CCP is trying hard to legitimise terrorist leader Ming Aung Hlaing for their business interests," wrote one user.

Wunna Maung Lwin then subsequently attended a special ASEAN-China Foreign Minister's meeting in Chongqing, where he also took part in a Mekong-Lancang Cooperation meeting and had a one-on-one informal rendezvous with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

The state-run Global New Light of Myanmar (GNLM) newspaper said the two discussed the "advancement of the existing Pauk Phaw relations" and the "implementation of Myanmar-China bilateral projects", lending more strength to the idea that the junta may have agreed to speed up Chinese development projects in Myanmar in exchange for political support.

Most of the 15 new mega-infrastructure projects cleared by the military junta are Chinese.

"They also discussed for closer collaboration between the two countries in both regional and multilateral contexts, particularly the ASEAN and the US," the GNLM article says in a likely reference to China shielding Myanmar from any international consequences or pressure due to the coup.

Hammering the point home, GNLM said the two ministers discussed ASEAN's role in resolving the "political developments" in Myanmar, with an emphasis on "non-interference".

Meanwhile, Wang assured his counterpart that China will always support Myanmar in choosing its own developmental path and friendly relations between the two countries have not been affected by recent developments.

"Of course, Myanmar did not choose this path - a handful of generals did at the expense of millions, who have emphatically rejected military rule," said a spokesperson of the Myanmar's exile National Unity Government (NUG).

During the Mekong-Lancang Cooperation meeting with other foreign ministers from the Mekong region, the bloc approved 22 projects worth $8 million to be implemented in Myanmar, according to state media.

It's not immediately clear if these are the same 22 projects already agreed to in 2020, for which China pledged $6.7 million in funding.

"The Chinese government should take note that the State Administrative Council established by Min Aung Hlaing does not represent the people of Myanmar, and that efforts to legitimize it as the government of Myanmar risk undermining people to people relations between the two countries," the NUG warned in a statement.

Emboldened by Chinese support and ASEAN engagement, the military junta hit deposed State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi with a corruption charge on Wednesday, taking her number of alleged offences to seven.

The only real surprise though is that it took so long for the charge to be announced, given the junta began pushing this corruption narrative back in March.

Suu Kyi has been charged under section 55 of the Anti-Corruption Law over allegations that she took bribes and rented state land at reduced prices in Yangon and Nay Pyi Taw for the Daw Khin Kyi Foundation, a charity organisation set up in the name of her mother.

She faces up to 15 years in prison, which is basically a formality at this point given the other six charges levelled against the 75-year-old would easily see her put away for the rest of her life anyway.

Deposed Nay Pyi Taw Council Chairman Myo Aung, his deputy Ye Min Oo, and Nay Pyi Taw Development Committee member Min Thu were also charged under section 55.

They all stand accused of facilitating Suu Kyi's alleged transgressions.

Suu Kyi, President Win Myint and Myo Aung all appeared in court on Monday to discuss case management in a separate hearing for five charges against the state counsellor.

The judge ruled that the hearings should be completed within 180 days because they are "simple cases".

To most, they are simple in the sense that they are obviously politically motivated and should be dismissed immediately, but we suspect the junta-controlled courts won't feel the same way.

In any event, it seems the process will now speed up, with hearings expected to be held twice a week, on Mondays and Tuesdays.

On June 14, the court will begin to hear from the plaintiff in the case against Suu Kyi, Win Myint and Myo Aung.

It seems the 180-day period starts from some time in February, as her lawyer, Khin Maung Zaw, said the prosecution will present its last arguments by June 28, while the defence must present by June 26.

As a reminder, Suu Kyi is facing a charge under section 67 of the Telecommunications Law (for possession and use of walkie-talkies without a licence); one charge under the Import and Export Law (for illegally importing walkie-talkies); two charges under section 25 of Natural Disaster Management Law (for allegedly violating election campaign rules); and one incitement charge under section 505 (b) of the Penal Code.

A more serious charge (alongside the new corruption charge) under section 3(1)(c) of the Official Secrets Act is being heard separately at the Supreme Court, with a hearing scheduled for June 23.

"The charges against the elected leaders reflects the new found confidence of the military junta and all because they have strong Chinese support . India should immediately discontinue all support for the junta because Delhi gains nothing by backing a Chinese lackey," said Mrinal Chakma, a former fellow at Kolkata's Maulana Azad Institute of Asian Studies who has followed Myanmar and visited the country often.

Chakma, who has close links to Buddhist clergy across Southeast Asia, said the "God-fearing Burmese Buddhist looks up to India for moral leadership at this critical juncture, as do other ethnic minorities".

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Lucknow, June 11 : The Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh has listed 'death by drowning' as a disaster, making the victim's family eligible for a compensation of Rs 4 lakh under the state disaster relief fund (SDRF).

Death by suicide, however, will not be considered for compensation.

According to an order issued by additional chief secretary (revenue) Renuka Kumar, this is in addition to nine situations considered disasters under the SDRF. Death by drowning in a well, river, lake, pond, canal, pit and puddle will also be considered as a disaster from now on.

The district magistrate, where the death takes place, will have the authority to determine whether the death was an accident or suicide as the families of suicide victims will not be eligible for state assistance.

To ensure this, a panchnama of the victim will have to be carried out compulsorily. For the release of funds under any category of disaster, the SDM will have to verify the claim of the family.

This step is being taken to ensure that no fraudulent claims are made.

In 2018, the government had added four categories of death to the list of disasters. These were snake bite, boat tragedy, death while cleaning sewer or gas leak and man-animal conflict.

An official had said that snake bite had been included since there were several such cases, particularly in flooded areas, during monsoon.

The categories already listed under SDRF before 2018 included death due to unseasonal rain or heavy rainfall, lightning, storm, loo and falling into a borewell.

The directions come in the light of a central government order which had asked the state to formally list state-specific disasters within the local context for inclusion in SDRF.
New Delhi, June 11 : Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Friday called on BJP chief J.P. Nadda after his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, during his visit to the national capital.

During his one-hour meeting, Adityanath apprised Modi of the political situation in UP and steps being taken to curb the second Covid wave.

Later, the UP CM met Nadda at his residence to discuss the preparation and strategy for the next year's state Assembly polls.

Sources said that Adityanath discussed Covid management, vaccination, political situation, impact of farmers protest in Western part of the state and cabinet reshuffle, in his meeting with the BJP chief.

"For any change in party's organisational structure in UP, Nadda's approval is required. The changes in organisation and government were discussed between Nadda and Adityanath," sources said.

On Thursday, the UP CM met Union Home Minister Amit Shah in which apart from political situation and saffron party preparation, BJP's performance in recent panchayat polls was also discussed and it was decided to focus on electing its members as 'Zila Panchayat Adhyaksh'.

Former Union Minister and Apna Dal Chief Anupriya Patel had joined the deliberation between Shah and Adityanath.

Shah also had a separate meeting with Patel after UP CM's departure.

Patel, was the Minister of State in the first Narendra Modi government, but then failed to make the grade in its second term, is demanding a ministerial berth for herself in the Modi cabinet and a ministerial post for her husband Ashish Patel in the state.

Sources said she is also demanding posts of Zila Panchayat Adhyaksh of five districts -- Mirzapur, Jaunpur, Pratapgarh, Banda, and Farrukhabad.

Later in the evening, NISHAD Party Chief, Sanjay Nishad and his son also met Shah.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New Delhi, June 11: After almost one year since the bitter Galwan valley clash between India and China took place, New Delhi has gradually started clearing the pending investment proposals from Beijing. While the small ticket foreign direct investment (FDI) proposals are being cleared in the initial stage, sources said that India is not opposed to Chinese FDI per se.

"India has never banned Chinese FDI. The only change in the regulatory structure is the requirement of an approval from the authorities for Chinese companies to invest. This is not a very retrograde step and yes we will apply caution and I don't see why that should lead to such concerns," a policymaker on condition of anonymity said.

It is also learnt that India will study the proposals one by one and in cases which pose no threat to security will be approved.

"The government has always maintained that there is a need for healthy FDI inflow for economic growth and job opportunities," he said.

Since April 2020, India has received over 120 FDI proposals of about $1.63 billion from China.

According to India Briefing, most of these investments are for brownfield projects.

It also noted that despite the hype, though China remains India's largest trading partner, the actual proportion of FDI directed into New Delhi constituted only $2.43 billion -- 0.51 per cent of total inflows." Singapore, Mauritius, the Netherlands, Japan, US, US comprise the list of countries from where India has received the largest share of FDI.

However, India also needs to be watchful as China has been rapidly increasing its investments in Indian companies including startups.

"There are too many variables involved in such decisions. I don't think these can be handled in a hurry. The authorities will have to take appropriate decisions keeping the best interest of the country in mind," Deepak Sood, secretary general, Assocham told India Narrative.

Last year, the government revised its FDI policy to bar any "opportunistic" takeover or acquisition in domestic companies by its neighbouring countries even before the Galwan Valley incident. The move was aimed at protecting domestic companies from hostile takeovers amid dropping valuations due to the Covid 19 pandemic.

Reports suggested that several China-backed funds including Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) and China Investment Corporation (CIC) were aggressively looking for investment opportunities in Indian companies in various sectors as their valuations had taken a hit with the spread of the pandemic.

In India, FDI is either allowed through the automatic route -- where companies do not require any government approval or through the government route-- for which companies have to seek government nod.

"A non-resident entity can invest in India, subject to the FDI Policy except in those sectors/activities which are prohibited. However, an entity of a country, which shares land border with India or where the beneficial owner of an investment into India is situated in or is a citizen of any such country, can invest only under the government route." a press note by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) said.

"The resilience of China-India economic and trade relationship should not be completely dismissed. It is true that the Modi government has pushed for a self-reliance strategy to support domestic industrial development, but that doesn't necessarily mean decoupling from Chinese supplies that are integrated into the local market," the Chinese state backed Global Times said in an article in January.

(This content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com) --indianarrative/

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New Delhi, June 11: In post-partition India, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has remained the only prominent flag-bearer of the concept and the ideology Hindu nationalism.

After independence, with the influence of the Hindu Mahasabha losing its impact, it was these bands of lathi wielding Swayamsevaks sporting white shirt and khaki shorts who emerged as the symbol of Hindutva.

Influenced by V. Savarkar, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, a doctor in the city of Nagpur founded RSS in 1925. Later, the RSS' political wing, Jan Sangh founded by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee in 1951 carried on the mantle (At present in the BJP avatar).

The concept of Hindutva gained prominence in the 1980, when RSS called for a Hindu temple (Ram Mandir) to be built in the spot of a 16th century mosque (Babri Masjid) at Ayodhya, in northern India. The events that followed eventually changed the Indian political scenario. However, following the call, northern India became the epicentre of the idea of Hindu revivalism. But, it was in the pre-independence undivided Bengal, where the roots for the rise of Hindutva were sown.

Mondobina Gupta, a journalist and an author in an article, 'Historical Roots of the Rise of Hindutva in West Bengal' indicated that the "threat of being demographically overpowered by Muslims" was actually put into words by an author, U.N. Mukherji in 1910.

"U.N. Mukherji, author of a suggestively titled pamphlet called Hindus: A Dying Race (1910), projected a scenario of doom and extinction for the Hindu community. Citing census statistics, Mukherji argued that there would be a demographic overpowering of Hindus by Muslims. He invoked a warning by C.J. O'Donnell, Bengal's census commissioner, who in 1891 calculated the number of years it would take for the Hindus to "disappear altogether from Bengal, if the Mohammedan increase went on at the rate it was doing," Gupta wrote.

However, the idea of Hindutva and Mother India was conceptualised much before 1910. History shows that Bengal was actually pivotal to the development of the idea of Hindu nationalism.

It was in Bengal, the first image of 'Bharat Mata' and the word 'Hindutva' were conceptualised. In 1905, when Bengal was partitioned by the British, Abanindranath Tagore painted the first image of 'Bharat Mata'- a saffron-clad woman dressed like a Sadhvi.

In one hand she holds the Vedas, in the second she holds the rice paddy(signifying rich food of the land), in her third hand she holds the 'rudraksha' and in her fourth hand, she holds a piece of white cloth. Bharat Mata as painted by Abanindranath Tagore offers-"Shiksha, Diksha, Anna, Vastra." Much before the concept of Hindutva became associated with the Hindu right wings, the term was coined in Bengal for the revival of Hinduism. In 1892, for the first time ever, the term "Hindutva" was invented or conceptualised by Chandranath Basu, a Bengali litterateur in his magnum-opus-'Hindur Prakrita Itihash(Actual History of Hindus). This apparently is the "first recorded" use of the word "Hindutva". Chandranath went on to project Hindus as "fundamentally superior to people of all other faiths, whose traditional social customs and practices in that they have survived centuries of thought-schools and hence were axiomatically superior to western culture and way of life. Basu was against religious conversion and "insisted that India shall not be a homeland to foreign religions like Islam and Christianity." Born in 1826, Rajnarayan Basu, an educationist, litterateur and intellectual established 'Jaitya Gaurab Sampadani Sabha (Association for Achieving National Glory)' in Medinipore(Midnapore), and 'Savjibani Sabha (Association for Regeneration)' in Calcutta(now Kolkata) for promoting Hindu nationalism. His writing Hindu 'Dharmera Sresthta', ('The Superiority of the Hindu Religion') in 1879 was also on the lines of Hindu revivalism.

It was in Bengal that Dharma Rakshini Sabha (Protection from conversion) was founded in 1869.

The first congregation of the Hindus took place in West Bengal. In 1867, Nabagopal Mitra, a playwright, poet, essayist and a patriot started a political and cultural festival called-"Hindu Mela." The objective as stated in various articles was to "instil a sense of national pride among the people of Bengal and India." As records indicated, in 1875, Rabindranath Tagore, who was then 14-years-old recited his first poem-'Hindu Melar Upahar(Hindu Mela's Gift)." This incidentally was the first poem published in the name of Rabindranath Tagore.

In 1853, Girish Chandra Ghosh founded the newspaper-'Hindoo Patriot'. During the 1857 mutiny stories published in the paper indicated that the rebels "harmed their own cause by placing their trust in the leadership of Mughals".

"Vande Mataram", pronounced in Bengali as Bande Mataram (Mother I bow to thee), appropriated by the right wingers was written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in 1876. His novel "Anandamath" (in which he included the poem) written in 1882 is open to many interpretations.

Sandeep Banerjee, Associate Professor Department of English, McGill University, in his book, 'Space, Utopia and Indian Decolonization' while talking about Anandamath wrote-"The ending simply concretizes the distinct anti-Muslim tenor that runs through Anandamath." Banerjee maintained in his book that "Anandamath is thus complicit in creating a reified category of the "Muslim" and situating it as an "other" to a normative Hindu identity in modern South Asia, an idea that would gain pan-Indian purchase over time." Pointing fingers at the Hindu Bengali bhadralok, Banerjee wrote that replicating the "common sense" of colonial historiography that presented Hindus as the original inhabitants of India, the bhodrolok, following their colonial masters, styled themselves as descendants of the Aryans while portraying Muslims as tyrannical foreign conquerors of India. He concluded by maintaining that the" anti-Muslim rhetoric of Anandamath not only draws on these ideas but also provides them with an imaginative and affective gloss before releasing them into the public sphere. These ideas would inform the ideology, including the blut und boden nationalism, and the horizon of political action of the Hindu Right in colonial as well as postcolonial India." Even before the first partition(1905) Bengal witnessed the rise of nationalist organisations. Most prominent among them was the 'Anushilan samiti or the Body Building Institution. It was established by the local Bengali youths and akharas in Bengal. The Anushilan Samiti was led by Aurobindo Ghosh, his brother Barindra Ghosh and was influenced mainly by Hindu Shakta philosophy- as established by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Swami Vivekananda. Incidentally Shaktisim is worship of Hindu goddess Shakti-power or energy.

After 1905(first partition of Bengal) the simmering difference between Bengali Hindu bhadraloks and Muslims came to the surface when the Britishers introduced 'Communal Award 1932'. In short, the Communal Award was a proposal on minority representation. Joya Chatterji, professor of South Asian History while talking about 1947 partition of Bengal in her book- Bengal Divided-Hindu communalism and partition(1932-1947) wrote-"The Communal Award reduced the Bengali bhadralok to being an impotent minority in the legislative assembly....For the first time in the history of Bengal's legislatures, Muslims were placed in a position of strength relative to the Hindus." Chatterji stated: "Given the decline of bhadralok fortunes, the vehemence of the Hindu reaction is hardly surprising." She pointed out that the "bhadralok did not invoke standard nationalist critiques of British policies....instead their anger was directed against the group that they regarded as the Award's greatest beneficiaries, the Bengali Muslims." Gradually as the influence of Bengal declined over national politics the politics of bhadraloks became more sectarian. "In less than forty years, bhadralok politics had come full circle, moving away from nationalist agendas to more parochial concerns....shift from nationalism to communalism," Chatterji pointed out in her book.

Cut to the modern times, particularly the recently concluded high voltage West Bengal elections. The verdict is out, the flag-bearers of the Hindutva were defeated. But did Bengal and Bengali bhadraloks reject Hindutva? Or is BJP's rise from four to 76 seats could possibly be a signal of history repeating itself in Bengal after nearly 100 years? (This content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com) --indianarrative/
New Delhi, June 11 : The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to close all proceedings against the Italian marines in India, after Rs 10 crore compensation was deposited with the court, for disbursal amongst the family members of two Indian fishermen killed off the Kerala coast in February 2012.

A comprising Justices Indira Banerjee and M.R. Shah said it would pass orders in the matter on June 15.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta submitted the compensation of Rs 10 crore has been deposited with the court and it is up to the Kerala government to decide on apportionment of it.

The counsel for Italian government submitted that criminal proceedings pending before a Delhi court must also be dropped in terms of the award by the international tribunal.

Italian government had offered a compensation of Rs 10 crore, out of which Kerala government proposed to disburse Rs 4 crore, to the dependents of each deceased and Rs 2 crore to the owner of the boat St. Antony.

Mehta submitted before the bench the tribunal held that Italy would reserve the right to prosecute the marines.

"Both the Union of India and government of Kerala have accepted the tribunal's award", said Mehta.

The bench pointed out Rs 4 crore isn't a small amount, and some appropriate measures will have to be taken to ensure the money isn't wasted.

Mehta responded that money can be deposited in interest-bearing bank accounts for gradual withdrawal and accrual of adequate interest.

The top court suggested that the money can be transferred to the Kerala High Court which can monitor the aspect of disbursement to the families of the victims.

Centre and Italian government counsel urged the top court to close all proceedings and it can formalise the aspect of disbursement in its final order.

The Italian government told the top court that it would prosecute the marines, as per the international tribunal order.

The bench noted that it would pass an order on quashing the pending criminal case against the Italian marines in India.

In February 2012, India had accused the two marines on board the MV Enrica Lexie -- an Italian flagged oil tanker -- of killing two Indian fishermen who were on a fishing vessel in India's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Thiruvananthapuram, June 11 : The alleged scam pertaining to the felling of centuries-old rosewood trees in Kerala's Wayanad district by flouting norms took a new turn on Friday with the BJP asking the Wayanad MP Rahul Gandhi to break his silence on the matter.

Union Minister of State for External Affairs V.Muraleedharan on Thursday called on Union Forest and Environment Minister Prakash Javadekhar in the national capital and demanded a detailed probe by his ministry in connection to the massive felling of rosewood trees in Wayanad district.

Muraleedharan was seen on Friday morning moving around those interior areas of the district where the trees were illegally axed.

"This Wayanad constituency has now become a high profile one and its MP Gandhi is surprisingly silent on the crores of forest trees, which protect the environment, have been cut illegally and sold.

We have not heard a word from him and so does it mean he is also a silent supporter to what's happening? He should break his silence," said Muraleedharan.

He asked Javadekhar that a probe should be launched to find out the Rs 130 crore trade of rosewood trees that was felled from various places in Wayanad and other districts.

"Not long ago, when steps were not taken to douse the fire that broke out in the Amazon forests by authorities, and presently those in power here led protests against the incident.

Just see what the very same people are up to, by coming out with orders favouring the mafia and it has come to light that similar things have happened in other districts also. BJP will not allow this to happen," said Muraleedharan.

It was on Thursday a timber dealer named Rojy Augustine, presently in the dock, after forest officials alleged that he had felled expensive rosewood trees in Wayanad, claimed that he had cut the trees as per the rules and to get the necessary papers, he had paid Rs 25 lakh as bribe to the forest officials.

Incidentally, the issue was raised in the Kerala Assembly by the Congress-led Opposition on Tuesday, while the same case surfaced in the Kerala High Court the following day.

Meanwhile State Forest Minister A.K.Saseendran, however, said not a single tree which is presently in the news was cut from forest land.

"The Forest department has not come out with any order giving permission to felling of trees. It's the Revenue department which allowed such activity. I have already asked for a detailed probe into the role of forest officials in this," said Saseendran.

However, former Revenue Minister E.Chandrasekheran, presently a legislator, said that it was based on the various requests from farmers that the initial order which came out in 2005 during the then Congress-led rule (which did not allow felling of rosewood and certain high value trees) here which he had tweaked in 2020, that allowed for all those having trees except sandalwood in revenue land can cut it.

"That order was given based on the requests of farmers and others who wanted it," said Chandrasekheran.

Meanwhile, former Leader of Opposition and senior Congress legislator Ramesh Chennithala demanded a judicial probe into the illegal felling of trees.

" I seriously doubt if this order came out without the concurrence of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. The state government just cannot wash their hands and we demand a judicial probe into this case," he said.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
London, June 11 : The Group of Seven(G7) leaders countries -- Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US -- have pledged to donate one billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines to poor countries to help vaccinate the world by the end of next year, according to media reports.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has pledged more than 100 million surplus doses, which will be delivered in the next year, the BBC reported on Friday.

The first five million doses from the UK will be given by the end of September, with another 25 million by the end of the year.

Of the 100 million Covid doses, 80 million will go to the COVAX programme -- the international vaccine-sharing initiative -- 20 million will be shared bilaterally with countries in need.

"As a result of the success of the UK's vaccine programme we are now in a position to share some of our surplus doses with those who need them," Johnson was quoted as saying.

"In doing it so we will take a massive step towards beating this pandemic for good," he said, adding that he hoped his fellow leaders at the summit, which starts on Friday, would "make similar pledges so that, together, we can vaccinate the world by the end of next year".

US President Joe Biden has also promised half a billion doses of Pfizer vaccines to 92 low and middle-income countries and the African Union, the report said.

While the first 200 million doses will be distributed by the end of this year, another 300 million will be distributed by June 2021.

"The United States is providing these half billion doses with no strings attached. No strings attached," Biden was quoted as saying.

"Our vaccine donations don't include pressure for favours, or potential concessions. We're doing this to save lives," he added.

The UK government has already donated over 500 million pounds to COVAX.

Early, this month, the Biden administration had announced sharing at least 80 million vaccine doses globally by the end of June. Of these 25 million doses will be distributed this month to countries in the Caribbean and Latin America; South and Southeast Asia; Africa; and the Palestinian territories, Gaza and the West Bank. The remaining 75 per cent of these vaccines will be distributed through COVAX, the White House had said in a statement.

France and Germany have committed 30 million vaccine doses each, while Italy has pledged 15 million doses.

Together, the European Union has committed to donate at least 100 million doses of coronavirus vaccines to middle- and low-income countries before the end of the year, the Euronews reported.

Japan has pledged to donate 30 million doses this year. Canada has said it will donate excess vaccine doses to COVAX, but has not yet said when or how many, the CTVnews reported.

The G7 countries account for over a third of the world's vaccine supply, despite making up only 13 per cent of the global population.

COVAX had last month said it needed another $2 billion pledged to secure enough vaccines to vaccinate almost one-third of people living in low and middle-income countries.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation on Thursday said that 47 of Africa's 54 countries -- nearly 90 per cent -- are set to miss the September target of vaccinating 10 per cent of their people unless Africa receives 225 million more doses.

At 32 million doses, Africa accounts for under 1 per cent of the over 2.1 billion doses administered globally. Just 2 per cent of the continent's nearly 1.3 billion people have received one dose and only 9.4 million Africans are fully vaccinated.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
London, June 11 : The much-anticipated G7 Leaders' Summit, which will mark the first in-person meeting of the member heads of state since the Covid-19 outbreak last year, is set to begin on Friday with the main focus on the pandemic and climated change.

Hosted by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the three-day event will take place in the coastal village of Carbis Bay in Cornwall.

Following the inaguration on Friday, the leaders are due to discuss recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, focusing on questions such as Covid-19 vaccine donations and financial aid to build vaccine production sites around the world.

In the evening, the G7 leaders will be joined by Queen Elizabeth II, the Prince of Wales, the Duchess of Cornwall, and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge at a formal reception, the BBC reported.

Afterwards, Prince Charles will host a reception for the G7 leaders and CEOs from the world's largest companies to discuss how the private sector can work with governments to tackle the climate emergency, with Prince William also in attendance.

Last year, the G7 leaders only met virtually last year due to the pandemic.

This is also is the first major international summit for US President Joe Biden since he came to office in January, which he is attending as part of a one-week Europe trip.

After his arrival on Thursday, Biden and Johnson held a meeting during which they signed a new Atlantic Charter aimed at working together on global challenges, including illicit finance, violent conflict and extremism, climate change, and global health crises like the Covid-19 pandemic.

They also agreed to work to reopen travel and to continue to share information that will help defeat the spread of coronavirus in our countries and internationally.

The G7 comprises the US, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and Canada.

On Saturday, the leaders of Australia, India, South Korea and South Africa are invited as guests as well.

Johnson has said he hopes this will make the summit more of a conference of leading democracies.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
June 11 : Netflix today dropped the first trailer of Taapsee Pannus forthcoming film Haseen Dillruba. Taking to her Instagram profile, Taapsee dropped the trailer and wrote, Ek tha Raja, ek thi Rani, hui shuru ek khooni prem kahani (theres a king, theres a queen...starts a bloody love story). The thriller also stars Vikrant Massey and Harshvardhan Rane in pivotal roles. Helmed by Vinil Mathew, Haseen Dillruba has been penned by Kanika Dhillon, who has also been credited for the dialogue and screenplay.

In the love triangle, Taapsee, who had earlier described her character as a self-obsessed borderline narcissist, is seen in a game of love, lust, deceit and the bloodstains of a murder. Taapsee plays Rani Kashyap in Haseen Dillruba, who wears her sexuality with pride, and is a fan of pulpy fiction writer Dinesh Pandit. Rani gets married to Rishu, played by Vikrant, who fell in love with her at the first glance. Rishu, who loves her to the extent of tattooing her name on his wrist, goes all out to keep her wife happy, while Rani is seen indulging in an affair with Harshvardhan's character. Rishu is also seen suspicious of her intentions, and expressed that he feels like killing her.

Ek tha Raja, ek thi Rani, hui shuru ek khooni prem kahani.#HaseenDillruba #TheUltimateKaunspiracy pic.twitter.com/Htkjp8nBVH  taapsee pannu (@taapsee) June 11, 2021

When Rishu gets killed in a blast, Ranis life comes crashing down. The police, headed by Aditya Srivastava of CID fame, suspects Rani as the prime suspect. As the investigation starts, layers of Rani as well as Rishus characters come off. While Rani is seen trying to prove herself innocent by all means, she is seen telling the police officer, quoting her favourite writer that love is incomplete without a splatter of blood, and every story has a different side, it only depends on who is narrating it.

Fans seemed to have loved the trailer, as they flooded Taapsees post with comments. I will be locking my door and sleeping tonight! You scare me! wrote a fan. "This can be best movie of Taapsee and very excited to see Harshwardhan Rane after Sanam Teri Kasam and Vikrant Massey to special h hi," wrote a fan. Another commented on YouTube, "Whoa!!! Taapsee Is on fire, Vikrant and Harshvardhan are killing it. Cant wait."

Earlier, about Haseen Dillruba, Taapsee had said, Its not just a beautifully written mystery, it has such wonderful characters involved which is candy in an actors hands. Vikrant had said, Haseen Dillruba is the perfect mix of humour, quirk, revenge and romance. I hope it surprises the audience as much as it surprised me when I heard it first. Haseen Dillruba will start streaming on Netflix on July 2.
New Delhi, June 11 : The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday said that it has issued a show cause notice to Crypto-Currency Exchange Zanmai Labs Pvt Ltd (WazirX) and its Directors Nischal Shetty and Sameer Hanuman Mhatre for transactions involving crypto-currencies worth Rs 2,790.74 crore, officials said.

The ED had initiated Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) investigation on the basis of the ongoing money laundering probe into Chinese owned illegal online betting applications.

The official said that during investigation, it was seen that the accused Chinese nationals had laundered proceeds of crime worth Rs 57 crore by converting the Indian rupees deposits into Crypto-currency Tether (USDT) and then transferring the same to Binance (exchange registered in Cayman Islands) Wallets based on instructions received from abroad.

He said that WazirX allows vide range of transactions with Crypto-currencies(CCs) including exchange of CCs with INR and vice-versa, exchange of CCs, person to person (P2P) transactions and even transfer/receipt of crypto-currency held in its pool accounts to wallets of other exchanges which could be held by foreigners in foreign locations.

The ED official claimed that WazirX does not collect the requisite documents in clear violation of the basic mandatory Anti Money Laundering (AML) and Combating of Financing of Terrorism (CFT) precaution norms and FEMA guidelines.

"In the period under investigation, users of WazirX via its pool account, have received incoming crypto-currency worth Rs 880 crore from Binance accounts and transferred out Crypto-Currency worth Rs 1,400 crore to Binance accounts," he said.

He said that none of these transactions are available on the blockchain for any audit or investigation.

"It was found that the WazirX Clients could transfer 'valuable' crypto-currencies to any person irrespective of its location and nationality without any proper documentation whatsoever, making it a safe haven for users looking for money laundering or other illegitimate activities," he said.
Strasbourg, June 11 : Following the May 23 forced landing of a Ryanair plane travelling between two EU capitals and the arrest of blogger Roman Protasevich in Belarus, the European Parliament has called for further sanctions on the hardline regime in Minsk.

Punitive measures should be taken against the crude oil-processing industry, the production of petroleum products, and the potash, steel and wood-processing industries, it said in a resolution adopted on Thursday.

In addition, cooperation with state-owned Belarusian banks should be stopped, reports dpa news agency.

Consideration should also be given to temporarily excluding Belarus from the Swift payment system.

Josep Borrell, the EU's foreign affairs commissioner, said during Tuesday's plenary debate that he hoped the bloc's member states would adopt further punitive measures on Belarus at the next summit. For the first time, targeted economic sanctions had been agreed upon.

Belarusian authorities forced the Ryanair passenger plane on its way from Athens to Vilnius to make a stopover in Minsk and arrested the government critic Protasevich and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega on board.

The EU then reimposed sanctions on the former Soviet republic. Since last Saturday, Belarusian airlines are no longer allowed to fly into the bloc's airspace.

Due to the ongoing repression of the democracy movement in Belarus, the EU had already adopted several packages of sanctions targeting President Alexander Lukashenko's supporters last year.

Russia's possible role in the case should be investigated and, if necessary, sanctions imposed on those responsible, they said.

MEPs also backed a call by Belarusian opposition activist Svetlana Tikhanovskaya for the establishment of an international criminal court to hold the leadership in Minsk accountable.
New Delhi, June 11 : The Congress is in damage control mode in Rajasthan after Jitin Prasada's exit and is all set to fill the vacancies in the Rajasthan Cabinet in the coming days and will also take up the pending issues.

These comments were made by Rajasthan Congress in-charge Ajay Maken while staging a protest in Delhi against the fuel price hike.

To a question about the vacancies in the Rajasthan Cabinet, Maken said, "Vacant positions in the cabinet, boards and commissions would be filled soon and we are in talks with all." He said that all other pending issues will also be taken up.

When asked if senior party leader Sachin Pilot is angry, the former Union Minister said, "I am speaking to Pilotji on a regular basis. If he would have been angry, he would not be speaking to me." After Jitin Prasada switched to the BJP on Wednesday, Pilot raked up the issue of non-resolution of commitments made to him.

"It has now been 10 months. I was given to understand that there would be swift action by the committee, but now half of the term is done, and those issues haven't been resolved. It is unfortunate that so many of the party workers who worked and gave their all for getting us the mandate are not being heard," Pilot said.

On Thursday, six MLAs met Pilot at his residence. All the six were part of the 18 MLAs who had rebelled against Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and had camped in a hotel in Gurugram.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
New Delhi, June 11 : The BJP on Friday alleged that the Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal-led Delhi government is under the control of ration mafia.

Addressing a press conference on Friday, Union Minister and senior BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad said: "Arvind Kejriwal is talking about home delivery of ration, while he could not provide delivery of oxygen at doorstep or medicine from mohalla clinics.

Home delivery of ration is also a 'jumla'. The Delhi government is under the control of the ration mafia." Referring to the Food Security Act, Prasad, said: "Act provides periodic audit and monitoring of ration shops by a vigilance committee." He said that the government gives wheat at Rs 2 per kg, rice at Rs 3 per kg across the states under Food Security Act, while the rice and wheat cost Rs 37 and Rs 27 per kgs respectively.

"The government gives subsidised food grains to the states for distribution through ration shops. The government had spent about Rs 2 lakh crore annually on subsidies," he said.

Prasad added that like last year, under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana, this year also free ration is being given to the poor till November.

He further said that the government provides 37,573 tonnes of food grains to the Delhi government for distribution among 73 lakh people every month.

The Union Minister asked why the Kejriwal government did not implement 'One Nation, One Ration Card' in the national capital, which was rolled out across the country except in three states.

He further claimed that after four lakh bogus ration cards found in Delhi, the Kejriwal government stalled authentication of PoS (point of sale) machines within four months of introducing it in January 2018 under pressure from the ration mafia.

"Why authentication of beneficiaries through PoS machines has not started in Delhi's ration shops from April 2018 till now," Prasad said.

He also claimed that the Kejriwal government has no data of SC/ST beneficiaries in the city.

The Minister added that the Delhi government should come out with a new scheme for home delivery of rations and purchase food grains from the centre.

"Government will provide ration for new scheme of Kejriwal at reasonable price," he said.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Guwahati, June 11 : The opposition Congress in Assam on Friday slammed Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma for his remarks on controlling the population of the northeastern state.

While addressing the media on Thursday, Sarma said that the immigrant Muslim population must adopt decent family planning norms as land and resources are limited.

"If the population is not controlled then various problems and crimes would come up jeopardising the future of the new generations," he added.

In response, Assam Congress' Media Department Chairperson Bobbeeta Sharma said that the Chief Minister's statement in the context about population 'explosion' in Assam is "misinformed and misleading".

She said that as per the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS) undertaken by the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and released in December 2020, the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) across most Indian states have declined in the last five years.

"The total fertility rate is defined as the average number of children that would be born to a woman by the time she ends childbearing. A TFR of 2.1 is known as the replacement rate. Fertility rate of less than 2.1 implies that the total population will be less than the existing population which is also called the negative growth rate," Sharma said.

She said that as per the same survey above the fertility rate of women in Assam has declined from 2.2 in 2015-16 to 1.9 in 2020-21 and 1.9 is less than 2.1 which means the future population of Assam will only be less than the current population.

"Hence there is no question of an increase in population as per the Ministry's data." The Congress leader said that if the Chief Minister is referring to the "population explosion" that may happen in future due to immigration of people from Bangladesh and Pakistan because of the implementation of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act then perhaps his concern is valid.

"We at the Congress party take this opportunity to assure the Chief Minister that we will take definite steps and do our best to save Kamakhya temple and his house from such encroachment.

"If the population explosion continues, one day even the famous Kamakhya temple land will be encroached upon, that even my house will be encroached upon" is unbecoming of the Chief Minister of a state who is expected to be well versed in the demographic facts of the state, she added.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Lucknow, June 11 : Former Uttar Pradesh cabinet minister and Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) President, Om Prakash Rajbhar, has taken a jibe at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and said, "BJP is a sinking boat, whosoever wants to ride on it is welcome to do so, but I will not ride on it.

Apna Dal President Anupriya Patel and Nishad Party Chief Sanjay Nishad have met Union Home Minister Amit Shah amid speculation that has started months before the Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh next year.

Rajbhar tweeted on Friday, saying, "BJP is a sinking boat, whosoever wants to ride on it are free to do so, but we (SBSP) will not ride on it. Whenever elections are near, the BJP remembers the deprived and the backward sections of society. Whenever a Chief Minister has to be chosen, he is brought from outside the state and made the CM. Four-and-a-half years have passed but the issues on which my party had reached an agreement with the BJP, not a single work has been completed." The SBSP President wrote, "The rights of the backward communities were looted during the recruitment of teachers in Uttar Pradesh. With what face will the BJP, which has failed to give representation to the backward community, ask for votes among the community? They remember the backward community only at the time of seeking votes. The SBSP has formed the Bhagidari Sankalp Morcha whose aim is to defeat the BJP." The sudden arrival of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in Delhi for two days has fuelled speculation in the political circles in Uttar Pradesh. Along with a change in the BJP's state unit, there is speculation about a reshuffle in the UP cabinet. Therefore, this visit by Yogi Adityanath is considered quite significant before the Assembly elections next year.

MP Anupriya Patel also met Amit Shah to deliberate on the UP Assembly elections. After this meeting, once again speculation is rife that she might rejoin the Narendra Modi cabinet.

According to sources, Anupriya spoke to Amit Shah about the representation of Apna Dal in the possible cabinet expansion at the Centre and in Uttar Pradesh. She has asked for the inclusion of the District panchayat President and party leaders in the state corporations and commissions in Uttar Pradesh.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Kabul, June 11 : Taliban militants seized control of another important district in Afghanistans northern Takhar province, officials said on Friday.

Ishkimish, a strategically crucial district for both the Taliban and the government, fell to the militants after tough clashes late on Thursday, local council members said.

After hours of fighting, the security forces were forced to leave the district due to lack of ammunition and air support, dpa news agency quoted the members as saying said.

The fighting over control of the territory has also left a number of security forces dead and wounded, but an exact number was unknown, they said.

According to the councillors, the district is strategically important as it connects four more districts in the province and Taliban militants can now easily threaten neighbouring districts.

In the meantime, the Taliban have also been attacking parts of Bangi, another district in the province, since Thursday, the officials said.

The militants have seen a string of gains in the country recently.

Since the beginning of the official withdrawal of the US and other NATO troops in Afghanistan on May 1, at least 15 districts have fallen to the Taliban.

Afghanistan has 34 provinces and around 400 districts.

District centres serve as secondary-level administrative units, one level below the provinces.

According to a UN report, the Taliban were able to capture five districts in the past year, four of which were recaptured by the government within several days.

The Pentagon is now considering seeking authorization to carry out airstrikes to support Afghan security forces if Kabul or another major city is in danger of falling to the Taliban, according a New York Times report.
New Delhi, June 11 : On the day when the Congress is protesting against fuel price hike across the country, former party president Rahul Gandhi attacked the government for looting the country.

In a tweet on Friday he said, "GDP crashing, Unemployment soaring, Fuel prices skyrocketing. In how many more ways is #BJPLootingIndia?" Hundreds of Congress workers on Friday staged protests at several petrol pumps across the national capital over the increase in the prices of petrol and diesel.

Several senior Congress leaders including KC Venugopal, former Union Minister Ajay Maken, Delhi Congress chief Chaudhary Anil Kumar participated in the protest at several locations.

Speaking to the media, Venugopal who is Congress general secretary (organisation) said, "When the UPA government was in power, tax on petrol and diesel was Rs 9.20." "Now it is Rs 32 and we demand the government to rollback the excise duty hike on petrol-diesel," he said.

He said that fuel should come under the purview of GST.

The Congress leaders brought a horse cart to highlight their protest over the rise in fuel prices across the country.

The price of petrol has crossed Rs 100 per litre in several parts of the country while the price of diesel also saw a massive increase as it selling at over Rs 85 a litre in several areas.

The Congress leaders demanded the rollback of the hike in the fuel prices.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Gurugram, June 11 : The Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA) is working on various measures to fix the water-logging issues ahead of the monsoon season this year.

GMDA CEO Sudhir Rajpal has directed the officials of the Municipal Corporation of Gurugram (MCG), National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) and DLF to install more water pumps and deploy additional manpower in the water-logging prone areas.

Rajpal said that GMDA, MCG, NHAI and DLF should work together closely to address the water-logging woes.

The GMDA CEO also instructed the officials that complaints received through the Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC) during the monsoon season should also be resolved.

They will be addressed by sending the officers of the agency to the spot, he added.

Last year, the city was plagued by massive traffic congestion due to lack of coordination between various departments.

"A special team of the district administration will be on patrol during the monsoon season to deal with the water-logging problem across the city. Mobile pump vans and additional water pumps have been installed with operators at multiple underpasses and stretches," said a senior MCG official.

"The civic body is making all necessary efforts during the monsoon season so that the commuters on Delhi-Gurugram expressway along with the city's internal roads don't face any problem related to traffic jams. To ensure the smooth traffic in the city traffic personnel will be deployed 24x7 along with recovery vans at water-logging prone sites," he added.

Meanwhile, the Gurugram police have identified 24 points within the city which could be vulnerable to heavy traffic jams during rains. These points are Shankar Chowk, Atlas Chowk, Iffco Chowk, Signature Tower underpass, Sector-31, Jharsa Chowk, Rajiv Chowk underpass, Hero Honda Chowk underpass, Vatika Chowk, Subhash Chowk, Bata Chowk, Atul Kataria Chowk, Huda City Centre, Hanuman Chowk, Ghata More, Kherki Daula toll plaza, Rampura Chowk, IMT Chowk in Manesar, Panchgaon Chowk, Bilaspur Chowk, Kapriwas, Himgiri Chowk sector-10, Ambedkar Chowk in Sohna and Jamalpur in Pataudi. The police department has planned to deploy additional force to manage traffic during the rainy season.
New Delhi, June 11 : Credit card major SBI Cards and Payment Services has collaborated with the Gurugram administration in its fight against the pandemic.

In a statement, the company said that it has pledged over Rs 2 crore to support the Gurugram administration by helping them with ventilators, BiPAP machines, test kits and ambulances for managing the Covid-19 situation.

This collaboration is part of an ongoing national initiative by SBI Card, wherein the company is partnering with various administrations, NGOs and medical institutes under different healthcare and meal support programmes.

As the second wave of novel coronavirus has severely affected people and put pressure on the healthcare system, SBI Card has partnered with the Gurugram administration by committing 12 ventilators, 20 BiPAP machines, 30,000 test kits and 2 ambulances.

Rama Mohan Rao Amara, MD & CEO, SBI Card said: "In these testing times, SBI Card is committed to support the community and the nation in the fight against Covid-19 pandemic. We hope that this contribution will aid the efforts being made by the Gurugram administration." Yash Garg, Deputy Commissioner, Gurugram, said: "It is imperative for everyone to follow the well laid out guidelines and stay safe, it is equally important to have effective on-ground mechanism to support those affected, as also to gear up for the future. We are thankful to SBI Card for extending their support to augment our efforts."

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Srinagar, June 11 : Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) headed by former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti said on Friday it won't participate in the ongoing delimitation process since the PDP has no sitting Parliament member or any member of the legislative assembly.

PDP spokesman, Suhail Bukhari, said in reply to a question whether the People's Alliance for Gupkar Declaration (PAGD) would participate in the delimitation process, "Political parties in J&K can individually decide on their participation in the ongoing delimitation process.

"As far as the PDP is concerned, we have no MP or MLA at present so we cannot participate in the delimitation process".

Bukhari said the way the delimitation commission has been designed, only the elected representatives are entitled to participate in the process.

He said there are reports that people living within the jurisdiction of the Srinagar Cantonment board are being asked to pay property tax.

Bukhari said the government should revoke its arbitrary decision to charge properly tax from locals.

Instead of helping the people who have been suffering from 2019, the government is pushing the people to the wall," he alleged.

It must be recalled that members of the PAGD that includes the PDP, National Conference, Awami National Conference, CPI-M and J&K People's movement had met on Wednesday to discuss the way forward in light of rumours that Delhi was planning 'something big' in J&K.

Sources in the PAGD said the issue of participation in the delimitation process was brought up by National Conference patron, Farooq Abdullah during the meeting, but no consensus could be reached on this issue.
Mumbai, June 11 : Jacqueline Fernandez says she shot for her new music video "Paani paani" over two days in the blazing heat of Rajasthan. The actress made the revelation along with an Instagram collage post on Friday.

The collage is of behind-the-scenes moments that went into the making of the song, composed by Badshah and sung by Badshah and Aastha Gill.

"We shot #PAANIPAANI over 2 days in blazing Rajasthani desert heat but still this team made it so easy! Love you guys," she wrote as the caption.

The track marks the second collaboration between Badshah and Jacqueline after last year's controversial but popular "Genda phool".

The song, set in Jaisalmer, released on June 8 and currently has 26,161,055 views and 420K likes on the photo-sharing website.

-- Except for the title, this story has not been edited by Prokerala team and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed
Hyderabad, June 11 : With the US Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) recommending Ocugen Inc, the US partner of Bharat Biotech, to go for Biologics License Application (BLA) instead of Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA), the launch of the first indigenous Indian Covid-19 vaccine in the US market may be delayed.

As additional information and data is to be submitted with BLA, the launch of Covaxin is likely to take more time.

"Our US partner, Ocugen has received a recommendation from the FDA to pursue Biologics License Applications (BLA) path for Covaxin, which is full approval. All applications have to follow the BLA process, which is the standard process for vaccines. Therefore, for BLA, data from an additional clinical trial will be required to support the marketing application submission for Covaxin. This process will extend our timelines," Bharat Biotech said in a statement on Friday.

According to Hyderabad-based company, with good herd immunity and a significant percentage of the population vaccinated, the pandemic is reducing in the US. "On the sidelines of this, the USFDA had earlier communicated that no new emergency use authorisation (EUA) would be approved for new Covid-19 vaccines." No vaccine manufactured or developed from India has ever received EUA or full licensure from USFDA, it said. "When approved, it will be a great leap forward for vaccines innovation and manufacturing from India," it added.

Covaxin has received already EUAs from 14 countries with more than 50 countries in the process.

In February, Ocugen and Bharat Biotech had entered into a definitive agreement to co-develop, supply, and commercialise Covacin for the US market.

Ocugen will have US rights to the vaccine candidate and will be responsible for clinical development, regulatory approval (including EUA) and commercialisation for the US market, a joint statement had said.

Bharat Biotech had said that it would supply initial doses to be used in the US upon Ocugen's receipt of an EUA. In addition, Bharat Biotech will support the technology transfer for manufacturing in the US. In consideration for the exclusive license to the US market, Ocugen will share the profits from the sale of Covaxin in the US market with Bharat Biotech, with Ocugen retaining 45 per cent of the profits.

Early this month, Ocugen also received exclusive co-development, manufacturing, and commercialisation rights to Covaxin in Canada.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Chennai, June 11 : Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) founder- president S. Ramadoss has urged Tamil Nadu Chief minister MK Stalin to write to the Governor for the release of the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case convicts. He said that the state government must petition the Governor to immediately take action on the request made by the earlier Palaniswami government.

In a letter written to the Chief Minister on June 11, he said that the state government must request Raj Bhavan and not Rashtrapati Bhavan for the release of seven convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case.

The PMK leader said that June 11 marks the 30th year of the arrest of the seven convicts and alleged that Raj Bhavan is playing a game of hide and seek on the release of the convicts.

In reference to Chief Minister MK Stalin's letter to the President in May requesting his intervention for the release of the seven convicts, Ramadoss said that requesting the President would lead to further delay in the release. He added that the courts have already clearly said that the Governor has the authority to decide on this and approaching the President would lead to compromising the interests of the state before the Centre.

The seven convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case are Nalini Sriharan, Murugan, AG Perarivalan, Santhan, Jayakumar, Robert Payas and P Ravichandran who are in Tamil Nadu prisons.
Chandigarh, June 11 : With the failure of the Punjab government to reply on the hardship being faced for post-matric scholarship for Scheduled Castes, National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC) Chairman Vijay Sampla on Friday said the state Chief Secretary and two others were summoned for personal appearance in his office for June 17.

All the three notices issued by the commission to the Punjab government relating to the Post-Matric Scholarship Scheme being availed by the Scheduled Caste (SC) students went unanswered.

The notices were issued on May 25, June 7 and June 10.

The Chief Secretary along with the Principal Secretary (Department of Social Justice, Empowerment and Minorities) and the Principal Secretary (Department of Higher Education) has been asked to provide action taken report and other relevant documents to facilitate the hearing.

"It is unfortunate that senior officers of the Punjab government are ignoring the notices issued by the NCSC, a constitutional body set up under Article 338 of the Constitution of India," said Sampla in a statement here.

"As Chairman I am duty bound to secure the rights of Scheduled Castes and ensure that they get justice in all respects," added Sampla.

He asked the state government that "if they have not done anything wrong in implementing the scheme, then why they are running away from replying to the letters issued by the NCSC".

A day earlier, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking release of the state's pending amount and revised sharing pattern under the Post-Matric Scholarship Scheme for 2017-2020.

In his letter, the Chief Minister said though the Centre had, on December 31, 2020, amended the guidelines for the scholarship to introduce a revised sharing pattern between the Centre and the states (60:40), the same had been made effective only from April 1, 2020.

No decision had, however, been conveyed on the issue for the period April 2017 to March 2020, thus jeopardising the future of lakhs of Scheduled Caste students, he added.
Chennai, June 11 : India's only moped manufacturer TVS Motor Company Ltd closed last month selling 9,601 units, the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) said on Friday.

In a statement, the SIAM said that TVS Motor sold 9,601 units (domestic 7,135 units, exports 2,466 units) last month as compared to 13,326 units (domestic 13,088 units, exports 238 units) logged during May 2020.

Cumulatively the company has produced 43,833 mopeds this fiscal and sold 37,354 units (domestic 33,112 units, exports 4,242 units).

TVS Motor rolls out TVS-XL moped.
New Delhi, June 11 : Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Friday called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief J.P. Nadda and discussed governance as well as the political situation in the state.

In his one-hour meeting with Modi, Yogi apprised him of the political situation in UP and the steps being taken to curb the second Covid wave in the state.

After the meeting, the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) tweeted, "Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Yogi Adityanath met PM Narendra Modi." Taking to Twitter, Adityanath said: "Today, I had the privilege of meeting with respected Prime Minister Narendra Modi and getting his guidance. I wholeheartedly thanked the Prime Minister for taking out time from his busy schedule." After meeting Modi, the UP Chief Minister met BJP chief J.P. Nadda.

"Met Uttar Pradesh's Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath," Nadda tweeted post meeting.

The Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister termed it as a courtesy meeting.

The key agenda of both the meetings were next year's Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls along with Covid management, vaccination, impact of farmers protest in the western part of the state and cabinet reshuffle, sources said.

Sources said a cabinet reshuffle will take place in the coming days to include new faces and also fill vacancies.

"Some changes in state organisation may also take place to address the social equation," they said.

Sources said the role of alliance partner and new recruit Jitin Prasada was also part of the discussion between Adityanath and the BJP central leadership and the Prime Minister.

The role of former bureaucrat turned politician A.K. Sharma, an aide of Prime Minister Modi, was also discussed in the meetings.

"Decision on role of alliance partner Apna Dal, Nishad party and others in Uttar Pradesh government also discussed. Whatever is decided between Adityanath and the central leadership will be executed in Lucknow and it will be visible in the coming days," sources said.

It is learnt that in the meetings the central leadership emphasised on better coordination and connection between the government and the organisation which is reportedly missing.

On Thursday, the UP CM met Union Home Minister Amit Shah in which apart from the political situation and the saffron party's preparations, the BJP's performance in the recent panchayat polls was discussed and it was decided to focus on electing its members as 'Zila Panchayat Adhyaksh'.

Former Union Minister and Apna Dal Chief Anupriya Patel had joined the deliberations between Shah and Adityanath. Shah also had a separate meeting with Patel after the UP CM's departure.

Patel, who was a Minister of State in the first Narendra Modi government but failed to make the grade in its second term, is demanding a ministerial berth for herself in the Modi cabinet and a ministerial post for her husband Ashish Patel in the state.

Sources said she is also demanding the posts of Zila Panchayat Adhyaksh of five districts -- Mirzapur, Jaunpur, Pratapgarh, Banda and Farrukhabad.

Later in the evening, Nishad Party Chief Sanjay Nishad and his son also met Shah. Rumours had started circulating in Lucknow last fortnight ever since BJP national General Secretary (organisation) B.L. Santhosh and state in-charge Radha Mohan Singh visited Lucknow to review the party's preparations for next year's Assembly elections.

Santhosh had taken feedback from the state ministers and MLAs, which had fuelled speculation about possible changes in the party and the government set up in the state.

Sources claimed that based on the feedback collected by the central leadership, it has been decided to go for a reshuffle in the Uttar Pradesh government as well as in the party's state unit.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Hyderabad, June 11 : Planting saplings on birthdays by politicians and celebrities in Telangana seems to have become the new fashion these days.

Their followers and fans also prefer to do something meaningful by presenting them saplings instead of bouquets or garlands.

Green India Challenge, an initiative of Member of Parliament J. Santosh Kumar, is credited with bringing this change.

The Rajya Sabha member's Twitter timeline is flooded with pictures of political leaders, actors, sportspersons and other eminent people planting saplings to celebrate their birthdays by accepting his Green India Challenge (GIC).

While greeting other MPs, ministers, legislators, leaders and celebrities on their birthdays, the MP belonging to Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) urge them to plant a few saplings to mark the occasion. They respond by posting photographs clicked while planting the saplings.

"Hope you would plant few saplings to mark the special day of your life and see that your followers to do the same in order to achieve the dream of our CM KCR Sir's HarithaTelangana," Santosh Kumar tweeted tagging K. Prabhakar Reddy, the MP from Medak on his birthday on June 6.

Prabhakar Reddy accepted the challenge, planted saplings, posted the pictures to lend support Santosh Kumar's cause.

Though looks symbolic, this initiative has helped in bringing a silent transformation. The MP's passion about GIC and his continuous efforts to rope in top celebrities have helped the cause and so far led to planting of more than 10 crore trees in Telangana and other parts of the country.

It was on July 17, 2018 that Santosh Kumar launched GIC with the slogan 'Hara Hai Toh Bhara Hai' (If it is green, it is complete). "I was inspired by our Chief Minister's Haritha Haram programme which is aimed at improving the green cover," he said.

Started in 2015, Haritha Haram is one of the world's largest plantation programme with an aim to increase the forest cover in the state from 24 per cent to 33 per cent. Every year, crores of saplings are being planted across the state under Haritha Haram, a brainchild of Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao, popularly known as KCR.

"Haritha Haram is a testimony of KCR garu's vision for the overall development state and its citizens. The logic behind is simple. The thick, dense forest cover ensures timely arrival of seasons, rains, which in turn increases the agricultural productivity, reduces environmental pollution, instills healthy living and the list of benefits goes on," says Santosh, a relative of the chief minister.

Keen to do his bit in promoting green cover, the MP came with the idea of GIC, inviting people from all walks of life to plant saplings.

The challenge gained momentum with people sending in images, videos, responses, positive opinions about taking part in GIC.

Several eminent personalities have responded to his call. Celebrities like Sachin Tendulkar, Sanjay Dutt, Ajay Devgun, Shruthi Haasan, Shraddha Kapoor, Chiranjeevi, Nagarjuna, Prabhas, Krishna, Pawan Kalyan, Mahesh Babu, Rajamouli, Samanta, Pullela Gopichand, P V. Sindhu, Saina Nehwal and Sania Mirza have participated in GIC.

Going beyond the symbolic gesture, Santosh Kumar adopted 2,042 acres of Keesara Reserve Forest on the occasion of state minister and TRS Working President K. T. Rama Rao's birthday. This was in response to 'Gift a smile challenge' of Rama Rao, who wanted his supporters to do something meaningful for the society on his birthday. It is believed to be the first instance of an individual adopting a forest for its protection.

This idea of adopting and pledging care for reserve forests motivated others. Actor Prabhas of 'Baahubali' fame came forward for protection and development of 1,650 acres of Kazipally Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Hyderabad.

The actor gave Rs 2 crore to the forest department for the purpose.

Santosh's call to industrialists to come forward to participate in the green movement also started evoking good response. Hetero Pharma agreed to shield the greenery and life in 2,543 acres of Mumbapur-Nallavelli Reserve Forest.

On the Chief Minister's birthday on February 17, the MP gave a call for 'Koti Vrukshaarchana' or planting of 1 crore saplings.

He appealed to everyone to plant at least three saplings wherever possible.

"This idea was instantly liked and lapped up. I spoke to various individuals, professionals, employed, self-employed including public representatives both at central and state levels and it became a hit in a jiffy," he said.

Last month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi lauded the Santosh Kumar's initiative. In a letter to the MP, Modi congratulated him for undertaking 'this noble initiative to preserve a cleaner, greener environment.' The MP recently brought out the book 'Vruksha Vedam' which has the shlokas highlighting the importance of trees and forests as depicted in the Indian literature. It also explains the importance, medicinal and therapeutic properties of various plants, trees as mentioned in vedas for creating awareness among the general public.

GIC representatives Raghava and Karunakar Reddy say the GIC is for everyone. Anybody can plant 3 saplings in his/her house, park, balcony or any other place and WhatsApp selfie pictures to 9000365000. He will receive a message to download an App, where he can upload selgies. GIC also post the images its social media pages.
Kathmandu, June 11 : As part of the 'Neighborhood First policy, medical equipment and supplies worth Nepali Rupees 28.80 crore (Rs 280 million) provided by the Indian Army were handed over to the Nepali Army here on Friday.

During a ceremony at the Nepali Army headquarters, the medical equipment were handed over by the Ambassador of India to Nepal, Vinay Mohan Kwatra, to General Purna Chandra Thapa, Chief of the Nepali Army, according to the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu.

The medical equipment, including ventilators, ambulances, ICU beds, PPE kits, PCR test kits etc. were delivered to Kathmandu on Thursday.

Kwatra reaffirmed India's support to Nepali Army in its fight against the Covid-19 pandemic and lauded its contribution in this respect, the Embassy said, adding that the latest assistance is another testament to the close cooperation between the two armies and the two countries, particularly in times of need.

The Indian Army has been assisting the Nepali Army to fight Covid-19 through various kinds of help since last year, including donation of one lakh doses of Covishield vaccine, which were provided in March this year.

The armed forces of the two neighbouring countries share fraternal relations since decades where chief of both the armies are respective honorary chiefs of Nepali and Indian armies.

Due to these strong fraternal relations, Nepali Army receives a large amount of support from the Indian Army. Most of the time, Nepali Army procures its military and other logistical support and needs, including both lethal and non-lethal, from the Indian Army.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Kolkata, June 11 : In a big blow to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in West Bengal, its all-India Vice President and MLA Mukul Roy joined the Trinamool Congress on Friday along with his son Subhrangshu Roy, almost four years after deserting the Trinamool camp for the saffron brigade.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who was present at the Trinamool Bhavan during the meeting to induct Roy back into the party fold, said that more people will come out of the BJP and join the Trinamool Congress.

Roy and his son were greeted back into the Trinamool by its all-India General Secretary, Abhishek Banerjee.

"Mukul (Roy) is our old member and he has come back. He was not in a good condition in the BJP because the saffron party created pressure on him through agencies, as a result he was not in mental peace. I was watching that his health condition had also deteriorated because one cannot stay in the BJP. It is a heartless party and no human being can stay there," Mamata Banerjee said.

Roy, who had left Trinamool Congress in 2017, said, "I am having a nice feeling for being among familiar people again. This has a kind of homely atmosphere. I am confident that West Bengal will again reach to the top under the leadership of our leader and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee." When asked what made him return to the Trinamool, the former all-India General Secretary of the party said, "I shall not work for the BJP again, so I have come back here." Denying having any difference with Roy even when he was in the BJP, Mamata Banerjee said, "Even when he was in the BJP, he never said anything against me or the party. He has always been good with our party leaders. Even during the elections, he was quiet about our party." Hinting that more people from the BJP are likely to join the Trinamool, the Chief Minister said, "Trinamool will welcome everybody who is sober and gentle. But there are some people who betrayed the party before the elections and badmouthed the Trinamool leaders. They are betrayers, and the party will never accept them."

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Agartala, June 11 : The plan to rehabilitate 36,140 tribal migrants, who had fled Mizoram 24 years ago, following ethnic strife, received a jolt after the National Green Tribunal (NGT) accepted a complaint filed against their resettlement in Tripura's forest areas.

The Centre and the Tripura government have undertaken a Rs 1,200 crore ambitious project to rehabilitate 36,140 tribal immigrants in 13 locations across different districts of Tripura.

Environmentalists, experts and Dhanishwar Debnath, who filed the petition in the NGT, have been saying that they are not against the rehabilitation of the tribal migrants but they are against deforestation and adverse effect on forest and environment.

The NGT has sought replies from the Forest department and North Tripura district administration on a complaint filed by Debnath that the migrant tribals from adjoining Mizoram were being resettled in forest land of Tripura.

The Kolkata-based eastern zonal bench of the NGT directed the Principal Secretary of Tripura's Forest Department, the District Magistrate of North Tripura district and other officials to submit a report on the rehabilitation plan by July 14.

Debnath, General Secretary of a local club, in his petition referred to an e-tender floated by the Tripura government on November 4, 2020, seeking "certain constructions within a forest area" in North Tripura district.

He said that according to the Forest Conservation Act of 1980, if certain areas were deforested, the concerned authorities must have afforested those areas by new plantations but there is no such additional lands in most districts for the fresh plantations.

Principal Chief Conservator of Forests Dvijendra Kumar Sharma while talking to IANS said that they are aware about the order of the NGT and they would respond in due course of time.

Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb, who recently visited Dhalai district to supervise the arrangements of the resettlement of the tribal migrants, had said that the Tripura government has selected 13 locations in different districts to rehabilitate the internally displaced Reang tribes, locally called "Bru".

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah have taken bold steps to resolve the 24-year-old ethnic crisis of the Reang tribes," said the Chief Minister.

He said that the Prime Minister has already announced a Rs 600 crore package for the resettlement of these tribal migrants in Tripura.

According to the agreement signed in January last year by the Chief Secretaries of Mizoram, Tripura, Union Ministry of Home Affairs Joint Secretary Satyendra Garg and the representatives of the refugees in the presence of Home Minister Amit Shah, 36,140 tribals from around 5,400 families of the Reang tribal community would be resettled in different districts of Tripura.

Since October 1997, the Reang tribals have been sheltered in northern Tripura's seven relief camps in Kanchanpur and Panisagar sub-divisions.

The resettlement of the first batch of around 890 Reang tribals had started on April 19, more than 15 months after a four-partite agreement was signed in Delhi.

Dhalai District Magistrate and Collector Govekar Mayur Ratilal said that the tribals would now temporarily stay in the newly built makeshift houses in Ambassa and Longtharai Valley sub-divisions before their permanent resettlement.

"The concerned departments have arranged water, electricity and other basic amenities for the tribals," the DM told IANS over phone.

The agreement came after the Tripura Chief Minister in November 2019 agreed to accept the 36,140 tribal refugees and rehabilitate them in the state.

The Reang tribals would also be included as voters in Tripura as maintained in the agreement, which was signed on January 16 last year.

The Centre has announced a Rs 600 crore package for the settlement of the Reang tribals, recognised as a primitive tribe in Tripura.

Of the package, Rs 150 lakh will be earmarked to the Tripura government for land acquisition and the rest would be spent on the welfare of these tribals.

A series of violent agitations against the resettlement of the Reang tribals in northern Tripura was witnessed in November last year.

The agitations in Kanchanpur and Panisagar, both North Tripura districts adjoining Mizoram, caused two deaths -- fire-fighter Biswajit Debbarma (41) and agitator Srikanta Das (45) -- besides injuring 32 others, including security personnel, fire-fighters and protesters besides damaging many police and private vehicles.

The Joint Movement Committee (JMC), comprising two organisations -- Nagarik Suraksha Mancha (Citizen Protection Forum) and Mizo Convention, both representing the non-tribals and Lusai tribals, had spearheaded the agitations opposing the resettlement of the internally displaced Reang tribals in Kanchanpur sub-division.

(Sujit Chakraborty can be contacted at sujit.c@ians.in)
New Delhi, June 11: Right when the G7 Summit of the seven wealthiest democratic nations begins in Cornwall in the south of UK, French President Emmanuel Macron dropped a bombshell, saying that France, and hopefully the European Nation (EU), will maintain equidistance from both the US and China.

"Our approach in terms of Indo-Pacific strategy is not to align with anybody. The line I'm advocating for France, and I hope for Europe, is not to be made a vassal by China nor be aligned with the United States on this subject." He shared these views at a news conference, highlighting that France would like to remain neutral in matters of defence in the Indo-Pacific region.

In doing so, Macron appeared to be returning to his country's de Gaulian roots. At the height of the Cold War, former Prime Minister Charles De Gaulle saw France as a "third pole," which was neither aligned with the United States, nor the former Soviet Union. In de Gaulle's worldview, France was an independent player on the global chessboard, with its own set of partners and followers, attuned to the French, if not European way of life.

Interpreting Macron's statement just before the G7 meets, author and former Indian diplomat Achal Malhotra told India Narrative in an exclusive interview that the French President has made numerous similar statements in the recent past which conclude that France considers China, at the same time a partner, competitor and a systemic rival".

Malhotra said: "France considers there is a potential in engaging China as a partner in issues such as climate change, competing in the spheres of trade and economy and dealing in such matters through established international mechanisms such as WTO, and containing China's aggressive expansionism".

The former diplomat to east European nations says that it is clear that Macron is visibly opposed to any firm and loud anti-China alliance. "This anti-China alliance may be called an 'alliance of democracies' or by any other description but France views that such an approach would be counterproductive".

The French leader's opinion is significant as it comes before an extended grouping of G7. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has also invited India, Australia, South Korea and South Africa to the summit under the guise of key Indo-Pacific players. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will participate virtually.

The US has been voluble about forging an anti-China alliance with like-minded countries owing to China's territorial ambitions and its unsheathed aggression in various geographical quarters. In a recent thought paper, made public by US President Joe Biden, he had made it clear that China has come up a formidable competitor and enemy in the areas of defence and technology. Biden's paper laid emphasis on knitting together like-minded democracies to take on China.

With the US trying to stitch together a coalition with allies in Europe and in the Indo-Pacific, the French President's views have sprung a surprise. As Malhotra says: "In my opinion, the divergence of views within the European community in this context may impact on the US President's desire to forge a global alliance against China to a certain extent".

The divergence of opinion reflects some amount of confusion among the European nations.

France has, to the contrary, in February this year sent its battle ships to the Indo-Pacific for the three-month mission. The ships will sail through the South China Sea at least twice and will also hold maritime exercises with the US and Japanese navies.

France has also deployed a nuclear attack submarine in the South China Sea to re-affirm its, the European Union's and the American government's position on the freedom of navigation in the international seas.

(This content is being carried under an arrangement with indianarrative.com) --indianarrative/
New Delhi, June 11 : The Supreme Court on Friday asked the West Bengal government to immediately implement the 'one nation one ration card' scheme.

A bench of Justices Ashok Bhushan and M.R, Shah said no excuse will be considered and the state must implement the scheme, as the state government counsel submitted that there are Aadhaar seeding issues. The bench said: "You cannot cite one or the other problem. This is for migrant workers." The top court was hearing the suo moto case addressing the problems and miseries of migrant workers amid the Covid pandemic. Senior advocate Dushyant Dave, appearing for the petitioners, submitted that there were nearly 2.8 crore migrants without ration cards, and they are under serious difficulty as they would not be covered under the PM Garib Kalyan Yojana.

The bench noted that the scheme has been extended till November, but Dave said the scheme will benefit only those who have ration cards.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta pointed out that 80 crore have been identified under the Garib Kalyan scheme.

As the bench queried what scheme will cover the people who don't have ration cards, Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati replied that the latitude has been left to the states and it is for the states to have schemes for those who do not have ration cards.

The bench noted that the Centre is ready to distribute food grains, and it has to see what mechanism can be adopted. Dave, however, argued that the Centre is trying to pass the burden on states.

The bench said that there are states that don't have such schemes, and can the Garib Kalyan scheme be temporarily extended to also those who don't have the ration cards. To this, Mehta said that the Centre's officials can have talks with the Secreatries concerned in the states and come back after a week. "Nobody is leaving them to die. There are schemes to help them," he said.

During the hearing, counsel for the Maharashtra and Punjab governments informed the court that they follow the one nation one ration card scheme. At this stage, the West Bengal government counsel submitted that the state has not implemented the scheme yet and the bench said that it has to implement it when the others have.

The top court asked the states to file short response in the matter and reserved the judgment.

It also expressed dissatisfaction over the delay in the development of software by Centre for registration of unorganised workers. "You initiated it in August 2020, and it is still not over," it said, adding that the Centre is not conducting any survey but only creating a module so that data can be fed into the mechanism. Mehta replied that court's concerns are right, and he will take instructions in the matter.

At this, the bench said that this can't be left to bureaucracy anymore. "Your officers have done nothing. Just because your directors etc don't have time, this can't be put on hold forever," said the bench pulling up the Centre.

Mehta requested the court not to pass order on extension of the scheme, as it may have financial ramifications. The bench responded that it understands the matter.

The top court was hearing an application by activists Harsh Mander, Anjali Bhardwaj, and Jagdeep Chhokar, seeking directions to ensure that migrant workers are not deprived of ration and food security, and they should also be able to travel back to their homes at nominal cost.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Patna, June 11 : Larger parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Janata Dal United JD(U) which are part of the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in Bihar are in a dilemma over the issues raised by smaller allies like Hindustani Awam Morcha (HAM) and the Vikassheel Insaan Party (VIP).

By raising such issues, the tension between the parties which are part of the NDA is quite evident. There is already a tussle between HAM and the BJP, the largest constituent party in the NDA. HAM Chief and former Bihar Chief Minister, Jitan Ram Manjhi, has put the Bihar government in a spot by advising it on various issues.

Now another smaller NDA alliance partner VIP has also created problems for the Bihar government by demanding a refund of the money collected from the members of the Legislative Assembly and the Bihar Legislative Council.

Manjhi's HAM has said that some BJP leaders are trying to destabilise the Bihar government. The HAM has demanded the formation of a coordination committee for the NDA.

Manjhi demanded a caste-based census on Friday. Manjhi tweeted from his official Twitter account, "Census of the country is necessary in the present situation but due to Covid-19 pandemic, the census work has been put on hold. Why avoid caste-based census when elections are held in the country?" The HAM Chief wrote demanding that the government must start a 10-year census along with a caste-based census without any further delay.

Earlier, Manjhi had put pressure on the Central government by demanding a special status for Bihar.

VIP Chief and cabinet minister, Mukesh Sahani, has advised the NDA government to stop internal feuds but has raised the promise of providing employment to 19 lakh people in Bihar.

Sahani tweeted from his official Twitter account, "Requesting all NDA colleagues to refrain from making unnecessary rhetorical statements. All of us must come together with the people of Bihar and work on the promise of generating 19 lakh jobs." The VIP Chief has written to Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar demanding return of the money taken from the members of the Legislative Assembly and the Legislative Council.

Sahani wrote in his letter that since 2020 till now the development work for the people in each area has come to a standstill. Now that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced to give vaccines free to the states, the Chief Minister should give power to the MLAs to use the amount of the voluntary fund under the regional development head so that the latter will be able to do development work in their areas and help to improve medical facilities.

In view of the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic, the Nitish Kumar government has taken Rs 2 crore each from the funds of MLAs and MLCs.

However, after the demands made by the smaller NDA allies, problems have increased for the Bihar government. The opposition Grand Alliance has also been targeting the NDA government raking up these issues. Now the NDA is in a dilemma after many questions were raised by the parties which are part of the government.
Chennai, June 11 : Television broadcast major Sun TV Network Ltd on Friday said it closed last fiscal with 11 per cent growth net profit of about Rs 1,520.41 crore on reduced revenue.

According to the company, it has earned a net profit of about Rs 1,520.41 crore last fiscal up from a net profit of about Rs 1,371.83 crore logged in FY20.

Sun TV's total revenue was about Rs 3,388.03 crore last year, down from Rs 3,653.35 crore earned in FY20.

The advertisement revenues for the year was at Rs 994.03 crore as against Rs 1,336.91crore for the previous year ended March 31, 2020.

The subscription revenues for the year were up about 10 per cent at about Rs 1,721.48 crore, as against about Rs 1,562.23 crore for the previous year ended March 31, 2020.
Chennai, June 11 : Dairy major Dodla Dairy Ltd will use the Rs 50 crore raised from initial public offering (IPO) for repaying debt and also for expansion, said a top company official.

The company will hit the market with its premium Rs 520 crore IPO that consists of fresh issue of Rs 50 crore and an offer for sale of up to 10,985,444 shares by promoters, promoter group and existing investors.

Briefing reporters about the forthcoming public issue, Dodla Sunil Reddy, Managing Director of the company, said that about Rs 32 crore of the IPO proceeds coming into the company will be used for retiring debt and the balance for incremental capex.

"We will improve milk procurement, invest in chilling plans. We are also looking at inorganic growth," he said.

According to him, the company has sizable internal accruals as well.

Reddy said the company has an appetite to look at acquisitions with a ticket size of about Rs 200 crore, but it should be value accretive.

Dodla Dairy, which will get on to the online sales segment soon, also plans to add a couple of hundred of retail outlets this year to its existing 370 outlets selling milk and milk based products.

According to Reddy, the company gets 73 per cent of its revenues from selling liquid milk and the balance from value added products.

The Dodla Dairy IPO opens on June 16 and the price band will be Rs 421-428 per share. The bid lot will be 35 shares.
Bengaluru, June 11 : Kannada actor Rakshit Shetty is all set for the release of his upcoming film "777 Charlie". Besides in Kannada language, the film will also release in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam languages.

"Bearing the vitality and the pertinence of the subject in mind, the making of '777 Charlie' had been wisely planned and executed in a way that the film feels relatable to audiences across borders. Owing to the universality of the subject, the team has conformed to the idea of presenting the film on a pan-India scale," Rakshit tells IANS.

He adds: "Good content has a universal language. This has been proven time and again in the last 18 months, as people have been consuming creative content presented from around the world on OTT platforms. Great content always strike the right chords. We are therefore certain that our film will be well received by the audience across the country and beyond." says the actor, who was last seen on screen in Kannada film "Avane Srimannarayana".

"777 Charlie", directed by Kiranraj K., explores the bond between humans and animals. Rakshit, who plays the character of Dharma, reflects on the relationship humans have with their dogs.

"Dogs bring happiness and affection into our lives. Since the pandemic the world has seen a steep rise in the number of adoptions. People have become increasingly open to inviting pet pals into their lives. The story of Dharma and Charlie (his dog) will add to the girth of the profoundness of the relationship that we share with our pets," he says.

While the makers haven't yet finalised the release date yet, the film is expected to be somewhere in September.
Chandigarh, June 11 : A huge cache of foreign-made pistols has been seized and a smuggler, allegedly linked with Pakistan-based terror outfits and pro-Khalistani elements based in the US, Canada and the UK and operating on directions of a US-based handler, arrested, Punjab's Director General of Police Dinkar Gupta said on Friday.

The weapons seized on late Thursday were meant for carrying out terrorist activities in various parts of India, he said.

Jagjit Singh, 25, a resident of Batala, was arrested from near Kathunangal village in Amritsar district by a team of the Internal Security Wing, he said.

In an intelligence-led operation, the police intercepted a car at a specially laid police barricade on the Amritsar-Batala road in Kathunangal, and found two nylon bags containing 48 foreign made pistols of different foreign makes and bores, along with magazines and ammunition. The cache included 19 Turkish pistols of 9 mm, 37 magazines and 45 rounds; nine Chinese pistols of .30 bore and 22 magazines; 19 pistols of .30 bore (Star mark), 38 magazines and 148 rounds; and one Italian pistol of 9 mm and two magazines.

Giving details of the weapons smuggling nexus, the DGP said preliminary investigations had revealed that Jagjit Singh had been directed by Darmanjit Singh, a former gangster, to collect this weapon consignment.

Jagjit Singh has been in touch with Darmanjit Singh, who is at present based in the US. During his stay in Dubai from 2017 to December 2020, Jagjit Singh had remained in touch with Darmanjit Singh, who motivated him to work for him.

The mastermind of this racket, Darmanjit Singh had reportedly tasked Jagjit Singh to collect and conceal the weapon consignment and wait for further instructions for the delivery of the pistols, said the DGP, adding open-ended warrants against proclaimed offender Darmanjit Singh have been obtained.

Darmanjit Singh was involved in various criminal activities in Punjab before his escape to the US in 2017 to evade arrest.

He facilitated the escape of notorious gangster Harwinder Singh from police custody in 2017.

Punjab Police, which has launched a drive against Pakistan-sponsored terrorist elements, have busted 44 terror modules in the past four years. Besides, 283 terrorists and criminals have been arrested.
New Delhi, June 11 : The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) has welcomed the judgement of the Karnataka High Court on Friday dismissing the petition of Amazon and Flipkart and the stay granted on an investigation by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) against Amazon and Flipkarts e-commerce business model in India.

"It fully vindicates the stand of CAIT that the business model of Amazon and Flipkart is entirely based on violating the FDI policy, rules and other laws and therefore without wasting any more time, the CCI should immediately begin its probe," CAIT said.

The CCI found a prima facie case for investigation against Amazon and Flipkart for violating competition law and distorting the level playing field in January 2020. Amazon and Flipkart had approached the Karnataka High Court in February 2020 and obtained a stay on the probe.

The CCI then approached the Supreme Court which directed the Karnataka High Court to hear the matter. Thereafter the matter was heard for nearly 40 days by the Karnataka High Court and the order was reserved in April which was pronounced on Friday.

While welcoming the court order, CAIT said that with the pronouncement of the judgement, there is no bar for conducting investigations into business model of Amazon and Flipkart, and therefore, the CCI should immediately take necessary steps to investigate Amazon and Flipkart's business practices and their business model in India, through which they are continuing with malpractices and dodging the law, rules and policies of the country.

CAIT said it is for both the Central and state governments to bring to the books the people who are continuously violating the law and the rules and speedy actions should be taken against Amazon, Flipkart and others.

"Foreign companies, particularly in the e-commerce sector, have been taking India as a Banana Republic where the laws, policies and rules have no sanctity and they have been provided with impunity to manipulate them according to their wish.

"Unfortunately, they have been successfully violating the laws and polices, bringing much disadvantage to the small traders of the country. Therefore, the dictum 'actions speak louder than the words' needs to be put into practical operation by the Union government," CAIT said.

CAIT has urged Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal to immediately release a much-awaited new press note replacing press note No. 2 of the FDI policy, blocking the escape routes for these foreign funded e-commerce companies.
New Delhi, June 11 : The issue of delivery of subsidized food grains at the doorstep, which has sparked a political war between Delhi's ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led Central government, again brought both the parties to a confrontation on Friday.

The fresh standoff between the AAP and the BJP began after Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Friday attacked Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, calling his doorstep delivery of food grains scheme a 'jumla' and accused the AAP of links to the 'ration mafia.' Addressing a press conference, the Union Minister also accused the Arvind Kejriwal-led AAP government of not implementing the Centre's 'One Nation, One Ration Card' scheme under which economically weaker sections get subsidised food grains.

"This ration delivery to homes sounds like a novel idea. But, if you check the details you will find loopholes and possibilities for corruption. Is this what Arvind Kejriwal wants? Do you (Kejriwal) want to break the law and fool the people?" Prasad said.

He also accused the Kejriwal government of failing to provide oxygen to the people of Delhi during the peak of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.

"We introduced 'One Nation, One Ration Card' based on Aadhaar. People can get their ration at fair price shops anywhere in the country, and can even divide portions with the family back home. Sad to say only three states have not implemented it - Delhi, Bengal and Assam," Prasad added.

Later, responding to the charges, Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said the oxygen shortage in Delhi was the failure of the Centre and not the Delhi government.

Addressing a digital press conference, Sisodia said, "People were knowing that BJP means Bharatiya Janata Party, but now it has become 'Bharatiya Jhagda Party. BJP's leaders do nothing but abuse the opposition. Every time, they will fight with state governments, instead of helping the states in development issues." Earlier, AAP head and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had accused the BJP of supporting the 'ration mafia'.
New York, June 11 : After getting slammed for not complying with Indias new Digital Media Ethics Code which dramatically alters intermediary liability in the country and mandates the appointment of a chief compliance officer, Jack Dorsey's Twitter is scrambling to hire a "staff designer" who can "locally tailor" its "global product" for India, besides aggressively pushing an open position based in Bengaluru, also the backyard of homegrown competitor Koo.

With this, Twitter India is stepping into the equation in the public domain after a series of recent blows, even as Twitter officials told an Indian newswire that they are hurrying and would close the loop on appointing a chief compliance officer "within a week" from June 7.

As on date, Twitter shows 19 open positions in India, with "Resident Grievance Officer" and "Chief Compliance Officer" popping up now at the top of that list. Both the positions don't show a last date for applications on the landing page.

Meanwhile, Twitter India MD Manish Maheshwari re-posted a job opening on his Twitter timeline on Thursday, saying "Design for India, design in India. Join TeamIndia. We are hiring".

"Locally relevant", "locally tailor" and "needs" of Indian customers are all over Twitter's job description for a "Staff Designer - Global Participation, India".

Twitter India did not respond to three specific questions on the timing of its "new approach" or the "gaps" in strategy that it highlights in its own ad.

The opening lines of the ad read, "India is one of Twitter's key markets and will be one of the first countries in which we pilot this new approach of building an in-market team to locally tailor our global product to the needs of a specific region." The new hire is expected to "customise the Twitter experience to best meet the needs of our customers in India".

The India-focus staff designer is expected to use "deep understanding" of the "unique" ways people use Twitter in India to highlight "gaps" in Twitter's product strategy.

Twitter is hoping to land on a designer who can cover "everything from engineering to business development and product marketing".

"Very happy that a year old startup could rattle a giant to start thinking of innovating locally," said a Bengauru based Twitter and Koo user.

Twitter's open position push comes after a series of blows. On June 5, India dashed off a notice to billionaire Jack Dorsey's Twitter, giving the micro blogging platform one last chance to "immediately" comply with her new information technology rules which came into effect on May 26, 2021.

A furious Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) warned Twitter that failure to adhere to the norms will lead the platform to lose exemption from liability under the Information Technology Act.

Such loss of exemption will expose Team Dorsey, including Dorsey himself, to multiple headaches under the IT Act, 2000 as well as other penal provisions of the land. In the past, Dorsey had refused to present himself before a Parliamentary panel of 31 MPs citing short notice.

MeitY saw Team Dorsey's refusal to comply with the rules demonstrating the microblogging site's "lack of commitment and efforts towards providing a safe experience for the people of India on its platform".

The notice, however, did not give a specific deadline to comply with the rules. The Delhi High Court has already backed MeitY's case.

Dorsey's nonchalance before governments is well known. This was evident when the platform claimed to be a defender of free speech.

India returned the volley with indignation: "Protecting free speech in India is not the prerogative of only a private, for-profit, foreign entity like Twitter, but it is the commitment of the world's largest democracy and its robust institutions. Twitter's statement is an attempt to dictate its terms to the world's largest democracy.

"Through its actions and deliberate defiance, Twitter seeks to undermine India's legal system. Furthermore, Twitter refuses to comply with those very regulations in the Intermediary Guidelines on the basis of which it is claiming a safe harbour protection from any criminal liability in India." With 68.8 million Twitter follows, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has the second highest number of follows among all political leaders on the planet after Barack Obama. The 'NM' handle is 12th highest followed on the platform overall and has more follows than even Twitter and 12x of Jack Dorsey's. Dorsey was granted a coveted meeting with Modi during a drop-by to Delhi in November 2018.

As political risk escalates around media regulation, and Twitter finds itself on the wrong side of government(s), Koo has found a new perch in Africa. The Nigerian government on June 10 created its account on Koo days after banning Twitter.

As per Statista, India has upwards of 17.5 million Twitter users (January data). This makes it the third biggest market for Jack Dorsey in the world after the US and Japan. Koo reported more than 6.5 million downloads, as of last week.
Chennai, June 11 : Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin on Friday announced the extension of the lockdown by another week till June 21 with some relaxations that includes opening of liquor shops in 27 districts.

The current lockdown comes to an end on June 14.

In a statement issued here, Stalin said all shops that are permitted to operate should have: (a) sanitiser with dispenser outside the shop and thermal screening of customers should be done (b) shop employees and the customers should compulsorily wear masks (c) all shops should be without air conditioning and social distancing should be maintained with markings on the floor outside the shop for people to stand should be done.

He said considering the high rate of Covid-19 infection in Coimbatore, Nilgiris, Tiruppur, Erode, Salem, Karur, Namakkal, Thanjavur, Tiruvarur, Nagapattinam and Myladuthurai, some essential services, subject to certain restrictions, are allowed from June 14 onwards.

Private housekeeping services will be allowed with an e-pass, while electricians, plumbers, carpenters, motor technicians and other self-employed persons will be allowed to function between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. with e-pass at their customers' homes buy they cannot open their shops; Shops selling and repairing spectacles, as well as cycle and two-wheeler mechanic shops, can function between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m, and pottery and handicraft makers can function between 6 a.m. and 5 p.m.

Taxis with three passengers, other than driver, and autorickshaws with two passengers can ply with e-pass.

Meanwhile, export units and units supplying raw materials for export units located in Coimbatore, Tiruppur, Salem, Karur, Erode, Namakkal and Trichy can function for supply of samples with 25 per cent staff strength.

In the case of other 27 districts apart from the earlier relaxations, the new relaxations include opening of state-owned TASMAC liquor shops between 10 a.m and 5 p.m., beauty parlours/saloons are allowed with 50 per cent customer capacity between 9 a.m and 5 p.m., and shops selling and repairing spectacles, mobile phones, construction materials, and consumer durables can function between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m.

Government parks will be open between 6-9 a.m. for walkers, while pottery and handicraft makers can function between 6 a.m. and 5 p.m.

Schools/colleges can function only for administrative work in connection with student admission, export units and units supplying raw materials for export units can function with 50 per cent staff strength and other industrial units with 33 per cent staff strength, and industrial workers and reach office on their two-wheelers with e-pass and office identity card.

IT offices can function only with 10 persons or 20 per cent staff strength whichever is lower, and housing finance, and non-banking finance companies can function with 33 per cent staff strength.
Hyderabad, June 11 : The genetic variants responsible for Covid-19 severity among Europeans may not play a role in Covid-19 susceptibility among South Asians, reveals a study by an international team of scientists.

In the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, it is still unclear why some people experience more severe symptoms and adverse outcomes than others.

An earlier research done on the European population suggested variations in a specific DNA segment strongly associated with severe Covid-19 infection and hospitalisation. This DNA segment is present in 50 per cent of South Asians as compared to 16 per cent of Europeans.

The international team of scientists have analysed the role of this DNA segment in determining Covid-19 outcomes among the South Asian population. They concluded that the genetic variants responsible for Covid-19 severity among Europeans may not play a role in Covid-19 susceptibility among South Asians, as per findings published in journal Scientific Reports.

The study was directed by Dr Kumarasamy Thangaraj, Director, the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics & Chief Scientist, CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad and Prof Gyaneshwer Chaubey, of the Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi.

"In this study, we have compared infection and case fatality rates with South Asian genomic data over three different timelines during the pandemic. We have especially looked into a large number of populations from India and Bangladesh," said Dr Thangaraj.

"Our result reiterates the unique genetic origin of South Asian populations. A dedicated Genome-wide association study on South Asian COVID-19 patients is the need of time for us in the Asian sub-continent," said Prajival Pratap Singh, first author of this study.

The study also suggests that the genetic variants correlated with Covid-19 outcomes differ significantly among caste and tribal populations of Bangladesh. "Scientists working in the area of population studies should be more cautious to interpret their findings by differentiating caste and tribal populations, more explicitly so in the Bangladeshi population," said Prof George van Driem, a renowned linguist and co-author of the study.

"With growing data, it is becoming quite clear that there are several factors including genetics, immunity and the life-style are the contributing factor for COVID-19 susceptibility. CCMB's expertise in population studies are proving useful in understanding these details of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic," CCMB Director Dr Vinay Nandicoori said.

Other participants of this study include Anshika Srivastava and Nargis Khanam from the BHU; Dr Abhishek Pathak and Prof Royana Singh, of the Institute of Medical Sciences, BHU; Dr Gazi Sultana from Dhaka University, Bangladesh; Dr Pankaj Shrivastava, Forensic Science Laboratory, Sagar, MP; and Dr Prashanth Suravanjhala, Birla Institute of Scientific Research, Jaipur.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Gandhinagar, June 11 : Gujarat BJP president CR Paatil on Friday said that during the pandemic's 2nd wave, which impacted the state terribly alongwith the country, the Congress leaders were nowhere to be seen, whereas the BJP party and its workers were constantly in touch with the people. He was speaking at the state BJP headquarters in Gandhinagar where the core committee meeting of the saffron party was held.

The BJP in-charge for Gujarat, Bhupendra Yadav is on a three- day visit to the state and on the first day headed the core committee meeting held on Friday at 'Shree Kamalam', the party headquarters.

The meeting was convened to chart out a roadmap for connecting with the people, especially in tough times like Covid-19, the second wave and the after effects of cyclone Taukte. The meeting also saw a discussion on the next year when the state will be going to the polls.

Gujarat has been badly affected by the second wave of Covid-19 and there seems to be a strong anti-BJP sentiment among the public. The saffron party has been ruling the state for about two and a half decades now.

The Bharatiya Janata Party will be facing a lot of resentment from the public, with many of them having lost their loved ones to the pandemic due to the pathetic healthcare system of the state.

The recent cyclonic storm Taukte also inflicted damage on a major portion of the state, with the farmers suffering the most.

So the ruling party is seemingly faced with a very strong backlash against it.

Political pundits feel that the meeting chaired by Gujarat in-charge Yadav was convened because of these factors. However, state BJP chief CR Paatil denied that.

"It has been such a long time since we have had a meeting due to the Covid-19 restrictions. It was nothing of the sort that is being speculated. We still have the support of the people. Our party as well as the state government performed fairly well during the second wave of Covid-19. I don't know of a single BJP leader who was not with the public during tough times," Paatil said in a press briefing at Kamalam.

"Whereas, not a single person from the opposition Congress was seen amongst the public," added Paatil.

"The party had a meeting to discuss various subjects like the possible third wave of Covid-19, how and what should be done by the party members, how to spread awareness about vaccination, especially in the rural areas. And how to have a better connect with the public, detailing all the good work done by the state as well as the central government," added Paatil.

The BJP chief said that the meeting also saw primary discussion on next year's election.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Mumbai, June 11 : Terming the house-crash in Mumbai's Malad late on Wednesday - which claimed 12 lives - a "man-made disaster" and that "citizens lives are not cheap", the Bombay High Court on Friday ordered a judicial probe into the tragedy to be completed within a fortnight.

Taking suo moto cognizance of the incident, a division bench of Chief Justice Dipankar Datta and Justice Girish Kulkarni admonished the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), observing that lives of citizens are not "so cheap that they can be left to die in such incidents".

Soon after the house crashed around 11.30 pm on Wednesday, the Mumbai Police booked the tenement owner Rafique Siddiqui on charges of culpable homicide not amounting to murder, while building contractor Ramzan Shaikh has been nabbed in connection with the incident that claimed 12 persons, comprising 9 members of a single family, and including eight minors, including a toddler.

When BMC counsel Anil Sakhare argued that the land in Malvani, Malad west where the tragedy occurred, belongs to the Collector, the Chief Justice asked if a government directive can over-ride a constitutional mandate since it obliges the BMC to work against illegal constructions.

Noting that in the past 25 days alone, there have been four building crashes - two each in Mumbai and Thane, killing a total of 24 and injuring 23 more, the bench asked: "How many more lives will be lost?" Ordering the Commission of Enquiry to probe the tragedy and submit its report by June 23, the court warned all corporations that it would come down heavily on them if any more lives are lost in future.

Adjourning the matter, the judges made it clear they would not hesitate to order a special enquiry into the "mechanism" whereby unauthorised constructions crop up with the corporators and civic officials failing to take any action, even as Additional Solicitor General Anil Singh pointed out that 75 per cent of the constructions in Malvani are illegal.

The court asked Sakhare why the civic officers failed to take action or "were they waiting for deaths", warning that they (the officers) would be held responsible for deaths.

It pointed out that while the BMC has performed against the Covid-19 pandemic, why are such effective steps not being taken against illegal constructions and why the elected corporators don't point out such activities.
Kolkata, June 11 : In a big blow to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in West Bengal, its all-India Vice President and MLA Mukul Roy joined the Trinamool Congress on Friday along with his son Subhrangshu Roy, almost four years after deserting the Trinamool camp for the saffron brigade.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who was present at the Trinamool Bhavan during the meeting to induct Roy back into the party fold, said that more people will come out of the BJP and join the Trinamool Congress.

Roy and his son were greeted back into the Trinamool fold by its all-India General Secretary, Abhishek Banerjee.

"Mukul (Roy) is our old member and he has come back. He was not in a good condition in the BJP because the saffron party created pressure on him through agencies, as a result he was not in mental peace. I was watching that his health condition had also deteriorated because one cannot stay in the BJP. It is a heartless party and no human being can stay there," Mamata Banerjee said.

Roy, who had left Trinamool Congress in 2017, said, "I am having a nice feeling for being among familiar people again. This has a kind of homely atmosphere. I am confident that West Bengal will again reach to the top under the leadership of our leader and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee." When asked what made him return to the Trinamool, the former all-India General Secretary of the party said, "I shall not work for the BJP again, so I have come back here." Denying having any difference with Roy even when he was in the BJP, Mamata Banerjee said, "Even when he was in the BJP, he never said anything against me or the party. He has always been good with our party leaders. Even during the elections, he was quiet about our party." Hinting that more people from the BJP are likely to join the Trinamool, the Chief Minister said, "Trinamool will welcome everybody who is sober and gentle. But there are some people who betrayed the party before the elections and badmouthed the Trinamool leaders. They are betrayers, and the party will never accept them." The BJP, however, tried to separate itself from Roy and asked him to resign as Krishnanagar North MLA, and give up all the party portfolios that he was enjoying.

Speaking to the media, state BJP President Dilip Ghosh said, "Mukul Roy wanted to leave the party and so he has left. Thousands of BJP workers are out of their homes who are more important to me. I don't know how the BJP stands to lose with Roy leaving the party, because his presence in the party did not serve any benefit." Meanwhile, state BJP spokesperson Jay Prakash Majumdar wished Roy all the best for his news innings in the old party.

However, BJP MP from Barrackpore, Arjun Singh, strongly criticised Roy, alleging that he and his son have always done politics for their vested interest.

"He behaved like 'Mir Jafar', but I am not at all surprised. I have never trusted him. He is a betrayer and he has not made any contribution to the party," Singh said.

Another BJP leader, Silbhadra Dutta, said, "Personally I cannot make a comment on one's choice of a political party, but one should keep in mind that frequent party switching doesn't create a good impression among the people." Though most of the BJP leaders chose to ignore Roy, there were last minute efforts to hold him back.

Senior state BJP leaders had called Roy before he was supposed to leave for the Trinamool Bhavan at 3 pm, but Roy decided to shun all his ties with the saffron brigade and didn't take the calls.

There were indications that Roy was on his way to change camp, which became evident when Abhishek Banerjee went to see his ailing wife at a private hospital a few days back.

Interestingly, neither the Trinamool leaders, nor Roy had given any indication that their talks have reached a final stage until Friday.
Hyderabad, June 11 : Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been an upward trend in the number of students from Telangana planning to study abroad.

A survey by Mumbai-based Yocket, one of India's largest platforms for study abroad aspirants, found out that many students who wanted to study abroad in 2020 but could not go due to travel restrictions and financial instability, have deferred their plans for 2021.

The survey, based on a sample size of about 30,000 students from the state, found that 90 per cent of the students are keen to study abroad.

Around 8,000 students went to study abroad from Telangana in 2019. The number went up by 17 per cent in 2020 and surprisingly there is a huge spike in the number of students to 62 per cent in 2021, as compared to 2019.

The US, the UK and Canada are the most popular destinations for Telangana students. Over 90 per cent of the students are going to these three countries. Australia and European countries like Germany, the Netherlands and Ireland are also popular among the rest of the students.

Computer Science is still the most popular course with about 50 per cent of students planning for it. Courses with a mix of management and technology like Management Information Systems (MIS) are also gaining popularity in recent years, as per the survey. Other popular courses range from Information Technology to varied engineering courses like Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Automobile Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, and Chemical Engineering.

Yocket has also found out that the majority of the students from Telangana are planning to fund their education by the means of an education loan. About 55 per cent of students have preferred to take loans for their study abroad plans while 30 per cent of students are willing to arrange it by themselves and 15 per cent of students want a scholarship.

"The pandemic could certainly slow down the study abroad aspirants' plans last year, but it is evidently not the case in 2021. We have witnessed an upward trend in the number of students willing to study abroad from different states with Telangana leading. Lots of students who had planned but were unable to travel in 2020 have deferred their plans to 2021 and 2022 intakes. We will definitely see a major increase in these intakes as things get better," Yocket co-founder Tumul Buch said.
New Delhi, June 11 : The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Friday carried out searches at six locations in Mumbai after registering a case of bank fraud worth Rs 134 crore against Gujarat-based Associate High Pressure Technologies Pvt Ltd and its directors.

A CBI spokesperson here said that the agency has booked Associate High Pressure Technologies, its directors Ramchand K. Issrani, Mohammad Farouk Suleman Darvesh, Srichand Satramadas Agicha, Ebrahim Suleman Darvesh, Manoharlal Satramdas Agicha, and Satish Sunderdas Agicha, and other unknown public servants and others on a complaint from Union Bank of India.

In the complaint it was alleged that Associate High Pressure Technologies Pvt Ltd, through its Directors and guarantors had misappropriated, the bank's funds and diverted the same to earn wrongful gain. It was also alleged that the company had an intention to cheat the bank and as such diverted the funds through other banking channels in contravention of the terms and conditions of the loan sanction orders.

"An alleged loss of around Rs 134.43 crore was caused to Union Bank of India," the official said.

"Searches were conducted today at the premises of the accused at six places in Mumbai which led to recovery of incriminating documents," he added.
New Delhi, June 11 : The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Friday filed a supplementary charge sheet against Sake Kalavathi, Area Commander of the CPI (Maoist), in connection with the murder of Kidari Sarveswara Rao, Araku MLA of Andhra Pradesh.

A NIA spokesperson here said that the agency filed the charge sheet against Kalavathi under several sections of the IPC, Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and Arms Act before a Special NIA court in Hyderabad. The anti-terror probe agency official said that during the probe it was revealed that Kalavathi had joined the proscribed terrorist organisation 20 years ago and was an Area Committee member of the organisation at the time of her arrest.

"She is the wife of Kakuri Peddanna, a State Zonal Committee member of CPI( Maoist) and she, along with her husband and other co- accused persons was part of a 40 member team which was camping in Dumbriguda 15 days prior to the incident of the murder." "She was an armed cadre of CPI (Maoist), used to carry INSAS Rifle and was instrumental in providing logistics support to the team that carried out the killing of Rao, the then MLA of Araku and Siveri Soma, ex-MLA of Araku," the official added.

The case was originally registered on September 23, 2018 at Visakhapatnam relating to the murder of Rao, Araku MLA and Soma, ex-MLA, by armed cadres of CPI (Maoist) at Livitiputtu village in Dumbriguda Mandal, Visakhapatnam. The NIA had re-registered the case on December 6, 2018. After investigation, the NIA had filed the charge sheet against nine accused persons.
Dharamsala, June 11 : Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has written to Ukhnaa Khurelsukh to congratulate him on his election as the President of Mongolia.

In the message, the Dalai lama wrote: "I have warm memories of your country, which I first visited in 1979. I have been encouraged by the interest and enthusiasm shown by Mongolians both young and old in my efforts to promote human values, as well as the need to combine traditional Buddhist knowledge with modern education.

"Historically, the people of Mongolia and we Tibetans have been like twin brothers and sisters. The Dalai Lamas have enjoyed a unique and close relationship with your people since the time of the third Dalai Lama, Sonam Gyatso.

"As I have mentioned during my visits to Mongolia, although there are other faiths in the country, it is Buddhism that has historically shaped the identity, culture and spiritual life of your people. Since the Buddha's teachings emphasise such fundamental human values as compassion and non-violence, they have the potential to be of benefit, without contradicting an individual's personal beliefs. I trust that you and your government will continue to preserve and uphold these values." The Dalai Lama ended his letter by wishing the President-elect every success in fulfilling the hopes and aspirations of the people of Mongolia.

On June 9, former Mongolian Prime Minister Ukhnaa Khurelsukh became the country's sixth democratically elected President, further consolidating the power of the ruling Mongolian People's Party (MPP).
Bengaluru: Defence Minister Rajnath Singh with Chief Minister of Karnataka BS Yediyurappa, Union Minister DV Sadananda Gowda, Bipin Rawat Chief of Defence Staff, Karambir Singh,Chief of the Naval Staff of the Indian Navy and others during inauguratio Image Source: IANS News

Patna: Karnataka Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa addresses during a 90-minute inaugural programme streamed digitally in all the 30 districts across the state for the benefit of the party cadres and the public, to mark the week-long celebrations on co Image Source: IANS News

Hassan : , June 11 (IANS) A day after Karnataka BJP in-charge Arun Singh's endorsement, embattled Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa declared on Friday that he will remain at the helm for the next two years.

With the state Assembly elections are due only in 2023, Yediyurappa has sent out a strong signal to his detractors that he's here to stay.

Speaking to the media here after chairing a Covid review meeting with the district officials, the Chief Minister declared that with the party's national leadership ruling out leadership change in Karnataka, he would work with greater zeal and responsibility.

Just few days ago, Yediyurappa had expressed his willingness to resign as the Chief Minister if the BJP's central leadership demanded so.

However, Arun Singh's endorsement on Thursday has come as a shot in the arm for the 78-year-old BJp leader.

Amid the mayhem caused by the Covid pandemic, Yediyurappa has been fighting the latest bout of dissident activities from his detractors in the party.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Dhaka, June 11 : Shakib Al Hasan, Bangladesh all-rounder and captain of the Mohammedan Sporting Club, on Friday lost his cool twice and kicked the stumps during a Dhaka Premier League match against Abahani Limited.

Shakib first kicked the stumps after his appeal for an LBW verdict against Mushfiqur Rahim was turned down. Following that he was involved in a heated exchange with the umpire that lasted close to a minute. Rahim was then batting on 11 with Abahani Limited on 21/3 in 4.4 overs, chasing 146.

An over later, with Abahani on 31/3, Shakib uprooted the whole set of stumps and hurled them on the ground after the umpires called for the covers due to the deteriorating weather with one ball remaining in the sixth over.

Shakib later apologised to the fans who were aghast with what they saw on the ground.

"Dear fans and followers, I am extremely sorry for losing my temper and ruining the match for everyone and especially those who are watching from home. An experienced player like me should not have reacted that way but sometimes against all odds it happens unfortunately. He later apologised for the misconduct on social media saying," he said on social media.

"I apologise to the teams, management, tournament officials, and organising committee for this human error. Hopefully, I won't be repeating this again in the future. Thanks and love you all." Mohammedan won by 31 runs under D/L method, with Abahani only able to score 44/6 in nine overs.
Mumbai, June 11 : Bollywood veteran Dilip Kumar was discharged from Hinduja Hospital in Khar on Friday, his official Twitter account informed fans. The actor had been admitted on June 6 after experiencing breathlessness.

A tweet on the microblogging site read: "With your love and affection, and your prayers, Dilip Saab is going home from the hospital. God's infinite mercy and kindness through Drs. Gokhale, Parkar, Dr. Arun Shah and the entire team at Hinduja Khar. --Faisal Farooqui #DilipKumar #healthupdate." The senior actor's wife, actress Saira Banu, was seen with him while leaving the hospital. She had earlier requested fans to not believe in rumours about his death. In a note posted on Dilip Kumar's Twitter account a few days ago, she had said: "Past few days my beloved husband, Yousuf Khan, has been unwell and recuperating at a hospital in Mumbai. Through this note, I want to thank all of you for keeping him in your prayers and for all the love and affection. My husband, my Kohinoor our Dilip Kumar Sahab's health is stable and doctors have assured me that he should be discharged soon." Requesting netizens to not pay heed to rumours, the actress further wrote: "I urge you not to believe in rumours. While I ask you to pray for Sahab's health, I am praying that the almighty keep all of you safe and healthy during this pandemic." This was the second time in a month that Dilip Kumar was admitted to hospital.
Srinagar, June 11 : The Jammu and Kashmir Police said on Friday that four friends of missing PhD scholar, Hilal Ahmad Dar, who went missing on June 13, 2020, will be subjected to narco analysis as part of the ongoing investigation to trace Dar.

Hilal Ahmad Dar, a PhD scholar belonging to the Bemina locality in Srinagar city, had gone for trekking in the mountains of north Kashmir's Ganderbal district with his four friends, following which he went missing.

These friends reached home the same evening on June 13, 2020 after Dar went missing.

"On repeated requests from the family members of the missing person, we called these four persons to the Kangan police stationin Ganderbal, police sources said.

"Narco-analytical test will be carried out on these four persons to find out as to how Dar went missing, while his friends reached home safely. This test will be carried out in Gujarat and a local police party will leave on Saturday along with the four persons for Gujarat," the sources added.
Bengaluru, June 11 : Quashing the petitions of the e-tailers, the Karnataka High Court on Friday allowed the Competition Commission of India (CCI) to probe the alleged violations of the competition law by Amazon and Flipkart.

Justice P.S. Dinesh Kumar dismissed the petitions, which challenged the CCI probe into the e-commerce firms, and allowed the watchdog to investigate the reported violations by them.

"CCI can go ahead with a probe against Amazon and Flipkart for alleged anti-competitive practices," said the single-judge bench in its order.

The judge did not agree with the petitioners' contention that the probe was in violation of the Competition Act after the CCI counsel said that an inquiry by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) did not bar the watchdog from the probe.

The US-based e-tail giant Amazon and Flipkart's owner Walmart in February 2020 had sought a stay against the CCI order, which asked the director-general to investigate its anti-competitive means in selling smartphones online at heavy discounts.

The CCI ordered the probe after the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) and the Delhi Vypar Mahasangh (DVM), representing micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and traders, accused the e-commerce firms of unfair trade practices.

The court had earlier stayed the probe through an interim order when Amazon and Flipkart had challenged the CCI order against them in February 2020.

During the hearings, which lasted for 40 days over the months, on their petitions in the high court, Amazon and Flipkart had denied any wrongdoing.

Welcoming the court order, CAIT national president B.C. Bhartia said the CCI should begin its probe into the unfair trade practices of Amazon and Flipkart.

"The court decision vindicates our stand that Amazon and Flipkart's business models are in violation of the FDI (foreign direct investment) policy, rules and other laws," said Bhartia in a statement from New Delhi.

CAIT secretary-general Praveen Khandelwal said the CCI found a prima facie case for investigation against Amazon and Flipkart for violating competition law and distorting the level-playing field in January 2020.

"The central and state governments should act against the e-tailers violating the law and take speedy action against them," asserted Khandelwal.

The CAIT also urged Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal to issue a new press note, replacing press note number 2 of the FDI policy, blocking escape routes for foreign funded e-commerce firms.

The traders' apex body (DVM) had alleged in October 2019 that the e-tailers were giving preferential treatment to select vendors with indirect control on their operations, especially in launching smartphones in the country.
New Delhi, June 11 : With BJP chief J.P. Nadda meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi thrice within a week, speculations of a cabinet expansion have gained ground.

With no change in the ministries since the Modi government began its second term in 2019, and a string of key Assembly elections, including in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Uttarakhand and Goa, slated for next year, a reshuffle may be on the cards this month or in July and could see more berths for representatives from the poll-bound states.

Nadda had met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday, with Union Home Minister Amit Shah also present. According to sources, the UP Assembly elections and the ministerial reshuffle was on the agenda. On Thursday too, Nadda had called on the Prime Minister at his residence, and had met him once more recently.

A senior BJP leader, who did not want to be named, said: "No reshuffle has taken place since the government took over on May 30, 2019. However, there was a reshuffle months after the first Modi goverment took over in May 2014." Another senior party functionary also said that a cabinet expansion or reshuffle is due and it may likely take a matter of days or weeks.

"It was postponed as a reshuffle at the peak of the second wave of the Covid pandemic could have sent a wrong message among the people. Now that the Covid cases are coming down and the situation is under control, we hope that the cabinet expansion will take place soon. But the date and time will be only decided by the Prime Minister," he said.

With the demise of LJP's Ram Vilas Paswan and BJP's Suresh Angadi, there is one vacancy each of a Cabinet Minister and a Minister of State.

Apart from this, the two ministerial posts vacated by representatives of the Shiv Sena and the Akali Dal after they exited the National Democratic Alliance are also there.

Due to no cabinet reshuffle or expansion, many ministers have multiple portfolios. For example, Agriculture Ministry Narendra Singh Tomar has the charge of Rural Development, while Railways Minister Piyush Goyal also has Commerce and Industry, and Food and Consumer Affairs.

Among the names doing the rounds for induction are that of Rajya Sabha member and former Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi. His chances have brightened as Paswan senior's demise has left a vacancy from Bihar, but the LJP has left the NDA, and the JD-U does not want a berth.

Jyotiraditya Scindia, whose defection led to the fall of the Congress government in Madhya Pradesh, is also a contender.

UP regional party Apna Dal leader Anupriya Patel is also looking for a berth, given the coming UP polls. She she had also met Amit Shah on Thursday, when Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had called on him.

The Prime Minister is also reviewing the works of the ministers in his cabinet. Some ministers like Dharmendra Pradhan, Prakash Javadekar and Hardeep Puri had already met the Prime Minister.

Sources said based on the review of works, underperforming ministers will be dropped from the Modi cabinet.

"The ministers are explaining about the works of their respective ministries to the Prime Minister, in the presence of BJP chief Nadda," a party insider said.

Another leader said that the Prime Minister will meet all the ministers either individually or in a group to review their performance before taking any decision about their continuity in the government.

The Modi government, sworn in on May 30, 2019, had 57 ministers - 24 Cabinet Ministers, 9 Ministers of State (Independent Chage) and 24 Ministers of State, against 45 in the first Modi government.

According to the Constitution, the limit on the Council of Ministers at the Centre is 15 per cent of the strength of the Lok Sabha, or 81.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Chennai, June 11 : The Tamil Nadu government will set up a high-level committee of experts to work out revival plans for the tourism sector that is facing the doldrums following the first and second waves of the Covid pandemic, a statement said on Friday.

The statement from state Tourism Minister's office said that Minister M. Mathiventhan, who chaired a meeting at the Tourism Department headquarters here on Thursday, decided that the high-level committee will identify ways that will lead to generation of revenue, create new jobs, and earn foreign exchange for the state.

It will also chalk out measures to ensure the safety of those who travel to the state by putting in place standard Covid-19 protocols.

Talking to IANS, K. Raghavan, who had been in the field for 30 years, said: "Tamil Nadu tourism was doing extremely good following meticulous plans of successive governments to promote the sector and it was providing good revenue for the state exchequer but the pandemic has given a body blow to the sector.

"It is good that the minister has called up such a meeting to constitute a committee to find ways for the revival of the sector which is indeed a right step in the right direction. Already Gujarat and Karnataka have classified the sector as an industry and we are expecting something of a similar nature from the TN government also." The tourism sector is expecting a one-year moratorium from payment of property tax as Gujarat has already provided relaxation to hotels, restaurants, water parks and resorts on this count. It has also exempted fixed electricity charges for the sector and only actual electricity bills need to be paid.

K.R. Vinoth Chandran, a tourism operative in Dindugal, told IANS: "The tourism sector of our state has been generating huge revenue and the minister must act proactively for the sector. Otherwise, this sector, that had earned a good reputation and huge money for the state, will not prosper again." Along with hotels and restaurants, the pandemic affected tourist taxis, travel agencies, truck drivers, guides, and even autorickshaw drivers.

Latest updates on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
New Delhi, June 11 : The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) India on Friday released an independent appraisal report on the Aspirational Districts Programme (ADP).

The report captures the progress of the flagship initiatives and recommendations for further improvements. The report was handed over by Shoko Noda, Resident Representative, UNDP India, to Rajiv Kumar, Vice Chairman, and Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog.

The report, which includes a comparison of Aspirational Districts (ADs) with non-aspirational districts, indicates that ADs have outperformed non-ADs by substantial margins, given the increased focus through monitoring real-time data, convergence across government programmes and schemes, and receiving the benefits of the ADP.

Faster development in the ADs is all the more creditable given the fact that to start with, most of them were difficult and remotely located backward districts.

This report also underlines the strengths of state and local governments to bring all partners and stakeholders to collaborate to achieve the goals and targets. It clearly shows evidence of how localizing the global SDGs and monitoring them closely have helped the local governments to improve people's lives.

This programme has seen the commitment from the highest political leadership in the country since its inception, to bring about rapid progress, especially in the under-developed pockets.

The ADP was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2018, with the objective of expediting the transformation of 112 most backward districts across 28 states through convergence across government departments.

Keeping in mind the need to accelerate progress in these backward districts, NITI Aayog has been convening regular monitoring to encourage the district collectors to prioritise and deliver their best on the ground.

For developing this report, the UNDP team interviewed various stakeholders, including district magistrates, central Prabhari officers, district fellows and other development partners.

Most of them credited "convergence" as the crucial factor for the improved performance of their districts and underlined how this initiative encouraged departments to move away from working in silos towards collaborative planning and governance to achieve the set targets of the programme.

NITI Aayog has termed the report as very useful since it clearly shows that the template of Aspirational Districts Programme, which has the innovative features of careful selection of performance indicators, monitoring the progress on a dashboard and healthy competition among districts, can be used for accelerating development in the backward regions in India and in other parts of the world.

"As we publish this appraisal of the Aspirational Districts Programme, the world continues to grapple with the devastating consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic that have reversed some of the progress we had made on the SDGs so far. So, if we have to make up for the lost time and the lost opportunities, we need to further strengthen our focus on the most backward areas and communities.

"This is where the ADP can have the biggest impact by localizing the global goals, translating and delivering them as integrated programmes and services that work to improve people's lives, particularly for those at risk of falling behind. UNDP is committed and proud to partner with the Government of India, NITI Aayog and other development partners for this great initiative to ensure inclusive growth for all," said Shoko Noda, Resident Representative, UNDP India.
Patna, June 11 : Days after the Banka blast, Bihar's Araria district saw an explosion on Friday that left two minors injured, police said.

The bomb exploded at Rampur Chowk (east) under Bairgachi police station in the district, injuring Mohamad Afroz (12) and Mohamad Jaish Alam Washimo Rahim (13).

Police also recovered two live bombs from the spot.

Bairgachi SHO Harendra Kumar said: "As per statement of the victims, they were playing in the area when the bomb exploded. They sustained splinters injuries and were admitted in the Araria Sadar hospital." "During investigation, we have recovered 2 crude bombs from the area. The local criminals are on our lens," he added.

The Banka blast, three days back, left a cleric named Abdul Momin dead.
London, June 11 : Leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) economic powers opened a three-day summit in an English seaside village on Friday, focused on pandemic recovery, including plans for equitable access to vaccines and financial support to build vaccine production sites around the world.

The much-anticipated G7 Leaders' Summit marks the first in-person meeting of the member heads of state since the Covid-19 outbreak last year.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his wife Carrie welcomed the G7 leaders at the beach of Carbis Bay in Cornwall, where the group posed for the traditional "family photo" as talks kicked off, the dpa news agency reported.

In his opening remarks, Johnson said the leaders of the world's wealthiest democracies would learn from the lessons of the "wretched pandemic," Britain's Press Association (PA) reported.

"We need to make sure that we learn the lessons from the pandemic, we need to make sure that we don't repeat some of the errors that we doubtless made in the course of the last 18 months or so," Johnson said.

He also said that the G7 wanted to be sure that "we are building back better together and building back greener and building back fairer and building back more equal." US President Joe Biden, who is on his first trip abroad since taking office, jokingly said at one point while on the beach: "Everybody in the water." "I'm looking forward to reinforcing our commitment to multilateralism and working with our allies and partners to build a more fair and inclusive global economy," he said, according to PA.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel also stressed the importance for multilateralism.

She said especially Biden "presents and represents the commitment to multilateralism, which after all we have lacked in recent years," referencing Biden's predecessor, former US president Donald Trump.

On Thursday, the G7 pledged to donate 1 billion vaccine doses to poorer nations, by sharing jabs directly and through financial aid, the British government announced.

Leaders are also to come up with a plan to extend vaccine manufacturing.

Ahead of the summit, Biden said the US would donate another 500 million vaccine doses to 92 poorer countries and the African Union by June next year.

Johnson, who is hosting the summit, announced that his country would provide 100 million surplus doses, most of them to be distributed through the COVAX vaccine-sharing programme.

COVAX co-chair Jane Halton told Times Radio she was "delighted and excited" about Johnson's announcement.

"We've been calling to target the vulnerable around the world. So let's assume we get to 1 billion by the end, that will be extraordinarily welcome." However, about 11 to 12 billion vaccine doses were necessary to immunize the entire global population, Halton warned, adding that so far only about 2.2 billion doses had been administered, about 77 per cent of which had gone to just 10 countries.

The G7 group remains divided over the issue of lifting patent protection for coronavirus vaccines, as proposed by the US and several other nations.

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday that France and South Africa would present a proposal during the summit on an exemption for a limited period of time and applying to particular places.

The group is also looking to discuss plans to better prepare the world for future outbreaks. "Global solutions are needed," according to a draft of a "Carbis Bay Health Declaration" seen by dpa.

In the evening, the leaders are scheduled to attend a reception hosted by Queen Elizabeth II and her son, Prince Charles, during which environmental protection and fighting climate change are on the agenda.

In the afternoon, hundreds of Extinction Rebellion environmental activists staged a protest march targeting the G7 summit, PA reported.

Extinction Rebellion says the protests are in response to G7 nations' "failure to respect the global climate commitments they made in Paris in 2015" and "to urge the leaders meeting at Carbis Bay in Cornwall to act immediately to address the climate and ecological emergency." A group of 457 global investors published a letter on Friday, calling on leaders worldwide to ramp up national plans to combat climate change to meet the goals set in the Paris climate agreement.

It is the leaders' first in-person meeting in this format in two years, after the G7 leaders only met virtually last year due to the pandemic.

It is the first major international summit for Biden, which he is attending as part of a one-week Europe trip.

The group is also to discuss relationships with Russia and China, with Biden looking to strengthen ties with the other G7 members again to create a united counterweight to the two nations.

The G7 comprises the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and Canada. On Saturday, the leaders of Australia, India, South Korea and South Africa are invited as guests as well.

Johnson has said he hopes this will make the summit more of a conference of leading democracies.
Chennai, June 11 : The Tamil Nadu Public Health Department has suspended a pharmacist at an Urban Primary Health Centre (UPHC) at Tirupur for allegedly diverting vaccines meant for the UPHCs to inoculate workers of three private garment factories, a statement said on Friday.

The incident occurred on June 5.

The Directorate of Public Health (DPH), in the statement, said that its Deputy Director, Dr Jagdeesh Kumar, had conducted an inquiry into the incident based on media reports, and on the basis of the findings, the suspension of the pharmacist was ordered. Disciplinary proceedings were also initiated against him.

The Tirupur corporation officials had allegedly used around 800 Covaxin doses which were meant for PHCs to vaccinate workers and employees of three export units without informing the medical officers of the UPHCs concerned.

The Deputy Director of Public Health has, in his investigation. found that the pharmacist had received the vaccine doses from the office of the Deputy Director of Health Services but handed them over to the corporation officials without informing the Health Department.

The corporation is also facing flak over its decision to employ nurses from private hospitals to administer vaccination which is not permissible and the Health Department has already sought an explanation on this.
New Delhi/Amaravati, June 11 : Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy culminated his two-day visit to New Delhi on Friday with a meeting with Union Railways and Civil Supplies Minister Piyush Goyal, during which he appealed for the release of Rs 3,229 crore pending arrears for Andhra Pradesh Civil Supplies Corporation.

The arrears are expected to come in handy for paying the farmers for Rabi crop procurement.

During his discussions with Goyal, Reddy said that free rice distribution will be carried out for another two months owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, even as he stated that effective measures are being taken by the government to overcome the situation.

According to the Chief Minister, nearly 1.29 crore ration card holders in the state were provided with 1.85 lakh MT of rice every month till December 2015 under the National Food Security Act, which later diminished to 0.91 crore beneficiaries, prompting him to call it an injustice.

"After December 2015, considering the 2011 Census, the distribution has been limited to only 60.9 per cent households in rural areas and 41.1 per cent households in urban areas, where only 0.91 crore ration card holders are receiving the ration with the allocation getting reduced to 1.54 lakh MT," he noted.

Comparatively, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat are receiving more supplies, he claimed.

"Allocation basis for rice was decided before the state's bifurcation, but all the allotments in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh are being carried out on the same basis without any reality check," said Reddy.

He also reminded the Union Minister that according to a Supreme Court ruling, the state government is responsible for identifying those eligible for ration cards, and Andhra Pradesh had identified 1.47 crore such ration card holders.

The CM emphasised that the poor are severely suffering due to the unreasonable restrictions under the Food Security Act and called for a rectification at the earliest.

Reddy also informed Goyal that the southern state is procuring paddy for 2020-21 Rabi season at remunerative prices from the farmers in a timely manner.

Reddy ended his two-day visit to Delhi with a series of meetings involving Amit Shah, Dharmendra Pradhan, Gajendra Singh Shekhawat and others.
Kohima, June 11 : A 'Parliamentary Committee' on the Naga political issue, comprising all the 60 members of the Nagaland Assembly and the two Members of Parliament from the state, was constituted to facilitate the ongoing peace talks between the Central government and various Naga outfits, a top official said on Friday.

Nagaland Home Commissioner Abhijit Sinha said that the Parliamentary Committee was constituted with Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio as the Convenor and Deputy Chief Minister Y. Patton and opposition leader T.R. Zeliang as Co-Convenors.

"The Parliamentary Committee shall discuss matters relating to the Naga political issue and play the role of facilitator in the ongoing peace talks between the Government of India and the Naga political groups," Sinha told IANS over phone quoting the notification of the Home Department's Political Branch.

The notification, which was issued by Chief Secretary J. Alam, said that Parliamentary Affairs Minister Neiba Kronu would be the member Secretary of the committee, which includes four members from the Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (NDPP) and five members each from the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Naga People's Front (NPF) and Independent MLA and Minister Tongpang Ozukum.

A senior official of the state Home Department said that the 'Parliamentary Committee' likely to meet on June 19 to deliberate the way forward on the long-pending issue.

The dominant group -- the Isak-Muivah faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-IM) -- and the other outfits have been holding peace talks with the Centre for the past many years.

While the ceasefire with the NSCN-IM is continuing since 1997, the Centre in April had extended the ceasefire agreements with three more Naga insurgent outfits -- the National Socialist Council of Nagaland-NK (NSCN-NK), the National Socialist Council of Nagaland-Reformation (NSCN-R) and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland-K-Khango (NSCN-K-Khango) -- for one more year till April next year.

The NSCN-IM has held around 80 rounds of negotiations with the Central government in Delhi and outside India after signing a ceasefire pact 24 years ago. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had signed a "framework agreement" with the NSCN-IM in 2015.

The NSCN-IM and the intelligence sources said that while many of the 31 demands of the Nagas have been almost resolved during the talks with the Centre, differences remain over a separate flag, and a separate constitution.

Nagaland Governor and the Central government's interlocutor for peace talks, R.N. Ravi had recently rejected the demand for a separate flag and a Constitution for the state as demanded by the NSCN-IM.

The NSCN-IM, in a recent statement issued by its 'Ministry of Information and Publicity', said that the historic "Framework Agreement (FA)" signed on August 3, 2015 is being brought back to life in order to remove any misinterpretation and thereby, hasten the signing of Naga solution agreement.

It had alleged that unnecessary confusion was thrown into the air because of the "reckless statement" made by Ravi that the political talks had concluded, and termed it unfortunate that he has made such a "misleading statement before the whole nation by blatantly contradicting the government of India and the Indian Parliament besides the 136 crore Indians and the world community in the matter of such sensitive political negotiations going on for more than two decades".

Ravi, however, recently said in Kohima that the Centre's several political initiatives to resolve the Naga issue could not be fructified in the last 24 years due to the "unrealistic intransigence of some people who are unwilling to forsake the politics by gun".

(Sujit Chakraborty can be contacted at sujit.c@ians.in)
Thiruvananthapuram, June 11 : With Germany having over 1.3 lakh nursing jobs, Kerala-based philanthropic organisations, with presence in both countries, have decided to utilise this opportunity to help financially disadvantaged Indian nurses get placements there.

Speaking to IANS over phone from Germany, Thomas Vallomtharayil, a key mover of the project and a coordinator between the German and Indian governments for this humanitarian venture, said this year, they expect about 100 Indian nurses to get placements.

"The placements will be offered free after assessing the financial position of the nurses. This is open for BSc nurses and also for general nurses and the first condition is they should have passed A1/A2 or B1/B2 levels of German language. We are offering free German classes. Those who are having work experience will have an edge," said Vallomtharayil, who hails from Thiruvalla here, but has been in Germany since 1973 and runs a dialysis centre at Castrop-Rauxel, about 70 km from Dusseldorf.

He said at present they have centres (www.germancareacademy.eu) where German is taught to aspiring nurses at Thiruvalla and are opening at Thiruvananthapuram, Bhopal, Bengaluru, Assam and Gurugram shortly.

"If a nurse from India gets a direct job offer from the German government, that nurse will have to spend Rs 3 lakh and if it is through an agent, the rates can be as high as Rs 15 lakh. We will not charge any service charge or agency fee and if necessary, we will support the living expenses when the nurse attends the German language course," added Vallomtharayil.

The participants in this philanthropic activity includes charitable organisation Abhayam, the Indo-German Centre for Health Care Sustainability (IGCHS) and the Vallomtharayil family.

Vallomtharayil also pointed out that the A1 and A2 German language courses will be handled by Indian teachers and for the B levels, they will bring in German teachers through online lessons and for an average student, all it requires is 6 months to pass the B levels.

"For conducting the placement interviews, we will be taking the permission of the Ministry of External Affairs. By the end of this year, we expect to give placement for 100 Indian nurses and next year about 500," he added.
New Delhi, June 11 : Triggering off speculation about the long-awaited Cabinet reshuffle, Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Home Minister Amit Shah and party President J.P. Nadda on Friday.

The meeting assumed even more significance after Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's meetings with the same personages in the national capital. A reshuffle in Uttar Pradesh, which goes to the polls next year, is also not being ruled out.

Thereafter, meetings took place with small groups of five-six ministers where their work was evaluated and discussed. It appears that the impending reshuffle may finally take place either on June 13 or June 20.

The names of Sarbananda Sonowal, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Chirag Paswan, Trivendra Singh Rawat, Anupriya Patel, Sushil Modi, Meenakshi Lekhi, Jayant Sinha, Mahesh Jethmalani, Rajiv Ranjan and Lallan Singh were discussed as possible new inductees.

Of these, leaders like Anupriya Patel, Jayant Sinha and Sonowal have earlier been in the Union Cabinet.

Many of the existing ministers have multiple portfolios, some of which may be shed in favour of the new inductees. The portfolios which could see changes include:
Bud Holste, an adventurer who retired from a thirty-one-and-a-half-year career working with and protecting wildlife resources, has completed his new book Leaving My Footprints in the Outdoors: an outdoor-based, adventure-filled biography detailing Buds outdoor escapades over the span of seventy-five years.

Bud writes, I did some trick shooting one day when a bunch of us boys went out to the Old Maids (Ollie Due) house to shoot starlings and pigeons. We were up in the hayloft of her barn when someone bet me I couldnt shoot a cigar out of David Walkers mouth. David was a senior and wouldnt light the cigar so he wouldnt catch the barn on fire; I figured he was smart enough to know what he was doing. I was only a junior, maybe just as stupid, and should have known better too. Kids, dont ever do this at home or anyplace else. David was at least twenty feet away, and I had a safe background of several bales of hay to shoot into. All the other boys stood behind me as I took aim at the middle of the cigar and squeezed the trigger. David flinched as the tobacco bits hit him in the face. For a minute, I thought I hit him, but I knew that wasnt possible because my rifle was sighted in

to hit where I aimed. It scared me bad enough not to ever try it again. Later, I bought a four-power Weaver scope for ten dollars and could hit small targets out to one hundred yards.

Published by Page Publishing, Bud Holstes authentic biography details his outdoorsy life as he spent seventy-five years hunting, fishing, and rafting.

Bud has lived an adventurous outdoorsy life. As a boy he enjoyed fishing, hunting and watching wildlife. When he grew up he obtained a career as a wildlife enforcement officer protecting the fish and wildlife resources in America for thirty-one years. He not only had a career, but he also has multiple hobbies based in the outdoors.

Across the United States, Bud has hunted since he was a teenager by self-taught methods and trial and error. He has hunted game ranging from birds to antelope with friends, family, and at times alone for sixty-five years. Even though he almost died from drowning when he was a teenager, Bud still pursued a hobby in rafting. He has been white-water rafting on nineteen rivers throughout the states and luckily only swam three class V rapids and survived. Camping in various modes, Bud has not always taken the easiest path. The true tales are filled with adventure. Readers will learn what the life of a true outdoorsman actually entails.

Readers who wish to experience this passionate work can purchase Leaving My Footprints in the Outdoors 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.
The Adventures of Walter the Walleye: a charming fish tale. The Adventures of Walter the Walleye is the creation of published author, T. Pfrommer.

Pfrommer writes, Walter the Walleye was born in Canada, on a beautiful body of water called Eagle Lake. Over the years of taking the long eighteen-hour road trip to spend the week fishing up in the pristine waters in Canada, Walter and his underwater world came to life. On the days the fishing was slow, I would imagine Walter and Willie going on great adventures right under our boat. And year after year we have visited Walter and Willie, they were always on a new adventure. So, after many years of fishing those waters, I decided to sit down and tell the world about what I saw under the water. And that is how The Adventures of Walter the Walleye was born. And the rest is history.

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, T. Pfrommers new book is an educational adventure for little ones to delight in.

Inspired by Pfrommers love of the outdoors, join us for a sweet tale of two fish friends as they adventure away from their school. Will they make it back before they are caught?

View a synopsis of The Adventures of Walter the Walleye on YouTube.

Consumers can purchase The Adventures of Walter the Walleye at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about The Adventures of Walter the Walleye, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Hodnett Cooper Real Estate recently celebrated the opening of Brampton Lofts, an upscale apartment community among the historic homes of downtown Brunswick. The company hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony and open house event in conjunction with the monthly Downtown Brunswick First Friday event last week.

Brampton Lofts was at one time the Old Brunswick Hospital on Norwich Street. The property was purchased in November 2019 by Bob & Will Bryan, of Statesboro, Georgia. The building has been completely transformed into 25 contemporary apartments with upscale amenities and freshly renovated residences. Brampton Lofts boasts three floors with unique apartment configurations including studio, one-bedroom, and two-bedroom units.

Amenities at Brampton Lofts include a modern fitness center with a cardio room and weight room, outdoor community space, gated parking, and a laundry center on-site. Water/sewer services and public Wi-Fi access are included in rent, with monthly rental rates ranging from $950/month to $1250/month.

Brampton Lofts is an amazing new rental option in our community. The renovations and upgrades are top-notch  stainless steel appliances, quartz countertops, modern finishes  each unit is completely fresh and new and ready to welcome new residents, shared Melody Wood, leasing specialist. Brampton Lofts is managed by Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Hodnett Cooper Real Estate, a real estate brokerage that serves clients throughout the Golden Isles, from Camden County to McIntosh, and everything in between. They are a full-service brokerage and assist clients with sales, rentals, and property management.

For more information or to inquire about rental availability, please contact Melody Wood at 912-291-3467.

About Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Hodnett Cooper Real Estate

Hodnett Cooper Real Estate is a family-owned and operated company with four offices throughout the Golden Isles offering a full range of real estate services including real estate sales, residential rentals, property management and commercial sales. The brokerage is the premier real estate company in southeast coastal Georgia with a professional and diverse team of agents. Visit http://www.BHHSHodnettCooper.com.

About Brampton Lofts

Brampton Lofts is a 25-unit apartment community in Downtown Brunswick, Georgia that offers residents contemporary living with upscale amenities. Configurations include studio, one-bedroom, and two-bedroom units. Brampton Lofts offers residents a modern fitness center, outdoor community space, gated parking, and a laundry center on-site. Please visit http://www.bramptonlofts.com for more information.

Contact:

Catherine Maybank, Director of Marketing

Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Hodnett Cooper Real Estate

(912) 638-5450

catherine@hcrega.com

Melody Wood, Leasing Specialist

Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Hodnett Cooper Real Estate

(912) 291-3467

melody@hcrega.com
It is said that Data is the new oil and it is not without a reason. There are numerous success stories of companies that have built robust business intelligence based on data analysis  Netflix, Spotify, Amazon to name a few. Data has stories to tell which would be hard for a human mind to fathom without spending an enormous amount of time on significantly skilled people.

Does that mean that only Big Companies can take advantage of the data and built efficient Business Intelligence? The answer is no.

Small and medium-sized companies have also benefitted a lot from using data to drive their decisions. Using BI (Business Intelligence) gives clarity on price fluctuations of key materials, working capital cycles, customer behavior, employee performances, uncontrolled costs, and the list is endless. By using data, Small and Medium-sized companies can position their niche skills against bigger competitors.

According to a survey conducted on 2000+ Companies using Business Intelligence, more than 74% reported an increase in operational efficiency, 66% reported an increase in customer satisfaction, 74% reported better decisions, 52% reported an increase in competitive advantage, more than 40% reported an increase in revenues and decrease in costs.The ROI on Business Intelligence is very high and one research puts the number at a whopping 1300%. Unbelievable..right?

During the dreadful pandemic, 83% of data-driven Companies in India gained critical business advantages.

In an uncertain environment, it is the intelligent use of the Companys data that acts as a key differentiator between Companies, as the Company using data can take clear, thought-through, data-driven decisions as against organizations who are not using data to drive their business.

This is how an organization can bring transformation by utilizing its own data;

A. KPI Management

I. Identify the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)  KPIs are important parameters that measure a companys organizations health  it is at the foundation of building a business intelligence-driven business. The emphasis is on the word - within 15 to 20 KPIs for the overall organization.

II. Set benchmark for the KPIs  It is important to set targets for each of the KPIs based on market study and internal considerations. Targets should satisfy the SMART criteria which mean they should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound

B. Decision Management

I. Identifying key decisions a company need to make  Organizations need to take two types of decisions  a) strategic decisions includes things like dropping a product from the portfolio due to its poor performance or deciding on new geographical expansion or investing in a new business segment AND b) Operational decisions like price-to-quote, selection of vendors, prioritization of dispatches, etc.

II. Set decision criteria  For every decision that an organization needs to make, there has to be a decision criterion  for example, Return on Investment (ROI) is one of the criteria for deciding to enter into a new business. Employee evaluation score is a criterion to promote or remove an employee depending on the performance. The decision criteria will be based on variables that the organization needs to decide based on which it would take the decision. Many operational decisions are trigger based set on a variable. For example, if the inventory of a particular raw material goes below a certain level, then the organization has to order more material. Here the variable is the minimum stock level.

C. Data Management

I. Identifying all Data Points for KPI and Decision Management - Once the KPIs are set with benchmarks and also the decision trees with their variables, the next step is to determine all the data points that are needed to measure KPIs and evaluate variables.

II. Perform data gap analysis  All the data points needed for KPI and decisions must be available with the organization in some form or the other. So it is important to map the data points available vis-a-vis what is needed. The data can be internal data or an external one like market share etc.

III. Data discipline analysis- Several organizations have data but their accuracy is suspect due to indiscipline in capturing them accurately and in a timely. An analysis of available data should be made to see if they are reliable from the perspective of accuracy and timeliness

IV. Data improvement planning  Based on data gap and discipline analysis, the organization should plan and implement a data improvement program which should be timebound

D. Design a Business Intelligence Framework

I. Designing dashboards and data visualizations  It is a proven fact now that the human mind can understand data presented as images much faster than when it is presented in a tabular form. Thus getting critical insights through interactive dashboards will make it much easier to understand and act upon information represented by thousands and sometimes millions of records. Thus designing the dashboards with an ability to get critical insights and locate the exact problem area is the key.

II. Role-based access -The organization should ensure that all people involved in achieving KPIs and taking important decisions have access to information whenever they need it and wherever they are. Mapping of various roles with the dashboards they need to see is a key step in setting up the BI framework

III. Alert and Alarms  Setting alerts and alarms in the form of emails, notifications on mobile are important to ensure that critical actions are not postponed for want of human intervention.

IV. BI automation  It is important that the entire BI solution is automated and does not depend on any human intervention. This will save significant costs incurred by the company for preparing the data. Automation opens up a world of possibilities where the organization can see critical information whenever they need it rather than waiting for a month-end report to take action.

E. Set up resources for BI

The entire BI solution needs 3 important elements that have to come together:

a. A strong BI tool  A strong BI tool that has elements of data visualization, alerts systems, role-based access, strong data security, and capability to integrate with other systems is needed

b. Functional experts  Having a good BI tool is just the first step but more important than that is having the right functional team to design the BI system based on business drivers, KPIs, and decisions. A Company may have to dedicate a team from its internal resources or engage a third-party service provider for performing functional analysis

c. Technology team  Once the functional team draws the design and functional requirements, the technology team has to develop reports and dashboards in the BI tool as well as set up an integration with the organizations underlying transactional systems. They will also set up the automation of the BI system.

The organization has to evaluate the total costs of procuring a self-service BI tool, engaging functional and IT teams to run the BI system vis-a-vis the cost of going for a completely assisted BI solution where all the elements (functional, technical, and the BI tool) are managed end-to-end.

Some of the popular self-service BI tools are Tableau and Power BI whereas BiCXO is a good assisted BI solution that provides tremendous value for money.

Bottom line: Implementing a good BI system will go a long way in improving operational efficiencies, customer satisfaction, and significant monetary benefits for the organization but all this can be possible only under one circumstance  Complete belief and support of top management in the BI solution.

About the writer

The writer is the founder-director of BiCXO, a completely assisted Business intelligence solutions provider

Sources

https://bi-survey.com/benefits-business-intelligence

https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/companies/83-of-data-driven-companies-in-india-gained-critical-business-advantage-during-covid-19-report/article33276686.ece
CaringKind, New York Citys leading expert on Alzheimers and dementia caregiving hosted their 25th annual Forget-Me-Not Gala virtually for the second year on Monday June 7th, raising over 1 million dollars in support of Alzheimers caregivers.

Hundreds of supporters tuned in from far and wide to support the initiative. Attendees were treated to special appearances from actors David Hyde Pierce and Lucy Liu, media mavens Nina Garcia and Cristina Cuomo, comedian Seth Herzog, social entrepreneur Claudia Romo Edelman, and local news personality and Emcee for the evening, Bill Ritter.

John Moore, Chairman and CEO of Atria Assisted Living, received CaringKinds 2021 Corporate Leadership award for outstanding dedication to supporting families affected by dementia. Mr. Moore received a hand-drawn portrait created and donated by artist Nicole Alger.

Attendees were treated to a roundtable discussion on the importance of social engagement, human and self-care for caregivers, moderated by Dr. Max Gomez, CBS-2 Medical Reporter.

The Forget-Me-Not Gala is a way for CaringKind to continue to raise funds to support the myriad of programs offered. Funds were raised through donations, tickets and auction items which included Knicks Tickets, Giants Tickets, and a catered dinner for eight including wine, and salon visit.

About CaringKind

CaringKind* is New York Citys leading expert on Alzheimers and dementia caregiving. With over 40 years of experience, CaringKind works directly with their community partners to develop the information, tools, and training to support individuals and families affected by dementia. They offer a CaringKind Helpline (646) 744-2900 run by professional staff; individual and family counseling sessions with licensed social workers; a vast network of support groups; education seminars and training programs; early-stage services and a wanderers safety program. They believe in the power of caregiving and seek a world where everyone dealing with dementia has the support they need when they need it.

https://www.caringkindnyc.org

*Formerly Known As Alzheimers Association, New York City Chapter.

About Eleonora Tornatore, CEO

Eleonora Tornatore-Mikesh spent almost 14 years at a premier assisted living community as the executive director. More recently Mrs. Tornatore-Mikesh was the CEO of the Alzheimers Associations Connecticut Chapter. During her tenure of 7 years at the Association she more than doubled revenue and implemented statewide dementia training in over 140 facilities. She created a state-wide early-stage group and secured funding for the state. Mrs. Tornatore-Mikesh also served as chairperson for the Connecticut Assisted Living Association (CALA) where she created a statewide curriculum for an Executive Director course. She served as a representative for the Connecticut Assisted Living Association (CALA) for seven years on a Department of Public Health committee revising regulations for assisted living and the Institute of Senior Living Education. For the last fifteen months she has been a senior executive for an Assisted Living on the Upper East Side, charged with program development. She is currently the President and CEO of CaringKind, the Heart of Alzheimer's Caregiving. She returns to CaringKind having served as an intern under Jed Levine 25 years ago.

About Atria Senior Living

Atria Senior Living is a leading operator of independent living, assisted living, supportive living, and memory care communities in more than 200 locations in 28 states and seven Canadian provinces. We are the residence of choice for more than 20,000 seniors, and the workplace of choice for more than 12,000 employees. We create vibrant communities where older adults can thrive and participate, know that their contributions are valued, and enjoy access to opportunities and support that help them keep making a positive difference in our world. For more information about Atria, visit AtriaSeniorLiving.com or follow them on Facebook or Twitter. For career opportunities and more information about working for Atria, visit AtriaCareers.com.

About John Moore, Chairman, and CEO

John Moore is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Atria Senior Living, a leading operator of more than 200 independent living, assisted living, supportive living, and memory care communities in 28 U.S. states and 7 Canadian provinces. John has served on the board of Atria and its predecessors boards since 1999, and as Chief Executive Officer for Atria and its predecessor since 2003. Prior to joining Atria in 1998, John worked as Managing Director of Lazard Alternative Investors and a Managing Principal and Chief Financial Officer of Lazard Real Estate Partners (LREP) in New York. He also worked as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of World Financial Properties, a private New York City-based office property owner/operator and a predecessor to the public company Brookfield Financial Properties Corporation. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Louisville Regional Airport Authority. He is also a member of the Argentum Board of Directors and previously served as the Chairman of the Board of the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing and Care.

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Dental office safety during COVID-19 The increased steps the ADA recommended has really contributed to the "remarkably low incidence of COVID-19 in dental offices"

Clearwater periodontist Dr. Todd Britten says new studies are showing that the dental office has been a very safe place to be during the COVID-19 pandemic. On June 1, 2021, the American Dental Association stated at a meeting regarding OSHA's Emergency standards, There does not appear to be a grave danger of being exposed to COVID-19 in dental settings, particularly as the pandemic is decelerating.

The American Dental Association representatives added that dentists have experienced exceptionally low monthly incidences of COVID-19. The cumulative COVID 19 infection rate was 2.6% for dentists and 3.1% for dental hygienists as of November 2020 and October 2020, respectively, prior to the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines.

The first thing Dr. Britten said he and his team did when the pandemic started was to look to the guidance from the ADA. The ADA and many renowned dental organizations and experts offered training webinars, for free, to help dental providers understand how to protect our patients and staff. Dentists and other medical professionals had to work hard to get the needed PPE in a time where shortages were rampant. Dental professionals really came together to help weather the storm of the pandemic," said Britten.

He feels the increased steps the ADA recommended really contributed to the "remarkably low incidence of COVID-19 in dental offices". These steps included:



Developing guidance for high- and low-exposure staff to take when a patient reports a positive COVID-19 test after their dental appointment.

Offering a flowchart, risk assessment and strategies for self-quarantine and returning to work if a staff member or someone in their household tests positive for COVID-19.

Furnishing a guide for handling patients who do not wear a face mask, whether because of a disability or a personal choice.

Sharing state-by-state updates on procedure requirements and/or restrictions for dentists.

Producing informational webinars on vaccine efficacy, targeted toward addressing vaccine hesitancy concerns among both patients and staff.

Britten Periodontics is a periodontal practice offering patients personalized dental care in periodontics, implants, laser therapy, cosmetic periodontics and regenerative therapy in Clearwater, Florida. Dr. Todd Britten received his Bachelor of Science and Doctorate of Dental Medicine and Masters Degree and Certificate in Periodontology and Implant Dentistry at the University of Florida. He is a Diplomate of the American Board of Periodontology. He has completed extensive continuing education coursework, including training at the Pankey Institute, Pikos Institute for Advanced Bone Grafting, Misch International Implant Institute and LANAP Institute for advanced Laser Dentistry. His Professional Associations and Memberships include American Board of Periodontology, American Academy of Periodontology, American Dental Association, Florida Association of Periodontists, Academy of Osseointegration, Upper Pinellas County Dental Association, Pinellas County Dental Association, Top Dentist 2015, Florida West Coast Dental Association and he completed extensive training at the Institute of Advanced Laser Dentistry. Dr. Britten is part of the one percent of dental professionals offering the FDA cleared laser procedure for gum disease treatment.


Tenant Screening USA Confusion over evictions and rent repayment, as well as federal relief, may continue for some months and a best practice remains to work with a well-qualified third-party tenant screening agency.

Millions face potential eviction as current CDC Covid 19 related moratoriums are set to expire at the end of June 30, 2021 and greater confusion may continue as both landlords and tenants search for an answer to the back rent crisis. Adam Almeida, President and CEO of TenantScreeningUSA.com states: Confusion over evictions and rent repayment, as well as federal relief, may continue for some months and a best practice remains for all landlords and property managers to work with a well-qualified third-party tenant screening agency, such as TenantScreeningUSA.com, to stay compliant with laws that govern tenant screening.

There are a variety of paths that may be taken if the CDC Covid 19 Eviction Moratorium ends on June 30, 2021. Some states are beginning to take measures to extend beyond the federal deadline while a court case is attempting to get the moratorium eliminated via legal action.

From National Law Review on June 7, 2021:

As detailed in a recent alert, U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich, in Alabama Association of Realtors v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, found that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did not have authority to impose a nationwide eviction moratorium (CDC Order) under the Public Health Service Act (PHSA). Since the decision, there has been a spate of activity in that case and throughout the country regarding the CDC Order and its enforceability. With the CDC Order set to expire on 30 June 2021 and increasingly encouraging national COVID-19 data, it seems less likely that the CDC Order will remain in place for an extended period. Individual states, however, may ultimately keep certain pandemic protection measures in place in order to protect residential tenants. While landlords and tenants await an official decision from the CDC about a further extension of the moratorium, courts will continue to rule on the enforceability of the CDC Order. (1)

Tenants Rights advocates in the state of Washington are pushing the governor to extend past the June 30, 2021 deadline.

From The Seattle Times on June 4, 2021:

Housing advocacy groups and the City of Seattle urged Gov. Jay Inslee this week to hold off on lifting the statewide eviction moratorium until support programs are in place to keep renters from losing their homes in vast numbers.

Instead of lifting the moratorium all at once, the letter to Inslee proposes a county-by-county approach that would roll back the moratorium only after a county is effectively distributing rental assistance and has set up programs to help tenants. The letter also asks Inslee to extend a prohibition on rent increases for one year. (2)

Almeida concludes: Other states, such as Colorado and Oregon, are searching for longer term resolution to the impending eviction crisis, but one thing remains clear. Partnering with a well-qualified third-party tenant screening agency, such as TenantScreeningUSA.com, remains a best practice to stay ahead of potential change to laws governing tenant screening.

TenantScreeningUSA.com provides full-service tenant screening for landlords and property managers of any size and can greatly assist in remaining fully compliant with all existing law governing tenant screening. With a highly trained and experienced staff, TenantScreeningUSA.com can provide help to landlords and property managers with all their tenant screening needs.

Notes:

(1) natlawreview.com/article/covid-19-moratorium-madness-will-challenges-to-eviction-order-force-cdc-s-hand

(2) seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/with-aid-programs-still-in-the-works-advocates-call-on-inslee-to-extend-washington-eviction-ban-again/
Residentially Speaking podcasts provide a great way to continue the conversation with builders, share success stories and science-based solutions for building healthy, robust and energy efficient homes that endure for years to come."

DuPont (NYSE:DD) today announced Residentially Speaking, a podcast series hosted by Alan Hubbell, Residential Marketing Leader, DuPont Performance Building Solutions. Each educational podcast features expert guests addressing topics most relevant to building high performance residential and multi-family wood-framed homes.

The Residentially Speaking series brings the voice and experience of key builders, dealers, thought leaders and influencers to discuss key issues shaping the residential home building market today and into the future. These podcasts are available on the DuPont Performance Building Solutions education portal, the EDU HUB.

"Builders have told us of their need to stay on top of the latest, proven building practices. With more than 50,000 builders in the U.S. and Canada, theres a large audience in need of educational touchpoints to help them continue to learn and grow in their trade," said Hubbell. Residentially Speaking podcasts provide a great way to continue the conversation with builders, share success stories and science-based solutions for building healthy, robust and energy efficient homes that endure for years to come."

The inaugural edition of the Residentially Speaking podcast series, released on May 3 and currently live on the EDU HUB, features Mark LaLiberte, cofounder and president of Construction Instruction, a company that provides building professionals with training and solutions to build better, long lasting, healthier homes. Hubble and LaLiberte discuss the state-of-the-industry and trends that drive the future of home building and most importantly why building science education is important to the industry.

In their conversation, LaLiberte points out, 100 Years is probably a reasonable expectation of how long a building that is built today should last. Homeowners put a lot of trust in builders knowledge of their trade and the science of buildings because of their title as a professional in the field. Buildings need to last throughout several changes of occupants and climate variations and that requires knowledge of three fundamentals; control the flow of heat, air and water in a structure. Understanding the science of buildings is essential if we want homes to be healthy, safe, durable and efficient.

When asked why teaching people is important, LaLiberte comments on the variation of professional training that builders receive today  whether that be on-the-job, apprentice training, or more formalized construction education. He notes that builders dont learn to build great buildings by accident, but rather they must be trained to do it. In his role with Construction Instruction, he interacts with builders across the United States to teach builders residential construction best practices and to help them incorporate good building science principles into their residential designs.

This conversation sets up a similar discussion on industry trends for the second podcast in the series featuring guest, Bill Smithers, CEO, CBUSA. In this episode, Bill shares his experience from the point-of-view of a builder in the industry. Residentially Speaking episode 2, with Bill Smithers is scheduled for release on June 17.

DuPont Performance Building Solutions provides the marketplace with a full suite of weatherization, thermal and air sealing solutions and services with the EDU HUB being the latest addition to a solution set aimed at meeting the educational and information needs of the residential building industry. In addition to podcasts, visitors can register for (and view) a series of solutions-oriented educational webinars as well as building science-based training materials and installation videos that will help the homes they build stand the test of time  expanding, contracting, breathing and protecting  for generations to come.

About DuPont Performance Building Solutions and Corian Design

Grounded in science, DuPont Performance Building Solutions and Corian Design are working alongside those who also seek a sustainable tomorrow to help people thrive at home and in their communities for years to come. By developing solutions for managing the air, water and thermal performance of buildings and residences, we help our customers build energy-efficient, resilient, and durable shelters in a rapidly changing world. Backed by unmatched industry insight, building knowledge, and technical support, as well as world-class brands such as Styrofoam Brand, Tyvek, and Great Stuff, our products and services portfolio enables customers to focus on what they do best, no matter where and how they choose to build.

About DuPont Water & Protection

DuPont Water & Protection is a global leader in products and solutions that protect what matters  people, structures and the environment  and enables its customers to win through unique capabilities, global scale, and iconic brands including Corian, Kevlar, Nomex Tyvek, Styrofoam, and Filmtec.

About DuPont

DuPont (NYSE: DD) is a global innovation leader with technology-based materials and solutions that help transform industries and everyday life. Our employees apply diverse science and expertise to help customers advance their best ideas and deliver essential innovations in key markets including electronics, transportation, construction, water, healthcare and worker safety. More information about the company, its businesses and solutions can be found at http://www.dupont.com. Investors can access information included on the Investor Relations section of the website at investors.dupont.com.

# # #

DuPont, the DuPont Oval Logo, and all trademarks and service marks denoted with ,  or  are owned by affiliates of DuPont de Nemours, Inc. unless otherwise noted.

6/11/21
Rep. Mike Rogers receives the 2021 Life Safety Advocate Award from Fire Equipment Manufacturers Association president, Guy Jones As the Ranking Member of the Armed Services Committee, Representative Rogers has worked tirelessly to ensure the safety of our nations service members by keeping fire extinguishers on all military installations.

The Fire Equipment Manufacturers Association has selected Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabamas 3rd congressional district for its 2021 Life Safety Advocate Award.

As the Ranking Member of the Armed Services Committee, Representative Rogers has worked tirelessly to ensure the safety of our nations service members by keeping fire extinguishers on all military installations, said Guy Jones, president of the Fire Equipment Manufacturers Association. The Fire Equipment Manufacturers Association appreciates all Rep. Rogers efforts, and we congratulate him on this award.

The annual Life Safety Advocate Award is given to an individual who has demonstrated a commitment to enhancing the safety of the public through innovative efforts, including legislative, educational, enforcement or other effective means.

Rep. Rogers was presented the award during an event on June 8, 2021, at Amerex Corporationa manufacturer of fire extinguishers and fire suppression systemsin Trussville, Alabama.

The Alabama congressman was first elected to Congress in 2002. He is a recognized leader on key national security issues, and with three military installations located within his congressional district, a strong advocate for service members and their families.

Rep. Rogers is a sixth generation East Alabamian and son of a firefighter. He has been married to his wife, Beth, for more than 35 years; they have three children.

About the Fire Equipment Manufacturers Association

The Fire Equipment Manufacturers Association is a more than 80-year-old non-profit trade association dedicated to saving lives and protecting property by providing education of a balanced fire protection design. For additional information, including videos, interactive questionnaires, and training websites about fire safety and protection, visit femalifesafety.org or call 216-241-7333. Follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/BalancedFireProtection. For a complete listing of member companies, visit the Member Profiles page of the associations website at femalifesafety.org/members.
China urges Japan to keep promises on Taiwan question

Xinhua) 17:38, June 11, 2021

BEIJING, June 10 (Xinhua) -- China on Thursday expressed strong dissatisfaction with remarks by Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, in which he called Taiwan "a country", and has lodged solemn representations with Japan, according to a Foreign Ministry spokesperson.

Spokesperson Wang Wenbin told a daily news briefing that the Japanese leader has openly referred to Taiwan as "a country", which seriously violated the principles of the four political documents including the China-Japan Joint Declaration, and breached the solemn promise of "not regarding Taiwan as a country" made by the Japanese side many times so far.

China wants Japan to immediately issue clarifications to eliminate the damage and to ensure that such a thing will not reoccur, the spokesperson said.

There is only one China in the world and Taiwan is an inseparable part of China's territory, said Wang, adding that the Taiwan question concerns the political foundation of China-Japan ties, the basic credibility between the two countries, and the international rule of law and justice.

"China seriously urges the Japanese side to earnestly keep its promises on the Taiwan question, to exercise caution in words and deeds, to not damage China's sovereignty in any way, and to refrain from sending wrong signals to the "Taiwan independence" forces," Wang said.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Hongyu)
inPOWERED Light's Lamp Angel now available at Wayfair As a women-owned business, we are committed to creating lamps that provide style and functionality, especially during a power outage.

inPOWERED Lights' Lamp Angel will be your best friend during a power outage. This decorative emergency backup lighting is now available at Wayfair.

The patented technology means the LED lamp automatically switches on when the power goes out, providing up to 24 hours of light and charging power.

We are excited to launch our new products using the patented Autolight Emergency Technology, said Cherie Cunningham, Owner and Chief Financial Officer. As a women-owned business, we are committed to creating lamps that provide style and functionality, especially during a power outage.

The Lamp Angel and Blue Coral lamps are stylish yet functional, bringing the consumer a perfect partner for any side table, desk, or nightstand.

The Lamp Angel works nicely for kids who are afraid of the dark with color changing LED lights. Schedule the light to turn on and off, as needed, until they fall asleep. Plus, make it easier on yourself to wake up in the morning by having the lamp come on when its time to get out of bed. The shatter resistant base can be changed to hundreds of different colors and brightness. The lamp is controlled by smartphone or remote and allows kids to change colors and styles.

Lamp Angel Description:



Use as a normal lamp and when the power goes out, this light automatically turns on

Fun color-changing LEDs that you can control from your smartphone or included remote (100 colors!)

Provides light for up to 24 hours during a power outage

USB port charges phones, iPads, etc. with or without electricity

Perfect for your kids bedroom

Available on Wayfair, Amazon and http://www.inpoweredlights.com

Price: $49.99

IPL is a certified woman-owned business. The brand designs and manufactures innovative decorative lamps with AUTOLIGHT Emergency Technology donating 1% of profits to programs committed to helping women entrepreneurs. They seek to empower other women through creativity and ingenuity, encouraging them to submit design ideas for selection as their next new product.
Trade Up to a Kia Sales Event 2021 - Performance Kia

Performance Kia is promoting Trade Up to a Kia Sales Event 2021 for all Pennsylvania customers. This sales event allows customers to sell the old vehicle without any hassle while saving money on the next vehicle. Now until July 6, 2021, well-qualified buyers around Pennsylvania can trade in an old Kia and get 0 percent APR financing for up to 66 months plus earn up to $1,500 Trade Assist Cash toward a brand-new 2021 Kia model. No down payment is necessary to grab this offer.

Please note that this offer is only applicable on the purchase of selected 2021 Kia vehicles, including 2021 Kia K5 GT-Line (up to $750 Trade Assist Cash), 2021 Kia Sportage SX Turbo AWD (up to $1,500 Trade Assist Cash), 2021 Kia Soul Turbo (up to $750 Trade Assist Cash), and 2021 Kia Forte GT (up to $500 Trade Assist Cash) that are available in their inventory. Trade Up to a Kia Sales Event 2021 may not be combined with other special offers at Performance Kia. The customers credit is subject to approval by Kia Motors Finance before finalizing any offer.

Interested customers can visit the dealerships website or call at 570-291-5294 for any sales-related queries. The Performance Kia dealership is located at 4225 Birney Ave., Moosic, Pennsylvania. The Sales department is available from 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Saturdays.
RouteOne RouteOne adds prequalification to its suite of Digital Retail Services, helping dealers offer flexible solutions to meet the expectations of online consumers.

RouteOne has enhanced its Digital Retail Services product to include a prequalification feature that delivers more qualified online leads to dealers from their website. Prequalification functionality provides dealers with visibility into a consumers credit worthiness and requires only the consumers name and address to request a credit score and credit report. This soft pull of credit is completed without an impact on the customers credit (i.e., no hard credit inquiry) and helps dealers match the appropriate vehicle and financing product at the beginning of the sales cycle. This process helps both the dealer and customer manage expectations and create a more efficient process with successful outcomes. This feature, available from 700 Credit, is seamlessly integrated into RouteOnes Premium Digital Retail Services.

RouteOne adds prequalification to its suite of Digital Retail Services, helping dealers offer flexible solutions to meet the expectations of online consumers. RouteOne Digital Retail Services are available in multiple levels to best fit a dealers F&I processes. All of RouteOnes embedded online F&I offerings provide flexibility and are packed with features to enable a variety of customer experiences including customizable branding, Mobile Point of Sale application with eSign, guided video tours, and multi-lingual functionality. A Premium subscription provides the highest level of engagement online and helps dealers automate compliance tasks such as identity verification, privacy notice, and Credit Score Disclosure Notices. The new prequalification functionality rounds out payment call and customer quotes to provide a robust online experience. All consumer data is automatically populated into the RouteOne Deal Manager for the dealer to continue to work the deal with Menu and eContracting, reducing duplicate data entry and digitizing the F&I process.

As the industry evolves, so will the innovative products RouteOne delivers to their dealers, stated Amanda George, Chief Product Officer, RouteOne. We are pleased to have 700 Credit integrated into our Digital Retail Service product and excited for dealers to enable prequalification and offer their consumers even more options.

Dealers interested in RouteOnes Digital Retail Services, including prequalification, can subscribe by logging into the RouteOne platform and navigating to Admin, then Premium Services; or by contacting their RouteOne Business Development Manager at 866.768.8301 or http://www.routeone.com/salesteam.

About RouteOne

RouteOne was formed in 2002 by Ally Financial, Ford Motor Credit Company, TD Auto Finance, and Toyota Financial Services to improve the F&I process for automobile dealers and their customers. Connecting thousands of dealers and finance sources in North America for vehicle financing, RouteOnes platform delivers a comprehensive suite of F&I solutions across multiple channels: in-store, online, mobile, and via third-party solutions. Its product line-up includes digital retail, credit application, eContracting, menu, and compliance solutions. In addition, RouteOne enables dealer choice across a wide variety of best-in-class providers through open integrations with over 200 DSPs. More information is available at http://www.routeone.com.
SIU School of Dental Medicine Dean Bruce Rotter Bruce has an incredibly informed perspective having been a part of SDM as a student, faculty member and long-serving administrator.

Southern Illinois University School of Dental Medicine (SIU SDM) Dean Bruce Rotter, DMD, MS, announced his retirement today, effective December 2021. Rotter was named SDM dean in Nov. 2012 after serving as interim dean for more than a year.

An SIU SDM Class of 1982 alumnus, Rotter joined the SDM as a faculty member in 1993. He brought a unique perspective to the deans position, fully participating in the SDMs progress as a student, faculty member and administrator.

On behalf of SIUE and the SIU School of Dental Medicine, I want to thank Dean Rotter for nearly 30 years of service, said Chancellor Randy Pembrook. Bruce has an incredibly informed perspective having been a part of SDM as a student, faculty member and long-serving administrator. In particular, I want to commend Dean Rotter and the School for their dedication to the community as evidenced by their free clinics for Veterans and the Give Kids a Smile Program which annually provide more than $100,000 of free dental service to valued constituencies, as well as their work at the WE CARE Clinic in East St. Louis. We wish Bruce and his wife, Cindy, best wishes as they plan for retirement in 2022.

Rotter was SDM associate dean for academic affairs for six years prior to serving as interim dean. He joined the SDM faculty as an assistant professor in 1993, was named associate professor in 1997 and professor in 2009. During that time, Rotter created and administered one of the first implant fellowship training programs in the country. That program led to the creation of a freestanding implant clinic, which he designed, helped develop and directed.

Highlights of Rotters distinguished career include:



Three times led the School through reaccreditation from the Council on Dental Accreditation.

Jan. 2021, Appointed Cornell Thomas, DDS, as SDM chief diversity officer and director of the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) to increase concentration on diversity, equity, inclusion and well-being.

Nov. 2020, was elected vice chair of the Commission of Dental Accreditation (CODA), the national programmatic accrediting agency for dental and dental-related education programs at the post-secondary level.

Nov. 2020, launched SDM clinical endodontic training graduate program.

April 2019, SDM received a $2 million grant from the Illinois Childrens Healthcare Foundation (ILCHF). The SDM is building a medical operating suite with general anesthesia capabilities for children with special dental care needs within a new Advanced Care Patient Clinic.

Feb. 2017, SDM showcased its renovated clinic in University Park on the Edwardsville campus, expanding the scope of the SDMs available care, providing that care to a greater demographic and esnuring an even higher level of training to SDM students.

March 2014, SDMs new and expanded presence in Alton earned an Award of Achievement from Pride, Incorporated, a local nonprofit organization dedicated to community beautification. The award recognized the construction of the Schools Multidisciplinary Simulation Laboratory and adjacent space, an 18,000-square-foot, $9.5 million project.

Throughout his academic career, Rotter continued to be active in the private practice of oral and maxillofacial surgery in order to maintain his knowledge and skills while bringing that experience to the academic setting. He has worked with Southern Illinois Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Ltd., in Belleville and Glen Carbon since 2002 until his appointment as dean. He also has served the Veteran's Administration Medical Center in St. Louis as an oral and maxillofacial surgeon and/or consultant since 1994.

A member of 15 dental professional associations, Rotter has been elected to fellowship by the American College of Dentists, the International College of Dentists, and the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons.

Rotter has been associated with more than a dozen hospitals throughout his career including affiliations with St. Anthonys Medical Center in Alton, Belleville Memorial Hospital, Healthsouth Surgical Center in Belleville and the Veteran's Administration Medical Center in St. Louis.

The SIU School of Dental Medicine students manage approximately 35,000 patient visits each year at its patient clinics in Alton and East St. Louis. In addition, students offer oral health treatment, screenings and education to more than 10,000 people annually through a wide variety of off-campus community outreach events. These opportunities provide students the training they need to graduate and become highly skilled dentists. The School of Dental Medicine is a vital oral health care provider for residents of southern and central Illinois, and the St. Louis metropolitan region.
Mark Schneider, CEO of Vizion Health, LLC (Vizion) announced today that the company has acquired Brookhaven Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Community NeuroRehab (CNR) located in Iowa. Brookhaven Hospital is a 64-bed Joint Commission and CARF-accredited acute care psychiatric hospital providing a range of both inpatient and outpatient behavioral health services to the adult and adolescent community. Brookhaven Hospital is nationally recognized for its Neurological Rehabilitative Institute (NRI) which specializes in providing services for Traumatic Brain Injury( TBI). Founded in 1991, Brookhaven is the first hospital offering TBI Programs in the United States. CNR is a CARF-accredited community-based step down program for long-term TBI patients. Brookhaven Hospital also includes multi-site long term step-down services for TBI patients in Tulsa. Vizion is committed to continue the high quality of care and professionalism the exceptional staff provides at Brookhaven and to build on the legacy of its NRI programs reports the CEO. Also, the Vizion team is pleased that Brookhavens CEO, Thomas Brown, who has decades of experience in TBI, will remain as CEO of the hospital. Vizions purchase of Brookhaven marks its most recent acquisition in an aggressive campaign to purchase high quality behavioral health facilities throughout the country. Vizion partnered with National Health Investors (NHI) on this acquisition. We are looking forward to working with NHI and look forward to future partnerships going forward says Aaron Kneas, one of Vizions partners. NHI is a real estate investment trust whose portfolio spans 34 states and consists of senior housing communities, skilled nursing facilities, medical office buildings and specialty hospitals.

Vizion Health LLC is a privately-owned healthcare company with offices in Charlotte, NC. Vizion brings a seasoned behavioral healthcare team with decades of experience to Brookhaven Hospital. Mark Schneider has over four decades of operating a broad spectrum of behavioral health facilities. Stephen Chesney, Vizions Chief Operating Officer, brings more than 30 years of experience operating multi-site and multi-state behavioral health businesses. Dr. Ann Miller, a recognized national expert in the addiction treatment industry, is Vizions Chief Development Officer. Aaron Kneas, a Vizion partner and managing director with New Century Capital Partners (NCCP), supports the Vizion team on structuring transactions and securing the capital for the Companys growth. The strength of the core Vizion team enables us to grow quickly while continuing to ensure quality programming throughout our system, says Mark Schneider.

Vizion currently owns and operates Willow Crest Hospital and Moccasin Bend Ranch in Miami, Oklahoma. Willow Crest is a 50-bed acute care psychiatric hospital and Moccasin Bend Ranch is a 28-bed residential treatment center for children and adolescents with mental health problems. Vizion also manages Red River Academy in Norman, Oklahoma, a 56-bed residential treatment center which provides mental health services to adolescents. In addition, Vizion owns Shoreline Treatment Center in Taft, Texas, a 91-bed addiction treatment center for adolescents, as well as Magnolia Counseling Center in Batesville, Mississippi which provides outpatient mental health services and addiction treatment services to adults and adolescents. Magnolia also provides Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) services to addicted patients, as well other cutting-edge outpatient addiction treatment services.

The purchase of Brookhaven provides Vizion the largest presence of free-standing behavioral health beds in the state of Oklahoma.

Further information on Vizion Health can be found at http://www.vizionhealth.com. Vizion Healths management team can be reached at 703-980-7085
Slater & Zurz is pleased to announce the winner of the 4th Annual Slater & Zurz Scholarship Award. Slater & Zurz is an Ohio law firm with offices in Akron, Canton, Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati dedicated to helping Ohio college students pursue their dreams of a higher education. The 4th Annual Slater & Zurz Scholarship awards a student with $5,000 toward costs incurred at an Ohio college or university during the 2021-22 academic year.

This years winner is 17-year-old Analyse Sutton, who will be attending Kent State University this fall to pursue a degree in Physical Therapy.

To compete for the scholarship, students were asked to write a 1,000  2,000 word essay and create a two to four-minute YouTube video addressing the following question:

What changes should be made to law enforcement in the United States?

Although this years scholarship contest attracted many compelling essays, Miss Suttons submission stood out due to its outstanding execution, insightful perspective, and discerning solutions. In her winning essay, Analyse Sutton wrote,

As law enforcement officers work through this difficult time, they need to hold each other accountable and give each other support to discern good from evil and the strength to make good choices, even when those choices are made under great amounts of stress.

When asked why she chose physical therapy as her course of study, she explained, I started off the year (2020) on a mission trip to Liberia and West Africa to work with children. One day, a young girl brought her little brother to the village we were in. She said he was ill, and since a fellow volunteer was a physical therapist, the sister hoped she could help. The boy had Cerebral Palsy. Seeing him and watching the physical therapist work with him is what made me realize that pediatric physical therapy was something I could do to help children. I want to bring that little bit of relief and comfort I saw the physical therapist give this boy to other children.

Jim Slater and the rest of the Slater & Zurz team wish Analyse the best and look forward to hearing from her about her future endeavors.

About Slater & Zurz

For over 40 years, Slater & Zurz have helped Ohioans with a variety of legal matters pertaining to personal injury, family law, and probate law. Their experienced and compassionate legal team deeply cares about the members of our community and understands the importance of obtaining a quality education. Offering the Slater & Zurz Annual Scholarship Award is one way to give back to our community and ease some of the financial effects that are often felt during the pursuit of a college degree.

The Slater & Zurz team wants to thank everyone who participated in the 4th Annual Scholarship Contest. We welcome you to check back to learn more about next years contest.
Typically, as the school year comes to a close, many educators and parents thoughts turn to how they can stem summer slide, or the learning loss associated with students being away from schoola key access point for booksduring summer vacation. But in the wake of all the disruptions that school districts nationwide have experienced during the Covid-19 crisis, concerns about students pandemic learning loss and students and educators social-emotional well-being have also mounted. As educators, students, and parents gear up to meet these challenges, many publishers, ed tech companies, libraries, and nonprofits are expanding their traditional summer reading offerings and/or creating new tools to help.

The companies PW spoke with unanimously named two key elements of effective summer reading programs: access to booksin print and/or digital formatsand the opportunity for students to choose their own reading materials. Research has long supported the importance of these two factors. According to the Kids & Family Reading Report 7th Edition from Scholastic, conducted in 2019, for example, 53% of kids access books they read for fun from school, and 50% of kids get them from the public library. And for most kids, schools are the least-available access point for books during the summer.

The same report finds that parents also focus on book access and choice when they encourage summer reading at home. Fifty-four percent of parents said that taking trips to public libraries was one of the top strategies to bolster their kids efforts. That was closely followed by ordering from school book clubs or book fairs (42%) and taking books on road trips for vacations (42%). And 70% of kids ages six to 17 participating in the survey noted that they like summer reading because, I get to read whenever/whatever I want. A companion study titled Teacher & Principal Report, conducted in 2020, highlighted the significance of book access, as well, revealing that 96% of teachers, principals, and school librarians believe that providing year-round access to books in the home is important to enhancing student achievement.

On the publishing front, Scholastic, which has offered a free summer reading program for kids since 2008, rolled out this years version in late April, with some tweaks that reflect the current climate. Our 2021 program continues to keep reading motivation at the core, while addressing new challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic, including book access and providing kids with a safe digital community to interact with their peers, says Lizette Serrano, v-p of educational marketing at Scholastic. From now until September 3, kids can participate in the program by creating accounts on Scholastic Home Base, which Serrano describes as a safe, 24/7 moderated digital destination.

Home Base allows kids to join a community of readers, as well as meet some of their favorite authors via virtual events, read e-books, and watch author readaloud videos. Participants can track their reading progress by keeping Reading Streaks, during which they mark milestones and can earn virtual rewards. The volume of reading tracked through participants Reading Streaks, Serrano says, will help to unlock a donation of 100,000 print books from Scholastic, which will be distributed to kids in rural areas with limited or no access to books by Save the Children, a nonprofit organization that has transformed the lives of more than one billion children since its founding more than 100 years ago.

Serrano believes that this summer presents an opportunity for learning acceleration. She adds, We know that districts and families nationwide are working to ensure their summer learning plans include social-emotional support, online experiences, and holistic learning opportunities for all students. The Scholastic Home Base online community provides options for social-emotional learning and connection.

As an example, Serrano points to the format of this summers programming. Every Thursday from May 6 to August 26 at 3 p.m. ET, award-winning authors including summer reading ambassadors Sayantani DasGupta, Varian Johnson, Ann M. Martin, and Kelly Yang will host virtual events for kids to interact via a moderated chat function, ask questions, and learn behind-the-scenes information about the authors books, she says. And for budding writers, there will be opportunities to write a short piece with the authors.

In addition to the summer reading program, Scholastic is offering a number of resources for students and families, including a Family Help Desk staffed by experts in trauma, anxiety, early childhood, and reading development from the Yale Child Study Center + Scholastic Collaborative. Among the other available tools are a resiliency workbook for kids, the opportunity to host/participate in summer reading virtual Book Fairs, and themed grab-and-go take-home student book packs for purchase.

Ed tech on board

Other companies are making available curated packs of books for home use this year, as well. We created the take-home/summer reading book packs because distance learning has further highlighted the longstanding inequities that our students face, says Deidra Purvis, director of classroom services at ed tech company Mackin. Not all students have reliable access to the internet or to books at home. This has always been a challenge for schools, but even more so when students are spending less time in school and more time at home. The number of books in a students home has been found to correlate with their level of academic achievement. We also know, based on the science of reading engagement, that when provided with books that they find personally relevant, students are more likely to engage in reading, and thus become better readers. That is why we have designed an easy solution for schools to pick and choose inclusive book packs to be sent home to build ownership over reading for their students. It was most important to us that these books are of high interest and personally relevant to the lives of students.

The grab-and-go model has become an essential element of Folletts work with nonprofits and with school districts this summer. Last year, for the first time, it teamed up with two early literacy organizationsPage Ahead in Seattle and Start Reading Now in Minneapolisto provide low-income families with books to read over the summer. The partnership idea was born when the pandemic forced the closure of schools, and thus the cancellation of the large in-school book fairs that the nonprofits had traditionally used to get summer reading materials to their participating students. Follett stepped in and offered an online ordering and shipping solution on a tight turnaround, using its book eFair template. All parties chose to continue the arrangement in 2021.

Weve made some improvements this year, to make it easier for students to be able to order the books that they want and have them bagged and packed and shipped, says Britten Follett, executive v-p of Follett School Solutions. Last year books went to a central location and the organization worked on the distribution. Were doing the same this year, but we also have the ability to ship to homes as well.

The summer reading pillars of access and choice are in play here, too. Both organizations have a goal that allows for student choice, Follett says. There are a lot of organizations out there trying to get books in the hands of kids, but if its not a book the kid is interested in reading, theyre probably just going to put it on the shelf and not remember it. If the student has the opportunity to pick from popular titles, the idea is that theyre going to be far more engaged and potentially remember the book and develop their literacy skills further. Thats why they like the eFair platform, because it essentially allows kids to go shopping virtually.

Folletts relationship with Page Ahead has expanded this summer. The number of eFair events has increased from 32 to 45, and in a new twist, Follett will additionally be working with the school districts that participate in Page Aheads Book Up Summer program, which focuses on grades K2. The school districts that Page Ahead serves were so pleased with the events that they decided to use their own funds to also provide books to students in grades 35, Britten Follett says. Its an interesting public-private partnership where the nonprofit [organization] funds K2, the school district funds 35, and Follett is able to provide the platform for the distribution of the books.

Beyond Washington State, Follett notes that, from a school district perspective, we are seeing a huge demand in books-to-home [shipping]. School districts across the country are funding what were calling a grab-and go modelbasically books in a bag for a student to keep at home to build their home librarybecause theyre concerned about the Covid slide combined with having an additional two-and-a-half months off over the summer.

Districts are also looking at potential programming for high needs students over the summer, according to Follett. Its not a requirement from the federal government, but some states are strongly encouraging school districts to offer summer programming for high needs students due to the Covid slide, she says. I think it has just elevated the discussion, associated with the fact that many families dont have books at home for students to read. So, if we know that thats a gap, how can we use the large amount of federal funding thats descending on K12 schools to help fill it? Thats how some districts are thinking about it: What if we could help every student build their home library so that, when theyre not in the school building, they can have print books that are at their age and grade level and access them throughout the year?

Follett says her company sees expanding on this nonprofit concept as a positive new business strategy. If we can tap into third parties that are looking to get books into the hands of students, thats additional revenue into the funnel, she notes. The idea of giving publishers a virtual fair option to test new authors, new genres, new concepts, new charactersthose are things were interested in talking to our publishing partners about because, again, by selling directly to students and allowing them to select books without the financial limitations of a book fair, I think its an interesting potential test market. As Follett explains, In a book fair you can only buy what you can afford; in this case we set it up so the nonprofit is actually funding the selection of the books, which gives students an opportunity to choose more books than they might have previously shopped for.

At OverDrive, educational general manager Angela Arnold reports that summer reading is among the top-of-mind concerns for the school districts and partners that use the companys Sora reading app. In this unprecedented era when every month, every quarter, every unit of time creates a different challenge for our school partners, she says. The way we can help is by really listening to their needs. Right now, theyre saying that they need to be able to deliver summer reading. They are looking for low-cost summer reading options like our Sweet Reads program, which is very popular and will help them provide some books right away. She notes that OverDrive has really turned on the gas on that program this year, pointing out that it includes more titles (38) and more types of content (audiobooks, graphic novels).

Sweet Reads addresses such overarching questions as, What kinds of materials are going to entice kids? and, What do they need right now and what do they want? Arnold says. Whereas in the past it was strictly a pleasure reading program to keep kids engaged over the summer, now its a little more prescriptive.

Arnold pointed to the impressive success of last years program and noted that 2021 is already off to a strong start. In 2020, nearly 25,000 schools around the world took part in Sweet Reads, a 90% increase from the number of schools that participated in 2019. Student participation grew more than five times from 2019, resulting in a 500% increase in checkouts year over year. In total, more than 250,000 students joined in, reading at least one of the programs 31 simultaneous-use titles. So far more than 48,000 schools are enrolled in the current Sweet Reads program, which runs May 5August 20.

Apart from the Sweet Reads program, OverDrives school partners are looking for additional free content and thats something else that were bolstering in our Sora offering, Arnold says. Our publishers have very generously agreed to go back and make sure that they participate in the free content models we offer. School partners are also looking for us to help them provide structured programming or support the schools structured programming.

Arnold points to the example of ongoing discussions with one school district that does a community outreach program working with parents and families for whom English is a second language. Theyre providing reading materials, webinars, and weekly touch bases for those families, she says. And theyre talking to us because they are interested in how we can support that with digital books.

Ann Arbor Public Schools in Michigan is one of the district partners taking advantage of OverDrives offerings to support its summer school programs. Jennifer Colby, library services department chair for AAPS, shared information on what her students will be able to access in the coming months. AAPS is offering summer school for students in kindergarten through 12th grade via online platform Schoology, which integrates access to Sora. To help make that connection, she says that all students will retain or be provided with district-issued devices (iPads for lower elementary and Chromebooks for upper elementary through high school). In all the programs, school librarians will showcase how to access and use the Sora e-book library and simultaneous use collections like Sora Sweet Reads and AudioSync Audiobook programs as well as a social and emotional learning lineup of titles.

Access to these free, simultaneous use collections affords our teachers and students the opportunity to discuss choice book literature circles, Colby says. These discussions help students to share their understanding of a text and make connections with the text to their own lives and the lives of their fellow students. A major focus of our summer school curricula is community. These connections to the people within and outside of our communities are especially important as we have lived a socially distanced life over the past year and our students have not been able to personally interact with each other to the extent that they normally do.

AAPS summer school students will have access to the districts Sora curated e-book library collection, too. Providing choice books to our students allows them to read and enjoy books of interest to them, Colby says. Without the opportunity to check out print books from our library collections since March 2020, access to books for pleasure reading has been limited. Our Sora e-book library, available to our students since November 2020, is growing in popularity every day. With continued promotion and use throughout the summer we hope to start the 20212022 school year with a robust and engaging e-book library.

Colby adds that continued use and instruction in the Sora e-book library this summer will help students develop their digital decoding and comprehension skills, which will serve them well in the future. As our AAPS curriculum and instruction will continue to incorporate digital resources, access to digital texts and knowing how to use the Sora interactive features strengthens student comprehension of texts and prepares our students for engagement with digital texts provided in other platforms as they move through our program and into college, she says.

Programs and materials abound

In another partnership geared toward keeping students engaged and reading during the summer break, large-print publisher Thorndike Press has teamed up with the Beanstack reading tracking app and entrepreneur Mark Cuban to deliver Level Up, a national K12 summer reading challenge for schools. Between June 1 and July 15, participating students will log the books they read on the Beanstack app, where they can earn virtual achievement badges and engage with friends in addition to discovering new books. Level Up participants can choose any genre or format of book to read, and large print booksa proven literacy intervention toolwill be one of the formats featured during the program.

Schools whose students log the most reading time will win cash prizes provided by Cuban, and prize packs of middle grade and YA large-print books. The grand-prize-winning school will receive $5,000 cash and a $1,000 collection of large print books, as well as a virtual chat with one of four authors: Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, Meg Medina, Kwame Mbalia, and Jewell Parker Rhodes. There will also be a second-place prize awarded, and four runners-up will earn cash and books, too.

Digital reading platform Epic plans to keep kids attention when schools out with the launch of its first-ever summer program, Camp Epic. Under the Camp Epic umbrella, the app will release a 10-page comic each week for five consecutive weeks beginning July 5. The comics mark a crossover event and star characters from the Epic Originals line of titles joining together for fun and adventure with a summer camp backdrop. Each of the weekly comic installments will also include a hands-on activity for campers, including classics like making a friendship bracelet or tie-dye shirt.

While not every publisher runs a distinct summer reading program, many of the companies that created online resources for students, educators, and families to access during the pandemic continue to support those offerings, keeping them available during the summer break. Others may expand their marketing efforts behind books whose appeal may spike during the summer, from award-winning titles that often appear on schools summer reading lists, to workbooks and skills-boosting tools. At Penguin Young Readers, Mad Libs is offering such print supplemental educational materials as its Mad Libs Workbook series. New titles include Mad Libs Workbook: Grade 1 Reading and run through Mad Libs Workbook: Grade 4 Reading.

The library story

Public libraries have always been at the forefront of offering summer reading programs, book clubs, and other special resources and programming for students during the summer. Though many librarians have found creative ways to bring these opportunities to their local kids over the years, the nonprofit Collaborative Summer Library Program has been helping libraries across the country plan and implement themed summer reading programs since 1987, when, according to the organizations timeline, 10 regional library systems in Minnesota teamed up to develop a reproducible summer reading program for kids that had a theme and dedicated artwork, as well as incentives for libraries to purchase and use. These days the group collaborates with libraries to create an annual inclusive literacy based program that is enjoyable for all ages, according to its mission statement. The reproducible programs and materials are available to babies through adults. This years theme is Tails & Tales and features artwork by Salina Yoon.

Luke Kralik, organizational coordinator for CSLP, says that the group has weathered the pandemic stresses and disruptions fairly well and looks forward to regaining some footing as summer reading programs kick off this time around. Last summer was quite a wild ride for us, he recalls. March and April are huge shipping months for CSLP, and sudden library closures caused hundreds and hundreds of orders to become undeliverable. There were days when over 60 boxes were showing back up at the warehouse.

As a result, Kralik says, CSLP had to temporarily halt shipping. But at the time, there was still tremendous optimism that things would be back to normal in the summer. He adds that fellow coordinator Melissa Hooke was contacted by, or personally reached out to, thousands of libraries, and had their delivery addresses changed from their closed libraries, to their own personal addresses.

CSLP scrambled to pivot in other ways, as well. We also put together a small committee of volunteers to find and repackage worksheets, handouts, and reproducibles from previous CSLP manuals, Kralik says. This was to help folks with their new curbside grab-and-go programming. As 2021 summer programs launch, things have not quite returned to normal, but have been much more manageable, he adds. We have had a lot of libraries put off ordering until the last minute, and it does seem like we are seeing a lot of people new to their position placing orders. This, compounded by some manufacturing and sourcing issues, has caused us to run out of products a bit prematurely, but nothing too bad.

Processing learning loss

Many educators and schools have been working hard to create summer learning support for their students, but Morgan McCullough, OverDrive librarian, believes they may not be thinking too much about learning lossyet. She works directly with schools, brainstorming with them about their needs and how OverDrive can provide the best solutions for them.

Most often these days, McCullough says, schools want supportive materials, things they can access when theyre not in school, on weekends, and, of course, in our current circumstances, in blending learning environments. In terms of how schools are addressing learning loss concerns, Id say theyre not quite there yet, she adds. The past year its been like putting out fire after fire. We all know learning loss is on the horizon, but were still triaging moment by moment what their needs are. SEL [social and emotional learning] is coming to the fore, because educators know there are going to be traumatized kids. The expectation is a sharp increase. You cant really do anything practical until you manage your kids emotions to the point where they can regulate themselves and take in what youre giving them.

To that end, McCullough says that OverDrive is offering a free SEL collection for partners that our publishers helped us create. We have professional development that is key for SEL, because teachers have to be able to regulate themselves. Theyve had tough years, as well. They need to figure that out before they can help their students.

Arnold agrees, offering that she has seen a shift in the types of professional development that schools are seeking. One of the key differentiators between this year and last year is that the professional development gap that schools were looking to address last summer revolved around how to teach in a remote or hybrid modelhow do you do digital? she says. Now the need seems to be more about, how do you care for the kids who are not necessarily in a good place?

Referring to the aforementioned Family Help Desk and other SEL resources Scholastic is offering this summer, Serrano says, As a parent myself, I see firsthand how critically important these elements are, and the research confirms itaccording to the Scholastic Teacher & Principal School Report, 99% of educators agree that for students to reach their highest academic potential, their social-emotional needs must be met, and nearly all educators, 98%, agree that literacy is critical to students health and emotional wellness.

Beyond the summer

Arnold believes that school administrators continue to face tremendous challenges this summer and further down the line. They have to now think about how to preserve learning and address unfinished learning as they wind down this school year, she says. They need to think about how to enter the fall and what will happen. If that werent enough, they are also going to be presented with opportunities to participate in education stabilization fundingand its a lot of money. Theyre going to be asked to start preparing proposals, to start thinking about which are the most worthy projects for this funding, and how this money could best be applied in their districts for what their kids need. In any other time that would be its own full-time job.

Ultimately, Arnold says, I think theres hope; its going to be okay. We really have to home in on that message and convey that to parents and everybody, that we will get through this together. She believes that message has never been more important in the context of K12 education.

Of course, the downside, Arnold says, is that, due to many inequities in the educational system, not everyone had the same kind of experiences during the pandemic, and some kids were impacted way more than others. But its important to reinforce and recognize that its okay and that students are probably commensurate with their peers. One thing Ive learned from our school partners is to eschew the terms learning loss and summer slide and Im starting to adopt the term unfinished learning. Its a subtle distinction, but I think its one of many ways we can help reduce anxiety, especially among kids and parents. Its not done yet; well get there. Your teacher will know where you left off and where you are.

McCullough concurs. We all know our students might have some gaps and might need extra help or commitment to make sure theyre meeting some of those benchmarks, she says. We all understand, and were all there walking in lockstep together. There is learning loss, but theres not a loss of support.
Wole Soyinkas literary and activist careers are as marvelous and impressive as his full name, Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka, which Pantheon executive editor Erroll McDonald told me to look up. The winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature, Soyinka is coming out with his first novel in almost 50 years, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth.

A biting satire that looks at corruption in an imaginary contemporary Nigeria, Chronicles is also an intriguing and droll whodunit. The mystery unfolds around someone trying to stop Duyole Pitan-Payne, a prominent Nigerian and a Yoruba royal, from taking an important post at the United Nations in New York City. Meanwhile, Pitan-Paynes childhood friend, Dr. Menka, confides that body parts are being stolen from his hospital to be used in rituals. Who is involved and why come together in a brilliant story that takes on politics, class, corruption, and religion from the very first chapters, and that highlights Soyinkas lush, elegant language:

That the nation known as the giant of Africa was credited with harbouring the Happiest People in the World was no longer news. What remained confusing was how such recognition came to be earned and, by universal consent, deserved. Aspiring nations needed to be rescued from their state of envious aspiration, a malaise that induced doomed efforts to snatch the crown from their head. The wisdom of elders counsels that it is more dignified to acknowledge a champion where indisputable, thereafter take ones place behind its leadership, than to carp and wiggle in frustration. When we encounter an elephant, let us admit that we have seen the lord of the forest.

And this description of a woman: May I just say that she was like the blending of the kola nuts in the tray she balanced on her head.... I look that skin, and is like God take the red kola and mix it a little with the yellow-white kola nut, and you get a complexion for which even an angel will sell one of his wings, I swear.

The playwright, poet, essayist, memoirist, novelist, and film writer tells me via Zoom from Nigeria that he did not write this novel suddenly, noting, These ideas have appeared in all my work, my theater, my poems, but I decided they needed an extensive prose treatment. It took many years; he says he needed time out of ittime away to write about my country. I had to wait until it was ready.

Theater, Soyinka tells me, is where he is most at homeboth my work and [plays by] others. I love all of it. His first major play, The Swamp Dwellers, was written in 1958, when he was 24.

Soyinka calls the Covid-19 pandemic the nasty icing on the cake that provided so much time to work. Before the pandemic, he had carved out spaces, spending 10 days in a little village in Senegal on the sea and then in Ghana at a residency. The actual writing of the book took close to 12 months, he says, working in a white heat. He cites the trials of computers, losing text, computer crashes, adding, I was outside and by myself, and then Covid happened and lockdown.

I ask Soyinka why hes framed this book as a mystery. Secretly, he says, I always wanted to write a whodunit. This is a confession! I would come across ideas and think, this would make a good mystery. It was always lurking in my mind, so this book was an opportunity to inject a bit of mystery.

Soyinka sent the first draft of Chronicles to three friendswritersto ask if it was worth pursuing. One friend I chose because hes crazy, he says. I told him, I am sending it to you because you are mad.  The other two, he adds, are sane. He also sent it to McDonald.

I wondered if I had forgotten how to write a novel that was intelligent and intelligible, Soyinka recalls. I asked Erroll, Frankly, tell me how you feel, and he wrote back enthusiastically.

McDonald tells me that when Soyinka contacted him to say he had written a novel, he was thrilled to reconnect and thrilled with the book. He hadnt spoken to Soyinka in many years. He says the last time he saw Soyinka was eight or nine years ago at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard. I heard someone behind me call out Shadowmy nicknameand there was Wole.

McDonalds first book with Soyinka was his 1981 memoir, Ake: The Years of Childhood. Five years later, Soyinka won the Nobel Prize, and he invited McDonald to attend the ceremony as a guest.

It was my first time, McDonald says (he went again with Toni Morrison in 1993). And it was life changing.

McDonald calls Chronicles Soyinkas magnum opus. Its culturally rooted and scathing in its attitude toward elites, the hoi polloi, everyone, he says. Wole is rambunctious; he has such spirit, such linguistic facility.

The final draft came to McDonald from agent Melanie Jackson, who has represented Soyinka since the early 1990s. She says she heard of the new novel the week before Labor Day 2020 and submitted it in September. It was a competitive situation that Pantheon won, she adds.

When I ask how McDonald won it, shes succinct: Because Erroll McDonald is great. The deal for North American and audio was made a few weeks after submission. Pantheon will publish Chronicles in the U.S. in September, and Bloomsbury will release it simultaneously in the U.K. Foreign rights to date have been sold in eight other territories.

Soyinka was a political prisoner in Nigeria in the 1960s and went into exile in 1971. He returned in 1975 and left again in 1994 for exile in the U.S. He was sentenced to death in absentia during the rule of Gen. Sani Abacha. He tells me that exile has never set well, calling it a political sabbatical. He says he dealt with the pangs with annoyance and angeranger that I had to leave in the first place. I didnt feel pathos, but mostly anger, and when I came back [in 1998, after Abachas death], I thought, I hope nothing ever takes me out again.

About publicity plans, Soyinka is clear: Im a minimalist when it comes to hard work. I wish others would take over. My main purpose has been achieved. Im throwing the baby into the lap of others and wish it good luck!
New York this week became the second state to pass a bill that would ensure public libraries the right to license and lend e-books that are available to consumers in the state.

After votes on successive days this week in the Assembly and the Senate, the bill crossed the finish line just before the June 10 close of the legislative session and is now headed to Governor Andrew Cuomos desk. If signed, the law would be the second such piece of digital library legislation to pass, following Maryland's.

Like the Maryland legislation, which passed into law on June 1, the New York bills (S2890B in the Senate and A5837B in the Assembly) require publishers who offer to license e-books to the public to also offer those e-books to libraries on reasonable terms. The bills summary states that the law is designed to ensure that widely accepted and effective industry practices remain in place while prohibiting harmful practices that discriminate against libraries and harm library patrons. And, also like the Maryland legislation, New Yorks bill passed unanimously in the Assembly.

Notably, New Yorks version of the library e-book law could take effect before Marylands. Marylands law doesnt take effect until January, 2022, while New Yorks legislation would go into effect just 19 days after it is signed into law. The governor has 10 days to sign or veto a bill if that bill was passed during the legislative sessionwhich this bill was. And if the governor doesnt sign or veto the bill within the allotted time frame, the bill automatically becomes law.

The wild card, observers told PW, is exactly when the bill will be delivered to the governor. While the law must be presented for signing by the end of the calendar year, legislators have some discretion as to when to send the bill to the governors desk, and it is not uncommon in New York to hold bills and send them along in packages for the governors signature.

Jeremy Johannesen, executive director of the New York Library Association, said he was "absolutely cautiously optimistic" that Cuomo will sign the bill, citing the overwhelming strength of the vote count. But until it is signed, its not signed, and we will continue to advocate.

Passage of both bills came despite opposition from the Association of American Publishers, which filed testimony in Maryland in March claiming its library-e-book law runs afoul of federal copyright law, and is unconstitutional.

At the AAP's annual meeting June 2, AAP CEO Maria Pallante reiterated those claims, accusing library lobbyists and tech-funded special interest groups of working to divert copyright protection away from Congress to state assemblies, and of spinning a false narrative.

While the New York bills passed overwhelmingly, it wasnt without some late drama. Earlier this week, the New York Library Association asked library supporters on social media to contact their legislators after discovering that a well-known lobbying firm was advocating against the law. But Johannsen said his grassroots base of library advocates generated more than 5,000 emails in the last three days of the session.

Were just so grateful to our partners on both sides of the aisle, in both houses of the legislature, Johannesen said.
The unexpected death of Dick Robinson, the longtime chairman, president, and CEO of Scholastic, on June 5 at age 84 leaves a huge leadership hole at the company. Hes been associated with Scholastic since being hired in 1962 as associate editor of one its magazines. Robinson held the three highest-ranking positions at Scholastic and was the primary architect in building one of the worlds most prominent publishers and distributors of childrens literature. He has been a constant presence at a company that has undergone tremendous change since he was named president in 1974.

We are deeply saddened by the sudden passing of Dick Robinson, Scholastics board of directors said in a statement. Dick was a true visionary in the world of childrens books and an unrelenting advocate for childrens literacy and education with a remarkable passion his entire life. The companys directors and employees, as well as the many educators, parents, and students whose lives he touched, mourn his loss.

With annual revenues of about $1.5 billion, Scholastic was the 10th-largest publisher in the world in 2019, according to the Livres Hebdo and Publishers Weekly annual ranking. It is also unique in the industry. Scholastic is the dominant player in the school book fair and book club markets; has a trade operation that, at $307 million in fiscal 2020, would on its own be the sixth-largest trade house; operates a $287 million education business that focuses on the publication of supplementary materials and magazines; and has a $324 million international division.

And after more than 100 years in business, Scholastic is still something of a family-run company. It was founded in 1920 by Maurice R. Robbie Robinson, Dick Robinsons father, as a publisher of youth magazines, and went on to release its first book in 1926 before branching out into the book club business in 1948, international publishing in 1957, and educational publishing in 1961. Under its corporate charter, members of the Robinson family own all of the outstanding shares of Scholastics Class A stock, meaning no significant transaction, including the sale of the company, can happen without approval from the family.

The Dick Robinson era

During Robinsons tenure, Scho-lastic acquired activity kit publisher Klutz, production company Weston Woods Studio, and encyclopedia publisher Grolier, and launched the influential kids graphic novel imprint Graphix in 2005. Its trade publishing arm also published such zeitgeist-dominating series as the Baby-Sitters Club (by Ann M. Martin), Captain Underpants (Dav Pilkey), Dog Man (Dav Pilkey), Goosebumps (R.L. Stine), Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling), the Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins), and the Magic School Bus (Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen).

Scholastics impact on American culture has largely been overlooked considering that, in addition to selling hundreds of millions books, scores of its titles were turned into films, many of them blockbusters, and were also the basis for television shows, apps, and even Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade floats (Clifford the Big Red Dog). The companys ability to discover franchise-making authors is due in large part, insiders say, to Robinsons willingness to take risks and then fully support his editors and publishers.

While Scholastic was enjoying success on the trade side, it also became one of the first publishers to mount a major technology effort for the school market. The division reached $249 million in sales in 2015, but, realizing it was competing with larger companies in the educational space, Scholastic sold the unit to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for $575 million. In a statement on the deal, Robinson said the company had a historic opportunity to further grow its core businesses by renewing its focus on books and reading in schools and at home.

Indeed, books, reading, literacy, and supporting teachers and schools were at the core of Robinsons philosophy. His true North was to help kids, a former employee said.

With its school book fairs and book clubs, the Scholastic brand is one of the few in publishing that enjoys widespread consumer awareness, especially among teachers, schoolchildren, and parents. To help gauge how to get children more interested in reading, in 2006, the company released the first Kids & Family Reading Report, which shares the views of children and parents on reading books for fun. The seventh edition of that report was released in 2019.

Robinsons commitment to readinghe considered reading a civil rightwas widely admired throughout the publishing industry. The National Book Foundation awarded him its Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the Literary Community in 2017. Research says that if children choose and own their books, they are much more likely to finish them, he said upon accepting the Literarian Award. Scholastic is privileged to be the link between the child, the school, and the book.

In 2019, PEN America honored Robinson at its annual gala, at which he spoke about the power of the book. We have been banned in schools in the 30s and 50s for being too soft on communism; in the 40s and the 60s for promoting liberal views on race, civil rights, and the Vietnam War; in the 70s for articles on student rightsnot a popular subject in schools; in the 80s and 90s for climate change; and in the 2000s for the Iraq War, he told the audience. Despite these controversies and temporary bans, schools have relied on our balanced approach to help the young gain basic knowledge about their world, with the larger goal of helping kids know how to build and maintain a fragile democracy.

Robinson was also a pillar of the publishing industry. A former chairman of the AAPs board of directors, he was the longest-serving director in the organizations history, serving on the board for 32 years, from 1989 until his death. AAP CEO Maria Pallante called him an extraordinary leader, noting that Dick believed deeply in the power of publishing to inspire students and drive progress.

Brian Napack, the CEO of John Wiley and current chair of AAP, described Robinson as a major force in publishing, adding, He lived his mission to inspire and educate through literature, and to improve the world with empathy and understanding.

Perhaps Robinsons most important attribute was his total commitment to Scholastic and its employees. He is said to have known the names of most everyone who works there and would send notes to many to thank them for their work on particular projects. His personal attention was uncanny, an insider said.

Replacing the heart of Scholastic will not be an easy task. The company hopes to appoint an interim head soon, but until then, operations will be overseen by a joint committee.

Dick Robinson in 1980 with his father, Scholastic founder Maurice Robinson.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind.  Charged by the Board of Trustees in the fall of 2020, Purdue University continues taking steps to enhance the experience for Black Boilermakers. As part of the multimillion-dollar Equity Task Force initiative, Purdue is hiring additional recruiters to help attract Black students; is expanding existing programs such as Emerging Leaders; and thanks to more than $25 million in donations, is introducing more scholarship opportunities for underrepresented minority students.

On Friday (June 11), Purdue trustees heard an update on the actions of the Equity Task Force Core Implementation Team, established in April and led by Jay Akridge, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs and diversity, and John Gates, vice provost for diversity and inclusion.

Fridays update coincides with the first graduating class from Purdue Polytechnic High School in Indianapolis, a school created to build new K-12 pathways that lead to Purdue, especially for Hoosier students who are underserved by traditional high schools and underrepresented in higher education. 40 PPHS graduates will attend Purdue to continue their education, laying the groundwork for many more to follow.

The charge for the 10-member ETF Implementation Team is to undertake:

* Robust recruitment of Black undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff through new programs, scholarships and cluster hires.

* New and expanded mentoring and community-building initiatives for Black students, faculty and staff.

* Enhanced career development opportunities and professional recognition for Black students, faculty and staff.

* Purdues becoming a leader in attracting and ensuring the success of Black scholars, ultimately enhancing the lives of the entire Purdue community and beyond.

Purdue is committed to not only providing opportunity through recruitment of Black students, but also enhancing their experience while on campus and their lives after their time at Purdue, Akridge said. We are also going to recruit more Black faculty and staff members through a variety of hiring and remote working opportunities.

To help attract additional students, faculty and staff, Purdue will begin the process of hiring additional recruiters through the Office of Enrollment Management and Human Resources, as well as initiate faculty cluster hires and added recruitment of graduate students via the Graduate School.

Enrollment Management has created the position of academic outreach coordinator, and two hires will be made initially. The team will join with Marketing and Communications to conduct market research, develop enrollment strategies and plan an expansion of K-12 initiatives in Indiana, among its activities.

Our overarching goal is for Purdue to be the first-choice institution for Black Boilermakers, whether they are students, faculty or staff, Gates said. This is just the beginning of a larger commitment to expand Black representation, improve experiences and success of Black Boilermakers that we will be undertaking.

Provost Fellow Barrett Caldwell will help lead an effort to identify STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) areas for possible cluster hires, such as public health. The group will determine the number and cadence of cluster hires, with an initial wave to begin in fall 2021. Two new hires in African American studies will be made.

A review and expansion of graduate mentoring programs is underway. A part-time academic success coordinator for Purdue Polytechnic High School students also will be hired.

Purdue has worked to increase the number of scholarships and financial aid packages for underrepresented minority students and continues to support the PPHS and Emerging Leaders programs. To do that, Purdue appointed Mark Gaines as senior director of development for diversity and inclusion for the Purdue for Life Foundation.

Through May 31, Purdue has raised $26.9 million for minority scholarship and recruitment efforts, which is an increase over the $3.4 million raised in fiscal year 2020. For 2021, there have been 5,446 gifts to 212 different funds.

$2.8 million in commitments for designated Black Boilermaker funds have been received in 2021, including 2,414 gifts to 76 designated funds.

$5 million from benefactors Bill Uhrig (BSAAE 82) and Anastasia Vournas for a College of Engineering investment called Project Bridge. Project Bridge will test a variety of approaches to attracting and retaining underrepresented minority students and preparing them for success on and beyond the Purdue campus.

$4 million from Ed and Bea Schweitzer to support PPHS, including the renaming of the flagship facility to Purdue Polytechnic High School Schweitzer Center at Englewood.

PPHS Schweitzer Center at Englewood will graduate its first class on Friday (June 11), and 40 of its students will come to Purdues West Lafayette campus in the fall. The Emerging Leaders program, in collaboration with the College of Science, enrolled 88 students from various backgrounds to address gender and underrepresented minority gaps in STEM-related fields this past academic year, and 140 new Emerging Leader scholars are expected to join in the fall.

Purdue also received gifts from Valerie Berger McKinney for female students enrolled in the Integrated Business and Engineering program and from Joanne Troutner for several diversity initiatives, and an anonymous $1 million gift to establish scholarships for Black students in honor of the first Black graduate from the College of Engineering  David Robert Lewis  in 1894.

Trustees also approved new names for Griffin Hall North and Griffin Hall South. The residence halls will be renamed in honor and memory of Frieda Parker Jefferson and Winifred Parker White. The Parker sisters were Purdue students in 1946 who were denied access to live in the residence hall system. The family appealed the decision, and eventually Indiana Gov. Ralph Gates directed Purdue to integrate its student housing. They became the first Black students to live on campus. Both went on to graduate from Purdue in 1950. The residence hall names will be Frieda Parker Hall (Parker North) and Winifred Parker Hall (Parker South).

Purdues Board of Trustees established the Equity Task Force in fall 2020, with trustee Don Thompson serving as chair. Approximately 150 members of the Purdue community  faculty, staff, students and alumni  formed into working groups of 10-12 each and held meetings and listening sessions in the ensuing months.

The creation of a campuswide implementation team was included as one of Purdues Next Moves initiatives under the Equity Task Force pillar at the April 9 trustees meeting, with financial support of $75 million over the next five years. The group represents various parts of the university. The Equity Task Force Implementation Team, representing various parts of the university, consists of the following:

Executive sponsors: Jay Akridge and John Gates.

Strategic advisor: Venetria Patton, head of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies and professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts.

Strategic advisor/provost fellow: Barrett Caldwell, professor in the School of Industrial Engineering and provost fellow for graduate/faculty initiatives related to the Equity Task Force.

Undergraduate experience and success: John Gates, vice provost for diversity and inclusion.

Undergraduate representation: Kris Wong Davis, vice provost for enrollment management.

Graduate, post-doc and professional students: Linda Mason, dean of the Graduate School.

Faculty and post-doc: Peter Hollenbeck, vice provost for faculty affairs.

Staff: Bill Bell, vice president for human resources.

Marketing and Communications: Katie Weismiller Ellis, assistant director of marketing strategy.

Data/assessment: Molly Amstutz, assistant director of institutional data analytics and assessment.

Project coordinator: Christopher Munt, director of inclusive excellence in the Division of Diversity and Inclusion.

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a top public research institution developing practical solutions to todays 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 https://purdue.edu/.

Writer: Matthew Oates, 765-586-7496, oatesw@purdue.edu, @mo_oates

Media contact: Tom Schott, 765-427-1721, tschott@purdue.edu

Sources: Jay Akridge

John Gates

Journalists visiting campus : Journalists should follow Protect Purdue protocols and the following guidelines:

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To enable access, particularly to campus buildings, we recommend you contact the Purdue News Service media contact listed on the release to let them know the nature of the visit and where you will be visiting. A News Service representative can facilitate safe access and may escort you on campus.

Correctly wear face masks inside any campus building, and correctly wear face masks outdoors when social distancing of at least six feet is not possible.

Related release:

Purdue launches Next Moves initiatives
Online shopping and shipping increased in the past year. Global health concerns kept individuals out of stores and housebound. A recent political transition places a strain on our new way of consuming.

On his first day in office, President Biden signed the U.S. onto the Paris Agreement. Our national commitment to climate change prevention is unaligned with our newfound 'two-day shipping' mentality. Fortunately, renewable energy offers a sustainable solution to the high emission transportation industry.

Greenhouse Gas Emission Reduction

The Paris Agreement signifies our commitment to limiting global warming by two degrees Celsius below pre-industrial levels. We can achieve the goal by establishing current greenhouse gas emissions as peak levels, adopting reduction methods now. Carbon neutrality is possible when using renewable power sources.

Nearly 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions derive from the shipping industry. The industry is growing by 5% annually, posing adverse effects on the environment. Professionals predict a 1.48 billion metric ton carbon emission increase without sustainable changes.

Marine shipping companies look to align their values with the Paris Agreement, using biofuel. Various fuel types reduce emissions, like corn ethanol biomass which releases 52% less carbon than conventional gas. Sugarcane ethanol reduces air pollution production by 78%, and cellulosic biofuel limits emissions by 86%.

Biofuel generates a cyclical intake and output process with carbon dioxide. Their plant origins absorb and filter localized emissions in the production phase. When burned for power, biofuel releases less carbon than they absorb.

The carbon neutrality of biofuel makes it an optimal power source for marine shipping. It is also a renewable energy source, limiting global resource exploitation.

Sulfur Reduction

The marine shipping industry identified the adverse environmental and human health effects caused by conventional fueling methods. They initiated a sulfur reduction regulation, pushing companies to use alternative power sources. The new rule limits the sulfur content in shipping fuel to 0.50% mass by mass.

Previously, the sulfur limit was 3.5%, and companies struggled to maintain regulatory levels. Biofuel provides a sustainable solution for emission reduction and the protection of human health. Current sulfur emissions cause lung, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases in individuals working on ships or living by ports.

The continued use of conventional fuel sources would place limitations on the shipping industry's growth. Utilizing sustainably sourced biofuel can improve the planet's health and expand transportation capabilities in an eco-conscious world.

Biofuel Options

Recent advancements in the biofuel industry provide options for low sulfur and greenhouse gas-emitting shipping. The ZyloCell uses dry cellulose, producing ethanol from corn kernels. It converts the kernel fibers into fermentable sugars for fuel.

The new biofuel product increases the quantity of available ethanol for the marine shipping industry. It also has a long, stable shelf life, lasting about a year. The fuel option requires no refrigeration and comes in a dry powder form for optimal long-term storage.

Another biofuel advancement led to algae-generated clean energy. Researchers at Friat University in Turkey discovered the multi-anode sediment microbial fuel cell properties of aquatic plant matter. Current production uses algae for electricity generation, and future development shows promising potential for shipping fuel.

We can develop a purely sustainable fuel source when eliminating the fossil fuels used in biofuel production. Many companies are using renewable energy, powering the necessary farming equipment for crop growth. When we optimize renewably powered biofuel development efficiency, other industries can utilize its power for expansion.

Planes are other devices heavily utilized by the shipping industry. Smaller jets burn five gallons of greenhouse gas-emitting fuel every mile. Cargo planes release ecologically harmful quantities of pollution, making biofuel a sustainable option for emission reduction.

The Growing Industry

The Amazon shipping company has over 200 million active Prime members. Society is getting used to shipping their products rather than getting them from the store. Meeting consumer demands and the goal of the Paris Agreement requires shipping companies to adopt biofuel energy.

There is a vast quantity of biofuel on Earth because of its renewable nature. As long as the sun is shining and plants are growing, the marine shipping industry can access clean energy.

Supporting Expansion

Many shipping companies are starting to integrate biofuel energy into their shipping practices. Consumers can support the industry's transition toward clean power by purchasing goods transported with biofuels. When we establish an eco-consumer demand for shipping companies, they must alter their procedures to remain competitive in their field.

Jane Marsh works as an environmental and energy writer. She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Environment.co.
Texas could surpass California and become the nations dominant solar energy producer by 2030.Achieving this goal will take hard work, smart policies, and better grid connectivity. We must ensure that Texas energy continues to lead the nation and the world: its time for Texas to ride the alternative energy megatrend.

Alexander Mirtchev writes perceptively of The Alternative Energy Megatrend: The ongoing technological revolution bolsters expectations of turning alternative energy from a dream of clean, limitless, and affordable energy into a technologically feasible, commercially viable, and environmentally friendly solution.This paradigm shift could benefit Texas, which enjoys some of the worlds best solar and wind resources. As Mirtchev notes, solar power has the highest theoretical power generation capacity of all renewables.

Texas is already the nations leader in renewable wind capacity, oil and gas production, and refining capacity. Texas trails California in solar capacity, however. The Golden State currently enjoys about 13.4 Gigawatts (GW) of installed, utility-scale PV solar, while the Lone Star State registers only about 5.6 GW, according to the EIA. Texas is poised to rapidly catch up, however: as Texas plans to add about 11.7 GW of new utility-scale solar; California only has in 6 GW in queue. Texas and California are in a competition to determine the solar energy industrys future capital. Do we want solar firms to place their headquarters in Los Angeles and San Francisco, or Houston and Dallas?

The choice is clear: Texas needs to lead the solar revolution. But how? First, Texas shouldnt use the tax code to subsidize oil and gas . While theres a strong economic and social argument for using the tax code to lower emissions and save lives from pollution, these arguments do not apply for hydrocarbon production. Austin legislators should not make hard-working Texans subsidize inefficiency, waste, and pollution.

Second, the state should become a leader in solar-related research, especially storage technology. Solar can only provide electricity during daylight hours, necessitating the ability to store electrons over days and seasons. Storage technology is not a pie-in-the-sky solution: Texas alone has about 1.8 GW of battery storage capacity in development (versus Californias 4.3 GW).Turning Texas into the Silicon Valley of storage technology wont be easy, but the state has already managed to attract some high-end technology, including a Tesla giga factory and, potentially, a Samsung chip factory.

Third, the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and the rest of the country need to dramatically expand inter-state and intra-state transmission lines. Solar generation faces economic curtailment, or when output is reduced to balance supply and demand, and physical curtailment, or when the grid cant absorb all the electrons.

Transmission lines can help mitigate solars economic and physical curtailment problems. According to Mirtchev, a lack of adequate transmission infrastructure poses a substantial challenge for the widespread applicability of alternative energy. Greater intra and inter-state transmission connectivity would allow Texas to ship excess solar generation to other states, or even export electricity to Mexico. Connecting ERCOT to the national grid would also improve Texas resiliency, limiting the risk of another disastrous outage.

The Texas solar industry spurs billions of dollars in investment, supports tens of thousands of good-paying jobs for Texans, especially in rural communities, and could help to lower local and state property taxes. Most importantly, the solar industry is only getting started. If Texas can work hard, design the right free-market frameworks, and enhance transmission connectivity, we can ensure that Texas  and not California  remains the energy capital of America and rides the alternative energy megatrend off into the sunset.

Joe Webster is an energy consultant based in Houston, TX. He has consulted for both clean energy and hydrocarbon companies. This article represents his own personal opinion.
This week, Vice President Kamala Harris learned that three little words can cause a lot of damage. On her first vice presidential trip abroad, Harris stoked controversy when she spoke at a news conference in Guatemala and told potential migrants, "do not come." She warned that would-be migrants would be turned back at the US' southern border, adding, "So let's discourage our friends, our neighbors, our family members from embarking on what is otherwise an extremely dangerous journey."


For nearly three decades, Susan Ward has relied on her hair-styling business to support herself. But when California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued COVID lockdown rules last year, forcing her to stay home and forgo seeing clients, she dutifully complied with the shifting restrictions.

The state and the federal government promised tens of thousands of dollars in unemployment funds to compensate Ward and millions like her for the lost work. More than a year ago, Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act to boost these payments, an effort to ease the economic pain for millions of out-of-work individuals and stabilize the pandemic-induced economic free fall.

Republicans on Capitol Hill and numerous economists are now blaming the scaled-up unemployment for creating an incentive for workers to remain at home, instead of going back to work as the economy reopens. The additional $300 a week above normal unemployment compensation that Congress subsequently provided individuals is now creating a nationwide worker shortage, they argue, while small businesses struggle to hire.

But Ward, like so many other self-employed people, returned to work months ago, as soon as restrictions were eased. She is among hundreds of thousands of Californians and millions nationwide still waiting for the unemployment checks they had been promised. Meanwhile, fraudsters have made off with an estimated $200 billion in state and federal unemployment funds during the pandemic, according to some congressional estimates.

California and more than a dozen other states, both red and blue, were unprepared to handle the massive influx of unemployment claims, according to a Labor Department inspector general report released last week. But a lot of the waste and fraud could have been avoided. Forty percent of states did not comply with federal rules requiring basic safeguards  cross-checking of unemployment claimants against a national directory of new hires, as well as a federal database of illegal immigrants, the inspector general found. The report focuses on California, as well as Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington state for special scrutiny.

This is probably going to go down in history as the biggest rip-off of taxpayer dollars ever, Rep. Jackie Walorski of Indiana, told RealClearPolitics. Walorski, the top Republican on the House Ways and Means worker and family support subcommittee, says she tried to work with Democrats to fight potential fraud in Decembers $1.9 stimulus bill, but Democrats stripped out those provisions.

In California, the nations most populous state, unemployment insurance fraud has been so rampant it now has the dishonorable distinction of being the most costly financial scandal in state history. The Employment Development Department, which doles out the unemployment payments, has admitted that one in four payments could have been improperly made  that it paid as much as $31 billion in fraudulent claims, including to nearly 35,000 inmates of the states prisons and jails.

More than a year ago, when the fraud first started snowballing, Newsom pledged to take bold steps to fix the overwhelmed system. But the claim backlog has recently ballooned again, along with increased EDD call wait times. The bureaucratic bungling is making daily headlines across the state, handing recall proponents and those running against Newsom easy ammunition.

EDD kicks Californians already down, charged an Orange County Register editorial over the weekend. In late May, the California Republican Party hit Newsom for promoting vaccine incentive lotteries and giveaways on Jimmy Kimmel Live! while the EDD system remains a mess and the states unemployment rate is the second highest in the nation.

While the nations unemployment claims go down, Californias are going up, the party said in a release. The unemployment department is a disaster  and the claims pending EDD action have grown for the sixth straight week  all while the EDD made up to $31 billion in fraudulent claims to criminals.

Nearly 229,400 Californians have been waiting for more than 21 days for the agency to address their claims, according to an EDD website dashboard. Critics say far more cases are pending or under dispute. Susan Ward, who estimates she is owed $15,000 to $20,000, says dealing with the EDD bureaucracy has been a nightmare  that EDD has repeatedly denied her even though she has provided every document the agency requested, including her birth certificate and drivers license.

The first letter of denial she received from Californias Employment Development Department, which RCP reviewed, starts off by listing the wrong Social Security number next to her home address. A second letter in mid-March with the correct Social Security number claimed she had not provided the right identification.

After several failed attempts to call the EDD customer service line, Ward gave up and is now seeking help from state Sen. Pat Bates.

My concern is that maybe my Social Security number had been hacked because theyre still denying me, and whenever I try to call, I cant get through to save my life, she tells

RCP. It just says the lines are busy and then hangs up  even if I call before 8 in the morning.

Its so difficult to get through on the states perpetually jammed EDD phone lines that thousands of Californians are hiring private companies to connect them to the agency by robo-dialing it, the San Francisco Chronicle reported this week. Meanwhile, calls have nearly doubled from 2.7 million in March to 5.12 million in late May with the percentage of calls not answered up to 32.2%, according to EDD figures. Even when callers get through, they are placed on hold, sometimes for hours.

Inundated by thousands of similar complaints, state legislators say many of their staffers are handling nothing but EDD cases from frustrated constituents.

When people call my office and a real person answers the phone, some of them just start crying because theyre so happy just to be talking to a real person. Its heartbreaking, Senate Republican Leader Scott Wilk told RCP. Even with the infusion of money [in the latest budget], its going to be a minimum of 12 months to get everything back on track.

Early last month, Assemblyman David Chiu, a Democrat who represents San Francisco, said his office has been flooded with countless calls from constituents, some on the brink of homelessness and some who have even threatened suicide.

This is just a completely untenable situation for our constituents, he told the Los Angeles Times.

Over the last month, the legislature has passed a raft of bipartisan bills aimed at overhauling the system, including provisions requiring the agency to cross-check claimants and prison inmate rolls and barring the state from mailing Social Security numbers. In February, the agency started hiring 900 new staff members to work in its overwhelmed call centers. It also stopped printing claimants full Social Security numbers on the two highest-volume EDD documents sent out to claimants, a recommendation that was made by the state auditor in March 2019 to stop identify theft and false claims -- but was never followed.

Californias unemployment-benefit system has been a poster child of what not to do nationwide, Assemblywoman Cottie Petrie-Norris, a Democrat representing parts of Orange County, said last week after her bill aimed at stopping prisoner abuse of the benefit passed. Without these processes in place, it is ridiculously easy for fraudsters to take advantage and steal millions of dollars.

Recall proponents argue that the ongoing bureaucratic mess reveals a basic incompetence in the executive branch headed by Newsom. For his part, the governor has been celebrating the state coming out of the pandemic with a surprise budget surplus of $76 billion, and he has a $100 billion plan to get California roaring back. As part of that, the government will issue two rounds of $600 stimulus checks to poor and middle-class residents to get the economy moving further, along with $5 billion extra in rental assistance.

Earlier this week, Newsom announced that he is directing an extra $267 million toward fixing the EDD system, but said the funds wouldnt become available for months, and lawmakers say the agency wont be able to resolve the backlog completely until next year.

Instead of waiting for the normal budget process to be start in October, Wilk said Newsom could provide a budget trailer that would make the funds available within weeks. The governors office did not provide a response when RCP asked whether he supports a budget trailer.

Earlier this year, the governor added a multibillion-dollar economic aid and recovery package for small businesses struggling through the pandemic but left out more funds to fix the EDD system until the recent release of his new budget. Republicans are lambasting Newsoms failure to quickly step in and channel funds to fix EDD while announcing the distribution of $600 stimulus checks to most Californians  a gambit they characterize as pure politics.

The EDD is not going to get fixed anytime soon, which is why hes got this Band-Aids and buy-off budget  hes really trying to invest in himself, not invest in California, Wilk said. Thats what this budget is going to be about this year  its going to be all about the recall.
Unless Joe Bidens memory is as weak as his critics contend, he has been lying for years by claiming, I have never spoken to my son [Hunter] about his overseas business dealings.

As reported in the New York Post, an email from his sons abandoned laptop, which Joe Biden and much of the media inexplicably dismissed as Russian disinformation  confirms that the senior Biden met with Vadym Pozharskyi, an executive of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, in Georgetown on April 16, 2015.

Dear Hunter, Pozharskyi wrote the next day, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. Its realty [sic] an honor and pleasure.

At the time, Vice President Biden was overseeing U.S. policy toward Ukraine and his son Hunter was being paid $83,333 a month to sit on the board of Burisma, which was accused of corruption. The Posts Miranda Devine also reports that the guest list for the dinner at Cafe Milano in Georgetown included Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, corrupt former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, who since has died. Baturina wired $3.5 million on Feb. 14, 2014, to Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, a Delaware-based investment firm co-founded by Hunter and Devon Archer, a former adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry.

The White House has refused to comment on the revelation, apparently concluding that the mainstream press will protect the president by ignoring the story. Despite its clear evidence of Bidens deception, and the strong suggestion of corruption, the May 26 New York Post article has only received attention from conservative outlets. This silence is all the more unusual considering that Hunter Biden is facing a federal criminal tax investigation reportedly connected, in part, to his work in the Ukraine.

This was not small beer. Some surveys suggest news blackouts regarding Hunters business dealings might have swung the election to Biden.

The medias nothing-to-see-here attitude stands in stark contrast to its coverage of President Trump, whom it consistently depicted as a kleptocrat who used his office to enrich himself and his family. The fact that his net worth declined by $1 billion during his presidency was irrelevant as they echoed Democrat claims that foreigner leaders who stayed at his properties were helping him violate the Constitution.

Compare the vigorous and accusatory coverage that followed Chinas decision in 2018 to award 18 trademarks to Ivanka Trump  which she had applied for before her father became president and couldnt use because she had dissolved her namesake brand  to the lack of interest in Hunter Bidens far more questionable business dealings.

The mainstream media, which doggedly pursued even the most far-fetched allegations against Trump, has become a lapdog regarding the Bidens ethics. Hypocrisy and double-standards are too benign to capture this betrayal of journalistic ethics. Our most prestigious news outlets have become propaganda arms of the left.

If that sounds harsh, remember these are the same folks who pushed the false narratives that Trump was conspiring with the Kremlin and that COVID-19 could not have been engineered in a Chinese lab. They lied to us for months that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick was murdered by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6 when, in fact, he died of stroke.

And, a new IG report reveals, they spread the fake story that police tear gassed protesters so Trump could stage a photo op at a Washington church last June. The report found that officers had no knowledge of Trumps planned visit when they decided to clear the area so that contractors could install a security fence. This was no secret: Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist reported all this at the time. As of Thursday afternoon, neither The New York Times (Protesters Dispersed With Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church), NPR (Peaceful Protesters Tear-Gassed To Clear Way For Trump Church Photo-Op) had appended corrections to their articles. No one should hold their breath waiting for Vice President Kamala Harris to admit she got it wrong when she stated, Last night I watched as President Trump, having gassed peaceful protesters just so he could do this photo op, then he went on to teargas priests who were helping protesters in Lafayette Park.

Heres a real-time opportunity to test my analysis. The Daily Mail is reporting that Hunter Biden used the N-word in numerous emails he sent to his white lawyer. They included:

How much money do I owe you. Becaause [sic] n***a you better not be charging me Hennessy rates, and I only love you because you're black' and 'true dat n***a'.

Hunter was clearly not using the term maliciously, but that has mattered little to the left, which has even gone after school children for the same offense. I predict that Biden will not be punished for his offense against political correctness, unlike the young woman who was forced to withdraw from the University of Tennessee because she excitedly said, I can drive, n***a when she got her license.

He will, instead, get the all-is-forgiven treatment enjoyed by Democrat Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who was allowed to stay in office after it was discovered that his medical school yearbook page featured a man in blackface and another in a Ku Klux Klan robe; Northam initially admitted one of them was him, but then recanted.

For the mainstream media, there is no principle, only power. They are not guardians of truth but defenders of the cause. That is something Joe Biden clearly remembers.
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Students can customize a dining plan using an online meal plan builder based on their housing status, year and how often they plan to eat in the dining commons and at retail dining locations.
In 2019, Natalie Smith knew she wanted to do two things  find a new job and help people through music. This is what eventually brought her to co-founding HEART music.
David Zwart and his son Holland pose in the Clocked! restaurant on Washington Street. Zwart chose the location in 2000 because of its proximity to the 40 Watt Club. (Photo/Olyn Gee)
Brattleboro, VT (05301)

Today

Thunderstorms in the morning followed by occasional showers in the afternoon. High 67F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms during the evening followed by occasional showers overnight. Low 57F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%.
NEW MILFORD  A New Milford man in his 20s was sent to the hospital following a dirt bike accident Thursday, a police official said.

The man was sent to Danbury Hospital with what appear to be non-life-threatening injuries, according to Sgt. Michael Lafond.
BRIDGEPORT  A restaurant owner shamed on social media last fall by the governor for breaking coronavirus rules has been arrested for his alleged involvement in a recent downtown party where two people were killed.

Police said they took Mitch Noel, owner of Ten20 Lounge on the East End, into custody Wednesday afternoon after securing an arrest warrant to charge him with second-degree reckless endangerment.

Bond was set at $2,500. Noel is scheduled to appear June 23 at the Fairfield County Courthouse on Gold Hill Street.

Noel, 37, is the third individual charged by local law enforcement over an early morning May 16 party at 1023 Main St.  leased by the Temple of the Way House of Worship  where Charles Barnes, 38, and Norman Peters, 40, were shot and killed around 2 a.m.

Last week, police arrested Josiah Israel, Temple of the Ways pastor, and Christopher Mojica, on charges of illegal sale of alcohol, conspiracy to commit illegal sale of alcohol and second-degree reckless endangerment. Following the deadly shootings, Israel told Hearst Connecticut Media his storefront church subleased the party space, and Mojica said he organized the May 16 event.

The two men had also linked Noel and Ten20 to the party, saying the restaurant had partnered with Mojica to provide food and drinks.

They had their own party (at Ten20). We came to an agreement that Id use my spot for the after party, Mojica previously said.

City and state health officials shuttered Ten20, 1450 Barnum Ave., last fall for holding what appeared to be a packed, maskless Oct. 24 bash that violated capacity and mask-wearing guidelines businesses had to follow for much of the past 15 months to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

The incident received statewide attention Oct. 27 after Gov. Ned Lamont through Twitter circulated online video footage of the festivities as one example of why coronavirus cases were increasing in Connecticut at that time.

This is what were talking about when we mention establishments not obeying the rules, Lamont tweeted. This was in Bridgeport over the weekend. ... This isnt fair to all of the restaurants across CT looking out for their customers.

Noel, in an interview afterward, said it was a private birthday party and the online footage Lamont tweeted was of the finale, when guests who had been outdoors got cold and went inside as the event was wrapping up.

Yes, the person who had the event had a lot of people come. ... We had people outside and inside. It got cold outside so they came inside as we were closing. ... It did get out of hand, but we did separate people. (And) the videos circulating are people coming in as we were shutting down, Noel said then.

He appealed the forced closure with the state and, following an inspection by health officials, was allowed to reopen in December under a three-month probationary period. Noels attorney in that matter, Reine Boyer, said at the time of the agreement that her client was not trying to be difficult.

This business is their livelihood and they want to be able to provide quality services to the city and run their business, Boyer said. But they are also mindful and very much concerned about the residents of the city and anyone who comes to patronize their establishment as far as safety.

Neither Boyer nor Noel could be immediately reached for comment.

It is not yet known whether the city and state will fine Israel, Mojia and Noel for violating COVID regulations May 16. While on May 19 most of those rules were lifted, the three could face a $10,000 penalty, according to the state health department, because on the night of the gathering at Temple of the Way a midnight curfew was still in place.

The two homicides remain under investigation. Police Capt. Kevin Gilleran said investigators continue to chase down several leads. Anyone with information is asked to call Detective Martin Heanue at 203-581-5242 or the police tips line at 203-576-TIPS.

In a related story, on Tuesday Bridgeports Civil Service Commission voted to terminate a rookie police officer who, days after graduating the academy, attended the party inside Temple of the Way while off-duty and lost her badge and other personal belongings.

That officer  Kaitlyn Edwards  had initially been placed on paid administrative status and Acting Police Chief Rebeca Garcia subsequently recommended she be terminated.
THOMASTON - Resident Henry Osowiecki says that he will never forget how. while he was serving in Vietnam during the war, everyone depended on each other.

Now, Osowiecki was recently thanked for his service with a special honor bestowed on the Vietnam veteran, who served in major battles in 1966 and 1968.

Osowiecki, who is the commander of American Legion Post 44 in Bantam, appeared surprised when his longtime friend and fellow veteran John Secor recently visited him at his office in Thomaston, and then asked him to come outside where a small crowd included Post 44 and Post 27 vets, Osowieckis family members, a Thomaston police officer, Thomaston First Selectman Edmond Mone and employees of his business, Henry M. Osowiecki & Sons Shop on Clay Street.

Osowiecki and Caroline, his wife of 53 years, were ushered to outdoor chairs, where he said, I dont know what this is all about.

Secor, who is first vice commander of Post 44, spoke to the crowd about a comparison to Union Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, famous from the battle of Little Round Top. On July 2, 1863, in southern Pennsylvania, Chamberlain led his 20th Maine Regiment in a famous counterattack of the Civil War. After running out of ammunition, he instructed his soldiers to use their bayonets against the Rebel army, thus winning the Battle of Gettysburg, Secor said. The toll was great: 100 of his 300 men died in battle. Secor said Chamberlain himself was wounded six times during his service.

Secor said the parallel to Osowiecki was that his friend, who served as a staff sergeant in the 12th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army, was wounded four times and his commanding officer depended on him for dangerous or dirty missions. He noted that Osowiecki was awarded a Bronze Star for meritorious service and valor.

Osowiecki returned home from Vietnam after receiving four Purple Hearts for wounds incurred in fighting that took the lives of 44 men in his regiment.

Secor introduced Jane Dougherty, one of two state of Connecticut coordinators for the Quilts of Valor program, which began in 2003 when Catherine Roberts son Nat was deployed in Iraq. Dougherty said Roberts had a dream about a young soldier in utter despair, then imagined him wrapped in a quilt, where his whole demeanor changed from despair to hope and well-being.

On her web page, Roberts notes: The model appeared simple: Have a volunteer team who would donate their time and materials to make a quilt. One person would piece the top and the other would quilt it. I saw the name for this special quilt. It was a Quilt of Valor that unequivocally says, Thank you for your service, sacrifice and valor in serving our nation.

Dougherty said each quilt is personal for the recipients, with their name on it, and as many as 20 people could have taken part in the quilt to be awarded to Osowiecki. Included in the quilt was a patch depicting the Bronze Star, one for the Purple Hearts, and one for his 12th Infantry Regiment. Secor and Osowieckis grandson Jacob Roloff spread the quilt open and his wife Caroline helped to wrap it around him.

Osowiecki said Sunday he was thrilled, and shocked, with the ceremony and the quilt, shaking his head and saying This is all wonderful.

He shared that 44 men in his era of service were killed in battle and acknowledged that he was lucky to have survived to receive four Purple Hearts.

My two years serving in the Vietnam War was a bonding experience that I will never forget since we all depended on each other, he said.

Secor said Post 44 holds a Veteran of the Month program that honors a different veteran on the first Saturday of each month, using his Burial Flag, which is then flown from the center flag pole at the All Wars Memorial in Bantam for a month.
SOUTH WINDSOR  Funeral services for Jessica Edwards will began Friday in Windsor as police continue to review evidence in her case.

Friends and family are encouraged to wear cheerful colors to represent Edwards cheerful spirit during the services, according to a post on the GoFundMe page organized by Tenisha Duncan for Edwards family and 7-month-old son. All attendees must wear masks.

Services begin Friday with the wake at The Lodge, 130 Deerfield Road in Windsor. Services begin at 6 p.m. and are expected to continue through 9 p.m.

The funeral ceremony will be held from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. at Rehoboth Church of God, 1170 Blue Hills Ave. in Bloomfield, on Saturday. The burial will follow at Mount Saint Benedict Cemetery in Bloomfield.

South Windsor Police Sgt. Mark Cleverdon said there were no significant updates in the case to report as of Thursday.

We are in constant contact with the States Attorneys Office in Hartford and are still reviewing evidence and sharing information with them, he said.

Cleverdon said investigators are also still waiting on the full autopsy report. The states chief medical examiner ruled Edwards cause of death to be asphyxia by compression of torso and neck, with the manner of death ruled a homicide.

Edwards, 30, was reported missing to police on May 10. Her body was recovered on May 21. Her husband, Tahj Hutchinson, was taken into custody the same day Edwards body was found and he was charged with manslaughter in connection with her death.

Cleverdon has previously said investigators hope to elevate that to a murder charge once additional evidence is processed, and once they have the final autopsy report. Its unclear how long that could take, but investigators are hoping to have more information before Hutchinsons next court appearance on July 15, Cleverdon said on Thursday.

In his arrest affidavit, police allege that Hutchinson confessed to killing Edwards after a weekend of arguing when their fight turned physical on the morning of May 10. He later dumped her body in the woods in East Hartford, where police later recovered her body.
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP)  New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham vowed Friday to replenish the state's indebted unemployment insurance trust fund with federal relief funds to avoid future tax increases to businesses and said a $300 weekly federal bonus to unemployment benefits will continue through the expiration date in September.

Lujan Grisham held a news conference to announce reform efforts at the Workforce Solutions Department that handles unemployment benefit claims.

She hopes to improve the state's ability to field telephone calls for unemployment benefit claims. A companion initiative is designed to counteract fraud that has siphoned off an estimated $133 million from the state unemployment trust. Overpayment of legitimate claims are estimated at over $100 million during the coronavirus pandemic.

Lujan Grisham said guidance from the U.S. Treasury allows states to devote new relief funding to rebuilding unemployment trusts and that she absolutely will pursue that.

I have zero interest in making it harder for businesses that are working diligently  and theyre doing a good job right now, getting jobs out the door, getting people re-employed, Lujan Grisham said.

Lujan Grisham's administration is in the process of expanding staffing by 110 positions to a total of 380 staff members at the Workforce Solutions Department.

As unemployment claims soared at the outset of the coronavirus epidemic in March 2020, the Workforce Solutions Department shifted staff away from its anti-fraud office in efforts to answer a deluge of unemployment claims and related telephone calls, according to a recent evaluation from the Legislature's budget and accountability office.

The governor said New Mexico will now turn for help to federal anti-fraud authorities in attempts to crack down on bogus unemployment claims and cybertheft from the state.

In terms of constituent services, additional job positions would allows the Workforce Solutions Department to answer up to 7,000 unique calls each day, according to Friday's announcement. There are currently about 6,000 unique calls each day.

Workforce Solutions Secretary Ricky Serna says about 77,000 residents of New Mexico are currently on unemployment. He says the agency has paid out $3.7 billion in benefits over the past 14 months amid economic turmoil linked to the pandemic.

The state is commissioning an outside analysis of management, operations and information technology at the labor agency though an Albuquerque-based firm called Abba Technologies in conjunction with Mark Fidel, president of the information technology firm RiskSense.

Several states have pulled the plug on the $300 weekly federal supplement over concerns that it may discourage people from returning to work when jobs are available.

Lujan Grisham said most people want to return to work but still may have difficulties because of safety concerns, disruptions in child care services and other issues.

She said the best way to encourage a return to work is to make sure people make living wages at jobs that are safe.

You should not expect me to change that $300 benefit, she said

In efforts to modernize unemployment services, the governor said she is tapping the expertise of call center executive and Democratic state Sen. Michael Padilla of Albuquerque for a review and policy recommendations. Padilla said he is contributing his time on a volunteer basis.
/ CT state police

LITCHFIELD  State police on Friday said they are looking for witnesses who may have seen two cars traveling erratically on Route 202 around the time of a fatal shooting outside a downtown law firm earlier this week.

State police said they are seeking anyone who may have been a witness to any erratic operation or interaction of two vehicles traveling eastbound on Route 202 between 4:30 and 5 p.m. Monday.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP)  The teenager who pulled out her cellphone and began recording when she saw George Floyd being pinned to the ground by a Minneapolis police officer was given a special citation by the Pulitzer Prizes on Friday for her video that helped to launch a global movement to protest racial injustice.

Darnella Frazier was cited for courageously recording the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality, around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists' quest for truth and justice," the Pulitzer Prizes said.

Frazier was not giving interviews to the media, her publicist said Friday.

Frazier was 17 when she recorded the arrest and death of Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, on May 25, 2020. She testified at the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin that she was walking to a corner grocery store to get snacks with her then-9-year-old cousin when she saw a man being pinned to the pavement, terrified, scared, begging for his life.

She said she didn't want her cousin to see what was happening so she ushered the girl into the store then went back out to the sidewalk and began recording because it wasn't right. He was suffering. He was in pain." She kept recording even though she said she felt threatened when Chauvin ignored the cries of bystanders and pulled out his Mace as he knelt on Floyd's neck for 9 minutes, 29 seconds.

Her video, which shows Floyd repeatedly saying he couldn't breathe before going limp, was posted to Facebook hours after it was recorded, sparking outrage in Minneapolis and beyond. It was also a prominent piece of evidence in Chauvin's trial. Chauvin was convicted in April of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter. He will be sentenced June 25.

The Pulitzer Board also announced Friday that the Star Tribune of Minneapolis won the breaking news reporting prize for its coverage of Floyds murder and its aftermath.

Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, said in a column for Nieman Lab last month that Frazier should win a Pulitzer for her video. Clark, who has been a Pulitzer juror five times, told The Associated Press on Friday that Frazier was like the many journalists or artists who have won Pulitzer Prizes for standing up for tolerance, equality and social justice.

There she was, at 17, sort of witnessing an injustice and she stood there in the face of threats and captured that video, he said, adding, It would be hard to select, even from the work of professional journalists over recent years or decades, a 10-minute video that had as profound an impact as this young womans video did.

Frazier's video was globe shaking," spoke truth to power and gave a voice to the voiceless, Clark said.

It's unusual but not unprecedented for the Pulitzer Board to award citizens who capture news events; the famous photo of a firefighter cradling an infant after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was taken by Charles Porter IV, a bank credit officer, and distributed by the AP.

Clark said the special citation that Frazier received recognizes exceptional work that falls outside specific award categories. The honor puts Frazier on a list with Ida B. Wells, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and the staff of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, for their response to a 2018 shooting in their newsroom.

Frazier was also given the PEN/Benenson Courage Award last year by PEN America, a literary and human rights organization.

PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said at the time: With nothing more than a cellphone and sheer guts, Darnella changed the course of history in this country, sparking a bold movement demanding an end to systemic anti-Black racism and violence at the hands of police."

During her testimony at Chauvin's trial, Frazier told jurors that she sometimes wishes she had done more to help Floyd. She said she looks at her father and other Black men in her life and thinks about how that could have been one of them.

Its been nights I stayed up, apologizing and apologizing to George Floyd for not doing more, and not physically interacting and not saving his life, she testified, adding of Chauvin: But its like, its not what I shouldve done, its what he shouldve done.

The three other officers involved in Floyd's arrest are scheduled to face trial next year on aiding and abetting counts. All four officers are also charged with violating Floyd's civil rights.

___

Find APs full coverage of the death of George Floyd at: https://apnews.com/hub/death-of-george-floyd
POTTSVILLE  Alvernia University plans to expand its presence in Schuylkill County, and help Pottsville, by moving into the downtown area.

President John Loyack said the Reading-based university is looking at a property that it plans to purchase. He didnt provide specifics, citing ongoing negotiations.

The university would move its Schuylkill Center out of the Cressona Mall in North Manheim Township. Its been at that location for 12 of the 20 years theres been a Schuylkill campus.

The university renewed its mall lease for another year to allow for transition to a new facility, he said.

Loyack said new programs such as logistics and college credit offerings for high school students will be added to the existing course offerings as part of the move. He said Schuylkill Center currently offers bachelors degrees, masters degrees and certificate programs focusing on social support, business and nursing, with a focus on adult learners or individuals who arent 18-24 and doesnt come directly from high school to college.

The building would also house a student-centered business incubator, in which students trained in business plan development and project management partner with an entrepreneur on a business plan. Both the entrepreneur and student would work with mentors at the building.

Loyack said the university would also work with city officials and those in economic development as part of the new building. The concept, known as CollegeTowne, is already in place in downtown Reading and has been successful, he said.

We would come into the city, develop something and really create an engagement between the city community and the university, he said Thursday, adding the incubator will play a big role in working with local leaders.

They would additionally partner with the Joseph McCloskey School of Nursing for a program that leads to an associates degree and registered nurse certification from the school and a bachelors of science in nursing from Alvernia.

Purchasing a building in Pottsville, he said, would give the university space for its joint nursing program with the nursing school and business incubator.

Being in downtown Pottsville, Loyack said, allows the university to partner with city and community leaders, which he said benefits everyone, pointing out that students will be able to visit local businesses.

Those town-gown relationships can be very powerful, he said. It creates a synergistic relationship between the city.

Loyack said the university will be a supporter and helper of economic development by helping existing small businesses and creating new ones, as well as giving the university more presence in the county, attracting students, faculty and staff. It will also create employment opportunities, with the university looking to work with area employers to help their workforce.

He noted that about 40% of adult learners at Alvernia are from Schuylkill County.

City leaders contacted Thursday said they are ecstatic about the universitys plans.

Its a plus for the city, and brings students, staff and professors to the downtown, said Mayor James T. Muldowney. He said city officials will welcome the university with open arms and will make them feel comfortable.

Savas Logothetides, executive director of the Pottsville Area Development Corp., said Alvernias presence is another step in the aggressive revitalization in the city.

A partner like Alvernia University is a game changer, and the business community will undoubtedly see an immediate boost by bringing them into Pottsville, he said.

Loyack said it is possible some programs could start in the new space next year, adding there could be overlap with the existing Schuylkill Center as operations transition.

Plans for the buildings reconstruction will happen once an announcement is made, which Loyack expects will occur in the coming weeks.
SCHUYLKILL HAVEN  The Schuylkill Haven Area High School celebrated the Class of 2021s commencement Thursday evening.

After thunderstorms delayed the ceremony by a day, the 76 seniors received their diplomas outside at Rotary Field.

The weather worked out just like I planned it, Superintendent Shawn Fitzpatrick told the graduates, teachers, family and friends.

Valerie Bildheiser, senior class president, began the ceremony with a welcome speech, in which she said despite all the changes in the past year, the class did have some normal shared experiences, such as complaining about tests, waiting for the final bell and looking forward to the future.

I am truly grateful that my high school experience comes to an end here, while Im surrounded by so many people who managed to create a fulfilling school year even when everything has changed, Bildheiser said. I feel such pride to have served as the president of the Class of 2021. We have earned this and we deserve this.

Morgan Philips, salutatorian and class treasurer, said COVID-19 has not been the classs only case of bad luck over the years, recounting stories of field trip mishaps and academic challenges throughout their time in the district.

COVID hasnt been our first encounter with the unusual, unexpected and perhaps undesired, Philips said. However, here we are. Despite all these mishaps, we persevered, and for this, we should be proud.

Philips also thanked the teachers, who also had to endure COVID and every other challenge along the way.

Through all of our 13 years of craziness, you were our constant good luck charm, Philips said.

Gloria Evert, a Schuylkill Haven Area Elementary Center music teacher and school counselor for 36 years, told the graduates during her commencement speech that they should remember three points to make their lives meaningful.

Find your talents and use them, was her first point.

Set standards, and make sure you surround yourself with people who do the same, was Everts second point.

Never be afraid to ask for help, was Everts third piece of advice. You will always get support from your home team.

Joshua Whittemore, valedictorian and senior class vice president, told his fellow graduates that being valedictorian has been a goal of his for years, and he is proud to represent his class.

We have stellar athletes, musicians, artists, tradesmen, Eagle Scouts, future members of the armed forces and just plain good people who smile and wave at one another in the hall, Whittemore said.

Whittemore quoted the Bible verse Micah 6:8, Its quite simple: Do what is fair and just to your neighbor, be compassionate and loyal in your love, and dont take yourself too seriously.

In closing, Whittemore said to keep these words in mind moving forward.

Graduates, these are the things we can do, he said. After all, we come from the little town, and say it with me, that could.
POTTSVILLE  The Joseph F. McCloskey School of Nursing, Lehigh Valley Health Network, celebrated its 124th graduation ceremony Thursday, with 27 new nurses graduating after living and learning through the COVID-19 pandemic.

The commencement was held outside at Veterans Memorial Stadium in Pottsville, with friends and family invited to attend in person and take part in the ceremony.

Lynne Hausman, director of the school of nursing, began the ceremony by commending the graduates on their journey.

All our graduates have traveled the long hard road of study, clinicals, late nights and sacrifice to reach tonight, Hausman said. Tomorrow, they set off on their separate paths, each in pursuit of their own professional goals.

Dr. Robert Barraco, chief academic officer, was happy to see so many people gathered for the ceremony after the graduates persevered through the pandemic.

Today, you will be getting your diplomas, and it becomes real: You will take care of people when they are most vulnerable, during living and dying, when they look to you for healing and comfort, Barraco said.

William Reppy, president of Lehigh Valley Hospital-Schuylkill, said the experience the graduates have gained over the past year will help them carry out their highly trusted profession.

When you began your studies nearly three years ago, would you ever expect that you would be training, learning and practicing in what would become a worldwide pandemic? Reppy said. Needless to say, you have seen more than most nursing students, training you could never get from a textbook.

Melanie Bendinsky, a registered nurse for over 40 years and former program coordinator for the school of nursing, advised the graduates in her commencement speech to continue to tell their nursing stories.

My advice to you is not to focus on the difficult times and negative experiences but on the positive ones, Bendinsky said. Those will sustain you through your career.

Valedictorian Antonio H. Madera told his fellow graduates to embrace their futures as the next generation of nurses.

I encourage you not to aspire to make a living, but aspire to make a difference, Madera said. Always remember we are the ones, as nurses, making a difference in someones life.

In closing, class President Madison Noelle Garland said that no matter where they end up, they will all be incredible nurses.

Be safe, be kind, and dont ever forget how hard youve worked to get to where you are today, Garland said.
Netflix, last week announced that their brand new anime series, Trese is all set to make its debut. The streaming platform had earlier released the trailer of the highly anticipated fictional series on May 21. Netflix anime series Trese is a supernatural show based on the award-winning Filipino comic of the same name. Now, just two weeks after the announcement, the original graphic novel has been sold out.

The publishers of TRESE Graphic Novels announced that Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimos TRESE Volume 1: Murder on Balete Drive TP has been sold out and is now on its way to a second printing. With TRESE Volume 1s second printing, the publishers are confident that the TRESE Volume 2: Unreported Murders, which will hit bookstore shelves soon, will also be gone fast. Fans are currently on the run to spot and get caught up on the supernatural mysteries based on Filipino mythology before Netflix drops the anime on June 11.

Trese on Netflix

Trese makers had earlier dropped the first five minutes of the highly anticipated Anime series as part of the Netflix Geeked Week. The video which was dropped before its official release on June 11, 2021, was well received and many seemed to have gotten hooked to it already.

The 5-minute preview starts off with a setting in the busy city of Manila. A train rushing at a high speed breaks down in an eerie and quiet neighbourhood, forcing its passengers to get down and walk towards the nearest station. A group of three girls get off and find a strange person standing at a distance. Suddenly, two more shadows appear out of nowhere singing Hush Hush and scaring the group of girls. A group of zombies then start creeping up on the railway tracks and attack the girls.

On the other hand, Alexandra Trese introduces the story of Manila. Later, the main character is seen inspecting a supernatural crime involving the death of the White Lady of Balete Drive, which was only an urban legend that existed in the 50s. See the new post here.

On Wednesdays, we wear black. Get a first look at Trese, dropping this Friday on Netflix. #GeekedWeek pic.twitter.com/xVRTYSwUo7  Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) June 9, 2021

Apart from this, the Trese cast announced that they would be discussing some details of the movie after its release. The session is titled Trese After Dark. The makers of the series would be in conversation with Atom Araullo. In the session, they would reveal more details about the entire series and their experience of making the show.

Trese's release and cast

Trese's release date of June 11, was earlier announced in May when the trailer was first dropped. It gave a look into the horror series and also introduced the lineup of the star cast that would be involved. Trese cast includes Nicole Scherzinger, Shay Mitchell, Darren Criss, Lou Diamond Phillips, Jon Jon Briones, Manny Jacinto, Dante Basco and more. The Filipino Trese cast featured Simon Dela Cruz, Apollo Abraham, Niica Rojo, Steffi Graf Bontogon-Mola, Liza Soberano and RJ Celdran among others.

IMAGE: NETFLIX'S FACEBOOK

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A dog who had gone missing after a car accident in Idaho in the United States has returned home. Linda Oswalds family and dog were driving on a highway in Idaho when they met an accident on June 6. They were safe but their dog named Tilly had gone missing after the accident. The family and Idaho Police had started the search for the dog and the dog was finally reunited with his family after two days on June 8.

Dog reunites with family after 2 days

Idaho State Police put out a press release in which they mentioned the reunion of the dog with his family. In the press release, the police said that the dog that ran off after a collision on the Rathdrum Prarie on June 6 was found. They further added that the dog is now safe and has been given to his human family. The dog was reportedly found on a farm near the place of the accident.

Tilly's human family also posted the update of their dog's return on their social media account. In her Facebook post, Linda Oswald described the dog as a shy reddish-brown male with back markings on his face. They further added that Tilly also has a medium-long fur and bobtail. She had also shared a picture of Tilly alongside the post.

The post about the dog had gone viral on social media. The post managed to gather more than 170 comments and was shared over 3300 times. Netizens took to the comments section to share their views. Some of the users prayed for the safety of the dog while others expressed a sense of relief after the dog was back with the family. One user commented, "Oh no! I am so sorry to hear this! Sending love and prayers to find the puppers. Sorry to hear about the accident." Another user commented, "Prayers for safe return." Another individual commented, "It's amazing how such a little dog can bring so much joy and happiness into peoples lives."

IMAGE: LindaOswald/Facebook

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Kuwait City, Jun 11 (PTI) External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has held a meeting with India's envoys to the Gulf nations to discuss a host of issues, including encouraging speedy resumption of flights to this region and facilitating reuniting families separated by Covid disruption.

Jaishankar, who arrived here on his first bilateral visit to the oil-rich Gulf nation early on Thursday, also unveiled a bust of Mahatma Gandhi at the Indian Embassy in Kuwait in presence of the ambassadors.

"Chaired a fruitful meeting of Indian Ambassadors in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain today," the external affairs minister tweeted.

"Discussions focused on ensuring utmost welfare of the Indian community in respective jurisdictions, facilitating reuniting of families separated by Covid disruption, interceding for early return of Indian talent and skills who left the Gulf during the pandemic, encouraging the speedy resumption of flights to Gulf destinations to help NRIs and strongly push our trade interests that contribute to economic recovery at home," he said in a series of tweets.

Jaishankar also exuded confidence that the ambassadors and embassies will deliver on these priorities.

Earlier in the day, he held "productive discussions" with his Kuwaiti counterpart Sheikh Ahmed Nasser Al-Mohammad Al-Sabah on Thursday during which the two sides discussed a range of issues including health, food, education, energy, digital and business cooperation.

The two sides also signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) that will give Indian workers greater legal protection in Kuwait.

There are over 10 lakh Indians residing in Kuwait. India is amongst the largest trading partners of Kuwait and Kuwait is a major supplier of oil for India.

Jaishankar, who is carrying a personal letter from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Kuwait's Emir Sheikh Nawaf al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, also called on Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah Khaled Al-Hamad Al-Sabah.

"Conveyed our felicitations on the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations. Appreciated his commitment to taking our partnership to higher levels. Our historical ties have been reinforced through our joint fight against COVID19," Jaishankar tweeted.

His visit comes nearly three months after the two countries decided to establish a joint ministerial commission to formulate a framework to strengthen ties in sectors like energy, trade, investment, manpower and labour and information technology.

Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Ahmed visited India in March during which both sides decided to set up the joint commission.

The year 2021-22 marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between India and Kuwait.

Kuwait has been supporting India in dealing with the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic by supplying relief material as well as medical oxygen. Indian Navy ships have brought a large quantity of medical oxygen from Kuwait in the last few weeks. PTI NSD NSD

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The Indian Military Academy, Dehradun has boarded out two Indian Gentleman Cadets undergoing training, while disciplinary action has been taken against two other Indian GCs & 6 Tajikistan GCs after a violent clash took place between them in the month of March this year. A court of enquiry was ordered after the incident, the completion of enquiry found the GCs guilty of indiscipline and physical assault causing injuries to a few of them. The injured GCs were hospitalized after the scuffle. The Indian Military Academy (IMA) has taken strict action against 4 Indian and 6 foreign GCs. A statement was issued by IMA in this regard that reads :

Here's the complete statement:

1. The Indian Military Academy (IMA) at Dehradun stands tall amongst its peers and has a rich legacy since its raising in 1932. It commands great respect across the world for its stellar training standards, discipline benchmarks.

2. On 03 March 2021, an act of indiscipline was reported wherein a scuffle occurred between few Gentlemen Cadets at the Academy. The authorities took severe note of this breach of discipline and an inquiry was promptly instituted. Since the incident involved certain Gentlemen Cadets from a friendly foreign country, the process was progressed ensuring uniform policy yardsticks for all trainees. Associated facts and pinpointed culpability on those involved were clearly established.

3. After requisite vetting and approval, strict disciplinary actions have been taken against six foreign Gentlemen Cadets and four Indian Gentlemen Cadets for violating instructions concerning discipline in the Academy. The disciplinary actions are well-considered and proportionate to the act of indiscipline by these Gentlemen Cadets.

4. Almost every fourth Gentlemen Cadet under training at the Indian Military Academy hails from a friendly foreign country and the Academy does not distinguish any functional aspect based on nationalities. This is even more so when the discipline of trainees and ethos of the Academy are concerned, as is the norm in any military training establishment of world standing.
New Delhi, Jun 10 (PTI) India hit out at Pakistan on Thursday for making an unverified claim that some material seized recently in Jharkhand's Bokaro was uranium and described it as an attempt by Islamabad to malign the country.

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said the material seized was not uranium and asserted that India maintains a stringent law-based regulatory system for internationally-controlled items, which is reflected in its "impeccable" non-proliferation credentials.

"The Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India, after due evaluation and laboratory analysis of the material sample, has stated that the material seized last week is not uranium and not radioactive," MEA Spokesperson Arindam Bagchi said.

"The gratuitous remarks about India by Pakistan's Foreign Ministry, drawing upon a media report, indicate their disposition to malign India without caring to check or verify facts," he said at a media briefing.

Bagchi was replying to a question on Pakistan's official remarks in response to a media report on the seizure of the suspicious material in Bokaro last week.

"Let me also reaffirm that India maintains a stringent law-based regulatory system for internationally-controlled items, which is reflected in our impeccable non-proliferation credentials recognised by the international community," he said.

Last week, Pakistan's foreign ministry called for a probe into what it called the seizure of nuclear material.

Asked about reports of security concerns at the Indian High Commission in Pakistan, Bagchi did not give a direct reply but said the MEA maintains contacts with local authorities regarding the safety and security of its diplomatic premises.

"The MEA maintains contact with local authorities regarding the safety and security of all our diplomatic premises, which we believe is the responsibility of the host government," he said. PTI MPB RC

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Jodhpur, Jun10 (PTI) Amid a lingering uncertainty over the Covid vaccination of the Pakistani Hindu migrants in Rajasthan, the Barmer and Jaisalmer district administrations have begun inoculating them, while Jodhpur administration is awaiting the states decision over the issue.

On the inoculation of Hindu migrants in his district, Jaisalmer District Magistrate Ashish Modi said they have surveyed such migrants who do not have any Indian documents but have Pakistani passports.

We have identified 2,281 such migrants in Jaisalmer and have started their vaccination on the basis of their passports. So far, 17 of them have been vaccinated and the drive would begin from Friday in full swing, he said.

Similarly, Barmer District Magistrate Lok Bandhu said the inoculation of the migrants with no local identity document has already begun.

A total of 21 of them were vaccinated on the first day of the drive on Tuesday, he added.

We have already started a survey of these migrants with no citizenship with the help of their representatives. But parallel to this, we have also started their vaccination, the officer said.

But there is no decision on the vaccination of migrants without identity documents in Jodhpur and the administration is still awaiting the state government's directions over the issue.

Jodhpur's Chief and Medical and Health Officer Balwant Manda said they have not received any directions on vaccinations of Pak Hindu migrants from the state government and have not yet taken any decision on the issue.

Jodhpur has the largest number of Pakistani Hindu migrants awaiting citizenship and no decision about their vaccination by the administration has further added to their insecurities.

Seemant Lok Sangthan president Hindu Singh Sodha termed the Jodhpur administration's indecision shocking and said when the Barmer and Jaisalmer administration have already proceeded with the vaccination, why is the Jodhpur administration reluctant to inoculate them.

We are unable to understand the reluctance of the Jodhpur administration. Jodhpur has over 20,000 such migrants with no local identity proof, which is largest in the state, he said.

"When all other districts with the presence of the Pakistani Hindu migrants, including Jaipur, have started their vaccination, I fail to understand why the Jodhpur residents among the migrants are being denied these life-saving shots, Sodha said.

The two district administrations began the inoculation of Hindu migrants on Tuesday amid a purported uncertainty over the state and the Centres policies over the inoculation of the people without identity documents.

The Rajasthan High Court had earlier this month taken exceptions to the state government's submission that it had written to the Centre seeking its clarification over the special operating procedures for states on how to identify people for inoculation in absence of prescribed identification documents.

During the adjudication of a plea related to Pakistani Hindu migrants' inoculation, the state government had also told the high courts Jodhpur bench that it has also requested the Centre to declare Pakistani migrants eligible for vaccination.

The high court subsequently had taken strong objections to the states submission saying that the bench had in May itself clarified that the Centres SOP clearly makes migrant Pakistani Hindus eligible for the vaccination against Covid.

The high court had also ordered the Rajasthan chief secretary to file a detailed affidavit on the state governments step to inoculate the people without valid identification documents, including the Pakistan migrants.

A Jodhpur bench of the high court is slated to hear the matter again on Monday. PTI CORR RAX RAX

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COVID-19 Origin: US & UK Back 'timely & Transparent' Next Phase Of WHO Study In China

In a big development on Thursday, the US and the UK extended support for the next phase of the WHO-convened global study in China to trace the COVID-19 origin. This was a part of the joint statement issued on the visit of US President Joe Biden to the UK. Amid growing calls to further investigate the origin of the novel coronavirus, the nations stressed that the process should be "timely, transparent and evidence-based".

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Karnataka Lockdown Extended Until June 21; Curbs Eased In 20 Districts Including Bengaluru

On Thursday, the Karnataka government extended the COVID-19 induced lockdown till June 21 while easing some restrictions in all but 11 districts of the state. Chikmagalur, Shivamogga, Davanagere, Mysore, Chamarajanagar, Hassan, Dakshina Kannada, Bengaluru rural, Mandya, Belagavi, and Kodagu will remain under complete lockdown as they have a case positivity rate of 15%.

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No Need To Vaccinate People Who Had Documented COVID-19 Infection: Health Experts

Some public health experts, including doctors from AIIMS and members from the national task force on COVID-19, have recommended that there is no need to vaccinate people who had documented COVID-19 infection. In addition, they also stated that mutant strains may emerge in case of mass, indiscriminate, and incomplete vaccination.

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Andhra Pradesh CM Jagan Meets HM Amit Shah; Three Capitals, Polavaram Project Discussed

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy on Thursday met Union Home Minister Amit Shah in New Delhi and discussed the idea of three capitals in the state, the Polavaram project, and the COVID situation. In August, last year, the State Government had promulgated the 'Andhra Pradesh Decentralization and Inclusive Development of All-Region Act, 2020' in order to have three capitals.

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India Seeks 'two-way' Travel With China; MEA Raises Concern Over Denial Of Visas, Students

India has raised the issue and has expressed hope regarding visas for Indian nationals to travel to China. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) asserted that Chinese nationals have been able to travel to India despite the suspension of flights but Indian nationals have not been able to do so as their visas have been suspended by Beijing.

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India Files Affidavit Proving Mehul Choksi's Citizenship In Dominica HC; Fugitive Panics

In more trouble for Mehul Choksi, the government of India on Thursday filed an affidavit proving the fugitive businessmans Indian citizenship in the Dominica High Court. CBI officer Sharda Raut who is leading the legal fight to drag Choksi back to India signed the affidavit ahead of his bail plea hearing on Friday.

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COVID-19: Government Releases Tips For Managing Children's Anxiety Amid Pandemic

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, the government June 10 released tips for parents to manage anxiety among their children. With families facing major changes in their day-to-day life due to COVID-19, it is quite normal to feel anxious. This stress does not just affect the adults, but it even affects kids. Therefore, to help them cope with the feeling of anxiousness, the government released tips that may help decrease the levels of anxiety.

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COVID-19: UK To Donate 100 Million Surplus Vaccine Jabs To The World By 2022

Amid the ongoing second wave of coronavirus, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Friday the United Kingdom will donate 100 million surplus COVID-19 vaccine doses to the world within 2022. This came right before the G7 summit which will take place in Cornwall. In an official announcement, Johnson's office said, "As a result of the success of the UK's vaccine program we are now in a position to share some of our surplus doses with those who need them."

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France: Man Who Slapped President Emmanuel Macron Jailed For Four Months

A French court sentenced the 28-year-old man who slapped French President Emmanuel Macron to 18 months in jail, 14 of which were suspended, BFM TV reported. Damien Tarel, who is a medieval martial arts enthusiast, had earlier acknowledged striking Macron during the Presidents visit to the southeastern French region of Drome. However, he later told investigators it was not premeditated.

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EAM S Jaishankar Meets Kuwait FM; Holds 'productive Discussions' On Range Of Issues

External Affairs Minister Dr. S Jaishankar on June 10 met his Kuwaiti counterpart Sheikh Ahmed Nasser Al-Mohammad Al-Sabah and had productive discussions on a range of issues including health, food, education, energy, digital and business cooperation. While taking to Twitter, Jaishankar said that the discussions with the Kuwaiti foreign minister were aimed at taking forward the traditional friendship.

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After Congress leader Jitin Prasada switched his allegiance to BJP on Wednesday, Rebel Congress leader and MLA Aditi Singh once again lamented the indecisiveness of top Congress leadership and the dissatisfaction among the Congress cadre leading to several promising Congress leaders jumping ship to BJP.

Mentioning the names of several tall leaders of Congress who quit the Party, Aditi Singh in an exclusive interview to Republic TV said, "A lot of Congress leaders are dissatisfied. You saw the G23 letter asking for a change in leadership. It is certainly a worrying time for Congress Party."

"In terms of electoral losses, they were all elected politicians (who quit). If the Party is not performing for whatever reasons, it is dissatisfying for leaders to stick around, especially when they are not being heard in the top echelons of the Party," she added.

Speaking of her own experience with the top Congress leadership, she said, "If the leadership is not listening to them, or rather not proactively acting on what the political leaders have to say, then it's a big issue. There have been young leaders who had many good political years ahead of them to good work in their constituency. That has certainly been a problem I have faced even if I have a good audience at the high command and with senior leaders, there has been no action. The top leadership is in complete paralysis."

'More defections will happen': Aditi Singh on Jitin Prasada's exit

Going by the nature of the top Congress leadership which still remains in denial mode, Aditi Singh predicted many more defections ahead of the UP Assembly Elections which is due next year, and the General Elections in 2024. She categorically pointed out that although the top Congress leadership listens to its members, very little retrospective action is seen on ground.

Aditi Singh also gave an interesting point of view on Congress General Secretary Priyanka Vadra who has been at the helm of Congress in Uttar Pradesh.

"Even the changes that have taken place since Priyanka Gandhi Vadra Ji became the General Secretary for Uttar Pradesh, I don't think the changes have been very promising. I don't think the kothri she has surrounded herself with, or the people around her are necessarily very good advisors. And it is very evident from the results of 2019 Lok Sabha elections which happened under her leadership in UP," Aditi Singh said.

Jitin Prasada switches to BJP

Jitin Prasada, a senior Congress leader despite his relatively young 48 years, was welcomed into the saffron fold at the party headquarters in the presence of Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal. Prasada jumped ship ahead of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls that are scheduled to take place early next year. The Congress leader, who was perceived as Rahul Gandhi's close aide, met Goyal and Union Home Minister Amit Shah in Delhi before joining the party.

His induction into BJP serves as a huge embarrassment to Congress as he was the AICC in-charge of the West Bengal Assembly polls in which his party was wiped out. This brings to an end the speculation regarding Prasada's place in Congress.
Kolkata, Jun 10 (PTI) A day after actor-MP Nusrat Jahan claimed that her marriage in Turkey with businessman Nikhil Jain in 2019 is not valid under Indian laws, her estranged husband alleged that she had avoided always his requests to get the marriage registered.

He claimed that Jahan's behaviour started changing towards him since August 2020 when she was shooting a film, and she left his home bag and baggage in November.

Jain said though he had initially wanted to talk about the issue only in court and not in public, he was "dismayed with recent allegations against me and my family, regarding my married life and it has become imperative" for him to disclose some facts.

Jahan, who is reportedly dating actor-assembly poll candidate Yash Dasgupta in recent times, said in a statement on Wednesday that since her marriage ceremony with Jain had taken place in accordance with Turkish Marriage Regulation, the marriage is invalid here.

"Since it was an interfaith marriage, it requires validation under Special Marriage Act in India, which did not happen. As per law, it is not a marriage, but a relationship or a live-in relationship," she said.

Jahan had tied the knot with Jain at a destination wedding at Bodrum in Turkey in 2019, attended by a select few.

After winning the Lok Sabha elections in 2019 on a Trinamool Congress ticket, Jahan hosted a grand wedding reception at a five-star hotel in Kolkata which was attended by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee among other dignitaries.

"Out of love, I had proposed to marry Nusrat which she gladly accepted and we went for a destination wedding in Turkey," Jain said.

After that, he said, they lived together as husband and wife and introduced themselves as a married couple in the society.

"I devoted all my time and resources being a faithful and responsible husband. Friends, family and people close to us know everything that I did for her. My unconditional support for her is unchallenged," Jain said.

"Since August 2020 during the shooting of a film, my wifes behaviour started changing towards me, for reasons best known to her. During our stay together I requested her on a number of occasions to get the marriage registered but she avoided my requests," he added.

Nusrat has been cast opposite Yash Dasgupta in Bengali film 'SOS Kolkata', the shooting of which took place in August 2020.

Jain said that on November 5 last year, Nusrat left his flat along with her personal belongings and shifted to her Ballygunge flat "and thereafter we never stayed together as husband and wife".

Jain said he filed a civil suit against Nusrat on March 8 for annulment of their marriage "due to certain developments".

"The alleged marriage is not legal, valid and tenable; and thus, was not a marriage at all in the eye of law," she has said in the statement. PTI SUS NN NN

(Disclaimer: This story is auto-generated from a syndicated feed; only the image & headline may have been reworked by www.republicworld.com)
On June 11, the Hawaiian state of the United States of America celebrates King Kamehameha I Day. Kamehameha the Great, the Hawaiian monarch who was the first to unify the Hawaiian Islands of Niihau, Kauai, Oahu, Molokai, Lanai, Kahoolawe, Maui, and Hawai'i, was named after him. A duplicate of this statue can be found at Emancipation Hall at the Capitol Visitor Center in Washington, D.C., and in Hilo, Hawai'i. Read on to know more about King Kamehameha day 2021, its history, significance and more.

Kamehameha day significance

Kamehameha Day is a Hawaiian public holiday that includes a day off for the general public as well as school and business closures. Kamehameha the Great was the ruler of Hawaii from 1782 until 1819. He united and founded the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1810, for which he is well-known. Kamehameha Day is celebrated every year on June 11 in his honour.

Kamehameha day history

To honour his grandpa, Kamehameha I, Kamehameha V (on December 22, 1871) designated June 11 as King Kamehameha Day. It was almost intended to replace Hawaiian Sovereignty Restoration Day (on July 31), which the monarch and ministers disliked due to the Paulet Affair's connection.

The holiday was initially honoured the following year. In the late 1800s, King Kamehameha I Day celebrations included carnivals and fairs, foot races, horse races, and velocipede races. The Governor of Hawai'i and the Hawai'i State Legislature established King Kamehameha I Day as one of the first holidays when Hawai'i became a state in 1959.

King Kamehameha I Day is celebrated today with elaborate activities that harken back to ancient Hawai'i and honour the cultural traditions that Kamehameha fought to maintain as his society transitioned toward European influences. The King Kamehameha Hula Competition takes place over two days at the Neil S. Blaisdell Center, and it attracts hula groups from all around the world. Prizes are given out on the second night.

Kamehameha Day celebration

The celebrations include a traditional Pau Parade and a Hoolaulea. The activities are organised by the King Kamehameha Celebration Commission and several community organisations. The celebration's most important ceremony dates back to 1901 when the Territory of Hawai'i was created. The Kamehameha Statue in front of Aliiolani Hale and Iolani Palace on King Street in downtown Honolulu is wrapped in long strands of lei during the afternoon draping ritual.

IMAGE: HAWAII TRAVELS' INSTAGRAM
Scientists have discovered as many as 535 mysterious fast radio bursts, or FRBs using a telescope, known as CHIME, for the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment. The oddly bright flashes of light register in the radio band of the electromagnetic spectrum in space and occur for a few milliseconds, the vanishes without a trace. These strange FRBs have been recorded in distant parts of the universe as well as in our own Milky Way galaxy but their origin has been a puzzle for the scientific fraternity.

In its first year of operation, the CHIME telescope detected more than 500 mysterious flashes called fast radio bursts  quadrupling the number of known events. Scientists now hope to pin down the causes of such ultrabright, ultrafast signals. https://t.co/CyOdlujeBL pic.twitter.com/633Hkkg4b8  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (@MIT) June 10, 2021

Since the first was discovered in 2007, radio astronomers have only caught sight of around 140 bursts in their scopes, the Massachusetts Institute of technology explained in a news release on June 10.

The observations of the radio bursts have quadrupled as more than 500 new fast radio bursts have been registered within just one year, between 2018 and 2019. When the CHIME scientists in collaboration with MIT researchers attempted to map their locations, they found the bursts were evenly distributed throughout the space, occurring at a rate of about 800 per day. But the fact that the fast radio bursts were detected by the CHIME telescope suggests that they must have been produced by extremely energetic sources, scientists said. They now plan to detect their dispersion estimates to map their distribution in the space.

Scientists have documented these newly detected signals in the telescopes first FRB catalog, which they will present at the American Astronomical Society Meeting this week. Of the total fast radio, bursts identified there were majorly two categories detected. One that occurs consistently known as the repeaters and those that dont, called the offs. Researchers found 18 FRB sources that were repeaters which were slightly different with each burst lasting slightly longer and emitting more focused radio frequencies.

Before CHIME, there were less than 100 total discovered FRBs; now, after one year of observation, weve discovered hundreds more, CHIME member Kaitlyn Shin, a graduate student in MITs Department of Physics said in the MITs news release. With all these sources, we can really start getting a picture of what FRBs look like as a whole, what astrophysics might be driving these events, and how they can be used to study the universe going forward.

CHIME radio telescope

The CHIME radio telescope has at least four cylindrical radio antennas, located at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory, operated by the National Research Council of Canada in British Columbia, Canada. As the Earth rotates each day, the telescope receives signals. The stationary array focuses on incoming signals using a correlator  a powerful digital signaling processor that can work through huge amounts of data. The FRBs strike at the rate of 7 terabits per second, which is equivalent to a small percentage of the worlds internet traffic.

Digital signal processing is what makes CHIME able to reconstruct and look in thousands of directions simultaneously, Kiyoshi Masui, assistant professor of physics at MIT said. Thats what helps us detect FRBs a thousand times more often than a traditional telescope, he added.

Most of the fast radio bursts occurred from far-off sources within distant galaxies, travelling across space, any interstellar gas, or plasma, along the way. This can, sometimes, distort or disperse the waves properties and trajectory. If the scientists could measure the degree to which a radio wave is dispersed, it can give clue about the amount of gas it passed and eventually the distance it travelled.
External Affairs Minister Dr. S Jaishankar on June 10 met his Kuwaiti counterpart Sheikh Ahmed Nasser Al-Mohammad Al-Sabah and had productive discussions on a range of issues including health, food, education, energy, digital and business cooperation. While taking to Twitter, Jaishankar said that the discussions with the Kuwaiti foreign minister were aimed at taking forward the traditional friendship. The EAM also added that he appreciated the presence of Commerce Minister Dr. Abdullah Issa Al-Salman who was present during the talks.

In a series of tweets, Jaishankar said that the agenda of talks included health, food, education, energy, digital and business cooperation. He said that the two sides agreed to review progress with the early meeting of the Joint Commission. Further, he informed that the two sides signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) that will give Indian workers great legal protection in Kuwait.

Welcomed the openness to address the issues of Indian community in Kuwait. Witnessed signing of a MoU that will give our workers greater legal protection.



Launched the celebration of 60th anniversary of our ties. pic.twitter.com/xaKDm7H35T  Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) June 10, 2021

According to PTI, there are over 10 lakh Indians residing in Kuwait. India is amongst the largest trading partners of Kuwait and Kuwait is a major supplier of oil for India. "Valued the assessments and insights of FM @anmas71 on regional issues," Jaishankar further said.

Meanwhile, Jaishankar is on a three-day visit to Kuwait to further cement bilateral ties and thank the country for supporting India during the raging second wave of coronavirus pandemic. The EAM took this trip at the invitation of Sheikh Ahmed Nasser Al-Mohammad Al-Sabah, Foreign Minister and Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs, Kuwait. Jaishankar, who is carrying a personal letter from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Kuwaits Emir Sheikh Nawaf al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, earlier called on Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah Khaled Al-Hamad Al-Sabah.

"Conveyed our felicitations on the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations. Appreciated his commitment to taking our partnership to higher levels. Our historical ties have been reinforced through our joint fight against COVID19," Jaishankar tweeted.

India-Kuwait relations

Meanwhile, Jaishankar's Kuwait visit comes after on May 12 he spoke with Kuwait Foreign Minister Dr. Ahmed Nasser Mohammed Al Sabah. During the phone call earlier this month, Jaishankar thanked Kuwait FM for the much-needed assistance. EAM had tweeted saying that the call between both the diplomats was warm with India conveying its appreciation for the maritime bridge with Kuwait that facilitated smooth oxygen flow.

India and Kuwait have also set a maritime bridge for the convenient transport of medical oxygen as well as oxygen-carrying equipment. With this bridge, Indian Navy ships brought essential medical supplies under its Operation Samudra Setu II as the nation was tackling a dramatic surge of coronavirus infections. On May 27, Indian Navy Ship INS Shardul arrived at Kochi with 270 Metric Tonnes (MT) of liquid oxygen from Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates ((UAE) including 11 International Standardisation Organisation (ISO) containers, two semi-trailers, and 1200 oxygen cylinders.

(Image: Twitter)


Islamabad, Jun 10 (PTI) A Muslim cleric in northwest Pakistan has been arrested under the tough anti-terrorism act for threatening to kill Malala Yousafzai in a suicide attack and instigating people against the Nobel Laureate for her recent comments on marriage, police said.

Mufti Sardar Ali Haqqani, a cleric, was arrested in Lakki Marwat district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Wednesday, Dawn newspaper reported on Thursday, quoting Lakki Marwat District Police Office.

In an interview to Vogue magazine in its latest edition, 23-year-old Malala, an Oxford graduate and a Pakistani activist for girls education who miraculously survived a bullet to the head from the militant Taliban in October 2012, revealed that she is not sure if she will ever marry.

I still don't understand why people have to get married. If you want to have a person in your life, why do you have to sign marriage papers, why cant it just be a partnership? she told the magazine.

The cleric belongs to the Nowshera area of the province but was visiting Pizo in Lakki Marwat when nabbed by the police. He had apparently escaped from there to avoid arrest.

Haqqani was charged for under section of 16 Maintenance of Public Order (MPO) act and section 7 of Anti-Terrorism Act.

Station House Officer Wasim Sajjad Khan is the complainant in the case, the report said.

Sajjad told the media that Lakki Marwat police went into action after it was tipped about the presence of the cleric in the district.

According to the FIR, a video went viral on social media showing Mufti Sardar instigating people at a gathering in Wahid Ghari area of Peshawar to take the law into their own hands and attack Malala. He was armed when the incident took place, the report said.

"When Malala comes to Pakistan, I will be the first to attempt a suicide attack on her," according to the FIR registered at Pizo police station in Lakki Marwat.

The video of the speech inciting violence went viral on social media with many people urging the government to take action against him.

The complaint further said that the cleric's speech had threatened peace and incited lawlessness, according to the news report.

Malala's remarks caused a storm in the conservative Pakistan and her home in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province where women are seldom seen in public without a Muslim veil or a male guardian.

Recently, her views on marriage also echoed in the provincial assembly with Opposition Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) lawmaker Sahibzada Sanaullah demanding the government to probe whether she really made those remarks on marriage remarks as life partnership was not allowed in any religion and if she favoured it, then the stand was condemnable.

The PPP and Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal, an alliance of religious-political parties, also urged her family to clarify their position on the issue, the report said.

In February, a Pakistani Taliban militant, who had allegedly shot Yousafzai, had threatened her, saying that next time, "there would be no mistake." Haqqani made headlines last year when he mocked COVID-19 standard operating procedures (SoPs) in another video which resulted in his arrest by Nowshera police. He was released later. PTI RS/SH AKJ RS

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Islamabad, Jun 10 (PTI) Pakistan's Supreme Court on Thursday disposed of the case of death of 11 Pakistani Hindus in Rajasthan last year after assurance from the federal government to pursue the matter with the Indian government.

Eleven members of a family of Pakistan Hindu migrants were found dead at a farm in Rajasthans Jodhpur district on August 9 last year.

The relatives of the victims in Pakistan had petitioned the apex court to order the federal government to forcefully take up the case with India to know the real cause of their deaths.

The apex court wrapped up the case when the Pakistan government assured that it would task the Foreign Office to probe the issue with India. The apex court also observed that it would not like to interfere or give directions in the matters regarding ties with foreign nations.

Earlier, the petitioner's counsel, Syed Qalb-e-Hasan, said that the matter was highly serious and the top court should formally issue a notice to the federal government. He also said that Foreign Office was only following a routine procedure instead of forcefully pushing for it.

The Foreign Office has said that it has asked India to share all details about the dead but without any success.

The family came from Pakistan's Sindh in 2015 on a long-term visa. The family members were living on the farm which they had hired for cultivation.

Autopsies on the 11 Pakistani Hindu migrants found dead at the farm indicated the consumption of a poisonous substance, police said on August 10 last year, pointing at the possibility of a mass suicide. PTI SH ZH AKJ ZH ZH

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The confusion in Pakistan's political establishment again came to the fore on Thursday after the opposition vociferously opposed the passage of the bill pertaining to Kulbhushan Jadhav in the National Assembly. The International Court of Justice (Review and Re-consideration) Bill, 2020 allows a foreign national to challenge a military court's order in any High Court of Pakistan either himself or through a consular officer of his country's mission. The opposition objected to the fact that the Imran Khan-led government passed 21 bills including the aforesaid legislation despite its strong protest and walkout.

No right to read the bill, no right to debate the bill, no right to have our vote counted and our opposition recorded. Completely undermine the role of parliament in legislation. Highly condemnable. Bulldozing of Election rigging bill, Kulbhushan NRO bill, PMDC, NEPRA bill. https://t.co/v5rQpkcxTW  BilawalBhuttoZardari (@BBhuttoZardari) June 10, 2021

As the bill was being deliberated, the opposition parliamentarians gathered in front of the Speaker's dais and raised slogans such as "Modi's friend is a traitor". PML(N) member Ahsan Iqbal expressed concern over the notion that it is a person-specific bill as his name is mentioned in the Statement of Objects and Reasons. Moreover, Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi came under fire after he claimed that the opposition was toeing the "Indian agenda" by opposing the bill.

However, the country's Law Minister Farogh Nasim explained that the bill was being passed in light of the verdict of the International Court of Justice. According to him, India would have gone to the UN Security Council and initiated contempt proceedings against Pakistan in the ICJ if the bill would not have passed. The bill which was approved by the National Assemblys Standing Committee on Law and Justice on October 21, 2020, will become law only if it clears Pakistan's Upper House- Senate where the opposition has a majority.

Subsequently, the opposition moved a no-confidence motion against Deputy Speaker Qasim Suri who presided over most of the Assembly session on Thursday. Accusing him of collaborating with the government "illegally", the political parties alleged contravention of the Constitution and democratic norms. The joint opposition letter read, "The Deputy Speaker through his unlawful and fascist conduct has become the instrument of treasury benches to bulldoze legislation, deny the members the right to deliberate upon legislation and to repressively silencing the voice of the people of Pakistan".

PTI government bulldozed about 20 bills in the National Assembly yesterday in an unprecedented hurry & in contravention of democratic norms & legislative rules. This move clearly had a mala fide intention behind it. This is not how a Parliament is run through arbitrariness.  Shehbaz Sharif (  ) (@CMShehbaz) June 11, 2021

Kulbhushan Jadhav case

Involved in business dealings in Iran, retired Indian Navy officer Kulbhushan Jadhav was abducted by Pakistan in March 2016. His case came to light after the Pakistan Army released a video where is seen giving a coerced confession on camera. After a military court awarded him a death sentence on the charges of espionage and terrorism in 2017, India moved the ICJ. Queen's Counsel and senior advocate Harish Salve represented the country at The Hague.

In its judgment dated July 17, 2019, the ICJ stayed Jadhav's death sentence until the review and reconsideration of his sentence and conviction are completed. Furthermore, the ICJ directed Pakistan to allow India consular access to Jadhav. In response, Pakistan promulgated the International Court of Justice Review and Reconsideration Ordinance, 2020 permitting the review of a military court's decision at the Islamabad HC.

At present, the Islamabad HC bench comprising Chief Justice Athar Minallah, Justice Aamer Farooq and Justice Miangul Hassan Aurangzeb is hearing the petition filed by Pakistans Ministry of Law and Justice seeking the appointment of a lawyer for Jadhav. However, India has consistently raised 4 issues- concerns about the International Court of Justice Review and Reconsideration Ordinance, 2020, lack of meaningful consular access, not allowing Queen's Counsel to represent Jadhav and that appearing before a Pakistani court would compromise its sovereign integrity. A day earlier, sources told Republic TV that India is likely to seek the cross-examination of the Pakistani military officers who abducted Kulbhushan Jadhav, and also those who recorded his confession.
Islamabad, Jun 10 (PTI) Pakistan Finance Minister Shaukat Tarin on Thursday said the cash-strapped economy has shaken off the damaging impact of the coronavirus pandemic, citing official figures that nearly 2 crore people had returned to work in the last year.

Unveiling the Pakistan Economic Survey 2020-21 at a press conference here, he said the government had set 2.1 per cent GDP growth for 2020-21, while the International Monetary Fund had predicted even lower.

"(But) we recorded a provisional growth rate of 3.94 per cent in the first 9 months of the fiscal year," he said.

"The COVID-driven survey revealed that when COIVD-19 started, the working population was 5.57 crore and this figure dropped to 3.5 crore meaning nearly 2 crore people were laid off, he said.

Due to the prudent policies of Prime Minister Imran Khan, the working population has been restored to 5.3 crore people meaning that gap of only 25 lakh people remains, he added.

He credited the Pakistani diaspora abroad for large foreign remittances, contributing to the growth rate. PTI SH IND AKJ IND

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Pakistan has become the worlds third top country to have the largest donkey population in the year 2021 that has shot past 5 million, Pakistan-based channel Geo TV reported. The country is now facing an increase of 100,000 donkeys per year, according to the statistics listed by the Economic Survey 2021. Theres also a 1.2 million spike in the population of the buffalos, while the sheep population has risen from 31.2 million to 31.5 million, with a spike of a whopping 400,000 per year. The increase in the number of cattle and donkeys in Pakistan was first revealed by the Punjab Livestock Department.

The state has set up animal hospitals to treat the livestock free of charge, although the population was now shooting up uncontrollably. During the fiscal year, 2020-2021 in Lahore alone the donkey population jumped by 41,000. The sheep witnessed an increase of 400,000 in a year. The survey also highlighted the overpopulation among other livestock and cattle such as the goats recording a 2.1 million increase annually.

Based on the statistics, the overall cattle population has risen by 1.9 million during the current financial year 2021. The cattle rearing in Pakistan has been at its peak as the owners report that the animals fetch them good business, mainly in Lahore. The livestock such as the goats provide for dairy products, while donkeys are employed at the construction site for loading unloading goods, as well as ferrying the carts.

Donkey makes owners Rs 1,000 per day

ANI reports, citing the economic survey that a donkey costing about Rs 35,000 to Rs 55,000 to an owner makes them the business of approximately Rs 1,000 per day. "Our business of donkeys here is flourishing. Also, we get good returns when we sell them," a donkey breeder told Geo, according to the news agency ANI. Earlier similarly Pakistan broke records in terms of maximum temperatures in April in over 70 years. The temperature in the country reached 43.6 degrees Celsius with 6 percent humidity. Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) issued warnings of the heatwave currents across several parts as the dry winds swept on one of the most scorching days in decades.
A dozen countries and development organizations pledged on Thursday to intensify their efforts to address the causes that force millions to migrate from Central America.

Gathered in the Costa Rican capital of San Jose, country leaders, multilateral banks, international organizations said they will contribute with nearly $110 million to the project.

The statement came following a summit between Spain and member states of the Central American Integration System (SICA).

Spain organized the event in its capacity as chair of the MIRPS, the Comprehensive Framework for Protection and Solutions to Forced Displacement.

Officials said migration was aggravated by climate change and the coronavirus pandemic on top of economic hardship, insecurity and violence.

The United States announced it was donating $57 million in humanitarian assistance for displaced people in the region, in addition to the $310 million previously announced.

Spain said it will contribute more than $7.6 million between 2021 and 2022, and the European Union will contribute the equivalent of 18.5 million Euros.

The MIRPS, whose technical secretariat is comprised of the OAS and the UN refugee agency UNHCR, was created in 2017 with a humanitarian and development focus.

The member countries of the mechanism are Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Panama.

During the press conference at the end of the summit, Guatemelan President Alejandro Giammattei urged the government of Nicaragua to release the opposition presidential pre-candidates detained in the past week.

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Expectations are mixed ahead of legislative elections in Algeria. While independent candidates see an opportunity for more young people and women to take seat in parliament, members of a pro-democracy movement called for a boycott of the electoral process. 1,483 candidate lists, with 646 representing political parties and 837 independents, hope to win one of the 407 seats in the Algerian parliament in the elections on Saturday.

The voting comes earlier than planned, after the president dissolved parliament in February. Parity between female and male candidates is among the new rules governing the elections. "The new election law gives more chance to the youth who represent almost half of the candidates," said independent Khadidja Laatar.

The legislative elections are taking place under a new system meant to weed out corruption and open voter rolls, a major step in President Abdelmadjid Tebboune's promise of a "new Algeria." But a crackdown on the pro-democracy Hirak movement, with hundreds arrested around Algeria during recent protests, have cast a pall over presidential efforts to give a new face to a nation whose army plays a backseat role in governance.

Hirak supporters, including parties from the so-called "democratic movement," have vowed to boycott the first legislative voting since former president Abdelaziz Bouteflika was forced from office in April 2019 after 20 years in power. It was pressure from marchers of the movement, beginning in February 2019, and from the army chief at the time that decided Bouteflika's fate.

"Elections in Algeria have always proved that they are not the solution. The solution lies in the democratic transition, it also lies in a dialogue around a table in order to solve the crisis," said Sofiane Haddadji, an activist from the Hirak movement who was detained for participating in a protest in May and later released.

While in the streets opinions about voting or not on Saturday are divided, for political analysts, Algerians have lost faith in electoral processes. "It turns out that Algerians have confirmed that for them, elections have never been a solution," said Nacer Djabi, a sociologist and political scientist.

Two local Algiers residents had contrasting views. Mohammed Badaoui said he will vote as the candidates who "will bring change to the country". "Previous ones were more focused on their personal affairs and they forgot about people," he added. Abed Elhak, however, said he didn't have his voting card and even if he did, he wouldn't vote.

While there is an unprecedented number of candidates for the June 12 vote - nearly 1,500 lists for the North African nation's 58 regions with hundreds of others weeded out by the Independent National Elections Authority - how many people will go to the polls remains a mystery.

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Xi congratulates Khurelsukh on election as Mongolia's president

Xinhua) 17:51, June 11, 2021

Presidential candidate Ukhnaa Khurelsukh, chairman of the ruling Mongolian People's Party, walks to cast his ballot at a voting station in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, June 9, 2021. (Ukhnaa Khurelsukh's Office/Handout via Xinhua)

BEIJING, June 11 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday sent a congratulatory message to Ukhnaa Khurelsukh over his election as Mongolia's president.

In his message, Xi said China and Mongolia are friendly neighbors and sincere cooperation partners linked by mountains and rivers. At present, the development of bilateral relations maintains a good momentum.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Xi said, the Chinese and Mongolian governments and their peoples have stood together and joined hands in fighting the pandemic, and have achieved positive results.

Xi said he attaches great importance to the development of China-Mongolia relations, and is ready to work with Khurelsukh to guide the China-Mongolia comprehensive strategic partnership to constantly make new progress.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Hongyu)
Following the arrest of a Chinese intruder from the India-Bangladesh border on Thursday by the BSF, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) has taken an interest in the case, sources said. As per inputs, an NIA team interrogated the Chinese national, who has identified himself as Han Junwe, on Friday at Malda Mohodipur BOP.

In a video of the arrested Chinese intruder that has now been accessed, Han Junwe has claimed that he crossed a river by mistake and landed up in India, adding that it was not his intention to illegally enter the country. The Chinese national has claimed that he has no relative in India and has visited the country on 7 occasions previously with the first one in 2009. He has maintained that he visited India frequently for purpose of his export business.

"I reached Bangladesh on June 2. By mistake, I crossed the river and reached India. So I was arrested. I did not know where is India, where is Bangladesh. There was no signal on the river," the Chinese national has said, who is also suspected by agencies to be a spy. It is relevant here to add that he was carrying copious electronic equipment and other suspicious paraphernialia while purportedly 'crossing the river'.

Chinese intruder nabbed at Bangladesh border

The Border Security Force (BSF) on Thursday nabbed a Chinese intruder attempting to enter India through the Bangladesh border. The Chinese national, identified as Han Junwe, allegedly tried to stealthily cross the international boundary between India-Bangladesh and attempted to run away when sighted by the BSF at the Malik Sultanpur outpost.

According to the statement issued by BSF South Bengal Frontier, Han Junwe is a wanted criminal. The BSF had stated on Thursday that during an extensive search of the electronic equipment found in possession of the Chinese intruder, many facts have indicated that he was working for the Chinese Intelligence Agency in India.

Further, according to the statement issued by BSF South Bengal Frontier on Friday, Han Junwe has been a wanted criminal and upon thorough interrogation, shocking facts have come to the fore, that Han Junwe has so far taken around 1300 Indian SIMs to China using fake documents from India. Han Junwe, through his associates, used to hide the SIM in undergarments and send these to China. These SIMs were used to hack accounts and to do other kinds of financial frauds. Their purpose was to cheat people using SIM to get their money out of money transaction machines. His apprehension is a big achievement for the Border Security Force.

The Chinese national had claimed that during his previous visits to the national capital, he stayed at a hotel in Gurugram named "Star Spring" where some of his colleagues often stayed. Moreover, when he returned to China, his colleague in India, whom he has identified as Sun Jiang, sent him 10-15 numbers of Indian mobile phone SIMs. Moreover, he alleged that Sun Jiang - his business partner - had been arrested by ATS Lucknow due to which he could not obtain an India visa. The BSF had recovered 1 Apple Laptop, 2 iPhone Mobile, 1 Bangladeshi SIM, 1 Indian SIM, 2 Chinese SIM, 2 Pen Drive, 3 Battery, 2 small torch, 5 money transaction machines, 2 ATM/Master Cards, US Dollars, Bangladeshi Takas and Indian currency from his possession as well.
A leader of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) made a visit on Thursday to a tribute to victims of violence against protesters in Colombia.

IACHR Commissioner Antonia Urrejola toured the 'Stolen Lives' exhibition in Bogota and met with relatives of those killed during social demonstrations in the country since 2019.

Anti-government rallies reignited again in late April over a plan to increase taxes and at least 58 people have been killed since, the country's human rights ombudsman said Monday.

The government withdrew the plan, but the demonstrations have continued, fueled by growing inequality and unemployment during the pandemic.

An official IACHR delegation was sent to the country to assess allegations of police abuses, gender-based violence and disappearances in the context of the protests.

Urrejola spoke to relatives of victims including Nury Enith Rojas, the mother of Angie Paola Baquero Rojas, who was shot by police in Bogota on September 9, 2020.

The prosecutor's office charged a police officer in the case, but there has so far been no conviction.

"I ask for justice because I want the truth because I want to know who gave the order to kill these kids," Rojas said.

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Kathmandu, Jun 10 (PTI) In a setback to the embattled Nepal Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli's government, the Supreme Court on Thursday issued an interim order asking it not to implement the recently issued ordinance on citizenship.

A five-member Constitutional Bench of the apex court issued the order after conducting a preliminary hearing on the writ petitions filed against the decision of the minority government to introduce the Citizenship Amendment Ordinance.

Prime Minister Oli-led government issued the ordinance bypassing parliamentary discussions in a bid to woo the Madhes-based Janata Samajbadi Party-Nepal and to make a power-sharing deal with the party.

The constitutional bench observed that an immediate implementation seems irrelevant and such practices infringe parliamentary rights by standing against separation of powers, The Himalayan Times reported.

The Bench led by Chief Justice Cholednra Shumsher-led passed the order, asking the government to make necessary arrangements to distribute citizenship certificates based on the Citizenship Act endorsed duly by Parliament, according to court officials.

Altogether, six writ petitions were filed in the Supreme Court challenging the ordinance issued by President Bidya Devi Bhandari on May 23 at the recommendation of the Council of the Ministers.

The petitioners demanded the Supreme Court dismiss the ordinance as it contradicted the Constitution of Nepal.

The government, however, defended the ordinance as a legal base to commensurate the provisions mentioned in the Constitution.

Nepals beleaguered Prime Minister Oli recently joined hands with the key Madhesi Janata Samajwadi Party after effecting a major Cabinet reshuffle.

The 69-year-old Oli expanded his Cabinet with the inclusion of eight ministers and two ministers of state from the Madhes-based Janata Samajwadi Party (JSP). Oli appointed three deputy prime ministers, including two from the Madhesi community, during the reshuffle.

The Mahantha Thakur-led faction of the JSP decided to join the Oli-led minority government after the prime minister agreed to meet some of their key demands, including the citizenship issue that has been on hold in the parliamentary State Affairs Committee for the last three years and the withdrawal of cases filed against 120 leaders and cadres of the JSP.

Olis joining of hands with the JSP is regarded by many experts here as hitting two targets with one arrow, as it involves consolidating his grip on power and strengthening relations with India.

Madhesi parties in Nepal claim to be representing the cause of Madhesis, who are inhabitants of the Terai region. The community shares strong cultural and family bonds with India.

Nepal President Bhandari dissolved the 275-member House of Representatives on May 22 for the second time in five months and announced snap elections on November 12 and November 19 on the advice of Prime Minister Oli, heading a minority government.

President Bhandari rejected the separate bids of both Prime Minister Oli and the Opposition alliance's claims to form a new government, saying the claims were insufficient. Oli's move to dissolve the House sparked protests from a large section of the NCP led by his rival Pushpa Kamal Dahal 'Prachanda'. PTI SBP MRJ AKJ MRJ

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The British Minister of State, James Cleverly, visited the Libyan capital Tripoli on Thursday and met with Mohamed al-Menfi, the President of Libya's Presidential Council.

Cleverly pledged the UK's support and hailed the "important and positive relationship" between the two nations.

"I also wish to publicly express my support for the calls that you have made for foreign fighters to leave Libyan soil, so that you, as a nation, can set your own agenda, enjoy your own sovereignty and govern yourselves," he added.

Speaking in a news conference with the Foreign Minister of the Libyan Government of National Unity (GNU), Najla al-Manqoush, he added that the government must ensure an environment for safe, fair and inclusive elections in December, including measures to enable women to participate fully, equitably and meaningfully, as candidates and voters.

Cleverly also announced a UK support project for the electricity grid in Libya by adding renewable energy supplies and using energy efficiency measures, without going into additional details for this project.

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British Foreign secretary Dominic Raab on June 11 said that US President Joe Biden and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson discussed the opening of a transatlantic travel corridor at their first in-person bilateral meeting on Thursday as POTUS is in the UK for the Group of Seven (G7) summit. Raab told Sky News on Friday that, It was something that was discussed yesterday and we've got an idea about how to take it forward, but it's not something we'll be announcing imminently. Biden and Johnson met in Cornwall, southwest England before G7 leaders met on Friday.

The major takeaway from Biden-Johnsons meet is the reviving of the Atlantic Charter. On June 10, US President and UK PM signed a new Atlantic Charter, modelled after the 1941 agreement that outlines at least eight crucial areas for the cooperation of both nations and as Johnson said, to build back better. The revamped charter says it builds on the commitments and aspirations set out eighty years ago, affirms our ongoing commitment to sustaining our enduring values and defending them against new and old challenges."

UK PM Johnson US President Biden exchange gifts

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on June 10 gave US President Joe Biden a framed photograph of a British mural featuring Black 19th century abolitionist Frederick Douglass, said Downing Street following the first in-person meet of both leaders ahead of the Group of Seven (G7) summit in Cornwall. Striking a comparatively warm tone, Biden and Johnson utilised their maiden meet to underline the commitment to enhance the historic ties of their nations and keep aside the differences, at least publicly. As Johnson and Biden met, the UK Prime minister on Thursday described the new administration as a breath of fresh air.

As per the Daily Mail report, UK and US leaders exchanging gifts is a tradition. While Johnson presented Douglass mural to the US President, Biden gave the British PM a new America-made bicycle and a helmet to mark their first gathering. Further, Bidens also gave Carrie Johnson, UK PMs newly-wedded wife a leather tote bag made by the wives of American troops, as well as a presidential silk scarf. With a nod to Black Lives Matter, the mural that Johnson gifted depicted the former slave, Douglass who went on to become a leading figure in the 19th-century abolitionist movement in the United States.

Reportedly Douglass travelled to Ireland and Great Britain in the 1840s while on a speaking tour. The gifted image is painted by Ross Blair and it is a part of a mural trail around Edinburgh and the photograph was captured by Melissa Highton, an American-British dual national. Johnson also gave US First Lady Jill Biden the first edition copy of Daphne du Mauriers The Apple Tree. Downing Street also said in a statement that the choice of the book was to reflect Du Mauriers Cornish links. The author reportedly lived in the country and drew inspiration from her surroundings.

IMAGE: AP
The United States on June 10 announced the return of at least 27 antiquities values around $3.8 million to the people of Cambodia including Angkorian Buddhist statue. The artefacts were returned by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance in a repatriation ceremony attended by the Cambodian Minister of Culture and Fine Arts, Dr. Phoeurng Sackona, Cambodian Ambassador to the US, Chum Sounry and US Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent in Charge Erik Rosenblatt. In a statement, Vance said that the repatriation of the 27 stunning relics is an important link between the nations classical Angkor era.

The repatriation of these 27 stunning relics to the people of Cambodia restores an important link between the nations classical Angkor era and its modern customs and beliefs that, for far too long, was disrupted by the greed of stolen antiquities traffickers, said District Attorney.

Todays event is a powerful reminder that individuals who plunder and sell culturally significant items are committing crimes not only against a countrys heritage but also its present and future. I want to thank my Offices Antiquities Trafficking Unit and our partners at Homeland Security Investigations for their relentless efforts that have resulted in nearly 400 treasures being returned to 10 countries over the past year. I look forward to further repatriations in the near future, he added.

#HSINewYork is proud to have worked this investigation w/ the @ManhattanDA that resulted in the return of 27 antiquities, each invaluable to the preservation of Cambodian history, back to their home country. @cambodiaembus #HSIhttps://t.co/ALTIpPnkcz pic.twitter.com/dknKLLgtCe  HSI New York (@HSINewYork) June 10, 2021

Thanks to @ManhattanDA and @HSINewYork for securing 27 priceless antiquities to return to the people of #Cambodia, a tribute to the cooperation between our countries on preventing the looting and trafficking of Khmer artifacts.https://t.co/3PuAxGL672  Ambassador W. Patrick Murphy (@USAmbCambodia) June 10, 2021

US Homeland Security pledged to tackle plundering of heritage

Fitzhugh also expressed the commitment of US Homeland Security Investigations to tackle the plundering of cultural heritage and the illicit trafficking of cultural property. The HSI New York Special Agent in Charge said in a statement, Today, more than two dozen antiquities are being returned to the people of Cambodia; and while the underground market value of these items is in the millions, these pieces are invaluable to the preservation of Cambodian history. HSI New York is proud to have worked this investigation with DANY that led to the ultimate return of these items to their home country, as each artefact is a testimony to the rich cultural heritage of Cambodia. Meanwhile, Sackona noted the win-win policy of the Royal Government that has prevailed peace in Cambodia acts as a strong foundation for the preservation of nations culture.

IMAGE: @HSINewYork/Twitter
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is telling Congress that the U.S. military has already begun conducting combat operations and surveillance in Afghanistan from outside the country's borders, as the troop withdrawal continues.

Austin declined to specifically address whether the U.S. will provide combat air support to the Afghan forces to prevent them or their major cities from being overrun by the Taliban after the pullout is complete.

Austin said he would not "speculate on potential actions" but noted that once troops are fully withdrawn from Afghanistan it will be very difficult to provide such support to the Afghans.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, also said at a Senate hearing Thursday he is "very open minded to some significant and fundamental change in the area of sexual assault and sexual harassment."

Momentum in Congress for taking sexual assault prosecution powers away from military commanders, combined with a more flexible view by some military leaders, is pointing to a historic shift in the way the military addresses those crimes.

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New bans on investment in Chinese companies come on the heels of renewed trade and economic talks.

Chinese Vice Premier Liu He attends the closing session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China May 27, 2020.

The complexities of U.S.-China relations have been on full display in the past month with a succession of trade talks and sanctions that may leave progress in doubt.

The recent series of events began with separate video meetings between U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen with Chinese Vice-Premier Liu He on May 27 and June 2.

Those contacts left Chinese negotiators with a positive view of developments. Bilateral economic talks were "back on track," the official English-language China Daily reported.

"Both sides believed that the exchanges were professional, candid and constructive, and that the two countries' economic and trade communications have returned to normal," the paper quoted Ministry of Commerce spokesman Gao Feng as saying.

But China's optimism dimmed on June 3 when U.S. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. issued an executive order barring investment in securities of 59 Chinese companies and organizations linked to Beijing's military, intelligence and surveillance activities.

The expansion of sanctions originally aimed at 31 Chinese entities last November by former President Donald J. Trump was needed to counter the unusual and extraordinary threats to human rights posed by Chinese surveillance technologies, the Biden order said.

Coming just one day after the Yelen-Liu video meeting, the new sanctions also appeared to challenge the progress in relations that the trade and economic contacts had achieved.

The updated sanctions of the new executive order prompted a "strong condemnation" from China's Foreign Ministry as spokesman Wang Wenbin charged Washington with "abusing national power."

"China will take necessary measures to resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises," Wang said, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

The U.S. move spurred legislative action in China to defend the targeted enterprises ranging from telecom companies like Huawei and China Mobile to facial recognition developers like Hikvision and electronic giants like Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC).

Legal defense

On June 7, a draft law raising defenses against foreign sanctions was advanced by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) for a second reading, state media reported.

"People from all walks of life suggested that it is necessary for China to formulate a specific law on countering foreign sanctions, to provide legal support and guarantee for the country to counter discriminatory measures," Xinhua said.

On Thursday, the NPC moved quickly to vote the anti- sanctions measure into law without a third reading.

While details were sketchy, the new law would provide a legal basis for retaliating against sanctions on China and could impose penalties for complying with foreign curbs, the South China Morning Post said.

Under the law, Chinese parties could sue in Chinese courts for damages caused by foreign sanctions, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Individuals or entities that fail to comply with Chinese anti-sanctions measures would be subject to "unspecified legal repercussions," the paper said.

The U.S. bans could have far-reaching impacts on Chinese enterprises and the value of their offerings.

The sanctions prohibit any U.S. person "from engaging in the purchase or sale of any publicly traded securities" of the listed companies or those with "investment exposure" to such securities. Those holding such investments have one year to divest.

The new list of sanctioned companies largely mirrors the roster of targeted enterprises from the Trump administration including about a dozen entities added by the Pentagon in December and January.

The major changes include a focus on companies not only with ties to the military but also those that contribute to surveillance of religious or ethnic minorities, as in Xinjiang, an analysis by the Ropes & Gray law firm said.

Another major change is a shift of control over the list of additional targets from the Pentagon to the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the government's watchdog for financial sanctions, suggesting tougher enforcement ahead.

But the timing of the Yelen-Liu meeting with the announcement of the Treasury-supervised sanctions one day later may raise questions about the state of U.S.-China relations and the conflicting policy signals that both sides have sent.

A U.S. government official contacted by RFA cautioned against drawing conclusions from the sequence of events.

"The two events were not related. The executive order was part of a regular interagency policy process," said the official.

William Reinsch, a former Commerce Department undersecretary in the Clinton administration, also sees it as likely that the sanctions and the trade contacts advanced on separate tracks.

"My experience in the government suggested that things tend to happen when they are ready, and there is not always a lot of consultation or coordination between different agencies on timing," said Reinsch, who now holds the Scholl Chair in International Business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Echoes of the past

But the mixed signals on talks and sanctions are reminiscent of previous episodes in the bilateral relationship this year.

Within hours of Biden's inauguration in January, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs slapped visa and financial sanctions on 28 former officials of the outgoing Trump administration, charging them with interfering in the country's "internal affairs."

The next day, the ministry called for improved bilateral ties.

"With cooperation from both sides, the better angels in China-U.S. relations will beat the evil forces," a ministry spokeswoman said.

The pattern was repeated nearly two months later at the high-level meeting in Alaska with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, State Council Yang Jiechi and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in March.

The day before, Blinken announced sanctions against 24 Chinese officials, citing their efforts to "unilaterally undermine Hong Kong's electoral system" with legislation to exclude candidates not approved by Beijing.

In that case, the sequence of events leading up to the meeting appeared to leave little room for ambiguity about the state of relations.

"In diplomatic terms, the timing of the action was pointed and clearly intentional, continuing a testy start to relations between the Biden administration and China after a tumultuous four years under President Donald J. Trump," The New York Times said.

On Tuesday, yet another sign of frictions raised tensions between Washington and Beijing as the U.S. Senate voted 68-32 to approve funding of nearly U.S. $250 billion (1.6 trillion yuan) for technology and research to compete with China in fields including semiconductors, telecommunications and lithium battery development.

In a statement, President Biden praised the Senate passage of the bipartisan legislation.

"We are in a competition to win the 21st century, and the starting gun has gone off," Biden said. "As other countries continue to invest in their own research and development, we cannot risk falling behind."

In a Xinhua commentary, China blasted the bill, charging that it was driven by "ideological prejudice towards China's development."

The bill's sponsors were "steering their country onto a wrong and dangerous path, which will only harm the United States and the world at large," the commentary warned.
Defense official says full access would go against Cambodias sovereignty.

The U.S. embassy in Cambodia said Friday that its defense attache was denied complete access during an invited visit to the countrys largest naval base, but a Cambodian official told RFA that Phnom Penh had never agreed to a full tour.

The tour Friday came 10 days after U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, during a visit to Cambodia, voiced concern about Chinese military presence and construction of facilities at Ream Naval Base on the site of a U.S.-built structure Phnom Penh razed last year.

According to the embassys statement, when Sherman met with Cambodias Prime Minister Hun Sen on June 1, he agreed to allow U.S. Embassy Defense Attache, Colonel Marcus M. Ferrara to visit the base regularly.

During the brief visit, Cambodian military officials refused to allow the Defense Attache full access to the Naval Base, the embassy said.

When it became clear he would not be granted adequate access, Colonel Ferrara ended the tour and requested Cambodian military officials reschedule the visit with full access at the earliest opportunity, it said, adding that regular visits to the base were an important for transparency and mutual trust.

A Cambodian Defense Ministry official told RFAs Khmer Service in an interview that the ministry was disappointed with the embassys inaccurate statement.

We allowed the U.S. official to visit a few important places that the U.S. said were suspicious, and they accused Cambodia of wrongdoing there in the past, said Lt. Gen. Suon Samnang, deputy director of the ministrys foreign affairs department.

On the contrary, it is the U.S. that has committed a breach of trust, asking for more than what we agreed upon, he said. The U.S. first said it wanted to see the locations where Washington had funded buildings on the base, and requested to see other places which Cambodia rejected.

The other places they wanted to visit were contrary to what we had originally agreed upon, so Cambodia could not accept the request. It infringes on our sovereignty and our right to protect our military secrecy, said Suon Samang.

When asked which areas Cambodia denied Ferrara access to, Suon Samang declined to elaborate.

RFA was unable to reach Minister of Defense Tea Banh for comment.

Tea Banh last week told local media that China would be involved in the modernization and expansion of Ream Naval Base, but that other countries would be granted access to inspect it.

In September, Cambodia demolished the Tactical Headquarters of the National Committee for Maritime Security at Ream Naval Base, which was renovated and built by the U.S., equipped by Australia, and inaugurated in 2012. The U.S. raised questions about Chinas role in renovating the base.

Political analyst Em Sovanara told RFA that disagreement between the U.S. and Cambodia over Ream Naval base will affect the two countries relationship. He said that the U.S. should request exact locations to inspect ahead of their next visit.

The disagreement over Fridays visit comes at a time when Washington is trying to limit Chinas growing influence in Southeast Asia, especially in the South China Sea.

Vietnam Thursday said it was aware that China was helping Cambodia upgrade Ream.

Vietnam is a good, friendly and traditional neighbor of both China and Cambodia, and we want Sino-Cambodian relations to positively contribute to the peace, security, stability and prosperity of the whole region and the world, Le Thi Thu Hang, Hanois Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson, told state media.

Reported by RFAs Khmer and Vietnamese Services. Translated by Samean Yun and Anny Vu. Written in English by Eugene Whong.
Reports of new infections come as Cambodia marks its 300th death from the disease caused by the coronavirus.

A growing number of elderly political activists held in Cambodias notorious Prey Sar Prison are testing positive for COVID-19 as the coronavirus spreads unchecked through the penal system, inmates and their family members said Thursday.

Reports of the widening prison outbreak came as authorities announced Cambodias 300th COVID-19 death and 36,666th infection, marking a grim milestone for a country that just over three months ago had yet to report a single victim of the disease caused by the coronavirus, and whose key textile sector has been decimated by the pandemic.

Sok Polyma, the wife of an activist with the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) who is locked up in Prey Sar, told RFAs Khmer Service that she recently received a call from people inside the prison who asked her to relay a request for urgent help because an increasing number of inmates have COVID-19.

I was shocked when I heardI am afraid and I dont know how to get my husband out of jail so that he is safe from the virus, she said. Please dont wait until he is sick to send him home.

Prum Chantha, another wife of a jailed CNRP activist, told RFA she had received similar information in recent days and is worried for her husband, who she said suffers from underlying health conditions.

It is easier for him to become infected and if he gets sick, he will be at risk of dying, she said.

The government has detained him, even though he is innocent. If he and other political prisoners die, [Prime Minister] Hun Sen will go down in history for having murdered them.

An inmate at Prey Sar, who contacted RFA via social media on condition of anonymity citing fear of reprisal, said many elderly prisoners who are political activists have become sick and called on the government to immediately release them.

No exact numbers

Cambodias Supreme Court banned the CNRP in November 2017 over an alleged plot to overthrow the government. The crackdown on the political opposition, as well as on NGOs and the independent media, paved the way for Hun Sens ruling Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP) to win all 125 seats in the countrys July 2018 election.

In recent months, authorities have jailed dozens of CNRP activists on charges of incitement after they expressed views critical of Hun Sens leadership.

While the coronavirus made few inroads into Cambodia in 2020, the number of infections has skyrocketed since its latest outbreak in February led to its first recorded death in early March.

General Department of Prisons spokesman Nuth Savana told RFA that Cambodias prison outbreak is manageable and under control, adding that none of the prisoners have become seriously sick from the virus.

While RFA had previously reported that several hundred prisoners had become infected across the country, Nuth Savana refused to confirm the number of cases in the penal system.

It is very difficult to evaluate, he said, adding that in some cases symptoms thought to indicate COVID-19 would later disappear, or testing would show that prisoners were suffering from other illnesses.

The numbers arent exact. I cant give an answer because some people only got flu.

People shout slogans in front of NagaWorld hotel and casino during a protest in Phnom Penh, Jan. 10, 2020. AFP An issue of life and death

Ny Sokha of Cambodian rights group Adhoc called the situation alarming and said that authorities need to resolve it as soon as possible. He noted that Cambodia does not have a nationwide set of safety standards for its prisons, which he said are at high risk of virus transmission due to heavy overcrowding.

Without proper distancing, the virus will spread, he said. This is an issue of life and death, its not just the flu.

Ny Sokha reiterated earlier calls that the courts release prisoners who have nearly completed their terms or who are serving lighter sentences, and that the government work to reduce overcrowding in prisons.

To date, eight prisonsincluding two in the capital Phnom Penhhave reported being impacted by the outbreak.

Cambodias Ministry of the Interior issued a set of guidelines to authorities on Wednesday on how to avoid transmission of the coronavirus amid the latest outbreak that called on prisons with COVID-19 cases to coordinate with the Department of Health and strengthen the implementation of relevant health measures. It said every case of infection must be immediately reported to the ministry.

Mu Sochua, deputy president of the CNRP, who lives in self-imposed exile to avoid a string of charges and convictions she says are politically motivated, echoed calls by the wives of jailed party activists for authorities to release them during the outbreak for safety reasons.

This is very unjust, she said. They shouldnt be mixing politics and justice.

They are [officials] with the CPP. They serve the party, but they should also serve the countrys citizens. We demand rule of law.

Responding to calls for inmate releases, General Department of Prisons spokesman Nuth Savana said that the courts decide who should go free and that if such an order is given, prison officials will comply.

Cambodias prison population totals around 39,000 and the countrys prisons have an average occupancy above 300 percent of capacity. Some 35 percent of all prisoners are being held in pre-trial detention.

Layoffs during outbreak

Also on Thursday, a group of nearly 75 Cambodian NGOs issued a statement expressing disappointment with what they said are attempts by management of the Nagaworld Casino in Phnom Penh to dissolve trade union leadership and its plans to systematically fire workers, using the coronavirus pandemic as a justification for its actions.

The statement came a day after NagaWorld announced 1,329 layoffs, including union officials, who say the move is part of a strategy to crush worker representation.

In their statement, the NGOs said that the planned layoffs were intended to exclude the presence of the union in the company, something that they claimed NagaWorld did to the previous iteration of trade union leadership there in 2009.

These acts evince an intention to discriminate against the union and to violate the fundamental freedom of association guaranteed by the Constitution, core conventions of the International Labour Organisation and the Labour Law of the Kingdom of Cambodia.

The groups urged the government to monitor the companys actions and that company management negotiate with union representatives to find an appropriate resolution.

RFA was unable to reach NagaWorld management for comment Thursday.

A resident gets vaccinated in Hanoi, May 17, 2021. AFP Vietnam vaccinations

In neighboring Vietnam, a country of 96.5 million which has recorded 55 deaths from COVID-19 and a total of 9,784 cases, authorities have sped up plans to vaccinate the public and on June 8 began a phase of inoculation for people in the capital Hanoi who have received their first dose, staff at health facilities, those at the frontlines of the fight against the pandemic, and workers at two major industrial zones.

As of Tuesday, authorities in Hanoi said they had vaccinated 1.3 million people, of whom 42,115 have received two doses.

Vietnams Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Thursday also welcomed a recent announcement by Washington that it will provide 500 million doses of vaccines to nearly 100 countries worldwide, including Vietnam, as part of the COVAX program in 2021 and 2022.

Reported by RFAs Khmer and Vietnamese Services. Translated by Samean Yun and Anna Vu. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
Hong Kong and Chinese officials are engaging in sweeping curbs on dissent and political opposition, a U.K. government report said this week, as European Union officials joined a chorus of international criticism over a draconian national security law.



Over the past six months, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has moved to "crush dissent and suppress the expression of alternative political views in Hong Kong," a six-monthly report from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) said.



"China has broken its legal obligations by undermining Hong Kongs high degree of autonomy, rights and freedoms," the report found.



It said a draconian national security law imposed on the city by Beijing from , 2020 is being used "to ... deter freedom of expression and legitimate political debate."



Those who fall foul of the law's loosely defined provisions could face lengthy jail terms, as well as the transfer of some cases to mainland China for prosecution and sentencing, it said, citing the prosecution of 47 democracy activists and former opposition lawmakers on "subversion" charges after they took part in a democratic primary ahead of the Legislative Council (LegCo) election in .



Sweeping electoral changes were also imposed by the National People's Congress (NPC), which the FCO said "reverses Chinas promise to Hong Kong ... of gradual progress towards a system of universal suffrage, and further hollows out the Legislative Council."



It also hit out at the negative effect of the national security law on media freedom.



The European Union added its voice to the U.K.'s criticism with a statement on , drawing Beijing's ire at what it termed interference in China's internal affairs.



International aspect

Peter Stano, EU Spokesperson for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said the promises made to Hong Kong ahead of the 1997 handover were an international matter, however.



"We refute the allegations that that is EU interference in internal Hong Kong affairs," Stano said in comments emailed to RFA.



"There is a clear international aspect to what is happening in Hong Kong," he said, citing the registration of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration setting out Chinas international commitments regarding the city's promised autonomy.



Stano said the E.U. took issue with the Chinese Embassy's claim that the national security law had garnered broad public support in Hong Kong.



"The mass mobilization of Hongkongers against the imposition of the National Security Law, the electoral changes, and overall crackdown on pro-democracy forces, the stifling of pluralism, and erosion of fundamental freedoms, has been clear for everyone to see," he said.



The U.K. report was published ahead of the second anniversary of the storming of the Legislative Council chamber by protesters angry at plans by the administration of chief executive Carrie Lam to allow the rendition of alleged criminal suspects to face trial in mainland China.



Reports indicated that police will likely deploy more than 1,000 officers to patrol former protest sites in Causeway Bay and Mong Kok.



More than 10,000 people have been arrested to date in connection with the 2019 protest movement, more than 4,000 of whom were students at the time.



Ban on public gatherings

Online posts in recent days have called on Hongkongers to defy a ban on public gatherings under coronavirus restrictions and to commemorate the anniversary on the streets.



Trade union leader Lee Cheuk-yan, who is currently on remand pending trial on public order offenses linked to the 2019 protest movement, posted a message calling on people not to lose hope or to give up the struggle against authoritarian rule in Hong Kong.



Civil Human Rights Front convenor Figo Chan posted to social media, in a reference to a quotation from the work of revolutionary Chinese writer Lu Xun.



"We still have stones, and we still have sparks, so go Hongkongers!" Chan wrote.



Since the U.K. set out a potential pathway to citizenship for holders of the Hong Kong-specific British National Overseas (BNO) passport, more than 35,000 applications have been received, according to the FCO, averaging around 3,000 a week since the scheme was launched.



Canada has received nearly 6,000 applications for work permits from Hong Kong residents since the start of this year, compared with a previous annual rate of around 2,000.



Josep Borrell, High Representative of the EU, had earlier hit out at recent changes to Hong Kong's electoral system by China's NPC, adding that the EU is considering sending a delegation to Hong Kong.



A Germany-based student campaigner who gave only the nickname Kelvin said Hongkongers in Germany were encouraged by Borrell's statement.



"Sending high-level EU officials to Hong Kong would be the natural first step," he said. "The trend in the past year has been that Western democracies are standing up to China together, and the EU will likely also move towards this position."



Campaigners -- including the U.K.-based rights group Hong Kong Watch -- have previously expressed deep disappointment at a lack of economic sanctions from the EU, which recently inked an investment agreement on terms highly favorable to Beijing.



Reported by Su Yutong, Yitong Wu, Chingman and Carmen Wu for RFA's Mandarin and Cantonese Services. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has passed a law banning "defamation" or "insults" to military personnel, following the jailing of a blogger for posting about People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers during border clashes with Indian troops.



The standing committee of the National Peoples Congress (NPC) passed the law on , banning organizations or individuals from "slandering or derogating the honor of servicemen [and women], nor may they insult or slander the reputation of members of the armed forces," state news agency Xinhua reported.



Police officers and members of the People's Armed Police are also included in the ban.



Any "infringement of the legitimate rights and interests" of military personnel seriously affecting their performance of their duties is also covered by the new legislation.



Honors obtained by a soldier are to be enjoyed for life, while schools are required to teach "the glorious history of the PLA and the heroic and exemplary deeds of soldiers."



The law comes after blogger Qiu Ziming, who had more than 2.5 million followers on social media, was jailed for eight months for "defaming martyrs," the first case since changes to the law earlier this year banning insults or defamation of revolutionary heroes and martyrs.



In , a blogger was asked to make a public apology after he challenged the story of Qiu Shaoyun, a soldier in the Korean War (1950-53).



Catering to the military

Thousands of Indian and Chinese troops faced off in at three or four locations in the western Himalayas after Beijings forces intruded into Indian territory, according to Indian security officials and local media.



China denied intruding into Indian territory near the Galwan River in the mountainous Ladakh region.



Indian and Chinese troops later disengaged from the southern and northern banks of Pangong Lake, in an operation begun on Feb. 10, 2021.



Jiangsu legal scholar Qian Qinxue said the CCP is keen to improve the status of military and law enforcement personnel, as it is likely to rely on them more and more in the coming years.



"The CCP has been boosting the status of military personnel for some years now, raising salaries and setting up a department to ensure social security for veterans," Qian told RFA.



"This is an inevitable response to the increasingly serious political crisis faced by our authoritarian regime," he said, adding that the inclusion of the police and armed police was significant, as they are likely to be called in to keep the CCP in power if needed.



"The riot police and the counter-terrorism police perform a similar role to the armed police, and are deployed during major mass incidents," Qian said.



"[The army] would only be involved in actions to preserve the regime in special circumstances, such as [the suppression of the student-led democracy movement of] 1989," he said.



All about control

Zhejiang-based writer Dasheng said the new law increases controls on public speech and freedom of expression.



"This is all about wielding comprehensive power and control over the whole of our society, especially over our speech and our thoughts," said.



"They want to control people's mouths and brains," he said.



He said the CCP has become far more open about its attempts to control public speech.



"They used to arrest people secretly, but now they are making public announcements with great fanfare, to scare people," said.



The social media platform WeChat quickly moved to warn account-holders that they would face a permanent ban if they violated the new law.



It said censors would be cleaning up accounts "spreading historically nihilistic and erroneous remarks, malicious distortion, defamation, as well as those denying party history, national history or military history."



Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
North Korea (the dark area) and South Korea at night are seen in an undated NASA handout picture from the International Space Station.

People living in North Koreas rural areas have been forced to stumble in the dark without electricity after authorities re-routed power to keep the capital Pyongyang connected 24 hours a day, sources in the country told RFA.

North Korea has been unable to generate enough electricity for its needs for decades, and not even the capital  home to the most loyal and trusted citizens -- was immune to rolling blackouts.

Last month, however, Pyongyang began supplying electricity to homes around the clock, according to sources.

But the newfound abundance of power in Pyongyang has come at the expense of the people in the provinces, who must now endure long stretches without electricity.

Since Chagang province has abundant water resources and is a military industrial district, weve never had electricity shortages, even during the Arduous March, said a resident of the northern provinces Chunggang county, referring to the 1994-1998 famine that killed millions.

We have a new medium-sized hydroelectric power plant here in Chunggang. When they were building it in 2018, they submitted reports to the party saying it could generate enough electricity for the whole county, but that turned out to be false. Thats why theres a stoppage from the national electricity supply to the county, the resident told RFAs Korean Service Monday, asking for anonymity for security reasons.

The residents of Chunggang sacrificed much to build the power plant, according to the resident.

It took 20 years of labor. We carried cement on our backs and blocked off the streams, but the plant only worked for the first few years before it stopped generating power, the resident said.

At the time the power plant was completed, they lifted restrictions on electricity use and every household in the town of Chunggang received a gift of an electric rice cooker from the Highest Dignity, said the resident, using an honorific to refer to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The opening of the power plant and the gifts were touted as an example of Kims benevolence and love for the people, according to the resident.

But it was the start of our suffering. It was already bad that corrupt officials submitted a false report to exaggerate their own achievements, but it was worse that the guy at the top is so ignorant of how we at the bottom are living, and he is only concerned about taking credit for everything, said the resident.

As electricity is often unavailable in the peoples homes, the people have begun finding creative ways to access reliable power.

Last month at the Chunggang County Youth Mine, the mine supervisor caught a worker leaving the mine while carrying a suspicious package very early in the morning. He thought she might be stealing something from work, so he made her open the package to see what was inside, the resident said.

To his surprise, he found her rice cooker. What had happened was that she came to work very early in the morning with the rice cooker because there was no power at her house. She had made a pot of rice and corn for breakfast and was returning home, said the resident.

Residents outside of the major cities are mobilized many times per year for free farming work or labor for government projects. The resident said authorities are using the current mobilization periodwhen almost no one is at home during the dayas justification for the energy shortages in the countryside while Pyongyang is fully powered.

There are some government officials and rich people out here who can bribe the officials at the power station or the factories to steal electricity by attaching their individual power line to the plants, the resident said.

Another source, a high-ranking official in the nearby city of Manpo, who requested anonymity to speak freely, confirmed to RFA that Pyongyang was sucking all the power out of Chagang province.

With all the water resources in Chagang and several power plants, we used to be self-sufficient, the former official said.

But electricity supply has become more of a severe issue out here in Chagang province due to Pyongyangs increasing demand since 2016, when they built Ryomyong Street, said the official.

The residential Ryomyong Street section of the capital includes a 70-storey skyscraper and was touted by authorities as an example of North Koreas rapid economic development when it was finished in 2017.

Since the Ministry of the Central Electric Power Industry introduced a complete electricity distribution management system in 2015, the electricity supply in Chagang province made a turn for the worse, the official said.

The new system will automatically shut off electricity to an entire province if consumption exceeds its quota, according to the second source.

Even the electricity produced in the province itself would be taken away by the central government and the people end up living in total darkness, the official said.

Now as Pyongyang is trying to deliver on Kim Jong Uns recent promise to alleviate the citys housing shortage with 50,000 new homes by 2025, including 10,000 by the end of this year, the central government is rerouting all power across the country to the capital so that construction can continue around the clock, the official said.

Pyongyang people are living a very extravagant life with their houses on well-lit streets while the residents of the provinces dont even have enough juice to cook a measly pot of corn-rice, to say nothing of lights.

RFA reported May 31 that Pyongyang residents were concerned that the citys residential areas were getting continuous power only because the citys factories and businesses were closed due to poor economic conditions.

I dont know whether to laugh or cry because we have 24/7 electricity in exchange for so many factories shutting down, the Pyongyang resident said.

Reported by Yong Gun Shin and Jeong Yon Park for RFAs Korean Service. Translated by Jinha Shin. Written in English by Eugene Whong.
A Buddhist group has called on the junta to release nearly 20 activist monks.

In this handout photo provided by the Myanmar Ministry of Information, military and locals stand beside the wreckage of a Myanmar Air Force Beechcraft 1900 that crashed in Pyin Oo Lwin, Mandalay, June 10, 2021.

A military plane crashed in central Myanmars Mandalay region Thursday, killing at least 12 people on board, including a prominent senior Buddhist monk, according to state media.

The plane was carrying six military personnel, as well as two monks and six devotees, from the capital Naypyidaw to Pyin Oo Lwin for a ceremony to make the foundation of a new monastery, the official Myawaddy TV reported. A boy and a member of the military survived the crash, the report said, although unconfirmed accounts said the soldier later died in hospital.

The senior monk who died in the crash was Bhatanda Kavisara, the abbot of Zay Kone Monastery in Pyinmana, a town outside of Naypyidaw, who was believed to be in his 90s and had hosted junta leader Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing for a visit on Feb. 2, a day after the military orchestrated a takeover of Myanmars democratically elected government.

The coup prompted a nationwide Civil Disobedience Movement and widespread protests that troops loyal to the junta responded to with violent crackdowns. At least 860 people have been killed in the clashes, and more than 4,800 arrested, charged, or sentenced, according to the Thailand-based Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma).

Thursdays crash occurred as the plane, which appeared to be a Beechcraft 1900, encountered rough weather while attempting to land at Pyin Oo Lwins Anisakhan airport, Myawaddy TV said. In February 2016, five people were killed when an air force Beechcraft 1900D crashed after taking off from the airport in Naypyidaw.

Sagaing ambush

Amid nationwide turmoil following the coup, the military has stepped up offensives in remote parts of the country of 54 million that have led to fierce battles with a plethora of Peoples Defense Force (PDF) militias formed to protect residents from troops loyal to the junta.

On Wednesday, around 10 military soldiers were killed and 10 wounded during a firefight in Kani township in central Myanmars Sagaing region with the Kani Peoples Defense Force (KPDF)a volunteer militia formed to protect civilians from forces loyal to the junta.

A report by the Irrawaddy online news site cited residents as saying the KPDF used landmines to ambush five military vehicles carrying some 70 troops on the Monywa-Kalewa highway as they returned to a camp in Yargyi village after looting the nearby abandoned village of Thalin.

The number of military casualties could not be independently confirmed, and residents told the Irrawaddy that no members of the militia were killed or injured in the clash.

Around 5,000 residents from 10 villages in the area have now fled their homes, sources said.

On Wednesday, aid workers told RFA that an estimated 230,000 people have been forced to flee their homes through Myanmar as the result of fighting between the military and local militias, as well as territorial grabs between ethnic armies looking to capitalize on the chaos.

The United Nations in Myanmar voiced concern Tuesday about what it called the rapidly deteriorating security and humanitarian situation in Kayah state and other areas in southeastern Myanmar.

In a statement, the U.N. stressed the urgent need for food, water, shelter, fuel, and access to healthcare for people fleeing the fighting, saying that the aid it has distributed is insufficientparticularly for those in remote locations, where insecurity, travel restrictions, and poor road conditions are delaying the delivery of supplies.

This photo taken and received from an anonymous source on April 24, 2021 shows Buddhist monks marching during a demonstration against the military coup in Mandalay. AFP Detained monks

Myanmars the Dhamma and Peace group, a watchdog for religious issues, recently called on its Facebook page for pressure on the junta to release at least 18 leading monks from the Masoyein Taikthit Monastery in Mandalay who were beaten and detained troops on June 1 after working to stop violence during anti-coup protests or taking part in the protests themselves.

A monk in Mandalay, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said incident shows that the junta is only paying lip service to religion to legitimize its rule of the country.

No matter how many pagodas they built, how many titles and awards they presented to the monks, it is just a facade, he said.

The monks were beaten and knocked down by troops in cars. They hit the monks after dragging them onto the trucks.  If they have any respect for religion, they must stop all these beatings and killings of monks and laypeople.

Sayadaw Minthonnya of Myanmars Buddhist University, told RFA it is the responsibility of the countrys 500,000 monks and 60,000 nuns to secure the release of more than 5,000 people, including monks, held by the junta.

These people have been detained and imprisoned for working for Dharma (Good). Shouldn't we also fight for Dharma? he asked.

One of the requirements for the Sangha to stage a boycott is cursing and swearing at monks. But now [the junta troops] not only use blasphemy but they also kill. In such a situation, we can stage a united boycott. If the military doesnt apologize, if they dont release our Sangha members, we must stop providing religious services to them.

The military has denied, through state media, any wrongdoing in the June 1 incident.

Observers say there are now three types of monks in Myanmar: those who reject the coup, those who are close to the junta and accept it, and those who are not interested.

An AAPP spokesman said arrests and torture of monks, as seen under successive dictatorships, should never happen in Myanmar.

Deputy Information Minister Zaw Min Tun could not be reached for comment on Thursday and the junta has yet to make an official statement on the status of the detained monks.

Reported by RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
US Senator Tim Kaine presides over a hearing on the atrocities comitted against Muslim Uyghurs in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonous Region, in Washington, June 10, 2021.

More than 50 former inmates of detention camps in Chinas Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR)  many of whom have never spoken publicly  have presented new testimony of crimes against humanity, Amnesty International said in a report published Thursday.

The London-based right groups report shows how predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in the XUAR have been subjected to torture and maltreatment while arbitrarily detained in prison-like internment, while millions of others have faced harsh surveillance and persecution because of their religion, language, and culture.

The 160-page report titled Like We Were Enemies in a War: Chinas Mass Internment, Torture, and Persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang documents how since early 2017 China has conducted widespread, systematic abuses against Muslims living in the XUAR under the pretense of a campaign against terrorism.

Amnesty International believes the evidence it has collected provides a factual basis for the conclusion that the Chinese government has committed at least the following crimes against humanity: imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law; torture; and persecution, the report said.

Amnestys findings are based on interviews with former internees from October 2019 to the present, including ex-detainees who have never spoken to the media and other sources, including news reports, analysis of satellite imagery and data, and leaked government documents.

The Chinese authorities have created a dystopian hellscape on a staggering scale in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Agnes Callamard, Amnestys secretary general, said in a statement.

It should shock the conscience of humanity that massive numbers of people have been subjected to brainwashing, torture and other degrading treatment in internment camps, while millions more live in fear amid a vast surveillance apparatus, she said.

A former detention facility inmate with the pseudonym Madi told Amnesty how he was beaten after arriving at a camp when he resisted a strip-search by guards.

When I said I wouldnt take off my underwear they beat me with an electric baton, he said. They beat me and I was electrocuted...When I came to my senses, they took off my clothes, they searched me, made me bend down, tied my hands behind my neck. It was very painful.

A woman with the pseudonym Zhaina told Amnesty that women in her cell were punished by being made to stand still and look at the wall for hours and forced to watch others confined to metal tiger chairs in which detainees are confined for hours, including one who urinated herself while sitting in a chair for 32 hours.

A female guard used to take us [to another room in camp] to show us how people were suffering, she said. It was in a room [that was originally intended] to keep animals, surrounded by bars. It was dirty It was like a pound. It was made of bricks with an iron roof I saw them sitting in the chair.

A former camp inmate given the pseudonym Timur said he witnessed two of his cellmates immobilized in tiger chairs for extended periods as he and others were forced to watch and forbidden to provide any assistance.

They used to make people sit in tiger chairs for hours, he said of the guards in the camp. They used to make the person sit in the tiger chair in front of us. They used to bring the chair into our cell if someone was not obedient It happened twice. The first guy [was immobilized] for 24 hours. He was not allowed to eat or drink. He was taken to the toilet twicethe second guy was made to sit for six hours.

Former detainee Aibek told Amnesty he saw immobilized people tortured through the use of restraints and exposure to the cold while walking from his cell to the medical clinic in the camp.

I saw how they torture [other people], he said. One time they set a young lady in a metal chair outside [in January] in thin clothes [I saw] seven Uyghur men handcuffed [outside] to metal bars and chains on their feet without shoes.

End the systemic attacks

China has held up to 1.8 million Uyghurs in a network of detention camps since 2017. Beijing has said that the camps are vocational training centers or re-education centers and has denied widespread and documented allegations that it has subjected Muslims living in the XUAR to severe rights abuses. Smaller numbers of Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, fellow Turkic speaking people, have also been incarcerated in the camp system.

Amnesty notes that Chinese government data shows significant increases in prison sentences and satellite imagery shows significant new prison construction in Xinjiang since 2017.

Former detainees are placed under electronic and in-person surveillance for months after being released from a camp, including homestays by government cadres who monitor them and report what they consider to be suspicious behavior, Amnesty says. While many remain in detention in the camps, others have received lengthy jail sentences or are subject to forced or coerced labor.

The human rights group called on China to shut down the camps.

China must immediately dismantle the internment camps, release the people arbitrarily detained in them and in prisons, and end the systematic attacks against Muslims in Xinjiang, said Callamard.

The international community must speak out and act in unison to end this abomination, once and for all. The UN must establish and urgently dispatch an independent investigative mechanism with a view to bringing those suspected of responsibility for crimes under international law to account.

The report comes three days after a Uyghur Tribunal convened in London to investigate whether Chinas treatment of its ethnic Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims constitutes genocide.

More than 30 witnesses and experts provided testimony during the four-day opening session of the tribunal, which will reconvene in September and aims to issue a ruling by the end of the year.

The tribunal has no state backing and any judgments are nonbinding on any government.

Senate hearing discusses atrocities

Also on Thursday, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on the atrocities in Xinjiang with expert policy recommendations for ending the human rights crisis in the XUAR.

The matter of the treatment of Uyghurs in China has to be highlighted and exclamation-pointed to the world, said presiding Senator Tim Kaine at the beginning of the session.

Nowhere is the assault on individual freedom and human rights more comprehensive and more atrocious than against the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province, he said.

Senator Edward Markey, who also presided over the hearing, said that the genocide in Xinjiang is a stain on the global conscience.

Its hard to fathom that how in the 21st century such unspeakable crimes can occur, he said.

During the hearing, Adrian Zenz, an independent researcher with the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, discussed his latest report issued Monday on Chinas policy to reduce the natural population growth in southern XUAR.

The report indicates that Chinese policies could result in a large drop in births among Uyghurs of 2.6 million to 4.5 million by 2040, based on population projections by Chinese researchers.

Beijings strategy in Xinjiang is not one of population destruction, but population control, he said. Its a mass atrocity without mass slaughter, one with human rights violations of historic proportions, but leading to a loss of millions of lives potentially.

Rushan Abbas, executive director of the Campaign for Uyghurs, warned that the Chinese Communist Party has been able to control the narrative surrounding their genocidal crimes in the XUAR by keeping out journalists, which has led to a high number of genocide denialists, who target survivors and activists, attempting to undermine their stories, and even threatening their lives.

Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, called for the urgent need for the U.S. Senate to pass the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act and the SPEECH Act of 2021. The acts would prevent companies from relying on supply chains involving Uyghur forced labor and from providing technological equipment used in the surveillance and monitoring of Uyghurs in the XUAR.

The former will help stem the flow of goods made with forced labor to the U.S.; the latter to more carefully scrutinize exports that can be used for serious human rights abuses, Richardson said.

The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is a bill in the U.S. Congress that would change U.S. policy on the XUAR with the goal of ensuring that American entities are not funding forced labor among ethnic minorities in the region. The bill passed in the House of Representatives by a 406-3 vote in September 2020.

Omer Kanat, executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, also urged U.S. lawmakers to pass the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

This hearing showed that American elected leaders are extremely well-informed about the Uyghur genocide and the long arm of Chinese government repression, including harassment and retaliation against Uyghurs around the world, and even in the U.S., he said in a statement issued after the hearing. The Senate must pass the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act without delay.
Seven months after the 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the International Committee of the Red Cross released images showing Armenian families expressing joy and sorrow as they watch video messages from captive soldiers. The following photos of the families of captured Armenian soldiers watching video messages from their loved ones speaking from captivity in Azerbaijan were taken by Gohar Ter-Hakobyan.

Zara Amatuni, a communications manager from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Armenia, declined to say exactly when the photos were taken but confirmed that the "highly emotional" photos were "very recent." Amatuni says that in late May a team from the ICRC visited Armenian soldiers in captivity in Azerbaijan. There, with the permission of the authorities, the team shot video messages of the Armenian detainees, which were shown to their families back in Armenia. The ICRC also recorded messages from the Armenian families that will be delivered to the soldiers in Azerbaijan.

Yerevan claims around 200 Armenian soldiers remain in captivity in Azerbaijan, seven months after a Russian-brokered peace deal ended the 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijani authorities say only 70 ethnic Armenians are being held, most whom are from "a sabotage group" that crossed the border into Azerbaijan and "attacked both our servicemen and civilians."

After recent prisoner exchanges, Yerevan claims to no longer hold any Azerbaijani soldiers captive. Baku has not made any statements about prisoners held by Yerevan since a prisoner exchange in December. The return of detainees was one of the conditions of the peace deal between the warring sides.

A Human Rights Watch report concluded that the abuse of Armenian prisoners held captive in Azerbaijan is widespread. Released soldiers describe senior Azerbaijani officers acting largely professionally and in some cases actively protecting them. But they also reported beatings and abuse coming from low-ranking soldiers when commanding staff were not watching.
Four members of a Belarusian presidential candidate's team have been sentenced to five years in a maximum-security prison for preparing "mass riots" in the wake of last year's contested election that extended strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka's rule.



A Minsk court sentenced the four individuals -- Ihar Yarmolau, Dzmitry Kanapelka, Uladzislau Karetski, and Mikalay Saseu -- on June 10 despite what the opposition and rights groups said was a dearth of evidence against them.



The Belarusian rights group Vyasna considers the four political prisoners.



The main evidence presented in the trial was laser pointers found in Yarmolau's car around the time of nationwide mass protests in response to Lukashenka's declaration of victory in the August 9 presidential election.



The prosecution noted that each of the accused "intended to personally participate in the riots," but "could not," because law enforcement officers "took active steps to suppress the violation of public order and detain persons who took part in the riots."



Yarmolau was severely beaten during his arrest, suffering broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a concussion that sent him to a hospital for a week.



Crisis In Belarus Read our coverage as Belarusians continue to demand the resignation of Alyaksandr Lukashenka amid a brutal crackdown on protesters. The West refuses to recognize him as the country's legitimate leader after an August 9 election considered fraudulent.

All four had worked as volunteers for the presidential campaign of Viktar Babaryka, the former chairman of the board of Belgazprombank and once considered a top candidate in the election.



Ahead the election, Belarusian authorities seized control of the bank and arrested Babaryka, accusing him of masterminding the illegal transfer of millions of dollars to accounts in Latvia.



Babaryka, who alongside his son is sitting in pretrial detention, could be sentenced to 15 years in prison if convicted.



Babaryka's campaign ultimately backed Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a political novice who the opposition and West say is the rightful winner of the election.



Lukashenka has become an international pariah for directing a brutal postelection crackdown in which almost 30,000 people have been detained, many sentenced to lengthy prison terms, hundreds beaten, several killed, and journalists targeted.



In response, the United States, European Union, and other countries have ratcheted up pressure to isolate the Lukashenka regime through a series of sanctions and other measures.
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has warned that Belarus may be slipping "into pariah status" after it recently forced a civilian aircraft to land in Minsk to arrest opposition activist Raman Pratasevich and his girlfriend.

"We need Belarus to step up and live up to the basic, fundamental, cardinal rules of international law," Raab told the Reuters news agency in an interview published on June 11.

Raab's comments come a day after the European Parliament called for sweeping economic sanctions and a raft of other measures against Belarus in response to growing repression and the forced landing of the plane, a Ryanair passenger jet that was flying between two EU capitals on May 23.

In a nonbinding resolution that says it considers the regime in Belarus as "illegitimate, illegal, and criminal," EU lawmakers said economic sanctions should target Belarus's state-run companies in the oil, potash, steel, and wood-processing industries.



The European Union has already imposed three rounds of sanctions on Belarus, applying asset freezes and visa bans on 88 individuals and seven entities, including authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who has launched a sometimes violent crackdown on dissent after claiming to win a disputed presidential election last August.

Almost 30,000 people have been detained in the crackdown, with many sentenced to lengthy prison terms, hundreds beaten, several killed, and journalists targeted for reporting on the events.

Based on reporting by Reuters
SOFIA -- The European Union's chief prosecutor told Bulgarians weary of corruption that judges' independence is the most important condition for a functioning justice system.



Laura Koevesi chose Bulgaria, the EU's poorest and most corrupt country, for her first visit to a member state since the European Public Prosecutor's Office started operations on June 1.



"Only an independent judiciary can be a guarantor of justice," Koevesi told a news conference in Sofia, encouraging Bulgarians to send complaints about large-scale graft linked to misuse of EU funds directly to her office.



The European Public Prosecutor's Office is the first independent EU office with the power to investigate and prosecute crimes in members' courts that concern the misuse of EU budget funds.



"Everyone is equal in front of the law and we will make no distinction in who we will investigate ... We are here for you. We want to earn your trust for our work," Koevesi said.



She said her office had received more than 300 cases and 120 individual complaints from different countries, including Bulgaria, in the 10 days since it formally began operation.

Koevesi came to prominence as a successful anti-graft prosecutor in another corruption-ridden EU country, Romania. She was dismissed by Romania's corruption-ridden leftist government in 2018 for alleged abuse of power, something critics said was prompted by her dogged attacks on graft.



Many in Bulgaria hope that she will investigate bribery and fraud in Bulgaria and prove that the bloc is serious about rooting out misconduct across its 27 member states.



Bulgaria has yet to convict any high-level official on corruption charges.



Koevesi's visit to Sofia came amid protests by activists against Bulgarian chief prosecutor Ivan Geshev, whom they blame for refusing to investigate high-level corruption and fostering a climate of impunity.

Demonstrators chanting "Geshev is disgrace" and holding signs reading "Geshev = Mafia" waited for Koevesi at the offices of the EU commission in Sofia.



She called on the government to choose new prosecutors to join her office, after six of Bulgaria's ten nominations were rejected. She also urged Bulgarian prosecutors to hand over all ongoing investigations into major crimes that affect the EU budget.



The United States this month imposed sanctions on three Bulgarians and 64 companies linked to them over alleged corruption. Many Bulgarians welcomed the U.S. sanctions, but feel bitter that Bulgaria and the European Union failed to act first.



The EUs existing anti-fraud office is widely considered to be weak, having only the power to recommend member states prosecute cases, but not force them to investigate. In contrast, the new prosecutor's office will be able to take high-profile cases directly to national courts.

With reporting by Reuters
The European Parliament has called for sweeping economic sanctions and a raft of other measures against Belarus in response to growing repression and the forced landing of a plane flying between two EU capitals to arrest opposition activist Raman Pratasevich.



Economic sanctions should target Belarus's state-run companies in the oil, potash, steel, and wood-processing industries, EU lawmakers said in a nonbinding resolution on June 10.



Cooperation and financing for Belarusian state-owned banks should be halted and suspending Belarus from the SWIFT international banking system should also be considered, the European Parliament said.



The European Union has imposed three rounds of sanctions on Belarus, applying asset freezes and visa bans on 88 individuals and seven entities, including authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka himself.



Even before Lukashenka had a Ryanair flight forcibly diverted to Minsk on May 23, the bloc had been working on a fourth round of targeted sanctions on senior Belarusian officials for electoral fraud in the presidential election of August 2020 and subsequent human rights violations.

Crisis In Belarus Read our coverage as Belarusians continue to demand the resignation of Alyaksandr Lukashenka amid a brutal crackdown on protesters. The West refuses to recognize him as the country's legitimate leader after an August 9 election considered fraudulent.

The resolution said it considered the regime in Belarus "illegitimate, illegal, and criminal."



The plane diversion put renewed urgency on addressing Lukashenka's rogue behavior, which the resolution stated has become a threat to international peace and security.



The "hijacking" and forced landing of the Ryanair flight in Minsk and the detention of Pratasevich and his girlfriend was a "horrendous act" in violation of international law and constituted an "act of state terrorism," EU lawmakers said.



Earlier this week, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told MEPs the bloc would likely adopt economic sanctions on Belarus later in June when EU foreign ministers meet to hammer out the details.



Shortly after the plane was diverted, EU leaders called for targeted economic sanctions.



The EU also banned Belarusian carriers from using the bloc's airports and airspace.



The United States is coordinating a response with European allies and the Group of Seven summit of industrialized countries is expected to discuss the situation in Belarus this week.
Hungary's dominant ruling party has proposed legislation to ban dissemination of materials on sensitive gender and sexual topics in a move that is already drawing comparisons to Russia's yearslong crackdown on "gay propaganda."

The Fidezs-backed amendment -- to a bill to combat pedophilia -- was introduced to lawmakers on June 10, and bans spreading content that is seen to promote gender change or homosexuality in schools.

National-populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz allies hold a supermajority in parliament that virtually ensures passage of priority legislation.

Orban's government has backed a strongly conservative social agenda and stepped up anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) moves as woes mounted amid the coronavirus pandemic.

It has already embedded a requirement that marriage be between a man and a woman in the constitution and banned adoption by same-sex couples.

The government also retroactively prohibited legal status for transgender people in a move that the Constitutional Court ruled was unconstitutional.

The new amendment tacked onto the anti-pedophilia bill says children cannot be shown any content that encourages gender change or homosexuality.

The ban would also apply to advertising.

It also suggests the creation of a list of groups that would be allowed to conduct sex-education classes in schools.

The Hatter Society, a local LGBT+ rights group, called the draft amendment an attempt to "seriously curb freedom of speech and children's rights" and a move that "endangers mental health of LGBTQI youngsters and prevents them getting access to information...and affirmative support."

The Hatter Society compared it to legislation enacted in Russia in 2013 that has been used to punish discussion of a broad range of LGBT messages, including efforts to educate or to confront discrimination against that community.

That Russian legislation targets "propaganda on nontraditional sexual relations" and has been widely condemned by domestic and international rights groups.

With reporting by Reuters
The departing head of Israel's Mossad intelligence service has hinted at possible Israeli involvement in recent attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities and on an Iranian scientist, though he stopped short of directly claiming responsibility.

The statements to Israel's Channel 12 by Yossi Cohen, broadcast late on June 10, included phrasing that suggested that other Iranian scientists working on Iran's nuclear activities could be targeted for assassination.

The appearance by the outgoing chief of Mossad coincides with what are likely to be the waning days of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rule with a confidence vote set for June 13 in a broad coalition that would topple the country's longest-serving head of government.

The detailed descriptions of possible covert operations also come with the United States and other world powers negotiating a possible return to the 2015 nuclear deal that Washington abandoned three years ago.

Iran's disputed nuclear program, which Western governments fear is aimed at a capacity to make nuclear weapons, and ongoing U.S. sanctions to punish Tehran are at the center of those efforts. Iran claims its nuclear ambitions are only for civilian uses.

Cohen offered a seemingly detailed description of Iran's Natanz enrichment facility and the damage inflicted on it by at least two separate explosions there over the past year.

The TV station's interviewer, Ilana Dayan, also painted a detailed narrative of events suggesting Israel or its agents had snuck explosives into the underground halls of Natanz.

"It doesn't look like it used to look," Cohen said of "the cellar" where "the centrifuges used to spin" at Natanz.

Cohen also discusses the killing in November 2020 of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an Iranian scientist widely credited with beginning an alleged military nuclear program decades ago that U.S. intelligence and the UN atomic watchdog say was abandoned in 2003.

"If the scientist is willing to change career and will not hurt us anymore, then yes, sometimes we offer them" a path out of harm's way, Cohen said.

The interviewer, Dayan, described Cohen as having "personally signed off on the entire campaign."

The U.S. government said on June 10 it had removed sanctions on three former Iranian officials and on two companies previously involved in trading Iranian petrochemical products.

The move quickly raised questions about whether they were related to efforts to revive Iranian and U.S. compliance with the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that traded sanctions relief for curbs on Iran's most sensitive nuclear activities.

President Joe Biden took office in January vowing a return to that agreement, which Israel has long opposed.

With reporting by AP and The Times of Israel
Russia recently took journalists on a PR tour of what it calls an "ecological" military base on a remote Arctic island, complete with MiG jets and missile defense batteries. In 2020, the United States sent destroyers into the Barents Sea for the first time since the 1980s, raising its military profile in the region. Once far removed from diplomatic tensions, the Arctic has become another potential flash point between Moscow and the West.
MAKHACHKALA, Russia -- A daughter of a close associate of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov who was forcibly removed by police from a shelter for domestic violence victims and rights activists has warned that she could be killed in an "honor killing if she is returned to her home.



The June 11 warning about Khalima Taramovas fate came one day after Chechen and Daghestani police raided the apartment in Daghestan, where Taramova fled, and took her away.

The apartment where she was staying was used by domestic violence advocates to protect women fleeing their homes.



Taramovas whereabouts were not immediately clear.



In a video published online earlier in the week, Taramova said she had fled her home in Chechnya due to "regular beatings and threats."



She pleaded with authorities to not to add her to the national missing persons list. The video was shot by rights activists in an effort to prevent police from searching for her.



Activists with Russias LGBT Network said Taramova fled because she was being intimidated for her sexual orientation.



In the video, Taramova, who has also been identified as Khalimat, did not name anyone as the culprit behind her alleged beatings. She is married, though the identity of her spouse was not immediately clear. She also told RFE/RL that her marriage had been arranged, against her will.



Her age was also not immediately clear.



She is the daughter of Ayub Taramov, a powerful real estate developer in Grozny and an ally of Kadyrov, who is Chechnyas strongman leader and is openly hostile to gays and lesbians.

Svetlana Anokhina, a womens rights advocate based in Makhachkala, told RFE/RL late on June 10 that Taramova was taken from the Makhachkala apartment by a joint unit of Chechen and Daghestani police led by a top district police official.



The police officers allegedly beat four women who were also in the apartment and tried to protect Taramova and her girlfriend, Anokhina said.



Daghestani police authorities did not respond to calls from RFE/RL seeking comment.



Anokhina was later detained by police on June 11 and charged with police obstruction, a lawyer, Patimat Nuradinova told RFE/RL. She was ordered to appear before a local judge on a misdemeanor charge later on June 11.



Meanwhile, Tim Bestsvet, a spokesman with the Russian LGBT Network  one of the countrys largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender advocacy groups -- told TV Dozhd that Taramova's girlfriend, Anna Manylova, was taken to Chechnya against her will.



Anokhina later told RFE/RL, however, that Manylova was not in fact taken to Chechnya but was scheduled to fly to St. Petersburg later on June 11.



Bestsvet said that, if Taramova was brought back to Chechnya, she could face death from an "honor killing"-- a practice where a person is killed for his or her immoral behavior, actual or perceived. It is illegal in Russia, but still practiced quietly in some Russian regions like the North Caucasus.



Russian authorities have long turned a blind eye to the human rights problems in the North Caucasus, a region with deep Islamic cultural roots and conservative traditions.

Kadyrov, who has ruled Chechnya for more than a decade, has been frequently accused by Russian and international groups of overseeing widespread human rights abuses, including abductions, torture, and extrajudicial killings.



The region was the site of a so-called "gay purge" in 2017 in which dozens of gay men claimed they were abducted and tortured by Chechen authorities.
The Moscow-based Memorial human rights center has condemned a court decision to label a group of organizations associated with jailed opposition politician Aleksei Navalny as extremist.



In a statement on June 11, Memorial called the court's decision to label Navalny's regional campaign network, along with his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) and his Citizens' Rights Defense Foundation (FZPG), "another step toward the full replacement of political discussion and political competition with repression."



"We consider the decision to ban these public organizations as purely political, violating the rights and freedoms of Russian citizens. It brazenly contradicts freedom of association, freedom of assembly, and freedom of expression. Its obvious consequence will be politically motivated criminal prosecutions and administrative repressions. Its goal is obvious -- the fear of such deliberately used sanctions will paralyze peaceful political opposition, as well as, wider public activities and public criticism of the authorities," Memorial's statement says.



The Moscow City Court handed down its ruling to label Navalny's organizations as extremist late on June 9, marking a watershed moment for Russias opposition as September parliamentary elections loom.

The decision prevents people associated with the FBK and Navalny's other groups from seeking public office. It also makes it illegal to hold membership or participate in the activities of the groups tied to Navalny, who is serving a 2 1/2-year sentence in a prison outside of Moscow on fraud charges he says are trumped up. His supporters could now also face fines and jail time for displaying symbols associated with the groups.



In April, tens of thousands of people protested for his release, following similar mass protests in January against his arrest.



Prosecutors in Moscow have claimed that "under the guise of liberal slogans," Navalny-linked organizations were "engaged in creating conditions for destabilizing the social and sociopolitical situation."



On June 11, lawyer Vladimir Voronin said his client, FBK director Ivan Zhdanov, who is currently residing in Lithuania, had been added to the Interior Ministry's wanted list on unspecified charges.

In late March, Zhdanov's 66-year-old father, Yury Zhdanov, was arrested after police searched his home in the city of Rostov-on-Don.



Investigators accuse Yury Zhdanov of recommending that a Russian towns administration provide a local woman with a subsidized apartment, though it later turned out that the woman's family had previously received housing allocations.



Ivan Zhdanov has said that his father's arrest was a move to exert pressure on him because of his ties to Navalny.

Russian authorities have ramped up pressure on dissent ahead of the elections in September, with opinion polls showing support for the ruling United Russia party waning.



Navalny's foundation has relentlessly targeted senior government officials over the past decade with widely watched videos that expose alleged corruption. His political network has been instrumental in implementing a "smart voting" strategy -- a project designed to promote candidates most likely to defeat Kremlin-linked figures.
The director of jailed Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), which was labeled as "extremist" and banned in Russia this week, says the Kremlin critic is in "significantly better" condition as he recovers from a hunger strike that raised fears he may die.

Speaking to the Ekho Moskvy radio station on June 11, Ivan Zhdanov said Navalny was monitoring the situation around the FBK and other news related to him and his associates via his lawyers.

Navalny's lawyers and close allies were concerned about his health as it deteriorated during a 24-day hunger strike he held in March-April to protest a lack of medical treatment for severe back pain and numbness in his legs.

"Aleksei Navalny is in significantly better condition. Every time when he gets news [about FBK] he says he is shocked by the news he receives there.... He tries to follow the agenda, to be informed on what is going on.... In general, everything is okay," Zhdanov said, referring to a June 9 decision by the Moscow City Court to declare organizations linked to Navalny as "extremist."

The Kremlin's most vocal critic was arrested on January 17 upon his return to Russia from Germany, where he received life-saving treatment for a poisoning attack in Siberia in August 2020.

Navalny has insisted that the attack, with a Soviet-style chemical nerve agent, was ordered directly by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Kremlin have denied any role in the poisoning.

In February, a Moscow court ruled that while in Germany, Navalny had violated the terms of parole from an old embezzlement case that was widely considered to be politically motivated.

His 3 1/2-year suspended sentence from the case was converted to a jail term, though the court said he will serve just over 2 1/2 years in prison given time already served in detention.

The June 9 court ruling marks a watershed moment for Russia's opposition.

Protests for Navalny's release from jail in January precipitated a concerted state crackdown against his supporters. Law enforcement raided the homes of protesters, opposition-minded journalists, and even defense lawyers involved in the multiple criminal and civic cases against Navalny and his employees.

The extremist designation comes against the backdrop of an intensifying campaign by the authorities to dismantle opposition networks ahead of elections to the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, in September.

Legislation signed by Putin this month banned people tied to "extremist" organizations from running for elected posts, and the ruling against Navalny's group was widely seen as the inevitable final step in a legal process that would allow authorities to formally exclude any political force deemed to pose a challenge.

With reporting by Ekho Moskvy
The most popular man in Tajikistan has arrived for a three-day visit to that country.



But it's not a Tajik -- it's Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev.



And the reason he is so popular in Tajikistan is because Tajiks see Mirziyoev as a reformer, someone who is loosening state control over society and making positive changes in Uzbekistan -- while his counterpart in Tajikistan, Emomali Rahmon, has been doing the opposite.



Mirziyoev is also reversing many of the policies of his predecessor -- Islam Karimov -- that left relations between the two countries in tatters and often seemed deliberately aimed at punishing Tajikistan.



Mirziyoev started making promises about reforms as soon as he took over as Uzbekistan's leader in September 2016.



Many people in Uzbekistan have trouble seeing a lot of those reforms, but Mirziyoev's comments about greater social, political, and religious freedoms resonate strongly in Tajikistan, where the process has been heading in the opposite direction.



Ahead of what many see as Rahmon's move to install his son, Rustam, as the next president of Tajikistan, authorities have worked to eliminate political rivals and tighten control over the country, including the number of people who practice Islam.

Improving Ties



But while Mirziyoev's credentials for reforms at home might be in question, his work in improving ties with Tajikistan is undeniable.



In the last 21 years, official visits by Uzbek presidents to Tajikistan happened less often than total solar eclipses.



When Mirziyoev visited Tajikistan in March 2018, it was the first time since 2000 that an Uzbek president had done so.



Many of the obstacles to good Tajik-Uzbek relations that Mirziyoev inherited when he succeeded Karimov were removed and his meeting with Rahmon on that trip was characterized by a warmth and spirit of cooperation which had not been seen since the two countries became independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The cantankerous Karimov, who ruled over Uzbekistan during all the years of independence until his death in 2016, dictated terms to Tajikistan and felt that Uzbekistan's role in the 1992-1997 Tajik Civil War was decisive in keeping Rahmon in power there.



It became clear early on that Uzbekistan had many levers it could use to pressure Tajikistan, starting with access to the outside world.



Tajikistan is backed up into the southeastern corner of Central Asia, hemmed in on the east, and most of the north and south, by the Pamir Mountains.



The easiest way into or out of Tajikistan by land is through the west -- through Uzbekistan.

Tajikistan's civil war broke out in the spring of 1992. In order to keep Tajikistan's problems from spilling into Uzbekistan, in September of that year Karimov ordered the governors of the Uzbek provinces neighboring Tajikistan not to accept any war refugees.



Railway routes connecting the two countries were reduced and eventually almost cut entirely.



The Soviet-era roads connecting the two countries were shut at the border and only a trickle of cargo traffic was allowed to cross.



Some of these roads stayed closed and others that were open regularly had long lines of traffic waiting to cross until Mirziyoev became president.

The 'Karimov Wall'



Walls and fences constructed along parts of the Tajik-Uzbek border also remained standing until Mirziyoev took over.



Just weeks before Mirziyoev's March 2018 visit to Tajikistan, officials and citizens from both countries took part in a ceremony to demolish the so-called "Karimov Wall," which divided part of Tajikistan's Sughd region from Uzbekistan's Samarkand Province.



In early 2016, Uzbekistan completed the $1.9 billion Angren-Pap railway line, built specifically so that trains between eastern Uzbekistan and the Tashkent area would not have to pass through Tajik territory.

Karimov also objected to Tajikistan's plans to build the massive Roghun hydropower plant, and Uzbek authorities halted trains bringing cement and other construction materials to Tajikistan. By early 2010, rail cargo bound for Tajikistan had dropped by some 40 percent.



Then, in late 2011, there was a mysterious explosion at a bridge in Uzbekistan along the Ghalaba-Amuzang railway line that totally suspended shipments along that route.



In January 2013, then-Tajik Agriculture Minister Qasim Qasimov complained that Uzbekistan's closure of railway lines connecting to Tajikistan left his country without its primary means to export agricultural products.



The Ghalaba-Amuzang bridge was finally repaired just before Mirziyoev's March 2018 visit and has been operational since.



Other railway connections have also reopened, and one of the big agreements expected to be signed during Mirziyoev's current visit envisions construction of a new railway line connecting the Uzbek city of Samarkand to the Tajik city of Penjikent and farther east to Ayni.



New bus routes connecting the two countries are expected to open in addition to those that started operating not long after Mirziyoev assumed office.

Soviet-era gas pipelines also brought gas from Uzbekistan to Tajikistan.



But it was difficult for Tajikistan to make payments and Uzbekistan frequently cited this debt to reduce or cut off gas supplies, often when it appeared Tashkent wanted to show its displeasure with decisions made in Dushanbe.



By 2014, Tajikistan had given up depending on Uzbekistan and instead ramped up domestic coal production, greatly adding to the air pollution in the country.



Uzbek gas supplies have resumed since Mirziyoev took over in Uzbekistan. Tashkent's objections to Tajikistan's Roghun hydropower plant were dropped, and during Mirzioyev's March 2018 visit, the two sides agreed to cooperate in developing hydropower in Tajikistan.



When militants from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan appeared in the summer of 1999 and fought with Kyrgyz troops in the Batken area, it became clear they were operating from bases in Tajikistan's mountains.



When they returned in the summer of 2000 and succeeded in crossing into mountainous areas of eastern Uzbekistan, Tashkent responded by planting land mines along its borders with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.



In the years that followed these land mines claimed the lives of dozens of Tajik citizens -- mainly shepherds and children gathering firewood -- and maimed dozens of others.



In January 2018, when Uzbek Prime Minister Abdullo Aripov visited Tajikistan to prepare for Mirziyoev's visit, he said Uzbekistan would work with Tajikistan to clear the border area of the land mines.

Side-By-Side For Centuries



It was the latest act in a series that have made Tajik-Uzbek relations better than they have ever been since independence -- and the Tajik people equate these much warmer ties with the change in leadership in Uzbekistan.



Tajiks and Uzbeks are traditionally the sedentary peoples of Central Asia and have lived side-by-side for centuries as part of various emirates and khanates, spoken each other's language, and intermarried.

There are currently some 1.5 million ethnic Uzbeks living in Tajikistan and, although officially there are about the same number of ethnic Tajiks living in Uzbekistan, many Tajiks registered themselves as ethnic Uzbeks during Karimov's time in power and the actual number is probably 6 million or more.



They have experienced problems visiting their kin across the border for decades, but that situation has changed since Mirziyoev became Uzbek president.



According to the Uzbek president's Institute for Strategic and Regional Studies, prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus in early 2020 some 20,000 people crossed the Tajik-Uzbek border daily.



There is one more thing that Tajiks are citing that adds to the level of endearment for Mirziyoev.



He was born in what is now Uzbekistan but one of his grandfathers lived in the northwestern Tajik village of Yakhtan and his father is buried in the nearby Mastchoh district.

Salimjon Aioubov, the director of RFE/RL's Tajik Service, contributed to this report.


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NASA's Juno spacecraft has sent some close-up photos of Ganymede, one of Jupiter's four Galilean moons and the Solar System's largest natural satellite.

The images were taken from a distance of around 1,000 kilometers. Thus, the given image covers around 0.6 kilometers of the moon per pixel.

According to NASA, the breathtaking view shows swaths of frozen plains, pockmarks of enormous craters, and long surface streaks.

It's the first time in more than 20 years that a spacecraft has come this close to Ganymede.

"This is the closest any spacecraft has come to this mammoth moon in a generation," Juno Principal Investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio said in a statement released by NASA. "We are going to take our time before we draw any scientific conclusions, but until then we can simply marvel at this celestial wonder."

Science Times reported that the Juno spacecraft flew within 645 miles (1,038 kilometers) of Jupiter's massive satellite Ganymede, which is larger than Mercury.

Juno's was a one-time pass; its primary mission is to explore Jupiter. However, the European Space Agency is planning to launch a dedicated mission to Jupiter's moons soon.

The JUpiter ICy moons Explorer - or Juice for short - will sail by two additional Galilean moons, Callisto and Europa, before settling into a stable orbit around Ganymede in 2032.

Juno Reveals Ganymede's Shattered, Damaged Surface

The first image above reveals Ganymede's "damaged and shattered" surface in incredible detail. It showed virtually the whole side of the crater-pocked Ganymede, which is supposed to be home to a vast ocean of liquid water beneath its ice cover.

ALSO READ: Juno Captures Stunning Images of Superstorms, Preparing for More Flybys of Jupiter

The image was taken with JunoCam's green filter; photos taken with the camera's red and blue filters will be released later, resulting in a color portrait of Ganymede, Gizmodo said.

However, since Ganymede's ocean is likely sandwiched between two ice layers, it isn't as astrobiologically interesting as the buried oceans of Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Enceladus which are in contact with rocky interiors, Space.com reported, allowing for a variety of complex chemical reactions.

Stellar Reference Unit, a black-and-white camera used by Juno for navigation, provided the second image. The side of Ganymede opposite the Sun, which is dimly lighted by light reflecting from Jupiter, is shown in this photograph.

Astronomers will compare the photos taken by NASA's Galileo (1995-2003) and Voyager (1979) missions to discover if any changes have occurred over time.

"The conditions in which we collected the dark side image of Ganymede were ideal for a low-light camera like our Stellar Reference Unit," Heidi Becker, Juno's radiation-monitoring lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement.

"So this is a different part of the surface than seen by JunoCam in direct sunlight," Becker said. "It will be fun to see what the two teams can piece together."

One of the things that fascinate astronomers about Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa is that they all seem to contain oceans of water beneath their ice covers. However, NASA said Ganymede the only moon known to have a magnetic field, indicating what scientists believe to be a salty ocean underneath its surface.

Juno began its journey to Jupiter in August 2011 and arrived in July 2016. The solar-powered probe is gathering data on Jupiter's composition, inner structure, and magnetic and gravitational fields, which will aid scientists in better understanding how Jupiter and our solar system arose and evolved.

Juno occasionally shifts its acute gaze to other bodies in the Jovian system, such as Ganymede, which is 3,273 miles (5,268 kilometers) across. According to NASA scientists, observations taken during Monday's flyby could yield important details on the moon's composition, ice shell, and radiation environment, among other things.

RELATED ARTICLE: Why Did NASA Skip Their Missions to Jupiter, Neptune Moons?

Check out more news and information on Space on Science Times.
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Scientists have recently discovered an exoplanet positioned 90 light-years from Earth and it is believed to have contained water clouds.

Exoplanets, CNN reported, are planets located outside of the solar system. Such an exoplanet, identified as TOI-1231 b, completes an entire full orbit round its star every 24 Earth days.

The newly-discovered planet orbits an M-type or red dwarf star, identified as NLTT 24399, that is smaller and dimmer compared to stars like the Sun.

The detection of the planet was described in detail in a new study to be published in The Astronomical Journal.

ALSO READ: NASA's Roman Mission: Will Nancy Grace Roman Telescope Find 100,000 Exoplanets?

Reason for Containing Cloud Waters

According to study co-author Diana Dragomir, assistant professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Mexico, even though TOI -1231 b is eight times closer to its star, compared to Earth's to the Sun, its temperature is the same as that of Earth because of its cooler and less bright host star.

Still, the planet itself is larger compared to Earth, not to mention a little bit smaller compared to Neptune and could be called a sub-Neptune, Dragomir said.

Researchers were able to measure the radius and mass of the planet which helped them compute its density and infer its structure, ABC 7 reported.

As described in the study, TOI-1231 b is a low-density exoplanet, suggesting it is a gaseous planet instead of a rocky one like Earth. Researchers have yet to determine the structure and the atmosphere of the exoplanet.

Among the Coolest of the Small Exoplanets

According to Jennifer Burt, the lead study author and a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, TOI-1231 b is similar to the size and density of Neptune, leading scientists to speculate that it has the same large, gaseous atmosphere.

Dragomir explained that TOI-1231 b could comprise of a large hydrogen or hydrogen-helium atmosphere, or a thicker water vapor atmosphere.

Each of these types of atmosphere would enable astronomers to understand if and how planets form differently around M-type or red dwarf stars when compared to planets surrounding the Sun in the Solar System, according to STScI.

The study authors believe the newly-discovered exoplanet has an average temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit, making it one of the coolest of the tiny exoplanets, making it an ideal subject for the future research of its atmosphere.

"TOl-1231 b is one of the only other planets we know of in a similar size and temperature range, so future observations of this new planet will let us determine just how common (or rare) it is for water clouds to form around these temperate worlds," Burt said in a statement.

This makes TOl-1231 b an ideal observation candidate by the Hubble Space Telescope or the James Webb Space Telescope which will be launched into space in October. The Webb telescope is able to determine the composition of the atmospheres of exoplanets.

The Webb will have the capability of peering into the exoplanets' atmospheres and help identify their structure, And Hubble is slated to observe the exoplanet in the latter part of June.

Related information about TOI-1231 b is shown on Space Sci Network's YouTube video below:

RELATED ARTICLE: Life on Venus, Other Planets May Be Proven With New Insight on Molecules

Check out more news and information on Space on Science Times.
Still no evidence for COVID-19 leak from Wuhan lab: media

Xinhua) 18:03, June 11, 2021

Australian reporter Sharri Markson's "exclusive" report that Chinese military and public health officials had been working on weaponizing coronaviruses since 2015 was quickly debunked, including by some of the very "experts" she cited, according to an article published on the website of Australian Citizens Party.

SYDNEY, June 11 (Xinhua) -- Proponents of the theory that the virus which causes COVID-19 was created in and escaped from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology imply that new evidence has emerged to support it, but in fact none has, according to an article published on the website of Australian Citizens Party.

Media mouthpieces of the Anglo-American empire's "War Party" are doing their utmost to reinvigorate the theory that has been repeatedly hyped up in the West, joined by Sharri Markson, the Australian newspaper's alleged investigative reporter, whose aim is to fuel tensions with China instead of solving scientific problems, according to the article published on June 2.

Markson's "exclusive" report that Chinese military and public health officials had been working on weaponizing coronaviruses since 2015 was quickly debunked, including by some of the very "experts" she cited, as being based on a book that has been freely available online for years, said the article by Richard Bardon, researcher for the Australian Alert Service, the weekly publication of the Australian Citizens Party.

This COVID-19 origin debate must not be allowed to turn into a repeat performance against China, it said.

(Web editor: Guo Wenrui, Hongyu)
On July 31, 1846, the ship Brooklyn sailed through the Golden Gate carrying 230 passengers, almost all of them Mormons. One was a 12-year-old girl named Ann Frances Moses, who had sailed with her family.

As related in the previous Portals, a terrible scandal rocked the ship during the voyage: The Mormon Churchs shipboard leader, Sam Brannan, excommunicated a woman and three men, apparently because they had discussed some sort of polygamous arrangement. One of those excommunicated was Anns father, Ambrose Todd Moses.

The Moses family became outcasts. They were not allowed to pitch a tent with the other Mormons near the old Mexican plaza in the hamlet of Yerba Buena. Instead, the family headed 3 miles southwest, to the small Spanish-speaking hamlet in and around the decrepit Mission Dolores and its four dozen outbuildings, some of which had been turned into residences. There, according to Ship Brooklyns Saints, a 2009 book by Richard Bullock, Ambrose Moses constructed a lean-to against an old wall.

According to Bullock, the 100 or so Californio residents of Dolores, as the settlement was called, treated the newcomers kindly, telling them where to get water and firewood, helping them get settled and giving them all the beef they could eat. Almost all the Dolorenos were Hispanic; most belonged to a few extended families, including the Sanchezes, the Valencias, the de Haros and the Bernals. Heads of these leading families, now commemorated by the names of San Francisco streets and places, had been given land grants by the Mexican government, usually in return for military service.

The Valencia family was typical of these clans. It traced its roots in San Francisco back to 1776, when Jose Manuel Valencia came up from what is now Mexico with the Anza expedition. His wife, Maria Luz Munos, was the first Spaniard buried in San Francisco, in the Presidio cemetery. Valencia Street is named after the family.

Valencias grandson Candelario Valencia was born in 1804 and served as a sergeant in the Presidio from 1822 to 1840. In 1834 he was granted the 3,329-acre Rancho Acalanes, near present-day Lafayette. He sold it in 1839 and returned to a much smaller plot just east of Mission Dolores. Candelario lived there in an adobe, near the site of the present-day Notre Dame Convent, with his wife, Paula Sanchez, and their 13 children.

Paula Sanchez was a member of another notable Californio family. Her father was Jose Antonio Sanchez, who was granted the 14,639-acre Rancho Buri-Buri on the Peninsula in 1835. When Jose Antonio died in 1843, she and her siblings inherited the vast property.

The American conquest spelled doom for the Californios. As Leonard Pitt recounts in his classic study The Decline of the Californios, their trade-and-barter-based economy and their gracious, hospitable, quasi-feudal culture were swept away by the hard-charging Yankees. In the coming decades, they would lose most or all of their land. But in 1846, the Valencias, the Sanchezes and the other leading clans could still claim to be California aristocracy  the Spanish dons of gauzy legend. This is essential to understanding the marriage of Ann Frances Moses.

One of Candelarios four sons was Eustaquio Valencia, who was born in 1828 and whose occupation was listed in the city directory as farmer. According to Bullock, Eustaquio noticed Ann Moses when he went to talk to the priests at the mission and began courting her in the traditional Californio way, asking her fathers permission to marry her. Bullock writes that Anns parents agreed to the marriage because Eustaquio had much influence and wealth in the area. Their own diminished prestige may have played a role as well.

The couple were married, reportedly in Mission Dolores, on Oct. 29, 1850. He was 20, she was 16.

Theirs was an extraordinary, perhaps unique, marriage. Intercultural unions were common in California, but they were almost exclusively between Anglo men and Latin women. The most obvious reason for this was that there were few Anglo women in California, but cultural taboos involving gender, race and ethnicity also played a role.

The racial status of the Californios was, in fact, ambiguous. As Barbara L. Voss notes in The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco, they usually presented themselves as of pure-blooded Spanish descent, i.e., white, but they were generally of mixed race, usually mestizos (Indian and white).

The Anglo sea captains and merchants who married Californio women happily accepted that their brides were the daughters of Spanish dons. And for the Californio patriarchs, such marriages both confirmed their standing as high-status white Spaniards and connected their daughters with wealthy and ambitious foreigners who had better prospects than the young Californio men, whose putative status as rancheros did not translate into actual wealth or opportunity in increasingly gringo-dominated California.

More from the Archive The Vault Home of the San Francisco Chronicle's archive and more than 150 years of journalism covering the Bay Area and beyond.

Trivia time The previous question: In the 1950s, the Little Theatre at Playland-at-the-Beach displayed what famous scene? Answer: The Last Supper. This week's trivia question: What San Francisco auto dealership was singled out by civil rights protesters in 1963? Editor's note Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Gary Kamiya's Portals of the Past tells those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco's extraordinary history - from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond. His column appears every other Saturday. Dig deep into Chronicle Vault Like what you're reading? Subscribe to the Chronicle Vault newsletter and get classic archive stories in your inbox twice a week. Read hundreds of historical stories, see thousands of archive photos and sort through 153 years of classic Chronicle front pages at SFChronicle.com/vault. See More Collapse

A transactional logic made such unions acceptable to both sides. But that logic did not apply to white women marrying Californio men.

Young Californio men were thus placed in a vise: They were forced to accept older gringos marrying Californio women who otherwise might have been romantic prospects for them, but the few gringo women were off limits.

Not surprisingly, some young Californio men were embittered by this state of affairs. At least one claimed he turned to crime as a result. The Californio bandit Tiburcio Vasquez, who was born in 1835 in Monterey, told the Los Angeles Star shortly before he was executed in 1875, My career grew out of the circumstances by which I was surrounded as I grew to manhood. I was in the habit of attending balls and parties given by the native Californians, into which the Americans, then beginning to become numerous, would force themselves and shove the native-born men aside, monopolizing the dances and the women. ... A spirit of hatred and revenge took possession of me.

Thanks to a unique set of circumstances, Eustaquio Valencia became possibly the only Hispanic Californio of his era to marry an Anglo woman. The story of the Valencia-Moses marriage, their fate and that of their families, will be the subject of the next Portals.

Gary Kamiya is the author of the bestselling book Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco, awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. His new book, with drawings by Paul Madonna, is Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicles archives, go to sfchronicle.com/vault. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com
A new demonstration project expected to begin in the San Francisco Bay this summer aims to change how ferries and other vessels that ply the regions waterways operate.

The 75-passenger Sea Change is the first electric fuel-cell ferry built in the U.S. The company thats developing the vessel, SW/TCH Maritime, is working with Hornblower Cruises to test the Sea Change in real-life conditions on the Bay. Its expected to start running this summer.

Were getting really close to getting in the water, says Pace Ralli, chief executive and founder of SW/TCH Maritime.

Before the pandemic, ferry commuting was exploding in popularity  and expanding along new routes. While using a ferry as mass transit to cross the Bay is less carbon-intensive than driving solo across the Bay Bridge, ferries powered by diesel in the Bay Area emitted more than 88,000 short tons of CO2 and CO2-equivalent emissions in 2018, according to the California Air Resources Board. That's about the equivalent of 17,400 cars worth of yearly driving.

Fuel cell technology uses chemical reactions between hydrogen and oxygen inside the cell to produce electricity to power the ferry, emitting only water instead of CO2. Similar tech already powers buses and passenger cars.

A separate project by the bays largest ferry operator, Water Emergency Transportation Authority (WETA), plans to build a battery-electric ferry, but for the shorter trip between Mission Bay and S.F.s ferry terminal. That project is tied up in the larger Mission Bay ferry terminal project, WETA spokesman Andrew Hall says, and construction wont go forward until the terminal projects $12 million funding gap is closed.

Local news for a global problem More local climate change stories and solutions in the MicroClimates newsletter. SIGN UP

Zero emissions ferry vessels  and fuel cell technology  are of keen interest to the California Air Resources Board and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. The project that became the Sea Change received a $3 million grant as part of California Climate Investments  funding from the states cap and trade money  and later a loan guarantee, toward the construction of the ferry.

Theyre hoping fuel cells can expand beyond ferries. If we can demonstrate [zero-emissions] in a ferry, we can show it in other harbor craft, like tugboats, crew boats and barges, among others, Earl Landberg of the Air Resources Board Mobile Source Control Division says.

Landberg's colleague also notes the health benefits to ferry commuters. "In a passenger ferry, people are exposed almost directly to diesel emissions," Todd Sterling says. "With an electric ferry, you dont have to breathe that in."

The fuel cell technology is promising, but unproven in commercial applications  one of the reasons SW/TCH and the Air Resources Board are excited to get the Sea Change on the water.

Electric ferries have lower maintenance costs than traditional vessels, and the fuel cells can be used modularly in different sized vessels. But going farther distances means storing more fuel on board and storing it safely.

Hydrogen is the most energy dense zero-carbon fuel available to us, Elias Van Sickle, SW/TCH's director, says. But its still less dense [than fossil fuels], so we need to bring more on board. Its one of the things were managing in the design of the vessel.

Hydrogen transit fuels are also nowhere near as common as diesel, and more expensive, especially if produced with renewable energy to make the fuel truly zero emissions. But proving a commercial vessel powered by fuel cell can work means potentially creating a bigger market for hydrogen as a transit fuel, Landberg says, lowering the price as more companies get into producing hydrogen fuels.

Once the ferry gets on the water, Hornblower will run it for several months. Specific routes are still being pinned down, Ralli says, but will replicate normal trips within the region. The data from this test project will be analyzed by Sandia National Labs and eventually made public. If its successful, Hornblower will keep the ferry in its fleet and the model will be certified by the state as achieving the emissions reductions it's promising.

SW/TCH hopes that means it can build the next ferry and start adding more zero-emissions vessels to San Francisco Bay and other regions.

We absolutely have our sights on building two to 10 of these in the near term, we believe the market is there for it, Ralli says. [Ferry fleets] are in a desperate need of renewal and we dont want to build more diesel-running ones that will be in use for another 30 years. While they're starting smaller, the technology is "absolutely applicable" for larger ferry sizes of 150 to 300 passengers, he says.

Staff at the Air Resources Board agrees. Wed like to see this technology deployed worldwide, Landberg says.
As the number of COVID-19 cases fall in San Francisco, the city is looking a bit more like its pre-pandemic self  and so are its crime rates. A Chronicle analysis of San Francisco crime data shows that rates of four major types of crime that changed drastically during the pandemic are getting closer to their pre-pandemic levels.

We used data from the San Francisco Police Department to compare monthly crime rates during the pandemic with those in 2019, the last full pre-pandemic year. We looked at two types of violent crime, aggravated assaults and robberies, and three types of property crime: burglaries, motor vehicle thefts and larceny thefts. We didnt look at homicides and rapes because they dont happen often enough to meaningfully compare month to month.

With the exception of motor vehicle thefts, which remain close to their average levels during the pandemic, the crimes we looked at have all inched closer to their 2019 levels. All of the crime types, including motor vehicle thefts, have moved away from their pandemic-era highs and lows in recent months.

The crimes that we had seen decreases in during the pandemic, were seeing some increases in them, and in the crimes that we saw increases in during the pandemic, were seeing some decreases, Magnus Lofstrom, a policy director and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, told The Chronicle.

Unlike most other major U.S. cities, which saw drop-offs in most property crimes, surges in violent crimes overall and soaring homicide rates in particular, San Francisco saw violent crimes go down overall; while homicides increased compared with 2019, it was a relatively small rise. And while burglaries decreased in most major cities, they spiked in S.F.

As of May 2021, rates of burglaries  the crime that saw the greatest pandemic jump of the five we studied  were 32% above their rates in May 2019. That may sound high, but its a smaller increase than any other month after March 2020; since that month, burglaries have been up by 62% on average. Lofstrom said its possible that burglaries in San Francisco soared at the height of the pandemic because many San Franciscans left their homes temporarily, and vacant homes are more likely to get burgled. Now that workers are returning to their offices in the city, theyre also coming back to live in the city, leaving relatively fewer opportunities for would-be burglars.

Larceny thefts, meanwhile, were 18% below their May 2019 rates as of May 2021. This crime has been down by 42% on average since the pandemic began, so this means larceny theft rates are creeping upward.

The violent crimes we analyzed, robbery and assault, declined for the first six months or so of the pandemic, until COVID-19 cases began surging nationwide in late October. Both robberies and assaults spiked through late February, though robberies remained below 2019 levels for every month except February 2021, when they reached 11% above where they were pre-pandemic.

As of May 2021, both types of violent crime are hovering slightly below pre-pandemic levels, but above their pandemic-era lows.

That these two crimes are up compared with their lowest rates during the pandemic makes sense, Lofstrom said. The interaction among other people is a fundamental part of those crimes, he said. When were limiting those interactions, its not surprising that we would see fewer aggravated assaults, that were going to see fewer robberies, that were going to see fewer larceny (thefts).

Lofstrom cautioned that its still too early to make predictions about what will happen in the coming months to years with crime rates in the city, namely because so many factors influence crime, from population density to economic inequality.

We dont know, for example, how commuting and working in the city ... will look, say, in a year or two years, he said.

Still, he said its likely that as San Francisco  and the rest of California  continues to recover from the pandemic, crime rates will start to resemble their pre-pandemic selves again.

I think broadly we can say (that) as we are slowly returning to life that resembles more of the pre-pandemic life, that crime rates are more likely to return to levels that we saw prior to the pandemic, Lofstrom said.

Charis Kubrin, a criminologist at UC Irvine, said monthly data on crime rates needs to be treated with caution because so many factors can cause short-term boosts or declines in different types of crime, particularly in individual cities.

But she noted that statewide, rates of most types of crime in California have declined precipitously over the past several decades, despite the state reducing its prison population significantly over the past decade. San Francisco is no exception to this trend: Both robberies and aggravated assaults are down more than 50% since the early 1990s.

As it turns out, California is doing pretty darn well overall, Kubrin said. We are still at near historic lows despite pandemic-era fluctuations.

Looking forward, however, Kubrin expressed concern about various long-term factors related to the pandemic.

The pandemic has put a lot of economic pressure on folks, (and weve seen) rises in purchases of firearms, she said. There are a number of problems on the horizon that make me concerned California can sustain these low crime rates.

Susie Neilson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: susie.neilson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @susieneilson
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From Mount Whitney to Lake Tahoe, 400 miles of High Sierra wilderness is rapidly defrosting, uncovering dozens of trailheads for backpackers with access to hundreds of lakes and camps, crowned by peaks that poke holes in the sky.

The winters low snowpack, while a deeply troubling sign of the states drought, is a windfall for high-country visitors as snow melts off wilderness trails nearly a month early compared to many years. Above 10,000 feet, snowfields still cover some shaded areas, ice is clearing from the highest lakes, and wildflowers, mostly lupine and monkey flowers, are starting to bloom.

Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park opened this month, along with trailheads for Kings Canyon-Sequoia National Park, and Mount Whitney, Desolation, Granite Chief, Emigrant Basin, Mokelumne and other wilderness areas on both flanks of the Sierra Crest. The Devils Postpile-Reds Meadow area of the Eastern Sierra, and its trailheads to the Ansel Adams Wilderness and the Minarets, will open next Friday.

While demand for lottery permits to hike the popular John Muir Trail is sky-high, there are plenty of ways to access this beautiful area.

Instead of launching from Yosemite, Whitney Portal or Kings Canyon, enter the High Sierra from a national forest trailhead, where wilderness permits are often free and easier to snag at a district office. You then hike up to the JMT or Pacific Crest Trail, often with access to lakes on the flank of the Sierra.

Here are five great hikes.

Cherry Lake Trailhead to Laurel Lake: Northern Yosemite Wilderness. Deep in Stanislaus National Forest, you drive to Cherry Lake then cross the dam and head to a trailhead on your right. The trail leads east over a short ridge to Lake Eleanor, where you then continue along the far side of the lake.

You then break away from the lake and start a steady climb through forest, 8.2 miles from Eleanor, past Miguel Meadow and up to Laurel Lake (at 6,200 feet elevation), a pretty lake with good swimming.

The next day you climb up the foot of Moraine Ridge to reach Vernon Lake (6,500 feet). This lake is a jewel. From here, you can continue to the PCT at Wilma Lake (8,000 feet; mosquitoes often an issue), and branch off toward drop-dead beautiful Benson Lake.

Reserve wilderness permit 24 hours ahead of time (pick up at Groveland District, on drive to Cherry Lake); Stanislaus National Forest, Groveland Ranger District, 209-962-7825, www.fs.usda.gov/stanislaus.

Meeks Creek Trailhead to Rubicon Lakes: Desolation Wilderness, Lake Tahoe. The Meeks Creek Trailhead is located along Highway 89 near the western shore of Lake Tahoe, near Meeks Bay, marked by a billboard and parking area. The hike starts out flat on a dirt road through a valley for 1.4 miles, then passes the wilderness sign marker and starts the climb along Meeks Creek.

Courtesy Tony Rowell

This is one of the best spots to hear the mating calls of grouse, which sound kind of like Bigfoot hitting a hollow log with a stick.

Youll pass a series of gem-like lakes: 4.5 miles one-way to Lake Genevieve (7,300 feet), Shadow and Stony Ridge Lakes, and then hidden gem of Tahoe, Rubicon Lake (8,320 feet), 7.5 miles one-way. Ambitious hikers can continue on to connect with the Tahoe Rim Trail.

For Desolation wilderness permits by trailhead (scroll to Genevieve or Rubicon), go to www.recreation.gov; Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit, 530-543-2600, www.fs.usda.gov/ltbmu.

Horseshoe Meadow Trailhead to Big Whitney Meadow: Golden Trout Wilderness. Horseshoe Meadow is located on the southern flank of Whitney and, at 10,000 feet, it is the third-highest trailhead you can drive to in California.

With most of the climb behind you, it is a 1,100-foot climb over 4 miles to Cottonwood Pass and the Pacific Crest Trail (11,100 feet). Here you turn right, with the choice to venture to Chicken Ranch Lake (featuring large golden trout) or ahead to a junction on your left to Big Whitney Meadow. The latter is an easy descent to a pristine, alpine meadow (9,700 feet) that is cut by pretzel-like stringers  small, clear creeks that eventually form the headwaters of the Kern River.

To the north, you can then hike into one of the most remote landscapes in California, the Siberian Outpost at the brink of Kern Canyon.

Reserve trailhead permit for Cottonwood Pass Trail at www.recreation.gov; Eastern Sierra Visitor Center, Lone Pine, 760-876-6200, or Inyo National Forest, www.fs.usda.gov/inyo.

Agnew Meadows to Thousand Island Lakes: Minarets, Mammoth Lakes. Reds Meadows Road from Mammoth Lakes to the campgrounds and trailheads near Devils Postpile National Monument will open June 18.

Agnew Meadows is a U.S. Forest Service campground  first-come, first-served  nestled at 8,400 feet near the headwaters of the San Joaquin River near the Devils Postpile. Plan to drive in before 7a.m. to beat the required shuttle bus.

You hike a short spur to connect with the JMT and turn north. Youll pass Shadow Lake, one of the prettiest lakes on Earth, Garnet Lake, Ruby Lake, and Emerald Lake, en route 7 miles to Thousand Island Lake. The setting is jaw-droppingly beautiful, backed by Banner Peak (12,942 feet) and nearby Mount Ritter (13,149 feet). From here, a route breaks off the JMT and leads to little Catherine Lake at the foot of Banner Peak.

Mammoth Lakes Welcome Center, 760-924-5500, www.fs.usda.gov/inyo. Permits available atwww.recreation.gov, then pick up at Welcome Center.

South Lake Trailhead to Bishop Pass: Dusy Basin Lakes, Lone Pine. The trailhead is near South Lake (9,768 feet), west of Bishop. This is where you launch toward Bishop Pass (11,972 feet), 5.5 miles one-way, with a series of spectacular options.

For anglers, you can turn left on an old mule trail that climbs steeply to Ruwau Lake, with some of the biggest wilderness trout in the high Sierra. Most continue ahead toward Bishop Pass, with cut-off trails to a series of lakes at the foot of Mount Thompson and Mount Goode.

If you cross over Bishop Pass, you then enter Kings Canyon National Park with access just ahead to gorgeous Dusy Basin. A series of small lakes set in alpine granite are available. Them are a dozen or so lakes to explore, camp and call your own for a night or two.

Permits available at www.recreation.gov, then pick up at White Mountain Visitor Center, 760-873-2500, www.fs.usda.gov/inyo; Wilderness permit information at 760-873-2483.

Tom Stienstra is The San Francisco Chronicles outdoor writer emeritus. Email: tomstienstra2021@gmail.com Twitter: @StienstraTom
An Oakland financial planning company that charges $2,000 for its services had some surprising advice this week: Stop buying Boichik Bagels.

If you are buying Boichik Bagels, you deserve to be poor, reads the subject line of a newsletter sent out by Lula Financial on Thursday, referring to the wildly popular Berkeley bagel shop that was recently lauded by The New York Times as being better than New Yorks bagels.

The sons of bit*hes charge $3 per bagel, the email reads. Effective immediately, I am prohibiting all clients from visiting Boichik Bagels more than once per year.

Emily Winston, who owns the shop, was shocked, upset and finally amused by the email, which a customer forwarded to her. Instead of getting angry about the attack on her bagels, she decided to post a screenshot of the email on Boichiks Instagram. Its now picking up steam online.

I thought it was just really kind of bananas, she said of the email, which she provided to The Chronicle. Its the same old trope: Stop buying $3 lattes and youll have savings. Its kinda saying the bagel is the new latte.

Lula Financial founder Benjamin Packard, who wrote the email, said it was intended as a joke and he never meant to offend a fellow small business owner.

I use humour to make financial planning more accessible to my clients, he wrote in an email to The Chronicle. I work primarily with young families saving up to buy their first home. Frugality is one of the core pillars I use to get them to the nearly impossible goal of buying a house in this crazy market. This was just a friendly (and funny) reminder to be conscientious about their spending.

As a Jewish kid from the East Bay, he added, he actually finds Boichiks bagels to be delicious.

The Lula Financial website is indeed full of cheeky language, like the final step in a five-step plan for getting ones finances in order: If you don't follow the plan, you'll die poor and alone. Packard writes in his online bio that he started buying stocks at age 9 and is a terrible cook. Lula bills itself as financial planning for people who hate financial planning, and Packard also recently wrote a blog post comparing cryptocurrency to a hot new girl.

But for Winston, the emails profanity and targeting a small business felt inappropriately over the top  especially coming from a company that charges $2,000 for financial planning and $100 per month for ongoing advising, according to Lula Financials website.

Joke or not, the comment section of Winstons Instagram post, which drew well over 100 comments in less than two hours, quickly became a roast of Lula Financial.

For some, it echoed avocado toast-gate. Several years ago, a real estate mogul in Melbourne suggested that Millennials would be able to become homebuyers if they just quit their pricey avocado toast habit. The New York Times fact-checked this assertion, finding that even if young adults spent less on dining out, it would take around 113 years for them to afford a down payment on a home.

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This screams youd be able to buy a house if you stopped buying avocado toast energy, one person commented on Boichiks Instagram.

This guy has some bagel trauma to resolve, another quipped.

I just signed up for Boichik Bagels financial advisory and my bank account has never been more full of dough! I dont even nova what to do with all this cream (cheese), joked the owners of Square Pie Guys. Share this post with 140,000 friends for 50 years of good luck in the stock market.

Winston said she had never heard of Lula Financial or Packard before seeing his email.

If he thinks the world should just be eating Costco bagels, thats not the world I want to live in, Winston said. I want to eat good bagels.

Elena Kadvany is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: elena.kadvany@sfchronicle.com
Fifteen more Californians were chosen Friday to receive $50,000 cash prizes in the states coronavirus vaccine lottery program created to boost inoculation rates.

Gov. Gavin Newsom hosted a second giveaway show from San Diego, with a video patch to California Lottery headquarters in Sacramento where the winners were selected by two state legislators and the lion-costumed Sacramento Kings mascot.

The winners, chosen from nearly 22 million Californians who have received at least one vaccine dose, came from San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda and Santa Clara counties  two were from Santa Clara County  along with Monterey, Sacramento, San Diego, Orange, Riverside, Kern and Fresno counties, plus three from Los Angeles County.

Fifteen people were selected in the first giveaway last Friday. Newsom invited one of them, Nancy Gutierrez, a 17-year-old high school junior from Vista (San Diego County), to join him to talk about her decision to get vaccinated.

What would you tell folks who are a little hesitant ... that still may be reticent to get a shot? Newsom said.

Most of us want life to go back to normal, and getting the vaccine would definitely help that, Gutierrez said.

The next lottery drawing will be held Tuesday, when California lifts most of its pandemic restrictions. Raising the ante, this one will give $1.5 million apiece to 10 Californians who have been at least partially vaccinated.

Californias Vax for the Win program was created to encourage more people to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Newsom said Friday that the effort was showing success, although a Chronicle analysis showed the early returns were lackluster.

All told, the state will spend $116.5 million on the COVID-19 vaccine lottery and $50 retail and grocery store gift cards for everyone who gets a first shot.

The winners names arent being announced because of federal medical privacy laws and a California law concerning disclosure of immunization records. The state Department of Public Health will contact the winners, who can go public if they wish.

The health department said it will try to contact winners via phone, text and email for up to 96 hours after the drawing, after which time they may no longer be offered a prize and another person may be selected for the prize from the pool of eligible persons.

Two winners from last weeks drawing didnt respond. State officials reached one backup winner and are trying to notify a second.

Health workers have administered nearly 40 million COVID-19 vaccinations in California, and more than 70% of state residents age 18 and older have received at least one dose, state officials said.

Julie Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: julie.johnson@sfchronicle.com. On Twitter @juliejohnson
A day after Supervisor Aaron Peskin announced he had entered alcohol treatment, there were more questions than answers about whether or how the powerful supervisor would perform his day-to-day City Hall duties while also seeking care.

Peskin told The Chronicle in an email Thursday that he is in treatment and will continue to be in treatment for as long as it takes to get better. But he did not answer follow-up questions on details  such as if he had entered an inpatient or outpatient program.

Peskins announcement that hes entering treatment and his apology for his public conduct came a day after The Chronicle asked him to respond to complaints about his behavior, including allegations he was under the influence during a recent board meeting. The Chronicle spoke to more than two dozen people, including elected officials and City Hall staff over the past few months, who raised concerns about his alleged bullying and drinking.

The type of treatment Peskin receives likely will have implications for how the supervisor performs his day-to-day duties. Peskin did not respond Thursday when asked whether he would continue attending Board of Supervisors and committee meetings.

I will defer to the guidance of my healthcare provider on the work/life/treatment balance, Peskin said in an email.

Peskin and his legislative aide, Sunny Angulo, did not respond to a request for comment Friday morning.

When asked by a reporter if Peskin would be at the next Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday, board President Shamann Walton only responded via text: Have a great weekend.

Walton  who, as president of the board has the power to remove any member for disorderly conduct  declined to comment further.

On Friday, many questions still remained about what Peskins decision to seek alcohol treatment means for his job as a supervisor, and regular City Hall business. June is an incredibly busy time for the Board of Supervisors, as the city emerges from the pandemic and also enters negotiations for the citys $13.1 billion budget.

Peskins first public meetings after his announcement would have been two committees on Monday, but both have been canceled. The clerk of the Board of Supervisors said they were canceled to accommodate the budget process, which includes multiple special meetings.

His next scheduled public appearance is at Tuesdays regular Board of Supervisors meeting. For weeks, the board had planned to meet in person at City Hall on June 15 for the first time since the pandemic began, but on Friday the meeting was abruptly shifted to Zoom.

The board clerk said Friday that the board will be remote until the health officer lifts the citys mask mandates.

David McCuan, a political science professor at Sonoma State University, said if Peskin steps back from his day-to-day role it could leave a big void on the board. As the longest-serving member, Peskin is a powerful policy wonk with intricate knowledge of the citys legislative process and arcane laws.

But, McCuan said, to repair relationships both on the board and in the city, he must dramatically change his behavior.

Supervisor Peskin has had a long reputation as being difficult, he said. The new politics are about treating people better, about changing past arrangements. Its no longer business as usual. And he is someone who has had difficulty making that adjustment.

Peskin is not the first San Francisco elected official to seek treatment while in office. When then-Mayor Gavin Newsom admitted he had a drinking problem in 2007, he announced he was seeking alcohol treatment. Newsom did not enter a rehab program or stop work, but had private and group meetings with Mimi Silbert, head of the non-profit Delancey Street Foundation, as needed.

At the time, Peskin, who was President of the Board of Supervisors and a strong Newsom critic, told the San Francisco Examiner that Newsoms admission explained the lack of leadership those of us who work at City Hall have witnessed.

The question is, is this enough of a wake-up call for him to turn around and engage and lead? Peskin said. Also, will rehab get in the way of his duties? Only time will tell.

Peskin said Thursday he had never been in any form of therapy or alcohol treatment before. If he did take time off work for treatment, it would qualify as a medical leave, according to the Department of Human Resources.

Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University professor of psychiatry who specializes in addiction medicine public policy, said that 90% of treatment is outpatient, during which people can usually stay at home and work. For alcohol, that treatment could range from different kinds of prescribed medication to professional counseling to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, which he said can also be effective and therapeutic.

Humphreys said usually someone is only referred to inpatient treatment if theyre at risk medically, in a dangerous environment, or homeless and their life is totally disorganized. Patients in inpatient care usually dont work, he said.

Ive known a number of public officials with problems in mental health and addiction and its easy to forget that they are actually people, they do have rights, and we dont want to harm them, Humphreys said. It is at the same time entirely legitimate for all of us to ask anybody whos in a position of public trust: Is someones job performance impaired because of addiction? Because that can cause harm to others.

More than two dozen people interviewed by The Chronicle said Peskin often bullied colleagues and lower-level city staff, used profane language in private conversations and accused a department head of corruption in a public meeting without direct evidence the person knew about the scandal.

Many said he has appeared to be visibly intoxicated in public and private phone meetings, with some alleging they smelled alcohol on him during in-person meetings before the pandemic and noticed that he spoke in a slow, slurred fashion.

Early Thursday evening, the San Francisco Municipal Executives Association, the union that represents more than 1,300 city managers, sent two Department of Human Resources leaders an email expressing concern about an increasing number of complaints, many of them without merit, against managers over the past several years and bullying by public officials, including during Tuesdays Board of Supervisors meeting.

The email mentioned Peskin and an employee interest group by name. Union heads said the email and request for a meeting with the department wasnt directly prompted by this weeks events.

Two days earlier, Peskin aggressively berated a department head in a public meeting.

On Wednesday, Peskin did not directly confirm or deny when asked whether he had been drinking before or during Tuesdays meeting. He said he drank  including excessively a time or two but not too often  and that elected officials have been known to have a drink. He said alcohol did not affect his behavior or actions.

On Thursday, he asked The Chronicle not to publish his comments from the previous day  specifically his remark about all politicians drinking on the job  while admitting hed made them on the record. He called his Wednesday remarks flippant, irresponsible and incorrect.

Mallory Moench, Trisha Thadani and Heather Knight are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: mallory.moench@sfchronicle.com tthadani@sfchronicle.com hknight@sfchronicle.com
All fireworks are illegal and punishable by fine in most of San Mateo County which makes Supervisor Warren Slocum wonder why Independence Day sounds at times like a war zone, he said.

It starts in the evening and is just constant and has gotten worse.

The $100 fine that has been on the books for decades was an deemed insufficient deterrent. So last month, the countys Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance increasing the fine tenfold  to $1,000 per incident  with a separate $1,000 fine applicable to any party host where fireworks are lit, either legal or illegal.

The fines apply to any area of the county that is unincorporated and not covered by municipal regulation. The county has 19,000 residents in unincorporated pockets including North Fair Oaks, a dense area that borders Redwood City, Menlo Park and Atherton and sparkles and pops on the night of July 4, Slocum says.

A lot constituents have complained about the fireworks and the noise and the fire danger, Slocum said. The drought contributes to it, but the bigger concern is the fire season.

If conditions are dry in San Mateo County, they are worse in Contra Costa County with its hot inland valleys and vast grasslands. On June 8, that countys Board of Supervisors strengthened its existing ordinance to call for a fine of $100 for the use of fireworks.

Since fireworks are prone to start up as soon as the July 4 weekend begins, the fine doubles to $200 for a second citation and $500 for every citation thereafter. Like San Mateo County, the ordinance only covers unincorporated areas, including Bay Point, Discovery Bay and Crockett, more than 100,000 residents in all.

The sale of fireworks has banned in Contra Costa County for many years. The updated ordinance holds property owners more accountable, and adds in Airbnb rentals. Already the county ordinance has triggered the cities to look at their own fireworks ordinances, said Diane Burgis, who chairs both the Board of Supervisors and the Contra Costa Fire Protection District.

Burgiss own city of Oakley has added a $1,000 fine for fireworks and Brentwood is in talks to strengthen its ordinance so that we can stand shoulder to shoulder to face this drought year and fire season, Burgis said.

In neighboring Alameda County, only the cities of Newark, Union City, and Dublin allow for the sale and use of safe and sane fireworks which are generally described as any device that files through the air. Most safe and sane fireworks are manufactured by either Phantom Fireworks, headquartered in Youngstown, Ohio and TNT Firework in Florence, Ala.

San Francisco and Marin counties dont allow either brand. So if you live in either the city or Marin and want to feel the warm nostalgia of a roadside stand staffed by Rotarians you have to hit San Bruno or Pacifica which both allow both the sale and ignition of safe and sane fireworks on private property and designated public areas.

The stands open at noon on Monday, June 28 and it is quite a scene along El Camino Real in San Bruno and Highway 1 in Pacifica, where 15 stands open at once. All 15 stands are staffed by volunteers, each representing a separate non profit and they pull in a combined $200,000 to $250,000 a year, according to mayor Sue Beckmeyer.

Beckmeyer said she did not know where the fireworks ended up after they are purchased: We dont card people, Beckmeyer said. You dont have to prove that you live in Pacifica to buy them.

Ron Meyer, fire chief for the North County Fire Authority, which covers Pacifica, Daly City and Brisbane, said reports of fire involving safe and sane fireworks are negligible on July 4 and there is no measurable uptick in fire calls from Pacifica, which allows them, than from Daly City which doesnt.

It is illegal fireworks that are our problem, he said. It keeps growing and until they can stop illegal fireworks from getting into the state we will have problems.

For both Daly City and Pacifica, the greatest protection on July 4 is the dreaded incoming marine layer.

We have times on the coast when the windshield wiper is going, he said. When San Francisco tries to do a fireworks display and there is so much fog you cant see it, that makes it less likely that there will be a (fire) call anywhere.

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com. Twitter:@samwhitingsf
As the only stand-alone public law school in the country, UC Hastings puts the jobs of dean and chancellor on one person. The average survival rate is about three years, and four of them came and went in the span of a decade.

Then came Mary Kay Kane.

She outlasted the other four combined, and when she finally retired, in 2007, the universitys main administration building was renamed Mary Kay Kane Hall, to honor the first woman to serve as permanent dean after 115 years of men.

Even then, Kane kept working in the building bearing her name, passing by her own portrait in the lobby to get to her office and pursue her scholarship in civil procedure and mentoring faculty and deans nationwide.

Her only allowance to her emeritus status was her 9 a.m. start time, later than her usual 7 a.m. And she didnt always come in on weekends, said Margreth Barrett, Hastings professor emeritus and Kanes close friend for 35 years.

When the pandemic hit and the law school was closed, Kane bought office furniture for her condo in Emeryville so her work would continue uninterrupted. It did until April, when Kane was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, Barrett said. She died June 3, in hospice care at home. She was 74.

If it werent for the pandemic, she would have kept coming in every day, said David Seward, chief financial officer at UC Hastings who confirmed her death. The Hastings community was literally her family.

Barrett described Kane as the heart and soul of that family, but not a parental figure who was cuddly and chummy with students. She was earnest and straightforward and always polite, Barrett said. She wasnt trying to impress anybody.

As a legal scholar, Kane revised and updated the six-volume Federal Practice and Procedure, the leading treatise in her field. As dean, from 1993 to 2006, she managed the entire educational enterprise of 50 full-time faculty and 1,200 students.

As chancellor, she represented Hastings before the Legislature and oversaw the maintenance and upkeep of the campus. She also oversaw the safety of staff and students in the Tenderloin, where both the school and its student housing tower are located.

The Hastings dean has to be concerned with safety and security, and litigation, Seward said. You have to deal with fundraising, donors, faculty, students. It is a much bigger job than youd find in a university setting.

Midway through Kanes tenure, the university added chancellor to her title to acknowledge two jobs she was already doing. She oversaw upgrades to all three campus buildings, centered around McAllister and Hyde streets, and financing for the first campus parking garage. A five-year term led to a second, almost unprecedented, five-year term plus a three-year extension.

The Hastings Board of Directors surprised Kane by naming the university building after her  a tribute that could have easily been sold to a donor. The board really loved her and wanted to show it, Barrett said. She was just so good at juggling 18 balls at once.

Mary Kay Kane was born Nov. 14, 1946, in Detroit, where she grew up attending parochial schools. Her father was an attorney with a general practice. But following her father was Mary Kays second choice of career. Her first was to be a concert pianist. She was accepted to the conservatory at the Juilliard School in New York, but her parents talked her out of it, Barrett said.

Instead she attended the University of Michigan and proceeded directly to the law school there. If she won awards there she wouldnt have talked about it, Barrett said. She was kind of a modest person.

Kane never entered private practice. She got a teaching position at the State University of New York law school in Buffalo, where she met and later married Ronan Degnan, who was a visiting professor of law. When he returned to his full-time faculty position at UC Berkeleys Boalt Hall, they moved west. She was hired as a full professor with tenure at Hastings in 1976.

All first-year students are required to take civil procedure, and George Frost will never forget his first day, in 1992, with Professor Kane. From his front-row seat, he hazarded a quip, which compelled Kane to single him out for a grilling on a complex case study.

She was the foremost scholar in civil procedure in the country, said Frost, a Berkeley startup attorney. I shall probably never recover from her gentle mockery. As with all first-year students who survived, Frost came to respect her intellect and would go by her office, even as she was promoted up the ladder, from associate academic dean to academic dean to dean and chancellor.

She was kind of the first at everything among women at Hastings, said Barrett, who began at Hastings in 1984, when there were still only six women on the full-time faculty of about 50. Mary Kay was a serious academic above all else, but she was always kind.

Kane never tried a case, though she often served as an expert witness, most prominently in the class-action suit against the swindling investor Bernard Madoff. She had stories, but you had to pull them out of her.

She was never interested in publicity, thats for sure, Barrett said.

Degman died in 1987 at age 63, and Kane lived alone thereafter.

She held season tickets to the San Francisco Opera and also attended the Symphony. She never returned to the piano, once explaining to Barrett that her hands were too small to be a concert pianist anyway.

Kane specified that no funeral be held, but she reluctantly consented to a memorial service, which will be held at 4 p.m. Sept. 9. It is tentatively set for Mary Kay Kane Hall, UC Hastings.

Her portrait will serve as door greeter, as it long has.

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @samwhitingsf
San Francisco and Seattles mayors both say that their cities are leading the nation in vaccinations. But who is really winning the race? It depends on the metric.

Seattle beat out San Francisco to become the first major city to fully vaccinate 70% of residents over 12, mayor Jenny Durkan announced in a news conference on Wednesday. San Francisco was just behind at 69% as of Wednesday, according to the citys vaccine tracker.
PHOENIX (AP)  The Arizona Legislature made a brief appearance Thursday and conducted virtually no business weeks into a budget stalemate that shows no sign of abating soon.

The Senate returned after a two-week hiatus but held only a pro-forma session before adjourning until Monday. The House did the same after a morning session on Monday ended with one Republican joining all Democrats in rejecting two key bills that are part of the budget package.

Senate Majority Leader Rick Gray said it should not be surprising that a closely divided Legislature swimming in a budget surplus can't reach consensus.

This is a historic year  I dont when the last year was where we had a bare minimum in both chambers for a majority party, and then what were looking at for a tax cut is obviously historic, Gray said Wednesday afternoon. So it shouldnt be surprising that we have a certain amount of grappling on this years budget.

Republicans who hold just one-vote majorities in each chamber can't agree on a $1.9 billion income tax cut their leaders negotiated with GOP Gov. Doug Ducey as part of the $12.8 billion spending plan. Holdout Republicans in each chamber say they can't support that large a permanent tax cut and want to pay down more state debt and better fund universities, community colleges and other priorities.

Democrats are solidly opposed to the tax cut proposal at it stands.

Ducey told KTAR radio on Tuesday that he's willing to talk with Democrats about a path forward. On Thursday, House and Senate Democratic leaders said that has not yet happened.

No voice messages, House Minority Leader Reginald Bolding said in a text message. No missed call pertaining to the budget. Weve reached out to no engagement up until this point.

Senate Assistant Minority Leader Lupe Contreras said that so far Democrats had not been asked to negotiate.

Standing in the way of the Republican-negotiated budget are GOP Sen. Paul Boyer and Republican Rep. David Cook, who both oppose the size and permanence of the tax cuts. Cook voted with all House Democrats Monday to block the tax cuts.

House Speaker Rusty Bowers and Senate President Karen Fann now must choose how to revise the budget proposal to win support from those Republicans or make even more changes to win support from some Democrats. Any changes to the tax cut plan will likely lose some Republican support, so the negotiations are a tightrope walk.

Time is short, since a budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1 must be enacted by then.

The massive tax cut package, which proponents called the largest in state history, would cut more than 25% of state income tax revenue after being fully phased in over the next two years.

The biggest winners would be the wealthy, who would be mainly shielded from a 3.5% tax surcharge on high-earning Arizonans that was approved by voters in November. They would also get the biggest benefits from a flat-tax proposal that lowers rates to 2.5%. The current top tax rate is 4.5% for high-earning Arizonans, plus the new surcharge. Couples earning over $500,000 a year would pay a maximum of 4.5% under the proposal instead of 8% foreseen under Proposition 208.
CHICAGO (AP)  A Chicago police officer charged with breaching the U.S. Capitol and entering a senator's office during the Jan. 6 insurrection texted photos of himself inside the building while wearing a police department sweatshirt after telling someone he was going to Washington to save the nation.

Karol Chwiesiuk, 29, was arrested Friday and faces five misdemeanor counts, including entering a restricted building, disrupting government business and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds with the intent to impede a congressional proceeding.

Prosecutors allege in a criminal complaint that Chwiesiuk was among a mob of people who broke into and damaged the office of Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat. They also say that days before he traveled to Washington to attend a rally supporting then-President Donald Trump, Chwiesiuk said in a text to a friend that he was going "to save the nation and was Busy planning how to (expletive) up commies." He later sent photos of himself inside the Capitol, according to prosecutors.

Chwiesiuk was on medical leave from the Chicago Police Department when he traveled to Washington for the attack, the complaint states. Along with text messages, he also sent photos of himself inside and outside the Capitol. In them, Chwiesiuk is grinning and wearing a sweatshirt with a Chicago Police Department emblem underneath an unzipped coat.

We inside the capital lmfao, he texted, using an abbreviation indicating he thought it was funny, according to the complaint.

Chwiesiuk appeared via telephone in federal court in Chicago on Friday. His attorney, Tim Grace, said Chwiesiuk has been a Chicago police officer since 2018 and that he previously served as a Cook County sheriff's deputy. He was stripped of his police powers this week and is on desk duty, Grace said.

Police Superintendent David Brown said during a news availability Friday that Chwiesiuk had his police powers stripped on June 2 after the department learned of his participation in the attack.

Brown said that if the allegations are true, it is a betrayal of everything we stand for."

What happened in D.C. on Jan. 6 was an absolute disgrace, he said. The fact that a Chicago police officer has been charged in that attack on American democracy makes my blood boil.

We have a zero tolerance for hate and extremism of any kind within the Chicago Police Department, Brown said. And if you harbor such ignorance in your heart, you should take off your star now and find another line of work, or Ill do it for you.

Five people, including a Capitol police officer, died in the attack and hundreds of people were injured. Two other officers killed themselves afterward. More than 450 people from throughout the country have been criminally charged.

Chwiesiuk was arrested Friday morning at his parents' Chicago home, where he lives, the Chicago Tribune reported. U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel Fuentes ordered him released on bond. Chwiesiuk was ordered to surrender any firearms and his firearm owners identification card. He spoke only once, answering Yes I do when the judge asked if he understood the conditions of his bond.
When President George W. Bushs nomination of Roger Benitez to a new federal judgeship in San Diego came under attack in 2004, the nominee drew crucial support from one of Congress most vocal advocates of gun control: Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

Benitez, a state and federal jurist since 1997, has been praised for his superb demeanor, intelligence, pragmatism and fairness, the California Democrat said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in February of that year, according to a transcript quoted by CNN this week. Feinstein said observers also described him as ethical and courteous to all who appeared before him.

Seventeen years later, Benitez has become the leading judicial ally of firearms advocates in California, striking down a series of gun-control laws that voters had overwhelmingly approved and portraying the state as an enemy of the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. He appears to invite controversy, as in the opening words of his June 4 ruling that declared unconstitutional the states ban on assault weapons, in effect since 1989.

Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment, Benitez wrote. Later, he compared the rifles  used in half of the nations 10 deadliest mass shootings  to seat belts and smoke detectors, saying both were essential in emergencies.

I dont believe this judge would uphold a single gun law anywhere, Robyn Thomas, executive director of the San Francisco-based Gifford Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said at a news conference Thursday on the states appeal of the ruling.

Feinstein, meanwhile, has been laboring for years, with little apparent prospect of success, to reinstate a national ban on firearms classified as assault weapons, semiautomatic rifles or pistols that can carry magazines allowing dozens of shots without reloading. She sponsored a 10-year ban in 1994 that won narrow congressional approval, but lawmakers refused to renew the ban in 2004, and Feinstein has introduced several bills seeking to revive it.

It was also Feinstein, along with then-Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who had sponsored legislation establishing the new federal judgeship in San Diego, despite knowing it would be filled by a Republican president.

The American Bar Association rated Benitez as unqualified, largely because of what foes described as his unfavorable temperament. But with support from Feinstein, who introduced him at the committee hearing, he breezed to confirmation on a 98-1 Senate floor vote, with Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the only dissenter.

Benitez, 70, was born in Cuba and came to the United States as a child. He attended college and law school in San Diego and practiced law for nine years before Gov. George Deukmejian appointed him to the Imperial County Superior Court in 1997. Four years later, he was chosen by federal judges in San Diego to be a magistrate in their courts, hearing mostly pretrial proceedings, then was named to the new judgeship by Bush in 2004. He transferred to senior status, with a reduced caseload, in 2017.

One of Benitezs first noteworthy rulings came in 2010 when he said that a high school math teacher in Poway (San Diego County) had the right to hang banners in his classroom with wording that included One nation under God and God shed his grace on thee, and that the school district violated his freedom of speech by ordering their removal.

Our institutions and government actors have in past and present times given place to a supreme God, the judge said. But the appeals court overruled him in 2011, saying the teacher had no constitutional right to promote his religious views in the classroom.

His first significant gun ruling came in 2017, a year after California voters passed Proposition 63, a gun-control initiative backed by then-Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom. Benitez barred enforcement of one of its provisions, a ban on possessing magazines holding more than 10 cartridges. His ruling remains in effect, but the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has granted the states request to review it before an 11-judge panel.

Since then, the National Rifle Association and its affiliates have been able to get their suits assigned to Benitez as cases related to his earlier gun ruling.

A decision in April 2020 rejected another section of Prop. 63 that imposed the nations first requirement of background checks for purchasers of gun ammunition. Criminals, terrorists and tyrants dont do background checks, Benitez observed.

But the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco has allowed the state to enforce the requirement while it considers the case.

Gov. Newsom likewise minced no words at Thursdays news conference announcing the states appeal of the assault weapons ruling.

Judge Benitez is a stone-cold ideologue ... a wholly owned subsidiary of the gun lobby, said Newsom, whose late father, William Newsom, was a state appeals court justice.

In response, the Firearms Policy Coalition, a pro-gun group, said the governors verbal assaults on a long-respected member of the judiciary shows his deep and continuing disrespect for the rule of law, the judiciary, the Constitution, and the human rights of California citizens.

Benitez has put his ruling on hold for 30 days, and the state is likely to obtain a longer stay while the case is reviewed by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which has upheld other gun laws in California. The issue could wind up before the Supreme Court, a difficult forum for advocates of gun restrictions since the addition of three appointees of former President Donald Trump.

Feinstein refrained from personally criticizing Benitez but called his decision a clear outlier and said it should be overturned.

Federal appeals courts have routinely upheld assault weapons bans across the country, in part because they reflect the will of the public to try to stop the mass shootings that continue to plague this nation, the senator said in a statement. She did not reply to a question about her past endorsement of Benitez.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
LEWISTON, Idaho (AP)  When it comes to cases of adding insult to injury, the story of Helen Wong ranks among the worst.

I came back from vacation and found my house in a mess, Wong, 70, told The Lewiston Tribune Thursday while seated in the front room of the 15th Street Lewiston home where she has lived for 30 years. I was so sad. I cannot do it (clean up by myself). I feel so helpless.

But now Wong doesnt have to do it by herself, thanks to the efforts of a kind-hearted deputy from the Nez Perce County Sheriffs Office. Jesse Broyles happened upon Wong on Tuesday night outside the county jail as he was getting off work.

She just got off the plane from China on June 4, Broyles recalled. The (baggage claim) tag is still on the little cart she pulls around.

He said that even though Wong didnt look well, he almost walked right past her, eager to get home after a long day. But the teachings of his faith tugged at his heart, so Broyles stopped to talk.

The story Wong told floored him. What started in late 2019 as a vacation to her Chinese homeland ended up as an unplanned year-and-a-half exile when the COVID-19 outbreak slammed the door on her return to Lewiston. China eventually eased its travel restrictions, but Wong just recently decided that her health would be safe in the tight confines of a jumbo jet. Late last week, she finally made it back to the United States.

But what awaited at her 15th Street home shocked Wong and left her despondent. She arrived to find it plundered, abused and partially dismantled by squatters, 18 of whom had to be rousted by the Lewiston Police Department. Almost all of her property had been stolen, including clothing, furnishings, fixtures and personal belongings.

Someone even went underneath the house and cut out all the copper water pipes to sell for scrap. The electrical junction box had been stripped, and the homes power and water had been long discontinued. There was trash and drug paraphernalia heaped everywhere, and a putrid stench permeated the whole two-story residence.

To make matters worse, the day after she got back, her wallet went missing. A grocery store wouldnt take a check in payment for food because she didnt have identification. Desperate, she got a ride from a good Samaritan to the Nez Perce County Sheriffs Office in North Lewiston to get a new ID. But she had no proof of residency and couldnt get an ID. Thats where serendipity stepped in, serving up Broyles as a path to salvation.

Thats what caused her to sit out on the bench in front of the jail at that exact moment when I got off work, he said. So the timing of all this was very miraculous. If she hadnt had a problem getting her ID, she would have been in and out of there and I would have never seen her, and she would have gone back to a home that has no power, no water. The jungle, as I call it.

He went with Wong to see the situation for himself, and what he saw spurred him into quick action. That night he posted a long message on Facebook, asking for help. The response in the first 48 hours was overwhelming, with a squad of helpers on hand by Wednesday to start making the house livable again.

On Thursday, an inspector signed off on the homes electrical service so Avista can turn the power back on. Broyles wasnt there because he was at work, but that days crew of volunteers buzzed around, methodically putting things back in order.

Deputy Ryan OToole had spent much of his Thursday morning cutting down massive piles of weeds and brush from the yard with Travis Candler, and piling trash to haul away later. He said the damage done by the squatters was appalling.

When we came through, there was garbage all over the floor, OToole said. My wife and I took an entire pickup load of garbage to the dump.

Candlers fiancee, Amber Haning, was busy in Wongs kitchen, down on her hands and knees using a metal scraper to remove layers of solidified dirt from the tile floor. She had a smile on her face despite the nasty work, because she has also seen tough times and was happy to lend a hand.

I know what its like to need a place to sleep, Haning said. I just felt for her. I know how people can destroy things.

Candlers son, Logan Candler, has also been by the house to help with the cleanup effort, as have several other volunteers. One of the busiest has been Broyles sister, Jeriann Moffett, who is also giving Wong a place to live until the home is fit for occupation.

That kind of support has been building thanks to Broyles Facebook posts. Someone dropped off a bunch of furniture Thursday morning, and another brought several bags of food. Cleanup crew volunteer Jodi Brunelle, retired sheriffs office jailer, also set up a GoFundMe account for Wong on Wednesday that had collected $300 of a $5,000 goal after the first 24 hours. Those who would like to contribute to the fund may visit gofund.me/df9e163b.

Other help is on the way. Moffetts husband, Kevin Moffett, works at Miller Bros. Plumbing and Heating in Lewiston, and owner Paul Miller has offered to supply the piping necessary to restore water service. Carlton Construction has also offered assistance.

Broyles said he knows Wong is thankful for all the support the community has shown in such a short amount of time. But he directed his gratitude toward his new friend, who gave him the opportunity to undertake the simple but profound act of showing love for a fellow human in need.

The lucky ones in this entire situation, its not Helen, he said. Its actually the people around her who are coming here who have been blessed. They leave the house sweaty and tired and exhausted, but with a smile and almost a tear in their eye after meeting the coolest person in the entire world.
SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP)  The Biden administrations plan to revive protections for some wetlands and streams that got eliminated during Donald Trumps presidency isn't likely to restore federal oversight of a proposed mine outside the Okefenokee Swamp's vast wildlife refuge.

On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced the first steps toward undoing and replacing the Trump-era environmental rule that narrowed the types of U.S. waters that qualify for federal protection from pollution under the Clean Water Act. A review ordered by President Joe Biden found at least 333 projects had that would have required a federal permit no longer needed one after the Trump administration's rule change took effect last year.

Among the beneficiaries of the 2020 change was Twin Pines Minerals. The Alabama-based company has spent two years seeking permits to mine titanium dioxide on land 2.9 miles (4.7 kilometers) from the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge near the Georgia-Florida line.

Federal scientists have warned that mining near the Okefenokees bowl-like rim could damage the swamps ability to hold water. Regardless, the Army Corps of Engineers declared last October that it no longer had permitting jurisdiction over the project because the rule change under Trump excluded wetlands on the site from federal protection.

Even if Biden moved swiftly to reverse Trump's rule, it's probably too late to force Twin Pines and other project developers already cleared of federal permit requirements to reapply for them, said Kelly Moser, an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center.

That's because decisions on whether projects need Clean Water Act permits last for five years, unless there's a specific reason to revisit a particular project.

Moser is handling a federal lawsuit in South Carolina by conservation groups challenging the rollback under Trump. She said getting a court to rule that the Trump administration changed the rule illegally is probably the only way to restore federal oversight of projects like the mine outside the Okefenokee.

A Biden rule wont reverse the removal of federal clean water protections, only a court ruling will, Moser said Thursday. Thats why we remain in court fighting against the unlawful rule.

The Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge covers nearly 630 square miles (1,630 square kilometers) in southeast Georgia and is home to alligators, bald eagles and other protected species. The swamps wildlife, cypress forests and flooded prairies draw roughly 600,000 visitors each year, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge.

EPA spokesperson Nick Conger said in a statement that protecting treasures like the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge is a key reason for replacing the Navigable Waters Protection Rule enacted under Trump.

Still, Conger said the Trump-era rule will continue to be implemented, with decisions on permitting requirements lasting five years, until a replacement rule is completed.

In February 2019, the Fish and Wildlife Service wrote that the proposed mine outside the Okefenokee could pose substantial risks to the swamp, including its ability to hold water. Some impacts, it said, may not be able to be reversed, repaired, or mitigated for.

Steve Ingle, president of Twin Pines, has insisted his company can mine the site without harming the Okefenokee. Ingle has said mining will occur on a ridge above the swamp and wont go deep enough to cause underground leaks.

In a statement regarding Biden's plan to replace the Trump-era rule, Ingle said: Right now it would be pure speculation as to what it might or might not be.

We will follow the guidelines that are in force now and in the future, Ingle said, and will continue to do what the regulators instruct us to do.

Without federal oversight, sole permitting authority over the proposed mine now rests with the Georgia Environmental Protection Division.

U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, and others have asked state regulators to enlist help from federal scientists as they review five permit applications from Twin Pines. But the Georgia agency has been cool to the offer.

Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, has declined to take a stand on the proposed mine.

The onus remains on Governor Kemp and Georgia EPD to accept the offer of assistance from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to cooperate in the investigation of the proposed mines impacts on the Okefenokee," said Josh Marks, an Atlanta environmental attorney who opposes the Twin Pines mine.
SACRAMENTO  Even as Gov. Gavin Newsom lifts the most stringent pandemic restrictions on public life in California, he will keep in place the underlying state of emergency that has been the foundation for 15 months of coronavirus guidelines.

Newsom made official Friday that California will return to near normalcy next week, signing executive orders to end the original statewide stay-at-home order and subsequent tiered blueprint for reopening. Effective June 15, there will be no more reduced capacity for businesses, physical distancing requirements or limitations on out-of-state travelers.

California is turning the page on this pandemic, thanks to swift action by the state and the work of Californians who followed public health guidelines and got vaccinated to protect themselves and their communities, Newsom said in a statement.

But unwinding the full scope of changes the state adopted to confront a historic pandemic  more than 460 rules across 58 orders, according to the Governors Office of Emergency Services  will take longer. The March 2020 emergency declaration that gave Newsom authority to waive regulations and take other sweeping steps to combat the virus remains in effect indefinitely, though not permanently, officials say.

Newsom administration officials told reporters Friday that hundreds of remaining provisions from pandemic-era executive orders are set to phase out by the end of September. They include such measures as a waiver for manufacturing licenses that allowed businesses to switch over to producing hand sanitizer, the ability for government boards to meet virtually, and mail-in drivers license renewals for older Californians.

Another 52 provisions, including one that gives pharmacy technicians the authority to administer vaccines, will extend beyond that, with no clear expiration date as the state tries to chart an orderly path out of the coronavirus era. If Newsom terminated the state of emergency, all those orders would end as well.

Its like the Jenga tower. You pull out the brick at the bottom, it all comes down immediately, without any notice to anyone, said Ann Patterson, Newsoms legal affairs secretary.

The continuation of the emergency declaration, despite California having among the lowest rates of coronavirus transmission in the country, has drawn sharp criticism from the governors political rivals, who accuse him of refusing to give up his power even as the science shows it is safe to reopen.

Newsom has defended himself by comparing the situation to natural disasters, such as the 2018 Camp Fire, where an emergency declaration lasts for years so the community can continue to draw federal assistance.

Once a fires out, it doesnt mean you remove the state of emergency. Youve got debris removal, youve got recovery, Newsom said during a news conference Thursday in San Francisco. And thats why we want to be here in the long run on testing, vaccination, supporting local government.

Alexei Koseff is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: alexei.koseff@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @akoseff
SEATTLE (AP)  A company backed by the Chinese government on Friday ended its seven-year effort to build one of the worlds largest methanol plants along the Columbia River in southwestern Washington, following a series of regulatory setbacks and a long debate over its environmental footprint.

Northwest Innovation Works proposed a $2.3 billion project to take fracked natural gas from Canada and convert it into methanol, which it would then ship to China to make ingredients for plastics used in everything from iPhones to clothing to medical devices.

The state Department of Ecology denied a key permit for the project in January, saying it would create too much pollution and have negative effects on the shoreline. On Friday, the company notified the Port of Kalama it was terminating its lease, saying the regulatory environment had become unclear and unpredictable.

Economic development officials in southwest Washington blasted the state for dooming the project, saying that the company's methods of making methanol from natural gas would have been cleaner than making it from coal, as is done elsewhere. That would have benefitted the environment while creating 1,400 construction jobs and 200 family-wage permanent positions, they argued.

NWIW did everything right, and their understandable decision to pull out of this project is a real loss for families trying to make ends meet, the future of economic development in our state, and our environment," Port of Kalama Commissioner Troy Stariha said in a written statement.

A review required by the state found that the plant would boost the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere, but not as much as if the methanol were made elsewhere.

Environmental groups, including Columbia Riverkeeper and the Washington Environmental Council, as well as tribal activists, vehemently opposed it. They celebrated the lease termination as the latest in a string of victories that helped block more than a dozen fossil-fuel developments in the Pacific Northwest, including fracked gas pipelines, liquefied natural gas terminals, coal export terminals, and oil-by-rail developments.

Projects like this simply cannot go forward as we fight to save our climate, Kristen Boyles, an attorney with the environmental law firm Earthjustice, said in a news release. The climate-killing emissions from this project would have overwhelmed Washington, and we must keep drawing the line and saying no.

The proposal had a roller-coaster history, with Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee initially supporting it and going so far as to visit Kalama to promote it. But in 2019, amid his climate-activist campaign for president, Inslee reversed himself, saying he could no longer in good conscience support massive fossil-fuel infrastructure projects.

Northwest Innovation Works suffered another setback that year when the state Department of Ecology demanded further environmental review, saying that five years in, its backers had failed to provide enough information about its greenhouse gas emissions and how they would be offset.

Last fall, a federal judge invalidated permits issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for construction of an export facility on the river, agreeing with conservation and public health groups that further environmental review was necessary.

And then in January, following the additional environmental study, Ecology officials refused to issue a key permit. The company and the port appealed, but that appeared to be rendered moot by Friday's news.

In a written statement, Northwest Innovation Works thanked the port and local government and labor unions for their support.

We remain committed to addressing the global climate challenge, creating jobs and economic growth, and are moving forward in developing other innovative net zero projects, the company said.
On June 9, El Salvador became the first country to approve the use of Bitcoin as legal currency . But while the president of the Central American country, Nayib Bukele , celebrates the decision of the Legislative Assembly in style, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) considers that perhaps it was a bad idea, since it entails challenges on several levels.

The instruction of the Salvadoran government is that "every economic agent must accept Bitcoin as a form of payment" , since the president is sure that this will contribute to the banking of the population and avoid losing "millions of dollars" in sending remittances from the Foreign.

However, the International Monetary Fund sees this measure from another perspective.

"The adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender raises a series of macroeconomic, financial and legal problems that require very careful analysis , " said Gerry Rice , IMF spokesman at a press conference on Thursday.

"We are closely monitoring progress on this issue and will continue our consultation with the authorities ," Rice added before confirming that they would hold a meeting with President Bukele to discuss the issue.

Regulatory problems for Bitcoin in El Salvador

"What we have said in the past, in general, is that cryptocurrency assets can pose significant risks, and effective regulatory measures are very important in addressing them ," the IMF spokesperson commented.

One of the concerns of the body is the speed with which the Bitcoin Law and the brief regulations it includes were approved, since it already has only 16 articles and leaves much to interpretation.

Economy Minister Maria Luisa Hayem presented the bill to legislators on Tuesday night, June 8.

In less than 24 hours, after a quick discussion in the Financial Committee of Congress, it received the go-ahead to be presented to the full legislature, where it was approved with the votes of 62 deputies. Of these, 56 belong to the New Ideas (NI) party bench, which represents the majority and are allies of President Bukele, while minority opposition parties refused to support the regulations.

The #LeyBitcoin has just been approved by a qualified majority in the @AsntacionSV .



62 out of 84 votes!



Story! #BTC

"The purpose of this law is to regulate Bitcoin as legal tender, unrestricted with liberating power, unlimited in any transaction," says article 1 of the new Bitcoin Law.

In addition, he points out that "the exchange rate" between Bitcoin and the US dollar "will be freely set by the market."

President Bukele asked the state energy company to offer alternatives for mining bitcoin in a "very cheap, 100% clean, 100% renewable and zero emissions from our volcanoes," he announced on Twitter.

I've just instructed the president of @LaGeoSV (our state-owned geothermal electric company), to put up a plan to offer facilities for #Bitcoin mining with very cheap, 100% clean, 100% renewable, 0 emissions energy from our volcanos



This is going to evolve fast!

Since last April, the government of El Salvador has been in talks with the IMF to obtain a new loan of about 1.3 billion dollars . This would be destined to re-boost its economy, which in 2020 contracted by 7.9% due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Last year, the agency granted the country emergency assistance for around 389 million dollars to face the health crisis, through the Rapid Financing Instrument (IFR).

Copyright 2021 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
This article was first published on NerdWallet.com.

Each passing day brings 43 million federal student loan borrowers closer to resuming the payments that have been paused since March 2020  and further from the chance that life-changing loan forgiveness is coming anytime soon.

Borrowers had reason to hope.

Student debt, now at $1.7 trillion, was a crisis long before COVID-19. But the pandemic became an inflection point: Relief came quickly, with payments halted interest-free as debtors sought to cope with lost jobs and reduced work hours. Forgiveness became the rallying cry of progressives, helped by promises of support from both candidate and President Joe Biden.

But the quick fix of a White House executive order hasn't emerged, and there is no legislative remedy in the pipeline. Biden's first budget plan, released May 28, didn't carve out any money for forgiveness either.

That means struggling borrowers hoping for at least some cancellation before payments restart may need to reset their expectations and focus instead on how they'll make payments in October.

Current chances for forgiveness

While campaigning, Biden called for $10,000 of student loan forgiveness as coronavirus relief. He also called to cancel tuition-related debt for those who attended public colleges and earn under $125,000 per year.

Debt forgiveness of $10,000 would cancel debt entirely for about 15 million borrowers, according to a NerdWallet analysis of federal data.

Since then, the president has been reluctant to commit to taking action. He has publicly questioned his authority to grant cancellation and is awaiting a memo from Education Secretary Miguel Cardona exploring his ability to do so.

Robert Kelchen, associate professor of higher education at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, says he thinks its unlikely Biden will forgive loans en masse.

I think that if President Biden wanted to do widespread loan forgiveness through executive action, he would have already done so, he said in an email.

Debt relief advocates like Braxton Brewington, press secretary for Debt Collective, a membership-based union for debtors, are undeterred.

Borrowers are just as frustrated and stressed as they were on Day One of [Bidens] administration because this is something Joe Biden should have done on Day One, Brewington says. He adds that Debt Collective remains optimistic that broad cancellation is still possible under COVID-related relief  because it is COVID relief, Brewington says.

Keeping the pressure on

Democratic lawmakers, meanwhile, introduced a pair of resolutions in February to both houses of Congress calling on the president to cancel $50,000 of student debt. Democratic lawmakers, progressive activists and even cities like Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia regularly voice support for canceling debt, but theres no active legislation to this effect.

Some student loan experts are skeptical legislation can pass in a politically polarized Congress. Cody Hounanian, program director at Student Debt Crisis, a student borrower advocacy organization, says moving forgiveness through Congress will be an uphill battle that will take time borrowers no longer have. But executive action is something we know can be done immediately; it will bypass Congress, and [Biden] has the authority to do it, Hounanian adds.

The conversation around loan forgiveness is unlikely to end anytime soon, says Megan Coval, vice president of policy and federal relations at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. Coval says forgiveness could still happen, and its possible borrowers might see more targeted cancellation by factors like debt amount or income  though there has been no proposal of this nature thus far.

Changes to current forgiveness plans

While broad forgiveness isnt off the table, there are still some existing targeted debt cancellation programs available to borrowers. However, these programs are underperforming and in need of reform, according to experts and lawmakers.

Public Service Loan Forgiveness, for example, is granted to borrowers who made payments while working full-time for an eligible public service employer. It has only a 2.2% approval rate, according to federal data. Other programs, like borrower defense (for students whose colleges defrauded them) and income-driven repayment forgiveness, also are helping far fewer borrowers than designed.

Bidens budget proposal included a sentiment that his administration plans to work with Congress on improving income-driven repayment and PSLF programs, which could help millions of borrowers with relief. While campaigning, Biden called to repair PSLF with a new plan forgiving $10,000 of student debt relief for up to five years of public service.

Legal and student loan experts such as the National Consumer Law Center and Student Borrower Protection Center blame red tape, misinformation and mismanagement for the dysfunction that mars existing forgiveness programs. But this could change soon: The education department announced recently it would hold feedback hearings in June to get input on potential future rule-making topics, including these programs.

Streamlining the process for both income-driven repayment plans and Public Service Loan Forgiveness won't be as flashy as debt forgiveness, but both of these plans will forgive at least some debt for many Americans, Kelchen says.

Strategies for resuming payments

With loan forgiveness proposals unlikely to bear fruit anytime soon, and payments set to restart for borrowers Oct. 1, heres how you can strategize repayment, depending on your situation:

If youre financially stable, consider making additional payments before Oct. 1 to pay off your debt faster  you can chip away faster at your principal while your loan isnt collecting interest.

If you anticipate having difficulty making payments, contact your servicer now to discuss enrolling in an income-driven repayment plan to keep payments manageable. Itll cap your payments at a portion of your discretionary income and extend repayment. If youre out of work or underemployed, your payment can be $0.

If you wont be able to make payments but dont want to enroll in an income-driven repayment plan, contact your servicer to discuss an unemployment deferment or forbearance. These options are best if you expect to be out of work or are managing a short-term financial hardship.

If youre pursuing Public Service Loan Forgiveness, keep in mind that each month of nonpayment counts toward the 120 needed for forgiveness so long as youve remained employed full time. Continue making payments on an income-driven plan when they restart.

If your loan was in default before the pandemic, it will restart in good standing. Make sure you have a plan to stay on track, like enrolling in an income-driven plan.

Anna Helhoski writes for NerdWallet. Email: anna@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @AnnaHelhoski.

The article Can Student Loan Forgiveness Still Happen? originally appeared on NerdWallet.
HONG KONG (AP)  Hong Kong censors now have the power to ban films that endanger national security, prompting concerns that freedom of expression is being further curtailed in a city once known for its vibrant arts and film scene.

Authorities are cracking down on criticism of Chinese Communist Party rule, arresting many pro-democracy activists in the city and implementing a sweeping national security law last year that criminalizes actions such as the calls for independence made during months of anti-government protests in 2019.

The Hong Kong government announced Friday that it has amended the guidelines for censors in the citys Film Censorship Ordinance to include vigilance against any portrayal, depiction or treatment of any act or activity which may amount to an offense endangering national security.

Censors have the power to ban films from exhibition to prevent or suppress any act or activity endangering national security, it said in a statement.

The film censorship regulatory framework is built on the premise of a balance between protection of individual rights and freedoms on the one hand, and the protection of legitimate societal interests on the other, the government said.

The amended ordinance takes Hong Kong a step closer to the censorship of films on the Chinese mainland, which are closely vetted for themes and scenes critical of the Communist Party's leadership or that do not align with values that the government seeks to espouse.

On Friday, organizers of the 15th Fresh Wave International Short Film Festival canceled the screening of Far From Home, a short about political divisions in Hong Kong following the 2019 anti-government protests, after it did not receive approval from censors.

This film censorship system shows how freedom of expression is disappearing from Hong Kong," said Anders Hammer, director of Do Not Split, an Oscar-nominated documentary about the 2019 protests. "In 2021 we have seen how the situation is deteriorating further where activists and pro-democracy politicians are put in prison, charged under the new draconian national security law, he said.

And unfortunately, it looks like the local government and Beijing only want to continue with this dissolvement of basic democratic rights in Hong Kong, he said.

In March, organizers canceled the screening of the documentary Inside the Red Brick Wall which portrays clashes between pro-democracy protesters and police at a local university, following an editorial in a pro-Beijing newspaper that said the movie spreads messages of subversion and may breach the national security law.

Censors in May also issued warnings to a hospital workers union over the screening of two films related to the crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989, stating that it had not sought approval and that one of the films had not been rated.

Earlier this month, Hong Kong authorities banned for a second year the annual candlelight vigil held in remembrance of victims of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Authorities have also ramped up efforts to overhaul the school system to instill patriotism in students.

___

Associated Press journalist Juwon Park in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this report.
The Associated Press won two Pulitzer Prizes in photography Friday for its coverage of the racial injustice protests and the coronaviruss terrible toll on the elderly, while The New York Times received the public service award for its detailed, data-filled reporting on the pandemic.

In a year dominated by COVID-19 and furious debate over race and policing, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis won the breaking news reporting prize for its coverage of George Floyd's murder and its aftermath, while Darnella Frazier  the teenager who recorded the killing on a cellphone  received a special citation.

Frazier's award was intended to highlight the crucial role of citizens in journalists quest for truth and justice, the Pulitzer Board said.

The AP and The New York Times each won two Pulitzers, the most prestigious prize in journalism, first awarded in 1917.

The feature photography prize went to APs chief photographer in Spain, Emilio Morenatti, who captured haunting images of an older couple embracing through a plastic sheet, mortuary workers in hazmat gear removing bodies, and people enduring the crisis in isolation.

The breaking news photography prize was shared by 10 AP photographers for their coverage of the protests set off by Floyd's killing. One widely published photograph by Julio Cortez on the night of May 28 in riot-torn Minneapolis showed a lone, silhouetted protester running with an upside-down American flag past a burning liquor store.

Everybody, not just myself, has given up something to go cover this stuff, Cortez said. To be an illegal immigrant kid who now has a piece of the AP history is just insane. Im just super proud of everyones work.

AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt said the two prizes are a "true testament to the talent and dedication of AP photojournalists. He added: These photographers told the stories of the year through remarkable and unforgettable images that resonated around the world.

The New York Times received its public service prize for pandemic coverage that the judges said was courageous, prescient and sweeping" and filled a data vacuum that helped better prepare the public. Wesley Morris of the Times won for criticism, for his writing on the intersection of race and culture.

Similarly, the prize for commentary went to Michael Paul Williams of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia for a series of columns on dismantling Confederate monuments in Richmond following Floyds death.

And Star Tribune journalists were honored for covering the rage in Minneapolis, where protesters burned buildings, including a police station, in the wake of Floyds death. The Black man died after a white Minneapolis police officer pinned him to the ground with his knee on Floyd's neck for up to 9 1/2 minutes. The officer was later convicted of murder.

Our staff poured its heart and soul into covering this story. It has been such a traumatic and tragic time for our community, Star Tribune Editor Rene Sanchez said in a statement. We felt that our journalism had to capture the full truth and depth of this pain and the many questions it renewed about Minnesota and the country.

Prizes for explanatory reporting went to two recipients. Ed Yong of The Atlantic won for a series of deeply reported articles about the pandemic. Andrew Chung, Lawrence Hurley, Andrea Januta, Jaimi Dowdell and Jackie Botts of Reuters were honored for a look at the legal concept of qualified immunity and how it shields police from prosecution.

Two prizes for feature writing were also awarded. Nadja Drost won for her freelance piece on global migration in The California Sunday Magazine, which suspended publication late last year. And freelance contributor Mitchell S. Jackson won for an account in Runner's World on the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who was chased down and shot while jogging in Georgia.

The national reporting prize went to the staffs of The Marshall Project, AL.com, IndyStar and the Invisible Institute for an investigation into attacks on people by police K-9 units around the country.

BuzzFeed News won its first Pulitzer, in international reporting, for a series by Megha Rajagopalan, Alison Killing and Christo Buschek on the infrastructure built by the Chinese government for the mass detention of Muslims.

Also, BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium of Journalists were finalists in that category for an expose on the global banking industrys role in money laundering. A former U.S. Treasury Department employee was sentenced to six months in prison this month for leaking the trove of confidential financial reports that served as the basis for the series.

Matt Rocheleau, Vernal Coleman, Laura Crimaldi, Evan Allen and Brendan McCarthy of The Boston Globe received the investigative reporting Pulitzer for a series demonstrating the systematic failure by state governments to share information about dangerous truck drivers.

McCarthy, the editor on the series, said the Globe quickly found that this kind of tragedy had been happening year after year for decades. The problems were in plain sight but had never been addressed.

The winner of the public service Pulitzer is honored with a gold medal. The awards in the other categories carry a prize of $15,000 each. The prizes are administered by Columbia University.

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Associated Press writers Deepti Hajela, Donna Edwards and Sarah Rankin contributed to this report.
Namu Stonepot has permanently closed its original San Francisco location after nearly four years at 553 Divisadero St.

Chef-owner Dennis Lee and brothers David and Daniel Lee, who co-owned the restaurant, announced that the restaurant's outpost on Divisadero St. would host its final service on June 6.

It's with a heavy heart that we have to announce our Divisadero location is coming to a close at the end of this week, the Instagram post read in part. Due to this crazy past year and the state of the pandemic and COVID health regulations, we just aren't able to accommodate reopening anytime soon.

Namu Stonepot's second location at 499 Dolores St. will remain open.

The closure comes months after the family members closed their other Korean restaurant Namu Gaji in late April. The reasons behind that closure echoed the same struggles as chef Lee told the San Francisco Chronicle that Namu Gaji would cease operations following operational struggles it faced throughout the pandemic. (SFGATE and the San Francisco Chronicle are both owned by Hearst but operate independently of one another.)

Sadly, Namu Gaji is no more, Chef Lee told The Chronicle in April. Operating a full-service restaurant is extremely challenging as is. With all of the delays and new challenges brought on during the first two shelter-in-place orders and uncertainty of the coming year, we had to make the difficult decision to end that business.

Kevin Y. on Yelp

But despite the closures, the Lees have an upcoming project still in the works that is anticipated to open sometime this year at 59 Ninth St., the former home to Perennial restaurant. The unnamed business will debut as a beer hall, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, that will feature beers from Cellarmaker Brewing Co., among others, and a condensed menu from Namu Stonepot and Sunset Squares  Dennis Detroit-style pizzeria that opened last year. Menu items from Filipino pop-up Uncle Tito will also be on hand.

We look forward to the new exciting changes that are in store, and we hope you'll continue to follow us along our journey with the Namu Family, the owners wrote on Instagram.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP)  A jury on Thursday awarded nearly $15 million to five people who lost eggs or embryos when a cryogenic storage tank failed at a fertility clinic.

A federal jury made the award in a lawsuit filed over the 2018 tank failure at the Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco that destroyed about 3,500 frozen eggs and embryos.

The award  including more than $14 million in damages for pain, suffering and emotional distress  will go to three women who lost eggs and a married couple who lost embryos.

Their case is the first to go to a jury, but hundreds of other people also have sued the clinic and Chart Industries Inc., which made the cryogenic tank where the specimens were stored.

During the trial, the women and the couple described their pain from the loss.

Chloe Poynton, 39, lost nine eggs.

Its really painful to be at a baby shower celebrating someone elses family being built and knowing inside youll never get that, Poynton testified. So you start to pull back. You start to isolate.

A similar tank failure in a Cleveland suburb that occurred the same day as the San Francisco failure ruined more than 4,000 eggs and embryos. They were the biggest such losses on record in the U.S., causing centers around the nation to review their procedures.

In closing arguments during the San Francisco trial, a lawyer for Chart blamed the fertility center for the tank failure. But jurors rejected the argument that the tank had been misused or improperly modified.

Jurors found that a manufacturing defect was to blame for the tank failure and found Chart 90% responsible and negligent for failing to recall the malfunctioning part, finding that was a substantial factor in causing harm.

The part was a controller that monitored liquid nitrogen levels.

Pacific Fertility was found negligent and 10% responsible for harm.

The three women were each awarded about $2 million to $3 million, while the couple was awarded $7.2 million.

Messages left for Charts attorney and Pacific Fertility weren't immediately returned Thursday.
DENVER (AP)  A former Colorado law enforcement officer is facing sexual misconduct accusations from three women, prosecutors said Friday.

Wayne Darrell Nelson, 68, was charged with seven counts stemming from incidents between April 2018 and December 2020 when the women were his tenants and roommates, Jefferson County District Attorney Alexis King said.

Nelson is a retired officer who previously worked for the Westminster Police Department and the Jefferson County District Attorneys Office until he resigned in 2014. He currently teaches concealed carry classes and womens self-defense classes, prosecutors said.

Charges allege that on Dec. 24, Nelson forcibly groped and solicited sex from a 27-year-old tenant in Arvada. Other charges include two incidents of unlawful sexual contact that allegedly happened in 2018 and 2020.

Victims told detectives they were scared to report Nelsons conduct because he was a retired law enforcement officer, according to the district attorney.

Nelson turned himself in to the Jefferson County jail Thursday and is being held on a $5,000 bond. His preliminary hearing is set for July 7.

Nelson is charged with attempt to commit sexual assault, unlawful sexual contact, two counts of soliciting prostitution and three misdemeanor counts of unlawful sexual contact.

Online jail records do not indicate if he has an attorney who can speak on his behalf.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)  The American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia is seeking to void four laws that it claims were passed in violation of open meetings laws during the pandemic.

A lawsuit filed this week argues lawmakers knowingly violated a transparency law when the publics access to the Capitol building was restricted and an audio feed for a committee meeting malfunctioned.
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SANDERSVILLE, Ga. (AP)  An autopsy confirms that a body found June 4 on a rural road in eastern Georgia is a missing teacher.

Washington County Sheriff Joel Cochran tells WMAZ-TV that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation confirms the remains belonged to 46-year-old Tina Prince. Cochran said he met with family members Friday to discuss the autospy, but said it's too soon to say how Prince died.

The body was found near a clay mine outside Sandersville.

The first grade teacher was last seen May 28 when she left a restaurant after getting phone calls, telling her daughter she was leaving to meet a man later identified as 31-year-old Aaron Matthew Adams.

Adams was arrested the day the body was found, charged with felonies for concealing a death and false statements. Jail records show Adams remained jailed Friday without bail. It's unclear if Adams has a lawyer to speak for him.

A warrant says Adams hindered the discovery of the body. Cochran says he anticipates additional charges.

Deputies have said Adams and Prince had previously dated.

Cochran earlier told The Union-Recorder of Milledgeville that Adams claimed the two went to his house outside Sandersville, but that Adams awakened the morning after meeting Prince and discovered she was nowhere to be found.
ATLANTA (AP)  The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s youngest daughter said she's afraid American society is unraveling, telling a Christian radio network on Thursday that "I dont know whats going to happen ultimately to democracy."

But Dr. Bernice King also said she is determined to be part of the solution, working to transform minds and help unite a divided nation.

There are a number of bridge builders out there, Im one of them, and we are determined to ensure that we do not lose our humanity, King said.

Bernice King joined former U.N. Ambassador, congressman and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young and several other panelists in a webinar hosted by the Alliance for Christian Media about the legacy of Dr. C.T. Vivian, a civil rights strategist and mentor to many more prominent figures of the movement. Vivian died last July at the age of 95, hours before the death of Rep. John Lewis, at 80.

Bernice King's father had called Vivian the greatest preacher who ever lived, a fierce and influential advocate for social justice. Panelists also described Vivian's optimism and humility, and his desire to see the best in other people, even if it was a racist Alabama sheriff who prevented Black people from registering to vote.

But when asked what advice Vivian would have given to Black Lives Matter protesters today, Bernice King was blunt: Respect the power of strategy.

We arent stopping to strategize, organize, mobilize and put together a strategy," she said. King and Vivian knew that the power of nonviolence is the most potent weapon that any people who are oppressed can use, but they also realized that people had to see success to believe in it.

Daddy understood that people were really tired and incensed at what was happening, but we werent getting any victories," she said. He brought to this movement a strategy of nonviolence that brought people to victories, first with the boycott that ended segregation on city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, and then in other carefully planned acts of civil disobedience across the South.

What we need now is some victories, she said, pointing to the conviction of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd. It was a small piece. We need more victories.

Young, 89, also shared his fears, saying Im probably more concerned right now than Ive ever been before in all my life.

Ive never had such anxiety about Congress, or the presidency or the Supreme Court. Even during the movement, we thought we could trust John Kennedy. We knew Lyndon Johnson was a Southerner who understood race, Young said. There was always a very realistic approach to social change, and we were always optimistic."

Now, Young said, he prays that America's democracy will overcome its challenges.

I think we are all deeply concerned; Im very troubled myself, but not without hope," Bernice King interjected. It's part of the process of change and transformation, that friction is always going to happen. But there's always a critical mass that eventually emerges."

There is a God in this universe  this is what pulled the movement together  and its the same God that C.T. Vivian, John Lewis and all the rest believed in, she said. They believed that if we persist, if were hopeful, if we do the necessary work, we'll succeed.

King also referred to her late mother in an effort to lighten the conversation, saying Coretta Scott King told me the darkest hour is just before the dawn. The only thing I wish I'd asked her is, just how dark is it going to have to get?

Other speakers included C.T. Vivian's son Al and Steve Fiffer, who wrote Vivian's posthumously published memoir, It's in the Action. CNN anchor Don Lemon moderated the panel.
MADISON, Wis. (AP)  The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Friday that local health departments do not have the authority to close schools due to emergencies like the coronavirus pandemic, delivering a win to private and religious schools that challenged a Dane County order.

The conservative majority of the court, in a 4-3 decision, also ruled that a school closure order issued last year by Public Health Madison & Dane County infringed on constitutional religious rights.

The ruling is another victory for conservatives who challenged state and local orders issued during the pandemic to close businesses and schools, limit capacity in bars, restaurants and other buildings and require masks to be worn. All of those restrictions have either expired or been rescinded by courts.

Friday's ruling will have no immediate impact because the 2020-21 school year has ended, but it will limit the powers of health departments in the future by preventing them from ordering school closures.

Even as the COVID-19 pandemic recedes, the courts decision provides a critical correction that ought to prevent future abuses of power in an emergency, said Rick Esenberg, president of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. That group brought the lawsuit on behalf of five private schools and eight families in Dane County, School Choice Wisconsin Action and the Wisconsin Council of Religious and Independent Schools.

Dane County Health Director Janel Heinrich said the ruling "hinders the ability of local health officers in Wisconsin to prevent and contain public health threats for decades to come.

The lawsuit targeted an order issued in August by the county health department prohibiting in-person instruction for grades 3-12 at any public or private school. The Supreme Court in early September put that order on hold while it considered the case.

While many private and public schools in the county resumed in-person classes, Madison's school district remained entirely virtual until March. Its school year ended this week.

The law in question allows local health departments to do what is reasonable and necessary to suppress a disease outbreak. It does not specifically grant authority to close schools. There is a law giving that power to the state Department of Health Services secretary.

Justice Rebecca Bradley, writing for the conservative majority, said the law giving local health departments their power during a health emergency cannot be reasonably read as an open-ended grant of authority,.

She was joined by Chief Justice Annette Ziegler and justices Pat Roggensack and Brian Hagedorn.

Liberal justices Rebecca Dallet, Ann Walsh Bradley and Jill Karofsky dissented, saying closing schools is under the umbrella of what action local health departments are permitted to take in an emergency.
ATLANTA (AP)  For more than a decade, Georgia Democrats struggled to lure highly qualified, big-name candidates to run for statewide office. With Republicans firmly in control of all constitutional positions and the state legislature, none wanted to take the risk.

This year is different.

Boosted by significant electoral victories in the 2020 election, a near-win of the governors office in 2018 and rapidly changing state demographics, seven sitting Democratic lawmakers have declared candidacies for one of Georgias eight statewide offices  a full nine months away from the 2022 qualifying deadline.

Among them are names that have drawn national notice, including Democratic state Rep. Bee Nguyen, a candidate for secretary of state who seeks to leverage her partys outrage over Georgias restrictive new voting law to raise money nationwide, and state Sen. Jen Jordan, who is running for attorney general.

I absolutely think it is going to be a strong field, Nguyen said. I think we recognize we can win in Georgia. We saw it last year; we saw it in 2021.

Republicans, who still hold all of Georgias constitutional statewide offices, hardly intend to concede. Most incumbents are gearing up for reelection and prominent GOP state lawmakers are also planning statewide runs.

Georgia is one of six Southern states where only Republicans hold statewide office. In others, Republicans are dominant. In Louisiana, Republican control is broken only by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, while in Florida, Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried is the only Democrat in statewide office.

Still, as they look to the 2022 elections, few Republicans in Georgia expect the relatively easy victories that characterized the peak of GOP ascendance in the state in the 2010s.

Thats because Georgia  as evidenced by the most recent elections  is evolving into the Souths most electorally competitive state. In November, President Joe Biden became the first Democrat to win the states 16 electoral votes since Bill Clinton in 1992. Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff then went on to win U.S. Senate seats in multimillion-dollar January runoffs that tipped control of the chamber to Democrats.

Candidates also hope to benefit from Stacey Abrams' expected retry for the governor's office in 2022. Abrams' narrow loss to then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp in 2018 bolstered the party that year, as did gains in the General Assembly.

Before Bidens victory, the last Democrats to win statewide were four incumbents who retained down-ballot offices in 2006, even as Republican Sonny Perdue swept to reelection as governor. Those victories came as voters split their tickets at a rate that has become unusual in Georgia today. Democrat Thurbert Baker won a third term as attorney general with 57% of the vote, at the same time Perdue won 58%.

But no statewide Democrats remained after the 2010 election, and the partys candidates became less competitive over the next two cycles.

The candidates who may have been the party's strongest challengers to GOP incumbents during that time said, No, not now, Im not going to give up a sure thing for a longshot, noted University of Georgia political scientist Charles Bullock.

Some who did try didn't fare well. In 2014, the Democratic nominee for agriculture commissioner was Christopher James Irvin. Although he had huge name recognition as the grandson of a Democrat who held the post for 42 years, he raised only $52,000 compared to Republican victor Gary Blacks $1.65 million.

Abrams has yet to announce plans for 2022, but other Democrats expect her to run again. Candidates are excited at the prospect of having her and Warnock atop the party's ticket.

We are all sitting here waiting," said state Rep. William Boddie, a Democrat from the Atlanta suburb of East Point who is running for labor commissioner. "She brings a lot of energy, a lot of policy initiatives and a lot of drive to push Democratic values to any ticket.

Abrams is likely to raise a boatload of money, and some could find its way to other Democrats. Nguyen, for example, could cash in on opposition to Georgia's restrictive new election law in her race for secretary of state.

Democrats do face challenges. Like 2010, when Democrats were swept out of statewide office, 2022 falls in a midterm year, when the party that doesn't control the White House tends to pick up seats. With Biden in office, national gains by the GOP could drag down the state's Democratic ticket.

Its not necessarily the easiest to recruit in this cycle for the constitutional offices," said Ross Rocketto, the cofounder of Run for Something, a political action committee that recruits and trains Democrats to run for office. "People are worried that its not going to be that good of a year for Democrats.

But there are other factors that could push Democratic state lawmakers to run for higher office. When the legislature redraws district lines this fall for the 2022 elections, some Democrats could find themselves with unfriendly districts. In addition, the party overall is likely to remain in the minority in both chambers.

There's also the issue of pay. Statewide officers all make more than $120,000 a year, while state legislators make far less.

Youve essentially got two full-time jobs and one of them pays $17,000 a year," Bullock said of what lawmakers earn.

Being elected statewide also gives politicians a chance to set their own agenda, instead of being one voice among 236 in Georgias expansive General Assembly. Jordan said thats part of the attraction of running for attorney general, a race in which she faces 2018 Democratic nominee Charlie Bailey. The winner will likely take on Republican incumbent Chris Carr.

To ensure victory, Democrats have to make sure their supporters don't just vote for top offices when they go to the polls, something that happened in January. Even as Warnock and Ossoff won, a fellow Democrat lost a runoff for a post on the Georgia Public Service Commission.

Voters need to vote down the ticket, because Stacey cant do it by herself, Rocketto said.

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KABUL, Afghanistan (AP)  For the past four years, since she was 14, the notebook was always within her reach. Shukria Ahmadi titled it Beautiful Sentences and put everything in it. Poetry that she liked  sometimes a single line, sometimes long verses. Her drawings, like one of a delicate pink rose. Her attempts at calligraphy in swooping Persian letters.

Now the notebook is torn and scorched. It was with Shukria the day that three bombings in quick succession hit her school in the Afghan capital Kabul. The May 8 explosions killed nearly 100 people, all of them members of the Hazara ethnic minority and most of them young girls just leaving class.

Shukria has been missing since the blast. She took this notebook everywhere with her, her father Abdullah Ahmadi said. I dont remember seeing her without it. She would even use it to shield her eyes from the sun. Everything she loved is in here.

The attack on the Syed Al-Shahada School was gut-wrenching for Afghanistans Hazaras, even after so many attacks against them over the years. It showed yet again how Islamic State group militants who hate them for their ethnicity or their religion  they are Shiite Muslim  were willing to kill the most vulnerable among them.

The school, which covers grades 1-12, has boys classes in the morning and girls in the afternoon. The attackers waited until the girls were all crowding out the exits as their day ended.

Zahra Hassani, 13, recounted how she was thrown off her feet by the first explosion.

I saw bodies burning, everyone was screaming, she said. She saw another student raising her hand calling for help. I was going to help her, and then the second explosion happened, and I ran and ran, Zahra said.

Speaking in the mostly empty school, Zahra choked back tears and clutched the hand of a friend, Maryam Ahmadi. What is our sin? That we are Hazara? That we are Shiites? said Maryam, who is not related to Shukriya. Is our sin that we are studying?

Dasht-e-Barchi, the Kabul neighborhood where the school is located, was built by Hazaras hopes. It had long been the main Hazara district in the capital, and after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, impoverished Hazaras poured in from their strongholds in central Afghanistan in search of jobs. Dasht-e-Barchi swelled into a giant sprawl.

Murals at Syed Al-Shahada school promise students that education and hard work will unlock the future. Your dreams are limited only by your imagination, proclaims one slogan emblazoned large and bright across a wall.

But the explosions erased the dreams of dozens of Hazara children there. Here are a few of them:

Nekbakht Alizada, 17, dreamed of being a doctor. I want to help my family and I want to help poor people, like us, her father Abdul Aziz said she told him.

Noria Yousufi, 14, wanted to become an engineer, her father Mehdi said. The best word to describe her, he said: Kind.

Ameena Razawi, 17, always had a smile on her face, said her father, Naseem Razawi. She hoped to become a surgeon.

Arefa Hussaini, 14, had a slogan she lived by: Where there is a will there is a way. She vowed that one day she would be a lawyer, but even as she studied, she worked as a tailor to help support her family, her uncle Mohammad Salim said.

Freshta Alizada, 15, shone in her classes and twice had skipped a grade, her Aunt Sabera boasted. Freshta was always telling her family that one day she would become a journalist.

Hadisa Ahmadi, 16, was a math genius and dreamed of becoming a mathematician, her older sister Fatima said. She would always solve Fatimas math problems and tease her that even though she was older, she just didnt get it. Hadisa wove carpets to earn money for her poor family and to pay for additional math tutoring.

Farzana Fazili, 13, was the jokester in her family, said her brother Hamidullah. She too wove carpets in her spare time to earn money for her family. When she wasnt teasing her younger brother, she would help him with his homework.

Safia Sajadi, 14, made clothes to earn money to pay for her English-language lessons, said her father Ali. Weeping, he boasted how his daughter always had the highest marks.

Hassina Haideri, 13, was forever in the kitchen helping her mother, says her father, Alidad. She loved to cook, but she dreamed of becoming a doctor. She sold clothes she made in a nearby shop to earn extra money for her family.

Mohammad Amin Hussaini said his 16-year-old daughter Aquila loved him better than anyone. She would read him poetry and hoped to become a doctor.

At the Syed-Al-Sahada School, students who survived cried and held each other. Some were angry.

Maryam said Hazaras have no hope in the government, which she said has done nothing to prevent attacks.

Only God can have mercy on us," she said. "From others, we expect nothing.
ST. LOUIS (AP)  A federal jury has found a former suburban St. Louis police detective with a string of past misconduct allegations guilty in an excessive force case for kicking a defenseless person during a 2019 arrest.

Ellis Brown III was convicted Thursday of felony deprivation of rights under color of law for repeatedly kicking a man who was face-down and restrained, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

Steven Kolb had led St. Ann police officers on a chase in April 2019 through north St. Louis before his car and several police cars crashed, prosecutors said. Kolb then got out of his car and initially tried to flee before lying on his stomach in a bank parking lot with his hands outstretched.

The incident was captured on bank surveillance video, and prosecutors said it showed Kolb had surrendered as was not a threat.

Ellis Brown was interested in one thing and one thing only: retribution, U.S. Attorney Sirena Wissler said in her closing argument.

Prosecutors said the beating required Kolb to be flown by medical helicopter to hospital for treatment of broken ribs and broken bones in his face.

Defense attorney James Towey said in his closing argument that Brown could have believed Kolb had a weapon, though no weapon was found.

Police work is a very dangerous job, Towey told the jury. They make split-second decisions.

Brown faces up to 10 years in prison when hes sentenced in September.

Brown was the former head of the St. Ann police detective bureau at the time of the 2019 arrest and carried a string of misconduct complaints on his record when he joined the department in 2017.

He had come to the St. Ann department  which has hired several officers accused of misconduct at other departments  after leaving the St. Louis Police Department during a state of Missouri disciplinary investigation in which he and his partner were accused of following a vehicle that crashed, then not reporting the crash or helping the driver. Investigators say Brown also lied about how he spend his time that night.

Brown denied the misconduct, but state officials placed his police license on probation.

Brown also was one of two officers who shot and killed 25-year-old Kajieme Powell in St. Louis in 2014 while investigating reports that Powell stole an energy drink and snacks from a market. Local prosecutors later declined to charge the officers, who said Powell approached them with a knife.

Several criminal cases involving Brown in St. Louis were later thrown out when lawyers found he submitted nearly identical language in 19 search warrant applications.
JACKSON, Mo. (AP)  A former southeast Missouri deputy has been found guilty of statutory sodomy for having sexual contact with a 16-year-old boy while on duty.

KFVS-TV reports that a jury on Thursday recommended two years in prison for 32-year-old Brandon Cook, but a judge has not yet decided on the sentence.
BOZEMAN, Mont. (AP)  An exclusive Montana resort has been granted a permit to use treated wastewater in its early season snowmaking operations, the state Department of Environmental Quality said.

The private ski and golf resort  whose members include Tom Brady and Gisele Bundchen along with Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel  already uses wastewater to irrigate its golf courses, as do other golf courses in Big Sky.
EARLINGTON, Ky. (AP)  A western Kentucky city is receiving a $610,000 in federal funding to improve its water infrastructure.

The city of Earlington in Hopkins County will use the money for water system improvements. The project will also get $390,000 in local matching funds, according to a media release from the governor's office.

These improvements will ensure the city of Earlington has the capacity to provide water and sanitation to any company looking to expand or relocate to our region, Earlington Mayor Philip Hunt said. The improvements are expected to create 20 jobs.

The funding comes from the Economic Development Administration's Assistance to Coal Communities initiative, which sends federal dollars to areas impacted by declining coal production.
HELSINKI (AP)  Finland holds local elections Sunday in a first litmus test for popular young Social Democratic Prime Minister Sanna Marin, who took office 18 months ago shortly before the pandemic outbreak, and whose party is behind in polls across the country.

The 35-year-old Marin, who became Europes youngest government leader in December 2019, enjoys high personal popularity and has won international praise for her handling of the COVID-19 crisis in the Nordic nation of 5.5 million.

However, the result of Sunday's municipal elections  the first for Marin as leader of both the government and the Social Democratic Party  may be a disappointment to her.

Despite her popularity, the Social Democrats have failed to attract young voters in particular. Two opposition parties, the conservative National Coalition Party and the populist Finns Party, are in the lead in the polls.

The vote to renew local councils in Finlands more than 300 municipalities is seen as a catalyst for parties popularity ahead of the 2023 parliamentary election. Stakes are higher this time because the elections were postponed for two months due to COVID-19, and because of the tensions inside Marins center-left, five-party governing coalition.

In April, it came near collapse because a senior coalition member  the Center Party  threatened to leave the government in a dispute over spending. Only persistent negotiations saved Marin's Cabinet from collapsing but political analysts said scars and ideological differences are running deep between the Social Democrats and the centrists.

The main themes dominating the local election are the governments planned social and health care reform in municipalities, taxation and the implications of Finlands COVID-19 exit strategy.

Since the start of the pandemic, Finland has recorded just under 94,000 cases with 964 deaths, which are among the lowest figures in Europe. An improved situation means Marin's government has been able to ease some restrictions and the country is reopening.

Marin, whose political career started in the southern industrial and university city of Tampere, said Friday she had received her first COVID-19 jab.

In a Twitter post with a photo showing a band-aid on her left shoulder, Marin said: Got first corona vaccine shot. Summer is here. Sun is shining.

In Helsinki, the capital, the most acute question is who should become the next mayor of the city of 630,000. The conservatives are trying to stay in power  which they have held for decades  while the Greens are closing in, followed by Marins Social Democrats.

A poll commissioned by Finnish public broadcaster YLE predicted Thursday that, nationwide, the National Coalition Party would garner some 19.6% of votes, the Finns Party 18% and the Social Democrats 17%, which is 1.1 percentage points lower than in the previous elections.

A third of eligible voters, or some 1.5 million people, had already voted in advance by the Tuesday deadline.
FALMOUTH, England (AP)  Towering steel fences, masses of police, protests on the beach: The Cornish seasides turquoise waters and white sandy beaches are looking decidedly less idyllic this week as leaders of the Group of Seven wealthy democracies descend for a summit.

U.S. President Joe Biden and leaders from Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan are arriving for three days of talks starting Friday at the tiny village of Carbis Bay, near St. Ives in Cornwall. The region is a popular holiday destination in the southwestern tip of England known for its long, picturesque coastline, its mild climate  and a savory pastry called the Cornish Pasty.

Locals may be used to crowds and traffic jams during the peak summer tourist season, but the disruptions caused by the summit are on another level. A naval frigate dominates the coastline, armed soldiers guard the main sites and some 5,000 extra police officers have been deployed to the area. Authorities have even hired a cruise ship with a capacity of 3,000, moored offshore, to accommodate some of the extra officers.

A main road is closed for the whole week, and local train lines and bus services have been shut down. A 3-meter (10-foot) tall metal fence nicknamed the ring of steel has been erected around Treganna Castle in Carbis Bay, where world leaders will stay. Security is also tight in the nearby town of Falmouth, the main base for international media covering the summit.

This is just a totally surreal experience, the amount of police presence is phenomenal. Its got to be the safest place in the country to be at the moment, said Sue Bates, 64, who was relaxing on the beach Wednesday. Her husband, John, said they felt their holiday cottage shake when helicopters flew over.

I feel sorry for the consequences that it is having on locals, I understand that some of the restaurant staff cant get in to work during the period of the G-7, which is pretty unfortunate, she said.

Still, Bates and others said they believed the long-term benefits of promoting tourism and local businesses to the world will be worth the hassle.

Britains government hopes the summit will bring 26 million pounds ($37 million) in tourism growth to Cornwall, one of the poorest regions in the country  and the whole of western Europe. Despite its upmarket restaurants and luxury holiday cottages, some neighborhoods are among the poorest 10% in England. Wages are below the national average and child poverty is high in areas not far from St. Ives' waterfront.

The summit has been a boon for local hotels and guesthouses, which have just recently been allowed to reopen after months of forced closure under the U.K.s COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. All rooms were booked up months in advance by visiting media and officials.

For a small business like The St. Ives Co., which has been chosen to supply gift hampers for some of the worlds most powerful leaders, its a dream opportunity.

When were like, Joe Bidens going to be using our toiletries, you almost have to keep saying to yourself -- its happening, we are doing this, said co-owner Tegen Mackay.

Others arent so happy. A local fisherman, Ian Jepson, told British media he was turned back by a warship and told he couldnt fish in the waters because of an exclusion zone. And Andrew Narbett, who operates tourist boat trips on his boat Tiger Lilly, said many bookings had been canceled and he will not bother operating during the summit.

We were fully booked yesterday and throughout the day we had a lot of cancellations where people were travelling down the A30 (main route) and seeing signs saying major disruptions, he said.

Some see the summit as a chance to promote Cornwalls emerging sectors, especially its green businesses. Climate change is among the top issues on the summits agenda, and Britains government has said Cornwall was chosen as the host venue partly because it is already a powerhouse for green innovation.

Glen Caplin-Grey, who heads the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Enterprise Partnership, said hes keen to showcase the regions low-carbon businesses like offshore wind farms and lithium mining. Lithium is a key component in batteries for electric vehicles.

What the last year has shown, in terms of the pandemic, is that theres an over-reliance on tourism here, he said. Its great that people want to come and visit, but its really important to look at other higher wage sectors as well."
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP)  A former Alaska legislator was indicted on new felony charges alleging voter misconduct related to the 2018 elections, according to an indictment released by the state Department of Law.

Gabrielle LeDoux pleaded not guilty Thursday, the department said.

Her attorney, Kevin Fitzgerald, did not immediately return a message from The Associated Press Friday. LeDoux told the AP by text message she is completely innocent of all charges. I have done absolutely nothing wrong. I look forward to clearing my name at trial.

The department, in March 2020, announced charges against LeDoux; a former aide, Lisa Simpson; and Simpson's son Caden Vaught. LeDoux was serving in the Alaska House at the time. She lost her Republican primary last summer.

A judge earlier this year dismissed two misdemeanor counts against LeDoux related to the 2014 campaign.

An indictment, dated June 2, 2021, wasn't publicly announced until Thursday. It included four new felony charges against LeDoux.

The indictment charges LeDoux and Simpson with five felony counts of voter misconduct and Vaught with four.

Simpson's attorney, Rex Butler, said his client pleaded not guilty and is innocent, and said we intend to fight it out all the way.

A message seeking comment was left for attorney Paul Ervasti, who court records show is representing Vaught.

The Department of Law said Vaught has pleaded not guilty.
BUTLER, Pa. (AP)  The former chief operating officer of a Pennsylvania hospital system and her ex-detective husband have both been sentenced to federal prison terms for embezzling more than $1 million from the wife's employer.

Federal prosecutors said Scott and Stephanie Roskovski used the stolen money for personal expenditures including expensive vacations, home improvements and lavish parties. The funds were taken from Butler Health System from 2011 to 2017.
SPRINGFIELD, Mo. (AP)  A one-time certified public accountant in south-central Missouri has been sentenced to more than 15 years in federal prison for conducting a Ponzi scheme that swindled millions of dollars from dozens of victims.

Douglas Richardson, 47, of Lebanon, was sentenced Thursday in Springfields federal court to 188 months and ordered to pay more than $8.8 million in restitution to his victims across the country, the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Western District of Missouri said in a news release.
MADISON, Wis. (AP)  A former Wisconsin high school teacher accused of secretly videotaping undressed students during field trips in Wisconsin and Minnesota has reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors.

David Kruchten, 38, of Cottage Grove, has agreed to plead guilty to one count of attempting to produce child pornography, the Wisconsin State Journal reported Friday. He would face at least six years in prison if U.S. District Judge James Peterson accepts the deal filed Thursday. A hearing is set for June 21.
MACON, Ga. (AP)  The owner of a south Georgia tractor company has pleaded guilty to lying about his debts, assets and income to obtain loans from banks and financial institutions.

Nashville Tractor owner Rickey Carter, 60, pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court in Macon to one count of bank fraud.

Carter agreed to plead guilty to a criminal charge without being indicted. The charge says Carter took out a $5 million loan from Farmers and Merchants Bank in Lakeland in 2016 that was backed by the U.S. Small Business Administration. He also agreed to a $625,000 line of credit. Carter admitted he falsified financial statements in order to obtain the loan for his financially troubled tractor dealership,

He also admitted to selling 88 pieces of equipment worth more than $1.5 million that Nashville Tractor held in trust for CNH Industrial, the manufacturer of New Holland tractors; and other equipment that he held in trust for Kubota, without notifying the manufacturers. Carter then used the cash to pay Nashville Tractors debts. Carter also forged sale and lease contracts for 33 pieces of New Holland equipment, improperly receiving $1.25 million and then improperly selling the equipment to others without telling CNH.

In total, three banks, the SBA and manufacturer financing divisions lost $6.4 million to Carter because of the fraud. Carter is supposed to repay that amount in restitution.

U.S. District Judge Hugh Lawson set sentencing for Sept. 15. The crime carries a maximum of 30 years in prison, but Carter is likely to be sentenced to far less under federal sentencing guidelines. He could also face up to a $1 million fine and up to five years of supervised release.
BERLIN (AP)  German lawmakers on Friday approved legislation meant to ensure that big companies see that human rights are respected throughout their supply chains.

The plan is set to take effect from 2023. It will apply initially to companies with 3,000 or more employees, and from 2024 to companies with 1,000 employees. There are about 2,890 firms in Germany with a work force of 1,000 or more.
ATHENS, Greece (AP)  Greeces prime minister said Friday that his government is willing to back the European Unions positive agenda for relations with Turkey, signaling a further easing of tension between the neighboring countries.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is due to meet Monday with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the sidelines of a NATO summit in Brussels.
HONOLULU (AP)  Honolulu on Friday loosened some restrictions on social activity now that more than half its population has been vaccinated against COVID-19.

The new rules allow outdoor social gatherings of up to 25 people and indoor gatherings of up to 10.
BOISE, Idaho (AP)  Idaho's newest federal magistrate judge, Raymond Patricco Jr., was sworn in during a brief ceremony Friday morning at the federal courthouse in Boise.

A more formal swearing-in ceremony with pomp and circumstance will be held at a later date, Chief District Judge David Nye said, but Friday's event allowed Patricco to get right to work presiding over his first hearing that afternoon.

Patricco succeeds Chief Magistrate Judge Ronald Bush, who is retiring after nearly 18 years on the bench in state and federal courts.

With roughly 1.8 million residents, Idaho has two federal district and two federal magistrate judges  the fewest federal judges of any state, including those with much smaller populations. Wyoming, with about 581,000 people, has five federal district and magistrate judges. Montana, with about 1 million people, has eight, plus an additional judge on a form of semi-retirement called senior status.

In fact, Idaho's federal judiciary numbers have stayed the same since 1954, when there were just 600,000 residents.

That leaves the state with a high per-capita case load  a prospect that is daunting, Patricco said.

It's such an unfairness to the state that we only have two district court judges and two magistrate judges  the case load is oppressive, Patricco said. You just hope at some point the people in D.C. will come to their senses. If you want justice to be done fairly and fully, you've got to give people time.

After Patricco was sworn in, Nye recounted his own first day on the federal bench.

He went back to his chambers, Nye said, turned on his computer and waited to be assigned his first case.

There was a ping, when his first case showed up a few minutes later, followed by another and another  by the end of his first day, 80 cases were on his docket, Nye said.

Patricco, 51, graduated from Harvard University and received his law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law. He served as a federal defense attorney for a private firm, focusing mostly on white-collar crime, before he joined the U.S. Department of Justice as a federal prosecutor in 2000.

He has litigated several notable cases, including prosecuting five defendants with American International Group, Inc. (AIG) and a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway for securities fraud in 2006. He was also one of seven federal prosecutors who indicted the remaining alleged co-conspirators in the 9/11 attacks in New York before the case was moved to the military commission.

In Idaho, he was involved in the prosecution of executives with DBSI for securities and wire fraud. That was the biggest federal fraud case in state history, with the trial spanning more than 40 days in court.

I feel kind of like the legal version of Forrest Gump  I go to these places and these amazing things happen to me, Patricco said, referencing the 1994 film starring Tom Hanks. As a first-generation college graduate, my family is very proud and excited ... It's just been such an amazing journey.

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This story has been updated to correct that Patricco worked for the U.S. Department of Justice as a federal prosecutor.
CHICAGO (AP)  Illinois will hit a milestone Friday when the state lifts all capacity limits on bars, restaurants, businesses and other venues, nearly 15 months after the first stay-at-home order during the coronavirus pandemic.

"As we take this next step forward, lets do so with a renewed commitment to empathy, to community, and to making each day together count," Gov. J.B. Pritzker said. "You did it, Illinois.
LAFAYETTE, Ind. (AP)  A Lafayette man has been has convicted in his twin 3-year-old sons' house fire deaths more than two years after a judge vacated his earlier guilty plea in their 2014 deaths.

A Tippecanoe County jury on Thursday convicted Brandon Abbott on 13 counts, including two counts of neglect resulting in death, the Journal & Courier reported. He's set to be sentenced Sept. 13.

Abbotts attorneys had wanted jurors to debate whether he was guilty of a lesser level of neglect. His attorney Stacy Uliana, said in closing arguments, that Abbott could not have foreseen the April 2014 fire that killed twins Landon and Liam Abbott.

There has to be something more than neglectful. It has to be foreseeable, she argued.

But Tippecanoe County Deputy Prosecutor Cassidy Laux challenged the characterization that Abbott could not have foreseen the fatal fire, which occurred after Abbott slept off a night of partying as his twins were left unattended downstairs.

The boys died from smoke inhalation in the rented house near the town of Mulberry, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) northwest of Indianapolis, while on a weekend visit with their father.

Abbott had pleaded guilty in March 2015 to two counts of neglect of a dependent resulting in death and was sentenced to 70 years in prison.

A judge vacated his plea, conviction and sentence in February 2019 after an attorney for Abbott argued in part that his sentence was illegal because his guilty pleas were not made knowingly or voluntarily.
GOSHEN, Ind. (AP)  A northern Indiana man convicted for his role in the 2019 torture-slaying of a woman whose body was dumped in southern Michigan has been sentenced to life in prison without parole.

A judge gave Donald Owen Jr., 22, the life sentence Thursday despite pleas for a lesser sentence from Kimberly Dyers mother and aunt, who cited evidence that another man had killed Dyer.
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP)  A Palestinian teenager was killed by Israeli fire on Friday during clashes between protesters and Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian authorities said.

The Health Ministry identified the slain youth as Mohammed Hamayel, 15, adding that six protesters were wounded during the violence in the village of Beita near the city of Nablus where dozens of Palestinians demonstrated against the expansion of a nearby Jewish settlement at the expense of their land.
Eileen Meslar/AP

MILWAUKEE (AP)  A federal judge has halted a loan forgiveness program for farmers of color in response to a lawsuit alleging the program discriminates against white farmers.

U.S. District Judge William Griesbach in Milwaukee issued a temporary restraining order Thursday suspending the program for socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
BOSTON (AP)  A judge has rejected a plea deal in the extortion case against the ex-chief of staff to a former Massachusetts mayor that called for her to serve no time behind bars.

Genoveva Andrade, who was the former chief of staff to former Fall River Mayor Jasiel Correia, was set to be sentenced on Thursday. But U.S. District Judge Douglas Woodlock said he didn't approve of the deal she made with prosecutors that would have spared her prison time.
FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP)  Jurors in southwest Florida found a man guilty of second-degree murder and of impersonating a law enforcement officer in the 2018 deaths of two teenagers.

The verdict against Elwood Robinson was returned Thursday evening following a three-day trial, the state attorney's office said in a news release.

Robinson is scheduled for sentencing on Aug. 10 for the deaths of William Hughes Jr., 19, and Jeremy Stewart, 16.

Prosecutors said the teens were hanging out at a gathering spot in Alva early in the morning on Nov. 17, 2018. Robinson heard a loud argument coming from the area. He drove his truck to the area and encountered the first teen, who flagged him down and asked for a ride home, saying he was stranded.

According to the news release, Robinson told the teen that he was a police officer and would take care of the situation. The teen got into his truck. As another car tried to leave the area, Robinson tried to block him before chasing the car at high speeds before losing him.

The first teen remained in the truck during the chase. Instead of taking the teen home, Robinson drove back to the original location. At that point, the news release said, another car drove up with a male and a female inside. They had come there to retrieve a car left at the site.

That's when Robinson got out of the truck, and holding a revolver, ordered the male to the ground. He told him he was a police officer and would take him to prison, the news release said. Robinson ordered the female to get the other teen out of his truck, telling her it was his son.

Two more people arrived at the location, who were friends of some of the teens, the news release said. They saw the gun and one attempted to disarm Robinson. But Robinson stumbled, got up and shot the teen he'd ordered to the ground in the back of the head. He then shot the teen who'd pushed him.

Prosecutors said that after shooting the two teens, Robinson fired at the female victim. She survived but a bullet hit her right hand, grazed her shoulder and hit her neck. He also pointed the gun at another teenager but didn't shoot.

Some of the teens fled to a friend's house and called 911, the release said.
Law enforcement agencies across the country experienced a wave of retirements and departures and are struggling to recruit the next generation of police officers in the year since George Floyd was killed by a cop.

And amid the national reckoning on policing, communities are questioning who should become a police officer today.

Mass protests and calls for reforming or defunding the police, as well as the coronavirus pandemic, took their toll on officer morale. The rate of retirements at some departments rose 45% compared with the previous year, according to new research on nearly 200 law enforcement agencies conducted by the Washington-based Police Executive Research Forum and provided to The Associated Press. At the same time, hiring slowed by 5%, the group found.

The wave comes as local lawmakers have pledged to enact reforms  such as ending the policies that give officers immunity for their actions while on-duty  and say theyre committed to reshaping policing in the 21st century. And recruiters are increasingly looking for a different kind of recruit to join embattled departments.

Years ago, a candidates qualifications might be centered around his  yes, his  brawn. Now, police departments say they are seeking recruits who can use their brain. And they want those future officers to represent their communities.

Days of old, you wanted someone who actually had the strength to be more physical, Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant said. Todays police officers, thats not what were looking for. Were looking for someone who can actually relate to the community but also think like the community thinks.

But the climate today, coupled with increases in crime in some cities, is creating what Chuck Wexler, the head of the Police Executive Research Forum, called a combustible mixture.

Its creating a crisis on the horizon for police chiefs when they look at the resources they need, especially during a period when were seeing an increase in murders and shootings, Wexler said. Its a wake-up call.

The data from Wexler's organization represents a fraction of the more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide and is not representative of all departments. But its one of the few efforts to examine police hiring and retention and compare it with the time before Floyds killing in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. Former officer Derek Chauvin, who pressed his knee on Floyds neck while Floyd was handcuffed behind his back, was convicted of murder and is awaiting sentencing.

Researchers heard from 194 police departments last month about their hires, resignations and retirements between April 1, 2020, and March 31, 2021, and the same categories from April 1, 2019, to March 31, 2020.

By comparison, the changing public attitude on policing is well documented. In the past year, as many as half of American adults believed police violence against the public is a very or extremely serious problem, according to one poll conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Its hard to recruit the very people who see police as an opposition, said Lynda R. Williams, president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, who previously worked on recruitment efforts for the Secret Service.

Bryant knows firsthand. In the weeks after Floyds death, a white officer, Garrett Rolfe, shot and killed Rayshard Brooks, a Black man, in the parking lot of a Wendys.

In quick succession, Rolfe was fired, the chief resigned and the local district attorney announced charges, including felony murder, against Rolfe  a rare step in police shootings. Some cops left the force, which currently has about 1,560 officers  about 63% of the force is Black, 29% white and 5% Latino.

Then came the Blue Flu  when a high number of police officers called out sick in protest. Bryant, then the departments interim chief, acknowledged that it had occurred in Atlanta after Rolfe was charged.

Some are angry. Some are fearful. Some are confused on what we do in this space. Some may feel a bit abandoned, Bryant said last summer in an interview at the height of the crisis.

But it hasn't shaken the resolve of some, like Kaley Garced, a hairdresser-turned-police officer in Baltimore who graduated from the academy last August. Despite the protests and attitudes toward law enforcement, she stayed with her career choice with a plan to interact with residents.

Earning their trust leads to better policing, she said. Citizens who trust officers will not be afraid to call upon you on their worst day and ask for help.

Williams said she believes the next generation of law enforcement will bring a new outlook and move the profession forward by making departments more diverse and inclusive.

They are the change that they want to see, Williams said.

Recruitment is still a challenge. In some cities like Philadelphia, departments are spending more time scouring a candidates social media to hunt for possible biases. In others, pay disparities  a longtime problem  still exist, making it difficult to attract would-be officers and keep newly trained recruits when a neighboring jurisdiction offers more money and benefits.

In Dallas, city leaders spent much of the last decade struggling to draw candidates and stem the outflow of officers frustrated by low pay and the near collapse of their pension fund.

Despite those efforts, the force now stands at about 3,100 officers  down from more than 3,300 in 2015  a loss at a time when the citys population has grown to more than 1.3 million. The force is about 44% white, 26% Black and 26% Latino. This means officers handle more calls and detectives more cases, all amid increased racial tension.

In 2016, five officers were killed in Dallas by a sniper who was seeking revenge for police shootings elsewhere that killed or wounded Black men. Two years later, an off-duty officer fatally shot her neighbor in his home. She was fired and later was sentenced to a decade in prison for murder.

Mike Mata, president of the Dallas Police Association, said the national political climate and local pay and pension issues have been compounding challenges to hiring in Dallas.

In 2019, however, a consulting firm Dallas hired to review its department found that it needed not simply more officers but also a realignment of strategy, goals, mission, and tactics. That finding rings true to Changa Higgins, a longtime community organizer.

You dont need to focus on hiring more officers, Higgins said. You need to focus on how you got these guys allocated.

In Los Angeles, the department is fighting against a decade-long image of scandal and racial strife from the Watts riots in 1965 to the bloodshed in 1992 after a Simi Valley jury's acquittal of officers who brutally beat motorist Rodney King.

Capt. Aaron McCraney, head of the Recruitment and Employment Division, and Chief Michel Moore ticked off the issues facing the 48 new recruits  more than half of whom were women  last year, noting that the pandemic, civil unrest and economic uncertainty were just some of the challenges the new officers would face.

Even though these are tough times, these are difficult times, these are interesting times, McCraney said, these times will pass, and well get on to things better.
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP)  In the final minutes of their legislative session, Louisiana lawmakers agreed to change the way the state shops for voting systems, to include more public vetting and require an auditable paper trail, after two recent efforts to replace the states voting machines failed amid controversy.

The House voted 69-34 Thursday for the heavily rewritten bill by Senate Republican leader Sharon Hewitt, while the Senate backed it with a 27-10 vote. The proposal  which was negotiated with Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin  heads to Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards for consideration.

The measure would add new layers of legislative oversight and technical analysis, enact new requirements for the voting system that could be chosen and remove some decision-making from Ardoin, the Republican who oversees elections in the state.

It shifts our state from an outdated electronic voting system and shifts to a paper-based voting system, which is more secure, easier to audit and cheaper, most likely, said Hewitt, of Slidell.

A newly created commission that includes lawmakers, elections experts, a cybersecurity expert and others would analyze and make recommendations about the type of voting system that should be bought or leased. The commission would have to hold open meetings, giving the general public more points to offer thoughts before the bid solicitation begins.

Louisiana's new voting system would have to produce a paper record, unlike the current decades-old machines used on Election Day. The legislation also would mandate that Louisiana's voting system can't connect to the internet, already the practice today in the secretary of state's office.

Rep. John Stefanski, the Crowley Republican who handled the legislation in the House, said the state could either get digital machines that print out a paper receipt or use paper ballots that are then scanned into a digital system.

Ardoin supports the bill. Edwards hasn't taken a public position on the proposal.

Some Democrats questioned the need for changes, saying Louisiana's current laws haven't led to any significant fraud or allegations of voting impropriety. Meanwhile, some Republicans who have repeated baseless allegations of widespread fraud in other states during the 2020 presidential election said Hewitts legislation did not do enough to address their worries about hacking and elections meddling.

I'm not satisfied that this takes care of the majority of the concerns the general public has been yelling about for months, said Rep. Beryl Amedee, a Houma Republican.

The last two attempts by the secretary of state's office to buy or lease a new voting system and replace the state's 10,000 machines were scrapped amid disputes and criticism.

Ardoin ended the latest replacement attempt in March after facing widespread complaints from election technology firms, Hewitt and other Republicans about how the search was handled. A previous 2018 search fell apart amid allegations of improper bid handling.

In the meantime, Ardoin's office continues to pay its current voting machine vendor, Dominion Voting Systems. That rankles supporters of former President Donald Trump who suggest Dominion is somehow to blame for Trumps loss in key swing states, though not his victory in Louisiana. Dominion has sued several high-profile figures for spreading the allegations.

Other bills sent to the governor would require regular audits of elections by the legislative auditor, allow political parties to designate their own poll watchers and slightly tighten voter identification requirements for absentee ballots.

While Republicans in other states have pushed bills to limit voter access to the polls, Louisianas majority-GOP Legislature largely avoided those contentious debates. Trump won Louisiana, and Ardoin has fiercely defended Louisiana's voting system as secure.

Edwards said lawmakers also knew he wouldn't sign bills that make it harder to vote.

I dont know of any incidents in recent memory where theres been any fraud on a scale that would warrant change in the way we vote, the governor said. Were not going to create problems for people unnecessarily.

In fact, lawmakers agreed to add four days to Louisianas early voting period for presidential elections.

Edwards vetoed a measure to prohibit local elections officials from taking grant dollars or other private funds to pay for election expenses. It's the second year the governor has rejected the proposal from House Republican leader Blake Miguez, a bill backed by GOP Attorney General Jeff Landry.

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Follow Melinda Deslatte on Twitter at http://twitter.com/melindadeslatte.
BOSTON (AP)  A bill approved by the Massachusetts House would upend the process of drawing local precinct lines, setting off a political squabble that pits Democratic lawmakers against the Democratic secretary of state and local city and town leaders.

Due to the pandemic, the U.S. Census Bureau is releasing redistricting data six months later than usual, giving cities and towns less time than in previous years to update their precincts.

Under current state law, after every once-in-a-decade U.S. census, cities and towns update their precinct lines first. State lawmakers then use those newly drawn municipal precincts as the building blocks for the states process of drawing new state House, state Senate and congressional districts.

The bill approved Thursday by House lawmakers on a 131-29 vote, would reverse the process to let state lawmakers redraw district lines first. Local officials would then have to draw precincts to fit those districts.

Supporters of the bill, including its sponsor, Democratic state Rep. Michael Moran, argue the change is needed because delays in receiving final census data from the federal government from the 2020 census wont leave enough time for the process to play out as it has in the past. Moran is also House chairman on the special committee leading the redistricting effort.

The Census Bureau plans to release redistricting data by Sept. 30 rather than March 31. Some information could be released in August.

Democratic Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin, who oversees the census in Massachusetts, described the move as a power grab by lawmakers.

The bill is about completing undoing the process that has worked for many decades and taking away the authority of cities and towns to draw their own precincts and giving it to the Legislature, Galvin said Friday.

Galvin also pushed back against the argument that the change is needed because of a compressed time frame.

There is plenty of time. My office has already been in touch with cities and towns. We have been having webinars. They are fully prepared when the numbers come out, most likely in August, he said.

A statewide group representing cities and towns sides with Galvin and also opposes the bill.

Local communities are in the best position to take into account neighborhoods and racial and ethnic communities of interest when they draw precincts lines, according to Geoff Beckwith, executive director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association.

Beckwith said municipalities also must hold at least one local public hearing as part of the process, ensuring local public input.

If the state draws districts first, it could unknowingly split neighborhoods and communities of interest who wish to be connected and represented in their local government and municipal elections, Beckwith said in a written statement.

A coalition of progressive advocacy groups has backed the proposal, arguing that time is running out to redraw political lines.

The current timeline gives municipalities an unrealistically short time period in which to redraw precinct lines, Geoff Foster, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts said in a written statement. He described the bill as a modest, common sense change that will make both redistricting and reprecincting better for voters and local officials.

The bill would also give the Legislatures Joint Committee on Redistricting the flexibility to increase political power in communities of color and immigrant communities, Foster said, adding it would empower voters to know their electoral districts as soon as possible and empower municipalities by providing adequate time to draw precincts."

The bill now heads to the Massachusetts Senate.
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP)  Connecticut lawmakers and civil liberties advocates are calling the 2021 state legislative session historic for criminal justice reform.

Bills that passed during the session that ended Wednesday included allowing the erasure of many criminal convictions, limiting the use of solitary confinement and other isolation in prisons, aiming to make jury pools more diverse and expanding both the state's landmark red flag gun seizure law and the definition domestic violence.

There really were very few areas of the criminal justice process that didnt get talked about and in many respects reformed this year, state Rep. Steven Stafstrom, a Bridgeport Democrat and co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, said Friday. Connecticut has long been a national leader in the criminal justice reform movement. I think we passed some groundbreaking legislation this year.

The headlining legislation was the so-called Clean Slate act that allows for erasure of many criminal convictions after seven years for misdemeanors and 10 years for lower-level felonies, if the person has not been convicted of any other crimes during those periods. The bill, which would cover an estimated 300,000 people, does not allow erasure of convictions for family violence, or violent or nonviolent sexual assaults that require sex offender registration.

Leaders of the legislature's Democratic majority said the bill would erase convictions that disproportionately affect Black and Hispanic residents compared with white citizens and help people who face difficulties finding jobs and housing because of their criminal records. It also bans discrimination based on erased criminal convictions.

Many Republican lawmakers and even Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont had some reservations about the bill because it allows erasure of convictions for some violent crimes. Rep. Craig Fishbein, a Wallingford Republican and ranking GOP member of the Judiciary Committee, said examples range from carjacking to interfering with police.

Lamont signed the legislation Thursday, but also sent a letter to legislators asking them to address his concerns that more violent felonies were not excluded, and that erased records will not be available to law enforcement agencies issuing gun permits or the judiciary in the event someone with a erased record returns to court.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut called the new law the strongest Clean Slate legislation in the country.

Simply put, Connecticut residents will now be able to move forward in life without a cloud following them for a price already paid, said Tracie Bernardi, leader of the state ACLU's Smart Justice campaign. We have a system that on paper is cut and dry, but in reality never stops haunting."

Also this session, the legislature approved several other criminal justice bills that will:

 Strictly limit the use of solitary confinement and other forms of isolation in prisons. The bill would require almost all inmates to be allowed at least 6 1/2 hours out of their cells and also limits the use of certain restraints.

 Aim to increase the diversity on juries and avoid having too many residents from suburbs, which tend to be largely white, sit in judgment of defendants from cities, which have large minority populations.

 Expand Connecticut's law that allows judges to order someones guns seized upon evidence and probable cause they are a danger to themselves or others. Current law allows only prosecutors and police to ask a judge to issue a warrant to temporarily seize someone's guns. The bill would allow others, including relatives and medical professionals, to request a police investigation into whether someone's guns should be seized. After a gun seizure, the owner is entitled to a hearing within 14 days to determine if the seizure order should continue. It also eliminates the one-year cap on keeping someone's guns.

 Expand the definition of domestic violence to include coercive control" and allow victims of such control to be eligible for civil restraining orders. Coercive control includes isolating the family or a household member from friends, relatives and other support, depriving them of basic necessities, making certain threats and forcing the performance of sex acts.

 Require prisons and juvenile detention centers to provide free phone and other communication services including video and emails. Advocates said Connecticut has been charging some of the highest communication rates in the country for inmates and their families, up to $5 for 15 minutes.

 Prohibit police officers from using no-knock warrants and expand the reasons that an officer's state certification may be canceled or revoked.
MORROW, Ga. (AP)  Police officers have arrested a 19-year-old Georgia man for illegally possessing a gun in connection with a shooting Thursday at a suburban Atlanta mall.

A shouting match led to dozens of gunshots and one person wounded Thursday in Morrow at Southlake Mall.

Morrow police said Friday that they charged Cody Wilson of Dallas, Georgia, with illegal possession of a gun by a convicted felon. Wilson was booked Thursday and remained jailed Friday without bail in Clayton County on the felony charge, according to jail records. It's unclear if he has a lawyer who could speak for him.

The wounded man, shot in the thigh, hasn't been identified. He remained hospitalized Friday but is expected to recover. Morrow police spokesman Sgt. Eli Skelton said authorities aren't releasing his name because he may have been involved in the shooting. Skelton said Thursday that police believe multiple people fired guns in the mall parking lot.

Police had detained seven people for questioning immediately following the shooting. Skelton said more people could be charged.

Paramedics treated three people for anxiety attacks after the shooting, and many other shoppers said there were frightening moments during the gunfire.
TEMPLE HILLS, Md. (AP)  Three people, including two juveniles, have been arrested after a police officer responding to a call was hit by a car, Prince Georges County Police said.

Two officers responded to a window tinting business in Temple Hills on Wednesday after a person said his credit card, which had been stolen from his car, had just been used at the business, police said in a news release.
MEXICO CITY (AP)  Mexican officials and protesters on Thursday marked the 50th anniversary of a June 10, 1971, massacre of student protesters that was depicted in the 2018 Oscar-winning movie Roma.

Demanding punishment for those involved, demonstrators marched down the same boulevard in Mexico City where students were attacked with guns and clubs by government-organized thugs 50 years ago.

Assistant Interior Secretary Alejandro Encinas vowed that the massacre, which he said killed 37 students, would not be forgotten.

The students had a simple demand  democracy, Encinas said at a ceremony. It is the Mexican government's irrevocable commitment, and the will and orders of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, that these ominous events in Mexican history do not remain in silence, or be forgotten.

The students set out from a teacher's college just west of the city center in 1971 for one of the first large-scale protests since hundreds of demonstrators were killed in a far larger massacre in 1968. They didn't get more than a few blocks before they were set upon by plainclothes thugs.

The main female characters in Roma are depicted as incidental witnesses to the slaughter when they go to buy baby furniture at a store near the scene. Unwittingly they run across the protagonist's sometime boyfriend, who is depicted as participating in the repression.

Roma won the Oscar for best foreign language film.

Despite the attention, the prospects for punishment five decades later are slim.

In July 2005, a judge exonerated Luis Echeverria, who was president from 1970 to 1976, on genocide charges stemming from the 1971 student massacre. In that case, the judge ruled that Echeverria may have been responsible for homicide, but could not be tried because the statute of limitations for that crime expired in 1985.
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP)  The Minnesota State Fair is back.

The fair was canceled last year amid COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and social distancing recommendations. But fair officials announced Friday the beloved event will return on Aug. 26 and run through Labor Day, which falls on Sept. 6.

Dubbed the Great Minnesota Get-Back-Together, a play on the fairs traditional Great Minnesota Get Together moniker, the fair will not limit daily attendance or require masks, although fair officials ask that anyone who isn't vaccinated against COVID-19 wear them.

They did warn that some parts of the fair will look different.

For example, the River Raft Ride, Go Karts, Giant Sing Along and the Festival of Nations Demonstration Stage will not be offered this year. The llama costume contest will move to the Warner Coliseum which offers more seating. The fair will feature dozens of newborn animals but no live births. The fairgrounds and most exhibits will close an hour earlier on Labor Day than in years past.

Tickets purchased for the 2020 fair before it was canceled will be valid this year, they added.
BALTIMORE (AP)  Two reported members of the MS-13 gang have been sentenced to life without parole for their roles in the murder of a man believed to have been a member of a rival gang, the states attorney office for Baltimore County said.

Hugo Portillo Chavez, 33, and Jonathan Escobar Hernandez, 21, were convicted Tuesday of first-degree premeditated murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and sentenced Thursday, according to a news release.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP)  The constitutional right of North Carolina's children to have access to a good public school education also applies to individual students who aren't getting help to stop classroom bullying and harassment against them, the state Supreme Court ruled Friday.

The justices' unanimous ruling in part addresses the declaration in a landmark 1997 ruling by the court that the combination of two portions of the state constitution guarantees every child of this state an "opportunity to receive a sound basic education in our public schools. This and another 2004 ruling in what's known as the Leandro" case created the basis for a separate public policy debate over how to address inequitable school funding and services that is not considered in this case.

But the right to that opportunity also must be offered as grounds for reasonable legal claims by individual students who say their rights were violated and there is no other way to seek redress, Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote.

The right to a sound basic education rings hollow if the structural right exists but in a setting that is so intimidating and threatening to students that they lack a meaningful opportunity to learn, Newby said in the opinion, which reverses a ruling by the state Court of Appeals to dismiss the case.

The case involved a mother and her three children. Ashley Deminski said her children, two of which are diagnosed with autism, were subject in 2016 to physical violence and sexual harassment and vulgarities by as many as four students at Lakeforest Elementary School in Pitt County. Deminski said the school's leadership and the local school board were largely unresponsive to her concerns.

School personnel said changes would take time but no real change occurred, according to the opinion. Ultimately the three were able to transfer to another school, but Deminski sued in late 2017, citing education provisions in the North Carolina Constitution. The family sought monetary damages and an order that the children would never have to return to Lakeforest.

A trial court judge allowed the case to proceed, despite arguments by the Pitt County School Board that it was immune from the litigation as a government body. A majority on a three-judge Court of Appeals panel dismissed the case last year, citing a similar case involving the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board and negligence claims related to a teacher's sexual relationship with a high school student.

But Newby said the Court of Appeals' majority decision would mean the constitutional guarantee extends no further than an entity affording a sound basic education by making educational opportunities available.

Instead, the constitutional right to education and the state's duty to guard and maintain that right extend to circumstances where a school boards deliberate indifference to ongoing harassment prevents children from receiving an education," he added.

Pitt County board lawyers had argued there was no cause of legal action under the constitution in cases alleging school employees had failed to prevent harm caused by a third party.

Deminski is very pleased with Fridays ruling, attorney Troy Shelton said in an interview, calling it a victory for all North Carolina students in that schools cant turn a blind eye to abuse thats happening right under their noses and not face consequences. Deminski's children are no longer in elementary school, Shelton said.

The case, which now returns to a trial court, received attention from outside groups. The American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina and Disability Rights North Carolina filed briefs stating a sound basic education includes a safe learning environment.

Lawyers for the North Carolina Schools Boards Association, siding with the Pitt County board, wrote in a brief that subjecting school boards to more claims of individual injury would be financially ruinous to school systems.

Recognizing a (new) constitutional claim ... would extend Leandro well beyond its holding and purpose, which was to create a framework through which the states public school system, as a whole, could be scrutinized for constitutional adequacy," wrote attorney Elizabeth Troutman, representing the association.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP)  North Carolina's Supreme Court on Friday upheld a lower court's decision finding a man guilty of first-degree murder by starvation and neglect of his 4-year-old stepson in Gaston County.

The child, Malachi Golden, died in May 2015 weighing 19 pounds (9 kilograms) at the time, roughly half the weight of an average boy his age. Malachi experienced spasms at 4 months old and had been prescribed an anti-seizure medication that was effective in treating his disability, the justices noted in their opinion. Thomas Allen Cheeks was accused of not providing the child with medical treatment for over a year. He was the primary caretaker and provided up to 80% of the childs care.
LINCOLN, Neb. (AP)  A man serving a life sentence for murdering an Omaha woman in 1999 failed Friday to win a new trial despite his claims that follow-up DNA testing exonerated him.

The Nebraska Supreme Court upheld the first-degree murder conviction of Daryle Duncan. Duncan was convicted in 2001 of fatally stabbing of one of his neighbors, Lucille Bennett. He also was sentenced to up to 20 years in prison for use of a deadly weapon to commit a felony.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP)  An organization that represents thousands of race horse owners, breeders and trainers around New Mexico is challenging regulators in state district court over a recent decision to change the way some purse winnings are distributed.

Also at issue is the state Racing Commissions move to halt the collection of fees that fund medical expenses for horsemen and their employees and legislative lobbying efforts.

The New Mexico Horsemens Association contends in recent court filings that commissioners are taking away a large portion of the groups funding by prohibiting members from contributing 1% of their race winnings to the association and by ending the contribution of starter fees that fund medical expenses as well as fees that go toward advocacy efforts.

The association said the commission adopted the changes without any notice and horsemen were not given an opportunity to testify before the commission.

The group contends that commissioners made the changes as retaliation for its opposition to purse money being used to cover operational costs at the states five privately owned tracks. According to the group, more than $8 million has been diverted from purses to the tracks for certain operating expenses, including to purchase insurance.

The group also has criticized the commission for canceling some race meets and shortening others and has long demanded good tracks and safe and clean backsides, which include stable areas.

A motion filed this week by the association states that the commission sees the horsemen as a thorn in their side rather than a partner that has advocated for horse owners by protecting purse money and race dates.

Let there be no mistake, the motion stated. This is a fight to save horse racing in New Mexico and if this commission wins, horse racing will sadly deteriorate to the point of being a sideshow at casinos existing solely to help casinos keep their license and keep the pueblos and Indian nations from claiming a breach of the Indian gaming compacts.

The commission did not immediately comment on the pending litigation.

In a letter sent in May to association attorney Gary Mitchell, the commissions lawyer wrote that the decision to halt contributions to the association from purse winnings was not taken lightly but that it will translate to an addition of about $700,000 a year to purse money.

The horsemen's most recent motion argues that the commission has no control over the money that horsemen have won once races are concluded, testing has been done and the purses released.

The money belongs to the horsemen and they use it as they see fit, the association argued, saying the system for member contributions has been in place since the 1960s.
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP)  North Dakotas Republican legislative leaders are in no hurry to spend an additional $1 billion in federal coronavirus aid, despite grumbling from some lawmakers that the funds should be distributed sooner rather than later.

Senate Majority Leader Rich Wardner and Ray Holmberg, who heads the powerful Senate appropriations committee, say they're awaiting federal guidance on how the money can be used.

The federal funds were transferred to the state-owned Bank of North Dakota this month and represent the single-largest deposit into state coffers in history, state Treasurer Thomas Beadle said.

Other massive deposits, including the previous appropriation of $1.25 billion in coronavirus aid last year, were made in increments, Beadle said. The latest deposit is parked in short-term CDs, earning less than 1% interest, he said.

North Dakotas share of the federal funds is part of a coronavirus relief package signed by President Joe Biden that includes $350 billion for state and local governments.

Around the state Capitol in Bismarck, some members of the GOP-led Legislature jokingly refer to the aid as Biden Bucks. Some lawmakers have been pushing to identify projects and begin doling the money out, Wardner said Thursday.

I dont know why there is such a hurry, he said. How can we spend it when were not sure what the rules are?

Holmberg said Friday that lawmakers are still in limbo over how the federal the money can be spent, and officials are still figuring out the impact the coronavirus pandemic had on the states economy.

Right now, we need more information, he said.

The leaders said the money must be assigned by the end of 2024 and spent by the end of 2026, under federal rules. That means the full Legislature, which meets again in January 2023, would have an entire session to decide what to do with the funds.

Before adjourning in April, lawmakers approved a nearly $17 billion, two-year budget, or about $2.1 billion more than the current budget cycle that ends June 30. The increase largely reflects additional money the state previously received in federal coronavirus aid.
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP)  New Yorkers would avoid jail time for nonviolent parole violations, and children under age 12 could no longer be arrested as juveniles under bills that passed the state Legislature Thursday.

The state Senate and Assembly passed the Less is More Act as state lawmakers wrapped up the end of the legislative session. The act would largely eliminate the practice of incarcerating people for technical parole violations in New York.

The Assembly also passed a bill Thursday to end the arrest and prosecution of kids below the age of 12, except in homicide cases. That bill earlier passed the Senate.

Under current state law, children can be charged as juvenile delinquents as young as age 7. In 2019, police arrested over 800 largely Black or Hispanic elementary school children in New York City ages 12 and younger, according to city data.

Legislative leaders will decide when to send the bills to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who would have 10 days to sign or veto it.

The parole bill, sponsored by Senior Assistant Majority Leader Brian Benjamin, a Democratic state senator whose district includes most of central Harlem, has exceptions for parole violations that could endanger public safety, including if someone incarcerated for driving under the influence then went out driving.

People could also receive earned time credits to encourage positive behavior, and would have the right to counsel during the parole revocation process.

This legislation recognizes that people on parole who have committed no new crimes should be with their communities and families, not behind bars for missing an appointment, New York Civil Liberties Union policy counsel Jared Trujillo said.

Republicans, who are a minority in the state Legislature, have blasted Democrats for focusing more on perpetrators of crimes than victims. Several Republicans argued that only a handful of children who are arrested end up detained.

Meanwhile, some criminal justice advocacy groups criticized the Democratic-led Legislature  which wields a veto-proof supermajority  for failing to pass more bills to help people denied parole as well as New Yorkers with criminal records.

By Thursday night, lawmakers failed to pass an expected compromise bill to automatically seal the records of many criminal convictions at least three years from sentencing for a misdemeanor, or seven years for a felony.

That bill, the Clean Slate Act, wouldn't have applied to sex offenses, or for people who are currently under parole or probation or facing a pending criminal charge. Courts, or anyone required to run fingerprint-based criminal history checks, could access the records in certain scenarios.

Lawmakers had removed an original provision of the bill, sponsored by Sen. Zellnor Myrie, a Democrat from Brooklyn, that would have also eventually expunged the records from an individuals criminal history.

Youre playing with too many peoples lives and these people have families that they need to be reunited with, said Donna Robinson, 65, of Buffalo, who protested outside the statehouse Thursday. She said the failed parole reforms could have helped give a second chance to her 45-year-old daughter Al-Shariyfa Robinson, who received 15 years to life after confessing to setting a boarding house on fire in 2015. Two people died in the fire.

A look at other bills:

DECRIMINALIZING SYRINGES, NEEDLES: New York would repeal misdemeanor criminal penalties for possessing needles and syringes under a bill that passed the Assembly Thursday and the Senate earlier this week. Pharmacies could also provide syringes without facing the current limit of 10 syringes. Supporters, including advocacy group VOCAL-NY, have pushed to pass the bill for 11 years in hopes of cutting rates of diseases like HIV and encouraging participation in state-funded syringe programs. Republicans and critics have raised fear that decriminalization will encourage drug use.

PAROLE REFORM: The Assembly didn't pass Thursday a bill to direct the state parole board to start evaluating whether individual prisoners over the age of 55 would pose a significant public safety risk if released. Another bill that failed to pass would have required the board to parole prisoners once their minimum period of incarceration is up, unless theres a clearly articulated current public safety risk.

MTA BILL: Lawmakers did not pass the governor's bill that would have allowed him to appoint two Senate-confirmed heads of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, up from one currently. Cuomo's office released a memorandum that said having a single individual serve as chairman and chief executive officer needlessly limits the pool of individuals who can serve in the position while clashing with not-for-profit reform laws that say a CEO shouldn't serve on the board. Cuomo on Tuesday said he nominated MTA interim leader Sarah Feinberg as the agency's board chair and MTA Chief Development Officer Janno Lieber as CEO. Critics say Cuomo wields too much power over the agency: Riders Alliance Executive Director Betsy Plum said unlike in the private sector where board members elect their own chair and hire a CEO, Cuomo himself appoints every board member as well as senior management. The fate of the bill is unclear, but Cuomo has said the nominations are a priority. Senate Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said Thursday that lawmakers are ready to return for any outstanding issues.

ANTI-HARASSMENT, ANTI-ABUSE BILLS: The Assembly had no plans Thursday to take up several bills that passed in the Senate to extend the statute of limitations for workplace harassment to five years, give people who were sexually abused as adults a one-year window to sue perpetrators despite statutes of limitations and ensure all state employees are protected from harassment and retaliation. Several former Assembly employees who were sexually harassed claim the Assembly is blocking the bill to protect its own interests. Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes said Thursday that lawmakers will keep reviewing whether current harassment laws are working.

The Legislatures Judiciary Committee has launched an investigation into whether there are grounds to impeach Cuomo over multiple allegations  including that he groped a current female aide and sexually harassed multiple employees. The governor denies he did anything wrong.

GRAND JURY SECRECY: A bill to allow the release of some grand jury material has passed the Assembly but wasn't on track for a Senate vote as of Thursday. Typically, when there's no grand jury indictment, information about the proceedings often remains secret. Under the bill, courts could release some details when the public is aware of the grand jury proceedings and the suspect's identity.
WEST PAWLET, Vt. (AP)  The owner of an unpermitted gun range in West Pawlet is appealing a Vermont Environmental Court ruling that ordered him to shut down his firearms training school, demolish any unpermitted buildings and pay $46,000.

The attorney for Daniel Banyai of Slate Ridge Vermont filed a notice of appeal with the Vermont Supreme Court last month.
PITTSBURGH (AP)  Federal prosecutors say a Glenshaw, Pennsylvania, man has been arrested on assault, robbery and other charges for his alleged participation in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Robert Morss was arrested Friday and was scheduled for a first appearance in federal court in the Western District of Pennsylvania on Friday afternoon. According to court documents released Friday, Morss was identified by witnesses who told investigators he was a Penn State University graduate and a veteran who may have mental health issues from his military service.
ELDRIDGE, Iowa (AP)  A woman was found shot to death inside her eastern Iowa home, and police arrested her husband on unrelated charges.

Officers found Jessica Bostrom, 28, dead inside the Eldridge home around 1:30 p.m. Thursday, television station WQAD reported. Officials told WQAD that her husband, 34-year-old Shane Bostrom, was arrested on suspicion of various charges unrelated to the death, including several drug violations, misdemeanor child endangerment and felony obstruction.
BOONSBORO, Md. (AP)  A Frederick County man and his 2-year-old son were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide along the Appalachian Trail in western Maryland early Friday, state police said.

The boys mother contacted Maryland State Police on Thursday night and reported her husband, Sean Thompson, and their son, Dawson, missing, police said in a news release. She told police that her husband picked up their son from her parents' home at 8:30 p.m. and said he was going hiking. She found his car parked in a lot along the trail in Boonsboro and told police she was concerned because her husband had been despondent lately.
South Africa: COVID-19 vaccine "magnetic fields" claims dismissed

The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Health has welcomed input from top global health experts, who have dismissed purported links between the COVID-19 vaccine and magnetic fields.

This follows a series of viral video footage on social media, where some individuals are seen placing metal coins on the arms of people who have recently been vaccinated against the virus.

This is in an apparent attempt to prove the purported presence of a magnet in the newly-injected arm.

Several international medical scientists have rejected these claims as scientifically improbable and false.

According to a report shared by World Health Organisation (WHO) affiliated group, Africa Infodemic Response Alliance (AIRA), COVID-19 vaccines do not contain magnetic microchips.

The report further declares that these social media posts are an absolute hoax, which should be viewed with the contempt it deserves, KZN Health MEC, Nomagugu Simelane, said.

In an article by Natalie Wade quoted in the same report, medical experts weigh in, saying these videos are nothing more than a conspiracy theory typical of disinformation about the novel Coronavirus, Simelane said.

The MEC welcomed the feedback from experts, saying it is very unfortunate that at a time when the world is in a war against the deadly epidemic, there are people invested in a misinformation campaign, which results in vaccine hesitancy.

This is certainly not what we need, and we call upon South Africans to consume and take seriously only news and reports that are from trusted sources such as WHO, as well as reputable and credible news sources, Simelane said.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2021-06-11. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Jacob & Co. is the first luxury watch and jewelry brand that will accept cryptocurrency as payment. It has partnered with crypto exchange company, CEX.IO, to provide the platform to accept purchases using Bitcoin, Ethereum and other verifiable digital currencies for Jacob & Co.s bold and innovative offerings, such as the Astronomia and Twin Turbo Furious timepieces and high jewels with exceptional gems and craftsmanship.



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The value of cryptocurrencies has skyrocketed in the 11 years that the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, began trading. The cryptocurrency market cap surpassed $2 trillion in April, doubling in value since February. Anissimov says the new currency is not only here to stay but is expanding into the consumer retail sector. There is a huge and growing community of people who use crypto and even earn their primary income in crypto. This offers a large audience for e-commerce companies. It is only logical that cryptocurrency is and will be expanding more into consumer retail. Accepting crypto as a payment can help expand market share for retailers and facilitate the transformation of the ecommerce at large.



In fact, Anissimov says, it has similarities with credit cards when it comes to public acceptance.



For Arabov, he sees this new financial frontier as another way to be in close contact with Jacob & Co. clients, many of whom are the cryptocurrency users.
ROME (AP)  Pope Francis has tapped a South Korean bishop to lead the Vatican office responsible for the worlds 400,000 Catholic priests, in the second major appointment of an Asian prelate to the Holy See during his papacy.

Monsignor Lazarus You Heung-sik, currently the bishop of Daejeon, replaces the retiring Cardinal Beniamino Stella as prefect of the Congregation for Clergy, the Vatican said Friday.

You's appointment follows Francis 2019 decision to bring Filipino Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle to Rome to head another important Vatican congregation, Propaganda Fide, which is responsible for the church in the so-called mission territories of Africa, Asia and elsewhere.

Asia is increasingly seen as the future of the Catholic Church. Along with Africa, it is the only region in the world where numbers of priests, seminarians and religious sisters have shown continual growth, amid steady declines in Europe and the Americas.

You, 69, accompanied Francis on his 2014 visit to South Korea, the first of several Asian pilgrimages the Argentine pope has made.

Recently Francis authorized a Vatican investigation into Stellas clergy office, presumably to be completed before the handover to his successor. In Friday's announcement, Francis told Stella, 79, to remain in his job until You is installed.

Its the second Vatican department Francis has subjected to an external assessment upon the retirement of its leader. Francis ordered an investigation into the Vaticans liturgy office that until recently was headed by conservative Cardinal Robert Sarah. Recently Francis tapped Sarah's No. 2, British Bishop Arthur Roche, to succeed the Guinean cardinal.

Francis has been overseeing a process of reform and financial transparency in the Holy See bureaucracy, leading up to the expected publication of a new governing constitution laying out the organization and mission of the Vatican's various departments.
SOMERS, Conn. (AP)  Connecticut has closed the maximum security prison that once housed the state's death row.

Gov. Ned Lamont announced Friday that the Northern Correctional Institution, the state's highest security prison, was taken out of service three weeks ahead of the state's target date of July 1. The decision to close the prison was announced in February.

Northern is the first of three prisons the Correction Department plans to shutter amid lower crime rates and an inmate population that has declined during the pandemic. The state has yet to name the other two.

The state's inmate population has been hovering around 9,000 in recent weeks, a drop of about 3,400 people over the last 15 months.

Northern, which was designed in pods to keep high-security inmates isolated, once housed more than 500 prisoners, but has not had more than 100 in over a year.

In February, a lawsuit filed on behalf of prisoners alleged the use of prolonged isolation and in-cell shackling was violating the rights of mentally ill inmates. This week the General Assembly passed legislation banning the use of solitary confinement in most cases and the use of certain restraints.

The last of Northern's inmates was transferred to other high-security settings on Monday, Lamont's office said.

Spending millions of dollars annually to operate facilities for a population that continues to get smaller and smaller is not a good use of resources, especially as we work to reduce the cost structure of state government, Lamont said.

There were no layoffs associated with the closure and the 175 workers who staffed Northern have been transferred to nearby prisons, Lamont's office said.

Northern opened in 1995 and the states death row was moved there the same year. The state abolished its death penalty in 2015 after having executed only one person  serial killer Michael Ross in 2005  since 1960.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)  Race-related tensions within the Southern Baptist Convention are high heading into a national meeting next week. The election of a new SBC president and debate over the concept of systemic racism may prove pivotal for some Black pastors as they decide whether to stay in the denomination or leave.

It could be a watershed moment for America's largest Protestant denomination. The SBC was founded before the Civil War as a defender of slavery, and only in 1995 did it formally apologize for that legacy  yet since 2000 its Black membership has been increasing while white membership declines.

Over the past year, however, several Black pastors have exited the SBC in frustration over what they see as racial insensitivity within its overwhelmingly white leadership.

Depending on the outcome at the meeting in Nashville, the exodus could swell  or subside. Many Black pastors are comfortable with the SBC's conservative theology and grateful for financial support, but do not want it to wade into conservative national politics or distance itself from the quest for racial justice.

The Rev. Nate Bishop of Forest Baptist Church near Louisville, Kentucky, said some members of his Black congregation want to leave the SBC while others want to stay, and he intends to assess the tenor and tone of deliberations in Nashville to guide his decisions.

Theres a bigger question going on  will there even be an SBC in the next five, 10, 15 years? Bishop said. Theres going to be a move away from this national organization. The only way forward is going to be if we reject the fear-mongering that's being projected day after day.

One of the SBCs most prominent Black pastors, Dwight McKissic of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, said his church will quit the SBC if either of two leading conservative candidates wins the presidency: Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, or Mike Stone, a pastor from Blackshear, Georgia, whose core supporters view Mohler as insufficiently conservative.

Both have made statements that Black Baptists would find anathema, regarding racial matters and politics, McKissic said via email. I could not proudly call myself a Southern Baptist if either of them wins.

He also criticized them for supporting tight restrictions on women's roles in the church, saying he and many other Black pastors favor letting women serve as assistant pastors or in other meaningful roles.

McKissic is endorsing a third candidate, white pastor Ed Litton of Redemption Church in Saraland, Alabama. Litton will be nominated by Fred Luter, a New Orleans-based pastor who in 2012 became the SBCs first and so far only Black president.

A crucial dividing line in the presidential election and for the SBC overall is the issue of critical race theory, a term used to describe critiques of systemic racism.

Last year Mohler and the five other SBC seminary presidents, all of them white, declared that critical race theory is incompatible with the SBCs Scripture-based theology.

The statement created friction far beyond SBC academia, particularly due to lack of Black involvement in its drafting. But Mohler hasn't budged from his repudiation of critical race theory, and Stone has harshly condemned the concept.

A resolution endorsed by Stone and many of his key allies, to be proposed at the meeting, denounces critical race theory as rooted in Neo-Marxist and postmodern worldviews. Stone's allies also will seek to rescind a 2019 resolution suggesting that critical race theory could be useful as an analytical tool.

McKissic said approval of any such measures might be another trigger for his exit.

Last December he, Litton and Luter were among the co-signers of a statement by a multiethnic group of Southern Baptists asserting that systemic racial injustice is a reality.

Some recent events have left many brothers and sisters of color feeling betrayed and wondering if the SBC is committed to racial reconciliation, the statement said.

Relatively few of the SBCs remaining Black pastors have echoed McKissics explicit threats to leave.

Luter, as part of a recent video series titled Why I Stay, said the sometimes-hostile environment within the SBC made it all the more important for Black pastors to stay and seek improvements. The Rev. Marshal Ausberry, who heads the SBC's association of Black churches, has urged respectful dialogue to resolve race-related differences.

Charles Jones, pastor of New Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Clute, Texas, has chosen to keep his small Black congregation in the Southern Baptists Texas affiliate  the Baptist General Convention of Texas  in part because of the opportunity for his church to support missionary programs.

Other churches have benefited from SBC ties for things like funding to construct a new building or the convention's ministry certification programs.

Jones considers the debate over critical race theory a distraction that lets people avoid serious discussions of social inequalities.

They dont want to talk about schools, about why ghettos are ghettos, Jones said. We debate theory after theory, and nothing gets done.

The debate flared last year just as the SBC was releasing statistics showing that African Americans have been a primary source of growth within the denomination since 2000, even as white membership steadily declined.

As of 2018 the SBC had about 907,000 African American members out of a total membership of 14.8 million, and roughly 3,900 predominantly Black congregations out of about 51,500.

Asian American and Hispanic participation also increased, prompting Ronnie Floyd, president of the SBC's Executive Committee, to hail Americas diversity as an amazing opportunity" for future growth.

The statistical report didn't say how many African American congregations are dually aligned with historically Black Baptist denominations. As self-governing entities, Baptist churches can choose which groups to affiliate with and decide how much or how little to participate and donate.

The Rev. Joel Bowman Sr., senior pastor of Temple of Faith Baptist Church in Louisville, said his African American church maintains ties to Southern Baptists at the state and local level, but plans to sever its nominal ties with the national convention.

The SBC to me is not currently a safe place for African Americans and other people of color, he said. There are probably a number of churches and pastors who would leave the SBC, but because theyre so financially tied to the denomination, theyre probably slower to leave.

Another Louisville pastor, Deryk Hayes of St. Paul Baptist Church @ Shively Heights, withdrew from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary this year. He cited a lack of respect for the Black church, including a decision to retain the names of its slaveholding founders on some seminary buildings.

From my perspective, these men arent heroic, Hayes said. They were practicing heresy.

Hayes said many Black pastors share the theological conservativism of their white counterparts, but not their politics.

The conservative resurgence is fine if its really about biblical inerrancy, he said. I think its about male white privilege and male white power.

John Onwuchekwa, pastor of Cornerstone Church in Atlanta, was a rising star in the SBC before breaking with it last year. Among his reasons: He didn't want to be held out as an example for other Black ministers to prove the SBC would be a good place for them.

Theres no doubt in my mind that there are good people in the SBC, Onwuchekwa said. But when opportunities arose to make major improvements in race relations, instead they take moderate baby steps to not offend the base.

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Smith reported from Pittsburgh and Crary from Carbondale, Colorado.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support from the Lilly Endowment through The Conversation U.S. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP)  Gov. Daniel McKee on Friday signed into law a new 20-year no-bid contract with International Game Technology and Bally's Corp. to run Rhode Island's gambling operations, the state's third largest source of revenue.

The deal boosts revenue, keeps jobs in the state and will spur development, he said at an open-air signing ceremony.

This legislation represents $250 million in economic development that includes securing 1,100 well-paying jobs right here in Rhode Island," the Democratic governor said.

IGT will keep and expand its 1,100-strong workforce in Rhode Island, and Bally's  formerly Twin River Holdings  will expand the Twin River Casino in Lincoln.

Ballys will pay the I-195 Commission for park renaming rights, and the companies are required to contribute at least $200,000 to problem-gambling programs.

The companies have also agreed to boost worker pay, a spokesperson said.

Republican lawmakers criticized the deal, saying it epitomizes backroom dealing, corporate welfare, and crony capitalism."

The legislation overpays IGT and Ballys by $800 million, they said, adding that the state is getting ripped off by accepting smaller percentages of table game and slot revenue than other states.

To protect taxpayers, Governor McKee should do the responsible thing and negotiate a better deal, they said.

The state would not have been able to get such a deal through a bidding process, Democratic President Dominick Ruggerio said.

IGT and Bally's had feuded in the past, but on January 2020 formed a partnership they said would maintain the states gambling revenue, enhance competitiveness with Massachusetts and Connecticut, and keep jobs in the state.

This is an economic development success story that Rhode Islands leaders should be proud of and should be able to say with confidence: Yes, we did this,'" said Jay Gendron head of lotteries for IGT.

The legislation is named after Ballys top executive in Rhode Island, Marc Crisafulli, who has been battling cancer.

It provided me such a boost, and gave me the positive energy I needed to take this on," he said.
UNITED NATIONS (AP)  Russia sparred with the European Union and the United States at a U.N. meeting Thursday that highlighted the strained relations between Moscow, Brussels and Washington.

Estonia, which holds the Security Council presidency this month, organized the meeting to focus on cooperation between the United Nations and the 27-nation European Union, inviting its foreign policy chief Josep Borrell to speak about the relationship and challenges to peace and security.

The council meeting came just ahead of this weekends summit of the Group of Seven major industrialized nations  which Russia was ousted from in 2014  and next weeks first meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Russias President Vladimir Putin, which comes as relations between Washington and Moscow have sunk to a post-Cold War low.

Borrell told the council in a virtual address that the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the fragility of our hyper-globalized and interdependent world.

The demand for multilateral solutions is much greater than the supply, he said, pointing to more divisions, more free-riding and more distrust than the world can afford.

We need global cooperation based on agreed rules because the alternative is the law of the jungle, where problems dont get solved, he said. Every day we see the cost of the absence of multilateral action in reduced access to vaccines and insufficient climate action, and peace and security crises that fester.

Borrell blamed the rise in power politics and ideological contests that erode trust, stressing the EUs commitment to the U.N. and to rules-based multilateralism. He said there must be pushback against selective and self-serving approaches to multilateralism.

Russias deputy ambassador Dmitry Polyansky strongly disagreed with Borrell's view of the world.

EU-UN cooperation should lead to strengthening multilateral approaches to global affairs, he said, but the EU more often chooses destructive unilateral approaches over careful and patient collective work seeking compromise and constructive solutions.

True multilateralism entails consistent support for the central role of the United Nations, he said. Promoting dubious concepts like the `rules-based order or imposing bloc approaches and attempts to present ones own experience and achievements as a golden standard which other countries should implement back at home -- all of it bears no resemblance to multilateralism and often leads to blatant interference in the affairs of other states.

Unfortunately, Polyansky said, EU-Russian relations are currently at the lowest ebb in history.

He warned the European bloc against interfering in other countries affairs including by taking action against Belarus, a close Moscow ally.

Borrell sharply criticized the massive repression of peaceful protesters after last Augusts presidential elections in Belarus, which were widely seen as rigged, and the recent major attack on air safety, when a civilian aircraft was diverted to its capital and a prominent journalist and his girlfriend were taken off and arrested.

The EUs chief diplomat said the bloc has closed its airspace to Belarus airlines and is in the process of adopting a new package of economic sanctions.

Borrell also alluded to sharp differences with Moscow over Syria, where its close ally Russia holds the key to continued cross-border delivery of humanitarian aid to millions in need, and in Ukraine, where Borrell called Russia a party to the conflict in the east and urged Moscow to take a constructive stance to implement the Minsk peace plan.

Elsewhere, Polyansky questioned the EUs naval operation in the Mediterranean to implement the U.N. arms embargo on Libya, urging it to tread very carefully in this region. He said Russia also believes the EU can do better as a mediator between Kosovo and Serbia, which has close ties to Moscow. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, a decade after a brutal war between separatist ethnic Albanian rebels and Serb forces.

Polyansyky warned the EU that it intends to more adamantly and uncompromisingly fight against what he said was the bloc's promotion of its own approaches on gender, human rights, climate and other topics in U.N. documents as allegedly universal and consensus-based.

U.S. political coordinator Rodney Hunter affirmed the U.S.-EU partnership, saying it is built on shared values and the pursuit of trans-Atlantic prosperity and security. He also unequivocally affirmed the EUs role as a crucial partner to the United Nations, particularly in the Security Councils efforts to maintain peace and security in the world.

At the same time, Hunter was sharply critical of Russia, saying its actions in Ukraine including the occupation of Crimea, remain a threat to European security. He stressed U.S. and EU unwavering support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine and of Georgia, where Russian forces occupy the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions.

We will continue to stand with our allies and partners in calling on Russia to immediately cease its evolving military, economic, diplomatic and disinformation efforts to destabilize Ukraine and Georgia, Hunter said, adding that the U.S. also supports EU actions against Belarus.

Polyansky ended his remarks saying he didnt want everyone to think that Russia has a negative attitude to the EU. This isnt the case, he said, pointing to the EU's role coordinating meetings of parties to the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six major powers, which we highly value.

Borrell said the EU is working non-stop and making progress on getting the United States back in the nuclear deal, sanctions lifted against Iran, and a return to the agreements limits on Irans nuclear activities.

Negotiations are intense and slow on a number of issues, including on the precise sequencing of steps, he said. Theres still a lot of work to be done.

Polyansky said there are other areas in addition to the Iran nuclear deal where Russia and the EU cooperate successfully.

Most importantly, the EU should understand that there is no place for hegemony and dominance in the modern world, he said.
LEESBURG, Va. (AP)  A northern Virginia school system plans to appeal a judge's order to reinstate a suspended gym teacher who spoke at a school board meeting against a proposal requiring that transgender students be addressed by their preferred pronouns.

WTOP-FM reports that Loudoun County Public Schools said in a statement Friday that it respectfully disagrees with the decision and will appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court of Virginia.

Many students and parents at Leesburg Elementary have expressed fear, hurt and disappointment about coming to school, the statement said. While it respects the rights of public-school employees to free speech and free exercise of religion, those rights do not outweigh the rights of students to be educated in a supportive and nurturing environment.

Loudoun County Circuit Court Judge James Plowman ruled Tuesday that teacher Tanner Cross was exercising his right to free speech when he told the board he could not abide by the proposal based on his religious beliefs. His order required Cross immediate reinstatement until a full trial is held.

Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group, sued the county school board last week and filed for an emergency injunction on behalf of Cross, a teacher at Leesburg Elementary. Cross was suspended after a May 25 school board meeting where he said that he could not abide by proposed rules that would require teachers to address transgender students by their chosen gender.

Im a teacher, but I serve God first. And I will not affirm that a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa because it is against my religion. Its lying to a child. Its abuse to a child, Cross said at the hearing.

The school board is considering the new regulations in conjunction with a state mandate requiring all school systems to update their policies on transgender students. The model regulations circulated by the state include a requirement that students be addressed by their preferred pronouns.

The state law gives the school board no leeway on implementing the policy and existing school board regulations already prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, which includes referring to transgender children by their preferred pronoun, according to Stacy Haney, a lawyer representing the school system. That means Cross was articulating a defiance to follow existing school policies, she said.

The school system also argued Cross was suspended because his remarks caused a disruption at the school, not expressing his beliefs.

A disruption of that magnitude didn't justify punishing a teacher for exercising his free speech rights, Cross lawyer, Tyson Langhofer of the ADF, argued last week. Plowman agreed.

The opinion was a well-reasoned application of these facts to clearly established law,  Langhofer said in a statement.

We are confident that, if the Virginia Supreme Court hears the appeal, it will affirm the circuit courts decision, Langhofer said.
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP)  State senators blocked the leader of the state's affordable housing agency from keeping his job amid allegations he sexually harassed an employee.

Louisiana Housing Corporation Executive Director Keith Cunningham was among four people who didn't receive Senate confirmation on Thursday before the legislative session ended. Senators don't talk publicly about their confirmation decisions.
JOHANNESBURG (AP)  South Africa said Friday it has finalized an extradition treaty with United Arab Emirates that would allow it to bring back members of an Indian family accused of involvement in high-level state corruption to face trial.

Brothers Ajay, Atul and Rajesh Gupta are believed to be living in Dubai after hastily leaving South Africa around the same time former President Jacob Zuma resigned in 2018 amid allegations he had overseen massive levels of corruption at state-owned companies.

The Guptas are accused of using their association with Zuma to cash in on huge government contracts and kickbacks, and were believed to be so influential they had a say in Zuma's appointment of Cabinet ministers.

The U.S. Treasury Department placed the three Gupta brothers on a sanctions list in 2019, accusing them of being members of a significant corruption network. That forbids U.S entities from conducting business with them or handling their assets.

Zuma was president from 2009 until he was forced to step down by his African National Congress Party amid the graft scandal. He is currently on trial for corruption related to another huge government contract before he was president, while his allegedly corrupt relationship with the Guptas is being investigated in an ongoing commission of inquiry in South Africa.

Witnesses at the inquiry have testified how the Guptas' Johannesburg mansion became a meeting place for senior government ministers and bosses of state-owned companies during the Zuma years, and those officials sometimes left with bags of money.

South African Justice Minister Ronald Lamola said Friday the process of extraditing the Guptas could become a lengthy legal battle.

We should not expect that the people of interest will board a plane to South Africa first thing tomorrow morning, he said.

The extradition treaty will come into effect on July 10, Lamola said.

South Africa's National Prosecuting Authority has approached Interpol to assist in the execution of arrest warrants for the Guptas.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP)  The president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Executive Committee said Friday it is contracting an outside firm to investigate its actions amid accusations that top denominational leaders mishandled sex abuses cases, despite calls from some critics for a more independent probe.

Ronnie Floyd announced the hiring of international consulting company Guidepost Solutions to review the allegations made by Russell Moore, who resigned last month as president of the denomination's influential Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

In letters to SBC officials that became public, Moore accused Floyd and Mike Stone, who at the time was chairman of the Executive Committee, of trying to stall efforts to hold churches accountable for their handling of abuse cases and of seeking to intimidate and retaliate against those who advocated on the issue.

Floyd and Stone, who is now a candidate to become president of the SBC, have denied those claims. On Thursday a former assistant to Moore released clandestinely recorded audio clips from meetings with Floyd and Stone to bolster Moore's allegations.

Guidepost will be tasked with reviewing the allegations and providing training for the committee.

Rachael Denhollander, an attorney and prominent advocate for fellow abuse survivors who has been urging an independent investigation, called Guidepost a highly qualified firm, well able to do the job."

But she cautioned that the company must have free rein in its investigation including access to materials that might otherwise be shielded under attorney-client privilege, and she said the full findings must be released publicly.

The announcement comes as more than 16,000 delegates are expected at the SBC's annual meeting next week in Nashville, the largest gathering of the country's biggest Protestant denomination in a quarter-century, and amid controversies over sexual abuse, race and the role of women in ministry.

Two pastors have planned to propose at the meeting that the SBC create a task force to pick an independent investigator, an idea that has won prominent endorsements.

One of the proponents, Tennessee pastor Grant Gaines, said Friday that the announcement by Floyd is a step in the right direction but he plans to go forward with the idea. The task force should comprise Southern Baptists and sexual abuse experts to do the hiring and oversight and should be responsible for reporting findings to the denomination and the public, he said.

"At the end of the day, we do not believe the Executive Committee should be trusted to hold themselves accountable, Gaines said.

A similar sentiment was expressed by Christa Brown, a longtime advocate for fellow survivors of abuse within Southern Baptist churches. She has called for an even more independent commission composed of people not affiliated with the denomination and with a mandate to hear and report on cases of abuse and cover-up.

So long as (the Executive Committee) controls purse strings, Id expect problems, Brown said.

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Smith reported from Pittsburgh.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support from the Lilly Endowment through The Conversation U.S. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP)  Overnight summer camps will be allowed in all 50 states this season, but COVID-19 rules and a pandemic labor crunch mean that many fewer young campers will attend, and those who do will have to observe coronavirus precautions for the second consecutive year.

The Southeast is the first region to kick off camps this month, with other parts of the country to follow in July.

Camp might look a little different, but camp is going to look a lot better in 2021 than it did in 2020, when it didnt happen, said Matt Norman of Atlanta, who is getting ready to send his 12-year-old daughter to camp.

Even though most camps will be open, reduced capacity necessitated by COVID-19 restrictions and the labor shortage will keep numbers well below a normal threshold of about 26 million summer campers, said Tom Rosenberg of the American Camp Association.

Across the country, many camps face competition for counselors in a tight job market. Traditional recruitment tactics like job fairs on college campuses have been canceled.

Its been hard to get people to work, said Josh Nelson, at Glorieta Adventure Camp, a facility in pine-covered foothills outside Santa Fe, New Mexico.

A group of Glorieta camp staffers started their orientation by rolling up their sleeves and getting vaccinated in an area between the mess hall and the water slides. But many campers are too young to get the shots because the vaccines have not been approved for children under 12.

That means this year's camp experience will still involve many of the same prevention practices that were adopted at the small number of camps that operated last year. Those measures include grouping kids in cohorts, mandating masks, emphasizing social distancing  and lots of hand washing. Some states, like Vermont, are offering free virus testing for campers.

At an all-girls camp called Fernwood in Maine, about 200 of the 300 counselors and campers will be vaccinated by the time the six-week term starts.

Going into it, its a much better scenario for us. Because instead of being worried about 300 people, were worried about 100 people, Fernwood Director Fritz Seving said.

Norman plans to send daughter Jane Ellen to Camp Illahee in Brevard, North Carolina, and he's glad the camp is encouraging vaccinations.

Jane Ellen agreed and said the focus on vaccines is a good idea.

If most people are vaccinated, the more people can go, she said.

Back at Glorieta, staff arrived in May from Oklahoma, Texas and a college town in Mexico called Puebla, where an in-person recruiting fair took place. They have been training on safety protocols, including virus protection, zip lining and life guarding.

The camp is running at one-third capacity  1,100 out of 3,000 slots are filled  and staff will be grouped in pods. Kids are expected to wear masks, even outdoors, except when the are eating meals or in their sleeping dorm.

More than 90% of the staff agreed to be vaccinated, but there was no mandate for vaccinations.

Even with those limitations, the outlook is much better than last year, when camp was canceled and 80% of the staff was laid off by March, Nelson said. Federal Paycheck Protection Program loans helped but didnt alleviate all of the financial pain, he said.

Rosenberg said camp is more important than ever in terms of providing normalcy for kids who have dealt with remote learning, canceled events and boredom at home, not to mention health worries.

Kids have been traumatized. Theyve had some real academic losses. We still havent talked enough about the social and emotional learning losses," he said.

Camp will let them practice engaging peer to peer and offer a chance to "to try new activities, take positive risks and be out in nature, and sort of regain some of the humanity theyve lost over the past year.

Last year, about 19.5 million kids missed out on camp, but most of the overnight camps that opened operated successfully. There were a few notable outbreaks. More than 250 people were infected at a camp in Georgia, and more than 80 infected at a camp in Missouri.

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Sharp reported from Portland, Maine. Associated Press Writer Patrick Whittle in Portland also contributed to this report. Attanasio is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues. Follow him on Twitter.
ALGIERS, Algeria (AP)  A politician and a journalist who are prominent opposition figures in Algeria have been arrested days ahead of the country's parliamentary election, according to a group of lawyers defending jailed activists of the pro-democracy movement.

The National Committee for the Liberation of the Detained said politician Karim Tabbou was arrested Thursday night at his home in the southwestern suburbs of Algiers.

Tabbou is a very popular activist with the pro-democracy Hirak movement. He previously was imprisoned from September 2019 to July 2020, and spent more than a month under judicial supervision, which prohibited him from engaging in any political activity.

The decision followed a complaint for assault filed by the president of the National Council of Human Rights, a government-related body.

An Algerian court sentenced Tabbou in November to a one-year suspended prison sentence for inciting violence and damaging the image of the military. A ruling in his appeal is expected on June 19.

The lawyers' group said police also had detained journalist Ihsane El Kadi for questioning at the Antar police station since Thursday night. El Kadi is the director of online news site Maghreb Emergent and Radio M, which gives voice to opposition members. He also is an activist in the pro-democracy movement.

Algerian Communication Minister Ammar Belhimer accused El Kadi of divulgating information likely to be detrimental to the national unity. El Kadi was placed under judicial supervision on May 18 with orders to present himself at a police station once a week. His passport was confiscated.

On Saturday, Algeria is set to hold its first legislative election since former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was forced from office in 2019 after 20 years in power.

Hirak supporters have vowed to boycott the election, which President Abdelmadjid Tebboune called as part of his pledge to tackle corruption and build a new Algeria, as they denounce a crackdown on opposition and increased repression of protests.
AP

GENEVA (AP)  The U.N. human rights chief is warning of a military buildup in parts of Myanmar and rising violence, with the army using heavy weapons against armed groups as well as civilian targets, including Christian churches.

Michelle Bachelet said more than 108,000 people have fled their homes in eastern Kayah state in the last three weeks, and her office cited credible reports that security forces have shelled civilian homes and churches and blocked access for humanitarian aid.
HONOLULU (AP)  Two Hawaii health department inspectors showed up at a home unannounced after a complaint and found it was operating an adult care facility without a license, leading to a fine of more than $800,000.

The $828,000 fine against Island Promise Homes LLC announced Thursday is part of a larger effort in recent years to rein in an industry that has skirted health and safety regulations, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported.
SAN DIEGO (AP)  The Biden administration said Friday it has dismantled a Trump-era government office to help victims of crimes committed by immigrants, a move that symbolizes President Joe Biden's rejection of former President Donald Trump's repeated efforts to link immigrants to crime.

Trump created the Victim Of Immigration Crime Engagement Office, known by its acronym VOICE, by executive order during his first week in office in January 2017.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it was replacing VOICE with a "more comprehensive and inclusive victim support system.

VOICE will be replaced by The Victims Engagement and Services Line, which will combine longstanding existing services, such as methods for people to report abuse and mistreatment in immigration detention centers and a notification system for lawyers and others with a vested interest in immigration cases.

The new office will add a service for potential recipients of visas designated for victims of human trafficking or violent crimes in the United States.

Providing assistance to societys most vulnerable is a core American value. All people, regardless of their immigration status, should be able to access victim services without fear, said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Stephen Miller, a key architect of Trumps immigration policies, called the decision to close VOICE a moral stain on the conscience of our nation."

He likened the new office to the Drug Enforcement Administration opening a call center to help drug dealers get lawyers and amnesty for their crimes."

The Department of Homeland Security is a law enforcement agency, not a legal help center for criminals and lawbreakers," Miller said.

Jon Feere, an ICE official during the Trump administration, said he referred a man to VOICE whose sister was killed by an intoxicated driver and that the office helped families understand the status of immigration cases.

The change of tone regarding immigration has been striking between the two administrations.

While studies suggest immigrants are less likely to commit crime than native-born, Trump relentlessly sought to establish a link. He launched his 2016 presidential campaign by portraying Mexicans in the country illegally as violent criminals and frequently highlighted the MS-13 gang, which was started by Salvadoran immigrants.

To advance his immigration agenda, Trump invited angel families  people whose loved ones had been victims of crimes by immigrants  to campaign rallies and high-profile speeches.

Trump's office for victims of violent crimes appears to have had little impact.

Its most recent quarterly report posted online for the last three months of 2018 said it fielded 781 calls during the three-month period  and that just 256 of the calls pertained to services it offered. About half were requests on the status of immigration cases, and many of the rest were referrals for assistance, such as social services to help cope with impacts of domestic violence or assault.

The office was used as a platform by the Trump administration to promote a link between immigrants and crime.

Ive had to hold the hand of too many mothers who lost a child to a DUI or somebody else whos been raped by an illegal alien or someone with a nexus to immigration, Barbara Gonzalez, the then-director of VOICE, told reporters in October 2019. It is a problem we cannot ignore as a country.

In April, the Biden administration ordered U.S. officials to avoid using terms like illegal alien and instead use the phrase undocumented noncitizen.

Vice President Kamala Harris drew strong criticism from some of the administration's pro-immigration allies for telling would-be migrants during a visit to Guatemala on Monday, Do not come ... Do not come," and that they would be denied entry at the U.S. border with Mexico.

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Associated Press writer Julie Watson contributed to this report.
DETROIT (AP)  In a reversal from Trump administration policies, U.S. auto safety regulators say they will move to require or set standards for automatic emergency braking systems on new heavy trucks.

The Department of Transportation, which includes the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, announced the change Friday when it released its spring regulatory agenda.

It also will require what it said are rigorous testing standards for autonomous vehicles, and set up a national database to document automated-vehicle crashes.

The moves by the administration of President Joe Biden run counter to the agency's stance under President Donald Trump. NHTSA had resisted regulation of automated-vehicle systems, saying it didn't want to stand in the way of potential life-saving developments. Instead it relied on voluntary safety plans from manufacturers.

NHTSA had proposed a regulation on automatic emergency braking in 2015 before Trump took office, but it languished in the regulatory process. The agency says it has been studying use of the electronic systems, and it plans to publish a proposed rule in the Federal Register in April of next year. When a regulation is published, it opens the door to public comment.

We are glad to see NHTSA finally take the next step in making large trucks safer by mandating AEB," said Jason Levine, director of the Center for Auto Safety, which was among the groups that petitioned for the requirement in 2015. Unfortunately, at this rate, it will still be years until the technology that could help stop the 5,000 truck crash deaths on our roads is required, he said in an email.

A trade group representing independent big rig drivers says the technology isn't ready for heavy vehicles and can unexpectedly activate without reason.

Our members have also reported difficulties operating vehicles in inclement weather when the system is engaged, which has created safety concerns, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association said in a statement.

The association says that while the technology is still being perfected, legislators and regulators shouldn't set time frames for requiring it on all trucks.

However, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a research group supported by auto insurers, found in a study last year that automatic emergency braking and forward collision warnings could prevent more than 40% of crashes in which semis rear-end other vehicles. A study by the group found that when rear crashes happened, the systems cut speeds by more than half, reducing damage and injuries.

Cathy Chase, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, another group that sought the regulation from NHTSA in 2015, said the agency is moving too slowly by not publishing the regulation until next year.

I don't understand the delay, she said. I know that might sound impatient, but when people are dying on the roads, 5,000 people are dying on the roads each year, and we have proven solutions, we would like to see more immediate action, she said.

In 2016, NHTSA brokered a deal with 20 automakers representing 99% of U.S. new passenger vehicle sales to voluntarily make automatic emergency braking standard on all models by Sept. 1, 2022. But that deal did not apply to big rigs.

The announcement of the requirements comes two days after four people were killed when a milk tanker going too fast collided with seven passenger vehicles on a Phoenix freeway. At least nine people were injured.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates crashes and makes recommendations to stop them from happening, said Thursday it would send a nine-person team to investigate the Phoenix crash. The agency said it would look at whether automatic emergency braking in the truck would have mitigated or prevented the crash.

Since at least 2015 the NTSB has recommended automatic emergency braking or collision alerts be standard on vehicles.

At present, there are no federal requirements that semis have forward collision warning or automatic emergency braking, even though the systems are becoming common on smaller passenger vehicles.

The systems use cameras and sometimes radar to see objects in front of a vehicle, and they either warn the driver or slow and even stop the vehicle if its about to hit something.
In Tennessee and North Carolina, demand for the COVID-19 vaccine has slowed down so much that they have given millions of doses back to the federal government, even though less than half of their total populations are vaccinated.

Oklahoma has not asked for new doses from the government for more than a month, spurning its 200,000-a-week allotment. Around the country, states are rushing to use up doses before they expire this summer.

The U.S. is confronted with an ever-growing surplus of coronavirus vaccine, looming expiration dates and stubbornly lagging demand at a time when the developing world is clamoring for doses to stem a rise in infections.

Million-dollar prizes, free beer and marijuana, raffled-off hunting rifles and countless other giveaways around the country have failed to significantly move the needle on vaccine hesitancy, raising the specter of new outbreaks.

The stockpiles are becoming more daunting each week. Oklahoma has more than 700,000 doses on shelves but is administering only 4,500 a day and has 27,000 Pfizer and Moderna doses that are set to expire at the end of the month.

Millions of Johnson & Johnson doses nationwide were set to expire this month before the government extended their dates by six weeks, but some leaders acknowledge it will be difficult to use them up even by then.

We really cannot let doses expire. That would be a real outrage, given the need to get vaccines to some under-vaccinated communities in the U.S. and the glaring gap in vaccinations and the inequity of vaccinations that we have globally, said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, chair of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco.

The U.S. averaged about 870,000 new injections per day at the end of last week, down sharply from a high of about 3.3 million a day on average in mid-April, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

President Joe Biden wants to have 70% of the adult U.S. population at least partially vaccinated by July 4. But the U.S. could well fail to meet that target. As of Friday, 64% of Americans 18 and older had had at least one dose, by the CDC's count.

Some states, especially in the Northeast, have already reached that 70% goal for adults, while places like Mississippi and Alabama are nowhere close. Mississippi, in fact, has been transferring large quantities of vaccine to other states and the federal government.

Amid the glut, the White House has announced plans to share 80 million doses globally by the end of June and also buy 500 million more doses of the Pfizer vaccine and donate them to 92 lower-income countries and the African Union over the next year.

With demand stronger in Maine and Rhode Island, the two states received 32,400 doses each from Mississippi, where only about one-third of the state is at least partially vaccinated. Mississippi has also transferred 800,000 doses to a federal vaccine pool. The state has seen demand plunge to levels not seen since the opening weeks of the vaccine rollout, with only 18,400 doses administered there this week.

Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs said Friday that the state health department was more than happy to help states in the Northeast.

In Mississippi, if people dont understand how important it is to keep alive, we want to protect other Americans, he said.

Each week, states are allotted a number of doses from the government and are allowed to order shots from that. But more states, including Oklahoma, Alabama, Utah, Delaware and New Hampshire, have stopped placing orders for new doses in recent weeks because they have such a large inventory. That has added to the ballooning federal stockpile.

Those skipping the vaccine include Benjamin Schlink of Pearl, Mississippi, who said he believes he is healthy enough to fight the illness.

The way I look at it, I dont worry about it, because God is in control, he said. If God wants you to have it, youll have it.

Gayle Charnley, 69, said some of her neighbors in the small town think she should get the shot, but she is not planning on it. Theyre just forcing them on people as fast as they can get them, and we dont know what the long-term effects are going to be, she said.

Hundreds of millions of vaccine doses have been administered around the world with intense safety monitoring, and few serious risks have been identified.

Some of the demand slowdown is a natural part of the rollout process. In Massachusetts, 68% of people have a first dose and the mass vaccination sites are shutting down as officials shift to harder-to-reach places, such as drug treatment centers.

Demand has been especially low for the J&J vaccine, a one-shot, easy-to-store formula that held great promise because of its convenience but whose rollout has been hurt by links to a rare blood clot disorder and contamination problems at a Baltimore factory.

Bibbins-Domingo said that with many parts of the world desperate for doses, the U.S. has a moral obligation not to waste the J&J formula, which is especially useful in remote areas, among people who are homeless and in rural communities.

At all costs, we need to make sure that those doses get to people who can use them." she said.

In West Virginia, demand has nearly dropped off completely for the J&J vaccine. About 42% of the total population there has gotten at least one dose.

That's in spite of a sweepstakes raffling off everything from cash to hunting rifles to pickup trucks. When Ohio kicked off a trend of million-dollar prize drawings a few weeks ago, officials saw a robust 43% increase in vaccination numbers  but only for the first week.

In North Carolina, $25 cash cards helped bring people to vaccine clinics, but even so, the state isn't ordering any new doses from the government for the second week in a row.

Instead, the state has given back 1.2 million doses. In Tennessee, 2.4 million have been returned to the federal pool. It's a disappointing development to William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University's medical school in Nashville.

If the governor is not making an impassioned plea  and ours hasn't  then I look to local leaders of every kind, he said.

In Colorado, which has given over 175,000 back to the federal pool, there's a million-dollar lottery, and drag queens have begun beckoning people at clinics during Pride Month. In New Mexico, the nations biggest lottery grand prize, $5 million, halted a downward trend in vaccinations and may have even caused a slight improvement, officials said. Washington state allowed marijuana stores to offer free joints this week.

While incentive programs may not have sent vaccination rates soaring, they are still a worthwhile tool for states working through the difficult last mile of a marathon, said Dr. Nirav Shah, head of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention and president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers.

About one-quarter of the hundreds of people who responded to North Carolina's cash-card giveaway said it was key to their decision to get the shot that day.

If states are able to prevent chains of transmission that would have otherwise landed people in the ICU on a ventilator, missing weeks of work, keeping their family out of school, if we can avoid a handful of those incidents, then these programs will have been worth it, Shah said.

Several states aren't ordering new vaccines from the government, including Alabama, Delaware, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Utah, and Oklahoma. Other states, such as Iowa and Nevada, are still ordering new doses but in dramatically reduced amounts.

Still, Shah said the nation's vaccine rollout is moving much more quickly than he expected, and he welcomed efforts to expand distribution to hard-pressed regions like Africa.

One of the things that the pandemic has illustrated is that we are not safe, as a state, as a country, as a globe, until everywhere is safe, he said. We should be doing our part to vaccinate everyone in the globe."

___

Associated Press writers around the country contributed to this report.
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP)  The federal government announced plans Friday to repeal or replace a decision by the Trump administration last fall to lift restrictions on logging and road building in a southeast Alaska rainforest that provides habitat for wolves, bears and salmon.

Conservationists cheered the announcement as a positive step. Republican Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy criticized it and vowed to use every tool available to push back.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's plans were announced on a federal regulatory site with little detail. They were described as consistent with a January executive order from President Joe Biden that called for reviewing agency actions during the Trump administration that could be at odds with Biden's environmental priorities. The U.S. Forest Service falls under the Agriculture Department.

The Tongass National Forest is the countrys largest national forest. In a statement, Matt Herrick, an Agriculture Department spokesperson, said the Trump administration decision did not align with the overwhelming majority of public opinion across the country and among Alaskans.

Future decisions about the role of the Tongass National Forest should continue to reflect the best interests of Alaskans and the country as a whole, Herrick said.

The statement did not outline the next steps the Agriculture Department would take to repeal or replace the Trump administration decision.

The Agriculture Department last October decided to exempt the Tongass from the so-called roadless rule, which prohibited road construction and timber harvests with limited exceptions. The roadless rule, dating to 2001, has long been the subject of litigation.

In 2018, Alaska under then-Gov. Bill Walker, an independent, asked the federal government to consider an exemption. Dunleavy supported the request, as have members of Alaskas Republican congressional delegation.

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska's senior senator, said the Trump administration, through the Forest Service and Agriculture Department, put considerable work and effort into the final rule and now the Biden administration is literally throwing it all away."

We need to end this yo-yo effect as the lives of Alaskans who live and work in the Tongass are upended every time we have a new President. This has to end, she said in a statement.

U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan called the decision misguided, and U.S. Rep Don Young said it was yet another nail in the coffin for economic opportunity in southeast Alaska. The region, heavily reliant on tourism, was hard-hit by the pandemic last year.

The congressional delegation, in a statement, said the exemption is needed to restore balance in federal management on the Tongass. Sullivan has said the roadless rule is a hindrance to activities such as mineral development, building energy projects and connecting communities.

The Biden administration earlier this month suspended oil and gas leases in Alaskas Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, following a January lease sale that drew a tepid response. A law passed by Congress in 2017 called for two lease sales to be held.

But U.S. government attorneys also have defended a decision made during the Trump administration to approve a major oil project on Alaskas North Slope that Alaska political leaders have supported.

The Agriculture Department in its decision about the Tongass National Forest last fall concluded that a policy change for the forest could be made without major adverse impacts to the recreation, tourism and fishing industries, while providing benefits to the timber and mining industries, increasing opportunities for community infrastructure, and eliminating unnecessary regulations.

More than 9 million of the Tongass' roughly 16.7 million acres are considered roadless areas, according to a federal environmental review last year. The majority of the Tongass is in a natural condition, and the forest is one of the largest relatively intact temperate rainforests in the world, the review said.

Meredith Trainor, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, said those who supported keeping the roadless rule provisions in place for the Tongass heartily encourage the administration to put this thing to bed by repealing the Trump rule once and for all.

Josh Hicks, senior campaign manager with The Wilderness Society, in a statement said forests are highly effective at sequestering carbon and, if left standing, are one of the strongest natural solutions to combating the climate crisis.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Fully vaccinated members of Congress and staffers will no longer have to wear masks on the House floor and in committee rooms, the Office of the Attending Physician said Friday, delighting some GOP lawmakers who have been chafing at the mask-wearing requirements.

The new protocol came nearly a month after vaccinated Americans were told they could ditch their masks, and just days before House lawmakers were set to return to Washington following three weeks in their home districts. Before they left, some Republicans invited fines by not wearing a mask on the House floor.

One of those lawmakers, Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., tweeted Friday in a dig at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: PELOSI CAVES. FREEDOM PREVAILS.

Another, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, tweeted: Excellent news! I have been urging the House to lead by example and all fully vaccinated Members to go without masks since April. Great to see the House is FINALLY listening to the science.

Both of the GOP lawmakers had been fined $500 last month for failing to wear a mask on the House floor. Democrats said they were hoping to ditch their masks, too, but wanted their GOP colleagues to get vaccinated first.

Friction over the Houses mask-wearing requirements increased after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new guidelines last month, saying its safe for fully vaccinated people to skip face coverings and social distancing in virtually all situations.

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., sought to get the Office of the Attending Physician to update its guidance for mask wearing, but Democrats defeated it along a party-line vote of 218-210. The physician's office is the medical unit of Congress.

Dr. Brian P. Monahan, head of the medical office, said in Friday's memo that the relaxed requirements for those who have been vaccinated stem from a continuous reduction of coronavirus community spread. He also said that face coverings would still be required for those who are not fully vaccinated and for vaccination-indeterminate individuals.

He noted that about 43% of Americans are fully vaccinated and 52% have received at least one dose. Congressional community vaccination rates are generally much higher but vary between Offices and Agencies, he wrote.

There is no requirement for wearing masks in the Senate chamber.
NEW ORLEANS (AP)  For the second year in a row, organizers have canceled a Halloween weekend music festival in New Orleans.

Last years Voodoo Music and Arts Experience was among many festivals around the world canceled last year because of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.

A brief message posted Thursday on the festival's website didn't say why there wont be one this October. People who have already bought tickets will be emailed about options to use them in 2022 or get refunds, it said.

As our city reopens with an abundance of events to reconnect with, we look forward to holding our reunion when we can fully embrace the Voodoo experience, the statement said.

With Louisiana's pandemic restrictions over, other festivals are coming back. French Quarter Festivals Inc. announced weeks ago that its Satchmo Summerfest would take place July 31-Aug. 1. On Thursday it released the lineup for the city's first post-pandemic in-person festival.

The Essence Festival of Culture, which was online last year, plans a hybrid festival June 25-27 and July 2-4.

Several spring festivals announced during the winter that they would be held in the fall. The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, usually the last weekend in April and the first in May, will be Oct. 8-17.

It will be bracketed by the French Quarter Festival, Sept. 30-Oct. 3, and Buku: Planet B on Oct. 22-23. The French Quarter Festival is usually in April and the Buku Music + Arts Project in March.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Faced with a #MeToo reckoning, the FBI says it is getting serious about sexual harassment in its ranks, starting a 24/7 tip line, doing more to help accusers and taking a tougher stand against agents found to have committed misconduct.

The changes follow Associated Press reporting last year that found a series of sexual assault and harassment allegations against senior officials who were allowed to quietly avoid discipline and retire or transfer even after the claims were substantiated.

FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate told the AP that the bureau is sending its strongest message ever that employees who are tempted to engage in sexual misconduct should be scared because if they do so, were coming for them.

Thats a strong approach, a forceful shift and we mean it. And its coming from the top, Abbate said. Individuals who engage in this type of misconduct dont belong in the FBI and they certainly should not have supervisory oversight of others. Period.

Among the changes FBI officials detailed to AP in a series of recent interviews was a round-the-clock tip line that provides a centralized mechanism to report abuse, though they would not say how many calls it has received. They also cited a working group of senior executives to review policies and procedures on harassment and victim support, and faster action to investigate allegations and fire or at least demote employees found to have engaged in misconduct to ensure they have no path to management.

To address chronic concerns that the FBI makes it difficult and intimidating for victims to come forward, the bureau is more broadly spreading the word in online and internal communications about where victimized employees can report allegations. And the FBIs Victim Services Division, which until recently had focused on aiding victims of federal crimes outside the bureau, has been extending the same level of support to employees who are victims of internal misconduct.

Advocates of combating sexual abuse greeted the bureaus changes with skepticism, calling them long overdue  coming years after the advent of the #MeToo movement  and unlikely to affect lasting change.

Everyone has gone through this, including the military, and the bureau has managed to skate, said Jane Turner, a former longtime FBI agent who in 1983 became the first woman named head of an FBI resident agency.

Until the FBI charges these people and throws them in jail  or at least out of the FBI  and the message gets out that you cant do this, it wont stop, said Turner, who now works with the National Whistleblower Center. Its going to take a total cultural shift.

FBI officials insist sexual misconduct allegations involve a narrow segment of the roughly 35,000-member workforce. But the cases that have been identified  by the AP and also by the Justice Departments internal watchdog  have exposed accountability gaps and startlingly bad behavior.

An AP investigation last year found that several senior FBI officials have avoided discipline  quietly transferring or retiring with full benefits  even after claims of sexual misconduct against them were substantiated.

That includes James Hendricks, the former top agent in Albany, New York, who was alleged to have sexually harassed eight female subordinates, including by asking one to have sex in a conference room. An assistant director also retired after he was accused of drunkenly groping a female colleague in a stairwell.

Those incidents come on top of a class-action lawsuit alleging systemic sexual harassment at the FBIs training academy in Quantico, Virginia.

And just last month, the Office of Inspector General released a new report to AP alleging an assistant special agent in charge groped a female colleague at an after-work event  a sexual assault captured on surveillance video.

It was gross and creepy, he was touching the same parts of me repeatedly so not by accident, the woman texted a friend after the groping. We put up with a lot so as not to rock the boat.

The heavily redacted report does not identify the agent but says investigators substantiated allegations he engaged in unwanted physical sexual contact with three female FBI employees. The report says an unspecified agency declined to prosecute the official; its unclear whether the FBI disciplined him.

Sexual misconduct also has drawn the attention of Congress and advocacy groups, which called for new whistleblower protections for rank-and-file FBI employees and for an outside entity to review the bureaus disciplinary cases.

FBI Director Christopher Wray said during a congressional hearing in April that this is a subject that makes my blood boil.

There is nothing more important than our people and how we treat each other, Wray said. I have tried to make it crystal clear that were going to have zero tolerance for that kind of activity at any level within the organization.

____

Mustian reported from New York.
By Olivia Wynkoop

Bay City News Foundation

Are the mountain lions of the Bay Area retreating from the Santa Cruz Mountains and into the urban sprawl?

Mountain lions have been caught lurking in the shadows on security cameras in Millbrae over the past week. A handful of residents in the Oakland hills and Piedmont say they've seen mutilated deer carcasses in their neighborhoods. One wildcat was even caught in a tree in San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood and transported to the Oakland Zoo three weeks ago, while another broke into a San Bruno home filled with game trophies a week later.

More than half of the state is mountain lion territory, and it's not too unusual to see them popping up in unexpected places, according to officials from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The species typically migrates during the dry season in search of ample food and water supplies, but they might be traveling further than usual as drought conditions are on the rise and deer populations are declining, department spokesperson Ken Paglia said.

"Be aware that we do share the state with other wildlife, like mountain lions or bears, they are around. Even though they potentially can be dangerous, they're usually in the city because they're looking for food resources and they're not there to hurt us," Paglia said.

Despite the recent sightings however, being attacked by a mountain lion is a rare occurrence, Paglia said. He suggests Bay Area residents should call their local law enforcement if they see a wildcat in a residential area, and those agencies can then reach out to wildlife agencies if they deem it's a public safety risk. The main goal in these cases is to get the wild animal back to its natural habitat on its own without much human intervention, he said.

"We want to make sure the public is safe, but we also want the animal to be able to live out his life in its own habitat. That's probably the best solution," Paglia said.

The mountain lion population is also estimated to be scarce, roughly in the low thousands, according to experts. Because of this, there's been a recent push in getting the species on the endangered species list, and law enforcement is prohibited from killing a mountain lion unless it's actively endangering human lives or property.

There are ways to prevent large predators from making rounds in a neighborhood, and it starts with thinking about what's attracting small prey to your property, according to Rebecca Dmytryk of Humane Wildlife Control. Unwanted wild animals in an urban area is not something "you can kill your way out of," she says.

"Nature is always in balance. When we bring in these man-made, artificial resources, like pastures, orchids, domesticated animals like sheep, we're putting those artificial resources out in the open, and they've got to be protected," Dmytryk said.

Installing motion center lights around the property, keeping pets indoors at night and adequately storing feed supplies are some of the ways residents can avoid encounters with mountain lions. More tips and tricks from the Mountain Lion Foundation can be found at https://issuu.com/mountainlionfoundation/docs/cdfw_mlf_conflict_brochure_booklet_final_2020.

Resources:

California Wildlife Incident Report portal for property damage, sightings or encounters: https://apps.wildlife.ca.gov/wir

24-hour dispatch to report injured or sick wildlife in Northern California: (916) 358-1312

In emergency situations, call 911

Copyright  2021 Bay City News, Inc. All rights reserved. Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area.

Copyright  2021 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited.
OAKLAND (BCN)

Oakland International Airport officials announced Thursday that Southwest Airlines will be starting new nonstop service to Bellingham, Washington, a popular way for travelers to get to Vancouver, Canada.

The service to Bellingham International Airport begins Nov. 16 and flights will go twice daily, according to the airport.

It will be the sixth connection between Oakland and the Pacific Northwest via Southwest Airlines, which is starting service to Eugene, Oregon, on Aug. 29 and already flies to Seattle; Portland; Spokane, Washington; and Boise, Idaho.

Information about fares and scheduled flights can be found at www.southwest.com.

Copyright  2021 Bay City News, Inc. All rights reserved. Republication, rebroadcast or redistribution without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. Bay City News is a 24/7 news service covering the greater Bay Area.

Copyright  2021 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited.
The Weather Channel recently announced most of the U.S. will be a tick time-bomb in 2021, adding that the threat ticks pose this year is slightly above average in California.

Despite the drought  which is normally a deterrent for ticks  scientists are noticing more of those bloodsuckers on the coast than ever.

Some of these rampant tick species are known to carry spotted fever pathogens and occasionally transmit tularemia, a rare disease that attacks the skin, eyes, lymph nodes and lungs

While she hopes she doesnt have to use it, our parks editor learned a clever (if extreme) way to stop the insects in their tracks.

More:

I visited the Calif. tide pools that inspired 'SpongeBob' and they were full of magical sea slugs. To live in such a harsh and dynamic environment, these animals adapt in highly unusual ways. Read more.

Why the state park system never restored this notorious Calif. ghost town. It's a time portal to the Wild West. Read more.

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park limits oasis trail to 4-hour daily window because of weather danger. Two hikers had to be airlifted out of the park Sunday. Read more.

Calif. sea lions are facing a deadly, 'unprecedented' health crisis. It's potentially linked to toxic chemicals from generations ago. Read more.

Last weeks top story:

I hiked to a surreal Calif. desert oasis. Then another. And another. In SoCal, oases are basically everywhere. Read more.

California Parklands is curated by Jasmine Garnett and California Parks editor Ashley Harrell. Contact Garnett at Jasmine.Garnett@sfgate.com or Harrell at Ashley.Harrell@sfgate.com.
During her trip to Guatemala this week, Vice President Kamala Harris was criticized by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after strongly urging migrants not to come to the southern border seeking asylum.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who endorsed Harris early in her 2020 presidential bid, is taking the side of Ocasio-Cortez.

The border has seen a dramatic surge in migrant arrivals, and Harris, who was tasked with leading the Biden administration's response to the surge, told migrants, I believe if you come to our border, you will be turned back."

"I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border: Do not come." Harris said. "Do not come."

After Harris delivered her remarks Monday, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, "First, seeking asylum at any US border is a 100% legal method of arrival. Second, the US spent decades contributing to regime change and destabilization in Latin America. We cant help set someones house on fire and then blame them for fleeing."

At a Friday press conference following the state's second vaccine lottery drawing, Newsom was asked about progressive criticism of Harris and took the side of the progressives.

"As it relates to her comments, we only say this: We believe  I certainly believe  [it's] right for people to seek asylum in a safe way, and I believe the entire immigration system needs to be reformed," he said. "California has long had, from my perspective at least in the past few decades, a more enlightened approach to immigration, a more inclusive approach."

Despite agreeing with Ocasio-Cortez on the issue of asylum, Newsom said he was worked closely with the Biden administration on handling the surge.

"I had the pleasure of being with Health and Human Services Secretary [Xavier] Becerra a week ago talking about how California can be more supportive in terms of the needs of asylum seekers, particularly young children," he said. "We have continued to approach these efforts with the federal government in the spirit of collaboration and cooperation."
Buying a house is exciting. Moving to it? Not so much!

Of course, hiring a professional mover to schlep your belongings from your old home to your new abode can make things a whole lot easier. Choosing the right mover, though, will require some careful vetting.

While you probably know to ask certain questionslike the cost of moving and what COVID-19 precautions the mover has in placethere's a lot more you can cover that could help you avoid some chaos-inducing curveballs down the road.

To help you find the right movers, here's everything you should ask upfront before hiring them for the job.

1. Do you offer in-person estimates?

Though you can obtain a moving estimate over the phone or online, getting an in-person estimate is the way to go, says Scott Michael, president and CEO of the American Moving and Storage Association.

Doing it in person ensures that the mover will see all the items that need to be shipped, and can identify any complications in advance, Michael says. For instance, if there are low-hanging tree branches that would prevent the moving truck from being able to pull up to your house, thats something you want to know ahead of time.

2. Is there anything you will not move?

Some movers refuse to move certain things, warns Lindsey Schaibly, moving services director at Two Men and a Truck, a franchised moving company based in Lansing, MI.

For example, a moving company may not be willing to transport plants, fragile family heirlooms, or other valuables if it believes the risk of losing or damaging such precious belongings is too great.

3. What kind of liability coverage does your company provide?

Under federal law, most moving companies are required to provide released value protection, or basic coverage, where the company is responsible for 30 cents per pound per item for an in-state move, or 60 cents for an interstate move, for any items damaged during the move.

Many moving companies, though, enable customers to purchase full-value protectionan insurance policy that offers extra protection. Heres how it works: If any of your articles are lost, destroyed, or damaged during the move, full-value protection requires the moving company to either have the item repaired so that it's in the same condition as it was before being damaged, replace it with something similar, or give you cash to replace it.

If you want to purchase full-value protection but a mover doesnt offer it, you can buy an insurance policy from a third party.

4. Is your crew covered by workers' compensation?

Reputable moving companies carry workers compensationa form of insurance that pays for medical expenses and lost wages if employees are injured on the job. If you hire a mover that doesnt offer workers compensation, you could be held responsible if an accident occurs during the move.

5. Do you disassemble and reassemble furniture?

Large pieces of furnituresuch as bed frames, couches, and dining tablesoften have to be dismantled before they can be moved safely through doorways, hallways, and stairs. Many movers will disassemble and reassemble furniture for you, but some wontespecially when asked to put together antique furniture without an instruction manualso make sure you know which services the moving company offers.

6. Will youor a third partybe delivering my items?

While many moving companies have their own movers do the packing and driving, some movers act only as brokers and subcontract their services to a third party. The issue there is that some moving contractors are more experienced than others.

If a moving company says it will be outsourcing the loading, transporting, or unloading of your items, make sure the contractor has a qualified team of moving professionals that is up to the task. Some moving companies will even let you meet the actual movers face to face before the big day.

7. If I pack my own belongings, are there any restrictions on the type of boxes I can use?

Packing stuff up yourself can help you trim your moving costs, but some movers require self-packers to use particular types of boxes or packing materials.

For instance, a moving company may require you to protect items by covering them in protective material instead of towels.

Pro tip: Boxes and protective material like Bubble Wrap and newsprint are the most effective means of carrying, transporting, and protecting one's personal items, says Aaron Steed, CEO and founder of Meathead Movers in California.

8. Can you guarantee my delivery date?

If youre planning an interstate or cross-country move, certain movers will offer to deliver on a particular day, whereas others may promise to deliver only within a two- or three-day window. The latter can help lower costs, but if you need your stuff by a certain deadline, make sure your movers can accommodate your schedule.

9. How much will it costand are there extra fees I should know about?

Moving costs can vary significantly. You can get an instant estimate for your move using Realtor.coms moving cost calculator, which will give you a ballpark figure on the cost of your move based on the number of rooms you have, how far you're moving, and other variables.

Brace yourself for some surprises. For one, the average cost of a local household move is $1,250, according to Moving.com. That number climbs to a whopping $4,890 for a long-distance move, based on an average weight of 7,500 pounds and an average distance of 1,000 miles.

Still, every moving company has its own way of evaluating the cost of a moveand some movers will offer significantly lower estimates but bake in hidden fees (e.g., fuel charge, stairs charge, or even heavy-item charge).

10. Do you offer any discounts or promotions?

This question may seem like a no-brainer, but many consumers forget to ask it, Michael says. Some moving companies offer discounts to AAA members, veterans, or customers who are willing to pay in all cash, so dont leave free money on the table.

The post 10 Crucial Questions To Ask Before Hiring Movers appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com.
The former Berkeley home of Oscar-winning independent film producer and John Fogerty nemesis Saul Zaentz recently came to market with an asking price of $4,100,000 for the five-bedroom, five-bath on over half an acre.

Zaentz was an owner of Fantasy Records, best known for its hugely successful Creedence albums and subsequent legal battles with Fogerty. But the label also released Lenny Bruce's stand-up recordings and Vince Guaraldi's beloved "A Charlie Brown Christmas" soundtrack. (Fellow jazz pianist Dave Brubeck was also an early Fantasy Records artist and investor.)

Zaentz later moved into film, acquiring the rights to literary hits and turning them into cinematic award-winners. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" got him his first Oscar in 1975, which was followed by "Amadeus" almost a decade later. In 1980, he built the Saul Zaentz Media Center in downtown Berkeley, which he sold in 2007 for $20 million. He passed away in 2014 at the age of 92.

By the time Zaentz was building the media center he had already parted with his Thousand Oaks view home. The current owner bought the property from him in the late '70s and has lived there for more than 40 years, according to listing agent Bebe McRae. McRae said her client hadn't heard any stories of Jack Nicholson or other stars visiting the home but said they were told of "wonderful parties" during Zaentz's time.
If you were itching to travel this summer but not drive or cram into a full airplane, Amtrak might have the right deal for you.

On Friday, the rail company discounted its "USA Rail Pass," which allows passengers to travel up to ten different segments anywhere in the United States over a thirty-day period for the low price of $299. Passengers can hop on and hop off at five hundred Amtrak destinations across the nation.

The deal is available until June 22, and you have up to 120 days from purchase to start using the pass.

The passes are available on all Amtrak Trains nationwide except three lines: the high-speed Acela, Auto Train, and the Maple Leaf that travels to Canada. After purchasing your pass, passengers can book each segment of their trip on Amtrak.com or the Amtrak mobile app. The thirty-day clock starts ticking from your first trip, and it is free to change and reschedule future legs of the trip before any scheduled departure as long as it is within the thirty-day pass period.

Joel Carillet/Getty Images

There are some fine points to the deal that are important to know. First, if a trip involves a connection train, then that would be considered two segments. So, for example, if you wanted to travel from the San Francisco Bay Area to New York City, the trip would be considered two segments: the California Zephyr from Emeryville to Chicago and then transfer to the Lake Shore Limited from Chicago to New York City.

Pass passengers can only book seats in Economy Class which is quite roomy on Amtrak. Although there are no blackout dates, pass holders are eligible to purchase Amtrak Saver and Value Fares only and not segments offering only Flexible Fares.

If you are not sure about your travel plans and don't want to pass on the deal, you have an opt-out. The USA Rail Pass is fully refundable for 120 days after purchase if you have not used it for any travel.

Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images

For those worried about traveling during the COVID-19 coronavirus, Amtrak requires all passengers and staff to wear masks while at stations and on the train (except while eating and drinking) and notes that the onboard filtration system recirculates fresh air every 4-5 minutes.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its travel guidance this week, and the changes open up many more destinations for Americans looking to travel.

Europe, however, remains largely at increased risk levels and travel is not advised yet.

The list, using a four-tiered method of notices, still deems approximately 30% of countries worldwide not safe to visit. These include Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, India, the Netherlands and Sweden.

Countries now moved to "low risk" level 1  meaning travel is deemed fine to vaccinated travelers  include Fiji, Iceland, Israel, Laos, Malta, Morocco Singapore and South Korea. These countries have shown fewer than 50 new cases of coronavirus over the past 28 days per 100,000 people.

The CDC stated that the guidelines seek to "better differentiate countries with severe outbreak situations" from countries in which COVID-19 is "sustained, but controlled."

Seven of the eight most popular international destinations for U.S. travelers  Canada, Mexico, the U.K., Italy, France, Spain and Germany  are listed in the 3rd level, implying there is risk of getting and spreading the virus. The Dominican Republic is at the highest risk tier, level 4.

All levels state that vaccination is highly recommended before any travel, and many countries have their own restrictions on welcoming tourists from the U.S.

Since the global outbreak of COVID-19 in late 2019, there have been 175 million cases worldwide and about 3.7 million deaths.

Find the full updated CDC travel list here.
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The Ontario government made updates to unpaid Infectious Disease Emergency Leave (IDEL) on April 29 and amended the Employment Standards Act, 2000 (ESA), introducing the Ontario COVID-19 Worker Income Protection Benefit. In addition to the unpaid IDEL, employers are now required to provide eligible employees with the new paid IDELmore specifically, up to $200 (approximately USD 166) a day for up to three daysfor reasons related to COVID-19. The three days need not be taken consecutively.

In addition, a recent decision determined that COVID-19 was irrelevant for determining the notice period of an employee who was discharged before the pandemic but looked for work during it.

What are the eligible reasons for taking the paid IDEL?

Paid IDEL is available for certain reasons related to COVID-19, including:

Going to get vaccinated.

Going to get a COVID-19 test.

Staying home awaiting the results of a COVID-19 test.

Being sick with COVID-19.

Experiencing a side effect from a COVID-19 vaccination.

Having been advised to self-isolate due to COVID-19 by an employer, medical practitioner or other specified authority.

Providing care or support to certain relatives for COVID-19-related reasons.

As is the case with the unpaid voluntary IDEL, employers cannot require employees to provide evidence, such as a doctor's certificate, to prove that they are eligible for the paid IDEL.

Who is an eligible employee?

Only those employees who are covered under the ESA are eligible for the paid IDEL. So, federally regulated employees or independent contractors are not entitled to the three days of paid leave. That is not to say that these non-qualifying employees would not be eligible for other income support benefits; they may, for instance, qualify for the Canada Recovery Sickness Benefit (CRSB), which is currently available until Sept. 25.

Can employers be reimbursed for the paid IDEL?

Eligible employers can be reimbursed up to $200 (approximately USD 166) per employee for each day taken. Applications must be made to the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board within 120 days of the date the employer pays the employee. The provincial government has indicated that it will soon provide more information on how to apply.

What if an existing contract already entitles the employee to take a paid leave for reasons related to COVID-19, as listed above?

If this was the case on April 19, the employee's right to three paid days under the ESA will be reduced by the contract, so long as the amount of pay stipulated in the contract is equal to or greater than the employee's ESA entitlements.

Can employees opt out of the paid IDEL if they feel it adversely affects their benefits under other programs?

Yes, employees may choose to opt out of the paid IDEL, in which case employees must advise their employers in writing that they are choosing to take the time as unpaid IDEL. This written decision by the employee must be made before the end of the pay period in which the leave occurs.

Is the paid IDEL retroactive?

This leave is retroactive from April 19. In other words, if the employee took an unpaid IDEL from April 19 to April 28, for a reason that would qualify them to take a paid IDEL, the employee can choose to take those days as paid leave, as long as the employee advised the employer of this decision in writing by May 12.

Entitlement to Notice of Termination

In the case of Nahum v. Honeycomb Hospitality Inc., the employer, Honeycomb Hospitality, terminated their director of people and culture when she was five months pregnant.

The notice period is intended to bridge a terminated employee to their new position. Courts consider the employee's age, length of service and the character of the employment when determining what notice period is appropriate.

The director of people and culture had been with Honeycomb for just four and a half months. She was 28 years old and made $80,000 per year (approximately USD 66,310). She was terminated without cause, did not have a valid contract governing her termination entitlements and therefore was entitled to notice in accordance with the common law.

Honeycomb argued that an appropriate notice period for the former director of people and culture was two months.

Job Searching While Pregnant

The former director of people and culture was left to look for a new job while visibly pregnant. Prior to the birth of her baby, she applied for 36 jobs and got one interview. She was not offered the job for which she interviewed and suspects that it was because she was eight months pregnant at the time.

She took two months off from her job search after the birth of her baby at the end of February 2020. At the time of the summary judgment motion, she had applied for another 75 jobs without success. At that point, she was looking for a job during the pandemic.

COVID-19 Job-Search Difficulties Did Not Lengthen the Notice Period

The court confirmed that the notice analysis looks at the time an employee is expected to take to find a new job at the time they are terminated. The former director of people and culture was terminated in October 2019, prior to the pandemic, and therefore her notice period was not lengthened due to the difficulties in her job search created by the pandemic. They did not exist at the time of her termination, which is the relevant time for the determination of the notice period. The court here used the same analysis as the court in Yee v. Hudson's Bay Company.

Impact of Pregnancy on Notice

In considering the impact of the former director of people and culture's pregnancy on her notice entitlement, the court noted past cases which ruled that "fairly or not," being pregnant did not enhance an individual's immediate employability.

Honeycomb argued that it would be problematic for the court to find that pregnancy is a barrier to employment, as it implies that prospective employers will violate human rights laws in making hiring decisions. The court found that there are reasonable, bona fide reasons why a company may not hire a pregnant person, namely: "An employer seeking to fill a position is likely to have an immediate need for someone in the role. The prospect of a new employee who will shortly require a lengthy leave will be unappealing to many employers and may not meet bona fide needs of their organization."

The court awarded the former director of people and culture five months of notice.

Takeaways for Employers

The best way for employers to protect themselves from notice disputes is to ensure that their new hires sign valid employment contracts before they start work. A properly drafted employment contract will bring certainty to an employee's termination entitlementseven if they are pregnant.

While not discussed in this case, there is also always the risk of a human rights violation when terminating a pregnant employee. An employer should never terminate an employee because they are pregnantto do so will usually be a violation of that employee's human rights, exposing the employer to a human rights claim.

SpringLaw is a law firm in Toronto.  2021 SpringLaw. All rights reserved. Reposted with permission of Lexology.
Indian conglomerate major, Hindustan Unilever (HUL) announces the appointment of Kedar Lele, presently CMD of Unilever Bangladesh, to the HUL management committee as executive director, customer development (CD) effective from July 1, 2021. Kedar would take over from Srinandan Sundaram who is likely to move into his new role as executive director, foods & refreshment.

The transition to its managing committee comes with the announcement of its foods and refreshments leader, Sudhir Sitapati stepping down to join Godrej Consumer Products as managing director and CEO.A statement by HUL, said, Kedar, who joined HUL in 2004, has over the last 17 years demonstrated a strong performance track record across customer development, marketing and general management. Being Chairman of Unilever Bangladesh, Kedar has further strengthened CD execution and transformed the companys end-to-end supply chain. He also helmed the transition of the GSK business into Unilever Consumer Care in Bangladesh.

Before to his Bangladesh stint, Kedar held the responsibility for leading the e-commerce and modern trade business.

Sanjiv Mehta, CMD, HUL says, I am delighted to welcome Kedar to the HUL Management Committee. Under his leadership, the Bangladesh business made great all-round progress  be it in CD coverage expansion, transformation of our Supply Chain or setting up sustainable models for market development. I would especially like to laud Kedars efforts towards developing talent and improving diversity in the Bangladesh business. I am certain that Kedar will take the HUL Customer Development function to the next level of performance.
Telecom industry body COAI on Thursday said that Bharti Airtel's Ajai Puri has been re-elected as the Chairman of the association for 2021-22.

Puri is the Chief Operating Officer (India and South Asia) of Bharti Airtel Ltd.

Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd President Pramod Kumar Mittal will be the Vice Chairman of the Association.

A COAI statement said that Puri has been with Bharti Airtel since 2004, and has held several senior leadership positions including Director, Market Operations and Director and CEO, DTH. Prior to joining Bharti Airtel, he served as the Business Head, Foods at Cargill Foods India.

Mittal comes with a rich experience of 42 years in telecommunications. Before joining India's largest telecom operator, Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd as President, Mittal served in the Department of Telecommunications for over 37 years.

COAI Director General S.P. Kochhar expressed his appreciation for Puri and Mittal's support and their leadership.

The past year has been one of the most eventful and also the most challenging for the Indian telecom industry. The AGR ruling of the Supreme Court added to the challenges posed by the pandemic, the nationwide lockdowns, and the multiple cyclones that battered India, the statement said. Despite these challenges, the industry has continued to serve the nation as an essential service, it added.

COAI is optimistic about the future of the industry and the opportunities ahead, as 5G and allied technologies get closer to commercial deployment, it added.

Puri said: "The digital communications industry has once again risen to serve India and has kept the nation connected during this unprecedented phase. On behalf of the industry, I would like to reiterate our commitment to support the government's efforts to connect and digitise the country at large as we emerge from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic."

Mittal said: "It's a pleasure for me to once again take the responsibility as Vice Chairman of COAI and continue to work with the industry to bring about the next level of reforms in order to uplift and strengthen the sector while initiating measures for the benefit of end consumers."

Kochhar noted that the digital communications industry, with the support of the government has emerged as the economic and social backbone of the nation, keeping the citizens connected and enabling the economy to function during the crisis period of Covid-19 and cyclones.

"As the industry continues to play its critical role, the future has a lot in store for us with the ecosystem gearing up for 5G. We are committed to play an even greater role in achieving the Digital India vision," he added.
National Telemedicine Service  eSanjeevani, initiative by Union Health Ministrys has crossed another milestone by completing 6 million (60 lakh) consultations through more than 375 online OPDs, where over 40,000 patients consult over 1600 doctors and specialists on a daily basis using this innovative digital medium to seek Health services.

At present, the National Telemedicine Service is operational in 31 States/Union Territories.

The idea was conceptualised by Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, eSanjeevani  a doctor to doctor telemedicine platform in November 2019 for implementation at 1,55,000 Health and Wellness Centres under Govt. of Indias Ayushman Bharat Scheme in a Hub & Spokes model. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, as OPDs across the country were closed, the Union Health Ministry ensured a rapid development and roll out of this initiative in collaboration with The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (Mohali).

eSanjeevaniAB-HWC  the doctor to doctor telemedicine platform has been implemented at around 20,000 Health and Wellness Centres as spokes and over 1800 hubs in around 30 States. The Ministry of Defence too has hosted a National OPD on eSanjeevaniOPD, where over 100 veteran doctors and specialists  roped in by the Ministry of Defence, serve patients across the country.

People across many states have been quick to recognise the benefits of eSanjeevani and this has led to an encouraging trend of widespread rapid adoption of this digital modality of seeking Health services. It has led to massive improvement in access to specialised health services, particularly in rural areas. Further, this Service has come in handy for the patients in urban areas as well, especially during the second wave of the ongoing pandemic that has burdened the Healthcare services delivery system in the country.

In a short span of time, Govt. of Indias National Telemedicine Service has started aiding the Indian healthcare delivery system by plugging the digital health divide that exists in urban and rural India. It is also addressing the shortage of doctors and specialists at ground level while reducing the burden on secondary and tertiary level hospitals. In line with the National Digital Health Mission, eSanjeevani is also boosting the digital health ecosystem in the country.

Leading 10 States in terms of adoption (number of consultations) of eSanjeevani are Andhra Pradesh (1219689), Tamil Nadu (1161987), Karnataka (1056447), Uttar Pradesh (952926), Gujarat (267482), Madhya Pradesh (264364), Bihar (192537), Maharashtra (177629), Kerala (173734) and Uttarakhand (134214).
The IIT Bombay has set up the 'Koita Centre for Digital Health' - India's first to focus on driving academics, research and industry collaboration in digital health - in collaboration with the Koita Foundation (KF), a statement said on Thursday.

The initiative followed a grant from its alumni Rekha and Rizwan Koita to help improve the quality, accessibility and affordability of healthcare through digital health.

The KCDH will focus on academic and research areas like clinical applications (including electronic patient records and medical imaging, healthcare data management including its privacy and security, healthcare analytics, health AI/ML, consumer health, public health and public policy.

It will offer minor, dual degree, Masters and Doctorate programmes in Healthcare Informatics and conduct industry/outreach programs for healthcare and industry professionals in digital health to enable them act as 'force-multipliers'.

The IIT-B said that digital health and informatics need cross-functional expertise -- computer science, statistics, artificial intelligence/machine learning, bioinformatics and medicine -- and the KCDH will build strong collaboration with digital health partners like hospitals, medical research institutes and the industry who would also establish joint academic and research programmes.

"The KCDH will enable an ecosystem to help address the healthcare challenges that have been so glaringly exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Digital health and informatics need cross-functional expertise," said IIT-B Director, Prof. Subhasis Chaudhuri.

The KCDH will strive to enable seamless cross-functionality across these streams and the new initiative will throw open exciting opportunities for the graduate, including spearheading research, launching start-ups and a lot more, he said.

Rizwan Koita - who is co-Founder and CEO of global healthcare technology company CitiusTech, said that digital health is critical to improve healthcare at scale, and the KCDH can play a pivotal role in improving healthcare in India and the world.

The KCDH will also actively collaborate with government organisations, healthcare technology companies and NGOs working in the healthcare, even as the world is focusing increasingly on enhancing digital health and informatics, while India launched the National Digital Health Mission in 2020.
By Dr Rais Hussin / Dr Margarita Peredaryenko



Increased testing is probably one of the most crucial tools of non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) due to substantial asymptomatic transmission in COVID-19.



According to the latest estimates, asymptomatic individuals are responsible for transmitting close to 60 per cent of all infections.

Therefore, only by ramping up testing capabilities can countries capture wider circles of asymptomatic cases, asymptomatic case contacts and individuals without obvious exposure.

Furthermore, test results prompt individuals to self-isolate, inform health officials about the pandemic state and guide policymakers in their decision to deploy other NPI strategies such as closing/opening schools, various economic sectors, etc.

The reported daily new infection cases do not even begin to tell the story. Epidemiologists continuously warn us that the number of detected cases is lower than the number of actual cases. The main reason for that is testing limitations.

Therefore, the daily number of confirmed cases combined with the daily number of tests, or rather the dynamic of their proportion over time, may begin to inform us how COVID-19 transmission and containment management unfolds in the actual population.

There are few ways to look at the dynamic of daily confirmed cases vis-a-vis daily new tests.

One method is so-called per cent positive or test positivity ratesimply the percentage of tests that return positive, which is calculated as (positive tests)/(total tests) x 100 per cent.

Some scientists prefer using the opposite metrictest-to-case ratio calculated as (total tests)/(positive tests) and indicating how many tests it takes before one of them return positive.

However, it is crucial to understand that what matters is not only how many people being tested but also who have been tested.

Understanding various categories of those who can be tested and who are most likely to be tested (figure 1) brings us to understand why epidemiologists recommend keeping test positivity rate low and how it can be achieved.

High test positivity may indicate that those are mainly tested who are more likely to turn out to be positivefor example, people with strong or mild symptoms who themselves arrive at testing facilities or close contacts.

In other words, high test positivity indicates that testing is not wide enough to capture those who might not even know they are infected (asymptomatic and presymptomatic cases).

At the same time, too high test positivity may indicate the too wide spread of infection in the communitymeaning no matter how much you increase the number of tests, including even random people, if the spread in the community is too wide low values of test positivity may not be achievable.

Thus, in any case, a high positivity rate implies inadequate pandemic control.



It is the pertinent question: what should be a benchmark positivity rate?

World Health Organization currently suggests that the positivity rate should remain at 5 per cent or lower for at least two weeks before a region under the surveillance can be considered for reopening.

However, more recent discussion in the scientific community based on the experience of countries worldwide suggests that rates as low as 1 to 3 per cent would be a better indication of the pandemic being under control.

In a methodologically rigorous worldwide study conducted by Dr Ravindra Prasan Rannan-Eliya, the executive director of the Institute for Health Policy in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and his team, the researchers found that of all NPI measures, the testing intensity was the most influential and was highly statistically significant.

Dr Ravindra and his colleagues also found that almost all countries that reduced transmission to levels compatible with elimination were testing at test-to-case ratio levels of 100 and above, equivalent to test positivity rate 1 per cent and below.

As a policy recommendation, the researchers then suggested the following. At test positivity rate as low as 1 per cent and below, when the virus is close to elimination (the reproduction number is substantially below 1), increases in testing could be traded for relaxing other interventions, such as school and economic sector closures.

The graph below plots Malaysia daily new cases versus daily new tests (both averaged by month to declutter the chart) from September 2020 till June 9 2021. The dashed red lines indicate various levels of positivity rates.

As we can see from the graph, Malaysia's positivity rate was below 1 per cent only until September 2020 (to be precise, until two weeks before the Sabah election). Already in October 2020 we have crossed above 3 per cent, and in November 2020 above 5 per cent.

This was the time when according to science, we should have immediately ramped up the testing volume multiple folds to get the pandemic under control which would be much more feasible when our contact tracing and healthcare facilities were not overwhelmed yet.

However, we can see that daily test remained well below 25,000 on average and only in January 2021 were increased two folds.

During Phase 5, which lasted from January 1 2021 till March 31 2021, when certain states with high COVID-19 cases were placed under MCO2.0 from January 13 2021 till March 4 2021 the positivity rate gradually reduced to just above 3 per cent, indicating pandemic getting under control.

And again, the testing volume should have been much higher even at that time.

Also, given still relatively high positivity rate, any SOP relaxation should have been carefully considered. Instead, the Ramadhan bazaar and Terawih relaxation came as untimely jeopardy, with positivity rate measures spiraling out of control ever since.

As of now, Malaysia's positivity rate is still hovering around 7 per cent and, therefore, recently observed new daily cases reduction should not be interpreted outside this alarming context. Only falling positivity test rate observed while maintaining or better else increasing testing volume can be seen as a bit of good news.

The above data visualization indicates that Malaysia has never tested its population wide enough, at least since September last year.

The reality might be even gloomier when we consider that the above graph is based on data that includes not only PCR tests but also rapid antigen tests.

While it is generally recommended to include only PCR tests in positivity rate calculations.

It is understood that government health authorities make decisions within given constraintsfinancial, technology, human resources etc.

However, given the strategic importance of testing volume, as worldwide experience over one and half year with the pandemic indicates, we might want to ascribe a higher priority to itnext to probably only fast tracking the national vaccination program.

Importantly, even New Zealand, which could be rightfully considered an outlier with its outstanding ability to nearly eliminate COVID-19 spread in its community, continues testing its population extensively to date.

As Our World in Data site states, "Without testing, there is no data. Testing is our window onto the pandemic and how it is spreading."

Without sufficiently wide testing, not only in terms of number but also going far beyond close contacts, we are like wandering in the dark.

Our decisions might be inadequate, and we might be sending a wrong signal to the public, thus unwillingly inciting complacency.

On the contrary, transparent reporting of the figure pertaining to the positivity rate (including the breakdown by the type of tests performed and geographic locations) could help us all acquire more stable prevalence information, make better decisions and bring more coherency to cooperation among various levels of our society in fighting this pandemic.

(Dr Rais Hussin and Dr Margarita Peredaryenko are part of the research team at EMIR Research, an independent think tank focused on strategic policy recommendations based on rigorous research.)
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Office behemoth Dexus $180 million investment in Australian Unitys healthcare fund, the latest in a succession of big deals, is telegraphing a shift away from gleaming white-collar corporate towers while creating headaches for a Canadian takeover rival.

The fast-diversifying property players income stream will get a shot in the arm after it tied up a deal this week to invest in Australian Unitys extensive healthcare platform.

Dexus chief executive Darren Steinberg is shifting focus to sub sectors like healthcare. Credit:Janie Barrett

Its investment follows hot on the heels of a $5 billion merger six weeks ago between AMP Capital Diversified Property Fund and a Dexus-managed fund, and the platforms surprise takeover of ASX-listed APN Property in a $320 million cash deal announced in May.

All three deals are in sectors once unfamiliar to the $11.8 billion office-focused landlord.
And yet Walker continued on her path of deception, proffering fake bank remittance notices when challenged on unpaid bills, even while subject to community corrections orders for previous fraud offences. Among the most serious crimes cited in court was Walker providing false documents to police, claiming she was unable to meet her bail conditions because she was in hospital seeking treatment for unspecified mental health issues. PS previously revealed accounts of a long line of other victims, some stretching back to her school years at Frensham, ranging from employers to ex-boyfriends, all of whom claimed she had fleeced them of hundreds of thousands of dollars. PS was among the small group of reporters in September last year who watched as the well-dressed, courteous, composed and eloquent woman initially addressing the court was reduced to a trembling, teary heap when she was sentenced to 18 months prison (with a minimum 12 months non-parole period that was subsequently reduced on appeal by four months) after pleading guilty to a string of fraud convictions. I am so sorry mum, I love you! she told her mother, Kate Hyles, while removing her jewellery and handing over her designer handbag as Corrective Services officers handcuffed her. She also declared, in a loud but strained voice and for all of us to hear: Its OK, I deserve this!

For arts sake Four-year-old Vera Swartz of Alexandria may well be Sydneys most cunning art speculator. Gracing her wall is an original drawing by renowned artist Luke Sciberras, which her parents, Jess Easler and David Swartz, paid $100 for at last Saturdays hugely popular Incognito art sale in Paddington. Little Vera Swartz with her big-name artwork by Luke Scibberas. Credit: I had researched the works in detail and made an educated guess that it could have been one of Lukes works because I am a great fan of his, but until now we have not been able to afford art at that level. Vera really took a shine to it, Easler told PS.

The piece is estimated to be worth 10 times what they paid for it and was one of nearly 1600 works submitted for sale from a wide variety of artists  some famous, others not  that raised money for Studio A, NSWs only supported studio for professional artists with intellectual disability. The queue outside the Incognito Art Show at 4.30am on Oxford Street last Saturday. Credit:Gorden Jiang PS was among those who braved chilly conditions early on Saturday morning to join the queue on Oxford Street. The young man holding the first spot had been there since 10.30pm on Friday night. Turns out he had been hired on Airtasker and was being paid $200 to stand in line by an unknown art collector, clearly oblivious of the potential value of some of the artworks on sale inside, such as the Ben Quilty pen drawing estimated to be worth up to $8000 by one gallerist PS spoke to. Further down the queue was actor Hugo Weaving, along with at least 500 other shivering art lovers who, despite the chilly conditions, seemed all too happy to be there. Organiser Dave Liston, whose family travelled from Glen Innes to volunteer their services, said he was overwhelmed by how successful the show had been; he has plans for a much bigger version next year, with many more artists  both high-profile and unknown  submitting works, and buyers who only discover the name of the artist when they pay for the work.

The tale of the Lady Ghislaine The final paragraph in British author John Prestons excellent new book Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell offers an extraordinary morsel about the fate of the controversial media magnates superyacht, the Lady Ghislaine, which also graces the cover. The Murdoch family: (From left) Lachlan Murdoch, James Murdoch, Anna Murdoch, Elisabeth Murdoch and Rupert Murdoch. Credit: The huge boat is now called the Dancing Hare, but had originally been named after Maxwells daughter, the former lover of dead paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein. Ghislaine Maxwell is now behind bars in New York. Even more intriguing, the boat is now owned by Rupert Murdochs ex-wife Anna, the former Sydney reporter who became the media moguls second wife and is mother of Elisabeth, James and Lachlan Murdoch, who also shares a love of floating gin palaces and is now building a huge new one in Europe.

Ghislaine Maxwell with a photo of her father, Robert, in 1991. Credit:Getty Images On the evening of November 5, 1991, with his empire on the brink of collapse, Robert Maxwells naked, bloated 140 kilogram body was found floating in the Atlantic off the Canaries, having fallen overboard from the stern of his yacht earlier in the day. Then, in 2017, according to Preston: Anna decided that she wanted to buy a yacht. Their son James, a keen sailor, offered to help. He found a boat called the Lady Mona K on the market for $14.5 million. Anna went to have a look and liked what she saw. Apparently it was only after buying the boat that Anna learnt its name had been changed years earlier and that it was previously Maxwells Lady Ghislaine. Eek.

Iconic bar to reopen The oldest cafe in Kings Cross, the iconic Piccolo Bar, will soon reopen its doors to become the smallest cocktail bar in the city. Piccolo dates back to 1952, and everyone from Gough Whitlam and Mel Gibson to Jeff Buckley, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Marianne Faithfull have had a caffeine fix there. David Spanton is breathing new life into iconic Kings Cross venue Piccolo Bar. Credit:Rhett Wyman Now magazine publisher David Spanton has taken over, and he says he is refreshing the space, replacing some of the missing photographs that lined the walls of famous customers and recreating it as a welcoming, unpretentious cocktail bar, with seating for just 12 inside.
Almost a decade into their tenure as arguably Australias most influential underground rock band, The Scientists went out in a thrilling blaze of glory.

It was 1987. The band were recording their seventh album The Human Jukebox and founding member Kim Salmon recalls it was a last dying explosion before the band conked out for good. That was our last gasp  and I loved it, Salmon says. It was quite a significant thing.

The Scientists are back with more grunge.

It also sent the man himself, long since credited as the father of grunge, on a whole new adventure. And its taken more than 30 years to come full circle.

Sitting in a Northcote cafe, the prolific songwriter and guitarist has stepped away from the sketch books hes been filling with drawings since live shows mostly dried up early last year. An exhibition of his paintings a few months ago was a great success, he says with a smile, but its good to be talking about the Scientists again.
In 1978, Charlie Chaplins body went missing from his grave in Lausanne Switzerland as part of a failed extortion attempt. As police searched for the body, the Australian performer Barry Humphries was asked about the disturbing events.

I shouldnt worry, Humphries said. Hes probably touring Australia.

The joke may have been in bad taste, but it was also gloriously close to the mark. In the Australia of the time, you could hardly move without stumbling over an imported celebrity, sometimes close to death, trying to stumble through the final chapter of their career.

Australia was like one of those mining operations in which they search through the tailings from an exhausted shaft, seeing if there might be a last speck of value to be extracted.

Humphriess joke about Chaplin floated back into my mind after interviewing Shaun Micallef about the return of one of my favourite shows: Mad As Hell. In an appreciative fanboy way, Id accused Shaun of plagiarising the eye-rolls and aghast glances of the great British comedian Frankie Howerd. It was a charge to which Micallef happily pleaded guilty.
Hmmm, whats that big, hairy thing blocking your view of the bathroom mirror? Wait, could it be  your husband? Yep. Most probably. Thanks to the pandemic, men are getting love bites on their mirrors. The latest research reveals that the male of the species is currently spending more time in the bathroom beautifying himself than his female partner. Why? Well, a year of Zoom meetings and video conferencing has blokes focusing on their flaws.

Gone are the days when a males grooming technique required nothing more than a shower, a shit and a shave. A woman is now more likely to come home from work to find her mate midway through his do-it-yourself mani/pedi, a collagen mask plastered across his face, a vat of wax heating up for his back, crack and sack manoeuvres, bleating Dont touch me! in case you smudge his fake tan. Yes, those rugged good looks youve been admiring on men of late turn out to be some of the most natural and attractive assets  that money can buy.

Those rugged good looks youve been admiring on men of late turn out to be some of the most natural and attractive assets  that money can buy. Credit:iStock

And its not just bathroom beauty treatments currently bankrupting blokes. Cosmetic surgeons report an unprecedented boom in men opting for tweakments including Botox, dermafillers, laser resurfacing, nose jobs, butt lifts, pec implants and mini facelifts. Add a hair transplant and some tailored teeth and your fella will have fully completed his transmogrification into a walking, talking Ken doll.

Its not just Aussie blokes suddenly going through the tunnel of love holding their own hands, either. In the US, men are queuing up for structural alternations such as chin implants. In the UK, cosmetic surgery statistics reveal that a record number of males are undergoing tummy tucks and moob removal.
The publishing sensation Dark Emu rewrote our understanding of Indigenous history when it was published in 2014, but accordingly to a pair of veteran academics in the field, there is little real evidence for many of author Bruce Pascoes grander claims.

Indeed, a new book by veteran anthropologist Peter Sutton and archaeologist Keryn Walsche Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers: The Dark Emu Debate (released by Melbourne University Press next week)  argues that Pascoes book in fact devalues pre-colonial Aboriginal society. In claiming, for instance, that our First Nations people lived in villages of thousands, or built stone houses, or sowed fields of crops, or might have been the worlds first bakers, it fails as a work of scholarship and dangerously emphasises the values of ingenuity, sophistication and creativity.

Explains Sutton: Thats the culture of cleverness, invention, change  constant change  a boredom with constancy. Aboriginal societies were the opposite of that. They highly valued the continuing reproduction of what had gone before.

The highly respected Sutton  who has spent half a century working with the Old People and studying Indigenous culture  was speaking on the latest episode of Good Weekend Talks, along with freelance writer Stuart Rintoul, who wrote this weeks cover story: Debunking Dark Emu: Taking aim at a publishing phenomenon.
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Emma Isaacs can feel the love. Standing on stage in the ballroom at Crown casino in Melbourne, she looks out on a sea of upturned faces. This is awesome! she says, beaming. Nine hundred women beam back at her. This is better than my wedding! Isaacs continues. How happy are we to be here? In response, the crowd whoops and applauds with the kind of enthusiasm that at an evening event might be attributed to mass consumption of pre-dinner cocktails. This, though, is a breakfast meeting. Some of us havent even had coffee yet. Isaacs, 41, is the leader of Business Chicks, billed as Australias largest networking organisation for women. Her guiding principle, spelt out on her website, is that every woman is capable of achieving brilliant things  especially if that woman has the support of the sisterhood. Judging by the atmosphere, the ballroom is full of true believers. In the experience of The Australian Financial Review columnist Myriam Robin, Business Chicks events have an exuberance reminiscent of evangelical religious rallies. Its like the Hillsong of corporate networking, Robin says. High-energy. Very inspirational. All of that. On this March morning, the program includes three guest speakers  lawyer and human rights advocate Nyadol Nyuon, Paralympic athlete Kelly Cartwright and distinguished feminist Wendy McCarthy  but the star of the show is Isaacs herself. Small, blonde, supremely self-assured, she is visiting from Los Angeles, where she has lived for the past five years. She moved to the US with the aim of establishing an American branch of Business Chicks. This was to be the first step in creating an international networking empire. In anticipation, she gave herself the title of Business Chicks global CEO. The plan went pear-shaped for reasons that Isaacs will candidly explain to me. She has kept the title, though: world domination is still her long-term goal. Ive always admired her chutzpah, says feminist writer and social commentator Jane Caro. After the speeches have been given, the poached eggs eaten and the door prizes distributed, breakfast guests stand around in excited clusters, hoping for a quick word or a photograph with Isaacs before they head to their offices. Shes got this magnetic quality that is hard to define or describe, says Olivia Ruello, chief executive of Business Chicks Australian operations. People are drawn to her almost in a cult-like way. Without it being weird. Shes got this magnetic quality that is hard to define or describe. People are drawn to her almost in a cult-like way. Without it being weird. Former governor-general Quentin Bryce has described Business Chicks as the modern-day Country Womens Association: a movement of women working together to support one another, and support their communities. In fact it differs from the CWA in one key respect: it is a commercial enterprise. Isaacs, its sole owner, runs it as a business, though she says turning a profit isnt her highest priority: I do what I do at Business Chicks because I want to be a light for other women.

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Last June, Isaacs had a baby. Her sixth. Like her first five children, her son Louis was born at home. Unlike his siblings, he made his entrance in front of a large audience. Apparently around 60,000 people tuned in, Isaacs says. Live-streaming Louis delivery on Instagram seems to her to have been one of her best ideas yet. Im a very, very private person, she assures me. But her aim was to demystify and celebrate birth, and the feedback has been gratifying. I still have people coming up to me saying, Oh my gosh, I sat on the couch and I cried the whole time. So yeah, its been really, really beautiful. Her only regret is that she didnt do this sooner. I wanted to live-stream the birth of my fifth child and everyone talked me out of it. They said, What if something bad happens? You open yourself up to a huge amount of scrutiny. This time, she was determined to go ahead. I think the reason Im put on this planet is to inspire women, she says, eyes shining. Ive always seen my purpose as trying to be someone who is a role model. Emma Isaacs speaks at a Business Chicks event in Melbourne: The events are joyful, says one member, like school reunions without the mean girls. Credit:Josh Robenstone Business Chicks is by no means alone in its field. Organisations that bring working women together have proliferated in this country in recent years. Future Women, Lady Startup, Like-Minded Bitches Drinking Wine (which is advertised as catering to entrepreneurial-minded and business-savvy women who love their wine and has more than 150,000 members in its Facebook group), Women in Digital, Heads Over Heels  the list goes on. Theyre everywhere, says journalist Catherine Fox, co-author with Kirstin Ferguson of Women Kind: Unlocking the Power of Women Supporting Women. A lot of smart women have jumped into the space and said, Okay, lets set up a networking group. 

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Things were different 16 years ago, when the then 26-year-old Isaacs set out to make Business Chicks the kind of club to which shed want to belong. Groups like Chief Executive Women existed for those at the top of the business world, but Isaacs saw the potential of an organisation that welcomed women on all rungs of the corporate ladder as well as those who worked in small businesses or were self-employed. Traditionally, womens professional groups were a bit staid. Business Chicks gatherings were loud and ebullient. Music played. Women hugged and high-fived. When Emma kicked it off, it was unusual, says Fox. She was a real pioneer in that sense. Ive always seen my purpose as trying to be someone who is a role model. Fox, who then worked for The Australian Financial Reviews Boss magazine, took note of Business Chicks rapid growth. I remember we were watching it, thinking, Gosh, isnt this fascinating? Look how many people are turning up to these events.  Not that everyone was impressed. A lot of people sneered at it, Fox says. They trivialised it and ridiculed it. In the early days, particularly, I heard people say disparagingly, Oh, thats for secretaries.  To Fox, it was plain that Isaacs had hit on a winning formula. The democracy of the model was genuine. And that was her real stroke of genius. Today, Business Chicks has 395,000 followers across Instagram and Facebook, and an estimated 40,000 paid-up members (Isaacs wont confirm the figure), most of them aged from 25 to 54. Fifty-six per cent work for someone else and 44 per cent run their own businesses. Jane Caro links the rise of Business Chicks and similar organisations to the fact that the number of female business operators in Australia has grown by 36 per cent in the past 20 years (compared with a 10 per cent increase for men). So many new businesses are started by women, and its very isolating, Caro says. Its really helpful to have that sort of network available to them. Putting women in touch with one another comes naturally to Isaacs, says long-time Business Chicks member Cathie Reid, who is co-founder of the Icon Group, a large private cancer care provider. Its like she has a mental Rolodex that is constantly whirring. She goes, I know someone who would be really interested in hearing about that or I know someone it would be really good for you to connect with. Shes incredibly generous with those connections. As Reid sees it, Business Chicks is really just an extension of who Emma is  The events are joyful  like school reunions without the mean girls. Isaacs with her husband, Rowan, and five of their six children, dressed for Halloween. Credit:Courtesy of Emma Isaacs

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One morning, I arrive at Business Chicks headquarters in the Sydney CBD with Isaacs and her affable offsider, Lucy Ormonde. Several young women leap up from their workstations to greet us. Like Isaacs, they have wide smiles and excellent teeth. Hi, Im Bree, one of them says, shaking my hand. A second introduces herself, Hi, Im Bree. Ormonde murmurs, Everyones called Bree. What strikes me is how warm and friendly everyone is. I have read in Isaacs 2018 book, Winging It, that after her managers interview potential new employees, one of her first questions is: Were they sunshiney? I know from the book that Isaacs likes to keep things lively in the office. Ill often hide under my desk if I think someones looking for me, she writes, and when they get close, Ill jump out and scare them. In the wider organisation, too, Isaacs is funster-in-chief. At Business Chicks shindigs, shes the first on the dance floor. In photographs, she hams it up, flinging her arms wide or kicking a leg in the air. If theres a swimming pool in the vicinity, shell lead a conga line into it. A costume party is the highlight of the annual Business Chicks conference, and Isaacs outfit is always one of the best. At a conference in Fiji a few years ago, where the instruction was to come as someone or something starting with F, she was Princess Fiona from Shrek, in ogre-ish ears and green body paint. Cathie Reid says Rowan Isaacs, Emmas husband, is equally keen on fancy-dress. At every opportunity, the two get their children into costume as well. Living in the US, they can embrace the Halloween spirit in a way that theyre never going to get the opportunity to do here in Australia, Reid says. I actually wonder if it was one of the reasons for moving to LA. Winging It is part memoir, part motivational manual (you can follow your dreams). Isaacs central contention is that in order to have what she calls a big life, it is necessary to be adventurous. As she once put it to a group of Business Chicks: Nothing magical happens when you go to work at 9am, leave at 5pm, do a yoga class, catch up on some Netflix and fall into bed. To illustrate her own willingness to throw caution to the wind, she tells me that years ago, before she had a husband or kids, she met a woman at a party one Saturday night. They talked about travel. She was like, Ive always wanted to go to India. I said, Me, too. Thats a dream of mine. She said, If I go, will you come? I said, Absolutely. I didnt know this girl at all. The next morning, the pair went to a travel agency and booked flights. They spent three weeks together in India and had a fabulous time. Shes one of those people whos up for anything, says Reid. Isaacs makes an annual trip to Necker Island, in the Caribbean, where she hosts a Business Chicks leadership conference. Both Necker and Moskito, an island four kilometres away, are owned by Isaacs friend and mentor Richard Branson, the British billionaire founder of the Virgin Group. One year, Branson suggested a picnic at Moskito, and asked if anyone wanted to swim rather than take the speedboat. To Reids consternation, Isaacs accepted the challenge. Reid recalls saying to her, I never knew you were a swimmer. She goes, Im not, really. I said, Why are you doing this? She goes, Why not?  The way Isaacs tells it, she was shaky and exhausted when she got to Moskito. Reid remembers her arrival differently: She charged up the beach and grabbed a cocktail. She has more energy than anyone Ive ever met in my life.

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On the wall in the Sydney office is a picture of Isaacs and Branson lying side by side at Necker. Branson is reading Winging It. She is reading Bransons Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way. Books about business and personal development are catnip to Isaacs. She cant get enough of them. When she was a teenager, her

favourite was Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. I dont really know where the drive to want to create wealth came from, she says. To her friend Cathy Burke, former chief executive of Hunger Project Australia, there is no mystery about it. She was born a hustler, Burke says. Thats just part of her DNA. Isaacs and her mentor, British billionaire Richard Branson, enjoy each others book while in the Caribbean. Credit:Courtesy of Emma Isaacs Isaacs grew up in the middle-class southern Sydney suburb of Lugarno, the oldest of three children of a schoolteacher and an accountant. At 18, she dropped out of university, where she had half-heartedly embarked on a business course, and joined a fledgling recruitment company called Staff It. The fourth person on the payroll, she tried to make herself indispensable, answering phones, typing resumes, doing the banking, emptying the bins, even painting the office walls. She says that when one of the two owners left the business soon after she started, he told the other: If youre going to offer equity in this company to anyone, you would offer it to that kid sitting there. The $10,000 she had saved from years of weekend waitressing wasnt enough to pay for a half-stake, Isaacs tells me, so we made a deal that any commission I got from placing people into jobs would go straight back into the business. To supplement her small take-home salary, she took some of the casual shifts offered by employers using the recruitment service. If a client called needing a waitress on New Years Eve, Id say, Ill do it. I was working in the office all day and doing temp jobs at night. At only 19, she made her first foray into the property market, investing in a two-bedroom unit in the then down-at-heel inner-Sydney suburb of Redfern. Eight mortgage brokers had turned her down, she says. The ninth said yes. She took out another loan the following year, this time to buy a studio apartment. Business Chicks Australian boss, Olivia Ruello, first worked for Isaacs at Staff It, and remembers how earnestly she whittled away the amount she owed: She would write down in her notebook when she could pay an extra $40 or $50 off her mortgage. Isaacs says she was happy to scrimp and save: Ive always been very frugal. Even now, she avoids making unnecessary purchases; she rarely even buys take-away coffee. I appreciate the value of every single dollar. I mention to her that I was recently at a smart bar filled almost entirely with groups of carefree young women paying $20 a glass for wine.

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Laying down his view this year on why January 26 should remain as our national day, Scott Morrison implied Indigenous complaint was overstated because it wasnt a particularly flash day for convicts either.

The leader of conservative Australia may have been struggling to recall indignant table talk half-heard at a dinner of the Institute of Public Affairs. But if, in the 1920s, Russian scientists had planted the brain of a dead Bolshevik in the cranium of a Siberian Husky and the parahuman had offered a similar locution, they would have regarded their experiment as a setback for Soviet science. Menzies, Fraser or Howard might have made a better conservative defence of January 26.

May well they despair ... speechwriter Graham Freudenberg with former prime minister Gough Whitlam in 2005. Credit:Penny Bradfield

My own side could also do better at the language of politics. The politics of the pandemic has got Labor repeating negatives about itself with a half-crazed, dogged insistence. After the Upper Hunter byelection, former leader Jodi McKay gave her own party a tongue-lashing. Yet it was always a Coalition seat. Self-laceration just multiplies the damage. Joel Fitzgibbon savages Labor about climate when he could indict, rather than his own party, boardrooms such as BHPs for putting profit above jobs as they vacate coal.

One Labor Senator last year wrote that she was sick of people who look down on those who send kids to private schools. The Wizard of Oz didnt provide a weaker straw man. In 17 years as a Labor leader I never heard anyone scorn constituents for choosing private education. As premier I talked up the contribution of the low-fee, non-state sector. So have all Labor leaders. Oppositions get trapped by defensiveness, stuck with a telltale phrase, pleading The problem is  The problem is the 24-hour news cycle; the problem is media wont report our policies; the problem is the government is living off Labor reforms 
Australian Federal Police have arrested an employee of an Emirates-owned air services company and charged him with drug trafficking and money laundering offences as a result of the Operation Ironside investigation.

The man, Frank Meredith, is a Sydney Airport-based employee of air services company Dubai National Air Travel Agency (DNATA), which is owned by Emirates and his arrest came after a two-year AFP operation.

The inquiry previously led to the charging of two Sydney men over a 38-kilogram methamphetamine importation on an Air Canada flight in March 2019. But it was evidence uncovered by the AFPs infiltration of the An0m encrypted phone platform as part of an operation codenamed Ironside that allowed investigators to uncover the alleged infiltration of DNATAs Sydney Airport department.

A DNATA spokesperson confirmed in a statement that one of its employees in Australia was in police custody but declined to comment on ongoing legal proceedings and investigations by the authorities.
Hornsby mayor and Liberal Party elder Philip Ruddock has apologised to a constituent after telling her to get back on your leash during a council discussion about dog walking.

A northern suburbs resident who overheard the comment took to social media this week to complain of the disgraceful and misogynistic remark made to another woman by Cr Ruddock, a former Howard government minister, while trying to alert her that her time speaking to the council was up.

Hornsby mayor Philip Ruddock has apologised for remarks to a woman in council. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Last night at the council meeting Mayor Ruddock said to a female constituent who had finished speaking regarding off-leash dog times for Mt Kuring-Gai Oval Now get back on your leash, the resident posted.

A council spokesperson said Cr Ruddock had apologised directly to the resident and regretted any offence that may have been caused.
Essentially, they have handcuffed each other by endorsing and trusting An0m and openly communicating on it  not knowing we were watching the entire time, said AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw. The app had been installed on dedicated handsets, concealed within a calculator program that could only be opened with a secret code, and sold by unwitting crooks to each other as a trusted communications tool. The handsets were not capable of normal phone or wifi or messaging, supposedly to make them more secure. They were developed for the FBI by one of its informers, in exchange for money and the possibility of a reduced sentence. Loading The app was tricked up by the AFPs tech experts in a co-operative effort inspired by an informal chat with some FBI officers over beers. In all they needed three critical elements to make it work: access to the communications; the ability to read the messages in clear  that is, unencrypted text; and a way of transmitting the information to the authorities. The handset supplied the access point; sophisticated codes allowed the ability to read messages in clear text; and more sophisticated tech tricks allowed the information to be transmitted from the handest without the user being able to detect it. The Australians used the legal powers created by the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018, shorthanded as TOLA, to get computer access warrants to allow them to read the crooks communications. The Australians and Americans worked together to pool their different legal powers and tech abilities to make it work as a seamless international surveillance operation.

Once An0m was proven to work, police agencies in a total of 17 countries actively joined the US-Australian effort and the net brought in Mafia groups, Mexican cartels, Triad gangs and illegal bikie gangs. The operation was named Ironside in Australia, Trojan Shield in the US and Greenlight in Europe. Loading Its the digital equivalent of an old-school ruse. It reminded Peter Dutton of an American police trick to bring in elusive criminals  the police would phone the suspect to tell them theyd won a prize in a lucky draw. The crooks were too stupid to realise it was a con and when they turned up to collect their free toaster theyd arrest them, the former home affairs minister told colleagues. The app-equipped handset is the 21st century equivalent of the 20th century toaster, a lure to bring the mouse within the grasp of the cat. In the second blow we saw this week, the FBI went after a $US4.4 million ($5.6 million) ransom payoff made by a US oil and gas company to a Russian cybercrime gang, and managed to grab most of it back. Even though it was paid in the digital currency, Bitcoin.

This demolishes the long-lingering myth that digital currencies are anonymous, untraceable and somehow beyond the reach of the law. Loading In this case, the Russian-based DarkSide group inserted malicious ransomware code into the systems of the Colonial Pipeline company, which supplied 45 per cent of US east coast petrol, diesel and jet fuel. That crippled the company and the pipeline shut down, causing immense disruption to the fuel supply. Colonial paid $US4.4 million ransom in Bitcoin to get its operations up and running. The FBI followed the digital trail of the ransom payment to a digital wallet or account specified by DarkSide and was able to recover $US2.3 million. The traceability of the Bitcoin transaction did not surprise experts, but the fact that the FBI somehow had possession of a private digital access key did. Again, there is an old-school equivalent. When a ransom was paid in cash in the pre-digital era, the police would try to stake out the drop-off point and lie in wait for the crooks who came to collect the money.

In both cases revealed this week, its the eternal cops and robbers routine, the same old game of cat and mouse, but written in computer code. The revelations flowing from both operations, widely publicised around the world, provide a forceful new argument in favour of equipping the state with new powers and tech abilities to stay apace of organised crime. Loading They dont fully satisfy the guardians of legal oversight, such as the Law Council. Its president, Dr Jacoba Brasch, QC, says that the level of disclosure from the authorities in the Ironside operation doesnt justify the powers given to the police by the TOLA Act: We have no information about which TOLA-related powers were used, how they were used, whether that use was in fact lawful and proper, and the extent to which the use of any of those powers contributed to the reported outcomes of the operations. And, in particular, whether the powers are proportionate to the legitimate objective to which they are directed. Shes right that officialdom has not clearly spelled out enough detail to answer her concerns. Citing operational security, it does not intend to.

There are three bills before the Australian Parliament right now likely to be affected by the newly energised debate over police powers. The committee responsible for scrutinising such bills is the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, or PJCIS, one of the most effective and successfully bipartisan parts of the Australian legislature. Its chair, Liberal Senator James Paterson, remarks: Operation Ironside is a timely reminder of the sophisticated and constantly evolving tools criminals use to evade law enforcement, and the challenge Parliament faces in ensuring legislative powers keep pace. Loading For instance, there are many other encrypted apps running on dedicated devices and likely only being used by criminals. And they are not operated by the authorities, as far as we know. Some, like Ciphr, have many more subscribers than An0m had. Like An0m, they are distributed only by one criminal to another and can only be used to communicate with other subscribers on a closed system. In other words, there is a great deal more criminal activity organised through these systems; An0m was a small window into a vastly bigger underworld. But the authorities do not currently have the legal powers to break into them. So the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill, now before the Parliament, is designed to give Australias authorities the powers they want to be able to crack such systems and to penetrate the dark web where the worst crimes are organised, perpetrated, bought and sold. Patersons committee hopes to finish its work on this bill later this year.
Across Australia, several dirty cash runners were identified as being part of the same money-smuggling operation. Its modus operandi could have been scripted in Hollywood. Before a run, couriers were posted Samsung phones stripped down and loaded up with Ciphr hardware intended to make the phones impossible to tap. They also included a self-destruct application that enabled the devices to be remotely wiped. Policing sources who cannot speak publicly say the courier would receive messages on the encrypted phone directing them to a dead-drop location. There, hidden in a park or a storm water tunnel in suitcases or boxes, was a bundle of cash. Next would come a message with directions about where the money was to be delivered. More than $4 million cash seized in a raid in Brisbane last November. Even if the couriers were arrested, the most they could give up was a wiped encrypted device and an intriguing story about a Ciphr moniker: Mr Blonde. Source briefings and extensive searches of public records and court cases by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald suggest Mr Blonde is an Australian, most likely based offshore.

Mr Blonde is also believed to be in touch with members of the Aussie Cartel, identified this week by the chief executive of the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, Michael Phelan, as the most prolific drug-trafficking organisation attacking Australia. The cartels members include those effectively shut down or badly destabilised by Ironside, including Turkish based Hakan Ayik and Hakan Arif. But other Aussie Cartel members and their associates, including bikie-linked Mark Buddle and Marco Coffen, while weakened, are still operative. Police intelligence suggests Coffen was still busy distributing Ciphr phones in Australia as Ayik was peddling the An0m devices at the heart of Operation Ironside. An ingenious plan The execution of Operation Ironside would not have happened without the resolve of a cop regarded as an accidental Assistant Commissioner. Nigel Ryans understated style belies intelligence and integrity. According to colleagues, in a profession where arse-covering usually increases with ones rank, Ryan also has an unusual appetite for risk. Early in his career, Ryan was the AFPs first undercover officer deployed overseas, where he put his life on the line to play a drug dealer in a buy-bust operation in Europe. Later, he was deployed to the Northern Territory to investigate high-level police corruption. After this, he was appointed to head the AFPs internal affairs unit, an unpopular job that, if done well, guarantees powerful enemies.

Ryan left with more than a few. His focus and his uninterest in playing politics led to his appointment as AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaws first chief of staff in 2019 and, next, as the AFPs top organised crime fighter. Ryan made his brief clear: he wanted to innovate and have impact despite the AFPs limited resources. This meant attacking the infrastructure of organise crime, rather than just locking up the odd Mr Big. During the two and half years the AFP was secretly controlling the An0m phone network, the agency hoovered up millions of ostensibly encrypted messages and used data crunching to analyse them. AFP Deputy Commissioner Nigel Ryan displays items seized during raids after the Ironside operation. Credit:AAP It was not without risk. At times, Ryan had to make the call to let some organised crime plots unfold, rather than move in and expose the police operation. Had something terrible and potentially preventable occurred while the AFP were monitoring the phones, policing sources say Ryan would have faced the consequences. He was also challenging the timid, risk-averse culture of the AFP. Ryan argued the reward justified the risk. It paid off. Taking over An0m had, by one officials estimate, the effect of having an extra 300 detectives running dozens of high-level informers. For 18 months, the AFP had greater visibility into Australias underworld than ever before. Multiple crime cells have been wiped out and the Aussie Cartels most dangerous member, Hakan Ayik, is, according to one senior investigator, finished, considering his key role in distributing hundreds of An0m phones at the same time police were monitoring them.

The Italians have likely already put out a contract on [Ayiks] life. They will want to send the message that if you give the mafia technology that is compromised, you will pay with your life, the source says. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Yet the key technological enabler of Operation Ironside is now closed. With the expiry of the warrants that permitted the takeover of An0m and the decision of police to make arrests, conduct raids and carry out a carefully planned media strategy, Ryans extraordinary gambit is no more. Meanwhile the infrastructure of organised crime remains in place. Ciphr phones are still in use, albeit in falling numbers. The Hells Angels have recently been spruiking a new encrypted device called Diamond Secure. Criminal organisations still have trusted insiders working at ports and airports, including inside Qantas.

The arrest this week of a Sydney Airport contractor for allegedly facilitating a drug importation will not dent the trusted insider networks still in operation, police sources say. Loading The Aussie Cartel that sat at the top of the organised crime tree may be splintering, yet some of its members will continue their activities. And Australians still want drugs. As Assistant Commissioner Ryan plots his next innovation, Mr Blonde is likely planning his next importation.
Former Prime Minister John Howard said: We will choose who comes to this country. Karen Andrews needs to pay attention to the groundswell of support for the permanent settlement in Australia of the Murugappan family. The electorate is making clear the this family should be chosen. Barbara dArbon, Chittaway Bay Why hasnt the cost to taxpayers of millions of dollars to maintain this abuse appalled the PM in the way that Australia Posts $20,000 Cartier watches gifts did? Didnt he boast to a Christian conference recently that he had been called to do Gods work? Lets start seeing it in practice. Graeme Hudson, Avalon Beach The PM needs a stern reminder of the quote: Religion is in the heart, not in the knees. Edward Loong, Milsons Point What is the difference between human rights abuse in China, Myanmar, Hong Kong and more and Christmas Island? None. While our politicians condemn other countries for violations of human rights, Australia locks up children on a remote tropical island. Next election, vote them out. Chris Bell, Osborne Park (WA) No other democratically elected government in the world would put a family with native-born children through such an inhumane ordeal for the sake of political gain. If the Morrison government does win the upcoming federal election, it would constitute the most morally reprehensible victory in the history of Australian politics. Vincent Zankin, Rivett (ACT)

Hotel folly Hotel quarantine  perfect example of an oxymoron (Letters, June 11). Michael Britt, MacMasters Beach Spider effect It seems another dangerous side effect of COVID-19 is tarantism (Swamped Moree test site turns away locals, June 11). Once associated with the dance of the tarantella, people who had been bitten by a tarantula were advised to go into a frantic dance to rid themselves of the poison. The modern equivalent of this has seen the host victims going into frenzied sprees, visiting shopping centres, cafes, cinemas, motels, service stations, in a bid to rid themselves of the poison. Dangerous for all. Jennifer Carter, Oyster Bay

Code war For those smug people who believe NSW manages QR code compliance better than Victoria, I cant recall the number of times Ive paused at a shop doorway to check in while many others walk straight past the QR code (Letters, June 11). Weve avoided major lockdowns in NSW more by luck than management. Margaret Grove, Abbotsford New entry As an ancient hoarder, your letter inspired me to find my old, yellow International Certificate of Vaccination. The last entry was 1977 and hopefully it will have another COVID vaccination entry soon (Letters, June 10). Lorna Denham, New Lambton Heights

A study in how to enter the country I agree that it is time we started bringing back international students (Education airlift: NSW to fly in foreign students, June 11). They are indeed important for our economy. Let us not forget though that the purpose of education is the learning experience for the individual, for the overall benefit of society. So we must ensure that students get back to face to face on-campus learning when they return to our shores. Having just spent time this week face to face with NSW school students under the COVID tutoring program, the value of this interaction was great to see in their eyes. Michael Blissenden, Dural The NSW Treasurer can set up a way to bring in foreign fee paying students but state and federal governments cant find a way to expand the capacity for Australian citizens to return to their homes. Money tugs at politicians heartstrings more than separated families. Here is a tip for Australian residents stuck overseas: enrol in a university course. Rene Vogelzang, Haberfield Down the electric avenue Sydney trains are going green by 2025 (Green line: Sydneys trains go renewable, June 11). While this is commendable, the question remains why four more years, when the Netherlands with its much larger network went completely renewable in 2017? Kevin Bolton, Burwood

Electrification of all private cars, trucks and all public transport sounds like a good idea until the thought of the millions of overnight recharges taking place. Where will the required huge amount of night-time base load capacity come from? Certainly not from solar or batteries. Nuclear power is the only practical 24/7 baseload solution if all fossil fuels are rejected. Greg Turek, Killara No ANZUS to key questions When Scott Morrison meets US President Joe Biden in September this year, he may recall with a shudder a meeting with another President two years previously that found him trapped at a campaign rally, in thrall to Donald Trump (PM plans to visit Biden to mark ANZUS, June 11). Ah, those were the days. Joan Brown, Orange Just picture it at the G7 conference: Biden: Well, Mr Morrison, it is taking longer than I thought to return those 2000 children that Trump separated from their parents at the Mexican border. You have it easy with returning just one family to Queensland. I guess they are all settled back now? Morrison: Um, well, Ive still got them in detention. Marjie Williamson, Blaxland

Compassion fatigue Another reason for the drop in donations to charities may be compassion fatigue (Donations to charities fall to 40-year low , June 11). Especially as we near the end of the 2020/21 tax deductibility period, letterboxes are filling up with emotive missives from the CEOs of charitable organisations, each trying to outdo the other in tugging on the heartstrings, swamping potential donors with tales of distress and heartbreak. Gone are the days of simply becoming aware of a need and giving a donation to a worthy cause. One is left wondering how much of the donation pie is left for the cause in question after the marketing department takes its slice. Doug Walker, Baulkham Hills Officials take note When there is a request from government to classify expenditure as a payment for services, rather than a grant, its time for suspicion (Government funding to farming group delayed as favouritism concerns unearthed , June 11). When a senior public servant expresses ethical concerns about that request its time for alarm. When there is a connection between the recipient organisation and a person in a position of political influence, its time for a formal investigation. Tony Judge, Woolgoolga

Too big to fail We are grateful to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore for providing very sound advice to Scott Morrison regarding how to handle China in a diplomatic manner (Dont have to become like them: Singapore advises Australia to work with China, June 11). Peng Ee, Castle Cove Firing from the hip Weve seen evidence of it before, for example, the outburst in Question Time over the Cartier watches revelation (Morrison uses international crime bust to target Labor but misfires, June 11). It would seem that Scott Morrison has a trait of shooting first and asking questions later. David Rush, Lawson

Live for TV What an interesting life Fred Kenyon had (TV pioneers skills helped create digital revolution, June 11). A great pioneer of television but marrying Miss Dawn from Romper Room was the highlight. I wonder what windows they looked through in their life? John Dinan, Cheltenham A dam shame Yesterday I stood at the Warragamba dam wall marvelling at the pristine wilderness that would be inundated and destroyed by future storms if the dam wall were to be raised (Letters, June 11). Id encourage your correspondent to do the same. Katriona Herborn, Blackheath

Privacy first AustralianSuper is a member first organisation and at no time has it put member data in danger or ignored member concerns (AustralianSuper dismisses privacy concerns, June 7). In the campaign highlighted in the article, AustralianSuper is partnering with The New Daily as part of a range of activities to improve members financial literacy. This is being done openly and with full consideration of all privacy and regulatory obligations. Members have been emailed directly about the campaign prior to it commencing and have the option to opt out at any time. AustralianSuper works tirelessly to provide the best possible retirement outcome for over 2.4 million Australians, and that includes the proper management of all member data consistent with relevant legislation, regulation and global best practice. No member data has been breached or compromised. Members data is protected by AustralianSuper at all times. Sarah Adams, AustralianSuper Group Executive Strategy, Brand and Reputation

Royal fantasy What a storm in a royal teacup (Palace wont back Sussexes in Lilibet row, June 10). The Sussexes may simply have their own comic-book-fairytale agenda in mind. So far, Meghan and Harry have Archie and Lilibet (Betty). All they need now are twins named Reggie and Veronica to complete their comic book offspring. With Meghan thinking shes Ariel the Little Mermaid, and Harry thinking hes Prince Charming, their cartoon fairytale is complete. They can live happily ever after (and anonymously) in Fantasyland, the happiest kingdom of all. Pam Timms, Suffolk Park Bad habits Making whoopie or just getting into bad habits (Nun stole $1m from school, June 11)? Allan Gibson, Cherrybrook

Brass monkey Thursday was the coldest day for 37 years (The big chill: Sydney shivers through its coldest day since 1984, June 11). At 9 am it was 9 degrees here. We rugged up with coats, beanies, gloves and scarves to go walking. We passed a young man wearing swimmers only strolling down for a swim. We wondered, did he lose a bet, is he in love, is he crazy or just a young nature lover? Stay warm.

Bea Hodgson , Gerringong Postscript Are other Australians ashamed, as I am? began Fridays letter by Gerard Brennan of Bronte condemning the governments lack of compassion towards the Biloela family. The sentiments expressed by the former High Court chief justice resonated with writers (many wrote to say they were ashamed) and reflected the views of hundreds of correspondents who flooded our inbox this week. As Christina Pender of Naremburn pointed out, all the letters published in the Herald have supported the Tamil family and condemned their treatment yet the government is apparently afraid of losing votes if it deviates from its hard line on boat arrivals. Where are all these voters the government is so afraid of? she asked. Theyre certainly not writing to the Herald: we have received only one letter supporting the governments stance.
A family killed in a fiery Boxing Day crash on the NSW South Coast in 2017 were loved and cherished and will never be forgotten, their loved ones have told an inquest.

Lars and Vivian Falkholt died instantly and their adult daughters Jessica and Annabelle were seriously injured when a Toyota Prado driven by Craig Whitall, 51, failed to negotiate a bend on the Princes Highway at Bendalong and crossed on to the wrong side of the road, hitting the familys Mazda head-on.

Lars Falkholt, his wife Vivian, and their daughters Annabelle and Jessica died after the crash. Credit:Facebook

Both cars were engulfed in flames and Mr Whitall died at the scene. Passers-by pulled Jessica and Annabelle to safety, but they later died in hospital.

This week, an inquest at the NSW Coroners Court was told Mr Whitall had a mixture of illicit and prescription drugs in his system including methadone, diazepam, methylamphetamine, and a very high concentration of the antidepressant doxepin, which is sometimes prescribed for insomnia.
A man has been caught allegedly trying to flee the country after police seized $7 million in cash that was hidden under a concrete floor last week.

Hugo Jacobs, 39, was arrested at Sydney Airports international terminal about 9pm on Thursday trying to board a flight to Dubai.

Hugo Jacobs (right) outside the NSW Supreme Court with his barrister Philip Dunn in Sydney in 2010, Credit:AAP

Detectives arrived a short time later and took him to Mascot police station where he was charged with knowingly dealing with the proceeds of crime and knowingly directing activities of a criminal group.

Mr Jacobs was acquitted in 2011 of murdering Kings Cross nightclub identity Todd OConnor. He was accused of luring Mr OConnor to an isolated street in Sydneys south at Tempe and carrying out an execution-style killing in a dispute over drug money.
The contract and clearance dispute between multi-code star Israel Folau and Queensland Rugby League is set for a full-day showdown in the states Supreme Court next month.

Folau is seeking an injunction against the QRL in a bid to return to the playing field with his two brothers for the Clive Palmer-backed rugby league team Southport Tigers.

The case was heard in the Queensland Supreme Court on Friday and Justice Susan Brown listed the matter for a full-day hearing on Monday, July 12.

The case centres around whether the QRL acted appropriately in not registering Folau until he solved his contractual dispute with French club Catalans Dragons.
Victoria Police has lost a protracted court battle against an officer who was sacked in 2019 over allegations he exposed himself to a beauty therapist as she waxed his Speedo line.

The senior constable was found guilty in 2018 of disgraceful conduct after an internal police investigation, but must be reinstated to his former role with the Melbourne Highway Patrol following a decision by the Court of Appeal last week.

The case had previously been the subject of an appeal to the Supreme Court of Victoria and a five-day review by the Police Registration and Services Board before reaching the states highest court.

The officer, given the pseudonym IHF in court documents, had attended a day spa and wellness centre on six occasions between in 2016 and 2017, where he requested a male wax, Speedo line.

He repeatedly asked for a 23-year-old woman to perform the depilatory procedure, including on March 27, 2017, when the alleged incident occurred.
The halls of Trinity Primary School in Richmond were a hive of excitement on Friday.

Students returned to classrooms and saw their friends for the first time after two weeks of remote learning.

Trinity Catholic Primary School Principal Nigel Rodrigues and students Dafalla, Cesafino, Isabel and Sophie. Credit:Chris Hopkins

Its very bubbly. Its lovely, principal Nigel Rodrigues said. I went to the gate this morning and it was just a sea of happy faces bursting to get through.

Mr Rodrigues said while children and teachers had coped well with the sudden switch to learning from home in the latest coronavirus lockdown, there was a feeling of relief at being back on site.
A boy snorkelling at one of Western Australias most popular holiday locations is due to be flown to Perth for treatment after being attacked by what was believed to be a two-metre shark.

The 10-year-old was swimming about 75 metres offshore with his father at Five Fingers Reef, near Coral Bay, when he was bitten by the bronze whaler in the foot on Friday.

Fisheries officers patrol the site of the shark attack south of Coral Bay.

The remote swimming spot is only accessible by four-wheel-drive and is popular with snorkellers.

A Royal Flying Doctor plane is due to land at Coral Bay to take the boy to Jandakot Airport where St John Ambulance crews will be waiting to take him to hospital.
Western Australias Chief Health Officer says alternative vaccines could be available to over-50s by the end of the year as concerns over the AstraZeneca vaccine mount, following a second death linked to the jab.

Speaking to ABC Radio on Friday, Andy Robertson said supply limits meant those aged 16 to 49 would be preferenced for the Pfizer vaccine before it could be considered for older age groups.

WA Chief Health Officer, Andy Robertson. Credit:Hamish Hastie

We still have limited supplies of the Pfizer vaccine, its anticipated by September, October hopefully those supplies will increase, he said.

I would imagine by the end of the year, we will have sufficient supplies that there will be a choice of vaccine, but it may not be before then.
Western Australia has no active coronavirus cases, including in hotel quarantine, for the first time since the pandemic arrived on our doorstep in February 2020.

The zero cases tally will likely be fleeting, with 140 infections detected in Perths quarantine hotels this year  three of those seeping out into the community through two security guards and a returned traveller.

Nearly half of the cases, 59, were recorded in April alone, and one-third of the total arrived via COVID-stricken India.

Since then, WA has halved its intake of returned international travellers from 1025 a week to 530 and temporarily restricted entry for people in India.
Sydney and Melbourne are now the third and sixth least affordable housing markets in the world, and other Australian cities are seeing rapid price rises. Headlines about record house prices reappear every time the notch is pegged higher. Nevertheless, these stratospheric price tags are remarkable  and are having significant social effects.

With deposits shifting further out of reach, the dream of home ownership is evaporating. The proportion of people aged 25 to 34 owning a home has fallen from 61 per cent in 1981 to 37 per cent in 2018, and pandemic-driven price rises are likely to have exacerbated the drop.

Already prohibitive house prices are inflated by continuing undersupply and regulations that blow out the cost of building. Credit:Paul Rovere

Associated with this, the proportion of young adults living with their parents rose from 24 per cent in 2010 to 32 per cent in 2018. Other potential buyers are trapped in insecure rental accommodation.

Higher housing costs increase inequality. Elderly rich homeowners are doing well, while renters and young homebuyers are falling further behind. Moreover, many buyers can only borrow from the bank of Mum and Dad. So home ownership is becoming hereditary.
A military sociologist who helped expose alleged war crimes by Australian soldiers says she wont be bullied or intimidated, insisting cultural change is needed within the defence force.

Defence Minister Peter Dutton last week suggested Samantha Crompvoets would be cut off from receiving future contracts to research military culture.

Melbourne-based academic Samantha Crompvoets says shes unapologetic about raising issues she believes are significantly jeopardising the reputation and capability of defence. Credit:Dean Sewell

She had come under attack from some commentators and sections of the media over plans to publish a book titled Blood Lust, Trust and Blame about her research, which included interviews with special forces soldiers.

Dr Crompvoets was commissioned by the Department of Defence in 2015 to produce a report on culture within the special forces. Some of her inquiries led to members disclosing claims of unlawful behaviour including alleged war crimes.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has flown to Britain for the G7 but he leaves many of us here wondering how long we will remain trapped in Australia.

While the G7 meeting in Cornwall is vital and no one would question Mr Morrisons decision to attend, it is reasonable to ask whether the federal government is moving too slowly opening up Australias borders to the tens of thousands of people who have reason to travel.

NSW has shown that with determination more can be done to reopen to the rest of the world. Treasurer Dominic Perrottet announced on Thursday that within six weeks the state wants to start a trial program welcoming 250 international students a fortnight.

They will stay in purpose-built student accommodation adhering to the same 14-day quarantine as other arrivals. By years end the number of students a fortnight is expected to double to 500, offering a lifeline for the $14.6 billion-a-year education export industry which creates 95,000 local jobs.

Mr Perrottet says that universities will foot the bill and the new places will be in addition to 3000 hotel quarantine places a week that NSW currently provides.
NSW Labor leader Chris Minns has revealed his opposition frontbench, elevating five new members to a shadow cabinet in a reshuffle some MPs have described as a genuine attempt to heal the party.

Former leader Jodi McKay was offered a frontbench portfolio by Mr Minns, but turned it down. Mr Minns recent leadership rival Michael Daley was promoted to shadow attorney-general, while newly appointed deputy leader Prue Car will hold on to the education portfolio.

NSW Labor leader Chris Minns after he was unanimously elected leader last week. Credit:Louise Kennerley

The line-up promotes five MPs to the frontbench for the first time, including Anoulack Chanthivong, Steve Kamper, Rose Jackson, Courtney Houssos and Tim Crakanthorp.

The reshuffle was described as a real generational change with a crop of Labors younger MPs elevated to the frontbench, said one Labor MP, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to do so.
NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet wants university bosses to explain how they will get more local students back into the classroom as the sector prepares for the long-awaited return of international students.

Mr Perrottet said he did not want local students falling behind, with many tutorials and lectures still online and students frustrated that campuses are not coming back to life as quickly as the rest of the city.

In a letter on Friday, the Treasurer asked university vice-chancellors to explain how they would further support our domestic students in having the best on-campus learning experience in NSW.

It came one day after Mr Perrottet revealed he had brokered a deal to return 250 international students to NSW every fortnight, subject to federal approval.
Singapore: The Malaysian king and the heads of the countrys eight other royal families will hold a special conference of rulers next week as calls grow for the resumption of parliament in a nation battling a surging COVID wave.

The south-east Asian nation has since January been under a state of emergency invoked by King Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad at the urging of Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin to deal with the pandemic.

Malaysias King Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah holds the keys to the countrys immediate political future. Credit:AP

The order is due to run until August 1 but as the COVID-19 crisis has escalated significantly there have been renewed appeals to the king not to extend it beyond then, while analysts fear an angry public could take to the streets if elections are not staged later this year. Malaysia is currently under a nationwide lockdown. It has the worst per capita outbreak in the region - 206.24 cases per million people, higher even than Indias 76.66 per million, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Under its wide-reaching emergency powers, the Prime Ministers Perikatan Nasional (National Alliance) government notably revived so-called anti-fake news legislation to stamp out misinformation about the virus and vaccines. The police chief said last week that 10 people had been arrested under the law.
PHILIPSBURG:--- On Tuesday, May 18, 2021, the Ministry of Justice launched a book drive aimed at furnishing the prison library and providing additional educational resources for the inmates at the Point Blanche Prison and Detention Center. In an effort to expand the selection of programs and activities available to the inmates at the prison, the Honorable Minister of Justice, Ms. Anna E. Richardson, met with various entities prior to the launch of the book drive to discuss ways in which these plans can be realized. Furnishing the prison library was an essential part of the process in order to stimulate inmates in their pursuit of self-development.

With the collaborative efforts of the University of Saint Martin(USM), the book drive was launched and hosted over a two (2) week period which started on May 18, 2021, and ended on June 1, 2021. As a means to motivate the inmates, a survey was conducted to identify what their educational interests are and the genres of books that appeal to them most. The genres identified as a result of the survey included amongst other types were poetry, fiction, science non-fiction, and history. The public was encouraged to support the development and growth of the inmates by donating at least (1) one used or gently used book to replenish the library with quality literature.

Minister Richardson stated that when the book drive was launched, she had hoped for large community involvement and support. After seeing the results, she expressed how pleased she is to see those hopes came to fruition. Its an amazing feeling to see our community come out and show their support to achieve this goal meant to benefit the inmates at the Point Blanche Prison and Detention Center. The support of our community over these past two weeks will provide positive opportunities for so many of the inmates, said the minister.

The book drive was concluded on June 1, 2021, in which over 300 books were collected from donations by the community. The donations covered various genres that were of interest to the inmates including a variety of other genres.

It is always an honor and pleasure for us to participate in these types of initiatives. We believe that education and access to literature is a human right. If we think of Malcom X, Nelson Mandela, and many other heroes who spent a considerable amount of time in prison, we can recall that they did a lot of reading. We were also very happy to collaborate with the Ministry of Justice, and we continue to applaud their efforts., said Dr. Carmona Baez, the President of the University of St. Martin (USM).

Having been the drop-off point for the book drive, the Management team of the USM was pleased to present the book collection to Minister Richardson along with the Acting Director of the Prison, Mr. Aartwichgt Bell, and a member of the Management Team at the Prison; Mr. Steven Carty, who expressed their gratitude to the community for making such a donation.

On behalf of the Ministry of Justice, I would like to extend a special thank you to the USM for their partnership in this initiative. We were fortunate to have the USM respond quickly to our request for using their institute as the designated drop-off point, allowing us the means to move forward with the book drive. I would also like to thank the people of Sint Maarten for showing your support and contributing to this success. Our goal is not just to fill the shelves of the prison library, but to also provide more opportunities that inmates can make use of to continue developing themselves and sharpen their skills that they will be able to use in the future, stated Minister Richardson.

Consideration for different types of development programs is currently in the execution phase. Additionally, the Ministry of Justice will be carrying out a needs assessment to determine the next steps in being able to effectively offer the GED course at the prison, while also assessing proposals for the implementation of classes and other courses.
~Teenager returned home.~

PHILIPSBURG:--- On Thursday, June 11th 2021a report of Missing person was filed at the Philipsburg Police Station by the mother of Nallelin Nayrovi Lorenzo-Mercedes, born in the Dominican Republic, on 10 of September 2003

Nallelin was last seen by her mother on May 8th, 2021, before they were to travel to the Dominican Republic. Nallelin had refused to travel with her mother to the Dominican Republic and have since not returned home, nor contacted her mother or any other family member.

Nallelin is about 55 feet tall, normal built, dark brown complexion, brown eyes, and black hair, and is 17 years old she also has a piercing in her nose. Its unknown what the teen was last seen wearing when she left the family residence on May 8th, 2021.

The police department is seeking assistance from the community to help locate Nallelin Nayrovi Lorenzo-Mercedes. If you have any information about the whereabouts of this person, please contact the Police Force: 54-22222 or the emergency number 911.

Also if you are Nallelin and you are reading this then please do contact your mother to let her know that everything is okay with you.

UPDATE: Missing teen returns home

The Sint Maarten Police Force would officially like to inform everyone that Nallelin Nayrovi Lorenzo-Mercedes has returned home safely.

Personnel of the Detective Department has spoken to the minor and as well as her parents regarding the consequences of leaving home without proper communication.

We would like to especially thank the media and the community for the quick sharing of the police press release on social media. Together we can always make a difference.

KPSM Press Release.
The Board of the Dutch Caribbean Nature Alliance (DCNA) recently held their first Board Meeting for 2021 in a mixed virtual and in-person setting, making decisions and discussing strategies crucial to ensuring the continuation of the conservation management activities executed by the Park Management Organizations of all six islands of the Dutch Caribbean. Originally an in-person meeting was planned for Sint Maarten, but due to a spike in COVID19 cases on the ABC islands, it was decided to host a mixed meeting, with some members joining from Sint Maarten while others joined from their respective home locations throughout the Dutch Caribbean and the Netherlands.

The DCNA Board meetings are critical for discussing and strategizing on the most effective way to support protected area management organizations in the Dutch Caribbean, especially in light of the significant challenges brought about by the global Covid-19 pandemic and other pressures faced by the Park Management Organizations. Park Management Organizations also had the opportunity to update each other on some of the challenges and successes the parks are experiencing as they continue to safeguard nature in the Dutch Caribbean. Various governance decisions were also taken including decisions related to financial good-governance, the disbursement of the Conservation Trust Fund, and the support the DCNA network provides in terms of its regional and international lobby on behalf of the conservation organizations in the Dutch Caribbean.

The DCNA conservation network provides support to the Protected Area Management Organizations on all six islands of the Dutch Caribbean: Aruba National Parks Foundation, STINAPA Bonaire, CARMABI Curacao, STENAPA St. Eustatius, the Saba Conservation Foundation, and the Sint Maarten Nature Foundation. Another critical component discussed during the Board Meeting is the importance of implementing a strategy that will help foster the development of sustainable tourism for the islands, enabling the Dutch Caribbean to emerge from the challenges brought about by the Pandemic with a greater focus on green and blue economies. Aside from conservation managers and the various experts of the Board of DCNA, observers from the World Wild Fund for Nature the Netherlands (WWF-NL), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN-NL), BirdLife Netherlands, Observation International, and the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature, and Food Quality (LNV) also participated in the last DCNA Board Meeting.

The next DCNA Convention is planned for the 22-24th of November in Curacao. The DCNA convention not only has the DCNA Board Meeting on the agenda but also several workshops for the protected area management organizations from the six Dutch Caribbean islands, bringing scientific institutions, local stakeholders, and youth nature ambassadors together for knowledge exchange and capacity building.
Barbadians looking to pursue a medical career may be eligible for financial support from Ross University School of Medicine (RUSM) in partnership with the Barbados Ministry of Education. RUSM is proud to announce the opening of their 2021 Barbados Scholarship application, a need-based scholarship covering the cost of medical school tuition and fees at RUSM for two deserving Barbados students per semester, for a total of six scholarships per year.

The Ministry of Education Technological and Vocational Training (METVT) is pleased to accept the scholarships from RUSM to support the growth of medical education in Barbados. These scholarships represent an important partnership between RUSM and the METVT and signals the continued commitment of RUSM towards creating additional opportunities for Barbadian students to pursue careers in medicine, said Minister of Education, Technological and Vocational Training, Hon. Santia Bradshaw. It is our hope that by expanding the opportunities available to our students, we can continue to build on this Governments investment in our human capital and assist our students to achieve their career goals.

To qualify for the scholarships, individuals must be citizens of Barbados and accepted to study at RUSM. Upon acceptance, students will submit a completed scholarship application form no later than six weeks prior to the first day of class. The RUSM Admissions Office will evaluate student applications and the Ministry of Education will certify student eligibility. Scholarship recipients will receive financial support in the form of full tuition costs and fees, so long as they maintain satisfactory grades throughout their enrollment.

RUSM is proud to continue providing scholarships to those residents who are looking to pursue a career in medicine, said James M. Record, MD, JD, FACP, provost and chief academic officer for RUSM. He continued, We are pleased to grow the global healthcare workforce by expanding access to our programs through this scholarship program. For more information on the scholarship, visit https://medical.rossu.edu/admissions/scholarships.

RUSMs 14,000+ diverse alumni practice medicine throughout North America and across all specialties, including a high percentage of graduates who enter the in-demand field of primary care.

A part of Adtalem Global Educations (NYSE: ATGE) healthcare vertical, RUSMs scholarships follow Adtalems long history of providing Caribbean nation citizens with access to its three Caribbean-based institutions: American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine (AUC) in Sint Maarten, Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine (RUSVM) and RUSM.
Chamberlain University, which has the largest nursing school in the United States and is committed to supporting access to quality healthcare education and programs nationally and around the world, is partnering with Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College in St. Kitts (CFBC), to implement a simulation training program . Chamberlain will launch the simulation training program with CFBC staff as part of a collaborative effort to strengthen the competencies of nurses in the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis. During the pandemic, when much of the worlds curriculum shifted online, Chamberlain shifted to an interactive virtual-patient simulation in order to give students access to real world experiences online. Through this partnership, Chamberlain will now provide simulation training supports to benefit CFBCs existing Health Sciences division and their state-of-the-art nursing skills lab.

Chamberlain was built on a strong appreciation for academic technologies and the use of simulation in equipping students for hands-on care. The partnership with Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College is a meaningful way of advancing simulation in nursing education, which has forever changed the way that quality education will be delivered. By providing a comprehensive simulation training program to the faculty of CFBC we are pleased to support the preparation of the islands future nursing workforce, said Chamberlain University Provost Carla D Sanderson, PhD, RN.

Chamberlains mission is to educate, empower and embolden diverse healthcare professionals who advance the health of people, families, communities and nations. Chamberlain, which is part of Adtalem Global Education, is committed to graduating extraordinary nurses who transform healthcare in their communities and worldwide. To do so, they are expanding access to quality medical education and training for current and future healthcare professionals. The mission of CFBC is to foster the development of responsible, self-sufficient citizens by delivering a range of academic, professional and vocational courses and programs that reflect high values and standards, and which prepare students to make lifelong contributions to their communities.

CFBC President Dr. Jacqueline Austin applauded the work of the Dean of the Division of Health Sciences Dr. Rondalyn Bradshaw who spearheaded the effort to bring this high-quality training to the College. We are profoundly grateful to have established a partnership with Chamberlain University who are using cutting edge technology to strengthen and augment the competencies of our student nurses, nurse practitioners and nurse educators, she said.  This training will assist nurse educators at CFBC in providing realistic simulated experiences in order to prepare clinically competent and extraordinary nurses.

The purpose of the comprehensive simulation training program is to educate CFBC staff in the techniques and methodology of simulation. Chamberlain University will provide two courses to 25 participating faculty: Advanced Training of Simulations 101 and Simulations 210. The courses, which are self-paced, will explore: the principles and methodology of simulation as a learning technique, the history and trends of simulation, and the ethical principles used in simulations facilitation. At the end of the program, participants will be able to Identify the key components of a strategic plan to create an effective simulation-based program. Faculty will also be equipped to implement, assess and manage simulation-based activities utilizing simulation standards and guidelines.

For more information about Chamberlain University and other innovative partnerships and programs visit chamberlain.edu.
PHILIPSBURG:--- Pro Soualiga, along with its sister Foundation Korsou Na Kaminda Pa Libertat, presented Curacao's Prime Minister Gilmar Pisas with a Writ of Notification informing the Government and Parliament of other means of resolving the financial predicament without engaging the IMF or COHO. The Writ of Notification serves as formal notice to the Government and Parliament that the former Netherlands Antilles was omitted from the 1963 list of Non-Self-Governing Territories due to a classification error. Additionally, the Writ of Notification reminds the Government and Parliament of Curacao that no U.N. Resolution exists that removed the former Netherlands Antilles from the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories. The Dutch State confirmed this in the Court of First Instance in St. Maarten on April 23, 2021, during oral pleadings. These two facts when taken together (i.e. absence of U.N. Resolution and classification error) mean we are on the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories and fall under Article 73 of the UN Charter, and no longer have a financial problem but, rather, a knowledge problem. The governments of Aruba, Curacao, and St. Maarten until now, were not aware of the tremendous benefits and privileges available under Article 73. The Writ of Notification serves to ensure that our governments and parliaments are no longer unaware of this vital information. A territory on the NSGT's list cannot receive liquidity support as loans, but, rather, the administering state is under the UN-mandated obligation to ensure the economic and social welfare of the inhabitants of said territories. This is vital information which until today our leaders were lacking. They are now better equipped to meet the needs of the people they serve without being forced to accept inhumane, humiliating, and unreasonable conditions.

Pro Soualiga Foundation




"Whenever there's a most strenuous or most dangerous task, we'll ask Party members to be the first to respond."

Yao Wenhua has served as a cableway maintenance worker in a famed mountain in China's Anhui for 30 years. Find out what made him stick to the post for decades.

Produced by Xinhua Global Service
Chelsea's Callum Hudson-Odoi is reportedly a possible transfer target for Manchester United as they seek alternatives for top target Jadon Sancho.

Manchester United will reportedly consider turning to Chelsea's Callum Hudson-Odoi if they miss out on top transfer target Jadon Sancho.

The Red Devils have made signing Sancho their top priority once again this summer after missing out on the Borussia Dortmund attacker last year.

United are believed to have agreed personal terms with the England international, but they face a big challenge in persuading Dortmund to lower their asking price.

According to The Express, United are unwilling to spend more than 70m on a player, so alternative options have already been lined up if a deal with BVB cannot be agreed.

Versatile Chelsea winger Hudson-Odoi is said to be on the English giants' list of targets, as is their former forward Cristiano Ronaldo and Barcelona's Ousmane Dembele.

Ronaldo is out of contract with Juventus in a year's time, which is also the case for Dembele at Barca, whereas Hudson-Odoi still has three years to run on his Chelsea contract.

The Blues are thought to be prepared to cash in on the 20-year-old this summer, but United would likely face strong competition from Bayern Munich for his signature.
Algiers, 10 June 2021 (SPS)-The recent crisis between Spain and Morocco has shown that the Sahrawi conflict is a matter of uncompleted decolonization, said Ambassador of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) to Colombia Mah Lahdid in an article published on the Algerian online newspaper La Patrie News.

The crisis triggered by the pressure imposed by Morocco on Spain to recognize its alleged sovereignty over the Western Sahara, which was amplified by the hospitalization in Spain of the Sahrawi president Brahim Gali. It is also closely linked "to the dramatic and chaotic socio-economic situation in Morocco that provokes social revolts, said Mah Lahdih.

"We have witnessed a timid awakening of Spain in the defense of its sovereignty in the face of constant interference and Moroccos pressure, as well as in its assumption of responsibility as the administering power of the territory of Western Sahara," said the diplomat.

The crisis between the two countries has revealed "the true face of the medieval Moroccan system with the obscene and condemnable use of the innocent population, especially minors and infants, he continued.

"Morocco's position both in the United Nations (UN) and in the African Union (AU) is that of recognizing the existence of SADR, but it denies this position under internal propaganda, said.

"An example of this propaganda that does not fit the reality of things is when the Makhzen says that the Sahrawi Republic does not exist but sits next to the representatives of this Republic in all AU summits, parliamentary and ministerial meetings, said the ambassador. SPS

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Algiers, June 10, 2021 (SPS) - The President of the Council of the Nation of Algeria (Upper House), Mr. Saleh Gudjil, received this Thursday a delegation from the Parliament of the Sahrawi Arab Sahrawi Democratic Republic (SADR).

During his meeting with the Sahrawi delegation, Mr. Gudjil expressed his satisfaction with the state of health of the President of the Republic and Secretary General of the Frente POLISARIO, Mr. Brahim Ghali, highlighting the importance of the promising results of parliamentary diplomacy in the achievement of the aspirations of the continent .

For its part, the Sahrawi delegation, made up of Mr. Jamal Bendir, member of the Saharawi Parliament and President of the North Africa Regional Group in the Pan-African Parliament, along with Ms. Mariam Mohameddu, member of the Saharawi Parliament and the Continental Parliament, they expressed their "gratitude to the Algerian people and his government for the firm position expressed by President Tabboune's visit to his Saharawi counterpart in the hospital where he is recovering from COVID-19." SPS

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WINDSOR LOCKS  Frontier Airlines launched Friday service from Bradley International Airport to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the latest of several routes added this year at Connecticuts largest airport.

The service operates on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Flights depart from Windsor Locks-based Bradley at 11:44 a.m., and arrive in Atlanta at 2:29 p.m. They depart from Atlanta at 8:39 a.m., and arrive at Bradley at 10:59 a.m.

We are thrilled to offer our passengers more travel options to Atlanta with the launch of new, nonstop service with Frontier Airlines, Kevin Dillon, executive director of the Connecticut Airport Authority, which owns and operates Bradley, said in a statement. As we reemerge from the pandemic, we are more than ever committed to connecting our passengers to their favorite destinations. In fact, thanks to our partnership with Frontier Airlines, our passengers will have more options to travel affordably this summer, with the airline now offering nonstop service to five exciting destinations.

The new route will complement Frontiers nonstop flights from Bradley to Denver; Miami; Orlando, Fla.; and Raleigh-Durham, N.C.

Frontier Airlines is key to our growing route network and we thank them for their continued vote of confidence in Bradley International Airport, Dillon said.

Among other recent announcements, the new Breeze Airways said last month that it would start service between Bradley and Charleston, S.C.; Columbus, Ohio; Norfolk, Va.; and Pittsburgh.

Also last month, Sun Country Airlines announced a route between Bradley and Minneapolis.

In March, Southwest Airlines began a route between Bradley and Nashville, Tenn.

On June 24, JetBlue is set to launch daily service between Bradley and Miami.

The new routes will help Bradley offset the steep drop in passenger traffic that it has experienced since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. A total of about 2.4 million travelers passed through Bradley in 2020, down 64 percent from 2019.

Despite the declining traffic during the pandemic, Bradley is still widely regarded as one of the countrys leading small airports. It ranked No. 7 in USA Todays 2021 10 Best Readers Choice travel contest.

pschott@stamfordadvocate.com; twitter: @paulschott
The Vice President of the United States (EU), Kamala Harris , toured Mexico and Guatemala to speak with the presidents of both nations. He expressed his concern about the " corruption and impunity" that occurs in the two countries.

The main reason for the visit was "to attack the migration problem from the root." In his speech to the Guatemalan migrants, he told them that what the US government wanted was for Guatemalans to "find hope in their own home." He warned them that his country was going to reinforce security at its border, repeating twice a resounding, "Don't come."
STAMFORD  Two years and several appeals from Mayor David Martin after its last vote, the Board of Representatives re-upped on its commitment to demolish Stamfords former police headquarters.

Representatives this week approved an environmental monitoring contract between the city and Eagle Environmental. As a result, the city can now move forward with remediating and knocking down the dilapidated police station, which has been the subject of debate and scrutiny for seven years.

But theres a catch.

The mayor wont determine what happens next. Instead, representatives will make a final call on whether the city keeps the property or sells it to an outside developer.

It is very unique, if not unprecedented, in our city, to allow our citys elected board to make such an important decision for a portion of such visible real estate and valuable real estate at the heart of our city, said Rep. Jonathan Jacobson, D-12, who heads the Operations Committee.

The board originally voted in early 2018 to approve demolition for the station at Bedford and Hoyt streets, a building long plagued by contamination issues. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, in 2014 fined the city for violating federal safety procedures at the then-65-year-old headquarters. Because of the asbestos and chemical contamination on-site, Stamford constructed a new police station, where officers started working in 2019.

But, when the city attempted a year later to move the project forward, board members argued that the circumstances had changed. They decisively struck down a $135,000 demolition and abatement contract for the property. Instead of demolishing the building, which was estimated to cost roughly $3.3 million, representatives argued the city could sell the contaminated building and harness the funds for other municipal projects.

Even though the course of action hadnt changed since the boards 2018 vote, the result might differ from when it first agreed to raze the old station. Once the contaminated building is gone, the Board of Representatives decides what comes next.

In March, Mayor David Martin persuaded the boards Operations Committee  which bristled at the idea of approving something they had already struck down  to let his administration raze and abate the headquarters. He and city engineer Lou Casolo argued that getting rid of the old building kept residents safe and allowed the city to take advantage of pandemic-induced cost savings.

To strike a deal with the committee, Martin agreed that he would defer to the full board on what comes next. In a resolution sponsored by the mayor and Jacobson  along with board President Rep. Matt Quinones, D-16, and Rep. John Zelinsky, D-11  Martin promised that his administration would adopt the recommendation made by the board as its own after holding public hearings on the stations future.

This is a community decision, Jacobson told The Stamford Advocate. You have right in the heart of Bedford Street ... a very attractive parcel of property, next to a brand new, state-of-the-art police department. Next to the most beautiful courthouse in the state. This is prime real estate.

Jacobson has publicly advocated for turning the former lot into a permanent park, but the board wants to weigh other alternatives. Martin backed turning the property into a green space for the foreseeable future while the city contemplates another use for the land.

Like Rep. Nina Sherwood, D-8, some are interested in seeing the site turned into a hub for Stamfords emergency services, an idea that the city has floated in the past. Other representatives, namely Reps. Terry Adams, D-3, and Benjamin Lee, D-15, suggested that selling the lot in hopes of tempting developers could be the best path forward.

Consistently, Martin has pushed back on that idea.

Although I have no specific plans for this property, and no one has come up with anything thats very specific, we have no intention of selling this, he said to the boards Operations Committee in March.

An appraisal from real estate company Cushman & Wakefield said if Stamford sold the building as-is  contaminated building and all  it could expect the property to be worth $1.175 million. According to the real estate appraisal, the more changes the city makes on the property, the more money it could reel in.

Interior asbestos remediation of the building, which Casolo pointed out is an expensive undertaking that would result in an unstable structure, would make it worth $1.7 million. If city officials chose to level the building and rezone the property, they could expect to make either $2.2 or $4.5, depending on how dense they made the lot.

Board approval doesnt mean demolition starts tomorrow.

Theres still more paperwork to be drawn, Casolo said. The Law Department must finalize contracts between the city, demolition company Stamford Wrecking, Eagle Environmental, and BL Companies, the firm tasked with overseeing the demolition. That will take time, but the city expects to move forward on the project soon.

Its generally pretty, pretty fast, Casolo told The Advocate Wednesday. It doesnt happen overnight, but it doesnt take once a month either.

The city expects demolition to happen within six months of finalizing contracts and obtaining municipal approvals.

veronica.delvalle@hearstmediact.com
LITCHFIELD  While state police continued to say little Thursday about the ongoing probe into the deadly shooting involving a well-known lawyer, the head of the Litchfield County Bar Association says its common for attorneys to carry guns.

Litchfield County Bar Association President Ryan Henry, a partner at Allingham, Readyoff & Henry, says a number of attorneys carry guns for their protection.

As lawyers, were dealing with, in many cases, a lot of high-conflict situations where people are angry and feel they didnt get a fair shake, he said. Theres a lot of people out there with mental illness that have serious psychiatric issues. Its not uncommon for people to carry guns. Fortunately, hes one of those ones that does it legally. You dont know whats on the other side of that door.

As one example, Henry cited the case of attorney Julie Porzio, who was gunned down in the parking lot of a Connecticut courthouse in 2009.

Henry said hes known attorney Robert Fisher, the subject of the state police investigation into Mondays shooting, for 16 years.

This is so unfortunate, Henry said.

Litchfield States Attorney Dawn Gallo said police are still investigating the shooting, but added there is not a case until and unless an arrest is made.

The states attorneys office prosecutes the cases once there are arrests made. However, of course, in serious cases, wed like to be kept apprised of the investigation, Gallo said. We would review search warrants if needed  things of that matter.

Gallo called in state police Western District Major Crime Squad detectives after the shooting was reported Monday evening outside the Litchfield office of the Cramer & Anderson law firm. As of Thursday, state police said there were no updates to release about their investigation, including whether anyone was arrested.

State police said Fisher, a senior partner with Cramer & Anderson, was the subject of the investigation. On Tuesday, state police identified the victim as 39-year-old Matthew Bromley. Police said they believe he and Fisher knew one another, but said how the two are connected is part of the ongoing investigation.

Fisher has hired Torrington attorney Bill Conti, of the Law Offices of Conti, Levy & Salerno. When reached Thursday, Conti confirmed he is Fishers attorney, but said he had no further comment.

According to the Conti, Levy & Salerno website, Conti has practiced law for 46 years. His areas of practice include criminal law, personal injury law and civil litigation.
LITCHFIELD  The family of 39-year-old father who was fatally shot this week in front of a local law firm said they are seeking truth and justice as state police have released few details about the killing.

State police said Matthew Bromley, a former Torrington resident who had been living in Virginia in recent years, was fatally shot in the head late Monday afternoon outside the Litchfield law firm, Cramer & Anderson, but have not said what led to the homicide.

Matt was not a bad person. Matt deserves justice. He was good to his friends and his family. He loved life, said his cousin Ray Parsons, who said Bromleys brother is married to his first cousin.

Hes not a very threatening guy, added Parsons, in reference to Bromleys criminal history, which included a conviction for carrying a dangerous weapon charge and jail time.

Cramer & Anderson, said one of its partners, attorney Robert Fisher, was involved in the shooting and has been placed on leave. State police identified Fisher as the subject of the investigation and said he remained at the scene Monday evening.

Parsons said Bromley, who has two sons, ages 22 and 18, had just returned to Torrington after living in Virginia for the past two years.

I can't believe after coming home from Virginia, being down south for two years, the week he comes back to Connecticut, he gets shot, Parsons said. Its heartbreaking.

While Parsons said he had lost touch with Bromley while his cousin was living in Virginia, he still has fond memories of him.

When we used to hang out, he would help me work on my house, Parsons said. He was great with his hands. Hes the type of guy you could sit by a fire with and talk about life with all night. He was a chill guy.

According to Parsons, Bromley worked in the heating and cooling business while in Virginia.

He was such a handy guy  a good friend, good man, Parsons said. We just want to know what happened.

State police have released few details about the shooting, other than to say Bromley was killed and the weapon belonging to a registered owner was seized at the scene. They have not said what motivated the killing.

Cramer & Anderson also released a statement, saying the firm had no connection to Bromley. Judicial records show Fisher was not representing anyone in any active civil or criminal cases as of this week.

Fisher declined to comment when reached by phone this week. His attorney, Bill Conti, of the Law Offices of Conti, Levy & Salerno in Torrington, also declined to comment.

Parsons said the last time he saw Bromley was right before he moved to Virginia.

Parsons is making arrangements to hold a vigil in memory of Bromley and a protest to demand justice.

We hope we can get some answers for his family and friends  that's all we want is the truth and how this happened. His kids and nieces are hurting right now and we need to all work together to get them justice, Bromley said. I'll fight till the end to bring Matt and his family justice.
A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:

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Spike protein produced by vaccine is not toxic

CLAIM: COVID-19 vaccines make people produce a spike protein that is a toxin and can spread to other parts of the body and damage organs.

THE FACTS: COVID-19 vaccines do instruct the body to produce spike proteins that teach the immune system to combat the spikes on the coronavirus, but experts say these proteins are not toxic and do not damage organs. The spike protein is immunogenic, meaning it causes an immune response, but it is not a toxin, said William Matchett, a vaccine researcher at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Dr. Byram Bridle, an associate professor in viral immunology at the University of Guelphs Ontario Veterinary College, forwarded the fringe theory about the spike protein being a toxin during a radio interview with Alex Pierson in Ontario, Canada. We made a big mistake. We didnt realize it until now, we thought the spike protein was a great target antigen. We never knew the spike protein itself was a toxin and was a pathogenic protein so by vaccinating people we are inadvertently inoculating them with a toxin, said Bridle, who described himself as pro-vaccine. But scientists and researchers say that is not the case. Dr. Daniel Kaul, an infectious disease expert at the University of Michigan, noted that the vaccines have been proven safe and effective through clinical trials and the millions of people who have so far received the vaccines in the U.S. In terms of the spike protein itself being pathogenic in some way thats just simply not true, he said in response to Bridles claims. All the vaccines that received emergency use authorization in the U.S. do not contain live COVID-19 virus. Nor do they contain actual spike protein from the virus, which is what allows the virus to easily infect the human cell and replicate. The vaccines work by teaching the immune system to identify and fight off the spike protein in the body. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines rely on messenger RNA, often referred to as mRNA, that delivers a set of instructions to create spike proteins so your body can learn to combat them. Unlike the mRNA vaccines, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine carries its genetic instructions for the spike protein through a modified adenovirus. Posts online shared quotes of Bridles interview to further push the false narrative that COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous and attack the body. In the interview, Bridle says that the spike proteins generated by the vaccines dont stay in the shoulder muscle, but spread and cause so much damage in other parts of the bodies of the vaccinated. But Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at NYU Langone Health, said that vaccines are mostly concentrated at the site of injection or the local lymph nodes. What was said in the radio show was completely inaccurate, Ratner said. There is no spike protein in the vaccines first of all. The amounts that are made after the mRNA is injected are very small and it almost exclusively stays locally. It is nowhere near the amount he was talking about. Bridle did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press. An auto-reply email from his account said that a more comprehensive report on his comments would soon be published. My answer to the question posed by the host was objective and founded on multiple reliable scientific sources, the email reads.

 Associated Press writer Beatrice Dupuy in New York contributed this report.

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Video misleads on Fauci emails

CLAIM: People should stop wearing masks because leaked emails written by Dr. Anthony Fauci said masks arent effective against COVID-19. Emails also showed Fauci takes hydroxychloroquine and tells his family members to take it to prevent COVID-19.

THE FACTS: A trove of emails from Fauci, longtime director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was released to The Washington Post and Buzzfeed News through Freedom of Information Act requests. The emails were not leaked. Social media users have misrepresented the emails to make it appear Fauci lied to the public. Several of the claims were contained in a TikTok video that was shared on Facebook this week. How you see Dr. Faucis leaked emails about how masks dont work and still wear masks? Brainwashed, states a man in the TikTok video. The typical mask you buy in a drugstore is not really effective. Guys, thats from Fauci, thats not me. Thats from the man who got yall wearing masks. The video is accompanied by a screenshot of an email that Fauci wrote on Feb. 5, 2020, before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, that was later published by Buzzfeed News: Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material, reads the email. Fauci had sent the note to Sylvia Burwell, president of American University and a former secretary of health and human services, after she asked him whether she should take a mask to the airport. But that was written in early February 2020 when there were few reported cases in the U.S. Early in the pandemic, Fauci had publicly downplayed mask wearing for the general public, stating in March 2020 masks should be spared for healthcare workers. As new information emerged on how the virus spreads, officials shifted their messaging, urging everyone to wear a mask, even if they werent sick with COVID-19. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance on April 3, 2020, to recommend that people wear masks, Fauci also promoted that message. During a PBS Newshour interview that day, Fauci encouraged masks, saying new information showed infected people without symptoms can still transmit the virus. In a CNN interview on May 21, 2020, Fauci stated: Wear a mask. The video also makes the false claims that Fauci admitted he took the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine because it is effective against COVID-19, and that therefore those who had promoted it as a cure were correct. The drug has not been approved as a treatment for COVID-19. To back up the false hydroxychloroquine claim about Fauci, the video shows a screenshot of an email stating: The other drug I have, and have told my family and some friends to get, is called hyroxychloriquine -- also seem to be effective and safe. But Fauci didnt write that email, in which the drug was misspelled. He received the email from Erik A. Nilsen, CEO of Bio-Signal Technologies, a startup based in Texas, on March 18, 2020, according to the emails published by Buzzfeed News. Other emails written by Fauci during that time period show that he was not willing to endorse hydroxychloroquine because data did not support its use and he has continued to state that science doesnt back using hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. Dr. Fauci has never taken hydroxychloroquine, an NIAID spokesperson confirmed to The Associated Press in an email.

- Associated Press writer Arijeta Lajka in New York contributed this report.

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COVID-19 vaccines do not cause magnetism in bodies

CLAIM: COVID-19 vaccines have resulted in some people becoming magnetic.

THE FACTS: In recent weeks, videos have circulated on social media falsely claiming that metal objects shown hanging on peoples bodies were the result of magnetism created by COVID-19 vaccines or microchips. A new video claims that magnetism was added to the vaccine in order to make the messenger RNA move throughout the body. The CDC says there is no truth to these claims and that the COVID-19 vaccines are free from ingredients that could produce an electromagnetic field. Receiving a COVID-19 vaccine will not make you magnetic, including at the site of vaccination which is usually your arm, the agency posted on its website. In addition, the typical dose for a COVID-19 vaccine is less than a milliliter, which is not enough to allow magnets to be attracted to your vaccination site even if the vaccine was filled with a magnetic metal. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized use of the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines and the ingredients are publicly available in agency documents and on the CDC website. None of the shots include any metals. The vaccines have gone through three phases of clinical trials and were tested on thousands of people to be deemed safe and effective before being distributed nationally in phases. If there was any possibility that the vaccines were magnetic, it would have been reported early on, said Dr. Carl Fichtenbaum, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. Some social media users shared videos of magnets sticking to their bodies only to later confirm it was a joke. If some videos do show metal objects stuck to a person, there could be an explanation. Dr. Christopher Gill, an infectious disease expert at the Boston University School of Public Health, said the answer could be as simple as humidity in the room or moisture. Back when I was in college, I had this game of sticking spoons to my face and I would just blow on it a little to get some moisture, he said. But clearly my face is not magnetic. There are other clues that the videos showing supposed magnetism are not authentic, according to Fichtenbaum. Whats interesting to me is I havent seen anybody put a compass on their arm because a compass under a magnetic field gets disrupted, said Fichtenbaum.

 Beatrice Dupuy

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Asymptomatic COVID-19 infections do occur

CLAIM: Coronavirus cases without symptoms arent real. An asymptomatic patient is simply a healthy person.

THE FACTS: Posts liked thousands of times on Instagram this week are falsely claiming that asymptomatic COVID-19 cases do not exist. In case anyone is still confused- an asymptomatic person is a healthy person, the posts read. Never in the history of acute respiratory illnesses have we declared cases without any indication of symptoms. Its called a false positive. The end. In fact, asymptomatic COVID-19 infections do occur and are a key feature of the virus, according to the CDC and several experts consulted by The Associated Press. We know that asymptomatic infections occur based on at least two facts, said Jade Fulce, public affairs specialist at the CDC. First, she said, the virus has been isolated by culture from persons who have tested positive but never develop symptoms. Second, she said, there are well documented cases of infected persons who are asymptomatic who have transmitted infection. Though false positive and negative tests can occur, the risk of such errors is low in most of the tests authorized for use by the FDA, Fulce said. Furthermore, false positives due to lab errors are not the same as asymptomatic cases. Though estimates vary, researchers who reviewed the available published data in May 2021 said that at least one-third of people who become infected with the coronavirus likely did not experience symptoms. This occurs pretty frequently, said Dr. Roger Shapiro, an associate professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. We would not expect our tests to have false positives to that high of a percentage. Other viruses, including other respiratory viruses, have also been identified in individuals who never developed symptoms, said Dr. Panagis Galiatsatos, an assistant professor in the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Asymptomatic can occur 100%, Galiatsatos said. Theres countless cases where an upper respiratory virus never gives you symptoms but still can be highly contagious. Theres many viruses that have done that, and other coronaviruses possibly in the past, as well, have done that. Experts say when we talk about asymptomatic COVID-19 patients, we are actually talking about two different types of patients. There are patients who are truly asymptomatic and never develop symptoms. Then there are patients who dont develop symptoms at first, but later do. "We do consider presymptomatic people more infectious, Shapiro said. They have virus thats on the way up, they have viral loads sort of on the way up. Theyre more likely to be replicating a lot of virus and passing that on.

 Associated Press writer Ali Swenson in Semora, North Carolina, contributed this report.

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Video misrepresents Biden statements, policies on guns

CLAIM: President Joe Biden once said he was about to swoop down with Special Forces and gather up every gun in America, and now his administration is advertising giving out guns to people who get vaccinated for COVID-19.

THE FACTS: A video circulating widely on social media this week falsely claims to show the U.S. president standing at a podium and threatening to take peoples guns away. Text overlaid on the video aims to contrast it with current policies, falsely suggesting Bidens administration is now advertising guns to the public as an incentive to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Neither claim is true. Bidens administration has not led any national giveaway of guns for getting a vaccine. Some smaller-scale lotteries like this do exist, such as in West Virginia, where a statewide vaccine lottery counts hunting rifles and shotguns among its prizes. Biden also never threatened to take every gun in America. The video, which amassed thousands of shares on TikTok and spread to Instagram, strips key context from Bidens words during a 2013 press conference. The video makes it sound like Biden intends to take everyones guns away. However, Biden was actually explaining that the government would do no such thing. In the original video, then-Vice President Biden was speaking to reporters about disinformation surrounding gun control legislation proposed after a shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Biden listed and debunked several false claims, including that the federal government wanted to put all firearm transactions into a massive federal registry. Theres no central registry for anything, Biden said. No way that Uncle Sam can go find out whether you own a gun because were about to really take away all your rights and were going to swoop down with Special Forces and gather up every gun in America. Its bizarre. But thats whats being sold out there. In context, its clear that Biden was dismissing false claims that the federal government wanted to keep all firearm transactions in a federal registry and take everybodys guns. He was not describing actual plans to do these things. In his presidency, Biden has taken executive action to crack down on homemade firearms and regulate pistol-stabilizing braces like the one used in a recent shooting in Boulder, Colorado. He has also called on Congress to strengthen gun laws, including requiring background checks on all gun sales and banning assault weapons.

 Ali Swenson

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Video uses fake subtitles to misrepresent popes message

CLAIM: Video shows Pope Francis saying in Italian that we are living in the end times, that he has a secret agenda to deceive people and that he unites people under one world religion in order to control them better, among other foreboding messages.

THE FACTS: A video clip circulating widely this week on Instagram, TikTok and conspiracy theory websites shows Pope Francis speaking to the camera in Italian while fake English subtitles mislead viewers about his message. The subtitles falsely claim the Roman Catholic leader is letting viewers in on something he has been keeping secret for a long time. The video inaccurately translates Francis as saying that we are living in the end times, that we are living like Jesus Christ isnt coming back, and that in worshipping Francis, people will actually receive a message from the Antichrist known as the Mark of the Beast. An internet search reveals the clip actually comes from a 2014 video filmed on a smartphone by Anthony Palmer, a pastor who knew Francis personally and died later that year. English subtitles on multiple 2014 versions of the video indicate that Francis is actually saying Christians should come together as brothers. The original videos do not include any mention of the Mark of the Beast or a secret agenda. I am here with my Brother, my Bishop Brother, Tony Palmer, read English subtitles for Francis on the original video Palmer posted on YouTube in 2014. Weve been friends for years. Later in his remarks, Francis says, We have a lot of cultural riches, and religious riches. And we have diverse traditions. But we have to encounter one another as Brothers. He goes on to say, I am speaking to you as a Brother, adding, I speak to you in a simple way. With joy and nostalgia (yearning). Let us allow our nostalgia (yearning) to grow. Because this will propel us to find each other, to embrace one another. And together to worship Jesus Christ as the only Lord of History. News reports on the video from 2014 confirm that the popes message was one of Christian unity.

 Ali Swenson

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Friday, 11 June 2021 17:16:23 (GMT+3) | Istanbul

Ukraine-headquartered Metinvest has recently announced its plans to build a new cold rolling and coated steel complex at its facility in Mariupol. The company has signed an agreement with Italian steel equipment supplier Danieli Group for the handling of the project.

Metinvest plans to build a new complex at its Ilyich Steel Plant, which in the first stage will include a cold rolling line of over 400,000 mt per year, a HDG line of over 600,000 mt, and a PPGI coil line of over 140,000 mt, SteelOrbis has learned from the official statement. The first stage of the project to be completed in 2025 will consume over $800 million, while the total amount is estimated to exceed $1 billion. The second stage of the project will include the building of a new annealing furnace department, a skin pass and coil slitting line, and new coating lines. After the second phase is completed, the cold rolling capacity will exceed 1.6 million mt per year.

The cold rolling shop is our largest construction project for the next five years. It is a logical continuation of Ilyich Steels rolled product modernization program. With this entirely new technological chain - including the modern continuous casting machine, reconstructed hot strip mill 1700 and new cold rolling shop - Metinvest will be able to achieve world-class quality at all production stages, from semi-finished to coated rolled products, said Yuriy Ryzhenkov, CEO of Metivest, in the official statement.

The products are intended mainly for the Ukrainian market, where these high-quality locally-produced coils will be able to replace low-quality imported coils. The rolled coils will also be exported to countries in the CIS and Europe.
USR PLUS Co-chairman and leader of the European Parliament's Renew group Dacian Ciolos says that the European Commission's approach to the national recovery and resilience plans will not be that of an evaluator "ticking checkboxes as they verify documents", but that of a partner.

The clarifications follow the statement of Social Democratic Party (PSD) leader Marcel Ciolacu, who said that the European Commission representatives have made "devastating observations" on the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) submitted by Romania.

"I thought that with Dragnea out, PSD will get rid of thievery, but of villainy too. Mr. Ciolacu convinces me that at least villainy remains a value in the 'new' PSD as well. Because I cannot interpret otherwise his tossing around the idea that Romania's National Recovery and Resilience Plan has been rejected by the European Commission. The last time I spoke with the European Commission President about the national recovery and resilience plans and the assessment evaluation and approval procedures was this week, on Monday. And it's clear to me that the European Commission's approach will not be that of an evaluator ticking checkboxes as they verify documents, but that of a partner to each member state, in order to make sure together that the money borrowed from the EU is invested wisely," Ciolos wrote on Facebook.

He also noted that according to the EC, Romania's PNRR has not been rejected and that requests for clarifications are part of the normal negotiation process with member states. Ciolos reproached the PSD representatives that they did not come up with project proposals during "the dozens of area-specific public consultations Minister Cristian Ghinea has held in recent months".

Ciolos reminds that Minister of European Investments and Projects Cristian Ghinea was his colleague in the 2016 government and later in the European Parliament, and that he also participated in the elaboration of the European framework for the recovery and resilience fund and is well acquainted with the European institutional environment.

"Even though he now has to work with many departments in ministries set under political command and de-professionalised, including by and particularly by the PSD governments, I am convinced that he will get the job done," Ciolos concludes.
Prime Minister Florin Citu quoted on Friday a recent study by PricewaterhouseCoopers according to which the confidence of Romania-based company managers in our country's growth prospects has reached a record high in a decade since this report is being put out, adding that this shows that the solutions adopted by the Government as of last year and the transfer of resources to investments have led to this effect.

"Today I received a study (...) which clearly shows that Romania is going in the right direction. It's study done by PricewaterhouseCoopers and I would like to read to you just one thing. It is public, it is an interview that this company takes directors, managers of companies in Romania and today, at this moment, the confidence of executives or these managers in Romania's growth prospects has reached a record high in a decade, since this report is being made. So, the percentage of optimists is three times higher than in the 2020 edition. So, we are only a year after the pandemic, we have just come out of the pandemic and the optimism of these managers is at a record level, a ten-year high, which means that the solutions we proposed last year and the fact that we said that we are transferring resources to investments, in order to produce more, so that everyone can enjoy the results of the investments afterwards, have given confidence to these managers," Florin Citu told a press conference in Zalau.
Prime Minister Florin Citu reiterated on Friday that the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) submitted by Romania in Brussels was not rejected and that the entire amount of 29.2 billion euros will be drawn, noting that, at the current stage, the European Commission has made a number of comments the officials working on this document will have to answer quickly, otherwise those who deal with things superficially risk going home.

"I would like to clarify a few things about the PNRR, because I saw some fake news. I also said this morning that the PNRR was not rejected and it was not referred back, this is fake news. And this is the truth - before the Commission coming with clarifications, which confirmed what I said. Here, Romanians must be very careful and things must be very clear to them, we are not losing this money, 29.2 billion euros, we will take it all, we have projects for this money, important investment projects for Romania that will be completed by 2026 - infrastructure, hospitals, educated Romania, development plan for UATs [territorial administrative units] or development fund for UATs, there are projects there to take this money. We are currently undergoing a customary procedure, one that all the countries of the European Union are undergoing. The European Commission makes observations, we answer them and this is the moment we're at," Florin Citu told a press conference of the Salaj County Council.

The prime minister sent a 'very clear' message aimed at mobilizing officials working on the PNRR.

"We have a very clear message for all those who work on the PNRR - and here I am referring to public administration officials. You must know that you cannot go on holiday until we have this PNRR approved. (...) It is our responsibility and of those who are working on this project to have the best PNRR. You must therefore take all the comments of the European Commission and treat them with great care. Should we have problems with PNRR because these remarks were dealt with superficially by an official or anyone, at any level of the public administration, I guarantee you that person or those people will go home. We do not play with this, you must take into account all the observations, we respond quickly, respond immediately and make a good PNRR. So, no one goes home, on vacation, until we have this PNRR. (...) We have to take this money, it is money we need to develop," Citu also declared.
Deputy Prime Minister Dan Barna, co-chair of Save Romania Union - Freedom, Unity, Solidarity Party (USR PLUS), said on Friday in Sibiu that the Social Democratic Party (PSD)'s attack on the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) is "irresponsible", explaining that the consultations underway these days with the European Commission are "natural", the PNRR will be approved and it will be a "success".

"I see an attack of the PSD and its chair that I call downright irresponsible on what the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) means. It is an attack that shows how little the PSD understands about what such a programme and such a plan mean for Romania. An absolutely natural procedure, a procedure that will last for two months, during which the European Commission will send to all the countries that have sent these programmes (...) natural and normal questions and clarifications when we are talking about documents of thousands or tens of thousands of pages, is transformed by the PSD into an attack, practically, on Romania's perspective and credibility both as a European partner and as a country capable of developing such a programme. This is obviously happening because the PSD was and remains a party of poverty, a party that believes that an underdeveloped Romania can provide it with the political clientele with which it has accustomed us and with which it has kept Romania underdeveloped for 30 years," Dan Barna said in a press statement.

The Deputy Prime Minister pointed out that the programme will be approved and will be a success, and Romania will implement major projects by 2026.

"I have news for Mr. Ciolacu [PSD chairman] and for the PSD members who support him: this programme will be a success, Romania will attract these over 29 billion euros and Romania will develop, in a way that the PSD has tried to prevent from happening in all the governments it has had until now (...) The programme has not been rejected, it has not been withdrawn, there is a natural consultation, the programme will be approved, Romania will have this resource and by 2026 we will have the chance to see major projects, important projects that have never existed in Romania," added Dan Barna.

Chairman of PSD Marcel Ciolacu Marcel Ciolacu urged Minister of European Investment and Projects Cristian Ghinea to resign, adding that if the National Liberal Party (PNL) and Hungarian Democratic Union of Romania (UDMR) lawmakers fail to vote on the simple motion filed against him by PSD, they will be equally accountable.

The European Commission (EC) has started an in-depth assessment of the recovery and resilience plans (PNRR) it has received from member states to access funding under the European recovery plan for the economies affected by the novel coronavirus pandemic, the EC Representation in Romania announced on Friday.

The European Commission has two months to approve the national plans, one of the essential conditions for their approval being that Member States allocate at least 37 percent to the ecological transition and 20 percent to the digital sector, the release issued by the EC Representation in Romania further mentions.
Health Minister Ioana Mihaila stated, on Friday, in Craiova, that the human and material resources for the vaccination campaign will be directed in the coming period to the rural environment, where the number of vaccinated persons is much more reduced, given the fact that addressability has decreased in large urban centers.

Mihaila is on a two-day visit in Dolj County, where she is to meet representatives of the University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Craiova, family doctors and community medical assistants.

"I discussed with representatives of the Craiova University about what the institution accomplished in the field of non-invasive imaging and gastroenterology, but also about plans for the future, given that we and universities have the same purpose: to increase the quality of the medical act through a reform of the professional formation of staff in the health domain. I had meetings with the managers of the two hospitals subordinated to MS [Health Ministry] and with the director who is the coordinator of the vaccination campaign on the part of the DSP [Public Health Directorate], we also discussed about problems in the hospitals and how we can hasten and make more efficient the opening of hospitals in order to increase access of non-COVID patients to medical services, about how we can reorganize the vaccination activity, so that, seeing that addressability has decreased in the large urban centers, we direct human and material resources to the rural environment, where for the moment the percentage of vaccinated persons is much lower," said the Health Minister in a press conference.

Ioana Mihaila also stated that, besides the discussions regarding the vaccination campaign, she will also discuss with family doctors and community medical assistants about the issues in primary and community medical assistance and what solutions there are to solving them, because investments are to follow through the National Plan for Recovery and Resilience which are allotted to primary medical assistance, but also to community medical assistance.

Deputy Prefect of Dolj County, Iustin Dumitrescu, mentioned that the vaccination center at the Polyvalent Hall in Craiova was, a few weeks ago, at the top of centers in the country with the highest number of persons vaccinated. "I hope the visit of the Minister will impel us to move forward and advance in this vaccination process, because we know very well this is the only option by which we overcome the pandemic as quickly as possible," said Dumitrescu.

The director of the Dolj Public Health Directorate, Valeria Andreescu, the coordinator of the vaccination campaign in the county, stated that, from the data the institution holds, in the country the vaccine coverage is around 21 pct and in Craiova City - 30 pct.
Prime Minister Florin Citu, while on a visit today to Zalau - Salaj County, reminded that the European "green vaccine pass" that will be issued EU-wide to facilitate travel will be also rolled out in Romania beginning July 1.

"We'll have a green certificate beginning with July 1," Citu told a press conference, cautioning in the context that the pandemic is not over yet and the vaccination campaign will continue, with focus on rural areas, in order to bring the vaccine as close as possible to the people.

"We must do more, because the pandemic is not over. (...) We have very good results, but we mustn't slack off. This vaccination campaign continues until there is no more case left and that's the moment when we can say that we have overcome the pandemic," Florin Citu said.

He also invited the Social Democrats to join efforts in support of the vaccine rollout.

"Honestly, until today I haven't seen [PSD leader] Marcel Ciolacu go to a vaccination center, to support the vaccination campaign. Neither Sorin Grindeanu or anyone else in the party leadership, like Mrs. Gabriela Firea. (...) I don't understand why, because this vaccination campaign belongs to all of us, it's a campaign for the return to normalcy of entire Romania, not just of the National Liberal Party or of this government. I will raise this challenge for the Social Democrat opinion leaders every time, to come and support this public vaccination campaign," the Premier said.

Florin Citu also visited the vaccination walk-in facility organized this weekend in the parking lot of a mall in Zalau.

"Salaj County is on the 10th position, with a vaccination rate of almost 30 percent, so we have to do more because we must bring the vaccine as close as possible to the citizens and you have the necessary resources and if you need more, you can also call on the government for help. Thank you and congratulations again for everything you have done here," PM Citu said.

The European Parliament finally approved on June 9 the EU COVID-19 digital certificate to facilitate travel within the Union and contribute to economic recovery.

The certificate shall be issued free of charge by the national authorities and will be available in digital or paper format and shall include a QR code. The document will serve as proof of the holder's vaccination, negative testing or having undergone COVID-19.

The system will apply from July 1 for a period of 12 months. Holding a certificate will not be a precondition for freedom of movement. At the same time, the certificate will not be considered a travel document.
Prime Minister Florin Citu declared on Friday, in Zalau, that the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) was neither rejected nor referred back by the European Commission to the Romanian authorities, as it was said in the public space.

"I saw in the public space that there was a debate on the PNRR. PNRR was not rejected, it was not referred back. (...) Just so we're clear," PM Citu declared, at the end of a visit at the Zalau ring road construction site.

On Friday, national leader of the opposition Social Democratic Party (PSD) Marcel Ciolacu urged Minister of European Investment and Projects Cristian Ghinea to resign, adding that if the National Liberal Party (PNL) and Hungarian Democratic Union of Romania (UDMR) lawmakers fail to vote on the simple motion filed against him by PSD, they will be equally accountable.

The European Commission (EC) has started an in-depth assessment of the recovery and resilience plans (PNRR) it has received from member states to access funding under the European recovery plan for the economies affected by the novel coronavirus pandemic, the EC Representation in Romania announced on Friday.

The recovery and resilience plans will be assessed on the basis of 11 transparent criteria set out in the Regulation establishing a Recovery and Resilience Facility, the main component of the NextGenerationEU relaunch programme. As provided for in this Regulation, the Commission will work closely with the Member State concerned throughout the evaluation period in order to clarify any potential questions raised, for example by requesting additional information.

"Our goal is to work with Member States to ensure the optimal use of these funds," the European Commission said.

The European Commission has two months to approve the national plans, one of the essential conditions for their approval being that Member States allocate at least 37 percent to the ecological transition and 20 percent to the digital sector, the release issued by the EC Representation in Romania further mentions.
President Klaus Iohannis has signed the decree on Friday for the promulgation of the Law on the adoption measures regarding the information and communication infrastructures of national interest and the conditions for the implementation of 5G networks, the Presidential Administration announces.

On June 7, the Senate has adopted, as a decision-making chamber, the draft initiated by the Government.

The law aims to adopt measures regarding the authorization of producers of technologies, equipment and software used in information and communication infrastructures of national interest, as well as in electronic communications networks through which 5G electronic communications services are provided - 5G networks, in order to prevent, contract and eliminate risks, threats and vulnerabilities to the country's national security and defense.

"In order to achieve the intended purpose, the use of technologies, equipment and software programs within the information and communications infrastructure of national interest, as well as in 5G networks, except for the terminal equipment used by end users defined according to GEO 111/2011, is conditioned by the producers' obtaining of an authorization, under the conditions of the present law. The authorization is granted by decision of the Prime Minister based on the opinion of the Supreme Council of National Defense, within 4 months from the date of the request," the law stipulates.

According to the normative act, the opinion is based on a series of documents, as well as on assessments from the perspective of risks, threats and vulnerabilities to the country's national security and defense. If risks, threats and vulnerabilities to the country's security are identified as a result of the analysis, the CSAT opinion is negative.

Providers of authorized electronic communications networks and services may use only technologies, equipment and software in 5G networks developed by authorized manufacturers in accordance with this law.

The use by providers of electronic communications networks and services of technologies, equipment and software in 5G networks provided by manufacturers who have not obtained the authorization established by law represents a contravention and is sanctioned with a fine ranging between 1 pct and 5 pct of the turnover.

If, after the authorization is granted, risks, threats and vulnerabilities to the national security and defense of the country are identified, the obtained authorization is withdrawn by decision of the Prime Minister, at the request of the CSAT. The prime minister's decision is published in the Official Journal of Romania.

Suppliers who will have their licenses withdrawn can use the equipment for a period of 7 years in the case of networks and for the core area - 5 years.
The main and enduring message of the National Bank of Romania (BNR) for the National Bank of Moldova is that of a sustainable and robust partnership, BNR governor Mugur Isarescu said on Friday at the signing ceremony of the new Cooperation Agreement between the Romanian and the Moldovan central banks.

"Let me begin by mentioning that this year we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the signing of the first cooperation agreement between the central banks of Romania and Moldova. I take this opportunity to reaffirm the cooperation and rapprochement between Romania and the Republic of Moldova, between our central banks, based on shared values and symbols. The main and enduring message of the National Bank of Romania for the National Bank of Moldova is that of a sustainable and robust partnership. This is why we wanted to continue the cooperation between our institutions in a regulated form. As a matter of fact, the multiple transformations in the banking sector's regulatory framework at both national and international level required the conclusion of a new agreement to replace the one in force since July 27, 2001. So today we sign the new cooperation agreement between the National Bank of Moldova and the National Bank of Romania," Mugur Isarescu said.

He mentioned that the general scope of the new agreement is the development and expansion of cooperation in areas of mutual interest with a view to promoting the proper functioning of the Romanian and Moldovan financial-banking systems.

"We are expanding our cooperation in strengthening crisis surveillance and management institutional capacities, in the field of payment service providers and electronic money issuers as well as on the infrastructure of financial markets, cash transactions, cross-border transactions, for the combat of money laundering and terrorist financing, as well as for statistical purposes," Isarescu specified.

Governor of the National Bank of Moldova Octavian Armasu said that the new agreement between the Romanian and the Moldovan central banks is the most comprehensive cooperation agreement signed by the Bank of Moldova and which covers the most areas of cooperation.

"We also appreciate the important contribution of Romanian investors, Banca Transilvania and BCR in particular, that have directly contributed to the development of the Republic of Moldova's banking sector and to the promotion of good governance, according to European Union standards and practices. The entry of Banca Transilvania - one of the major Romanian banks - on the Moldovan banking market together with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development represented an important moment in the reform of the Republic of Moldova's banking system. It was a positive signal for other investors, mainly from the European Union, who decided to invest in the largest Moldovan banks," Armasu said.

According to a BNR release, the new Cooperation Agreement between the National Bank of Moldova and the National Bank of Romania was signed on June 11 in Bucharest by the governors of the two central banks, Octavian Armasu and Mugur Isarescu.

The general scope of the new agreement is the development and expansion of cooperation in areas of mutual interest, with a view to promoting the proper functioning of the Romanian and Moldovan financial-banking systems. The new agreement expands cooperation on institutional capacity building in areas such as banking supervision, crisis management, the activity of payment service providers and electronic money issuers, financial market infrastructures, cash operations, preventing and combating money counterfeiting, money laundering and terrorist financing, statistics, as well as supervising the enforcement of international sanctions in the financial-banking field.

The new agreement replaces the previous one, signed on July 27, 2001, on cooperation on the mutual exchange of information and the conduct of bank inspections in order to increase efficiency and ensure banking supervision on a consolidated basis, following the multiple transformations in the banking sector's national and international regulatory framework.
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The last of the Cold War era Russian Delta Class SSBNs (ballistic missile nuclear subs) are finally retiring after serving far longer than expected, mainly because they had to. In April 2021 Russia revealed the time-table for the long-delayed retirement of the last six Cold War era Delta IV SSBNs. The first is being officially taken out of service this year and the other five will quickly follow by late 2022. These Deltas were unofficially withdrawn from service over the last five years, something that was obvious to the U.S. Navy that keeps track of when Russian and Chinese SSBNs go to sea. Over the last decade very few Russian SSBNs, old or new, have gone to sea except for brief training or testing cruises.

The cause of all this was the difficulty Russia had, and is still having, designing and building a post-Cold War class of SSBNs. These delays continue. For example, Russia was supposed to have the four new Borei class SSBNs in service by 2019, but that was delayed because sea trials of the fourth sub kept revealing new problems that had to be fixed. That led to another round of sea trials to make sure the modifications worked and did not cause additional problems. These latest sea trials took place successfully in mid-May 2021 and it finally entered service shortly thereafter.

This was the second new submarine design where the first one built ran into so many problems that the second ship was quite different and still suffered delays as a seemingly endless series of new problems appeared. The first case of this disease was the Graney class SSGN (nuclear-powered cruise missile sub), where the second boat of the class was the one that had major changes in appearance and capabilities and lots of unanticipated problems.

Delays getting the new Borei SSBNs into service were made worse because of similar problems with the new SLBMs (Sea Launched Ballistic Missile) for the Boreis. Problems with the new SLBMs continued after the first Borei was ready for service. There were so many SLBM delays that the older Delta class SSBNs had to stay in service longer than they were designed for. That meant these Deltas were unable to go to sea as often, if at all. As a result, Russia has had few SSBNs at sea during the last decade. The four Boreis now in service and at sea did not fully compensate for the growing inability of the Deltas to stay at sea. The reality was worse, something Russia now admits.

Only five of the Borei class SSBNs have been completed and one of them is still undergoing sea trials. Three more are under construction. A typical experience with this was seen with the fourth Borei, the Knyaz Vladimir (Prince Vladimir) which completed its sea trials in early November 2019 and was supposed to enter service in January 2020. Once more the final sea trials revealed more problems that took months to deal with before another final round of trials took place in mid-2020.

All these problems were not unexpected because Knyaz Vladimir was actually the first of an improved Borei, or Borei A design and construction took longer, and cost more than planned. One feature, adding four more SLBM launch tubes, was deleted. Borei A includes improved electronics and changes to the hull and propulsion system to make the boat quieter and more maneuverable. There are now additional sonar arrays on the sides of the boat in addition to the usual one in the bow (front). There were significant changes to the propulsion system to improve maneuverability at low speeds. The hull now has a sleeker form without the noticeable bump behind the sail (small superstructure on top of subs). One morale-enhancing new feature is a small (four-seat) sauna. There are also larger and more comfortable crew quarters. These changes made the Borei-A look more like Western SSBN as well as perform like one.

These changes made the Borei A so expensive that the navy can only afford to build eight Boreis instead of ten originally planned. The four Boreis currently in trials or under construction are all Borei A boats which incorporate all the changes made to Knyaz Vladimir during over a year of sea trials and subsequent modifications.

There were many delays just getting the first Borei built at all. This boat, the Yuri Dolgoruky, was launched in 2008 and then encountered further delays before even undergoing the first round of sea trials in 2012. The Yuri Dolgoruky was supposed to have been launched by 2006, but there were technical problems that caused more delays. Construction of the Yuri Dolgoruky began in 1996, but money shortages and technical issues slowed progress. The cash shortage was initially thought to be temporary but was eventually declared permanent with a chance of getting worse. This was all about the permanent decline in oil prices after 2013 and the impact of economic sanctions imposed because of the 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Another factor, less frequently discussed, is continued corruption that is crippling economic growth, including shipbuilding.

The Boreis were needed to replace the aging Delta IVs, which entered service in the late 1980s. There was only enough money to refurbish one of the Cold War era Delta IVs to extend their active life. Keeping several of these boats active was an emergency contingency plan if the initial problems with the Borei and its Bulava SLBM were not solved in time. The Deltas were not built for this sort of thing.

There were 43 Deltas put into service between 1972 and 1990. There were actually four distinct models (Delta I, II, III and IV) that varied in size and capabilities from 7,800 to 13,500 tons. The Deltas were supposed to be replaced by the enormous (24,000 ton) Typhoon/Akula class SSBNs. These proved too expensive to build and operate. Six of them entered service between 1981 and 1989 and to save money all were retired or scrapped by 2009. One Akula is still around to test new SLBM designs. Thats because the missile tubes on the Akula are so large they can easily be modified to handle any new SLBM design.

The problems with the Akulas were a foretaste of worse problems with the Borei and Graney class subs and similar sized new surface ships. Part of the problem is growing corruption, which played a role in destroying the Soviet Union, as well as a shortage of qualified managers, engineers and construction workers to design and build these new ships. Because of all that Russia has had to cope and adjust its plans. In the 1990s it was decided that subs were more important than surface vessels and that meant, once all the budget and construction management problems manifested themselves after the 1990s, the subs always had priority. This led to the cancellation of several large surface ship construction plans and many modifications for submarine construction and use. More subs were retired as they became too old and expensive to operate. That killed the Akulas and many of the older Deltas. Money was always found to keep construction of new subs, especially SSBNs, going. There was also more patience for dealing with the seemingly endless flaws found in the new subs and their weapons. Priorities took Priority.

The first three new Borei Class boats were supposed to be based in the Pacific but that changed to only two in the Pacific. One reason was the lack of money to refurbish and reactivate the Chizha Test Range near Arkhangel to monitor ballistic missile or SLBMs test-fired from east to west. The test range on the Pacific coast has been upgraded so that ballistic missiles and SLBM testing could continue and be accurately monitored to measure success, and accuracy, of test warheads. To continue testing the Bulava one of the Boreis had to be assigned to the Northern Fleet.

During the Cold War,most of Russian SSBNs were based in the north, at several bases east of the Norwegian border and facing the Arctic Ocean. Russia is also spending over $350 million to expand and improve its submarine base on the Kamchatka Peninsula on its Pacific coast. This will enable its new SSBNs to threaten China as well as the United States.

The Boreis were the first new Russian boomers (naval slang for SSBNs) to enter service since 1990 when the last Delta IV was put to work. Borei was the first new Russian sub design since the end of the Cold War. Starting with the fourth Borei there have been some major changes made and this version is called Borei A. These slightly larger Boreis were supposed to carry 20 SLBMs and have some new equipment and features as well as being a bit longer than the original Borei. Most of the new features survived, except for the expansion of SLBM capacity from 16 to 20.

The Boreis are closer in design to the Delta IVs than to the Typhoon/Akula boats that were originally meant to replace the Deltas. The Boreis are 170 meters (558 feet) long and 13 meters (42 feet) in diameter. Surface displacement is 15,000 tons, and 16 Bulava SLBMs are carried. Work on the Yuri Dolgoruky was delayed for several years because the first missile being designed for it did not work out. A successful land-based missile, the Topol-M, was quickly modified for submarine use. That should have worked but it didnt and failed in many frustrating ways. This "Bulava" (also known as R-30 3M30 and SS-NX-30) SLBM was a larger missile, cutting the Boreis original capacity from 20 to 16 missiles. The boat also has four torpedo tubes and twelve torpedoes or torpedo tube-launched missiles. There are also tubes for launching smaller countermeasure devices that look like torpedoes. The Bulava has a max range of 10,000 kilometers with six warheads and 8,000 kilometers with ten warheads.

The Boreis have a crew of 107, with half of them being officers. This is a common Russian practice when it comes to high tech ships like nuclear subs. Each of these Borei A boats cost at least two billion dollars, in part because money was spent on improved crew quarters. That was necessary to attract enough skilled, and volunteer, sailors to run these boats. The high cost of Boreis, by Russian standards, is partly because many factories that supplied parts for Russian subs were in parts of the Soviet Union that are not now within the borders of post-Soviet Russia. New factories had to be built. All components of the Boreis and their missiles are to be built in Russia. The eight Boreis now being built probably won't be completed until 2030.

These delays in getting Bulava to work reliably resulted in a lot of embarrassing changes. Thats because, in early 2012, Russia announced that its SSBNs would resume long-range "combat patrols" within a year. On schedule, the Russian Navy finally accepted its first new Borei class SSBN (Yury Dolgoruky) for service on December 30th, 2012. Thus, it appeared that the newly commissioned Yury Dolgoruky would be the first Russian SSBN in many years to make a long-range cruise, as soon as it had a working SLBM to arm it. Mass production of Bulava began in 2013, with the goal of producing at least 124 of them. Yury Dolgoruky finally made its first combat patrol in 2015, although it was understood that only about half of the 16 Bulava SLBMs carried would work if launched. The Bulava SLBM is considered combat ready but only if you accept that about half of them will not work.

The Russian Navy has made a mess of its SSBN force and has done slightly better developing new SLBMs. This is all about what kind of SSBN force Russia will have in the future and what those SSBNs will be capable of. At the moment the answers seem to be diminished and not much.

In 2018 it was believed that six of the original seven Delta IVs were still in service and that is only because each has been or was about to be put through a two-year shipyard upgrade of its electronics and some mechanical components. The shrinking naval budget changed that and by the end of 2018 four Delta IVs had been quietly retired while another had been converted to a special operations support sub. Only one Delta IV went through the full refurb to make it capable of another decade of limited active service. The shorter refurb extends the life of the Delta IV 3-4 years which explains why Russia finally admitted these Deltas were done and would be officially retired by 2022.
Wowza Takes "Significant Investment" from Boston-Based Private Equity Firm

Wowza Media Systems has taken "a significant investment" from Boston-based private equity firm Clearhaven Partners. Since the financial terms are not disclosed, and Clearhaven is a relatively new firm (founded in 2019), we really don't have a lot more hard data to share beyond some snippets from the press release and some comments from Wowza CEO David Stubenvoll (pictured above).

That said, this doesn't mean that the investment isn't big news, both for what it might enable Wowza to do down the road and to celebrate Wowza's accomplishments over the last 15 years. So we'll spend a bit more time on what you can glean from the press release, talk a bit about Wowza's colorful backstory, and share some of our conversation with Stubenvoll.

Scanning the Press Release

In the press release, Chris Ryan, managing partner at Clearhaven Partners, shared that "Among many companies we see each year, Wowza stood out to us due to its reputation as a technology leader and its ability to deliver market-leading video streaming solutions at scale in a market with significant tailwinds." The release further states that "Clearhaven's investment positions Wowza to accelerate innovation of Wowza's leading solutions known for helping customers solve their complex video workflow challenges."

Hey, I told you there wasn't a lot of hard data there.

The Backstory

Forgive me an indulgence here and let me ramble. Of all the companies in the streaming industry, Wowza is the one that feels most personal, at least for me, and its accomplishments are something that I celebrate like I would those of a nephew or best friend's daughter. It's hard to get excited about established tech companies like Google or Microsoft, or behemoths like Netflix or Amazon.

But Wowza was founded by two of us, David Stubenvoll and Charlie Good, both Adobe alums. During Wowza's nascent stages, they directed one of the most consequential streaming-related product pivots of all time, launching their company to distribute a video messaging platform, then changing their focus to the media server they developed to drive that platform when the media server generated more interest than video messaging. Thus, Wowza Media Systems was born.

Wowza didn't invent transmuxing (also called on-the-fly or dynamic packaging), but it was one of the first to commercialize it at scale, paving the way for streaming publishers to efficiently support multiple ABR packaging formats like HLS, DASH, HDS, and MSS. They became so successful that they overshadowed the Adobe Flash Media Server, leading Adobe to sue Wowza in 2011. But David slew Goliath yet again, and in 2015, Adobe's claims were "settled and dismissed with prejudice." In short, Wowza was birthed and grew up right in front of our eyes, becoming, in the words of the press release, "the gold-standard for live streaming solutions and today powers more than 6,000 active customers with a track record of more than 35,000 deployments worldwide."

CEO Interview

By way of background, I was not originally scheduled to talk to CEO David Stubenvoll; I stepped in when editor Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen took his cat to the emergency room for a cut paw (the cat survived and is doing well). I know Stubenvoll well enough to shake hands at a trade show, but we're not on each other's holiday card list (if those are still a thing).

After Stubenvoll described the investment, I asked "Why would Clearhaven invest in a company about to be obsoleted by CMAF?"half joking, but genuinely interested in his response. For those not up to the millisecond on the Common Media Application Format, the CMAF container format has the potential to eliminate the need for transmuxing, one of the major features of the Wowza Streaming Engine and Wowza Streaming Cloud, two of Wowza's most significant products.

Stubenvoll laughed, and considered, and then responded, "That's partially true. CMAF may reduce the need for some product features, but we've innovated far beyond transmuxing in our current products, and this investment will allow us to go much further much faster."

Here are some of the other questions we addressed.

Streaming Media: Why take an investment? Why not go public?

Stubenvoll: We never considered going public. This investment and partnership gives us flexibility to invest on a much broader scale without the restrictions and hassle of being a listed company.

Streaming Media: What about employees and their stock options? Don't companies go public so employees can profit as well?

Stubenvoll: Clearhaven is purchasing shares and options, which allows employees to cash out of their options and stock.

[Author's note: To understand the following, note that Wowza started selling the Wowza Streaming Engine, which is server software that customers can rent or buy, and then install and operate themselves. Then Wowza launched Wowza Streaming Cloud, a managed service which is based upon the Wowza Streaming Engine.]

Streaming Media: What will you use the money for?

Stubenvoll: Accelerating innovation and growth. That means more investment in the cloud, to make our SaaS service a superset of the features offered by Wowza Streaming Engine. We've been investing in this for a while, and customers will start to see the benefits this year in the form of a better integrated bundle of products and services that are highly reliable and scalable, and the ability to drive more configurations without coding. We're also extending the cloud service to better integrate into the customer's data set and workflows/processes, and to extend features like multiple cloud support with automatic switchover should one cloud fail.

Beyond investing in existing products, we're analyzing our enhanced go-to-market capabilities now; this could take the form of company or product acquisitions, or could involve opening up new offices if it helps develop and maintain deep relationships with our customers.

Streaming Media: What's in it for Clearhaven?

Stubenvoll: Wowza's a great investment. We've been growing and profitable for a long time. It's no secret that they're going to need an exit strategy, which could be a public offering or sale. It's too early to say what the proper exit is but there will be an exit at some time.

Streaming Media: What else do Streaming Media readers need to know?

Stubenvoll: There will be no layoffs. Every time I bring up private equity investment, someone suggests that layoffs or some form of contraction are coming. In this case, it's the opposite; Clearhaven is allowing us to invest and accelerate our growth.

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NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO U.S. NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

LONDON, UK / ACCESSWIRE / June 10, 2021 / Further to the news release of May 27, 2021, Gabriel Resources Ltd. (TSXV:GBU)("Gabriel" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has completed closing of its previously announced non-brokered private placement (the "Private Placement") of 30,444,800 common shares of the Company ("Common Share") at a price of $0.245 per Common Share for gross proceeds of US$6.0 million (approximately $7.5 million), subject to stock exchange and other approvals as applicable.

The Company is progressing with its arbitration case against Romania before the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes ("ICSID Arbitration") and intends to use the proceeds of the Private Placement to finance the costs of the ICSID Arbitration and for general working capital requirements.

The 30,444,800 Common Shares issued pursuant to the Private Placement represent approximately 4.9% of the Common Shares in issue and outstanding (on a non-diluted basis) prior to the Private Placement and are subject to a statutory 4-month hold period expiring on October 11, 2021.

The Private Placement was conditionally approved by the TSX Venture Exchange (the "Exchange") on June 8, 2021. The Private Placement remains subject to final acceptance by the Exchange and the receipt of all other applicable approvals. The Company will not pay a cash finder's fee in connection with the Private Placement.

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 accordingly may not be offered or sold within the United States or to "U.S. persons", as such term is defined in Regulation S promulgated under the U.S. Securities Act ("U.S. Persons"), except in compliance with the registration requirements of the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities requirements or pursuant to exemptions therefrom. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the Company's securities to, or for the account of benefit of, persons in the United States or U.S. Persons.

Further detail regarding the Private Placement, including the participation of insiders, can be found in the news release issued by the Company on May 27, 2021, which is available on the Company's website at www.gabrielresources.com and filed on SEDAR at www.sedar.com, and the material change report of the same date also filed on SEDAR. For information on this press release, please contact:

Dragos Tanase

President & CEO

Phone: +40 730 399 019

dt@gabrielresources.com

Richard Brown

Chief Financial Officer

Mobile: +44 7748 760276

richard.brown@gabrielresources.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.

Further Information

About Gabriel

Gabriel is a Canadian resource company listed on the TSX Venture Exchange. The Company's principal focus has been the exploration and development of the Rosia Montana gold and silver project in Romania. The Rosia Montana Project, one of the largest undeveloped gold deposits in Europe, is situated in the South Apuseni Mountains of Transylvania, Romania, an historic and prolific mining district that since pre-Roman times has been mined intermittently for over 2,000 years. The exploitation license for the Rosia Montana Project is held by Rosia Montana Gold Corporation S.A., a Romanian company in which Gabriel owns an 80.69% equity interest, with the 19.31% balance held by Minvest Rosia Montana S.A., a Romanian state-owned mining company.

Upon obtaining the License in June 1999, the Group focused substantially all of their management and financial resources on the exploration, feasibility and subsequent development of the Rosia Montana Project. Despite the Company's fulfilment of its legal obligations and its development of the Rosia Montana Project as a high-quality, sustainable and environmentally-responsible mining project, using best available techniques, Romania has blocked and prevented implementation of the Rosia Montana Project without due process and without compensation. Accordingly, the Company's current core focus is the ICSID Arbitration. For more information please visit the Company's website at www.gabrielresources.com.

Forward-looking Statements

This press release contains "forward-looking information" (also referred to as "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements are provided for the purpose of providing information about management's current expectations and plans and allowing investors and others to get a better understanding of the Company's operating environment. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements.

In this press release, forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by the Company at this time, are inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies that may cause the Company's actual financial results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied herein. Some of the material factors or assumptions used to develop forward-looking statements include, without limitation, the uncertainties associated with: the ICSID Arbitration, actions by the Romanian Government, conditions or events impacting the Company's ability to fund its operations (including but not limited to the completion of further funding noted above) or service its debt, exploration, development and operation of mining properties and the overall impact of misjudgments made in good faith in the course of preparing forward-looking information.

Forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors including those set out below, that may never materialize, prove incorrect or materialize other than as currently contemplated which could cause the Company's results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Any statements that express or involve discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance (often, but not always, identified by words or phrases such as "expects", "is expected", "is of the view", "anticipates", "believes", "plans", "projects", "estimates", "assumes", "intends", "strategy", "goals", "objectives", "potential", "possible" or variations thereof or stating that certain actions, events, conditions or results "may", "could", "would", "should", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved, or the negative of any of these terms and similar expressions) are not statements of fact and may be forward-looking statements.

Numerous factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements, including without limitation:

the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID19) may affect the Company's operations and/or the anticipated timeline for the ICSID Arbitration;

the duration, required disclosure, costs, process and outcome of the ICSID Arbitration;

the advancement of Romania's nomination of the "Rosia Montana Mining Landscape" as a UNESCO World Heritage site;

changes in the liquidity and capital resources of Gabriel, and/or the group of companies of which it is directly or indirectly parent;

access to funding to support the Group's continued ICSID Arbitration and/or operating activities in the future;

equity dilution resulting from the conversion or exercise of new or existing securities in part or in whole to Common Shares;

the ability of the Company to maintain a continued listing on the TSX Venture Exchange or any regulated public market for trading securities;

the impact on business strategy and its implementation in Romania of: any allegations of historic acts of corruption, uncertain fiscal investigations; uncertain legal enforcement both for and against the Group and political and social instability;

regulatory, political and economic risks associated with operating in a foreign jurisdiction including changes in laws, governments and legal regimes and interpretation of existing and future fiscal and other legislation;

volatility of currency exchange rates; and

the availability and continued participation in operational or other matters pertaining to the Group of certain key employees and consultants.

This list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect any of the Company's forward-looking statements.

Investors are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and investors should not infer that there has been no change in the Company's affairs since the date of this press release that would warrant any modification of any forward-looking statement made in this document, other documents periodically filed with or furnished to the relevant securities regulators or documents presented on the Company's website. All subsequent written and oral forward-looking statements attributable to the Company or persons acting on its behalf are expressly qualified in their entirety by this notice. The Company disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly or otherwise revise any forward-looking statements or the foregoing list of assumptions or factors, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, subject to the Company's disclosure obligations under applicable Canadian securities regulations. Investors are urged to read the Company's filings with Canadian securities regulatory agencies which can be viewed online at www.sedar.com.

SOURCE: Gabriel Resources Ltd.

View source version on accesswire.com:
Quickline plans to bring full fibre and all-new 5G technology to half a million premises in rural Britain

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Specialist, ultrafast broadband provider Quickline Communications Limited (Quickline) and Northleaf Capital Partners (Northleaf), a Toronto-headquartered global private markets investment firm, today announced that funds managed by Northleaf completed the previously announced acquisition of a majority share in Yorkshire-based Quicklines holding company, QCL Holdings Limited.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210610006019/en/

Quicklines management team, as well as Bigblu Broadband (AIM: BBB.L) and Harwood Capital have retained minority stakes in the company.

The acquisition further underscores Quicklines reputation as a frontrunner in complex, rural connectivity requirements. Quicklines strategy includes a plan to invest more than 500m to provide ultrafast and gigabit-capable broadband connectivity in rural Northern England and beyond.

Quickline expects to provide ultrafast broadband accessibility to more than 500,000 rural premises in the coming years by expanding its market-leading, gigabit-capable, next-generation hybrid network. New 5G capabilities will be a first of its kind in the UK, with the start of a large-scale, full fibre rollout to complement this in remote areas.

To reduce the digital divide, Quickline will use an innovative hybrid approach of utilising 5G and a fibre to the premise (FTTP) network for a cost effective, technical solution. This has enabled Quickline to secure four multi-million-pound Building Digital UK (BDUK) contracts to supply next-generation internet access in places that other operators have largely ignored.

Quickline is also working alongside local authorities and UK Government to help remote communities, with subsidies providing much-needed assistance in the promotion of large-scale investment in gigabit-capable networks. Quickline is at present upgrading digital infrastructures across North Lincolnshire, Lincolnshire, West and North Yorkshire.

Sean Royce, Quicklines newly appointed CEO, said: This is a major turning point in Quicklines history and sets us even further apart from other ultrafast broadband providers.

Receiving this kind of investment from Northleaf provides us with the ability to supply life-changing gigabit-capable broadband to hundreds of thousands of rural customers that previously were unable to access the internet at speed. We look forward to working alongside Northleaf to create this unique hybrid next-generation network, provide hundreds of jobs and build a business that provides new breakthroughs in internet connectivity for broadband users in remote pockets of the UK.

Roderick Gadsby, Head of Northleafs infrastructure activities in the UK and Europe, said: We are delighted that the acquisition has been successfully completed. Quickline is an excellent fit with our communications infrastructure investment strategy and offers our investors exposure to an attractive and growing sector.

The evolution of the industry is being led by the likes of Quickline, which has experienced rapid growth in recent years. Quickline plans to utilise both full fibre and 5G fixed wireless technologies to accelerate the deployment of gigabit-capable broadband in remote UK regions which will provide critical infrastructure to rural communities in its target markets.

Digital Infrastructure Minister Matt Warman said: "I welcome this substantial investment in Quickline. It will help us build back better by connecting more than half a million rural homes and businesses to top-of-the-range broadband speeds by 2025.

"Boosting connections in rural communities is crucial to our plans to level up Britain, and we're working alongside commercial providers to plug in hard-to-reach homes and businesses through our 5 billion Project Gigabit scheme."

Cllr Don Mackenzie, Executive Member for Access at North Yorkshire County Council, which established its own high-speed internet service provider NYnet in 2007, added: We are committed to continuing to bring access to superfast broadband for our residents and businesses across North Yorkshire with our SFNY project. The latest phase of the programme being delivered by Quickline is vital as we extend connectivity to more premises in the most rural areas of the county.

Communities are currently experiencing first-hand our and Quicklines commitment to securing the future of digital connectivity in all our towns and villages. The transformation, especially in our more secluded communities is a key factor for improving our economy and employment prospects."

Notes to editors

About Quickline

Quickline is focussed on delivering improved broadband connectivity in rural areas of the north of England and beyond where a significant digital divide remains and many hundreds of thousands of premises are in desperate need of increased broadband speeds.

Quickline is a Yorkshire-based internet service provider, with its heritage in fixed wireless but its network includes increasing amounts of full fibre connectivity, as well as rural-delivered 5G technology. Its aim is to be the leading UK-dedicated, rural broadband infrastructure provider, delivering innovative, flexible and hybrid solutions that can address the millions of premises unlikely to be served commercially by full fibre networks for many years to come. For more information on Quickline, visit www.quickline.co.uk.

About Northleaf Capital Partners

Northleaf Capital Partners is a global private markets investment firm with US$16 billion in private equity, private credit and infrastructure commitments under management on behalf of public, corporate and multi-employer pension plans, endowments, foundations, financial institutions and family offices.

Northleafs 150-person team, located in Toronto, Montreal, London, New York, Chicago, Menlo Park and Melbourne, is focused exclusively on sourcing, evaluating and managing private markets investments globally. Northleafs portfolio includes more than 400 active investments in 40 countries, with a focus on mid-market companies and assets. For more information on Northleaf, visit www.northleafcapital.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210610006019/en/

For Quickline media enquiries:

Louise Adu

Communications Specialist

t: + 44 (0)7845 807569

e: louise@cake-icecream.co.uk

For more information on Northleaf:

Investor and media inquiries:

Nadine Cannata

Director, Communications

t: +1 416 477 6623

e: nadine.cannata@northleafcapital.com

Transaction-related inquiries:

Roderick Gadsby

Managing Director

t: +44 20 7321 5752

e: roderick.gadsby@northleafcapital.com

Source: Northleaf Capital Partners
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Joe Biden delivers remarks after touring Ford Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michigan, U.S., May 18, 2021. REUTERS/Leah Millis

By Ernest Scheyder

(Reuters) - Lithium Americas Corp has delayed plans to excavate its Thacker Pass lithium mine site in Nevada, according to court filings, while a federal judge considers whether the former Trump administration erred in approving the project that opponents say could threaten sage grouse and other wildlife.

The delay is the latest setback for the U.S. critical minerals industry as environmentalists pressure courts and regulators to block mining projects from a slew of companies including ioneer Ltd , Antofagasta Plc , Rio Tinto and others, even if those mines produce metals key to fighting climate change.

Thacker Pass, if completed, would be the largest lithium mine in the United States, producing 30,000 tonnes of lithium annually - enough to make more than 475,000 electric vehicle (EV) batteries.

The court case, though, is likely to push back the company's development timeline and an adverse ruling could seriously imperil it.

Mine opponents have asked a federal judge to rule by next month on whether Vancouver-based Lithium Americas may dig at the northern Nevada site.

The company had intended to start digging at the site on June 23, several months earlier than initially planned.

Opponents requested a temporary injunction to block excavation while the court considers the broader case, which centers on whether the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) erred in approving the project in January less than a week before U.S. President Donald Trump left office.

Thacker Pass has been under review for more than a decade.

Lithium Americas this week agreed to pause digging through late July, according to filings.

SAGE GROUSE

Environmentalists filed the suit after that BLM decision, arguing in part that regulators did not abide by federal statues designed to protect sage grouse. The company and BLM disagree, according to filings.

"These sage grouse protections are the law of the land and we feel we have a strong case with our injunction motion," Roger Flynn, an attorney representing conservation groups, told Reuters.

Chief Judge Miranda Du of the federal court in Reno, who is overseeing the case, has in the past ruled in favor of preserving sage grouse habitats.

If Du grants the injunction, Lithium Americas would not be able to develop the site while she considers the broader question of whether the Trump administration erred in approving the mine. A ruling on that is expected later this year or in 2022.

In a statement, Lithium Americas said it is "confident the BLM's extensive and approved environmental impact statement will withstand judicial scrutiny."

Lithium Americas told the court that blocking the mine would harm national security and impede President Joe Biden's plan to wean the U.S. economy off fossil fuels.

Reuters reported last month that Biden plans to look abroad for most supplies of EV metals, part of a strategy designed to placate environmentalists.

Lithium Americas has an unlikely ally in Glenn Miller, who founded the environmental group Great Basin Resource Watch, which is one of the conservationist groups suing to block the mine.

Miller said he disagrees with the group's opposition to the project and resigned from its board earlier this week.

"Everyone is deeply concerned about climate change. It's a question about values, and I go with the need for lithium," said Miller, a retired professor at the University of Nevada. "This is one of the least-impactive mine plans I've ever seen."

(Reporting by Ernest Scheyder; editing by Amran Abocar and Marguerita Choy)
NEW YORK, June 11, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Association of Junior Leagues International (AJLI) today announced that Dona Ponepinto has been named President-Elect of the prominent womens leadership organization which has more than 125,000 members in 295 independent Junior Leagues in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and the UK. Ms. Ponepinto, a member of the Junior League of Tacoma, is President and CEO of United Way of Pierce County, and brings decades of leadership experience to this role. She will take over the role of President in June 2022, succeeding current President Bett Williams.

With a professional career that spans across leadership positions in four different United Way chapters, Ms. Ponepinto has consistently showcased her talent for bringing people together to change community conditions for the common good. She has broken down barriers in communities surrounding her, both in her career and volunteer service. As an At-Large Director on AJLIs Board from 2011-2014, she played a significant role in the creation of the Associations diversity and inclusion statement, among other projects.

The Association of Junior Leagues International celebrates its 100th anniversary this coming October, when it will launch a new strategic plan, said Ms. Williams. Donas expertise in nonprofit management, strategic planning, and community development will be essential to the Association during this milestone year and beyond.

AJLI CEO Patsy Doerr is leading the team through the planning process and will be working closely with both Williams and Ponepinto. I welcome Donas voice and leadership as we work together to finalize and then implement a plan that will ensure The Junior League is a relevant, streamlined, focused and impactful organization for the 21st century, added Ms. Doerr.

About The Junior League Since its founding in 1901 by social activist Mary Harriman, The Junior League has evolved into one of the oldest, largest and most effective womens organizations in the world, encompassing more than 125,000 women in over 295 Leagues in four countries. For more than 100 years, the mission of Junior Leagues has not wavered: to develop exceptionally qualified civic leaders who collaborate with community partners to identify a communitys most urgent needs and address them with meaningful and relevant programs and initiatives that not only improve lives, but also change the way people think. In 1921 the Leagues joined forces as an association, which is today known as The Association of Junior Leagues International, Inc., in order to bolster their power and amplify their voice through shared knowledge and common causes.

Media contact:Rosalia Scampolirscampoli@marketcompr.com914-815-1465

Source: The Association of Junior Leagues International
Auckland, New Zealand--(Newsfile Corp. - June 10, 2021) - Ducks Unlimited Canada is the latest global conservation organisation to partner with Metalbird, the outdoor bird sculpture company dedicated to supporting real birds in the wild.

They've designed a metal version of Canada's iconic Mallard duck and 20% of all the new Metalbird Mallards sold will go to Ducks Unlimited Canada to support their work.

The Mallard is the ancestor of most of the world's domestic duck breeds and like other wetland birds, continues to see its precious habitats being lost. Ducks Unlimited Canada has been working to conserve waterfowl habitats for over 80 years - restoring wetlands that have been lost, fighting invasive species and sharing research and knowledge with other organisations.

Given their ambitious mission, strong values and long history of success, Ducks Unlimited Canada was the perfect partner for Metalbird.

"We were blown away by the impact this organization has had. Since 1938 they've completed more than 11,299 projects and conserved and influenced more than 197 million acres of habitat across Canada," says Metalbird creator, Phil Walters.

"We're honored to be working, in one small way, to help them continue to have an impact."







Metalbird Mallard



To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

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Metalbird Mallard



To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit:

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Ducks Unlimited Canada



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ABOUT DUCKS UNLIMITED CANADA

Ducks Unlimited Canada is a passionate community of people who believe that nature is the foundation of strong communities, a prosperous economy and a sustainable future that supports the hopes and dreams of the next generation. Together, they conserve and restore some of the most valuable and threatened landscapes on the planet. It is their mission to conserve, restore and manage wetlands and associated habitats for the benefit of North America's waterfowl. These habitats also benefit other wildlife and people.

Visit ducks.ca for more information.

ABOUT METALBIRD

Metalbird grew from a personal street art project started in 2009 by industrial designer, Phil Walters. He created and installed metal bird silhouettes around his neighborhood just for fun. People loved them, wanted their own birds. 10 years later Metalbird is a worldwide phenomenon and a global art project. With the simple tap of a hammer, these beautifully-crafted, life-like bird silhouettes transform backyards into art spaces. Producing locally and ethically is important to Metalbird and the company is currently working with a Canadian factory to put local manufacturing in place. Until that happens, the birds are made in the US and shipped from Montreal.

Visit metalbird.ca for more information.

FOR MEDIA ENQUIRIES

Details below for all media enquiries relating to Metalbird and the Metalbird partnership with Ducks Unlimited Canada.

Steven Fernandez Media (Metalbird Press Office)

steven@stevenfernandezmedia

+ 1 323 616 4319

Ducks Unlimited Canada (Press Office)

media@ducks.ca

Source: Metalbird Outdoor Bird Sculptures

- Ends -

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/87247
EL SEGUNDO, Calif., June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Phase Four, the creator of the radio-frequency thruster for satellite propulsion, announced today that it has closed a Series B investment round of $26 million. The round was led by New Science Ventures LLC ("NSV"), a leading venture capital firm focused on building companies that leverage breakthrough science to create extraordinary value.

Phase Four to scale production of its Maxwell engine and accelerate development of higher performance Maxwell engines

The new capital follows a year of significant growth for Phase Four. So far in 2021, Phase Four's Maxwell plasma propulsion engine has been launched aboard multiple commercial small satellites with still more launching throughout the remainder of 2021 and beyond. Phase Four has also secured multiple government contracts including a contract with the U.S. Air Force to adapt the Maxwell engine to utilize iodine, a new alternative fuel, to replace costly, legacy electric propulsion propellants in high-performance commercial and defense applications.

"We've seen demand for the Maxwell engine exceed our current production capability," said Phase Four CEO, Beau Jarvis. "This capital infusion will enable us to rapidly scale our production capacity and accelerate our development of new Maxwell variants including the iodine-fueled Maxwell engine."

"We're excited about our partnership with Phase Four," said NSV Managing Partner, Somu Subramaniam. "The global space economy has outstanding long-term growth potential. Phase Four has the management team, core technology set and product strategy to build a leadership position in the in-space propulsion sector."

About Phase Four Phase Four is a disruptive provider of next generation electric propulsion (EP) solutions for small satellites. The company was founded in 2015 to address the demands of the rapid proliferation of satellite constellations and to accelerate the advancement of its radio-frequency thruster (RFT). The Phase Four RFT represents a revolutionary new architecture that realizes lower cost, mass-manufacturability, miniaturized power electronics, and propellant agnosticism over incumbent technologies, without compromising performance. In 2021 Phase Four's Maxwell turn-key propulsion system achieved flight heritage and is now being regularly utilized by small satellite operators.

Learn more at www.phasefour.io.

About New Science VenturesNSV is a leading venture capital firm focused on building companies that leverage breakthrough science to create extraordinary value. NSV invests in companies using fundamental, science-based innovation and backed by strong IP protection to address large unmet needs in the Life Sciences and Information Technology sectors. The Firm invests in early and mid-stage companies with a long-term view and supports them through value inflection points to create scalable businesses and realize value. NSV was founded in 2004, has $800 million under management and is based in New York, NY and London, UK and operates a Life Sciences incubator in San Diego, CA.For more information please visit: www.newscienceventures.com

Media Contact:Phase Fourmedia@phasefour.io

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/phase-four-raises-26m-series-b-led-by-new-science-ventures-301310467.html

SOURCE Phase Four
UNITED STATES

SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION

Washington, D.C. 20549

FORM 8-K

CURRENT REPORT

PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE

SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934

Date of Report (Date of earliest event reported): June 11, 2021

ALUSSA ENERGY ACQUISITION CORP.

(Exact name of registrant as specified in its charter)

Cayman Islands 001-39145 N/A (State or other jurisdiction

of incorporation) (Commission File Number) (IRS Employer

Identification No.)

PO Box 500, 71 Fort Street

Grand Cayman KY1-1106

Cayman Islands

(Address of principal executive offices, including zip code)

Registrants telephone number, including area code: +1 345 949 4900

Not Applicable

(Former name or former address, if changed since last report)

Check the appropriate box below if the Form 8-K filing is intended to simultaneously satisfy the filing obligation of the registrant under any of the following provisions:

 Written communications pursuant to Rule 425 under the Securities Act (17 CFR 230.425)  Soliciting material pursuant to Rule 14a-12 under the Exchange Act (17 CFR 240.14a-12)  Pre-commencement communications pursuant to Rule 14d-2(b) under the Exchange Act (17 CFR 240.14d-2(b))  Pre-commencement communications pursuant to Rule 13e-4(c) under the Exchange Act (17 CFR 240.13e-4(c))

Securities registered pursuant to Section 12(b) of the Act:

Title of each class Trading Symbol(s) Name of each exchange on

which registered Units, each consisting of one Class A Ordinary Share and one-half of one Redeemable Warrant ALUS.U The New York Stock Exchange Class A Ordinary Shares, par value $0.0001 per share ALUS The New York Stock Exchange Warrants, each whole warrant exercisable for one Class A Ordinary Share for $11.50 per share ALUS.WS The New York Stock Exchange

Indicate by check mark whether the registrant is an emerging growth company as defined in Rule 405 of the Securities Act of 1933 (230.405 of this chapter) or Rule 12b-2 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (240.12b-2 of this chapter).

Emerging growth company 

If an emerging growth company, indicate by check mark if the registrant has elected not to use the extended transition period for complying with any new or revised financial accounting standards provided pursuant to Section 13(a) of the Exchange Act. 

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

FREYR Battery, a company organized under the laws of Luxembourg ( Pubco ), filed on March 26, 2021 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the  SEC ) a registration statement on Form S-4 which was amended on May 7, May 27 and June 9, 2021 (as amended, the  Registration Statement ), which includes a preliminary proxy statement of Alussa Energy Acquisition Corp., a Cayman Island exempted company ( Alussa ), and a prospectus in connection with the proposed business combination transaction (the  Business Combination ) involving Alussa, Pubco and FREYR A/S, a company organized under the laws of Norway ( FREYR ). After the Registration Statement is declared effective, the definitive proxy statement and other relevant documents will be mailed to shareholders of Alussa as of April 30, 2021. Shareholders of Alussa and other interested persons are advised to read, when available, the preliminary proxy statement, and amendments thereto, and the definitive proxy statement in connection with Alussas solicitation of proxies for the special meetings to be held to approve the Business Combination because these documents will contain important information about Alussa, FREYR, Pubco and the Business Combination. Alussa shareholders and other interested persons will also be able to obtain copies of the Registration Statement and the proxy statement/prospectus, without charge, once available, on the SECs website at www.sec.gov or by directing a request to Alussa by contacting its Chief Executive Officer, Daniel Barcelo, c/o Alussa Energy Acquisition Corp. PO Box 500, 71 Fort Street, Grand Cayman KY1-1106, Cayman Islands, at +1(345) 949 4900.

Participants in the Solicitation

Alussa, Pubco and FREYR and certain of their respective directors, executive officers, other members of management and employees, under SEC rules, may be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies from the shareholders of Alussa in favor of the approval of the Business Combination. Shareholders of Alussa and other interested persons may obtain more information regarding the names and interests in the proposed transaction of Alussas directors and officers in Alussas filings with the SEC, including Alussas annual report on form 10-K for the year-ended December 31, 2020, which was filed with the SEC on March 1, 2021 and amended on May 6, 2021, as modified or supplemented by any Form 3 or Form 4 filed with the SEC since the date of such filing. Additional information regarding the interests of such potential participants will also be included in the Registration Statement and other relevant documents when they are filed with the SEC. These documents can be obtained free of charge from the sources indicated above.

No Offer or Solicitation

This Current Report on Form 8-K and the exhibits hereto do not constitute a solicitation of a proxy, consent or authorization with respect to any securities or in respect of the Business Combination. This Current Report on Form 8-K shall also not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any states or jurisdictions in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction. No offering of securities shall be made except by means of a prospectus meeting the requirements of Section 10 of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or an exemption therefrom.

2

Item 7.01 Regulation FD Disclosure.

On June 11, 2021, Alussa and FREYR issued a joint press release announcing that FREYR is in negotiations with a major multinational industrial conglomerate (the  JV Partner ) to potentially develop battery production facilities in North America. A copy of the press release is attached hereto as Exhibit 99.1.

The press release is being furnished pursuant to Item 7.01 and will not be deemed to be filed for purposes of Section 18 of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the Exchange Act), or otherwise be subject to the liabilities of that section, nor will it be deemed to be incorporated by reference in any filing under the Securities Act or the Exchange Act.

Item 9.01 Financial Statements and Exhibits.

(d) Exhibits

3

SIGNATURE

Pursuant to the requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the registrant has duly caused this report to be signed on its behalf by the undersigned hereunto duly authorized.

ALUSSA ENERGY ACQUISITION CORP. By: /s/ Daniel Barcelo Name: Daniel Barcelo Title: Chief Executive Officer and President Dated: June 11, 2021

4

Exhibit 99.1

Joint Press Release

FREYR in Negotiations for Building Battery Production Facilities

in the United States

OSLO, Norway and NEW YORK, NY, 11 June 2021  FREYR AS (FREYR), the Norway-based developer of clean, next-generation battery cell production capacity, and Alussa Energy Acquisition Corp. (Alussa Energy), disclosed that FREYR is in negotiations with a major multinational industrial conglomerate (the JV Partner) to potentially develop battery production facilities in North America. This development was noted by FREYR Battery in its 9 June 2021 filing of a third amendment to the registration statement on Form S-4 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

FREYR and the JV Partner have entered negotiations regarding a draft non-binding memorandum of understanding (MoU) for a potential joint venture to be formed with the purpose of preparing a project to build battery production and potentially related facilities in North America at a targeted scale at least 50 GWh in annualized battery cell production by 2030 (the Venture).

The draft MoU provides a framework for FREYRs cooperation and that FREYR and the JV Partner will work to enter into certain additional arrangements regarding the consummation of a joint venture to use U.S.-developed solutions from 24M Technologies, Inc. (24M) at a battery manufacturing facility in North America. The use of 24M process technology in the Venture would require a modification to FREYRs existing 24M license agreement.

It is a natural step for FREYR to include North America in our long-term plans for expanding our production of clean, low-cost and low-carbon battery cells. This ambition was clearly validated by the U.S. Department of Energys call this week for immediate actions to scale up the U.S. supply chain for battery materials and technologies. FREYR has strong U.S. bonds through our technology partner 24M and the upcoming business combination with Alussa Energy and NYSE listing which is supported by some of the leading institutional investors including Fidelity Management & Research, Franklin Templeton, Sylebra Capital and Van Eck Associates. We are excited to be part of the gathering momentum in North America for battery-led green growth and decarbonization of transportation and energy systems, said Tom Einar Jensen, the CEO of FREYR.

Daniel Barcelo, CEO, President and Director of Alussa Energy, added, Alussa Energy is proud to be merging with FREYR to potentially bring clean, next-generation battery cell production to the North American market utilizing proprietary U.S.-developed technology. The potential joint venture demonstrates that other companies within the battery manufacturing ecosystem view FREYRs sustainable platform being developed in Norway as a robust starting point for scaling business opportunities into one of the largest markets in the world. We and Encompass Capital, a member of Alussa Energys sponsor, are thrilled to support FREYR to become a leading player in the effort to accelerate Americas clean energy future.

As part of these negotiations, FREYR and the JV Partner exchanged draft terms outlining the key commercial points of the potential joint venture in May 2021. However, many key terms of the Venture, including economic and investment terms, have not been agreed to in principal. There is no guarantee that the draft MoU, if entered into, will lead to entry into binding documentation with respect to the Venture, its terms or consummation of the Venture.

On 29 January 2021, FREYR announced that it will become a publicly listed company through a business combination with Alussa Energy, raising approximately $850 million in equity proceeds to accelerate the development of up to 43 GWh clean battery cell manufacturing capacity in Norway. Subject to closing conditions being met, the combined company will be named FREYR Battery (Pubco) and its common stock is expected to start trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol FREY upon closing, expected in the second quarter of 2021. On 16 February 2021, the extraordinary general meeting of FREYR approved the business combination. Alussa Energy expects its Special Meeting to approve the business combination to take place on June 25, 2021.

About FREYR AS

FREYR plans to develop up to 43 GWh of battery cell production capacity by 2025 to position the company as one of Europes largest battery cell suppliers. The facilities will be located in the Mo i Rana industrial complex in Northern Norway, leveraging Norways highly skilled workforce and abundant, low-cost renewable energy sources from hydro and wind in a crisp, clear and energized environment. FREYR will supply safe, high energy density and cost competitive clean battery cells to the rapidly growing global markets for electric vehicles, energy storage, and marine applications. FREYR is committed to supporting cluster-based R&D initiatives and the development of an international ecosystem of scientific, commercial, and financial stakeholders to support the expansion of the battery value chain in our region. For more information, please visit www.freyrbattery.com.

About Alussa Energy Acquisition Corp.

Alussa Energy is a blank check company formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, share exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, reorganization or similar business combination with one or more businesses. While Alussa Energy may pursue an acquisition opportunity in any industry or sector, Alussa Energy intends to focus on businesses across the entire global energy supply chain. For more information, please visit: https://www.alussaenergy.com.

Contact Information

FREYR

Harald Bjrland, Investor Relations, +47 908 58 221, harald.bjorland@freyrbattery.com

Alussa Energy

Chi Chow, Alussa Energy, Strategy & Investor Relations, +1 929-303-6514, cchow@alussaenergy.com

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains, and certain oral statements made by representatives of Alussa Energy and FREYR and their respective affiliates, from time to time may contain, forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Alussa Energys, FREYR Batterys (Pubcos) and FREYRs actual results may differ from their expectations, estimates and projections and consequently, you should not rely on these forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. Words such as expect, estimate, project, budget, forecast, anticipate, intend, plan, may, will, could, should, believes, predicts, potential, might and continues, and similar expressions are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include, without limitation, expectations with respect to the shareholder approval of the business combination, the listing of Pubcos common stock and warrants on the New York Stock Exchange, the production of clean and cost-effective batteries, the plan to build battery production and related facilities in North America at a targeted scale of at least 50 GWh in annualized battery cell production by 2030, the entry into a memorandum of understanding between FREYR and the JV Partner, the consummation of a joint venture to use 24M technology at a battery manufacturing facility in North America, the ability to modify the existing 24M license agreement, collaborations with customers and global supply chain partners across the transportation and energy storage sectors, the ability to leverage the Nordic regions developing battery ecosystem and the closing of the business combination shortly after the Special Meeting. These forward-looking statements involve significant risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expected results. Most of these factors are outside the control of Alussa Energy, Pubco or FREYR and are difficult to predict. Factors that may cause such differences include, but are not limited to: the failure to enter into a memorandum of understanding and a binding agreement, the failure to modify the 24M license agreement, the inability to consummate the transaction due to failure to obtain approval of the shareholders of Alussa Energy; the inability to obtain the listing of Pubcos common stock and warrants on the New York Stock Exchange following the transaction; the failure of capital to be delivered in the business combination; the risk that the transaction disrupts current plans and operations as a result of the announcement and consummation of the transaction; the inability to recognize anticipated benefits of the proposed business combination; the possibility that Alussa Energy, Pubco or FREYR may be adversely affected by other economic, business, and/or competitive conditions that might lead to, among other things, a failure to develop clean and cost-effective batteries, deliver on the targeted battery cell manufacturing capacity, leverage Norways perceived advantages in battery production and build collaborations with customers in the transportation and energy markets; and other risks and uncertainties identified in the registration/proxy statement relating to the transaction, including those under Risk Factors therein, and in other filings with the SEC made by Alussa Energy, Pubco and FREYR. Alussa Energy, Pubco and FREYR caution that the foregoing list of factors is not exclusive, and caution readers not to place undue reliance upon any forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. None of Alussa Energy, Pubco or FREYR undertakes or accepts any obligation or undertaking to release publicly any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in its expectations or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any such statement is based, subject to applicable law.

No Offer or Solicitation

This press release is for informational purposes only and shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities pursuant to the transaction or otherwise, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any jurisdiction in which the offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction. No offer of securities shall be made except by means of a prospectus meeting the requirements of Section 10 of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended.

No Assurances

There can be no assurance that the transaction will be completed, nor can there be any assurance, if the transaction is completed, that the potential benefits of combining the companies will be realized.

Information Sources; No Representations

This press release has been prepared for use by Alussa Energy, Pubco and FREYR in connection with the transaction. The information herein does not purport to be all-inclusive. The information herein is derived from various internal and external sources, with all information relating to the business, past performance, results of operations and financial condition of Alussa Energy was derived entirely from Alussa Energy and all information relating to the business, past performance, results of operations and financial condition of FREYR and Pubco was derived entirely from FREYR. No representation is made as to the reasonableness of the assumptions made with respect to the information herein, or to the accuracy or completeness of any projections or modeling or any other information contained herein. Any data on past performance or modeling contained herein is not an indication as to future performance.

No representations or warranties, express or implied, are given in respect of this press release. To the fullest extent permitted by law in no circumstances will Alussa Energy, Pubco or FREYR, or any of their respective subsidiaries, affiliates, shareholders, representatives, partners, directors, officers, employees, advisors or agents, be responsible or liable for any direct, indirect or consequential loss or loss of profit arising from the use of this press release, its contents (including without limitation any projections or models), any omissions, reliance on information contained within it, or on opinions communicated in relation thereto or otherwise arising in connection therewith, which information relating in any way to the operations of FREYR or Pubco has been derived, directly or indirectly, exclusively from FREYR and has not been independently verified by Alussa Energy. Neither the independent auditors of Alussa Energy nor the independent auditors of FREYR or Pubco audited, reviewed, compiled or performed any procedures with respect to any projections or models for the purpose of their inclusion in this press release and, accordingly, neither of them expressed any opinion or provided any other form of assurances with respect thereto for the purposes of this press release.

Important Information About the Transaction and Where to Find It

In connection with the transaction, Alussa Energy and Pubco have filed and will file relevant materials with the SEC, including a Form S-4 registration statement filed by Pubco on March 26, 2021 and amended on May 7, May 27 and June 9,2021 (the S-4), which includes a prospectus with respect to Pubcos securities to be issued in connection with the proposed business combination and a proxy statement (the Proxy Statement) with respect to Alussa Energys shareholder meeting at which Alussa Energys shareholders will be asked to vote on the proposed business combination and related matters. ALUSSA ENERGY SHAREHOLDERS AND OTHER INTERESTED PERSONS ARE ADVISED TO READ THE S-4 AND THE AMENDMENTS THERETO AND OTHER INFORMATION FILED WITH THE SEC IN CONNECTION WITH THE TRANSACTION, AS THESE MATERIALS WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT ALUSSA ENERGY, PUBCO, FREYR AND THE TRANSACTION. The Proxy Statement contained in the S-4 and other relevant materials for the transaction are being mailed to shareholders of Alussa Energy as of April 30, 2021. The preliminary S-4 and Proxy Statement, the final S-4 and definitive Proxy Statement and other relevant materials in connection with the transaction (when they become available), and any other documents filed by Alussa Energy with the SEC, may be obtained free of charge at the SECs website (www.sec.gov) or by writing to Alussa Energy Acquisition Corp. at c/o PO Box 500, 71 Fort Street, Grand Cayman KY1-1106, Cayman Islands.

Participants in Solicitation
Staff Sgt. Wesley W. Wes Kubie, shown here with his wife, Abby, in an undated photo posted to social media, died of injuries suffered in a Humvee crash that occurred Tuesday afternoon near the Smoky Hill Weapons Range. (Facebook)

TOPEKA, Kan. (Tribune News Service)  Friends took to social media Thursday to mourn the death of Staff Sgt. Wesley W. Wes Kubie, 30, a Kansas Air National Guardsman who died Tuesday of injuries suffered in a military vehicle crash at Smoky Hill Weapons Range in Salina, Kan.

Kubie lived in Salina and was married with three children, according to his online obituary.

Kubie died of injuries suffered in a Humvee crash that occurred Tuesday afternoon near the Smoky Hill Weapons Range near Salina, according to the Salina Journal.

Three guardsmen were riding in a Humvee when it left the road, rolled and landed on its roof. All three were ejected.

The two airmen who were injured in that single-vehicle rollover accident were identified Thursday as Staff Sgt. Jaden Johnson, 23, of Salina, and Staff Sgt. Cole Frederick, 28, of Topeka. Both were being treated at the Salina hospital.

Kubie, who had been in a rear passenger seat, died while being airlifted to a Wichita hospital, the Journal reported.

He will be greatly missed, wrote Christina Corbett on the SHHS Memorials and Memories Facebook page. All around stand up guy. RIP, Wes.

Kubie was a Joint Terminal Attack Controller instructor for the Kansas Air National Guard, assigned to the 284th Air Support Operations Squadron at Smoky Hill, according to his obituary.

He was deployed to Afghanistan from 2019 to 2020 as an active guard reservist in the Air Force, the obituary stated.

___

(c) 2021 The Topeka Capital-Journal, Kan.

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Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Rob Sweet poses for a photo after his retirement ceremony Jun 6 at Moody Air Force Base, Georgia. During Operation Desert Storm, Sweets aircraft was shot down and he was held as a prisoner of war for 19 days. (Andrea Jenkins/U.S. Air Force)

MOODY AIR FORCE BASE, Ga.  I thought to myself this is it  Im a dead man.

As Lt. Col. Rob Sweet, the last serving Air Force prisoner of war, approached retirement on June 6, 2021, he recalled the moment during Operation Desert Storm when his A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft was shot down by enemy forces southwest of Basra, Iraq.

On his 30th mission in Desert Storm, Sweet and his flight lead, Capt. Stephen R. Phillis, flew a mission to eliminate enemy targets in the area. When they arrived, they were met with heavy fire.

Our orders at that point were to leave, said Sweet, who retired as the deputy commander of the 476th Fighter Group at Moody Air Force Base, Georgia. If the target area is too hot, you have to leave. Dont get shot down. Well come back at night or the next day, its not time to be a hero.

Following the orders, Sweet and Phillis navigated away until they saw something they couldnt ignore.

We left and found a pristine array of tanks that had not been hit, which shocked us because by that point everything had been bombed for the past 30 days, Sweet said. We started attacking those (tanks) ... I got launched on by a (tank), so we started attacking the site where it came from, and I got hit from behind.

With severe damage to the aircraft, Sweet lost control of his steering.

I tried a couple of things, and basically it wasnt going to work so I punched out, said Sweet.

After ejecting from the aircraft, Sweet said he was unaware of the traumatic events he was about to face upon landing next to about 15 angry Iraqi soldiers.

He was then captured and spent 19 days as an Iraqi prisoner of war. During that time, he experienced beatings and starvation, fought off diseases and dealt with emotional and mental torment.

Sweet gives most of the credit to his military training for survival.

The SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) school that we have is outstanding, Sweet said. There were very few surprises in the jailhouse  I knew what to expect.

Thanks to a prisoner exchange effort, Sweet and many others returned back to America. Unfortunately, everyone didnt make it back. Phillis, who at the time was flight commander with the 353rd Tactical Fighter Squadron, was killed in action.

Shortly thereafter, I found out my flight lead was killed, Sweet said. I was not without psychological problems. I had survivors guilt, and it took me a long time to get over that.

From those tough experiences, Sweet said he learned how to live again through the importance of taking life as it comes.

With 20 years on active duty and currently retiring as a reservist, Sweet has had a long career. The most fulfilling part was his experience as a squadron commander. Throughout that time, Sweet mentored countless Airmen, especially young fighter pilots, teaching them what it means to be a leader and how to make good decisions under pressure.

Rob, I want to take this opportunity to recognize your service to our nation and congratulate you on your retirement, said Gen. Charles Q. Brown, the chief of staff of the Air Force. Youve had an outstanding career that I know you, your family, friends and fellow Airmen are proud of. With your retirement it will be the first time in the history of our Air Force that we will not have a former POW serving. In closing, thank you for all youve done.

As he concludes his journey in the armed forces, his advice to anyone in the military is to take every experience day by day.

Bloom where youre planted, Sweet said. Youre going to have assignments you dont like, but make the most of them and move on.

(c)2021 the Enid News & Eagle (Enid, Okla.)

Visit the Enid News & Eagle (Enid, Okla.) at www.enidnews.com

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Col. Daniel Miller, 41st Field Artillery Brigade commander, meets with Norwegian artillery soldiers to observe firing with the K-9 self-propelled howitzer during Exercise Thunderbolt on June 9, 2021, in Setermoen, Norway. (Joe Bush/U.S. Army)

GRAFENWOEHR, Germany The U.S. Armys only long-range artillery brigade in Europe fired its rockets this week in the Arctic region, marking a first for a unit that has been tested in a new series of drills stretching from the High North to Africa.

The 41st Field Artillery Brigade marked the end of its Fires Shock exercises with a live-fire event in Setermoen, Norway, where it combined forces Thursday with its Norwegian counterparts.

Soldiers assigned to 1st Battalion, 6th Field Artillery Regiment, 41st Field Artillery Brigade maneuver during Exercise Thunderbolt on June 10, 2021 in Setermoen, Norway. The soldiers fired the Multiple Launch Rocket System in Norway for the first time in more than 25 years. (Joe Bush/U.S. Army)

The exercise was the farthest north the brigade, based in Grafenwoehr, has operated since being reactivated in 2019. It was also the first time in more than 25 years that the U.S. Army had conducted a Multiple Launch Rocket System live-fire in Norway.

This type of training in the Arctic increases the Armys ability to operate in extreme cold-weather, mountainous and high latitude environments and supports the Armys Arctic strategy, U.S. Army Europe and Africa said in a statement.

The Arctic has emerged as a larger priority for the Pentagon amid concerns about Russias escalating military presence. The Army released a strategy document in March that called for specially equipped and trained brigades in the Arctic given increasing levels of great power competitor activities in the region.

This will be the first time we have conducted an MLRS live fire this far north, but in accordance with the Armys Arctic Strategy I doubt it will be the last, brigade commander Col. Daniel Miller said in a statement.

For USAREUR-AF, the exercise was the culmination of a more than monthlong effort that has showcased the 41sts FABs range across Europe. Fires Shock has sent its artillerymen on missions to the Baltics, Black Sea region, Germany and northern Africa.

In Norway, U.S. soldiers worked with Norwegian forces and Marines based out of Camp Lejeune, N.C. The brigade also coordinated with Norwegian F-16s to conduct precision targeting.

Soldiers assigned to 1st Battalion, 6th Field Artillery Regiment, 41st Field Artillery Brigade conducted the first U.S. Multiple Launch Rocket System live-fire in Norway in more than 25 years during Exercise Thunderbolt, June 10, 2021, in Setermoen. (Joe Bush/U.S. Army)

In the past month and a half our 41st FAB Soldiers have bounced all across Europe and into Africa conducting long-range precision fires missions, Miller said in the statement. Throughout the Fires Shock exercises, we have proved our ability to expertly plan, deploy and execute multiple missions simultaneously across the globe at the time and place of our choosing.

johnson.immanuel@stripes.com

Twitter: @Manny_Stripes
Kevin Riddle, left, Chicago field office director for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, asks Illinois National Guard Spec. Alan Juarez, second from right, to recite the oath of allegiance in a special ceremony at Cook County Healths vaccination site at Thornton Township High School in Harvey on June 10, 2021. Major Gen. Richard Neely, adjutant general of the state of Illinois and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle were on hand.. (Terrence Antonio James, The Chicago Tribune/TNS)

CHICAGO (Tribune News Service)  A few hours into his shift checking in people for their vaccine appointments Thursday, Illinois National Guard Spec. Alan Juarez briefly left his post and took his final step toward American citizenship.

With his fellow soldiers looking on at the Cook County mass vaccination site in south suburban Harvey, the 31-year-old specialist raised his right hand and swore allegiance to his adopted country. He vowed to bear arms in its defense, serve noncombat roles if needed and perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by law.

In other words, he promised to keep doing everything he already has done with the Illinois National Guard.

Im proud to be doing this here today, with all my friends watching, Juarez said before the ceremony. But to be honest, I dont feel all that different. This is the only country Ive ever known and Ive always felt I was an American. Ive always wanted to help my country in any way I could, whether I was technically a citizen or not.

The ceremony came as the Guard has begun winding down its vaccination duties across the state. At the height of the rollout, Gov. J.B. Pritzker deployed more than 1,600 guardsmen to help with the effort. As of Thursday, only 898 members remained on active duty.

With the soldiers assistance, Cook County has given more than 800,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines since late December. The demand, however, has fallen in recent weeks, leaving less need for centralized vaccination sites and spurring a new strategy for meeting hard-to-reach residents where they live, work and gather.

In late May, the county permanently closed three of its six suburban vaccination sites in favor of pop-up and mobile clinics. Though soldiers are assisting with those efforts, their involvement is expected to finish by late July.

Their withdrawal would mark the end of the Guards unprecedented role in responding to COVID-19. Since the earliest days of the pandemic, troops established the first state-run testing sites and ran them with military precision as they performed more than 233,000 tests over a four-month period. After spending the spring and summer testing people for COVID-19, some soldiers returned to vaccinate the public.

I think it has been great for the guardsmen to serve in this way, County Board President Toni Preckwinkle said during Juarezs ceremony. It certainly has been wonderful for all of us who have been beneficiaries of their great work.

Juarez, who works as a machinist at a central Illinois garage door factory, was deployed to help with the countys vaccination efforts in March. He is assigned to the registration desk, answering questions about the process for nervous patients and translating documents for those who only speak Spanish.

Born in Tampico, Mexico, he immigrated to the U.S. with his mother when he was 6 years old because the country offered better job opportunities for his father, who had moved here a few years earlier. The family, which included his parents and two siblings, all shared a bedroom in a two-room trailer in Arcola, a small town about 35 miles south of Champaign.

We came here for the same reason everyone comes here: We wanted a better life, Juarez said. It was rough and we didnt have a lot of money, but we made the best of it.

At the time, no one in Juarezs family had legal documentation to live and work in the country, but he always considered the U.S. his home. He said he didnt give much thought to his official status until he grew older and found it difficult participate in teenage rites of passage such as getting a drivers license, finding an after-school job or applying for college scholarships.

A beneficiary of the Obama administrations Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, he eventually was able to obtain a work permit and build a life without fear of deportation. And after marrying his wife, Kristina, in 2016, he became a permanent U.S. resident.

Through it all, he dreamed of becoming a citizen. The bureaucracy and expense  he spent nearly $10,000 on legal costs and various administrative fees  made it practically impossible for him to do.

Until he spoke with an Illinois National Guard recruiter.

Juarez joined the Guard in November 2019 and immediately enrolled in a program that makes the citizenship process faster and cheaper than the route typically taken by people who immigrate without documentation. He had his citizenship papers in less than two years at no cost to him.

His mother is now expected to have an easier time with her citizenship application because of his status.

Its an amazing program and its a fair one, he said. I think everyone should serve their country in one way or another. You dont have to be in the military, but you should find a way to make life better for others.

When his mission ends, Juarez will return home to his wife and 10-year-old daughter, Emma. Hell resume full-time work while also attending Parkland College in Champaign, where he is working on business marketing degree thanks to the Illinois Guards tuition assistance program.

He has been taking classes online throughout his deployment, studying for two to three hours after his shift at the vaccination site each day. Its a minor sacrifice, he said, to be a part of a historic moment.

Ill always be proud of what weve done here, he said. I had a chance to step up and help people in my state when my country needed it. Thats not a small thing.

2021 Chicago Tribune

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USS Carter Hall sailors haul on a mooring line during a port visit in Aqaba, Jordan. Carter Hall is part of the Norfolk-based Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group. (Seaman Sawyer Connally/U.S. Navy)

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. (Tribune News Service)  More than 100 days at sea without a single COVID-19 case, the sailors and Marines of the Virginia-based Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group arent letting their care to keep the pandemic at bay get in their way.

Working alongside the Norwegian, British and French navies, the ships and aircraft at the group have landed Marines on Norways military training grounds, after figuring out how to minimize contact with allied troops and civilians who may not have been vaccinated.

Operating closer inshore than normal, using the shelter of Norwegian fjords to shield the groups USS Iwo Jima, USS San Antonio and USS Carter Hall from the worst of the wild waters of the North Sea, the groups ships hosted Norwegian officers to help them understand that nations rules for operating in its airspace and seas. Sailors from the Greek Navy have been on the flight deck of the Carter Hall, to support their pilots operating off the ship.

We work on interoperability, and were building trust with our friends, said Capt. Darren Nelson, the Iwo Jima groups commodore.

Last year, Navy ships operating with allies usually had to do that trust-building and coordination remotely; this year, theres been a chance to work side-by-side.

Of the 4,300 men and women of the group, more than 94% voluntarily lined up to be vaccinated as they headed east from Norfolk, Virginia, in February. At sea, theyve been following the guidelines set in Hampton Roads and by the Sixth Fleet, which itself has seen no COVID-19 among the sailors and Marines of U.S. Naval Forces Europe/Africa.

While the group has made port visits in Europe and hosted visitors, it has maintained a COVID-19-free bubble, said Capt. William Wallace, officer in charge of Fleet Surgical Team Six, which embarked with the groups sailors and the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit.

In those events we might have seen someone contract COVID-19 yet with our thorough mitigation efforts we were able to protect our most vital asset, sailors and Marines, he said.

For the Iwo Jima group, being COVID-19-free has meant some restrictions have eased  on the groups way to the Middle East, sailors and Marines had a chance to go ashore to see the sights and enjoy some beach time on the Greek island of Crete, keeping in small groups and maintaining social distancing.

Crete is really something to see, Nelson said.

Before stopping in Crete, meanwhile, the groups fighters played the role of enemy aircraft to help the Royal Navys new carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, certify its crew as ready to deploy.

The group was among the 19 ships from 11 nations that participated in the first part of NATOs big Steadfast Defender exercise off the the coast of Portugal May 30, an exercise led by Vice Adm. Andrew Lewis, commander of NATOs new Joint Force Command Norfolk and the U.S. Second Fleet.

The Steadfast Defender work focused on the challenges of trans-Atlantic military reinforcements, particularly when near European shores where air and sea attacks could be most intense. The Queen Elizabeth, fresh from defending against the Iwo Jima groups mock attacks, drilled on attacking, while the other NATO ships practiced defense.

After transiting the Suez Canal earlier this month, the group now faces yet another different pandemic situation. Nelson is hoping it may mean still more chances to get off the ships and the piers they moor on when making port calls.

But it still means making decisions step-by-step.

We think about this every day, it takes a lot of work, Nelson said .Dealing with COVID is part of our mission.

2021 Daily Press.

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U.S. Marines board an MV-22B Osprey at Royal Australian Air Force Base Darwin, Australia, May 26, 2021. (Sarah Nadeau/U.S. Marine Corps)

A company of U.S. Marines will soon join Australian and Japanese troops in the Outback for drills that aim to enhance their ability to coordinate artillery and air support with both manned and unmanned aircraft.

Exercise Southern Jackaroo kicks off Tuesday and runs through June 24, Capt. Thomas deVries, a spokesman for Marine Corps Rotational Force  Darwin, said in an email Thursday.

The purpose of the exercise is to increase the capacity to mutually support one another during joint operations, he said.

The force of 2,200 Marines is twice the size of the one that deployed to Darwin for the annual six-month rotation last year as the coronavirus pandemic raged. A record 2,500 Marines were sent there in 2019.

Southern Jackaroo, which happens annually, reinforces cooperation across a range of military disciplines, including infantry, aviation, artillery, and combat engineer training, according to the head of Australias army, Lt. Gen. Rick Burr.

The three forces will conduct complex activities coordinating artillery, unmanned aircraft systems and rotary wing assets, he said in an army statement. There is a lot to learn from our partners and this trilateral format allows us to better understand our respective capabilities. It also enables us to continue to work together and be ready to contribute to national and collective responses.

The exercise comes just before Talisman Sabre, large-scale biennial training involving 17,000 troops, mostly from the U.S. and Australia, that starts in late June and peaks July 18-31. Canada, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom are also involved.

France, India and Indonesia will participate as observer nations, the Australian Defence Department said last week.

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Buy Photo Brig. Gen. Brian Cavanaugh speaks after taking command of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, Okinawa, Friday, June 11, 2021. (Matthew M. Burke/Stars and Stripes)

CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa  Marine air power in Japan welcomed a familiar face as its new leader Friday at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma on Okinawa.

Brig. Gen. Brian Cavanaugh took command of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing from Brig. Gen. Christopher McPhillips during a flight-line ceremony with MV-22B Ospreys and F-35B Lightning II stealth fighters parked nearby.

Cavanaugh, a Bronze Star recipient, is no stranger to 1st MAW. He has held every rank in his 30-year career, save for second lieutenant, while serving under its banner, he said.

I understand that 1st MAW, through the work of Gen. McPhillips and his team, is ready to fight now and we will continue to be ready to fight now, Cavanaugh told the audience. All I ask of the marines and sailors is to be ready.

Buy Photo Brig. Gen. Brian Cavanaugh takes command of the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing from Brig. Gen. Christopher McPhillips at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, Okinawa, Friday, June 11, 2021. (Matthew M. Burke/Stars and Stripes)

The 1st Marine Aircraft Wing  often referred to as the tip of the spear in Marine aviation  consists of approximately 7,500 Marines and sailors operating a complement of fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft from bases across Japan and Hawaii. The unit is the aviation combat element of III Marine Expeditionary Force.

The wings mission is to provide offensive air support, anti-air support, aerial reconnaissance and electronic countermeasures, according to the Marine Corps. The wing may also perform tasks on behalf of the Navy.

McPhillips, a career AV-8B Harrier pilot who took command in June 2019, heads to a joint billet at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii, wing spokesman Maj. Ken Kunze said Friday.

McPhillips two years were marked by the coronavirus pandemic and a steady stream of exercises in new Marine island-fight doctrine called expeditionary advanced base operations. The strategy calls for Marines to move inside the range of an adversarys long-range precision fires and establish difficult-to-target forward bases.

Air assets have the capability to refuel and rearm in remote and austere locations as opposed to large, static military bases that could be targeted by adversaries.

At Fridays ceremony, McPhillips lauded his Marines for remaining ready during the pandemic. He said the future was bright for the wing and III MEF.

I couldnt be more excited about the officer that is taking my place, McPhillips said of his friend of over 30 years. This is heartfelt for me; there is not a better person to take command of this unit right now. Hes a quality leader and I think 1st MAW is going to be better off for having him.

Cavanaugh returns to the wing from Marine Corps headquarters in Washington, D.C., where he served as assistant deputy commandant for programs and resources, a March 4 Pentagon statement said.

Both he and McPhillips have been nominated by President Joe Biden to the rank of major general, the statement said.

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Marine Cpl. Eric John Niss-De Jesus, 24, of Mountain Lake, Minn., poses for a photo at Camp Foster, Okinawa, April 16, 2021. (Lucas Vega/U.S. Marine Corps)

The body of a Marine who went missing June 5 while swimming off Okinawa has been recovered and identified, U.S. and Japanese officials said Friday.

Cpl. Eric John Niss-De Jesus, 24, of Mountain Lake, Minn., was a military working dog trainer, Marine Corps Installations Pacific 1st Lt. Ashleigh Fairow told Stars and Stripes in an email.

Niss-De Jesus, assigned to Camp Kinser, went missing while swimming with colleagues near a reef, according to a spokesman for the Japan coast guard in Naha who spoke on a customary condition of anonymity. The Marine had been swept out to sea by a large wave.

The coast guard, which received a call about the incident at about 4:45 p.m. that day, used helicopters and patrol boats to search for Niss-De Jesus until noon June 7, the spokesman said. Japanese fireman also searched on land.

The body was found Wednesday afternoon in the sea about 1,000 feet off Odo Beach in Itoman, according to the spokesman.

Marine Corps is working closely with local officials to determine the facts surrounding Cpl. Niss-De Jesus death, Fairow said in her email. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family and friends of the Niss-De Jesus family.

Niss-De Jesus, who had a bachelors degree in animal science from the University of Minnesota, was recently selected for the enlisted commissioning program, the Marine Corps announced in April. He was slated to attend officer candidates school later this year and aspired to be a combat arms officer.

Eric was incredibly loved and we have felt it from each of you, his mother, Jessica Blom, wrote on social media, according to a Thursday report by CBS News affiliate WCCO in Minneapolis. God has blessed us with a community that knows exactly how to lift up and support each other.

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Carlos Del Toro, a Navy veteran, served as a tactical action officer in Operation Desert Storm and was the first commander of the USS Bulkeley, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer. (Stimson Center)

WASHINGTON  President Joe Biden will nominate Carlos Del Toro, a Navy veteran and a CEO for an engineering and consulting firm, to serve as Navy secretary, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement Friday.

Del Toro now serves as president and CEO of government contractor SBG Technology Solutions, which he founded in 2004, according to the companys website. The business, which is based in Alexandria, Va., specializes in engineering, cyber security and information technology modernization and governance.

The nomination comes as the Navy works to modernize its force, devoting as much money  about $22.6 billion  on research and development efforts as the service has to ship procurement in its proposed 2022 budget.

The pick for the services top civilian leader is a Naval Academy graduate who spent 22 years on active duty in the Navy, according to his biography on the academys alumni association website. Del Toro also spent five years as a civilian employee for the Navy, including as senior military assistant to the director for programs analysis and evaluation.

During Del Toros time in uniform, he served as a tactical action officer in Operation Desert Storm and was the first commander of the USS Bulkeley, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, according to his biography.

In Reeds statement, he called Del Toro an excellent selection for Navy secretary.

He has an impressive resume and exemplifies so many of the qualities that make the Navy and our nation great, Reed said. Carlos rose through the ranks of the Navy with a distinguished record of service, leadership and innovation.

Del Toro has masters degrees in space systems engineering, national security and strategic studies and legislative affairs from the Naval Postgraduate School, the Naval War College, and The George Washington University, respectively, according to his biography on his companys website.

He has also previously served as a White House fellow and special assistant to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, according to his biography. He also leads the procurement committee in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Council on Small Business.

As a naval officer, a White House fellow, entrepreneur, and a tech CEO, hes had success at every step of his career in both the military and private sector, Reed said in his statement.

If confirmed by Congress, Del Toro would be the first Navy secretary born in Cuba after immigrating to the U.S. with his family in 1962. He and his wife Betty, who works as chief financial officer of his company, live in Mount Vernon, Va., and have four children, according to his biography.

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When the Celebrity Millennium departed St. Maarten on Saturday with celebration and fanfare, the cruise was hailed as a milestone both for the cruise line and the embattled North American cruise industry.

With sailings from the United States still paused, the voyage was seen as a way for Americans to return to a favorite vacation pastime at least relatively close to home. But despite a requirement that all passengers over 16 be vaccinated, the celebratory cruise couldnt avoid the virus that shut the industry down 15 months ago.

Two passengers who were sharing a room on the ship tested positive for the coronavirus on Thursday, two days before the cruise was scheduled to end. The results came as part of required end-of-cruise testing, Celebrity Cruises said in a statement Thursday evening.

The individuals are asymptomatic and currently in isolation and being monitored by our medical team, the statement said. We are conducting contact tracing, expediting testing for all close contacts and closely monitoring the situation.

According to the statement, all guests on the ship were required to show that they were fully vaccinated and that they had a negative coronavirus test taken within 72 hours of the cruise leaving St. Maarten. Crew members are fully vaccinated, and the company says its protocols exceed CDC guidelines to protect the health and safety of our guests.

This situation demonstrates that our rigorous health and safety protocols work to protect our crew, guests and the communities we visit, the statement said.

According to a news release when the cruise started, the ship has reduced capacity to allow for people to space out more. Experiences on the ship and on land, safety drills and arrival and departure procedures have also been tweaked for covid-era cruising.

Masks are not required on the ship, in accordance with recent CDC guidance for sailings with vaccinated crew and guests, the company said.

Celebrity did not provide any details on the vaccination background of the two people who tested positive. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, breakthrough cases are expected in a small percentage of people who are fully vaccinated.

Cruise lines trying to restart in the U.S. have turned to vaccine requirements to speed the process along. The CDC says that if at least 95% of passengers and crew will be fully vaccinated on a ship, the cruise line does not need to conduct a test cruise to show it can mitigate the risk of covid-19. There are fewer restrictions on board for vaccinated passengers as well.

Celebrity Cruises, which is based in Miami, got CDC approval last month to sail the first ship from the U.S. with paying passengers on board. The company says vaccines will be required for everyone 16 and older on the cruise, which is scheduled to leave Fort Lauderdale on June 26. Its not clear how that will square with a Florida law that says businesses cant ask for proof of vaccination status.

Thursdays positive tests on the Celebrity ship follow two earlier this week on an MSC cruise in the Mediterranean. In that case, two passengers who were not traveling together tested positive as part of a routine check midway through the cruise. They were asymptomatic and no one else in their groups or any close contacts tested positive, the cruise line said.

The passengers and their companions left the ship in Sicily and were taken home by company-provided transportation while the ship continued its planned schedule. MSC does not require passengers to be vaccinated.
Jens Spahn, Germany's Federal Minister of Health, shows the app for the digital vaccination certificate at the regular press conference on the Corona situation in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, June 10, 2021. (Michael Kappeler/dpa via AP)

BERLIN  Germany on Thursday started rolling out a digital vaccination pass that can be used across Europe as the continent gets ready for the key summer travel season.

The country's health minister said starting this week vaccination centers, doctors practices and pharmacies will gradually start giving out digital passes to fully vaccinated people. The CovPass will let users download proof of their coronavirus vaccination status onto a smartphone app, allowing them easy access to restaurants, museums or other venues that require proof of immunization.

The vaccination passport should be available to everyone in Germany who is fully vaccinated by the end of this month, Health Minister Jens Spahn said.

"The goal is that this certificate can also be used in Helsinki, Amsterdam or Mallorca," Spahn told reporters in Berlin.

People who have been fully vaccinated will either get a letter with a QR-code they can scan with their phones or they can contact their doctors or pharmacies to retroactively get the digital pass.

"By doing so, we in the European Union are setting a cross-border standard that doesn't exist elsewhere in the world yet," Spahn said, adding that the digital vaccination pass is an important step for the revival of international tourism.

The country's disease control agency, the Robert Koch Institute, reported Thursday that 47% of the population, or about 39.1 million people, have gotten one shot. Almost 24%, or 19.9 million people, are fully vaccinated.

On Wednesday, almost 1.3 million people received a vaccine jab, the second highest daily number ever.

Also Thursday, Germany's committee on vaccinations, known as Stiko, recommended that children aged 12 to 15 only receive the shot if they have certain illnesses such as obesity, chronic lung or heart diseases, dpa reported. Healthy teenagers can, however, also be vaccinated if they, their parents and doctors decide to do so.

The German panel's opinion differs from the European Medicines Agency, which last month recommended expanding the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to children 12 to 15, a decision that offers younger and less at-risk populations across the continent access to a COVID-19 shot for the first time.

The head of Stiko, Thomas Mertens, said while youths are very well protected by the vaccine, only few children and teenagers had participated in medical studies and possible severe side effects could therefore not be excluded.

Mertens said the recommendation was also based on the fact that very few children fall severely ill with COVID-19 as opposed to older people.
WASHINGTON  The Pentagons move to divert some $3.6 billion from military construction coffers to fund 175 miles of border fencing will defund planned projects in 23 states, three U.S. territories and at bases in 20 other countries, the Defense Department announced Wednesday.

The Pentagon is confident that Congress will later provide another $3.6 billion for the 127 planned construction projects worldwide from which funds were diverted to pay for sections of border wall to be built in Texas, Arizona and California as part of President Donald Trumps February national emergency proclamation, a senior defense official said Wednesday. The Defense Department has no Plan B should lawmakers decide not to backfill those funds to build the defunded projects, said the official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in impacted states largely expressed dismay at the decision approved by Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Tuesday, which came months after Congress provided the Trump administration some $1.375 billion for wall construction after the White House had requested $5.7 billion.

Pentagon officials released the list of impacted projects Wednesday after lawmakers and foreign allies were notified of impacted projects within their jurisdictions. Pentagon officials insisted all of the projects listed remained important to the Defense Department, which would seek future funding for every project that it listed for defunding this week.

Locations hit hardest by the fund transfers included Puerto Rico, which saw some $400 million worth of projects  primarily construction of buildings impacted by 2018s Hurricane Maria  defunded.

In New York, $160 million in planned projects at the Armys storied U.S. Military Academy at West Point  a parking facility and an engineering center  were defunded, drawing condemnation from Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who called the decision a slap in the face to the military.

Virginia and North Carolina also saw large cuts. In Virginia, some $90 million for four projects was defunded, including for a cyber operations facility at Joint Base Langley-Eustis. North Carolina saw about $80 million for projects defunded, including a battalion complex at the Marines Camp Lejeune.

In Alaska, Pentagon officials diverted more than $60 million of planned construction projects, including $8 million from a planned extension of Fort Greelys missile field No. 1, a key component of U.S. missile defense capabilities. The senior defense officials said the expansion was to build two backup missile silos and would not impact the militarys ability to defend the nation from a ballistic missile strike.

The list of defunded projects also includes projects to build or upgrade nine Defense Department schools, including one at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, three in Germany, two in Japan and one in the United Kingdom.

The Pentagon decision drew criticism from Democratic lawmakers, who accused the Trump administration of abusing power and circumventing Congress to pay for the presidents border wall with military funds.

Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., said the Trump administration was grossly irresponsible for moving the funds from the Pentagons coffers to pay for portions of the vanity wall. The congressman, who is chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on military readiness, labeled Esper as Trumps new pawn for agreeing to divert the funds.

Rep. Anthony Brown, D-Md., said Trump was stealing military construction funds from needed projects, including at Joint Base Andrews, in Marylands 4th Congressional District, which Brown represents. Projects diverted at Andrews included a child development center and an explosive ordnance disposal range.

It is outrageous that President Trump is abusing his power to cancel military construction projects in Maryland and around the world in order to fulfill a campaign promise, Brown said Wednesday in a statement. This will hurt morale, degrade readiness and make America less safe. President Trump should not build his ineffective, xenophobic vanity project on the backs of our servicemembers and military families.

The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday evening issued a statement announcing it would seek court action to block the movement of funds from Pentagon construction projects to build the border wall.

The fact that the government sat on these so-called emergency funds for seven months further confirms that this is nothing but an unlawful power grab, Dror Ladin, a staff attorney with the ACLUs National Security Project, said in a statement. Well be back in court very soon to block Trumps latest effort to raid military funds for his xenophobic wall.

But the move was not met with universal disapproval.

Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, supported the decision and urged other members of Congress to support backfilling the diverted $3.6 billion.

We continue to face a very real crisis at the southern border, Thornberry, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. I regret that the president has been forced to divert funding for our troops to address the crisis. His initial requests to secure the border were not unreasonable and Congress should have been able to come together to find a compromise.

Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., also expressed support for the movement of funds, though she also said she had lobbied the Pentagon to ensure Arizona military construction projects would not be delayed by the transfer. Only one Arizona project was defunded as a result, a $30 million ground transport equipment building at the Armys Fort Huachuca, which McSally said had already been delayed by environmental factors. McSally said top Army leaders ensured her the project would be completed in the future.

We need to secure our border and protect our military. We can and should do both, McSally said. As soon as the emergency was declared, I went to the mat to fight for Arizona projects and succeeded by receiving assurances from the highest levels of the Department of Defense.

The wall projects approved by Esper would build about 175 miles of barrier  described by the Pentagon as pedestrian fencing  in border locations in Texas, Arizona and California.

In a note to members of Congress dated Tuesday, the defense secretary said the building of the barrier wall was necessary to support the use of the armed forces in their mission to support Department of Homeland Security operations on the border. The Pentagon has about 5,000 servicemembers deployed along the southern border with Mexico, who perform duties including surveillance, vehicle maintenance, ferrying CBP officers around the border and busing migrants to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol stations.

Esper hinted building the new barriers could mean less troops serving along the border in the near future. Pentagon officials said Tuesday that it would take at least 100 days before any construction would begin.

These projects will deter illegal entry, increase the vanishing time of those illegally crossing the border, and channel migrants to ports of entry, Esper wrote in his memorandum. They will reduce the demand for personnel and assets at the locations where the barriers are constructed and allow the redeployment of DOD personnel and assets to other high-traffic areas on the border without barriers.

The diverted funds would include nearly $1.2 billion for three phases of a border project near Yuma, Ariz., that would primarily replace fencing and vehicular barriers  areas where military vehicles line the border  with a new, permanent barrier largely on the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range.

Another $1.27 billion would fund a project in Laredo, Texas. The money transfer also funds border barrier planned for San Diego and Texas El Centro and El Paso. The projects in El Centro and Laredo are on private property, which defense officials said could delay their construction start.

The White Houses proposed $718 billion Defense Department budget for fiscal year 2020 included $3.6 billion in an emergency fund to backfill money taken from 2019 construction projects for the wall as well as an additional $3.6 billion marked for potential new construction at the U.S. southern border. The House and Senate have passed defense budgets, but need to reconcile their differences during the fall session to draft a compromise on the spending plan.

The Defense Department is already paying $2.5 billion for about 150 miles of border wall through a drug interdiction fund, authorized earlier this year by then acting Defense Secretary Pat Shanahan. The Army Corps of Engineers have awarded all but 20 miles worth of those construction contracts, because those final miles were approved by Esper last week.

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WASHINGTON  A federal judge on Tuesday blocked President Donald Trumps use of military construction funds to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, cutting off a major source of money for the controversial project, according to court documents.

The order comes after the judge, David Briones of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas El Paso Division, ruled in the case of El Paso County, Texas v. Trump that Trump violated the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2019, which makes it unlawful to use money appropriated for other purposes to fund the construction of the wall on the southern border.

The judge ordered military construction funds beyond what had already been appropriated by law be blocked permanently and declared Trumps declaration of a national emergency on the southern border as an unlawful use of the money.

Earlier this year, Trump and Congress fought over the amount of border wall funding, causing a monthlong government shutdown that ended in January. On Feb. 15, Trump declared a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border and directed the use of military construction funds as well as counter-narcotic funding to pay for border wall construction.

Up to $3.6 billion in unobligated military construction funds were authorized by the declaration to be used for the border wall and have been directed toward 11 barrier projects totaling 175 miles of fencing to be built in Texas, Arizona and California. The Pentagon diverted the money from 127 planned construction projects worldwide.

El Paso County, where a portion of the wall is being constructed, is one of the plaintiffs in the case. They argued in the lawsuit that $20 million that was supposed to go toward a military construction project at Fort Bliss, a local Army installation, was redirected to wall construction Sept. 5, taking away construction jobs for the area.

And the county is going, That's our biggest employer. That's our biggest source of revenue into the economic engine of this county, and you're taking money away from that,  said David Bookbinder, the chief counsel for the Niskanen Center, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. Bookbinder is one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case.

The judge said Tuesday that because plaintiffs have demonstrated irreparable harm, an inability of traditional remedies at law to rectify that harm, and the balance of the equities and public interest weigh in their favor, they are entitled to a permanent injunction against defendants use of [military construction] funds for border barrier construction.

By directing more appropriated money for the wall with the emergency declaration than the amount approved by Congress, Trump violated the law, the Texas judge decided.

The law says if you ask for X and Congress gives you one fifth of X, that's it, you can't put any more money into that pot. And the judge said, the president has violated that, Bookbinder said of the judges decision.

Tuesdays order prevents Defense Secretary Mark Esper, among a list of senior government department officials, from using billions of dollars of available military construction funds beyond the $1.375 billion that had already been appropriated for wall construction in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, or CAA.

The CAA states in section 739 that none of the funds made available in this or any other appropriations act may be used to increase, eliminate, or reduce funding for a program, project, or activity as proposed in the presidents budget request for a fiscal year 

The $2.5 billion in counter-narcotic funding has also been committed to build about 150 miles of the border wall project, however Tuesdays decision did not apply to this funding

Lawyers for the defendants, which includes Trump, Esper and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, argued in their response to the judges October decision that a sweeping injunction would be inappropriate because they said the CAA is only referring to projects and funding in that law, and not all Defense Department military construction funds.

The defendants lawyers on Tuesday appealed the judges decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.

Kenney.Caitlin@stripes.com Twitter: @caitlinmkenney
Our service members should be able to raise a family while building a financially secure future even when duty calls them away at home or overseas. Sadly, shockingly and shamefully, that is too often not possible. And that unfortunate reality is threatening the health and well-being of children and families while having a devastating impact on morale and readiness.

As members of the congressional armed services committees, we see firsthand how military families are struggling like never before amid frequent moves  usually every 1 to 3 years  and long, sometimes unexpected deployments. Lack of child care is a significant contributor to a military spouse unemployment rate of 24%, as estimated by the Government Accountability Office. And like most American families, very few military families can afford to not have both parents working.

The militarys feeble efforts have, frankly, failed for too long. A 2020 Pentagon report showed nearly 9,000 children of servicemembers were stuck on waitlists for child care services despite an immediate and critical need. The military services also have 121 unfunded military child development center projects in their backlog, many of which would expand badly needed capacity and address the 135 existing military child care centers in poor and failing condition.

We also must do more to enable servicemembers who are new parents to spend crucial early time at home with newborns. Over the last two years, Congress established a parental leave benefit of 12 weeks for federal employees who are new mothers and fathers  but these benefits exclude servicemembers. We should do our part to expand military parental leave benefits as much as possible to better align it with that of those they serve and protect.

As it stands right now, a foster child with two caregivers who are servicemembers could end up without any parental bonding time. Not 12 weeks. Not 6 weeks. Not 5 days. Nothing. Its clear who this hurts the most: the children themselves. This shouldnt be controversial: Every child deserves to bond with their parent, no matter how they came to join their family.

Our nation must do better by our servicemembers and their families. Thats just one reason why we introduced legislation to confront this crisis. Our Military Child Care Expansion Act would establish new funding options for military child development centers; help servicemembers pay for in-home child care; pilot a public-private partnership to expand child care capacity for military families; and require the Defense Department to identify the root causes of poor and failing child care facilities as well as report the cost of fixing them. These reforms, plus a major investment in military child care centers in the upcoming infrastructure bill, would turn a significant national failure into a point of patriotic pride.

Our Servicemember Parental Leave Equity Act would expand caregiver leave for servicemembers to 12 weeks for both new mothers and fathers. It would offer paid parental leave to servicemembers providing long-term foster care and more flexibility for military families by allowing caregiver leave to be taken in multiple increments. In the private sector and the government, new fathers often take their parental leave at the birth of the child and the rest after the mother returns to work. This must be allowed for servicemembers, too. Our bill would also ensure that new mothers are not ordered to participate in overnight travel or physically demanding training exercises, except at the option of the mother or in the interest of national security, and it would adjust the option by which servicemembers can pause their career to attend to longer-term caregiving, professional needs or personal interests.

So even while we celebrated moms on Mothers Day last month, Congress needs to do more to prove that were willing to honor and lend a hand to moms the 364 other days of the year, too  and that includes the mothers who serve either directly or as military spouses and partners. Expanding service member parental leave and helping military families get the child care they need and have been promised is the very least we can do.

Rep. Jackie Speier, a California Democrat, is chair of the House Armed Services Military Personnel subcommittee. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat, is chair of the Senate Armed Services Airland subcommittee and a retired Army National Guard lieutenant colonel.
If youre free to worship as you see fit, chances are youre not in China these days, where religious persecution is rampant.

Examples abound. Last month, the Catholic press agency AsiaNews reported that in the space of just two days, almost all the ecclesiastical personnel of the apostolic prefecture of Xinxiang were wiped out with an operation by the police forces of the province of Hebei. Arrests included a bishop, seven priests and 10 seminarians.

Small wonder that the watchdog group Open Doors USA ranks China in the top 20 of the countries where Christians are most at risk of persecution. The Catholic Leader reports the Chinese Communist Party removed Bible apps from the App Store and suspended Christian WeChat accounts across the country. All this oppression raises a serious question: Why is the Catholic Church still practicing constructive engagement with Beijing?

If it was to emphatically denounce and help end the persecution, that would be one thing. But no: In 2018, the Vatican signed an agreement on the appointment of bishops between the Peoples Republic and the Holy See. The deal was renewed last October until 2022.

The Holy See claimed that the agreement was merely pastoral and not political. One of the main supporters, Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, said he was pleased with the dialogue with Beijing. He downplayed the idea that Christians in China had anything to fear, literally asking reporters: But, what persecution?

The Vaticans persistent detente with Beijing raises some troubling concerns. For starters, it continues even as the Chinese Communist Party continues to spearhead an ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs and other religious and ethnic minorities. To make matters worse, despite the agreement, the condition of Catholics in China has not improved.

Further, while the pastoral intent of the Holy See is understandable, in reality it is not possible to clearly distinguish the pastoral from the political in China. The Vaticans deal gives political legitimacy to the Chinese regime.

It cant be coincidental that, three years ago, the Italian Jesuit magazine La Civilta Cattolica, in supporting the original agreement with China, mentioned the case of the Concordat of 1801 between Pope Pius VII and Napoleon. It is true that the Sino-Vatican agreement is not a concordat, but it could become one. Thats a problematic scenario, supporting moral and political values that are not simply different from but antithetical to Christianity. Accepting the total incompatibility of value systems seriously jeopardizes the principle of Libertas Ecclesiae (the freedom of religion of ecclesiastical authority of the Catholic Church from temporal powers).

Worse, the Vatican has abandoned holding the Chinese regime accountable for its lack of transparency and trustworthiness. At a time when many are clamoring for Beijing to be held accountable for its role in the Uyghur genocide and global pandemic, the Vatican is out of step in giving Beijing a pass on significant abuses of religious liberty.

The Vaticans disappointing diplomacy caught the attention of the last U.S. administration. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was critical of the Beijing deal. The Trump team believed that this agreement could give political and diplomatic legitimacy to the Peoples Republic, thereby strengthening its soft power.

As relations between the Holy See and Washington grow frostier, Chinese has been bargaining harder with the Vatican, a potential problem also for Taiwans autonomy, given that the Vatican is one of the few countries that still continues to have full diplomatic relations with Taipei. In this context, according to Global Times (a tabloid affiliated to the Chinese Communist Party), Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said last October that the two sides [the Peoples Republic and the Holy See] will stay in close contact to keep pushing forward the relationship. It cannot therefore be ruled out that Beijings goal is to push the Vatican to break its diplomatic ties with Taiwan.

If the new administration is as committed to religious liberty as it claims it is, and if it is as serious about pushing back on Beijings wolf-warrior diplomacy as it claims, then the U.S. needs to double-down on pressing the Vatican to get on the right side of the Chinas flagrant abuses. In short, we need more moral clarity from both Washington and Rome.

Stefano Graziosi is an essayist and a political analyst who writes for the Italian newspaper La Verita and the weekly magazine Panorama. James Jay Carafano is a Heritage Foundation vice president, in charge of the think tanks research program on matters of national security and foreign relations.
Ever since President Joe Biden announced that U.S. troops would be leaving Afghanistan by Sept. 11, there has been a troubling trend on my social media platforms. Afghans with whom I served during my deployment have been reaching out more frequently. At first, it is the familiar conversations that we have shared in the three years since I left: how our families are, current events, who has been killed in action. Lately, the messages have been direct and urgent. They are calls for help.

As U.S. and coalition troops leave Afghanistan, thousands of translators will be without not only their source of livelihood, but their protectors. They are marked men, as the Taliban retake sections of the country and have begun assassinating them.

In 2009, Congress passed the Afghan Allies Protection Act making Afghan translators eligible for Special Immigrant Visas (SIV). There are currently some 18,000 deserving Afghans who have applied under the SIV program and are awaiting a decision. But the program needs to be reformed, and time is running out.

I have participated in the SIV process. As I was leaving Afghanistan in 2018, I wrote a letter of recommendation for one of my interpreters, Hazrat, to the chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. In addition to my letter, he had to provide a human resources letter from his company that stated that he had worked there for at least two years, and that he was under my charge during employment.

There are many problems with the current process.

I had two interpreters but could only recommend Hazrat because the other switched employers during my tour, resetting his two-year employment clock. My other translator, Noorullah, had to apply under a letter of recommendation from another U.S. Army officer.

As for the human resources letter, it can be a year or more until the company that employs an interpreter is contacted by someone from the embassy. As is the case with many contractors, the company could be closed or reorganized, which leads to a denial.

The two-year requirement needs to be eliminated. Due to the current and previous coalition withdrawals, many interpreters were released of their employment before they could complete 24 months of service. Regardless, how long you served coalition troops does not make you any less of a target.

Finally, the process takes too long. Under the Afghan Allies Protection Act the U.S. government has nine months to process a SIV application. It took 36 in the case of Hazrat, and that was just for his approval. He still is not in the U.S., and it is unlikely that he will be before the September withdrawal date. After which, he and his family could be killed.

What is needed is an immediate evacuation of Afghan interpreters to a third country. There, they can safely conduct the SIV application process. In 1996 the U.S. did just that for Iraqi Kurds in what was known as Operation Pacific Haven. In danger of reprisal from Saddam Hussein due to their work with U.S. aid groups, Kurds were airlifted to Guam. There they were housed and processed through immigration before eventually settling in the United States and other countries.

Verifying those who served as interpreters for U.S. troops is a relatively straightforward process. They have already gone through extensive background checks and undergo counterintelligence screening every six months. Unlike the thousands of refugees who seek to enter our country each year, we have records for those who have supported our forces in Afghanistan.

It should be noted that the United States does not and should not have to undertake this evacuation alone. The NATO-led Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan is a coalition of 29 countries, all of which have had local national interpreter support.

We have a moral obligation to protect those who put their lives on the line to support our troops in Americas longest war. If we do not, who would ever help our forces in a future conflict? We must not allow the date of Sept. 11 to have yet another tragic meaning.

Wesley Satterwhite is a masters student at Georgetown Universitys School of Foreign Service. A captain in the U.S. Army Reserve, he served as a mentor to Afghan National Army commandos from 2017-2018.
Over the past couple of weeks, a large Iranian navy transport ship, the Makran, has been lumbering through the Atlantic, reportedly headed to the Caribbean. Strapped to the top of this warship is a very lethal cargo: seven high-speed missile attack boats, probably headed to Venezuela.

The speedboats are of the Iranian Peykaap class, and are typically operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Nearly 60 feet in length, they can carry two lethal antiship missiles that have a range of close to 20 miles in surface-to-surface mode, as well as a pair of 13-inch torpedoes. Some reports indicate an Iranian frigate may be accompanying the Makran and her cargo.

I know that class of ship well, as do most U.S. Navy officers. We see them frequently in the Arabian Gulf, harassing merchant ships and occasionally challenging our warships. They are quite dangerous, especially in a constrained seaway like the Gulf.

What is unique in this situation is that they are paired with the Makran, which can function as a kind of 755-foot mother ship to a hostile brood of missile boats, providing general logistic support, fuel, ammunition and long-haul communications. After unloading the speedboats, the Makran can operate with a large flight deck to operate helicopters, which would effectively extend the combat range of the patrol boats by giving them eyes over the horizon.

What is going on between Iran and Venezuela so close to American shores, and how would the Venezuelans cooperate with the Iranians in using this sea power?

There have been close relations between Venezuela and Iran for two decades, initiated by the former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Likewise, the two nations navies have cooperated since the turn of the century. When Chavez died in 2013 and current dictator Nicolas Maduro took over, the friendship only deepened. Bitter relations with the U.S., crippling sanctions, crumbling economies, harsh regimes with regional ambitions  Tehran and Caracas, unfortunately, have a lot in common.

When I was the head of the U.S. Southern Command in the late 2000s, I was particularly concerned about Venezuelan irregular maritime activities directed against U.S. allies in the region such as Colombia and Trinidad and Tobago. These included pressuring commercial fisherman and providing tacit support to smuggling vessels.

The Venezuelan navy has several potential uses for the Iranian missile boats. The most obvious would be to harass Colombian warships, which often operate in the waters of the southern Caribbean. The two nations are involved in several territorial disputes, and Colombia has attempted to provide U.S.-supplied food aid to Maduros opposition.

Another option is for the Venezuelans to use the Iranian boats to protect and escort merchant vessels violating U.S. sanctions or involved in narcotics smuggling. After the U.S. seized more than one million barrels of oil from Iranian tankers bound for Venezuela in August, it seems the Maduro regime concluded it needed a more robust scheme for protecting vessels coming in and out of its ports.

Finally, the Venezuelans could generally make themselves nuisances in nearby waters, much as the Iranians do in the Gulf; the Caribbean is rich with cruise ships, merchant cargo and larger vessels headed toward the Panama Canal. They could also link up with Cuban naval vessels to form an axis of annoyance across the eastern Caribbean.

Whether Iranian sailors will operate the speedboats or train the Venezuelans to do so themselves is unclear. Either eventuality is of great concern to SOUTHCOM in Miami. It already has its hands full with counter-narcotics enforcement, humanitarian disaster relief, medical diplomacy centered on COVID-19 and, above all, protection of the Panama Canal and the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Arms transfers by either nation are a potential violation of U.S. sanctions, so intervention may be justified. The U.S. should take any intelligence it has on the voyage of the Makran to the Organization of American States, which can coordinate a response with Americas partners in the region.

If the U.S. was willing to seize Iranian oil shipments for violating sanctions last year, it should be prepared to take direct action to stop these small but lethal machines of war from being delivered to a corrupt and dangerous regime in Caracas.

Bloomberg Opinion columnist James Stavridis is a retired U.S. Navy admiral and former supreme allied commander of NATO, and dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is also an operating executive consultant at the Carlyle Group and chairs the board of counselors at McLarty Associates. His latest book is 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
French Barkhane Air Force mechanics maintain a Mirage 2000 on the Niamey, Niger base June 5, 2021. France's defense minister said Friday, June 11, that an Islamic militant linked to al-Qaida was killed in a French military offensive in Mali. (Jerome Delay/AP)

PARIS  A French military offensive in Mali has killed a jihadist leader linked to al-Qaida who is believed to have helped orchestrate the kidnapping and killing of two French journalists in 2013, France's defense minister said Friday.

Three other militants were also killed in the weekend anti-terrorist operation around Aguelhok in northern Mali, Florence Parly said in a statement. The operation was targeting a group suspected of plotting an attack on U.N. forces in the area.

French authorities identified one of those killed as Baye ag Bakabo, considered to be behind the kidnapping and killing of Ghislaine Dupont and Claude Verlon, journalists for Radio France Internationale, in November 2013.

The killings prompted new efforts to protect journalists in conflict zones.

RFI reported Friday that the jihadist leader drove the beige pick-up truck used for the kidnapping, and that in recent months he had headed an armed group tasked with "eliminating all people suspected of collaborating" with French forces operating in Africa's Sahel region.

RFI expressed regret that he was killed instead of captured, saying "his testimony could have removed zones of doubt that continue to cast a shadow on this case." Only one member of the unit behind the kidnapping remains alive, RFI said.

The announcement of his death came the day after French President Emmanuel Macron announced a scaling back of French forces in the Sahel and a "profound transformation" of France's military operation in Mali and neighboring countries so that it relies more on regional partners.
Tyler Savage and Bella Siegrist pose at Ala Wai Boat Harbor, Honolulu, June 5, 2021, just after completing a three-week sailboat trip from San Diego. (Vera Savage)

FORT SHAFTER, Hawaii  Every summer as a boy, Tyler Savages mother took him to spend time in her native country of Hungary, where he swam and learned to sail on Lake Balaton, the largest body of water in Central Europe.

But Savage, now 19, was always frustrated with the strict rules preventing him from sailing all the way across the lake.

Last month, he, along with his 19-year-old girlfriend, Bella Siegrist, set sail on a journey that had no boundaries, crossing the Pacific Ocean from San Diego to Honolulu in a 29-foot boat in 21 days.

They arrived June 5 at a Waikiki Beach marina and will begin attending the University of Hawaii in August. Thats a long, long way from Stuttgart High School in Germany, where the two met.

At the time, Savages father, Marine Corps Lt. Col. Glenn Savage, was stationed in Germany. Siegrists father, a retired soldier, worked as a government employee.

The sailing trip came about through happenchance and a sense of adventure.

They graduated in the spring of 2020, after which Savages father was transferred to Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego. The teen moved with them, and Siegrist joined him there later in the summer.

They had both planned to attend college in Oregon that fall but decided to forgo school for a year when that college offered only virtual classes. They then set their sights on attending the University of Hawaii.

Tyler Savage and Bella Siegrist get their first sight of Hawaii as they near the end of a three-week trip from San Diego. (Tyler Savage and Bella Siegrist)

In the meantime, they immersed themselves in San Diegos sailing world, first buying a tiny catamaran for a few hundred dollars, which they rented out for income. Siegrist worked at a marina at Lake Miramar.

With money borrowed from his parents, they bought a 24-foot boat, and with it, the seed of an idea.

I said to Ty, What if we sail to Hawaii with this boat? Siegrist said during an interview Wednesday under a huge banyan tree on Waikiki Beach near the marina at which they arrived.

Ty got into the idea, and he just carried it away.

Savage found a YouTube video posted by a man who had sailed that same route with a 23-foot sailboat.

That looked miserable, Savage said. But when he arrived, walking on dry land again having done it, it seemed like a really, really good feeling. So, it motivated me and Bella to do it.

Ultimately, they did not think their first boat was up to the rigors of a transpacific trip, so they ended up selling the boats they had to buy the 29-footer they ended up taking  after a fair amount of refurbishment.

They set off May 15, shortly after they had both gotten their second dose of coronavirus vaccine.

Week one was not at all pleasant  cold and windy, with choppy waters pounding onto the side of the boat and drenching what was inside.

The first night I threw up, Savage said.

Tyler Savage and Bella Siegrist pose for a selfie while bundled up for the chilly first leg of their San Diego-to-Honolulu trip via sailboat from May 15 to June 5, 2021. (Tyler Savage and Bella Siegrist)

But as they reached a warmer clime and began sailing into the waves, there was more to enjoy.

Whales seemed to be curious about their small boat, swimming under it at times and partially surfacing near it. They once saw a shark rocket out of the water and catch a low-flying bird.

Sound sleep, however, was elusive for the entire three weeks. More often than not, some small item in the boat would begin tap, tap, tapping.

And eventually you go crazy because you can't sleep, Savage said. So, we just start opening up everything, all of our stuff and just throwing everything on the floor, rip the whole boat apart to discover what the knocking is.

Savages parents, who flew to Hawaii for their arrival Saturday, provided them with a lifeboat and other safety devices for the trip.

We are not big sailors, so we dont exactly know what is needed, so we just trusted them, Vera Savage said.

The teens are staying with friends as they begin preparing for school in the fall. Siegrist plans on majoring in marketing or management, while Savage will focus on physics.

As for their boat, they hope to generate some income by perhaps chartering it during summers for tourists seeking a taste of life at sea, perhaps offering trips to neighboring islands.

I think a lot of people want to see the more unfiltered version of sailing, Savage said.

olson.wyatt@stripes.com

Twitter: @WyattWOlson
Buy Photo A medical worker with the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force fills a syringe with the Moderna COVID-19 vacine during a shot clinic in Otemachi, Tokyo, Wednesday, June 9, 2021. (Akifumi Ishikawa/Stars and Stripes)

CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa  The number of COVID-19 patients continued to decline across Japan on Friday, including at U.S. military bases, which recorded just a handful of new cases.

The Marine Corps on Okinawa had four people test positive for the coronavirus respiratory disease, according to a Facebook post by Marine Corps Installations Pacific. Three are at Camp Foster and one is at Camp Hansen.

The Marines have reported 28 cases on Okinawa since May 29.

Yokosuka Naval Base, 35 miles south of central Tokyo, announced Friday that two patients have popped up since Wednesday. One is an unimmunized person in Japan under the status of forces agreement. The other is a base employee who tested positive after displaying COVID-19 symptoms.

The SOFA member is in quarantine and is being monitored by U.S. Naval Hospital Yokosuka staff, a statement said.

Japan reported 1,937 new coronavirus cases Friday, 937 fewer than the same day last week, according to public broadcaster NHK and the World Health Organization. There were also 64 deaths.

The government has counted 765,000 COVID-19 cases during the pandemic and more than 13,500 deaths, the WHO said.

Tokyo on Friday reported another 435 coronavirus infections and eight deaths, according to NHK, which cited metropolitan government data. Thats 37 fewer cases than the same day last week.

Osaka prefecture, the nations second-largest metro area, reported 134 new cases Friday and 11 deaths, NHK said.

Okinawa prefecture, home to the majority of U.S. troops in Japan, reported another 145 new infections Friday, 102 fewer than the same day last week, according to NHK.

Though Japan has lagged other developed nations in vaccinating its population, the country is ramping up its efforts ahead of the Olympic Games, scheduled to begin July 23. Prime Minster Yoshihide Suga said Wednesday he hoped to have the lions share of Japans population inoculated by November.

The Japanese government is also considering lifting a state of emergency for 10 prefectures, including Tokyo, Osaka and Okinawa, on June 20 as scheduled, Kyodo News reported Friday, citing unnamed government officials. However, they may maintain some restrictions through a quasi-state of emergency in places like Tokyo and Osaka.

burke.matt@stripes.com

Twitter: @MatthewMBurke1
Buy Photo Travelers head to departure gates at Denver International Airport in Colorado on June 6, 2021. Germany removed the U.S. from its list of coronavirus risk countries on June 11, 2021, paving the way for American tourists to return to the country more than a year after they were barred entry amid soaring coronavirus infections in the U.S. (Karin Zeitvogel/Stars and Stripes)

KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany  The U.S. has been dropped from the list of countries Germany considers risk areas for the coronavirus, paving the way for American tourists to be allowed back into the country in time for the summer travel season.

Germanys disease prevention agency, the Robert Koch Institute, made the announcement Friday when it published an updated coronavirus risk evaluation for countries around the world.

The U.S. and 13 other countries were taken off the list, while regions in five other countries were removed as coronavirus numbers fell.

Passengers arriving in Germany by air still have to complete a digital entry form before arrival and upload either a negative test result, proof that they are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus or that they have recovered from COVID-19 and been cleared for travel by a medical professional, RKI said on its website.

Travelers from the U.S. who fulfill those requirements no longer have to quarantine on arrival in Germany, the health ministry told Stars and Stripes last month.

Buy Photo All air travelers arriving in Germany have to fill in a digital form and attach negative test results, proof that they are fully vaccinated or have recovered from COVID-19 and are allowed to travel. Fully vaccinated travelers and those who have recovered, including from the U.S., which is no longer considered a risk area for the coronavirus by the German authorities, do not have to quarantine on arrival. (Karin Zeitvogel/Stars and Stripes)

The risk categorization is the lowest health threat level in RKIs ranking system. Countries where variants of the virus are circulating, such as the United Kingdom, are ranked at the highest risk level under the German system, and countries with high incidence of the virus are in a tier in between.

Removal from the list means Americans may once again be able to travel to the Continent for tourism after they were barred from entering most EU countries, including Germany, for more than a year as coronavirus infections soared in the U.S.

Germany has not officially announced that U.S. tourists will be able to enter the country now that U.S. infection levels have fallen to around 30 new weekly cases per 100,000 people, but German media reports have suggested that such a move will happen.

Guests from overseas could once again be welcomed at Neuschwanstein Castle, under the Brandenburg Gate and at the Obersee near Berchtesgaden, all beloved destinations of Americans, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported Wednesday, when the U.S. State Department lowered the warning level for Americans traveling to Germany.

Prior to Wednesday, the State Department warned Americans not to travel to Germany  even though its weekly incidence rate for new cases was lower than that in the U.S., at 18 new infections per 100,000 people as of Friday.

The German border police did not respond to an email inquiry as to when American tourists arriving by air will be allowed to enter the country.

Members of the large American military communities, mostly in the south of the country, are in Germany under the Status of Forces Agreement, which gives them resident status and calls for them to be given the same travel rights within the EU as citizens of the 27 nations in the bloc.

EU leaders were expected to agree Friday to allow people who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus to travel freely within the bloc this summer, Euronews reported.

Stars and Stripes reporter Marcus Kloeckner contributed to this report.

zeitvogel.karin@stripes.com

Twitter: @StripesZeit
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg shakes hands with U.S. President Joe Biden at a meeting in Washington, June 7, 2021. The president will participate in a NATO summit in Brussels on June 14. (NATO)

STUTTGART, Germany  President Joe Biden and other heads of state next week will agree on a revamped NATO strategy that accounts for Chinas ambitions and the implications of climate change, the alliances top official said Friday ahead of a summit widely expected to lack the tumult of the Trump era.

Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said allies will open a new chapter Monday when they agree to NATOs 2030 plan, which also calls for emphasis on cyber and space defenses as well as more technology investments.

This high level of ambition has to be properly resourced and funded, Stoltenberg told reporters.

Leading up to the summit, Stoltenberg also has talked about changing how NATO operations are funded as part of his 2030 proposal, advocating the alliance to allow members to tap into NATOs shared defense budget to subsidize some missions. Currently, the nation that deploys troops pays the bill, which Stoltenberg has in the past described as unfair.

On Friday, Stoltenberg did not make clear whether the idea allowing nations to use common funds for operations will make it into the final 2030 plan. He did, however, say common funding was a force multiplier and that he expected members to recognize the importance of spending together.

Beyond updating strategies and plans, Mondays summit also is expected to serve as a chance for NATO to showcase unity among members in a way that was challenged during former President Donald Trumps tenure.

In this video screenshot, Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg previews next week's NATO summit during a press conference in Brussels, June 11, 2021. (NATO)

Traditionally, NATO summits have been bland, well-rehearsed affairs, with few surprises and disputes kept behind closed doors. That changed with Trump, who in his first NATO summit in 2017, publicly blasted allies for insufficient defense spending and questioned the relevance of a security pact that he regarded as a drain on American resources.

Bidens inaugural visit to NATO headquarters as president is anticipated to be bring a major shift in tone from Trump, whose appearances in Brussels kept many allies on edge.

Biden is a strong supporter of NATO, the trans-Atlantic bond, and all allies welcome this very clear message, Stoltenberg said. We will demonstrate that commitment to our alliance, not only in words but also in deeds.

Meanwhile, Stoltenberg said the Trump era demonstrated NATOs resilience and that alliance unity goes beyond individual political leaders.

We have weathered different political winds  This alliance has proven extremely robust, he said.

vandiver.john@stripes.com

Twitter: @john_vandiver
President Joe Biden listens as first lady Jill Biden speaks to American service members at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, England, on June 9, 2021. (Patrick Semansky/AP)

PLYMOUTH, England  President Joe Biden is going to be hosting German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the White House next month.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced Friday that Merkel, who is leaving office later this year, will visit Washington on July 15.

Psaki, in a statement, said the meeting will affirm ties between the two nations and the leaders will discuss the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and international security.

Merkel will be the first European leader to visit the White House.

She and Biden were set to meet later Friday at the Group of Seven summit, a gathering of some of the worlds wealthiest nations, taking place in England.
Infantrymen fire anti-tank shoulder mounted missle launchers at a live fire range in Grafenwoehr Training Area, Germany, on Dec. 9, 2013. The U.S. Defense Department announced on Friday, June 11, 2021, that Ukraine was awarded a new $150 million security aid package. (Caleb Barrieau/U.S. Army)

WASHINGTON  The Defense Department on Friday announced a new $150 million security aid package for Ukraine to support the countrys border security and territorial integrity to help thwart Russian expansionism.

The Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative package includes counter-artillery radars, counter-unmanned aerial systems, secure communications gear, electronic warfare capabilities, military medical evacuation equipment and training and equipment to improve the operational safety and capacity of Ukrainian Air Force bases, the Pentagon said in a statement.

It complements a $125 million package announced in March that included two Mark IV patrol boats, tactical gear, radars and other equipment to improve command and control capabilities, medical treatment and combat evacuation.

The $150 million package was awarded after the Pentagon and State Department certified Ukraine had made sufficient progress on defense reforms this year, as required by the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, which sets spending priorities for the Defense Department, according to the statement.

The department continues to encourage Ukraine to enact reforms that are in line with NATO principles and standards to advance its Euro-Atlantic aspirations, chief Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters on Friday.

Since 2014, the U.S. has given Ukraine more than $2.5 billion in security assistance, according to the statement.

[The U.S.] will continue to strengthen our strategic defense partnership, including through the provision of defensive lethal assistance, the Pentagon said. The United States will also continue to assist Ukraine with the implementation of these reforms to advance its Euro-Atlantic aspirations in support of a secure, prosperous, democratic and free Ukraine.

doornbos.caitlin@stripes.com

Twitter: @CaitlinDoornbos
A press conference is held for the 2021 World Conference on Display Industry in Hefei, capital of East Chinas Anhui province,on June 10, 2021.

The 2021 World Conference on Display Industry is slated to be held from June 17 to 18 in Hefei, capital of East Chinas Anhui province.



The event will be co-hosted by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the provincial government of Anhui.

The conference, in its third year, will continue strengthening international exchanges and cooperation in the industry, promoting technological competition, making the industrys progress widely known and pooling resources of the sector, the organizers said at a press briefing on Thursday.

The two-day event will include a main forum, six theme forums and some roadshows. It will also feature an exhibition on latest display technology and products.

Many experts and representatives of leading businesses, including Corning, Siemens and Samsung, from foreign countries such as Japan, South Korea, the United States and Germany will attend the conference.




A sign informing customers they must wear a mask at the entrance to a NatWest Group bank branch in the City of London on June 7, 2021. (Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg)

U.K. infections of COVID-19 continued to rise, posing a dilemma for Prime Minister Boris Johnson ahead of a crunch decision Monday on whether to proceed with the final stage of reopening the economy later this month.

Data released Friday by the Office for National Statistics showed an estimated 1 in 560 people in England had the virus in the week to June 4, up from 1 in 640 a week earlier and 1 in 1,340 in the week through May 8.

The monthlong rising trend has been fueled by the faster-spreading delta variant of the virus first identified in India, which now accounts for more than 90% of infections in the U.K. The number of confirmed cases of the strain tripled in a week to 42,323, Public Health England said Friday.

The growing numbers have led ministers to discuss options including delays ranging from nine days to a month for the planned reopening on June 21, and allowing some relaxations to go ahead and others not.

Lets not squander those hard-fought gains in the fight against the virus, Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi told BBC radio on Friday. The virus hasnt gone away, it will attempt to survive by mutating.

The ONS data also showed rises in the caseload in Scotland and Northern Ireland, with a decline in Wales.

While Zahawi said the government would continue to assess the data over the weekend, his remarks suggest a delay to the planned easing is likely. That will put Johnson in direct conflict with prominent members of his Conservative Party, for whom the June 21 Freedom Day has become totemic.

The prime minister will be kept up to date in terms of the latest scientific evidence and data and well be looking at the figures closely over the weekend and on Monday, Johnsons spokesman, Jamie Davies, told reporters.

As well as announcing a decision on the planned easing, the government on Monday will set out the conclusions to a number of reviews, including on social distancing, Davies said. The roadmap also promises the results of reviews on large events and COVID-status certification.

With Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak among those prepared to accept a delay, a key hurdle has been removed for the premier if he decides the data now warrant one. In March, Sunak extended key economic support for workers and businesses through to the end of September to allow for delays to the governments roadmap for unlocking the economy.

The government had been optimistic that one of the worlds most advanced vaccination programs would allow the U.K. to drop social-distancing measures altogether on June 21, including the requirement for pubs and restaurants to only provide table service, limits on theater, concert and sporting audiences, and restrictions on the number of attendees at weddings. Under the plans, nightclubs would be allowed to reopen for the first time in 15 months.

Now the tone is shifting. Ministers are shuffling options including continued wearing of masks in enclosed indoor spaces, ongoing social-distancing rules, and limits on numbers gathering indoors or outdoors, according to people familiar with the matter.

It was always the case that the dates in the four-step plan for reopening the economy were the earliest possible days when relaxations could take place. But after the first three steps were able to go ahead on schedule, the new variant has put the final stage at risk.

Its really important that we try and open up our economy again, because the economic damage is immense, Former Prime Minister Tony Blair told Bloomberg TV on Friday. He suggested the relaxation of rules should go ahead  at least for those that are vaccinated.

If youre balancing restrictions with risk management, it therefore in my view makes perfect sense to give those people who are vaccinated greater freedom, he said. Greater freedom to travel, greater freedom from restriction.

There was some positive news for the government: Zahawi said the link has been broken between coronavirus cases, and hospitalizations and deaths. He said cases went up by 63% last week, with hospitalizations rising 7% and deaths up by 1.9%.

These have been hard-won battles against the virus, he said.

Bloombergs Francine Lacqua contributed to this report.
An Iranian national flag flies above the new Phase 3 facility at the Persian Gulf Star Co. (PGSPC) gas condensate refinery in Bandar Abbas, Iran, on Jan. 9. 2019. (Ali Mohammadi/Bloomberg)

World powers and Iran will try reviving their landmark nuclear accord one last time before voters in the Islamic Republic head to the polls next week to elect a new president who is likely to be less willing to make concessions to the West.

Diplomats have been filtering in to Vienna for a sixth and possibly final round of negotiations starting Saturday. At stake is the 2015 agreement that capped Irans nuclear activities in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. Then-President Donald Trump jettisoned the accord three years ago and unilaterally reimposed punishing penalties, prompting Iran to dramatically increase its production of nuclear fuel.

The negotiations are being closely watched by oil markets as a deal would remove U.S. sanctions on Iranian exports. Agreement in Vienna could also help calm the Middle East, after the standoff between Tehran and Trumps Washington fueled regional conflicts and coincided with a spate of unclaimed attacks on shipping.

Plenary talks between China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia and the U.K. are expected to convene on Saturday. Enrique Mora, the European Unions deputy foreign policy chief whos coordinating sessions, is charged with shuttling messages and instructions between delegates and Washington envoy Robert Malley as long as the U.S. formally remains outside of the accord.

European diplomats have been warning for weeks that resurrecting the deal could become more complicated if an agreement isnt struck before Irans presidential election on June 18.

Asked if one week is enough time to reach a deal, assuming theres a will on both sides to do so, State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters Thursday that big issues continue to divide the sides.

We are moving at a pace that is consistent with our desire to see Irans nuclear program once again restricted and to see Iran, once again, subject to a permanent and verifiable ban on ever obtaining a nuclear weapon, he said.

Previous deadlines set for mid-May and the start of June were missed after sides remained deadlocked over the scope and timing of sanctions relief, as well as the possibility of follow-on talks about regional security.

An Iranian government spokesman said this week that the countrys approach toward restoring the deal wont change after President Hassan Rouhani, who championed the accord, leaves office in August. But hes widely expected to be succeeded by conservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi, whos generally seen as hostile to engagement with the U.S.

Mora told delegates after adjourning the last round of negotiations that both the U.S. and Iran needed to make hard decisions that could ruffle domestic political constituencies.

Members on both sides of the aisle in Congress remain adamantly opposed to the accord, making it harder for the Biden administration to lift non-nuclear-related sanctions  as demanded by Iranian lawmakers  before Tehran rolls back the advances in its enrichment program.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday that Irans nuclear program is galloping forward in the absence of an agreement. Iran, home to the worlds No. 2 natural gas and No. 4 oil reserves, began enriching uranium close to the levels needed for nuclear weapons in April and its stockpile of fuel has been growing at an alarming rate.

Its becoming increasingly difficult, said International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi this week, whose inspectors will face greater restrictions on access to Iranian nuclear sites once a temporary monitoring pact expires on June 24.
California has appealed a judge's ruling that the state's ban on assault weapons is unconstitutional. (Timothy A. Clary, AFP, Getty Images/TNS)

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Tribune News Service)  California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Thursday filed an appeal to a federal court decision that overturned the states ban on assault weapons, arguing that the law is needed to protect the safety of Californians.

The appeal seeks to reverse Fridays decision by U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez, who said the states three-decade ban on assault weapons is an unconstitutional infringement on the rights of California gun owners that has had no effect on curtailing mass shootings.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom joined Bonta in making the announcement at Zuckerman San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, a leading facility for treating gunshot victims.

Californias assault weapons ban has saved lives, and we refuse to let these weapons of war back onto our streets, said Newsom, who was elected on a platform that included expanding gun control laws. This is a fight California will never back down from, period.

The judge issued a permanent injunction against the enforcement of key provisions of the law but stayed the order for 30 days to allow the state to appeal.

Bonta said his filing on Thursday with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco asks for the stay to be extended until the case is decided.

The ban on assault weapons will not put an end to all gun violence, but it is one important tool the state has to protect the safety of Californians while also respecting the rights of law-abiding residents who choose to possess firearms, Bonta said Thursday.

He was especially critical of Benitezs decision for comparing the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle to a Swiss Army knife, with the judge calling it good for both home and battle.

Equating firearms that have been used in many of the deadliest mass shootings in this country with Swiss Army knives has no basis in law or fact, Bonta said.

California was the first state in the nation to ban assault weapons when it acted more than three decades ago in the wake of a shooting at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton that killed five children and wounded 29 others.

The original law banning the manufacture and sale of some 60 models of assault weapons was signed five months after the Stockton shooting by then-Gov. George Deukmejian, a Republican.

Lawmakers expanded the law several times over the following years to add a features-based definition of assault weapons to stop gun manufacturers from producing functionally identical firearms to the ones that are banned by model.

This ban was enacted after a shooting that took the lives of five schoolchildren and injured countless more, and my administration will do whatever it takes to continue protecting Californians and leading the nation in gun safety laws, said Newsom, who as lieutenant governor authored Proposition 63, a 2016 initiative approved by voters to toughen state law with measures including a ban on the possession of large-capacity ammunition magazines.

The case has implications for gun laws beyond California. Six other states and the District of Columbia followed California in adopting their own assault weapons bans, and Congress enacted a ban in 1994, although it expired 10 years later.

Benitezs ruling was in response to a lawsuit filed in 2019 by three San Diego gun owners and advocacy groups including the Firearms Policy Coalition, California Gun Rights Foundation and Second Amendment Foundation.

The judge, who has ruled against other California gun laws, said the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires protection of the rights of people to bear arms. The Second Amendment, he wrote, elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.

Benitez also disputed the argument of state officials that the assault weapons ban has reduced gun violence. He said the number of mass shootings is about the same as it was before the ban.

The assault weapon ban has had no effect, Benitez wrote in his 94-page ruling. Californias experiment is a failure.

But state officials said there is evidence that the law has prevented gun deaths.

On Thursday, Bonta cited a study by the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, which found that, for the last 12 years, the use of an assault weapon in a mass shooting has led to six times as many people shot per incident than when there was no assault weapon.

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Vegetation in Paradise Valley, Petersburg Ranger District, Tongass National Forest, Alaska, in August 2011. (Karen Dillman/USDA Forest Service)

WASHINGTON  The Biden administration said Friday that it would repeal or replace a rule allowing roads and other types of development in more than half of Alaskas Tongass National Forest, reviving 20-year-old protections President Donald Trump had stripped three months before leaving office.

The move was outlined in the administrations new regulatory agenda. The notice from the White House said the change was consistent with President Joe Bidens Jan. 27 executive order Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis. The Agriculture Department expects to publish the proposed rule in August, the notice said.

In an email, USDA communications director Matt Herrick said the department recognizes the Trump Administrations decision on the Alaska roadless rule was controversial and did not align with the overwhelming majority of public opinion across the country and among Alaskans.

The majority of comments recognized the important role of the Tongass National Forest and roadless areas protections to tourism, fishing, recreation, indigenous cultures and the uniqueness of the temperate rainforest, he said. We recognize the vital role the Forest and its inventoried roadless areas play in communities, and in the economy and culture of Southeast Alaska, as well as for climate resilience.

Coming shortly after officials suspended drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the step highlights how the state has become a climate and conservation battleground since Biden became president. With its vast natural resources and focus on extracting commodities such as oil, timber and metals, Alaska often finds itself at odds with Washington when Democrats control the White House.

Republicans pushed to open up remote and largely pristine areas in Alaska to drilling, mining and logging while Trump was in office, from its southeast edge to the western Arctic and the Bering Sea. Biden and his deputies have worked to freeze or unravel many of these policies during the past four and a half months. In April, it took the unusual step of postponing the effective date of public lands orders allowing mining on 11 million acres in Alaska for two years.

The two political parties have fought over the Tongasss fate for two decades. Just before leaving office in 2001, President Bill Clinton finalized the roadless rule, which barred road construction in 58.5 million acres of national forest. President George W. Bush held a handful of timber sales in the Tongass before a federal judge reinstated the Clinton rule.

Sonny Perdue, Trumps agriculture secretary, sought to forge a compromise that would have protected most of the Tongasss 9.3 million acres. But he was overruled by Trump, who decided to exempt the entire area after meeting privately with Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, R, aboard Air Force One during a stopover at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson.

Environmentalists and many in Alaskas recreation industry have argued that roadless protections are essential to protect the Tongass, which ranks as one of the worlds largest intact temperate rainforests. While parts of the forest were heavily logged in the 1960s and 70s, its trees  many of which are hundreds of years old  absorb at least 8% of all the carbon stored in the entire Lower 48s forests combined.

Trout Unlimited President Chris Wood, whose conservation group represents anglers across the country, said in a phone interview that a quarter of the salmon and steelhead that swim along the Pacific Coast spend time in the Tongasss rivers and streams. Its a fish factory, he said.

The region also has a thriving tourism industry. Cruise ship traffic, which is not dependent on roads and ranks as a major economic driver in southeast Alaska, dried up last summer and has yet to come back. But visitors are again flocking there in smaller groups, providing business for local operators.

Beautiful wild places are Alaskas competitive advantage in the adventure tourism market, Alaska Seaplane Adventures manager Dan Kirkwood, who supports the roadless rule, said in a phone interview.

But Alaskas elected leaders have argued that the limits on roadbuilding impede not only logging but other industrial activities, including mining, that would bolster a region thats been battered by the pandemic.

In a petition to the Agriculture Department during the Trump administration, the state wrote that the roadless rule and subsequent 2016 management plan each independently restrict road construction and timber harvest to such a degree as to have devastating socioeconomic effects on Alaskans.

While the Forest Service temporarily halted roadbuilding activities in the Tongass by issuing a memo in February subjecting them to a special review, it will still take months for the new proposal to be finalized. And Alaskas exemption from the roadless rule is now in litigation, so the courts could also intervene in the case.

Southeast Alaska Conservation Council Executive Director Meredith Trainor said that she hopes the administration moves quickly to cement the change.

The Trump-era decision to exempt the Tongass National Forest from the roadless rule is one of the very worst pieces of forest policy weve seen in decades, and the sooner the Biden administration gets rid of the exemption and restores the national roadless rule, the better, she said.

Separately on Friday, the White House indicated that it would take steps to reverse the Trump administrations changes to how the federal government factors climate change and other environment impacts into its decision-making process. The Trump administration changed how agencies analyzed a plans carbon emissions, and did a sweeping overhaul of the National Environmental Policy Act that curtailed public input and narrowed how officials calculated a projects environmental impact.

The White House Council on Environmental Quality said it will issue a notice in September instructing agencies on how to properly assess the greenhouse gas emissions and climate change effects of their proposed actions. The agency will also reverse the Trump administrations broader changes to law governing federal environmental reviews, with a short-term change next month and a formal rule later.

Environmentalists, who are challenging the Trump-era changes in court, urged the administration to go further.

While we welcome the fact that the Biden administration is taking steps to restore NEPA, we remain convinced that the Trump rule needs to be scrapped in its entirety, and as soon as possible, said Kym Hunter, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. We are hopeful that the courts will soon put Trumps illegal rule to bed once and for all.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III speaks with Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie at the Pentagon in Washington on June 1, 2021. Moultrie testified in a House hearing on Capitol Hill on Friday, June 11, that DOD intelligence agencies are overhauling efforts to combat foreign influence and disinformation campaigns. (Jackie Sanders/U.S. Air Force)

WASHINGTON  The Defense Departments intelligence agencies are overhauling efforts to combat foreign influence and disinformation campaigns in response to a request from combatant commanders for help in fighting information attacks from Russia and China, a Pentagon official told House lawmakers Friday.

We need to revamp the training that we have today to ensure that people are properly focused on this issue, said Ronald Moultrie, the Defense Departments undersecretary for intelligence and security.

Moultrie also said the department is prioritizing getting information out to combatant commanders by using open source intelligence and declassifying information that can be unsealed.

But, were also trying to protect those sensitive sources and methods. So, malign influence and activity in the gray zone were really focused on it and within the enterprise  the Defense Intelligence Enterprise  were revamping ourselves to be able to get after this problem, Moultrie said during a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee subpanel on intelligence strategies.

The Defense Intelligence Enterprise are organizations and infrastructure related to intelligence, counterintelligence and security at the Pentagon, the Joint Staff, the combatant commands and other parts of the Defense Department that deal with national intelligence and security.

In April, POLITICO uncovered a memo sent from nine of the eleven combatant commanders, pleading for spy agencies to find ways to declassify and release more information about bad behavior from Russia and China.

We request this help to better enable the U.S., and by extension its allies and partners, to win without fighting, to fight now in so-called gray zones, and to supply ammunition in the ongoing war of narratives," the commanders wrote in January to then-acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, according to POLITICO.

Russia and China have been using gray zone tactics, or nonmilitary actions, such as election meddling to compete against the United States.

In April, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced the establishment of a new center tasked with tracking overseas efforts to wage disinformation and influence campaigns in the United States.

ODNI said the center will be focused on coordinating and integrating intelligence pertaining to malign influence, drawing together relevant and diverse expertise to better understand and monitor the challenge, according to media reports when the center was announced.

Intelligence officials have increasingly raised alarm over the threat of foreign efforts to interfere in the U.S. elections, especially after Russia in 2016 waged a campaign to discredit Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Moscow also targeted the U.S. midterm elections in 2018 and the 2020 presidential election, according to assessments from the National Intelligence Council.

The discussion in the House on Friday came after Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., chairman of the subcommittee on intelligence and special operations, raised the issues described in the POLITICO report. He asked Moultrie to explain how his office is working across the defense intelligence community to ensure coordination to combat the information war against China and Russia.

Gen. Paul Nakasone, director of the National Security Agency, said a lot of the work at the agency is written for release, however thats not the end all.

The end all is, as we take a look at that, working with a specific combatant commander, looking at the private sector, looking at the tools and the information available. How do we do this in the quickest manner possible, Nakasone said.

Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the agency is ensuring analysts write reports with the mindset that this product will be released to the max level of audience or consumer.

While its a good start, Berrier said those who are collecting sources and developing information reports are writing at the lowest classification level possible when they can.

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U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks about voting rights at the Justice Department in Washington, on Friday, June 11, 2021. (Tom Brenner, The New York Times/Pool)

WASHINGTON  Attorney General Merrick Garland pledged Friday to double the size of the Justice Departments voting rights enforcement staff to combat efforts to restrict ballot access and prosecute those who threaten or harm election workers.

In an expansive speech that invoked the nations long and, at times, faltering progress toward ensuring every Americans right to vote, Garland likened the fight against efforts to curtail ballot access to past campaigns enshrining voting rights for Black Americans in the Constitution and the seminal Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Garland said the additional trial attorneys, which he plans to hire over the coming 30 days, will scrutinize new laws and existing practices across the nation for potential discrimination against Americans of color, including in new measures GOP state lawmakers are pushing. They will enforce provisions of the Voting Rights Act by challenging such laws or practices in court  and prosecute anyone found to intimidate or threaten violence against election officials.

The expanded unit will also monitor the growing number of post-election ballot reviews being called for around the country by supporters of former president Donald Trump in search of signs of violations of federal laws, Garland said, and will watch over upcoming redistricting efforts to call out discriminatory practices.

To meet the challenge of the current moment, we must rededicate the resources of the Department of Justice to a critical part of its original mission: Enforcing federal law to protect the franchise of all eligible voters, Garland said in his address to department employees.

He added: Where we see violations, we will not hesitate to act.

His remarks come as the Biden administration faces growing pressure from civil rights groups and state Democrats to more forcefully challenge Republican-backed voting restrictions and attempts by Trump supporters to revisit the results of the 2020 election.

Republicans have justified their push for new voting laws by citing a need to make elections more secure, despite the fact that there is no evidence that widespread fraud marred last years election.

Garlands announcement represents one of the most sweeping commitments to voting rights in recent U.S. history - one made necessary, he said, by the raft of laws being considered in dozens of state legislatures.

The plan is also needed, he said, because of the landmark 2013 Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder, which struck down key provisions of the Voting Rights Act that required some jurisdictions to seek Justice Department approval before changing voting practices and laws.

Although Congress is considering a new measure, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would replace the pre-clearance provisions struck down in Shelby, we will not wait for that legislation to act, he said.

Garland said the Justice Department will do what it did before the 1965 legislation passed: It will scrutinize laws and practices county by county and state by state to ensure all voters have equal access to the franchise.

One focus of the departments scrutiny, he added, will be to examine why Black voters in some U.S. cities often stand in longer lines than their White counterparts.

He quoted the late civil rights icon and Georgia congressman John Lewis, after whom the pending voting legislation is named: Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part.

He pledged to dedicate a level of fire power to voting rights not seen in decades. In addition to the expanded team of trial attorneys - which will grow from about 12 to two dozen  the departments national security and criminal divisions, 93 U.S. attorneys as well as the FBI will be part of the effort to investigate and promptly prosecute any violations of federal law, he said.

Garland also took aim at the efforts to review ballots cast in the 2020 election, such as the one underway in Arizonas Maricopa County, saying they are premised on false claims about fraud that have been debunked by the current and previous administrations.

Some jurisdictions, based on disinformation, have utilized abnormal post-election audit methodologies that may put the integrity of the voting process at risk and undermine public confidence in our democracy, he said.

The Arizona audit was rebuked Friday by Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who was ousted by House Republicans from her leadership position after she criticized Trumps attacks on the 2020 election.

What is happening in Maricopa County is not an audit, she wrote in a tweet. It is an effort to subvert democracy.

The Justice Department was already closely monitoring the Arizona audit, with a top official in the civil rights division, Pamela S. Karlan, writing to the state Senate president in a letter last month that the recount could be in violation of federal law by leaving ballots at risk of damage or loss. She also raised questions about the auditors stated plans to identify voter registrations that did not make sense and interview voters via phone and physical canvassing, which raised the risk of voter intimidation.

Arizona Republicans have said they have deferred the plan to contact voters.

President Joe Biden has faced growing pressure from within his party to fight back harder against the ballot reviews and the new voting restrictions imposed by Republican-led state legislatures.

Many Democrats see federal legislation as the most effective response to the voting fights playing out in multiple states. But a House-passed bill that would directly challenge some GOP efforts by establishing national standards for early voting and vote-by-mail, among other provisions, lacks the support in the Senate to succeed.

White House and Justice Department officials, keenly aware of the near-impossible hurdles they face on Capitol Hill, see the executive branch as perhaps their primary tool for taking on the Republican voting laws.

The Friday speech follows Bidens decision that Vice President Kamala Harris will lead the administrations efforts to protect voting rights.

The more aggressive posture by the administration comes amid an increasingly volatile atmosphere for election workers. In Michigan last year, a crowd of protesters assembled on the lawn of Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, chanting into megaphones as she and her 4-year-old son were decorating their home for Christmas. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his wife have received death threats. And the attacks on local election administrators have continued this year as the drumbeat for post-election reviews has grown.

In his address, Garland said protecting election workers is a key piece of the new effort. We have not been blind to the dramatic increase in menacing and violent threats against all manner of state and local election workers, ranging from the highest administrators to volunteer poll workers, he said. Such threats undermine our electoral process and violate a myriad of federal laws.

While Republicans were largely silent about Garlands announcement, civil rights groups hailed it - even as they demanded more in the form of voting legislation from Congress.

The uphill battle to protect our most sacred and fundamental right, the right to vote, is far from over, NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement. Todays announcement from the Attorney General speaks to the level of urgency that is needed to protect our democracy and ensure that our voices are heard. It is a race against time, and against those working to suppress our votes.

Biden signed an executive order earlier this year expanding ballot access by tasking federal agencies with promoting greater voter participation and establishing a Native American voting rights steering group. Still, his efforts have left many in the party calling for more, mainly due to Republican successes passing restrictive new voting laws in Georgia, Florida and other states.

Some Democrats said the administrations intense and increasingly drawn-out focus on infrastructure has come at the expense of a more aggressive push on voting rights. White House officials strongly rejected this characterization, asserting that they are tackling multiple issues at once.

- - -

The Washington Posts Matt Zapotosky and David Nakamura contributed to this report.
Family and friends attend funeral services for Phoenix Police Officer Ginarro New, a Marine veteran, at Dream City Church, Thursday, June 10, 2021 in Phoenix. (Nick Oza/The Arizona Republic via AP)

PHOENIX  The wife of fallen Phoenix police Officer Ginarro New said she understood the risk of having a husband in law enforcement, but despite her grief, she would not change anything.

"It feels unfair that we didn't get to do as many things as we wanted to do, so many milestones we never got to get to," Kristen New told dozens of mourners. "But I would relive the time I had with him a thousand times over because he was my soulmate."

Family, friends and fellow officers filled Dream City Church in Phoenix on Thursday to remember New, who died May 31 when his patrol car collided with another vehicle whose driver authorities say ran a red light. The other driver, a 30-year-old man, also died.

New, 27, joined the department in July 2019, just a few months before he got married. At his graduation, Police Chief Jeri Williams recalled being "struck by the poise and confidence he possessed as a brand new officer."

"By all accounts, he was on his way to a very successful career," Williams said, choking up at times.

Officer Ginarro New. (Phoenix Police Department via AP)

Officers in his precinct, his commanding officer and a former field training officer spoke of his compassion, integrity and work ethic. He found police work to be the best fit after a career path that included stints as a member of the U.S. Marine Corps, a school nurse and an EMT.

"His way of living his life was giving his life in service to others," said Darren Viner, the commander of his precinct.

Out of uniform, "Gino" loved spending time with family and being the "fun uncle" to his nieces and nephews. He was also was a pop culture nerd who loved "Star Wars" and comic books.

"Today is the easy part," Kristen New said. "The hardest part is living the rest of our lives with this loss."

After the service, New received full police honors in the church courtyard.

Besides his wife, he is survived by his mother, brother and grandmother.
The Pentagon is getting back $2 billion of military construction funds that were diverted in recent years by former President Donald Trump to fund his signature barrier wall efforts on the U.S. southern border, President Joe Bidens administration announced Friday.

That money will be returned to its initial purpose  funding more than 60 military construction projects around the world approved by Congress, according to a statement from the Office of Management and Budget. The Pentagon, under Trump, diverted $3.6 billion in 2019 that had been earmarked to fund 127 military construction projects under a seldom-used authorization for the Pentagon to reroute its Congress-appropriated funds.

The Biden Administration is committed to properly equipping American military personnel and caring for their families, the OMB statement read. No more money will be diverted for the purposes of building a border wall, and [the Defense Department] has started canceling all border barrier projects using the diverted funds.

The $3.6 billion  a portion of the $10 billion that the Pentagon ultimately contributed to border wall coffers  was meant to build about 175 miles of fencing in Texas, Arizona and California, Pentagon officials said at the time. Then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper and other top defense officials said they were confident Congress would reinvest new money into the construction projects that lost funding in the shift. However, Congress never re-appropriated funding to those projects, which spanned 23 states, 3 U.S. territories and bases in 20 other countries and included a host of projects from upgraded training ranges and facilities to new barracks and schools.

When Biden canceled nearly all border wall construction in an order issued on his first day in office, the Pentagon had disbursed about $5.3 billion of the $10 billion it had authorized for border wall construction, according to a report last month by the Congressional Research Service. The Pentagon in April announced it would no longer provide funding for border wall operations.

The $2.2 billion returning to military construction will pay for 66 of the projects deferred under the Trump administration. The Pentagon said it chose which of the 127 deferred projects would be re-funded based on operational and component priorities. A spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for specifics about the projects.

OMB listed five of the projects as top priorities:

 $10 million to add two new anti-ballistic missile ground-based interceptors at Fort Greely in Alaska.  More than $25 million to build a 2nd Radio Battalion Complex at the Marine Corps Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.  $79 million to build a new Spangdahlem Elementary School in Germany, for 600 U.S. military children.  More than $25 million for a fire/crash rescue station at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida.  More than $9 million for an upgraded small arms training range in Indiana for Air National Guard units.

Trumps controversial move to divert the funding was met with castigation from Democratic lawmakers, some of whom described the reprogramming effort as a theft of needed military funds.

Biden has long been critical of Trumps border wall efforts and immediately moved to end construction of as much as he legally could after his inauguration Jan. 20.

America has the right to secure its borders, Biden said at the time. However, building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution. It is a waste of money that diverts attention from genuine threats to our homeland security.

During Trumps time in office, about 450 miles of border wall were built, although the vast majority covered upgrades in areas where border barrier existed, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

OMB said Friday that the Trump administration built 52 miles of wall where no border barrier existed. The office estimated some sections of the wall cost about $46 million per mile.

The effort diverted critical resources away from military training facilities and schools, and caused serious risks to life, safety, and the environment, according to the Biden OMB statement Friday. It also took attention away from genuine security challenges, like drug smuggling and human trafficking.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has continued the deployments of active-duty and National Guard troops authorized by Trump in 2018 to the southern border to support U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. About 3,600 troops are serving on a federal mission to support border operations, according to the Pentagon. Several hundred additional National Guard troops are serving missions authorized by state governors at the border.

The federal deployment is authorized through Oct. 1. The Homeland Security Department has asked for troops to continue the federal mission into fiscal year 2022 amid high levels of apprehensions along the southwest border. The Pentagon has yet to reveal if it will continue the deployments.

In May, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported more than 180,000 apprehensions of migrants at the border, the largest monthly total in at least two decades. The agency reported apprehending about 178,000 migrants in April.

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Twitter: @CDicksteinDC
The traveling Vietnam Wall, a slightly smaller version of the Washington memorial, offers families an opportunity to honor loved ones even when they cannot travel to the capital. (Francis S. Trachta/U.S. Army )

NEW BERN, N.C. (Tribune News Service)  After a year of pandemic delay, the traveling Vietnam Walls stop in April in New Bern, N.C., brought emotional comfort for vets and families of the fallen.

It also attracted more than 9,000 visitors.

The Wall That Heals continues to count benefits to the area.

More than $18,000 in leftover fundraising money has been distributed to 18 regional veterans groups and supporting organizations.

Well-known projects such as Flag Day and Wreaths Across America benefit, along with efforts such as American Legion Post 64 in Pollocksville staying afloat amid rebuilding efforts following 2018s Hurricane Florence.

Assistance after the visit was the plan from the outset, said George Halyak, head of the sponsoring New Bern American Legion Post 539 and the Knights of Columbus.

The upfront cost to get the wall was $10,000 payable to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund in Washington. D.C.

We were able to raise just over $50,000 from donations from companies and individuals here in New Bern, he said.

Expenses such as insurance, brochures, volunteer supplies, advertising and other miscellaneous costs came to $20,000, leaving $20,000 for veterans projects.

Many of these groups were hurting because of Covid and the inability to have fundraisers with the lockdown imposed by the governor, Halyak. Its highly unlikely that the Wall will be back to New Bern in our lifetime.

The money allows the Elks Veterans Committee to maintain projects such as its annual Salute to the Flag on Saturday at Union Point Park.

State Rep. Steve Tyson is the speaker and the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing Band performs at the 10:30 a.m. public ceremony.

John Serumgard, Flag Day chair noted, The Elks Veterans Committee is also very involved in seeking ways we can help veterans and active-duty personnel. We try to do a lot for the residents at the Kinston Veterans Home, but also seek ways to help those currently serving.

Elks support four military relief organizations which aid soldiers, sailors and air personnel who have emergency situations.

We have supported just about every local event honoring the veterans, from the Stand Downs, to the Women in the Military luncheons, to the Purple Heart dinners, to Wreaths Across America, and the veterans rooms at the RCS shelter, he said.

The money helps to offset pandemic fundraising losses such as BBQ Rib sales at the Piggly Wiggly and solicitations at Food Lion, Walmart and other stores.

Since the COVID pandemic, we have been unable to conduct those fund-raising solicitations, which has limited our ability to reach out to our beneficiaries, Serumgard said. The $1,000 contribution from the Wall That Heals will go a long way to replacing those funds. And we deeply appreciate all the hard work that George Halyak and his committees undertook to bring the Wall to New Bern, and to raise a significant fund of money now being used to support the diverse veterans organizations in our community.

The Veteran Enforcers Motorcycle Association hosts Wreaths Across America at the New Bern National Cemetery each December.

We were very fortunate to receive $1,000 from the Wall Committee, said President Kevin Yates. We will utilize this donation to help us prepare for the upcoming Wreaths Across America event later this year. Every wreath that is placed at the cemetery has to be sponsored, due to the size and age of the New Bern National Cemetery. Each year is an incredible challenge to place a wreath on every headstone. There are over 1,000 Unknowns buried in the cemetery and each year the gap between those buried there and those placing wreaths grows.

Even during the pandemic, the Wreaths Across America event still drew 500 volunteers to place more than 5,000 wreaths in the cemetery.

American Legion Post 64 in Pollocksville is juggling rebuilding from Hurricane Florence and maintaining veterans support.

The donation received gives us a bit more breathing room as we seek to assist others amid our own much needed building repairs, said Commander James W. Gray Sr. Although our post building continues to require a great deal of repair damaged by hurricane Florence, we felt it important to not lose sight of providing some level of support to veterans and their families also in need.

For example, in May, the post repaired and replaced a kitchen sub-floor, installed new ceramic tile and base kitchen cabinets in the 1958 home of a wheelchair-using 85-year-old widow to a deceased Vietnam veteran.

The arrival of the $800 donation was a pleasant surprise, given it arrived in the midst of our habitat for humanity project within the widows home, Gray said. The much-needed kitchen project repair was identified during our quest to recognize Vietnam veterans and their families.

In another project, the post identified a Pollocksville Vietnam vet, who was recently placed in the N.C. Veterans Home in Fayetteville, requiring much assistance with relocation and filing of disability claims.

There is a great deal of work to be done in our area. The funding received helps us better serve our surrounding communities, Gray added. We are very grateful for the financial support received from the American Legion Post 539, New Bern and the Knights of Columbus committee.

(c)2021 the Sun Journal (New Bern, N.C.)

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GREENSBURG, Pa. (Tribune News Service)  The final farewell is about to be sounded.

Tom Beaver opens the black case slowly. He slides white gloves on his hands. Then he lifts the silver-plated brass instrument. Taking a few steps, he moves toward the shelter.

The sun is shining. Wind is blowing through the nearby trees. Thousands of white crosses stand high in the plush green grass.

Beaver waits patiently outside the May 12 funeral service for Raymond Ladner, of West View, which is about to begin at the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies in Cecil, Washington County, a burial place for veterans and their spouses. Beaver is about to sound taps as part of military honors for Ladner, whose family has gathered for the final good-bye.

The U.S. Navy veteran of the Vietnam War died on May 7 at the age of 72.

I just close my eyes and think of the notes I will be playing, said Beaver, of Bethel Park, after he sounded taps, the 24-note bugle call, at Ladners service. It is definitely emotional.

Beaver, a U.S. Air Force veteran, has sounded taps on 1,231 occasions to date. He uses a Getzen American Heritage Elite Bugle. Taps are sounded after a gun salute and before the folding of the American flag at military honors at a veterans funeral.

Each time I sound taps, it is special, said Beaver. He was standing on a hill at the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies overlooking the white crosses, an American flag flying nearby. Even though I have sounded taps all those times, for this family today, this is the first for them.

To arrange for someone such as Beaver to sound taps, a family goes through Bugles Across America. The organization provides qualified instrumentalists to sound taps at funerals and memorial services.

Taps performed live are sound or sounded. When a prerecorded version is presented, it is played.

Beaver recalled how emotional it can be to see a surviving spouse of a marriage that spanned six or seven decades. He recalled a husband and wife who died within hours of each other. Both were veterans. He sounded taps twice, once for each of them.

I am not sure the younger generation understands the consequences of war, said Beaver. His father, Walter Beaver, landed on Utah Beach during the D-Day Invasion of World War II and earned two Purple Hearts. There isnt as much focus on it today. But I do. And thats why I am here.

Beaver, 71, said his bucket list includes sounding taps at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia and in Normandy, France. He practices daily, usually in South Park alongside his dog, Tucker.

You have to stay in condition to sound taps and be able to sound taps in all weather, he said.

Beaver sounded taps at the 2014 funeral for Wilbert Frisch, his band director at St. Canice High School in the Knoxville/ Carrick section of Pittsburgh. I was honored to, in a small way, thank him for the talents that he developed in me some 50 years prior, Beaver said.

Beaver started playing the trumpet in seventh grade. He was determined to learn how to sound taps for the first time to honor his friend, a World War II veteran named Jack Skerba, who died in July 2013.

He said it makes him feel emotional every time he sounds taps.

I make it a point to read every obituary before a service so I can have a small connection to the deceased that I am about to honor, he said. On a personal note, I carry my fathers combat infantry badge in my uniform pocket that he earned on Utah Beach during the Normandy Invasion and sound taps also in his memory. While he returned, I think of the thousands who did not. I treat every funeral as if it was my first and only one.

Beaver has sounded taps several times a week for years. Sometimes he is called to duty more than once a day.

After Ladners funeral, another procession filed in. The veterans widow approached Beaver and asked if he would sound taps.

He did.

The family always comes first, Beaver said. If they ask me, I will do it. I am honored to sound taps. Taps is a veterans last farewell. The bugle call is reverent.

He keeps several pairs of white ceremonial gloves in his bugle case, so he always has clean ones to protect the silver finish on the horn. He only touches the bugle with gloves on.

After sounding taps that second time on this day, Beaver opened the black case.

He placed the bugle in gingerly. He removed the white gloves. Then he closed the case.

Taking steps, he walked away from the shelter. The sun was still shining. The wind was still blowing through the trees.

Two more white crosses will now be placed high in the plush green grass.

The final farewell has been sounded.

(c)2021 The Tribune-Review (Greensburg, Pa.)

Visit The Tribune-Review (Greensburg, Pa.) at www.triblive.com

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The Eastern Bay of Plenty community is still reeling after the news that one of its biggest employers will be closing down, meaning 160 people will lose their jobs.

Norske Skog announced the closure of the Tasman mill in Kawerau and a sales process for the mills assets on Wednesday.

In a statement on their website the Norwegian-based pulp and paper company states they initiated a strategic review of their role in New Zealand in October 2020, made necessary by the secular decline of the publication paper industry and the impact of Covid-19.

They state that despite exploring a range of alternatives the process has resulted in a decision to close the Tasman mill and proceed with a sale of the mills assets. Read more here.

Toi EDA, an economic development group in the Eastern Bay, says the news is devastating for the families involved and for the wider regional wood processing sector.

Despite the news, Toi EDA says the recent focus on diversifying the regions economy away from reliance on forestry has been validated by the closure announcement.

Toi EDA has offered support to the impacted workforce via the MSD coordinated efforts, and sees great opportunities to reposition the workers due to the surge in economic confidence in the region.

In a statement released on Thursday, Toi EDA says the Eastern BOP is one of the few regions in the country to have rebounded strongly to pre-Covid employment levels and continues to grow based on several catalytic sectors that are receiving significant investments.

With the community-minded Sequal Lumber Mill taking on an extra shift in Kawerau, the booming boat building sector recruiting heavily, record planting in the high value horticulture sector, and Whakatohea Mussels taking on almost 100 new roles, the demand for work ready employees is strong, says Toi EDA general manager Ian Morton.

Three years ago we recognised the need to change our economy to be more diverse and thankfully these opportunities exist today as a result.

The construction of the Kawerau Putauaki Industrial Development, leveraging the clean geothermal energy found in the town, has already begun to attract investment in the town, such as the Waiu Dairy Factory.

Ian says the construction of the new roundabout to service the new industrial complex is well underway and the town is well set up to leverage the heavy industrial engineering expertise located in Kawerau.

He says mill workers wanting to start their own businesses are encouraged to tap into support resources that the EBOP Chamber of Commerce has on offer, with a business advisory role that regularly visits Kawerau.

The local industry community group, Industrial Symbiosis Kawerau, will continue to support those businesses that work alongside the Norske Mill to ensure they are able to identify new opportunities.

Fellow Toi EDA general manager Karl Gradon encourages central government to align wood processing policy that will reduce the incentives for log owners to export logs offshore in their raw form and instead find ways to add value locally.

The distortion in the world lumber market is extreme and, alongside our high energy costs, is causing the closure of our domestic processing capacity.

He says if these distortions continues, then the domestic wood processing sector will continue to be challenged and further closures will be on the horizon.
A Tauranga businesswoman has landed a major role in a nationwide initiative to tackle period poverty in schools.

When former youth lawyer Vicki Scott launched Crimson Organic tampon company from her home in Mount Maunganui in 2018, donating menstrual products was a key part of her business.

An announcement today confirms her products are being utilised by a Government initiative that places period products in every state and state integrated New Zealand school and kura that opts in.

I am absolutely ecstatic to be part of this history-making initiative, Vicki says, following todays announcement by Associate Minister for Education, Minister for Women and fellow Tauranga resident Jan Tinetti.

This is a very exciting and momentous occasion for human rights and therefore womens rights in New Zealand. Its a giant step towards gender equity in schools, and life.

From next week, Crimson Organic tampons will be handed out free of charge in schools as part of the governments Access To Period Products initiative. Her company is one of four preferred suppliers to the government project.

As a lawyer, Vicki regularly saw women who could not afford pads or tampons passing through the district court system.

When I visited these young clients, the boys would ask me to bring them chips and Coke. The girls would ask me for toilet paper, soap, pads and tampons. These girls had no access to period products at home so they frequently stayed away from school, which of course affected their education and job prospects.

Aside from breaking my heart, it was hugely troubling because Ive seen the international research that links school absenteeism with young people entering the justice system.

She say a 2019 survey found as many as 100,000 Kiwi schoolgirls missed up to a week of school every month because they had no access to menstrual products.

Vickis online tampon donations programme has been helping women in need since the inception of Crimson Organic, with the companys website inviting women who can afford tampons to buy some for those who cant.

Consequently, Vicki has delivered thousands of sustainable, organic, environmentally-friendly period products to organisations that work alongside impoverished and vulnerable women, including Auckland City Mission, womens shelters and church organisations.

And now, thanks to this new school initiative, were going to be able to help thousands and thousands more, she says.

Thats a dream come true for me.
A lengthy review is under way to clarify who does what when Whakaari/White Island erupts, just four years after a memorandum was signed to confirm responsibilities.

Twenty-two people died after the crater exploded in December 2019, while tour groups were visiting.

The island's owners, the Buttle family, hold the rights to restrict, or prevent access to the volcanic cone, but Whakaari's distance offshore means it does not come under any city or district council.

Instead, Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta is automatically the territorial authority for Whakaari and 10 other offshore islands.

RNZ revealed last week that Department of Internal Affairs staff have spent months reviewing the minister's health and safety, civil defence and emergency management duties for the island.

Only to tell her: "It is not clear in the legislation how your role as Territorial Authority is intended to work in practice."

The department is now also reviewing a Whakaari Memorandum of Understanding signed with the Bay of Plenty Civil Defence Emergency Management Group in 2017, and expects this will take a year to finish.

In a statement, the department's general manager of policy and operations Martyn Pinckard says the memorandum worked well for the minister after the 2019 eruption but it will now be fine-tuned.

"In particular, a review could better define the high-level expectations that the Civil Defence Emergency Management Group and the minister can reasonably expect of one another; definitions of response and readiness activities and what each party is responsible for."

Photo: RNZ / Dom Thomas.

University of Canterbury disaster risk professor Tom Wilson says clarity is vital in natural hazard risk management.

"It's really important that everybody knows what their roles and responsibilities are for the management of that risk. So ensuring that that's very clear, and that we know who's meant to be doing what, becomes paramount."

National Party leader Judith Collins says Minister Mahuta's response to the Whakaari eruption has been "flawed".

"There seems to be little understanding as to who is actually in charge."

But Mahuta disputes this.

"I have territorial responsibility for Whakaari but in terms of the activities and what happened there, the health and safety elements are handled by other agencies."

WorkSafe has charged 13 parties with breaching health and safety rules leading up to the tragedy, including tourism operators, the island's owners, and two government organisations - GNS Science and the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA).

NEMA pleaded not guilty in the Whakatane District Court last week, but the other accused are yet to enter pleas.

The WorkSafe and coronial investigations are not enough for Judith Collins who still wants a Royal Commission of Inquiry.

"It seems remarkable to me that the government has so far refused to have a Royal Commission set up. We've certainly had them before with Pike River, [and] with the March 15th killings in Christchurch."

The government has said a public inquiry could risk overlapping, duplicating and prejudicing current investigations and reviews.

The Bay of Plenty Civil Defence Emergency Management Group declined to comment on the Whakaari Memorandum of Understanding.

-RNZ/Sam Olley.
From a field of 166 entries, the 28 finalists in the 2021 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults have been announced.

Across six main categories, these books offer the nations young readers a tasty smorgasbord of titles, packed with meaty themes and addictive plot lines.

Taurangas Sherryl Jordan is one of the finalists for her young adult fiction work titled The Kings Nightingale.

She is joined by Tom E. Moffat from Rotorua for his book Youre Joking: Become An Expert Joke-Teller, and Whitiangas Des Hunt and his book Red Edge.

The diversity of ideas in this years entries really stood out, says convenor of judges Alan Dingley.

Its clear that our authors truly credit kids and young people with having the emotional intelligence to deal with complex themes, issues and feelings.

Whether thats celebrating Maori culture or dealing to the injustices of inequality, seeing a reflection of their own small-town community or exploring issues around body image, disability and adversity, no topic is off-limits.

But, says Dingley, big ideas are delivered in a way that also entertains.

Tom E.Moffat.

Dystopian futures, ecological battles and immersive fantasy all take the reader into new worlds, something that has been so important of late, after so many have been trapped in their homes.

And while kids will find no shortage of reading material on the finalist list, Dingley thinks adults will discover plenty of treasures too.

Its a really accessible selection. If a child brings any one of these books home, I guarantee an adult will enjoy reading it also.

>This years Picture Book Award shortlist beautifully combines delicate illustrations that connect to and enhance sometimes delicate themes.

There are laughs, tears, sighs (both contented and wistful) to be had in equal measure.

Des Hunt.

Picture Book Award Finalists

Hare & Ruru: A Quiet Moment, Laura Shallcrass (Beatnik Publishing)

Hound the Detective, Kimberly Andrews (Penguin Random House NZ)

Kowhai and the Giants, Kate Parker (Mary Egan Publishing)

The Hug Blanket, Chris Gurney, illustrated by Lael Chisholm (Scholastic New Zealand)

This Is Where I Stand, Philippa Werry, illustrated by Kieran Rynhart (Scholastic New Zealand)

The books vying for the Wright Family Foundation Esther Glen Junior Fiction Award presented the judges with eclectic plot lines and endearing characters and they struggled to narrow down to a shortlist from the well-crafted titles.

Wright Family Foundation Esther Glen Junior Fiction Award Finalists

Across the Risen Sea, Bren MacDibble (Allen & Unwin)

Charlie Tangaroa and the Creature from the Sea, T K Roxborogh, illustrated by Phoebe Morris (Huia Publishers)

Red Edge, Des Hunt (Scholastic New Zealand)

The Inkberg Enigma, Jonathan King (Gecko Press)

The Tunnel of Dreams, Bernard Beckett (Text Publishing)

The top contenders for the Young Adult Fiction Award speak to the power of young people to profoundly influence the world around them, and dont shy away from topics such as environmental destruction, oppression and injustice.

Young Adult Fiction Award Finalists

Draw Me a Hero, N K Ashworth (Lasavia Publishing)

Fire's Caress, Lani Wendt Young, (OneTree House)

Katipo Joe: Spycraft, Brian Falkner (Scholastic New Zealand)

The King's Nightingale, Sherryl Jordan (Scholastic New Zealand)

The Porangi Boy, Shilo Kino (Huia Publishers)

The judges found the Elsie Locke Award for Non-Fiction a particularly strong category this year, stating to say there is something for everyone is an understatement, this list has everything, for everyone.

Elsie Locke Award for Non-Fiction Finalists

Egg and Spoon: An Illustrated Cookbook, Alexandra Tylee, illustrated by Giselle Clarkson (Gecko Press)

Mophead Tu: The Queen's Poem, Selina Tusitala Marsh (Auckland University Press)

New Zealand Disasters, Maria Gill, illustrated by Marco Ivancic (Scholastic New Zealand)

North and South, Sandra Morris (Walker Books Australia)

You're Joking: Become an Expert Joke-Teller, Tom E. Moffatt, illustrated by Paul Beavis (Write Laugh Books)

The judges faced an outstandingly strong and large pool of entries for the Russell Clark Award for Illustration.

The finalists are characterised by a diversity of styles and media, but the books all have in common an expert use of colour and line to communicate emotion and pace and skilfully add texture to the narrative.

Russell Clark Award for Illustration Finalists

Hare & Ruru: A Quiet Moment, Laura Shallcrass (Beatnik Publishing)

I Am the Universe, Vasanti Unka (Penguin Random House NZ)

Kowhai and the Giants, Kate Parker (Mary Egan Publishing)

Moon & Sun, Malene Laugesen, written by Melinda Szymanik (Upstart Press)

Te Uruuru Whenua o Ngatoroirangi, Laya Mutton-Rogers, written by Chris Winitana (Huia Publishers)

The finalists in the Wright Family Foundation Te Kura Pounamu Award for books written entirely in te reo Maori will appeal to a broad range of abilities. Te reo in its simplest form will lift the language for beginners, while there are also titles with a depth of language to send the imaginations of confident speakers soaring. The judges were pleased to see a marked increase in the number of books written in te reo Maori, rather than translated from English.

Wright Family Foundation Te Kura Pounamu Award Finalists

Aroha Te Whai Ora, Rebekah Lipp, illustrated by Craig Phillips and translated by Karena Kelly (Wildling Books)

Mihi, Gavin Bishop (Gecko Press)

Pipi Kiwi, Helen Taylor, translated by Heni Jacob (Penguin Random House NZ)

Ngake me Whataitai, Ben Ngaia, illustrated by Laya Mutton-Rogers (Huia Publishers)

Te Uruuru Whenua o Ngatoroirangi, Chris Winitana, illustrated by Laya Mutton-Rogers (Huia Publishers)

Finally, the finalists for the Best First Book Award left the judges reassured that the future of childrens literature in New Zealand is in good hands. In fact, the standard is so high, that four of the books are also finalists in one or more of the main categories.

Best First Book Award Finalists

Laura Shallcrass for Hare & Ruru: A Quiet Moment (Beatnik Publishing)

Kate Parker for Kowhai and the Giants (Mary Egan Publishing)

Jonathan King for The Inkberg Enigma (Gecko Press)

Amy Haarhoff (illustrator) for The Midnight Adventures of Ruru and Kiwi, written by Clare Scott (Penguin Random House NZ)

Shilo Kino for The Porangi Boy (Huia Publishers)

The winners of each of the six main categories  Picture Book, Junior Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Non-Fiction, Illustration and te reo Maori  take home $7500 and are then in the running to be named the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year, with a further $7500 prize money. In addition, the judges will award a Best First Book prize of $2000 to a previously unpublished author or illustrator.

The New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults are the preeminent celebration of publishing for young people in Aotearoa.

As well as acknowledging the best and brightest in books for children and teens, a core aspect of the Awards mission is to foster literacy and a love of reading amongst New Zealands children and teenagers.

This includes administering the ever-popular HELL Reading Challenge, which has encouraged children to read close to 12 million books since its inception, and running a programme of popular Books Alive events, which see authors and illustrators interact with Kiwi school children.

Following the success of the online programme in 2020, Books Alive will have a strong virtual component again this year, in partnership with the Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa (LIANZA).

In addition, hundreds of Wellington school children will also be able to enjoy a very full programme featuring many of the shortlisted authors and illustrators in person on the day of the Awards ceremony.

After Covid made a virtual presentation necessary last year, this year finalists and publishers plan to celebrate in person, at a ceremony to announce the winners at Tiakiwai Conference Centre at the National Library in Wellington on August 11.

The formidable task of narrowing the field to a list of finalists was met by this years experienced judging panel: Alan Dingley (convenor) has over 20 years of experience working in childrens/youth libraries; Mary Sangster, a specialist children's bookseller; Nicola Daly, a senior lecturer in Childrens Literature at the University of Waikato; Pauline (Vaeluaga) Smith, an author, educationalist and director of Miharo Murihiku Trust; and Stephen Clothier, a librarian, composer and performer.

They were joined by a panel appointed by Te Ropu Whakahau, the national body that represents Maori engaged in Libraries, Culture, Knowledge, Information, Communication and Systems Technology in Aotearoa, to judge te reo Maori entries. Anahera Morehu (convenor), is the Kaiarahi at the University of Auckland Faculty of Business and Economics; Ruki Tobin, the Poutiaki Rauemi National Manager Maori for Services to Schools at Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, National Library of New Zealand; and Te Paea Paringatai, is a Library and Information Advisory Commission Commissioner, and a Library Manager at the University of Canterbury.

The New Zealand Book Awards for Children & Young Adults are made possible through the generosity, commitment and vision of funders and sponsors: Creative New Zealand, HELL Pizza, the Wright Family Foundation, LIANZA, Wellington City Council, Nielsen Book and The National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa. The Awards are administered by the New Zealand Book Awards Trust.
Police have arrested three people with links to the Head Hunters motorcycle gang after they allegedly obtained over half a million dollars in fraudulent loans.

Organised Crime Unit detectives, assisted by the Northland Asset Recovery Unit and district staff, carried out a total of five search warrants throughout Northland, Hamilton and Auckland this week.

The warrants were part of a Northland Organised Crime Unit operation targeting the group who have allegedly been obtaining cash through fraudulent car loan applications over several years, says Detective Senior Sergeant Kevan Verry.

Its alleged the key player has been scamming finance companies into offering loans to purchase cars since 2017.

"Falsified bank documents were allegedly used to get loans approved and then fake settlement statements were produced to obtain further loans and more money," says Kevan.

A 30-year-old woman is facing 22 fraud charges before the Hamilton District Court.

Two other individuals, aged 28 and 34, are believed to have assisted her in the alleged fraud, and also face a number of charges including Obtains by Deception.

A total of six companies were defrauded of $500,000 in this scam.

"All have links to the Head Hunters motorcycle gang and are before the Whangarei, Hamilton and Auckland District Courts."

Kevan says the offending would have had a financial impact on the companies who were defrauded.

He says the operation demonstrates polices commitment to targeting organised crime groups and the harm they cause in the community.

The Northland Organised Crime Unit is determined to target those who make a living from illegal activities and committed to hold those people accountable for their actions.

"Were also focused on stripping them of their wealth and they money theyve made through crime, he says.

Police seized three vehicles as part of the operation, including a BMW Sedan, Ford Ranger Utility and a Nissan Navara Utility.

The Asset Recovery Unit also restrained two properties in Northland worth $300,000.

Police cannot rule out further arrests and charges as the investigation continues.
An Auckland and Waikato marine area will need at least 30 per cent of its waters turned into reserve, the end of marine dumping and better fishery quota management in place in order to restore its almost barren seabeds and reefs, a panel of experts say.

The Hauraki Gulf, covering more than 12 nautical miles of Auckland and Coromandel waters, is depleted of sea life.

More than 200 people gathered in Whitianga recently to hear anecdotal and research-based evidence on the state of Coromandel waters and what can be done to improve it.

With much of the seascape now covered in kina  which flourishes in the absence of snapper and crayfish  a panel of scientists, conservationists, iwi leaders and local officials are calling for a collaboration between community, Government, local bodies and fishery industries to restore a once abundant taonga.

More than 200 people attended the Protecting the Sea on Our Doorstep event on Whitianga.

Hauraki Gulfs story is not a great one, Hauraki Gulf Forum CEO Alex Rogers says.

Speaking to a packed crowd in Whitianga, he says the gulf was under significant pressure.

The 2020 State of our Gulf report, produced every three years, depicts a collapsed ecosystem due to overfishing, invasive fishing practices, marine dumping and sediment and nutrient runoff, he says.

Since 2000, snapper, tarakihi and crayfish have been at, or have fallen to, levels requiring action to actively rebuild stocks.

Scallop, mussel, crayfish and paua populations have also been declining for decades.

A quarter of fish in the Hauraki Gulf have also been found to have plastic in their guts.

The Hauraki Gulf has become a kina barren which is a sign of an ecosystem out of whack.

While kina are endemic to the gulf, he says, they are rampaging through kelp beds because they no longer have the predators to keep them in check.

This destroys the habitat for many fish that need shelter, particularly in their juvenile stages, he says.

There once was 1000 square kilometres of shellfish beds and reefs, which would filter the gulf to make the water crystal clear.

We would like to see this restored.

He calls for 30 per cent of the gulf to be protected, continued riparian planting in catchment areas and the end of marine dumping near the Marine Park.

His words are echoed by many of the speakers.

More reserves on the Hauraki Gulf would benefit not only the ecosystem, but would also benefit fisheries, University of Auckland marine scientist Dr Tim Haggit says.

Having collected data on crayfish and snapper since 1995, Haggit has recorded a decline in rock lobster and snapper populations across three reserves in New Zealand  Leigh, Tawharanui and Hahei.

Through tracking, hes been able to identify that the decline in snapper and lobster in the reserves is mostly due to them migrating outside the reserve area.

Egg production in the reserve, however, has increased with lobster having a 23 per cent higher success rate and snapper a 27 per cent higher success than outside the reserve.

This is due to more legal-sized species in the reserve.

Ngati Hei kaumatua Joe Davis says Ngati Hei knew it needed to lead the scallop kaupapa, but to see it evolve into a korero on all species in Coromandel waters has been great.

Haggit says to reproduce the same number of eggs a 64cm snapper could produce, there would have to be 36 30cm snappers to have the same reproduction output.

Imagine if we had a network of reserves placed accordingly. Youd argue that you have better fishing.

Its not about locking up areas, but its about ensuring youve got a bank for future fisheries.

Waikato Regional Council representative Denis Teggs opinion, however, differs.

He says eliminating bottom trawling and putting more costs on the commercial fisheries should be prioritised, but that the push for change would need to come from the public first.

Thats because of the 13 members that make up the Waikato Regional Council, he says only three electorates have a coast making it difficult to get marine issues to the front and centre.

Councils do have authority to impose control over fisheries resources under the RMA, such as protection of the indigenous biodiversity.

An increase in poaching Coromandel's favourite seafood delicacy has led to the decline of spiny red lobster from Te Whanganui A Hei marine reserve.

In this case, however, Tegg says it would be unlikely that the regional council would do this because Waikato currently, aside from Hahei, still has a lack of data to prove a case if the decision was challenged in the Environmental Court.

Personally, Ive found the response from the council a bit underwhelming and I want to talk about how you can correct that, Tegg says.

The regional council plan to map habitats around the Mercury Islands up to 20 metres and will carry out aerial photography studies.

Thats a good start, but theres a long way to go, and were just starting on that journey.

He encourages the public to put pressure on local and central government, join a harbour care group, lobby ministers and make a submission to the regional councils Waikato coastal plan, a report that hasnt been reviewed in 20 years.

You have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to influence the Waikato coastal plan.

If we want marine protection, we have to demand it. People power is a very powerful force.

The event, Protecting the Sea on Our Doorstep, was inspired by Coromandel iwi Ngati Heis recent rahui on scallops in Opito Bay over the summer period which saw an upheaval of support from locals leading to a snapshot survey of scallop population numbers.

Since then nationally many iwi and locals have followed suit, calling for rahui in their rohe, as well as an extension to marine protection areas.

Other speakers at the event included local scientist Thomas Everth, Ngati Hei kaumatua Joe Davis, Noises Island Trusts Sue Neureuter, Sea Change co-chairwoman Alison Henry and New Zealand Rock Lobster Fishery Council chief operating officer Daryl Sykes.

Sir Michael Fay also attended in support of his conservation aspirations for Ahuahu/Great Mercury Island.

A panel discussion chaired by local environmentalist Pamela Grealy was held afterwards, giving the audience an opportunity to ask questions directed towards: Rogers, Haggitt, Tegg, Henry from Sea Change, LegaSea, Whitianga Fishing Club, Darrel Bird from Dive Zone Whitianga and Sykes.

- Stuff/Sharnae Hope
"With over $100 million invested so far in New Zealands medicinal cannabis industry, 2021 is our year to shine, says Dr Zahra Champion, executive director of BioTechNZ and MedCan Summit 2021 organiser.

Academics, researchers, government officials, doctors, business people, investors, entrepreneurs and innovators, growers, and patients are being told they cannot afford to miss Octobers MedCan Summit 2021.

The summit marks the sunrise industrys true starting line, as local producers are taking positive steps towards being in market, says BioTechNZ.

Registrations of interest are open for New Zealands second year of the medicinal cannabis summit at Aucklands Cordis hotel. Building on the success of last years sold-out inaugural event, MedCan 2021 will take place on October 12 and 13. Attendees can attend in person or digitally.

MedCan 2021 will help local companies accelerate their path to market through valuable insights to exporting, innovation and education, says Zahra.

Well present the latest medical and scientific findings and breakthrough technologies, and well explore the current challenges and opportunities around the likes of investment, agritech, pharma manufacturing, and clinical trials.

Connecting, science, medicine, industry, and technology for a new frontier of care, the two-day summit will feature leading international and national thought leaders. Areas covered will also include seed to sale, clinical trials, prescribing, patient case studies, as well as the social, cultural and economic benefits to New Zealand.

Hosted by NZTech, in association with BioTechNZ, MedCan 2021 comes as many Kiwi patients are eager for the countrys newest industry to replace expensive, and often inaccessible, imported products.

Local companies have been plugging away for three years now and have invested heavily. It has been a costly entrepreneurial endeavour, but Kiwi companies are on the precipice of market entry which is great news for suffering patients here and abroad, she says.

Zahra says MedCan 2021 will assess the highs and lows of 2020/21, learnings, local and global trends, and new areas of growth for 2022 and beyond.

Over the past year there has been significant growth within local companies, both in terms of investment and employment, which is all creating a stronger pharmaceutical industry. MedCan 2021 will explore what our companies are doing and where the big opportunities are for New Zealand, she says.

MedCan Summit's Advisory Committee has been working hard on developing this years programme, with some exciting international speakers already secured. The finalised programme and confirmed speakers will be announced in July.

Again, there will be a specific stream for healthcare professionals, with organisers keen for more GPs to attend given theyre critical to patient access. A full days programme for doctors will provide essential updates and information on prescribing medicinal cannabis.

Zahra says there has been strong interest from exhibitors this year, with available space filling up fast. Attendees will have two days to connect with exhibitors across the spectrum of cultivation, manufacturing, as well as an array of supporting products and services to the industry.

MedCans foundation sponsor, Helius Therapeutics, is delighted to again support the two-day summit. It says, importantly, the summit will also enable greater knowledge of a new plant pathogen recently registered in New Zealand which has the potential to significantly stunt both potency and yield in cannabis cultivars.

Ive been really enthused by the recent industry collaboration on the Hop Latent Viroid (HLVd) prevention initiated by Helius together with Plant & Food Research and BioLumic. MedCan 2021 will be a great way to continue the dialogue, experience and ideas on how to protect and grow our industry now and in future, says Carmen Doran, chief executive of Helius Therapeutics.

Zahra says its critical the summit formally presents on the highly transmissible HLVd. Its early discovery, considerable local research, and greater sector-wide collaboration will undoubtedly protect New Zealands medicinal cannabis sector going forward.

This is shaping up to be two intensive days of industry, science and medical. Our goal is to ensure all MedCan attendees come away with a comprehensive understanding about all that lies ahead and how we can best maximise this exciting sectors success, she says.

For more information on the summit, please email info@medcansummit.co.nz or visit www.medcansummit.co.nz
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SpaceX's most prolific and veteran drone ship finally departed Port Canaveral several days right after the preparations seem to have begun. It is a few-thousand-mile travel period starting from Florida, with California as the leading destination.

The drone ship is famous for its name -- Of Course, I Still Love You (OCISLY).

Its name came from one of the late Iain Banks' books called "Culture Universe." This specific drone ship took part in supporting its first Falcon booster landing back in March 2016, and it successfully recovered one booster after two months.

Within the span of five years after its inaugural ocean landing, OCISLY has successfully assisted 52 attempted Falcon booster landings. It also recovered Falcon 9's first stages 45 times, and all of its recoveries occurred in the deep areas of the Atlantic Ocean.

SpaceX's Previous Efforts

Before OCISLY's launch, another drone ship called Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) was transferred from the Port of Los Angeles to Port Canaveral. It was then inspected and gravely upgraded from August 2019 to May 2020.

SpaceX relocated it to give their East Coast fleet a new pair of drone ships, enabling a launch boost that is otherwise unachievable. This decision ultimately allowed SpaceX to use both of the drone ships efficiently.

As a result, they got a total of 35 successful booster recoveries in just 12 months ever since JRTI entered the mission, together with OCISLY on the East Coast.

However, the private space agency once again needs a drone ship on the West Coast to support their rising polar Starlink launches, and missions for the U.S. government. It is essential to know that they just finished two launches outside Vandenberg Air/Space Force Base or VAFB within the last 24 months.

Read Also: SpaceX's Starlink to Power and Improve In-Flight WiFi, Talks with 'Several' Airlines - Aviation Satellite-Powered Internet Coming?

SpaceX's Target, Plan, and Schedule

According to Teslarati, SpaceX targets one VAFB launch each month. The first phase of the Starlink constellation, 4,400 satellites, will need at least two dozens of dedicated Falcon 9 launches to complete three shells of polar-orbiting spacecraft.

When the constellation is finally hooked with laser interlinks, the polar-orbiting Starlink satellites will officially assist SpaceX in delivering internet anywhere within the Earth's vicinity. At the same time, they can also start enabling access to rising markets focused on in-flight and maritime connections.

Teslarati mentioned that NextSpaceFlight and SpaceXFleet.com's Michael Baylor recently confirmed that the OCISLY drone ship would travel to the Bahamas right before flying to the Panama Canal.

Based on his statement, he added that OCISLY would be transferred by a semi-submersible, heavy-lift apparatus called Mighty Servant One.

Despite having usual duties such as lifting numerous stacked barges and building-sized gas and oil equipment, Mighty Servant One will now transport the drone shop throughout the Panama Canal, going to Port of Long Beach.

The reason behind it is not precisely apparent.

However, using a transporter such as Mighty Servant One could expedite the entire journey by at least 30% despite being expensive. It also makes placing a 53-meter-wide barge right through a 55-meter-wide canal easier to process. The trip also allows SpaceX to stay true to their schedule, kicking off West Coast Starlink by July.

Related Article: Sirius XM Digital Radio Satellite Successfully Returned by Falcon 9, Acing Nighttime Landing at Sea

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Written by Fran Sanders

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
(Photo : Pixabay/freestocks-photos ) Uber ride-hailing health insurance

Uber claims it mistakenly sent out an email to its drivers and delivery workers in May. The email states that the ride-hailing company is offering to cover some of their health insurance costs.

Uber revoked the offer two weeks after the email was sent out.

Uber Won't Cover Health Insurance

On May 26, an email from Uber with the subject line "It's a great time to get health coverage" was sent to an unspecified number of drivers and delivery workers.

When the respective drivers and deliver workers opened the email, they were greeted by an even more alluring proposition, stating that Uber can help cover their healthcare costs.

Drivers and couriers for Uber are classified as independent contractors, making them ineligible for any employer-sponsored health insurance plans.

Also Read: Uber Self-Driving Car Detected But Ignored Pedestrian In Arizona Crash

For years, many of these workers have campaigned for more protection and benefits, especially during the holidays. Unfortunately, they were faced with opposition from Uber.

This is the reason why the email came as a shock when the drivers and workers received it, with it stating that the company offers subsidies ranging from $613.77 to $1,277.54. It will depend on the type of insurance plan they had and the amount of hours they worked each week.

That kind of money could be very helpful for drivers, many of whom subsist on poverty-level wages and are struggling to find work amid a drop in demand during the coronavirus pandemic.

Uber's Change of Mind

As it turns out, nothing has changed. Uber was suppose to send the email to drivers and workers in California only, and not in any other state.

The follow-up email stated that the company made a mistake sending the initial email, as the policy only applies to drivers and delivery people in California. Uber apologized for the error.

A spokesperson said that the company's support team is working with drivers and delivery workers who got the email by mistake, according to Vox.

In 2020, Uber --- together with Lyft, DoorDash, and other gig companies --- poured over $200 million into the campaign to exempt them from a California state law that would require the companies to treat their workers like employees.

The companies opposed the law, arguing that it would eliminate driver flexibility, while also increasing consumer prices and wait times. The measure passed in November 2020 with 59% of the vote.

Uber and the other ride-hailing companies are required to give healthcare subsided equal to 41% the average premium for each month, as stated under Prop 22.

The subsidies should be given to drivers and couriers who average between 15 and 25 hours per week of engaged time. This would then explain the email, but it does not explain why it also ended up in the inboxes of drivers and couriers who do not reside in California.

Edward Burmila, a professor and occasional Uber driver was one of the workers who received the email. According to The Verge, Burmila stated that the email is the typical tactic that ride-share companies do to maintain the fiction that their labor force are not employees or workers.

Burmila added that Uber's move shows that they will provide benefits for the riders only when they are forced to.

Related Article: Uber Willing to Follow UK's Minimum Wage Policy for Drivers with Holiday Pay and Pension

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Written by Sophie Webster

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
NASA isn't stopping at exploring the Red Planet. They're planning to go back to Venus, and the European Space Agency (ESA) also wants in on the fun.

CNET reports that both NASA and the ESA have announced three new missions to the planet Venus, with the American space agency launching two of the three. The ESA's own mission, called EnVision, will join NASA's Veritas and DaVinci+ expeditions in studying the greenhouse planet.

NASA, in fact, is collaborating with the ESA for EnVision, as reported on the NASA website. According to them, they will provide their European counterparts with the Synthetic Aperture Radar called VenSAR, which will enable the space probes to create high-resolution measurements of Venus' surface features.

The two NASA missions, which are slated to launch in 2028 and 2030, will be mapping the planet's rocky surface and closely studying its atmospheric composition, as reported by CNET. Both projects will be funded to the tune of $500 million each, which is actually quite cheap, considering that the current Mars Perseverance mission costs as much as $2.9 billion.

When these three missions launch, they will be the first ones that aren't mere flybys or gravity assists, which were the types of expeditions involving Venus ran from the late 80s to the early 2010s.

Read also: German Astronaut Shares Photos of Space Food in an Experiment to Better Understand the Body

NASA Is Clearly Going Back to Venus, But Why?

All of the previous NASA missions to Earth's so-called "twin" were successful, with one still operational (the Parker Solar Probe is expected to do three more flybys until 2024). But despite all those expeditions, scientists still didn't learn much about the mysterious planet.

There is one recent discovery. However, that likely prompted NASA and the ESA to go back and take a second look. Back in 2020, scientists were able to detect trace amounts of the chemical phosphine in Venus' atmosphere. It might not sound that exciting, but phosphine is a substance that living organisms have been known to produce as a byproduct at times.

In other words, the Venusian clouds might offer potential proof of the existence of extraterrestrial life. Before that phosphine discovery, though, numerous hypotheses have already pointed out the possible habitability of Venus' clouds, owing to the existence of microorganisms on Earth that can survive extremely harsh conditions. And you'll find no shortage of that on Venus.

While still not definitive proof of alien life, that discovery was enough to get people around the world talking when it was announced. Considering that the DaVinci+ mission is going to examine the clouds of Venus more thoroughly, then perhaps scientists will finally get more answers to the mystery at hand.

As for the ESA, EnVision also aims to monitor gases in the atmosphere, analyze the planet's surface composition, and look for tell-tale signs of volcanic activity. Both NASA and the ESA plan to gather as much data about Venus as they can into the next decade, which means Mars will not be the only poster planet for space exploration in the foreseeable future.

Related: Neil deGrasse Tyson on StarTalk Podcast: Venus Lifeforms Get Checked After Radio Telescopes saw It Emits 'Phosphine' Gasses

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Written by RJ Pierce

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Elon Musk has confirmed that SpaceX will soon use the Starship rockets to bring Starlink satellites in orbit and conduct its future missions. This will replace the current usage of Falcon 9 in the missions of SpaceX to add more satellites for the constellations that would serve as internet connections. Falcon 9 has brought a massive array of Starlink satellites in the past and has served as its mainstay rocket.

However, all good things come to an end, and even so for incredible spacecraft like the Falcon 9, soon to be replaced by the Stainless Steel rocket ship which would soon be intended for its Mars journey. Recently, the Falcon 9 made history for SpaceX and the space industry after flying its 100th consecutive flight, featuring one of the bests in reusable rocket history.

This follows the massive plans for Starship, particularly the SN15 rocket ship which has landed successfully last May, in SpaceX's Boca Chica launch facility in Texas. The success of the SN15 and Starship project has moved it up for its awaited "Full Stack" test flights and landing maneuvers which would be done with the Super Heavy Rocket at its base.

Read Also: SpaceX Drone Ship Travels to the Bahamas Before Flying to California

Elon Musk: SpaceX to Use Starship for Starlink

Musk was recently asked by a fan via Twitter (@elonmusk), asking if SpaceX would soon use the Starship for launching Starlink satellites in the air and replace the long-used Falcon 9. The SpaceX CEO answered this with all honesty and revealed to the fan and the world that it would soon shift to using the Starship for Starlink's ventures.

Starlink missions will move to Starship  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 10, 2021

The internet satellite up in the air are already nearing its 1,800 counts, and the company will not stop there as it aims to improve its coverage and service for internet connections.

What this revelation shows is that SpaceX is ready for the next generation of its spacecraft to take over the business, and bring the future for the company.

It is known that SpaceX and Musk plan to have an ocean spaceport called "Deimos," which would serve as the launch facility for the Starship and Super Heavy for its soon missions.

Good Bye Falcon 9?

While there were no words regarding Falcon 9 retiring or soon getting its upgrade, it seems so that the company would use the reusable rocket for less than its current track record today. This follows the plans in going to Mars, which is the company's next goal and aspiration in reaching, to make humans a multi-planetary species.

Falcon 9 has brought a lot of great moments for SpaceX, and it became one of the mainstay rockets of the company, even those missions that were curated or had dealt with private companies, NASA, and other nations.

Moreover, the schedule or timeline of Starship's first launch with the Starlink satellites is still unknown, and for the time being, it would still be Falcon to bring these internet satellites.

Related Article: Elon Musk Confirms SpaceX Ocean Spaceport Deimos Under Construction for Starship Launch Next Year

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Written by Isaiah Richard

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
This upcoming Father's Day, Apple wants to take part in the special world celebration for our dear fathers through the latest Apple Pay Promotion that you could enjoy. The Cupertino giant wants you to be happy for a week by offering the best deals for Adidas starting Thursday, June 10 until the next Thursday, June 17.

Apple Pay Promo:: Adidas App Joins Week-long Father's Day Deals

More recently spotted Apple to be on the lookout for another week of product discounts for all dedicated Apple Pay customers. Father's Day for the fans will be twice as special as the upcoming day for the dads out there.

Earlier, the company has announced via email that it would be bringing some joy to the hardworking fathers around the world thanks to the guaranteed savings that they can get from the Adidas app. If you want to begin your purchase, you can click here for more details.

Specifically, the promotion is set to grant you a $20 discount on the selected Adidas items if you complete a purchase worth $100 or higher. The good news is you still have a week to buy your desired products until next week on June 17 so there's more time to think about your potential acquisition.

Apple noted that there are some reminders that customers should keep in mind before entering the Father's Day Deals through the Apple Pay Promo. First, this deal only covers US-based domestic orders.

Read Also: Silicon Valley Clipper Card Now Supports Apple Pay, Express Mode, But There's a Catch

What Products Are Not Included in the Apple Pay Promo?

Moreover, you could also notice that not all offers are included in the promotion. To name a few, they are the products from Disney, Human Made, and YEEZY.

Here's the emailed announcement from Apple:

"Limited-time offer, valid from June 10, 2021, through June 17, 2021, at 11:59 p.m. PST. Offer good for $20 off your purchase of $100 or more when you use Apple Pay at checkout. Valid in-app only. One use per customer. Offer cannot be combined with other offers. Offer is not valid on prior purchases. Offer is not valid for cash and excludes shipping and taxes. Exclusions apply, including but not limited to YEEZY, 4D, select Ultraboost, Pharrell x adidas, Disney, adizero adios pro, Human Made, limited-edition Originals, select NMD, select Stan Smith, select Superstar, gift cards, and purchases on the Confirmed app. Valid on domestic U.S. orders only. adidas reserves the right to change terms and conditions, substitute offer of equal or greater value, and end offer at any time without notice. Void where prohibited or restricted by law."

Furthermore, you could also discover that there are perfect deals at Dunkin Donuts, Best Buy, Dick's Sporting Goods, and Land's End. You could possibly find what you are looking for your father before we head to the end of the week.

Last month, the Apple Pay Promo offered discounts to shops like Bern, Alice+Olivia, PacSun, Persol, Costa Del Mar, and Under Armour, Macrumors reported. Next month, the company could give us another round of slashed prices when Independence Day comes.

Related Article: Apple Pay Mother's Day Promo: Gift Bundles with Discounts on Flowers, Clothes, Kitchenware, and MORE for Moms

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Written by Joseph Henry

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Unitree Robotics, a startup robotic company based in China has unveiled its latest bot called the Unitree Go1. The quadrupedal machine resembles a mechanical dog that you walk with every morning when you are jogging outside. It has a lone job: carrying a bottle of water while you are doing another task.

Indeed, what's still amazing with this creation is its affordable price of $2,700 which is more consumer-friendly than Spot Robot of Boston Dynamics which sits at a staggering price of $74,500.

Unitree Go1 Robot Could Accompany You Wherever You Go

In a demo video uploaded by Unitree Robotics on YouTube earlier this week, users should not be bothered anymore in looking for a reliable companion who would run with them. The intelligent side-follow robot would literally "follow" you while you're on your pace. It will also do the job for you of "carrying a single bottle of water."

You could possibly give it something like a wallet if you do not have a pocket for that, but be mindful that it is impractical to do such a thing. However, if you want to join a night party with your friends, it could act like a robot butler to you.

Boston Dynamics' Spot, for instance, has been found out to be a useful addition during industrial inspections and search operations, The Verge reported. While the Unitree Go1 has limited specs compared to the US-based robot, it would be handy for those who want to have a walking friend by their side. For its price, you could be torn between it and your next smartphone.

Read Also: This Robot Modifies its Body Based on a Particular Terrain - Shape-Shifting from Grass to Concrete is Possible!

Unitree Relays the Features of the Bottle-Carrying Robot

From the official website of Unitree Robotics, users could choose different versions for the Go1 robot, and there are three of them. The first one, Go1 Air is the cheapest among the three followed by the second Go1 which costs $3,500. The last and the third one, Go1 Edu is the most expensive with a price tag of $8,500.

Each version shares the same weight of 12 kg or 26 pounds, however, the two valuable editions come with high-grade sensors and chips although Go1 Edu remains the only model to have an unspecified programming API.

At first glance, the robot appears to be a remote-controlled toy, but it turns out that it would automatically follow a person and prevent the obstacles along its way. At the moment, the Chinese startup has not yet mentioned how long will its battery last but given Spot's battery span of 90 minutes, we could surmise that the Go1 robot could operate for fewer minutes.

Meanwhile, the more high-tech models could run at a recorded top speed reaching 17 km/h. For the years to come, maybe the Go1 robot could carry heavier loads like a set of appliances or a sack of equipment. We could also anticipate new things that it could do besides carrying a small water bottle.

Related Article: Boston Dynamics Grants Special Access to Massachusetts Workshop--'Stretch' Robot to Launch in 2022

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Written by Joseph Henry

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
(Photo : Getty Image: Handout)

Hackers are on to their next target: Samsung. By tampering with Samsung's pre-installed apps, hackers can now spy on users.

Hackers can watch users, and even take complete control of the entire system. What is more alarming is that the bugs seem to belong to a much more extensive set of an exploited one. One of Samsung's security researchers reported the incident to the tech giant's bug bounty program.

Samsung is a South Korean tech giant, but that did not stop hackers from tampering with their system. The company is now working on fixing endless vulnerabilities that continue to affect its mobile smartphones.

Hackers on Three Critical Samsung Issues

Bleeping Computer recently reported that ever since the start of 2021, the founder of Oversecured Company, Sergey Toshin, discovered over twelve vulnerabilities currently affecting all of Samsung's devices.

Because of the security risk that these bugs pose to Samsung users, the company only release light details about the incident. As of now, only three issues have been raised.

According to the online media outlet, Toshin also mentioned that the least threatening risk that the issue poses is that hackers can steal users' messages if they successfully trick the victim.

The two issues are more complicated and severe because of the gravity of their stealth.

Exploiting the bugs does not require Samsung users to do anything because they could use it to read and write arbitrary files to access the devices.

Samsung still has not confirmed when the bugs will be fixed, mainly because the entire process could take up to two months. The company still has to do numerous patch tests to ensure that it would not cause further problems.

Toshin added that he reported all of the three security threats, and he is now waiting to get his hands on the bounties.

Read Also: Hacking Epidemic: Over Seven Ransomware Attacks Per Hour - America's Biggest Security Threat

Hacker Collected Almost $30,000

One hacker received almost $30,000 since the beginning of 2021 because he disclosed a total of 14 issues within Samsung devices' systems.

The hacker found out that there are bugs in the pre-installed applications on Samsung smartphones using an Oversecured scanner that he made to help with the bug.

He informed Samsung about the flaws in February, and even posted a video about how a third-party app could give him admin rights to any Samsung device. However, it had a massive side effect -- all of the applications in the Samsung device were deleted while trying to get elevated privileges.

The bug was later patched in April, but it still had a significant impact on the Managed Provisioning app, and it is now labeled as CVE-2021-25356.

As a reward, the hacker got $7,000 for reporting the bugs.

Bleeping Computer mentioned that Toshin also received $5,460 for letting Samsung know about another issue regarding their Settings app. It gave hackers access to arbitrary files as an actual system user. Its label is known as CVE-2021-25393.

Lastly, he got another $4,850 from February's batch of bugs that allowed creating arbitrary files disguised as a Telephony user who can access SMS and call details.

Related Article: Hacking Epidemic: Over Seven Ransomware Attacks Per Hour - America's Biggest Security Threat

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Written by Fran Sanders

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
McDonald's artificial intelligence drive-thru bot wants to brush up efficiency services for customers behind the wheel. However, a single customer is not impressed and filed a lawsuit alleging that its new upgrade broke the biometric privacy law.

Some are concerned that McDonald's invading their privacy through the data that it collects. It comes after the fast-food giant launched the automated drive-thru orders on June 2, CNBC reported.

Drive-Thru AI

At least ten branches in Chicago are letting go of workers, and instead relying on a Siri-like way of collecting orders like McNuggets or french fries. Chris Kempczinski, McDonald's CEO, noted that the new voice-command AI showed at least 85% accuracy.

There are no data officially published on how humans compared, so there was no way to confirm. But McDonald's says it improved both speed and accuracy.

The adoption of McDonald's to a smart drive-thru was announced on February 27, but even before the COVID-19 pandemic started, which led to lockdowns, the fast-food company had already spent a whopping $300 million to acquire an AI company known as Apprente in 2019.

The company is now called McD Tech Labs. It is behind the smart drive-thru facing the scrutiny of some customers.

Unimpressed

The new tech of the fast-food intends to ease up the experience of hungry customers inside a vehicle.

However, some customers value their privacy more than convenience. Hence, they are not letting McDonald's collect their voice data without the proper permission.

According to The Register, Shannon Carpenter claimed that McDonald's is going against the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The law says: "No private entity may collect, capture, purchase, receive through trade, or otherwise obtain a person's or a customer's biometric identifier or biometric information."

The Register noted that all of these are only permitted once the other party gave their consent.

As such, Carpenter brought McDonald's to court on April 26, alleging that the fast-food business collected the voice data of drive-thru customers without any written consent.

Read Also: Mom Finds Used Needles On McDonald's Baby Changing Table

Price of Breaking BIPA

If indeed proven that McDonald's "intentionally or recklessly" did what was accused, the company will have to pay $5,000 for each customer affected.

And it would have been an expensive lawsuit to lose. The estimate is that, overall, the fast-food giant will have to pay about $5,000,000.

However, if the act has been violated due to negligence, affected customers will only receive $1,000.

Alleged Other Data Collected

Shannon claimed that McD Tech Labs transcribes speech into text, and analyzes the audio collected to guess the gender, nationality, and age of customers.

Elsewhere, here's why McDonald's take photos of its customers' vehicle when they are ordering via drive-thru.

Related Article: Fast-Food Giant McDonald's Rejects Proposal To Ban Plastic Straws

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Written by Teejay Boris

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
(Photo : Getty Image: Joe Raedle)

Recent news shed light on how the Trump-era Department of Justice purposefully gathered personal phone records of numerous journalists from the Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN.

This fiasco happened to quiet down some of their sources, which is part of the administration's goal to suss down leakers.

However, the issue did not end there.

Back in 2017 and 2018, the Department of Justice's grand jury left Apple Inc., a Cupertino-based tech giant responsible for the iPhones, iPads, and other gadgets, with no choice but to hand over private data of two Democrats.

People Involved

According to The New York Times, a report confirmed that the Department of Justice compelled Apple to hand over metadata on personal accounts of two Democrats from the House Intelligence Committee. This incident happened in 2017 and 2018 in preparation for former president Trump's campaign.

Gizmodo stated that the subpoena was also able to cover even the records of at least 12 people connected to the committee members. These include family members, aides, and one minor individual.

Among those records that were seized involved the personal data of Representative Adam Schiff of California.

According to sources of the New York Times, he is a committee chairman and, not to mention, a frequent victim of Trump's rowdy insults.

Apple's Attempt to Minimize Data Breaches

Despite DOJ's pressure on Apple, the tech giant did its best to minimize the provided data.

According to the news outfit, Apple only gave metadata and account information, excluding emails, photos, and other private content.

However, it is hardly comforting considering how easy it is to learn a lot of information about someone simply based on their metadata. Information such as their location, plans, and preferences are all accessible, especially that most of the people involved were individuals with public information, and social media accounts.

Read Also: Facebook Gives Trump 2-Year Suspension, Updates Punishment for Politicians

The Current Situation

U.S. prosecutors still found no evidence on the retrieved data that specifically tied DOJ members to the leakers with the information on hand. And according to New York Times, Apple was understandably under a direct order from the DOJ, which stopped the company from dispensing information to the public regarding the matter.

DOJ's direct order expired in 2021, so Apple started to contact the committee members who allegedly had no idea that the Trump administration investigated them.

Gizmodo also declared that CNN, New York Times, and The Post did not know that some reporters were under federal investigation.

DOJ and Schiff's Response

According to NBC News, at the height of the issue, Schiff asked the Inspector General to investigate Trump's "weaponization of law enforcement," which he later labeled as a terrible abuse of power.

Schiff added that the incident makes the DOJ a subsidiary of Trump's personal and political interests.

In light of the situation, the U.S. Department of Justice promised that they would stop secretly seizing private records of Journalists. Lawmakers, media outlets, and even President Joe Biden condemned the department's disclosure.

Related Article: [BREAKING] US DOJ Prioritizes Preventing Ransomware Attacks Among Companies

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Written by Fran Sanders

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Electric flying taxi, "Maker," which take-offs and lands vertically, launched in Los Angeles on June 10. Its commercial release is expected to be in 2024.

United Airlines invested about $20 million in Archer Aviation to help the production of Maker, Bloomberg reported. The electric taxi was unveiled at an event on Thursday, June 10, in Hawthorne, California.

Electric Flying Taxi: Environment Friendly and Traffic Congestion Solution

Bloomberg added that companies, which the majority are airlines, hopped onto the electric flying taxi development to fix traffic congestion and, at the same time, help the environment due to its zero emissions.

The idea of Maker birthed from two college buddies that wanted to find a solution to traffic congestion and pollution, as per Forbes.

It could help ease up the congestion below as people will instead travel through the air. And, of course, electric vehicles are emissions-free.

"We're working on a project that has the potential to help curb carbon emissions," Archer co-founder and CEO, Brett Adcock, said.

Adcock added that Maker has "the potential to help fix traffic problems because even if we have electric cars on the ground we're not fixing the problems in cities about getting around."

Maker

The electric autonomous flying taxi could fit up to two people ideally. A total of six batteries power the 12 electric motors of the eVTOL.

Although it take-offs vertically like a helicopter, Archer claimed that it is 100 times quieter than the latter at only 45 decibels. If so, it is even quieter than two people conversing as it would resemble the audible level of whispering, according to Drummer Palace.

The electric taxi has a 60-mile range, and it could go as fast as 150 mph.

Moreover, aside from the Los Angeles International Airport, the eVTOL is also anticipated to fly in Miami. Adcock claims that both cities experience extreme traffic congestion. Thus, the need for such technology.

United Airlines plans to secure 200 pieces of the electric taxi if everything goes well. It is on top of the million-dollar investment.

Read Also: Bye eFlyer 800 to Fly People on Solar Power and Clean Energy-But Has a Limit of Only 8 Passengers

Lawsuit

According to Bloomberg, the spotlight on the development of Maker has been stolen by a lawsuit.

It comes after its rival Wisk Aero, LLC brought Archer to court in April. It claimed that Maker has stolen its technology from them.

To add, Wisk has giant backers, such as the Boeing Co. and billionaire Larry Page. Both accused its former employees of bringing the design blueprints to Archer as they now work for the latter.

In response, on June 1, Archer requested the judge to dismiss the allegations of Wisk.

Meanwhile, on March 13, 2018, Wisk Aero also tested a similar technology in New Zealand. And elsewhere, there is also an attempt to fly electric taxis in Florida.

Related Article: Whim, a Mobile App Startup, Wants to Fix Car Addiction to Reduce Pollution and Traffic

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Written by Teejay Boris

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Google's new ad tracking mechanism known as Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) carries numerous privacy issues, according to Mozilla, the creator of Firefox.

The analysis posted by Mozilla on its blog pointed out the privacy issues that Google needs to address with FLoC. Supposedly the new system, which replaced the third-party ad tracking cookies, is "privacy-preserving." However, the study showed that it ironically risks the information of users.

FLoC: 'Privacy-Preserving'

On February 8, Google announced that it was bidding farewell to "cookies," and replace it with FLoC.

Cookies collect the data of users to provide advertisements the mechanism deemed suitable. However, Google's technology, which gives away data to third parties, disgusted privacy advocates. Now, more than ever, that privacy has been a hot topic.

With that, Google had to devise a new system for ad tracking -- thus, FLoC.

However, the new technology is still not enough. As such, WordPress bluntly called it a "terrible idea." The blogging website even joined a movement that wanted to "Block Floc." Additionally, WordPress also disabled FLoC on its sites.

It got the irk of critics as Google positions the new mechanism as an ally for privacy. But it still collects data without informing its users beforehand.

On top of that, DuckDuckGo, another search engine, blocked the Google system due to privacy issues as well.

Related Article: Google Plans to Stop Selling Ads: What's Next After Phasing Out Browser Cookies?

Privacy Issues of FLoC

So, FLoC, unlike cookies, uses "cohort identifies." It does not recognize a single user, and instead, it identifies people in groups based on their interests. According to Google, the new system produces a nearly accurate 95% per-dollar conversion of advertisements.

However, Firefox found out that the Cohort IDs could potentially be utilized for tracking a single individual.

In estimate, an interest group could be filled with thousands of users. Even so, there are multiple ways to narrow it down.

For instance, browser fingerprinting could give more information about the users. According to Firefox pairing the FLoC cohort and information from browsers could narrow down the group into smaller chunks.

Also, FLoC provides more information than site-based cookies. This time around, Google tracks users on multiple websites they visit.

Apple Insider noted that "because of that, 'they become a shared key to which trackers can associate data from external sources.'" Additionally, Firefox explained that through the browser fingerprinting and the vast information that FLoC extracts, it could be easier invade the privacy of users.

Read Also: Android Apps Will No Longer Track Users Who Opted Out of Ads Thanks to Google's Latest Strict Policy

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Written by Teejay Boris

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
(Photo : Getty Image: Mark Case)

Cryptocurrency, specifically Bitcoin, continues its upward trend despite having an ongoing issue: being proclaimed the world's riskiest form of assets.

The current price of the infamous cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, had an uproaring increase again on Friday, June 11, the morning right after a banking regulator proposed to view Bitcoin, and the entire crypto market as the riskiest of all assets.

Bitcoin, also called BTC-USD, started June 11 down after falling a little over 1% with a total of $36,425. However, it began to shoot up at about 1.5%, which costs $37,306 around 8 AM.

On Wednesday, June 9, and Thursday, June 10, the cryptocurrency had a massive surge when El Salvador finally made it legal in their country to use Bitcoin as a bonafide form of money. Because of this incident, the said cryptocurrency spiked at 8% the following day.

Cryptocurrency as the Riskiest Asset

According to a report by Yahoo, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision strongly believes that every bank should have a backup saving to cover any future losses of their cryptocurrency holdings.

The organization even proposed a public consultation regarding proposals for treating banks' exposures to various crypto markets and assets. The current plans would be expensive for banks to get a hold of digital currencies. As a result, it could stop a large-scale market acceptance of tokens.

One proposal is for banks to attack a 1,250% risk possibility of exposure to Bitcoins, and other cryptocurrencies in the crypto market.

Read Also: Crypto Weekend Drops Have Been Happening for Several Years, Experts Say--Here's Why

New Crypto Regulation Commission

Yahoo also mentioned that numerous experts had expressed their concern about the crypto market. They suggest that the U.S. needs to create a new department solely to regulate cryptocurrencies because it is a severe issue covering every market and institution.

Carol Alexander, a Professor of Finance from the University of Sussex, said that the unregulated exchanges are the main reason behind excessive manipulation strategies in the crypto market.

She added that crypto is known as the Wild West of the financial world because despite U.S.' regulators' attempt to control it, all of their efforts deemed underwhelming.

Another massive cryptocurrency dwindled in the market. Etheruem, referred to as ETH-USD, is the second most significant crypto after Bitcoin. It experienced a gigantic 5% crash to trade at about $2,421.

Dogecoin, or DOGE, is one of the most famous cryptocurrencies because Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, advertises it. It also had a 4% drop to $0.32.

Bitcoin's Legalization: One Small Step for El Salvador, One Giant Leap for Crypto Market

Although other people might see Bitcoin's legalization in El Salvador as a small step, it is indeed a massive step for the entire crypto market. This power move crowns the Central American nation as the first country in the whole world to formally accept digital currency.

Despite various organizations' attempts to discourage people from looking into the world of crypto, Bitcoin and other crypto marketers continue to progress.

Related Article: 'Anonymous' Hacking Group Threatens Elon Musk After Musk's Tweets Affect Bitcoin Value

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Written by Fran Sanders

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
JBS, one of the largest meat suppliers across the globe, was recently attacked by a massive ransomware breach. This online attack is quite serious since the giant meat company confirmed that it was forced to pay around $11 million.

JBS said that it has to do this after its North American and Australian operations were affected. Aside from this, the Brazilian meat supplier also said it temporarily halted cattle slaughtering at all of its U.S. plants for a day last week in response to the cyberattack.

Various experts and other security critics claimed that the action of JBs could disrupt food supply chains and further inflate already high food prices. And now, security researchers claimed that the recent ransomware attack is currently affecting various restaurants and farmers.

JBS Ransomware Affects Farmers and Restaurants

According to The Wall Street Journal, the new ransomware hack that targeted JBS could affect various farmers, as well as restaurant reopenings.

Also Read: Security Company Now Offers 'Unbreakable Encryption' As Ransomware Attacks Continue to Rise

Experts said that this could happen since food distributors are already struggling to get enough meat competed to replace their pork, beef, and chicken orders to the giant meat supplier.

Aside from this, when the JBS processing operations went offline, various cattle and pork slaughtered in the United States were reduced. On the other hand, security experts and other involved investigators added that the meat supplies tightened and wholesale beef and pork prices rose.

Based on one distributor, the price of bone-in pork shoulders used to make pulled pork-like barbecue staples rose 25% last week to a record $2.48 per pound.

JBS Still Handles Attack Better Than Colonial Pipeline?

Although the JBS ransomware attack also affected smaller farmers and restaurants, some experts and security researchers still claimed that the meat supplier was still able to handle the online breach better than the Colonial Pipeline, another company targeted by a group of hackers.

Cyber Security Hub reported that, unlike Colonial Pipeline. Specifically, JBS issued press releases on May 30, June 1, June 2, and June 3 to keep customers and the public apprised of the status of the incident. Thanks to this effort, the meat supplier was able to ease the tension regarding the ransomware breach somehow.

For more news updates about JBS ransomware attacks and other security breaches, always keep your tabs open here at TechTimes.

Related Article: CD Projekt Red's Data Source Code Circulating Online, Company Says Investigation is Ongoing

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Written by: Griffin Davis

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
American flags planted at the foot of the Louisiana State Capitol are seen Saturday, May 29, 2021, in Baton Rouge, La. The flags, planted by members of the Blue Star Mothers of Louisiana, Chapter 1, are placed in memory of fallen Louisiana service members.
When a taxpayer-funded psychiatric crisis center opened in East Baton Rouge in February, it aimed to ease upward-trending overdose deaths and mental health issues and divert people from jail and emergency rooms.

So far, the Bridge Center for Hope has risen to the challenge, its executive director Charlotte Claiborne says.

Weve almost doubled the number of patients weve seen in the first 78 days, she said at a community outreach event Thursday. Some people stay for a few hours, talk to a counselor, get some food, and leave, and some people stay with us for a week. It all depends on the persons situation.

In the first few months since launching the intake facility Claiborne said it has helped more than 425 clients stabilize after a crisis. Once they stabilize, she said the center steers them toward other resources so they can stay healthy in the long run.

On Thursday, the center hosted the first event in a series, a roadshow titled Bridging the Gap to Mental Health, at the East Baton Rouge Library to highlight some of those other resources. Sixteen organizations that work hand-in-hand with the Bridge Center  including Reilly Counseling Center and inpatient programs Apollo Behavioral Health Hospital and Beacon Behavioral Health  took part in the forum.

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During morning-to-noon informational sessions Thursday, Bridge Center officials explained how the facility serves as a short-term solution that prevents people in mental crisis from ending up in an ER or behind bars. As a licensed crisis intake center, patients can receive residential care for up to seven days.

There isnt a long-term mental health facility in Louisiana, Claiborne explained. So that means when a patient has to leave the center, we direct them to one of our community partners that can provide outpatient support.

Claiborne said that each installation of the Bridging the Gap tour will feature such providers from various parts of Baton Rouge.

We realize that residents dont know what resources to use if theyre struggling, Claiborne said. Our hope is that through these events, well be able to bring resources out to people instead of making them search around.

Dates and locations for upcoming events in the series have yet to be announced but will be shared online at brbridge.org.
The president of Louisiana's top school board said Thursday night the board will delay action on state Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley's plan to revamp how the state rates schools and students.

The proposal had been set for a vote on Tuesday by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Brumley has spent days briefing education and other groups on his proposal, including a more generous scoring system that would trim the number of D- and F-rated schools.

How D, F schools might benefit from Louisiana school chief's revamped rating proposal State Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley is recommending a major change in how public schools are rated annually, and the new rules woul

Other changes would delay the state's 2025 target date for improved student achievement and start giving high schools credit for students scoring a 17 on the ACT, which measures college readiness.

The minimum ACT score for credit today is 18 of a possible 36.

BESE leaders said action on the plan will be put off until a "future date."

"After digging into accountability recommendations and having questions myself, hearing from a variety of advocates and stakeholders on all sides and hearing from other board members, BESE leadership is prepared to pull this off the agenda for next week to allow for additional discussions about this important topic," Holloway said in a statement.

"While we can all agree that it's well past time to bring K-2 accountability to the board, none of these discussions should happen in isolation," Kira Orange Jones, vice-president of BESE said, also in a statement.

"Other important discussions about growth, ACT and moves to mastery must also happen and given the need to ensure we are making solid decisions on the system as a whole allowing additional time for important conversations and learning among board members seems imperative," Orange Jones said.

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The state's longtime goal is for students by 2025 to average mastery, the top achievement level, on key tests for a school to get an A rating.

Backers say that would put the state in line with education gauges used in other states.

Brumley for months has called for the state to set up an accountability system for K-2 students.

That push has won wide support.

However, the accountability proposals have gotten mixed reviews.

Local superintendents last week praised plans to change the scoring system in a way that would reduce the number of D- and F-rated schools.

Others said the changes amounted to watering down standards in a state with one of the lowest student achievement rankings in the nation.
The Legislature approved a sweeping bill Thursday that would gradually boost state aid for roads and bridges by about $300 million per year, which would be the biggest investment in Louisiana's troubled transportation system in nearly four decades.

The House approved it 87-13 and the Senate did so 37-0 with less than an hour left in the session.

A key issue is whether Gov. John Bel Edwards will sign the measure, House Bill 514.

"I am not yet ready to tell you whether this bill will be signed," Edwards told reporters in his post-session press conference.

The hike would happen by gradually transferring 60% of sales tax revenue from the sale of cars and trucks from the state's general fund to one for transportation improvements only.

Backers said 75% of the money would be aimed at so-called mega projects, including construction of a new bridge across the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge, and 25% for preservation.

The vote followed days of behind-the-scenes meetings between Edwards and legislative leaders, including Wednesday evening and early Thursday morning.

House Speaker Pro Tem Tanner Magee, R-Houma, chief sponsor of the bill, implored House members to get behind the proposal.

Magee said he has watched the state make major investments in education, health care and other areas while road and bridge conditions routinely rank near the bottom in national surveys. "But the one thing we have never committed to investing is infrastructure," he said.

One of the key sticking points was whether lawmakers could craft a plan that Edwards could embrace without worries that it would drain the general fund of needed dollars for key state services.

The legislation includes provisions aimed at keeping that from happening.

The sales tax for the sale of cars and trucks generates about $500 million per year.

Under the bill, 30% of that revenue would be moved to a transportation fund in mid-2023 and another 30% the following year  60% in all.

However, sponsors added a provision that would limit transfers to $150 million per year if state revenue projections forecast a drop of $100 million or more.

In addition, only $150 million of the new revenue could be tied up annually in borrowing costs, a move designed to stretch dollars but one that could also hinder efforts to shore up Louisiana's general fund.

Senate Transportation Committee Chairman Rick Ward III, R-Port Allen, Senate sponsor of the bill, said backers took deliberate steps to reduce chances than the transfers could worsen any future state budget crisis.

"We wanted to make sure we did this in a responsible way," Ward told the Senate.

The legislation, if signed by the governor, would be the biggest ongoing revenue boost for roads since the tax was boosted by eight cents per gallon, to 16, cents, in 1984, according to state records.

"The Legislature's action today is a major milestone toward reducing the state's backlog of infrastructure needs and positions Louisiana to compete economically with the rest of the nation," said Erich Ponti, director of the Louisiana Coalition To Fix Our Roads, a group of business interests that advocate for long-term funding for roads and bridges.

HB514 also represents a breakthrough for addressing transportation needs, which has sparked years of complaints by motorists in Baton Rouge and elsewhere about daily traffic backups without any permanent solutions from the Legislature.

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+3 Louisiana getting $216M to connect New Orleans to Lafayette, other transportation projects Gov. John Bel Edwards announced Monday the state is getting $216 million in transportation aid from one of the federal stimulus bills, includi

Efforts to boost the state gas tax, which is 20 cents per gallon, repeatedly fell on deaf ears in the House and Senate despite a $14 billion backlog of road and bridge needs.

+2 How might Louisiana fix road, bridge problems? This bill is believed to be the solution While major hurdles loom, Senate leaders are behind a late-session push that backers say would go a long way toward solving Louisiana's longst

Opponents have said their constituents are unwilling to pay more at the pump.

A short-lived push to extend the state's 0.045% sales tax, which is set to expire in 2025, to boost state aid for transportation by nearly $400 million per year was shelved earlier this week amid opposition from the House Conservative Caucus and others.

Senate backs new plan to aid transportation, including new bridge in Baton Rouge The late-session drive to find new state aid for roads and bridges took a major turn Monday.

In 2019 the Legislature agreed to re-route more than $700 million the state is getting because of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which injected dollars into a handful of road and bridge projects.

But that aid was onetime compared to the transfer approved Thursday, which would raise about the same amount of money as a 10-cent-per-gallon hike in the state gas tax.

The bill was initially a simple measure to remove the state sales tax exemption from the sale of therapeutic marijuana.

However, once the measure passed the House efforts by Ward, Senate President Page Cortez, R-Lafayette, and others to rewrite the bill began, with an eye toward making a major impact on transportation.

The makeup of the negotiating committee that hammered out the final version of the bill pointed up its importance, including Cortez, Magee, Ward and House Speaker Clay Schexnayder, R-Gonzales.

The speaker said earlier that the 2021 regular session had the potential to include historic breakthroughs.

Cortez, Ward and Magee all played leading roles two years ago in the overhaul of the Deepwater Horizon money.

The money would target high-profile projects statewide, including the Baton Rouge bridge; upgrading U.S. Hwy. 90 between New Orleans and Lafayette to interstate standards and widening Interstate 12 roughly between Satsuma and the Mississippi line.

Scott Kirkpatrick, executive director of the Capitol Region Industry for Sustainable Infrastructure Solutions, said the bill would allow the Baton Rouge bridge to be built and be a "tremendous step forward."

Newly-added projects in the final version of the bill include widening Interstate 10 to eight lanes between Williams Boulevard and Veterans Boulevard in Kenner and I-10 from La. Hwy. 30 to La. Hwy. 22.

+2 First look at possible crossings for new Mississippi River bridge nearly two years away The public will get its first look at 15 possible crossings for a new bridge across the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge in the spring of 2022

Sponsors of the bill insisted that this one is more likely to have an impact than a 2008 law that called for the transfer of $400 million in motor vehicles sales revenue from the general fund to the Transportation Trust Fund.

However, that law included a provision that said the transfer would only take place when state revenue reached a certain level, which never happened.
A proposal to expand Louisiana's definition of domestic abuse to include controlling behaviors like coercion and intimidation was shelved on Thursday ahead of adjournment, spelling the end to legislation that faced unexpected opposition from the state's powerful gun lobby and religious right.

Rep. Malinda White, the chief sponsor of House Bill 159, took to the House floor Thursday morning to apologize to victims' advocates and survivors of abuse for failing to carry the bill across the finish line, vowing to refile an improved version of the legislation next year.

Law professors, family court judges and victims' advocates spent four years crafting the proposal to streamline and expand the state's definition of domestic abuse. Over the last decade, lawmakers have enacted a raft of new protections for victims of abuse, a piecemeal approach that inadvertently resulted in dozens of conflicting civil code definitions.

The definition proposed expanded domestic abuse to include some forms of non-physical, emotional abuse such as coercion, control and intimidation  but only when its used to prevent a victim from escaping a relationship or contacting law enforcement.

The legislation initially sailed through the Legislature, and after overcoming objections from the National Rifle Association, was poised to become law. But eleventh-hour opposition from religious conservatives held up its final passage, sparking an impasse that exploded into public view Wednesday.

This bill would keep guns away from domestic abusers. NRA says it goes too far Louisianas powerful gun lobby is opposing legislation that would make it easier for domestic violence victims to obtain protective orders bar

Amid a one-on-one conversation over the bill's language, White, a Bogalusa Democrat, abruptly began shouting at Rep. Alan Seabaugh. Moments earlier, the Shreveport Republican had told her she didn't understand the ripple effects of her bill. A colleague intervened to remove White from the floor.

"When I said you're not a lawyer and you don't understand, she completely lost her mind," Seabaugh said. "As she was dragged away she said either I'm going to get my gun and finish this or let me get my gun and we'll finish this."

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White said in the heat of the moment, she made comments she probably shouldn't have, but said as a survivor of domestic abuse, she was "triggered by the notion that she didn't understand the issue at-hand.

"He told me I don't know a damn thing about it  and I suffered it," White said. "Nobody's going to come tell me I don't know about that when I lived it."

+2 Lawmaker says colleague threatened him with gun violence, sidetracking domestic abuse bill Legislation that would expand Louisiana's definition of domestic abuse to include behaviors like coercion and control was temporarily sideline

Seabaugh said the language was too broad and that "people will lose their kids, they will lose their gun rights and all kinds other bad things for a bad text message, an offensive Facebook post or tweet." He also said it would open the door to requiring alimony between dating partners.

But Andrea Carroll, an LSU law professor who helped draft the legislation, said those concerns are unfounded. She noted that existing law doesn't allow for financial support between unmarried cohabitants and offered to include an amendment reiterating that fact.

Louisiana has the fifth highest rate of women murdered by men in the nation  nearly twice the national average, according to the Violence Policy Center  while homicide is among the leading causes of death for pregnant women in the state, according to researchers at Tulane and LSU.

Experts argued the language provided in the bill better reflects the realities of domestic abuse, which often begins with controlling behaviors, and would help victims obtain protective orders before their circumstances escalate to physical violence.
Louisiana's State Police are investigating whether a lawmaker's alleged threat of gun violence against a colleague on the House floor earlier this week warrants criminal charges.

Rep. Alan Seabaugh, a Shreveport Republican, said Friday he filed the complaint with law enforcement shortly after an altercation Wednesday morning with Rep. Malinda White, a Bogalusa Democrat.

Seabaugh claims White violently grabbed him by the arm, and as she was dragged off the floor by a colleague, shouted that she would "finish" their disagreement by getting her firearm. The incident brought the lower chamber to a halt and occurred amid a heated one-on-one conversation over language in domestic abuse legislation sponsored by White.

+2 Lawmaker says colleague threatened him with gun violence, sidetracking domestic abuse bill Legislation that would expand Louisiana's definition of domestic abuse to include behaviors like coercion and control was temporarily sideline

East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Hillar Moore confirmed Friday that state law enforcement are investigating the encounter. State Police are collecting statements from lawmakers who witnessed the confrontation.

White declined to comment. Following the incident, she told reporters that she likely misspoke, but said as a survivor of domestic abuse, she was set-off by the notion that she didn't understand her legislation.

Seabaugh said White is "clearly guilty" of simple battery for grabbing his arm. He also said she should be charged for threatening a public official with bodily harm, a crime that can carry a $500 fine and up to six months in prison.

"I think if a male Republican had done what she did, they would've been charged already," Seabaugh said.

Legislation expanding domestic abuse definition shelved after outburst on Louisiana's House floor A proposal to expand Louisiana's definition of domestic abuse to include controlling behaviors like coercion and intimidation was shelved on T

White apologized to her colleagues on the House floor in the aftermath of the incident. Seabaugh said she also tried to make amends with a hug on Thursday. The pair were slated to meet together with House Speaker Clay Schexnayder, though Seabaugh said White ended up meeting with leadership separately.

"While I cant comment on an ongoing investigation, the Legislature will cooperate with law enforcement in any way they request, Schexnayder, a Gonzales Republican, said in a statement. He added that his office will take appropriate disciplinary action against White after the investigation is complete.

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The day after the incident, White pulled her legislation, House Bill 159, from consideration. The measure would have expanded the definition of domestic abuse to include non-physical, emotional abuse like coercion, control and intimidation  but only when it's used to prevent a victim from escaping a relationship or contacting law enforcement.

Experts said the language proposed better reflects the realities of domestic abuse, which often begins with controlling behaviors, and would have helped victims obtain protective orders before their circumstances escalated to physical violence.

The public blow-up came moments after Seabaugh told White that she didn't understand the ramifications of her legislation. He argued the definition provided was too broad and would have opened the door to spousal support for unmarried couples, a concern family law experts said is unfounded.

"When I said, 'You're not a lawyer and you don't understand,' she completely lost her mind," Seabaugh said following the dust-up. "She grabbed me by the arm, her face was turning purple and as she was dragged away she said either 'I'm going to get my gun and finish this' or 'Let me get my gun and we'll finish this'."

White said she spent seven years in an abusive marriage when she was younger and was triggered by the assertion that she didn't understand her own legislation.

"He told me I don't know a damn thing about it  and I suffered it," White told reporters Wednesday afternoon. "Nobody's going to come tell me I don't know about that when I lived it."

White said she's already "wired up like a racehorse by nature," and was running on little sleep and steroids after dealing with an illness earlier in the week. "My father comes out of me when my mother should," she said. "My father was a fighter."

Rep. Blake Miguez, who heads up the House's GOP majority, said Schexnayder should punish White by removing her from her committee assignments for at least the next year. He said the relatively lowkey response from House leadership to her actions is dismaying, especially when compared to the sanctions placed on Chalmette Republican Rep. Ray Garofalo earlier in the session. Schexnayder ousted Garofalo as chairman of the House Education Committee weeks after making an offhand comment about the "good of slavery."

"[Schexnayder] needs to be evenhanded in his punishment," Miguez said. "She broke the law on the House floor, she threatened death to another member and she has yet to be publicly reprimanded."

Rep. Mandie Landry, a New Orleans Democrat, noted that Garofalo's removal came nearly a month after he made the controversial remarks. The current dust-up, meanwhile, occurred just days ago. She said its disingenuous to argue that White hasn't been punished considering her legislation was permanently shelved.

"To tell a member they don't understand their own legislation, and then to tell an abuse survivor that she doesn't know what she's talking about is extremely offensive and probably intended to provoke," Landry said.
Louisiana is poised to soon stop accepting the federal $300-a-week boost to jobless benefits a month early under a deal passed by lawmakers in the waning hours of the legislative session Thursday, a move that would make the state the latest to end the benefits over concerns from business groups that they are causing a worker shortage.

Lawmakers approved a bill to boost the states unemployment benefits by $28 a week starting next year. But it would only take effect if Gov. John Bel Edwards ended the states participation in the federal program by July 31, which appears likely. That program is giving thousands of laid-off workers $300 a week in addition to whatever they get from the state, which currently is a maximum of $247 a week.

If that happens, it would make Louisiana the latest in a string of states to end participation in the federal program to boost pay to jobless workers; more than two dozen GOP-led states have ended the program. The benefits have sparked a heated debate: Business groups say the benefits are too generous and are causing a worker shortage, while labor groups say businesses should pay a more livable wage if they want to attract workers.

For a long time now Louisiana has had the smallest weekly benefit in the country. And we need to do better in that. Everything is a tradeoff, Edwards said, adding that organized labor had wanted an increase in the weekly benefit for years.

Edwards expects a report soon by longtime LSU economist James Richardson on whether the states economy has recovered sufficiently to end the federal benefits. But he said Thursday evening he had always anticipated ending the benefits in early August, saying the state could end the benefits when most schools welcome students back.

"So the 31st of July is not a bad compromise," Edwards said.

The deal drew the support of the states largest business groups, and enraged some of Edwards progressive allies, including members of the Black caucus. The House voted 75-26 in favor of the legislation and the Senate voted 32-5 to send it to Edwards desk. Both chambers voted in the final hour of the session, which ended 6 p.m. Thursday.

I do believe at the end of the day that we represent many varied interests, said Rep. Chad Brown, who carried the legislation. He noted businesses in his district have complained about a worker shortage. Vote your conscience on it.

Though Brown, of Plaquemine, is a Democrat, a number of his fellow party members spoke against the bill in the House; debate was limited because of time constraints lawmakers instituted in the final hours of the session.

I just really cant believe youre doing this  turning down federal unemployment for people who just had the hardest year of their lives, said Rep. Mandie Landry, D-New Orleans. She dismissed the theory that the $300 extra was keeping the unemployed out of the workforce.

"Its based on junk science and no data," Landry said.

Sen. Jay Luneau, D-Alexandria, described the measure as a compromise that would see the state benefit increase in exchange for ending the federal payments early.

Job growth should continue this year, but federal unemployment benefit may explain stubborn unemployment Job growth in the Lafayette region and nearly every other metro in the state should exceed 3% over the coming year as economic conditions are 

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Republicans largely supported the bill after killing a previous effort to raise the states miserly state benefit by $28 a week in exchange for replenishing the states unemployment trust fund.

This bill now has what the businesses want, which is the ability to try to get workers to come back to work, said Rep. Larry Frieman, R-Abita Springs.

The increase in the unemployment benefits would only go into effect if the state ceases and does not reinstate its participation in the federal governments supplemental unemployment benefits program by July 31. That language was added in a conference committee report posted less than two hours before the mandated 6 p.m. adjournment of the 2021 session.

Its a great compromise, said Dawn McVea, head of the Louisiana chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business. This will allow the fund to stabilize, get folks back into the workforce and know what we are dealing with on true economic recovery.

Louisiana has among the lowest maximum benefits in the U.S., at $247 a week, and actually has the lowest average weekly benefit in the country, according to the Louisiana Budget Project. A host of GOP-led states have opted out of the $300 federal benefit, which comes on top of whatever the states pay.

Jan Moller, head of the Louisiana Budget Project, said the Legislature has been extremely generous to businesses, pointing to hundreds of millions of dollars already appropriated to bail out the states unemployment trust fund.

Taking away federal unemployment benefits won't help Louisiana's economy; in fact, it will do the opposite by taking away resources from people in need who would spend it in their local communities on basic necessities, Moller said. The least they could have done is let people who lost their job through no fault of their own keep the benefits that Congress appropriated.

Will Louisiana cut its $300 federal unemployment aid? Gov. John Bel Edwards says not yet Gov. John Bel Edwards said Thursday the extra $300 in weekly federal unemployment assistance going to the jobless in Louisiana wont be cut an

The Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, the states largest business lobby, had earlier this year reached a deal with the AFL-CIO and other labor groups to increase the state unemployment benefit by $28 a week. In exchange, LABI was assured the state would replenish the trust fund that pays those benefits to above $750 million. That would mean businesses wouldnt see higher taxes that automatically kick in when the fund is depleted, like it was during the pandemic.

LABI sent a note to House members Thursday voicing its support for the bill, saying it would avoid higher taxes for LA employers in the future. But the Republican-dominated House, which often aligns with LABI, voted against the proposal on a 39-60 vote. The Senate had approved the original arrangement on a 36-0 vote.

That proposal had started out as a bill by Rep. Rodney Lyons, D-Harvey, but was killed earlier this session. Senators amended Browns instrument to tack on the deal.

After the House rejected the idea again, negotiations restarted between business and labor groups, as well as Edwards office and lawmakers, ending with the compromise that passed Thursday.
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Crown Resorts will face an additional 10 weeks of scrutiny in Victorias royal commission after new evidence of potential wrongdoing cast further doubt over its suitability to hold its Melbourne casino licence.

The Victorian state government said on Friday morning it had granted a request from commissioner Ray Finkelstein for more time and funding to complete his assessment of how Crown runs its sprawling Southbank casino.

The royal commission into Crown has been extended by 10 weeks and its budget has been doubled. Credit:Chris Hopkins

The royal commission - announced in February after an inquiry in NSW found Crown was unfit to open its new Sydney casino - was originally due to report back on August 1. That has been extended to October 15 while its budget has almost doubled, from $10 million to $19.5 million.

Victorias opposition had criticised the inquirys original tight timeframe as more proof the Andrews government was beholden to the James Packer-backed $8 billion gambling giant.
Its serious, this bloody Alzheimers. I was diagnosed a couple of years ago, and its the reason Ive pretty well stopped doing any dramatic work, he says. He appears in the latest (ostensibly final) season of Jack Irish, reprising his role as Wilbur, one of the old drinking buddies at the Prince of Prussia in Fitzroy. In the original telemovies, there were three of them  Terry Norris as Eric and Ronald Falk as Norm helping prop up the bar  but Falk died in 2016, and now Eric is bedridden, so we find Wilbur sitting alone at the bar, lost in a fog of memories, bewildered by the gentrification of his old watering hole, barely grasping a word of the slang publican Stan (Damien Garvey) spouts in a bid to seem hip to his young clientele. Stan (Damien Garvey) and Wilbur (John Flaus) in the newly renovated Prince of Prussia pub in the third season of Jack Irish. Credit:ABC Its a rather grim portrait of ageing, I tell Flaus; is this how you feel, like you dont belong? I still feel like I belong, he says, and theres plenty of evidence to that effect. The day after we meet, a car is due to come and take him to Melbourne for a small role  I havent seen a script; I think its for a commercial  and at the end of the week hes due in a recording studio in nearby Chewton for a voiceover. On June 26, hes launching his second volume of poetry at the Northern Arts Hotel in town. I devised a poetic form, which is like the haiku in some respects. I call it the parallact, he explains. Its two lines, each of nine or 10 syllables, in which differing perspectives contend. Theres also a short film called Trust Frank that has played at 25 festivals in 11 countries, winning him some of the best notices  and seven acting awards  of his career.

Receipt for lunch Credit:Karl Quinn But a little later, he offers a slightly more melancholy view. I dont think there is a place for me any more, he says. Im just not reliable enough to remember stories now. Jack Irish is probably the last acting job Ill ever do. I have trouble remembering dialogue  not just the lines to speak, but the cue too, when to start speaking and when to connect with someone else. For a man who has spent his life enmeshed in words  writing on film, teaching film history to students at La Trobe University, where he helped devise the first film studies course in 1972, and at the Australian Film and Television School (later AFTRS) the following year; broadcasting and writing about movies in the media; and of course speaking other peoples dialogue  it must be very sad to feel them slipping away. It is sad, he agrees, though with no trace of heaviness. But we can talk like this, and some of these things coming back to me have been with me all my life.

Flaus loves a yarn, and his recollections take us through the streets of Vaucluse where he worked in the 1950s with a horse and cart, delivering 800 bottles of milk six mornings a week to customers who included alleged underworld figure Abe Saffron and a young actor called Coral Lansbury, the future mother of Malcolm Turnbull. Spinach, feta and rice tart with tomatoes. Credit:Simon Schluter He tells me that as a Christian Brothers scholarship boy, he dreamt of being a teacher, but was ruled out by poor eyesight, the result of a schoolyard brawl when he was just eight. The other kid bashed me head up against a brick wall and me eyes went on me and I had to have glasses, he says. He didnt even dream of acting  I never got cast in any of the school productions  until he was on the set of The American Poets Visit, a short film being made by Sydney Push figure Michael Thornhill in 1969. Flaus was there to observe; as a writer on film, he was keen to see what all those jobs in the credits amounted to. But then Thornhill barked at him to make himself useful in a party scene. But I havent got a script, demurred Flaus. You dont need a f--ing script, replied Thornhill. Get in there and speak your normal bullshit. His next screen appearance was in 1974, in a film called Yackety Yack, in which he once again effectively played himself. I like to say I behaved rather than acted, he says. The first real role came in Queensland (1976), a 52-minute film from Swinburne students John Ruane (who would later direct Death in Brunswick) and Ellery Ryan (a prolific cinematographer). They came to Flaus for help with the script; he saw similarities with his father in one of the main characters. I said, You know, I think I could play this fellow. It wouldnt have occurred to them otherwise.

For most actors in Australia, its essential to have a Plan B. For Flaus, acting was the Plan B, and a most fruitful one (hes been in everything from Neighbours to The Castle to Tracks). Teaching was the Plan A, but his various stabs at academia tended to run aground. A lifelong philosophical anarchist, his tolerance for bureaucracy was pretty low  and the feeling was mutual. A selection of salads from Togs Place, Castlemaine. Credit:Simon Schluter You can perhaps gauge just how much he loved the learning environment by how long he spent there. I dont know whos got the record for the longest undergraduate degree at Sydney University, he chortles, but I enrolled in 1953 and graduated in 1971. But its outside the academy where he made the most impact, teaching film appreciation at the Council of Adult Education, working as a script editor, mentoring young writers and directors in some capacity or other, and sharing his love and knowledge of movies on the radio and in print. Hes like the Velvet Underground of Australian screen; he may never have been a big star, but plenty of people went on to make movies because of him. As were wrapping up, I remember Paul Harris, his co-host on Film Buffs Forecast in the 1980s and 90s, had told me to ask him about his time teaching at Long Bay jail. Not teaching, Flaus corrects; he was a psychologists assistant, testing inmates for literacy and numeracy, helping them write letters if they needed help, or offering a hand with their studies.

Thats how I met Judith, he says, referring to the mother of his four children. She was a prisoner. Well, I didnt see that coming. Three wise monkeys: John Flaus, Ronald Falk and Terry Norris as Wilbur, Norm and Eric in Jack Irish. Credit:ABC They fell in love while she was inside (shed been jailed for burglary) and carried it into the outside world. But a few years after her release, by which time they had two children together, they were spotted (at the cinema, of course) by someone who recognised them from prison. So when I went to work the next day I was told to go to the governor, and that was it, I was out of a job. I got sacked. Honestly, the stories he could tell. Id love to stay and hear more, but its getting late and the Calder calls. On creaky legs, Flaus gets up and walks me to the door. This has been a good day, he says as I head to the car.
Spaniard Jaime Martin will pick up the baton as the next principal conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra after a five-year hunt to fill the position.

Martin, who has led some of the worlds best orchestras, commissioned major new works and is highly acclaimed for his career as a flautist, will visit Melbourne in August to conduct a concert series before he starts in the position in January.

He replaces Sir Andrew Davis, who ended his tenure as chief conductor after six years in 2019 and will now become conductor laureate.

Jaime Martin, new chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

The London-based conductor, 55, assumes the position as MSO tries to find its feet after a troubled year that saw relationships between the orchestra and management sour.
The answer lies further down in the story really, the actor says. It takes maybe 15 years to get to that level of experience and expertise but ... she has survived an incident in her own life [it is intimated in the opening scenes that something has happened to her child] and at the centre of that event is a secret she has never dealt with, leaving her with an oppressive guilt. She knows that it has to come out and its like Connie is witnessing and probing all these little earthquakes and you sense that there is going to be a moment when it goes off and Emma cracks. Prison interviews: Emily Watson (Dr Emma Robertson) and Denise Gough (Connie Mortensen) in Too Close. The issue of mental health has been brought dramatically to centre stage in recent months, with its reminder that no one is immune to losing their grip. Watson is keen to emphasise that even people who may be characterised as monsters are not bad people. Whats profound about this piece is that this could happen, really, to anybody  if the circumstances are right and things conspire to send us in a direction. Connie and Emma in another life would have been great friends. What I love about this story is that its two women who are emotionally very similar mirroring each others unfolding. Watson has had close members of her own family struggle with depression and is concerned that the complexity of mental illness tends to be treated with the one-stop easy fix of prescription drugs that can seem like: Diagnose your patient according to how much profit we [the pharmaceutical companies] are going to make when what it should take is an incredible amount of time, effort, patience and understanding of trauma and that really just isnt there. The plasticity of one character merging into another is something Watson knows a little about; on occasion, she has become too close herself, as it were, to the person she is playing. When you consider the roll call of her roles, and the emotional demands of the stories, it is perhaps not surprising they can sometimes take their toll.

Her breakthrough part  after years with the Royal Shakespeare Company  where she was suddenly catapulted into fame, nominated for an Oscar and Hollywood came calling (but Watson decided she wasnt in) was in controversial director Lars Von Triers Breaking the Waves in 1996. She plays a young woman living in a remote Scottish community who has sex with men at the request of her husband, who has been immobilised in an accident, and later pays the ultimate sacrifice with her life. Emily Watson in her breakthrough role in Lars von Triers film Breaking the Waves, In 1998, Watson was nominated for an Oscar again for her role as Jacqueline du Pre in Hilary and Jackie. Other stand-out roles and dramas include: Chernobyl; Appropriate Adult where she played the volunteer Janet Leach (for which she received a Bafta award) who sat in the police interviews with serial killer Fred West; Apple Tree Yard as another respectable professional, a scientist, who goes off the rails after embarking on an affair (sparked by sex in a former broom cupboard at the House of Commons after giving a presentation), and A Song for Jenny, the BBC drama about the 7/7 bombings, in which she played the vicar Juliet Nicolsons struggle to come to terms with the death of her 24-year-old daughter who was killed by a suicide bomber on a tube train at Edgware Road. It was this project that threatened momentarily to unmoor Watson. At its screening in 2015, which marked the 10th anniversary of the bombings, Watson wept on stage. Our expectations of sealed objectivity, be it of a psychiatrist or an actor, can be challenged when a persons fragile humanity erupts through the professional veneer. Watson has been open about seeking professional help to recover from immersing herself in Juliet Nicolsons turmoil. How typical was that for you? That experience was actually very extreme because of the experience of that woman, Watson says. She shared with me very intimately what her journey had been in the loss of her daughter and that she felt it was her duty to go through every single detail of the path that her daughter took to the moment of her death; to live it and breathe it and discover it and look at it in all its awful detail. It was almost as though she went to the very edge of life and looked into the abyss. Her eloquence and her intelligence really affected me.

There was one day when my body went I cant cope with this. I was physically sick and it was because it was real, very real. We were at Edgware Road tube station and people were there who had been there on the day it happened and that was quite extreme. My Dad had also died around that time so I think I just got into a bit of a mess. But I didnt actually lose anybody in a terrorist attack. Its not for me  real. Youre here and you move on and to claim trauma from that is a bit ... her voice trails away, its just a process that as an actor you put yourself through and you tread the neural pathways experiencing that. It was almost as though she went to the very edge of life and looked into the abyss. Her eloquence and her intelligence really affected me. Emily Watson on playing the mother of a bombing victim What is likeable about Watson is that while she treats her craft with the utmost seriousness  underlined by her willingness to submerge herself into her characters so that it can be hard to differentiate between them and me  she seems not to take herself too seriously. Talking on Zoom in a bland room in a city in Western Europe where she is making a film (but unable to offer any details), she appears make-up-free behind her spectacles and is engaged, thoughtful, alert and interested. Also, funny. Emily Watson in the mini-series Chernobyl with Stellan Skarsgard and Jared Harris. When Amelie was created for her (the film that made a star of Audrey Tatou), her reason for turning it down was that she didnt speak French and just had an instinctive feeling that I would make an utter tit of myself. She went to Hollywood with her agent, to discuss mouthwateringly well-paid roles but, again, declined. Part of the reason, in both instances, was not wanting to be away from her family; she and her husband Jack Waters met at the RSC, married in 1995 and live in Greenwich, London with their two children, Juliet (15), Dylan (12), and a beagle. Waters is a potter and holds the home together when his wife is filming. If she had her time over again, the actor says she would have gone to art school.

Emily Watson at the 68th Berlinale International Film Festival in 2018. Credit:Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images There were other things at play, however, that contributed to her sense of ill-ease in Hollywood: I had an overwhelming sense that I could get lost, she says. I was fearful of the whole set-up there. I didnt want to get sucked into it and I just felt that I had to hang on to my integrity because that would make me survive. This was when independent filmmaking was on the ascendant and Harvey Weinstein was king. She never experienced the criminal behavior that we know about now but you always heard stories that he would be very disrespectful and controlling with directors, like the films were his property. He didnt care about anybody and you could sense there were unhealthy power relations around. It just didnt smell right. Surviving her upbringing in what she refers to as The Organisation had its uses in that Watson developed a psychological radar that helped her see through undesirable elements in Hollywood. Because of where I was brought up, I had an intense bullshit detector that was just like an alarm bell going off: Not safe! Not safe! Not safe! Just be really careful here; pick through this very carefully. She was born into what its critics have called a cult  a quasi-spiritual-philosophical set-up named The School of Economic Science, founded in 1937, with a guru and influences from Hinduism to Gurdjieff. In 2020, nearly 1 million in compensation was paid to at least 45 former students at St James in South Kensington (attended by both Emily Watson and Clara Salaman, who have been friends since they were toddlers) after an inquiry found that pupils had been subjected to criminal levels of violence over two decades from the 1970s.

Loading Watson describes the school as quite strange and weird and a bit damaging, to be honest. Damaging to you?  Um not so much to me as to other people. In some peoples lives it has had a very long-reaching trauma. Knowing that she grew up in Islington along with her older sister, Harriet, I wondered whether their late parents  Richard, an architect; Katherine, a teacher  were the sort of left-liberal arts folk who had wanted to explore the self-enlightenment courses that were so fashionable in the late 70s and early 80s? Watson describes the school as quite strange and weird and a bit damaging, to be honest. Um, not so much to me as to other people. Emily Watson on growing up in a cultish organisation. No, no Watson says firmly.  They were much less knowing than that. People like that will drift in and also drift out again but it preys on more vulnerable people who have a need to belong somewhere. For my Dad, and possibly my Mum, as well, it gave a sense of validation and an intense sense of meaning and purpose. But my experience was that I was born into it and it took me a very long time until I got to the point that I could stand back and see it.

This wasnt until Watson had reached the age of 28 and accepted the part of poor Bess McNeill in Breaking the Waves. Yes, that was when they told me to go on my undignified way, she says. Because there was a particular way women should be? And that wasnt it. Definitely. The outlook of the place was intensely misogynistic in many, many ways and a lot of the damage, I think, comes from that. A middle-aged woman in the grip of a fierce sexual momentum: Emily Watson in Apple Tree Yard She has talked about being this character actress who gets laid but as she aged, the bed scenes stopped until Apple Tree Yard came her way with its depiction of a middle-aged woman in the grip of a fierce sexual momentum, which Watson applauded. There is an increasing awareness and discussion of the potentially empowering aspects of perimenopause as well as menopause. Has she experienced this herself? Yesss, she exhales. Im sure its a hormonal thing but also that youve reached that point in your life where youve answered a lot of the questions and you feel your authentic self in a way that maybe you havent in earlier decades. And part of that is being connected to your body and feeling sexual. How do you feel about ageing? Well, its very stark when youre an actress because you see yourself on screen and you go Oh My God!. She bursts out laughing. Between projects, you know, you go Wow! Its really happening! So you have to be very philosophical about that. Its quite healthy in a way. I ask her to describe what the kitchen would look like if she had been Zooming from home: Cluttered! Another big laugh. Theres our beagle in it and the dining room and kitchen are all in one room, with always three or four things happening at any one time: somebodys on X-box, somebody is cooking, the dog is calling for his dinner, the radios on, the footballs on  its the crucible of family chaos.

Loading Watson and Waters have recently introduced their children to the joys of vinyl records the Oxfam online vinyl collection is pretty amazing. When we first bought it, the kids kept leaning over and saying What is this magic thing? You know, in the way that we would marvel over a phone or something. She smiles as though unable to prevent herself laughing at a punchline yet to be delivered: My daughter was at home by herself and she had bought a copy of I think were alone now [the 80s version by Tiffany] in a thrift store as a vintage piece of weirdness. The record player was there and we talked her through putting it on over the phone and she said, Oh Mum, its just some old guy [Watson imitates her singing very low and slow as though drawling underwater] going Iiiiii thinnnnk werreee aloooo -----nne nowwwww and she had put it on at the wrong speed, which is absolutely priceless! Too Close premieres on BBC First on Foxtel and Fetch from June 20 at 8.30pm
Christian Porter and his defamation barrister have been ordered to pay legal costs, expected to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, after losing a court fight with a friend of the woman who accused the federal minister Mr Porter of rape.

Jo Dyer launched Federal Court proceedings against prominent defamation barrister Sue Chrysanthou, SC, in May to stop her acting for Mr Porter in his defamation case against the ABC.

Christian Porter has been ordered to pay Jo Dyers legal costs. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Ms Dyer had sought the court order on the basis that Ms Chrysanthou had previously advised her in relation to an article in The Australian that was published after she appeared in an ABC Four Corners broadcast in November last year about Mr Porter and others.

The parties disagreed about whether confidential information was imparted at a November 20 meeting between Ms Chrysanthou and Ms Dyer, which was also attended by senior Macquarie banker James Hooke, a former boyfriend of the woman who accused Mr Porter of raping her in the late 1980s when they were both teenagers. Mr Porter strenuously denies the rape allegation. The woman took her own life last year.
Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Sweaty saddle, hints of ambergris, oodles of pippy hedgerow fruits. The way wine people waffle on about what theyre tasting can seem fanciful at best  and downright off-putting to anyone whos not obsessed by the subject. Every specialised area of life, from sport to science, has its own peculiar lexicon that can seem baffling to anyone not intimately involved in that field. But seemingly made-up and often ludicrous tasting descriptors  from heady nose of exotic spices to firm, sinewy palate  can make wine talk particularly intimidating. Its just fermented grape juice, for Gods sake! Why do you wine geeks need to wrap it up in all these layers of flowery language? The answer is, its worth making an effort to understand the thinking behind wine words, to learn some jargon  even to embrace the odd silly tasting note  because it can truly enhance your enjoyment of this most fascinating subject. So, what are the rules of wine talk? How much is scientific and how much is poetry? And when should you describe your wine as funky or smashable? The ancient Egyptians enjoyed a tipple and recorded the fact in the tomb of the astronomer Nakht from about 1421BC. Credit:Getty Images Where did wine talk come from? People have been talking and writing about wine for as long as theyve been making it. Language is particularly important in the wine world because its pretty much the only way of sharing our impressions of taste and flavour with another person (interpretive dance is another option, of course, but is not commonly practised).

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When we listen to music or look at a painting we dont need to verbalise our shared experience because we can all hear it or see it out there in the world. But to let someone else know what you think of the wine youre drinking  thats in your nostrils and on your tongue  and to compare your impressions with theirs, you have to talk about it. Wine talk in the ancient world was mostly limited to distinguishing between the merits of one wine over another. Some of the amphorae of wine buried with Tutankhamun over 3000 years ago are inscribed with the simple phrase very good quality. No indication what it actually tasted like. In the first century, Pliny the Elder and others wrote about Roman wine in detail. While Plinys writing is big on technical aspects of winegrowing and is very concerned with the reputation of wines from specific regions, its short on tasting notes: he described one very old wine as having the consistency of honey with a rough flavour. Thats it. W. S. Benwell described the colour of a rose as brickish autumn russet, like the faded sail of a Venetian fishing-boat. By the 19th century, wine was being written about in slightly more evocative but still vague terms, usually by well-educated and well-travelled gentlemen with enough time on their hands to study wine, and money to spend on the best bottles. Wines were described as harmonious and health-giving, ferruginous and vigorous, all rather grand and Victorian. This gentlemanly tradition continued into the 20th century with writers such as the Australian doctor W. S. Benwell who, in the early 1960s, described the colour of a rose as brickish autumn russet, like the faded sail of a Venetian fishing-boat  presupposing his equally gentlemanly readers would be thoroughly familiar with the references.

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The burgeoning middle-class interest in wine in the 1970s and 80s gave rise to a new breed of wine writer: the popular critic. To attract readers, the language became less poetic, more prosaic  and yet more effusive. Influential US critic Robert Parker epitomised this new way of talking about wine, with descriptions of wines that were dark, dense and rich, with powerful flavours of cinnamon, leather and blackcurrants, big, tough and fat with exceptional concentration and so on. Middle-class dining in the 70s and 80s gave rise to a new type of wine writer: the popular critic. Credit:Getty Images Are there rules for describing wine today? In the mid-1980s, in an effort to bring some scientific rigour to the field, Dr Ann Noble at the University of California, Davis, developed the wine aroma wheel. This useful tool grouped wine flavours into general categories (such as fruity, woody, earthy) in an attempt to help tasters take a more analytical approach to wine appreciation. There are things to be said for both the analytical and evocative approaches to talking about wine. In each case, the trick is to balance effective communication of the qualities of the wine youre tasting with meaningful description of the experience of tasting it. The analytical approach  finding a word to describe each aspect of the wine-tasting process in order, from looking at the appearance of the wine in the glass to thinking about how long the aftertaste stays with you  is a helpful way to create a memory of what youre tasting.

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So, to describe a shiraz, say, as having medium-full colour, typically varietal aromatic nose, some high-toast oak, moderate concentration of fruit, savoury complexity, noticeable tannins and good length on the palate is correct and, to a certain extent, objective. But its a bit dull, isnt it? Much better, I think, to say bold purple in the glass, bursting with the perfume of pepper and toasty vanilla, grippy and gamey on the tongue, like well-hung venison and freshly dug truffle, deliciously satisfying. But some people might say, at this point, a wine taster is just making stuff up. How can something produced from grapes smell like pepper or vanilla  not to mention well-hung venison and truffle? Im not making it up, honest. Well, not the pepper bit. Or the toasty vanilla. (Well come back to the dead deer and fungi in a minute.) Describing a glass of riesling as smelling like spring blossom isnt just waffle. Many grape varieties  and, therefore, the wines produced from them  contain flavour compounds that are found in other foods and plants and elsewhere in nature. The shiraz grape variety, for example, contains an aromatic compound called rotundone, also found in peppercorns. So, when I describe a young shiraz as tasting peppery, I dont mean it has aromas that remind me of pepper, I mean it has aromas that are the same as pepper. Similarly, describing a glass of riesling as smelling like spring blossom isnt just waffle. Riesling grapes contain aromatic chemical compounds called monoterpenes  geraniol, nerol, linalool  which are also present in the scent of flowers. And the toasty vanilla comes from the barrels that the wine was matured in: barrels are made by bending oak staves around open flames, which chars the wood, creating heaps of complex aromatic compounds  vanillin from the wood itself, smoky flavours from the charring process  that are imparted to the wine as it sits inside the barrel.

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Ann Noble and her wine aroma wheel in 1999. Credit:Quentin Jones OK, I get all that. But what about the well-hung venison? Ah, yes, well this is where we wine people do stray into the realm of figurative language  metaphor, analogy and even, dare I say, poetry. The English language doesnt have a lot of words to directly describe the sensation of having an aromatic alcoholic liquid in our mouths, or words that help us distinguish one aromatic alcoholic liquid from another. So we are forced to use comparisons. The wine doesnt taste precisely of venison and truffles but it does elicit feelings in me when I drink that are similar to the feelings I get when I eat those foods (which would, by the way, taste great washed down with the shiraz). Take my description, too, of the tannins in the shiraz. Tannins are the astringent-tasting phenolic compounds found in grapes. They dont literally grip your tongue as you drink the wine  but using the word grippy is a good way of conveying the drying sensation of the astringency in the liquid.

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The Grand Canal broadcast union was established during the Grand Canal international communication event in Beijing's sub-center on Wednesday.

The media members of the union are from eight municipalities and provinces including Tianjin, Hebei, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shandong, Anhui, and Henan.

Domestic and international scholars and experts were invited to the event to give advice and join discussions on protecting the Grand Canal, presenting ecological beauty, and charting the future of museums about the Grand Canal.

According to the broadcast union, its media members will cover the high-quality and green development of Beijing's sub-center and the achievements of the Grand Canal's cultural campaign with videos, reports, and pictures.




A womans hands were allegedly zip-tied behind her back and her feet bound with string before she was driven to a Queensland forest and left behind by a man in a series of domestic violence offences. Detectives have charged a 25-year-old Gympie man with 14 domestic violence related offences including strangulation, deprivation of liberty and assault occasioning bodily harm following investigations into several incidents in recent weeks. On one occasion, the woman was driven up a track in Toolara Forest, her hands and feet bound, and left there. Upon being cut free a short time later, she was forced to walk alongside the car. Credit:iStock In one incident, the woman was driven to the Toolara Forest, which is almost three hours north of Brisbane in the Gympie and Fraser Coast regions, her hands zip tied behind her back and her feet bound with string, police said. The man allegedly drove off before returning a short time later, cutting the woman free, before then making her walk on a dirt track for about 1.5 kilometres.

She was allowed to re-enter the car only when another vehicle approached, police said. On another occasion, the man drove the woman back to Toolara Forest where he allegedly placed her in a headlock as she sat in the car and choked her. She was then made to get out of the car and sit on the dirt before being allowed back in the car, where she was allegedly further punched and assaulted. Police said during another incident in the Gympie area, the woman was punched in the face before being grabbed around the neck and choked in a headlock, making it difficult for her to breathe, as he continued to punch her. It will be alleged by police there were further incidents of the man contravening domestic violence orders by contacting the woman, visiting her address, verbally abusing her in public and physical assault.
Queenslands Health Minister has warned Melburnians trying to cross the border after five Victorians were found to have entered the sunshine state without an exemption.

The warning comes after a Melton couple drove from Victoria to Queensland through NSW before testing positive for coronavirus earlier this week.

Queensland Health Minister Yvette DAth. Credit:Getty

Police are yet to interview the couple but police departments spanning two states are investigating the pairs travels.

Health officials said on Friday morning genomic testing indicated the Melbourne couple may have the Kappa variant of the virus.
In normal times Madlaina believes Finn, like many adolescents navigating puberty and the transition between primary and secondary schools, may have experienced some anxiety. But not like this, she says. The severity, the extent of it, I think is a direct result of the pandemic, or the lockdowns resulting from the pandemic. She worries about the impact of this epoch-defining disaster on a generation of young people. Hopefully theyll come out the other end with a war story to tell, but I do think its going to have a long-term impact on a lot of kids in terms of their mental health. Across the globe, people are questioning what the impact of a calamity of this scale will have on what some are already dubbing Generation C - those growing up in a society profoundly altered by COVID-19.

What are the long-term effects of things like lockdowns and school closures on young people? And what lessons can we learn from the past? Modelling conducted by Orygen, the national centre for youth mental health and University of Melbourne, in May 2020 predicted an additional 82,000 young Victorians would experience mental health disorders by mid-2023 as a result of the pandemic. Unfortunately our predictions appear to have been strongly validated by the growing surge we have seen in need for mental health care for young people in recent months. And we know from all previous disasters that this crisis wont be over when the pandemic itself recedes, says Orygen executive director Professor Patrick McGorry. Our predictions are in the process of being updated by others now, but it does look like there will be a significant increase - up to a 30 per cent increase - in need for care for young people sustained over the coming months and years. McGorry says the modelling showed young people would be more severely affected, and this has now come to pass. Young people ... are naturally more fragile in their coping skills and experience of life. Theyre in a transitional stage of life, which puts them at the highest level of risk for mental ill health across the whole lifespan.

Olive spent most of her last year of primary school in lockdown. She missed out on all the year 6 milestones: camp, an excursion to Funfields Themepark, picnics and the school fair. We were really upset because it was our last year and we didnt even get to have it. Olive with her mother Simone. Credit:Jason South Olive found online learning difficult. It was really hard to pay attention in class, it was like everything would be a distraction and I didnt really get much done. This year she feels way more behind than everyone else, especially in maths and science. Since last year - even this lockdown - Ive lost a lot of motivation. And I just feel really sad and depressed a lot of the time. Olive figured this time the lockdown would be a week and she could hang out with her friends on the weekend.

But it got extended and we got really really upset. Whenever Im sad a lot of the things that makes me happy is my friend, because I dont like the feeling of being alone. And my friend is an escape from my sadness, and when I cant see them it just makes me feel worse. Olives mother, Simone, a casual relief teacher, has seen the effect lockdowns have had on children from a range of year groups, academically and socially. I was at a primary school working on the day that lockdown was announced and there were kids crying because they didnt want to be stuck at home again. Simones oldest daughter wasnt able to do work experience because of COVID-19. Little things like that that I took for granted, growing up, they havent been able to have that experience, she says. Unfortunately I feel this cohort of students going through constant lockdowns - and no one knows when this might all end given the pervasive nature of COVID - have been tragically short-changed with their education and experience of school.

In the autumn of 2020 (spring in the northern hemisphere) schools were closed in countries across the world. There has never been such a social experiment in human history, Dr Klaus Zierer, professor of education at the University of Augsburg in Germany, writes in one of the first multi-country analyses of the impact of pandemic-related school closures. In the review - published in the peer-reviewed journal Education Sciences on May 22 - Zierer analysed data from the US, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany. He found that students across all the countries had already fallen behind in learning after 6 to 8 weeks of school closures in the first lockdown. These measures resulted in a reduction in learning of between 23 and 35 per cent of a school year, which amounts to between 8 and 13 weeks of learning loss, he told The Age.

This was greater than the duration of the school closure itself, he says, because attitudes to learning had suffered, children missed out on social contact and some schools had not responded adequately when students returned to school. What should not be overlooked here is that school closures have been longer in almost all countries in the meantime, so that even greater effects can be expected, Zierer adds. But he stresses there is more at stake than just student performance. Mental disorders are on the rise in the wake of the pandemic, Zierer says, an increase in screen time has led to a reduction in physical activity and surveys showed many students had experienced a decline in motivation to learn. In the longer term, these factors are more serious than the decline in learning performance because they form the foundation for it, Zierer says. The damage caused in this way is not even visible yet.

Dr Peter Goss, who leads PwCs Australias school education consulting practice, says while it was anticipated the effect of lockdown on learning would be grim, there have been some surprises. University of Newcastle research in NSW government primary schools, for example, found only year 3 students from the least advantaged schools fell behind academically during the remote learning period. However the study found student well-being did suffer, with teachers and principals expressing concern even after the return to face-to-face schooling. Education researcher Professor John Hattie believes those concerned about a loss of learning can be reassured by what occurred after the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes, which shut schools for weeks. At the time Hattie was an adviser to the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, which oversaw senior high school exams. The authority was under pressure to give students special dispensations for exams. But Hattie advised against this based on research on the impact of teachers strikes, which showed no effects on students performance at the upper school level, with positive effects in many cases.

Sure enough, the performance of Christchurch students went up, and as schools resumed, the scores settled back down, Hattie says. Hattie attributes this to teachers focusing explicitly on what students didnt know in the lead up to their exams. Teachers move from lots of talking to lots of listening, Hattie says. Its early days yet, but Hattie is similarly sanguine about the impact of COVID-19 shutdowns. Overall the average negative effect is pretty small, he says. I think weve got to give credit to teachers for stopping major learning loss. As students return to school Hattie believes they should all be evaluated to determine how the pandemic has impacted on them: What COVID has done is shown that the social and emotional is a key part of learning and not something that we should be thinking of as a separate issue.

Sebastiano, who is in year 10, says his mental health took a massive dive towards the end of last year. He switched off at the end of term three, worried about his friends in Italy and the US, where he grew up. By the second week of term four, he had stopped doing school work completely. Year 10 student Sebastiano says his mental health took a massive dive towards the end of 2020. Credit:Jason South I missed out on a fair amount of school work as a cause of my cracking under pressure ... not too much, it could have been worse, Sebastiano says. My friends, especially those in New York, have also seen a decline in their mental health, everything seems to be magnified more. But even from a distance we often spent time sitting together in a voice chat speaking to one another doing things from video games to helping on another complete work. Now back at school and doing one VCE subject in year 10, Sebastiano believes he will recover quickly from the effects of the pandemic.

Teachers have been doing their best to organise us all and try to patch up gaps in our learning which we missed on. Its generally very chaotic. He and his friends agree they will never forget living through the pandemic. It certainly will ensure we keep our cleanliness and there will be ones throughout the younger generations who will be mentally impacted, in a sort of way, it will scar us, leaving us in a critical point of our lives. Professor Janet Clinton, the deputy dean of the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, believes most young people will be fine. Broadly children are resilient, she says. My concern is for those students who are already facing issues within their lives.

Clinton says the effect of the pandemic is exacerbated for children from violent homes, for whom school can be a safe haven, those with behavioural issues, children living in poverty, who may not have access to the internet or sufficient food, and those whose parents are unable or unwilling to assist with their school work. Loading Last year a report found 10 per cent of Victorian students from disadvantaged schools were absent during the states first period of remote learning compared to just 4 per cent in advantaged schools. If you look at the young people who are already in that vulnerable group, for some of them the probability of getting out of that vulnerable group becomes less and less, Professor Clinton says. Social worker John Chellew, the director of Bayside School Refusal Clinic, has received a massive increase in referrals of young people refusing to go to school after the lockdowns.

The children that tend to come to me are smart, creative, risk averse over-thinkers who worry a lot, Chellew says. When kids are anxious they require structure and predictable routines in their day to feel at all in control of their lives. When school is disrupted, they feel less connected, so therefore more likely to to kick back about going to school. All the research says that the longer kids have been out of school, the harder it is to get them back. On June 1, the Victorian Commission for Children and Young People began surveying how young people were feeling during the states fourth lockdown. Victorian Children's Commissioner Liana Buchanan. Credit:Justin McManus Commissioner Liana Buchanan says that of the 220 responses received so far - most of whom were aged between 13 and 16 - common themes were experiences of anxiety, feeling overwhelmed and feeling isolated.

I am trying to find the right word - it makes me deeply concerned, Ms Buchanan says. A number of them were talking about significant mental illness, about having experienced depression or self-harm last year and either experiencing that again or being fearful that theyre going to go through that again during the lockdown over the last two weeks. Buchanan is hopeful that in the future Victoria will be able to contain the community transmission of COVID-19 without blanket shutdowns of schools. What children tell us through these surveys is not going to school really increases their isolation, it increase their anxiety, for many it leaves them feeling completely disconnected from education, she says. If we can find a way to safely keep schools open, Ill be very very pleased. On Friday, the Victorian government announced an extra $9.57 million for mental health services, including funding for headspace, which provides mental health services for 12-25 year olds and services for people with eating disorders.

Loading The number and severity of eating disorders among young people surged during the pandemic, with stress, anxiety, loss of control and dislocation from friends, school and normal life all potential triggers for disordered eating. The current restrictions are in place to protect every Victorian  but we know this is a tough time and many are struggling with their mental health, said acting Premier James Merlino. In March the BMJ, a peer-reviewed journal published by the British Medical Association, published an article on the mental health of children and young people during the pandemic, noting that deterioration is clearest among families already struggling. The long-term effects also remain uncertain, it says. What we do know is that education has been disrupted and many young people now face an uncertain future.
While the body is yet to be formally identified, police believe it is that of missing woman Nina, who went missing from Simpson on Wednesday, the spokeswoman said. In the states east, Victoria SES chief officer Tim Wiebusch said the current onset of river flooding was causing real concern, with the Thompson River expected to impact Sale in coming hours. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Mr Wiebusch said emergency services were already in the process of relocating a nearby caravan park and door-knocking homes. Regardless of COVID restrictions, if you do find yourself presented with an emergency warning or asked to evacuate you can absolutely leave your home to move to a safer location, he said.

Loading On the outskirts of Melbourne, the upper reaches of the Yarra River are expected to see moderate flooding with the Healesville-Yarra Glen Road closed on Friday. The racecourse and 20 properties there are expected to come under threat, Mr Wiebusch said. On the outskirts of Melbourne, the Healesville-Yarra Glen Road was closed on Friday and the racecourse and 20 properties were expected to come under threat, Mr Wiebusch said. Flood warnings were downgraded to moderate on Friday evening but a major warning was still in force for Traralgon Creek. Mr Wiebusch said there had been 42 flood rescues in the past 24 hours.

I cant emphasise enough to never attempt to drive through flash floodwaters, he said. It could be the last decision you make. The biggest challenge now, Mr Wiebusch said, was the Traralgon community because while the river was receding and the Princes Highway reopening, more rain was forecast. An aerial view of flooding in the township of Traralgon in Gippsland. Credit:Blake Bourne Senior meteorologist at the Bureau of Meteorology Dean Narramore said its been a tough few days for southern parts of Victoria, including Gippsland and, unfortunately, theres a lot more rain and wind to come. People could be waking up once again to flooded homes and communities in the early hours of Saturday morning.

He said people living in areas surrounding Traralgon, Yarra Glen and Sale should keep an eye out for emergency warnings and evacuation messages. Although wind gusts wont be as strong as Wednesday night, when they topped 100km/h, Mr Narramore said strong winds could cause more trees to fall on Friday night. We could still see winds gusting 50km/h to 60km/h. Soils are already saturated so trees are really vulnerable, he said. The rain is expected to ease around lunchtime on Saturday, allowing people to begin clearing up the debris.

Mr Narramore said rain would fall in Melbourne across the weekend but flooding wont be a concern. Only minor flooding is expected through the metro area of Melbourne, to the inner suburbs into the CBD, he said. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video In Traralgon, 30 homes have already been affected by floodwaters alongside homes in the Hazlewood and Maffra areas. Mantra Traralgon general manager Andrew McDonald spoke of a waterfall of water pouring into the hotels underground car park on Thursday morning.

It was scary how fast it happened, he said. In a matter of 15 minutes, the water had flooded the bottom and was far enough into the upper basement car park that people couldnt access their cars. The car park was still inaccessible on Thursday night at the hotel, which opened in January. Floodwaters in Traralgon on Thursday. Credit:Nine News I was talking to the SES guys and they thought this was a one-in-80-year, one-in-100-year flood. Its unprecedented, Mr McDonald said. As of Friday morning, Mr Wiebusch said 121,000 homes remained without power and there were major efforts under way to restore phone and NBN services still down across parts of the AusNet network.

Loading Were getting generators into sites but access has been difficult, he said. The lack of power has stopped some schools reopening to students as coronavirus restrictions eased throughout the state on Friday. Warrandyte High School and Andersons Creek Primary School were both closed. The schools posted messages on their Facebook pages on Thursday night, saying they hoped to have electricity back on by Tuesday when students returned from the Queens Birthday long weekend. Lilydale High School principal Wendy Powson arrived at the school on Thursday to find it had no power and was strewn with fallen trees, including one which fell on a toilet block.

Everyone moved very quickly and did really well. Theres just a big clean up going on now, Ms Powson said. Residents of Trentham are still being advised on Friday not to drink tap water because the storm had affected access to a water treatment plant and a burst water main. Emergency crews rescue a woman in Olinda on Thursday. Credit:Joe Armao Two people have lost their lives in floodwaters in the past 24 hours. A Victoria Police spokeswoman said search and rescue officers located a body, believed to be that of missing 20-year-old woman Nina Barake, in floodwaters about 10.40am. Ms Barake was last seen leaving her home in nearby Simpson in a white ute with her dogs on Wednesday.

On Thursday afternoon, a rescue team recovered 69-year-old Brian Gillilands body in the South Gippsland town of Woodside, about 70 kilometres from Traralgon. Gippsland flood victim Brian Gilliland Credit:Nine News Members of the public reported a vehicle almost submerged in floodwaters. The family of the father-of-four told Nine News he was the kind of guy who would lend a hand and expected nothing back. Mr Merlino urged residents in flood-affected areas to pay attention to any warnings. It was quite extraordinary leaving home and driving through the Dandenongs this morning. Just massive trees across homes across the roads, Mr Merlino said.
More than 91,000 people aged 30 to 49 in Western Australia have registered for the Pfizer vaccine but a gap of about 26,000 have yet to make an appointment with not all rollout centres fully equipped yet, especially in the regions.

In the meantime, 65,000 people have booked into the four metro clinics, where there are plenty of available appointments according to the Department of Health, yet Claremont Showgrounds online bookings have already blown out until the end of July.

Clinical staff draw up COVID-19 vaccines at the Claremont Showgrounds. Credit:Paul Kane

Premier Mark McGowan heralded it as terrific news, since vaccination is the key to our states success, while Health Minister Roger Cook said 1300 were expected to get vaccinated at Claremont on Thursday.

And well be opening up the Kwinana, Joondalup and Redcliffe clinics to the Pfizer vaccine in the near future, Mr Cook said.
Australia will donate 20 million doses of locally made AstraZeneca vaccines to Asian and Pacific nations as part of a global plan to deliver one billion doses to nations seeking urgent help confronting the pandemic.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who arrived in Britain on Friday for the G7 summit, pledged the minute he landed in Britain that Australia would ship desperately needed doses to countries across the region, countering Chinese efforts to use vaccine exports to build its influence in the Pacific.

Australia will be doing its part, as we already have been, committing some 20 million doses as part of that effort here at the G7 Plus in Cornwall, Mr Morrison said.

These 20 million doses will go support our region to ensure that we continue to exercise our responsibility as part of a broader global responsibility to combat this virus.
Leading figures within Labors Right faction have called on the party to reconsider its criticism of the federal governments handling of Australias relationship with China, use the United Nations to pressure Beijing on human rights and promise to seek greater trade alliances with India and Korea.

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese has sharpened his criticism of the Morrison government in recent times as diplomatic relations between Canberra and Beijing have reached their lowest levels in decades.

Australia Workers Union official Misha Zelinsky says Australians expect their politicians to be honest with them about challenges facing the country. Credit:Robert Peet

China has imposed more than $20 billion of tariffs in response to various Australian moves including calling for a global inquiry into the origins of COVID-19 and banning Chinese telecom giant Huawei from its 5G rollout.

But in a column for the upcoming edition of the Labor-aligned John Curtin Research Centres flagship publication The Tocsin, Misha Zelinsky, the assistant national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, warns while it makes political sense to blame the Liberals for mishandling a critical bilateral relationship, it may be counterproductive to winning government.
A political clash on national security could end within days under a Labor offer to pass new federal laws to give police more power to ban aviation workers who fail criminal intelligence checks.

Labor is willing to pass the aviation security measures when they go to the Senate on Tuesday after federal agencies warned this week existing laws were not strong enough to weed out airport workers with links to organised crime.

Labors home affairs spokeswoman, Kristina Keneally, wrote to the PM on Friday to offer a compromise that could pass the aviation security changes while negotiating a separate bill to cover shipping and ports. Credit:Rhett Wyman

But Labor will hold out against similar changes for workers at Australian ports in a bid to broaden the powers to include foreign shipping crews, claiming there is a gaping hole in the government proposal.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison sparked a dispute with Labor on Tuesday by claiming the opposition was holding up three security bills, signalling a political fight at the next election on law and order.
It has been a very long journey for Nades and Priya Murugappan. Originally from Sri Lanka, they came separately by boat in 2012 and 2013. Both claimed asylum on the basis of their links to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, which had fought a long and bloody war against the Sri Lankan government.

Their claims took so long to wind their way through the courts and tribunals that Priya and Nades met, married, and were allowed to settle in the town of Biloela, Queensland, where they had two children, Kopika and Tharunicaa.

Priya Murugappan with her daughter Tharunicaa in Perth Childrens Hospital.

Their freedom came to an end in 2018 after all their appeals for asylum were rejected and they were forcibly detained in Melbourne. The following year, the Coalition government put them on a plane back to Sri Lanka but was thwarted mid-flight by an injunction in court. After landing in Darwin, the family was sent to Christmas Island to be detained.

Since their detention as illegal arrivals, the plight of the Sri Lankan couple and their Australian-born daughters has been a cause celebre. Not only do the usual advocates who oppose the Coalitions tough border policies want them to be allowed to stay, but so do former Sydney radio shock jock Alan Jones and the former National Party leader Barnaby Joyce.
The privatised rollout of vaccines to the nations 2500 aged care homes has proved far more difficult than originally envisaged by Aged Care Minister Greg Hunt, his junior minister Richard Colbeck and the federal Health Department earlier this year. In February, a joint press release from Mr Hunt and Mr Colbeck declared vaccines would go to aged care homes within about six weeks from the start of the program. This would have seen the program completed in early April. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Figures tabled in the Senate last week show that by the start of June, of 44,333 Victorian residents in aged care, 27,294 were fully vaccinated. The operator of one private chain, who asked that his group of centres not be named because he feared it would affect its relationship with the federal government, said Aspen had visited its homes to vaccinate residents.

Loading By the time they came the second time, we had new admissions  so Aspen couldnt do them. Other people just werent there on the day. No one has thought this through. TLC in April announced its 1500 residents and 2000 staff had been fully vaccinated. Mr Pascuzzi said his company had anticipated delays in the government vaccination rollout across aged care, so went to Canberra and got permission to vaccinate its own residents and staff. He said TLCs working relationship with the Health Department, developed during the months it vaccinated its residents and workers, had helped it secure the contract to help immunise people in other homes this week.

Mr Pascuzzi said too often aged care operators happily accepted federal funding to house and care for residents, but tried to avoid blame when things went wrong. The executives and boards of the aged care industry in Australia have sat back and expected the government to spoon-feed them. Their lack of traction on the COVID-19 vaccination rollout is a perfect example of why that approach is not acceptable or sustainable, he said. He said vaccinating residents and staff was solely the responsibility of the aged care providers who have a duty of care. Mr Pascuzzi said the vaccine rollout had been overseen by the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee and blame for what had gone wrong in aged care needed to be sheeted home to this group, not the government.

But Labors aged care spokeswoman Clare ONeil said the addition of another contractor to visit homes in Victoria tells us everything about how this government prioritises looking after our elderly. Loading The vaccine rollout in aged care has been a joke, she said. Vaccinating aged care residents was always going to be complex and difficult. Thinking this was going to be seamlessly done with two visits is and always was nonsensical. Why is this contract just being signed now? A spokesman for Mr Hunt said the Commonwealth had now completed first doses in 100 per cent of aged care homes around Australia, and that this new contract was to provide extra opportunities for residents who declined, were unable due to illness or other circumstance or for whom consent was not given during previous vaccination rounds. There were also instances where residents could not be vaccinated due to illness, or were away for a medical appointment or with family, he said. Residents are permitted to leave the facility and are not bound to attend the vaccinations, although it is highly encouraged.

Aspen Medical was contacted for comment but did not respond. A spokeswoman for Healthcare Australia said it had completed all vaccinations assigned to it in Victoria under the departments allocated schedules. Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation state secretary Lisa Fitzpatrick said it was extraordinary the Morrison government was getting yet another private contractor onboard. I find it extraordinary the lengths that the Commonwealth will go to in order to cover their mistakes, she said But the main aim is to get people vaccinated, and it is a race.
London: The first in-person meeting of world leaders since the coronavirus pandemic has been disrupted by a heavy fog which has blanketed the summit site and prevented some world leaders from landing.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison was one of several key leaders to have their travel delayed because the airport had been temporarily deemed too dangerous.

He was forced to land at the RAF base of Brize Norton, west of Oxford - a five-hour drive from the G7 event in the seaside town of Carbis Bay in south-west England.

Prime Minister Scott Morrisons plane had to land near Oxford, a four-hour drive from the Cornwall resort hosting the summit.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson selected the Cornwall site to showcase the regions natural beauty and warm temperatures over summer but a thick fog rolled across the region on Thursday afternoon local-time.
Washington: During the Democratic Party presidential primaries in 2019, Joe Biden described British Prime Minister Boris Johnson as a physical and emotional clone of Donald Trump.

Given Biden was positioning himself as the soothing, well-qualified yin to Trumps disruptive and inexperienced yang, he didnt mean it as a compliment.

Biden was reflecting the widespread view in America that Johnson was essentially a transatlantic carbon copy of Trump. This was always an oversimplified caricature, but its one Trump himself embraced and promoted.

US President Joe Biden held his first overseas meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Cornwall. Credit:AP

In Johnson - a leading proponent of Brexit - Trump saw a fellow charismatic right-wing populist who was sticking it to the left-wing global elites.
The Cheyenne Police Department (CPD) hired and swore in Teralyn Alarid, Mariah Bolkovatz, and Daniel van Swearingen as Cheyenne Police Officers, Monday, June 7, at the Public Safety Center.

The new officers will now attend the Wyoming Law Enforcement Academy located in Douglas.

Officers Bolkovatz and Alarid are both natives of Cheyenne, and they each express a strong desire to give back to their hometown.

"I have wanted to be a police officer since I was very young, Officer Bolkovatz said. "I have been very fortunate and blessed to grow up in a community where I felt safe and supported. Now, I want to be that person that supports and makes others feel safe."

Officer van Swearingen relocated to Wyoming from Alaska, where he was a teacher for eight years.

"I have wanted to make the career change to becoming a police officer for about five years now," Officer van Swearingen said. "I really like the idea of protecting and serving the citizens of Cheyenne."

The CPD's mission is "Protecting the Legend" by working in cooperation with Cheyenne's citizens to lead the charge in preventing crime and defending the community's rights. These recruits will be tasked with serving and protecting Wyoming's capital and its largest city in their new roles.

City officials, officers, members of the department, and family members attended the swearing-in ceremony and wished the new officers the best of luck and success in their new careers.

"These officers are the future of our organization," Chief of Police Mark Francisco said. "We are proud to welcome this next generation of leaders and appreciate their commitment to the police department and the community
Habitat for Humanity, the organization known for building homes for low income people, has a new home of its own in Cheyenne. Habitats ReStore held a grand opening on Saturday, June 5, at its new location at 715 East 15th Street.

We were bursting at the seams at our Ames Street Store, said Kate Wright, Executive Director of Habitat for Humanity of Laramie County.

We couldnt take in any additional donations, she added. The new store has much more space, and is also on one level, making it easier for customers to shop.

Judy Owens came to the grand opening and left with a sofa and a recliner. She moved a few months ago, and was looking for new furniture.

I didnt want to spend hundreds of dollars, not when I could get one for $50. Owens said she paid $50 for the sofa and $35 for the recliner.

Local non-profit organizations set up tables inside the ReStore as part of the grand opening. They included Family Promise, Enroll Wyoming, Equal Justice Wyoming, Meals on Wheels, the Boys and Girls Club, Day of Giving, Grace for 2 Brothers, Cheyenne Regional Medical Center, K9s 4 Mobility, CASA of Laramie County, and Needs, Inc.

We are out here today to spread the word about Family Promise of Cheyenne and our goal is to help families that are struggling to find affordable housing, said Rachel Martinez, Executive Director of Family Promise.

Money raised through the sale of items donated to Habitat for Humanity goes to build homes in the community.

The main purpose of the Restore is to support Habitat for Humanity builds. All of the proceeds here go to paying staff, go to paying the essential bills, and whats left over goes to pay for our homebuilding program, our repairs program, added Christopher Jounos, store manager.

Habitat completed its 50th home in Laramie County last year. A new home is under construction at 603 East 7th Street.

This year were doing our very first veterans home, building a home for Thomas Redding, a Navy veteran, Wright said.

Habitat offers free pickups for donated items. The organization is also launching a program called Habitat in the Neighborhood. Habitat will park a truck in a different Cheyenne neighborhood once a month, and neighbors can bring donations to the truck instead of the ReStore.

The ReStore hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 9 AM to 5:30 PM.
Vials labelled "AstraZeneca COVID-19 Coronavirus Vaccine" and a syringe are seen in front of a displayed AstraZeneca logo in this illustration taken March 10, 2021. (Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters)

272 Deaths After COVID Jab: Australian Drug Regulatory Body

The Australian Therapeutics Goods Association (TGA) has said it had received 272 reports of death after receiving COVID-19 vaccinations, noting that many were elderly and had symptoms from other illnesses.

The statement comes after revelations a 52-year-old woman in New South Wales died after blood clotting in her brain, which was linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine.

According to the TGA, between May 31 and Jun. 6, the drug administrator reviewed 2,198 reports regarding adverse events following immunisation (AEFI).

The reports found that to June 6, 2021, 272 people had died following the administering of a COVID-19 vaccine.

By chance, some people will experience new illnesses or die from a pre-existing condition shortly after vaccination, especially if they are elderly, the TGA said in a statement.

We review all deaths reported after vaccination and compare the expected natural death rates in a similar case group to observed death rates following immunisation to distinguish between possible side effects of the vaccines and coincidental events, it continued.

For reports of death other than thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS also known as blood-clotting), our review of cases and analysis of reporting patterns does not suggest that the vaccine caused these deaths.

So far, Australians have received 5.5 million doses of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines.

Speaking after the death of the 52-year-old woman, Australian Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly said that his heart goes out to the family and friends and colleagues of this particular person. These events remain of concern, and we are looking at them very closely. We learn from each of these, including this unfortunate event in New South Wales.

I will point out that its only the second death with now over 3.6 million doses of this vaccine being given across Australia, he told reporters.

So far, Australia has recorded 48 confirmed cases of TTSwhich under UK definitions would come to 35while an additional 13 cases were probable.

Two have died in hospital, while 15 remain hospitalised including one in intensive care. The other 31 patients have been discharged and are recovering.

Kelly also noted that the expert group on immunisation had met again and made a risk-benefit analysis in relation to AstraZeneca that it was still a good choice for people over 50.

And for under-50, the Pfizer vaccine currently is preferred. There is definitely a much lower risk of this event, these clotting events, the older one gets, he said.

Pfizer Side Effects Also Being Investigated

The TGA also noted that they were investigating reports from Israel and the U.S. linking the Pfizer or Comirnaty vaccination to incidents of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the membrane around the heart) which have been reported after receiving the Pfizer vaccine.

The United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration said they had received 800 reports of patients complaining of heart inflammation symptoms after receiving the Pfizer of Moderna vaccines.

The TGA noted that to 6 June 2021, nine cases of pericarditis and one case of myocarditis following vaccination had been reported to the TGA.

However, they note that there is no indication at present that these cases are due to the vaccine, but the TGA is collaborating with international medicine regulators on this issue.
This screenshot shows Syrian and Russian attacks on Syria's Idlib that kill civilians and rebels in a spike in violence, Syria, in June 2021. (Reuters/Screenshot via Epoch Times)

Air Raids in Rebel-Held Syria Said to Kill at Least 10

AMMANAt least 10 people were killed in Syrian army artillery attacks and Russian air raids this week in a spike in bombardments in the last major area of the country still in rebel hands, witnesses and civil defense officials said.

They said seven civilians including a woman and a child were killed when their home in the village of Ibleen in the mountainous Jabal al-Zawya region in southern Idlib came under fire from Syrian army outposts.

At least four other rebels were killed when their convoy was hit by a Russian jet when they approached the village to rescue survivors, two civil defense workers told Reuters.

Syrias northwest corner is the scene of sporadic violence but has not seen a resumption of widespread bombing since a deal last year ended a Russian-backed air campaign that displaced over a million people.

Mohammed Rasheed, a former rebel official, and a volunteer aircraft spotter, said their network which covers the Russian airbase in the coastal province of Latakia observed at least six Russian raids on villages in Jabal al Zawya.

There has been an escalation in the last few days of artillery rockets and long-range missiles, Rasheed added.

There was no immediate comment from Moscow or the Syrian army, which have accused militant groups in the region of wrecking the ceasefire deal and attacking army-held areas.
Arizona AG Mark Brnovich Launches Bid for Senate Seat

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, announced his bid for the U.S. Senate on Thursday, portraying himself as a trusted and proven leader who would fight for secure borders, oppose defunding the police, and defend civil liberties.

Brnovich, who has served as the states top prosecutor since 2015, said in a June 10 campaign video that mistrust runs deep among voters because they have entrusted elected officials to protect us and our freedoms, and they failed, with the barb apparently aimed at Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), whose image serves as the backdrop for that fragment of the video.

Our very freedomsfrom the Second Amendment to Life to practicing our faithare at stake, he said in a statement. Mark Kelly would rather hide in a corner waiting for orders from Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi than lead for Arizona.

The son of immigrants who fled communism in the former Yugoslavia, Brnovich said in the video he has dedicated his career to upholding the rule of law and fighting for justice, while touting his record of pushing back against government overreach, tackling crony capitalism, and standing up against woke corporations and boardrooms that try to tell us how to live our lives while shipping jobs overseas.

With the announcement, Brnovich becomes the third Republican to throw his hat into the Republican primary race, alongside Michael McGuire, a former adjutant general of the Arizona National Guard, and solar-business executive Jim Lamon.

Trust and freedom arent just buzz words for me, Brnovich said in a statement. Every day, I fight on behalf of Arizonans, going toe-to-toe with elected officials, bureaucrats, agencies, and corporations. Ive spent my career taking on the hard fights, he added.

Brnovich has been among the Republican attorneys who have mounted high-profile legal fights involving border security and election integrity. His office has been part of lawsuits challenging the Biden administrations pause on deportations and opposing the rollback of Trump-era immigration policies.

We have a crisis at the border, Brnovich said in the statement. Arizonans want safety and security for their families, says a policy note on his campaign website. Ensuring that is one of the responsibilities of government, but one our elected officials routinely ignore, choosing instead to politicize our safety with politically motivated calls for open borders and the defunding of police. Enough is enough.

The winner of the GOP primary will face Kelly in the 2022 general election, where Republicans hope to flip the seat back to red after consecutive losses to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) in 2018 and Kelly in 2020.
Attorney General Merrick Garland delivers remarks on voting rights at the Department of Justice in Washington on June 11, 2021. (Tom Brenner/Pool via Reuters)

Attorney General: DOJ to Focus on Ensuring Voting Access, Scrutinizing Audits

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is doubling the number of lawyers in its Civil Rights Division with the aim of making sure Americans right to vote is protected, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Friday.

Lawyers will utilize provisions in the Voting Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act, the Help America Vote Act, and the Uniformed And Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act to ensure that we protect every qualified American seeking to participate in our democracy, Garland said during a policy address in Washington.

We are scrutinizing new laws that seek to curb voter access and where we see violations we will not hesitate to act, he said. We are also scrutinizing current laws and practices in order to determine whether they discredit against black voters and other voters of color. Particularly concerning with in this regard are several studies showing that in some jurisdictions nonwhite voters must wait in line substantially longer than white voters to cast their ballots.

The DOJ will apply the same scrutiny to post-election audits, according to Garland, to make sure the election reviews fall in line with federal laws meant to protect records and guard against voter intimidation.

Garland referenced the audit taking place in Maricopa County, Arizona, on the orders of the Republican-controlled Senate in the state, noting that the DOJ previously sent a letter to Arizona Senate President Karen Fann expressing concern about the review. Fann said in a response letter that the audit was secure and that a previous plan to canvass some voters was on hold indefinitely. The attempted intervention lacked constitutional authority, experts told The Epoch Times.

Fann told The Epoch Times in an email that Garlands remarks did not surprise her.

The Democrats have been trying every avenue they can to stop or discredit this audit. Im sure this will be one of many avenues they will pursue post audit as well. What disturbs me more than anything is the fact that according to recent polls, 40 to 50 percent of voters believe there are serious problems or serious fraud in our electoral system and none of these entities think its important enough for them to do an audit to answer all of our citizens concerns or questions, she wrote.

The DOJ in the coming days plans to publish guidance outlining laws that apply to the audits along with guidance with respect to early voting and voting by mail. It will also promote access to voting by assisting other agencies in expanding voter registration opportunities, push Congress to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and partner with other agencies to combat election disinformation that intentionally tries to suppress the vote, Garland said, warning against people who are considering issuing threats against election workers.

Garland took no questions after his address.

Republicans in over a dozen states this year, including Georgia and Arizona, have passed laws aimed at bolstering election integrity, with measures such as requiring voter identification and mandating stricter regulations for voter rolls.

GOP lawmakers and governors say the laws will prevent fraud and help ensure only qualified voters vote.

Democrats say that the laws will cut down on voting access and that voting fraud occurrences are rare.

Workers examine ballots cast in Maricopa County in the 2020 election during an audit at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Ariz., on May 6, 2021. (Matt York/AP Photo)

A poll worker talks to a voter before they vote on a paper ballot on Election Day in Atlanta, Ga., on Nov. 3, 2020. (Brynn Anderson/AP Photo)

Democrats quickly weighed in on Garlands announcement.

In April, my colleagues and I called on AG Garland to investigate the recent attacks on voting rights. Doubling the @CivilRights division shows us he sees whats happening around the country and is serious about protecting voting rights, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.) said in a tweet.

This is great news coming from Attorney General Garland. At a time when the right to vote is under attack by Republicans, we enacted stronger protections in Virginia and it is great to see those protections being expanded on the federal level, added Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Brennan Center also said they supported Garlands plans.

But Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, told The Epoch Times via email that Garlands claims about voting discrimination are demonstrably false.

There is less discrimination today in voting than at any time in our history; it has become a very rare event that can be easily remedied under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In fact, recent elections have seen record levels of registration and turnout. Garland demonstrated that he has no idea what he is talking about when he criticized recent election reforms passed by state legislatures to fix the vulnerabilities that exist in our election system. They are not discriminatory and, contrary to his misrepresentations, protect the fairness and integrity of the election process for all voters, Spakovsky added.

His vow to double the staff of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division when there is so little actual discrimination is an absurd waste of taxpayer money, a partisan public relations ploy that has no justification.
Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison (L) and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong shake hands at the Istana Presidential Palace in Singapore on June 7, 2019. (Wallace Woon/AFP via Getty Images)

Australia and Singapore to Create New Travel Bubble

Australia and Singapore have agreed to build a quarantine-free travel bubble between the two countries similar to Australias pre-existing one with New Zealand.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison met with Singapore leader Lee Hsien Loong on Thursday on his way to the G7 summit to be held in Cornwall, U.K. The two PMs committed to resuming two-way cross-border travel when the public health situation in both countries permits, according to a joint statement.

There is still some time before we reach that milestone, Morrison told reporters in Singapore.

But there is nothing impeding us getting on with the job of putting systems in place that will enable such a bubble to emerge between Singapore and Australia.

Defence Minister Peter Dutton said he hoped the travel bubble can open as soon as possible.

Its not going to happen tomorrow, but lets work toward it as quickly as we can, he told the Nine News on Friday.

Dutton said students of Singapore will be prioritized to return to Australia once the travel bubble is built.

Thats a big industry for Australia, he said. International student numbers have dried up so to see that start again will be important and there are many Australian jobs that hang off that industry.

However, the Singaporean prime minister suggested that the travel bubble would not be built before most people in both countries receive vaccines.

Lee said at the joint media conference that the bubble would need mutual recognition of vaccine certificates to start.

When ready then we can start small with an air travel bubble to build confidence on both sides, he said.

So far, Australia has administered about 5.4 million vaccines, lagging behind Singapore, which has less than half of the 4.7 million-strong adult population been fully vaccinated.

The leaders signed a new memorandum of understanding on health and health technologies, agreeing to establish a $30 million partnership to accelerate the deployment of low emission fuels and clean technologies to reduce emissions in maritime and port operations.

The two parties also shared their concerns on the station in Myanmar and agreed that ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) could play a significant role in facilitating a peaceful solution for the country.

AAP contributed to this report.
Pro-democracy signs seen near Victoria Park in Hong Kong on June 4, 2020. (Isaac Lawrence/AFP via Getty Images)

Beijing Uses National Security Law to Drastically Curtail Hong Kong Freedoms: UK Report

The Chinese regime has been using the National Security Law to drastically curtail the freedom of expression, the UK government said in its latest six-monthly report on the situation in the former British colony.

In a foreword in the report, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said: China has broken its legal obligations by undermining Hong Kongs high degree of autonomy, rights, and freedoms, which are guaranteed under the Joint Declaration.

Britains Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab gestures during an interview with Reuters on the sidelines of G7 summit in Carbis Bay, Cornwall, Britain, on June 11, 2021. (Toby Melville/Reuters)

In March, the UK government declared the Chinese regime to be in a state of ongoing non-compliance with the Sino-British Joint Declaration, signed by then Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that guaranteed wide-ranging freedoms for Hong Kong for at least 50 years.

Of particular concern has been the draconian National Security Law imposed by the Chinese regime on Hong Kong in June 2020, which criminalizes individuals for any acts of subversion, secession, and collusion with foreign forces against the Chinese Communist Party, with a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

Raab said in the foreword: The National Security Law is not being used for its original purpose, as stated by Beijing, to target just a tiny number of criminals who seriously endanger national security.

Rather it has been used to drastically curtail the space for the expression of alternative political views and deter freedom of expression and legitimate political debate.

We are now seeing the effects of a law with loosely defined provisions, backed up with the threat of potentially long jail sentences and transfer of cases to mainland China for prosecution and sentencing.

Raab said the situation has been deeply concerning but the UK has stood up for its values and for the people of Hong Kong.

In January, Britain launched a new visa scheme for British National (Overseas) status holders, which allows them to live, study, and work in the UK for five years and eventually apply for citizenship.

There were 34,000 applications from Hong Kong residents to live in Britain in the first three months of the year, according to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford.

At a routine press briefing in Beijing, Chinas Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin condemned the British report, which he said was full of ideological bias.

He said the National Security Law had helped Hong Kong regain stability and return to the right track.

Wang urged the UK to let go of its old colonial dream and stop meddling in Chinas domestic affairs including Hong Kong affairs.
Beijings Ever-Watchful Eye on Overseas Dissidents

It was a bone-chilling moment for Eve Zhan when her son in China told her he had just been shown a video of her participating in a community event in Sydney.

Her son described the video to her, saying it showed Zhan handing out flyers in a plaza around September 2018.

I thought about when those videos were made and believe I was at Martin Place (in the CBD), she told The Epoch Times in Mandarin.

Like many Falun Gong meditation group members, Zhan has been a target of monitoring and intimidation from Beijing.

Last year, the Australian government issued repeated warnings about interference from foreign governments in its domestic affairs.

Melbournes Chinatown on August 13, 2020. (William West/AFP via Getty Images)

Members of our diverse communities have been both victims of interference and used as vectors to engage in foreign interference, Then-Acting Immigration Minister Alan Tudge told the National Press Club.

Despite now being proud Australians, some communities are still seen by their former home countries as their diasporato be harassed or exploited to further the national cause, he added.

Evidence of Endangering National Security

The video was supplied to her son as part of an ongoing legal dispute involving Zhans family and Chinese authorities.

According to Zhan, the Peoples Procuratorateakin to a public prosecutor in the Westwas attempting to prove she was endangering national security.

However, the law is applied broadly to encapsulate a wide range of activities including those who raise awareness of the Chinese Communist Partys (CCP) human rights or democratic abuses, or to those who practice Falun Gong.

Falun Gong is a traditional exercise practice that originated in China. People who practice the system try to live their life according to the core principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.

Eve Zhan (alias) folding origami lotus flowers. (The Epoch Times)

Being found guilty of endangering national security attracts penalties such as death or confiscation of property, according to Article 113 of the Criminal Code of the Peoples Republic of China (pdf).

Zhan, now in her 60s, alleges the video evidence shown to her son was used to prove she practiced Falun Gong, and in turn, was a risk to the security of the CCP.

Details of the case and Zhans real name are being withheld due to safety concerns.

Chinas Extensive Falun Gong Blacklist

Falun Gong, with its meditation practice that encompassed both Buddhism and Daoism, spread widely in China during the 1990s, growing to over 100 million adherents.

However, in July 1999, former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin launched a nationwide persecution on the practicedespite protests from fellow Politburo membersdeclaring that the CCP would ruin their reputations, bankrupt them financially, and destroy them physically.

As a result, millions of Falun Gong adherents became victims of the persecution, with many imprisoned, tortured, and compelled to renounce their faith. Family members were also targeted and encouraged to pressure adherents to quit the practice.

But the persecution did not just stay in China. It was exported around the world, including to Australia.

Prior to 2001, the Chinese Consulate-General collected a list of about 800 Falun Gong practitioners names. We called it the blacklist. Almost all the Falun Gong practitioners in Sydney are on the list, Chen Yonglin, a former Sydney-based Chinese diplomat, said not long after declaring his defection from the CCP in 2005.

This way, this person would be part of a larger list and would not be allowed to enter China anymore, he added.

Chen Yonglin, a former Chinese diplomat who defected to Australia in 2005, speaks at a Sydney rally in 2015. Chen says that CSSAs is supported by the Chinese regime and used to control and spy on Chinese students and scholars outside China. (Shar Adams/The Epoch Times)

Chen famously claimed the CCP had over 1,000 spies implanted throughout Australian society. Many were casual informants occasionally providing intelligence to Beijing.

The main mission for CCP spies is to monitor the activities of groups who oppose the CCP, especially pro-democracy activists, he added.

Federal Member of Parliament for Dawson George Christensen called Zhans experience deeply concerning.

I think people should not, theoretically, fear reprisals in Australia for what they do, he told The Epoch Times. However, on the ground, it seems there is a problem, particularly with a foreign nation, having its operatives or agents of influence, spying on people in Australia.

That causes a problem when there are links to foreign nationswhether that link is family, property, assets, or a bank accountthey can be penalised, or find their family thrown in jail, or thrown out on the street, he added.

We need to be more mindful that this activity is going on and take measures to quash it.

Multi-Layered Infiltration

John Deller, a committee member of the Falun Dafa Association of Australia, said incidents of spying on Falun Gong practitioners have been ongoing since the persecution of the practice began in 1999.

CCP spies in Australia do not just work out of the Embassy or Consulates. They inhabit a multi-layered system built into Chinese migration, particularly over the past 20 to 30 years, he told The Epoch Times.

The workings of the CCPs United Front are now widely reported in Australia. It uses an extensive network of Chinese associations that link to Beijing and prey on Chinese peoples connection to the motherland. They provide information on anything that interests the CCP, he added.

A woman walks through the Chinatown district arch on March 04, 2020, in Sydney, Australia. (Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images)

The United Front Work Department is Beijings foremost foreign influence body and has been accused of engaging in extensive interference in the political activities of Western nations, including Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.

Groups outside of Falun Gong have also been subjected to extensive monitoring, including Uyghurs and Cambodian communities.

Deller said fear was the worst response to such activity.

It does not help to be afraid of thatthe CCP uses fear to control people, he said. We should be alert and prepared to confront and expose such activity. The greatest fear we should hold as Australians is that we do nothing.
Biden Admin Plans to Defend Title IX Exemptions for Religious Schools

The U.S. Department of Justice said in a court filing that it intends to defend an exemption for religious schools and universities from an anti-discrimination federal law.

The filing (pdf) comes in response to a class action lawsuit brought against the U.S. Department of Education by a coalition of current and former students from over 20 colleges associated with evangelical Christianity and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The students, identifying as LGBTQ+, alleged that they experienced discrimination at those schools because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

The Religious Exemption Accountability Project (REAP), an LGBTQ advocacy group, filed the lawsuit on behalf of the students in March in an Oregon federal court. The suit seeks to challenge the application of Title IX, which outlaws sex-based discrimination in institutions that accept federal funding except those controlled by a religious organization.

Three Christian universities, along with the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, have petitioned to intervene in the case under the presumption that the Biden administration would not defend their Title IX religious exemptions. The Justice Department, however, declared in the June 9 court filing that its interests coincide with those of the Christian institutions, and that it will represent those interests adequately.

At this stage of the litigation, it is premature to conclude that the Federal Defendants would neglect to raise, or be ill-equipped to develop, effective arguments in support of the Religious Exemption, the department said in the filing, obtained and reported by The Washington Post.

The Christian institutions and the Justice Department share the same ultimate objective, which is to defend the religious exemption and its current application, the filing stated, urging the court to not grant the request for intervention.

The filing also affirmed that just because the Education Department is undertaking a comprehensive review of Title IX regulations, it doesnt mean the Justice Department will not perform its duty to uphold existing legal statutes, including the religious exemption.

Neither the Administrations stated policy positions nor the [Education] Departments review of existing regulations abrogate the governments duty to defend federal statutes and regulations in court as a legal matter, the Justice Department stated.

Paul Southwick, the director of REAP, told The Washington Post that his organization was disappointed by the move, saying that the Biden administration has chosen to align itself with anti-LGBTQ extremist groups.

What this means is that the government is now aligning itself with anti-LGBTQ hate in order to vigorously defend an exemption that everyone knows causes severe harm to LGBTQ students using taxpayer money, Southwick said. It will make our case harder if the federal government plans to vigorously defend it like they have indicated.

Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the legal group representing the Christian universities in their petition, warned that depending on the outcome of the lawsuit, schools could lose their federal funding for operating according to Christian beliefs on sexuality.

Religious schools would face the impossible choice of losing students who would be denied needed federal financial assistance or abandoning their beliefs, the ADF said on its website. And it would slam the door of opportunity in the face of students who want to pursue higher education at colleges and universities that share their faith.
Biden and Johnson Agree on a New Atlantic Charter

Commentary

Leaders from the seven richest nations in the world that make up the G7China is still not considered an advanced economyare meeting this weekend in the UK.

Prime minister Boris Johnson chose Carbis Bay on the Cornish coastline as the location to host this years gathering since his other priority was to launch a new Atlantic Charter between America and the UK, before the G7 conference had officially begun.

He told reporters prior to Thursdays meeting, The agreements President Biden and I will make, rooted as they are in our shared values and outlook, will form the foundation of a sustainable global recovery. Eighty years ago, the US president and the British prime minister stood together promising a better future. Today we do the same.

The original Atlantic Charter was agreed between President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill on the 14th of August 1941 off the coast of Newfoundland. This was four months before Pearl Harbour, so America was not even at war, but it was part of Churchills efforts to get the United States involved, and he was even willing to risk being sunk by German U-boats to get there.

Considering Britain was then standing alone against the combined might of the axis powers, it was an incredible act of foresight and optimism.

There were eight clauses in the charter. After the war, the United States and UK would: not seek territorial gains; not change boundaries without peoples consent, not erect trade barriers for either victors or vanquished, promote peoples right to self-determination, support global economic and social advancement, work for a world free of want and fear, enable freedom of the seas, and call for common disarmament.

It is now credited with leading to the formation of the UN, NATO and GATT (The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade). Through its call for self-determination, it would eventually lead to the end of the British Empire, though this was not Churchills intention.

To unveil Atlantic Charter II, all Mr. Johnson had to do was travel 300 miles from London to Cornwall. He chose to use a jet plane rather than the train, and then took part in discussions on reducing CO2 levels.

Climate change is one of eight themes in the new Atlantic charter alongside resuming U.K.-U.S. travel, boosting trade, strengthening global security, technology cooperation, tackling cyberattacks, protecting biodiversity and aiding global recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns. It reads like a stopgap for the trade deal the Prime minister has so far failed to get with two U.S. administrations.

After their initial get together, Mr. Johnson claimed, Theres so much that they want to do together with us, from security, NATO, to climate change, and added there was complete harmony with Biden over Northern Ireland. But this does not mean complete agreement as Biden strongly opposes what he sees as Britains attempts to jeopardize the Good Friday Agreement.

Recent British attempts to correct the misjudgement Johnson made by moving the EU-UK customs border between Northern & Southern Ireland to the Irish Sea, led the Biden administration to send a strongly worded diplomatic complaint, a demarche, to Britains chief Brexit negotiator, Lord Frost, expressing great concern.

Whereas the first charter inadvertently led to the break-up of the British Empire, could this one inadvertently lead to the break-up of the United Kingdom itself? Moving the border has left Northern Ireland on the EUs side fueling both Unionist anger there and nationalist demands that Scotland should also be able to stay within the EU framework.

Eighty-years on since the first charter was agreed, the geo-political situation has changed significantly. The UK is not the global political force it once was, and the Atlantic is being replaced by the Pacific rim as the most significant area for global influence and trade, so what impact will the new charter have compared to its predecessor?

Johnson is hoping that showing leadership on climate change will increase the UKs stature post-Brexit, that is provided the theory doesnt get debunked by science or time itself.

There is no doubt the global establishment believes anthropogenic global warming (AGW) poses an even more lasting danger that the Axis powers did in 1941. Signing America back into the Paris Agreement has given Biden near messianic status in Europe. But although Boris Johnson was one of the first leaders to congratulate him on being named president, Biden has not changed his pro-EU views and dislike of Brexit.

Roosevelt and Churchill also had their differences, especially on the dangers of communism and dealing with Joseph Stalin. The British historian, Paul Johnson, writes that in 1942, FDRs naive assessment of Stalin was that: If I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he wont try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of Democracy and peace.

FDR berated Churchill for questioning the dictators motives: You have 400 hundred years of acquisitive instincts, and you just dont understand that a country might not want to acquire land somewhere if they can get it.

In 2019 Mr. Biden told an audience in Iowa, China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man . Theyre not bad folks . They are not competition for us.

During his first press conference as president he said: Ive known Xi Jinping for a long time. Allegedly, by the time I left office as Vice President, I had spent more time with him than any world leader.

He added, I have told him on several occasions that I will not be looking for confrontation. This will not have helped the people of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Chinas Uyghur Muslims, Christians and other persecuted believers, sleep any easier.

At the end of WWII, FDR gave the predatory Stalin a green light to start annexing Eastern Europe by announcing that all American forces would be withdrawn from Europe in two years. When 1947 came, Churchill was no longer in power, but he still felt he needed to travel to Fulton, Missouri to deliver a wake-up call to America, saying: From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain is descending across Europe.

Johnson is no Churchill, so this time America will have to work out for itself how best to deal with a much more powerful communist adversary.

Andrew Davies is a UK-based video producer and writer. His award-winning video on underage sex abuse helped Barnardos childrens charity change UK law, while his documentary Batons, Bows and Bruises: A History of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, ran for six years on the Sky Arts Channel.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
AR-15 style rifles are displayed for sale at Firearms Unknown, a gun store in Oceanside, Calif., on April 12, 2021. (Bing Guan/Reuters)

California Appeals Ruling Striking Down Assault Weapons Ban

California officials on Thursday said the state has appealed a federal judges decision to strike down its three-decade-old ban on assault-style weapons, saying the law is needed to prevent gun deaths.

The appeal challenges last weeks ruling from U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego that the law illegally infringes upon the U.S. Constitutions Second Amendment, which guarantees the right of citizens to bear arms.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta, both Democrats, told a news conference outside a San Francisco hospital they were confident the decision was flawed and would eventually be overturned.

Were better than this, said a visibly frustrated Newsom, who also sharply criticized the judge.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks during a news conference regarding the San Jose rail yard shooting in San Jose, Calif., on May 26, 2021. (Amy Osborne/AFP via Getty Images)

The state will ask the appeals court to put the ruling on hold during the appeal; Benitez stayed his order from taking effect for 30 days, leaving the law in place for now.

California became the first state to ban assault weapons in 1989 in the wake of a school shooting that killed five children. Six other states and the District of Columbia have an assault weapons ban in place, according to the gun safety group Giffords.

A federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004, and Congress has not re-authorized the law in the face of Republican opposition.

Guns are a politically sensitive issue in the United States, which has the highest rate of gun ownership of any country.

Two weeks ago, a gunman opened fire at a San Jose rail yard, killing nine people, part of a spate of high-profile mass shootings in Indiana, Colorado, and Georgia, among other states.
Three vials of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine are pictured in a new coronavirus, COVID-19, vaccination center at the Velodrome-Stadium in Berlin, Germany, on Feb. 17, 2021. (The Canadian Press/AP/Michael Sohn, pool)

California Woman Who Got Both Moderna Vaccine Shots Dies of COVID-19: Officials

An elderly woman in Napa County, California, who had received both Moderna vaccine shots died from COVID-19, county health officials said.

While scant details about the woman were released, Napa County spokeswoman Leah Greenbaum said she was over the age of 65 and had underlying health problems. The woman died on June 2 after a long hospital stay, Greenbaum said on June 7.

Officials said she tested positive for the B.1.1.7 variant of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. The World Health Organization has recently started calling the variant Alpha, saying it was first detected in the UK.

No vaccine is 100 [percent] effective, but this does not diminish the urgency and importance of getting vaccinated, especially as more variant strains emerge, Napa County Public Health Officer Dr. Karen Relucio said in a statement about the womans death. Despite the fatality, COVID-19 vaccines provide exceptional protection against death and illness, Relucio added.

The officials added that the womans death suggests more people need to get vaccinated.

Getting vaccinated helps protect us, and it helps protect vulnerable people who arent able to mount that immune response, Greenbaum said in the news conference.

The Epoch Times has contacted Moderna for comment.

Meanwhile, a man who got both COVID-19 AstraZeneca vaccine doses died of the virus on Thursday, according to officials in Seychelles.

Jude Gedeon, the island nations public health commissioner, said during a news conference that the 54-year-old man was the first person to have received the vaccine to die of COVID-19.

Its not clear when the man had received the vaccine or whether AstraZeneca is investigating the matter. The Epoch Times has contacted AstraZeneca for comment.

Officials have said Seychelles, an archipelago nation in the Indian Ocean that relies heavily on European tourism, is the most vaccinated country in the world. However, recent reports have indicated that despite the high vaccination rate, there has been a spike in COVID-19 cases.

Unfortunately the downward trend that we saw from mid-May seems to have stabilized and it is not going further down, Gedeon said during the Thursday news conference. Community transmission is continuing, he continued to say, adding that the government might force to implement more lockdowns.

Seychelles has used Sinopharms vaccine and Covishield, a version of the AstraZeneca vaccine. And recently, the country began using the Russian Sputnik V shot, according to authorities.

World Health Organization officials in March warned they have very low confidence in some data that was provided by Sinopharm, a CCP-backed state-run pharmaceutical company. We are very confident that 2 doses of BBIBP-CorV are efficacious in preventing PCR confirmed COVID19 in adults (1859 years), said a WHO document, according to Reuters.
CDC to Hold Emergency Meeting Over Rare Post-Vaccination Heart Inflammation

The Centers for Disease Control and Preventions vaccine advisory committee plans to hold an emergency meeting this month to discuss the higher than expected reports of heart inflammation in young males following a second dose of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines.

The June 18 meeting will address the conditions that are very infrequent and have not been directly linked to the vaccines, the agency announced on June 10.

The first portion of the meeting will feature an update on COVID-19 vaccine safety, including myocarditis cases seen after the administration of vaccines built on messenger RNA technology, according to the meeting agenda.

Myocarditis is a rare disorder that leads to heart inflammation. Causes include the flu and COVID-19.

Rates of myocarditis and a similar condition, pericarditis, for those between the ages of 16 and 24 after vaccination with two of the three COVID-19 vaccines authorized in the United States are higher than the expected rate, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) disclosed in a meeting earlier Thursday.

The CDC has so far identified 226 reports in people ages 30 and younger that might meet the agencys working case definition of heart inflammation following the shots, Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, a deputy director at the agency, told the Food and Drug Administrations vaccine advisory group during a virtual meeting. That was out of about 12.2 million who had received a vaccine as of May 31.

While the vast majority of the patients have recovered, 41 had ongoing symptoms, 15 are still hospitalized, and three are in intensive care units.

Shimabukuro told members that the CDC will continue to evaluate myocarditis following vaccination and assess the benefits and risks of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which both use mRNA technology, ahead of the emergency meeting next week.

Illustration photo of Pfizer vaccine. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters)

Three vials of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine are pictured in a new coronavirus, COVID-19, vaccination center at the Velodrome-Stadium in Berlin, Germany, on Feb. 17, 2021. (The Canadian Press/AP/Michael Sohn, pool)

A CDC spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email that there will be more discussion about post-vaccination myocarditis at the meeting, the spokesperson added.

Given the number of COVID-19 vaccine doses administered, these reports are rare. More than 18 million people between ages 12-24 have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine in the United States. CDC continues to recommend COVID-19 vaccination for everyone 12 years and older, the spokesperson said.

The agency has thus far declined to recommend a pause of vaccinating youth, despite advising such a pause after a smaller number of post-vaccination blood clotting cases appeared in April.

The CDCs advisory group, formally known as the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, makes recommendations to the agency regarding vaccines. The recommendations are nonbinding but the CDC often takes the recommended action.

After the group recommended lifting the pause of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine following the blood clots appearing in seven women after vaccination, the CDC lifted the pause.

Not all of the reports, which were submitted to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, will turn out to be accurate, Shimabukuro told Thursdays meeting. But he added that the higher-than-expected rate the statistics indicate are consistent with surveillance data from Israel and the Pentagon.

Dr. Monica Gandhi, professor of medicine and associate chief at the University of California, San Francisco, told The Epoch Times in an email that the CDC could end up recommending only vaccinating children who have not recovered from COVID-19 because there is a link between COVID infection and myocarditis.

Other possibilities include giving a single dose of the Moderna or Pfizer shots to those under the age of 20, lowering the dosage amount, and extending the duration between doses one and two in young people, she added.

Members of the Food and Drug Administrations Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, which heard from Shimabukuro, expressed concern about the myocarditis data.

Because weve all discussed at fair length the concern about myocarditis and other side effects, which seem to generally be worse after the second dose, I think we need some studies on single dose and whether that might be adequate going forward, Dr. Mark Sawyer, professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego, told colleagues during the meeting.

I think the myocarditis is something that needs to be looked at closely because were likely seeing the tip of the iceberg, added Dr. Michael Kurilla, director of the Division of Clinical Innovation at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, which is part of the National Institutes of Health.

Pfizer said it supports the CDCs assessment of the heart inflammation cases, noting that the number of reports is small given the number of doses administered.

It is important to understand that a careful assessment of the reports is ongoing and it has not been concluded that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines cause myocarditis or pericarditis, the company told The Epoch Times in an email.

Moderna did not respond to a request for comment.
A delegation comprised of Senators Tammy Duckworth (3rd L), Christoper Coons (3rd R), and Dan Sullivan (2nd L), poses for photographs with Taiwan's Foreign Minister Joseph Wu (2nd R) and American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) Director Brent Christensen (R) following their arrival at the Songshan Airport in Taipei on June 6, 2021. (Pei Chen/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

China Flexes Military Muscle After US Senators Visit Taiwan

Beijing recently ramped up its warmongering rhetoric against its democratic neighbor Taiwan, following a recent visit by three U.S. senators to the self-ruled island.

Senators Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Christopher Coons (D-Del.), and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), made a three-hour stop in Taiwan on June 6 to announce that the United States would donate 750,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses to the island. Prior to the announcement, the Taiwanese government has repeatedly slammed Beijing for interfering in its efforts to buy vaccines from major COVID-19 vaccine makers.

Two days after the senators trip, on June 8, the Eastern Theater Command of Chinas Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) announced on its WeChat account that its 72nd Group Army recently held a military exercise in the waters off the coast of southern Chinas Fujian Province. The exercise, involving landing ships and ambitious vehicles, was aimed at improving the units amphibious abilities.

Also on June 8, Wu Qian, a spokesperson for Chinas Ministry of National Defense, told local media that the senators trip to Taiwan was a political show and a vile political provocation against China. Wu also accused the United States of seriously undermining the stability of the Taiwan Strait.

Without naming any country, Wu threatened that anyone who dared to split Taiwan from China would see a resolute attack head-on from the Chinese military.

In an article published on June 9, Chinas hawkish mouthpiece Global Times claimed that any PLA exercise should not be seen as merely a deterrence move. In fact, Beijing was preparing to win any possible military conflicts in the future. The same article also boasted Chinas ever-increasing amphibious warfare capability.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sees Taiwan as a part of its territory despite the fact that the self-ruled island is a de-facto independent countrywith its own democratically-elected government, military, constitution, and currency.

As a result, Beijing opposes any government from establishing ties with Taipei or interacting with Taiwanese government officials.

Last year, Beijing also reacted angrily when two Trump administration officials visited TaiwanHealth and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and former Under Secretary of State Keith Krach.

Washington currently has no diplomatic ties with Taipei but has been the islands main weapons supplier in accordance with the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA).

On June 7, U.S. Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) took to her Twitter account to say that Beijing should stay out of any interactions between Washington and Taipei.

Americans are allowed to travel to #Taiwan whenever they want and the #CCP has no control or right dictating to a US Congressional delegation visiting the country, she wrote.

Taiwan, which sits 81 miles off the coast of China, has been upgrading its military defense capacities to thwart any invasion attempt by Beijing. Some China experts have stated that the Chinese invasion is a real possibility in the near futureperhaps within the next three years.

In March, Adm. Philip Davidson, who was then-head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, warned during a Senate hearing that the communist regime could invade Taiwan in the next six years.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping exchange documents during a signing ceremony following their talks at the Kremlin in Moscow on June 5, 2019. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AFP/Getty Images)

China Tries to Pull Russia Closer as US, Russian Leaders to Meet

With U.S. and Russian presidents set to meet in Geneva on June 16, the Chinese communist regime is highly concerned and is trying to win greater Russian support to counter the United States through a series of actions. Analysts believe it shows that China is very worried about Russia leaning toward the United States in U.S.-China-Russia relations.

Since June 2, Chinese state media Xinhua has run a series of articles claiming that China-Russia relations are solid and resilient. Chinas Foreign Minister Wang Yi has also spoken directly with the Russian Foreign Minister as the regime tests the waters with its neighbor.

On June 4, despite Wang Yi emphasizing during a phone conversation with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov that Sino-Russian relations have been comprehensive, Lavrov had focused his comments on strengthening anti-virus cooperation with China and economic recovery.

On June 5, Chinese state-run English media CGTN reported that during the online St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, when addressing the heads of major international news agencies, Russian President Vladimir Putin had said, Russia-China relations have reached an unprecedented high level. However, according to international media reports, Putin had been specifically referring to an unprecedented oil deal signed with China in his comments.

Shi Shan, a U.S.-based China expert, told The Epoch Times, The reason why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is trying its best to cozy up to Russia is that it is uncertain about the development of U.S.-Russian relations. Although Sino-Russian relations have improved in recent years, the Kremlin announced the first meeting between the heads of Russia and the United States on the 16th anniversary of strategic security consultations between Russia and China (May 25).

The timing has made people wonder about Russias intentions, he said.

Shi pointed out that Biden will take the opportunity of the G7 summit to discuss with Putin how to restore the predictable and stable U.S.-Russian relations.

Once U.S.-Russian relations improve, the CCP will not be able to continue to use Russia to contain the United States, he said. The years of its efforts to play the China-Russia-U.S. triangle would be in vain. Therefore, the CCPs official media is intensively promoting Sino-Russian relations in an attempt to pull Russia closer.

U.S.-based current affairs commentator Wang He told The Epoch Times that Russia has also been constraining the CCPs overseas expansion. This is reflected in the fact that Russia on one hand has close relations with the CCP to boost its own economy and counter Western countries; on the other hand, it also has close relations with Chinas neighboring countries and Asia-Pacific countries to avoid over-dependence on the CCP and to contain China, he said.

The Kremlin towers in front of the Russian Foreign Ministry headquarters on March 18, 2021. (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images)

As for the relationship between the United States and Russia, Shi believes that the United States has always considered both Russia and China adversaries and has tried to contain both.

Its the United States and European Unions worst nightmare if Russia and China become allies, president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council Frederick Kempe wrote in April.

The United States and Russia have had frictions over many years as well as recently. For example in March, in an interview with ABC News, Biden agreed that Putin was a killer, and would pay a price for interfering with U.S. election. This triggered a diplomatic crisis between the United States and Russia. Putin reacted angrily to Bidens remarks, and recalled the Russian ambassador to the United States.

But at the same time, Putin also said that Moscow would not sever ties with Washington and would cooperate with the United States under conditions favorable to Russia. Shi pointed out that this demonstrates Putins shrewdness. For example, on the Middle East issue, Russia has avoided direct conflicts with U.S. military operations multiple times.

Shi added, At the moment, the United States intends to establish a good relationship with Russia. Apparently, Putin will use this as an opportunity to benefit more from the relationship with the CCP. After all, due to differences in systems and ideology, its not easy for the U.S. and Russia to have really good relations.

Li Siqi contributed to this report.
A man feeds scraps to seagulls as the cold snap continues to grip much of the nation, in Whitley Bay, England, on Feb. 10, 2021. (Owen Humphreys/PA via AP)

Climate Policies Continue to Mislead the Public

Commentary

I had previously written about the problems of the global warming hypothesis. This article is a continuation of the same topic. I will elaborate on how some people identified a stand-in for the global warming hypothesis, and how they fool governments and the general public into paying for their so-called climate policy.

Global warming has disappeared from the vocabulary of the Biden administrations climate policy. This is because there have been several unusually cold winters after the global warming theory was touted, thus many people began to question it. However, in terms of relevant policies, global warming has not disappeared completely. Is there any difference between global warming and climate change? In fact, the two terms are essentially the same thingglobal warming entered the various international summits under a new name: climate change.

Governments and international organizations now use the term climate change and have formulated a series of related policies to prevent climate change.

According to a report from Deutsche Welle on Feb. 3, 2007, it was President George W. Bush who first used the term climate change during his tenure. Then President Barack Obama inherited the entire climate change game from the Bush administration.

After President Donald Trump took office, he declared that climate change was a hoax and subsequently withdrew from the Paris climate agreement.

Does the Earths Temperature Keep Rising?

The core argument of the climate change theory is still based on the global warming hypothesis, which blames carbon dioxide emissions for the continual increase of global temperature. Therefore, it continues to stress that mankind must implement policies to reduce various carbon dioxide emissions.

However, does the Earths temperature continue to rise?

Based on temperature records, from 1983 to 2008, many places on Earth were much warmer than before, but at the end of 2009 many regions had a severely cold winter.

In January 2019, the average temperature in the Great Lakes region of North America dropped around -34C to -40C (-29F to -40F), and many cities and towns experienced record low temperatures. In early February 2021, the United States again had cold snaps several times, and cold weather spread to the central region, causing many areas to reach record low temperatures. Even Texas was among the severely affected areas.

Online research reports show that the change in global temperature from January 1999 to December 2008 is plus or minus 0.07 degrees Celsius, which is much less than the plus or minus 0.18 degrees Celsius of the previous ten years. It is basically stable, and the main cause of global temperature fluctuation is the El Nino, an oceanic and climatic phenomenon.

G.G. Matishov, the academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) and the scientific director of the Southern Scientific Center RAS, believes that the world is not warming up, but rather cooling down. In his opinion, the climate is cyclical and now the warming cycle is over and the Earth is entering the cooling cycle.

In an interview with the Russian newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta on Feb. 23 this year, Matishov stated that what awaits mankind is not global warming, but the Little Ice Age. He has been doing research in the Arctic since 1965 and believes that there is no such thing as global warming. If the theory of global warming is correct, then the Arctic ice would have already melted. Mattisov also said that since the Arctic temperature has slightly increased in recent years, this led some people to believe that global warming is the trend. However, the Arctic in 1878 and 1933 were in the same warm cycle, but since then entered a cold cycle again. Is our memory really so short? Matishov asked sarcastically.

Ice is seen floating in the Arctic Ocean in this undated photo. There is a hot debate among climate skeptics and scientists on how much the worlds ice is melting or accumulating. (Courtesy of NOAA News)

He believes that to understand the trend of climate change, one must look at data accumulated over at least one hundred years, rather than focusing on events that have occurred in the last couple of years.

Mattisov pointed out that the climate is cyclical, and mankind is now witnessing the beginning of a new Ice Age. He believes the warm cycle that caused the temperature to rise in the Arctic has ended, and the climate is turning into a cold cycle. He said that the European part of Russia has experienced extremely cold winters, droughts, and heavy precipitationall these factors prove his claim.

Mattisov also pointed out that the Antarctic ice sheet is a very stable system, and the argument that global warming will lead to ice sheet melting, sea level rising and severe flooding is false.

However, the political correctness camp obstructed the debunking of the global warming theory. Obsessed with their own political and economic interests, they used political power to suppress criticism of the global warming theory, and at the same time continued to push forward various arguments supporting it. Additionally, these arguments were used as the basis for the forceful implementation of various policies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. In recent years, global summits are the international arena for this group of people to turn their political agenda into policies and regulations in different countries.

What Are the Causes of Climate Change?

The Earths surface temperature is always changing. The temperature change is usually fluctuating, and there are natural climate cycles. Each cycle may last several decades, or even millions of years. The fluctuation may be regional or global, and the factors causing these changes are numerous and mostly due to natural factors, including solar radiation, changes in the Earths orbit, continental drift, changes in ocean currents, and orogenic movements.

These natural factors are beyond human control. Of course, changes in climate may also be related to human activities. However, it is unscientific to attribute all climate changes to the economic activities of mankind.

I have summarized how these natural factors led to climate changes in my previous article, and pointed out that so far, the scientific community cannot describe or explain them clearly due to their complexity. The global warming hypothesis emerged as a result of an unscientific approachsome scientists chose to ignore the influence of all natural factors and use carbon dioxide emissions to explain the short-term temperature changes on Earth.

The climate change claim inherited all the arguments from the global warming hypothesis, making the successor as questionable as the predecessor.

Let me use an analogy to illustrate what these theories amount to: if someone notices that a plant in the backyard is not growing well, without analyzing whether the weather, soil conditions, pests, diseases, moisture levels have changed compared to previous years, he subjectively asserts that it is the residents outdoor barbecue activities that is solely responsible for the unhealthy state of the plant!

Are Experts Right in Their Calculation?

Since the climate change theory became a government policy, carbon dioxide emissions have become a rigid indicator. However, there are serious human errors in the calculations, that is, researchers only calculate carbon dioxide emissions, but refuse to calculate carbon dioxide absorption by plants.

It is high school knowledge that plants use light to turn carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates, a process known as photosynthesis, yet scholars doing research on carbon dioxide concentration choose to ignore this part of the carbon cycle.

Rainforest near Victoria Falls in this undated photo. (Ninara)

Twenty years ago, I participated in a conference hosted by a non-profit organization, and one of the topics was global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions. During the conference, I asked a climate expert, How do you calculate the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed?

He really surprised me when he replied that such calculations are too complicated and scientists like him choose to ignore it.

I then asked him, Does this mean that the natural balance of carbon dioxide in the air in North America, which has a high degree of vegetation coverage, and that of African deserts, are treated the same way? In North America where there are many lush green open spaces, the carbon dioxide emitted by cars can be absorbed to a large extent in rural and suburban areas, but very little in cities and deserts. Would it be inaccurate if scientists only calculate carbon dioxide emissions in each country, without knowing how much carbon dioxide is absorbed in different regions? This expert finally admitted that they have to stick to their unscientific method, otherwise they wont be able to get research funding.

Pushing Policies Based on Flawed Theories

There is a Chinese idiom, He who is muddle-headed tries to educate others. The decision-makers of climate policies in different countries seem to fit in this category.

As a matter of fact, to analyze the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and absorption in a country, some scientists proposed an index called carbon flux, which is the amount of carbon exchanged between carbon pools in a certain region.

However, up to now, no country cares about the carbon flux data and there is no research paper that discusses this measurement. I only found one such paper written by a Chinese scholar at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania in 2011, and it was the study of the history of carbon flux changes in peatlands on Earth.

The recent climate summit set the goal of carbon neutrality by 2050, also known as net zero emissions. There are three main methods to achieve net zero carbon dioxide emissions. First, planting trees and growing forests to absorb more carbon dioxide; second, replacing coal and oil with wind and solar energy; third, giving money to developing countries to help them emit less carbon dioxide.

The first method itself reflects the fallacy of climate policy. Since climate policy advocates and researchers refuse to calculate the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by existing plants in various countries, it is equivalent to assuming that the amount of carbon dioxide uptake by all plants is negligible. Then why do they list afforestation as the top priority of climate policy? Conversely, since planting trees and afforestation has become the top priority of climate policy, it means that people who advocate climate policy actually know that plants can absorb carbon dioxide. Why do they refuse to calculate how much carbon dioxide is absorbed by plants in various regions on Earth?

Based on this fallacy, climate policy has proposed the so-called green energy program as an alternative to coal and oil. If the general public understands that climate policy is not solid science, they will certainly reject this costly alternative.

The third method could also fail, because even when developing countries receive subsidies for carbon reduction, it is not a guarantee that they will stop using coal and oil.

In addition, there are two drastically different methods in the current monitoring of carbon dioxide concentration in the global atmosphere: super-macro and super-micro.

Super-macro: Although there are more than 200 observation points monitoring the changes of carbon dioxide concentration in the world, only global data is given, while the data collected from each countrys observation stations is absent. Therefore, it is impossible to determine whether the global data can represent the trend of changes in the carbon dioxide concentration in each country. Super-micro: For instance, global data often comes from an observation point in Hawaii, and sometimes from another observation point in Australia. However, do we really know to what extent the changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at these two observation points are caused by local human activities, or by other factors, such as whether the volcanic eruptions in Hawaii had caused an excessive increase of carbon dioxide?

When the leftists in Western countries are in power, they pursue so-called progressivism and include all the policies they want to promote into the category of progressivism and political correctness, labeling their opponents as backward and ignorant. In such a setting, climate policy is promoted as an unquestionable issue. They are actually using political correctness to interfere with scientific research and hype up the issue in order to push forward certain policies. Subsequently, the same group of people would profit from these policies as well as bolster their political image.

Needless to say, the general public can easily fall prey to such a large-scale and concerted brainwashing campaign and become indoctrinated.

Cheng Xiaonong is a scholar of Chinas politics and economy based in New Jersey. Cheng was a policy researcher and aide to former Chinese Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang. He also served as chief editor of Modern China Studies.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
EU Suspends Use of Johnson & Johnson Vaccine Made at Baltimore Plant

The European Unions drug regulator announced Friday it will not use batches of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine that were made at a Baltimore, Maryland-based plant around the time that manufacturing problems were reported at the facility.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said that vaccines that it obtained from the Emergent Biosolutions plant werent affected by any contamination. The move on Friday to suspend using the vaccines is being done out of an abundance of caution, the agency said.

Authorities in the EU are aware that a batch of the active substance for COVID-19 Vaccine Janssen had been contaminated with materials for another vaccine manufactured at the same site, the statement said, adding that the batch concerned was not intended for the EU market.

Based on available information, batches of the vaccine released in the EU are not affected by the cross-contamination, the EMA said. However, as a precaution and to safeguard the quality of vaccines, the supervisory authorities have recommended not releasing vaccine batches containing the active substance made at around the same time that the contamination occurred.

Its not clear how many J&J doses would be affected by the EU decision.

The decision came amid reports, citing anonymous sources, that claimed that up to 60 million doses were tossed out due to the decision, although spokespersons for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or Johnson & Johnson did not respond for comment after The Epoch Times inquiries about the doses.

A Johnson & Johnson spokesperson, in an email to The Epoch Times, pointed to a news release from Kathy Wengel, a vice president, who said that the recent actions represent progress in our continued efforts to make a difference in this pandemic on a global scale, and we appreciate the close collaboration with the FDA and global health authorities. A spokesperson for the FDA, in an email, referred to J&J.

The FDA, in a news release on Thursday, said that two batches manufactured at the Baltimore plant can be used under the emergency use authorization.

The FDAs decision to include these two batches of vaccine drug substance in the [emergency use authorization] for the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine means that Janssen vaccine made with this drug substance can be used in the U.S. or exported to other countries, the FDA said.

But the FDA said it has discovered that several other batches are not suitable for use, but additional batches are still under review and the agency will keep the public informed as those reviews are completed. The agency not make any mention of how many Johnson & Johnson single-shot vaccine doses, known as the Janssen vaccine, would be affectedif any.

Additionally, the news release said, the FDA has extended the expiration dating for the refrigerated Janssen COVID-19 vaccine after reviewing information submitted by Janssen and determining that the vaccine can be stored at 2-8 degrees Celsius for 4.5 months instead of 3 months.

Emergent Biosolutions is one of several J&J contractors that make the vaccine in bulk, which is then shipped to other factories to finalize. In April, there were reports that a human error caused millions of doses to be ruined.

The Epoch Times has contacted Emergent Biosolutions for comment.
FBI Director Christopher Wray testifies before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on "Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation," on Capitol Hill in Washington, on June 10, 2021. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

FBI Director: At Least One Individual Brought Gun Inside Capitol on Jan. 6

'For the most part, the weapons were weapons other than firearms'

FBI Director Chris Wray on Thursday testified that at least one individual was found with a gun inside the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6.

Wray made the remarks during an oversight hearing held by the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, suggesting that serious charges are still coming in the criminal investigation of the Capitol breach.

This is a very ongoing investigation and theres a lot more to come, Wray said of a subgroup of protesters who are being investigated for bringing weapons into the Capitol building when it was breached on Jan. 6 . I would expect to see more chargessome of them maybe more serious charges.

Wray testified that a lot of the arrests and more significant charges that are coming out of the investigation currently are individuals who brought all sorts of weapons inside the Capitol building, including Kevlar, tactical vests, and bear spray.

Firearms? Anybody bring firearms? asked Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).

I can think of at least one instance where there was an individual with a gun inside the Capitol, but for the most part, the weapons were weapons other than firearms, Wray responded.

Wray said that the FBI had divided the tens of thousands of protesters who were at the Capitol on Jan. 6 into three groups: peaceful, maybe rowdy protesters who didnt participate in the breach and made up the biggest group, a second group who engaged in criminal trespass of the Capitol Building, and a third groupthe smallest in numberwho were responsible for carrying weapons into the Capitol.

Close to 500 arrests among those in the second and third groups have been made so far in connection with Jan. 6, Wray told the committee. The Department of Justice (DOJ) previously said that the majority of cases are related to entering a restricted building, obstruction of an official proceeding, and civil disorder.

The DOJ last month accused a Maryland man of carrying a semi-automatic handgun and ammunition on Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, among nine other charges. However, it isnt clear whether Wray was testifying about this individual.

The Justice Department didnt immediately respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times on the matter.

A superseding indictment from the DOJ alleges that Christopher Alberts was seen carrying an Taurus G2C semi-automatic handgun on restricted Capitol grounds without a licence around 7:25 p.m. on Jan. 6 where the vice president and vice-president elect were visiting, and that he also had in his possession a large capacity ammunition feeding device.

Alberts has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

The FBI director also testified that the law enforcement agency considered the events that unfolded on Jan. 6 an act of domestic terrorism. When asked by Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) whether the events on Jan. 6 at the Capitol were an insurrection, Wray replied that he believes it would be inappropriate to describe the breach as such.

In my role as FBI director, because thats a term that has legal meaning, I really have to be careful about using words like that, Wray said, adding that what he says could impact ongoing criminal cases.

Democratic lawmakers pushed the narrative that the Jan. 6 breach was an insurrection largely during the January impeachment effort against former President Donald Trump. No one who participated in the breach has been charged with insurrection.
Hospital staffers are seen outside Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Conn., on April 20, 2021. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)

Federal COVID-19 Safety Rules Issued for Healthcare Workers

President Joe Bidens administration on Thursday issued rules aimed at keeping workers safe from the virus that causes COVID-19.

The Department of Labors Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued the rules, formally known as an emergency temporary standard, for healthcare facilities. They do not apply to other businesses, though updated guidance was issued for non-healthcare companies.

The rules require each healthcare employer to develop and implement a COVID-19 plan for all of its workplaces, including policies and procedures to determine which workers have received a COVID-19 vaccine.

In general, healthcare employers must require employees to wear a mask, even if theyre fully vaccinated, per the standard. Masks can be ditched if fully vaccinated employees are in an area where there is no reasonable expectation that any person will be present with suspected or confirmed COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as the coronavirus.

Other pieces include: requiring employers provide workers paid time off both to get a COVID-19 vaccine and to recover from any side effects suffered after vaccination; mandating social distancing, or six feet of distance between people, in many situations and barriers when it is not; and requiring employers with more than 10 employees to keep a log that includes details of each instance an employee is COVID-19 positive, even if the case is not connected to exposure at work.

Healthcare facilities include hospitals, nursing homes, and assisted living facilities. Workers who provide healthcare services at peoples homes are also governed by the regulations.

Too many of our frontline healthcare workers continue to be at high risk of contracting the coronavirus, Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh said in a statement. As I said when I came to the department, we must follow the science. This standard follows the science, and will provide increased protections for those whose health is at heightened risk from coronavirus while they provide us with critical healthcare services.

This standard is necessary to give our healthcare workers deeply needed protections, added Jim Frederick, acting assistance secretary of labor for OSHA.

The new rules stem from an executive order Biden issued on his first full day in office, directing the labor secretary, acting through OSHA, to consider whether any emergency temporary standards on COVID-19, including with respect to masks in the workplace, are necessary, and if such standards are determined to be necessary, issue them by March 15.

OSHA had not issued such an emergency standard until this week since 1983, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Loren E. Sweatt, a health official during the Trump administration, told members of Congress last year that issuing such rules at the same time that the healthcare industry is responding to the COVID-19 public health emergency is counterproductive to both the public health response and robust stakeholder engagement.

For example, the efforts employers would take to document compliance with such a standard would distract them from other vital response activities, she added.

OSHA said in a letter to Congress last year that existing standards already imposed obligations on employers to protect workers from COVID-19, including requiring the use of gloves, eye and face protection, and respiratory protection in a range of situations.

The new rules, which were issued after daily COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths plunged to lows not seen since the spring of 2020, drew both praise and criticism.

National Nurses United, a large union representing nurses, said the standard is an important step forward that will contribute to safer health care settings for workers, patients, and communities.

A preliminary review of the rules showed that they included significant requirements that will protect nurses and other health care workers and patients, and some areas that can still be strengthened as OSHA conducts updates, the group added in a statement.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-Va.), the ranking member on the House Education and Labor Committee, expressed support for how the rules did not apply to all businesses.

We appreciate the Department of Labor refuted the ridiculous claims from Democrats and their union allies that all American workers are presently in grave danger from the virus, she said in a statement. Yet still, despite widespread vaccinations and COVID-19 cases at lows not seen since the beginning of the pandemic, OSHA caved to political pressure from special interests to adopt an emergency temporary standard (ETS) in the health care sector. Placing new and burdensome regulation on this heroic industry at this stage of the pandemic is completely unnecessary. Further, we cannot endorse an inflexible, restrictive regulation that is unable to keep up with the ever-evolving science regarding COVID-19.

OSHAs rules came after the Biden administration said this week that federal agencies generally shouldnt force their employees to get a COVID-19 vaccine as a precondition for working in person.
A Huawei thermal engineer performs a heat test in the research and development area of the Bantian campus in Shenzhen, China, on April 12, 2019. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Foreign Companies Must Act at Beijings Behest Under New Law in China

China passed a new law that orders all individuals and businesses in China to apply sanctions the regime has launched against foreign counterparts. It also bars companies from complying with foreign restrictions placed on Chinese firms and citizens.

Moreover, the law came into effect on June 10, when the regimes rubber-stamp legislature approved it without a third reading, which is a prerequisite under Chinas Legislative Law.

It orders foreign citizens to act against their own homelands, and be loyal to the Chinese Communist Party [CCP], said Tang Jingyuan, a U.S.-based China affairs commentator, in a phone interview with The Epoch Times on Thursday.

The timing is key. The CCP passed the law right after President Joe Biden started his Europe trip. Biden will talk with European leaders about the investigation into the origin of the CCP virus, which likely leaked from the Wuhan lab, Li Hengqing, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Information and Strategy, told The Epoch Times on June 10.

Li believes that the CCP virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus, leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Once this fact is verified by the world, other countries will hold the CCP regime accountable, Li said.

New Law

The Chinese rubber-stamp legislature passed and released the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law on June 10.

The law requires that all individuals and organizations in China, no matter their citizenship or registered status, must execute the sanctions that the Beijing regime launched.

Furthermore, clause 12 of the law states: No organization or individual can enforce or help to enforce the discriminatory restrictive measures that foreign countries use against Chinese citizens and organizations  Chinese citizens or organizations can file a lawsuit against foreign entities [who are complying with foreign-imposed sanctions], and ask them to stop the infringement and pay compensation for [Chinese] losses.

Buick Excelles are displayed during the opening ceremony of the Jinqiao South Vehicle Plant of Shanghai General Motors Corp. in Shanghai, China, on May 28, 2005. (China Photos/Getty Images)

Retaliation

In retaliation against foreign-imposed sanctions, the law targets foreign violators and their direct relatives, company managers and directors, as well as other related individuals and organizations.

Punishment methods for violations under the new law include refusing or revoking visas, seizing property and assets, and banning trade activity.

Wang Wenbin, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry, said in a news brief on June 10 that the law is a legal tool to retaliate against foreign sanctions.

When asked whether the law would impact diplomatic relations with other countries, Wang said the concern  is completely unnecessary.

In the past months, the United States, European Union, Canada, and the UK have imposed sanctions on Chinese officials, accusing them of serious human rights abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and destroying autonomy in Hong Kong.

On May 12, the U.S. government announced sanctions against a CCP official for persecuting Falun Gong, as the Beijing regimes brutal suppression of the spiritual practice approaches its 22nd anniversary.

So far, the U.S. government has imposed sanctions on about 45 Chinese officials, including all 14 vice-chairs of the rubber-stamp legislatures standing committee. Meanwhile, Washington also blacklisted Chinese companies from buying American technology, such as Chinas largest telecommunications manufacturer Huawei, which violated U.S. sanctions against Iran.

The Chinese regime started its retaliation earlier this year. On Jan. 21, the regime banned 28 Americans and their direct relatives from visiting mainland China and Hong Kong.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping (second row C) and lawmakers stand for the anthem during the closing session of the rubber-stamp legislatures conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, on March 11, 2021. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

Consequences

The newly launched Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law is a comprehensive retaliation against the United States and other developed countries. It covers all individuals and organizations and threatens to grab their property if they dont listen to the Beijing regime, Tang told The Epoch Times.

Tang worries that the CCP will require that foreign companies buy forced-labor products, such as purchasing cotton from Xinjiang; and sell American technology to Chinese enterprises, such as selling semiconductor chips to Huawei.

I see risks that this law brings to the society. I can imagine that foreign companies will have to leave the China market before the CCP forces them to do things [against U.S. sanctions], and Chinese enterprises are forced to stop purchasing imported technology, Tang said.

Tang used Chinas most advanced, largest, and state-owned chip manufacturer Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) as an example.

On Sept. 15, 2020, SMIC told the Chinese state-run Securities Times that it stopped supplying chips to Huawei because SMIC used American technology to make its chips and Huawei was blacklisted from purchasing any American technology.

Under Chinas Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, SMIC has no other choice but to supply chips to Huawei. Once SMIC sells chips to Huawei, it violates the American law, and loses its right to use American technology as well as its global market, Tang said.

For foreign companies, their situations are worse than SMIC. They will lose all their assets and other property in China if they dont follow the Beijing regimes law, Tang added.

Luo Ya contributed to this report.
The P4 laboratory building at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is shown in Wuhan, China, on May 13, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

GOP House Members Pose Questions to NIH Over US Nonprofit That Helped Fund Wuhan Lab

A group of Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee on June 10 sent a letter to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), asking for information that would assist a probe into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-Wash.), the ranking Republican on the panel, was joined by 25 other Republican lawmakers in signing a letter to NIH Director Francis Collins, asking for reports and documents related to EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), which channeled money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) for the purpose of understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence.

WIV is located in the same city where the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, is believed to have first emerged.

According to internal emails from NIH officials and an office inside the agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) which is led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the agencies sent a total of $826,777 between fiscal years 2014 and 2019 to the New York-based medical research nonprofit group.

The total amount is different from the amount that Fauci told members of Congress the Wuhan lab received from the U.S. government.

The Chinese Communist government has not yet allowed Chinese scientists to cooperate with an investigation into COVID-19 origins, and has admitted to destroying samples and records pertinent to such an investigation, the lawmakers wrote. Thus, it is imperative we assemble all data and information in U.S. possession about bat coronavirus research experiments and lab safety protocols from all sources outside of China, particularly from EcoHealth Alliance (EHA).

The lawmakers noted that EHA is an NIH grantee who has been involved in bat coronavirus research in China and has issued grant sub-awards to the WIV.

It is also essential to collect information about the WIV, the laboratory that was conducting bat coronavirus experiments located in Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak, they wrote.

The letter emphasizes that NIH is in a unique position to share publicly detailed research reports in its possession, as it is a federal cognizant grant-making agency that funded bat coronavirus research at the WIV through EHA awards.

Importantly, NIH has full access to EHA records and EHA has refused to cooperate with our inquiry, the Republicans added. Therefore, it is critical for NIH to cooperate with our objective fact-finding investigation as we continue to collect data about U.S. funded bat coronavirus research.

It comes as the hypothesis that the CCP virus could have been artificially or deliberately manipulated at Chinas WIV receives wider recognition.

Early reports about an outbreak of the CCP virus first appeared in Wuhan in late 2019, when a cluster of cases was reported by state-controlled media to be linked to a local wet market. More than a year later, the origins of the virus remain unknown, although the possibility that the virus leaked from a laboratory at Chinas WIV is gaining traction.

The Wall Street Journal reported on May 23 that three researchers at the WIV were hospitalized in November 2019 with symptoms consistent with seasonal flu and COVID-19. The newspaper cited unnamed U.S. government sources familiar with a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report.

President Joe Biden has ordered the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) to ramp up efforts to investigate the viruss origins.

The Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have given the NIH a deadline of June 24 to answer its latest questions, as well as those it posed in a letter dated March 18.
Palm Beach County Sheriffs officers stand outside of a Publix supermarket in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, on June 10, 2021. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Gunman Kills Grandmother and Child at Florida Publix Supermarket

Three people have been killed following a shooting at a supermarket in Florida on the morning of June 10, the Palm Beach County Sheriffs Office announced.

The shooting occurred shortly after 11:30 a.m. ET in a Publix store in the 1100 block of Royal Palm Beach Boulevard in Royal Palm Beach, about 15 miles west of Palm Beach, officials said.

Officers arrived at the scene to find three individuals, including one adult female and one child, had died from gunshot wounds.

Authorities identified the victims as a woman and her grandson, who would have turned two at the end of the month, and said their names would not be released at the familys request.

The male shooter has been identified by PBSO as 55-year-old Timothy J. Wall from Royal Palm Beach, CBS Miami reported. He died of a self-inflicted wound, authorities confirmed.

Officials said there is currently no known motive or relationship between this gunman and his victims.

Detectives are now investigating the incident and are in the beginning stages of determining what led up to the shooting.

The Publix sign is seen on the building in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, on June 10, 2021. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

One shopper who was in the supermarkets deli area when the incident took place recalled hearing gun shots and employees screaming.

I heard, Theyre shooting! A woman Publix worker said, Run! Shooting!' Juan Guardia told the Palm Beach Post. I was scared. Its sad because everything happened fast. Everyone was running. Some employees were crying.

Publix said in a statement to USA Today that it was aware of the shooting and that it was directing questions to the police.

Our thoughts are with those who are impacted by this tragedy, Publix said. We are cooperating with the local law enforcement. Since this is an active police investigation, we cannot confirm any additional details.

County Commissioner Melissa McKinlay, who represents the area, said the shooting was heartbreaking in a statement posted to Twitter.

A law enforcement officer stands outside of a Publix supermarket in Royal Palm Beach, Florida on June 10, 2021. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Weve become too numb to gun violence, she said. Today we mourn the loss of these lives and we pray for those inside of Publix who witnessed this tragedy as well as the first responders who continue to run toward danger to protect the public. Tomorrow we must step up and engage in a very honest conversation about why this happened and what can do specifically to prevent this violence. Inaction is not an option.

At a news conference, sheriffs spokeswoman Teri Barbera said detectives were interviewing witnesses and reviewing surveillance-camera video. The store would remained closed until Saturday.

The shooting comes just says before the five-year anniversary of the deadly rampage at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando which claimed the lives of 49 people.

The gunman, Omar Mateen, was later killed by police after a three-hour standoff.

As of May 26, there had been 232 mass shootings in the United States this year, according to The National Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group.
Hungary Plans to Ban Promoting Homosexuality to Under-18s

BUDAPEST, HungaryHungarys governing conservative party has prepared new legislation that bans showing pornographic material of any kind, or any content encouraging gender change or homosexuality to anyone under 18.

The party describes the new legislation as part of an effort to protect children from pedophilia. But LGBT rights activists denounced the bills as discriminatory, with some comparing it to a 2013 Russian law banning gay propaganda. Human rights groups have described the Russian law as a tool of discrimination and harassment.

Fidesz, the governing party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, tabled the amendments in the Hungarian Parliament on Thursday. They are scheduled to be debated on Monday and face a vote on Tuesday.

Fidesz has a majority in the legislature and the bills are expected to be easily approved.

The legislation prohibits making pornographic content available to anyone under the age of 18, as well as content that depicts sexuality for its own sake, or promotes or displays deviations from the identity of the sex of birth, gender reassignment, or homosexuality.

This also applies to advertisements.

ILGA-Europe, a Brussels-based umbrella organization of hundreds of LGBT rights groups in Europe and Asia, denounced the amendments, calling them the next stage in a series of legislative attacks launched by Fidesz against the human rights and fundamental freedoms of LGBT people.

They also violate the right to freedom of expression and the right to education for all Hungarian people, the group said.

Gabriella Selmeczi, a lawmaker with Fidesz who is among those who introduced the legislation, denied that it is discriminatory or anti-liberal.

True liberalism is when children are left alone with questions about their sexual orientation until the age of 18, she said.
The logo for Facebook appears on screens at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York's Times Square on March 29, 2018. (Richard Drew/AP Photo)

Judge Rejects Facebooks Bid to Dismiss Lawsuit Claiming Discrimination Against American Workers

An administrative law judge has ruled that Facebook must face allegations that it discriminated against U.S. workers based on their citizenship by reserving thousands of jobs for temporary visa holders, Department of Justice (DOJ) documents show.

On June 8, the DOJs Executive Office for Immigration Review announced that the Office of the Chief Administrative Hearing Officer (OCAHO) published a decision (pdf) by Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) Andrea R. Carroll-Tipton that denied Facebooks motion to dismiss a lawsuit accusing the social media giant of discriminatory hiring practices.

Facebook sought to dismiss the lawsuit, initially brought by the DOJ against the company in December 2020, which alleged that the social media giant refused to consider or hire qualified and available U.S. workers for over 2,600 positions that it hoarded for temporary visa holders it sponsored for permanent work authorization, or green cards, in connection with the permanent labor certification process (PERM).

The Department of Justices lawsuit alleges that Facebook engaged in intentional and widespread violations of the law, by setting aside positions for temporary visa holders instead of considering interested and qualified U.S. workers, said Assistant Attorney General Eric S. Dreiband of the Civil Rights Division, in a statement.

Our message to workers is clear: if companies deny employment opportunities by illegally preferring temporary visa holders, the Department of Justice will hold them accountable, Dreiband said. Our message to all employersincluding those in the technology sectoris clear: you cannot illegally prefer to recruit, consider, or hire temporary visa holders over U.S. workers.

The PERM program works to hire from inside the company, creating permanent jobs for temporary visa holders who want to continue working for a given firm, subject to the condition that the process does not adversely impact the job opportunities for U.S. workers. But the DOJ alleged that, in Facebooks case, the way the program was structured was discriminatory because even if U.S. citizens applied for these jobs, they would not be considered because the positions were reserved for temporary visa holders.

The DOJ said that, unlike other open positions, Facebooks PERM program jobs were not advertised online and applicants were pre-selected based on their immigration status and invited to send in their application by email. This led to the situation in which U.S. workers were unfairly denied an opportunity to be considered for these jobs, the DOJ said.

In its motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Facebook argued that the ALJ lacked subject matter jurisdiction and that the complaint failed to state a claim upon which relief could be granted.

In her decision to deny Facebooks motion to dismiss, Carroll-Tipton acknowledged that she lacked subject matter jurisdiction to determine whether Facebook broke PERM regulations, but determined that OCAHO has such jurisdiction. She also found that the pleading standards were met by the DOJ in bringing forward the lawsuit.

As the Court has previously held, allegations of manipulating the hiring practice to disqualify individuals based on citizenship, meet the legal standard in this forum for stating a claim upon which relief can be granted, she wrote in the opinion.

The lawsuit is part of the DOJs Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative, established in 2017 under the administration of then-President Donald Trump.

Following the filing of the initial complaint in December, Facebook issued a statement to NPR, saying it has been cooperating with the DOJs review and while we dispute the allegations in the complaint, we cannot comment further on pending litigation.
Louisiana Officers and Good Samaritan Save Woman From Jumping off Bridge in Team Effort

Two Louisiana police officers and a quick-acting passerby have been credited with saving a distraught womans life who was on the verge of jumping off a bridge.

On June 1, Bossier City Police hurried to the scene after receiving a call about a suspicious person on the Shreveport-Barksdale Highway bridge.

Cpl. Mathew Bragg was the first to arrive on the scene. As he approached the distressed woman, he found her stepping onto the ledge of the bridge over the Red River. In footage captured from Braggs dashboard camera, the woman is seen hitting her hands on her legs several times. She takes off her shoes and places them into the side of the road and appears to get ready to jump off the Westgate Bridge.

Bragg acted fast, running to the woman and wrapping his arms around her. All I could do was just grab her and put all my weight down to keep her from falling, he explained in a Bossier City Police Department press release.

A second officer arrived in under a minute.

Officer Brandon Bailey pulled over, lights flashing, and ran to Braggs aid. While helping prevent the woman from falling into the river, the pair was unable to pull her over the ledge without a third pair of hands, and they waited for additional officers to arrive on the scene.

A passing driver who knew the officers needed help stopped his car and intervened in the nick of time, running to grab the womans legs and help haul her to safety. The woman and her trio of saviors then fell onto the highway.

Bragg hailed the rescue as a team effort.

The two officers were grateful to the Samaritan who sprang into action to help.

Police Chief Shane McWilliams claimed his officers put their lives on the line to save another. I commend them for their quick response and offer my gratitude to the good Samaritan who stopped to help them, he said.

The woman, who remains anonymous, sustained no physical injuries. She was driven to Willis-Knighton Bossier Health Center for evaluation.

Bossier City Police want the community to know that help is always available; anyone in distress can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 1-800-273 TALK (8255).

Watch the video:

(Courtesy of Bossier City Police Department)

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Another Elephant Herd in Southwest China

Chinese residents liken a quarantine site to a concentration camp in the city of Guangzhou. The facility was set up to combat a surge in the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus there.

While under at-home quarantine, a group of Chinese citizens were seen crying out to nearby authorities for help. They explained theyd been stuck inside for days without food.

A communist party official was murdered at the university he worked for. A lecturer is the main suspect, and police say he was motivated by employment issues.

For the first time ever, a Chinese scientist is going on trial in the United States for hiding his research work in China, while taking government grants.

Another herd of elephants is on the move in southwestern China. The group comes after a separate band of 15, who caught the public eye with a more than 300-mile march.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more first-hand news from China.

For more news and videos, please visit our website and Twitter.
Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei, returns to B.C. Supreme Court after a break from her extradition hearing, in Vancouver, B.C., on March 31, 2021. (The Canadian Press/Darryl Dyck)

Meng Applies for Publication Ban on HSBC Materials Obtained via Hong Kong Court

VANCOUVERHuaweis chief financial officer is seeking a publication ban on new evidence that her legal team wants to introduce in her fight against extradition to the United States.

Meng Wanzhous lawyers obtained the new material from HSBC through an agreement in a Hong Kong court that they say includes a stipulation that they protect confidential information.

They argue in documents filed with the B.C. Supreme Court that the ban preserves HSBCs privacy interests in relation to its business processes and it encourages the banks participation in criminal justice proceedings.

However, lawyers for Canadas attorney general say the application goes too far by seeking a ban on all of the documents, when redacting private information would do, and it compromises the medias ability to share information with the public.

Meng is wanted by the United States on bank fraud charges that both she and Huawei deny.

She is accused of lying to HSBC about Huaweis control over another company, putting the bank at risk of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran.

A publication ban is necessary to protect the proper administration of justice, Mengs lawyers say in the application.

A hearing over the publication ban is scheduled for Monday, while another hearing on whether the court will allow the evidence to be used in the case is set for the end of the month.

Meng has been living in one of her Vancouver homes on bail since her arrest at Vancouvers airport in December 2018.

The final set of hearings in her extradition case is scheduled to begin Aug. 3.
Missouri Governor Mike Parson speaks in support of Republican U.S. Senate candidate Josh Hawley during a campaign rally in St. Louis, Missouri, on Nov. 5, 2018. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Missouri Governor Will Sign Bill Nullifying Federal Gun Laws: Spokeswoman

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson will sign newly passed legislation that would ban state law enforcement agencies from enforcing new federal gun laws following proposed rulemaking from the Biden administration to regulate firearms with stabilizing braces.

According to Parson spokeswoman Kelli Jones, the Republican governor will sign the Second Amendment Preservation Act, which says that it is the duty of courts and law enforcement agencies in Missouri to protect the Second Amendment rights of citizens to keep and bear arms. It also declares federal laws that infringe on that right null.

The Governor is aware of the legal implications of this bill, but also that, now more than ever, we must define a limited role for federal government in order to protect citizens rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, Jones said in a statement to news outlets on Thursday.

The bill, she said, is about allowing Missourians to protect themselves and acknowledging the federalist constitutional structure of our government.

Parson will sign the bill at a shooting range in the Kansas City suburb of Lees Summit, reports said.

Gun-control advocacy groups and Democrats criticized the bill, saying it would violate the Constitutions Supremacy Clause. Democrats have also argued that because Missouri has a relatively high number of shootings and murders, the measure would be dangerous.

This bill has no benefit, and will interfere with the enforcement of the critical protections that help keep Missourians safe from gun violence, gun-control group Moms Demand Action spokeswoman Tara Bennett said in a statement after Parson indicated he would support the bill. There is no doubt this bill should not become law.

But Republicans in the state legislature said that the federal government will continue to push for more and more gun control measures.

Gun bans directly, magazine bans, attacks on private gun manufacturers, red flag laws and restrictions on individual citizens from buying firearms, state Sen. Eric Burlison, a Republican, said in January.

We are doing this bill because the Second Amendment is under attack. Its under attack by the Democrats, specifically the Biden administration and the Democrats in Washington, said state Rep. Jered Taylor, a Republican, when the bill passed in May.

The Second Amendment Preservation Act has been introduced in the state legislature several times since 2013. Previously, the bill was vetoed by Democrat Gov. Jay Nixon.

This year, however, the bill was approved by the Senate in a 22-10 vote, and the House approved the measure 111-42.

Earlier this month, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) proposed a new rule that would consider most firearms with stabilizing pistol braces illegal. The rule would define a handgun as a short-barreled rifle if it is equipped with a stabilizing pistol brace, which, according to the ATFs own estimate, is a popular accessory.
Mom Panics as Son Chokes on Chicken Nugget at McDonaldsThen Guardian Angel Saves the Day

A mother in Ireland praised a good Samaritan who saved the life of her son, who she said was slipping away in her arms, in a restaurant in Newry.

Mary Byrne, a mother of four, and her son were eating at McDonalds when the near miss happened in late May.

She and her 5-year-old son, Johnny Og, had just visited the beach and, afterward, had decided on some takeout from the fast-food joint.

Mary Byrne with her son, Johnny Og. (Courtesy of Mary Byrne)

The McDonalds restaurant located in Newry, Ireland. (Screenshot/Google Maps)

Johnny Og went to put the wrappers in the bin and had a chicken nugget in his mouth, Mary said, as reported by the Irish Mirror. I called him and he didnt answer, he just turned around and started staring at me.

It was at that moment when she realized Johnny Og was choking on the chicken nugget. She rush over to him and tried to dislodge the food but was unable to.

He wasnt moving or speaking at that point and I feared he was slipping away, Mary said. Another woman rushed to help and two men jumped out of a car but their efforts didnt work.

Mary started panicking; but luckily, a man named Gabriel McKenna entered the establishment just in time.

Mary with her son, Johnny Og. (Courtesy of Mary Byrne)

I dont know where Gabriel came out of. I had Johnny Og across my knee and Gabriel just said, Give me him, Mary said.

Gabriel held Johnny Og upside down in the air, and with two thrusts between the shoulder blades, the nugget was dislodged.

After her son was saved, Mary was so overcome with emotion she just went to her car where she called her husband and started crying.

I was shaking so much that I couldnt drive and Gabriel told me afterwards that his tears started to fall too, when he returned to his car, she said.

Gabriel, who lives in Cullyhanna, Armagh, called it divine intervention that he happened to be there at the right time, and said he was thankful he was able to help.

Mary referred to Gabriel as her guardian angel.

After the incident, she took to Facebook to try and track him down to thank him.

I would love to be able to get an address for a man called Gabriel McKenna from somewhere in Cullyhanna? Mary posted on Facebook. Today this man saved my wee Johnnys life, we were at McDonalds in Newry when Johnny choked and I could not get the food dislodged.

(L-R) Gabriel McKenna, Mary Byrne, and her son Johnny Og. (Courtesy of Mary Byrne)

Within 20 minutes of posting, she received over 60 messages online from people telling her how good a man he is.

She eventually located Gabriel, and even took a photo with him and her son, which she posted on Facebook, along with a caption thanking him for his heroism.

When you meet a hero, forever in his debt, Mary wrote.

The mom has since pledged to start a CPR course, which is set to be offered in her community in the next few weeks.

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National Police Association Praises DOJ Decision to Equip Officers With Body Cameras

The National Police Association (NPA) on Thursday said that it welcomes the transparency of the Department of Justices move to require its federal officers to wear and activate body cameras while carrying out pre-planned search and arrest warrants.

Sgt. Betsy Brantner Smith, a spokesperson for the NPA and current law enforcement trainer, told The Epoch Times that the non-profit organization believes the new requirement will both improve the safety of federal agents through the review of footage, and lead to a greater confidence in federal law enforcement in general.

The National Police Association welcomes the transparency that body worn cameras (BWC) bring to law enforcement, Brantner Smith, a 29-year police veteran, said in an emailed statement. Many federal agents, especially when working with local police agencies on multi-agency task force initiatives, get involved in incredibly dangerous situations and the American public should be able to see firsthand the risks these brave police officers take.

Brantner Smith cited the Feb. 2 deaths of FBI Special Agents Laura Schwartzenberger and Daniel Alfin in Sunrise, Florida, as instances where review of body worn camera footage could have been utilized to improve the federal agent safety. The pair were killed in the line of duty while serving a federal search warrant in a crimes against children investigation.

Federal law enforcement leadership, including and perhaps especially the Department of Justice, should be role models for sound policy concerning the use and the release of BWC footage, Brantner Smith said. Federal law enforcement has the opportunity to lead the way in the swift release of BWC footage in all federal police use of force cases.

The NPA spokesperson also suggested that had body worn cameras been in use during the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol building, there would certainly be more clarity about the death of Ashli Babbitt, leading to a greater confidence in federal law enforcement in general.

Melody Black, from Minnesota, visits a memorial setup near the Capitol Building for Ashli Babbitt in Washington, on Jan. 7, 2021. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Babbitt, an unarmed Air Force veteran, was fatally shot by a U.S. Capitol Police officer when she reportedly tried to climb through a broken window into the Speakers Lobby, adjacent to the House chamber.

The DOJs requirement marks a shift from a long-standing policy that barred federal agents from wearing body cameras. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a memo (pdf) that the policy decision was based on recommendations from the Departments law enforcement components.

Previously in October 2020, the DOJ under the Trump administration announced it would allow but not mandate state and local law enforcement officers on federal task forces to wear body-worn cameras. The policy still prohibited the cameras from being activated in multiple scenarios, including in sensitive investigations, and federal agents were still blocked from wearing body cameras.

Before then, state and local police were required to turn off their cameras while working on federal task forces.

The call for law enforcement officers to wear and activate body cameras has intensified in recent months, particularly after the police officer-involved deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) however, argues that while police body cameras have the potential to serve as a police oversight tool to reduce any cases of abuse by officers and increase community trust in the police forces as a whole, they must be deployed with good policies to ensure they accomplish those goals.

Without good policies, they risk becoming just another police surveillance deviceand one with very real potential to invade privacy, the ACLU says. Especially important are policies governing when the cameras are turned on, and who has access to the footage and under what conditions.

Monaco has directed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the FBI; and the U.S. Marshals Service; to submit for review policies regarding body cameras for their respective agencies within 30 days from June 7.

Mimi Nguyen Ly contributed to this report.
Steve Ellis (L) with his father, Roger Ellis, who suffers from a mysterious neurological syndrome that has appeared in clusters in New Brunswick, in Bathurst, N.B., in August 2020. (Courtesy of Steve Ellis)

NB Families Bemoan Lack of Information From Province About Mystery Brain Disease

Families search for answers as loved ones suffer from fatal neurological illness

BATHURST, New BrunswickSufferers of a mysterious brain disease and their families in New Brunswick are complaining that provincial health officials are denying them information about the illness.

People are dying, Steve Ellis told The Epoch Times. My father has been sick for two years, and 18 to 36 months is the lifespan of this disease. I dont know how much more time my father has left.

Six people are known to have died from the as yet unidentified syndrome of unknown cause. The syndrome can come with a wide range of symptoms such as delusions, blurred vision, hallucinations, bouts of aggression or other behavioural changes, memory problems, pain in the arms or legs, repetitive speech, imbalance, and sudden weight loss.

At just under six feet, Roger Ellis, a former industrial mechanic who worked for years in the now-closed Brunswick Mine, lost roughly 65 pounds during the first year of the illness. Since then, he has put 35 pounds back on, but now suffers from an entirely new problem: an inability to tell when he has eaten and is full.

The 63-year-old is now living in a special care home in the small city of Bathurst in northern New Brunswick. His son, who lives in Bridgewater in neighbouring Nova Scotia, has created a Facebook community of about 20 sufferers of the mysterious illness along with their families and friends.

Together theyve been trying to get answers about the illness from New Brunswicks Department of Health.

I want Health Minister Dorothy Shephard to give public briefings on a regular basis, as needed, says Steve Ellis.

When it comes to COVID-19, they have no problem releasing information about the ages and genders and zones where the cases were detected. So why arent they doing it for this?

New Brunswick health officials, who had earlier been providing information about the number of confirmed cases of the illness and where they were detected, turned off that flow of information on June 2.

Bruce Macfarlane, a spokesman for the provinces health department, explained in an email response that since neither the syndrome nor its cause has been identified, we are refraining from using words like confirmed or diagnosed.

Macfarlane also said the province will not be releasing more information, including aggregated data about the personal characteristics of those suffering from the illness, which might provide clues of possible risk factors.

Due to the relatively low number of cases, we will not be releasing more personal information as it could lead to a privacy breach for patients, he wrote.

In the Acadian Peninsula, the northeastern corner of New Brunswick where most of the cases of this mysterious brain syndrome have been detected, the provinces lack of willingness to provide details about cases to the public is leading to anxiety and frustration, according to Caraquet Mayor Bernard Theriault.

The small town of Caraquet, which bills itself as the unofficial capital of Acadia, is right in the middle of the region hardest hit by the mysterious illness.

Theriault, who knows people who are suffering from the disease, told The Epoch Times that they and their families are upset and baffled by the governments unwillingness to share information.

It worries me, he said.

The families affected and the region in general should have more information rather than less. They should be kept up to date by public health officials and the health authorities. This is not the time to give people less informationit is the time to give them more.

Steve Ellis (L) with his father, Roger Ellis, at Chaleur Regional Hospital in Bathurst, N.B., in October 2019. (Courtesy of Steve Ellis)

No One Is Recovering From This

The neurological disease, which first appeared in 2015, has symptoms similar to those of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a rare and fatal degenerative brain disorder. But New Brunswick Public Health has so far ruled out that it is CJD. It appears to have a fatality rate of 12.514.5 percent, with at least six of those afflicted, possibly seven, out of the 48 known cases having died by the beginning of June 2021.

In April this year, public health officials began to collect consent and contact information from those affected in order to undertake an investigative survey. Macfarlane said the data collected will be used to help identify potential sources of the disease.

The government has also created a joint oversight committee that is working with the provinces two health authorities, the Horizon Health Network and Vitalite Health Network, to fully investigate all known cases of the mystery illness.

I want to assure you that we will keep all lines of communication open, and when there is more information to share, the Department of Health and Public Health New Brunswick will, without question, share it with New Brunswickers, Macfarlane said.

Thats good enough for some people living in the Acadian Peninsula, including Lameque Mayor Jules Hache. The mayor of the small town on the very tip of the peninsula is willing to give public health officials the time they want to conduct their investigation.

Were going to let them do their jobs, he said in an interview. They dont have enough data to be able to draw conclusions.  There isnt enough data for it to be credible.

But those suffering from the illness, and their families, are fed up with being told to wait.

Elliss greatest fear is that the illness will eventually prove to be fatal in all cases. No one is recovering from this, he says. Right now, it is a fatal brain disease.

We know the investigation will take time and we know that science takes time. What we dont know is what theyve been doing for the last 18 months since they ruled out CJD.

Ellis is trying to get every family member and friend of a patient with the mystery brain disease to email, call, or write the health minister and demand regular public updates.

Please. There is strength in numbers, he advises the members of the Facebook community. Even if you dont live in New Brunswick, please contact [Shephards] office. This is a national, if not international, issue.

Duff Conacher, co-founder of the Ottawa-based national citizens advocacy group Democracy Watch, says the provincial government of New Brunswick needs to make public whatever it knows about the illness.

The government has no valid excuse for hiding this information, and it shows how undemocratic and excessively secretive the New Brunswick premier and government are that they have failed to disclose this key information that the public has a clear right to know, Conacher said in an email.

The public should write to their politicians at the municipal and provincial level calling for whatever information the government has to be made public.
People gather around floral tributes to the victims of the Manchester terror attack ahead of a vigil in St. Ann's Square in Manchester, England, on May 24, 2017. (Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

No Immunity for Brother of Manchester Arena Bomb Plotters

The elder brother of the Manchester Arena bombers has been denied in his application for immunity from prosecution in return for answering questions at the public inquiry into the terror attack.

Ismail Abedi wanted a promise from the Attorney General that if he were to give evidence his answers will not land him in the dock, his lawyer told the hearing in Manchester last month.

A legal application was made to Sir John Saunders, chairman of the inquiry, asking him to consider making the application to the Attorney General in return for Abedis co-operation.

However in his ruling, made public on Friday, Sir John said allowing immunity to get Abedi to co-operate did not outweigh the potential effects on the administration of justice, and refused the application.

File photo showing people attending a vigil for the victims of the Manchester Arena bombing, in central Manchester, Britain, on May 29, 2017. (Andrew Yates/Reuters)

The ruling said: If as a result of an undertaking from the Attorney General the applicant was to disclose material to the inquiry which provided evidence to justify charges of murder or conspiracy to murder then he could avoid trial for 22 murders and causing serious injury to many more.

While less serious, if he were to disclose material as a result of the undertaking which evidenced a failure by him to disclose information to the authorities which could have prevented the bombing happening, a failure to prosecute would be considered by many to be a considerable affront to justice.

Images from devices recovered at Ismail Abedis home during a police raid the day after the bombing indicated he was sympathetic to the ideals of ISIS [another name for the so-called ISIS terrorist group], the inquiry has heard.

He was arrested, held for 14 days, and interviewed by detectives 25 times but not charged with any offence through insufficient evidence.

Lawyers for the families of the 22 people murdered in May 2017 were divided over allowing Abedi immunity to get him to co-operate and answer questions, with others who opposed the move describing it as unconscionable.

Currently, Ismail Abedi, who is married and lives in Manchester, is refusing to co-operate with the inquiry despite repeated requests, claiming his legal privilege not to incriminate himself. He denies any knowledge or involvement in the bomb plot.

The inquiry is soon to consider how his two younger brothers became radicalised and planned their deadly bomb plot.

Abedi is expected to be served with a legal notice soon which will require his attendance in person at the inquiry, sitting in Manchester.

He will be entitled not to answer questions on the grounds that he may incriminate himself, but he will have to justify why and on what grounds he is refusing to answer.

Salman Abedi, 22, detonated a home-made shrapnel-packed bomb at the end of an Ariana Grande concert at the arena on May 22, 2017, killing 22 bystanders and injuring hundreds more.

Hashem Abedi was jailed in 2020 for a minimum of 55 years before parole for his part in the bomb plot.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine gives his victory speech after winning the Ohio gubernatorial race at the Ohio Republican Party's election night party at the Sheraton Capitol Square in Columbus, Ohio, on Nov. 6, 2018. (Justin Merriman/Getty Images)

Ohios DeWine Opposes Legislation Seeking to Weaken COVID-19 Vaccination Laws

The governor of Ohio on Thursday opposed a controversial bill that seeks to weaken vaccination laws in the state, according to reports.

Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, said he is antagonistic about House Bill 248 while asking Ohioans to contemplate the impact COVID-19 vaccines have had on society so far, The Columbus Dispatch reported.

Before modern medicine, diseases such as mumps, polio, whooping cough were common and caused great, great, great suffering and death to thousands of people every single year, DeWine said during a news briefing announcing the latest winners for the states Vax-a-Million lottery.

The bill would block employers from mandating vaccinations as a condition of employment and allow state residents to skip any vaccination by making a written or verbal declaration.

It would also prohibit unvaccinated people to be forced to wear a face mask and block health departments, schools, or other government agencies from mandating participation in a vaccine registry.

The governors comments came after hearings on the bill garnered attention in the news when Cleveland physician Dr. Sherry Tenpenny told lawmakers at the Ohio House of Representatives the COVID-19 vaccines cause autism and also make people magnetized, The Hill reported.

People deciding to get their vaccines in the state of Ohio have seen a surge after DeWine announced that five residents will win $1 million each as a monetary incentive for getting inoculated.

A person receives a COVID-19 vaccine in Dayton, Ohio, on Feb. 10, 2021. (Megan Jelinger/AFP via Getty Images)

Ohios Department of Health said last month that from May 14 to 17, vaccination rates for people 16 and older jumped 28 percent.

The Ohio Vax-a-Million program is funded by existing federal pandemic relief funds and Ohio residents who are at least 18 years old and have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine are eligible to win the sum in once-a-week lottery drawings, the governor announced last week.

The first drawing happened on May 26 and the Ohio Department of Health will be the sponsoring agency for the drawings and the state Lottery will conduct them.

DeWine said at the time that the pool of names for the drawings will take place each Wednesday for five consecutive weeks and will come from the Ohio Secretary of States publicly available voter registration database. Residents not in the database can register on a separate website that will be made available later.

A separate incentive for younger Ohio residents will see five vaccinated 12- to 17-year-old students receive full four-year scholarships to attend Ohio public universities, including tuition, room, board, and books.

Isabel van Brugen contributed to this report.

From NTD News
Work is done on a new border wall being constructed in Jacumba, Calif., on Jan. 22, 2021. (Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)

Pentagon Diverts Most Border Wall Funds to Overseas Military Construction: Memo

Biden sends back $2.2 billion in border wall funds to military

The Biden administration announced Friday that it returned more than $2 billion in military funds that former President Donald Trump had diverted to the construction of the U.S.-Mexico border barrier, while the Department of Defense (DOD) simultaneously announced that those funds will be used for overseas military construction projects.

Instead of border wall construction, the DOD said Friday that the $2.2 billion will be used for 66 projects across 16 countries, three U.S. territories, and 11 states.

A memo (pdf) released by the Pentagon reveals that the majority of the funds, or around $1.26 billion, will be spent overseas in places including Hungary, Japan, Italy, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Germany, Romania, Spain, and other countries.

According to the memo, in one instance, about 59 million will be spent on a regional munitions storage facility in Slovakia. In Jordan, $18 million will be spent by the Pentagon on an air traffic control tower and about $34 million will be doled out for a munitions storage area.

Nearly $10 million will be spent at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for the replacement of a working dog treatment facility, it showed. The Navy will spend about $53 million, meanwhile, on an electrical system upgrade in Bahrain.

About $608 million will be spent on military projects in the U.S. territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Within the United States, about $300 million will be spent on military projects in Alaska, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, and several other states.

A group of Venezuelans wait to be picked up by Border Patrol after illegally crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into Del Rio, Texas, on June 3, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

DOD press secretary John Kirby told reporters that the department approved a $150 million military package for Ukraine, including systems to counter artillery radar and drones.

The effort diverted critical resources away from military training facilities and schools, and caused serious risks to life, safety, and the environment, the White House said in a statement Friday about the release of funds back to the DOD. It also took attention away from genuine security challenges, like drug smuggling and human trafficking.

In late April, the DOD announced that it canceled all border barrier construction projects that were initially appropriated for other military projects. During President Joe Bidens first day in office on Jan. 20, he issued an order that terminated the construction of the border wall.

An additional $1.4 billion in border wall funds were appropriated by Congress for the fiscal year 2021 as part of a December 2020 COVID-19 relief measure. The Biden administration on Friday called on Congress to rescind the funds to construct the wall.

Republicans are almost certain to pounce on Fridays announcement. Following Bidens January executive order and a surge in illegal immigration, GOP lawmakers and governors have called on the administration to re-start construction of the wall. The Biden administration, however, described the wall construction as a waste of money that doesnt curb illegal immigration.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, said Thursday that he will direct Texas to construct a wall along the states border with Mexico, arguing that its needed to stop the surge of people illegally crossing the border into the United States.

It will help all of us to work on ways to stem the flow of unlawful immigration and to stem the flow of illegal contraband, Abbott said during an event.

In April, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration over his order rescinding the walls construction, alleging the move violates the National Environmental Protection Act.

The border wall was one of Trumps key campaign promises when he was a candidate in 2016. During his administration, more than 450 miles of the barrier were constructed, according to Customs and Border Protection.
Milo Ventimiglia as Denny and Butler as Enzo in the poster for The Art of Racing in the Rain. (20th Century Fox)

Popcorn & Inspiration: The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Cosmic Canine and Life Lessons

PG | 1h 49min | Comedy, Drama, Romance | 2019

Frankly, heading into my viewing of director Simon Curtiss 2019 film The Art of Racing in the Rain, I knew virtually nothing about itother than it featured a dog, his master, and seemed to be focused on racing. Or so I thought. But due to Kevin Costners fantastic narration as the canine character Enzo, I eventually realized that it focused on the dogs interesting perspectives on life and used racing to provide metaphors.

The film certainly starts off in an unusual way. Enzo (Butler as old Enzo and Parker as the younger version) is an older dog near the end of life. As his owner Denny (Milo Ventimiglia) sits next to him on a couch, we find out that Enzo admires a particular documentary about how dogs are highly admired in Mongolia and fantasizes about being reincarnated (as Mongolians believe) as a human. Although Enzo knows hes lived a full and happy life, Denny doesnt seem quite so ready to let him go.

From there, the film retraces Enzos steps  or paw prints if you will, from his adoption by Denny as a fresh-faced puppy to when Enzo becomes a beautiful golden retriever with gleaming, soulful eyes.

Milo Ventimiglia as Denny and Parker as Enzo. (20th Century Fox)

The pup has an instant symbiotic bonding with Denny, who is an affable, aspiring Formula One driver with a crooked smile. The two seem inseparable. Young Enzo watches all of the up-and-coming racecar drivers matches, proudly barking out encouragement at Denny as he speeds down various tracks.

But then a pretty young lady named Eve (Amanda Seyfried) comes along and captures Dennys affections. They quickly fall in love and get married. The wedding takes place at the mansion of Eves well-to-do parents, Maxwell and Trish (Martin Donovan and Kathy Baker). Maxwell considers Denny an underachiever since he hasnt made it to the top his profession yet, after years of racing.

Amanda Seyfried and Milo Ventimiglia, with Butler. (20th Century Fox)

At first, Enzo is somewhat resentful of Denny and Eves pairing, even knocking over pictures of them together. But Eve soon wins Enzo over, especially when she becomes pregnant with the couples first child, daughter Zoe (Ryan Kiera Armstrong and later Lily Dodsworth-Evans).

Over the years, Dennys promising racing career means that he frequently has to leave town for matches around the globe, and so he misses goings-on at home. And when tragedy strikes and he may lose custody of Zoe, his world becomes very dark indeed.

As this all plays out, Enzo makes some astute observations, such as comparing Dennys unusual ability to race high-performance cars in the rain, to his being able to channel calmness and clarity amid the chaos of his deteriorating life.

We also see how loyal and supportive Enzo is during Dennys dark days as the dog recalls many of the things learned, while growing up from a puppy to a now older and wiser companion, through observing Denny. But despite all of this mans best friends support, will Denny be able to weather the tumultuous storm surrounding his life?

The Art of Racing in the Rain is well-paced, with a peppy script, capable direction, and very good acting. But Costner as Enzo is the real hero here, magically drawing together a beautiful tapestry of tribulations and triumphs as if some sort of cosmic, canine guru.

In one racing scene, as Enzo looks on from the sidelines, Denny suddenly turns off the track and into his teams pit. Hes behind in the race but oddly has his pit crew change his racecars tires to those used for rainy weatheronly its not raining. But a few moments after Denny speeds back onto the raceway, a torrential downpour begins, and he soon overtakes all of the other drivers. As his teams leader exclaims from the sidelines, When it rains, it doesnt rain on him!

The Art of Racing in the Rain

Director: Simon Curtis

Starring: Kevin Costner, Milo Ventimiglia, Amanda Seyfried

Rated: PG

Running Time: 1 hour, 49 minute

Release Date: Aug. 9, 2019

Rated: 5 stars out of 5

Ian Kane is a filmmaker and author based out of Los Angeles. To learn more, visit DreamFlightEnt.com or contact him at Twitter.com/ImIanKane.
Portland police disperse a crowd after rioters set fire to the Portland Police Association building early in the morning in Portland, Ore., on Aug. 29, 2020. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

Portland Police Union Relocating After Being Repeatedly Targeted by Antifa

The police union in Portland, Oregon announced this week that it is relocating its headquarters because of repeated attacks by rioters, including members of the far-left network Antifa.

The Portland Police Association enjoyed friendly relations with neighbors after transforming a building that had housed a card room that involved illegal drug use and late-night partying, Daryl Turner, the unions executive director, said on Facebook.

The neighbors welcomed us and were glad to have the police union and police cars there. The community supported us and dropped by to say hello. We opened a Rest Stop for officers, so they had a place to come have lunch, use the restroom, and write reports. Time and again we heard from folks that they felt safer in the neighborhood and were thankful to have things cleaned up, he said.

But after protests and riots started in the summer of 2020things have died down, but unrest continues to happen regularlythe building became a key focal point, being repeatedly set on fire and vandalized.

As the rioting escalated at our location, we felt that the community was more and more at risk. At the most recent arson incident, a neighbor stood on the sidewalk with a water hose trying to put the fire out just before first responders arrived. It went too far and it was time to find another location, Turner said.

We have since moved out and relocated. The Lombard building will be repaired and, at a later date, put on the market to sell.

Turner thanked the community in North Portland, especially the business owners who are located adjacent to the building.

We appreciate their support and patience over the last year. We thank them for their tolerance. And we hope that with our relocation, they can have some peace, he said.

Included in the post was a photograph showing graffiti left by vandals. They wrote cops=murderers and rot fascist pigs among other far-left slogans.

Antifa, a far-left, anarcho-communist network, is most active in the United States in the Pacific Northwest.

Members of the group have been involved in the unrest in Portland that dates back to the summer of 2020. The protests and riots started after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Social media accounts linked with the group expressed interest in continuing to vandalize the building, according to Andy Ngo, a Post Millennial editor and expert on Antifa. Some indicated they hope to find where the new headquarters are so that building can also be vandalized.

A person who lives near the Lombard building told KOIN-TV that some neighbors would be excited about the union relocating, but he would miss the officers.

They are good human beings and they are just doing their job and so I am kind of sorry to see them leave actually, he said. I enjoyed their presence but it caused a strain on the peacefulness around here. It was always peaceful before the protests. The only thing constant is change; hopefully, its a change for the better, he added.

Timothy Becker, a spokesman for Mayor and Police Commissioner Ted Wheeler, declined to comment on the police unions announcement.

Portland Police Bureau Lt. Greg Pashley told The Epoch Times in an email, Hopefully the move will help the administration of the associations business as its hundreds of members continue to serve the community.
Demonstrators gather to protest coronavirus restrictions by Cal-OSHA in Santa Ana, Calif., on June 10, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Protestors Outside of Cal-OSHA Fight for Consistency in Mask Guidelines

More than 40 Orange County, Calif. residents frustrated with the uncertainty of mask guidelines protested June 10 outside of the regional Occupational Safety and Health (Cal-OSHA) in Santa Ana.

The previous day, on June 9, the agencys board reversed a previously-made decision requiring all California workers to wear masks indoors, unless all people are vaccinated and not showing symptoms of the CCP virus.

The proposed rules also scrap physical distancing requirements if employers make N-95 respirator masks available to non-vaccinated workers.

Cal-OSHAs proposal was met with criticism due to its conflicting stance with state and CDC masking regulations. Its June 9 special meeting was held to reverse their decision. However, the board will revisit the issue during a future meeting.

Cathy Kubo, one of the rally organizers and member of Orange County Informed and United, called Cal-OSHAs proposed rules horrifying.

This is ridiculousif you have one person who isnt vaccinated, then you all have to wear masks, Kubo told The Epoch Times.

Kubo said the regulations will put pressure on individuals who dont want to get vaccinated to get the jab to avoid being the one guy in the office that people are saying, youre the guy thats making us all stay masked.

Laura ONeal, a small business owner in Irvine, said Cal-OSHAs regulations would be stressful and cause division within the companys culture.

If employers are required to treat employees differently based upon vaccination status, it will pit employees against each other, she said.

Were going to have more of these rallies; were going to get more people here; and well get more business owners.

Adam Beamish, owner of an Orange County construction company, said the proposed rules put him in a dilemma. He is concerned he may be sued by employees if he requires them to wear masks after June 15, since he would be following the proposed Cal-OSHA rules, but not state and CDC regulations.

At a minimum, my hope is that we will line up with the federal guidelines from the CDC, Beamish told The Epoch Times.

At least were all on the same page and were not running contrary to what the guidelines are.

One of the rally attendees, who works in human resources, said employers requiring proof of vaccination is an invasion of privacy.

With whatever Cal-OSHA decides moving forward, all employers will be obligated to comply  so, we need to continue this fight, we need to take it to the state, and make sure that they do not pass these ridiculous regulations, she said during the rally.
People are seen outside a restaurant on a dark usually busy street in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on June 10, 2021. (Ricardo Arguengo/AFP via Getty Images)

Puerto Rico Blackout After Explosion, Fire at Power Station

Puerto Rico was left in the dark Thursday after a large fire caused power outages throughout the island, leaving hundreds of thousands of residents without electricity.

An explosion and subsequent fire at power firm LUMA Energys Monacillos power distribution substation in the Puerto Rican capital, San Juan, caused the widespread outages, the Canadian company said.

The fire caused major blackouts across the entire island. The situation is under assessment and work is being done to restore the system, utility company LUMA Energy said on Twitter, noting that restoration efforts would continue overnight.

The Puerto Rico Fire Department confirmed on Twitter that it was tackling a blaze at the San Juan substation.

At the height of the power outage, at least 700,000 Puerto Ricans were without power, and at least 400,000more than 1 in 10 residentsstill had no power late Thursday, the Associated Press reported.

In its latest update on the social media platform, midnight Friday, LUMA Energy said about 60,000 residents were still affected by the power outage.

Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluisi said in a statement on Twitter that the cause of the explosion is under investigation by state and federal law enforcement authorities.

All the resources of the PR government are available to handle the emergency caused by the fire at the Monacillos substation in Rio Piedras. Firefighters have already arrived on the scene to handle the situation. As soon as [firefighters] confirm more details, we will let you know, Pierluisi wrote.

The priority must be to re-establish the electrical service as soon as possible and our people can rest assured that we are making sure that this is the case, he added. At the same time, as soon as we have the results of the investigations related to the cause of this incident, whoever is responsible for it will have to answer to the People of Puerto Rico.

No injuries have been reported so far.

Hours before the explosion, LUMA said a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on its website was blocking customers from accessing their accounts.

The DDoS attack was identified and has been issuing 2 million visits per second, LUMA Energy said in a statement. As a result, many clients may have had difficulty accessing the information related to their accounts.

The attack has been reported to the relevant authorities and LUMA awaits the results of an ongoing investigation, the company added.

It isnt clear if the two incidents are related.

LUMA Energy has been in charge of Puerto Ricos power grid since June 1. It was chosen by the island in June 2020 to operate and modernize its transmission and distribution system.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies at a Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees Joint Hearing in Washington on April 10, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Report: Zuckerberg-Backed Grants, Which Were Irregularly Distributed, Increased Voter Turnout for Democrats in Wisconsin 2020 Election

A Wisconsin-based think tank analyzed the impact of private election administration grants on the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin, claiming in its newly released report that the donations had a significant impact on voter turnout for Democrats.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), a think tank and litigation center, requested and received records from 196 of the 216 municipalities that received between $2,212 to $3.4 million in grant funding for the the 2020 election from the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), a nonprofit foundation funded in part by Facebooks CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

This analysis provides convincing evidence that the CTCL grants played a role in increasing turnout for Joe Biden in 2020, WILL Research Director Will Flanders said in a statement released on Wednesday. Wisconsin lawmakers should act to ensure local election administration isnt captured by private money seeking partisan advantage.

After analyzing the change in turnout between 2016 and 2020 for Democrats and Republicans, WILL found a statistically significant increase in turnout in cities that received CTCL grants.

Residents wait in line to vote at a shuttered Sears store in the Janesville Mall in Janesville, Wisconsin, on Nov. 3, 2020. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

In those cities, Biden received approximately 41 votes more on average in each of 196 municipalities. In comparison, CTCL funding did not increase voter turnout for former President Donald Trump.

Given the number of municipalities in Wisconsin that received grants from CTCL, the potential impact is more than 8,000 votes in the direction of Biden, the report claimed.

According to data from the Wisconsin Elections Commission, Trump lost Wisconsin by 20,682 votes or 0.6 percent.

The report noted that according to the Amistad Project, an initiative from the Thomas More Society, CTCLs 20 largest donations all went to cities that Hillary Clinton won in the 2016 electiontargeting states such as Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

By dumping large sums of money into strategically selected municipalities, groups seeking partisan advantage could, in effect, enlist local election administrators into get-out-the-vote operations that serve to help one candidate over another, WILL said in a statement.

The five largest cities in WisconsinMilwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Kenosha, and Racinereceived $8.8 million in CTCL grant funds; that is 86 percent of CTCLs $10.3 million grant funds in Wisconsin.

Other non-CTCL grants accounted for only three percent of the total grants received.

The report also said that CTCL exerted a concerning amount of control and access to election oversight in cities that received grant money.

A file photo shows an election voter collecting the count from a voting machine in a file photo of the Nov. 3 election (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

For example, in Milwaukee, CTCL assisted in the ballot curing process. In Green Bay, CTCL officials were given keys and access to absentee ballots. The report noted that the process was so frustrating that assistants to the clerk were threatening to leave.

For the five big cities who received most of the money, CTCL stipulated that the municipalities must hold to the Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan or CTCL may discontinue, modify, withhold part of, or ask for the return of all or part of the grant funds.

According to the Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan, which was proposed by the five recipient cities, there are four main recommendations to ensure a safe and secure election: encourage and increase absentee voting; dramatically expand strategic voter education and outreach efforts, particularly to historically disenfranchised residents; launch poll worker recruitment, training, and safety efforts; and ensure safe and efficient election day administration.

The report also found that most of the grant money was spent on poll worker recruitment, hazard pay, and training; vote-by-mail or absentee voting equipment or supplies; election administration equipment; and temporary staffing support.

The report said there was a need to ensure that such funds are distributed equitably in a per capita manner and used in similar ways across all voting districts.

While we have no objection to the use of resources to help people vote (with appropriate safeguards), it is important to remember that elections are a contest. When resources are expended that ease voting in some areas and not in others, their expenditure has a distorting effect on the election, the report concludes. It is not surprising that they were perceived as unfair. They were unfair.

Zuckerberg and his wife granted $350 million to CTCL last year, distributed to nearly 2,500 election jurisdictions across 49 states.

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg attend the 2020 Breakthrough Prize Red Carpet at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., on Nov. 3, 2019. (Ian Tuttle/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize)

While Mark and Priscilla provided an overall grant to CTCL to ensure funding was available, they did not participate in the process to determine which jurisdictions received funds, and as a [501] (c)(3) [organization] CTCL is prohibited from engaging in partisan activities, a Chan-Zuckerberg family spokesperson told The Epoch Times.

The spokesperson also provided a list of counties that received grants from CTCL, saying the list shows more counties nationwide that received grants voted for Trump than Biden, although it is unclear if the list was corrected to account for significant changes to voting patterns from 2016, as was done in the WILL analysis.

CTCL didnt respond to a request from The Epoch Times for comment.

State Sen. Duey Stroebel (R-Saukville) and state Rep. Adam Neylon (R-Pewaukee) are advancing Assembly Bill 173 to require that no local municipalities to apply or receive private donations for election administration, except expressly authorized under election statutes. If the Elections Commission accepts a donation or grant, the commission must distribute the money to each municipality in Wisconsin on a per capita basis.

The Assembly passed the bill in May, and the Senate passed it on Wednesday. Now, its back in the Assembly.
Li Zhanshu, chairman of the National People's Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, presides over the closing meeting of the 29th session of the 13th NPC Standing Committee at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, June 10, 2021. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

BEIJING, June 10 (Xinhua) -- The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's top legislature, adopted multiple laws including those on data security, Hainan free trade port and countering foreign sanctions, as it wrapped up a session on Thursday.

President Xi Jinping signed presidential orders to promulgate the laws.

Li Zhanshu, chairman of the NPC Standing Committee, presided over the closing meeting of the 29th session of the 13th NPC Standing Committee, which ran from Monday to Thursday.

Lawmakers also passed a law on the protection of status, rights and interests of military personnel, a revision to the Law on Military Facilities Protection, a decision to amend the Law on Workplace Safety, and a law on stamp tax.

They adopted a decision to authorize the Shanghai Municipal People's Congress and its standing committee to formulate regulations concerning the Pudong New Area.

Legislators approved the central government's final accounts for 2020, and a resolution on promoting legal awareness through public communication and education campaigns.

They also adopted a report on deputy qualifications and personnel-related bills.

Addressing the closing meeting, Li Zhanshu called for efforts to formulate and improve supportive regulations to ensure the effective enforcement of the laws and decisions.

The enactment of the law on Hainan free trade port has provided important legal backing at the state level for the development of the port, he noted.

On the law against foreign sanctions, Li said that it has provided legal support for countering hegemonism and power politics, and safeguarding the interests of the country and the people.

Li stressed the importance of having a full and faithful grasp of provisions of the law so as to get prepared to fight against foreign sanctions through legal means in due course.

He called for efforts to speed up legislation relating to external affairs and upgrade the legal toolkit for meeting challenges and guarding against risks.

Lawmakers have voiced their support for the law in group discussion, saying the legislation is necessary, vital and in a timely manner. They agreed that it is of great significance to opposing hegemonism and power politics, as well as safeguarding China's sovereignty, security, and development interests.

Li also chaired a meeting of the Council of Chairpersons of the NPC Standing Committee before the closing meeting and presided over a lecture for lawmakers after the closing meeting.
U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) speaks during a news conference about inflation on Capitol Hill in Washington, on May 26, 20210. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Republican Senators Reintroduce Legislation to Hold Chinese Officials Accountable for COVID-19

A group of Republican senators has reintroduced legislation with the aim to hold Chinese officials accountable for suppressing and distorting information about the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Chinese Communist Party silenced Dr. Li and many others for attempting to speak the truth about the coronavirus outbreak and Beijings involvement. Meanwhile, they stood by as the virus spread around the worldresulting in loss of life and loss of livelihood for millions, stated Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), according to a statement from her office on June 10.

Dr. Li Wenliang was one of several Chinese whistleblower doctors who tried to warn the public of an unknown pneumonia outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late December 2019. The Chinese regime ignored the warningsinstead, Li was taken to a police station, reprimanded for rumor-mongering and accused of disturbing social order.

Li eventually died on Feb. 7 after contracting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, the pathogen that causes COVID-19, while unknowingly treating an infected patient.

The legislation would grant the president the authority to sanction government officials and their associates for acts intended to deliberately conceal or distort information about a public health emergency of international concern, including COVID-19, according to the text of the bill (pdf).

These sanctions outlined in the bill include inadmissibility to the United States, revoking existing U.S. visas, and blocking property transactions within the United States.

Additionally, the legislation would empower Congress to ask the president to review specific foreign officials for their roles in a health crisis. In response, the president must report back to Congress within 120 days after Congress request, to state whether the officials would be sanctioned.

The president could remove sanctions on foreign officials under the conditions including that they have been prosecuted appropriately for the activity for which sanctions were imposed, according to the bill.

The Chinese regime eventually investigated Lis case and punished two police officers in March 2020 for their inappropriate actions in punishing the doctor. Critics have expressed dissatisfaction with the investigation, saying the two officers were merely scapegoats.

Any actions by foreign governments to suppress those who provide pertinent information about public health crises are unacceptable, and they must be held accountable to the fullest extent, Blackburn added.

The legislation, named the Li Wenliang Global Public Health Accountability Act, was introduced by Blackburn, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Steve Daines (R-Mont.), James Lankford (R-Okla.), Rick Scott (R-Fla.), and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). Similar bills were introduced in both the Senate (S.3600) and House (H.R.6421) last year.

Throughout the past year, we saw Communist China lie and spread propaganda in an attempt to cover up a global pandemic, silencing any and all who dared speak the truth, Scott stated according to the statement.

The Florida senator added: This legislation will give the United States the authority to sanction any foreign official who suppresses or distorts information about global health, like the Chinese Communist Government did.

Since the onset of the pandemic, Beijing has blamed multiple countries, including India, Italy, and the United States, for the spread of the CCP virus. Most recently, on June 7, the Italian Embassy in China took to its social media to refute Chinese articles for groundlessly attributed remarks made by the Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi in connection to the origins of the CCP virus.

The origins of the virus have currently remained a mystery as the Chinese regime has repeatedly blocked outside investigators from having unfettered access in China to probe where the virus came from.

On June 10, the British health minister Matt Hancock became the latest political figure to call for a full, independent COVID-19 investigation in China. He said Chinas lack of transparency was one reason that hampered the UKs early response to the pandemic.
A Huawei logo is seen on a cell phone screen in their store at Vina del Mar, Chile, on July 18, 2019. (Rodrigo Garrido/Reuters)

Romanian President Signs Bill Into Law to Ban Huawei From 5G

BUCHARESTRomanias President Klaus Iohannis signed a Washington-backed bill on Friday that effectively bars China and Huawei from taking part in the development of its 5G telecommunication networks, on security concerns.

The centrist government of Prime Minister Florin Citu, an ally of Iohannis, approved in April a ban on Chinese-controlled firms, and parliament subsequently rubber-stamped it.

Europe has emerged as a battleground in the technology Cold War playing out between Beijing and Washington, and Huaweis European competitors, Ericsson and Nokia, could become a supplier duopoly should the Chinese be shut out.

The bill stems from a 2019 U.S.-Romania memorandum under which the two governments had said: as part of a risk-based security approach, careful and complete evaluation of 5G vendors is necessary, with those controlled by a foreign government and lacking a transparent ownership structure ruled out.

Romania was a staunch Washington ally even before it joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 2004. Washington sees Huawei as an arm of Chinas Communist Partys global surveillance machinery.

Huawei has repeatedly denied spying for the Chinese state.

By Radu Marinas
The U.S. Capitol building is seen behind security fencing that was put up after the January 6, 2021, breach on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 28, 2021. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

Six Alleged Members of the Three Percenters Militia Indicted Over Jan. 6 Capitol Breach

Six alleged members of the Three Percenters right-wing militia group have been charged with conspiring to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced.

The six defendants named indictment are: Allan Hostetter, 56, Russell Taylor, 40, Erik Scott Warner, 45, Felipe Antonio Tony Martinez, 47, Derek Kinnison, 39, and Ronald Mele, 51. All six are from California.

According to a federal indictment, which was returned by a grand jury in the District of Columbia on Wednesday and made public on Thursday, the group is now facing charges of conspiracy, obstructing an official proceeding, and unlawful entry on restricted building or grounds.

Taylor is also charged with obstructing law enforcement during a civil disorder and unlawful possession of a dangerous weapon on Capitol grounds. Warner and Kinnison are also charged with tampering with documents or proceedings.

The Justice Department said in a news release that four of the six men identify as members of Three Percenter militias, and that all of them chatted on the app Telegram through the late fall and early winter of 2020 to coordinate their actions on Jan. 6.

According to the indictment, Hostetter founded a group in 2020 called the American Phoenix Project that opposes government-mandated restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The members used the encrypted messaging app to plan and co-ordinate their efforts to obstruct and interfere with the joint session of Congress at the Capitol on Jan. 6 to certify the Electoral College vote, sharing information regarding the election, coordinating travel to Washington, D.C., and promoting events sponsored by the American Phoenix Project.

According to the DOJ, they first began to form their plan in December through the Telegram app. Hostetter and Taylor texted each other regarding travel and whether they would bring firearms.

Taylor created a Telegram chat called The California Patriots-DC Brigade, which the defendants, along with more than 30 others, joined and used to identify themselves, communicate, and coordinate with each other.

Taylor explained the purpose of the group was to serve as the Comms for able bodied individuals that are going to DC on Jan 6. Many of us have not met before and we are all ready and willing to fight. We will come together for this moment that we are called upon.

Taylor also asked members to identify if they had previous law enforcement experience, military experience, or special skills relevant to our endeavors.

Two of the six men, Hostetter and Taylor, were seen a day before the Capitol Hill breach with Roger Stone, a long-time friend and adviser to Trump, during a protest outside the U.S. Supreme Court against the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, Reuters reported.

Stone was convicted of process crimes by special counsel Robert Muellernamely, lying to Congress, tampering with a witness, and obstructing the Houses Russia investigation.

Former President Donald Trump commuted his sentence in July 2020 and eventually pardoned him in December of the same year. The special counsel investigation concluded finding no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The Three Percenters was founded in 2008 as an anti-government group. The group derives its name from the idea that only three percent of Americans fought in the Revolutionary War against the British.

The men are the first members of a Three Percenters militia group to be charged with conspiracy in connection to the Capitol riot, although 16 members of another militia group, the Oath Keepers, have been indicted on similar charges.

In the 150 days since Jan. 6, approximately 465 individuals have been arrested on charges related to the Jan. 6 Capitol breach, including over 130 individuals charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement, the DOJ said.
Superior Court Orders Dismissal of Lawsuit Ordering Release of 1,800 Inmates

The Orange County Superior Court ordered the dismissal of a lawsuit June 10 that sought to release 50 percent of the Orange County Jail inmate population to allow for more social distancing.

The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in June 2020, claimed that the COVID-19 pandemic could hurt vulnerable inmates with underlying health conditions.

After being ordered by Superior Court Judge Peter J. Wilson to release the inmates last December due to a COVID outbreak within the jails, Sheriff Don Barnes appealed the decision multiple times, stating it would cause great danger to the community due to the risk that many of them would re-offend.

If successful, the suit would have resulted in more than 1,800 inmates being released back into the community, according to the Orange County Sheriffs Department, and many were in pre-trial status for or were already convicted of violent crimes.

Navigating the pandemic presented challenges, but I am proud of the exceptional work of our personnel who continued to provide for the health and safety of inmates in our custody, Barnes said in a prepared statement.

Most importantly, we accomplished this work without releasing dangerous criminal offenders and compromising public safety. This ruling validates the extraordinary innovation, diligence and dedication of custody personnel and Correctional Health Services staff.

To help mitigate the outbreak, the sheriffs department quarantined new inmates for two weeks before letting them into the general population, gave many COVID tests, and offered the vaccine to any inmate who wanted it.
Texas to Build Its Own Border Wall and Arrest Illegal Immigrants: Governor

Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced a major border security plan on Thursday that involves building its own barriers along the Mexico border and arresting illegal immigrants who enter the state.

The new comprehensive plan to stamp out illegal border crossings in Texas was announced at a Border Security Summit in Del Rio, attended by Texas law enforcement, county judges, mayors, district attorneys, and landowners.

The Republican governor said he will sign state budgets that will appropriate more than $1 billion to increase border security, and that Texas will expand its border barrier, with more details to come next week.

He also said that Texas will be arresting illegal immigrants who enter the state. Were going to start making arrestssending a message to anyone thinking about coming hereyoure not getting a free pass. Youre getting a straight pass to a jail cell, he wrote on Twitter.

The new order builds upon Abbotts disaster declaration that had directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to enforce all federal and state criminal laws for criminal trespassing, illegal entry, smuggling, and human trafficking. The disaster declaration also called for more jail space for the arrested illegal immigrants.

A group of Venezuelans wait to be picked up by Border Patrol after illegally crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into Del Rio, Texas, on June 3, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

Also as part of the enhanced border security plan, a new Governors Task Force on Border and Homeland Security, will meet every two weeks to discuss updates on the southern border and make recommendations on ways to stop the crisis, Abbott said. The task force will comprise representatives from multiple state agencies.

Furthermore, both Texas and Arizona will invoke an interstate compact, the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, under which both Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey are seeking the support of other states to send law enforcement officials to help with arrests and jailing. The two governors say they are also asking for resources such as drones and helicopters to help landowners, who have suffered damage to their property due to the surge in illegal immigration.

In a statement, Abbott said that the Biden administrations policies have led to the humanitarian crisis at the southern border with record levels of illegal immigrants, drugs, and contraband pouring into Texas.

While securing the border is the federal governments responsibility, Texas will not sit idly by as this crisis grows, Abbott said. The state is working collaboratively with communities impacted by the crisis to arrest and detain individuals coming into Texas illegally.

Our efforts will only be effective if we work together to secure the border, make criminal arrests, protect landowners, rid our communities of dangerous drugs, and provide Texans with the support they need and deserve. This is an unprecedented crisis, and Texas is responding with the most robust and comprehensive border plan the nation has ever seen.
The Curse of the Million-Dollar Franchise

About 10 years ago, I bought a franchise that provides an essential service for building contractors.

Because the franchise was new, I was able to cut a terrific deal for a large territory in my state. Im paying only a flat royalty fee each month, not a percentage of my gross sales as is typical for most franchises, so my margins are very generous.

Ive worked my tail off to build the territory, and now Im earning more than $1 million a year in gross sales.

Im planning to sell the franchise within the next year or two so I can retire, but Ive hit a snag. The franchise has indicated that it will honor my flat-fee royalty arrangement for the remaining term of my franchise agreement (five more years), but anybody who purchases the franchise will have to agree to pay a percentage of gross sales going forward. This will eat significantly into the buyers income and will likely reduce the amount they will want to pay me for the franchise.

I tried to discuss this with the franchise, but they said they couldnt offer me any exception as it would violate the law. Is that right? I would hate to think that I spent all these years building a successful franchise only to find that I cant sell it at the end of the day.

Sometimes, you can be a victim of your own success, and this is a classic example.

When you buy a franchise (either a new or an existing territory), the deal doesnt last forever. Your agreement with the franchise lasts for several years with the right to renew for an additional period. This is assuming the franchise is happy with your performance and you have generally behaved like a good franchisee. You can sell your franchise anytime you like to a buyer the franchise approves. However, the franchise is free to impose any terms they wish on your successor, even if those differ from the deal you had with them.

When a new franchise is just getting off the ground, they tend to offer extremely generous terms to their franchisees to get them on board. After all, the franchise hasnt yet proved its business model, and early-stage franchisees are taking much bigger risks than those who buy in to the franchise later on.

The problem with doing that is after a while, the franchise looks less like a franchise and more like an agglomeration of entrepreneurs who are all doing their own thing. That creates both business and legal problems for the franchise, as it dilutes the brand they want to offer their customers.

At the end of the day, franchises are all about uniformity and consistency. A Burger King in Bangor, Maine, offers the exact same menu, decor, and customer experience as a Burger King in San Diego, California, and all points in between. To preserve the franchises brand recognition in the marketplace and make the franchise easier to operate at the corporate level, it is often necessary for the franchise to eliminate special deals and insist that all franchisees play by the same set of rules.

While a franchise cannot unilaterally change the rules that are spelled out in your franchise agreement, they are perfectly free to do so when your agreement comes up for renewal or when you sell your franchise to a new owner. Thats exactly what is happening here.

Normally, thats not such a big deal, but, in this case, it poses a problem because of how successfully you have run your franchise.

With over $1 million in annual gross sales, your franchise will probably be valued in the $1 million to $2 million range, depending on how much of those sales translate into net income (earnings before interest and taxes). Simply put, there arent a whole lot of people with pockets deep enough to buy a business in that price range, and those that do have the money arent looking for a franchised service business.

Your prospective buyer is likely to be a downsized corporate executive looking to buy a job for a purchase price in the low- to mid-six figures that can be financed with proceeds of a small business administration loan.

So, what can you do here? First, I would have a frank discussion with the franchise about your concern that the new fee structure will inhibit your ability to sell your territory. They cannot legally make a material amendment to their program that treats similarly situated franchisees differently, but they may be able to offer a discount or impose a cap on the new percentage royalties for all franchisees making more than $1 million in gross sales. This information can be found on the Federal Trade Commissions Franchise Rule Compliance Guide.

They might also be willing to divide your territory into multiple territories, enabling you to sell each one separately for a price that middle-class buyers can afford.

Failing that, you should have your accountant prepare pro forma financial statements showing what your franchise would earn under the new fee arrangement and resign yourself to a lower fee than you would have gotten had this not been a franchised business upon sale.

Cliff Ennico (crennico@gmail.com) is a syndicated columnist, author, and former host of the PBS television series Money Hunt. This column is no substitute for legal, tax, or financial advice, which can be furnished only by a qualified professional licensed in your state. To find out more about Cliff Ennico and other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit our webpage at Creators.com. Copyright 2021 Clifford R. Ennico. Distributed by Creators.com
Top Democrats Demand Ex-Attorneys General Barr, Sessions Testify Over Apple Subpoenas

Top Senate Democrats on Friday called on former Attorneys General William Barr and Jeff Sessions to testify before Congress after reports claimed that the Department of Justice (DOJ) sought phone records related to communications by House Intelligence Democrats.

If they refuse, they are subject to being subpoenaed and compelled to testify under oath, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a statement. In addition, the Justice Department must provide information and answers to the Judiciary Committee, which will vigorously investigate this abuse of power.

They said that other officials should testify in front of Congress, adding that their Republican colleagues should join us in getting to the bottom of this serious matter. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement on Thursday that an investigation is warranted.

For the initial reports about the subpoenas, the NY Times and other media cited anonymous and unnamed sources in saying that the DOJ subpoenaed Apple in order to obtain metadata of House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and committee member Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.). The NY Times report claimed the Justice Department was searching for members of Congress who were leaking information about the Trump administration to mainstream media outlets.

Barr told the Wall Street Journal on Friday that he wasnt aware of DOJ-authorized subpoenas regarding House lawmakers communications.

Jeff Sessions addresses the media after voting in the Alabama Republican primary runoff for the U.S. Senate at the Volunteers of America Southeast Chapter in Mobile, Alabama, on July 14, 2020. (Michael DeMocker/Getty Images)

I didnt recall that case, Barr said. Whatever steps were taken, were taken before I arrived.

Schiff, who has long been an opponent of Trump and was a key architect of the former presidents first impeachment inquiry, told the New York Times and other media that the DOJ subpoena regarding his phone records was authorized in 2017 or 2018. And Swalwell, who has been accused by Republicans of being cozy with a Chinese Communist Party spy following an explosive Axios report that detailed his ties with the woman, said the DOJ obtained his phone data around the same time.

What they were looking for, I still dont know. Apparently, they didnt find anything, Schiff said during a CNN interview on Friday. He called for an investigation into the matter, alleging that Trumps DOJ went after him in retaliation.

It looks like they were renewed a number of times and, thankfully,  it looks like [the Biden administration] did not renew it, Swalwell told CNN during the same segment.

The Epoch Times has contacted Trumps office and the DOJ for comment. Officials with the DOJ declined to comment on the reports when contacted by other media outlets.
Top US General Warns: China Increasing Military at Serious and Sustained Rate

The top U.S. general warned Thursday that the Chinese regime is increasing its military capacity at a very serious and sustained rate and said it could pose a threat to worldwide stability and peace.

Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that its necessary the United States retain our competitive and technological edge over the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which comes after President Joe Biden and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin raised similar concerns in recent days about the rhetoric coming from the CCPas the United States and China have remained intransigent over Taiwan, the CCPs human rights violations, and disputes over territory.

Austin told senators on Thursday that Bidens defense request of $715 billion is needed to meet the challenge posed by the increasingly assertive regime.

The request is driven by our recognition that our competitorsespecially Chinacontinue to advance their capabilities, Austin said during a hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee. We must out-pace those advances to remain a credible deterrent to conflict around the world.

Milley also noted that the combined total defense spending by China and Russia is greater than that of the United States, although he did not say how he reached that conclusion during the hearing. But aside from that, China poses the number one military threat to the United States, he added.

Earlier this month, a bipartisan group of senators visited Taiwan and said the United States would provide 750,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses to the island nation. It prompted a series of bellicose statements from Chinese officials, including Wu Qian, a spokesperson for Chinas Ministry of National Defense, who alleged the United States is seriously undermining stability in the region.

Wu then threatened that anyonewithout providing nameswho dared to split Taiwan from China would see a resolute attack head-on from the Chinese army. The CCP has long claimed that Taiwan belongs to it, while Taiwan has asserted that it is a sovereign, democratic nation. Because the regime believes Taiwan is part of its territory, it opposes any government or world body from establishing ties with the island nation.

J15 fighter jets on Chinas sole operational aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, during a drill at sea in April 2018. (China OUT/AFP via Getty Images)

Milleys comment comes months after another top U.S. commander, Adm. Philip Davidson, head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, warned the same Senate panel that Chinas military is threatening U.S. dominance in the Pacific.

The military balance in the Indo-Pacific is becoming more unfavorable for the United States and our allies, Davidson said, adding: Our deterrence posture in the Indo-Pacific must demonstrate the capability, the capacity, and the will to convince Beijing unequivocally the costs of achieving their objectives by the use of military force are simply too high.

The CCP is also able to project more and more naval power in the Indian Ocean, as well as the Horn of Africa, said Gen. Stephen Townsend, head of the U.S. Africa Command, in mid-April.

Their first overseas military base, their only one, is in Africa, and they have just expanded that by adding a significant pier that can even support their aircraft carriers in the future. Around the continent, they are looking for other basing opportunities, Townsend told the House Armed Services Committee at the time.

The Senate on Tuesday passed a nearly $250 billion bill to invest in manufacturing and technology to out-compete with Beijing, which includes some $190 billion in spending. Much of that money will go to research and development at universities and other institutions.
Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo, nominee for Secretary of Commerce, speaks at The Queen theater in Wilmington, Del., on Jan. 8, 2021. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

US Commerce Chief Expressed Concerns to Chinese Counterpart, Washington Says

SHANGHAI/WASHINGTONThe Biden administrations top commerce official told her Chinese counterpart that Washington is concerned about Beijings unfair and market-distorting industrial policies, the Commerce Department said on Thursday, the latest high-level exchange as the countries spar over disagreements.

The department said U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondos phone call with Chinas Commerce Minister Wang Wentao also included discussion of Washingtons view on the need to level the playing field for U.S. companies in China and the importance of protecting U.S. technology from unauthorized users.

Chinas commerce ministry said separately that the two officials agreed to keep lines of communication open.

They agreed to promote the healthy development of trade and investment and cooperate in a pragmatic way to handle their differences, the Chinese ministry said in a statement.

Earlier this month, Chinese Vice Premier Liu spoke with U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and late last month he held a similarly candid exchange of views with U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai.

The worlds two biggest economies are at loggerheads on a variety of fronts, with the U.S. Senate this week approving a sweeping package of legislation intended to boost the countrys ability to compete with China-made technology over national security concerns. The move drew criticism from Chinas communist party in Beijing.

On Wednesday, however, President Joe Biden withdrew a series of Trump-era executive orders that sought to ban new downloads of the popular Chinese-owned WeChat and TikTok, and ordered a Commerce Department review of security concerns posed by those apps and others.

By Colin Qian, Engen Tham, and Tony Munroe
Zhou Deyong and You Ling in Monument Valley in Navajo County, Ariz., in January 2020. (Courtesy of Zhou You)

US Lawmaker Calls on Chinese Regime to Free Detained Falun Gong Relative

Zhou Deyong last saw his wife and son in Florida half a year ago before flying back to China to care for his ailing parents aged 87 and 90.

Hes now being held in a Chinese detention center with little access to the outside world.

Both his wife and son practice Falun Gong, a Buddha-school spiritual practice targeted for brutal suppression by the communist party in China for over two decades.

Zhou, a senior geological engineer at the Geological Scientific Research Institute of the Shengli Oil Field, the second-largest crude producer in China, was arrested on April 23 at his home in Dongying, a coastal city in eastern Shandong Province. They accused Zhou of utilizing heretical religion to sabotage the enforcement of lawa common charge that many religious believers have faced under a regime that has shown little tolerance of faith.

The police gave no official document when they raided Zhous house and seized more than 100 Falun Gong-related books and bookletswhat his family had left behind when they fled to the United States. According to Falun Gongs website, the self-improvement discipline promotes the values of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.

Something felt off to them when days of phone calls to Zhou went unanswered. They then found out after seeing Zhous name in an article on Minghui, a U.S.-based website dedicated to documenting the persecution, that also noted the arrests of 18 practitioners from the region.

Under Chinese criminal law, one could face three to seven years of jail time for making and spreading 250 books and publications that the regime deems to be heretical propaganda. For one-fifth of that quantity, the sentencing would be up to three years.

A Stone Dropped Into the Vast Sea

Authorities were tight-lipped on any information of the detainees. Many calls from Zhous wife, You Ling, to the local police stations and detention centers in China never got through. And the few times they did, the officials tended to dodge the questions or even played communist red songs, she said.

It was like a stone dropped into the vast sea, they completely ignore you, the son, Zhou You, told The Epoch Times.

We can only guess why my father was arrested in the first place, he said. I dont think my father had any clue himself.

The authorities initially denied a request for Zhou to meet with his lawyer. On May 25, the day before a scheduled video meeting, police called the lawyer to call off the meeting, citing weather conditions.

Over those few days, there was no extreme weather, and the meeting equipment  its just a software they install at the police bureau and a camera, rain and wind should have no impact on them, said the son. They are simply finding an excuse to stop us from seeing him.

On the U.S. side, the familys plight caught the attention of Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.), who wrote a letter to Chinese leader Xi Jinping calling for Zhous release.

Bilirakis, who co-chairs the Congressional International Religious Freedom Caucus and is a member of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, spoke highly of the family and said he wants to do everything in my power to make sure the gentlemen is released.

Its really unforgivable some of the things the Chinese Communist Party has done to these wonderful people, he told The Epoch Times, referring to the Falun Gong community.

This just should not happen anymore, and it has, he said.

Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.) asks questions to Dr. Richard Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, during a House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health hearing to discuss protecting scientific integrity in response to the coronavirus outbreak in Washington, on May 14, 2020. (Greg Nash/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

A grandson of Greek immigrants, Bilirakis recalled having a family member who had to leave Turkey in the early 1900s during the persecution of Greek Orthodox Christians, a memory that made him identify with the Falun Gong practitioners, he said.

These are peaceful people, he said, adding that they should have a right to practice any  spiritual meditation.

Its only a positive thing, he said.

The U.S. pressure appeared to leave an impact. Half an hour after Zhou You mentioned Bilirakiss letter in a call to the judicial officials, the detention center called the lawyer and said that the meeting would proceed.

Zhous family said they are concerned about his health after receiving updates from the lawyer. Turning 60 in a few weeks, Zhou already looks thinner. He also asked his lawyer to tell his son the message: Stay here and be well.

The family have carefully kept the news from Zhous parents, who both have heart problems and high blood pressure among other health issues. They told them that Zhou had returned back to the United States for a second visit.

In the two-month period between March 1 and April 30, nearly 2,860 Falun Gong practitioners are known to have experienced police harassment or arrests, according to Minghui.

The local police in Zhous hometown of Dongying city conducted a campaign this year to collect personal details of each Falun Gong practitioner, including their address, the details of the vehicles they own, and phone numbers.

Chinese miners from Shengli oil field work on a drill machine to pump out water from a flooded mine site in the Zhangzhuang mine in Xintai, eastern Shandong Province, China, on Aug. 20 2007. (Teh Eng Koon/AFP via Getty Images)

Shengli Oil Field

The state-controlled Shengli Oil Fieldwhich has the meaning victory in Chineseis a major economic powerhouse in the region that has workers by tens of thousands, including Zhou and his wife You. Over the years, thousands of Shengli employees have experienced house raids, detention, forced labor, or imprisonment for persisting in their practice of Falun Gong. Dozens lost their jobs and at least 11 died under the ongoing persecution.

You, who has sought refuge in Florida, recalled spending more than 40 days in a black jail operated by the oil field in 2012, where she was fed propaganda materials that maligned her faith on a daily basis.

Falun Gong practitioner You Ling meditates near her home in Tampa, Fla., on June 10, 2021. (Courtesy of You Ling)

Every time we went out to talk to people about the persecution of Falun Gong, we didnt know if we could come back, You said. She said that she has minimized her use of phones for nearly 20 years due to surveillance concerns.

Shi Ning, a former data center engineer at the oil field who also suffered persecution for her Falun Gong faith and escaped to the United States, told The Epoch Times she has undergone a total of nearly eight years of official and unofficial detention over a two-decade span.

At one labor camp, at least 100 people took turns day and night persuading her to give up practicing Falun Gong, she said of her ordeal in China. She would hear horrible cries as Falun Gong practitioners detained in the same cell got pulled out one by one. When it was her turn, her hands were cuffed behind her back as 11 people rained down beatings on her head and waist. Three days later, when she saw herself in front of a mirror, she could hardly associate with the body she saw reflected back.

My head  was completely swollen, she told The Epoch Times. My two eyes were almost triangularyou couldnt see the eyeballs at all.

Shi Ning at Shengli Oil Field in 1987. (Courtesy of Shi Ning)

She started a hunger strike and was four times sent to the hospital due to failing health. There, a guard hit her head with an iron rod after spotting her doing Falun Gongs qigong exercises.

She lost around 66 poundsaround half of her body weightover the months of brutal detention.

Those times were marked with confusion and fear, said Shi, now in New Jersey. We were merely trying to be good people, why would it come to this? she said of the Chinese authorities.

She cited the death of a friend whom she suspected had been a victim of state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting. Shi said the woman had tears in her eyes when her relatives saw her, hours after the police had claimed she was dead. Her husband was also tortured after questioning her cause of death and died under mysterious circumstances two years later.

There were no reports on this. None, Shi said. Who has the gut to report on this in mainland China?  They kept silent in the face of crimes.

Bilirakis was one of the original sponsors for a House resolution a decade ago that called for an end to the ongoing persecution of Falun Gong.

Now, he said, its time to bring another one to Congress attention.

It needs to be brought to the forefront again, he said, adding, Its going to be a strongly worded resolution.

Were not going to back down, and were not going to be intimidated by the Chinese Communist Party.
Virginia County Teaching Children to Root for Socialism: Teacher

A Fairfax County, Virginia, teacher on Tuesday pushed back against what she says is progressive agenda being pushed by school board officials in neighboring Loudoun County.

Speaking during a school board meeting, teacher Lilit Vanetsyan said that the curriculum being taught in the county will teach children to root for socialism by the time they get to middle school.

Parents, the longer that you wait and dont have your childs schools accountable, gives these guys more time to dictate whats best for your childs physical, mental, and emotional health, Vanetsyan said.

The teacher urged students to challenge teachers when they are presented with a ludicrous statement.

Students, you are on the front lines of these indoctrination campsdo not allow anybody to tell you that you cannot accomplish anything because of your skin color, or to hate yourself because of your skin color, Vanetsyan said.

She added: Students, it is up to you to be the next generation of victims, or victors.

According to the co-founder of a parents group taking on the education establishment in Loudoun County, the state has become ground zero in the fight against critical race theory-based indoctrination in schools nationwide.

Critical race theory (CRT) must be uprooted because it seeks to view everything through the lens of race and believes all institutions, traditions, language, and history of this country are systemically racist, said Ian Prior, a parent who helped to found and is executive director of Fight for Schools.

The Loudon County School District didnt immediately respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times.

CRTwhich espouses the idea that race is not natural but socially constructed to oppress and exploit minoritiesis an offshoot of the quasi-Marxist critical theory social philosophy that was promoted by the Frankfurt school of thought.

Former President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning CRT training in federal agencies in September 2020, with the White House describing it as anti-American propaganda.

After taking office, President Joe Biden reversed Trumps September 2020 executive order and has pushed CRT training on a number of fronts.

Proponents of CRT have argued that its needed to demonstrate what they say is pervasive systemic racism and to facilitate rooting it out.

The Biden administrations efforts have triggered widespread pushback from federal and state Republican lawmakers, conservatives, and related organizations, as well as parents.

Matthew Vadum and Tom Ozimek contributed to this report.
A car is seen submerged by flood water in Traralgon, Victoria, Australia on June 10, 2021. (AAP Image/James Ross)

Woman Found Dead, Victorian Flood Water Death Toll Rises to 2

Victorias winter storm has claimed its second victim as a woman was found inside a car submerged in floodwaters.

The vehicle was found on Maddens Bridge Rd at Glenfyne, about 200 kilometres from Melbourne, on Friday morning.

While yet to be officially identified, Victoria Police believe the deceased woman to be the Victorian woman missing since Wednesday, named Nina.

The exact circumstances leading to the death is currently unknown. However, authorities are not treating it as suspicious.

It follows the first fatality, which occurred on Thursday, where a man was found dead in floodwaters.

Victoria is currently experiencing extreme winter weather, with major flooding and wild winds of up to 60 km/h (37 miles/h) in regions around the state.

The Bureau of Meteorology has issued major flood warnings for the Thomson River, Traralgon Creek, and the Yarra River. It has also issued a severe weather warning for the West and South Gippsland area.

Authorities are also pleading for locals not to drive through floodwaters, particularly around Traralgon, Sale and Yarra Glen, with meteorologist Dean Narramore telling locals to pay extra attention when outside.

Victoria State Emergency Service (SES) has received more than 7,400 requests for help, of with 5,800 were related to fallen trees. Around 2,500 requests have yet to be completed.

We know it is not over yet, Acting Premier James Merlino said. It was quite extraordinary leaving home and driving through the Dandenongs to work this morning, having a few different routes to go through to get off the mountainmassive trees across homes, across the roads,

Two SES members were taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries after separate tree-related incidents.

The cold front from Antarctica has bought freezing temperatures to parts of Victoria, NSW, and the ACT. Sydney experienced its coldest day in 25 years on Thursday as the cold air blew past much of the east coast.

AAP contributed to this article.
Woman Sacked Over View on Transgender Issues Wins Appeal

A woman who lost her job after her tweets were deemed transphobic has won an appeal at the Employment Appeal Tribunal in London.

The judgment (pdf) handed out on Thursday concluded that Maya Forstaters belief as to the immutability of sex is one that amounts to a philosophical belief and therefore protected under the Equality Act 2010 (EqA).

Justice Akhlaq Choudhury said that Forstaters belief might in some circumstances cause offence to trans persons, but the potential for offence cannot be a reason to exclude a belief from protection altogether.

He also said that the gender-critical belief is not unique to Forstater.

It is a belief shared by others who consider that it is important to have an open debate about issues concerning sex and gender identity, Choudhury said.

However, the judgment said those who hold gender-critical beliefs may still face impunity if they misgender trans persons because it may amount to harassment or discrimination within the meaning of EqA.

It also said employers would continue to be liable [subject to any defence under s.109(4), EqA] for acts of harassment and discrimination against trans persons committed in the course of employment.

Forstater, who worked as a tax expert at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), didnt get a renewal of her contract in March 2019 after she posted tweets opposing government proposals to reform the Gender Recognition Act to allow people to identify as the opposite sex without a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

The decision was made as a result of an investigation after some of her colleagues complained that her tweets were trans-phobic, exclusionary or offensive, and that the tweets were making them feel uncomfortable.

Forstater later took her case to the employment tribunals on the grounds that her dismissal constituted discrimination against her beliefs, but employment judge James Tayler dismissed her claim (pdf) on Dec. 18, 2019, saying her views are absolutist in her view of sex, and as a result of the view, her approach is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.

Harry Potter author JK Rowling came out the next day in support of Forstater, writing on Twitter: Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?

After Forstater won the appeal on Thursday, Rowling showed her support again by sharing Forstaters victory tweet.

Maya Forstater. Undated handout photo issued on April 27, 2021. (PA)

Forstater said that she felt vindicated after winning the appeal.

I am delighted to have been vindicated. I lost my job simply for expressing a view that is true and important, and held by the great majority of people in this country: sex matters, Forstater said in a statement.

Being a woman is a material reality. It is not a costume or a feeling. Institutions that pretend sex doesnt matter become hostile places for women, in particular, she added.

After this judgment, employers and service-providers that ignore sex and silence women who object, need to consider whether they are acting unlawfully, and the substantial legal risks they face if they do not change their approach.

Amanda Glassman, executive vice president of Forstaters former employer CGD, called the decision a step backwards [sic] for inclusivity and equality for all.

The decision is disappointing and surprising because we believe Judge Tayler got it right when he found this type of offensive speech causes harm to trans people, and therefore could not be protected under the Equality Act, she said in a statement.

Were currently considering the various paths forward with our lawyers.

Also reacting to the ruling, Baroness Kishwer Falkner, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said that people must be free to hold their beliefs.

Some may see the beliefs of others as questionable or controversial, but people must be free to hold them. This is why this case is so important, she said.

It provides clarity that people are free to hold their beliefs and must not be discriminated against because of them even if others might find their beliefs offensive, she said.

There is a difference between holding a belief and how it is expressed. We are all responsible for what we say and do.

According to Forstater, MP Rosie Duffield, Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, Lord Philip Hunt, athletes Martina Navratilova and Sharron Davies, actor Joe McGann, writers Joan Smith and Trevor Phillips, and broadcasters Jenni Murray and Jonathan Ross are among her supporters.

PA contributed to this report.
Could providing $11,000 to every child born into poverty close the states wealth gap, one of the worst in the nation?

Legislation headed for the governors desk aims to try.

The bill provides $50 million a year so the state can set aside and invest $3,200 for each child born after July 1 who is enrolled in Medicaid. Thats about 16,000 children a year who stand to benefit from these so-called Baby Bonds. When these children reach age 18, that money is expected to have grown to nearly $11,000 for the adolescents to use to purchase a home, go to college or trade school, or to start a business.

I witnessed firsthand how generational poverty holds a community and individuals back, said State Treasurer Shawn Wooden, the chief proponent of the program, on the day he announced the proposal. He grew up in an impoverished neighborhood in Hartford and attended Trinity College through a scholarship.

I was able to make it. I am the exception.  I know its not simply about kids not working hard enough. Its about opportunities and access. Oftentimes, we talk about people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. Well, the truth is, in the communities that were trying to target, there are simply not enough bootstraps.

The governor is expected to sign the Baby Bonds bill into law, included in the massive state bonding bill that funds billions in construction and other initiatives.

With the governors signature, Wooden said, Connecticut will become the first state in the country to provide every child born into poverty with this gift.

This massive investment will be a game changer, said state Rep. Geraldo Reyes, the chairman of the legislatures Black and Puerto Rican Caucus. He grew up in poverty and struggled to pull himself out of that.

I am one of the few in my neighborhood that ever even made it out of that neighborhood. I come from a very poor district in the south in Waterbury. And, truth be told, most of my friends are dead. And they never had a chance. They never had a chance. I am one of the few that made it out, Reyes said on the day the proposal was announced.

On Wednesday, shortly after the Senate gave final passage to the bill, Reyes said the bill was a top priority for the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus.

Listen, when I was 18, I didnt have $11,000. I didnt even have $1,000. This is a hand up. Its enough to go to trade school to become a plumber or an electrician. Its enough to help with a down payment on a home, he said.

While access to this program is race neutral  any child whose family is poor enough to qualify for Medicaid will have funds set aside for them  state data show that Black and Latinx residents stand to disproportionately benefit from the Baby Bonds program.

Thats the same population that has been disproportionately impacted by historical systemic racist policies such as housing discrimination and numerous criminal justice polices, advocates say. White families also have five times the wealth of Latinx families and eight times as much as Black families.

Research of hypothetical baby bond scenarios indicates that it is an effective approach to begin closing the staggering wealth gaps.

Beginning July 1, the state will begin setting aside the funding to test that scenario.

Its time we see what $11,000 could do for a child with so little, said Reyes.
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Frank J. Infurna, Arizona State University

(THE CONVERSATION) Midlife was once considered a time to enjoy the fruits of ones years of work and parenting. That is no longer true in the U.S.

Deaths of despair and chronic pain among middle-aged adults have been increasing for the past decade. Todays middle-aged adults  ages 40 to 65  report more daily stress and poorer physical health and psychological well-being, compared to middle-aged adults during the 1990s. These trends are most pronounced for people who attained fewer years of education.

Although these trends preclude the COVID-19 pandemic, COVID-19s imprint promises to further exacerbate the suffering. Historical declines in the health and well-being of U.S. middle-aged adults raises two important questions: To what extent is this confined to the U.S., and will COVID-19 impact future trends?

My colleagues and I recently published a cross-national study, which is currently in press, that provides insights into how U.S. middle-aged adults are currently faring in relation to their counterparts in other nations, and what future generations can expect in the post-COVID-19 world. Our study examined cohort differences in the health, well-being and memory of U.S. middle-aged adults and whether they differed from middle-aged adults in Australia, Germany, South Korea and Mexico.

US is an outlier among rich nations

We compared people who were born in the 1930s through the 1960s in terms of their health and well-being  such as depressive symptoms and life satisfaction  and memory in midlife.

Differences between nations were stark. For the U.S., we found a general pattern of decline. Americans born in the 1950s and 1960s experienced overall declines in well-being and memory in middle age compared to those born in the 1930s and 1940s. A similar pattern was found for Australian middle-aged adults.

In contrast, each successive cohort in Germany, South Korea and Mexico reported improvements in well-being and memory. Improvements were observed in health for each nation across cohorts, but were slowed for Americans born in the 1950s and 1960s, suggesting they improved less rapidly than their counterparts in the countries examined.

Our study finds that middle-aged Americans are experiencing overall declines in key outcomes, whereas other nations are showing general improvements. Our cross-national approach points to policies that could could help alleviate the long-term effects arising from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Will COVID-19 exacerbate troubling trends?

Initial research on the short-term effects of COVID-19 is telling.

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the fragility of life. Seismic shifts have been experienced in every sphere of existence. In the U.S., job loss and instability rose, household financial fragility and lack of emergency savings have been spotlighted, and children fell behind in school.

At the start of the pandemic the focus was rightly on the safety of older adults. Older adults were most vulnerable to the risks posed by COVID-19, which included mortality, social isolation and loneliness. Indeed, older adults were at higher risk, but an overlooked component has been how the mental health risks and long-haul effects will likely differ across age groups.

Yet, young adults and middle-aged adults are showing the most vulnerabilities in their well-being. Studies are documenting that they are currently reporting more psychological distress and stressors and poorer well-being, compared to older adults. COVID-19 has been exacerbating inequalities across race, gender and socioeconomic status. Women are more likely to leave the workforce, which could further strain their well-being.

Changing views and experiences of midlife

The very nature and expectations surrounding midlife are shifting. U.S. middle-aged adults are confronting more parenting pressures than ever before, in the form of engagement in extracurricular activities and pressures for their children to succeed in school. Record numbers of young adults are moving back home with their middle-aged parents due to student loan debt and a historically challenging labor and housing market.

A direct effect of gains in life expectancy is that middle-aged adults are needing to take on more caregiving-related duties for their aging parents and other relatives, while continuing with full-time work and taking care of school-aged children. This is complicated by the fact that there is no federally mandated program for paid family leave that could cover instances of caregiving, or the birth or adoption of a child. A recent AARP report estimated that in 2020, there were 53 million caregivers whose unpaid labor was valued at US$470 billion.

The restructuring of corporate America has led to less investment in employee development and destabilization of unions. Employees now have less power and input than ever before. Although health care coverage has risen since the Affordable Care Act was enacted, notable gaps exist. High numbers of people are underinsured, which leads to more out-of-pocket expenses that eat up monthly budgets and financially strain households. President Bidens executive order for providing a special enrollment period of the health care marketplace exchange until Aug. 15, 2021 promises to bring some relief to those in need.

Promoting a prosperous midlife

Our cross-national approach provides ample opportunities to explore ways to reverse the U.S. disadvantage and promote resilience for middle-aged adults.

The nations we studied vastly differ in their family and work policies. Paid parental leave and subsidized child care help relieve the stress and financial strain of parenting in countries such as Germany, Denmark and Sweden. Research documents how well-being is higher in both parents and nonparents in nations with more generous family leave policies.

Countries with ample paid sick and vacation days ensure that employees can take time off to care for an ailing family member. Stronger safety nets protect laid-off employees by ensuring that they have the resources available to stay on their feet.

In the U.S., health insurance is typically tied to ones employment. Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic over 5 million people in the U.S. lost their health insurance when they lost their jobs.

During the pandemic, the U.S. government passed policy measures to aid people and businesses. The U.S. approved measures to stimulate the economy through stimulus checks, payroll protection for small businesses, expansion of unemployment benefits and health care enrollment, child tax credits, and individuals ability to claim forbearance for various forms of debt and housing payments. Some of these measures have been beneficial, with recent findings showing that material hardship declined and well-being improved during periods when the stimulus checks were distributed.

I believe these programs are a good start, but they need to be expanded if there is any hope of reversing these troubling trends and promoting resilience in middle-aged Americans. A recent report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation concluded that paid family leave has a wide range of benefits, including, but not limited to, addressing health, racial and gender inequities; helping women stay in the workforce; and assisting businesses in recruiting skilled workers. Research from Germany and the United Kingdom shows how expansions in family leave policies have lasting effects on well-being, particularly for women.

Middle-aged adults form the backbone of society. They constitute large segments of the workforce while having to simultaneously bridge younger and older generations through caregiving-related duties. Ensuring their success, productivity, health and well-being through these various programs promises to have cascading effects on their families and society as a whole.

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/middle-aged-americans-in-us-are-stressed-and-struggle-with-physical-and-mental-health-other-nations-do-better-157569.
NORWALK  The city is set to receive more than $22.3 million in state aid for the next fiscal year.

In the fiscal year 2022 state budget, approved Thursday, Norwalk will receive $9,077,570 in non-education aid and an additional $13,232,756 in education aid.

It amounts to a nearly 30 percent increase  the largest jump in the state, followed by Stamford at 27 percent, New Haven at 23 percent.

Last fiscal year, Norwalk received a total of $17,198,617 compared with this years $22,310,326. The difference amounts to more than $5.1 million in state aid.

I applaud the governor and state legislature for passing a bipartisan budget that directs more funds to municipalities where it can make a big difference, Mayor Harry Rilling said. I am especially thankful to Sen. (Bob) Duff for his leadership and advocacy efforts to ensure Norwalk receives more funding.

The increase in funds accounts for previous underfunding of the PILOT (payment in lieu of local property taxes) program, city spokesperson Josh Morgan said.

The PILOT program provides a payment in lieu of local property taxes (PILOT) for property owned and used by the state of Connecticut, according to the Office of Policy and Management website. The payment is equal to a percentage of the amount of taxes that would be paid if the property were not exempt from taxation, according to the office.

The PILOT program prioritizes cities with a larger percentage of tax-exempt property. PILOT payments are made once a year on Sept. 30, according to the office.

The state budget addresses some long-standing issues with underfunding PILOT and it is great news that Norwalk is getting more of the funding it deserves, Morgan said. This state aid, like in previous years, will go into the General Fund, which gives us maximum flexibility for this Fiscal Year and into the future as we emerge from the pandemic.

While the city received an overall increase of 29.7 percent in state aid, nearly all the additional funding went to non-educational use.

For the 2021 fiscal year, Norwalk received $12,642,570 in education state aid. In the newly approved state budget, Norwalk schools receive $13,232,756 in education aid.

Norwalk Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment about the state aid and its uses.

I am proud that we have passed a local budget with no tax increases and these additional state dollars will help shield us from any unforeseen circumstances as we recover from the pandemic and continue to address the needs of our residents, Rilling said.

Statewide, the budget designated $229 million more in municipal aid, a 9.4 percent gain  making towns and especially cities the big winners in the budget that starts July 1.

An additional $191 million in education and non-education funding will be distributed next year under ongoing programs. Nearly two-thirds of that money, $123 million, goes to the states eight largest cities, including Norwalk.

The bipartisan approval of the 2022-2023 biennial state budget sends a clear message to all of the residents of our great state  this is the most progressive, transformative, and life-changing budget our state has ever seen, Gov. Ned Lamont said in a statement Thursday. The investments in equity will lift up our state for generations to come.

abigail.brone@hearstmediact.com
NORWALK  A 48-year-old city woman is facing a felony larceny charge after police say she stole more than $100,000 from an older resident.

Saipin Ashton, of Richards Avenue, was taken into custody Monday following a nearly nine-month investigation into suspicious bank transactions, police said.

Sgt. Sofia Gulino said the investigation began last August when an older Norwalk resident reported fraudulent activity involving multiple accounts. The individual told police that several online purchases were made with their debit card.

Investigations revealed that Saipin Ashton, known to the victim, as she had lived with the victim at one time, had gained access to account information and over a period of several years had been taking money, Gulino said.

Gulino said the questionable activity included transactions to Amazon, Walmart, Soma Intimate, Womens Health and Saks, and as well as transfers from the victims accounts to an online Zell account. She said the transactions all but depleted the victims funds over the course of several years.

Police obtained an arrest warrant after collecting evidence, Gulino said. Ashton then turned herself into police on the warrant in the presence of her attorney and was held on a $25,000 bond.

Ashton was charged with first-degree larceny. If convicted, she could face between one and 40 years in prison. An attorney for Ashton did not respond to a request for comment.

richard.chumney@hearstmediact.com
DANBURY  The recently unsealed warrant for the arrest of a city woman charged in the death of her 1-year-old grandson earlier this year revealed that the boy died from a fentanyl overdose.

Cora M. Brandon, 60, was arrested on manslaughter, drug possession and risk of injury to a minor charges May 26, following an investigation into the March 17 death of her grandson, who had been in her care that day. She was arraigned at state Superior Court in Danbury on May 27, and has a remote pre-trial hearing scheduled for July 23.

She is being held on a $500,000 bond at the York Correctional Institution in Niantic, according to the state Department of Correction. An attorney for Brandon could not be reached Friday.

Police launched the investigation after responding to Danbury Hospital for the childs untimely death.

Although there were no apparent signs of trauma, Detective Lt. Mark Williams said police found the circumstances surrounding the boys death suspicious.

Doctors at the hospital told police the childs mother drove the boy to the emergency room around 4:30 p.m. after finding him unresponsive at Brandons home, the warrant stated. The childs mother had left the 1-year-old in Brandons care around 9:30 a.m. because she had to go to work.

The boys mother told police her son went to the doctor earlier that morning for vaccines and had been asleep when she dropped him off at his grandmothers house.

About six hours later, she said Brandon called her to report that the baby was still aslee, the warrant continued. The mother said she found that unusual, so she called her sons pediatricians office and was advised to take him to the hospital.

When she went to pick up the child from Brandons house, the mother said her son was limp and unresponsive, the warrant stated. She said Brandon told her she believed the childs lethargy may have been from the vaccines he had received that morning, but encouraged her to take him to the hospital to be certain.

Nothing suspicious was found during the boys autopsy, according to the warrant for Brandons arrest, but toxicology results later revealed he had fentanyl, a strong synthetic opioid, and xylazine in his blood and had died as a result of a fentanyl overdose. Xylazine is marketed as a vertinary drug, according to the National Library of Medicine, and can be used as a sedative, among other uses.

Five milligrams of undigested fentanyl had also been found in the babys stomach, according to the warrant.

Police said video surveillance from the Crown Court building on March 17 showed Brandon exhibiting behavior similar to that of someone who is intoxicated or under the influence of drugs at about 1:47 p.m. before she enters the apartment with a man about a minute later.

Authorities later learned that the man was Brandons brother-in-law. At 2:19 p.m., surveillance video showed Brandon walking back to her apartment with a woman and young boy. Police said Brandon appeared to be upset at the time.

The woman in the video later told police that Brandon called her multiple times, asking her to come to her home  and when she did, Brandon was in a panic because the baby had gotten into her bag of illegal drugs, according to the warrant for Brandons arrest.

The woman told police she was still at Brandons home when the babys mother came to pick the child up and take him to the hospital. Less than 30 minutes later, the woman said Brandon received a call from her daughter who said the baby had died.

After being called to the hospital, police went to Brandons apartment at the Crown Court complex on Padanaram Road and found the residence had been recently cleaned.

Items recovered from Brandons residence a glassine bag found in a vacuum dust collection canister, as well as a cut straw found under a cushion on the sofa where the baby had been sleeping  tested positive for fentanyl, according to the warrant for Brandons arrest.

A witness, who said she went to Brandons home after the baby was taken to the hospital, told police that Brandon had checked into a drug rehabilitation program a day after her grandsons memorial service in April.

The mother of Brandons deceased grandson told police she had not spoken to Brandon since her sons service, but had heard she checked into rehab.

The investigation findings implicated Cora Brandon, the childs grandmother, to be complicit in his death, Williams said. Based on the facts and circumstances revealed in the investigation, the Superior Court found probable cause to issue an arrest warrant for Cora Brandons arrest.

The warrant was issued May 25, and Brandon was arrested the next day for her alleged involvement in her grandsons death.

Brandons attorney, Jeffrey Hutcoe, could not be reached for comment Friday afternoon.
EDWARDSVILLE  This week the U.S. hit a major milestone, Dr. Alex Garza of the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force began his weekly briefing, half of the U.S. adults are now fully vaccinated against COVID.

These adults are now not only protected from serious illness, he went on Wednesday, but they can also get back, safely, to those activities that they have stopped during the pandemic.

In Madison County, 102,941 people, or 38.92% of the population, have been fully vaccinated, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health websites most recent statistics.

Of those fully vaccinated, 80.8% are age 65 and older and 45.6% are in the 16-64 age bracket.

Now if you remember back in the beginning of our vaccination roll out, the healthcare systems stuck with vaccinating the populations that were at highest risk for poorer outcomes, Garza said, and those that were mostly in the higher age brackets.

The Pfizer vaccine recently became available to those age 12 and older, resulting in a disparity between age groups.

Pretty consistently, as your age group decreases, so does your vaccination uptake, Garza said. While were confident that those patients most at risk are well protected, were concerned about those other age groups.

Garza went on to discuss the hospital data showing an increase in hospitalizations of patients younger than age 65. More of this age group are getting sick and ending up in hospitals, although the numbers are smaller than the hospitalizations seen at the beginning of the pandemic.

Vaccines work, they protect people against becoming seriously ill and having to go to the hospital, he said. We still have some work to do so fewer and fewer people end up needing to come to the hospital and receive treatment for COVID-19.

Garza said that data shows those in the St. Louis region are continuing to move in the right direction. He does not want to lose sight of the significant progress that everyone has made as a community, but warned that the virus is not over yet.

Were going to continue to spread it to those who are not vaccinated, he said. As we head into the holiday season, lets be smart about how we celebrate.

He encouraged anyone who is not vaccinated to wear a mask and practice social distancing to protect themselves and their loved ones. He also encouraged anyone who has not been vaccinated to do so as soon as possible, in order to be fully vaccinated by the Fourth of July.

If you havent already, please, please, please make plans to get your COVID vaccine, he went on.
EDWARDSVILLE  The 1820 Col. Benjamin Stephenson House is offering three hands-on history summer camps this year.

The three-day camps in Edwardsville give participants an opportunity to learn about the regions rich heritage and the lives of Edwardsville residents during the early 19th century.

The Stephenson House site, located at 409 S. Buchanan St., in Edwardsville, will host two sessions of Mrs. Lucys Academys for Young Ladies this summer in an effort to keep class sizes small. The first session sold out, scheduled for June 16-18, but openings are still available for the second session, July 7-9. The third camp is the Secondary Academy of Learning, July 21-23.

 Mrs. Lucys Academy for Young Ladies, 9 a.m.- 2 p.m., July 7-9, space limited to six participants.

Open to girls age 8-12, young ladies attending this summer camp will discover what it was like to be an American girl in 1820. Participants dress in reproduction clothing, similar to styles worn in the early 1800s. At the end of the camp, a virtual tea party, hosted live on the Facebook page, will showcase the skills learned during the three-day camp. Pre-registration is required. Dress size is needed for each participant.

Participants should bring a sack lunch. A mid-morning snack and drinks will be provided a by the site. The cost is $90 per camper, due at registration.

Due to the difficulty of some of the camp projects, it cannot accept campers younger than 8 years old.

 Secondary Academy of Learning, 9 a.m.- 3 p.m., July 21-23, space limited to eight participants.

Open to girls age 13 and older, this three-day camp focuses on an in-depth exploration of several activities, such as hand sewing, needlework, hearth cooking and more. Participants will work on more advanced projects than presented during previous camps. Girls attending this camp should have a basic knowledge of hand sewing techniques. Participants may dress in reproduction clothing (provide dress size at registration). Pre-registration is required.

Participants should bring a sack lunch and any sewing items obtained at previous Stephenson House summer camps. A mid-morning snack and drinks will be provided by the site. The cost is $100 per camper, due at registration.

Fill out the summer camp registration at https://stephensonhouse.org/summer-camp-reg to return to the site with payment. To register a child or obtain more information about a particular camp, call 618-692-1818 during the sites hours of operation, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Thursday - Sunday or visit the sites online shop at https://stephensonhouse.org/online-store/ols/categories/workshops. Registration forms are also available at www.stephensonhouse.org. In the event of cancelation due to COVID-19, all registration fees would be refunded.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed an executive order that will lift most of the states coronavirus rules.

The order Newsom signed Friday takes effect Tuesday. It will end the states stay-at-home order and its various amendments.

Starting Tuesday, there will be no capacity limits or physical distancing requirements for businesses. Fully vaccinated people can stop wearing masks in most places.

Newsom said he will not end the statewide declaration of emergency. That ensures the governor has the power to alter or suspend state laws in the future. That has angered Republican lawmakers who say the declaration is unnecessary.

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MORE ON THE PANDEMIC:

 AP source: J&J doses to be released, some tossed in U.S.

 Britain registers highest coronavirus cases since late February

 Leaders of G-7 nations gather to pledge 1B vaccine doses for world

 Reports of rising coronavirus cases in Russia

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 Follow more of APs pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine

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HONOLULUHonolulu is loosening some restrictions on social activity now that more than half its population has been vaccinated against COVID-19.

The new rules allow outdoor social gatherings of up to 25 people and indoor gatherings of up to 10.

Karaoke bars and nightclubs may operate at 50% capacity if all attendees are tested for the disease or show proof they have been fully vaccinated.

The city will allow gatherings of 25 indoors and 75 outdoors once 60% of the population has been vaccinated. All limits will be lifted when the vaccination rate tops 70%.

Honolulu reported 25 new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, down 25% from two weeks earlier.

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HERES WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:

CHICAGO  Officials declared Chicago fully reopened on Friday, ending a requirement that people wear face masks in most indoor places and lifting capacity limits intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Chicago sometimes veered from the states restrictions and opted to be stricter or more lenient than the state required. But city officials decided to join the rest of Illinois in lifting restrictions Friday, nearly 15 months after Gov. J.B. Pritzker issued the first stay-at-home order as coronavirus cases began to rise.

People who arent vaccinated must still wear a mask indoors, and everyone will still need to wear masks inside health care facilities, jails, shelters, schools, taxis, ride-hailing vehicles and on public transportation. Businesses can still opt to require people to wear masks on their premises.

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FALMOUTH, EnglandU.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres welcomes commitments by the U.S. and Britain to share millions of coronavirus vaccine shots with struggling countries. But he says its not enough.

Without a global effort, Guterres says the coronavirus could spread like wildfire in much of the developing world.

Leaders from the Group of Seven wealthy democracies are expected to commit to share at least 1 billion vaccine shots with poorer countries, with half the doses coming from the U.S. and 100 million from the U.K.

Guterres says to defeat the virus, countries producing vaccines need to form an emergency task force to coordinate an effective response to COVID-19.

We need a concerted effort, we need a global vaccination plan, says Guterres, who will join the summit. If not, the risk is there will still be large areas of the developing world where the virus spreads like wildfire.

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SACRAMENTOGov. Gavin Newsom says hes confident his workplace regulators will soon fall in line with Californias plan to drop virtually all masking requirements for people vaccinated against the coronavirus.

The California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board is set to consider revising its conflicting rules Thursday, two days after the state eases its pandemic restrictions. Newsom said Friday that he expects to make sure the worksite regulations take effect along with the planned reopening.

Businesses have been baffled by the shifting rules over who needs to wear masks and where once the nations largest state fully reopens from the pandemic.

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JACKSON, MISS.Due to lagging demand for shots, Mississippi has transferred well over three-quarters of a million doses from its federal coronavirus vaccine allocation to other states.

In recent months, the state has transferred 871,950 vaccine doses to Rhode Island, Maine and a nationwide vaccine pool, said Liz Sharlot, spokesperson for the Mississippi Department of Health. Maine is among the states in the U.S. with the highest vaccination rates.

Mississippi has the lowest vaccination rate in the country, with around 29% vaccinated. Just over 930,650 people in the state are fully vaccinated, according to data provided by the state Department of Health.

Sharlot said 32,400 doses of the Moderna vaccine set aside for Mississippi by the federal government were sent to Rhode Island on April 20, and 32,400 doses to Maine.

The state has transferred at least 807,150 doses to a federal vaccine pool. The states first transfer to the pool was May 6.

Each week, the federal government provides every state with a number of available doses to be ordered and distributed to providers, Sharlot said. This number is based on provider demand and the individual states needs, Sharlot said.

Officials with the state Department of Health review the number of doses made available for Mississippi to order each week and determine whether to order additional doses, or send the doses to the federal pool for other states to use.

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LONDON  The U.K. has recorded its highest coronavirus infections since late February, the majority from the delta variant first identified in India.

Government figures on Friday showed 8,125 new cases, the highest since Feb. 26. The delta variant, which is considered about 40% more transmissible than the previous dominant strain, accounts for more than 90% of all new infections in the U.K.

There are concerns the next planned lockdown easing in England on June 21 may be delayed because of the increase in cases. Prime Minister Boris Johnson will announce Monday whether social distancing restrictions will be lifted.

The hope is the rapid rollout of vaccines will break the link between new cases and deaths, especially as most cases are among younger age groups. On Friday, another 17 coronavirus-related deaths were announced, taking the confirmed total to 127,884, the highest in Europe.

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ROME  Italy is recommending the AstraZeneca vaccine only for people over age 60, saying younger people who received a first AstraZeneca shot should get Pfizer or Moderna for their second shot.

The governments scientific committee revised its vaccine strategy after reviewing the latest data on cases of rare blood clots in people who received AstraZeneca. Its acting now because the virus has drastically decreased, thanks to months of restrictions and a vaccine campaign that inoculated 45% of the population with at least one shot.

While cases of blood clots after a second dose are extraordinarily rare, the committee is recommending a different vaccine for a second dose for people under age 60, according to Dr. Franco Locatelli, head of the scientific committee.

Other countries, including France and Canada, have made similar recommendations. The European Medicines Agency still recommends people who received a first AstraZeneca vaccine to follow up with the same shot.

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COLOMBO, Sri Lanka  Sri Lanka extended its lockdown for another week, amid a surge of coronavirus deaths in recent weeks.

Sri Lanka is under a nearly three-week lockdown, scheduled to end on June 14. But on Friday, the government announced it will remain until June 21.

The new restrictions come as the coronavirus death toll crossed the 2,000 mark on Friday. It took 14 months to reach the first 1,000 deaths, while the second 1,000 deaths came in just 23 days.

People are banned from leaving their homes, while food and other essentials will be distributed through mobile vendors. However, the government says the ban will not apply to those engaged in essential service such as health, food supply, communications and power sectors. Factories, construction sites and agriculture sectors can operate.

Doctors and health workers have urged the government to keep the existing travel ban to contain the spreading of the coronavirus. Sri Lankas total confirmed cases have reached 216,134.

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WASHINGTON  U.S. regulators are allowing the release of 10 million doses of Johnson & Johnsons COVID-19 vaccine from a troubled Baltimore factory.

However, material to make many more doses must be thrown out because of possible contamination, according to a person familiar with the decision.

The FDA announced Friday it had determined that two batches from the plant could be released. But it says several other batches are not suitable for use and additional batches are still under review. The doses originated at an Emergent BioSolutions factory, known as Bayview, that is making the vaccine for J&J.

A second person familiar with the decision confirmed it would allow for 10 million doses to be released. Both people spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because they werent authorized to release details about it ahead of its announcement.

 By Zeke Miller and Linda A. Johnson

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TOKYO  The question of allowing any local fans into Tokyo Olympic venues is still being debated, with a decision not expected before the end of the month.

Fans from abroad have already been banned in what is shaping up as a largely made-for-television Olympics.

Tokyo organizing committee president Seiko Hashimoto originally said she would announce a decision in April but has repeatedly postponed it.

Ticket sales were to account for $800 million in income for the organizing committee. Most of that income will be lost and have to be made up by Japanese government entities.

The postponed Tokyo Olympics are scheduled to open on July 23.

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BELGRADE, Serbia  Serbias medical agency has approved the use of Pfizer vaccines against coronavirus for youth ages 12 to 15.

The Medicines and Medical Devices Agency of Serbia on Friday says it gave the approval after a rigorous control of the scientific data about the clinical trials in other countries.

A senior government health official, Mirsad Djerlek, says a priority would be children with chronic diseases who are at greater risk from COVID-19. Djerlek says Serbia has vaccinated about 37% of adult population in the country of 7 million. He says authorities hope to reach 50% vaccination by the end of this month.

Serbia has mostly used Chinas Sinopharm vaccines, along with Pfizer, Sputnik V and AstraZeneca.

Serbia has relaxed rules against the coronavirus after a drop in daily cases and hospitalizations. The Balkan nation has confirmed more than 700,000 infections since the start of the pandemic and nearly 7,000 deaths.

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ISLAMABAD  Pakistan will spend $1.1 billion in the next fiscal year to import COVID-19 vaccines to inoculate most of the 100 million adult population.

This announcement was made by finance minister Shaukat Tareen on Friday while presenting the annual budget for fiscal 2021-22 in the parliament. Pakistans fiscal year begins on July 1.

Pakistan, a nation of 220 million, has so far mainly relied on vaccines import from neighboring China. The latest development comes two days after Pakistan said it has administered 10 million vaccine doses amid a decline in COVID-19 cases and deaths from coronavirus.

Tareen also set a target of achieving 4.8 percent GDP growth in the next fiscal year. Pakistans economy has been under pressure since last year when it imposed weeks-long nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of coronavirus.

Pakistan has registered a total of 938,737 confirmed cases and 21,576 confirmed deaths.

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TAIPEI, Taiwan  If China is to meet its tentative goal of vaccinating 80% of its population against the coronavirus by the end of the year, tens of millions of children are going to have to start rolling up their sleeves.

Regulators have taken the first steps by approving two domestically produced vaccines for use in children aged 3 to 17, though no date has been set for the shots to start.

Children have been largely spared the worst of the pandemic, becoming infected less easily than adults and generally showing less severe symptoms when they do contract the virus. But some experts say if countries are going to achieve herd immunity, inoculating children should be part of the plan.

Few regulators around the world have evaluated the safety of COVID-19 shots in kids. The United States, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong are allowing the use of the Pfizer vaccine in children as young as 12.

China has a population of 1.4 billion, meaning it needs to inoculate 560 million people to reach its goal of 40% vaccination by June and 1.12 billion people to get to the 80% goal. It will be hard to do the latter without vaccinating many of its 254 million children who are younger than 14.

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LONDON  The European Medicines Agency has approved a new manufacturing site for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, in a move that could substantially boost production for the European Union.

In a statement on Friday, the EU drug regulator says it had approved a site in Monts, France, operated by Recipharm. In addition to the new site approval, the EMA authorized several other sites to conduct batch control and testing.

This month, two locations in the U.S. were approved for production of vaccines destined for the 27-nation EU bloc. Any medicines or vaccines authorized for the EU market must first have their production facilities approved by the EMA.

The EMA says these new approved sites are expected to result in an additional 1 to 2 million vials of Modernas coronavirus vaccine every month.

___

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia  Malaysias government says a two-week nationwide lockdown due to end Monday will be extended for another two weeks as new daily infections remain high at more than 6,000.

Senior Minister Ismail Sabri said the National Security Council made the decision at its meeting Friday. Although daily cases have dropped from its peak of above 9,000 just before the lockdown, he said average daily cases since the lockdown was still high.

The health ministry on Friday reported 6,849 new infections, bringing the countrys confirmed total tally to 646,411. Another 84 deaths raised the confirmed death toll to 3,768.
This was the scene a year ago at Pier 42  a rally organized by U.S. Senator Charles Schumer and State Senator Daniel Squadron to urge the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. (LMDC) to fund the revitalization of the East River Waterfront. Tomorrow morning you can expect a very similar photo op at the pier, which is now being used as a parking lot. Almost exactly a year after that initial rally/news happening, the politicians will be back on the Lower East Side for a big announcement: the LMDC is poised to allocate $14 million of its remaining 9/11 recovery funds to refurbishing Pier 42.

In a story given exclusively this evening to the Wall Street Journal (full text hidden behind the dreaded paywall), Schumer boasts, this is the missing link in the dream of having a ribbon park around Lower Manhattan. The LMDC, which has about $20 million left to spend, will take up the funding issue on Monday. The $14 million will be enough to demolish a 600 foot shed that sits on Pier 42. The grand plan of turning the stretch of waterfront into a park is expected to cost about $42 million. Finding the rest of the money will be a tall order at a time in which government at all levels is straining to fund even essential services.

But theres no denying the decision is a big win for the Lower East Side. The community board and a coalition of neighborhood groups have complained bitterly about the citys heavy emphasis on West Side projects, as sections of the East River waterfront languished.

Squadron, who was once a Schumer aide, has made Pier 42 revitalization a major priority. He told the Journal the shed demolition would likely be completed nect year. The LMDC grant will provide funds to allow the Parks Department to conduct a community-based master plan process for the final design of the pier, the newspaper reported.
Over the weekend, some new details dripped out concerning one of the more prominent attractions coming to the big Essex Crossing project. The 1.9 million square foot mixed use development near the Williamsburg Bridge is scheduled to break ground next spring.

At its gala Saturday night, Andy Warhol Museum Director Eric Shiner told guests that the Pittsburgh-based museum was moving forward with plans for a 10,000 square foot annex as part of Essex Crossing. While the museum was included in the grand plan for the former urban renewal site announced last September, Andy Warhol execs have been largely silent about their potential involvement.

But in the past week Shiner told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the partnership has been formed and were moving forward with our plans to open the branch in New York, while adding, theres still much work to be done to finalize the project and plans and designs.

More from te Post-Gazette story:

Having a New York presence is like having a chance to exhibit more of the collection to a wider, more international audience and to encourage more people to come to Pittsburgh to see everything we have as well, Mr. Shiner said. New York is the amuse bouche and Pittsburgh is the main course.  Mr. Shiner said negotiations for this project began in 2012. David M. Hillenbrand, the president and CEO of Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, approved the initiative, as did Joel Wachs, president of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Delancey Street Associates (the Essex Crossing developers) will pay for the cost of building the museum branch, which has a target opening date of 2017. For the first five years of the museums existence, the developers will pay for any operating deficits.

The museum will be located on site #1 of the Seward Park development area, bordered by Ludlow, Broome and Essex streets. The developers are expected to unveil their final renderings in September (the drawing you see above was simply a mock-up prepared for their successful bid). The Warhol Museum is celebrating its 20th year in existence. The Pittsburgh location is about 88,000 square feet.
The developers of Essex Crossing last night announced changes in their plan for the large Lower East Side project, including the addition of 61 affordable apartments and more units for low-income seniors. The adjustments, forced by the expiration of the states 421-a tax break program, will also mean fewer affordable condo units, fewer affordable apartments for larger families and the elimination of mixed-income diversity in three buildings.

The changes were outlined at a meeting of Community Board 3s land use committee by Isaac Henderson, project manager of Delancey Street Associates. Thats the consortium responsible for building the residential and commercial complex in the former Seward Park Urban Renewal Area. The original plan was heavily influenced by CB3, which spent years reaching a community-wide consensus for the sites.

Essex Crossing was meant to include 1,000 apartments, 50% of them set aside for low- and middle-income residents. 157 of the units were supposed to be condos available for purchase (including 32 affordable condo units). But the plan was dependent on 421-a, a state program that offered generous property tax breaks in buildings which include blocks of affordable housing. 421-a expired more than a year ago and the mayor, governor and State Legislature have been haggling ever since about a new version of the program.

The developers say theyre revamping the housing plan to make sure the project stays on track while the Legislature weighs the latest proposal from the governor (approval in Albany is expected in the not-too-distant future, perhaps by the end of March).

The changes do not impact phase one of the construction project on sites 1, 2, 5 and 6. When the first four buildings open next year, more than half of the apartments planned in Essex Crossing will have been delivered, including 311 affordable units. But the second and third phases of the project will be impacted. Heres an overview from Hendersons presentation last night and from an interview with The Lo-Down earlier in the week.

Site 3, located at Delancey and Norfolk streets, was originally planned as a rental building split evenly between market rate and affordable apartments (98 total residential units). Now that project will be 100% market rate condos.

Site 8 (where one of the Essex Street Market buildings now sits) was intended as an 80/20 condo project, including 19 market rate and 5 affordable apartments. It will now consist of 92 studio apartments for low-income seniors. As senior housing, its available for a zoning increase of about 10,000 square feet.

Site 9 (the current home of the Essex Street Market) was meant to be another 80/20 condo building. The developers are now hoping to make it a mixed-income rental project with half of the units designated as affordable. The plan assumes that a version of the 421-a program will be enacted in time to utilize tax incentives on this site. [The Essex Street Market, by the way, is moving to a new building within Essex Crossing and the current facility will remain open until the move occurs.]

Site 10, formerly an 80/20 condo building, is now being refashioned as a market-rate condo project. A health care clinic has a lease on this parcel until the year 2021, so construction is not expected to begin for a few years.

In total, the changes mean there will now be 1.078 apartments in Essex Crossing, as opposed to 1,000. There will be an increase in low-and middle-income units of 61, making the project 52% affordable. The developers are adding 17 additional market-rate apartments.

One goal in revising the housing plan is to add more affordable units for very low-income households. In the new configuration, some apartments are set aside for families earning as little as 30% of Area Median Income (AMI). The citys Department of Housing Preservation and Development encouraged the developers the add new income bands, which were not part of the initial Seward Park plan. Under the new plan, 343 apartments will be available to people earning 60% of AMI or below.

One downside in the revised plan is that 20 affordable condo units are being sacrificed. When a new version of 421-a is enacted, it is not expected to include a home ownership program. Without a tax abatement, said Henderson, its virtually impossible to do affordable home ownership. Delancey Street Associates is making up for this loss by creating a larger number of affordable units and by doubling the number of senior units in the project. The developers are relying on new tax breaks for the senior housing not impacted by the expiration of 421-a.

[In a related conversation last night, board members expressed serious concerns about the 421-a application for site 1, where 55 condo units are under construction. While 11 of those units are designated as permanently affordable, it has come to light that the tax abatement for those apartments will expire in 15 years. The unit owners will then be responsible for thousands of dollars each month in property taxes. Well have more about this situation in a separate story.]

When affordable housing lotteries begin in a few weeks, former tenants of the urban renewal area (displaced in 1967) will have priority status. But Henderson explained, A lot of people are really concerned that the former site tenants, who will receive a 25% preference in each of these projects, wont have an opportunity to live in these projects.

Most of them are going to be senior and most of them are going to be very low-income, he added.

During last nights meeting another concern was raised. The changes are forcing the elimination of 30 affordable apartments for larger families. Board member Lisa Kaplan said, I get, 100%, that there is a real need for very low-income senior apartments. But she added, I think a lot of the seniors who are former site tenants and a lot of seniors in our neighborhood live with extended families. And I think the need for affordable units is not restricted to studio apartments (for seniors). Theres an overwhelming need for affordable housing at every apartment size. I regret that we werent able to find a solution here that allowed for deeper subsidies.

Henderson said he understood Kaplans concern, which she has apparently voiced repeatedly during private meetings of a Seward Park community task force. But he argued that its important to evaluate Essex Crossing as a whole. If you look at the overall project, he said, there are apartments available for a range of incomes (from 40-155% of AMI) He said 40% of Essex Crossings affordable apartments are larger units.

One issue that did not generate much conversation last night concerns the mixed-income makeup of Essex Crossings buildings. The community boards original guidelines placed a high priority on income diversity. Plans called for an equal number of affordable and market rate apartments throughout the project and in each building. This priority has been maintained in most of the buildings. But sites 3 and 10 will now be purely market rate, while site 8 will be all affordable.

Under the new plan, Henderson pointed out, 3 out of 5 parcels in the second and third phases will not require 421-a (or whatever replaces it). Essex Crossing is still dependent, however, on the tax abatement program for site 4 (located at Delancey and Suffolk streets) and for site 9. Delancey Street Associates and city officials are in conversations about a contingency plan should Albany fail to act on a 421-a replacement.

Delancey Street Associates is a partnership among Taconic Investment Partners, L+M Development Partners and BFC Partners.
NYU Langone Medical Center has filed an application with the State Department of Health for approval of its 55,000 square foot ambulatory care facility at Essex Crossing on the Lower East Side. The news was first reported yesterday by Crains.

In January of 2016, Delancey Street Associates, the consortium building the mixed-use project, announced that NYU had signed a 15-year lease for a space at 175 Delancey St. The medical facility, which will be called the Joan H. and Preston Robert Tisch Center, will be located in the same building housing affordable senior rentals and Grand Street Settlements senior center.

Details of NYUs $32.8 million Lower East Side facility were included in a certificate of need application filed with the state March 7. From the executive summary:

NYU Langone Medical Center proposes to open a new Ambulatory Care Center, NYU Langone Ambulatory Care Center at Essex Crossing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (Manhattan Community District 3) that will provide residents of this neighborhood with 21st century care, focused on the provision of care in the outpatient setting. Included in this center are both Article 28 and non-Article 28 programs. NYU Langone Medical Center requests approval from the Public Health and Health Planning Council (PHHPC) for the Article 28 programs that will be located in this new facility. The NYU Langone Ambulatory Care Center at Essex Crossing will include a free-standing multi-specialty Ambulatory Surgery Center consisting of 4 Class C Operating Rooms as well as space dedicated to the provision of Physical Therapy services. It is expected that 2 of the Class C Operating Rooms will be dedicated to General Surgery procedures including ENT, GYN and Endoscopies while the remaining 2 Class C Operating Rooms will be dedicated to Orthopedic Surgery procedures.

In its application, NYU noted space limitations at its Center for Musculoskeletal Care and Ambulatory Surgery Center on 38th Street. It also pointed to high utilization rates in the operating rooms at the NYU Hospital for Joint Diseases and the need for more space for physical therapy services. The institution expects that more than 9,600 physical therapy visits from residents of Community District 3, now being accommodated at existing facilities, will be shifted to Essex Crossing.

NYU plans to situate its physical therapy center on the ground floor of the building. The ambulatory surgery program will be located on the ground floor and in the cellar level. A few administrative offices will be on the second floor. More details from the application:

Patients will enter this site on the ground floor which is located off Delancey Street. The Physical Therapy Reception and Waiting Room will be accessed directly off the entrance vestibule. The Physical Therapy suite includes an open therapy and exercise area, a private physical therapy room, office, equipment and supply storage, changing rooms, soiled holding room, janitors closet, staff lounge, patient and staff toilets. Passing through the entrance vestibule, directly to the left, is the outpatient surgical waiting room which includes a reception desk, patient toilet, and wheelchair storage The cellar floor of the program includes the pre-operative holding/recovery area containing 14 patient cubicles and one multipurpose Consultation/Examination/Observation /Perioperative holding/ recovery room.

The new facility is expected to open in late 2018.
A year before the scheduled move of the Essex Street Market into a new home in the Essex Crossing project, city officials are going public with a few details about the new facility. The Economic Development Corp. (EDC) yesterday announced it is accepting applications for two new restaurants and 11 smaller vendors to be part of the expanded public market. Were also getting our first look at renderings and floor plans.

All of the existing (28) vendors will be moving across the street to 115 Delancey St., on the first two levels of a building that will also include a 14-screen movie theater and rental apartments. The EDC is looking for two restaurant operators for spaces that each measure about 1100 square feet. According to a press release, the city seeks, independent, locally-based restaurateurs or restaurant groups who are interested in using farm-to-table seasonal produce or other regional foods on their menus. They will have their own entrances (on Delancey and Broome streets), built into the new facade of the market.

The existing vendors have already chosen their locations in the new facility. According to a floor plan, additional spaces are available ranging from 87 square feet to 534 square feet. More information and application materials are available here.

The new market is supposed to open in June of next year and the current market will remain operational up until that time. The ground floor covers 30,000 square feet (about twice the size of the current facility). Theres also a 6,000 square foot mezzanine. There will be a demonstration kitchen for catered events and public classes. There will also be a late night zone for merchants who wish to stay open until 8 p.m. Right now, the whole facility shuts down at 7 p.m.

In yesterdays press release, Vendor Association Chair Anne Saxelby of Saxelby Cheesemongers, said, I am thrilled about the move to a new space The market is a Lower East Side institution, and in a city where the retail landscape is becoming ever more homogenized, its so exciting to see the expansion and continuation of this unique and diverse community of small businesses. Its markets like Essex that make New York great!

Lower East Side Partnership President Tim Laughlin added, We are excited to partner with NYCEDC to ensure the market continues to thrive and grow supporting existing vendors and welcoming new ones in a state-of-the-art facility; this unique opportunity allows the market to continue supporting a diverse collection of small and independent merchants for many years to come.

As we reported in April, the Vendor Association, the LES Partnership and the EDC recently came to terms on an agreement for operating the new market. While the EDC will continue to manage the facility, the vendors and the Partnership will take on more responsibilities in marketing and running the market on a day-to-day basis.

The new Essex Street Market is meant to complement a subterranean shopping pavilion known as the Market Line, a major feature of the Essex Crossing mixed-use development. The Market Line will begin directly below the Essex Street Market, eventually extending to the east in two buildings that will be constructed during phase 2 of the project.
PROTECT, CONNECT, AND STRENGTHEN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD!

Learn more about the LMCR Project HERE and join us on Wednesday, May 31, 2017 at the Rutgers Community Center at 200 Madison St. from 6:30  8:30 p.m. This meeting will focus on the waterfront from Montgomery Street to the Brooklyn Bridge.

*This is a paid advertisement.
Jill Fiore performing on her fire escape, via her Instagram page: @soundandfiore

Local musician Jill Fiore will offer an encore performance from her now famous fire escape, on Essex Street, between Grand and Hester (above Delancey Car Service) on Saturday, June 12th at 8:30pm. Fiore made a splash by offering free live concerts from her fire escape this past year as the COVID-19 pandemic wore on and performance venues throughout the city were shut down. She was diagnosed with COVID-19 in April of 2020, but recovered from her bout with new inspiration to share her tunes, and realized she could do it from her very own front steps, or in this case, her own Lower East Side fire escape.

She put together the first show in October of 2020 and dubbed it the Fiore Escape. It was a hit with locals and reminded the community how much has been lost as we all hunkered down and stayed inside.

Fiore has since garnered quite a bit of local media attention and gone on to record some new songs, which she will share on Saturday. In a recent update, Fiore told The Lo-Down:

Much has happened since you covered the last [Fiore Escape], both good and very bad. My dad passed away in February and I almost completely stopped the presses on my music endeavors. But, because of great people like you who helped tell my story so well, it really helped me to get through the grief knowing my dad was so proud to see me and his name in the press and on TV before he passed away. He not only saw me happy, but he saw me making a difference in peoples lives. What a gift!

I have since dusted off my boot straps, recorded two more songs that Im releasing next weekend for the show, filmed a rock music video in the Arizona desert (coming soon!), and was featured in this beautiful docuseries  that really honors our Lower East Side community. Ive planned what should be the best Fiore Escape yet this Saturday June 12th, what would have been my parents 56th wedding anniversary in honor of my dad, with even better sound and lighting and the businesses on the block participatingeven more community oriented. So, I am back on my mission to champion resilience and recovery, but this time with a celebration of LIFE and LOVE.
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President Muhammadu Buhari has kicked out the Acting Director General of the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), Professor Armstrong Idachaba, who on Monday June 7 directed all broadcast stations in the country to suspend the patronage of Twitter with immediate effect.

In his place, the President has appointed Mr. Balarabe Ilelah as the Director-General of the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC).

Idachaba has held the NBC DG post in an Acting role since February 2020 when his predecessor, Mallam Ishaq Modibbo Kawu, was placed on an indefinite suspension.

It remains unclear why the President failed to confirm Idachaba for the role and why the Professor was being relieved of the position at this moment.

However, when in Buharis pre-recorded Arise TV interview on Thursday the President was asked questions on the Twitter drama, His Excellency had declined to comment on the episode, saying he would prefer to keep that issue to himself.

Information Minister, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, who announced Ilelahs appointment via a statement on Friday, indicated that the new NBC DG had a five-year tenure.

In a rather unpopular and controversial move that attracted threats of litigation from outfits like Daar Communications, Professor Armstrong Idachaba, as Acting Director General of NBC, on Monday directed all broadcast stations nationwide to suspend the patronage of Twitter with immediate effect.

Not a few had felt that Idachabas intervention and direction in issuing the instruction amounted to that of a meddlesome interloper, as many media houses had skirted the Twitter ban by accessing the platform through the VPN router instead of the local networks that had been instructed by the government to bar the service.

The Twitter platform had been a fertile ground for sourcing and exchanging news and information for the media.

But Idachaba and NBC declared that it would be unpatriotic for any Nigerian broadcaster to patronise the banned platform as an information source.

According to him, the directive fell in tandem with Section 2(1) of the NBC Act, mandating NBC to enforce the responsibility of ensuring strict adherence to national laws, rules and regulations.

Idachabas memo also quoted Section 3.11.2 of the Nigeria Broadcasting Code, which he said stipulated that: The broadcaster shall ensure that law enforcement is upheld at all times in a matter depicting that law and order are socially superior to or more desirable than Crime and Anarchy.

Attention is also drawn to Section 5.6.3 of The Code which requires Broadcasters to be mindful of materials that may cause disaffection, incite to panic or rift in the society in the use of a User Generated Content (UGC).

Born in 1962, Armstrong Aduku Idachaba was a Nigerian Professor of Mass Communication, and had served as Director of Broadcast Policy and Research in the commission before his February 2020 elevation as replacement for Modibbo Kawu who had been sacked over corruption allegations.
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The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Chief Timipre Sylva has commended President Muhammadu Buhari for his giant strides in the Niger Delta which is making a huge impact on the people of the area.

The Minister made this known on Friday while speaking at a ceremony to mark the execution of Shareholders Agreement between the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), the Nigerian Content Development & Monitoring Board (NCDMB) and Zed Energy for the establishment of a 50 million litre Petroleum Products Terminal in Brass, Bayelsa State.

The N10.5 billion Brass Petroleum Products Terminal project is expected to deliver an automated 50 million litre depot with two-way product jetty, automated loading bay, and 6 automated tanks for storage of 30 million litres of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS)and 20 million litres of Automotive Gas Oil (AGO) and Dual Purpose Kerosene (DPK).

I make bold to say today without any fear of contradiction that no President has impacted the people of the Niger Delta like President Muhammadu Buhari. Aside from what we are witnessing today, remember there is also the Brass Fertilizer & Petrochemical Company, the Oloibiri Oil and Gas Museum and the Oil & Gas Park in Ogbia, all under Mr. President, the Minister stated.

Sylva added that the establishment of the Terminal further demonstrates Mr. Presidents commitment to the enhancement of the livelihood of the Niger Delta people particularly, the riverine communities in Bayelsa State where people purchase products at exorbitant prices due to logistics challenges associated with transporting products to that area.

Speaking shortly after signing the agreement, the Group Managing Director of the NNPC, Mallam Mele Kyari said the Corporation was proud to be part of the project which aside ensuring products availability in all nooks and crannies of the Niger Delta, will also guarantee the nations energy security and generate employment.

This Terminal will create 1,000 direct jobs during the construction phase, and over 5,000 indirect jobs during its operation. Considering the potential for employment when completed, this will definitely reduce youth restiveness in the Niger Delta area and will also address the problem of illegal refining in the area, Kyari stated.

In his remarks, the Executive Secretary of NCDMB, Simbi Wabote stated that this milestone was as a result of strong interagency collaboration and public-private sector partnership. The NCDMB will continue to drive such partnerships across the industry to bring development in Nigeria, he noted.

Earlier, the Coordinator of the Project and Group General Manager, National Petroleum Investment Management Services (NAPIMS), Mr. Bala Wunti stated that the project would enhance the economics of marine petroleum products distribution.

Dr. Kennie Obateru

Group General Manager

Group Public Affairs Division

Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation

NNPC Towers,

Abuja.

11th June, 2021
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Anxiety, expectations, rising and falling hopes, prayers and supplications from intending pilgrims and Hajj administrators for Hajj 2021 indicates that we are in a difficult season in the Hajj industry. It is now the time to be active and ready to confront whatever challenges that might come along with Saudi Arabia's decision on the allocation of the number of pilgrim to Nigeria and other Hajj participating countries.

As of last week, yours sincerely made a personal decision to keep my fingers off my keyboard as far as Hajj 2021 is concerned pending when the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Hajj and Umrah deemed it fit to officially announce what is in for Hajj participating countries.

However, two emerging developments thwarted my earlier resolution: The cancellation of Hajj 2021 by Indonesia and the silent calls by some stakeholders for Nigeria to toe the same path of cancellation due to the limited time available. There are strong indications that more countries will opt out in few days time.

First, Indonesia, India and Pakistan are still among the countries on suspension list from entering the Kingdom due to Covid 19. Though, those marshaling the argument of deferment have a good reason because, no matter the level of efforts the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is expending on the control of Covid 19 and safeguarding the lives of Muslim Ummah during Hajj, they need to acknowledge that the Hajj and Umrah industry revolves around 20 percent Saudi and 80% other Hajj participating countries.

Just like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Hajj participating countries spending timeless energy, deploying human and material resources all year round in preparing for Hajj. There should be an established communication with other world Hajj Missions to enable them adjust and reconfigure their plans.

More importantly, Covid 19 protocols has come to stay and both the Kingdom and other Hajj countries acknowledge these facts. Nigeria in particular has provided enough arrangement for Covid 19 vaccine for its pilgrims despite the scarcity of vaccine to developing nations.

However, I am not in support of calls for cancellation due to time factor or any other reason unless the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia excludes Nigeria from Hajj 2021 list  and there are cogent factors in our favour. One of the reason is the approaching rise in Hajj fare and I acknowledge that there will be complex challenges on how to distribute the number of Hajj seats that falls below 30,000 to states and modalities to be adopted in doing so in a limited time. Likewise, there are the issues of medical arrangements, consular services, airlift arrangements and mobilization of necessary logistics.

Confronting challenges differentiate leaders from others and the world is not about pleasurable situation all the time. My opinion is that Nigeria should participate in Hajj 2021 on whatever figure or conditions.

When the going gets tough, lets put one foot in front of the other and just keep going. We should be ready to imprint it in Hajj map that when Hajj operations get tough, Nigeria was among the country that gets going.

As the countdown begins, the announcement may come any moment from now, but we should be prepared to comply with whatever conditions that might be spelled out and the number of pilgrims. If we decide to evade this year's Hajj due to challenges, can we predict or know-how and what Hajj 2022 will bring forth? If Saudi Arabia Ministry of Hajj announces Hajj 2021 details by 1pm, Hajj administrators should be ready to kick start operation destination Saudi Arabia by 2pm. May Almighty Allah be our guide. Ameen

Hajj administrators in Nigeria need to be in Hajj 2021 to understudy the emerging trends in Hajj administration, to preview the new templates for service delivery, to strategise against Hajj 2022 and to see how the role of Hajj Missions in Hajj operations is being trimmed by the deployment of ICT in pilgrims documentation and services especially the emerging Smart CARD HAJJ solution.

Moreover, Nigeria received 90,000 Hajj seats allocation in 2018 and 2019 and only about 55,000 were able to perform Hajj from Nigeria. Sometimes it comes below and other times it can flow above.

Operation Deflation of Hope

NAHCON should direct States Muslim Pilgrims Welfare boards especially those that are currently conducting enlightenment to impress it on their pilgrims that not all those who paid for Hajj will be able to make it this year. Continuous giving hope in a hopeless situation will end up creating an atmosphere of tension whenever the figure is out. The timely and well structured piece (If tomorrow never comes for foreign pilgrims) written by the Head of Public Affairs Unit of NAHCON, Fatima Sanda Usara should serve as a starting point of gradual watering down of expectations from Nigerian pilgrims.

Going further, NAHCON should seeks for the cooperation and support of Hajj stakeholders especially those with relevant experienced in the Hajj industry to brainstorm on the way forward and such an interface should be an immediate task. Even Saudi Ministry of Hajj and Umrah recently convened a meeting of all past and present Hajj managers in the Kingdom in their quest to fashion out the best template for Hajj 2021.

There will be a lot of aftermath puzzle to be sorted out especially from States Pilgrims boards and private Hajj operators if eventually our allocation falls below 20,000. Hajj 2020 and Hajj 2021 should serve as lesson to Hajj administrators to always resist the temptation of promising to give what they dont have. Hajj policies especially those that has to do with operations are subject to the Saudi Arabia Ministry of Hajjs decisions and regulations.

It is a trial time for the Hajj industry, but no matter how crucial the situation becomes, we must always have trust in Allah SWTs power that He has written what is best for us and when it is best for us.

Ibrahim Muhammed is the Publisher, Hajj Reporters, National Coordinator, Independent Hajj Reporters 08037024356
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The Apex Igbo socio-cultural organisation Ohanaeze Ndigbo on Thursday chided the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd), saying that he has a choice between dialogue or an avoidable war against the Igbo.

Ohanaeze justified the agitation for Biafra by Igbo youths through various pro-Biafra groups, adding that Buharis nepotistic and sectional government reenforced separatist agitation in the South East.

Buhari had while responding to questions from team of journalists on agitation for Biafra by Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), said that tougher times await the people of the South East of Nigeria.

But Ohanaeze in statement titled Buhari: A choice between dialogue and war, signed by its National Publicity Secretary, Chief Alex Ogbonnia, said that Buhari since inception of his regime has not hidden his disdain for the Igbo that failed to vote for him en-masse in 2015.

The statement partly read: Ohanaeze Ndigbo has followed with deep concern the security sequence targeted at the Igbo: the deliberate posting of Northern Military and Police Officers at the various strategic locations in the South East.

The Special National Security Council Meeting, where major decisions were taken for the South East and the South South to the utter exclusion of security personnel from the South East of Nigeria.

The ominous Launching of the Operation Restore Peace in the South East and South South.

The Shoot on Sight Order by the Inspector General of Police targeted at the Igbo Youths,

And the Shock Tweet where Mr. President stated that those of us in the fields for 30 months, who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand

Today, June 10, 2021, Mr. President stated on Arise TV that Tough Times await the South East. He reiterated: In any case, we said we will talk to them in the language they will understand. We will organise the police and the army to pursue them, thats what we can do and we will do it.

Ohanaeze added, for clarity, there has been a sustained agitation for secession by the Igbo youths, especially the IPOB, the Indigenous People of Biafra, led by Mr. Nnamdi Kanu. The agitation by IPOB became heightened by the obvious exclusion of the Igbo in President Buharis government and Mr. President has not in any way hidden his disdain for the groups that failed to vote for him en-masse in 2015 and 2019 general elections.

Ohanaeze Ndigbo has cautioned that the unprecedented lopsidedness of the Nigerian government in favour of the Fulani, to the exclusion of other ethnic groups, especially in the security architecture, will rather exacerbate the internal security challenges in the country. History shows that leaders who espoused ethnocentric ideology, especially in Africa had often created more problems than they intended to solve.

Ohanaeze Ndigbo believes that the agitation by the Igbo youth over marginalization is justified. In spite of the orchestrated alienation of the Igbo, we are committed to a diplomatic approach towards a restructured Nigeria that guarantees equity, fairness and rule of law.

With the present level of violence in Nigeria; armed robbery, banditry, kidnappings, unknown gunmen, herdsmen menace, Boko Haram, mass poverty, unemployment, downward spiral of Nigerian currency and other untoward signals, Nigeria has arrived at a critical juncture. Both history and literature show that the decision taken by a leader at a critical juncture has a lasting effect for the society.

President Buhari has a choice between Dialogue on one hand and an avoidable War against the Igbo on the other. Again, history shows that our thoughts are very infinitesimal to the immutable Law of the Universe.
Don talks vaccine aid with China

THAILAND: Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai has asked China to provide further support for Thailands vaccine procurement needs.

ChineseCoronavirusCOVID-19Vaccine

By Bangkok Post

Friday 11 June 2021, 08:49AM

Photo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Foreign Ministry spokesman Tanee Sangrat said Mr Don had a bilateral meeting on Tuesday (June 8) with Wang Yi, Chinas State Councillor and Foreign Affairs Minister on the sidelines of the Special Asean-China Foreign Ministers Meeting in the city of Chongqing.

Mr Tanee said both sides discussed cooperation on COVID-19 vaccines as Thailand had asked China to support its procurement of vaccines produced in China, such as Sinovac and Sinopharm and the new CanSino vaccine developed by CanSino Biologics.

The Chinese side expressed its readiness to support and respond to Thailands vaccine procurement needs.

The two also reiterated their willingness to increase strategic connectivity through the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) and Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA), as well as the Thai-Chinese railway project, the spokesman said.

They also expressed readiness to promote collaboration on sustainable development in line with their respective national development policies, Mr Tanee said. The possibility of Thai students returning to China to continue their studies was also discussed.
Ex-prosecutors face bribe charge in Phuket case

BANGKOK: Two former public prosecutors based in Phuket have been indicted in connection with demanding a bribe from a private company accused of encroaching on a national park, according to the Office of the Attorney-General (OAG).

corruptioncrime

By Bangkok Post

Friday 11 June 2021, 10:16AM

Wanchat Chunhathanom is one of two former public prosecutors at the Phuket Public Prosecutors Office facing corruption charges. Photo: PR Phuket / file

The OAG said in a statement that the attorney-general had decided to indict prosecutors Thamma Sornchai and Wanchat Choonhathanom, reports the Bangkok Post.

The news follows the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) announcing in December that the agency was moving to have two former Phuket Public Prosecutors charged for corruption for allegedly demanding money from a defendant in order to drop charges of encroaching on state land.

Thamma was accused of demanding a bribe from a company run by a foreign national, sought for prosecution for encroaching on and grabbing land in Sirinart National Park in Thalang district of Phuket. The case reached the prosecutor in 2019, noted the Bangkok Post report today.

The prosecutors allegedly sought a bribe worth B10 million between them, with Wanchat acting as Thammas accomplice.

According to the OAG, the attorney-general has assigned the provincial prosecutors office to take legal action against the pair. The alleged bribe was demanded with a promise to the company that the case would be dropped and the provincial governor would not seek to reverse the decision.

A complaint was later raised against the prosecutors, prompting the OAG to order a probe which ruled the allegation had grounds. A formal investigation was then set up while at the same time the NACC launched a separate probe into the matter.

According to the OAG, the prosecutors investigation confirmed the alleged bribery demand had taken place and ordered one prosecutor to be dismissed and the other transferred from Phuket. It is understood that Thamma had lost his job and Wanchat faced a transfer.

Later, the NACC probe also found grounds for the allegation and recommended the OAG indict the pair.
G7 to provide 1 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses to world by 2023

WORLD: G7 leaders will agree to expand global COVID vaccine manufacturing to provide at least one billion doses to the world through sharing and financing schemes, Britain said yesterday (June 10).

CoronavirusCOVID-19Vaccine

By AFP

Friday 11 June 2021, 09:03AM

US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the eve of the G7 Summit in Cornwall, UK. Photo: AFP.

The UK, which is hosting the big powers gathering in southwest England, added it would donate at least 100 million surplus doses within the next year, including five million beginning in the coming weeks.

The commitment follows growing calls for richer countries to step up their efforts to share COVID-19 shots with less developed nations, with charities warning the current situation is leading to vaccine apartheid.

Britain, which has orders for more than 400 million doses, has faced criticism for failing to begin making donations to poorer countries.

But on the eve of welcoming world leaders from the group of seven wealthy nations to their first summit in almost two years, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson vowed that would soon change.

As a result of the success of the UKs vaccine programme we are now in a position to share some of our surplus doses with those who need them, he said.

In doing so we will take a massive step towards beating this pandemic for good.

At the G7 Summit I hope my fellow leaders will make similar pledges so that, together, we can vaccinate the world by the end of next year and build back better from coronavirus.

A Downing Street statement said: At the Summit world leaders are expected to announce they will provide at least one billion coronavirus vaccine doses to the world through dose sharing and financing and set out a plan to expand vaccine manufacturing in order to achieve that goal.

The UK will donate five million doses by the end of September, beginning in the coming weeks, primarily for use in the worlds poorest countries, according to Johnsons office.

Britain has also committed to donating a further 95 million within the next year, including 25 million more by the end of 2021, it added.

Around 80% of the jabs will go to the Covax scheme, which aims to ensure equitable distribution of vaccines around the world, with the remainder shared bilaterally.

The United States said yesterday it would donate 500 million jabs to 92 poor and lower-middle-income nations.

Meanwhile EU members have agreed to donate at least 100 million doses by the end of 2021 - with France and Germany each committing to providing 30 million.
Government orders 20m doses of Pfizer jab

THAILAND: The government has approved the order of 20 million doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine.

CoronavirusCOVID-19Vaccine

By Bangkok Post

Friday 11 June 2021, 08:40AM

Photo: AFP

Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul told the media yesterday (June 10) that Dr Opas Karnkawinpong, head of the Department of Disease Control, has signed a contract to buy 20 million doses of Pfizer vaccine to be delivered this year.

The department will have a month to discuss with Pfizer the conditions and price while the company must send documents to register the vaccine with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

As for the procurement of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, Mr Anutin said the government has already received approval from the Office of the Attorney-General.

A contract has not yet been signed, as Janssen Pharmaceuticals, the vaccine maker, has to accept the deal first.

He said the government has also agreed with AstraZeneca to receive supplies of its vaccine every week.

The government has contacted all vaccine makers to seek more vaccine doses as the pandemic does not seem to have stopped spreading.

Plus, no research is certain about the efficacy period so people who were vaccinated in February are advised to get more doses to stimulate immunity, he said.

Permanent secretary of public health Kiattiphum Wongrajit said a million more doses of the Sinovac vaccine arrived in Thailand yesterday, bringing the total to 7.5 million, but they must be tested by the FDA and the documents inspected by the Department of Medical Science first before being used.

As at the current rate, we can vaccinate at a rate of 400,000 doses per day, so all one million doses will be used up in three days. So, the government needs to seek three million more doses of Sinovac and sign other contracts for more doses," Dr Kiattiphum said.

As for vaccination using Sinovac jabs in children aged over three, he said research in China is needed first to validate the safety.

Deputy government spokeswoman Rachada Dhnadirek also said on her Facebook page that AstraZeneca had told the government that it was postponing the delivery of more supplies for two days from Monday.

Nevertheless, AstraZeneca (Thailand) Ltd assured that it was committed to delivering the vaccine doses by next Friday.
Phuket Town Mayor takes office, outlines policies

PHUKET: Saroj Angkanapilas has been installed as the new Mayor of Phuket City and held his inaugural meeting to take office.

politics

By Eakkapop Thongtub

Friday 11 June 2021, 12:08PM

Speaking at the main conference chamber at the Phuket City Municipality main office in Phuket Town yesterday (June 10). Mayor Saroj broadly outlined his policies for the development of Phuket City Municipality. pushing towards a special model for the country to follow.

In outlining nine major policies his administration will follow during his four-year-term, Mayor Saroj said the contact and feedback from the people was the top concern.

The municipality will improve the 24-hour complaints hotline, organise forums to hear opinions from all segments of the community and actively invite people to take part in submitting proposals to the government for consideration.

Improving education and supporting children with disabilities and the underprivileged to receive equitable education were also high on his agenda, including developing educational institutions in terms of quality and efficiency, he said.

Improving civic and community areas, such as by creating a music-performance area at Queen Sirikit Park and developing public areas at Khao Rang Park and Suan Luang Rama IX Park to become beautiful as a tourist attraction and exercise place, with emphasis on sustainable waste management, as well as developing a wastewater treatment system to be more efficient, were key objectives, Mr Saroj said.

In terms of local residents safety and security, the municipality will pursue quality of life policies such as promoting safe cities under the Pineapple Eyes project and monitoring traffic safety through CCTV.

Public health policies included pushing for the development of a public health service center to provide care for the elderly, as well as improving care for the disabled and the development of dialysis centres, Mr Saroj said.

Other key issues to be addressed included developing areas in Phuket Town to become tourist attractions, such as by transforming the municipalitys two main fresh markets to become walking markets and by developing the beach area at Saphan Hin.

Also key issues were consistent quality tap water supply, public transport, Wi-Fi connectivity, openly dealnig with corruption complaints and the sustainable economic development of Phuket Town, he added.

For the policies presented to the Phuket City Council to be effective and successful requires cooperation from all sectors, to cooperate with each other and develop with the intention of managing the government of Phuket City to be in accordance with the law, rules, regulations, ordinances and policies, and we will adhere to the principles of good governance in accordance with good governance practices, Mayor Saroj said.

We intend to develop Phuket City Municipality to become an organization with excellent service, to put the people at the centre. It will be a medium to coordinate cooperation from all sectors in solving problems, to encourage people to share ideas, share presentations, share information, share recommendations, and participate in the review of the performance of the executive and legislative departments.

We aim to develop our work, develop people, develop Phuket Municipality to progress with efficiency and effectiveness to lead Phuket Municipality to become a diverse creative city with a cultural identity, to be livable, safe, and modern with technology, for the greatest benefit to the people in the future, he said.
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Southern Pines, NC (28387)

Today

Intervals of clouds and sunshine. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 91F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Considerable clouds early. Some decrease in clouds late. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 70F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph.
A must see presentation on the rich history of the Montgomery County Sentinel, all 164 years of it, at the January 25th Montgomery County Historical Society Conference.
EDWARDSVILLE  Southern Illinois University School of Dental Medicine Dean Bruce Rotter has announced his retirement effective December 2021.

Rotter was named SDM dean in Nov. 2012 after serving as interim dean for more than a year. An SIU SDM Class of 1982 alumnus, he joined the SDM as a faculty member in 1993.

On behalf of SIUE and the SIU School of Dental Medicine, I want to thank Dean Rotter for nearly 30 years of service, said Chancellor Randy Pembrook. Bruce has an incredibly informed perspective having been a part of SDM as a student, faculty member and long-serving administrator. In particular, I want to commend Dean Rotter and the School for their dedication to the community as evidenced by their free clinics for Veterans and the Give Kids a Smile Program which annually provide more than $100,000 of free dental service to valued constituencies, as well as their work at the WE CARE Clinic in East St. Louis. We wish Bruce and his wife, Cindy, best wishes as they plan for retirement in 2022.

Rotter was SDM associate dean for academic affairs for six years prior to serving as interim dean. He joined the SDM faculty as an assistant professor in 1993, was named associate professor in 1997 and professor in 2009. During that time, Rotter created and administered one of the first implant fellowship training programs in the country. That program led to the creation of a freestanding implant clinic, which he designed, helped develop and directed.

Highlights of his career include:

Three times led the School through reaccreditation from the Council on Dental Accreditation.

Appointed Cornell Thomas, DDS, as SDM chief diversity officer and director of the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

Elected vice chair of the Commission of Dental Accreditation, the national programmatic accrediting agency for dental and dental-related education programs at the post-secondary level.

Launched SDM clinical endodontic training graduate program.

In April 2019, SDM received a $2 million grant from the Illinois Childrens Healthcare Foundation and is currently building a medical operating suite with general anesthesia capabilities for children with special dental care needs within a new Advanced Care Patient Clinic.

In February 2017, SDM showcased its renovated clinic in University Park on the Edwardsville campus.

In March 2014, SDMs expanded presence in Alton earned an Award of Achievement from Pride, Incorporated, for the construction of the Schools Multidisciplinary Simulation Laboratory and adjacent space, an 18,000-square-foot, $9.5 million project.

Throughout his academic career, Rotter continued to be active in the private practice of oral and maxillofacial surgery. He worked with Southern Illinois Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Ltd., in Belleville and Glen Carbon since 2002 until his appointment as dean. He also has served the Veterans Administration Medical Center in St. Louis as an oral and maxillofacial surgeon and/or consultant since 1994.

A member of 15 dental professional associations, he has been elected to fellowship by the American College of Dentists, the International College of Dentists, and the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons. He has been associated with more than a dozen hospitals throughout his career including affiliations with St. Anthonys Medical Center in Alton, Belleville Memorial Hospital, Healthsouth Surgical Center in Belleville and the Veterans Administration Medical Center in St. Louis.
EDWARDSVILLE  A new Riverbend effort to fight crime is being led by an experienced local law officer.

Maj. Jeff Connor of the Madison County Sheriffs Department has been named commander of the recently created Cross-River Crime Task Force Thursday. Connors selection was announced Thursday afternoon by Madison County States Attorney Tom Haine and Sheriff John Lakin.

The task force is a collaboration of federal, state, county and local law enforcement agencies. Its first meeting was in April; last week the group adopted a charter.

Currently chief deputy sheriff for Madison County, Connor said he wants to start gathering data and putting a plan together as soon as possible for the task force.

Im proud to have been chosen as commander for this important new law enforcement effort, Connor said. Im thankful for the deputy commanders who have agreed to assist, and we look forward to getting to work combating the flow of violent crime into and throughout Madison County.

The task force was created to address the increasing amount, and perception, of crime and criminals coming to Madison County from the Missouri side of the St. Louis area. While much of the discussion has been about vehicle and retail thefts, officials have said much more serious crimes  including murder  have been committed by criminals crossing the Mississippi River into Illinois.

Also on Thursday two two deputy commanders were named: Maj. Nick Novacich of the Granite City Police Department and Alton Deputy Police Chief Jarrett Ford.

The three of us will meet in the upcoming weeks to discuss a strategy on what to do, how to move forward with this task force, Connor said.

Organizers have said the task force will use a two-pronged approach of special patrols and advanced technology, primarily license plate reader (LPR) cameras.

Well need to gather statistics, and then we have logistics we have to deal with, Connor said. Its in the infancy stage right now. But we hope to get running soon on some projects.

He said he is unsure exactly how many officers will be involved.

Almost every department in Madison County has agreed to be part of it, he said of the task force. Officers likley will be rotated in and out of special details as needed, he said.

If we do an operation, we may have six, eight, 10 officers working at any given time, Connor said. Thats part of the meetings were going to be having.

He said discussions will be held on how to best use the LPR camera technology and where they are placed.

The county has been involved in the placement of several cameras, with some local departments also placing them. The LPR cameras scan license plate numbers and hit on plates from stolen vehicles or when the owners have active warrants. There are also some mobile LPR cameras available.

Im looking forward to this challenge, and to help the citizens of Madison County to be safe, Connor said.
As the state enters a full reopening, Im mindful of how far weve come and how far we still have to go.

I live and work in southern Illinois, and as a former Census worker and now a regional lead for the Illinois Public Health Associations Pandemic Health Navigator Program, I am well-traveled in this part of the state. One thing theyve have had in common this past year is the devastation COVID-19 has had on families and businesses.

Reopening will undoubtingly boost the local economy and our collective spirits as we resume in-person activities and return to a sense of normalcy in our lives. We are also learning that vaccinations are steadily increasing and as a result, more than two-thirds of all Illinoisans have received at least one vaccine dose.

These are incredible numbers and they were not achieved by accident. State government, the Illinois Department of Public Health, healthcare providers and associations like IPHA have all worked tirelessly to meet vaccination goals through outreach and education, and ultimately with shots in arms.

Nearly one third of our residents are still unvaccinated and vulnerable, meaning we should still exercise caution indoors and in crowds and of course, continue to encourage our family, friends and neighbors to get the vaccine.

We shouldnt forget that the virus is active and impacting people every day. Those that contract COVID-19 are still struggling to quarantine, maintain access to food and resources during quarantine or find themselves out of work as a result of getting sick or from the larger economic impact of the pandemic.

Programs like the Pandemic Health Navigator are necessary and helping people through their toughest times. While there are so many stories to tell, Id like to highlight just a few to demonstrate the extraordinary work these people are doing and the life-changing results a little empathy can make.

Recently a young mom who had been out of work for nearly a year reached out for help when her water was cut off, just as she and her two teenagers had been quarantined with COVID-19. No less than a dozen organizations were approached, many out of resources, some willing to put this family on a long waiting list. A health department referral put this family in the care of Coordinated Youth and Human Services. They were able to get the water turned back on and is now helping this mom find a job.

Illinois Migrant Council has long served as support and a guide to recent immigrants and refugees who come to Illinois. Though they receive very few local health department referrals, in the month of May, they assisted nearly 400 families with food, employment assistance, and other needed resources.

Fifth Street Renaissances community health workers have provided critical support like delivering food, medicine and cleaning supplies to families across the state. Like many community-based organizations that have partnered with IPHA, they see community health workers as a long-term solution to increase health equity.

These are just a few examples of the hundreds of organizations and community health workers that have worked so hard to get impacted families through this pandemic and get us all to a place that allows for a full re-opening.

Thank you for all that you have done and continue to do. Lets not forget their efforts and lets do our part to make sure we re-open safely and continue to follow local and posted health guidelines, use caution, and common sense as we resume events and activities.

Lynden Schuyler is a Pandemic Health Navigator Regional Supervisor at the Illinois Public Health Association. For more about the Pandemic Health Navigator Program, visit HelpGuideThrive.org.
SPRINGFIELD  Four area projects are among $106 million in grants announced Wednesday by the Illinois Department of Transportation and Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

From safer pedestrian paths to new bike lanes and trail systems to beautification projects, the Illinois Transportation Enhancement Program will deliver real value to nearly 100 communities across the state, with a special focus on equity, Pritzker said.

Alton will receive $1.3 million to create safer routes to school. Alton Public Works Director Mike Parsons said the sidewalk improvements will include a 10-foot wide combined shared pathway for cyclists and pedestrians from the intersection of Rock Spring Drive and Memorial Drive to College Avenue. Another shared pathway is planned from Memorial Dive to Brown Street and along College Avenue to Rock Springs Drive.

Its just a good thing for Alton, Parsons said. With budgets being the way they are, were looking for all the grant money to keep our projects going.

The grant announcements included $823,500 for a shared use path along Illinois 157 in Edwardsville; $486,720 for the Route 40 trail extension to CA Henning Elementary School in Troy; and $465,536 for a Rails to Trails path connecting three parks in Carrollton.

Bike paths provide a safe public space for residents, families and visitors to be physically active and enjoy the outdoors, said state Sen. Rachelle Crowe, D-Glen Carbon. These investments will allow residents to enjoy our scenic landscape while offering even more opportunities for safe transportation and recreation.

The 99 projects cited by state officials include biking and walking paths, trails, streetscape beautification and other projects designed to encourage safe travel across the various modes of transportation at the local level. More than 60% was allocated to projects in communities that best demonstrated a financial need.

For a complete list of recipients, visit the ITEP page on the IDOT website at https://idot.click/itep.
PHOENIX (AP)  Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich announced Thursday he's running for U.S. Senate, becoming the third major candidate seeking the Republican nomination to take on Democrat Mark Kelly.

Brnovich, who is in his second term as the state's top law-enforcement officer, is the best-known GOP candidate and the only one with political experience.

In a video announcement, Brnovich described himself as the son of immigrants who fled communism in Yugoslavia. He says he used his post as attorney general to take on crony capitalists" and government overreach, while promoting religious liberty, border security and election integrity.

We need an Arizona conservative in Washington who stands up for us and our values, Brnovich said in the video. Someone whos been tested. Someone who won't go run and hide at the first sign of trouble.

Brnovich has drawn the ire of former President Donald Trump, which could become a major liability in a crowded GOP primary. Trump has repeatedly called Brnovich lackluster and said he's nowhere to be found in support of the audit of Maricopa County election results by state Senate Republicans.

Trump and many of his most loyal supporters have latched onto discredited allegations of widespread election fraud in Arizona and elsewhere, which they claim cost him his re-election. Brnovich, Gov. Doug Ducey and Secretary of State Katie Hobbs certified Arizona's election results showing a narrow victory for Democrat Joe Biden.

Our Country needs Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who has done little so far on Voter Integrity and the 2020 Presidential Election Scam, to step it up, Trump wrote in a statement earlier this month.

Brnovich downplayed the presidential feud, saying he can't worry about what anyone else does.

I want this race to be about me, what I believe in and what I stand for, Brnovich said in a brief interview. The media focuses so much on the things that no one can control. They dont want to focus on what I stand for, what I believe and the record I have.

Solar energy entrepreneur Jim Lamon and retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Michael Mick McGuire, both political newcomers, have also announced plans to seek the GOP nomination. U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs has said he's considering a run but has not announced a decision. Blake Masters, who has worked closely with billionaire Peter Thiel, also may run.

Kelly, a retired astronaut, won a special election last year to finish the late John McCains Senate term. He is now running for a full six-year term. The race is one of the most high-profile contests in 2022 and will help determine which party controls the U.S. Senate.

As attorney general, Brnovich has picked a number of high-profile fights, including suing the Arizona Board of Regents  which is typically his client  over plans to build a hotel at Arizona State University. He's also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to invalidate part of the Voting Rights Act in a high-stakes case filed by the Democratic National Committee; a decision is expected in the coming weeks.

Democrats immediately signaled that they would highlight his support for a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the Affordable Care Act, the health care law known as Obamacare. Democrats effectively used opposition to the law against Republicans in 2018 and 2020.

Before he was elected attorney general in 2014, Brnovich was a federal prosecutor and head of the state Gaming Department, which regulates gambling.
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds complained in a letter sent Thursday that the federal government didn't notify her before flying migrant children into the Des Moines airport in April, then shuttling them to other cities as part of an effort to join them with relatives.

In a letter sent to Iowa U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, Reynolds called for a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on immigration that should address the Biden administrations lack of notice when it moves children through the states.

Although similar migrant children relocation occurred during the Trump and Obama administrations, Reynolds spokesman Pat Garrett said the recent flight was different because it occurred late at night and a federal agency initially denied it had organized the flight.

Reynolds claims 19 children were flown into the Des Moines International Airport from Long Beach, California, late on April 22. Two buses were used to transport most of the children to other airports in or near Kansas City, Chicago, Detroit, Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and Janesville, Wisconsin. Two children were unified with their sponsors at the Des Moines airport.

Reynolds, a Republican and a Donald Trump supporter, said little about immigration problems when Trump was president despite highly publicized issues, but she has repeatedly sought to focus attention on President Joe Biden's immigration efforts since the Democrat took office.

In the letter, Reynolds said Trump had made significant progress at the nation's southern border and argued Biden's failed policies have incentivized the largest surge in illegal crossings in 20 years, including the largest monthly number of unaccompanied children in history.

Reynolds said the lack of notice about the movement of children through the airport forced law enforcement to investigate whether the flights indicated a criminal act of human trafficking or the federally-sponsored transport of vulnerable children.

The letter also was signed by Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, who questioned similar flights into his state.

The travel was arranged by the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Administration for Children and Families, which is in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement said in a statement that its mission is to safely care for unaccompanied children until they can be unified with a vetted sponsor, usually a parent or close relative.

Their parents and relatives are located across the United States, and ORR contractors use various transportation modes to unite unaccompanied children with their families. These modes include air and ground transportation options, taking into account child safety and wellness, travel time, and cost-effectiveness. This travel may consist of flights originating from various locations with stops/layovers in different airports," the agency said.

Data from the agency shows 27,417 unaccompanied children have been released to sponsors since October 2020, including 163 in Iowa. Last year, Iowa sponsors took 119 children and 489 were located with Iowa sponsors in 2019.

The agency provided data details numbers of children brought to Iowa since 2015.

Reynolds last month rejected a federal request for the state to help migrant children, saying the need to find homes for them is the presidents problem."

Reynolds stand contrasted with her willingness to accept refugees coming into the United States when Trump raised the issue in 2019. At that time, Trump signed an executive order giving states the right to refuse to take refugees.

Reynolds was among more than 30 governors who said they would accept refugees.

Iowa Democratic Party Chair Ross Wilburn said in a statement that Reynolds is "only focused on dividing and distracting Iowans from her own record and using a fake crisis to further attacks on our friends and neighbors.

However, Democratic U.S. Rep. Cindy Axne, whose district includes Des Moines, also complained that when she asked about reports of the flights, the Department of Health and Human Services and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn't clarify the situation.

I join Governor Reynolds in demanding further investigation and disclosure from HHS to determine why this flight was kept secret and why its existence was denied to both the public and to the public officials seeking to learn the whole truth," Axne said in a statement.
LONDON (AP)  Imagine trying to make an impression on someone whos met, well, almost everyone.

Such is the challenge for President Joe Biden, who is set to sip tea with Queen Elizabeth II on Sunday at Windsor Castle after a Group of Seven leaders' summit in southwestern England.

Biden, accompanied by wife, Jill, became the 13th president to meet the monarch, making her acquaintance Friday night at a reception at an indoor rainforest that she and other royals held for leaders attending a summit in Cornwall of the world's seven largest economies.

The White House said Biden met the queen in 1982, but that was when he was a U.S. senator.

The now-95-year-old monarch has met every American president since Dwight Eisenhower during her nearly 70-year reign, except for Lyndon Johnson, who didn't visit Britain while he was in office.

She was a 25-year-old princess when she came to Washington in 1951 and stayed with President Harry S. Truman and his family at Blair House, where Truman lived while the White House underwent a major renovation. She met Herbert Hoover in 1957, more than 20 years after he left office.

Her personal ties to U.S. leaders underscore the importance of the United States to the United Kingdom and to the queen. She came of age during World War II and understands the central role the trans-Atlantic alliance has played in modern British history, said Robert Hardman, author of Queen of the World, which examines her role representing Britain on the world stage.

She grew up with that sort of sense of the USA is almost a sort of salvation that came along and rescued Europe in the darkest days of the war, Hardman told The Associated Press.

Here are highlights of some of her meetings, on both sides of the pond, with past American presidents:

DONALD TRUMP

Trump and the queen met in July 2018 at Windsor Castle during a visit to Britain that drew large anti-Trump protests in downtown London, including the hoisting of a balloon that depicted Trump in a diaper.

He was criticized for breaking protocol by briefly walking in front of the queen  instead of alongside her  and turning his back on her as they reviewed an honor guard.

Trump later said he thought of his late mother, Mary Anne, who was born in Scotland and who loved the royal family, when he and his wife, Melania, sipped tea with the queen.

Trump's subsequent comment that the queen told him that Brexit  Britain's break from the European Union  was complex also created a stir. Most heads of state keep private their private conversations with the queen. She also doesn't discuss political matters.

The Trumps and the royals met again during the D-Day commemoration in 2019.

BARACK OBAMA

Obama and the queen had their first of three meetings in April 2009 at a reception for world leaders attending the Group of 20 nations summit in London.

It was there that first lady Michelle Obama broke protocol by briefly putting an arm around the queen's back as they commiserated about their achy feet. It's generally a no-no to touch the queen, but she returned Mrs. Obama's gesture.

The queen invited the Obamas for a state visit in 2011 that included a two-night stay at Buckingham Palace and a lavish banquet in the president's honor.

As Obama delivered a toast to the queen, he didn't miss a beat when the band assumed that a pause in his remarks meant he had concluded and launched into a rendition of God Save the Queen. Obama kept talking over the music until the band quieted down.

The couples saw each other again in 2016 when Obama visited the queen at Windsor Castle a day after her 90th birthday during another swing through Europe.

GEORGE W. BUSH

Bush detested stuffy, formal affairs, but he donned a white tie-and-tails tuxedo after the queen pulled out all the stops for a state dinner in his honor at Buckingham Palace in November 2003.

A few years later, Bush's slip of the tongue generated ripples of laughter at a White House welcoming ceremony for the queen, who was touring the U.S. in May 2007.

Stumbling on a line in his speech, Bush said the queen had dined with several of his predecessors and had helped the United States celebrate its bicentennial in 17- ... Bush caught himself and corrected the date to 1976, and paused to see if she had taken offense.

She gave me a look that only a mother could give a child, Bush said with a smile.

The queen later turned the tables on Bush with her toast at a dinner she hosted for the president at the British Embassy in Washington.

I wondered whether I should start this toast by saying, When I was here in 1776,'" she said to laughter.

BILL CLINTON

The queen hosted Clinton and his wife, Hillary, aboard her royal yacht, Britannia, in June 1994.

The ship, 412 feet (125 meters) long and 55 feet (17 meters) wide, was docked at the Portsmouth Naval Base and was home base for the Clintons as they attended the queen's dinner at Guildhall for leaders of Allied nations whose troops participated in the D-Day invasion of Normandy 50 years earlier.

The Clintons spent one night aboard the boat. The next day, the Britannia ferried Clinton to the USS George Washington aircraft carrier as it prepared to sail across the English Channel, from Portsmouth to Normandy, for D-Day anniversary celebrations.

GEORGE H.W. BUSH

One of the more memorable images from the monarch's third state visit to the U.S. came in 1991 when only her white-striped purple hat could be seen above the microphones when she spoke at an arrival ceremony on the White House grounds.

Someone forgot to adjust the lectern after the much taller Bush spoke.

The queen stayed strong and carried on, later making light of the incident as she opened an address to a joint meeting of Congress.

I do hope you can see me today from where you are, she deadpanned. Bush later apologized and said he felt badly for not pulling out a step for her to stand on.

RONALD REAGAN

Reagan and the queen bonded over their mutual love of horseback riding.

They rode side by side on an 8-mile (13-kilometer), hourlong tour on the grounds of Windsor Castle when Reagan visited her there in June 1982. Reagan was the first president to sleep over at the British royal family's historic home, an 11th-century estate overlook the River Thames.

While in the U.S. in 1983, the monarch and Philip stayed with the president and first lady Nancy Reagan at their ranch in Santa Barbara, California. She wanted to ride horses again, but a rainstorm wouldn't allow it. The Reagans served a lunch of regional staples, including enchiladas, chiles rellenos, refried beans, tacos, rice and guacamole.

They also hosted a state dinner for the queen in San Francisco at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum.

JIMMY CARTER

The queen hosted Carter in May 1977 on his first overseas trip at a dinner for NATO leaders at Buckingham Palace. At one point, as Carter stood with the queen and other guests, he noticed the arrival of the queen mother.

Ever the Southern gentleman, Carter broke away, took her by the hand and escorted her to the assembled line of guests.

The no-frills Georgia peanut farmer-turned-president ate chicken mousse off a gold plate and seemed excited by his dinner seating between the queen and her sister, Princess Margaret, and across from her son, Prince Charles, Prince Philip and the queen mother.

GERALD FORD

Ford threw a gala state dinner for the Brits in 1976 to mark the bicentennial of the American Revolution. The queen was resplendent in a diamond-studded tiara that sparkled for a crowd that included diplomats, star athletes and celebrities such as Cary Grant and Julie Harris.

The mood evaporated when Ford led the queen to the dance floor while the song The Lady Is a Tramp echoed throughout the State Dining Room.

___

Superville reported from Washington. AP news researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York and Associated Press writer Nancy Benac in Washington contributed to this report.
CARBIS BAY, England (AP)  Jill Biden is sending a sartorial message of love as she accompanies her husband President Joe Biden overseas.

The first lady wore a black jacket with the word love outlined on the back in silver beading as she and the president met with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his wife Thursday. She wore the same jacket more than two years ago to kick off Bidens presidential campaign.

Were bringing love from America, she told reporters, explaining her fashion choice.

This is a global conference and we are trying to bring unity across the globe and I think its needed right now, that people feel a sense of unity from all the countries and feel a sense hope after this year of the pandemic."

Biden is known for her sartorial choices, often donning bright pastels or eye-catching patterns for her outings on behalf of the Biden administration. She is rarely seen without a kitten heel or stiletto boot, adding height to her petite frame.

And this isnt the first time shes sent a direct message with her clothes: During a campaign trip to Iowa late last year, Biden wore black skinny jeans bearing the word VOTE down each calf.

Bidens jacket and pants come in contrast to the last first lady to offer a message with her clothes: Melania Trump wore a jacket that read I Really Don't Care, Do U?" during a trip to a detention center for migrant children in 2018. She wore a different jacket at the shelter.

The first lady is accompanying her husband during the U.K. leg of his foreign trip, where she'll participate in spouses' activities at the Group of Seven summit, and a couple of events focused on military veterans and their families. She joined Johnson's wife, Carrie Johnson, for tea Thursday and tweeted a photo of the two and Johnson's son, Wilfred, on the shore.

On Friday, Jill Biden, a community college English professor, and Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, and mother of three young children, plan to appear together at a preschool in Cornwall and participate in a roundtable discussion on early childhood education, the White House said.

Joe Biden is on his first overseas visit as president. Along with his participation in the G-7 summit and a NATO summit in Brussels, he will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Jill Biden said her husband had been studying for weeks for the trip and joked that he is overprepared.

Joe loves foreign policy. This is his forte," she said.

The Bidens are set to meet with Queen Elizabeth II on Sunday at Windsor Castle. The first lady told reporters that's an exciting part of the visit for us.

-

Associated Press writer Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.
MEXICO CITY (AP)  A senior U.S. official said Thursday that less than two week ago, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Nicaragua's foreign minister that the Biden administration would respect the results of free and fair elections in November.

But since then, the U.S. has seen Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega unleash a wave of repression against political opponents and members of Nicaraguas civil society, Julie Chung, the acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, told reporters.

A day earlier, the U.S. Treasury Department slapped sanctions on four people close to Ortega, including his daughter and a top army official. The sanctions followed the arrests of four potential opposition candidates for the presidency since last week.

Blinken was in Costa Rica on June 1 and 2 to meet with member countries of the Central America Integration System, and Chung said he talked with Nicaraguan Foreign Affairs Minister Denis Moncada.

Secretary Blinken did speak to Foreign Minister Moncada and relayed that we want to see a free and fair elections, Chung said. The whole world would love to see free and fair elections in Nicaragua, and we would abide by the results of that if they were certified by an independent institution.

Ortega, and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, have been moving in the opposite direction ever since, apparently clearing the field of his strongest opponents.

As we inch towards election in November in Nicaragua, I think its apparent Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo are fearful. Theyre fearful of losing, theyre fearful of a free and fair, transparent system, Chung said. They are fearful of losing their grip on power.

Murillo has struck a defiant tone this week, lashing out at foreign interference. She and Ortega have maintained that widespread anti-government protests in April 2019 were a coup attempt with foreign backing.

Chung said the efforts to push a change of course in Nicaragua are multilateral.

On Thursday, the European Parliament warned Ortega in a letter that future cooperation with the European Union will depend on the country moving back toward democracy.

The November elections are an opportunity to end and peacefully resolve Nicaraguas deep political crisis, the letter said.

The EU similarly called for Ortega to change course Thursday. The EU firmly condemns the actions of the Nicaraguan authorities against opposition parties, media, journalists and other media workers, human rights defenders and civil society, including the systematic detention and arrest of potential presidential candidates and opposition leaders, the bloc said in a statement.

But later Thursday, Nicaraguas Attorney Generals Office said in the statement that judges had granted its request to hold two of those candidates arrested this week for up to 90 days while their investigations continue. Opposition leaders Felix Maradiaga and Juan Sebastian Chamorro face charges related to alleged crimes against the government.

Chung said she spoke to Maradiagas wife the day before, who described how police beat her husband before carting him off to jail.
EDWARDSVILLE  Three men  two of them from Tennessee  were charged Thursday with burglary and weapons charges after an incident at a Pontoon Beach gas station.

Jordan R. Parker, 25, of Atoka, Tennessee; Andre B. Bateman Jr., 25, of Memphis, Tennessee; and Armond L. Davis, 31, of St. Louis, were each charged June 10 with burglary, all Class 2 felonies, and aggravated unlawful use of weapons, all Class 4 felonies.

The cases were presented by the Pontoon Beach Police Department.

According to court documents, on May 19 the three allegedly entered the Phillips 66 gas station at 3802 Illinois 111 in Pontoon Beach to commit theft. All three were found to be carrying loaded and accessible handguns in their vehicle: Parker a Smith & Wesson MP 380 Shield, Bateman a Glock 44 and Davis a Springfield XP 9 mm.

Bail was set at $75,000 each.

Other felony charges filed June 10 by the Madison County States Attorneys Office include:

 Mark C. Abercrombie, 47, of St. Ann, Missouri, was charged with offenses relating to motor vehicles, a Class 2 felony. The case was presented by the Alton Police Department. On April 19 Abercrombie allegedly was found to be in possession of a stolen Pace American box trailer. Bail was set at $50,000.

 Kevin P. Ricks Sr., 55, of Cahokia, was charged with retail theft over $300, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Edwardsville Police Department. On June 9 Ricks allegedly took $687.56 in food items from the Edwardsville Dierbergs, 6671 Edwardsville Crossing. Bail was set at $15,000.

 Mark A. Schieler, 56, of East Alton, and Gary A. Lavite, 61, of East Alton, were each charged with theft under $500 (second subsequent offense), a Class 4 felony. The case was presented by the Bethalto Police Department. According to court documents, the two allegedly took clothing valued at less than $500 from another person. Schieler has a 2019 Madison County conviction for theft. Lavite has a 2013 Madison County conviction for burglary. Bail was set at $15,000 each.
EDWARDSVILLE  T\hree people were charged in Madison County Thursday with aggravated DUI in separate cases.

Lucas S. Sims, 22, of East Alton, was charged June 10 with aggravated driving under the influence while licenses suspended, and aggravated driving under the influence, both Class 4 felonies.

The case was presented by the Alton Police Department.

According to court documents, on May 14 Sims allegedly was found to be driving under the influence of alcohol while his license was suspended.

Bail was set at $15,000.

Samantha D. Graham, 22, of Alton, was charged with aggravated driving under the influence while having no valid drivers license, and aggravated driving under the influence /no valid insurance, both Class 4 felonies.

The case was presented by the Madison County Sheriffs Department.

On May 21 Graham allegedly was found to be driving a 2010 Ford Fusion while under the influence of alcohol, and did not possess either a drivers license or valid liability insurance.

Bail was set at $15,000.

Robin L. Leslie, 51, of Sullivan, Missouri, was charged with aggravated driving while under the influence, a Class 2 felony.

The case was presented by the Pontoon Beach Police Department.

On April 12 Leslie allegedly was found to be driving a vehicle while under the influence of alcohol. It was noted she received court supervision out of Madison County in 2005 and a conviction out of St. Clair County in 2013 on similar crimes.

Bail was set at $15,000.

Other drug-related felony charges filed June 10 by the Madison County States Attorneys Office include:

 Daphyne A. Sanborn, 55, of Collinsville, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony, and driving while license revoked, a Class 4 felony. The case was presented by the Collinsville Police Department. On Jan. 27 Sanborn allegedly was found to be in possession of less than five grams of methamphetamine; and was driving on North Bluff Road with a revoked drivers license. Her license was suspended in 1994 for DUI, and she had multiple convictions for driving while license revoked. Bail was set at $15,000.

 William S. Jones, 31, listed as homeless out of Granite City, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Granite City Police Department. On June 9 Jones allegedly was found to be in possession of less than five grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $15,000.

 Kelli E. Johnson, 36, of Fairview Heights, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Collinsville Police Department. On Feb. 21 Johnson allegedly was found to be in possession of less than five grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $15,000.

 Shawn M. Morales, 43, of Granite City, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Granite City Police Department. On June 9 Morales allegedly was found to be in possession of less than five grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $15,000.

 Scott Wyant, 38, of Granite City, was charged with unlawful possession of methamphetamine, a Class 3 felony. The case was presented by the Madison County Sheriffs Department. On June 9 Wyant allegedly was found to be in possession of less than five grams of methamphetamine. Bail was set at $15,000.
MARYVILLE  Two Nebraska men were sentenced this week to lengthy prison terms for committing a series of armed robberies, including ones in Madison County.

Allen McCray, 23, and Victor Linton, 27, both of Omaha, Nebraska, appeared in federal district court in the Southern District of Illinois this week. McCray was sentenced to 26 years; Linton was sentenced to 24 years.

According to court documents, in April 2017 McCray, Linton and a third man  Brandon D. English, Jr., 21  stole a Hyundai Santa Fe out of a Nebraska driveway and went on a week-long, multi-state crime spree.

The first robbery took place on April 13, 2017, in Raytown, Missouri, where they held up a convenience store. Recovered receipts show they used the proceeds from the robbery to make cash purchases at Dollar General, Rally House, Foot Locker and TJ Maxx locations in the Kansas City metropolitan area.

Two nights later, the trio covered their hair and faces and entered a Moto Mart in OFallon, Illinois, where English put a gun to the cashiers head and demanded money. They also struck the cashier with her own purse before taking money out of her cash register and leaving.

Less than an hour later, the men used similar methods to rob a Circle K in Troy and a Caseys General Store in Maryville, according to court records.

After buying ammunition and trying to purchase another gun, the three left the Metro East, driving first to the Chicago area and then to Indianapolis. They returned to Illinois on April 19, 2017, where McCray and Linton stopped in a Prime Sole shoe store in Effingham. When they tried to take merchandise without paying, a store employee confronted them. According to court records, McCray pulled out a gun and fired a shot at the clerk. The two men then fled the scene with the stolen items.

McCray and Linton eventually abandoned the Santa Fe in Booneville, Missouri, when they missed the turn into the Break Time gas station just after midnight on April 21, 2017. The men spotted a truck in the parking lot and fired six shots into the vehicle, striking the driver four times.

Eventually, they stole another vehicle and led law enforcement on a chase through Lafayette County, Missouri. Spikes were used to stop the vehicle, and the pair were taken into custody.

All three defendants entered guilty pleas to conspiracy, robbery (three counts) and brandishing a firearm during a crime of violence. McCray and Linton also pleaded guilty to a fourth robbery count and to discharging a firearm during a crime of violence.

In addition to their imprisonment, McCray and Linton also will serve five years of supervised release and pay $793.51 in restitution.

English was sentenced in December 2018 to 20 years in prison.

The FBI led the investigation, with assistance from state and local law enforcement agencies including the OFallon Police Department, the Maryville Police Department, the Troy Police Department, the Illinois State Police and the Missouri Highway Patrol.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The U.S. leveled sanctions Thursday against a Yemeni network that it claims was cooperating with Iran's Revolutionary Guard to illicitly transfer tens of millions of dollars to Yemen's Houthi rebels.

At the same time, the Biden administration also announced it was lifting sanctions on three former Iranian oil executives and two companies that it said had been involved in banned petroleum sales, saying the U.S. had verified a change in status or behavior" on their part. Neither the State Department nor the Treasury Department would elaborate further on the reason for the de-listings.

The departments of State and Treasury announced both moves in simultaneous statements that come as the administration is trying both to press the Iranian-linked Yemen rebels into peace talks for the war in Yemen, and close a deal returning the United States and Iran to an accord on Iran's nuclear program.

The money moving through the alleged Houthi financing network came from sales of Iranian petroleum and other commodities throughout the Middle East, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

International officials and analysts say Iran has increased its material support to Yemen's Houthi rebels as the war in the Arab nation passes the six-year mark. A Saudi-led coalition is trying to hold off the Houthis, who seized the country's capital and are waging an offensive now to capture a major northern city, in defiance of U.S. and U.N. calls for a ceasefire.

The new U.S. action designates 11 Yemeni individuals, alleged front companies and intermediaries and vessels involved in what it said were the illicit transfers.

The 11 included Jami Ali Muhammad, a Houthi and alleged Iranian Revolutionary Guard associate who the United States says helped procure vessels, facilitate shipments of fuel, and transfer funds for the benefit of the Houthis."

The 2015 nuclear deal is based on Iran limiting development of its nuclear program in return for the U.S. and others lifting sanctions against Iran. Ongoing talks in Vienna have focused partly on timing of the U.S. lifting sanctions and Iranians returning to compliance with the agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA.

The administration said the lifting of sanctions on the three former officials and two companies is unrelated to the indirect discussions in Vienna that are to resume this weekend.

There is no linkage, there is no connection to the de-listings that we announced today to the JCPOA or to negotiations that are ongoing in Vienna," State Department spokesman Ned Price told reporters. However, he was unable to offer a complete explanation of the reasons behind the move, other than it was made in response to a petition for the removals.

These petitions are reviewed very carefully, he said. They are verified by experts to ensure that the information put forward is factual, that it is accurate, and only after we have verified the information put forward in petitions would we undertake a de-listing. In the case of these three individuals it was the result of our ability to verify that there was a change in status or a change in behavior that allowed us to undertake this de-listing.

Price added that the step demonstrates our commitment to lifting sanctions in the event of a change in status or behavior by sanctioned persons. He said that practice is consistent with good sanctions hygiene and administrative processes.

Still, he could not say what the change in status" or change in behavior had been, and Irans national oil company, NIOC, and a number of other affiliates remain under U.S. sanctions. Sanctions have been removed in the past because a target has died, retired or otherwise left their position but there was no indication any of those had happened.

Critics of the nuclear deal and the administration's intent to return to it immediately denounced the lifting of sanctions as a concession in the absence of anything in return from Iran, and while Tehran continues to ignore demands from the U.N. atomic watchdog to explain elements of its nuclear program.

The Biden administration should not be offering Iran sanctions relief at a time when Tehran is refusing to comply with the International Atomic Energy Agency investigation into its nuclear program," said Andrea Stricker, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Unfortunately, the U.S. just signaled that it is buckling on sanctions relief and the IAEA investigation before a deal is even reached. Iran will be sure to seize on this concession and try to get more.

The sanctions against Ahmad Ghalebani, a managing director of NIOC, two directors of NIOC affiliates and those companies had been imposed in 2013 by the Obama administration.

The 2015 deal with world powers allowed it to sell crude oil again on the international market. President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord in 2018, leading Iran into clandestinely taking its oil abroad and selling it.

___

Ellen Knickmeyer contributed from Oklahoma City.
EDWARDSVILLE  A Livingston woman was charged Thursday after allegedly attempting to run down a former boyfriend with a motor vehicle.

Kyra I. Mostajo, 38, of Livingston, was charged June 10 with aggravated assault with a motor vehicle, a Class 3 felony.

The case was presented by the Madison County Sheriffs Department.

According to court documents, on June 8 Mostajo allegedly drove a vehicle in the direction of a former boyfriend, placing him in reasonable apprehension of being struck.

Bail was set at $15,000.

Other felony charges filed June 10 by the Madison County States Attorneys Office include:

 Troy E. Slack, 35, of Alton, was charged with domestic battery (second subsequent offense), a Class 4 felony. The case was presented by the Alton Police Department. On May 22 Slack allegedly threw a glass bottle at a family or household member. He has a 2019 Madison County conviction for domestic battery. Bail was set at $15,000.

 Natika B. Hinton, 27, of Alton, was charged with aggravated fleeing or attempting to elude a police officer, a Class 4 felony. The case was presented by the East Alton Police Department. On June 10 Hinton allegedly was driving a 2014 Hyundai Sonata when she tried to flee from an East Alton police officer, reaching speeds of more than 21 miles above the posted speed limit. Bail was set at $15,000.

 Romel S. Taylor, 34, of St. Louis, was charged with unlawful possession of a stolen Illinois vehicle registration plate, a Class 2 felony, and aggravated fleeing or attempting to elude a police officer, a Class 4 felony. The case was presented by the Granite City Police Department. On June 10 Taylor allegedly was found to be in possession of a stolen Illinois registration plate; and attempted to flee a Granite City police officer, reaching speeds more than 21 miles an hour over the posted speed limit.

 Stephanie M. Younger, 29, of Granite City, was charged with criminal damage to property over $500. The case was presented by the Granite City Police Department. On May 27 Younger allegedly damaged a door, window and roof of a home. Bail was set at $15,000.

 Jammie D. Payne, 37, of St. Louis, was charged with criminal damage to property over $500, a Class 4 felony. The case was presented by the Alton Police Department. On March 27 Payne allegedly damaged multiple windows of multiple vehicles belonging to another person. Bail was set at $15,000.
Tasha Leverette was in the mood for her favorite drink from Starbucks, an iced peach green-tea lemonade.

When she went through the drive-thru of her usual Starbucks in Atlanta three weeks ago, though, she was told they couldnt make the drink because they didnt have any peach-flavored juice. Shrugging it off, she drove to another store. And another. And another.

Each stop brought disappointment. None of the locations had the integral ingredient.

I said to them, This is the Peach State, right?  said Leverette, 33, who owns a public relations firm. Its surprising because Starbucks always seems like it has anything and everything you need.

Across the country, customers and baristas are taking to social media to bemoan shortages not only of key ingredients for popular Starbucks drinks, like peach and guava juices, but also a lack of iced and cold-brew coffee, breakfast foods and cake pops, and even cups, lids and straws.

A video on TikTok this week featured what appeared to be a group of employees screaming in frustration over a list of ingredients the shop had run out of  including sweet cream, white mocha, mango dragon fruit and every food item. The caption also said that they were low on cold brew and the will to live.

Starbucks is hardly the only company struggling with supply issues. Earlier this spring, ketchup packets became hotter than GameStop stock. Automakers have slowed production because there are not enough computer chips for their vehicles. And homeowners are waiting weeks, if not months, for major kitchen appliances.

But Starbucks is running out of ingredients for Very Berry Hibiscus Refreshers and almond croissants after being one of the clear winners of the pandemic economy. During lockdowns, the coffee chain quickly shifted from its position as a third place, where people could linger to work or meet up for long chats, to focusing on frictionless transactions with customers ordering through mobile apps and drive-thrus. Earlier this year, company executives said Starbucks had seen a full recovery in U.S. sales, back to prepandemic levels.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Starbucks said the company was experiencing temporary supply shortages of some of its products. She said the shortages varied by location, with some stores experiencing outages of various items at the same time. She added that the company was working with its vendors to restock the items as soon as possible, and that the supply-chain issues had not affected prices.

Although most people are familiar with the problems in the global supply chain to some extent, some Starbucks customers are still shocked  even incensed  by their inability to get their coffee exactly how they want it. Others laugh it off.

I was told they couldnt give me an extra shot of caramel because there was a national shortage, Nicole Brashear, a 24-year-old pharmacy student at the University of Louisiana at Monroe, said of ordering an iced caramel macchiato with extra caramel drizzle in late May. I just sort of laughed and was like, Isnt caramel just burnt sugar?

The problem for Starbucks is that it was never just selling a simple cup of coffee. For many, the experience of visiting the chain is a self-indulgent treat.

Customers learn the language regarding sizes and special drinks and then share their customized, 12-ingredient drink orders on social media. Many look forward to seasonal specials, like this summers Unicorn Cake Pop and Strawberry Funnel Cake Frappuccino, which are available for a limited time.

Orders are not barked out by number like other fast-food chains but rather are announced by name, suggesting customers are friends or are part of the Starbucks club, said Bryant Simon, a history professor at Temple University and author of Everything But the Coffee: Learning About America From Starbucks.

Starbucks did something remarkable: taking a really ordinary product, coffee, and remaking it as an identifier of class, of culture, of discernment and of knowledge, Simon said. Starbucks is a way to communicate something about yourself to other people. While it has become more complicated over time, that drink still says, I deserve a break in my life. I can afford to waste money on coffee.

There were earlier hints that supply issues could be bubbling up for Starbucks. In a late April call with Wall Street analysts, the chief executive of Starbucks, Kevin Johnson, voiced some concerns about companies that were part of its supply chain struggling to hire the staff they needed.

I do anticipate well do a little more to invest and help our supply chain partners, whether its staff that they need in manufacturing or staffing that they need for distribution and transportation, Johnson said.

By late May, customers and baristas were reporting shortages of key ingredients or foods in stores all over the country.

Fred Rogers knew something was wrong right before Memorial Day weekend when he opened his Starbucks app and an alert flashed that the company was experiencing shortages of certain items. He wasnt able to order his 3-year-old daughter her favorite sandwich  sausage, Cheddar and egg  from his nearby Starbucks in Burlington, New Jersey. His drink, a Caramel Ribbon Crunch Frappuccino, was also not available.

I know if you go after a certain hour that theyre going to be out of some items, said Rogers, a 33-year-old manufacturing specialist. But this was 6:45 in the morning.

Customers may be unhappy, but Simon said the paucity of drinks or food items would likely only increase demand. One of Starbucks biggest challenges in recent years has been overexpansion, meaning it has shed some of the uniqueness that once made it special.

Im sure there are a lot of heated conversations in Seattle right now about the supply-chain issues, but someone on the branding side is going to be chirping in that the scarcity may not be a bad thing, Simon said.

Perhaps, but the issues could also be a risk if customers become too frustrated over not being able to get what they want, as they always have. When his daughter couldnt get her favorite breakfast sandwich at Starbucks, Rogers took her to a nearby Chick-fil-A for breakfast.

And after driving to four Starbucks locations and not getting her favorite drink in late May, Leverette is no longer a regular customer.

Its disappointing, she said. You go, and youre waiting in the drive-thru, and youre only going for one thing and they dont have what they need to make it.

I just stopped even bothering to go.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
With former state Rep. Marty Flynn now a state senator, Democratic and Republican officials have turned their attention toward filling his 113th state House District seat.

Neither party has set a date for interviewing candidates who want to become its nominee in the Nov. 2 special election.

Lackawanna County Democratic Party Chairman Chris Patrick said the party is accepting applications at lackawannacountydc@gmail.com, or by sending a letter of intent or resume to the Lackawanna County Democratic Committee, P.O. Box 441, Olyphant, PA 18448. He recommends using email to ensure timeliness.

The county Republican Party is accepting letters of intent or resumes and copies of voter registration cards via email at lackawannagop@gmail.com or by writing Republican Party of Lackawanna County, P.O. Box 362, Moscow, PA 18444.

The 113th seat became vacant Wednesday when Flynn took the oath of office as a state senator. He won a special election May 18 for the 22nd Senate District seat vacated by John Blake.

Patrick and Scranton Democratic Committee chairman Bob Sheridan said they are leaning toward limiting eligibility for interviews for the special election nomination.

Under their potential scenario, party committee members would only interview candidates who promise not to run for reelection next year and would commit to only serving the rest of former Rep. Marty Flynns term, which expires Nov. 30, 2022. That would allow for an open primary election in May 2022. In an open primary, party committees dont endorse or nominate a candidate.

For the special election, the partys 84 113th district committee members will choose a nominee for the special election, which coincides with the general municipal election. Only that person could run as a Democrat.

The other option would be to interview all candidates for the special election and choose one, regardless of whether they plan to run for reelection next year.

Patrick and Sheridan said they plan to talk further before deciding on an approach, but feel choosing someone who wont seek reelection makes sense.

First, the party committee choosing a nominee could upset the unsuccessful candidates, dividing the party, Patrick said. The party divided over the committee members nomination of Flynn for the special Senate election over Rep. Kyle Mullins, D-113, Blakely.

I know theres still hard feelings, Patrick said.

Second, Patrick and Sheridan said, reapportionment  the rewriting of House district boundary lines based on the 2020 census  will alter district boundaries for the 2022 primary.

Somebody nominated now might not be in the jurisdiction next year, he said.

Patrick said he has received interest from three people interested only in serving out Flynns term. He declined to name two because they havent decided to put in their names, but said the third is Thom Welby, former chief of staff to Flynn. In a letter to 113th Democratic committee members, Welby, 71, commits to only serving the rest of Flynns term and promises he wont seek reelection.

Welby confirmed that commitment during a telephone call Thursday. Flynn said he supports letting Welby only serve out his term.

At least six other Democrats have said they plan to seek the nomination or are seriously considering it  Jack Corcoran, Patrick Flynn, the senators cousin, Bill Fox, Robert Solfanelli, Amber Viola and John Sheroda.

Sheroda, 63, said he might be interested in seeking only to serve out the rest of Flynns term.

Viola said she favors doing whats best for district residents and keeping the seat in Democratic hands without dividing the party.

Corcoran and Solfanelli said they favor no limit on reelection, partly because that could cost the 2022 winner a year of seniority. Corcoran noted the party allowed multiple candidates to apply for a vacant 114th House District seat without a reelection limit.

Patrick said that March 2019 special election happened 20 months before winner Bridget Kosierowskis term expired and without any looming reapportionment.

Patrick Flynn declined to comment. Efforts to contact Fox were unsuccessful.

Stange said Republicans who have confirmed or expressed potential interest so far are William Kresge, David Burgerhoff, former county chief deputy sheriff Dom Manetti; and Chris Brooks.
SCRANTON  When it rains, it leaks in historic 1888 City Hall.

The rooftop section of the Municipal Building at 340 N. Washington Ave. that needs repairs the most, the rear South Tower along Dix Court, will soon be repaired.

The city seeks bids by June 23 on an exterior restoration of the South Tower, according to recent public notices in The Times-Tribune.

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981, the Victorian Gothic-style building sits on a street that showcases some of the citys best historic architecture. City Hall has four floors containing various city government departments and offices, a basement containing a Civil War museum and a dirt-floor sub-basement with mechanical equipment.

With numerous problems inside and out, City Hall is a victim of age, long-standing neglect and piecemeal repairs over decades, officials have said. The last major renovation of the 52,600-square-foot building was done in 1980.

The landmarks four corners each has a tower, the most recognizable of which is the tall steeple with stained-glass windows on the corner of North Washington Avenue and Mulberry Street. That steeple for years has had broken windows, rotted wood, peeled paint and pigeons, but its not first up for repairs.

Water does come into the building, it absolutely does. They believe the South Tower is worse than the other ones (towers on the four corners), said Carl Deeley, the citys former business administrator who recently switched jobs to director of information technology.

A study in 2019 estimated it would cost $10.7 million for a total renovation of City Hall  inside-and-out and top-to-bottom.

As the city can not afford a total overhaul, Scranton officials have applied for state grants toward defraying costs and picking off individual projects. The city last week received a $100,000 state grant for the South Tower work.

The decision was made lets start there, Deeley said. The South Tower is the most urgent need, but the intent is to continue over the next few years with everything that has to be done.

The South Tower project calls for removal, repair and replacement of the pyramid roof and accessories, which include slate shingles, smaller pyramids and decorative finials, as well as repair and repointing of masonry walls.

Scaffolding along Dix Court likely would be required, Deeley said. A cost estimate of the project is unknown and the bid proposals will determine that, he said.

The project would start upon contract execution, with completion estimated for September, said Drew Marcinkevich of Highland Associates of Clarks Summit, an architectural/engineering consulting firm overseeing the project for the city.

On Thursday, about 13 contractors attended a pre-bid conference in Dix Court where city officials discussed the project and fielded questions.

Gary Mihal of Titan Roofing of Albany, New York, was among those who attended the conference. He said his firm definitely intends to submit a bid. Mihal asked city officials for more details. Marcinkevich then accompanied Mihal to the roof for a closer look. Mihal measured slate shingles, because the project requires slate shingles of the same size put back on the historic building.
Homeless awareness event planned

To bring the community together to raise awareness of the struggles faced by homeless families, the Catherine McAuley Center is hosting the inaugural virtual event: Where will I sleep tonight? on June 24.

During the awareness event, participating students, individuals, families and other groups may choose to sleep on the living room floor or in the backyard; they may crash on a friends couch or on the futon in a relatives spare room or office.

We have the opportunity to reach an unlimited number of people through this event, said Krista Somers, executive director of the Catherine McAuley Center. The more people who participate, the greater impact we can have on homelessness here in our own community.

The event will also help raise critical funds needed to assist homeless families in Lackawanna and Luzerne counties. Suggested donations for registrants range from $10 to $50. Sleepers are encouraged to organize teams and ask friends and family to sponsor them with a pledge of support.

Those who register will receive a participation kit with suggested activities, resources and links to programming designed to educate the community on homelessness and the work of the Catherine McAuley Center. Participants will also be invited to contribute to a Facebook live stream event the evening of Thursday, July 24, from 7 to 9 p.m.

Community groups and businesses interested in putting together a larger team are also invited to join as sponsors. Major Gold Sponsors of the event include Metz Culinary Management, Navient Inc., Pathways Consulting Group and Toyota of Scranton.

For details about the event or to register, visit www.CatherineM

cAuleyCenter.org/sleep.aspx.

Super students

Local students who attend East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania were among 344 of their peers set to be recognized during the universitys Annual Honors Convocation.

The event was not held due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The students still honored include Joshua Berrios Morales, Milford; Demarese Burley, Scranton; Carly Chapman, Madison Twp.; Nicholas Coleman, Plains; Emily Cox, Hawley; Gabrielle DAmore, Honesdale; Amanda Floystad, Milford; Brianna Frable, Dunmore; Molloy Jacobs, Lackawaxen; Mahmut Kalaycioglu, Dingmans Ferry; Kristen Konarzewski, Peckville; Christopher Mason, Hawley; Rachel McCarthy, Jessup; Erin Oxley, Milford; Eric Peifer, Greentown; Austin Pirl, Dingmans Ferry; Michael Quigley, Lakeville; Christopher Shivers, Milford; Logan Smith, Milford; and Theresa Wilusz, Covington Twp.
WASHINGTON  The Justice Departments internal watchdog launched an investigation Friday after revelations that former President Donald Trumps administration secretly seized phone data from at least two House Democrats as part of an aggressive leaks probe. Democrats called the seizures harrowing and an abuse of power.

The announcement by Inspector General Michael Horowitz came shortly after Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco made the request for an internal investigation. Horowitz said he would examine whether the data subpoenaed by the Justice Department and turned over by Apple followed department policy and whether any such uses, or the investigations, were based upon improper considerations.

Horowitz said he would also investigate similar Trump-era seizures of journalists phone records.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and another Democratic member of the panel, California Rep. Eric Swalwell, said Apple notified them last month that their metadata had been subpoenaed and turned over to the Justice Department in 2018, as their committee was investigating the former presidents ties to Russia. Schiff was then the top Democrat on the panel, which was led by Republicans.

While the Justice Department routinely investigates leaked information, including classified intelligence, subpoenaing the private information of members of Congress is extraordinarily rare. The disclosures, first reported by The New York Times, raise questions about what the Justice Departments justification was for spying on another branch of government and whether it was done for political reasons.

In a statement, White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said the Trump administrations conduct is shocking and clearly fits within an appalling trend that represents the opposite of how authority should be used.

Bates said one of President Joe Bidens top reasons for seeking the presidency was his predecessors unjustifiable abuses of power, including the repugnant ways he tried to force his political interests upon the Department of Justice.

The Trump administration's secretive move to gain access to the data came as the president was fuming publicly and privately over investigations  in Congress and by then-special counsel Robert Mueller  into his campaigns ties to Russia. Trump called the probes a witch hunt, regularly criticized Democrats and Mueller on Twitter and dismissed as fake news leaks he found harmful to his agenda. As the investigations swirled around him, he demanded loyalty from a Justice Department he often regarded as his personal law firm.

Swalwell and Schiff were two of the most visible Democrats on the committee during the Russia probe

.
PASCAGOULA, Miss. (AP)  A woman whose body was found 30 years ago in Mississippi has finally been identified thanks to DNA and the persistence of cold case investigators.

Authorities found the woman's body on Feb. 1, 1991, in a swampy area of Ward Bayou in Vancleave in Mississippi's Jackson County. The body is believed to have been there for up to three years before it was found, WLOX-TV reported.

The woman, believed to have been in her 20s, had brown hair and was referred to as Jane Doe.

On Thursday, Jackson County Sheriff Mike Ezell said Jane Doe has a name. It's Kimberly Ann Funk, who was born Feb. 7, 1969, in Sharon, Pennsylvania, 75 miles (120 kilometers) northwest of Pittsburgh.

In 2019, an anonymous donor helped the Mississippi Crime Lab finance updated DNA testing through Othram Inc., based in The Woodlands, Texas. Researchers were able to build a family tree using DNA that could potentially help identify the Jane Doe.

In March, Othram identified a possible brother of the victim. Cold case investigators talked with him and he confirmed that he had a sister named Kimberly, also known as Star, who went missing in 1990.

DNA swabs were collected from him and sent to Othram for comparison. Tests confirmed that the DNA was a match and Kimberly Ann Funk was officially identified as the Jane Doe, authorities said.

With the brothers help, investigators were able to learn that Funk arrived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast from Houston, Texas, between April and June of 1990. The cold case team is still working to piece together a timeline of her life between April 1990 and the time she was found in February 1991.

Anyone with information that could help investigators is asked to contact Jackson County Sheriffs Office at 228-769-3063. Anonymous tips can also be made to Mississippi Coast Crime Stoppers.
The American Families Plan offers a historic chance to improve the lives of children.

For a country brimming with pro-family politicians, the United States sure is a tough place to raise a family.

We Americans like to think Were No. 1, but one recent study found that the United States was the second worst out of 35 industrialized countries as a place for families. We ranked behind Bulgaria and behind Chile.

Now we have a historic chance to support children and families, for President Joe Bidens American Families Plan proposes programs such as high-quality day care and pre-K that are routine elsewhere in the world. You might think that the pro-family Republican Party would be eager to translate platitudes into practical help. But youd be wrong.

You know who else liked universal day care? tweeted Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tennessee. She cited the old Soviet Union, apparently suggesting that there is something communist about day care, and falsely claimed that participation would be mandatory under the Biden plan.

J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, warned, Universal day care is class war against normal people. South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott denounced efforts to put Washington even more in the middle of your life, from the cradle to college. Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley railed at lefty social engineering.

In Idaho, a Republican state representative, Charlie Shepherd, explained that he was against a day care measure because that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child. He later apologized because his remarks sounded sexist.

This is sad because the GOP is right to hail the importance of family. Having loving, supportive parents who read to children, hug them and help them with homework  thats crucial for kids. One University of Minnesota study found that maternal attachment at age 3 was a better predictor of high school graduation than IQ.

So Republicans are correct that healthy families make a healthy nation. Democrats sometimes are too reluctant to acknowledge the toll of dysfunctional families, for fear of blaming the poor for their poverty. But its difficult to have a serious conversation about improving opportunity and equity in the United States without acknowledging the complicated problems in many homes.

Some 8 million American children  roughly 1 in 8  live with a parent with a substance abuse problem. Millions more live in households with domestic violence. Others are latchkey kids who look after younger siblings because parents work and no day care is affordable.

Families desperately need help. In other countries, they get it. In the United States, they get empty homilies about the importance of family.

As a poorer nation in World War II, the United States could afford to operate an excellent day care program to enable moms and dads to hold jobs in the war economy. A follow-up study found that children in that wartime day care went on to enjoy higher high school and college graduation rates and earned more money as adults.

As of 2019, only 34% of American 4-year-olds attended state-funded preschool, and an important new study underscores why America needs national high-quality pre-K. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Boston offered public programs for 4-year-olds but couldnt meet demand, so a lottery was used to determine which children to accept.

Scholars have now found that the long-term effects of this random assignment were enormous. Children who had been accepted into pre-K were 18% more likely to enter college on time. They were more likely to graduate from high school and get better SAT scores, and were less likely to be incarcerated while in high school and disciplined as often. Effects were particularly strong for boys.

This new study is part of an enormous body of research showing that the greatest leverage we have to help people may be early in life, as brains are developing.

Skeptics say early childhood programs are expensive. Sure  but poorer countries can afford them. And educational failure and juvenile delinquency are even more costly, and also undermine American competitiveness around the world.

Senators say they care about crime. Well, heres a way to reduce juvenile crime: Offer high-quality pre-K. They say they want to help young people attend college. So back the Biden plan for pre-K. In other words, this isnt spending, but high-return investment.

Its odd that Republicans perceive early childhood programs as a Democratic plot. One of the best states for early childhood programs is Republican Oklahoma, and Oklahomans dont see pre-K as communist but as common sense: If you dont invest in children at the front end, you pay at the back end.

Bidens effort to slash child poverty and create systems for day care and pre-K could be historic. Its the most important policy issue of 2021. These initiatives would do for children and families what Social Security and Medicare did for the elderly.

So, please, Republicans, come to your senses: Helping children isnt the first step to communism. Its a step to strengthening Americas families, and thus to strengthening America.

NICHOLAS KRISTOF writes for The New York Times.
As Russias dictator attempts to disrupt Western democratic elections and criminal hackers from there and elsewhere shut down a major pipeline and otherwise disrupt the economy, many Americans wonder why the United States  supposedly the most technically sophisticated nation on Earth  hasnt been able to stop them.

A related question is whether the United States has responded in kind by disrupting the economies and governments of adversaries. Its harder to know because the dictators wont acknowledge the attacks because it diminishes their mystique of being all-powerful. And the United States likely wouldnt disclose so as not to reveal the scope of its abilities.

There have been several heartening public developments on the cyberwar front this week, however, that demonstrate that the United States and its allies arent asleep at the digital switch.

First, the Department of Justice announced that the FBI was able to track and recover most of the $4 million in the Bitcoin e-currency that Colonial Pipeline Co. paid Russian hackers, who had crippled its distribution system, to regain control.

Then, the FBI announced that it and its counterparts from Australia and several other countries had duped a wide array of criminals around the world into using a supposedly encrypted communications system that, in reality, revealed a host of international crimes to the investigators and produced hundreds of arrests.

In some ways, the fight against cyber criminals will be like the war against drug distribution. As one dealer falls, another takes his place, and the same likely will be true as investigators unravel the plots of cyber criminals.

But its encouraging that the good guys have the know-how to keep pace, and that cyber criminals no longer can act with impunity.
Attorney Frank Phelan, age 52, of Sun City West, Arizona, and former assistant district attorney of Carson City, Nevada, passed away peacefully and unexpectedly on June 1.

Born on April 16, 1969, Frank spent time in Duryea in his youth before graduating with honors from Peddie School and earning his bachelors degree from Occidental College in Los Angeles, Calif., in 1990. He initially worked as a financial advisor for both T. Rowe Price and Prudential in Santa Monica, Calif., before joining the U.S. Peace Corps where he served as a computer teacher to children in Belize.

Upon moving home, he then earned his Juris Doctorate from the William Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV). Upon graduation in 2007, he began a career in law working as an assistant district attorney for Carson City, Nev. He returned to Las Vegas where he worked in general law before opening his own private practice firm specializing in family law.

A world traveler, Frank had covered much of the globe, including extensive time in Europe and Asia. He also enjoyed wind surfing, mountain biking and camping.

An enormous loss to those who dearly loved him, as eliquently said by one of Franks acquaintences: We can only hope that the brilliance of Franks life outshines the darkness of his loss.

He is survived by his mother and best friend, Louise (Stallo) Phelan, of Sun City West; an uncle, Carlo Junior Stallo; and dear cousins and friends.

He was preceded in death by his father, Frank Phelan.

Blessing services from the Thomas P. Kearney Funeral Home Inc., 517 N. Main St., Old Forge, with burial at Marcy Cemetery, Duryea, were private.

Memorial contributions may be made in franks name to Sun Cities 4 Paws Rescue Inc., c/o Surprise Towne Center, 13764 W. Bell Road, Surprise, AZ 85374. Please visit the funeral homes website to leave a condolence.
MARISSA BERGEL, Wheeler softball, senior: Bergel hit a two-out, two-run single in the seventh inning to lift Wheeler past Holy Cross, 9-7, in the Class S state tournament. The hit was part of a five-run rally in the inning.

JOEY GUARNIERI, Westerly track & field, senior: Guarnieri placed first in two sprints at the Southern Division championships. He won the 100 (11.19) and the 200 (22.73).

JOSH MOONEY, Stonington track & field, sophomore: Mooney placed first in the 110 hurdles at the Class M state meet in 14.65. He also finished second in the 300 hurdles (39.87) and second in the javelin (160-0).

MARGARET WEEDEN, Chariho track & field, junior: Weeden finished first in the high jump at the Southern Division championships. Weeden cleared 5-1 and also placed sixth in the triple jump at 31-5.

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The reopening of indoor dining in hospitality venues last month did not stop total sales in pubs and bars declining by over a third of their pre-pandemic levels, new figures have claimed.

The Coffer GCA business tracker said overall sales in the sector in May were down by 26 per cent on the same month two years ago as outlets in England were still only permitted to serve customers outdoors until May 17.

This also meant that thousands of venues without outdoor space had to keep their doors shut until then, while nightclubs and small venues were still forced to remain closed after that date due to being unable to abide by social distancing restrictions.

Subdued trade: Sales in the hospitality sector last month remained far below their 2019 levels even though venues were allowed to serve customers indoors from mid-May

Bars were the worst-performing division for the second month in a row, recording a 38.3 per cent fall in sales, while pubs reported a 34.3 per cent drop despite a boost from sunny weather over the late May Bank Holiday weekend.

Restaurants did comparatively better, though sales still declined by 13 per cent. However, on a like-for-like basis, revenues only fell 5.5 per cent against a 15.4 per cent decrease across the hospitality industry in general.

Karl Chessell, director for hospitality operators and food at CGA, said: 'May brought a solid if unspectacular return to inside trading for managed restaurants, pubs and bars.

'Consumers have been eager to get back inside restaurants, and sunny weather helped pubs close the month on a high, but distancing and other trading constraints continue to offset those benefits.

'While the long-term outlook for the sector remains good, so much now hinges on whether the Government sticks to its road map to recovery.'

The findings come ten days before the UK government plans to initiate the fourth step of the roadmap out of lockdown when all limits on social contact are set to be lifted.

Recovery: Restaurants did comparatively better than pubs and bars last month, with like-for-like sales only 5.5 per cent lower than the same months two year ago

However, the recent rise in Covid-19 infection rates has made the hospitality industry worried that restrictions will stay in place for longer than initially planned and cause a further loss in trade.

According to data software provider Fourth, it has been one of the worst affected sectors by the coronavirus pandemic, losing about 650,000 jobs in 2020.

Industry bodies, including HospitalityUK and the British Beer and Pub Association, have called for the raising of restrictions on venues not to be delayed beyond June 21 to prevent job losses and help the struggling sector recover.

Paul Newman, head of leisure and hospitality at auditing firm RSM, called for the government to provide extra support to the sector until social distancing restrictions are ended.

The Recruitment and Employment Confederation's deputy CEO Kate Shoesmith said the UK's skills and staff shortage was 'the most pressing issue in the jobs market right now'

'A targeted extension to the 100 per cent business rates relief for leisure and hospitality properties beyond the current end of June deadline will go some way to ensuring that pubs are still in business to capitalise on the welcome boost to trade that the Euros will offer,' he remarked.

Hospitality bosses have also warned recently that the industry is suffering a massive shortage of workers due to economic uncertainty, European Union migrants returning home, and the continuation of the furlough scheme.

UKHospitality has said there are 188,000 vacancies in the sector and has launched a campaign in conjunction with the Department for Work and Pensions and Jobcentre Plus to encourage Britons to apply for jobs in hospitality.

Mark Sheehan, the managing director at Coffer Corporate Leisure, said: 'Hospitality is fighting for survival. The costs of compliance are higher notwithstanding the pressure on labour costs, and until we see restrictions lifted, we will see closures increasing.

'The good news is that the public have shown they want to return to hospitality in increasing numbers and the future, once restrictions have gone, looks very positive.'
French President Emmanuel Macron attends a press conference with Secretary-General of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Jens Stoltenberg (not in the picture) at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, May 21, 2021. (Photo by Aurelien Morissard/Xinhua)

PARIS, June 10 (Xinhua) -- The European Union needs to build the framework of its strategic autonomy on economic, industrial and technological issues as well as military values, said French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday.

"For me at the heart of these days to come is the European sovereignty," Macron told a press conference at Elysee on the eve of the Group of Seven (G7) summit in the United Kingdom from June 11 to 13.

Citing "a solid record" by Europe in this regard in recent years, including progress in defense, digital governance and post-pandemic recovery plan, Macron called for a new partnership with the United States.

On the NATO summit next week in Brussels, Macron, who said in 2019 that the trans-Atlantic alliance was experiencing "brain death", stressed that "the strategic capability autonomy of Europeans should be recognized."

Macron said that "NATO must clarify its common values. NATO must build a rule of conduct among allies and NATO must clarify its concept."

"What seems to me to be very important in this context is that we, as Europeans, assume that we are the players in arms control on our soil. This is an essential subject for the months and years to come," he said.

"Europe is not simply an object or a territory of the distribution of influences. We are a subject of international geopolitics and we must assume it," he added.

Flags of the European Union fly outside the EU headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, May 21, 2021. (Xinhua/Zheng Huansong)
ALBANY  A court ruling puts state agencies on the hook for legal fees incurred by families of the victims of the 2018 limousine crash in Schoharie who went to court to get access to records of contacts state agencies had with the limo company before the tragedy.

A lower court had already ordered the state to pay the families' legal bills, but the state appealed the decision.

On Thursday, a panel of justices from the Appellate Division of state Supreme Court in Albany ruled that the Department of Transportation and Department of Motor Vehicles must pay the families' legal bills tied to their efforts to obtain DOT and DMV records that detailed interactions the agencies had with Prestige Limousine, which rented out the stretch Ford Excursion that crashed on Oct. 6, 2018. The crash killed 20 people.

The legal work dates back to 2019 when the records request was initially made by Paul Davenport, an Albany attorney hired by some of the families in the wake of the crash. He and other local attorneys hired by the families are pursuing civil cases against Prestige Limousine and members of the Hussain family, who operated the business out of a Wilton motel they also owned.

Davenport originally sued the DOT and DMV in state Supreme Court in Albany on behalf of the estate of Erin McGowan, who died in the crash. Last year, state Supreme Court Justice Peter Lynch ordered the state to turn over the records and pay Davenport's legal fees and costs, but DOT and DMV appealed the case to the Appellate Division in Albany.

On the day before attorneys for the state and Davenport were supposed to make oral arguments before the appeals court, the state handed over the documents but still fought paying the legal fees.

Davenport said Friday that he must file a request to the state Supreme Court for approval of his legal fees the state must pay in the case.

"The fees and costs will be in the vicinity of ($30,000) due to all the work required to force the state to comply with the law," Davenport said.

Neither the DOT nor the DMV immediately responded to requests for comment on Friday.

The crash occurred on Oct. 6, 2018, when the Excursion, en route from Amsterdam to Cooperstown, crashed in a parking lot next to the the Apple Barrel Country Store at the intersection of routes 30 and 30A. The driver and all 17 passengers died as did two people in the parking lot.

The limo was traveling down a steep section of Route 30 going toward the village of Schoharie when it lost control at speeds that exceeded 100 mph, likely due to brake failure, State Police said.

The National Transportation Safety Board had blamed not only the limo company, which had been twice ordered by the state to take the vehicle off the road in the months before the crash, but also the DOT and DMV for not doing enough to stop the Hussains from operating the vehicle, which was nearly two decades old and had a history of safety and mechanical issues.

The victims' families won another court fight earlier this week, according to an attorney representing two of the families, who told a state Supreme Court judge in Albany that the Schoharie County coroner had finally released copies of autopsies done in the wake of the tragedy, which found that all of the victims had died of blunt force trauma.

The only person facing criminal charges in the crash is Nauman Hussain, the son of limo company owner Shahed Hussain. Nauman Hussain is scheduled to appear next month in Schoharie County Court in what could be a potential guilty plea. He faces 20 charges each of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide for failing to keep the limo off the road after it failed multiple DOT inspections and for employing a driver who was not properly licensed to drive passengers.
SARATOGA  Dozens of applicants strolled through the first hour of the two-day job fair at Saratoga Race Course Friday morning, looking to become some of the 2,350 workers that help the historic 40-day summer horse racing event run smoothly.

The job fair, hosted by the New York Racing Association, is a decade-old event that returns following a year of pandemic shutdowns that last year saw horses racing in front of empty stands.

Despite the Bureau of Labor Statistics' JOLTS survey earlier this week showing 9.3 million job vacancies nationwide in April, up from 8.1 million in March, NYRA is optimistic that hiring will go smoothly, said Pat McKenna NYRAs communications director.

We have already seen strong early traffic here this morning so we are encouraged, said McKenna. We went on sale with tickets this past Wednesday, we saw an unprecedented response in terms of tickets sold on Wednesday. The enthusiasm, the energy that we are seeing that is running through this community is significant in a way we havent seen before. We are absolutely optimistic that will carry over to hiring.

Many of the job applicants attending the fair on Friday were returning workers who had a long history of working at the track. For others, the fair kicked off their search for a first job after being out of work during the pandemic. Applicants ranged from high school graduates to retirees who were looking to keep busy.

Karen Rumpler has worked at the track for 28 summers and is excited to get back to work after losing her job at the track last year, and her winter job at Disney in Florida, due to the pandemic.

I cant wait to get back to work, said Rumpler. I love to work and I miss my customers. She hasnt heard from Disney yet but is hopeful she will be returning to work in the winter as well.

Rumpler was receiving unemployment benefits for the time periods she was scheduled to work at both the track and at Disney, but she doesnt receive them anymore by choice.

It doesnt feel right to me to be taking them still, Rumpler said. I think they need to stop [unemployment benefits]. People need to go back to work.

Jobs at the track include hospitality ambassadors, guest services, cashiers, admission attendants, ushers, security, cooks, waitstaff, cleaners, customer service associates, technology support, and many more.

Wages vary from minimum wage to $20 an hour, McKenna said.

We have raised wages across a number of different areas compared to 2019, McKenna added.

The job fair continues from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday at the Race Course.
ALBANY  Small businesses in New York state that still need a cash infusion to cover costs from the COVID-19 pandemic now have access to a new pool of money.

Starting this week, small businesses can apply for between $5,000 and $50,000 in assistance under the state's new Pandemic Small Business Recovery Grant Program. It is launching after the federal Paycheck Protection Program, created last summer to help small businesses harmed by the pandemic, drew to a close at the end of May.

More than 330,000 small businesses are eligible for the $800 million program, according to the Cuomo administration.

The program is designed to help small businesses cover expenses from March 1, 2020, to April 1, 2021.

Grants can pay for a wide range of expenses, including payroll, commercial rent or mortgage payments, local property or school taxes, insurance premiums and utility costs.

Also covered are costs of personal protective equipment for workers and consumers; heating, ventilation, and air conditioning; and other machinery or equipment and supplies needed to comply with pandemic protocols.

The program is different from the federal PPP in a key way, according to Jim Lozano, a partner at the BST & Co. accounting and consulting firm.

While PPP aimed primarily to keep employees on company payrolls and keep businesses open, the new program looks to help small firms recoup some of the costs they incurred at the height of the pandemic.

They are trying to get them through this next stage of recovery, Lozano said.

To be eligible, a company must have 2019 or 2020 gross receipts between $25,000 and $500,000 per year. The company also must have had

at least $1 profit in 2019 and suffered at least a 25 percent loss in gross receipts in 2019-2020.

Unlike, PPP, business operators can apply online and dont need to go through a bank.

The application site will be powered by Lendistry, a minority-led community development financial institution. Thats notable as state officials estimate that 57 percent of the state's certified minority- or woman-owned businesses are eligible for the program.

Another difference is the money from the state will be grants rather than loans. PPP monies were loans although they could be forgiven if businesses used the money for certain purposes such as maintaining their payrolls.

Lozano said his company has been busy helping businesses file the paperwork needed for PPP loan forgiveness.

Likewise, small business operators who are daunted by the substantial paperwork for these assistance programs should consult with a CPA or other similar advisor.

If you are struggling with things, dont waste time, he advised. Ask for help.

The grant application site is at nysmallbusinessrecovery.com.

rkarlin@timesunion.com 518 454 5758 @RickKarlinTU
A man died after being hit by an Amtrak train May 27 in an area of Columbia County where the rail company has been trying to erect fences and gates to keep people off the tracks.

Amtraks plans to fence off four-and-a-half miles of its Empire Corridor rail line at 22 sites between Poughkeepsie and Rensselaer to improve safety has attracted heavy opposition because the fencing would also block access to the Hudson River.

Advocates for river access told Times Union: Hudson Valley they believed the fencing would not have prevented the death, and that Amtraks plans made its tracks less safe.

The man, Bernard Barrett, 51, of nearby Hudson, had been fishing off a railroad trestle in Stockport before he was hit.

The trestle abuts a parking lot with a boat launch and a small park where locals often gather to watch the sunset and take in views of the Hudson. The Empire Corridor line runs close to the river, and a two-foot wooden fence with No Trespassing signs separates the area from the whizzing trains. Like most people who trespass on Amtrak property, Barrett was only trying to access the river.

At about 2 p.m. on May 27, Barrett was fishing off the trestle, which crosses the Stockport Creek as it meets the Hudson River, when he heard the trains whistle, according to the Columbia County Sheriffs Office.

He tried to move out of the way but tripped and was hit by the train and thrown off the west side of the trestle into the Hudson River, according to a Sheriffs Office spokesman. Still conscious, Barrett was able to swim to the shallows. A second person near the trestle, who had not seen the impact but heard the splash when Barrett hit the water, was able to rush in and call 911, according to the spokesman. Barrett was flown by Medivac to Albany Medical Center, where he died from his injuries, according to the Sheriffs Office.

Trains travel at 90 miles per hour while passing through Stockport, according to the Empire State Passengers Association.

No one on the train, which had been traveling from New York City to Rensselaer, was injured, according to an emailed statement by Amtrak.

This incident is a critical reminder to the public about the importance of exercising caution around railroad tracks and crossings. Amtrak continues to work closely with Operation Lifesaver (OLI) to communicate the dangers of being inattentive at rail grade crossings and along the railroad right-of-way. Each year, approximately 2,000 people are killed or injured in grade crossings and trespassing incidents nationwide, the statement continued. The initiative referenced, OLI, raises awareness of the dangers of trespassing on train tracks.

Barretts death was the second near the trestle in the last four years. On May 15, 2017, a Philmont man was hit by an Amtrak train and died just north of the trestle. The man had been walking along the tracks when he was hit, according to the Federal Railroad Administration.

Fencing not seen as solution to pedestrian safety

Christina Bohnsack, who has fought the Amtrak fences in her own Columbia County town as part of the Germantown Waterfront Committee, called Barretts death absolutely a tragedy.

"I just dont think that any gates or fences will keep people from accessing the river, she said.

Opponents of the fences want to preserve access while increasing safety by installing a series of pedestrian crossings along the rail line. Amtrak first released plans to fence off sections of its tracks along the Hudson in 2018 but withdrew them in early 2019 after sustained opposition from town leaders and the conservationist group Scenic Hudson.

An undisclosed Amtrak plan, obtained by The Other Hudson Valley earlier this year, proposed far more fencing than was originally planned.

Opponents to the fences have argued that New Yorkers have a right to access the Hudson River, citing the states coastal management policies. Bohnsack said safety is a priority and this could be better achieved while maintaining access. If there are safe places where access is permitted to fish, I think people will use those rather than go into increasingly dangerous situations as access is decreasing, she said.

After the initial plan was withdrawn, Scenic Hudson released its 2020 Hudson River Access Plan (HRAP) last March following months of public input, which proposes creating new pedestrian crossings at places where people commonly cross the track to access the river.

The HRAP identified 64 places where people commonly crossed the railroad tracks to access the river. Though five people have died after being hit by trains on the Empire Corridor between Poughkeepsie and Rensselaer since 2011, according to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), the other three deaths were not in areas identified by the HRAP as common crossing points.

Scenic Hudson's proposal suggested the installation of 10 at-grade, or ground-level pedestrian crossings, which have warning lights and sounds and include a crossing gate that swings down when a train is approaching.

Eight months after the HRAP was released, Amtraks previously withheld plan was published, Bohnsack said, with updated recommendations. It used the HRAP to see where people commonly accessed the river, then proposed additional fences at these traditional crossings.

This 2020 Amtrak plan called for approximately 780 feet of 6-foot-high fencing along the tracks near the Stockport trestle, which would block views of the river from the parking lot and park. Any plan Amtrak has for fencing off their rail line must be approved by the New York Department of State and to date it has not been submitted.

George Rose via Getty Images

Pedestrian crossings may not be realistic

Jeff Anzevino, director of land use advocacy for Scenic Hudson, said Barretts death just underscores the need to provide safe ways for people to cross the tracks.

People are always going to walk around the fence, he said. Fishermen are like a magnet to water, and theyre going to find a way to get to their favorite fishing spots, and there needs to be safe crossings, at-grade, for people to get to the river at the places where theyve been doing so for years and years if not generations.

The HRAP does not specifically call for a pedestrian crossing near the trestle, stating Fencing or barriers intended to keep people away from the tracks should be low key and fit the context of this park.

We have to be looking holistically at all the places, Anzevino said. I dont know if anyone can afford [pedestrian crossings] everywhere, but I think we need to find the places where people are using the river, and then prioritize the right kind of infrastructure in the most appropriate places.

Scenic Hudson commissioned a white paper in November 2018 from McLaren Engineering Group studying at-grade pedestrian crossings across the country that estimated a crossing would cost between $50,000 and $300,000.

Bruce Becker, the former president of the Empire State Passengers Association, an independent advocacy group for train passengers in the state, said he could not think of an example in recent memory of Amtrak installing at-grade pedestrian crossings at the behest of a local community. Amtrak is in the habit of improving vehicular crossings, but even with these the company seeks outside funding from the federal or state governments, he said.

Very frankly, the concept of creating new at-grade crossings of rail lines, particularly on a high-speed line like the one that runs along the Hudson River  it would be very rare that any new crossings would be graded, Becker said, contrasting it with other types of crossings, such as pedestrian bridges.

But pedestrian bridges cost up to $1.5 million each and have been panned by Scenic Hudson as being inconvenient and taking up too much room on the often thin tract of land between the rail line and the Hudson River.

State and federal representatives have demanded Amtrak work closely with the municipalities along the rail line on any improvements on the tracks. Assemblywoman Didi Barrett (D-Columbia, Dutchess) penned a letter to the Department of State, which must approve any proposed fences or crossings, saying it was imperative for the state to work with these affected municipalities to ensure public access and the safety of our residents.

On the local level, town leaders in the affected municipalities have passed town resolutions and written joint letters to Amtrak demanding the rail company work closely with them to maintain access while increasing safety.

Stuyvesant Town Supervisor Ron Knott, whose community borders Stockport and was included by Amtrak in its fencing plans, said there has been no communication from Amtrak since the pandemic hit.

Other than the aforementioned statement, Amtrak did not respond to inquiries by press time.
ROSWELL, N.M. (AP)  Severe flooding in eastern New Mexico has prompted Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to declare states of emergency in Lincoln and Chaves counties.

The governor issued her executive orders Wednesday, freeing up $1.5 million for the counties to use for repairs and to prevent more damage.

State officials say the flooding that began over the Memorial Day weekend continues to threaten public safety and critical infrastructure.

Local officials pointed to a levee near Roswell that was overwhelmed by heavy rain and storm runoff over the holiday weekend. They said the water had breached the levee in at least two locations.

The city of Roswell shared video footage of the flooding on social media following a tour last week. Residents also posted images and video of water flowing through neighborhoods and covering streets.

Officials in both counties said the emergency declarations will help to open avenues for relief for those affected by the flooding.

State Homeland Security and Emergency Management Secretary Bianca Ortiz-Wertheim said her agency has been working with local officials, the American Red Cross and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers since last week.

"Despite this tragedy, our department has been inspired by the way these communities have come together to protect one another, propose solutions, and begin recovering from this disaster, she said.
ALBANY  State lawmakers passed long called-for reforms by progressives on criminal justice and gun reform. They legalized marijuana. They agreed to protections for those afflicted by the coronavirus pandemic.

The laws passed in this years legislative session that came to a close late Thursday night came under unique circumstances: the power of a progressive caucus in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement; the response to the coronavirus pandemic; and scandalous allegations swirling around Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, limiting his political swagger and ability to force deals.

The solutions some advocates proposed to deal with issues they view as priorities in the criminal justice system at times fell short, despite overwhelming Democratic majorities in both chambers.

And while Democratic leadership checked just how progressive the policies they would pass would be, Republicans seized on the leftward shift and staked out their platform moving into next year's elections.

In the waning days of the session, with gun violence surging both in the state and nationwide, conservatives called for a tough-on-crime approach and attributed the increase in shootings, in part, to police forces that are being hobbled by progressive policies and calls to "defund" their agencies.

For Cuomo, a last-minute controversy erupted as he sought to push through a long list of appointees to key positions ranging from the Board of Elections to the Public Service Commission. With his stature arguably weakened by ongoing state and federal investigations, as well as an impeachment probe in the Assembly, some lawmakers pushed back and complained they should have more time to vet the appointees who often normally sail through that process.

The session was defined as much by its bills passed as the moment in time. The coronavirus pandemic restricted the access to lawmakers from the public, including lobbyists and the advocacy groups who normally flood the Capitol's hallways. Debates were conducted virtually for the most part and the usually pulsing Capitol was largely lifeless throughout the session.

It remains unclear whether there will be a special session this year, including to pursue any potential impeachment proceeding of Cuomo, who faced calls for his resignation, including from key Democratic leaders.

"As our scheduled session concludes tonight, we are proud of the historic progress we made this year," Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said in a statement late Thursday. "If ongoing discussions on any outstanding issues require action, we stand ready to come back when and if necessary."

The state is continuing to operate under a state of emergency, although the Senate recently reined in some of the executive powers they approved for Cuomo as the pandemic began last year  a setup that had particularly unsettled Republicans.

In spite of what they will talk about after this session, thats the story, Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt said Thursday. A governor with multiple investigations, a governor who lied to the people of New York, a governor who's being investigated by the (state) attorney general, the U.S. attorney and the Assembly and yet he continues to retain all of his pandemic power and continues to horse trade to get things that he needs.

On Thursday, the Legislature also approved parole reforms, but not all of what criminal justice advocates called for had broad Democratic support.

The "Less is More" legislation would avoid sending someone back to jail for a non-criminal parole violation. It was part of a package of reforms that were partly taken up by the Legislature, but more far-reaching plans like an opportunity for elderly inmates to have mandatory parole eligibility  with the right to a parole hearing  failed to get to the floor.

I want to thank my colleagues who, like me, came to Albany to resist the ongoing criminalization of our people, Assemblywoman Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas said on the floor Thursday. It is time to punish less and heal more.

Gonzalez-Rojas, a Queens Democrat, was elected last year, a few months after Black Lives Matter protests and calls for criminal justice reform swept the country.

This eliminates all parole, Andy Goodell, R-Chautauqua, said. And for this reason Im opposed.

Throughout the session, Republicans pushed back on the way Democrats wanted to reform criminal justice systems that many progressives call broken. Instead, conservatives said the state needed to support its law enforcement and avoid tying their hands.

The partisan issue flared similarly during a debate on major gun reforms passed earlier this month.

Democrats, with a legislative supermajority, passed legislation that can allow the attorney general's office to sue gun manufacturers. There was also legislation passed to outlaw so-called ghost guns, that are largely untraceable and come disassembled. And a new center is to study that issues of gun violence in New Yorks communities.

Republicans called the legislation an affront on the Second Amendment and looking to the wrong people to solve the widely agreed upon problem of gun violence.

But one of the most notable measures approved this year was the legalization of recreational marijuana use for adults, something Cuomo pushed for while his public image plummeted. Lawmakers have projected the move will result in fewer incarcerations while eventually raising hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenues and creating up to 60,000 jobs.

I'm proud these comprehensive reforms address and balance the social equity, safety and economic impacts of legal adult-use cannabis, Cuomo said in a statement on March 31. I thank both the (Senate majority) leader and the (Assembly) speaker, and the tireless advocacy of so many for helping make today's historic day possible."

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that advocates for elder parole are seeking mandatory parole for those inmates. They are supporting legislation to give elderly inmates mandatory parole hearings.
NEW HAVEN  There is no shortage of suggestions for what to rename Christopher Columbus Family Academy.

A committee tasked with giving the city Board of Education two names to choose from has received 240 so far, after putting out an online survey and holding a forum this month.

The deadline to submit suggestions was Sunday.

Names offered ranged from the simple  Discovery  to the longer  The Stars and Explorers of the Four Winds Family Academy.

At least one student in the pre-K through through second grade school wants the school named Chocolate. Another is rooting for Dragonfly, the schools mascot.

A member of the public said they preferred the name not changed, but, if it must, they would vote for the Ronald Reagan School.

And change it must.

The school board decided last June to change the name, indicating the name Columbus should no longer be memorialized because of the Italian explorers role in the violent colonization of the Americas.

An ad hoc naming committee was formed.

Carlos Torres, a committee co-chairman and former school board member, said the aim is to choose a name appropriate to the schools mission and values.

A good number of suggested names included the word Discovery and/or Exploration in the name.

While fitting with the schools mission to impart knowledge, some participating in the online forum worried both words too closely linked back to Columbus and his purported discovery of the Americas.

As of last week, about one-quarter of those who responded to the surveywere students, one-quarter were New Haven residents, 17 percent were parents and the rest were graduates or teachers.

Some wanted the name to denote a location. Nearly 29 percent of all respondents want the school to have a theme name. Another 27 percent want it to be named after a person.

Individuals from Sonia Sotomayor to Harriet Beecher Stowe were suggested, as was the schools retiring principal, Roy Araujo, and Superintendent of Schools Iline Tracey.

Tulani Dial, a forum participant, said she hadnt yet filled out the survey but would love to add William Lanson to the list of contenders.

Lanson was a Black entrepreneur Dial said she only learned about in college.

He built Long Wharf, Dial said. He once owned Wooster Square.  We should shed a little light around great people who made a difference or impact in the city itself. Who impacted New Haven.

Kerry Hayes, a teacher at the school who led one of the forum breakout sessions, said some in her group wanted to stay away from naming the school after a person.

Someone always will have a problem with it, agreed Sarah Miller, a member of the ad hoc committee.

Miller said she wondered whether one of the several names related to indigenous people could rise to the top. Among the names suggested were Momauguin, Paugussett, Quinnipiac, Quiripi and Taino.

In a group led by Jacqueline Vazquez, the consensus was the name had to be short enough so that Family Academy could be its surname.

It needs to have family in the name, said Liz Curtiss, a kindergarten teacher at the school.

Others hoped the word multilingual of multicultural would make its way into the name.

Torres said that once the survey closes the committee will meet June 8 to cull through the suggestions and select two to forward to the school board by the end of the month.

Given the number of ideas, Torres said it could take more than one meeting.
ALBANY  Troopers assigned to an elite unit that protects the governor are being interviewed as part of a state attorney general's investigation into sexual harassment and groping allegations that multiple women have been made against Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

The interviews with current and former members of the governor's Protective Services Unit indicate the investigation has crossed into a realm that is rarely pierced by outside investigations. Indeed, the members of the governor's protective unit are generally hand-selected for their abilities and expected to keep secret what they see or hear in terms of the governor's official and private dealings.

For years, the troopers and investigators on the protective detail have also been required to sign non-disclosure agreements that describe their role with the governor as a "special trust," according to language in the agreement that was obtained by the Times Union.

"During your work you become aware of information concerning the personal and professional behavior of the governor, his family, or members of his staff as well as other officials," states the agreement, which predates Cuomo's time as governor. "You are ordered to treat all such information as strictly confidential and (it) must not be disclosed to any person except as necessary in the performance of your official duties."

But Cuomo has at times had an icy relationship with the troopers who guard him, his staff and his family.

He demands 100 percent loyalty and 100 percent commitment and gives none to the people who work for him," said a former member of the State Police who has been interviewed by the attorney general's investigators.

Current and former State Police members familiar with the non-disclosure agreements that must be signed by those appointed to the Protective Services Unit note that the documents may not exempt the troopers from their role as a police officer if they have observed anything criminal or unethical.

The attorney general's investigators have drawn that same conclusion and forged ahead with their interviews of the governor's guardians, including gathering details from their observations of the Executive Chamber's "culture," and the manner in which women have been treated or interacted with the governor and his staff. Female troopers have also been among those interviewed, the sources said.

One of the people with knowledge of the matter said that the private attorneys conducting a parallel impeachment investigation on behalf of the state Assembly's Judiciary Committee have also begun preliminary interviews with at least some current or former members of the governor's protective detail. But that probe is moving much slower than the attorney general's investigation, which is being led by attorneys Joon H. Kim and Anne L. Clark.

Kim has a deep background in criminal investigations as a former acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan; Clark has extensive experience in sexual harassment cases.

"We have the highest regard for State Police and the troopers who serve on the Executive Detail," said Richard Azzopardi, a spokesman for the governor. "We are respecting the process and believe those seeking to settle scores and score political points under the cloak of anonymity should as well."

It is not unprecedented for troopers assigned to the protective detail to become embroiled in controversies involving the governors they have sworn to protect. While serving as the state attorney general, Cuomo conducted an investigation of many of those transgressions. His 16-month probe ended in September 2009 with an 11-page report that concluded that top State Police officials engaged in "political interference," but he found no evidence of a "rogue unit" operating within the 4,500-member agency, as had been alleged.

Cuomo's 2009 investigation was prompted by an order issued by then-Gov. David Paterson, who became entangled in his own controversies involving his State Police protectors. He publicly disclosed in 2008 that he had an open marriage  an admission he said he made because he feared State Police operatives might disclose the information. Not long after Cuomo's 2009 report was issued, Paterson subsequently was accused of having State Police contact a woman who had accused one of Paterson's top aides of assault.

The records gathered in Cuomo's investigation of the State Police  which were detailed in a 2013 Times Union story  indicated that some governors, including George Pataki, bypassed State Police protocols and hand-selected the leaders of their own security details, leading to a series of political scandals and abuses of authority. Those records also revealed transgressions that were not included in Cuomo's report, including troopers using connections to gain promotions; running personal errands for governors; teaching governors' children to drive; walking dogs; and ferrying governors' children to social events.

Other records in the case revealed that Eliot Spitzer had demanded that troopers guarding him leave his hotel room floor at night. "Now we know why," a trooper assigned to Spitzer's security detail later wrote in an email, referring to the former governor's use of prostitutes.

Some members of the unit have questioned whether Cuomo's administration has followed the guidance of a finding he listed in his 2009 "rogue unit" report: "The governors office should set the standard for diligence in avoiding political interference with State Police business. The superintendent of the State Police must conduct the business of the State Police in a wholly apolitical manner and must avoid even the appearance of partisan activities within the State Police."

A year after Cuomo issued his report as attorney general, the Executive Services Detail was renamed the "Protective Services Unit" and underwent an overhaul. But troopers who worked on the detail at that time said the meddling continued.

Joseph Percoco, a disgraced former top aide to Cuomo who is serving six years in federal prison for a bribery and corruption conviction related to his work in the administration, had allegedly had a hand in directing the security detail and facilitating promotions of a few State Police members who were viewed as loyal, according to people familiar with the matter.

Among those that Percoco favored, the sources said, was Vincent Straface, who quickly ascended through the ranks of the detail and later ran it after being promoted to the rank of captain. He retired earlier this year as a major. The sources said that Straface's first key promotion, which Percoco pushed for, was to the rank of senior investigator against the recommendations of the detail's commander at the time.

Straface could not be reached for comment.

Six years ago, Percoco delivered a message to the leaders of the unit that a trooper would no longer be stationed inside the first floor of the governor's mansion, a person familiar with the matter said. Since then, troopers remain largely outside the mansion.

Decisions on who is promoted to positions within the Protective Services Unit are made solely by the State Police," said Beau Duffy, a spokesman for the agency. "The Executive Chamber is made aware of promotions, but is not involved in making those decisions."

The unit, with its mixed history of scandal, has become an assignment both coveted and feared within the ranks of the State Police. The detail has a commander at the top who normally holds the rank of major; below that person is a captain and at least two lieutenants  one assigned to the Capitol and governor's mansion, and a second lieutenant assigned to oversee the governor's Manhattan office and downstate security.

There are four travel teams  each headed by a senior investigator with four to six State Police investigators on each team who are tasked with transporting and traveling with the governor. Those units, which take turns guarding the governor or other dignitaries who visit New York, also accompany the governor on trips, including Cuomo's treks to Israel, Cuba, the Dominican Republican and other overseas locations.

The team also is responsible for visiting locations the governor is scheduled to visit. That work included scouting out security and mapping routes to the nearest hospitals if something should go wrong.

The security duties have often put many of those members in close proximity to the governor and his top aides, especially when they are traveling in a vehicle or aircraft and overhear Cuomo's conversations.

It remains unclear how much information the attorney general's office has gleaned from its interviews with current and former troopers assigned to the security detail.

The Assembly's investigation, which began in March, is being conducted by the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, which specializes in white-collar criminal cases. Several of the top members of the legal team have previously worked as federal prosecutors.

A third investigation being conducted by the Justice Department is examining allegations that Cuomo's administration manipulated data on nursing home deaths to elevate the governor's public persona. The Assembly also is investigating the state's handling of an alleged cover-up involving potential structural problems during the construction of the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge.

Lawmakers have also asked that their investigators examine why high-level members of the state Department of Health were directed last year by Cuomo and Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker to conduct prioritized coronavirus testing on the governor's relatives as well as influential people with ties to the administration. Cuomo has denied knowledge of the preferential testing for his relatives, including his brother Chris, an anchor for CNN.

blyons@timesunion.com
With most faculty and students vaccinated, colleges and universities in the Capital Region are easing COVID-19 restrictions for summer.

Based on May 13 guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Union College in Schenectady no longer requires masks outdoors regardless of vaccination status or distance between people.

Indoors, Union students may gather in small groups without masks - although the size of such groups is not clearly defined by the federal guidance.

"We recommend that you consider the size of your space," college officials wrote in a recent memo to families. "For example, we continue to believe that a small group in a residence hall room should be approximately four people. Groups of fully vaccinated individuals gathering in groups should follow our current capacity guidelines and event guidelines. As the percentage of our community that is vaccinated increases, we will be able to further relax restrictions on gathering sizes."

Students or faculty who are not fully vaccinated are strongly encouraged to double-mask with a cloth mask over a disposable mask when indoors, including in classrooms. Approximately 75 percent of all students and faculty are partially or fully vaccinated, according to the school's COVID-19 dashboard.

While vaccinations are required at Union, medical and religious exemptions are granted.

At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, biweekly testing for on-campus students and staff has dropped to a weekly frequency, vaccinated individuals may remove masks outdoors and the coverings are still required indoors, according to a campus update from Wednesday.

All RPI students and employees in certain job categories must be vaccinated by this summer.

The university will allow indoor masked gatherings of up to 30 people on campus. Social distancing must be maintained at all times.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced last month that State University of New York (SUNY) campuses will require vaccines on campus this fall, but that requirement is contingent on approval of COVID-19 vaccines by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The University at Albany has few students on campus this summer and is awaiting final guidance from SUNY and the state on how testing, masking and other policies will take place in the fall.

"We do expect policy changes as more people are vaccinated and public health conditions continue to improve, but its too soon to know what exactly they will be," spokesman Jordan Carleo-Evangelist said.

The college continues to test its on-campus population weekly. The policies will likely depend on whether SUNY's vaccination requirement is in place by fall.

There was some confusion in K-12 schools this week due to conflicting guidance over whether masks should continue to be required in school buildings. The state Department of Health sought to drop the in-school mask requirements to align the policy with that of summer camps. Currently, most schools have dropped the mask requirement when students are outdoors or playing sports.
Uizaie Brigman, Shanita Thomas, Brian Jenkins, Chyna Forney, Danny Pearson Jr., Sharf Addalim, LaShon Turner, Destiny Greene, Devin McGlothan.

These are the names of the lives lost to gun violence in Albany this year. Each one of these people was a human being  a person with dreams, hopes and fears, families and loved ones  whom we have lost forever because of senseless violence. My heart is broken, and my deepest condolences go out to the families of the victims.

Albany is in the midst of a crisis of violence. We must act now to stop further bloodshed before more lives are lost. Mayor Kathy Sheehan announced that the State Police and Albany County Sheriffs Office will be assisting the Albany Police Department with patrols. I am hopeful that this step, in response to an urgent community need, will result in the removal of illegal guns from our streets.

However, we will not solve this problem until we invest in permanent solutions that prevent violence.

I propose that we use federal funds to immediately invest in community-oriented violence-prevention programs. This includes outreach workers who can provide conflict resolution, grief counseling, and mental health services. For the long term, we must recognize the impact of the decades of neglect and discrimination and reverse the growing inequality, poverty, and lack of opportunities. The city and county combined are set to receive over $140 million from Washington. Investing a modest portion of this funding in our most resource-deprived communities would make a significant impact. If we can save even one life this summer, it will be worth the investment.

Albany is on track for a year of record violence. We know there will be more violence this year. The only question is: What we are doing right now to try to save lives? I hope every public official and resident of the city has a sense of urgency and will join me in coming up with practical solutions quickly. As elected officials, we must take actions that are responsive to the needs of the communities we serve.

Over the past year, we have seen communities take action and demand a different approach to addressing the social problems plaguing so many communities of color. People are demanding we address the root causes of crime and violence rather than double down on policing and incarceration. While this is often portrayed as a radical idea, it has been expressed by some members of the law enforcement community as well. As Albany Police Chief Eric Hawkins put it in a recent Times Union article, until the underlying social factors are addressed, efforts to address crime will be Band-Aid efforts and Band-Aid solutions.

Some people believe the movement for police reform and the demands for public safety are somehow opposed to one another  that reform must come at the expense of public safety. I reject this narrow view. I believe the people of Albany reject this view as well. Our aim must be to create a system of fair, equitable policing, and safe communities for our families and loved ones. By truly reimagining policing in Albany, along with investing in our communities, we will build trust between police and communities, better prevent violence, and ultimately make our communities safer. There simply is no other option.

Sam Fein is an Albany County legislator representing the Sixth District, comprising part of Albanys South End and Arbor Hill neighborhoods.
James Franco

As the discussion on the usage of Washington Park continues, a quote from another time on the same topic may be of interest and perhaps some guidance. In speaking of the upcoming July 4, 1891, fireworks display in Washington Park, Parks Superintendent William Egerton had this to say: "But, after all, reliance must be placed upon the good sense and breeding of the mass of people who come to be amused and are generally good-natured. It is hoped they will protect the park and do as little damage as possible," according to an article in The Albany Argus from June 22, 1891.

Lynn MacGowan
Jacquelyn Martin/AP

It seems the White House is concerned about Vice President Kamala Harris' awkward interview with NBC's Lester Holt in Guatemala, in which he pressed her on why she has yet to visit the southern border amid a surge in migrant arrivals.

In April, Harris was put in charge of the administration's efforts to mitigate the surge, with her embarking on the Guatemala trip to work on solutions for the "root causes" of migration. CNN reports that "some administration officials" are "quietly perplexed about what they perceive as her bumpy answers to questions about whether she will go to the US-Mexico border."
A company backed by the Chinese government says it is ending its seven-year effort to build one of the world's largest methanol plants along the Columbia River in southwestern Washington
Search underway for missing boater in northern Colorado lake

A search is underway for a man who fell off a pontoon boat at a lake in northern Colorado
Authorities in Las Vegas have said a man from El Paso, Texas, was arrested on reckless driving and DUI charges after fatally hitting a moped rider last weekend while driving 141 mph near the Strip
Facebook's New Tools For Instagram/Whatsapp Highlight Shift in Business Communications

Social media giant Facebook (News - Alert) has unveiled new tools for Instagram and Whatsapp, two of the companys most widely used applications, that will assist in creating better communications between businesses and customers.

The new tools were announced at Facebooks F8 Refresh developer event, where company representatives pointed out the growing preference for messaging for business correspondence, deviating from the more traditional routes like phone calls or email. In fact, Emile Litvak, Facebooks Head of Business Messaging, stated that nearly 64% of customer prefer messaging over all other forms of communications, according to company research.

Instagram Messenger API and Whatsapp API can now be integrated into third party platforms, eliminating the need for customers to switch between applications to communicate with businesses. New features also allow participating companies to automate simple customer inquiries, and allow companies to send customer info to customer service agents for quicker turnaround. The company believes that with these tools, communications between businesses and customers can become more efficient and productive.

The company also revealed additional features to its own platform, announcing Facebook Login will soon allow customers to opt into business messages when using Facebook on a participating website. Along with that, Facebook representatives also stated that an upcoming API will allow developers to access the companys Spark Augmented Reality software.

Edited by Maurice Nagle
[June 11, 2021] AM Best Downgrades Credit Ratings of Trans City Casualty Insurance Company and Trans-City Life Insurance Company

AM Best has downgraded the Financial Strength Rating to B++ (Good) from A- (Excellent) and the Long-Term Issuer Credit Rating to "bbb+" (Good) from "a-" (Excellent) for Trans City Casualty Insurance Company (TCC) and Trans-City Life Insurance Company (TCL). Both companies are domiciled in Scottsdale, AZ. The outlook of these Credit Ratings (ratings) has been revised to stable from negative. The ratings of TCC reflect its balance sheet strength, which AM Best assesses as very strong, as well as its adequate operating performance, limited business profile and appropriate enterprise risk management (ERM). The rating downgrades reflect deterioration in underwriting results, which has resulted in operating performance that no longer supports the strong assessment. The continued decline in operating performance has been driven by increased claim activity and negative development, particularly in more recent years. Furthermore, the company has experienced a consistent decline in premium volume and will remain challenged to grow its business. As a result, key operating performance metrics, such as return on equity, underwriting cash flows and its expense ratio have been negatively impacted. TCC's balance sheet strength reflects the strongest level of risk-adjusted capitalization, as measured by Best's Capital Adequacy Ratio (BCAR), and a high quality investment portfolio with solid liquidity. The limited business profile assessment reflects TCC's risk exposure writing guaranteed cost workers' compensation insurance and contractual liability for vehicle service contracts for auto dealerships and groups in Arizona. AM Best views the company's ERM practices as appropriate for its risk profile.



The rating downgrade of TCL reflects the removal of rating enhancement from TCC. TCL offers credit life and credit disability insurance coverage exclusively to automobile dealers in Arizona that have an ownership interest, in line with the company's founding principles.

This press release relates to Credit Ratings that have been published on AM Best's website. For all rating information relating to the release and pertinent disclosures, including details of the office responsible for issuing each of the individual ratings referenced in this release, please see AM Best's Recent Rating Activity web page. For additional information regarding the use and limitations of Credit Rating opinions, please view Guide to Best's Credit Ratings. For information on the proper media use of Best's Credit Ratings and AM Best press releases, please view Guide for Media - Proper Use of Best's Credit Ratings and AM Best Rating Action Press Releases. AM Best is a global credit rating agency, news publisher and data analytics provider specializing in the insurance industry. Headquartered in the United States, the company does business in over 100 countries with regional offices in London, Amsterdam, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Mexico City. For more information, visit www.ambest.com. Copyright  2021 by A.M. Best Rating Services, Inc. and/or its affiliates. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005423/en/

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[June 11, 2021] Bavarian Nordic Assists Public Health England in Response to New Cases of Monkeypox

COPENHAGEN, Denmark, June 11, 2021  Bavarian Nordic A/S (OMX: BAVA) announced today that the Company was recently engaged by Public Health England (PHE) and the Medicines and Health Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to supply its IMVANEX smallpox vaccine in response to new cases of monkeypox in the UK. Two related cases were confirmed and admitted to a hospital in Liverpool. One was most likely infected in Africa, where the family arrived from a few days before onset of disease, and a sibling case most likely infected on UK soil by the first case. Monkeypox is a rare, but serious disease, which is endemic in Central and West Africa. The disease is quite similar to human smallpox, although it is less severe with an estimated fatality rate of 1-10%. IMVANEX (MVA-BN) is approved by the European Commission for active immunization against smallpox but has also received approval for monkeypox by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Health Canada, as the only vaccine approved for this indication in these territories. Bavarian Nordic previously delivered IMVANEX to PHE in connection with the first human cases of monkeypox in the UK in 2018 and later in 2019, when several unrelated human cases were imported from Nigeria with a subsequent infection of a healthcare worker in the UK. Paul Chaplin, President and CEO of Bavarian Nordic said: We are pleased to assist Public Health England rapidly in such an emergency situation. Vaccination is a critical measure to prevent and control the spread of diseases globally Governments have an essential role in preparing for outbreaks by stockpiling vaccines and treatments so that they are readily available in events like this. We have a long history of working with other governments on strengthening their national preparedness in outbreak situations, and we urge more countries to actively consider and mitigate the risks of diseases like monkeypox, which unfortunately is on the rise in Africa and has in recent years shown to cross borders several times.



About Bavarian Nordic

Bavarian Nordic is a fully integrated vaccines company focused on the development, manufacture and commercialization of life-saving vaccines. We are a global leader in smallpox vaccines and have been a long-term supplier to the U.S. Government of a non-replicating smallpox vaccine, which has been approved by the FDA under the trade name JYNNEOS, also for the protection against monkeypox. The vaccine is approved as a smallpox vaccine in Europe under the trade name IMVANEX and in Canada under the trade name IMVAMUNE. Our commercial product portfolio furthermore contains the market-leading vaccine Rabipur/RabAvert against rabies and Encepur against tick-borne encephalitis. Using our live virus vaccine platform technology, MVA-BN, we have created a diverse portfolio of proprietary and partnered product candidates designed to save and improve lives by unlocking the power of the immune system, including an Ebola vaccine, MVABEA, which is licensed to the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson. We are also committed to the development of a next generation COVID-19 vaccine based on an in-licensed capsid virus-like particle technology. The vaccine candidate, ABNCoV2, is currently being investigated in clinical trials. For more information visit www.bavarian-nordic.com . Contacts

Europe: Rolf Sass Srensen, Vice President Investor Relations, Tel: +45 61 77 47 43

US: Graham Morrell, Paddock Circle Advisors, graham@paddockcircle.com , Tel: +1 781 686 9600

Attachment 2021-06-11-en



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[June 11, 2021] Colombier Acquisition Corp. Completes $150 Million Initial Public Offering

Colombier Acquisition Corp. (the "Company") announced today the closing of its initial public offering of 15,000,000 units. The offering was priced at $10.00 per unit, resulting in gross proceeds of $150,000,000, before deducting underwriting discounts and commissions and other offering expenses payable by the Company. The Company's units began trading on the New York Stock Exchange (the "NYSE") under the ticker symbol "CLBR.U". Each unit consists of one share of the Company's Class A common stock and one-third of one warrant. Each whole warrant is exercisable to purchase one share of the Company's Class A common stock at a price of $11.50 per share. Once the securities comprising the units begin separate trading, the Class A common stock and warrants are expected to be listed on the NYSE under the symbols "CLBR" and "CLBR WS" respectively. The Company was formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, capital stock exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, reorganization, or similar business combination with one or more businesses. It may pursue an initial business combination target in any business or industry. B. Riley Securities, Inc. acted as sole bookrunning manager. The offering was made onlyby means of a prospectus. Copies of the preliminary prospectus relating to the offering and final prospectus, when available, may be obtained from B. Riley Securities, Inc. at 1300 17th Street N., Suite 1400, Attn: Syndicate Prospectus Department, Arlington, Virginia 22209, by telephone at (703) 312-9580 or by email at prospectuses@brileyfin.com.



A registration statement relating to the securities was declared effective by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the " SEC (News - Alert) ") on June 8, 2021. This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This press release contains statements that constitute "forward-looking statements," including with respect to the proposed initial public offering and the anticipated use of the net proceeds. No assurance can be given that the net proceeds of the offering will be used as indicated. Forward-looking statements are subject to numerous conditions, many of which are beyond the control of the Company, including those set forth in the Risk Factors section of the Company's registration statement and preliminary prospectus for the Company's offering filed with the SEC. Copies are available on the SEC's website, www.sec.gov. The Company undertakes no obligation to update these statements for revisions or changes after the date of this release, except as required by law. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005316/en/

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[June 11, 2021] FCP Euro Closes $25 Million Debt Facility For Growth Capital

MILFORD, Conn., June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Connecticut-based online auto parts retailer FCP Euro announced the closing of a $25 million debt facility financed by JPMorgan Chase. The deal will provide FCP Euro with access to funding that will enhance customer experience by accelerating infrastructure and inventory investments. In addition, FCP Euro will have access to a full range of industry-leading financial services that will complement the multi-year growth strategy. "This deal marks the culmination of a multi-year vetting process that not just identified a transactional bank, but a company that can provide industry-leading advisory, analytics, growth capital, information security, and treasury management services that align with our growth strategy," said Scott Drozd, CEO of FCP Euro. "FCP Euro is proud to work with JPMorgan Chase to enhance our commitment to an exceptional customer experience through investments in technology, people, and infrastructure." A growing presence in the $400 billion U.S. Automotive Aftermarket, FCP Euro surpassed $110 million in total parts sales in 2020, 53% growth from 2019, and has been recognized in Inc. Magazine's 5000 fastest-growing privately-owned companies seven times. With a decade-long total parts sales CAGR of 27% versus an eCommerce industry CAGR of 15%, FCP Euro will achieve $500 million in total parts sales by continuing to grow market share with a focus on the European sector.



"We are proud to be a part of FCP Euro's growth story and to support its outstanding leadership team," said Bill Creaser, Executive Director, JPMorgan Chase Middle Market Banking, CT. FCP Euro is an online provider of OE, OEM, aftermarket, and genuine auto parts for European vehicles, with a focus on connecting their content directly with the automotive enthusiast community. Along with their eCommerce website, the company invests heavily in video and written content focused on helping DIY (do-it-yourself) automotive enthusiasts learn how to maintain and repair their vehicles. Through car shows, events, and an in-house professional motorsports team, FCP Euro fosters deep relationships within the community. For more information on FCP Euro and to learn about these and more offerings, you can visit https://www.fcpeuro.com/ .

About FCP Euro FCP Euro ( www.fcpeuro.com ) is a B2C online retailer of OE, OEM, aftermarket, and genuine parts for European cars, specializing in BMW, Volvo, Audi, VW, Mercedes, and Porsche. Launched online in 2001, FCP Euro expanded under the leadership of CEO Scott Drozd and President Nick Bauer, developing a website listing a hand-curated catalog of European car parts, kitted projects, and do-it-yourself instructions for customers. In 2019, FCP Euro expanded to over 100,000 square feet in Milford, CT, including a state-of-the-art distribution center, customer experience, and community center, a professional motorsport garage, and an advanced walk-in retail shop with automated locker systems for local customers. With a Lifetime Replacement Guarantee on all parts, Hassle-Free Returns, and free shipping on orders over $49, FCP Euro has continuously challenged the boundaries and advanced the standards of quality, service, and technology in the automotive industry. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fcp-euro-closes-25-million-debt-facility-for-growth-capital-301310897.html SOURCE FCP Euro

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[June 11, 2021] HKW Portfolio Company Infab Announces Organizational Changes

HKW, a middle-market private equity firm focused on growth-oriented companies, announced that its portfolio company, Infab Corporation ("Infab" or "Company"), is implementing several organizational changes. These changes support the Company's long-term growth strategy. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005017/en/ Don Cusick has been named Vice Chairman of the Company and will continue to work in the business as a managing board member. "As Vice Chairman, Don will focus on the acquisition, growth, and manufacturing strategies of the business. Don's perspective on the industry and passion for developing a strong team led to this as a logical next step, and he will be a key part of continuing to maintain the great culture and team-first focus that we believe has made Infab so successful," said Kent Robinson, HKW Partner and Chairman of Infab's Board of Directors. Daren Dickerson will move into the role of Chief Exeutive Officer ("CEO"). Daren joined Infab as the CFO in 2020 and will now manage the day-to-day operations and execute the strategic plan as the CEO.



Brittany Lepley has been named Chief Relationship Officer ("CRO"), focused on leading the Sales organization and Customer Service. According to Don Cusick, "Brittany has been a key part of the growth of Infab, and her strong customer relationships have been the reason why. It's great to see her move into this role to continue her focus on serving customers." Finally, Justine Peterson will move into the role of Chief Marketing Officer ("CMO"). Justine will expand the product offerings, expand sales channels and geographic reach, and develop sales tools and brand presence.

About INFAB Infab designs and builds lightweight, comfortable, and technologically advanced radiation protection products. Infab's PPE products enable health care providers and patients to benefit from the diagnostic capabilities of imaging technology, functioning as a "one-stop-shop" for distributors and customers. About HKW HKW is a private equity firm investing in growth-oriented companies with talented management teams in the US and Canada. HKW targets companies in the Business Services, Health & Wellness, and Technology sectors. Since 1982, HKW has sponsored 64 platform transactions of lower middle-market companies throughout North America and 71 add-on acquisitions. For more information on HKW, please visit hkwinc.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005017/en/

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INVESTOR ALERT: Law Offices of Howard G. Smith Announces Investigation of RLX Technology Inc. (RLX) on Behalf of Investors

Law Offices of Howard G. Smith announces an investigation on behalf of RLX Technology Inc. ("RLX" or the "Company") (NYSE: RLX) investors concerning the Company's possible violations of federal securities laws.

RLX purports to be the "No. 1 branded e-vapor company in China," which the Company claims is its "largest potential market."

In January 2021, RLX conducted its initial public offering (the "IPO"), selling approximately 116.5 million American Depositary Shares ("ADSs" or "shares") at $12 per ADS, raising approximately $1.4 billion in gross proceeds.

On March 22, 2021, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology posted draft regulations confirming that e-cigarettes and new tobacco products would be regulated similar to traitional tobacco offerings.







On this news, RLX's share price fell $9.31, or 48%, to close at $10.15 per share on March 22, 2021, thereby injuring investors.

Then, on June 2, 2021, the Company announced its first quarter 2021 financial results, reporting only a 48% increase in net revenues quarter over quarter, and second quarter guidance suggesting that its gross margin would "remain steady."

On this news, RLX's share price fell $0.97, or nearly 9%, to close at $9.90 per share on June 4, 2021, thereby damaging investors further. The Company's shares have traded as low as $7.89 per ADS, or 32% below the IPO price.

If you purchased RLX's ADSs, 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/20210611005440/en/
[June 11, 2021] The Law Offices of Frank R. Cruz Announces Investigation of RLX Technology Inc. (RLX) on Behalf of Investors

The Law Offices of Frank R. Cruz announces an investigation of RLX Technology Inc. ("RLX" or the "Company") (NYSE: RLX) on behalf of investors concerning the Company's possible violations of federal securities laws. If you are a shareholder who suffered a loss, click here to participate. RLX purports to be the "No. 1 branded e-vapor company in China," which the Company claims is its "largest potential market." In January 2021, RLX conducted its initial public offering (the "IPO"), selling approximatly 116.5 million American Depositary Shares ("ADSs" or "shares") at $12 per ADS, raising approximately $1.4 billion in gross proceeds.



On March 22, 2021, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology posted draft regulations confirming that e-cigarettes and new tobacco products would be regulated similar to traditional tobacco offerings. On this news, RLX's share price fell $9.31, or 48%, to close at $10.15 per share on March 22, 2021, thereby injuring investors.

Then, on June 2, 2021, the Company announced its first quarter 2021 financial results, reporting only a 48% increase in net revenues quarter over quarter, and second quarter guidance suggesting that its gross margin would "remain steady." On this news, RLX's share price fell $0.97, or nearly 9%, to close at $9.90 per share on June 4, 2021, thereby damaging investors further. The Company's shares have traded as low as $7.89 per ADS, or 32% below the IPO price. Follow us for updates on Twitter (News - Alert) : twitter.com/FRC_LAW. If you purchased RLX Technology 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 Frank R. Cruz, of The Law Offices of Frank R. Cruz, 1999 Avenue of the Stars, Suite 1100, Los Angeles, California 90067 at 310-914-5007, by email to info@frankcruzlaw.com, or visit our website at www.frankcruzlaw.com. If you inquire by email please include your mailing address, telephone number, and number of shares purchased. This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005490/en/

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[June 10, 2021] Patriot One Technologies Announces Third Quarter Results

TORONTO, June 10, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Patriot One Technologies Inc. (TSX: PAT) (OTCQX: PTOTF) (FRANKFURT: 0PL) (Patriot One or the Company) is pleased to release its third quarter interim financial results for the three and nine month periods ended April 30, 2021. All information is in Canadian dollars unless otherwise indicated.

The following press release should be read in conjunction with the Companys Condensed Consolidated Interim Financial Statements, prepared in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and our Managements Discussion and Analysis for the three and nine month periods ended April 30, 2021, which can be found on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and on the Companys website at www.patriot1tech.com. We continue to see an upturn and strong acceleration in market activity, resulting in a significant increase in the number of customer engagements, site surveys, demonstrations and trials stated Peter Evans, Chief Executive Officer of Patriot One. With this momentum, along with our new focused sales organization and our strengthening sales pipeline, I am very optimistic, and believe we are well-positioned to deliver a strong end to our fiscal year. Company Highlights for the Three and Nine Month Periods Ended April 30, 2021 The following is a summary of the key business highlights for the Company for the three month period ended April 30, 2021: Continued to capitalize on newly hired seasoned sales representatives who have begun closing long-term contracts and building a strong pipeline of business for both our threat detection and advanced video AI solutions;





Closed multiple long-term PATSCAN platform subscription arrangements during the quarter bringing our total PATSCAN backlog to over $800,000. Many prospective customers are in final negotiations or undergoing pilots which should lead to additional commitments in the coming months;





Xtract was awarded multiple government projects during and subsequent to the quarter, totaling over $2.4 million including a 12-month contract worth $999,940 to adapt its innovative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to provide misinformation and disinformation detection for Canadas Department of National Defence; and





Continued to implement restructuring and cost cutting efforts to improve operatin efficiencies and to better align the Company with its strategic direction and business development plans.





Fiscal 2021 Third Quarter Financial Results Revenue was $0.2 million and $0.8 million for the three and nine month periods ended April 30, 2021 respectively as compared to $1.2 million and $1.7 million for the same periods ended April 30, 2020. The year-over-year decrease was attributable to a single substantial contract with a Government agency for $0.7 million for the three and nine month periods ended April 30, 2020.







The Company had $0.3 million of deferred revenue and $1.0 million of contracted revenue not yet recognized as revenue as of April 30, 2021. Subsequent to quarter end, the Company was awarded an additional $2.2 million in contract commitments.





Net loss was $3.2 million and $9.7 million for the three and nine month periods ended April 30, 2021 as compared to $5.2 million and $18.7 million for the same periods ended April 30, 2020. The decrease in loss pertains to streamlining of the Companys business operations, COVID-19 relief funding received and transaction costs incurred in the comparative nine month period for the acquisition of Xtract Technologies Inc.





Basic and diluted loss per share was $0.02 and $0.06 for the three and nine month periods ended April 30, 2021 respectively as compared to $0.03 and $0.13 for the same periods ended April 30, 2020.

About Patriot One Technologies

Patriot One Technologies makes unobtrusive, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven weapons and threat detection systems that enable arenas, schools, theaters and other businesses to provide unprecedented safety while also improving the customer experience. The companys Multi-Sensor Gateway enables companies to covertly screen for weapons at points of entry without disrupting the flow of traffic, and its AI-based video-recognition software (VRS) enables venue and building operators to identify weapons and other threats inside and outside of facilities, while also providing valuable intelligence for optimizing operations. Follow us on Twitter @patriot1tech . For further information, please contact: Patriot One Technologies Inquiries

info@patriot1tech.com

www.patriot1tech.com Media Contact

Caroline Metell

PatriotOne@threeringsinc.com CAUTIONARY DISCLAIMER STATEMENT:

No securities exchange has reviewed nor accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of the content of this news release. This news release contains forward-looking statements relating to system sales, product development, licensing, commercialization and regulatory compliance issues and other statements that are not historical facts. Forward-looking statements are often identified by terms such as "will", "may", "should", "anticipate", "expects, believes, and similar expressions. All statements other than statements of historical fact, included in this release are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations include counterparty default and other risks detailed from time to time in the filings made by the Company with securities regulations. The reader is cautioned that assumptions used in the preparation of any forward-looking information may prove to be incorrect. Events or circumstances may cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted, as a result of numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of the Company. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking information. Such information, although considered reasonable by management at the time of preparation, may prove to be incorrect and actual results may differ materially from those anticipated. Forward-looking statements contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date of this news release and the Company will update or revise publicly any of the included forward-looking statements only as expressly required by applicable law. Neither the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.



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[June 11, 2021]

RLHTalent Has Signed Minneapolis, Minnesota Model, Actor and Social Media Sensation Alexander Denning

LOS ANGELES, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Alexander's story is not the normal runway model background. Alexander Denning, in April 2017, was released out of the Minnesota Correctional Facility-Lino Lakes a free man after serving a six-year prison sentence for first-degree assault. Less than two years after his release, Alexander's chiseled physique and unique styled pompadour have become well-sought-after in the modeling world. His striking features have been seen on the cover of several magazines.

RLHTalent is an independent artist management and publicity company representing experienced and new-to-the-industry performers for work in the feature film, television, modeling, and music industry.

Rod L. Harrell is CEO of RLHTalent Management, Publicity and Productions LLC. Daniel Wurzbacher is a partner and manager of talent at RLHTalent.

Rod L. Harrell says: "We are very excited to sign Alexander, as he is a great young man who with his second chance is doing great things. Alexander's story is a great one to follow as he shows that people can change."

For booking and/or press interviews, please email us: dw@rlhtalent.com with your inquiry and affiliation.

You can find Alexnder Denning on the following social media sites:







YouTube at Alexander the Great TV

TikTok: thealexanderdenning

Twitter/Snapchat- allyboydenning

And on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/thealexanderdenning

For upcoming bookings and event dates, contact RLHTalent.com or our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RLHTalent

Contact: Daniel Wurzbacher of RLHTalent at 424-281-8450 or dw@rlhtalent.com

Related Images

alexander-denning-model-and-social.jpg

Alexander Denning Model and Social Media Influencer

Alexander Denning Model and Social Media Influencer

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rlhtalent-has-signed-minneapolis-minnesota-model-actor-and-social-media-sensation-alexander-denning-301310637.html

SOURCE RLHTalent Management Publicity and Productions
[June 11, 2021] Steve Wozniak Prevails in Copyright Infringement Lawsuit

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The lawsuit brought against Steve Wozniak and Woz U regarding alleged copyright infringement related to a website for a Woz-branded tech school  which was never approved by Wozniak and never in operation  was resolved in favor of Wozniak and Woz U. At the trial, the plaintiff failed to establish evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of Wozniak or Woz U. In the end, the jury deliberated for less than 30 minutes before rendering a verdict in favor of the Apple co-founder and Woz U. "I am really pleased with the outcome of this lawsuit. From the time this issue was brought to my attention, I was confident that I would be vindicated by the facts surrounding the case since I had not seen or approved a demo site using my name. I'm glad the jury agreed," said Wozniak. All other claims broght by the Plaintiff against Wozniak, including a claim for breach of contract, had already been resolved in favor of Wozniak prior to the commencement of the trial.



Wozniak further stated, "Given the fact that the lawsuit centered around the use of my own name and pictures on the non-existent website in question, it makes perfect sense that the jury would see that there was no copyright infringement on my part." About Woz U

Woz U is an Arizona-based digital learning eco-system designed to train, cultivate, and upgrade talent in technology fields to meet the workforce needs of today and the future. Through our Education-as-a-Service model and our proprietary learning experience platform, we offer customizable, career-focused training curricula to help individuals, businesses, and educational institutions meet their goals, achieve their business objectives, and enhance their education offerings. We're working to close the technology skills gap by elevating human capital and empowering individuals in high-demand technology careers, while adhering to the highest education and business standards.

View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/steve-wozniak-prevails-in-copyright-infringement-lawsuit-301311006.html SOURCE Woz U

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[June 11, 2021] UnionPay First Global Payment Network to Launch Frictionless Parking with Sonicboom in Malaysia

UnionPay becomes first international payment brand in Malaysia and South East Asia to launch Frictionless Parking with Sonicboom at two KL parking complexes

GoPayz UnionPay customers can now park without using cash, card or collect parking ticket KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- International payment brand UnionPay has partnered leading cashless parking provider Sonicboom Solutions Sdn Bhd to launch Frictionless Parking for GoPayz UnionPay customers to park in the city without using cash, card or collecting parking ticket. UnionPay has become the first global payment network to enable Frictionless Parking in Malaysia, and in Southeast Asia. With this launch, parking at Desa Sentul Commercial Park and Metro Point Complex in the Klang Valley area is truly seamless as GoPayz UnionPay customers only need to register their car plate info in their GoPayz app to enjoy cashless and contactless parking at these two locations. This means entering the parking structure effortlessly - the driver need not collect a parking ticket when entering the parking gantry, as the system automatically recognises the pre-registered car plate upon entry. The exit from parking will be also be fast and convenient  drivers need not look for autopay machine, QR Codes to scan, or pay in cash or card as parking charges based on actual usage will automatically be deducted from the UnionPay Virtual Card in the GoPayz app. The charges will appear real time in GoPayz app transaction history for receipting. Frictionless Parking uses Sonicboom's Licnce Plate Recognition technology, a usage scenario in the UnionPay International Content & Service Platform (UCSP), whereby a vehicle license plate, upon entering a carpark, will be automatically captured and recognised upon exit. Payment for parking fee will simply be deducted from their pre-registered UnionPay account based on actual parking fee charged.



"In line with bringing more seamless, integrated and convenient payment services to our customers, UnionPay International is pleased to partner Sonicboom and GoPayz to introduce Frictionless Parking to our Malaysian customers. We believe that Frictionless Parking will improve the payment experiences for our customers, especially the busy Malaysian consumers who are always on the go. In future, we hope to introduce more usage scenarios under the UCSP to further enhance mobile payment experiences," said Huiming Cai, General Manager, UnionPay International Southeast Asia. Besides this Frictionless Parking pilot, UnionPay has also partnered Sonicboom to enable UnionPay Contactless parking at sites across Kuala Lumpur, including the Tun Razak Exchange 106 (TRX), Pavilion Shopping Mall, Plaza Arkadia, Desa Park City, The Majestic Hotel and plans to extend to more sites in next two years. In future, UnionPay customers will be able to park around Klang Valley by just waving their UnionPay card upon entry and exit. With no surcharge and pre-authorisation, everyone can enjoy the convenience of cashless parking.

"Sonicboom is pleased to partner UnionPay International to bring the Frictionless Parking technology to Malaysian drivers. This technology truly empowers drivers here to park with no hassle. Enabling contactless payment for UnionPay at parking sites makes perfect sense during this pandemic, it not only reduces cash usage, but also creates an eco-friendly and safe driving experience," said Desiree Chow, Head of Comms and Partnership, Sonicboom Solutions Sdn Bhd. Commenting on the launch of the new Frictionless Parking technology and Cashless Parking, Jasmine Lee, Chief Marketing Officer, U Mobile Sdn Bhd said, "GoPayz by U Mobile is delighted to partner with UnionPay International and Sonicboom to enable customers to be among the first in Malaysia to enjoy and experience Frictionless Parking technology. GoPayz is all about enabling affordable, accessible and inclusive digital financial and lifestyle services and hence this latest initiative is very in line with that goal. GoPayz users will now have even more reason to use their virtual UnionPay cards in their everyday lives." The UCSP integrates various mobile payment scenarios into a mobile payment ecosystem, enhancing consumer's payment experiences for everyday purchases. The usage scenarios include transit, parking, benefits, coupons, tax refund and others. Please click on hyperlink below to watch how Frictionless Parking works:

https://fb.watch/62Z-iHyz8T/ SOURCE UnionPay International

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[June 11, 2021] Virtual Solar Cup Program Culminates With Celebration of Student Winners Across Southern California

Though the pandemic kept Southern California students from competing in person, more than 300 students from 16 high schools throughout the region participated in the virtual 2021 Solar Cup, which featured challenges that tested students' technical, engineering and creative skills. The competition culminated in a virtual awards ceremony Thursday evening, when students were recognized for first, second and third place honors in each of 10 challenges conducted over the last five months. Among those winning awards in numerous challenges were Lennox Academy in Inglewood, Chino Hills High School, Cabrillo High School in Long Beach, St. Anthony High School in Long Beach, Centennial High School in Corona, Mountain View High School in El Monte, and Downey High School. A full list of winners is available here. "The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted all of our lives, but I know it has been particularly hard for students, because you weren't able to attend special events like grad night or homecoming," Metropolitan board Chairwoman Gloria D. Gray said during the virtual recognition vent. "Despite that, your brilliance and passion never wavered. I want to congratulate you on behalf of Metropolitan and behalf of our Board of Directors."



Solar Cup 2021 students worked in teams, selecting from a menu of activities covering a wide range of fields including robotics, computer-aided design, online gaming development, social media messaging, visual arts and career-building. At the end of the competition, instead of racing boats on Lake Skinner, teams virtually raced the solar vehicles they built with kits during the program. Winners were not only the fastest, but were also judged on their creative use of recycled materials to build the vehicles and transfer mass a 20-foot distance. "I am very proud of all of the teams that competed this year," Solar Cup Coordinator Julie Miller Kalbacher said. "Although it looked different than in past years, I saw a lot of growth from students and I hope they learned skills that they will take through with them in their futures."

Metropolitan also honored Chino Hills High School Junior Samantha Olivar with the Spirit of Solar Cup "Bart Bezyack Award" for her efforts leading and inspiring her team. The award is named for a student in the early years of Solar Cup who kept the program going at Canyon High School in Anaheim after his teacher relocated and while he was battling leukemia. "Bart passed away, but his spirit continues in Solar Cup with this award," Kalbacher said. "Participating in a competition that is held virtually brings particular challenges and I want to congratulate Samantha for embodying what this award represents through this difficult year for students." Solar Cup teams are sponsored by their local water agencies. Metropolitan designs and staffs the program, this year offering a wide variety of activities to build a diverse set of skills that students could use as they begin to explore higher education and chose career paths. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is a state-established cooperative that, along with its 26 cities and retail suppliers, provide water for 19 million people in six counties. The district imports water from the Colorado River and Northern California to supplement local supplies, and helps its members to develop increased water conservation, recycling, storage and other resource-management programs. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005438/en/

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[June 10, 2021] Peiffer Wolf: $15 Million Award From Jury in Embryo-Destruction Case May Be First of Its Kind, Will Guide Handling of Hundreds of Other Victims

In the wake of a jury decision in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California today, five victims of the large-scale destruction of embryos and eggs at the Pacific Fertility Center in 2018 were awarded $14.975 million, including $14 million for emotional damages. Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane & Conway (Peiffer Wolf), which is handling the cases of more than 100 Pacific Fertility Center victims, welcomed the jury award and said it would pave the way for justice for many others. In the last seven years, Peiffer Wolf has handled hundreds of IVF/genetic material cases that have involved well over 1,000 people. In 2019, the firm spearheaded the Peiffer Wolf push for national legislation to rein in the abuses of IVF and fertility clinics. Peiffer Wolf attorney Adam Wolf, a leading U.S. attorney handling fertility, IVF, and related genetic material lawsuits, issued the following statement this afternoon: "To our knowledge, this is the first jury award for a case involving the destruction of embryos and eggs. These families have suffered an unspeakable loss and still struggle every day with the tragedy that took place mre than three years ago at Pacific Fertility Center. The jury's decision to hold Chart, the tank manufacturer, accountable for this tragedy is a historic step in the right direction."



"There are about 200 other Pacific Fertility Center victims who are awaiting their day in court or in arbitration proceedings. Today's jury award should send a statement to tank manufacturers and fertility clinics around the country. What these families lost is priceless and irreplaceable. Today's jury award honors the pain and suffering that these families have gone through and are still going through. This award will not make them whole, but it will help them start to put their lives back together." "We will work tirelessly to make sure that all of the victims of this tragedy receive the justice they deserve. Chart, Pacific Fertility Center, and all other responsible parties must be held fully accountable for their actions that destroyed our clients' eggs and embryos."

Wolf noted that the U.S. fertility industry has fewer regulations than barber shops or nail salons. Without common-sense regulation, the "Wild West" nature of the multibillion-dollar fertility industry leaves the door open for instances of fertility fraud and other fertility clinic disasters, like those recently experienced in Cleveland and San Francisco. In August 2019, Peiffer Wolf published The Fertility Center Regulation Crisis in the U.S., a report calling on Congress to impose a system of tight and highly transparent IVF clinic oversight. In addition to identifying several glaring weaknesses and the general lack of regulatory oversight of the IVF/fertility centers in the U.S., the Peiffer Wolf report identified the much tougher government standards in the United Kingdom as an excellent model for this nation. ABOUT PEIFFER WOLF CARR KANE & CONWAY The law firm Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane & Conway maintains offices in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Cleveland, St. Louis, Austin, and New Orleans. In addition to handling numerous fertility fraud cases, Peiffer Wolf has handled a multitude of cases in which medical professionals and facilities were accused of either destroying or losing eggs, embryos, and other genetic material. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210610006005/en/

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[June 10, 2021] Worldwide Server Market Revenue Grew 12.0% Year Over Year in the First Quarter of 2021, According to IDC

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, the worldwide server market grew 12.0% year over year to $20.9 billion during the first quarter of 2021 (1Q21). Worldwide server shipments grew 8.3% year over year to nearly 2.8 million units in 1Q21. Sales of volume servers were up 15.4% to $17.3 billion during the quarter, while midrange server sales declined 2.7% to $2.4 billion. High-end server sales grew 0.1% to $1.2 billion. "The first quarter 2021 server market performance benefited from a comparison against the most difficult quarter of last year's pandemic stricken year, but this fact doesn't tell a complete story," said Paul Maguranis, senior research analyst, Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies at IDC (News - Alert) . "The considerable increase of server investments during the quarter were also buoyed by global economic tailwinds along with increased investments targeting the modernization of business applications, datacenter infrastructure, and IT operations." Overall Server Market Standings, by Company Dell (News - Alert) Technologies held the top worldwide server market ranking in 1Q21, accounting for 17.0% of total revenue. HPE/H3C(a) was the second largest company, accounting for 15.9% of total revenue. Inspur/Inspur Power Systems(b) and Lenovo (News - Alert) were tied for third with 7.2% and 6.9% respective share of total revenue. The ODM Direct group of vendors accounted for 26.3% of total server revenue during the quarter. The top suppliers of 1Q21 server unit shipments were Dell Technologies (17.5%), HPE/H3C(a) (14.5%), Inspur/Inspur Power Systems(b) (8.0%), and Lenovo (6.1%).







Top 5 Companies, Worldwide Server Vendor Revenue, Market Share, and Growth, First Quarter of 2021 (Revenues are in US$ Millions) Company 1Q21 Revenue 1Q21 Market Share 1Q20 Revenue 1Q20 Market Share 1Q21/1Q20 Revenue Growth 1. Dell Technologies $3,556.3 17.0% $3,473.7 18.6% 2.4% 2. HPE/H3C(a) $3,324.9 15.9% $2,891.3 15.5% 15.0% T3. Inspur/Inspur Power Systems(b)* $1,507.7 7.2% $1,374.5 7.4% 9.7% T3. Lenovo* $1,435.4 6.9% $1,063.9 5.7% 34.9% 4. IBM (News - Alert) $1,110.5 5.3% $860.1 4.6% 29.1% ODM Direct $5,488.7 26.3% $4,826.4 25.9% 13.7% Rest of Market $4,476.0 21.4% $4,167.9 22.3% 7.4% Total $20,899.4 100.0% $18,657.7 100.0% 12.0% Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, June 10, 2021

In addition to the table above, a graphic illustrating the worldwide market share of the top 5 server companies in 1Q21 and 1Q20 is available by viewing this press release on IDC.com. Top 5 Companies, Worldwide Server Unit Shipments, Market Share, and Growth, First Quarter of 2021 Company 1Q21 Unit Shipments 1Q21 Market Share 1Q20 Unit Shipments 1Q20 Market Share 1Q21/1Q20 Unit Growth 1. Dell Technologies 488,981 17.5% 474,011 18.4% 3.2% 2. HPE/H3C(a) 405,190 14.5% 377,544 14.6% 7.3% 3. Inspur/Inspur Power Systems(b) 222,596 8.0% 216,896 8.4% 2.6% 4. Lenovo 169,467 6.1% 154,415 6.0% 9.7% T5. Super Micro* 128,558 4.6% 131,989 5.1% -2.6% T5. Huawei (News - Alert) * 116,606 4.2% 100,035 3.9% 16.6% ODM Direct 887,520 31.7% 770,466 29.8% 15.2% Rest of Market 377,236 13.5% 356,689 13.8% 5.8% Total 2,796,154 100.0% 2,582,044 100.0% 8.3% Source: IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, June 10, 2021 Top Server Market Findings On a geographic basis, server revenue in China was up 29.1% year over year while Asia/Pacific (excluding China and Japan) increased 16.6%. Latin America declined 9.1% and North America grew 10.6% year over year. Revenue generated from x86 servers increased 10.9% in 1Q21 to $18.7 billion. Non-x86 server revenue grew 23.0% year over year to $2.2 billion. Notes: * IDC declares a statistical tie in the worldwide server market when there is a difference of one percent or less in the share of revenues or shipments among two or more vendors. (a) Due to the existing joint venture between HPE and H3C, IDC is reporting external market share on a global level for HPE and H3C as "HPE/H3C" starting from 2Q 2016. Per the JV agreement, Tsinghua Holdings subsidiary, Unisplendour Corporation, through a wholly owned affiliate, purchased a 51% stake in H3C and HPE has a 49% ownership stake in the new company. (b) Inspur revenues include revenues and server units for Inspur Power Systems. Inspur is reported as a separate company with revenues including Inspur OEM systems and Inspur Power Systems locally developed and branded systems revenue. Per the JV agreement, Inspur Power Commercial System Co., Ltd., has total registered capital of RMB 1 billion, with Inspur investing RMB 510 million for a 51% equity stake, and IBM investing RMB 490 million for the remaining 49% equity stake. IDC's Server Taxonomy IDC's Server Taxonomy maps the eleven price bands within the server market into three price ranges: volume servers, midrange servers and high-end servers. The revenue data presented in this release is stated as vendor revenue for a server system. IDC presents data in vendor revenue to determine market share position. Vendor revenue represents those dollars recognized by multi-user system and server vendors for ISS (initial server shipment) and upgrade units sold through direct and indirect channels and includes the following embedded server components: Frame or cabinet and all cables, processors, memory, communications boards, operating system software, other bundled software and initial internal and external disk shipments. IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker is a quantitative tool for analyzing the global server market on a quarterly basis. The Tracker includes quarterly unit shipments and revenues (both vendor revenue and value of shipments), segmented by vendor, family, model, region, operating system, price band, CPU type, and architecture. The IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker is part of the Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Infrastructure Tracker, which provides a holistic total addressable market view of the five key enabling infrastructure technologies for the datacenter (servers, external enterprise storage systems, purpose-built appliances: HCI and PBBA, and datacenter switches). For more information about IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, please contact Lidice Fernandez at 305-351-3057 or lfernandez@idc.com. About IDC Trackers IDC Tracker products provide accurate and timely market size, vendor share, and forecasts for hundreds of technology markets from more than 100 countries around the globe. Using proprietary tools and research processes, IDC's Trackers are updated on a semiannual, quarterly, and monthly basis. Tracker results are delivered to clients in user-friendly Excel deliverables and on-line query tools. Click here to learn about IDC's full suite of data products and how you can leverage them to grow your business. About IDC International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. With more than 1,100 analysts worldwide, IDC offers global, regional, and local expertise on technology, IT benchmarking and sourcing, and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries. IDC's analysis and insight helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community to make fact-based technology decisions and to achieve their key business objectives. Founded in 1964, IDC is a wholly owned subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), the world's leading tech media, data, and marketing services company. To learn more about IDC, please visit www.idc.com. Follow IDC on Twitter at @IDC and LinkedIn. Subscribe to the IDC Blog for industry news and insights. All product and company names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210610006002/en/

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[June 10, 2021] Slintel Raises $20M in Series A Funding Round Led by GGV Capital

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., June 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Slintel, a leader in B2B buyer intelligence, has raised $20 million in Series A funding led by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that is known for its investments in successful companies such as Airbnb, HashiCorp, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, StockX, and Wish. Existing investors Accel, Sequoia Capital India, and Stellaris Venture Partners also participated in the funding round. B2B buyers today are more digital than ever, and buyer intelligence is taking over traditional sales and marketing intelligence as buyers embark on complex journeys online. It is estimated that by 2025, 80% of all B2B buying will occur on digital channels. Slintel helps go-to-market teams understand where buyers are in their journey, what their pain points are, their adoption of technology, and churn data to get a 360-degree view of the buyer. The announcement comes shortly after the company reported that its revenue and customer base has grown by over 5x in the last 12 months. Buying intent is the fastest-growing category in the $24 billion sales and marketing intelligence space, and Slintel is one of the fastest-growing companies in this space. With the backing of GGV Capital, the company aims to establish itself as a leader in this category. "The Slintel team is delighted to welcome Hans Tung as its newest board member," said Deepak Anchala, CEO and Founder of Slintel. "We look forward to deepening our solution to power-use cases across different GTM functions." Hans Tung, Managing Partner at GGV Capital, was ranked at #3 in Forbes' prestigious Midas List this year for the strides he made in the strategic investments landscape in 2020. When asked about the investment, Hans stated, "With the global pandemic completely changing the way companies operate, B2B transactions have gone more digital than ever before. Inside sales teams are closing high-value, multi-million dollar deals while working remotely, and products like Slintel are enabling companies to do this by helping them re-imagine their entire sales process for today's environment."



"The next big wave in the enterprise space is (the) use of AI to rethink processes, and all AI at its core requires data," said Alok Goyal, Partner at Stellaris Venture Partners. "I am therefore bullish on the entire data stack, including data which is either proprietary or inferred data that is not easy to replicate. Slintel is in the second category. Their ability to predict strong prospects is a relatively unique capability, and it is very easy to sell due to a direct correlation to (the) top line for their customers." "Slintel has one of the best GTM engines that we've seen in any startup, and the consistency with which the team has been able to deliver on their growth targets is commendable," said Prayank Swaroop, Partner at Accel. "We're looking at a company that's changing the marketing and sales intelligence sphere as we know it, and we couldn't be happier to be a part of their board," he added.

Slintel was founded in 2018 when Deepak Anchala and Rahul Bhattacharya realized that sales organizations needed to re-imagine their processes in order to achieve better efficiency and scale faster. Identifying companies using traditional, beaten-down parameters such as territory, size, industry, or similar companies is an inefficient undertaking that costs marketing and sales professionals valuable time, resources, and effort. To combat this, they built a platform that uncovers various forms of buying intelligence to make the process of identifying high-intent prospects much simpler, more intuitive, and completely data-driven. For more information on the product, visit www.slintel.com. Press Contacts

Rahul Agarwal

rahul.agarwal@slintel.com

+91 953 550 0544 Related Images the-slintel-team-june-2021.jpg

The Slintel Team - June 2021

Employees of Slintel celebrate the company's Series A funding announcement. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/slintel-raises-20m-in-series-a-funding-round-led-by-ggv-capital-301310564.html SOURCE Slintel

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[June 10, 2021] Smart Plug Market to grow by almost $ 14 Billion during 2021-2025 | Technavio

NEW YORK, June 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -Technavio has been monitoring the smart plug market and it is poised to grow by USD 13.99 billion during 2020-2024, progressing at a CAGR of almost 30% during the forecast period. The report offers an up-to-date analysis regarding the current market scenario, latest trends and drivers, and the overall market environment. Request a Free sample report Frequently Asked Questions: Based on segmentation by technology, which is the leading segment in the market?

Based on the technology, the market witnessed maximum growth in the early majority segment in 2019.

Based on the technology, the market witnessed maximum growth in the early majority segment in 2019. What are the major trends in the market?

The increasing demand for smart homes and the development of smart cities is the major trend in the market.

The increasing demand for smart homes and the development of smart cities is the major trend in the market. At what rate is the market projected to grow?

The market is projected to grow at a CAGR of almost 30% during the forecast period.

The market is projected to grow at a CAGR of almost 30% during the forecast period. Who are the top players in the market?

Belkin International Inc., D-Link Corp., EDIMAX Technology Co. Ltd., Etekcity Corp., Insteon, iSmart Alarm Inc., Leviton Manufacturing Co. Inc., Panasonic Corp., SDI Technologies Inc., and TP-Link Technologies Co. Ltd. are the top players in the market.

Belkin International Inc., D-Link Corp., EDIMAX Technology Co. Ltd., Etekcity Corp., Insteon, iSmart Alarm Inc., Leviton Manufacturing Co. Inc., Panasonic Corp., SDI Technologies Inc., and TP-Link Technologies Co. Ltd. are the top players in the market. What is the key market driver?

The market is driven by the high demand for remote access to appliances.

The market is driven by the high demand for remote access to appliances. How big is the North American market?

North America dominated the market with a 33% share in 2019. Related Reports on Consumer Discretionary Include: Global Smart Doorbell Camera Market - Global smart doorbell camera market is segmented by product (stand-alone and integrated) and geography (North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and MEA).

Request a Free Sample Report Global Soundbar Market - Global soundbar market is segmented by application (music players, TV sets, and computers) and geography (North America, Europe, APAC, South America, and MEA).

Request a Free Sample Report Buy 1 Technavio report and get the second for 50% off. Buy 2 Technavio reports and get the third for free.

View Our Sample Report Before Purchasing The market is fragmented, and the degree of fragmentation will accelerate during the forecast period. Belkin International Inc., D-Link Corp., EDIMAX Technology Co. Ltd., Etekcity Corp., Insteon, iSmart Alarm Inc., Leviton Manufacturing Co. Inc., Panasonic Corp., SDI Technologes Inc., and TP-Link Technologies Co. Ltd. are some of the major market participants. The high demand for remote access to appliances will offer immense growth opportunities for the market vendors. In a bid to help players strengthen their market foothold, this smart plug market forecast report provides a detailed analysis of the leading market vendors. The report also empowers industry honchos with information on the competitive landscape and insights into the different product offerings offered by various companies.



Technavio's custom research reports offer detailed insights on the impact of COVID-19 at an industry level, a regional level, and subsequent supply chain operations. This customized report will also help clients keep up with new product launches in direct & indirect COVID-19 related markets, upcoming vaccines and pipeline analysis, and significant developments in vendor operations and government regulations. Smart Plug Market 2020-2024: Segmentation

Smart Plug Market is segmented as below: Technology

Early Majority



Innovator



Early Adopters

End-user

Residential



Commercial

Geography

North America



Europe



APAC



MEA



South America To learn more about the global trends impacting the future of market research, download a free sample: https://www.technavio.com/talk-to-us?report=IRTNTR43229 Smart Plug Market 2020-2024: Scope Technavio presents a detailed picture of the market by the way of study, synthesis, and summation of data from multiple sources. The smart plug market report covers the following areas: Smart Plug Market Size

Smart Plug Market Trends

Smart Plug Market Industry Analysis This study identifies the increasing demand for smart homes and the development of smart cities as one of the prime reasons driving the Smart Plug Market growth during the next few years. Technavio suggests three forecast scenarios (optimistic, probable, and pessimistic) considering the impact of COVID-19. Technavio's in-depth research has direct and indirect COVID-19 impacted market research reports.

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Technavio's SUBSCRIPTION platform Smart Plug Market 2020-2024: Key Highlights CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2020-2024

Detailed information on factors that will assist smart plug market growth during the next five years

Estimation of the smart plug market size and its contribution to the parent market

Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior

The growth of the smart plug market across North America , Europe , APAC, MEA, and South America

, , APAC, MEA, and Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors

Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of smart plug market vendors Table of Contents: Executive Summary Market Overview Market Landscape Market ecosystem

Value chain analysis Market Sizing Market definition

Market segment analysis

Market size 2019

Market outlook: Forecast for 2019 - 2024 Five Forces Analysis Bargaining power of buyers

Bargaining power of suppliers

Threat of new entrants

Threat of substitutes

Threat of rivalry

Market condition Market Segmentation by Technology Market segments

Comparison by Technology

Early majority - Market size and forecast 2019-2024

Innovator - Market size and forecast 2019-2024

Early adopters - Market size and forecast 2019-2024

Market opportunity by Technology Market Segmentation by End-user Market segments

Comparison by End-user

Residential - Market size and forecast 2019-2024

Commercial - Market size and forecast 2019-2024

Market opportunity by End-user Customer landscape Overview Geographic Landscape Geographic segmentation

Geographic comparison

North America - Market size and forecast 2019-2024

- Market size and forecast 2019-2024 Europe - Market size and forecast 2019-2024

- Market size and forecast 2019-2024 APAC - Market size and forecast 2019-2024

MEA - Market size and forecast 2019-2024

South America - Market size and forecast 2019-2024

- Market size and forecast 2019-2024 Key leading countries

Market opportunity by geography Drivers, Challenges, and Trends Market drivers

Market challenges

Market trends Vendor Landscape Overview

Landscape disruption Vendor Analysis Vendors covered

Market positioning of vendors

Belkin International Inc.

D-Link Corp.

EDIMAX Technology Co. Ltd.

Etekcity Corp.

Insteon

iSmart Alarm Inc.

Leviton Manufacturing Co. Inc.

Panasonic Corp.

SDI Technologies Inc.

TP-Link Technologies Co. Ltd. Appendix Scope of the report

Currency conversion rates for US$

Research methodology

List of abbreviations About Us

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focuses on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios. Contact

Technavio Research

Jesse Maida

Media & Marketing Executive

US: +1 844 364 1100

UK: +44 203 893 3200

Email: media@technavio.com

Website: www.technavio.com/

Report: www.technavio.com/report/smart-plug-market-industry-analysis View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/smart-plug-market-to-grow-by-almost--14-billion-during-2021-2025--technavio-301310570.html SOURCE Technavio

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[June 11, 2021] VVDN Announces Measures as Manufacturing Business Growth Continues Amidst Pandemic

Holds employee vaccination drive GURUGRAM, India, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- VVDN Technologies, a premier electronics product engineering and manufacturing company, continues manufacturing business growth amidst the unprecedented pandemic by taking up several measures taken to safeguard its employee health and safety. VVDN continued its hiring process and employed more than 2,500 people during the time to boost manufacturing output. VVDN has designed and manufactured electronic products in the domains of 5G, Access Points, Dashcams, AI Based Cameras, Audio Devices, Smart Trackers, EV Chargers along with several Covid related products such as Covid-19 diagnostic kits, social distancing and contact tracing solutions VVDN's manufacturing business has witnessed key growth with the capacity expansion by adding new SMT lines, mechanical mold and injection molding production expansion as well as die casting facility. Company undertook severl measures to counteract supply chain challenges by leveraging its strong supplier and silicon partnerships.



Mr. Puneet Agarwal, CEO, VVDN Technologies: "VVDN is known for its business resilience and commitment to its customers. While we all know it has been a tough year with regards to the Pandemic, witnessing growth in manufacturing has instilled a whole new level of confidence in our employees as well as our customers. We owe this to our people who defied all the odds and entrusted us. The addition of new SMT Lines and another Mechanical Tooling facility, which also houses our new Die Casting facility, to our set up has resulted in the increase in our manufacturing numbers by multi fold. We have also hired in record numbers in the past year to ensure business and deliveries were not affected and our commitments to our clients were honored. The company is proud to have not only met the deadlines but also boost manufacturing." Keeping employee health and safety in mind at the forefront, VVDN followed all the SOPs for social distancing as well as hygiene. Dormitory accommodation as well as hygienic food facilities were provided to all the employees. Further, to tackle any exigency, Covid War rooms and a quick response team were setup that provided medical assistance for employees as well their families. In May, VVDN had initiated a Covid-19 Vaccination Drive for its employees. In the first and second phases of the employee vaccination drive, more than 1500 employees and family members have been vaccinated.

Mr. Balakumar Chinnusamy, Vice President, HR, VVDN Technologies: "Taking our employee safety as the topmost priority, series of measures are being taken up. Our Covid Quick Response Team is doing a tremendous job in providing support to our employees as well as their families too. We are also running vaccination drive at our campus. We are also in the process of setting up more such vaccination drive at all our other offices across the country. We have been working closely with local government and public health authorities to address the challenges." Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1531036/VVDN_Technologies_Logo.jpg For media queries:

Kunwar Sinha

kunwar.sinha@vvdntech.in

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[June 11, 2021] Moviebook Enables Digital Promotion and Transmission of Intangible Cultural Heritage with Video AI and ADT

BEIJING, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Moviebook, a leading infrastructure and service provider of intelligent video production, is capitalizing on its intelligent video production technology (Video AI) and Automatic Digital Twin (ADT) engine to virtually demonstrate the ancient wax printing technique of the Miao people, an ethnic group dwelling in Guizhou province in southwest China, for China's Cultural and Natural Heritage Day which falls on June 12 this year. Moviebook pioneers a model of applying digital technologies to the preservation, promotion and transmission of intangible cultural heritage. Different from merely recording the process to make wax prints, Moviebook digitalizes all the instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces associated with wax printing by first breaking them down into multidimensional information including appearance, texture, features, description, internal form, among others, and then visually demonstrating the purpose of each item and ultimately the whole production process. In other words, the audience can gain hands-on experience of producing wax prints from designing patterns to dyeing the wax printed cloth and removing the wax all without having to be physically preset at site. It feels like creating a wax printed notebook by oneself.



An executive from Moviebook commented, "We make use of digital technologies including ADT and Video AI to create digital twins for physical objects used in wax print production, which are then virtually accessible to the general public. This helps to showcase the charm of these items and further popularize intangible cultural heritage. We are also opening up new possibilities of monetizing intangible cultural heritage merchandise so as to unleash the untapped commercial potential of intangible cultural heritage." China's Cultural and Natural Heritage Day is an annual event held on the second Saturday in June. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the majority of activities rolled out to celebrate the Day are being held online. Thanks to the development and wide application of AI and digital technologies, celebrations for the Day have taken on a wide variety of forms, making it possible to safeguard and transmit intangible cultural heritage anywhere and at any time.

About Moviebook Moviebook, a leading infrastructure and service provider of intelligent video production, aims at empowering monetization capacity for clients from media, retail, education, and culture through intelligent vision. Building on technological advantages in fields of computer vision, computer graphics, among others, Moviebook significantly improves the production efficiency of visual content and innovates ways of presenting and interacting with such content. By applying AI technologies to videos, Moviebook is pioneering a wide variety of application scenarios for intelligent video production technologies. For more information, please visit http://www.moviebook.cn/about/index. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/moviebook-enables-digital-promotion-and-transmission-of-intangible-cultural-heritage-with-video-ai-and-adt-301310712.html SOURCE Moviebook

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[June 11, 2021] TADS Awards 2021 -- The World's First Annual International Awards for Tokenized Assets & Digitized Securities ("TADS") Opens for Nominations

HONG KONG, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- TADS Awards is the world's first annual international awards for the Tokenized Assets and Digitized Securities ("TADS") sectors. Gathering individuals and businesses from around the world to share the energy that tokenization brings to financial markets, TADS Awards celebrates these industries by recognizing and honoring significant contributions and distinguished achievements worldwide. Nominations for the second-year's TADS Awards to be held in 2021 ("TADS Awards 2021") are now open for submission until 30th September 2021. Nominations can be self-submitted or submitted through TADS Awards' Global Ambassadors, any TADS Awards' partners or Committee Members. Details in relation to the nomination process are available at - https://tadsawards.org/ TADS Awards is co-organized by Asia Pacific Digital Economy Institute, Coinstreet Partners and the STO LAB, and is sponsored by GOIR and Wave Financial. It has received strong support from strategic partners, including (alphabetically):- Accenture, Association of Family Offices in Asia, Crypto Valley Association, Deloitte, Entoro Capital, Gibraltar Stock Exchange, Hong Kong Cyberport, HKbitEX, IBM, Microsoft Hong Kong, Morningstar, SBI Group, Somerley Capital, Stormharbour, TheTokenizer, and West Park Capital, among many others, plus support from its Global Ambassadors from over 16 countries. Samson (SAM) Lee, Founder & CEO of Coinstreet Partners and Chairman of the Organizing Committee of TADS Awards, commented, "thanks to strong support from many industry leaders and key ecosystem drivers, TADS Awards was launched last year with great success. To keep abreast of market trends, we have introduced dynamic new elements to the second year's TADS Awards including NFT Token Award, NFT Platform Award and Rising Stars Awards." David Wen, Chairman of Asia Pacific Digital Economy Institute, remarked that "tokenization provides a secure and standard way for digitization of our economy, so that more powerful and transparent financial tools can be used to help better manage risk & return and better serve the entire community." Nitin Gaur, Director of IBM Financial Sciences and Digital Assets at IBM said, "TADS Awards creates important recognition for best-of-breed ideas and solutions in the rapidly progressing area of asset tokenization and digital assets powered by technologies like digital identity, blockchain, DLT and IPFS." Robert Lui, Partner and Hong Kong Digital Asset Leader of Deloitte commented, "Security Token Offering, o STO, is a regulated fundraising channel that is recognized by governments around the world and further empowered by blockchain technology to ensure the transparency and traceability of the asset tied to the token. Audit is, and will continue to be, a crucial mechanism to ensure the security token is compliant with local regulations in different countries, which is a major Fintech development in capital markets."



Sachiko Ohshige, Managing Director, Technology Strategy & Risk Lead of Accenture noted that "many financial institutions in the capital market space are looking to take full advantage of the opportunities of tokenization. Token-based trading platforms would need to emerge to provide the infrastructure for tokenized asset trading and establish a level playing field between conventional and new market infrastructures." Peter Yan, Chief Executive Office of Hong Kong Cyberport, added that "TADS Awards have proven to be an important platform for promoting positive developments in tokenized assets and blockchain technology, helping people understand the latest applications in the space from all over the world. This awareness is essential to making Hong Kong a more attractive place for talents in the industry. Being home to Hong Kong's largest FinTech community and many blockchain start-ups, Cyberport is glad to support this year's edition of TADS awards."

Chris Carlin, Head of Alliances, Redistribution Solutions and Data Products at Morningstar Asia said "as the Tokenized Assets and Digitized Securities industry has grown from last year and is moving more into the mainstream, TADS Awards are a good time for us to reflect on who the emerging leaders are in this field. I am looking forward to taking a moment to recognize the companies that have demonstrated leadership in technology, products and platforms, as well as being innovative in the field." "The CVA is proud to be a part of TADS awards for a second year. The space is moving so fast that it is imperative to have good information to be successful. TADS Awards brings a clear classification and details on some of the most interesting developments, and we are excited that this year, we also include NFTs into the mix," said Daniel Haudenschild, President of the Board of Directors, Crypto Valley Association. "I commented last year that a 'wind of change' was blowing through financial markets, a change we should, and must, embrace. Little did I realize how much change would come and how quickly, and with it some controversy. It is important to realize that Tokenized Assets and Digitized Securities are not equivalent to cryptocurrencies, though they are based on some of the same technology. While innovation is key, those of us promoting TADS and the systems to support TADS must strive to keep regulators onside and ensure that markets are comfortable with developments in this admittedly disruptive field," said Mr. Martin Sabine, Chairman of Somerley Capital Holdings Limited. "In the world of fundraising, asset tokenization and STOs provide us with a more efficient and more flexible way of fundraising and investment structure on a global basis. TADS Awards brings together many good examples of STOs and can help promote the concept to an even wider platform," reflected Stephan Law, Managing Director of ANS Capital Limited. Benjamin Tsai, President & Managing Partner of Wave Financial said "we are very pleased to be participating as a sponsor of TADS Awards 2021. It is a world-class event that recognizes excellence in the Digital Assets industry." For TADS Awards 2021, a special mid-year awards will be hosted in Japan in June. Winners from the mid-year awards will automatically qualify as finalists in the year-end awards that will be hosted later in November 2021 in Hong Kong. The year-end awards will be a full-scale awards ceremony with a total of ten winners selected from two awards categories (five awards for each category) with the newly added NFT Token Award and NFT Platform Award. In addition, a number of Rising Stars Awards have been created to encourage start-up companies and recognize innovative proof-of-concept projects in these industries : (1) "BEST OF CLASS TADS" category is for issuers of different types of Tokenized Assets & Digitized Securities, including -

Equity-Backed Token

Asset-Backed Token

Tokenized Debt Token

NFT Token (new)

ESG / SDG Token ++ TADS Rising Stars (new) (2) "ECO-SYSTEM EXCELLENCE" category is for service providers and vertical solution providers along the TADS value chain, including - KYC / Compliance

Token Issuance

Digital Custodian

NTF Platform (new)

Brokerage / Asset Management ++ Ecosystem Rising Stars (new) To review last year's TADS Awards ceremony - "TADS Awards Gala 2020", please visit - https://tadsawards.org/winners/#stream The related press release is also available in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and German. About Asia Pacific Digital Economy Institute Asia Pacific Digital Economy Institute (APDEI) aims to create a center of excellence, leadership, and partnership to incubate new thinking and innovation in practice; advance thought-leadership; generate new growth opportunities; enhance the competitiveness and productivity of business; and cultivate talents to accelerate the digital economy. For more information, please visit - https://apdei.org/ About Coinstreet Partners Founded in 2017, Coinstreet is an award-winning, decentralized investment banking group, a high-end financial services firm for private wealth, and a professional consultancy firm in the Digital Asset and FinTech sectors, providing a business eco-system for the new era of digital economy. Coinstreet Partners focuses on five key business segments: (1) Asset Tokenization & Digitized Securities Consultancy, (2) Digital Asset Management & Private Banking, (3) Digital Asset Global Distribution Coordination, (4) TADS Issuance, Trading & Management Platform, and (5) DeFi, NFT & DLT Solutions. Coinstreet is a co-organizer of Global Online Investor Roadshow (www.GOIR.info) - the next generation, institutional scale, online private placement platform for private equity, alternative investments, and digital asset opportunities; and a co-organizer of TADS Awards (www.TADSawards.org) - the world's first international award for Tokenized Assets and Digitized Securities sector. For more information, please visit www.coinstreet.partners About The STO LAB Incubated by the Hong Kong Cyberport, the STO-LAB provides fully compliant, one-stop, end-to-end "asset tokenization" and "digitized security global distribution" solutions. The STO-LAB delivers asset tokenization services for a variety of asset types, including fixed assets, real estate, commodities, derivatives, stocks, debt, cash flow, and investment funds. The STO-LAB has established a global blockchain alliance network, with objectives of promoting Security Token Offering (STO) projects, facilitating convergence between digitized securities, tokenized assets and traditional financial market assets, and contributing to build a better eco-system for STO projects globally. For more information, please visit - https://thestolab.com/ Media contact : Camille Yau

marketing@tadsawards.org

Visit our website

Follow us on LinkedIn SOURCE Coinstreet Partners

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[June 11, 2021] HKBN Takes My HKBN App Rewards Programme City-wide

HONG KONG, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited ("HKBN")'s residential customers have long enjoyed an exciting array of exclusive perks and benefits on "My HKBN App", HKBN's all-in-one rewards & services mobile app. Starting today, this privilege will be extended to all Hongkongers[1], as non-HKBN customers can now also sign up to My HKBN App and enjoy fabulous weekly "Infinite Rewards Thursday" offers and free HKBN services[2]. At the same time, existing customers who successfully refer new eligible users to use the app may join the "My HKBN App Referral Giveaway" campaign, for the chance to earn awesome rewards worth up to HK$20,000[3]! Weekly "Infinite Rewards Thursday" offers for My HKBN App users My HKBN App has always been a "go to hub" for a growing array of "Infinite Rewards" offers, discounts and even giveaways for its users, covering everything from fashion to dining, as well as special festive occasions. With its latest update, My HKBN App is adding a weekly-rotating "menu" of rewards for its users, whether or not they are HKBN customers, accessed simply by logging in the app, every Thursday[2]. The latest featured offers include:







Featured "Infinite Reward Thursday" Offers[4]

(Offers launched every Thursday) Yummy choices Hung Fook Tung - Traditional formula herbal tea HK$20/2 bottles, and year-round 20% off selected items

Tai Hing - HK$20 discount upon HK$100 dinner dine-in

Cafe de Coral - Free upgrade to Latte or Cappuccino

Maxim's Cakes - Disney Princess Diffuser special price HK$138 (Value HK$288) Fashion :CHOCOLATE, FIVE CM, i.t, double park, Mini Cream, MUSIUM DIV, ete! - 25% off selected regular-priced products and 15% off selected discounted products Beauty and health AUSupreme - Mother and baby care products up to 66% off, and premium health products buy 1 get 1 free

Eu Yan Sang - Year-round 10% off regular-priced products

BORGHESE - Fango Active Mud for Face and Body special price HK$68/piece (Original price HK$300/piece) Lifestyle goods Sing Tao Daily - Sing Tao E-paper free 2-month subscription

Stanford Swim School - Kids Swimming Trial Course special price HK$225/3 lessons (Original price up to HK$864)

City Hung Transportation - 10% off moving services and 35% off storage rental

Visit https://youtu.be/i0nTe7BFnZo for a learn more about the exciting rewards available in My HKBN App. Businesses interested in featuring their offers on "Infinite Rewards Thursday" are welcome to sign up here:

https://www.hkbnes.net/web/tc/promotions/details/2106-merchantrecruitres (Chinese only). Earn greater rewards with more referrals Besides taking advantage of these exciting weekly offers and handy account management functions via My HKBN App, existing HKBN residential customers can also earn generous referral rewards by joining a brand new "My HKBN App Referral Giveaway" campaign. From today till 13 August 2021, existing customers who successfully refer a minimum of three non-HKBN customers to register and login to My HKBN App will be eligible to receive exciting referral rewards including a KARA Smart Fitness Mirror with exclusive fat burning yoga programme by Coffee Lam, e-Cash Coupons for online shopping platform HOME+, plus vouchers for dining goods[3]. Rewards given out will be based on the cumulative number of referrals made, so refer more to earn better rewards! HOME+ HK$200 E-cash Coupons will also be rewarded both to eligible referees who successfully register and login to My HKBN App, as well as to the referrers[4]. For more details, visit www.hkbn.net/personal/home/en/downloadmyhkbn. "My HKBN App Referral Giveaway[4] Reward Details HOME+ HK$200 E-cash Coupons will be rewarded both to eligible referees who successfully register and login to My HKBN App, as well as to the referrers. Earn greater rewards with more referrals[3] Referral ranking Rewards The 1st  25th winners (Quota: 25) KARA Smart Fitness Mirror - 24-mth fitness programme with exclusive fat burning yoga programme by Coffee Lam (value HK$18,750)

HK$500 HOME+ E-cash Coupons

HK$155 Pacific Coffee E-vouchers

HK$100 KFC E-vouchers (Rewards value approx. HK$20,000) The 26th  125th winners (Quota: 100) HK$500 HOME+ E-cash Coupons

HK$155 Pacific Coffee E-vouchers

HK$100 KFC E-vouchers (Rewards value over HK$700) The 126th  1,125th winners (Quota: 1,000) HK$200 HOME+ E-cash Coupons

HK$155 Pacific Coffee E-vouchers

HK$50 KFC E-vouchers (Rewards value over HK$400) Elinor Shiu, Co-Owner and CEO  Residential Solutions of HKBN said, "As an established home-grown corporation, HKBN is always looking to deliver more value for our 1 million residential customers via win-win partnerships, including with our enterprise customers. One powerful way we've been doing that is via My HKBN App, a must-have app which gives users handy access to a unique array of exciting rewards, offers and freebies. Today, we're thrilled to extend this privilege to the family and friends of our customers  by extension the Hong Kong public  and to invite more enterprise customers and merchant partners to join our rewards programme, such that millions more can enjoy their awesome products and services!" Through My HKBN App, customers can easily upgrade or renew services, check mobile data usage and bills, refer friends, and redeem exclusive offers! Download My HKBN App at www.hkbn.net/personal/home/en/downloadmyhkbn today to start redeeming exciting offers and earn referral rewards with "My HKBN App Referral Giveaway"! [1]My HKBN App is open for registration for users aged 18 or above. [2] Free services only applicable to designated HKBN services and designated users. Availability of offers are limited while stocks last. Terms and conditions apply. [3] Referral reward only eligible upon successful referral of at least 3 non-HKBN customers to use My HKBN App. Terms and conditions apply. [4] Terms and conditions apply. About Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited is part of HKBN Group ("HKBN" or the "Group"). Headquartered in Hong Kong with operations spanning across Asian markets like Hong Kong, Macau and mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia, the Group is a leading integrated telecommunications and technology services provider. Through three core brands, Hong Kong Broadband Network, HKBNES and HKBN JOS, the Group offers comprehensive one-stop Information and Communications Technology ("ICT") solutions that include broadband, data connectivity, cloud and data centre, managed Wi-Fi, business continuity services, system integration, cybersecurity, mobile services, roaming solutions, digital solutions, voice and collaboration, stationery and supplies that are cumulative to our one-stop-shop offering of Transformation as a Service (TaaS) and OTT entertainment. HKBN's extensive tri-carrier fibre infrastructure covers over 2.4 million residential homes and over 7,400 commercial buildings and facilities across Hong Kong. Committed to creating a lasting positive impact to wherever it operates, HKBN embraces a core purpose to "Make our Home a Better Place to Live". The Group is managed by hundreds of Co-Owners (supervisory and management level Talents in the Group) who invested their savings to buy shares of HKBN Ltd. (SEHK Stock Code: 1310). For more information about Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited, please visit www.hkbn.net/en. SOURCE Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited

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[June 11, 2021] "Aoppella!?" Project Celebrates 100 Days! First Web Radio Series and Fan Contest Announced!

TOKYO, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- KLab Inc., a leader in online mobile games, announced it has been 100 days since the new multimedia music project "aoppella!?" first launched on Thursday, March 4, 2021. A special web radio show will be held in commemoration of this milestone. In addition, there will be various social media campaigns and a fan contest on Twitter and YouTube. See the official press release ( https://www.klab.com/en/press/release/2021/0611/aoppella_100.html ) for more details.



The "aoppella!?" project began on March 4, 2021 and has reached its 100th day today, Friday, June 11. The project's first J-Pop cover medley of "Hakujitsu / Pretender" surpassed the 1 million view mark (currently 3 million views) in just one week. The "aoppella!?" project continues to grow and gain support among fans from all over the world.

In commemoration, the series' first web radio series is scheduled for early July 2021. The series' very first web radio series "aoppella!? Radio" will air on the official Youtube channel with hosts Tetsuya Kakihara, voice of Luka Shihou, and Daiki Hamano, voice of Yui Nekoyashiki. In addition, there will be a social media cheer campaign to reach goals and unlock "aoppella!?" content. There is also a summer campaign to unlock the summer uniforms for the cast so be sure to check the official Twitter ( @aoppella ). Fan Works Contest "AoCon" We are looking for a wide range of fan created works such as illustrations, novels, and more based on the themes of the "aoppella!?" original songs "Playlist" and "Think About U". Special prizes will be awarded to winners and participants of the contest and outstanding work will be displayed on the official website at a later date. Entry Period: Friday, June 11, 2021 to Sunday, August 1, 2021 Contest Website:

https://www.aoppella.com/lp/aocon/ Guidelines:

https://www.aoppella.com/guideline.html *The content of the campaigns and contest are subject to change without notice.

*The official website and social media are Japanese language only. About "aoppella!?" "aoppella!?" is KLab's latest original multimedia music project built on the themes of "youth" and "a cappella". Official Website: https://www.aoppella.com/

Official Twitter: @aoppella

Official YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/aoppella

Copyright: KLab View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aoppella-project-celebrates-100-days-first-web-radio-series-and-fan-contest-announced-301310764.html SOURCE KLab Inc.

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[June 11, 2021] Fineco offers access to Wellington Management funds on its investing platform

LONDON, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- FinecoBank today announces that UK customers will have access to a new suite of funds by Wellington Management via its investing platform. Wellington Management is one of the largest global asset managers offering investment solutions spanning across the global equity, fixed income, multi-asset and alternatives. The latest addition to Fineco's investment platform follows a string of recent fund announcements made this year including AXA IM, Candriam and Ninety One. Paolo Di Grazia, Deputy General Manager, Fineco: "Following the recent news that more than 70% of Fineco clients hold active current accounts on brokerage, we are determined to continue expanding our investment offerings. We are very pleased to have partnered with Wellington Management and to offer our UK customers access to their selection of quality funds through our competitively priced investment platform." Matthew Knight, Head of UK distribution, Wellington Management: "At Wellington Management, we strive to combine the resources ofa large, global asset manager with the boutique feel of an independent, privately held partnership. We look forward to working with Fineco to offer their UK clients our innovative investment solutions."



About FinecoBank Launched in 2017 in UK, FinecoBank, the multi-currency bank and one of the most important FinTech banks in Europe, has built an integrated business model proposing customers its One-Stop-Solution: it offers from a single account banking, trading and investment services through innovative transactional platforms developed with proprietary technologies. Fineco represents a new way of banking, a smart way to invest money.

Fineco's mission is to simplify customers' lives when dealing with financial services and has developed a very powerful yet user-friendly platform. Learn more about us on finecobank.co.uk. About Wellington Management Tracing its history to 1928, Wellington Management is one of the world's largest independent investment management firms, serving as a trusted adviser to over 2,200 clients in more than 60 countries. The firm manages more than US$1 trillion for pensions, endowments and foundations, insurers, family offices, fund sponsors, global wealth managers, and other clients. As a private partnership whose only business is investment management, the firm is able to align its long-term views and interests with those of its clients. The firm offers comprehensive investment management capabilities that span nearly all segments of the global capital markets, including equity, fixed income, multi-asset, and alternative strategies. With more than 800 investment professionals located in offices around the world, Wellington pairs deep multi-disciplinary research resources with independent investment teams operating in an entrepreneurial boutique" environment. For more information, please visit www.wellingtonfunds.com .

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[June 11, 2021]

"KWAVE Star Emoji" contest for the first time in US

LOS ANGELES, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- A KWAVE Emoji contest with the theme of "Hallyu Star" will be held for the first time in the United States.

"KWAVE Hallyu Star Emoji" contest for the first time in US

Ahead of the launch of KWAVE GO, a social network app aimed at Hallyu (Korea wave) fans around the world, KWAVE GO, inc is holding an "Hallyu Star" emoticon contest across the United States. Hallyu stars mean such as BTS, Blackpink, Exo, Twice, Lee Min Ho, Hyun Bin etc.

KWAVE GO app built based on blockchain so thatover 1 billion Hallyu fans around the world can communicate freely without worrying about security. It will provid 12 services (K-Pop, K-movie, K-toon, K-food etc.) to a Hallyu fan community that can be consumed with KWAVE GO coins. The beta version will be released in mid-June and full-scale service will be provided from July 1.







The theme of this contest is to create emoticons that can express Hallyu stars. Applicants can submit their favorite Hallyu star as a digital image file of characters expressing 16 different emotions.

A Kwave Go company official said that K-pop fans such as BTS Amy and Blink, who have already pioneered the fan art genre, are expected to participate.

The submission period is from June 4th to 28th. The award results will be announced on the KWAVEGO website and news media on July 1st. For detailed participation guidelines, please refer to the website.

Website: www.KWAVEGO.com

View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kwave-star-emoji-contest-for-the-first-time-in-us-301310909.html

SOURCE KWAVE GO, Inc
[June 11, 2021] Moody's Analytics to Provide CMBS Cash Flow Data for Citi Velocity Platform

Moody's Analytics and Citi announced today that Moody's Analytics will provide data and cash flow analytics for commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) on the Citi Velocity platform. The collaboration will allow all Citi Velocity users to access up-to-date and in-depth data and analysis of CMBS deals and tranches from Moody's Analytics. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005336/en/ The addition of CMBS cash flow data expands a collaboration announced in 2018 for Moody's Analytics to provide CLO data on the Citi Velocity platform. "With this enhancement to the Citi Velocity platform, we are creating a more efficient and automated BWIC experience, saving our customers time and reducing costs in the CMBS space," said Bryan Chao, Co-Head of Non-Agency Trading at Citi. Citi Velocity users will benefit from a consolidated tear-sheet from Moody's Analytics that includes a summary of deal origination and performance characteristics, including a comparison of a deal to its cohort. A price/yield table is available on the selected security across various prepayment scenarios. The proprietary Moody's Analytics CMBS dataset gives investors visibility into long-term trends by covering more than 12 years of performance history of active CMBS deals, spanning $828 billion of outstanding debt. The CMBS dataset also provides access to 20 years of historical data on the CMBS universe in the US. The analytical capabilities are powered by Moody's Analytics Structured Finance Portal, a powerful data and analytics tool. "We are very pleased to expand our collaboration with the Citi Velocity team to help structured finance investors navigate CMBS markets. The disruption wrought by COVID-19 on commercial real estate has made it more important than ever to optimize decision-maing through access to trusted information, delivered efficiently," said Bhargav Jani, Senior Director of Structured Finance Solutions at Moody's Analytics.



Citi Velocity delivers unprecedented access to Citi's global footprint and award-winning technology, giving Citi's institutional investor clients access to world-class data, proprietary analytics, research and market commentary sourced from around the world. Citi Velocity is the #1 ranked web-based analytics platform in its class and is available via web, mobile, and desktop applications. About Moody's Analytics

Moody's Analytics provides financial intelligence and analytical tools to help business leaders make better, faster decisions. Our deep risk expertise, expansive information resources, and innovative application of technology help our clients confidently navigate an evolving marketplace. We are known for our industry-leading and award-winning solutions, made up of research, data, software, and professional services, assembled to deliver a seamless customer experience. We create confidence in thousands of organizations worldwide, with our commitment to excellence, open mindset approach, and focus on meeting customer needs. For more information about Moody's Analytics, visit our website or connect with us on Twitter or LinkedIn. Moody's Analytics, Inc. is a subsidiary of Moody's Corporation (NYSE: MCO). Moody's Corporation reported revenue of $5.4 billion in 2020, employs approximately 11,500 people worldwide and maintains a presence in more than 40 countries. About Citi Citi, the leading global bank, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 160 countries and jurisdictions. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management. Additional information may be found at http://www.citigroup.com | Twitter (News - Alert) : @Citi | YouTube (News - Alert) : http://www.youtube.com/citi | Blog: http://blog.citigroup.com/ | Facebook (News - Alert) : http://www.facebook.com/citi | LinkedIn (News - Alert) : www.linkedin.com/company/citi. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005336/en/

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[June 11, 2021] Global Reinsurance Market Outlook (2021 to 2024) - Future Growth Trends - ResearchAndMarkets.com

The "Global Reinsurance Market Outlook, 2021 Update - Market Analysis, Key Trends, Competitive Intelligence, Drivers, Challenges, Regulatory Overview and Developments" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. This report provides in-depth market analysis, information, and insights into the global reinsurance industry and key regional reinsurance markets. This report provides a detailed outlook of the Global Reinsurance industry. The report captures premium trends for top 20 reinsurers and seven reinsurance hubs market, the data for which has been collected from company annual reports/SFCR's. It provides values for key performance indicators such as reinsurance premiums during the review period (2015-2019). It also provides key indicators such as premium accepted, premium ceded and cession rates during the review period (2015-2019) and projected figures for the forecast period 2019-2024 for the reinsurance hubs including primary insurance segments. The report gives a comprehensive overview of the global and regional reinsurance industry, key trends, drivers, challenges, regulatory overview and developments, and impact of the COVID-19 on the industry. It provides a detailed analysis of the competitive landscape, overview, and comparative analysis of leading companies and top reinsurance markets' premium trends for key regional markets. The report also gives a comprehensive overview of the regional economy and regulatory insights. The report also profiles natural hazard risks at regional level,including loss figures.



The report brings together the publisher's research, modeling, and analysis expertise, giving insurers access to information on Reinsurance dynamics in the country. Companies Mentioned

GIC Re

RGA

Great West Lifeco

Allianz SE

China Re

Lloyd's

Berkshire Hathaway

Hannover Re

Swiss Re

Munich Re Key Highlights Key insights and dynamics of the reinsurance industry.

Insights on key market trends in the reinsurance industry.

Insights on key growth and profitability challenges in the reinsurance industry.

Comparative analysis of leading reinsurance providers.

Regional overview and in-depth analysis on key regional reinsurance hubs.

Impact of COVID-19 outbreak on the global and regional reinsurance industry.

Insight on the future growth trend and market outlook. Scope It provides historical values from 2015-2019 for the top 20 global reinsurers.

It provides key trends in the global reinsurance industry.

The reports covers in-depth the analysis of historical values of KPIs and COVID-19 impact on the company financials for top reinsurers from 2016-2020.

It provide the market share and ranking dynamics of the top reinsurers.

The reports provide in-depth coverage and analysis of top reinsurance groups, including they business and product mix and financial performance.

It provides historical values from 2015-2019 and forecast from 2019-2024 for key regional reinsurance hubs.

It details the natural hazard profile of a region.

It offers a detailed analysis of the regional Reinsurance industry, top 10 Reinsurance markets and provides comprehensive overview of economy and demographics, reinsurance market trends, and competitive landscape of key Reinsurance hubs.

It provides an in-depth analysis of the Reinsurance hubs.

It provides rankings, premiums, and competitive landscape analysis of top reinsurers operating in regional markets. Reasons to Buy Make strategic business decisions using in-depth historic and forecast market data related to the global and regional Reinsurance industry.

In-depth market analysis, information, and insights into the Global Reinsurance industry.

In-depth analysis of the competitive landscape and Reinsurance hubs.

Understand the key dynamics, trends, and growth opportunities in the global and regional Reinsurance industry.

Identify key regulatory developments impacting market growth.

Identify growth opportunities in key regional markets. For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/gp93h1 View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005340/en/

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[June 11, 2021] Total Rethink author David McCourt warns G7 to "stop regulating the past"

NEW YORK, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- As the 47th G7 summit commences in the UK marking President Biden's first official foreign trip, world-leaders have collectively promoted the need for a united front on global issues. But with tax reforms high on the agenda, tech and telecoms entrepreneur David McCourt, author of bestselling book Total Rethink, has warned "these defensive moves miss half the point." The introduction of seismic tax reforms taking aim at multinationals and big tech firms in particular, outlines the G7's hope to force tech giants to share their wealth to fill the public purse. McCourt, who spoke exclusively to the Irish Independent, commented: "With all the G7's attention on tax reform, what we're seeing is policymakers on the back-foot, acting defensively, as opposed to looking at where technology could take us a civilization. "The burning question now is should US policymakers continue to be the protector of big tech and allow it to continue to self-police? Or should the US join the EU in trying to force tech firms to take more responsibility around transparency, interoperability, use of data, discrimination and truthfulness? Clear, specific revolutionary regulation must be a priority for world-leaders. "Right now, China has a tech vision. Europe and the USA do ot. That means the West is playing defence on this issue while China goes on the offensive. The West's dominance in tech could disappear as fast as American and Europe's industrial strength did unless both sides immediately rebuild the transatlantic rift caused mostly by Mr Trump."



Described by The Economist as possessing "incredible credentials as a telecoms revolutionary" McCourt has spent his 30-year career at the intersection of public policy, business and society. Having founded the first competitive phone company in America, McCourt invented the triple play that is voice, video and data  today considered the norm. In the process, McCourt led the charge for number portability  meaning people own their own phone number. Now we need to own our own data. In a series of articles, Irish-American McCourt, who is chairman of NBI delivering the Irish Government's $5billion National Broadband Plan  issued a stark warning to policymakers attending the summit.

"At this pivotal time, we must be considering more offensive moves. These would include much more support for Western research and development, as well as a unified transatlantic approach to issues such as the balance of data rights between tech companies and citizens. What's now needed is a total rethink among business and policymakers." About David McCourt David McCourt is the Chairman of National Broadband Ireland delivering Ireland's National Broadband Plan. A telecoms entrepreneur and Emmy Award-winning television producer, he is the author of the best seller Total Rethink (Wiley, 2019) and inaugural economist in residence at USCs Annenberg school. Visit: www.granahanmccourt.com www.davidmccourt.com Follow David on social media: Twitter: @dcmccourt LinkedIn: David McCourt Instagram: @dcmccourt View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/total-rethink-author-david-mccourt-warns-g7-to-stop-regulating-the-past-301310933.html SOURCE The Office of David McCourt

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[June 11, 2021] The IoT Community Announces Link Labs Has Joined its Elite IoT Ecosystem as a Gold-level Corporate Member

The IoT CommunityTM (Internet of Things Community), the world's largest community of CXOs and IoT professionals and practitioners, announces Link Labs has joined its elite ecosystem as a Gold-level corporate member. Link Labs' Bob Proctor, the company's chief executive with decades of experience in public companies, including line, staff and IPO leadership positions, has also been appointed to the IoT Community Advisory Board and will also participate in the IoT Community's series of IoT Slam events taking place throughout 2021 and 2022, including delivering a keynote address at IoT Slam Live 2021 event on June 24, 2021. Link Labs is a provider of a complete, end-to-end enterprise IoT platform for tagging, locating and monitoring commercial and industrial equipment, supplies and assets. Its flagship product, AirFinder, helps companies in nearly every industry locate, monitor and manage hundreds to millions of business assets and features customized reporting and advanced analytics while integrating seamlessly into business workflows. Link Labs is based in Annapolis, Md. and holds more than 25 patents on its software-driven innovations. Link Labs's corporate membership adds to the elite IoT Community ecosystem that is comprised of the biggest names in technology and household names across the IoT industry. Over the past six years, IoT Community has engaged with industry leaders to create the most compelling and trusted thought leadership content in the IoT ecosystem. David Hill, Executive Director of the IoT Community: "We are delighted to welcome Link Labs to our IoT Community corporate member ecosystem as a Gold-level corporate member, adding Bob Proctor to our Advisory Board. Link Labs are helping to democratize the track and locate pace and we look forward to working with Bob and the Link Labs team to accelerate the uptake of industrial/enterprise deployment of this transformative technology, which makes locating and monitoring anything, anywhere easy, affordable, and impactful."



Dr. Tom Bradicich, Hewlett Packard Fellow, at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and IoT Community Advisory Board Chair: "We are pleased Link Labs will join our IoT Community, and Bob Proctor will join our Advisory Board. We look forward to hearing Link Labs' vision for real time location systems in the IoT at our 2021/22 IoT Slam events, beginning with their presence at the June 24 IoT Slam Live event." Bob Proctor, CEO, Link Labs: "Becoming a member of the prestigious IoT Community is a real honor for Link Labs and we are excited to join as Gold members. I am proud and excited to join the IoT Community Advisory Board, helping to further raise the focus at a core level on the critically important issues relating to Real Time Location Services across all enterprise and industrial IoT domains."

At the June 24 IoT Slam Live 2021 event, the IoT Community's 15th IoT Slam branded event, Link Labs' Proctor joins a world class lineup of IoT thought leaders and executive speakers who will present at this landmark event that is held in partnership with the IEEE (News - Alert) , World Forum on the Internet of Things. Limited availability remains for Live in person attendance to the IoT Slam Live 2021 event in New Orleans, LA, USA. To register for the live and real-time global broadcast, go to: https://iotslam.com/iot-slam-conference-registration/. Also at the IoT Slam Live event, CFO Jennifer Halstead will speak on the Women in IoT Center of Excellence panel and COO Stas Wolk will speak on the Mobility and IoT Center of Excellence panel. IoT Practitioners seeking to expand their knowledge in IoT are invited to sign up for a free individual membership in The IoT Community, which is comprised of 26,000+ members.. For more information, go to: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4662022. IoT solution providers seeking accession to and collaboration opportunities with the IoT Community should contact: info@iotcommunity.net. About IoT Community (Internet of Things Community) The IoT Community is the world's largest CxO community of senior business leaders and IoT practitioners consisting of 26,000+ members. The function is to focus on adoption and application of IoT in commercial environments, overcoming the variety of barriers, inhibitors, technical and operational issues. For more information, visit http://www.iotcommunity.net Twitter: Follow @IoTCommunity @IoTChannel or hashtag #IoTCommunity, LinkedIn (News - Alert) : https://www.linkedin.com/company/9370944/ # # # View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005355/en/

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[June 11, 2021] Insight Schools of California Class of 2021 Ready for the Next Big Part of Their Lives

This year was a year like no other in American education. But thanks to schools like Insight Schools of California, (ISCA), an online public school serving 9-12 grade students throughout the state since 2008, students will soon move forward to begin the rest of their lives. ISCA will celebrate its graduates virtually with a commencement ceremony on June 14th and 15th and the times listed below. "Our students struggled, our students fought to get ahead, and our students succeeded like no others," said ISCA Head of School Kimberly Odom. "This was certainly a challenging year, but our students and families got the education they needed to move on and be successful." This year, ISCA will graduate approximately 480 students between their three online campuses. Collectively, the graduating class reports it has been accepted to community colleges across the state and many will begin military service. Prior to the pandemic, students enrolled in virtual school for a number of reasons-some were looking to escape bullying, some may have fallen academically off track, and others were looking for an alternative to the traditional classroom setting. ISCA students access a robust online curriculum in the core subjects and a host of electives and attend live virtual classes taught by state-certified teachers. Details of the graduation ceremonies are as follows: WHAT: Insight School of >California 2021 Graduation Ceremony - Maricopa Campus



WHEN: Monday, June 14th, 2021, 1 PM, Link can be found here. WHAT: Insight at San Diego 2021 Graduation Ceremony - San Diego Campus

WHEN: Tuesday, June 15th, 2021, 11 AM, Link can be found here. WHAT: Insight at San Joaquin 2021 Graduation Ceremony - San Joaquin Campus WHEN: Tuesday, June 15th, 2021, 1 PM, Link can be found here. CONTACT: For any questions about the celebrations, please contact Jaime Forrest at jaforrest@k12insightca.org. For media inquiries, please contact Ken Schwartz at kschwartz@k12.com. About Insight Schools of California Insight Schools of California (ISCA) are full-time online public charter schools for students in grades 9-12 who are behind in their education or need additional support to graduate from high school. The schools are available for students in Alameda, Amador, Calaveras, Contra Costa, Imperial, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Los Angeles, Orange (News - Alert) , Riverside, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Joaquin, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Stanislaus, Tulare and Ventura counties. ISCA is tuition-free and provides families the choice to access the curriculum and tools provided by K12, a Stride Company (NYSE: LRN). Common household items and office supplies like printer ink and paper are not provided. Our enrollment consultants can help address your technological and computer questions and needs. Stride offers learners of all ages a more effective way to learn and build skills for their future. Learn more at ca.insightschools.net. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005001/en/

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[June 11, 2021] The Law Offices of Frank R. Cruz Reminds Investors of Looming Deadline in the Class Action Lawsuit Against Credit Suisse Group AG (CS)

The Law Offices of Frank R. Cruz reminds investors of the upcoming June 15, 2021 deadline to file a lead plaintiff motion in the case filed on behalf of investors who purchased Credit Suisse Group AG ("Credit Suisse" or the "Company") (NYSE: CS) American Depositary Receipts ("ADRs") between October 29, 2020 and March 31, 2021, inclusive (the "Class Period"). If you are a shareholder who suffered a loss, click here to participate. On March 1, 2021, Credit Suisse froze $10 billion in funds that were invested in financial products from Greensill Capital ("Greensill") and held by its supply-chain investment funds. On March 8, 2021, Greensill filed for insolvency protection, and more than 1,000 investors in the Greensill funds marketed were unable to exit their positions. On March 10, 2021, media reports revealed that Greensill investors had retained counsel and intended to sue Credit Suisse for their losses because Credit Suisse continued to market the biggest of the funds as a fully insured, low-risk product despite a decision by insurers during the summer of 2020 not to renew coverage. On this news, the Company's American Depositary Receipts ("ADRs") fell $1.85, or 12.5%, to close at $12.85 per ADR on March 12, 2021, thereby injuring investors. On Friday, March 26, 2021, several banks began liquidating billions of dollars' worth of shares that Archegos Capital Manageent ("Archegos") had swap positions on at fire sale prices after Archegos had failed to meet a margin call. By the time Credit Suisse tried to liquidate its own holdings of stocks underlying Archegos' swap contracts over the following weekend, prices had collapsed and Credit Suisse amassed billions of dollars in losses.



On March 29, 2021, Credit Suisse conceded that "the loss resulting from this exit . . . could be highly significant and material to our first quarter results." The Financial Times (News - Alert) then pegged Credit Suisse's estimated losses at between $3 billion and $5 billion, more than a year's worth of the Company's net profit. On this news, the market price of Credit Suisse ADRs fell another nearly 20%, from a close of $13.21 per ADR on March 25, 2021 to close at $10.60 per ADR on March 31, 2021.

The complaint filed in this class action alleges that throughout the Class Period, Defendants made materially false and/or misleading statements, as well as failed to disclose material adverse facts about the Company's business, operations, and prospects. Specifically, Defendants failed to disclose to investors: (1) that Credit Suisse's co-mingling of its lending, asset management, and private wealth management functions and imprudently aggressive pursuit of fees had materially diminished the Company's ability to properly assess and manage its own risk exposure to high-risk clients and potential liabilities from client losses; (2) that Credit Suisse had ignored numerous red flags in connection with the Greensill funds, such as suspicious shipment activities during an internal compliance check, and overrode the concerns of the Company's in-house credit-structuring team in packing and selling billions of dollars' worth of Greensill-linked securities to investors; (3) that Credit Suisse had conspired to allow Archegos to covertly take on billions of dollars in excessively concentrated and risky positions by utilizing highly leveraged total return swaps, placing the risk of loss associated with these positions on Credit Suisse and its investors; (4) that Credit Suisse was understating its exposure to risk and thus overstating its Tier 1 capital ratios in its public statements; and (5) that Credit Suisse's internal controls were inadequate to ensure that the Company's potential liability to customers and losses arising from its exposure to customer losses were properly accounted for, managed and disclosed to investors. Follow us for updates on Twitter (News - Alert) : twitter.com/FRC_LAW. If you purchased or otherwise acquired Credit Suisse securities during the Class Period, you may move the Court no later than June 15, 2021 to request appointment as lead plaintiff in this putative class action lawsuit. To be a member of the class action you need not take any action at this time; you may retain counsel of your choice or take no action and remain an absent member of the class action. If you wish to learn more about this class action, or if you have any questions concerning this announcement or your rights or interests with respect to the pending class action lawsuit, please contact Frank R. Cruz, of The Law Offices of Frank R. Cruz, 1999 Avenue of the Stars, Suite 1100, Los Angeles, California 90067 at 310-914-5007, by email to info@frankcruzlaw.com, or visit our website at www.frankcruzlaw.com. If you inquire by email please include your mailing address, telephone number, and number of shares purchased. This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005009/en/

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[June 11, 2021] Explosive Analysis of Negative Online Reviews in the Construction Industry Released

CALGARY, AB, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Over 1,000 online reviews of restoration businesses across all 50 US States were analyzed in the first-ever report that looked at the reasons home construction companies receive bad reviews online. Conducted by software company KnowHow, the findings highlight the common problems that lead to restoration projects failing, and customers taking the company to task online. From minor inconveniences like "no show appointments" to conflicts that require police intervention, the report is the first of its kind to take a broad view of the home construction industry in the US and discover where projects derail. The results of their analysis will be released as an e-book Delivering 5-Star Restoration Experiences: An Analysis of 1,000 Bad Online Reviews in the Restoration Industry this week at https://fivestarrestorer.com. "We conducted this study to deeply understand the common mistakes construction compaies make," said Leighton Healey, Chief Executive Officer of KnowHow, "but boy oh boy did we get more than we bargained for."



In the book, readers will get: Shocking stories of contractors gone wild

Clear, common breakdowns during restoration projects, from delays to poor workmanship

Tangible steps restoration companies can take to eliminate costly bad habits

Insight and takeaways from the industry's biggest names "The majority of the restoration companies in America deliver great customer experiences, and because of this they didn't appear in our report," said Healey. "But you can bet I am going to check the reviews of any company I'm thinking of working with before I invite them into my home. A book like this proves that consumers should do their research, and businesses need to remember that in the age of the internet, they're always accountable to their customers."

ABOUT KNOWHOW: KnowHow is a software tool that helps restoration companies eliminate process, project and workmanship inconsistencies across their workforce, and give their management teams back the 50% of their time. Find out more about KnowHow at https://tryknowhow.com For Inquiries or Press, Contact

Travis Martin

Vice President of Marketing

travis@tryknowhow.com Related Images delivering-5-star-restoration.png

Delivering 5-Star Restoration Experiences Book View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/explosive-analysis-of-negative-online-reviews-in-the-construction-industry-released-301310982.html SOURCE KnowHow

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[June 11, 2021] IIT Bombay announces the launch of its new Centre for Digital Health, with generous support from the Koita Foundation

MUMBAI, India, June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- IIT Bombay has set up the 'Koita Centre for Digital Health' (KCDH) with a generous contribution received from its alumni Rekha and Rizwan Koita, under the aegis of the Koita Foundation. KCDH will be the first of its kind in India, focused on driving academic programs, research and industry collaboration in Digital Health. Improving the quality, accessibility and affordability of healthcare is one of the world's biggest priorities. Digital Health, including healthcare informatics, has a profound impact on the quality of care and efficiency of healthcare delivery. Consequently, there is substantial focus globally on enhancing Digital Health and Informatics. In India too, the launch of the National Digital Health Mission (NDHM) in 2020 is expected to drive Digital Health adoption at a national scale. KCDH's academic and research focus areas include clinical applications (including electronic patient records and medical imaging), healthcare data management (including healthcare data privacy and security), healthcare analytics, healthcare AI /ML, consumer health, public health and public policy. KCDH will offer minor, dual degree, Masters and PhD programs in Healthcare Informatics. KCDH will conduct industry / outreach programs for healthcare and industry professionals in digital health and enable them to act as force-multipliers. Digital Health and Informatics need cross functional expertise - computer science, statistics, AI/ machine learning, bio informatics, and medicine. KCDH will foster strong collaboration with Digital Health Partners - hospitals, medical research institutes, industry. KCDH and its Digital Health Partners will establish joint academic and research programs. In addition, KCDH will actively collaborate with healthcare technology companies, healthcare NGOs and government organizations. KCDH is establishing world-class advisory board consisting of experienced healthcare professionals, academics, healthcare technology and industry veterans. The advisory board will provide overall vision and guidance to KCDH.



"The centre will enable an ecosystem that can help address the healthcare challenges, that have been so glaringly exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Digital Health and Informatics need cross-functional expertise," said Prof. Subhasis Chaudhuri, Director, IIT Bombay. "At KCDH we hope to enable seamless cross-functionality across these streams. We hope this new initiative will open up exciting opportunities for our graduates, including spearheading research, launching startups, and much more." Koita Foundation will work closely with the Centre to help scale its operations and work with Digital Health Partners on joint digital health initiatives (e.g., internships, research programs). Koita Foundation can also provide financial support to Digital Healthcare Partners, as part of its overall commitment to Digital Health. In addition, Koita Foundation will help the Centre establish industry relationships e.g., healthcare technology and medical device companies.

"Digital Health is critical to improve healthcare at scale. We are delighted to support IIT Bombay in establishing the Centre, which can play a pivotal role in improving healthcare in India and across the world", added Mr. Rizwan Koita, Founder Koita Foundation. "We look forward to supporting KCDH establish and drive digital health partnerships and industry collaboration". Mr. Koita is also the co-founder and CEO of CitiusTech (www.citiustech.com), a global healthcare technology company. About Koita Foundation Koita Foundation (www.koitafoundation.org) is a not-for-profit organization focusing on two key areas - NGO Transformation and Digital Health. KF partners with NGOs to digitally transform their business operations using enterprise and mobile technology platforms. We also leverage data and analytics to drive organizational performance, which are key success factors for sustainable growth and impact. Koita Foundation partners with leading academic institutions, hospitals and healthcare technology companies to drive Digital Health in India. About IIT Bombay Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, the second IIT to be set up in 1958, is recognized worldwide as a leader in the field of engineering education and research. The Institute was granted the status of 'Institution of Eminence' by the Ministry of Education (the then Ministry of Human Resources Development) on July 9, 2018. IIT Bombay is reputed for the quality of its faculty and the outstanding caliber of students graduating from its undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. The Institute has 15 academic departments, 32 centres, two schools and four interdisciplinary programmes. Over the last six decades, more than 60,000 engineers and scientists have graduated from the Institute. It is served by more than 681 faculty members considered not only amongst the best within the country but are also highly recognized in the world for achievements in the field of education and research. The Institute is recognized as one of the top centres of academic excellence in the country. Over the years, there has been dynamic and rapid progress at IIT Bombay in both academic and research activities, with a parallel improvement in facilities and infrastructure to match with the best institutions in the world.

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Investment Pool for Chicago Booth's New Venture Challenge Jumps to $1.73 Million

The record investment pool in the 25th annual Edward L. Kaplan, '71, New Venture Challenge (NVC) jumped to $1.73 million this week after investors put additional money into the finalist teams.

The award from the NVC, a program at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business that is run by the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, is the largest in the nation among business school student startup competitions.

The 12 finalist teams received $1.6 million in investment on the day of the finals June 3, a record for the contest and a major increase from last year's investment total of $1 million.







Another $130,000 rolled in during the week that followed, in part as a result of a Second Look event debuted at the request of investors who didn't participate as finals judges.

Funding for startups competing in the NVC has grown markedly over the past several years. Just five years ago, the NVC investment pool totaled $285,000.

The first-place winner this year, Andes STR, which helps people invest in short-term rental properties, received $681,000 in investment.

Find the complete list of winners here.

The NVC, founded in 1996, ranks as a top seed accelerator, alongside Techstars and Y Combinator. It is both a credit-bearing MBA class at Chicago Booth as well as a business plan competition.

Nearly 370 companies that went through the NVC are still active and thriving today, including household names such as Grubhub, Simple Mills and Braintree/Venmo. They have raised more than $1.2 billion, achieved $8.5 billion in mergers and exits and created more than 13,300 jobs.

About the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago

The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation applies world-class business expertise from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business to bring new ideas and breakthrough innovations to market. With a 60-person professional staff, the Polsky Center drives the creation of new ventures and commercial partnerships at the University of Chicago and beyond. As a global leader in entrepreneurship education, the Polsky Center is home of the Edward L. Kaplan, '71, New Venture Challenge, one of the top accelerator programs in the nation. The Polsky Center provides training for aspiring entrepreneurs and those seeking a career in private equity, venture capital, and entrepreneurship through acquisition. Learn more at polsky.uchicago.edu and follow updates on Twitter (News - Alert) @polskycenter.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005445/en/
[June 11, 2021] My Alarm Center Announces Completion of Deleveraging and Recapitalization Transaction Providing it with Significant Capital Available for Acquisitions

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa., June 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- My Alarm Center ("the Company") today announced that it has successfully completed a deleveraging and recapitalization transaction. The completion of this transaction provides a strong and financially flexible balance sheet which enables the Company to continue to grow the business through organic sales and subscriber account acquisitions. My Alarm Center is the 7th largest residential home security provider in the United States. The Company operates a strong regional platform and continues to grow its national presence through an expanding branch network and a robust, diversified acquisition engine. "The Company is backed by strong new ownership including funds managed by Invesco as controlling shareholder. Our new owners share the management team's strategic vision of continuing our core mission to provide an outstanding experience for all of our partners, customers, and employees as well as growing the business through the creation of high-quality profitable accounts." said CEO Amy Kothari. My Alarm Center has been a leader in acquisitions of accounts and businesses in the residential home security ndustry for over 20 years. The Company's acquisition vehicle, Alarm Capital Alliance, is a trusted partner and recognized as a buyer of choice for small and mid-sized security companies. The Company expects to quickly execute on several acquisitions focusing on regions where it has a strong geographic footprint, including the Philadelphia Tri-State area, Atlanta, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, Los Angeles, and Seattle. For more information on the Company's acquisition programs, visit alarmcapital.com or contact Jason Grelle, Senior Vice President of Business Development, at jason.grelle@alarmcapital.com.



About My Alarm CenterWebsite - https://www.alarmcapital.com/

My Alarm Center, headquartered in Newtown Square, PA, was founded in 2000 and is a leading residential home security company that utilizes a unique business model to acquire, install, and manage security alarm contracts. The My Alarm Center family of brands includes Hawk Security Services throughout TX, ACS Security in Los Angeles, Alarm Monitoring Services of Atlanta, and My Alarm Center in PA and Seattle, WA. Prior to the recent debt restructuring process, the Company had achieved over twenty consecutive years of growth. About Alarm Capital Alliance

Alarm Capital Alliance is the acquisition vehicle of My Alarm Center, and it dominates a critical industry niche of providing capital through acquisitions to small and midsized residential home security companies.

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/my-alarm-center-announces-completion-of-deleveraging-and-recapitalization-transaction-providing-it-with-significant-capital-available-for-acquisitions-301311068.html SOURCE My Alarm Center; Alarm Capital Alliance

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[June 11, 2021] GLOBAL TECH INDUSTRIES GROUP, INC. ANNOUNCES LAUNCH OF BETA VERSION OF ITS BEYOND BLOCK PAY DIGITAL WALLET

New York, NY, June 11, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Global Tech Industries Group, Inc. (OTCQB: GTII) (GTII or the Company), www.gtii-us.com, a Nevada corporation, announced today that the beta version of its digital wallet Beyond Block Pay should be available on Monday morning, June 14, 2021 to anyone who is interested in establishing a Beyond Block Pay account. The new website address will be announced by the Company on Monday, June 14th..

Through GTIIs agreement with Alt5 Sigma, Inc. (Alt5), the Beyond Block Pay digital wallet and the launch of its crypto currency exchange Beyond Blockchain is intended to enable customers to trade cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, Litecoin, Ethereum, and Tether), tokens, FX, commodities (physical gold and silver), and other assets, such as fractionalized interests in tokenized fine art, through the Companys digital assets platform. As was previously announced, the Company acquired an original Picasso etching to begin the formation of its planned digital fine arts and collectibles platform. The work, entitled Quatre femmes nues et tete sculptee was executed in 1934 on Montval laid paper and published by A. Vollard, Paris, in 1939 (the Picasso Etching). Also, in early June, the Company completed another fine arts collectible purchase, Bianca Jagger  Birthday Party at Studio 54 a gelatin silver print, taken in 1977. These two acquisitions, in conjunction with GTIIs partnership with Cavalier Galleries, have formed the basis of what we hope will be a significant digital arts portfolio that could appeal to both classic and contemporary fine art collectors. The technologies being providedthrough GTIIs agreement with Alt5 will house any tokenized and fractionalized assets that the Company may distribute to its shareholders.



David Reichman, CEO of GTII commented We are very pleased that we are close to making available the beta version of our Beyond Block Pay digital wallet, which will serve as the entry point to the Companys digital assets platform. We look forward to advancing the roll-out of our platform and enhancing its functionality as we prepare to include our fine arts digital assets on the platform. About Global Tech Industries Group, Inc.: GTII, a publicly traded Company incorporated in the state of Nevada, specializing in the pursuit of acquiring new and innovative technologies.

Please follow our Company at: www.otcmarkets.com/stock/GTII

Safe Harbor Forward-Looking Statements:

This press release may contain forward looking statements that are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that involve risks as well as uncertainties that could cause actual outcomes and results to differ materially from those anticipated or expected, including statements related to the amount and timing of expected revenues related to our financial performance, expected income, distributions, and future growth for upcoming quarterly and annual periods. These risks and uncertainties are further defined in filings and reports by the Company with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Actual results and the timing of certain events could differ materially from those projected in or contemplated by the forward-looking statements due to a number of factors detailed from time to time in our filings with the SEC. Among other matters, the Company may not be able to sustain growth or achieve profitability based upon many factors including but not limited to the risk that we will not be able to find and acquire businesses and assets that will enable us to become profitable. Reference is hereby made to cautionary statements set forth in the Companys most recent SEC filings. We have incurred and will continue to incur significant expenses in our development stage, noting that there is no assurance that we will generate enough revenues to offset those costs in both the near and long term. New lines of business may expose us to additional legal and regulatory costs and unknown exposure(s), the impact of which cannot be predicted at this time. Words such as estimate, project, predict, will, would, should, could, may, might, anticipate, plan, intend, believe, expect, aim, goal, target, objective, likely or similar expressions that convey the prospective nature of events or outcomes generally indicate forward-looking statements. You should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of this press release. Unless legally required, we undertake no obligation to update, modify or withdraw any forward-looking statements, because of new information, future events or otherwise. Mike King

Princeton Research, Inc.

3887 Pacific Street, Las Vegas NV

702.338.2700



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[June 11, 2021] Ipsidy Announces Reverse Stock Split Effective Monday June 14, 2021

LONG BEACH, N.Y., June 11, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ipsidy Inc. (www.ipsidy.com) [OTCQB:IDTY] a leading provider of Identity as a Service (IDaaS), delivering a suite of secure, mobile, biometric identity verification solutions, today announced that effective June 14, 2021 it will complete a 1-for-30 reverse stock split of its common stock (Reverse Stock Split). At the Annual Meeting of stockholders of the Company held on March 22, 2021, the stockholders approved an amendment to our certificate of incorporation to effect a Reverse Stock Split with the exact ratio to be set by our Board of directors. The Board resolved to set the Reverse Stock Split at the ratio of 1-for-30, and filed an Amendment to the Restated Certificate of Incorporation with the Secretary of State in Delaware. As a result, on Monday, June 14, 2021 every 30 issued shares of Common Stock will automatically be combined into one share of Common Stock. We believe this change will make it easier for investors to trade in our stock and is a necessary step before the Companys common stock can be admitted to listing on a national exchange. Shares of the Companys common stock will be assigned a new CUSIP number (46264C206) and are expected to begin trading on a split-adjusted basis on Monday, June 14, 2021. The Companys common stock will trade under a new and temporary ticker symbol IDTYD for a period of 20 business days including the effective date of the Reverse Stock Split. No fractional shares will be issued and any fractional shares resulting from the Reverse Stock Split will be rounded up to the nearest whole share. Stockholders holding shares of IDTY common stock at registered brokerage firms, should consult their broker for further information on their account. Stockholders who hold shares with our transfer agent will receive information in the mail about their accounts over the next few days. Further information about how the reverse stock split affects the individual holdings of investors, whether holders of certificates for Common Stock, or warrants, options, or notes convertible into Common Stock will be provided to investors following the effective date. About Ipsidy: Ipsidy Inc. (OTCQB:IDTY) ( www.ipsidy.com ), Ipsidy is Digital Identity. Our mission is to ensure our customers know the identity of their users with biometric certainty. Our Identity as a Service (IDaaS) platform delivers a suite of secure, mobile, facial biometric identity solutions, available to any vertical, anywhere. Our robust identity verification and authentication solutions work great on their own, but even better together to help answer everyday questions: Who is applying for a loan? Who is sending money? Who is requesting an account change? Ipsidy is committed to providing seamless, accurate and speedy identity solutions that establish security and trust in todays digital world.



Ipsidy is headquartered in New York and has operating subsidiaries: MultiPay in Colombia, www.multipay.com.co; Cards Plus in South Africa, www.cardsplus.co.za ; Ipsidy Enterprises in the U.K. and Ipsidy Peru S.A.C. Further information on Ipsidy can be found at www.ipsidy.com or contact us at sales@ipsidy.com . Contacts:

Ipsidy Inc. Phillip Kumnick, Chairman & CEO phillipkumnick@ipsidy.com Graham N. Arad, General Counsel grahamarad@ipsidy.com +1 (516) 274-8700 Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements. Information contained in this announcement may include forward-looking statements. All statements other than statements of historical facts included herein, including, without limitation, those regarding the financial position, business strategy, plans and objectives of management for future operations of both Ipsidy and its business partners, future service launches with customers, the outcome of pilots and new initiatives and customer pipeline are forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on a number of assumptions regarding Ipsidy present and future business strategies, and the environment in which Ipsidy expects to operate in the future, which assumptions may or may not be fulfilled in practice. Implementation of some or all of the new services referred to is subject to regulatory or other third party approvals. Actual results may vary materially from the results anticipated by these forward-looking statements as a result of a variety of risk factors, including the risk that implementation, adoption and offering of the service by customers, consumers and others may take longer than anticipated, or may not occur at all; changes in laws, regulations and practices; changes in domestic and international economic and political conditions, the as yet uncertain impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and others. Additional risks may arise with respect to commencing operations in new countries and regions, of which Ipsidy is not fully aware at this time. See the Companys Annual Report Form 10-K for the Fiscal Year ended December 31, 2020 filed at www.sec.gov for other risk factors which investors should consider. These forward-looking statements speak only as to the date of this announcement and cannot be relied upon as a guide to future performance. Ipsidy expressly disclaims any obligation or undertaking to disseminate any updates or revisions to any forward-looking statements contained in this announcement to reflect any changes in its expectations with regard thereto or any change in events, conditions or circumstances on which any statement is based.



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[June 11, 2021] Bank of America Declares Preferred Stock Dividends

Bank of America Corporation today announced the Board of Directors has authorized regular cash dividends on the outstanding shares or depositary shares of the following series of preferred stock:







Series of Preferred Stock Dividend per Share

or Depositary Share1 Record Date Payment Date 7.25% Non-Cumulative

Perpetual Convertible

Preferred Stock, Series L $18.125 July 1 July 30 5.875% Non-Cumulative

Preferred Stock, Series HH $0.3671875 July 1 July 26 Fixed-to-Floating Rate Non-

Cumulative Preferred Stock,

Series MM $21.50 July 1 July 28 4.375% Non-Cumulative

Preferred Stock, Series NN $0.2734375 July 15 August 3 4.125% Non-Cumulative

Preferred Stock, Series PP $0.2578125 July 15 August 2

1 Each series of preferred stock, other than Series L, is represented by depositary shares. Dividend payments are made on a quarterly basis for each series of preferred stock, other than Series MM, for which dividends are paid on a semi-annual basis. Bank of America

Bank of America is one of the world's leading financial institutions, serving individual consumers, small and middle-market businesses and large corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management and other financial and risk management products and services. The company provides unmatched convenience in the United States, serving approximately 66 million consumer and small business clients with approximately 4,300 retail financial centers, including approximately 2,700 lending centers, 2,600 financial centers with a Consumer Investment Financial Solutions Advisor and approximately 2,400 business centers; approximately 17,000 ATMs; and award-winning digital banking with approximately 40 million active users, including approximately 31 million mobile users. Bank of America is a global leader in wealth management, corporate and investment banking and trading across a broad range of asset classes, serving corporations, governments, institutions and individuals around the world. Bank of America offers industry leading support to approximately 3 million small business households through a suite of innovative, easy-to-use online products and services. The company serves clients through operations across the United States, its territories and approximately 35 countries. Bank of America Corporation stock (NYSE: BAC) is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. For more Bank of America news, including dividend announcements and other important information, visit the Bank of America newsroom. Click here to register for news email alerts. www.bankofamerica.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210611005461/en/

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[June 11, 2021] Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP, a Leading Securities Fraud Law Firm, Announces Investigation of RLX Technology Inc. (RLX) on Behalf of Investors

Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP ("GPM"), a leading national shareholder rights law firm, today announced that it has commenced an investigation on behalf of RLX Technology Inc. ("RLX" or the "Company") (NYSE: RLX) investors concerning the Company's possible violations of the federal securities laws. If you suffered a loss on your RLX investments or would like to inquire about potentially pursuing claims to recover your loss under the federal securities laws, you can submit your contact information at https://www.glancylaw.com/cases/rlx-technology-inc/. You can also contact Charles H. Linehan, of GPM at 310-201-9150, Toll-Free at 888-773-9224, or via email at shareholders@glancylaw.com to learn more about your rights. RLX purports to be the "No. 1 branded e-vapor company in China," which the Company claims is its "largest potential market." In January 2021, RLX conducted its initial public offering (the "IPO"), selling approximately 116.5 million American Depositary Shares ("ADSs" or "shares") at $12 per ADS, raising approximately $1.4 billion in gross proceeds. On March 22, 2021, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology posted draft regulations confirming thate-cigarettes and new tobacco products would be regulated similar to traditional tobacco offerings.



On this news, RLX's share price fell $9.31, or 48%, to close at $10.15 per share on March 22, 2021, thereby injuring investors. Then, on June 2, 2021, the Company announced its first quarter 2021 financial results, reporting only a 48% increase in net revenues quarter over quarter, and second quarter guidance suggesting that its gross margin would "remain steady."

On this news, RLX's share price fell $0.97, or nearly 9%, to close at $9.90 per share on June 4, 2021, thereby damaging investors further. The Company's shares have traded as low as $7.89 per ADS, or 32% below the IPO price. Follow us for updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. Whistleblower Notice: Persons with non-public information regarding RLX should consider their options to aid the investigation or take advantage of the SEC (News - Alert) Whistleblower Program. Under the 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 Charles H. Linehan at 310-201-9150 or 888-773-9224 or email shareholders@glancylaw.com. About GPM Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP is a premier law firm representing investors and consumers in securities litigation and other complex class action litigation. ISS Securities Class Action Services has consistently ranked GPM in its annual SCAS Top 50 Report. In 2018, GPM was ranked a top five law firm in number of securities class action settlements, and a top six law firm for total dollar size of settlements. With four offices across the country, GPM's nearly 40 attorneys have won groundbreaking rulings and recovered billions of dollars for investors and consumers in securities, antitrust, consumer, and employment class actions. GPM's lawyers have handled cases covering a wide spectrum of corporate misconduct including cases involving financial restatements, internal control weaknesses, earnings management, fraudulent earnings guidance and forward looking statements, auditor misconduct, insider trading, violations of FDA regulations, actions resulting in FDA and DOJ investigations, and many other forms of corporate misconduct. GPM's attorneys have worked on securities cases relating to nearly all industries and sectors in the financial markets, including, energy, consumer discretionary, consumer staples, real estate and REITs, financial, insurance, information technology, health care, biotech, cryptocurrency, medical devices, and many more. GPM's past successes have been widely covered by leading news and industry publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Reuters (News - Alert), the Associated Press, Barron's, Investor's Business Daily, Forbes, and Money. 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/20210611005451/en/

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NASHVILLE, Tenn.  Today, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds joined with U. S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) in calling for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing regarding the crisis at the Southern border and the ensuing flow of unaccompanied minors to states.

We are writing to support your continued calls for the Senate Judiciary Committee to hold an oversight hearing regarding the current border crisis, the governors wrote in their letter to Senator Grassley. We believe this hearing should also address the Biden Administrations failure to provide notice and transparency in their movement of unaccompanied migrant children into states.

Both Iowa and Tennessee have faced a series of disturbing incidents involving the transport of unaccompanied children into respective states, under the cover of darkness, with no advance notification, consent or plan from federal partners.



These experiences sow seeds of mistrust in our communities, and work to intentionally subvert the will of the people for a secure border and a clear, lawful immigration process, the governors wrote in their letter to Senator Grassley. Additionally, the lack of transparency places an undue burden on our law enforcement partners to determine whether these types of flights constitute a criminal act of human trafficking or the federally-sponsored transport of vulnerable children.



Both Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn and Senator Bill Hagerty support calls for a hearing.

The Biden Administration is secretly transporting migrants to communities throughout the United States, including in Tennessee, without the knowledge of or permission of the communities involved, said Senator Blackburn. President Bidens failed immigration policies have turned every town into a border town. The Senate Judiciary Committee should immediately hold an oversight hearing on the crisis at our southern border. I applaud Governor Lee for his efforts to protect our state and the people who are being trafficked by the Mexican cartels.

Tennessee and states all across the country are seeing the real, tangible results of President Bidens total failure to solve the crisis at the bordera crisis of his own makingwith the systematic resettling of migrants in our communities, said Senator Hagerty. Mayors, sheriffs, and governors are on the front lines of combatting increased human trafficking and drug smuggling, as well as addressing strains on public resources. I applaud Governors Lee and Reynolds for continuing to draw attention to these matters, asking questions, and urging Congress to perform its proper oversight function.

The full letter may be viewed here.
MURFREESBORO, Tenn.  Rutherford Countys JROTC program teamed up with the Tennessee Army National Guard to host the JROTC Cadet Leadership Challenge at various locations throughout Murfreesboro from June 3-10.

CLC is a weeklong course designed to challenge students physically and mentally while incorporating JROTC principles and values.

High school sophomores, juniors, and seniors are provided a safe military setting to develop leadership, teamwork, and citizenship skills, while being engaged with peers in activities aimed at building confidence and discipline.

David Escobar, an upcoming senior at La Vergne High School and JROTC cadet, recently enlisted in the Tennessee Army National Guard as a health care specialist with plans to further his education and start a military career.

The JROTC program has given me the chance to get out of my comfort zone and make connections, said Escobar.

Training included field survival skills, rafting, canoeing, rappelling, water survival, orienteering, rope bridging, and a Field Leadership Reaction Course. Cadets also received a tour of Middle Tennessee State University and a seminar on scholarship opportunities. Following that, there were intramural competitions in various sports, a flag retirement ceremony, and a pass in review graduation.

The men and women that help mentor the students consist of Senior ROTC Cadre from Middle Tennessee State University and Tennessee Army National Guard Soldiers. I enjoy the opportunity to mentor and influence tomorrows leaders, said Staff Sgt. Mistee Harris, Tennessee Army National Guard Recruiter.

Organized under the authority of the 1916 National Defense Act, the Rutherford County High Schools Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps program was first established in 1967 at Central High School. Since then, the program has expanded into eight area high schools with Rockvale High School opening in the 2019-2020 school year.

We currently have 1,265 students enrolled and we expect that number to rise next semester, said Lt. Col. Russell Rector, Senior Director for Rutherford Countys JROTC.

A JROTC cadet is under no obligation to join the military. The JROTC program is a credited course given during regular school hours that prepares students for life, not the military, such as developing winning habits, job interviewing, financial planning, test taking, and overcoming fears.

The impact of this camp can be measured in the success stories of overcoming fear, said Sgt. 1st Class Jesus Merino, Senior Leader for the JROTC in Rutherford County. Learning to make lifelong friendships and trust others by allowing them to help.
ANDERSON COUNTY, SR 61 Bridge over Norfolk Southern Railway and Market Street in Clinton: SR 61 East is reduced to one lane through this bridge repair project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, changing conditions, lane shifts, and use extreme caution through this area.

ANDERSON COUNTY, US 25/SR 9 Bridge over Clinch River between SR 61 and Carden Farm Drive: SR 9 northbound is reduced to one lane approaching the bridge as crews continue work in this area. Motorists should be alert for workers present, changing conditions, lane shifts, and use extreme caution through this bridge construction project.

BLOUNT COUNTY, US 129 North and South between SR 35 Hall Road and Tyson Boulevard: Motorists should be alert for workers present, possible lane closures and brief stoppages of traffic through this roadway construction project. For project information, go to https://www.tn.gov/tdot/projects/projects-region-1/sr-115-alcoa-highway-hall-road-to-tyson-blvd.html

BLOUNT COUNTY, SR 335 Hunt Road between Ambrose Street and Ramsay Street: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures at various times as crews install utilities through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present directing traffic and use extreme caution through this area.

BLOUNT COUNTY, SR 33 between Foothills Mall Drive and Henry Street: Motorists should be alert for possible nightly lane closures between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning through this intersection improvement construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, changed conditions, and use extreme caution through this area.

CAMPBELL COUNTY, I-75 North and South between Mile Markers 135 and 142: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning through this project. Motorists should be alert for slowed or stopped traffic, expect potential delays and use extreme caution through this area.

CAMPBELL COUNTY, I-75 North near Mile Marker 143: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning on Sundays through Thursdays through this project. Motorists should be alert for slowed or stopped traffic, expect potential delays and use extreme caution through this area.

CAMPBELL COUNTY, SR 63 between Myers Lane and Frontier Road/Woodson Lane: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures between the hours of 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and/or 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for slowed or stopped traffic, expect potential delays and use extreme caution through this area.

CARTER COUNTY, US 19E/SR 37 Bridge over the Doe River and Riverview Road: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures through this bridge repair project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slowed traffic, and use extreme caution in this area.

CLAIBORNE COUNTY, SR 33 between Irish Cemetery Road and Hardin Street: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures through this area between the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. as crews install traffic signal detection loops in the roadway. Motorists should be alert for workers present and use extreme caution through this area.

CLAIBORNE COUNTY, SR 63 between Old Town Creek and US 25E/SR 32: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, expect delays and use extreme caution through this area.

GRAINGER COUNTY, US 11W/SR 1 between Promiseland Road and Circle Loop: Motorists should be alert for possible daily lane closures between the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. through this resurfacing project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduced speeds, expect possible delays, and use caution through this area.

GRAINGER COUNTY, SR 375 between Helton Road and US 25/SR 32: Motorists should be alert for possible daily lane closures between the hours of 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. through this resurfacing project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduced speeds, expect possible delays, and use caution through this area.

GREENE COUNTY, US 11E/SR 34 both directions between Blue Springs Parkway and Forest Road in Mosheim: Motorists should be alert for lane closures and lane shifts through this area for bridge repair operations. These lane closures will remain in place 24/7 until repairs are complete. Motorists should be alert for workers present, changing conditions, and use extreme caution in this area. This bridge repair project is estimated to be complete on or before October 31, 2021.

HAMBLEN COUNTY, SR 34 near Commerce Blvd.: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slowed traffic, and use extreme caution in this area.

HAMBLEN COUNTY, SR 160 near Commerce Blvd.: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slowed traffic, and use extreme caution in this area.

HAMBLEN COUNTY, SR 343 between US 11E and East Main Street: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary road closures with detours between the hours of 7 p.m. and 5 a.m. the following morning as utility crews perform work in this area. Motorists should be alert for workers present, follow signed detours, and use extreme caution in this area.

JOHNSON COUNTY, SR 167 at Log Mile 7.5: Motorists should be alert for intermittent roadway work through this slide repair project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slowed traffic, and use extreme caution in this area.

KNOX COUNTY, I-140 East and West between Mile Markers 0 and 8.9: Through Thursday, June 10, 2021, motorists should be alert for possible mobile lane closures between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning as crews perform roadway maintenance activities. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow traffic, and use extreme caution in this area.

KNOX COUNTY, I-640 East and West between Mile Markers 0 and 3.6: Beginning Sunday, June 13, 2021, motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures nightly between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning through this milling and resurfacing project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slowed traffic, expect potential delays and use extreme caution through this area.

KNOX COUNTY, I-640 West between Mile Markers 8 and 3: On Thursday, June 10, 2021, motorists should be alert for possible rolling roadblocks to occur between the hours of 10:30 p.m. and 1 a.m. the following morning as crews perform attenuator repairs. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow or stopped traffic, and use extreme caution in this area.

KNOX COUNTY, Various Interstates through Knoxville: On Thursday, June 10, 2021, motorists should be alert for possible mobile lane closures between the hours of 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning as crews perform roadway maintenance activities. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow or stopped traffic, and use extreme caution in this area.

KNOX COUNTY, US 129/SR 115 Alcoa Highway between Topside Road and Maloney Road: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures and lane shifts as crews perform work through this project. Motorists should be alert for new traffic patterns. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduce speed and use extreme caution through this area. For project information, go to https://www.tn.gov/tdot/projects/projects-region-1/sr-115-alcoa-highway-little-river-to-maloney.html

KNOX COUNTY, US 129/SR 115 Alcoa Highway between Maloney Road and Woodson Drive: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures and lane shifts as crews perform work through this project. Motorists should be alert for new traffic patterns. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduce speed and use extreme caution through this area. For project information, go to https://www.tn.gov/tdot/projects/projects-region-1/sr-115-alcoa-highway-maloney-to-woodson.html

KNOX COUNTY, US 441 Broadway Viaduct between Jackson Avenue and Fifth Avenue: US 441 Broadway Viaduct over Norfolk Southern Railroad in downtown Knoxville is closed for bridge replacement. The Broadway Viaduct will be closed to all traffic for the duration of the project. During the closure, Broadway will be closed

from the intersection of Oak Avenue, Worlds Fair Park, and Jackson Avenue to just north of the Depot Avenue intersection. Depot Avenue will also be closed. These closures will ensure the safety of workers and motorists as crews demolish the old bridge and reconstruct the new bridge. Primary and Local Detour Routes around the bridge closure will be in place. For detour routes and project information, go to https://www.tn.gov/tdot/projects/projects-region-1/broadway-viaduct.html

KNOX COUNTY, US 441/SR 33 Henley Street between W. Hill Avenue and W. Main Avenue: Motorists should be alert for possible nightly lane closures between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning through this resurfacing project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduced speeds, expect possible delays, and use caution through this area.

KNOX COUNTY, US 441/SR 71 Chapman Highway between Nixon Road and Martin Mill Pike: Motorists should be alert for possible nightly lane closures between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning through this resurfacing project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduced speeds, expect possible delays, and use caution through this area.

KNOX COUNTY, US 441/SR 71 Chapman Highway between Highland View Drive and Burnett Lane: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures daily between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers and equipment present, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution through this area. For project information, go to https://www.tn.gov/tdot/projects/projects-region-1/chapman-highway-evans-to-burnett.html

KNOX COUNTY, SR 62 Western Avenue between Copper Kettle and Texas Avenue: Motorists should be alert for possible nightly lane closures between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning through this resurfacing project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduced speeds, expect possible delays, and use caution through this area.

KNOX COUNTY, SR 162 Pellissippi Parkway West at Hardin Valley Road: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduced speeds, expect possible delays, and use caution through this area.

KNOX COUNTY, SR 332 Concord Road between Turkey Creek Road and Northshore: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures daily between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. and new traffic patterns through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution through this area. For project information, go to https://www.tn.gov/tdot/projects/projects-region-1/sr-332-proposed-widening.html

LOUDON COUNTY, I-75 North and South between Mile Markers 79 and 84: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning through this resurfacing project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow traffic, expect delays, and use extreme caution through this area.

LOUDON COUNTY, SR 2 between Loudon Middle School and Carter Street: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures daily between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduced speeds, expect possible delays, and use caution through this area.

LOUDON COUNTY, US 321/SR 73 between I-40 and Simpson Road: Motorists should be alert for possible nightly lane closures between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning through this resurfacing project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow or stopped traffic, and use extreme caution in this area.

LOUDON COUNTY, SR 73 between McGhee Blvd. and 2nd Avenue: On Monday, June 14, 2021 and Tuesday, June 15, 2021, motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning as crews perform overhead sign foundation work. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduced speeds, expect possible delays, and use caution through this area.

LOUDON COUNTY, US 411/SR 33 between Blount County Line and Monroe County Line: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures daily between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. through this resurfacing project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow or stopped traffic, and use extreme caution in this area.

ROANE COUNTY, I-40 West between Mile Markers 340 and 344: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures at various times through this slope stabilization project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduced speeds, lane shifts, and use extreme caution through this area.

ROANE COUNTY, I-40 East near Mile Marker 353: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning as crews set portable barrier rails through this slope stabilization project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow traffic, and use extreme caution

through this area.

SCOTT COUNTY, US 27/SR 29 between Industrial Lane and Second Avenue: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, expect possible delays, and use caution through this area.

SEVIER COUNTY, SR 71 between US 411 and Macon Lane: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures daily between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers and equipment present, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution through this area.

SULLIVAN COUNTY, I-26 East and West between Mile Markers 5.3 and 9.9: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures through this resurfacing project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow or stopped traffic, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution in this area.

SULLIVAN COUNTY, West State Street (US 11W/SR 1) near Island Road, N.E. in Bristol: Motorists should be alert for possible and closures between the hours of 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. as crews construct a median crossover and turn lanes in this area. Motorists should be alert for workers and equipment present, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution through this area.

SULLIVAN COUNTY, SR 36 at SR 126: Motorists should be alert for possible nightly lane closures between the hours of 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following morning through this intersection improvement project. Motorists should be alert for workers and equipment present, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution through this area.

SULLIVAN COUNTY, SR 93 from near I-26 (Log Mile 6.2) to near US 11W/ SR 1 (Log Mile 11.3) : Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures through this resurfacing and bridge repair project. Motorists should be alert for workers and equipment present, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution through this area.

SULLIVAN COUNTY, SR 126 Memorial Boulevard at SR 36: Motorists should be alert for lane reductions through this intersection improvement project. Motorists should be alert for workers and equipment present, changed traffic patterns, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution through this area.

SULLIVAN COUNTY, SR 355 between Log Miles 1 and 3: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures daily between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers and equipment present, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution through this area.

UNICOI COUNTY, I-26 East and West near Mile Marker 33: Motorists should be alert for lane closures as I-26 will be reduced to one lane in each direction around the clock through this bridge repair project. Wide loads should follow signed detour routes. Motorists should be alert for workers present, slow traffic, and use extreme caution through this area. This project is estimated to be complete on or before August 31, 2021.

UNICOI COUNTY, SR 81 between Log Miles 0 and 1.8: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures daily between the hours of 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. through this resurfacing and safety project. Motorists should be alert for workers and equipment present, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution through this area.

UNICOI COUNTY, SR 107 between 6th Street and SR 173: Motorists should be alert for possible lane closures daily between the hours of 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. through this resurfacing and safety project. Motorists should be alert for workers and equipment present, expect potential delays, and use extreme caution through this area.

WASHINGTON COUNTY, SR 93 between Davis Road and Fire Hall Road: Motorists should be alert for possible temporary lane closures through this construction project. Motorists should be alert for workers present, reduced speeds, and use caution through this area.

For information on statewide interstate construction motorists can access the Tennessee Department of Transportation SmartWay website at https://smartway.tn.gov/traffic

TDOT is now on Twitter. For up to the minute traffic information in Knoxville and the Tri-Cities follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/knoxville511. For statewide travel information follow www.twitter.com/TN511
NASHVILLE --- The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency is now accepting entries for its 2022 photo contest for publication in Tennessee Wildlifes annual calendar. All interested photographers are invited to submit up to 10 of their best photos on fishing, hunting, boating, and wildlife species native to Tennessee.

In the past, the calendar had been the summer issue of Tennessee Wildlife magazine and began in August. The new format will begin in January 2022 and run through December 2022.

Photographers must submit their photo entries by the September 30, 2021 deadline. Photos must be horizontal (landscape), in JPEG format, and submitted online or by CD. They must be sized to print no smaller that 8-1/2x11 and resolution should be at least 300 pixels/inch.

If a photo is selected for the calendar edition, the photographer will receive a cash stipend of $60.

Photographers must be sure to provide their name, address, phone number, and e-mail address with their disk. Disks cannot be returned.

Entries may be mailed to:

Tennessee Wildlife

Calendar Issue

Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency

5107 Edmondson Pike

Nashville, TN 37211

Tennessee Wildlife is the official magazine for the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency. Subscription rates are $10 for one year, $17 for two years and $25 for three years.

---TWRA---
Don't misconstrue our lead image.

Sometimes fire can be cleansing . . . For instance, consider the ancient myth of the phoenix rising from the ashes of its predecessor.



To wit and with special thanks to KICK-ASS TKC READERS for noticing this bit of local legislation first . . .

COUNCIL LADY MELISSA ROBINSON RECENTLY SUBMITTED AN EPIC RESOLUTION WITH NEW "PRINCIPLES" TO GUIDE KANSAS CITY POLICE!!!



Credit where it's due . . . Mayor Q is exceptionally cagey when he talks out of both sides of his mouth on the topic of policing. In fact, Mayor Q habitually shares a reasonable perspective with gullible MSM middle-class reporters AND THEN saves his more "provocative" ideas for protests or East side community meetings where his audience is sadly limited.

And so, TKC must commend Council Lady Robinson for at least publishing and sharing her intentions for the record at 12th & Oak.

A few highlights that stand out in this new mandate . . .

CATCHING CRIMINALS SHOULD NOT BE THE 1ST PRIORITY OF KANSAS CITY POLICE?!?!

Right off the bat that's a bold start and something that might be disputed by victims of crime.

More . . .

"Promoting alternatives to arrest and incarceration, addressing the root causes of crime," is an ongoing KCMO theme over the past few weeks.

It's unclear how much police training council lady Robinson has attained but her new rules will now determine how police officers protect themselves and the public on local streets . . .

"To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public cooperation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective."

The last point is interesting and shouldn't be lost in all of the verbiage . . . Council lady Robinson judges police on the prevention of crime . . . And, seemingly, she advocates against a heavy police presence on local streets . . .

"To recognize always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them."

Accordingly and for a good laugh . . .

Read this EPIC screed and a first glimpse at what "local control" will look like for Kansas City . . .



RESOLUTION NO. 210510



Expressing the City Councils support for policing within the City of Kansas City, Missouri, and in all communities across the nation, to be built upon principles designed to protect human rights, reduce violence and addiction, and build public respect for, and trust in, law enforcement.



WHEREAS, the first goal of policing should be the prevention of crime and not catching criminals with the intent to punish citizens or suppress their rights; prioritizing low crime rates over high arrest rates; and



WHEREAS, the key to preventing crime is earning public support and building a culture where every community member believes they have a shared responsibility to prevent crime, as if volunteer members of the police force themselves; a culture that can only materialize if the community supports and trusts the police; and



WHEREAS, a police force can earn public support by respecting community principles through hard work to build and keep a reputation of enforcing the laws impartially, hiring officers who represent and understand the community, and using force only as a last resort; and



WHEREAS, the Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP) is a nonprofit organization composed of police, prosecutors, judges, corrections officials, and other law enforcement officials advocating for drug policy and criminal justice reforms that will make communities safer by focusing law enforcement resources on the greatest threats to public safety, promoting alternatives to arrest and incarceration, addressing the root causes of crime, and working toward healing police-community relations; and



WHEREAS, LEAP advocates for the adoption of core ideas and principles that are critical to the success of policing in America and stem from the principles of Sir Robert Peel (the Father of Modern Policing); and



WHEREAS, the City Council of Kansas City is desirous that those same principles be reflected in policing operations in Kansas City, Missouri; NOW, THEREFORE,



BE IT RESOLVED BY THE COUNCIL OF KANSAS CITY:



Section 1. That the City Council expresses its support for policing in the City of Kansas City, Missouri, and in all communities across the nation, to be built upon the following principles:



a. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.



b. To recognize always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behavior, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.



c. To recognize always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing cooperation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.



d. To recognize always that the extent to which the cooperation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.



e. To seek and preserve public favor, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humor, and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.



f. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public cooperation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.



g. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.



h. To recognize always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.



i. To recognize always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.



##################################



You decide . . .


First and foremost, TKC is not a doctor despite 6 years of pre-med at UMKC amid (worthless) grad degree pursuits in communication studies.



The local angle is that the KC area keeps pushing the COVID vaxx in a public health effort that is totally supported by most elected officials. For the most part this is a "white hat" endeavor and has earned enthusiastic public support.

Check the link . . .



6 months after U.S. authorized COVID-19 vaccine, KC hospitals continue proactive approach OVERLAND PARK, Kan. - Friday marks six months since the United States Food and Drug Administration gave Pfizer emergency-use authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine. In that time, Truman Medical Centers University Health has administered roughly 122,000 vaccines. It averaged about 25,000 per month at first, but that number is now closer to 10,000 per month.

Meanwhile, there is more aggressive debate about the vaxx that is both serious and hilarious. Here's a guide to that conversation without judgement or advice to locals who have to make their own health choices for themselves and loved ones . . .



More young adults than expected have reported heart inflammation following Covid-19 vaccination A higher-than-usual number of cases of a type of heart inflammation has been reported following Covid-19 vaccination, especially among young men following their second dose of an mRNA vaccine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday.

CDC plans "emergency meeting" on rare heart inflammation following COVID-19 vaccines The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Thursday that it will convene an "emergency meeting" of its advisers on June 18th to discuss rare but higher-than-expected reports of heart inflammation following doses of the mRNA-based Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 So far, the CDC has identified 226 reports that might meet the agency's "working case definition" of myocarditis and pericarditis following the shots, the agency disclosed Thursday.

Heart inflammation in young men higher than expected after Pfizer, Moderna vaccines -U.S. CDC A higher-than-expected number of young men have experienced heart inflammation after their second dose of the mRNA COVID-19 shots from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, according to data from two vaccine safety monitoring systems, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Thursday.

Tucker Carlson: Young people are being forced to get COVID vaccine, but it may harm them more than COVID In January, Israel became one of the first countries in the world to give the new coronavirus vaccine to young people. At the time, Israel's Education Ministry said the vaccine was necessary so that students could sit for in-person exams. Schools mandated the shot; kids got it. So what happened next?

Anti-Vaxx Doctor Tells Ohio Legislature Vaccines Magnetize People in Off-the-Rails Hearing A hearing held by the Ohio state legislature on vaccination mandates took a turn for the worse Tuesday when a notorious anti-vaccine activist testified that vaccines magnetized recipients' bodies.

SEE IT: Ohio nurse hilariously fails to prove COVID vaccine makes people magnetic, key falls from her neck Perhaps she's just attracted to conspiracies. An Ohio nurse attempted to prove that COVID-19 vaccines contain "magnetic vaccine crystals" but failed in comedic fashion Wednesday in Ohio's state capitol. Registered nurse Joanna Overholt asked lawmakers to explain why a key stuck her to her body, before jabbing it into her chest, the Ohio Capital Journal reported.

You decide . . .


Sadly, today starts with a bang and if a spate of deadly shooting this week is any indication . . . Local gunfire, violence and crime will only get worse.



Here's a morning note with a look and a hope that our blog community will stay safe this weekend . . . Read more:


The start of what will be a tragic tradition this Summer . . . Read more:



Kansas City Mayor Honors 15-Year-Old Shooting Victim, 'One Of Too Many Young People Who Have Died' Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas spoke at Sycamore Park on Friday to remember a 15-year-old who died in a shooting there earlier this week. Terrell Bell, a Ruskin High School student, was shot and killed at 109th and Sycamore Terrace on Tuesday.
Postscript to a Kansas City South side tragedy and a reminder that the NEXTGEN confronts and exceptionally violent Summer.



The latest from police . . .



Arrest in Homicide at 108th and Sycamore - One juvenile has been arrested and charged in regard to this homicide. Any further inquiries in regard to this arrest should go through the Jackson County Family Court.

Tonight's memorial . . .



100 gather to honor 15-year-old shooting victim Terrell Bell KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Dozens of family and friends gathered Thursday to honor the life of a 15-year-old boy whose life was ended due to gun violence. Terell Bell was shot and killed on Tuesday at 109th Street and Sycamore Terrace, near Sycamore Park.

More on the arrest . . .

Police say juvenile arrested and charged in killing of 15-year-old at Sycamore Park in south Kansas City by: Brian Dulle Posted: / Updated: KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Kansas City, Missouri Police is reporting that a juvenile has been arrested and charged in connection to the shooting death of 15-year-old Terrell Bell. Officers responded to the shooting around 2:30 p.m. Tuesday in the area of 108th and Sycamore.
It was fun while it lasted but now the illusion of the post-COVID "work from home" future has been myth-busted by cruel reality.



To wit . . .



KANSAS CITY CERNER LAYOFFS CONFIRM THAT TELEWORKERS ARE EASIER TO CUT AT THE OUTSET OF HARSH TIMES!!!



Here's the word from a TOP ECHELON INSIDER who sent this insightful perspective our way . . .

"If you can do your job from home, then somebody from India or Southeast Asia can probably do it even cheaper. The telework model is a great idea and it has a HUGE potential upside to save on travel expenses and the cost of doing biz. However . . . When we're talking about businesses cutting back, there tends to be an 'out of sight, out of mind' component and people who aren't in the office will always get less consideration. It's cruel after this horrible pandemic but nobody said the corporate world was kind."



Moreover . . .

Let's be honest and admit that a great deal of American corporate infrastructure is comprised of B.S. jobs that don't really contribute to the bottom line.

Despite so many myths of capitalism that rule local media and manual laborers with low self-esteem and too much respect for authority . . . The reality is that a great deal of corporate hiring is based on cronyism and class discrimination.

And so, once again, Cerner leads a cultural shift in Kansas City that signals a "new normal" for the local oligarchy and even more insecurity for the middle-class.

Check-it . . .



North Kansas City-based Cerner lays off 500 employees globally, including some locally NORTH KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Cerner Corp., Kansas City's largest employer, says it has laid off hundreds employees globally. Spokesperson Misti Preston said 500 associates were let go globally out of the company's 26,000-person workforce. A portion of those layoffs affect Kansas City, Preston confirmed Thursday, but it was not clear how many local employees were laid off.

Cerner confirms layoffs in Kansas City as part of 'company transformation' Cerner - Kansas City's largest private employer - confirmed through a spokesperson on Thursday that it is going through a reduction of its workforce.Misti Preston, Cerner's director of external communications and public relations for Cerner, said "today's event includes 500 associates out of our 26k+ global associate base.

Business expert breaks down cause, impact of Cerner layoffs NORTH KANSAS CITY, MO (KCTV) - The Cerner Corporation announced Thursday that it is laying off hundreds of people. Employees contacted KCTV5 indicating they received their notices. Cerner touts itself as the KC-metro's biggest employer and says it will still be after this.

Developing . . .
There's only one aspect of this debate that deserves a bit of scrutiny . . . Critical race theory isn't anything new. In fact, it's the dominant mode of liberal arts scholarship amid American universities.

And so, there's an argument to be made that this kind of training actually preps youngsters for college life.



About the objections . . .



In a recent email to supporters, Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, a Republican candidate for governor, called critical race theory a radical new curriculum and called on the U.S. Department of Education to withdraw its priorities to teach it in classrooms.

Its the Far Lefts new strategy to teach our students that they should be ashamed of America, Schmidt said in the email, and that our skin color should define who we are.

Read more . . .
Whilst banging your wife.



Sorry.

Anybody who knows firefighters will get our post title joke and everyone else will have to get their chuckles by pretending to take this week's city hall legislative gambit seriously.

More importantly, KCFD rank & file from across the demographic spectrum will openly admit that the REAL crisis confronting the department has more to do with RAMPANT NEPOTISM and politically charged power moves rather than racial hateration.

Also, hoes.

Despite continued efforts to improve the "discourse" amongst workers in the KCFD since about 1978 . . . We can't help but note that firefighters constantly complain about hoes in their unguarded moments.



Read more:


Highly touted video didn't show anything but a chaotic struggle with that ended with the death of Malcolm Johnson, who was wanted on violent assault charges.



Here's the latest development in his case that continues to draw sympathetic local media headlines.



Read more . . .



Investigation into Malcolm Johnson shooting moves to Jefferson City KANSAS CITY, MO (KCTV5) --- The investigation into the police shooting of Malcolm Johnson has cleared another step. The case file for the Missouri Highway Patrol is now in Jefferson City, according to Sgt. Bill Lowe. Once it moves through the Missouri Highway Patrol's chain of command, the Jackson County Prosecutor's Office will make a ruling on it.
She has a great deal of experience and might edge out more dedicated MAGA competitors with an uncanny ability to walk the line betwixt legit policy advocacy and the outright lunacy it takes to rally any political base.



Hartzler launches Senate run echoing Trump Missouri Republican Rep. Vicky Hartzler launched her Senate campaign in a video Thursday, echoing former president Donald Trump's slogan to "make America great once again" and touting her support for his border, military and economic policies.

Here's mainstream news and their unfriendly angle . . .
 American Airlines began operations with a new international route that increases to four the routes that connect Yucatan with the U.S.; Carnival Cruise Line returns to Puerto Progreso starting next month.



(TRAVPR.COM) UNITED STATES - June 11th, 2021 - Yucatans Tourism Minister,Michelle Fridman Hirsch, announced this week that the Economic and Tourism Recovery Plan of the State of Yucatan  specifically, the reestablishment airport and cruise port connectivity  has been proactive, showing concrete results with the return of 100% of U.S. flights and now the return of more cruise ships.

Connectivity is one of the fundamental pillars of the tourist recovery of Yucatan and, therefore, hand in hand with the airlines, cruise ships, [airports operator] ASUR and our naval port, we are working hard to recover the routes we had before the pandemic and, of course, expand the offer and thus be able to reach new and better markets, increasing the number of visitors to Yucatan, said Fridman Hirsch.

This past Saturday, June 5, saw one of most important air hubs in the world, Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW), connected with Merida International Airport (MID) with the arrival of American Airlines Flight 3925, carrying 62 passengers.

Americans weekly service, a 2-hour, 40-minute flight aboard a 76-seat Embraer 175 aircraft, will operate every Saturday with an arrival time in Merida of 1:39 p.m. and departure for Dallas at 2:25 p.m. until August 14 of this year, giving a total of 11 roundtrip flights.

American Airlines Director of Operations for Mexico, Central America, Colombia and Ecuador, Jose Maria Giraldo, said American Airlines is proud to start these new routes to Dallas-Fort Worth, our main connection center, which will allow Yucatecans to connect with more than 180 destinations in the United States and 57 destinations around the world.

Continuing with the reopening of Yucatan state, Carnival Cruise Line announced that on July 26 one of its ships will arrive at Puerto Progreso as part of the restart of operations in the North American and Caribbean region after a 16-month freeze on activity due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The cruise company confirmed that the Yucatecan port is one of the destinations included in its first itineraries.

It is expected that most of the passengers traveling on cruise ships under this new modality will be vaccinated and those who are not, due to age or for other reasons, will be guaranteed their safety during the crossing and the visit to the ports of call.

Governor Vila Dosal previously communicated that a large number of national and international companies, including airlines, shipping firms and receptive operators, have adopted the Certificate of Good Sanitary Practices Yucatan, as a measure to prevent and control contagions by Covid-19. This will contribute to a safe arrival of passengers, which aids the economic development of local communities while guaranteeing the health security of the population.

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UNITED NATIONS, June 10 (Xinhua) -- Josep Borrell, the foreign policy chief of the European Union, on Thursday called for efforts to bring multilateralism alive.

"We live in a world where the demand for multilateral solutions is greater than the supply. We see more divisions, more free-riding and more distrust than the world can afford," he told a Security Council meeting on UN-EU cooperation.

"Rules-based multilateralism is a term that's perhaps well understood at the UN and in Brussels. Maybe it is not a simple, nor an appealing phrase. But our job is to bring it alive," he said.

"We need global cooperation based on agreed rules. The alternative is the law of the jungle, where problems don't get solved. Every day we see the cost of the absence of multilateral action: reduced access to vaccines, insufficient climate action, peace and security crises that fester," he added.

The root cause for the lack of multilateralism is the rise in power politics and ideological contests, leading to the erosion of trust. There is a need to address this deficit of multilateralism and push back against selective and self-serving approaches to multilateralism, said Borrell.

"The EU remains committed to the UN and rules-based multilateralism. The core of our strategy is to protect, reform and build multilateralism that is fit for purpose."

Borrell regretted the lack of consensus among Security Council members.

"Last year I said, 'At a time of global crisis, we need a Security Council able to take the necessary decisions and not one that is paralyzed by vetoes and political infighting.' Unhappily, the situation has not improved," he said.

Sitting on the Security Council is a serious responsibility, politically, even morally. The UN Charter gave this council the supreme say on matters of peace and security. For the EU, there is no acceptable alternative, he said.
Writer and performer Kyle Hernandez of Trinidad is receiving death threats, following a performance he did on local television station WESN, where he seemed to insult not only Tobagonians but the national bird of the island.
In May, Russian armed formations launched 271 attacks in eastern Ukraine, killing four Ukrainian soldiers and wounding 18 more.

In May 2021, the Ukrainian side counted 271 cases of shelling by the Russian armed formations, 40 percent of which (that is 110) were delivered with the use of the Minsk-proscribed weapons. Four Ukrainian servicemen were killed and 18 wounded. Residential areas were shelled 7 times, Ambassador Yevhenii Tsymbaliuk, Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the International Organizations in Vienna, said at the OSCE Permanent Council meeting on June 10.

The Ukrainian Ambassador noted that those armed attacks continued to be supported by Russias ongoing supplies across the uncontrolled segment of the UkraineRussia border.

In the past two weeks, the SMM reported a gradual decrease in ceasefire violations. Their number remains well below the level registered in the first half of 2020. Still, dozens of ceasefire violations per day are far away from the situation, which could be characterized as a comprehensive and sustainable ceasefire. It can easily deteriorate at any time, Tsymbaliuk said.

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Over two months, Russia delivered three railway cars and 34 cars with ammunition, mortars, electronic warfare systems Triton and Leer-3, as well as 84 cisterns with fuel, to certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

In two months, from 18 March until 20 May, the Russian side sent 3 rail wagons with ammunition, 34 cars with ammunition, mortars, UAVs, mines, and electronic warfare systems Triton and Leer-3, as well as 84 cisterns with fuel and lubricants, Ambassador Yevhenii Tsymbaliuk, Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the International Organizations in Vienna, said at the OSCE Permanent Council meeting on June 10.

According to him, in view of this, it is clear why Russia so strongly opposes any steps aimed at enhancing the monitoring of the UkraineRussia state border by the OSCE.

Tsymbaliuk also drew the attention of foreign diplomats to the fact that the SMM spotted last week 139 heavy weapons outside designated storage sites, namely in the training areas in the occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Unpredictable military intentions of the Russian side remain a serious security challenge for Ukraine. Reluctance by the Russian side to ensure necessary military transparency, including under the Vienna Document 2011, only adds reasons for concern, Tsymbaliuk added.

As reported, in May, Russian armed formations launched 271 attacks in eastern Ukraine, killing four Ukrainian soldiers and wounding 18 more.

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Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal and Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the Italian Republic Luigi Di Maio discussed topical issues of trade, economic and investment cooperation, as well as cooperation in the field of energy and infrastructure.

They held a meeting in Kyiv on June 10, the Government portal reports.

Shmyhal stressed that Ukraine will kick off the process of privatization of large state-owned enterprises this year and invited representatives of Italian business to participate in tenders.

"The auctions have demonstrated a great interest from foreign investors, so that the process of large and small privatization can be interesting for the further development of business in Ukraine," he said.

The head of the Ukrainian government also noted positive trends in trade between Ukraine and Italy. According to the PM, the turnover for the first five months of 2021 increased by 39.2% and amounted to USD 2.1 billion.

"Ukraine is ready to offer Italian business the benefits of the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area between Ukraine and the EU, in particular in the format of industrial cooperation, including the implementation of joint production projects," he stressed.

Moreover, the sides voiced issues of cooperation in the agricultural and energy sectors.

"The European green course is one of our governments priorities. We are keen on the joint efforts targeted at achieving the goals of the Grean Deal, and are interested in the development of alternative energy technologies, " the PM noted.

Among other things, Shmyhal invited Italian companies to cooperate in the field of gas production.

Apart from that, the parties touched upon cooperation in infrastructure projects, in particular on the development of the railway.

For his part, Luigi Di Maio stressed that Italy fully supports Ukraine's European aspirations and the implementation of reforms, including agrarian, anti-corruption, and judicial ones.

Shmyhal thanked Italy for its continued support for Ukraines sovereignty and territorial integrity, as well as for Ukraines aspirations towards the EU and NATO integration.

Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio was on an official visit to Ukraine on June 10.
The Ukrainian-Italian business forum in Kyiv has become a platform for the conclusion of a number of bilateral agreements and new large-scale projects, Ukrinform reports with reference to the Government portal.

Four bilateral documents were signed during the forum. In particular, in the presence of the foreign ministers of the two countries, memorandums of understanding were signed between the Council of Exporters and Investors under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine and the most powerful association of industrialists and entrepreneurs of Italy  Confindustria Italia, as well as between Ukraines Entrepreneurship and Export Promotion Office and the Italian Trade Agency, etc.

More than 30 companies took part in the forum. As part of the event, a number of negotiations took place between top managers of Italian and Ukrainian companies.

The event was organized by the Council of Exporters and Investors under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Italian Embassy in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and Confindustria at the Diplomatic Academy under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in compliance with quarantine restrictions.

The Council of Exporters and Investors under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine is a platform on which the ministry accumulates information on investment and trade opportunities from around the world. The Council facilitates business contacts between Ukrainian exporters and importers abroad.

As reported, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and Italian Foreign Luigi Di Maio opened the Ukrainian-Italian business forum in Kyiv on June 10.

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The Ukrainian low-cost carrier SkyUp Airlines expands its flight program and adds routes to Dalaman from Kyiv and to Bodrum from Lviv, the airlines press service reports.

In particular, Kyiv-Dalaman-Kyiv flights began on June 10 and will be operated three times a week: on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays.

Starting from June, regular flights to Bodrum from Lviv depart twice a week: on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Tickets are already available on skyup.aero.

New directions complement other SkyUp flights from Kyiv to Bodrum, Izmir, and Istanbul. In addition, SkyUp flies to Istanbul from Zaporizhzhia, Lviv, Odesa, and Kharkiv.

To enter Turkey, it is necessary to provide a certificate in English about a negative PCR test, made no later than 72 hours before crossing the border. The test result can be provided in digital. These requirements do not apply to children under six years old, as well as to transit passengers traveling through Turkish airports to other countries.

PCR test alternatives include an antigen test result, issued no later than 48 hours before the border crossing; a certificate of the full course of vaccination done no earlier than 14 days before the trip; and antibodies test result, or certificate of recovery within the last six months. Any of these documents should be provided in English. Additional random PCR tests may be performed upon arrival (at the expense of the Turkish side).

As Ukrinform reported, in May 2021, SkyUp Airlines operated 1,419 flights, which is a record-breaking number in the companys history.

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Investors from Denmark intend to expand their businesses in Lviv, because they note a good business environment in the city, Danish Ambassador to Ukraine Ole Egberg Mikkelsen has said.

According to an Ukrinform correspondent, he stated this on Friday, June 11, at the All-Ukrainian Forum of Local Self-Government, which was broadcast live on the forum's Facebook page.

"Lviv occupies a very special place among other Ukrainian cities. After all, now this is the place where there is more Danish investment than anywhere else. And it is no accident, because investors came to Ukraine and could not find anywhere else what they found in Lviv. And for me, it is not a coincidence, because there is a good business environment here. Danish investors tell me that they intend to expand their businesses, because they are completely satisfied with how everything works here and have clear confidence in the future," Mikkelsen said.

He added that many Danish finances were currently working on various projects in Lviv, which means that financial institutions in Lviv are confident that "the city is thriving, that there is development."

"And this is a key thing, a good result of that work. [...] I think that the example of Lviv tells us how critical it is to allow local authorities to work, to give them more independence so that they could create a good investment climate. And business creates new jobs, which is also important for the whole country," Mikkelsen said.

The VIII All-Ukrainian Forum of Local Self-Government is being held in Lviv on June 10-11. It brought together more than 300 mayors and representatives of local self-government from all regions of Ukraine. In total, about 1,150 participants registered for the event.

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Representatives of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine and Hungary acknowledged the positive dynamics of the dialogue on education reform in Ukraine and agreed to begin preparations for a meeting of the Joint Ukrainian-Hungarian Commission for National Minority Rights.

The Embassy of Ukraine in Hungary released a corresponding statement following the Ukrainian-Hungarian political consultations in Kyiv at the level of Deputy Foreign Minister of Ukraine Vasyl Bodnar and Deputy State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Hungary Andras Baranyi.

As noted, the parties discussed the implementation of the agreements between the foreign ministers of Ukraine and Hungary, coordinated further steps to develop cooperation in the political, security, trade, energy, humanitarian spheres and within international organizations.

"The parties praised the dynamics of the dialogue on education reform in Ukraine, in particular on ensuring the observance of educational rights of the Hungarian national minority in Ukraine and the Ukrainian national minority in Hungary. The parties prepared to sign an agreement on mutual recognition of educational documents and degrees. The diplomats also agreed to start preparing a meeting of the Joint Ukrainian-Hungarian Commission for National Minority Rights," the statement reads.

Bodnar and Baranyi paid special attention to the preparation of the meeting of the Joint Ukrainian-Hungarian Intergovernmental Commission on Economic Cooperation under the chairmanship of the foreign ministers and demonstrated a common approach to the risks and threats posed by Nord Stream 2 pipeline construction to the two countries and Europe as a whole.

Bodnar stressed the importance of intensifying political dialogue at the highest level and again invited Hungary to take part in the inaugural summit of the Crimean Platform and events marking the 30th anniversary of Ukraine's independence.

Baranyi noted that Hungary supported the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine within internationally recognized borders, its European and Euro-Atlantic choices.

The delegations also discussed the state and prospects of joint projects for the development of border infrastructure and the construction of crossing points on the Ukrainian-Hungarian border.

The Deputy Foreign Minister confirmed the proposal of the Ukrainian side to hold a meeting of the Joint Ukrainian-Hungarian Intergovernmental Commission on Cross-Border and Border Cooperation in Zakarpattia region in August this year.

The parties also praised the launch of the Ukrainian-Hungarian Joint Commission on Border Traffic Control in March 2021.

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EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell has welcomed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's intention to convene a Crimean Platform summit this August and confirmed his participation in the event together with European Council President Charles Michel.

He made this statement on Thursday, June 10, during a UN Security Council video conference on cooperation with regional organizations on the maintenance of international peace and security, according to an Ukrinform correspondent.

The video of his speech has been published on the EU's multimedia portal.

"I welcome President Zelensky's initiative to convene the Crimea Platform Summit; I intend to take part with President Michel and I hope there will be the widest possible participation from UN members," Borrell said.

Speaking about the importance of multilateral efforts to maintain peace and stability and the key role that the UN has to play here, he noted that the world needs global cooperation based on agreed rules. An alternative to such rules, he said, is the law of the jungle, where problems do not get solved and new ones emerge  "reduced access to vaccines, insufficient climate action, peace and security crises that fester."

"Ukraine: I regret that the situation in the country tends to be instrumentalized for political purposes here at the Security Council. To be clear: six years after all members of this Security Council unanimously supported the Minsk Agreements, little has been done to implement them. Russia is a party to the conflict and we count on it to take a constructive stance," Borrell said.

Michel stated earlier that he would represent the EU at the Crimean Platform summit in Kyiv, which will be held at Ukraine's initiative in August this year.

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Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal and Prime Minister of Croatia Andrej Plenkovic discussed the intensification of economic cooperation, the development of political dialogue, and the resumption of tourism between the countries.

Their online meeting took place on June 10, Ukrinform reports with reference to the Government portal.

Shmyhal noted that maintaining a high level of active bilateral political dialogue between Ukraine and Croatia is an important component of further development of relations.

He also thanked his Croatian counterpart for accepting the offer to visit Ukraine in August and take part in the inaugural summit of the Crimean Platform.

"Your participation in the inaugural summit of the Crimean Platform and the signing of a bilateral Joint Declaration on Ukraine's European Prospect will be a powerful step towards strengthening our partnership," Shmyhal said.

The sides discussed combating the spread of COVID-19. Shmyhal noted that Ukraine is increasing the rate of vaccination of the population and expressed hope that in the near future the epidemic situation in both countries will improve significantly.

In this context, the heads of government of Ukraine and Croatia discussed the issue of resuming tourism, in particular the possibility of mutual simplification of entry for citizens.

"We expect that this summer the situation in the tourism sector will improve significantly, in particular, due to the introduction of digital certificates. Our team is currently actively working on the development of such a document in line with the EU standards. At the same time, we hope that we will be able to open borders to tourists from our countries by using other available tools," Shmyhal said.

During the meeting, they also spoke about strengthening trade and economic cooperation. The head of the Ukrainian government told his Croatian counterpart that Ukraine had taken an important step towards creating a full-fledged stock market that would open new opportunities for foreign investors.

For his part, the PM of Croatia expressed interest in the participation of Ukrainian companies in the reconstruction of infrastructure damaged by the earthquake in December last year.

Shmyhal thanked Croatia for its consistent support for Ukraines sovereignty, territorial integrity, and European and Euro-Atlantic integration.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has briefed Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio on the security situation in eastern Ukraine and along Ukraine's borders and discussed with him the threats posed by the Nord Stream 2 project.

The meeting between the two took place in Kyiv on Thursday, June 10, the presidential press service reported.

Zelensky stressed the importance of increasing further international pressure on Russia, which has so far withdrawn only a small part of its forces and resources from Ukraine's borders and continues to block progress in a peaceful settlement.

"I thank Italy for supporting Ukraine in many areas, first of all, the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our country," Zelensky said.

Di Maio, in turn, assured Zelensky of Italy's full support for Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity.

According to the President's Office, both parties exchanged views on topical issues in the context of forthcoming international events, including the G7 and NATO summits.

Zelensky noted that the implementation of the Nord Stream 2 project is, first and foremost, a security challenge for Ukraine and Europe.

"Preventing the launch of Nord Stream 2 is in the interests of Europe's energy security," he said.

Special attention during the meeting was paid to the issues of Euro-Atlantic and European integration of Ukraine. Zelensky stressed the importance for Ukraine to obtain a NATO Membership Action Plan and expressed hope that Italy would support Ukraine's efforts on the path to membership of the Alliance.

Zelensky noted that Ukraine is committed to reforms in the framework of the Association Agreement with the EU, and a clear European prospect will be an additional incentive to build a successful country.

Both parties discussed the development of political dialogue at the highest level, in particular the participation of the leadership of the Italian Republic in the inaugural summit of the Crimean Platform and the events marking the 30th anniversary of Ukraine's independence.

The head of state praised the dynamic development of trade and economic cooperation between Ukraine and Italy.

"We have significant potential to create new success stories in our relationship," Zelensky said.

Zelensky and Di Maio also noted the important role played by the Ukrainian community in Italy in strengthening relations between the two countries.

Di Maio thanked Zelensky for providing important assistance to his country in the fight against the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic last year.

Zelensky emphasized the importance of interpersonal ties between the peoples of the two countries and noted the need to take measures to restore tourism.

Di Maio made an official visit to Ukraine on June 10.

Photo credit: President's Office
The Senate (upper house) of the Parliament of the Czech Republic by a majority of votes adopted the resolution "On Current Situation in the Territory of Sovereign State of Ukraine Occupied by Troops of Russian Federation."

No senator voted against the resolution, Ukrinform reports with reference to the website of the Embassy of Ukraine in the Czech Republic.

As noted, the Senate calls for the immediate release of all Ukrainian citizens illegally detained and imprisoned on the Crimean peninsula and in Russia; demands that Russia must immediately cease hostilities and human rights violations in Crimea and the occupied territories of eastern Ukraine; states that Russian officials, whose activities or omissions enabled or led to war crimes against Ukraine, will be brought before the International Criminal Court; supports the independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders; supports the EU's policy of non-recognition of the illegal annexation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, as well as the imposition of EU restrictive measures in response to Russia's actions.

The resolution was initiated by Pavel Fischer, Chairperson of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Security of the Senate of the Czech Parliament, who said in his address to the Czech lawmakers: "This resolution is a manifestation of solidarity, a reminder of the importance of Ukraine's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders."

Ambassador of Ukraine to the Czech Republic Yevhen Perebyinis thanked Pavel Fischer, as well as Senate President Milos Vystrcil and all Czech senators for their support and adoption of this important document, which became a concrete expression of the Czech people's solidarity with Ukraine at this difficult time.

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The Russian side has repeatedly claimed that the conflict in eastern Ukraine was the result of a "foreign-orchestrated coup detat," but Russias aggression is the sole cause of the conflict.

Charge dAffaires of the U.S. Mission to the OSCE Courtney Austrian said this at an online meeting of the OSCE Permanent Council in Vienna on June 10, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

Last week, our Russian colleague told this Permanent Council the conflict in eastern Ukraine was the result of a foreign-orchestrated coup detat. The Russian delegation has made this claim repeatedly here at the OSCE. But repeating it doesnt make it true, nor does it change the fact that Russias aggression against Ukraine is the sole cause of the conflict," she said.

According to the U.S. representative, the only reason for the ongoing armed conflict is that Russia has continued to fuel it for more than seven years.

The conflict has killed 13,000 people, injured tens of thousands more, and displaced more than a million people. It seems Russia believes the death and destruction it cold-bloodedly inflicts on the civilian populations of eastern Ukraine is acceptable collateral damage in its efforts to destabilize its sovereign neighbor and impede Ukraines Euro-Atlantic integration," the diplomat stressed.

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Signing a number of political and security agreements may be on the agenda of the forthcoming visit of President Volodymyr Zelensky to the United States of America.

"Today [on Thursday], a constituent meeting was held to establish a working group to properly prepare the visit of the President of Ukraine to the United States. We discussed a number of agreements to be signed during this visit. Some of these agreements concern the political and security bloc," Deputy Head of the Presidents Office Andrii Sybiha said in an interview with the Yevropeiska Pravda online media outlet, Ukrinform reports.

As noted, negotiations are underway to ensure that documents of political and security bloc and military-technical cooperation are on the agenda.

"It [the visit] has a clear goal of effectiveness, achieving concrete results in specific areas  from political and security to the economy, environmental cooperation. We set ambitious goals," said the Deputy Head of the Presidents Office.

As reported, on June 7, Volodymyr Zelensky and Joe Biden held telephone talks, during which the American leader invited his Ukrainian counterpart to visit the White House in July.

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Ukraine plans to build a foreign policy course aimed at expanding the geography of strategic international partners, including with an emphasis on the Baltic-Black Sea region.

Deputy Head of the Presidents Office Andrii Sybiha said this in an interview with the Yevropeiska Pravda online media outlet, Ukrinform reports.

"Based on the risks and challenges facing our country today, we will build a foreign policy course aimed at expanding the geography of our partners, strategic partners, with an emphasis on the Baltic-Black Sea region," he said.

Sybiha stressed that "all formats, all mechanisms that add security to the state of Ukraine and add security to the region have the right to life and development."

At the same time, he added that his task as the deputy head of the Presidents Office is to further develop bilateral relations and strengthen the foreign policy course and its integrity.

As Ukrinform reported, on May 31, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appointed Andrii Sybiha as Deputy Head of the President's Office for Foreign Affairs and Strategic Partnership Development. Prior to that, Sybiha served as Ukraine's ambassador to Turkey.

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Ukraine's cooperation with the North Atlantic Alliance will be strengthened in the coming months as the Allies are ready for even closer cooperation.

NATO Special Representative and Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs James Appathurai said this in his video address on behalf of Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to the participants of the Youth Kyiv Security Forum, founded by the Arseniy Yatsenyuk Open Ukraine Foundation, Ukrinform reports with reference to the organizers of the event.

NATO's door remains open. Allies stand by the decisions of the 2008 Bucharest summit that Ukraine and Georgia will become NATO members," he stressed, expressing hope that NATO leaders "will clearly state that principle at the summit next week."

In turn, Appathurai noted that there is no shortcut to NATO membership.

Each prospective member has to go through wide-ranging reforms not only of its security and defense institutions, but also with regard to the rule of law, good governance, and economic stabilization. These are things that the Ukrainian people of all ages expect from their leadership, he said.

The NATO special representative added that reforms will make Ukraine more resilient, prosperous, and stable, and will bring Ukraine closer to NATO.

As Ukrinform reported, the decision was made at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would become NATO members and a Membership Action Plan should be a step on this path. There is still no consensus among NATO countries on the issue of granting MAPs to both countries.

On June 12, 2020, the North Atlantic Council recognized Ukraine as an Enhanced Opportunities Partner.

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Incumbent Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky would receive the greatest support if a presidential election were held in Ukraine in early June, according to a survey conducted by Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) between June 1-7.

In particular, 30.6% of Ukrainians who have decided on their choice are ready to back Zelensky. In second place is the former Ukrainian president, European Solidarity party leader Petro Poroshenko, for whom 17.4% of respondents are ready to vote.

Some 12.7% of those polled would cast their ballots for Batkivshchyna party leader Yulia Tymoshenko, 10.6% would support a co-chairman of the Opposition Platform - For Life party, Yuriy Boiko, and 8.1% would vote for Strength and Honor party leader Ihor Smeshko.

An all-Ukrainian public opinion poll was conducted using computer-assisted telephone interviews, based on a random sample of mobile phone numbers. Some 2,003 respondents aged 18 and over living in all government-controlled regions of Ukraine were interviewed.

The poll's margin of error does not exceed 2.4% for figures close to 50%, 2.1% for figures close to 25%, 1.5% for figures close to 10%, and 1.1% for figures close to 5%.

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06/11/2021

Contacts for media: Nancy Cicco, 978-934-4944, Nancy_Cicco@uml.edu and Christine Gillette, 978-758-4664, Christine_Gillette@uml.edu





LOWELL, Mass.  Hundreds of higher education, business, government and nonprofit leaders gathered virtually this week to advance support for inventors and startups at the 10th annual Deshpande Symposium for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Higher Education.





The symposium is presented by its founders UMass Lowell, which runs three business incubators and a student entrepreneurship program, and the Deshpande Foundation , which supports sustainable, scalable social and economic impact through innovation and entrepreneurship, along with the Burton D. Morgan Foundation , which champions the work of entrepreneurs of all ages. The events aim is to empower campus leaders in their efforts to raise the next generation of entrepreneurs. That goal has never been more essential, as the global economy evolves from the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Tom ODonnell, UMass Lowells senior director of innovation initiatives, who is among the events organizers.





Deshpande Symposium participants world-class programs educating student entrepreneurs, translating university research from lab to market, expanding regional entrepreneurial ecosystems and transforming their campuses are truly inspirational. In these times of global challenge, their collective efforts in advancing innovation and entrepreneurship are more important than ever in preparing tomorrows leaders to tackle the worlds most pressing problems and in providing them the needed tools to do so, ODonnell said.





Over the course of the two-day event, held Thursday, June 10 and Friday, June 11, participants heard from keynote speakers Sethuraman Panchanathan, Ph.D., director of the National Science Foundation, an $8.billion federal agency charged with advancing all fields of scientific discovery, technological innovation and STEM education, and Gilda A. Barabino, Ph.D., president of Olin College of Engineering and professor of biomedical and chemical engineering who specializes in sickle cell disease, cellular and tissue engineering, and the role of race/ethnicity and gender in science and engineering.





Participants were able to choose from 24 conference sessions, networking sessions and online Birds of a Feather gatherings based on their interests. Panels, presentations and discussions were organized into four tracks, including Entrepreneurial Universities: Culture and Ecosystems, Entrepreneurship in the Curriculum, University Research Commercialization and Startups, and Emerging Trends.





Highlights of the symposium included the plenary panel 10th Anniversary Reflections, which featured UMass Lowell Chancellor Jacquie Moloney and technology entrepreneur and co-founder of the Deshpande Foundation Gururaj Desh Deshpande, who together launched the symposium in 2012, along with Judith Cone, former vice chancellor for innovation, entrepreneurship and economic development of the University of North Carolina.





Recognizing excellence

The event featured the presentation of the annual Deshpande Symposium Awards, which this year recognized two individuals and six institutions for their exemplary work fostering entrepreneurship. Along with Moloney, Deshpande and Cone, this years awards selection committee members were Deshpande Foundation Executive Director Raj Melville and VentureWell President and CEO Phil Weilerstein.





After a years hiatus, the Deshpande Symposium Awards returned with a strong and diverse pool of nominations. This years awardees highlighted diversity of programming, curriculum and geography, including strong representation from Canada. Once again, two programs were recognized for innovation and potential in their approaches with the Rising Star Award. For the first time, the awards were online with acceptance speeches by the awardees streamed to a worldwide audience, Melville said.





This years Deshpande Symposium award winners are leaders in this field and we congratulate them for their exceptional contributions, ODonnell said.





The Deshpande Symposium Founders Award was presented to Edward B. Roberts, David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology and founder and chair, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management.





I am honored to receive the Founders Award from the Deshpande Foundation. The MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation closely collaborated with myself and the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. Later, I learned much more about the philanthropic generosity of the Deshpandes in nurturing entrepreneurship at MIT, in Boston through supporting MassChallenge, and in low-income communities in America and India. The Deshpande values and actions have inspired me always and make me proud to be selected for this award, Roberts said.





The Outstanding Contributions to Advancing Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Higher Education Award, which goes to individuals who have demonstrated extraordinary achievements in entrepreneurship in higher education, was presented to Dianne Welsh, Hayes Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship, University of North Carolina Greensboro.





It is truly an honor to receive this award. The Deshpande Foundation is an extraordinary organization supporting entrepreneurship education around the world. The foundation unequivocally understands the importance of entrepreneurship in the development of the world economy one entrepreneur at a time through education and support. As we strive towards greater inclusivity locally and worldwide, the Deshpande Foundation will continue to be a leader, Welsh said.





The Entrepreneurial University Award recognizes institutions that demonstrate overall excellence in innovation and entrepreneurship. This years honor went to Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.





We are honored to receive this award and the recognition that Queens students and graduates are indeed contributing to our society through innovation and entrepreneurship, said Queens University Principal and Vice Chancellor Patrick Deane. As changemakers, their efforts have real social impact and we are proud of their work and leadership. We are especially grateful for the support of the Deshpande Foundation in fostering a creative, collaborative environment that has made us a university for the future.





The Excellence in Curriculum Innovation in Entrepreneurship Award, honoring innovative educational courses and programs to foster entrepreneurship education, was presented to the University of Connecticut Werth Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and the Rising Star award in this category went to InnovationX, the Oregon State University Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the College of Business.





Entrepreneurship can be a change agent in business and academia. The Werth Institute helps students with an entrepreneurial spirit in the sciences, engineering, arts and other areas of study specialties develop the business knowledge and connect with mentors who can help them to become disruption ready, a sought-after skill in todays workplace. In just three years, the Werth Institute has become an integral part of the student experience and is key to UConns strategic direction, said Werth Institute Managing Director David Noble.





Weve worked hard to elevate and expand Launch Academy, an agile and inclusive student business incubator, said Audrey Iffert-Saleem, director of InnovationX. And we've made real progress: Each year, we serve more women, students of color, students with financial need and student parents; students from the different OSU colleges and campuses are bringing in their friends; the larger Oregon and Pacific Northwest business community knows to keep tabs on us. InnovationX has celebrated these accomplishments along the way, but the Rising Star Award and recognition from peer institutions within this notable forum is an honor.





The Excellence in Student Engagement in Entrepreneurship Award  which recognizes an institution that encourages student leadership and engagement and supports the development of entrepreneurial awareness, skills and practice  was presented to the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute of Georgia State University and the Rising Star award in this category went to the Sheridan College EDGE Entrepreneurship Hub.





Over the last five years, the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute and Georgia State University leadership have committed to growing a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation across the university. Were building a model for inclusive entrepreneurship with an ecosystem of innovative programs and resources to advance new and diverse entrepreneurs. It is an honor to be acknowledged for Excellence in Student Engagement in Entrepreneurship and among the group of trailblazing institutions recognized at this years symposium, said Jackie Davis, the institutes associate director.





I cant say if its despite or because of the past years challenges, but the Sheridan EDGE team and student founders we support have demonstrated an entrepreneurial spirit Im truly proud of. Our focus on impact entrepreneurship seems more relevant now than ever and students are responding with enthusiasm. Their visions for a more equitable and sustainable future are what fuels our momentum. Were very grateful to be recognized with this award, said Director of Entrepreneurship & Changemaking Renee Devereaux.





The Exemplary Practice in Technology Commercialization Award, which recognizes comprehensive programs that accelerate innovative research into commercialization, was presented to the University of Akron I-Corps Sites Program.





Its our great honor to receive this Deshpande Symposium Award for Exemplary Practice in Technology Commercialization and particularly to accept the award on behalf of so many university faculty, student and community innovators. The success of the University of Akron's NSF I-Corps Site is a testament to the quality of Northeast Ohios innovators and entrepreneurs, who have enabled the I-Corps program to thrive, said Elyse Ball, executive director, University of Akron Research Foundation.




Suabo, a midwife from Quissanga district in Mozambique's Cabo Delgado Province, was forced to flee violence in her home village in November 2020.  UNHCR/Juliana Ghazi

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, remains gravely concerned for the safety of civilians in northern Mozambique as armed conflict and insecurity in the coastal city of Palma continues to displace thousands of people, two and a half months after a brutal attack by non-state armed groups. People are fleeing daily in a desperate search for safety both in Mozambique and across the border in Tanzania.

Those fleeing have told UNHCR staff that the situation in Palma remains very unstable, with regular gunfire at night and torching of houses.

Some 70,000 people have fled Palma since 24 March, bringing the total number of displaced in Cabo Delgado province to nearly 800,000 according to humanitarian estimates.

UNHCR continues to advocate for the internally displaced to receive protection and assistance in Mozambique and for vulnerable people seeking safety in neighbouring Tanzania to access asylum.

The ongoing insecurity has forced thousands of families to seek refuge in the south of Cabo Delgado and Nampula provinces. The districts of Nangade, Mueda, Montepuez, Ancuabe, Metuge, Balama, Namuno, Chiure, Mecufi, Ibo and Pemba continue to register new arrivals every day.

Thousands of others are reported to be stranded in very insecure areas around Palma with restricted humanitarian access. However, UNHCR and partner agencies were recently allowed access to some remote areas to help displaced people living in dire conditions. UNHCR continues to work with partners to assess their needs and provide life-saving assistance. We have distributed relief items to some 10,000 displaced people.

Many others have attempted to cross the river that marks the border with Tanzania to seek international protection.

According to Mozambican border authorities, more than 9,600 of them have been forcibly returned through the Negomano border point since January this year. Some 900 were pushed back into Mozambique in just a few days from 7 to 9 June. UNHCR teams have been supporting people arriving in a desperate condition, many separated from their family members.

Those pushed back from Tanzania end up in a dire situation at the border and are exposed to gender-based violence and health risks as many are sleeping in the open at night in extreme cold without blankets or a roof over their heads. There is an urgent need for emergency relief items including food.

UNHCR reiterates its call for those fleeing the conflict to have access to territory and asylum, and, in particular, for the principle of non-refoulement (no forced return) to be respected. Refugees must not be forced back into danger.

For more information on this topic, please contact:
A Salvadoran refugee who works as a taxi driver, outside his workplace in the city of Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico.  UNHCR/Gabriella Perez Montiel

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica  The international community today reaffirmed its solidarity with forcibly displaced people in Central America and Mexico and with the seven countries that make up the Comprehensive Regional Protection and Solutions Framework (MIRPS) in the region, during the Solidarity Event for Forcibly Displaced Persons and Host Communities in Central America and Mexico.

Pedro Sanchez, the President of the Spanish Government, which convened the event in its capacity as Presidency of the MIRPS Support Platform, announced that Spain would donate 6.3 million euros (US $7.6 million) in 2021-2022 as a direct contribution to the MIRPS action plans. The situation, with one million people displaced and a reality that affects women and children especially, is urgent, he said.

Costa Rica hosted the event, where 12 cooperating countries and the European Union, as well as multilateral organizations and international agencies, development banks, the private sector and civil society met to discuss a comprehensive and coordinated response to displacement in the region.

Migratory and refugee flows are a reality in our region. The approach requires urgent joint and solidarity action as well as public and strategic actions in alliance with international organizations, partner countries and civil sectors that offer solutions to the causes that generate these flows, said Carlos Alvarado, President of Costa Rica.

Guatemala, in its capacity as Pro-Tempore Presidency of the MIRPS, reiterated the commitment of the member states to continuing to implement their national action plans aimed at strengthening refugee systems, addressing the immediate and persistent protection needs of displaced persons and supporting host countries and communities in finding lasting solutions.

Short-term solutions have been applied to tackle irregular migration, to stop migrants in different ways and they have even been criminalized. Lets bet on a better solution: the construction of prosperity, said Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei.

Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, encouraged continued cooperation.

The crisis in Central America, which has forced more than a million people to flee, is both humanitarian in its impact and related to security and development in its roots. These three dimensions are closely linked, and the high levels of human mobility will not be mitigated without a comprehensive and coordinated response that can promote achievements in terms of social inclusion, prosperity and reduction of violence, he stressed.

Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), said, We will not rest in continuing to advocate from our political forum to promote the generation of durable solutions for refugees, asylum seekers and displaced persons in Central America and Mexico, in order to achieve more inclusion, more protection, more dignity and more rights for more people. The financial support commitments that we heard today at this event are a great step forward in this regard, which we value and appreciate.

Spain, as Presidency of the Support Platform, celebrated the participation of representatives from the private sector and the highest levels of government, as well as the generous contributions and the encouraging messages of solidarity. In addition to the support that is already being provided to the region by the cooperating states and development banks, during the Solidarity Event new commitments were presented at both the humanitarian and development levels with substantive contributions totalling US$110 million by Spain, the European Union, the United States, Ireland and Switzerland, as well as from the private sector and foundations. Organizers agreed to establish a joint mechanism for monitoring the results of the event so they could continue to mobilize support for the region.

Canada reaffirmed its commitment to assume the next presidency of the Support Platform to give continuity to the process of cooperation between the MIRPS countries and the international community.

Organized by the governments of Spain, Costa Rica and Guatemala, with the support of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and the OAS, the event took place during the Central American Integration System Summit.

For more information, please contact:
Dhaka, June 10 (UNI) Bangladesh Foreign minister Dr AK Abdul Momen on Thursday said Dhaka would not recognize Israel until Palestine is established as an independent and sovereign country free of any occupation forces.

As long as Palestine is not established as an independent and sovereign state, we (Dhaka) are beside them and we would not accept any occupation (Israel) army there (Palestine), he said.

He was speaking at a handover ceremony of the donation of Bangladesh Association of Pharmaceutical Industries for the people of Palestine at the state guest house Padma in the capital.
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We may never know if a Manchester police officers act of kindness to a teen would-be shoplifter will make a difference in the teens life. But it certainly brightened the day of a lot of Manchester residents and others who read our story or saw the TV newscast about Officer George Morales.
AMERICA has always been at the forefront of innovation, and we cannot afford to lose that edge. We need to act decisively to outcompete China, boost domestic research and manufacturing, and secure supply chains that are critical to our national security and economy.
The Goodrich Scholarship Program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha traces its origins to 1972 with one question: What could students from low-income backgrounds achieve if economic barriers were removed, they received close personal contact with faculty, and experienced a stimulating teaching-learning atmosphere?

Nearly 50 years later, the answer is found in each of the programs 1,900 alumni who graduated from the program and went on to become business leaders, educators, medical professionals, elected officials and others having a positive impact on the state.

Today, UNO as a whole has internalized the Goodrich philosophy, that access to exceptional learning opportunities can transform lives, including service learning, a tailored curriculum, internships and more.

Developed by former College of Public Affairs and Community Service Dean Hubert Locke and named for Nebraska State Sen. Glenn Goodrich, who introduced the legislation, the program was hailed as an unparalleled opportunity to get economically deprived young people in and through UNO.

Elizabeth Hruska, a fiscal analyst for the Nebraska Legislature, was a member of the first cohort of Goodrich Scholars.

The funding for the program was provided to equalize state support for UNO which had not been part of the University of Nebraska System for very many years, Hruska said. I remember that Goodrich was described as an experiment. Rather than just providing additional scholarships, the program was built to provide the financial aid along with a community of supports to help students succeed.

As a part of the program, Hruska and her peers received specialized support from dedicated faculty and experiences that included a trip to Washington, D.C., where students took tours of federal buildings and met with then-Nebraska Congressman John Y. McCollister. The extra attention and experiences didnt slow down her academic journey  it put her ahead of schedule.

I would have had to work several years before attending college and may not have been able to attend full time, Hruska said. I think a strength of the program is the diversity of the faculty and staff. It provided for a richer college experience.

The experiment that began nearly 50 years ago and that is sustained by state funding is a resounding success, boasting a nearly 80% six-year graduation rate for its 2015 cohort  far exceeding the 62% national six-year graduation rate of first-time, full-time undergraduate students.

One of the Goodrich Programs most recent products is Imani Brown, who attended Omaha North High School and graduated from UNO in 2019 with a degree in Emergency Management and Disaster Science and a minor in Business.

The 23-year-old  who recently earned her masters degree from Florida A&M University  utilized the speaking, writing, and critical thinking skills she gained through Goodrich general education courses to launch her own sneaker customization and restoration business, ChixFixKix.

She was inspired to launch the business to support low-income individuals who may not be able to afford to replace shoes. The desire to help low-income students is something she ties back to her own experiences with the Goodrich program.

There was no judgement, and the support was essential for my success. Even with starting my business, the first people I reached out to were my Goodrich family. They support me and see my dreams beyond the classroom, Brown said.

They challenge me and elevate me to achieve my dreams like getting a graduate degree, as Im the first in my family to do this. Goodrich pushed me to take a leap, inspired me and have the confidence to achieve my dreams.

Todays Goodrichers represent rural and urban backgrounds, a wide variety of majors and career aspirations, and racial and ethnic diversity. Each student is a Nebraska resident who began their academic career at UNO with fewer than 32 college credits. More than 70% of students are first-generation.

Vanessa Chavez Jurado, a junior elementary education major from Millard, NE, is one of the thousands of first-generation students at UNO.

While she chose to pursue a college degree as a Maverick for the same reasons many from the Omaha metro area do  affordability, proximity to family, and exceptional educational experiences  she found her voice through the Goodrich program.

The hands-on mentorship from faculty and relationships she built with her peers opened doors in the first-generation student community and motivated her to take on a role as student body vice president for the 2020-2021 academic year.

As a first-generation college student, beginning this journey alongside peers who were going through a similar experience reassured me that I was going to thrive, she said. Goodrich has instilled in me the confidence to get involved on campus and seek leadership positions such as those I have held in Student Government.

While her ultimate career goal is to serve as U.S. Secretary of Education, after graduation, she looks forward to staying in Omaha and teaching. She encourages others to use the Goodrich program as the launchpad for their dreams.

The great thing about Goodrich is that it is much more than just financial support, Chavez Jurado said. To be a Goodricher also means being welcomed into a community of faculty, staff, and students who are there for you and want to see you succeed. Having the chance to take courses with Goodrich faculty and other Goodrichers is an opportunity I hope no one passes up.

Additional information on the Goodrich Program at UNO as well as how UNO continues to provide Nebraskans with access to opportunities can be found at impact.unomaha.edu
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Britain's economy grew 2.3 percent in April as the government eased a lockdown, official data showed Friday, with finance minister Rishi Sunak cautiously welcoming the data as the Delta variant spreads

London, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Jun, 2021 ) :Britain's economy grew 2.3 percent in April as the government eased a lockdown, official data showed Friday, with finance minister Rishi Sunak cautiously welcoming the data as the Delta variant spreads.

It was the fastest monthly output for UK gross domestic product since July last year "as government restrictions affecting economic activity continued to ease", the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said in a statement.

Britain's economy had contracted 1.5 percent overall in the first quarter, although had already begun to bounce back strongly in March with output of 2.1 percent.

The UK's overall output for April remains 3.7 percent below pre-pandemic levels seen in February last year.

"Overall, the economic recovery stepped up another gear in April and GDP is on track to return to its February level before the end of the year," noted Thomas Pugh, UK economist at Capital Economics research group.

"If anything, the economy could regain its pre-crisis level even sooner." April's growth was driven by the service sector, which jumped 3.4 percent as consumers once again started to visit physical stores, restaurants and bars and as more children returned to onsite lessons, the ONS said.

Output in the production sector however dropped 1.3 percent during the same month, recording the first fall since January.

And the construction sector contracted 2.0 percent following a strong March.

Since May, the government has further eased restrictions, with people now allowed to eat and drink inside restaurants and bars, having initially been only able to sit outside.

"Today's figures are a promising sign that our economy is beginning to recover," said Chancellor of the Exchequer Sunak.

His cautious response comes amid mounting concerns over whether the emergence of the Delta variant of the coronavirus threatens the UK government's provisional June 21 deadline for further lifting virus restrictions.

The Delta variant, also known as the Indian variant, is now the dominant strain in the UK, according to Public Health England figures.

Britain on Thursday said G7 leaders will agree to expand global Covid vaccine manufacturing to provide at least one billion doses to the world through sharing and financing schemes.

The UK, which is hosting the big powers' gathering in southwest England, added it would donate at least 100 million surplus doses within the next year, including five million beginning in the coming weeks.

The announcement came after the United States said it would donate 500 million jabs to 92 poor and lower-middle-income nations.
(UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News / WAM - 11th Jun, 2021) By Mohammed Jalal Al Rayssi- Director-General of Emirates news Agency

ABU DHABI, 11th June, 2021 (WAM) -- The UAE's win today of a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) for the period 2022-2023 signifies the prominent status the nation boasts on the regional and international scene.

Nearly 35 years after serving on the Security Council in 1986-1987 for the first time, the UAE is now taking on this responsibility at a time the world is experiencing unprecedented challenges.

"Following the same steps and principles on which it was founded, the UAE will pursue its efforts to maintain international peace and security in cooperation with the members of the council," affirmed H.H. Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, when the UAE announced its candidacy for this two-year seat last year.

The scale of the responsibility is great, and the challenges are more complex and urgent. From issues of peace, sustainability, climate change, extremism and terrorism to an unprecedented pandemic that shattered all records.

However, the UAE has the expertise and conscious understanding to help find more sustainable solutions to many of these issues that concern the world, based on a great legacy and close relations with all countries and international organisations.

The slogan "Stronger with our Union" reflected the depth of understanding of the importance of global cooperation and interdependence to build up resilience and enhance international peace and security.

During its membership in the UNSC, the UAE has a lot to present, foremost among which is its experience in institutionalising gender equality, fostering tolerance and countering terrorism and extremism, addressing climate change issues, prioritising humanitarian relief, tackling global health pandemics, and harnessing the potential of innovation for peace.

The UAE's policy, which is inspired by and based on cooperation, dialogue, diplomacy and tolerance, will have a strong presence during this two-year term. The UAE will share its experience with other council members to help maintain peace and security from traditional security threats, as well as from those posed by pressing global challenges such as climate change.

Strengthening the multilateral approach, working with all member states, building resilience, stimulating innovation, and securing peace for generations to come are the priorities of the UNSC, which is the same approach that the UAE believes in and will spare no effort to promote during its term in the council, in pursuance of the approach established by the Founding Father, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan.

The UAE will transfer its experience as a moderate force to the Council, a force that works to promote tolerance, help convey moderate voices, and promote cultural diversity.

The 15-nation council has 10 seats for temporary members but is dominated by its five, veto-wielding permanent members: Russia, China, the United States, Britain and France.
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Washington, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Jun, 2021 ) :A CNN contributor who went on a leave of absence eight months ago after exposing himself during a Zoom call returned to the air on Thursday.

Jeffrey Toobin, a prominent legal affairs analyst for CNN, apparently unwittingly exposed himself in October during a Zoom call with colleagues from The New Yorker, where he was also employed.

The New Yorker fired him after the incident and Toobin had not featured on the CNN network until his appearance on Thursday.

The 61-year-old Toobin, who has said he believed his camera was off when he was seen masturbating during the video call, was asked about his behavior by a CNN host.

"I feel like we should address what's happened in the months since we've seen you," anchor Alisyn Camerota said.

"What the hell were you thinking?" "I thought that I had turned off the Zoom call," Toobin said. "Now that's not a defense -- this was deeply moronic and indefensible.

"I'm a flawed human being who makes mistakes." Toobin said he has spent the past few months "trying to be a better person." "I am trying to become the kind of person that people can trust again," he said.

A CNN spokesman confirmed to the network that Toobin will return to his role as chief legal analyst.

Besides working at The New Yorker and CNN, Toobin is a former prosecutor and the author of several books.
Miami, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Jun, 2021 ) :US-based cruise lines are chafing to resume voyages from Florida ports in July as the pandemic wanes -- but for vaccinated passengers only -- yet the state and its governor won't let them demand proof of inoculation.

So far, neither side has blinked, even as two guests on one of the first cruise ships to sail from North America since the Covid pandemic tested positive on Thursday.

Florida "is the cruise capital of the world," with billions of Dollars of revenue and thousands of jobs at stake, said Doug Parker, editor of the Cruise Radio website.

"It would be a big blow if they couldn't come to terms." If neither side gives in, Parker said, cruise ships "would have to start sailing out of other ports that would accept them... because these ships are trying to do the right thing." The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention currently requires that more than 95 percent of passengers and crew be vaccinated in order for cruise lines to bypass a requirement for trial voyages.

The two guests who tested positive on Thursday were sailing on the Celebrity Millennium, which had departed from the Caribbean island of St. Maarten on Saturday with everyone on board fully vaccinated.

The pair, who were sharing a stateroom and are asymptomatic, were placed in isolation, Royal Caribbean said in a statement.

The chief obstacle now for cruises departing from Florida comes from Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who made his tourism-dependent state one of the first to drop its pandemic restrictions.

Last month he signed into law a bill barring businesses from demanding vaccination "passports," stopping them from requiring that employees provide proof of vaccination -- and threatening fines for noncompliance that could amount, for cruise lines, to $5,000 per passenger.

The measure takes effect July 1, just when cruise lines hope to resume operations after a year in which Covid played havoc with their industry.

"While the governor, on the one hand, wants to see jobs back and tourism back... (he) is kind of his worst enemy, because he's also saying, you can't ask for that same proof," Parker said.

The governor's terse response: "Our state policy is our state policy." To DeSantis's critics, his is a political decision aimed at winning the votes of Donald Trump sympathizers -- many of them vaccine skeptics -- ahead of a possible re-election campaign in 2022.

With the world's three biggest cruise lines all based in Miami, the coming months offer a Calendar of confusing and shifting health requirements, with conflict a near-certainty.

Carnival Cruise Line will require vaccination on cruises leaving from Texas -- another Republican-led state that has been quick to drop Covid curbs -- but Carnival has provided no detailed information on a cruise set to leave Miami on July 4.

This Monday, Norwegian Cruise Line -- which has threatened to abandon Florida ports altogether -- directly defied the governor by saying it would demand proof of vaccination on all its cruises.

"We are currently in communication with his (DeSantis's) staff and legal counsel to ensure that we can offer the safest cruise experience for our passengers departing from the cruise capital of the world," the company's CEO, Frank Del Rio, said.

The third big cruise line, the Royal Caribbean Group, meantime reversed itself.

Having initially announced that it would demand proof of vaccination, it said Friday that passengers and crew were only "strongly recommended" to get the vaccine, and that anyone unvaccinated would face "other protocols." Celebrity Cruises (part of Royal Caribbean) will launch the first trip from Florida, sailing out of Fort Lauderdale on June 26. A "test" cruise six days earlier will depart from Miami.

"It's confusing," Jim Walker, a maritime lawyer, told AFP. His Cruise Law news blog last year provided daily updates on the distress of those on cruise ships stranded at sea by the pandemic.

Now, he said, there's "different companies trying to solve a problem differently." "The impression that the public have is that the cruise line is not taking appropriate steps to send out a message that their ships are safe," said Walker, pointing to a survey by CruiseCritic.com that found that 80 percent of potential passengers would prefer to travel on ships that demand vaccination proof.

He also pointed out that ships making Caribbean port stops could spread Covid to islands lacking the vaccine access enjoyed by the US -- "although quite frankly," he added, "very few cruise lines seem to express concern about that potential." And cruise lovers, Walker continued, "don't really seem to care if they infect people in the Bahamas or throughout the Caribbean." "It's so reckless and dangerous and irresponsible," he said.

The cruise industry is hugely important to the Florida economy, generating yearly revenues of $9 billion and providing jobs for 160,000 people, according to the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA).

Since ocean voyages were suspended in March last year as the pandemic cut a devastating path around the world, Florida has lost an estimated $5.6 billion.
Lima, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Jun, 2021 ) :Final results from Peru's presidential election -- in which leftist Pedro Castillo considers himself the winner -- are still days away, officials said Thursday, as a prosecutor sought preventive custody for corruption-accused candidate Keiko Fujimori.

Right-wing populist Fujimori, daughter of a scandal-tainted former Peruvian president, is disputing thousands of votes cast four days earlier as she trails in the nail-biting final count.

Fujimori's corruption trial would be delayed if she wins her presidential race against Castillo, who is clinging to a narrow lead.

Prosecutors have said they would seek a jail term on charges of taking money from scandal-tainted Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht to fund failed presidential bids in 2011 and 2016.

The 46-year-old denies the allegations, but has already spent 16 months in pre-trial detention.

Late Wednesday Fujimori, who has claimed electoral fraud, asked Peru's National Electoral Tribunal (JNE) to annul the results from more than 800 polling stations, the equivalent of 200,000 votes. The tribunal is expected to take about 10 days to weigh the request.

Fujimori has also asked for another 300,000 ballots to be reviewed.

- breaking parole - If the JNE rules in Fujimori's favor, it could shift the balance.

Rural school teacher and trade unionist Castillo was leading by about 70,000 votes with over 99 percent of the tally completed by Thursday.

According to the ONPE electoral body, Castillo had 50.18 percent of the vote compared to 49.81 percent for Fujimori in her third presidential race.

Under Peruvian law, Fujimori was allowed to contest the election as she had not been convicted of a crime.

On Thursday, prosecutor Jose Domingo Perez asked an organized crime court to take Fujimori into custody for allegedly having met with a witness in the case, violating the conditions of her parole.

The witness, Miguel Angel Torres, had accompanied Fujimori to a press conference on Wednesday.

"There is no fear that this preventive detention will take place," Fujimori said in reaction to the prosecutor's request.

She claimed Perez was attempting "to distract us, unsettle us." Peruvians voted on Sunday for their fifth president in three years after a series of crises and corruption scandals saw three different leaders in office in a single week last year.

Despite there being no official result, Argentina's President Alberto Fernandez on Thursday became the first sitting leader to congratulate Castillo as Peru's "president-elect." The center-left leader said on Twitter he had contacted Castillo and "expressed my wish that we join forces in favor of Latin America." Bolivia's former leftist president Evo Morales sent a message of congratulations, while Brazil's ex-leader Luis Inacio Lula da Silva celebrated Castillo's "victory" on Twitter and said the result "represents another advance for the popular struggle in our beloved Latin America." But Brazil's incumbent leader, far-right Jair Bolsonaro, lamented the possible leftist victory, telling an evangelical event that a "miracle" was needed to stop it.

As tension grew, Castillo supporters rallied late Wednesday outside the vote counting office in Lima, while a pro-Fujimori crowd gathered in a park in the capital to denounce vote "fraud." Peruvian authorities and election observers have dismissed any possibility of vote-counting fraud.

As in Peru's three previous presidential elections, the tail-end of vote counting has been slow due to delays in the arrival of ballots in Lima from rural and jungle areas, and from abroad -- where one million of the country's 25 million eligible voters live.

Fujimori has taken most of the expat votes, but Castillo is popular among rural electors.

Whoever wins will lead a nation battered by recession and the world's highest coronavirus death rate, with more than 187,000 deaths among its 33 million population.

Two million Peruvians lost their jobs during the pandemic and nearly a third now live in poverty, official figures show.
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

KAMPALA, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Jun, 2021 ) :-- RwandAir announced Thursday the suspension of its flights to and from Uganda's Entebbe International Airport, due to a surge in COVID-19 cases in Uganda.

The measure will be in place until further notice, the Rwandan national carrier said in an announcement on its official website.

"Affected customers can re-book and fly at a later date once flights resume at no additional cost or request a refund," the airline tweeted.

Uganda has been suffering from another upsurge in COVID-19 infections, with 7-day average of daily new cases climbing from around 100 in late May to near 1,000 in the week starting June 6.

The national tally of cases rose by 1,438 to 56,949 on Thursday. The country remains in partial lockdowns as social gatherings and inter-district travel are prohibited.
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Ouagadougou, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Jun, 2021 ) :At least ten "terrorists" were killed and three soldiers injured on Thursday in an ambush on a patrol in northern Burkina Faso, security forces said.

"A mixed patrol made up of soldiers and gendarmes.. were ambushed around the village of Gaigota," one of the sources said.

The rest of the armed group was "routed" in the ambush. The three injured soldiers were evacuated for medical treatment, the source said.

Weapons, ammunition and motorcycles were seized, another security source said, adding that "search operations are continuing in the area".

Following, an attack on Saturday in which gunmen stormed northern Solhan village and killed 132 civilians, according to the government, over 7,000 villagers had fled the area.

Sweeping operations were continuing as well as the securing of the entire northern sector, the source said.

Those responsible for Saturday's attack, the bloodiest massacre in a six-year-old jihadist insurgency, "would not go unpunished", Prime Minister Christophe Dabire said on a visit to the area.

Since 2015, Burkina Faso has been facing mounting violence from jihadist organisations, including the Group to Support islam and Muslims (GSIM) and Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (EIGS).

But the GSIM on Tuesday said it "completely denies any involvement" in the Solhan killings, which it condemned as "atrocious".

Jihadist attacks first started in the north near the Mali border in 2015, but have since spread to other regions, particularly in the east.

At least 1,400 people have been killed and more than a million displaced.
Washington, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Jun, 2021 ) :The United States on Thursday imposed sanctions targeting Yemen's Huthi rebels as it voiced exasperation that the insurgents have kept up a military campaign.

President Joe Biden's administration -- which has used sanctions more sparingly than Donald Trump's previous team -- also removed sanctions on several former Iranian officials, saying it was acknowledging changes in behaviour.

The Treasury Department said it was imposing sanctions on several individuals including Said al-Jamal, a Huthi supporter who allegedly has run a smuggling network to sell oil illicitly to benefit the insurgents.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said it was hoping to exert pressure on the Huthi rebels to end their offensive launched in February to seize Marib, the last significant pocket of government-held territory in the north.

"It is time for the Huthis to accept a ceasefire and for all parties to resume political talks," Blinken said in a statement.

"The United States will continue to apply pressure to the Huthis, including through targeted sanctions, to advance those goals," he said.

The Biden administration, in one of its first steps, removed a last-minute designation by Trump of the Huthis as a terrorist movement.

The move came in response to fears from aid groups that they would need to pull out of Yemen as they are obliged to deal with the Huthis, who effectively are the government in vast areas including the capital Sanaa.

The Biden administration has ramped up diplomatic efforts on Yemen, which the United States considers the world's worst humanitarian crisis, and distanced itself from a devastating air campaign.

Biden has also sought to re-enter a nuclear accord with Iran rejected by Trump. Indirect talks in Vienna have been held up by Iran's insistence on a complete removal of sanctions.

The Treasury Department said Thursday it was removing sanctions on three former Iranian officials including former National Iranian Oil Company chief Ahmad Qalebani.

"These delistings are a result of a verified change in behaviour or status on the part of the sanctioned parties and demonstrate the US government's commitment to lifting sanctions in the event of a change in behavior or status for sanctioned persons," the Treasury Department said.

State Department spokesman Ned price said the move was not linked to the talks on the nuclear deal in Vienna.

Critics of US sanctions policy have said that targeted individuals have little recourse to get off the blacklist, even if they address concerns.
Washington, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Jun, 2021 ) :Colorado has reported its first litter of gray wolf pups in 80 years, a major milestone in the western state's efforts to reintroduce the iconic species even as it stands imperiled in other parts of the country.

Between June 4 and June 8, a state biologist and a wildlife manager independently reported visual confirmation that "John" and "Jane," known collared wolves, were seen with three young.

The observations were made at a distance from the den site so as not to interfere with the pack.

It is not known if the three pups spotted are the only offspring. Litters typically consist of four to six pups.

"Colorado is now home to our first wolf litter since the 1940s," said Governor Jared Polis in a statement released Wednesday. "We welcome this historic den and the new wolf family to Colorado." Coloradans narrowly voted last year in favor of a law to reintroduce the predator by 2023.

A quarter of a million wolves once roamed from coast to coast before European settlers embarked on campaigns of eradication by shooting, trapping and poisoning that endured into the 20th century.

There are now an estimated 6,000 gray wolves in the lower 48 states, up from the roughly thousand or so that remained before the US granted them protection under the Endangered Species Act in the late 1970s.

A few individual wolves crossed over to Colorado from Yellowstone National Park, where they were reintroduced in the 1990s, but it was not clear there was a self-sustaining, viable population in the state.

"We are continuing to actively monitor this den site while exercising extreme caution so as not to inadvertently jeopardize the potential survival of these pups," said Libbie Miller, a state wildlife biologist.

"Our hope is that we will eventually have photos to document this momentous occasion in Colorado's incredible and diverse wildlife history, but not bothering them remains a paramount concern." - Ongoing peril - Despite the welcome news from Colorado, wildlife groups remain deeply concerned about the species' future after the administration of former president Donald Trump lifted Federal protections last year, exposing wolves in several states to trophy hunting and extermination by ranchers.

In March, licensed hunters in the Midwestern state of Wisconsin blew through their quota and killed 216 wolves over the course of three days.

The number was almost twice as high as the allocation, and amounted to roughly 20 percent of the state's entire population.

In May, Idaho's governor signed a bill allowing contractors to kill up to 90 percent of the state's 1,500 wolves, including by shooting them from helicopters or chasing them down with snowmobiles or all-terrain vehicles.

Research has confirmed the keystone predator's ecological importance in thinning over-browsing herds of elk to prevent destruction of habitat. Wolves also help with wetland creation by keeping beavers in check.

A paper in the Proceedings of the National academy of Sciences last month found wolves reduced the frequency of car-deer collisions by a quarter in Wisconsin.

Most of the reduction was due not to a decline in the deer population but to increasing skittishness by deer around roads often used by wolves as travel corridors, the paper said.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken congratulated Mongolia on the success of the presidential election and said the United States is proud to be "the third neighbor" to the country which borders Russia and China

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 11th June, 2021) US Secretary of State Antony Blinken congratulated Mongolia on the success of the presidential election and said the United States is proud to be "the third neighbor" to the country which borders Russia and China.

"The United States congratulates the people and government of Mongolia for their successful presidential election on June 9...

We commend Mongolia for its commitment to democracy, and we are proud to be Mongolia's "third neighbor" and strategic partner," Blinken said in a statement.

Blinken said the United States look forward to working with Ukhnaagiin Khurelsukh, the ruling Mongolian People's Party, candidate won the race with around 67 percent of the vote.

The election was the eighth presidential vote in Mongolia since 1990.
(@FahadShabbir)

BUENOS AIRES (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 11th June, 2021) Bolivia is looking into alleged supplies of ammunition from the former Ecuadorian government of Lenin Moreno during the tenure of Bolivian ex-interim president Jeanine Anez, Bolivian Interior Minister Eduardo del Castillo said on Thursday.

According to the official, the authorities received unofficial information that the Moreno administration had possibly delivered large caliber ammunition to Bolivia. Earlier in the month, Bolivian lawyer Gary Prado, who represents two former defense ministry officials, said that when Anez was the interim president, a military plane was dispatched to Ecuador to deliver anti-riot equipment for the police and military.

"This is currently under investigation and in the coming hours we will inform the Bolivians about all shipments delivered by Ecuador to Bolivia," del Castillo told journalists during a press conference.

The El Deber newspaper reported that the ammunition deliveries could have taken place during the Bolivian protests in the wake of the ouster of then-President Evo Morales in late 2019.

In November 2019, Bolivia experienced a change in leadership following mass protests against the results of a general election the month before. Evo Morales stepped down as president on November 10 and fled to Mexico. Most of Bolivia's senior officials resigned with him. This resulted in the upper house's second vice speaker, opposition lawmaker Jeanine Anez, declaring herself interim president and vowing to hold a new election.

The new vote in 2020 was won by Socialist candidate Luis Arce aligned with Morales.
(@FahadShabbir)

China's State Council Taiwan Affairs Office Friday urged Japan to immediately correct its mistakes regarding the Taiwan question and abide by the one-China principle and the principles of the four political documents between China and Japan with concrete actions

BEIJING, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Jun, 2021 ) :China's State Council Taiwan Affairs Office Friday urged Japan to immediately correct its mistakes regarding the Taiwan question and abide by the one-China principle and the principles of the four political documents between China and Japan with concrete actions.

Ma Xiaoguang, a spokesperson for the office, made the remarks in response to the latest moves by multiple Japanese governmental officials who had openly referred to Taiwan as "a country." "We firmly object to the Japanese officials' misrepresentation concerning China's Taiwan region, and we feel shocked at the repeated wrong moves by Japan regarding the Taiwan question," Ma said.

Ma said Japan should exercise caution in words and deeds and not send misleading signals to the "Taiwan independence" forces.

The spokesperson also warned the Democratic Progressive Party authority and separatist elements in Taiwan that any attempt to collude with external forces to challenge the one-China principle can not alter the iron-like fact that Taiwan is a part of China.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Friday hailed the first in-person G7 summit in nearly two years as a "huge opportunity" to kickstart recovery from the coronavirus pandemic

Carbis Bay, United Kingdom, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Jun, 2021 ) :British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Friday hailed the first in-person G7 summit in nearly two years as a "huge opportunity" to kickstart recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

Opening the first session of the leaders' meeting in Cornwall in southwest England, the summit host said a more equitable future for the world was essential.

"We need to make sure that when we recover, we level up and we build back better. We have a huge opportunity to do that as G7," he added.
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Iran made a partial payment toward the United Nations budget that allowed the country to restore its voting rights at the UN General Assembly, the body's President Volkan Bozkir said in a meeting on Friday

UNITED NATIONS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 11th June, 2021) Iran made a partial payment toward the United Nations budget that allowed the country to restore its voting rights at the UN General Assembly, the body's President Volkan Bozkir said in a meeting on Friday.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran has made the necessary payment to reduce its arrears below the amount specified in Article 19 of the Charter," Bozkir said ahead of the Assembly's vote to elect five non-permanent members of the UN Security Council for a two-year term.

Article 19 indicates that a United Nations member state whose arrears equal or exceed the amount of contributions due for the preceding two full years loses its voting rights in the General Assembly.

As of last Wednesday, Iran owned the United Nations $16.2 million, according to the letter circulated by Bozkir and UN chief Antonio Guterres.

Tehran said it was behind on payments because of the US sanctions imposed by former President Donald Trump's administration upon Washington's decision to abandon the nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018.

Besides Iran, the Central African Republic, Somalia, Comoros and Sao Tome and Principe are also currently in arrears on paying their dues to the UN budget.
WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 11th June, 2021) US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin discussed bilateral cooperation and regional issues in a phone conversation with Turkey's defense minister, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said in a statement.

"Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke by phone today with Turkish Minister of National Defense Hulusi Akar to discuss bilateral cooperation and regional issues," Kirby said in a readout. "The secretary reaffirmed the longstanding US-Turkey defense relationship and said he looked forward to seeing the Minister at the June 14 NATO Summit in Brussels."
A top Chinese diplomat on Friday condemned Washington's "small circle" diplomacy, state media reported, in a phone call with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken as G7 leaders meet for their first in-person summit in nearly two years

Beijing, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Jun, 2021 ) :A top Chinese diplomat on Friday condemned Washington's "small circle" diplomacy, state media reported, in a phone call with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken as G7 leaders meet for their first in-person summit in nearly two years.

Yang Jiechi, the Chinese Communist Party's chief diplomat, reportedly told Blinken that "genuine multilateralism is not pseudo-multilateralism based on the interests of small circles".
The Editorial Office of the Foreign Policy and Diplomacy of Turkmenistan magazine interviewed Ms. Freya von Groote, Director of the UNOPS Multi-country Office in Austria, who told about the key vectors of cooperation of UNOPS with Turkmenistan.

Ashgabat (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th April, 2021) The Editorial Office of the Foreign Policy and Diplomacy of Turkmenistan magazine interviewed Ms. Freya von Groote, Director of the UNOPS Multi-country Office in Austria, who told about the key vectors of cooperation of UNOPS with Turkmenistan.

United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) is the operational arm of the United Nations implementing unit projects for the UN system. What are the priority tasks for UNOPS?

As a member of the United Nations family, UNOPS has a mandate, expertise and experience in providing project, infrastructure and procurement support and services to Governments, UN agencies and other development partners.

UNOPS is a unique organization among the UN system. It does not receive any core contributions from Member States, but entirely depends on projects on a full cost recovery basis. This allows UNOPS to remain flexible and agile to optimally meet the needs of partners quickly and efficiently.

UNOPS has been growing significantly over the past year. In 2020, we implemented over 1,000 projects in over 80 countries around the globe, and in total, delivered over 2.2 billion dollars of assistance. We also have vast experience in providing support to various partners in the Europe and Central Asia Region, and have been implementing a variety of projects, including to supply critical medical equipment and supplies, construct school facilities and provide technical assistance on climate change.

We are excited to now operate in Turkmenistan, and we look forward to working closely with the Government, the UN Country Team and other partners in facilitating Turkmenistans journey towards the Sustainable Development Goals.

UNOPS provides important assistance to countries in progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, including by providing expert skills. Tell us about the prospects for UNOPS cooperation with Turkmenistan in this context?

UNOPS is already working with the UN Country Team, and under the leadership of the UN Resident Coordinator, to identify ways in which it can partner with the Government, the rest of the UN system and other development partners to help implement the UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework. Our projects and activities will focus on facilitating the achievement of the national development priorities and needs, and implemented in line with UNs values and principles, as well as UNOPS drive for operational excellence.

More specifically, we will be exploring partnerships and initiatives in areas including health systems strengthening, and climate change mitigation and adaptation. UNOPS will offer its global expertise and experience in these areas and beyond to ensure that a variety of development projects are managed effectively, the relevant infrastructure assets are made available, and various essential goods and services are sourced and provided in a fair, transparent and cost-effective manner.

The UNOPS office has successfully started its activities in Turkmenistan. What are the joint projects in cooperation with the Government of Turkmenistan planned to be implemented in the first stages?

UNOPS will work in the coming weeks and months to strengthen Turkmenistans pandemic preparedness and health systems for the benefit of the countrys population and medical professionals. Thanks to the generous contribution of the Government of Japan, a strong global partner of UNOPS, we will deliver a 2.8 million USD initiative to this end until March 2022. UNOPS will closely coordinate and collaborate with the Government, as well as the World Health Organization, to procure and deliver medical equipment and supplies to approximately 15 hospitals and health centers. UNOPS will also ensure that medical staff is trained and warranty arrangements are put in place to optimize service delivery and sustainability.

What areas will be focused on activities of the UNOPS Office in Ashgabat?

Looking ahead, UNOPS will work with the UN system, the Government and other development partners, and make available our project, infrastructure and procurement services that are in line with our mandate as the operational arm of the UN.

We are confident that UNOPS and the expert support that we are able to provide through our mandate, will make strong contributions and allow us to maintain a long-term presence in your country.

How do you rate regional and international transport, energy and humanitarian initiatives and projects of Turkmenistan in the context of achieving the SDGs?

Effective transport and energy infrastructure and initiatives are becoming increasingly critical in ensuring the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, as well as the green transition that is required under the Paris Agreement.

Accordingly, these national needs and priorities are reflected under the respective development plans, and the UN system is working to facilitate their implementation through the UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework for Turkmenistan.

UNOPS looks forward to adding value to these efforts, and working with the Government and the UN system to add value in these areas in its mandate areas and expertise in project, infrastructure and procurement management. We stand ready to provide technical assistance, as well as avail management capacities to facilitate the effective delivery and expansion of existing and future initiatives.
UN rights chief Friday warned that a further escalation in violence is unfolding across Myanmar and must be halted to prevent even greater loss of life and a deepening humanitarian emergency

UNITED NATIONS, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Jun, 2021 ) :UN rights chief Friday warned that a further escalation in violence is unfolding across Myanmar and must be halted to prevent even greater loss of life and a deepening humanitarian emergency.

The warning by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet follows reports of a continuing military build-up in various parts of the country including Kayah State in the east where more than 108,000 people have fled their homes in the last three weeks and in Chin State in the west.

This runs contrary to commitments made in April by Myanmar's military leaders to regional powers ASEAN, to cease brutal violence against civilians which has followed the 1 February coup.

"As I had feared, armed conflict and other violence are intensifying in many parts of Myanmar, including Kayah State, Chin State and Kachin State, with the violence particularly intense in areas with significant ethnic and religious minority groups", Ms. Bachelet said in a statement released in Geneva.

"State security forces have continued to use heavy weaponry, including airstrikes, against armed groups and against civilians and civilian objects, including Christian churches." The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights cited credible reports that security forces had used civilians as human shields, shelled civilian homes and churches in Loikaw, Phekon and Demoso, in Kayah State.

She also appealed for hospitals, schools and places of worship to be protected throughout the country, after several reported incidents in which hospitals, schools and religious institutions were entered and occupied by State security forces, "fired upon and damaged in military actions".

Soldiers had also blocked humanitarian access, including by attacking humanitarian actors, Ms. Bachelet insisted, noting with concern that more than 108,000 people had fled their homes in Kayah State over the last three weeks alone, many into forest areas where they are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights also warned that "sweeping arrests" have continued of activists, journalists and opponents of the regime.

At least 4,804 people remain in arbitrary detention, Ms. Bachelet's office noted, before citing reports of torture and collective punishment of family members of activists including one mother of an activist who was sentenced to three years' imprisonment in place of her son on 28 May.

"In just over four months, Myanmar has gone from being a fragile democracy to a human rights catastrophe. In addition to the loss of life, people are suffering from severe impacts on the social and economic rights. The military leadership is singularly responsible for this crisis, and must be held to account," the High Commissioner said.

Since the military takeover, a minimum of 860 people have been killed by security forces, mostly in the context of protests, the UN Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) noted.

More than 100 self-styled "people's defence forces" and opposition armed groups also operate across the country, OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani said, although there was "little centralised command".

Appealing for an "intensification" of regional diplomacy, including by regional power bloc ASEAN and other influential States, Ms. Bachelet urged them to insist on the immediate cessation of violence and ongoing violations.

"Dialogue is urgently needed with the National Unity Government and civil society stakeholders", she said.

The High Commissioner noted that she intends to update the UN Human Rights Council on the situation in Myanmar on 7 July.
USAID chief Samantha Power will visit Central America on her first international trip since taking office as President Joe Biden's administration seeks to tackle root causes of migration, the agency said Friday

Washington, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Jun, 2021 ) :USAID chief Samantha Power will visit Central America on her first international trip since taking office as President Joe Biden's administration seeks to tackle root causes of migration, the agency said Friday.

Power, a writer and humanitarian advocate who held senior posts under former president Barack Obama, will visit Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala from June 13-17 and meet with civil society, government and business leaders.

She will also meet beneficiaries of US assistance as well as young people, members of marginalized groups and people affected by severe drought and hurricanes, the US Agency for International Development said in a statement.

The trip comes as Biden's Republican rivals, many of them sworn critics of immigration, go on the offensive over the arrival at the US border of thousands of migrants including children since Biden entered the White House.

Vice President Kamala Harris also visited the region on her first international trip, stopping both in Mexico and Guatemala, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas will visit Mexico as well next week.

The Biden administration has urged undocumented people not to come but has also promised a more humane response than former president Donald Trump, who sought to deter migrants by separating children from parents, forcing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico and freezing aid to Central American nations.

Biden has sought funding for a four-year, $4 billion plan to address the roots of migration in the so-called Northern Triangle countries including dire poverty, violence, corruption and climate change.

Power after taking office channeled some US assistance away from Salvadoran government institutions amid concerns over the removal of the attorney general and Supreme Court justices by allies of President Nayib Bukele.
Ivory Coast's former president, Laurent Gbagbo, returns home next week after almost a decade in which he was tried and acquitted of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court

Abidjan, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 11th Jun, 2021 ) :Ivory Coast's former president, Laurent Gbagbo, returns home next week after almost a decade in which he was tried and acquitted of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court.

Gbagbo was ousted in April 2011 after a conflict sparked by his refusal to accept electoral defeat at the hands of Alassane Ouattara, the current president.

Around 3,000 people died in the brief war, which divided the West African state along north-south lines.
IEEE Students Lab Kit Sales Create a New Scholarship

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a professional organization for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines). The IEEE Student Branch at USF serves as a bridge between USF and the IEEE national organization and provides opportunities to network with fellow USF students and professionals. It also promotes project collaboration. A recent IEEE initiative led to the creation of the IEEE USF Student Branch Leadership Scholarship

Several years ago, members saw the need to develop multiple lab kits to be sold to electrical engineering students that provide instruments for use in undergraduate classes. During the pandemic, the members took on more responsibility helping the department adapt to new learning delivery methods by facilitating the distribution of hardware to use for remote lab courses.

According to IEEE USF Student Branch Chair, Noah Hamilton, the lab kits have become a necessity for multiple electrical engineering classes and the kit components vary with each class.

The lab kit process begins with us receiving a parts list from the professor of each participating undergraduate electrical engineering class. We then contact vendors to supply the parts for the kit and we also build some of the parts ourselves, said Hamilton. The kit is then assembled for the class and sold to the students. We usually make around 10-15% profit, which equates to about ten dollars for some of the kits. One of the courses we sell for is Lab 1 and students get to keep their lab kits probes, breadboard, wires, and resistors to use on future projects.

The IEEE USF Student Branch Vice Chair, James Hunter Ireland, also elaborated how the lab kits are being utilized by engineering students.

Were selling these kits to a variety of undergraduate electrical engineering classes which includes Lab 1, Lab 2, and Fundamentals of Digital Circuits, said Ireland. The components within each kit helps engineering students learn the basics of their chosen field. In addition, we also sell our kits to students that are enrolled in a class called MakeCourse, an undergraduate course offered to all engineering students, not just electrical. The course allows students to essentially build their own robotics project and our kit components help them do just that. The IEEE handles all the logistics with the assembly and distribution of these kits.

All funds that are raised by the IEEE USF Student Branch are used to benefit fellow engineering students and the sales of lab kits have been a successful activity for the members over the years. This year, members decided to give back by gifting $5,000 to establish a new scholarship fund in the USF Foundation. The IEEE USF Student Branch Leadership Scholarship will aid undergraduate engineering students from all majors that demonstrate exceptional leadership qualities and who are actively involved on campus. The goal is to eventually raise enough money to transform this gift fund into an endowed scholarship.

Hamilton commented on how proud he feels regarding the creation of this scholarship and knows it will have a lasting impact.

This scholarship embodies the impact that I try to make as a leader on campus and one of the main reasons I joined the IEEE USF Student Branch. My goal as chair is to give back and help other students in any way possible. The creation of this initiative allows for a lasting impact for engineering students at USF.

Ireland believes this scholarship is the result of diligent work and dedication by IEEE members and has also fulfilled a personal goal of giving back.

The ratification of this scholarship will recognize hardworking engineers for their work and dedication to their academic career alongside their involvement with IEEE USF for years to come. Working with my fellow executive board members to accomplish this milestone has fulfilled a personal objective of giving back to the USF engineering community. Go Bulls!

Chris Ferekides, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering, is extremely proud of the IEEEs student branch and their numerous accomplishments. The IEEE chapters amazing work ethic and desire to give back to their engineering peers left a positive impression.

The IEEE USF Student Branch are my heroes and awesome role models for their peers. During the pandemic, they stepped up and in addition to selling the various lab kits following COVID safety protocols, they also took responsibility for distributing the lab hardware purchased by the department and loaned to students to facilitate online learning. They are demonstrating their true leadership qualities by reinvesting the funds they raise through their various activities in a new electrical engineering scholarship that will benefit new students. They are setting the bar very high, and I look forward to future IEEE student leaders continuing to raise that bar, said Ferekides.

Donate to the IEEE USF Student Branch Leadership Scholarship today!
Seventy-five-year-old Sister Giuseppina Berti is denied a visa renewal.

Vatican News

Seventy-five-year-old Sister Giuseppina Berti, who has worked for 26 years in the leprosarium of Tabriz and now lives in Isfahan in the house of the Congregation of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, will have to leave Iran in the coming days. In fact, her visa has not been renewed and she has received a travel order. Her departure will make it difficult for her fellow nun, Sister Fabiola Weiss, a 77-year years old Austrian, who has dedicated 38 years to the poor and the sick in the leprosy hospital, and whose residence permit has been renewed for another year



The two religious nuns, who have dedicated their lives to the country's sick without distinction of religious or ethnic affiliation, are forced to abandon the Congregation's house, built in 1937. In Isfahan, the Daughters of Charity had dedicated themselves for years to the education and training of young people. Their commitment to hundreds of Polish children, refugees and war orphans, who arrived in Iran in the spring of 1942, should also be remembered. In fact, the sisters ran a large school in the city, which was confiscated after the 1979 revolution. In recent years, the two sisters did not carry out any outside activities, to avoid being accused of proselytizing.



The house of the sisters is currently the only reality of the Latin Catholic Church in Isfahan and their chapel, built in 1939, serves as the parish of the "Powerful Virgin", which is occasionally made available to visitors for the celebration of Mass



This is the current reality of the Catholic Church in Iran: two Assyrian-Chaldean archdioceses of Tehran-Ahwaz and Urmia-Salmas, which have one bishop and four priests (in the summer of 2019, the patriarchal administrator of Tehran of the Chaldeans, Ramzi Garmou, was also denied a visa renewal and could no longer return to the country); an Armenian diocese in which there is only a bishop and the Latin archdiocese which currently has no priest and is awaiting the arrival of its newly appointed pastor, Archbishop Dominique Mathieu. As for the religious presence, the Daughters of Charity operate in the country, with three sisters in Tehran and two sisters in Isfahan. There are also two consecrated laywomen. The faithful number about 3,000.



With the departure of the nuns, the presence of the Latin Catholic Church in Isfahan would be permanently lost. In 2016, the house of the Lazarist Fathers in the city of Isfahan had also been confiscated. It is to be hoped that the Iranian authorities will retrace their steps and reconsider their decision, allowing the sisters to continue in the country that they have loved so much and served with sacrifice and dedication.


Guided by Politburos Resolution No.55/2020-NQ/TW, the recent draft decision of the Prime Minister to approve the draft Power Development Plan VIII (PDP8) specifies 45 major liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects with total capacity of just over 53,000MW, lining up in the list of power ventures which are of national importance and a development priority from now until 2045.

The LNG infrastructure is strongly promoted under PDP8, setting a steady foundation for the growth of such projects and its related businesses in Vietnam.

Under Vietnamese laws, a LNG project can be developed in either a public-private partnership (PPP) initiative whereby the investors will cooperate with the state to develop and operate it through signing and performing the PPP contracts; or an independent power producer (IPP) project whereby investors will wholly develop it by themselves.

Investment in PPP form

For an LNG project to be considered under the PPP form of investment, the total capital must be not less than VND1.5 trillion (approx. $65 million). However, the capital requirements for certain ventures in practice, particularly involving foreign inventors, can be substantially higher, normally around $2.5-3 billion in the past, and now perhaps $5 billion or higher for large-scale LNG projects.

Investors of a PPP scheme shall have to sign a PPP contract with the state agency in order to implement the project. Types of PPP project contracts under the Law on PPP are as follows (see red image):

The model contracts for each type of PPP project shall be further specified by the government.

Generally, basic steps for implementation of a LNG venture in PPP form shall be as follows (see pink image):

The time period for the investor to be officially selected as the developer of the PPP project will be substantially long due to the heavy involvement of the government and the sophisticated requirements under the bidding procedures. In return, the investor will be entitled to better governmental support and guarantee (e.g., guarantee on foreign currency convertibility) which are required to raise project finance from foreign lenders.

Investment in IPP form

The funding and development of an IPP LNG project shall mainly be governed by the Law on Investment and its implementing regulations as well as Circular No.57/2020/TT-BCT.

- There are four general policies  on power purchaser, electricity generation price, a power purchase agreement (PPA), and construction of transmission lines and substations.

At present, Electricity of Vietnam (EVN) and its subsidiaries are no longer the sole wholesale power purchaser from LNG power generators/sellers. Circular 57 has allowed big power consumers and wholesale power purchasers to purchase power from the power seller, which aligns with Vietnams plan to develop a fully competitive power market.

If EVN or its subsidiaries is a contracting party to the PPA, based on the model PPA provided under Circular 57, the investor of the LNG project as the Power Seller, and EVN or its subsidiaries as the power purchaser, can negotiate, agree, and supplement certain terms which are suitable for the actual conditions of the specific venture if necessary. This regulation may suggest that parties can have more flexibility in negotiating upon the technical clauses under the PPA.

Under Circular 57, such projects are not entitled to enjoy the feed-in tariff mechanism. Rather, it provides the basic principle to determine the electricity generation price for LNG initiatives.

This generation price is the aggregate of the power purchase agreement price and the specific connection price, which shall be agreed upon by the parties and determined by the method as specified under Circular 57.

The specific connection price is a new component introduced under Circular 57, which is for the LNG project to recover from the grid connection costs incurred by or allocated to the investor to build the transmission lines and the power substation(s) from the distribution yard of the power plant to the main grid connection point as agreed with the power purchaser; or assigned by the competent state authority.

Under Circular 57, the competent state authority can assign the power seller to establish a separate project to build the transmission lines and the power substation to load electricity from their power plant to the main grid connection point. However, we have to wait for further guiding implementations to see how this mechanism will be implemented in practice.

However, the circular regards the construction of transmission lines and power substation as the power sellers obligations, which may cause additional liabilities to the investor. Thus, they should seek consultation with the power purchaser and local authorities upon this obligation, especially taking into account its financial/technical capacity.

- Investment procedures

The investor can fund an IPP LNG project through two options: registering for investment of a greenfield LNG scheme and setting up an economic organisation as the project company to implement it in Vietnam; or brownfield  putting money into an existing project by way of acquiring existing shares or subscribing for new shares in the relevant Project Company.

If following option 1, there are four key steps. First, the selection procedure is applied in the circumstances and methods as stipulated under the Law on Investment, which will take a substantial amount of time due to the complex bidding/auction procedures.

Second is in-principle approval. Depending on the nature and scale of the project, it can be subjected to the approval authority of either, the National Assembly of Vietnam, the Prime Minister, or the provincial Peoples Committee.

After that step, the competent provincial Department of Planning and Investment (DPI) will issue the investment registration certificate to formalise the registration of the LNG project.

The next step is the enterprise registration certificate for the project company. The investor must set up a project company in Vietnam to start implementing the LNG scheme.

If a foreign investor and following option 2, they must register for the approval of the acquisition or subscription of the existing shares/new shares in the Target Company with the competent DPI, which is required in the following three cases:

First, if the acquisition or subscription increases the ownership ratio of the foreign investor(s) in the Target Company which conducts business in areas with certain market access conditions applicable to foreign investors.

Second, if the acquisition or subscription results in foreign investor(s) holding over 50 per cent of the charter capital of the Target Company in the following cases: charter capital ownership ratio by the foreign investor(s) is increased from less than or equal to 50 per cent to over that amount; or charter capital ownership by them is increased while such foreign investor is holding over 50 per cent of the charter capital of the Target Company.

Third, if the foreign investor acquires or subscribes to shares of the Target Company which has a land use right certificate for land on an island or in a border commune; in a coastal commune; or in another area that affects national defense and security.

Key challenges

The first major barrier currently is a lack of an exhaustive legal framework and implementing regulations. Given that the Vietnamese LNG market and its legal framework are still at an early stage of development, the investment and implementation of such projects and especially LNG-related businesses are expected to face uncertainties and ambiguities. For now, Decree No. 87/2018/ND-CP is acting as the key piece of legislation governing the trading, importing and transporting of LNG. However, the conditions therein are quite general and ambiguous, which may cause confusion for investors.

Second is the lengthy regulatory approval process for the full project chain. The LNG market is relatively new in the country and Vietnam still lacks supporting infrastructure. Thus, investors participating in the sector may need to fund all aspects of the LNG venture chain and to ensure smooth operation of their projects, which shall involve complex and lengthy regulatory approval processes associated with each component of the LNG-to-power chain.

The third issue involves foreign currency availability. Like other countries, Vietnams foreign exchange reserves are limited and there exists a risk that the availability of US dollars in the country may be rationed at times, which poses a challenge for any investors who want to convert VND into USD to conduct their business.

Finally, the Law on Land allows investors to mortgage both their land use rights as well as assets attached to land (understood as immovable assets) as collateral(s) to raise financing from local banks in Vietnam. However, the land use rights can only be mortgaged where the land rent due to the state authorities has been paid in a one-off payment. This means that, if the project land is exempted from the land rent (as an investment incentive) or the land rent is paid on an annual basis, the land cannot be used as a security for raising finance to support the LNG project.
Many nations in the world currently have to cut down on their greenhouse gas emissions. Photo: Shutterstock

Roger Cox, lawyer for the Netherlands branch of Friends of the Earth, called on organisations across the world to pick up the gauntlet and take legal action to force multinationals to play their full part in tackling the climate emergency, after successfully taking on Shell over its emissions.

A court in the Hague last month ordered Royal Dutch Shell to cut its global carbon emissions by 45 per cent by the end of 2030 compared with 2019 levels, in a landmark case initiated by Friends of the Earth and over 17,000 co-plaintiffs.

This is a turning point in history, Cox said. This case is unique because it is the first time a judge has ordered a large polluting corporation to comply with the Paris Agreement. This ruling may also have major consequences for other big polluters.

The oil giants sustainability policy was found to be insufficiently concrete by the Dutch court in an unprecedented result that could have bigger consequences for the energy industry and other multinationals.

The Anglo-Dutch company was told it had a duty of care and that the level of emission reductions of Shell and its suppliers and buyers should be brought into line with the Paris Agreement.

Judge Larisa Alwin said Shell must at once reduce its CO2 output, adding that the ruling may curb the potential growth of the Shell group. The interest served with the reduction obligation outweighs the groups commercial interests, she said.

Shells activities and products are responsible for about 1 per cent of global emissions annually, but the company is investing billions more in oil and gas.

Shell, which said it would appeal the judgment, was the ninth-biggest polluter worldwide between 1988 and 2015, according to the Carbon Majors database. An appeal against the ruling could last two years but Cox said he hoped the companys executives and shareholders would act in the meantime.

Earlier this year the multinational said it would push forward with transition of its business to net-zero emissions, including targets to reduce the carbon intensity of energy products by 20 per cent by 2030 and 100 per cent by 2050. But lawyers for the plaintiffs successfully argued that the company had been aware for decades of the dangerous consequences of CO2 emissions and its targets remained insufficiently robust.

A Shell spokesperson said, We are investing billions of dollars in low-carbon energy, including electric vehicle charging, hydrogen, renewables, and biofuels. We want to grow the demand for these products and scale up our new energy businesses even more quickly. We will continue to focus on these efforts and fully expect to appeal todays disappointing court decision, the spokesperson said.

Worldwide ramifications

Around the same time as the court ruling, other iconic energy companies were facing new pressures to change. Exxon shareholders voted to appoint at least two climate-conscious members to the companys board in the face of stiff opposition from management, while their counterparts at Chevron supported a motion to include emissions from burning fuels sold by the company in future reduction targets, also against the wishes of the board.

Oil companies have adopted climate consciences at very different rates, with those in the United States generally lagging behind their European counterparts. They tend to focus on scope 1 and scope 2 emissions  those from their own operations such as drilling, pumping, shipping, and processing oil and gas, as well as from those of their suppliers. But Bloomberg reported that companies now face a more complex challenge of reducing what is known as scope 3 emissions  those generated by burning the products they produce. That could change with the Dutch court ruling, which says Shell must take account of the carbon dioxide emitted from the fuels it produces.

Friends of the Earth Netherlands is already helping other groups mount similar cases under human rights laws in other countries. Companies operating in developed economies, mainly the US, UK, European Union, and Australia, face the highest risk of legal action, according to a Climate Litigation Index by research firm and consultancy Verisk Maplecroft. But climate lawsuits are breaking new ground in emerging markets, with cases filed in Argentina, South Africa, and India.

We are already supporting other organisations to set up similar cases in their countries, said Donald Pols, director of Friends of the Earth Netherlands. This court case and verdict open a whole new approach to climate litigation and because of its success it will be copied by other civil society organisations in the rest of the world.

Oil majors have taken steps to address criticism from investors and consumers about their environmental impact, but theyre under pressure to do much more as the global climate movement gains momentum and the cost of clean energy drops faster than expected, according to Bloomberg.

Decarbonisation plans put forward by Eni SpA, Total SE, and BP Plc were last month ranked the best in a report published by financial think tank Carbon Tracker. Shell, Equinor ASA, Repsol SA, and Occidental Petroleum Corp are in the middle of the pack, while ConocoPhillips Co, Chevron, and Exxon Mobil Corp were rated the worst.

The top-ranked companies set goals to reduce emissions on absolute terms, while Shell, Equinor, Repsol, and Occidental have only pledged to cut the intensity of their emissions  as in, even if the amount of emissions per unit of energy falls over time, overall emissions may keep rising if their production increases.

In a warning for corporations worldwide, Arthur Peterson, professor of science, technology, and public policy at University College London wrote last week, That a court can order any company to fundamentally change its business model because it constitutes a climate danger should give firms around the world pause to rethink their commitment (or lack thereof) to the low-carbon transition.

Vietnamese projections

As well as individual organisations, governments also have to step up and work together for the betterment of humanity. This November, Scotland will host the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), which will bring nations together to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The summit hopes to build consensus on securing global net zero by mid-century and keeping 1.5 degrees within reach, with countries being asked to come forward with ambitious 2030 emissions reductions targets. To deliver on these targets, countries will need to accelerate the phase-out of coal, curtail deforestation, speed up the switch to electric vehicles, and encourage investment in renewables, according to COP26 organisers.

Vietnam has offered recent positive renewable energy policy developments, with solar capacity increasing despite the pandemic and global supply chain disruptions. The country could become a regional leader for solar and has a large untapped potential for offshore wind, yet the coal pipeline is still expansive even considering draft plans to cancel some planned coal projects, according to The Climate Action Tracker  an independent scientific analysis that tracks government climate action and measures it against the globally agreed Paris Agreement aims.

Vietnam updated its Paris Agreement NDC target in 2020, resulting in a slightly lower emissions level that is still above the current policy projection. A target based on a reduction from current policy projections would ensure real progress in climate action, the analysts explained.

Vietnam submitted its updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in September 2020. Using 2014 as a new base year with and an updated national emissions inventory, Vietnam has committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by about 7.3 per cent compared to the business-as-usual (BAU) scenario by 2025, and has slightly increased its relative mitigation target for 2030 from 8 per cent in its previous NDC to 9 per cent. The NDC now suggests that this percentage could be increased to 27 per cent by 2030 with international support, a moderate rise compared to the 25 per cent target set in the previous NDC.

According to the updated NDC, the investment costs of achieving the unconditional commitment (a 9 per cent emissions reduction compared to BAU by 2030) are estimated at about $24.7 billion. According to a recent communication by the Vietnamese Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, these investments would need to be more than doubled to $56 billion to meet the conditional target of a 27 per cent emissions reduction compared to BAU by 2030.

Minh Anh Nguyen, research fellow at the International Climate Protection Fellowship Program, said, This is a tall order for a lower middle-income country, especially given the recent negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, given the multiple co-benefits addressed by the updated NDC, these actions can be considered as an investment in a future-oriented economy for the Vietnamese people.
Jade Vichyanond - Economist ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office

In 2020, despite the massive disruptions in global supply chains and dampened global economic activity, foreign direct investment (FDI) into Vietnam registered a decline of merely 2 per cent while global FDI flows shrank by over 40 per cent. Vietnams attractiveness as an FDI destination amid the pandemic is largely credited to the countrys relatively successful containment of the pandemic and its manufacturing sectors resilient export mix.

Furthermore, the country has greatly benefitted from global value chain reconfiguration as several multinational companies are now moving or diversifying their production facilities from China to ASEAN countries to mitigate vulnerabilities of the existing supply chain network.

As supply chain reconfiguration continues unabated amid the unrelenting pandemic, it is vital to understand the key determinants of FDI into Vietnam for the country to remain an investment darling.

Firstly, Vietnams competitive labour cost and ample labour supply constitute the main factors for the influx of FDI into Vietnam. In recent years, Chinas rising income level and wages have eroded its cost competitiveness for low-value-added manufacturers and spurred many multinationals to relocate to countries with lower labour costs.

Against this backdrop, with a population of over 97 million, of which almost 60 per cent are under the age of 35, Vietnams abundant labour supply has allowed wages to remain competitive.

Moreover, the countrys relatively skilled workforce has attracted FDI in industries that demand technological know-how, such as the electrical and electronics industries. However, Vietnam still has a long way to catch up with its regional peers in labour productivity.

Moving ahead, to capitalise on its young labour force and boost productivity, Vietnam needs to upgrade its tertiary education system and strengthen vocational and technical programmes to ensure a sufficient supply of workers with adequate skills at attractive costs.

Secondly, with stiffer competition from other FDI destinations, the country needs to promote a favourable business environment. For more than a decade, comprehensive policy efforts by the Vietnamese government have fostered a friendly environment for foreign investors. Assistance is provided in various areas, ranging from land acquisition and registration to export and import custom procedures.

Additionally, over the past decade, the country has lowered corporate income tax rates  that currently stands at 20 per cent  and provided generous tax breaks such as for companies investing in high-tech sectors, certain industrial zones, and underdeveloped socioeconomic regions.

These policies help ensure cost competitiveness for foreign companies operating in Vietnam.

However, cross-country comparisons show that Vietnams institutions and governance still have great room for improvement. Going forward, strengthening these institutions and governance aspects will be increasingly important for the country to remain as a top FDI destination.

Thirdly, Vietnams proximity to key regional markets and fast-expanding network of free trade agreements (FTAs) has proven beneficial in attracting FDI. With China as a northern neighbour, Vietnam possesses easy access to one of the worlds largest consumer markets as well as a top supplier of intermediate inputs. Other major regional economies such as Japan and South Korea are increasingly outsourcing parts of supply chains to Vietnam, taking advantage of convenient shipping routes off its extensive shoreline.

Moreover, Vietnams initiatives to expand its markets through numerous bilateral and multilateral FTAs, particularly with countries and regional blocs with large market potential, have made the country more competitive as a production hub. It is therefore crucial that Vietnam continues to enhance its transport and logistics infrastructure while broadening and deepening relations with its trading partners. This has become even more crucial now that bottlenecks in transport infrastructure, such as land connectivity and port capacity, are growing concerns as the economy develops.

Lastly, the pandemic has accelerated global supply chain reconfiguration, and Vietnam has emerged as a beneficiary in the process. Even before the pandemic, Vietnam was among the top destinations for diverted FDI in the region at the height of the US-China trade tensions. In 2019, around $1 billion worth of co-location plans were announced, from only $76 million in 2017.

As border control measures were imposed to limit the COVID-19 contagion, many firms whose production relied on imported intermediate inputs were suddenly cut off from their supply network, hindering operations. At the same time, many firms with high dependence on certain countries as final sources of demand had trouble exporting to those markets.

These trade bottlenecks served as a further impetus for firms to diversify their production base. With its expanding production capacity and relative success in controlling the COVID-19 outbreaks, Vietnam is one of the most promising countries for co-location or relocation of production.

At the moment, Vietnam must once again demonstrate its resilience against the pandemic through effective containment of the current outbreak. Successful control of the coronavirus will safeguard the countrys production capacity and its reputation as a major investment destination.
Illustrative photo (Source: VNA)

Hanoi - Only 7.5 percent of official development assistance (ODA) and foreign loans have been disbursed since the beginning of the year according to the Ministry of Finance (MoF).

This rate is too low, Deputy Minister Tran Xuan Ha told a June 11 meeting between ministries and sectors on disbursement.

He proposed that ministries, sectors, and project owners adopt more drastic measures to complete their tasks.

Truong Hung Long, director of the ministrys Debt Management and External Finance Department, cited data from ministries and sectors in saying that, as of June 10, only 1.25 trillion VND (54.6 million USD) worth of ODA and foreign loans had been disbursed, equivalent to 7.53 percent of the assigned estimate.

Only five out of 13 ministries and sectors have disbursed public investment from ODA and foreign loans this year.

The MoF said the partial completion of investment procedures for investment projects has resulted in slow disbursement, together with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many projects that have been allocated capital and completed investment procedures, meanwhile, have been slow in site clearance and resettlement.

To fulfil disbursement plans, Long stressed the need for synchronous and drastic measures in the entire political system, the Government, ministries, sectors, and localities.

It is necessary to review the detailed allocation of estimated capital to each project, ensure the progress and disbursement needs of each project, remove obstacles and difficulties in project implementation and disbursement, and speed up disbursement for potential projects and those that have completed investment procedures, bidding, and contract approval.

The MoF also suggested that the Ministry of Planning and Investment coordinate with relevant agencies in reviewing and evaluating public disbursement in the past, clearly identifying any difficulties and obstacles and proposing solutions to address them.
Polytex Far Eastern Vietnam. Source: Facebook

In May, Taiwans Far Eastern pumped an additional $610 million into a factory from Polytex Far Eastern Vietnam, located in the southern province of Binh Duong. This raised its total investment in Vietnam to $1.37 billion since it started investing in the country in 2015. This factory manufactures textiles, clothing, polyester, and chemical fibers.

Like Far Eastern, many other foreign-invested enterprises are continuing to eye the processing and manufacturing, as well as power and real estate sectors. Meanwhile, foreign investment in sci-tech remains modest, making up just 1-2 per cent of the countrys total foreign direct investment (FDI).

As shown in statistics from the Ministry of Planning and Investment, Vietnam lured nearly $14 billion worth of newly-registered, added FDI and stake acquisitions in the first five months of 2021, up 0.8 per cent on-year. Meanwhile, FDI in sci-tech hit nearly $321 million, or 2 per cent of the countrys total.

In the three national high-tech parks, the FDI picture was still gloomy. According to Saigon High-tech Park (SHTP) in Ho Chi Minh City, it attracted no new projects in May. In the first five months, the total value of newly-registered and newly-added capital was nearly $800 million. The amount included just one new domestic-invested project worth just over $7 million and nine others getting licensed to increase capital, with three being foreign-invested ones worth $784 million.

Le Bich Loan, deputy director of the SHTP Management Board, told VIR, We saw a fall in investment attraction during the period because of a number of unfavourable conditions, including COVID-19, and a lack of land funds.

A similar situation was also seen at Hoa Lac High-tech Park (HHTP) in Hanoi, and Danang High-tech Park (DHTP). So far this year DHTP and industrial zones (IZs) in the central city of Danang have lured three foreign-invested projects with the total investment capital of $145 million, including two in DHTP.

In the north, HHTP attracted two new domestically-invested projects totalling $134.8 million between January and May. A HHTP source admitted, The result is lower than that of the same period last year. This is due to COVID-19 which has prevented investors from visiting the site to seek opportunities.

HHTP was on a roll in 2018, when it attracted 11 projects registered at $739 million, a record high over the past 20 years and involving notable names like Nidec, Mitsubishi Chemical, and Hanwha Group. The park has welcomed few such giants since then.

Both DHTP and HHTP boast special incentives for investment attraction. One advantage for DHTP is the governments issuance of Decree No.04/2018/ND-CP in 2018 on incentive policies, in which a new investment project of at least VND3 trillion ($130 million) enjoys a 10 per cent corporate income tax (CIT) within 30 years, along with other boons. However, the incentives are not making much of a dent in the pandemic era.

Meanwhile, HHTP is backed by Decree No.74/2017/ND-CP from 2017, governing special mechanisms and policies for the park. As ruled, a new investment project of at least VND4 trillion ($181 million) in the park shall be subject to the 10 per cent CIT within 30 years.

While the pandemic can be cited as the main reason for the poor performances, results were lower than other sectors even before the pandemic hit, with performances yet to meet the expectations of 2019s Resolution No.50-NQ/TW on orientations to improve institutions and policies and enhance the quality and effectiveness of foreign investment through to 2030. In particular, it placed focus on application and transfer of high-technology, as well as research and development and innovation.

In 2019, FDI in sci-tech activities was $1.5 billion, compared to nearly $25 billion in the processing and manufacturing sector. Excluding the foreign investment in mergers and acquisitions, the threshold was just $500 million. Similarly, in 2020, FDI in sci-tech activities was $1.34 billion, compared to nearly $14 billion FDI in the processing and manufacturing sector.

Nguyen Mai, chairman of the Vietnam Association of Foreign-Invested Enterprises, blamed the situation for Vietnams traditional approach in FDI attraction, which has now become inefficient and inappropriate with the new development period when regional competition intensifies.

Moreover, Industry 4.0 and digital transformation is making great impacts on the national socioeconomic development. In this new period, to increase the quality of FDI, a new approach should be taken that focuses on the development level of cities and provinces, the change in the incentive policy, and the development of specific norms to assess the influence of FDI on socioeconomic development, he suggested.

Mai recommended that it is high time for Vietnam to have more concrete criteria on measuring efficiency of such investment, instead of making common assessments. For instance, at an IZ to license a foreign-invested project, the criterion and norms must be set out on how much USD minimum is required per cleared hectare of land, and how much contribution to the state budget is required.
U.S. President Joe Biden and U.S. First Lady Jill Biden disembark from Air Force One on their arrival at Royal Air Force Mildenhall, England on June 9, 2021, ahead of the three-day G7 Summit. /Brendan Smialowski/AFP

U.S. President Joe Biden has arrived in the UK ahead of the G7 Leaders Summit. But before the conference, Biden is set to hold a bilateral meeting with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Crucially, it's his first foreign visit as president that has included a one-on-one meeting with another leader.

The meeting will center on a new "Atlantic Charter" between the U.S. and UK. The original charter, signed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, set out anti-totalitarian aims and led to the creation of the United Nations and NATO after World War II.

A statement from Downing Street explained the agreement as a promise to "apply our combined strength" to battle the challenges of a post-COVID-19 world. Much like the G7 schedule, the charter also aims to usher in a new age in the fight against climate change.

One of several UK Navy ships patrolling St Ives Bay and the area. /CGTN/ Patrick Atack

After the turbulent years of the Donald Trump presidency and Brexit, the two leaders will hope to re-establish UK-U.S. relations  often called "the special relationship" in reference to a phrase coined by Churchill. Johnson reportedly dislikes the term, but military and intelligence cooperation between the two nations remains close.

However, the meeting risks being overshadowed by Biden's criticism of the Johnson administration's handling of tensions in Northern Ireland, which stem from Brexit, among other issues. European Union leaders have made clear they intend to raise the issue while in Cornwall for the summit.

St Ives' historic harbor will provide a backdrop to the G7 talks. /CGTN/ Patrick Atack

What's on the table?

The G7 summit starts on Friday at the Carbis Bay Hotel in St. Ives, Cornwall, a rural area, 450 km southwest of London, where Justin Trudeau of Canada, Emmanuel Macron of France, Mario Draghi of Italy, Angela Merkel of Germany, and Yoshihide Suga of Japan will join Johnson and Biden.

The main focuses will be global economic and social recovery from COVID-19 and the environment.

Ahead of his counterparts' arrival, Johnson called on the G7 to end the pandemic by ramping up inoculations.

"Vaccinating the world by the end of next year would be the single greatest feat in medical history," he said.

"I'm calling on my fellow G7 leaders to join us to end this terrible pandemic and pledge will we never allow the devastation wreaked by coronavirus to happen again."

Later in the week, Extinction Rebellion, the global environmental movement, is expected to march through St Ives to remind the leaders of the commitments needed to stop climate change.

The climate is also a key area for Johnson, who will host the COP26 Summit later this year. It's the first time the G7 leaders have met since all their countries have committed to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The third Youth Co:Lab Regional Summit brought together several thousand participants from 120 countries and territories

Ending on June 4, the three-day virtual event brought together over 4,700 young social entrepreneurs, incubators, accelerators, investors, and governments across 120 countries and territories, to turn sustainable development ideas into viable business models.

The Summit also saw the release of a research report conducted by Youth Co:Lab titled One Year On: How Young Entrepreneurs in Asia-Pacific Responded to COVID-19. The report discloses how the pandemic has challenged youth-led enterprises in Asia and the Pacific on multiple fronts.

The survey shows that 92 per cent have been negatively impacted by COVID-19, with 85 per cent shrinking their businesses or limiting their growth to survive.

The agility and resilience of youth-led enterprises is evident as 87 per cent changed and adapted their business strategy in response to the pandemic.

Despite this, the agility and resilience of youth-led enterprises is evident as 87 per cent changed and adapted their business strategy in response to the pandemic. A majority 86 per cent have innovated to develop new products and services while transforming their operating models.

The Asia-Pacific is home to 55 per cent of the worlds young people, or 660 million youth between the ages of 15 to 24. This segment accounts for almost half of the region's unemployed. The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic turmoil have exacerbated the segments unemployment crisis. At the same time, young people are also leading the response to the crisis through volunteering, social innovation, and activism.

COVID-19 recovery strategies must incorporate measures to tackle the worsening youth unemployment crisis. Social entrepreneurship offers a route for young people to create jobs, tackle challenges faced by their communities, and drive inclusive growth and sustainable development, said Peter Babej, CEO of Citi Asia-Pacific. Citi and the Citi Foundation are committed to working with all partners to help young people develop their own solutions to the biggest social problems impacting their communities, and meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Over the last four years, Youth Co:Lab programmes have been implementing in 25 countries and territories across the region, with national dialogues, regional summits, and social innovation challenges reaching over 75,000 participants. The initiative has benefitted over 8,000 young social entrepreneurs and helped launch or improve over 1,000 social enterprises.

In Vietnam, 29 startups received financial and technical support through the SDG Innovation Incubation Programme to further innovation with AI and other 4.0 technologies.

420 youths joined sub-national and national policy dialogues at local and central level to advocate for social impact business and youth innovations and entrepreneurship. Vietnam was also chosen to host the second Youth Co:Lab Asia-Pacific Summit 2019 in Hanoi with the participation of 500 delegates from 20 countries.

Youth Co:Lab has also established partnerships with 192 key ecosystem players to strengthen the Youth Empowerment Alliance. The aim is to support young entrepreneurs, particularly women and marginalised youth, by connecting them with businesses, incubators, accelerators, and financing options, to develop their ideas into viable business models for sustainable social impact.
From June 4 to June 7, a four-day independent peoples tribunal was held in London, England. Testimonies were heard describing forced abortion, torture, sexual violence, and other atrocities committed against Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in re-education camps run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China.

Presided over by prominent human rights lawyer Sir Geoffrey Nice QC and eight others, the tribunal featured testimonies from 24 witnesses and hundreds of other written witness statements. Out of more than 50 experts who were approached, 14 experts testified.

Despite offers for The Peoples Republic of China (PRC) to participate, Beijing refused and instead denounced the proceedings as illegal and a serious provocation to the 25 million members of ethnic groups in Xinjiang. The CCP claimed that anti-China forces arranged the proceedings to spread lies.

Rape, forced abortions, torture, and fear atrocities

Omir Bekali, one of the persecuted Uyghurs, spoke on the first day of the tribunal. Bekali grew up attending Uyghur schools and said he was taken into custody while visiting family in China away from his home in Kazakhstan, reported Newsweek.

He described tortuous interrogation techniques in his testimony, being locked in a small cell for a month, being heavily surveilled, and being forced to ingest unknown medicines. He said, They made me sit on a tiger chair hung me from the ceiling, chained me to a wall and beat me with plastic, wooden, electric batons and metal wire whip. They pierced needles under my nails.

A tiger chair is an iron contraption with restraints used to secure detainees hands and feet while locking them in a sitting position. Prisoners are forced to sit in the chair for days at a time, enduring excruciating pain and discomfort. Witnesses also described water rooms, where detainees are shackled and forced to stand up to their necks in freezing liquid.

In a conversation with the Associated Press, one woman described being forced to have an abortion when she was six and a half months pregnant. She said, The police came, one Uyghur and two Chinese. They put me and eight other pregnant women in cars and took us to the hospital.

They first gave me a pill and said to take it. So I did. I didnt know what it was, she continued. Half an hour later, they put a needle in my belly. And sometime after that I lost my child.

Another witness, Mahmut Tevekkul, was imprisoned and tortured in 2010. Authorities were attempting to gather information about his brother, who was being investigated for writing a religious text, reported The Associated Press.

They put us on a tiled floor, shackled our hands and feet and tied us to a pipe, like a gas pipe. There were six soldiers guarding us. They interrogated us until the morning and then they took us to the maximum-security area of the prison, he told AP.

Others described the torture of a young girl who was forced to confess to spurious crimes and repeatedly raped by prison guards in front of a hundred other detainees.

Young girls were taken away at night for the sexual gratification of camp guards and returned beaten, bloody and broken, and according to one camp teacher, others were earmarked for lethal injections and organ harvesting. All without exception were starved and humiliated, reported Bitter Winter, a magazine on religious liberty and human rights.

Organ harvesting

Many of the detainees in Chinas re-education camps were purportedly forced to undergo unwanted surgeries to harvest their organs, often resulting in death.

A report titled Organ Procurement and Extrajudicial Execution in China: A Review of the Evidence by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that over [a] four-year period from 2000 to 2004, China more than tripled the number of hospitals performing transplants. This resulted in transplant volume growth in kidney transplants of 510%, in liver transplants of 1,820%, in heart transplants of 1,100%, and in lung transplants of 2,450%.

While Chinese authorities claimed the organs were taken from death row inmates, a much more plausible source was from unwilling detainees, primarily Uyghurs and Falun Gong practitioners. The report states, a close examination of PRC transplant activity indicates that Chinese hospitals have been performing at least several times more transplants than even the largest estimates of death-row prisoners are able to account for.

The report concludes, only the Chinese authorities are in a position to put these allegations to rest. Instead of doing so, they have co-opted international medical elites, responded with propaganda to those making the allegations, and engaged in an elaborate scheme of data falsification.

Currently, upwards of three million people are estimated to be imprisoned in Chinas re-education camps. Another tribunal will follow the four-day tribunal in September, with a final judgment expected in December.
President Joe Biden was in Oklahoma on June 01, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to commemorate the anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, the destruction in 1921 of a prosperous Black community by a white mob that left up to 300 people dead and thousands homeless. White House correspondent Patsy Widakuswara has this report. VOA Khmer's Chap Chetra narrates.
United States law enforcement agencies in New York, U.S., are returning 27 pieces of antiquities back to Cambodia, according to officials from both countries.

The antiquities were confiscated from two New York-based art galleries. The pieces date back to the Angkor era and include Buddhist and Hindu statues made of either bronze or sandstones.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said the restitutions were part of operations conducted to counter the trafficking of culturally significant items.

The repatriation of these 27 stunning relics to the people of Cambodia restores an important link between the nations classical Angkor era and its modern customs and beliefs that, for far too long, was disrupted by the greed of stolen antiquities traffickers, Vance said at the ceremony held at his New York office on Wednesday.

Among the 27 items, 24 were confiscated from art dealer Subhash Kapoor, who is serving a jail term in India for possessing stolen artifacts, and another three were taken from another art gallery owned by Nancy Weiner, an art dealer facing several charges in relation to her artifacts business.

Cambodian Culture Minister Phoeurng Sackona attended the event virtually and said the country welcomed the repatriation of its long-lost relics.

The repatriation provides evidence that even during the difficult circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cambodia remains committed to finding and bringing back our ancestors souls that departed their motherland over a number of years, including during a period of war, she said.

According to Vances office, the estimated price of the 27 artifacts was around $3.8 million in the arts black market.

[W]hile the underground market value of these items is in the millions, these pieces are invaluable to the preservation of Cambodian history, said Peter C. Fitzhugh, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's New York special agent in charge.

Hab Touch, secretary of state at Cambodias Culture Ministry, said the government was in the process of getting the artifacts back to Cambodia.

Regarding when [they will arrive in Cambodia], we have not determined that because we are now proceeding with the paperwork that we now keep them at a safe warehouse out there first, Touch told VOA Khmer.

He said Cambodian officials believe so many other pieces of Khmer artifacts  trafficked abroad during the countrys decades of civil war  are yet to be retrieved.

In January, the family of late British art scholar Douglas Latchford announced it would return more than 100 pieces of Khmer artifacts from his personal collection.

But, Hab Touch said shipment of the first batch of artifacts from Latchfords collection, who was accused of possessing stolen art, would be delayed to July due to complications involving international travel and logistics during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chinese state media report wildlife officials are increasingly concerned about a wandering herd of elephants in Chinas southwest Yunnan Province that has captivated social media.

China state broadcast and print media report the herd has been around Shijie Township in the city of Yuxi, where it has rained for the past several days. Drone video and other video and pictures of the elephants splashing in puddles and playing in the mud have been shared with hundreds of millions of people on social media.

The herd of about 15 elephants has taken a more-than-500-kilometer journey from a nature reserve in Yunnan's mountainous southwest. State media reports one male elephant, which broke free from the herd five days ago, is now about 12 km from the rest of the herd, in a forest in Anning.

Wildlife officials in charge of monitoring the elephants say they are safe and healthy. But many officials have expressed concern about the damage they have done and could do in the future as they roam around suburban towns and cities.

The elephants have already done more than a $1 million in damage to crops and have damaged buildings and raided kitchens and pantries in residential areas looking for food. The officials say while not one has been hurt, the mere presence of wild elephants poses a threat to people, as an aroused elephant or group could easily trample people, especially children.

But Beijing Normal University mammal conservation and wildlife biologist Zhang Li told Chinas Global Times, said elephants may be disturbing the public, but they are not acting maliciously. He said they are searching for permanent habitat, where they can eat and live in peace, and they just have not found the right spot.

Zhang called for better planning and creation and protection of elephant habitats within Chinas national parks. He said elephant ecological corridors should be constructed to connect habitats so they can travel among them without encountering humans.
An executive order signed by President Joe Biden this week dropped a Trump-era measure that barred Americans from downloading TikTok and several other Chinese smartphone apps. But analysts say the order also broadens the scrutiny of foreign-controlled technology.

Bidens move replaced three Trump administration executive orders that sought to ban downloads of TikTok and WeChat and transactions with eight other Chinese apps. The order asked the Commerce Department to launch a national security review of apps owned or controlled by a foreign adversary.

Analysts said that even though TikTok and WeChat were not named in the executive order, they were not entirely cleared by the administration.

According to a White House fact sheet, the order will provide clear criteria to identify transactions involving foreign adversary-connected software that may pose risks to U.S. national security.

"The Biden administration is committed to promoting an open, interoperable, reliable and secure Internet; protecting human rights online and offline; and supporting a vibrant, global digital economy," the document said. "Certain countries, including the Peoples Republic of China, do not share these values and seek to leverage digital technologies and Americans data in ways that present unacceptable national security risks while advancing authoritarian controls and interests."

The order also sets deadlines for executive branch officials to form committees to study the risks posed by foreign-controlled technology and to create policy recommendations.

Overcoming legal challenges

Analysts say the new process could help overcome the legal challenges that set back Trump administration executive orders.

Courts blocked two executive orders aimed at banning WeChat and TikTok that former President Donald Trump issued in August 2020. Another one issued in January 2021, aimed at banning transactions with eight other Chinese apps, has not taken effect.

James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said the new order cleared the legal challenges that the Trump-era bans faced.

"The executive order lays out a strong basis for deciding when to take action, and with its clear criteria for a decision meets the court's objections about capriciousness. The EO puts us in [a] much better place by creating strong criteria and a good process for decisions," Lewis told VOA in an email.

"This means that TikTok may have to go through another review, and any decision won't be easily challenged in court," he added. "This is the start of Round 2, and TikTok may not get off as easily this time."

When asked during a briefing Wednesday if the White House still intended to ban TikTok or WeChat, an administration official told reporters that all apps listed on the revoked executive orders would be reviewed under the new process and criteria.

Key order stands

Julian Ku, a law professor at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, told VOA that Biden had maintained one of Trump's most important executive orders. Trump signed the Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain order in May 2019, declaring a national emergency posed by foreign adversaries "who are increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities in information and communications technology and services."

Biden is not revoking the basic framework, which is that the U.S. government should be trying to prevent transfer of personal data to a foreign adversary," Ku told VOA in a phone interview. "He reserves the right in theory to come back and go after those companies or other companies that would potentially be threatening the personal data of America."

Both TikTok and WeChat did not respond to VOA's request for comment.

TikTok, a social networking app for sharing short, user-produced video clips, and WeChat, an app that includes messaging, social media and payment platforms, both collect extensive data on their users. The core concern is that the Chinese government will be able to access this data and potentially leverage it for espionage or blackmail. U.S. officials also worry that the heavy censorship of these apps will result in biased political opinions and increased spread of misinformation.

A Ban on WeChat and TikTok, a Disconnected World and Two Internets Some policy analysts from Americas closest allies welcome the latest hardline approach by the Trump Administration

The American Civil Liberties Union applauded Biden's move but warned against "taking us down the same misguided path by serving as a smokescreen for future bans or other unlawful actions" with the requirement of a new security review. The rights group considered the Trump-era bans a violation of First Amendment rights.

BREAKING: The Biden administration has revoked Trump-era executive orders that targeted TikTok and WeChat and violated our First Amendment rights.  ACLU (@ACLU) June 9, 2021

Senator Josh Hawley criticized Biden's move, calling it a "major mistake."

It "shows alarming complacency regarding China's access to Americans' personal information, as well as China's growing corporate influence," he said on Twitter.

This is a major mistake - shows alarming complacency regarding #Chinas access to Americans personal information, as well as #Chinas growing corporate influence https://t.co/AP8KswDHNW  Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) June 9, 2021

Chinese Ministry of Commerce spokesman Gao Feng said in Thursday's daily briefing that the revocation of Trump-era bans was "a step towards the right direction" and that officials hoped to see Chinese companies "treated fairly."
The Global Fund has allocated Zimbabwe US$75 million for the country to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a statement, the United States Embassy in Harare said the Global Fund has allocated US$75-US$150 million to Zimbabwe and the southern African nation can secure the funds through an evidence-based grant proposal to run from 2021-2022 to respond to the devastating COVID-19 pandemic and mitigate the impact of the pandemic in the fight against HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria, and strengthen health and community systems.

The base allocation of US$75 million amounts to 15% of Zimbabwes 2021-2023 Global Fund allocation. Zimbabwe can apply for an additional US$75 million, and the funds should be used by December 31, 2023.

The United States government has contributed, through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA), US$3.5 billion to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria (the Global Fund) COVID-19 Response Mechanism (C19RM), as part of the broader U.S. governments global COVID-19 response and recovery strategy.

The funds from the U.S. government support the Global Funds second phase of the COVID-19 Response Mechanism, which seeks to alleviate the effects of COVID-19 on the Global Funds AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria programs and to strengthen health and community systems.

According to the embassy, the resources harnessed under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, with the generosity of the American people, and disbursed through the Global Fund will provide funds to countries for COVID-19 control and containment interventions, such as personal protective equipment, diagnostics, treatment, communications, and other measures as specified by the World Health Organization; COVID-19-related risk mitigation measures for programs to fight the three diseases of AIDS, TB, and malaria; and strengthening of health and community systems, including support to key aspects of health systems, such as laboratory networks, supply chains, and community-led response systems.

Working closely with the government of Zimbabwe and health development partners, the Embassy said, the COVID-19 Response Mechanism funds complement existing funding sources, such as World Bank, World Health Organization, other UN Agencies, bilateral assistance, and individual USG agencies, such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

The U.S. Embassy has provided over US$20 million in support of the COVID-19 response in Zimbabwe.

The United States Government remains committed to working together with the Government of Zimbabwe, through the Ministry of Health and Child Care, multilateral organizations, partner governments, and civil society organizations, to fight the COVID-19 pandemic and other public health threats, for Zimbabweans to live safer, healthier, and longer lives.
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The Alabama Supreme Court rejected a Gurley man's appeal over a fatal crash that killed a Buckhorn High School student.

Court records made public Friday show the state high court denied a Writ of Certiorari in Joshua Getzinger's case.

Getzinger was sentenced to 40 years in prison for leaving the scene of an accident that killed 18-year-old Jordan Collier.

The teen was hit while driving along Maysville Road in December of 2018 and Getzinger was arrested more than a week later.

He remains in the Madison County jail pending his transfer to state prison.

The 47-year-old received a stronger sentence due to multiple other felonies from previous criminal convictions.
This week, triple murder suspect Jimmy Spencer managed to bring a shank from the state prison in Montgomery to the Marshall County Jail.

That means he had a shank for the entire three-hour car ride with the sheriff's office, and who knows how long he had it while inside the state prison.

Now, lawmakers are saying this is just another example of the serious problems within Alabama's prison system.

"It's certainly a concern, when you hear news like that you wonder about the safety of the inmates," says Sen. Arthur Orr.

The Department of Justice is also concerned with the safety of inmates in the state of Alabama, suing the Alabama Department of Corrections over civil rights violations.

"That's what the Justice Department is saying. That these people, it's inhuman treatment, it's a violation of the eighth amendment, cruel and unusual punishment," explains attorney Mark McDaniel.

The lawsuit includes data regarding murders, assaults, and over crowded prisons. The overcrowding is what many lawmakers point to as the root cause of violence.

"And that's the reason we need to get on with building new prisons that help in our state prison situation and modernize these prisons through new construction. And uh, we're working on it," says Senator Orr.

If the state can't come up with a solution, a federal judge could rule for the Justice Department to take control of Alabama's prison system.

"Obviously we've got some issues in the prison system that we've got to address. Not only, not only the facilities and complying with the federal court order. We certainly don't want the court system to take it over, but that's just an example of some serious problems in the prison system," says House Representative Randall Shedd.

The problem is the state doesn't have enough money to build more prisons, even though they're already spending 25% of Alabama's general fund on prison systems.

"Alabama is saying we're doing the best we can, and we're trying to make upgrades, we're trying to do things. But if the Justice Department, if a federal judge were to say you got to do it, you got to do it now. You know, we're spending an awful lot of money in the state of Alabama just to keep people locked up," says McDaniel.

WAAY31 tried to get some answers from the Alabama Department of Corrections regarding this string of violence in the prison system. We are still waiting on a response.
The National Weather Service in Huntsville Alabama has issued a Severe Thunderstorm Warning for Southwestern DeKalb County until 5:15 p.m.

At 440 PM CDT, a severe thunderstorm was located near Geraldine, or 10 miles west of Rainsville, moving south at 20 mph.

HAZARD...60 mph wind gusts and pea size hail.

SOURCE...Radar indicated.

IMPACT...Expect damage to roofs, siding, and trees.

Locations impacted include... Rainsville, Crossville, Fyffe, Powell, Geraldine, Lakeview, Guest, Hopewell, Skirum and Lebanon.

PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...

For your protection move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a building.

Turn to WAAY 31 for everything you need to know to stay safe during severe weather. Chief Meteorologist Kate McKenna, Meteorologist Rob Elvington, Meteorologist Carson Meredith and Ashley Carter will provide you with the most accurate information on storms by using our StormTracker Early Warning Radar Network.

Stationed in Muscle Shoals, Decatur and Guntersville, the radars provide the best data for all of North Alabama by scanning EVERY community in North Alabama.

See all the radars HERE

Access the Muscle Shoals radar HERE

Access the Decatur radar HERE

Access the Guntersville radar HERE

And download our news and weather apps HERE
The head office of a female Catholic Religious Order based in central Rome seeks a Finance Administrator for a temporary contract. The part-time role will report directly to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), supporting the work of the international finance office, the Congregation leadership team and sisters around the world. The main duties will include financial administration, including use of accounting software, assistance with translation and interpretation (Italian to English) and administrative support for the CFO.

The ideal candidate should have at least two years experience in a similar financial administrative role, preferably at an international level. Candidates should be fluent in both English and Italian. Knowledge of either French or Spanish would also be useful. Expertise in the use of accounting software is essential, preferably the software Xero.

All applicants must possess valid EU working documents for work in Italy.

To apply, please send your CV and a letter of application in English to romefinance2021@gmail.com Closing date for applications is Monday 21st June 2021. Interviews will be held the same week with a view to appointing someone as soon as possible. Responses will only be sent to successful candidates.
Rome's wild animals make increasing inroads into city life.

Rome has a long history with wild animals, going as far back as the lupa, or she-wolf, who suckled the city's legendary founders Romulus and Remus.

In ancient Roman times the world's most exotic creatures were transported to the Eternal City before being slain in front of cheering crowds in the Colosseum.

There are countless streets in the capital named after animals. They are portrayed in the city's fountains and feature prominently in church frescoes.

Animals are intertwined with the city's legends, the local dialect. The city's stray cats appear on tourist postcards.

In recent years Rome's relationship with wild animals has entered a more complicated phase, with ever-increasing cases of creatures "taking back" the city.

This became most pronounced over the last year during the covid-19 lockdowns and the huge reduction in people, traffic and noise on the streets of the capital.

Either emboldened or liberated, animals and birds would appear to be testing the boundaries - literally and metaphorically - with changing behaviour patterns and increasingly frequent forays into town.

No animal gets more media coverage in Rome than the cinghiale, or wild boar, whose growing population and "anti-social" activity poses problems for authorities.

Cinghiali have discovered that it is easier to rifle through the city's trash than go foraging for food in the woods.

Overflowing bins in the suburbs provide the hogs with rich pickings.

The boar can be extremely dangerous to humans if approached when there are young cinghiali present, and they have been known to cause traffic accidents, particularly for motorcyclists.

Cinghiale running through Prima Porta cemetery. Photo Facebook - Laura Corrotti.

Some people living in the northern suburbs of the city complain they are afraid to go out in the evening, with one school bringing forward its closing time to avoid children coming into contact with the animals.

In October last year there was uproar when authorities killed a family of wild boar which had become trapped in a playground near the Vatican, leading to an embarrassing blame game between municipal and regional bodies over who is actually in charge of keeping the animals' population in check.

Last month cinghiali "mugged" a woman outside a supermarket in a rural area north of Rome, relieving her of her shopping bags and promptly eating the contents.

At the weekend cinghiali were spotted pottering around in front of the Farnesina, Italy's foreign ministry, a stone's throw from the Olympic Stadium where the Euro 2020 tournament kicks off on 11 June.

Earlier this week the animals were photographed running amok in the city's Prima Porta cemetery.

Seagulls

Like the wild boar, the city's seagulls have also made some lifestyle changes. The first gulls to settle in Rome, in the 1970s, kept their distance from the city at first. They lived on rooftops and were never seen on streets or on the ground.

Each day they would travel outside the capital to the once sprawling Malagrotta rubbish dump, now closed, to pick up scraps of thrown-out food.

When the vast dump closed about a decade ago the birds were forced to search for food a little closer to home.

The gulls soon realised that they had all they needed right on their doorstep.

Encounter between a seagull and a rat, two of Rome's 'problem' creatures. Photo Il Messaggero - Francesco Toiati.

These days it is a common sight to see the birds tugging open bags of restaurant waste on the streets, as well as attacking the city's pigeons and rats, often using car rooftops as the setting for their gory feasts.

Crow attacks

Not wishing to be left out, the city's crows made international headlines last week for dive-bombing residents of the southern EUR suburb. Ornithologists say this behaviour is isolated and occurs only at certain times of the year, and only when people are near the birds' chicks.

Deer

A few days ago commuters waiting for trains at Cesano station, in the far-northern fringes of the capital, were surprised to see two red deer grazing in the tall grass nearby.

Wolves

Less reassuring are reports of the return of wolves to a nature reserve near Fiumucino airport, however experts assure people that the wolves avoid human contact and are not a threat to farm animals. The wolves hunt cinghiali instead.

One problem facing conservationists however is the phenomenon of wolves breeding with dogs, leading to "wolf-dog" hybrids.

Political issue

The encroachment of wild animals into the city is taking on political dimensions too. Critics are quick to lay the blame at the door of Rome's mayor Virginia Raggi, who is seeking a second five-year term in office in elections later this year.

The reality is a little more complex, with multiple agencies involved, both from the city and the Lazio region, complicated further by animals moving in between public and privately-owned land.

That said, the issue of cinghiali 'muscling in' on the city is real and will have to be addressed sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, whoever is elected as Rome's next mayor will be faced with the difficult task of ensuring harmony between the city and its animal population, in a story that is not likely to go away any time soon.
Rupert Murdochs News Corp wrote down the value of its once high-flying The Sun title to zero, underscoring the dramatic decline in Britains newspaper industry.

The tabloids blend of gossip and right-wing political coverage has made it Britains most widely read paper for more than four decades, until the rival Daily Mail claimed the title last year.

Rupert Murdochs News Corp has written down the value of its once high-flying The Sun title to zero. Credit:AP

Its editors have struggled to carve out a place for the paper in a new world of online news  trying a paywall model before abandoning it  and attempting to move on from a phone hacking scandal that blew up a decade ago, damaging The Suns credibility as a campaigner for social causes.

News Corp said its cash flow forecasts for the Sun led it to book an impairment of 84 million pounds ($154 million) in 2020, according to its accounts published on Friday. The carrying value of its publishing rights and titles as of June 28 last year fell to zero from 112 million in 2019.
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen framed the G7 deal as a way for governments to protect their national sovereignty to set tax policy. For too long there has been a global race-to-the-bottom in corporate tax rates, Yellen said following the G7 finance ministers meeting in London last week, ahead of this weekends gathering. Amazon and some other tech companies, meanwhile, have endorsed the agreement, believing the global regime will be more manageable than costly alternatives being pursued by individual countries. Bezos has also voiced support for higher US corporate taxes to pay for infrastructure. Advocates for higher taxes say the steps are necessary to stave off a rise in populism and even for the sustainability of capitalism. The most visible and prominent winners of globalisation are these big multinationals whose effective tax rates have collapsed, said University of California at Berkeley economics professor Gabriel Zucman, who tracks wealth and inequality. That can only lead to a growing rejection of that form of globalisation by the people.

The World Economic Forum, the organiser of the annual conference for the rich and powerful in Davos, Switzerland, issued a white paper this month arguing taxation systems must be redesigned efficiently to tax capital and multinationals. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google and Microsoft collectively skirted approximately $US100 billion in US taxes from 2010 to 2019, according to an analysis of regulatory filings from Fair Tax Mark, a progressive think tank. Many of those untaxed profits were shifted into tax havens like Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Credit:AP There remain plenty of defenders of low taxes. Conservative economists such as Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, argue taxing the wealthy and corporations more heavily will damage the economy. Higher taxes on capital generally raises the possibility of a slowdown of productivity growth, said Holtz-Eakin, who was an adviser to President George W. Bush.

That view is losing ground though as resentment grows over the ways that highly profitable corporations reduce their taxes. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google and Microsoft collectively skirted approximately $US100 billion in US taxes from 2010 to 2019, according to an analysis of regulatory filings from Fair Tax Mark, a progressive think tank. Many of those untaxed profits were shifted into tax havens like Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Amazon paid an effective corporate tax rate of 11.8 per cent in 2020, according to a Bloomberg Economics analysis, and its hardly an outlier among highly successful tech companies. Facebook, founded by the worlds fifth-richest person, Mark Zuckerberg, paid 12.2 per cent last year. Asked to comment for this article, an Amazon spokesperson pointed to some of the companys prior statements related to its tax bill, including, in part: Amazons taxes, which are publicly reported, reflect our continued investments, employee compensation, and current US tax laws. Billionaire tech founders often pay even less personally than their corporations do.

Bezos, for example, got $US77 billion richer in 2020, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. But in the US, gains on stock are only taxed when theyre sold, at a far lower rate than well-off workers pay, meaning that Bezos owed at most a few billion dollars in taxes to the US Treasury last year. It is very easy for multinationals and the richest people to escape tax. What we are seeing with the G7 is that the time has come for politicians to take back power. Philippe Martin, a former adviser to French President Emmanuel Macron who now heads the Conseil dAnalyse Economique. This countrys wealthiest, who profited immensely during the pandemic, have not been paying their fair share, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden said after ProPublica reported that several of the worlds billionaires, including Bezos, didnt pay any federal income taxes in some years. The media organisation said it obtained confidential tax documents on thousands of the wealthiest Americans, including for Warren Buffett and Michael Bloomberg, owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News. Bloomberg and others told ProPublica they had paid the taxes they owed. To remove advantages in the US tax code that benefit the ultra-wealthy, Biden has proposed taxing inherited assets that currently escape levies, and boosting the top rate on investment income so that well-paid workers and investors pay the same.

On an international scale, the administration is seeking a global minimum tax of at least 15 per cent for the worlds most profitable companies  the deal expected to be pushed forward at the G7 meeting this weekend. The G7 deal would change other rules for taxing multinationals, in order to undercut efforts to shift profits to low-tax countries. Biden is also advocating to increase the US corporate rate to 28 per cent, partly reversing Trumps tax overhaul. Tech companies could see their effective tax rates jump if a global tax deal is reached, according to research from Morgan Stanley. Facebook and Alphabets Google could both pay 28 per cent on their profits worldwide, up from 18 per cent and 17 per cent respectively under current rules, the report found. For all the talk of taxing the rich, Bidens proposals, and the international tax deal, face serious hurdles before theyre adopted. While some of his fellow Democrats, who narrowly control Congress, are pushing for more radical changes to the taxes of estates and wealth, others are hesitant.

Loading The next step for the global tax negotiations, which were launched years ago by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and have involved roughly 140 nations, is to win agreement among the Group of 20 countries. Finance ministers for the G20, which collectively oversee about 90 per cent of the worlds economy, will meet in July in Venice. Stumbling blocks to reaching a deal by year-end include China, which may seek exemptions from the minimum tax. Still, there are hopes the global effort puts an end to the craziness, said Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the centre for tax policy at the OECD. You had loopholes everywhere and nobody was taking care of that. Its undermining the very goal of capitalism and a free-market economy. Bloomberg
None  not a single one  of the six murders that we allege Mr Roberts-Smith either committed or was involved in, involved decisions that were made in the heat of battle Owens asserted. Instead, he said, six Afghani men  on separate occasions over a number of different missions  died at the hands of Roberts-Smith or with his blessing in situations where they were either already a prisoner or rendered incapable of combat. Under those circumstances, Owens went on, they should have been entitled to protection under the Geneva Conventions even if any one of them could have been without a shadow of a doubt the most brutal, vile member of the Taliban imaginable. But asked later by McClintock if he thought it was acceptable to kill unarmed people under the control of Australian troops, Roberts-Smith replied: Absolutely not. He said every time he heard or read that allegation he couldnt believe it and it felt like he was in a bloody nightmare. There is more at stake in this trial than contested events on the battlefields of Australias longest and messiest war.

The allegations the mastheads have levelled against Roberts-Smith also include claims of bullying of fellow soldiers, and a separate claim of an act of domestic violence against a former lover (who will be known only as Person 17 during the trial). But at the very heart of the case will be whether Roberts-Smith will walk away forever labelled a murderer, or whether the Victoria Cross-winner will retrieve his place in the pantheon of the countrys greatest war heroes. Ben Roberts-Smith with the SAS in Uruzgan province, Afghanistan. Credit:Australian Defence Force Much will turn on whether McClintock can convince Justice Besanko, presiding over proceedings in room 18D of the Federal Court building in Sydney, that the six deaths were legitimate under the armys secret rules of engagement at the time. In an environment where insurgents did not wear uniforms, where any seemingly-harmless civilian or farmer might turn out to be a combatant, perspective is everything McClintock argued this week. Even an act as simple as a man putting a hand in his pocket, which might presage activation of an explosive device or suicide vest, could enliven the rules of engagement and entitle a soldier observing that action to use lethal force.

Implementing the rules of engagement  is a matter of impression unique to the person making the decision McClintock added. Owens is likely to argue that this is an excessively liberal interpretation of what the rules of engagement allow, even for the elite SAS of which Roberts-Smith was a part. Much will also come down to the credit and recollections of the military witnesses lined up by each side, who will be known only by numerical pseudonyms to protect their identities. Owens revealed this week that the media outlets are planning to call as many as 21 former and current special forces soldiers to back the newspapers case. These witnesses, Owens says, have no reason to lie. Many have not spoken to each other about what they saw in Afghanistan. They were in a range of different patrols. Some were troops on their first rotation, others were seasoned commanders. Conspiracy between them is, we will submit, simply impossible Owens told the court on Thursday. By contrast, he pointed to what he saw as suspicious conduct between Roberts-Smith and the latters former comrades.

In 2016, two years before the media outlets broke their stories concerning the highly decorated ex-soldier, the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force had already embarked on a highly confidential external inquiry into allegations of war crimes committed by Australian troops, a probe which later became known as the Brereton inquiry. Owens said his evidence would show that when that inquiry began interviewing some of Roberts-Smiths associates the former soldier purchased two burner phones so he could speak to friends without fear of being tapped. Owens went on: Several months later, days after his own first interview with the Inspector-General, Mr Roberts-Smith arranged for two further burner phone numbers to be purchased for him. Subpoenaed material from the telephone companies will demonstrate a remarkable pattern of spikes in the usage of those phone numbers around critical events, such as Mr Roberts-Smiths first interview with the Inspector-General. McClintock has yet to lead Roberts-Smith through this aspect of the case but he has already flagged how he will seek to shoot holes in Nines defences. He will highlight, in the first instance, the length of time that has elapsed since the contested events, the earliest of which took place in 2006. The first of the contested killings took place on Easter Sunday, 2009, in a compound designated Whisky 108 by the Australian troops conducting operations there.

Were memories forged under the stress of war so long ago likely to be reliable especially since official reports at the time recorded no misconduct, McClintock asked? Drinking from a prosthetic leg was gallows humour, a way to decompress and let go of some of the demons that they deal with. Ben Roberts-Smiths evidence Perhaps, he suggested, those accusing his client of misdeeds could have been confused, mistaken, or have false memories because of the trauma of the missions  the multiple missions  in a war zone over a period of years. His second line of attack will rest on the motivations of those who Nine  the current owner of The Age and the Herald  will seek to call to the witness stand. McClintock argues that many of those witnesses are motivated by jealousy, or in other cases resentment because he exposed their weaknesses on the battlefield. The soldier identified as Person 1, for instance, had left his 6-man patrol, including Roberts-Smith, critically exposed high on a ridge-line during a battle in the Chora pass because he had forgotten to bring gun oil to lubricate the groups only machine gun. On another occasion, that soldier had been more focused on preparing his lunchtime noodles than on obeying an order to move his vehicle to a more protected position, McClintock said.

Roberts-Smith told the court that being awarded the Victoria Cross for valour in battle in 2011 had been an honour but had also put a target on my back and brought him a lot of misfortune and pain. McClintock will continue pursuing this line forcefully . My client was an exceptional soldier: highly organised; disciplined; a leader; resourceful; and exceptionally brave he said. But what is clear is that, by 2014, a number of soldiers had developed enormous jealousy of my client connected primarily with awards he received. They resented those awards and above all the Victoria Cross. Owens however says it defies credibility that the men Nine will call to the stand, some of whom were allegedly involved in crimes themselves, are all motivated by envy. Is it really to be supposed to take the most extreme example, that a man would himself confess to murder just so as to give vent to some jealousy about a medal? Owens asked.

Roberts-Smith was visibly overcome in the witness box on Thursday as McClintock led him step by step through his actions during the heavily-fought battle of Tizak in 2010, the battle which delivered the former soldier the VC. It was a momentary crack in the otherwise supremely confident facade hed presented all week, striding up the courtroom steps each morning in a crisp white shirt and sharply tailored suit, shoes shone to a high brilliance. It was not the only theatre the week provided. The former soldiers personal life also came into the spotlight, both in the courts, and in the media. Journalists covering the case were galvanised on Wednesday by developments in a different court-room, a floor above the Roberts-Smith trial, where another judge, Justice Robert Bromwich, was presiding over a related case involving Roberts-Smiths former wife, Emma Roberts. Ms Roberts was initially going to be a witness for her husband but recently decided to give evidence for Nine. Her decision to back the media companys case prompted her ex-husbands legal team to launch an eleventh-hour legal strike alleging shed had access to an email account hed used to communicate with his lawyers. They sought urgent orders from Justice Bromwich seeking the handover of any such material on the grounds of a potential breach of legal professional privilege. It was while interrogating the basis for those orders on Wednesday morning that the judge stunned everybody by raising the question of whether the ex-soldier had had a personal relationship with a member of his legal team, solicitor Monica Allen, his honour saying hed seen reports to that effect in the media, and that he should have been alerted to the issue.

Ironically the way this curveball entered the case was via a soft-focus piece on Roberts Smith which had appeared in last Sundays Daily Mail, showcasing photos of the tattoo-ed war hero limbering up for his court case with a workout near a set of well-known steps in harbourside Woolloomooloo. One of Ben Roberts-Smiths legal team, Monica Allen. Credit:Janie Barrett That prompted a brief item in the Australian Financial Review the next morning, suggesting that after the training session, Roberts-Smith had taken a path to the apartment block where Allen normally resided. The AFR piece recalled for many an item a year earlier in News Corps Brisbane Courier Mail which had published pictures of Allen and Roberts-Smith holding hands in public  an encounter Allenss boss, Mark OBrien later characterised as evidence of a purely social friendship between the pair, which was probably unwise. On Wednesday afternoon Roberts-Smiths lawyers rushed back into court to emphatically state there was no relationship between Allen and the former soldier and that Nine (owner of the AFR) had been party to a deplorable slur as part of an attack on his lawyers.

Nine strenuously denied any such suggestion. Roberts-Smith was also questioned this week about the provenance of a prosthetic leg souvenired from battle, which ended up as a drinking vessel for SAS troops at their bar back at the Tarin Kowt base, strikingly named the Fat Ladys Arms. Ben Roberts-Smith and friend with a novelty drinking vessel made from the prosthetic leg of an Afghan man. Roberts-Smith acknowledges shooting the man but says he did so in battle. He didnt souvenir the leg himself, nor ever drink from it. But he didnt condemn those who did. It was gallows humour, a way to decompress after returning from situations where you expect that you may get killed at any moment, he said. It was just about people being able to let go of some of the demons that they deal with. With weeks of this trial yet to run, its impossible to gauge at this early stage which side has the upper hand. One thing is certain already, though. As the trial continues, the Australian public will be getting a very different picture of the long, untidy war in Afghanistan than that curated by Defences public relations department over the years.
Chris Dawson will face trial for the murder of his wife, Lynette, after the Court of Criminal Appeal rejected his application to have a permanent stay in the case due to a delay in prosecution and extensive pre-trial publicity.

Mr Dawson, 72, was charged in 2018 with murdering Lynette, who disappeared in January 1982. He has pleaded not guilty. The charge followed the publication of a high-profile podcast, which cannot be named for legal reasons.

Chris Dawson, pictured in 2020, will face trial for murder. Credit:Getty Images

Last year, Mr Dawson sought a permanent stay of proceedings in the NSW Supreme Court. Justice Elizabeth Fullerton declined to grant it, but agreed to a temporary stay, which meant any jury trial could not proceed until after June 1, 2021.

Mr Dawson launched an appeal, arguing in the Court of Criminal Appeal that there were errors made by Justice Fullerton, including failing to take into account the prejudice caused by pre-trial publicity.
Nationals MP George Christensen has made two secret submissions to Australias privacy watchdog in an attempt to block media access to information about a now concluded police probe into his frequent travels to the Philippines.

For almost two years, Nine News, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald have been trying under Freedom of Information laws to access a letter sent by the Australian Federal Police to then-Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton on June 25, 2018. The letter advised it was closing the case into Mr Christensen, but warned the Nationals MP remained an ongoing risk of being compromised, according to sources who have seen the letter.

Government MP George Christensen has made two secret submissions to the privacy watchdog. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Mr Christensen was dubbed The Member for Manila by colleagues after it was revealed he spent 294 days in the Philippines between April 2014 and June 2018.

The police investigated his travel for more than a year, which included frequent visits to Angeles City - an urbanised area more than 80km north of the capital Manila which is known for its red-light district.
Mr Stewarts Twitter posts promoting the conspiracy group may have gone unnoticed in ordinary circumstances. However, his wife Lynelle has a long-standing friendship with the Prime Minister and his wife Jenny. Mrs Stewart, who has known the Morrisons through their church activities since they were all children, was employed up until recently as Mrs Morrisons personal assistant. These relationships were first reported in The Guardian in October 2019. Mr Stewarts estranged sister Karen, who ran for the Greens in Camden, has previously said it was absolute rubbish to claim her brother and Mr Morrison were just associates. She told News Corp last year that the two couples were close family friends. Meanwhile, its Mr Stewarts networking with other colourful Liberal figures, who have questionable business track records, that have raised eyebrows. The town planner has been working closely on development applications with Matt Daniel, also a former bankrupt, whose name has cropped up in his capacity as a planner at two corruption inquiries. Property developer Rene Licata is also one of Mr Stewart and Mr Daniels politically well-connected clients. Mr Licata, also a previous bankrupt, operates property development group Manta Group. In 2014 his wife Marie Simone, also a former bankrupt, received a good behaviour bond after pleading guilty to four charges of obtaining money by deception. Ms Simone, a councillor on Sutherland Shire, is a key Liberal party fundraiser. She is also the president of the Caringbah Liberal Party branch, where her friend Mr Daniel, himself a former Sutherland Shire councillor, is also a paid up branch member, as is her developer husband. President of the Caringbah Liberal Party branch Marie Simone with her husband, property developer Rene Licata. Credit:Facebook

In 2017 Mr Licata and Mr Daniel established the Commercial and Economic Planning Association which claims to represent the interests of smaller developers. According to CEPAs website, in September 2019 they charged $350 per head for members and guests to dine with the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. Like Mr Stewart, Mr Daniel has had some setbacks in his business dealings. His accountant Sam Cassaniti was jailed for tax fraud and the former morticians development company collapsed owing creditors $5 million. Mr Daniel has featured in back-to-back corruption inquiries. In April it was revealed that Mr Daniels planning company was lobbying Canada Bay councillors for favourable rezonings on behalf of then Liberal MP John Sidoti. Matt Daniel photographed in 2013 Credit:Nick Moir Mr Daniel and Mr Stewart also featured in ICACs investigations into questionable planning decisions made by Canterbury Council. Documents tendered at the inquiry show the pair were on the payroll of controversial property developer Charbel Charlie Demian who was lobbying the council and its planners for major expansions to his development sites. The ICAC inquiry also showed that Mr Daniel was using the services of the now-disgraced former Liberal MP Daryl Maguire to help lobby planning officials and other ministers on behalf of Mr Daniels clients.

The kickbacks Mr Maguire sought for advancing the business interests of Mr Demian eventually proved to be Mr Maguires undoing. ICAC has since referred both Mr Maguire and Mr Demian to the Director of Public Prosecutions to consider whether they should face perjury charges. No adverse findings were made about Mr Daniel or Mr Stewart, who did not respond to the Heralds inquiries. The FBI first identified QAnon and its army of supporters as a dangerous extremist group in August 2019. Just how dangerous the group has become is evident from the number of QAnon adherents who have been criminally charged over the storming of the US Capitol building on January 6. Followers believe that Q, supposedly a secret intelligence official, has been leaving clues urging them to mount an insurrection against the evil forces of the deep state. One of the apparent clues that the QAnon supporters have latched onto is the phrase ritual abuse. On October 22, 2018 Mr Stewarts Burn Notice account tweeted: A new conversation began today in Australia. Mentioning that it was a stepping stone, he also said the Prime Minister took control of the narrative powerfully and commenced phase 1 of our restoration. A prominent QAnon figure from the US was pumped. Do my ears deceive me?, asked Joe M. The new Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison must be a rider in #TheStorm. Tim Stewarts text message exchange about Ritual abuse sent five days before the Prime Ministers speech.

What they were referring to was that earlier that day the Prime Minister used the words ritual abuse in his national apology to survivors of institutional sex abuse. Private messages on the encrypted app Signal, which have been released by Eliahi Priest, a former close associate of Mr Stewart, show that in the days prior to the speech Mr Stewart had been urging his wife to tell Mr Morrison it was essential that he use the term ritual abuse in his apology. According to screen images of their private conversations Mr Priest has posted on his Facebook page, Mr Stewart and others believed that this phrase was a secret code for sexual abuse victims to make contact. Well said Scott, tweeted Mr Stewarts son Jesse that same day. Jesse also included the hashtags #RitualAbuse. #StopChildTrafficking and #WWG1WGA. The latter is a rallying cry for QAnon members which stands for Where We Go One, We Go All. There is no indication that Mr Morrison was influenced to shape his speech to include those words or that his choice of words was in any way related to QAnon.

Mr Stewarts son has previously accused former foreign minister Alexander Downer of being a traitor over the latters role in passing on information to US authorities in 2016 about the Trump campaigns alleged connections to Russia. Apart from retweeting bizarre comments made by his son, Mr Stewart regularly retweeted comments from another prominent Australian QAnon supporter, @KillAuDeepState. Before he, too, was banned by Twitter, this account was operated by a struck-off psychiatrist from Dee Why, on Sydneys northern beaches. Dr Russell McGregor was found guilty of professional misconduct and was banned from practising as a doctor in 2020. The NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal held his publishing of his bizarre beliefs about global conspiracies and other disturbing matters had the potential to place vulnerable psychiatric patients of the practice at risk. In July 2019 Dr McGregor posted a tweet which included three images featuring blue and white stripes. One was Julia Gillard, in a striped jacket, greeting Hillary Clinton. Another was a property with a striped wall belonging convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and, lastly, a striped backdrop on the Ellen DeGeneres show. Nothing to see here, tweeted Dr McGregor. Mr Stewart, who retweeted Dr McGregors post, also tweeted that the arrest of Epstein exposed a satanic cabal involving many world leaders and celebrities.
A $1.8 billion settlement of the governments broken robo-debt scheme has re-invigorated calls from Labor and the Greens for a royal commission to hold ministers accountable for the program that a judge on Friday declared a shameful chapter in the countrys treatment of the poor.

The Federal Courts approval of the settlement, which includes $112 million in compensation, also allows 680 people unhappy with the settlement to opt out and bring their own claims in court, which could extend the governments legal woes despite it making no admission of liability.

About $11,500 was taken out of Felicity De Sommervilles account without warning. Credit:Gordon Legal / Andrew Tauber

Justice Bernard Michael Murphy lashed the government as he approved the settlement on Friday, saying ministers and senior public servants should have known the welfare debt recovery scheme was unlawful.

The proceeding has exposed a shameful chapter in the administration of the Commonwealth social security system and a massive failure in public administration, Justice Murphy said.
Mebai Warusam was working on a pearling boat off central Queensland when his home in the Torres Strait was thrust into World War II.

The 97-year-old, one of the last two surviving members of Australias first and only all-Indigenous army unit, recalls the war as a life-changing moment.

Mebai Warusam says everyone was equal in the army. Credit:Kate Geraghty

On March 14, 1942, Japan carried out a bombing raid on Horn Island, off the tip of Cape York. The Japanese would go on to bomb the Torres Strait island another seven times.

The Torres Strait Light Infantry Battalion was formed amid fears the archipelago could have been used as a staging point for any Japanese invasion of the mainland.
Beijing: China has passed a law designed to counter foreign sanctions, a new tool in its fight to resist US and EU pressure over trade, technology, and human rights in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

Individuals or entities involved in making or implementing discriminatory measures against Chinese citizens or entities could be put on an anti-sanctions list by a relevant department in the Chinese government.

President Xi Jinping wants the Communist Party to use legal means to defend Chinas interests against foreign parties, hence the new law. Credit:White House

Those on the list may be denied entry into China or be expelled. Their assets within China may be seized or frozen. They could be restricted from doing business with entities or people within China.

The United States and its allies have increasingly sanctioned Chinese officials to express concern about the treatment of the Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang and pro-democracy activities in Hong Kong. China has already implemented its own counter-sanctions on US and European officials.
Washington: Planning is under way for Prime Minister Scott Morrison to travel to the United States in September to join US President Joe Biden at major commemorations marking the 70th anniversary of the signing of the ANZUS treaty.

Australian and US officials are hoping to co-ordinate the ANZUS events with a high-powered joint summit with the Japanese and Indian prime ministers in Washington as well as the United Nations general assembly in New York.

Plans are under way for Scott Morrison to go to the US to meet Joe Biden and commemorate the 70th anniversary of the signing of the ANZUS treaty.

Lavish ceremonies marking the anniversary are being planned in New York and Washington for mid-to-late September, with organisers who are not yet cleared to speak on the record hopeful both Biden and Morrison will be in attendance.

The two leaders will meet at the G7 summit in the United Kingdom this weekend for their first face-to-face meeting since Bidens inauguration in January.
SALEM, Ore. (AP)  Lawmakers in Oregon on Thursday night expelled a Republican legislator who let violent, far-right protesters into the Statehouse.

Rep. Mike Nearman was the first member of the House to be expelled in its 160-year history. The House voted 59-1 to remove him from the Legislature for disorderly behavior.

At an earlier hearing Rep. Paul Holvey said Nearman let in protesters who had planned to occupy the Capitol. Some were armed.

Nearman was seen on security video opening a door to protesters on Dec. 21 as lawmakers met in emergency session to deal with economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. Protesters barged into the building, which was closed to the public because of coronavirus safety protocols, got into shoving matches with police and sprayed officers with bear spray.

Its impossible to overstate the seriousness of the reason we are here today, Holvey said. Rep. Nearman enabled armed, violent protesters to enter the Capitol, breaching the security of the Capitol, which was officially closed to the public, and also endangered the authorized staff and legislators inside the building.

Some of the protesters had guns. Among those who gathered outside the Capitol in Salem that day were people espousing false QAnon conspiracy theories about Democrats kidnapping babies. They carried American flags and banners for former President Donald Trump. One carried a sign calling for the arrest of Democratic Gov. Kate Brown, Holvey said.

Nearman was unapologetic as he read a statement to the committee.

The fact is that I exited the building and members of the public entered into the Capitol building, a place they had a right to be  a place the Legislative Assembly had no right to exclude them from, Nearman said. He said that on the advice of his attorney he would not answer questions.

Hundreds of people provided written testimony to the House Special Committee On December 21, 2020, which is composed of three democrats and three Republicans.

Some people who testified excoriated Nearman as a seditionist. Others praised him for letting people into the Capitol, saying residents should be allowed to attend even though hearings are livestreamed on video.

Mike Nearmans behavior ... was abhorrent and anti-democratic, David Alba said. Furthermore, by aiding and supporting extremists, he has placed peoples lives in danger. He should be removed from office and he is not fit to represent my district.

After video emerged in local news reports Friday showing Nearman choreographing how he would let protesters into the Capitol, pinpointing the door he would open for them and disclosing his cellphone number so protesters could text him, all of his House GOP colleagues on Monday strongly recommended he step down.

But Nearmans supporters said they elected him and the House should not expel him. One supporter suggested those 22 GOP lawmakers be voted out of office.

We see you compromising Republicans that whittle away at concepts of morality, liberty, and justice to take a knee to the woke mob, Casey Ocupe said in written testimony. May your Republican constituents take no mercy on you.

On Monday, House Speaker Tina Kotek introduced a resolution that would have the House expel Nearman if two-thirds of its members vote in favor. She appointed the committee to consider the matter.

Kotek credited riot police, who finally pushed out the protesters, with preventing a full-scale assault like the one by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. She said some were visibly injured and shaken.

Nearman has not responded to numerous requests from The Associated Press for comment. He told a conservative radio talk show that a video presentation he held on Dec. 16 was me setting up the 21st. He indicated that his actions were civil disobedience because he objected to the Capitol being closed to the public.

Nearman also faces two misdemeanor criminal charges and has said he will seek a trial by jury.
SKOPJE, North Macedonia (AP)  Police in North Macedonia say they have broken up a Taiwanese crime ring that had lured unsuspecting Taiwanese workers to the country and forced them to work in slave-like conditions to commit telephone fraud targeting people in Taiwan.

A police statement Friday said authorities acted after receiving a tip-off from Taiwanese authorities last November about a crime ring operating in several countries, including North Macedonia. It said the suspects had been under surveillance since April.

Raids on several locations near the capital Skopje on May 7 uncovered 39 Taiwanese people who were identified as victims of enforced labor, police said. Another nine Taiwanese, all in their mid-20s, have since been arrested on an international arrest warrant as suspected ring organizers.

Police spokesperson Toni Angelovski told The Associated Press that the organizers arrived in the country in November, and the victims began arriving successively from November until April.

According to Angelovski, the victims were lured with promises of work. Most didn't know what the nature of their jobs would be until they arrived.

Once in North Macedonia, Angelovski said, the organizers allegedly confined them to a house from where they would be working, and confiscated their passports and phones. They were then forced to work long hours without pay, and were beaten if they didn't obey orders, he said.

The organizers allegedly used high-speed internet to set up international telephone centers from where the workers were forced to make fraudulent calls to people in Taiwan, telling them they had been served with fictitious fines.

In a three-tier system, some workers impersonated bank, post office or insurance company employees who would make the initial calls. The call would then be transferred to a second worker, impersonating a police officer who would try to extract more personal information from their targeted victim and seek proof of payment for fictitious fines.

Finally, the call would be transferred to a third worker who would impersonate a judge or prosecutor who would seek to persuade victims to transfer money to designated accounts to avoid prosecution or to reduce potential sentences.

The public prosecutor's office said that the nine suspects and the 39 victims had all been sent to Taiwan from Skopje on Thursday. The nine suspected organizers face charges there of human and drug trafficking, and money laundering.

Authorities did not elaborate on why the crime ring might have picked North Macedonia as one of the countries from which to operate.
PLA Air Force soldiers stationed in Dandong, a Chinese city bordering North Korea, present flowers at a memorial hall on Fri as China commemorates the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Peoples Volunteers army entering the DPRK for the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea. Photo: Cui Meng/GT

A special law aiming to protect the dignity and rights of military personnel in China was approved on Thursday at the 29th session of the Standing Committee of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC).

No organization or individual may in any way slander or belittle the dignity of soldiers, insult or slander the honor of soldiers, and must not damage or defile the honors given to soldiers, Xinhua News Agency reported on Thursday.

The law says that honors obtained by a soldier shall be enjoyed for life, and shall not be revoked except for statutory reasons or through statutory procedures.

China implemented an amendment to the Criminal Law on March 1, regulating that those who infringe on the reputation and honor of martyrs, severely damage the dignity of martyrs, and damage the image of soldiers on the national border, should be prosecuted according to law.

On May 31, Qiu Ziming, known as "Labixiaoqiu" online, who has more than 2.5 million followers, received a jail term of eight months for defaming martyrs. It was China's first such reported case since a new amendment was attached to the Criminal Law.

In September 2016, a blogger was asked to make a public apology after he challenged the story of Qiu Shaoyun, a soldier who was said to have chosen to burn to death rather than betray the positions of his fellow soldiers during the Korean War (1950-53).
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There are a couple of spoilers in here for anyone not wanting In the Heights twists ruined for them!

It's been two years since WhatsOnStage was whisked to New York to meet the cast on the set of In the Heights, during one of the hottest summers we can recall.

On display was the hum of activity you'd expect to find backstage at a stage show  wardrobe, chore, make-up  individuals bustling around as Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegria Hudes' musical was transplanted from stage to screen. You can read all about the experience on set here.

Leading the surefire blockbuster (set to be released later this month in the UK, while out in the US today) was Anthony Ramos: musical fans will know him as Philip Schuyler from the original Broadway cast of Hamilton. Now, he's stepping into the shoes of bodega owner Usnavi  the role originated by Miranda himself when the show first came to the stage.

How did Ramos feel stepping into the role, considering Miranda's global fame? "A dream," he confessed, while sat in an unfurnished side room inside the film's Brooklyn sound-stage. The production had meticulously recreated the Washington Heights street corner inside a giant warehouse  like something out of Dogville but with more walls.

"I'm like man, I can't believe this is my job to tell this story. Following in Lin's footsteps, for him to trust me with this role  it's huge. I remember playing the role for a special Kennedy Centre performance and we were in rehearsals in front of Lin: seeing his eyes bloodshot red. Afterwards, he just hugged me."

He goes on: "Lin has always been like, big bro. We've always had this vibe  the love is so real. His work has changed my life, and changed the lives of so many Latinx people. There just aren't that many roles  I wanted to stop acting when I was 19 because there are so few shows for me: like Man of La Mancha and In the Heights. Maybe like West Side Story, but you have to be like a ballet dancer to be in that show! But Lin has inspired us  not just to perform but also to write our own things  like I'm making my own music."

Like any good movie casting, there's always a story involved, as Ramos recounts: "Before I was cast, I sat and had breakfast with the director Jon M Chu in LA one morning and we shared stories across from one another. Next thing you know, we're both crying."

It wasn't plain sailing however: "I got an offer for another film, and that's what did it. I had to send Jon a text saying, 'I've got an offer for another movie, I'm gonna go ahead and do it if you guys are looking elsewhere'. Jon replied saying: 'Give me a second, I need to get the suits to move.' The next day I had the offer."

Melissa Barrera and Anthony Ramos

 Macall Polay

This is now Ramos' third Warner Brothers movie  after supporting turns in A Star is Born and Godzilla. To some, Ramos' career might feel like a rapid turnaround: going from auditioning for an off-Broadway musical (The Hamilton Mixtape, which would later blow the world away as Hamilton) and working in a bakery  to having Hollywood knocking at his front door. But he sees it differently: "It doesn't feel rapid to me! I've been doing this for eight years (ten now!) trying to find my places: cracks where I can fit in. Do you ever see the concrete in the street with the grass growing through the gaps? I was that f**king grass growing through the concrete."

Are there any moments from shooting that stand out? "Recording "Alabanza" was so crazy for me (a scene when the community comes together to mourn the death of barrio matriarch Abuela Claudia) because my grandma used to live with us as a family  and she passed away in our home. Not to make it dark but, even at the age of ten, I'll never forget it: my grandma was lying in bed when we found her  just like the "Alabanza" lyrics."

Ramos has a whole load of love for his co-stars  including Melissa Barrera, who plays fashion visionary and Usnavi's love interest Vanessa: "Melissa's dope. She's so talented: I remember that Lin and Jon had been looking for Vanessa for a while, and I was shooting another movie so I couldn't go into most of the chemistry tests  I didn't have time. But they were like, we need you to come in for Melissa. I actually slid into her DMs on Instagram before the chemistry test  we met up an hour beforehand and had lunch so we could go in and already feel like we knew how to act like we were in love."

He finishes up: "Musicals can save your life. I was chatting to guys in costume and sound and we got into a deep conversation: people often say about the theatre 'we ain't saving lives here'  but we are. Think about pieces of art that people connect to deeply  when art is honest and made with passion and love, it saves lives."
Indigenous leaders in Saskatchewan are calling on Catholics to stand in solidarity with residential school survivors by not attending church services.

Flowers and cards are left at a makeshift memorial at a monument outside the former Kamloops Indian Residential School to honour the 215 children whose remains are believed to have been discovered buried near the city in Kamloops, B.C., on Monday, May 31, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

Indigenous leaders in Saskatchewan are calling on Catholics to stand in solidarity with residential school survivors by not attending church services.

Felix Thomas, chief of the Kinistin Saulteaux Nation northeast of Saskatoon, asked Friday for Catholic worshippers to make their feelings known by praying at home instead.

"Something that everybody and every Christian can do is have that show of solidarity and not show up for church on Sunday," said Thomas.

"If its not this Sunday, pick a Sunday."

It would send a message to the church that congregants care about what happened in residential schools and want a meaningful apology, he said.

"You can pray at home in your own way. You dont need a middleman to pray to the Creator, to God."

David Pratt is vice-chief of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, which represents 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan. He said "anything that would help pressure the (Catholic) Church to do what's right would be good."

He said Pope Francis needs to apologize for the church's role in residential schools.

Last Sunday, the Pope expressed his sorrow following the discovery of the remains of what are believed to be 215 Indigenous children found buried at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site in British Columbia.

He stopped short of a full apology for the Catholic Church's involvement in Canada's residential schools.

"We dont think hes gone far enough," Pratt said. "They (the Catholic Church) have to apologize. I know some people say its not important, but we believe its really important. There has to be an acknowledgment of the wrongs done by the Catholic Church.

"There is no excuse for them not accepting their role."

Pratt said the discovery in Kamloops has "reopened the hurts and the pains and the trauma" of residential school survivors, and the Pope's non-apology is prolonging that pain.

"Many of our people are practising Catholics as well," said Pratt. "They need (an apology) for their own healing, because of some of the things they suffered and endured. They need to hear the leader of their church recognizing the harms that theyve done to them.

"We call on all members of the Catholic Church to talk to their bishops, talk to their archdeacons, talk to their pastors and their ministers (and) put as much pressure as they can on the Pope to do whats right and to apologize."

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops did not respond to a request for comment.

Pratt, who expects more bodies will be found at residential school sites, said continuing to wait for an apology from the Catholic Church is a moral issue.

"As far as Im concerned, if you cannot recognize the harms and impacts that you and your organization have done to individuals, youve lost the moral leadership to be able to address and speak on behalf of your congregants."

Thomas said staying home from church is something people can do "to support the 215 that were found in Kamloops."

"I think every Canadian and every Christian would understand that event, and they could understand we need that support and solidarity."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 11, 2021.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Former President Donald Trumps signature border wall project would lose much of its funding as well as the fast-track status that enabled it to bypass environmental regulations under a Biden administration plan announced Friday.

A pair of migrant families from Brazil pass through a gap in the border wall to reach the United States after crossing from Mexico in Yuma, Ariz., Thursday, June 10, 2021, to seek asylum. The families are part of an influx of asylum-seekers entering the U.S. in the Yuma area from South America and other continents. (AP Photo/Eugene Garcia)

WASHINGTON (AP)  Former President Donald Trumps signature border wall project would lose much of its funding as well as the fast-track status that enabled it to bypass environmental regulations under a Biden administration plan announced Friday.

President Joe Biden suspended construction of the wall upon taking office while his administration reviewed the project. That angered Republicans in Congress eager to see it go forward amid an increase in apprehensions of migrants along the southwest border.

The new plan does not cancel the wall project outright, but it's still likely to face opposition in Congress, where many Republicans are eager to promote a project closely associated with the former president.

Biden plans to return more than $2 billion that the Trump administration diverted from the Pentagon to help pay for the wall and use other money appropriated by Congress to address urgent life, safety, and environmental issues created by the construction. It also asks lawmakers not to provide any additional funding for what the Biden team believes is an unnecessary effort.

Building a massive wall that spans the entire southern border and costs American taxpayers billions of dollars is not a serious policy solution or responsible use of federal funds, the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement outlining the plan.

The government has built walls and other barriers along the 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) U.S.-Mexico border for decades to eliminate some of the easier routes of avoiding checkpoints. Trump turned the issue into a centerpiece of his political identity.

Trump vowed to build a virtually impenetrable wall, insisting it would be paid for by Mexico, which never happened. Instead, his administration set aside about $15 billion through a combination of congressional appropriations and taking the money from the Pentagon and other parts of the government.

The Trump administration built about 450 miles (725 kilometers) of wall, moving quickly and waiving requirements for environmental reviews and mediation, though only about 52 miles (84 kilometers) were in areas where no barrier previously existed.

Biden's decision to suspend construction prompted Republican senators to ask the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether the administration was violating federal law in not using appropriated money for its intended purpose.

The administration said Friday that it will use funds already set aside by Congress for their appropriated purpose, as required by law" but is requesting no new money for wall construction in the Department of Homeland Security's 2022 budget.

Biden is instead seeking money for increased technology at the ports of entry and elsewhere, saying there are more efficient ways to stop illegal immigration and drug smuggling at the border.

The administration said it would return $2 billion taken from the Pentagon and use it for the construction projects for which the money was originally intended. That includes $79 million for an elementary school for the children of American service members in Germany; $25 million for a fire and rescue station at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida; and $10 million to expand defenses against North Korean ballistic missiles at Fort Greely in Alaska.

It plans to use the approximately $1.9 million remaining appropriated by Congress for the wall for drainage and erosion control or other environmental problems caused by wall construction in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and elsewhere.

Dozens of advocacy organizations have called on the Biden administration to pay for the restoration of sensitive wildlife habitat and land considered sacred to Native Americans that was damaged by wall construction. This is a welcome, sensible next step to begin healing the devastation that Trump inflicted on the borderlands, said Paulo Lopes, a senior policy land specialist for the Center for Biological Diversity.

The administration doesn't explicitly say it won't build any new wall. But it says that any new construction will be subjected to environmental review and that it will review ongoing efforts to seize land from property owners by eminent domain and will return parcels to the owners if the Department of Homeland Security determines it's not needed.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, said Thursday that the state would build its own new barriers along the border with Mexico but offered no details, including precisely where or what they would look like. He has promised more details next week.

We need to recognize that the numbers of people coming across the border are just going to continue to increase unless we change the game plan, Abbott said.

Associated Press writers Anita Snow in Phoenix and Paul Weber in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP)  The Keystone XL is dead after a 12-year attempt to build the oil pipeline, yet the fight over Canadian crude rages on as emboldened environmentalists target other projects and pressure President Joe Biden to intervene  all while oil imports from the north keep rising.

FILE - In this Aug. 21, 2017 file photo, workers make sure that each section of the Enbridge replacement Line 3 that is joined passes muster in Superior, Wisc. The sponsor of the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline says it's pulling the plug on the contentious project, Wednesday, June 9, 2021, after Canadian officials failed to persuade the Biden administration to reverse its cancellation of the company's permit. (Richard Tsong-Taatarii/Star Tribune via AP)

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP)  The Keystone XL is dead after a 12-year attempt to build the oil pipeline, yet the fight over Canadian crude rages on as emboldened environmentalists target other projects and pressure President Joe Biden to intervene  all while oil imports from the north keep rising.

Biden dealt the fatal blow to the partially built $9 billion Keystone XL in January when he revoked its border-crossing permit issued by former President Donald Trump. On Wednesday, sponsors TC Energy and the province of Alberta gave up and declared the line "terminated."

Activists and many scientists had warned that the pipeline would open a new spigot on Canada's oil sands crude  and that burning the heavily polluting fuel would lock in climate change. As the fight escalated into a national debate over fossil fuels, Canadian crude exports to the U.S. steadily increased, driven largely by production from Alberta's oil sands region.

Even before the cancellation, environmentalists had turned their attention to other projects, including Enbridge Energy's proposal to expand and rebuild its Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota, the target of protests this week that led to the arrest of some 250 activists.

"Dont expect these fights to go away anytime soon," said Daniel Raimi, a fellow at Resources for the Future, an energy and environmental think tank in Washington. "This is going to encourage environmental advocates to do more of the same."

Bill McKibben, an author who was arrested outside the White House while protesting the Keystone XL in 2011, said its defeat provides a template to kill other pipelines, including Line 3 and the Dakota Access Pipeline from North Dakota's Bakken oil field.

Describing Keystone XL as "a carbon bomb," McKibben said Line 3 is the same size and "carries the same stuff. How on earth could anyone with a straight face say Line 3 passes the climate test?"

Enbridge said the cancellation of Keystone XL will not affect its projects, describing them as "designed to meet current energy demand safely and in ways that better protect the environment."

A second TC Energy pipeline network, known simply as Keystone, has been delivering crude from Canadas oil sands region since 2010. The company says the line that runs from Alberta to Illinois, Oklahoma and the Gulf Coast has moved more than 3 billion barrels of oil.

FILE - In this March 2, 2014, file photo, several hundred students and youth who marched from Georgetown University to the White House to protest the Keystone XL Pipeline wait to be arrested outside the White House in Washington. The sponsor of the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline says it's pulling the plug on the contentious project, Wednesday, June 9, 2021, after Canadian officials failed to persuade the Biden administration to reverse its cancellation of the company's permit. . (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

Canada is by far the biggest foreign crude supplier to the U.S., which imported about 3.5 million barrels a day from its neighbor in 2020  61% of all U.S. oil imports.

The flow dropped slightly during the coronavirus pandemic but has largely rebounded. Import volumes have almost doubled since the Keystone XL was first proposed in 2008, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers said Thursday that it expects no immediate effect on production from Keystone XL's cancellation, but the group predicted more oil would be moved to the U.S. by rail.

A series of fiery accidents occurred in the U.S. and Canada after rail shipments of crude increased during an oil boom on the Northern Plains, including a 2013 incident in which 47 people were killed after a runaway train derailed in the Quebec town of Lac-Megantic.

The dispute over Keystone XL and other lines raised diplomatic tensions between the two countries, but Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau adopted a conciliatory tone with Biden, who canceled the pipeline on his first day in the White House.

Canada uses much less oil than it produces, making it a huge exporter, and 98% of those exports go to the U.S., according to the Natural Resources Canada.

Trudeau raised Keystone XL as a top priority with Biden while acknowledging that the president had promised in his campaign to cancel the line.

Both leaders have taken heat at home over Keystone, with Republicans slamming Biden for shutting it down while construction was underway, costing hundreds of jobs. The project was meant to expand oil exports for Canada, which has the third-largest oil reserves in the world, and provincial officials in Alberta wanted Trudeau to do more to save it.

The White House declined to comment on the cancellation. Spokesman Vedant Patel declined to say if Biden plans to address increased crude exports from Canada or intervene in other pipeline disputes.

His action on Keystone "signals at least some appetite to get involved," but pipelines that have operated for years would be tougher targets, Raimi said.

Winona LaDuke, executive director of the Indigenous-based environmental group Honor the Earth, called on Biden to withdraw an Army Corps of Engineers permit for Line 3 and to order a new study.

"He could stop the project," she said. "Dont ask us to be nice to Enbridge. Theyre all over our land. Theyre hurting us."

The Biden administration has been "disturbingly quiet" on Line 3 and the Dakota Access line, said Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. He urged the administration to declare both unacceptable.

Fiercely opposed by Native Americans, the Dakota Access pipeline was the impetus for protests that were quashed by law enforcement. The Biden administration has not sought to stop the line, and it's still in court after a judge revoked its permit but allowed oil to keep flowing.

Alberta sank more than $1 billion into Keystone XL last year to kick-start construction. Officials in the province are considering a trade action against the U.S. to seek compensation.

Keystone XLs price tag ballooned as the project languished, increasing from $5.4 billion to $9 billion.

Another question: What to do with pipe already in place at the U.S.-Canada border and other infrastructure along its route.

Jane Kleeb, a pipeline opponent in Nebraska, said state regulators should revoke the permit they approved for a route through the state. Otherwise, she said, TC Energy might try to sell the easements to another company.

Until the state acts, farmers and ranchers will continue to face TC Energy attorneys in court, "protecting their property from an eminent domain land grab by a foreign corporation," she said.

Daly reported from Washington and Flesher from Traverse City, Michigan. Rob Gillies contributed from Toronto and Grant Schulte from Omaha, Nebraska.

Follow Brown on Twitter: @MatthewBrownAP
RICHMOND, Va. (AP)  It's been nearly three decades since Virginia's only woman to win a statewide race held political office.

RICHMOND, Va. (AP)  It's been nearly three decades since Virginia's only woman to win a statewide race held political office.

That drought will end in November when voters decide whether Democratic Del. Hala Ayala or former Republican legislator Winsome Sears will be their next lieutenant governor. Either will make history as the first woman of color to serve statewide.

In interviews this week, after Ayala's win in the Democratic primary Tuesday, both Democratic and Republican women expressed excitement about the race and frustration that it's taken so long to get here.

I'm thrilled we will be saying Madam President' come next year, Republican state Sen. Siobhan Dunnavant said, referring to how the staid chamber addresses the lieutenant governor who oversees it.

The lone female statewide officeholder in Virginia's long history is Democrat Mary Sue Terry, who served as attorney general from 1986 to 1993.

If a UFO came and stayed long enough to observe our situation, one gender has most of the power and the majority is second-class, Terry said during a recent speech at a museum event, the Martinsville Bulletin reported. There is something wrong with this picture.

Barring some extraordinary turn of events, this year's race will pit Ayala, a cybersecurity specialist who launched her political career in 2017 in response to the election of Donald Trump, against Sears, a Marine veteran who has made history as a woman in politics before. Each has cast the other as a radical or extremist.

Sears, who won the GOP nomination at a convention last month, got her start in elected office in 2001 when she stunned both parties by defeating a 10-term Democrat in an overwhelmingly blue district to become the first Black Republican woman elected to the House of Delegates.

She served just one term before deciding not to seek reelection. After moving, she unsuccessfully challenged U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott in a race The Associated Press described as a campaign of raw invective."

She went on to serve on the State Board of Education and more recently as the national chair of an organization dedicated to reelecting Trump. She's also led a mens prison ministry and served as director of a womens homeless shelter.

The 57-year-old who immigrated to the United States from Jamaica in 1970 when she was 6 describes herself in part as Christian. Wife. Mother, in her Twitter bio.

Sears lives in the Winchester area, where she runs an appliance, plumbing and electric company. She will join GOP gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin and attorney general nominee Jason Miyares on their partys ticket.

Staunchly conservative, Sears generally opposes abortion rights and gun control, and would support overhauling education funding to increase school choice.

In an interview Friday, she seemed unfazed about the possibility of making history again in November.

Once you win, its history. What matters is going forward. What do you do with the office now that you have it? Im going to be focusing on education, she said.

Lieutenant governor, a position first in the line of succession to the governor, mainly involves presiding over the procedural flow of bills through the Senate and breaking tied votes, though the job can also be used to advocate on policy issues.

The role is often a stepping stone to higher office, and with the Senate closely divided, it's an important one. Outgoing Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax has broken ties on a number of bills of significance, including Medicaid expansion and marijuana legalization.

Ayala, a 48-year-old mother of two whose campaign said she was not available for an interview, will be looking to keep the position in Democratic control for a third term.

She won Tuesday's competitive six-way primary, boosted by the support of much of the Democratic establishment, including endorsements from House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn and Gov. Ralph Northam.

In a statement after her victory, Ayala emphasized her personal story, including her fathers death to gun violence and a harrowing pregnancy during which she relied on Medicaid for health care.

I understand the struggles so many Virginia families face because Ive lived them, she said.

Ayala, who is of Afro-Latina, Irish and Lebanese heritage, worked at a gas station while pregnant with her son before getting a college degree and starting a career in cybersecurity. She ran for delegate after helping organize the Womens March on Washington after Trumps election in 2016. She defeated a four-term incumbent, Rich Anderson, who now chairs the Republican Party of Virginia. She beat him again in 2019 when he challenged her.

She supports abortion rights and campaigned on a promise to expand paid family leave and tighten gun control laws. Filler-Corn said Ayala is smart and fearless, with a collaborative approach.

Hala Ayala is closer to shattering one of the highest glass ceilings in Virginia elected office, which would be a triumph for the entire Latino community, Nathalie Rayes, Latino Victory Fund president & CEO, said in a statement.

Ayala will be the only woman on the Democrats statewide ticket this year, joining incumbent Attorney General Mark Herring and former Gov. Terry McAuliffe. McAuliffe ran away with the gubernatorial nomination contest, defeating four primary opponents, including state Sen. Jennifer McClellan and former Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy, either of whom would have become the nation's first Black woman governor if elected.

There will still be one woman in the marquee race: Princess Blanding, who is running as an independent, qualified this week to appear on the general election ballot.
BAGHDAD (AP)  Iraqs oil sector is rebounding after a catastrophic year triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, with key investment projects on the horizon, Iraq's oil minister said Friday. But he also warned that an enduring bureaucratic culture of fear threatens to stand in the way.

Ihsan Abdul-Jabbar Ismael, Iraq Oil minister speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, June 11, 2021. Iraq's oil sector is rebounding after a catastrophic year triggered by the coronavirus pandemic with key investment projects on the horizon, but the country's oil minister warned an enduring bureaucratic culture of fear threatens to stand in the way. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

BAGHDAD (AP)  Iraqs oil sector is rebounding after a catastrophic year triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, with key investment projects on the horizon, Iraq's oil minister said Friday. But he also warned that an enduring bureaucratic culture of fear threatens to stand in the way.

Iraq is currently trading oil at $68 per barrel, close to the approximately $76 needed for the state to operate without reliance on the central bank to meet government expenditures.

Oil Minister Ihsan Abdul-Jabbar Ismail took over the unenviable job of supervising Iraqs most vital industry at the height of an oil price crash that slashed oil revenues by more than half last year. Since then, he has had to balance domestic demands for more revenue to fund state coffers and pressure from OPEC to keep exports low to stabilize the global oil market.

With the sector rebounding, Ismail told The Associated Press, he can now focus on other priorities. In the interview, he offered a rare glimpse into the inner-workings of the countrys most significant ministry  Iraqs oil industry is responsible for 90% of state revenues.

He said cutthroat Iraqi politics and corruption fears often derailed critical investment projects during his tenure and those of his predecessors  a source of long-term frustration for international companies working in Iraq.

In the Ministry of Oil, the big mistake, the big challenge are the delays in decision-making or no decision-making at all," he said, attributing indecisiveness to fears of political reprisal from groups or powerful lawmakers whose interests are not served.

He described what he said was a warped work culture where allegations of corruption are used as tools by political players to get their way. He alleged that the mere possibility is often enough to keep high-ranking officials in ministry from signing off on important projects.

This is the culture: To stay away from any case, to stay away from inspectors, to say let us not do it, he added. I think this is the corruption that slows the economy.

He said that during his time as minister he has sought to fast-track projects, he said.

Top on his list is developing the countrys gas sector, a central condition for Iraq to be eligible for U.S. sanction waivers enabling energy imports from neighboring Iran. To that end, Iraq is looking to develop long-neglected gas fields and capture gas flared from oil sites.

Ismail said he is hopeful contracts will be signed within the coming months to develop key projects that could boost Iraq's gas capacity by 3 billion cubic standard feet by 2025. But that all depends on closing the deal with oil companies; lucrative contract negotiations in Iraq have a history of stalling once commercial terms are laid out.

Iraq currently imports 2 billion standard cubic feet to meet domestic needs.

The ministry is close to signing with China's Sinopec to develop Mansuriya gas field in Diyala province, said Ismail. The field could add 300 million standard cubic feet of gas to domestic production. He hopes to finalize the deal by mid-July.

The ministry is also in talks with France's Total to develop an ambitious multi-billion dollar mega investment project in southern Iraq, including the Ratawi gas hub, development of Ratawi oil field and a scheme to provide water to oil fields required to boost production.

Early talks are also ongoing to develop Akkas gas field in Anbar province, with the American Schlumberger and Saudi Arabia's oil giant Aramco, he said, expressing hopes for an agreement there too.

Though negotiations with international companies have picked up speed, Ismail said entrenched indecision within his ministry persists. Investors have blamed glacial bureaucracy and indecision within ministry ranks for thwarting projects.

Among his deepest regrets is the collapse in talks  after five years of negotiations  between the ministry and Exxon-Mobil over a multi-billion dollar investment project that would have been key to increasing Iraq's production and exports.

For me it was a big mistake from our side, said Ismail, who was the former director-general of the state-owned Basra Oil Company.

Ismail himself came under scrutiny when lawmakers accused him of corruption. The Cabinet dismissed him as head of the Basra company in October 2019 during a purge against alleged corruption. He was reinstated a few months later.

Iraqi media are often used as a pressure tool, Ismail said

Someone sends me a contract, and it would be illegal to say yes, so I say no, and he starts to say bad things in the media, Ismail said.

Also, he said 80% of his time is spent fielding requests from political parties and individuals asking for employment, contracts or job transfers  requests he says he routinely rejects.

They say: Move this person from this position to this, we need this position, we need this department, we need this company," he said.
U.S. regulators are allowing the release of about 10 million doses of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine from a troubled Baltimore factory, but many more doses can't be used and must be thrown out.

FILE - In this May 19, 2021 file photo, Robert Kramer, President and Chief Executive Officer of Emergent BioSolutions, speaks via videoconference during a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington. U.S. regulators are allowing for the release of 10 million doses of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine from a troubled Baltimore factory, but material to make many more must be thrown out because of possible contamination, a person familiar with the decision told The Associated Press on Friday, June 11. (Stefani Reynolds/The New York Times via AP, Pool, File)

U.S. regulators are allowing the release of about 10 million doses of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine from a troubled Baltimore factory, but many more doses can't be used and must be thrown out.

The Food and Drug Administration announced Friday that it had determined that two batches could be released from the plant, which is owned by Emergent BioSolutions and has been shuttered for eight weeks. But it said several other batches are not suitable for use and additional batches are still under review.

The agency wouldn't specify the size of those batches or why they can't be used, but a person familiar with the decision told The Associated Press that they could have yielded tens of millions of doses and that they possibly were contaminated. Another person familiar with the situation said the doses to be discarded were made about the same time as a vaccine batch equal to about 15 million doses that was contaminated earlier this year and thrown out.

Neither person was authorized to release details about the decision and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

J&J and Emergent wouldn't give any details on the size of the batches that are usable, nor those being discarded.

The two batches from the factory known as Bayview can be used in the U.S. or exported to other countries. They are the first J&J vaccines from Bayview approved for use.

The FDA said if any of the vaccine is exported, J&J and Emergent must allow the agency to share information about the manufacture of those batches confidentially with regulators in other countries.

The FDA statement implied that the batches didn't meet all of the agency's manufacturing quality standards. "This review has been taking place while Emergent BioSolutions prepares to resume manufacturing operations with corrective actions to ensure compliance with the FDAs" manufacturing requirements, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDAs Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a statement.

The agency said the vaccines are "critically needed," given the current public health emergency, and that it made the decisions after reviewing records and the results of quality testing.

The FDA, however, stopped short of allowing the plant to restart vaccine production. The agency said it was working through issues there with J&J and Emergent BioSolutions management.

Emergent is one of several J&J contractors that produce its one-shot vaccine in bulk. The concentrated vaccine then is shipped to other factories for final steps, including diluting them to the correct strength, putting them in vials and packaging them up.

Roughly 100 million doses made from bulk vaccine produced at Emergents factory, including those just approved for use, had been set aside for additional review by FDA staff after factory employees accidentally contaminated an earlier batch.

That contamination led the FDA to shut down the factory in mid-April and send in a team of inspectors. They spent a week going through the factory and reviewing security camera footage that showed employees carelessly handling vaccine materials. The inspectors reported unsanitary conditions, poorly trained employees and other problems.

The lapses have hampered J&J's efforts to be a major player in vaccinating people, particularly in remote areas and poor countries, given that its the only drugmaker with an authorized vaccine that only requires one dose and standard refrigeration. It's also cheaper than some other vaccines.

The productions problems have forced J&J to import millions of doses from its factory in the Netherlands to the U.S. and to miss supply commitments.

Emergents factory had a history of FDA citations for problems including mold, dirty walls and floors, poorly trained employees and an inadequate strategy to prevent contamination, yet it was given a huge role in COVID-19 vaccine production by the Trump administration. Emergent was handed a lucrative contract to make many millions of COVID-19 vaccines for both J&J and AstraZeneca at the Bayview factory.

Emergents chief executive has blamed the contamination and other problems on the complexity of scaling up the factory in just months to make two different vaccines.

The Biden administration is working to find a different American manufacturing partner for the British drugmaker, which has yet to request authorization to distribute it in the U.S.

Associated Press writer Matthew Perrone contributed. Follow Linda A. Johnson at https://twitter.com/LindaJ_onPharma.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  California selected another 15 people on Friday to win $50,000 each just for getting the coronavirus vaccine amid hopes from state officials that the chance of winning big money will convince skeptics to get inoculated ahead of the state's broad reopening next week.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)  California selected another 15 people on Friday to win $50,000 each just for getting the coronavirus vaccine amid hopes from state officials that the chance of winning big money will convince skeptics to get inoculated ahead of the state's broad reopening next week.

The lottery-style drawing selected winners from the nearly 22 million Californians who have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine. State officials identified the winners by what county they lived in, with plans to contact them in the coming days.

Fifteen other people won the prize last week. But state officials could not reach two of them. The two were replaced by alternate winners in Sacramento and Monterey counties, Gov. Gavin Newsom said.

In addition to the $50,000 prizes, the state has pledged to give $50 gift cards to 2 million people who get vaccinated.

But the big prize will be handed out on Tuesday, when Newsom will oversee a drawing where 10 people will win $1.5 million each. Newsom has said that on that same day he will lift the state's stay-at-home order and end most restrictions on businesses  including allowing fully vaccinated people to stop wearing masks under most circumstances.

One of last week's $50,000 winners was 17-year-old Nancy Gutierrez, who is about to finish her junior year of high school in the San Diego area. Newsom indicated the money would go into a savings account because Gutierrez is under 18.

My only advice: Don't spend all that money. Invest it in your future and in your mind, Newsom told her during a news conference in Vista, California, that was streamed on the governor's social media channels.

Gutierrez appeared with Newsom at the news conference, smiling while holding a microphone and answering questions from the governor as he acted like a game-show host for the second week in a row. Gutierrez said she and her family initially did not believe the news that she had won and encouraged everyone to get vaccinated.

I think most of us want life to go like back to normal and getting the vaccine would definitely help that, she said.

Newsom said California has administered nearly 40 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine and that 70% of the state's adult residents have received at least one dose.

Newsom said it would be challenging to for the state to achieve a rate of 75% to 80% of California residents vaccinated with one dose, but that he believes the prize money has been an effective incentive.

Newsom said the state administered 1.43 million does over the past week, an increase from the fewer than 1 million doses that were given out the week before.

Just a handful of states can lay claim to seeing week over week increases in vaccination doses being administered, he said. We're here to celebrate that.

Associated Press writer Elliot Spagat contributed from Vista, California.
BISMARCK, N.D. (AP)  Dakota Access oil pipeline opponents asked a judge Friday to require the pipeline company and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to provide detailed monthly status reports while the federal government conducts an extensive environmental review of the project.

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP)  Dakota Access oil pipeline opponents asked a judge Friday to require the pipeline company and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to provide detailed monthly status reports while the federal government conducts an extensive environmental review of the project.

The request comes after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled in May that the pipeline, which carries oil from North Dakota to a shipping point in Illinois, may continue operating while the Army Corps of Engineers conducts the review known as an environmental impact statement.

In court documents, attorneys for the pipeline company said Boasberg should not require the monthly reports and also renewed their longstanding request to have the case dismissed.

Boasberg issued his May ruling after attorneys for the pipelines Texas-based owner, Energy Transfer, argued that shuttering the pipeline would be a major economic blow to several entities, including North Dakota, and the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, in the heart of the states oil patch.

Earthjustice attorney Jan Hasselman, who represents the Standing Rock Sioux and other tribes, said a decision on whether to appeal that order could come later.

Attorneys for the Standing Rock Sioux and other tribes say the pipeline is operating illegally without a federal permit granting easement to cross beneath Lake Oahe, a Missouri River reservoir near the Standing Rock reservation that is maintained by the Corps. They said preventing financial loss should not come at the expense of the other tribes, especially when the law has not been followed.

The Standing Rock Sioux, which more than four years ago sued the Corps for granting permits that led then-President Donald Trump to approve pipeline construction, draws its water from the Missouri River and says it fears pollution. The company has said the pipeline is safe.

The $3.8 billion, 1,172-mile (1,886-kilometer) pipeline began operating in 2017, after being the subject of months of protests during its construction. Environmental groups, encouraged by some of President Joe Bidens recent moves on climate change and fossil fuels, were hoping he would step in and shut down the pipeline. But the Biden administration left it up to Boasberg.

Attorneys for the tribes on Friday also requested that Boasbergs court retain jurisdiction over the litigation until the environmental work is completed and a new easement is issued.

Boasberg ordered further environmental study in April 2020, after determining the Corps had not adequately considered how an oil spill under the Missouri River might affect Standing Rocks fishing and hunting rights, or whether it might disproportionately affect the tribal community.
NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP)  Ministers from 47 Council of Europe member states have agreed to seek new regulations to protect freedom of expression online and in news media amid growing concerns that artificial intelligence may be used to curtail the right, officials said Friday.

NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP)  Ministers from 47 Council of Europe member states have agreed to seek new regulations to protect freedom of expression online and in news media amid growing concerns that artificial intelligence may be used to curtail the right, officials said Friday.

The ministers in charge of media and information society have also asked the Council of Europe  the continent's top human rights organization  to help draft national action plans to protect journalists whose safety has recently come under increasing threat.

The pledges were included in documents the ministers adopted at the end of a two-day conference organized by the Council of Europe and the government of Cyprus in the Cypriot capital Nicosia.

The ministers agreed to develop a regulatory framework ensuring that automated tools for creating and distributing news content dont curtail the right to freedom of expression.

They would also work together with developers of artificial intelligence technology designed to create and distribute online content on drafting rules to safeguard free expression. Journalists would be invited to jointly develop ethical codes promoting the transparent and responsible use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom and to protect people online from personal data exploitation.

It is an important commitment of states to be able to say, this freedom of expression is one of the cornerstones of our societies and we need to protect it, said Patrick Penninckx, head of the CoE Information Society Department.

In order to protect democracy, in order to protect the societies as we know, and despite the pandemic, we can ensure that media freedom is not being curtailed.

The ministers pledged to support independent media outlets as a bulwark against increased disinformation and called on the CoE to toughen up standards for online content.

They also expressed a commitment to remove all unnecessary obstacles to freedom of expression in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The clothing brand Forever 21 is making a return to the Canadian market after an agreement with Hudson's Bay Co. allowing them to offer collections inside the department store.

In a September 30, 2019 file photo, people walk in front of a Forever 21 clothing store in New York.THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP-Mark Lennihan

The clothing brand Forever 21 is making a return to the Canadian market after an agreement with Hudson's Bay Co. allowing them to offer collections inside the department store.

Forever 21 debuts today at Hudson's Bay stores in Toronto's Yorkdale Mall and the Square One Shopping Centre in Mississauga, Ont.

Hudson's Bay says multiple stores across the country are expected to offer Forever 21 in the coming weeks, beginning in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec.

The brand will also be available to order on the Hudson's Bay website.

Forever 21, a low-cost fashion brand that is popular with younger shoppers, filed for bankruptcy in 2019 and shuttered all of its Canadian locations.

The brand, which is represented by YM Inc. in Canada, still has multiple standalone locations in the U.S.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 11, 2021.

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous version included an erroneous time frame for additional Forever 21 openings.
While many businesses anxiously wait for the pandemic crisis to dissipate, allowing them to get back to normal, other growing Manitoba businesses are trying to figure out how to keep pace with demand.

While many businesses anxiously wait for the pandemic crisis to dissipate, allowing them to get back to normal, other growing Manitoba businesses are trying to figure out how to keep pace with demand.

Four of those businesses received a total of a $3.4 million in interest-free loans from Western Economic Diversifications business scale-up and productivity program.

Terry Duguid, the Winnipeg MP who is the parliamentary secretary to the minister responsible for WED, said the investments are a demonstration of the government of Canadas commitment to support local businesses to become more competitive both at home and abroad.

In many ways, the four businesses are great examples of the resiliency of the local economy that shows local entrepreneurs ability to continue to produce industry-leading products and services and create employment in the province.

 Permission Click received $1,565,783 to add to its sales force which effectively speeds up the companys ability to grow its sales team by a couple of years. The company makes a workflow automation and policy compliance platform for schools from kindergarten to Grade 12.

The automation of paper-based forms and workflows is gaining traction with school boards around the world, allowing for faster data collection and approvals and increased policy compliance. It is already being used by millions of students, parents and school staff in more than 14,000 schools in 50 countries.

CEO Chris Johnson said because of the lengthy sales cycle required to introduce new products to school divisions, it means it can cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars before it starts earning anything from new salespeople.

A few days before the WED funding announcement the company officially became a partner with a large existing service provider who will now deploy its large sales force to introduce Permission Click to even more potential customers.

 Trainfo, a smart, young Winnipeg specialized technology company, received $460,700 to staff up its efforts to expand into the North American market for its unique solutions that can prevent traffic delays and collisions at rail crossings.

Using sensors and artificial intelligence and machine learning, Trainfo has already shown in about 60 installations that it can reduce delays and accidents at rail crossings by 25 per cent for one per cent of the cost.

Garreth Rempel, CEO of the Winnipeg company, said the company will use the interest-free loan to ramp up production of marketing materials to get the word out. It is already partnering with a first-responder dispatching company to help ease transportation delays  train crossings delay about 30 per cent of all calls  that occur for that mission-critical service.

He believes the WED funding alone will help the company triple revenue over the next two years as more and more municipalities become aware that even if they do not have at least $50 million to build an underpass, there is another option to help deal with a problem that is one of the most dangerous parts of urban transportation.

 Global Drain Technologies Inc. received $400,000 to integrate a new advanced manufacturing process into its 50-person stainless steel drain manufacturing business.

Tyler Gompf, the CEO of the company, said supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic and new tariffs made it more challenging to secure certain components. The new funding will allow the company to manufacture those parts in-house.

The company specializes in drainage solutions for the booming agri-food processing industry. Since acquiring patents and technology from a Winnipeg inventor, the company which just moved into a new production facility, has increased the number of products it makes from six to 100 in the past couple of years and is now in tight trying to keep up with demand.

 Prairie Fava, out of Glenboro, Man., received $1,025,773 to scale-up its production capabilities and to continue to open up new markets in North America for fava beans, an up-and-comer in the food market.

The WED funding will help in the purchase of new equipment that will allow the company to commercialize new value-added food ingredients and consumer products targeted at the consumer packaged goods, food service, and food manufacturing markets.

Hailey Jefferies, company CEO, said fava is becoming an in-demand ingredient for plant-based meats, gluten-free baking and other applications.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca
CARBIS BAY, England (AP)  Group of Seven leaders brought pledges to share vaccine doses and make a fairer global economy Friday to a seaside summit in England, where British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the coronavirus pandemic should not be allowed to leave a lasting scar on the world.

French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron arrive at Cornwall Airport in Newquay, England, Friday June 11, 2021, ahead of the G7 summit. Leaders of the G7 begin their first of three days of meetings on Friday in Carbis Bay, in which they will discuss COVID-19, climate, foreign policy and the economy. (Stefan Rousseau/Pool via AP)

CARBIS BAY, England (AP)  Group of Seven leaders brought pledges to share vaccine doses and make a fairer global economy Friday to a seaside summit in England, where British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the coronavirus pandemic should not be allowed to leave a lasting scar on the world.

The wealthy nations leaders were all smiles and unity as Johnson greeted them on the freshly raked sand of Carbis Bay, but they jostled over who was doing most to help the worlds poorer nations fight COVID-19.

Recovery from the pandemic was set to dominate their discussions, and members of the wealthy democracies club committed to sharing at least 1 billion vaccine shots with struggling countries. That includes a pledge from U.S. President Joe Biden to share 500 million doses, and a promise from Johnson for another 100 million shots.

Host Britain said the G-7 will also announce a package of measures aimed at reducing the chances of another pandemic. The U.K. government said the grandly titled Carbis Bay Declaration will aim for a 100-day goal to develop vaccines, treatments and diagnostics for future disease and to bolster surveillance for new illnesses.

The group will also pledge to strengthen the World Health Organization, which former President Donald Trump pulled out of and Biden rejoined.

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and his wife Mariko Suga arrive at Newquay Airport in southwest England early Friday June 11, 2021 where he will attend the G7 Summit to be held at Carbis Bay in Cornwall. (Leon Neal/Pool via AP)

Johnson said the goal of the measures was to make sure that never again will we be caught unawares.

Opening three days of talks in Cornwall, southwest England, Johnson warned that world leaders must not repeat errors made over the past 18 months  or those made in the recovery from the 2008 global financial crisis.

It is vital that we dont repeat the mistake of the last great crisis, the last great economic recession in 2008, when the recovery was not uniform across all parts of society, he said after leaders posed for a formal family photo by the sea.

Activists pose with faces of the G7 and other world leaders as they demonstrate on the beach in the harbour near the G7 meeting taking place in St. Ives, Cornwall, England, Friday, June 11, 2021. Leaders of the G7 begin their first of three days of meetings on Friday in Carbis Bay, in which they will discuss COVID-19, climate, foreign policy and the economy. Leaders faces from left, Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison, U.S. President Joe Biden, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, South Korean President Moon Jae-in, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin. (AP Photo/Jon Super)

And I think whats gone wrong with this pandemic, and what risks being a lasting scar, is that I think the inequalities may be entrenched, Johnson added.

The leaders of the G-7  which also includes the United States Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan  hope the meeting at the resort will also energize the global economy. Beneath moody dark skies, the group walked away from the photo as cheerful as children who had just built a sand castle.

As Johnson led the politicians off the beach, French President Emmanuel Macron threw his arm around the shoulders of Biden, whom he was meeting for the first time. The White House later said the two men discussed COVID-19 and counterterrorism efforts in the Sahel region of Africa and would have a meeting on Saturday.

President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visit during a bilateral meeting ahead of the G-7 summit, Thursday, June 10, 2021, in Carbis Bay, England. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Facing criticism that they are hogging vaccines, the leaders are competing to be the global champion of so many wounded by the virus. With 3.7 million people lost in the pandemic, the worlds richest democracies are eager to show themselves the champions of the afflicted.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she hoped the summit would show the world were not just thinking of ourselves." Macron sought to underscore that, noting that France had already shipped vaccine doses to the worlds poor  and gently chiding countries that have not by urging in a tweet for clear goals and concrete commitments.

For Johnson, the first G-7 summit in two years  last years was scuttled by the pandemic  is a chance to set out his vision of a post-Brexit global Britain as a mid-sized country with an outsized role in international problem-solving.

Activists wearing giant heads of the G7 leaders tussle over a giant COVID-19 vaccine syringe during an action of NGO's on Swanpool Beach in Falmouth, Cornwall, England, Friday, June 11, 2021. Leaders of the G7 begin their first of three days of meetings on Friday in Carbis Bay, in which they will discuss COVID-19, climate, foreign policy and the economy. Depicted from left to right, Japan's Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Italy's Prime Minister Mario Draghi, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, U.S. President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

On Friday Queen Elizabeth II  Britain's biggest global star  traveled from Windsor Castle near London for a reception with the leaders and their spouses at the Eden Project, a futuristic botanical garden housed inside domes that features the world's largest indoor rainforest.

The 95-year-old monarch drew laughter from her guests as she chided them during a group photo session: Are you supposed to be looking as if youre enjoying yourself?

Senior royals  including heir to the throne Prince Charles, his son Prince William and Williams wife, Kate  joined the leaders for the reception and a dinner of roasted turbot, Cornish new potatoes and greens with wild garlic pesto cooked by a local chef.

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson speaks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel during arrivals for the G7 meeting at the Carbis Bay Hotel in Carbis Bay, St. Ives, Cornwall, England, Friday, June 11, 2021. Leaders of the G7 begin their first of three days of meetings on Friday, in which they will discuss COVID-19, climate, foreign policy and the economy. (Phil Noble, Pool via AP)

The choice of an ecologically themed venue was deliberate. Climate change is also a top issue on the agenda, and hundreds of protesters gathered in Cornwall to urge the leaders to act, some dressed as sea creatures such as jellyfish. Demonstrators deployed a barge off the coast with two large inflatable figures depicting Biden and Johnson on board.

The G-7 is also set to formally embrace a global minimum tax of at least 15% on multinational corporations, following an agreement reached a week ago by their finance ministers. The minimum is meant to stop companies from using tax havens to shift profits and to avoid taxes.

It represents a potential win for the Biden administration, which has proposed a global minimum tax as a way to pay for infrastructure projects, and it dovetails with the president's hope to focus the summit on ways the democracies can collaborate to build a more inclusive and fair global economy to help compete with rising autocracies like China.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II speaks to US President Joe Biden and his wife Jill Biden during a reception with the G7 leaders at the Eden Project in Cornwall, England, Friday June 11, 2021, during the G7 summit. (Jack Hill/Pool via AP)

But the main issue of the day was vaccines and the mounting pressure to outline global vaccine-sharing plans, especially as inequities in supply around the world have become more pronounced. In the U.S., there is a large vaccine stockpile, and the demand for shots has dropped precipitously in recent weeks.

Biden said the U.S. will donate 500 million Pfizer vaccine doses in the next year, 200 million of them by the end of 2021. That commitment was on top of 80 million doses Biden has already pledged to donate by the end of June. A price tag for the doses was not released, but the U.S. is now set to be the larges donor to the international COVAX vaccine effort, as well as its biggest funder.

Johnson said the first 5 million U.K. doses would be shared in the coming weeks, with the remainder coming over the next year. Macron said France would share at least 30 million doses globally by years end. Germany plans to donate the same amount. White House officials said the G-7 leaders on Friday committed to 1 billion doses in all.

Protestors in costumes march on the beach of Carbis Bay outside the G7 meeting taking place in St. Ives, Cornwall, England, Friday, June 11, 2021. Leaders of the G7 begin their first of three days of meetings on Friday in Carbis Bay, in which they will discuss COVID-19, climate, foreign policy and the economy. (AP Photo/Jon Super)

The COVAX vaccination campaign got off to a slow start as richer nations locked up billions of doses through contracts directly with drug manufacturers. The alliance has distributed just 81 million doses globally, and large parts of the world, particularly in Africa, remain vaccine deserts.

Humanitarian workers welcomed the new donations but said the world needs more doses and sooner.

We are still far from getting there, said United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres, who is due to attend the summit Saturday as a guest.

Campaigners attend a vigil to remember the millions who have died during the COVID-19 pandemic, organised by 'Crack the Crisis Coalition' in Falmouth, Cornwall, England, Friday, June 11, 2021. Leaders of the G7 began their first of three days of meetings on Friday in Carbis Bay, in which they will discuss COVID-19, climate, foreign policy and the economy. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

We need a concerted effort. We need a global vaccination plan, he added. If not the risk is there will still be large areas of the developing world where the virus spreads like wildfire.

Biden will wrap up his eight-day journey by meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva. Asked on the beach Friday what his message would be, Biden said, I'll tell you after I deliver it.

Putin, in an interview with NBC, said Russia's relations with the U.S. had deteriorated to their lowest point in recent years.

Asked if he agreed with Bidens assessment in March that he is a killer, Putin laughed and said the criticism was part of America's macho attitude. Ive gotten used to attacks from all kinds of angles and from all kinds of areas under all kinds of pretext, and reasons of different caliber and fierceness and none of it surprises me," he said, adding, "So, as far as harsh rhetoric, I think that this is an expression of overall U.S. culture."

Kirka reported from Falmouth, England. Associated Press writers Sylvia Hui in Falmouth and Jonathan Lemire in Plymouth, England, also contributed to this report.
NEW YORK - The Associated Press won two Pulitzer Prizes in photography Friday for its coverage of the racial injustice protests and the coronaviruss terrible toll on the elderly, while The New York Times received the public service award for its detailed, data-filled reporting on the pandemic.

This undated photo shows the front and back sides of the medal awarded for the Pulitzer Prizes in New York. The Pulitzer Prizes in journalism and the arts will be announced, Friday, June 11, 2021, almost two months later than initially planned due to the pandemic. (The Pulitzer Prizes via AP)

NEW YORK - The Associated Press won two Pulitzer Prizes in photography Friday for its coverage of the racial injustice protests and the coronaviruss terrible toll on the elderly, while The New York Times received the public service award for its detailed, data-filled reporting on the pandemic.

In a year dominated by COVID-19 and furious debate over race and policing, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis won the breaking news reporting prize for its coverage of George Floyd's murder and its aftermath, while Darnella Frazier  the teenager who recorded the killing on a cellphone  received a special citation.

Frazier's award was intended to highlight "the crucial role of citizens in journalists quest for truth and justice," the Pulitzer Board said.

The AP and The New York Times each won two Pulitzers, the most prestigious prize in journalism, first awarded in 1917.

The feature photography prize went to APs chief photographer in Spain, Emilio Morenatti, who captured haunting images of an older couple embracing through a plastic sheet, mortuary workers in hazmat gear removing bodies, and people enduring the crisis in isolation.

A protester carries a U.S. flag upside down, a sign of distress, next to a burning building, May 28, 2020, in Minneapolis. Protests over the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody, broke out in Minneapolis for a third straight night. The image was part of a series of photographs by The Associated Press that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)

The breaking news photography prize was shared by 10 AP photographers for their coverage of the protests set off by Floyd's killing. One widely published photograph by Julio Cortez on the night of May 28 in riot-torn Minneapolis showed a lone, silhouetted protester running with an upside-down American flag past a burning liquor store.

"Everybody, not just myself, has given up something to go cover this stuff," Cortez said. "To be an illegal immigrant kid who now has a piece of the AP history is just insane. Im just super proud of everyones work."

AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt said the two prizes are a "true testament to the talent and dedication of AP photojournalists." He added: "These photographers told the stories of the year through remarkable and unforgettable images that resonated around the world."

Demonstrators protest, June 4, 2020, near the White House in Washington, D.C., over the death of George Floyd. The image was part of a series of photographs by The Associated Press that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The New York Times received its public service prize for pandemic coverage that the judges said was "courageous, prescient and sweeping" and "filled a data vacuum" that helped better prepare the public. Wesley Morris of the Times won for criticism, for his writing on the intersection of race and culture.

Similarly, the prize for commentary went to Michael Paul Williams of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia for a series of columns on dismantling Confederate monuments in Richmond following Floyds death.

And Star Tribune journalists were honored for covering the rage in Minneapolis, where protesters burned buildings, including a police station, in the wake of Floyds death. The Black man died after a white Minneapolis police officer pinned him to the ground with his knee on Floyd's neck for up to 9 1/2 minutes. The officer was later convicted of murder.

An American flag falls from its pole as police attempt to secure the area after protesters set fire to the department of corrections building, Aug. 24, 2020, in Kenosha, Wis. Protests have erupted following the police shooting of Jacob Blake a day earlier. The image was part of a series of photographs by The Associated Press that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

"Our staff poured its heart and soul into covering this story. It has been such a traumatic and tragic time for our community," Star Tribune Editor Rene Sanchez said in a statement. "We felt that our journalism had to capture the full truth and depth of this pain and the many questions it renewed about Minnesota and the country."

Prizes for explanatory reporting went to two recipients. Ed Yong of The Atlantic won for a series of deeply reported articles about the pandemic. Andrew Chung, Lawrence Hurley, Andrea Januta, Jaimi Dowdell and Jackie Botts of Reuters were honored for a look at the legal concept of qualified immunity and how it shields police from prosecution.

Two prizes for feature writing were also awarded. Nadja Drost won for her freelance piece on global migration in The California Sunday Magazine, which suspended publication late last year. And freelance contributor Mitchell S. Jackson won for an account in Runner's World on the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man who was chased down and shot while jogging in Georgia.

Demonstrators vandalize a car as they protest the death of George Floyd, May 31, 2020, near the White House in Washington, D.C. Floyd died after being restrained by Minneapolis police officers. The image was part of a series of photographs by The Associated Press that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The national reporting prize went to the staffs of The Marshall Project, AL.com, IndyStar and the Invisible Institute for an investigation into attacks on people by police K-9 units around the country.

BuzzFeed News won its first Pulitzer, in international reporting, for a series by Megha Rajagopalan, Alison Killing and Christo Buschek on the infrastructure built by the Chinese government for the mass detention of Muslims.

Also, BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium of Journalists were finalists in that category for an expose on the global banking industrys role in money laundering. A former U.S. Treasury Department employee was sentenced to six months in prison this month for leaking the trove of confidential financial reports that served as the basis for the series.

Residents look at the street through a window at the Icaria nursing home in Barcelona, Spain, Nov. 25, 2020. The image was part of a series by Associated Press photographer Emilio Morenatti that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Matt Rocheleau, Vernal Coleman, Laura Crimaldi, Evan Allen and Brendan McCarthy of The Boston Globe received the investigative reporting Pulitzer for a series demonstrating the systematic failure by state governments to share information about dangerous truck drivers.

McCarthy, the editor on the series, said the Globe "quickly found that this kind of tragedy had been happening year after year for decades. The problems were in plain sight but had never been addressed."

The winner of the public service Pulitzer is honored with a gold medal. The awards in the other categories carry a prize of $15,000 each. The prizes are administered by Columbia University.

Associated Press writers Deepti Hajela, Donna Edwards and Sarah Rankin contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON (AP)  The Justice Department has asked for an internal investigation after revelations that former President Donald Trump's administration seized phone data from House Democrats in 2018 as part of an aggressive leaks investigation.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, left, and House Judiciary Committee member Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., talk during a recess of the committee's oversight hearing on the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Capitol Hill, Thursday, June 10, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

WASHINGTON (AP)  The Justice Department has asked for an internal investigation after revelations that former President Donald Trump's administration seized phone data from House Democrats in 2018 as part of an aggressive leaks investigation.

The deputy attorney general, Lisa Monaco, asked the Justice Departments inspector general to open an investigation on Friday, a senior Justice Department official told The Associated Press. The official could not discuss the matter publicly and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.

The request came after Senate Democratic leaders demanded that Trump-era Attorneys General Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions testify about the seizures.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. APs earlier story follows below.

WASHINGTON (AP)  Senate Democratic leaders are demanding that Trump-era Attorneys General Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions testify about the secret seizure of data from House Democrats in 2018, calling it shocking and a gross abuse of power.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Illinois. Sen. Dick Durbin said in a statement Friday that Barr and Sessions must testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee and are subject to a subpoena if they refuse.

The demands came after Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell were notified that the Justice Department under former President Donald Trump had seized their metadata from Apple three years ago as part of an aggressive crackdown on leaks related to the Russia investigation and other national security matters. Thats according to three people familiar with the seizures.

Schiff and Swalwell were serving on the House intelligence committee at the time  Schiff now is the chairman.

FILE - In this May 9, 2019 file photo, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, accompanied by Attorney General William Barr, right, speaks during a farewell ceremony for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in the Great Hall at the Department of Justice in Washington. Senate Democratic leaders are demanding that former Attorneys General Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions testify about the secret seizure of data from House Democrats in 2018. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

While the Justice Department routinely conducts investigations of leaked information, including classified intelligence, opening such an investigation into members of Congress is extraordinarily rare. The disclosures reveal one branch of the government using its powers of investigation and prosecution to spy on another.

Schiff said the seizures suggest the weaponization of law enforcement by a corrupt president.

Prosecutors from Trumps Justice Department subpoenaed Apple for the data, said a committee official and two other people with inside knowledge. The records of at least 12 people connected to the intelligence panel were eventually shared by the company.

The committee official and the two others with knowledge of the data seizures were granted anonymity to discuss them.

Apple informed the committee last month that the records had been shared and that the investigation had been closed, but did not give extensive detail. Also seized were the records of aides, former aides and family members, one of them a minor, according to the committee official.

The Justice Department obtained metadata  probably records of calls, texts and locations  but not other content from the devices, like photos, messages or emails, according to one of the people. Another said that Apple complied with the subpoena, providing the information to the Justice Department, and did not immediately notify the members of Congress or the committee about the disclosure.

The secret seizures were first reported by The New York Times.

The Trump administrations attempt to secretly gain access to the data came as the president was fuming publicly and privately over investigations  in Congress and by then-special counsel Robert Mueller  into his campaigns ties to Russia.

Trump called the probes a witch hunt," regularly criticized Democrats and Mueller on Twitter and repeatedly dismissed as fake news leaks he found harmful to his agenda. As the investigations swirled around him, he demanded loyalty from a Justice Department he often regarded as his personal law firm.

Schiff and Swalwell were two of the most visible Democrats on the committee, then led by Republicans, during the Russia probe. Both California lawmakers made frequent appearances on cable news. Trump watched those channels closely, if not obsessively, and seethed over the coverage.

Schiff, in a statement late Thursday, called for an investigation by the Justice Departments inspector general on the seizures.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement that the data seizures "appear to be yet another egregious assault on our democracy waged by the former president.

The news about the politicization of the Trump Administration Justice Department is harrowing," she said.

The committee official said the panel has continued to seek additional information, but the Justice Department has not been forthcoming on questions such as whether the investigation was properly predicated and whether it only focused on Democrats.

It is unclear why Trump's Justice Department would have targeted a minor as part of the probe. Swalwell, confirming that he was told his records were seized, told CNN on Thursday night that he was aware a minor was involved and believed that person was "targeted punitively and not for any reason in law.

On CNN Friday, Swalwell said he would not be surprised if the department had gone after other members as well. He said an internal Justice Department investigation could find that out. The Senate Intelligence Committee was not similarly targeted, according to a fourth person who was aware of the probe and granted anonymity to discuss it.

There's no indication that the Justice Department used the records to prosecute anyone. After some of the information was declassified and made public during the later years of the Trump administration, some of the prosecutors were concerned that even if they could bring a leak case, trying it would be difficult and a conviction would be unlikely, one of the people said.

Federal agents questioned at least one former committee staff member in 2020, the person said, and ultimately, prosecutors werent able to substantiate a case.

The news follows revelations that the Justice Department had secretly seized phone records belonging to reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN as part of criminal leak investigations. Following an outcry from press freedom organizations, the Justice Department announced last week that it would cease the practice of going after journalists sourcing information.

Associated Press writer Eric Tucker contributed to this report.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed an executive order that will lift most of the states coronavirus rules.

Health workers collect nasal swabs from local residents for the coronavirus testing at a market in Bangkok, Thailand, Friday, June 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed an executive order that will lift most of the states coronavirus rules.

The order Newsom signed Friday takes effect Tuesday. It will end the states stay-at-home order and its various amendments.

Starting Tuesday, there will be no capacity limits or physical distancing requirements for businesses. Fully vaccinated people can stop wearing masks in most places.

Newsom said he will not end the statewide declaration of emergency. That ensures the governor has the power to alter or suspend state laws in the future. That has angered Republican lawmakers who say the declaration is unnecessary.

MORE ON THE PANDEMIC:

Local residents line up, waiting for the coronavirus testing at a market in Bangkok, Thailand, Friday, June 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

 AP source: J&J doses to be released, some tossed in U.S.

 Britain registers highest coronavirus cases since late February

 Leaders of G-7 nations gather to pledge 1B vaccine doses for world

 Reports of rising coronavirus cases in Russia

 Follow more of APs pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine

HONOLULUHonolulu is loosening some restrictions on social activity now that more than half its population has been vaccinated against COVID-19.

A volunteer carries containers with rice, chicken and salad to be given to residents at the San Antonio de Padua soup kitchen in the Petare neighborhood of Caracas, Venezuela, Thursday, June 10, 2021, amid the new coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

The new rules allow outdoor social gatherings of up to 25 people and indoor gatherings of up to 10.

Karaoke bars and nightclubs may operate at 50% capacity if all attendees are tested for the disease or show proof they have been fully vaccinated.

The city will allow gatherings of 25 indoors and 75 outdoors once 60% of the population has been vaccinated. All limits will be lifted when the vaccination rate tops 70%.

Honolulu reported 25 new cases of COVID-19 on Thursday, down 25% from two weeks earlier.

HERES WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:

CHICAGO  Officials declared Chicago fully reopened on Friday, ending a requirement that people wear face masks in most indoor places and lifting capacity limits intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

A dummy simulating a breathing human being sits in the NDR's Great Broadcasting Hall before the start of a concert by the NDR Radiophilharmonie, in Hanover, Germany, Thursday, June 10, 2021. The concert serves as an experiment on the distribution of aerosols in space. Dummies from the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute are in the hall to precisely measure the distribution of aerosols. (Moritz Frankenberg/dpa via AP)

Chicago sometimes veered from the states restrictions and opted to be stricter or more lenient than the state required. But city officials decided to join the rest of Illinois in lifting restrictions Friday, nearly 15 months after Gov. J.B. Pritzker issued the first stay-at-home order as coronavirus cases began to rise.

People who arent vaccinated must still wear a mask indoors, and everyone will still need to wear masks inside health care facilities, jails, shelters, schools, taxis, ride-hailing vehicles and on public transportation. Businesses can still opt to require people to wear masks on their premises.

FALMOUTH, EnglandU.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres welcomes commitments by the U.S. and Britain to share millions of coronavirus vaccine shots with struggling countries. But he says its not enough.

Without a global effort, Guterres says the coronavirus could spread like wildfire in much of the developing world.

Leaders from the Group of Seven wealthy democracies are expected to commit to share at least 1 billion vaccine shots with poorer countries, with half the doses coming from the U.S. and 100 million from the U.K.

Guterres says to defeat the virus, countries producing vaccines need to form an emergency task force to coordinate an effective response to COVID-19.

A government employee receives the Convidecia COVID-19 vaccine from a health worker while others wait their turn at a vaccination center in the Nishtar hall, in Peshawar, Pakistan, Friday, June 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Muhammad Sajjad)

We need a concerted effort, we need a global vaccination plan, says Guterres, who will join the summit. If not, the risk is there will still be large areas of the developing world where the virus spreads like wildfire.

SACRAMENTOGov. Gavin Newsom says hes confident his workplace regulators will soon fall in line with Californias plan to drop virtually all masking requirements for people vaccinated against the coronavirus.

The California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board is set to consider revising its conflicting rules Thursday, two days after the state eases its pandemic restrictions. Newsom said Friday that he expects to make sure the worksite regulations take effect along with the planned reopening.

Businesses have been baffled by the shifting rules over who needs to wear masks and where once the nations largest state fully reopens from the pandemic.

JACKSON, MISS.Due to lagging demand for shots, Mississippi has transferred well over three-quarters of a million doses from its federal coronavirus vaccine allocation to other states.

In recent months, the state has transferred 871,950 vaccine doses to Rhode Island, Maine and a nationwide vaccine pool, said Liz Sharlot, spokesperson for the Mississippi Department of Health. Maine is among the states in the U.S. with the highest vaccination rates.

Ambulance Doctor Vladimir Canal enters a home to attend a COVID-19 patient with oxygen problems after an emergency call to the residence during his night shift in Lomas de Zamora, Argentina, late Thursday, June 10, 2021. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Mississippi has the lowest vaccination rate in the country, with around 29% vaccinated. Just over 930,650 people in the state are fully vaccinated, according to data provided by the state Department of Health.

Sharlot said 32,400 doses of the Moderna vaccine set aside for Mississippi by the federal government were sent to Rhode Island on April 20, and 32,400 doses to Maine.

The state has transferred at least 807,150 doses to a federal vaccine pool. The states first transfer to the pool was May 6.

Each week, the federal government provides every state with a number of available doses to be ordered and distributed to providers, Sharlot said. This number is based on provider demand and the individual states needs, Sharlot said.

Officials with the state Department of Health review the number of doses made available for Mississippi to order each week and determine whether to order additional doses, or send the doses to the federal pool for other states to use.

LONDON  The U.K. has recorded its highest coronavirus infections since late February, the majority from the delta variant first identified in India.

A protester dressed in a protective suit holds slogans during a rally against the G7 summit outside the British Embassy in Taguig, Philippines on Friday, June 11, 2021. The group called on G7 Summit member nations for debt cancellation for poor countries facing difficulties due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

Government figures on Friday showed 8,125 new cases, the highest since Feb. 26. The delta variant, which is considered about 40% more transmissible than the previous dominant strain, accounts for more than 90% of all new infections in the U.K.

There are concerns the next planned lockdown easing in England on June 21 may be delayed because of the increase in cases. Prime Minister Boris Johnson will announce Monday whether social distancing restrictions will be lifted.

The hope is the rapid rollout of vaccines will break the link between new cases and deaths, especially as most cases are among younger age groups. On Friday, another 17 coronavirus-related deaths were announced, taking the confirmed total to 127,884, the highest in Europe.

ROME  Italy is recommending the AstraZeneca vaccine only for people over age 60, saying younger people who received a first AstraZeneca shot should get Pfizer or Moderna for their second shot.

The governments scientific committee revised its vaccine strategy after reviewing the latest data on cases of rare blood clots in people who received AstraZeneca. Its acting now because the virus has drastically decreased, thanks to months of restrictions and a vaccine campaign that inoculated 45% of the population with at least one shot.

While cases of blood clots after a second dose are extraordinarily rare, the committee is recommending a different vaccine for a second dose for people under age 60, according to Dr. Franco Locatelli, head of the scientific committee.

A government employee receives the Convidecia COVID-19 vaccine from a paramedic at a vaccination center in Nishtar hall, in Peshawar, Pakistan, Friday, June11, 2021. (AP Photo/Muhammad Sajjad)

Other countries, including France and Canada, have made similar recommendations. The European Medicines Agency still recommends people who received a first AstraZeneca vaccine to follow up with the same shot.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka  Sri Lanka extended its lockdown for another week, amid a surge of coronavirus deaths in recent weeks.

Sri Lanka is under a nearly three-week lockdown, scheduled to end on June 14. But on Friday, the government announced it will remain until June 21.

The new restrictions come as the coronavirus death toll crossed the 2,000 mark on Friday. It took 14 months to reach the first 1,000 deaths, while the second 1,000 deaths came in just 23 days.

People are banned from leaving their homes, while food and other essentials will be distributed through mobile vendors. However, the government says the ban will not apply to those engaged in essential service such as health, food supply, communications and power sectors. Factories, construction sites and agriculture sectors can operate.

Doctors and health workers have urged the government to keep the existing travel ban to contain the spreading of the coronavirus. Sri Lankas total confirmed cases have reached 216,134.

Eleven Alvarez poses for friends after graduating as a nutritionist, at a park amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Wednesday, June 2, 2021. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

WASHINGTON  U.S. regulators are allowing the release of 10 million doses of Johnson & Johnsons COVID-19 vaccine from a troubled Baltimore factory.

However, material to make many more doses must be thrown out because of possible contamination, according to a person familiar with the decision.

The FDA announced Friday it had determined that two batches from the plant could be released. But it says several other batches are not suitable for use and additional batches are still under review. The doses originated at an Emergent BioSolutions factory, known as Bayview, that is making the vaccine for J&J.

A second person familiar with the decision confirmed it would allow for 10 million doses to be released. Both people spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because they werent authorized to release details about it ahead of its announcement.

 By Zeke Miller and Linda A. Johnson

TOKYO  The question of allowing any local fans into Tokyo Olympic venues is still being debated, with a decision not expected before the end of the month.

Palestinian hikers approach the Deir Qalaa, "Monastery of the Castle," the remains of a Byzantine monastery, over looking the West Bank village of Deir Ballout, background, west of Salfit, Friday, June. 11, 2021. A growing number of Palestinians are taking up hiking, which offers a way to explore the countryside and historical landmarks in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)

Fans from abroad have already been banned in what is shaping up as a largely made-for-television Olympics.

Tokyo organizing committee president Seiko Hashimoto originally said she would announce a decision in April but has repeatedly postponed it.

Ticket sales were to account for $800 million in income for the organizing committee. Most of that income will be lost and have to be made up by Japanese government entities.

The postponed Tokyo Olympics are scheduled to open on July 23.

BELGRADE, Serbia  Serbias medical agency has approved the use of Pfizer vaccines against coronavirus for youth ages 12 to 15.

The Medicines and Medical Devices Agency of Serbia on Friday says it gave the approval after a rigorous control of the scientific data about the clinical trials in other countries.

Hikers explore Deir Qalaa, "Monastery of the Castle," the remains of a Byzantine monastery near the Jewish settlement of Peduel and the Palestinian village of Deir Balout, west of the West Bank city of Salfit, Friday, June. 11, 2021. A growing number of Palestinians are taking up hiking, which offers a way to explore the countryside and historical landmarks in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)

A senior government health official, Mirsad Djerlek, says a priority would be children with chronic diseases who are at greater risk from COVID-19. Djerlek says Serbia has vaccinated about 37% of adult population in the country of 7 million. He says authorities hope to reach 50% vaccination by the end of this month.

Serbia has mostly used Chinas Sinopharm vaccines, along with Pfizer, Sputnik V and AstraZeneca.

Serbia has relaxed rules against the coronavirus after a drop in daily cases and hospitalizations. The Balkan nation has confirmed more than 700,000 infections since the start of the pandemic and nearly 7,000 deaths.

ISLAMABAD  Pakistan will spend $1.1 billion in the next fiscal year to import COVID-19 vaccines to inoculate most of the 100 million adult population.

This announcement was made by finance minister Shaukat Tareen on Friday while presenting the annual budget for fiscal 2021-22 in the parliament. Pakistans fiscal year begins on July 1.

Pakistan, a nation of 220 million, has so far mainly relied on vaccines import from neighboring China. The latest development comes two days after Pakistan said it has administered 10 million vaccine doses amid a decline in COVID-19 cases and deaths from coronavirus.

People cross a street as they make their way towards Chicago's Wrigley Field during baseball game, Friday, June 11, 2021, as Chicago and rest of Illinois fully reopens ending an over a year-long COVID-19 restrictions. (AP Photo/Shafkat Anowar)

Tareen also set a target of achieving 4.8 percent GDP growth in the next fiscal year. Pakistans economy has been under pressure since last year when it imposed weeks-long nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of coronavirus.

Pakistan has registered a total of 938,737 confirmed cases and 21,576 confirmed deaths.

TAIPEI, Taiwan  If China is to meet its tentative goal of vaccinating 80% of its population against the coronavirus by the end of the year, tens of millions of children are going to have to start rolling up their sleeves.

Regulators have taken the first steps by approving two domestically produced vaccines for use in children aged 3 to 17, though no date has been set for the shots to start.

Children have been largely spared the worst of the pandemic, becoming infected less easily than adults and generally showing less severe symptoms when they do contract the virus. But some experts say if countries are going to achieve herd immunity, inoculating children should be part of the plan.

Few regulators around the world have evaluated the safety of COVID-19 shots in kids. The United States, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong are allowing the use of the Pfizer vaccine in children as young as 12.

China has a population of 1.4 billion, meaning it needs to inoculate 560 million people to reach its goal of 40% vaccination by June and 1.12 billion people to get to the 80% goal. It will be hard to do the latter without vaccinating many of its 254 million children who are younger than 14.

LONDON  The European Medicines Agency has approved a new manufacturing site for the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, in a move that could substantially boost production for the European Union.

In a statement on Friday, the EU drug regulator says it had approved a site in Monts, France, operated by Recipharm. In addition to the new site approval, the EMA authorized several other sites to conduct batch control and testing.

This month, two locations in the U.S. were approved for production of vaccines destined for the 27-nation EU bloc. Any medicines or vaccines authorized for the EU market must first have their production facilities approved by the EMA.

The EMA says these new approved sites are expected to result in an additional 1 to 2 million vials of Modernas coronavirus vaccine every month.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia  Malaysias government says a two-week nationwide lockdown due to end Monday will be extended for another two weeks as new daily infections remain high at more than 6,000.

Senior Minister Ismail Sabri said the National Security Council made the decision at its meeting Friday. Although daily cases have dropped from its peak of above 9,000 just before the lockdown, he said average daily cases since the lockdown was still high.

The health ministry on Friday reported 6,849 new infections, bringing the countrys confirmed total tally to 646,411. Another 84 deaths raised the confirmed death toll to 3,768.
LONDON (AP)  The easing of lockdown restrictions in April helped the British economy grow at its fastest rate since July 2020 and recoup further ground lost during the coronavirus pandemic, official figures showed Friday.

FILE - In this Monday, April 12, 2021 file photo, people sit, drinking and eating, outside cafes and pubs in Soho, central London, on the day some of England's coronavirus lockdown restrictions were eased by the British government. The easing of lockdown restrictions in April helped the British economy grow at its fastest rate since July 2020 and recoup further ground lost during the coronavirus pandemic, official figures showed Friday June 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali, File)

LONDON (AP)  The easing of lockdown restrictions in April helped the British economy grow at its fastest rate since July 2020 and recoup further ground lost during the coronavirus pandemic, official figures showed Friday.

The Office for National Statistics said the economy grew by 2.3% during April, which saw the reopening of shops selling non-essential items and a number of other service providers, such as hairdressers, resuming work. Schools were fully open for in-class learning, while pubs and restaurants were able to serve customers outdoors for the whole month.

The four nations of the U.K.  England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland  have been lifting lockdown restrictions in stages after new coronavirus infections fell sharply and vaccines were rolled out rapidly.

Despite the growth recorded in April, the British economy remained 3.7% smaller than it was in February 2020, before the U.K.'s first virus lockdown. Of the major sectors in the economy, only construction was above the level it was at on the eve of the pandemic.

The British economy is expected to regain more ground over the summer as remaining restrictions are lifted.

Following the historic collapse in spring 2020, the U.K. remains on track to return to its pre-pandemic level by the turn of the year, said Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg Bank. Judging by recent data trends, that could happen even sooner.

Though most sectors of the economy have reopened, there are concerns that the next planned easing for England, scheduled for later this month, may have to be delayed because of a recent spike in new infections largely due to the delta variant that was first identified in India.

The hope is that the rapid rollout of vaccines will dramatically break the link between new infections, hospitalizations and deaths. So far, the evidence suggests that a large proportion of the people being infected are in younger age groups, many of which have yet to receive a first dose.

Under the government's plan for ending lockdown measures, social distancing restrictions are set to be lifted on June 21, which would be a particular boon to businesses such as pubs and cinemas. They are currently operating with capacity limits to meet the need to keep people apart.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to announce Monday whether the next easing will take place.

Follow all of APs pandemic coverage at:

https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic

https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine
Manitoba's summer startup plan for businesses has come too late for one iconic establishment.

Manitoba's summer startup plan for businesses has come too late for one iconic establishment.

The King's Head Pub, which sells imported beer on tap and fish and chips, and has had an Indian buffet for more than three decades, will close on Saturday; owner Chris Graves doesn't know if he will open again.

"At this point, it just seems I don't know," said a dejected Graves on Thursday.

"I need to realign some things. This whole time I've been robbing Peter to pay Paul. I'm losing a lot of money with takeout and delivery.

"It really comes down to discussions with my bank."

Chris Graves, owner of the Kings Head Pub, says the Winnipeg landmark may close down for good this weekend. (John Woods / Winnipeg Free Press)

Graves said the province's reopening plan, called Manitoba's 4-3-2-One Great Summer, wouldn't help him until Canada Day  almost three weeks away  and won't help him unless more Manitobans get their first and second vaccine does.

Under the plan, the province said by July 1, 25 per cent or greater capacity will be allowed at businesses, services and facilities as long as 70 per cent of Manitobans aged 12 and up have received their first vaccine dose, and at least 25 per cent have their second shot.

"My fate lies in the hands of these people getting their vaccines, and my fate is in the ability of government to get people double-vaccinated," said Graves.

"I need to realign some things. This whole time I've been robbing Peter to pay Paul. I'm losing a lot of money with takeout and delivery... It really comes down to discussions with my bank."  King's Head Pub owner Chris Graves

"But how is it that we allow double-vaccinated people to go to see the Jets if these same people are not allowed to come to my pub? If 14 per cent are double-vaccinated now, I would take a percentage of that in my pub at this point."

Kate Fenske, CEO of the Downtown Winnipeg BIZ, said business casualties of COVID-19 are mounting.

"Almost 50 businesses here have closed," said Fenske, noting two of the largest are the downtown Bay and the Staples store in Portage Place.

RUTH BONNEVILLE Kate Fenske CEO of the Downtown Winnipeg BIZ. (Ruth Bonneville / Winnipeg Free Press files)

"We added it up and found some businesses have been closed for 25 weeks. It's just mind-boggling."

Fenske said downtown business owners are glad there is finally a road map for the reopening.

"Businesses have been waiting for this," she said. "It's good to finally see the path and we now know what the thoughts are... but while we understand the need for flexibility, it doesn't give enough. Businesses need more clarity."

Fenske said they need more financial support from the province.

"Many people employed in the hospitality and service sectors remain out of work and each closure affects the future of our downtown," she said.

"Businesses have been waiting for this. It's good to finally see the path and we now know what the thoughts are... but while we understand the need for flexibility, it doesn't give enough, Businesses need more clarity."  Kate Fenske, CEO of the Downtown Winnipeg BIZ

Meghan Greenlay is one of the many people who hasn't been able to work because of public health restrictions during the third wave. Greenlay, one of four hair stylists at Menagerie Beauty and Goods in Osborne Village, said it will be difficult even if enough people are vaccinated to open at 25 per cent capacity.

"At 25 per cent reopening capacity, I get to do two to three clients during my five-hour shift, at best. We all have set hours and take turns at Menagerie. I clean for 30 minutes in between each client. So, regardless of when and how we open, this type of working schedule is what I'm working with for a very long time.

Manitoba's reopening plan hinges on vaccination rates Click to Expand MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Dr. Brent Roussin, left, and Premier Brian Pallister. Posted: 12:02 PM Jun. 10, 2021 Manitoba public health officials predict most restrictions will be lifted by Labour Day so long as 80 per cent of Manitobans are partially vaccinated against COVID-19. Premier Brian Pallister and chief provincial public health officer Dr. Brent Roussin revealed the governments One Great Summer Reopening Path on Thursday and explained the incremental rollback of pandemic measures as vaccination rates increase. Read Full Story

"Rebooking hundreds of clients is work."

During the pandemic, several restaurants have ceased to exist. The latest is Black Bird Brasserie on Tache Avenue, which put up a lease sign this week. Its owners could not be reached for comment.

Shaun Jeffrey, executive director of the Manitoba Restaurant and Foodservices Association, said others are hanging on while some have been sold for a heavily reduced price.

"(The reopening plan) is very vague," said Jeffrey. "It's hard to decipher... we waited weeks and weeks for this plan and it has been delivered with a small amount of information. We can't control Manitobans getting vaccinated, but our businesses are depending on this.

"Who would have thought we would have more restrictions 15 months after (the pandemic) started than four months after it started?"

Ray Louie, an owner and general manager of The Gates on Roblin, which is not only a restaurant, but a popular place for brides and grooms to hold their receptions, said he is hearing from brides upset by the reopening plan.

"It's hard to decipher... we waited weeks and weeks for this plan and it has been delivered with a small amount of information. We can't control Manitobans getting vaccinated, but our businesses are depending on this."  Shaun Jeffrey, executive director of the Manitoba Restaurant and Foodservices Association

"Couples have just been told they won't be having their wedding," said Louie. "The reopening isn't until September. They call it the one great summer reopening plan, but this isn't summer. This is fall.

"This is not good for our industry or the couples... this is putting the summer into the ground."

Chuck Davidson, president and CEO of the Manitoba Chambers of Commerce, said "for the most part, we're glad we've got a bit of a road map.

"We've been asking for it for months. But we need to see more detail... we need to get more meat on the bones."

Davidson hopes the province will provide more details "at least a week before that July 1 opening."

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca
GREENBELT, Md.  Patrik Mathews walked into a U.S. federal courtroom Thursday cloaked in the presumption of innocence. When he left, he was a felon  four times over.

GREENBELT, Md.  Patrik Mathews walked into a U.S. federal courtroom Thursday cloaked in the presumption of innocence. When he left, he was a felon  four times over.

The former master corporal and combat engineer in the Canadian Army Reserves pleaded guilty to four criminal charges in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Maryland during a rearraignment hearing.

The charges stem from crimes committed in Maryland and Delaware in late-2019 and early-2020, while the Beausejour resident was on the run, and allegedly involved in the plotting of murders and terror attacks.

The convictions bring the saga of Patrik Mathews  perhaps the most dramatic, high-profile case where a member of the Canadian military has been linked to far-right extremism in recent years  one step closer to completion.

Patrik Mathews outside his home in Beausejour in August 2019. (Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press files)

Mathews pleaded guilty to two counts of being an illegal alien in possession of a firearm; one count of transporting a firearm over state lines with the intent to commit a felony; and one count of obstruction of justice, related to the deliberate destruction of evidence.

For each of the three firearm-related crimes, the Manitoba man faces up to 10 years in prison; for the obstruction of justice charge, he could be sentenced to an additional 20 years.

There is no parole in the U.S. federal prison system.

"Did you do the things the government said you did?" District Judge Theodore D. Chuang asked Mathews  shortly after determining his competency to agree to a plea deal  at the federal courthouse in Greenbelt, a suburb of Washington, D.C.

"Yes, your honour," Mathews said, softly.

Mathews, 29, strode into court with a beard down to his chest and thick blonde hair that fell below his shoulders. Clad in an orange prison jumpsuit and white sneakers, he admitted under oath to being a member of a violent white supremacist group.

Throughout the hearing, Mathews spoke in a flat, monotone voice, offering short, perfunctory responses whenever asked questions by the judge. Occasionally, he would turn to his lawyer, Joseph Balter, and seek approval before answering a question.

In the fall of 2019, after a month-long undercover investigation, the Winnipeg Free Press exposed Mathews as a member of the Canadian military moonlighting as a recruiter for the Base, a neo-Nazi paramilitary organization.

On Feb. 3, the Base (alongside a dozen other extremist outfits) was officially designated a terror group by the government of Canada. It remains unclear what, if any, complications this might create for Mathews if he ever returns to Canada.

Following his exposure  and a nighttime raid of his Beausejour home by the RCMP, who seized firearms but released him without charge  Mathews illegally fled to the U.S., where he linked up with neo-Nazi comrades.

Following a lengthy probe by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Mathews and seven other reported members of the Base were arrested as part of a nationwide crackdown.

They were accused of a litany of crimes, ranging from vandalism of synagogues to murder plots and the ritualistic slaughter of an animal, as well as plans to open fire on crowds at a pro-gun rights rally last year in Richmond, Va.

A photograph from a Base training camp. (U.S. Attorney via The Associated Press) United States District Court for the District of Maryland - filed January 21, 2020 - Patrik Mathews - The Base - white supremacist organization From document: Later in August 2019, (Brian Mark) Lemley and (William Garfield) Bilbrough attended another Base training camp in a different state. The photographs below were taken at that separate training camp. In the second photograph, Bilbrough is standing second from the left while firing a long gun. - for Ryan Thorpe story / Winnipeg Free Press

Across the board, according to U.S. federal law enforcement, their actions were aimed at fomenting chaos and sparking a violent revolution for the white race.

"Derail some f---ing trains, kill some people, poison some water supplies," Mathews said in a self-recorded propaganda video.

Homegrown hate: Coverage of a neo-Nazi recruiter in Winnipeg Click to Expand Posted: 11:56 AM Sep. 13, 2019 Read Ryan Thorpe's story on infiltrating a neo-Nazi paramilitary group, and the Free Press' follow-up coverage. Read Full Story

Mathews closest co-conspirators were William Bilbrough, 21, and Brian Lemley Jr., 35.

Bilbrough was the only man to plead guilty early on in the court proceedings. In December 2020, Bilbrough admitted to helping Mathews travel throughout the U.S. while knowing he was an illegal alien. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

Mathews and Lemley initially pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges against them. But on Thursday, they admitted guilt to certain crimes as part of a plea deal struck by defence attorneys and the prosecution.

The two men will not know their fates until sentencing hearings Oct. 28.

Despite the plea deal, there appear to still be numerous legal matters for Chuang to untangle in the case.

On Thursday, assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Windom said the prosecution would seek "hate crime" and "terrorism" enhancements to the sentences against Mathews. Balter has indicated he plans to oppose the enhancements.

On Mathews' computer, agents found at least one video of Mathews discussing his illegal journey into the United States. Many of the videos discuss killing people in furtherance of "the movement." In this screenshot from one of those videos, Mathews is observed wearing a gas mask and attempting to distort his voice. (U.S. Attorney via The Associated Press)

By pleading guilty, Mathews waived his right to appeal the criminal convictions, but he retains the right to appeal his sentence, according to the terms of the agreement.

"Todays admission of guilt shows how far Mr. Lemley and Mr. Mathews were willing to go to support extremist activity," Rachel Byrd, acting special agent of the FBI Baltimore field office, said in a written statement, shortly after the hearing.

"This investigation and the guilty plea underscore the continuing threat we face from domestic extremist groups."

As revealed in the agreed upon statement of facts, which were read into the court record, the night before the FBI arrested Mathews and Lemley at an apartment in Delaware, the two men discussed the possibility of going to prison for their neo-Nazi activity.

"I may be going to jail upon the discovery of the propaganda in my cellphone," Lemley told Mathews on Jan. 15, 2020.

The conversation proved prophetic.

Early the next morning, the FBI executed a search warrant at the apartment, and the two men frantically tried to destroy their cellphones as agents closed in on them.

Mathews and Lemley have been in federal custody since.

Courtroom sketches of (from left) Brian Lemley, Patrik Mathews, William Garfield Bilbrough IV. (William J. Hennessy Jr.)

In total, as he stood with slumped shoulders in the orange prison jumpsuit, Mathews repeated the word "guilty" four times Thursday. Each time, his voice seemed to grow quieter and more dejected.

Windom declined comment when approached by the Free Press after the hearing.

Outside the courthouse, Balter provided a short statement, before walking off and ignoring follow-up questions.

"All I can say is that Mr. Mathews has entered his plea of guilty, he has accepted responsibility for his actions, and were hoping to get a proportioned sentence in the case," the lawyer said.

ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @rk_thorpe
A naming committee has been tasked with reviewing Ryerson School amid growing concerns its title pays tribute to an architect of residential schools.

A naming committee has been tasked with reviewing Ryerson School amid growing concerns its title pays tribute to an architect of residential schools.

Late Thursday, trustees in the Pembina Trails School Division unanimously approved a motion to have a committee consider the name of the K-6 school at 10 Ryerson Ave., and report back on the matter "as soon as possible."

Egerton Ryerson (1803-82) was a teacher and Methodist church leader whose ideas about education influenced the design and implementation of residential schools, as well as the public school system in Ontario.

"(The residential school system) was something that was certainly intended to eradicate Indigenous culture and, as a result of that, there was enormous suffering," said David Johnson, who spoke about only recently learning about Ryersons resume during the evening board meeting.

The longtime trustee said he is in favour of changing the name "in the spirit of reconciliation."

Community members started raising questions about the local school's name after the recent discovery that 215 children were buried in unmarked graves near a residential school site in Kamloops.

While Ryerson School's website has no details about its namesake, the Winnipeg Architecture Foundation's directory says the school, which opened in 1972, was named after a leader who "worked towards his belief that education and faith were the primary forces of a positive evolution of society."

Johnson said he believes the school was named after Ryerson by "happenstance" because of its location in Fort Richmond, where many streets are named after universities.

Schools in Pembina Trails must be named after the street on which a building faces, the historical or current name of the area it is located in, a name symbolic of its unique programming, or a historic figure renowned to the divisions community or whose contribution to society is "recognized and valued."

Indigenous students, staff members and alumni at Ryerson University in Toronto have become increasingly vocal about their concerns with the schools namesake in recent months. A statue of Ryerson on the downtown campus was toppled on Sunday.

Debate around names is nothing new  but recently, these debates have increasingly taken into account racism and gender representation, said Karen Pennesi, a linguistic anthropologist who studies personal names at Western University.

"(A name) is a symbolic link between whatever the object or person or thing is and the person for whom its meaningful," Pennesi said, adding a school name is a window into local history and values at the time of its opening. "Over time, the object or the institution or whatever it is continues or persists, but the people change, so then this symbolic link might be broken."

The associate professor of anthropology is a proponent of more frequent school name reviews  for example, to be done every generation  that are built into policy.

Pennesi suggests administrators seek out contemporary leaders, people who are often excluded in naming, desired values and qualities, local historical events of significance, and Indigenous places names when considering potential options.

Educator Katya Adamov Ferguson has studied local school names at the University of Manitoba; in her 2017 thesis, she called on divisions to analyze naming policies from an equity standpoint and consider, among many things, where names are mounted on buildings.

"Engraving into the stone does not allow for flexibility," Adamov Ferguson wrote.

"Ryerson Elementary" is hung in black block lettering on the concrete building in south Winnipeg. Whether or not the name comes down must, per division policy, involve community input and consultation.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @macintoshmaggie
Plywood was removed from Portage Avenue-facing windows on the shuttered downtown Bay building Thursday to reveal a pair of murals made by Indigenous artists Peatr Thomas and Glenn Gear.

Plywood was removed from Portage Avenue-facing windows on the shuttered downtown Bay building Thursday to reveal a pair of murals made by Indigenous artists Peatr Thomas and Glenn Gear.

Since the grand building closed Nov. 30, its future has been uncertain. Its windows, which once held intricate seasonal displays, were boarded up a short time later, sparking concern about its dreary appearance. There were impassioned calls for it to be used as affordable housing, a marketplace or cultural centre as a form of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.

Thomas, an Inninew (Cree) artist, has created a mural of a giant black turtle emerging from the land, beneath a glowing red sky. It fills several windows alongside Gear's mural of ghost dogs.

He said the display is a chance to make a statement.

"When it comes to understanding the history of the Hudsons Bay Co. and the fur-trade era, theres a bit of animosity among a lot of Indigenous peoples, myself included," said Thomas. "The building is now vacant, but theres an opportunity to reclaim this place.

Peatr Thomas's mural is named "Aski Pimachi Iwew", which means Earth Giving Us Survival Ways. It was named by his mother, a residential school survivor. (Ruth Bonneville / Winnipeg Free Press)

"Even if its just a window, its a start."

Kallie Pirrie, an artist who often sets up shop in front of the building, says the boarded-up windows are an eyesore. "They were boring. Multiple people vandalized the boards because they were tired of looking at them," she said Thursday.

Everyone was tired of looking at them, said Dayna Spiring, CEO of Economic Development Winnipeg and the chair woman of the Bay downtown advisory committee, which has the task of figuring out the buildings future.

"When those boards went up, there was a lot of concern," she said. Though the boards were put up to protect the building, "it was not a good look for Winnipeg, and we had to do better as a community."

Through consultation with Hudsons Bay, Spiring said it was decided to use the windows to promote Indigenous art and showcase Qaumajuq, the new Inuit art centre at the Winnipeg Art Gallery across the street; works by Thomas and Gear are featured there.

Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman announced Thursday the city would contribute $10,000 toward the public installations, while the provincial and federal governments contributed $20,000 and $30,000, respectively.

The story of the mural is based loosely on a prophecy that with a red sky comes a time of great change as Mother Earth cleanses herself and people awake to truth and the sacred teachings. (Ruth Bonneville / Winnipeg Free Press)

"We wanted to make sure that iconic building was looking better than it has been," Spiring said. "Ideally, it would have been in time for the (Jets to play in) the Stanley Cup Finals, but it wasnt meant to be."

Gladys Thomson was stopped in her tracks by the murals while walking down Portage Thursday. The 71-year-old downtown resident remembers going to see the window displays with her family.

"To see it boarded up was heartbreaking. In a way, it was the end of a legacy," she said. "To see it today, a bright display of local art  the beautiful colours, the inspiring words, its wonderful."

Spiring said future plans include the possibility of more artwork on windows that face Memorial Boulevard. The future of the building, she said, is an open discussion, and the committee will make recommendations in the coming months.

Indigenous artist Jimmy McKenzie was sewing moosehide moccasins in front of the Bay Thursday afternoon, and said it was fitting that Indigenous art filled the windows. "Thats exactly what we need here," he said. "The natives are the ones who started the Hudsons Bay Co. Theyre the ones who gave them all the furs in 1670."

McKenzie said displaying more Indigenous art in public could change the city, give artists an outlet to share their stories and inspire Indigenous artists to make more art. Of the building itself, McKenzie hopes its future will follow the windows lead.

Glenn Gear's mural of ghost dogs fills several windows on Portage Avenue beside Thomas's. (Ruth Bonneville / Winnipeg Free Press)

"Id like to see this whole place full of native people, doing native art," said McKenzie, 61, whose father was a residential school survivor in British Columbia. "If they gave the whole building to native people to make and sell native art, that would be awesome. For now, they stand outside, like I do here."

Thomas came by Thursday afternoon to take a second look at the mural, which he created digitally. Its title is "Aski Pimachi Iwew", which means "Earth Giving Us Survival Ways." it was named by his mother, a residential school survivor.

The story of the mural is based loosely on a prophecy that with a red sky comes a time of great change as Mother Earth cleanses herself and people awake to truth and the sacred teachings. "This mural, to me, is what I hope is the aftermath of that change," he said. "A new Turtle Island built on truth."

Affixed to the Bay building, the murals theme of renewal and returning the land takes on additional meaning. Like McKenzie, Thomas hopes its future includes space for creative work, performing arts, a market for Indigenous artists, and other positive endeavours for the community.

"A lot of the people who stopped to look at the mural were Indigenous people, and that felt really good," Thomas said. "I cant help but wonder what theyre thinking or feeling, but I imagine and hope its something positive and something that they can feel proud of and represented (by) as Indigenous people."

After Thomas skateboarded away, two Indigenous teenagers walked by the mural, stopped, and stared for a few seconds.

"That looks much better," one said.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca
A clinic quickly co-ordinated at a Winkler business to distribute COVID-19 vaccine shots was a rousing success  and it wont be the last.

A clinic quickly co-ordinated at a Winkler business to distribute COVID-19 vaccine shots was a rousing success  and it wont be the last.

C.W. Wiebe Medical Centre administrator Jim Neufeld said the provinces vaccine implementation team reached out several weeks ago with 110 doses available "kind of short notice." It asked if Neufeld would be able to co-ordinate a vaccine clinic set up within a large business (similar to one that had taken place in the Brandon Maple Leaf Foods plant previously).

"There was the ask of: did they think that that was something we could do in Winkler?" he said.

JOHN WOODS/FREE PRESS FILES A clinic quickly co-ordinated at a Winkler business to distribute COVID-19 vaccine shots was a rousing success  and it wont be the last.

On June 3, the shots were made available to employees and family members of employees at two businesses under the same ownership group, which employs around 700-800 people in Winkler.

"The long and the short of it is every appointment was filled, and we were able to vaccinate 110 people," Neufeld said Thursday.

The owner of the businesses declined to comment, citing concerns with potential pushback from some in the community.

Only about 28 per cent of Winklers adults have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine placing it only ahead the Rural Municipality of Stanley, which is at 15 per cent of adults, according to provincial data.

Neufeld said he hasnt witnessed any criticism around the project, personally.

"We know that theres certainly some pushback here as far as individuals getting vaccinated, and local businesses dont need to take that on, theres no real benefit there for them to do that," he said.

"We have nothing but fabulous things to say about the effort that they put in to doing this."

A similar clinic is being planned next week at Central Station Community Centre, a Winkler non-profit that manages affordable housing units in the city, with the goal of vaccinating 70 people currently living in those units.

JOHN WOODS/CANADIAN PRESS FILES A similar clinic is being planned next week at Central Station Community Centre, a Winkler non-profit that manages affordable housing units in the city, with the goal of vaccinating 70 people currently living in those units.

The C.W. Wiebe Medical Centre has been contacted by a handful of other businesses interested in setting up similar clinics for their employees, Neufeld said. The project will continue on a weekly basis as long as there is supply and businesses able to organize and recruit employees.

"Having somebody doing the communication to people kind of closer to them, it seemingly worked out better than us just putting it out in the public saying, generally speaking, We have vaccines, you can come here," Neufeld said.

"I think it was a real benefit both ways. They seemed to be able to attract this number of people with their communication channels better than, perhaps, the general message the public gets."

Winkler Mayor Martin Harder has long-championed the idea of homegrown vaccine rollout programming, including campaigns featuring local doctors and vaccine rewards from local businesses.

Harder said Thursday it wasnt likely Winkler organizations would apply for the grant initiative announced by the province last week that will fund vaccine uptake programming targeted at communities with low vaccination rates.

"We have done our own thing, we still do our own thing in terms of (vaccination)," the mayor said.

MIKAELA MACKENZIE/FREE PRESS FILES Winkler Mayor Martin Harder has long-championed the idea of homegrown vaccine rollout programming, including campaigns featuring local doctors and vaccine rewards from local businesses.

President of the Winkler Chamber of Commerce, Keith Gislason, said he was "pretty excited" to hear of the clinics success.

"Were a pretty interesting community, where we kind of tend to work together already," he said. "Not everybody participates sometimes, but this is a good example of what we would normally want to do."

Gislason said the local chamber is encouraging its members to get in on the program, if their business qualifies.

"We have a lot of members that have been hit really hard by all the restrictions and all the closures, and the whole debate around vaccines," he said. "We are encouraging anything we can do to get everything to open up so those businesses can function again."

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: malakabas_
As Idris Elbakri was waving goodbye to the 300-plus vehicles that had gathered around the Winnipeg Grand Mosque to mourn the four Muslims killed in London, Ont., earlier this week, one car came to a halt in front of him.

As Idris Elbakri was waving goodbye to the 300-plus vehicles that had gathered around the Winnipeg Grand Mosque to mourn the four Muslims killed in London, Ont., earlier this week, one car came to a halt in front of him.

A small gift  tobacco, often used in Indigenous cultures as a sacred offering to show respect or to open communication  was passed from the person in the vehicle to Elbakri, who had organized the Thursday vigil through his role as chairman of the Manitoba Islamic Association.

Elbakri was moved beyond words.

"He just extended that offer of tobacco to me, which Im not sure if Im worthy of, but I came home and I showed my family, and Ill cherish and keep it," he said Friday.

He tied the tobacco with ribbons that were handed out at the vigil: yellow, in remembrance of the 2017 Quebec mosque shooting, and purple, the favourite colour of the 15-year-old girl who was mowed down along with her parents, brother and grandmother Sunday evening in Ontario.

On Thursday evening, vehicles stretched out beyond the south Winnipeg parking lot and into the surrounding grass field  typically used for big festivities, such as the yearly Eid celebration  and speeches from community members called for kindness, solidarity and action against racism.

Leen Aljindi, 17, who wears a hijab, said she has Muslim friends who also wear hijabs that have been spit on, verbally harassed and physically attacked.

"Ive become hesitant to call myself Canadian and proud, because our Canada is a place of racism," she told the crowd Thursday. "Every country has it flaws, we always hear and assume how amazing and inclusive Canada is, however, whether its Islamophobia or any form of racism, it surrounds us."

While there were a large number of Muslim community members present  many of which Elbakri was seeing in person for the first time in more than a year, a "bittersweet" feeling  he wasnt surprised, saying the tragedy had struck a nerve in the city and beyond.

"I think it just reinforced what I already knew," Elbakri said of the notion of standing together in solidarity in the face of racism.

Its not enough to come to a vigil or offer platitudes, or to place the blame solely on an earlier generation, Elbakri said (the alleged killer is 20 years old).

"We need to collectively go beyond thoughts and prayers and condemnation to concrete action, and that doesnt just mean government," he said.

The Manitoba Islamic Association has held regular virtual community check-ins since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and plans to host one on Islamophobia in Winnipeg in the near future.

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: malakabas_
This week brought news of renewed infighting, back-biting and metaphorical mud wrestling among high-ranking officials in the Green Party of Canada. This culminated Thursday in the revelation Green MP Jenica Atwin would cross the floor to sit with the Liberals.

Opinion

This week brought news of renewed infighting, back-biting and metaphorical mud wrestling among high-ranking officials in the Green Party of Canada. This culminated Thursday in the revelation Green MP Jenica Atwin would cross the floor to sit with the Liberals.

Continued reports of internal fractiousness will not help the party grow beyond its current minor party status. Indeed, the Greens may be facing an impending crack-up and reversal of even the small gains the party has made in recent federal elections.

Two Green MPs have recently been critical of leader Annamie Pauls position on the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, and have struck strongly pro-Palestinian positions. In what was seen as a response to this criticism, a Paul adviser, Noah Zatzman, took to Facebook to accuse a number of people  including Green MPs and activists  of "appalling anti-Semitism."

"We will work to defeat you," Zatzman wrote, "and bring in progressive climate champions who are antifa and pro LGBT and pro indigenous sovereignty and Zionists!!!!!!" In May, more than 150 members of the party signed a letter to Paul imploring her to fire Zatzman over those comments.

This conflict highlighted divisions in the party over the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, as well as tension between Paul (who doesnt have a seat in the House of Commons) and members of the Green caucus. One Green MP, for example, condemned Zatzman for making accusations of anti-Semitism in response to "legitimate critiques of human rights abuses" committed by the state of Israel.

While it appeared Paul would try to protect her adviser, the partys executive committee nevertheless voted not to renew Zatzmans contract. Despite this, MP Atwin still decided to defect to the Liberals, cutting the Green delegation in Parliament by a third.

The Greens can scarcely afford this airing of their dirty undergarments in full public view. The party already faces a built-in disadvantage when competing in Canadian elections: our single-member plurality electoral system. The design of this system, in which each constituency elects the candidate with the highest number of votes, benefits big established parties which are typically competitive and can win in ridings across the country.

But minor parties such as the Greens can be well regarded and receive a respectable number of votes in each constituency, yet still end up with snake eyes in terms of parliamentary representation if their votes are diluted across the country and they cant maximize their votes in any one seat. In the 2008 Canadian election, for example, the Greens scored more than 900,000 votes, but elected no MPs.

The one exception to this rule for minor parties is those with strong regional bases of support, such as the Bloc Quebecois, which runs candidates only in Quebec, or the Reform Party of years past, which was strong in Western Canada. Because these parties maximize their votes in a small number of ridings, they can build a sizable caucus despite being comparably small.

The Greens figured this out in recent elections, and accordingly poured resources into a very small number of seats that were seen to be winnable. This is why the partys former leader, Elizabeth May, was able to win her seat on Vancouver Island for the first time in 2011. The party boosted its seat share to two from Vancouver Island in the 2019 election as a result of this strategy, and picked up Atwins surprise seat in Fredericton, N.B.

In one sense, Green infighting is not surprising. Nothing tames party people like the prospect of power. Party officials may grit their teeth and stay silent if they feel that sparking an internal conflict will hurt the partys chances in the next election. And the party leader is in a stronger position if the scuttlebutt is that he or she will likely soon become the prime minister, with all the power to bestow favours that comes with the position.

But, in small parties such as the Green party, there is no chance of electoral victory in the near future, so none of this applies. The prospect of power cannot pre-empt conflict for rambunctious Green activists.

Throughout the 20th century with few exceptions, the Liberal party remained largely cohesive both in and out of office. This was because the party won so often. Even when it lost, party officials could count on victory only one or two elections away. Given what a big-tent party the Liberals are, this was a remarkable feat.

Meanwhile, the Tories spent long periods on the opposition benches, essentially tearing themselves apart, which in turn made it even more difficult for them to win in subsequent elections. This vicious cycle repeated itself over and over. It was so notable that political scientist George C. Perlin coined a term for this tendency to self-immolate between Canadian elections: the Tory Syndrome.

Now, the Green party has developed its own syndrome. If the Greens dont want three MPs to have been their high-water mark, theyd best work out these internal problems.

Royce Koop is an associate professor in the department of political studies and co-ordinator of the Canadian studies program at the University of Manitoba.
NEW YORK (AP) - The NewYork-Presbyterian hospital system will require all of its 48,000 employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 unless they have a valid exemption.

Hospital officials said in an email to staff that employees will be required to receive their first vaccine dose by Sept. 1.

Applications for medical or religious exemptions are due Aug. 1.

A spokesperson says about 70% of the networks employees are now vaccinated. NewYork-Presbyterian appears to be the first health care network in the state to mandate vaccinations for staff.

Kenneth Raske, the president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, says he supports the mandate.
UTICA, N.Y.  A Utica man was arrested after New York State Police say they found him in possession of guns and drugs while executing a search warrant.

The state police Violent Gang and Narcotics Enforcement Team and Special Operations Response Team went to a Utica home with a search warrant on Tuesday, June 8, where they arrested 38-year-old Christopher L. Wallace.

Police say Wallace, who is currently on state parole and federal probation, was arrested after officers found two loaded firearms, fentanyl and drug paraphernalia.

Wallace is charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance, and second- and third-degree criminal possession of a weapon, all felonies.

The suspect is being held in Oneida County jail without bail.

State police say the Utica Police Department assisted with the investigation.
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) - President Joe Biden's administration plans to divert money that the Trump administration had planned to use on the southern border to other military projects, including an investment in Terre Haute.

On Friday, the Office of Management and Budget announced more than $9 million of the diverted funds would go to a small arms range in Indiana.

A White House representative told News 10 that small arms range would be at Terre Haute's Air Guard Base at Hulman Field.

The money will be used to build a small arms range to "enhance the readiness of the Air Guard unit through marksmanship training."

This is after the Department of Defense returned more than $2 billion from the border wall project to work on unobligated military construction funds to 66 previously deferred projects.

See the full list of other announced projects below:
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI)  There's a new man in charge of the West Lafayette Fire Department.

Former Deputy Fire Chief Jeff Need was sworn in as Chief on Friday, but the moment was bittersweet as the department said goodbye to former Chief Tim Heath.

"I'm sad, but I'm excited," said Heath. "It's a new chapter for my family and I."

That new chapter started as Heath passed his role onto former Deputy Chief Jeff Need.

Heath has served with WLFD for 31 years and has been chief for the last 10.

West Lafayette Mayor John Dennis said the day was met with mixed emotions.

"Bittersweet is the best way to describe it," Dennis said. "Chief Heath wasn't just a great chief and a great leader. He was a great friend."

Dennis said Heath was a great leader when it came to making sure his successor would be ready to lead the department.

Need said he's excited to take on the new role.

"Chief Heath has led us to new levels in the last 10 years," said Need. "The city has grown, our department has grown and I'm just excited for the future of the department."

Heath said he's grateful for those who helped make that growth possible.

"I'm really proud of the department," Heath said. "I'm proud of the people that have worked under me, and I'm proud of the job that we have done."

He's also thankful to the community he served.

"Anything else you want to say about your time here?" asked News 18's Samantha Thieke.

"Just thank you," said Heath. "Thank you to West Lafayette."

Heath and his family are headed to San Antonio, Texas where he'll be taking on a new, civilian job.

News 18 thanks Heath for his service to the community, and we wish him the best.
Two appointed, two reappointed to William & Mary Board of Visitors

New board members: Ardine Williams (left) is the vice president of workforce development at Amazons HQ2, and John Rathbone (right)  the father of two W&M alumni  is a former chief financial officer for Norfolk Southern Corporation. They will begin four-year terms on July 1. Mirza Baig and H. Thomas Watkins III '74 will rotate off the board after completing their terms June 30. Photo - of - Hide Caption

New members bring expertise in business, workforce development

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam today appointed two new members to William & Marys Board of Visitors: John Rathbone and Ardine Williams. The governor also reappointed Barbara L. Johnson J.D. '84, currently serving as secretary of the board, and J. E. Lincoln Saunders '06 to second terms.

Williams is the vice president of workforce development at Amazons HQ2, and Rathbone  the father of two W&M alumni  is a former chief financial officer for Norfolk Southern Corporation. They will begin four-year terms on July 1. Mirza Baig and H. Thomas Watkins III '74 will rotate off the board after completing their terms June 30.

We thank Gov. Northam for his continued support. These appointments reflect the governors strong commitment to advancing higher education across the Commonwealth and here at William & Mary, said President Katherine A. Rowe. We welcome Ardine and John to the board. Each brings important insight to the opportunities facing higher education today as we prepare our students to thrive in a rapidly changing workforce.

We are delighted that Barbara and Lincoln continue as colleagues on the board. The board and university leadership will benefit from their valuable perspective and experience. At the same time, we are forever grateful to Mirza and Tom. Their dedicated service helped us navigate an unprecedented era in our history, and their leadership and support were vital to our success.

The Board of Visitors, which is led by Rector John E. Littel P '22, includes 17 members and serves as the primary governing body for the university.

We are thrilled to continue the work of the board the past four years with Barbara and Lincoln, Littel said. Both will serve important roles going forward. As we look forward, we are also eager to engage our new board members, Ardine and John. I know the university will benefit greatly from their unique experiences and expertise.

We thank Mirza and Tom for their guidance and their impact as board members, Littel said. Tom played a central role in setting the course for the universitys future by leading the search committee that selected President Rowe. Mirza was an engaged colleague, and his contributions were especially helpful as we addressed the financial challenges of the past two years.

John Rathbone

Rathbone joined Norfolk Southerns predecessor, Norfolk & Western Railway Co., in 1981. He held multiple auditing roles for the company before being named vice president and controller in 1992. He became senior vice president in 2003 and executive vice president of administration in 2004.

In 2012, the company named Rathbone as its executive vice president of finance and chief financial officer. He retired in 2013 after 32 years with Norfolk Southern and continued as an independent consultant for the company until 2015.

Prior to his work with Norfolk Southern, he worked as a senior auditor for KPMG, formerly Peat Marwick Mitchell.

Rathbone is a native of Alexandria, Virginia, and a graduate of Virginia Tech, where he earned a bachelors degree in history and English. After his graduation from Virginia Tech, he took accounting classes at William & Mary.

The father of Jay Rathbone 02, M.Acc. 03, and David Rathbone 05, M.B.A. 11, he chaired the Parent and Family Council and is an emeritus trustee of the William & Mary Foundation. He is also a former member of the W&M Foundation Board. Inspired by his two sons, Rathbone made a $1 million commitment in 2015 to the Raymond A. Mason School of Business at William & Mary in support of its Master of Accounting and M.B.A. programs.

Ardine Williams

Williams has worked at Amazon since 2014, starting as vice president for Amazon Web Services talent acquisition. She became vice president of people operations in 2017, and two years later, she moved into her current role as vice president for workforce development.

In that position, she is responsible for advising businesses across Amazon on talent attraction and development and has focused on accelerating the companys initiative to re-train 100,000 employees by 2025 for careers in high-demand fields. She also works closely with community and state leaders and serves on the Washington Education Investment Oversight and Accountability Board and the Greater Washington, D.C., Partnership CoLAB (Collaborative of Leaders in Academia and Business) Advisory Board.

Before Amazon, Williams served in multiple roles at Intel Corporation from 1997 to 2014. Most recently, she served as vice president of human resources enterprise services. Prior to her time at Intel, Williams worked in the NetServer Division of Hewlett Packard and in various positions for Behring Company.

Williams is a graduate of Pacific Lutheran University and completed the executive program at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

A U.S. Army veteran, Williams has become known for her work in recruiting military veterans and their spouses. She served as the executive sponsor for American Veterans at Intel and represented the company in meetings about veterans issues and immigration with multiple government agencies. Williams was also a member of the White Houses Joining Forces Initiative industry working team and the Presidents Job Council working team. Among her many accolades is a Seven Seals Award from the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

Returning board members

Johnson, who earned her law degree from William & Mary and founded BLJohnsonLaw PLLC, serves as secretary of the Board of Visitors. She is also a former member of the Board of Trustees of the William & Mary Law School Foundation and previously served as its president and vice president (2012-2014). Appointed to the Board of Visitors in 2017, she was a member of the Committee on Administration, Buildings and Grounds; vice chair of the Richard Bland College Committee; and co-chair of the Committee on Organizational Sustainability & Innovation.

Saunders, who received a bachelors degree in government from William & Mary and started his career in government while a student at the university, is chief of staff to the mayor of the City of Richmond and acting chief administrative officer. He was appointed to the Board of Visitors in 2017 and served on the Committee on Audit, Risk and Compliance and the Committee on Institutional Advancement. He was also vice chair of the Committee on Administration, Buildings and Grounds.

Departing board members

Baig, partner and co-founder of Aldrich Capital Partners, was appointed to the Board of Visitors in 2017 and served on the Committee on Academic Affairs. He was vice chair of the Committee on Financial Affairs, chair of the Investments Subcommittee and co-chair of the Committee on Organizational Sustainability & Innovation. He is also the father of a member of the Class of 2024.

Watkins, who earned a bachelors degree in accounting from William & Mary, most recently served as president and CEO of Human Genome Sciences. He was appointed to the Board of Visitors in 2013 and reappointed in 2017. During his tenure on the board, he served on the Committee on Financial Affairs and as co-chair of the Committee on Organizational Sustainability & Innovation. In addition to serving as vice rector, he was also vice chair of the Investments Subcommittee. Watkins also previously chaired the William & Mary Foundation and was chair of the Presidential Search Committee for the 28th President of William & Mary. He is the father of two W&M alumni and son of former William & Mary Rector Hays Watkins.
Madagascar, the worlds second-largest island country located off Africas eastern coast, is an island of diverse ecosystem and biodiversity hotspot. The country has unique wildlife, with 90% of its plants and animals found nowhere else. Madagascars wildlife, especially plants, create some of the country's most fascinating sceneries and popular spots. One of its striking landscapes, attracting tourists from almost all corners of the Earth, is the Avenue of the Baobabs in the Menabe region. This avenue, also known as the Alleys of Baobabs, comprises numerous baobab trees along the dirt road linking Beloni Tsiribihina and Morondava, creating a unique and beautiful setting that may soon be Madagascars first natural monument.

A Spectacular Sight

Beautiful Baobab trees at sunset at the Avenue of the Baobabs in Madagascar.

Baobab trees, known locally as renala (meaning mother of the forest in Malagasy), are common throughout Madagascar. Of the Earths eight species, six are endemic to the country. Some of the baobabs in the country are as much as 2,800 years old, with trunks rising to 150 feet. However, in the Manabe region, these trees line a dirt road between Beloni Tsiribihina and Morondava, creating the impressive Avenue of the Baobabs.

The avenue is a row of about 25 baobabs stretching about 260 meters. Other baobab trees are also found in the nearby pastures. This sand and gravel road is one of Madagascars most visited places. It is also the most accessible place to see some of Africas oldest baobabs. These trees were once part of a forest that comprised other plants. However, encroachment and massive deforestation cleared the area of most trees, leaving the baobabs to grow in isolation. A handful of ancient trees are also present in the nearby areas. When the Arabs visited the area about a century ago, they remarked that the devil may have ripped the baobabs from the ground and planted them upside down because their canopies look like roots.

Conservation Of The Baobab Trees

A local woman carrying a log of wood on head with the Avenue of the baobabs in the background. Editorial credit: javarman / Shutterstock.com

The 20-25 baobab trees along the road and the other species growing in the nearby areas are always under constant threat from the increasing population. The trees also face threats from effluents from the nearby paddy fields, forest fires, and bushfires. Despite being a popular tourist destination, Avenue of the Baobabs has no admission fee nor visitor center and generates little income for the local communities.

Thankfully, civil societies and non-governmental organizations, in partnership with the government, have noticed the area and developed activities to protect the avenue. The Ministry of Environment, Water, and Forests declared it a temporary protected area in July 2007. In July 2015, the site was designated a national monument, the first in Madagascar. The government and local communities hope the tree can survive for additional 800 years.

Baobab Amoureux

A natural landmark in Madagascar: Les Babobabs Amoureux.

Besides the Avenue of the Baobabs, the Manabe region also has another baobab attraction known as Baobab Amoureux. This attraction is located 7 kilometers northwest of the avenue and comprises two baobab trees of the Adansonia za species twisted to each other. According to a famous legend, two lovers lived in the nearby village but could not live or have children together because they already had different partners. However, they always wished they were together and asked for help from their god. However, the answer came in form of the two baobabs that have embraced each other for eternity as the young lovers always wished.
Editor's Note: Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), China has worked with all other countries to build a community with a shared future for mankind, which has boosted confidence and added impetus for development of Asia and the world. For the celebration of the 100th funding anniversary of the CPC, we are launching the CPC in eyes of foreign military students series, viewing China and CPC from the perspective of foreign soldiers.

By First Lieutenant Itoua-Zondea Paul Cheryl Eder from the Republic of the Congo

I'm a post-95s from Africa. When I turned 18 in 2013, my father said I should set a good example for my little brother and sister, so he sent me to study in China  the most vibrant country in the world. During my first year here, I visited cities with historical interests, such as Beijing and Xi'an, where I witnessed the heroic spirit of Great Wall and grand sight of terracotta warriors. In a nutshell, I was fascinated by the profound civilization of this ancient country.

In 2019, I got another chance to study in China, and this time, the school  the PLA Army Logistics University  arranged for us to visit Shanghai. With its rows upon rows of high-rises and roads bustling with heavy traffic, the city struck me as extremely vibrant and vigorous.

In Shanghai, we visited a small building, and it interested me because homely as it is, it attracted a lot of tourists. As soon as I stepped into the building, a red flag came into my sight. Our interpreter told me it is the flag of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and the 1st CPC National Congress was held in the building. We took turns to have our photos taken in front of the Party flag and listened carefully to stories about the foundation of the CPC. Those inspiring historical events filled me with respect and admiration.

When my fiancee came to visit me last January, the COVID-19 pandemic had just broken out in China, and we were quarantined together for 14 days, during which I told her about Chinas history and culture and its amazing development achievements made in the past few decades under the leadership of the CPC. Both my fiancee and I were confident in Chinas ability to address the challenges brought by the pandemic, firmly believing that nothing could stop the great Chinese people. What happened later proved us correct.

Today, I'm back in my home country, but my bond with China cannot be severed though we are far apart. On March 10, the Republic of the Congo received the first batch of COVID-19 vaccine assistance, which was provided by China, our long-standing friend. Hearing this, I applied for inoculation immediately. Seeing the Chinese national flag on the vaccine package, I couldnt help thinking about the red flag in the little building in Shanghai, and once again felt assured and confident as I did when I was in China.

In China, we can feel the sincere friendship. My little twin brothers came of age this year. As the big brother, I advised them to begin studying Chinese. In my opinion, young Africans today should visit China in person if they ever have the opportunity  to see the hard-working Chinese people and the prosperous and resilient China after overcoming difficulties one after another. Im sure China will walk into a brighter future.

(This article is based on an interview by the PLA Daily with First Lieutenant Itoua-Zondea Paul Cheryl Eder assigned to Armed Forces of the Republic of the Congo, who had once studied at China's PLA Army Logistics University.)
Covid hubs in North Wales offering support to the hardest hit  with one set to open in Plas Madoc

Hubs offering holistic support to people who need to self-isolate and to those hit hardest by the pandemic are being rolled out in a pilot scheme across five areas in North Wales.

Welsh Government say the Covid Support Hubs offer immediate support with lateral flow tests and help to self-isolate if necessary. They also offer longer term assistance for people who might be struggling to buy food or pay rent, to access services, manage debt or with utility bills.

The pilot scheme is part of Waless Test Trace Protect programme, offering an extended and longer-term Protect offer in deprived communities in North Wales. It brings together the Betsi Cadwaladr Health Board, Local Authorities, the voluntary sector and community groups to support communities in a range of areas.

This multi-partner approach should mean that extra support can be offered if identified, even if people test negative for Covid-19 and are not required to self-isolate, such as signposting to benefits, providing information on food banks and low-cost food services, and advice on budgeting.





The first pilot hub launched in Holyhead in May, with 59 people seen in the first nine days. Ynys Mon Citizens Advice are the lead organisation, with input from a range of partners to deliver additional support around food provision, digital skills and access to mental health support.

The scheme is also now underway in Bangor and Denbigh, with hubs expected to open in Plas Madoc and Flintshire later this month.

Minister for Health and Social Services, Eluned Morgan said: Im pleased to see that this pilot scheme is up and running in North Wales and is already delivering positive results.

Its vital that people self-isolate if they test positive for Covid-19 in order to stop the virus spreading in our communities. Test, Trace Protect has been extremely effective at supporting people who have tested positive and their contacts to isolate and providing advice, guidance and support, and its important that we continue to invest in initiatives like this to support people to self-isolate when needed.

This pilot also demonstrates the benefits of a partnership approach which is reaching those who are often hard to reach and opening up a range of services to them to relieve worry and stress in other areas of their lives, providing much-needed support to people at an extremely difficult time.

The six types of support offered by the hubs are:

Lateral Flow Testing : LFD availability linked to the extended family of school-age children. To working individuals who require assurance as part of a stay safe initiative. To key workers who use public transport or have concerns about their Covid status.

LFD availability linked to the extended family of school-age children. To working individuals who require assurance as part of a stay safe initiative. To key workers who use public transport or have concerns about their Covid status. Extended food offer: Emergency need: To provide an initial food offer via to maintain self-isolation. Poverty need: to provide access to food to address food poverty as result of impact of Covid.

Emergency need: To provide an initial food offer via to maintain self-isolation. Poverty need: to provide access to food to address food poverty as result of impact of Covid. Fuel poverty To work with and refer to Energy Wardens and other fuel poverty initiatives for advice and assistance around energy and fuel poverty. To work with Warm Wales to support their local programme. Emergency top-up

To work with and refer to Energy Wardens and other fuel poverty initiatives for advice and assistance around energy and fuel poverty. To work with Warm Wales to support their local programme. Emergency top-up Financial Inclusion To work with and refer to Citizens Advice in the relevant counties. Additional capacity to support with benefits uptake, benefits check, debt management. (Income Maximisation Plan)

To work with and refer to Citizens Advice in the relevant counties. Additional capacity to support with benefits uptake, benefits check, debt management. (Income Maximisation Plan) Mental health support: Focus on mental health awareness. Securing local counselling services.

Focus on mental health awareness. Securing local counselling services. Digital connectivity: Provision of Chromebooks or tablet. Connection to the internet / PAYG data package One to One digital assistance

Case studies were also offered by Welsh Government, with names changed, based off the Holyhead hub:
Ken Skates MS asks Welsh Government to look at this again as Ministers are accused of turning blind eye to Newbridge landslip damage

Wrexham Council say repairing the damage caused by Storm Christoph earlier this year remains a priority and a visit by leading politicians to Newbridge showed how the effect on the local road network and local communities was clear.

Storm Christoph saw torrential downpours resulting in a landslide in Newbridge, which caused a section of footpath to collapse down an embankment, with a key route remaining closed pending works to fix the damage.

As we have recently documented Wrexham Council have been disappointed by the response from Welsh Government to a funding request to help fix the landslip, and currently no agreement has been reached.

Clwyd South MP Simon Baynes has also criticised the Welsh Government and called on Ministers to step up and provide the support and funding necessary to repair damaged infrastructure, adding In the event of closures on the trunk road, whether for planned works or emergencies, alternative routes are diverted via Llangollen  a fifteen mile diversion  and this is clearly not sustainable. Particularly when emergency vehicles are taken into account, this is unacceptable.

Im calling on Welsh Government Ministers to step up and take action on an issue that is seriously affecting residents in our part of Wales. Im concerned that Ministers in Cardiff Bay are turning a blind eye to the damage to our communities in Clwyd South caused by flooding. Im willing to work with Welsh Government to ensure Wrexham Council receives the funding support they need to repair our damaged infrastructure.

Today Wrexham Councils Lead Member for the Environment and Transport, Cllr David A Bithell, said he welcomed the opportunity to meet with MS Ken Skates on the matter, I hope that these talks and discussions will be fruitful in ensuring that this road re-opens as soon as possible. This is causing major difficulties for local people and we need substantial funding to address the effects from storm Christoph.

Ken Skates Clwyd South MS said: The damage caused by the extreme weather last year wreaked havoc in communities across Wales. This is a particularly bad example, and I know it has caused a lot of problems locally.

I have raised the matter with the Minister for Climate Change, Julie James, and asked the Welsh Government to look at this again. I know the Welsh Government has been in discussions with the council about other funding which might be available, so I look forward to receiving the Ministers response outlining how both parties can work together to remedy the situation.

Previously we have reported how early estimates place the price tag of any works in the low millions of pounds.
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2021, pp. 37-40

2021 Conference Magazine

By Susan Abulhawa

ITS NICE TO BE BACK with the Washington Report and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy. Im just going to give a brief overview of apartheid and a topline comparison between South African and Israeli apartheid systems.

The word apartheid comes from the Dutch Afrikaans language. It means separateness. It was a white supremacist ideology conceived by the descendants of Dutch colonists in South Africa. Although the concept of apartheid emerged in the early 1930s, it wasnt formalized as a political, social and legal reality until 1948ironically, the same year that Israel was created, formalizing Zionism, another face of white supremacy, as a political, social and legal reality in Palestine.

South Africas Nationalist Party implemented apartheid through such things as a color bar, a hierarchical social stratification system based on race. Israel does not have a color bar, but they do have color-coded license plates and color-coded ID cards that identify ones religion, which has been the basis of their own social, political and legal stratification of human beings living there.

South Africa had something called Pass Laws, which restricted the movements of indigenous South Africans, generally confining them to restricted Bantustans unless they had a passbook, which was given to those who served as cheap labor for the ruling white minority.

Israel has a far more elaborate mechanism that restricts the movement of people and goodshundreds of checkpoints making life hell for Palestinian individuals trying to get from one Palestinian town to another Palestinian town, and the near impossibility to enter the Dakhil, the part of Palestine stolen from us in 1948 by European Zionists.

Some Palestinians are given permits, or passbooks if you will, to enter these 1948 territories as cheap labor. Often, if they overstay overnight, beyond their permit allotment, theyre imprisoned. The daily commute alone is a horror show of humiliation and abuse for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian laborers. The recent short film by Farah Nabulsi, The Present, which just won the BAFTA award and is nominated for an Oscar, touches briefly on one day laborers life.

In Gaza, where two million human beings are locked up in a tiny enclave, Israel prevents students from studying at universities abroad, prevents the sick from seeking medical care outside Gaza, prevents anyone from taking a simple vacation. There are families who have not seen their children, parents or siblings in decades, even though theyre only a few miles away from one another, because Israel has made Gaza a giant prison.

Apartheid South Africa instituted anti-miscegenation laws to prevent racial intermarriage. Israel was clever not to explicitly pass such a law, but they in effect made it illegal for Jews to marry non-Jews. They accomplished this by requiring all marriages to be performed by religious officials, where rabbinical courts not only strictly forbid interreligious marriage, but also have a bloodline requirement to determine if one is Jewish enough to even marry another Jew by the Orthodox Jewish rabbinical court.

A Palestinian with Israeli citizenship who marries a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza cannot bring their spouse to live with them. In Jerusalem, Palestinians who do not have citizenship but residency status in Israel likewise cannot live with their spouses in Jerusalem. Theyre frequently forced to choose between keeping their families whole or losing their right to live in their own Jerusalem homes or being near their extended familiestheir grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

Israels obsession with religious purity and the majority, which is not unlike the Nazi obsession with racial purity, is expressed in a multitude of absurd laws that constantly fret over the so-called demographic threat (their fear of Palestinian babies), and in rules that delve into the minutiae of Jewish bloodlines and so-called Jewish DNA (which refers to a genetically identifiable subset of European society, called Ashkenazi Jews, which does not apply to Jews of other regional origins).

These are just some of the similarities between apartheid South Africa and apartheid Israel which are also similar to Nazi Nuremberg and Jim Crow southern laws.

But there are differences. There are big and important differences. The situation in Israel is much worse than it was in South Africa. So said the chairman of the ANC, Baleka Mbete; Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu; Mandla Mandela, Nelson Mandelas grandson; and many other notable South Africans who fought apartheid.

In South Africa, Bantustans, as horrendous as they were, were sustained with government resources to maintain a pool of cheap labor. Within these enclaves, black South Africans could move freely amongst themselves. They could breathe a little. Rarely did either the police or the military go into their communities.

On the other hand, Israel has been actively working to get rid of Palestinians, slowly replacing us with imported Jews from around the world. There is nowhere for Palestinians to be in Palestine where their bodies, spirits and dignity are not molested in some way by Israeli soldiers or paramilitary settlers.

The home demolitions; the daily theft of land, of water and property; the uprooting, burning and cutting of fruit-bearing trees; the night raids; the systematic terrorizing of childrena matter of military policy to ensure Palestinians grow up fearing Israelis; the raiding, tear gassing, closing, restricting and bombing of schools to ignorize our children through trauma.

Not even in their most depraved hour did white South Africans bomb black South Africans with heavy war death machinesplanes, helicopters and tanks. Not in their most depraved hour did they calculate the calories allowed into Bantustans to keep millions of human beings on the edge of starvation. Not in their most depraved hour did they bomb and destroy water infrastructure, places of worship, sewage treatment plants, electrical grids, schools, playgrounds or hospitals in order to break and destroy whole populations.

We use the analogy of apartheid because it fits and it has a historic resonance. It is understood and appropriately repudiated. But Israel is worse both qualitatively, as Ive just said, and quantitatively, as Israeli apartheid has endured 30 years and counting, longer than apartheid in South Africa.

I appreciate that BTselem, Israels largest human rights organization, finally applied the word apartheid to their society. But Id like to point out that this is not something that just crept up on them. It is not the result of increasingly right-wing governments. It is not because of Netanyahu or Trump. It is simply the condition of Israeli rule since they first conquered Palestine, expelling 80 percent of the indigenous population, putting those remaining under military rule for 18 years while they steal everything they could get their hands on, and instituting a legal system thats designed to keep those Palestinians as inferiors.

Palestinians have always spoken of this injustice. Weve always decried it since Zionism first arrived on our shores with guns. Im glad our Israeli counterparts have caught up. They are seven decades late, but theyve arrived. And were glad for it.

ISRAELS LAWS ARE USED TO OPPRESS

Years ago I gave a keynote talk at the first North American BDS conference, which was held at the University of Penn. For that talk, I researched some of Israels laws and military orders that have been used to oppress and break Palestinians. Im going to begin my closing by reading a few of these laws. The first part are laws within Israel that apply to Israeli or Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Section 5 in the Law of Political Parties and Section 7A of the Basic Law stipulates that any party platform that calls for full and complete equality between Jews and non-Jews can be disqualified from any political post. The law demands that Palestinian citizens may not challenge the states Zionist identity.

The Law of Return states that every Jew has the right to become a citizen no matter where they come from, while the indigenous non-Jewish inhabitants who were expelled in 1948 and 67 are expressly barred from returning to their homes.

The Nakba Law penalizes any institution that commemorates or publicly mourns the expulsion of the native Palestinian population.

The Anti-Boycott Law provides that anyone calling for the boycott of Israel or its illegal settlements can be sued by the boycotts targets without having to prove that they sustained damage. Then the court will decide how much compensation is to be paid.

The Admission Committees Law formally allows neighborhood screening committees to prevent non-Jewish citizens from living in Jewish communities that control over 81 percent of the territory in Israel.

The Nation-State Law states that the right to exercise self-determination is unique to the Jewish people, relegating indigenous Palestinian Christians and Muslims as subjects. This law establishes Hebrew as the official language, downgrading Arabic, the language spoken by the indigenous population for centuries in the land. The law also establishes Jewish settlements as a national value, and mandates state resources for the expansion of illegal Jewish-only colonies built on confiscated Palestinian land.

The Amendment to the Citizenship Law stipulates that an Israeli citizen who marries a Palestinian cannot live as a couple in Israel with his or her spouse. A Palestinian spouse can neither gain citizenship nor residency.

Ninety-three percent of the land, the vast majority of which was confiscated from Palestinian owners after 1948, can only be owned by Jewish agencies for the benefit of Jews only. One of these agencies is the Jewish National Fund, which, in its charter, forbids the sale or lease of land to non-Jews.

The Specified Goods Tax and Luxury Tax Law, Article 26, authorizes lower import taxes for Jewish citizens of Israel compared to non-Jewish citizens of Israel.

The National Planning and Building Law of 65, through various zoning laws, freezes the growth of existing Palestinian villages while providing for the expansion of Jewish settlements and the creation of new ones. The law also reclassifies a large portion of established ancient Palestinian villages as unrecognized and therefore non-existent, which allows the state to cut off water and electricity as well as to simply appropriate the property.

Appropriations are carried out under the Requisitions Law, which allows a competent authority to requisition the land, called a land requisition order, so that only he may use and exploit the land as he sees fit. This applies to home requisition orders as well, whereby another competent authority who can order the occupier of a house to surrender the house to the control of a person specified in the order for residential purposes or for any other use as may be prescribed in the order.

In the education sector within Israel, the state spends $192 per year per non-Jewish student, compared to $1,100 per Jewish student.

A Mosque Law has been debated off and on to prohibit the broadcasting of the Muslim call to prayer, which has been sounding over that land since the dawn of Islam.

Also, for the first time in the history of Islam and the history of Christianity, Palestinian Muslims and Christians in the West Bank and Gaza are consistently denied access to their holy places in Jerusalem, even on the high holy days of Eid, Christmas and Easter Sunday. In fact, since Israel took the West Bank, the Christian population has declined from 20,000 in 1967 to less than 7,500 today.

THOUSANDS OF ARBITRARY MILITARY ORDERS

Palestinians who live in the West Bank are subject to military orders which are arbitrarily issued by a military commander and which immediately become law. Here are some examples of these military orders, of which there are literally thousands.

Military Order 1229 authorizes Israel to hold Palestinians in administrative detention for up to six months without charge or trial. Six-month detentions can be renewed indefinitely, without charge or trial.

Military Orders 329 and 1650 effectively prevent Palestinians from being anywhere in the West Bank without a specific permit to be there, making it a criminal offense to go from one Palestinian town to another.

Military Orders 92 and 158 give the Israeli military control of all water resources in the West Bank, which belong to Palestinians in the first place. Israel then allows the Palestinians access to only a fraction of the shared water resources, while unlawful Israeli settlements receive virtually unlimited supplies, creating a reality of green lawns and swimming pools for Jewish settlers and a parched life for Palestinians, whose access to water according to the World Health Organization does not meet the minimum requirements for basic human needs. Furthermore, that fraction of confiscated Palestinian water is sold to Palestinians at 300 percent more than what it costs Jewish settlers in the same area.

Military Orders 811 and 847 allow Jews to purchase land from unwilling Palestinian sellers by using power of attorney.

Military Order 25 forbids public inspection of land transactions.

Military Order 128 gives the Israeli military the right to take over any Palestinian business which is not open during the regular business hours.

Military Orders 138 and 134 forbid Palestinians from operating tractors or other heavy farm machinery on their land.

Military Order 93 gives all Palestinian insurance businesses to the Israeli insurance syndicate.

And Military Order 1015 requires Palestinians to get military permission to plant and grow fruit trees. This permit expires every year.

Again, this is just a sampling of Israels legal infrastructure, which is multi-tiered to apply to individuals based on their religion and place of residence.

Today well hear from experts who will expand our understanding of Israeli apartheid to explain why and how it has endured and avoided scrutiny, while apartheid in South Africa was brought to its knees.

I would like to urge everyone listening to become involved in putting an end to this monumental injustice. Israels 74-year assault on Palestinians is an affront to humanity. It continues in part because the United States funds it.

Id like to point out that Betty McCollum has reintroduced a bill to condition aid to Israel on Israeli adherence to human rights standards, in particular, that no U.S. tax dollars be used to imprison and torture Palestinian children. This is a minimal recognition of Palestinian humanity, though it is sadly the only such bill to be introduced. I urge everyone listening to call and write your representative to co-sponsor and support this bill, because it lays the groundwork upon which all of us can build a little compassion and justice into the U.S. political system when it comes to Palestine.

Beyond that, I encourage all of you to support Palestinian endeavors. Read our books, watch our films, engage in our institutions, buy our products, and lobby your lawmakers.

For our part, Palestinians will never walk away from this struggle. Never. In the words of Zeev Jabotinsky, one of the early Zionist forefathers, he said, TheyPalestinianslook upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true favor the Aztecs looked upon Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. Palestine will remain for the Palestinians not a borderland, but their birthplace, the center and basis of their own national existence.

Susan Abulhawa is an acclaimed Palestinian-American poet and writer. She is the author of the international bestselling novel Mornings in Jenin, and her second novel, The Blue Between Sky and Water, was translated in 19 languages before its release. Her latest novel, Against the Loveless World, is a Palestine Book Awards winner. She is also an activist, and founded Playgrounds for Palestine, an NGO upholding the right of Palestinian children to play.
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2021, pp. 12-13



Five Views: Palestinians Unite to Resist Israels Occupation and Bombs

By Sara Roy

DEAR PRESIDENT BIDEN,

I am writing to you about Gaza, a place that I have studied and written about for the last 35 years, a place that I consider another home, filled with the kindest and most generous people you will ever meethave you ever been there? But I am writing not only as a scholar of the region but as a Jew and one whose parents survived Auschwitz.

I have a question for you, Mr. President: When is the death of a child acceptable? Or perhaps I should ask the question this way: When does the death of a Palestinian child become unacceptable? You have experienced the unspeakable loss of your own children so you are better placed than most to answer my questions.

Last week after 87 Palestinians in Gaza were killed and over 500 wounded you stated that you had not seen a significant overreaction on Israels part to Hamas rocket attacks. Among the dead at that time were 18 children. I did not know any of them but I know people who do. Would you please help me explain to my friends why the death of these 18 children does not constitute an overreaction? This brings up another question I have for you, Mr. President: How many children must die in Gaza before you would consider Israels response excessive particularly since you have made human rights the center of your foreign policy? I need to know so that I can explain it to my friends. As I write this, over 60 Palestinian children have been killed by the government of Israel. Is that enough to qualify?

I know people inside our government who work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I need to tell you something I heard from one of them about the death of Gazas children. This individual implied that some of the dead were likely the children of Hamas officials so their deaths dont really matter, that is, their deaths are acceptable. Is this the answer to my first question? Should this be the way I explain it to my friends? Please help me out here.

It is tragic that after more than three decades of research and writing, I still find it necessary to argue for the humanity of Palestinians, even to you. One more thing before I end this letter if youll indulge me. It is about my mom. When she was imprisoned in the Lodz ghetto during the Holocaust, she risked her life hiding children who were chosen for deportation to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. The Nazis eventually found the children and sent them to their deaths. But my mom tried to save them even though she knew she was powerless to do so. And I can assure you, knowing her and learning from her as I did throughout my life, she would have done the same for any child under threat, Jewish or Christian or Muslim. She would have been horrified by the senseless killing of children in this terrible conflict, both Palestinian and Israeli, and she would have railed at the injustice of it all. And this is my last question for you: Why havent you done the same?

Dr. Sara Roy is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. This article was printed in CounterPunch on May 21, 2021.
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2021, pp. 8-9



Five Views: Palestinians Unite to Resist Israels Occupation and Bombs

By Gary M. Burge, Ph.D.

WHENEVER YOU WONDER whats happening in the current round of conflicts, it depends on where you start the clock. The least helpful are the television media, who reduce this story to a minute or so and simply count how many rockets and missiles are exchanged between Israel and Gaza. They may tell you how Israels Iron Dome Defense System intercepts and destroys over 90 percent of the Gaza rockets. Then, this is followed by interviews with grieving families on both sides. Numerical facts and emotional appeal with little or no insight.

The problem is that while many think this conflict is complex and incomprehensible to the average person, it really is not. But you do have to manage a couple of basic ideas. For instance, there are two types of Palestinians: First, there are Palestinians living within Israel with full Israeli citizenship. They make up about 20 percent of the Israeli population. Second, there are Palestinians who have been living under Israeli military occupation since 1967. They live in Gaza and the West Bank. Since Israel controls everything between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, it is fair to use a comprehensive population countroughly 7 million Israeli Jews, 1.8 million Israeli Palestinians, and 4.5 million Palestinians under military occupation without citizenship freedoms. Do the math. About 55 percent of this country is Jewish and about 45 percent is Palestinian.

We could start the clock when Israel began in 1948. Immediately, Israel set to work depopulating large areas of Palestinians, removing 700,000 people from their homes, making them lifelong refugees and bulldozing hundreds of their villages.

Or we could start the clock in 1967, when Israel conquered the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza, capturing millions of Palestinians (as well as the Golan Heights and Sinai). At once, two things were set in motion. First, Israel initiated a severe military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that has gone on for 55 years. The human rights abuses in these areas are legendary. Second, Israel consolidated its Jewish cultural and legal dominance over Palestinians within Israel. This too is legendary and today some compare this effort to the Jim Crow laws of early 20th century America. These two oppressive decisions, one military, one based on civil law, has led to two Palestinian populations that have deep grievances. It has also led to two major uprisings (1987, 2000).

Israels creeping de-facto annexation of the West Bank by illegal settlements and its overt talk about formally assimilating this land now have inspired many leading organizations to officially call Israel a colonial enterprise or an apartheid state. Human Rights Watch and the Israeli human rights group, BTselem, have both now said that Israel has crossed the line. Apartheid is now in open discussion in the New Yorker and The Hill but fiercely denied by Israel. However, there is a shift in the wind and Israel knows it.

I prefer to start the clock at 2018. In July of that year, Israels parliament passed (by close vote) the Basic Law known popularly as the nation-state law. This makes explicit what we have seen all along, that Israel is a country based on race, devoted to Jewish privilege and legally able to discriminate against Palestinian self-determination. It drew enormous international criticism, but it also explains why someone like Binyamin Netanyahu can declare he has no real interest in Palestinian rights. Simply, Palestinians are secondary. Amnesty International calls it institutionalized discrimination. Arab/Jewish legal organizations in Israel such as Adalah now list over 65 laws that are breathtakingly discriminatory on their face.

Since 2018, Israel has accelerated this overt discrimination within its borders. From destroying Palestinians homes (which fail to obtain building permits because they are near-impossible for non-Jews to get) to encouraging illegal settlements on Palestinian landall activities soundly criticized around the worldthis country has become a cauldron of anger. The recent COVID-19 response has been typical in that Israel boasted about its speedy vaccination of its own people but failed to mention that 4.5 million Palestinians were left out of that success story.

When the explosives are ready to go, it only takes someone to light the match.

Patrick Kingsley at the New York Times would start the clock and the match-strike that started everything on April 13, 2021. This was the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. In Jerusalem, the al-Aqsa Mosque is the third holiest site in Islam and on this night, its towers (minarets) call people to prayer and fasting. This is the mysterious and haunting call that fills Jerusalem daily.

But on this night, Israels president wanted to make a speech nearby and didnt want interruptions. Israel sent soldiers into the al-Aqsa Mosque (desecrating it) and they cut the wires to the sound system. At first, the military denied thisbut a score of eyewitnesses forced the government to concede. The army then closed off the Damascus Gate plaza, which on this night is a site for Muslim families to gather and walk to al-Aqsa. Think about it. An army raid on al-Aqsa led to closures for Palestinian movement on a most holy religious night.

But there is more. In the last few months, Israel has moved ahead with its plan to depopulate the region east of Jerusalem. A Palestinian village on the Mount of Olives, Silwan, is under constant threat. And a neighborhood not far away, Sheikh Jarrah on Mt. Scopus, is facing eviction orders for 13 families. By law, if a Jewish settler says that land was once Jewish before 1948, they can make a claim. By contrast, if a Palestinian says that land was Arab before 1948, the claim gets no traction. Everyone in Israel knows this. This is what happens when a country defines itself by religion and ethnicity.

And in the confluence of events this month, May 9 was Jerusalem Day, recognizing Israels conquest of all Jerusalem in 1967. Thousands of Israeli zealots stream through the walled old citys Muslim quarter shouting death to Arabs, and pounding on the doors of Arab homes. It is frightening. This year, the police worried about a riot and forced them to reroute around the quarter, but the fear remained.

Suddenly street clashes increased, arrests and shootings accelerated, and Gaza, living under occupation and a merciless blockade for years, sent in rockets after demanding that Israeli security forces leave the al-Aqsa Mosque. The match had been struck. The exchanges are producing predictable results: for every Israeli Jew who dies, about 20 Palestinians are killed. The New York Times is now doing a first-rate job tracking the casualty numbers.

But this time things are different. Israels domestic Palestinian citizenry and Palestinians in the global diaspora are protesting in concert with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. And news outlets and human rights groups are publicly saying things rarely heard beforethe cost of building a state based on a religious ideology has led to enormous human rights violations. The forbidden A-Word (apartheid) is now spoken openly. As Ami Ayalon, the former director of Israeli intelligence has said, We have to wake up. We have to change the way we understand all this, starting with the concept that the status quo is stable. Israels greatest existential threat may actually not be Iran or even Gaza, it may be the sustained system of structural discrimination and oppression that is now going public.

Gary M. Burge, Ph.D., is a professor at Calvin Theological Seminary and the author of the widely read Whose Land? Whose Promise? What Christians Are Not Being Told About Israel and the Palestinians and his theological treatment in Jesus and the Land: The New Testament Challenge to Holy Land Theology. His website is <https://www.garyburge.org>.
A recently leaked Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) document shows that Canadas military gathered intelligence on the mass protests that erupted in Ontario in late May and early June 2020 in response to the police murder of George Floyd,

This revelation underscores that the federal Liberal governments much trumpeted deployment of the armed forces during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was not primarily motivated by humanitarian concerns. Rather its principal purposes were to prepare for potential social unrest, including by testing out methods of repression against the population, and to bolster the public image of the military to generate support for rearmament and Canadian imperialisms foreign interventions and wars.

Mass protest in Toronto on June 6, 2020 against police violence and racism (Facebook0

The surveillance operation was carried out by the Canadian Joint Operations Command (CJOC). The CJOC leads most military operations within Canada and around the world, as it is responsible for directing all CAF operations except those run by the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command and NORAD. The CJOC collected information on the Ontario demonstrations and the individuals who took part in them, mining social media accounts to identify so-called major actors and gathering information on the organizational practices of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and other groups.

The latest revelations make clear that Canadas military-intelligence apparatus increasingly functions as a law unto itself, not just in its operations abroad but also at home. Canadas military-intelligence agencieswhich include the CAF, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and RCMPhave been implicated in many of imperialisms greatest crimes over the past two decades, from the US-led destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, to extrajudicial detentions and torture, and the deploying and staffing of a global surveillance network that targets the worlds population.

The news that the military surveilled peaceful protests follows on from last Augusts report that the CAF sought to use techniques it had developed during its decade-long involvement in the neocolonial war in Afghanistan to shape public opinion in Canada during the pandemics first wave. This included plans to broadcast government propaganda, carry out assessments of the potential for civil unrest in cities across the country and enlist the support of community leaders.

The Department of National Defence (DND) responded to the exposure of its spying on the George Floyd protests by issuing a statement that claimed it had gathered intelligence with the aim of increasing the militarys understanding of the local environment, and that this was necessary under conditions of their deployment to long-term care facilities in Ontario.

In order, claimed the DND statement, to ensure the movement of our personnel/vehicles to support Ontario LTCF (Long Term Care Facilities) would not interfere with BLM solidarity activities, preliminary research was undertaken.

To be clear, it continued, this work was only done with the intent to avoid disruption to both planned BLM activities and CAF operations.

This stretches credulity, to say the least. The federal government agreed to send troops to the Quebec and Ontario long-term care homes hardest hit by the pandemic in late April 2020, and they arrived in early May 2020. The deployment was aimed at fostering the public perception that Canadas governments were acting decisively to deal with the catastrophic situation in Quebecs and Ontarios long-term care facilities, so as to provide political cover for their homicidal push for a precipitous reopening of the economy and schools.

The first protests in response to George Floyds murder occurred in Ontario on May 30 in Toronto and May 31 in Sudbury and Windsor. The majority of the provinces protests, however, occurred between June 5 and 7, at which point troops had been present in Ontarios LTCFs for almost a month.

The militarys own documents concede the protests were entirely peaceful. Moreover, in the highly unlikely event that any of the protests had somehow impeded the movements of the few hundred CAF personnel deployed to Ontarios seven hardest hit LTCFs, it would have been the responsibility of local police to deal with the matter, not the armed forces.

One section in the leaked CAF intelligence report is titled Hostile Foreign Actors and has otherwise been completely redacted. This title alone is evidence that the intelligence gathering was not simply part of a well-meaning effort to avoid a clumsy interaction between troops and those marching in opposition to police violence and racism.

The document noted that the protests were supported by anti-capitalism and social justice organizations, unions, and antiracism groups, particularly from indigenous communities. The report also noted the participation of celebrities and politicians at all levels, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan, both of whom attended the June 5 protest in Ottawa.

Military intelligence officers also tracked content relating to the protests on social media websites to pinpoint the core narratives surrounding the demonstrations and mined the social media accounts of individuals to gather information. A timeline was produced of every protest that took place within Ontario.

Protests for social reform after police-involved deaths of George Floyd in Minnesota and Regis Korchinski-Paquet in Toronto continue to gain traction in Ontario, the intelligence report notes.

Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a 29-year-old black-indigenous-Ukrainian Canadian woman, died on May 27, 2020 after allegedly falling from her 24th floor balcony while police were present in her Toronto home. Korchinski-Paquets family continues to dispute the police version of events and seek further inquiry into what happened. Many Canadians protested her death along with Floyds murder.

The Canadian Joint Operations Commands gathering of this information amounts to spying and is a threat to the populations fundamental, constitutionally protected right to voice their views through protests and mass demonstrations. It was an egregious assault on civil rights and should be acknowledged as such, no matter what excuses the CAF may concoct in the future to further explain away the situation.

The fact that a CAF operation allegedly intended to alleviate the mass suffering and death ravaging the countrys vulnerable care-facility population was brazenly exploited as an opportunity to spy on the public speaks volumes of the true purpose and intent of a military that is so often characterized as being more humanitarian and less predatory than that of its neighbour to the south.

However, it is hardly surprising. As the World Socialist Web Site has previously noted, in March 2020, at the very beginning of the pandemic, the CAF announced that it was deploying fully one-quarter of its personnel to a special anti-COVID-19 force and that these troops were being placed on a war footing in preparation for a possible worst case scenario, that according to the CBC, included public disturbances.

In response to the attempts of the CAF and Liberal government to cover up the significance of the earlier revelation that the military was mounting information operations based on techniques developed during the Afghan war, the WSWS, wrote: If these statements are true, they raise a host of questions, all of which are carefully avoided in the accounts of the militarys activities provided so far. Does the military have a free hand to conduct whatever operations it deems fit within Canada without government authorization? If the government had no idea about the militarys plan, who took the decision to deploy soldiers in accordance with the information operations plan? Did the worst-case scenario that purportedly informed the operation include plans for the military to assume any government functions in the event of the breakdown of law and order, and, if so, which ones and under whose authority? (See: Bringing Afghanistan home: Canadas military launched operation to shape opinion amid pandemic)

Ottawa Citizen defence correspondent David Pugliese broke both stories after obtaining leaked documents, and in both cases their only substantial coverage in the corporate media was provided by Pugliese or by other journalists at the Citizen.

According to the Citizen, some senior military public affairs officers have not been happy with its exposes and at an Oct. 29, 2020 meeting, one of those officers suggested striking back at the newspaper, although details werent discussed about how that might happen.
A strike planned last week by 2,100 group home workers in Connecticut, set to begin June 4, was called off at the eleventh hour by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) District 1199 New England. Working in tandem with Democratic Governor Ned Lamont, who threatened to call out the National Guard, this is the third time in a month that the SEIU called off a strike by nursing home and group home workers in Connecticut at the last minute.

The multiple strikes halted by the SEIU were planned as limited actions as part of a deliberate effort to keep the struggles of health care workers isolated. This included a strike set for May 13 by 2,800 workers at 26 nursing homes in the state. Another strike planned by group home workers across 200 group homes initially set for May 20 was postponed to June 4 and now has been called off.

Healthcare workers protest over payroll delays in February outside of Allied Community Services East Windsor, CT. (Photo credit: Shana Sureck with the New England Health Care Employees Union, District 1199, SEIU)

SEIU District 1199 New Englandthe bargaining agent for 29,000 health care workers including nurses, direct care workers, CNAs, cooks, case managers, therapists, doctors, maintenance staff and home care workers in Connecticut and Rhode Islandis acting to isolate the various units, making backroom deals with the state and corporations while attempting to palm off betrayals as victories, this all in the interest of the multi-billion dollar health care industry.

The 2,100 group home workers include support staff, program coordinators, residential day program workers, assistant teachers and licensed practical nurses. They provide care to people with intellectual or developmental disabilities at 200 group homes across the state owned by six nonprofit providers: Oak Hill, Network, Whole Life, Mosaic, Journey Found and Sunrise.

These workers have not seen a pay increase in 14 years, including during the pandemic, where they worked under inhuman workloads. They were asking for a mere $20 per hour wage and benefits along with smaller patient ratios to ensure better outcomes and survival for their patients.

Enthusiasm for the strike was expressed on social media, where workers expressed their determination to fight for a living wage and patient safety. We need change for every essential worker, and Even 15 dollars an hour cannot take care of a family with skyrocketing rents. Meanwhile, health care workers in nursing homes have suffered severely high rates of illness and death from COVID-19.

A joint investigation by Kaiser Health News and The Guardian found that that the reported deaths of more than 3,600 health care workers from COVID-19 in 2020 included twice as many nursing home workers as hospital workers. The report found that many of these deaths were a result of malign neglectthe policy pursued by the ruling class, which put profits before lives. In a damning indictment of capitalism, the study concluded with the following, Widespread shortages of masks and other personal protective gear, a lack of COVID testing, weak contact tracing, inconsistent mask guidance by politicians, missteps by employers and lax enforcement of workplace safety rules by government regulators all contributed to the increased risk faced by healthcare workers.

District 1199 called off the strike and agreed with Governor Lamont on a two-year $184 million state funding package, the full details of which have not been disclosed to the public. Nor have the full tentative agreements between the various group homes and workers been shared with workers.

Rob Baril, president of District 1199 New England, cynically postured as having made substantial progress toward our goals for a $20 minimum wage, with major progress on retirement and other benefits. Baril referred to the scotching of the planned strike by 3,200 nursing home workers earlier in May, leading to the rotten deal signed with the multi-millionaire governor, as a positive step

On the sellout deal the union agreed to on May 13, Jesse Martin, vice president of District 1199, was obligated to note that even the poverty wage of $20 was to be phased in. By 2023, CNAs will be making $20 an hour, LPNS, licensed practical nurses will be making $30 an hour. Gloria Plumber, a certified nursing assistant speaking to News 8, was openly contemptuous of the sellout. During the pandemic, we were called heroes and essential workers, but yet we are not treated as heroes or essential workers. We should not have to be treated this way, begging or offered crumbs. We are better than that, we are bigger than that; we deserve a decent living wage.

Kimberley Ackerman, a group home worker, spoke scathingly about Governor Ned Lamonts proposal to continue poverty wages for the group home workers. She told News 8, He wants to pay the individuals $14.75 an hour? $14.75 an hour? Do you know that 30 hours of your monthly salary goes to pay for your health insurance?  A lot of people are on food stamps or are using the food banks to provide for their families because that $14.75 is just not enough.

While Lamont insists on poverty wages for health care staff, the Democratic governor represents the interests of the corporations and elite, of which he is part. The New York Times reported Lamonts net worth at an estimated $90$332 million, based on his 2006 financial disclosure. In 2018, Lamont reported federal income totaling nearly $18 million over the past five yearswhich is 253 times the median household income in Connecticut.

The Connecticut Post was obliged to take note of the Democratic governors fortune when he refused to make public his federal tax returns, noting For Lamont, home is a $7 million, 8,300-square-foot colonial behind bushy evergreens and a high, deer-proof fence on a secluded, private cul de sac in mid-country Greenwich. Lamonts eight bathrooms became a point of contention during the primary. The adjoining two-acre, $1.6 million parcel was added for privacy. A few miles away, along Long Island Sound, a slick 22-foot Mako power boat is docked. Lamont has predictably refused to raise taxes on the wealthy and was quoted in the Hartford Courant in May, You dont raise taxes when you dont have to raise taxes.

Oak Hill was the largest group of six that were faced with the threat of a strike. Barry M. Simon, CEO of Oak Hill, commented on the difficulties of finding replacement staff in a population that has been ravaged by the pandemic, noting that out of 600 open positions he was able to fill only thirteen.

In a desperate move, the company then started transferring patients over to other nursing homes and even homes of the families, where possible, in the morning of June 3. Simon noted that many patients were limited in their ability to communicate and removing them from their familiar surroundings attended by highly skilled staff would take a heavy emotional cost. Theyre highly anxious. Theyre terrified of this.

The SEIU has no intention of mobilizing its 29,000 statewide membership to fight for living wages or patient safety. Instead it has worked to enforce a deal that provides a $20 an hour wage, which is currently near poverty, and that will be worth far less by 2023.

The companies caring for these vulnerable populations are nonprofit in name only. The 2019 IRS form 990 of Oak Hill shows Barry M. Simon made $240,422 and that the organization has paid its top eight officers $1.2 million, including Simon. Similarly Zachary Wray, president of nonprofit Sunrise, made $278,881 in 2018 and its nine top officers got a total of $1.4 million.

To advance their fight for decent pay and working conditions group home workers must take the fight out of the hands of the SEIU that has tied their hands at every step. The path forward is shown by Volvo workers in Dublin, Virginia, that walked out on strike at noon Monday after their vote Sunday overwhelmingly defeating the second pro-company contract proposal agreed to by the United Auto Workers union. Workers voted by 90 percent to reject the six-year deal, which would have continued the string of concession-laden contracts pushed by the UAW spanning decades.

Health care workers should follow the lead of Volvo workers and set up their own rank-and-file committee, independent of the corrupt SEIU, to democratically decide on their demands and how to fight for them.
A succession of tragic workplace accidents occurred in Australia in May within three days of one another, highlighting the hazardous conditions many workers confront on a day to day basis.

Robert Langella with his three-year-old granddaughter, Amelia (Photo supplied by family)

On May 16, 53-year-old grandfather Robert Langella was hit by a semi-trailer while working at an Inghams chicken production and processing plant in northern Adelaide, South Australia. Langella died at the scene at about 8:20 a.m., despite efforts from paramedics and colleagues to save him. His daughter Kayla said that her father was just at work doing what he did every day when he was taken away from us with a blink of an eye.

Just two days later, again in Adelaide and only five kilometres from the first incident, 35-year-old father of six Varlee Jardu died at a workshop after being crushed by a tyre-pressing machine.

Jardus wife Makoya Sesay told Seven News that they had just been celebrating the birth of their new baby two months earlier. We were doing everything together, she said. He was a very, very good man. He did everything for me, so if I think about him I cant stop crying.

This was the second workplace-related death to strike the family in just six months. Jardus cousin, Abraham Jabateh, a 30-year-old truck driver and father of nine, died in a horrific truck rollover in the Adelaide Hills late last year. His two bosses were later charged with industrial manslaughter after an investigation showed that 19 of their 20 trucks were defective on the day of the accident.

Varlee Jardu (Source @vjardu Twitter)

The third workplace death last month occurred at a construction site also on May 18 in St Albans, Melbourne, at around 11:30 a.m. An unnamed 40-year-old man was operating alone when he was hit in the back of the head, after the end of a concrete pump truck boom (a kind of robotic arm) snapped off.

The three deaths are part of an ongoing epidemic of workplace fatalities. According to Safe Work Australia, a federal government statutory agency, as of May 13, 34 Australian workers had been killed at work this year. In 2020, 182 Australian workers were killed at work, with 183 workers killed the year before that. Between 2003 and 2018, a total of 3,751 workers died.

Agriculture, forestry and fishing have the highest death rate at 11.2 per 100,000 workers, while transport, postal and warehousing are the next most dangerous with a rate of 5.9. Construction came in at a rate of 2.7 as a five year average, with 31 percent of these deaths the result of vehicle collisions.

The carnage is in part due to the role of pro-business regulator Safe Work Australia, whose inspectors have the power to issue a range of penalties.

In Australias largest state of New South Wales (NSW), Safe Work launched only 100 prosecutions in the last financial year, of which 59 were settled through fines. In the countrys second largest state, Victoria, Safe Work issued 124 fines, amounting to 91 percent of all prosecutions. Breach notices and on-the-spot fines represent even more blatant slaps on the wrists of corporate offenders. For the latest available figures in NSW, on-the-spot fines in 2018 totalled just $265,000, an average of $265 for each violation. This represents a minute fraction of the billions of dollars in profits generated in Australian industry each year.

The trade unions are also culpable. They have suppressed the class struggle for decades, sabotaging workers efforts to organise industrial action to advance their interests, including for safe workplaces, and shackling workers to the anti-democratic Fair Work industrial regime.

Many unions, including the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMMEU), the Transport Workers Union (TWU) and the Australian Workers Union (AWU), whose officials routinely issue empty platitudes over industrial deaths, have argued for years that the introduction of industrial manslaughter laws will address workplace deaths.

Industrial manslaughter is broadly categorised as an offence where an employer owes a duty of care to a worker, breaches that duty and is reckless or negligent, and by that breach, causes a death.

Special industrial manslaughter laws were passed in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) in 2004, Queensland in 2017, Victoria in 2020, and Western Australia (WA) in 2020, but they have been largely unenforced by big business governments.

The first ever industrial manslaughter conviction in Australia occurred in Queensland in 2020, after a worker was pinned to a truck by a reversing forklift and died. The company was fined $3 million and the two company directors were sentenced to 10 months imprisonment. However, their sentences were suspended.

The first conviction to result in actual jail time was handed down last year in WA to Mark Thomas Withers, the director of a small shed-building business.

In March last year, two workers employed by Withers, 25-year-old Jake Williams, and 21-year-old Fraser Pinchin, were attempting to install roofing on a large machinery shed at a farm about 100 kilometres from the coastal town of Esperance. The two were not wearing safety harnesses when the roof sheet lifted under strong winds, causing them to fall nine metres. Williams died, while Pinchin suffered multiple fractures to his pelvis, hip, wrist and ribs.

Withers received a prison term of eight months, eligible for parole after four, with an additional 18 months suspended, a personal fine of $2250 and a business fine of $605,000. WorkSafe Commissioner Darren Kavanagh said, Withers completely failed in every sense to provide a safe workplace for his employees.

This conviction, for one workplace death amid hundreds, is the exception that proves the ruleindustrial manslaughter laws have largely remained a dead letter and have not substantially improved safety conditions for the working class. Workers need to organise rank-and-file committees in every workplace and industry, independent of the trade unions, to oppose the profit-driven undermining of safety protections and fight for the right of every worker to a safe workplace.
The auditor-general of New South Wales (NSW), Australias most populous state, has revealed that the state Liberal-National governments $6.7 billion budget for school infrastructure over the next four years will not be enough to accommodate the growing number of students past 2023.

The report, issued in April, provides an insight into the decades-long process in which NSW and federal governments have deliberately rundown public schools, while pouring billions of dollars into private education.

Temporary classrooms at The Ponds High School last year (Source: ABC News)

It reveals an ageing, cramped, and outdated public-school system with 34,000 classrooms in a state deemed unfit for purpose, and over half of buildings more than 40-years-old.

The report indicates the future impact of this systematic neglect. It estimates that by 2039, the state government will need to build 7,200 new learning spaces for an additional 180,000 students to meet the demands of swelling populations in suburban areas.

This crisis is not confined to NSW. The Australian Centre for Educational Research (ACER) warned in 2015 of the need for schools nationally to accommodate a further 400,000 students over the following 10 years.

In 2017, the NSW government created School Infrastructure NSW (SINSW) to deliver 123 new schools announced that year. In 2018, the government announced the biggest school building program in the states history, promising schools that would last 100 years or more.

In practice, however, the response has been to build temporary pop-up schools in areas of Sydney as a stopgap measure until new schools are constructed.

Fort Street Public School was one such school, temporarily relocated in 2018 to a public space next to the Wentworth Park greyhound track in Sydneys inner-city suburb of Ultimo. Construction of the temporary site continued despite the discovery of lead contamination at the location.

In its 201920 budget, the state government rejected funding for 18 of 31 of SINSWs prioritised projects and announced 27 projects of its own. In the 202021 budget, it only funded 2 of the 20 projects for which SINSW requested funding.

The federal Rudd-Gillard Labor governments imposition of the NAPLAN high-stakes testing regime in 2008 and its introduction of the MySchool website, which ranked school performances, has caused an uneven distribution of students, with more attractive schools pulling larger numbers of enrolments.

In 2019, the NSW government introduced enrolment caps and adjusted school catchment areas to force parents to keep their children enrolled at the school nearest their home.

These measures were unsuccessful. Enrolments at Sydney schools have since dwarfed their population caps. Castle Hill High School had a cap set of 900 students in 2019 but now accommodates more than 1,000 students over this limit. The Ponds High School in Western Sydney experienced a 380 percent increase in enrolments from 2016 to 2021 and now has 48 demountable classrooms on its grounds.

Hanna Braga, a mother in the Camden region southwest of Sydney, expressed dismay at the conditions of schools in the area, including her daughters Gledswood Hills Public School. I am actually so thankful this report has come out because it just proves the experience that were all living with in south-west Sydney, she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell has refused to accept responsibility for the school infrastructure crisis. Instead she has attempted to pit city and regional parents against each other, saying the people of NSW do not expect new schools and upgrades to occur only in Sydneys growth areas.

This situation has been created by decades of successive Labor and Liberal-National governments stripping funding from public education. In this years federal budget, the funding of private schools was buoyed by $14.7 billion, an increase of 13 percent from the previous budget, while public schools continued to be starved of funds, despite the extra burdens placed on teachers and students due to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Australian Education Union (AEU), public schools face a $19 billion funding shortfall over the next four years.

A decade after the last federal Labor government launched its Education Revolution, Australia has one of the most unequal school systems in the world. In 2020, of the 37 countries in the OECD, only Turkey and Colombia had lower levels of government funding for public schooling than Australia.

NSW Teachers Federation (NSWTF) President Angelo Gavrielatos said the auditor-generals report showed that the governments planning and investment in public education is woefully inadequate both in terms of the infrastructure needed and also in the conditions of work for teachers.

But the trade union said the same in 2015, when it advised teachers to highlight to their local politicians and aspiring politicians their schools needs in the effort to achieve greater investment in public schools. Such lobbying of local politicians has failed to reverse the assault on public education.

In fact, the NSWTF and the AEU have for years strangled opposition by teachers, parents and students. They called off the teachers boycott of the NAPLAN testing regime in 2010 and they were cheerleaders for Labors pro-business Gonski agenda, which only poured more funds into wealthy private schools.

As a result, a generation of working-class children languishes in cramped, temporary and potentially classrooms. This highlights the need for the creation of new organisations, such as rank-and-file committees, completely independent of Labor and the unions, and for a socialist perspective that rejects the subordination of education, and every other social need, to the interests of the wealthy elite and the profit demands of big business.

To develop this fight, teachers and parents are urged to contact the Committee for Public Education (CFPE) at:

Email: cfpe.aus@gmail.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/commforpubliceducation

Twitter: @CFPE_Australia
In a display of incompetence and indifference, Fijis Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama has rejected calls to declare a nationwide state of emergency as the Pacific island nation struggles with a rapidly escalating COVID-19 outbreak.

COVID-19 screening in Fiji [Credit: FBC News Fiji @FBC_News, Twitter]

While Suvas Colonial War Memorial Hospital is now sealed off after becoming the centre of a major cluster, Bainimarama last week told parliament there was no need for a state of emergency. He said it was up to the ministry of health to decide whether it was necessary to take that option, and it had not done so.

New Zealand epidemiologist Michael Baker warned on Wednesday that with Fiji battling the infectious Delta variant from India, it could well follow the path of countries that have lost control of the pandemic, with large numbers of cases and unfortunately large numbers of deaths as well. In order to eliminate the virus, he said, a total and intensive lockdown is needed.

Authorities are losing their grip as the outbreak rapidly escalates. TVNZ Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver reported: We dont know what Fijis strategy is because we are not hearing from the leaders. Bainimarama had not fronted the media for some time and there was a lot of confusion on the ground, she said.

Fijis Secretary of Health James Fong declared that the government would fight this virus in a targeted way. Echoing governments around the world that are prioritising business demands above public health, Fong said the current policy allows Fijians to access essential services and allows the economy to function as normally and safely as possible.

The governments Incident Management Team has itself become a fast-growing cluster with 35 cases in the Ministry of Health. Fong, along with the head of health protection Aalisha Sahu Khan and chief medical advisor Jemesa Tudravu have been forced into isolation. On Tuesday, the parliamentary complex in Suva was shut down over fears for staff members.

As of Thursday, there have been 880 cases recorded since the pandemic began, with 234 recoveries and four deaths. For the entire year to March, there had been only 70 cases.

The origin of many cases remains unknown. Over the past week there have been record numbers of daily infections reported. On Monday night, health authorities logged 64 cases and highlighted one death. On Wednesday, another 94 new infections in 24 hours were confirmed. Of these, 28 were from the main hospital. People recently discharged had turned up as positive cases in other districts.

According to Fong, the escalation in daily case numbers, especially from the Central Division around Suva, signals the increasing severity of this outbreak, which has an impact on our ability to respond. More cases are expected.

On May 30, Suva, Nausori and Lami were placed in what is called the Lami-Nausori containment zone, which is under a 6 p.m. to 4 a.m. curfew with several villages locked down. Fong declared that with the escalating numbers, combined with the paucity of resources, authorities would shift into a mitigation phase to prioritise only those patients with severe illness.

There are currently 604 cases in managed isolation, which is now at capacity. The government has set up a field hospital in Suva, which has become the de facto emergency department and triage centre for the city of 300,000.

Outside the capital, 44 isolation communities have been established across the country. Food shortages are being reported, with vulnerable families living on a tin of fish or a packet of biscuits a day. In squatter settlements in the Nasinu district outside Suva many people already live hand-to-mouth. Usaia Moli from the Council of Social Services told Radio NZ thousands of people were not being reached and were suffering in silence.

The defence force has come under scrutiny after soldiers returning from overseas in April reportedly broke quarantine rules. The first cluster appeared after a soldier contracted the virus at a quarantine facility and transmitted it to his wife, who exposed up to 500 people at a funeral. A cluster of over 30 cases erupted when a naval officer contracted the virus at a funeral and spread it to his crew members.

Fiji can now test almost 2,000 people a day with the recent supply of four new machines by the World Health Organisation. Overall testing, however, remains low. Since testing began in 2020, 129,200 tests have been conducted among the population of 903,000.

So far 228,030 people have received at least one dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, but supplies remain inadequate. This week, Australia is sending an additional 50,000 vaccine doses, and another 500,000 doses will reportedly arrive from New Zealand but not until Julyall of which falls well short of what is required.

The response of the regional imperialist powers, Australia and New Zealand, has been paltry. New Zealand Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta said her officials were in contact with counterparts in Fiji and were responding to their needs as they arise. She then added: However, Fiji is tasked with responding to an issue which weve all had to, and weve given our commitment in terms of PPE gear support and also some financing.

The outbreak is certain to exacerbate the impoverished countrys social, economic and political crises. Tens of thousands of workers in the moribund tourism industry have already lost their jobs. Tourism normally contributes nearly 40 percent of Fijis GDPabout $FJ2 billion ($US980 million)and employs over 150,000 people either directly or indirectly.

While Fiji was initially one of the more successful Pacific countries in containing an influx of COVID-19, its economy went into sharp decline. The government responded by looting $US454 million from workers pension savings in the National Provident Fund to provide relief to businesses.

The Minister for Economy Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum last month announced a $US930 million stimulus package, with $US690 million sourced offshore. Total debt will increase to $US4.1 billion by this July with gross borrowing for the 2020/2021 financial year at $US1.4 billion.

Across the region, the pandemic is heightening social tensions and political instability. Samoa remains in the grip of a constitutional crisis following Aprils election which saw the defeat of the ruling Human Rights Protection Party that had been in power since 1982. Amid an escalating health disaster in Papua New Guinea, Prime Minister James Marape has adjourned parliament to avoid a no-confidence vote and his likely removal from office.

Bainimarama, who has ruled Fiji with an iron fist since seizing power in a military coup in 2006, will, sooner rather than later, confront the eruption of mass opposition from the working class and rural poor.
Directed by Rodrigo Garcia; screenplay by Garcia and Eli Saslow

Four Good Days is a sensitive, honest film about the devastating impact of the opioid epidemic on families throughout the US. The work is a fictionalized version of events in the life of a woman from Farmington Hills, Michigan. Her story was first told by Eli Saslow in a Washington Post piece headlined Hows Amanda? A Story of Truth, Lies and an American Addiction.

Four Good Days

Saslow is the co-screenwriter with director Rodrigo Garcia (Albert Nobbs), the son of famed Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The film follows the emotional journey of 31-year-old Margaret Molly Wheeler (Mila Kunis). In the first scene, Molly struggles to open the front door of her mothers modest ranch-style home in what could be any working class town in America. Her mother Deb (Glenn Close) has changed the locks to prevent Molly from coming in and robbing heragainto buy drugs.

On the doorstep, a ragged-looking Molly begs for a place to stay while she detoxes from heroin. Having been through countless experiences of this character with her daughter over the previous decade, the older woman coldly refuses to allow Molly inside the house, The deal was you would not come back until you were clean. Deb shuts the door on a still protesting Molly. If you are looking for sympathy, you wont find any here, her mother insists.

The icy greeting, of course, is only a facade. Deb is clearly shaken and concerned. Unbeknownst to Molly, Deb spends the whole night watching over her daughter from a kitchen window. The next morning, Deb agrees to take Molly in, on condition that she first detoxes in a womens center for three days.

Upon Mollys release from the center, a doctor tells her and Deb about a powerful new drug treatment labeled an opioid antagonist that blocks the patient from getting high from opioids for an entire month. There is just one caveat: the patient must be sober for a full week before receiving the treatment. That is, in order to qualify, Molly has to stay sober for another four days.

The rest of the film follows Molly and her mother as they struggle to keep her clean until she can receive the shot.

Four Good Days has largely been met with a collective yawn from the critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film review aggregator, it holds an approval rating of just 51 percent based on 74 Top Critics. A New York Post reviewer terms the story well worn, while another from the Tribune News complains that the films ending offered more questions than answers.

The lead comment from Rotten Tomatoes Top Critics, by Indiewires Ryan Lattanzio, laments the fact that the film did not sufficiently vilify Mollys mother: Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this shallow movie is left unexplored: why doesnt Deb look in the mirror at her role in Mollys addiction?

Glenn Close and Mila Kunis

Contrary to the complaints of the critics, perhaps the greatest strength of Four Good Days is its nuanced and compassionate attitude toward all its characters. Each person is complex, with strengths and weaknesses, regrets and guilt. While some characters are presented with more or less admirable attributes, no one is scapegoated as the villainand rightly so. No single figure in the film is ultimately responsible for Mollys addiction and the havoc it has wrought on her family.

While the story of an ordinary girl, in an ordinary family setting, caught up in the throes of addiction may bore the critics, it has met with a significantly warmer response from viewers. Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score registers an 81 percent approval rating.

Drug addiction is a mass phenomenon in the US, with an estimated 31 million users, almost 10 percent of the population. Tens of millions more suffer from the scourge as family members and friends. Great numbers of people will make an emotional connection to one or another character in the film, who are all profoundly influenced by Mollys addiction.

The audience eventually comes to learn that Deb, who found herself in an unhappy marriage, left the family when Molly was in high school.

In a particularly emotional scene, Molly explains to her mother, I thought you couldnt stand to be around us, around me, referring to how her mothers departure affected her. Deb is clearly hurt. She takes her time trying to make Molly understand how difficult her marriage and life were for her to endure. In the end, Deb calmly tells her daughter, I am so sorry for causing you so much pain. But I cant apologize for trying to survive. I just cant. I would be lying.

She pauses before anxiously asking Molly, You think its my fault that you are an addict? Molly breaks eye contact with her mother, looks down and shakes her head, no.

Later, we meet Mollys father, Dale (Sam Hennings), who has remarried and refuses to interact with his daughter until she is drug-free. At this point, Molly has suddenly gone missing. Deb is in a wild state of anger and concern. She shows up at her ex-husbands to berate him for not phoning Molly. The two exchange harsh words, blaming each other for Mollys addiction. When it looks like they may come to blows, they stop themselves, exchanging apologetic and perhaps even sympathetic looks in a moment of silence before parting ways.

We also learn more about Molly herself, a straight A student who never made it through high school. She has two kids who live with their father. Molly no longer has custody. Her addiction started when she was 17. She hurt her knee and was prescribed 75 oxycontin and never had a refill denied. Her addiction, like so many, spiraled into heroin.

Addressing high school students in a health and wellness class, she explains, I have degraded myself for drugs in ways  in ways that you dont want to know. One student interrupts Molly, boasting that she would never let herself get that far into addiction. Molly responds, I have woken up every morning for the last couple years and said that this is it. Today I am not going to get high. And an hour later I am meeting up with my dealer to get high. Clearly struggling to continue, Molly stresses, I fail every single day.

Molly is consumed by guilt. While she may lash out at times at her mother and others, it is clear that, above all, she blames herself.

Four Good Days grapples constantly with the question of responsibility. The characters are collectively burdened with a sea of regret that stem from their love for Molly and their desire to help.

What if more counseling had been available at school? What if Deb had remained in her unhappy marriage? Or if her father had just contacted his daughter?

Perhaps things would have turned out differently, but more than likely not.

Instead, the audience is left with a sense that something more fundamental is wrong here. While personal decisions certainly can make a difference in immediate outcomes, none of the enormous problems involved in the opioid epidemic can be solved on an individual basis.

Human beings undergo particular experiences and have different physical and psychological susceptibilities. However, the mass upsurge in opioid addiction points toward a broader cause, the coalescence of many ills hammering at peoples livesinequality, poverty, low wages, unemployment, homelessness and a general lack of confidence in the future that afflicts a considerable section of the population.

What stands out so starkly, and painfully, in Four Good Days is that Mollys family is left entirely alone to deal with these immense social problems. Such a burden exacts a staggering emotional toll.

However, as helpless and isolated as the charactersor, rather, the real human beings they are meant to representmay feel, they are certainly not alone. The wrenching story of Molly and her family is currently being played out millions of times across the US, and globally.

Over the past year, as governments around the world shoveled trillions of dollars into the financial markets and giant corporations, while leaving masses of people to suffer through the pandemic, the opioid epidemic has only worsened.

Four Good Days leaves wider questions untouched. Its narrow focus is a limitation. However, the films perceptive and frank treatment of addicts and their loved ones is certainly worth commending.
Progressive News Network podcast Logo (PNN)

Socialist Equality Party National Secretary Joseph Kishore and WSWS writer Eric London recently appeared on Progressive News Network with host Brook Hines. The program addressed the pro-imperialist historical origins of the DSA and the significance of the present celebration of the crimes of Stalinism. The full recording of the discussion can be accessed here.

The WSWSs initial report detailing the highly coordinated character of this campaign was posted on May 18. WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North published an open letter to DSA National Director Maria Svart on May 22 demanding the DSA repudiate this campaign. The open letter has still not been answered.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison this week used the unveiling of the results of a secret international police operation, targeting organised crime, to launch an aggressive law and order campaign under conditions of rising social and political discontent.

Morrison hailed as a watershed moment in Australian law enforcement history, the announcement that Operation Ironside had resulted in some 500 police raids and more than 220 arrests of alleged dangerous criminals, and contributed to similar roundups in the US and other partner countries.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison (Screen shot ABC News)

All the television networks contributed to the show of force by featuring footage of heavily-armed police smashing down the doors of homes, hauling away prisoners and seizing computers and other material.

At a media conference, standing alongside the Australian Federal Police (AFP) chief Reece Kershaw and the FBI Legal Attache at the US Embassy, Anthony Russo, Morrison demanded the immediate passage of three bills to expand even further the surveillance and other powers of the police and intelligence agencies.

Morrison declared that these measures were now needed to keep Australians safe, claiming that this was the aim of everything weve been doing since he took over as prime minister in 2018.

The fraud of that pretext, however, was underscored when he included the 2019-20 bushfires and COVID-19 on his list of the threats his Liberal-National Coalition government had supposedly addressed, as if people had forgotten the governments failures and indifference to lives and livelihoods in both disasters.

In reality, the constant enlargement of police powers and resources is, above all, aimed at strengthening the repressive state apparatus, to combat the disaffection and unrest that has been intensified by these catastrophes, coming on top of ever-greater social inequality and attacks on working class jobs, wages and conditions.

Details of the three-year international police operation and the legal powers utilised in it remain unclear, but it reportedly involved an encrypted communications platform called ANOM, secretly run by the FBI, to entrap and record targeted individuals holding incriminating conversations.

The AFP-FBI partnership was said to involve covertly designing, administering and monitoring the ANOM app and placing it into the hands of crime figures. Kershaw indicated that this was just the start. He said 1,600 to 1,700 people used ANOM in Australia, accounting for about 5 percent of the encrypted phones in the country.

Police said the 25 million messages intercepted from ANOM could expand on information they already had to provide evidence to put people through court on serious and organised crime-related offences.

Such operations point to extensive police use of undercover agents, electronic surveillance and anti-encryption technology.

Morrison and Kershaw refused to answer journalists questions about whether the AFP had taken a key role in the transnational bust because it could use the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment Bill. That legislation, passed with the Labor Partys support in 2018, forces internet companies to facilitate the cracking of encryption, passwords and other privacy devices. Kershaw confirmed the use of the powers but would not elaborate.

Morrison boasted that his government had already updated the telecommunications surveillance laws, spent $590 million to boost the capabilities of the AFP and other agencies, and allocated another $1 billion in this years budget.

The prime minister accused the Labor opposition of stalling three bills. Kershaw publicly backed him, also demanding that parliament pass the bills as soon as possible.

The first bill is surveillance legislation to give the AFP and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission greater online powers. The second is an International Production Orders Bill to give the security agencies access to overseas electronic data. The third is a Transport Security Bill to bar suspected criminals from working in or getting access to ports and airports.

Labors shadow home affairs minister Kristina Keneally protested, insisting that the only bill Labor had opposed was the Transport Security Bill, and that was for nationalist reasons. She said Labor was willing to support the bill if it explicitly required foreign workers in the industry to face the same licensing requirements as Australian citizens.

Speaking of Morrison, Keneally said: He wants to put tougher protections to ensure Australians who work in our ports and airports are law-abiding citizens. OK, fine, youve done absolutely nothing to ensure that foreign crew, who come through our ports and airports, have to meet security requirements  He fixes that, this bill can pass the parliament.

Since the declaration of the war on terrorism, Labor has joined hands with the Coalition to pass more than 125 national security bills, containing more than 14,500 amendments to previous laws.

This has included multiple barrages of counter-terrorism laws, the 2015 metadata retention provisions, the 2018 encryption-cracking measures and the 2018 foreign interference legislation, which expanded the scope and penalties of the secrecy laws, as well as criminalising links with China or other foreign entities.

These police-state powers seek to legitimise and formalise, as well as extend, mass political surveillance. As revealed by WikiLeakspublished by Julian Assangeand US National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden, the US-led Five Eyes network, of which Australia is a member, conducts electronic spying and data collection on millions of people worldwide. It also plays a critical role in conducting its members wars and war crimes, notably in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At the same time, the government is proceeding with two trials, being conducted behind closed-doors, over leaks that exposed the criminality of the intelligence apparatus. In one, former military lawyer David McBride is accused of giving the Australian Broadcasting Corporation the Afghan Files on the protracted cover-up of the Special Forces war crimes in Afghanistan.

In the other prosecution, a former Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) officer, known only as Witness K, and his lawyer Bernard Collaery could be jailed for exposing ASISs illegal bugging of East Timors cabinet office, on behalf of the Howard Coalition government, during oil and gas negotiations in 2004.

Behind the false banner of keeping people safe, the bipartisan drive to protect and bolster the police and intelligence apparatuses is aimed at preparing for political and class convulsions.

Under Malcolm Turnbull, Morrisons predecessor, a 2017 intelligence review pointed to the global and domestic concerns wracking the ruling elite. It warned that Australias national security environment was being reshaped by the decline in the global influence of the US and the rise of economic and political disaffection. It declared that heightened tensions and instabilities were generating a growing sense of insecurity and alienation.

That was before the bushfire disaster and the COVID-19 pandemic, and the intensifying US-led conflict with China, which have exacerbated these social and political tensions. It is ruling class alarm over the rise of discontent in every country, including Australia, that is driving the law and order agenda of Morrisons government and the whole political establishment.

The 2017 review featured expedited laws to call out the military to suppress outbreaks of internal violence, plans for a Home Affairs super-ministry to take command of seven surveillance and enforcement agencies, and the creation of an Office of National Intelligence in the prime ministers office.

The Labor Party helped push all these measures through parliament.
Another right-wing extremist group has been discovered in the ranks of the police in the German state of Hesse. The state prosecutor is investigating 20 officers from the Frankfurt special operations unit (SEK) because they shared Nazi symbols in a chat group and engaged in hate speech.

On Wednesday morning, the state bureau of criminal police searched the apartments and workplaces of six members of the elite unit. Christian Democrat (CDU) Interior Minister Peter Beuth then announced Thursday the dissolution of the unit. We are initiating a fundamental new start for the SEK, he said. There will be a complete organisational restructuring and a new leadership culture, Beuth insisted.

The Hessian SEK 2017 during an exercise (Image: wiesbaden112.de / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The future is of course unthinkable without our special forces, he continued, but under a different set of guidelines.

According to the official version of events, the police were made aware of the group when they were investigating a 38-year-old officer last summer suspected of possessing child pornography. The confiscated phones and computers not only contained child pornography, but also pictures of Hitler, swastikas, and insults against asylum seekers that the officer shared with his colleagues in a chat group.

The Hesse state bureau of criminal police (LKA) took over the investigation in April this year. Like the SEK, the LKA operates under the direction of Interior Minister Beuth.

The government and opposition parties responded with feigned horror over the latest revelations. Beuth, for his part, described it as totally unacceptable for police officers from such a highly specialised unit to talk to each other in these types of chats. All police officers must be aware at all times that any misconduct will be thoroughly investigated. Given the accusations, he determined that none of the accused people are any longer suited to serve in a special operations unit in Hesse. Where it is legally possible, he added, they will be removed from the Hesse state police.

The president of the Frankfurt police, Gerhard Beresvill, declared at a press conference on Wednesday that the behaviour of which the officers are accused struck at the foundations of democracy and rule of law. With a suspicion of misconduct, it is essential to intervene early and act decisively, he stated. A thorough uncovering of the facts would be the top priority.

Beresvill claimed that the exposure has a positive side because it makes it possible to improve preventative work. The fact that a small number of our colleagues still think that they dont have to respect the rules of our profession incentivises us to continue and intensify efforts to correct our mistakes, he said.

The head of parliamentary affairs for the Social Democrat (SPD) group in the Hesse state parliament, Gunter Rudolph, raged, This new case of right-wing extremist activity within the Hesse police explodes all dimensions. He called on Interior Minister Beuth to finally take political responsibility.

The interior policy spokesman for the Left Party, Hermann Schaus, commented that one can only watch the scandals produced by the Hesse police with cynicism. Beuth must explain how he intends to finally bring the Hesse police out of the negative headlines.

These are all transparent efforts at a cover-up and to treat the population like fools. In reality, the Nazi chat group confirms that the state security agencies are teeming with right-wing extremist networks, and that these elements are protected and promoted by the state and the political establishment.

Hesse in particular, which is home to the banking capital Frankfurt, is a centre of this right-wing extremist conspiracy. It was in this state on the night of June 2, 2019 that Kassel district president Walter Lubcke was murdered by right-wing extremist Stephan Ernst, who had been surveilled by the intelligence services for 30 years. Ernst was activelike the members of the National Socialist Underground terrorist groupin the militant neo-Nazi milieu in Kassel, which was full of informants from the police and intelligence agencies.

The intelligence agent Andreas Temme, who supervised several right-wing extremist informants, was at the scene when the NSU murdered the internet cafe owner Halit Yozgat in Kassel. He was never called to testify and was working in Lubckes government department when Lubcke was murdered. The files on these events have been placed under lock and key for at least 30 years by Interior Minister Beuth.

In the Frankfurt police presidium, under whose command the SEK operates, a right-wing extremist chat group called Itiotentest was discovered three years ago. Investigators discovered the group while searching for the source of death threats sent to individuals and signed NSU 2.0. Information about the Frankfurt-based lawyer Basay-Yldz that was not publicly available had been accessed from a computer in the Frankfurt police presidium a short time earlier.

In the course of the investigation, a growing number of cases were discovered, including in other police presidiums. There have been 94 proceedings brought against Hesse police officers suspected of having right-wing extremist views. In February, four men were charged with sharing racist pictures, Hitler images and Nazi memorabilia. Similar far-right chat groups involving police officers were found in North-Rhine Westphalia in September 2020.

When the investigation into the Frankfurt chat group was in full swing and the media began reporting about it, the SEK officers continued to chat unhindered. Most of the chats discovered came from a period between 2016 and 2017, but messages were still being shared in 2019. The SEK officers obviously felt very safe.

Then in early May this year, police arrested a 53-year-old right-wing extremist and presented him as the only source for the more than 130 death threats signed NSU 2.0, which were sent to lawyers, artists, investigative journalists, leaders of religious communities and leading politicians. However, it was never clarified how the man managed to obtain the private information about his victims from police sources.

Following the arrest of the alleged lone wolf, Beuth provided the police with a clean bill of health. According to everything that we know today, no police officer in Hesse was ever responsible for the NSU 2.0 series of death threats, he asserted at the time. The entire police in Hesse can take a deep breath. It only took another four weeks before the next neo-Nazi group within the ranks of the Hesse state police was uncovered.

But Hesse is merely the tip of the iceberg. The WSWS has reported in detail about the right-wing extremist terrorist networks in the military, intelligence agencies and the police, which grouped around figures like the army officers Franco A. and Andre S., who had the alias Hannibal. Hannibals prepper network, which had members across Germany, allegedly operated safe houses in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and prepared with weapons and kill lists for a civil war on Day X, according to witness testimony and chat group messages.

While Franco A. is currently in court in Frankfurt, Hannibal is a free man. The Boblingen district court merely convicted him of violating firearms and explosives regulations, gave him a 60-day sentence and removed his firearms permit. He was also never laid off by the army prior to the ending of his term of service as a soldier. The state prosecutor also refused to investigate his group as a terrorist organisation.

The right-wing extremist networks in the state apparatus, and their concealment by the executive and judicial branches, recall the Weimar Republic, when terrorist groups like the Consul Organisation, with close ties to the highest echelons of the state, could murder and spread terror at will, and played an important role in the rise of the Nazis.

These developments have the same source. The obscene enrichment of a tiny minority, while the vast majority can hardly make ends meet, the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands due to the profits before lives policy in regards to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the return to rearmament, militarism and war are incompatible with democratic rights. This is why the ruling elite in Germany and around the world is increasingly resorting to dictatorship and fascism.

The right-wing extremist networks have close ties to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Maximilian Tischer, a personal friend and accomplice of Franco A., works for the AfD deputy Jan Nolte and has access to parliament. The AfD, in turn, is being promoted by all the other parties and has its origins in them. Alexander Gauland, the political leader of the AfD, held senior positions in the state during his 40-year career as a CDU member in Hesse. Between 1987 and 1991 he headed the state chancellery of Minister President Walter Wallmann and was responsible for the Hesse intelligence agency.

The suppression of the far-right threat requires an independent movement of the working class, which links the struggle against fascism, militarism and social inequality with a socialist programme to overturn capitalism.
On Thursday, the US National Cathedral rang its bell 600 times, once for every thousand people who have lost their lives to COVID-19 in the United States. But this little publicized event, which did not even make the evening news, was among the only public acknowledgements of the terrible milestone of 600,000 dead.

A procession of vehicles drive past photos of Detroit victims of COVID-19, Monday, Aug. 31, 2020 on Belle Isle in Detroit. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

On February 22, just one month after his inauguration, US President Joe Biden gave a speech in remembrance of the 500,000 people who had died from the pandemic at that point. While we have been fighting this pandemic for so long, Biden declared, we have to resist becoming numb to the sorrow. We have to resist viewing each life as a statistic or a blur on the news.

One hundred thousand deaths later, this is exactly what has happened. Indeed, in the news these deaths do not even rise to the level of a blur. Most days, the evening news does not mention the number of people who died that day, much less remember individuals who have passed.

The decision of the media to move on from the pandemic was exemplified by the New York Times , which announced earlier this month that it was bringing to an end its Those Weve Lost section. [T]he need to chronicle the toll has grown less urgent as the numbers have declined in much of the world, the Times wrote, as vaccination rates have risen and as large numbers of people have returned to a more normal life.

No one who watches the evening news would know that, in the past 30 days alone, 15,000 people have lost their lives from COVID-19 in the USmore than die of AIDS in an entire year. And when the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington estimated last month that the actual COVID-19 death toll was closer to 900,000, the media largely ignored the figure.

As for much of the world, contrary to the Times claims, the pandemic is raging without restraint. Even before we reach the halfway mark for the year, more people have died from the pandemic in 2021 (1,884,000) than in all of 2020 (1,880,000). India recorded this week 6,148 daily new deaths, its highest total ever, after one of its poorest states, Bihar, revised upward its death total to account for those who died at home or in private hospitals.

When the Times states that large numbers of people have returned to normal life, it is alluding to the fact that, across the entire political establishment and throughout the media, there is a deliberate effort to create a celebratory mood, effectively declaring the pandemic over even as hundreds of people die every day.

Or, as Biden put it in a speech earlier this month, America is headed into the summer dramatically different from last years summer. A summer of freedom, a summer of joy, a summer of get-togethers and celebrations. An all-American summer that this country deserves.

This campaign seeks to justify the abandonment of all serious measures to contain the pandemic, with the aim of ensuring the full reopening of schools and workplaces to continue generating profits for the financial oligarchy.

After the United States passed the milestone of 300,000 deaths, the World Socialist Web Site noted the efforts to normalize death on a massive scale. We wrote at the time:

The normalization of death arises from the decision, rooted in class interests, to treat economic health and human life as comparable phenomena, with the former prioritized over the latter. Once the legitimacy of the comparison and prioritization is acceptedas it is by the political establishment, the oligarchs and the mediamass death is viewed as unavoidable.

Since then, nearly all remaining measures to facilitate social distancing, or even the wearing of masks, have been dismantled. On May 13, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reversed its guidance on mask wearing, urging vaccinated people to stop wearing masks and socially distancing in crowded areas.

The abandonment of mask mandates was opposed by epidemiologists, who warned that the majority of people in the United States remain unvaccinated, while dangerous new variants of COVID-19 are surging around the world.

Throughout the world, the so-called Delta variant of COVID-19the most transmissible so faris surging. This variant is now causing 91 percent of cases in the UK, the Johnson government said Thursday. The number of daily new cases in the UK has doubled over the past two weeks, and the Financial Times warned that hospitalizations are growing exponentially.

The Delta variant is now also the fastest-growing variant in the US, which has approximately the same percentage of the total population vaccinated as in the UK (42 percent).

Epidemiologists warn that with the combination of declining vaccination rates, states particularly across the South with large unvaccinated populations and the abandonment of masking and social distancing, the United States could be facing a massive resurgence of COVID-19.

In the face of this looming disaster, states are abandoning efforts to even count the number of people who have become infected. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday: A growing number of states are slowing the pace of their reports on key pandemic data, including cases, deaths and hospitalizations. The Journal noted that half of states are no longer providing daily reports. Some have gone from reporting data every day to five days a week. At least three states have lessened that frequency to three times a week, and Florida and Alabama this week shifted to a once-a-week schedule.

Epidemiologists condemned the dismantling of mechanisms to even keep track of the disease. The last thing we need in confronting the rise of the hyper-transmissible Delta variant is to not have a handle on the data, wrote Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. Topol warned, As vaccinations have tailed off in the US, the number of new cases is no longer declining.

Epidemiologists are also warning that the Delta variant targets young people even more aggressively than earlier variants, underlining the dangers posed by the drive to reopen schools.

But despite the danger, the Biden administration has only doubled down on its efforts to return to 100 percent in-person instruction in schools, driven by the demand of the ruling class for the continued availability of cheap labor by warehousing children in schools.

Workers must reject the ruling classs campaign to abandon measures to contain the pandemic, the aim of which is the normalization of mass death to facilitate the enrichment of the financial oligarchy. As the United States is threatened with a new resurgence of the global pandemic, it is all the more urgent for workers to oppose the abandonment of social distancing and mask wearing and the ongoing dismantling of the health care infrastructure for tracking and isolating COVID-19 cases.

The effort to normalize mass death reflects the fundamental social dynamics of capitalism and the subordination of human life to the enrichment of the financial oligarchy. It is this social order that bears responsibility for the massive toll of the pandemic, which is in the final analysis the grisly expression of the incompatibility of the needs of society with capitalism.
The merger of the real estate concerns Vonovia and Deutsche Wohnen, announced in May, will create the largest real estate group in Europe. Vonovia owns 400,000 flats in Germany. Deutsche Wohnen has a portfolio of 150,000 flats, of which around 113,000 are situated in the greater Berlin area. The concerns and their shareholders expect higher profits from the merger, while tenants must reckon with even more rent increases.

The new mega-real estate company will exert enormous influence in greater Berlin, as the holder of just under 10 percent of the capital citys nearly 1.63 million rental flats. This will give the corporation significantly more power to jack up rents. In addition, such major mergers are usually followed by other mergers; a company of this size can easily swallow up other smaller fish, while its competitors will also seek to merge in order to remain competitive.

Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen (Photo: Uwe Hicksch/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Vonovia is offering over 18 billion for its competitor. Including the dividend for 2020, shareholders would receive 53.03 per Deutsche Wohnen share. The stock market value of the merged company is currently reckoned to be around 48 billion.

This is the third attempt at such a merger. In 2016, the first effort failed after Deutsche Wohnen rejected Vonovias offer. Another unsuccessful attempt at a takeover was made at the beginning of 2020. The merger will most likely be approved by the Federal Cartel Office, which had already sanctioned the first effort to join the companies.

The timing of the merger announcement is not coincidental. A temporary cap on rents introduced by the Berlin Senate was recently overturned by the Federal Constitutional Court, opening the way for limitless profits on the part of real estate speculators. Although the rent cap introduced by the Berlin Senate was entirely incapable of stopping the dramatic explosion of rent prices in the capital, the constitutional court ruled that any encroachment on the profits made by real estate speculators was impermissible.

The rent cap decided by the Social Democratic Party (SPD)Left PartyGreen Party Senate in 2019 was deceptive from the outset. The measure did nothing to alleviate the citys acute housing shortage or curtail the profits of the real estate companies. Vonovia, for example, which owns and manages almost half a million flats (10 percent of the stock in Berlin), estimated that its total rental income would fall by less than 1 percent.

Nevertheless, the ruling overturning the rent cap threatens a new wave of rent increases for Berlin residents. In addition to the fact that tenants must repay the rents capped in February 2020, landlords can now increase rents again by up to 15 percent every three years. This is stipulated by the misnamed Mietpreisbremse (rent brake) introduced by the government in 2015. The constitutional ruling has been celebrated on stock markets, and the share prices of major real estate groups have skyrocketed.

Tenants of Vonovia and Deutsche Wohnen will face additional costs following the merger. Somebody has to find the billions that are now being expended for the takeover. And then in the end, its quite possible they get this money from tenants after all, declared Lukas Siebenkotten, president of the German Tenants Association.

There have been massive protests against the extortionate rent prices in the capital for years, with tens of thousands taking part. Immediately after the ruling against the rent cap was announced, more than 10,000 demonstrated and demanded the expropriation of the real estate sharks.

The initiative Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co. has already collected well over 130,000 signatures for a petition calling for a referendum to nationalise all housing. Although the initiative has little to do with genuine expropriation and is far too limited in scope to solve the lack of affordable housing, it is an expression of the mass support for action to be taken against the unscrupulous real estate companies.

The initiative is opposed by the Berlin Senatea coalition of SPD, Greens and Left Party. Berlins mayor Michael Muller (SPD) effusively welcomed the merger plans. Immediately after their announcement, Muller called a joint press conference with the CEOs of Vonovia and Deutsche Wohnen, declaring that it was a very important day and that the fusion marked a step forward.

His remark that there was a new collaboration between politics and companies that is not confrontational but rather cooperative made clear that the Berlin Senate supports the interests of Vonovia and Deutsche Wohnen. The senator for Urban Development and Housing, Sebastian Scheel (Left Party), also welcomed the merger, describing the cooperation between the corporations and the Senate as progress.

The governing parties justify their support by saying that the merged group is offering to sell the state 20,000 flats in the capital. In addition, Deutsche Wohnen and Vonovia have allegedly promised to cap rent increases for the next five years and made assurances that tenants will not have to pay the full cost of refurbishing housing stock to meet energy targets.

Apart from the fact that the vague promises made by the real estate sharks are worthless, their declarations of intent involve no real concessions. The leading DIW economist Claus Michelsen points out in Die Zeit that rents in existing contracts in Germany only increase by 1 to 2 percent a year on average anyway. Capping rents is therefore not a particularly big concession. The promise could be kept by the companies without in anyway endangering their profits.

It would have been more interesting if they had said we will keep prices constant for new rentals, Michelsen added. In this sphere, prices usually rise much faster. He was also critical of the offer to sell 20,000 flats to the state of Berlin. The price for the flats still has to be negotiated, and it is barely conceivable that a listed company would sell flats at special conditions, Michelsen told Die Zeit.

In fact, such a sale would be a good deal only for the corporations. From 2002 to 2011, the SPD and the Left Party sold off 150,000 out of the citys 400,000 state-owned flats to real estate sharks under the pretext of debt reduction. In most cases, the flats were sold for less than 25 percent of their value, and since then, the average value of flats in Berlin has more than doubled. In an interview with the Tagesspiegel, Schell admits that the flats would now have to be recovered for a sum far in excess of what was formerly accrued.

In addition, the properties under discussion for sale are in an extremely bad condition. Due to costs, the flats have never been fully renovated by the corporations. Buildings are alleged to be contaminated with asbestos, and the necessary renovations would swallow up huge amounts of taxpayers money.

The SPD, Greens and Left Party are well aware that a merger of Vonovia and Deutsche Wohnen will worsen the situation for hundreds of thousands of households in Berlin and nationwide. With its shameless support for the deal, the Senate in Berlin is seeking to defuse public anger against rising rents and counter the calls for expropriation of the real estate sharks.

The Left Party plays a particularly repulsive role in this affair. While officially giving its support to the petition for a referendum to expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co., the Left Party actually supports the merger of Deutsche Wohnen and Vonovia into Europes largest real estate corporation and further rent increases to appease and satiate the new mega-concerns shareholders.
A New South Wales (NSW) parliamentary inquiry established in September 2020 after a succession of preventable deaths in rural and regional hospitals has heard of discussions by rural doctors of mass resignations from the public health system because of the systems onerous demands.

Health outcomes and access to health and hospital services in rural, regional and remote New South Wales (Source: NSW Parliament)

The inquiry received over 700 submissions from health professionals and members of the public revealing the disastrous state of healthcare services, which has been likened to conditions in a third world country.

In September 2017, an otherwise healthy 18-year-old Alex Braes died after presenting four times to the hospital in the outback city of Broken Hill with an infected toe. Only on his last visit were proper tests done which indicated the seriousness of his condition. The closest major hospital with free beds was Sydney, over 1,100 kilometres away, but in the time the air ambulance took for the return trip Braes went into cardiac arrest and died.

A further tragedy occurred last year in the small town of Gulgong, where 66-year-old Dawn Trevitt, a local primary teacher, presented to the local hospital emergency department with internal bleeding and dangerously low blood pressure. There had been no doctors at the hospital for four months. Trevitt was being treated via teleconference when she died.

Alex Braes (Source ABC News)

Trevitts daughter, Hayley Olivares, told the inquiry: When did we get to the point that the level of health care you should expect to receive not only depends on your postcode but also on your likelihood of survival?

The system is failing. It failed my mother, our family, the community, and it will continue to fail unless acknowledgement turns into accountability. There must be change People are dying; families are broken.

In Tumbarumba in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains, a registered nurse, Mrs Paton, told the inquiry the local hospital had no doctor for four months last year. She reported that kitchen staff were regularly used to keep an eye on patients when the nurses were too busy to deal with them. Asked what was needed for the health system, Paton replied more staff.

Patons experience was echoed by nurse Pen McLachlan, who told of a Condobolin hospital cook caring for a stroke patient in the hospital car park while waiting for the local firefighters to get the patient out of the car.

In Deniliquin, the inquiry was told by Dr Marion McGee of a 30-year decline in health care in her region resulting in the reduction of ten visiting specialists to three. Over the previous 20 years, 350 out of 700 doctors in the local health district had decided not to reapply because the reapplication process was so onerous.

McGee said the 11 Deniliquin doctors are at a tipping point where we are actually at the point of saying, No, our service stops to the hospital because it is so onerous we cannot do it anymore. And we are considering resigning en masse.

McGee said she worked on average a 120-hour week and it was rare for her to get a full nights sleep due to being on call.

Representatives from the remote town of Bourke told how no children can be born in the shire and mothers must travel almost 400 kilometres to Dubbo to give birth.

People from the regional and rural communities of Coffs Harbour, Tumbarumba, Deniliquin, Murrumbidgee, Parkes Shire, Warren Shire, Dubbo, Gulgong, Warrumbungle and Bathurst told the inquiry of decades of reductions in services provided at their hospitals.

Basic medications, including antibiotics, and supplies, such as quality suture kits and dressings, are routinely unavailable at public hospitals due to cost.

Many submissions criticised the use of telehealth services as a substitute for doctors on site rather than as an aid to healthcare workers.

One nurse wrote: Patients are in danger due to staffing levels. We have moved to a wonderful new building. More beds, bigger area to cover But, no more staff. Every shift someone is sick mostly from exhaustion.

Another said: Our aim is to provide the best care to our patients but because we are constantly short staffed, we cannot provide adequate care and we are constantly under stress we try and support each other however we can only take so much before we fall apart!

In 201718, people living in remote and very remote areas of Australia were hospitalised at nearly 1.3 times and twice the rate, respectively, of those living in major cities. That resulted in up to double the mortality rate, compared to their city counterparts, for conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, respiratory disease and cancer.

Deaths due to diabetes, suicide, land transport accidents and liver disease were all more than 1.5 times greater in remote and very remote areas, with life expectancy up to five years less than in the metropolitan areas.

According to a submission by the NSW Rural Doctor Network, the number of rural General Practitioners (GPs) has declined in rural areas from more than 800 in 2011, to less than 200. Moreover, more than half these GPs are over 55.

One submission quoted figures which estimated that governments would need to spend an additional $2 billion per annum on healthcare for rural Australians to bring national expenditure into parity with the per capita health spend on people in cities.

The Health Services Union (HSU) submission stated that in a membership survey 70 percent of their rural members said the public health system was getting worse and that for all NSW healthcare workers the biggest concern was unreasonable workloads and lack of staff.

The NSW Nurses and Midwives Association (NSWNMA) submissions to the inquiry revealed that 80 percent of nurses and midwives had experienced violence at work in the previous six months, and most perceived that violent episodes were becoming more frequent.

The devastation of public healthcare is result of a broad assault on the social gains of the working class over decades by successive state and federal Liberal-National and Labor governments with the assistance of the trade unions, which have enforced the budget cuts and suppressed health workers struggles against privatisation, job cuts and wage cuts for decades.

Most recently, the NSWNMA shut down a strike of nurses at Sydneys Blacktown hospital following the deaths of six babies at the hospital in under two years because of staff shortages.

These experiences underscore the necessity for the future of public healthcare to be taken out of the hands of governments and the unions. It can be taken forward only by developing an independent political movement of the working class through the formation of rank-and-file committees to unite the struggles of health workers throughout Australia and internationally.

Free, high-quality and available healthcare is a social right that can be provided only if the resources of society are freed from grip of the financial elites and placed under the democratic control of the working class, that is, by the establishment of socialism.
A bill recently considered by the New York State Legislature would impose unionization on rideshare and app delivery workers, such as Uber, DoorDash, and Amazon Flex workers. The legislation would create two statewide units, with one union covering each category. Collectively, these would encompass approximately 250,000 workers.

Uber Eats delivery worker (Wikimedia Commons)

Far from providing a mechanism for improving conditions for the highly exploited so-called gig workers, this legislation would do nothing to change their status from independent contractors to employees. Gig workers would still have little or no rights or protections, minimal as they are under existing labor laws, such as minimum wage and anti-discrimination regulations, which apply only to employees. The proposed legislation is, in fact, an attempt to corral and suppress the extreme anger of these workers and place them under the yoke of unions, which have been thoroughly exposed as agents of big business.

It would create an entirely top-down approach, imposing an existing union bureaucracy on a workforce without their active participation, much as the recent failed attempt by the RWDSU to unionize Amazon workers at the Bessemer, Alabama warehouse.

Among the bills provisions:

A union would be recognized when as few as 10 percent of the workforce signed membership cards, without an election, a completely undemocratic imposition on the majority. The state would retain final discretion over whether a particular union would be recognized, effectively ensuring that a union acceptable to the businesses is selected.

Funds to support the union bureaucracy would be generated not from dues paid by the workers but through a 10-cent surcharge on each ride or delivery, though the unions could potentially institute dues payment as well. The bureaucrats would thereby have a source of revenue completely outside the control of the workers. Indeed, the unions would have an incentive to maximize the exploitation of their members to increase their own incomes. The potential revenue from the surcharge alone would amount to many tens of millions of dollars per year.

The legislation would establish a labor peace agreement, under which no strikes, protests or other such actions by the workers would be permitted.

Since antitrust laws prohibit collective bargaining by contractors, proposed rules negotiated by the companies and unions would be presented to the state legislature as recommendations, which would be subject to review by a five-person state board, placing any such proposals even further out of the control of the workers and subject to the mercy of bourgeois politicians.

This legislation is nothing more than a mechanism to impose a corporatist union that would exercise control over what are among the most highly exploited members of the labor force, treating the workers as a source of revenue for a privileged bureaucracy whose interests are totally divorced from those of the membership they purport to represent. At the same time, the companies would benefit from having unions to act as police to keep the workforce in line.

Tellingly, the proposed legislation is supported by Uber. It is a slightly dressed up version of legislation, Proposition 22, recently passed in California, supported by Uber and Lyft to the tune of $200 million, which prohibited the classification of gig workers as employees and was nominally opposed by the unions. Unions are now trying to get a piece of the action.

This is not the first time that Uber has attempted to create structures to suppress gig workers struggles in New York. In 2016, it established and funded a front organization, the Independent Drivers Guild, affiliated with the International Association of Machinists, which would likely become the union for rideshare workers if the legislation is adopted.

John Samuelson, president of the Transport Workers Union (TWU), which represents New York City transit workers, at first expressed support. I had every intention of staying away from it, and now after seeing how much itll advance gig workers, Im fully supporting it. He added, I actually think it becomes a national model. The TWU would likely become the union for delivery workers.

The real motivation for union support of the legislation was inadvertently revealed by the TWU president, who said, Its going to add tens of thousands of members into the organized labor movement. In other words, it will increase the union bureaucracys revenue stream, which has been impacted by decades of falling membership due to betrayal after betrayal.

More recently, after the no-strike provision was revealed, Samuelson backed away.

The New York State AFL-CIO is supporting the effort. President Mario Cilento stated in an email: This is obviously a very complex issue, and everyone is trying to work through the details.

At the national level, the AFL-CIO is currently supporting the Democratic Biden administrations proposed Protect the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, a similar piece of legislation which would reclassify gig workers as employees only for the purposes of unionizing them, but effectively maintain their status as independent contractors.

As the true nature of the New York proposal becomes apparent, a number of unions and other groups have come out against the legislation, some no doubt motivated by concerns that it could potentially conflict with the PRO Act or that they would not be cut in on the potential new revenue stream.

Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the Taxi Workers Alliance, an organization of taxi and app-based drivers in New York City, expressed opposition to the proposed legislation. The bill reads like Ubers fantasy novelthey get everything they want: ultimate deregulation, a phony union to give them cover, and workers at their mercy with no labor law or right to strike to build their power.

On Thursday, New Yorks legislative session ended without enacting the proposed gig worker bill. Nevertheless, this legislation represents a clear example of the drive by big business to employ what has become the corporatist trade unions to subjugate the gig workers and suppress the rapidly intensifying class struggle.

Bidens PRO Act and the recent unsuccessful campaign by Democrats and even right-wing Republicans to promote unionization of Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, demonstrate clearly that the ruling class sees the imposition of control over workers by the thoroughly corrupt unions as a necessary weapon to meet the rising resistance of the working class.

However, the enormous force of the working class is beginning to emerge. The ongoing strikes by Volvo Trucks workers in Virginia and coal miners in Alabama following the rejection of UAW- and UMW-negotiated sellout contracts show the open defiance of workers toward these corrupt anti-working class organizations and a willingness to fight.

The only way forward for workers is through the building of new organizations of strugglerank-and-file committeesin every workplace, that are completely independent of both the trade unions and the Democratic Party and based on an international socialist program.
The Tennessee Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee stands in solidarity with the 3,000 workers at the Volvo Trucks plant in Dublin, Virginia who have rejected the agreement brokered by the UAW and this week returned to the picket lines. The actions of the Volvo Workers Rank-and-File Committee serve as a model for educators and workers everywhere to take the initiative to organize an independent opposition to the pro-corporate unions.

Volvo Truck workers [Source: UAW 2069]

Teachers are familiar with the sting of betrayal from their unions. In 2020-21, union leaders stood by while educators were forced into unsafe classrooms as COVID-19 killed millions across the globe. American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten recently assured the Biden administration, There is no doubt: Schools must be open. In person. Five days a week. With those words, she sent the teachers who elected her back into classrooms without any guarantee for their safety, while protecting the profits of capital. In 2018, the teachers unions isolated and shut down powerful strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, in complete disregard for the demands of the rank-and-file.

When schools in Nashville-Davidson County and Memphis-Shelby County resisted fully reopening schools earlier this year, millionaire Governor Bill Lee and the Republican-controlled state legislature threatened to cut funding for schools in both municipalities and their tens of thousands of students.

The schools superintendent in Memphisoften listed as the poorest city of its size in the nationagreed to reopen schools the day after he admitted to getting a letter from the head of the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce.

In February of this year, Lee stripped state-run health departments of their ability to close schools in an emergency of any sort. His legislation effectively circumvents the power of health departments to close schools, while also granting school boards and charter schools governing boards the power to keep schools open, regardless of the health risks. The governor can also veto school board decisions through an executive order, in effect ensuring that schools remain open.

The multi-millionaire governor, whose home is a 1,000-acre horse and cattle farm in the states richest county, serves the interests of the Business Roundtable and Chamber of Commerce. Like his counterparts across the US and globally, he has forced the reopening of schools so that parents will return to offices, factories and plants to produce corporate profits.

In the face of all of these attacks, the teachers unions in Nashville-Davidson County (MNEA) and Memphis-Shelby County (MSCEA) have consistently failed to make any effort at all to keep schools closed and protect teachers, students and school employees. Like the UAW, the union bureaucrats in these locals, as well as the AFT, National Education Association (NEA) and Tennessee Education Association (TEA) serve only themselves, not the workers who pay them dues.

Moreover, the actions of Tennessees Republican governor and Republican-dominated legislature are fully in line with the policies of the Democratic Party. The entire ruling establishment is united in the aim of reopening schools and forcing parents back to work to shore up the profits of the super-rich and the large corporations at the expense of the lives of workers.

Workers must therefore fight independently. The more unified we are, the more powerful we will be. Teachers in Tennessee stand with the striking Volvo workers and call on all teachers and workers everywhere to support your fight and take up a common struggle. Workers across all industries and professions must fight to build the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) and put an end to the exploitation of the ruling class and the betrayal of our corporatist unions.
SULLIVAN, Ind. (WTHI) - More than 40 hours after a Sullivan County shooting, Indiana State Police continue to look for people of interest. Police told us two groups met for a fight.

That's when police say someone pulled a gun and started firing in the direction of the opposing group. Fifteen-year-old Mezmariah Wilson was killed in the shooting.

Now loved ones of Mezmariah are remembering her life. A life that friends say was full of hope and promise. Those who knew Mezmariah say she was one of the sweetest girls you could come across.

Jamirah Harris says she's only been best friends with Mezmariah for nearly a year, but in that short time period, she lived with her for a few months when she says she had nowhere to go.

LINK | Police identify 15-year-old girl killed in Carlisle shooting as they continue the search for 'people of interest'

"Her mom is like my second mom, she's my sister. her sisters were like my sisters," says Harris.

Mezmariah was a member of Abundant Grace House of Prayer for four years at the time of her passing.

Her youth pastor Raji Hollifield says when the church first heard the news youth members gathered and offered prayer and support.

"There's also hope that we will see Mezzy again. Mezzy was a believer in Jesus and had given her life to Christ accepted Him as her Lord and Saviour. So we pass that hope on that we will one day be reunited with Mezzy," says Hollifield.

Hollifield says he hopes this tragedy will somehow bring people together.

"That's the call to come together, we need unity now more than ever. I believe that that's true. I believe we can have peace. The basic reality of it is, is that there is evil in the world and we need to combat that evil with peace," says Hollifield.

Her friend Jamirah says Mezmariah had the ability to make her feel better whenever she was down.

"I just liked being around her, in general, she made me a happy person," says Harris.

She adds she'll always remember one piece of advice Mezmariah gave her.

"Keep pushing Mez always told me no matter what sad, upset, push through it cause at the end of the day it's gonna benefit you to do what you want to do," says Harris.

If you want to help remember Wilson's life, there is a candlelight vigil Friday night at the square in Sullivan. It starts at 9:00 pm.
VIGO COUNTY, Ind. (WTHI) - Young riders are getting the chance to show off their skills.

Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College is hosting its Summer Equine Camps.

The camp teaches riders how to ride and handle horses. SMWC told us at the end of the week-long camp, and the campers get to show off what they've learned.

"I rode more than one horse. I rode a horse named Taffy and a horse named Boston. They were really nice," Lucy Taylor, a camper, told us.

Taylor told us her parents are looking to sign her up for riding lessons.
PASCAGOULA, Miss. (AP)  A woman whose body was found 30 years ago in Mississippi has finally been identified thanks to DNA and the persistence of cold case investigators.

Authorities found the womans body in 1991 in a swampy area of Vancleave in Mississippis Jackson County.

WLOX-TV reports the body is believed to have been there for up to three years before it was found.

On Thursday, Jackson County Sheriff Mike Ezell said Jane Doe has a name _ 22-year-old Kimberly Ann Funk of Sharon, Pennsylvania.

DNA from Funk's brother led to her identity.

Her brother told investigators Funk was on Mississippi's Gulf Coast between April and June 1990.
TUPELO, Miss. (WTVA) - Police officers responded Friday afternoon to a reported shooting at the Regions Bank location on West Main Street.

According to Tupelo city spokesman Lucia Randle, officers responded just before 1:00.

Police determined someone fired shots but reported no injuries.

Investigators are working to learn more.

This story will be updated when more information becomes available.
Dear Abby is written by Abigail Van Buren, also known as Jeanne Phillips, and was founded by her mother, Pauline Phillips. Contact Dear Abby at www.DearAbby.com or P.O. Box 69440, Los Angeles, CA 90069.
Flooding caused by heavy rainfall in a swath of the South this week led to drenched farmland, warnings of dam and levee collapses, fires, water rescues and damaged homes
This article was published originally in the May 12 edition of The Guardian, as part of its This Land is Your Land series, and is reprinted here with permission.

Zack Harold is a freelance writer who lives in Charleston.
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Tales of Arise Gets a New Trailer, Further Information Coming Soon
Leon Bennett/WireImage Shock G

Digital Underground founding member Shock G's cause of death has been revealed.

According to the initial case summary released by the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner's office and obtained by PEOPLE, Shock G died from an accidental overdose of fentanyl, ethanol and methamphetamine.

The rapper and producer, born Gregory Jacobs, was found dead in a hotel room on April 22 at the age of 57.

"Our son, brother and friend, Gregory Jacobs, also known as Shock G, suddenly passed away today. The cause of death is currently unknown," his family said in a prior statement provided to PEOPLE at the time. We truly, truly appreciate all the out-pouring of love and concern. Please keep us in your prayers at this very difficult time."

RELATED: Celebrities Who've Died in 2021

Earl Gibson III/Getty Images Shock G

Jacobs started Digital Underground with Chopmaster J and the late Kenny-K in the 1987 after relocating from the East Coast to Oakland, California.

The group's early singles included "Underwater Rimes" and "Doowutchyalike," which featured the first appearance of Jacobs' alter ego, Humpty Hump. In 1990, Digital Underground released their debut studio album, Sex Packets.

The album's second single, "The Humpty Dance," found huge commercial success, reaching No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The song's music video also featured a young Tupac Shakur, who would go on to make his recording debut on Digital Underground's 1991 single "Same Song."

In addition to his work as a rapper, Jacobs was also a gifted music producer. He was most known for his work on Shakur's breakthrough single "I Get Around," on which he also appears as a featured artist.

In his career, Jacobs also produced Shakur's 1995 single "So Many Tears" off the music legend's third studio album, Me Against the World. As a producer, he had also worked with Bobby Brown, Dr. Dre and Prince.

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Jacobs was laid to rest on May 1 in Tampa, Florida.

Friends and family of the rapper gathered together to say their final goodbyes at an intimate funeral held at the Allen Temple A.M.E. Church. The service was streamed live on the church's website.

"His legacy was how he loved people unconditionally," Reverend Doctor Alesia Ford-Burse said of the musician at the service. "He loved to a default."
Ashley Jacobs has a lot to celebrate!

The former Southern Charm star is expecting her first child, a baby boy, with Mike Appel, PEOPLE can exclusively reveal.

But that's not all - the couple, who got engaged in March, recently tied the knot in a private, intimate wedding ceremony.

"We're having a baby!" the couple tells PEOPLE. "It's wild how the universe works - our first child together is due the same day we met, two years ago!"

"Baby boy coming in August," Jacobs, 36, and Appel, 40, add.

Photography by @Logic413

RELATED: Southern Charm Alum Ashley Jacobs Engaged to Boyfriend Mike Appel: 'We're a Great Team'

Jacobs says the two planned a babymoon trip to Kauai, Hawaii to celebrate their first child's upcoming arrival together. And after tying the knot, they turned the vacation into a honeymoon.

The two enjoyed their relaxing getaway at the Ko'a Kea Hotel & Resort, an upscale beachfront property at Poipu Beach.

"We are over the moon to be on this adventure together, as newlyweds," she says.

Photography by @Logic413

RELATED: Southern Charm's Ashley Jacobs Has a New Boyfriend - 'Found Someone Close to My Own Age'

Photography by @Logic413

Jacobs and Appel, owner of Related Garments clothing apparel and creative agency Nnovate, met in 2019 at a summer rooftop party in Jacobs' hometown of Santa Barbara, California. The couple made their relationship Instagram official a few months later.

In March, PEOPLE exclusively revealed the two got engaged while they were out on a snowmobile ride in Park City, Utah.

"After a year and half of dating, we can both agree that this adventure we're on together is just getting started," Jacobs told PEOPLE at the time. "We're a great team and we can't wait for what's ahead! Buckle up!"

Jacobs was last linked to Thomas Ravenel, 58, whom she dated for more than a year before they split in 2018. Their relationship was chronicled on season 5 of Southern Charm.
A Texas hospital has suspended 178 staff members who refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine despite a mandate for staff to be inoculated by this week.

Houston Methodist hospital, which oversees eight hospitals and has more than 26,000 employees, set a Monday deadline for staffers to get the vaccine or risk suspension and termination.

The hospital said Tuesday that 178 full-time or part-time employees, who did not get fully vaccinated and were not granted an exemption or deferral, were suspended for 14 days without pay for not complying with the requirement.

If those suspended do not get vaccinated within the two-week period, they will be terminated, a spokesperson for the hospital told ABC News.

Dr. Marc Boom, the president and CEO of Houston Methodist said in a statement nearly 100% of the hospitals staff was compliant with the mandate and 24,947 were fully vaccinated.

PHOTO: People hold signs to protest Houston Methodist Hospital system's rule of firing any employee who is not immunized by Monday, June 7, 2021, at Houston Methodist Baytown Hospital in Baytown, Texas. (Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle via AP)

He said of suspended employees, 27 had received one dose of the vaccine, so I am hopeful they will get their second doses soon.

We won't have the final numbers for two weeks as employees can still get vaccinated with their second dose or with the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine, Boom said. I wish the number could be zero, but unfortunately, a small number of individuals have decided not to put their patients first.

MORE: 117 employees sue Houston Methodist hospital for requiring COVID-19 vaccine

Of all employees, 285 received a medical or religious exemption, and 332 were granted deferrals for pregnancy and other reasons, he said.

This decision was ultimately made for our patients, as they are at the center of everything we do at Houston Methodist, he said in the statement.

Last month, 117 Houston Methodist employees sued the hospital for mandating the vaccine. The lawsuit, filed in Montgomery County, alleged the hospital was "illegally requiring its employees to be injected with an experimental vaccine as a condition of employment."

PHOTO: People gather to protest Houston Methodist Hospital system's rule of firing any employee who is not immunized by Monday, June 7, 2021, at Houston Methodist Baytown Hospital in Baytown, Texas. (Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle via AP)

The lawsuit cited that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued its first emergency use authorization for COVID-19 in December 2020, but the vaccines are awaiting full FDA approval and licensing, which will likely take months for the agency to review additional data.

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The lawsuit said forcing the plaintiffs to take the vaccine violates public policy in Texas and requested a temporary injunction to prevent the hospital from terminating employees.

Attorney Jared Woodfill, who filed the lawsuit, told ABC News last month that Houston Methodist is forcing employees to get the shot to boost the hospital's profits.

"To promote its business and increase profits at the expense of other health care providers and their employees' health, Defendants advertise to the public that they 'require all employees and employed physicians to get a COVID-19 vaccine.' More clearly, Defendants' employees are being forced to serve as human 'guinea pigs' to increase Defendants' profits," Woodfill said. "It is a severe and blatant violation of the Nuremberg Code and the public policy of the state of Texas."

PHOTO: Medical workers and pedestrians cross an intersection outside of the Houston Methodist Hospital on June 09, 2021, in Houston. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

MORE: What to know if your employer requires vaccinations: federal legal protections

The Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, a federal government agency that protects workers from discrimination, issued a new guidance last month that said employers can legally require COVID-19 vaccines to re-enter a physical workplace as long as they follow requirements to find alternative arrangements for employees unable to get vaccinated for medical reasons or religious beliefs.

Some of those accommodations may be allowing an unvaccinated employee to wear a face mask and social distance while at work, to work a modified shift, get periodic tests for COVID-19, be given the opportunity to telework or accept a reassignment, according to the guidance.

178 staffers at Houston Methodist hospital suspended for not complying with COVID-19 vaccine mandate originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
TOKYO (AP)  Japan's relations with Taiwan are nongovernmental and practical and are based on Tokyo's recognition of China as the sole legitimate government, a top Japanese official said Friday, following Beijing's protest over a recent reference to the island as a country.

As China flexes its muscle in the Taiwan Strait and the Asia-Pacific region, the issue of Taiwan is a sensitive topic, especially as Japan, the United States and other democracies develop closer ties with the self-ruled island that Beijing regards as a renegade territory to be united by force if necessary.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato told a regular news conference Friday that Japan's position is to maintain working relations with Taiwan at the nongovernment level, in line with the 1972 Japan-China Communique, when Tokyo switched the diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China. That's our basic policy and there is no change to that."

Kato's remark came a day after China protested Prime Minister Yoshihide Sugas reference to Taiwan as a country during a parliamentary debate on Wednesday.

Suga, while answering a question about pandemic measures, made a passing reference to Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia as three countries.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Thursday the comment violated Japans solemn promise to not regard Taiwan as a country.

We strongly deplore Japans erroneous remarks and have lodged solemn complaints with Japan, demanding that Japan immediately make clear clarifications to eliminate the adverse effects caused by relevant remarks, and to ensure that such situations will not happen again, Wang said.

On Friday, Japans upper house of the parliament adopted a resolution calling on the World Health Organization to include Taiwan in its general meetings, saying its expertise on coronavirus measures is indispensable.

China has so far blocked the move, and has increased Taiwan's diplomatic isolation, leaving it with just over a dozen formal diplomatic allies. Taiwan still operates a network of trade offices around the world that act as de-facto embassies, including in the United States, Japan and most other major nations.

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Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi carefully referred to Taiwan as a region in his brief remark emphasizing the importance of including the island for the benefit of international public health.

Japan also has donated 1.24 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Taiwan as it battles its largest outbreak of infections amid a shortage of jabs. Taiwan has blamed China for interfering in a potential deal for another vaccine.

___

This story has been corrected to remove reference to one country, two systems."
Lockdown easing in the UK

As the UK economy emerges from the effects of the pandemic, various sectors are reporting shortages of staff.

The lockdown easing has prompted employers to start recruiting. UK job vacancies have hit their highest level since the start of the pandemic.

Yet, puzzlingly, the latest employment figures show one-in-20 people who want a job can't find one.

Hospitality, for example, is struggling to find staff, and there is a shortage of lorry drivers. Several other sectors face similar problems.

Where have all the workers gone?

In the words of Kate Nicholls, chief executive of trade body UKHospitality, the sector has "the wrong workers in the wrong place at the wrong time".

Staff in the hospitality industry often work long hours

Students and apprentices, who often work part-time in hospitality, have had their studies disrupted by Covid and are not in their normal place of education. Other workers have moved away from big cities to save money during the pandemic.

But, as the director of the Institute for Employment Studies, Tony Wilson, points out, the hospitality sector has trouble holding on to staff at the best of times.

"This sector has a very high turnover," he told the BBC. "Nearly half of people change jobs every year. A lot of firms have found people just move on to other things."

Kate Shoesmith, deputy chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), says there was a shortage of chefs even before the pandemic.

But during lockdown, she says, many people sought out other kinds of work and are reluctant to return to the "quite brutal" culture of long hours and night work.

"They've transferred to other sectors where they can work during the day, have proper breaks and more time with their family," she says.

Is this shortage of workers spreading?

There are indications that the retail sector is also now feeling the pinch.

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In the early days of the pandemic, supermarkets and other essential stores were able to recruit workers who had previously been employed by restaurants and pubs. Now there is more competition for those people's labour.

vacancies

Tamara Hill, employment policy adviser at the British Retail Consortium, says shortages would traditionally have been filled by non-UK workers.

"This shortfall has been impacted by barriers within the UK's new immigration rules and a restricted apprenticeship levy that does not address the skills that are currently scarce," she says.

Are some age groups more affected than others?

Young people have been particularly badly hit. "The proportion of young people facing unemployment is higher than in other age groups, because they don't have the experience and employers might be risk-averse," says Ms Shoesmith, of the REC.

Younger workers still face higher rates of joblessness than the general population

Mr Wilson, of the IES , says more young people in full-time education have stopped trying to hold down a job at the same time - 2.4 million, as opposed to 2.1 million a year ago.

However, he adds that many young people have managed to find more rewarding work during the pandemic: "One-third of young people now in high-skilled work were in medium or low-skilled jobs a year earlier."

And younger workers are more wary of customer-facing roles than they used to be, says Mr Wilson. "They don't want to put themselves at risk of catching Covid. They haven't been vaccinated."

Are there other sectors particularly under pressure?

According to the REC's Ms Shoesmith, the haulage industry is suffering from a shortage of drivers. "There were high numbers of people from Romania and Bulgaria undertaking driving jobs," she told the BBC.

Keeping the UK's lorries moving is hard as the economy opens up

They stayed in the UK after the Brexit referendum, but started leaving when the pandemic struck. "They have either sourced work in their home countries or they feel it's not right to return to the UK, either because of Brexit or the pandemic."

Ms Shoesmith says there is an estimated shortfall of 30,000 large goods vehicle drivers in the UK.

What about overseas workers in general?

It does seem to be the case that many EU nationals who worked in the UK have returned home. According to Ms Nicholls, of UKHospitality, 1.3 million foreign workers left the UK during the pandemic.

"That's taken out a large part of the economy, and that has a knock-on effect on the economy as a whole," she says.

Warehouse staff are in high demand

However, Mr Wilson, of the IES, argues this has more to do with Covid than Brexit.

"With these quarantine arrangements, many people who have rights to work here are not taking them up. If you're in Spain or Poland, you're not coming to the UK to take up jobs," he says.

But he cautions that international job search websites such as Adzuna have seen a "massive collapse" in the number of foreign workers seeking jobs in the UK.

"There is an acute problem in some industries right now, but in the long term, it could become chronic because of Brexit," he adds.

Other factors affecting the labour market

The government's furlough scheme has helped millions of people stay in jobs. But there are unintended consequences says the REC's Ms Shoesmith.

"With government support still in place until the end of September, the danger is that if people come off furlough and there is another lockdown, they can't go back on to it. You have to start again," she says.

graph

As a result, some people who are being approached about job opportunities are reluctant to come off furlough to take them, she says.

Xiaowei Xu, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, reckons the impact might go deeper.

"If the pandemic does lead to a structural change in the economy, with less demand for the High Street and more for e-commerce, then furlough might be delaying that shift," said Ms Xu.

What else do we know about the long-term implications?

Mr Wilson, of the IES, reckons that in future, businesses will need to pay more attention to how they recruit, train and treat staff.

"When firms say, 'We can't get the staff,' they mean, 'We can't get the experienced staff,'" he says.

But with unemployment still at 1.7 million, there is a "big labour pool" of people who could take up those jobs, he adds.

That means accepting staff who are less experienced and training them, as well as offering more support to those with health conditions or caring responsibilities.

"It's not necessarily about pay, it's about offering better terms," he adds. "Employers haven't had to do that for a decade."
President Donald Trump (L) and Russian President Vladimir Putin arrive to waiting media during a joint press conference after their summit on July 16, 2018 in Helsinki, Finland. Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Former President Donald Trump said he trusts Russia's Vladimir Putin more than US intelligence agencies.

The comment was a reference to Russia's pro-Trump interference in US elections.

Trump asked President Biden to give Putin "my warmest regards."

See more stories on Insider's business page.

Former President Donald Trump again denied the fact that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election to aid his campaign, saying he trusts Vladimir Putin more than the US intelligence community.

In a statement, the ex-president complained about the investigation into Russian election interference, which was confirmed by not just by US intelligence agencies, but by foreign allies and a Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee.

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The comments come as President Joe Biden is set to meet his Russian counterpart.

In the statement, the loser of the 2020 election asked his Democratic successor to give Putin "my warmest regards."

Read the original article on Business Insider
The former president (right) suggested that he trusted the Russian president more than US intelligence on interference (AP/ Reuters)

Former President Donald Trump has aimed a dig at Joe Biden, the man who beat him in last years election, by telling his successor to stay awake during next weeks summit meeting with Vladimir Putin and to give the Russian President his warmest regards.

Good luck to Biden in dealing with President Putindont fall asleep during the meeting, and please give him my warmest regards!, Mr Trump said in the statement on Thursday.

Mr Trumps cheeky quip at Mr Biden is a return to his sleepy Joe comment, which he often employed during the 2020 election campaign.

Mr Trump also suggested that he trusted the Russian president more than US intelligence on interference in the 2016 election.

He made reference to his meeting in Helsinki with Mr Putin during his time as president, during which he ruffled feathers after he refused to side with US intelligence agencies over Putins denials over vote interference.

As president, I had a great and very productive meeting in Helsinki, Finland, with President Putin of Russia, Mr Trump said.

He added: Despite the belated Fake News portrayal of the meeting, the United States won much, including the respect of President Putin and Russia.

The former president then ranted about the phony Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, made up and paid for by the Democrats and crooked Hillary Clinton.

As to who do I trust, they asked, Russia or our intelligence from the Obama era after all that has been found out and written, should be obvious.

Mr Biden is set to meet with Mr Putin on Wednesday in Switzerland to end his first trip abroad as president since taking office.

The president is set to confront Mr Putin on a number of tense issues including cybersecurity attacks and overt and covert efforts by the Kremlin to interfere in US elections.

"Were not seeking conflict with Russia," the Democratic president said at the start of his eight-day visit to Europe.

"We want a stable and predictable relationship... but Ive been clear: The United States will respond in a robust and meaningful way if the Russian government engages in harmful activities."

Story continues

Additional reporting by the Associated Press

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Naftali Bennett is expected to become Israel's next prime minister. (Menahem Kahana / Pool Photo)

Naftali Bennett, the man on the brink of becoming Israel's next prime minister, has long been adept at keeping a foot in disparate worlds. That shape-shifting quality proved crucial in propelling the 49-year-old politician to the threshold of power in a country as deeply divided as it has been in nearly three-quarters of a century of statehood.

As the head of a small hard-line nationalist party, Bennett  son of American immigrants, onetime elite military commando, start-up entrepreneur who made a high-tech fortune  is in many ways an unlikely figure to emerge from the no-holds-barred scrum of Israeli parliamentary politics with his hands on the biggest prize of all.

But a combination of happenstance, perseverance and more than a touch of raw political opportunism has put Bennett in position to push aside his former friend and mentor, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when the Knesset, or parliament, holds a vote of confidence in a new ruling coalition Sunday.

Ousting Israel's longest-serving leader is no simple task, let alone governing in the aftermath of a bruising, era-ending change of power. And Bennett isn't even the official chief of the "change coalition," the kaleidoscopic political grouping that is united in its desire to dislodge Netanyahu  and precious little else.

Yamina party leader Naftali Bennett, left, smiles as he speaks with Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid during a special session of the Israeli parliament. (Ronen Zvulun / Pool Photo)

In an extraordinary concession, centrist politician Yair Lapid, who leads the anti-Netanyahu alliances largest party, Yesh Atid, agreed to share the top job in rotation, with Bennett taking the first two-year turn. Because Bennett's party was just large enough for him to be courted as a swing vote, Israeli commentators called it a case of a political kingmaker unexpectedly becoming king.

He won the lottery, political analyst and pollster Dahlia Sheindlin said, noting that, while technically possible, it is virtually unheard of for the leader of a party with a single-digit seat count in parliament to ascend to the premiership. But he also won the strategic lottery. He made this happen.

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Although skilled at cultivating political relationships, Bennett is something of an enigma even to those who have long been acquainted with him.

Fluent in American-accented English  just as Netanyahu is  Bennett is culturally familiar with North America after stints of living in Canada and the United States. He was born in the northern Israeli city of Haifa to Myra and Jim Bennett, who immigrated to Israel more than half a century ago from the Bay Area.

At various points in his life, Bennett has chosen to move in circles where he was likely to be perceived as an outsider. In his youth, he was one of the first religiously observant recruits to an elite military commando unit in which Netanyahu had served years earlier.

Bennett still wears a small yarmulke, or skullcap  in Israel, normally a signifier of devout Orthodox Judaism  which clings to his bald pate in a precarious manner that even admirers sometimes lightly mock. But his degree of religious observance is sometimes described by Israeli observers as "modern Orthodox lite. His wife, Gilat, a high-end pastry chef, is reported to be secular but a keeper of the Sabbath.

Bennett was something of an outlier in Israel's high-tech world as well. Start-ups such as the banking-security firm Cyota, which he helped create and later sell off, are likelier to emerge from Israels freewheeling secular milieu than from the religiously observant one with which he more closely identifies.

He has also surprised some in Israels religious-nationalist community with relatively liberal views on gay rights and indications of a willingness to diminish the outsized political clout wielded by Israels ultra-Orthodox rabbinical establishment.

Yohanan Plesner, a former lawmaker whose 30-year acquaintance with Bennett dates to their army days, describes the prime-minister-in-waiting as very much a pragmatist.

He identifies opportunities and he exploits them, said Plesner, who heads the nonpartisan Israel Democracy Institute, because he is able to reinvent himself and his message.

When Bennett entered electoral politics less than a decade ago, his vehicle was a faltering religious party called Jewish Home. But after run-ins with its influential rabbis, he finally founded his own party in 2019  Yamina, which means "rightward."

Bennett's family home, which he shares with his wife and four children, is in the tranquil Tel Aviv suburb of Raanana, firmly within Israels internationally recognized borders. But he lived briefly in a Jewish settlement in the northern West Bank; served a short stint as leader of the Yesha Council, the countrys main settlement-advocacy group; and has made maintaining Israeli control over what he refers to as Judea and Samaria  the biblical name for the West Bank  the cornerstone of his political philosophy.

A backer of an annexation plan promoted by then-President Trump before it was dropped, Bennett has called for settlement-building momentum to not be stopped even for a second.

Among Palestinian citizens of Israel and their political representatives, Bennetts pro-settlement stance is cause for suspicion and mistrust. He would be the first Israeli prime minister to have lived in a settlement.

The political power of settlers in the state of Israel is far higher than their proportion in the population, said Sami Abu Shehadeh, who represents an Arab party in the Knesset.

Bennett's rhetoric on Palestinians has often been incendiary, even racist, and he contends that the creation of a Palestinian state would be national suicide for Israel. But he also agreed to the unprecedented inclusion of an Islamist party, known by its Hebrew acronym, Raam, in the coalition now poised to take power, and has signaled a desire to improve the economic prospects of Israel's Arab citizens, who make up one-fifth of the country's population of about 9 million.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister for the last 12 years, is on the verge of being ousted from office. (Gali Tibbon / Pool Photo)

When Bennett threw in his lot with Lapid  something he had vowed never to do, prompting Netanyahu angrily to label him a con artist  he declared that he, like other coalition members, was willing to compromise in the interest of broader goals. In recent days, he has sought to strike a statesmanlike tone, imploring Netanyahu to eschew extremist language and extravagant threats.

Dont leave scorched earth in your wake, he urged his former mentor this week.

The falling-out between Bennett and Netanyahu, an episodic estrangement that became definitive with the formation of the change coalition, was by all accounts a wrenching one. With a 22-year age gap between the two, the relationship at its apex bore father-son overtones, according to people who know both men. Bennett even named his son after Netanyahus fallen war-hero brother, Yonatan.

The initial split, more than a decade ago, is often attributed at least in part to Bennett's clashes with Netanyahus wife, Sara. But the prime minister's own willingness to use and discard allies is widely perceived as the reason he found himself all but friendless politically when erstwhile intimates at last banded together against him.

The rise of Bennett, viewed by many Israelis as the only means to halt an alarming slide into autocracy by Netanyahu, is being greeted with almost universal indifference or disdain by Palestinians inside and outside Israel. Bitterness is running high after Israels recently ended fighting with Hamas, the rulers of the Gaza Strip, in which Palestinian deaths exceeded Israeli-side fatalities by a ratio of 20 to 1.

In contested Jerusalem  where Israeli authorities heavy-handed treatment of Palestinians facing property expropriations has drawn worldwide attention  Bennetts government will face an early test if far-right Jewish activists stage a threatened march two days after he is sworn in.

The political temperature has been running hot in advance of the Knesset vote. The head of Israels domestic security agency, the Shin Bet, issued a rare warning last weekend about inciting and violent discourse on social media, and security was stepped up for several senior members of the coalition after Netanyahu supporters staged angry demonstrations outside their homes.

On Thursday, Netanyahus Likud Party sought to distance the prime minister from any potential violence associated with Sunday's vote. In a series of English-language tweets, it said that there has always been a peaceful transfer of power in Israel, and there always will be.

Bennett's adaptability stood him in good stead as Israelis grew increasingly frustrated with seemingly permanent political deadlock after four inconclusive elections in two years. Teaming up with Netanyahu  who had first shot at putting together a new government  would have been a more natural ideological fit for him, but he instead accepted a political alliance that includes the main remnants of Israel's beleaguered peace camp.

Im a man of the right, and for me values are important, Bennett said a scant two months before joining the new coalition.

Not even his political opposites claim to have him pegged.

None of us know who Naftali Bennett is. Especially not Naftali Bennett, lawyer and activist Danny Seidemann, a longtime defender of Palestinian rights in Jerusalem, wrote last week on Twitter. We shall see.

Special correspondent Noga Tarnopolsky in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
McKee, Kentucky, a small Appalachian town with a single traffic light, is in one of the poorest areas of the country. But it has some of the fastest internet anywhere, and that's created more than 3,000 jobs throughout a 23-county region.

McKEE, Ky.  Matt and Jennifer Muncy were dangerously close to becoming homeless.

They had lost their livelihood when a local factory sent work to Mexico. They barely subsisted on a string of low-paying jobs that followed.

Raising their four children in a part of Appalachia with a median annual household income barely above $32,000  about half the national average  had become as lonely as McKee's single traffic light.

We were literally at a point where we were done, Matt said, tears welling up in his eyes. We had each other, and as God is my witness, thats the one thing which kept me going.

Then the couple heard about a program that helps land customer service work with companies like Apple, Cabela's and Amazon. Matt was skeptical. He had looked into the promise of online jobs before and they seemed like a scam.

They would never go into specifics and when you get to the end of everything, theyre wanting a credit card, theyre wanting money, he said.

But desperation had set in.

It was to a point where something either had to give or we sank, Matt said.

The couple took the advice of a State of Kentucky employment center, which sent them to Teleworks USA, a nonprofit that says it has created more than 3,300 jobs in a 23-county region since the deployment of high-speed internet service about six years ago.

Shortly after he and Jennifer finished their training in 2018, they landed positions with a company that does tech support for Apple. Teleworks provided office space and a computer until they got back on their feet and could work from home.

Matt no longer had to tell his children they couldn't have something at the store "because Daddy can't find work."

"If you've never lived poverty, you really don't know," he said. "You will never know what a wonderful feeling it is to be able to buy your kid a candy bar, to buy your wife a little something extra just because you can."

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Matt Muncy, of McKee, Kentucky, went from being nearly homeless to supporting his family with a good-paying job working at home, providing tech support for Apple.

At a time when a good portion of rural America lacks high-speed internet, also known as broadband, Matt and Jennifer Muncy's experience stands as testament to its power to lift people out of a hand-to-mouth existence. In this thinly populated part of eastern Kentucky, nicknamed Silicon Holler, technology has trumped location.

A similar story is unfolding in Wisconsins Northwoods and in other rural places that have found ways to tap the potential of the internet  and in doing so, illustrate the missed opportunities when it's not available.

Studies have shown that in addition to enhancing education and quality of life, broadband creates jobs, boosts entrepreneurship, raises property values and ultimately creates taxpayers who contribute to the common good.

"The internet is the most powerful platform in the history of the planet," said Tom Wheeler, who was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President Barack Obama. "Unfortunately, it's not yet pervasive."

In 2016, Wheeler went to eastern Kentucky to see for himself how the region was being changed by the infusion of broadband into the countryside, where only a few years earlier, people could barely get online.

"I hope you folks realize what a big deal this really is," he told a group of 90 folks who listened to his speech at the People's Rural Telephone Cooperative conference center in McKee.

"This is a network that can create a level playing field for everybody."

Wheeler recently said he still feels that way, maybe more so as the COVID-19 pandemic accentuated the depth of the rural broadband problem.

"The internet is no longer 'nice' to have. It's critical," he said.

One of the biggest obstacles in getting service to everyone is the high cost of installing fiber cable in places where there are few customers to defray the expense. It can cost $50,000 per mile in rugged terrain, an unattractive figure for a service provider seeking a return on its investment.

More in this series: Electricity transformed rural America nearly a century ago. Now, millions of people on farms and in small towns desperately need broadband.

But it's justifiable from a public-interest standpoint, according to Wheeler.

"The answer is to step up and pay the necessary capital costs, just like we pay for building highways," he said.

Jackson County, where McKee is the county seat, doesn't have a four-lane highway yet. That's true for other parts of rural America as well. However, Wheeler said the telephone cooperative's success with broadband could be replicated across the country.

"While I was at the FCC, we estimated it would cost about $80 billion for a one-time fix to deliver service to everyone," he said.

President Joe Biden's American Jobs Plan currently proposes around $65 billion, scaled back from $100 billion announced in April.

A very thin single strand of fiber-optic cable can support ultra-fast uploads and downloads of 1,000 megabits per second. By comparison, the copper wires would only support a small fraction of those speeds.

'The impact is real and immediate'

Nearly 800 miles away from McKee, in Vilas County, Wisconsin, Amelia Gagliano can relate to living in a place where good-paying jobs are scarce. The poverty is not as dire as parts of Kentucky, but shes seen folks scrape by with seasonal work.

If you can find a year-round job here that's 40 hours a week, has benefits and pays well, that's amazing, said Gagliano, who grew up at a fishing resort on the Rainbow Flowage near Lake Tomahawk, where her parents always had second jobs to keep the bills paid.

People dont stick around when they can go to cities, she said.

High-speed internet has made it easier for young folks like Gagliano, an avid dog-sled racer, to remain closer to home and family.

She manages the Land O Lakes office of Errand Solutions, a Chicago firm that has a virtual concierge service for the employees of large companies and hospitals.

In February, when Texas was slammed by an ice storm that knocked out power and left thousands of people with frozen, broken water pipes, Errand Solutions weighed in from the Northwoods. No stranger to cold-weather crises, the staff helped folks with things they'd never encountered before.

We cant solve all the worlds problems, but that was definitely one we could handle, Gagliano said.

Amelia Gagliano manages the Errand Solutions customer service center in Land O' Lakes. The Chicago-based firm was able to open an office in the small town in Vilas County, Wisconsin, because it has high-speed internet. Many business professionals now work remotely from towns in the Northwoods, provided they can get a decent internet connection.

It was company founder Marsha McVicker's idea to open the client service center in the town of about 800 people. She splits her time between Chicago and Land O Lakes, 385 miles north, where she has a cabin.

McVicker grew up near Wausau. As a child, she tagged along with her father who was in the road construction business in northern Wisconsin and Michigans Upper Peninsula. She grew to love the Northwoods, and when it came time to expand her business a few years ago, the forest and lakes won out over other places in Florida and Texas.

Land O Lakes is tiny. But when you create jobs in such a small community, the impact is real and immediate. The ripple effect has been beautiful to see, McVicker said.

High-speed internet allowed her to make the move. The town on the Michigan border already had fiber-optic broadband and was looking for ways to tap its business potential.

We asked Marsha what it would take to open an office up here, recalled Dave Juday, a Vilas County Economic Development Corp. board member.

She told us she needed a building, $350,000 of local money, a workforce and high-speed internet, Juday said. "And we had three weeks to get it done.

The building that McVicker sought was a former We Energies customer service center, and the money was raised by Juday's business contacts in exchange for an equity stake in Errand Solutions.

"I told them to bring their checkbooks," he said.

The workforce was a crew of Northwoods residents grateful for jobs that paid a decent wage and didnt have seasonal layoffs. They embraced the new positions and showed the outside world a Wisconsin friendliness that transcended borders.

When someone calls into the Errand Solutions center, its going to feel like theyre talking to their aunt or their neighbor. It has such an incredible vibe, McVicker said.

The office only employed about a dozen people, before the pandemic, but the goal is to have 60 in the next couple of years. An airplane hangar behind the building could be converted into office space and the staff can work from home as well.

High-speed internet was essential in the decision to set up shop in Land O Lakes.

If investments are going to be made in rural America, its got to start with broadband, McVicker said.

Just as good as New York City

It took ambitious planning, millions of dollars in federal grants and a mule named Old Bub to bring the internet to every home in Jackson County, Kentucky.

Saddled with about a 30% poverty rate, the county has struggled for many years. McKee is a small mountain town with empty storefronts clustered around the courthouse square. Dollar General and Family Dollar stores are among the few places to shop. A restaurant by the courthouse closed, but Dairy Queen stays busy.

McKee mirrors thousands of small towns in rural America. Yet against this backdrop, its Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative has helped connect folks to an economy not hemmed in by the Appalachian Mountains, a beautiful but hardscrabble slice of the South.

Subscribers to the member-owned cooperatives broadband can get gigabit speeds, plenty of bandwidth for any business. It's much faster than in most of rural America.

Every home and business in Jackson County and adjacent Owsley County has access to broadband delivered through fiber-optic cable, a major accomplishment given much of the area is swallowed up in the hills and crags of the Daniel Boone National Forest.

The prices are low, starting at $10 a month for families eligible for a federal subsidy and around $40 without the government assistance. Moreover, there are free Wi-Fi hot spots all over the area  at libraries, churches, the courthouse and the cooperatives offices.

Keith Gabbard, CEO of People's Rural Telephone Cooperative, was largely responsible for bringing high-speed internet service to Jackson County, Kentucky. It's supported work-from-home jobs for Apple and other Fortune-500 companies.

Keith Gabbard, the CEO of Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative, is largely credited with having the foresight and chutzpah to make it happen.

In 2009, when President Barack Obamas administration announced that federal stimulus money was available for rural broadband projects, Gabbard seized the opportunity.

The McKee native, who returned to his hometown in 1976 after receiving a bachelor's degree in business from Eastern Kentucky University, saw the internet as a way to create sustainable jobs in an economy hurting from the loss of manufacturing and, years earlier, coal mining.

All told, it cost $50 million to bring ultra-fast service to the area. Largely financed by federal grants and low-interest loans, the project took six years to complete. But even the construction fueled an economic boom as workers came from other places to string cable through the mountains.

Thats when Old Bub earned his place in local history. The mule spent several years trudging up and down the steep hillsides hauling spools of fiber cable in places where it would have been difficult to maneuver a machine. There was even a song written about the sure-footed beast that brought eastern Kentucky into the 21st century.

"People still ask about him," Gabbard said.

A lack of high-paying jobs remains a problem in the area. But the influx of call-center work, paying between $12 and $20 an hour plus benefits, has lowered the jobless rate in small towns like McKee, Booneville and Annville by around 5%.

Broadband also has brought educational opportunities, and with telemedicine, folks no longer have to travel long distances to see a doctor. Theres even a virtual living room at the public library in McKee, where veterans can connect with a Veterans Administration hospital several hours away in Lexington.

Much of my life I heard people complain about everything you couldnt do here," Gabbard said. "We only had one stoplight. We didnt have a Walmart or a college or a hospital. But now we have just as good of broadband as New York City."

A Jackson County, Kentucky, inmate uses the internet to take his GED test at the public library in McKee. The space, called the "virtual living room," is mostly used by veterans for telemedicine appointments at a Veterans Administration hospital.

'It's changing the economy'

In Wisconsin, Vilas County has been one of the leaders in the number of state Public Service Commission broadband grants -- 14 in seven years. This spring, service providers CenturyLink and ChoiceTel won nearly $3 million, altogether, for projects in the county.

The aggressive deployment of broadband has largely been the result of a long-term effort by local officials, some of them retired executives, to secure state and federal funding.

Without it, most of us would have been stuck with dial-up speeds, said Bill Niemuth from Boulder Junction, a small town known as the "Musky Capital of the World" that in March helped CenturyLink win a $2.2 million state grant.

He was director of global security and corporate air transportation for Kimberly-Clark Corp., a job that took him to dozens of countries. Now, from his home, he runs a corporate security business with clients around the world.

The presence of business professionals from outside the area isn't immediately noticeable in Boulder Junction, where the population swells in the summer with tourism. However, their spending in the off-season has made a difference at restaurants, grocery stores and other businesses and has boosted home sales.

Its changing the economy, Niemuth said.

Wealthy seasonal homeowners have poured money into the community.

For example, Uline Corp. executives Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein donated several million dollars for a lakefront pavilion in Manitowish Waters and a 17-mile paved bike trail to Boulder Junction.

The Uihleins have owned a hotel, a condominium complex, a coffee shop, restaurant, spa and two gift shops in a town where the business district runs a third of a mile before it retreats into the surrounding forest.

Another notable is Dick Leinenkugel, brewing scion and former Wisconsin secretary of commerce.

Katherine Desch works at a loan processing center on the Lac du Flambeau Reservation in Vilas County. The center's work is supported by high-speed internet service, creating jobs, yet some parts of the reservation and surrounding area still struggle with not having a high-speed connection.

In Lac du Flambeau, a Native American community in Vilas County, high-speed internet supports a loan processing center run by the Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians.

The center, which employs about 40 people, handles payday loans from all over the country. It generates significant revenue for the tribe, the largest employer in the area.

The starting wage is around $11.50 an hour, better than some other jobs on the reservation, where there's a paucity of options.

Daniel Two Crow

"People can move up fairly quickly. It's an important part of our organization," said Dean Zaumseil, CEO of the Lac du Flambeau Business Development Corporation.

Daniel Two Crow has worked at the loan center for seven years. He supervises about 15 people and says it would be difficult to find another job with comparable pay and benefits.

At 48 years old, he's lived in Minnesota, Colorado, Illinois, Washington, South Dakota, North Dakota and New Mexico, before settling down in Lac du Flambeau. Hes married with five children.

My wife and I are in the process of buying our first home. This jobs been a blessing for me and my family, he said.

The benefits of broadband certainly haven't been felt everywhere. Some areas of the reservation, and other parts of Vilas County, struggle to get online.

Brad and Rubie Gauthier are shown with their 10-month-old daughter in Minocqua. They are the owners of Sitecast, a national website design firm. They lived in Portland, but anxious about coronavirus and social unrest, left the city and moved to the Northwoods.

"We've still got a lot of work to do," said Dion Reynolds, information technology manager for the Business Development Corporation.

But the deployment in Minocqua, a tourist town in Oneida County, allowed Brad Gauthier to return home from Portland, Oregon.

Gauthier grew up on the Lac du Flambeau reservation, and while in his 20s, traveled extensively across the U.S. His laptop was his office and he spent five years working from internet cafes.

His wife, Rubie, was raised in the Philippines. As an executive with Hewlett Packard Corp., she traveled globally before she met Brad and they settled down in Portland to run a software development business.

For a while, the young couple ran the business from laptops while touring the U.S. National Park System. Their customers never knew the difference and many now probably dont realize theyre based in the Northwoods.

In Portland, they paid $32 a square foot for office space. In downtown Minocqua, the rent is about a dollar a square foot.

Huge office buildings might be just a snapshot in time, Gauthier said. When you look at where the trends are headed, its all about remote work. You can attract the best talent without disrupting someone's life."

Jobs that offer promotions, good pay

In Annville, about 15 minutes from McKee, one of nine Teleworks facilities sits on a hill overlooking a vacant lot that was once the site of Jackson Countys largest employer, Mid-South Electronics.

On Jan. 15, 2005, much of the plant was destroyed in a fire.

While no one was injured, it took more than a half-dozen fire departments to extinguish the flames in a 100,000-square-foot building where plastic-molded parts were made for appliances.

Shana Green, of Jackson County, Kentucky, lost her job when the area's largest manufacturer was destroyed in a fire. Now she works from home, assisting veterans with medical issues.

Shana Green, who along with her mother and boyfriend worked at Mid-South, recalled that night the factory was set ablaze by a disgruntled employee.

It was about 3 oclock on a Saturday morning when my phone rang, Green said. It was my mother. She said shed heard the plant was on fire.

Green rushed to take a look but couldnt get within miles because of the thick smoke and road barricades. Nearby homes were evacuated due to fear of chemical explosions.

Damages to the plant were estimated at $50 million, including lost revenue, and efforts to restart the operations in Annville eventually fizzled.

An empty lot marks the site of what was a Mid-South Electronics plant in Annville, Kentucky. The plant was destroyed in a 2005 fire which left about 700 people out of work. What was a child care center in the industrial park is now a Teleworks USA hub that provides training for customer service jobs for national retail chains and other companies.

It was a big blow to the community, Green said.

Now, she does telephone customer support for a national health insurance company.

I really enjoy the job because I know Im helping veterans, she said.

Only a handful of companies remain in the industrial park where Mid-South had been a regional employer. What was a child care center is now the Teleworks office.

The nonprofit teaches customer service skills for online and telephone support positions in all kinds of fields, such as retail, health care and consumer electronics.

The Teleworks jobs often pay better than local businesses. One company, Kelly Connect, offered a $500 sign-on bonus and a dollar-per-hour raise after three months.

All of our companies promote from within, and you can quickly move up the ranks to become a trainer, a supervisor or a mentor, said Betty Hays, operations director at the Annville office.

Its made a huge difference in peoples lives around here, she said.

Hays has tapped the power of broadband for a second job, teaching English to kids in China. She's had the same students for several years and has gotten to know them well.

One of them sent her Beebop headphones for Christmas. A mother of one of her students, worried about the COVID outbreak in the U.S., sent her a thousand face masks.

She wanted to know if there was anything she could do to help, Hays said.

Outside the back door of her home are lush green hills dotted with cows. Hays sometimes uses the camera in her laptop to give her students a glimpse of rural Appalachia. Theyre living in high-rise apartments in Beijing and Shanghai.

Three of them say theyre determined to come visit me, she said.

Finding new paths in life

In Owsley County, the second-least populous county in Kentucky, Teleworks has brought about 400 jobs, according to County Judge Cale Turner. Other jobs have come from folks using broadband to tap a remote workplace on their own.

"It's probably the best thing that's happened to this community in my lifetime," Turner said. "We were right near the bottom of counties for median household income, and we're no longer in the bottom ten."

Kate Roberson is one of those folks who landed a Teleworks job.

Originally from California, she raises sheep and flowers on a 150-acre farm not far from the Red River Gorge, an intricate landscape of canyons, sandstone cliffs, waterfalls and natural bridges in the Daniel Boone National Forest.

She and her husband, Lee, aren't connected to the electric grid. But most days Kate drives into Booneville where she rents an office for $75 a month that includes high-speed internet and a shared receptionist. There, she does customer support for retail catalog companies.

Roberson moved to Owsley County in 2016, sight unseen, after a ranch she rented in Colorado was sold to an owner who wanted all the sheep gone. At the time, she had dozens of pregnant ewes. Spring lambing was only a couple of months away.

"I got on the internet, started looking around and saw pictures of this area. It was just gorgeous and the land was so inexpensive," she said.

But the move came with big challenges, including how to earn a living while getting the farm going.

"I had no idea what I was in for, economically," she said.

After putting in a morning of chores on the farm, Roberson heads into Booneville and settles in behind the computer for her customer support job.

She says the transition from farm to office suits her well.

"I can take my muddy boots off at the door, put on my slippers and be at work, no extra effort involved."

From nearly homeless to comfortable

This spring, Matt and Jennifer Muncy purchased their first house  just three years removed from being nearly homeless. They are comfortable, even if theyre not getting rich.

Thats what high-speed internet has brought to our family, Matt said.

Hes been promoted to a senior support specialist who handles some of the most difficult customer service calls, where people are sometimes frustrated and angry over something like losing a job as well as a technology issue.

Those are the customers I absolutely will not give up on, Muncy said.

It humbles me, knowing that Ive been there.

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More in this series

The Journal Sentinel is examining the lack of high-speed internet, also called broadband, in rural areas.

Heres some of whats coming:

The deployment of broadband has created more than 3,300 jobs in whats known as Silicon Holler in Eastern Kentucky. In Wisconsins Northwoods its attracted new businesses and executives working from their home on the lake.

For all the billions of dollars poured into expanding service in rural America, there's been an inability to identify coverage gaps, a lack of accountability in spending, and a short-sighted view for what consumers actually need.

New technologies, such as Elon Musks SpaceX and Starlink venture, could help bridge the digital divide, although some doubt their effectiveness. Moreover, millions of people in both rural and urban areas cant afford the options available to them

Rick Barrett is a business reporter who covers agriculture, large manufacturers such as Harley-Davidson, the telecom and defense industries, and other topics. Barrett's coverage of Wisconsin's struggling dairy industry received a 2019 National Headliner Award  his second. His work also has earned a Gerald Loeb Award for outstanding business reporting, a Barlett & Steele Award for investigative reporting, and has been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists, the Society of Environmental Journalists, and the Association of Health Care Journalists. Barrett lives on a hobby farm near Appleton where he takes care of donkeys. He joined the Journal Sentinel in 2000.



Email him at rick.barrett@jrn.com and follow him on Twitter: @rbarrettJS.

Mark Hoffman has been a visual journalist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel since 1992. He has traveled around the world covering the Olympics and other major sporting events, the plight of refugees in Jordan and Europe, the threat of zoonotic diseases, the civil war in El Salvador, the ongoing struggle of poverty and corruption in Haiti, the environmental effects of oil sands mining in Alberta, and the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York City. Before coming to Milwaukee, he was a photo editor at the New York headquarters of The Associated Press, a photojournalist at the Bridgeport Post & Telegram (now the Connecticut Post) and a photographer at the La Crosse Tribune.



Email him at mark.hoffman@jrn.com; follow him on Twitter: @MJSPhotog.

About this project







Reporter Rick Barrett spent the 2020-21 academic year as an O'Brien Fellow in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University examining the challenges facing rural Wisconsin. He was assisted by student researchers Christopher Miller and Kelli Arseneau.

All work on the project was done under the guidance of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editors. Marquette University and administrators of the program played no role in the reporting, editing or presentation of this project.

To support the Journal Sentinel's in-depth local reporting, please subscribe at jsonline.com/deal.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Broadband internet changes lives in rural Kentucky, Wisconsin
Jun. 11Lebanon's popular Charm at the Farm Vintage Market will celebrate its fifth anniversary by raising funds for two Cincinnati charities geared toward helping women.

Charm at the Farm, founded in 2017 by friends Amy Doyle and Jayme Kuenkel, has become one of Lebanon's most popular events. This year's festivities will take place June 11-13, August 20-22 and October 15-17. The vintage market consists of over 100 primarily women-owned vendors selling vintage and handmade items, repurposed furniture, clothing, home decor and more on a 56-acre horse farm.

In honor of Charm at the Farm's fifth anniversary, Doyle and Kuenkel are partnering with two charitable organizations  Eve Center and Sifa Collective  that work to promote the healing and growth of women in various ways.

"Organizations like Eve Center here in Cincinnati and Sifa Collective in Africa provide women with the support and encouragement they need to heal, grow, learn, gain confidence and succeed," said Jayme Kuenkel, co-owner and founder of Charm at the Farm. "Our aim for 2021 is to not only continue to offer a fun and unique Charm experience for our community, but also to pay it forward. We want to invite our Charmers to join us in making an impact and offering hope to women locally and around the world."

Charm at the Farm will also celebrate its anniversary by adding 15 new vendors and food trucks, commemorative items, unique photo opportunities and giveaways.

This weekend, VIP tickets will be sold online for $18 per person to attend the event from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Friday, June 11 (though these tickets are currently sold out) and for $15 per person to attend the VIP event from 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday, June 12. General admission tickets will be sold online for $10 to attend the event from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, June 12 and online and at the gate for $6 to attend the event on Sunday, June 13 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tickets can be purchased by visiting Charm at the Farm's website. Guests must purchase tickets to the events on Saturday and Sunday in advance. Tickets to Sunday's event can be purchased at the gate.

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Children 12 and under are free. Parking is also free. More information about the pricing and hours of the August and October markets are available on Charm at the Farm's website.

HOW TO GO

What: Charm at the Farm Vintage Market

Where: 4953 Bunnell Hill Rd., Lebanon

When: Friday, June 11 from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.; Saturday, June 12 from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.; and Sunday, June 13 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

More info: Website  Facebook


Hamilton County District Attorney Neal Pinkston, centre, speaks at a news conference, Wednesday, June 9, 2021, in Chattanooga, Tennessee (AP)

A former Tennessee governor has been linked to a 1979 hit on a friend of Jimmy Hoffa, investigators have concluded.

Cold case investigators say that Ray Blantons administration had paid a known bank robber to kill Samuel Pettyjohn, because he was cooperating with FBI agents in a corruption investigation.

The killing took place as federal prosecutors were investigating Mr Blantons office over a cash-for-clemency scandal.

Hamilton County District Attorney Neal Pinkston said on Wednesday that no charges will be brought as all of the major players are now dead and they have finally closed the 42-year-old case.

Mr Pettyjohn was gunned down by a contract killer in blackface, wearing a wig and fake beard, inside the Beverage Mart he owned, and had cash and jewellery worth $100,000 on him when he died.

Essentially, Mr Pettyjohn cooperated with authorities and knew too much about what was going on locally, as well as the state level, and individuals didnt like that and so individuals hired someone to murder him, said Mr Pinkston.

Here we are some 42 years later.

He was asked how he could be sure that Mr Blantons administration paid for the killing.

Im very sure, Im proof positive, he replied.

Mr Blanton, a Democrat, was never indicted in the corruption investigation, but three members of his administration were.

Prosecutors, who reopened the murder investigation in 2015, say that the hitman was a known bank robber, Ed Alley, and that he was paid between $25,000 and $50,000 on behalf of the Blanton administration to carry out the killing.

Alley himself died in federal prison in 2005.

Cooperating individuals indicated Alley admitted Pettyjohn was murdered for various reasons including he was a source of cooperation for the FBI in investigations of Gov. Ray Blanton, a grand jury concluded.

And the grand jury stated that if he was still alive Alley would be charged with first-degree premeditated murder of Pettyjohn.

Mr Blanton sparked controversy as he pardoned and commuted prison sentences for more than 50 state inmates in the final days of his administration.

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The situation got so bad that his fellow Democrats worked with his Republican successor, Lamar Alexander, to move up his inauguration by three days.

Mr Blanton, who died in 1996, was never charged but in 1981 was convicted of selling a liquor licence to a friend for $23,000.

The Associated Press contributed to this report
Jun. 11MANCHESTER  Manchester Community College has posted virtual commencement exercises on its website,

www.manchestercc.edu/current-students/commencement

The presentation includes recorded speeches by Valedictorian Sarah Hocutt of East Windsor, as well as additional content honoring the graduates.

The webpage was posted Thursday and is available online after that.

Hocutt was homeschooled for most of her education, the school said in a news release. At the age of 15, she attended Central Connecticut State University as a non-matriculated student and, after two semesters, transferred to MCC to pursue the CSCU Pathway Transfer Degree: Mathematics Studies.

Along the way she also satisfied the criteria for a high school diploma, completing all her requirements for an associate degree with a GPA of 4.0 in fall 2020. She is enrolled at the University of Connecticut, studying mathematics, computer science, and German, with plans for a career in cyber-defense or a related field.

Salutatorian Jo Dee Cyr of Newington developed a passion for drawing and sketching in early childhood. After a 30-year career as a legal administrative assistant and paralegal she was forced to consider a new path and enrolled at MCC as a full-time visual fine arts major. She plans to continue her education with the goal of teaching art to children and adults.

In addition to their remarks, Carol Curchoe, a 2000 graduate, gave the graduation address.

Curchoe, a native of South Windsor now based in San Diego, California, is the founder of ART Compass, (www.artcompass.io) a mobile application platform for in vitro fertilization laboratory management. She has published in numerous scientific journals and popular press. She is the author of "The Thin Pink Line," a critical exploration of historical perspectives and controversial topics in modern gynecology.

She was awarded the Manchester Community College Alumna of the Year award in 2019. She shares the ways in which, after struggling to earn her high school GED, she first began to transform her life at MCC.

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"The teachers and classes I had at MCC gave me the foundation for who I am," Curchoe said. "I realized I could learn things even if they were hard."

After earning an associate's degree in general studies from MCC, she went on to earn a bachelor of science degree in molecular and cellular biology, and a master's degree and a doctorate in the physiology of reproduction, from the University of Connecticut.

These area students graduated from Manchester Community College this spring.

Andover

Nic Gagliardi, Constantina Paris, Kristina Schilling, Matthew Wantek.

Ashford

Sara Batter, Francis Gomez, Adam Gruszczynski, Hudson Kamphausen, Alexandra Kuzara, Caroline Olis

Bolton

Leah Gavin, Kevin Gordon, Sarah Pasqualini, Daniel Pfisterer, Erik Veo.

Coventry

Sydney Bevivino, Heather Brousseau, Christianna Comollo, Aidan Darcey, Devon Doran, Gianna Duberek, Melissa Ferguson, Julia Francis, Matthew George, Hailie Kegler.

Anna Meltser, Chelsea Moskites, Christina Pierce, Christine Reynolds, Julia Salinsky, Jacob Sauerhoefer, Arielle Spencer, Patrick Trombley, Gabriella Veerasammy.

East Hartford

Scott Arsenault, Christein Avatar, James Bonsu, Whitney Bruzual, Raissa Calero, Marielena Cartagena-Santiago, Christian Carvajal, Ed Concepcion, Thy Huong Doan, Jessica Edwards, Jacqueline Espana.

Guadalupe Ferreyra, Terrence Foster, Aadil Galliwala, Shamara Gilbert, Morgan Gionfriddo, Nicholas Gopaul, Christopher Gopaul.

Conor Haddock, David Harper, David Harris, Linda Harvey, Kai Haughton, Chardell Hawley, Sara Hayes, Austin Heath, Lizandra Hernandez, Linoshka Hernandez, Taylor Januario, Richard Krizenosky, Bernard Kufuor.

Thuy Dung Le, Kimberly Markey, Edwin Martinez, Jamie Mathiau, Lakisha Mathis, Joshua McGee, Bryan Monserrate, Evans Morrison, Claudia Murillo, Christopher Nieves, Sheyla Ortiz-Caraballo, Daniela Pena-Sulantay.

Maria Rivera, Ruth Rivera, Giovanni Rodriguez, Adrian Rodriguez, Limbert Rodriguez, Elba Rosado, Ashley Ryea, Quannal Sanabria-Hutchings, Dalon Scott, Taneka Stewart, Andrew Williams, Maxwell Yeboah, Nadia Zuniga.

East Windsor

Brianna Coughlin, Sarah Hocutt, Megan Palma, Isabella Rizzo, Courtney Robertson, Aneta Zaliszewski.

Ellington

Amy Bernabe, Alexander Bruno, Aruna Dhanushkodi, Maxwell Gale, Nathan Giordano, Thomas Joyse, Kyle Luginbuhl, Christian Nelson, Casey Noller, Anthony Rizzuto, Caitlin Trudeau, Jonathan Vamvilis, Ryan VanNostrand.

Enfield

Jami Bailey, Jonathan Bartlett, Warren Chamberlain Jr., Daven Harmon, Mary Kibbe, Katherine Kusta, Matthew Laplante, Nancy LaRussa, Leslie O'Brien, Aymee Perdomo, Zachary Perry, Kelley Starkey, Jasmine Xiong.

Glastonbury

Ilir Bici, Jon Bourret, Jesus Bueno, Franchesca Bustamante, Liliana Chuquihuanca, Gina Daddona, Carmella Hancock, Rachel Hasenauer, Josyah Howard, Joshua Jones.

Mackenzie Lesco, Caleb McQuade, John Panetta, Zachary Pierson, Daniel Talevi, Conor Thompson, Akilas Totonis, Zachary Ureta, Andreas Varnauskas, Lisa Yee.

Hebron

William Albin, Jessie Kimball, James Larned, Adam Lisee, Tammy Noble, Melissa O'Reilly, Zackery Parsadanov, Trevor Pasquale, Tyler Roberts, Ericka Sandstrom.

Manchester

Rowena Ahia, Muhammad Ahmad, Daniela Alberca, Jessica Alexandrides, Natalia Amaya Torres, Michelle Andzel, Michelle Andzel, Antonio Ayala, Dephtany Ayala.

Jillian Babin, Jillian Begin, Alyssa Bisi, Mariah Boland, Mckenzie Boland, Hannah Boulier, Reagan Bousquet, Eric Brosnan, Christopher Bucchere, Kayla Bunnell.

Lauren Camire, LeAnna Carlson, Connor Casey, Mark Chesterton, Michael Ciparelli, Victoria Cirilo, Christopher Clarke, Alicia Clarke-Olen.

Leala Daigle, Emma Daly, Kwabena Darko, Kamare DaSilva, Ilyani Del Orbe, Tina DiGregorio, Jo-Ann Doyle, Samantha Edinger, Taylor Edwards, Callan Engelbrecht, Carlos Espada, Violimar Espada.

Frankie Fana, Brittanie Farr, Joseph Fogarty, Kyle Forrest, Sebastian Furze, Jessica Gaskell, Jennifer Gates, Kayleigh Gauthier, Peter Guasta, Eleanore Hewett, Brandon Hoffler, Arnold Holmes.

Samantha Isaacs, Nathan Jedziniak, Smila Kalarikkal Jolly, Ian Kim, Caroline King, Angeline Laroche, Michael Lemire, Richard Lion, Christopher Longo.

Paul Marvin, Marisol Mata, Julie Misuraca, Natalie Mojica, Erika Moore, Kaitlyn Mott, Azmi Mou, Maggie Munzu, Caroline Nazareth, Austin Neil, Michelle Nickerson, Karma Nielsen, Scott Oliver, Mayrelis Ortiz.

Danielle Panton, Sumi Paul, Nicholas Piggott, Richard Piske, Stephanie Reyes, Andrew Robinson, Juan Rodriguez, Erin Rosa, Odalys Rosario, Jasmine Ross.

Benjamin Salamatian, Bryan Saltos Garcia, Shane Samuels, James Santa Maria, Victor Santiago, Jennifer Scott, Maria Segovia, Lydia Sekscenski, Brandi Sinclair, Stacey Smith, Kelsie Sullivan, Daniel Sutfin.

Kendra Thepphanava, Norma Torres, Alyssa Tracy, Yomaira Vargas, Dylan Wiafe, Armani World, Danielle Yagle.

Somers

Lauren Buettner, Christopher Chase, Eric Wheeler.

South Windsor

Julian Alexandre, Daniel Burgess, Kyle Cahoon, Kameron Chaddha, Maria Cheema, Samantha Cormier, Alyssa Dobler, Austin Fletcher, Megan Gregory, Brian Griswold, Deanna Gronski.

Amber Hutchinson, Timothy Johnson, Rafal Kempisty, Molly Kennedy, Ashley Konarski, Travis Maneeley, Kevin Mead, Phillip Misenti, Jordan Nason, Victoria-Taylor Orduz, Joyce Rolon, Joyce Rolon.

Rhiannon Scannell, Sandra Slater, Poornima Vikas, Joseph Viola, Bekalu Yilma.

Stafford

Matthew Bouthillier, Daniel Chrzanowski, Hannah D'Amico, Ashley LaCroix, Jordan McKay, Erin Murphy, Marilyn Myers, Aleksondra Patalik, Izabella Pelczar.

Suffield

Phillip Brunton, Dena Chance, Nicolas Emma.

Tolland

Hanna Bacha, Rebecca Baker, Jacob Castonguay, Amnah Chaudhry, Jessica Dempsey, James Doherty, Melissa Kiely, Kara Kondratovicz, Ashley Loomis, Kyle McDonald, Julieanne Pedemonti, Joseph Roshkowski, Chloe Sinnamon, Daniel Weed, Stacey Williams.

Vernon

Thomas Alfano, Elizabeth Baddeley, Christopher Bassett, Jenna Blinn, Laura Blowers, Akintola Campbell, Brooke Cournoyer, Brandy Cupe, Madelyn Daitch, Amanda Despres.

Alexis Garcia, Kristen Giordano, Laura Gorecki, Zachary Gregus, Zachary Gregus, Mercedes Huapaya, Shannon Kelly, Geeta Khade, Emily Kurban, Cameron Lavoie.

Christopher MacCoy, Taylor Machholz, Salar Malik, Jonathan McCartin, Jacqueline McGrail, Simona MoCofan, Eric Mohr, Natalie Morganson, Keith Morris, Keith Morris, Adine Moynihan, Susan Mulligan.

Christopher O'Connor, Tyler Parsons, Nicholas Persaud, Savannah Piechowicz, Michael Reel, Aiden Reid, Oscar Rodriguez, Murphy Ruocco, Scott Sandberg, Jane Satkowski, Taylor Sloat, Annelise Sonner.

Jose Tanchiva Pascual, April Violette, Lisa Vonberg, Austin Wagner, Robert Wakefield, Abby Wilson, Kristiana Wintress.

Willington

Kiona Cortese, Anna Farnsworth, Brittney Merced.

Windsor

Benjamin Alas, Sagine Alexandre-Watson, Cameron Alexis, Kerry Ann Black, Joshua Brouillard, Heather Bultmann, Courtney Carter, Frank Corbett, Sarah Espada, Katherine Espinal, Melody Girona, Gregory Hawkins.

Anisha Johnson, Brittany Jones, Allyson Kerr, Cheryl Moran, Danielle Newbold, LaShawnda Price, LaShawnda Price, Keniesha Salmon, Imani Schley, Justin St. John, Caroline Toal, Shanice Williams.

Windsor Locks

Christopher Block, Charlene Clemons, Patrick Fallon, Adam Haglund, Briana Hall, Kenil Patel, Gianna Silva.
Jun. 10TUPELO  After two days of nearly solid rain across the region, the weather dried up Thursday to allow flash flood waters to recede.

Northeast Mississippi officials used the day to survey damages to infrastructure, while a dozen-and-a-half Lee County families began to assess the damage the flooding caused to their homes.

According to the National Weather Service in Memphis, portions of Oxford and Lafayette County received as much as 15 inches or rain from 7 a.m. Monday through 7 a.m. Thursday. Most of Lee County had 6 inches or more rain during the same period.

Lafayette County Emergency Management Agency director Steve Quarles said the heavy rains caused numerous problems Wednesday, including flash floods turning some streets into temporary rivers more than a foot deep.

"We had three streets where roads were washed out or culverts blew out," Quarles said. "Right now, we only have one house with major flood damage, but as things settle down, more might be reported."

Quick action from officials may have averted severe damage just north of Oxford. Wednesday afternoon, residents downstream from Tara Estates on County Road 102 were asked to evacuate their homes when a sinkhole started forming in embankment of Lake Tara Dam.

"The fire department and (the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality) helped pump water out of the lake," Quarles said. "They were able to get it down to a safe level, and we are not worried about it causing any damage.

In Lee County, at least 18 houses in the Saltillo and Guntown areas suffered flood damage. The bulk of the damage was in the flood-plagued Willow Creek subdivision in Saltillo. The neighborhood drains though a small culvert under a railroad track. In heavy rains, the culvert is overloaded and the water backs up, tuning the subdivision into a detention pond. The same streets also flooded in 2019.

"We got an incredible amount of rain in a short period of time," said Saltillo Mayor Rex Smith. "We opened up the community room at city hall in case any of the displaced families needed a place to stay, but no one took advantage of it."

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The water had receded for the most part by Thursday morning, and city officials were out assessing damage. Smith said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is expected to be in town next week looking at the damage.

"Since this is the second flood event in that area in two years, FEMA might have to change the flood insurance criteria," said Lee County EMA director Lee Bowdry. "They can't keep throwing good money after bad."

Bowdry and his staff took advantage of the drier Thursday to head out to affected areas and begin the damage assessment process. He said road crews are reporting that damages weren't as widespread or as bad as initially thought.

"After talking to (county road manager Tim Allred), they hope to have most of the roads they had to close opened back up pretty quickly, possible by Friday afternoon," he said.

There is more rain in the forecast over the next two days, with possible thunderstorms Friday and Saturday. But after this weekend, sunny (or at least partly cloudy) days are expected to return for all of next week to allow the region to dry out.

william.moore@djournal.com
via Facebook

ROMEFew would argue how Valerie Bacot rationalized pulling the trigger that sent a fatal bullet into the back of her stepfather-turned-husband Daniel Polette's neck on March 13, 2016. She had earlier unsuccessfully tried to poison him with a sleeping pill, and she said she knew he was grooming their 14-year-old daughter for serial rape. She was tired of years of abuse and being pimped out to strangers in the family minivan, so she did what she thought she had to do.

I took the gun, she said in an emotional interview with Le Parisien ahead of her June 21 murder trial that could send her to prison for life. There was a loud noise, the flash, the smell. I got out of the car, opened the door, he fell. I thought only of saving myself because I was sure he was going to kill me.

Bacot then told her oldest childrenwho she says were borne of rapethat she had killed the monster they called their father. They admitted they helped bury his body in a forest. All the while, she packed dirt on the hastily dug graveshe said she worried he would come back to life. The only thing I thought about was putting dirt on it, she said. Because I was afraid he would come out and kill us.

Prosecutor Wont Contest Doomsday Moms Incompetency Claim

The 40-year-old and two of her children were arrested in October 2017 when Polette's body was found after the mother of her sons girlfriend, who had been involved in the hasty burial, turned her in. Since that time, more than 400,000 people have signed a petition to ask Emmanuel Macron for a presidential pardon that could save Bacot, though opponents say presidents have no place in the court of law. Interest in her case has galvanized those fighting against domestic violence, not just in France, but across Europe where, on average, one woman is killed every three days by an angry partner. A television interview in France ahead of her trial garnered 4.5 million viewers, and her horrific memoir Tout le monde savait or Everyone Knew is a national bestseller in France.

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Bacots lawyers told The Daily Beast that they are withdrawing from the media in the weeks leading up to the trial to focus on her defense, saying, We will neither give interviews nor make any statements during the several weeks to come.

The case harkens back to Jacqueline Sauvage, another French woman who fatally shot her husband after years of abuse against her and her children. Sauvage won a presidential pardon after being sentenced to 10 years in prison for murder. Bacots supporters believe her case merits the same consideration, though in both cases, the women were failed by a system that did not protect them from years of documented abuse. In Bacots case, her children went to police more than once to try to help their mother, but police turned them away because they were minors.

Even though she committed murder by killing her torturer, and taking into account the 25 years of suffering she suffered and endured in general indifference, it is her freedom that we ask for, a spokesperson for the support group sponsoring the petition says.

Polette, a truck driver, married Bacots mother in 1992, and started grooming her immediately, insisting he put body lotion on her prepubescent body and on watching her bathe, according to her memoir. She says he then began raping her when she turned 12, after her first period. Bacot reported the rape to authorities through a teacher at her school and Polette was sentenced to four years in prison for raping his stepdaughter. All the while, her mother made her visit the man who raped her in prison. When he got out, he moved back in with Bacots mother and the abuse started once more. Every night after school he would say you go upstairs to me, she said in the interview. I knew what that meant.

When she became pregnant at 17 with the first of four children he would father with his stepdaughter, her mother sent her off to live with the ogre. My mother helped me pack my boxes, she said. At first I thought my mother didnt know, but over time I realized she did, but never did anything.

Husband Cleared of Murdering Wife Because He Was Delirious With Jealousy

Several years into the relationship, they married. Then things got worse. Bacot says Polette had always physically abused and emotionally tortured her, but then he started threatening to kill her and the children with a gun, at times pulling the trigger as he pointed what she did not know was an unloaded gun at her head. Youre lucky, its not today, he would say. There is nothing in it, but next time I will not miss.

Then when money got tight, Bacot says Polette started to pimp her out of the family Peugeot minivan, speaking to her in an earpiece and threatening her the whole time not to ask the men who paid for sex for help.

Even that, she says, she could have tolerated. But shortly before she killed him, she said he asked their 14-year-old daughter how she was sexually. She knew exactly what would happen next. At that point, she knew she had to stop him.

Bacot knows she could spend the rest of her life in prison, but says it is better than the rest of her life with him. I deserve to go to jail, a very long time, thats normal. But this trial is not only mine but that of the other, she told Le Parisien, referring to Polette. I hope that I can be stronger than him and for once in my life win against him.

Bacots story mirrors that of countless women who are prisoners in violent relationships, having been groomed to believe they cannot leave. I have lived my whole life believing that I deserved it, Bacot writes in her book. That it was because of me.

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In line for breakfast at the Juvenile Detention Center in Shreveport, La., on May 15, 2008.

I am never sure what kind of response my writing will receive, or what kind of audience it will reach. To my surprise, a column I wrote in April for USA TODAY reached an audience of inmates in Americas prisons and jails, and some of them sent letters to tell me what they thought.

What provoked me to write was a Supreme Court ruling, Jones v. Mississippi, that made it easier for judges to sentence juvenile offenders to life without parole. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for a six-justice majority, found that it is constitutional to impose LWOP sentences on children, so long as the law gives the judge the discretion to take into account the defendants age.

My piece criticized the decision and characterized it as a significant step in the wrong direction. Instead of making it easier to sentence children to life without parole, I argued, the United States should join the rest of the world by eliminating life prison sentences without parole for juvenile offenders and giving hope a chance.

The responses arrived quickly, and by various forms of mail  some even by certified mail to ensure that the sender would know I had gotten his letter. Several included stamped, self-addressed envelopes. I wondered whether those envelopes were tangible requests for an answer. These were letters meant not just to reach a sender, but to initiate a connection, an exchange.

A personal letter is a sensory treasure

That led me to read about the traffic in letters to and from prisoners. I learned that getting letters out of or into a prison is not easy. There is, in fact, a whole industry of online advice about corresponding with prisoners, respecting the regulations governing such correspondence, and helping practicing lawyers think about whether to treat such letters as privileged communications.

Sister Helen Prejean, of "Dead Man Walking" fame, offers a set of do's and donts for writing to prisoners. But she frames those instructions in a way I found quite arresting. Receiving a personal letter, Sister Helen says, is something to treasure for a person in prison.

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Cassandra Bensahih, reflecting on being in prison in 2007 in Massachusetts, underscored that point at a hearing early this year. Mail makes us feel more normal and like we are a part of the world," she said. "There is nothing like being able to touch a letter, reread it, go back over it.

Reading that brought me up short. Seeing an ordinary letter as a sensory treasure is a powerful reminder of another of the painful deprivations of prison life.

Sister Helen cautioned her readers that such correspondence can create false hopes: Because letters are so special (and often rare), its important that from the outset you let your correspondent know your intentions. If you want to strike up an ongoing correspondence, let them know that (and stick to it!). If you just want to send a one-off note of support, make that clear so you dont raise expectations  you could include something like No need to respond, I just wanted to let you know Im thinking of you. 

I shouldnt have been surprised to learn that this is another domain of life where the human misery of some can be turned into profit by others, with private businesses seeking contracts to process and monitor mail to and from prisoners.

And several states are trying out new procedures to see whether mail systems can be developed to prevent prisoners from sending or receiving letters on real paper, which might contain drug residue. Those policies would cruelly eliminate the kind of simple human pleasure of holding and reading letters that Sister Helen says prisoners treasure.

The letters I got from prison fit into several categories. The first, I guess not unexpectedly, contained straightforward appeals for help. Thinking I might be a practicing attorney, inmates asked me to advise them or to sign on to represent them. They wrote to see whether I would be willing to help them win their freedom and end the nightmare of long years spent incarcerated for crimes they committed as children.

Some of these requests for help came with copies of legal pleadings their authors had carefully drafted for my review. Some asked me to send books I had written about life without parole that might shed light on an aspect of their case.

Others didnt ask for help directly, but instead sought answers to long and carefully thought out lists of questions, probing what I thought about specific aspects of LWOP in general and juvenile LWOP in particular. These lists surprised and intrigued me. They revealed parts of the lived experience and the curiosities sparked in people subject to the rules and decisions I understood only in an academic sense.

Franklin Correctional Center in Bunn, N.C., in 2017.

A third genre of these letters were what I would call "scholarly commentaries" on LWOP jurisprudence. One seven-page letter from an inmate in a California jail offered what I thought was a far more insightful analysis of the Jones v. Mississippi case (and the precedents Justice Kavanaugh had misread) than the one I had written. Its author was too generous to point out where he thought I had gone wrong, and instead simply offered a few penetrating thoughts.

The final group of prison letters was thank you notes for the criticism I offered in USA TODAY, or for having the strength and courage to speak up. I didnt feel particularly strong or courageous when I wrote that piece. It was just a part of what I do and an expression of what I care about. And I certainly didnt feel strong or courageous when reading these letters from prison and imagining the lives of their authors.

They all came on lined paper, written out in longhand. They were addressed to me by people whose identities in prison are reduced to a number. The names and inmate numbers were always included in the return address and sometimes along with the signatures of the prisoners.

The Supreme Court is wrong: Even children who kill don't deserve life without parole

Those numbers are hard to ignore. They are stark reminders of what Yale law professor James Whitman calls the calculated degradation that accompanies incarceration in the United States.

Inmate numbers are necessary in a return address if letter writers are to have any hope of receiving a response. Sister Helen reminds her readers that a letter to a prisoner whose number is omitted will not reach its addressee. But seeing that number next to the signature is more telling. It registers, to me, as routine dehumanization that can alter the way an inmate thinks of himself.

These letters will be answered

The letters I received were all written in well-crafted, block letters by writers who seemed to regard cursive as a foreign language, or might never have learned to write in that way. The authors of these letters, almost all of which were several pages long, must have expended considerable time and effort in just the physical act of putting their words on paper, as if they could not risk that their contents might be illegible.

I was struck by the discipline of these writers, carefully crafting their hand-printed lettering, a discipline someone like me would find hard to muster after adapting to the brevity of texts and the ease of the computer.

I couldnt help but think of these prison letters as treasures offered to me by people cut off and distanced from my world, sent in desperation, but also in the hope that they would not be discarded as unwanted junk mail.

Spare this man: I helped put an 18-year-old Black teen on federal death row. I now think he should live.

I think the playwright Samuel Shepard was right when he observed that the form of the letter is an imagined conversation;  always available. You can just sit down any old morning & have a conversation whether the persons there or not. You can, Shepard continued, have long gaps between passages  days can go by & you might return & pick it up again. And the great difference in all other forms of writing is that it is dependent to a large extent on the other person. Its not just a solo act.

While I may not be able to offer legal advice, or even provide very good answers to the questions asked by these prisoners, I can  and will  let their authors know that their letters were received, read and appreciated. I can  and will  keep up my end of the conversation, whether it is about juvenile LWOP or the lives of those whose fates I had hoped my writing might help to alter.

I have no illusions about my ability to do very much, but I can at least make sure the people who wrote to me realize that their writing was not just a solo act.

Austin Sarat (@ljstprof), associate provost and associate dean of the faculty and the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College, is the co-editor of "Life Without Parole: America's New Death Penalty?" The views expressed here are solely his own.

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Letters prisoners sent me: Sharp thinking and snapshots of deprivation
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New Delhi: Manish Sisodia, Delhi's Deputy Chief Minister on Friday (June 11) hit out at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) calling it Bharatiya Jhagda Party and accused it of constantly abusing state governments and chief ministers including Arvind Kejriwal.

Addressing a virtual press conference, Sisodia made veiled references to remarks made by Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.

A very senior minister of the Central government held a press conference right now. I saw it too. He abused Arvind Kejriwal on ration, vaccines and many other things. These days, central government ministers have only one job  to abuse Kejriwal. They dont talk of nation-building or any other important issue, he said.

Further, Sisodia said the Union ministers and BJP leaders were constantly attacking CM's of other state governments too. From morning to night, they keep abusing state governments. Sometimes it is Bengal, sometimes Jharkhand, or Maharashtra. Do they have no other work left? Union ministers and BJP leaders are all doing the same, said Sisodia.

Earlier, Prasad called Delhi governments doorstep ration delivery scheme a jumla.

You couldnt provide doorstep delivery of oxygen, medicines, and now you want to give ration Delhi government is under control of the ration mafia, as are their decisions. Im saying this with full responsibility, he said.

On June 5, Centre had scrapped Delhi governments flagship ration delivery scheme saying that the Kejriwal government did not seek the approval.

With this scheme, the delivery of packed wheat flour and rice were to be delivered to the beneficiaries at their doorstep. The scheme, which was announced under the Mukhya Mantri Ghar Ghar Ration Yojna (MMGGRY) of the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) of the National Food Security Act, 2013 was notified by the government on February 20. The scheme was aimed at benefiting 72 lakh people.

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New Delhi: Aam Aadmi Partys senior leader and MLA Atishi presented the vaccination bulletin through a video address on Thursday and stated that Instead of getting maximum people vaccinated, the Centre wants to hide the position of vaccine stock. Amid vaccine scarcity, the central government finds hiding numbers more important than inoculating its citizens.

Vaccination for Delhis youth restarted today (Thursday) after a halt of 16 days, amid such a situation, surprising that the Centre wants us to conceal facts and escape our own people. The Delhi govt believes that people have a right to know about the situation of vaccines and it has been our constant effort to put everything transparently in front of our people. For 45+ 2 days of Covaxin and 26 days of Covishield available. For 18-44, 4 days of stock of Covaxin and 8 days of Covishield available. For 18-44 years, 1,24,000 doses of Covishield and 50,000 doses of Covaxin available. 29,800 doses were supplied to us yesterday for the 18-44 category. On 9th June, 47,978 doses were administered out of which 25,527 were first doses and 22,451 were second doses.

The senior leader of the Aam Aadmi Party and MLA Atishi said,  As the people of Delhi know that the Delhi government releases the vaccination bulletin every evening. We share about how many vaccines were administered the previous day, and information about the total vaccination in Delhi, how many first doses and how many second doses, as well as the stock position of the different vaccines  Covaxin and Covishield, that whether those vaccines are available or not."

She further said, "we believe that the people of Delhi have a right to know whether there is any vaccination available or not or whether their slots are available or not, because today, after the devastating effects of the second wave, want to get vaccinated. That is why they want to know about the availability of the vaccines and where they are being administered, whether the slots will be opened up or not. But we are surprised by the fact that yesterday the Central Government has sent a letter to all the state governments where they have mentioned that no state government will be allowed to share the information about how many vaccines have been administered and what is the stock position. 

She said, We are surprised by the fact that the Central Government whose work was to vaccinate the people above 18 years but it did not do so. Today the situation in Delhi is such that the vaccination has begun after 16 days. For 16 days no vaccine was available in Delhi. Every day people were struggling such that no dose of Covaxin was available for those between 18-44 years and even those above 45 years. that is why the people wanted to know whether the vaccine was available or not and the Central Government, instead of providing the vaccination, passed the order that no state government will be allowed to share information regarding the availability of the vaccines .

Atishi said,  It is our appeal to the Central government that instead of hiding information regarding the vaccines, focus on providing the vaccines. If the vaccine is unavailable then either today or tomorrow the people will get to know about it and to know about the vaccine status, is the right of every citizen because it is the very vaccine that can save the people from Covid-19. So today it is our appeal to the central Government that instead of hiding notices, make the vaccines available to the state governments so that the people of the states and the entire country can get vaccinated and, in that way, save their lives as well as the life of the rest of the country .

The senior leader of the Aam Aadmi Party and MLA Atishi said, The vaccination drive is happening at a rapid pace in Delhi. Yesterday, that is on 9th June, 47,978 doses of the vaccine were administered out of which 25,527 were first doses and 22,451 were second doses. With this, in Delhi 58,30,579 total vaccine doses have been administered and now in Delhi, 13,63,000 people are those who have been administered both the doses .

She said, As far as the availability of the vaccine is concerned, as of today 5.5 lakh doses of the vaccine are available for those above 45 years out of 5,20,000 doses of Covishield are available and 28,600 doses of Covaxin are available. As we had shared earlier, the Covaxin doses are only being administered as the second dose, that is only those who have been administered the first dose of the vaccine, only they are being given the second dose .

She said, For 18-44 years, the total stock position is as follows  in Delhi 1, 74, 000 doses of the vaccine are available out of which 1,24,000 are of Covishield and 50,000 doses of Covaxin are available. Yesterday 29,800 doses of the vaccine were added for the 18-44 category. The vaccines for 45+- we have a stock of 2 days of Covaxin and 26 days of Covishield. For the youth  that is for those between 18-44 years we have 4 days of stock of Covaxin and 8 days of Covishield. This means for the next 4 days, those who have been administered the first dose of Covaxin, they can comfortably get their second dose administered in the next 4 days. As far as those who have not gotten vaccinated with their first dose, all the slots will be available for the next 8 days for those between 18-44 years. You can book the slots on the CoWIN app. 

She said We believe that the people of Delhi have a right to know about the availability of the vaccine and where it is available. This is the reason why we share this information with the people of Delhi and it is again our request to the Central government to please make the vaccine stock available.

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NEW DELHI: Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Friday alleged that the Delhi government is under the control of the ration mafia and the chief minister should explain why is he opposing the Centres 'One nation, One ration card' scheme.

Addressing a press conference in the national capital, Prasad said, Arvind Kejriwal is talking about home delivery of ration when he even failed to provide oxygen to the people of Delhi. The Delhi government is under the control of the ration mafia.

Arvind Kejriwal is talking about home delivery of ration when he even failed to provide oxygen to the people of Delhi. The Delhi government is under the control of the ration mafia: Union Minister and BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad pic.twitter.com/QJ26uzo4jd  ANI (@ANI) June 11, 2021

The senior BJP leader went on to say that 34 States/UTs have adopted the 'One nation, One ration card' scheme. Only 3 states -Delhi, West Bengal and Assam - have not adopted it.

Arvind Kejriwal should answer why the scheme has not been implemented in Delhi, the Union Minister sought to know.

Prasad made these remarks days after Arvind Kejriwal urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to allow the implementation of the doorstep ration delivery scheme in the national capital.

"Till date, I have supported you in all the work of national interest, you should also support us for the same. The scheme should be implemented in the whole country during the COVID times. We are ready to do whatever amendments the Central government wants to make to this scheme. I request you in folded hands on behalf of 70 lakh poor people of Delhi, Sir, please do not stop this scheme," wrote Kejriwal in his letter to Prime Minister Modi.

Kejriwal had earlier slammed the Central government for putting a stop to the Delhi government`s doorstep ration delivery scheme, asking why, despite writing to the Centre five times, the scheme had been brought to a halt.

In a press conference, Kejriwal had said that all preparations had been made for the scheme.

"Just two days before the `doorstep delivery of ration` scheme`s implementation, the Central government stopped it. If this Ghar-Ghar ration scheme was implemented, the ration mafia would be stopped. The strings of this ration mafia reach right to the top. This is the first time a government has had the courage to stand up to the ration mafia," he had said.

The scheme was originally named the MMGGRY (Mukhya Mantri Ghar Ghar Ration Yojana) but a notification on March 9 was issued by the Union Ministry of Consumer Affairs that the subsidised food grains being allocated by the department for distribution under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) cannot be used for running any state-specific or other scheme under a different name other than NFSA.

Following this, the Delhi government dropped the name. Both the Centre and the Delhi government are at loggerheads over the doorstep ration delivery scheme, with BJP calling it a ''big scam'' while the AAP saying that it will finish the ration mafia.

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New Delhi: Fuel prices were yet again hiked on Friday, thus reaching new record highs, with price of petrol breaching Rs 102 per litre level in Mumbai.

On Friday Petrol price was increased by 25-29 paise per litre and diesel by 27-30 paise a litre, according to a price notification of state-owned fuel retailers. In Delhi, petrol hit an all-time high of Rs 95.85 a litre, while diesel is now priced at Rs 86.75 per litre.

The hike  23rd since May 4 and 6th time in the month of June- took fuel prices across the country to a historic high. Petrol is now above Rs 100 per litre mark in six states and union territories - Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Ladakh. Fuel prices differ from state to state depending on the incidence of local taxes such as VAT and freight charges.

Here is looking at the price difference of diesel and petrol in four metro cities on June 11, 2021.

City Petrol Diesel Delhi 95.85 86.75 Mumbai 102.04 94.15 Chennai 97.19 91.42 Kolkata 95.80 89.60

Check petrol, diesel prices in your city, here is how to do it

In India, petrol and diesel prices are revised daily in the morning at 6 AM. Anyone can easily check the rate of petrol and diesel by sending an SMS to 9224992249. All you need to is type RSP <space> Petrol Pump Dealer Code and send it to 9224992249. You can find the RSP code of your locality by visiting the official site of the petrol pump near you.

But why are fuel prices constantly on the rise?

Fuel prices differ from state to state depending on the incidence of local taxes such as VAT and freight charges. Rajasthan levies the highest value-added tax (VAT) on petrol in the country, followed by Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.

The excise tax levied by the Central and state government one of the reasons behind fuel price hike.

Fuel rates in the international market determine the rates of oil prices in India. When global fuel prices go up, OMCs hike prices in the country.

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#mute
New Delhi: The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is expected to release the Class 10 Result 2021 soon.

The board has released additional frequently asked questions (FAQs), which is an extension of previously released FAQs. The CBSE Class 10 students can visit the official website of the board i.e. cbse.gov.in for more details.

The list will solve the query of the students and peers on CBSE Class 10 Result 2021 and its evaluation criteria.

The additional FAQs released for CBSE Class 10 Result 2021 are categorized under mathematics standard and basic, languages, students in the particular range, the first batch of switch over category schools and more.

In view of the uncertain conditions due to COVID and the feedback obtained from various stakeholders, PM Narendra Modi decided to cancel the Class 12 Board Exams this year.

It was also decided that CBSE will take steps to compile the results of class XII students as per a well-defined objective criteria in a time-bound manner

The Prime Minister said that the decision on Class 12 CBSE Exams has been taken in the interest of students.

He stated that COVID-19 has affected the academic calendar and the issue of Board Exams has been causing immense anxiety among students, parents and teachers, which must be put to an end.

The Prime Minister stressed that the health and safety of our students is of utmost importance and there would be no compromise on this aspect. He said that in todays time, such exams cannot be the reason to put our youth at risk.

PM Modi said that all stakeholders need to show sensitivity for students. The PM directed officials to ensure that the results are prepared in accordance with well-defined criteria, in a fair and time-bound manner.

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New Delhi: India suffered a massive loss with the second wave of COVID-19 and many lost the earning members of their families, leaving several families helpless.

The Central government is currently working on various schemes to cushion the damage but at the same time many private players in the field of education are also announcing various schemes for the students.

The educational app has declared a complete waiver for JEE & NEET aspirants who belong to economically weaker section (EWS) or those who have lost an earning family member to COVID-19.

This opportunity will help them to continue to prepare for the examinations and achieve their goals.

Melvano is an AI-based learning app that is transforming the face of traditional learning by providing an adaptive practice interface for aspirants.

The application offers customized learning courses, assessment tests, and question banks. One of the key features of the app is it offers personal IIT mentors for every user.

Taran Singh, the CEO of Melvano, also an IIT Madras alumnus, said in a statement, "Our mission is to prepare all the aspirants for their better future, and we aim to fulfill everyone's dream especially for those who arent privileged. With the help of this social initiative, the students will get access to the learning program on our app. This will help them in continuing with their preparation for competitive examinations, without worrying about the cost. This is our way of giving back to the society."

Students need to fill up an application form on the app and submit supporting documents for review. An internal team will thoroughly check all the applications, to select the students who are eligible for waiver. After filtering, they plan to roll out waivers to all eligible candidates by July.

They also have plans to start a fundraiser on Milaap to support the campaign for students from the EWS.

People can contribute a small amount through this fund raiser to sponsor education of financially weak students. The company will match the donation amount for the amount raised through the campaign.

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New Delhi: Popular television turned movie star, Avika Gor hogged the limelight for playing Anandi in Balika Vadhu - a show based on child marriage. She earned her stardom with the show and slowly moved to regional movies. Recently, she refused to endorse beauty creams and hit back to headlines.

Avika Gor told Times of India, "Unfortunately we have been fed the wrong notion when it comes to the idea of an ideal beauty standard. Over the years we have seen so many advertisements where being fair is considered to be beautiful and I have never been comfortable with this idea. Being fair cannot be equivalent to your overall personality. Another reason why I refused to endorse these products is that I know that this kind of unrealistic approach towards the concept of beauty can have a lasting impression on young minds."

"As an actor, it was a conscious decision to not degrade anyone but to send out the right message. Being fair wont make you confident and beautiful, but its your work ethics, your thinking, talent, and overall personality that matters the most as these will be your defining qualities", she added.

Avika Gor further added, "Beauty for me is all about being happy and comfortable in your skin. There was a time when I was doing great on the work front but I still doubted my talents and felt ugly. I didnt like what I saw in the mirror. But the day I shifted my perspective, started taking care of my body, loving myself, eating right, and staying happy, thats when the change happened. It also helped me a lot in my weight loss journey."

The 23-year-old actress has also worked in some South movies such as Uyyala Jampala, Cinema Choopistha Mava and Raju Gari Gadhi 3 amongst others. She made her Tollywood debut with Uyyala Jampala in 2013.

She even bagged a SIIMA Award for Best Female Debut (Telugu) at the 3rd South Indian International Movie Awards for her role in the film Uyyala Jampala.
New Delhi: Board of School Education, Haryana will release Haryana Board Class 10 Result 2021 or HBSE 10th Result 2021 on Friday (June 11, 2021). The Haryana Board Class 10 Results will be declared by the Board at around 2.30 PM.

Students who have registered themselves for Class 10 exams can check the result on the boards official site - bseh.org.in.

As per reports, the board will declare Class 10th results for over 3 lakh students. It may be noted that the Class 10th examination could not be held this year in view of COVID-19 and the BSEH 10th result 2021 has been prepared based on students performance in internal exams or assignment work.

Private portals such as indiaresult.com will also host the Haryana Board 10th result 2021.

A total of 3,18,373 students have registered for Class 10 board exams out of which 1,74,956 are male students and 1,43,417 are female students.

How to check Haryana Board 10th Result 2021

Haryana Board Class 10 Results will be announced by the Board at 2.30 pm. The website where the result can be checked is the official site of BSEH on bseh.org.in.

-Visit the official site of BSEH on bseh.org.in.

-Click on the result link available on the home page.

-Press BSEH 10th Result 2021 link and enter the login details.

-Your result will be displayed on the screen.

-Check the result and download the page.

-Keep a hard copy of the same for further need.

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New Delhi: Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia addressed a press conference, condemning the BJP-led central government for acting as obstructionists to the Delhi government's work. He mentioned a press conference done by a senior Minister from the Central government who had attacked Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal with regard to Delhis oxygen management, ration distribution etc.

Sisodia spoke about how all BJP leaders address the media once a day to slam CM Arvind Kejriwal instead of speaking on pertinent topics related to India's development or vaccine management or the people of this nation. He said the BJP governments single point agenda was to slam opposition parties that dont support BJP's agenda.

Sisodia said, "They will either condemn the West Bengal Government or the Jharkhand Government or Maharashtra Government. It seems like the BJP-led Central Government has no other work but to divert focus of people and attack state governments that are actually doing some work."

Stating the gross mismanagement and inaction of BJP-led Central Government, Sisodia said, "Only when the Supreme Court asked the Central Government to supply oxygen or face contempt, did the latter begin helping states with oxygen supply. Why didnt the Central Government take any action for oxygen supply earlier?"

Speaking about the dilemma several students, parents and state governments were facing with regard to Board Examinations, the Deputy CM said, Many state governments along with our nations children supported cancelling the examinations, but we faced objections from BJP leaders. Why were the Boards cancelled only when the Supreme Court stepped in? State Governments appealed to the Central Government for adequate vaccines, but even here the Central Government turned a deaf ear to our demands. Instead, the BJP-led Central Government just slammed State Governments. It was only when the Supreme Court interevend that Central Government woke up to our demand for vaccines.

Sisodia further said, "It has become normal behaviour for the BJP-led Central Government to slam 4-5 State Governments which are doing actual work. The only common factor between oxygen management, vaccines, ration and COVID management is BJPs opposition and deliberate inaction. When CM Arvind Kejriwal implored why ration cannot be delivered to households and pizza can, several BJP leaders pounced on KejriwalJi and began calling him corrupt. What is wrong if a well-thought after CM -- who is an IIT graduate -- promotes doorstep delivery of ration? The people of this nation are tired of the Central Government. They are tired of being led by a Government that only engages in petty politics and slams State Governments for doing good work."

Manish Sisodia said, "People of this country elected the Bharatiya Janata Party, but now we should just call it the Bharatiya Jhagada Party. All that BJP does is fight with people. I want to tell BJP leaders to maintain its vision instead of solidifying its Bharatiya Jhagada Party image. Our citizens want a government that can collaborate with States and work together for the development of this nation. Obstructing the work of State Governments and slamming them will not result in the development of the nation. Central Government should cooperate with State Governments and I appeal to the Central Government to not act as an obstructionist."

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New Delhi: Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) has issued guidelines for examination centres, examination functionaries and candidates.

The institutes official statement read, ICAI is taking all possible measures for safe and secure conduct of CA Examinations scheduled to be held in November 2020. ICAI has increased the examinations centres from 505 planned for May 2020 Exam to 915 for Nov. 2020 examination to cover additional 192 districts of the country to facilitate candidates to not to travel beyond their district to the extent possible.

The candidates can read the official statement on the official site of ICAI- icai.org.

The official statement reads, Considering the prevailing COVID-19 situation and in the interest to mitigate the anxiety and hardships of the students concerned, it is hereby informed that the Guidelines for Examination Centres, Examination Functionaries and Candidates for July 2021 CA Examination shall be the same as was announced vide Announcement dated 8th October, 2020 for November 2020 / January 2021 CA Examinations.

Important guidelines:

1. Before commencement of the examination, seating areas shall be adequately sanitized. All door handles, staircase railing, etc. shall be disinfected.

2. Adequate gap as per norms between two seats shall be maintained.

3. Thermo scanning for temperature check of examination functionaries/candidates shall be done at the entry.

4. Hand sanitizer would be made available at the entry and inside the exam venue at prominent places for candidates and centre staff to use.

5. Candidates appearing for the exam will have to carry mask on face, face shield, gloves on hand, personal transparent water bottle, personal hand sanitizer and exam related documents.

6. All examination staff shall carry No Risk status in Aarogya Setu App installed in their Mobile.

Meanwhile, ICAI President CA. Nihar N. Jambusaria has shared an important message to students. The examination will begin on July 5 and will end on July 20, 2021.

Live TV
New Delhi: As soon as the reports of CoWin data breach surfaced, the Union Health Ministry on Thursday (June 10, 2021) issued a statement that said that CoWin stores all the vaccination data in a safe and secure digital environment.

The Union Health Ministry further refuted the reports of CoWin data breach as fake.

As per a report in India Today, the Health Ministry in the statement said that the attention has been drawn towards the news circulating on social media platforms claiming alleged hacking of CoWIN system.

"There have been some unfounded media reports of the CoWIN platform being hacked. Prima facie, these reports appear to be fake. However, the Union Health Ministry and the Empowered Group on Vaccine Administration (EGVAC) are getting the matter investigated by the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MielY)," the Health Ministry said in an official statement.

The fake reports started to surface on social media a day after the Centre announced a new feature on the CoWIN portal, which will enable the users to correct any inadvertent errors in name, year of birth and gender printed on their vaccination certificate.

Now you can make corrections to your name, year of birth and gender on your Cowin vaccination certificates if inadvertent errors have come in, the official handle of the Aarogya Setu app tweeted on Wednesday.

Additionally, in May, the Union Ministry had also defended CoWin portal, after it faced criticism about the vulnerability of the CoWIN platform, saying that it cannot be hacked.

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New Delhi: Amid intense speculations of expansion of the Uttar Pradesh cabinet ahead of the crucial state assembly elections next year, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi on Friday.

CM Yogi, who is on a two-day visit to Delhi, will also meet BJP National President JP Nadda later today.

The Chief Minister arrived at the 7 Lok Kalyan Marg residence of the PM around 11 AM to discuss issues related to cabinet expansion and the upcoming state assembly elections, the sources said.

Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath meets Prime Minister Narendra Modi at his official residence in New Delhi pic.twitter.com/pPci0binPy  ANI (@ANI) June 11, 2021

Adityanath had arrived in the national capital on Thursday and met Union Home Minister Amit Shah at his residence. Ahead of the 2022 Assembly elections, there is speculation that the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government in Uttar Pradesh will reshuffle its cabinet soon.

With elections due next year, the BJP has decided to strengthen the party in the state by seeking feedback from its leaders in the wake of the outcome of panchayat polls and the murmurs from some sections over govt's handling of the COVID-19 situation.

The party has also decided to prepare a strategy based on feedback received from its state leaders and ministers in the Yogi Adityanath government, strengthen the image of the state government and resolve the issues in the state.

These efforts are also aimed at improving the coordination between the party and the government, BJP national general secretary (organisation) BL Santhosh arrived in Lucknow earlier this week and held one-on-one meetings with some of the ministers and leaders in the poll-bound state.

Santhosh was accompanied by Radha Mohan Singh. Many of these leaders had flagged issues like COVID-19 handling, disenchantment among people and lack of coordination between government and party leaders, among others.

However, the Bharatiya Janata Party`s Central leadership has thrown its weight behind Yogi Adityanath, putting a stop to murmurs against the state government months ahead of the Assembly polls.

The Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections are scheduled to take place in 2022. BJP had registered a landslide victory in the 2017 Assembly polls winning over 300 seats.

In the 403-member Uttar Pradesh Assembly, among the major parties, BJP has 309 legislators, SP 49, BSP 18, and Congress 7.

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New Delhi: Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who is on a two-day visit to Delhi, will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP National President JP Nadda on Friday (June 11) amid speculations of expansion of the Uttar Pradesh cabinet ahead of Assembly elections next year.

The Chief Minister is scheduled to meet PM Modi at his residence at 7 Lok Kalyan Marg at 10:45 am. Later, he will meet JP Nadda at his residence at 12 noon.

CM Adityanath arrived in the national capital on Thursday and met Union Home Minister Amit Shah at his residence.

Ahead of the 2022 Assembly elections, there is speculation that the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government in Uttar Pradesh will reshuffle its cabinet soon, according to news agency ANI.

With elections due next year, the BJP has decided to strengthen the party in the state by seeking feedback from its leaders in the wake of the outcome of panchayat polls and the murmurs from some sections over handling of the COVID-19 situation.

The party has also decided to prepare a strategy based on feedback received from its state leaders and ministers in the Yogi Adityanath government, strengthen the image of the state government and resolve the issues in the state.

These efforts are also aimed at improving the coordination between the party and the government, BJP national general secretary (organisation) BL Santhosh arrived in Lucknow earlier this week and held one-on-one meetings with some of the ministers and leaders in the poll-bound state.

Santhosh was accompanied by Radha Mohan Singh. Many of these leaders had flagged issues like COVID-19 handling, disenchantment among people and lack of coordination between government and party leaders, among others.

However, the Bharatiya Janata Party`s Central leadership has thrown its weight behind Yogi Adityanath, putting a stop to murmurs against the state government months ahead of the Assembly polls.

The Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections are scheduled to take place in 2022. BJP had registered a landslide victory in the 2017 Assembly polls winning over 300 seats.

In the 403 member Uttar Pradesh Assembly, among the major parties, BJP has 309 legislators, SP 49, BSP 18, and Congress 7.

Live TV
New Delhi: Yet another incident of misbehaviour with a coronavirus-infected woman has come to light, this time in Uttar Pradesh's Agra. The father of the woman, who succumbed to her COVID-19 related illness, accused the hospital management of negligence and held it responsible for her daughter's death. He also alleged that she was molested by a staff at the COVID-19 ward and claimed that he has evidence of it.

The victim's father has written a complaint to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, District magistrate and SSP in this regard. He has demanded that after a thorough investigation of the matter, a case should be registered against the doctor and staff involved in the matter.

The woman, aged 34, a resident of Jagdishpura's Bodla, had tested positive for COVID-19 coronavirus on May 5 and was subsequently admitted to a private COVID-19 hospital at MG Road in Agra. At the time of admission, the daughter's BP showed 120/80, oxygen level at 94 to 96 and 9/25 in the CT scan report. The father alleged that after the daughter got admitted to the hospital, her medical condition started worsening and the doctor and staff appointed to her duty did not pay any heed. On the contrary, the hospital management assured him that his daughter's health was improving.

In his complaint, the father alleged that due to negligence in treatment, the daughter passed away on May 19. The hospital management generated a bill of Rs 5.08 lakh for her treatment.

Staff at COVID-19 ward misbehaved with my daughter, alleges father

The victim's father alleges that on May 13, his daughter was mistreated by staff at the COVID-19 ward. His daughter had even shared the incident with her younger sister via phone. The father said that he has evidence with him that his daughter was subjected to mistreatment by staff while she was admitted to the hospital.

Along with the complaint sent to Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath, DM and SSP, the victim's father also attached the evidence of mistreatment with her daughter at the hospital, said a report.

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New Delhi: West Bengal BJP leader Dilip Ghosh on Friday (June 11) trained his guns on Trinamool Congress MP and popular actor Nusrat Jahan in view of ongoing controversy surrounding her marriage with Nikhil Jain and her pregnancy rumours. The Bengal BJP termed the actress-turned politician a 'fraud' and also attacked West Bengal supremo Mamata Banerjee for trying to save her.

"What a fraud. A person who was given a ticket by TMC, took oath, now says she was not even married. However, she wore sindoor, dragged a rath, conducted pujas, and won the election," said Dilip Ghosh. He added that Nusrat Jahan had taken oath in Parliament as a married woman.

The statement from Dilip Ghosh came after Nusrat Jahan on Friday claimed that her marriage does not have any legal standing in India as she got married in a ceremony in Turkey.

On Thursday, the actress-turned-politician had released a fresh statement on her marriage and separation. Hindustan Times quoted her saying, "Our separation happened long back, but I did not speak about it as I intended to keep my private life to myself."

She added that her marriage with Nikhil Jain is not valid as an interfaith marriage in India requires validation under the Special Marriage Act, which never happened. "As the marriage was not legal, valid and tenable, there is no question of divorce," reported HT.

"Being rich does not always give a man the right to act as a victim and belittle the woman alone in this society. I have made my own identity by my sheer hard work; thus I would not allow anyone not related to me to share the limelight or a title or followers, based on my identity," the MP added in her statement. Hindustan Times reported that Nusrat alleged that her estranged husband Nikhil withdrew money from her bank accounts illegally, even after the separation. She said that her clothes, bags, accessories are still with Nikhil's family. Even all the family jewellery that was gifted to Nusrat by her parents, friends and other family members are in Nikhil's family's possession.

Nusrat Jahan tied the knot with her businessman beau Nikhil Jain in the picturesque Turkish town of Bodrum on June 19, 2019. The wedding ceremony was done as per Turkish Marriage Regulation.

Meanwhile, Nikhil Jain has alleged that Nusrat had always avoided his requests to get the marriage registered. He claimed that Nusrat's behaviour started changing towards him since August 2020 when she began shooting a film, and left his home in November thereafter.

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Is BJP's Mukul Roy all set to return to Trinamool Congress? Seems so, if sources are to be believed. According to media reports, following a closed-door meeting with his trusted aides, which also saw the presence of his son Shubranshu, the former TMC leader who had left the party in 2017 and later joined BJP, has decided to come back to TMC. Neither Roy, TMC or BJP has officially commented on the matter so far. However, Roy has now reached Trinamool Bhawan in Kolkata to meet Mamata, and sources say that the switch is all but certain now. An official confirmation is awaited.

On Wednesday evening, Trinamool Congress MP Saugata Roy told a news channel that the party turncoats have to be divided into softliners, who didn't badmouth CM Mamata Banerjee after leaving the party, and hardliners who insulted the CM. "While Suvendu Adhikari badmouthed Mamata Banerjee after shifting, Mukul Roy never openly abused the chief Minister," Roy told the channel. Many saw this as a clear hint that Roy is all set to return to TMC.

Kolkata | Bharatiya Janata Party leader Mukul Roy arrives at Trinamool Bhawan#WestBengal pic.twitter.com/0VlAYsYgPQ  ANI (@ANI) June 11, 2021

Sources also inform that the growing popularity of the leader of Opposition in Bengal Suvendu Adhikari in BJP was one of the many reasons behind the growing rift between Roy and BJP.

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New Delhi: In a significant move, India and Kuwait have signed a memorandum of cooperation that will protect the rights of Indian domestic workers in Kuwait by introducing employment contracts that provides them with the protection of Law. The pact on the anvil for a long time was signed during External Affairs Minister Dr S Jaishankar's visit to the country and streamlines the recruitment process for Indian workers. The MoU focus on the signing of contracts that ensure the rights and obligations of both Kuwaiti employers and Indian domestic workers.

EAM speaking to the Indian Diaspora in Kuwait said that the MoU, "streamlines and strengthens the position of our workers in Kuwait" and it is "an important step which would encourage greater Indian presence" in the country

The MoU was signed by India's Ambassador to Kuwait Sibi George and Kuwait's Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Majdi Ahmad Al  Dhafiri. Under the MoU, a 24-hour mechanism will be established to assist domestic workers. Also, a joint committee will be established for periodic review and assessment and a follow-up to the implementation of MoU.

Kuwait hosts, over one million Indian community members in Kuwait. They form the largest expatriate community in the west Asian country. The Indian embassy has an Indian Workers Welfare Centre which provides a toll-free 24x7 telephonic helpline for Indian domestic workers, a labour complaint redressal mechanism and accommodation for domestic workers in distress and other services.

EAM was on a 3-day visit to the country as part of increased political engagement between the 2 countries. During the meeting, he called on Kuwait's PM Sheikh Sabah Khaled Al-Hamad Al-Sabah and held delegation-level talks with FM Sheikh (Dr.) Ahmed Nasser Al-Mohammad Al-Sabah.

Dr S Jaishanakar during the talks conveyed to Kuwaiti leadership the country's efforts and role amid the 2nd wave of COVID pandemic in India. Kuwait and India had established an air and sea bridge under which the West Asian country had sent Liquid Medical Oxygen and Oxygen containers to deal with the crisis.

Later this year, India and Kuwait will hold the first meeting of the Kuwait-India joint commission meeting and also planning early meetings of Joint working groups on health, hydrocarbon and manpower. This year both sides celebrate the 60th year of diplomatic ties, one that will continue through the year 2021-2022.

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New Delhi: The Centre has deposited Rs 10 crore in the Supreme Court, which was paid by Italy as compensation to the kin of the two Kerala fishermen who were shot dead in 2012 by two Italian Marines.

Earlier, on April 9, the Centre asked the Supreme Court for the closure of judicial proceedings against the two Italian marines, saying that it has accepted the recent ruling of the international tribunal.

The Centre also said that it has accepted the Arbitral Tribunal's award United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) which held that India is entitled to get compensation in the case but the trial of the marines will take place in Italy.

The Union government had assured the apex court that they will deposit the amount within three days, but the compensation could not be deposited even when the apex court took up the case on April 19.

The Supreme Court office revealed that the Centre deposited the compensation amount on April 26.

Timeline of the case:

February 15, 2012: Two fishermen, identified as Jelestine and Ajeesh Pinku, from Kerala who had gone deep sea fishing from the Neendakara Fishing Harbour, were shot dead in international waters.

February 17, 2012: The Italian oil tanker was brought to Kochi following the Indian Navys allegations that the Italian military personnel had gunned down two Indian fishermen.

February 19, 2012: Both the Italian marines, namely Latorre Massimiliano and Salvatore Girone, were arrested by Kerala Police.

February 22, 2012: The Italian government moved Kerala High Court.

April 20, 2012: Legal heirs of the two victim fishermen informed the Kerala High Court that a settlement has been reached between the Italian government representatives and them.

April 30, 2012: The Supreme Court questioned this settlement and called it illegal and astonishing.

May 18, 2021: A chargesheet is filed by the Neendakara Coastal Police.

May 20, 2012: Italy expressed unhappiness over the chargesheet filed against the Italian marines.

June 2, 2012: Both the Italian marines are released on bail after 105 days in custody.

February 22, 2013: The Apex Court granted permission to the Italian marines to visit their country to vote in elections.

March 11, 2013: Italy says the accused marines wont come back to India.

July 26, 2015: Italy moves the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.

August 24, 2015: The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea puts a status quo on the case. The tribunal asked both countries to suspend all court proceedings.

August 26, 2015: SC suspends proceedings against the Italian marines.

July 3, 2020: The Permanent Court of Arbitration in Hague orders that the Italian marines wont be tried in India, but in Italy, adding that India was entitled to compensation.

April 9, 2021: The Supreme Court directed the union government to deposit the Rs 10 crore compensation given by Italy to the kin of the fishermen killed by Italian marines in 2012.
South Africa: NERSA welcomes intervention intended to achieve energy security

The National Energy Regulator of South Africa (NERSA) has welcomed the decision to amend Schedule 2 of the Electricity Regulation Act, 2006 (Act No. 4 of 2006), to exempt generation facilities up to 100MW from the licensing requirement.

President Cyril Ramaphosa announced on Thursday that the regulation will be amendended in an effort to resolve the countrys energy supply shortfall and reduce the risk of load shedding.

The exemption is aimed at achieving energy security, and reducing the impact of load shedding on businesses and households across the country.

"The exemption includes generation projects connected to the grid, as well as those not connected to the grid. However, the generation facilities will still be required to apply to NERSA for registration to ensure that they meet all the requirements, NERSA said on Friday.

NERSA said it will await the gazetted Schedule 2 of the Electricity Regulation Act, 2006, from the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy for implementation.

Any material changes necessitated by the amended Schedule 2 will be communicated in due course, NERSA said.

The Department of Mineral Resources and Energy is expected to publish the final version of the amendment to Schedule 2 within the next 60 days or sooner.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2021-06-11. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
By Bi Zhengsheng

Recently, the Danish media cited sources familiar with the matter and disclosed that, from 2012 to 2014, the Danish Defense Intelligence Service used European submarine communication cables, which that pass through Danish territorial waters, to assist the US National Security Agency(NSA) to spy on dignitaries, government departments, enterprises and individuals of Germany, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and other European countries. The news set off a huge wave of public opinion in Europe. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron both expressed that this kind of incident between allies cannot be tolerated.

Conducting Llarge-scale network eavesdropping activities on the world and even its allies are indeed the norm for the US to maintain its hegemony. The US is unscrupulous in its surveillance against its allies, not to mention how unimaginable it could be for the US to spy on other countries. It is the US, who is used to accuse other countries of "security threats", that carries out large-scale cyber surveillance activities in an organized and planned manner.

Direct eavesdropping on enterprises, government agencies and even leaders of other countries is not only a violation of the basic norms of international relations, but also an infringement of the sovereignty and core interests of other countries. The US's repeated eavesdropping aims nothing but to obtain sensitive information to serve its own political, economic, and security interests, and even obtain leverage to threaten and intimidate other countries.

At the same time, the US practices double standards on cyber security, wantonly and unreasonably smears and suppressed other countries, labels countries including China and Russia as "cybersecurity threats", "digital authoritarianism", "spreading false information" and "threatening Western democracy".

The US move is aimed at serving its private interests. At the economic and technological level, the US uses "China threat" as a guise to prevent China's 5G equipment, applications and digital service from entering the US and even the international market, attempting to cut off China's global supply chain and cooperation with the global technology industry,which aims to impede the development of China's high-tech industries.

At the political level, the US discredits and damages the bilateral relations and mutual trust between China and other countries, thereby roping other countries into the chariot of its "Anti-China Alliance".

At the security level, the US tries to slander "Made in China" as a "security threat",strengthen the psychological and policy "security dependence" of its allies and strengthen the binding of its allies with their security, defense, and intelligence to cover up for the systematic eavesdropping carried out by the US.

Unfortunately, the USs approach of covering up its misdeeds by shifing the blame on China has disrupted many European countries and politicians' perception of China. They followed the US' advocacy, created barriers and obstacles to the normal economic, trade and technological cooperation between China and European countries, which brought a negative impact on the political mutual trust.

The development of Chinese technology companies such as Alibaba and Huawei in Europe is based on "honesty". They rely on their own technological advantages to seek development opportunities on the basis of respecting and strictly complying with the laws and regulations of the EU and its member states. Huawei has carried out business in the communication industry in Germany, France and other European countries for more than ten years and has built mutual trust and close cooperation with local enterprisesrelying on its brand and reputation. In fact, Huawei has been widely praised by the European communication industry.

We understand Europe's concern about cybersecurity, and we hope that through the repeated exposure of the real eavesdropping scandals, people of insight in Europe can realize where the real cybersecurity threats come from, and where their sincere partners are.

Editor's note: This article is originally published on China.org.cn, and is translated from Chinese into English and edited by the China Military Online. The information, ideas or opinions appearing in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of eng.chinamil.com.cn.
New Delhi: The Supreme Court ruled that the proceedings against the two Italian Marines will be closed and Italian government will prosecute them as per the ruling by an international tribunal. The two marines on board the MV Enrica Lexie -- an Italian flagged oil tanker -- are accused of killing two Indian fishermen who were on a fishing vessel in India's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in February 2012.

Shortly after the incident, the Indian Coast Guard intercepted Enrica Lexie and detained the two Italian marines Salvatore Girone and Massimiliano Latorre.

A vacation bench comprising justices Indira Banerjee and M R Shah said the case against the marines for the offences would be now pursued by Italy in referrence to the international arbitral award and the terms of the agreement among India, Italy and the Kerala government.

Further, the apex court said that it will pass an order on June 15 regarding the disbursal of the Rs 10 crore compensation paid by the Italian government to the family of the fishermen.

Appearing for the Centre, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the bench that Republic of Italy has deposited Rs 10 crore with it over and above the ex-gratia paid earlier and the same has been deposited by the Union Ministry of External Affairs with the apex court's registry as directed.

"There was an award by International Tribunal, which we as a Nation have accepted. The agreement is among Republic of Italy, India and the Kerala government," the law officer said,

"Now, the question of apportionment of the compensation amount remains and it can be left to the Kerala Government. The dispute before the international tribunal was as to which country, Italy or India, has the jurisdiction to prosecute the marines and it was decided that both the nations have the 'concurrent jurisdiction'", Mehta said.

The compensation is a mutually agreed amount between India and Italy in terms of the award by an international tribunal.

The Supreme Court had earlier said that Rs 4 crore each out of the compensation will go to the next of kin of the two fishermen while Rs 2 crore will be given to the owner of the fishing vessel in which they were travelling.
New Delhi: The Karnataka government on Friday (June 11, 2021) released detailed guidelines for the 11 districts in the state with a high positivity rate, where the COVID-19 lockdown will continue.

The 11 districts which will remain under lockdown includes Chikmagalur, Shivamogga, Davanagere, Mysore, Chamarajanagar, Hassan, Dakshina Kannada, Bengaluru rural, Mandya, Belagavi and Kodagu.

The relaxations have been given based on the recommendations of the technical advisory committee. We will be able to provide more relaxation if the pandemic situation comes under more control, CM Yediyurappa said.

Check complete guidelines here:

Revised guidelines to continue in districts with high positivity- Chikkamagaluru, Shivmogga, Davanagere, Mysuru, Chamarajanagara, Hassan, Dakshina Kannada, Bengaluru Rural, Mandya, Belgavi & Kodagu: Karnataka Govt pic.twitter.com/wwTtOU4Lbb  ANI (@ANI) June 11, 2021

The BS Yediyurappa-led Karnataka government also issued guidelines for the weekend and night curfews in the state.

Guidelines for night curfew:

- The movement of individuals shall remain strictly prohibited between 7 pm to 5 am, except for essential activities.

- Patients and their attendants/persons requiring the emergency need for movement shall be allowed to move.

- All industries/companies which require operations at night shall be permitted to operate. Movement of employees of such organizations shall be allowed on producing valid ID card/authorization issued by their respective organisation institution.

- Employees and vehicles of telecom and internet service providers shall be allowed movement on producing valid ID card issued by their respective organization/institution. Only essential staff employees of IT and ITeS companies/organization shall work from office. Rest will work from home.

- Medical, emergency and essential services including pharmacies shall be fully functional and other commercial activities are prohibited.

- There shall be no restriction in movement of all types of goods through trucks, goods' vehicles or my goods carriers, including empty vehicles. Home delivery of goods and operations of e-commerce companies are allowed.

- Movement of trains and air travel is permitted. Movement of public transport, private vehicles and taxis to and from airports, railway stations and bus terminal/stops/stands are allowed, for facilitating movement of passengers by air, rail and road. The movement will be allowed only on displaying valid travel documents/tickets.

Read the weekend curfew guidelines here:

Relaxations permitted in remaining districts w.e.f. 6 am on June 14 to 6 am on June 21: Karnataka Government pic.twitter.com/AONjDTgsTF  ANI (@ANI) June 11, 2021

Meanwhile, Karnataka on Thursday (June 10, 2021) reported 11,042 new COVID-19 cases and 194 deaths, taking the total number of infections to 27,39,290 and the death toll to 32,485.

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Amritsar: Punjab Police on Thursday night seized a huge cache of foreign-made pistols, and arrested a weapons smuggler with alleged links to Pakistan-based terrorist outfit and anti-India pro-Khalistani elements based in USA, Canada and UK. He is reportedly to have been operating on the directions of a US-based handler.

Giving details of the seizure, DGP Dinkar Gupta disclosed that the weapons were meant for carrying out terrorist activities in various parts of India.

Jagjit Singh, 25 was arrested from near Kathunangal, Amritsar on Thursday night by a team of Punjab Internal Security Wing, SSOC Amritsar, Gupta said. The SSOC Amritsar intercepted a car at a specially laid police naka on Amritsar-Batala road, Kathunangal village.

The team recovered two nylon bags containing 48 foreign-made pistols of different foreign make along with magazines and ammunition. The cache included 19 pistols 9 mm (Zigana-Made in Turkey), 37 Magazines and 45 rounds; 9 Pistols of .30 bore (Made in China) and 22 Magazines; 19 Pistols of .30 bore (Star mark), 38 Magazines and 148 rounds; and 1 Pistol of 9mm (Baretta-Italian) and 2 Magazines.

The DGP said preliminary investigations had revealed that Jagjit had been directed by Darmanjit Singh, a former gangster and criminal, to collect this weapon consignment.

Jagjit Singh has been in touch with Darman, who is currently in USA. During his stay in Dubai from 2017 to December 2020, Jagjit was in touch with Darman Kahlon who motivated him to work for him.

The mastermind of this smuggling racket, Darman had reportedly tasked Jagjit to collect and conceal the weapon consignment and wait for further instructions for the delivery of the pistols, said the DGP. Open-ended warrants for Darmanjot Singh have been obtained.

Darmanjot Singh of village Talwandi Khumman, PS Kathunanagal, Amritsar was involved in various criminal activities in Punjab before escaped to USA in 2017 to evade arrest.

He facilitated the escape of notorious gangster Harwinder Singh from police custody in 2017. Along with his associates, he mounted an attack on the police escort party and managed to get Harwinder Singh to flee.

An FIR was registered on May 12, 2017 in PS Civil Lines Batala and Darman was declared Proclaimed Offender (PO) in January, 2020 by the court of JMIC Batala in 2017.

In 2020, during his stay in America, Darmanjot Singh funded a criminal group with Rs 2 Lakh in Punjab to purchase illegal weapons for carrying out anti-India activities. Ten members of his criminal group were arrested by SSOC Amritsar and seven pistols 32 bore were recovered from their possession. An FIR was registered in this case by PS SSOC Amritsar on Novermber 10, 2020.

The DGP said an FIR under Sections 13, 17, 18, 18-B, 20 Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 120, 120-B IPC and 25 Arms Act, PS SSOC, Amritsar has been registered on dated June 10, 2021 with regard to last nights seizure.

Further investigation is on to unearth the whole nexus, he said.

The Punjab Police, which has launched a relentless drive against the nefarious designs of Pakistan-sponsored terrorist elements who are trying to disturb the peace, communal harmony and destabilize the state, has busted 44 terror modules over the last 4 years.

Besides, 283 terrorists/criminals have been arrested, and 21 Rifles, 163 Revolvers/Pistols, 38 hand grenades, 10 drones, 5 Satellite phone, 2 Walkie-Talkie sets and RDX have been seized in this period.

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New Delhi: The legal team of fugitive diamantaire Mehul Choksi, who is currently facing the charges of entering Dominica illegally, has approached the Metropolitan Police in London under the "universal jurisdiction" provision to investigate the alleged kidnapping of the absconding businessman from Antigua and Barbuda to neighbouring Dominica.

Mehul Choksis lawyer Michael Polak said that his client was unlawfully removed from Antigua and Barbuda, adding that as a citizen he enjoys the right to approach the British Privy Council in case of extradition. Polak also added that the English authorities have "universal jurisdiction" to probe such cases.

Describing Choksis case as one of "egregious breach of the rule of law and fundamental fairness", Polak said, "What has happened to Choksi has been terrible. He was lured into a property, kidnapped, a bag placed over his head, beaten, forced onto a boat and unlawfully renditioned into another country."

"In Antigua, he has the right to appeal to the Privy Council in London to determine whether the government is acting properly...against him. In Dominica, he does not have such protection. The motive behind the kidnapping could not be clearer," he said.

A complaint filed by Polak with the UK Metropolitan Police contended that Choksis case should be investigated by the War Crimes Unit as it involves "torture".

"The War Crimes Unit of the Metropolitan Police investigates war crimes, torture and genocide wherever it takes place," the lawyer said.

Polak also alleged that the group which abducted his client had conducted a dry run in April. Polak said Jabarica, who lured Choksi to her Airbnb accommodation on May 23, had specifically asked the owner if there is a place for docking a small boat in the backyard.

Choksis lawyer also presented the chat details between Jabarica and the owner of the properties, claiming that she had discussed taking two adjoining properties after getting confirmation about docking place for boats.

Mehul Choksi, along with his nephew Nirav Modi, is accused in the Rs 13,500 crore Punjab National Bank scam. Choksi had gone missing from Antigua on May 23 after going out for dinner and was soon caught in Dominica.

Choksis attorneys claim that their client was kidnapped from Jolly Harbour in Antigua by policemen, who looked like Antiguan and Indian. He was charged with illegal entry by the police in Dominica after he allegedly escaped from Antigua and Barbuda in a possible attempt to evade extradition to India.

(With Agency inputs)

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New Delhi: Priti Choksi, the wife of fugitive Indian businessman Mehul Choksi, has raised a series of questions to make her case and accused Barbara Jabarica, Mehul Choksi`s alleged girlfriend, of wrongdoing. She has also alleged that the entire episode since her husband went missing was a state-sponsored scheme that went wrong.

Talking to ANI, Priti Choksi asked, "How is it possible that the CCTV cameras near Jolly Harbor all simultaneously stopped working when my husband was abducted? If anything this is only further evidence of the state-sponsored kidnapping attempt against my husband."

She alleged that the entire episode of Choksi`s disappearance and reappearance exposes the lies of the Antiguan Prime Minister, Gaston Browne, who said that her husband went to Dominica with Barbara Jabarica, who later said that she never went to Dominica.

Priti also posed several questions in the defense of her husband and when asked if he was lying, she said, "Why would he willingly leave his passport in Antigua?" Raising further questions, she asked, "Why would he have hurt marks and injuries on his body? Why would he not carry any luggage, personal belongings, cash, etc.? Why would he leave his keys in the car while the car was at Jolly Harbor? Why would his family/ lawyers be unaware of his antecedents? Why would he not have made prior arrangements at a hotel to stay in Dominica? Why would the coast guard have found him stranded on an island?"

In an interview with ANI, Priti Choksi also questioned Barbara Jabarica`s claims about Mehul Choksi. Barbara Jabarica had made several sensational claims against Choksi, In her interviews with several Indian media outlets.

Priti Choksi smashed out on her claim that Mehul introduced himself as Raj is false, in light of the fact, that even a child today looks up the identity of his/her friends on the internet, and with technologies like "Reverse Google Search" and social media, this would have only been a matter of seconds, or are we living in the Stone Age?!

Moreover, the WhatsApp messages surfacing can easily be created by changing the content or through software`s like Photoshop, there is no evidence to support its authenticity, Priti Choksi said, asking "How is it possible that despite all the media attention and public furore surrounding this case, that this lady who has an Instagram account with thousands of followers was in the dark about all this, and did not come out to speak in defense of her `friend`?"

"It is common sense that if the version of events advanced by my husband is a lie, then why would he risk his entire reputation by first giving false information and then revealing the only link by which his story might fail? These bogus claims are only an attempt to present a wrong picture of my husband," Priti added.

She further added that as per her information, Barbara's last name is Jabarica and "I guess she is not telling her location to anyone, so how can her version be credible at all?"

In a recent complaint, Mehul Choksi had alleged that Barbara Jabarica did not attempt to help him while he was being beaten up and placed on small watercraft, adding that the manner in which Jabarica conducted herself clearly indicated that "she was an integral part of this whole plan to abduct".

In her media interviews, Jabarica said that she had met Mehul Choksi over breakfast on the day he was allegedly abducted, but left for the airport and was on the other side of the island that day.

Choksi, who went missing from Antigua on May 23 and was caught in Dominica, was charged with illegal entry into Dominica by police after he allegedly fled Antigua and Barbuda in a possible attempt to avoid extradition to India.

The 62-year-old fugitive is wanted in India in connection with the Rs 13,500 crore fraud in Punjab National Bank.

Meanwhile, the Dominica Ministry of National Security and Home Affairs had declared Mehul Choksi a "prohibited immigrant" on May 25. It directed necessary actions to be taken under prohibited immigration as well as not permitted to enter the Commonwealth of Dominica and the Chief of Police was instructed to take all the necessary actions to have him repatriated, said an official order of Rayburn Blackmoore, Minister for National Security and Home Affairs.
In the face of the heavy rainfall and consequent waterlogging in Mumbai, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) issued an advisory on leptospirosis, a bacterial disease, says media reports.

What is leptospirosis?

Leptospirosis is a bacterial infection that spreads through the urine of infected animals. Animals like dogs, pigs, cows and rodents, which have close contact with human beings, can be the carrier of the disease.

Why the fear of getting infected?

Leptospirosis can spread through the animal's body fluids to water and then to human beings. In monsoon, waterlogging is extremely common in Indian cities like Mumbai and the chance of animal urine mixed with flooded water infecting human beings rises. Doctors say that the risk increases when people have injuries in their feet or body parts and then wade through dirty water in the rains.

The symptoms

According to health experts, some of the symptoms of leptospirosis includes fever with chills, joint pains, cough, rashes, vomiting, diarrhoea, jaundice and sore throat.

The treatment

If one has the above symptoms and if they have recently walked through waterlogged streets, they should immediately consult a doctor. One should completely avoid self-medication.

If the symptoms are not severe, the doctor can prescribe antibiotics, such as doxycycline or penicillin. Patients with severe leptospirosis will have to be admitted to hospitals and doctors will then suggest the course of action. Women who are expecting should be extra cautious as leptospirosis can affect the fetus, say doctors.



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Chennai: National Investigation Agency (NIA) has filed Charge-sheet before NIA Special Court, Poonamallee, Chennai against three CPI( Maoist) operatives namely (i) Vivekanandan @ Vivek @ Raja @ Balan @ Anandan @ Rajamouli, r/o Moovendar Nagar, Madurai, Tamil Nadu u/s 120B, 124A and 505(1) (b) of IPC, Sec 13(1) (b), 38 and 39 of Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, (ii) Suresh Rajan r/o Moovendar Nagar, Madurai, Tamil Nadu and (iii) Mohan Ramasamy @ Advocate Mohan r/o Jaihindpuram, Nethaji 7th Cross Street, Madurai South, Madurai, Tamil Nadu u/s 120B, 124A, 201 and 505(i) (b) of IPC, Sec 13(1) (b), 38 and 39 of Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 in RC-07/2021/NIA/DLI

The case was initially registered as 1916/2020 dated 01.09.2020 at PS D1 Tallakulam ( L&O), District Madurai, Tamil Nadu relating to uploading of objectionable contents on Facebook account Thozhar Vivek denigrating the celebration of Independence Day as a sham. NIA had re-registered the case as RC-07/2021/NIA/DLI dated 14.03.2021 and taken over the investigation.

Investigation and scrutiny of posts uploaded on social media accounts of accused persons have revealed their support and active role in propagating the cause and ideology of proscribed terrorist organisation CPI (Maoist) and its frontal organizations. It has also been revealed that the accused persons had been knowingly possessing documents, pamphlets, brochures, banners, handwritten notes, photographs, etc. which were published by CPI (Maoist) with the intention of supporting the proscribed terrorist organization and were propagating its violent extremist ideology.

Further Investigation in the case continues

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Ludhiana: Ludhiana Times, the leading Digital Media Channel proved as the best source of authentic and real time information for the people. With just one click on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram channel of Ludhiana Times, the people get all updates related to Ludhiana and Punjab.

In the era of Digital Media, the Ludhiana Times is considered as the best source of information. As the government and administration issue new orders about Lockdown, Corona Virus related information and other, the Ludhiana Times always remined first to telecast the news and inform the people.

The people also believe that they get all authentic and first hand information on Ludhiana Times Facebook and YouTube handles. Apart from routine information, Ludhiana Times also telecast, motivational stories, informative interviews and other useful content.

Owner and News Editor of Ludhiana Times, Amarpreet Singh Makkar said that we didn't telecast fake news or perceptions. They always focus on providing authentic information and for this reason only, people rely on Ludhiana Times.
Islamabad: In a significant development, Pakistan's National Assembly has passed a government-backed bill that will provide the right of appeal to Indian death-row prisoner Kulbhushan Jadhav.

The National Assembly passed the ICJ (Review and Re-consideration) Bill, 2020 on Thursday aimed at allowing alleged Indian spy Kulbhushan Jadhav to have consular access in line with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) verdict, the Dawn newspaper reported.

Jadhav, the 51-year-old retired Indian Navy officer, was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and terrorism in April 2017. India approached the ICJ against Pakistan for denial of consular access to Jadhav and challenging the death sentence.

The Hague-based ICJ ruled in July 2019 that Pakistan must undertake an "effective review and reconsideration" of the conviction and sentence of Jadhav and also to grant consular access to India without further delay.

The ICJ, in its 2019 verdict, had asked Pakistan to provide a proper forum for appeal against the sentence given to Jadhav. Speaking after the passage of the bill, Law Minister Farogh Nasim said had they not passed the bill, India would have gone to the UN Security Council and could have moved contempt proceedings against Pakistan in the ICJ.

Nasim said the bill was being passed in light of the verdict of the ICJ. He said that by adopting the law, they had proved to the world that Pakistan was a "responsible state".

The National Assembly also passed 20 other bills, including the Elections (Amendment) Bill. The Opposition members staged a walkout and pointed out the lack of quorum three times, but each time the chair declared the house in order and continued the business, forcing the Opposition to resort to noisy protest.

The Opposition members gathered in front of the Speaker's dais and raised slogans. Criticising the government's move, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) lawmaker Ahsan Iqbal pointed out that it had included the bill in the heavy legislative agenda to provide relief to Jadhav.

Iqbal said it was a person-specific bill and the name of Jadhav was mentioned in the Statement of Objects and Reasons of the bill. He said when the country's law allowed high courts to review the sentences awarded by military courts then what was the need for bringing the law.

The government had already enforced the law through the promulgation of an ordinance in May last year soon after the ICJ verdict in Jadhav's case. Amid stiff resistance offered by Opposition parties, the National Assembly's Standing Committee on Law and Justice on October 21 last year had approved the bill that seeks a review of the conviction of Jadhav.

The house also witnessed a rumpus when Pakistan Peoples Party's Raja Pervez Ashraf protested over remarks of Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, who had stated that by opposing the bill to provide relief to Jadhav, the Opposition members were toeing the Indian narrative, the paper said.

Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari asked the speaker to provide some time to the members to see the bills. He slammed the government for first bringing the bill to provide relief to Jadhav through an ordinance and then getting it passed through bulldozing the legislation.

Law Minister Nasim said he was shocked to see the Opposition's behaviour and it seemed that the opposition had not read the ICJ verdict. He said the ICJ had clearly asked Pakistan to make effective legislation to provide the right of review to Jadhav.

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Mumbai: Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackerays party Shiv Sena has taken a dig at the BJP over the induction of Jitin Prasada, saying the young leader was "useless for Congress and will remain so for the saffron party too.''

In a strongly worded editorial in its mouthpiece Saamana, the party said it was hilarious to note that the BJP is celebrating the induction of Jitin Prasada. Maharashtras ruling party described Prasada as a young leader, but said that he was of no use to the Congress and will remain so to the BJP.

"Jitin Prasada, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin pilot were young leaders and there were high expectations from them. There is already a vacuum in Congress after the death of Ahmed Patel and Rajeev Satav. It is not good that young leaders are going the BJP way," the Saamana editorial said.

The Saamana editorial went on to say that "Prasada, who had faced defeat in Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, has finally joined the BJP. Prasada's family members were Congress loyalists. He was a minister in former prime minister Manmohan Singh's cabinet. However, he kept losing Assembly and Lok Sabha elections. The BJP has now started celebrating his induction into the party fold.

Shiv Sena pointed out that the caste politics of Uttar Pradesh is behind it. Eye on UP's Brahmin vote bank is being said to be behind Prasada's induction into the BJP. But if Prasada had a hold over the Brahmin votes, why these votes weren't transferred to Congress?" the party questioned.

Shiv Sena also cautioned that the BJP is worried at the moment because its traditional upper caste vote is drifting away from the party. "Till now, the BJP did not require any arithmetic or face in UP. Narendra Modi was everything. Ram Mandir or Hindutva were enough to win votes. But now, the situation is so bad that it wants the support of Jitin Prasada? it said sarcastically.

The Uddhav Thackeray-led party said the important issue is why are the Congress leaders jumping ship. Talking about the defection of Jyotiraditya Scindia to the BJP and the rebellion of Sachin Pilot, the Shiv Sena said that in Punjab, too, there is a rebellion in the Congress. It, however, said that rebellion and factionalism are not restricted to Congress alone.

Shiv Sena also gave a piece of advice to Rahul Gandhi, saying that the Congress central leadership needs to create a strong team to revive the party. The Congress has done a lot of work in the pre-Independence era and even after that. Congress has a contribution to building the nation. Even today, the Nehru-Gandhi' identity of the country cannot be obliterated. The Congress has a stronghold at the grass-root level, it said.

"Congress president Sonia Gandhi has ably carried out her responsibility in the party. Now, Rahul Gandhi has to create a strong team, which will be the answer to the challenge before the party," the Shiv Sena mouthpiece added.

In a shot in the arm for the BJP, Prasada, a Congress leader joined the saffron party on Wednesday, months ahead of the Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh scheduled for early next year. The 47-year former Union minister comes from a well-known Brahmin family of UP.

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New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday (June 11) refused to entertain former Mumbai Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh's plea seeking transfer of all inquiries against him to an independent agency outside Maharashtra.

Refusing the plea of Param Bir Singh, the apex court said, "You've been in police force for 30 years. You can't now say you want your inquiries outside the state. You can't have doubts over your own force. You're part of Maharashtra cadre & now you dont trust the functioning of your own state? This is a shocking allegation."

While hearing Singh's plea seeking transfer of inquiries against him outside Maharashtra, an SC vacation bench of Justices Hemant Gupta and V Ramasubramanian said, "It is commonly said, the person who lives in glass house should not throw stones at others."

After the apex court observed that it will pass an order dismissing the petition, Singh's counsel said he would withdraw the plea and would avail another appropriate remedy.

Param Bir Singh, a 1988-batch IPS officer, was removed from the post of Mumbai Police Commissioner on March 17 and was made the General Commander of Maharashtra State Home Guard after he levelled allegations of corruption and misconduct against the then Home Minister and senior NCP leader Anil Deshmukh.

Senior advocate Mahesh Jethmalani, appearing for Singh, said the petitioner can't keep on facing one case after the other just because he is a "whistleblower" in the matter.

He said Singh is seeking directions for transferring all inquiries which are already ordered against him outside the state and also that the investigation be transferred to an independent agency like the CBI.

During the hearing conducted through video-conferencing, Jethmalani said that the Bombay High Court had ordered a CBI probe into allegations of Singh against Deshmukh.

He argued that Singh has been pressurised by the inquiry officer to withdraw his letter in which he had levelled allegations against the former minister. Jethmalani told the bench that Singh is not living in a "glass house" and false cases have been lodged to frame him.

Earlier, the Bombay High Court had ordered a CBI probe into allegations of Singh against Deshmukh who had to resign as the minister.

In his plea filed in the apex court, Singh has alleged that he has been made to face several inquiries by the state government and its instrumentalities and sought their transfer outside Maharashtra and a probe into them by an independent agency like the CBI.

In his plea filed before the top court, Singh had sought a CBI probe against Deshmukh who, he claimed, had asked police officers, including Sachin Waze, to extort Rs 100 crore from bars and restaurants. He was then asked to go before the Bombay High Court which later ordered CBI probe into Singh's allegations.

The state government and the NCP leader subsequently filed an appeal in the apex court but failed to get any relief against the high court order.

(With Agency Inputs)

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New Delhi: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Jayanta Kumar Roy and his party workers were allegedly attacked in West Bengal's Raiganj on Friday (June 11). According to reports, Roy and his party workers were attacked by Trinamool workers at Raiganj block in Jalpaiguri district of West Bengal. He was taken to North Bengal Medical College and Hospital in Siliguri for treatment.

"Fascism at its peak in Bengal. Today @AITCofficial goons attacked me and our party workers at Rajganj. Savagery and lawlessness are the order of the day today in Bengal. @HMOIndia @PMOIndia @jdhankhar1 @narendramodi @AmitShah @BJP4Bengal @DilipGhoshBJP," Jayanta Kumar Roy tweeted along with a video.

Suvendu Adhikari says Roy and 4 other BJP workers were attacked by TMC goons

BJP MLA and Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari also alleged that Roy and four other workers were attacked by TMC while arranging the return of BJP workers who left due to the post-poll violence in the state. "Dr. Jayanta Kumar Roy; M.P. Jalpaiguri attacked by TMC goons along with 4 workers at Rajganj while arranging the return of BJP workers who fled due to political violence. The injured have been rushed to North Bengal Medical College & Hospital. I wish them speedy recovery," Adhikari tweeted.

Dr. Jayanta Kumar Roy; M.P. Jalpaiguri attacked by TMC goons along with 4 workers at Rajganj while arranging the return of BJP workers who fled due to political violence.

The injured have been rushed to North Bengal Medical College & Hospital.

I wish them speedy recovery. pic.twitter.com/ECQqdpGYA5  Suvendu Adhikari _ ________ _______ (@SuvenduWB) June 11, 2021

On May 6, BJP MP and Union minister V Muraleedharan's convoy in Panchkhudi of West Midnapore was allegedly attacked by TMC workers. The BJP leader's car was left shattered with broken windows.

Earlier on June 3, some BJP workers claimed that they were attacked by Trinamool Congress goons in the Howrah district. The violence took place outside a vaccination centre in Polgushtia village under Jagatballavpur Police Station of the district. The BJP workers alleged that they were informed that the COVID vaccine was not being provided to everyone at the primary health center of the village. When they reached the vaccination centre to check the fact, the goons of Trinamool Congress allegedly attacked them with sticks.

The BJP workers claimed that TMC goons chased them and waved pistols in the air. They alleged that some Trinamool Congress workers even went ahead and hurled bombs.

In a related development, over 100 academicians have written to President Ram Nath Kovind seeking his immediate intervention for security of SC and ST communities following post-poll violence in West Bengal. The memorandum said after the declaration of result of West Bengal assembly polls, "the state-sponsored activists of Trinamool Congress in collaboration with the state police have targeted the SC/ST community and spread the violence of killing, looting, raping, and occupying their land."

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New Delhi: The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on Thursday said fugitive diamond merchant Mehul Choksi remains in the custody of Dominican authorities with certain legal proceedings underway, and asserted that all efforts will continue to be made to bring back fugitives to face justice in India.

At a media briefing, MEA Spokesperson Arindam Bagchi also said the issue of economic offenders was discussed during the UK-India talks last month, and the British side had conveyed that there are some legal hurdles because of the nature of the criminal justice system in that country, but they will do whatever possible to make sure that such people are extradited at the earliest.

New Delhi has been seeking extradition of Indian fugitives Vijay Mallya and Nirav Modi from the UK to face trial in India.

Asked about Choksi at the online media briefing, Bagchi said, "As regards Mehul Choksi, I don't have any particular update this week. He remains in custody of Dominican authorities and certain legal proceedings are underway."

He said India will continue to make all efforts to bring fugitives to face justice in India.

The Dominica High Court has adjourned the bail hearing of Choksi till June 11, local media reports had stated.

Choksi had mysteriously gone missing on May 23 from Antigua and Barbuda, where he has been staying since 2018 as a citizen.

He was detained in neighbouring island country Dominica for illegal entry after a possible romantic escapade with his rumoured girlfriend.

His lawyers alleged that he was kidnapped from Jolly Harbour in Antigua by policemen looking like Antiguan and Indian and brought to Dominica on a boat.

To a question on fugitive diamond merchant Nirav Modi, wanted in India for alleged fraud and money laundering in the PNB scam case, Bagchi said that on April 15, the UK secretary of state had ordered his extradition to India.

"We understand that Nirav Modi is seeking to appeal against this decision. He remains in the custody of UK authorities," he said.

On Vinay Mishra, against whom the CBI has issued a red corner notice in connection with its investigation in a case of cattle smuggling, Bagchi said he doesn't have anything to share.

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Dehradun: Yoga guru Ramdev, who had said he does not need the Covid vaccine as he has the protection of yoga and Ayurveda, has said that he will soon get the jab, describing doctors as "God's envoys on earth". Ramdev had earlier drew the ire of the medical fraternity in the wake of his comments on the efficacy of allopathic drugs against COVID-19.

Welcoming Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement about the free vaccine to all from June 21, Ramdev described it as a "historic" step and appealed to all to get themselves vaccinated.

Talking to reporters in Haridwar, he said, "Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made a historic announcement of vaccinating every citizen free of cost from June 21. Everybody should get vaccinated. Also, people should practice yoga and Ayurveda which will prepare a protective shield against disease and will also prevent COVID casualties."

Baba further said, "Get both doses of the vaccine and the double protection of yoga and Ayurveda. They will combine to give you such a robust shield of protection that not a single person will die from Covid."

Asked when he will get the vaccine shot, the yoga guru said, "Very soon." He also heaped praise on good allopathic doctors, describing them as "God's envoys on earth".

On the ongoing confrontation with the Indian Medical Association (IMA), Ramdev said he cannot have any animosity with any organisation. All he was against the exploitation of people in the name of medicines, he said.

Ramdev said Pradhan Mantri Jan Aushadhi Kendras had to be opened because of the tendency among many doctors to prescribe expensive medicines in place of generic drugs, which are much cheaper.

He further said, "I am not against any organisation. Good doctors are a real boon. They are God's envoys on earth. But individual doctors can do wrong things," adding that for emergency treatment and surgery, allopathy is the best.

"When it comes to emergency treatment and surgery, allopathy is the best. There cannot be two opinions about it," said the yoga guru who had caused so much anger among doctors by his recent remarks against allopathy.

He, however, said that people should practice yoga and Ayurveda which will act as a shield against diseases and will prevent COVID casualties.

Commenting on the drug mafia, Ramdev said, "We cannot be at enmity with any organisation. And all the good doctors are all messengers sent by God on this earth. They are a gift to this planet. But if a person is a doctor does anything wrong then that is the fault of that individual. Pradhan Mantri Jan Aushadh stores had to be opened because drug mafias have opened fancy shops where they are selling unnecessary medicines at very high prices instead of basic and necessary ones."

"We want that nobody should be harassed in the name of medicines and people should refrain from unnecessary medication. There is no doubt that allopathy is better for emergency cases and surgeries. But other life-threatening diseases, incurable disorders can be cured through ancient practices listed in Yoga Ayurveda, which is not a matter of argument," said Ramdev.

As the Uttarakhand government announced certain relaxations amid the ongoing COVID-induced curfew, Baba Ramdev requested the state government to allow Char Dham Yatra with COVID guidelines, adding "Some relaxation has been given by the state government during the Corona curfew, but the Char Dham Yatra has not started yet. The government should now start the Char Dham Yatra following COVID guidelines. Business should not be affected due to the lockdown."

Meanwhile, The Indian Medical Association (IMA) on Wednesday wrote to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) against yoga guru Ramdev alleging him of making "Unprovoked demeaning and prejudicing utterances against modern medicine".

(With Agency Inputs)
New Delhi: Veteran Bollywood actor Dilip Kumar has finally been discharged from hospital, and his ocean of fan following can now heave a sigh of relief. The 98-year-old legend was admitted to Mumbai's Hinduja Hospital in Khar after he complained of breathlessness and chest pain a few days back.

A close family friend Faisal Farooqui gave the latest health update of the legendary actor and tweeted from Dilip Kumar's Twitter handle, thanking God and fans. He wrote: With your love and affection, and your prayers, Dilip Saab is going home from the hospital. God's infinite mercy and kindness through Drs. Gokhale, Parkar, Dr Arun Shah and the entire team at Hinduja Khar. --Faisal Farooqui #DilipKumar #healthupdate

With your love and affection, and your prayers, Dilip Saab is going home from the hospital. God's infinite mercy and kindness through Drs. Gokhale, Parkar, Dr. Arun Shah and the entire team at Hinduja Khar.

--Faisal Farooqui#DilipKumar #healthupdate  Dilip Kumar (@TheDilipKumar) June 11, 2021

Dilip Kumar was later diagnosed with bilateral pleural effusion and has since been in the ICU ward. He was on oxygen support and not on the ventilator as reported by a few.

        ...      

   

  #DilipKumar #healthupdate  Dilip Kumar (@TheDilipKumar) June 11, 2021

Earlier, Dr Jalil Parkar, the pulmonologist treating the actor at the suburban hospital provided an update regarding Kumar's health and said, "Dilip Kumar's health is improving and the problem of breathlessness has also subdued, but he continues to be on oxygen support."

On Sunday, Dr Parkar had affirmed that the actor's condition is stable now and said, "His condition is stable now. Even though he is in the ICU, he is not on a ventilator. We are trying our best that he makes a quick recovery and goes back home."

The superstar has been suffering from age-related health issues in recent years. Last month, the 98-year-old actor was admitted to the same hospital for two days regarding some routine checkups and tests.

In a career spanning almost 5 decades, Dilip Kumar worked in 65 movies, reportedly.

In 1991, Dilip Kumar was honoured with the Padma Bhushan for his contributions to Indian cinema. In 1994, he received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award.

In 1998, the Government of Pakistan honoured him with its highest civilian honour, the Nishan-e-Imtiaz.
New Delhi: Actress Minissha Lamba and husband Ryan Tham have ended their marriage. The couple tied the knot in 2015 after dating for about two years. Recently, the actress opened up about her divorce and relationship.

Confirming the news, Minissha Lamba told Times of India, 'Ryan and I have parted ways amicably. The legal separation has been done.' In an interview with Navbharat Times, the actress talked about her divorce and life afterwards. She said, "I would like to put it like this: Everyone has the right to live happily. Divorce was looked down upon in our society but now that women are self-dependent and can voice their opinions, things have changed. Earlier, only women were responsible to bear the burden of a relationship. They had the sole responsibility for all the sacrifices. But now, they have understood that they have the right to walk out if they are not happy in the marriage."

"Divorce is not easy but when the relationship is toxic, walking out is the right option. I would like to add that relationship or marriage can be an important part of your life but it cannot be your complete life. Unfortunately, women are recognised by their relationships and marital status. However, things are now changing," she added.

Minissha Lamba married Ryan Tham on July 6, 2015. He is a restaurateur and owner of Juhu nightclub 'Trilogy'. Ryan is actress Pooja Bedi's cousin. The couple had announced the finalisation of their divorce proceedings in August last year.
New Delhi: Ace choreographer Remo D'Souza recently revealed that late Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput had wanted to do a dance film with him and recalled his stunning performances when he was a contestant in the show 'Jhalak Dikhla Ja' in a recent interview.

He told ETimes that after entering the Bollywood industry, Sushant had appeared on Remo's show 'Dance+' to promote one of his movies and during his time there, he confessed that he really wanted to work on a dance film with the choreographer.

He said, "Sushant wanted to do a dance film. When he had come on my show, Dance+, for the promotion of one of his movies, he had asked me to work on a dance film with him. I wish I could have."

He further praised the 'Kedarnath' actor and expressed that he's an amazing dancer.

"Right from his first performance on JDJ, we knew he had the potential to win. To me, he was a winner. In fact, I was surprised he lost. He was such a good-looking boy, who owned the stage each time he stepped on it. He was great with every dance form that he tried," he added.

The choreographer revealed that recalling this particular conversation gives him goosebumps as it was his last meeting with the actor.

It's a lesser know fact but Sushant Singh Rajput was trained for dance at Shiamak Davar's academy and was a part of his dance troop. He has also performed as a background dancer at award shows.

On June 14, 2020, Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput was found dead in his Bandra home leaving his friends, family and fans in immense pain. The loss of the talented star left the Bollywood industry in shambles and fans are still mourning his untimely death.

As an actor, Sushant had started on the small screen with his television roles in the 2008 show 'Kis Desh Mein Hai Meraa Dil', followed by Zee TV's popular show 'Pavitra Rishta' by Ekta Kapoor.

Owing to his talent and charm, his performance in 'Pavitra Rishta' alongside Ankita Lokhande led him to reach new heights and gave him immense popularity, opening a gateway to Bollywood.

Soon the rising star made his movie debut with Abhishek Kapoor`s 2013 release Kai Po Che! and then went on to act in Shuddh Desi Romance, PK, Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story, Raabta, Kedarnath, Chhichhore, Drive, and Dil Bechara.
New Delhi: TMC MP Nusrat Jahan is in news these days for her divorce from husband Nikhil Jain. Amid her break-up and alleged link-up rumour, speculation over her pregnancy too was doing the rounds. Zee News has got an exclusive first photo of Nusrat flaunting her baby bump, thereby, confirming her pregnancy news.

In the picture, Nusrat Jahan can be seen posing with Bengali actress Srabanti Chatterjee and other acquaintances.

Nusrat Jahan recently announced her split with husband Nikhil Jain and released an official statement as well. The actress-turned-politician said, "Our separation happened long back, but I did not speak about it as I intended to keep my private life to myself."

She added that her marriage with Nikhil Jain is not valid as an interfaith marriage in India requires validation under the Special Marriage Act, which never happened. "As the marriage was not legal, valid and tenable, there is no question of divorce," reported Hindustan Times.

For the unversed, TMC MP Nusrat Jahan and Nikhil Jain who tied the knot in June 2019 in Turkey, have been making headlines due to marital discord and cheating allegations on the former.

Meanwhile, after allegations were made against Nikhil Jain and his family in the past few days, he decided to reveal some important facts about his relationship with Nusrat. He recently issued an official statement about the ongoing marital discord and made some important revelations in it.

He wrote, "I proposed to Nusrat which she gladly accepted and we went for a destination marriage in Bodrum, Turkey in June 2019 followed by a reception at Kolkata."

Jain claimed that even though he devoted all this time to her, within a short period of time, her attitude towards him changed.

Nusrat Jahan tied the knot with her businessman beau Nikhil Jain in the picturesque Turkish town of Bodrum on June 19, 2019. The wedding ceremony was done as per Turkish Marriage Regulation.

Amid these speculations, Nusrat Jahan's intimacy with BJP's actor-turned-politician Yash Dasgupta has also gained ground. Yash and Nusrat worked together in the Bengali film SOS Kolkata in 2020.
New Delhi: TV actor Ssumier Pasricha has left a fiesty reply to veteran actor Anupam Kher's tweet about losing 80,000 followers on Twitter and reposted the conversation on his Instagram handle as well.

After Anupam Kher complained about mysteriously losing a large amount of followers on social media, Ssumier Pasricha came out dissing him and critcising him for being so concerned with social media followers. He further said that there are better things to worry about such as the pandemic.

He wrote, "Dear god I lost lot of my friends and family members in this pandemic .. I see 10 less people who loved me .. is there a glitch in your software or something else .. its is an observation . Not a complaint .... Better things to worry about ... than Twitter followers".

Check out his tweet:

Dear god I lost lot of my friends and family members in this pandemic .. I see 10 less people who loved me .. is there a glitch in your software or something else .. its is an observation . Not a complaint .... Better things to worry about ... than Twitter followers https://t.co/HQV69U7fhr  Ssumier (@Ssumier) June 11, 2021

He has also posted the thread on his Instagram with the caption, "Are we serious ? That we still worry about our followers ... are we so obsessed with this social media ? This pandemic has taught us nothing ...I thought great people think wise."

On Thursday, Bollywood veteran Anupam Kher had alleged that his follower count on Twitter has reduced by 80,000 followers in the last 36 hours and said he was curious to know how this occured.

On the work front, Kher will be narrating the upcoming documentary film "Bhuj: The Day India Shook", the trailer of which was released earlier this week.

(With IANS inputs)
New Delhi: The Reserve Bank of India has announced a couple of changes in the ATM rules. While these rules are in line with the long pressing demands by the payment services, banks and white label ATM operators for customers it also means a little more burden on their pocket.

Here are 5 big rule changes related to ATM card you must know

1. RBI has now permitted banks to increase charges for cash and non-cash ATM transactions beyond free monthly permissible limit from next year. "To compensate the banks for the higher interchange fee and given the general escalation in costs, they are allowed to increase the customer charges to Rs 21 per transaction. This increase shall be effective from January 1, 2022," the RBI said in a circular.

2. Bank customers will have to pay Rs 21 per transaction, instead of Rs 20, with effect from January 1, 2022, if they exceed the monthly limit of free transactions.

3. Customers are eligible for five free transactions (inclusive of financial and non-financial transactions) every month from their own bank ATMs.

4. Customers are also eligible for free transactions (inclusive of financial and non-financial transactions) from other bank ATMs viz. three transactions in metro centres and five transactions in non-metro centres. Beyond the free transactions, the ceiling/cap on customer charges is Rs 20 per transaction.

5. In another announcement, RBI has said, effective August 1, 2021, banks are allowed to increase interchange fee per transaction from Rs 15 to Rs 17 for financial transactions and from Rs 5 to Rs 6 for non-financial transactions in all centres, the circular said. ATMs are deployed by banks for serving their own customers and also provide services to other banks' customers as acquirers where they earn interchange income.
New Delhi: The central government is offering a golden opportunity to farmers who havent registered for the PM Kisan Yojana yet. Under the scheme, the government offers financial support to millions of farmers across the country.

Prime Minister Kisan Samman Nidhi launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has so far provided a financial cushion to over 11 crore farmers in India. The scheme offers Rs 6,000 annually in the account of registered farmers.

So far, an individual farmer has received a total of Rs 16,000 in eight instalments. The eighth instalment of the scheme was recently rolled out by PM Modi last month. Overall, Rs 20k crore were disbursed under the scheme in the account of 9.5 crore farmers. Government to formulate cash crop and export-centric farming system: PM Modi

How to get double benefits from PM Kisan Yojana

Farmers who are yet to register for the PM Kisan Yojana can get two instalments of the scheme simultaneously. For getting double benefits from the scheme, a farmer will have to register for the scheme before June 30.

Farmers who have registered or will register before June 30 will get their first instalment under the PM Kisan scheme in July 2021, as part of the eighth instalment. Meanwhile, the ninth instalment of this scheme will be released in August.

In this way, farmers who havent registered for the scheme can receive double benefits under the PM Kisan Yojana in a matter of few days. Also Read: PM Kisan Yojana: Farmers can receive Rs 36,000 annually, heres how

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New Delhi: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has carried out several 'Discovery Program' in the past and many projects are under process right now.

The aim of Discovery is to deepen the understanding of our solar system and get to the bottom of its formation and evolution. Under the umbrella of 'Discovery', NASA has launched two new projects namely, DAVINCI+ and VERITAS to explore the planet, Venus.

Scientists are keen to explore the composition of Venus and understand its evolution as it is the twin planet of earth.

The super hot surface of Venus with a temperature of around 471 degrees Celcius makes it all the way more interesting for exploration.

Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI+)

DAVINCI+'s mission is to measure the composition of the atmosphere of Venus to map the information of its formation and evolution.

Also, its task is to determine whether the planet ever had an ocean.

The key part of the mission is a descent sphere that will plunge through the planets thick atmosphere, making precise measurements of inert gases and other elements to understand the basis of huge differences between the atmosphere of the earth and Venus.

Also, DAVINCI+ will deliver the first high-resolution pictures of the unique geological features on Venus known as tesserae, which may be comparable to Earths continents, suggesting that Venus has plate tectonics.

Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy (VERITAS)

VERITAS' mission is to map the of surface Venus to analyse the planets geologic history and understand why it evolved so differently than Earth.

VERITAS while orbiting around Venus will chart surface elevations over almost the entire planet to create 3D reconstructions of topography with the help of its synthetic aperture radar, and confirm whether processes such as plate tectonics and volcanism are still active on Venus.

In addition to these two missions, NASA has Lucy, Psyche, and MEGANE under Discovery to unveil the mysteries of our solar system.

ALSO READ: Bdelloid rotifer comes back to life after freezing for 24,000 years in Siberia

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New Delhi: Google has updated its Search algorithms to protect people who are dealing with extraordinary cases of repeated harassment online.

Now, once someone has requested a removal from one site with predatory practices, Google will automatically apply ranking protections to help prevent content from other similar low-quality sites appearing in search results for people`s names.

"We`re also looking to expand these protections further, as part of our ongoing work in this space," said Pandu Nayak, Google Fellow and Vice President, Search. Also read: Microsoft to bring Xbox gaming directly into web-connected TVs

The changes in Search algorithms come after The New York Times highlighted one such case of repeated harassment, and shed light on some limitations of Google`s approach.

"The change was inspired by a similar approach we`ve taken with victims of non-consensual explicit content, commonly known as revenge porn. While no solution is perfect, our evaluations show that these changes meaningfully improve the quality of our results," Nayak said in a statement on Thursday.

Google said it has designed ranking systems to surface high-quality results for as many queries as possible, but some types of queries are more susceptible to bad actors and require specialised solutions.

One such example is websites that employ exploitative removals practices.

"These are sites that require payment to remove content, and since 2018 we`ve had a policy that enables people to request removal of pages with information about them from our results," Nayak informed.

Beyond removing these pages from appearing in Google Search, the company also used these removals as a demotion signal in Search, so that sites that have these exploitative practices rank lower in results. Also read: Nigeria officially joins India's Koo after blocking Twitter for indefinite period

"Search is never a solved problem, and there are always new challenges we face as the web and the world change," the company said.
New Delhi: In the most recent development in the on-going Pearl V Puri rape case, the actor was denied bail today (June 11) after being arrested under POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) Act for the rape of a minor girl.

According to an official statement by DCP Sanjay Patil (Zone 2, Mira Bhayander Vasai Virar), he didn't get bail and the hearing for the bail plea has been postponed to Tuesday (June 15).

The actor will remain in judicial custody until June 15 as per a Times of India report.

In addition, the victim's father's lawyer has recently issued a statement to Spotboye stating that the narrative of bad marriage, toxic husband proposed by his estranged wife Ekta Sharma is a diversion from the fact that his child has been molested by the actor.

He further claimed that the girl had reported the matter herself and her statement was confirmed through a medical examination.

Earlier, Aarti Puri, a family member of the victim's mother Ekta Sharma has spoken about the issue on her Instagram handle and blamed the husband of making 'false charges' to gain custody of their daughter.

For the unversed, a Vasai Court, on June 5, had sent television actor Pearl V. Puri to 14 days' judicial custody. Puri was arrested on alleged charges of molesting and raping a five-year-old girl two years ago.

The 31-year-old 'Naagin 3' actor was booked by Mira-Bhayander Vasai-Virar Police Commissionerate, invoking charges of IPC Sec. 376 AB and POCSO Act, 4, 8, 12,19, 21 for the rape of the minor girl, said the officials.

Several celebrities showered support for the actor. Besides Karishma Tanna, producer Ekta Kapoor, actress Anita Hassanandani among others dismissed it as a false charge and showed support for Pearl.

He made his acting debut in Television with a supporting role in Dil Ki Nazar Se Khoobsurat in 2013.

He shot to fame with a musical drama Phir Bhi Na Maane...Badtameez Dil opposite Asmita Sood. His image as Abeer Malhotra, a successful charmer, made him a household name. Starred in shows including Meri Saasu Maa, Naagarjuna  Ek Yoddha to name a few.
DEHRADUN: The Uttarakhand government on Friday said that it has cancelled Class 12 state board examinations in view of the COVID-19 situation in the state.

Uttarakhand government cancels Class 12 state board examinations, in view of COVID situation  ANI (@ANI) June 11, 2021

With this, Uttarakhand has also joined the league of states which have earlier cancelled the exams due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

So far, a large number of states have cancelled the exams following the footsteps of the Centre, which on June 1, announced that the CBSE Class 12 board exams will not be held this year.

Delhi, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Telangana, West Bengal, and Tamil Nadu are among those states that have cancelled the exams.

Most of the states have cited the Centre's decision to cancel the Class 12 exams. The total number of COVID-19 deaths in Uttarakhand till Wednesday evening was 6,849.

Meanwhile, the Uttarakhand government has also ordered an inquiry against all the private labs conducting rapid antigen tests after discrepancies were found in COVID-19 testing during Maha Kumbh.

On the other hand, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has said that Class 10 and 12 state board examinations will be held only if the COVID-19 positivity rate drops below two per cent.

A series of meetings were held by the education department with guardians, students' organisations and other stakeholders and they are in favour of holding the examinations, Sarma said addressing a press conference on Thursday.

Further, he said, "The schedule for the examinations will be announced within the next few days but with the rider that the positivity rate in the state comes down to less than two per cent.

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New Delhi: Another day and yet another bride refuses to marry the groom because of his 'indecent' behaviour. The incident took place in Uttar Pradesh's Ballia district where the groom turned up reportedly drunk and chewing 'gutkha' (tobacco).

As per the police, the bride, hailing from Mishrauli village was to get married to the man from Khejuri village on June 5 but as soon as she saw the groom with the marriage procession chewing 'gutkha' she decided to call off the wedding.

Maniyar police station official, Shailendra Singh was quoted as saying by IANS.

Despite being persuaded by her family members for hours the bride refused to relent. Eventually, the wedding was called off and the families decided to return the gifts they had earlier received from each other.

This is the second such incident within one week in Uttar Pradesh.

Earlier, a bride in Pratapgarh district had turned away the groom because he came to the wedding in an inebriated condition and allegedly misbehaved with the bride. He forced her to dance with him which irritated the girl and called off the wedding.
New Delhi: Elephants are fond of eating sugarcane and peanuts but have you ever seen an elephant eating a helmet. Yes! elephant eating 'helmet', sounds weird but that is what exactly happened in Assams Guwahati.

The incident occurred in the Satgaon army camp near Narangi in Guwahati and was likely shot by the owner of the bike who kept his helmet hanging to his bikes handlebar.

A wild elephant was seen eating a helmet, and a video of the same became viral. The elephant may have mistaken the helmet for some kind of edible item and ate it.

ALSO WATCH: Fitness freak cat does crunches, leaves netizens surprised, video goes viral
Kolkata: Elated with her former trusted aide Mukul Roys ghar wapsi, West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee on Friday said that more people will come out of the BJP and join her party in the days to come.

"Mukul (Roy) is our old member and he has come back. He was not in a good condition in the BJP because the saffron party created pressure on him through agencies, as a result, he was not in mental peace. I was watching that his health condition had also deteriorated because one cannot stay in the BJP. It is a heartless party and no human being can stay there," Mamata Banerjee said.

We welcome Mukul Roy. He will play an important role in the Party: West Bengal CM and TMC chief Mamata Banerjee pic.twitter.com/2oels5BGnD  ANI (@ANI) June 11, 2021

Mamata 'Didi' made these remarks shortly after Mukul Roy, in a big setback to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in West Bengal, returned to his former party Trinamool Congress along with his son Subhrangshu Roy.

He returned to his former party nearly four years after deserting the Trinamool camp for the saffron brigade.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, her nephew and TMC MP Abhishek Banerjee, and many others were present at the Trinamool Bhavan during the meeting to induct Mukul Roy back into the party fold. Roy and his son were greeted back into the Trinamool by its all-India General Secretary, Abhishek Banerjee.

Roy, who had left Trinamool Congress in 2017, said, "I am having a nice feeling for being among familiar people again. This has a kind of homely atmosphere. I am confident that West Bengal will again reach to the top under the leadership of our leader and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee."

When asked what made him return to the Trinamool, the former all-India General Secretary of the party said, "I shall not work for the BJP again, so I have come back here."

I could not continue in BJP, I will never do it again, he said. I will explain the reasons in a written statement soon. I want to be with the leader who took Bengal forward. In the present political situation, not many people will be able to continue in BJP, Roy told reporters.

Denying having any difference with Roy even when he was in the BJP, Mamata Banerjee said, "Even when he was in the BJP, he never said anything against me or the party. He has always been good with our party leaders. Even during the elections, he was quiet about our party."

Hinting that more people from the BJP are likely to join the Trinamool, the Chief Minister said, "Trinamool will welcome everybody who is sober and gentle. But there are some people who betrayed the party before the elections and badmouthed the Trinamool leaders. They are betrayers, and the party will never accept them."

Banerjee also claimed that Roy was threatened in the BJP, and that, in turn, affected his health. "Mukul's return proves that the BJP does not let anyone in peace and puts undue pressure on everyone," the Chief Minister said.

Speculation had been rife about Roy's possible homecoming ever since Banerjee's nephew and TMC MP Abhishek visited his wife at a city hospital.

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NEW DELHI: In a big setback to the BJP, its national vice president Mukul Roy and his son Subhranshu Roy rejoined the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in the presence of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee in Kolkata on Friday.

Welcoming him to the party, the TMC supremo said, "Mukul Roy is our son, he has returned home." "We welcome Mukul Roy. He will play an important role in the party," West Bengal CM and TMC chief Mamata Banerjee added.

"Those who criticized the party, betrayed the party before elections for BJP, for money, we will not consider them," Mamata Banerjee said on being asked if more people will be joining TMC.

BJP national vice president Mukul Roy and his son Subhranshu Roy join TMC in the presence of West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, in Kolkata. pic.twitter.com/WS9oFE2J79  ANI (@ANI) June 11, 2021

Attacking the BJP, Mamata said, "Mukul's return proves that the BJP does not let anyone in peace and puts undue pressure on everyone."

Speaking on his turn, Mukul Roy said that he never had any differences with Mamata Didi and felt like coming back home. "Bengal wants to return to its own position. We want her (Mamata) to lead us,'' Roy said.

I could not continue in BJP, I will never do it again, he said. I will explain the reasons in a written statement soon. I want to be with the leader who took Bengal forward. In the present political situation, not many people will be able to continue in BJP, Roy told reporters.

Both Mamata Banerjee and Mukul Roy had earlier reached the Trinamool Congress headquarters and held a closed-door discussion, triggering intense speculations about the saffron party leader's possible return to the ruling party in the state.

Other senior party leaders, including minister Subrata Mukherjee, were also present at the Trinamool Bhavan off the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass. Roy, the former second-in-command of the TMC who joined the saffron party in November 2017, has been distancing himself from the BJP for the last several days.

It is being said that Roy was apparently miffed at being sidelined in the BJP due to the growing popularity of Suvendu Adhikari, who had defeated Mamata Banerjee in the prestigious electoral battle in Nandigram by a narrow margin of about 1,200 votes.

Once a confidant of Mamata Banerjee and one of the founding members of the TMC in 1998, Roy had joined the BJP in 2017. After the recent assembly elections, Suvendu Adhikari was made Leader of Opposition (LOP) in the West Bengal Assembly. Suvendu's elevation added fuel to the fire and this possibly led to a widening rift between Roy and the BJP, the sources said.

Speculation had been rife about Roy's possible homecoming after Mamata Banerjee's nephew and TMC MP Abhishek recently visited his wife at a city hospital.

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By Yang Chun and Xiao Hui

Russian President Putin and his American counterpart Joe Biden are set to meet in Geneva, Switzerland, on June 16 to discuss topics of common concern, but both sides tough statements have already cast a shadow over the upcoming event.

America emphasizes defending allies

On June 7, US President Joe Biden met with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg in the White House. They discussed the relations with Russia and reached the consensus that they will continue to contain Russia while advancing dialogue with it. On the same day, President Bidens national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Washington takes the upcoming meeting between American and Russian leaders as an opportunity of high-level communication but doesnt expect anything substantial from it.

Biden recently published an article on Washington Post, pledging to take effective measures to counter threats from Russia and consolidate what he calls the democratic alliance. According to Biden, the US and its allies should jointly cope with the Russian threats, and there is no question about Americas resolution to defend democratic values on Ukraine.

Echoing Bidens statement, Stoltenberg said the NATO 2030 initiative to be released soon would further elaborate on the strategic threats posed by Russia. This is a pivotal moment for our alliance and our collective security. In a more competitive and unpredictable world, we need transatlantic unity, he added.

Russia expects no breakthrough

While the US was making tough statements, both the Russian government and media expressed pessimism about the Putin-Biden meeting.

First, Russian leaders are indifferent to the meeting. When attending the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on June 4, Putin said the Russia-US relation is at a low point. The US publicly announced it would contain Russias development, and he didnt expect the meeting to bring any breakthrough for bilateral relations.

Second, media in Russia are pessimistic about the meeting. Viktor Murakhovsky, editor-in-chief of the influential Russian defense journal Arsenal of Homeland, commented that Washington and Moscow dont see eye to eye on many things, so the top leaders meeting isnt likely to reach any important agreement. Russian scholar Aleksey Poplavsky said the current Russia-US relation is at a record low in history, featuring mutual distrust. Washington is treating Moscow with an ultimatum, sanction, and ridiculous accusations. Therefore, the upcoming meeting between the two heads of state wont reboot bilateral relations.

Third, the two countries are making tit-for-tat moves. The US has kept pressuring Russia, and Russia has responded tit-for-tat. According to news released by Russias Northern Fleet, the Russian Navy has begun a large-scale military drill at the Barents Sea, focused on protecting the countrys North Pole region from external threats. Multiple coast defense troops, more than 20 surface vessels, and submarines, and about ten fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters participated in the drill.

The Putin-Biden summit has dim prospects

Information from the Russian side shows that the Putin-Biden meeting will discuss a range of topics, including arms control, global conflicts, COVID-19 pandemic, and climate change. The American side also released news that Biden will broach topics like cyber-crimes. The White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on June 4 that the two leaders might talk about nuclear security and the situation in Ukraine. Still, American doesnt count on the meeting to resolve all problems between the two countries. Therefore, due to all these factors, the Putin-Biden meeting is much more symbolic than substantive and wont be able to bring the bilateral relations back to the normal track in the short term.

For one thing, their structural conflicts are hard to erase. The relationship between Russia and the US is at the lowest point ever, with constant frictions and mounting problems waiting to be addressed. For another, NATO remains the obstacle to ice-breaking. Biden is going to attend the G7 Summit, the NATO Summit, and the US-EU Summit before meeting with Putin, and those events, instead of creating favorable public opinions for the Putin-Biden meeting, may very well undermine its chance of success by coming up with tough measures to curb Russia. The director of Russias Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST) once described NATO as the barrier to improving the relations between Russia and the West.

The US and Russia have intense conflicts over core interests, which cannot be mediated in the short term, and the two countries wont be able to build mutual trust any time soon. A single meeting wont make much of a difference for breaking the current stalemate, so neither of the two countries has high hopes for it.


Photo:CCTV

Qi Fabao, the regimental commander from the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Xinjiang military command, who suffered serious head injury while fighting bravely in the Galwan Valley border skirmish on June 15, 2020, made an appearance and spoke at a recent high-level military meeting in honor of heroic border troops on Friday. As the first anniversary of the skirmish approaches, experts say China has once again shown its determination to safeguard territorial integrity.

According to the video clip from the military channel of China Central Television (CCTV) on Thursday, Qi, in military uniform with a Party emblem on, attended a meeting organized by the Political Work Department of the Central Military Commission. The scar in his head can be clearly seen.

Along with four other frontline soldiers, Qi shared the stories of four martyrs who sacrificed their lives in the Galwan Valley clash.

"If the troop is compared to a sharp sword, then the courage and uprightness of soldiers is the blade of the sword. We are not afraid of sacrifice, and we have always held on to the belief that we would rather sacrifice our lives than lose an inch of our territory," Qi said in his speech.

Qian Feng, director of the research department at the National Strategy Institute at Tsinghua University, told the Global Times on Friday that Qi's speech in the briefing showed China's consistent and firm attitude of safeguarding sovereignty and territorial integrity.

India should not have any illusion that China will make any concession on the issue of territorial integrity, said Qian, noting that the two countries should respect each other and meet halfway to restore peace and tranquility on the border and create conditions for the restart of China-India relations.

The skirmish in June 2020 was caused by India's provocation, and Chinese frontline soldiers have demonstrated their spirit of never giving up an inch of territory in safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity, Song Zhongping, a military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Friday.

The briefing that highlighted heroes can also been seen as a patriotic and national defense education for the Chinese public before the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China on July 1 and China's Army Day on August 1, the expert said.

The event can make the whole society understand the importance of the military, which needs greater respect, as they are protecting China's core interests with their blood and lives, Song said.

In February, the Central Military Commission issued commendations to the servicemen for their role in bravely fighting back provocations by foreign forces at the Galwan Valley. The title of "border-defending hero" was conferred on Battalion Commander Chen Hongjun posthumously, while Chen Xiangrong, Xiao Siyuan and Wang Zhuoran received first-class merits. They all died in a Galwan Valley clash last June, Xinhua reported.

In May, the CPC Central Committee announced that they will, for the first time, issue July 1 Medals to Party members who have made outstanding contributions and created valuable spiritual wealth. The 29 candidates recommended for the award included Chen Hongjun, a Galwan Valley hero who died in the clash last year.
BEIJING, June 11 (Xinhua) -- China urges the United States to respect facts and science, refrain from politicizing COVID-19 origin tracing and concentrate on international anti-pandemic cooperation, senior Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi said on Friday.

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, made the remarks in a phone conversation with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the latter's request.

Yang pointed out that China has actively participated in and supported international anti-epidemic cooperation, and firmly opposes any despicable acts that use the epidemic as an excuse to slander China and to shift blames.

Some people in the United States have fabricated and peddled absurd stories claiming Wuhan lab leak, which China is gravely concerned about, he said.
Asia's drug lords have established new manufacturing hubs and maritime trafficking routes to ramp up the supply of methamphetamine across the Asia-Pacific, the United Nations crime agency said Thursday. The value of the drug trade in the region is estimated between US$30.3 billion and $61.4 billion, the agency said.

Seizures of both "yaba" meth pills and the crystallized meth version -- called "ice" -- since the start of the pandemic have surged, despite widespread border closures, restricted air travel and rolling lockdowns inside the drug markets.

Authorities across Asia seized a record of 170 tons of meth last year, up nearly 20 percent from 2019, putting it on a par with -- if not larger than -- the North America's synthetic drug market, according to a report on drug flows by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. The seizures "show COVID-19 has had very, very little impact on the organized crime groups and their ability to supply methamphetamine," said Inshik Sim of the UNODC.

Between May and December last year, as the pandemic raged, police made at least 14 seizures of over one ton of crystal meth across Southeast Asia, Sim said, as the gangs pivot from airports to sea routes to move their product across the region.

New maritime routes have emerged over the last year from Myanmar through the Andaman Sea south to Malaysia, as well as the longer established pattern of sending tons of ice hidden in containers shipped from Thai ports to Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong.

Intercepted cargo has revealed the use of "mother ships" far out to sea where large amounts of ice are stored awaiting smaller vessels to pick up hauls and whisk them onto shore, said UNODC regional representative Jeremy Douglas. "Typically, these are ships which are swapping flags, changing names fishing fleets with crews who are pawns in the game," he said.


In a release, ESA said the probe will be called EnVision, and much like the DAVINCI+ and VERITAS missions announced by NASA earlier in June, its overall mission will be to collect data about Venus' atmosphere and surface to unlock information about how the planet formed and evolved.

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced Thursday it will collaborate with the U.S. space agency NASA on an unmanned probe to study Venus, the third such mission to the planet announced this month.

Venus is of particular interest to scientists because it is Earth's closest neighbor in the solar system and strikingly similar to Earth in size and composition. Yet in its current form, it is inhospitable to life as we know it, with a surface temperature capable of melting lead.

The EnVision probe will contain instruments to answer questions as to how Venus got that way. The spacecraft will include a "sounder" to help reveal what lies below the surface of the planet. Spectrometers on the probe will study both the surface and the atmosphere, monitoring for trace gases that might indicate an active volcano.

NASA will contribute the VenSAR radar system to image and map the surface. The space agency will also be responsible for the project's overall instrument management.

Scientist from both agencies say there will be some overlap among the missions. The DAVINCI+ probe will also study Venus' atmosphere, but do so by dropping a secondary probe directly through it.

And like the EnVision probe, VERITAS will study the planet's surface, but will use high resolution topography and a global location map for Venus that will serve as a reference system for all past and future surface data collected.

The two NASA probes are expected to launch between 2028 and 2030. The earliest launch opportunity for EnVision is 2031. The spacecraft would take around 15 months to reach the planet, with a further 16 months to achieve the desired orbit.


Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi telephoned his Korean counterpart Chung Eui-yong on Wednesday to protest against the U.S. strategy of containing Beijing's growing assertiveness in the region.

Wang in a blunt warning told Korea to "stick to the correct position." The comments came ahead of the G7 summit in the U.K. later this week, where the U.S. is expected to tout its new cold war against China.

"The Indo-Pacific strategy proposed by the United States is full of cold war mentality and stirs up confrontation among different groups, which is not conducive to regional peace, stability and development," the Chinese Foreign Ministry website quoted Wang as saying. "China is firmly opposed to it. As friendly neighbors and strategic partners, China and [Korea] should know well the rights and wrongs, stick to the correct position, abide by political consensus and never be misled."

President Moon Jae-in last month appeared to come at least partly on board with the strategy when he met U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington.

The joint statement issued following their summit did not mention China directly, but included mention of Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman earlier warned the U.S. and Korea against "playing with fire."

The Korean Foreign Ministry did not publish Wang's remarks.
Budget airlines have applied to resume international flights after the government said it will seek to open a severely limited travel bubble with other Asian countries.

T'way Air has applied for authorization to resume flights to the remote U.S. outposts of Guam and Saipan next month.

Air Seoul recently obtained permission to resume flights to Hong Kong and Japan and applied for authorization to fly to Guam and Vietnam.

Air Busan applied to resume flights to Guam, while Jeju Air already started to fly to Saipan this week.

Carriers plan to offer one flight a week for now but could increase them if demand rises. One airline industry insider said, "Although no agreements have been reached about the travel bubble, we believe international flights will gradually resume."
The council currently has several Middle Eastern crises on its agenda, including the Israeli-Palestinian situation and conflicts in Libya, Syria and Yemen.

The council deals with issues of international peace and security. It has the power to deploy peacekeepers to trouble spots and to sanction bad actors. New members bring different experiences, perspectives and national interests to the council and can subtly affect dynamics among its members.

Albania, Brazil, Gabon, Ghana and the United Arab Emirates all ran unopposed for available seats in their regional groups, and each secured the necessary two-thirds majority required of the secret ballots cast. They will begin their terms on Jan. 1, 2022.

Richard Gowan, UN director for the International Crisis Group and a long-time UN watcher, says the United Arab Emirates may play a role in those areas and elsewhere. "The UAE has a lot of influence not only in the Middle East but in the Horn of Africa, and other council members will hope the Emiratis will use their influence to help stabilize countries like Sudan and Ethiopia," Gowan said.

Gowan notes that Albania is a country that has "seen the UN fail awfully in its region in the past." The UN failed to stop the Balkan war of the early 1990s, leading to NATO bombing in 1995. Then in 1999, Kosovo's ethnic Albanians fought Serbs to gain independence. "Albania's main interest on the UN agenda is of course still Kosovo, but the Security Council only has very limited influence there now," Gowan told VOA.

UAE Ambassador Lana Nusseibeh noted that the council's work does not end when resolutions are adopted. "The UAE will be part of the coalition that speaks to strengthen the results-oriented nature of the council as much as possible," she said, adding that the council is most effective when it is united.

But in recent years, diverging views, particularly among its permanent members -- Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States -- have stymied action on urgent issues.

"The Security Council's record on recent crises has been pathetic," Louis Charbonneau, UN director at Human Rights Watch, told VOA. "Whether it involves war crimes in Gaza, massive human rights abuses in Myanmar, or atrocities in Ethiopia's Tigray region, the most you can usually expect is the occasional statement of concern -- and that's if you're lucky," he said.

The countries elected Friday will replace exiting members Estonia, Niger, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Tunisia and Vietnam on Jan. 1.

They will join the five other current non-permanent members: India, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico and Norway, and the five veto-wielding permanent members: Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States.
Regulator calls for 'relentless' efforts to combat financial risks

From:ChinaDaily | 2021-06-11 09:23

Top banking and insurance regulator called for "relentless" efforts to combat financial risks on Thursday, even though financial instability has subsided in many areas.

Guo Shuqing, chairman of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, said the country should "remain alert to dangers in times of calm and make restless efforts" in financial risk prevention, with five areas including bad assets and shadow banking worth particular attention.

China will actively deal with a possible rally in nonperforming loans, as the country has allowed repayment deferral of loans lent to smaller businesses hit by the COVID-19 and certain amounts of them will turn into bad assets, Guo said via video link at the 13th Lujiazui Forum 2021 in Shanghai on Thursday.

Credit risks facing the banking system are on the rise due to property bubbles in some regions, debt repayment pressure of a number of government financing platforms and growing default risks of some large and medium-sized companies. The risk situation of some small and medium-sized financial institutions is more severe, Guo said.

Banks must categorize their assets and increase loan loss provisions, so that they can dispose of nonperforming assets at a faster pace, he said. By the end of March, China's outstanding nonperforming loans stood at 3.6 trillion yuan ($563.4 billion), up 118.3 billion yuan from the beginning of the year. The banking system's nonperforming loan ratio came in at 1.89 percent, down 0.02 percentage point from the beginning of the year, according to official data.

Guo also vowed more efforts to implement the new asset-management rules, which aim to eradicate principal-protected wealth management products and reduce investment in nonstandardized assets, to prevent any resurgence in shadow banking activities.

The scale of China's shadow banking sector has decreased by 20 trillion yuan compared with its peak, but the sector remains large and can easily rebound, he said.

Moreover, the commission will firmly crack down on illegal public offerings of securities, prevent risks related to financial derivative investment and remain alert to Ponzi schemes, a kind of investment fraud that promises high returns with minimal risk, which could be disguised as financial technology, Guo said.

He reiterated the country's determination to financial opening-up and strengthening financial support for the real economy and small businesses.

"The most prominent task now is to further boost the share of direct financing," he said. Stock and bond financing, the main body of direct financing, accounted for about 37 percent in total new social financing last year, but the future room for growth remains huge.

To boost direct financing, it is critical to make clearer to stakeholders that avoiding bond repayments intentionally is a legal breach and even a crime. In addition, it is necessary to accelerate registration-based reform with information disclosure at the core, Guo said.
Hong Kong: Aid for professional sectors continues

The Development Bureau today announced that training subsidies for employers hiring graduates and assistant professionals of the engineering, architectural, surveying, town planning and landscape sectors will continue this year.

The bureau said that fresh graduates of relevant professional sectors and assistant professionals who have just completed training are facing difficulties in securing jobs because of the impact of COVID-19 on the job market.

The Government's Support for Engineering, Architectural, Surveying, Town Planning & Landscape Sectors 2.0 will provide employment opportunities to retain talent for the long-term development of these sectors.

A total of 1,700 subsidy places, divided into two groups, will be provided under the support measure.

The first group with 550 subsidy places is for fresh graduates who studied architecture, surveying, town planning and landscape architecture.

Employers will receive a subsidy of $5,610 per month for up to 18 months for providing recognised professional training to each eligible graduate employed.

The second group with 1,150 subsidy places supports private organisations to employ assistant professionals of the engineering, architectural, surveying, town planning and landscape sectors.

Employers will receive a subsidy of $10,000 per month for up to 12 months to provide opportunities for recognised professional practice to each eligible assistant professional employed.

The subsidy under the second group is mainly targeted at assistant engineers who complete the Scheme A Graduate Training of the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers this year. For the other four sectors, assistant professionals who complete the training recognised by the relevant professional institutes this year will have priority in receiving the subsidy.

The subsidy scheme will open for applications from June 18. The deadline for application by the graduate group is November 30 and that for the assistant professionals is August 31.

Click here for details.

This story has been published on: 2021-06-11. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
City exhibits global traditional fine arts

By:Zheng Qian | From:english.eastday.com | 2021-06-11 17:48

With the opening of the 11th International Exhibition of Traditional Fine Arts on June 11, Shanghai citizens can appreciate sparkling Hungarian glass carving, beautiful Turkish calligraphy and the mysterious Venezuelan Masked Devil Dancers on their doorstep.

Themed tracing art in the heart , the exhibition displays more than 240 pieces of work from 24 countries, and the number of participating countries and works both set a record.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the promulgation and implementation of Chinas intangible cultural heritage law, and June 12 will also usher in the nations 16th Natural and Cultural Heritage Day.

(Chinese National Arts and Crafts Master Pan Jingshi's jade carving work)

Chinese artists including national arts and crafts masters, intangible cultural heritage inheritors and contemporary artists have contributed a batch of artworks, covering a wide range of forms, such as carving, porcelain, lacquerware, embroidery and crystal.

(Artwork recommended by Jeollanamdo Provincial Government, Republic of Korea)

Exhibits brought by overseas artists like Japanese artists Masayuki Imai, winner of Japanese National Medal of Culture, Yoshita Minori and Imaidumi Imaemon Juuyondai, are also quite glamorous. And the Consul General of Japan in Shanghai even brought artworks collected in his residency, covering porcelain, lacquerware and painting, to the exhibition.

Despite the current COVID-19 pandemic that is still raging, countries globally have actively organized to send artworks to this exhibition. For example, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of sisterhood with Shanghai, the Jeollanamdo Provincial Government of South Korea brought someartworks, and so did the Consulate General of Austria to celebrate the 50th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic relations between Austria and China.

(Calligraphy work recommended by the Consulate General of Turkey in Shanghai)

Akio Isomata, the consul general of Japan in Shanghai, said that he was quite moved by peoples enthusiasm.I hope that through this exhibition, the audience will be able to see the traditional crafts handed down in Japan since ancient times, the Japanese perception of beauty and the spirit of Japanese craftsmanship. We look forward to the further expansion and deepening of various cultural exchanges, including traditional arts, between Japan, China and other countries in the world, said Isomata.

(Painting work recommended by the Consulate General of Indonesia in Shanghai)
Enjoy Dragon Boat Festival holiday at Six Arts Museum in Suzhou

2021-06-11 18:10

With the Dragon Boat Festival approaching, are you thinking about where to go? If there were a place where you could eat the specialties of the Yangtze River Delta region, buy daily living products at a great discount, watch many kinds of featured performances, and visit an ancient town with beautiful scenery and few people, would you be tempted to visit it?

On the evening of June 11, 55 Shopping Festival-Happy Shopping in Wujiang and Wonderful Fenhu GO and the opening ceremony of Six Arts old street will be held in the square of Six Arts Museum in Lili Town. At the same time, a sales exhibition and cultural performances of 2021 Wonderful Fehu GO will also be launched.

Lili Town, located 30 kilometers southeast of Wujiang District, Suzhou, Jiangsu province, has a history going back 2,500 years, and Six Arts Museum is Chinas leading ancient folk arts museum which is located in Lili Town.

From June 11 to 13, branded merchants from the Yangtze River Delta region will gather in the square of Six Arts Museum to showcase their products in four areas: food and cultural & creative products, consumer goods, real estate and cultural tourism & trade.

There will also be performances of the Lili Town, a special exhibition in the Six Arts Museum and other activities during this period.

The activities are being hosted by Fenhu High-Tech Industrial Development Zone Management Committee in Jiangsu Province and Bureau of Commerce of Wujiang District, with the aim of promoting more in-depth sharing of resources between Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and helping Wujiang build an international consumption node city in the Yangtze River Delta region.
South Africa: New strategic partner for SAA

Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan says government has found a strategic equity partner in a bid to save the embattled South African Airways (SAA).

Gordhan on Friday confirmed that Cabinet has agreed for government to own 49% of the stake, while Takatso Consortium will hold 51% of SAA.

The ground breaking venture comes after the State-owned airline, SAA, was placed under business rescue in December 2019, a process which concluded in April this year.

According to Gordhan, the objective has always been to restructure SAA to ensure that it is viable, agile, competitive and not reliant on the States coffers.

The Minister said Takatso Consortium comprises Harith General Partners, a leading investor in African infrastructure and airports.

Meanwhile, airline management firm, Global Airways, has been selected as the preferred strategic equity partner for SAA.

This is a demonstration of South Africa's ability to develop an entirely home-grown solution to successfully relaunch SAA as a sustainable, competitive and transformed airline.

Once again, so that we understand this clearly, this airline is not dependent on the fiscus, Gordhan said.

As part of the relaunch of SAA, Gordhan said the finances of the operations of the airline will be provided solely by the consortium, which will provide about R3 billion during the initial stages.

Gordhan believes that the public-private partnership will reposition SAA in the domestic market, continent and beyond.

It will give us an opportunity to augment SAA with technical, financial, and operation expertise, he explained.

SAA, which is a well-known brand globally, will contribute its brand, landing slots, route licences, lounges and loyalty programme into the partnership.

Like many airlines in the world, Gordhan said SAA was hard-hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, he believes that the global race to vaccinate the adult population will make an impact on both regional and global travel.

It is anticipated that Africa will [have] the largest and most rapidly growing market, as far as aviation is concerned, in terms of the movement of the people, cargo and trade.

Meanwhile, Gordhan said SAA will begin to revive and re-establish partnerships with African and international airlines and networks to fully access the growing African aviation market.

The Minister said SAA will also leverage the commercial skills of the consortium, and build on the brand name and positive image of the airline to serve the national interests of the country.

We will build a new and uniquely South African culture in the airline that showcases the country's broad skills, talent and diversity.

Transformation agenda

The State will have a golden share of 33% of the entity's voting rights and certain areas of national interest, said the Minister.

Government will also enjoy some pre-emptive rights and take responsibility for historic liability.

The partnership has also committed to an inclusive and diverse team, representative of the countrys demographics at all levels at the airline.

According to the Minister, there will be a majority of Black ownership, since the consortium is 51% Black-owned. This includes the composition of the board, management and staff.

According to the Minister, the board chairperson and the executive team will be South African.

The consortium will prioritise the training and promotion of qualified Black pilots as part of a non-racial team of qualified men and women.

A memorandum of understanding, the Minister said, has been signed between the consortium and government.

Once the due diligence exercise completed, a purchase and sale agreement will be signed.

Government is pleased that all the elements have been brought together for a leading and sustainable Pan-African airline to emerge, and that this will be done without any future reliance on the fiscus.

Gordhan believes that South Africans will one day be able to buy shares once the airline has settled down in its new form.

"Government will not be putting in more money. That's the clear message we'd like to communicate to you."  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2021-06-11. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
First State Bank Welcomes Brian Gillispie to the Team FSB is proud to announce and welcome Brian Gillispie as Senior Vice President to the team!



Brian brings over 30 years of banking experience and local leadership to the bank. He is a lifelong resident of the Texas Panhandle and has called Spearman home for 29 years.



After graduating from Gruver High School in 1988, Brian attended Texas Tech University. He is also a proud SWGSB Graduate with Leadership Distinction from Southern Methodist University.



" Brian brings many years of banking experience and knowledge to help service the customers of the Hansford county area, said Tim Cooper, CEO.



Brian is passionate about community involvement and has spent decades serving and holding different appointments in community-based clubs and organizations, including serving as Mayor of the City of Spearman for 10 years.



I am proud to work with a bank and a team that has served our community for many years. FSB has a strong tradition, and it's exciting to be able to add to their efforts," said Gillispie.



First State Bank was chartered in 1917. FSB is locally owned and proudly serves the citizens of the Texas Panhandle with two convenient locations located in the heart of downtown Spearman and downtown Amarillo, TX.



FSB specializes in agriculture and real estate lending, with loan decisions made in-house, giving customers quick answers to loan requests.










Woburn, MA (01801)

Today

Cloudy with a few showers. High 73F. Winds S at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 40%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms during the evening followed by occasional showers overnight. Low 63F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 60%.
THE CONJURING CONTINUES - Ruairi OConnor (above) in a scene from The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It realeased by Warner Bros. Entertainment. The film leans into old school horror without really upping the scare factor. Its rules are increasingly easy to predict.
HAMMOND  Could losing last year's Democratic primary election to represent Northwest Indiana in the U.S. House actually end up propelling Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. to an even higher office?

The five-term Hammond chief executive admitted Friday on his "Left of Center" podcast he's considering running statewide in 2022 for a six-year term serving Hoosiers in the U.S. Senate.

McDermott avoided using the so-called "magic words" that would trigger Federal Election Commission oversight of his potential Senate campaign. He said his most immediate focus is training to compete in the Chicago triathlon in late August.

But McDermott also acknowledged he's "always been interested in furthering my career," and he did not hesitate to criticize the incumbent, U.S. Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., for voting against both investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection and the American Rescue Plan.

WATCH NOW: Organizers protest downsizing of Franciscan Health Hammond

"To me, when we are attacked, our nation's capital is attacked  it was  and the Republican Party is refusing to even open an investigation into it, it's a disgrace," McDermott said. "It's about loyalty to our country, and I think that's missing right now in America."

The U.S. Navy veteran said Young, a graduate of the U.S Naval Academy, seems to have forgotten about the patriotism and loyalty that's instilled alongside the education midshipmen receive at the Annapolis, Maryland, university.

"I'm troubled by where we are in America. I think that people like Todd Young should have been pulling people together and trying to work across the aisle, and I don't really see that," McDermott said.

"And Sen. Young knows better. He knows what the right thing to do about the Jan. 6 insurrection is. He knows what the right thing to do is, he knows what the political thing to do is, and he chose political. And it's not a patriotic vote."

Likewise, McDermott said he doesn't understand Young's opposition to the American Rescue Plan that will deliver $3 billion in federal funds to the state of Indiana, and another $2.6 billion to Indiana cities, towns and school corporations, to speed recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Every Republican member of Indiana's congressional delegation voted against the measure. Only U.S. Rep. Frank J. Mrvan, D-Highland, and U.S. Rep. Andre Carson, D-Indianapolis, backed the plan that McDermott described as a "game-changer for Indiana."

"The fact that only two of our 11 representatives voted for it is disgraceful  in the middle of a pandemic," McDermott said. "You know, Hammond lost millions of dollars during the pandemic, and this is trying to make us whole again.

"So, I see things in Washington that bug me a lot, and I think I'm the kind of person that could work across the aisle."

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McDermott acknowledged winning a statewide race in Indiana, which currently has zero Democrats holding statewide office, won't be easy.

"Todd Young, honestly, in my opinion, is the toughest candidate in the Republican Party for a Democrat to consider taking on," he said.

But McDermott believes his slightly left-of-center positions could help him attract support from many traditional GOP Hoosier voters who don't like the continuing influence of former President Donald Trump on the Republican Party.

WATCH NOW: Riding Shotgun with NWI Cops  Patrolling Lowell with Cpl. Aaron Crawford

"My politics are different. I could appeal to Republicans and Democrats, and if you're going to be successful as a Democrat in Indiana you've got to be in the middle and you've got to be appealing to both sides  and I think I'm the kind of candidate who could be successful in Indiana," he said.

McDermott also suggested Young is more focused on responding to the needs of big-time campaign donors instead of listening to Hoosiers, pointing to a recent Young statement that he may need to raise $150 million to $200 million for his reelection bid.

"I really think Todd Young has completely lost touch with reality," McDermott said. "He's talking about a job that pays $180,000 a year, and he wants to spend $200 million on it. You want to know what's wrong with Washington, D.C.? That's what's wrong with Washington, D.C."

A spokesman for the Young campaign declined the opportunity to comment on McDermott's claims.

McDermott made similar noises about running for the 2016 Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. But he opted against a Senate bid, and a potential campaign for Indiana governor, after being reelected Nov. 3, 2015, to a fourth term as Hammond mayor.

He also campaigned unsuccessfully in 2010 to replace U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., as the Democratic U.S. Senate nominee after Bayh unexpectedly quit the race after the primary election filing deadline.

At the same time, McDermott said a snap poll of his podcast listeners Friday found 92% support him running next year against Young.

PHOTOS: Hammond names its first black police chief
Press Release

June 10, 2021 Pangilinan: Extend deadline, use Filipino languages in farmers' registration forms for P100B coco levy trust fund IN a bid to resolve the concerns of coconut farmers to access benefits due them from the recently passed law on how to use the 100-billion-peso coco levy trust fund, Senator Francis "Kiko' Pangilinan enumerates several recommendations on how to hurdle the roadblocks. "We don't want any eligible coconut farmers, landless or owning land to get excluded. And number two, we want to make sure that those in the list are in fact legitimate and bona fide para makinabang dito sa naturang batas," Pangilinan said in his opening statement in Thursday's hearing on his Senate Resolution 736. Under the Coconut Farmers and Industry Trust Fund Act, only coconut farmers registered on the National Coconut Farmers Registry System (NCFRS) will be able to benefit from the coco levy trust fund. The law took effect on March 13, 2021 and mandated the Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA) to complete the registration of coconut farmers and farmworkers within 90 days from its effectivity. Registration ends tomorrow, June 11, 2021. To inquire into the status of the NCFRS, Pangilinan co-authored with Senator Risa Hontiveros Senate Resolution 736 which led to today's Senate Committee on Agriculture hearing. In the hearing, Pangilinan expressed the concerns of coconut farmers on the said registration. "There are concerns about the registration, including among others the use of English in the registration forms, what has been observed as the lack of information dissemination in far-flung areas...and also the short registration period," said Pangilinan. In its report to the Senate, the PCA stated that there are 314,104 new registered farmers in the NCFRS. And if it added the existing list on their registry, the total number of registered coconut farmers would be 2,839,371. The Senate panel agrees that this number is enough to start the programs in the law and release funds for it. Pangilinan suggested to instead put a working deadline on succeeding registrations. "Pwede nang ituloy ang pagrelease ng funds, pero mayroon working deadline para ma-enganyo ang mga farmer magparehistro. Kasi nakita natin dito tatlong buwan lang naka 315,000 na," he said. "Ang Pilipino kasi naghihintay ng deadline tapos last two minutes magre-register. It's really a working deadline in order to get as many as soon as possible and that deadline does not mean that after that date ay wala na," he added. The Coconut Farmers and Industry Trust Fund Act aims to improve the lives and increase the income of coconut farmers nationwide. The trust fund will be utilized under the Coconut Farmers and Industry Development Plan.
Press Release

June 10, 2021 REVILLA LAUDS CEBU GOV'S SWABBING POLICY I laud the provincial government of Cebu for extending humanitarian considerations to our OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) and ROFs (Returning Overseas Filipinos) who are besieged with various challenges during this time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their anxieties with their job and financial security, health and safety while away from their families cannot be appeased by any amount or article. Indeed, allowing them to immediately reunite with their families upon their arrival in the province under the "Swab-Upon-Arrival-Policy" is a commendable initiative." This is how Senator Ramon Bong Revilla, Jr. in his letter to Cebu Governor Gwen Garcia welcomed Cebu's "Swab-Upon-Arrival Policy" for arriving OFWs and ROFs in the province of Cebu. It was first implemented through Executive Order No. 17, Series of 2021 issued by Garcia, which was subsequently adopted as a local law through Cebu Provincial Ordinance No. 2021-04. The solon expressed his belief that Cebu's policy does not contradict the purpose of the IATF's (Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases) guidelines, saying this in fact complements and improves upon the practice. Under the policy, Cebu residents, OFWs, and ROFs are subjected to an RT-PCR swab test upon arrival. When they test negative, they are sent home and undergo home quarantine for the remaining balance of the 14 days required and will be monitored by the barangay. After seven days, the second swab will be done by the local government unit of residence in Cebu. "Wala nang mandatory 2-week quarantine sa hotel na sadyang napakagastos," Revilla said. "There are even experts saying that there is no substantial difference between testing upon arrival and testing after seven days - na gusto ng IATF," he added. Revilla stressed that the swab-after-7-days/10-day-quarantine of the IATF imposes a great and additional burden on OFWs and ROFs, and deprives them of precious time to be with family. "Hindi naman sila pauuwiin kung hindi negative 'yung swab test, at itutuloy naman nila ang home quarantine. So wala namang dapat ipag-alala," he ended.
Press Release

June 11, 2021 Dispatch from Crame No. 1074:

Sen. Leila M. de Lima on Fake Drug Charges and Drug Lists in the Fake Drug War 6/11/21 The revelations of Police Master Sgt. Jose Jay Senario on how Calbayog City Mayor Ronaldo Aquino was framed for illegal drug raps by his political rival with the help of PNP officers before he was ambushed and assassinated paints a dire picture of the extent political persecution has reached under the Duterte Administration. I cannot avoid comparing my fate with that of Aquino, since like me he was framed and made a subject of bogus drug charges. At least I am still alive. Aquino was not so fortunate. Failing to get rid of him through a frame-up, his enemies with the help of PNP officers simply chose to kill him. Hindi na nakakagulat ang ganitong mga expose'. Like the "nanlaban" narrative, concocted drug raps against targeted personalities, including political opponents, are a common feature of Duterte's war on drugs. My own situation is the gravest example of case fabrication. I look forward to the day when those who took part in this despicable project reveal the truth, and that any one or some of the prosecution witnesses against me come forward to confess, just like Sgt. Senario, on how they were forced and intimidated by Duterte's henchmen like former DOJ Sec. Aguirre, SOLGEN Calida, PAO Chief Acosta, Sandra Cam, and other officials hiding in the shadows, to fabricate drug charges against me. In relation to this, I laud the decision of the Court of Appeals to finally rule on the unconstitutionality of Duterte's so-called drug lists of political personalities involved in the illegal drug business, when it granted the habeas data petition of Leyte Cong. Vicente Veloso. It is about time the drug watchlists are exposed for what they are, as unconstitutional and illegal instruments for witch hunts and for intimidating politicians and even ordinary individuals who refuse to bend the knee to Duterte. Indeed, if the government has hard evidence against politicians, then it should just file a case instead of including them in a drug list that endangers their life and that of their families. These lists are per se a violation of the human rights of individuals to be secure in their own person at all times, and to be free from government intrusion other than through legal searches and seizures, including the filing of proper bonafide cases in court, and not fabricated ones which is what was done in my case. Although the CA decision came too late to protect the reputation and the life of Mayor Aquino, at least it could now be used to protect the life of Cong. Veloso. This also serves as a wake-up call to the judiciary. Their inaction in the past four years on cases of human rights violations in the course of Duterte's drug war has already cost so many lives. It is already time to shake off the cloak of madness thrown over the heads of our judges and justices in this war on drugs, and see it for what it really is. It is nothing but a tyrant's instrument of fear, the fear of being targeted as drug offenders or drug personalities and summarily executed by his death squads, like Mayor Aquino, or politically persecuted by his minions, like me. (Access the handwritten copy of Dispatch from Crame No. 1074, here: https://issuu.com/senatorleilam.delima/docs/dispatch_from_crame_no._1074)
Press Release

June 11, 2021 De Lima slams Duterte for touting 'deep and abiding friendship' between PH and China amid WPS issue Opposition Senator Leila M. de Lima has chided Mr. Duterte for recently celebrating what he deemed as "deep and abiding friendship between the Filipino and Chinese peoples" amid Beijing's unrelenting incursions in West Philippines Sea (WPS). De Lima said that China is clearly taking advantage and bullying the Philippines as the former relentlessly refuses to recognize our sovereign rights in WPS and takes away the livelihood of Filipino people. "Duterte should stop dragging the entire country with this so-called 'deep and abiding friendship' with China. Ang pagiging tuta niya sa China ay hindi katumbas ng malalim at mabuting pagkakaibigan," she said. "Paano maituturing na kaibigan ang bansang patuloy na sumasakop sa ating teritoryo, ninanakawan ng kabuhayan at ginigipit ang ating mangingisda, at paulit-ulit na binabantaan ang mga kapwa natin Pilipino?" she added. In a recent forum celebrating the 46th anniversary of Philippines-China diplomatic relations, Duterte commended the "deep and abiding friendship between the Filipino and Chinese peoples." "It is a bond that predates, by centuries, the formal establishment of diplomatic relations 46 years ago," Duterte said in a taped message before the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Inc. that led a celebration of the event. The President was apparently echoing words used in a letter to him from his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping who marked the same anniversary by saying he was ready to work with Duterte "to achieve greater win-win results and mutual benefits." "It is not surprising that Duterte merely parroted President Xi Jinping's words in his recent letter to him because he has, for years, kowtowed to China's position on the WPS ruling. Everyone knows that Duterte cares more about keeping his unusual friendship with China than protecting our national sovereignty and territorial integrity," De Lima said. "Baka win-win para sa China at kay Duterte. Mahirap na talagang magising sa katotohanan ang himbing na himbing sa kulambo ng kanyang mga kasinungalingan," she added. De Lima, who was part of the Philippine delegation who argued the country's arbitration case against China over the WPS before The Hague during her stint as Justice Secretary, maintained that what Duterte is doing in the Philippines' relation with China is "a strategy of subservience and servility which betrays the Constitution and the Filipino people." This April, De Lima filed Senate Resolution (SR) No. 694 urging the government's Executive branch to exert all legal and diplomatic actions on the Chinese government in asserting Philippine sovereign rights in the WPS. De Lima is also among the 11 Senators who recently filed SR No. 708 urging the upper chamber to "condemn in the strongest possible terms" the illegal activities of China in the disputed waters.
Press Release

June 11, 2021 ANC Headstart Interview of Senator Win Gatchalian with Karen Davila on Luzon blackouts Q: I watched the hearing yesterday and I wanted to ask you, do you feel frustrated? SEN. WIN: Well, I wanted to be assured, at the very least, that we will not have brownouts in the next few months, especially this coming month and next month. But I didn't get that assurance. In fact, the only slide that I have is a slide from NGCP which states that we will have a potential brownout system in June and July. So, I will take that as it is, because they are the system operator. But there's also a caveat to that because DOE will get back to us to validate those numbers which they should have done a long time ago. but for now to be prudent about it, I'm preparing myself for an eventuality of a brownout this coming June and July. Q: There was a lot of finger-pointing that was going on yesterday, and the DOE stands, well, essentially by blaming the NGCP why the rotational brownouts happen. From your perspective, could this have been avoided, and how? SEN. WIN: Both the government and NGCP and also the gencos for that matter, On the generating plants have their own shortcomings and they have themselves to blame. I don't believe the government is inutile. Government has all the powers to enforce. In fact, the government should not plead for compliance, we should not beg for compliance. Government should enforce compliance, and if the private actors are not compliant, they should be penalized and punished accordingly, because that's how you create discipline in the environment. But right now since enforcement is weak, of course the private players can do whatever they want and that's what's happening right now. So, first the government should enforce it. Second is the issue of reserves, it's important to have reserves, and it's the responsibility of NGCP to contract reserves, and on top of that, deliver power, and this is where the delayed transmission projects come in and that's their responsibility also. Q: So, in terms of, let's talk about compliance. What you said we should not beg for compliance. Let's start first with number one, the Energy Regulatory Commission, what is their accountability in all this? SEN. WIN: To put it simply, the power sector is the regulator, meaning the private sector, puts in cash and operates the entire power sector. DOE is the policymaker. They create policies for the betterment of this sector. And then ERC enforces those policies and if the actors don't comply, they can be penalized. Q: Is ERC doing its job? SEN. WIN: ERC from what I've seen yesterday is delayed in terms of enforcement. And they have to improve their communication with DOE and these two actors should talk and they should act fast. For example, I will give you a specific example. Q: The DOE says they can't penalize. SEN. WIN: They can't because they are the policy maker but they can come up with strong policies in order for ERC to enforce those policies but they have to talk. Because if they don't talk, then we have that finger pointing. And there are many mechanisms for them to talk. They know that because there's already a Supreme Court ruling that they should coordinate closely. So, yes there is a delay in enforcement for example in the reserves, that is quite controversial right now, that has been a policy since January, 2020, but until now it's not being enforced. So, in other words there's a delay in enforcement. Q: So, in a situation like that, it seems that parang rules tend to be a recommendation, so to speak. It's like, follow it, don't follow it, there are no penalties, you still keep your franchise, or let's say if you're a power plant, and you take a vacation leave or a sick leave during the peak months, Look, we can't close you down, we can't shut you down but then the consumers are left to suffer. So the question is, let's start first with each sector, the power plants, how do we know if power plants are performing up to par? These are big contracts, right? So, if DOE says they're calling out on two, they're investigating for that they're calling out on two who should have not taken a leave during these peak months. SEN. WIN: To put it simply, the power plants are also governed by rules and they're allowed to do maintenance work. But the maintenance work cannot happen during Summer. That's where the demand comes in. And if they violate that rule, ERC can penalize them. ERC also came up with what we call a reliability experience wherein they already identify the number of days that they can go on outage, and if they violate that, they can be penalized. So in other words, Karen, rules are present, and gencos should follow that because if they don't follow it, then we get affected, as consumers. And the only way they should follow, the rules should be followed. If they violate those rules, then they should be penalized. Q: The ERC, I mean, also coming from the hearing yesterday, the ERC identified some gencos that did not report plant outages right? But after reporting it, even to you, the question now is what do you do with those gencos I think that's the bigger issue. Okay, so, it's deregulated but what do you do with gencos that are not performing up to par, you have gencos that are excellent and then you have gencos that are earning and instead of contributing to power in the country is doing a bad job. SEN. WIN: That's a very good observation, Karen, they should be penalized and the costs of economic losses on behalf of the consumer should be passed on to them. For example, if we went on, unplanned outage, the consumers are the one bearing the economic losses, that should be transferred to the gencos. So meaning they should be penalized. In the rules so far how gencos will be penalized if they don't follow the prescribed number of outages. Again, there's a review.. Q: That's number one, are they actually penalized in any form, for performing badly? SEN. WIN: Not yet. You go back again to enforcement and that's why the government as a whole, should be held accountable for the delay in enforcement or no enforcement at all. Again, in a deregulated environment, it's important to have rules, it's important that the rules are being enforced or else it will be chaotic, and there will be no discipline among players. Q: Number two is the ERC Jurassic for today's modern times? I'm not saying it is. I'm just saying, do they lack dynamism? Is it acting, is it slow, is it old? SEN. WIN: I wanna be fair, Karen, and under the leadership of Chair Agnes, there's a lot of reforms that she implemented. One of the things that she pushed very hard, are the delays in the approval of permits. Before that was a perennial problem. We want power plants to be put but the delays in the permitting in the hands of ERC, prior to hers, leadership was really, really a big concern. Sometimes types permits take a year, two years just in ERC so she managed to fix that. But they have to do it, they have to perform better. Because after fixing the delays, now we're talking about enforcement and this is one of the things that they have to improve on, discipline and enforcement. The last thing we want to see is what we call regulatory capture. Meaning the regulators are really captured by the entities being regulated. And we don't want that to happen, we don't want that perception, even that inkling of that perception to be in our minds. Q: A viewer says, gencos, today, are penalized when they buy the replacement power, and it's so much more expensive than operating themselves. SEN. WIN: Of course, they should find the replacement power. You're the one who went on a forced outage so it's your responsibility to find a replacement power and it's your responsibility to bear the cost. That's another feature, again, that's another feature that they released a few years back. Now it's the responsibility of the gencos to find replacement power, before it was the consumers responsibility to the deal. So we bear the brunt of buying expensive power from the environment. Q: Let's move now to the NGCP, the DOE already wants to review the franchise of the NGCP and Secretary Cusi is going as far as saying, frankly, it should be under the control of the government again. SEN. WIN: Karen, I thank the Secretary for coming up with very comprehensive solutions from review of franchise, all the way to the government stepping back into generation, and other reforms, and I have to give him credit. That means the Department is really putting a lot of brain power in reforming the power sector. However, I have a lot of reservations about the government stepping back into business because when the government steps into business, corruption ensues, and that's for sure. And the reason why the government moved out of the power sectors is because of corruption. Remember in the past, Napocor was saddled with trillions of pesos of debts, because of corruption and we don't want that to happen. So my take on that is I have a lot of reservations in going back to the power sector, what I'm open to is strengthening the DOE, strengthening ERC and bring in more power and more budget to perform its mandate. Q: The NGCP for example, the DOE's circular that the NGCP has to get into contracts for ancillary reserves have been there, and yet they've been debating because their points is number one, two points, there is not enough power, number one to actually buy the reserves, and number two they claim, prices will go up. So you will have, even if the circular is there, you have essentially agencies of government that are debating among themselves on policy itself. SEN. WIN: Actually, Karen, the first point is that they're concerned, if there's supply or not, there might be force to buy for reserves. Whether the supplies are available or not, that's the problem of DOE, that's not their problem. In terms of the rates increasing, I don't believe that. And that will not happen because there are other mechanisms to mitigate that. For example, the reserves should be paid by the gencos. The aim of having reserves is to make sure that we have constant power in the event that gencos fail. So it's like a performance bond, pass it on to the gencos. Let the gencos pay for it. Why will the consumers pay for your performance bond? So there are other mechanisms to mitigate loss by passing it on to another, to the generals or to another entity. Q: But I think at the end of the day for the consumer, the question is this, bakit ba tayo nagba-brownout? Did we already, ang tanong ng consumer ito, coming from, I even covered, I remember, former President Fidel Ramos' time when we had to get into very expensive contracts remember Senator, just to make sure we don't have intense brownouts. So, you have the consumer asking, hanggang ngayon ito pa rin ang problema? So if you're a regular consumer ang tanong mo ito, power is already very expensive in the Philippines, compared to other countries in Asia, ang tanong bakit pa tayo nagkaka-brownout? SEN. WIN: I put it in a very simple explanation, there are two reasons. Number one is supply and the government needs to make it easier for power plants to come in. I saw the comment of Mr Ramon Ang, he said, 'gusto na nga naming mag-invest kami pa ang pinahihirapan.' So, in other words, a lot of investors are eager to put in the money to put the plants up, but red tape, bureaucracy is delaying them. So we have to make the environment conducive. Number two... W: Do we lack power plants? Do we lack power and the supply? SEN. WIN: At this point in time, no, but our country is growing at a rapid pace. In fact, you will be surprised Karen, in our May, I was looking at the May numbers, our May consumption is even bigger, the May consumption is at the level of the pre-pandemic time. So meaning, even during this pandemic people are probably working from home, everything is online so people are consuming more power now. So in other words, our country is growing and we need more power. We need to make it conducive for investors to come in. And then number two is issue reserves and these reserves are really a mechanism for us to make sure that the grid is stable, and it has constant supply and that is absent for now. And that's why DOE came up with the resolution to make sure that is present, so that we will not experience brownouts. Q: Now, that was the first hearing, what are you expecting, Senator Gatchalian. I mean, clearly it's gotten into finger pointing, but somebody's got to be made accountable to ensure there are no brown-outs in the next few months. If it's an issue of reserves, someone may ask, can the NGCP just be ordered at this point, to buy those reserves and get into those firm contracts? SEN. WIN: It can, it can, actually that's the fastest way. In fact, you don't need a lot of technical expertise in that. Government should just order, ERC for that matter should just order NGCP to contract for reserves. Q: Can't DOE, just will essentially but I mean, a basic question is, is there a faster mechanism where the NGCP has enough to get into these contracts and bigger power plants just end up selling more at a period in time when some power plants, break down without the NGCP involvement? SEN. WIN: In our rules, it's the system of NGCP, which is a system operator is the one to pass to make sure that there are reserves, and that is the, it's like, it's like a performance bond or insurance that it's always there. If something breaks down, we can dip into that and make sure that the electricity flows. So that's number one. That's the fastest, and then number two is build more plants, again making the environment conducive. These are two ways of increasing supply. But you're absolutely correct, everyone has to be made into account or take into account, the government, NGCP, as well as the gencos. All of these players have their own responsibility and they have to take responsibility. Q: And have you done, I mean, has anyone at least presented to you, or done the math, that if you start buying reserves, how much increase consumers will have in prices? SEN. WIN: Yes, a lot of a lot of different entities have done the math, the gencos have done the math, ERC has done the math, NGCP has done the math, DOE also came up with their own mechanism, but then again, I believe that we can contract reserves, without passing it on to our consumers. Q: And who will pay for it? SEN. WIN: The gencos should pay for it. Again, It's like a performance bond, when you hire a contractor... Q: So the gencos, all gencos or you mean the gencos that shut down? SEN. WIN: There's a mechanism, either the gencos that failed or shut down and all gencos as a performance bond. For example, if you hire a contractor, and the contract failed, you can take into his performance bond to compensate you. It's the same mechanism. So, you can compare it to a performance bond. Q: I can imagine the gencos reacting to that particular suggestion already, what is needed for that to actually happen? SEN. WIN: DOE needs to enforce that. DO already has a comprehensive study on this, but basically it's the gencos pay that bears the cost. Then, the DOE just needs to enforce it and it's a concept that is being practiced all over the world.
South Africa: Nxesi reflects on Labours efforts to mitigate COVID-19 impact

The COVID-19 pandemic saw the Department of Employment and Labour dig deep into its pockets as it attempted to provide a safety net for those adversely affected by loss of jobs due to the associated lockdowns, says Minister Thulas Nxesi.

As government, working with social partners, we were able to mitigate some of the effects of the pandemic and the lockdowns, said the Minister on Friday.

He made the remarks during the departments webinar on its role and interventions to mitigate the worst effects of COVID-19 on the labour market.

Leveraging its social security institutions  the Unemployment Insurance Fund (UIF) and the Compensation Fund (CF)  and working with business and labour, Nxesi said the department was able to build massive network to distribute the benefits on an unprecedented scale.

At the same time, we used our health and safety measures to support our social partners at Nedlac [National Economic Development and Labour Council] drafting COVID-19 health and safety directions, as well as to inspect and enforce the new regulations alongside health and safety regulations.

This we achieved with a reduced budget, as the pandemic and economic trends adversely impacted government revenue.

To enforce health and safety compliance, despite the COVID-19 conditions, over 31 000 health and safety inspections were conducted for the period 1 April 2020 to 31 March 2021, Nxesi said.

The department has appointed an additional 500 occupational health and safety (OHS) inspectors in the past year, which Nxesi said was a welcomed addition in the battle against COVID-19.

During the current financial year, inspectors are expected to conduct over 96 000 OHS inspections.

Systemic challenges

In April 2020, the UIF began paying out the Temporary Employer/Employee Relief Scheme (TERS) benefits.

By 30 March 2021, Nxesi said, TERS benefits had been disbursed to 267 000 employers and 5.4 million individual employees at a cost of R58 billion.

The Minister said the pandemic also exposed the inadequate capacity of the State of many fronts.

The payment of COVID TERS benefits by the UIF quickly became a target of fraud and corruption.

We are therefore grateful to the office of the Auditor-General for their assistance in analysing systemic weaknesses requiring strength in controls, and to the SIU [Special Investigating Unit] for investigating possible fraud and corruption.

The UIFs follow the money strategy to audit all employers that received the COVID-19 TERS funding also added a layer of security.

These interventions saw auditors verify payments of R16 billion and traced R228 million that was fraudulently claimed by employers.

They are not yet done. There are 121 employers that are already been handed over to the Hawks via the Presidential Fusion Centre, Nxesi said.

Of these, 16 have already appeared in court.

The pandemic saw the department exposed to the shortcomings of the UIF as a social safety net, particularly around the social sector.

We recognise the role of the CF [Compensation Fund] and the licensed mutual insurance companies which have paid for medical treatment, and the replacement of the lost income for 12 500 claims over the last 12 months, Nxesi said.

The Compensation Fund and mutual assurance companies - Rand Mutual Assurance and Federated Employers Mutual Assurance - have joined forces to contribute R1.35 billion to procure vaccines for workers without medical aid cover and UIF pensioners.

Nxesi, however, warned that the department needs to take extra caution in ensuring that systems are in place to prevent further fraud and corruption.

We must be extra careful on social dialogue. The pandemic has also taught us the value of social dialogue, a core value upon which South Africas democracy was founded.

Nedlac, he said, also continues to facilitate social dialogue around issues of growth and jobs, and monitoring the implementation of the Presidential Jobs Summit commitments.

Also, there will be facilitated input by the social partners in governments Economic Reconstruction and Recovery Plan (ERRP), which is set to lift us out of the economic doldrums.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2021-06-11. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Press Release

June 11, 2021 Hontiveros: Gov't needs foreign policy that benefits the PH, not China Senator Risa Hontiveros on Friday said the government should enforce foreign policy that benefits the Philippines, not China. The statement comes after former Senator Juan Ponce Enrile said that President Duterte's current foreign policy is the "best, practical, and realistic we can have to serve and protect our national interest." "How has likening our 2016 Hague victory to a piece of trash served our national interest? How has calling China a best friend helped our country? The pivot to China has not resulted in resplendent gains for Filipinos. The administration's pro-Beijing foreign policy has not reduced China's aggression against the Philippines. Mas lalo lang nga lumakas ang loob ng Tsina na mambully kasi mukhang garantisado siyang hindi buong titindig ang liderato ng Pilipinas," Hontiveros said. Hontiveros said she also takes exception to Enrile's statement that China is a strong country and the Philippines is weak; therefore, "the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must." "If that's the mentality, then we would still be under Spain; we would not be celebrating our independence. That the weak must only submit to the strong is an antiquated belief that has long been disproven. Modern nations stood on ideals that birthed the vital concept of national sovereignty, which is thus enshrined in our Constitution," Hontiveros said. Additionally, the senator said that the administration's current foreign policy vis-a-vis China has weakened our country not only in terms of state sovereignty, but also in our pursuit of economic development. She said the incessant actions of Chinese vessels in the West Philippine Sea have cost the Philippines over P800 billion worth of marine life and resources, an amount that the country should charge to China. "China has destroyed billions worth of resources in our own waters. That money could be used to jumpstart our economy as we recover from the severe long-term effects of the pandemic. Kung naging mas assertive tayo sa pagdepensa sa ating mga teritoryo, baka hindi umabot sa ganito. Ang mga nasira nilang likas-yaman, mga nawalang tirahan ng mga isda ay hindi na maibabalik. The least China can do now is pay," Hontiveros said. Hontiveros then emphasized that the wealth of gas and oil in Recto Bank should drive our government to safeguard our territories, especially since former Gem-Ver captain Junel Insigne recently shared with the media that there have been more Chinese ships fishing in Recto Bank. Insigne also said that the presence of China's vessels has affected their catch on recent trips. "Ang realidad ay nawawalan ng huli ang ating mga mangingisda at patuloy na winawasak ang mga likas yaman ng Pilipinas. Ang tunay na 'best, practical, at realistic' na foreign policy ay ang isang polisiya na makakaprotekta sa kabuhayan ng mga Pilipino at sa yaman ng ating bansa. It is in our national interest to defend our citizens and our resources. A policy of appeasement and accommodation is not a realistic foreign policy, it is an injudicious one," Hontiveros said. "As we celebrate the Philippines' Independence Day, I hope that our people, moreso our own present and former government officials, retire the notion that the Philippines is a weak country, and therefore, should just let China be. Hindi tayo bansa ng mga duwag. Hindi lumaban ang ating mga ninuno para lang ipamigay natin ang ating dignidad, karapatan, at kalayaan," Hontiveros concluded.
Press Release

June 11, 2021 'CHINA'S PRESENCE IN THE WEST PHILIPPINE SEA AN INSULT TO PHILIPPINE INDEPENDENCE'

Statement of Senator Risa Hontiveros on the 123rd Independence Day of the Philippines This year, Independence Day bears a deeper and more profound meaning for the Filipino people. At the start of 2021, amidst a global pandemic, a deepening recession, and a worsening public health crisis for the Philippines, over 200 Chinese maritime militia vessels swarmed our waters in the West Philippine Sea -- blindsiding our government. Worse, even several months later, this threat continues to threaten the country's sovereignty. China continues to deny our vessels access to the WPS despite numerous diplomatic calls for her to comply with international law and leave. China has deliberately turned a deaf ear to the global community's demands that she comply with the internationally-recognized law of the sea and preserve the hard-won peace and stability in the region. China's incursion into our waters will never be acceptable to the Filipino people and must never be normalized. Our fisherfolk who venture out to their traditional fishing grounds are chased away by Chinese vessels. Our Philippine Coast Guard who conduct legitimate maritime patrols are shadowed and blocked by China's Coast Guard ships. Our government officials who condemn China's territorial ambitions are slandered with misinformation and falsehood. These are an insult to Philippine independence, as well as an affront to our forefathers and mothers who fought and toiled for the freedoms we Filipinos enjoy. It is a desecration of their memory. We must always remember that the West Philippine Sea is part of the patrimony of the Filipino people, bequeathed to us by the valiant heroes who died defending the right of the nation to determine our own destiny. Over a century has passed since the Philippines liberated ourselves and proclaimed our independence, and yet, history seems to be repeating itself. But like the Filipinos of yesteryear were called to throw off the yoke of imperialism, this generation of Filipinos is called to defend our freedom by resisting the rise of a hegemon seeking to dominate a region and take our waters for herself. This Independence Day, I call on every one of us, especially our own government officials, to take a united stand against the gradual erosion of our sovereignty in the West Philippine Sea. I call on my fellow patriots to assert our nation's dignity, pride, and sovereign rights. I call on all Filipinos to proclaim - so that China and the other world powers will hear - that the Philippines and the West Philippine Sea are ours. No calling China our best friend; no downplaying our 2016 victory at The Hague; no kneeling to China. The time to stand up is now.
Press Release

June 11, 2021 Senator Koko Pimentel's Statement on appeals received from OFWs asking for more reasonable quarantine protocols Senator Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel III today said he supports the "swab-upon-arrival" policy for Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) and Returning Overseas Filipinos (ROFs). This is in response to the various appeals received by his office from OFWs asking for more reasonable quarantine protocols. The existing protocols require OFWs and ROFs to undergo a minimum of 10 days quarantine in an accredited quarantine facility from arrival before they are allowed to go home and complete the remaining quarantine period at home. "Our hardworking OFWs and ROFs are often only given a short period of time by their employers to come home to visit their families. We do not want that period to be spent on quarantine alone, away from home. I am appealing to our government to study and implement the 'swab-upon-arrival' policy", Pimentel said. Senator Pimentel pointed out that in fact some OFWs and ROFs are being required to undergo "double quarantine", first upon arrival and second upon reaching their respective hometowns. "This requirement is excessive. Umuwi yung kababayan natin para makasama ang pamilya pero inubos natin ang mga araw niya sa quarantine!", Pimentel expounded. Pimentel said that "We should give value to the scientific results of the RT-PCR Tests, the so-called gold standard in testing for COVID-19. Our returning kababayans, who are coming from other countries, can be tested upon arrival to see if they are infected upon arrival, and if results are negative, then they should be immediately released to finish the 14-day quarantine in their homes. On the 7th day from arrival, they should be swabbed again to comply with the directive of the IATF, this time the purpose is to check if they got the virus while here in the Philippines". The Senator further explained that it is important to listen to feedback especially from those affected by the quarantine protocols. "Our OFWs and ROFs are directly affected by this and are already voicing out their concerns. Again, I support and understand the efforts of the government on effective quarantine protocols but there is room for more compassionate and reasonable regulations which do not compromise on the need for virus testing," Pimentel added.
Sudans transitional Prime Minister Abdullah Hamdok has directed the Ministry of Transport initiate discussion with Turkish construction company Summa to resume the building of the countrys biggest airport suspended owing to change of leadership, London-based Al Quds reports.

Hamdok, media notes, with Selim Bora, the chair of the construction firm in the presence of the Sudanese Minister of Transport, Mirghani Musa.

The meeting came following Musas visit to Turkey May 27-28 to lure Turkish investment in the country now back on the international front after the removal of US sanctions.

Sudan in 2018 signed an agreement with Istanbul-based Summa to build a new airport 40 km from the capital, Khartoum, with international specifications.

The project, made of three phases, will cost $1.15 billion. The airport capacity Bora told Anadolu news agency in 2018, will reach 9 million in the second phase and 12 million in the third phase. The first phase will concern the construction of a terminal with a 6 million-person capacity along with all infrastructure services, runways, and airport aprons.

The project will be developed on the build-operate-transfer (BOT) model. BOT is an investment system that gives the developer an agreed period of privilege to operate the facility, during which it recovers the value of its investments and achieves some amount of profits, before returning it in good condition to the owner.

The project at design stage had been suspended in 2019 after revolution ousted former leader Omar Bashir who ruled the country for 30 years.
The Egyptian parliament has approved the World Banks $400-million credit line to support the Arab Republics comprehensive social health insurance system expected to provide a higher quality of medical services, reports say.

The Health Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives approved a loan agreement, $400 million between Egypt and the World Bank, signed in late January this year.

The World Banks lending arm, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), will back the comprehensive social health insurance system through a subsidy scheme to cover insurance costs for people unable to afford it as well as to fund infrastructure.

The Egyptian President Abdelfattah al-Sisi, Arab Finance reports, launched in November 2019, the comprehensive insurance program.

The average contribution per treatment per person is being raised from EGP 180 ($11.5) at present to at least EGP 2,000 ($127.5) under the new system, finance media notes.
Security agents in Ainamoi, Kericho county are on the hunt for a high school student who attacked his principal on Wednesday, June 9.

The 18-year-old student at the Ainamoi Secondary School swung a wooden plank with protruding nails at Mr Geoffrey Rono at his office, striking him on the head.

Reportedly, the school head had sent the student home to collect the balance of his fees amounting to Sh7,000. The Form Three student returned to the school at around 6 pm and attacked the teacher before fleeing the scene.

Kericho County Police Commander Silas Gichunge said the principal had ordered the students locker to be taken away until the balance was settled.

Preliminary investigations indicate that the student attacked the teacher at around 6 pm at his office and fled after inflicting serious head injuries, said the commander.

We are looking for the culprit who did not report back to his parents home after the incident.

Following the incident, the schools bursar responded to Ronos distress call and helped rushed the bleeding principal to a private hospital in Kericho town.

Doctors stopped the bleeding, dressed the wound, and discharged Rono at around 10 pm.

Police recovered the weapon used in the attack and established that the student has a history of threatening teachers.
Radio personality Annitah Raey has disclosed how attempts to get herself a White lover ended in premium tears.

Speaking in an interview with Jack Kipyegon, the former Hot 96 presenter said she fell prey to fraudsters who promise to hook up Kenyan women with a mzungu.

At the time, Annitah Raey had just divorced her abusive husband and resolved never to date Kenyan men.

Raey, who got married aged 17 and divorced at 21, said she saw an advert for a Mzungu hook up in the newspaper and gave it a shot.

The former radio personality said she gave the hook-up agency the benefit of the doubt because they did not immediately ask for money.

The agency only required Annitah Raey to submit a description of the mzungu of her dreams, which she did. They later contacted her with the good news that her profile had matched with another of their clients.

It is here that they asked Raey to pay Sh1,000 to kickstart the process of hooking them up. A meeting was then set up between her and the agencys representative.

When we met he told me that he had met my match and I was already registered on their platform, then took me to a cyber cafe to confirm. The guy told me that in order to access my soul mates profile I needed to top up with Sh2,000 which I did, said the former Ghetto radio presenter.

Also Read: Raped at 15, Married to Abusive Husband at 17 Radio Presenter Annitah Raey Story

The agency rep told Annitah Raey to proceed home and wait for them to send her the profile of her Mzungu match.

After the meeting, she never heard from the agency again as it dawned on her that she had been swindled.

Two years after her first attempt, Annitah Raey fell victim to an online scam through a website.

Raey thought she had found her elusive Mzungu lover on the website. After a few weeks of chatting with a man who claimed he was from Canada, the owners of the website demanded payment for hooking her up.

The fraudsters texted me and said they wanted us (Annitah and her catch) to exchange phone numbers but I had to pay the registration fee which I had initially evaded, she recounted.

Believing she had already established contact with her Mzungu, Raey believed it wasnt a scam and paid a huge amount of money which she said was too embarrassing to reveal.

The fraudsters would later send her two phone numbers which belonged to random men from Ethiopia and India.

At that point, Annitah realized she had been conned of her money again and gave up on such hookups.
The Nairobi Metropolitan Services(NMS) has identified 1,000 illegal dumpsites set for closure in an effort to rid the capital city of the heaps of garbage.

Already, the Major General Mohamed Badi-led agency has shut down 73 sites in what promises to be an uphill task.

NMS deputy director-general Kangethe Thuku said the dumpsites, which are run by cartels who are notorious for frustrating garbage collection in the city, were unearthed over the past two months. Most of them are in Ruai, he said.

Some 73 dumpsites have been cleared and closed, preventing further illegal disposal of garbage. NMS is still working on the rest of the remaining areas where garbage had accumulated, stated Thuku.

At the same time, Thuku said NMS has designated 35 new garbage collection points which will soon be made public.

NMS has also contracted new casual labourers in a bid to increase daily garbage collection from 2,500 tonnes to 3,000 tonnes.

Since the establishment of NMS last year in March, we have increased daily solid waste collection from an average of 1,800 tonnes to 2,500. Our aim is, however, to increase the average daily waste collection to 3,000 tonnes by roping in casual labourers to boost the collection, Thuku said.

The workers will also try to enhance the aesthetic value across four regions in Nairobi.

These are Starehe, Kamukunji, Mathare and Makadara sub-Counties in the Southern region, and Dagoretti North and South, Kibra and Langata sub-Counties forming the Northern region.

The Eastern region comprises of Embakasi North, Central, East, West, and South while Westlands, Ruaraka, Kasarani, and Roysambu will be part of the Western region.

The deputy director said NMS will be working in collaboration with the National Youth Service.

Additionally, Thuku said NMS has engaged solid waste contractors who are assisting in garbage collection in various city estates. This has seen the number of garbage collection trucks increase to 205.

The contractors are tasked with collecting garbage at the designated points across the 85 wards.
Dr Mukhisa Kituyi has denied allegations that he assaulted a female companion at the Tamarind Village hotel in Nyali, Mombasa last month.

This follows a report filed at the Nyali police station in Mombasa County on May 22, 2021, in which one Diana Opemi Lutta claimed that the presidential aspirant beat her up after she rejected his sexual advances.

Ms Opemi claimed Mukhisa Kituyi was her boyfriend, and that he pushed her out of bed and continued kicking her after she fell on the floor.

When reached for a comment on the allegations, the former UNCTAD Secretary-General said he has never beaten a woman.

I am aware of the said report. It did not happen, he told K24 Digital.

Adding: Ive never beaten any woman in my life nor do I intend to ever do it at any given time. We sorted out the case and it was withdrawn.

However, senior police officer in the Coast region who declined to be named said he was not aware that the case had been withdrawn.

Kindly get in touch with the officer in charge of the station since I am not aware of the matter being withdrawn. We were waiting for the P3 form to be filled and handed over to us to enable us to arrest the suspect, the officer said.

On Wednesday night, Nyali OCS Albert Chebii said the case had not been withdrawn and said investigations were ongoing. We are still investigating the matter, he said as quoted by K24.

The matter was also escalated to the office of the Inspector General of Police who indicated that: The Inspector-General of Police has directed Regional Police Commander Coast to pen an inquiry against a politician who assaulted a woman and forward to DPP for perusal and advise.